Wilderspool Vaults

By Richard Moses

In 2012, with his private eye on retirement, private investigator Andy James returns to the only case he never solved - an enquiry into the beliefs and opinions of a transient group of social misfits called 'the grapevine' and the disappearance of their enigmatic leader Thonatos Goose, and his closest confidant Spyglass.

With the benefit of hindsight Andy James reviews the evidence he collected 18 years earlier. The cold war had ended and the age of social media had yet to begin. Amongst the contents of his evidence cupboard are the transcribed teachings of Thonatos Goose and his own case notes detailing interviews he conducted with the nihilistic raven-haired beauty Linda Only, the ultra-intelligent blue eyed blonde in the wheelchair Ernestina Goodway, and the ethereal Australian Adel (nee Leda). Along the way Andy fell in lust with all of them – while in the present time he tries hard to avoid the attentions of Gale next door.

Each interview reveals a little more about who the grapevine were, what they did, and why it went wrong. Thonatos emerges as some kind of prophet, preacher, teacher, misfit... Spyglass as his friend, conspirator, nemesis... and possibly murderer?

As Andy embraces the facts of the matter once more he is seduced again by the grapevine’s ideology, but as he reviews the answers that were provided to questions he never asked, and questions he asked that went unanswered, he begins to rethink his whole approach - not just to this investigation but to his entire life. Can he re-establish order? Is there any such thing as order?

The grapevine talked about re-incarnation, spiritual evolution, the rejection of present day institutions, comedy as a means to an end, and believed their leader was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall. They also taught lions to ride motorcycles, dressed up as clowns, and played Egyptian Ratscrew for days on end in a derelict brewery.

Tower Blocks fall to the ground. The Miraculous Pawnshop appears and re-appears. There is drinking and back-packing, sermonising and manipulation. Andy is impressed by their rejection of established thinking, but ultimately wonders if there is any benefit, wisdom, insight in their alternative 'disorganised religion'.

In their time the grapevine were active in India, South East Asia, the Middle East, South America. Andy's investigation took him to West London, the Essex marshes and New York City; but primarily his approach focuses on the internal landscape, the personal journeys of those he questions – not least himself.

Previously, Andy came to the conclusion that Spyglass murdered Thonatos, but he was forced to reconsider when Spyglass turned up and subjected him to an impassioned testament on the roof of Wilderspool Vaults - before pulling off a disappearing act of his own.

Can Andy achieve closure this time around, or is there actually no such thing?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Moses
• Release date: Jun 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311040428

Richard Moses

I was born in Dixie in a boomer shed, just a little shanty by the railroad track, freight train was it taught me how to cry, the holler of the driver was my lullaby. I got the freight train blues. Oh Lord mama, I got them in the bottom of my rambling shoes, and when the whistle blows I gotta go baby, don't you know, well, it looks like I'm never gonna lose the freight train blues.Well, my daddy was a fireman and my mama-ha, she was the only daughter of an engineer, my sweetheart was a brakeman and it ain't no joke, seems a waste to get a good man broke. I got the freight train blues. Oh Lord mama, I got them in the bottom of my rambling shoes, and when the whistle blows I gotta go mama, don't you know, well, it looks like I'm never gonna lose the freight train blues.Well, the only thing that makes me laugh again is a southbound whistle on a southbound train. Every place I wanna go I never can go, because you know, I got the freight train blues. Oh Lord mama, I got them in the bottom of my rambling shoes... thanks Bob.

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WILDERSPOOL VAULTS

a satire on disorganised religion

by Richard Moses

Copyright 2014 Richard Moses

Smashwords Edition

CHAPTER ONE: NOT THE BEGINNING

I couldn’t make any sense of it at the time, nor subsequently, but I’m going to give it one final go. I was travelling backwards at a minimum of seventy miles an hour, squash ball in my mouth, hessian sack over my head, ankles and wrists bound with duck tape, hands behind my back, but knees thankfully in tact. I had a searing pain in my cranium and dried blood in my hair, but it remained the thoughts splitting the synapses in my brain that caused the most discomfort. I could hear a gearbox shrieking, grit timpani inside wheel arches, other vehicles taking evasive action on what I sensed was the M6, while what sounded suspiciously like PIL’s Death Disco emanated from the in-car stereo; but none of these sounds distracted me from the fearful heartbeat in my chest, the existential nausea churning my gut, the anxiety and panic that was my current predicament. Houdini would’ve struggled to get out of this one. At that time I could’ve named a considerable number of top politicians, civil servants and financiers who would’ve paid four figure sums to be treated less harshly.

Behind the wheel was a man who answered to the name of Spyglass, madder than ever, glimpsing the future for both of us through his rear-view mirror, trying to fastforwardintothenextlife. If you’d asked him, which I had done previously, what he was trying to achieve he would’ve explained that he wanted to shut off the stream of consciousness. Within his running commentary he would’ve said, ‘All the time there is the hammering at the brain, the awareness, the consciousness of what most do not know… The glimpses, the insights, the frustration of others not knowing… The grappling for the words to convey this meaning, on this planet, right here, right now… And all the time there is the understanding that what most consider real is unreal, that what you call fact is fiction, that what passes generally as the external world is instead a personal internal construct. It is all so obviously not real. You can see the stretch marks, the way it fades at the edges. The seams are so badly joined. It wobbles in the wind. It is a conceit, an illusion, a mirage. You call it life. He called it the journey-dream, but I call it the lie-dream… And all the time I hold the knowledge that I am spinning through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. You ask the question: what are we to do? The answer that evades almost everybody is: progress your evolution physically, mentally, spiritually. This and other such knowledge resides within the enlightened sentient beings, wherever they exist, across the infinite universe. So when did it all get too much for me? While I will try and answer that one for you as well let us be clear about one thing. There is no, In the beginning. That is exactly how it does not start.’

It was December 1994, the culmination of nine and a half months of investigation. The previous winter had been particularly cold, February depressingly so, but then in mid-March the temperature had lifted, my mood had lightened, and I’d found myself wandering aimlessly on Blackheath. At the end Spyglass had said, ‘Never ever wanted it to be like this… Did not want to be like him, or anyone other than my own sweet self. Yes there was a time when I was bored, when I was suffocating, but I turned it around by myself, made something of myself… Didn’t I? Wanted to be me, see! So I turned off the television, then the radio, stopped reading newspapers, and then dropped out completely. That is not how it started, but it will do for this time around. I guess like everyone I always thought there were beginnings to things, and ends too, but that is one of the things I have learnt. Let me break it to you robustly… There are not. Let me tell you a story. I am going to need to start from before the beginning, after the end, and right in the middle. I want to tell you what I heard through the grapevine. I want to introduce you to some faces, some types, some sorts, some clowns. Now Thonatos never wanted us to do this. He felt it was interfering, with time, see? He felt we should just hang back, hang on, hang around… Keeping ourselves to ourselves, know what I mean? Thonatos wanted to wait for everyone to catch up. That almost certainly includes you by the way. Well that was never my style. Who is to say he was right and I was wrong? Well he is gone and I am still here so this is my chance.’

But that was later and this is my story, and despite what Spyglass believed possible I want to try and tell this in order. That’s the point of what I’m trying again to do here. Things became deranged and I want to re-establish order, make sense of it all, piece together the fragments of this whole experience. Also, Spyglass is a character in my story; it’s not the other way round. He will talk, I can guarantee you that – in his disjointed, maniacal way. They all will talk. But it is I who shall arrange their words into an order that makes most sense to me. I have to you see. I have no choice. I stumbled upon something that baffled and intrigued me to such an extent that I had to pursue it, get to the heart of it, but I couldn’t make sense of it. A full understanding of it evaded me back then, as it did subsequently, time and again, when I returned to it. Each time it obsessed me, nearly drove me mad, and so I’d put it away again, try to forget about it. Now I take up the task once more. I’m older now. Eighteen years have passed since then. I’m less vulnerable now, less susceptible, so I’ll try as before to unpack the glimpses and shards, find out what it was all about, who they were, what was going on. There were times in my initial and subsequent investigations when I really felt that I had within my grasp both the ultimate question and answer, but to get back to that point I need first to introduce you to the work of another madman:

At approximately 5:45am on the 16th May 1968 one corner of a 22 storey residential tower block in East London called Ronan Point collapsed, killing four and injuring 17 residents. The partial disintegration of this building occurred following a gas explosion on the eighteenth floor. The main architectural fault was identified as a weakness in the ties between walls and floors. There followed a subsequent collapse in the confidence of local authorities and the public for building and living in such constructions. Although there were many other good reasons for abandoning the architectural approach to social housing epitomised by Ronan Point, most significantly the undesirable social implications for the communities out of which they rose, this dramatic and tragic architectural failure was the most significant nail in the coffin of the brutalist nightmare. While various accounts of the collapse, albeit from a relatively small number of witnesses, were recorded at the time and subsequently made available to anyone with an interest, one startlingly unique account has never previously been revealed.

So begins the Thesis of Oscar Wolvereen Thompson: bearded gent, publican, thinker, romantic poet, morris dancer and illustrator, who within an eccentric lifetime of eclectic pursuits invented the ‘bar swiveller’ and ‘self-calculating dart board’ before he taught lions to ride motorcycles - all details gleaned from the short autobiographical note with which he prefaced his manuscript.

I picked up his work for a couple of coins in a junk shop in an alleyway behind Greenwich market. The script lay on top of a battered tea chest filled with ragged books and other such papers. I was in an absent frame of mind when I spotted it, opened it, read a line or two and decided to purchase it. Thompson continues:

On the morning in question, in the final seconds before the collapse, a twelve year old boy named David Lines was hurrying along Butchers Road, Newham, approaching Ronan Point, late for his paper round, which he undertook on behalf of the TMP News Agency in Labefaction Lane. As he drew close to the ill-fated tower block his attention was drawn to the roof of the building, initially by an eerie, wailing sound. It was emanating from a human figure, standing on the parapet of the south-east corner, quite clear against the pale early morning sky. To the local police constable who took his statement later that day he described the figure as male, dressed in some kind of chequered overall and dancing. He described the figure moving from side to side, stepping back and forth, to the very edge of the roof and then retreating again. He describes the individual jerking his head spasmodically and waving his arms around wildly. He said that as he moved his body in this way he was shrieking up into the sky above him, as if he were ‘casting a spell’ or ‘giving the sky a telling off’. What the boy had to say was faithfully recorded, filed, but ignored. Presumably there was no corroborating evidence and consequently the tale was put down to a young and fertile imagination. But I’m not so sure that there was nothing in it. David Lines said he was so surprised by what he saw that he stopped to watch. He describes the movements and the cries of the man growing to a crescendo. Then he describes the corner of the building starting to disintegrate, the structure beneath the man dropping away beneath him, and him falling down above it. David describes the man descending, upright, his arms wheeling, his legs kicking as if to tread water. Then the dust and debris consumed him.

Thompson’s contention is that what the boy had witnessed in the seconds immediately preceding the collapse was a highly evolved sentient being with knowledge of other lives in other parts of the universe attempting to communicate with some otherworldly force. What the boy described, Thompson suggests, was an attempt by this individual to ‘summon something out of the empty sky’. Thompson attributes the escalating dancing and remonstrating of the man as the dawning realisation that this was not going to work, but draws back from suggesting anything other than the intensity of activity on the roof coincided with the collapse. He doesn’t suggest that the former caused the latter, any more than he suggests that the latter frustrated the purpose of the former. Nevertheless, he does appear to be suggesting that something else was happening, that this was more than just a badly designed building collapsing.

You’d think it would’ve been traumatic for the lad, but Thompson says the policeman that interviewed David Lines described him as ‘quite calm in recounting his tale’. It isn’t clear how Thompson came by this statement, but he claims that it’s genuine, and furthermore that he subsequently tracked down and spoke with both the policeman and the boy in the November of 1968. The policeman, it seems, had nothing to add to the statement he’d taken on the day. David, on the other hand, made a further intriguing claim, which was that two thirds of the way down, the man disappeared. Not, you understand, that he was consumed by the falling wreckage, but that he literally disappeared. The building continued to collapse, but the man was gone. When pressed, David refused to say any more. He insisted that what he’d relayed to the policeman at the time and subsequently to Thompson himself was the truth. While Thompson acknowledges that there is no way of knowing whether this is the case or not, he does highlight the fact that no body was found – an argument that clearly favours more than one scenario. Either way Thompson doesn’t appear to have been able to let it lie and some two years later attempted again to question David about the incident. Unfortunately he was unable to locate him. David Lines himself, it seemed, had disappeared.

At the time I didn’t realise it, but with hindsight I can be quite clear, the discovery of this text signalled the commencement of my investigation – a case that remains unclosed. That was March 1994. The related events that then ensued continued throughout that year, reaching a conclusion in mid December. As I said earlier, I haven’t yet managed to make sense of them.

*

While I may be struggling to get this thing off to a clean start, I can be precise about the finish. I observe a man, just as the boy described it, in a state of great agitation, apparently trying to intercede with some external body, or force, and in the process bringing about the partial collapse of… well in my case, reason. The location this time was a building collectively known by the salient characters as Wilderspool Vaults. The man was Spyglass. At least, that was his moniker. He was at his wits end. He’d given up waiting for things to happen. He’d decided instead to take a most direct course of extreme action in a vain attempt to get off the treadmill, to, as he saw it, save himself a whole load of misery. He’d wanted to change everything forever. He’d wanted to do something that ensured he’d never have to return to anything like his current life ever again. But a reckless and wicked act had solved nothing and so he’d found himself contemplating other extreme acts in order to dissipate the log jam of his own personal evolution. As I write this I’m transported back to that fire escape, that doorway that gave out onto his final stage. I surveyed that tragic vista and the horror that his existence had become from where I lay in a crumpled heap of pain; a forced witness to madness. I can visualise him now, on that roof top, strutting along the parapet of that building, intoning to the cold, dark, empty sky:

‘Never ever wanted it to be like this… Saying this over and again to myself… Have known for a while that it would be… He is dead, I am on the edge. I am standing on top of this building, looking out across this town, this night. I can see the houses, the flats, filled with human beings, while I wait for my ship to come in. This is what I have worked towards all this life. I never doubted they would come and get me. Always knew I would know when it was time to go. Not so sure this time what awaits me. Fear I might be regressing. I watch the lights coming on and going out. What are my lights doing? For the first time real fear has crept into my life. For many years I have walked the pavements down there, trying not to look up, frightened of tempting fate. I never wanted to destroy the knowledge of that moment by imagining this moment. I never knew when exactly it would happen, until, oh… Quite recently. Two in the morning, is it? Then three? Four will never come again, of that I am quite sure and then that will be the end of this particular method of measuring time. I never knew precisely how many others there were, but I am dismayed by how quickly and completely they all seem to have found better things to do with themselves.’

‘I studied at the feet of a master. Thonatos Goose we called him. A beautiful example of refined understanding. The near perfect combination of intellect and intuition. This was Earth, obviously, but his knowledge was of a vast sweep of the universe and universal law. Throughout time he has been quoted endlessly. I followed him for a while, listened to his teachings, was there at the end. He knew more than most and as so often is the way on this planet with those who know more than most his death was premature. The butterfly beat its wings and whole forests were felled. I thought that would be the end of it, but with him gone his meaning became only more profound to me. "Nothing ends," as he used to say. His journey continues throughout the multitudinous future. No doubt his followers continue to grow in number. They respond to his otherworldliness. While I must continue with my own secret knowledge of him, on this plain. Or so I fear. Still, the idea persists, fastforwardintothenextlife and try again.’

So said Spyglass, but don’t forget, this is my show, my account. If I want to tell you what he said, or what anyone said for that matter, then I will. When I tell you, just be aware that as well as what they say, my wanting to share it with you is significant. Most importantly of all the order in which I share it with you is mine and mine only. It’s I who will bring clarity to this ramshackle affair. Did I tell you I was there right at the end, Spyglass’s end? Alright, not always conscious, but there. I heard most of what he had to say. Much of it was addressed directly to me. Bound and gagged, but there. He didn’t block up my ears. God knows how he got me up onto the roof. My clothes were shredded and my knees and elbows were raw so I suspect there was a degree of dragging. But I was there and I remember everything. I could write nothing down. I did not need to. I saw how it was with my own clear vision. Later I did write it all down in a blue hardback journal. When I came round this is what I observed. When we’re done with this I’ll go back further and tell you how it came to be. That’s something I continue to feel the need to do. Because of and despite my previous failed attempts, to make sense of this investigation, I again take up this task. Back then, I’m sure of it, I asked the right questions, got the right answers. I troubled the grapevine relentlessly, but couldn’t make sense of what they told me. I pursued them until I got what I thought I wanted. Even right at the end I was interrogating Spyglass. It was just what I did back then.

*

I’d been walking along Queensway, West London, when he’d tapped me on the shoulder. After everything that had happened I was astounded to be confronted by Spyglass, with his badly scarred face, his past career as a clown, and his mind fixed firmly on the future. By this stage he’d abandoned everyone. I couldn’t help but wonder when his wife Ernestina had last seen him. How much did the grapevine know about what had happened? Thus it was at the end just as it had been at the beginning. They were all outsiders. No one stranger than any other.

I asked him about Thonatos Goose and he said: ‘He was the purest soul I ever met. Like all of us he had lived many times in many places. Like many of us he had retained significant memories of those previous lives and the broader experience to which they related. More than anyone else I ever met he had managed to pare his wisdom down to such an extent that it contained more light and penetrated more deeply… I have known a number of prophets, preachers, sears, mystics, et cetera… In far off places such souls continue to evolve and transmit their light, but prior to Thonatos it had been a long time since such beauty walked amongst the sentient beings of this planet. I was honoured to know him, could not help but love him.’

‘Some said he was the son of God?’ I broached.

‘He always said that we were all the sons and daughters of God and that therefore we were all entitled to envisage and perceive our father, or mother, as we wished.’

‘So is your rift with the grapevine permanent?’ I asked him, as we turned into Westbourne Grove.

‘Stupid bloody term that,’ he’d replied.

‘Permanent?’

‘Grapevine.’

Not really a team player, I thought.

‘So bloody trite,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but you know what I’m referring to!’

Wearily, ‘Yes of course.’ Resigned, ‘No it isn’t permanent. As you know, nothing is.’ Rallying, ‘Don’t come the naive enquirer with me.’

‘Of all of them, you seem the most angry?’ I persisted.

Spyglass fixed me with an intimidating stare. ‘They were a rather passive lot, if the truth be told… There were times when Thonatos lost his cool too, when he momentarily lost sight of his love of everyone and everything. I remember one occasion when faced with a particularly apathetic crowd he began to shout at them, over and again: "LIARS, LIARS, LIARS, LIARS…"'

‘That sounds more like you, than him?’

Spyglass adopted a sarcastic face and tone. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘There were times when he was a little bit like me.’

‘I’ve seen some of your Mezzotints,’ I told him.

He ignored this: ‘Why wouldn’t he, I, any of them, get angry? Why not? It’s extremely frustrating being surrounded by people all day, everyday, who have barely scratched the surface of their own consciousness, who have no inkling of what their current experiences actually mean, or what is and is not worth doing, and who are so easily distracted from everything that is important by anything that is utterly trivial and stupid… The grapevine have a vastly superior understanding of what Douglas Adams once referred to as Life the Universe and Everything… They laugh at him and ignore us… We are just trying to help them understand!’

*

Later, on the roof, I watched him, fascinated, as he turned away from me to resume his position on the parapet. Clearly I’d touched a nerve. The worst of the pain had drained from my head, the grogginess dissipated in my brain. I was thinking lucidly again and my appetite for this story had been pricked once more by what Spyglass had said. Then he recommenced regaling the night sky:

‘I am thinking back now, recalling, reconsidering the past, the key events in this life, the key event… PANIC… STOP… I cannot take risks like that. Who knows what will happen next time? Was I someone else then? Ever since that day. Everything different. Nothing the same. Had been told about it. Knew not to do it. Wanted to find out for myself. Active learner. It is the only way. The Buddha used to say, "Believe nothing unless you know it yourself to be the truth". Situation presented itself. Could not be certain it would work on Earth. Was desperate. Was not myself. Was something else then. Cannot say them. Dare not say them. Is all about the combination of words, intent, circumstances, recipient. What people do not realise here, generally speaking, is that by compounding factors… Anything is possible… That is infinity. There is nothing imaginable that cannot be, that has not been, that will not be, that is not. Where do you think your fantastic dreams come from? Experience. The bigger life beyond the constraints of this world. So it was for me. Are you coming for me? I am ready now. Can’t you see? ARE YOU COMING FOR ME NOW?’

It was an electrifying performance. It was like the first time I encountered the words of Thonatos Goose. I read them as they’d been transcribed by another. Regrettably I never actually heard him speak; only heard about him. You see I was so inspired by the thesis of Oscar Wolvereen Thompson that I returned to the junk shop in Greenwich to see what else lurked in the tea chest where I’d found it. I wasn’t disappointed, for there I discovered a collection of speeches, sermons, prose, something or other, that upon reading made me burst out laughing. I simply couldn’t believe it. The sentences and paragraphs seemed so obvious, chimed so completely with my own thinking, and yet I’d never thought of them, heard of them, or seen them written down before. Reading them felt like remembering a time when everything made sense, when everything was understood, when everyone was happy. It was truly enlightening, inspiring, majestic, ludicrous and true. How amazing, it seemed to me, that I should’ve wandered into that curious little shop and found what I did, then returned and found something else like I did. It was very disappointing to me when I returned for a third time and found it abandoned, empty, partially boarded up. Unable to explore within I cast an eye over the outside and noticed a rusted enamel sign between the window and the door. The top half was obscured by a painted shutter, but beneath that I could make out one word: Pawnshop. Sadly, I wandered on, already suffering from the obsession that was to dictate the key events of the rest of that year.

*

The second and as it turned out final purchase that I made in Greenwich consisted of fifty-four pages of old fashioned typescript, crudely stitched together and glued into a black cardboard binding. The title on the front had been inscribed in white letters: THE TESTAMENT OF THONATOS GOOSE. Inside it just began. There was no frontispiece, foreword, introduction, preface, contents page, or explanation at the front. There were no appendices or indices at the back. There was also no explanation of who Thonatos Goose was, when he had testified, nor when, where, or by whom, this collection had been assembled. There were no chapters, or section titles, or subtitles, or page numbers. The text was broken up into paragraphs, some of which seemed complete in themselves, while others clearly connected with what preceded or succeeded them.

*

I began writing this last night, on the computer, but I couldn’t pluck up the courage to look again inside the evidence cupboard. I get up from my chair and walk over to it now. I put the key into the lock the day before yesterday, ready to re-open the investigation, but I needed a further forty-eight hours to emotionally prepare myself. I turn the key and open both doors and set my eyes once more upon familiar problems: Thonatos’s Testament, Thompson’s Thesis, my own journal recording the mental workings out of my initial investigation in 1994 (all subsequent notes from subsequent investigations have been burned), three loose sheets of paper with further typewritten text on them, three Mezzotints, a VHS cassette in a brown post-dated envelope, and a black feather boa.

I take the Testament out and return to the computer. Some eighteen years have passed by since I first discovered it. Scanning again the typescript takes me back to another time, to the initial investigation in 1994 and beyond it to an age without computers, or mobile phones, the internet, social media, or gamification. Not for the first time I ask myself: Does the medium influence the message? Does the culture affect the questions asked? I notice, for the umpteenth time, the hand-written title, the typewritten pages, the home-made binding, before turning to the contents. When first I took it up, in the junk shop, it came open in my hand at page five. Although I’ve subsequently read it from front to back my preferred approach is to allow it to fall open at random. In this way a relevant section always appears to present itself.

On the computer I’ve created a new file and a new document within it. I shall properly re-commence this investigation now by copying the first lines from the Testament I ever read, words that began my searching; that ruined my life:

I want to talk to you about the sensory experience you call life. I have been struggling to find the words here, to express what I know. I think I have something to say that might help you. I want you to relax and enjoy what you are experiencing, rather than worry about it, rather than struggle with it. If you can do that then you may also understand the purpose of it, because that naturally exists within each and every one of you. It is a kind of journey that you are on, a sort of dream, within an infinite multi-verse of such experiences. You actually exist elsewhere. You are smaller than you currently realise, within a greater context than you currently know. But do not be frightened by that. There is nothing to be afraid of. This current and specific anxiety you feel, constantly, or intermittently, is just an aspect of this ‘journey-dream’ you are experiencing. Just as within this current consciousness there are different levels, degrees, types, so this consciousness is just one level, degree, type, of a greater multi-versal consciousness of sentient beings. As in this life falling asleep, consuming substances, staring out of a train window alters your consciousness, so in the greater multi-versal consciousness of the sentient being you will take up challenges, encounter specific experiences, go through one particular door or another and find yourself in this your present life, or an infinite number of alternative lives. This current life of yours and all the infinite alternatives to it are evolutionary lessons – I am talking about spiritual and intellectual evolution here. Reincarnation – depending on what you learn in each life – means either re-sitting the examination, or graduating. Whether you pass or fail the test, first time or thousandth time around, each journey-dream is an infinitesimal part of the experience.

Suffice to say that this opening paragraph motivated me to purchase the manuscript. As I recall the shopkeeper took a quid and a cigarette for it. I kept the Testament close to me for the rest of that year, before putting it away in despair. Shortly after obtaining it I bought my own journal and began recording my own observations. Initially I think I thought the Testament might explain everything, might make sense of everything, but as I tried to understand it better, find out about its origins, it posed more and more questions; gave rise to greater and greater uncertainty.

I wanted to understand what Thonatos was saying. To this end I wanted to know who Thonatos was. When I couldn’t find him I wanted to know what had happened to him. To this end I sought out and questioned those who had known him, from whom a whole other mystery unfolded. The waters were further muddied. The day was clouded with more confusion. I found myself wandering, aimlessly, lost, pondering the imponderable, referring to the Testament constantly. Ultimately my sole conclusion was that I’d failed in my quest. And whenever I returned to this problem, to try to make sense of what I’d discovered that year, my thinking failed me again.

I never met Thonatos Goose, but I did get to know the soul responsible for compiling the Testament. As I think of her now I feel another obsession flaring up again. She explained how at a particular juncture she’d thought it worthwhile producing several dozen copies and then going out and leaving them in places where they might be picked up: art galleries, furniture shops, telephone boxes and so forth. It’s to the conversations with her and with others that I recorded in my journal that I return now, again, to understand what happened. It’s to these two books, the black and the blue, and in due course, no doubt, the other pieces of evidence I’ve collated. Then of course there are my memories. In my endeavour to make sense of everything that happened I shall arrange my evidence and recollections as if they were one conversation, which is what they are to me. To solve this, I’ve always felt, requires simply getting all the relevant bits into the right order. Then and only then will the whole truth shine out from the page. That, I know not why, is what I believe. That, I think, is what Thonatos would’ve wanted. It’s true he never wrote anything down himself. He spoke amidst the circumstances of his time. His words must therefore be considered, not in isolation, but as part of a discourse. They were never set in stone, but are part of the explanation to the ever evolving question. Nevertheless, I only have them because Adel wrote them down. She disclosed this to me in Queens, New York. She was just thirty then. I don’t know where she is now. My only contact with any of them was during the course of that year; 1994. She had red hair, green eyes, pale skin and a slim physique. I laugh out loud, again, as I transcribe more of The Testament of Thonatos Goose:

The first idea is a capital letter Q. It comprises the circle of life – complete with an inside and an outside – and a tail that is the way in