Mousehead

By BC Derbyshire

Aubrey Mousehead is 65, alone and going mad. His past has caught up with him. He can feel mortality stalking him. He stares at the TV with the sound off, seeking answers – seeking the voice of God. In his bowels the Black Flower of madness is germinating as memory and regret threaten to engulf him.

He is young Aubrey, a solitary child, growing up in the 50’s in a house full of books Sitting in an empty, sunlit room, he sees an ant appear from the skirting and follows it into its nest, where he finds – and is terrified by – the queen. Later, he grows and goes to school. He plays, explores, has more moments of fear. He gets older, trying in vain to look up his teacher’s skirt. Finally, on the beach, he builds his last sandcastle. Rain pours on him, washing away his childhood. Mousehead is born.

He is Mousehead, the hedonistic, idealistic 20-year-old long-haired 60’s drop-out, 20 and untamed. Living in Cornwall with his parents and Aunt Dorothy, dotty and colourful. Hitching to London where his friends - those reckless sons and daughters of impossibility - live. Meeting the luscious Trixie and ultimately losing all.

And he is to be found in ‘The Patient’, a novel he wrote in his youth. A man wakes in a deserted hospital which looks down on a beach. He is swathed in bandages, like a mummy. He has no memory of his name or condition. Outside, on the beach, erotic plastic and zippered constructions are scattered randomly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BC Derbyshire
• Release date: Sep 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310117466

BC Derbyshire

In the 60's I was inspired by Jack Kerouac,Ray Bradbury, J.P. Donleavy, Genet, Rabelais and others to learn how to write books of my own. The first attempts were merely bad pastiche, but slowly I found my own voice. Now retired, I have just begun to publish online. Originally from Ealing, the latter ten years or so of my life have been quite nomadic, moving across south-east England. I am at present, though, happily living in Cardiff, Wales with Tess, who I married earlier this year. I have two grown children who I love very much.

Book preview

MOUSEHEAD

By

BC Derbyshire

Published by Rainbird at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 BC Derbyshire

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

About BC Derbyshire

Other titles by BC Derbyshire

Contact BC Derbyshire

CHAPTER 1

Mousehead Magnificat.

Mousehead Inviolate.

Mousehead screaming silently because he always screams silently, so silently he hears nothing. Sitting watching television with the volume off, knees to chin, long back bent forward, hair swept back, just beginning to thin at the front and whiten at the sides. Watching images moving unfathomably on the screen. Groups of soldiers or guerrillas or rebels or terrorists running from wall to wall or crouching in dusty places to fire rockets at a distant village which sheds smoke into the cloudless sky. The heroic freedom fighters or fascist murderers grin at the camera as if they have just paid 50p a shot at a fairground. Cut to a row of bodies in a courtyard. Weeping and anger. Elongated faces, hands turned skyward, perplexed eyes. Close-up of pool of blood congealing to brown in the high white sun.

Cut to woman immaculately suited, slim, trustworthily brunette - no flighty air headed blondes for us thank you very much - hazel eyes wide open with astonishment. No sorrow, no anger here. She is wearing a sky-blue suit, fashionable yet conservative, and a white blouse. Her world holds no terrors. It is world without pain. World without poverty. World without war. World without the body-odour stench of verminous millions turning toothless faces to the dust. World without end, amen, amen. She is amazed because the whole wash is cleaner, brighter, fresher than it has ever been before. Suddenly the sun has come from behind the clouds. The high white sun splintering over the clothes line, drying the blood. Cut to new Cola anthem, heroes and heroines turn their clean, astonished faces to the sun, to the high white sun. Cut to cornflakes. Cut to death.

●

Mousehead Magnificat.

I hold these words like cracked and polished knucklebones. I speak the truth, for every polished word is true; every scoured and rubbed and burnished word is true. They have their own weight, these words. I can feel the weight of them in my hand. They are beauty, these words. I can feel the beauty of them in the hard ball of my stomach. I open my mouth and they fall out -scatterings of bones in the corner of a sunlit silent room where particles of dust drift lazily down to the open pages of a small, old leather-bound book.

●

Aubrey Mousehead, 65 and fading.

Named in a moment of divine pomposity after Beardsley. So named, but not of course baptised, by Arthur and Elizabeth Mousehead, nee Freeman. Conceived in splendour, born in what Arthur, clinging to Art like a life raft in his shipwrecked post-war world, called Celestial Poverty.

On the mantelpiece behind him are several curling black and white photographs of young pretty women. He does not see them. They exist, possibly, somewhere in the unfocussed past.

●

Aunt Dorothy moved her pale translucent fingers as she spoke. With every word her bottom lip quivered as if it were struggling over the strange vowels and consonants of an alien language.

Let me tell you, m’boy. King Edward had legs like stripped-down herrings! What d’you think of it? Hmm?

Mousehead - then 20 and untamed - liked Aunt Dorothy. He liked her age, her crumpled face, her distaste for all things commonplace, her endless stories of a regal girlhood, her fruity voice, her bizarre sense of humour, her blatant animosity towards the others. Most of all he liked her because he felt she could see through him as easily as he felt he could see through her.

"Saw ‘em once, y’know. Stripped-down herrings! He came to stay with us for one of those ghastly weekend party affairs. Everybody just so. Frightfully posh. Thirty-two of us sat down for dinner, don’t y’know - quails eggs and all that. Squirrels’ backsides in aspic. Revolting stuff! Anyway, we gels were there for decorative purposes only. We weren’t supposed to eat. After the meal the men had their cigars and brandy. The whole blessed lot of them were as drunk as skunks by ten O’clock, and the footmen had to carry them all up to bed. I was looking out of my window and I saw him come out in his dressing gown. I believe he urinated behind a tree. Whatever, that’s where I saw ‘em. Skinny and white like fishbones in the moonlight. Ha!"

Her face disintegrated into a smile, as brown and creased as an old ten shilling note. Mousehead smiled back at her and leaned back in his chair, looking out of the window at the black Cornish night.

They spy on me, she said. What curious path had taken her from Royal legs to this tired old obsession he knew not. He turned reluctantly to look at her, at her watery colourless eyes.

They watch me every moment of the day and night. Every moment. Now. I can feel them watching me. I can hear them behind the doors, behind the windows. And what do they hope to see? Hmm? What do they hope to see? An old, old woman withering away her last few years. Old and decrepit and stupid. Half dead already. They tried to put a curse on me, y’know. Or somebody did anyhow. I’m sure it was them. I found the crossed sticks outside the caravan door, three mornings in a row. They want rid of me. I scare them. Your Father daren’t speak to me. He leaves the room as soon as I walk in. And your Mother leaves notes, just like talking to a child. ‘Your dinner is in the oven.’ ‘Have you got any laundry?’. They wanted to kill me with the crossed sticks but I lit candles and prayed. Soon saw ‘em off! They can’t get me, y’know. They keep spying and leaving their curses, and I keep praying and lighting candles.

Mousehead allowed his gaze to leave her and to settle instead on the black rectangle of the window. He had heard it all before, this talk of curses and candles, and it was at such times he liked Aunt Dorothy least. He found any talk of things spiritual profoundly uncomfortable, although he would never have admitted it. The persona he offered to the world was that of the omnivorous intellectual, avidly devouring every creed, philosophy, idea and statement which came his way; then diligently sifting through them all, sucking out the meat and discarding the bone, so maintaining his integrity. In fact his mind was teeming with half-digested and half-understood snippets of other people’s thought and beliefs. Of himself there was little more than a desire for self-preservation at all costs, sharpened by an almost superstitious dread of mortality. Anything which smacked of personal reality gnawed at his stomach and sent him scurrying for cover. Abstractions and earnest late-night conversations were more his forte.

Outside it had begun to rain steadily, so sadly it constricted his chest and brought the kitchen shadows into painful focus, providing the perfect setting for his mood. She would be slipping out to her solitary caravan soon. She was almost done now, almost talked out. The stories were over and the confused, fearful mumblings had begun. She would rise like a ghost and drift ghostlike out of the door, exhaling ectoplasm. Rain dribbled down the window. His chair creaked as he settled himself back on it.

They hate me, she continued," because I know all about them. They want to suck me - they’re vampires don’t y’know. They want to make me just like them; hollow and bloodless. They’ve no blood of their own so they want to take mine. They want my heart and guts. I’ll never let ‘em, my dear. I’ll die first - Ha! Then I’ll come back clanking and rattling and haunt ’em. Not that they’d notice. They’d just carry on reading their silly books and looking at their silly pictures as if writers and artists were something more than just plain ordinary men. Ha! God’s not to be mocked, y’know!"

Mousehead doubted it.

Father’s books reached the ceiling, shelf upon shelf, multiplying over the years until they filled every wall of every room apart from the kitchen - and even this haven possessed two shelves of cookery books. In the rest of the house Arthur’s wildly catholic taste in reading matter had originally been arranged in alphabetical order of authors, so that Groucho rubbed shoulders with Karl, and Death of a Salesman brooded alongside the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Eventually this system had been abandoned in favour of classification by subject, which appeared to work quite successfully as far as non-fiction was concerned, but which led to some startling bedfellows among the novelists. Finally, with so many books in the house, the criteria had become size alone. Now the different systems vied with each other in ecstatic confusion, their musty scent pervading the air and constantly dragging him back to his childhood.

Then he had sat for hours on end in the enclosed world of an only child, leafing through big canvas-bound Art books. Botticelli, Dürer, Cezanne, Magritte, Rembrandt, Hals, Turner, Picasso - these were the stuff of his imagination, the Heroes and Supermen who’s passions and labours cascaded undiluted into the uncomprehending and indiscriminate heart of an eight year old boy. And there, among these glossy prints, he had seen for sure all those mournful Christs hanging in such precise and delicate agony between snarling villains or trees or marbled architecture, while overweight winged babies held aloft golden cups to catch the fountains of blood. So many sacrifices. So many impaled hands and long, pale legs. So many nails and thorns, tears and scarlet gushings. Yet these images - these erotically beautiful men with dark hurt eyes turned heavenward in mute surrender- were, he had been assured, the images of God Incarnate. Surely God was to be mocked.

It’s raining, she said.

I know. It’s been raining for hours.

She looked out of the window. You can’t see the moon any more. Only the night. Doesn’t it scare you?

No.

Ha! Yes it does. I can see the fear in your eyes. I can smell it. That’s why you sit hunched up like that.

He sat up. No I don’t!

"Yes you do. You’ve always been scared or angry. Small wonder with them as parents. The Living Dead."

They love you, you know. He was on the defensive now. Reality was lumbering out of the shadows and he was genuinely afraid. Also, whatever else could be said of them, they were his parents after all.

They love me, as you put it, because I am your Father’s Aunt, that’s all. They would change me if they could. They’d push me and prod me like a piece of dough until I was the right shape. They’d dress me in tweeds and thick stockings and sensible shoes don’t y’know and dust me off for visitors.

Mousehead looked at the splash of Indian colours she was wearing, and at the embroidered Turkish slippers, and he knew she was right. Mother and Father were free-thinking in principle, just as long as the practice did not in any way venture beyond the horizons of their own moral and aesthetic landscape. They tolerated his long hair because it could be interpreted as Artistic, though they would have preferred it not to touch his shoulders, let alone flow past them. But the jeans were another matter. Corduroy, preferably brown, was the correct male attire Chez Mousehead.

When your Father was a child, continued Aunt Dorothy relentlessly, he loved to dissect frogs. I believe it says a lot about his outlook on life. He was a fat little boy, always cutting things up. If it was small and twitchy he’d be at it with his chloroform and scalpel before you could say slice. His nanny was terrified of him. Then he’d draw ’em. Yards of squiggling entrails across the paper. I can’t imagine what he hoped to get from it, unless it held some sort of mystic significance for him, which is most unlikely. He only drew their insides y’know, right up to the age of fourteen I think. Then he left off frogs altogether, thank God, and went on to those blotchy landscapes he hangs everywhere. I’d have strangled him at birth myself. At least your Mother has some technical ability, if nothing else.

Mousehead was trying not to listen, casting around desperately for a way of diverting the conversation. The subject of frogs had brought crashing into his mind the incident with the worm. Already he could feel the bile of anguish rising into his throat, sending hurricanes of panic through his nervous system, draining the colour from his face. He needed a drink badly, but there was none in the house. They were teetotal.

Aunt Dorothy began to prepare herself to rise out of her chair. He wanted her to stay, in spite of the spectres she had released. Or, had he been honest, because of them. Forgotten things were now stalking the corridors and he was afraid. He wanted to reach out and cling to her sleeve, cling to her curled, brittle leaves of hands and force her back into her chair.

Don’t go yet, he said, trying to keep his voice flat and neutral, it’s not late.

I’m not a nightbird like you, m’boy, she smiled. "I’m an antediluvian lady with tired old bones who should have been tucked in hours ago. Anyway, you know I can’t bear this house. If it wasn’t for you I’d never come here. Look at it. Books, books! Dusty bits of leather and cardboard and paper gathering more dust. Printed with dust. Illustrated with dust. There’s no life here, none at all, that’s what I can’t stand. No life. He reads everything but sees nothing. Never read if you can