What the Hell

By RG Gregory

There is writing in them that pleases me. So I have mingled them amongst the short pieces, making the book a gathering of oases that have spurted a little water, or have run out of a proper supply.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burgage Books
• Release date: Aug 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910493007

Book preview

What the Hell

WHAT THE HELL

Copyright © 2014 by RG Gregory.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

RG Gregory is hereby identified as the author of this work in accordance with the section 77 copyright, designs and patents Act 1988.

First Printing: 2014

ISBN: 978-1-910493-00-7

Publisher: Burgage Books

The Burgage, Market Drayton, Shropshire, TF9 1EQ

Website: www.rggregoryco.uk

PREFACE

I have no clear idea where the writing urge came from, but I could read before going to school, and was into short stories and even a detective novel by my mid-teens. In my late teens I shifted over to poetry and had committed to being a playwright before leaving grammar school and becoming a post-war conscript, in, eventually, the Education Corps. All early stories (along with most of the poems) have disappeared. The first stories in this collection were written during my three years at University.

In the succeeding years, poetry, and all aspects of theatre activity, dominated my creative time. Occasionally, though, there was space for another story, and then a splurge of themes that seemed capable of becoming novels. Out of five attempts, only one found the way through to being completed (Nought – Snapshot for Victor Sugar). The others now hover between forms.

What the Hell!

There is writing in them that pleases me. So I have mingled them amongst the short pieces, making the book a gathering of oases that have spurted a little water, or have run out of a proper supply.

What The Hell is the first of my writings to be turned into an e-book.

Other productions have included:

Imaginative Speech and Writing (with Ronald James): Nelson

1966/Macdonald/1970

The World of Instant Theatre: Wanda Publications 1993;

Glimpses of Dorset: Wanda Publications 1996;

The Ansty Experience: Wanda Publications 1997;

Christmas The Delinquent: erbacce press 2008;

Gentlemen Lift the Sea: Indigo Publishing 2012

Bad for Ears: Indigo Publishing 2014

The Buddha’s Tooth: Indigo Publishing (to come 2014/2015)

Many poems in journals and Poetry Magazines: 1946-present

WHAT THE HELL

Oh no green lady with the red face, don't hit the boy with the wind in his hair. It's not his fault that a cloud's knocked his hat off. Pepita, Pepita! cried the fat man. Lumps of tears rolled down his cheeks into his frying-pan of a mouth. But Pepita was round the corner with her boy-friend and the words boomeranged and got caught up in his handkerchief.

The lamppost looked up at the tall man and was astonished. The dog forgot which was the lamppost. The tall man shook his leg and walked on through the clouds. I sucked fiercely at my third peppermint. It was a shirt-button that had been hanging around in my pocket for weeks. I remembered Lulu who said that shirts ought to have no buttons. The next one was a peppermint and a hot one. It burned.

The thin needle of a man threw the quarter-inch cigarette away with a curse. He examined his false teeth, stamped his feet, swung his arms and caught Pepita on her prow. She smiled and burst out crying. Her hair was ruffled and her lips red. Her boy-friend came up. He was red too, the same colour red as Pepita's lips. She told him to rub it off. He wanted to thread the thin needle of a man so I stepped in and gave them all a peppermint. I told them to shut up. Pepita smiled at me and she reminded me of Lulu. I gave her the shirt button. She threw it back in my face and kissed me.

The fat man came up and caught me one with his larder. He thought I was Pepita's boy-friend. I thought it a good idea. So did Pepita. Her boy-friend thought it a rotten idea. I gave him another peppermint. He said thank you. My nose started bleeding. Pepita spat with delight and the fat man stopped crying. The tears had solidified on his cheeks. The boy with the wind in his hair blew away from the green lady and kicked Pepita's boy-friend in the shins. I hit the fat man in the paunch and couldn't get my hand out. Pepita locked her arms round my neck and pulled me to the ground. I didn't like the taste of her lipstick. She didn't ask my opinion.

The fat man was on the ground too. He breathed out and I pulled my fist free. The green lady with the red face was hitting Pepita with a yellow umbrella. The boy was eating my peppermints. He didn't take to them. He started to look for the shirt button. Pepita bit off one of mine and gave it him. Pepita became more and more like Lulu. That is what I was afraid of.

The fat man was bouncing his stomach on the pavement. The boy with the wind in his hair was bouncing on the fat man. He coughed up the shirt button. The yellow umbrella snapped. Pepita had black hair. It didn't taste too good.

The thin man looked as lost as a needle in a haystack. When Pepita paused for breath I could see him. I could not see him very often. I tried to push Pepita away. She came back at high tide. The dog returned and started to lick my nose. Pepita's boy-friend came out of the fat man and bit Pepita in the neck. I suddenly realised Pepita wasn't English.

The fat man was praying in broken Spanish. He thought the green lady with the red face was the Madonna. I don't think she was. Pepita became passionate and began plucking my eyebrows. I got one hand free and set the dog on her. She bit the dog. The boy with the wind in his hair picked the dog up by the tail and swung it round.

The thin needle of a man stitched, but he wasn't quick enough. His elbow pricked the dog. The dog swore. Pepita's boy-friend barked. His nose wasn't wet. The green woman with the red face wept over her yellow umbrella. She was using a blue handkerchief. The boy with the wind in his hair was trying to knot the dog's tail to Pepita's shoe-lace. Pepita wasn't worried about her shoe lace. I was worried about Pepita. I was worried about everything. Everything was a bit too deep for me. I know now. I love Lulu.

The tall man came back and the dog was happy again.

CHERRYMAN

ONE

My office had nothing to recommend it except the view and that, in these last few years, has become cataclysmic. Not so long ago the building I am a part of had its own smart reputation. It rose out of the heartland of the city, singing with the money that made it possible, echoing with successful business. I was allowed into my one spare room as an afterthought. The owners of this elegant exclamation (ejaculation) mark to prosperity discovered, when it was somehow too late to alter it, that the plan had omitted to obliterate an odd space right at its very top. These owners too were aficionados of the detective story. When I came along, dispossessed elsewhere, looking for a room to camp my shaken Investigating Agency in for a while, till I could know for sure whether it had further life left in it or not, they remembered this woebegone space with a sumptuous view and offered it me more or less rent-free and for ever, if I so desired.

I came by way of recommendation from a drunken dilettante who once had used my services and found himself free of a prison sentence he thoroughly deserved, even if he were not technically guilty of the crime the police were anxious to clobber him with. He also happened to be someone's illegitimate son. Whose I did not discover, but clearly one of those whose stake in this monumental but golden-fingered folly carried the right kind of clout. Guilt, self-pity, sentimentality, ticklish pride – one or more of these gave me a free ride in a lift those mornings I felt it necessary to be office-bound., and brought me hurtling back to earth those evenings when my wasted, lonely, or fantasising days were over.

Once installed, nobody bothered me. Nobody seemed to care that I was there, although every single employer and employee, occupying the expensive office suites my bare-knuckled room pressed down upon, knew what my business was, pretending to be unperturbed at the rank clientele  shooting up to the heavens for my pedestrian contribution to their great mysteries of life.

I often looked upon my unintended garret as the skyscraper's pinhead of a brain. No one climbed as high as I did every day; no one soared above the streets with as much élan. Sometimes I spent whole days, when there was no detecting to do, or no advice to be invented, imagining the lay-outs and activities in particular offices below. I had a chart of all floors, pinned to the wall furthest from my desk, all four feet away, and I would choose the subject space below randomly by miniature dart (the last remnant of my childhood) and then throw myself into concentrated meditation, daring to guess the events occurring there at that very moment. I liked the idea of picking locks between spaces, of entering worlds parallel to but oblivious of my own. I enjoyed the idea of the quantum leap, without ever being able to fathom what it could properly mean. Perhaps what I was really in search of was power – over those whose power was always one up on my own. In my office I sat above them, frustratedly. My meditative games always ended with severe disappointment. What went on in those offices never offered me any great reward. Try as I might to fantasise on my own perception of the shallow and corrupt worlds below, I ended reduced to my own incompetence, and sensing that I was eavesdropping (as it were) onto a far richer sense of existence than my own.

Over the past few years though, things have subtly (at first) but now fundamentally altered. The ejaculation has gone out of the mark. My fantasies do not leave me any better off; I still cannot get my equality of stature out of the come-uppance of those below. But life has been draining out of this building, despite the arrogant fronts of once prosperous bloodsuckers. In the lifts people have become ghosts to each other; their eyes are inturned and their heads like often-struck coconuts about to topple off their stands to the floor. Their hair is flecked with a psychic dandruff; and the cool fragrances of their bodies, which once made my nostrils wrinkle with envy, have given way to the faintest of odours, as though they can no longer take time to shoot their deodorants straight into their armpits, and other bodily cubicles. I am haunted by the thought of my own smells ending up in their pockets.

The truth is, I have become dissolute; not from drink or drugs, nor any other indulgence or sensation of the flesh, but from disillusion. I sit up here on the point of this once-elegant pencil and both of us are losing our lead. We are remnants of an age that wanted to be better, sharper than it was.

TWO

I am Donald Cherryman, founder of, and sole worker in, the Cherryman Investigation Agency, deliberately named by me some twenty or so years ago to give the business some mocking street cred – the poor person's CIA. I came of age with a blurred photo of my father and a dying mother who had nothing to bequeath me but her name. She fell victim to the radiation sickness that cleared millions off this earth in the first half of this century, the result of the vast computer-network scam that took over the whole world in the decades overlapping the millennium, and the consequences of which have yet to work their way through the human psyche. The explosion of the internet (its tangled skeins still visible in the eyes of its fanatic devotees, who now haunt the underworlds of all big cities) and its mountainous tumours of knowledge, turned every headache into a spiritual cancer – a certifiable medical condition, of course, which the profession itself has to this day not officially recognised.

I was born into the death of human aspiration, the collapse of linear time and the machine mind, but long before I was thirty a kind of renaissance was taking place. A rush of spirit demanded a return of enterprise, a want again to have nature doing as it was told. A madness of clear thought drove the born-again survivors to reassert the old late twentieth-century ideals of individualistic panache. For a while an old-new architecture forced itself upon the contemporary penury, sticking its needles up in defiance of the universe, as though humanity could best express itself as a collective hedge-hog (long since extinct, but the most powerful totemistic symbol of the day). It was during this time that the building I now squat upon was raised, and I, soused beyond redemption in a zeal for deep intrapersonal inves-tigation, first set out to pull the skin off the murkier sides of human endeavour and to make healthy what lay within.

I see now that I was merely part of the final wave of what persisted in knowing itself as the new age, even though it was a term as old as the hills. As part of the private eye tradition, I was simply recycling the Greek tragic hero: the stupid godlike man seeking to wrestle with the sins of his race, by carrying the battle to the gods, who simply laughed and kicked him in the balls when his eyes were vainly trying to pick out the roads to the heavens. In my choice I was a victim of the literature, indeed the wider culture, of the times. Nothing could be published, viewed, communicated creatively that did not have a detective in it. All over the globe, police forces had collapsed out of an epidemic of corruption; law and order could speak only through gifted individuals, or through vigilante bands, often pitted against each other. Much government had reverted to being local, after the death of the concept of centralisation. We private detectives were the icon of our time, both in image and reality, much as the cowboy had once dominated and confused the politics of over a hundred years ago.

About this time too, the Central Intelligence Agency, which had spread from being the powerful arm of one government to becoming the powerbroker in every ambitious nation-state, turned in upon itself and went into strange eclipse, within a year shrinking to an anonymous blob. Money-systems suddenly found themselves needing to be honest; few managed to survive – and it was this, more than any other factor, which encouraged the outburst of reactionary anarchic energy and spawned the mid-century illusion of rejuvenated spirit.

Each detective, self-appointed, fought avidly for local distinction. Cult after cult appeared, clustered around finer and finer specialisations of the detective's role, each bred from a conviction that the root of the human dilemma lay in a different part of the spiritus mundi. Detectives not only strolled alertly through the dark streets; huge billboards proclaimed their values. They asserted themselves in language that used the old publicity skills of doctors, priests, politicians blurred into one. They represented the middle finger stuck up into the sky against the vindictiveness of the godhead that could not possibly exist. They waded through the sore seas of human wickedness, and reached the far shores often battered to within a millimetre of their lives, but with shining recuperative powers.

For some years I played that game for all I was worth. I was the scum's CIA, the mocking redemptor of the down-and-out, the one who could see beyond the unseeable. My territory was the gall-bladder. There was not an ailment, crime, nor sin that did not leave its stone in that much discarded organ. The gall-bladder was the seat of the deepest pain known to the human frame. Its deposits were so often argued to be the symptom not the cause, as though the liver itself was by far the greater oligarch in that part of the body-state. I knew differently. The ripping of the gall-bladder from a sufferer's body was to remove the only revitalising sanctum for a being's bitterness. Bitterness inwardly denied must spew outwards, or dig deeper into the impenetrable channels of a person's mythologically-inturned landscape. I was a great success. Detectives have always been incurable romantics. In their born-again period, so many carried hearts, souls, eyes, mouths, faces, brains, minds on their banners. And there were the scurrilous romantics who proposed the sexual organs as their cause celebre, and seats of evil. There was a smaller coterie that reached to the liver or the spleen or the kidneys, as the important organs of communication. Many foreswore the physical and went for the more obviously spiritual. I was the first to my knowledge who attempted to solve the deep mysteries that came his way by treating the gall-bladder as the door into the mystic centre.

I tell you this now with something akin to self-contempt, although no one can be detached from the fashions of the day, no matter how much such knee-jerking is denied. For a while it gained me fame (or notoriety) to a degree, and enabled me to live with some disreputable comfort. They were dangerous times too – after one particularly vituperative denigration of the liver as the detective's most valuable hieroglyph, I was the victim of a scalpel attack in broad daylight, wielded by a nonagenarian long past-it surgeon whose whole life had been bound up with liver-transplanting. He was after mine, and got too close for my own comfort before a young adulator of mine managed to kick his legs out from under him. But not before the scalpel had penetrated some centimetres into my flesh and somehow broke off in our mutual fall, leaving part of its blade behind. My tissues still remember the pain.

THREE

I have had nothing to investigate now for nearly a month. In the world at ground level, politicians have reduced their sentences to one word. Abuse and the sheer enormity of everyday problems have eroded the need for any more lengthy reasoning. In the business world beneath me, the collapse of money itself, threatened now for decades but forcing its way into public consciousness (with greater brutality each dawn) has replaced gilt by guilt. Minor tycoons face themselves as paupers in their mirrors. There is barely an office that has not had to come to terms with dismissal, or suicide, in the past few days. The crisis is gnawing away in the bloodcells of the entire country. What is happening elsewhere we have scant means of finding out.

I survive, of course – and  so do the other millions. Food finds its way into shops. It is just more of a hassle to obtain it – more queuing, more bartering, more bad temper – not  so easy to dodge the violence that is bound to associate itself with shortage. I have taken to hoarding, little by little, so that, when needs be, I can spend days, even the odd week or two, confined to this office space. I have rooms elsewhere in the city, but they are in a basement. In them, over the past year, I have begun suffering from intimations of claustrophobia – nothing I could confess to my neighbours, but sufficient to depress my own sense of reality. Here, on the contrary, however bleak the world, it cannot totally deny me my sense of elevation, as though, even now, there is one hair-breadth of hope to be relied upon, no matter how much the options for that hope have been crushed under heel over and over again.

I have not left my penthouse squat-hole for three days. I have decided to sit it out, waiting for my next client, the ghost I desire to haunt me, no matter how much I am riddled with spiritual disbelief. The streets are perilous; no person, however burdened with a crime against self or family or other loved ones, is likely to risk the journey out of doors, maybe for miles, to seek out the long lift upwards to where I wait, impecuniously convinced no one has my interests at heart. Even if such desperate people cannot know it, they are deterred as much by my cynicism as by their own bodily fears. I have come the whole gamut, from the most enthusiastic humanist in town to one who looks upon common humanity and cannot prevent himself from spitting. I cannot even joke about it anymore – and I was one who, in the terminology of the day, was often caricatured as the Swinging Detective, the most cheerful cherry-picker of them all. I lived by my jaunty air, my unassailable assertions of the gall-bladder's superiority as the most likely cache of the soul. I was an alchemist more or less, proclaiming the gall-bladder as my crucible, wherein the necessary bile was transported into realms of gold. It was the home of the philosopher's stone. Gall and grail were not that far apart.

Now I blame the ordinary and the