Queen
of Hearts
I
made an appointment to see the Queen of Hearts who was under house arrest, down
at No.42. It’s murder getting in there, now that the bureaucrats are in
charge.
Heavy
great typewriters tap out an administrative symphony; movements for both
‘unrequited love’ and ‘affairs of the heart,’ performed in languages
from Danish to Senegalese. They’ll
even shout them down a drain pipe if you inform the manager that you can’t
read.
Remembering
love had once been simple, I went a waltzing like a madman through a park of
autumn leaves, listening for birdsong. A woman in a long tailed coat and hat
called the police. I was promptly arrested.
Down
at the station the inspector smiled smugly and said, ‘lad it’s
complicated.’ He told me that my salary of a bowl of plumbs and half a pound
of English pears was less than half of what she’d spent this time last year.
‘Who
expected?’ I asked, bemused.
‘Why,
the woman who interrupts your every thought’ he snorted
Then
he turned the key and locked me in, leaving me to a mattress spread far too
thin. I was unsure at that point of the charge.
A
hunchback in a cell opposite, in a voice caked and as dry as bread, pressed
himself against his bars and said,
‘Seek
man the Queen of Hearts, the Queen of Hearts, for she was with us from the
start, when we took our first steps from the ‘old’ man to the ‘new’.
She
came after equality but stood against the Malls. She resisted stomach stapling,
laser treatment and nose strip pores. Celebrate her, the Queen of Hearts, the
Queen of Hearts who was with us from the start.’
‘Why
are you here,’ I asked.
‘They
told me to fix cars- but I had no spanners,’ he bemoaned
And
when the fence in the garden broke they shook their heads and called some bloke-
who in his turn shook his head, taking fifty notes. How they looked down at
me!’
Moved
was I by those bloated eyes, hounded through this churlish world. I shall
protest’ I announced indignantly, “I shall take our case to the Lords, into
the lofty spheres of modern thought, where the libertarian wigged head bows and
sighs. They shall hear our plea, my brothers, in their oak panelled court. He
could tell I was half cut.
I
called the guard and demanded my telephone call. He obliged me and then turned
back to his bacon sandwich, over which he continued to salivate. As he drooled
over meat and sauce I secretly dialled, having imprinted the number to head. A
bureaucrat answered. ‘Three o’clock? Great! I’ll be there in a while’.
The Appointment had now been made to see the Queen of Hearts.
A
violinist cried out in despair from a cell further down, his prayers
repetitively mutating into groans. The inspector came back and issued him with a
warning, declaring that ‘dreaming was forbidden’ and that ‘truth was to
remain hidden under the pillows of his concrete bed.’
Released,
I rallied like a berserker and sped to No.42.
Shedding
my anger at the step, I knocked the door.
Bang
Bang Bang went the
gold lion knocker.
Bang
Bang Bang; the
knocker went down again.
A
bureaucrat answered. He was prim and proper and as grey as stone. With hair of
straw and a pelican nose, he boomed aloud ‘Sir, there’s no one home’
‘Piffle’
I spat and barged straight in shouting ‘you fools, you fools, you fools, I a
dreamer and a fool, I shall never give in!’
‘Sir’,
began the bureaucrat, ‘wishing not to aggrieve there is something I must
advise you of before I slam the door’
‘What
is that, my good man?’ I snapped.
‘Why
sir’, twanging his moustache, ‘you’ll never leave.’
Then,
like a moan, he petered out; too where I could not tell- no doubt somewhere
efficient- a stationary cupboard with a servants bell.
I
stood for a while alone in the lobby. Then I heard it. Music was coming from somewhere down below- a dithyramb of
voices and laughter, gilded and golden and from the womb with a heartbeat base,
both pleasing and cruel. An aroma issued from those intoxicating notes, rising
up a winding case of chocolate stairs, wafting down the hall. I met those notes
there, clean, standing on a washed tiled floor.
That
fragrance broke inside my mind like a great rock chord, calling me toward that
surreptitious place. I hurried through empty rooms, flapping and panting through
curtains and doors like a dog in heat. I pushed and penetrated darkness until I
found myself alone.
A
long white marbled hall stretched out before me, at the end of which waited a
thick, blackened door. Oh, how I could feel it- truth banging like a drum in my
blood. Truth changing into something weighted with meat; flesh and blood; truth
banging like a drum; truth banging deep in the belly of the blood.
Unbound
and burning with a lust for smells and sounds unknown I flew to that door, like
a crazed bird. With oily wing and crooked beak I halted at its metal handle,
secreting a cry from my wormy throat. I threw that door open and stepped
into….
I
expected an ending; a great, gentle death, like that which results from the bite
of a bear. Its teeth would crush my neck. I would collapse, dead; falling down
into the folds of a giant’s sleep. I waited for the drop or the bite or the
war to come and claim me. Instead, under my feet I felt a carpet of warm grass.
Before
me was a midnight Garden in glorious bloom found beneath high hanging trestles
and red grape vines, under the light of a hot summer moon. A sax player squeezed
out notes with ease; a strawberry jazz breeze ruffled the locks of my hair.
Music seemed everywhere.
Music
permeated and radiated, melting the block ice and cold metals that clogged
arteries, nailed lungs and blistered eyes. It was music born of night. Music was
inside of me and it was alive inside of me and I, in it, felt life and breathed
life. I was new born once again.
On
a lawn of lush green, as the jazz went down, warm and long, a great pride of
women chattered and twirled, once forgotten, rejected by the world. My eyes
beheld strange, esoteric sights, which seemed as though they had lingered there,
over innumerable nights, for a thousand, thousand years, far below an industrial
world, unformed.
There
were Prostitutes fresh from turning tricks, a Jilted bride sharing canapés with
a vicar’s wife. The mistress who had usurped the king swigged beer with an
overweight model. In the corner Daddy’s angel, with her two clipped wings,
played with the girl who liked beetles and twigs. There were ballet dancers with
arthritic toes and an elderly woman basking in a pregnant glow.
In
the middle of this gathering, guarded by soldiers in pink mule heels, observing
the ancient stars, sat the Queen of Hearts on a plastic throne- oh the Queen of
Hearts, who was with us from the start.
With
eyes glittery and biting with sparks she looked at me and said, ‘Come forward
sir,’ ‘though do not trouble yourself with the ‘why’ the ‘how’ and
the ‘where’ for removed from your world we ‘are. Tell us, for what reason
do you seek our counsel?”
‘Madam’
said I, ‘my world is a sun bed full of fattening hides, lost to the gadget
beat of modernity, to individualism, angst and driving range crimes. Twenty four
hour commerce and ping cuisine, fuels my working day. It steals my child away.
(Oh, it steals my child away) And at night, I look to the stars and cry, for the
need to love is stuffed right down, like a pie down the trousers of a drunken
clown.
‘Yes,
great lady, it steals my child away, A child, bottle fed on booze until the age
of four, dragged by the arm up and down the stairs because of mother- (for he
could have no other)-and now I’m looking for him everyday, for she stole my
child away, stole him right away, from the hole that hurts.’
‘I
watch the news; half dead youth haunt the streets. Isolation pumps into the TV.
I’m high on this optical heroin. I cannot sleep. Is it the end of my world?
Cradled in the velvet womb of a grubby arm chair (there’s no one there)
nursing grumbling guts drugged with beer, I anesthetise myself to the world.
Help me find love and start again’. A tear came to me then. Like a solitary
diamond it fell.’
‘I
stare and stare until I don’t know who I am or what it is to be. Then I
remember that I loved a woman once but her heart hummed like a fridge. I was in
love but I just couldn’t sleep. Her damn humming wouldn’t let me be. I lie
on my slanted bed and I look to the stars and cry.’ Those beautiful diamonds
filled my eyes.
The
Queen of Hearts, regal and divine on her plastic throne, looked at me with regal
authority and care. ‘Stay with us then, be washed and renewed’ she implored.
‘Learn and grow from our codes and laws, from the beauty that is choice, for
here we will be what we will be without judgement, demands or a society that
would order us appropriately clothed. All Insecurities, shame and guilt must be
declared at the cloak room door.’
She
continued her tract. ‘We are women, good and bad, powerful and mad, though
often just glorious in the fact that we are plainly ourselves. Here the
magazines stoke our fires, sir. No woman, under my reign, will ever be a slave
to a man’s desires, to his ideals or dreams, to his rules, attending to him as
though he were a king. We will meet our brother man at the table of equality
with liberty and power drawn up from the well of self. Whether we are in sack
cloths, unshaved, ball gowns or fetish leather, we shall be loved and respected
for whom it is we are.’
‘Hail,
hail, the queen of hearts who was with is from the start’, proclaimed the male
guards, clicking their pink mule heels.
Captive
under her crown was her hair, white gold and vibrant, full of the music of
clouds, that balloon upward into the air. Ancient and hypnotic were her green
field eyes, full of the wind that moves the wheat. Scented was her skin, as
bluebells are in the wild, wild wood; inside her mind a philosophy of love,
heard but misunderstood. I craved to hear the music and the words; to take her
gospel back to my world; a world unformed coming to an end.
I
stood their mesmerised, overcome by freedom, a man reborn.