|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| The next time I laid eyes on him he was supine on a parkbench, exhaling a great Tower-of-Babel smoke plume into the night. You could tell by his eyes he was plastered to the hairline, but that was nothing unusual. | ||||||||||
| "The world has tended, and probably always will tend, in its bastardly fashion, to substitute appearance for reality," he began. "But while the world goes on giggling and twittering away, the artist, who is always alone, who is heterodox when everyone else is orthodox, multifurious when everyone else has had the life kicked out of them, the artist is the perpetual upsetter. The artist must remain the enemy of the people, and the restorer of the real." | ||||||||||
| He was always an eloquent drunk. | ||||||||||
| �"Let's go to the old community theatre," he said. | ||||||||||
| I never liked homicide and I never liked genocide, not any more than I liked suicide. | ||||||||||
| "But Rose," he said, "you do like graveyards." | ||||||||||
| Along the avenue the fluorescents were stammering epileptically. A mannequin emerging from a bathtub filled with ermine and wearing a voluminous ballgown admired its reflection in a shop-window. Some children ran past, pursued by a man wielding what looked like some sort of gardening instrument that was not quite an axe. Further on, achromatic flowers sprouted up from between fissures in the pavement. The gate of the cemetery groaned on the wind. | ||||||||||
| No-one had been buried there yet. Probably no-one ever would be. But somehow the unallocated plots, the finely cut grass, seemed much more disquieting than the tumbled graves of churchyards. There was no mandrake, no hemlock. Only, under the one tree that had been planted, a yew of course, a book lay open. And as its pages ruffled, like the sound of wings, it alone suggested something of the history of the place. | ||||||||||