BEYOND THE PALE OF SENSE

by Weirdmonger


The town had suffered a skinful short of a deluge - bordering on the night sky becoming a second cousin to the sea.  Such conditions gave Gant the hump, particularly when a swollen shop-awning released its freight of icy water down his neck.  The rain seemed endless, each dotted slat of its liquid stretching back to the tilted palm of God.

Gant, mawkish yet preening, spoke to himself as if he were in love with nose-slime.  He was geared to a destination where, weather or not, synchronicity had him ear-marked to reach on time.  A computer date would never forgive him being late - especially a filly filleted for him from a posh infotech, an agency that had cost the earth (plus Value Added Tax), exorbitant merely for a surface assessment as to his needs and potential for matching.

"You're slicked up for love," hummed Gant, as he smarmed back his hair, cursing the vertical river that even his huge golf umbrella couldn't keep at bay.  The razor-sharp creases in his slacks, steam-ironed by his own fair hand, showed visible signs of cross-skewing to either side of each ridge - making him squirm with something more intrinsic than simply snagged pride.  The black mirrors into which the uppers of his shoes had been buffed raced droplets sooner than reflect the scissoring of his handsome strides.  His tie, loosened at its post, hung slackly like a midget waif to whom his collar had given necking room ... silk arms pitifully upraised for a kiss.

Gant's computer date was to be met outside the Odeon, she sporting a red rose, he a white, for the sake of mutual recognition and, in his case, an instinctive feel for sartorial elegance.  In case of any doubt, both were to raise their roses in salute. 

His own rose had cost an arm and a leg, since he hadn't wanted to stint on freshness nor tightness of furled petal.  But, then, of course, the neck-tie knot had let him down, having dropped a notch after Gant's original uptug of a trial vis a vis its firm fixity - the only means of knowing: as he didn't trust mirrors.  The tie's top-bud had, at that time, indeed felt sternly lodged in the wing-collars' neat nest.

The rain was causing his rose to droop, its white involutions now faintly edged with an aberrant pink - as if it had always been a red one at heart, now bleeding towards its eventual fulfilment as a pyre plant.  Gant shook his head.  The last time he had thought such thoughts, his own true nature had bloomed too soon - and the computer date on that occasion, once met, had easily spotted the two fangs bedded upon his nether lip - like two tiny tots in their cot: each a mini skeleton with no space between its bones.  The date had thus been scared off, before Gant had chance to wield his charm upon her...

Tonight, he loitered looking in a shop window near the Odeon because there appeared to be nobody waiting there, of any sexual persuasion, let alone of a female one, nobody either wearing or not wearing a red rose.  Gant's ability to kill time was, however, no better than his ability to create it.  God had already created the most there'd ever be.

"You're still slicked up for love," he intuned.  His thoughts had been running away with themselves and he needed to settle them down with a top-heavy one, preferably a thought he'd already had because used ones were often catalysts and became rich with weighty considerations that had autonomously developed amid the empty mental areas previously unused by the original thought.  He smarmed back his hair - and wondered what it was that winked at him from behind the shop window.

A VDU screen was beaming bright even as he watched: a sales PC left switched on all night to attract, like moths, those people at a loose end towards the display...

He staggered away from the Odeon cinema, knowing his senses would have been wasted on that wide pale screen.  Neither would there have been kissing and cuddling in the back row ... unless it had been simply with his own neck-tie.  But he managed to lower his nose to the rose in his lapel - with some satisfaction that he was still alive, if barely.  Yet, be thankful for God's small mercies.  His sense of smell, alone among the five senses, remained switched on - enabling him, somehow, to expend all his unused thoughts via that particular medium. 

Blind dates were never like this in the old days, he thought.  Even his own blood smelt blind.

Abruptly, the VDU’s square brilliance turned a roaring red, a searing wildness of infra crimson, and it  rose up, in tune with Gant's own thoughts as these thoughts themselves dropped through the floor of his mind.  He felt a scorching right back to each of his optic fuses - and autonomous pain screeched to his heart’s quick with the whitest white noise rising to crescendos beyond the reach of even a soundest deafness.

At least, while the screen rose, the rain started stopping - or, at least, not making itself felt.


Published  ‘The Bloody Quill’ 1998