Leviston - Disinformation

I woke with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbows and I dont know where to put it down. It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again. George Seferis, Mythistorema Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Lying is done with words, and also with silence. Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying I am making jelly for my nephews fourth birthday party, any flavour as long as its red, bouncy cubes snipped and stirred into hot water in a cloudy Pyrex dish, rediscovering the secret of isinglass, or is it horse gelatin, while a radio announcer intimates that certain unpopular facts about the operations hitherto repressed, like signs removed from crossroads and bridges in occupied lands, can now be revealed, if we just stay tuned. Party bags designed to please infants pile on the counter, too-bright colours, badly made; blue napkins, party-poppers; my red hands put cylinders of sausage on cocktail sticks (these pass for traditions) and all the time I listen to them talk fluently about foreknowledge, proactivity, stations.

It is winter, treacherous to walk. The children are on their way by now, adults too, bundled against the promise of snow and the entertainer, with tricks and jokes hidden under a blanket in the boot of his Volvo, limp balloons into which he will blow his lungs full of ideal animals, practises misdirection. I chop yellow cheese. Out the kitchen window the whirligig turns, metal spokes merciless as diagrams cutting the air no clothing softens, tiny gems icing the nodes where their lines intersect. Every extant leaf is fixed with glitter where the glues dried clear.

Like a wet dream this snow-globe was a gift to myself.

She rides shotgun or stuck to the dashboard, swirling and swirling across the carpet of potholes to my house. Mantelpiece matryoshka, she wears an inscrutable face: theres no telling how many dolls deep she goes beyond her one red peanut-shell, her pupas lacquered shine, superglued to a painted knoll, brilliantly magnified by an atmosphere of cerebrospinal fluid under the smooth glass domes museum, a solid case of ozone. When I do a U-turn it triggers another storm. Her compass boggles. Lie down there in that drift, little girl, youre feeling strangely warm, and something big is about to make sense if we just keep going in the opposite direction.

All along the skyline, cranes quiet above rooftops, conspicuous as knives dropped vertically into carpet, folded ironing-board-upright or set at right angles, corner brackets bolting the sky to the ground.

They dangle claws on chains, unbaited hooks balanced by elevated breeze-blocks, into the unfinished town, fishing a pond that hasnt been stocked. Their paintworks bright as macs in rain, or the mops and pans a woman once persuaded me to sell door to door, describing in the air of her living room a pyramid, most mysterious of all mysterious extancies, her red nail climbing floors to the vertex, where it stood or floated as she effortlessly said In no time at allyoull have a lifestyle just like mine. Through the cranes necks the cloud-burst rings, across the clad stone hotel still missing its penthouse, its punchline, bucketing down like the old cartoon where a skeleton drinks champagne.

Twelve days since I took up my post in this village, a handful of clapboard houses crowded round the harbour and the concrete yards glittering with scales where church groups serve up grits and tamales from long trestle tables and the interiors of white vans. I myself eat at the hotel: beef, pasta, anything but fish, watching the black sea break foamlessly against the chemical barricade. On its surface orange curds ride like surfboards or childrens life-preservers. After dinner I take my coffee in the privacy of my suite.

There is little to accomplish here. I walk on the beach where the nests of common terns driven upwind to breed are marked with red flags mounted on popsicle sticks, hundreds of them, bunting in the wind. Each nest is no more than a dint in the sand, easily made with a fist. Yesterday I saw a dead sea-turtle turning to soup inside its own shell. I am not immune to the irony of this. I write cheques for the fishermen fitting their boats with booms to skim the water, and speak to sad newscasters under a flypast of helicopters and a crop-duster salute.

Try to imagine what a hundred million litres means. You cant. At night, before bed, in the surprisingly deep bath, I push my big toe into the streaming faucet and feel its pressure turn to a hot, relentless gush, nightmarishly pleasurable, like pissing myself in my sleep.

Power flares on command from a central faucet into the white tub of the flagship hotel, confirming our worst suspicions of comfort, whipping the clear worm of complimentary gel to a fairies castle, unsupportable. Testimony built round air-conditioned air and a dose of sparkle dissolves when a live somebody enters with their oils and smells that melon-tinted water. The summit is over.

Protesters disperse against plastic shield-walls tough as double-glazing. Orderly behind panelled veneer, the mini-bar committee sits in darkness for the hour its called upon, no expenses spared, cutesy bottles rattling in their seats when the choppers pass, like draft dodgers jumpy in the House of Representatives, like working class heroes in the House of Lords. Arms and legs exiting through the bathwaters lens to reliable applause from extractor fans bend at strange angles, without broken bones, revealing a second, smaller person, peacefully submerged and dormant as a property that no one seems to own. The midget hairdryer and the bible abridged in the mirror belong to her. That foot would fit the shoe in the heritage museum two clicks from here.

In the poky attic bedroom a bit-broken cocktail umbrella made of blonde toothpicks and crpe paper printed with bamboo stands proud of a shut paperback book on the tallest shelf a shiny edition of Hamlet or Othello, incidental not symbolic downcasting its tiny disc of shade under the damp skylight.

Youd miss it at first then find it garish, a finch in the Dolomites glued to a tree, trembling in the noonday blaze to be found by the bird-catcher, seized-upon, pickled and crunched. Somebody sentimental kept it close after dinner in a Japanese restaurant decorated just like a joke about Japan waitress in kimono, walls hung with ideograms, an indoor pool where fat gold carp drift under a wooden bridge, drifted, never swam... Well, but what is sentiment? Emotion out of time with its occasion? Pocketed, then with a flourish produced right in the middle of an argument, there it stands: a wish-coin welded to the tiles of a fountain, a green anachronistic needle in the head.

This gadget intrudes so nothing else can. It froths the way a widget froths beer, agitant, dispenses with the problem of abstinence dont and plants a dull pea under the mattress. Sleepless. Sleepless.

Rings on cushions do this too, diamonds in the toilet. I placed a jar in Tennessee; in the wilderness I buried my witchs bottle, half-full of screws, pins, piss and curse blood, keeping a promise in a place Ive forgotten. A prize in every box! A mine in a mitten. Automated night-time sprinkler system. The walk-in wardrobes coat-hangers cannon and tinkle, turning to hooks.

Shocking pink and plasticky-looking, like something that would titivate an antechamber or teach medics nerves, its leaves contuse around their perimeters.