Apocalypse of Jude

Janice walks into her apartment and suddenly feels scared to see Paul sitting there with Gary, the telltale signs of a cocaine rush on Audrey’s face. Paul turns brusquely to her, displaying no surprise.

“We better get going Gary.”

But before Paul can get up from the sofa, Janice slips languidly astride him and lets her mouth close on his.

“Let’s go snuff and have sex rather”.

He brushes her face away and with his hands around her waist, gives her a shove into the seat alongside him.

“I’d rather have a beer.”

Paul stands and collects his keys from the coffee table. “I’ll see you at the party later.” He walks from the house leaving Gary to follow him.

Janice laughs, feigning indifference to the force of rejection she feels.

“You’d better go Gary. Before I have to take out my sexual frustration on you.”

Audrey watches as Gary’s eyes betray for the umpteenth time his growing obsession with wanting Janice’s sex. But the Pygmalion metamorphosis of Mae into Audrey Hepburn inside Audrey’s head, and the jealous anger it causes, grips her soul, refusing to let it go at the expense of her self worth.

/this is the guy who rejected audrey hepburn and then chose me/ /you should be in the driving seat audrey/ /you should have him wrapped around your finger/ /why is his mind is wondering on to this slut/ /he is mine now/ /and i will be damned if im going to let this slut take him away from me/ /ive just got to keep on giving him a good time/ /cause if i dont/ /she will/

After Gary has gone, Janice stares viciously at Audrey.

“Paul’s up to something and you’re somehow involved. What is it?”

Audrey, with the icy confidence of cocaine thrilling her, is too angry inside to say anything. Janice feels vulnerable in the silence and laughs to protect herself. Only this time it is a flummoxed laugh at her increasing loss of control she thought she had over Audrey.

“I know something’s up. I tried to protect you that night I gave you snow. I hoped he’d leave you alone after that. That he’d see you as damaged goods. But he must really need you. I should never have got you a job with my sister.”

Her own words claw at her heart as if wanting to tear it out.

“Paul never lets anyone get involved with him unless he really needs them.”

Again she pauses as the realisation of her situation slices open her soul.

“But whatever Paul gets you involved with, when he’s done with you, he makes sure he gets rid of you.”

Momentarily, Janice is seized with horrifying fear.

“Get out of this Audrey.”

Janice’s sudden appeal of seeming genuine care only causes the Hepburn hand to tighten its grip on Audrey and she strikes back, no longer clear on what she is saying.

“You just want me to go so you can have Gary to flaunt before his ex. And I’ll be damned if she ever sees him in your pants.”

Janice stares nonplussed at Audrey, takes what is nonsensical to her as the cocaine speaking, and reacts with a flash of her own viciousness.

“Damn it Audrey, can’t you see the only reason Gary’s with you is because he’s doing what Paul wants him to do, and then to get regular sex on the side. And I should know. Paul’s been doing it to me for years.”

But Audrey is not listening.

/i should be ashamed of myself/ /looking so old fashioned compared to her/ /you got to make yourself look a bit smart he said/ /ill give you the money/ /i just want a good time after that miserable marriage/ /you are a fool audrey/ /what did i get together with him for if it wasnt to give him a good time/ /but there is still tonight/ /tonight ive got my chance to get him back/

Audrey stands up coldly arrogant before Janice and turns to go to her room.

“You just see that tonight you keep your hands off him.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 49

Janice cheers heartily as Gary drinks, then shoos him with her hand.

“Off you go and join Paul at the pool table, and let Audrey come sit here so I can talk to her.”

She gives him a wink as he acquiesces. Once he is gone, she taps her hand on the empty seat, inviting Audrey to move closer. Audrey moves over, pulling a long face. Janice leans over, speaking in a strong whisper, accusingly to her ear.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself looking this antique tonight. You’re only thirty-one, but you look like fifty tonight.”

“I can’t help it. It’s those pills I took to bring it off. That chemist said it would work out okay, but you can never be the same after doing that. But how could you know what I’m talking about?”

Audrey’s voice is bitter.

“Listen Audrey, I’m not going to mince my words. If Gary wanted kids, he’d of have stayed married. And if he can’t leave you alone, so what? Don’t be a fool. Now that Gary’s got his promotion, you’ve got to make yourself look smart. I know he’s going to ask you what you’ve done with the money he’s given you for that purpose. Don’t look shocked that I know. It’s my business to know these things. I heard him speaking to you, saying he can’t stand to look at you the way you are now. And can you blame him after the past three years of being married to that witch woman. He wants a good time, and if you don’t give it to him, there are others that will.”

“Is that right?” Audrey looks at Janice with a straight look.

“Yes, that’s right. So you had better hurry up about it.”

“Well then I’ll know who to thank, won’t I?”

“Oh go on with you. Go and find that man of yours and make him yours. I’ve got some seduction to do on Caul here.”

She gives Caul a short side glance. “He causes me such despair.”

Audrey complies by haughtily turning from her stool and stalking into the pool room alongside. Janice meanwhile turns back to Caul, goblet in hand and offers it to him. He shakes his head. “I find little in this success to toast.”

“Neither do I, but this is the way things are moving, isn’t it?”

Janice drinks resignedly from the glass, lays it on the bar, then takes his hand.

“You know, selling cosmetics, is not, despite appearances, a pretty world. I just can’t keep up with all these new fragrances and make-up styles anymore.”

He takes his hand back and looks strangely at her.

“What do you want Janice?”

“Tell me how it is that you landed up stranded in this bar.”

“The stories of my wanderings are my own.”

She laughs an exasperated laugh, letting her hand dust his knees to try disaffect any hint of the urgency to hurry up with him, because it is time.

“Seeing that’s the case, I’m going to go that side. See you later darling.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 50 

“You ask me how it will end? I know what you’re thinking in your minds. You’re thinking, hurry up please, it’s time. Do not desire the end because you wish to see it. For it is a time of woe unlike anything yet seen. Desire rather for Christ and remember that we do not know when it will end.”

The old woman looks at a group gathered around her in her living room, the afternoon sun filtering its diffuse golden light around them.

“Nevertheless, let me tell you as the Word describes it. The dragon will arise and the abomination set forth on its road to perdition, throwing by the wayside the false prophet who performed miraculous signs on the beast’s behalf, signs which deluded people to receive the mark of the beast and worship the beast’s image.

“The dragon will gather with it the beast and the kings of the earth along with their armies to make war against the rider on the white horse and his army who have reigned with their resurrected king for a thousand years, and who have been given authority to judge the earth because they have not worshipped the beast or his image, or received his mark on their hands or foreheads. They need not fear the second death for it has no power over them.

“But soon the time to reign is coming to its close, and Satan will go forth into the world and deceive all the peoples of the nations to gather for a battle. They will come from the four corners of the earth and settle around the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire will come down from heaven and devour the beast and dragon and throw them into the lake of burning sulphur, which is the second death, to be tormented forever. The armies of the beast will be killed by the sword coming from the rider on the horse. And he will leave them to the birds to gorge themselves on their flesh.

“This then is the great supper of God, and He Himself will come down seated on His great white throne, dispatching earth and sky from his presence, for there will be no more room for them. And all the dead will be there, great and small, prostrate before the throne as the book of Life is opened. The sea will give up her dead, and death and Hades will let their dead go, so that they may come be judged according what deeds of theirs are recorded in the Book. Death and Hades will be tossed into the self-same lake where the Devil, his whore and his beast drown in eternal torment. And if anyone’s name is not found to be written in the Book of Life, he too will be thrown into that lake of second death. That is how it will end.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 51

The sun’s death falls spectacularly in through the windowed terrace of the self-same restaurant Mae and her mother dined in just the night before. The ocean soaks up the sun’s glow while clouds robe it in splendour. The effect comes streaming in, encircling tables filled with guests awaiting the banquet. A man stands from his table and glides to the shallow stairs rising to the bar. Halfway up he turns, open before him the sea of faces. His voice lifts sonorously, conducting authority around the elliptical room.

“Tonight we are here to celebrate romance recaptured. Life among the vineyards in the arms of seven towering peaks, the clean cool stream of birdsong in the glow of the early evening, and freedom from the conventional suburbs but with the security and history of an estate stretching back for centuries. Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to a way of life perfected, and the official inauguration of Seventh Peak Golf and Country estate.
Around the world we are seeing the rising growth of gated villages in which tranquillity, natural ordered beauty, a sense of community and honest returns on investment are being returned to people. Estates like ours stand as medieval castles in a world of hostility, offering personal security in ways others can’t offer.

“Of all my years in real estate, the most valuable thing I have learnt is never to underestimate the value people place in their security. People will go to great lengths to get the best they can for their families. This town, I am proud to say, is one of those lengths, and our estate merely an added attraction to this utmost of lengths.

“Tonight you are all here as sponsors to ensuring that this way of life that is everything you’ve grown up with and more is being protected. Within our sanctuary, there will be no walls, only open fronts onto superb golf greens and greater neighbourliness and friendliness. Our vision is for a move back to community life, here with a golfing theme. And from this community setting we hope to see a greater expression of community living coming to the fore.

“But more than anything, our vision is that our estate will be a place that will give your soul the right to breathe. Tonight, on Christmas Eve, you are seeing the fruition of a long-term vision that has for many years been burning inside of me. For here is a place where you will be able to come and be freed from the world and be able to look into yourself and find your soul, while daily being soothed by beauty around you and ensuring that you get the best of what God has to offer. Let us then toast to our peace in this season of peace and goodwill.”

He raises a glass of champagne, the floor below him rising from its seat to join him in toast. Then he glides away down the stairs before the welling, reverent applause to his seat at the head of the table at which Mae sits.

She feels nauseated at her father’s oratorio, and still uncertain whether to believe what Caul told her as true. But more than anything else, she is grateful that her back is to Gary sitting across the room with Janice. Waiters filter in, bringing food to each table as the wine and chatter begin to flow. Behind Mae the shrill voice of a woman penetrates her mind such that she can’t keep it out.

“Last Sunday, the Anthonys invited me to dinner to enjoy the beauty of a hot gammon ham. And young Gary Stetson was there. Isn’t that surprising considering he divorced their daughter.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 52

The steeple’s bells begin to toll the violet hour, telling Jude to hurry up and that it is time. Behind his back, the late evening light is casting a pall of fading purple and scarlet sunlight onto the face of the seven peaks, while above him, the purple-pink mackerel sky is beginning to turn grey, as over the ocean the sun sinks lower unto its death. The bells continue their tolling.

/hurry up please its time/ /hurry up please its time/

He eventually lets his fishing stick fall into the river below, lights a cigarette and then turns to shuffle forward towards his confession.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 53 

Jude can hear the thump of music resonating from inside the house as Paul’s stooge escorts him with a hand on his shoulder, making sure he can’t make the break he wants to make. On entering the house, Jude sees the living room, all candlelit, prepared for a solemnity. Beyond its windows, on the sprawling garden below the veranda, around thirty people are dancing under the skies to a dithyrambic beat. He knows this is the beginning of his end.

“Sit Jude.”

Paul motions to him as he takes a sofa seat beside Mae, a certain possession in her eye as if in another world. Janice and Gary sit blindfolded and gagged on the other sofa.

/goodnight janice/ /goodnight gary/ /you were in the same boat as me/ /following the pied piper’s call/ /we didn’t know what we were doing following paul/ /but we have helped him dig up the god of his parents/ /now paul’s resurrecting it/

Jude lowers himself into Caul’s usual arm chair, noticing that the coffee table has been replaced with what looks like an alter and that on it lies a bough of fresh mistletoe. Then the mustard curtains are pulled shut as ten others in the room gather in a circle around them. Jude looks upon those circled around them. His eyes pick out Paul’s three loitering heirs, his trading kings whose wares had seduced him, Janice and Gary while Paul made way for his once-upon-a-time god to ascend.

/ta ta/ /goodnight/ /goodnight/ /goodnight/

Then he remembers Caul and notes his absence, feeling somehow comforted in the seat of Caul’s chair.

/goodnight caul/ /where ever you are/ /i hope you’ve found God and made your escape/ /as for me Lord/ /strengthen me once more/ /like samson/ /make me sing as the swallow here in this ruined house/ /that i might sing of your glory one more time/ /and cause their god to fall/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 54

From the bar of a warehouse-turned-club, a demure blonde sits stiffly poised on her stool, trying to listen to what Gary is telling her, but being drowned by a pounding music she doesn’t particularly like. Audrey notices though as Gary’s eyes wander from her and turn angry. Following his gaze, she sees the likeness of the image of womanly perfection entering the club. A cloud of bitter fumes wraps its veil around her.

“Who’s that?”

The disdain of her voice matches the sudden blood redness of her cheeks. But he just continues to watch Mae, whose searching eyes flicker on him before she moves to dance in the way that used to arouse him. It is too much for Gary. An oceanic force of anger swells up from him, and propels him from the bar to the dance floor. He hauls Mae round by her arm and their bodies meet in an April-cruel memory of, and desire for, their now broken marriage.

“Is this all that you have left to do? Haunt me every place I go?”

“Do you want to have a dance?”

The coyness to Mae’s voice and softening of her ephemeral body bewilders him, forcing him into a spear threatening stance.

“No Mae. I don’t want to dance. You’re crazy, you know that!”

Paul’s hand suddenly rests firmly on Gary squared shoulders. “Come, our pool table’s free. The girls are waiting for us.”

Paul looks straight at Mae, the black pearls of his eyes impenetrable as to their feeling.

“Don’t waste your time here.”

He fades slowly backward, but leaves his presence hanging, causing a rapid coolness to descend upon Mae’s soul. She looks at Gary.

“You’d better go. After all, the girls are waiting.”

Her body is now shaking with anger as Gary tries to strangle it in his own voice.

“Don’t even come near the table alright. Just leave me alone.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 5

People mill around the bar’s inviting warmth, busy with chatter, being chilled by dub vibes and oblivious to the one they call the village idiot, shuffle-dancing, clutching an empty to his chest, and grinning stupidly from the middle of the bar floor at one whose shadow enters the bar door.

“Hey Caul, I see heaven coming down for you. But you’ve got to ask the right questions first.”

Caul looks at Ben in a mixture of surprise and amused perplexity as their right hands move through a rapid ritual of positions.

“That sword’s looking kind of blunt Ben. You want another?”

“Only if it’s like okay with you.”

Ben flourishes a bow. “You can score some pipe with us you make out.”

Caul, still amused, looks over at two familiar figures shrouded around a corner table where a window lets the night shine in.

“Sure, let me get the beers first.”

He gives Ben a backhand clap round his shoulder as he moves forward to the bar.

“Caul, my good fellow. Where have you been? Come hither.”

From behind his bar, Jude, feeling his guilt of betrayal flow back through him, beckons the new arrival to follow, then disappears into the kitchen, leaving the bar again to a girl working alongside him.

Caul meanders around the peopled bar, into a passageway, and through a closed door that opens up to Jude before the gaping womb of a long-disused oven. He locks the door behind him.

“What took you so long?”

Caul doesn’t answer, but just lays his left forearm against the wall’s dust-coated side, lowering his head to peer at Jude’s hands at work on the blackened inside.

“I’m not going to be throwing this up later tonight am I?”

“Guaranteed soap-sud free. Courtesy of Paul’s cartel that he’s trying to get together. How was your realty who’s who dinner?”

“All so civilised, drinking wine and discussing golfing estates. Enough to make you puke.

But our house clerk was there.”

“Oh yeah? He was always a greedy turncoat. You think that means he’s broken from Mae?”

“That’s what I’d like to know too.”

“Well, you can ask him. He came in a few minutes ago.”

Jude’s words twist deep into a hurt freshly ruptured in Caul’s depths, forcing a silence between them for a few moments. He breathes deeply and affects a light-hearted voice.

“So how was mass?”

This time it is Jude’s turn to suffer a brief, bitter silence and collect his wits. He looks into the oven’s void.

“Too much confusion Caul. Just my vain hope of relief in a lost cause. They seem to have completely lost the authority to transmit faith. But enough of that.”

Below Jude’s hands is a pentacle-shaped plate with four white powdered strips on it and a tossed aside ATM card. He straightens up, withdrawing a rolled note from his shirt pocket. He hands it to Caul, who takes it and descends into the oven mouth, rising to let the chemical taste pass down the back of this throat. He goes down a second time and then sniffs hard to clear his nose. Jude descends to clear his lines in two swift snorts before his fingers pick up a small tin-foiled square from the plate, unfurl it and tear its contents into a triangular two. Looking downwards, he laughs ruefully to himself at how long this betrayal has been going on.

“I guess this is what it must feel like to administer the Eucharist. I could offer you red wine at the bar after this, if you want.”

Jude laughs awkwardly at his own joke and stares into Caul’s off-putting green eyes. “By the way, I hear this bread is hexed.”

Caul stares searchingly back at Jude, his eyes suddenly flickering with frightened shock as he meets in them the desolation of his own soul. Ben’s words suddenly return their echo, making Caul aware that he wants to ask Jude a question he can’t quite catch. Instead he puts the tab on the tip of his tongue.

“Come, you’ve got a bar to tend.”

He shoos Jude away with his hand and turns to leave by the door he came, the tab beginning to secrete its juices into his system. He merges back into the bar’s dull glow, the music’s dub grooves helping to take the edge off the cocaine buzz pulsing through him. He stands in silence at the bar, awaiting his ordered beers. In his gut, beyond the chemical sheet of bravado growing in his ego, the events of the evening churn. Cutting off these thoughts, he listens to the disembodied voices of those around the bar become to his ears like those lamenting death at a funeral.

/hell this place is desolate/ /how did i end up here/ /how long can i have been here/

He picks up two beers and walks towards the window table, planting them down before two figures sitting there, pulling up a remaining stool.

“I hope you know which white rabbit you’re following tonight.”

The measured voice comes from Drew, a lanky figure sitting suspended between the window light and the dim lights of the wall. He shares the table with a peroxide-haired man on whose hair, a tacky neon sign outside projects its changing colours. Ben pulls up alongside Caul, clawing up the bought beer in a half-fingered left hand.

“Don’t follow the white rabbit, bru. You need to go into the fire.”

Ben, still standing, play surfs to the groove of the music and then tumbles forward exuberantly, throwing his right arm around Drew, who throws him off in feigned disgust. Ben spins away laughing onto the floor between the table and bar and then back again.

“And when you come out of the water, it’s spiritual vibes. You will know what God is singing from his heavens of gold.”

Ben’s words draw a laugh from Drew.

“Shut up and have a fag Ben. Maybe that will keep your tongue busy. You want one Caul?”

“Thanks.”

They punch fists together before Caul pulls the cigarette from the loosely filled box, and lights it from a lighter held up by the other. On exhaling, a half grimace, half smile ripples Caul’s lips.

“I remember we did this the first time I came to this bar. Just after Paul bought it. What was that? Three years ago? You were sitting in this corner as well.”

“Can you remember what you were feeling that night?”

“I remember feeling how desolate this whole place seemed.”

Drew’s laugh is caustic. The smoke he exhales hangs dead in the air.

“But you kept coming back didn’t you, and that feeling has buried itself in all that snow, hasn’t it?”

Sudden awareness of the length of his having been in this desolation without his knowing digs its way through to Caul’s surface.

“Until tonight I think.”

From the speakers new music comes and a trumpet carves a river of lamentation through the air, flooding the world into Caul’s mind, drowning the freshly opened wound again inside him. He laughs with desperate relief and looks over to the peroxide-haired man.

“Don’t you just dig that trumpet?”

His fingers gesture vaguely to where the brassy stream emanates from.

“That band haunts me, you know that. It’s like they’re saying nothing, but telling us everything about ourselves.”

“Difficult to do sound for as well. Screw up and they sound like chaos.”

Caul lifts his beer to his mouth, cigarette between his fingers, elbow of the other arm laid on the table, letting his head rest in his right hand as he looks at the solid figure next to him.

“You’ve got quite a job don’t you. Keeping the reins on chaos. Making it sound like something.”

“Well, I love my job.”

Caul laughs in a way that suggests that there is nothing left to say, and scratches his head amazed.

“A love that makes chaos sound like something. I need love like that.”

He sighs haggardly and gets up into an undulating world of melting dimensions. His hand shakingly lifts his cigarette to his mouth, and he feels in his heightened sensitivity, the smoke curling its way down the back of his throat and into the lungs that sigh as anxious blood is stabilised.

“I need new faces.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 6

Face pale, Mae walks briskly, her breath frostily running the chill air into her bloodstream that courses the devastated effects of hunger around her body. Her guts are knotted as her body tries to deal with what to her feels like pieces of a burst heart being digested. She is struggling to keep her composure, but the cumulonimbus state of her soul on the surface of her consciousness has created a dry, electromagnetic storm. A thunder of emotion now cruelly spews forth a slew of memories—dried tubers that have been stirring with life in her soul to breed out of its dead land.

{Her body is exposed, moving unhindered by clothes, skin moulded around her bones. She is gargoyling her shrivelled image before a looking glass, shaped like a bell jar. Hands on her sunken womb, she instinctively knows that only being without clothes will remove the shadow that clouds her soul as to what took place in her sleep the early hours of Easter morning.

“Why are you naked again? Are you shameless?”

As she whirls to meet him, she sees in Gary’s eyes a horror at her sexuality and realises how shrivelled and caged she has become.

“I asked you not to come in here. You’ve got your room.”

Behind her back she feels his fury rising.

“You’re like a walking-talking doll gone wrong, you know that.”

In the mirror, she sees him through sunken eyes observing her sex now sealed from him since that strange morning.

“There is nothing I can really do about it.”

He leaves the bedroom with his arm slamming the door loudly behind him.}

She wants to be without this infiltration of memory; wants to be without depth and just be surface, but this memory has already unearthed an earlier one from the undernourished exhaustion of her soul, with its snatching attempts to keep alive and intact a marriage now fully broken.

{She is walking naked around the room while Gary watches, just woken and confused, from the bed.

“You’ve been doing this for a week now. Can’t you at least cover yourself with a sheet?”

“Don’t you even love my nakedness any more?”

She haughtily watches him recoil at the chill of her words, and then recover into exasperation.

“And this sudden morning walking and leaving your job? You’re losing me Mae, even if you were to explain it all to me.”

“You’re not the only one with those feelings. You’re so greedy for the money and power my father’s offering you now, there’s no space left for the vows you made to me in your heart.”

“As if your bulimia helps.”

Silence extends its hands over the space between them, sealing them off from each other.

“I’m going for a shower.”

She watches him rise from the bed and go out to the bathroom.}

There is a sealing to that memory as she makes conscious to herself again that she is walking in residential streets. But the swirling improbabilities of a legion of memories somewhere underneath encroach upon her, and she feels helpless to counter their relentless persistence. As they take over her consciousness, a sense of panic encloses around her throat as a memory of Easter rises.

{“Tell me again the story of how you fell in love with me?”

Gary laughs self-consciously.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s just the question a girl asks on her third wedding anniversary. And because something about you lately has my father written all over it.”

She is laughing lightly at him, not wanting to offend him, but desperately wanting to hear his answer.

“Remember you said, we were going to deny both their grasping hands the right to this town.”

She goes to draw his eyes into hers by lowering her head to below his. “Tell me we’re still going to deny them access to that power.”

He stares down into the table at which they are having dinner. “Why were you walking around naked when I woke up this morning?”

She looks at him and takes a deep breath before speaking again.

“I told you Gary. I had this horrible dream, like I was being raped. It just seemed to me that if I walked around with my clothes off, I’d get the dirtiness off.”

She looks down, fiddling with her fingers, heart feeling like it’s going to burst from pain.

“So do you still love me?”

Again he just looks away.

“I’m not sure I ever loved you.”}

Her hands are pulling back her hair with white tension, and the physical pain allows her hunger to gnaw into her consciousness. As she realises it, her entire self moves to enclose itself around the hunger, wanting only to satisfy its craving. She is closed off to everything else, walking brusquely and with a wildness in her eyes, retreating to the walled place where she lives. On entering the semi-detached, she is unable to quell the desperation, but gives way to the desire that is possessing her. Slowly her shrunken stomach is filled beyond that which it can bear, and it reacts with her consent to the burden of release.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 7

Outside the bar, Caul is met with the sharp, fresh air of the burgeoning morning. Free from the deathly atmosphere of the bar, his breathing gulps help restore him to himself again. The sleeping road running in front of the bar is an incandescent mix of streetlight glow and morning indigo light. Gazing up, sheer mountains wall in his view with their purple bulk. He unlocks and slides into the seat of his car.

The sudden, intense safety of his hoisted bark and the town dawn through which he is gliding, comforts him again to a sense of place and renews the delight of his eyes. His whole being is enjoying the silence of no music and the gentle turn of the engine. There is no direction to his driving, just deep relief at being able to drift and regain identity. He haunts himself with laughter or sometimes cringes visibly as he passes by sights steeped in memory. But he is unable to connect them together with a sense that they constitute life.

Slowly, indigo changes to a sapphire blue, making less surreal the line between sky and cloud crowding the top of a mountain range that folds from the coastline like an arm around the town. Independent and perpendicular to this backdrop, a single mountain of three peaks lies cloudless, so that the basin is fully enclosed in mountainous relief. Coming up from the south, an onshore wind blows from off two oceans that sweep uneasily together in the bay that borders the basin. The wind carries sails of tepid moisture up against the towering amphitheatre of mountains where the moisture knits itself with the night’s cold, interior desert air. Above the peaks, voluptuous blanketing clouds gather. But they will bring no rain.

As the surrealness fades into a deep clear ocean horizon, Caul’s car rolls to a rest outside a security complex, its marble-white wall like a rampart. From its wrought black gate, Mae emerges. She does not see the car, having walked off in the opposite direction, wrapped in meditation. The sight of her and knowing she now walks alone, summons from within him a long-sealed oath of restless hurt seeking healing—an oath to love her and her only. What he does not know is that this very night there have been stirred dull roots in the frozen ground between them. They will take hold and grow out of this land once the shroud of winter now about to cover the land gives way to spring. Yet this work is not the work of Paul alone. It is also an answer to those who in their common salvation have contended earnestly for their faith. Their prayers from Easter till this Whitsuntide too have been heard in a land where desire for God is no longer stirred.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 8

Chilled beats mix an ocean calm between all in Paul’s house as its partygoers waft from living room to kitchen to veranda, fixing drinks, lighting cigarettes, lounging in chairs and gazing out on a view whose beauty dulls the mind with a subtle sense of salvation. Audrey gets up from one of the two foam-picked orange couches that face each other, and goes to the large window overlooking the overgrown garden. But she is more interested for the moment in the reflection of Paul and Janice on one couch, and this man Gary that seeks her, now alone on the other.

When returning to this town four months ago, she had expected to receive the pariah status that any person who had been forced out was met with. Five years earlier, her parents had been ostracised and forced to leave. It had served them right. They had supported the old exclusionary law which prevented the sale of property in the town to anyone who so wished to buy it. The town had turned on them and exiled them. But her own need to come to terms with this town and its faith was overwhelming, and so she returned. Yet after returning, instead of finding enmity towards her, Paul had contacted her. Said he liked her credentials, could arrange a job for her and had a place for her to stay; said he thought hard feelings towards her because of her parents was ridiculous, and wanted to clear her name before the town.

The euphoria had swept over her and before she knew it, she was working as a secretary with Janice’s sister for one of the town’s top lawyers and had moved in with Janice, who seemed to be Paul’s girlfriend, though she seemed to sleep with whomever she liked. Yet Paul seemed happy with it. The other day, Janice had told her that Gary—son of Rupert Stetson no less—was interested in her. So last night they had all gone out…and the honeymoon ended. Seeing that flower girl and her obvious hold over Gary at the club had put in her heart an incessant, banging, jealous desire to take Gary from her. But it had also shocked her eyes open, and for the first time she felt an uneasy dark music drifting out of Paul that was intoxicating all around him. Right now, that same uneasy darkness seemed to be tugging at her to let go into this lazy, lounging atmosphere.

Realising its sway over her, she changes the focus of her eyes to look across the bay to where the water lies still as a lake, like the Starnbergersee she had once seen, and where the late afternoon sky is beginning to ready its palate of colours for the evening. She sees Caul broodily sitting alone on the terrace wall, legs hanging free, looking out over the scene. Wanting to be more sure of this house’s nature before committing to her jealous desire, she goes out to him.

“You’ve got a strange name.”

Caul takes a moment to connect with Audrey who joins him on the terrace wall, sitting with her back to the view.

“I was born with one on my head.”

“With what on your head?”

“A caul.”

“What’s that?”

He looks at her, maybe with slight disdain. “That I’m going to leave to your curiosity.”

She makes no response, but lifts her shoulders and then drops them as she continues to try gauge this new environment. She casts her eyes to some unpruned rose bushes with the signs of spring budding in them.

“Those roses must be beautiful in summer.”

Caul looks sullenly over.

“They are. They’re those big unkempt pink ones that just spread it all out for you to dig your nose into and smell. But they’re quite diseased and we only really get a few.”

“They need pruning and care, that’s why. Then you’d get more roses to stick your nose into.”

Audrey witnesses a look of sad hope as Caul turns back to her.

“I don’t know. A few healthy roses among the sick. It kind of gives me hope that health exists despite sickness.”

She squints at him closely for explanation.

“You grew up in this town right?”

She nods.

“It’s going to be beautiful in summer wouldn’t you say?”

He laughs as if it pains him to see her realise the intention of his question.

“Well, this town is like those rose bushes. Sick and diseased. And this house is the reason for that disease. We’ve been spreading it around, creeping into people’s souls to line them with the mildew of rot, waiting for that one day when they’ll wake up and realise that the beauty that is their life is missing. Then we would come to heal them and take this town from those who stole it from us.”

A scowl of anger darkens Caul’s countenance, infecting his voice with cut bitterness.

“But the reality is that the ones who are dead are us, and we’re feeding them our death. Now they are patiently dying our death, and there is no way out except to hope that this summer will surprise us and throw up a few healthy roses.”

Audrey’s clean blue eyes try to find a fix on Caul’s mixed, angered, green ones. He suddenly laughs apologetically, as if realising what he’s just said.

“Well, you’re caught in our death now. But my wish is that you’ll leave now and that I won’t see you again.”

Caul swings his legs back over the wall and heaves himself from it, stalking into the house, melting into its gloom. Gary comes out from the lounge. He lays his hand on her right shoulder, but with her hand she pushes it off.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can you take me home Gary?”

“Why? It’s just getting nice and lazy now.”

“I just don’t want to be here anymore. Caul just proved what you said about this place last night.”

“What did I say?”

“That it’s crazy.”

“I meant like it’s alive you know, compared to that.”

His arm gestures disparagingly to the lights of the town below covered now in hazy dusk, but his words serve only to wring a heightened sense of alarm from her.

“Then right now I don’t want to be alive. Can you please just take me home.”

She doesn’t wait for him to agree, but lifts herself from the wall, shoulders her bag and goes out to wait for him beside his car, wondering how she found herself here. As if in answer, out of her soul rises the image of Pygmalion perfection that she saw last night. She remembers Gary’s anger and the way he dismissed that cockney striptease. The angry pleasure that the memory gives her grips her heart, and it is intent on smothering her fears of this place.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 9

The sun lights up a tempestuous sky as it begins its rise from beyond the peaks of the enclosing mountains, ready to scorch the earth’s surface and burn the people with fierce heat. A wind, blowing in dry warm gusts down from the north, is whipping up the ocean bay with the storming intent to turn it into the blood of dead men, so all that life within its waters may die.

The wind blows stiffly through a colonnade of trees, their boughs yielding up ancient groanings that seep down deep into the soil, calling out for the earth to release its foul and painful sores upon those who inhabit it. Beneath these boughs the hot wind picks up loose strands of Mae’s raven black hair, and blows them across her face. She slowly, lovingly rubs against the bark of each tree with her outstretched hand as she passes, seeking to draw from them a sense of their primeval power to strengthen her new-found temperance.

/its like a sacred grove/ /so much as happened since that day caul passed me by here/ /im eating healthier/ /im coming on more regularly again/ /and working again/ /im more conscious of things going on around me/ /it cant be a coincidence that im here now experiencing these thoughts and going to meet him later today/

Under the trees’ mottled shadows, she stills herself, allowing herself to draw more deeply from their source of life. As she does so, a spirit of joyful wildness so intense begins filling her that her skin shines with inner energy. She stretches her arms in worship to catch more of these trees’ life, wanting more of their ecstatic joy. But what flows into her blood and into her mind is her sibylline Easter dream of being taken by a man she is unable to make out. As the memory passes, she feels frustration and a haunting of knowing the perpetrator, but is unable to make him out for a blind spot in her own vision.

/its like youre still in control of my body/ /if i could just find out whats blurring my vision/ /i need to take control of my own body again/ /yes/ /i claim my body for myself again/ /do you hear me caul/ /soon i’ll be able to see who you are clearly/ /and when i know for sure its you caul/ /i wont be your consort/ /be careful of maenad/ /she’ll rip you to shreds and devour you in sacrifice to dionysus/

Shock at her thoughts stills her with ashamed guilt at her sudden intemperance. Yet the fresh remembrance of her name fills her with pain, and thoughts continue to fall from her thick like leaves.

/what did you see mother to name me after such a horrid creature/ /what fruit did you bear in your attempt to marry the cosmos with my merchant father/ /did you see your utopian mix of free love and free markets for this town going all wrong/ /is that why you left me behind mother/ /to dad playing king in his business suits/ /did i scare you/ /what hope does that ever give me of being free to the ecstatic joy of my name/ /and now you mother/ /famous clairvoyant/ /coming to visit in december/ /what tidings is it that you are bringing with you this time/

Breathing deeper, she turns to face the seven amphitheatre peaks from underneath the boughs. As the air entering her goes down into her lungs, stretching them to capacity, energy again begins pulsing all over her, and she becomes aware of the stream of blood circulating her life force around her body. Again she feels the wildness, not of joy, but of savagery rising through her, and she forces it back down with a heavier feeling of guilt.

Being resolute with herself, Mae passes out from the colonnade into the sunlight, the guilt of her gluttony searing upon her soul. She walks to where the town’s river runs channelled through a park. Here the hot wind blows down upon its fresh waters, all so that this river too might become like blood. Here, along its banks, she determines not to give into the lust for flesh that promises her freedom from her guilt. All the while though, she curses God under her breath, though she knows not why, except that it comes from within her spirit.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 10

At the door of the Hofgarten restaurant where their last abortive meeting took place, Mae and Caul, both spattered wet, ascend steps and take a table next to a window to watch the storm unfold its drama on the earth. Mae turns to the ushering waitress and runs her hands through her hair, slicking it with fresh wetness.

“Just coffee for now thanks.”

She finds her pack of cigarettes in her bag and puts it on the table in wait for the coffee. Caul picks it up to quiz it.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking you to join me today.”

Satisfied, he tosses the pack back on to the table. She replies by way of a simple non-committal smile and an unaffected shrug of her shoulders, then shifts the attention to him.

“So tell me Caul. You still sure you’re dead?”

“Yes, very much.”

“And how about that desire to find love?”

Her question prods him to look out the window and gather his thoughts. Above the ocean lightening streaks, followed by a roll of thunder pouring itself across the dome of sky.

“Before you married Gary, the only passion in my life was uprooting people to show them what I thought was their spiritual death. I couldn’t see you for that self-righteous passion as you called it. You asked me to come clean with you on that. There you have it. I’m more sorry than you can know. And I can tell you that I had nothing to do with initiating my death.”

He stares directly into her eyes, looking for forgiveness. The merely murmured soft whisper of thank you from her lips restores to him a legitimacy with her he has long since felt.

“After you married Gary and killed my hope, all my passion seemed stupid. I realised it wasn’t just you as a consort I wanted.”

He sips from his coffee to fill the pause of his thoughts.

“I tried to look on the bright side. Took the dead hope and buried myself with it in the soil of the new, unknown future, thinking I would be able to re-root my life. But I couldn’t. I just lived three years of a half life really, feeding my proud, selfish and undernourished ego with Paul’s drugs.”

The waitress comes with the coffee. “Anything else?”

Both shake their heads and fall automatically to their coffee rituals. She lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, props her elbow on the table with wrist turned perfume-ways to the let the smoke drift off.

“When I married Gary Caul, you were right about me not wanting to face the darkness that we would have to face.”

Caul leans back into his seat and Mae reacts to it.

“Don’t you even think about putting a smug smile on your face mister, or I’m walking out this door right now.”

She stares at him full with the seriousness of her threat. Satisfied with the gravity of his nod, she draws and exhales again, calming her nerves. She looks out the window on the rain

“I loved him as well. Even if it was for all the wrong reasons. I loved him.”

She turns and fixes on him.

“Do you understand that?”

He nods with the same gravity. She lifts her coffee to her lips, blows across it, and puts it down without a sip.

“Like I was saying, the darkness scared me. I ran away from it. And like you said, it devoured me. You have no idea how much I’ve hated you for saying that and being right about it. That’s my confession. I’m sorry for hating you.”

This time it is she who looks directly at him. And he smiles with relief back at her.

“Forgiven.”

A joyous, impish grin breaks on her face.

“Have you ever considered Caul, in that self-righteous world of yours that maybe there is an alternative path for us to take? Not a path that runs away, but one that leads out of the darkness we seem fated to?”

Caul’s heart leaps with curious surprise. “What are you thinking of?”

This time she ashes her cigarette, and with the other hand, stirs her coffee further.

“We need to teach ourselves to be perpetually conscious of what is going on around us at all times.”

Caul falls back into his seat disappointed. “Like for so-called coincidences?”

She doesn’t pick up on his scepticism.

“Exactly. And as you piece all these coincidences together over time, a guiding pattern emerges that connects the past to the present to the future. When you see that happening, you’ll be able to start focussing on the beauty of life rather than how dead you feel. That’s what I’ve been doing the past couple of months. And it’s really changed my whole attitude.”

Looking briefly out the rain-spattered window, Caul drums the fingers of his left hand three times before turning back to face her.

“Mae, again at the risk of sounding self righteous, I’ve been through this already, and what use is it to me coming from the wasteland I’m living in.”

He puts out both his hands to hold her tongue.

“And it also begs the question who is narrating so that all these coincidences can add up to a meaningful life?”

She sits back in her seat now as well, one arm across her stomach, the other resting perpendicular on it, cigarette to her slightly pursed mouth.

“Our inner selves do it. Through our connection to the cosmos.”

He shakes his head.

“I used to believe that too Mae; that if I learned to listen to my subconscious and my dreams, I could get closer to discovering my self and my connection to the cosmos, and then begin to be filled with spiritual life. But reality is the fisher king is wounded and cannot heal his own wound.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that no matter how much we connect the dots, the wound that you and I are meant to heal for a season can never be completely healed. The healing we offer is just an endless deferral. And going into our darkness is futile too. Opening the gates to the underworld to allow the spirit of life back to earth can never deliver the unwounded child, because the underworld is part of the wound.”

He watches the full import of what he has said sink in before risking his conclusion on her.

“Our only hope of healing lies in it being revealed to us somehow from beyond the stars.”

Three barrels of thunder resound the world as heavy rain pounds the roof. Then an extraordinary burst of vivid electric light almost instantaneous with a dark crack of thunder shakes the world with its reverberation. The restaurant’s electric circuits are drained under the earth’s electric surge, sinking momentarily the lights that hold at bay the violet grey darkness of the earth. To Caul it feels as if the lightening and thunder have cracked open the universe and have heralded the foreboding of an inescapable evil in the same instant.

“Welcome to summer.”

In gaunt, ghostlike suddenness, Jude stands wrapped in a thin trench coat along side them. Not realising or understanding the wildness that Caul’s pronouncement has caused to fill in Mae, Jude removes his coat and sits down next to her.

“Paul said to find you guys here, so I came. Hope you don’t mind.”

Suspicion and cold fear sweep through Caul and he looks interrogatively at Jude.

“Summer?”

“Yeah, it’s Halloween, and here comes summer crashing in on a winter festival of dead souls seeking cheer from the living.”

Jude lights a cigarette in rather glamorous fashion, inhales, falls back and exhales.

“But then we are at land’s end at the bottom of the world. That makes it May Day for us, and you the May Queen.”

Mae smiles with her wildness curling her lips. “Does that then make you my May King?”

At Mae’s question, it is Jude’s turn to turn pale, but he hides his sudden fear with a disarming smile.

“Ah, not quite my dear. Just its straw impostor.”

Caul chills further at Jude’s words. Jude continues his disarming laugh, but knows now he has made his betrayal an open confession to Caul.

“Now, where’s the waitress and what were you talking about?”

Mae looks at Jude, realising that her wildness is moving in a direction she can no longer control, nor neither wants to control.

“That coincidences have cosmic meaning.”

Caul sees Mae’s wildness taking hold of Jude too, and begins to understand the full portent of his thunder-heralded coming. He decides to counter Mae, hoping to draw Jude back.

“I was saying that I believe God exists.”

Jude’s face lights up with mirthful surprise. “What do we have here? So God exists. His self-revelation emerges from the self-righteousness of Caul’s mind.”

Caul’s face fills with consternation, but feeling the dig of Jude’s barb, he rises in defence.

“Because I can’t deny that the coincidences aren’t there. But if there is a force trying to communicate these coincidences to us, tying all the events of the cosmos together in a narrative, it has to be independent of its own story.”

For a moment, from the look of humble amazement in Jude’s eyes, Caul believes he has pulled Jude free from the trap Paul has him in.

“Boys. Enough. I’m hungry.”

Jude turns to Mae. “You know what. I was thinking exactly the same thing. Must be more than just a coincidence. What do you say?”

The cruelty Caul feels baiting Jude’s laugh sinks him, his melancholia all of sudden becoming unbearable, and he shifts his gaze into the rain-spattered window.

“Are you still going to the party tonight Caul?”

He looks vacantly over at Mae before his eyes flicker and return him to outside reality.

“Where?”

“To the party on the farm.”

“Yeah, I’ll see. You know what, I’m going to go. He looks sadly at Jude. “Give her a lift back, will you.”

“Of course old chap. Sorry you have to go.”

“But Caul, we just got here.”

Mae’s voice is a touch rueful.

“I’m sorry.”

Caul’s voice has dropped into a dislocated echo. “I’ve got to go. Here’s some money.”

He gets up with little fuss.

“I’ll see you guys later.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 11

The taste of sick moves into Caul’s mouth.

“What?” The word croaks.

Jude carries on. “Me and Mae Caul!”

He glees viciously.

“After you left us at the Hofgarten, we ended up just drinking coffee and talking for an hour. Then when the storm broke, we went back to her place and drank wine on her garden roof. Things just clicked, and after the party, it just flowed as a matter of fact. It wasn’t even an issue of my vow getting in my way. It didn’t. Like it didn’t matter anymore.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 12

Mae breathes deeply, picking her food, chewing on Paul’s words. She looks at her father sitting diagonally across from her, his wife jealously guarding him. She sees old Mrs Equitone talking to her mother and listens in.

“You do know dear that I’m not Russian. I’m from Lithuania. I’m really German. And when I was a child, each winter, I would go to my cousin the duke. We would go out and ride the sled down the hills on the estate. And I would get frightened, but he’d always say to me, ‘Hold on tight Marie. Hold on tight.’ And down we would go. We used to feel so free.”

The conversation fades from her as everywhere the din of voices and clink of glasses and scrape of utensils intrudes upon her. Mae swivels on her chair to look at the hypnotising cacophony of people eating and talking, every table perpetuating a babble filtering the meaning of human life out of the architecture. In her head comes the echo of Paul’s words. They trigger again the cocktail effect of her preternatural fear and wildness, forcing her to go to the bathroom. She skirts wide of Gary and Janice at their table, feeling their presence together here an ominous sign of the death Paul talked about. She knows Paul is watching her from the bar, where he continues to loiter, and feels his eyes sink into her bare back. Then there is the sudden brutal awakening of nauseating sexual emotion crossing her synapses, of the fullness of Paul’s growing force penetrating her, and she knows the hidden face of her nightmare is his.

She gasps gratefully at the luxurious privacy of the bathroom, enclosing herself womb-like into a cubicle with basin and toilet. She clings to her self and begins to spin round in small contrite circles until the giddiness nauseates her enough to empty her stomach over the mouth of the toilet bowl. By so doing, she dowses with brute efficiency the prophetic dream memory of Dionysus-as-Paul’s forced penetration into her at Easter that began her mourning metamorphosis.

She looks up at the reflection of herself without fear, sees the running streaks, smudged lipstick and blotched base before bending over the basin and stripping it, watching the tissue paper soak away in the toilet bowl, and then disappear with the flush out into nowhere. She is left staring at her plain skin face shocked with dark black eyes shining with anger. She laughs for a moment almost hideously as she sees herself both maenad and sibyl.

/what big eyes you have/

/all the better to see you with my dear/

/to see me with or to see through me with/

/to guide you through the underworld with/ /to guide paul through the underworld with/ /to find dionysus/ /to take paul to him/

/and for me to have union with dionysus in paul/ /for me then to conceive his child/

As the understanding breaks through Mae, a violent, joyful shiver passes through her being.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 13

Jude and Mae sit opposite each other in wicker chairs before a big window looking out on a world of single stories below. Above these houses, no mountains can be seen, only the silver-grey clouded sky and the westward-moving sun angling golden-turning rays on the north and eastern walls of Mae’s large studio apartment. The sun glows on both of them as they exhale smoke from their lungs to watch it twirl listlessly away in the confined air.

She looks over at him. “Jude.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing. Just sounding your name in my mouth.”

He just smiles. They sit finishing their cigarettes in silence.

“What does Jude mean anyway?”

“It’s short for Judas. Whatever the name meant originally is now irrelevant.”

She is sitting upright now, her legs crossed, gazing at him, listening.

“But the Jude I was named after was the writer of the book Jude—the saint of hopeless causes.”

A grunt of a laugh comes from Jude. “And I feel I live up to his toil very well.”

“Why is that?”

“Because in being a hopeless cause, I am a saint. I don’t think that’s what my parents had in mind though.”

“What do you think they wanted?”

“Someone to save their dying church.”

In her eyes is a reflection of the broken storm clouds through which the sun is shining. But his remark drives deeper into her not yet fertile womb where a devouring hunger lies in wait for him. It is a hunger that is formless and empty and something she cannot put her finger on, but that has insistently refused to let her go since Jude’s storm announced arrival at the Hofgarten earlier in the afternoon.

“We should get up and go out on the roof to watch the sunset.” She gets up without waiting for his approval.

“Come on, I’ve got some red wine in the kitchen. I’ll get it so long and meet you up top.”

She leaves the room and Jude hears her making ready in the kitchen. He doesn’t move, having been suddenly haunted by the beauty of this daughter of man sitting cross-legged in the golden sun. She comes back into the room, calling from behind his back as she climbs a narrow staircase in the room’s far back corner.

“You’d better not let the sun go down on me.”

He pushes himself out of the chair and wanders up the wooden and wrought iron staircase, through a trap door, and into the breezy air filled with yellow haze.

She is sitting with her legs hanging over the wall that surrounds the sunken flat roof, her lithe black cotton dress accentuating the thinness of her form. Her long black hair is catching both the breeze and the sun and he finds her in that moment and pose more sexy than any girl he has ever seen.

“There you are. Come sit close and have some wine.”

He hoists himself on top the wall and takes the glass she hands him. The fresh dryness of the wine grips his smoke-stale throat while she talks.

“You know, the view straight ahead is the only one in this town where you can just see sky. No mountains and no sea, just the freedom of the western sky. Not many people can boast a view like that here.”

Dying quickly now in the west, the sun turns the clouds into burning pillars of fire. But with no ocean or mountain to swallow the sun, and just the open horizon to let it fade away, the sun’s death is made more comfortable and easy to let pass.

“What a fine, splendid way to start the weekend.”

“Hmm.” Their legs are swinging easily together, carelessly scuffing against the white wall. A lethargy has settled into their gait and Jude is trying not to allow his mind any leisure to range free with her, as another burst of wine glistens his throat.

“I just love my apartment. It’s got a character just so different to this town. Did you know it was one of the first built by an outsider after the law was changed?”

Jude takes another gulp of wine, being engulfed by the stark beauty of her black dress on the white wall.

“How did you find it?”

“I was looking for a place when I separated from Gary. I remember walking by one day and seeing it, and I fell in love with it on the spot. It just so happened that the owner was selling the property. Coincidence of not?”

She laughs, and carries on.

“So I decided to use the opportunity as a half-attempt of reconciling with my father. I said daddy dear, buy the place and we can make the top storey my apartment and rent out the lower storey. One can play the guilt of divorce very successfully if you are the victim. I sound so vindictive don’t I?”

“Well put it this way. I wouldn’t want to be the object of your vindictiveness.”

“I’m not bad Jude, really. Just that when your parents divorce, it seems like you are fruit that goes bad. And that rot kind of just hangs around, affecting all your relationships.”

To him her smile is winsome and her lithe frame tantalises his hands for wanting to touch.

“So do you feel the same way about your mother?”

“The mid-wife to destiny?”

“That’s quite bitter.”

“It’s true. I was seventeen when my father left. My mother and I grew quite close from then on. Then I grew up, and she moved north. Now she spends most of her nights reading about newfangled ways to plot destiny, and migrates south every winter like a bird to come try them on me. She’s coming out this Christmas.”

“Just think how many paths you’ll have to choose from by the time she goes.”

There is now in his eye the merry twinkle of a man seeking to have his way with a maiden.

“Thanks, but no thanks. If she were any wiser for her own paths she has chosen, which keep changing by the way, I’d be half inclined to listen.”

She swings her head seductively, looking from below her brows into his eyes.

“But I’m quite happy now to keep myself until Dionysus comes bearing the truth. Him will I follow.”

Her seduction is zeitgeist to him; the ephemera of his eternal longing present in her.

“Do you know I’m named after the women that Dionysus frenzied with wine?”

He wants her seduction, and is resolute to follow.

“I had no idea. Tell me more.”

She tosses back the last of her wine and licks her lips almost crudely.

“The Maenad. They were mad women who went deep into the forests and mountains to worship Dionysus in ecstasy under the night sky. There he would give them great peace and freshness. That’s why I can’t wait for the party tonight. I feel like I’m about to go deep into the forest and just let my hair down to revel under the night sky and dance to resurrect the spirit of life. I haven’t felt like this in a very long time.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 14

Caul talks, sitting upright and tense in Mae and Gary’s apartment.

“Until about two months ago, this town was like a beautiful garden with its façade of mountains and ocean views. But since Easter, before my eyes, all I’ve been able to see is this town as a desert that nourishes no roots, or as a heap of broken fragments that once told a story. ”

Mae is hunched forward on her settee, her elbows on her knees, arms still cradling the cushion. “So this is the vision of the vegetative death.”

Caul becomes aware that he is finding his way through her garden.

“Yes, but it is not quite what I expected it to be. Since I realised what was going on at the bar last night, I’ve been trying to say or guess why this kind of afterlife at all.”

“What do you mean? What kind of afterlife?”

“Despite my spiritual death, I still feel love in my heart. I know this because I felt this incredible sense of love for Jude last night. It’s unlike a love I’ve ever known, as if it is not mine at all, but another’s. It makes no sense. The death of the spirit is meant to turn the son of man into a handful of dust, only to be resurrected and made green again. That resurrection is supposed to make me able to love again. And yet I still love, and when I look at the handful of dust that I am, I fear that even after I am resurrected, I’ll forever sense this love but never be able to figure out why this love at all, and I’ll live out the rest of my life in a loveless, shelterless, wasteland this town now is to me.”

He sinks back into the armchair again.

“I’m scared Mae. I want you to come and find me. Show me that what we’ve been raised to be is true.”

Caul’s words break through her, initiating the sympathy that she has been raised to give when the time came. But as that sympathy begins to flow from her, before her eyes, a sudden shadow steals over the squared room, turning the bland colour of the two chairs, settee and TV that sit in fourfold equality around the room into a heap of rubbish. It gives way to a vortex of choking fear in her, and she begins clutching at the tightness of her clothes. She looks accusingly at Caul, suddenly believing that it was he who has initiated his death, he that raped her in the shadow of her dream, he that has broken her marriage with Gary. But she remains harshly silent, then raises herself from the settee, folding herself into a possessive envelope.

“You should probably leave now.”

He looks up, perplexed, sure that she had begun responding.

“Why?”

“Because Gary might come back soon. And I don’t want you to be here if he does. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“It’s got everything to do with me Mae. You kicked me out of your life because of him. Remember? And everything we were raised for.”

She just looks away out of a net-curtained window, more convinced of her notion. He holds up his hands. “Okay.”

He wants to say Gary is not coming. Wants to hurt her with those words. But he finds it within himself to keep his proud words from surfacing. Instead he finds himself choosing to love her regardless.

“If you need any help…”

“I can deal with it.”

The cold lash of her words want to enter his heart and freeze it over with his pride, but he sees immediately it would turn his decision to love her into nothing but dust. And he is suddenly determined not to let this spark of love be drowned by the fear that is turning everything of beauty in his life to dust. He gets up and walks towards the door.

“Maybe later then.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 15

“Come, let’s do what we have to do quickly.”

Paul’s whispered words snake into Jude’s ear and tighten the noose around his soul. Jude turns fearfully, but slavishly follows from his bar into what once was the kitchen of his home. There Paul opens and enters a door to an adjoining office. A slug of air finds difficulty in passing down Jude’s throat. He enters. Turning to close the door, he feels the sudden pressure of being pinned up against it as it slams, the snort of Paul’s breath in his face.

“Rumour has it you were at mass this evening?”

Paul’s black eyes entrap Jude’s, but Jude cannot say or even guess what they hide. Sinking his eyes only brings Paul’s left hand to his chin, clamping his head back against the door.

“I thought I’d made it clear that when I bought this house from you, and put you in charge of its bar, I didn’t want the Church screwing with your head any more than it already had.”

A sullen look now glazes Jude’s eyes. “And all it did was confirm itself as dead.”

“I’m still going to have to kill you. That was our deal. Your going to Mass is not going to break that.”

With his hand still on Jude’s chin, Paul twists his wrist to see the second hand on his watch go ten seconds to midnight.

“It’s time. Shall I behead this priest-king?”

Jude breathes deep. “Behead him.”

Watching it down to four seconds, Paul suddenly puts a finger gun to Jude’s forehead.

“One, two, three, let the King headless be.”

He follows with the sound of a shot being fired.

“You’re dead my May King. You had better play the part that will allow us to resurrect Dionysus. You know the consequences if you don’t.”

Jude nods, slumping relieved at nothing stranger having passed, leaving the knowledge of his betrayal of Caul as almost mundane.

Paul leaves him against the door and turns to the desk, the quiet refrain of Hey Jude on his lips. He opens a drawer and lifts a plastic package that he dumps on the desk. Paul looks up from behind the desk.

“You in Mass is not good for business either Jude. The three stooges aren’t eating out of my hand yet. But if they smell a rat…”

Paul’s eyes bore into Jude. “…they’re going to bolt. That is not an option I’m willing to consider. I will do whatever it takes to get them under my thumb. You got my meaning?”

Paul walks back up to Jude and looks him squarely in the eye, sinking his dark light deeper and deeper into Jude.

“Thought so.”

He laughs with much mirth.

“What is it that made you want to hold onto that detritus anyway? Surely you understand Jude. You’re part of the mysteries now. They’re going to free our waters from this desert. There’s no shelter in this desert anymore. No relief. No sound of water. Only dead trees and dry stone. But you’ve got to be serious about coming in under the shadow of our rock, and I promise you I will show you something different from your shadow striding behind you every morning and it rising to meet you in the evening. Look at tonight as your first and final warning.”

He laughs again, then speaks almost kindly to Jude, turning with a gesturing hand.

“Come, the hour grows late. Get your pay and go rule over your bar.”

Jude watches Paul disappear from the office, then looking fixedly at the plastic package, takes a step towards the table. He picks it up, weighing it for a moment as if a soul. Then clutching it, he turns and leaves the office to hide his package in the kitchen. Having done this, he emerges back into the wooded aura of the bar. He stalls for a moment, realising that the bar suddenly seems a more shadowy place than the bar he had left some minutes ago, its maroon walls absorbing into near darkness what negligible light was emanating from two dull fixtures on the left wall. Inside of him, he feels the faintest flickers of a desolation enter his heartbeat.

/is this what caul meant/

Shrugging off the cold shiver that snakes down his spine, he steps full into the arch-shaped, shining yellow bar, its new shadowy darkness giving it the glow of a shrine.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 16

Mae pushes her seafood hors d’ oeuvre away in further disgust, and looks out of the hotel’s glassed terrace doors to the vestiges of a sun sinking into the sea.

Her emotional state becoming increasingly upset, she swings her head towards the bar where she sees Paul standing in the very place her father has just spoken from, as if he had sprung up from that position. He stands looking expansively out into the gathering darkness of the ocean. To her amazement, she is suddenly overcome by a shining beauty resonating throughout his being, and he is nothing less than the most beautiful man she has ever seen. It is as if for the first time, she is laying her eyes upon a god.

Paul sees her taking him in and descends fluidly into the candlelit dining room, motioning for her to come to him. She rises to meet him, despite a preternatural fear that that shouts to her from the bottom of her being to not do so.

“The wind is blowing fresh to the forests, Maenad. Why are you lingering here? Or is your father’s dream-come-true, yours too?”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 17

Caul stands on the lone mountain grove’s alter, unsure what to feel after his dance with Mae, but grateful for the momentary lightness of being.

“Thank you.”

Mae smiles in her impish way.

“It’s my pleasure.”

He looks at the spent candles.

“Think we should head on down?”

She nods her assent. Slowly he extinguishes the remaining candles bar one, which he uses to guide himself and then her from the rock and over exposed roots of trees onto the narrow pathway that leads out of the grove to where above them, the firmament is turning with a white moon edging towards its half full state, and to where below them twinkles a confetti expanse of lights. The air is warm with the earth radiating what it has received from the day’s sun. They trundle in silence for a few steps, but the question burning in Mae refuses to remain silent.

“Caul, why did you stop dancing?”

A few steps ahead of her, he stops short.

“Because of the car accident Mae. I thought that was obvious.”

He resumes with her alongside him, their footsteps crunching graded dust.

“But you healed. You were so fortunate. Bones were broken, but you healed.”

“Did I?”

“I would have thought that you would be dying to return. Let it help you deal with your parents’ death the way you always used dancing to deal with life. But you didn’t.”

“I hated them. If it wasn’t for her screwing around and his spineless faith, I would never have had to be born and suffer this crap life.”

“Caul…”

“Spare me the lecture on who we’re meant to be Mae. That’s true and you know it. I was seventeen when the accident happened, and feeling very awkward in my body. The sexuality of dancing was driving me insane. Your sexuality was driving me insane. There was suddenly no secret garden left to go to and escape. So I closed the gates to you and started becoming the self-righteous bastard you ended up hating enough to go marry Gary—and that’s not a slur against you, before you have a go at me.”

With his hands, Caul shifts the shoulders of the pack on his back as if to justify himself.

“That’s just the truth. Until that night you and Gary separated that is. Your garden opened to me again that night. And tonight I entered it, though I’m not so sure I should have.”

She stops abruptly on the stiff downward path and looks at him shocked.

“You were in love with me as well?”

He comes to a halt a few steps ahead of her and looks back over his shoulder.

“Consumed by you rather. Consumed by someone I was forbidden to touch until the time was right.”

Caul turns his head back to the path again and continues the descent, bitterness in his heart. She follows a few steps off the pace, listening to his voice guide her through the darkness.

“I remember coming back with you one evening from the lake we used to go to, just before the accident. You had picked some hyacinths and your hair was wet. My eyes failed me for your beauty, and I could not speak. In that silence, it was like I was completely overwhelmed by the fullest intensity of what love could be. It was like I no longer existed, either as a person alive or dead. I knew nothing. I was just looking into this heart of light. And it scared me to death.”

They walk in silence for a while, Mae internalising his confession. Then she suddenly skips forward with a hint of joy to draw abreast of him.

“Why don’t you start over with me again now? Our time is almost nigh.”

He looks mournfully at her.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You danced with me in my garden tonight.”

“Oh Mae, I really appreciated dancing again with you tonight, but I realise it was just symbolic of something else I want; am searching for.”

Mae throws her hands up to her sweat-beaded brow in exasperation.

“There we go. Another man off after the holy grail trying to heal some wounded need inside nobody can define. Sorry to throw your words back in your face, but the fisher king cannot heal himself.”

Their feet plunge steeply downwards, holding back from the impulse to let go and run their bodies headlong into the oncoming darkness. Caul’s sudden transformation by Mae’s words from quester to fisher king inspires him.

“So I’m fighting a fruitless fight?”

“Yes. And in the process wounding yourself deeper.”

“And yet you cannot heal me either, for you are not whole.”

“Oh Caul. Come on…”

But she is silent for she knows not how to answer. He carries on.

“I know I can’t heal myself Mae, or anyone else for that matter. But I’ve also realised that neither you nor anyone else can effect total healing either. That includes the one who was wounded, but then was healed only to be wounded again and again.”

“So who can heal then Caul?”

But here Caul’s voice drifts to silence and he shrugs his shoulders, not yet willing to confide in Mae that he thinks only God can heal, not yet willing to confess to her that he is no longer waiting for her, but searching for God.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 18

“Before even the Spirit-time, when the sea was waste and void with darkness over the surface of the deep, the Spirit was upon the waters.”

The old woman speaks into a prepared silence that twelve people scattered on her lawn have made for her. During their time of prayer the Spirit has come upon the old woman as it does from time to time. The long rays of a sun falling away into the ocean stride the garden’s hedge-rose wall and mantle her small frame in gold. Behind her back a purple-robed range of peaks seem to bear down on her in the approaching twilight.

“And through the Spirit, God breathed Light to draw men to the Light.”

She now lifts an intense, inquiring gaze into the eyes of each around her.

“But many who have seen the Light, yet having not fully understood the Light, came in among us called to the Light. With their minds on darkness, they caused many among us to lose our first love.”

In her pause, a grief passes across her face extinguishing some of the light from it. Then as if from long memory, she draws breath.

“There have also been those who have been as hypocrites among us, slandering us so that we were persecuted. Others have come that have set up the high place of the enemy among us and with fallen priests enticed many to false sacrifice.”

Disgust now wrinkles her brow, slowly deepening to great sorrow, as in her turn she faces full into her shadow.

“Even Jezebel came with her deep secrets.”

She sighs deeply.

“Many of us learned them and fell away.”

Having stopped in the face of her shadow, she chews on her tongue as if trying to displace a foul taste. Motionless, she continues.

“There have been times when we seemed to come alive. But for the most part it was dead faith.”

She raises her head high again and lifts her voice.

“And if we have stood, it is because He has placed an open door before us.”

Around her a number of Amens are heard.

“But for some time now, most in this town have become neither hot nor cold. And it is about to be spat out.”

The vehemence of her voice angrily defies the now descending dusk.

“For we have chosen to clog up our souls with vanity, saying we are rich and, having become wealthy, are in need of nothing, not knowing that we are miserable, naked and blind. With the turn of each day, this Laodicea we live in has become even more wretched, preferring darkness to the Light, knowing not that Light is about forever to leave them.”

Anguish breaks forth at the end of her anger, revealing her heart. She breathes heavily in the freshly fallen twilight, before allowing her voice to come out in defiance again.

“But we are still here, as a voice in this place prepared for us in the wilderness. And this Easter we have petitioned for the souls of two young men whom the Lord has revealed and marked out to us for the fulfilment of His purposes in this town. Let us not give up praying for them.”

She raises her hands over them.

“To you who have been called. You are loved by God and kept by Jesus Christ. May mercy, peace and love in abundance be yours until He returns in glory to separate forever Light from the dark, as day is now separated from night. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit has to say.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 19

To read the Purgatory Mix, follow the embedded links.

Across the late violet expanse, accumulating waves of fractals have woven themselves into the sky. Thick bars of moisture sit lavishly over the mountainous amphitheatre. As Mae rounds the bend at the top of her road, she sees Jude’s car waiting for her. He gets out and leans back against his car. In the background, the hourly wailing of the church bells brings to her mind the disgust of their consorting and how she has defiled herself. There is no attempt on her part to disaffect the disdain with which she meets him.

“What are you doing here Jude?”

“To talk would be a good place to start.”

“I can’t now. I’m expecting my mom to call soon from her hotel to tell me she’s arrived. She insists on settling herself first.”

He follows her up the outside stairwell to the green door. Her hands unlock first the metal gate then the wooden door. She enters her kitchen without inviting him in.

“Can I pour you a glass?”

She flippantly holds up the unfinished wine bottle she had shared with Caul in the mountain grove the previous evening. He nods.

“I just wanted to say sorry for what Halloween degenerated into.”

“It’s okay. I’m over it.”

She pours and hands him the red, smouldering glass in an offhand way.

“Stop being so cold with me.”

“Hey, I told you I don’t have time for this. I’ve just got back from work, and my mother is about to barge into my living space.”

“And you’ve got a friend trying to make up with you and you’re showing no concern.”

“I’m sorry if you see it that way. I’m not unconcerned. Just that at the moment I have no space to deal with it. This is going to have to wait until after my mother goes. If I don’t get this off on the right foot, her whole stay here will be a disaster.”

The telephone rings. They are still in the kitchen.

“That’s probably her.”

She dissolves into the adjacent bedroom where they have shared each other. Her voice rises in girlish excitement at the sound of her mother’s voice. From through her bedroom door she can see Jude gulp the wine down and then leave backwards through the open door, disposing of the glass on the sinkboard.

“Anyway darling, I’m at the hotel but I have a bad cold, so I’m going to take a nap until dinner. Can you get to the hotel at about eight for dinner? No doubt I’m going to have to call that father of yours, but I think that can wait until tomorrow. Oh and I’ve brought the horoscope myself. One has to be so careful in reading these days, and I want to read yours. I’ve got so much to tell you, but darling I must get some rest. I’ll see you at eight. Call for me in the lobby. I’m in 616. Got that?”

“Yes, mom.”

“Bye darling. I love you. Only a few more hours now.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 20

Mae concentrates on breathing and loosening her body to languid movement, preferring to let her emotions be expressed in her breathing than in her mind for now. She has disciplined herself well. She runs her hands back through her hair, interlocking her fingers with its black strands, and feels the surface-settled wetness of millions of water molecules soak into them. The misted roads are still quiet when the yellow globules of street lamps flicker and are gone, their parallel disappearance coming as a series of distant rolls of thunder rumble somewhere over the ocean, seemingly content in its own wrath. Her mind wanders to the tarot reading her mother gave her the evening before.

{“Here is the wheel, inverted, the cycle of the seasons turned upside down with the waters rising as if to flood the world, drowning those that rule and freeing those that are oppressed. It is a time for changing the set seasons. The crowd of people in a ring around the wheel are what is emerging into this world, but also being destroyed from it. On top is the man with three staves, someone with enormous powers of fertility. Enough to crush the Empress here under the wheel. She is one who is decadent and is a lady of Rocks and situations. To her right, and about to be crushed, is the one-eyed merchant, or whatever is myopic and profit-driven. But the blank card that follows him is something forbidden me to see. I do not see the Hanged Man. The time of crucified religion is no more. Fear death by water. But here, ascendant, on the left, is the drowned Phoenician sailor, coming to resurrection. Reproductive and spiritual regeneration is strong Mae. These are your cards. This is the world you are about to inherit.”}

The hope of the new vision moves her to ecstasy and she breaks into a skipping run, then spins her body through a series of turns down the wet shining street, her silk black hair flailing around in gravity’s momentum. As she comes to dizzied halt, she hears the earth ringing with fresh birdsong and the awakening sounds of people’s lives beginning for the day. The mundane has left her. Rather, she walks bright-eyed and eager down the sloping grass field through which the river burbles. Its surface sheen, continuous flow and murmuring movement mesmerise her as she stops to take the shoes from her feet. She enjoys the cold sensation of running across the grassy slope. Then without giving it thought, she lies down in the field. Her clothes start to soak and her skin shivers but she stays, just looking at the misted sky burning away. She throws out her voice from the depth of her stomach in one monotonous sound, then lifts a tone and lets her voice sound again. She does this seven times such that the sound and sight of the world around her become purified in clarity. Nothing can stop her giggling now as her blood fills with hysterical drafts of oxygen.

“I’m mad.” Her voice is laughing loud.

“I’m maenad.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 21

“Did you tell Old Mrs Equitone that I was coming?”

Mae nods, fingers rubbing round the wine glass stem.

“It’s really important that I read your tarot tonight. Very weird things are going on in my cards.”

Her mother’s voice is hushed, her hands on the table flattening out the cloth in an urgent manner. Mae sighs, wishing she didn’t have to be reminded of all that must soon happen.

“Mother, we’ve decided that we would talk about that later. Right now I just want to have a great dinner and hear you complaining how you can’t possibly celebrate Christmas with no snow, and telling me how I should give up smoking.”

She pulls out a cigarette.

“I did the honour of ensuring a smoking table while I was waiting for you in the lobby for twenty minutes.”

“I can’t believe they still allow that here. You’ve got to get out of this backward place, as beautiful as it is.”

Mae grins conspiratorially.

“Come on Mom. Light up with me for old time’s sake.”

Fiddling with a large agate ring on her finger, the woman pulls an aghast face.

“I don’t know where you get your impertinence from. Oh, I forgot. From that long lost father of yours.”

“Mom!” Mae slaps her free hand down softly on the edge of the table.

“This is me. Just let it go will you and let’s talk.”

Her mother breathes deeply, and let’s her shoulder’s relax.

“Okay. You’re right. Anyway, so how is your father? Making lots of money and raising horrid kids? No doubt they’re singing sweetly in church choirs. How old are they now?”

“Pre-pubescent bordering on zit explosions.”

“Ah, now there’s a touch of acridity that comes from me.”

Mae folds her arms, mouth half agape, and just shakes her head.

“Do you often do that?”

The surprise on the woman’s face is genuine.

“Do what?”

“Spend your time dissecting my various anatomical and psychological parts and dividing them between you and Dad.”

The woman puts her hand open against her breast.

“How can you say that. It makes it sound like you were split with the estate when we were divorced.”

Mae exhales. “Excuse me, I think I was.”

The clairvoyant woman breathes deep again.

“Okay, I think we’ve just hit another topic of conversation that is off limits. No talk of the divorce and you, okay. You’ve made your ground rules. I’ve made mine now. Got it?”

Mae’s face is scarlet but she backs down, letting the angry blood pacify.

“So tell me what your father’s been doing?”

“Building up his family dynasty by building hotels like the one you’re staying in for one thing.”

Her mother slows her breath sharply as if the architectural design is somehow contaminated.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

“You’ll have a hard time finding anything that doesn’t have his finger in it somewhere. Maybe a bread and breakfast.”

“Oh now, how quaint. No, here will be fine. On the sea front. It’s really beautiful. And look at that moon hanging over it.”

A tall waiter, impeccably dressed, slides alongside their table and effortlessly places plates before them rolling their names with a smooth tongue.

“May I offer to pour your wine now?”

“Do you speak French as well as you introduce our food?”

He smiles politely. “No ma’am. Shall I?”

His hand is offering the wine bottle from out of hand.

“Of course.”

He moves with dexterity pouring from both their right sides.

“That’s hardly full if you don’t mind me saying.”

Mae looks abashed at the brashness of her mother. His reply is first austere.

“Etiquette requires that I only fill the glass so far.”

And then with a subtle humour. “It also allows one to get one’s nose deep into the glass and enjoy the bouquet without getting one’s nose wet. I trust you’ll enjoy the entrée.”

He moves off with the same glide with which he appeared. Both of them burst out laughing.

“Mom, you’re so impertinent. You see. It does come from you.”

“Yes, yes, you were talking about your father and his business.”

Mae hangs her head for a moment, the humour going out of her. She looks up, angry.

“He has a new heir apparent. My father apparently still has a son-in-law even though his daughter no longer has a husband.”

The surprise allows no words to pass from her mother’s mouth.

“And I haven’t begun to tell you half of what’s been unfolding.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 22

A sheet-bare mattress lies on a wood-square floor of a large, empty room. On it, Gary tosses in the shallowness of but a few hours sleep. Beneath the current of his consciousness he has become a whale swimming out of his depth among the coral, where as a whale he knows he should not be. He is much surprised at being here, but accepts it, going immediately to look for food. Then he finds himself beached and his dying flesh about to be hacked apart by men gathered around him. At this point sleep bears him no more.

In the mezzanine between waking and sleeping, Gary cannot place where he is. His eyes open to a glossy white ceiling after which the rest of the world comes flooding in. Mae looms in his head, placing him on the uncomfortable perimeter of a pain that has never had a sounding in his mind before. To shake loose of it, he rises and goes padding off down a cream-coloured passage to the toilet.

/did we really say goodbye last night mae/ /is all this for real/ /three years worth of effort gone and life just carries on/ /im not damaged/ /ill manage without you/

Leaving the bathroom, he passes into the lounging area, a mess of papers on its sixties mustard carpet. He walks over them through to the veranda, spacious, oblong, slate paved and littered with dry leaves and cigarette butts. He draws a cigarette from a box stashed in his shirt pocket, but can find no light with his digging hands. He re-enters the house, picks up a scattered lighter from an arm of a chair and lights up while crossing the lintel back into the early, blue morning sun too warm for its season.

He steps his expansive frame up onto the veranda wall. From the lower spine of the lone mountain where the house stands, he surveys the view, lolling his body around one of the poles which supports an uncovered pergola. His mind, feeling the intensity of everything now being different, takes in greedily the distant, frayed edges of the bay carving out a hazy peninsula filled with the far, unreal city under a brown smog. Then there are the sandy flats, squatted upon by the Moor’s people, that lie between the city and this protected basin with its luxury seashore highrises backing up into industria, then malls and business districts to schools and residential houses which lie nestled in the hand-like slopes of the lone mountain.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 23

Her dark hair still heavy from her morning shower, Mae merges herself with those now flowing over an old footbridge towards work. Their eyes are before their feet, their breathing short and hurried. She passes with them into the bricks and mortar of the town, strides briskly down King William Street and turns into the courtyard of a small business centre. The name Margate Sands hangs above it and an isolate oak tree is encircled in the centre of its paving. To counter the curse she feels the bells of Saint Mary are tolling, Mae walks up to the oak to run her hand across its bark. But as the bells chime their final dead stroke of the hour, Mae sees Audrey enter the bricked square from the opposite side. She pulls up short of the oak, her eyes flickering with sudden jealous vehemence at this girl who now bestrides Gary.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 24

“You remember when you went to Mass at Pentecost.”

From the armchair in Caul’s room, Jude simply nods his head at him, aware that a deep silent chasm is pushing between them. But Caul remains focussed, wanting to say more.

“Well, I had this weird trip that night when everybody I saw in the bar was part of the living dead. Except you. You had this life as if burning from within you, fighting against the death trying to steal your life away. And I remember suddenly feeling that I had to help you escape from that death. It seemed that if you escaped that death, then maybe we could be restored to life. Later that day, in my room, you told me that maybe you had the Holy Spirit inside of you, but you didn’t know anymore. It struck me that if you had the Spirit in you, then that’s why you weren’t dead like the rest of us. But it didn’t make sense, because you are the person Paul and I have uprooted most. You should be dead. But you’re not. Why not?”

There is a long silence as Jude calmly finishes smoking his cigarette while looking distantly through the door of Caul’s room and beginning to wonder which way the betrayal really ran.

“I recall that when I was confirmed I received the spiritual seal. Let’s see if I can remember.”

Jude gazes ceilingward for a moment.

“The spirit of wisdom and understanding, of right judgement and courage, of knowledge and reverence and the spirit of holy fear in God. And I was told to guard what I had received; that God had marked me with a sign which Christ had confirmed by placing the Spirit in my heart.”

He laughs one of his elegant laughs.

“So you were right those months ago about me having the Spirit in me. But I have obviously not guarded very well have I? Otherwise, I might have been able to offer you some holy wisdom as to why you think I’m not dead.”

He laughs now in a mocking way, remembering that night when Paul ritually mock executed him in the bar as a substitute priest king for the true dark deed still to come.

/it is me that paul killed/ /not you caul/

“For what it’s worth, and it’s ironic I know, but preparation for confirmation includes recognising your wretched state, so you can be in a state of grace to receive the sacrament. And it also includes growing familiar with the Spirit and his workings. So maybe there’s hope for you yet Caul to find your grail. Maybe your death is not what you think it is. Then you can come heal me if you find it. God knows I need it.”

He laughs again, but this time sadly to himself and for the first time really desiring to put his betrayal of Caul right.

“So I say, let go of this maniacal dream that Paul’s sucked you into. Uprooting people’s hope has never ever been you. You’ve got every reason to hate people and want to make their lives miserable. I mean, you’ve been treated like dirt ever since you arrived. Yet something lies within your breast that wants to triumph over that hate. And it has always given me hope, even though you know I despise you for that unfortunate trait.”

Jude smiles and for a moment feels a glint of light burn against the darkness in his soul. But darkness overpowers him with unworthiness, and in the torturous moment he finds worthiness only in vindicating himself of his own betrayal. He rises from his chair.

“Right my questing healer, I think I will go back and join the living dead while you mull on what’s to be the best medicine.”

After he leaves, Caul steps up to his bedroom window and looks out over the darkened town.

/why is it that they in this town do not realise they are dead/ /havent we undone them enough/

Waiting in the silence, he suddenly comes to understand.

/because weve got them preferring to believe in fortuitous order rising from chaos//rather than nothing at all/

Caul lets his mind turn back over his conversation with Jude.

/i desperately want to know the source of life that jude does not know he has/ /if i can find the door that leads back to life again/ /will that life come to me/ /will i be able to receive it and lead others to that door/

/who can lead me to this door but jude/ /but he knows not that he stands at it/ /and who will come through it as light to take me out of this darkness/ /will it be mae/ /how can it be/ /even if she does come round and accept what is now happening/ /the death has her too/

Hopeless, he breathes and holds out the palms of his two hands, weighing in them the worlds in which he now lives.

/if i am to continue languishing in this hell/ /i need to remember that im in purgatory as well/ /surely paradise must be at hand ready to breathe its light into me/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 25