Apocalypse of Jude

Caul leaves the dance frustrated beyond means, not knowing why he cannot enter the dionysian state which should be his to enter. He begins to wander around the club, fighting the acid flood that is seeking to sweep him away. But as he approaches the table where Paul and the others are playing pool, he is unable to keep from entering him the dark wave of music now shuddering the club. It creeps up upon the waters of Caul’s soul, stirring them up, breaking the tent of his soul, causing the waters to pour forth their visions of desolation.

He watches Paul laughing out loud into the evening, soothing the palpable tension around the table with his words. But Caul sees that they are seductions for Paul’s own lusts sneaking unawares into those around him; sees that they are death undoing them. He watches Paul’s effect on Janice whom he has turned from Christian faith; watches her playing the whore he has taught her to play, while denying her the freedom from the lust that now agonises her. And he watches as Paul’s well-placed jibes burden Gary’s bull-like shoulders over his sense of failed performance such that with each pool ball that Gary plays, his male strength transgresses into avaricious desire.

Then his eyes settle on the blond, Audrey, one in whom Paul’s words have had little chance to grow. As he watches her, all he can observe is an angry soul cooped up in body insecurities that drag her through the evening with parched thirst for an affirmation of identity. He suddenly fears for her; for what Paul has planned for someone so ready to implode. Then realising he must look inside himself to see what has been wrought upon him by his brother’s words. As he does so, Caul finds Paul’s envy of him coiled around his being. He realises how much he has let this envy feed his own pride, and how it had hardened his love for Mae, even before she married Gary; a love that even now, despite being dead, he wants to find.

Realising what his brother’s words have done to him and wanting to see its envious cause, Caul turns horrified back to his half brother. Looking at Paul’s soul, Caul reads written there a condemnation, and beside it a wound caused by Caul’s own being. In greater mortification and grief that has ever touched him, Caul realises that the wound has rejected and perverted all possible grace and forgiveness offered, and has turned into a fiery fount through which poison and hatred spew forth into the burning sea of other’s souls. Unable to take any more, Caul back-pedals away from the table, turns away, and hurries from this booming place into the chill, late winter night.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 55

Dawn peaks from behind the dragon-back peaks, lightening the firmament of the sky and pushing back darkness across the bay to where the city stands at the peninsula’s edge. The sun is now past its closest point to the earth. Darkness will grow now, the sun slowly bringing less heat, enough only to ripen the harvest, and then the burning of whatever has not yielded goodness from the earth.

In this growing darkness is the lone mountain and the river running softly from it, seeking to end its song under the suffocating overgrowth of alien vegetation that crowds its banks. The river winds downwards into the town, channelled all the way by cobbled stones cemented to the soil. Here its banks are drenched with leftover summer filth: empty bottles, sandwich papers, cigarette butts and condom wrappers. And its waters, once unsullied and meant as a source for parched throats, are now dirtied by those that have run after profit.

Finally it will open up into the false bay whose waters are neither polar cold nor tropic hot; to where the ships of the earth trade their wares with the merchants of the multitudes for the intoxication of the kings of the earth. And instead of infusing the salt mix with living fresh water, its pours out the dirty effluent of men who have cuckolded this town, and have eaten in it without the slightest qualm, pretending to be shepherds, but feeding only themselves.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 56

Jude is swallowed by the pangs of grief exposed by the cocaine and he lets them overcome him as the night swallows him up.

/by the banks of this town’s river/ /i have sat down and grieved/ /praying that the life it gives/ /will run till i end my song/ /and to run softly/ /for what i now have to speak/ /is to be neither loud nor long/

/before their destruction/ /the star that fell into the abyss will rise to the earth/ /the destroyer that has been bound for the thousand years will be released/

/but nothing will compare to the darkness/ /the darkness from voice of the bridegroom and bride never being heard in this town again/

/the bride will lie dead in the street of their town/ /and they will celebrate thinking their time of torment from plague is over/ /but her blood is found in them and will be revenged/

/the harvest at the close of the age is at hand/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 57

Leaving the bar to the girl beside him, Jude lifts the bar flap and by force of habit thrusts his head into the pool room where he meets Paul’s arched laughing eyes, his chuckle spreading from ear to ear as he converses with three loitering heirs with whom he has now grown close. They are the only ones in the room and a shiver goes down Jude’s spine, rattling his bones.

He retreats quickly not wanting to garner Paul’s gaze too long and enters the kitchen via the side door in the passage way. Feeling safe again, he stares out the back window at figures in the dark gathered lazily around the tree that grows on the far side of the small, but empty parking lot. Jude watches wistfully the ritual of closed fists meeting gently against each other as a burning coal is being passed between them.

“I figure you want your snarf?”

Jude turns quickly to see Paul behind him. There was no hearing him coming, just a cold blast at his back.

“No. It wasn’t that at all. Just looking in you know.”

“Come.”

Paul turns. His footfalls are silent like darkness. He unlocks the door to the small office. Jude follows him in warily, and at a distance. But Paul goes straight and opens a safe inside a cupboard, retrieves a package and then closes it, throwing the package almost flippantly on to the desk.

“That’s the last of your thirty pieces of silver’s worth.”

The sight of the pack itches a gnawing hunger that never leaves Jude now. A last shred of dignity holds him back from just taking it though, and he affects suspicion.

“Why early this month?”

Paul merely chuckles again.

“Come on Jude, I know you’re out. I don’t want to keep you from having a white Christmas do I, and have you lose your nerve when you most need it.”

Though the laugh is light, Jude feels Paul’s black eyes bare in on him.

“Thanks.” It’s a meek voice, squeezed unwillingly of its own authority.

“Good.”

Paul’s smile in now expressionless.

“I’m glad my giving it to you tonight was worth it.”

He moves past Jude and towards the door.

“Lock the door when you are done.”

He leaves. Jude stands frozen to the spot. Paul sticks his head back in the door.

“It has been a pleasure working with you Jude. Take the rest of the night off. My treat. I’ll be waiting for you Christmas Eve, a crowned joker, right? Ave Maria, and all that.”

The wolfish grin abruptly disappears as Paul closes the door and leaves Jude alone in the small cubicle office. Too gripped with craving to give the last step of his betrayal its last moment of remorse, Jude’s shaking hands open the package from its brown paper wrapping and withdraws a solidly packed translucent pack of cocaine. He takes a pen and gashes the plastic, overflow from the contents bursting through. Jude, now sitting behind the desk, carefully with his finger brushes this effluent onto a square memo note, puts it on the desk in front of him and then opens the drawer to his left where he takes out a role of scotch tape, a piece of which he neatly places over the gash in the plastic, finally wrapping the package back into its brown paper. He unfolds his empty wallet from which he draws an old ATM card and a paper note. His fingers nimbly, albeit shakily, cut the crystals into two lines. The powder lifts easily through the rolled note and deposits itself where his gullet meets his airways. He licks his forefinger, the saliva on it picking up errant granules from the desk, and then sticks it back into his mouth to rub his gums. They begin to numb, while inside him, the intensity of grandeur begins. He stuffs the package blatantly under his arm, gets up and leaves the office, locking it behind him. In the kitchen he scrambles around until he finds an innocuous looking supermarket bag into which he drops his package. He passes back into the bar via the passage door, not bothering to stop at the bar, and seeing only Gary being seduced by a forgotten Janice in the dark table by the corner before exiting. As he exits, he turns his head to look in through the glass panes of the veranda door to his left and finds himself looking at Paul leaning against the dark maroon wall, one leg up against it and his head resting. Jude looks away and leaves.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 58

The spacious veranda is full of stagnant pleasure and its laziness is intoxicated with the hazy mid-afternoon beauty of the bay. Gary is lain out on cushions straddling the veranda wall, bare-chested with his t-shirt covering his eyes, trying to keep the preternaturally warm sun out of his eyes and the girl making him feel bad, out of his mind. Paul is sprawled out in the shade on an armless, stone-coloured veranda sofa, propped up by his right arm, musing upon his brother’s wreck and his father’s death before him. His eyes then turn to Gary with a disgust and a longing in his heart to be finally rid of this pawn. Yet he knows the next move cannot wait. Bracing himself and hiding his disdain, he casts his eyes into the bay.

“Sit up Gary. It’s time we talked about bringing your father’s house down.”

Gary lifts the t-shirt from his eyes and squints at Paul as he sits up warily. Paul bores his eyes straight into Gary.

“You know what it was like to grow up here with that half-breed as a brother? To know that your own mother gloated over that bastard in front of you, while all the so-called good Christian folk of this town, led by your turncoat father, laughed at you, called you names, despised you.”

Paul’s voice is cold and colourless. But the effect of his words on Gary is powerful, wrenching as they do, his gut with guilt. Knowing he needs the full treatment to gain the mastery he needs for his next move with Gary, Paul prepares for his assault.

“Shall I remind you Gary, how this town became the stench of my childhood? Thirty seven years ago my father became rightful leader of this town. When he became leader, he defied everyone and married my unbelieving mother. You know what it was like before they took over. Those pharisaical believers had made it illegal for any Gentile from outside of this town, even if they professed the faith, to buy property here. In 1967, after six years of getting this town to accept my mother’s religion along with theirs, my parents changed that law, and they gave your father the right to sell property to anybody from outside. These new buyers didn’t even have to confess the Church’s faith like they would have had to before. My father was finally doing what no one before had had the courage to do—make this town open to everyone and let my mother teach her mysteries alongside the Church. That was the year we were born Gary. That was the year Caul was conceived.”

Paul pauses to watch Gary’s guilt begin to change into anger. Happy with the progress he continues.

“But when my mother gave my father Caul as a son; a son who was not his son, but a son from a religious rite of hers, your father pretended to be all religious and started making the Church churn out good works so they could feel self righteous about themselves—enough to get them to turn against my parents, who had freed them from tyranny, and make your father the leader of this town. While all the time he was just consolidating his power over the new trade on property. Scandalous, wasn’t it.”

Gary can only sit shamefacedly as Paul shakes his head.

“Don’t let it break your heart Gary. My mother deserved it. And the fact that Caul’s coloured. That was her way of making sure everybody knew he, and not me, was to succeed my father as head of this town and as priest and king of her faith. Even his name is a bastardisation of mine.”

Here, for a second, Paul’s voice loses its mesmerising hold over Gary as it dips into the cup of bitterness in his spirit.

“I’m glad those rocks thrown that night on the highway killed them. Maybe it would have been better if he had died as well.”

Paul looks full of hate over at a bewildered looking Gary, realises his slip in mastery and commands a soothing voice over him.

“It’s not Caul I hate. Him and me. We are the victims. That’s why we’re still here in this house they built. But it’s gone to rack and ruin. And now it’s time I got a house of my own. That’s where you come in.”

Paul releases Gary slowly to be able to speak again.

“You mean bringing my father down has to do with this house?”

A gleeful smirk ripples Paul’s face, as he sees his pawn beginning to move.

“Yes. You know that I’m busy washing my hands of coke by bringing the three stooges under my control and handing them the coke trade in this town. We’re at a point now that anyone I find pushing coke in this town not authorised by me is sorry they were ever born. The reason I can do this is because I’m forty kilometres from the city. Close enough to get in, but far enough to be left alone. I’ve been in this game a long time. I’ve built up close connections. And the stooges have to go through them. So if I scare the crap out of some pusher they’ve brought in that bought a few low-grade grams from some scumbag on the city beach front, there are going to be no recriminations from that side if I take care of things here. You see Gary, there are no dealers in this town. Too easy to get caught. So I’m just a regular gangster filling a vacuum out here in an upper-middle class society town. I’m protecting your right to snort, and snort good without letting in any of the scum that comes along with crack. I want to keep this town just where it is. It’s in my best interests because the status quo is my best clientèle. I don’t want to let any of the moral free fall and social decline happening in the city to come into this town. It will drive my livelihood away. I want to keep this town safely tucked up with their meaningless moral standards that their useless religion preaches and that they hold onto for dear life, while we sell their land out from under their feet to those who want what I sell. And I know I’m not alone in this desire. All you real estate people want this too, because we’ve got the same clientèle. Isn’t that right?”

Confusion washes over Gary’s face before he takes a look around.

“But what’s this got to do with the house and my father?”

“I need to come clean Gary. Now that my cash flow runs by the three stooges, it can’t be traced back to me. And I’m bored with the underworld. I want a piece of your pie too. But how am I going to get in now that there are two powerful real estate barons ruling this town? Unless of course I can get one of them implicated in a money laundering scandal. By the way, how much is this property worth?”

“You won’t be able to pull that off. Not by my father.”

“You let me worry about that Gary. The point is, I control what you want, don’t I? Well, I’ve got a deal to offer you. I secure you the best of what you want. Personal consumption, I might add. No cost. And you do some paperwork for me. I’ll provide the inside track.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 59

Mae hugs herself on the periphery of the dance floor, watching him bristle away, before starting to stalk towards the exit, ego haughty with pride drowning the pain. She spies Caul waiting for her yet again at the end of another failed initiation of love with Gary. She tries to stalk fast past him, but his hand clamps down on her shoulder like death. She reacts quickly, spinning around, venom rising through her spitting eyes.

“Quit waiting on me. I have nothing to give you.”

The cthronic undertow in her face is something Caul is unprepared for. He defends himself with an awkward smile and shrugs his shoulders to shed himself of his long-harboured resentment towards her from taking him over.

“As long as you haunt him, I’ll be there waiting for you. I’m dead. But it wasn’t me who did this.”

Her shoulders give way, releasing the pent-up tenseness of her soul.

“You have no right to wait for me like that.”

“I have every right. Your marriage to him nullified nothing. And the mourning you feel…”
Here Caul hestiates, not even sure if he wants to push this path anymore. “…It’s not for him. It’s for me.”

Her hand slaps his face before she turns to stalk away. His cheek stinging, Caul watches her leave, letting his depression at their yet again failed discourse clutch and sink into his soul. He retreats back into the hard, foursome beat and throws himself for the umpteenth time that night passionately into the dance, allowing the music to slowly empty his head of its acid scenes, and induce a desperately sought rhythmic calmness needed to enter the realm of his dead spirit. His movements are fluid and deliberate, but as the music drops its beat, his body loses its rhythmic certainty and he comes spinning to the surface again, where the beat is pounding itself into half-naked dancing white bodies. He winces in disgust as they unknowingly mimic forgotten rituals that stimulate nature’s reproductive energies to bring life to their souls. And he realises the best they have ever been able to do is to rattle their bones with a sense of life; that this is what these dancers satisfy themselves with from year to year.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 60

Mae emerges from her urban apartment and descends the stairs that lead to the street. She looks automatically to the mountain range as to a weather vane; the same way in which all the people of this town look to these mountains everyday of their lives for their source of inspiration and comfort, for their sense of beauty and security.

The sun is not far above these seven peaks that stretch out like a dragon’s back, each peak clarified in the slightly moist yellow and hazy air. The three peaks of the lone mountain, however, are still in the cold shadow of the vast mountain range whose various features often take the shapes of leopard, bear and lion to the eyes that watch it.

Mae’s footsteps have fallen quickly into a brisk, healthy looking rhythm, but her fidgeting fingers, winding themselves in and out of each other, belie an internal tension now finely balanced between the desire to gorge and eat healthily.

The sound of a car horn at her back shakes her from her thoughts. The car pulls up beside her and the window is rolled down.

“Do you want a lift?”

She finds herself staring half-blankly at Caul. Shaking her head, she says nothing.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, just leave me okay. What are you doing here anyway?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“I’m right where I want to be Caul. And listen, if I want to find you, I’ll give you a call okay. Right now, I just want you to leave me alone.”

Her eyes watch him self-efface her rejection.

“Well, I’m not even sure that I need you to find me anymore. I can go seeking my life elsewhere you know.” Caul nods his head curtly at her, then pulls away.

Sunlit gum trees shower her in early morning shade, as she pulls her hands in agitation back through her raven black hair, moist at the root with perspiration. Caul’s sudden proud threat of not needing her shudders her centre, releasing from her a pent-up river of anger into her blood, colouring it with the memory of Caul’s insult.

{“You marrying Gary is giving everything we’ve been raised for the finger. He represents everything you and me have grown up despising—greed, betrayal, self interest, you name it.”

“Speak for yourself Caul. I love him.”

“Crud. You’re in love with the idea of getting even with your father for his divorcing your mom.”

She stares coldly at him, wanting to wither him.

“If that is your assessment of me, then I want you out of my life.”

“Fine then.”

“Okay then.”

“Well, I’ll go then.”

“Fine. Go.”

“You want to know why I really think you’re doing this?”

“No.”

“Well I’m going to tell you anyway. Because you’re scared to death of what you were raised for. You want to abort the path, because you don’t want to face up to the darkness that you’re going to have to face. You think by marrying Gary, you’re going to escape that darkness. But all it’s going to do is put your spirit in a cage that it can’t escape. And there the darkness will eat you up.”}

/damn you for being so self righteous caul/

She is screaming at him inside her head.

/damn you/ /you bastard/ /it wasn’t the darkness i feared entering/ /it was what you’d be when i found you there/

She is now breathing deeply.

/and now i’m more scared than ever/ /what darkness is this in you that is crawling towards me/ /that raped me so/ /that is so beautiful but terrible/ /but you’ve left me no choice but to come find you/ /you bastard/

The anger cannot choke back the tears of remorse, regret, acquiescence.

/what have i been raised to/

After a few moments, however, she is breathing a little more regularly again.

/compose compose/ /go home and eat some food but not too much/ /just some cereal and some milk but no sugar/

Slowly, she begins pacing in a deliberate manner towards home. As she does so, she forces herself to come to terms with the reality of what has happened—her spirit in mourning, the new spirit growing in her, and Caul dead, waiting for her to come find him so that the ritual union will be fertile. Above her and the cold peaks of the lone mountain, beneath the clouds that cross from beyond to beyond, circles a great eagle that dives suddenly and is hidden in the cleft between two of the peaks from where flows a river that replenishes melancholy memory with joy and happiness forever, and futility of life with a life of never-ending vision.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 61

Caul, hunched forward on his elbows at a restaurant table, watches Mae approach from under his eyebrows.

“You’re late for your interview.”

Mae pulls back a chair from the window-side table, hooking her bag on its back knob.

“Okay, we can drop this interview façade now.”

Caul leans back with a smirk and his arms crossed. “So what brings Mrs Porter to Sweeney in the spring?”

“Whatever.” Mae sits down, immediately irritated by the supercilious nature of whatever arcane reference is being made.

A waitress draws near. Caul turns to her. “Just a coffee for me.”

“Same for me. And an ashtray.”

Mae waits for the girl to filter away before looking directly at Caul.

“Okay, I’ll get to the point. I called you for two reasons. Because I want to break out of this cage I’m stuck in, and to say I’m ready to come find you.”

She looks at Caul defiantly for half a second longer, then drags her bag onto her lap and rummages for her cigarettes.

“You sound so angry about your decision.”

“Of course I’m angry Caul. If you think I’m just going to let you off the hook for what you said to me back then, you’re sadly mistaken.”

“What are you trying to do? Make me apologise? Say that I was wrong when I was obviously right. It’s you that owes me an apology.”

“You know…” She throws her neck back and clenches her raised fists.

“There you go with your self righteousness. I can’t believe you. Three years down the road and you’re still doing the same thing. Just brazenly going ahead and initiating the whole damn ritual.”

He looks blankly at her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mae sits angrily back into her chair, arms crossed, glaring at him, shaking her head incomprehensibly.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about. Let me tell you what I mean Caul. I was in love with you, you nitwit. And I didn’t want to abort the path. I wanted to grow in it with you. But you were so locked up in this self-righteous attitude about who you were, you were too blind to see how scared I was. It was dark, dark, dark and I was scared and you didn’t see that. So when Gary came along, suddenly instead of feeling scared and alone in your world of constant darkness, Gary was my chance to let my spirit find light another way, for better or for worse.”

Caul doesn’t say anything, too stung to deny his hand in initiating any ritual. She looks fierily at him.

“So if I’m going to get myself involved with you again, you need to come clean about your self-righteous attitude with me and yourself. Because I’m still scared Caul. I look at the spirit I’ve got growing inside of me, and I’m scared. But I’ve got no choice now. So you had better come clean with me!”

The waitress draws up and sets their coffee on the table. Caul leans forward onto his forearms to lump a spoon of brown sugar into black coffee, then stirs, staring out the window with intense personal gravity. Mae lights up a cigarette, which she smokes staring the other way into the empty restaurant. He says nothing and she leaves her coffee untouched. Then with her cigarette drawing to its end, she stabs out the butt and exhales her lungs.

“I’m going to go now.”

Her hand is fiddling in her bag, once again pulled onto her lap. She withdraws a note of cash and lays it on the table next to her cup.

“Coffee on me.”

She stands up from the table.

“Give me a call when you’re ready to talk, okay.”

He nods at her, and she looks at him for a brief second, then turns swiftly to leave the coffee shop.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 62

“The moon shone bright on Mrs Porter, and her daughter, as they washed their feet in soda water.”

Opposite Mae, an eccentric looking midwife sits with long dark hair unabashedly greying, but unable to hide the marks of sad decadence from her face. A fire bottle of red wine nestles on the table between them, open and airing, but not yet drunk from.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 63

As Jude crosses the threshold of the sanctum of the church and gingerly dips his fingers in the shallow urn of holy water fixed to the back wall, he is relieved to see it not turn bloody with his guilt. He moves into an aisle, where he stoops to a bow, his hand moving instinctively from his forehead across his two breasts down to his solar plexus. Still stooped, he slides silently into a back right-hand side pew, lowering the kneeling stool onto which he falls heavily. He rests his elbows on the panel before him between which he sinks his head, the faint smell of beer clutching his breath.

/in the name of the Father/ /and of the Son/ /and of the Holy Ghost/ /what have i done/

Jude heaves a breath forcing words to his mind.

/ive killed a man/ /to become another mans priest/ /and avatar of an idol Holy Father/ /and surely this man will kill me when the rite is done/

A slight panic grabs at his throat now.

/i confessed my sin as if it had been done Holy Father/ /to the priest this afternoon/ /he absolved me from this sin and made me clean to take the eucharist/ /but i have no belief that a priest can do what i asked him to do/ /and no faith that what i confessed can really be forgiven/

/holy mother of God/ /have mercy on me/ /help me to understand the mystery of your son before i die/ /holy virgin mother/ /pray for me/ /help me to endure the doubt i feel about our most holy church/

Jude lifts himself up onto the pew bench to see the crucified Christ dead on a cross on the front wall and sees the man he killed, the nails pinning Christ piercing him with blood guilt. He quickly averts his eyes to watch the white robed priests enter in procession from the rear, holy water being sprinkled in penitential blessing before them as they approach the chancel.

He finds himself standing, looking up at the cupola and becoming filled by the choir’s Kyrie, and it brings to him memories of upbringing: of the sound of children singing, of catechism, of tradition, of ritual, of study, of faith emptying, of agony, of rejecting and of torment.

“Lord have mercy”

/Lord have mercy/

“Christ, have mercy”

/Christ have mercy/

“Lord, have mercy”

/Lord have mercy/

The words of the Gloria being uttered from the congregation roll quietly from his mouth, but in his mind the words become empty vessels on an ocean and hardened clots in his heart. From the front a voice rings out.

“Look upon us, give us true freedom and bring us to the inheritance you promised, Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”

The resonance of voices silently expressing the Amen brings the architecture to a preparatory silence of human bodies. In that silence, awareness of frustration begins to sweep over Jude as the mystical awareness of God’s presence in space he knows to be there, gives way to the unfathomable, incommunicable mystery of His presence in the Word.

“Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress.”

He knows the passage by heart, the midnight solemnity being his favoured since a child for its cloistered darkness, secrecy and engendering of mystery.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”

Jude suddenly lets himself sink into the tradition, making response with a conviction determined to force open the communication to the deeper reality of Christ locked behind these symbols of words the Church uses.

“Proclaim His salvation day after day; declare His glory among the nations, His marvellous deeds among all peoples.”

But inside Jude, nothing changes. His words merely echo along with the drone of others as words are read again from the Lectionary.

“Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; Let the sea resound, and all that is in it; Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy.”

His words have now been reduced to silent mouthings in the congregation’s drone.

“They will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth.”

But Jude’s dumb mouthing brings raw pain to his soul, which, having no other recourse to express its torture, seeks now to wrench the heart and twist the gut in a bid to escape the darkness that suffocates the light that Caul once saw flickering within him in torment.

“For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.”

The clawing, tearing pain continues.

“It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope.”

In response, all the darkness jealously enshrouding the light of Jude’s soul reminds him it is because of the Church that no pure and unfettered communication can now exist between him and the One who created him, and that all struggle against the darkness is futile.

“The glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. This is the gospel of the Lord.”

(more…)

Caul’s thoughts of Jude slowly bring him to Mae, and by the time Caul leaves the ever unlocked house, the mist has been burnt away, leaving clear blue harshness under which a swarm of grumblers and faultfinders are making ready for the advent they will shortly celebrate.

He walks gingerly in through the salon door where Mae sits, not cutting hair, and living visibly in suspended animation of the renewed madness inside her. At the sight of Caul, a ravenous thirst and a nervous fear tear at her emotions. She rises abruptly.

“Come, let’s go get some coffee. Nothing’s happening this morning. It’s just us twit twit twitting with gossip. It’s all coming this afternoon for my father’s banquet tonight.”

She calls out. “Madeline, if anyone desperately wants to me cut their hair, I’m at the bistro next door.”

They wind themselves around into a coffee aromatised bistro next door, where they sit on high stools alongside an elevated table and windows that open to the day outside. They sit in silence, waiting for their coffee, neither really quite sure where to begin with the other. Soon her cigarette smoke is swooning with the aroma of brewing coffee, a warm wafting draft of air slowly sucking it away. Caul feels the time slipping with it, his heart urgent with information.

“I need to tell you something weird.”

Mae cocks her head at him in response.

“I saw Jude this morning and had this hallucination of him as a straw man.”

Her jaw drops astounded. “That’s impossible.”

She is aware that a bowl of wrath is filling her stomach.

“You are the consort.”

“No.” He shakes his head firmly.

“My mother desired that we be consorts. But I realise now, anyone can be a consort. The power to confer the rite lies with the priest.”

“But you’re the priest right. After your father died…”

Caul’s sadly shaking head stops her short. She takes a long drag on her cigarette, swelling her lungs with smoky oxygen, trying to dull a festering sore plaguing her heart. The bowl of wrath in her stomach spills over.

“Well then, who is?”

She bores a belligerent look back at him.

“I was knocked unconscious after we came off the road. Didn’t come to until the hospital. Paul always told me that my mother and stepfather were killed instantly. But the other day he told me somebody killed them. I didn’t believe him at first, so I went to the police and asked them to dig up the records. The inquest says that my father was found with a knife in his chest, my mother with her throat cut. The police concluded that those who threw the stones had killed them, leaving me for dead. Paul believes it was your father; that he did it to steal the priesthood, and keep us from ever consorting.”

Mae looks at Caul, more annoyed than anything else, as if he is spinning her a yarn.

“What? So now my father is going to confer the rite on Jude? That’s ludicrous. Even if my father did hold the priesthood, he would never the confer the right on anybody.”

“Unless somebody was to kill him? Tonight?”

Mae shrugs her shoulders in incredulous disbelief, and leans back on her stool, casting her hardening eyes away to the outside. But remembrance of the morning’s encounter with Jude shivers her.

“Jude was parked outside my place when I left for my walk this morning. Said he wanted talk about what happened between us. He seemed to be hoping that me and him, you know, meant something other than it did. I had to tell him it didn’t.”

She sighs.

“It wasn’t even my intention to have sex with him. I was revelling in being free from Gary, and that night I wanted to revenge Gary, to spite him, flaunt my sex in front on him. But Dionysus frenzied me that night. It was as if he wanted to devour Jude’s spirit.”

She draws on her cigarette again, quivering slightly.

“Why he wanted to devour his spirit has been haunting me like a festering sore ever since.”

She looks at him, deep fear no longer hidden from her eyes.

“He was emptying Jude of God wasn’t he. Preparing him to be his avatar. Only I don’t believe he did devour Jude’s spirit, Caul.”

Caul looks straight at her.

“No, I agree with you. I don’t believe he did.”

The bowl inside her is spilling its contents once again, pumping through her blood, revolting her and thirsting her at once, turning the beautiful bright blue ocean of the world before her eyes into blood.

“You know what I need?”

She turns her head sharply, her black pony tail flicking smartly, giving her poise.

“A spring of clean water like on the mountain the other day. I’m in desperate need of fresh vitality. But every time I think I’ve got it, the freshness becomes bitter.”

“I know. I have the same experience. Every new stream I encounter without fail ends up at the bar getting mad on the wine of its own futility. It seems to me that all the world’s streams are crowding at the same bar, you know, drinking the same wine.”

She throws her hands out in exasperation as the bowl within her stomach overflows its rim for the third time.

“So how to go about escaping this plague that Jude’s carrying Caul? That not even Dionysus can kill. You called it the wound didn’t you?”

The coffee arrives, its thick bitter presence swirling up before them. Deep brown sugar crawls on the spoon as Caul lifts it to his coffee and swirls it into the blackness.

“Well that’s just the thing I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t think what you call Jude’s wound is actually part of the wound. I think what’s in Jude is God and our only hope of healing.”

The bowl in Mae’s stomach revolts suddenly for a forth time, searing her with an anger that boils her blood.

“God’s the cause of all this misery Caul. What do you want to go there for? Better to rule in hell, right, than to have to be servile before a God who could easily take away all this that plagues us, but doesn’t.”

She lights up a fresh smoke to steady her rage. He just looks down as he drinks some coffee. A dusky blues voice wails fluidly above all the other sounds around them. Finally, he looks at her.

“I guess you’re not going to follow me on this.”

In reply, Mae stubs out her half-done cigarette, leaving her coffee almost untouched.

“I should go back to work. No point in belabouring a moot point.”

She leaves some cash on the table and then tilts her head inwardly at him.

“I guess this is goodbye then?”

As Caul sighs, he feels the wrenching, burning sensation of a love passing out of existence, exploding with the air in his lungs.

“Yeah. So it is.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 65

Audrey sees Mae at the oak tree in the courtyard, but her mind is swallowed by a couldn’t-care-less cocaine binge with Janice the previous evening, Janice then leaving her, only to come home in the early hours with Gary and the jug jug noises of their copulation dirtying her ears. Nothing rudely forced. No tereu.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 66

There is a moment of uneasy stillness in which Caul stares out at through a low lying fog at the unreal city, flickering brighter now in the darker dusk that gathers over the poor masses his father the Moor now controls. Paul laughs suddenly with deep enjoyment, wanting to bury his fear quickly before Caul.

“But it soon won’t matter, will it Caul. Not after Christmas. Power will have shifted clearly into our hands.”

Paul draws on a crisply burning cigarette.

“Caul, come and lunch with me tomorrow at the Cannon Hotel and I will begin to show you how we will overthrow this whore of a system those real estate moguls have been bringing from their cities into this town. I’ll show you how we will use your father’s masses to set ourselves up in this town. The people here will worship us, because we will have the power to bring the supernatural daily in view of the people. You know I’m right. The real estate kings are fighting for their lives, and retreating into golfing estates. But more and more are joining our vision Caul. My plan is coming to fruition.”

Paul smiles satisfied.

“And then I hope you will join me for tomorrow evening’s banquet at the Metropole for the beginning of their end.”

His hand waves as a wand over the town below and to the city beyond.

“The last phase of their whore mixing with this town and creating a beast.”

Caul doesn’t answer this one who shares his blood, but draws further on his cigarette. Paul looks at Caul from beneath his eyebrows in a way that insists he be understood.

“So don’t let their Church get his fingers into you now. They’re the reason we’re stuck in this wasteland. It’s the Church that hated us. You want resurrection Caul? Come with me. And we’ll give these people a new way.”

He tosses away his cigarette. It glows on the dry grass then peters out. When Caul looks up from it, he finds himself alone.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 67

Audrey straightens her back from typing out the dictated voice of the law, and lifts her eyes to the blinded window in front of her desk. Strips of a world turning violet float into the office.

/all this law so carefully pretending to protect me and keep me safe/ /deliver me justice/ /but it cant give me justice from the culture that coughed up audrey hepburn/ /and then made my mother so obsessed with her/ /to try make me her/ /now with every guy i meet i know im not that image/ /and i feel guilty about it damn it/ /ive broken no law/ /but im guilty before even meeting a man just for not being born audrey hepburn/ /and you reinforced it mother/ /i thought the people of this town were supposed to be different/ /but youre no different from the culture of the world/ /just the way you always wanted to be one with the culture/ /i have spent my whole life trying to reconcile the two/ /but now that i have/ /im thrown to the wolves/ /he goes and screws janice/ /like audrey hepburn was just a façade to get me here/ /with no recourse to justice/ /and trapped as both criminal and victim in my own world/

Audrey swivels to face a woman exquisite in her features, elegantly dressed, silk scarf around her neck, and the radiance of peace in her face. Despite her being Janice’s sister, Audrey can feel no resentment against her, which she finds strange.

“Why does this day feel so long Evelin? It feels like it has been going on forever.”

Evelin pushes her chair out from under her desk and throws her arms out in a lazy afternoon stretch.

“Why don’t you go home. It’s after five anyway, and I saw you sitting there staring into space.”

“It’s called thinking. When I’m not a dictaphone, I do it from time to time.”

She smiles broadly at Evelin, already letting her hands begin the tidying of her desk.

“Anyhow, I’m going to take you up on that offer, especially as our gracious lawyers are enjoying their invitational round of golf.”

She gets up to go, feeling relief suddenly flood through her at the thought of a cup of tea at home.

“Bye Evelin, see you tomorrow.”

She walks by Evelin on her way to the door.

“Audrey, what you doing for Christmas?”

Turning at the door, Audrey shrugs her shoulders. “Nothing special.”

“You’re welcome to join us for Christmas Eve dinner. It’s just friends. You could get to meet some new people to hang out with.”

Audrey looks at Evelin unsure what to make of the invitation’s hopefulness.

“Sure. Thanks. That sounds nice.”

She stops a moment before as if to give the moment greater presence. Then she looks at Evelin and grins effortlessly.

“Oh to put my feet up and have a cup of tea.”

She leaves the office. As she walks past the salon downstairs she looks in the window, but can see only the reflection of herself, a human engine, trapped in her big-boned frame, throbbing, waiting for a phantom sense of freedom and hating the whimsical lightness of the one she knows is at work inside.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 68

As the industria comes to an end, the roadside fades into isles of graveyards, caravan parks and gas stations, until Jude arcs his car onto a dark unlit road winding up out along the cliffs of the coast. Below the ocean seethes black and lonely in its dense becalmed mass. The world gives way into an illuminated electric nerve system that lights the night’s darkness all across the bay. It is pulmonating as if in attempt to eradicate the darkness. Above the town the moist air sets the basin beautifully in the eerie glow of a thickening mist arising from the black sea. He pulls off the road, before reaching the summit, to where a few pines grow, precarious with their own lives. He squints through the windshield at their scraggly existence.

/shall i carry on living then/ /a wandering star reserved for darkness/ /can i live a life doomed to wait for God to come/ /knowing destruction will come/ /and keep trying to stay out of the grasp of babylon and her church/

He balances the wine bottle on the seat next to him, leans over to the cubby hole and takes out a plastic bag.

/help those of us who know we are helpless and those that dont even know they are blind/

The cobwebbed echo of the old pray running suddenly through his mind rises a bitter ire in him.

/but they soon wont be blind/ /they soon wont be/ /and the shock of being made to see/ /plagues of the mind and body/ /and they will curse God because of them/ /and they will destroy what is left of the church/ /blaming it for keeping them blind/

His hands shakily try to cut crystals as his voice breaks out loud and cynical, a sneer on his face with each spoken line.

“Oh but Christmas time. The advent of our Lord. The promise of his second coming. And mass will be full of them. Blind. Pretending. All before a God who will not hear them. Who has spat us out of his mouth.”

In the dark night-illuminated vessel that holds him here atop this black natural darkness overlooking the electrified existence of man, he lifts his makeshift plate to his nose. One, two, three. A moment to snort them in.

/their blindness grows/ /a blindness caused by their own eye salve/ /so that they will see before them only beauty and dignity/ /while truth clambers in around them in famine and war/ /up to that day of great violence/ /when babylon will be thrown as a millstone into the sea/

Four, five, six. He throws his head back on his seat, sniffs hard and closes his eyes. Slowly the white crystals take their possession of him.

/i feel as if i am trapped between two lives/ /in a body of an old blind man with sagging female breasts/ /as one who has foresuffered all/ /i have sat below their city walls/ /ive walked among the dead/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 69

Gary sails his car to a halt outside Audrey’s flat, happy with the day’s brisk trade. At her door, he knocks, but no answer. His hand seeks entry and finds the door unbarred, as if he is expected. He finds Audrey folding away the ironing board, laying it in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall, folded stockings, slips, and camisoles piled up in the plastic basket. She looks up, bored and tired, while he stares boldly at her, as if awaiting her accusation, self-assured of his position, despite the acne erupting on his skin. All she does is move first to the stove to stir a pot simmering upon it and then, with the pot, walks back to the table where she ladles the food onto two prepared plates, one of which she sets before him.

Disappointed, he wants to egg her on. He had expected a scene with her and foretold its outcome in his head.

“How did you know I was coming?”

“A man may go elsewhere to fill his sexual appetite, but he always comes home like a dog to eat.”

Her barb digs out of him the long resentment he has held towards her ever since Paul made him go with her to get what he wanted. They drop into a nothing-more-to-say silence. Over the rest of dinner he allows this resentment to take him over. Now that he no longer needs to pretend he is interested in her, he wants to punish her for the resentment she has caused, and as the resentment turns to anger he feels his sex beginning to excite him, and he knows he wants to enact out his resentment on her bed.
Feeling that the propitiatory silence over dinner has been enough, he rises from his chair and moves round the back of her putting his arms softly on her shoulders. His hands move to caressing her bare arms, but she continues to be limp and silent.

“Let’s go to the sitting room.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Come on, it will be much more comfortable.”

He has begun caressing her more nakedly. She is now pushing his hands away.

“Gary, please no. Just get away from me.”

He is looking down upon her, annoyed. Then flushed and decided, he assaults, surprised to find that he encounters no defence. His vanity takes this as her capitulation to him, and he welcomes her indifference to his groping hands. She even lets him steer her to her divan bed, where she lies listlessly until he is spent. Then rising, he gives her a patronising kiss on the cheek, leaving the dusk darkened house with a stumble on the unlit stairs.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 70

When Audrey is done combing her hair, she looks a moment again in the hand-wiped mirror, thinking of Gary and all that she has now left behind.

/well thats done/ /im glad its all over/

She exits the bathroom, mustering herself to walk from her own newly executed darkness into an attempt of sustained light beyond.

“How are you feeling?”

Evelin stands sympathetically before her.

“Much better thanks.”

She moves close to Audrey and with naturalness embraces her.

“Now don’t worry about staying here okay. I told my husband you needed a place to stay for a while. Don’t worry, all I told him was that things turned sour with your boyfriend and you needed out.”

A lightened smile relaxes Audrey.

“He’ll be around later tonight, but I asked him not to come home till later. So don’t worry, you can really just relax.”

“Thank you.” Audrey’s demure voice lays out beautifully the fullness of her gratitude.

“You are more than welcome. I’m just glad we could get all your important stuff out of that flat without anyone there. At least you know for now you can’t be tracked. But come sit down. Let’s eat.”

Evelin sets a plate in front of Audrey and sits opposite her at the small round table.

“Let’s say grace.”

Audrey bows her head and listens to the words of thanks for the food and is riveted at the sense of humility coming from Evelin. Once the blessing is done, Evelin looks up.
“Help yourself to some wine. Do you want some ice with it?”

“Please.”

She pours herself the wine as Evelin goes to the icebox.

“Can I pour you some wine?”

“Just half a glass. I already had some while cooking dinner. Please start. Cold lasagne just doesn’t do me justice.”

Audrey winces as Evelin sits.

“Justice.”

“Let’s worry about that later.”

“Sorry. It tastes really good. Do you cook like this every night?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Sometimes Geoff’s lucky if he gets toast with his Welsh Rarebit.”

They eat in silence for a while.

“How long have you and Geoff been married?”

“About three years.”

“You going to have kids?”

“I don’t know. I mean I know it sounds strange. We’ve been trying. But nothing yet. So we’re just trusting God will bless us when the time comes.”

Mouthfuls fill the silence.

“What’s he like?”

“Geoff? He’s a good man, with enough sensitivity in that masculine ego to know how to make you feel like woman, which kind of gets you hooked doesn’t it.”

She smiles impishly at Evelin.

“You spend so much of your single life waiting to be made to feel more than an object, and when you find a guy that can do that it’s a bit of heaven I guess.”

“You sound as if you’re very happy.”

Evelin drinks her wine.

“I wouldn’t change Geoff for the world. And if this counts for anything, over the years with him I feel more and more like a woman and less like an object than I ever did before.”

There is no hesitation to her voice.

“It’s amazing what kind of healing God can work within a marriage. Can I get you some more lasagne?”

“No thanks, I’m sorry but I’m not that hungry.”

“You don’t mind if I stuff my face then?”

Audrey returns the smile with a little laugh.

“No, of course not.”

“Good, because I love lasagne. And don’t you dare ask me how I can eat so much and stay so thin.” She laughs lightly.

Audrey watches her clean the plate thinking about Evelin’s comment on God and healing.

“May I ask you why you invited me for Christmas Eve dinner today?”

Evelin looks up from a mouthful to see Audrey leaning back with wine glass clasped in both her hands. She squints to the ceiling, her fork hanging mid air.

“Sometimes God puts this desire of His in my heart and asks me to do it.”

Her lips purse a secretive kind of smile and her eyes give a jig of a dance.

“That’s why.”

Audrey’s face is wincing again. Evelin smiles.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, it’s not that. Just that suddenly everything looks like God set all this up. You saying God asked you to invite me and all what happened to me today. Like he wanted me to be raped so I could land up here.”

Evelin drops her head and Audrey feels the sadness she has just caused, but knows she can’t change what she feels. But Evelin is looking at her again.

“You angry with God?”

Audrey quietly lays down her wine and thinks through the question.

“No, I guess I’m not angry with God. I’ve no right to be. This mess I’m in is because of decisions I’ve made. I’m more angry with my mother.”

Her voice trails off.

“Is that why you’re not going home for Christmas?”

Audrey heaves deeply and sniffs hard, but looks squarely at Evelin.

“Let me tell you about my obsession with Audrey Hepburn.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 71

The phone hangs uselessly in Mae’s hand, the dead tone pervading the silence. She puts it back on the receiver and gulps the smoky red wine, looking at nothing, her desire for wildness suddenly rising thickly through her, and a black bowl of darkness being poured out upon her. She stoops in her folly to its incessant pressure, and rises to draw the curtains, closing out the late opaque western sky. In the kitchen she pours herself more of the earth’s vine, closes the still wide-open gate and door, and then draws back into her bedroom, putting on music that slowly, stealthily begins to breathe its brooding atmosphere. Smoothing back her hair, she paces the floor, her blood clamouring for that selfsame gluttonous freedom and ekstasis found in savage brutality she felt that night with Jude.

She drops her covering of clothing and steps out of her inner garments in anticipation as the music builds its pounding ambiance. Her body reacts with deep automatism, as she brings her body unclad in dancing to it, unearthing rhythms long buried inside her unconscious.

At first, as the wildness surges through her, she lets it surge over her, disappearing her own self into a deeper place where Dionysus who calls to her lies waiting to frenzy her wildness. In the dark ambiance her hands run again through her hair, loosening it, but then grab her head, shaking it first softly, then with sudden terrible violence as she tries to stop the internal visions of how she would tear flesh from the body of Caul, when their consort was done. The desire overpowers her and she goes into it. She would kill him. Kill him. Rip him limb from limb just to satisfy. Just to satisfy.

Yet her moment of ekstasis is brief, and in her fall back to the mundane she flings herself on her bed, her chest rising heavily, heat condensing on her skin as her mind returns to its natural continuum. Abhorred by her own act and tormented by the desire that she thirsts, Mae cries out her remorse by tossing her body first left then right, hands over her face. She stifles an anguished scream hurtling from her soul covered in pains and sores, but she does not repent of her deep-rooted gluttony for human flesh. Rather she bites her own finger, seeking salvation from her own blood.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 72

Jude turns from putting bottles of beer before two weathered men at the bar to a morose looking Caul, sitting at the opposite corner of the bar. He leans his elbows on the bar, coming close as if in confidence.

“You asked me cousin, why I sold this property to Paul? Look at me. I’m like a priest here. This bar is my church. My Magnus Martyr. The closest I’ll come to Ionian white and gold. I’ve got my vocation back. To all who come here, I offer placebos for their hurts, absolution for all their guilt feelings. I offer them the flesh and blood of the broken world to see it come alive in them again. And they think I’m a miracle worker.”

The colour of Caul’s morose face pales as a shiver runs through him. He curses himself inwardly again for his self-righteousness that has blinded him to realising that Paul has worked Jude to be the priest at his rite with Mae.

/jude cannot be the priest / /when my stepfather died/ /that right passed to me/ /im both priest and avatar/ /he has to kill me first to be priest/ /and who will then take my place as consort to mae/ /paul/

Caul hides his double horror by turning away his face. He notices the silence of the bar.

“Play us a song Mr. barman. How about some blues. It fills up the air so well.”

Jude pushes himself up off the bar and moves to the tape deck. After a moment, blues starts to whine its pleasant melodrama through the bar, where the chatter of expectation mixes the evening’s first alcohol with blood, and the clatter of a pool game goes on in the room alongside.

The music creeps over Caul as he recalls the waters of the ocean along the Strand, and then his drive up Queen Victoria Street to bringing him inexplicably once again to this bar. Caul looks to his right at a jovial Gary sitting one seat removed from him, joking with the two old fishermen stumped by life, on the right corner of the bar. Swivelling on his stool he looks down at the two tables alongside the maroon walls, where jugs of beer stand and the lewd conversations of young sailors and merchants in pursuit of the world, are being carried out. Jude meanwhile, takes a position of leaning up against the back of the bar, arms crossed, looking at the panelled ceiling into which surrounding cigarette smokes dissipates.

At the scuffle sound of the door, all of them look up to see Janice walking into the bar with Audrey in tow. But none of the men’s eyes leave Janice. Jude, relieved for the game, grins like the Cheshire cat.

“Gentlemen, please rise. The Lady of the bar.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 73

A heavy bank of cloud has rolled off the sea and covers the half moon in a shimmering gauze. The town is now dark of its Christmas lights flashing their colour. Jude’s car swings loosely into the desolate road that sweats its oil and tar on the leeward side of an industrial zone, where buildings like river barges extend their reach from where the river in the west widens its mouth to the sea to down past the dance club in the east.

Jude knows this drift well, and where it will take him. He just lets his hands drive him down the roads, playing a game of solitaire with the street lamps and traffic lights. Lonely music echoes from around his stereo. In his hand is a bottle of wine that feeds his blood with its bitter taste. He drinks five short swigs and places the bottle back between his legs. At a desolate red light, he settles himself to lighting a cigarette, the smoke drifting on still air out of the window.

/i dont have the will to keep this life going anymore/ /this trying to keep my soul alive/ /supposing that my soul will still be alive after what ive got to do/

He changes the music and the air fills with a brooding weialala leia, wallala leialala.

/what other way was there for me/ /a church caught up in the lust of power for this town/ /this was the only choice i had/ /the only way i had to get away from their grip/ /where their lust would have become mine/ /and now im to be a murderous traitor/

The passing glow of orange street lights and the hypnotising droning beat has a mesmerising effect on Jude. He turns up the volume so that it reverberates the whole car, blending his being with the music’s fluid bleeding grief, identifying intimately with the lyric, wandering stars for whom it is preserved the blackness of darkness forever.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 74

Mae stands on an old footbridge over the river embraced in her own arms, watching a man, attended by a woman, beating oars in a row boat painted red and gold drifting under the bridge. She meanders to the other side of the bridge where she sees the oars guide the boat through the brisk current, sending ripples outwards to both banks. She sees in the couple herself and Jude, and reflects with disgust on her unbridled lust and how consorting with him has caused the nymphs to depart from her spiritual waters, a portent of plague.

/the nymphs want purity/ /before they can heal/ /but you frenzied me/ /now i am worse off than i was before/ /contaminated with some spirit in jude/ /and the nymphs have left me/ /only purifying my waters of that influence will bring them back/ /is this what you wanted/ /where is the healing from this coming plague going to come from/

The sound of pealing of bells coming from a white tower in the distance ahead of her puts a scowl on Mae’s face, their wailing not only reminding her of the call to work, but that it is the church that is suffocating her oak.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 75

Janice watches Mae leave with Paul, knowing that all the source of all her power has left her, and that he has abandoned her to whatever fate he now had planned for her. She looks at Gary, contemptuous, realising that he can offer nothing that will satisfy her lust. She laughs bitterly to herself, remembering when she first laid down and raised her knees to Paul: In a row boat on the river, at night, to the sound of a passing train, and the cicadas buzzing in the dusty summer trees, after Highbury, when they were passing through the areas of Richmond and Kew.

/thats where he undid my faith/ /it was so daring/ /that moments surrender/ /all my prudence gone/ /nothing left to retract/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 76

A jangling buzz breaks into Mae’s fitful sleep on the settee. Though it startles her, she moves quickly to the security phone, with the avidity of someone expecting another to come.

“Hey. It’s Caul.”

His voice carries with it a hesitation that is unsure of its point of entry. “Came to see how you’re holding up.”

Hearing it chills her and a violent anger rises through her. She says nothing, just pushes the gate button and returns to the settee. She grabs up a cushion in her arms before throwing herself down into the seat, blowing a stray strand of her fringe away with her breath. A hand knocks.

“…it’s open…”

Caul peers into the house as through the eye of a needle, then sees her crowded into the settee. He breathes deep to still his fear, and passes over the door’s threshold, determined not to turn back, determined not to be vanquished by her beauty, but to set the badness of his love right. He hears the door close. She glares the coldness of a desert night at him and he feels his loneliness.

“You come here to gloat? Say I told you so?”

“Like I said, I came to see…”

“Let’s not get into that now Caul. I don’t even know where he is.”

“He’s at my house.”

The silence hangs awkwardly. She sniffs sharply, breathing quickly, turning her face away as Caul perches himself on the armchair opposite her.

“Tell me Caul. Should I resent his leaving?”

He says nothing. She reaches out to grab a tissue from a coffee table littered with used tissues that look like a bunch of decapitated flowers.

“He said we should make a new start with my father. That this golfing village could heal the rift. But I told him that would be like me digging my heart out and making me jump up and down on it. He said he wasn’t going to go, but then he went anyway. Now here I am in Moorgate villa with my heart under my feet.”

“I’m sorry Mae.”

She goes through the motions of dabbing eyes and blowing her nose.

“There you go. Still apologising. I see nothing has changed with you in three years. Why are you really here Caul? Coming to see if you can get your consort back?”

He stiffens his back.

“If you want to put it that way. I came to see if you would be willing to try come find me?”

This time it is her turn to freeze warily.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m dead Mae. Somebody’s killed me.”

“What on earth?”

The hint of curiosity in her voice makes him feel safe enough to sit back in the chair.

“Actually, it was about two months ago. I just didn’t realise that was it until last night. I mean, how was I to know what it would feel like.”

She sits looking at him, the blank-blue sky of her face revealing to him that his words have failed to initiate her sympathy. He feels himself yielding to a welling, wounded pride within, and then the weight of its heaviness pressing down upon him. He swallows the welling, determined to try again.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 77

Paul takes a hypnotised Mae through the courtyard of Margate Sands to the tree which from her youth she has been wedded to as guardian spirit. Now she comes upon it and runs her hands down its oak trunk in a gesture of love, whispering, asking for its mistletoe that grows in the crowned crest above.

Wordless, she begins quietly circling the tree, as Paul, on another’s shoulders scythes the mistletoe from it. He is speaking, but it is distant. Rather she feels her flesh becoming now entwined and one with the spirit nine months ago deposited in her. As the uniting deepens, an abyss of night begins opening up in her mind, allowing her into its cyclonic waste where she knows she must now go to find and bring back the Dionysian spirit into this world. Paul, the needed bough in hand, follows, waiting to embody the returning spirit.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 78

Audrey passes Mae without another glance in her direction, can connect nothing with nothing, and climbs the stairs that take her to her still empty office. She settles herself behind her desk and tries to rearrange the contents of the desk the way she wants things, but each touch reminds her of the doctored deed of sale she ran through her desk yesterday. Rather she looks away, rubbing her hands together in feeble attempt to cleanse the dirt she feels on them. Finally, she lays her fingers upon the keyboard, but a broken fingernail reminds her again of the dirt she feels. Her face is calm but her fingers all the way up her arms are cringed with tenseness.

/get a grip/ /you’re a composed secretary for a prominent lawyer/ /you are his image before his clients meet him/ /breath deeply/

Slowly relaxation comes back to her fingers and numbness to her mind as the work begins again, but then in retaliatory anger her revenge and spite against Mae burns through the false meekness she shows the world.

/screw that audrey hepburn witch/ /looking like the way i want to look/ /looking the way you believed was the only way worth looking mother/ /pygmalion/ /you always taught me to be humble like my people/ /and to expect nothing/ /be happy to let the world kick sand in my face/ /but you really wanted me to be like her/ /you all wanted me to be like her/ /so that all of you could flaunt what youve always believed was your superiority/ /well look at me now mother/ /i took your road/ /hiding behind the false meekness you gave me/ /i am with the man that rejected her/ /i thought i had achieved what you all wanted/ /recognition from this world/ /but i havent/ /he merely uses me/ /and here i am so desperate for wanting to be had by him that ive perjured myself/ /only for him to go off and screw janice in my face/ /and there she works below me/ /laughing at me/ /probably going la la la la/ /like she has always laughed at me/ /in whatever form she has taken/ /this has got to stop/

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 79

Slouched and smoking on Mae’s bed, Jude watches an agitated Mae tell him be gone by the time she comes back. She leaves. Drawing the smoke in, diffusing himself with the post-coitus air and exhaling it, Jude feels the rapacity of their sex churn inside him. He draws in and lets out, tapping the ash into the tray on the beside table next to him. His other hand splays itself on the hollow of his stomach. The red welts of bite marks pox his chest.

/was it yesterday that i was still a virgin/ /a man dead to the world/ /for the sake of the kingdom of heaven/ /in ardent expectation of christs love and return/ /what does that mean now/ /just a stupid romantic notion ive been holding onto/ /finally its out of the way/ /no little light left in me to shine caul/ /no more church dragging its claws of guilt into me/ /to carthage i have come/ /im alive to the world at last/ /like ive come up from the grave/

His self-affirmation brings him the catalyst needed to move himself. He tumbles his spent body off the bed. With the cigarette hanging in his mouth, he pulls on his crumpled pants from the bottom end of the bed, and then his shirt from the floor, which he buttons bottom to top. Passing through the kitchen, he opens the door out, but pauses on its lintel to stare down the nine white steps in shadow leading to the gravel and his beat-up Citroen.

/i only leave what was already dead/ /there is no sign that my vow meant anything anyway/

But as he locks the door behind him, the infusion of the quiet morning air with the meaninglessness of what he has so long held onto as a final hope for meaning sends his remaining spirit into a downward spiral.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 80

Paul looks up and around at all of them, smiling and pleased.

“Ah. Finally we’re all here. I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this rite to take place. You are here tonight to witness the union of Mae in marriage to Dionysus in the underworld so that his spirit may be impregnated into the child of his rite; a child that I believe will bring us to freedom and victory from a dying Church who has laid waste our City and this land; a child who will change the set times and seasons.

“I believe the time has come for the child to be conceived, and I have voyaged far to come to this place. This bough that lies on the table is taken from the sacred tree that was bound to Mae’s spirit at her birth when she was prophesied to bear the child of Dionysus. It was ordained that the one who was to impregnate her would have to present her with a bough of mistletoe that would grow upon the tree, so that they could journey together into the underworld to find Dionysus. There Dionysus would take possession of him for the rite of sexual union to begin.”

Paul’s eyes then rest on Janice and Gary.

“But first, we send out from among us these two miserable and morally destitute wretches. We need to be purified before our paeans and choruses can begin. These two represent all that is evil among us—their lust for power and avarice for riches. Let us send them out from us that they may be beaten and stoned by those outside. Let them tear this whore’s clothes from her. Let them eat her flesh and burn her with fire. And let this merchant weep and mourn over her smouldering body as he realises all his wealth is gone.”

Paul signals to his three heirs, and they move, two to take Gary, one to take Janice. Then one-by-one, the remaining seven gather around them, slapping and scratching Janice, and pummelling their fists like great hailstones into Gary, their screams and groans muffled under their gags. Then they are released from the veranda door, pushed blindfolded and gagged over its lintel into the gathering orgy of people waiting in the garden below.

Through her glazed eyes, Mae looks upon the offering of mistletoe and takes it up. It lays in her hands for a few moments, before she lapses into a yet deeper trance, her voice beginning to babble an endless stream of sounds like that of an unintelligible language. Around them, the ten gather and begin enclosing the circle in dithyrambic chants of praise to Dionysus. For hours the cycle of chants and hymns continue, each one in the circle, on each finished cycle, taking over to lead the next chorus. Their bodies move to the rhythms, their voices spin calling the katabasis ever closer. Within the circle, Jude, Mae and the unquestioned presence of Paul enter the enchanted trance, drifting deeper and deeper into its darkness.

The air is cut with a shriek and from Mae’s depths echoes a mourning, fearful, frightened wail. Her wailing, tearing at her hair, and beating upon her breast continue as she intones the god’s name over and over in mystery and horror. Then suddenly she is silent.

“Come, follow me. First light is here. Hades doors are open.”

In the thorough darkness that suddenly plunges around the three of them, there is an inescapable wall of fire, intense as a furnace, blasting its roar before them. Mae stands impassively before it.

“Have no fear, the fire cannot kill. But no one further goes without passing through this tormenting flame.”

Mae turns to them, her eyes and voice, clearly those of another.

“Put your doubt away. Let us plunge forward. A thousand years within these flames would not singe a hair from your head. It is their torment you should dread.”

Jude watches as she walks in, unscathed by the flame. Paul follows. Then in the shape of a tongue, Jude is enclosed in the fire. Yet it is not that of Hades, but unknown to him, the fire that makes men fair, burning, burning, burning away the cauldron of unholy loves that have enclosed around the presence of light in his soul; that have sought to suffocate it from existence in his life.

Emerging from the flame, darkness plunges around them again, as if they walk through a dark wood. Then they pass an aged elm, where Jude see a chimera of Caul staring searchingly at him. He suddenly knows the urge to talk to this figure.

“You’ve brought me here by I know not what grace or understanding Caul. I almost expect this wasteland to bloom suddenly into flower and song and the Spirit to come meet me rejoicing. It’s as if I’ve passed through the flaming sword of Eden’s guarding cherubim back into paradise. Is it the Spirit that caused you to lead me so unwittingly here?”

The figure looks unwaveringly on.

“I guess you have no more word or influence over me here. But the fires it seems have cleansed me.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 81

/because me and paul have turned them to believe in fortuitous order rising from chaos/ /got them seeking to divine their own futures by wringing their hands at our stars/ /while all along/ /weve just been burning burning burning ourselves/ /with the outpoured cauldrons of unholy loves/ /heavens and earth/ /feeding off each other/ /like one big recycling trap/ /like a black hole getting denser and denser each year/ /with no way out/ /and no light to break in and free us/ /just stars out there receding further and further away/ /and us waiting to be swept away in the flood/ /who is going to pluck me out/

From his now motionless position on the nearly deserted car park, Caul watches his hope of reaching the source of the love needed to restore his life recede with the stars. He sits devastated, hunching his legs under his enfolding arms. Collapsing his back against his car, a serpent enters his mind and slivers through it, each dart of its tongue proclaiming that there is no way out. Everything around him is burning fire, as the first glimmer of grey begins to line the amphitheatre of mountains beyond.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 82