A piece I wrote for a Writers' Group Competition. It didn't get placed, and you'll probably see why. I enjoyed the way the process pushed me from a rather kitchen-sink thing to Greek Goddesses. It turned out far from seamless though.
Preamble
“And now Hephaestus, yours is the charge to observe the mandates laid upon you
by the father-- to clamp this miscreant upon the high craggy rocks in shackles of
binding adamant that cannot be broken…. Hurry then to cast the fetters about him.”
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.
The legend of the Titan, Prometheus, is one of the best-known of all the Greek
myths. For the crime of giving fire to the mortals, he is punished by Zeus. He is
fettered to a rock, and every day an eagle appears and consumes his vitals, which
every day regenerate for a repeat the next day. Who among the gods and
goddesses had the strength to bind him? And what has this to do with the harmless
and charmless little town of Pebsham?
Pebsham
A bus appears. It is first not there, then is. It is the way of buses. It resolves itself
along the spray-damped seafront road.
The driver: “I’ll just pop you round Pebsham, then we’ll go straight to Bexhill.”
I have never before been to Pebsham. I am content. The driver has a centuries old,
blasted look, the look of a man who has taken a million or a billion fares. The
serpent tattoo on his forearm is faded almost to a smudge. I pay with, not an obolus
or other ancient coin, but Google Wallet.
I am nobody, a mere resider in the world. I am travelling to meet somebody from the
beginning of history, history long merged into myth.
A word about Pebsham. It is a housing estate, adjacent to Bexhill, and near
Hastings, deep in the south of England. It is near the sea, yet no tourists go there.
Nobody goes there to shop: there is one shop. Nobody drinks there: there is no pub.
Pebsham sprawls, spreading its bungular cul-de-sac tentacles into the fields and
Sussex countryside, unnoticed and unregarded. Any secrets it holds are surely the
earthbound secrets of every town.
Our double-decker bus hauls itself around a roundabout, deviating from my usual
trip home. Upstairs are a few solitary characters, besides myself. Opposite, a bald
man, the top of whose head almost comes to a point, looks unwonderingly out of the
window. Intermittently his bottom set of false teeth shoots out alarmingly beyond his
half-closed mouth: he pushes it back with a satisfying – to him – “glock” sound. I
cannot decipher the name of the band depicted on his T-shirt but the iconography
suggests catastrophic sound, distortion, chaos.
A flicker of light, like a minor aurora, momentarily shows itself over the marsh and
field.
In the front seat sits another man. I can only see the back of him, but his voice loudly
pierces the dead echo of the interior: he expresses alarm at something only he can
see or feel.
Pebsham: we are in you.
Bia
I ring the bell; I get off. I had only asked to go further in a faint attempt to confuse any
pursuers. After a brief entanglement, with the three elderly women trying to get on,
during which no eye contact is made but a “tut” is audible, I find myself on a grass
verge. In front of me is The Co-op.
A tall, powerful-looking woman dressed in all black sits at a wallpaper pasting table
on the open space next to the shop. She is lightly drenched in voter apathy while
seemingly attempting to be elected to the Town Council. I move towards her,
curious. She smiles, lifts a stone paperweight from the table. Five or six leaflets are
blown into the road. The seventh she gives to me, speaking:
“Were you seen?”
“I think not, though for a moment I thought the driver knew me.”
“Let me show you Pebsham.”
I ask: “Why, how, in all of the world, does a Goddess, the daughter of a Titan,
companion of Zeus himself, find herself in this Pebsham of all the places? A
storyteller and known liar I have heard of tells me that Prometheus once found
himself in Swindon, but at least that has a civic centre and shops: but this…”
“…is handy for the seaside. That’s something.”
“To be the personification of POWER is something. To have been the only god or
goddess with the strength to bind a Titan to a rock is something.” Again I say:
“this…”
Her form shifts. The seeming black cloak is revealed as… wings; wings which
spread outward, above her head and mine, raven-black feathers rustling in the thin,
newly-chilling breeze. She now towers above me, her blazing green eyes fixed to the
middle-distance above me.
An elderly woman leaves the Co-op pulling a wheeled trolley. Of course, she doesn’t
see me or the ten foot tall winged goddess beside me. Why should she? It is none
of her business.
“Let me show you Pebsham”, Bia repeats.
Explore
Along Pebsham Lane is an unkempt bungalow with an encrusted orange cement
mixer anchored immovably to the front garden, like a parody of a Greek statue. His
neighbours loved Gordon because he did up their soffits at cost for cash, but now
they avoid him because bereavement is so embarrassing.
He supports Chelsea, but hasn’t been since Bonetti was in goal. That old wallpaper
mocks him: if Sheila had still been here they’d have chosen new by now. He is old
now; tired, old and lonely.
The cement mixer would need a drill to get it off its accidental plinth. Maybe next
week.
“Neither Force nor Power have a rôle here. That would need an altogether more
empathetic goddess. Good.”
A faint smell of semen joins the atmosphere around a town-house in Amanda Close.
We do not linger.
A house in Top Cross Road is on fire. Nobody has yet spotted this, not even Janet
who lives there. She is trying to write a book combining Magic Realism with
Regency England, which she is starting to suspect will never be published. Her
suspicion is well-founded.
The ghost of Eleanor Rigby smiles amiably upon Janet; the fire brigade less so after
the fire has spread next door, and next-door-but-one. Her doomed manuscript
survives to continue unread for another day.
“This is all very whimsical,” I venture, “but I still don’t understand why an ancient
Goddess with the power to bind Titans is here. To call this Pebsham ‘unremarkable’
is to garland it. You could have put out that fire with a breath, but we just moved on to
look at that house that sells houseplants and has a view of the sea. Of all the places
in the world, the sky-bothering mountains, the mighty deserts, the whirlpools that
swallow huge ships, mighty cities, giant rivers, huge forests. You could do some
GOOD in the world, this world its tenants are bent on destroying, in a way that the
ancient gods would have been amazed at.”
"I'm a personification of Force and Power. How have Force and Power served the
world these thousands of years? I feel the crushing weight of history upon me. It's as
heavy as the rock and the fetters Hephaestus and I clamped onto Prometheus.
History– so old they call it prehistory, or they call it myth. There's no history here in
Pebsham. 10 minutes ago it seems, there was only a farmhouse. Empty, no history.
That was like air to me. I wanted that. I don't like reminding myself that nobody even
knows where Scythia was, even if they’ve heard of it at all.. I don't want to stand next
to a pile of worn-out old carved stones and call it home. Memory is my curse.
Have you met my sister?”
Canvassing
In Kniver Lane stands an extraordinarily ordinary end-terrace house. A paved drive
and rhododendron ‘Nova Zembla’ flourishing redly in the gap between it and next-
door. Though the window is netted, a light seems to oscillate behind the net curtain,
and draws my eyes towards the interior. Instead of the expected sofa, TV,
occasional table and souvenir of Malaga I instead wonder at a distant vista, a
mountain, no, a mountain range. I am standing in a darkened, desolate landscape of
rock, of the toughest shrubs, of stunted hardy trees. The sky is first red, then green
then glows gold as the wind swirls, and the cloud is lit from below by a fountain of
sparks from the mountainside. Lightning suddenly fills the window and the shock of it almost literally knocks me backwards.
Suddenly back on the paviours outside the house, I look around for help but Bia has
vanished.
“Can I help you”?
A cardiganned man stands indignant on the far side of the gaudy rhododendron,
holding in his right hand that direful weapon of householders everywhere, a soft
broom with a red handle.
“I’m sorry, I…” I look back towards the window. The net curtain and window are blank,
colourless, suburban once more.
“What are you doing here? You’ve no business peeping through people’s windows.
Perhaps I should call the police.”
“It’s all right, he’s with me.” A woman in black, sans wings, no longer 10 feet tall,
reassures him. "Can I give you one of my election leaflets? ”
“What did you see?”
I tell her.
“Mighty Mount Olympus, we used to call it. I think it’s a National Park these days.
Haven’t been there since the World was young.”
“What was that blinding light I saw?”
“You know I asked if you’d met my sister Nike? I think you just have. The question is,
was it just a vision or an actual manifestation? All golden sandals and big wings and
perpetual victory. Cow. The last time I saw her she was taking legal advice about a
shoe company using her name. She was told that as an unembodied being and
moreover a mere aspect or attribute of another goddess she literally didn’t have a
leg to stand on.
I don’t normally do jokes by the way, but she just makes me cross.”
Milligans
Discontented but with no further reason to linger, I take my leave of the reluctant but
retired goddess and make my way to the bus stop, looking around me at the houses
all around and try with a shiver to block out any more thoughts of lives behind
curtains. After ten minutes which seem like thirty the bus approaches, arrives, and I
climb the stairs. To my astonishment the pointed-headed man from before is there,
and his eyes flicker towards me before returning to the window. I hear a “glock” and
a sharp intake of saliva. A shout of panicked alarm from the front seat completes the
phantasm.
It seems a natural response in me after experiencing so much, to go for a drink or
two to help me process all I had seen. I settle down in the bar of a pub named after a
famous comedian: he too saw things that changed his life. A pint of Doom Bar in
front of me, I begin to regain my equilibrium.
The barmaid comes to collect glasses, wipe tables. She is known to her customers
as Alice. She looks towards me with the unseeing yet all-seeing eyes of one who is
everyone’s yet no-one’s friend.
Her eyes shine gold: she is Victory. She is Nike, She works in a pub. She raises a
finger to her lips and wordlessly begs my silence.
`Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know
how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will,
to utter true things.'
Hesiod, The Theogony
