"Urgh! Ugly Black fairies! They plot down the centuries, cursing and robbing, taunting and stinging. Spit through stained fangs, tongues all forked, quick as a stroke. Razorish scales and brittle brown limbs. You can't see them, there in the sunlight, shitting in the grass beneath the fence. But the air is loud tonight, you can hear that. Hear those insects, toads and ravens, all jaws a-gnashing, all spines a-tingling. A million futile voices scratching down the sky. All cries, horrid cries, of warning: for that one dreadful Black fairy. (He's ignoring us for the moment.)
"Through the pickets on either side, men's dogs prowling, soon enough hysterical, bleating. Bloody minded men, those masters, ha! Shut up in sheds to the horizon in every direction. Hammering, oathing. Always hammering. Always oathing. And maddest of all, the boys of those men, hurling sticks and wild blasphemies into the moping sunset. Little mates of yours, I know: little devils in any case. All good food, this endless intolerable rumpus, for the Black fairies. They gather up mean energies. Build nests from the residues of terrible dreams. When they bicker, which is always, they curdle the oxygen; our oxygen. Squeeze misery from purest air. They don't know glamour, not the black faries; they just grow blacker, feeding all hours, spinning, messing...
"But they have one useful talent, and that talent cancels out all that nastiness, all that spite. You see, before moving on, (unknown to themselves of course), they excrete sweet sounds: an end product of all that greedy raiding and feasting. Inaudible to our ears, those blessed farts cling to the underside of all kinds of leaves. All breed of trees. And that, little cynic, is how God's air is purified; day in, day out."
Grandmother pointed to a single, peculiar cloud. "Believe do you boy? In God and wotnot?"
So roughly she spoke. And no, I never believed anything she said. I merely gobbled it up. She rambled on for days, it seemed. For forever, in fact. In her garden, stuck in that ugly big chair of hers. She's doing it now, wherever she is.
Her science was this:
When a Black fairy dies, (they do at last die), it rots and is eaten by cats: a delicacy to nicely line the feline stomach. There is no pain; indeed there is no taste. Cats eat those black carcusses quite in a trance. Then, when the cat later breathes on a man, the result is dark inspiration, foul as that breath stinks. Fairy stink.
And the man shall be a sneaking murderer.
The only solid stuff which Black fairies eat are cherries. They shit out the stones which are gathered by magpies and horded separate from rubies, combs and plastic cowboys. One such horde of a hundred stones collected in the life of one magpie may be favoured as a nest for Thunder hornets, which do not build their own. The larvae of Thunder hornets are stolen by bees (on dangerous business) and presented as food to a grateful queen. As she consumes the hornet young, she is bound to visit the gardens of the hospitals of men - and there, if the sun is up and the tide is in, her sting will cure all ailments.
When a Black fairy bites a child, that child will suffer badly from the pox, but will recover to become a priest, or a good Duke, or a philosopher. When a newly born babe is bitten, if it does not die outright, it will become a General, or a punisher of women, or a policeman of international borders.
Pale-blue fairies, quite on the other hand, are dainty and pleasing to the eye which has the misfortune of beholding them. Pale-blue's float upon the early mist, supping dew and spreading rumours. They sleep the day in kennels and barns, to return between sunset and the lighting of the stars. They gather at windows, spy on plump girls and invent cruel pranks. They spill sweat upon the door step, which enters the house as Great Temptation on the heels of hard-working men's boots. They poison the milk which is drunk by women, causing insanity, paranoia, or both. They block chimneys with hedgehogs and tamper with the print and meaning of the morning post. In winter they lounge in basements, filling the house with ill-feeling, invoking poverty and, untimely, bereavement.
Legends, Grandmother states yet again, are universal truths for which the smallest proof has long since evaporated. Proof, never-the-less, is gifted upon a few men and a few women in their declining hours. They see, with straining eyes, less of the thin world which has always bound them, and something of that which exists behind man's arrogance. This is gradually, or very suddenly, revealed to them right at the end. In any case, the result is dismal, mortal demise.
Our dying may well glimpse a ragged Black fairy, or a Pale-blue: or a dry Brown fairy who delights in arson and ignites itself above a person's head in singular ecstasy: or a brassy Green fairy from the churchyard: or a Yellow fairy, weaver of lover's promises and lies: or a White fairy who turns exhausted hearts to gravel: or a Violet fairy of prosperous lust: or a Rat-skin fairy, who rouses then taunts doomed armies.
All to no account. The astonished mutterings of the near dead are never taken with seriousness.
That small children are close to these fairies, these foreigners, and able to know them, is utter misconception and a serious error. Children are fools; good bait perhaps, but so easily tricked.
My Grandmother spoke from her nylon chair beneath the canopy of her 'healing pine', which sagged at the border of her pond. She told that men are shells, filled with useless ideals and with the odour of corruption, attractive to all fairies. That a knack for self deception puts men at odds with all other creatures and all other elements. Herein lies the cause of Man's endless melancholy.
I could never believe her, but I listened like a spy.
When men invent tales of adventure, truths to oppose God and Nature, when they wring legends out of beaten bones, they are replacing a vital thing they cannot see. The subconscious mind is thus cloaked in bad reasoning. According to her we refuse to suffer the pleasure of mere existence until that last 'hour of seeing' and the moment of death.
I asked my Grandmother if she found fear in her old age, and she answered: of course. But she preferred to talk of the fear of others, especially of the fear of Men. I assumed then, wrongly, that she thought of her husbands. Later I guessed her wider meaning. But I considered myself one of these Men, and took everything she said personally and literally. I was displeased, coniving even; but I listened.
Men are afraid to grow old because they believe their own legends. They believe that with age comes truth, and with it, the truth that men are dust upon dry leaves. They instinctively wallow in self-control, which keeps them separate from the natural world, binding them forever to the solid earth. Man calculated and invented his own science in a trick of side-step. A mere tonic, it turned out, for troubled guts.
I was often then filled with scorn. She babbled like a newly born. She laughed and cackled so much at times that I thought she must die right there. Above all, I knew she was no witch.
"You are my husband's grandson", she would say when I mocked her. "You will grow harder than any man. Now sit while I tell you the little I know, which is a great deal more than you will ever know!
"Some men listen without scathing minds. Out of fear they listen. But the proof is not opened on a slab before them. In this, a single Black fairy, the stupedest of animals, is wiser than all men together. For he refuses, simply refuses, to communicate with anything else. He is realer than real."
Just so, she went on. I listened endlessly, nimble to challenge the most glaring lies. I could not help myself. If I insulted her horribly, she would never accept I had done any such thing. Which infuriated me the more.
Not only by myself was my Grandmother condemned, though affectionately by the others, as mad.
Detail from the Berlin murals "Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring"
CASE OF HEARTS
In my room there is an ugly 70's book case with glass sliding doors. It was not empty when it arrived. I cleaned out the muck, then filled it with hearts. Hearts of slaughtered bulls and dogs and sailors. Finely carved hearts and strong smelling hearts. Hearts shrunken and blue and hearts knotted with wire. Hearts bright as brains and hearts sober as guts. Hearts set as bear traps, riddled with intrigue, transparent as diamonds, ugly as queens and impotent as servants. Hearts caught in fishing nets and hearts pierced with feathers. Inspired hearts and plodding hearts. Children's hearts with holes. The hearts of two ogre brothers, at one time buried in a witches grave. Hearts of ten teachers and ten hearts of fools. Hearts in wicker baskets among flowers and beads. Hearts spread on slabs and picked at by doctors. Hearts which openly weep and gobble up sympathy. Hearts trusting beyond madness. Mother's hearts and hearts which speak as babes would. Hearts clamped at birth, and kite-flying hearts. Hearts tangled as clumps of nerves, tricky as pins, or wide as half the world. Hearts stamped on by machines and sprayed with chemical paints. Hearts fit only for work, or lust, or disaster. Hearts flat as milk or slow as gold, mean as swearing birds or gripping cancer. Laughing hearts and coward's hearts. Hearts filled with insects, cement, nuts, cherries and wax. Hearts stapled to ribs and to door frames, or to a ship's wheel through a female breast. Hearts swung on puppet strings, stuck through with cocktail sticks, or flags of surrender. Hearts with spines like the porcupine. Hearts with lids and lined with foam. Hearts baked in tin-foil or mummified in holy swaddling. Hearts deep frozen too long, buried under pyramids, pressed in the pages of boring books. Drugged and drunken hearts, ticklish hearts, orgasmic hearts. Hearts stuffed with peaches and raisons, vinegar and expensive oils, injected with sperms and poisons. Hearts visited by bees on hot afternoons. Hearts bottoned with bows and clasps, or bullets, or fish bones, or shells. Hearts loud as battlefields, as mistresses, and blind as migraine. Thugs hearts and nuns hearts. Deaf hearts and senseless hearts, and the occasional heart of a genius. Bishop's hearts and strangler's hearts. Whore's hearts and therapist's's hearts. Hearts pressed into circuit boards, stitched to old cushions, thrown off of citadels. Hearts loyal as banks and useful as charcoal. Hearts on stilts, on plinths, or carried on mules. Hearts on poles at busy junctions. Hearts kept once in a rotten mattresses, in house barges, in a hay-barn. Hearts drowned in moats, lost in pockets, abandoned in attics and tipped into wells. Hearts locked behind wallpaper, in broken clocks, catacombs and iron tanks. Hearts out of rhymes and recipes and spells. Hearts in buckets and oysters and pipes. Hearts passed on with diseases, with gossip, with adoration. Invisible hearts, and hearts known across oceans. Circus hearts, and hearts blasted into deep, silent space.
My own heart I keep in the Japanese washing machine. It has not functioned properly for two years.
