Bricktease
The cracks were deeper and a large slab of sandy stucco leant against the evening sky, poised to fall. With soft moist fingertips, Jessica felt her way around the side of the building, not pressing hard enough to disturb the flaking surface but just enough to pick up any movement that was taking place now.
She stopped and nervously licked her lips, tasting the sharp, coppery taint of air that always made her nauseous whenever she got too close to what she deemed to be her twin sentinels, although they were structures of man-made appearance. Tonight copper mingled with the heavy scent of freshly dug earth for, behind her, seventeen rectangular plots of newly mounded river silt lay in the church yard. Seventeen was her lucky number. Her truly prime token of being alive. She didn’t care that most people’s lucky numbers were single digits, like seven or five. The lower the number, the higher the chances of luck, in some obscure law of covert averages, perhaps. But then, nobody would choose zero. That would be cheating. And, so, she stuck by seventeen. Perhaps, next year, she’d change it to eighteen.
With a resonating crack that disrupted her deep, dark, dank brown study, a long slab of stucco dissolved into a rubble which thundered down the side of one of the two sentinels. As the dust cleared, stained metal declared its indecipherable maps to the sky. Eight ionic columns, two straddling each corner of the building, trembled. Beneath their skin of stone ancient metal flexed. A telescopic leg jerked itself a fraction longer, exploding away shards of rock, freeing a tube of stone which dropped down the length of the smooth iron shank and smashed at the clawed base. Cracks rippled across all four faces of the building, spreading like river deltas as the other seven columns strained also to break their dormancy. Then, popping off stone as if it were eggshell the mighty sentinel ground all its legs into movement, sending hydraulic screeches far across the midnight estuary, as the sentinel's stone-tower head nodded like a jack-in-the-box, spitting a rain of stone with the visual consistency of saliva...
Jessica woke with a start and sat up quickly. All was quiet in the den, only the sound of distant whooper swans flying somewhere over the estuary broke the silence of the night. Still she wasn't satisfied. Struggling out of bed she stumbled over a stack of books and managed to find the cracked bakelite dome of the light switch.
The trembly lines on the paper drums of the seismographs showed no significant movement. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly. "Coffee."
Someone would be certain to bring it, now she’d spoken the word. Coff-ee. She fell asleep again in the chair, only to dream that the twin columnar towers were once real follies in the sensible land of waking. They were – in this perceived truth of existence where she dreamed of waking – the two now sole-standing extents of a church that once straddled the River Stour, having had their middle snatched away by piecemeal demolishment. This, she inferred, was, in more ancient days, to entice the Essex congregation towards a newer upstart church in the nearby, almost surrounding, community of Mistley, a church with proper naves and aisles and altars instead of salt marshes beneath a missing prayer duct…
The river today, though, was at a distance from the two towers. It was as if the ground had moved and, by moving, become more solid in different places, wetter in others.
The towers still sloughed off the stone garments that once buttressed them … and she stirred into full waking consciousness again, with the perking of the coffee beans clicking and bubbling furiously from the kitchen. She recalled swans walking, as only swans could walk, from the river between the metallic nakedness of the two vertical piers or phares … these words being paradoxically blurrier when she was truly awake than they were when being dreamed into meaningfulness beneath the canopy of sleep. These words she used for her feelings were snatched from both states of existence (waking and dreaming) and thus appeared unnatural in both.
As she dozed in a renewed submission to something that was controlling the intervals of so-called waking and dreaming, she walked towards the naked towers – careful to avoid the pent up power of swan wings that gave unmistakeable sign of protecting the sharp, shiny and sensitive elbows newly revealed by the shed stone. There … amid the faded gravestones was a blind breeze-blocked bungalowish structure that at one moment throbbed like a cuboid electricity substation and, the next, settled back into the configuration of what it truly was – a tomb. The two towers were still steadfast yet become pieces in a game where the rules allowed a King to check another King along the link that had once allowed the stride of Bride or Bridge. Words blurring together again. Each word meaning what the next word was intended to mean and vice versa.
She turned her back. Dreams could be left to their own devices. Indeed, this was where she had first come in.
“Jessica, your drink.” The voice bubbled upon a clot of solid saliva. There was a waft of coppery coffins…
Her brother – the one in whom she could see no self-likeness – was clicking toward her on the crutches that had grown up with him throughout childhood. She feared at first that he was in the dream. She was relieved to discover this was now real life – and at least she could handle him better in such familiar surroundings. They needed to study the seismographs as a first priority and that would keep them both busy.
He had almost lost both legs recently in another ground-breaking moment. They had been together exploring Mistley and Manningtree, allowed to venture that far from home by a mother deep in gin. The middle-gutted church had been their ultimate goal and they had hoped to save this site of the sentinels as Jessica called it, as best, for last. She had been young, then. Indeed, she was young still today, as she thought about those past events, sipping the oversweet coffee, between sucking in its wafts of gritty aroma.. It was as if time by-passed her, whilst aging everyone else, including her brother. The moment of disaster was when his legs gave way. The ground stood firm. But his legs caved in as if the seismic resonances had imbued his bones with fluid hollowness. She later learned that beneath the ground was situated a nuclear bomb-shelter; a secret one, but, strangely, open to tourists on day-trips. Her brother once joked about how the many holiday brochures advertising the attraction were subject to the Official Secrets Act.
But jokes were a million miles away, when his legs gave way. The general hospital in nearby Colchester (it had been touch and go whether he was taken to Ipswich or Colchester) was dumbfounded by the state of them. The windows were dull even with the sun out. But the bricks were certainly geometrical and well pointed. The whole place spoke volumes, but little was explained regarding the mystery of the Mistley Legs (as it was later called in jargonesque medical leaflets). Maybe he should have been taken to a proper limb clinic, and he may not have subsequently needed the crutches at all.
Jessica endured her brother. He was so miserable it was good to escape from his presence into the world of the Twin Sentinels and the sub-station bungalow where she imagined slept her sweetheart, whom she had only to wake with a kiss. But the coffee only served to keep her awake instead, far from those hybrid dream worlds she counted, one day, on giving her seventeen children.
There was a serious side to her which she could never fathom. Maybe, her whole role in life was to care for her brother, now their Mother was dead. The once kindly woman of their making had fallen from a road, near Manningtree railway station, in her cups. A raised road that ran almost parallel with a similar road beneath it. A quandary of roads, Jessica always called it. One way and double way roads, at cross purposes with direction. Bridge was not the right word for the higher road, indeed there were no right words for the circumstances surrounding their Mother’s fatal accident. No witnesses, therefore no words. Just the result. The insect-squashed remains on the lower road which a passing car skidded to avoid. The driver noticed nothing at all, of course, not even the skid.
And Bride was not the right word for seventeen year old Jessica as she later dreamed of waking at the Site of Sentinels, in gauzy white lace, layers of veils for various parts of her body, not only for her face. She waited for a door to appear, but the cuboid tomb was not her groom, after all – and it remains bunged up to this day by the shuddering ground spraying bricks upon it like confetti from above. This cascade does not seem to harm Jessica as she wanders in filmic splendour through the dream she helped create. She holds a thermos flask containing the piping hot redolence of coppery coffee, as provided by her brother. He doesn’t manage to go out much these days, except, possibly, to Clacton, where he enjoys hobbling along the sea front and meeting folk of his own age.
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