Unlike Ludwig...Roy has a nice face...

Unlike Ludwig…Roy has a nice face

Unlike Ludwig, who looks so sad and desperate.

Far, far away from a land faraway and half my father’s kingdom, he is castaway – Wilson, Wilson; oh, Wilson – and hopelessly unreachable; he is falling, falling through the endless night, through the crushing depths, as the cavern roof far above slides silently shut; far, far beneath the echoing green and children’s laughter on the lawn, feet running madly across the hall, and music and dancing and the party balloons; Mummy’s piano and patent leather, round-toed shoes with a silver buckle and a brand-new party frock on my birthday echoes in the room upstairs.

And lying on the comfortable carpet, head against the wireless, the touch of the teeth on the ivory knobs, and the kaleidoscopic red and green lozenges, and the feel of the gauze causeway between here and there and the commonplace strangers’ voices from faraway places – and we’re open ‘til six on Sathurday - hearing 1965 and Winston’s peaceful passing.

Autumn leaves heap up against the hard-oak door, as the swimmer cowers; shivers, shut out for ever - from here to eternity - so far, so far from virile fifties frolics in the foam with the English rose; broke-backed Fountainhead cracks before the boom of time.

Further out, further out, deeper and deeper, white-faced drowning in the deep blue; far, far beneath the sirens’ singing, far, far beneath the whale’s wholly inconceivable lumbering, primal rolling in the deepest deeps, cooing her calm, cool calf to sleep.

And hopelessly wants the feel of a hand in hand across the lawn to tennis, and the whisper of a cool cotton dress, the scent of summer strawberries under warm, delicate trees, and the cold surprise of a soft cheek, when we’re finally alone; and there, there; I know, I know…try not to get worried…everything’s all right now, everything’s fine; and, whilst looking for cabled cardies on cold afternoons, all jolly hockey-sticks, firm-jawed and gymslips, or flapping belted coats and laughter like gun shots in crow-cracked October skies, instead he is poster-boy brittle, bitten nails in faded sepia, portrait of white-face Billy the Kid, and a zipped scarecrow mouth, bloodless slash over snow-white skin from a hungry blade, Roy has a nice face.

Roy's seen things (you people wouldn't believe). But, unlike Ludwig, who stumbles away now from the fire into a head-world of dingy bedsits, crumpled paper and pencil stubs, holds himself tight and never let me go, Roy’s likely to stand too close and want to put his big huggy-bear hands on you. There are different kinds of love, you know, Roy says.

Ludwig shuffles off, begins to crackle and fade, and shrinks into the head-world, leaving Roy, Benn, Aldous, Erich, Theodor, Dennis, and Bertrand to unsatisfactorily warm themselves on the charred splinters of time; and try to raise the ghosts of revolution and rouse the wild, impossible dream (and why shouldn’t old men be mad?) that hope, Pater's cold, gemlike flame, will live again.

With mute echoes of John and Che huddled, heads together, walking in dusty, frayed plimsolls and shapeless, grey, threadbare teddy-bear sweaters, O was a little distracted on this particular evening. And he was particularly haunted by an image of himself as the Turin Shroud.

As he got older – and especially in this neat, closely-trimmed white beard and the Bedouin robes they had all taken to wearing to mark the mass migration (of the enlightened outsiders from the shadowy dwellings beneath the walls of the modern city to the forbidden territories of the outworld), rather disturbingly, he appeared to be steadily morphing into that mysterious, mystic exposure, occult medieval European imagining of the coffined Christ.

Sure, he’d lost a lot of weight since the migration – food was scarce out here in the hinterland deserts – and the robes hung loosely on his spare, white body; but why the appearance of the shroud just now? His days were filled with deep, dark forebodings, routinely waking to frightening visions of brutality, of unspeakable violence, flashing, singing blades slicing his flesh, dangerously sensual vampire fangs sucking his blood, cruel crescent sword swipes cutting him down to his knees from behind, blunt, steely, bone-shattering boots endlessly stamping on his poor head, skull-crushing blows from giant metal hands, and taut, tense, agonising dying in swirling, choking mists of searing pain.

Crown of thorns, crown of thorns, and His beautiful face, and His beautiful head - lolls to one side; his dark, sorrowful eyes upturned, and a single bubble of rich, dark wine on his pure ivory forehead. Father, why have you forsaken me?

Northern gothic romance: dark towers, black rosaries, and the crowns of black queens; the sorrow of the Christ. But here there is no sorrow; there is no art: only painful death on the cross.

O’s Roman Catholic upbringing hadn’t been entirely wasted, after all. The routine, commonplace, petty guilts suffered throughout his life had blossomed under desert privations into a Grunewald, gothic monstrosity, a twisted nightmare tree on which he hung lifeless, his flesh torn from his bones, his eyes pecked out by carrion crows, pathetic human meat, hanging in the butcher’s window for all to see.

'Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man'.

Rag and bone shop of the heart; through Lucian's lens: only the body; there is nothing…there is nothing; only the tree; his tree; the one he painted as a young boy at St Peters.

At the age of nine or ten, he had foreseen it all - his own agonizing death: to die alone, alone on the nightmare tree on the barren, purple steppes; death on the cross. O’s Roman Catholic schooling hadn’t been entirely wasted.

Sifr; cypher: O – O – O – O; Death and damnation, O; since he knew his numbers, every night in bed, O had counted down to the dreadful day: I am 4; how many years do I have left? O had known Father Time long before they met.