Queen of Hearts

I made an appointment to see the Queen of Hearts who was under house arrest, down at No.42. It’s murder getting in there, now that the bureaucrats are in charge.

Heavy great typewriters tap out an administrative symphony; movements for both ‘unrequited love’ and ‘affairs of the heart,’ performed in languages from Danish to Senegalese.  They’ll even shout them down a drain pipe if you inform the manager that you can’t read.

Remembering love had once been simple, I went a waltzing like a madman through a park of autumn leaves, listening for birdsong. A woman in a long tailed coat and hat called the police. I was promptly arrested.

Down at the station the inspector smiled smugly and said, ‘lad it’s complicated.’ He told me that my salary of a bowl of plumbs and half a pound of English pears was less than half of what she’d spent this time last year.

‘Who expected?’ I asked, bemused.

‘Why, the woman who interrupts your every thought’ he snorted

Then he turned the key and locked me in, leaving me to a mattress spread far too thin. I was unsure at that point of the charge.

A hunchback in a cell opposite, in a voice caked and as dry as bread, pressed himself against his bars and said,

‘Seek man the Queen of Hearts, the Queen of Hearts, for she was with us from the start, when we took our first steps from the ‘old’ man to the ‘new’.

She came after equality but stood against the Malls. She resisted stomach stapling, laser treatment and nose strip pores. Celebrate her, the Queen of Hearts, the Queen of Hearts who was with us from the start.’

‘Why are you here,’ I asked.

‘They told me to fix cars- but I had no spanners,’ he bemoaned

And when the fence in the garden broke they shook their heads and called some bloke- who in his turn shook his head, taking fifty notes. How they looked down at me!’

Moved was I by those bloated eyes, hounded through this churlish world. I shall protest’ I announced indignantly, “I shall take our case to the Lords, into the lofty spheres of modern thought, where the libertarian wigged head bows and sighs. They shall hear our plea, my brothers, in their oak panelled court. He could tell I was half cut. 

I called the guard and demanded my telephone call. He obliged me and then turned back to his bacon sandwich, over which he continued to salivate. As he drooled over meat and sauce I secretly dialled, having imprinted the number to head. A bureaucrat answered. ‘Three o’clock? Great! I’ll be there in a while’. The Appointment had now been made to see the Queen of Hearts.

A violinist cried out in despair from a cell further down, his prayers repetitively mutating into groans. The inspector came back and issued him with a warning, declaring that ‘dreaming was forbidden’ and that ‘truth was to remain hidden under the pillows of his concrete bed.’ 

Released, I rallied like a berserker and sped to No.42. 

Shedding my anger at the step, I knocked the door.

Bang Bang Bang went the gold lion knocker.

Bang Bang Bang; the knocker went down again.

A bureaucrat answered. He was prim and proper and as grey as stone. With hair of straw and a pelican nose, he boomed aloud ‘Sir, there’s no one home’

‘Piffle’ I spat and barged straight in shouting ‘you fools, you fools, you fools, I a dreamer and a fool, I shall never give in!’

‘Sir’, began the bureaucrat, ‘wishing not to aggrieve there is something I must advise you of before I slam the door’

‘What is that, my good man?’ I snapped.

‘Why sir’, twanging his moustache, ‘you’ll never leave.’

Then, like a moan, he petered out; too where I could not tell- no doubt somewhere efficient- a stationary cupboard with a servants bell.

I stood for a while alone in the lobby. Then I heard it.  Music was coming from somewhere down below- a dithyramb of voices and laughter, gilded and golden and from the womb with a heartbeat base, both pleasing and cruel. An aroma issued from those intoxicating notes, rising up a winding case of chocolate stairs, wafting down the hall. I met those notes there, clean, standing on a washed tiled floor.

That fragrance broke inside my mind like a great rock chord, calling me toward that surreptitious place. I hurried through empty rooms, flapping and panting through curtains and doors like a dog in heat. I pushed and penetrated darkness until I found myself alone.

A long white marbled hall stretched out before me, at the end of which waited a thick, blackened door. Oh, how I could feel it- truth banging like a drum in my blood. Truth changing into something weighted with meat; flesh and blood; truth banging like a drum; truth banging deep in the belly of the blood.

Unbound and burning with a lust for smells and sounds unknown I flew to that door, like a crazed bird. With oily wing and crooked beak I halted at its metal handle, secreting a cry from my wormy throat. I threw that door open and stepped into….

I expected an ending; a great, gentle death, like that which results from the bite of a bear. Its teeth would crush my neck. I would collapse, dead; falling down into the folds of a giant’s sleep. I waited for the drop or the bite or the war to come and claim me. Instead, under my feet I felt a carpet of warm grass.

Before me was a midnight Garden in glorious bloom found beneath high hanging trestles and red grape vines, under the light of a hot summer moon. A sax player squeezed out notes with ease; a strawberry jazz breeze ruffled the locks of my hair. Music seemed everywhere.

Music permeated and radiated, melting the block ice and cold metals that clogged arteries, nailed lungs and blistered eyes. It was music born of night. Music was inside of me and it was alive inside of me and I, in it, felt life and breathed life. I was new born once again.

On a lawn of lush green, as the jazz went down, warm and long, a great pride of women chattered and twirled, once forgotten, rejected by the world. My eyes beheld strange, esoteric sights, which seemed as though they had lingered there, over innumerable nights, for a thousand, thousand years, far below an industrial world, unformed. 

There were Prostitutes fresh from turning tricks, a Jilted bride sharing canapés with a vicar’s wife. The mistress who had usurped the king swigged beer with an overweight model. In the corner Daddy’s angel, with her two clipped wings, played with the girl who liked beetles and twigs. There were ballet dancers with arthritic toes and an elderly woman basking in a pregnant glow.

In the middle of this gathering, guarded by soldiers in pink mule heels, observing the ancient stars, sat the Queen of Hearts on a plastic throne- oh the Queen of Hearts, who was with us from the start.

With eyes glittery and biting with sparks she looked at me and said, ‘Come forward sir,’ ‘though do not trouble yourself with the ‘why’ the ‘how’ and the ‘where’ for removed from your world we ‘are. Tell us, for what reason do you seek our counsel?”

‘Madam’ said I, ‘my world is a sun bed full of fattening hides, lost to the gadget beat of modernity, to individualism, angst and driving range crimes. Twenty four hour commerce and ping cuisine, fuels my working day. It steals my child away. (Oh, it steals my child away) And at night, I look to the stars and cry, for the need to love is stuffed right down, like a pie down the trousers of a drunken clown.

‘Yes, great lady, it steals my child away, A child, bottle fed on booze until the age of four, dragged by the arm up and down the stairs because of mother- (for he could have no other)-and now I’m looking for him everyday, for she stole my child away, stole him right away, from the hole that hurts.’

‘I watch the news; half dead youth haunt the streets. Isolation pumps into the TV. I’m high on this optical heroin. I cannot sleep. Is it the end of my world? Cradled in the velvet womb of a grubby arm chair (there’s no one there) nursing grumbling guts drugged with beer, I anesthetise myself to the world. Help me find love and start again’. A tear came to me then. Like a solitary diamond it fell.’

‘I stare and stare until I don’t know who I am or what it is to be. Then I remember that I loved a woman once but her heart hummed like a fridge. I was in love but I just couldn’t sleep. Her damn humming wouldn’t let me be. I lie on my slanted bed and I look to the stars and cry.’ Those beautiful diamonds filled my eyes.

The Queen of Hearts, regal and divine on her plastic throne, looked at me with regal authority and care. ‘Stay with us then, be washed and renewed’ she implored. ‘Learn and grow from our codes and laws, from the beauty that is choice, for here we will be what we will be without judgement, demands or a society that would order us appropriately clothed. All Insecurities, shame and guilt must be declared at the cloak room door.’

She continued her tract. ‘We are women, good and bad, powerful and mad, though often just glorious in the fact that we are plainly ourselves. Here the magazines stoke our fires, sir. No woman, under my reign, will ever be a slave to a man’s desires, to his ideals or dreams, to his rules, attending to him as though he were a king. We will meet our brother man at the table of equality with liberty and power drawn up from the well of self. Whether we are in sack cloths, unshaved, ball gowns or fetish leather, we shall be loved and respected for whom it is we are.’

‘Hail, hail, the queen of hearts who was with is from the start’, proclaimed the male guards, clicking their pink mule heels.

Captive under her crown was her hair, white gold and vibrant, full of the music of clouds, that balloon upward into the air. Ancient and hypnotic were her green field eyes, full of the wind that moves the wheat. Scented was her skin, as bluebells are in the wild, wild wood; inside her mind a philosophy of love, heard but misunderstood. I craved to hear the music and the words; to take her gospel back to my world; a world unformed coming to an end.

I stood their mesmerised, overcome by freedom, a man reborn.