Plasti-cake

I love Plasti-cake. It’s a work in progress, something of an experiment and comes largely from the intuitive side of my brain. There’s a dreamlike quality to it that people can find challenging – the urge is to decode the symbolism. My advice is to resist that urge and just read it with a very literal frame of mind, let the magical realism pass itself off as realism.

Here are two excerpts from Plasti-cake that deal with two significant characters: Vinegar Vera and Moondance, as seen from the point of view of Maeve2, a young woman who can see auras.

VINEGAR VERA

Adam Norman’s coffee cup, on a repeating cycle, filled quickly and emptied slowly, meaning he could hunch over his notebook at minimal cost. He indulged in a little people-watching between bolts, flashes or dribbles of inspiration, but it was only when Susan Brown returned that his pen grew utterly limp in his hand, and he was forced to spend his creative energy in finding ways to look at her. There was a part of him that could tell he was sending out slow floating petals of energy in her direction, and there was a part of him that could tell it was plainly visible to those who cared to pay attention. Unconsciously he put his faith in the belief that no such people were present and he peeped over the edge of his cup.

Maeve2 watched. Between the wiping of tables and the buttering of teacakes she kept her eye on the slow motion kaleidoscoping of the entire communal aura. Energy blossoms passed to and fro, lightly hued branches of invitation and need stretched thinly between customers and staff alike, the branchings of Petri dish organisms. As the café population rose and fell new arrivals brought their contributions, their personal colours clashing, complimenting, vying for dominance, fading and submitting, blending easily or stubbornly staining the collective pattern.

She saw Gumbo’s colouring as a pale sea sky blue – still, untroubled, fading smoothly to white. His aura was a held breath between gull cries, the dying of the wind, pregnant with peace and stasis. It was a reflective calm between storms of holiday fun. It saturated the café to all of its nooks and corners, underlying all other auras like a slow tide, silently lullabying the punters and infusing the air with a state of indefinite gestation. It would linger in fullness for a long time afterwards, should he go out for a while, never completely dissipating at all, and it would gently fill up again in advance of his return.

“Ladies, come on … try the tart,” he wheedled.

The Three Hags clamped their mouths shut and shuddered. Their auras were blurs, competing for blandness: one pale pink, one lavender and one magnolia.

“Just a little taste. You can have a sample on the house.”

They gripped their handbags and turned their faces away, enjoying themselves, knowing they could never be persuaded.

“Try the tart!” yelled Susan Brown, but they were immutable in their chastity, impervious to all temptations save those so very small they barely qualified as such.

The light in the café darkened perceptibly and faces turned towards the door. Even Gypsy Woman, engrossed in unveiling the wisdom of the tarot, paused instinctively mid-revelation and peered up, causing Mary to turn and follow her gaze. Framed in the glass, facing the door, but not coming through, the figure of Vinegar Vera waited. Maeve2 saw the communal radiance contract and squirm slightly, a colourful grub suddenly pinned to a board. Only Gumbo’s blue remained smooth and untainted. He brushed the hair from his eyes, went over to the door and opened it wide, stepping right back to provide a clear berth.

“Hallo, Vee,” he said. She moved in, slow and purposeful, a battle-darkened warship in her great black coat, returning to port but ready for further fighting. She looked slowly down at him as she passed, checking he wasn’t an impostor, but she did not speak. In her wake came another figure, not quite so imposing, but still possessing shoulders wide and thick enough to facilitate the cracking of walnuts or the crunching of mid-weight wrestlers.

“Annie,” said Gumbo with a brief respectful nod. Annie acknowledged him with a small, slow yellow-eyed smile. At the back wall that faced the door Susan Brown was silently urging a quartet of students to vacate Vera and Annie’s table: First 1 (there are two tables numbered 1 in Gumbo’s: known as First 1 and Second 1, to avoid confusion). As she sensed the darkness approach behind her Susan Brown backed smoothly towards the thorax, scooping the air with her arms in a pantomime invitation for the young initiates to follow. They exchanged baffled smiles and mugged incomprehension, half tempted by the stunning crazy girl (probably a drama student), but altogether fixed to the spot by inexperience and doubt. Vera’s shadow fell over them and the two boys facing her looked up. The leader of the four was robust, good-looking and good-natured. His face, half way to the smile that lit his features so readily, froze where it was, held there like his world had stopped, giving him a strange look of serenity. Recognising him instantly as the leader, Vera drew his gaze into hers, so that he might look upon the void.

Heartbeats of eternity passed and he did not move. He saw the baby-like cast of her features, he felt the implacable strength of her physical being, he grew wraith-like beneath the knowledge of mortality that beamed from her eyes as if she were a lighthouse burning in hell, yet he did not move. Whether it was fear or ignorance, whether it was a death wish or some peculiar genetic trace of chauvinism, whether it was intended or involuntary, his body’s wisdom failed him and he did not move. The rest of the customers suddenly ceased experiencing the passage of time. Toktela paused in the cleaning of his forelegs and watched. Eternity stretched forth and grew thin. It was about to come to an end.

But then Gumbo made a little, deferential cough.

“I’ll, er … give you all a free coffee,” he said. The leader’s eyes turned slowly in their sockets: saw that Gumbo was nodding twitchily towards the thorax and wrinkling his nose in agreement that yeah, it probably was the best idea. Swivelling his eyes further the young man saw the frieze of faces, all turned his way in fascination, as if rapt by the discovery of a new kind of amoeba, wondering what it could do.

The humidity rose steeply around him and, with a level of surety he only ever experienced in dreams, he knew that it was appreciably cooler at the other tables. He climbed clumsily to his feet.

“Yeah … right …” he spluttered, stooped to gather coffee mug, plate of half eaten plum tart, notebook and pen, suddenly anxious to leave no trace of himself behind. The boy next to him, and the girl opposite him, quickly did the same. The remaining girl, who was sitting directly in front of, and with her back to, Vera cast about herself in confusion.

“What is it?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

Vera, internal fuse now spent, bent forward, gripped the sides of the back of the girl’s chair and lifted it, and her, out from the table. Finding her chair levitating, the girl gave a breathless little gasp, and then Vera tipped it to the side, spilling her towards the floor like she was emptying a bucket of piss out on the street of a Victorian slum. In one thoughtless movement of Zen Gumbo dipped forward, caught the girl, delivered her feet to the floor, eased her to a standing position and had her walking towards the thorax. She twitched with surprise and cast bewildered glances back over her shoulder while he talked soothingly and without pause of coffee and cake. With a silent sigh the customers returned to life. Toktela’s legs began to rub back and forth again.

Vinegar Vera and Annie took their places at First 1, backs to the wall, faces to the door. Vera’s colours unfolded against the wall behind her like wings: crimson, maroon, charcoal grey and pure innocent black, mottled delicately with clotted cream like ancient lungs run through with fat. Her aura was surprisingly beautiful, but Maeve2 always kept that to herself on point of principle, Vera being a monster and a killer. Annie’s colours were clownfish orange, white and black. The proportion of black varied according to her mood, and the orange could deepen to red or thin to yellow. The general view in Cylinder City was that Vera was the bull, Annie the cow, but a few believed it was the other way around. An even smaller number believed that they swapped their roles in private in accordance with the ebb and flow of some shared inner need, or the alignment of Mars with Jupiter.

MOONDANCE

It never rains in Cylinder City, yet now it did. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody looked up. Nobody looked down at the dark-spattered pavements and frowned. People continued to come and go, the entire city pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Maeve2 leaned on her elbows and stared without focus through the streaks running down the window, thinking virtually nothing at all, the painful pounding of her heart fluctuating erratically in its intensity, but held down to bearable levels. When it lurched suddenly she applied a counter pressure of mental will that kept it contained but left her feeling disassociated from her surroundings. It was then that a huge, suited shape, blurred through running rainwater and small, defocused eyes, but definitely possessing a blue head beneath a dark grey smudge of hat, slid into view. It paused, and then, just as she began to focus, moved again, opening the door, setting the bells jangling. Her heart shifted with a panicked determination, as if it were looking for a way out of her. Maeve2 was used to her heart communicating to her in a kind of physical sign language whenever she tuned out the synaesthesia borealis, as though it was a necessity for her to have some form of sixth sense operating at all times. Her heart was a mute, not averse to poking, punching or even kicking if necessary, to gain her attention; but now, as he stepped forward and looked down at her, it twisted and back peddled, flitting uncertainly against her ribcage and making no sense to her at all.

And her internal narrative suddenly opened up like a daisy beneath its first sky…

I will be Maeve. Maeve, number two. I won’t have expected to ever meet anybody more beautiful than Balast, not even another blue.

That could seem naïve of me, as Balast will be the only blue that had ever stepped foot in Cylinder City up until then, certainly the only one I had seen in the flesh anywhere. But I will know for sure that Balast is a beautiful soul, even amongst his beautiful people, and a great loss to their society, whether it is they that have exiled him or he who has exiled them. I may not always seem like much, but I will see the true stature of everyone I meet, and at seven and a half feet in height, and as wide and blue as the sky over Cylinder Bay, Balast’s physical presence will only be a fraction of his actual stature. It will set him apart from the other blues, in my eyes. In some ways they will all be alike. They will all be smooth and giant and muscular, not from the exercising of their obscene strength but from the restraint of it, every second of every minute. Any blue will be able to sit motionless for a year and still have a body as big and strong and hard as an orca, muscles kept toned and vital by the unending clench of their resolve. And they will all emit the invisible blue sparks that have escaped the burning embers of dark blue magic that is crushed down deep inside them and held in abeyance as a dense, long lasting fuel. But Balast … oh Balast … by the time his core energy has filtered up through the layers of his self-control, and out into the air around him, it will be purified. There will only be the merest hint of blue left. Now it will almost be white like the sparkling snow of high altitudes, brought down into the sun-trapped bay to melt and evaporate and ease our fever. And though there will be no one place in Cylinder City that isn’t palpating with some form of magic or other, I will have seen that the arrival of Balast’s presence is always gently yet powerfully transformative, much as the tide-like arrival of Gumbo’s aura, only deeper, heavier and colder. His artist’s shack will sit down on the bay by the cycle path, surrounded by an unlikely gathering of palms and conifers and broadleaf trees that all seem to be jostling elbows in their efforts to edge closer. It will have become deeply ingrained in the unspoken code of the people of Cylinder City that you must not impose yourself uninvited into the awareness of the blue man, and if you absolutely must pass through his grotto of deep green leaves, cool dark grass and buttery globs of sunlight, in the hope that he may appear, and maybe even meet your eye and grunt a reluctant acknowledgement, then you should at least lower your voices and keep moving, lest you break the spell and drive him away forever. It will seem that the best and only way to make his acquaintance will be to pretend that you haven’t noticed he is blue at all. He will be an avatar, trying to go unnoticed amongst the troglodytes. How could any living being compare …

The huge figure in the dark suit looked down at Maeve2 with tiny gleaming eyes and took off an incongruous pork pie hat. He was only about seven feet tall, and while he was more solidly built than any human had ever been, he didn’t come close to the wide sweeping proportions of Balast. But, as she looked up into those small bright eyes that seemed so shyly self aware, she was seeing his real stature, and her heart energy gushed outwards until it had filled her body and was streaming invisibly through her skin. She gaped helplessly. His voice came and it was velvet and humane, suffused with the kind of humility only great people can experience; it was effortlessly cultured, intimate and deeply respectful, all in one sentence.

“Could I have a filter coffee, please?”

Maeve2 just blinked for a while, and then she managed a nod. As she moved to get a coffee mug her knees bent under her weight and she sprawled along the floor behind the counter, eyes lodged open, hands twitching. Her shoulders began to shake. He came around to her side of the counter and she was aware of him putting her into the recovery position, lifting her head gently so that he could place a folded pair of oven gloves beneath it. Through a foundry of distorting senses she felt large blue fingers smoothing her hair tenderly and heard a warm blue voice soothing, shushing her, telling her it was all alright, steadily, continuously. His free hand took hers and held it, a solid, comforting presence that remained, anchoring her in space and time against the pull of her seizure. She somehow felt safe, even as the pulsing sounds of organic blast furnaces pressed down on her again and again.

His name was Moondance.

When she was well enough he put Maeve2 at table 2, made her into the customer, bringing her coffee and a reviving slice of lemon cake.

Her heart was still hurting her, making her arms shake, so she took two deep breaths, gathered her resolve, and allowed the synaesthesia borealis to flood back. The pain and discomfort eased immediately as his aura uncoiled around him, a whirlpool in reverse. The world washed blue, sunk beneath a quiet wave, until it was fathoms deep. The walls shifted with webs of light. Dark blue. Mid-blue. Pale blue. Concentric bands of patterning rotated around him in alternate directions, their paisley curlicues furling and unfurling like sea horses.