1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

on ”, with reference to the sets, the costumes, the star performances,
pastiche, the social construction of reality and romance. He pondered the
roles played by animals, and photography, and Jerzy Kosinki’s Zinoviev, and
Kosinski’s suicide, and Kosinksi’s last big book, the self-obsessed referencedrenched
, which ends with a quotation in bold,
.
Later, his essay incomplete, brooding on the Kosinksi as well as on (the
hydrolysis presumably wouldn’t start for some considerable time) the
penultimate paragraph of
, Plomer crawled into the darkest
quarter of the wardrobe. It was also the wettest, but it was peaceful there,
just him and the dozen or so headlice which nested and feasted and partied
in the dense shrubberies of his ears and nostrils.
He knew he was playing for time and maybe there was less left than he
realised. Maybe now was the moment to leave the wardrobe. He would
develop a taste for black coffee and Gauloises. He would go and live in a
geodesic dome. He could change his name to Cromer or Switchman or even
Switchman Cromer (or perhaps Cromer Switchman). Maybe he should get
into space travel. As a bald, worm-like, wrinkled creature of indeterminate
gender and with no interest in copulation he didn’t think he’d be fazed by
aliens. In fact aliens would probably warm to him heaps more than some two
metre tall slab of blue-eyed muscle with a throbbing penis, a meagre,
reactionary and a reading age of thirteen. What’s more his
long, lonely years in the wardrobe were a perfect training ground for the
monotonous rigours of space travel.
He thought he could handle Mars. The views weren’t so good as in and
around Chamonix but there was sand there and punts and intriguing
phenomena like the blue shimmering soft fiery globes he’d read about in
. They sounded more intriguing than a lot of the
things that happened on planet earth, like the freak whirlwind at Suttonon-Trent
which occurred on the Tuesday following the crash. Caused by a
huge drop in air pressure in the aftermath of the royal death, it cast some
forty pugs into the air, lifting them abruptly and causing them to fly
distances of up to half a mile. Astonished onlookers saw them, high above
the rooftops, writhing and swirling around until they plummeted down
again, crashing among chimney pots and tiles. There were dead pugs
everywhere.
It was only later, after he’d removed a pesky, escaped eyelash from his left
eye, that Plomer re-examined the source of this information and recognised
his error.
(September 1997)
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