He had come expecting nothing, but receiving everything.  She knew that his eyes were innocent, whilst her own eyes read more like an erotic book, one that was kept behind the encyclopædias in a timeless library.
     She took Anthony by the hand and, as hostess, few questioned her right to do this to any guest.  He had forgotten the young woman with whom he had arrived: the one who had not been invited in the first place and had become the fiction he had always wanted to write about in words of gold leaf.  Now, his new mistress took his soul and played with it as a kitten would with a ball of wool.  She had thrust him before her into a whole area of interlocking boudoirs, in each one of which she taught him dalliances far beyond birthright and even death.
    And, today, Anthony returns, this time without the fiction of other loves.  He has bailed out his son, as best he could.  History has taken a turn against the money-spinners, so Anthony's a trifle broke, somewhat spent.  His son accompanies him to the house, as goose-cook.  He's better than any valet, since he's part of Anthony's own body.  He's Anthony's  attempt at reincarnation.  The son's forward thrust would be Anthony's, or as good as.  Anthony totes him like a broadsword out of its sheath.
     The house is still there, a tall-chimneyed affair, rising from the mists like a rigger upon the rolling sea of meadows.  Indeed, it's as if the mists themselves create it or give it shape ... bigger than anything he remembers about it.
     The overgrown gardens, despite their untended appearance, are at once luxuriant and circumspect.  The gardener, whose face was modelled on a sculpture once seen in a glossy art book, is evidently still about, despite his great age.  The door's cobwebbed over—an entrance to a fairy story upon a slumbering day that knows no end nor, for that matter, beginning.  His son tries the handle, for what it's worth.  Then footsteps approach to open it from within.
     Anthony cannot bear to look.  So he turns his back to the door, only to see that the day has grown hazier, for the path through the gardens is curtained over with false memory and unguarded doubt.  He, of all people, feels he never existed.  The last coins of his fortune weigh his pockets down, but is merely loose change.
     He faces round as the great door swings wide and out steps one who's a dead ringer for his son's mother, but younger and prettier than he remembers her.  And both father and son catch a corner of her mouth in a gentle kiss.
     In wordless movements, she escorts them into a room of great elegance.  It contains too many windows, and a scent that floats into Anthony's nostrils, carrying with it memories of a time long disappeared.  The garden can be viewed through the giant shards of glass, with repulsive weeds creeping outrageously over the sills.  The house's green surroundings are as decrepit as Anthony's bones.
     Languishing scandalously upon a hideously-patterned chaise longue is ... she.  The one.  The only one, the teacher of lessons, the mistress of delight, the watcher over all the lonely souls that exist in their respective worlds of joyful hope.  Anthony's chest pounds vigorously, like a sledgehammer battering at his heart.  Age has treated her admirably.  He is instantly drawn to the mischievous twinkle of her eyes.  Nothing appears to have changed in her queendom.  She rules ... and teaches.  And yearns for fresh pupils.
     "It's been a long time, Anthony," she says, beckoning father and son to be seated beside her, on the chaise longue that he guesses has definitely seen all the secrets that the house possesses.
     The girl remains standing by the window.  Anthony is able to see the shadowy figure of her nakedness through the transparent gown she is wearing.  Viewed thus, side-on, she is wholesome, homely and erotic.  His soul shivers.
     "This is my daughter," says the hostess, sweeping her slender, ringless fingers in the direction of the virtual angel, "her name is Selena."
     A daughter!  Anthony had not known of such an offspring.  He wondered about the father's identity.  "This is my son."
     Her expression ought to have altered, but to Anthony's surprise she clings to the statuesque grimace that bites at her features.  She isn't playing the game, he thinks.  He almost scolds her, but only mentally.
     "So..." she mutters, as though no further words are necessary.
     Anthony latches on to this utterance like a fly clutching at a cobweb.  "My son requires learning."  He could think of no better instructress.
     She pauses for some seconds, as though deliberately teasing.  Anthony feels very old.  Thirty summers have gnawed at his flesh since their warm encounter; a long time since youth curled itself around his bones and offered so much optimism.
     "I hear you are now penniless - coins that only create shapes within the earth, then vanish, like the meaninglessness that money truly is," she says, her piercing eyes stabbing at his gaze, robbing him of his trembling bravado, causing him to slip into a deep funk.  "You mustn't forget the fee, Anthony.      You of all people ought to be aware of the fee, the exchange of desires."
     With his eyes he tells her of his slight annoyance.  The two youngsters wait in silent vigil, like soulful lambs expectant of slaughter.
     "I can meet the fee," Anthony declares unconvincingly.
     "What do you offer?"
     He hesitates before delivering the boom.   "My death."  A quivering gasp from Selena, a cry from the lips of his beleaguered son.  "It's all I have.  All I have left."
     "And you expect me to accept this?  Your death?  Death is empty coinage, as far as I am concerned."
     "I demand you accept it.  My son requires learning, and I can think of no better teacher."
     There is a lapse in conversation, and Anthony seizes this in order to drag out those memories, the ones he has tucked into a secure corner of his mind, a box that he keeps locked for reasons of sanity.  He opens it and out jump the leaping harpies, the images of silken boudoirs, temptress smells together with other things that cause him to tingle inside.  His memory is as overgrown as the weeping weeds that lurk like hell-fiends in the outside greenery.  And as he closes the lid of the box once again, he fancies that this seductress has accepted the payment of death on many occasions.
     In a different story, they would have lived happily ever after as a nuclear family ... at least for a while.  Anthony would have taken over the gardening, dropping the coins one by one into the holes that the dibbler left, hoping against even hope that they will grow into the tallest sun-flowers to hide the elfin abode from the prying eyes of the looming future.  Someone writes it out, this different story, as if Anthony were someone else, pretending that reality could be contained in the merest words, to be hidden in a book which, in its turn, could be hidden behind the encyclopædias in a library hidden beyond time.
     He only hopes to die before his son does.

    He closes his eyes and opens them again.  Death is not an easy gift to give.
    Nothing has changed, for there is the chair, the table, the bookcase, just where they were a few seconds ago.  However, over the years, it has been maintained that there is no such thing as continuity of existence, simply the impression of such.  Like money, it is only what one believes it to be. He feels younger; this place becomes almost half welcoming.  But he is rather surprised how the countryside outside the house's jurisdiction can look so run down.  Cities and towns, yes.  But for forests, hills, rivers and fields to be dilapidated, dirty brown grass, with shaggy trees and misshapen hedgerows, droopy horses pissing twenty four to the dozen, doleful cows dragging their red-raw udders along the stubbly ground, threadbare sheep tugging pitifully at the tussocks for sustenance only to spew them out again with yawning bleats ... well, this is not really the pilgrim's end he first envisaged when trawling wealth points in the city.  Even the odd building or two that remains within sight are either stinking cowsheds or detached slums with doors hanging off—and urchins in the yard playing ugly.
     Is he the same person as he was when a child?  Is there uniform consistency between the brat and the braggart?  Is he born again every morning?  Does he wrap himself in winding-sheets, every night?  What is the difference between cause and effect?  Does he fall asleep because of tiredness?  Or does sleep actually forge the tiredness as a necessary precursor for sleep?  What comes first: the Christmas fowl or its Easter egg?  The Child, is it really Father of the Man?
     He started out life as a baby, he was told.  Then he grows into the lengthening infant, the long pig of a man who breakfasts in bed each morning of coddled chitterling eggs, lean bacon rashers just on the turn, pure white honey from mountain pupæ, thick slices of bread toasted evenly thoughout and, to wash it all down, spring water whipped with a thousand natural flavours from the garden surrounding Selena's house.  She delivers these breakfasts with breasts tantalisingly half on show.
     He often sits in the secret garden (now safeguarded from the outer stubble by walls) debating with himself the whys and wherefores of God's existence.  Why is God so damn important anyway to warrant such debate on His own existence?  The mysterious interface of body and mind, of cause and effect, even the very illogic of logic itself, all stirs his enquiring mind.
     He actually applies himself to his own human existence as a topic worthy of doubt.  Come-uppance is always lurking round the corner in the shape of Selena.
     Their conversations are as if they have been plucked straight off poetic, literary gold-edged pages.
     "I had dreams," she says, "of a man who found the key to the erotic pain that underlay my innocence.  He said there was a tiny finger in my sweet gash, beckoning him..."
     "If he was in your dreams, Selena, my father, by such gift of death rather than dying outside of dreams in the natural course of things, was by definition without any existence ever."
     "Yes, but when I woke up, bits of me were often missing—a ventricle of my golden heart, a leprous tip of liver he must have fancied for his breakfast, the third rib down on the left..."
     "My father plundered the cupboards of your body in search of fizziness for his loins, then?" he asks, pointblankly.
     "Yes, but there were bits and pieces on the outside of my body missing, too."  She lifts the worm-silk blouse to reveal a missing breast.  "And he left me with things,too."  She raises her several comb-stitched skirts to reveal a strange flower sprouting from the afforested groin.
     He skips to the end like a happy school-girl, to the end of all such endless conversations in the Pagoda which, during the long light evenings, a pagan god called Pan will earwig, needing the gold-tooled words of Life’s rich stuffing for Death’s feast.
     Being one of those items left by Anthony inside his own mother, the son decides to grow up at last, become the philosopher in a university town far beyond the scrubland of the country house.  He becomes entrammelled with what comes first.  Is it the elfin lore of transformational structuralism, new mathematics, logical negativism, syllogistic phenomenalism, lingam semantics or, simply, ontological anthropomorphism?
     Selena waves away such strange pretentiousness as the young Anthony lies in bed, one day, trying to forget that boxes can harbour corpses as well as titillating Pandoras.  She has decided it is time for something more than just letting her single breast hang loose within her blouse.
    Anthony skulks around the dead bushes that lined the outskirts of the ruined garden, wondering how it has transformed into such a barbarous place.  He unwillingly absorbs the treacherous reek, one that reminds him of the soiled nappies of a dozen not-so-newborns.  In the distance he can see the ancient gardener, his features heavy with the awesome task that his employ demands.  He is snipping the ugly bits of weeds, the brown-rather-than-green siblings of nature.  Anthony then perceives a soft hand upon one of his most hoary bones and he slips out of his daydream to observe the thrilling countenance belonging to Selena.
     "Why is the garden so devoid of life?" he asks.  It is almost a demand to know.
     With a lukewarm grimace she replies.  "Instead of fertiliser, there is death.  Instead of rampant roots, there is death.  So much death.  Death, indeed, is life's mould..."

    Anthony does not answer and he succumbs to the tugging of his hand as he is led into the house, past crumbling brickwork and gruesome walls, unhinged doorways and light bulbs that threaten to drop to the floor with a shattering delight.  Upon entering a perfumed boudoir he does not realise how unclothed he has become until he begins to shiver.  Selena displays her flesh like a foolhardy enchantress, a debauchee of great experience.  They vanish into the bedclothes, their souls dancing some frenzied dance.  She opens her mouth to his and he takes a diabolical pleasure in placing his old lips around the pulsating pustules of her gleaming tongue, sucking until they burst in a tremble; then he takes in the leaking, oozing pus and bile that flow like glue from a crushed tube.  It is like tasting death.  Licking damp and mould and clay.
     He closes his eyes as she snakes her sole breast across his chest and, when he opens them again, he is horrified to find that the bed has turned to sand.  Ignoring the salacious embrace, he reaches out to touch the breast.  It is quite warm, as if the sun's rays have nestled in its luxury and redness.  He watches and, as their bodies tumble and topple in turbulent unison, he notices how the tiny grains cling to his dry skin.  And then, in order to traumatise him to a much further degree, he realises that he is no longer an ancient one.  He is the young Anthony again.
     "What is this?"  He is full of questions this morning.
     Selena takes her tongue away from his flushed cheek.  "The sands of time.  The sands of death?"  And then she thrusts her jaws upon his shoulder and sinks her shredded molars into the flesh that trembles there.
     He gathers a handful of sand and allows it to fall between his fingers and back on to the bed.  He imagines potter's clay reaped from primest cemetery mould, then dried and minced...
     With a jolt of shock he realises that his old bones have come back.  The sands of time?  He ponders.  Is this a dream?  Does time exist in dreams?  Is he truly old or is he meant to be young?  Does the unholy physics of time prevent him from seeking such a truth?  Does the passage of time only exist in reality and, if so, is this reality?  Or a dream?
     Returning to the real world, whatever this happens to be, he finds that Selena has opened her thighs to reveal the wild flower that pirouettes from her gash's pink gleam.  Separated only by inches, he reaches out and snatches it in his teeth, proceeding to wrestle with this strange thing like a dog with a rag doll.  The flower is wilting and close to death, yet still he possesses no strength to yank it to freedom.  Selena is crying out in terrible ecstacy, yelling out like a demented banshee through her sand-drenched lips.  Anthony starts to panic, which increases when the two of them begin to sink into the pit of sand, disappearing as though swirling in quicklime.  In seconds, although he still refuses to believe that time does exist in dreams, they are gone, out of this world, his paramour's shrieks now muffled and wholly insignificant.  Anthony is then taken by blackness.
     The sands of death?  Excavations are evidently in order.  Up, up, up from the silt that surges within yellow whirlpools of molten ground.  He has not brought his son to this house only for him to be drugged to the gills with such impure grit.  Only the unshaded whiteness of fine-calibre cuts will be good enough for a son of Anthony's.  Not dust-atomic nor granular, but fibrous and splintful, retaining its unsullied purity till even it is exgurgitated as the whitest possible shit.  Capable of being used again and again and again...
     Selena wakes him from his new revery. This time, words still hang about as if they have not yet been used to describe anything—words like "dibbler", "elfin abode", "doleful cows", "God's existence", "worm-silk blouse", "ontological anthropomorphism", "foolhardy enchantress", "unholy physics",  "pulsating pustules"....
     He senses—and so does she—that someone is rescuing the whirling words from the fast crumbling paper ... and salvaging them for some super-nothingness not unlike an infinite cobweb of know-how, similar to those spider ones that stretch in the misty mornings across the larchen glades and from fingerpost to fingerpost.  More is the pity that these posts do lean, having suffered many a  battering from heavy-uddered beasts as they traipse across the no man's land outside the house's precincts.
     In the distance, Anthony can barely discern the figure of a man with a goose under his arm and a chef's hat on his head.  At last!  Someone is answering the advert he hung from the four-armed, four-noosed hanging-post (a family gibbet) that vies with the leaning fingerposts as a landmark.  All that is needed now was a new gardener—one who will work for next to nothing bearing in mind the threadbare nature of Selena's purse (and his)—and everything will be tickety-boo.
     Meanwhile, he scrapes the clayy sludge off Selena's body, in hefty wadges; the way the sand has caked up is quite frightening.  It is like releasing a pal from some joke beach burial when summer holidays are as endless as death now seems to be.  Selena stirs.
     "It really hurt my insides when you tried to wrench out that flower..."  Her voice is surprisingly spry.  "I felt it even in my head as well as down there.  A pain you can't explain, since who could have felt such a pain before?  And there are no words for excruciating things like that."
     "I'm sorry." And with tears in his eyes he lightly brushes her brow with a kiss.
     "True love does not need any riches to bolster it," she murmurs, beckoning him to release the middle part of her torso from the sand.
     Anthony nods, noticing that, as he uncovers the top half of her body, the sand has formed into a mud-pack and, as he unpeels it, he sees it  retains the mould of two empty breasts, not one.
    The bathwater swishes and swirls around the breastless form that belongs to Selena, as Anthony gazes on, as if in a nonchalant trance, dripping sponge in hand.  Still amazed at the things his dainty eyesight has perceived, he gently wipes off the clinging, clutching specks of yellowy brown stuff which has suckered themselves on to her brazen skin.  They come away like leeches from a flesh wound. He touches her in places that perhaps only he is allowed to touch.  And as he performs these acts of intimacy he wonders when the time will come, the wretched time of death that has been promised but not yet delivered, rather akin to the glowing kisses of flesh-teasers.
     His thoughts jingle and jangle inside his head like abandoned words in a slush-pile.  Each idea that comes to his mind vanishes as soon as he conjures another one.  His memory is waning, rather like his bones.  Yet still the image returns—the mould of two empty breasts staring him fully in the features.  He reaches across and dabs with the sponge at the lonely jelly-wobbling delight that Selena makes so available to him.
     "I think I may be going mad," he says in a tone that can make a killjoy cry, "I dream, or do I hallucinate?  I see things, or do I merely glance inside my head?  I hope to perceive reality or am I just dabbling with my imagination?"
     "You think about death too much," Selena murmurs.
     Their more-than-cosy tête-à-tête is then interrupted as a jovial figure enters the bathroom, devoid of the politeness and etiquette involved in such dramatic appearances.  Anthony recognises the chef's hat.  This culinary person is holding a tray, chubby fingers wrapped around the silver edges.  His grip seems so tight, as if he is steadfastly clinging to the very edges of the earth, pondering whether to choose life or death in such a fantastic predicament.  His face glows like a beacon of light, as though he has placed the sunshine over his head, his cheeks appearing as roasted as chestnuts.  A smile seems so mandatory considering his convivial demeanour.
     "Breakfast!" he declares.
     Anthony is instantly intrigued, for it happens to be almost the middle of the afternoon, and surely not a time for such early morning nibblings.  It appears that time has become unpredictable, and not to be trusted, since his otherworldly experience in the sands of time.  Or has it been the sands of death?
    "But... we didn't ask for... breakfast?" replies the bewildered and bemused Anthony, his nerves atremble and his dreams aflutter.
     The chef's grin spreads horizontally into a see-or-not-believe monstrosity, the sides of his mouth seemingly as far apart as London and the coast.
     "Ask not and ye shall receive," he says, attempting to unmagically construct some wisdom he ought not to possess.
     Anthony conceives a terrible faux pas, but refuses to mention it, as he himself has committed plenty during his period of existence.  He exchanges glances with Selena, observing her uneasiness in the strange company of this intruder.  The chef then lifts the gleaming silver lid that conceals the palatable offerings.  Anthony declines to comprehend the object that lay silent and bleeding beneath the lid.  Selena starts to howl like a trapped fox.

    Does this remarkable and treacherous figure of frolic actually expect him to believe that upon that plate is spread... Selena's missing breast?  Blood-drenched and jiggle-less, as still as a speared jellyfish.  Together with a side dish of hairy warts and throbbing pustules, creeping pus and fœtid flakes of flesh.  Anthony, following a suppressed retch, looks across at the dripping wet and yowling Selena.  Some sounds leave his lips, although he is far too mesmerised to realise their exact nature.  Selena's chest displays a horror that is too grotesque for his stabbed nerves.
     No breasts.  No breasts!
     "Surely this must be a dream?" he rages, his eyes darting into the chef's, as lethal as javelins flung by a steroid-mad athlete.
     But his words are unheeded, and in the distance he spies a lurking figure of darkness approaching.  Shabby clothing stuck to this fellow's dirt-encrusted form like alien glue.  He carries an ugly grey colour with him as he tip-toes into the bathroom, more tip than toe in fact.  His mud-soaked laceless boots fetch dark footprints into the room, as incriminating as a Cluedo dagger left in the library—and no gloves.  Anthony lets out an unintentional startled cry as he recognises this wretch as the mysterious gardener.  The second part of his gibbet advert has not yet been answered.
     The stink that reeks from this green-fingered figure clings to the walls like distasteful tiles.  His eyes are glazed and featureless, as if he has devoured toadstools and not mushrooms.  Froth bubbles rabidly from in between his rotting, Signal-free molars and down the infested stubble of his chin.  Anthony detects a certain death-like quality in this absurd fellow.  But before his wonder can wander and before he attempts to distinguish between dream and reality again, the smell-drenched gardener reaches across to offer Selena a putrid gift.
     "A flower to accompany your breakfast," he says in a lazy drawl, reminiscent of unshovelled compost in summertime.
     Between his decaying fingers he holds a flower, dead and empty.  Anthony recognises it at once, for he is still able to recall the pungent taste as he twists it between his teeth.  It is the flower ... Selena's extra-personal gash-bloom.
     She seems to be all out of screams, as she splashes around in the water, searching the pink folds of her sweet prefumed garden.  She splays the forest of pube-hairs and looks into the cooling, foamless waters.  And then she does scream.
     Her flower has been plucked.

"The Bud is Mother of the Mulch."
                                  Rachel Mildeyes
from Menorrhagia And Marriage vol iii Gardens and Kitchens

"Blood to sand, flesh to coldest gold;
A dream of wealth, a dream of health,
A dankly acre of death and mould."

from William Blake's The Easing Flesh Book IX
 

The End