10. REVENGE

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (10)

FOREWORD

Regrets

THE TALE

The mist and amorphous nothing that was everything started taking shape. Not at once, not in a moment of being one thing and then another, but slowly so that it was far from easy to detect the change. Until, that is, a chequered plain stretched in all directions around the cloud or whatever it was that was all that was left of Cyril Boniface.

You die in one place, he thought, realising that’s what he must have done, to wander like a lost soul in another, a pawn in God’s chess game …“It’s not quite like that,” said a voice, “in fact, not like that at all, there being no player called God. A daft concept that’s kept humanity its thrall for far too long. Don’t you sometimes feel the rhythm of words in your head…?”

He was beginning to feel perky, so he replied “I might if I had a head, but I seem to have left it behind.”

“We all have heads even if you can’t see or feel them,” replied the speaker, “take me, for instance. I’m a poet, or at least I was a poet, and a jolly good poet at that. Will Shakespeare went on to claim the fame because he wasn’t stabbed to death in an Inn over a pint of nectar and I was. But if I’d stayed with the flesh and the head of a mortal then I may well have cast dear old Will into the shade good and proper. But who can tell, eh? On lonely nights or days or hours or seconds we debate it, Will and I, and it’s a good job there’s no such thing as time in this afterlife or we’d fill it to overflowing with all of our jabbering!”

“Have you seen Gwennie?” asked Cyril, fed up with the speaker’s proud self opinion. “I’m here and I’m looking for the lady from the middle floor flat. Gwennie she said she was and I want to find her to see if she has a moment she chooses to spend with me.

“You don’t want Gwennie!” scoffed the poet, “for she’s not here yet, and yet she is here because, and I found this confusing so you might, we’re all here for all of eternity, for ever, and yet we’re not.”

“You’re right,” murmured Cyril, “I do find it confusing.”

“I thought you might sirrah! But look around you and see this chunk of eternity for what it might be. Remember chess boards? Squares on which kings and queens and their courtiers sit and move around and enjoy defeat or victory? Now see what you see as an endless array of chess squares, and look for your queen. She may yet be opn one of them, contemplating her next move.”

Cyril looked and saw the squares and saw the queens. Loads of queens, all so noble he wanted to bow there and then, but couldn’t because he lacked a body with which to do anything like bowing.

“Hey, who do you think you’re looking at?” squeaked Daisy Walcott as was. “Looking up my skirts I shouldn’t wonder like all the old men do when I’m at the bar! Look up to see what you might see, and get a shock when you can’t see it!”

“Gwennie…?” asked Cyril.

“Daisy, or at least I was Daisy,” came the reply, “you’ve just got to move down the line a bit, chum! We’re a lonely lot here, especially those of us who got a taste for society before a scoundrel stabbed us with blades and stole our lives, eh Kit?”

The poet laughed. Not out loud because nothing in this new strange Afterlife was done out loud, and if it was then it wouldn’t mean a jot because nobody had ears to hear with.

“If I’d lived,” he said, I’d have outshone one and all with the neatness of my iambic pentameters and the sweetness of my rhyming couplets! I’d have created dramas the like of which would be walked by clowns on the boards of any stage down any year you would mention, not that we have years here, so that doesn’t matter. No sir, not one jot. What matters is Daisy here, for she came here so young and all because she saw the scoundrel that pricked me as he did it. And now that scoundrel is here and I would ask him why?”

“Aw, Kit, I loves you,” whispered Daisy Walcott, making as if she was pulling a pint that wasn’t there, but doing it anyway.

“I know you do, Cherubim, it’s writ all over your words, and here we have him, this Cyril Boniface who was the rogue with the blade, the one who plunged it into me, and he says he loves Gwennie, and she was you, so how can you go and do indecencies with the bladed man who stole my breath from me? From your Kit Marlowe?”

“I’d kill him rather!” wailed Daisy Walcott, “I’d torture him first, of course, make him bleed a little, but not too much, and slowly peel away those organs with which he would deflower me… That’s what I’d do, and I’ll tell you this, he wouldn’t like it.”

“But you can’t, sadly,” sighed Kit, “for this Cyril creature is and is not the enemy that smote me!”

And at that Cyril Boniface sunk to his knees, or would have done had he got any knees, and declaimed silently, because everything said had to be silent now that it was a different sort of life they were living, “I would cut my own throat for my sin,” he said, “because I’m remembering my guilt! Yes, I was paid to still your heart, and was paid by the queen at that! But what is solid politics in a solid world is nonsense in this, so I apologise full heartily for what I did to you.”

“You stole my career, denied generations the essence of my wit and my words,” sighed Kit, “and now you would come here and try to steal the wench who died for love of me? ‘Tis a dreadful state of affairs, eh Daisy?”

“But it wasn’t me!” protested Cyril, “but maybe an early version of me when I was learning to settle into my skin. Or our skin. That was the wretch that pricked you, yet all my life I lived as a good man knowing love and hope and all the good things a man can know, and living thus I knew nothing of Christopher Marlowe and his works nor of blades and the subterfuge of the state!”

“Yet you must be punished,” murmured Kit.

“Unpeel his gonads!” giggled Daisy, “for it is with those he would attack me and render me faithless to the King of this game.”

“Alas,” mourned Kit Marlowe, “he has no gonads, no need for them here, just his unfleshed heart and regrets.”

And the chessboard shrunk until it was just the sixty-four squares of any old chessboard and not the infinite one with infinite queens stalking a world that never was.

Cyril tried to sink to his knees again, but he had no knees.

“Move on,” ordered Daisy, “for there are other shadows for you to see before the sun goes out.”

And as she spoke she and the poet were gone, and all the squares save one were back to being mist. He looked for the sun that might go out, but there wasn’t one.

He was alone on the chess board, a pawn in tears that wouldn’t flow.

“Carry on!” ordered a voice from the shadows.

© Peter Rogerson, 19.03.20