ROUND TOUR

"The meek shall inhairit the irth, as long as worter continyoos to flo under brijjes."

The words carved into the plaque above the door, despite being misspelt, were vaguely familiar to Steven, as if it were a line from a poem that he had learned by heart as a child - a real sledgehammer of a punishment, it had been - but which even parrots couldn't memorise perfectly, for love or money (or even birdseed).

The whole situation had an echo of a dream, a version of deja vu that had been implicated with reality's spectrum at its least believeable point. Life for Steven had indeed become a precarious offshoot from the circle which, as a child, he thought to be endless. Ever since his wife left him, holidays were two-footed - and here he was touring an area that he'd not toured before ... even further west than geography could substantiate.

He was so dog tired and parrot pickled, this place with the funny words outside, purporting to be an inn as it did, became almost half welcoming. He was rather surprised how countryside could look 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 was not really the hiking trip he'd first envisaged when sitting in his city bedsit. Even the odd building or two were either stinking cowsheds or detached slums with doors hanging off - and urchins in the yard playing ugly.

Steven had today passed under a high aqueduct carrying Narrow Boats along a stretch of canal. These garish craft he jokingly depicted as nervous aeroplanes or stream-lined parrots. He laughed, suspecting real aeroplanes must have hidden strings - how could they stay up in the sky, otherwise?

That had been his one proper act of sight-seeing all day. And he did not now feel like erecting a tent tonight. He desperately yearned for a real bed with clean crisp sheets and plump pillows. The day had been like a dream with life thrown in for good measure. Like those crazy canal boats, he felt he wanted to moor himself for the night on the firm ground of sleep, as it were, in the hope of real dreams making more sense.

Having forced his way through a clutch of foul-mouthed brats, he knocked on the door beneath the plaque. The building was, unusually for this area, in reasonable repair, each window shutter on two hinges and the pebbledash less like a dreadful disease than that on the walls of other buildings hereabouts. Even the soot stains were minimal, if slightly pinker. It was a pity, therefore, when the front door toppled inwards upon his knocking.

A beautiful wench was standing in what must have previously been a dark hallway, since she blinked furiously at the intruder. Not that Steven considered himself to be an intruder, more an unexpected visitor, a stranger losing his strangeness by the second. It wasn't his fault that this place had half the look of an inn: a single shutter was not only open upstairs but had the word HOSSPISS crudely painted on it. Could the fact that his polite knocking had caused the door to collapse in a shower of splinters be laid at his door?

"Yes?"

The voice was as lovely as her face ... except the teeth were rather protruding. Her shortish frock flowed around her thighs like silky satin. Her unhaltered breasts were seemingly full plum-tipped and readily graspable. But then he noticed the chipped china chamber-pot positioned between her feet.

"Excuse me ... I don't know, but ... I thought you were an inn ... I'm very tired ... have you a room for the night?"

"With a bed?" The wench's question took him by surprise. "You see, we have some guests who don't need beds - even at the start of their stay."

In the distance behind him, he heard the unmistakeable sound of a canal boat horn. He even thought he could hear the rattle of lock paddles being worked, followed by the surge of water from the pound. Did he really want to stay here at all. Perhaps a ramshackle barn or, even, a haystack would suffice.

He whimpered a reply to the wench and fled so peremptorily he thankfully couldn't retain in his mind what they may have had time to do together. So, it was a mystery how he knew the inn had coffins, instead of real beds, slum coffins which would fall apart soon as one laid one's weary body upon their back-scratcherfuls of crumbly earth.

As Steven sluggishly returned to the straight and narrow circle of his life back home in the city, the anaemic amnesic parrot in his head couldn't remember much about the touring holiday at all, let alone why his subsequent monthly dreams featured the buxom wench necking him in the dark hallway amid an incessant splattering noise between her feet.

DF Lewis

Weirdmonger

Redsine

Drowse

Veils and Piques

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