Preliminary exercises for a short story

These exercises preceded the writing of Bread and Wine for Eight. The first is an account of a real life incident involving Dan and Ruby. The second explores Dan’s motivation. The third describes the location in which the story is set. The fourth is the dialogue that might have taken place. Much of the material in these four exercises does not make it into the story, and the story itself ends up going quite an unexpected direction.
 
1. Dan and those taps Dan’s sense of himself as a spiritually evolved being had been stoked by a cocktail of cannabis, MDA and what Ruby somewhat wryly called Sacred Sex. Dan had lived through the sixties, but never actually been there. He’d heard of hallucinations, but never had one – until now. As he walked down the steps to get a glass of water for his inexplicably dry throat, he saw that the record player was working, but he could hear no sound. Wonder flooded him as he realised that he was having an auditory hallucination. All the hallucinations he’d heard about until then had been visual: seeing what wasn’t there or what ordinarily wasn’t perceived. If vision did this, maybe all the senses did it. And if you sometimes saw that was not there, maybe you sometimes didn’t hear what was there. What other explanation could there be for not being able to hear what the player was clearly putting out. As he entered the kitchen he was startled to see that taps at the kitchen sink had become invisible. Two black holes stared back up him from where the taps were fitted. Shaken by the unexpected confirmation of what he’d half suspected about the material world, he applied the lesson he taught himself the first time he spun out on cannabis: stay calm, realise that things are often not as they seem; there is an objective reality which your mind knows; do as your mind would bid you do – act on what you know to be true, and no one will ever know that you are a seething mass of emotional chaos. So pick up the glass. Put your hand where you know the tap is. Turn it on and fill the glass with water. Then go and tell Ruby what an amazing thing just happened. Dan picked up the glass and reached for the tap. But his hand just went straight through the space where the tap was. Now he was really spooked. “Oh my God!” he gasped. “I’ve become trans-substantial!” a conclusion he drew on the basis of what he’d heard about another spiritually evolved being – the guy who walked right through the wall of the room where his friends were hiding out from the thugs who’d killed him three days earlier. Utterly agog with the realisation of expectations he’d barely dared to say out aloud, be bolted up the stairs to tell his lover what had happened.
“What taps” said Ruby. “There’s no taps there. They haven’t been put in yet.”


2. About Dan Dan paced as he rehearsed, anticipating his moment of truth. Not since high adolescence, when others his age were exploiting their infatuation with one another’s bodies as he lavished his passion on the new rituals of his church, had he been so intently focused on the drama of prayer. His slim stooped frame, the very model of supplication, his powerful baritone voice, the perfect instrument for a God in need of being heard, not to mention the patiently nurtured trust of those who would be his first congregants, would take care of the externals. But his qualms about the legitimacy of what he was about to do drove his zeal for the interior efficacy of his prayer. Denied ordination to the priesthood because of his sexual orientation, he had shifted his focus from liturgy to social justice, and watched mournfully as the conservative rump of his former church trivialised its ceremonies and drove out anyone with an enquiring mind by their authoritarian intolerance of debate. For three decades he absorbed the contributions of people who would otherwise have been strangers, to the larger picture of what it means to he human, and learned decency from those whom the pious judged as damned. Thirty years of enduring self righteous bigotry might have embittered most people. But Dan was not most people. As a boy he’d fallen in love with God. Now, at almost 60 years of age, he was about to consummate that love. After three decades of denial, he was about to hold the sacred elements in hands that had never lost their need for sacred gesture.

3. The address is ? William Henry St The address is ? William Henry St Glebe. It’s a terrace house in a row that’s being refurbished on the outside by a builder. The owners are taking care of the interiors. The front door is a jewel of coloured and bevelled glass. It opens into a hall that leads to a stairway. Two cherubim stand guard. To the left another door , a maze of inlaid wood, opens into a dining room. It appears at first glance to have very little in it: a table with eight chairs and a sideboard. But as the eye catches the finish the furniture reveals itself as the love child of a craftsman besotted with wood. Polished with a mixture of bee’s wax and myrrh, the room is filled with a subtle but powerful fragrance that evokes in all who enter the sense of being present to the whole of what exists, and gives a wholly redeemed meaning to the otherwise pejorative jibe: the odour of sanctity. Two candle sticks on the sideboard are crowned with bee’s wax candles inlaid with intense red and green runes. They have blackened wicks. The ceiling is Art Deco pressed metal painted a faint silver gum extending down the walls to a picture rail. The rail and ceiling highlights are silver grey, and the walls below a darker tone of the ceiling colour. A floor to ceiling bay window with fan light is draped with narrow tapestries in reds and greens. An Aeolian harp is fitted onto the lintel. On the wall opposite hangs a wide mirror framed in ceramic tile. It is heavily smoked so that any image it reflects is as flat as a painting. Miniscule concave and convex curves on its surface renders a surreal and mysterious image. The floor is polished hardwood. Two Turkish rugs in pink and blue break up the spaces between the table and the bay window at one end; and the mirror at the other. An Abyssinian cat soaks up the sunlight flooding through the bay window. Its unselfconscious indifference to visitors makes it clear who the room belongs to. It stretches its neck and lunges at the fur on its lower neck, lavishing it with an impossibly salmon pink tongue. A faint breeze sends widdershins of dust particles exposed by the sun swirling above the cat. Pigeons coo on the lintel and poo on the tiles outside the bay window. The cat utters a guttural moan as the fur along its spine does a Mexican Wave. A clank of ceramic on marble draws attention back to the interior of the room. A decanter of red wins has been set on the sideboard, and a platter of bread on the table. Two figures robed in bone linen are retreating to the kitchen. The fanlight closes down onto the Aeolian harp. It begins to hum. The liturgy is about to begin.


4. Oh come on Dan…Ruby
“Oh come on Dan, you don’t believe that New Age crap, surely?”
Dan
“What do you mean crap? What have we been doing for the last 36 hours?”
Ruby
“Having sex.”
Dan
“Is that all? What happened to the sacred bit of it?”
Ruby
“Spare me, Dan. You’re sounding like a gay man in drag who thinks he’s really a woman!”
Narrator
Dan was silenced by the unexpectedness of this as much as its power. He saw an implication for the huge range of styles that people affect – not that he would have used that word until now, but if Ruby was right, then maybe it was all just role playing.
Dan
“How many men who wear drag think they’re really women?”
Ruby
“I wouldn’t have a clue. It doesn’t matter if none of them do. It wouldn’t make any difference to my point.”
Dan
“Which is?”
Ruby
“Affecting an appearance of doesn’t make you the real thing.”
Dan thinks
Dan speaks
“There’s that word,” he thought.
“So men who dress in leather, wielding whips and body piercing gear, and talk S&M…”
Cowboy
“Most of them are all talk. No one takes them seriously – especially themselves.”
Dan
“No one? Some of them do…”
Ruby
“Yes, and aren’t they sick puppies.”
Dan
“You hear them saying exactly that about themselves all the time, and apparently being proud of it.”
Soldier
“Apparently?”
Dan
“Well if they’re so good at pretending to be brutes, maybe they’re only pretending to be proud of their perversion!”
Ruby
“Oh come on, that’s a bit rough.”
Dan
“What, calling it perversion?”
Cowboy
“Yeah. Who are you to judge?”
Dan
“Ruby’s the one who said they’re sick puppies. I didn’t hear any one getting upset then. You’re OK with euphemisms, are you?”
Narrator
Now it was Ruby’s turn to pout in silence. Dan’s needed to ferret out what she’d started.
Dan
“You know,” he continued, “you can’t tell most gay men from the heterosexual herd. But some are effeminate at home, and even in public when they’re with other gays. This doesn’t seem to be an act. It seems to be who they really are. Yet, they know not to flap their wrists where homophobia rules. And that’s the overwhelming majority of situations in the western world – and maybe even the whole planet – so you have to wonder about their sense of belonging. Does the contempt of blokes make them choose to be un-blokey?”
Ruby
“Who cares. And anyway where’s this going?”
Dan
“Well, is it the unforgiving harshness of reality that prompts people to bang on about star signs and the like?”
Astrologer
“What are you on about? And what do you mean “bang on”. That’s a bit rough, isn’t it”
Dan
“Well, again, it was Ruby who wrote off the New Age as “all that crap”; and once again, I didn’t hear anyone getting upset then. ”
Ruby
“What’s the New Age got to do with star signs in newspapers? No one actually believes what they say. It’s just fun.”
Dan
“If it’s just fun, what’s the problem with saying that people bang on about it? But more importantly, is it just fun when someone explains another person’s behaviour by saying “Oh yeah, he’s a Virgo.”
Astrologer
“Well what’s wrong with that?”
Dan
“Why do you assume I’m saying there’s anything wrong with it?”
Ruby
“Because you make it sound pathological. You said that people bang on – the tone of your language is negative.
Dan
“Ah ! Beauty!”
Ruby
“Don’t patronise me, you bastard!”
Dan
“What is patronising about what I just said?”
Ruby
“You beauty! At last! She’s catching on….”
Dan
“No, that was not what I meant! I meant beauty (and what’s pathological) – is in the eye of the beholder. You’re the one who used the word pathological. I put being interested in star signs together with the unforgiving harshness of reality, to wonder out aloud if people are looking for certainty, a way of explaining reality if not controlling it.”
Ruby
“It sounds like you’re saying it’s the opium of the masses!”
Dan
“It will sound any way you make it sound. And by the way, Ruby, you’re not still wallowing in Marxist ideology, surely?”