Arguably the day should have begun like any other except this one never did and never will – atmospherics hemmed us in, insolent rain and low slung mist like a poison gas cloud, eradicating all matter beyond a couple hundred yards (petro-dollar cloud?); we become prisoners, artificial for hours, on the brink of knowing but learning nothing of ourselves except paranoia and doubling, the consequences of that (sheepish dreams, bounding nightmares, Gothic masterpieces played out on the inner screen); lazy hours pass as the world attempts to clarify itself, coughing and spluttering back into existence, stepping out – the smells of roasting and frying wafting along the street, the old dear next door attempting bizarrely to clamber over the wall at the foot of the garden, her wild hair soon bedraggled by the damp, matting on her shoulders and against her cheeks; scratching beneath the surface, she becomes simply another fruitcake on the watch, another howler for the charnel house poor love – all matters are delinquent today as far as I’m concerned –
A message in a bottle is found by two young(ish) men whilst walking along a beach (Hebridean?) - there is a pencilled sketch of the ichthys (Christian fish symbol) and the handwritten words: keep pure thy heart among the mortals - at the bottom of the page the name LAURA is scrawled in quick, flighty capitals – attached to the whole by a paper clip is a photograph of a woman (maybe twenty-one or two), long auburn hair and red lips, standing at an old-style box microphone evidently in the midst of a song, her eyes turned dolefully toward the camera, blue half-light across her face from a spot maybe – both hands touch the microphone, one grips just below the head and the other deftly touches with fingertips the stand itself, it’s a classic pose caught somewhere between 1940 and now, who knows? Who is she, beyond the evidence that she is the aforementioned Laura? That’s what they’ll aim to find out I’m sure, these two logger boys. Or at least one of them will. He’ll become obsessed with discovering her identity and why it is she’s sent the message out across the ocean. Whilst the other will think of his friend as just a crazy –
This is a story rattling round my head . . .
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