Wednesday 12 September 2012

The church mouse and the God


We took off, the two of us. Hugging my back was a battered, brown leather bag, inside which rested in a comfortable tumble, my toothbrush, notepad and pen. He came empty handed. He would borrow my toothbrush he said; the rest he had little use for. I dressed in my toughest jeans, an old shirt splattered with ink, and my worn-out trekking boots. He wore dungarees, paired with an immaculate white t-shirt, dark glasses and impractical padukas. The writer and her handsome, rebel muse.
We were going on a dangerous adventure. He had read about the divine light at the end of a certain tunnel that seemed to exist merely in the map he had tattooed on his forearm, all the way up his shoulder. As good sense goes, I was mad to trust him, but his animal charm was not something my fumbling soul could resist. I was but a lowly writer, in search of a muse to worship, and my unlikely God I had found.
We travelled on foot.
Every time I asked how far away we were, or indeed if this blessed light was to be found on our continent, he simply showed me his arm, and said, ‘From here to there is where we go.’ When I did get a little restless, I took my notepad out and started sketching. A sharp paragraph for his profile, a little limerick for his adorable nose, a sonata for his lips, a poem for his gorgeous hair. He held my hand, guiding me around puddles and pebbles, whilst I scribbled away an ode to him. He pointed out, at that juncture, a glimmering speck in the distance that was our hallowed light. We hurried on. But when night came, we settled beneath an apple tree, huddled beneath a single wrap of muslin that he conjured up through a needle stuck in his dungarees. Weakened by the presence of this peasant God, I felt my legs turn to colloid. And he told me stories that seeped through the little pores on my goose-bumping hand, and coiled their through my blood stream, to my brain, from where a bunch of little warriors threw spears at my beating heart. My heart bled a black ink, which stained my pages boldly. We woke up when an apple hit my head, and he was cross that the apple chose to fall on my plain head. He stalked off and I scurried along. We reached a river, on which he walked without creating a ripple. I almost drowned in that reptilian pool and he didn’t care. The shimmering speck grew bigger. It looked like a mystical orb now. And when he turned to look at me finally, the orb made a halo around his head. So awed was I by the vision, I was caught unawares when he hurled a heavy rock on my being. That night, under a wise Oak, I wrote a letter of bloody pain on my notepad, as a purple-blue song wrote itself upon my tender bruise. The muslin, he kept to himself.
He soon grew tired of me, I could see that. He held me close, even as he inflicted deep cuts on the tips of my fingers and drew my soul out, with some potent form of black magic. It was then that we saw people down the road. He threw me by the wayside and made merry with the bunch over a bonfire and bon-bons with naughty gifts. That night, the white sap from the rubber tree wove my despair upon the dark, starless skies. The morning after, we were only hours away from the light, and he walked ahead with his bunch. I hurried along as fast as I could, the church mouse scurrying to keep up with the God.
And then we were there. The light. A nasty smell tickled my nostrils, and stung my bruised being. I walked a little closer, and there I saw a radioactive heap of poisonous intent. When he turned to give me a smile, it was evil…as revealed by the waves of noxious energy. In the radioactive light, the map on his hand was nothing but a pattern depicting the mouth of hell. At the centre of the light was an isotopic pool of death.
I turned, I left. I walked, sore and serrated, till I reached the apple tree. That night, for the first time, I took the pen out of my weathered bag and wrote, of my own volition, ‘Goodbye.’