A feeling for falling

Gum
On the street.
Looking down from windows
At aerial photographs,
New roads seem cobbled;
Victorian retro
Smoothed by feet.

Tom was pottering in his flat. His windows were open in the summer sunshine and light was pouring through as small clouds passed.
It was like in some cheap advert for washing powder; the freshness really was coming in, injecting his entire room with the scent of pollen and wild grasses.
He allowed himself a moment to enjoy this, to be infected by the season, before looking at the images he’d set in front of him.
Scattered scenes, in a square format, these nine prints were laid out in even rows of three on the table. Each photograph measured six by six inches and their arrangement, on the floor, became a pleasing square of squares.
Each colour image represented a different view, a window on the world, captured by Tom, of a view of the ground directly below, taken from a variety of heights.
The overall appearance of these various bird’s eye views, when seen together on the floor, was of falling through several spaces at once, towards a multiple of floors.
The first time Tom had stood over this strange world of gravity and seen all these different ways to fall, all these different grounds to rush forward and catch a brittle body, he was quite shocked and had to sit down.
A little later he viewed it with awe, later still and he was pleased with the work he had done. Vistas, opened up with snapshots.
He had sucked these images from the world over the past year of his life by taking a vintage camera with him, virtually everywhere he went, and looking out for interesting windows.
Once one was spotted, an estimated reading for distance and light had to be made and then, quite carefully, Tom would reach a slender arm out of the window, point the camera’s lens directly at the earth below and open the shutter.
The process was a little ‘hit and miss’! Without the luxuries of auto-focus, a light-meter or range-finder, the shots would often appear out of focus or incorrectly exposed. And there was always the wind to contend with.
Still, nine pretty decent images were the result. Interesting individually, Tom felt they created a powerful whole. Jennifer was coming over soon, to view the finished article, and Tom was quite excited at the prospect.
They were now ready for framing. He’d spent hours deliberating over their order, their suitability in place of about four discarded others, and the effect of the ‘overall’. Now, he felt it was almost finished.
Slowly, Tom picked them up, print by print and slid them into a frame he’d had specially made with nine perfectly spaced and separated mounts fitted.
As he sealed the frame, placed the completed artwork on the wall of his flat and stepped back to look at it, he was not struck by it as he first had been. In fact, he was not struck by it at all.
There was no feeling of falling, there was little in the way of synchronicity, flow or a majestic whole; there were just nine disparate images staring back at him. Nine snaps of broken concrete slabs, black bobs of hair and thin spikes of wire and cable criss-crossing it all.
Tom looked at the frame, and then his watch in a dazed panic. Rushing to the window, Jennifer’s bobbing head blurred into view, sliced by myriad railings. Time stopped moving for Tom until a buzzer sounded on his door and awaited his usual reaction.
Defeated again, Tom plodded towards the door. As the latch clicked open, somewhere a vintage camera slipped from a hand and was obliterated, smashing to a hundred tiny pieces on a hard and greedy street below.

The works of Stranger Tom

Stopping at the blistered door,
The dwarf explained what lay in store:
‘A stranger man than I’, says him,
‘Called ‘Stranger Tom’, resides within.
With mouth of claw and hand of tongue
A statue, made by gods gone wrong,
Then given damned life,
Abomination, scales and strife…’

Tom had taken to writing poems about himself.
In these he would always manifest as some type of ghoulish creation, a grave robber’s nightmare come to life.
He couldn’t say what had brought out this new found affection for the romantic poet in him, nor why he saw fit to so distort himself within the verse. But, as he scribbled away on the page, he would find himself contented; and when he would read them back to himself later, he would be smiling. ‘This can only be a good thing,’ he thought.
Earlier that day, Jennifer had taken her place at Tom’s side in the canteen for lunch. Tom was enjoying a rather fine salad of gruyere and cherry tomatoes with avocado and wild rice. It was a strange combination of his own dreaming and he thought the flavours complemented one another, perfectly.
Jennifer baulked, as usual, when he peeled back the blue plastic lid of the Tupperware container. She’d say things like, “oh my”, or “quite ghastly”, in a manner, so clichéd, Tom believed she must have borrowed it straight from Austen. Of course, that was a prime reason why he was so fond of her.
Jennifer stroked her long brown hair with affectation. Bending her neck back as she did so, Tom realised he was supposed to notice something: “I see, you have a new necklace - very fetching, Jennifer.”
“Oh this? Do you like it, Tom? Do you, really? Oh, why, it’s nothing really. My little Arnold bought it for me, actually. Brought it back from the East recently. It’s jade.”
The mention of Arnold’s name frustrated Tom, always, but he always let it pass without showing a flicker of emotion. If Jennifer had worked out how much it annoyed Tom then she was certainly a cunning psychologist and a keen manipulator of men.
Tom stared at Jennifer’s beautiful neck and sighed. His eyes flickered and held there, not daring to look lower in case she might be watching, daring him to embarrass himself with a brief inspection of her cleavage. The temptation burned him for many seconds until she mercifully relaxed and let her hair pour back down around her shoulders.
“So, how are things between you two then?” asked Tom, as uninterestedly as he could muster. He picked up his pen before continuing, “Is the ground still a little shaky?”
“Oh no, not at all Tom, dear. Well, at least not any more,” she replied.
“Well, I mean, I know we don’t talk that much - like you and I do - but there’s something about him that still drives me wild,” she went on.
“I mean, you’re such a pretty and handsome thing, poor Tom; but he’s a brute, raw and animal. Drives me quite delirious, sometimes, I can tell you.”
Tom’s teeth ground and his face wrinkled, ever so slightly, but his eyes remained stoic. He started scribbling in his notebook.
“Ah now, Tom, what on earth are you writing there?” she asked. “It’s nothing,” he replied, “just some verse.”
“Oh gosh, poetry? Let me read it Tom, please won’t you let me?”
Tom hunched over his work, as if trying to hide it, but he left a corner of the paper exposed and didn’t stir when she grabbed and pulled it from under him.
Her eyes opened wide and she devoured the lines, hungrily. Tom gripped hard his pen and watched as her entire head seemed to roll along and then spill over each of his syllables like they were the crests of waves.
“Oh dear, how frightful!” she exclaimed, grinning.

This marks a welcome return to the blog for Stranger Tom - I'd almost forgotten about him... Here's his first appearance.