The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas by Syd Moore

Author:Syd Moore [Moore, Syd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786076816
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MADNESS IN A CORUÑA

As dictated to Samuel Stone, curator

of the Essex Witch Museum

Halloween is the worst time for it.

You ask me why?

Walking the streets is one thing. I find myself alert to slipping ghouls, dark-backed creatures, shadows unpeeling from crevices and walls. The taint of real horror that swarms in with them is real and profound.

Holiday fun, they say.

Not so for me.

It brings it all back.

Sometimes on those nights I must look behind, double lock my doors, light incense and thank God for friends and American travellers.

Yes, even me.

And you want to know why.

Well, your instincts are right. Doctor Bradley said you were smart. Though I doubt you will find any explanation in your books at the Witch Museum. Not for this. No. Though perhaps the old man will understand. Mr Strange, I hear, has led an interesting life.

All right then.

I don’t really want to mention how I came to be in A Coruña but I suppose it has some relevance to the story and you will desire to hear of it I expect, so I may as well get it over with.

I had recently divorced. There. Judge me if you will. It is the least of it.

Sheila, my former wife, was twenty-five years my junior and a student at Litchenfield University where, as you know, I lectured in semiotics. Before you leap to conclusions, she had not taken my course. Oh no, Sheila read Modern English, my colleague’s department – the much-feted popinjay and television celebrity, Professor George Chin. He was so much more ‘relatable’ apparently and certainly more glamorous than my humble self.

It was at Chin’s exclusive Christmas gathering, huddled round his minimalist wood burner, that I happened upon my future wife. If perhaps she had taken my own course, then she may have understood more of my character and our marital trundle towards collapse would have proved less arduous. As it was, we worked our way through several Relate counsellors and two tedious and expensive psychotherapists before reaching the mutual conclusion that happiness was not to be found in each other. Privately I had discovered this for myself a couple of months into the marriage: Sheila was lean and pretty, but shallow and materialistic in a way that I found distasteful. The revelation wilted my ardour.

My young wife, never the pragmatist, insisted on trying to save our doomed union. Or more likely she thought she might save me.

There was a reason, as there always is, that I had remained a bachelor into my forties, yet she was determined to ignore it. Perhaps I presented a challenge to her. I don’t know.

However, as the months passed and Sheila came to know me more, she began, also, to formulate the point of view that I was less aesthetic than aesthete. Women whom I have met and seduced in the past often assumed that when I am thinking, or abstracted, I am contemplating the depths of life (or them). Whereas I am simply vacant or considering the semiotic deconstruction of whatever advertisement, signage or symbol lies within eyesight.

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