Johnmichael Simon

Johnmichael Simon was born in England, grew up in South Africa and has lived in Israel since 1963.  He has published two solo books of poems: ‘Sonatina’ –  largely on musical subjects and ‘Bordwinot’ – a mix of ballads balderdash and other strange ingredients, as well as two collections in collaboration with partner Helen Bar-Lev: ‘Cyclamens and Swords’ – poems and  illustrations about the land of Israel and ‘Silly Wishes’ – an illustrated collection of fun poems for children of all ages.  Johnmichael has been awarded several prizes in international poetry competitions: first and third places in the Reuben Rose, first place in the Margaret Reid, third place in the Tom Howard plus numerous honorable mentions in other contests.

The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

Codes

"Let's play codes", said the man.  He pushed away a wet lock of hair that was dripping from his forehead, a gesture which caused his badly fitting spectacles to slip even further down his nose.

"You know you'll only lose again", replied the boy.  "Yesterday I beat you five times in a row."

"No", said his father, "It was only four times."

"It was five!", said the boy decisively, jumping up from his seat on the dirty red sleeping bag.  He bounced the few short steps to the entrance of the tent, made a small window for himself by opening the front zip fractionally and peered out into the rain.

"Hateful spiteful rain".  He grimaced, his voice a tight, pent up complaint.  "It could go on raining like this for a month, God's punishment for a badly planned holiday".

"That's not fair", said his father.  "Do you really want to add a guilty conscience to your Old Man's sore throat and headache?  Hardly moral support under the circumstances.  The weather report said fine with light scattered clouds.  And please stop touching the walls with your wet fingers, how many times have I explained to you that it lets the water seep into the tent?"

"Sorry Dad", said the boy and flashed Benedict a warm shy smile, instantly melting the tension between them.  His father laughed, floating for a moment on a stream of inexplicable pleasure.  What was the source of his delight, he wondered?  He supposed it had something to do with the nature of the communication between them.  Ferdie had a quick intellect combined with an even quicker intuitive awareness of his father's changing moods.

They were camped on the bank of a river which flanked the brooding mountain they intended to climb.  What had been a gurgling stream on the evening they arrived had turned into a roaring torrent of water after two days of continuous hard downpour. Their Volkswagen Transporter, now a day's walk behind across a boulder strewn plateau, seemed a continent away.

Encased in a smelly fabric cocoon with no sign of the foul weather letting up, the sense of isolation was intensified.  Their small world was a dripping, depressing reality, held in place with untested pegs and ropes.

"Let's play codes", repeated Benedict.  He watched Ferdie with admiration and affection.  A mop of messy brown hair that seemed glued to his scalp like a wig.  Head bent, sniffing over the page torn from an exercise book, pencil stub gripped between dirty fingers.  The boy's intent eyes glowed animal like in fierce absorbed concentration.

"Let's go for a new world record", said Ferdie, licking his lips."

How intimately he knew and loved the boy, Benedict thought; and yet there were moments of strangeness, flashes of something - he groped for a word but could only think of 'alien'- which didn't seem quite right.  The boy was developing a style of his own.  Recently he had noticed it.  Here a mannerism, there a way of thinking or a new viewpoint so different from his own.  He shrugged off a touch of uneasiness.  It was natural.  The lad was growing up after all.

Benedict looked down at the scrap of paper in front of him.  Lost in thoughts, he had not been aware of his fingers moving at all. Yet there was the evidence on the page.  The alphabet, neatly printed out from A to Z and under each letter its code couterpart, selected on a completely random basis.  Underneath followed his message to be deciphered, obviously written only a few moments before, although he had no recollection of having done so.  The message was four lines of verse.

"Treetop stars, wondering night,
Far away worlds, strings of rubys,
Witches casting spells of light,
Lassoing galaxies".

He recognised it as part of a poem he had written as a youth.  He had completely forgotten it.  How had it emerged from some hidden place in his mind and inscribed itself , fully formed, on the paper?  He did not know. A little accumulated moisture detached itself from the ceiling of the tent and splashed like a teardrop on the page.

"How many words is yours?", asked Ferdie.  "Mine's twenty eight. Thought I'd start you off at yesterday's level."

He counted.  The stanza was only seventeen words long.  "It's not long enough", he said, "only seventeen words.  Give me another minute, I'll add another line."  (How could he add another line to a twenty three year old poem?)

"Seventeen's enough", said Ferdie, "give it to me".

"Don't be ridiculous", answered his father, "it's far too short, not enough material to get a representative letter frequency distribution.  The best you've done so far is twenty seven.  Anyway it's a poem", he added, "it doesn't have the same type of internal logic as the messages we've been working with."

"A poem.  Who is the poet?", the boy asked.

"I am, or rather was", admitted Benedict defensively.

"Anything you can do I can do better", sang out Ferdie, snatching the paper from the older man's hand.

"Why not?", said his father and his head ached suddenly.  "Don't give me your code, I'll make us something hot to drink instead."  He lit the little gas stove and measured out the coffee carefully.  "Feel like a biscuit with your coffee?", he asked.

Ferdie looked up ay him with a Mona Lisa smile, his eyes briefly glowing  bright reflecting the flames of the gas burner.  "Your poem's starting to take shape", he grinned.  Outside the rain beat down on the world and somewhere an unidentifiable animal howled. 

They drank their coffee in silence and sat there smiling at one another.  His poem lay between them, decoded in Ferdie's childish handwriting.  "I'm tired", said Ferdie, "I think I'll take a catnap."

"We need more than a catnap my boy", said his father, opening the leather cover which protected his wristwatch.  "Do you know what time it is?"

"Time loses its meaning in this rain, my dear Benedict."  Ferdie snuggled down inside the sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

His father smoked a last cigarette in the beating silence.  His son did not often call him by his first name.  He could not understand how the lad had managed to crack the code of the poem so easily.  There were so few words to work on that the accomplisment seemed incredible.  It could not have been achieved by using logic only.  He turned the boy's code page over and over in his hands as if the paper contained a clue to Ferdie's ability.  His eyes froze on a word.  The boy had written 'pearl' in place of 'rubys'.  A whisper flickered in his memory.  Had the original poem used the word 'pearl', or 'rubys'?  He could not remember.  Shivering, he climbed into the sleeping bag beside the slumbering child.

He came awake what seemed to be hours later, sweating in the night.  He swam up to wakefulness out of an ocean of red nightmare.  There was no sound at all in the tent save for the wild beating of his own heart.  The rain had stopped completely .  He lay unmoving, eyes open, every sense straining to discover what it was that had woken him.  The silence was cold and oppressive and somehow alive - animal.

"God", he thought, "there's an animal around.  I can feel it, almost smell it."  Yet there was no sound.  It was as if the tent had been captured in a bubble of silence.

He found his flashlight and snapped it on.  Ferdie was standing at the entrance to the tent, peering silently out of his peephole.  As the flashlight caught him he turned to face his father.  His complexion was dead white and his eyes were embers.  "Daddy I'm scared.  Please help me Dad, I'm so scared."

Benedict gathered the boy in his arms and bundled him into the sleeping bag.  Then, gathering courage, he unzipped the flap and stepped out of the tent.  The river roared by.  Strange he had not heard it before.  The black clouds had parted a little and some moonlight filtered through.  There was sufficient light to investigate the immediate area around the tent without having to walk very far.  When he was completely satisfied that there were no animals in the vicinity, or any other discernable sources of danger, he returned to the tent.  Holding the boy tightly in his arms he lay down in the sleeping bag.  On the edge of sleep a thought crept its way into his mind.  He knew the boy so well, but some quality in him had subtly changed.  He felt that he was looking at a reflection in a mirror and that the reflection was observing him.  The face was his own, but the eyes were those of his son.

The following day it rained again.  The heavens opened and emptied themselves on the world.  Benedict had never seen the likes of such a deluge.  It was unseasonal, unbelievable and immensely unfair.

"Let's play codes", said Ferdie after breakfast.

"Go to hell', snapped Benedict, sneezing violently.

"Hardly moral support under the circumstances", grinned Ferdie, "or perhaps you'd rather go for a swim?"  So they played codes.

"Let's go for a new world record", said Ferdie, licking his lips.

Benedict printed the sentence in code and looked at it. It said CAN YOU READ MY THOUGHTS.  There was no question mark.  He handed the paper silently over to his son.  Ferdie looked at the paper, chewed his pencil, looked at Benedict and looked at the paper again.  "He's got hair just like I had at his age", thought Benedict distractedly.  "But his eyes are different."

"I think so", said Ferdie.  He walked over to the entrance, parted his window with his finger tips and looked back at Benedict. 

"So that's the way you are", said his father.  "How long have you known about it?"

"It's been coming to me only these last two days", replied his son.  "Before then it was just a general feeling I had that I was good at guessing."

Benedict looked at the boy with new old eyes.  He remembered the fragrant baby he had held in his arms after bath time.  The infant teetering in his first few tentative steps.  The cheeky youngster grinning as he bungled his lines in the school play.  "What is happening to my son?", he thought.  "We've grown so close these last few years.  More like friends than son and father.  What kind of strange frightening ability is he developing?  How is this going to affect our relationship so dear to me?"  A feeling of apprehension pulled at his memory strings.  What was it?  He could not remember.  Something he had read a long time ago.

The rain cascaded down on the tent.  Benedict felt as if they were trapped at the foot of a crushing cosmic waterfall.  A sudden bolt of lightening flashed clear through the fabric.  The ear splitting clap of thunder followed almost instantaneously.  A gust of wet wind slapped at his face and he looked up to where the boy had been standing.  The entrance of the tent gaped open.  The whole structure of poles, ropes and fabric was lurching and rearing like a ship on a wild sea.  Then, Ferdie was gone, flying helter skelter away from him, instantly swallowed up in the driving frenzy of the rain.  He plunged after him like a madman.  He could not see which way he had gone.  The rain and the wind tore at him, he was drenched in a second.  His clothes clung to him like cold glue.

He thought he saw the boy running for a clump of trees and stumbled after him.  Inside the thicket there was some protection and the edge was taken off the violence of the storm.  He rubbed  his spectacles with his wet shirt sleeves.  Then he saw it.  It was an animal - but like no animal that had ever walked the face of the earth.  Brown fur covered unrecognizable contours of body.  It's flesh rippled in constant sinister pulsation.  From it emanated a repulsive sensation of cold insect like malevolence.  It's features seemed to be constantly changing like a slowly moving hologram, at the centre of which multifaceted eyes glowed as if under infra red light.

Benedict made no move.  They confronted one another across a few meters of misty clearing.  Then, as he gathered his courage he heard the voice of his son coming from behind the creature.

"Make it go away, please Daddy!"

He threw himself in the direction of the voice, tripped on a tree root and went sprawling in the mud.  Then the boy was in his arms, sobbing and shaking.  Covering Ferdie with his body he turned to face the beast but it had disappeared.  There was no sign or sound of it.  He felt with certainty that it was gone.

The tent was sagging but still standing.  The lightening and thunder had stopped, the storm was dying down.  Together they tightened the guy ropes and tied down the flaps.  "I was so scared Daddy", whispered Ferdie, "were you too?"

"Yes I was but I think I know where it came from", said the man.

"You do know", replied his son, "it's still there in your head".

Then suddenly Benedict the father remembered Benedict the pimply spectacled teenager, his bookshelf piled with fantasy and science fiction magazines, and on the cover of one, a gaudy illustration of the BEM, the Bug Eyed Monster.  How scary it had been as a boy reading those tales of the imagination.  How good it had been to close the magazine at last and to slip cozily under the blankets safe in his bedroom.  What a relief to realize that the creature they had faced was only a trick of his own memory, exposed by Ferdie's amazing new ability.

Father and son towelled themselves off, put on clean, dry clothing and crawled side by side into the sleeping bag.  They put their arms round one another and hugged closely.  "Ferdie", he said, "this new thing of yours, I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle it."

"It's all right Dad", said his son, "we'll handle it together, Ok?"  Benedict knew that was the way it would be.

Morning brought with it one of nature's miraculous transformations.  The sky was blue and clear of cloud.  The ground was still wet but a light breeze blew and everything was new and clean and fresh.  The mountain stood out against the sky and beckoned to them.  They packed their gear carefully into their backpacks and set off up the hilly track.  What a day it was.  What an incredible glorious day, thought Benedict.  They climbed steadily for two hours.  Ferdie went on in front and the father followed.  It was not a difficult climb but strenuous enough with the full backpacks.  They rested on a flat rock and Benedict made some coffee on the little satove.  The coffee was good and the baked beans and sardines tasted delicious, the way food does to hungry labourers.

After breakfast they swung into a long walk, moving up the track which led over the summit and across the top of the mountains.  There was no need to speak and so much to observe; granite formations, wild flowers of many varieties, birds of prey and everywhere streams, rivulets and miniature waterfalls.

Towards late afternoon they reached a hollow in the base of a towering rock face and decided to make camp.  They gathered twigs to make a fire and Ferdie boiled up some rice and dehydrated vegetables for their evening meal.  Benedict felt replete and fulfilled.  They sat back to back on the roof of the world feeling each others warmth in the gathering dusk.

The events of the previous day and night were far behind.  They had come a long way together since then.  So they sat on the rock gazing out at he heavens, eyes full of love and stars and infinite unknowns.

"Let's play codes", said a voice in his head.

"Yes", he thought, "this time I'll beat you."

"Not yet", the boy thought back. "Perhaps tomorrow when you've had a bit more practice".