OUSPENSKYVILLE or The Ballad of Alan Borky 1.

Well if my previous anticsd seemed to disturb the girls an eerie pin drop perfect silence now abruptly replaced their chirpy industrious burblings as they became deer trapped in oncoming headlights their pupils whizzing back and forth across dinner plate sized eyes in the hope of catching evidence out the corner of their eyes anyone but them was expected to deal with the bedraggled human sweat fountain whod had the nerve to abandon his jackhammer incessant bout of extended pocket perversion to broach the apparently highly controversial issue of whether or not the books in the window were for sale.

Apparently not daring to move or even so much as breathe it seemed for a moment they might remain permanently frozen to the spot in startled statue-like poses eternally recording whatever theyd been doing the moment my voiced spoken all of its own accord until much to their clear relief their apparent ringleader a diminutive and buxom brunette ceased her deeply suspicious eyeing up and down of me to abruptly assert in dry cracked but surprisingly vehement tones "Er you'll have to speak to Keith" whereupon she almost panickingly bellowed his name at the top of her lungs at which point I became intensely aware the space round me or perhaps it was the air seemed to be pulling its impossible solidifying trick from earlier on and was somehow both slowly AND rapidly rising up behind me as if to bar my way out before then all but coiling round me intensifying the abiding but originally background-level neurotic suspicion Id been nursing in the back of my mind even before I set out the whole deranged Bennett Sex book searchd simply been a device to get an unwittingly doomed man to attend his own death a recollection like the devastating deja vues Id momentarily experienced on first noticing

the Sandwich Shops floor tiles and hearing Keiths name mentioned which now seemed to accelerate still more my increasing awareness a strange caustic almost physically concentrated fear or dread unlike anything Id ever experienced befored been working its way up from my innards to my chest and was now in the process of establishing its burning acrid presence at the back of my throat something I was extremely grateful to be distracted from by my sudden realisation right at the back of the shop just behind the alternately gleaming glistening stainless steel hot water urn were a number of apparently old-fashioned honey-glazed grey speckled stone steps leading up to what I can only describe as a sort of gleaming white-tiled door-less doorway from where now emerged the turtle like inquisitive head of a deranged-looking scruffy medieval wizard type a man in his early forties with wildly unkempt greying light brown shoulder length unwashed hair and an even wilder-looking nicotinestained walrus moustache veiling the lower half of his face causing the boa constrictor-like solidified space air or energy effect to rise up and wrap itself round me all the more tightly and the strange new type of fear or dread to cause countless tiny salival jets in my tongue cheeks roof of mouth and throat to initiate a series of deeply unnerving cascades of strange dark unknown combustible chemicals down my increasingly metallic tube like oesophagus making the searingly painful skin particularly on my forearms feel as if it was catching fire and napalm to scorch through my bloodstream even as the back of my paradoxically desert-dry brass flavoured throat seemed to expand both outwards and inwards drawing into it some unknown part of me sending it plummeting down the infinitely descending tunnel which my oesophagus seemed tove become.

Mercifully though the swivelling walrus-moustachioed head whichd

popped its turtle-like neck out the entrance of its white tiled shell now distracted my imploding attention by chirpily inquiring "Ye what is it Caroline?".

"Er Keith THIS bloke's interested in THOSE books in the window" she hurriedly blurted tryno keep her face pointed at me while using the corner of her eyes to flash supposedly unnoticeable semaphore at him her whole tone and furtive head-jerking flustered manner conveying the impression Id just inquired about the black-market stash of child and bestial porn they housed in the back but without using the appropriate password making the suddenly enormously alarmed looking Keiths head judder as if hed received a violent electric shock until sufficiently recovering his composure to now slowly rotate his head 45 degrees towards me in the manner of The Exorcist he scrutinised me with a wariness verging on the hostile out the corner of eyes so slitted it was a wonder he could see anything causing me to gulp and for some reason dare not to blink as I became all but buried under a peculiar guilt for having seriously pissed SOMEONE or some THING off by inadvertently stumbling in on something I wasn't supposed to.

Continuing to regard me out the corner of Fu Manchu eyes over a Charlie Chan moustache his inclined shoulder turned away from me in a somehow aggressive pose Keith mumblingly inquired of me Ye? before rising to his full wiry bony bodied height and almost balletically stepping out into the open only to immediately assume a sort of Monty Pythonesque style medieval dungeoneer's crouch and scurry down the honey glazed steps towards me simultaneously wiping his greasy hands and fingers on the grubby apron tied round his waist but whereas before hed been lighthearted if not downright upbeat his mood now seemed almost to instantly

blacken as he half-growled half-hissed "Er wha is it yu wano know?" scanning me in a newfound furtive and shifty manner putting me in mind of an extremely bandy-legged spider circling its web-trapped prey just before pouncing.

I started tryno answer but even at the best of times I can speak very quickly very loudly very shrilly and when Im feeling particularly stressed or excitable these characteristics only seem to become all the more exaggerated a matter not improved by other tendencies such as simultaneously holding forth on several often only vaguely related subjects resulting in what must at times sound like incomprehensible helium-pitched gibberish to anyone unused to my way of talking whichs probably why Keith now abruptly held up the leathery palm of a hand clearly not afraid of hard work and without uttering a word somehow very pronouncedly COMMANDED me in a manner admittedly more fly munching Renfield than Dracula to come to him causing the solidified space/air/energy effect to come back to life and close round me still more tightly yet in spite of being utterly determined nothing in the world was getting me away from that door Id taken so long to attain I now found to my horror I was somehow effortlessly gliding across the floor without moving my legs and whilst it was just possible one of those suspiciously urine tinged looking pools of liquid on the floor I suddenly realised everyone might think were mine mightve cause me to slip surely that was something Idve noticed?

And of course the strange cloud of fear or dread I seemed permanently enveloped in immediately became even more oppressively strange which in turn triggered the factory already pumping jets of weird dark unknown burning chemicals down my corrosively metallic ash tasting oesophagus

into now somehow percolating them up into the regions immediately between and behind my eyes nose and ears in the form of squirts of bubbly heat seemingly melting or liquefying the contents of my skull and sending the results cascading down the painfully unbearable infinitely expanding hollow chasm both my body and the world seemed to be merging to become.

Fortunately though my attention now once again became distracted by the realisation Caroline and the other girlsd become so frenzied by what was going on between me and Keith that rather than take their eyes off us anymore they simply started grabbing the first things that came to hand shoving them in a bag and tossing them over the counter at the bemused customers like so many German stick grenades.

Meanwhile I continued effortlessly gliding towards Keith feeling so stressed and tense and bent out of shape I felt like a dried out twig about to snap in two until I now became embarrassed to realise my stomach and bowels were making such loud churning glooping and squishing noises I mustve sounded like the guy who devised the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory effects tipping everyone off everyone in the shop I was about to blow either spewing up my guts or shitting my pants if not both at the same time leaving me in little doubt whatever emerged would flow just as copiously and freely as the probably urine tinged sweat cascading from my bollocks down my legs out over my shoes.

And of course to the part of me concerned with matters of saving public face and preserving personal dignity the whole thing was a complete nightmare hence I now found myself continuously switching my efforts back and forth between one moment tryno suppress my gag reflex the

next reclenching my pert young glistening sweat-drenched buttock muscles tight enough to crack walnuts until suddenly blessedly I realised I no longer had to worry anymore about losing control of the contents of my stomach and bowels or even losing face because my lungs whichd been pounding so long on the walls of my ribcage for air that wasnt there now ceased their pointless sucking activity and simply stopped working in unison apparently with my no longer beating heart a deeply unnerving experience made all the more extraordinarily fascinating by the bizarre perception this wasn't just because they seemed tove failed but because Time inside my bodyd somehow simply come to a dead stop.

Similarly the floor now seemed to either shrunk and become a miniature black and white-tiled swimming pool or Id now somehow grown gigantic and was viewing it from somewhere very high up all of which convinced me my death had to be imminent thus the need I felt to pick out somewhere clean or more accurately cleanish for the splat which was surely about to come except instead of dying I was suddenly shocked to realise that as well as Keith the girls the customers and me there was now someone or something ELSE in the shop with us a complete other PRESENCE call it God Elvis the ghost of Sergeant Bilko call it whatever the hell you like!

I called it The Something because it was unlike anything Id ever known before and even as it loomed to the fore of my consciousness the indescribable strangeness of its presence became so unbearable it seemed to somehow make everything take on an intensely luminous white hot vividness while simultaneously causing everything I took for reality all but recede or fade out of existence an experience that seemed to last both less than a moment and an eternity of eternities long enough anyway for

The Something to leave me in no doubt not onlyd it always been there behind and beneath everything but both the whole days events and my lifed been devised to bring me to this very moment.

Then just as suddenly as itd made itself known it was gone completely excising itself from my field of awareness leaving me convinced the one thing I feared most in the world INSANITYd finally overcome me because while Weirdness and med been joined at the hip from the day I was born Id always told myself that STUFFd merely been products of one of the most highly developed overactive imaginations in an eight year old Ive ever encountered, as a genial old psychiatrist once reassured my beloved 2nd Year Tiber Street Juniors teacher Miss Singleton after my accounts of various run-ins with talking inanimate objectsd set her worrying I might be schizophrenic.

And I had to be insane because PARDON ME but didnt GOD just appear in the middle of an otherwise completely unremarkable sandwich shop and yet apart from me nobody else noticed a BLEEDIN thing?

Yet even as I desperately struggled to devise other more logical RATIONAL explanations a somehow very odd thought suddenly occurred to me if I took any of what happened in the wrong way Id become extremely vulnerable in precisely that same way which mustnt under any circumstances be allowed to happen this immediately followed by another somehow very odd thought making me feel almost as if I were an actor being prompted by someone that what mustve REALLY happened was Id obviously blacked out but for such a very VERY brief period it mustve both escaped my attention and left me still on my feet an explanation sufficiently adequate to make me momentarily forget the

matter until it suddenly occurred to me maybe the increasingly sober if not downright sombre-looking Keith mightve actually noticed something too except before I could get a word out he COMMANDED me to stop again diverting my attention this time by the almost unbearably acrid fumes of stale male sweat now suddenly overwhelming my senses causing my eyes to water and my nose to pull back away into my face and setting me worrying whether my notorious facial expressiveness might be conveying to him the impression I thought he never washed hence tryno change the subject away from whether or not there WAS a smell and the smell WAS him I instead garbled "Well what I'm really looking for isSTUFF by John Bennett" carefully avoiding all mention of SEX in case it made me look like a pervert. Or a virgin.

Anyway thats when I noticed he was doing something something so unusual I initially couldnt put my finger on quite what. It wasnt the way his jerky almost jagged body movements were gradually being replaced by an incredible softness and stillness nor was it the way his wiry torso and bony arms were filling out to take on a larger more muscular look nor was it the way his hands were serenely resting on the counter palms up in the manner of a yoga devotee It was the way he seemed to be looking at me THROUGH his eyes rather than OUT them and though Id seen some remarkably strange things courtesy of other peoples eyes in my time this was a new one on me especially since he was clearly aware he was doing it.

Anyway he now startled the living crap out of me by asking "Is it that you are interested in The Work?" because suddenly he was using a whole new almost foreign-sounding tinged voice and vocabulary with characteristics hinting at Russian French German Indian and countless other exotic

influences conveying the flavour of a man whod spent many years abroad seeking knowledge facing all kinds of trials and tribulations never having an easy time of it always struggling for everything rarely succumbing to self-pity instinctively eschewing familiar paths for the danger of what travellers of earlier times termed Terra Incognita evoking in my mind a rapid succession of video shots featuring dark sweltering barely frequented forests vast oddly coloured sparkling lakes rarely visited by men treacherous windblown precipitously high icy paths and endless forbidding mountains each of which had contributed to his gradual transmutation into something far more deep and vast than he appeared or perhaps even suspected and leaving me wondering with a huge gulp could this really be the same bargain-basement Rasputin Id first met only moments ago?

Anyway he continued "Then Bennett is not so useful these days" information Idve been extremely surprised to hear if a peculiar sense Id just missed something hadnt made me rewind the video concerned back a few seconds finally allowing the penny to drop. SHIT he's just used the Sufic term THE WORK so that business with the eyes must mean hes using some kind of Sufic mind control power on me until like a sun exploding in my brain it suddenly hit me SHIII-IIIT Im talkin to a fucking SUFI!

And not knowing what else to do I started wittering on about how I'd only recently begun to realize my own Nothingness another Sufi term but to my surprise Keiths eyes now suddenly lost their unusual intensely aware probing quality taking on a particularly alarmed look seemingly due to a sudden concern how my esoterically-phrased mystical ramblings might be affecting his customers.

Even still he continued "Yes it is possible to become a student of a school where one can learn about such matters. This fortunately happens to be a member of such a school" information that deep froze my brain and blood because for more than two years now I'd been continuously applying to join the school of the Sufi Teacher Idries Shah without even once receiving so much as the briefest reply yet as Keith's tone and manner of the last few minutes clearly implied I was now being invited to join just such a school in of all places a sandwich shop.

But then it occurred to me how all the books in the window were only concerned with what I viewed as one of Sufisms offshoots The Fourth Way hence I now sought clarification "Your school is it a Sufi school? only to watch in astonishment as a horizontal row of tiny jets of flame leapt into life in his eyes running from the corner of one eye to disappear behind the iris then reappear to reach the other corner then repeat the trick with the other eye making Keith look distinctly devilish before he replied with a cheeky playful mischievous but also fiendishly warm smile "No, it's a Gurdjieff-Ouspensky school adding with the intensity of the seasoned hard-seller But it is a REAL school" only to immediately back off when he saw this approach was losing me creating a vacuum I now hurriedly filled by telling him about my attempts to join Idries Shahs Sufi school.

"Ah, yes he said with the cutest rakish smile his eyes just as full of mischievous as ever but only hinting at their earlier fiendishness You want to be in the world but not of it" impressing the living crap out of me by his use of the archetypal Sufi phrase because until then I'd been half convinced I was the only other sad bastard who'd ever heard of the

buggers Sarah and my mob excepted of course but then theyd only heard of them because of me!

But when he now saw how resolved I was it had to be The Sufis he quickly accepted this if a little disconsolately before suddenly tearing off a strip of sandwich bag jotting down his contact details and thrusting them in my distinctly unenthusiastic hand "Just in case" he said which I took as my cue to make the shops old-fashioned brass doorbell sound what I swored be its last ever infuriating k-tching! as far as I was concerned before stepping into the street and like a cat thats suddenly realised its arses on fire running for dear life.