Recusant Prose & Poetic Prose
Boy to Ghost
I dream that I am coming home once more and wonder if my spirit lingers near the houses as, cycling in the darkness down the lane, I see the kitchen light from out the door and know my mother is within, her caring hands preparing the meal that I will eat before the stairway beckons me to rest.
Does someone, now the living owner of the land, glance out and feel the presence of a wraith that lingers by the gate where the ancient trees once stood? Does he or she have knowledge of the history of this place? And if they do can they think of gas lamps, latches to the doors, bare stone walls and limestone flags so cold to feet, coal or paraffin for heat? Do they know the cancerous deaths that dogged the footsteps of all who dwelt within these walls? …And may do still.
I walk in sleep the land which once I strode for real. The Beacon with my father’s wooden seat on which he sat to smoke his pipe and beyond, Long Furlong, wild, untamed where Jinnie went to bear her calves and which in turn leads to No-Man’s-Land, the creepy path that no man seems to want. The Dean, where bluebells bloom beneath the arching trees wherein I dozed and dreamed of ventures yet to come; or Glyde’s Field where I played the cowboy games of adolescence, a solitary boy and his imaginary girlfriend, Helen.
Perhaps the ghosts that people often say they see are but the apparitions of those elsewhere who dream of childhood sixty years ago and linger sadly where they know they felt the warmth of happiness and a future bright and clear.
Christopher Allen
Insa gripped the tiny hotel room sink, but her eyes played in a quiet daisy-dappled garden. The photograph, stuck to the wall with a piece of chewing gum, was all they had left of their homeland. The dinner plates were dry, but she could not turn to face Runti.
“Insa, please. It is time for bed.”
“You are an idiot,” she said, “when you do not speak the language in rivers. It does not matter that in reality you are not an idiot. They squint at you, and you stammer like a child.”
Runti turned the blanket down and fluffed the pillow for his young wife. “Everyone becomes nervous,” he said. He had promised her father to always take care of her. It was part of the deal, which had cost him much of his land. War had taken the rest.
“But you are small,” Insa said, “and your face fills with blood. This is the reason you do not gain a place for us. You must practice articulating the language until the blood flows to your chest rather than your face. When they ask you in what form you earn your money, you must stand as tall as you possibly can and answer with pride that you are a worker, that you build things, substantial things. You do not say, Pardon me, please repeat. You do not cower and blush. Pride must be practiced, Runti.”
“I will I will. Now sleep, my little Insa.”
She turned and inspected the bed, so prettily turned down by her doting husband. She loathed this box of a room.
“I cannot bear another day in this hotel,” she said. “Never a moment’s peace since we have come to this country. The sirens, this angry man across the hall. This booming television upstairs with its pings and buzzers as if life were a twenty-four-hour game show. And they call this refuge? Since two months, never a moment for the thoughts of my own mind. Do I still have one? Runti”—she seized her husband’s arm—“you must practice.”
“I will.”
“For you it is easier. You were a man. You fought a loud war. You slept with bombs ticking. Yet, unacquainted with such things, I suffer more than you. Do you understand?”
“I do. Please, Insa, come and sleep now.”
“You are small, but you are not dumb,” she said, finally taking the three steps to the bed.
Insa was in the habit of retiring before the 10:40 train rumbled through. If it did not wake her, the bitter man across the hall would not either. She would have a chance of sleeping until the gangs started killing one another outside the strip clubs at four a.m.
***
The gangs, however, were Runti’s trusted alarm clock. As their threats and shots rose from the street below, Runti raised himself on one arm and, smiling, watched his wife sleep. Her breathing was deep, the lines of worry relaxed. She was becoming accustomed to sleeping through hell.
As always, he practiced the language on the way to his job in the factory. To save money for Insa’s dinner, he set out walking at four thirty. He recited the language’s chirpy greetings and starchy formalities until they giggled like bouncing smiles and his chest rose with pride. The darkness was kind. Runti knew, however, that when the landlords began interrogating him he’d freeze up and blush like a schoolgirl. Still, he savored this moment and the broad, eloquent man in his voice.
For the next nine hours, the roar of the factory’s great drying machines drowned out Runti’s drills. The irregular verbs, the prepositional collocations, the past, the present and the ten complicated futures. He shouted soundless self-deprecating apologies. He sang the passive, the subjunctive and the moods. He role-played with imaginary landlords: the cordial ones and the bullies. He was ready for anyone; that is, until the machines ceased and left his feathery voice floating to the factory floor. There was no point in kidding himself. The landlords would look down at him as if he were an idiot; blood would rush to his cheeks. He would never gain a place for his pretty, young wife.
When he returned home, Insa was brushing her hair nervously on the bed. She’d washed it, which was a sign that she felt affectionate. When Runti greeted her, she laid the brush down and took her seat at the fold-up table near the window.
“Please tell me you have practiced, Runti. Today strangers clamored outside the door. I was fearful for my life.”
“Yes, my little Insa. I have practiced all day. Tomorrow is Saturday. we will surely find a place, and the air will be quiet and clean for you. You will see.”
“Tomorrow I must tidy this room,” she said. “It is impossible for me to accompany you.”
Unwrapping a piece of bread for his wife, he puckered and shrugged. He wouldn’t insist. It would be easier without her. With only the landlords to impress, he would be stronger.
“You must stand as tall as you can,” Insa said as she scraped the last bit of margarine from the foil and spread it charily on the bread.
“I will,” Runti said. As Insa swallowed the last crust, the tug of her neck muscles underneath the ripe peach of her skin reminded Runti why he’d parted with his land. “And now, Insa, come to bed.”
She obeyed. He slipped under the sheet and touched his wife’s cool, slender hip.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It is too much tonight. It is too warm and too late. And the train will come through soon.”
“I understand.” He too was weak from the day.
***
The next morning at the table near the window, Runti read the newspapers he’d collected from the rubbish bins—the poets, the thinkers, the great sentence-builders of the language. He wept as he mouthed so many polysyllabic diamonds, each morpheme packed with mean men, dirty children and rust. Three naked women—a neon sign outside the window—turned the newspaper green then pink then blue. Green. Pink. Blue. The colors of his new country’s flag.
“Runti?” Insa said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It is seven a.m. You must hurry. Have you circled the announcements? In particular those with a quiet garden far from this place?”
“Yes, yes. A few more minutes.”
“But—”
“A few more minutes,” Runti said gruffly. The language was a lover that left him breathless and guilty with Insa sitting artless there on the bed, her feet dangling so far above the floor.
“Runti,” she said as she brushed her hair, “other people will arrive before you, and they will speak the language like a new coin. They will sparkle. And they will not have the eyes and jaw of a stranger. They will be large and loud and laughing. You must go now before they have their chance to shine.”
“Just one more minute,” he shouted but laid the newspaper down. Insa seemed more insistent than usual. He did not like to agitate her. He cleaned his teeth, kissed his wife—her arms snug around her middle—and left.
***
He wandered the streets for an hour before he sat down on a bench and took out the classified advertisements and his pen. The radio in a passing car was playing his favorite song. It was a catchy tune, and Runti was a good singer.
The lighthearted song and the solid tone of his own voice lent him enough confidence to believe that anything was possible. There was a studio apartment for rent just a few streets away. It was on the twenty-second floor of a sixties apartment block. It would be gray and affordably drab. Circling and circling with his pen, he hummed the melody. He raised his head to an imaginary landlord and, in the language, said how interested he was in this beautiful room, how perfect it was for himself and his demure wife, how close to his secure place of employment it was. It was perfect.
He walked down the pavement toward the apartment block, practicing greeting the landlord to the tune of the catchy song. When passersby came close enough to hear his voice, however, he would stop singing and lower his head—a custom from his country to show deference. Finally standing in the shadow of the highrise, he took great care to press the correct buzzer. The door buzzed open and Runti, afraid of lifts, ran up twenty-two flights of stairs.
The landlord was standing at the door. Impatiently he asked Runti what had taken him so long.
“I am fearful.” Runti panted, arching his neck back to take in the full height of the giant before him. “I am honored and fortunate to meet you,” said Runti, as he had learned to say. “I am Runtigel Quisafritifim, but please call me Runti. It is a cordiality.”
The landlord nodded Runti into the one-room apartment.
“It is magnificent,” Runti said, slowly surveying the bare room as if this might make it larger. “It is exactly what my wife, Insa, and I—”
“I’ll let you know.” The landlord thumbed toward a table near the door where already a stack of forms from other potential tenants had started its own little highrise.
Runti sat down at the table, as he had done many times before, and began to fill out the form in his best penmanship. He was proud of his earnings at the factory. He was equally proud to confirm that he had never been arrested and that he had never defaulted on a payment.
You are small, but you are not dumb, Runti.
The landlord took the form and laid it—unread—on the stack with the others.
Runti stared at his perfectly formed letters, which would never be read, and tried to force the blood to his chest rather than his face.
“Please, sir. We are good people. We pay our rent every month, early. And we do not smoke or drink alcohol. My wife, Insa (which means plum in our language), is very quiet and modest, and I am a hard worker. I build things. I have never missed a day of work. You can ask my chief. I have provided his telephone number on the form. He will tell you that I am legal. We do not own a television or a pet. I am allergic to hair, you see. We are very clean. Please, sir,” Runti said and then played his trump: “We pray to the same God.” Runti’s face burned bright red.
“Where’s your little plum now?”
“My wife—”
The doorbell interrupted. The landlord buzzed the downstairs door open.
“Sir, you were asking about my wife,” Runti said. “She is home, cleaning our hotel room. She likes everything tip-top clean.”
The landlord puckered.
You are not dumb, Runti.
“We rarely cook. My wife is allergic to garlic. She eats mostly bread and butter. Please. We are small people and do not walk in the flat with shoes on. We are quiet as mice.”
“I’ll let you know.”
The landlord showed Runti to the open door. The next prospective tenants—a jolly, young couple speaking the language in loud, gushing rivers—were already waiting in the corridor.
Outside, Runti sat on a bench and gazed up at the building he would never live in. He struck a match in his mind and watched the highrise go up in flames. He imagined all the tenants streaming from the door, screaming for help so eloquently in the language—and then the landlord Goliath falling from a window, desperate to escape the searing black smoke of Runti’s vengeful imagination. Then he took a few deep breaths, stood up and dusted himself off—a symbol from his country that he had forgiven and moved on.
***
On the long walk home, he collected the newspapers from the rubbish bins and promised himself that he would practice even harder. His voice would please the next landlord and Insa would have vegetables and fish for dinner. She would no longer spend hours staring at that photograph of her lost garden. All he had to do was practice, he told himself; and so he greeted every tree along the way, discussed the weather with mailboxes, exchanged ideas with parking meters. By the time he reached the hotel, the night-time was a snarl of sirens and drunken youth.
“I have splendid news!” Insa said, opening the hotel room door before her husband could get his key out of the lock.
Runti let his newspapers fall onto the bed and sat down at the little table.
“But you must not be angry with me,” she said.
“What is it?”
“First, you must promise.”
“I promise.”
“I too went to search for apartments today.”
“You? But you said—”
“You have promised.”
“I know. I am not angry,” Runti said—but he felt smaller.
She handed Runti a rental agreement. “We must only sign. The landlord has already signed it. See here.” She pointed to the signature on the last page. “And, Runti, there is a garden with a Blue Prince hedge to defend against the clamor of voices.”
Runti read over the intricate wording of the legal document. Such rich, voluptuous ideas couched in rhetoric, buried in clauses, circling tiny specks of meaning like birds of prey.
“I do not understand,” he said finally. “You do not even speak the language.”
Insa turned away. “Do not ask.”
“Insa?”
“It is not so different from our own,” she said, her face tinged by the Green Pink Blue of the neon naked women.
Barry Basden
Sundays brought harsh religion in an unadorned church. The boy, who had just turned twelve, was now at the age of consent. He sat with his parents in a hard wooden pew midway back on the left side of the little hall. After a few a cappella hymns, the black-suited preacher worked himself up and spewed God’s wrath over the his flock.
“Frills are for Catholics,” Brother Jones railed, his face reddening. “They wear fancy robes and bow down to false idols. Blasphemy. Abominations in the eyes of the Lord. And the Jews are worse. They crucified Christ.”
The boy wouldn’t have blinked if the cross on the front of the pulpit had burst into flames.
Finally, the preacher stopped his agitated pacing and swept an arm expansively across his chest, taking in the whole congregation. “Get right with Jesus or face eternal Hellfire and damnation.”
Then came the call to salvation and, while the congregation sang a hymn about spotless garments and being “washed in the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb,” the boy’s father poked him with an elbow and nodded toward the preacher waiting at the front of the room.
The boy moved out of the pew and down the center aisle, his head lowered. His heart thumped and a sourness rose in his throat as he stood before the congregation and confessed aloud that he was a sinner and that he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
There was more singing and someone led him through a door into a tiny, dimly lit room where he changed into the white smock he found hanging on a peg. He walked down two steps into a galvanized baptismal tank reeking of chlorine. The preacher, wearing hip waders, took his hand to steady him. A curtain across the front of the tank opened, but the boy could not look out at the silent crowd.
The preacher turned to the congregation and raised his hand. “I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” He laid the boy back until water closed over his face, then lifted him upright again.
Dripping wet, the boy pulled free and stepped out of the tank, certain that God had nothing at all to do with any of it.
You’re 16 going on 30. A teen drama queen meltdown happening all over your mother’s hands.
Only your eyes will remain intact, cold and unwavering. Staring ahead, bored and unmoved.
While you struggle to break free with your cheap hairspray, white boots, and cigarette hanging on glossed lips, the rest of the world is oblivious. Joggers run by, the steamy buses charge past to town, circling magpies soar with a quiet menace above the park, as a woman child roams.
From my car, from my age now, I see you, walking down the dimly lit road. Like the pied piper, but your followers are boys, who eagerly, grubbily pursue you, As you pursue them.
In dark rooms and street corners, bus shelters and behind the old cinema. Tantalizing them with your tawdry glamour: long blonde blow-dried hair and thin, long legs.
The city prepares for slumber inside its warm houses, while you turn on the charm, ruling supreme, the leader of the pack. The girl with the most brass. I drive on by, your dead eyes averted from my gaze.
Some days after, the rails collapse, you go off like a piece of dynamite which was been smoking for some time. Firing, cracking, smelling of sex( or the promise of). Your scrawny neck covered in love bites telling tales of brazenness. The teachers get your worst that day, you scream and you shout, throw chairs, then they throw you out.
Sauntering off with your fan club in tow, all male of course, you wave goodbye to the group of girls from your class at the window. They laugh amongst themselves. Inside a small drip of jealousy, pushed aside by your streetwise pride. So…you get off, so your mum can mop
you up.
Mike Berger
Chris reeks of urine. Bleeding needle marks turned his arms blue.
His eyes are glazed and he shows no emotion. Heroin has taken
its toll. He’s unaware that I’m there.
He’s dying.
Dying slowly dose by dose. He begins to shake and quiver. He
needs another fix. The methadone will stop the shakes but it is
as bad as the real stuff. I inject a syringe full. Serenity returns
in just a few seconds. Eyes closed and he smiles; not realizing
He’s dying.
Usually we try to wean the user off-detoxify. Not Chris. He’s burned
out his brain and his kidneys are failing. He looks ghastly pale and
his eyes are yellow. He doesn’t respond to sound or light. He sits
like an amorphous lump of clay waiting to be returned to the earth.
He’s dying
Once a businessman whose partner stole him blind. He never
recovered. He has robbed, stolen, begged and borrowed. He’s
burned every bridge in town. He lived in a fleabag hotel and
survived on an SS I check. His family disowned him. His wife has
remarried. He is now too far gone to cry. The deep tragedy is
that nobody cares
He’s dying.
Jan Bradley
I gave chase to another visitation in the half-light. My mother’s shadow stepped out from the curtain; a raven-winged bump in the night. Nothing untoward, it may have been my earnest mind mirrored in a fool’s paradise. A phantasm in a flight of fancy, I dogged her footsteps, regardless, in my mind’s eye.
A favoured setting; back at the old house. In her bedroom; my father’s 1950’s lacquered cortege, a painful heirloom. The bed set like an anchor in a sea of linen. She was changing, I was searching, both hurting. The pair of us knew where she was; an apparition in phantasmagoria. A mirage in my submerged clairvoyance, relinquished.
Seated beside me, she lay open her scars; divulging enigmatic messages like stars, imparting prudence, shaking bewildered skeletons from her ottoman in penance. Some wounds bridge space and time, redressing the balance is an arduous climb. She is evoked as long as I rub the lamp; wear my wishing-cap straight, and never askant.
Stepping lightly, I broached the subject…’Mum, I don’t understand some things. When you were suffering I was paralysed, a feebled-shook-witness.’ She looked at me awkwardly, ‘I can’t talk to you about that love.’ She went by the book but she didn’t tell me which book, a fortune-teller sworn not to tell.
She hungered to show herself, to offer peace of mind to me. Jumping through hoops, she had them agree. Her Samson soul would say, ‘There are more important things to life kiddo. The remedy was worse than the disease, so please, be your own alchemist.’
Jan Bradley
Under the watchful canopy of home the attic is a sky-parloured cranium. Arching rafters crib life-cycles, orbited and compassed in variegated shades, chronologically archived by my father. Cathedralled high in consecutive shrines, epochs upon epochs of time-eaten codes to crack. Unkempt allotments of crops run to seed, when nurturing fingers are hidden in pockets, held back.
I wade through submerged decks, gang-planked in lintels. Shreds of daylight punctuate vaulted gables, conjuring a forest floor beneath me. I know this landscape by night. I prowl quiet as a fox, among crackling leaves and trees spined high. No one gains on me in this neck of the woods; sylvan territory is my natural-born hermitage.
You fail to remember the treacherous beams underfoot, shrouded by bleary eyes, but I don’t. My memory X-rays the ground. I shine a torch but the light only tinsels a line. Guttering dusty featherweight beacons, it quarries out finely drawn time. Columns and pilasters dissolve in cold veils of darkness behind.
My former lives consigned to oblivion for decades, wrapped out of reach amongst cargo-bayed artefacts; filed away under sections in faded hues of peerless value. Years have travelled silently, tombed in this mourner’s seat, held high at an altitude into an arcing meridian heat. A patchwork scrapbook trodden with crow’s feet floats on still waters under a perennial bridge.
Washed up by the rivers of time, I hear my mother say; ‘We all have to die someday’. She tells me to remember and to forget the elegant essences roosting here, inelegances to regret. From birth we start a treasury of life, deposited, catalogued, and indexed in wealth, to soften the rasping of grief, in our stealth.
Garlands shelved to be worn by and by, at the hands of followers crouched in an unsung chamber. Bowing and curtsying along pontooned trestles in a scaffolded watchtower. My father’s spirit holds a glittering searchlight, to the fragile timber tightroped. He does everything to help me, with the whole of his heart, he’s invoked.
Leon Brown
When Toby Barnham awoke he was curled in the foetal position. It was Sunday morning and his bed was saturated with that fluid released all too easily by either a full bladder or refined terror. The October sun lunged through the slats in the sunroof stamping his torso with a bright white grid. His brow was moist, his eyes wet and shining, his throat raw. Clearly he had been screaming. Why? It took him only a second to inwardly answer, as once again he was transported back to relive his ordeal in all its gruesome clarity.
Toby had just undergone the most insane nightmare. His vacuum cleaner – a top of the range Dyson – not content with trying to strike up a conversation about spiralling property prices in Sheerhaven had then proceeded to rape him. With gentle flirtation at first, it had stroked its nozzle under his chin before launching a frenzied and unprovoked all-out sexual assault. This steel and plastic predator was then joined in his campaign (one can only presume it was a ‘he’) by others; the kettle, the cruet set, the ipod, the Apple Mac, the LadyMantron. There was no way Toby could fight them all off, even with every ounce of the strength packed into the 170 pounds which comprised his pumped, primed, chromatically gleaming 6ft 2 bulk. So he surrendered – to an indescribable pain and humiliation. For the first time in his life he had wavered and ceased to be what he had always been: that rare specimen of modern English manhood – The Alpha Male. He might never be the same again.
Rolling his head onto his left shoulder he caught sight of the culprit hiding behind the slats in the storage cupboard. He was seized by a murderous rage and sprang from the bed towards it. Then he stopped, realising the absurdity of his murderous impulses: after all it had only been a dream. He looked away in shame. Even though Toby never used it – he hired an Iranian woman, a refugee from the war, at the minimum wage for that – he would never look on this humble machine with the same naïve eyes again.
Toby still felt a twinge of violation as he willed his now limp but not un-Olympian 39-year-old torso to the huge bay windows which gazed out upon the world like the eyes of some mutant bug . As he approached he extracted a fresh white towel from the steel and pine dresser. He tied it around his waist and pressed a button. The tinted black glass rose to reveal the sun-bleached shingle of Sheerhaven seafront now slowly being invaded by a force of fashionably attired human (and in some cases posthuman) termites. Beyond them loomed that dirty sapphire expanse co-mingling the exotic and mundane: the English Channel.
He pressed another button. The window lifted and he shuffled onto the balcony. This time his chin didn’t jut out towards the sun in its daily homage to Benito Mussolini. Several times he inhaled and exhaled the salty tang of the fresh yet warming morning air. After this he walked to the kitchen, filled the Gaggia with finest Columbian coffee beans and padded towards the bathroom. He turned on the taps, splashed water on his face and walked towards the windows once more. He felt unclean, his tension an unwanted guest outstaying its welcome. Once again he glanced at the Dyson. Then he caught sight of the kettle, the ipod, the Apple Mac. He felt claustrophobic. He walked towards the glass dining table to pick up his cellphone. There were three missed calls. All of them were from women, none of whose names were familiar. Cattie, Hannah, Kelly. Conquests from last night’s party presumably. He smiled – his sense of self reviving.
It was then he noticed it. A spasm of electricity pulsed through him.
It lay on the table, fleshy and inert, a perfect square about one inch high and five wide. It resembled wax but was the colour of Caucasian skin. Appalled yet fascinated he prodded it with a biro lying nearby. Dimpling slightly it emitted an almost imperceptible squeal. “Calm down, old son. You’re still in the nightmare,” reasoned Toby. He hadn’t woken up yet. After all it wasn’t uncommon to dream oneself in the process of waking only to find oneself still caged within the catacombs of the subconscious.
Toby closed his eyes. Then he opened them forcefully as if willing himself back to consciousness. But of course, he already was awake and had been for five whole minutes. And the thing – whatever it was – was still there on the glass, lying foul, fat and complacent, tremulous with an almost vulvic majesty on the glass. He prodded it a second time. It dimpled again but this time remained silent. Carefully rolling up his latest copy of the Erotic Review he scraped it down the mouth of the makeshift tube, where it momentarily hung, limp and labient, before he summoned up enough rage to hurl it against the wall. Now it most definitely did make a sound: another marrow melting squeal, louder than its first, before rolling onto the floor.
Toby approached it with a feline furtiveness. What was it? Ah that was probably it! Some prank devised by the kids in the apartment below whose voices sometimes penetrated his floorboards. A giblet from a Waitrose chicken fitted with a sound chip. He’d go round there. Yes, that’s what he’d do. Go round there and present the parents with the foul evidence of their ‘little darlings’ warped ingenuity. The Gaggia whistled. Toby rubbed his hands and poured it into the cafetiere. He took a white china espresso cup and poured the cafetiere into it. Inhaling deeply he proceeded to take a sip, feeling himself melt like a sugar cube into the coffee.
Once again Toby felt content. He looked at the strange waxy interloper again.
But even his near-perfect eyesight had failed to detect that it had grown in diameter by another centimetre.
After he had showered Toby went downstairs and rapped on the heavy pine door. No answer. He tried again. His ears were roused by the sound of giddy laughter deep within the apartment. Teenage girls? Funny he didn’t recall that girls lived here. But come to think of it he had no idea who the people next door to him were, let alone underneath him. Maybe he’d have to pop round more often and use the excuse that he was out of sugar. Hadn’t his parents employed a similar ruse back in the 1980s when they began their courtship? They had got the idea from some coffee advert. This had always tickled him. Anyway, as long as the girls were over sixteen there was no problem. For Toby was nothing if not scrupulous. He had his plastic surgeon’s license to think about.
He waited: more patient than ever now, his fingers drumming against his thigh as he tensed the knuckles of his other hand ready to rap them on the door again. Before he had a chance to do so the door flew open.
A nymph, no more than 16 – her blonde hair unravelling like a wicker basket, stood before him. Her blue eyes – almost level with his own – smirked. Sheerhaven’s answer to Botticelli’s Venus tiptoed over the threshold of her all mod cons seashell and demurely covered her breasts with her left arm. Toby smiled suavely. The girl was lithe and mildly tanned. She stood there for a few seconds appraising him.
“Yeah?” she enquired arching her eyebrows like an unusually full-on receptionist at a Home Counties Holiday Inn. He was thrown.
“I…I’m sorry…can I speak to your parents ?”
“Parents?” she squealed, tossing her head back with a snigger and leaning back against the door frame. She carefully secured her breasts with her slender fingers while rubbing a bare, pink heel against her left calf. “Is that the best chat-up line you can come up with?”
“Who is it?” trilled another girl’s voice.
“Some granddad asking about parents”
Another peal of mocking laughter split the mausoleum silence of the corridor.
For the second time that morning and probably ever, Toby felt mortified.
“Tell him we don’t keep any here!”
The girl smirked and raised her eyebrows at him again.
“Does that answer your question…….sir?”
Toby’s confidence was beginning to revive.
“No it doesn’t. I need your help with a little problem.”
“Uggh! Dirty old sod!” she cried. “There’s doctors for that sort of fing!”
The voice from inside the apartment shrilled out again.
“Granddad still there?”
“Unfortunately,” sniffed the girl in distaste.
“Why? Is he fit or something?”
The girl gazed upwards at him, a somnambulant puppy, under her unkempt fringe.
“Well? Are you?”
Toby knew he had already won. His eyes could trace the outline of his victory in the faint curves tilting upwards at the corners of the girl’s mouth.
“I might be. But the real question is… are you?”
A pair of bare heels slapped up the corridor. Then another semi-naked nymph – this one a brunette – launched her head with an expression of trout mouth-pursed incredulity over her friend’s shoulder.
“I should say!” she exclaimed. Without warning a hot bejewelled little paw shot out and grabbed Toby by a fold of his shirt. The blonde protested at her friend’s recklessness, “Shell what are you doing?”
This indignation was ignored. The door slammed behind Toby as he stumbled over the threshold of the apartment with the amazement of a visitor at the portal to another world. Already he had quite forgotten the strange waxy substance deposited in the hip pocket of his Levis.
Since the anti-Aids pill had been introduced onto the open market at prices affordable to the average, affluent consumer, assignations like the one just enjoyed by Toby had ceased to be relics of the 1960s and once again become the norm.
This suited men and women of all ages equally: now they could all indulge in the guilt free fuck without fear or restraint. Combined with the perfecting of sex drugs, compulsory sterilisation for couples with more than two children and huge advances in facial and body morphing (which rendered octogenarians youthful and sexually desirable once more) and of course the introduction of human cloning, which had dispensed with that axis of evil: childbirth, marriage and the family, Western civilisation was now experiencing the greatest sexual boom in its history. And if you were inadequate – and even if you weren’t – you could console yourself with the LadyManTron which simulated the sexual experience by projecting a 3D holographic
‘body’ of your choice which you could see, touch, smell and fellate. This body even had the added advantage of not answering back unless you classed orgasmic moans as such.
All very well, as long as you could afford the price tags for these and similar gadgets.
Not that any contemplation of the devices of sexual desperation (nor the new form of social exclusion created) was troubling Toby’s mind this glorious Sunday morning. As Toby piloted his car along Sheerhaven pier towards the East Saxington road he felt that slight wave of inexplicable tenseness returning; a sensation fostered by the silly nightmare, that the tectonics of his psyche were slowly shifting deep below his smooth, polished ironclad demeanour.
This morning he could console himself by meeting two of society’s ‘have nots’: his brother and sister-in- law on their smallholding in East Saxington. Currently they were fighting to prevent their house and organic smallholding, which rarely turned a profit, from being bulldozed by developers who wanted to build a new town, involving the construction of some 50,000 new homes. Such visits, involving the manufacture of much anti-establishment bile on the part of his brother, Davey, always amused Toby, rendering him more contented about his own circumstances. The misfortunes of our nearest and dearest invariably do. He could however gladly forego the grizzlings and crawlings of his nephews and nieces – all four of the snot-nosed little toerags.
As he swept above Sheerhaven pier his car was bought to a halt by a police cordon blocking the main road. Some fifty feet below a demonstration numbering about 20 protestors was taking place. From the banners, bearing slogans such as: “A baby is a human being, not a designer label,” Toby could see that it was a protest by The Royal Society for the Protection of the Human Being (RSPHB). They seemed to be marching towards the Conference Centre and Grand Hotel, where – Toby now remembered from last night’s news bulletin – the annual conference of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority was gathering. The police were grouped in menacing formations behind their riot shields, electro batons and police dogs by their sides, across the road. Yet it was a show of force which could not actually be deployed – not against members of a Royal Society.
Recently new laws had been passed by Parliament (with enthusiastic public support) lifting all restrictions on human cloning. The drafting of these new laws had of course been greatly assisted by consultants from the Society.
The RSPHB meanwhile – ferociously hostile to Government policy – had little to flex in the way of muscular influence. Their supporters, although numbering only about 20,000, were largely respectable and harmless Catholic middle class folk, although some militants had penetrated the organisation and a drive had been launched to root them out. These agitators were often prone to acts of unspeakable violence: the trashing of parthogenic farms, the slashing of tyres on cars belonging to geneticists – that sort of thing. Toby naturally was all in favour of the reforms.
Further down the pier another crowd – this one handpicked from the civic dignitaries of Sheerhaven’s ruling caste – was gathering around a gleaming, sparkling, new steel and glass building. They were waiting for the Work Flexibility Minister who was due to open this pioneering institution: England’s first compulsory Employment Motivation Centre. This was where the poorest members of society would be compelled to acquire new skills and engage in profitable work such as peeling shrimps and potatoes for Sheerhaven’s sprawling leisure industry as an alternative to staying at home on benefits. In return for working a 50-hour week for a three-year period, they would be housed, fed and given an allowance for clothing which would be enough to splash out once a month at Oxfam. Junior Work Motivation Centres were also now being extended to ‘catch’ the children of these unfortunate members of society – in which they would also be given basic tuition in the three Rs. The noble aim of the scheme was to break the ongoing generational cycle of welfare dependency and wind up the morally corrosive welfare state. Indeed recently tougher requirements for had been drawn up for those intending to “batten off the state.” These included giving 9 points on driving licenses as an automatic disincentive to would-be claimants, community service, a lie detector test and automatic police questioning under caution.
Now the regime was about to be overhauled again. From next April if people didn’t consent to surrender their benefits in return for a place at the Work Motivation Centres then they would be evicted by their landlords who would then prosecute them for loss of rent. Arrests would then follow and indefinite detainment at the Employment Motivation Centre after being fitted with a microchip – which would track their movements for a thirty-year period and banned from wearing hoods – forced to pay on-the-spot fines to the police for the expense incurred. The media, schools, banks, solicitors’ practices, constabularies and prisons throughout the land were naturally delighted by the plan as were the public who were now reassured that their taxes would no longer be going towards subsidising scroungers. There was, of course, a large role for the private sector. Of course a few do-gooders claimed that it was a return to the Victorian workhouse but the Minister of Work Flexibility had hit back with earnest assurances that “it is our aim that no citizen is thrown on the scrapheap.” Another policy suggestion also being mooted was that income tax be scrapped for those earning over a million a year as a reward for their entrepreneurial spirit, but raised to 40 per cent for those earning below the average wage as an incentive to work harder to climb out of poverty.
A helmeted traffic cop on a flyped, an officious wasp in fluorescent yellow chevrons and black overcoat, approached Toby’s door and drummed his heavy leather gloved fingers on the window. Toby pulled down the window.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to turn back sir! This road is closed for the next several hours.” he said in a dark monotone.
“But I’ve got to get to East Saxington!” spluttered Toby.
“I’m sorry sir. May I suggest you take the A23 and then cut onto the B1273?”
Toby took this advice good-humouredly.
“These pro-human headbangers running your boys ragged are they, officer?”
The traffic cop didn’t smile. “Something like that.”
Toby reversed and swung round his car at a right angle onto the road towards the seafront. As he did so, he felt something throb in his jeans. He remembered the waxy interloper. Winding down the window he extracted it and nonchalantly let it fall from his grasp as the wind rushed past. He then grimaced and wiped his fingers on his jeans and continued on his way. Neither he nor anyone else heard the scream as it hit the tarmac. Nor did he notice the two policeman outside the Employment Exchange beating the life out of a solitary demonstrator with steel-tipped electro coshes, who had appeared wearing a placard stating “Queen Victoria would be proud of you.” A crowd of fashionably dressed daytrippers with trendy haircuts laughed and clapped in between taking frenzied slurps of their takeway Frappacinos.
“That’s it! Show the dirty hippy what for!” yelled one Amazonian blonde woman in riding boots and jodhpurs, a riding crop dangling by her thigh.
***
Toby was still gripped in a vice of mild shock half-an-hour after his arrival at Davey’s. For the hundredth time he stirred his black organic coffee in a state of mild catatonia, in the spartan and homely, but to Toby’s fastidious supra-postmodern eyes, down-at-heel living room of his brother’s 17th century English farmhouse, which they had bought with an inheritance from Granny Barnham. Old enough to remember the Summer of Love she had disapproved of Toby’s profession and lifestyle. “Louche” was her sniffy verdict. Davey meanwhile had found favour with his liberal, sandal-wearing veggie wholemeal bread baking affectations.
Davey and Lola observed their guest wryly. Fortunately, the kids had been packed off to his parents in Leatherhead leaving the geese, the pigs, the chickens, the goats and organically grown vegetable plot to provide a surrogate form of entertainment.
His journey had indeed been a shocking one. Where there had once been countryside now there was nothing but a twenty mile bottomless chalk pit spanning the distance between East Saxington and Sheerhaven. Trees, fields, meadows – all had simply been ripped away like pastoral wrapping paper. But Toby didn’t have far to look to find the cause of this erasure. In every direction there were diggers, arranged in neat formations, like tank battalions.
This didn’t trouble Toby all that greatly. He was no lover of country walks or equestrian pursuits – let alone the isolation of rural life. Yet the icy fact that a vast tranche of the countryside had literally been swallowed up was psychologically disorientating; even to a townie like him. His brother’s house was now sitting at the base of this hollowed out pit and required a huge ladder to climb out of.
Toby decided it was a good moment to lance the silence with a judicious lie.
“Fine cup of coffee this. Organic beans I presume?”
“Naturally. They’re from a friend who lives in the Dordogne. The climate’s now so hot there that they can sustain a coffee plantation. So… no more flying in beans at massive cost to the environment and the exploited coffee pickers from South America,” shouted Lola smugly.
Toby looked up from his coffee cup at his sister-in-law in her Victorian rocking chair some 100 yards away. Both parties were separated by a narrow makeshift tarmac flyover which spliced the farmhouse neatly in half, started at the front door and linked one side of the bottomless pit with the other. It hadn’t been officially opened yet – fortunately for the inhabitants although that venerable ‘survivor’ Kate Moss had been called upon (for a considerable fee) to cut the ribbon in a few weeks time.
Toby mused on Lola’s utterance for a second before a thought struck him.
“If the indigenous peoples of these countries aren’t being exploited then that raises a serious question mark over their future? I’m not saying exploitation is justified you understand, but surely…..it’s better than dying.”
Lola scowled. “I should have guessed you’d take such a stance. Then again you always were the Arch-Globaliser of the Barnham family, weren’t you?”
Davey, mild and affable, non-confrontational Davey, merely averted his eyes from the grenade his wife had tossed into the flowerbed of an otherwise serene Sunday family afternoon.
Toby gently put down his coffee cup and smiled at his accuser with razored lips. “And I should have known that you’d react to my suggestion so….” He paused here for emphasis. “….petulantly.”
“How dare you, you of all people call me petulant!” Lola erupted. “At least I don’t drive a carbon-spewing Jag to the newsagents, every time I want my latest copy of GQ. At least I don’t make a living feeding the sex-fuelled dreams of sad, shallow ageing playboy millionaires with an infinite supply of money and cocaine combined with a strictly limited supply of humanity. And at least I don’t strut around town chasing the skirts of girls barely out of their teens like some has-been second division footballer.”
And still Toby smiled – ever the suave, unruffled charmer. “Actually I’m lucky enough to be able to pay for GQ to be delivered to my door. As for chasing skirt I am privileged in having numerous opportunities to lift them.”
Lola was rendered silent by these Wildean retorts, allowing Toby the space to slyly glance at his brother as if to ask, “And what is your take on this big brother?”
Davey cast his eyes down even further – deep into the very fibres of the fine but worn old Moroccan rug, now trampled with the dirt and chalk of the hollow in which all three of them were now sitting.
“I do wish everything didn’t have to be reduced to some petty philosophical or
political squabble in this family,” he said sorrowfully.
“He started it!” shrieked Lola.
“And I’m finishing it!” Davey roared with the ferocity of a Force 8 gale. Lola burst into tears. Almost immediately Davey regretted his outburst and rushed to embrace his wife.
“There, there Lolly. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to.”
“I know, I know. But you did didn’t you?” Lola wailed back softly.
“Shall I make some more coffee?” offered Toby diplomatically, struggling to be heard above the cacophony of frantic sobbing and hugging.
“You say that this house’s electricity needs are now met solely by wind and solar power?” asked Toby suspiciously, as he inspected the white revolving micro wind turbines that now dominated the endangered half acre square of land which comprised his brother and sister-in-laws entire existence.
“Indeed I am!” beamed Davey. “This is a 100 per cent carbon neutral household!
Not only that but all the food we grow here is organic and goes nowhere near Wallmart or Tesco. We only supply the best, and at very competitive prices, to delicatessens, vegetarian restaurants and health stores.”
Toby sniffed the air as if something noxious was taunting his nostrils.
“What about the heating? What does your boiler run on?”
“Finest rape seed oil.”
“It can also run on potato oil,” reminded Lola, her composure now somewhat improved.
“Yes,” murmured Toby letting his apathetic eyes trail over this Elysium of environmentalism. “But will it prevent all this from being swallowed?”
he interjected, waving his hand over the smallholding.
Davey’s face darkened.
“It’s a fair question,” he sighed. “We’re going to give it a fucking good try.”
We’ve been given assurances that we’ll be safe for the next 10 years.”
“And you buy those do you? Maybe you haven’t noticed but they’ve driven a link road through your living room!”
“Yes I think we might just be aware, but they assure us it’s only temporary and we don’t have much choice but to believe them, do we?” snapped Lola. “We’ve both served 18 months between us for a breach of the peace trying to save this place. 18 months spent in Wandsworth, locked up with murderers and rapists. And what did it achieve? Our babies left without a mother and father for the two most formative years of their lives? Three protesters, good friends of ours, crushed under the wheels of JCBs for which the culprits each received a 2-year suspended sentence. But I suppose when the company you work for has two board members who are ministers – one at the Ministry of Justice– the threat of doing time for corporate murder is miraculously removed.”
The geese in the kitchen quacked their agreement. Toby eyed them sceptically.
“Still at least the kids will soon be able to play with the kids on their back doorstep!”
“Perish the thought!” shivered Lola. “This place will be Chav City Central before the year is out.”
Toby couldn’t resist another swipe. “But I thought you were all for social inclusion.” he smiled. Davey winced in expectation of another confrontation but this time Lola retained her dignity.
“There are limits. Such as five year olds selling cocaine with sub machine guns as they do in Hackney. Even I am not ashamed to admit that, social inclusion is not always the best option,” she crisply answered with a flawlessly fastened smile.
Toby smiled back. “Full marks for admitting it! Although I’m sure it won’t come to that down here in green and affluent East Saxington. My dear Lola! It’s heartening to hear that you’re well on the way to becoming a fully paid up member of my tribe. The glossies call us a new social sub group.’ The Pragmatic Nihilists.’”
“Sounds like the name of a Chav Rock group,” she replied contemptuously.
“I suppose in a sense we are!” laughed Toby.
Lola raised her eyebrows and looked at Davey. But already he was gazing up at the darkening sky, floating deep in his own fathomlessly unthinking universe.
***
Upon his return to Sheerhaven Toby, feeling unaccountably restless, reverted to that default mode adopted by most of his fellow restless souls: shopping.
Parking his car at the vast open air skypark suspended high above the 10 storey globular Tower Shopping Village, he took one of the glass bullet lifts, which span him in a spiralling tube shaped like an epiglottis, down to the third floor, where a bewildering multitude of clothing outlets – all selling only the faintest variations of the same lines – had nonetheless established a colony in what was now the alimentary canal of Sheerhaven itself.
Although it was 6 pm the mall was overflowing with shoppers. Internet shopping, despite its intense popularity some years earlier, had recently experienced a sharp decline. Quite simply people yearned to be part of one huge collective experience which could not be provided solely by the Internet or its infinite blogs forever.
For many – mainly men – the hunger was fed by football, whether in the pub, the stadium or the living room. For women though (but also a not an inconsiderable number of men) it could only be met by shopping. It interstitched the very synapses of the British psyche. Without shopping, it could be asked in inverted Bonapartean fashion, what else did Britishness mean? And although one could equally say the same of Frenchmen, Americans, Italians, it must be admitted that the word shopping has always held a special magical, if not semi-mystical resonance for the British.
Like most of his fellow seekers of the peculiarly postmodern grail of the 75 per cent reduction, Toby was not shopping for anything in particular: he too suffered from this irrational desire to be part of the one and only remaining truly open society which had taken root in the shopping malls, a society which flourished without all that much interaction beyond the grunting pleasantries of plasma card transaction and the hushed, awed whispers activated by spotting a new bargain.
Toby became aware of the volume of people surrounding him, all dressed in the most expensive labels, their slender arms all weighted with the identical ballast of carbon neutral brown paper carrier bags, all madly gabbling with collagen lips into the tiny headsets attached to their morphed or botoxed faces, many of which he and his colleagues probably had steady hands in designing. An unaccountable sensation, at once cloying and depressing drifted over him: a sort of existential dizziness. The crowd seemed to be getting faster and younger, as if time itself was speeding up, and one collective sibilant whisper seemed to rise like an invisible cloud from them. “Got to have it! Got to have it!”
Toby peered through the windows of the Rolex shop. Then he looked down at the one attached to his wrist. It seemed inexcusably shabby. He felt a gathering urge to buy another. From the window he picked out the flashiest and checked the price. One Hundred Thousand pounds. He could afford it easily. Students remortgaged their flats for a birthday bash at the Grand for such paltry sums; a sum he could make easily within a fortnight. He had just crossed the threshold of the shop and was about to be pounced on by a breathlessly grinning blonde salesgirl with the airbrushed face and silicone charms of a Playboy centrefold when he was suddenly struck by the folly of what he had embarked on.
“Can I help you sir?” drawled the girl in an accent pitched somewhere between Medway and Massachussets.
Without even answering her Toby turned and fled. Down he fled on the escalator. Down past the giant inflatable robotic golden sculptures of those ageing but not forgotten icons the Beckhams, down past the Shopper’s Temple where an obscure Buddhist sect exhorted its followers to chant for Porsches and down into the roseate, jazz infused bosom of the Pacific Heights Wine Lodge.
He stumbled towards the bar. Then to his horror he noticed the girl behind the bar was the same as the one who had just attempted to serve him in the Rolex shop.
Toby’s head swam again. So this was what it was then: losing one’s mind. He had always dismissed sufferers of mental anguish in the past with a pitiless Darwinian logic. Was it time to apply such mercilessness to himself?
He did so. Somehow he managed to snap his disordered senses together like bamboo shutters on a grimy window.
The girl seemed neither to notice or acknowledge her customer’s confused state.
“Can I help you sir?” she gushed with the same antiseptic smile she had served up to each one of her day’s thousand and one customers –whether they were the most shamelessly leering 60 year-old obese businessman or the young thrusting middle manager on the make.
“Get me whatever is the most expensive drink on the house?”
“Well…that would be the Mustique, sir?” the girl purred in a soft Massachussets.
“What’s that when it’s at home? An island?”
“Why yes so it is sir! An exotic island cocktail which stimulates all to the senses and desires!” she answered as if reeling off a script.
“Yeah, yeah! But I’d prefer something to knock me out. Not stimulate me.
Nobody wants stimulating anymore! Except for their erogenous zones.”
The girl was at a loss how to respond.
“It’ll do!” scowled Toby. “How much?”
“Twenty thousand pounds sir!”
“Fuck a goose!”
The smile vanished from the girl’s glowing cheeks.
“Sir! Please restrain your language!”
“ Forgive me. I didn’t mean it literally of course, enchanting though you are. But what’s in it to justify such a price tag? Liquid gold bullion?”
“You’re not far off, sir! There’s a generous sprinkling of 12 carat gold leaves blended with finest Louis XVI brandy, champagne, tequila and cranberry juice to create a unique and subtle refreshing beverage showcasing the latest advances in drink design.”
“Rrrright!” said Toby, his eyes shooting off with wonderment into the sky before gently re-entering the atmosphere. “Sounds deliciously revolting! Suits me fine! he whooped slapping the bar exultantly.
The girl squealed – momentarily dropping her guard. “You’re the 10th customer to order this drink today.” That means I get a one per cent commission!”
“So that works out as…ooh….3,000 quid. Add another two thousand to that and let’s make it a cool 5,000, shall we? But shh! Don’t tell anyone. They’ll only take it off you!”
The girl bit her lip and glanced round warily. Her eyes shining in the spectral scarlet glow swerved back to Duncan. She burst into a nervous giggle.
Toby smirked and raised his eyebrows suggestively as he gave her his card.
She took it gently from him.
“Coming right up sir.”
Toby’s eyes followed the girl’s arse as it wiggled towards the ice bucket. He chuckled. Yet despite the return of his good humour he still felt more restless than ever.
***
Toby didn’t need to wait long for the explosive effects of the cocktail to register deep within his stomach. Soon he was scrabbling his way onto the spindly walkways, elevated like spacestation gantries jutting far out towards the seafront. It was getting dark. Just in time he managed to find a quiet corner to empty his guts – which he did so several times. But as he raised himself back up to his full height – he was astonished by the sight before him. Surrounding him were at least three hundred shoppers, teenagers, young mothers with toddlers, couples (its almost banal to mention the total invisibility of anyone over forty five not that you could accurately tell in every case) all of whom like him were violently retching into every illuminated fibreglass flower pod, every biodegradable carrier bag – many of them stuffed full with their day’s bargain purchases- everything in short that vaguely resembled a receptacle,
including empty prams; some of them still containing writhing little bundles of flesh.
“Surely not all of them could have been drinking a thirty thousand pound cocktail,” mused Toby, confounded and not a little crestfallen. If so, then he had ceased to be one of the elite, the select few who could afford to blow their money so extravagantly and not care a damn. Of course, he didn’t for a moment pause to consider that more potent forces, other than the bleep of plasma tills, might be at work in the larger world, a world beyond himself.
***
When he arrived home Toby, still traumatised by his strange day, had severe difficulty opening his door. No matter how many times he inserted the key card and punched in his entry pin or pushed at the heavy pine door it simply wouldn’t budge.
Eventually he went looking for someone to help him on the floors below. No matter how many doors he knocked on all of them remained defiantly shut, despite loud music or laughter emanating from several of them. Possibly out of sheer terror that some maniac had managed to breach the security compound at the entrance to the exclusive apartment complex, people chose not to answer.
He returned forlornly to his door. This time Toby’s unnatural calmness deserted him. He decided that the only option left to him was to break down the door.
This he succeeded in after only a half-hearted effort. Despite his deceptively slender frame Toby was a broad-shouldered big man whose days on the rugby pitch at Eton were not all that far behind him.
The door splintered, jerked off its hinges and crashed to the floor. Wincing at the damage Toby stepped over the threshold and felt something sticky attach itself to his soles.
He peered at them and was shocked to discover the same sticky, fleshlike substance which had so badly jolted him that morning. Worse still it wasn’t merely covering his shoes but the entire entrance to his flat: the door frame, the skirting boards, like a pink tide of candlewax.
Toby stared and as he did so, he felt that strange sensation of everything in the world compressing itself towards him, that zoom lens effect so beloved of Hollywood thrillers. Now he knew that it couldn’t have been some prank. How on earth could someone, or even some sort of gang, have invaded his apartment? There wasn’t the faintest sign of forced entry and he hadn’t given anyone a spare key card. He didn’t trust anyone enough for that and besides it was strictly forbidden by the apartment committee. And in any case, why would they leave something which was a cross between a poultry massacre and an exploding tallow factory? To unsettle him? To express some kind of cryptic comment on his profession? It made no sense. He had only made people happy during his career, not embittered. At least not to his knowledge.
He approached the window and checked no one had entered. It was as resolutely locked as he had left it. Below him, the super casinos, clubs and bars of the seafront glittered with somnolent sleaziness.
He went to the surveillance unit with which each apartment was fitted and rewound the digipod on which the whole day had been recorded. Again nothing! Everything beneath his epidermis, each sinew, each muscle, each gizzard, each blood vessel seemed as if it had been sprayed with water which instantly turned to ice.
His frozen frame felt as if it was cracking and about to shatter into a million shards. But it didn’t. Once again Toby’s snake eyed rationalism saved him. Without caring about his open apartment, his very life, he raced off to where he would feel welcome.
***
Toby felt unease’s foetus gestating within him as he mounted the steps of Camelia Templeman’s whitewashed Regency townhouse in Rhodes Square and standing inside the portico pressed the doorbell. The sounds of braying laughter, chinking glasses and a digital orchestra in the conservatory striking up an electronic rendering of Wagner’s Ring Cycle crystallised in his ears as he peered through the frosted pane and the dim, intimate lights growing in luminosity within. Toby had been feeling edgy, even nauseous, all day and the shock at the state of the apartment had merely bought it to a head. It was a little like the sickly feeling induced by a caffeine overdose, yet he didn’t feel wired. Rather he was infused with an all-consuming ennui as if nothing could ever be new, fresh or exciting ever again. Yet he was determined to push it away for now. He would deal with whatever had caused the mess in the morning.
The last time he had seen Camelia was when he had performed a successful all-over-body-morph on the heiress to the leather and fur fortune. A severe but hypnotically beautiful woman she was now approaching sixty, but looked thirty and had lost none of her sexual power or serpentine ability to coil round everyone who came within her orbit, scheming, flattering, charming, squeezing the very freewill from them like some glamorous feathered boa constrictor.
Yet it wasn’t this demonic woman who unsettled Toby. Of all her social circle she probably had the least effect on him because as with everyone in his life including himself he refused to take her seriously or let anyone draw close. Of course she intrigued him: far more than the sycophantic vampires who flocked to her, to the point of contemplating an affair with her, which fortunately for his own mental well-being he had just about managed to avoid sucking himself into. No, what was biting its jaws into Toby was contempt of a sort he couldn’t define. As to what it was directed towards – if indeed it was directed towards anything – he simply had no idea.
A butler answered the door, about fifty-ish, droopy eyed, with a scarlet veinous face, diminutive stature and world-weary countenance, looking for all the world like a put-upon bloodhound. He clearly didn’t have the salary to employ Toby’s services.
“Yes, sir?” he enquired in the classic mellifluous voice all butlers should possess.
Before Toby had the chance to reply, the hostess herself appeared as if from a parallel universe and placing her talons delicately on the butler’s jacketed shoulderblades turned towards her guest with the insatiable leer of a hyena.
“That’s okay Portman,” she purred in her velvety cruel voice. “I’ll take care of our guest. Go and serve our guests what we discussed earlier.” Here she fixed him with her most knowing stare before turning it on Toby.
Toby felt a surge of excitement concealing powerful undercurrents of pride and fear as he surveyed the apparition in front of him.
Camelia was dressed in a shimmering sequined low cut gown that displayed her lithe yet Junoesque proportions to their utmost. Her hair was a fastidiously sleek blonde bob, so pale it was almost platinum. The aquamarine Medusa paraboles which masqueraded as her eyes were almond and unutterably catlike and topped with quizzical pencil thin eyebrows etched with sheer malevolence. Her nose was waspish retrousee and ended in a perfect point, whose slight redness suggested indulgences of a more illicit variety. Camelia’s mouth was full and lustrous and twitched salaciously. She wore make-up but only a discreet amount – enough to show up the contours of her cheekbones and the glazed porcelain finish of her skin. All in all she was the most terrifyingly beautiful woman most men – had they been blessed with such a vision – would have set eyes upon. Yet this Clara Bow/Marlene Dietrich hybrid wasn’t entirely of Toby’s contrivance. For Camelia hadn’t overdone the surgery. She had too many former friends who acted as visual warnings of what could go wrong if one’s insecurities were allowed the upper hand. Toby had simply taken the physical assets his wealthy patron – a modern day Lucretia Borgia to his Michaelangelo – was fortunate enough to have been born with and delicately retouched them as she had directed him, the way the Master himself might have restored his own frescos.
“Toby. Darling,” Camelia gushed and approached him extending her arms as if about to consume him. She embraced him and pecked him with sensuous efficiency on both cheeks before planting a kiss square upon his lips. She tossed her head back and held him away from her with her powerful pectorals, surveying him for a moment like a lioness would her cub. She was twenty years his senior, if not more, and in a sense he was as much her creation as she was his. She clutched at his arm. “Now the question is are you here as my escort or am I going to have to be yours.”
As they entered the lounge, Toby was assailed by a scene of bacchanalian frenzy. Everywhere figures of indeterminate sex were engaged in acts which would not have looked out of place in Caligula’s court. Mercifully though there was no blood. Everywhere men humped and ground, women writhed and lolled, both sexes pausing only to moan orgasmically or take time out to snort that ubiquitous white powder chopped up neatly on the art deco glass topped coffee tables with gold acanthus leaf encrusted legs.
Toby – although in no way a prude or moralist – felt mildly disconcerted. Even for him this was too much. Maybe his discomfort was the last death pains of a christian upbringing. Then in the midst of this writhing sea of alternatingly alabaster and bronzed stockbrokers, lawyers, actors, accountants and fashionistas (some of whom were major public figures) his eye fastened on a simultaneously thrillingly welcome and unwelcome figure sitting pristine and elegant and repelled yet somehow fascinated by the goings on around her. Camelia wasn’t slow in spotting her too.
“Poor little Greta Garbo!” she purred lasciviously. “And there she was thinking that she’d have to spend the night alone. Little did she know that her own John Gilbert would come to rescue her.” She fixed Toby with a warning glare and two slender bony fingers which she placed lightly across the bend in his forearm. “Jennifer’s not your type my dear,” she spat. “Far too nice! But then again you’re not exactly good for her either! How we crave the things which will make us ill!”
And with that she fell into the hulking torso of the 6ft 8 naked model, wearing nothing but a an American football crash helmet, whose presence Toby had only been dimly aware of. He looked on, wearing a heavy overcoat of conflicting emotions, relief and jealousy sewn into its fibres, as these two phantoms of the Sheerhaven night disappeared into an ante room.
“Pimms sir!” enquired a sonorous voice. To his astonishment Toby found himself looking down at a naked eunuch dwarf in a bodily painted collar and tie.
“Ye…es!” Toby spluttered. “Propping his glass unsteadily in one hand he made his way through the copulating couples to where the dejected object of his desires sat. His attention was so magnetised that he didn’t notice the leering Roman soldiers officiating as two naked fat men wrestled in a pool of raw liver, while people sipped their cocktails without comment. Neither did Toby notice the two shuffling white sacred cows covered in rose petals lowing in distress, nor the mysterious girl with long dark hair floating down to her waist carrying two giant crabs in a Perspex tank towards a man chained to a pillar, his genitals exposed.
She looked up at him and smiled. Without waiting for an invitation he sat on the couch beside her.
“I know it’s hardly an original chat-up line “but I’m going to ask it anyway….what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked glancing around him and now catching sight of the strange goings on.
“I could ask you the same question if you were nice but of course we’d be fooling ourselves wouldn’t we?” she said in an elegantly fluted voice. She smiled tenderly, appearing incongruously serene against the frantic backdrop, dressed in a light summery peacock pashmina and sarong. Her honey blonde hair was charmingly swept back into a ponytail behind her tiny cottonbud ears.
Toby and her looked deep into each others eyes but try as hard as they might they could find nothing in the other’s pair.
She looked away sadly and smiled with mild distaste at the scene engulfing her but the truth despite her disgust was that this ‘nice’ girl was hypnotised the lurid and decadent and degraded by it. And yet another part of her was longing for the life of a quintessential English romantic, the cottage in the Cotswolds, kids, granny and granddad popping round for Sunday dinner – she was after all an RE teacher at Roedean. Yet such yearned after fantasies – belonging to a past age – were likely to remain just that for this perverse and lonely young woman.
Duncan extended his hand towards her bare, lightly tanned arm and traced his fingers gracefully across her silky skin.
“Shall we go somewhere a little more….savoury?” he whispered.
“A splendid idea.”
And with that they rose, scrupulously avoiding the distressed cattle, the fat men writhing in the pool of liver, the cruelly laughing Roman female soldiers, the advancing woman with the crab, the couples copulating on coffee tables and against palm trees, the naked chubby little city stockbrokers snorting industrial amounts of cocaine, in search of a more salubrious and prosaic destination.
After a delicious interlude they decided to just lie there, enjoying the warmth of each other’s bodies.
She looked at him with a genuine emotion she had never felt for anyone before other than him. He looked at her and then he knew. He felt an absence of anything for a second but then two emotions filled him: pride and power. She sensed them and drew away.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me not to be so incurably romantic aren’t you?”
“Something like that.”
“Why?” she exclaimed. “Is it wrong to want something more than just a casual screw. We’ve known each other for years. We went out with one another for three! It got pretty intense at times – or maybe you’ve chosen to forget that?”
He rolled over in the sheets and raising them to his jawline looked wistfully into space. “Maybe I have….or at least I should.”
“What are you afraid of? Me? That I might enslave you somehow, trap you, tie you down. Like some spider woman?”
“What physically or in terms of commitment? I can only cope with the physical.”
“Then… that pretty much nails it,” she murmured.
She sighed and raising herself up in bed reached for a packet of Gitanes on the dresser. She proffered him one. He waved them away with a wrinkle of his nose.
“Do you want to be alone when you’re older. Do you want to be an ageing, sad playboy?” she probed.
“Who said anything about ageing?” he sneered. “You seem to forget what my profession is.”
“Have I? I think I’m pretty much reminded by your choice of profession every time I look at the faces of Camelia’s guests.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I think you’re not content. That you see through all the artifice as much as I do?”
“And all I need is a good woman to make it right?”
“I wouldn’t be so bold as to suggest that. But you do need sincerity in some pocket of your life. Everybody does.”
Toby turned to face her. “I’ve never been so insulted in my life! So you think I’m merely ‘everybody’?”
She tilted her head back onto her pillow and exhaled a wreath of smoke which shrouded her face like either a bridal or widow’s veil – depending on your point of view.
“Yes, in your own way you are. You’ve got a body, a soul, feelings. You just refuse to admit it.”
Toby disliked this riposte because it was the truth and if there was one thing in life guaranteed to make him, in common with most people, feel twitchy – it was that.
He rose from the bed and walked towards the window. A perfect clear moonlit night had taken hold in Sheerhaven silvering everything with a spectral sheen.
“Let’s stop this philosophising and get back to what really matters.”
And with that he crawled back into bed and commenced ravishing her all over again. She did not in any way resist.
Toby was the first one to be jolted from his sleep by the sirens wailing from the seafront and when he awoke, soon after dawn, it was from a sleep both tormented and menacing: dark, tangled visions had once again penetrated his rest: an image of him in an exercise yard being thrown between an army of former patients without faces.
Jennifer – who, by contrast, had been enjoying a delicious, uneventful slumber – was jolted awake by her partner. They both ran to the window to identify the source of commotion below. It was then they noticed it. The buildings of the street in front had disappeared – encased within blocks of solid flesh coloured glistening wax. Everywhere people had poured onto the streets running aimlessly; pointing at their homes in dismay.
“What is it?” wailed Jennifer.
“My god! It’s come here also!” exclaimed Toby.
“What?” demanded Jennifer.
Toby ignored her and – still completely naked – rushed towards the TV, hoping for some clarification. He was greeted by the solemn face of a news reporter standing in some supposedly famous part of London: it was difficult to determine which. Then, as the camera panned slowly round from wax covered building to wax covered building until it alighted on what resembled an unusually tall candle reaching high into the sky Toby now realised it was Nelson’s Column.
“Reports of the wax have come from as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as Sheerhaven.” Here the camera flicked to footage from those exalted places, including the very street Toby and Jennifer were in.
“In St Tropez, home to the rich and famous, the famous seafront has literally vanished under 20 feet of wax. In downtown Manhattan, the Empire State Building has been completely encased in the mystery substance. At this stage it is only fair to say that meteorologists, defence experts and biologists are united by one thing: they are at an utter loss over how to adequately identify what the substance is or how it got here.
Neither is it known whether these appearances are manmade or why they have occurred in the most affluent areas of the countries they have been reported in, all of which at this stage seem to be among the richest nations on Earth. One thing is certain. Initial tests show it is not alive and it is not extra terrestrial.”
Toby looked on in horror. “Fuck me! It’s everywhere!”
Jennifer screamed and gestured towards the foot of the bed. Toby rushed to her side and looked down. There at the foot of the bed the whole carpet was coated in the livid, translucent, flesh. And in contrast to the news reports it was breathing!
At that moment screams erupted from downstairs. Seizing Jennifer by her diaphanous hand, Toby attempted to open the door and rush onto the landing but the door was jammed with the substance. Wildly, like some enraged beast just captured, he wrenched at the door: eventually it opened with a mournful creak.
He looked down the staircase that seemed to spiral infinitely, down to the underworld itself. What he saw astonished him. There, pouring from every room, every chamber and making for the front door were the guests from the party, each madly jabbering and raising their cupped hands to their incredulous mouths, each dressed or undressed as outlandishly as they had been. But something had changed. None of them any longer possessed anything remotely resembling a face. Each one had been erased; melted. Each guest – most of whom he had known on a physical intimate basis (either through work or play) for years and could still identify from their bodies and clothes – was indistinguishable from the next. Not only that. In front of each and every one of them Toby noticed a gathering accumulation of wax.
Toby felt something fundamental within him crack and splinter. Then he heard another scream from the bedroom. A strange, crimson pall was slowly flooding the room. Strangely detached and somehow omniscient he floated to the stairway window. The very sea had turned to a blood red tide of wax and the sky itself was starting to fall.
JUMP JUMP JUMP
Let’s make some time go by, let’s make some time-
Skip, past the stars, stars; Gods cosmic middle finger to the earth.
Everyone needs to know how everything works.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the gang.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the clergyman, politician,
scientist, teacher, father, brother, mother, friend, military.
Which fool am I?
Let’s stop some time let’s make time stop, stop lets-
reevaluate time, time to move on stop looking back, Lets kick some time to the curb.
Yeah curb stop time.
Picture this, someone dead.
Got that picture?
Snap. Ca-click, photoshopped then uploaded.
They died trying their best to jump over- Wait. Screw “They” “their” it’s not the ustedes “you all” general terms.
Its “him”, “he”, masculine, take two-
He died trying his best to jump over a fence into his pool.
He’s ugly. Not just because of the fence post that is impaled through his forehead.
The police officer, he shakes his head. Tisk-tisk.
Stop rewind. Let’s go back and unwaste time lets go smoke some heavy weed.
Of the cannabis type. He did. Right before he jumped.
At least he tied his sneakers but he’s not wearing pants or a shirt.
He’s nude besides the tied sneakers. Why?
Stop rewind ten years that’s 120 months that’s 5184000
minutes and you’re being yelled at by your dad or maybe its your mom
they’re being unfair you’re crying. “You’re” “They’re” “We” “Lets”
general you all, displace blame, it’s the word used to deny association
with. When really its “Me” “I” “Me” and “I” “us”.
“Jump, jump, jump!”
He jumps.
Close the dead, rotting jumpers staring wide open eye lids for him.
Why?
“For dignity, can you stop busting my balls? Why are you even here?” said the cop.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the law.
Look at the pole going through his dome look at him naked hanging there.
Blood splattered coagulated, red not the shade you’d expect
bits of pink not the color you’d think. Dignity he says.
He’s got a pole through his head he’s dead. He lost his dignity when he
tied those shoe laces.When he jumped.
I told the cop why I’m here: “They asked me to help”
Look past the giant finger in the sky, see clearly.
Transport to his room. Why did he decide not to wear clothes?
Look past it this time, look past time, WAIT.
Saw past seeing through the trick only for an instant.
Enough to see. He didn’t wear his pants because a girl was in the pool skinny dipping.
she shouts “Jump, jump, jump!”
Chanting it now, it’s a party and the Jumper, he’s bored.
“Let’s do some drugs, drinks or smoke something” said the jumper.
“Let’s do something sexy, lets skinny dip” that was the girl saying that.
“Sweet I’ll be right back I’m ganna’ jump from the roof!” that was the jumper that time.
“hahha dont do it –dd”
Can’t catch his name something ends it two d’s Teddy? No.
She’s taking off her clothes now there are those tits that defy
gravity. Shame our boy –dd can’t do the same.
“Nah don’t worry I do it ALL the time” said Todd. Todd was his name.
He’s not lying he does do it all the time, sober. He shot guns a beer.
“Jump, jump, jump!”
He jumps. Face free fall.
Shoes tied?
Check
Intoxicated and bored?
Check
Necessary velocity to impale your dome?
Check.
In fact he did not know it but a jump from two feet lower would have
caused him only a concussion to the head. Fate, but that’s boring. I’m
Bored let’s do some drugs lets pass some time let’s make time skip-
Close his eye lids for dignity? He looks like a Shish kabob.
Don’t do it, it’s time to unwind rewind look past the great big Godly
middle finger in the sky where if you have even an ounce of faith, if
you measure faith in ounces because I do not, I measure it in faith
units, you’d take the leap of one faith units. Find out how it all
works.
“JUMP JUMP JUMP”
We jump.
Resting against the whiteboard he looked across to the empty chair on his left where Marci had always sat, until a year ago when her estranged husband’s jealousy had finally won and she’d left the course. He knew nothing of her and David, her lecturer, he was jealous of every man.
It was a common story amongst mature female students. Men, feeling inadequate and frightened that their partners or wives were stretching towards new horizons – and wondering who was helping them get there – would occasionally come to the college and demand to know where their women were. When he asked for ideas for research projects a third of the females would opt for something to do with domestic violence, which he would turn into a working hypothesis that they could test.
Hope was such a one. She would sit next to him when discussing her work with heavy bruising under her eye. She was twenty, the youngest in a class of thirty.
‘I don’t deserve this, do I.’ she’d say.
Marci used to sit there wearing a tracksuit, her braided extensions rising above a headband, gazing at him with Bambi eyes and a knowing mouth, and occasionally sipping brandy from a plastic bottle. He thought it was mineral water.
It had been a frenetic time. He’d been to a gym with her, seen the frown under the darktight nest of hair to ward off posing machos, the burnt umber skin, ear-to-ear grin, watched her puffing out her pain in press-ups, drowning her sadness in saunas, lifted weights with her, and attempted ungainly to keep time with her aerobics group. He’d held her up in a nightclub, rushed to her bedside in a local hospital because she’d collapsed, gazed at the zigzagging, merging colours on the screen whilst her liver was being scanned, and after being dragged for a sunset ride on the Barracuda at Southend, lying next to her on his bed like a contortionist dying in his own arms.
The tables and chairs he’d arranged in a three-sided rectangle, for many mature students had had bad educative experiences when young and, especially at the beginning of an academic year, desks set out in well remembered rows would trigger the same fears. Most of the people on this course were from ethnic minorities, mainly African females, and nearly all went on to university.
He played devil’s advocate. When he first met them he would explain that under the guise of an evangelical mission Europeans had introduced Christianity to Africa for the purposes of social and economic control of half a continent – the more politically aware would nod wisely – and that God hadn’t created us, but we, him; the real question being, why?
The classroom would glow with outrage and anger and, often, pity. He wanted to shock their mindset, to create a sliver of a chance that he just could be right, thus helping them to detach, to step back. They were then halfway to a sociological view of the world, and that’s what he was teaching. There were always some female students who would say to him on their way out after the first lecture, lightly touching his shoulder as he sat at his desk, ‘We’ll pray for you.’ He was sure they did.
He’d begun the sociology of deviance the previous year at the beginning of term two and started on the semiotics part the day before Marci had left. He’d suggested that the police worked within the class structure, had pre-existing concepts, ‘pictures in their heads’, of what criminality was and ‘criminals’ were like. He’d asked them for the signs the Bill pounced on.
The two Dagenham lads, who’d always sat together, immediately and in concert had said, ‘Workin’ class, innit.’
‘They’re protecting the bourgeoisie from the proles.’ Abosede had shouted, her Catholicism weakening after a month of Marx.
He’d asked for the signals that would suggest ‘working classness.’ Pam, the Afro-Caribbean had suggested it was the walk; another that it was the Sun stuck in back pockets of jeans. He’d then turned his back to them, bouncing on his heels, squaring his shoulders and asked for, ‘Two lagers, John.’
He did this every year, ‘the calf muscle move.’ He’d then ask if they thought he was mimicking the son of an Emeritus Professor of Literature at Kings College, Cambridge – a cheap laugh, but it made the point. One of several Nigerians had said a car was an obvious clue, another, leisure activities and musical tastes, a usually silent Somalian suggested that accent and appearance were the obvious signals and, rather late, someone had suggested race. And so they’d gone on, most of them saying something and in the end creating a comprehensive coverage of perceived clues.
Marci, as ever, had said nothing, merely looking at him steadily. He’d hinted strongly that there would be questions on this at the end of term and suggested a mnemonic to help them. Their answers came back like drumbeats, and they’d made up a little chant:
dreadlocks, hip-hop, beemer, mean,
tattoos, skins, hard, obscene
Some of them had left the classroom happily singing it – possibly because they were going home to change for a birthday party for the twin girls in the class. He’d reminded them, tongue in cheek, they were to turn up in English time, not African.
Now, he let this evening class go early. His car had been stored in the nearby motor vehicle buildings – and probably used for teaching – for the length of his drink and driving ban, and he was wondering how it would feel when he drove it for the first time in a year. Marci, a lot noisier then than when she’d occasionally slipped into the staff room, unheard and unseen, and put a sandwich – and even an apple – on his desk, had been involved in that, too.
It had been decided that they’d go to a local East End pub for the party. He rarely drank, often being mocked by fellow brickies on the sites he’d worked on as an apprentice years before. The class had settled in well in the three months they had been together and most wanted to go. Marci he’d known outside the classroom since she had tearfully pleaded that her essay had been worth more than the grade he had given it because she had worked so hard; perhaps he should have realised then that she had emotional problems. He mumbled about professional integrity and encouraged her to work harder. He didn’t give in. He hadn’t the year before when a student who had done a lot of research on prostitution and, accompanied by her tough-looking CID husband and pitiful lame child – a two-pronged emotional attack – had harangued him in front of other staff to give her the Distinction she thought her work was worth. But, he rarely failed any one.
The next day Marci had rung him in the staff room and asked if he wanted to go to a bar that evening with her and some friends; he’d thanked her and declined. Later that night, with tears in her voice, she’d rang and asked for his address. A little afterwards he’d seen her walking up a garden path some houses away peering short-sightedly at the number on the front door, a manoeuvre she repeated on the next one. Taking her hand he’d gently guided her to his flat.
They drove to the pub late and on the way he’d made the mistake of mentioning the class flirt whom, apparently, he spent more time talking to in class than the others. The car stiffened; he was scared. She had this effect on him and however he analysed it, couldn’t prevent. She was out of the car before he’d stopped, towing his fear to the pub. Ignoring wondering classmates she pushed straight through to the bar and ordered a double brandy,
There was a small stage to the side and on it was the girl who had organised this get-together and who was groining her mini-skirted thighs around and pushing them out at everybody standing around. The swot whose name he could never remember was next to her wearing a blonde wig and rhythmically lifting up a kilt, showing his briefs. The two Ugandans, looking like bouncers, were chuckling deeply and the Nigerian women, gold bangles and ear rings glittering, were quietly smiling, their Victorian values not far away; not for them the two inch band of flesh at their waists, tops of knickers showing. He noticed the Ghanaian women were wearing traditional dress, which seemed to glow, as did their smooth skins and saw the Romford Marxist leaning against the flock-papered wall frowning disapprovingly. Most of them looked very different from the way they did in class, and seemed genuinely glad to see him.
He circulated, drank some wine – someone seemed to keep filling his glass – learnt more about Robert Gabriel Mugabe from an extrovert Zimbabwean student, and one of the older women came over to talk to him about social work. Then Marci was by his side, eyes narrowed. She turned and minced to the stage, jumped up and started dancing about in a clumsy, clattering way in front of a track-suited skinhead, repeatedly pressing herself against him. As she briefly pulled away there was a noticeable bulge in his crotch. She looked round at David and grinned. He strode across and pulled her off the stage. He could hardly see through the noise.
‘Get off, get off, get off!’ she shouted. ‘Let me go!’
She tried to pull her hand away, he gripped harder, dragged her across to the door, and in a tiny chip of cold detachment saw them performing some exotic dance where the man strides smoothly across the dance floor dragging his sylph-like partner horizontally behind him. He was angry and as he pulled the door open glimpsed one of the Dagenham students hiding under a table. She continued to shout at him to let her go as he hurried her to the car parked across the road. He held her against the passenger door for a few seconds then ran around to open the driving-side door. She kicked the side of the car and continued doing so as he got in. He leant across to open the door for her and saw two women run from the pub towards her. He didn’t know them.
‘He’s her tutor, he’s abusing her.’ one shrilled. ‘He’s using his authority.’
Again, the distancing irrelevance as he thought that this could be a cue for a lecture on perceptions of power. In the wing mirror he saw some men hastily cross towards him. He’d left the window down; the other woman pushed her arm in and grabbed his hand as it turned the ignition.
‘She’s with me.’ he said, as calmly as he could,’ I brought her here, she’s – ‘
‘I’m not!’ Marci screamed.’ I’m not with him, I’m not, I’m not!’ and then she began crying. He pushed the hand away and drove off.
He stopped after a hundred yards or so and then went around the block to go back to see if she was okay. Slowly he passed the pub, a group of women were comforting her. He could hear her sobbing. He drove homewards. Nobody with her had noticed him.
A few minutes later he was driving the wrong way down a one-way street and realised he was drunk. He stopped the car; it just happened to be outside of a small police station. A constable told him to get out. He did so and irrelevantly emptied his pockets, placing their contents on the roof of the car. He heard himself giggling as they slid slowly down.
She was leaning against the porch when he got back. He opened the door and closed it behind them. She followed him to the bedroom. He let out a tortuous explosion of the evening’s emotions.
‘You could have got me lynched.’ he yelled. ‘Why did you lie? Why?’
She suddenly slid down the wall and knelt on the floor. He picked her up and gently laid her on the bed. She slept instantly in his arms. He hadn’t mentioned the breathalysing. He held her tightly throughout the night.
The last of them left the classroom – Hope remarking facetiously that she’d seen a squirrel in the college earlier and wanted to know if it was deviant – and just to make sure that the motor vehicle lecturer had got his message he glanced out the window to see if the car was outside the workshops. It was. He hurried down the stairs, wondering why he felt such anticipation at driving again, something quite ordinary, mundane even. He’d got used to buses.
It felt immediately familiar. Driving slowly out the gate he turned westward, overtook two lorries and accelerated towards a main junction a mile away. As he neared it he became gradually aware that what was irritatingly taking his attention were flashing blue lights hitting the driving mirror. Their significance escaped him – he even flicked the mirror up to dull the flashes – until he heard the siren and saw the panda car suddenly behind him. The traffic lights in front were red. He slowed and stopped. Turning in his seat he saw two policemen step out from either side of their car, their movements synchronised.
He’d taught for nine hours in a twelve-hour day and was tired; he assumed he’d been speeding. He remembered the last time police had approached his car; the unbelieving shake of the head from the older one, the embarrassed grin from the other – who he hadn’t noticed at first – as he’d picked up his wallet, small change and comb from the roadside, and thought of Marci with her bloodshot beautiful eyes telling him the following morning that her husband was coming back and she wouldn’t be able to see him again. He thought also of the last lesson she’d had with him, what they’d all been discussing, and the little chant.
Quickly he pulled two paperbacks from the glove compartment; Sociology and Philosophical Theory, and dropped them face upwards on the passenger seat. And as the two uniformed figures looked in at him from both sides of the car he lowered the window and raised the volume on Classic FM.
Ken Champion
The most trivial encounter I had with Vic Denby was on the first day at my new school. My father had insisted on accompanying me despite my protests, for not only did he constantly embarrass me when out with him by telling me to pull my shoulders back and to breathe deeply – a leftover from his army days, the only cockney in a Yorkshire regiment serving in Delhi when he was seventeen – but seeming to wait purposely till we were in earshot of a dozen people. It was 1960, I was thirteen and going to the local Tech.
Nearing our destination, a twenty minute walk from home, isolated groups of boys in the silence of newness were standing around outside a wide, sloping incline leading to the main doors of the building. Not one of them had their fathers with them.
As I walked towards them, looking down and away from my father, there were the tinkling sounds of giggling and a barely controlled snigger. Glancing up, I saw a big, dark haired boy with a rough, pitted face looking from side to side at his newly found cronies and then pointedly at my father and me. I looked straight at him, his lips twisting in an exaggerated sneer of contempt. I turned away, unable to hold his eyes. I looked up at my father, willing him to return home. He was looking around him with a self-satisfied air, rocking slowly backwards and forwards on his heels with his hands held loosely behind him and repeatedly pushing his shoulders back, vigorously sniffing and nodding his head in approval as if in the middle of the countryside admiring the scenic beauty spread before him.
‘Yes, it looks a nice school, son. They seem to be decent boys. I think you’ll be okay here.’
He probably said it quietly, but it seemed to bellow out, echoing around the forecourt. The sound of a bell came from somewhere and we all moved towards the entrance.
‘You’ll be alright then, son?’
I gritted my teeth and momentarily closed my eyes, ’Yes, dad’ He looked uncomfortable then and said hesitantly, ‘Well, cheerio son.’ and walked away. I saw Vic for a second turning for a final sneer, then went into the building.
That morning we were told that for the first of the three years there we would be taught the usual academic subjects; after that, one day a week would be spent getting acquainted with the basic principles of the building trades and at the end of that period would be expected to choose the one we intended to specialise in, the remaining time almost singularly devoted to it. There were, after a while, a few extra-curricular activities not mentioned then that were to lighten the class and workshop rituals; one such created by an English teacher who decided that if we were at the School of Building, then, by definition, we must be louts and in an attempt to civilise us he taught, in the main hall and after hurriedly scoffed meals in the lunch hour, ballroom dancing.
It was, in retrospect, quite bizarre to watch boys, some with cement or paint-spattered overalls, dancing with each other – the ones who had to play the woman’s role gritting their teeth in a howl of sarcastic comments. One particularly small lad was made to stand on the teacher’s shoes and be whirled around as a teaching aid, like a puppet at a seaside fairground.
I realised after very few weeks that I had little interest or ability in any of the trades except the more artistic elements of decorating, and it was in this workshop a year or so later that Vic’s contempt for me came into the open.
He had quickly established himself as one of the dominant personalities of the class and gathered around him the majority of the rougher lads. He attempted to prove his physical superiority on every possible occasion. If there was any furniture moving or desk arranging to be done he would be the first to get up and push and carry, his expression meant to convey that he was only toying with small pieces of wood, mere child’s play, and after sliding a desk recklessly across the room would spread out his hands and curve his arms up over his head in an exaggerated follow-through. If there was cement to be made up in a brickwork lesson his hands were the first to grab a shovel, picking up wads of ‘muck’ and holding them up as high and for as long as he could before dropping them back on the mortar boards and, often unnecessarily, stacking a large load of bricks into a hod and carrying it around, depositing them in piles in front of the small walls the other students were building.
Vic had a native shrewdness and an aptitude for quickly grasping a practical subject and – considering the finer points of communication superfluous – was basic and direct.
In one decorating lesson we were all, either in pairs or singly, painting murals on the workshop walls. My associate for this was a normally quiet boy whose father, it was rumoured, had his own decorating business.
The particular creation we had evolved was a six feet square relief map of the Bay of Biscay and part of Spain, the land mass being formed by a stippler, made of short lengths of rubber strips placed at right angles to each other, being repeatedly pressed onto a thick layer of alabaster. This, when hardened, rubbed down and shaded in various tones of brown and green was a reasonable topographical representation of hilly, wooded land. The trade teacher, seeing that his class was absorbed in its work, was indulging in one of his periodic absences from the room.
We had been working silently for a while and I mentioned to my colleague something about Dali’s moustache dropping off if he could see the misshapen mess we were making of his country, and in a slow, scholarly manner, he surprisingly began to tell what he knew of the artist’s life. He rolled out a string of interesting facts and observations and as I aired my meagre knowledge of the subject, I became more absorbed in our conversation, was stimulated, loquacious.
‘What you on about, Bowes?’
I felt myself flush even before I turned and saw Vic looking down at me from across the room, He was standing on a pair of steps from which he was working on a version of the mailed fist and motto of the Tank Corps. He leisurely swivelled round, leant his back on the steps, drew one leg up a couple of treads higher than the other, rested his elbow on a knee and cupped the side of his face in a hand. He sat smirking and closing his eyes in an affected manner of nonchalant superiority, and thrusting his head forward said condescendingly,
‘What is it this time then, your artistic appreciation? He carefully emphasised the last two words as if they were foreign to him.
‘Why ain’t you like Jim and Lofty and the uvvers, Bowes?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes. ‘We’re gonna get motor bikes when we can. Get the gels, too.’ he grinned, looking around at the others.
The largest of his sycophants looked up and sniggered. ‘You don’t wanna know nuffin’ about art,’ he said with infinite conviction, his eyes moving from side to side as if he was thinking of a significant sequel to his statement. He looked down at his board again, shaking his head and saying almost absently,
‘Nah.’
Vic, turning the steps towards us, was using them as a pulpit now, leaning his folded arms comfortably on top of them.
‘You wanna watch wrestlin’, he said, holding his arms up like a weightlifter. ‘Strength.’ he shouted, ‘Strength.’
Somehow he represented the whole world, and I felt that familiar, panicky isolation.
‘Muscles,’ Vic was saying. ‘What yer wanna do, is –‘
‘The biggest muscle you’ve got is between your ears.’ I blurted out angrily in a sudden flash of bravery. The silence made the words seem even more inadequate and stupid. A few of the boys who had heard them laughed in a preoccupied way for they were, in varying degrees, enjoying what they were doing and there was nothing hostile in their amusement. I sensed that Vic had failed to see this and he glared around challengingly, his lips tightened in anger.
Nobody looked at him and if they had would probably have been surprised to see him so annoyed. His eyes caught mine in the second before he turned away. I stood tensely, trying to concentrate on my mural, wanting Vic to do the same with his.
No one was speaking. A few boys were humming or whistling quietly. I relaxed a little. Then a slipping, juddering sound, wooden clatter, heavy thump. I spun round. Vic was laying spread eagled on his back with the head of the steps across his legs and red paint, like blood, spattered over the floor around him, his paint can describing an arc in the air, its curve decreasing as it slowed. There was a momentary stillness, and then the sound.
They were pointing down at him, shrieking, mouths wide open, lips stretched back over teeth. One boy abruptly sat on the floor, head dropping back loosely and then whipping it up again to stare incredulously, his eyes moist, laughing hugely and soundlessly. I was watching Vic closely as he viciously kicked the steps away and clambered to his feet. His white face was expressionless as he calmly and methodically brushed himself down, hands slapping over his shoulders and the back of his thighs, eyes almost vacant.
The room had quietened a little, then without warning he strode across to me. I pushed my arm up defensively and pressed back against the wall, but Vic’s fist chopped it down with such force that I slid to the floor, cradling my arm to my chest. Vic then knelt in front of me, his back upright and erect, hands tightly clenched. He was quite still. I stared back at him, gaping. Nobody was laughing now. There was no noise at all.
He raised his fists high above his head and swung them down onto my shoulders, one at a time, as one came down the other would go up as if he were ringing imaginary church bells. Strangely, there was no force behind them, they just lightly touched me. I was holding my hands palms upwards in front of my face, turning away in anticipation of heavier blows and catching short glimpses of Vic looking unblinkingly at a point above his head, detached, yet frightened and frowning hard as if he were desperately trying to remember something or grasp the reality of his actions. Slowly and, at first, almost inaudibly he choked hoarsely,
‘I hate you, I hate you,’ and then quickening until he was screaming it into a high-pitched rhythm of, ‘aitchew, aithchew, aitchew,’ over and over.
A few of the bigger boys pulled him away from me and as soon as he was on his feet he shook himself from them and with head hanging walked limply back to the fallen steps, pushed them upright and slowly looked around him for something to clean the paint up, none of which had touched anyone’s work. Someone tentatively offered him a piece of rag then wandered back to where he had been working. The others returned to their places, also, some looking over at me and shrugging their shoulders, but shock showing in their eyes. Vic was kneeling on the floor, body stretched forward, rubbing the bunched-up rag in wide ineffectual movements, his shoulders spasmodically jerking. He was crying. The class then helped clear up the mess. I did, too.
Vic was quieter and less aggressive for a while afterwards, but not for long. His strident voice could soon be heard again and he seemed the same old Vic, except that he never spoke to me at all and when he eventually did it was only at moments when he more or less had to.
Eighteen months later and just prior to leaving I had an interview with a large City and West End painting contractors and a month afterwards started work.
A pressure on my shoulder. A rocking motion, gentle, rhythmic, my arm firmly gripped, the rocking more vigorous, my head lolling loosely about. My name was being called, gently, insistently. I opened my eyes and stared at my mother who was telling me that there was a cup of tea on the bedside table and not to knock it over and don’t be too long getting up. I nodded slowly, feeling sleep clamping my eyelids tighter and was only barely aware of the door closing, and then the slow realisation that it was Monday morning, my first day at work. I hung my head over the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Images of myself travelling to work drifted into my head and concreted themselves in movie form: a straightforward shot leaving the house wearing a grey, black-flecked sports jacket, neat, wool tie and worsted trousers. The camera pans towards me as I walk quickly along the street showing a back view with head bent forward on stooping shoulders, then a dramatic close-up, the camera on its trolley twelve inches from my bobbing face, minute particles of sleep in the corner of an eye, off-white filling in a front tooth and the pallor of the smooth skin.
The houses in the background are seen as the camera moves away, travelling faster than I’m walking. The corner of the road, a blank wall, a dog trots past, then I appear again, turning quickly, flashing from left to right of the screen. A side view this time as I begin running to catch a bus pulling away from the stop, a slowing down and then a casual leap onto the platform with an aerial shot looking almost directly down at me swinging around the pole with one hand and instantly disappearing into the interior. The blue-grey acrid air of the crowded top deck, a low shot showing boots, black shiny casuals, corduroys and a pair of brown suede shoes. Stark close-ups of men with a day’s growth of beard and the just shaven ones putting home-rolled or factory made cigarettes between their lips. Faces with closed eyes endeavouring to finish off harshly interrupted sleep, faces with eyes narrowed reading the pages of the Daily Mirror or Reveille, faces with mouths open, panting with the effort of the double exertion of having run for the bus and coughing from a too-early fag.
The vehicle slows and just when it has almost stopped starts away again. An early morning office girl climbs the stairs and looks around her with distaste. Nobody stands, and leaning against the side at the top of the stairs, brushes imaginary smuts from her crisp, clean dress with the back of a gloved hand and stares fixedly out of a window. The bus slackens its bouncing, rolling speed, the camera points away through a window and in the natural frame lorries and cars, motorbikes and cycles sweep across the lens which tilts upwards showing a wasteland of dust and bricks, squashed drink cartons, remnants of bonfires, old newspapers and the frame of a bicycle sticking up like a scalene triangle. The rectangle is then filled with tall, shabby Victorian houses, then a shot from the top of the steep, curved stairs as bodies helter-skelter down and as they jump off the bus, the majority before it has stopped, into the grimy entrance of the station, makes them look like squat-bodied giants with huge feet.
My gaze strayed from the ceiling to the underneath of a saucer rim protruding from the top of my bedside table and in a moment of full wakefulness I lifted myself from the bed in pleasant anticipation of the hot, sweet tea. Ten rushed minutes later I was on my way to the bus stop. There were no cameras.
I was to report at eight o’clock to the foreman painter, Mister Fox, at a building in Finsbury Circus. I was carrying a small case containing shiny, newly purchased tools and a packet of sandwiches. Walking from the station I swung this about disdainfully in an effort to hide from the world that this little lad, who I was sure it was looking at with comforting smiles and women with inclinations of heads and looks in their eyes which suggested an inwardly exclaimed ‘Aaaah’ of pity, was not really going off to work for the first time, but had, in fact, started years ago and was now accepted as one of the men. Squaring my shoulders, an old habit, I crossed the road to the entrance.
A staircase with a rail supported by iron balustrades wrought in heavily ornate designs spiralled upwards. I climbed carefully, passing floors with metal partitions, false ceilings, plastered walls and new window frames in the process of erection and men just starting work for the day, slow moving and reluctant. One of them told me where the paint shop was and I found the foreman there who, when informed timorously that I was the new apprentice, gave me a look of disapproval, a paint kettle full of pink priming and led me along the large, semi-partitioned floor to the windows at the end and told me he wanted ten completed that day. Half way across were pairs of trestles, scaffold boards stretched between them, and working in pairs on them were six painters, their brushes casually pounding the ceiling with hollow flip flops of sound. I hoped that, in time, I could pick up their effortless expertise.
They were laughing, voices and guffaws echoing around and one of them, with quick glances at an immaculately dressed man sporting dustless brogues, looking irritated and flicking a steel tape measure from hand to hand, was making a gesture towards his workmates by gripping an arm above the elbow and, still holding his brush, swinging it with tightly clenched fist mock-furiously up and down, lips curled back over gritted teeth – a universal gesture unknown to me at the time.
There was a cliquishness in such incidents, an unconscious knowledge of the right things to say and do, the correct responses, the right feelings. These things were seemingly a natural part of them, unthinking, unforced.
I walked over to a window which seemed to soar above me, the others vanishing into a pinpoint of perspective. In my brand new white bib and brace I began searching anxiously for a pair of steps. I explored the floors above and below and the only pair that weren’t being used were painted brown and an electrician, before grabbing them back from me, stuck his face through their inverted ‘V’ into mine and with patronising mock severity as if he had just caught his youngest child sticking a finger into a pot of jam, slowly and deliberately shook his head then burst into laughter while I stared with fascination at the small dots of amalgam in his mouth glistening with spittle.
I returned to the floor where I was supposed to be working and heard the foreman sarcastically say to one of the men, ‘If you can’t finish it till the first coat’s dry, stand there and blow on it.’
He turned to me.’ Haven’t you started yet?’
Then, ‘Anyway, we’re off to tea now, they’ve got a big area down there and they’ll have a long run till dinner.’
I sat in the café, the other boiler-suited or bib-and-braced painters laughing easily, ordering food – ‘two airships on a cloud, darlin’…’ babies on a raft, luv’ .for sausages and mash, or beans on toast – and then, swaggering in, shoulders rolling, long hair slicked down, was Vic Denby. He sat down in the corner, had a quiet chuckle with a couple of painters, looked at me, gave a slight nod, then turned his head away. I had no idea that he had come to this firm, was working on this job.
I only seemed to see Vic in the café, it was a big job, painters, mostly in twos, were spread out on various floors. He never spoke to me, never gestured. On the third day Charlie Fox took me to the main entrance ceiling – someone had mentioned that it was the biggest in London – and scaffold-boarded about eight feet below its surface where men were brushing cream eggshell onto it, finishing it with large, fine hair stipplers. He pointed up through the gap where the ladder entered through the boards to a large, elaborate Adam ceiling rose.
‘You been to Buildin’ School ain’t yer? Well, pick that out, the swags in red and the egg and arrers in white; do the round rim in blue. Ted’s got the colours, get ’em from the paint shop.’
This was more like it. I had a sudden urge to ask for the boards to be raised so I could lie on my back to paint and pretend it was the Sistine Chapel. I carried three paint kettles and brushes up with me in one go, then went down for the turps and rag. I started enjoying myself immediately; standing on an old stool, cutting in the Roman swags with a large chisel-edged sable, pushing the white into the tongue and dart with an inch tool. Time was irrelevant.
I stepped back. There was nothing there. My shoulder blades hit the metal edge of a board as I fell, I seemed to bounce away and then my buttocks were hitting rungs, then the back of my head hitting them as I fell, strangely upright. I landed vertically, also. I glanced down at a shoe. It was hanging off, almost broken in half. I looked around dizzily, perhaps for the brushes, the kettles…I don’t know.
I just stood there, alone. None of the painters on the boards above me seemed to have noticed. One was singing in a casual voice about a country girl, I could hear his foot tap quietly to the rhythm of the song, and his brush. And then I looked to the corner of this big, dust-sheeted area and there was Vic, ten yards away. In a moment of schizoid irrelevance I noticed he had cut his initials into the handle of a filling knife he was holding. He was smiling, almost likeably, a forefinger lightly tapping the side of his nose. He stopped, nodded his head slowly up and down, still smiling. I looked away. On the sheets around my feet were spatterings of red. Like blood.
Abigail Clark
Anomalies of the Third Tongue
Part 1
She was a middle class girl who indulged high tea and higher morals.
“I love you all the time”, whispered her soft fleshy lips.
“I feel it all,” I retorted, sharper than the thorns that would surround her rosebud mouth.
Sweeping a stylised fringe from where it had caught in her bovine-length eyelashes, I spoke in guttural persuasions.
“There’s a curse on this town, I’ve been a fool.”
Subliminally I heard her thoughts processing, like the sweet smell of lilies on a summer’s breeze; ‘Your words go deep to the heart of me’.
I saw her eye twitch, aware that I had grasped hold of her estimations and was consuming them like soggy spaghetti. She glanced down at her personally designed Converse trainers, the shine of which had been our first talking point when I found her hanging from the neon Café sign.
“I seem to have a history of missing the point. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep? Knowing now, that it is you that I adore.” This is of course rhetorical. I sit poised, lost in contemplation,
as I mix my raspberry sherbet into my vegan ice cream, believing I’m somehow experimentally diverse.
“Now you know where I’ve been,” I sighed, long and protruding. She had sat patiently, her pointed chin dug into her pale, ink-covered palm, while she listened to my stories and tales of childhood make-believe, slowly twisting her paintbrush through the foam of her latte as if she were teasing my stories out of its froth. I continued further, intent on conclusion.
“There’s no need to lie to yourself; it gave you pleasure, permitting the curious nature of your multi-faceted mind to play with the imagery my tragedies and triumphs bought you.”
She knew now, just as I always had, that the young generation is the sick generation, recycled repeatedly, as with double figures we find our cumulative cures and our temporary treatments.
With intense Dali-esque eyes, she turned to me and spat her hot caffeine into my palm.
“This feeling is sterile. I grow tired of coffee house debates and the laptop visionaries. Creation is my right, the snapping branches that grow within my flesh. I want to dance to the murmuring heartbeat of the busker on the street corner. I want to shake up the safety zone in society’s nightmares. You and I” she looked through my right cornea straight to where I hid my desires “we are the purveyors of casual enlightenment.”
She turned, tearful yet liberated, like the feeling of awakening on the first morning after new sexual passions, opened to an invigoratingly fresh and unfamiliar world, but still treading tentatively. We sat holding dry, gnarled hands across the shining veneer of the sugar-dotted table. Watching leaflet-laden club reps hustling the free, pushing flyers for nights of debauchery like highly sought hallucinogenic drugs, attempting to unshackle the closed down, button-holed society suits and lure them into a four-walled false dream underworld.
Catching her wandering mind once again within my invisible soap-coated hands, I heard her hoarse inner-head voice, almost as a reflection of my own, ‘your pounding heart releases me’. I pulled back the lower half of my jaw, until my bottom lip flipped under my front teeth and bit down hard until my eyes began to fill with water, blurring my vision and making the hanging light bulbs and wooden walls become a flood-lit plain.
Hence the Wall
“What kind of a man are you?”
That was the question put to me by one of the many political pamphlets stuffed through my letter box this morning. For some reason it struck a chord with me but since my life has been so recently turned upside down I have no answer.
“You’ve got a lot of faith in yourself haven’t you,” my boss had said only yesterday.
“Yes I have.”
“I’m afraid it’s misplaced.”
It goes without saying that I’m less than the man I thought I was. I’m dispensable. So here I am, still at home on a weekday, with nothing better to do than a spot of navel gazing. In the circumstances I can only think of myself in the terms they inevitably see me in – another number to add to the grim statistics. An article in one of broadsheets today talks of the depression as being the Somme of my generation. Without a war to do us in, it says, we are felled by the rapid fire machine gun of redundancy, leaving our pride, our hopes and our dreams languishing in the thick mud and mine fields of a financial crisis with no apparent end in sight. I’m not optimistic about my chances of finding a new job soon.
It doesn’t take an economics degree to see we’re beyond a double dip recession. The last few years have resembled a radio wave more than a “w” and though commentators now talk of a plateau, it feels more like a flat sea bed with an ocean of national debt above it – a salty sea of austerity. As you can see I’m depressed. I never used to get depressed. So whatever kind of a man I used to be, I’m changing and my life is changing too. My days as an owner occupier are numbered for the time being. Soon the car will have to go.
As I read past the caption and bold typeface on the front of the pamphlet, I discover that if I’m the sort of man who favours a sensible, pragmatic means of alleviating some of the problems of our time, then I’ll be in favour of the Townsfolk Act. Pretty much all the pamphlets say the same thing. Red, blue and gold seem to have become shades of grey with only the blue bigots and the loonies capable of deviating from the designated centre. I don’t have much truck with either of them to tell you the truth. Don’t they know that we put their kind of rhetoric to bed when we turned out the light on the 20th century and moved into a new millennium? It probably is helpful that the main parties all broadly agree on the direction things should take these days. Maybe it means that people don’t really stand up for what they actually believe in anymore, but life is all about compromise isn’t it?
The civil unrest has been bubbling away for quite some time with so many people out of work. It’s not so much the demonstrations and strikes choreographed for the cameras that cause the problems. They’re a nuisance but they’re not a menace as such, even when they turn violent. It’s all contained and the police come out in force to bash heads if people step out of line. The real problem is when disorder spills out into everyday life. The atmosphere in town is chilling sometimes. You dread walking past a group of angry young people because if it kicks off, no-one will help you. You just have to walk tall and hope they only hurl insults.
“We agree with the wall,” say today’s headlines. So at last the opposition has fallen in line with the coalition. Everyone knew they would after the inquest into the disturbances. A few weeks ago about fifty or so unemployed men and a few women turned up in the richest neighbourhood in town and starting wrecking the place. By the time the police turned up windows had been smashed and homes had been looted and set fire to. Someone had even killed a pet cat. It was obvious that after that we’d get a wall in some form. And I’m happy with that and whatever else the Townsfolk Act might say. At the end of the day you’ve got to give primacy to property rights. The day an Englishman’s home stops being his castle is the day we might as well all give up. Unfortunately my castle is now in the hands of the banks and I am in the hands of my parents. Thank God they never did move to Spain.
“I used to like building walls when I was younger,” my father tells me, encouraging me to get back to work instead of moping around the house. “It’s an art you know. It looks simple but there’s a real skill to it, getting it perfect. I built the wall around the garden,” he adds, as if I didn’t know.
“And you knocked down the wall that used to be there between the kitchen and the dining room,” I answer, feeling rather sore about the direction the conversation is going in.
“A lot of good has come from walls you know,” my mum remarks, adding her two-peneth. “There’s Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China and I’m not sure if Offa’s Dyke was a wall.”
“What about the Berlin Wall? I don’t think that was a good wall was it?”
“Well not all walls can be good walls,” she concedes, somewhat absurdly. “But I dare say most walls do a good job. And I’ll be relieved once this one is up.”
Bless them. They’re trying to condition me so that I’ll swallow my pride and do what needs to be done. Of course I know as well as they do that it’s only a matter of time before I’ll have to join the ranks of the well educated men who now work with their hands rather than their brains. I used to watch them digging foundations as I sat in traffic on my way to work. I pitied them. Now I pity me.
“You got any experience?” the foreman says.
“No.”
“You got your papers on you?”
“I didn’t know I’d need them,” I lie.
“No papers? I’ll have to put you down as a Pending. That’s less than the minimum wage. Understand? You get paid less than the other fellas. You want the same rate then you bring your papers in. But I can’t promise you’ll get any work on full rate. You understand?”
I understand alright. I’m not sure it really sinks in with everyone though.
“A bloody disgrace.”
That’s the view of one of the other new Pendings as he airs his views rather too openly in the minibus over to the site.
“You could bring your papers in,” I say a little provocatively to see what sort of reaction I get.
“That’d be a great entry on my CV wouldn’t it?“ he scoffs, thinking I mean it. “When an engineering job finally comes up I can say I don’t just do the design, I can build the bloody thing too.”
As the minibus pulls up at the site I can see that a crowd has gathered to look us over. They don’t look friendly. An eager young Pending is the first out of the bus and finds himself confronted by the sort of people I can tell he’s never encountered before. He makes the fatal error of being as friendly and helpful as he can be.
“Just let me know where to start,” he says, as if it’s his first day of work experience in an office.
“Ello matey boss chief,” comes a cheerful response that soon turns sinister. “You can start by learning that your degree don’t count for nothing here. And you boys working on the cheap puts men like us out of work.”
I made a conscious decision there and then to set myself apart from the other Pendings and join in with the career brickies. It’s made for a hard start but it spares me the worst of the abuse as time goes on. Gone are the rounded vowels and long words that would attract the sneers and threats of from my new colleagues. As much as I can be, I’m one of them. I’ve even plucked up the courage to taunt them back.
“How does it feel to be building your own prison walls?” I ask them.
Some of them laugh and shrug their massive shoulders. Others start to regurgitate the simplistic propaganda they buy into so easily.
“The thing that disappoints me about the loonies,” one of them said to me the other day, “is that they’re supposed to be in favour of public works and creating jobs but they’re against the wall. Makes my blood boil.”
“Well I guess they see it as putting a stop to social mobility,” I began to explain.
“Social mobility,” he snapped back. “What sort of bloody life do you think I’m trying to live. I’m not after tea with the Queen. I just want a job, pal.”
I don’t bother talking politics anymore. It’s not for me to tell the poor how to think if they can’t think for themselves. He might be happy to fence himself in but God help his children if they ever dare dream for more. They’ll never shake off the stigma of coming from the wrong side of the wall.
To the delight of the career brickies I seem to be the sort of man who worries about sunburn more than they do. It’s been a good source of insults during the hot spell in the last week or two. Well I’m not taking any risks. They can give me as much grief as they like but my delicate pink flesh doesn’t stand up to the sun like the hide of a beast accustomed to working outdoors. The foreman saw me rubbing in my lotion today. He just shook his head and called me a willy-woofter. Ironic that.
“Pending,” he said to me. “What you get your degree in?”
“Economics.”
“Is that like maths?”
“Sort of. It involves a lot of maths.”
“My little Stacey got A-levels in a few weeks,” he said. “Needs a C or above in maths so she can get to University and then spend the rest of her life working on a building site with clever bastards like you. You’re going to teach her.”
I’d heard about Stacey by reputation before I found out I was going to become her tutor. One of the other labourers told me she had the sort of tight, firm arse you could bounce a brick off. Having met her, I can’t tell whether she’s genuinely attractive or just young. It’s not something I’m worrying about.
“Have you slept with a lot of women?” she asks me.
“Is sixty-two a lot of women?” I ask back, bragging because I can tell she wants me to.
“Yes,” she gushes, wide eyed and impressed.
“Well in that case I haven’t slept with a lot of women.”
Don’t get me wrong, we do a lot of maths. It’s just that we do other things too. I meet her in the college library after work and try and get her to concentrate on logarithms and algebra for about twenty minutes or so. Then we sneak off and find an empty classroom to snuggle up in and have a bit of fun. She’s an excellent student. In a way it’s sad that she’ll be languishing in the ghetto when the wall finally goes up. I can’t say I’ll shed a tear. It just means I’ll be able to get on and live the nice, comfortable middle class life I was always destined to live.
Until that time I’m finding that labouring has almost become a pleasant occupation. I quite enjoy the mindlessness of it as well as the satisfaction you get from doing something practical and doing it well. My dad would be proud, although he wouldn’t be quite so happy about why my new career has come to such an abrupt end. It all started this morning with a familiar sneer.
“Ello matey boss chief.”
“Me?”
“Aye, you matey. Rumour is that someone’s knocked up young Stacey. How about that eh? And all the hard work she put into her exams. You know what, I reckon anyone daft enough to get involved there would be best getting off that Pending list right now so that proper brickies can do some work around here.”
He made a persuasive argument. I weighed it up for a minute or two and then walked off the site and kept on walking. It’s seven and a half miles home across town and into the suburbs where my parents raised me. For some reason I didn’t feel like getting the bus. I followed the route of the wall for much of the way. Only a few sections remain to be completed and those areas are still fenced off behind high hoardings. I think they’re still figuring out what the eventual route will be. Something to do with compulsory purchase orders apparently.
I can’t bring myself to tell my parents. The son of a headmaster and a banking clerk isn’t supposed to get a teenager in the family way. Then again I wasn’t supposed to lose my job, my house and my car. So how better to complete the fall from grace?
I can’t bring myself to get in touch with Stacey either to be honest. She’s a nice enough kid but there’s more than ten years between us. We’re in different generations. It eases my conscience to think that, as unsuitable boyfriends go, I must at least be at the better end of the spectrum. If it hadn’t have been me it would have been someone else. She was that sort of girl. At least I taught her maths too.
Now that the wall is about to go up I don’t even know if any of this matters. I never handed in my papers and I never even told them my surname. I’m just some random Pending who’ll be sitting pretty on the right side of the wall in maybe just a few days now. Plebs only have freedom of movement on their side. It’s there in the Townsfolk Act. Just punch your card at the gates and make your way briskly to work if you happen to be needed. No, I won’t be seeing any more of Stacey.
“They’ve fenced off your old school,” my dad yells to me as I sit brooding in the bedroom I grew up in.
It’s true they have. From the attic sky light I can see over the hoardings and barbed wire and I’m sad to say that digging has already started at the edge of the playing fields. That place had quite a proud tradition in my time but now it’ll become the same as the rest of them, a factory to churn out robots to work in factories – and brickies too God bless them.
The Mayor will be cementing into place the last symbolic brick today before the wall is finally completed. There’s a big gathering of the press planned and then a carnival to usher in the new era. I won’t be going. The hoardings came down yesterday and the precise route of the wall was something of a surprise. Like all the other dirty handed beasts of burden, I am a fool who has built his own enclosure. The wall and the Townsfolk Act no longer feel like a sensible, pragmatic means of alleviating some of the problems of our time. It all feels more like cynical ploy of the establishment to fence us off. And to think I thought I was one of them.
What kind of a man are you? Apparently I’m the sort of man who does the honourable thing. Stacey is excited about the wedding and it’s to go ahead as soon as possible. Everyone agreed it would be better to get her down the aisle before she started to show. I’m not especially traditional but that seems proper even to me. I suppose hard times change how you feel about yourself and the world. After all there’s only so many rejection forms a man can take and I have to accept that there are no jobs for graduates on this side of the wall. Without a wall to be built there are only so many labouring jobs to go around. It helps to know a foreman.
Evection
Down York Way toward Kings Cross. I’ve been smiling at the seamless solidarity of our journey, floating through sparse five a.m. conglomerates debating the morning. Buses shunt toward the footpath, stop and swallow wads of passengers. Condensation curtains the upper windows, words and shapes are communicated in slimy streaks.
Our footsteps, on the concrete, tap in time. I start laughing. Maxim turns. I keep laughing. He bends his index fingers into little horns sticking from his forehead. I laugh louder.
I laugh at the horns. I know the horns. I mock whisper, “cacoo, cacoo,” mispronouncing a word I don’t even know except from his mouth.
My laughing starts to slow. I think about moving my hand down from his shoulder. The thought gathers itself and I find my hand on his chest, his hand holding mine against his breast. I take the half step closer to him. His hand leaves mine and reaches around the back of my neck. I lean into his arms, his right hand pushes at the small of my back. I look up and he bends slightly toward me. We kiss for a long time. My eyes are closed until we begin to part, I feel his lips purse trying to hold my bottom lip. I hear him say, “Stephen.”
Blue helmets, retractable batons, round plastic shields. The leading cordon of police plough into the crowd. Thick, padded, black gauntlets. Blows caroom off a white boiler suit onto the shoulder of a shirtless man. Metal poles are removed from banners. Banners bound around a wedge made from two red and white barriers and metal pole. A woman in a black shirt, two men in boiler suits arrange themselves to stabilise the wedge. They charge at the line of police. Shields and batons fly. The crowd moves in behind the wedge. The police line begins to break up. People run from the foyer of the LIFFE building. Police without shields loose baton swings as people run past. The crowd pushes forward through the gap made by the wedge. The police move backward. Smoke swirls from the foyer.
“I see you my mirror girl,” yells Maria. Her arms stretch through the air and embrace. “Dove
to see you.”
“Same.” replies Astrid into her ear. “Every morning,” she laughs and leans back from Maria’s ear.
“Every morning?”
“I need you in the mirror every morning.” Astrid begins to laugh again.
“You’re looking moderate.”
“Still a bit left foot from the protest.”
Maria nods, a smile beginning to cross her face. Her eyes move to Astrid’s left hand. “What magic have you got down there?”
Astrid looks down at her left hand. “For Gaston,” she lifts the plastic wand in her left hand and holds it toward Maria. “Peace, maybe.”
Through the floor six people felt the steady vibration of tires passing over the smooth surface of a freeway. Metal guards around the pallets rattled at their hinges. His head was full of disappearing identity. Don’t remember who we were, his brother had said, don’t remember until we get there, we’ll learn the city. He forgot himself in the darkness and did something he would never have done. He reached for the stranger next to him, reached for his brother, lifted them as he stood. Felt his way through the darkness, past his brother and lifted the next person. As people stood they began to stumble a disenthralling dance, strangers circled in the blackness and reached for each other. Six people moved swiftly toward the channel, their eyes wide and sightless. Familiarity became a texture of fabric, a scent, the size and shape of body, a hardness or softness of hand.
Silhouettes move in front of two drums. Hand around, up and down, bodies past, stopping and past. The fire throws sparks into the air, light catching the smoke as it floods the sky. There and gone, smoke rushing through the light. Astrid looks at the silhouettes. Light from inside is at her back. Tough techno belts out through the back doors. Astrid waits in front of the double glass doors. The sky is dark grey as smoke caught rising from the drums. Voices and laughter come from the silhouettes around the drums. She steps forward tentatively into the darker light of the backyard.
…they were waiting for us…
…it was their plain to break the crowd…
…trashed the Benz showroom…
…went around from Bishopsgate…
…hit her and kept going…
…parasite tried to take a photo…
…had them on the run at LIFFE…
…on to Upper Thames…
…would have pushed us into the river…
…hit me four times…
…horses and over twenty vans…
…from all over London…
…four hours I heard…
…wanted to search every person…
…closed for the night…
…could have been millions…
…work at Croydon…
“You always listen in on people’s dramas?” He turns away from the fire to face her, pointy smile on his face. “I remember you. You gave me the crossy placard. I lost it not long after, got it ripped out of my hands when one of them tried to drag me onto their side of the line. I wasn’t going there by myself. They beat everyone out of the building,” looks away from her, “don’t know how I ended up there.”
“People were ragging everywhere,” she offers, hand bending to her hip. Her face turns to the firelight.
His face follows her look at the fire. “No one wants to get battered.”
Astrid looks him down and up, from his feet in darkness to the firelight glancing off the sheen of his shaved scalp.
He waits for the glance to rise, less then a second, to his face. He offers a hand. “I’m Stephen.”
Astrid takes his hand.
“Did the pineapple heads get you?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t give much away.”
“They held us at Finsbury Circus for hours.”
“Section sixty.”
“What?”
“They say it gives them the right to hold and search innocent people.” His hand touches his cheek. “In order to stop further disturbance.”
“There were hundreds.”
“Did you give them your details?”
“I thought we had to.”
“What did you say?”
“Name and an old address.”
“They’ll keep it on file for seven years and use it as evidence if you’re ever arrested.”
“I wanted to get away.”
“Don’t let them bully you, next time say none of your fucking business, you don’t have to answer their questions,” glances over his shoulder at the fire, “they make you think you’ve got no choice. Remember you’ve got the right to refuse, all they can do is search you for weapons.” He turns back to the fire, reaching into the bag slung over his shoulder. “I’ve got something for you. I’ve been waiting for someone who needs it.” He pokes a plastic wand at Astrid. “It kept me out of trouble, I’ll pass it on.”
Astrid takes the gift, a child’s toy, plastic wand blinking red and white light. “For next time.”
“For any time if you want to use it.”
I see them as I open my eyes, over Maxim’s shoulder, walking toward us. They’ve got rosy cheeks from the booze and cold night air. One of them must have said something to the others, they’re looking at us with bitter amusement. Swiftly aggrieved, now, because I’m looking at them. I look from the side of Maxim’s face, back again, quickly. The light is still beautiful on his skin, his expression is unsurprised, composed to conceal emotion. They’re younger than twenty five, each wearing an all-weather jacket. They look like they’ve been dressed by the same mother. I can hear the rustling of their jackets, their shoes are shining new leather. I imagine the selling points of their garments, the guarantee of durability, the thermally adaptive inner lining, the low surface tension of the weather protection layer. I think of them, each being convinced, each standing in a shop at a different time, each touching the exterior layer and feeling a surface that water will bead on and run off, each convinced by the ruthless practicality.
His brother stopped breathing. He waited. His own rhythm fell carelessly away until his body jerked, coughed and gulped at empty air. Sweat covered his limbs. The body in his arms. He kicked his feet against the metal cage, it rattled loudly in the darkness, he kicked again with more force, slipped down on to his back, arms tight around his brother’s head kicking both feet at the cage. Noise bounced around the rectangular container, a harsh, toneless and violent tolling. His tears came in a torrent, filled his eye sockets, ran over his temples as he twisted his head from side to side.
Stephen nods, “I stand in a queue pretty much, try to help people with the bureaucratic stuff. That’s officially. Unofficially I link people with people. My big achievement is getting people into jobs that pay cash at less than minimum wage.”
“I’ve never worked on the books.”
“Yeah right. I’m like the pied piper of dishwashers and minicab drivers. It’s not pretty but people need to eat. If you’re in Limbo you don’t get much help.”
“Sounds like you need the magic.”
“Not me.”
Music, lights and club-smell hit her simultaneously. She walks in between the shadowy shapes, turning and sliding sideways until she is under the balcony of the mezzanine level. Steps lead up on her left and right, the long bar is directly ahead. Between her and the bar is a fifteen metre clot of moving bodies.
“It’s been scarce without you.”
“I came to take you some place real.”
“Gotta play for the slave warriors.”
Astrid shakes her head. “Still?”
His face creases into a frown. “What you mean?”
“After last night.”
“You’re still blurred A.”
“Blur’s not the rage. I’m asking.”
“Don’t play all unique A,” he looks through the shadows at her face, “I’m the one with manoeuvres to make,” he sips cola, “you be wise.”
Astrid holds up the wand. She presses a small black button on the handle; the star shimmers with tiny red lights and emits a long brrriinnng. Gaston stares, moves his head to follow the line of her arm until he reaches her face.
“For me?”
Astrid raises her eyebrows and nods her head.
“I’ve got a wish.”
The beat jerks, slows, jerks, disintegrates to silence. Lights close to darkness. The room disappears. For a moment, silence. Blank darkness surrounds them. Voices begin. Names in the darkness, names fill the silence. Gaston stands still, he feels a hand on his side, it touches his arm and moves down toward his hand, it runs across his fingers, follows his hold on the wand. Her fingers reach over his hand and locate the button. She lifts his arm, presses the button. The wand sparkles with warm red light, the brrriinnng of a wish fills the silence around them. The light floods down their arms, flickering like fire, their eyes watching the light. Astrid steps closer to him, as the sparkle begins to die she presses the button again, they see the darkness outside the flare of red, hear the brrriinnng of another wish. Lighters begin to flicker in the dark, orange flames throwing circles of light, hands illuminated, the half moon of a face.
“Did you wish for this?”
“You need a minicab?”
“Yeah, Chalk Farm,” replies Astrid.
“Be thirty.” The driver is young, belt thin, he moves toward a dirty sedan.
Astrid nods. She moves quickly to the rear door.
Gaston’s voice, yelling, cuts through the sound of the engine starting. He runs along the footpath toward the car.
Astrid shakes her head, reaches around to the shoulder bag at her side. Her fingers latch around a bunch of keys.
The driver glances in the rear view mirror. “I don’t want trouble.”
His eyes stray down to her hand in the shoulder bag. He turns to the steering wheel and presses his foot on the accelerator. The car begins to move, jerking away from the kerb. Astrid lifts her hand from the bag and sidearms the keys through the open door. Gaston is at the door, the keys hit him on the right shoulder. He steps, keeping pace with the car. Astrid is thrown part out of the car as it pulls from the kerb. Gaston grabs the door. The car begins to gather speed. Gaston slams the door. It smacks into the side of Astrid’s face, just above her left eyes. The car straightens. Astrid tips herself back into the car. She reaches forward, grabs the handle of the door and pulls it closed.
Out the rear window she can see Gaston watching. His face becomes part of his body, hands on his knees. His body becomes a man. The man becomes a shape in the darkness. Astrid feels a warm dampness on the left side of her face.
The nearest has a racing stripe of shaving burn running from the middle of his cheek, across jaw line and down his neck. This is what they choose. The mean shell of all-weather protection, a few grimy lines of coke, drink until they’re sweating the sick-sweet smell of vodka and red bull, then shoulder into a fight. I can see pinpoints of sweat appear on his face, they’re catching prickles of light from the station. I look down and see the Kings Cross lights reflected in the dark leather of their shoes. I’ve got one hand in my right pocket. I’m looking down, caught in the light reflecting from their shoes.
“Take me to a hospital.” Astrid nods her head under her hand. “I’ll pay.”
“My first night, you bleeding,” he looks around her and the back seat, “not my car.”
“I’m sorry, please take me to a hospital,” she looks at him with her uncovered eye, “I don’t want to go back.”
The driver looks at her, “I don’t want trouble.”
“Please take me to a hospital,” she repeats.
The guy with razor burn is yelling at us. “You’re filthy, filthy.” He keeps yelling. From this distance, those bodies in the light appear to be moving in a perpetual approximation of convergence. Our deeds are steps around illumination.
The Cheap Seats
Lured in by a poster of a bear riding a unicycle with a flaming baton, Yoshi finds a vacant seat with the beer-guzzling crowd—high-fiving, belching, slapping their flabby guts. They’re all crunching peanuts, mumbling impatient, then the curtain explodes. Moving spokes, circus bikes and bowling pin jugglers hypnotize everybody. Everybody’s blinded by monkeyshines, and circumstance. Everybody’s chewing cotton candy and applauding short men who clean up clown sweat and elephant shit. On what he thinks is a dare by the guy beside him (pumping his fists, pointing and grinning—”Go! Baby, do it!”) Yoshi finds himself running down into the center, pointing and yelling at the ringleader. But the ringleader is oblivious and soon Yoshi’s ducking the somersaults of trapeze artists and mimes pretzeled together, hurtling over his head off giant trampolines. Stupendous! Where are the lions? Knife-throwers? Swordsmen? Can’t see the fire-breathers but uh-oh he smells something foul. The thick reek of burning flesh takes Yoshi aback. (He knows that smell. He smelled it once during an apartment fire; he stood outside the police tape and watched as the EMTs rolled out the bodies.) Did something go horribly wrong with the human cannonball? The lights cut out, the stage clears and it’s just him in the dark. In a flash of glitter, a poof of white smoke, the Eagle’s “Witchy Woman” cuts in abruptly—”raven hair and ruby lips / sparks fly from her fingertips.” Wide-eyed, a woman strolls out to greet him, looking something like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Or, maybe a B-movie imitation. Everyone quiets down and Yoshi’s smiling like an idiot as he escorts her down the catwalk for a hand-in-hand bow. What else could he do? Bent over, she loses her tiara in the floodlights. Spotlight on him alone! He IS the show! Where’s the pinhead, the bearded lady, the Siamese twins? He grabs hold of the aerial silk as it swings his way. Yoshi is hoping that the technical rigging doesn’t fail, that the stagehands aren’t too hung-over, or still drunk. Careful now, just one more spiral, one more fantastic flip. Can he tame the big cats? Swallow and belch fire on command? Let’s see how many plates he can spin while dancing a waltz…
Ex-Executive Considers His Future
I was diligent through all the hemorrhoid flare-ups, wasn’t I? Now my jowls droop and the one-liners just get duller as the calendar flips. Grand notions pucker into benignities and sprites of below average wisdom flick off the tongue, sputtering awkwardly as the central program in my brain unwinds in laughable fragments. Where’s my tenacity? I feel like I can only witness spirit vicariously, yet all around me I see vacant-eyed mutts ruling a certain freedom all their own. Not half of the cojones I have. Now I’m the little man, self-involved, yet without answers, nervous to emerge from behind my fictitious mask, still too much in awe with the mask itself. I wanted to be a champion, getting my rich friends richer. Now I sit in my high-back, leather chair, clicking the ceiling light on and off with the remote this afternoon remembering that last blow-out of a shareholder’s party; playing with myself under my silk boxers in the monotonous light and shadow, light and shadow, light and shadow. I walk outside and under my feet the earth murmurs suggestions to move on as the green returns to old sod. Springtime is on its way. I go back inside and try to write out my feelings in a poem. Nobody knew that I wrote poems. Not the wife that left, not the kids that are incommunicado. Not even Mertle, my ex-secretary. “Breath composes its black canon / whose aural specter strums / on the day’s grief.” Eh, balls. How about a hymn, a celebration of some sort, for chrissakes? Nope. I wasn’t born to pen verse. I wasn’t born to be a king that others might pen verse for. That’s what poets do, no? Maybe I’ve got it all backwards. Anyway, all is not lost. I’ve got this mop, and that break-room isn’t going to clean itself. The moving truck will be here in a few hours. The landlord will collect the keys tomorrow. Now, how the hell do I fix that damn dishwasher?
I Cannot See the Heart
No barrel-blown gunshot, no knives to the gut, no clothesline with a baseball bat. No obscene gesture, no stink eye, not even a minor quip. Still, there’s violence here. Right on the money: meticulous annunciation, carelessness in the tone. The smile of a predator showing its fangs. Sound-bites and dogma. It’s high crime dressed down in business casual. It’s the banality of trying to wash the blood off stained hands while yachting and golfing and building their industries above all else. What sycophant would admit that sincerity’s better done with word-tricks and wink-winks, guffaws and knee-slaps; fart jokes…than so-called heartfelt confessions, waffling half-truths? “Narcissus checked himself out in the spit-shined lens.” It’s either me or this other jackass, groveling in front of a live media feed so to spin all eyes elsewhere. I would never poison the planet but if I did by accident I would come clean, I would, I would. What I’m asking for is a sense of humanity beyond the tired old tenet that concealment of truth is not an abandonment of truth when it plays toward a perceived greater purpose. What greater purpose? Whatever, but please, tone down the fist-pumping and chest-beating. What politician would expose the dark, ugly mirror, the imperfect a-hole, the bright white shiny tooth cracked in the middle? I’d rather see a pair of Groucho Marx glasses with the furry eyebrows and mustache, a big red clown nose, or a fright wig. Then I might believe the indignation. A king down to a servant, master into a fool—now that I might buy.
Crumb Island
I’ve heard we are but footnotes at the bottom of an obscured page, cluttered pencil scribbles in the margins, roses on a headstone, graffiti on a grave-marker, ornamental shrubbery cut around the steps of glass houses. Great wild beasts, or quiet kids mulling in corners, brilliant with lint and candy wrappers, pockets full of dice. Living inside a spoiled child’s anticipation, wanting to lick the whole world, lucky to get a morsel. Adrift on Who-Gives-A-Shit Ocean, or maybe some concrete-encrusted north forty stamped on the armpit of Middle America. That I should deal with my own hang-ups, take off my tinfoil hat, wet thumb hitching up to the sky. Maybe someday when the devil comes as a happy accident, silly with horns and red-face—no choice but to take that pitchfork and scramble up something useful. My meager oeuvre maybe to be discovered by a weepy grandkid, rummaging through a cobwebbed attic for heirlooms amidst forgotten junk. It won’t be the nostalgia that hits, rather—the Scribble of my Truthful Dagger, the Dagger of my Truthful Scribble, or the Truth of my Scribbled Dagger. First scene: me as a kid squeezing my butt-cheeks together, trying not to shit my pants at the register of a grocery store, parents gabbing away with the cashier—finally, me letting loose, letting nature take its course. A muzak version of “Sweet Jane” playing over the intercom, a soprano sax jamming the lyric-less melody where Lou Reed would sing: “And there’s even some evil mothers / Well, they’re gonna tell ya that everything is just dirt.” Cut. In a grainy flash, squinting for eye-poppers inside dusty aisles at The Last Bookstore, I still have hope enough to believe that I might open up to find A Life Not So Different From Yours, or A Life So Different It Takes You Somewhere Else. When words seduce and complicate like hot carnal infractions—juxtaposed, flesh pressed against flesh—cry out for Great Mama of the Mongrel Muse, Gritty Queen of Funk, let go, climb up those dyed auburn locks, those espresso dreads, grab hold and swing on that grey armpit hair. Like an anti-hero from an unreleased take, a blooper cherished by fans of the director’s cut, reach out from the Great Beyond, snatch up and snap the cord. Yelp out a quasi-religious slur, smash in her cagey disposition. Snag a piece, however miniscule, make art with that Batty Bitch of Chaos and Inspiration.
Peter Dudink
1
When I was a teenager, I always wanted to be a saviour. Trouble was, I could never find people less fortunate than me, and one day I so got desperate that I decided I had to help the ones more fortunate than me. Anyway, one day while I was puttering about in a garbage can I heard this pitiful groaning next door: “Oh sweet Jesus, how long must I wait for a child? I’ve been a good girl all my life, haven’t I?”
Without hesitation, I straightened my shirt and rang Ms Lucky’s doorbell. Yes, that was her name. Anyway, she didn’t answer, so I heaved a brick through the window and shouted, “EXCUSE ME! I THINK I CAN HELP!”
The wailing stopped. The woman picked up the brick and looked at me in astonishment, possibly because the brick was made of baked dung.
“Ms Lucky, I know a spell that can make you pregnant,” I said and waved my wand to help her understand.
The brick plunked onto her foot, filthy slang leapt from her tongue, and in the ensuing silence her loneliness returned and she considered my offer. Perhaps she was mulling over what people would think once she was pregnant, since it was common knowledge that her man was sterile.
“Well,” she finally began, “it’s certainly very kind of you to offer. But can you promise that the child will be good?”
“Hmm. What would God do?” I wondered, and suddenly realized I should check the woman’s qualifications to rear a child. Still, I had already raised her hopes, and I didn’t want to add insult to her despair.
“It will be a fine child,” I promised.
“Sweet! But hey, is this cheaper than the fertility clinic?”
I stood there, stunned by her insensitivity. She noticed, apologized and took me in. The filthy apartment needed help too, but that wasn’t the time. I cast my specially formulated spell of immaculate impregnation and departed, confident of a job well done.
2
A few months later some depressing journalist reported domestic violence connected to the very residence where I had provided copious succour. So, the following week I stopped by to determine the truth. I could hear the screams and the violence a block away and dared not ask about the plume of smoke rising from thereabouts. Undaunted, I skipped onwards, danced up the steps and rhythmically rang the doorbell.
Mr Lucky opened the door, belching smoke.
“Hi. My name is Cootie Bugle. Could you get Mrs Lucky for me?”
He hesitated, looking at me with suspicion.
“COOTIEEEE!” a woman cried inside.
The moment I grinned a great fist grabbed my collar and held me flush with the giant oaf’s face.
“So it was you! You slept with my wife and gave us a colic baby!”
“Ah, no, no, m-m-my wand did it, I swear!” I beseeched him to spare my life and produced the diminutive branch as proof of my innocence.
“Oh,” he growled. “Then is it my child?”
“Sure, if you accept it.”
“YOU IDIOT! I mean, am I the father?”
“I’m sorry, I never thought to–”
The oaf screamed and I flew like a bird, or maybe more like a bag of garbage, before I could whisper a bruise-preventing spell, while hurtling through space, an angelic apparition distracted me with the words, “Cootie! I am your father! The man you inadvertently helped won’t be happy until he has a job. Help him!”
That was when my body got intimate with the pavement with a great KERCRACK.
“NEXT TIME I’LL FIND YOUR MOTHER AND PUT YOU BACK INSIDE HER!” Mr Lucky promised.
I wondered how he would do that. I didn’t mind suffering to make people happy, but what good would I be dead? Presumably, somewhat less good.
3
One sunny day, after the fire department extinguished the flames and life returned to normal for the Luckys, I returned to discover, much to my surprise, that the Lucky’s and all their neighbors were living on the sidewalk near the burnt hulk of the low income housing complex. The adults looked pretty unhappy. Me, I barely resisted the temptation to drag them into the abyss of despair, and just managed to put on my winning smile before cheerily greeting the miserable lot.
“Good morning everyone! Isn’t it an absolutely phenomenal day to be outside?”
The Luckys looked unconvinced. Indeed, they looked ready to murder me. To make matters worse, with exceptionally poor timing, their little cutie-pie burst into a fresh round of high-pitched, ear-violating shrieks.
I bent down and whispered into Mr Lucky’s ear, “Cheer up. I can help you get the best job of your life.”
“Really?” he asked in wonder. “I have no education and my IQ is just 82.”
“Never mind that! You see Mr Lucky,” I said, donning my Tony Robbins hat, “you have to believe in yourself and always understand that you have so much potential. You can do anything you want with your life. There’s no such thing as luck; just set goals for yourself and if you stay focused and eat your breakfast you can have the whole universe! Do you want a suit and tie? You can have them! Do you want a car and a carport? You can have them too! You only need a reasonable plan.”
By the time I finished my spiel he was standing up and cheering me on in a fit of excitement. As soon as he got his feet back on the ground we decided he would definitely become the CEO of a major beer brewery. We started planning and had just finished drafting our day’s itinerary and initiated a personal transformation trip to a business suit discount outlet, when, as luck would have it, Mr Lucky tripped over an empty bottle and broke his honker.
Whining, he said, “I’ll never get hired now!”
“Not with that attitude! Listen, you’re more employable than ever! Faces don’t get hired, people with confidence and exuberance get hired! Now, pick up your feet and let’s go! There’s a new fast food joint looking for a short order chef.”
4
Three months later, still homeless, with his mighty minimum wage earnings going into medical treatments for his daughter, with dreaded winter edging nearer, Mr Lucky’s confidence began to falter and I was running out of speeches and advice.
“Maybe you could use your wand again, Mr Cootie,” the man suggested.
“I can’t just magically give you a job. Imagine all the questions people would ask.”
“Could you improve my skill set?” he asked.
“Your employable assets?” I repeated, musing. I knew very well that no miracle could grant intelligence to anyone, not even to the most woefully short-changed child of humankind. Well then, what was I to do?
“Maybe Bob could start his own business,” the woman brilliantly suggested. “He used to deliver cold pizzas on foot. With super-powers he could deliver pizzas ten times faster than any car!”
I was desperate for a solution, anything to salvage my honor and confidence in my life-enhancing, magical powers. I considered consulting with my father, but decided not to tempt evil. With a deft flourish of my wand and a catchy spell, Mr Bob Lucky received twin, gas-powered prosthetic devices.
“HEY, THANKS!” said Bob, beaming as he dashed off through a blur of traffic.
Though Bob believed in himself, no one else believed in his ability to deliver pizzas on foot, so it was back to life as a short order cook for the Lucky Heart Restaurant, to everyone’s surprise, he robbed a few churches and banks and sold all my sex toys to some kids. Then he bought a house and retired, leaving me to deal with the cops. Luckily I tracked the Luckys down to an affluent, uptown neighborhood. When I arrived, I heard the whole family weeping, sobbing and some wailing too. I offered a box of 30% more absorbent tissues, but their hands were full of crumpled, wet newspapers.
“So, you’re feeling guilty, aren’t you?” I assumed, trying not to show my complete exasperation.
They shook their heads. The child, not yet a year old, cast a murderous glance my way, shook a flaming finger at me and complained in perfect English, “Sure we’re rich now, but what about the rest of the world? It’s drowning in abysmal poverty, rock music, synergistic mob behaviour, wet dreams, fast food, family destruction, global cooking and 7-11s 24/7; – not to mention electrolytic advances in vitamin pill production systems. Did you think to read a newspaper, just once, before creating me?”
I stood there, transfixed by my daughter’s piercing accusation. Then I did the only thing that seemed to make sense: I gave them my wand. Laura Lucky’s eyes lit up. Before I could escape, she jumped halfway across the room and nearly gave me an enema with my own wand! I escaped through a window and hobbled away, my buttocks impaled. Ten blocks away, out of breath, I wiggled the stick free and let out a blood curdling scream of frustration.
5
The whole family was after me, so I hid in a cemetery and wept and thought, “Why isn’t anything going right? Why can’t I make anyone happy? Why was I so unlucky?”
“Cootie, don’t feel blue. Lots of people need you.”
I turned and there he was, my confidence angel.
“Ha! Who needs me?” I asked.
“All the cadavers buried here. Resurrect one and you’ll see”
I rolled my eyes.
“Trust me,” the angel said.
I fumbled for my bloody wand and reluctantly looked among the tombs for someone to revive.
“Be careful,” the angel shouted after me and flew away, forever, I secretly hoped.
Be careful, be careful, I repeated to myself until I found a headstone with the name, “Mr Totally Unlucky.”
“Here’s someone who deserves to live again,” I concluded with confidence. In a magical jiffy I opened the grave and sprinkled the corpse with a secret concoction of invigorating vitamins. Within moments, the dilapidated body was reconstituted and stood before me, a beastly, horned silhouette in the night.
“Aren’t you going to thank me?” I asked, hoping I had not made another mistake.
No such luck. The resurrected monster laughed brazenly before bowing and saying, “I am much obliged for your kindness. BUT THE WORLD WILL PAY FOR IT!” With these words, he winked and left for the city.
Unable to bear another failure, I snapped my wand once, twice, three times and leapt into the empty grave. I clawed the earth down on me and lay there, sighing, sighing until a complete idiot noticed me and convinced me to give life another chance.
Caroline England
He wakes to black and white again, wrenches his mind into focus. Bank holiday Monday. A day of nothing. Closes his ears to the hum of traffic and the cheerful bloody birds.
The ring tone confuses him for a moment. He changed it the same time as deleting her number. He’d like to switch it off for ever, to execute an act of absolute finality to the fucking thing, but he needs it for work and his parents. He knows that it’s her, she never uses his landline. She likes an instant response and he always obliges.
“I’m in love, Jamie. Are you around this morning?”
James closes his eyes as sparks of colour fly. He wonders where the shred of hope comes from.
He slumps on the sofa, savours the warmth of her skin against his, closes his eyes and lets her talk. “Jamie, are you listening?”
Oh yes, he’s listening. He likes the sound of her voice. Lets it wash over him without hearing a word.
“Well, what do you think?” She’s peering at him. Her face is bare of make up, she has dark hollows under her eyes and there are at least three spots on her chin.
“I think you should get more sleep,” he replies.
“Open a window. Let in some air.” He watches her lips form the words from his bedroom window. She always looks up before she climbs in the car. Smiles and gives a small wave. Her parting gift. Remember me. Think of me.
James looks down at his t shirt. An amoeba of grease surrounds a bright orange stain. Last night’s chicken tikka masala. For now his heart is in spasm. He’s glad he was dirty and smelly; he’s fucking elated he wasn’t a sap. He clenches his fist, punches the air, and then heads for the shower.
He notices the sunshine for the first time in days. Runs for the blue bus but doesn’t give a toss when a smirking Pole slows down but decides not to stop. Keeps on walking stop to stop, his back perspiring, until he’s so close to Town that the fare’s not worth it. Focuses his eyes: Gemini Café’s changed hands, Townly building’s been demolished, another Tesco Metro, a cycle shop warehouse, an empty Lloyds TSB, all the things he looked at last week but didn’t see. He hasn’t flipped up his mobile for hours.
The cubicle’s getting smaller and he’s holding his breath. The jeans are his size but he can’t breathe. He stares at the mirror. A man he can’t stand stares right back. He chokes back the scream of self loathing, then head buts the glass. Tight fucking jeans. He hates tight fucking jeans but he’s trying them on. Just for her. He sits on the bench, puts his face in his hands, feels wet flood his palms. When he lifts his head everything’s grey except a smear of bright red blood on the glass.
He’s tired. Tired of life being on repeat, tired of being so bloody predictable. Torment in monochrome. It always kicks in sooner or later. Her legs thrown over his on the sofa. The tip toe kisses at the door. Her even white teeth. Her occasional tears. His head throbs and his hand vibrates with the judder of the bus as he stares at the screen. A smug icon of an envelope winks. He hopes it’s from her, but he knows its not. She’s told him her latest news; his usefulness for now has expired.
The text is from his mother. Don’t forget dinner. Her recently acquired skill from months
of waiting in hospital rooms. Always the same until the medics gave up. Dad’s next in line. Can you believe we’re still waiting? Sure someone’s jumped the queue. Wish we’d gone private. The Consultant seems nice. Are you alright James? Haven’t seen you in ages. Dad says hello.
The rain flattens his hair and drips off his nose. His t shirt is plastered to his chest and his teeth are chattering but he doesn’t feel cold. His mind is in overdrive, keeping him warm. He wishes he’d listened that morning. The who, what, when and why. Especially the who. Who the fuck had she fallen in love with this time? If he knew who, he could kick out the bastard’s brains instead of trying to spew out his own. Stripes of colour explode at the back of his eyes. He leans forward against a wall and for a moment he wonders if he’s haemorrhaging as he spits out some bile, but the thought is overtaken by the clarity of what he can do to stop the endless bloody cycle of conflict. And this time he knows he’ll see it through.
His mother’s in the kitchen at the sink. She doesn’t turn round. He’s glad. Postpone her painted cheerful face a little while longer. “Dinners on the table in five minutes,” she calls. “Why do you always leave it so late, James? Better say hello to Dad first. Be careful of those stairs. Alice is already up there.”
He’s shrunk again. Every time James sees his father he’s shrivelled a tiny bit further into his yellowing flesh. James hates his father for dying, for losing his strength. He loathes the wasting stranger left behind. “How’s it going, Dad?” he says.
“Better for seeing you, son.” His skeletal grip is surprisingly strong. James resists the urge to pull back his hand. “And my Alice, of course. James…”
James closes his eyes, sees nothing but black. He knows its coming. He wants to cover his ears and bolt from the room. His father’s breath is laboured, worse than before. “James. Son. Promise me you’ll look after your mother and your sister when I’m gone.”
James peels back his eyes and glances at Alice. She’s gazing at him and her forehead is creased. He’d forgotten about the cut. “What have you done to your forehead, Jamie? It wasn’t there this morning.” She lifts up her hand and explores the cut with soft small fingers. “More like me looking after him, Dad,” she laughs, but her father is asleep.
His knuckles are white as he waits for her at the top of the stairs. The hammer of his heart burns in his ears. He pulls back against the wallpaper to let her go first. But Alice stops on the landing, puts her arms around his waist and leans her head against his shirt. He’s sweating profusely and can smell her shampoo. “I will look after you, Jamie. I promise,” she whispers, her cheek against his.
A rainbow of fantasies shoots through his veins. He had a plan, he knows he had a plan but he’s lost it for now.
She pulls away and takes James’ hand. “Come on, little brother, dinner’s waiting. Did I tell you that Angus wears these really tight jeans?” And she smiles her smile with even white teeth.
Blake Everitt
The low sun drops its jaundice wings; they pierce through the blunt glass of train carriage windows, their motion as light as insects on scented lashes. A prefigured cloud murmurs as it falls like an avalanche. I sit on a hollow seat, woven with damp and famished hearts. Speed and precision give way to a padlock. I am amongst people, brown leather shoes, books, and coats. Against a curtain of burgundy a cloud wafts and breaks its brittle, nervous bones. The padlock is mistaken for the dual blades of shears closing around the flesh of bulbs and flower heads. To the left, my eyes fill with the tones of withered trees rushing past with the assault of winter. These tears are no petals the sea bed should see. It falls from the roof of a bungalow in Chichester . The minds interlock around me, creating a chain of rusted, black salt. Inch-thick worms burrowing up and up. It is important to note the difference between the cathedral itself – much more than a work of art, rather, a rising stem in a hurricane of sighs – and its architectural face. It retains pieces of collective intensity. A glass-footed gull hovers above my attic. It waits for the fog. The process of severing a shell from an interior, an ‘essence’, always yields a density of freedom from which can be made the shards of a new experience. This chain endangers me; it allows my thoughts to act only as an enveloping aura. My hair falls from a basket, it trails from the moon. The new is the mode of diversification. I become entangled, suffocated by the simulacrum of this chain; it allows me no autonomy. A river presses on my glass, my blue frankincense sweeping like a tide. The senses contained in matter, holed in like bright eyes welded to the wooden darkness of a forest, are innately flexible; they remain lucid even after transferral. By the side of the tracks stands a metal barrier. A hand, blue with pushing veins, chariots of skin, cracks in the heat. It has been 24 hours since a pink rosehead was removed from a table in the bungalow. By itself it is insignificant, but when doused in heavy dew, it takes on a new form. Looking into the eyes of fingertips I see suicide cowering next to a frozen portal. I placed the head of a rose in the furry arms of a bush in front of a four-paned window. It gleams with a wilderness of colours under a microscope. Chalky cliffs, insects caught by a hare, these are frames built on dust. Looking for the veins of cirrus in the ghostly brown bark of a tree is best left for the poets. The individual is unaware, it is through a merging, continuous bivouac of solitude that meaning becomes intelligible.
Webs forged in the honey coloured air
Dense fingers, plumb-ripe, curled
Around plump coils of hazel hair.
In order to shatter the audacity of one body, another must possess entirely the singular glow of its transcendence. The train passes a small church. Beads hang from arthritic necks, the visage of gnarled souls. The smell of mould wafts through the window, past the grazing stumps of stalks, through the myth of the angelus and into my lemonade. From the church building emanates a spectral shower, a gospel of imprisoned thoughts. Along the ear whorls I wish to gain poetic light, nourishment of gauzy, delicate hairs as they fall. I see silver packets, tangled roots, dancing clods of soil, in a ditch beside the tracks. The yellow panopticon signposts fright. The sky guards it’s secret behind icy walls wriggling like grey scales. Tears of blue manage to taint a menagerie of haze. The stroke of a twig upon water leaves the impressioned grin of a magpie upon dewy leaves. The glass that holds my lemonade is clouded with crystals, resentful of being placed on a wooden desk. I see the open window of a greenhouse gently flapping in the breeze. Eyes dried by the wind.
Fumes with no distinct cause
No essence, rise up to the level
Of my eyes, encircled by glimpses
Of voices and faces, a diptych of
Metamorphosis throwing objects
Into non-reality. It paralyses me
As the sun sets like a group of tiny
Fetid crowns on the heads of
Of skeletons.
Its glass is coated in pale shavings of moss, a cloak, the shining skin of a frog. I undress by the water, retracing the smiles. The train now passes from the threading fields to barren mud flats deserted by the sea. Laces of gloom and green fall silently upon our hill. In the deadpoint centre of my room a triangular light shines like a decaying tooth in a mouth filled with smoke. Moving back onto the streets, I see bare torsos of people and trees, they stand as columns of white marble under the warm fingers, particles forming hands of light. Utopian energy covers the wings that tremble. It grips me from within, stopping only to enhance the thrill of invitation. Inside of tunnels, roofing branches and ashen leaves, a stump stands like the grave of a poet sucking egoistically at the worms and weeds. I have come to reclaim the magic of death. I feel the blue and yellow scales forbidding me to move, muscles draped from the body. In amongst the sails, passing a harbour, I dream of a face reciting poems.
I stood exposed
Like a tunnelling rose
At the foot of an open grave.
The howl of a dog would move me to tears if my eyes were not dried; as for the drained wells they are, they possess neither remedy nor incitement. Now, walled in by a muddy encumbrance of thin, encrusted webs, I feel trapped. The doors of your eyes slowly open with the migration of dawn. The peaks of rooftops protrude like heads of cats from long grass leaving the voluminous azure untouched. Engines as black as crows abandoned for the white shell of time, left in heaps. I become unduly aware of a knock coming from the ceiling, the floor of the sky. Going through tunnels I feel the bricks brush against me, infecting me with efflorescence. I pace up and down with the brown eyes of robins. It offers me a languorous pact to which a constant and painful fidelity binds me. The city bulges, yawns like a waking giant.
A silver point darts
With eyes of snakes
Washed away
By the rain.
The song of a milkfloat leaps past the door, spraying, its cue taken from deep in my throat. Church spires graze in the sky, knotted as scribbled furze bushes. A fistful of thirsting flame vanishes before me. Another harbour: gulls so bleak and inviting stood one-legged in the mud. Balls of turquoise have riveted my sight. Amongst these painful windows I feel on my arm the warm blood escaping from a penny-sized wound. Everyday the shell of a boat stares me straight in the eye. A portrait of death, the final leaf falls. A spilling drain, shrill cries of insects bleating. A jet black heron, majestic and moribund, perched on the ribs of a boat.
The monument
That bathes
In blue rays
Has passed…
I remove the scab, leaving it on the carpet to be trampled by mites. From behind the iron fence I see oil-brown pebbles waiting to cushion the sea. Emerald nests house the mouths of sea urchins poised like shawls of cress. My mind takes me out of the door. My body responds with a kind of secrecy that evokes the idea of water. This morning it holds the fervour of death, it sits lower than usual, clouding its mirrored surface. The sky is the falling corpse of a finch. Finally, a spirit of rebellion seeps into my pores, as yet untainted by the auriferous voice of nihilism. The tracks are now bare, plain to the sight, merely a symptom of synecdoche. Its feathers are strewn upon the air as pebbles rolling through folds of water. I should remark that I make no movement from my sedentary position, for I am only the sigh of an unhealthy process. They lead to the innards, the gentle walls of the train station. The grooves of the eye sockets are paler than the laughing air above. I turn to gaze on the square of glass, shaking under the strike of the wind whose colour expands around hypotenuse chimneys. This is the part I most dread, the revelation of sight sucking like an ulcer, destroying everything I have forged.
The curve of a beak
Is stretching with long
Fingers pointing
Me below.
All of a sudden a face leans in on the glass, pressing a forehead so as to be carved in the permanency of my mind. 2007, the year of hollowness, sympathy graced me for the first time. Blades of grass stretch and unite, forming a net to break the fall of this plummeting bird. The face is slow and mechanical, fatigued, and it ripples on the pillowing air. Ianthe used to sit in café’s peering out at workmen. Its feet, upturned, burn in the cool air, bedecking the vapid hedgerows in dew. My breath threatens to give me away, its colour, filled with white plasticity, spills over fragments of jet black cloth. She saw their minds as architectural stages in the process of creation.
Golden gleams
Shaping leaves
And damning rooves.
I take great pains to silence it. Ianthe darts like a magpie spreading herself across pavements. Lights of orange burst forth, shattering mossy inhalations. The face now fixed on me begins to swivel on its axes. She had fleshy eyes surrounded by brown whips of lashes, bordering tints of yellow, car lights in darkness.
Thudding hands fall
Eloquently on foreheads
Raked with crisp hair.
I know it belongs upon me and throughout me, but I cannot allow it a place in my heart. Her light red mouth hid columned incisors, curved and grave, inviting eyes to be swallowed whole. A populace of limpits hugging their own graves. It occurs to me that my breath was held for too long and I may have enticed death. Her hair was a large, brown, ghostly body.
Against holes in glass walls
I peer without seeing
The blow-back of the world.
Death, being a fissured film, allows me to elope in its light. In the sun it gives off an air of hubris, striking like teeth into a baby’s knees. Embroidery curses the buttons of bugs, the headstones of water that make up my foundations. I feel airy for days, failing to realise that I am circumscribed by my own footprints. In winter blizzards, each hair used for fuel a drop of seasonal regret. I see in you the split soul, spoiled like a dove in a stove. I have reached a point of safety and I owe this to my close proximity to death. And her neck, remarkably inlaid with the blueness of veins gathering below the surface, emitted an odour that materialised into crimson beads. The lilac of the heart filters through sandy bones left to rot at the docks. I have left the house, its impression dampening itself like water trickling over plants. Always wearing a barbarous black coat that refuses even to unravel at the neck to allow her strong jaw bones a spiked crown from which to burst forth, she rejects all but solitude. Saltblue eyes hover in front of hymns sung to a mirror. I enter the garden. Ianthe, being an unwound thread, became mythical. Shells of turtles collided with fountains of souls. The lawn is made up of fecund blades that fight against death as a form of ivy wrapping its scudding arms around everything. She was extremely well read. Mountains bleating across trenches of sky. The air is warm and splintered with a wind that evokes its faded savagery, drowned like a lily. She carved out of herself an ideal rather than an act.
My only son
Parts his lips
And fingers
To point
At nothingness.
At the bottom of the garden looms a web, interspersed with jewelled, burgundy patches shining like ringed fists. Her life was fraught with atrementous hives and snow-capped peaks. Mollify this lapis lazuli, this breath of molasses, lugubrious hole in my sleeve. Below stands the wilted skeleton of a dwarfed willow. Eloquence, for her, had become the highest virtue, all that remained palpable. Leafless alleyways appetise the crumbs of automatism. When I venture – the act is as symbolic as swallowing mirrors, the senses of reality – to allow my vision the fluidity it needs to flicker to the left, I am confronted with a large, raging willow, as real as it is shallow of colour. A turbid mesh, a lace of iron covering a plumed leg; she had an air of fresh morality about her. I stand with my ear to the moon, my rain to the ground, and my grave to the weeds. It lives in a mask faded by perception. Ianthe always felt the inward scratching of nihilism. I spend the coins of my soil on liquid breaths and coiled fruits. What the mask falls prey to, that is, becomes a conception of, is the density of immediate colour. She’d always felt a longing to escape.
And I notice the clogged
Atmosphere bellowing
As snakes caught in
The wind.
These are a syntheses of yellows, reds, pinks, and a layer of non-colour that appears at the borders between soul, sense, and imagination. She’d rise in the room with eyes locked in concentration or sadness. I shake off a current of equal blackness as a burnt eyesocket. Raising my head with a tilt, the fiery arms of a tree just before metamorphosis erupt with a gentle movement. Watching her in conversation was mesmerising. The purity of a parental eye escapes from the sight of my mind. Returning them to a fixed point – a field of glacial refusal – I am cross-hatched into the throat of a robin. She was carried everywhere with red, flowing robes. The paws of cats shiver across spines. The robin is perched in amongst a dozen bamboo stalks as they snare the wings of flies, becoming marble in the air. It is, perhaps, best for those not having made her acquaintance, to picture her (as angry as sheets smothering the moon) at night in a garden at the foot of Chichester cathedral.
The apocryphal light
As distant as the
Origin of oranges
Swells her eyes.
The robin watches a butterfly waft past. The lights stream from globular tunnels entwined in the pavement (the cries of faltering souls whinnying from inside plastic bags); a wind smothers the homeless resting under holy walls; a rectangular light squirms and becomes a stone limb rising from the earth with muscles pressing on the black roof of the sky. Paperclips wade through countless rosettes belonging to heaven’s dead. The butterfly is damaged and at the point of either apotheosis or destruction. Rain skids across her head. The flesh of cheeks enfold their liquid mouths – the sea! A swilling toilet bowl! It is aware that its ‘essence’ is an idea passed into materiality and that its poetry has been corroded by oily shells.
O circular predator
Keep in mind when
You extend your
Talons north
My ancient mourning.
Towering walls carved and fondled by thin stonemason’s hands. A bottle bank filled with echoes. The wind moves a branch in an unfamiliar way and I am enclosed in myself once again. The rain crowds the air, falling ridged over ponds and rotten benches; Ianthe prepared for the elusive, internal revolution. An ocean-blue blanket creeps over its eyes. I bend down and see an open patch in the interplay of colour that reigns, a horizontal void promising and refusing its secret. These particular circumstances are the best providers of more than an inauspicious fear of her person. Crystal sphinxes trickle on dull rivers. I must enter a floating realism. She became, once recognised, alive in every dimension, a mere blend of chords thrown on backgrounds of fluidity. Beauty is awaiting sacrifice by the gods of language. I have pierced another field of sight in which all but my sense of touch is mute.
I hail to the frost
Of the self
Lying aggressively
Across my violets.
There are jagged strands of stalks running freely through my fingers. I attempt to follow the water they bring to bare upon my mind. I plow through the foam and arrive at the crest – vibrant snouts of froth and kelp, enlaced in chaos. This vision fails as a bookshelf interrupts the point of climax. It manufactures my awareness, making me conscious of a subcultural desire. My hand clamps upon a warm, rectangular object. It possesses a rigid spine, bringing forth an aroma of phantomic liveliness. I must go inside and consume it.
From a small hole that’s been burrowed sprouts a kind of gel, blue tipped and circular. They called it ‘Winter’ and it has since been used to cover our faces.
Voices
Sometimes I merge with other people.
People I see and watch. People on TV shows. People in books. But mostly people I obsess over. It’s not love I feel for them, it’s something more. It is more, even, than a connection. It is an often one-way spiritual flow that I have with those certain people and that I also have with my madness.
It is absorption and simultaneously projection.
I start to think in their voice.
I feel their facial features in the place of my face.
I absorb who they are and then I’m left to deal with the extra dimension they demand from my brain. An extension needs to be built to house this new person.
Then that’s that: they are always there. In my mind. Moving around. Talking to each other. I can hear their voices.
Their voices are stronger than my voice.
Pseudo-hallucinations the Doctors call them; but the voices don’t like having only one name like that. They want their own names. They always want their own fucking way.
If I am real in any way, I am not a person; I am a set of scales. These people I absorb live in my head and are in constant opposition to each other. They have such bitter things to argue about. I am the scale that weighs one voice against another. I measure out the right amount of each of them and then project this image of sanity when I talk to other people. But this image of sanity is only a magic potion made of spirits and voices. It does not make a real person. It also doesn’t always work- I am undeniably weird.
Projecting the people in my head, and managing some of their horrific ways is difficult. I take drugs: anti-psychotics, anti-depressants and tranquilizers, to dull them and sleeping pills to get some rest from them. But ultimately I have to project them somehow, or they will not go away. Making it harder is the way they all have impulses. Dirty impulses that need placation. Some make me cut myself deep. Some make me seek out throwaway sex.
Some make me manipulate: once you’ve absorbed someone you can see how they work. Everyone has a mechanism I can learn. I learn these mechanisms by heart because I’m hoping and hoping and hoping I will one day be able to make a mechanism like that for myself. One that would make me into a real person. Not just a conduit for voices.
It always comes back to the fact that I have to project them, the voices, purge them from my system (though only so new voices can soon imbed themselves in the resulting spare room). So I have to write; I have to paint; I have to act (after all, all the world is a stage); and I have to hoard.
But hoarding is also a process of absorption: there are all those voices in my books; all those foreign worlds on my discs; they are just too tempting for my black hole of a brain. I have to absorb four books a week. I have an obsession with the number four. It links all of my fantasy worlds and relays back to play a part in my reality.
When I sit and look at my hoard it becomes a physical representation of all of the pieces of me; all the different voices inside me.
I am not living when I’m not creating, not projecting, or hoarding. I fear that is because there is nothing there beneath the voices, the identities. The ones I have absorbed and the few I was born with: the child me who still plays, collects stickers and watches Adventure Time, the manic me, the depressed me, the grunge- dressed artist writer me. But these fragments of self have huge fissures in them. There is plenty of room in these fissures for the absorption of people and characters and their voices. There are so many layers. But I fear that maybe, if they were unravelled, I would find they’re not protecting anything.
Music really brings the voices out. They like listening and they like the ease it allows them to force me into their perception, like a musical lubrication. So I listen to certain albums in my isolated shed to summon certain parts of myself. Then I let them out onto the paper. Sometimes I don’t need the music to summon the voices up; but their signal strength increases if I do. Sleeping pills bring them out too. Half an hour after I take the tablet the voices flow freely; all of them off in their own wavering directions. When they join up and become one electric stream again I am asleep and they lead my dreams.
The book you hold right now contains four voices from the mystical and outright mentally ill kingdom of my head. Some of them are drawn from life, some from shadows of life, some from fantasy; and one, Azra, is a personification of my madness. The voices came out as poetry this time. Poetry is something that can only be written under intense inspiration, so these poems project some of the voices in my head with a unique clarity that it is hard to express in any other medium
from Radial City
Shadowing The City
Do Not Enter This Room
Low-level Bureau employees glance furtively at the yellow stenciled lettering as they hurry past the massive door of the Operations Centre. They don’t linger. Something vibrates at low frequency beyond the cracked plaster-work or beneath the worn carpets. Processes vital to the future well-being of Radial City are ongoing and cannot be interrupted.
Such processes are not explained in the Bureau’s induction handbook, but as these clerks and cleaners wheel their trolleys around the dim curve of this windowless corridor they must sense – perhaps via a slight queasiness, a dull ache in their skulls – that they are passing through a danger zone. The pastel Neo-Futurist wall posters might seek to reassure them. “Radial City – Your Business Hub!” But despite the glimmer of recessed lights the shadowy alcoves between the cable ducts seem to darken momentarily as these minor operatives struggle to keep on track with their productivity targets.
And it’s only when the latest group have scurried past that a qualified Technical Officer strides quickly into view, produces his biometric card and swipes it through a discrete slit beside the door. He must prepare himself for his session before the Portals.
Radial Eye
Clusters of monitors glow in the half-light. Officer Van de Graeff tries to adjust his eyes to the flickering gloom, and fiddles anxiously with his grimy wire-framed spectacles as he crosses the tiled floor to his Station. Unlike many Officers, some of whom have been recruited from local Psychiatric Institutes, he is not driven by metaphysical or mystical compulsions, but he is still over-awed by the responsibilities of his mission and his role in in Operation Cradle. He is tasked to compile weekly reports but he is keenly aware that he could be an unreliable narrator. “Multiplicity propagates across the Polyverse at sub-luminal speeds…” according to one of the standard Bureau manuals. But when events are unfolding in all their eventualities, how can he manage them as a single line of characters on a page?
Van de Graeff sits in the high-backed leather chair ( “the throne” in Officer jargon) and logs on. He believes his password is still “gnOmon*51” . He can’t help muttering it as he fumbles the keys, hoping that the scanners in the ceiling can’t lip-read.
The Portal interface opens on an image from a cam high on one of the concrete gargoyles overlooking the main concourse of the financial district. The Money Exchangers, in their traditional brown trousers, move in apparently random Brownian motion between the trading kiosks. They hurriedly swap slips of paper or key in data on the counter consoles. The sun glares down through the plaza’s glass dome as they swarm back and forth. Their shadows are sharply defined, as if they’re being stalked by busy black homunculi.
No surprises here, for this is a default location. Officers have a special responsibility to monitor – or attempt to monitor – activities in this zone. If there’s the slightest blurring of certainty about actions and transactions here, any hint of alt-futures in the ghosting of a hand that moves away from a console instead of towards it, or the shadow of a doubt in the shading of a face perusing a share statement, then the Officer must track in fast and try to keep up with the potential meta-temporal mutation. Van de Graeff is all too aware of his responsibilities as he selects the on-screen menu that will trigger the Probability Waves.
Screen Dump
The image shudders, narrows to a slit, darkens – and splits open again in a painful blaze of light. But the picture’s grainy now, pixellating around the edges; and the small figures darting around on the concourse like tiny fish in a tank emit a faint phosphorescent trail as they perform their ritual intersections. The Officer breathes deeply and tries to concentrate. But he will only know what he’s looking for when he’s found it.
Officer Van de Graeff doesn’t really understand how Probability Waves work. He only knows that they can be focused, for short periods of time, on a small area of the City. A practiced operator like himself can even zoom in and track individuals as the radiating Waves (supposedly) reveal the target straying into alternate time-lines, but the technology is in its early stages and only works intermittently, with curious side-effects. He’s even read a memo ( now deleted from the files) implying that Operation Cradle has already been responsible for some unpleasant accidents in public places. Yet right now as he strokes the console trackball and stares into the screen he’s more concerned with certain whispers circulating in the Bureau canteen – that the very act of witnessing events via the Rays could feed back to the observer, somehow destabilising their being-in-the-world, distorting their actual bodily framework perhaps…
Van de Graeff grips the arms of the throne, then reaches again for the console. He must control the sweats and remember he is here to do a job. He scans the scurrying figures – and zooms in on a stocky man with a moustache who’s carrying a briefcase. From previous forays the Officer knows that this is the CEO of Beaverdale Securities, although Van de Graeff has privately named him The Walrus, on account of his permanent expression of righteous indignation. The Walrus is always a prime target. Any hint of alternative outcomes of his behaviour might have serious implications for the market right across the Fatlands.
As the Walrus target strides towards the walkway leading to the Beaverdale Tower, Van de Graeff notices a shadowy form budding off from its corpulent abdomen, that inflates into a grayish semi-transparent clone. The Officer immediately recognizes the alt.time leakage as the Walrus time-clone turns away from the walkway and veers back in the direction of the trading kiosks.
At the nearest one, Van de Graeff recognises the indistinct form of “Johnny” Haruni, marketing guru of Astral Corp, Radial City’s biggest media conglomerate. “Now you see him, now you don’t, “ to quote the hookline of the Invisible Girls’ greatest hit. The smoky image of Haruni is casually- too casually – leaning against the counter reading The Daily Telegram. If The Walrus could conceivably enter some kind of deal with Haruni ,the divergent futures market could move into a new phase of exponential fission.
Van de Graeff tries for an extreme close-up on the clone’s face, in the hope of reading its lips. This could be his big one, that will give him a bonus and special privileges in the Hospitality District. But, as so often happens when the Rays open a time-slit, the mustachioed face morphs and a new head pops out of its fat cheek, to drag its torso off in yet another direction, or dimension; and then everything blurs into multiple over-exposure; and collapses into a single portly shadow, now stomping urgently towards the men’s room. Then the screen blanks. SYSTEM ERROR!
Interference Patterns
I can’t be blamed for losing the information flow. Technology failed again. They always fail to listen. I was instead consulted. “Perhaps you’re not cut out for surveillance.” They repeated it nicely and quietly. They were sending the message to me appropriately. “ We need to observe your operation.” They have planned the action to happen in three days. I have no plan. Their observations are ongoing, again.
I decide to walk home instead of taking the tram with its package of Bureau people, all those jolly but garrulous operatives from Domestic Services or Data Reclamation. For I have decided to use longer sentences that can’t be interrupted. “Of course, “ said a Data Reclamation man clutching a box of chocolates, “ we know as a Level Seven you can’t really talk about work. But you can make light conversation.” I wanted to make heavy love instead but no-one was available.
I walked up Progression Avenue under the dusty trees. The hot pavements were striped diagonally. The shadows were rich black, almost too rich, and I had to adjust my glasses yet again. This sense of something dark flickering at the edge of one’s vision – or visions. So many residual side-effects – special effects even – from working In the Operations room.
Perhaps this chiaroscuro phenomenon contributed to my confusion when I arrived at the junction by the Retro Tyre Plant, where Progression Avenue bifurcates into Mandrill Parade and Dworkin Road. Normally I’d alight from the tram here and take the right hand route up Dworkin Road towards the Bungalow District and my modest realistically priced dwelling in Hengist Close.
But I’d perhaps had an overfill of modesty. The thought of treading this predictable path suddenly repelled me. I stopped, keeping calm, trying to sustain long sensible sentences in my head, staying stable, feet on the hot asphalt. No need to be so random. At my age. My wise words would control me. I stared at the white hyphenation of the road markings.
Then, with a flash and crackle from its overhead line, a tram drew up behind me. The usual persons streamed out, several men in Bureau uniforms laughing at the punch-line of some obscure joke, a woman carrying a plaster religious statue in a miniature shopping trolley – and a young woman in dark glasses. I couldn’t place her for a second. Or maybe there was a longer time-lapse as she adjusted the strap of her canvas bag. I’d seen that pert profile and its bob of dark hair as a grey image in The Radial Times. I was glimpsing the artist Amelia Brunskill in the act of turning her head away as she swung off left towards the Parade.
I followed her swinging bag, with who knows what cargo of subversive manifestos. For artistes were part of the business model, hers might be a future pathway to trace. I followed her legs in their dark stockings and maroon pencil skirt. Or I followed those eyes concealed in black perspex, hoping for a glance, a flash…
After a couple of hundred meters, she turned into the entrance of Tompion Mansions, that huge decaying block of peeling white paint and collapsing balconies. A suitable refuge for bohemian riff-raff. Mrs Van de Graeff insists its proximity has affected property values in the Bungalow District, she’s talked about it to Jack Hague on Astral FM 93.7. Please, somebody, note I do my best to normalize my excessive peaks and troughs when logging these events. The young woman was turning, that’s all. I was not stalking, not staking anything out. Merely following a moving body.
Then her profile seemed to fragment, as if it was made of dried pigment, cracking into an irregular mosaic across my lenses. Her fractions, her fractal selves just floated away into the blur of overgrown shrubs that obscured the entrance. She was all gone.
I know this was an illusion, a mere side-effect induced by those long hours in front of the screen. But I wandered home the long way, close to tears. The imagery presaged her inevitable bodily decay and trans-dimensional death.
Pre-Observation
TIME OF SESSION: 1.30 AM.
SYSTEM: ACTIVE
OPERATOR: VAN DE GRAEFF@STATION 42
OBSERVED BY: **************
SESSION OBJECTIVE: ALERT BLUE (STANDARD) – MONITOR/REPORT PROBABILITY ANOMALIES IN LOCATION 23.878.005.94.9 (FINANCIAL PLAZA)
TARGET PROFILE: “WALRUS” (SIC) RE BEAVERDALE FUTURES, REPEAT ATTEMPT.
SESSION PLAN: PENDING
Night Shift
Night shift. Officer Van de Graeff sits awkwardly on his throne. His fingers hover over the keyboard, but he doesn’t know where to start any more. He cannot even begin to file the mandatory Action Plan for this session because all actions are possible, even probable, in the grand un-peeling of divergent time-slips, so what’s the point? The times they are a-shifting.
But Observers won’t take the point, the point that keeps scattering itself across space-time into infinity… He knows their cams are on his case, that the system is logging all his on-screen activities in the belief that he’ll discover more evidence of the Walrus’s hypothetical alt.world transactions. No detail is too tiny for the Bureau. Anything – a wink, a wank, a smirk, a phantom handshake – can be factored into the Bureau’s long-range financial models. If the Walrus was even considering a Beaverdale sell-off…
Van de Graeff gazes into the screen, with its quivering image of an empty plaza. A cleaner trundles his cart around the trading kiosks, or rather various pale permutations of him take alternative routes , flickering in and out of existence like phantom dots in a moire pattern. Van de Graeff still has to tell himself that this isn’t an optical or digital special effect, somehow inserted between the scene and the screen. This is real-time.
Then he sees his artist-in- residence hovering on the steps of the Beaverdale Tower. Her face is reflected in its black glass frontage. Correction: her faces are reflected in its black glass frontages which tremble at the edge of focus. What is she doing or undoing here? Filaments extend from the finger tips as she walks into a second life. Or a third way. The paths split and he feels that individual photons are bouncing back through the screen like bullets bombarding his forehead, smartly targeting the pineal gland. No, he must focus on his field work, keep spellbound by his quantized voyeurism.
She enters the dim-lit lobby via a revolving door; and another edition of her swings out and exits. He decides to focus his attention on the escapee, this sudden mind-change is more exciting. Perhaps she’ll return to Tompion Mansions, light candles and dance in front of the mirror. As he realigns the coverage to focus on this receding figure, he scarcely notices the recurring ping in his headphones that warns him against over-riding the default location settings.
Chiaroscuro
En route to the Mansions there were a few minor diversions as if she had been tempted to turn back but I kept the trackball steady on her glowing path through the sea of possibilities. She’s entering the Mansions. For a few seconds there’s obstruction, amorphous clumps of darkness – is her building destroyed in some darker mix of probabilities – but I’ve managed to keep deep focus, into an attic. She removes her jacket and has started to unzip her skirt.
They – all of you – must know my surveillance is protective, I want the best possible lives for her, she has nothing to fear. Door opens, quick shot of a narrow white bed. Will she touch her ghostly body with cautious fingers? My thought-spasms shame me. Lust is an instability factor across the whole City.
But she’s re-emerged, in paint-stained jeans. She’s taking spray cans and brushes and tools in a holdall. All this is sharply defined now, no blur at the edges. She’s off into the City again.
She’s moving down the Parade, crouching in the centre of the road, making a silvery dotted line of cyphers across the asphalt – a line that forks – and loops – and forks again. Within minutes the whole intersection of Mandrill Parade and Dworkin Road is covered in an intricate pattern of lines and spotty intersections like neural networks in a great brain.
But my connection is terminated.
Post-Observation
END OF SESSION: 2.23
SESSION PLAN: NOT FILED, NO INTENDED OUTCOMES, NOT RELATED TO STRATEGIC PLAN
TARGET: NOT LOCATED
COMMENTS: DEVIANT OBJECTIVES, UNAUTHORIZED LOCALE CHANGES
GRADE: UNSATISFACTORY. SUGGEST VAN DE GRAEFF UNDERGO PROFESSIONAL REDEVELOPMENT
Private View
Mrs Van de Graeff is enjoying the opening of the Radial Artists Circle exhibition at the Medusa Galleries, opposite the Polyphonic Hall. She relishes her role as Committee Chair, briefing the journalists from the Radial Times and Astral FM. They follow her with microphones and notebooks as she strolls between the exhibits. “Here we have one of Arnold Toobey’s orb-paintings, spiritual containment executed in pastels, all souls as rolling eye-balls on fields of dark green…”
Officer Van de Graeff hovers near the door, sipping a flute of champagne. He’s trying to stay inconspicuous. This is Hermia’s moment. Anyway, he doesn’t want light conversation about his workplace. The Bureau has advised him to take extended leave on half-pay, to prepare him for re-training, probably as a mere Data Reclamation Officer, but that doesn’t worry him any more.
For he feels hollowed out, almost burnt out by the sheer intensity of his old role. Even now, scanning the room, he fears the outlines of the women in their floaty dresses will start fraying at the edges, first signs of an alt.time leakage. He hopes wealthy patrons like the Walrus and Haruni will stay away this year. Their very presence could collapse his space-time continuum. The raw phenomenology of his minute-by-minute existence looms over him. A random childhood image flashes past: the skeleton of a small raptor swaying in a dark kitchen doorway. Random. The adjective of choice.
Now Hermia has finished her briefing and is sweeping towards him, hand in hand with a figure in a green gown. Confused for a second by the formal attire, his recognition falters. “ Esmond, let me introduce Amelia Brunskill, an artiste with a very select following.
Did you know she’s been commissioned to make a series of time-tableaux all around the City? Wonderful!” Then she catches sight of the Walrus, who has just entered, looking bemused amid the canopes and wickerwork sculptures. “Ah – our dear Trustee…” She’s off, leaving Van de Graeff staring absently at Amelia’s silver shoes.
“Your wife is exaggerating, I’m afraid, “ shouts Amelia, over the increasing chatter. “It’s just some little plaques. About things that may never happen.” She gestures towards the door; and Van de Graeff follows her on to a small balcony overlooking the ornamental lake in front of the Polyphonic Hall, where two old men are fiddling with model steam-boats in the sunshine.
He can’t make small talk. He wants to say I have no character I am a void through which fuzzy images slide in silence. He wants to look deeply in her grey mascara’d eye, and can’t, so peers over the balcony rail. “What do you think those Elders are doing? Are they doing their “thing”?”
“They’re re-enacting a battle,” she says absently, after a few seconds silence. “The Battle of Radial City.”
“But we’re many kilometres from the coast, “ he responds, suddenly feeling boorish for his scepticism.
“You don’t get it.” She’s brightly dismissing his fogeyish literalism. “There was a battle for Radial City at the end of the last century. Between the Factories. Before the Bureau took over. Gunships came up the North Wharf Canal and bombarded the old powder-mills. Where the bungalows are now. I’ve seen the memorial.”
“I’ve never seen a memorial for any such battle.” He’s surprised by the vehemence of his reply.
“Perhaps it’s an alternative retro-scenario.” Amelia smiles.
“What do you know about alternative scenarios?” It’s very bright on the balcony, he can’t stop blinking and it’s getting very hard to concentrate, he’s confused by conflicting desires, he has to be very careful to give nothing away about operational matters. Operation Cradle. Who gave it this absurd name? What’s being nurtured here?
“I’ve witnessed them. Odd moments. My split-level moments. Usually brief superimpositions – maybe retro, or slipping sideways, I never know for certain, because I’m an artist, not an historian.” She notices the flicker of his upper lip, the rictus in his jaw and pauses.
“You need to be very careful.” This is dangerous and extraordinary. An involuntary slippage into alt.time perception – minus the elaborate tracking technology of the Bureau and its deadly Waves.
A mass of whitish cloud is moving slowly across the sky, obscuring the glare, fading that precise definition of Amelia’s silhouette against the gallery’s stonework. He tries to frame a further question, but Amelia’s glance swings towards the door , where the Walrus has suddenly appeared, as if teleported.
“Hermia says this is an important patron and I need to entertain him. Excuse me…” The Walrus, ignoring Van de Graeff, grunts importantly in her ear and grips her arm as she guides him back into the salon.
Shadow Box
I’m in a state. I’m signed on the dotty line between two worlds. They keep shifting the shapes, losing my plot. They’re in it for the money, up their own bifurcating arses. There will be voices from a megaphonic time-cone across the blur of generations, worlds generating madly across the screens. I dabbled in the ergonomics of multiple universes from my plastic throne, as the identities stole up on me. Again and again Amelia is deeply fluxed by bogus execs, multi-tasked into concubinage by the hyper-cubing of all possible dimensions. That’s a perversion of event horizons. I am only the scrabbler of the shadow realms.
***
Shadowing The City forms part of a short story sequence Radial City. A related story Radial Citizens was recently published in Issue 5 of Brand Magazine. These texts are part of the Radial City multi-media project being developed in collaboration with digital artist Jeremy Welsh and the Bureau of Unstable Urbanism. A Beginner’s Guide To Radial City, a video compilation of shorter texts and graphics, is in preparation and will be screened at the Hay Poetry Jam in June 2010.
Ben Hall
Archaeology is a precise science, or likes to think it is. Archaeologist Harry Roskams, on his knees, puzzled over his context. An archaeologist’s ‘context’ is a layman’s ‘layer’. Each context represents a phase of human activity; it could be a floor in use for decades, or a ten-minute hole-filling job. Harry’s context was small and dark grey, and decidedly M-shaped with clearly defined edges. This was good. A context is defined by variations in colour and consistency which separate it from its neighbours. This can be a real bugger. Archaeologists lean heavily on Professor Albert H. Munsell’s (1858-1918) colour classification charts in an effort to distinguish one grey-brown from another. It drives them mad and blind. Harry was having no such difficulty with his dark grey ‘M’. He’d lent his Munsell book to some other poor sod earlier in the day. Haha! Let them fret and fume over contexts without edges. Contexts don’t often lie helpfully on top of one another, in clear sequence, like a layer cake. We wish! No, they will overlap at one edge, and be overlapped at another, or, often, punch holes in and take slices out of each other. It’s a mess. Harry’s ‘M’ suffered no such entanglements. With silent glee he took his trowel by its blade for greater control, like an oil painter doing fine detail, and deftly flicked away the remains of the tedious beige context which obscured it. This would be sieved by bored undergraduates and discarded. Archaeology is destruction! Each context is numbered, mapped and logged. It is assigned a place in a ‘Harris matrix’, which resembles a large flowchart or family tree. The matrix is supposed to fix the sequence of every context on the site. This is important for dating.
Dating, dating…..Harry’s mind wandered as he worked. The laymen thought it was so easy! Harry snorted at the thought. We rely upon sound method and datable finds; the smallest pot sherd, bead or coin embedded in a context. This lends it a terminus post quem the “limit after which”; the earliest possible date of the context, which knocks on, through the matrix, to all the contexts that post-date it. Beautiful. Harry’s thoughts darkened at the memory of the kitkat wrapper which had given an entire Iron Age hillfort a terminus post quem of 1986. They had chosen to disregard it. “Carried down by worm action” they had written in their notes, solemnly. Harry sighed, as had the Neolithic man who had occupied the exact same spot 6000 years previously. Knapping flint tools, discarding the dark grey offcuts until they had built up around and between his folded legs in the shape of an ‘M’, in an alphabet as yet uninvented. That’s how Harry interpreted it, correctly, though forever unproven. What is more, that’s almost exactly how another archaeologist, standing on the same spot, interpreted Harry’s own knee prints and trowelings, later, thousands of years later.
Carole Hamilton
Mademoiselle
On the Rue De Mange at the bottom of the steps between the Poissonierre and the Brassiere
I’m glad it’s morning. The night has been long and Baltic cold. I move around to soften my solid body. My fingers and toes nip. Pulsing throbbing chilblains through the caked woollen socks. A cold shudder runs through my back even though I have on several layers. At times like this I wish I lived inside. Paris normally has mild winters. This year is an exception. Hard frost and snow are the pattern most days. I blow on my hands, some breath escapes turning to a funnel of white mist. Monsieur Bovey brings me a paper cup of coffee, which I drink gratefully. The early morning bustle begins. Madame Bussey walks back from the morning market with full arms. She’s first there when it opens at eight. Bunches of flame red carrots with green soft heads bound in blue tape. Leeks for her soup and a bouquet of white tulips. They’re for her mother who’s has flu. She’s in her eighties and flu can wreak havoc with
the old. Madame Bussey was in hospital recently, women’s trouble. That was last month. Her mother got ill when she was left on her own.
I smell boiled ham and cabbage coming from Pierre’s stall. He’s carving fresh pink meat for his sandwiches. It’s mixed with the strong aroma of local cheeses. My stomach rumbles like horses clopping over stones. I bend over griping sore with hunger and the cold.
Monsieur Ames swings along the road with his arms in front, then behind. His weight’s always on his right side. He has a limp a wound from the war. It makes him lurch to one side. Touches his beret when he passes on his way to the post box. He corresponds with lots of people. Nobody knows who he writes to but whoever it is writes back as many letters as he sends. The post girl’s always at his door. Every day he greets her with an anticipatory look on his face. It is half past eight now, the postal workers step out the sorting office. They amble along the road in a straight line of attack. Trolley bags full of the day’s deliveries. Jostle each other for space on the pavement. Falling into single file when they meet someone.
On the fifth floor of the building opposite, Madame Champney looks out her window, past the wrought iron railing around the balcony. She’s hoping for a letter from her son who disappeared twenty five-years ago. He had been playing in the park opposite when someone snatched him. Her face is weary, sad with continual disappointment. Sometimes she sees me and waves down. I like to look out for her. In the summer she sits on her narrow balcony balancing a cup and saucer, watching the parade of people below. Her plants outside are dying of cold. Nobody’s paid them any attention for a while. Below her window the new occupants, a young couple, kiss and cuddle. They’ve got large green plants covered in a sheet of plastic to protect them from the frost. They attend to each other mostly, but never forget their plants. When they walk out together she holds onto his arm, their noses never more than two inches apart.
Under them and above the striped canopy of the Artisan Boulanger lives another newcomer, a petite middle aged Madame. She has a young daughter with long shining brown hair, two small Christmas trees either side of the ledge, one green, and the other pink with a gold star on top, perfect pupils. Every day she walks her daughter to school, looking like they’ve stepped out of the pages of Marie Claire. The mother stops at the Brasserie on the way back, spins out a pot of tea over the morning, reads the papers and magazines strewn along the counter. At one she collects her daughter for lunch. Today her hair is dried out, dusty looking but still stylish, with a clip that holds it back from her oval face. A seal-skin fur collar around her neck over a heavy brown knitted cardigan, a small gold cross dangles over the edge of the fur. She’s in the seat that I’ll sit at later, holding a white hankie embossed with roses to her nose, catching drips.
All day I watch the flow of people, a tidal wash, making criss-cross patterns on the pavements. The predominant colour they wear on the bottom is denim blue, and on top various shades of black or dark. I haul the checked rainbow blanket up to my neck, the one that Madame Bussey made for me before she went into hospital, as some raindrops fall to the ground. The colours are bold, stitched together from bits of old material she’d gathered up in her linen cupboard, the warmest wool and thick brocades. My neighbours call it my cloak of colours. I hold it round me hoping that the pockets of air will generate some heat.
I used to live along the road from Madame and her mother on the next block. I think about how I’m where I am now, the event that led me to here on this part of the street but it’s hazy. I had a two bedroom flat on the fifth floor. It had the best view down the street; bending around a wide corner, boomeranging past three zebra crossings to the large corner café where four streets meet. I could look straight ahead at eye level and see the Notre Dame cross sticking up and a piece of roof angle back from it like any roof, grey slate, nothing special from the perspective I had. Behind it, a bit of a distance away, another dome, always coated in city mist, a shadowy sketch with a wavy outline. I never go there anymore. Sometimes I visit the chapel in the Rue St Martin, in the next street, but only if they’ve a special event on.
I try to spin out the day, waiting as long as I possibly can to go for tea in the Brasserie. Today it seems to take forever till the lunch customers go. Madame Devereux is busy in the mornings, till after two. She doesn’t mind me sitting in the seat below the window when the customers have left. It’s a tight space to squeeze into and for paying customers there’s a draft even though a heavy damask curtain hangs over a brass pole at the door. Madame is very understanding. She’s seen a lot of life. Slim as a whippet, wears a polo-neck jumper, silk scarf with fancy birds scrolled on it, tied cravat style. A plain gold band on her wedding finger, but you never hear her talk about a husband. I see the entire goings on in the café. A lot of men like Madame Devereux. They come in dribs and drabs, stand at the counter sipping espressos trying to gain her attention. They like her matter of fact no nonsense businesslike manner. Sometimes she reminds me of the person I once was, before the illness and all the details I’ve forgotten.
In the afternoon I spin out my tea as long as possible. It feels like home listening to the sound of the coffee machine whirring, people chattering, the clip-clop of Madame’s highly polished brogue shoes on the wooden floor. Most customers acknowledge me, nod, say bonjour, and hide the squeamishness that flashes across their faces when they get a whiff of me. Very occasionally I get an all-over wash. In summer I go to the public baths, but I’ve had these clothes on for more months than I care to remember. The radio announces it’s to be minus thirteen degrees tonight. It frightens me, the night, especially these freezing cold ones. Sometimes I think I won’t wake up. I get numb when I’m stationary for too long. I like daytime best, no matter what season, watching the world at work, my neighbours going about their business.
I wait anxiously for the darkness to pass, a fallen star, voiceless on the ground.
Jan Harris
In all the months I’d spent in Iraq I hadn’t cried once. It was a matter of pride among the women soldiers to be as tough as the men, so we just got on with our jobs and didn’t let ourselves get too involved.
Since I came home though, the smallest things started me blubbering like a baby. Like the bird. At first I thought it was an autumn leaf falling but it hit the windscreen of my Peugeot 206 with a thud and bounced off into the road. Perhaps it was a sparrow, or maybe a wren. Sandwiched between a four by four towing a caravan, and a boy racer itching to overtake, I couldn’t stop to find out.
The bird seemed to fall straight down from the oak trees which lined the road, rather than fly into the windscreen. I hoped it was dead before it hit the car, knocked from its perch by some avian disease, at least then I wouldn’t be responsible for its destruction.
The familiar choked-up feeling hit me again, and I felt tears rolling down my cheeks. It was the third time I’d cried that morning and it was only nine o’clock. That must be a record, even for me. Despite the tears I didn’t feel sad, just empty, as if everything that mattered had been sucked out of me, sealed up in a vacuum bag and stored on top of a wardrobe, out of reach.
The only time I came close to crying in Iraq was when children were caught up in the fighting. One little girl reminded me of my kid sister. Something in the way the corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled. Her name was Rabab, and she used to hang around her gate waiting for us to pass by. Some of the soldiers gave her chocolate.
I remembered the day a suicide truck exploded outside a Sunni mosque. We were sent to help people trapped among the debris. As soon as I saw the white dress covered with red flowers I knew it was Rabab. Her mother had her arm around her, as if they had fallen asleep together. Except you wouldn’t go to sleep in a pool of blood, would you.
I suddenly felt angry with myself for crying over a silly bird, when I hadn’t shed a tear for Rabab. I turned off the main road and stopped on a quiet lane while I dried my face and pulled myself together.
I parked next to the village church. It was just the sort of place you’d want to get married in, a grey stone building half-hidden by chestnut trees, its bell tower soaring above them all.
It was still early, only nine fifteen. I was officially on leave for another two days but had decided to head back to base early, keen to throw myself back into work.
I got out of my car and wandered up the drive and through the cemetery. It was cool among the trees, and I started to feel calmer, more at peace with myself. Most of the graves were well tended, with stone and marble pots full of flowers in various stages of decay.
I noticed that the church door stood open, so I wandered inside to look around. The interior smelled of an uneasy mixture of damp and polish. The church was completely silent and specks of dust danced in the beam of light that shone through the stained glass window above the altar.
The pews were decorated with embroidered kneelers. One of them caught my eye – a picture of a sparrow with the words “he sees the meanest sparrow fall”. It must have taken someone hours to make; the stitches were tiny.
At the far end of the pew I saw an archway and beyond that a spiral staircase leading up the bell tower. I counted the steps as I climbed. Forty in all before I reached the ringing chamber, where six maroon and gold twisted ropes hung down from the bells up above. They ended in loops that reminded me of nooses.
On the far wall of the chamber a wooden ladder led into the belfry itself, where the huge, iron bells hung in a metal frame. Each was decorated with a border of vine leaves and the largest bore the date 1780 and an inscription. I ran my fingers over the letters – “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty”.
One more ladder, an aluminium one this time, led up to a trapdoor which swung open easily, allowing me to climb out on the very top of the tower. The countryside stretched out in front of me, a patchwork of gold and green fields, hedges and woods, with the road snaking away into the distance.
I looked down to the churchyard below. The graves looked tiny, like postage stamps against the grass.
It was easy to step off of the roof and up onto the low wall of the tower. The stone was so thick I was able to balance quite easily. I felt the wind tug at my coat, as if it wanted me to lift my arms and soar into the clouds.
I stretched out my arms and shouted “come on God, don’t just sit there watching – come and catch me”, as if he was some sort of super-hero who would come swooping down from the sky and take me in his arms just before I hit the ground.
Except I knew he wouldn’t do that, he would just watch until I hit the floor and that would be the end of me, just like the sparrow. Just like Rabab and her mother. Just like all of us in the end.
I shut my eyes and waited for the wind to carry me forwards. It would be so easy just to relax and let everything go.
Then I heard voices from below. A small girl and her mother were walking through the churchyard. The girl was carrying a bunch of flowers. They stopped at one of the graves and the woman took the old flowers out of the pot. She went to fetch water while the little girl arranged the fresh ones. I wondered if the grave belonged to her grandma, or grandpa. I hoped it wasn’t her father, or her sister.
The wind tugged at my coat again and I almost stumbled. I quickly stepped back onto the roof, not wanting to scare the child and her mother. Not wanting the girl to have to remember my broken body on the ground. Not wanting my own mother to have to bring fresh flowers to a grave.
I looked back down into the churchyard but the child and her mother were nowhere to be seen. I watched for a long time, wondering if they were hidden by a tree, or had gone into the church, but they didn’t reappear. It was if they had never been there at all.
I drove away from the church as if nothing of any importance had happened there. My next tour of duty was due to start in less than a week, and I had people to see before I left.
[Note: this is a work of fiction and any similarities to any persons’ experiences herein are purely coincidental]
Anthony Hitchin
An Appointment with the Psychiatrist
It is located at the back of the hospital. You have to drive past Accident and Emergency, the main car park, the staff car park, waste disposal and what looks like the back of a mortuary (often, there are gurneys scattered outside). After you have passed a thick bank of trees you are greeted by a security barrier. A disembodied voice crackles static. I remain silent, staring ahead. It is my Wife who speaks into the machine and tells it that I have an appointment. As she gently says my name my stomach ties knots of revulsion. We park. Cough and fidget awkwardly. It is called the Linden Centre, but there are no linden trees. Everybody knows locally what this place is: it is a Mental Hospital. A place for ‘nutters’, ‘mentallers’ and ‘psychos’. Or else malingerers who just can’t ‘cope.’ There is no sound here: it is like steeping out into a vacuum; a different void. Psychic weight hangs heavy, oppressive as grime. It crawls my skin. I ring my fingers feeling unclean. Eyes stare vacantly through windows. A few bodies lay sprawled on the little green outside smoking. It is the dead of winter. Near the automatic doors there are more residents. They are standing upright. Sometimes I see one particular woman who always seems to be holding a bag of piss. At that point we always wonder aloud why the in-patient and out-patients share the same entrance, or why they have to medicate the in-patients so strongly and leave them wandering unsupervised. We conclude that there is not enough money and staff. Every time. The doors slide open and a secretary smiles benevolently. Her tone is soft and mild. My Wife has to say my name again and whom I have an appointment with. I feel like saying ‘I’m not mad’, I am ‘sane and logical’, but realise this will only make me sound more insane and illogical. Instead, I smile amiably and quickly head up the stairs, my Wife trailing me like a shadow. There are pictures on the walls drawn by the mentally ill. They look like they were drawn by the mentally ill and do nothing to reverse stereotypes. One has chips of different, clashing coloured ceramics embedded in it. The entire piece obviously disparate and fractured. We sit on the sofa together in the waiting area. The cushions are thick and deep. Glancing at the clock I hear the feint clicking of hands; there are only minutes to go. Fish are swimming in the tank. Sucking and spitting stones absentmindedly. The sound of the clock grows louder as the minute hand advances. I sit straining my ears; waiting for his foot falls …
The Waters of Lourdes
I taste your longing … to please me, heal me, as I lay impossible. An obtuse enigma with one savant skill; a single saving grace. Thinking if you peal back the grimy layers you will find true meaning; reasons, knowledge, love … . You cherish all my ‘good’ moments and store them up … out of which you fashion another me. Like a potter with clay, an art student with paper maiche. Can I step into him?
Will he take the weight?
You see, I try to smile authentically but my facial muscles have become frozen in an anaesthetized rictus; people like to see the whites of teeth as much as they like cheery greetings and firm handshakes. As if expressions and words and social rituals mean anything … . Yet I feel you observing me, analysing all the pieces, trying to read me. Your caress encircles my shoulders placatingly as your tears begin to fall; pure
as the waters of Lourdes. Yet all I feel is tumorous swelling …
if I could breathe my soul, I would suffocate.
Friends, Indeed!
I feel free Madame Bloom; the Northern wind has cleansed me
you kneel before sculpted flowers, eager to recreate a village seen through skimmed postcards by a sender you’ve wished to ignore
I, on the other hand, forgot to water mine, last year’s Christmas present – shrivelled like prunes. Funny that, it was as if you expected it. Yet, you didn’t utter a word. I’ve come to accept that you’ve been silenced by a genocide you rarely mention.
to you my lady I am faithful, a fact you can’t deny. Pleasing you with my bourgeois ways and discreet departures
Unexpected that Southern wind, knocked me to the ground
an omen. I’m sure you’d agree.
Tom Kelly
He sits at the back of the class. The teacher’s blurred voice distant, as if talking in the school’s echoing corridor, or in some distant swimming baths. Teachers suspect drugs. Everyone leaves a force field around him as if touching him will shrivel them. He attends school most days but has not been there for years. His fingernails are filled with dirt and his uniform hangs on a by a thread. His brown eyes and black hair suggest a mediterrian background he has never considered. He once created interest and pity, but now he is too far away everyone agrees. In the staff room there is a grumbling agreement: there, but never really there.
The boy leaves school alone. His too big jacket hammocks from him as his belly ruptures over his too tight trousers. Black shoes and socks reveal gaping holes. No one tags along beside him. School is forgotten as he trundles to the shop. He buys crisps and a can of lemonade. Coins clatter in his top pocket. He is served with a mannered indifference. The shop keeper does not like this fat boy. He is unaware of this. The boy aims to eat, sleep. The rest is permafrost.
He is shocked when his mother shouts, ‘James’. He doesn’t think it’s him. He is genuinely surprised that someone knows his name. He doesn’t find that strange. Doesn’t say. His mother examines him as she has not seen him for weeks. She is busy with her new boyfriend who stands in a blur outside the bar, his cigarette weaving from his long arms. She holds her son for a moment and places money in his top pocket. She knows where he keeps his money. That’s one thing she does know about him. She asks him to smile for her boyfriend. He forms a smile as if slowly making concrete. The man walks toward him and takes his mother without speaking. They topple off together; her heels clack on the pavement as he walks home eating crisps that stick to his full lips. Soon he can’t picture his mother.
He does not have a front door key. He clambers over the back wall and likes to listen as the key scrapes in the barrel. The old man sits by the fire and doesn’t raise his head as the boy enters. They don’t speak. The old man’s head is lost to the fire that crackles with the wood he places carefully as if it were a child. They appear golden as the flames rise. This is their moment. The old man should not be here but he has nowhere else to go. He came dragging a heavy suit case and the boy pointed to what was going to be his mother’s bedroom and that was it. They play with silence. It is an instrument they love. They create other noises: the scraping of the old man’s shoes across the bare floor, the smacking of the old man’s hands when the wood runs out for the fire. They sit. Old man and boy. Happy with their silence.
The old man has slipped off everyone’s register. His family have forgotten him. One son moved away. Wife dead. Daughter lost to him. She died young. Doesn’t want to think about that. He doesn’t.
Night cuts in. The boy now wears a battered track suit. One of his mother’s boyfriends gave it to him. He can’t recall his name or face. One of the many, somebody once said. He doesn’t want to think about that so doesn’t.
The old man shuffles to bed, turns and looks at the boy in the track suit and nods his head. The boy notices this. They know one and the others’ every movement. Silence they learn to live with and the looks and movement which have become a new kind of vocabulary. Like the stars. There and distant but understandable.
On the boy’s birthday the mother turned up. She kept a taxi running as she gave him a card and a present she didn’t have time to wrap. At the banging of the front door the old man headed to the bedroom.
His mother looked at nothing. She gave him money from her bulging purse. The boy remembered later that the purse was red.
When the new boyfriend came into the room their drink dressed breath polluted the air. They began to sing happy birthday until they remembered the taxi and ran from the flat without saying goodbye, without ending the song.
They left him and the old man with happy silence. The old man looked out at the boy’s mother falling into the taxi and spat into the fire; decided to speak. Later.
The boy stopped going to school. The address in the schools’ records was four or five rented flats ago. His mother’s mobile seven ago. Authorities decided they had left the area. A rubber stamp made that claim.
The old man and boy began a new regime. There had never been order in the boy’s life. He took it every day as it came. His father, he recalled, was tall and dark but that might have been another of his mother’s boyfriends. ‘He left years ago’, is all his mother ever said. She drank. Flirted. Had late nights. Moved from rented flat to rented flat. He supposed this was routine. He had been to six or seven schools. Liked no school better than any other.
Old man and boy got up early. Bought food. Not just crisps and bread and lemonade. Food that wasn’t in a packet. The cooker began to be used. The old man showed the boy how to cook. They would begin by washing their hands. The old man pointed to the boy’s fingernails and said they should be clean. This was new to the boy.
They began to tidy the house. Bought a brush and shovel, cleared the dog and cat shit from the back yard. Filled the dustbin with the dirt that had gathered in the living room. The boy began to notice change. The old man began to be cleaner and so did the boy.
Nights were for stories. The old man and boy sat either side of the fire. The old man had not really spoken for years. He knew he had to do one thing. Let the boy see. Show him there was more to life than the litany of failure the boy had endured. A sense of duty was something the old man was remembering. Running was something the old man remembered and there was no pain.
When Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier I thought I could do the same. I could run and get away from everything I didn’t like or understand. A father that hit you before speaking. A mother that wanted to be young forever. The stories of running began every night. The boy liked to hear the same stories. They had gone to the library and the boy became a member for the first time.
They read about Herb Elliott and his coach Percy Cerutty. The boy began to run in his dreams. He told the old man. He said that’s how it begins but you must remember when you run in the real world, what you begin you must not stop. You have a duty to yourself and to running. You must be like a holy man. Work hard every day. The boy did not answer, he didn’t understand. One morning as he and the old man walked to the green market where they bought all their vegetables he caught his reflection in a shop window. He was a thin boy with an old man.
His mother banged on the door. Screamed into their front room. Her boyfriend had beaten her up and said he no longer loved her. She smelt of dried perspiration and stale drink. She threw herself on the floor. When her mobile rang the boy answered. It was the boyfriend. He was in a taxi on his way to pick her up. He told his mother and she ran to the toilet and re-appeared minutes later smiling and handed the boy one hundred pounds, ‘for crisps and stuff’. Then she ran out the door as the taxi reversed and left. She never said goodbye.
The old man took the one hundred pounds and laid it on the table. It remained there all night. The next day the boy told the old man he had to go somewhere. The old man nodded his worried head. The money was gone.
The old man carried out their daily routine alone: green market, butchers. He began their meal.
The boy returned at twelve. Placed the shopping bags on the table. They ate their meal before opening the bags. He produced a pair of training shoes, track suit and vest. For the first time in his life something had begun.
Tom Kelly
Trevor was quiet. That troubled me. His long fingers carefully held the pen as he wrote requests for housing repairs.
A quietness stunned the office. I was young and had neither knowledge or confidence to break the silence. I stared at the walls; important messages were busy turning yellow. No-one had bothered to take them down as if the past had to be there.
Trevor drew in his breath with a desperateness I found unsettling. I noticed, for the first time, his jacket was worn at the sleeves and provided a dark border for his pasty-white bony hands.
Did he know I was examining him? He said nothing as he searched under paper work for reading glasses.
The telephone ringing shocked me. I answered the call and was confronted by a shrill demanding voice. I had to do something quickly about a problem with their plumbing.
Trevor did not move as he wrote and wrote with such intensity it made me sweat. The office became smaller and I took off my Harris Tweed jacket which was a newer version of Trevor’s.
Loud banging on the portacabin woke his nervousness and he stepped outside.
He returned and said nothing. The silence was oppressive and held me at my desk as I watched the traffic flow slowly by. I found myself writing more and more receipts and advice notes which began to cover my desk.
He was working behind me. The door slammed. I turned and found an envelope addressed to me. He was standing outside my window and held a finger to his lips, wanting me to obey his silence.
I choose silence. He left. and was soon in the distance. He did not look back.
I placed the envelope in my inside pocket. It felt like a dead weight, heavy as his body that hung from a bannister that night.
I was young. I didn’t know what to say. His note just said, ‘sorry’.
Escape
My son is dead. My fingers knotted in the fabric of his trousers, pulling him close, he leaned against me and he died. The last of his breath blew over my lips and along my cheek. It passed my ear with a sigh.
He stands against me still. There is no choice, no room in here to lie him down on the floor. So I must hold him to me. We all must hold him. Our bodies are so close, so tight, that there
is not the room for him to fall. If I let go, he will not fall. He can not fall. But still, I can not
let him go.
Every bump in the road jolts us. I hear some of the others cry out in pain with each violent shift. My legs are now numb but for many hours they hurt with the pain of a thousand hot needles.
I imagine I too will die in here. When they finally stop and open the doors I will be standing here with my dead son held to me, but I will be dead also. Unable to lie down, unable to fall, upright and rigid and dead.
Breathing was difficult in here from the moment they shut the doors, but that was from the smell of our bodies, our sweat and fear, and from the tightness with which we were packed.
I could feel other chests pressing into mine on all sides. Each time those around me breathed in, they crushed me, forcing my breath from me. Even my son stole lungs-full of my air in order to fill his own. In time all our breathing grew more shallow and the pressure of other chests expanding grew less. We learned to time our breathing to take it in turns. We talked about it, quietly. Even joked about it. One man said it was like those people at a football match, each standing in turn, forming a human wave. Ours was a wave of breath moving from one end of the truck to the other. All of us snatching at life each in his turn.
Now the breathing is difficult because the air is thin and foul. The doors are sealed and have been for many hours. Hours? Days? I can no longer tell how long it has been. Too long is for certain. There seems to be no break in the seal, no hole in this container for air to leave or to enter. We breathe nothing now except what we brought in with us. There is the leavings of our lungs, our exhalations, but also the smell of bodies, of urine and excrement. And death.
I have already faded out once or twice. I could not have told you this for myself, but voices close to hand have brought me back, encouraging me to keep going. I don’t understand how I have been able to continue when my son has not, but maybe he was just too young. Too small. Too weak. He, like me, came and went for a time. Each time he left his muscles would slacken and he would lean into me. Each time he came back he cried out with the pain of muscles suddenly tensed. Finally, he went and never returned. His muscles loosened more than ever before and I smelled the stink of his evacuation, and his final breath caressed my cheek in farewell. I had not the strength to cry.
And yet we chose this journey. We paid for our death in money and promises. They wanted more from us in return than we had to offer. If we had had more to give why would we have wanted to leave? But in the new world they are delivering us to we were told we would be able to work for them, give them what they want and still have more than enough left over for us. I never believed them, but hoped that an escape would be possible. In the countries through which we pass there are laws to stop us from being kept as slaves. We could have made a life and lived as we have always wanted to.
Now I realise just how foolish my hopes were. If I should reach a destination it will be mine alone and with my son’s death to carry. And the more I think the more I come to the conclusion that men who would lock us in such a place will have equally tight seals surrounding us at the other end of our journey. Escape will be an impossibility and laws cannot protect you if the lawmen know nothing of your existence. Perhaps my son is the lucky one. He has already made his escape.
And still I would not make the decision differently if I had my time again. The death that I can feel stealing upon me was at least achieved in the hope of something better, something free. To have stayed and starved like my wife, my daughters and other sons, would have been less than useless, it would have been despicable. To have waited so long before trying already weighs on me. To never have tried at all would have been a death all its own, a living inhumation followed by a true death of far less nobility.
My hands and arms grow tired. I find I can no longer hold my son to me. My arms slump useless at my sides, unwilling to be raised even so short a distance, the fingers hanging limp. My son still stays upright, his knees and hips bent against me and his neighbours, his head rolled backwards and his open eyes staring up at the roof of the truck, glittering in the dim light with the artifice of life. I would like to have been able to reach up and close his eyelids when his head slumped back and they opened wide, but I cannot raise my arms through the press of the bodies around me. No-one can. No-one has been able to touch their own faces, their own lips. Some, I know, have brought small amounts of food or water with them, but none have been able to get these vital things into their bodies. For them it is yet another torment. At least I carry nothing but my clothes. I have no temptation of sustenance to torture myself with. All I can do is wait. Wait for the darkness to once more steal over me
and never withdraw. The final wash of a deep, deep tide.
Instead, the truck stops and, after brief agonising moments, the door opens. Daylight bursts
in like an explosion and everyone closes their eyes. At the same time sweet fresh air gusts in and each man stands taller and breathes their fill. Again, I can feel chests pressing into mine as they fill, but there are enough in here no longer breathing that it has no effect and I too can give my lungs free rein. I breathe deeply again and again and then it catches. I expect a cough but release a sob. My muscles reawaken with the physical jerk it causes and pain spikes my legs and back. I cry out in pain and my inward breath again turns to a sob. All around me are voices crying out in a pain and horror, finally given enough breath to express themselves.
I hear voices at the doorway, and the sound of sirens beyond them. The crush of bodies slackens and I feel my son start to leave me. With difficulty and another cry I raise my arms and pull him against me. I hold him and at last cry out his death.
Wherever we have come to I can finally announce to the world that my son is dead. I can finally cry his soul to heaven.
And I can finally release my shame that as his final breath caressed my face I breathed it in, snatching at the thin trickle of air, stealing my son’s final breath to keep myself alive.
The police of whatever country this is finally take the weight of his body from me and lead me from the container into a warehouse filled with flashing lights and noise. Yet, though they take his body from me, I shall always carry my son with me in my mind, on my tongue, in my actions and in every breath I draw. Wherever I have now arrived, and wherever I go to from here, my role now is to live so that with every breath I draw I can give life to him in return
for that final breath.
Prakash Kona
A woman can love only once.
A woman gives her heart only once.
A woman marries once, loves one man, and cannot conceive of loving another man.
Indian women can never do what western women are doing which means sleeping with more than one man at the same time.
A woman that is raped is not fit to live.
Whether a woman says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ it still means ‘yes’ if that’s what the man wants.
Virginity is a sign of purity.
A woman must be a virgin before she is married.
Virginity is the woman’s only “treasure” that must be given to no other man except the husband.
A “respectable” woman is a mother, sister, wife or daughter irrespective of whether she is a person in her own right or not.
Mothers are asexual.
Mother’s love is absolute.
All women want to be mothers.
Pregnancy is fun and all women enjoy being pregnant.
Abortion is sin.
Love is what the man wants of a woman and not the other way round.
Possessiveness to the point of obsession is real love.
If a man and a woman are in a room by themselves they are having sex.
Friendship between a man and a woman does not exist.
Indian culture is the best especially for women because it gives them home and family life which means the “privilege” of cooking, cleaning and taking care of husband and children – and all this does not mean work.
A wife fails in her duty if she is not ready for sex when the husband wants it.
If a man cheats it’s a sign of weakness and he can expect forgiveness. If a woman cheats she deserves to die or get killed.
A woman doesn’t mind being slapped and beaten once in a way as a proof of love.
Women fall into two categories – pure and impure. The impure ones want to be pure but cannot and therefore they must die.
All women are lustful creatures behind the mask of innocence.
Wife-beating is a part of married life.
A woman knows how to seduce when she puts her head to it.
Women do not have orgasms.
Women cannot be sexually satisfied.
A man is finished once he has an orgasm but a woman can go on forever.
Love has nothing to do with sex or the body.
Once a woman loses her virginity to a man she belongs to him forever.
An Indian woman cannot do what a man does.
There’s no greater happiness for a woman other than family life.
Something is wrong with single women.
A woman needs the carrot and the stick the same way as a child.
Women who divorce are shameless and have no respect for Indian culture.
Women like men who boss over them and treat them like dirt.
Ultimately a woman is not to be trusted.
Shrapnel around the heart
The boy sits beneath the shadow of the juniper tree, album splayed open on his lap. His fingers caress the pieces of his collection.
A friend joins him, an album of his own tucked under his arm, and they fall into comparing favourites.
The boy proudly displays rusted corkscrews, shards of spark plug ceramic, two nails twined into a crucifixion form pulled from the radiator of a bus near the detonation of a female suicide bomber in Tel Aviv.
His friend showcases his own crown jewel, a ragged circle laced with silver thorns. His father brought home from work, last week, pulled from the chest of a five year-old girl.
You can still see the blood on it, the boy marvels, holding the disc up to the fading sunlight.
Fiona Linday
Snaldov, the Baltics and me. We just don’t seem to fit. Since all the trouble, I’ve changed. I know it’s me because I don’t feel part of anything, any more.
It all seems safe here but things aren’t always what they seem.
From where I stand I can see twenty-two bullet holes in the wall of our house. Mrs. Ivanova, across the road, has only fifteen. I counted them.
Yes! That’s thirty-seven bullets that missed.
I came out here for fresh air but there’s no fresh air, only mud. But that’s okay. One day
this mud will be a meadow of tall buttercups. I know it.
Right now though, I have to collect the eggs.
I despise those chickens. I despise the way they’re turning our yard into a grey,
slippery, mess. It’s horrible. Still the eggs are lovely.
When I look out over the huddled rooftops that seem to squash me, I think of
Branimir and my eyes follow the pillars of smoke that drift over the village to the hills.
Branimir is in those hills, with his family. They’re gypsies and no one likes gypsies, except me. I really like Branimir. His smile does it for me. When I’m with him everything seems safe.
I met him last summer, a summer that went on forever. The sun excited the whole hillside until the flowers, the trees, the bushes and the grass, all burst into colour.
Then a bundle of feathers dropped from the roof, startling me.
“Stupid creature!” I shouted.
I want Branimir. I want his life and his freedom. And I want it now.
But this is my life. Chickens, mud and my dad, Konstantin.
I hate my dad.
I didn’t always hate him. A long time ago we used to have great fun together.
He was always laughing, always ready for a game. At bedtime he’d tuck me in and read me this story, the same one every night. It’s like the bible story about the child, Isaac, being given back to God by Abraham, his dad. Only instead of Isaac being saved in this story, the boy gets turned into gold. I don’t trust my dad. I used to love him but that was then.
And this is now.
In our house we only have five rooms for eight of us and my dad fills them all. I share a bedroom with my sister but the boys are really cramped in their room, top to toe in two beds. The front room’s full of dad’s mysterious boxes and we’re not allowed in there. If I so much as touch the door he yells, “You girl. Here! Now,” and I dread that.
I yell back, “I have got a name you know! I’m Yuliya, Yuliya.”
That’s when he gives me a smack round the head.
“Bring it on, Yuliya,” he jeers.
I don’t care what he says. I won’t cry because there’s no point.
So, anyway, I quite enjoy my boiled egg for breakfast, sometimes with fresh bread but not always.
My mum left for work before I was up. It was still dark when I heard the latch of the back door. She does her best. She has lots of jobs. It was freezing cold this morning and I needed to check on her because I wanted to know if dad had done a, ‘Bring it on, Elena,’ on her, too. But she seemed okay. She wasn’t limping, anyway.
For some strange reason she hasn’t given up on my dad, yet, so neither should I.
I get up and put on layers of clothes but as mum’s already filled the stove burner, I warm myself by the oven before heading outside.
I do the chickens and see to the goats. Boring! Luckily, Lala likes to milk them.
Next, I go to Mila our horse. I love Mila. When all that’s done, I come in to get warm again and put some eggs on to boil, making sure I’m washed before I shout the boys. Then I grab my coat quickly before the rush and see how Lala’s doing, poor kid. Lala’s only six, so I help her dress. Lastly, I make sure she gets some breakfast.
“Hurry up, let’s go see the icy cobwebs,” I say and off Lala skips in front of me.
I leave my brothers to sort themselves out. They get to me with their pushing and shoving and all Dragomir hears from them is moaning, “It’s not fair. Stop bossing us about! Who do you think you are?”
Dragomir always says, “I am older than you, that’s what! Now, have you got all your school stuff?”
Even from where we are standing we hear the back door slam and then they’re off.
We can even hear dad yelling, “Some of us are still sleeping! Be quiet now!”
Then the boys, with their bags thrown over their shoulders, come running up behind us.
Well, they get to school eventually, most of the time.
A t school, Mrs. Gamizov, my teacher, fills our heads with dreams of wealth and says, “Work hard, Yuliya, to get into college.”
“Do you mean me?” I ask. “Get into college! Sofia’s miles away and we’ve no money.”
This woman can’t be in her right mind.
She tries again, “It’s not a problem if you find funding, Yuliya.”
What a joke. The only way I could get to college would be if our church paid but they give to us already and I’m not special like the pretty stained glass window that needs repairing. Any spare money goes there first. The bullets caught our beautiful church too and there wasn’t much left inside by the time the police had finished.
But college would be brilliant.
Branimir doesn’t need to go to college. He’s learning on the job. His dad tells him all about horses and how to stay out of trouble. He can already catch rabbits with the dogs and shoot pheasants. His dad spends hours and hours with him.
It’s Dragomir who tries to show my brothers how to do things properly but sometimes they just copy dad and then I feel sorry for Dragomir.
Weekdays we all have to help out at home. Before dark I collect Lala, get home, dump my bag and pull on old clothes. Then I feed and lock the animals away.
Tonight, dad blocked the fire.
“Dad, guess what?” I say. “I’ve been talking to Mrs.Gamizov and she thinks I could go to college.”
He grinned, “Does she, ha?” I can see he’s not listening to me.
But I plough on, “If I did go, I could get a good job and you wouldn’t have to work for THEM any more.”
I meant his friends, those thugs. Big mistake. Dad’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you think you are, Miss?” he roars, grabbing a log from the stove log pile and throwing it at me. I didn’t see it coming and it hit me.
“Hey!” I cried, “What was that for?” Why did I open my big mouth?
Dad started shouting, “You don’t know you’re born! Where do you think the money comes from round here, stupid?”
I had to admit it was a crack shot but it hurt me. I felt a sharp pain on my cheek bone and then felt a trickle down my face. I put my hand up and it came away covered in blood.
I’d had enough, wiping the blood away. Pulling up my hood I stumbled into the yard where Mila was waiting, her hay net empty. I knew I should fill it but instead, I patted her holding her tight, I could trust Mila. She always lets me get close. I tugged the bailer twine to let some hay tumble into the stable and head down she tucked in, her breath all foggy in the cold night air.
“We deserve better than him.” I raged.
My brother shouted, “Supper time, Yuliya,” so after a while, I went in. As usual Mum was in the kitchen pretending we were normal.
A loud bang on the back door told me Dad’s friends had arrived, bringing a waft of cold air and the smell of cheap vodka with them.
“How can Dad let these creeps in?” I asked Mum.
“Shsh, Yuliya,” Mum said. Then, “Welcome,” and there she was offering them our supper.
But after that Mum ignored them until, “How old is this one?” the guy flashing the gold tooth leered.
“Please, leave the child alone,” my mum snapped. “ Yuliya, it’s late. Put those little ones to bed for me.”
How I wished I could tell that old goat to get out of our house.
My brothers, being streetwise, had already gone upstairs so I tucked Lala up, then read her a quick story, giving her my half-eaten chocolate bar. Next thing we hear is a police siren and chairs crashing below. We all heard the rush for the back door as the police banged on the front, followed by dogs barking.
I can’t stand this.
I knew the police were after the fake C.D.’s Dad was selling off our horse and cart. He was handy and looked so innocent shifting loads. What worried me was the other stuff he was selling. I hoped they all got caught. My dad said, “Those police are fools,” and Dragomir added, “They couldn’t even catch a cold!”
I knew where that came from. It was my Dad talking.
Later, I tiptoed downstairs “Are you alright, mum? Why does Dad keep getting us into trouble?”
“I don’t know,” she said, as she tidied and picked up chairs. “I just don’t know, Yuliya. It’s not fair, it’s one thing or another first, it was the Imperialists messing him about now it’s these black leather mobsters who have their hands on him.”
All I could think was, ‘Someone PLEASE help us.’
Our church had tried to help us, although their sharing of bread and beautifully decorated Easter eggs wasn’t as helpful as getting us away from these men would be. All the same, church prayers had held our family together. So far.
“I’ll go see what’s happening,” I told Mum, but what I hadn’t realised was that the goat was still outside, his gold tooth catching the light. I tried to get out of his way but I was too late. He grabbed me by the throat and caught my sore cheek.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
“Shut it!” he growled.
He got so close to me I could smell his breath. It stank.
“I’m going to have you!” he promised.
“Shove off!” I shouted, and somehow, I wriggled free.
When I got back inside I wanted to be sick so I rushed upstairs. Afterwards I prayed, “Lord, protect me. Please, show me a safe way out.” Mum came up with cooled, recently boiled water scented with her best soap and I scrubbed myself, scrubbing away his touch. It disgusted me. My Mum talked to me about forgiveness but I thought others needed that lesson far more than me. Yet, when I looked in Mum’s eyes I saw a beauty no beating could ever destroy. She must have stayed with me until I managed to drop off to sleep.
After having the worst nightmares, next morning I got up as usual. Dad was keeping a low profile so he insisted I wait for the travellers.
“Go in late today, girl. Stay home whilst the horse’s feet are looked at. My head’s exploding! I’m going back to bed.”
“It serves you right!” I whispered, but luckily he didn’t hear me.
Only Branimir came today. So full of excitement, I went out. I felt guilty but why? This was my life and what I did was up to me.
“How are you today, Yuliya?” Branimir grinned.
“Good thanks, and you? Where’s your dad this morning?” I asked.
“We’re on the move soon,” Branimir said, “so we’ve got lots to do but I am very glad to be here. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family but you can have too much of a good thing! ” He laughed and as he brushed by me a lovely musty smell hovered in the air.
“But what about you, really?” he went on.
“I’m okay.” I lied but Branimir pushed my hood from my face.
“Great. Now, what’s really been happening?”
“Nothing. Honest. Can I get you a hot drink?”
I tried to turn away but he took me in his arms.
“Stop right there, please, Yuliya. I’m so sorry,” he stroked my face, then gently brushed the purple bruise marks on my neck. I hoped they wouldn’t spoil things for us. I remembered my dream of our special day, me in a pure white wedding dress.
It made me realise how bad things had got lately. My friends regularly saw me with a black eye but Branimir hadn’t, not yet. Now his gentle smile made it easy for me to trust him. So why couldn’t I?
“Don’t worry, I must have done it clowning around with Dragomir,” I lied. “His name means peaceful. I wish! Not at my house.”
“Really? Well you know what Branimir means, don’t you?”
“No,” I couldn’t help smiling.
“Branimir means protection! So if ever that’s what you need, I’m your man!”
I looked into Branimir’s blue eyes, then shut mine and let him kiss me. He was all I needed and even though I felt a bit wobbly, I kissed him back.
“You know I can’t let this happen to you,” he said. “but what I can’t understand is why you have to lie about it.”
“Oh, Branimir, I didn’t mean to lie to you, it’s just that I dream. I dream and then I hope and I pray. That’s how it works with me. Otherwise, some days, I couldn’t carry on.”
Thoughtfully, he spoke again, “Well when you’re ready, I’ll help you.”
“Thanks. If only it were that easy. These people hang on once they’ve got you in their sights. The old goat has already threatened he’s going to have me. What’s worse is my dad’s going to let him. It’s all a waste of time.” His face went red but I didn’t want to get Branimir into trouble for helping me, so I went on, “Please, I really don’t want to get you mixed up in this business.”
“Well, it’s too late I am already involved,” he said firmly, “so let me do something.” He wanted to help me but I couldn’t let him. I was bad news and so all we actually did was go round in circles. I pushed him away.
“I’ve no time for this now, I’ve got to get to school.”
Branimir shouted me back, but I couldn’t go back. All that he’d said was whirling around my head, especially the, ‘I’m your man,’ part and I just couldn’t say goodbye to him.
Skulking into school, my tutor didn’t see me until that afternoon, when my face looked a bit better. The lessons weren’t the ones I needed like, ‘How to survive,’ and I hardly heard a word the teachers said, I got out as soon as I could.
Arriving early at the primary school gate for Lala, I was met by more stares from the parents. The boys had raced past us off home and Lala’s hand in mine felt good. “Hi, Yuliya,” she frowned. “Was it your turn last night?”
“Well it gave Mum a break!” I joked. “Don’t ever let anyone wallop you, Lala.”
“No way! I’ll .…”
“Shush, we’ll be okay,” I hoped and again, I prayed.
Usually, by home time the fire was lit but this afternoon there was no sign of smoke. Carefully, I pushed open the back door. Mum met us, out of breath. She was rushing to get Lala settled.
She whispered, “You’ve got to get away, Yuliya, the sooner the better. It’s tonight, and it’s all set up. They’re taking you to that Hotel Splendid. A few glamour photos by the pool and then you’re his. You know the one?”
“ You don’t mean the old goat, with the gold tooth, Mum?” I was almost crying. “ What can I do?” I panicked.
Mum went on, “It’s to pay off your dad’s debt. That man will trick you with a job offer because that’s what happened to Mrs. Ivanova’s daughter and Maria ended up in a real sorry state. ”
I put my head in my hands. “Darling, don’t worry,” my mum said. “ No way would I ever let that happen to one of mine. You have to get out of his way but you won’t be alone. I’ve asked Branimir for help. He’s here now. His family know the truth and have agreed to take you with them on the road. Our families go back years , they’ll help you and I know we really can trust them. They’re heading over the mountains to freedom today and you’re going with them.” She hugged me tighter.
“Mum, I can’t…”
“You’ll have a future, Yuliya, you must take it!” Mum insisted.
“I don’t want to leave you, I love you, Mum,” I said. I couldn’t believe there was hope for me, a way to be safe. I heard the back door go and there was Branimir.
“Come on, Yuliya,” Branimir said, hurrying me. “There’s an icy fog coming in, which will give us some good cover, so get your things together.”
“I’ve done that, Yuliya,” my mum said. “Here, take this money it should help. Mum was one step ahead, pushing a roll of notes into my pocket. “It’s what I’ve been saving for your college fund but you need it now. I shall pray for you.”
I grabbed her hand, “I’ll come back one day Mum, I promise. Keep Dragomir out of trouble and Lala and the boys.” Then I gave her a long hug. “And Dad,” I added.
Carefully, wrapping her shawl round me my mum said, “I’ll try. Now go!”
The gypsies decorated carriage was in our road, waiting for me to climb on board. So this was my answered prayer. This was the way out that my mum thought was right and I chose this new life. My stomach was doing somersaults and I was so excited.
Taking Branimir’s hand, I gave thanks for my second chance. For the time being I must not look back.
Finally, I felt safe.
We all have demons. I faced mine once. I was sat in my room. It was dark, but it wasn’t night time yet. I had been smoking a joint and listening to music and just thinking. There was nothing unusual about that.
I remember everything went silent and I felt a presence in the room with me. I first spotted it from the corner of my eye, nothing more than a charcoal blur in front of the wardrobe.
At first I was scared. I didn’t want to look at the creature directly. If only it wasn’t there. I wondered if there was a weapon nearby I could fight it with, or if there was someone I could call for help from, but I was alone and unarmed.
Following the fear was resignation. There was a crushing feeling deep in my chest, taking my breath away and threatening to stop my heart from beating. I knew the time had come. I knew it had been inevitable for quite a while now. The demon had been there all along but it was only now that it chose to present itself to me. I turned to face it.
The beast was only small but coming from it an enormous, unrestrained strength. For a moment all my senses were blocked out. I was blind; I could not hear; I could not smell. Then I looked upon the demon with a clarity I had never experienced before. Its scaly skin was covered with a fine film of slime. There were many horns, many eyes and many faces.
We all have demons and there comes a time in all our lives that we must face them. What defines us as people is what we gain from this encounter. As I was sat there in my silent room with a haze of smoke washing over my eyes I did not fight. I held out my hand for the demon to bite. The poor creature was only hungry, after all. I was hungry too.
Nick McMaster
Before what I have since called the ‘Hose Pipe Affair’, I had at best a one-up-from-stranger relationship with my neighbour. For instance I knew his first name, or had it narrowed down to two possibilities. I practically forgot it immediately after he introduced himself on the day he moved in. I never had the courage to ask him again. I know it was Tim or Tom; names that seem strangely apologetic for a man with those shoes. Annoyingly, even some of his mail that had occasionally, accidentally landed on my door mat only ever had the initial T. I was so focused on discovering the first name – trying to buckle the envelopes so as I could gain an oblique view through the little plastic window in the hope of reading more of the letters and maybe catch his full identity – that I subsequently forgot his surname. One wrongly delivered item, a water bill I think, was addressed to a Mr Fredericks and it had his address, but without the initial I could never be certain that it was for him.
Even right up to what I have since called the ‘Return of the Pepper Mill’ we displayed a level of civility in passing. That upward nod men of a certain class do along with a barely audible “alright” was the minimum though most frequent communication: albeit one which I had to learn. If either one of us passed the other slightly inebriated – me returning home from a post commute pint, him leaving home for the bookmakers – then it was positively warm enough for a “good weather/ shit (his words) weather we’ve been having, eh” call and response. I once fantasised what we would have said if the planets had aligned and our orbits had crossed with both of us stumbling and slurring. Who knows, after the usual acknowledgements we may have felt compelled to stop, talk about some match – I have a rudimentary knowledge of the Premier League just in case I need to use that plumber again – share an appropriately inappropriate joke and wish each other well. I may have even had the bravery to tell him that I had almost forgotten his name. We would have laughed about it.
So, one could safely say that any Laylandii-style neighbour dispute never really felt on the cards. The nearest we came to ‘blows’ (‘The nearest’ disappeared after what I have since called the ‘Incident with the Dog’) was when he parked his dilapidated Volkswagen pick-up outside my front garden, even though there was a parking space in front of his. Luckily he had parked it on a Saturday, which meant that I was not at work and therefore had time to hang about outside my front garden on the Sunday in my dressing gown and wait for him to appear in the corner of my eye. Once he did, I made it look like I had only just got up and on collecting the newspaper from the porch had noticed this van and was upset by it enough to wander out and wonder aloud about the offending vehicle. He overheard and came to apologise, muttering something about parking it absentmindedly before actually moving it into his dining room line of vision. All embarrassment that a direct complaint would have engendered was thus avoided. Though, he may have wondered why I was wearing a dressing gown at 5pm in the evening over a shirt and tie and Cotton Traders Wrinkle Free Pleat Front Chinos.
If it hadn’t been such a seemingly inconsequential event, I would have remembered the day more clearly. It was a Saturday. I had just finished washing the car, even though the weather didn’t merit it. I liked that car. It was a 2003 Ford Mondeo Ghia black hatchback diesel with power steering. It had a small scratch on the front left wheel arch where, in a supermarket car park, a shopping trolley with a stuck wheel had inadvertently rolled into it as if it were on a prior mission. I had meant to get the scratch seen to but ended up just colouring it in with
a permanent black marker pen. If you caught it at the wrong angle in bright light you could see how much the matt covering of the pen stood out. With this in mind I tended to park the car with the left side towards any shade. The car would eventually become embroiled in what I have since called the ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’.
The door bell should have rung but it didn’t and that perturbed me at the time. Instead there was a too informal rap on the window. The kind of thing that your best friend might do knowing that your door is actually unlocked and they are just alerting you to the fact that they are going to enter the house; having recently telephoned you about their imminent arrival. Though my best friend never did that, due to only scoring a modest 6 (10 being the highest) on the scale of friendship. This effectively meant we only organised a social get together if we bumped into each other at the newsagents or other local shop, because we had nothing else to talk about. Though, I did buy the Mondeo from him. Funnily enough, after all that has happened, I can’t remember if he was my level 6 best friend before or because of that financial transaction. The black marker pen was separate to this entire relationship; being a purchase originally intended as the final component of a comprehensive stationery store.
Luckily, as it turned out, because I didn’t have a level 9-10 best friend, the front door was locked. This gave me time to adjust myself to the shocking manner in which I had been alerted to a caller. Even if someone had followed the usual procedure, thus not necessarily putting me into a state of wariness, I valued the minutes spent locating my keys (this was another ruse designed to create time: they were always on the sideboard or in one of my jacket pockets) and unlocking, then unbolting the front door. It gave me a moment to gather my thoughts and present a man at ease with fellow man, and ready for any dialogue.
“Hi ‘mate’ (my inverted commas), sorry to trouble you, like. But I don’t suppose I could borrow your hose?”
“I…er…” My carefully crafted preparation time had been a waste of time. The rap on the window had been more unsettling than I imagined.
“I noticed you using one on your Mondeo. Mine seems to have sprung a leak and I’d like to hose down the patio this evening. You’d be doing me a favour.”
“Um…well…”
He must have sensed my unease, so tried some humour. “Tell you what, I’ll even return the water!” He must have sensed my unease, so tried reassurance. “Only joking, mate, I’ve got my own tap…” He trailed off, perhaps seeing in me for the first time a man who was able to stand his ground, defend his castle. In those split seconds I had formed an answer.
“No” I thought, “I’d rather just keep it. Cheerio!” No explanation was needed. I just wasn’t the lending type. I was just about to say these words aloud when.
“Look, if it’s too much bother.” It was then I noticed the menacing replica football shirt, the aggressive paint splattered track suit bottoms, the gold Onyx eagle medallion ring. This wasn’t the time to find out his true feelings under the bemused façade.
“Sorry, of course, of course” I mumbled as courageously as was possible. Gathering myself, I sensed his unease, so tried some humour. “I misheard you. I thought you asked if you could borrow my ‘hoe’. Imagine me using that on the Mondeo!” It worked. I’m sure I noticed a curious expression glance across his face as he imagined that very scene.
From the advantage of my living room I could hear him wash his patio. He was humming an inconsequential tune picked up from some service station. I drowned it out with my own nagging thrum. With all my might, I had acted with such triumphant casualness when handing him the hose pipe (including saying ‘mate’ in an ironic gesture), that I completely forgot to negotiate the timescale; instead opting for the regretful “whenever” riposte. It was reasonable to assume I’d get the hose back on completion of his job, but it would look unreasonable to actually, verbally demand it forthwith as soon as he had wound it in. This was my first mistake in the whole sorry saga. Hearing him compress the hose nozzle – allowing the remaining in limbo water to splutter pathetically to a halt – I drew the curtains across the French windows and turned off the light in the room and perched silently in the darkness. For all I cared he could think that I was out for the evening.
He didn’t think I was out for the evening. The door bell rang. At last he had learned something.
I systematically made my way round the rest of the house drawing all the other curtains and turning of all the other lights including the one in the fridge to further illustrate that I wasn’t bothered about getting my property back immediately. I heard him cough into the approaching chill and retreat. Now I had the night to hatch a plan which would ensure the speedy, safe return of my hose pipe without it appearing as such.
The theme tune of The Archers omnibus had just faded into thin air by the time I had brought out my last spoonful of water. Surrounding my Mondeo was a motley collection of different sized vessels all full to the brim. Earlier, knowing that my energy levels would ultimately dwindle I started with the largest non fixed containers. I had toyed with the idea of ripping out the bath, but the plumber was unavailable and I lacked the passion. After the buckets, saucepans and thermos flask the work got more tedious as I made countless trips carrying port glasses, egg cups and camera film cases, carefully ensuring no water was spilled either in the house or down the front garden path. Meanwhile the car, smeared from the soaping I had given it hours previously, stood parked and parched.
I was drinking tea from a hollowed out potato (having not left aside a spare cup for the purpose) gazing forlornly at the front left wheel arch, when my curtain twitch of a neighbour finally put in an appearance. I braced myself for my master stroke.
“Are you okay mate?”
“Hmm?” I said, as if waking from a day dream.
“Can I call someone for you?” Peering in too close, furrowing his brow and squinting, he was looking at me as if I was an intricate user’s manual. I imagine I had the same expression when I first tried out my Sat Nav. This led me to finally give him a name.
“TomTom” I thought to myself, inwardly chuckling at the idea of a nick name possibly being his real name, only childishly doubled.
“TomTom?” he said coincidentally, softly, in a questioning tone.
Over the road, Janet, Anne or whatever her name was, had just walked out of her front door carrying a refuse sack to her wheelie bin. I sensed her unease as she looked over at this surreal tableau. I, assuredly playing the part of the puppet master, whilst TomTom floundered, waiting for me to pull a string, provide direction.
“This isn’t about the hose pipe is it?” String tugged. “I tried to return it last night, but I think you must have been going to bed or something.” Pull the strings! Pull the strings! “You know you could’ve just popped round this morning to get it back.”
“Oh, not to worry,” I said casually, though it sounded almost robotic, “I didn’t want to bother you. I just assumed that you would hand it back when you had finished with it. You know me,” I lied, “I don’t like to let a small inconvenience put me off the task in hand.” Take that Pinocchio!
After an uncomfortable silence (guess who for!) we surveyed the scene. Janet/ Anne had been joined by some other onlookers who hadn’t even the courtesy to carry refuse sacks. “No, it’s alright,” I said rubbing TomTom patronisingly on the shoulder, answering his question, “give me the hose pipe back tomorrow. I’ve planned the job this way, so I may as well continue: Time to rinse!” I picked up a thimble, a gift from me to my mother. It had a tiny drawing of Chichester Cathedral on it. I threw the water towards the car. What little amount there was ineffectually came up short. Unconcerned, chirpily, I went in to finish him off. The permanent black marker pen line that had once been mere cover for a scratch became a kill mark under the cockpit of a fighter plane. “You can help me if you like.”
He sullenly tramped off, muttering random words such as “idiot”, “weirdo”, “loser” and “twat”. Like so much in life they were tossed asides: without meaning.
Sean J Mahoney
Cancer Girl’s Hair Set on Fire
“Police are investigating an 11-year-old girl who had battled back from cancer and had her newly grown hair set on fire at a school near Swansea.”
She suffered after four years with her friends. People who, in their misunderstandings of sums and parts, were not seeking Bianca. Bianca actually smothered friends with essays full of holes – she believed people needed paths. What was the point? For cancer waits. Cancer is Patience as equally as it is Pestilence. Cancer is petulant in line and in traffic, petulant while you remove your trousers or seek communion with various devils. The letter P is cancer. It’s just dreadful. Awards were given for schemes to tackle the facially paralysed cancer girl and not just tackle her but clothesline her, make her afraid of the restroom, fear her homeroom and the Quad. I’m a cancer. Cancer is a menace. Cancer is corporate. Cancer is conceived. Babies are conceived. Ideas are born in moments of duress. Why “Cancer Girl”? Why not young girl? I want Bianca to be safe. I want Bianca happy. She suffers but apparently not enough. The family has been to Hell. Only Bianca came back for more. She has cancer. Things I want are not important.
“Bianca Powell was in a corridor at Pontarddulais Comprehensive when her hair, which had grown back after four years of chemotherapy, was set alight. A 14-year-old boy has been bailed pending further inquiries.”
Such as: Who are you working for? Do you have any idea? Any at all? Do you realize that when the Americans come home all they really want are snapshots of the fallen empire? They want to see disarray and the compaction of propriety. They could give a fuck about Parliament and the Tube. They think the vanquished. They think tube steak. They think that they think like Locke and know what should be held under key and yet cancer crawled out anyway in front of their straight-for-a-price teeth. Cancer is knowledge about what could have been. And cancer dictates: Are you really an Englishman? There is nothing English about lighting someone afire. Fawkes maybe. Was this to be the second Great Fire? Your every action resembles that of a bullet fired from the cannon of stupid. You fop. Bianca’s father wired from Hell that Bianca would be best served cold but most thought him daft at best. Keep Bianca away from incendiary academics he declared. Keep Manchester united while the family seeks consulate assistance. The family pleads in unison, in choral mass, for a return to the surface where they can aggressively combat cancer and the corridors where the hair crime occurred. There is nothing normal about school anymore; not when the Diet of Worms is no longer a reliable weight loss program for believers in sola fide. Not after years of chemo. Not after years of hair growth. Not after arriving at age 12 only to learn that you are your own candle and no, there is no wind.
James Mansfield
Midnight at the lake, purple stains float towards Antonja, a loathing he feels, a sense of desertion for he is the last. He picks up his Free Rhodesia banner and walks. There are hundreds of coconuts shells, their white inners dead, the water has evaporated into the mouths of many. Ripple after curved ripple he will throw one into the lake. He feels the water, the silt through his palm cooling, a balm for the mineral-rich nights. Seventeen different varieties of shampoo in her bathroom. The windows of the offices open, papers billowing out in groups. Antonja felt so excited at the time. This is a change. Things will be different. As he sat in the Governor’s bathtub and read a stack of the manila files.
Colonel Perence Djerban crinkles his way into the bathroom and there is a scene. Two flies watch from the crack in the roof, above which a party is taking place. It continues for days and Antonja is sick several times at the end. The Colonel leans, rubs his dirty hands on the handtowel (which will never be washed again) and addresses the scene.
“Sixteen o’them they get away. Five laid down, evil faced. What he say next? Them jumbo jets useless. The captain he so drunk he never gonna fly for a week.”
“This it. Need this time, you have a few beer, and then we talk tomorrow. Tomorrow better and this bath, it a friend of no one.”
The Colonel stomps and throws the handtowel on the floor. He dislikes pink, reminds him of the gums of that Queen she visited back in ’58. He failed to meet her, she unlikely to return, she sit in Buckingham Palace and she eat breakfast cereal.
“Which face we gonna stick on them stamps? I don’t want birds, bees and anteaters.”
“Slice whatever you want, the portraits won’t be for a while.”
“I will not be licking the back of that Queen any more.”
Ten o’clock at the Hilton Hotel, a concrete den of the world’s reporters, those boys who didn’t get the pass to Washington, Moscow, or even Luanda. They keen, they spent the last of the old money. Oskar Muller, chief correspondent of the German Democratic Republic official sports magazine, Swimmers Today (Schwimmer Heute), wanders across the tribal rugs (made in Macao) and looks for a clean cup. Sixteen have the remains of the party, three are broken, and the tablecloth is torn as well, he notes, but nothing useful for he has had a tip-off that breaststroke champion Morgan Mfango used to work here, but he is yet to validate it.
“I should like two cups of coffee please.”
“No cafe. Breakfast suspended.”
“Then what is the point of these?” Muller waves a fan of dirty notes, Elizabeth’s face looking sad to be treated so badly.
“Many changes. The Italian say there is cafe at the Foreign Club. This is a bad hotel.”
“Saer bad. You are too honest….but wait a moment.”
The lumbering man paused and his eyes looked happy to be considered helpful; when there was nothing, a pool of empty croissants, white napkins used as bandages, the broken panes of glass he had removed that morning from the lobby.
“Such mild violence. When are you people going to get angry? I speak aloud but you know Morgan Mfango, he used to work here?”
“Mfango he is gone. He worked so hard, fifteen hours a day, and I say to him Morgan you work for them, not for yourself. He is gone, last year, he is with the Markists. A fighter? No he is not a fighter. There are no swimming pools in Salisbury.”
Five o’clock in the violet morning of the death of the British Empire. Cassandra speaks loudly to the white-shirted attendant, runs through sixteen different types of spirit but he just shrugs.
“Special wine miss. You like special wine.” She staggers back to the dance floor, a piece of carpet dirtier than the rest, three pale lights illuminating the dancers who have remained to celebrate the decline of King George and all his men. She sniffs a little, feels a blister surfacing on her left heel, and grabs the arm of Roberto Tomaselli. The arm responds and grasps her.
“Give me some of that vodka.”
He tips a few inches into her wine glass and they collapse on a sofa that has been waiting to be decommissioned for several years. It, colourless, is just weary for the corporate overhaul that it hopes will occur soon. It is mistaken, for the Hilton Salisbury is just a erstatz replica, owned by the late Jefferson Hilton, white-hatted lunatic and whose death was sad, but funeral poorly attended for people did not like the way he treated the staff, the family he never had.
Roberto is dozing his head in the arms of Cassandra, and she knows her father will have a busy month ahead and hopefully the nice man at the Central Reserve will be the same one as before the great divide. Roberto starts vodka-dribbling and she prods him in the cheek, gurgles, and then.
“I feel very ill. I am sorry Cassie but I will not be dancing anymore. Perhaps I should go home.” He slumps and continues to dribble. She rests his head on the end of the ambigious sofa and lights a cigarette, the last decent one she has. She puffs several times and the smoke forms a barrier between her and the bar which has been ransacked by the foreign correspondents. A man comes up to her and says something she doesn’t understand but she says no and waves her finger and he stops looking at her legs. England is so far away, she remembers just the cold darkness of five years since. Walking in Cambridge squares, a sense of tradition, the buildings like books, she will return, a mission, an aspiration when all else has faded. They retreat to the towers, to champagne introspection, to peer-reviewed journals and a constant worry that something is not right at the heart of England in this year of our Lord Nineteen Eighty.
Antonja walks up to the car, a peachy ripping of the dark, he opens the door and inside finds a newspaper yet to decay Former President Dupont dies aged 72. He puts it on the back seat and drives into the city. The yet-to warm tarmac laid by hundreds of newly democratic friends warms and a long green snake begins to decide sunbathing as Antonja swerves and nearly loses control, he feels queasy a mental jolt, and spins a little as he thinks of nothing but reaching the Central Reserve.
“You want to be an accountant – three jobs here for an accountant.”
“I don’t know. Where are they?”
“Here in Salisbury. Good pay.”
Antonja thinks of the future, when he will be about to retire, three children, grey hair, regular visits to the Sports Club, and a life spent of numbers, adding, taking away and the endless lists.
“Excuse me! Is anyone working here?”
A shuffle, adjustment of heavy spectacles and the window lumbers up to Antonja’s suitcase bulk.
“We’re closed today sir. National holiday.”
“But the door is open.”
“Bart he left it open. Please can you close it tomorrow. If you want new banknotes you have to wait until next week. No foreign transfers either.”
“You know Morgan Mfango. He works here?”
Antonja studies the man speaking. He wears pale blue trousers, white shirt and is trying very hard not to sweat. He, unshaven, and the stubbles lie like iron shavings, pulled around by a mischievous magnet.
Djerban sees the traffic from the window of the Interior Ministry, it fascinates him, he has been watching for several hours, the slow movements, the broken truck, bicycles weave in and out and it will be a tedious process to resurface the roads, build new highways. This is progress but he prefer the 1970s, chance to say a lot and do very little. He looks at the bookcase in the study that he has claimed. A lot of Shakespeare, technical reports, and a few holiday brochures. He thinks of the new army. He looks forward to his new army.
David R. Morgan
Life Cycle
What’s lost may never be found. What’s found may be lost forever
The sun creeps along the cement floor. Fairly soon, half my lifeless body is in light, the other in shadow,
like sunrise on a volcanic island. Dead a day or so, at least sixty flies have gathered by now, walking around
and ingesting what they’re walking around on.
I move in closer to me. Such organisation and grace–no fuss, no fighting. There’s obviously always
enough for everyone in the fly world.
And plenty of time to get off a quickie with your neighbour.
I’m now within inches of the calm feeding on something so familiar, of at least one hundred and fifty flies (give or take arrivals and departures).
None seem to notice me or care if they do, the sun glinting off their emerald thoraxes and through their purple wings.
The nobleman steps down from his carriage. It’s a district in the mountain valley.
The white shapes of old hands knit caps for thousands of spice-boxes.
At the manor, the animals are dressed up. The fox is in a tuxedo, a russet flame between his tails.
The nobleman lights candlesticks and eats rabbit stew.
The dormouse was an ice-floe of the mammoth era. The wind turned leaves in the washed linen. They heard the sun approach and withdraw, with a solemn
step, like organ music. At lunch, the decanter’s cork shone under the acetylene
burner, naive as a pear. After searching a long time, the children found a
hunter, lost, upside-down among branches. Very far off, in the bends of old roads, some robbers with a sack and a club cried: “Your money or your life!”
He gently does his angelic work. The school has four walls and its windows play
dominoes. Daytime opens its laughing drawers: yellow battles, slow cards, wise measures, sleeping gloves. Then, evening glides on the blue and white icing, his
slate scribbled with animals and heads. Bob’s toy-box contains a target, nails from wooden shoes, gelatin balls, a picture with a hunter in a derby hat.
At night, Bob sleeps in a little puff-pastry boat. After exhausting itself with white dust on the roads and bilberries in the wood, great summer, disarrayed and weak, is pulled in through the roof, through its wicker hall shaped like a hoop-net. Now, it’s neglected: ant-eggs clog its nose and a sore beard pushes them up to the slots of its eyes, a beard of rotting branches that’s called autumn.
The blue glasses, found in an elevated railroad car, belong to the victim, Lady Morton. But Nat and the coroner, misled to the black windows in depots, re-enact the daily routines of her double. The job hinges on a leaking cask, painted red, with mysterious contents. There’s also a garret, a furnished hotel overrun with
nettles, padded doors, a secret platform. All the action happens on Tuesday, poor day, stamping on the rain’s filings. Guided by a jockey, Nat discovers the culprit in a phoney pastor’s osier suitcase. He’s a horrid dwarf, of Mongolian ancestry. The pastor is his lieutenant.
The soup with jonquils that’s eaten at the fairies’ house, a dull little spoon gave me the recipe. One evening it lured me under its raincoat. In the dark, against its heart, a little light was living.
A weak little reddish flame, surrounded by a blue halo. It’s her — I’ve understood it ever since — she’s who hummed me the recipe. Alas!
My gasp was so strong that she died from it.
She’s morning’s residence. She’s as clear as she is invisible, as tranquil as forgotten lands. Her hair is golden, her smooth windows exchange glances.
She appears in bold alluring colors, a pretty basket of dew, protected by a long crystal rifle. On the doorstep, a bush shakes off his medals.
The door is open, but the bush hesitates forever: he doesn’t see he’s invited.
Gently, the house empties, she jingles her dress, her heart rustles: the dazed bush doesn’t understand. It’s a very complicated game.
From time to time, the glass rifle speaks all alone and shatters some small thing.
What was it a question of? A hair’s breath, in all. A tree was catching fire, a pond was sulking, a dew sprinkled maid-servant was lulled to sleep by currant
bushes. What was it a question of? A tiny line. Compact little figure, naked Merisette.
When the dawn’s heart begins to beat, the high little clouds come down to breakfast in the trees. Behind the masked clouds playing the big drum, real
clouds, still and caught in dreams, are hushed up.
They are the sky’s memory. Tired from wandering alone in the roadless sky, a dark cloud has gone to die in the forest.
Thursday is always pleasant with frost and a naked girl on the country’s palm.
The merchant of clouds counts the precious stones of the amazing house: an inviting lamp. The girl in the forest, brief snow-maid dressed in fire, in a leaving-coat. The white trees are listless. The house is a log, the merchant, Stout John, like the wind.
An uncle smokes a pipe, blows smoke, knows his target. An abbot traces a lion, builds a cardboard cone. The oldest child studies his shoulder join
A mother puts on her huge thimble, picks up a needle, yawns. A neighbour brings in a display of horns that just lies about, tells of his journey from Austria, drinks.
A table gloats in quarters. A child lies in ambush in a house. A house has a thousand windows. Heavy weather throbs in a countryman’s cloak.
We were hoping to spend Saturday in the bedroom in
Arabian sacks. It used to have a ladder under its arm and a trowel as shoulder-belt. The clock rang carefully, with an odor of preserved pears. A piece of thread was loafing on an armchair: it was the week’s pay. I kill the third bird while watching myself in the glass. The first I had taken for a chair, one of those folding
chairs which sometimes flutter between the hooks of the mirrors. I heard the second’s peck through the keyhole. I found it squashed against the back of the glass, the mender of faces. It was clear as oblivion.
The third was the breast of the mirror itself. It was flapping a thousand blinding hands, a thousand hands of fire. I was forced to close my eyes. It died because of them.
Saturday always means a pail of open oysters and a gaping plank, over there, in the corner of the wood where Oger, the staircase-maker, lives.
His wife Octavia washes with the black soap and eats the raw, chilled comb of a cock killed during the night by an axe-stroke, on the bakery block.
His drunken son Oscar has a sore throat. He set up a cutting table in the cabbage patch. He licks the almanac. It smells bad. The carpenter has bare fore-arms. He whistles between his teeth. He thinks about his brother the peddlar’s tired horse. He dreams of his daughter Odile, dead at fifteen, from hemorrhaging. Heaven is pale, its cheek swollen, with waterpockets under its eyes and a bandage on its calf.
In the evening, a preserved egg is eaten.
A cuckoo, larger than the forest, digs a hole in the still warm, ashen landscape.
The butt of a rifle spreads over the arrogant mountains.
A wisp of straw is placed as observer at the side of the hole. A guinea-hen’s eye, detached from its body, serves as a signal.
The eye reddens: the butt coagulates, the cuckoo’s feathers gather in a very furious four-fourths movement.
The straw glitters a long time in the complicated fistula of the sky’s deserter.
Thus, in the morning twilight, the winter cuckoo is sucked in by his surroundings.
He followed, point by point, the instructions on the hand-bill. Carefully, prudently, he folded the paper in quarters, then in tens, then again in a thousand equal little triangles. His work finished, he hid, for the night, under his pillow. Even so, in the morning a woman he didn’t know was washing, shamelessly, in front of his mirror.
In the mist, a quiet finger had drawn the curly head of a ram. The paper, folded so many times, had disappeared.In times of swollen cheeks, when the clay bugles roar, the little railroads of gold coins run, in festoons, around the country.
Oh beards of fire, oh streams rousing the thirst! But, at the heart of the region, among the mold growing under arms, milk-filled celebrities of the white wood
nourish the lumpy pillow of sleep which dents the young cows.
The felled tree still has a tree house. It also is left supporting this or that branch, with its birds. But the birds die off and the trestle reaches the top, the home will still be a sign of what has no form, the tree being, besides, overthrown.
He takes a rather spacious meadow, with a sky to match. He sits in the south or at the back, according to whether his partner is tall or missing.
If he falls, it’s water-eating. If he leaps, it’s dancing. He wins when his partner goes off and doesn’t return. He loses when his partner sits down to the table while
taking his shoes off. It’s a draw when the players resemble the game. It’s also played in the thicket (with planks) or in the mountains (with nets).
Two ladies climb the lower street. One is dressed in black, the other in black, the third, undressed. These ladies are charged with mounting the lower street.
The street is so low that it takes, thus, four ladies to climb it. After climbing the low street, the five ladies go down it again.
To ruin the lower street seems to be the purpose of these half-dozen stylish ladies.
I would feast on scoundrels and fall into step. When the cage was parting from the bird, I was arriving at my encounter.
When the kennel was eating the dog, I confused bodies and belongings. But, in broad daylight, I recovered my distance and usually got ahead of myself.
We’d grown wiser. We might have become nosegays, on the day’s silver lattices. When someone rapped on our door, we heard the noise in our hearts.
We ran to open. There was never anyone. It was always morning, mild, settled, clear, which threw us the pearls in its eyes.
Because our visitors no longer had business at the doors. They sprung from our looks, from our furniture, in their Sunday best, marvelous. They always wore flowers in their buttonholes.
They were sparkling or invisible, actors of light or musicians of shadows, to our liking.
Look out! This is not a bouquet: it’s a huge concerto for all the cocks.
Aroused from a daze, on the untouchable stone of dawn, at noon it sets fire to the structure’s main beam. Then it climbs, unquenchable, spreads, flings itself
into the azure depths, down to the frenzy of the bottom, down to the wheel’s center where red is the heart of blue.
Step-ladder, tiny pyramid for miserly hunchbacks, near- sighted reckoner, the reseda, gathered in its cunning little cabin, breaks up, clears itself of perfume.
This flower is the friend of silent eyes, of century- old hands, of honest blades.
She grows near modest shale-like clusters — these, devout, dyed purple, or else those, burnt to brown ribbons, daughters seen from a libertarian star.
When the limed soil turns toward the sexton, the weekly herb heralds, at the bottom of some old fashioned desk, some thin copy-book bound in boards of somber blue and covered with beautifully written secrets. When she’s moved by a ridge of fired peat, the flower forecasts for the initiated only such a display of
nymphomania, such nutritious folly, nauseating tropical inheritance.
And when she becomes incrusted in the millennial foundations of bits of shale, she’s the prophetess of the glass reed, the measly pot, the head schoolmaster, the starched virgin, the pigeon-breeding spiritualist.
Her perfume is a secondary condition since its disproportion to her stem and its continual layers make it unexplainable.
A trapped fawn: I fix her up, I dress her, I help her recover, I imprison her in a tower. I suckle her with the moon, bits of riddles, wasted blows.
When it’s windy, we travel on our mares of lace. When it rains, we climb, in slow spirals, to tease the nightingales with a stick. When the doors, like women in fallen gowns, exchange their passwords, we unfold in green, in grey, in jerks, piece by piece, like the perforated music roll of a player piano. I call her Mamzelle Impossible. I stuff her with food. I send her out to beg.
Standing up, weightless, Ponce has walls. They’re thin. They tremble. It’s a forest. These are princes washing themselves, unsettled quarrels, or a lot of Chinese peddlers. He makes his move. He spreads out. He’s in Naples, in cherries, in Dumas. He forms his woman and he forms all: all forms.
I’ve only known one emperor in my life. He called himself Zenon and did odd jobs at my parents’ house. He worked only at night.
During the day, he hid. Sometimes we caught a glimpse of him, under a disguise. I’ll always remember the orphic throne’s silence and all I didn’t see, behind the delightful picture of kittens hanging on the wall.
He left us one October morning, a long time ago. We found the remains of his crown in the pear tree. When he left, he blocked up the low door of the garden.
I know nothing more to tell about this emperor. And if I’ve written that his name was Zenon, it’s out of friendship for those who speak of gilded armour when they return from the goat-herds.
What’s lost may never be found. What’s found may be lost forever.
Alan Morrison
Stanley Tantalus (indeterminate time – unspecified departure) failed to make his presence truly felt during several decades haunting his now derelict digs at 41 St. Anthony’s Street, Tipton. The obscurity of the many undocumented achievements in his profession as Insubstantial Tenant at this only latterly recognised address classically illustrates the timeless theme of the polarised, struggling ghost; still a much-deprecated community role in our unreceptive technological society. Tantalus, an already doubt-afflicted fiction, was driven to inverse solipsism at his complete invisibility, and ultimately handed in his lack of notice. His absence wasn’t missed.
It is indeed shocking to meditate on the disturbing reality that throughout his entire posterity on earth, the full achievement of Stanley Tantalus’s prolific absence failed to capture the light of celebrity.
In recent times however revisionist mediums have begun to reassess Tantalus’s long and significant obscurity; the full metaphysical extent of which has only just begun to attract the critical notice it so giftedly eluded when transparently manifest at that now legendary bed-sit. All the more legendary for the fact that it was bulldozed down last year by a sub-contractors who refuse to be named, acting on the orders of a well-known high street retail company, who also refuse to be named, as part of an inner-city redevelopment, the details of which both the sub-contractors and the retail company refuse, emphatically, to divulge. Nevertheless, an un-intrusive shrine to Tantalus’s mythical home, now a pile of sub-contracted rubble, has since been erected by some of the more fanatical disciples of his in-growing cult phenomenon. This powerful gesture has ensured that both the address and Tantalus himself have tipped into the arena of popular folklore.
Stanley Leonard Tantalus, known indifferently to disinterested neighbours as ‘that work-shy loafer from number 41’, was frequently forgotten for his unmemorable, neutrally toned, threadbare cardigans. He was always missed by passers by, a morning paper crumpled in his armpit, spindly roll-up protruding from fish-lipped mouth, which puckered involuntarily in its gash of brillo-pad stubble whenever he smoked – a sort of smoker’s stammer. His unrecognised catchphrase, ‘If you’re out of Lambert & Butler I’ll have an ounce of Old Holborn and some blue RIZLAs, ta’ has passed into the popular unconsciousness and is now the stuff of void; it has almost become a ghost of the modern vernacular. This quintessentially idiosyncratic ‘Tantalism’ of alternating between straights and roll-ups never succeeded in attracting anyone’s notice. Tantalus was a emphatically self-effacing, inoffensive individual, who was often mistaken for himself in the street.
It is a testament to the vast vacuum of Stanley Tantalus’s contribution to modern Western society that an unmanned museum has recently been erected on the site of his demolished rented dwellings. The Tantalus Museum attracted much media disinterest on its unofficial opening last December to a throng of hard-hat sub-contractors, clipboard-waving surveyors and handpicked street beggars, all struck dumb by the complete absence of any building. Sponsored by the Tipton Spiritual Society, the new museum has been omitted by local architects for its striking innovation in design, lovingly built along the late Tantalus’s own forgotten spiral-pad specifications, constructed on the foundations of his lost thoughts.
‘The museum is built to last the ravages of time,’ stated site manager Derek Lepidus on the building’s incompletion. ‘Yes, we had a poor turn out at the unofficial veiling, but on hindsight we perhaps should have waited till the spring. Invisible buildings don’t tend to attract much interest, especially in late December’.
Similar sentiments were expressed by the museum’s undedicated curator, Lindsay Carus, or would have been, had she been aware of her appointment to such a post.
But the Museum has attracted a priceless accolade from an itinerant ex-architect through raising his methylated spirits in the wake of this ‘highly significant Post-Modern comment on our times – its transparent scaffolding, a masterful irony (anon.)’.
There is no doubting the seductive appeal of the breathtakingly un-researched detail of this unusual museum: no one could fail to be un-fascinated by exhibits such as Tantalus’s second-hand typewriter with its missing r, i and p; his precious pilfered Starbucks’ ashtray; and the coffee-stained sofa on which he composed some of his most obscure suicide notes which he un-famously scrolled into empty Unigate bottles every morning for the milkman to collect – all of which are tantalisingly un-manifest in the museum’s main gallery, The Rubbish Dump Room. Stanley Tantalus was indeed a prolific suicide note writer, having committed suicide on at least three occasions throughout his life.
But despite these recent non-commemorative developments in memory of the early Stanley Tantalus – ‘the unsung cultural stalwart of Tipton’ (The Morning Dodo); ‘the very sinew and bone of these disinterred Tipton streets’ (The Daily Spectrograph) – the incarcerated legacy of this most unremarkable of men is best absent-mindedly meditated on with a thrown, empty gaze at the burial mound of rubble cordoned-off with yellow tape under the auspices of a new urban rejuvenation initiative. The site, we have on good authority, is currently sub-contracted to a reputable high street exorcists who have requested to remain unnamed, as competition is currently at an all-time high due to a slump in business.
Predictably and poetically, too, the grossly overgrown pauper’s grave of one Stanley Leonard Tantalus, is also unnamed. It gathers mildew and molluscs in the shadow of its unmarked headstone – though the more feverish of Tantalus aficionados claim the incumbent’s initials are clearly visible in the eerie serendipity of snail spoors. There has even been the grisly rumour that some members of the local community were now able to recall numerous sightings of Stanley Tantalus whilst he was still alive.
Contemporary social theorist Julian Cruickshank, irritable at being asked to expend oxygen on the subject, interprets these ‘Tantalus witnesses’ (sic.) as suffering from ‘…a collective false memory syndrome triggered by the sudden wave of hysterical media neglect regarding the, until now, un-credited absence of one of life’s faceless understudies’. Cruickshank even goes so far as to describe this outburst of sudden communal mourning as ‘…uncannily similar to that of the disciples Christ’s body was interred in the sealed tomb: unable to accept their leader’s death, they experienced a collective hallucination immortalised as The Resurrection’. Cruickshank continues: ‘Of course, this Christianity itself could easily be explained as the culmination of centuries of Chinese Whispers. Or, indeed, Russian Dolls. The rational mind dismisses eschatology as myth. We don’t even know for certain whether the collective hallucination which inspired this myth ever actually happened either’.
[Note: our sympathies go to the family of Julian Cruickshank (late) on hearing news of his suicide last week, just as we went to print. Mr Cruickshank MPhil, MA, BA, BC, AD, took an overdose of St. John’s Wort washed down with a litre of White Lightning, only two days after the launch of his latest publication, The Impossibility of History. His suicide note simply said, ‘I’ve lost my faith in doubt’, and was signed in barely decipherable, spiderish scribbles, only the ‘Phil’ and ‘MA’ recognizable in his list of academic distinctions.]
Whatever one’s tilt on the subject of Stanley Tantalus’s non-existence, even sceptics are unanimous on most points: that something failed to happen; someone failed to make any impact; some number of people definitely witnessed nothing, and that this nothing was undeniably something; that this something must have been hugely significant to have inspired so much speculation as to the nature of its unapparent substance; that this substance emitted a strange, eerie, gas-meter grey aura, and that this aura shimmered with some sort of non-energy, or lethargy, that clearly wasn’t visible but was there; that this energy, or invisible apparition, uncannily resembled the anonymous face of someone; that this anonymous someone was completely unrecognisable but yet they KNEW it was Stanley Tantalus because they couldn’t remember what he looked like, nor indeed who he was, and yet all three of the witnesses swear blind that the apparition said it was Stanley Tantalus and bid one of them give him a fag; that as Stanley Tantalus dragged at his cigarette, he coughed out a billow of phlegm-green smoke, wiped his stubbly face as if shaking off some cobwebs, and told them to forget that they had ever remembered to forget him, go forth and spread the word that purgatory has a public smoking ban, angels have to save up for halos with easily mislaid coupons, your dead relatives bombard you with nonsensical gossip under the subterfuge of ‘catching up’, everyone speaks in infuriating tongues reminiscent of Born Again Christian bashes, if you can’t get a haunting job you have to go on a Ghost Training Scheme which is insufferably patronising and ill-equipped, and, most unimaginably of all, those who once looked straight through you now acknowledge you by asking you to autograph your obituary for them, while they politely look the other way and congratulate you on a superior work of fiction…
And so the paradoxical story of the unfashionably early, fashionably late Stanley Tantalus finds its infinite closure in a paradox of ifs, buts and maybes, and not least of all butts: Stanley Tantalus is the only prophet to have been glimpsed after death having a transcendental fag-break.
So the mystery remains, to no one’s particular notice, and the words of those few who testified to his little known resurrection continue to tantalise sceptics: we didn’t know what he looked like but we KNEW it was him, because he introduced himself…
This, no doubt, will go down in the annals of hearsay as perhaps the cleverest double bluff of all time. And who knows, it might even spark a little piece of history which some day in some plaque-yellow backstreet pub, the friendless, stubbly, fag-wafting drunk sat in the corner, who never manages to be seen through the cloudy ponds of clinking pints, might be the only person to know that piece of pub quiz trivia, and finally be sculpted into being by the perception in the other punters’ eyes.
First published in Headstorms magazine © 2005
Alan Morrison
I was seventeen when I first started to see; see properly I mean; see not just what’s here, but what isn’t here but should be. And once you start to see what is not here but is possible, everything else begins to fade as this mighty absence takes shape.
It’s a sort of awakening of conscience; a conversion of faith; a spiritual politics. It’s come a long way and had many forms: the blacked out face of a Scottish coal miner; the proselytising lips of tea-sipping thinkers; the turpentine nails of tubercular journeymen; the brief reigns of hair-suited Ministers; the thundering thoughts of compassionate minds. But it’s always had one thing in common at its core: life and its fruits are here to be shared.
My parents were going through one of their lean periods, so I accompanied them in our clapped-out burgundy Maxi to a car boot sale in the run-down school grounds of a local council estate. It was a depressing, drab community and the playground lay at the centre of a labyrinth of paint-peeling beige box houses, all exactly the same, with little patches of scrub for front gardens littered with rusting bicycles, old fridges and upturned shopping trolleys. This was where the pallid species known locally as ‘scum’ existed in their hidden numbers, cramped between the Social Security offices and the town centre. Graffiti sprawled on every road sign and lamppost – the claw marks of society’s neglected residents. Just outside the wire enclosure of this asphalt hinterland, a sign shouted the eleventh commandment: NO BALL GAMES.
There we displayed our commodities, old faded Star Wars figures and rusty toy soldiers, souvenirs of childhood, heaped in damp-stained luggage once used by us in mythic times when holidays were still possible.
In a small matter of minutes a grubby-faced little boy appeared wearing a pair of scruffy corduroys too big for him. His face had that transparent paleness typical of these neglected neighbourhoods, where skeletal kids look like they’ve barely seen sunlight for years – as if they’ve been left on their parents’ window-sills to fade in the urban glare like Chimney Sweep miniatures; the sort of luminous paleness the Council kids used to have at school, the ones who reeked of stale urine. That face was marked by a mighty absence of life’s better things.
I had to remind myself this was almost the twenty-first century – and no doubt at times so did this shabbily-dressed, thumb-sucking cadaver.
There he stood like a half-starved ghost gazing in wonderment at the out-of-date merchandise displayed before him in the old damp-smelling suitcases. He stared at the small figures as if they were nuggets of gold. I watched as he crouched on the asphalt and picked one of the figures up, toying with it and animating it as his father’s shadow hovered over his luminous skin. ‘How much are they each?’ asked the timid parent, back hunched humbly. My father could barely answer for the pity that scraped his tone: ‘50p’, he croaked. ‘Ok,’ said the father, kneeling down next to his enraptured son, ‘You can pick one of them’. As the small boy rummaged around in the multitudes of figures for his one plastic, out-of-date, paint-faded choice, I saw my father turn away for a second as if on the brink of tears while I held back my own, feeling a mixture of extreme pity, shame and…a sort of enlightening sadness; an unconditional love for the little boy and the little second-hand world he lived in; for the way he scrimped about for just one little faded figure, a faded little figure himself.
In time, and after much careful handling of figure after figure, the boy made his choice and the father pressed a cold 50 pence piece into my hand. The man and his mesmerised son turned and walked slowly away. As I stared after them, I noticed how the little boy held the plastic figure, which I had once taken for granted, as if it were a precious and priceless relic; as if one blink of his eye and it would disappear. Our hearts sank with our hands into our pockets.
What choice had we? We needed money ourselves and so we sold what we didn’t need anymore – but we felt ashamed, and it was all we could do to stop ourselves giving the boy the whole suitcase full of figures for the price of those meagre two. But it had largely been through such selflessness that we had come by hard times ourselves; my father often proudly quoted the motto of our Fabian ancestors: sui oblitus commodi – forgetful of one’s own interests. Doubtless these matchstick folk had never had any interests to forget.
Only a short time later another man, about the same age as the boy’s father, all jeans, trainers and clinking car-keys, squeaked up to us in his leather jacket and surveyed our suitcases of toys on the ground. With a screwed-eyed, indirect gaze beneath the peak of a baseball cap, he said to my father, ‘How much for the whole lot?’ Slightly taken aback, my father’s brow furrowed as he bit his nails in consideration of the toys’ collective value. As if instinctively sickened at the prospect of making a profit in such a deprived place, he muttered ‘I’m not really sure…’ ‘Thirty quid for the lot’ proposed the slightly impatient spectator who seemed as much a stranger to this playground as we were. ‘Right, ok’ agreed my father, no doubt so relieved at the prospect of securing sufficient funds to keep us in electricity for the next fortnight that it didn’t occur to him to haggle for any more; anyway, bartering was contrary to his ancestral nature.
The deal done, the man slid out three crisp ten pound notes from his hefty wallet. My father grinned with embarrassment as he took the money. ‘They’re for the kids’, said the man as he closed the lids on the figures and clicked the latches shut. He then heaved the two cases from the ground and carried them stealthily away, his trainers crunching on the playground gravel. My father gazed at the three notes in his hand, tapped his fingers on his corrugated brow, and smiled wearily at my mother stood shyly by the car.
Then there came the clunk of a car door shutting some yards along the asphalt and we looked up and saw the man seat-belting himself in. His car was a large, chunky estate with a huge boot at the back filled to the brim with all manner of children’s toys and clothes. No one except the woman who lived in the shoe had as many children as that! Or were they for him? Surely an adult should have grown out of hoarding toys? Of course, as his car heaved away, another possibility occurred to us…
The scruffy little boy whose day had been illuminated by the gift of one single second-hand figure came into my mind again, and no doubt, from the sad look clouding my father’s face, into his…
…the image of that boy and his innocent gratitude for what was a pittance of amusement has lodged in my mind ever since and even as I speak about it now I have to swallow the memory as if it’s a stone in my throat. But if it is a stone it’s from a fruit, as it’s grown in me, fleshing out with sweetness. Now every word on my tongue tastes of that memory.
So the seed of new convictions was planted in me that miserable day, when the grey skies hung heavy over the small, second-hand boy crouched on that asphalt before a trove of small, second-hand toys. That’s when I first glimpsed the mighty absence, under his chin, glowing like the golden shadow of a buttercup.
Previously published in Headstorms, 2005; The Seeker, 2005; The Overdose (Sixties Press), 2007
Alan Morrison
I have accrued a modest but eclectic collection of the souvenirs of other peoples’ travels: a Dutch Van Gogh print; an Argentinean pencil box; a portly pottery Czech village mayor with his nose in the air; a cadaverous wood-carved Don Quixote figurine. And then there are the stocks of crinkled postcards from all and sundry person and place, coffee-stained and ink-blotted, wishing I was here.
Travel may broaden the mind, but the mind can also broaden travel; it can intensify it; it can crystallize the experience and distil the sensation of moving itself until the kinetic process becomes frozen in time like the photo of a struggling smile. And of course, landscapes themselves are constantly on the move: hills and rocks slowly, almost invisibly, through time, subside or accumulate – especially desert dunes, plunging seemingly into themselves, snaking in the wind in North Africa, just across the water from here on which the Moors first came; it’s not only us who journey, the sand travels too.
When I do travel abroad, it is likely to be to Granada, to accompany Lucía in visiting her family. Granada: that contradictory, almost arcane city where uncannily preserved Moorish architecture clashes deafeningly with that of the sky-gazing Christian inheritors. You may feel yourself sojourning in two worlds at the same time in this labyrinthine place, nestled in a dusty valley between the olive-tree mottled hills and the snow-capped, Sierra Nevada mountains. They say that’s why Granada has such seasonal extremes, because of these mighty peaks: in summer the heat smothers the city like a hand over a face, and in winter the cold reddens the skin with an icy burn.
Our last visit was in winter. The penetrating chill of a city I had come to associate with thick, heavy heat, served to both surprise me and complete my sense of disorientation – my customary sense of being when travelling abroad. My Cancerian pincers always tense when I am away from home, but, unhelpfully, my shell recedes and the cold sunlight pours into me and stretches my eyes, melting off the blinkers. Then I am spiritually naked. My sense of self and purpose shrinking as I am exposed to the glare of an unfamiliar sun illuminating unfamiliar views and unfamiliar faces, until my own identity and perception are reduced to the size and dimensions of a postcard. This feels more than simply a transition of time and place; it seems sometimes like a painful but educative metamorphosis; a transmogrification from a native to a foreigner – and yet I’ve always felt a foreigner even at home. Some people go abroad carrying their countries with them and leaving their minds behind, safe at home. Unfortunately, or perhaps ultimately fortunately, I bring my mind with me.
While I am abroad, scooped like a tadpole from my microcosmic pond, I fill with the transience of things. It’s as if I’m suddenly all spirit, all ether, flitting insubstantially through a maze of lasting buildings, markers of my own earthly limitation. And throughout this dislocated passage of time, one thought sticks like a thorn in my mind: words printed on a page, my words, my poems, blinding me with their permanence – and all I want is to become as permanent as them; to have my entire consciousness immortally franked onto paper. And this immovable thought serves continuously and without any respite, to remind me with a piercing shiver, of my own ephemeral substance. This thought is the stone, it can blunt any scissor-points but those of panic; paper can wrap it – but paper also burns.
Why do I meditate on mortality as I pass by the beautiful, motley mustard-yellow and milkshake-pink town houses with their pretty balconies and large rectangular shuttered windows; the winding backstreets verged high by silent, shuttered terraces that look dark and unlived in, only a washing-line away from their opposites across the narrow Roman cobbles? Their shutters are sealed like visors – mine are stretched wide open as if someone had clothe-pegged my eye lashes apart. I want to look and to see and to appreciate, but my thoughts swirl in and out the nooks and crannies of every poetically dilapidated street. This is an intense type of tourism; an out-of-the-body visit. My guide is a dislocated native of this place, who was brought up to accommodate the great weight of history heaving through every vivid day; Lucía says Spain is ‘so heavy’, and I think I might sense what she means sometimes in the dark chocolate of the peoples’ eyes, the bars adorned with black bulls’ heads and dust-caked wine bottles, clamouring with glasses and laughter, plates clanking like castanets.
Near our cramped wood table where we feast on vivid-coloured delicacies, a gnarled-faced, leathery-skinned character strums flamenco – or some such idiomatic strain – on his chestnut-coloured guitar; his fingers spin their stringy web fast as a spider. Occasional thunderous strums strike picaresque images in my mind of Don Quixote jousting with the windmills as his armour clatters with his horse’s gallop; Sancho Panza riding rationally behind him on his bungling mule. The flamenco strums strike my ears with a violent gust of pride which doesn’t belong to me or my country – but it stirs something remote and significant in me nonetheless (like De Falla’s El amor brujo when I listen to it at home in the cold). It strikes only a sort of inherited sense of turbulence in Lucía – and it is at this point, as she sighs wearily through her cigarette, that she first coins her legend: ‘Spain is so heavy’. ‘So is England’ I utter, unconvinced of my own comparison, and she promptly ties up this thread of doubt: ‘No it isn’t – not like Spain’.
In the piercing mornings, while breakfasting, I am struck by how alive Latin culture is, as we scramble for a spare table in the fug of animated conversations and cigarette smoke. The natives of Granada are as lively and loud as the ubiquitous little birds that smother the trees in the winter squares like puffy, rotund, feathery leaves – so it seems all year round the city’s trees are in leaf; amidst the clatter of coffee glasses and tip-plates the café congregations chirrup over their chorros and hot chocolate. Lucía introduces me to the many shades of café con leche, subtly differentiated in a hierarchy of milk quantities served in little glasses hot to the touch: shadow (so milky only a shadow of the coffee remains), cloud (milky), cut (espresso with a trickle of milk). Another bright, stunning day is in the ascendant, and the mournful toll of the cathedral bell can do nothing to lastingly solemnize it; this city is unrepentantly alive; bustling with activity and thought and feeling; perfumed with the odours of incense and oranges. Granada is a slow taste to acquire, like the olive; when you taste it as it should be tasted it is both sweet and sour at the same time, gradually reviving the tongue. Many other analogies might do for this place: the smoky oak flavour of Rioja; the salty tang of jamon, sliced clean and red as if from a raw wound.
Strangely enough I had never actually been into the Al Hambra before this visit. Twice before we had sat sipping summer wine in the Satsuma-glow of the bird-chirping spring evening, staring up at the sunset-orange of the Moorish walls that had given the palace its name: the Red. Not so this time: we rose early one morning to discover another time, built in tribute to the Muslim sense of the transitory nature of things; built to pass like a thought, not to last, unlike the Christian cathedral at the city’s heart. But this convoluted palace had lasted, beyond all expectations or even considerations, no doubt, of its original architects. Though some of the cobalt blues of the interior tiles had unsurprisingly faded in places, the intricacy of the sculpted walls with their egg-shelled casting and high star-shaped ceilings remained painstakingly intact, like the imprint of mummified cerebrums. Courtyards once paced in by sleepy Sultans have retained their shape and detail, still fecund with fountains in the centre and pillared porticoes perfectly preserved and symmetrical, luring the eyes in to their whispering shades. One fountain stands on squat stone lions – ‘a gift from the Jews’ informs my guide, assuring me that even the tour-book omits this information. And from the portico balconies, through the Visigoth arches and architraves, the most breathtaking sight of all: the view of Granada itself, cliffs of innumerable white houses tumbling upwards to the inky mountains beyond. Here and there are protrusions of green, cypresses and poplars, and the whole city looks like the miniature Bethlehem lovingly crafted for display in a tent outside the Cathedral.
It is night in the miniature Bethlehem, only the bleats of shepherded sheep and the grumbles of King-burdened camels carrying in the evening silence. Faint glows of scrub-nestled households hover here and there like glow-worms on the hillsides; the three Wise Kings bring their gifts, guided by a special star lighting their way. Joseph and Mary are crouched beside a haloed baby in a straw manger in an illuminated stable. The Angel Gabriel is held on with blue tack to the stable beam. The customary visitors huddle near the place of nativity, three pipe-smoking shepherds, a cow and a mule. There seem to be more attendees than one would see in the average Anglo-Catholic crib – and most bizarrely of all, there is one figurine, possibly a shepherd, perpetually crouched in a crapping position, his trousers pulled down, an emerging stool protruding from his anus. ‘Who the hell is this meant to be?’ I ask Lucía and she smiles knowingly with that inimitable Spanish iconoclasm saying ‘No one knows – but he’s always there’. ‘Perhaps it’s meant to be the Devil?’ I suggest.
Strangely, my most enduring memory of this last visit of ours to Lucía’s city of birth will be of sitting round a glass-topped table, a heated tablecloth hugging all of our knees as we sit round watching Gabriel’s existential cartoons. Gabriel is only five years old, with wide brown eyes full of dread and wonder – the strange bedfellows of innocence. He sits couched in sierras of cushions, gripping his special pillow, Felipa, which he always brings with him wherever he goes. And I am the foreigner in his small imaginative world, struggling to let go of a thought which is lodged in my mind like a sharp and jagged rock. One day soon, he will have to let go of his pillow.
Cozi zipped into the glide-thru sushi bar, scooped a sachet of white herring with rice and hoi-sin, swept her card over the pay point, and jetted audaciously through the all-but invisible gap between two hovering suits. They glared at her, jealously, as she soared onwards and upwards, leaving the impatient jostling throng beneath her.
As she stuttered along the crammed streets, shimmying through the slightest break in the crowd but generally being forced to shuffle behind dawdling students and no-jobs and dodge pushy stall-holders, their eyes glinting with miserly relish, she impatiently punched her bean-counter. Time still is time wasted, an inner voice intoned. She flinched at the thought she’d become so much a part of the System that such mantras came to her so instinctively – and she no longer found in them anything distasteful.
The world was moving fast – too fast for some, she mused, glancing pityingly at the sight of a rotund courier, his jetpack belching noisily as he was buffeted into the (even) slow(er) lane by two thrusting hover-boys – and time waited for no man (or woman). There she went again, she reflected, grimacing at the plunging prices of the futures she’d been about to purchase. They’d slumped in the instant she’d allowed herself to gloat at the portly cruiser. She was either very good at this multi-tasking thing, or very bad.
Punching her counter ever faster in an effort to make up for lost time – she must learn to focus her priorities – it occurred to Cozi her sushi would be suffering. She needed to down it tout de suite: by the time she finally reached the boardroom there’d be no time left to lunch. Inserting the counter in her wrist cavity and switching it to auto-scan – a luxury she could afford for a few seconds, as the computer often spotted an option for her if only required to do so in short spurts – she pressed the eject button on her right hip, and slipped the sachet into her intravenous feeder. Within seconds she could feel that familiar whirlpool nutrients oozing into her bloodstream.
Now she could concentrate fully: sated, she knew she was a match for any trader. She noticed a string of attractive futures dart across the screen. The first to catch her eye was a controlling stake in a promising-looking cosmetic surgery start-up, AboutFace Inc. The second and subsequent ones were potentially lucrative holdings in combined energy and communications utilities. Not for me, she decided, making a split-second judgment she hoped she wouldn’t regret. Best to leave those behemoths to the big boys: mine’s a quick buck please, a killing swift and painless enough to give me something nice, but not too high maintenance, for my retirement.
Cozi (full name Coriolanus Azure – blame the parents) was 28, blonde, pretty in a faintly androgynous way, and (she liked to think) as self-reliant, no-nonsense and unsentimental as they came. She had five more years of working life ahead of her, if she was lucky, and every intention of collapsing in the most decadent fashion the second she retired. For the past three generations, no one in her family had lived past 35, so she was damned well going to pig out when her time came. From where she currently stood – or, more accurately, hovered – the prospect of all that still time seemed strangely suffocating. Yet, if she were ever going to enjoy the fruits of her labours, she would have to get used to it. Perhaps she’d learn to read. She chuckled.
She glanced at the time on her handset, nestled, winking reassurance, in her right palm. There were 10 strokes till the board meeting and she was never going to make it. Setting the counter to auto-scan once more, she keyed in the number for Dyle’s PA, Hilde, clumsily misdialling several times before finally being greeted by her grating singsong voicemail. Dyle was probably on a conference call; Hilde robotically taking the minutes as she simultaneously patched him through to another of Headcorp’s overseas subsidiaries and arranged his working lunch for the next day. Cozi felt a twinge in her left shoulder, followed by a fleeting but sharp pain in the middle of her chest. She suddenly realised how wired she was – a faint sweat had broken out on her forehead and her cheeks were flushed. It had been her third night without sleep, and the uppers she was using to keep her alert were playing havoc with her metabolism: one minute she felt hyper-focused, the next like a senseless ghost. She downed some pills, and sighed.
An amber light flickered on her handset: Hilde had picked up her message and placed her on hold. Dyle was evidently nearing the end of his conference call and toying with the idea of granting her an audience. Either that or he was revelling in keeping her on tenterhooks while he smoked a cigar or downed a swift cocaine cocktail. “Time Out of Mind,” she mused, considering Headcorp’s motto and imagining what it must be like to reach a status where such pleasure was possible.
Good old Headcorp, she thought. “Virtual retirement options”, indeed – what a wheeze! They’d certainly latched onto a growth industry (in fact, thinking about it, they’d created it). By tapping into citizens’ phobias about age and death so ruthlessly, so professionally, they’d managed to make the idea of genuine old age – the sort that used to bring creases to your face and aches to your bones, if her shaky memory of her grandmother could be trusted – seem totally out of reach. And give them credit: for most people it now was. When was the last time she’d heard of anyone living beyond 40? Ten, 20, years? Other than her dear, departed gran (41, she recalled, and something of a local celebrity at the time on account of her extreme antiquity), she could think of no one.
So, shorn of their hard-earned still time to enjoy the fruits of their life’s labours, what was there for the masses to live – and sweat – for? Virtual retirement, that’s what. She chuckled at the thought of Dyle and his posse of suited bozos craning over his screen as he hammered out his recipe for Headcorp’s expansion: his master-plan to transfer the redundant concept of deferred pleasure to the here and now. The company had been ailing, like all other pension funds. In an age where few people crept past their mid-30s – and those who did were manifestly on their way out – how could you sell them a future? Step forward RETIRE – Headcorp’s signature brand – and its new generation of alternate reality leisure environments. If punters weren’t going to live to actually reach retirement, they were sure as hell going to experience it anyway. Whoever said there were some things money couldn’t buy obviously hadn’t heard of RETIRE (the acronym stood for Real-time Escapes to Inspire, Relax and Entertain). Cozi snickered, adjusting her gears as she did so.
That thought shower meeting had been a hoot – especially when she’d half-jokingly suggested the last three initials should denote ‘Imbibe, Rut and Evacuate’, only to
be blasted down by a glassy eyed Dyle, who’d obviously had his humour glands surgically removed along with much of the rest of him.
RETIRE scenarios had taken holidays to a new level, offering subscribers holistic virtual retreats in which they could spend as much of their spare time as they liked, at whatever “speed” they liked (adequate premiums permitting). Long-standing subscribers with sufficient credit could while away a long weekend in an idyllic alpine spa – replete with their choice of company, hedonistic pastimes and landscape backdrop – spending ‘virtual’ weeks or months fraternising and fornicating before returning to the reality of workaday obligations (in truth, a mere weekend after they’d left it).
These fantastic sojourns were marketed as glimpses of a brighter, stress-free future – of what was to come when they reached their ‘real’ retirements (which, of course, they never did). And all to fund the vanity of Dyle and his ilk – those irksome corporate stooges who’d make damned sure they saw old age if anyone did by funnelling their bonuses into replacing whatever wore out as and when, and ‘freezing’ (or ‘rewinding’) their body-clocks to relive the edited highlights over again. True dotage they’d never see, but they’d certainly be making the most of the 35-40 years nature allowed them.
Cozi herself was an optimist. She was as fit as, if not fitter than, anyone she knew, burning calories by the bucket-load every day and spending 30 minutes a week minimum in intensive gym therapy. Only last month she had won a regional prize for speed cycling while simultaneously pumping weights and calculating the ratio of her own body mass to her optimum daily nutrient intake. Hers was an exemplary diet too: three vitades followed by raspberry and lemon essence, bran and calcium-free milk for breakfast; fish and fruit for lunch; and a gluten-free, mineral and vitamin-rich evening meal consisting largely of exotic vegetables (she prided herself on being able to hunt these out in the most unlikely places – why, she’d even found a cabbage last month in a back street grocer’s). Her only vice was the occasional caffeine infusion – not the tar-black espresso derivative favoured by her less health-conscious peers, but a potent guarana-based herbal concoction with just a hint of cocaine. No, if anyone would see out their 30s, it was she.
Her thoughts were interrupted by her bleeper. The screen on her right handlebar flashed into life – a blizzard of violent primary colours erupted into the stylised golden hourglass that was the logo of Headcorp. Within seconds it had bled into the familiar perma-tanned, platinum blonde visage of Hilde. Dyle must be ready.
“Mr King will to speak to you now,” Hilde intoned blankly, applying eyeliner with one hand as she mechanically tapped the transfer code on her comm.-set with the other. Why the formality? Cozi mused irritably. I work for him, for Chrissakes. Besides, you’re supposed to be his PA, not his bouncer (Hilde’s surly tone made it hard not to think of a blank-faced doorman blocking the entrance of a one-in-one-out cocktail bar).
“Azure.” Though Cozi resented the businesslike use of her second name, Dyle’s tone was informal, appropriate (even if his blatant lack of concentration wasn’t). On his face was his trademark thin smile. He appeared to be hovering near the top shelf of a cabinet stacked with files, while balancing in his hands some kind of miniature chess console (its screen flickered impatiently as it waited for him to make his next move); a muso-pod whose tinny twittering could still be heard even as he turned towards her; a colourful fizz in an impossibly slender flute; a large Havana; and a bean-counter marginally more compact and up-to-date than hers. Dyle was an old-school type who liked his artefacts: he’d rather be juggling half a dozen gadgets at any one time than invest in an ‘all-in-one’ like everyone else. It seemed to give him a sense of ownership (and, she suspected, make him feel reassuringly substantial).
Cozi was accustomed to Dyle’s inability to focus on one thing: in this respect he was no better nor worse than most. More disconcerting, she noted, wincing, was the steady trickle of orange fluid bubbling from a tube fastened to his left hip. It fizzed into a clear plastic flask on his lower thigh. You could at least turn sideways, she thought: I can’t be the only person who’d rather not watch you use your catheter. “Azure,” he repeated, a note of what she felt certain must be faux solemnity insinuating its way into his voice. “A slight hiccup has arisen. One of our biggest clients is cashing in his premiums. He’s just pocketed his gold watch.”
Cozi furrowed her brow in an effort to look grave. How could she be expected to take seriously a man who professed to be worried about losing money while juggling a clutch of the most expensive executive toys on the market; sipping a champagne cocktail; and urinating the proceeds into a twisted brown tube?
“That’s bad,” she commented dryly, unable to summon up a more alarmed response. “Can’t we do anything to finish him off? A free ‘taster’ weekend somewhere, perhaps? They usually wear those fat execs out. Do we know of any medical conditions we could exploit? I know a vigorous brothel-keeper in Mustique.”
She could swear she saw Dyle’s wig move. His smile remained fixed, but as her words conjured up the image of a corpulent plutocrat, she realised she could almost have been describing him. If he weren’t so vain he would have recognised the allusion himself.
“I’ve had his profile checked out,” he replied. “He’s surprisingly fit. In fact, he’s the sort of person who makes me question our diversification policy: had we remained in life assurance, his constitution alone could have bankrolled us.”
Dyle chuckled at this observation, but the thin-lipped smile remained static. There seemed to be so little flexibility left in his cheeks that his vocal cords were having to escape through his pores. Cozi struggled to mask her repulsion at his plasticated visage and expressionless eyes. Clearly his surgeon had been busy, again.
She became aware of an insistent bleat sounding from somewhere behind Dyle. He appeared to register nothing, but after a fashion Hilde’s voice could be heard trying to get his attention. Could she detect a more agitated tone than normal?
A giant rook could be seen hovering on the screen of Dyle’s chess set – the device was evidently doing its best to badger him into getting on with his game. Leave it much longer, she thought, and the computer will make the move for you (and everyone knows they’re programmed to undermine their human opponents). It was an apt metaphor, she considered: that man should devise machines more capable than him and allow them to continually remind him of his inadequacy seemed perverse. It was at this point that her screen cut out, to be replaced – after a blizzard of ads for cosmetic surgery, holistic life enhancement therapy and intravenous adrenalin-boosters – with a flickering Headcorp logo and a pixelated message informing her the “network” was “busy”. A further reminder of the paradox of technology: that something designed by man to make life simpler should so frequently fail him.
Cozi sighed and turned back to the freeway ahead. She noticed as she did so that her jetpack was belching far too much smoke for her liking. The distraction of conversing with Dyle had taken her mind off the practical consideration of trying to reach the boardroom and she was in danger of running out of fuel before she passed the next pay-point. She hoped it was stocked-up too: so many of them seemed to be running low at the moment, in the wake of the latest fuel crisis. Passing a handy sewage point, she pressed the eject button on her thigh and watched the biodegradable sachet which, until so recently, had contained her sushi, plunge into the gaping maw. As it fell, she could see the lid fly off, releasing the yellow-green drizzle of waste matter she had passed as she digested through her conference with Dyle.
She suddenly felt an overwhelming need to lie down and sleep. A nerve in her left eyelid began to twitch, and nausea descended over her like a heavy blanket. She became aware again of her racing pulse, on this occasion accompanied by an involuntary throbbing sensation at the nape of her neck. A listless fatigue overcame her, and as she glanced at the road ahead, struggling to retain consciousness, it occurred to her this was what it must feel like for someone who was about to crash. There was a traffic signal around the next bend, she remembered, tightening her grip on the handlebars and stretching her eyelids wide in an effort to force herself to stay awake. She had only ever glimpsed it as a flash of green as she whizzed past. She needed it to be that colour today if she was to stand any chance of arriving at the boardroom in time for the tail end of Dyle’s conference with the credit boys.
Always immaculate in their tailored shirts and double-breasted pin-stripes, the credit boys called the shots whenever a difficult client threatened to spoil Dyle’s delicately doctored balance sheets. The seriousness of his tone a few minutes ago – however much he had undermined it with his trademark fixed slim-line grin – left Cozi in no doubt they would be there waiting when she arrived: impassively cross-legged and cigar-chomping; hats tilted at rakish angles; un-winking eyes yielding nothing; fingers toying testily with Chinese puzzle-boxes – the relentless click-click-click playing time with Dyle’s fractious nerves and her twitching eyelid.
Her bleeper sounded again, and she flinched involuntarily. She realised with a start she had been sinking – and at the speed she was going, zipping, as if on autopilot, between flaccid hoverboys and stuttering skimmers, that was no laughing matter. She desperately needed a power nap, but there was no respite on the agenda. Instead, all that awaited her was a shaky, sweat-caked rendezvous with Dyle’s blank-faced barrow boys, no doubt followed by a panicky post mortem as he counted the cost of his folly, punching abstract digits into his bean counter with frantic fatalism. Cozi stifled a yawn as her jetpack belched, complainingly, against the riptide. She eyed the lane ahead, mentally assembling the remainder of the route, beyond the approaching lights. An over-ambitious hoverboy cut across her, dangerously, from the slip lane to her right. She swore at him, swerving to slip through the channel he’d unwittingly left open in his wake. Within seconds, she was well past him, her superior mastery of the slipstream leaving him flailing and spluttering amid a cloud of carbon.
She was still chuckling to herself, girlishly she noted, when she swerved the bend and caught her first sight of the run-up to the traffic signal. Dazzled by a shaft of sunlight, it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the view ahead, and a fraction longer to absorb the fact that, for the first time she could remember, the light was red.
She was suddenly overcome with wooziness, and her mouth felt parched and raw. She belched and tasted something like vomit in the back of her throat. At the rate she was approaching the lights she realised she’d have to slam on the brakes within seconds if the signal didn’t flicker to amber. The twitch took up again in her eyelid and, blinded briefly by another harsh beam of sunlight, she squinted to make out if there was any sign of a change. Careering into the shade cast by an overhanging balcony, she caught the signal in full view and felt her heartbeat quicken to a frenetic gallop as the red light beamed bloodily into her field of vision, solid and implacable.
Cozi skidded to a halt less than a metre before she would have hit the crash barrier. She could feel her clothes clinging to her back and legs, skin-tight and sodden. Her pulse seemed to be racing at its own pace, still retaining the momentum her jetpack had abandoned moments earlier. Stalled in an agonising paralysis, the clock ticking, gloatingly, as she waited for the off, she was suddenly aware of how fast everything around her was moving – and how still she seemed by comparison.
Hordes of nattering night-surfers skittered and skated across the byway bisecting her own, unleashed by the green light that had thwarted her progress. Cursing cabbies cruised impatiently between them, slipping through the slimmest of spaces, raised fingers silhouetted against their windows in profane salutes.
Somewhere, countless storeys above her, a giant neon smile flashed – teeth as white as glaciers glinting grotesquely against the starry sky. A woman with mad, frightened eyes sprinted from a shopping mall, screaming into her handset, while beneath her, cruel children bellowed at a baying dog with strange sadistic abandon. Two men with shrunken, shaven heads swore hideous revenge at each other as they clattered into railings on opposite sides of a narrow walkway – each overloaded with testosterone; neither looking beyond the teetering piles of paraphernalia crammed beneath his arms. And all the while these fractured, furious tableaux were sound-tracked by the screech of sirens; the incessant babble of animated advertising hoardings; and the steady, rhythmic thump of pounding dance muzak.
Cozi swallowed, hard. For the first time she could remember, she felt small. Ahead, above and below her, she could hear islands of laughter, sobbing and shouting vie for dominion. The air hissed with menace, and crashed with unexplained violence. Yet, amid this vicious melee, she felt a curious calm
James Morrison
The sky was slate-grey by the time Alec completed his rounds. Squeezing the pack of cards into his imitation leather wallet, and cramming this into the already bulging inner pocket of his faded suit jacket, he angled across Preston Street to the greasy on the corner.
Not a bad night: Shane ought to be pleased with the exposure. Should he just stop by briefly for a tea and a bacon sarny, or could he justify an all-dayer? Egg yolks bleached by the sun – “£3.90 for any six items plus tea or coffee” – greeted him from the misted window, feeding him the promise of a much-needed protein injection.
All-dayer it is, then, he mused hungrily, trying to calculate how much that would leave him with until mid-week payday. A fiver for food; a tenner for fags; £4 for leccie; £7 for a bottle of under-the-counter, no-questions-asked single malt from Joey’s – what else did he need? Of course, his daily bus fare: at £3 a pop it was getting too pricey and, not being a bona fide codger (Alec was 62 next birthday), he didn’t yet qualify for an OAP pass. Okay, so adding that on for the next three days, what would that leave him? He made it £38 all told, minus the breakfast, saving him just over a tenner for this and all other eventualities. No all-dayers tomorrow or the next day, that’s for sure, he conceded reluctantly – at least not if he was going to put away that fiver he’d promised himself for his collection. He needed to do that whatever happened, for the good of his morale: the set he’d first spied three weeks back in The Lanes was still there, and if he kept up the self-discipline he’d managed of late he’d have just about saved enough for the whole shebang by next month.
Catching a comforting waft of grease in his nostrils, Alec turned the handle and nudged the front door open with his shoulder. Its frame had swelled in the clammy weather, necessitating a more than usually forceful shove. Once inside, he was greeted by the plaintive cry of a shrill-voiced waitress barking the latest variation on her perpetual mantra – “two all-day breakfasts, black coffee and capchino” – as if her life depended on being relieved of her perilously stacked tray, its content an invitingly evil riot of burned pinks, browns and oranges. Even over the cacophony of oafish chatter, hissing coffee machines and inappropriately feverish disco music, Alec could hear his stomach rumble.
Glancing round the cramped interior, he found a seat at a small corner table, a ring of red describing where his predecessor’s plate had sat on the cheap checked tablecloth. It reminded him of childhood picnics – at least, he felt as if it should have done. His eyes followed a thin trail of sauce from the main ring to the foot of a guilty-looking plastic tomato which squatted in the middle of the table, its once shiny outer surface dulled by smears of dried ketchup. Beside it stood a bulbous glass container, grains of sticky white sugar clinging to its greasy circumference. Ranged beside each other, the two looked like twin sentinels counting the days to oblivion.
“What can I get you?”
The shrill-voiced waitress was at his shoulder, her plump fingers pressing a red biro into her pad as if she were trying to bore a hole in it. She had a persistent smoker’s cough and a harridan’s face but beneath her short skirt, he noticed, the legs of a young girl.
Startled, Alec looked up at her. The blue eyes, scowling beneath a blotchy forehead crowded with wrinkles, were probably once thought pretty, he observed, wrestling against tiredness to form the words he needed to abate his hunger.
“I’ll have an all-day breakfast please, with a pot of tea for one.”
“All right – I can see you’re on your tod,” she said, chuckling at her cruel quip. “Number one, number two or number three?”
Alec winced. Too many choices. It hadn’t occurred to him his order could be so complicated. He found himself staring at the cracks in his hands, and became conscious of damp patches beneath his arms. There was a fleeting waft of stale sweat. Was it him or the waitress? He struggled to drag his mind back to the task in hand.
“What’s the difference?” he heard himself ask.
The waitress sighed. “Look, I’ll come back in a minute when you’ve read the menu,” she snapped, shaking her head as she waddled back to the counter. As she did so, she hissed “pot of tea for the, erm, gentleman, Irene,” in a tone that made Alec feel guilty.
Surely she can’t know, he thought to himself, feeling a sudden twinge of paranoia. As he scanned the laminated menu, trying to distinguish between the trio of all-day breakfast options, his ears were besieged by snatches of conversation. A youth with mottled skin and fanatical black eyes was ranting about Saturday’s football scores to a thin-faced teenage girl on the table to his immediate left, while three pot-bellied trucker types were exchanging views about Big Brother and fake breasts as they thumbed through copies of the day’s redtops at the next. By the window, three pallid girls, their hair thinner and eyes duller than they should have been, smoked lazily over their empty plates – punctuating their puffs with occasional expletives and rasping, throaty laughs. They can’t be half the age Rachel must be by now, Alec reflected morosely, remembering the daughter he hadn’t seen for thirty years. Eighteen, twenty? Certainly no older.
Still, at least no one seems to be looking at me, he mused gratefully, as he twisted round in his chair to scan the rest of the café. Behind a counter festooned with grease-stained, wafer-thin order slips; empty mugs with stubborn, refusing-to-budge, treacle-dark coffee stains; and chipped dishes containing meagre tips and individual sachets of brown and white sugar, salt and pepper; a slim girl with strawberry blonde rat’s tails at least half the age of the waitress who had greeted him was grumpily filling a cheap steel pot from a hissing tap. As if feeling the burn of Alec’s gaze, she shot him an acid glance, her widely spaced grey-green eyes – striking in their own weary way – reminding him of something or someone he’d need a good deal more caffeine to be able to identify.
Suddenly the waitress was at his shoulder again, this time minus her pad. She had evidently decided his order would be so insignificant – whichever all-dayer he chose – that she wouldn’t need it. Plonking a steel pot and a mean mug with a faded blue ring around it before him, she glared at the top of his head expectantly: “Well?”
“I’ll have a number three,” he said spontaneously, having resolved to leave the precise content of his fry-up to fate. He had never been any good at visualising the subtle distinctions between one plate of near-identical stodge and another – and, frankly, he didn’t care. He was far too hungry to quibble about whether his brekkie came with fried bread or hash browns. Either would do.
“Beans or tomatoes?”
Christ, not another decision. Hoping this would be the last one for the day, he managed a weary “beans”.
With a curt nod, the waitress sloped back to the counter. Alec felt his taut buttocks ease as he leant back in his chair, finally able to relax.
“Fuckin’ pervs!”
One of the pot-bellied truckers, a large tattoo bearing the mis-spelt legend “original meet-eater” visible on his right bicep, just below the sleeve of his grubby white T-shirt, was glaring at a story on the front page of the local rag. It bore the headline: “Phone Companies Call Time on City Call-girls.”
“Locking up’s too good for them,” the man continued, aggressively. “They’re no better than fackin’ pimps; sticking those cards in phone boxes and sneakin’ off to leave the girls to fend for themselves. Not that I’m defending prossies, mind. It’s just you don’t know what nutters are out there, waiting for the chance to get their hands on these birds’ tits, but they’re fackin’ left to deal with it all on their own while some perv who hasn’t got the balls to be a real pimp pockets the dough.”
His equally thick-set, shaven-headed companion, hitherto silent on the evils of prostitution and phone box pimping, nodded sagely.
Having had their fill of the local paper, the truckers appeared to have turned their attention back to dissecting the redtops. One of them was glowering thunderously at the front-page headline. “I thought robbery was supposed to be illegal!” It was a story about unexpected tax rises in the Budget. A po-faced Chancellor glared from the front of the paper, his arched eyebrows and heavy jaw preaching prudence.
But the man’s companion was preoccupied. He was wrestling with the central section. Something about it seemed to be disturbing him.
“She’s young enough to be my daughter!” he spat. “Look at that picture. She’s just a teenager. She’s got her baps out and everything. It’s not right. It’s perverted.”
A hazy headshot of a pretty girl in a halter-neck top, substantial cleavage prominently displayed, stared from the page – her face a mask of blasé complaisance. Alec had no idea who she was, but beside her gazelle’s face a headline screamed: “Suzi was Red Hot Lover, Says Ex.”
The angry man’s companion seemed less fazed by the young woman’s generous show of flesh. “Ease up Nige, it’s just a bit of fun,” he said, grabbing the paper. “Anyway, she’s not exactly a shrinkin’ violet if you read what this says. She may only be 19 but she’s certainly been round the circuit a few times, if that Roddy Natch is to be believed.”
Roddy Natch, Roddy NatchWhere had Alec heard that name?
“E’s sposed to be transferrin’ to United next season, ain’t he?”
The (formerly) angry man seemed to have been easily distracted by mention of what Alec presumed to be the “ex”. From the way the pair’s conversation was going, it sounded as if Roddy Natch was some kind of footballer. It had been years since he’d followed the League, though, so none of these names meant anything to him.
As he poured a cup of rosy, clumsily spilling the weak yellow liquid over the tablecloth, Alec’s mind drifted back to work. He was supposed to be helping out with a house clearance that afternoon, so he’d best head off soon to make sure he grabbed a few hours’ kip before heading out. Jacko, his half-brother, had said he’d be round to pick him up about four, and being cash-in-hand it was too good to miss: it was just that, Jacko being Jacko, the cash tended to take rather longer to reach Alec’s hand than he would have liked. Still, a no-questions-asked £50 was not to be sniffed at, and it would come in handy whenever it did finally surface. Perhaps he’d try to sneak in a couple more hits on the way home too, to squeeze Shane for a bit extra.
His thoughts were interrupted by a surly “number three” from over his shoulder. It wasn’t the older waitress this time, but the equally moody-looking younger one; her potentially pretty face marred by a down-turned, thin-lipped mouth and hooded, too-much-caffeine, too-little-sleep eyes.
He made a vain attempt to clear a small space in front of him, knocking over the sugar container as he did so. The waitress picked it up for him, tutting under her breath, and plonked a plate of angry grease in front of him. He had pains in his chest just looking at it, but the smell wafting from it couldn’t have been more alluring.
As the waitress slunk away he caught a fleeting glimpse of her profile. Her hips seemed to sway slightly, something like a dancer’s. And was it just his tiredness that leant her slightly upturned nose and widely spaced grey-green eyes an air of familiarity, or had he really seen her somewhere before? Not here, surely; he seldom dined at this greasy, and every time he did the waitresses were different – all, that is, except for the menacing matriarch who so charmlessly ruled the roost.
He tucked into the feast of flesh before him, puncturing the soft orange yolk – done to a turn like mother’s, he noted approvingly – until it bled a trickle of gold round the outline of the tinned tomatoes beside it. His mind drifted to more rarefied realms. How many more weeks would he have to wait before he’d raised enough to buy his precious set of Carreras’ Glamour Girls of Stage and Film cigarette cards? He could see those glorious images in his mind’s eye now, all 54 of them, from Rochelle Hudson through Mildred Law to Pat Paterson – names long since upstaged by the Turners, Grables and Monroes – arrayed like leggy beauty queens in their all-in-one bathing costumes, little black dresses, floral print summer skirts, and capacious prototype bikinis. They had subtlety back then, he mused, recalling the ever so faintly coquettish poses of the girls featured on the handful of cards from the collection he already possessed – rescued from a skip in Portslade, where they had nestled among a pile of chipped china and broken lampshades. None of that crudeness, he reflected, glancing at the busty girl whose image (despite the truckers’ protestations of disgust) remained face-up on the table between them as they ate.
His favourite was a faded shot of Rita Hayworth, her glossy mane cascading behind her as if a wind were blowing from somewhere in front of the camera. The hem of her otherwise gorgeous dress looked strangely threadbare where the corner of the card had been creased by a previous owner (in the act, he imagined, of tearing it from the cigarette box like an impatient child dragging a doll from its wrapping). In the languid downturn of her shoulders, the set of her hips and the faintly coy positioning of her left hand over the inviting fold of fabric beneath her waist, had he known about such things he might have seen something of Boticelli’s Venus.
Alec wolfed down his second sausage and swept a half-eaten slice of fried bread around the rim of his now all-but empty plate, like a window cleaner banishing a final smear from an otherwise spotless pane. No sooner had he guzzled it than the young waitress was back again, this time at his elbow, to heavy-handedly scoop up his plate, mug and teapot and rub a grubby flannel over the patch beneath where they had sat. She seemed to be consciously clearing the whole table in one no-nonsense visit to avoid ever having to return.
She sashayed off again, and he felt something stir in him – whether recognition or longing he couldn’t be sure – at the sight of the graceful movement of her hips, so ineffectively disguised by her unflattering skirt and apron. It was the movement not of a sullen teenage girl tolerating a grim Saturday job in between studies, as he had first surmised, but of a blossoming young woman who already knew she was too good for this: a woman accustomed to using her body for other things. The reddish tint of her hair and those grey-green eyes definitely recalled someone else, whether Rita Hayworth or another he couldn’t be sure.
He glanced up at the clock on the far wall, a cheap plastic one like those they had in school classrooms and GPs’ waiting rooms. It was nearly 9am, so he had to be going or he’d have to chance of getting any shut-eye before Jacko came round. Casting a final glance at the girl, now languidly bundling dirty crockery into a dumb waiter, he got up and left.
It was when Alec was halfway down the street that it finally dawned on him where he might have seen the girl before. At first he wanted to dismiss the idea as a tired man’s irrational suspicion, but by the time he’d reached the top of Preston Street and was turning the corner into Western Road he could no longer shake the unsettling image from his mind.
Ducking into a side alley between a poorly stocked off licence and a shabby newsagent, he slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and fished out the small oblong packet he had sequestered there on entering the café. Shaking a wad of the luridly illustrated shiny rectangles out of the pack, he fanned them out in his palm like a hand of playing cards. There they lay, a whores’ gallery of spread legs, exposed genitals and outsized breasts, arranged in an array of pneumatic poses, their accentuated wide-eyed stares and painted, pouting lips lending them a range of expressions to suit any mood; some dominant, some submissive.
He leafed impatiently through the first three or four – “hear me moan and talk dirty while you masturbate” to “massage my tits till I cum” – failing to find a picture worth lingering over. Then he reached one that held his gaze; the one he had hoped not to find but somehow knew he would.
From behind, her gynaecologically arranged body, buttocks glazed and thighs wide, could have belonged to any one of the other girls: all disgustingly sluttish and infinitely, carnally desirable; all firm and healthy enough, seen clothed and in a different light, to be his own granddaughter. But studied more closely the face was a wholly distinct one: the widely spaced, grey-green eyes betraying a hint of melancholy and the glossy lips, parted in an imitation of drowsy ecstasy, settled in a natural downward curve. Only the dancer’s hips were devoid of their familiar grace – coiled, in the absence of a table to squeeze by or a trashy disco rhythm to sway to, in a grotesque parody of Babylonian excess, above the words: “Hear me wank while you play with yourself.”
Alec could taste egg-yolk again. He guiltily bundled the cards into a makeshift stack; squeezed them, complaining, into their pack; and returned this, in turn, to his inside pocket. Then, stumbling out of the alley, he angled down the street towards the bus-stop, passing an A-board outside the newsagent emblazoned with that same headline: “Phone Companies Call Time on City Call-girls”. But Alec failed to notice. He was bewitched by a mental image of the face on the card in his pocket transposed to the head of a Carreras glamour girl: porcelain, demure and as graceful as they come.
James Morrison
Julio was behind the bar again. His sullen eyes burned into the glass he was polishing, the lazy left one occasionally darting suspiciously towards the English table in the far corner.
“Oh Christ, it’s ‘im – oi Manuel, gis a smile! What ‘appened to that bird with the tits?” Martin turned to Rog with a look of feigned good humour, tossing back the last of his lager and clicking the fingers on his other hand with a chop-chop motion. “Garcon!”
Rog cracked up, rocking unsteadily in his faux cane armchair like one of those nodding Chinaman ornaments: “You’re a bastard, Mart. Look at ‘im run. You’ll give the geezer angina.”
A flustered Julio was stumbling towards their table, his heavy black eyes still glowering. He squeezed, wincing, between the congested chairs and settles, like a frazzled commuter racing across a crowded platform for his rush-hour connection. His black hair, thinning at the temple, hung over his flustered brow in oily strands.
“Sirs?” he stumbled on reaching their table, dropping his pen clumsily as he ferreted through his breast pocket for a pad.
“No need for that, my son,” Martin barked. “Two more of your delicious Dago lagers, if you please.”
“And sir?” Julio began, turning to Rog, whose perpetually beaming visage seemed something like salvation, set against his friend’s cruel glint. He attempted a weak smile.
“Erm, I think you’ll find one of them’s for me, sonny Jim. Not even Mart’s gonna knock back two at once – at least not this early in the evening! The night is young, as they say.”
Rog guffawed again, his deep throaty roar and fiercely rocking frame threatening to summon up a small earthquake.
Julio smiled weakly: “Of course. It is the accents, I think.”
He was trying to win them over, change the thrust and tempo of the exchange to persuade them he wasn’t the archetypal two euro waiter they doubtless took him for. He had a degree in history and was fast approaching the end of his Masters – forced to work weekends and nights in this hell-hole to scrape his way through. Surely they didn’t think he was thick, just because he was on the opposite side of the bar. Their mocking eyes suggested they did, and there was something else there that troubled him; something his limited experience of life outside Malta couldn’t pinpoint. Then again, he’d worked a double-shift and was tired: draft three of a dissertation on the American Revolution waited for him on the dusty desk in his cramped rented apartment when he finished, and he had a tutorial in the morning. Forcing a smile he realised looked more like a wince, he prayed for a placid response. It didn’t come.
“What did you say?” retorted Martin, apparently on the point of rearing up from his seat like a bald, sun-blotched cobra. Then his impassive face broke, and he guffawed at the genius of his predatory charade. Reaching a paw-like hand out to pat the waiter on his shoulder, he whispered: “Ne’er mind, mate, just kiddin’. I don’t think I can have ‘eard you right. I thought you mentioned something about accents for a second – only it’s probly just that I can’t understand a word you say. It must be the accent.”
Without thinking, Julio replied: “I did, sir. Only I was not trying to be rude – just to point out that you have a different accent to some of the customers from England who stay at the hotel. My English is not, how you say, fluent as yet, but I try.”
Mart’s twinkling eyes (smiling incessantly, even as his lower face suggested a different temperament) clouded. Rog’s cavernous laugh faded; his gaze fixing on Mart as if waiting for a seizure. Suddenly, Julio felt abandoned: alone, save for this small and threatening island, in a sea of empty chairs and tables with cheap flowers, tea lights and paper cloths. Even for 6.30pm on a Sunday evening, the lounge seemed extraordinarily empty. A barely recognisable instrumental version of He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother droned anonymously in the background. For a second, the bland muzak seemed like the most human presence in the room.
After what seemed like an age, Mart’s twinkle returned.
“I think you’ll find the only one with an accent around here,” he snorted (his cockney tones grotesquely exaggerated as he emphasised the disputed word) “is the greasy queer with the castrating drainpipes. Very nice. Where did you get them from?”
Mart chortled maniacally at his crude joke, pointing as he did so at Julio’s tight white trousers. They were part of the uniform, uncomfortable in more ways than one, and the waiter was already self-conscious about them. His mother told him they made him look like a merchant seaman in “the days of the Empire” (Britain’s he assumed), while people like Mart never ceased to point out their resemblance to standard-issue clone kitsch a la The Village People.
“Anyway, Manuel, chop-chop,” Mart continued, snapping two chubby fingers that resembled crudely moulded modelling clay.
As Julio scurried dutifully away, knocking over a vase on the next table in his rush to reach the safety of the bar, he added: “And change those fackin’ trousers – you’ll do yourself a mischief!”
Mart winked at Rog, and glanced at his reflection in the already moon-lit window overlooking the port. He was wearing a red and white checked polo shirt, and a showy gold chain of big interlocking circles. His tan, though patchy, was deep (and not, for once, out of a bottle). It extended to his thick neck and close-shaven head, and made him look rather impressive, he reckoned – like a security chief for a merchant bank.
He also felt relaxed – or, at least, more so than usual. He’d been in the pool today (lukewarm and oddly greasy, he felt, but more than made up for by the complementary cocktail trolley which passed round mid-afternoon and the blazing sun which beat down as he reclined on a sun-lounger to sip it while eyeing the short-skirted waitress bending over to offer Pina Coladas to the shaky fogies on the opposite side). Before that, he’d played a round of golf with Rog and his new mate, Steve (a double-glazing salesman from Abergavenny with an annoying stutter – bloody Welsh!). Mart had won, obviously, but there’d been a surprising resilience about Steve’s swing which had made the victory seem worthwhile, rather than the walkover it normally was with Rog. They must teach them something in the valleys, he mused, mentally replaying his triumphant final putt in BBC2 US Open-style close-up.
Yet, for all the day’s merits, and while he could hardly claim to be on edge (he did, after all, have the best part of a week left before his nightmarish, no-frills plane back to Stansted), deep down somewhere inside him he could still feel the volcano simmering. He couldn’t fathom the source of his anger, or decide when or whether it would unleash itself, but it was there, as it always had been.
“Your beers, sir,” Julio stammered, hastily placing two cheap paper coasters between the pair, and planting the half-litre glasses nervily on top. He cleared the two empties and hastened away.
“Where do they get the staff?” Mart snapped, automatically.
Rog guffawed almost before the line was out, as if Mart had tripped some hidden switch on the minimal portion of his mammoth frame that was squeezed beneath the low faux-cane table.
Mart grasped the beer glass as if it were a life-saving potion every drop of which was precious. He downed two-thirds of it in one breath, slamming it back on the table like a Medieval baron toasting a savage victory in front of a posse of cowering lackeys. “Fancy a fag?” he said, nodding to the patio overlooking the pool outside.
Rog’s expression silenced him. No peace for the wicked: Martha was obviously on his back.
“What you reprobates talkin’ about?” she began, shrewishly, as she sank like a beached whale into the settle beside him. She had that perfume on again, not to mention that low-cut top and lacy bra, and that diamond necklace he’d bought her on their 25th, its prize stone dangling over the deep crevice of her maternal breasts – another vain attempt to increase the value of her stock.
“Nothin’,” he snapped, as she pecked his cheek, possessively.
“England friendly tonight,” Rog offered, sensing the tension gathering between them. “They’ll be showing it in the other bar.”
Mart nodded sagely, and drained the rest of his glass. He clicked his fingers again and Julio came scurrying obediently.
Rog felt someone squeeze his left arm, and looked up to see Hettie bending over him, her shiny lips puckered for the kill. He kissed her back automatically, relieved to have some light-hearted company to break up the unspoken impasse between the other couple. She was wearing those heels again, he noted, unsure of whether they stirred something in him or just looked tacky. The cheap scent she’d bought at the airport wafted over him like air freshener in an old people’s home. That shapeless floral dress was doing her no favours but her legs looked good, he noted, as she planted herself heavily beside him, threw one over the other, and barked at a grimacing Julio: “Beers for us too, handsome.”
An awkward silence fell, but was interrupted by the arrival of four froth-topped half-litre glasses and a complementary plate of savouries, dried meat and cheese.
“’Ere Manuel, we didn’t order these,” Mart yelled, scowling across the lounge with thinly disguised contempt.
“It’s all right – they’re free,” Martha chided him. “They do that over ‘ere sometimes. It’s a kind of custom.”
Both Rog and Hettie dived in hungrily, but Mart eyed the plate suspiciously, as if surveying an intruder.
“Fackin’ custom, that’s all we hear about these days,” he said at length. “Thought we’d come ‘ere to get away from that.”
“So, you up for the game?” Rog offered, changing the subject.
“Be honest, mate,” Mart began, ignoring the two women. “I’m ‘appy to just keep drinking. Not that bothered about the game – it’s only a friendly and, besides, it ain’t like the old days.”
“No,” Rog conceded. “It ain’t exactly the World Cup and we ain’t got the best side we’ve ‘ad, but it’s still England init?”
“Is it?” Rog was startled by the swiftness and ferocity of Mart’s response. “They’re all fackin’ blacks and spics. Lennon, Cole, Phillips, Defoe – there’s ‘ardly a white geezer among ‘em. Then you’ve got Ferdinand – he discovered America, didn’t he?”
“Listen to you two,” Martha started. “Anyone’d think you weren’t on ‘ollidee. For gawd’s sake, chill art!”
Ever the peacemaker, Rog chirruped: “He’s got a point, love. It ain’t like the old days. Bloody manager’s double-Dutch, too!”
“The ‘ole place’ll be overrun one day,” Mart said, as he grabbed his latest beer from Julio, and waved away the coaster. “Look at the fackin’ Poles – takin’ all our jobs. It’s a battle for survival – like the grey squirrels wipin’ out the reds. There won’t be any of us left in ‘undrid years – we’ll be a race mem’ry or sumin’. Then there’s the Mooslins – don’t get me onter them – wiv their fackin’ ‘eadscarves. Livin’ in fackin’ ghettoes and plottin’ to blow us ap. ’E may’ve bin a Tory, but that Enoch Powell was onter somin’.”
Having purged himself, Mart glanced up at a cowering Julio, smiling almost benevolently: “Agreed, Manuel?”
“I am sure sir is right,” the younger man replied obliviously.
“There’s a good fellow,” Mart winked. “Now run along.”
“Goin’ to preen meself for the meal,” said Martha, levering herself out of the settles. “’Ettie, you camin’?”
The two women waddled off, clutching their handbags protectively, hefty rears scraping through the cluttered lounge as they headed for the lavatory beside the bar.
“’sup with them?” Mart snorted.
Rog shrugged, flicking through mental images in an effort to find inspiration for changing the subject. Anything to get off the foreign immigrant situation – Mart’s pet hobbyhorse. He resented them, too, but like it or not they were here to stay. Some of them even seemed – dare he think it – better at their jobs than their British peers. They certainly worked harder and didn’t tend to leave the job half-done. He thought of the boiler he and Hettie had had fixed last month – British Gas had quoted £1,000, but Tolska, the cash-in-hand Polish geezer his mates had told him about, did a grand job for £550 (well, he’d charged £550, but Rog had managed, after some nagging from Hettie, to beat him down to £500).
He alighted on a glossy-looking brochure lying on the next table. Perhaps he’d find something in there to distract Mart.
“Look Mart, time-shares,” he leant over and grabbed it. “You and Marfa ever thought of getting into that?”
Mart took a long, slow gulp of his beer. Rog noticed the vein in his neck bulge and the tip of his shoulder tattoo (an exotic belly-dancer with a snake writhing round her torso – a relic of his six years in the Navy in the 1960s) peak threateningly from his sleeve.
“Already ‘ave,” he declared. “Free more years of slog, and we’re off – at least I am. Put me mam’s money and all me savings into a villa in Madeira. It ain’t time-share – we’re talking retirement. ‘Ad enough of all the yobbos and blacks back ‘ome.”
“You mean you and Martha’s emigratin’?” Rog was clearly startled. “To Spain?”
“Portugal, you ign’ramus. An’, like I say, I am, but the jury’s out on Martha.”
Though there was only one other person in the lounge, a studious-looking German in khaki shorts and pince-nez, and he was some metres away, Mart leant forward conspiratorially: “Between you-me, I’d rather you din’t menshun anyfink to Marfa. She don’t know nuffing. Now the girls have left ‘ome, I’m waitin’ to see what me options is when the time comes, if you know what I mean.”
He winked, leant back, and took a long sip of his beer. Stifling a burp, he plunged his hand into the depleted pile of savouries, and crammed the remaining items into his mouth, like a greedy baby learning to feed itself.
Rog knew he wasn’t doing a very good job of appearing unsurprised by Mart’s matter-of-fact revelation. He’d never been any good at hiding his feelings, and he could feel the beginnings of a faint twitch stir in his left cheek.
“What’s ‘smatter Rog? You look like you’ve sin a ghost or somin’. Don’t cry – yous two can come an’ stay whenever ya like.”
“Sure,” was all he could muster. “We’d both like that.”
“It’s them greys, mate – the greys have gorn an’ driven me aat. I’m one of dyin’ breed. We all are. We need to get aat while the goin’s good. Don’t tell me yoove never thought about all this. Don’t tell me yoove never fought about the future of the species. ‘Aven’t you ever wannid to cut loose, mate, knock it on the ‘ead?”
“Not really,” began Rog, still struggling to absorb the enormity of Mart’s words. He’d always been such a home bird, such a true Brit; a man who’d start complaining about sun-stroke within 24 hours of hitting the turf at Majorca and would insist on egg and chips for brekkie, regardless of where he was or what else was on offer. Rog remembered him refusing to visit tapas bars for fear of “contracting something” from the “unwashed fish” and “Dago sausage” when they’d hit the Costa del Sol for his stag do.
Rog was hauled back to the conversation by the expression of perplexity which had descended over Mart’s normally static face.
“Yer what?” he stammered. “Yiv never thought of fleein’ that dump? Wiv all the cheap beer and tits? Do I know this man?”
He made a theatrical display of this line, turning his exaggeratedly bemused face from side to side as if soliciting reaction from a live audience.
“I’m just a bit surprised, mate, that’s all,” Rog managed, struggling to articulate his thoughts.
Mart eased his expression, and attempted a reassuring smile: “Yer see, Rog, you fought you knew me inside-out – but I’m a man of ‘idden depths.”
“They’re very well ‘idden.”
“That’s the kind of guy I am.”
“But what I still don’t understand,” said Rog, finally finding his voice, “is if you’re so sick of all the immigrants and stuff back ‘ome, why are you runnin’ away to spend more time with foreigners?”
Mart looked as if he was about to choke. Then, from nowhere, he laughed – a huge, full-hearted bellow.
“You really don’ know anyfink abaat this kind of fing, do ya?” he began, struggling to regain his composure. “’Ave ya ever seen one of these” (he paused) “ornclaves?”
Rog shook his head, mutely.
“There’s golf courses and beaches and club haasis with pool tables an’ snooker an’ 24-aar bars an’ shootin’ ranges an’ swimmin’ pools,” he exploded, “bat the wan fing there ain’t is foreigners. D’y fink I’d be movin’ abroad to live wiv foreigners? Do me a favour – they don’ even speak bloody English!”
With that, Mart rose in a single swift movement from his seat; the first firm action (save raising and lowering his beer glass) he’d performed in the past half-hour. As Rog rifled through his pockets for his room number (he’d agreed tonight’s drinks would be put on his tab), he watched his friend – the friend about whom he knew so little, and to whom he meant even less – tousle the waiter’s hair, whether mockingly or good-naturedly he couldn’t be sure.
Julio turned to meet Rog’s gaze, a split-second accident of timing that left him feeling implicated in his friend’s bigotry.
“Room 26, isn’t it? Have a pleasant evening sir,” the former said, clearly relieved at his tormentor’s departure. It took Rog a full 10 seconds to realise Julio’s English was better than Mart’s.
I’m in a state. Totally mental. Bouncing off the walls, my mind reeling and body going with it like a dance. Everything explodes outwards and I walk down the streets totally high, feet levitating. These people rushing past me are crazy. They don’t see what I see. They don’t know it. It’s all so pointless. We’re all just animals here and now, breathing and in love and with totally meaningless hang ups. Just relax and let it come over you. I get on the train with no particular direction in mind. It’s about time that I start to take things seriously and go with it. Sure, I’m meant to be at work, but I can’t deal with it right now and it means nothing. The train rushes onwards through these flat and formless lands. I have to change in London because you can’t go West without pausing in that place. London is the worst of them all. Everyone there seems like they’ve totally lost the plot, or never even got it even in principle. So I skirt around and don’t surface. From Kings Cross, then the light blue line to Oxford Circus and hop straight onto the brown. It leads to Waterloo. I have to wait a while until there is a train going in the kind of direction that I seem to be drawn to. It’s ok. I park myself on a bench and read Huxley. It bends my mind.
Another few hours of whizzing countryside, but now there are hills and woods and reality. I like it and watch it all go past. I pulse and eat some food and then we’re here.
I recoil a moment and think; what am I doing back here? I should be at work.
But when it hits, you just have to go with and take it all in and let it free. That energy,
I mean you can’t even put it into words because it is totally pure. There are no pre-determined words that can explain it. So you just have to deal with it in the way it takes you and go with it. The problem with everyone is that they push it aside. I don’t even know if they have even felt this energy. If they have then why do they waste it? Why waste this life? Sure, yes, it is all meaningless. But why cram it with stuff that is even more meaningless and then attempt to make some excuse up to justify it? I can’t deal with that. Something real has hit me and I have to embrace it, so I do and get off the train.
A red ribbon comes right out of my Solar Plexus; it snakes around and then goes onwards. I smile and move forwards. The sun is hot and the birds sing. It’s so right. I seek the boy
out who holds my heart. He’s right there and is not surprised to see me. We embrace and I plant kisses all over him, his neck, his cheeks, his hair, everywhere. I think I might stay here, because life was starting to get really fake.
This buzz lasts for a small while then crashes with a huge clatter. It’s too much and I can’t hold onto it. The world sucks me in and knocks it out of me. Now I’m crouched low to the ground, hugging my legs and not letting anyone in. Everything is pointless. I retain that sense. But the clarity has been shattered and now only a black confusion infuses me. The energy has shifted into an angry hum that consumes me. I can’t live right. I can’t be pure because everything around me is impure and it corrodes my will power. I get up and force my self back to my job and money. I am meek and low and quiet and numb.
Compliantly I wait for the energy to catch hold of me again. I hope that I can retain it this time; that I won’t let the rest of the world in; that I won’t let them spoil it for me. For now I am too weak and meek. For now I work and I take their money, buy food with it and play their insane game; the rules of which just don’t add up.
Mick Parkin
That Could All Change
Barcelona 1938
On Friday evening Carles has arranged to drop in and see his dad. The old man was a baker until a few years back and is still active in the CNT trade union, but now he works as a doorman in a warehouse near the docks.
The nearest tram drops Carles off at the bottom of Via Layatana from where he takes one of the long narrow streets which run directly to the harbour. The buildings here are five
or six stories high, with only the occasional side street to let in some air, so he enters the dark canyon between them with his head down, intent on just getting to the other end.
At the first side street he looks up to check the traffic, and that’s when he sees it – an amazing, even inspirational sight. The very top of the buildings on one side have caught the setting sun and been transformed into a thin strip of brilliance. It’s still the same buildings – still just a jumble of little top floor windows; balustrades with plaster cracking off them; a few improvised shacks and even, on one roof, some red geraniums – but now these mundane details have got the power to evoke a different world from the one he’s walking through.
What a contrast. How things are and how they could be, if we took back control of the war against Franco. Got rid of the Stalinists, and got the revolution back on track.
And another thing this contrast emphasises is how much the buildings in this part of Barcelona have dilapidated over the years – how dilapidated the capitalist system has become, and how close that better future is, if we can just give their rotten system one final push.
It’s amazing to think that some of these houses were built as villas, in the days when factory owners still built their villas this close to the port. And back then, even the industrial buildings were given little stylish touches to show how successful their owners were. By now, though, they have all been patched up, split up or had extensions added
to them. Like that wide stone arch which spans right across three windows, but one of those windows has been filled with bricks and is almost completely blocked off by the corner of a flat roofed out-house.
No, whatever capitalism may have achieved in the past, it is on its last legs now, reduced to the wretched remnants of a failed system. And that’s why, when we do eventually win the struggle against fascism, we’ll have to start a whole new struggle to completely transform the miserable inheritance which the capitalists will leave us. Until then, there
will only be one place where anyone can really be free, and that’s in their plans for the future.
He glances up again. In the future and, yeah, briefly perhaps, at moments like this when the setting sun gives us a glimpse of what that future will be.
Before long he arrives at the entrance to his dad’s warehouse, and that too is typical of the decayed grandeur of this whole area. A once impressive stone archway is disfigured by a mass of grooves where hundreds of trucks have scraped past over the years, and the two wooden doors which fit beneath it are pitted with holes and cracks.
Carles steps through a small oblong door set within the bigger doors and immediately sees his dad though the window of his little office. The old man is bent over a pamphlet, marking it with a stubby pencil, and the curve of his back places his head right beneath the overhead lamp. So, with its light illuminating the wispy hair behind his ears and making his scalp glow, the whole scene has a scholarly, almost medieval quality.
As Carles enters the office he shouts, “Dad, how are you?” at which his dad starts grappling with the arms of his swivel chair to manoeuvre himself round. While he’s doing
this Carles slips a small package containing some cured ham and a packet of fags onto a shelf by the door, then sits down on the edge of a filing cabinet.
“Good son, good. Still totally fucked, but…” and then, as if to illustrate the point, he goes into a brief but fierce coughing fit.
He always looks like a baby when he coughs, the way his mouth makes that tight little
oval shape – or maybe that’s just an image Carles had thought up to make the whole thing less upsetting.
“What are you reading?” he asks, nodding towards the pamphlet.
“Old stuff, this is. Luis Delgado. You don’t know him, eh?”
Carles just shakes his head and smiles.
“Well, don’t worry,” his dad says, “when I’m gone this pamphlet’ll come to you along with all my other possessions.” And that little quip starts the coughing again.
While he’s waiting for this to subside Carles realises he’s rubbing his hands on his knees, so he stops that and concentrates instead on the first thing he sees, which is the seat of the swivel chair. There are several books on the seat to raise it up and then on top of
them an old brown rug. That rug looks a bit shabby and, to be honest, so does his dad, but there’s a limit to how much charity he’ll accept. And anyway, there’s a limit to how much Carles can give him.
“This bit I was just reading,” his dad says now as he starts to move back, crab-like, towards the pamphlet, “I reckon it might be worth repeating tomorrow night at the Co-ordinadora.”
Co-ordinadora is the organisation which brings together all the different food distribution co-operativas, and although Carles isn’t up on the latest developments, he knows the basic drift of what is going on. It’s the usual story – total collapse of the old system after the revolution on July 19th when most of the owners fled; an amazing achievement by the CNT in terms of improvising new structures based around workers co-operativas; and then the gradual undermining of these structures by the Republican government.
By now his dad has handed him the pamphlet and slumped back in the chair – transforming himself from a turtle-necked creature into a crumpled heap of clothing, on top of which is balanced an animated little face. Carles locates the underlined passage, but just as he does so the old man starts to recite it from memory.
“Our victory must be achieved by radical methods, by methods which challenge the ordinary man and encourage him to develop his abilities as part of the process of attaining his liberation.”
“The co-operativas, then.” Carles says, briefly scanning the rest of the page.
“Got it in one, son – we’ve got to defend the central role of the co-operativas in our economy.”
“Agreed.” Carles says, looking up. But rather than leaving it at that, he adds, “And part
of that defence is the conquest of political power.”
“Aha.” his dad says, as if noticing a familiar chess move from one of his old cronies – a move he counters with a one word response, “Politics.”
“Yeah, politics – but it’s a kind of politics that goes way beyond just getting another seat in the latest cabinet reshuffle. The main thing we need is for the co-operativas to link up and ultimately replace the government.”
“So what the hell are we arguing about?” the old man says, and his laughter starts another coughing fit.
“Maybe I’m not arguing with you, dad,” Carles says, once the coughing has subsided, “but you’ve got to admit there are plenty of people in the CNT who think they can just rub along with the politicians, just wait until we win the war, then…”
“Ach, we’ve always had people like that in the organisation. They’ll get shoved aside once things hot up a bit.”
So there it is, Carles thinks to himself, the optimistic attitude which has always been the CNT’s greatest strength but also its greatest weakness. He used to think it was self-confidence, back in the days after the European War when his dad was winning one strike after another, but now, looking at this crumpled creature –physically destroyed, even if he is still mentally defiant – he can’t help thinking it is also a way to hide a terrible sense of defeat and insecurity.
“It’s like I said at the last meeting.” the old man says, bringing Carles back from these thoughts. “I said to them, ‘You keep telling us to wait until after we’ve won the war – that we can have our revolution after the war. But do you know what you’re like’?” He pauses here for a bit of rhetorical effect. “You’re like two men arguing over how they’re going
to harvest the fruit of a tree that hasn’t even been planted yet. And while you’re arguing
over that,’ I told them, ‘while you’re enjoying yourselves with a bit of idle speculation, there’s a tree that has already been planted, fruit that has already ripened, and that fruit could end up going rotten if you don’t do something about it.”
“The co-operativas.” Carles says again, but this time with a big smile.
Maybe if they were all like dad, maybe then it would work. But they’re not. So it starts
off with false confidence, then it’s self-deception, then in the end comes a stoic acceptance of defeat – that and a defensive refusal to see where they went wrong.
“You’ve got to admit, though,” Carles says out loud, “the Stalinists are getting stronger while we’re getting weaker. And that wasn’t meant to happen.”
“No, you might be right there, son. Maybe we did make a mistake in giving them the benefit of the doubt when they said we were all on the same side now, but… well, even generosity is a vice when it’s taken to excess. Still, don’t worry, all that can change, it
can change in an instant.”
“Yeah, but this time dad, if we do ever get back in the driving seat, we’ll need a clear programme of action that everyone can get behind. A definitive, step by step programme.”
“Ah right,” the old man says, wriggling a bit to get comfortable, “a programme that everyone has to follow, or in other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
“A dictatorship to end all dictatorships.” Carles says, touching his glasses, but his dad just says “Aha!” again with that triumphant tone.
“I’m just saying that we need a list of practical next steps, dad. That’s all a programme boils down to.” At which point, while he’s still wining, Carles decides to change the subject. “But anyway, look, I’ve got a question for you.”
In response to this the old man says nothing, but just wriggles round a bit more, preparing himself for the next job to hand.
“It’s about a certain comrade, a Vincente Rosell. Just, I was wondering if you know him? Chairman of Co-operativa Vigor.”
The old man sits for a few moments, licking the gums at the top of his mouth, then a smile appears on his face.
“Oh yeah, Rosell – The Walrus.”
“That’ll be him.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Co-operativa Vigor. Chairman now, is he? Well I’ve known him since he joined the CNT. When was it? 1908 maybe. Used to be in an affinity group called ‘Action
and Culture’. So, anyway, what’s he done now?”
“He’s leading the investigation into who stole those tanks.”
“Is that right?” the old man says, a smile spreading across his crumpled face. “Yeah, Vincente, not a bad sort. Bit cautious, but then he hasn’t always been like that.”
At this point a lorry driver in a beret raps on the office window, so the old man motions for him to open it and the driver says, “Potatoes from Granollers.”
“Potatoes and Cauliflowers?” he asks.
“Just potatoes.”
The old man looks away briefly and swallows what seems like a lot of phlegm, a gesture which somehow signifies a willingness to accept ‘just potatoes’.
Now he’s struggling to his feet, and saying, “I’ll show you where to put them.” But then he adds for Carles, “Wait till I get back, I’ll tell you a few things about Vincente Rosell.”
Mick Parkin
The Girl Who Couldn’t Save Warsaw
Carbeth (near Glasgow) 1947
Fiona and Sandy are spending the weekend about ten miles outside Glasgow, in a hut owned by a friend of her uncle’s – just one of many on the Carbeth estate, at the foot of the Campsie Hills. The first of these were put up back in the 1920s, and over the years the place has developed into an informal community of about two hundred huts, providing modest summer-houses for folk from Glasgow.
There is no running water, and no electricity of course, but even so Sandy’s younger sister, Mary, comes out for a visit on Saturday morning. She immediately joins in with Fiona, who is scrubbing the bare wooden surfaces that surround the windows and the sink. Then, after a cup of tea, the the two women decide to visit a neighbour from Glasgow who has also got a hut. Sandy gets up to see them off and, standing at the door, notices their other visitor,
Jozef – a Polish refugee – walking along the lane at the bottom of their track. He is wearing a peaked cap, which somehow makes him look younger than his twenty eight years, and when Sandy gives him a shout and a wave he sees the other man’s face light up as he waves back.
Fiona adds a wave of her own, then turns to Sandy and says, “We’ll only be about an hour, okay?”
“That’s fine.” Sandy says, then he adds for Mary. “And don’t go asking Mrs Davidson for sweets again.”
“That was years ago.” Mary protests, but she is smiling when she adds, “Still, if I do get any, I’ll no be sharing them with you.”
“You will.” Sandy replies, charmingly.
By this time Mary has started off down the path with Fiona, so she just turns and puts her tongue out, but does it so quickly that the effect is feline, rather than vulgar.
Sandy stays at the door, resting his gaze on the dozens of small trees which have grown up round the hut. A lot of them are still in leaf, though it’s a motley collection of withered and dried out leaves – as dry as plaster, and covered in the kind of colourful mould you get on old plaster, too. Still, with the sun on them they look fairly cheerful. And even where the sun can’t penetrate, that’s still impressive, because the latticework of overlapping branches goes right back as far as the eye can see. Endless nature.
Aye, that’s something you’d never get in Glasgow.
He closes his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face, and they remain closed until he hears Jozef opening the gate in the low fence that goes round the wee plot in front of the hut.
“Jozef.” he says, with a relaxed smile. Then he adds, “The other two are off on a visit, by the way.”
Even as he is saying this, though, he sees that Jozef’s happy expression has gone, and been replaced by one which could only be described as ‘shell-shocked’.
“Yes, they said this.” he replies, in a flat voice.
“Right well, let’s sit out here, eh?” Sandy suggest, completely thrown by this sudden change of mood. Then he adds awkwardly, “I’ll fetch a couple of beers from inside.”
“Yes, thank you.” Jozef says, even though Sandy has already turned to go back into the hut. He stands there for a while, then noticing a bench beside the hut, on the bit of grass which passes for a lawn, he goes over and sits down.
When Sandy comes out again, holding a couple of bottles, he finds Jozef staring blankly into space, so he decides he is going to have to say something.
“Are you alright, man?” he asks, sitting beside him and putting the beers down on the grass. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Oh, you have that expression, too?” Jozef asks, with a pensive smile. He still seems miles away, but then he adds, “Yes, I have seen a ghost – the ghost of a young girl.” Then he just looks down and shakes his head.
Sandy is at a loss for what to say, so he looks down as well, and sitting there side-by-side on a hard bench, he can’t help feeling like he is back in church.
“It was during the siege of Warsaw.” Jozef starts abruptly without looking up, “and I only saw her briefly, but she was wearing a cotton dress with thin blue and white stripes. A very simple dress, down to her knees, and with short little sleeves .”
Sandy realises he is describing Mary’s dress, but still can’t think of anything to say.
“And she had her hair in a side parting.” Jozef continues. “But she was younger than your sister – only about thirteen.”
“And this was in Warsaw?” Sandy asks. Then, having broken his silence, he takes this opportunity to open both the bottles and put one on the bench beside Jozef.
“Yes, in September, when the Germans invaded us.” Jozef replies, briefly looking across towards Sandy. “She was with about a dozen other children who were helping dig an anti-tank ditch in a park. I was with my unit, and we were moving up to reinforce a crossroads, so I only saw her as we passed. But still, I have remembered always that moment.”
He pauses, absorbed again by his memories. A magpie flutters down from the felt roof of the hut and lands on the grass. Somewhere in the woods behind them, the sound of a dog barking.
“It is strange,” Jozef says now, obviously distressed, “that I think back to her often, when I have seen much human tragedy since then. Perhaps it is because she looked so happy – because she had no way of knowing that what was going to happen next would make happiness a very distant memory.”
Then, making an effort to contain himself, he looks up at Sandy again and adds,
“It was a wide ditch, and she was up to her shoulders in it, working enthusiastically with her shovel. I even noticed the way her dress stretched round her little tummy – perhaps because that was the only curve on her body – but also because it suggested a child who was well-fed. And happy. Yes, I have said this already, but this is what disturbs me most when I think back on that scene – that she could look so happy and confident. They all did.” And now he laughs quietly, as if mocking himself. “I think they really believed, despite the hundreds of German tanks pouring into Poland, that their ditch would be enough to make a difference. And, of course, it wasn’t. Not that the tanks were what finished Warsaw. They were useless for street fighting. My unit disabled one with just a stick of dynamite. No, it was the Luftwaffe dropping their incendiary bombs, and the hundreds of guns all round the city which rained down shells upon us – until, before the end of that terrible September, they had made Warsaw into a living nightmare. Everywhere burning, and the dead left where they lay in the streets.”
He has gone back to staring at the grass, but now he looks over at Sandy again to see if any of this is making sense, to see if it is possible to explain such a thing to another human being.
“She was before all that, Sandy. Do you see what I am saying?”
Sandy manages a slow nod.
“That is the unbearable thing.” Jozef continues, staring straight ahead now, but with a desperate tone in his voice. “She believed – we all did – that we would get back to living once more as human beings. To sit at the dinner table with your family. To turn down the blankets on your child’s bed. To look out into your courtyard and see this girl playing with her cat.” Then he adds abruptly, “And she was wearing sandals. That is another detail which has stayed with me. Defending herself against the blitzkrieg in a pair of sandals.”
Looking down, he seems to be surprised to find the bottle of beer beside him, but he takes a drink from it anyway.
“So, we drove past.” he adds, his voice wavering and his eyes occasionally flitting across to Sandy, who has gone back to his church-pew pose. “And when she saw us, she looked up and smiled. She smiled. She was expecting praise. Of course, and why shouldn’t she? The grown-ups had asked her to help defend the city. They must have told her that the city could be defended. They probably told her that powerful allies had promised to come to her aid. Perhaps they believed it too. But this was before we discovered how ruthless the Germans were, how pitiless the fate they had planned for us – back when it was still possible to believe that good people could stop bad things happening. And she was a being a good girl, Sandy, so why shouldn’t she be rewarded? Just a smile and a few kind words.”
Suddenly, Jozef puts a hand to his mouth and turns away, his face twisted in pain, as if he could be about to start crying. He doesn’t, but he can’t help seeing images of what her actual reward must have been – the suffering she must have witnessed in those six long years of occupation. If, that is, she didn’t die horribly just after he left her.
So many bad things have happened. Things which are impossible to bear.
Eventually, he composes himself and picks up his beer again but, apart from a brief apologetic glance, he still avoids looking at Sandy.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I cannot help thinking that what we like to call ‘insanity’, the insanity of total war – that this has become our natural condition now. We are still ape-men, Sandy, but now we can fight with high explosives and also the hydrogen bomb.”
“Aye well,” Sandy says, “there may be some truth in that.”
These words hang in the air for a moment, but then Sandy adds awkwardly, as if he has decided his comment needs some justification,
“I mean, there was only twenty years between the last two wars, which is no exactly a long time, but now things are hotting up again after just two.”
“We must do everything we can to avoid another war.” Jozef says quietly.
Silence again, as Sandy tries to find a suitable response, but Jozef speaks first.
“And yet…” but then he falters, not wanting to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion. “And yet, this was the attitude which led to war. This was the essence of Appeasement.”
“Aye, I know.” Sandy replies, and it is obvious from his tone that he has wrestled with this contradiction before.
“This is the worst thing,” Jozef adds, more philosophical now. “That we cannot stand aside from such violations. If they hurt and kill our children, we must do the same to theirs… or at least be willing to.”
“Aye, it’s a tough one.” Sandy says, talking slowly, looking for the right words. “See, even with the best of motives… well, there’s no point being a good person, or even a good socialist, if you cannae find some way that… well, some way that works, when it comes to stopping madmen like Hitler and Franco.”
Jozef looks over at the magpie, which is strutting about on the grass and poking fallen leaves with its beak, then he takes another swig of beer before adding,
“There is something, which I find gives answers for this problem – and that is boxing.”
“How’s that, then?” Sandy asks, more relaxed, now that the other man is being less emotional.
“Well, as a boxer you learn how to break a man’s nose or smash his jaw bone up into his brain. This is violence, for sure. But at the same time you are learning how to control your violence – to use only what is really needed.”
“Right, I’m with you now.” Sandy says. “In fact, that puts me in mind of this guy I used to know who was a boxer – got as far as the Western District Finals back in 1922, so he did. But, anyway, one thing he always said was, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a man who doesnae know how to handle himself in a fight.” You know, some guy who – maybe there’s a wee bit of argy-bargy – then next thing you know he’s pushing a broken bottle into somebody’s face.”
“Yes, control.” Jozef says. “This is what is needed, for sure, when it comes to violence. “Control your anger.” they always said to us in boxing, “Don’t let your anger control you.”
“Aye well, that’s good advice too.” Sandy says, leaning back on the bench, which gives slightly as its feet sink into the grass. Then he adds, “Of course, all this would be a lot easier to sort out if we were living in a socialist world, instead of a world based on greed and competition.”
“Yes, but we have to get to that New World, Sandy. We are not there yet. So, until then… well, we must accept at least the possibility of violence. And we better hope we do find some way to keep that violence under control, because soon – once Russia gets the hydrogen bomb – another war would only mean one thing. Annihilation.”
Sandy replies to this by just raising his eyebrows and taking a swig of beer.
Then, in the silence which follows, Jozef continues the conversation inside his own head,
So, is this my definition of what makes a civilised man? Not a refusal to kill, but an ability to control your killing – a measured response. It doesn’t sound very idealistic. But then, look where idealism lead the German people. And yet, there is an ideal behind the pragmatism – a genuine desire for the well-being of all, which comes from a realisation that other people’s suffering is just as real as your own. Except that, at the same time, we must still be willing to inflict such suffering – to go to war, even though war is the ultimate proof that civilisation has broken down – realising that war is not the worst thing which can happen in this world.
He is just starting to wonder if this paradox really is all he has got to show for so many years of bitter experience, when Sandy says, in his slow thoughtful voice,
“Aye, the old hydrogen bomb – it’s a big responsibility, eh?” Then he adds with a smile, “So, what do you reckon – can we handle it?”
“You and me?” Jozef laughs. “Perhaps yes. Our fellow ape-men – I sometimes doubt.”
For a long time scientists couldn’t agree whether a photon of light was a wave or a particle. Eventually they decided it was both – or more likely something ‘other’ which we can only conceive of as ‘either’. And that’s the thing, because even when you’ve realised that somehow it is both, you’ve still got to accept that, in any given situation, you can’t actually do anything unless you see it as one or the other.
It was a surprise, I’ll admit that, when he walked in and stood next to me. He was holding the edge of the bar, so the cuff of his expensive shirt was pulled back to reveal an expensive watch, but when I looked up he had a face as long as a wet Monday.
“You alright there, pal?”
“You know, I can hardly believe it.”
That was obviously my cue to say something but, rather than go for the bulls-eye, I said,
“Woman trouble?”
“Oh God, no.” he laughed, forgetting himself for a moment in that familiar tone – easy and patronising, but with a hint of self-deprecation. “No, just the bloody car. Just some bloody idiot decided to cut a gash in the hood, that’s all.” Then there was a confused sadness, something very Prince Charles, when he added, “What makes these people tick? That’s what I can’t understand.”
Not really my sort of question, so I just cast him a glance. I knew already that he was about my age, but what struck me close-up was his hair. His is going a dignified grey at the temples, mine is going thin on top.
He must have realised the ball was still in his court, because he snapped out of his reverie, checked the half empty pint in front of me, and said,
“Look, let me get you a drink.”
Why not? I was going to listen to his problems anyway, so it wasn’t like he was buying my company.
Then, as he talked on, I had to feel sorry for him – genuinely, I mean – because, alright, he has got three cars but, as he pointed out, that meant there was always something wrong with at least one of them. So, with all his cars being the expensive kind, that meant sending it back to the original manufacturer, and that meant waiting three weeks during which time he only had two cars – i.e. one less than he’d paid for.
Not only did he have a whole load of problems, but they were all silly little problems like that, and a life full of silly little problems doesn’t exactly make a man of you. So, like I say, I did feel genuinely sorry for him.
Eventually though, I said I’d have to be off, and I even explained I was on a split shift. I didn’t bother saying I’d be working till nine o’clock that night without any kind of overtime bonus. Not the sort of thing he’d be interested in.
“Okay, look sorry.” he said, not apologizing for anything in particular, but the easy self-deprecation was back. Then he added, “Still, let me give you a lift.”
I hesitated, but then decided I could get him to drop me off a couple of blocks before my actual destination. And though he must have recognised the area, sure enough, he didn’t put two and two together.
We exchanged a few words of farewell once I’d got out the car. Then, when he put it into first gear, I leaned over and touched that gash in the leather fabric, allowing it to glide slowly under my fingertips as he accelerated away.
He was none the wiser, but my world felt a bit more real.
Alan Price
Ahmed went on holiday after only realising forty six per cent of his ‘potential’ sales. He was warned to make quality and customer satisfaction a singular obsession. Micro – managing young men told him to fight harder to achieve his targets.
At his hotel Ahmed knelt on his prayer mat. Work harder for less was the mantra that resounded through his brain. His oiled customers, sprawled inside the hotel lobby, restaurant and swimming pool, gave him no peace. Ahmed kept seeing everyone as an unrealised percentage. On his return flight he feverishly counted the passengers, but failed to make his duty bound target. By the taxi-ramp people kept running up to him. Yet Ahmed’s numbers were still not enough. Arriving home, he discovered more work inside his garage. Yet he was pleased and delighted that fifty four men, and women, had managed to comfortably fit inside.
Things now seemed to add up. Ahmed carefully attached a hosepipe to his car exhaust. They watched every move of Ahmed’s; whispered to each other and made notes. His anxious crowd, of morphed percentages, quietly drifted away only when he’d expired from monoxide poisoning.
The coroner concluded that there was more to life than business schemes and striving for profit. Yet if Ahmed had attended his own inquest he might have disagreed; stood up, offered his hosepipe, as if it were a comforting hookah to the coroner and probably said, I funded the ideals of the company and betrayed my customers. Now the accounts are bereft. I am ashamed. Look about you and see.
Here are the spirits of the lost fifty five!
Philippa Rees
You speak our language well enough. Try to be exact. Talk first of where you come from, what place, what climate of sun, corn of rattling monotony, or rows of sweating pineapple; were you near a beach? Let us begin at the beginning.
The drum of Africa rolls incessant, a barrel under the feet. It failed to stop for getting born…
We caught a wind off the Kalahari, which snagged us on barbed wire, the shred of a shirt flapping before we hastened on; pioneers are travelling folk, we uitspan where we find ourselves, and mostly for one night…
Very well. What manner of people suckled you? Taught you to walk?
Gave you your prayers at sunset, or maybe brushed your teeth?
Some wore socks and veldschoen, banded khaki hats..stored.dried peaches in the pocket, corralled a farm on horseback-, often chewed sweet grass…the labour filed in kaalvoet from distant smoking kraals with babies on their backs and calloused dirty feet. Their rivers flowed over boulders, and washing dried on rock. They walked like ants with purpose, carried heads of firewood, and swept the hills with song…
Your people are known to be obstinate, perhaps I’m being harsh. I realise it wasn’t easy. Did you ever go to school?
I opened up the ant spires, and paced the baobab girth. I saw elephants drunk on maroolas, and hyenas bloody jawed. My horse and I in the mountain alone took turns to cast our shadows… Was that the sort of thing you asked?
I had hoped for something else; the merest suggestion of books. I really want to understand you. I am not trying to be perverse.
Oh books, that’s very easy. Books were candle light, and whizz-bangs, and ghosts in the shadows flickering; leather smelt of sweat. Books were made of promises, improvements in design. Damp Keats eventually caught fire, and hectic Percy Bysshe…lit sparks of inspiration, and subtle Austen flavoured fish…but books were about England, there was African life to live…
I thought you said you were thirsty, and that was why you came. What had fed that appetite, identify the hunger ? It’s tethered you here for a reason…It seems reasonable to ask.
Now here we come to the doringbos, the wag’n bietjie thorn. It was you who persuaded that we never could belong. Not unless we learned to hold our crude and wagging tongue. So I came for your opinions, and your moderated views, tempered by your literature, I would learn them if it killed me, and it very nearly has…
There was nothing that you valued? Nothing that enriched? Subtle converse taught you no refinements, brought forth nothing new? Could we have had this conversation if you’d never put on shoes?
Is this a conversation? I had not realised that. We talk to one another. It isn’t the same thing. Yes I learned your language, and I worshipped it at first. I believed it would oil my power to show you other things; the glory of the sugar bright stars, thrown by razor wind, the need to pelt down sand dunes and shout injustice to the sky… oh yes I leaned refinement, lets call it constipation and have done…
Now who’s being harsh? Was there nothing that you loved? Nothing that explained your blood, or informed your letters home? Did you take no pictures, or stop before a view …Surely there was something…
That’s the point jou engelse, it was all face value so. I found your country perfect, exactly as expected, not a hair astray. There was a quota of eccentrics, and I loved them, every one. There was always mist on the Malvern Hills and Elgar wrote it down. London was Threadneedle Street, and Horseguards all stood still. It lived up to all its promises, and I gulped it like spring water, and thought that I’d come home. You wrapped me up in literature, words and place, one piece. It’s taken my life to unwrap it, and find instead its vacuum heart, and nothing to write back…
What about the politics you hated, we sheltered you from those…
Oh yes, you’re right, I quite forgot; the constant surveillance, the neighbours who informed; the ninety day detentions, the summary arrests, the banning of so many things, speech among the first…Sorry I’m getting distracted, what was it that you meant?
You draw a false analogy, we don’t do it the same way, your comparisons are facile, nobody here protests. We accept when things are necessary, and we have after all, the freedom of our Press…
To spin you like a marionette, too giddy to take heed of the swirling fascist state. Compulsory tolerance is your strychnine coated pill.. you swallow without tasting …
At least we knew we were pariahs, and not just because we smoked..
Come come you exaggerate, it really isn’t done. The essential rule you never learned is what makes us what we are; never to speak loudly…or criticise with emphasis, or most of all enthuse. Let me give you some advice, it will serve you everywhere, make a joke of outrage, keep it well to heel…
Ag ya my outrage is exhausted, like a cur behind a wagon, snapping at the flies. I know I have nowhere to stand, and nothing left to say. Your literature has tamed me like a mangy lion penned. You are all so very certain about such little things.
Kevin Saving
Adie was in no hurry. He watched the human shoals swimming outside the window of the cafe. Had he been ‘made’? It scarcely seemed to matter now. He gazed again at the strangers milling around in the London dusk -each with their own interior worlds pulsing away inside the few hundred cubic centimetres of their cranial cavities. Most were shopping, carrying the over-priced yuletide artefacts upon which so much of this society’s estimation of social worth seemed to be based. Would any of these individuals really miss their lives? He preferred not
to think of that right now.
A lady, alone, well-groomed and appealingly self-possessed smiled quizzically across at him from a chair some feet away. He watched her smile slowly fade like a searchlight from which the power source had been disconnected. Once, he might have been interested -played the courtship game of introduction, small-talk and selective disclosure. The lady seemed to be about his own age. Once, he might have thought that she was attractive. But it was late now for that sort of nonsense. Too late by far.
Adie wondered idly what had aroused her interest in him. He’d been staring out of the cafe’s windows, searching the faces in the crowd, looking for identifying features which he might have glimpsed earlier in the day: these things were (in the present circumstances) important. Turning to scan the comfortable interior of the expensive, well-situated cafe, he’d made eye-contact with her. Other women had, in the past, told him that he had ‘hypnotic’ eyes; bright, humerous and alive. Adie didn’t think that he was otherwise, or in any other way, especially prepossessing. He slowly picked his nose then quite ostentatiously examined his fingernails before glancing again covertly at the lady. She was already reaching for her gloves against the winter cold and preparing to leave. Adie smiled inwardly. This was his gift to her, an anonymous but pleasing stranger. His last christmas gift.
A waiter, neatly attired but with a slight squint, asked him if he required anything further. His coffee lay, already cold, on the table in front of him. He shook his head in polite dismissal and watched, half regretfully, as the woman left. She didn’t look again in his direction but walked, gracefully and with a kind of brittle determination, for the door. Adie didn’t rise to assist her. It was two or three minutes from here to the tube. Five more minutes then before completion of this final, self-appointed task.
Adie felt once more for the large suitcase besides his feet and under the table. It was exactly where he had placed it when he had first sat down. It contained one final, despairing gesture towards the ‘Great Satan’ whose luxurious palace was situated so close to here. Adie would dearly have loved to have penetrated even further into the dragon’s den -but he knew that security factors militated against the extra risk. He could only speculate as to what tracking devices, sniffer dogs, plain-clothed, armed-guards surrounded the Houses of Parliament. This Satan could afford to protect itself.
Adie was a well-educated man. He was familiar with the arguments of theoreticians such as Hobbes and John Milton on the subject of Tyranicide. Ultimately it had been a pragmatic choice, one informed by personal circumstances (a messy divorce and the prospect of inexorable decline into an illness for which the doctors had assigned multi-syllabic terminology, but no cure). Adie knew that he couldn’t ‘front up’ to that, so therefore the only choices left to him were choices of (as the Americans might have put it) what ‘exit strategy’ he might select.
Adie himself had no religion, looked on it all as the purest self-deception -harmless enough on a personal level but historically pernicious. One of his oldest friends, known since before university, had had no such scepticism. Revelation of Adie’s dilemma presented him with an obvious resolution: Adie would be ‘The Movement’s means to strike a great ‘Hammer blow’ against the hated oppressors, the squalid lackeys of a cowboy-state which was prosecuting one of the world’s most infamous war-crimes. ‘Let them see,’ Adie’s friend had concluded (with an oratorical flourish) ‘let the crusaders know that they cannot order the deaths of innocent women and children with impunity…let them understand that we can bring an equal horror into their citadels…let them recognise that there can be no hiding place for child-murderers from the just reckoning of one honest man’.
And so it had come to pass and with near-bewildering celerity. Adie understood all too little of the higher physics of what was inside the suitcase with which he travelled. He knew only what he had been told by the heavily-bearded courier who’d delivered the device to his hotel room this very morning. That the case contained approximately thirty pounds of semtex, with a roughly equal weight of radioactive material culled from the innards of an old hospital x-ray machine. That it was a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ which (if detonated correctly) would irradiate enough of a city to render it uninhabitable for half-a-century.
Adie had refused quite steadfastly to make any kind of video-taped ‘Martyr’s Farewell’ for propaganda purposes. He had gone on to make it clear that he had nothing but the profoundest reservations both for his friend’s protestations of devoutness and for the dubious motivation behind his friend’s organisation. He was a Briton by birth, imbued with whatever it is that the experience of forty-plus years of slow-drip national degradation leaves you. Inured from the self-serving lies of politicians from all shades of the British political spectrum: men with no principles and no honour. He recognised within himself the great desire to ‘make a difference’. He was just sorry for the innocent bystanders of this rather tawdry show of defiance which he was about to make.
He rose, a little unsteadily, to his feet, paid his bill and -with a gesture which seemed quaint even as he made it- left a sizeable tip. He pulled the suitcase through the door of the cafe, helpfully held open by the squinting waiter. My god, but the suitcase was heavy! His breathing was laboured now with the draining of what little remaining strength his wasting illness had left him. Adie had been told that for the weapon to have maximum effect it had to be activated in as open a space as possible, as close as was practicable to the palace of Westminster. He came panting to a stop and lowered his eyes to the watch at his wrist. Three minutes since he left the cafe, seven since the lady’s departure. he hoped she was on the underground, speeding away from here. The devil alone knew how many surveillance cameras were even at this moment recording his every movement. He stood stock still, one eye watering from the chilly breeze. He watched a uniformed policeman ambling along in his direction with all the unhurried, practiced arrogance of that profession. Slowly, and with infinite care, Adie’s hand reached towards the firing mechanism.
Coming of Old Age
The ceiling looked higher from the floor. Ron massaged his side and caught his breath on the rough carpet. He grunted onto his stomach and raised his torso with his arms. He hovered for a few seconds, trying to control his shaking arms until they gave under his weight and he crashed into the rough carpet.
“Come on, Ron,” he said to himself. “You’re not old yet.” He started to bend his right knee underneath himself, but stopped when the pain in his stiff joints exploded. “Dammit!” Ron rolled onto his side and did his best to bend his body into a V so he could massage his stiff leg.
Across the room, thick layers of dust collected beneath his bed. The cane and brace he’d kicked underneath so long ago were blanketed in gentle layers of neglect. Beside the bed, a breeze through the screened window made the curtains dance away from the wall. A three legged table stood in the corner beside the window. A lamp sat beside a photo of Ron and his son. The bookshelf towered beside the table along the adjacent wall. The chain of Ron’s unwanted emergency pendant draped over the top shelf, mocking his situation. Ron hadn’t touched it since he and his son argued over Ron’s health. Ron didn’t want it now any more than he did then. Ron didn’t want the phone in the hallway either.
Ron straightened at the waist and rolled onto his stomach. He aimed his body for the corner table and began to crawl. “Just like in the service,” he said. When he reached the table, his knees ached even more. He strained to bend his back and propped himself up on his left elbow. He reached for the ledge above him, missed, tried again, his fingers brushed the edge. “C’mon, Big Ron.” He dug his left elbow a little farther, grunted, and pushed into the air. His right hand grabbed the edge of the table and pulled. The table crashed to the ground.
The angled corner brushed Ron’s ear, the antique lamp shattered to the floor and the framed photograph fell onto his chest. Ron cried out and massaged his aching ear, checking for blood. He wasn’t bleeding. He laid on floor, catching his breath and spewing in anger. He examined the photograph on his chest. Alex and he stood in front of the fishing boat in front of the lake. Alex draped his arm over his father’s shoulders, flashing his trademark smile: the stubborn grin, the mischievous smirk. Alex tried to make him carry the pendant. Alex tried to make him move out. Alex tried to make him use the cane. Alex’s smirk thought it knew better. Ron chucked the picture across the room, cutting into the wall and bouncing the floor, cracking at the edges. The glass broke into two pieces. “Damn you, Alex, I’m fine!” Ron lay on the floor with new determination.
Ron turned his body in a new direction, this time for the window drapes a few feet away. The wind had stopped and the drapes hung motionless above the carpet. Ron crawled the easy distance and reached up. He grabbed a drape and pulled. Hand over hand, he slowly inched one painful knee underneath himself. Then he dragged a howling foot in front of the rest of his body. Pain ripped through his legs. He shook trying to hold himself steady. His eyes squinted and blurred with salt. Ron pulled himself up. His mechanical motions slowly lifted him above the ground. Then the drape snapped. The support rod broke in two and Ron crouched in his position, bent backwards, flailing for the other curtain, finger tips rushing, swimming through a wave of fabric, searching for support as he tumbled backwards, the wave crushing him from all angles, robbing his breath.
For a few seconds, Ron couldn’t breathe. Then his body recovered from the blow and he choked on his sobs. Helpless. Completely helpless. Ron’s back ached and his legs were boards and his arms burned. Helpless. Ron turned his head and looked at the picture of his wife beside the bookshelf. She was beautiful, smiling on a tree stump beside the lake, laughing at a joke he had just made. She was his age but looked half as old, her young skin reflecting the sunlight. “Where are you, Mable?” Ron heard the second curtain slide to the floor. The wooden rod bounced to stillness. The pendant chain still hung near the heightened ceiling. He couldn’t use the bookshelf to stand up because it could tip over. He didn’t want to use the bed because the springs would give and offer little support. But the beaded chain hanging from the bookshelf taunted him. “Dad,” Alex had said, “Just take it. You don’t have to use it, but keep it close by just in case. Just press the button and I’ll see it on my pager, okay? Then I’ll be over as quick as I can.” Ron had taken it, and then closed the door in front of his son. He walked right back into his house and tossed the useless thing on his bookshelf. It took a few minutes for Alex to stop knocking on the door and calling his name and finally drive away.
Ron rolled over and found the photograph he threw. He crawled a few painful feet and pulled the picture from its broken case. Mable had taken the picture. Ron examined his son and himself. They had the same smile. The same stone eyes, the slight squint, and the same angled mouth. Ron had never noticed. Ron remembered that day: the breeze on the lake, the fishing, and the laughs between the three of them.
Ron dropped the picture and rolled onto his back, closing his eyes. He lay quietly for a few minutes and then rolled towards the bed. The cane was still visible in the dying light. Ron pulled himself forward, groaning most of the way. He managed to pull himself parallel to the bed and the cane, pushed all the way against the wall.
Ron couldn’t reach it. Even with himself positioned as far underneath as he could manage, the cane was still two feet away from his outstretched hand. Two impossible feet. Ron suddenly felt claustrophobic, pressed in, airless, sealed tight. He pushed and rolled his way out, clambering to the middle of the room. He struggled to control his breathing. The phone. The phone was in the hallway. The door was open, he could make it to the hallway. The phone was on the table. He could just pull it down by the cord. He’d be alright. Alex would come. He’d help him get the cane and pendant. He’d be alright.
Rolling back onto his stomach, Ron aimed himself out the door. He pulled himself forward so he could call his son.
Prose Poems
Runoff
There are pollutants above this dog, above us all, and brush fires on the San Fernando foothills; crows perch on telephone cables, crows my dog hears cawing, crows who know the vacant lots where bones of murder victims sink among jimson weed, grass, and the narrow tunnels leading to the ant queen’s den and the sinews of this desert. As always, night arrives: this dog looks up, and only a grey darkness, like that of dishwater, night pressing through smog, through clumps of weed and burr, coagulant of night, dulling the heat the way salt and fats slow the nervous ticking of circulation. Dog thinks summer will never end; an ecstasy of sniffing and dozing, and men who sit on the sidewalk drinking beer, sowing the pavement with peanut shells. This dog has fangs chiseled for meat, and irises that dilate; but, at last, night swells, overflows, a sewage-tide of shadow, and both dog and poet will witness hillside and hearth washing away, the way a red taillight throbs in rainfall, diminishes in size, then turns onto a darker street where one can only hear the roar, decrescendo, of the engine.
High Frequency
When I left her at the loom in order to shack up with the Maenad, I walked out with a pile of clothes covering my eyes so that I couldn’t see what I was abandoning: my son clinging to my leg. Everything was sunlight, honey on bread, salt. We slept until noon those summer months; her breasts, bruised from my teeth, and I was basted with her sweat, spit. At night, the moon seemed less a temptress, and more like a promise. When I thought of Venus, I remembered Percival Lowell who predicted star-sailors would find her tropical and lush with flora and fauna. Snoring, spent from sex, shades of Ishtar and Aphrodite crackled in my sleep with the hearth-fire, and taste of milk. When the rainy season started, the Maenad locked herself in the bathroom with pills and bubbles, while I sat at the kitchen table, listening to the radio. One night, I heard what others like me had only thought they heard: whistling that turned
into a tea-kettle’s pitch, which then deepened, trembled, leaves shattered in a gust, or gushing water. Is that the wind? I asked myself silently. Or the sirens outside? “No, no.” I said aloud; “it’s your son crying.”
Why Don’t They
Why don’t they notice, as I mop sweat off my forehead with a paper napkin, as my teeth chatter in the glaring heat, why don’t they notice how I speak louder to not hear the siren within? Don’t they see my hand trembles when I lift a forkful of eggs to my whiskers? Don’t they pause when I tremble before the aperture in the pavement? I won’t listen to his tidbit about fares or phosphor, to her tale of tinsel and terror; I stare at the passersby out the window, and jolt when I hear the snarling motorcycles or trucks downshifting, as if I were awaiting locusts, earthquakes, or brimstone. Night comes,–I can’t shake it off,–and I lock myself behind this red door, and hear the silence that throbs, drowning my pulse in a darkness that is crimson like the light glimpsed behind clenched eyelids; and I cough, cough louder, I laugh to smother that siren’s call, the sizzle of tires on black asphalt, this rocking gurney, these headlights beaming on the curve, the shoulder, and the precipice.
Pentecostal Neon
From my motel window, I read: Templo de Dios…crackling in crimson at noon, when the heat jaggedly rises like an eight cylinder jalopy reaching the speed limit; at evening, the neon is a premonition of dusk and judgment; the tambourines hiss at me as I walk back from the liquor store with a six pack, and the congregation is howling God espíritu santo, while the children play in the parking lot; their ties and dresses itch them as they kick a blue beach ball until it bursts. Crimson neon is more than a buzzing, it is an ominous wash of noise, like the shushing from an air-conditioner that is mistaken for silence, yet once the traffic stops, and it is midnight, it’s the sound that throbs in my ears, the first light I see as I open to the darkness encroaching me when I can’t sleep, but stare out the window at a locked temple, the moon, but no constellation to spell out the red babble of my paganism.
*L*I*Q*U*O*R*&*I*C*E*C*O*L*D*B*E*E*R*
The bell rings as I open the door; two men dressed in overalls are getting their checks cashed from the Syrian owner; each is holding a twelve pack of Bud. Laughter and boasting will crackle as they will later sit drinking in a truck in an apartment building parking lot, listening to norteño ballads. I walk to the glass doors humming from refrigeration; my holdings, five dollars. My aim, to slake this thirst that has bludgeoned me since coming back from unemployment. The heat has been unbearable; nothing has burgeoned from my efforts, from the long lines and paperwork. I leave the door open for a couple of minutes, letting the cold air glaze my reddened forehead, until the owner whistles, and gestures: You buying or what? I pull out two tall cans, pay for them, and walk into the scalding dusk. In the Liquor store parking lot, the two workers have already ripped open a twelve pack. Faintly, from the truck stereo: an accordion, a guitar strumming chord changes in 3/4, and an out of kilter singer numerating revenge and betrayals. A dusty wind rushes across the parking lot, and I look up in perfect silence at the constellations, sense the vastness, fossilization of dead light, and new water on Mars. I sit, my back against the store wall. One streetlamp crackles faintly. Two yards from me, I notice a vacant lot, and while I take a sip, I see the ant-crawl, the swarm and tracery of black lines and swirls by the mound: persistence, labor so perfect because it is conducted with equanimity. And I sit here, engrandeured in the belittlement of myself under the moon, the wind, beneath the ants.
Ferry Token’s Obverse
I am the boy locked outside when your door is blue. You, too, are this boy when you enter the party, yet stand in a corner, so self-conscious you hear your neck-bones creak. You are
he when you cry, when your grip loosens and you taste vomit, and crumble among sheets that itch of insomnia. When you weigh the stone, the shell, as more than the gold ingot, though
the price of gas may rise, and the corner coffee shop sells fried eggs and boiled milk for dollars. Your mother is always dying,–cancer eats into her left breast though her heart is a puddle of roses; your father is always calling for you,–but from behind a pillar that casts it shadow on a dark plaza, and in the distance a freight train shoots across the horizon, its horn reaching out to you from so far that you find yourself outside the blue door, where you gaze at a coin with its obverse of ferry and hooded rower… the oleanders in the vacant lot behind you rustle
dryly, and a breeze rises, foul with carrion, with the tinkle of empty cans.
Ferry Token’s Obverse (II)
A coin each for those, like I, born in 1973: for the dental hygienist, for those in auto-wrecks and plastic surgery, for amputees, the toothless from crack, the accountant, wizard of data entry, mini-mart zombies or ghouls of neon bars where coke is worshiped atop the bathroom counter… all the buffalo-wings and beer you desire. All the debt, botched manicures, all the children, transubstantiation of hearth into mortgage, public education into the sophistry of debating binge-shopping or binge-eating. A coin for the podiatrist who looks at high-heels and shudders, for the dentist who loves the oral hygiene of his assistant, for the merchant of software, smoothies, or other coolants; they will tender their bonus in the Kingdom that doesn’t exist. We are funneling into the dark, and our sleep is a rumor of cancer, our vows yellowed like newspaper clippings, our God perched with angels atop a needle’s tip. Now the stale glory of hypocrisy awaits us; now the traffic on the freeway parts for the staff of my middle finger, but only after the baby-sitter has put the kid to sleep, and the last party is sputtering. It will be at the bar Las Playas where the silver tooth of the barmaid glistens with my reflection, as she laughs and slaps my last dollars from the counter, hands me a club-soda, because the cops are prowling, and I’m slurring my glossolalia.
Motel Room With Red Door
This is where I boil Top Ramen on a kitchenette’s stove. This is where I sit reading Ritsos and his doxology: praise the sun that cannot be burned. Nightfall, I pace the room: the television newscaster recites the daily famine and fads with the encouraging pitch of a Pilates coach. Hours later, I pull back the sheets, and I stretch out in bed. This is the room with a red door, where every night I struggle, as my Mistress of Insomnia mounts me, pins my arms in between her thighs, then stitches my eyelids open, thread spooled from embers, needle chipped from ice.
Ron Singer
The Lazy Animals
Not just the obvious –lazy dog, wallowing hog, eponymous sloth– but the porcupine who gnawed our porch three nights running, instead of sticking to the trees, with their tough bark and other stuff. (I’m told they’re after the glue, but never mind.) It took a bucket of water on his head to convince this fussy eater to waddle off into the woods.
Not just the porcupine, renowned for neither sloth nor (like the beaver) industry. Consider the honeybee, watchword for busy-ness. Myriads of workers buzz all over the place, signaling each other via the bee telegraph as to the exact location of the nectar. Meanwhile, back at the hive, the big fat queen sits on her stinger, dropping eggs, while she waits for dinner to be served.
Then, there are the human queens, not the working kind, the Catherine’s and Elizabeth’s (both “Great”), but the purely decorative, noted not for production, but consumption: rich cakes, wines, emeralds, rubies, silk, cloth of gold. And not just queens, it’s monarchs I mean (human beings, not butterflies).
Far below these kings and queens, you come upon those watchwords for sloth, recipients of public aid. Here, too, there are distinctions to be made. For every welfare queen, for every other cheat, there are legions of single moms, and of the unemployable and the un-and-underemployed, struggling to make ends meet.
So, when it comes to laziness, why not lose the clichés (sluggish surrogates for thought)? Be careful not to cast the first stone at humans or other animals, or you could find yourself sweeping up the shards from a glass house, and then, from the ground up, laboring to build a new one. Casting stones… building glass houses… wasting energy.
Peter Street
I
His auntie Liz always read the obituaries. So she will have seen it. But to make sure he sent a letter. Then a phone-call. Robert had argued with himself but in the end he thought he had to inform her about his mother’s death. There had never been love lost between them, even at grandma’s funeral twenty years previously. The two of them, sisters, had stood on opposite sides of the grave, refusing to touch the same sifted soil to sprinkle over their mother’s coffin.
So he was surprised but not shocked, when she asked about the arrangements. “Is she being buried a Catholic?” She wasn’t interested in how she had died or what kind of death it was.
He answered her question with a question, “Are you coming?”
“Where is she being buried, then?”
“They’re leaving her house at nine-thirty, then it’s ten o’ clock at Astley Bridge Cemetery, Bolton. Do you know where it is? Do you know where she lives?”
The phone went dead.
……
There were waxy faces with sunken eyes, peeking round the net curtain, thin breath misting the window of next-door neighbours’ at number thirteen. On the lawn under the front room window there was an assortment of wreaths and flowers. She wouldn’t have liked those. Waste of money! She would have said plastic anytime. He smiled as he remembered her at the sink, paisley apron round her waist, washing her array of plastic flowers, using an old toothbrush to get between the gaudy colours.
It was 9.20. Robert, chain smoking, stepped into the front room of the bungalow where her black coat still slumped over the arm of a red-and -green settee. Her red purse, with her bus-pass photo face up, was sticking out from under one of the cushions. A half-empty bottle of olive oil stood next to a hairbrush still misted with strands of white hair. On the sideboard alongside an old faded prayer book were various coins, a picture of himself as a ten-year-old in a black leather jacket with a white stripe across the chest. Black hair plastered down, his smile showed the gap he could fit a half-crown between. There were picturesque Christmas and birthday cards on the wall in plastic frames. He walked around remembering each one, the way she used to fill her tiny front room with old Christmas cards going back to just after the war. The dish of water she swore kept away sore throats was still next to the two-bar electric fire.
Hand-sewn, home-made knickers, skirts, blouses and tea towels straggled over the rods of her clothes-rack hanging a foot from the kitchen ceiling.
He stood at the door of her walk-in larder, recalling the conversations he had had with her about the advantages of a fridge. She wouldn’t budge. It was her way and that’s how she wanted it to stay. The marble slab for her meats. The damp tea-towel for keeping bread fresh, and the various enamel basins she used for steeping peas and pulses. On the kitchenette table alongside her tea strainer was her one cup and saucer, next to his “I love mum” mug.
He went into the bedroom. Through the half-closed curtains a yellow oblong of sun slid over the bedroom carpet. The forty-watt bulb made no real difference to the light. There was a whiff of Lifebouy Soap mingled with a smell of hospital. There were boxes of bandages, surgical stockings, and enough medicines to open a chemist’s shop. A pair of clogs underneath a mahogany wardrobe stood next to a pair of sandals and a pair of flat walking-out shoes. The walls were white, bare, except for a small black crucifix. The bed had been made. He smiled, thinking of the times she had shouted to him, “I can’t leave the house without making the bed. What will they say if someone breaks in!”
He remembered her waxed face, when he first saw her dead the undignified way her head had fallen back, mouth open, cheeks sucked in. She would have hated it. He remembered gently lipsticking her thin lips with her favourite bright red lipstick, careful not to smudge. Then leaning over her he lightly powered her nose to hide the many freckles she had hated for as long as he could remember. He combed her hair, gently feeling every white strand sliding through her blue comb, tucking some strands behind her ears, the way she herself did whenever she had to meet someone. She would tuck it back ever so gently, almost flirtatious. He fiddled around with the collar of her nightie, straight, neat. He moisturised her hands with Ponds Cold Cream. She would have liked all of it. Being made presentable for the undertakers. He squeezed her hand and tasted his last kiss, watching the pain of several lifetimes drain from her eighty-two-year-old face.
A tiny, dark blue, empty bottle of Evening in Paris stood on the walnut dressing-table Social Services had given her. He lifted and dabbed the tiny gold lid on his wrist, the way she used to. It had been empty for as long as he could remember. He started crying.
II
Kate Riley was walking round the dimly lit bedroom she shared with her sister. There was a navy blue A line dress laid out on the bed. Kate was clipping her hair up, when her sister Liz stormed in, “So you’re going then?” Kate ignored her and slid in the final clip. “I don’t know what you’re doing all this for? said Liz, “Nobody can be that hard up that they would want to dance with you!”
It was three years on V.E. Night, since she had visited The Empress Ballroom. The globe in the middle was sparkling over two dancers demonstrating the Flamenco. It was the sexiest thing Kate Riley had ever witnessed. She could feel herself blushing. Their bodies touched and wrapped around each other. She couldn’t take her eyes off the male dancer as he twisted and twirled. She had never seen such tight trousers on a man before. She blushed even more as she imagined him holding her tight, her breast squeezing into his chest and those tight trousers pressing into her. She made the sign of the cross, “Oh, God forgive me for my impure thoughts.”
She was the last one to leave the edge of the dance floor. Chewing her nails down to the wick. She fixed her eyes on the slim figure of the Spanish dancer. Her friend, Betty Mailey, tried to pull her away. But Kate was hypnotised. He came over. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,” he said in broken English. “ They are brighter than any star.”
She fell, hook line and sinker.
“You wait for me, while I change into my other clothes, yes?”
As he walked away, she was inching her eyes over every part of him. Betty said, “We’ll miss the ten o’clock bus.”
“I’ll walk home.”
“Come on, Kate, let’s go.”
“He said I have the most beautiful eyes he has ever seen.”
Betty was slipping her coat on, checking her handbag. “They all say that.”
There were people pushing past them giving them dirty looks for being in the way.
“Nobody has ever said that to me before.” Kate was wrapping her handkerchief around her fingers. Her face was flushed, mouth dry. She pushed her way back to Betty. “Honest, kid, he said brighter than any star.”
“Listen, Kate, I can’t stop, Frank will kill me if I don’t catch that bus!”
“ It’s alright, don’t worry.”
They stepped out of the warmth of the ballroom, into the cold evening air of Wigan. Betty pulled her friend to a halt, “My God, Kate, you’ve never walked home alone in your life!”
“I’ll be alright, see you on Monday. ”
“You’re joking! I’ll come round tomorrow. I want to hear everything.” She nudged Kate, winked, “You lucky bugger!” she said.
Kate’s body was tingling, she found herself wringing her hands, shifting from one foot to the other. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” Over and over those same words. His accent. His deep Spanish voice.
(Diary entry 20th March. For my thoughts I will have to say four Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s… But I don’t care. I feel so alive.)
She waited at the Exit. He appeared wearing things she had only seen in the movies: kid gloves, a silver-topped cane, handmade shoes. When Tomas Guerreo asked her if he could take her home she didn’t refuse.
He kissed her hand on the corner of St. Peter’s Avenue. She felt a giddiness and tingling she’d never felt before. It was almost eleven o’ clock. She had never been out so late. “You will meet me next Saturday, at the Finger-post, no? We will walk out together. Two o clock!” She nodded, kissed him on the cheek and ran up the street into her house as fast as her excitement would carry her. Her heart was bumping out of her chest, she imagined herself holding his tight body and kissing his heart-shaped lips.
That night she couldn’t sleep, turning over and over, again tasting his cheek, his sweat, that kiss on her hand
On Monday morning she was the talk of Langdales Cotton Mill. She blushed as the mill girls gathered around her: “ Did anything happen?”
“How long did it take him to get your knickers off?” They cackled around her. Someone shouted outside of the group: “ I hope he lasts longer than my Bill does! Is it right those Latin lads can do it all night?”
“Thank Christ mine’s from Bolton then.”
“Don’t be so rude.” said Kate.
They laughed again. It was the first time she had been the centre of so much attention. She both loved and hated it. In the afternoon she mimed to Betty over the deafening noise of the card-room machines how his deep Spanish voice made her go all funny. “Don’t forget, ” mimed Betty, “ he just wants to get into your knickers.”
Kate blushed.
When she climbed on the work’s bus for home, the other mill girls were still cackling about Cathleen Riley finding a man. She was deaf to their taunts; she was in some other world, where all she could think and talk about was Tomas, his Spain, his dancing, his body. The bus arrived at her stop: the Finger-post in Aspull. Arm-in-arm, she and Betty walked through the heavy rain, jumping over the large puddles in the narrow cinder path as they crossed the moor to home in St Peter’s Avenue. Stopping outside number three, Kate hugged her friend, “ Please don’t say anything to anyone around here, promise me?”
“Why?” asked Betty. “You’re thirty-two, not some young kid.”
Kate stood back. “ I just don’t want anyone to know. You know what they’re like.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Betty couldn’t contain herself any longer. “ What was he like?”
Kate twirled around like a teenage girl.
“He kissed my hand just like they do in the pictures.”
Betty waited for more.
“Is that all?”
Kate looked at her. “He’s not like that, he’s a Catholic.”
“No desert disease?”
“What do you mean?”
“Wandering palms.”
“I told you he’s not like that…He’s perfect. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I wish I had half-a-crown for every time I’d heard that.”
With that, Kate ran down the flagged path and into the red-bricked council house,
to a cry of “Wake me up when you’ve made the tea!”
(Diary entry: 26th March. I’ve not slept properly. I’ll die if he doesn’t turn up. Oh God please make him turn up.)
During the next five days she planned everything down to the last detail.
But it was Tuesday evening when she went to Karen, next door at number five, who was her size, a size fourteen. “ Listen, kid, could you lend me that grey two-piece suit with the pencil skirt? The one you had at Sandra’s wedding. You looked lovely in it.”
On the way back she popped into Betty’s for a green blouse to go with it. She couldn’t afford to buy the latest shoes with the Cuban heels. It would either be the clogs she wore at work or a pair of brown leather sandals (Never borrow anyone’s shoes, her mother had told her. You never know what you might catch) She washed her red locks with a block of green Fairy Soap
(Diary entry for the 27th March read: No one in our street had a sachet of shampoo. I’d kill for real shampoo.) She stood in her dimly-lit bedroom wearing just a full-length white cotton slip, looking at herself in a small mirror and leaning back on the spindles of her bedroom chair. Her arms fell to her side; “You are going to look the best anyone has ever seen.” Brushing her dank hair back, she lifted the mirror to arm’s-length, looked, turned her head to one side, and checked the other side. Shaking her head, she brushed her hair forward, looked, then brushed it sideways. In a fit of frustration, she threw the pink brush across the room onto her sister’s bed. She fell into her bedside chair, head in hands, crying, “Not today, please, not today!”
She picked up the brush again and drew her hair back, then pinned in the sides, brushing again, “He’s going to hate it, I know he’s going to hate it!”
She checked herself in the mirror. Dissatisfied, she threw that onto the bed too. She unclipped her hair, starting again, brushing it forward, back, brushing the sides. With a fringe, without a fringe. With clips, without clips. Eventually, brushing it straight back, she clipped it at the sides and patted her thick red waves forward. She sighed and sat on the green eiderdown, exhausted.
She dabbed Californian Poppy on her wrist. “He won’t like that!” She ran into the bathroom and washed it off. “I’m going to look awful. I’m going to smell awful!” She sat on the side of the bath, her head in her hands, imagining his slim, taut body turning around and around, her fingers running through his hair. She was his partner under that sparkling globe. His arms were holding her, her breast pressed into his chest, their lips inches apart. She stood up, swilled her face with cold water. Taking a deep breath she walked back into the bedroom.
Kate confronted the borrowed clothes hanging neatly over the back of her chair.
“ Please, God, let him like me.” Carefully she began to move them from chair to bed, holding her breath; she smoothed out creases as she lay the suit on the bed. Checking the time, “An hour! I’m never going to be ready.”
With half-an-hour to go, she pressed her little finger into the last of her deep red lipstick, smoothed it over her top lip, rolling her lips together. She checked herself, smiling. She match-sticked the last bit of lipstick out of the tube, to rouge her cheeks. She perfumed herself with ‘Evening In Paris,’ dabbing the light perfume on her wrist, neck and behind her knees.
She was breathless not so much with running but through the whole experience of going out courting. It was the excitement that was taking her breath away. It had been a dream she never thought would be realised. But it was, and it was happening now, today. Ok, she was ten minutes early. That was more to do with her father than anything else, that she should never be late for anything. It was something he had drummed in her since childhood.
If she had have planned it a bit better she would have waited around the clinic before walking down to the Finger-post were everyone would see her dressed to the nines. She never gave it a thought why should she? There were more important things on her mind than the men who hung around the Finger-post. The excitement of her date had pushed almost everything to the back of her mind. Including the Saturday men as they were known. They were men with flat lives who had nothing better to do that ridicule the women passer byes just for the fun of it. They were men in clogs or working boots, off-white collar-less shirts and grubby walking-out clothes. Some were kneeling, or squatting, waiting, just waiting, half-a-fag behind their ears. They were under-fed men of her own age, pale, from too many hours underground. They were men whom she had grown up with.
“Hello,” she said. She didn’t know why she blushed. But she felt as if she was on fire. She peeped sideways at the elderly rumour-mongers dressed in clogs and shawls, their whispers and prying eyes fuelling the flames in her neck and face. Kate felt every eye ball inch over every part of her, mostly from the women. Who had never seen her dressed like this before, she had never experienced anything like it. Just for a few minutes she wasn’t Kate Riley who hadn’t two pennies to rub together. This wasn’t Kate Riley who had never been kissed. Or kissed so passionately her legs buckled.
She gave a half-hearted wave to some people she knew waiting across the road at the Cenotaph. She wanted to be invisible except to Tomas. “ Where is he?” Her hand again would only lift shoulder high. She waved again. She had to. Everyone always waved.
“Why is everyone gawping?” she asked herself.
Old Mrs Thomson, from the new bungalows, a friend of her mother’s stopped and asked her, “Where did you get them clothes from?”
Kate just smiled. “ I’m going to a wedding.”
“I’ve not heard of a wedding. Who’s getting married?”
“Some one from the mill,” she replied. “She’s from Bolton”
The old woman trundled off, turned and shouted back, “Wait till I see your mam! Fancy not telling me about a wedding!”
She turned to more footsteps. More people she knew were walking down the steps behind her. Girls she had nursed as babies were running down with their friends.
“Hello Auntie Catherine!”
She forced a smile. Waved.
“Where is he?”
(Diary entry for the 27th March read: Everyone on the estate saw me waiting for Tomas. Old Mrs Jones will tell mum. What do I say? They won’t believe me. No point in telling them. They’ll spoil it anyway. )
She stepped back into the dank bus shelter away from the prying eyes and wagging tongues. In the dark of the shelter she became a little more at ease with herself. Even though the floor was covered in fag ends and there was a strong smell of urine and vomit. She stood as far back as the concrete walls and her clothes would allow. She changed her mind. “He won’t see me! Besides why should I hide from them, I’ve done nothing wrong”.
There were moments of shear delight. At everyone talking about her, seeing her dressed-up for the first time. She felt so proud of herself. An exhilaration she had never felt before surged through her body. She wanted to strut but didn’t dare.
It wasn’t her. She wished it to be. But she had never rubbed anyone’s faces in anything. Least of all those who were waiting at the Finger-post. But what if he doesn’t turn up? I’ll be a laughing stock. Kate paced to and fro, willing the bus to arrive. She willed the bus to arrive before him. She walked to the edge of the pavement looking down the road, past the hawthorn hedge, and the rugby pitch on the left. In the corner of her eye she caught people watching her. She looked up Haigh Lane. More faces she knew. She walked back to the front of the shelter.
A black car, like the one the mill manager drives, pulled up Her heart felt as if it was bumping out of her chest. Her mouth became dry, she wet her lips. Butterflies were bombarding her stomach. She wanted to run over to him, kiss him, feel every part of his body. But she daren’t. She wanted to strut out like some model on a cat walk and give them all something to talk about. It wasn’t her. But if there was ever going to be a red carpet moment in her life, this would be it.
His shoes were black soft-shoes, so shiny they glinted. His wore black trousers with a razor-sharp crease . His hair was brylcreemed down; his parting had been axed on the right hand side. In the daylight, he looked more handsome than ever.
( Diary entry for 27th: Everyone made fun of me, but it was worth it. He looked just like Tyrone Power. He is Tyrone Power)
“Catherine!” he shouted.
Men started chanting: “ Catherine’s got a swank! Catherine’s got a swank, ee- aye-addy- o, Catherine’s got a swank!”
She had never dressed to the nines before but she felt so confident when she saw Tomas beckon her to his car. Head high Kate took a deep breath, and stepped out into the sunshine. This was her moment. OK, it was a slight exaggerated walk, a movie star walk, but only slightly, she didn’t, would never want to rub their noses in it. She savoured every foot-step. She had never felt like this before, confused, elated, out of this world. Everyone at the Cenotaph glued their eyes to both of them, and the gossip-mongering began. She didn’t care. This was her moment. It was right. She knew it was. They were just jealous old men with nothing else to do except
“Que mujer mas bonita!” he said as she walked to his black Humber Hawk, Mk 11, glinting, new. She hadn’t a clue what it meant, but it sounded nice.
“Thank you,” she said as he opened the front door. The sweet musky smell of car leather was strong. Sliding her bottom in first, knees together, she swung her legs in. The black leather seats were soft, but not too soft. The back of her bare legs experienced the cold leather. As he pulled away, driving down Bolton Road, those waiting around the Finger post gawked and punctured the air with their fingers, pointing and giving V signs. Kate, waved and smiled a cheeky smile. She sat erect, frozen, peeking sideways at him, wondering what to say. She pressed her hands and knees together. She held in the scream of delight she wanted to belt out.
This was her time. God knows she had waited long enough. For the first time in her thirty-two years she felt alive, normal, a woman. She glanced sideways, just to make sure it was real. She pinched herself. Took in again the smell of leather, how posh it was and Tomas the gentleman.
In stroking movements he gently moved his leather kid gloves backwards and forwards over the thin gear stick on the steering column. Then round and round the steering wheel. There was silence, except for the drone of the engine. He searched his inside pocket, taking out a silver cigarette case. He clicked it open. Senior Service were strapped in, packed tight, behind two sets of gold-coloured elastic bands. He held it open, V shape, between his fingers and offered it to her.
“I don’t smoke,”
“I do not smoke either.” She looked puzzled.
“Why do you carry them about, then?”
He laughed, “In case anyone wants one.”
Kate shifted in her seat. “That’s daft.”
“I’m sorry,” she said meekly.
He took a yellow rag from the side of his seat and wiped his side window. He turned to her and smiled a perfect white-teeth smile. His eyes were black, sparkling, against an olive-coloured skin. She rested her hot face against the cool window, watching the farmers’ fields and the red brick building of St. Elizabeth’s Junior School whizz by.
(Diary entry for 28th of March: I made a mess of it before we started. Fancy calling him daft. Nobody with a silver cig case could be daft. He’s very posh. His voice just melted me.)
She wanted to say something, anything. She stared at the afternoon sun sliding over the tops of the brown cobbles in the road. She laughed. “Don’t they look like loaves of Hovis.” He looked puzzled.
“I do not know Hovis?”
“Do you not have Hovis in Spain?”
He laughed. “ What is Hovis?”
“It’s brown bread! It’s best with blackcurrant jam. I have it every day”
“Ah, bread, si, si we have bread in Spain, but no Hovis.”
They both laughed at the silly conversation.
Watching the sun bouncing along the rooftops of the terraced house along Bolton road, she began to feel at ease. She half turned and saw on the back seat a large picnic basket and a tweed car-rug. She clapped her hands in delight.
“Are we going for a picnic?”
“Si, somewhere quiet I think, do you know anywhere quiet?”
“I like the quiet.” she said. “Those machines in the mill drive me batty.”
“What machines? Where you work?”
“I work at Langdales. It’s a cotton mill. It’s so loud in the card-room you have to mime everything. It’s where I learned how to lip-read,” she said
His gentle smile eased her more.
“Rivington Pike,” she suggested. “Let’s go to Rivington Pike.”
“It is quiet, yes?”
“Yes, it’s very quiet. We could lay everything out on the car-rug. Next to all the other picnickers. I’ve never been on a proper picnic.”
“No, Catherine, I mean somewhere where there is no-one.”
“What for? We could have a chin-wag with people, while we eat our butties. Then we can all go down to the Chinese Gardens”
He shifted in his seat. His hands slid around the steering wheel.
“What church do you go to?” she asked.
“St. Luke’s in, er, Doncaster…Do you know it?”
“I’ve never been out of Wigan.”
“It is a beautiful church like the one my mother took me to as a child in Seville. I take you someday. But you won’t know St. Luke’s. It is in Doncaster, yes?”
A motorbike and side-car growled past. Kate let the splutter of the bike melt into the distance before she announced: “ I’ve been to all the churches around here…It’s Father Barr at St. Mary’s. It’s Father John at the Holy Family. That’s where I go, every morning before work. Some times on Sundays I go to St. Mary’s. Father John’s the nicest. Not like Father Barr…he’s a right old so-and-so. For the very littlest sin he gives you five Hail Mary’s and four Our Father’s.”
He smiled, nodded. “That is very good. Do you sometimes get fed up with Confession? I do,”
“We shall go to Belmont. It is beautiful there.”
“I’m sure Father Barr was drunk last Saturday. He fell out of the Confessional. God knows what he was doing there in the first place like that.” She laughed. “When I saw him I wanted to say your penance Father is ten Hail Mary’s and twenty Our Father’s. But I just ran out of the church laughing. No-one would believe me.”
He forced a laugh. Kate checked her hair. She tugged the tight skirt further over her knees. Resting her hands on her lap, looking straight ahead, she imagined that woman, his partner, dancing with him, and the way she lifted her leg up onto his thigh. “Who was the woman you were dancing with?”
She started squeezing her fingers. Before he could answer, she butted in, “Was it your girlfriend?”
“Ah, you mean Consuela? She is my sister.”
Kate sighed, laughed.
She turned and looked through the side window, watching the sun racing them over the roof tops up Dickenson Lane and on towards the A6 towards Belmont Moors.
“Are you doing a turn in all the Dance Halls?”
“Only around the North West. The travelling is too much.”
She interrupted him. “You’re brilliant.” She wanted to tell him how sexy he looked, but that would be at least five Hail Mary’s! Just thinking of it would be three Our Father’s! Instead, she snuggled her feet into the grey car mat that was plusher than the threadbare one stretched across her own front room. The one she has to wrestle with and thrutch over the washing line every Saturday morning to beat the week’s dust out. ( Diary entry for 27th of March: What you do for love! Got up for six. Lizzy shouted at me for switching on the alarm this morning. Beat out the carpet and mopped the floor before making the breakfast. They could have helped me out for once. Probably jealous. Missed Mass. Missed Mass. Said four Our Fathers and two Hail Mary’s.)
“The Flamenco is in my blood, my father taught me and Consuela. I think she is the better of us, yes?”
“Oh no, I think you could knock spots off anyone when it comes to dancing. Do you think you could teach me to Flamenco?”
“Of course I teach you the Flamenco. I can tell you are a natural, your red hair tells me you are a passionate woman.”
She laughed, a schoolgirl laugh. “It’s red for anger! So everyone in our house says”.
“Does everyone do the Flamenco in Spain? What’s Spain like? What’s your mother like? Where about in Spain do you come from?”
She closed her eyes as he told her about Spain, his home in Seville.
“It is beautiful and fiery like you my little princess. The food, the heat and the colours it is all of Spain, Magnifico!
Anger. Not really, she thought. It’s them. My sister makes me angry when she comes in with her boyfriends and they kiss and cuddle after mum’s gone to bed. Squeezing their ears into the radio, my radio, my 2/6p Radio Rentals radio. There’s never room for me. Then she wonders why I play holy-hell with them. She gave a wry smile. I will never have to run out crying again when they say the only man I’ve ever found is Jesus! Well now I’ve got myself a man. A better man than they could ever find, and he’s got a car. They’ll be dribbling.
They turned onto the A6. On her distant left a series of hills humped up and down the horizon with a tiny cone-shaped building on the top of one of them. She pointed, then shouted. “I’ve seen Rivington Pike first!”
He laughed. “Rivington Pike. What is Rivington Pike?”
In front of them were droves of people, four women in their grey or black Sunday clothes- black or grey, pushing their babies in second hand Silver Cross prams. Husbands walking behind in their best suits. Kate remembered the Monday evenings after work, when it was her job to take her father’s suit to the Pawnbroker who gave her 1/6d for it until Friday. The night after, she would take his collar to be starched for his Friday night drinking session.
A hundred yards in front of them a group of cyclists riding in two’s passed a rag-and-bone man, resting his horse and cart on the side of the road.
“Pip your horn,” said Kate. The loud honking made everyone turn. She waved to them all as they passed. “ I bet they’re all going to Rivington Pike.” She settled back into her plush leather seat.
“I’ve never heard of Belmont,” she said.
There was a strained silence. He smiled. “ Outside of Spain, Belmont is the best picnicking place I have been to!”
“What’s it like?” Before he could answer, she said, “No, don’t tell me, I love surprises.”
“I must, I cannot hold in the beauty. It is like being on top of the world. You can see for miles right over the tops of Bolton.”
“Will I be able to see Langdales?”
“On a clear day you even see as far as Manchester.”
“Manchester. God I’d love to go to Manchester. Is it right they have trams in Manchester?”
“I have danced many nights in Manchester. Even when it is dark it is bright from all the overhead electric cables flickering.” As he described Manchester, she closed her eyes imagining a fairy-tale land of posh houses and fancy cars.
__________________
They had arrived. She stared through the window at the bleak but beautiful landscape of Belmont, its mass of fields packed tight inside blocks of dry stonewalling. She soon became aware that there was no-one about.
“Where are you taking me?”
He touched her knee. It was the first time he had touched her. She moved her leg away and said, “Can we go to Rivington? Everyone will be at Rivington.” She pressed her hands into the seat, holding on tight to its edges.
“Scout Road, my pretty one, is just up here.” He slowed the car down, turning left. It was a steep climb. He manoeuvred the tight bends slowly in second gear. Up past the nothingness of a place she had never been to. On one side there were huge blocks of sand-stone, which had fallen, or had been rolled from wagons too weak for the arduous climb. She dug her nails into the leather seat as she watched the road below them falling, further and further away. The car bonnet seemed to lift up and point to the blue sky. Her nails dug deeper. “Where are you taking me?” she shouted.
“Venga con migo al paraiso.”
“What?” she asked nervously.
“Do not be worried, my Princess, I will take you!”
As they levelled out on Scout Road, her panic subsided. She looked to her left, down onto the tall chimneys and factories of Bolton and the hundreds of heavy grey chains of smoke linking sky and earth. She pin-pointed the mill where she had spent most of her working life, “Langdales!” she shouted. “I can see Langdales!”
He stopped the car on the side of the road. There was a long drop on Kate’s side. “I tell you we would be on top of the world.”
She shielded her eyes. She could see a horse and cart moving further and further away from them in the distance. She turned to her left.
“I can’t get out this side. It must be a ten foot drop!”
She moved her head looking for people, but they were alone. The only movement was from a clump of ferns, green skeletons bobbing from side to side, bumping into each other next to a dry stone wall on the other side of the road.
“Where is everyone?” she asked. “There’s no grass to lay out our picnic!”
“We shall begin our picnic, yes?” He opened the door. A gust of wind tried to lift up her tight skirt. She tugged it down back over her knees.
She tried shouting, “There’s no grass!” The wind grabbed her words before they could reach his ears and carried them over the heathered moors.
He opened the back door, lifting the picnic basket out.
“There’s nowhere to sit” she said.
He leaned over the back seat, whispering in her ear,
“We picnic in the car.”
He stepped out carrying the basket with him, and laid it next to the open front door, unclipping the leather straps. Flipping the lid open, he pulled out a bottle of wine.
Kate leaned over, looking into the basket, “Where’s all the butties?” she asked
“What’s butties? he asked.
“You don’t know anything do you? They are sandwiches. You know, food!”
“Who needs food? When we have love.”
He carefully lifted out two wine glasses, sliding back into the seat next to her, “You like wine, no?”
She took a moment to answer, then she said, “ We have an egg cup on birthdays and Christmas.”
She laughed nervously. “I think it would be better up Rivington, we could lay the rug out and have a chat with everyone . That’s what we do. It’s great. Come on let’s go over there. I don’t like it here.”
Kate tried opening the door, but she realised the drop on her side was…
The only sounds were the wind and the gurgling of wine splashing into the glasses. She hesitated as he handed her the glass, “I’ve never had a full glass of wine before!” She took it, sipped a tiny sip.
“No, no,!” he said. “ In Spain you take a gulp of the wine, like this, no.”
His eyes sparkled. His smile beamed. She gulped a large gulp.
“There,” he said. “that is not so bad.” He moved in close to her, his left arm moving higher up, until it was level with her shoulders. She edged away a little. It didn’t feel right. They should be talking and laughing. He tried to steel a kiss. She gently pushed him away.
He had another drink.
“I don’t think I should drink anymore,” she said apologetically, holding her hand over the top of her glass.
He drew away.
“You are right, I am sorry if I make you feel uncomfortable. We will have no more drink.”
Her hand moved away from her glass. She ran her fingers from thigh to knee tucking in her skirt. “How often do you do demonstrate your dancing?”
He was looking straight at the smoke rising from the chimneys of Bolton, “Friday, and Saturday. No Sundays?”
“Do you go back to Spain – sorry, Doncaster every Monday morning?”
“No, yes, sometimes.”
“What is your mother like?”
“Beautiful.”
“Your sister is a good dancer. Your father must have been a good teacher?”
“Yes.”
Kate looked across the fields and at the two reservoirs holding blocks of sky. She turned to him. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you not talking?”
He held up his bottle of wine, “I pay two pounds for this and you don’t want to drink it. It is a good wine.”
She looked again across the Bolton landscape. He was sulking, wearing a sad puppy look. “Alright,” she said. “But just one glass. I’ve had nothing to eat.”
He filled her glass.
She took a sip, “It’s lovely, honest, but I don’t usually drink, honest, cross my heart”
“You are so beautiful,” he said. She took another gulp, and caught with the corner of her eye the red flags flapping at the entrance of the Army Practice Range. She took another gulp and a warm comfortable feeling began to move through her chest and into her legs. She giggled and he laughed and poured again and then again. Her knees relaxed, parting a little, her shoulders fell, she rested one side of her face on her left shoulder The red flags were waving frantically.
The blustery wind on Scout Road gently rocked the car. His hand moved onto her knee. She went to knock it away but her floppity arm missed it altogether. She tried again but missed again. “Oh my Lord,” she said as his other hand moved onto her breast. She started reciting “Hail Mary Full of Grace….” He came back onto her… Kate tried holding her skirt down but her strength had left her. She lifted her arms in the air, but they somehow fell over his shoulders. As the pink home-made knickers came down she started saying her Confessional……..
Peter Street
1943. Above the One Two Two Paris Night Club…
“ ….Yes, give me five minutes he’s coming up the stairs now”.
She finished her update and quickly packed her Morse transmitter back into the little brown case and then hurried it all under the wooden bar stool sitting at the back of her tiny upstairs bedroom. Down stairs Piaf was singing: Padam Padam. He knocked but didn’t wait for permission to enter the dimly lit bedroom, bare except for a bed, table and chair. She lit two cigarettes and offered him one. He took it. She teased the officer’s hat from his head and cocked it sideways onto her own head. They both undressed; him quicker than her. She was down to her underskirt, when he, just in his underpants, moved the couple of feet towards her. Not saying a word he slot his face between her breast. He looked up to her and smiled. She held his head firm but seductively with one hand while the other was busy pulling the hat-pin in the shape of a dagger from her folded up hair. In one swift movement she rammed the steel hat-pin up into the back of his brain. He dropped instantly.
Summer 1993. 10.30, Monday morning. The thirteen steps to her attic were no problem. She had kept fit, unlike so many of her friends from the war years, who were now long gone. Friends in the village she had moved into one year previous laughed when she said about taking up jogging. Yet somehow they weren’t surprised not even when in1990 she entered the London Marathon. Once was enough though. She finished it. Ok, it took her six hours, but she finished it. Now it’s a mere five miles a day and she thinks herself lucky to be doing that at her age. She headed for the spiral staircase leading up into the attic. Since childhood she had dreamed of having a walk-about attic with a large double window at one end. She never understood why. Her dream had happened. Whatever that was? The attic was the one place she felt safe. It was her place and no-one would ever be allowed to enter. She loved the way a yellow oblong of sun slid along the bare floorboards and then over the wooden table in the centre of the room. It looked like a stage set, especially at night when the lights were on. She also loved standing at the window and giving her best performance to an audience of birds, trees, cows and fields.
She draped her cardigan over a wooden beam, walked over to her CD collection and inserted a Edith Piaf C.D. In seconds she was singing along with the Little Sparrow in perfect French, “Non, je ne regretted rien” She moved across towards her telescope. Soon, she was somewhere in the sky with the lapwings, gliding into the next field where a parliament of magpies was taking place. She scanned this way and that over the hedgerows. She paused the music with the remote control. It was a nightingale singing. She also heard machine-gun like-sounds of woodpeckers. A yellow hammer too was singing, “ A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese.” In a distant field she could just hear tractors going up and down.
There was a sudden explosion in the lane. A car was on fire! She spun her scope to where she saw two men: one was wearing dark blue jeans, and a green jumper. He had red hair and was carrying a Webley revolver. The other man was taller with blonde hair, and wore a boiler suit but apart from that there was nothing distinguishing about him except for the sawn off shot-gun.
Inching the scope to her right she saw a white car, it seemed to be waiting. The driver was bald with a goatee beard. The two men were laughing as they strolled over to the car and handed the driver a black money box like the security firms use. The blonde haired one punched the air.
She noted the white car’s registration X1573 BU on a piece of paper.
She went to the phone box a few yards from her house. “Police!” she said calmly to the operator. “And you’d better send the fire-brigade.
A car has exploded in Brewsters Lane. It’s Miss Hewitt, yes, goodbye.
There was a distant sound of Fire engine and Police cars. A second explosion set the hedge on fire. She went to walk towards the car but changed her mind and made her way back towards her front gate. There was a stench of burning rubber. A plume of smoke was being sucked up into the sky. Kestrels, pigeons,
starlings were flying in panic. Cows in the next field were escaping as far away and as fast as they could . A fox was darting across the field.
The next morning the grandfather clock in the hallway was chiming ten. She checked herself in the mirror, rolled her tongue over her teeth, fiddled with her hair. Outside the door, she winced at the stench of burning, put her hand over her mouth and coughed to clear her throat. She was surprised to see Mr Conroy was digging out that overgrown peony she had often complained about. His cap was crooked over one eye. He straightened up, groaned it was the fourth car that year. She was fixing her hat ready for going out when the sudden screech of motor-bikes doing wheelies up and down the country lane, yards from her garden while pillions shot Roman Candles at Mr Conroy. She phoned the police
It was a Detective Sergeant McCoy who visited her at home. They shook hands. He accepted tea and biscuits. She knew everyone in the village were too scared or too old to do anything about the gangsters and the vandals scourging their once peaceful village life. So she agreed to give all details about the stolen car and the men who destroyed it. If he promised to at least stop those vandals from bullying and wiping dog muck on the old peoples windows. He agreed.
…………..
Sergeant McCoy phoned asking her to go in and identify one of the suspects: a well known ‘wheel-man’. She cycled the four mile round trip. He had offered her a police car. She refused saying she preferred the exercise. Through the one -way glass in the I.D. room she recognised the bald guy with the goatee beard. Under intense questioning, a reduced sentence and guaranteed protection he gave McCoy the rest of the info he needed.
Back home she rested, listened to Piaf singing Padom Padom Mr Conroy was standing near the back door where he could see a royal blue Aga cooker. The patio windows were open. There was a welsh dresser, stacked with Royal Albert “old rose” plates, saucers and large a tea-pot. Next to that was a writing bureau. She invited him into the kitchen where she poured them both a cup of
tea. They sat down on opposite sides of a wooden table. She clipped her white hair back at the sides.
“ One lump or two?”
He asked for two lumps.
There was a loud silence while they blew steam from their cups and sipped their tea.
“ The vegetable patch is looking good,” she said clumsily .
“Is that the French way, growing in circles like that?”
She nodded. He had already gathered she had been brought up in France
by the slight accent and the music she always played. He once caught her dancing around the room to Charles Trenet singing: “Boum”. He never really asked her about France and the war years. He knew from Mrs Jospeth’s, the lady who had the house before Miss Hewit she had been there most of the war. But, he was never one for raking ashes.
They were talking about the designs for the chicken coop when the house phone startled them.
“Yes, this is Miss Hewit.”
Silence. She was gripping her cardigan sleeves.
“I see. Thanks for letting me know.”
He waited for her to say something.
“McCoy assured me they never got bail when it’s armed robbery. He was saying something about questions around the guns, my age and my vision from the distance I was away.”
They sipped their tea in a long difficult silence.
“You were great friends with Mrs Jospeths?”
She was a guest at our wedding: June 4th 1939. The next day I was drafted!”
“Who were you with?”
“I started with the Fusiliers, but finished up as a Chindit in Burma.”
“You, were one of Wingate’s?”
“Yes,”
They sipped more tea and shared more biscuits.
“ How long are they normally on bail for”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She cleared her throat and then asked if he would drive her into town to see a solicitor. She said it was urgent.
They each had their own jobs to do in the morning. So two ‘o’ clock was agreed on.
…….
All the time he was driving he was looking in his mirror, He checked and checked. It was on their way home when he noticed the dark blue Jag following them. When he stopped they stopped. They weren’t very good at this sort of thing. Amateurs he thought.
He asked Miss Hewit if she would take the wheel. He pulled out his large handkerchief and knotted each of the corners. “It’s a long time since I saw that being done,” she said.
“Something’s you never forget.”
She agreed.
She hurried down the house path towards her house. Mr Conroy put the car inside the empty garage then walked out through the back door of the garage. Tyres outside the garden were screeching to a halt. She fiddled for her key. Once inside, she slammed the door shut, locked it. She was running upstairs towards the attic when she heard the front door lock being blasted. There was the sound of heavy boots on the floor boards.
She ran up into the attic locked the door behind her. She hurried over to the left of the room, pulled a portmanteau from out of the shadows, clicked it open and pulled out a small leather case. Inside there was a Morse tapper and a radio receiver. There was a black and white picture of a young man with wavy hair. She kissed the picture,
“Henri,” she said in perfect French. “There is always trouble!”
She riffled through some French papers stamped with a Nazi eagle. She pushed to one side her L’Ordre de la Liberation and her George Cross. She unfolded an oily rag. In front of her was a Luger P08 pistol. She checked it. Then slammed in the full magazine. The gun was pointed to the floor. She moved across the room inserted her Edith Piaf C.D. Someone was trying to kick open the door but they gave up and decided to blast it. She was standing in the centre of the room sideways on.
She wet her lips. The gun felt right in her hand. She remembered it well. He was raising his gun when she pressed the remote control of the C.D. He flicked his eyes over to where Edith Piaf started singing, “Non, je ne regrette rien”.
He jerked back twice as the two bullets hit his chest. Not wanting her rug to be covered in blood she pulled it to one side. She then walked back over to the Portmanteau, clicked out the magazine and returned the gun back into the oily rag and replaced everything in its order.
Outside there was a man with red hair lying face up with a white handkerchief still around his throat. Through the open window she could hear Police sirens.
Peter Street
Chapter 1: Sand
November 1967. Astley Bridge Cemetery.
In the gravediggers’ cabin there were three cemetery workers sitting at the table. All three were pulling hard on Woodbines. The biggest of the three came over, introduced himself: “Arnold.”
His hand completely enclosed mine; his bottom two knuckles were out of line, his wrist bone seemed big. I’d seen this before with the Gaff lads – the fairground workers. He’d been a bare-knuckle fighter.
Rick, the youngest of the three, with the tattoos and Brian Jones hairstyle, nodded from across the table. He leaned forward, took the fag from the guy opposite who had just fallen asleep while talking to Rick, and then he suddenly jerked awake. Soon after he fell back to sleep with another fag in his hand.
One week later I was given my first ever four foot six grave. Rick helped me build the wooden staging at a forty degree slant so the earth would be easier to fill back in. He reassured me about it being easy on the C of E patch.
Easy, until we hit water; three foot later. Rick, to stop me from sinking to wherever, brought me a slate to stand on. Fine, until a rising stench: bodies below hit me with a mixture of sulphur and diarrhoea. It was now a dig in a stinking black porridge.
After pulling on a Woodbine he climbed down the wooden sides to show me how to slant the grave floor and then dig a sump ( a round hole lower than the floor) so the water would drain down into the hole and we could bucket it out from there. Easy, aye, once you know how.
After lunch, he brought three slates to lay over the coffin lid to protect our latest member from the backfill crashing through. Also to safeguard the next digger from dropping in unannounced.
My first ever funeral and everything went perfect. Not only, but the undertaker
gave me a five shillings tip. Rick smiled. Nodded, gave me the thumbs up.
We became close friends. He taught me about keeping safe with wooden sides and head and foot blocks to hold up the graves, especially the very deep ones.
A month later it was my turn for a nine footer: again, down on the Church of England section where he thought there was a good chance of hitting sand. Sand? I thought of Blackpool, sunbathing, donkeys, Punch and Judy. But Rick said for safety, we needed to knock in more wooden sides to stop the flood and stone kerbs from dropping in. Our wooden sides were almost touching each other.
Seven feet down and having a rest when: “Running sand!” Rick shouted. He also shouted across the cemetery for Arnold, who was working nearby.
Running sand. He leaned down to grab my hand. The sand was seeping behind and between our wooden sides down, down to the bottom of the grave where it was beginning to fill up. The wooden sides were starting to creak. I jumped up to grab his hand. Missed it. I tried again. Missed. The sand was gaining, dropping faster than ever; the floor was rising up. Sand was now covering my clogs. I was somehow being pulled down. I held my hands up for Rick to grab me. He wasn’t there. Sand was now up to my ankles.
“Rick!”
The sides were beginning to loosen, slide, creak. I looked up again…..
Sand was pulling my legs further down when Rick slid a nine foot plank down and somehow wedged it solid. Tested it by sliding down on it while holding on to what sides were still holding up the grave. Neither of us spoke. The creaking was giving us louder and louder warnings. Yes, it was going to happen. Calm as best as I could be. Rick grabbed my hand, and started pulling me up while trying to climb up the plank. It wasn’t working.
Calm.
He stayed in the grave with me and while waiting he offered me a Woodbine. We had no lighter – no matches.
Creaking and the speeding sand seemed to have calmed. “Have you ever had one of those days?” he asked.
I tried to smile but couldn’t. Two minutes later Arnold was looking down at us both and tutting the way he did. He undid his leather belt and keeping hold of one end, he threw the other end down for Rick to grab hold of. I grabbed hold of Rick’s wrist and together with the help of the plank, Arnold with those arms and huge hands you could strop a razor on muscled us up and out of that sand.
“Next time you’re going to get yourself in the shit,” Rick said, “can you make sure you have a light?”
I couldn’t say anything. There was a fright and an excitement I had never experienced before. I knew I couldn’t tell Mum. My God, she would’ve freaked and my grave-digging days would be over before they had really started.
The three of us were walking up to the cabin when Arnold took me to one side and out of the blue, “Do you get a warning with your epilepsy?”
I nodded.
“As long as we know.”
That was it. My epilepsy was never mentioned again.
The following day, there was a kiddie’s bucket and spade waiting for me on the bench next to my clogs. I had passed my initiation: I was now a real gravedigger. It was the first time I had ever been tested. In a way it was also a test for them, which they also passed with flying colours. I was now one of them; a gravedigger. For the first time in my life, I felt I was someone. Not only that, but I was now beginning to see the cemetery as some kind of village that had all the occupants of a normal village: police officers, post-workers, pensioners, children, nurses, doctors, soldiers, and with a few cats and dogs thrown in for good measure…
Peter Street
It was Tuesday 8th when Tony died. It was his birthday too. Whoever did it must have had a warped sense of humour. Saying that he would have loved it himself. He was like that. I think it’s why we got on so well. It was his unpredictable sense of humour. We go back a long way. We shared the same school, same teacher and the same desk. We were both five years old when we met on that first day at Holy Infants. From the word go, he called me Ben. I was christened Brian. Everyone else called me Brian. That’s what I mean about there being something different about him. We became inseparable. Sadly, I wasn’t there the night when they, who ever they were, put two bullets in the back of his head. An execution the police called it.
Looking back, he never smiled once that week. For someone who is, was, the life and soul of the party that was quite something. He certainly lived up to his name of “joker.” He really believed a laugh a day kept the doctor away. That was his motto. Maybe one of his jokes, pranks, call it them what you will, backfired
Fun was the way he led his life. He was one of those people everyone got on with….Yet, he must have upset someone. Who? Who or why would anyone want to go and put a couple of bullets through his head is beyond me and that’s what I kept telling the police. Worse still the police didn’t think it was a case of mistaken identity. That was the first thing I asked. No. They were certain he was the target. They went through his house like a dose of salts. Nothing. His bank details were spot on. Everything about him was spot on.
I wondered if it had something to do with those two kids, who him and Charlie Grey caught thieving from the old ladies car. I couldn’t get my head around, how he boasted to all and sundry how he would actually enjoy smashing their fingers to a pulp. That wasn’t like him at all. He deplored violence. Also what frightened me was the way he said, “They’ll think twice before doing an old lady again.”
He had a glint in his eyes and sly smile, the like which I’d never seen before. I kept thinking this wasn’t the boy I grew up with. I blamed Charlie Grey. I told the police as much.
For the last two weeks of his forty five years it was all Charlie this and Charlie that. Yes, they had known each other in nursery, and their mothers had been close. But he’d been off the scene for forty years or so and then he suddenly turns up out of the blue and then very quickly they are best friends. Of course I was jealous. Strange how Tony wished he had a boxers face like Charlie Grey. Me and Tony had known each other for almost forty years. Neither of us had ever been in a bit of bother, in fact we could count the number of fights we’d been involved on one hand.
Fighting wasn’t us, its why I didn’t get this thing he had about wanting ‘A boxers face’ I just didn’t get it. So why, after all those years would he chose Charlie as his best friend? Who looked and acted every bit of the gangster he was. Why did Tony need to be with someone like that?
Sheila, Tony’s wife was the one who found him with his hands tied behind his back. The police think he was shot while kneeling. She’s not stop crying since finding him. Another thing: strange how Charlie, out of the blue had become their next door neighbour and that was just a couple of weeks before the shooting. Sheila said Charlie had been brilliant how he had been supporting her, admitting she couldn’t have got through it on her own.
I never understood why she never phoned me, I was there waiting at the end of the phone for her to contact me; just once would have made me happy. I’ve always been there for her. But Sheila and Charlie went way back well before she met Tony. After she and Charlie finished and before she took up with Tony, I must have asked her half a dozen times without any luck.
I think the reason Charlie came around was to see about getting back with Sheila but she was had been too much involved with Tony. Besides it was far too soon ( if ever) to think of a date . It was so obvious Charlie still held a candle for her from all those years ago. It’s probably the reason why he moved next door to her and Tony. Funny, how just a couple of months after the Tony killing, again on the 8th the same happened: though this time it was Charlie lying there with two bullets in the back of his head.
This time there was no Coppers knocking on the door just big men dressed head to foot in black, bursting twhile shouting, “Police don’t move in.”
A plain clothes one sergeant stepped forward, first intruding himself very politely before holding out a dirty cloth and indicating a gun, the very same gun I’d bought from a man who knew a man.
Thomas Sullivan
The Only Patriot In The Neighborhood
There’s a house under construction across the street from my home in a major west-coast American city. A foundation has been poured and three tall concrete walls rise from the ground. Apart from a few new piles of gravel on the ground and the addition of black tarps to prevent runoff, the site has changed little over time. It’s been largely the same since we moved into our house three months ago.
The crew building the house is an odd assortment of people who show up sporadically to work on the place. Sometimes it’s a sole guy in a battered pickup truck. Other times it’s a dozen or so people spanning in age from around five to fifty years old, both men and women. The tools they use are archaic – a hand operated cement mixer, an ancient conveyor belt that squeals for mercy as gravel is slowly transported up from the curb, a few rusty hand saws. I’ve even seen a child filling up a plastic bucket using a playground shovel.
“How cool is that?” I thought to myself at first, when I surmised that a family was building its own house by hand. But then something disturbing happened. Yesterday I looked out my window and saw a guy wearing knee-protectors kneeling down and rocking his torso down toward the ground and back up again. He did this a few time before I realized something.
HE WAS FACING EAST!
HE WAS PRAYING!
In a flash of insight I realized that the knee-protectors and the tool belt on the guy’s waist were but props. The extended work crew was a sham. I knew exactly what was going on.
THEY WERE BUILDING A WEST-COAST VICTORY MOSQUE!
But they’ve learned to keep things quiet out here and spring it on us unannounced!
I’ve been ruminating on this for seventy-two hours straight, since I can’t sleep. I do have to admit that there are two other possibilities. And both are bad. Given the race of the guy in knee protectors he could be constructing a birth certificate mill for non-white politicians on behalf of liberals (and there are too many out here to count, believe me). Or, equally plausible, he could be building a FEMA camp to imprison Americans on behalf of their government (locating a camp inside the city lowers prisoner transportation costs, and what about those thick, windowless walls?). Whatever it is, it’s obviously a threat.
But I’m not backing down or cowering in fear inside my house like my neighbors, who pretend that nothing is amiss. No siree Bob. I’m taking action. And not just installing a home security system and trading in the cat for an attack dog. I’ve already snuck over to the site with a Garmin and recorded the GPS coordinates. I’ve located the lot on Google Maps and tracked down the Google Street View image. And I’ve sent this info to Homeland Security.
I’m still waiting for the Predator drones to arrive and decimate the site before it can sprout its poisonous roots. I know from what I’ve read that those missiles aren’t nearly as accurate as they claim. One might even incinerate my house with me in it. But I’m prepared to handle that loss.
It’s a very small price to pay for freedom.
The Fishfinder
A fishing community tries to come to terms with the fact that the fish have gone from the sea. One day, a child appears on the shore floating in a little basket. The village folk believe that when he grows up he will have special powers which would allow him to find fish.
They bring him up to be the fishfinder. He grows up learning to point out hoping that one day he will be able to point out where the fish are. But when his time comes he realises he can’t find the fish. Rather than disappointing his people, in the dead of the night he steals the glints from everybody’s eyes and with them he constructs a giant fish, each twinkle forming and scale. The following day when the people get up they see everything blurred. The sharpness of their vision has gone with the stolen glints but they soon feel happy as they see the fishfinder pointing out an enormous fish on the horizon.
Insomnia
I wandered through the streets for I couldn’t tell how long, I only know I went down many streets with dogs barking, many streets with their lamps missing a pane of glass, many streets with cars parked on the pavement with broken windows through which dangling wires could be seen, as if the nerves and veins of a machine had been pulled out, many streets that had nothing to say but houses jumbled together and stuck to each other, with dark eyes and eyelids drooping in wrinkles. I hated my insomnia with all the brutality a man can hate with;
it reminded me of original sin, the punishment received for living, hell, the dark and shelterless world that awaits us beyond death. Only those who suffer from it know what I’m talking about. Insomnia is being so close to the shadow that you recognise its breath, that you feel a sticky, slimy embrace as if the vapours of spirits were sizing you up.
And yet it was in insomnia that my brain discovered unknown places, lived far from my body, thought without my fears and felt free from the sordid problems with which I tormented it in my everyday existence. This was why at first I respected it and kept faith with it, joined forces and played with it; but later I foolishly provoked it, challenged it and suffered a definitive defeat.
I remember the first time well; I hadn’t gone in search of it, as often happens with the best finds; a timely hand, for a reasonable price, held out a fistful of the now unobtainable Dixidrines. This was how I came across this other existence. At the beginning, the experience of the amphetamines and that of the insomnia came mixed together and I wasn’t able to define their borders. I wasn’t even able to work out what it was that I was beginning to enjoy. I took Dixidrine for a while, a flock of us used to gather outside the duty chemist’s to pass off our forged prescriptions. When the authorities got tough on Dixidrine, we went for Portuguese amphetamines. A door had opened that I would never want to close, or at least this was what I thought then.
Little by little, as I made the acquaintance of my secret companion, my secret place, the paradise of wakefulness, I began to discover the tunnels and pathways that led me there without any need for amphetamines. Insomnia had taken hold of me, never again to let go.
Like all friends it offers favours and complicity, shared games, and in the end it also offers servitude and ill-treatment. But it was some time before I found out about the latter. So long as I was dominant – so long as I called for it and it came, so long as I was the boss, the joker, the leader, the one with ideas, the one who seeks out adventures – and it followed me, it was all a great joy for me. I played at being the lover of the seven beds, the shadow of the night, the misty rain, the neighbourhood night-watch, the anaemic, lunatic poet. What did I care about the comments the next day on my appearance, my general scruffiness, my bloodshot eyes, the rings always under them, my uncombed greasy lank hair. I knew I was living two lives – with them, the world, and then again while they were sleeping. I knew I was living twice; what I didn’t suspect was that I was going to have to pay for it. Those were years when I lived as if I’d come across a treasure, a talisman to which few have access, a secret spell. Under its protection I wrote innumerable poems, sketched out ideas and played with words. I became a denizen of the night and of its mysteries, I scrutinized the darkness listening to the sounds of the shadows, learning of their hidden loves, the echoing of their footsteps, their absinthes, their servitudes. Already then I knew the night had other denizens, but I fled only one of them: terror, fear. I can’t remember the first time I felt terror, because I didn’t even allow myself to feel it fully; I knew it occupied a place in the night into which I didn’t want to venture. I trusted that we would respect each other, in the way that cats and I felt mutual respect. Whenever I sensed that fear might be close, I felt a shudder running up my spine, a nail in my soul, and I threw myself at papers, always writing, writing on and on.
But now, with my feet worn down, in these nameless streets of the great metropolis where fear peeps from every window churning my bowels, it does me little good to remember the beginnings of what I considered a discipline, a treasure, which has become the cell that keeps me imprisoned without pity. Now I stumble along, as if lacking the breath of life, as if bearing on my back the heaviest cross that man or Christ has borne, the cross of the eternity of suffering, the cross of infinity, of the bottomless hole, of the endless stairway, of the lockless door – all the nightmares that frighten and disturb one as a child live together inside me. The most pitiless punishment that any man, living or dead, has endured: insomnia.
My rage has now disappeared, now I’m not fighting insomnia, futile attempts are now far distant, getting up to eat cakes, reading dull books … only alcohol had any effect, my other shackle, only by flooding my body with whisky did I achieve results, but I can feel the price I paid in these rotting, failing organs and limbs. Now I move chained to my insomnia; I know I cannot confront it. My tortured feet drag themselves along these streets like old papers blown by the night wind, aimless and desperate. And my bleeding brains groan with every stab of my tyrant’s spurs. I’d like to fall asleep in a corner somewhere, but there is no peace for me.
My eyes have now almost lost the ability to distinguish colours; I live in a world of fog that rises over my feet and tries to choke me in my throat. In the fog I hear a murmuring of voices laughing and joking about in a car. It’s an old Triumph, and on its bonnet it bears bestial warriors, horrifying and murderous, killing and biting each other in fury. The voice of a mad, toothless woman grates against the windows.
‘Bring me that one.’
‘We aren’t enough for you, you old tart,’ a hoarse voice as of someone manhandling his trousers into place.
The car door was flung open and swung on its hinges. A pair of ragged jeans emerges from the door, over battered army boots with steel toecaps, and little by little a greasy body slips from the front seat, until it comes out spluttering menacingly spat words.
‘Hey you. Miriam wants another bang.’
The guy looked me up and down, he had red cheeks with their skin peeling from infections or wretchedness, and his face pierced with studs. His lips, dark and fleshy, dribbled as he glared at me. Greasy arms with a jumble of tattoos. He was glaring at me with a murderous expression and breathing with difficulty. And now the rear door opened and the scratchy voice of a crow with appendicitis could be heard.
‘Come on, Rog, grab him.’
A pair of skinny legs brought out a guy who was filthy from top to toe, and thin with bones about to pop out of his body; he had a half-bottle of vodka in his hand and a tattoo of a snake ran down from his eye to his upper lip. He was leaning on the bonnet to stay upright.
‘Come on, Rog, stick his head into Miriam’s cunt. If there’s room for two there’s room for three.’
At that moment all I wanted was for them to start to beat me up until they left me for dead, for them to pound me with their scabies-ridden fists. I wanted them to smash me to pieces, in my search for that half-death of unconsciousness which would allow me some rest. I remained motionless, defiant, wanting their punches, wanting them to unleash against me all their hatred, all their boundless rage. But Rog, the fat red man, confined himself to grabbing the bottle of vodka and with a swift and precise movement he plugged it into his mouth and drank half of it; he glared at me in silence and climbed into the car without ceasing to glare. The other followed him in a flash, I heard the sound of the doors almost in unison, and with that sound my hopes of finding some rest disappeared.
‘You’re a couple of shit-scared chickens.’
‘Shut up, you whore, you didn’t see anything.’
And then just screeches and blows, words smothered by pressing hands, and jerks of the car. May the dark of the night devour you and steal your souls away, why don’t you make me the victim of your fists? It would be so easy to break a bottle over my head. It would be so easy to give me some respite; any passing pain is more merciful than this walking on, this stumbling on over streets that become concave and convex under my feet.
I have never been fond of cats; you can be certain that I know them well, but we’ve never liked each other, there isn’t room in the night for both of us. With their seven lives they take everything over and leave little space for all the other punished of the shadows. Between them and me there’s a repulsion that comes from long ago. We’ve never accepted each other, and if they hate me as much as I hate their seven lives there isn’t a corner of their hearts that doesn’t suffer from the cancer of hatred. I hate their silence, their measured gait, their feline agility while I stagger on along accursed streets.
When I saw it with its black markings standing still on the pavement, I made myself ready for its leap and its scratches, but contrary to my expectations it didn’t leap and didn’t threaten me from behind, it didn’t cross in front of me indicating the line that I must not go over, it simply walked towards me, as if cats didn’t talk to each other! as if they didn’t communicate and tell each other about me! rashly it didn’t respect our law of hatred and didn’t keep its distance. With that false mask of innocence it came towards me, silently, and before I noticed, it had walked through my legs. My senses betray me to such an extent and such is cats’ art of walking that I didn’t notice. I cursed my body, my punishment, my dragging myself along, and with every effort I could manage I plodded on.
A shape in the background, a shape that’s moving, what I’m afraid of doesn’t move, I don’t know what it is but it doesn’t move. A hand covered with scabs clutches sheets of newspaper and tugs at them; nothing so human can harm me, I hear a groan, a groan uttered without strength and without breath, the faltering hand pulls at more sheets, a pool of blood, and the cough of somebody with no lungs, who has had them torn out by a bad life or by a bad illness. A ragged hat covered him down to his grey beard and all that could be half-heard was a stream of sounds that dropped on to his bloodied belly. He became aware of my presence but didn’t look up, and went on talking to his wounded gut.
‘I know you’re there, you can walk straight past if you like, nobody can see you. But you can also free me from this torment a villain has left me in, all for a bottle of spirits – you can win a place in heaven, my friend.’
He rambled on like this, with the pride of wretches begging for pity, full of themselves and boasting of their bad luck, as if he thought he had a right to something, even to be heard. If I stopped it wasn’t because of him, he can be certain of that; if I stopped, it’s because something took it upon itself to tear my lungs out too – if only it had torn my life out! I decided to take in some air sitting on a box in front of him.
‘Have you ever done anything for anyone? Hey … you pigheaded old fool, have you ever given anything for nothing? You’ve got the chance to save yourself from eternal damnation: see these guts slipping out of me, give them a pull, give them a pull and I’ll be left here to be carted off by the dustmen; I don’t want crosses, I don’t even want anything sheltering my corpse; I don’t want to have dead what I never had alive; I want gulls and rats to share out my body. Hey, friend, have you ever done anything for anyone? You loner. Maybe it’s your last chance to save your soul.’
How can he beg me for pity, that scratched record of pain; I’d be happy to pull his guts out but only so he’d shut up, so as not to hear that stupid sermon from someone who thinks he has the right to spit his woes into others’ faces. The wretch has no right to complain, his agony isn’t as slow as mine.
‘Pull my guts out, don’t leave me lying here like this.’
Let him lie there half-dead, soon he’ll be somewhere more restful than where I am, and may it rot his soul, the lucky bastard.
I sensed the presence of light very close, reflected in the windows of the houses. As I crossed towards the bright street, a bent-over body came clattering out of a house, and it held a little boy by the hand. It was an old woman in a wig and a shiny skirt.
‘Come here, come to carnal Victoria’s arms.’
And so saying she lifted her skirts, revealing flaccid white legs that seemed to be hooked on to her hip bones with wires. One of her shoes fell off, the little lad bent down to put it back on and she whacked him behind the ear.
‘Stay where you are, you cheeky sod, trying to get a look at my knickers.’
As she leaned over her wig slipped off, revealing a red scalp with a few dead hairs.
‘Come and have some fun, don’t go getting into trouble with any old tart; carnal Victoria awaits you with open arms.’
And there, in the midst of that squalor of broken streets, serving as dens for semihumans with one foot in the grave, there opened up before me a great avenue the existence of which I’d never suspected before. I’d never seen anything like it, and yet it was familiar to me; it was stored away somewhere in my treacherous mind; it’s possible I’d seen it before, but hadn’t noticed it. There were beacons burning or a fire that had set the trees on either side aflame, it gave out a light that flickered and yet was constant, agonizing.
‘Where are you going, you devil, Victoria’s waiting for you.’
Suddenly I was able to forget my tiredness, and I walked on without hurrying. At the end of the avenue there was a great building with innumerable stairs leading up to it. It looked like Lámego cathedral, by the River Douro, where the faithful climb the stone steps on their knees, in search of a cure from Nosa Señora dos Remedios.
As I walked along, I could hear the sound of the wind humming through the burnt branches. It was a dark wind, promising bad luck. After walking like this for a while, I turned round and the old madwoman was still at the other end of the street waving her arms and tottering on her ungainly high heels, not daring to follow me. I had known terror; I had always found a way to lay a false trail for it, but today it had found me, it had heard me breathing and followed me, and, enclosing me in its trap, cornered me in this street of monsters amid the fire. This street that’s closing behind me to stop me from turning back. Victoria’s shouts could no longer be heard, a silence of flames crackling as they devour the sap of crucified trees. A silence that’s added to more silence and more silence and more silence until it explodes in your ears. A silence that hurts the ears more than the most anguishing of screams. A silence that is never quiet. I wish I could fall on my knees and pray gazing at my intertwined hands that plead to God, but what prayer could I say? There can’t be any prayer that would come to me, there are no sacred words in my mouth that can distance me from my enemy. Fear dominates me and there cannot be any cry that will stop it.
Suddenly I heard shrill screams: a burning vixen comes out from the left, writhes on the ground and walks on dragging one of its front legs, pushing itself forward with all its strength, its jaw pressed to the ground. It falls on its back and lies in the middle of the street, its teeth grinding and its legs stiffening. I walk on and avoid its rigid, burnt body. I no longer dare look back, because I feel infernal eyes eying me from every side and tongues of smoke licking my body, as if these tongues of smoke and gusts of air bore sticky mouths dirtying me with poisonous saliva. I would have liked to sit down and weep, to press a button and make everything stop, to wake up from a nightmare, but I knew that only he who sleeps can have nightmares. I can’t have nightmares, because I live twice, I live all the time while others sleep; I’m always awake, I’m always like this. There’s no other world to escape to, I haven’t any rest, any repose. All I have is fear, fear of living so much. Fear of living without a break, fear that gnaws at my bowels, fear that comes in through my mouth and drips from my ears. That is my fear, it is now that I feel it, it is now that it has found me or I have discovered it in its true form. In its endless form, in its formless eternal form.
A line of columns indicates the way to the building; they are clumsily carved with grotesque heads, with protruding tongues bitten by animals. Martyrs occupy the upper part of the columns and their heads with their spreading manes of hair form the capitals. My breath stuck in my throat when I saw that their vestments were fluttering in the wind; I walked on still staring at those fabrics, trying to discover whether it was a trick of the light, until I slipped on a puddle that had appeared. As I fell I could see the thick red colour of the blood, I looked at my smeared hands and observed that the blood was dripping from a martyr and that a lion had broken his neck with a blow of its paw. I coughed out my swallowed tears, I sat down, I wanted to get away; none of this could be true, fear couldn’t be so cruel. Nothing human or inhuman could treat me like this. Nobody could hate me so much.
A saint I wasn’t able to recognize, pierced by three arrows, an eagle pecking at his soul,
had a leg dangling loosely. A blast of cold air hit me in the face, which I didn’t understand, surrounded by so many flames. And I realized that it came from the intensely white light of the immaculate building; I began to climb and the silence and the light and the cold became more and more powerful. I thought for a moment about going up the steps on my knees, the final penitence, but there was something inside me saying it was all useless now. I didn’t know what was at the top, I didn’t know what was inside that light, but I felt that there, behind that wall of light shining more intensely than moonlight, was something that was waiting for me. I climbed like someone crossing a desert without water, I climbed like someone running away from himself, I climbed to what I sensed was my fall. On reaching the top I didn’t look back, I only wanted to know what had brought me here, why was I here? what was behind those shining doors, behind those infernos of light? As I walked through a door that opened at my approach the light enveloped me, and surrounded with an aura all my moving limbs. At the entrance there was a counter, long corridors with tiled floors and white walls stretched out on either side and before me. I went up to what seemed to be the reception desk, and there I saw, written at the bottom of the list, my name. A shudder ran through my bones and I looked all around for someone to answer all the questions I had in my mouth.
From the rooms came cries of people dying, and, as I walked down the central corridor, I saw bodies on beds with tubes going into their noses and into their arms. At the end of the corridor there was a glass door; I walked on towards it thinking that there I might find the meaning of everything that was happening to me. Something like a dull murmuring could be heard. I opened the door and there was a group of people beneath a lamp hanging from the ceiling. They weren’t moving and some seemed to be praying under their breath. As I came closer I began to feel a cold sweat all over my body, my mouth was drying up, and my face was smeared with blood and dried tears. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I didn’t want to believe, I knew the people there, they were people I’d loved before I fell into the infernal abyss I’ve been in for the last years of my – life? I approached them, I coughed so they could hear me, but nobody turned round, they were concentrating on their prayers. There was a man in an operating mask and a blood-smeared gown, I looked him in the face, and I’m sure he looked at me, but he didn’t bother to tell the others. It’s me, it’s just that you don’t recognize me. I touched my last wife on the shoulder: what was she doing there crying with
all the others? I came up closer to see the centre of attention. It wasn’t very easy to reach the centre except by pushing and there was no moving them. I could see feet hanging from the bed, whoever it was lying there had a broken nail on the broken big toe of his right foot just like me. When a nurse walked away I took my chance to get close to his face. And there with a tube going into its nose was my motionless body. My chest had been cut open and I
was swimming in blood. Suddenly the surgeon covered the body with a sheet.
‘We did what we could,’ he said taking off his mask.
What did those wretches mean, they’d done what they could? I was still there. They couldn’t be going to bury that body without me. If my body is dead, I want them to bury me with it. I want to be dead as well. They can’t be going to leave me here. I don’t want to live any more. A nurse came in and took away the bed with the dead body on it, with my dead body on it; damn them, they can’t be going to leave me here; and they call themselves my loved ones. Those present watched them go through the door performing the rite of death. But as for me, now I understand fear, now I understand why it waited, made ready for me the cruellest and most perfect of revenges. Fortunate those who fear death, for their fear will come to an end when the Holy Lady of the Scythe covers them with her cloak, but … what is left for me? I shall not find rest even in death. I shall continue walking, walking, living twice without respite, trying in vain to get through the lockless door, falling into the bottomless abyss, climbing the endless stairway. Bearing on my back the heaviest of crosses, the cross of eternal life.
included in From the Beginning of the Sea – An Anthology of Contemporary Galician Short Stories (Foreign Demand, 2008 – visit http://foreigndemand.net/ for more information and how to order a copy).
Papa’s Chair
‘Everything ready?’
‘I think so… something’s bound to get left behind, however much we rack our brains now.’
‘Buckets, spades, cool bag full of fruit, towels, sun creams, credit cards, maps, OK, OK, let’s be off.’
It’d been a long week, but it was worth waiting for Sunday. We were going to have a real beach day. The kids were unbearable, but they were on the back seat. The kids are always unbearable, even more so when they’re going to the beach. But their mother was keeping them in line. And so I could concentrate on my steering-wheel, my road, and on we went.
I liked taking my lot to the beach. It was good to see them enjoying themselves. The missus would spread the towel and lay there sprawled out to act as a landing-strip for solar waves, in spite of everything she’s been told about that skin cancer business. I’d put my little dogs-that-bite-the-hand-that-feeds-them, Nico and Laura, down on the sand, they’d make castles, knock them over, throw sandballs at each other, cry, go in the water, cry, some of the sandballs would come our way, you’d shout at them, they’d cry again, and finally they’d come crying to look in the lunch-boxes for something to eat. It was like a film you’ve seen a thousand and one times, so by now you know the ending off by heart, yet at the same time it was unexpected. Oh you’re crying, surprise surprise! The missus, red as a lobster, would point at the basket
and carry on sunbathing.
As for me, in situations like this I was one of the happiest of men, sitting in my deck-chair,
in my untouchable deck-chair. I’d spend hours like that, reading the newspaper, in my straw hat, sitting listening to the football scores. You break your back working all week, because shifting bricks isn’t child’s play, sometimes I even do overtime, it isn’t easy to make ends meet, it’s these hard times we’ve been born into, damn blast and bugger it, but once the weekend comes, if there’s one thing everyone knows it’s that Papa’s chair is Papa’s chair. My deck-chair, it’s much more than a contraption to sit in, it’s the reminder that Papa needs to be treated nicely every so often. To enjoy the occasional privilege, that’s why he’s Papa. And it’s a symbol of my authority, too, I’m the head of the household and that’s clear from Papa’s chair. The affairs of this life require a certain order, some hierarchy. Papa’s chair is the throne, it’s the centre of a beach day.
This time we weren’t going by ourselves – my wife, Rosa, she’s a right chatterbox, she’d made friends with a lady doctor who was married to a gentleman doctor and they’d just had a beautiful baby girl. And how did they meet? This is a fundamental question if you live in Britain, in other words how the wife of let’s call him a ‘layer of bricks’ can become the friend of a lady doctor married to a gentleman doctor. Easy, the lady doctor’s the health visitor at a school where my wife’s a dinner lady. And since they both like a good chat, they got on well, and the latest bright idea they’ve come up with is that people ought to fraternize and go to the beach together, so I, the brick-master, had to make conversation with the syringe-master.
We lived in the East End of London, not a bad place if you’re working class. Most of the Galician emigrants had taken it into their heads to live in the north-west, infected perhaps by some geographical virus that took them from the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula to the north-west of London. I’d laid my hat there, too, for the first few years, but then I moved to the east in search of cheap housing and building work. At first I’d lived in the Notting Hill Gate area, Portobello – round there Latin Americans, Spaniards, blacks from the West Indies, Galicians, Portuguese all did all right, it’s as if someone had put a little bit of each of us into a blender and after a good blend the result was the area around Notting Hill Gate. It wasn’t bad there, it was a good place for making contacts and switching jobs, and for getting produce and news from home. Lots of Galicians were living there for good, others weren’t.
When me and Rosa decided to put a proper roof over our heads, we thought it was a good moment for a change of air. Those were the golden years for the housing market, Señora Margarita had made up her mind that every English family mustn’t be content just to have a roof over its heads, but must own it too. The state offered tax reductions to encourage people to buy houses, and the market exploded. That was when I turned up in the East End.
I did all right in that neighbourhood. There was a gang of us doing up houses, we’d buy houses that needed refurbishing, and after working on them for no more than a fortnight they were up for sale again. We weren’t living in the golden age of the building industry, but you got by. My gang were reliable, two Pakistanis and a bloke from Albacete, Hussain, Hussain and Joseín, but we called him Alba to avoid confusion.
From the East End we had to drive further into London to pick up the doctors in Kentish Town; this was because Johni, the syringe-master, knew the way to some empty beaches. Johni and Crisi were still at the stage of drooling over their newborn little girl. They’d soon get over it, when the sleepy hours begin to build up, goodbye pub, goodbye peace and quiet, but as yet they were still on their honeymoon, let them be. This gaga stage can last for up to a fortnight. To be honest, there isn’t a better age – sucking, sleeping and shitting. They don’t ask questions about sex yet, that’s the critical moment. But Johni and Crisi still had a few nappies to change in the meantime. Why spoil the festa for them?
I’d assumed they wouldn’t be waiting for us at their front door. Cristina was breast-feeding the baby, and mister doctor was having a stretch after a short nap. He’d been on duty for seventy-two hours. Is that possible? More or less, every so often you have a snooze. I hope it isn’t while you’re at work with your scalpel.
My little animals went and sat down and started looking for something to break. Rosa, with all her long experience, went upstairs to give advice, and Johni took me outside to show me a dent in his car. It hadn’t worked properly ever since it got the dent, anyway they’d been thinking about trading it in for some time now. They had a new house, they’d just had a baby, and they were going to buy a new car. I wouldn’t mind being a doctor. The car doesn’t work, so get yourself a new one. The house is getting too small, well then let’s buy a bigger one. We were behind the schedule I had in mind, but I tried to calm down because it was clear it was going to take even longer. He went back to the seventy-two hours.
‘Is seventy-two hours possible?’
‘What would you all say to a good breakfast… there’s nothing like a good breakfast… to start the day.’
Eleven in the morning and the syringe-master is taking his breakfast. Breakfast for everyone, sausages, bacon, beans, toast and fried eggs, lend me a hand over here and a hand over there. Da-dah! – the house of plenty. Look what a lovely little girl, and aren’t your children good eaters. I hope he doesn’t think I’m starving them. My children will eat a horse if they’re given the chance, specially in other people’s houses to make us look poor. And what a big house, lots of room for them, for the baby, for their guests, for the toys, and a room for ironing in, and for the children that God sends. Who wouldn’t, working seventy-two hours?
We’d left home at ten, and at twelve on the dot Johni was wiping his mouth with a serviette. I hope he doesn’t want to have a sesta. Rosiña was trotting up and down the stairs all excited. When women smell nappies full of baby shit they all go crazy. Not me – as far as I’m concerned shit is shit, whether it’s baby shit or not, and the only effect it has on me is to make me feel like going out into the garden for a breath of fresh air and a fag. Time was going by. Johni had said on the phone that in less than an hour we’d be out of London and dipping our toes into the water. He must have been talking about the water in his cistern. At exactly three o’clock in the afternoon, give or take a minute or two, we were in the middle of a motorway, surrounded by other motorways, dual carriageways and everything connected with cars in any ways at all. Rosa was telling me we had to bear with them, they’d just had a baby.
Johni got out of the car, rubbed his head and said his mother had been told that driving north-east you couldn’t go wrong, there were plenty of empty beaches, do you mind waiting a bit for Crisi to breast-feed the baby?
Of course we don’t mind, it’s only Sunday, the day I’ve been waiting for all week to go to the beach. Of course we don’t mind! Not only didn’t we mind, we even parked our cars in one of those motorway services and I crossed the line I never should have crossed. I did what until then I had never done, I set foot in one of those McBollocks. I wasn’t disappointed. It was what I’d always imagined – after your last bite you were as hungry as on your first nibble. That stuff was bread and air, mustard, and tomato sauce without tomato. The coca-colas were large, true, but they were full of air bubbles as well, and they weren’t giving them away either. What a Sunday. Mister doctor, who had a new house, a new baby, who worked seventy-two hours on the trot and who would soon have a new car, left his credit cards in his car, so muggins here paid the bill.
Finally we were on the motorway again, driving towards some wonderful empty beaches someone had told Johni’s mother about, and she had told Johni about, and Johni had told us were over towards the north-east. My little kiddiwinks were getting rowdier and rowdier and Rosa’s shouting had stopped having any effect. We came off the motorway and drove down a side road trying to follow that hazy thing called north-east. I was at the end of my tether. I felt like smashing the steering-wheel so as not to smash somebody’s head in, and soon Johni flashed his indicator to stop at a petrol station.
A couple of characters on a motor bike answered our questions, exchanging astonished, blank looks. In the end they gave us the directions. This time I pulled out in front and told Johni to follow me.
We went down a country lane. We drove through a small town and carried on to where they’d directed us. There were fewer and fewer houses and there were meadows stretching out on either side of the lane. In the distance you could make out a huge grey building right by the side of the sea. The lane was narrow and at the end of it you had to stop in a car park. As soon as we began to get out we noticed that an intense humming was coming from the building. Johni got out of his car and asked if we’d read the notice, it’s a nuclear power station.
Some people were walking towards the only other car parked there. They got in and drove away. We were about to take the things out of the car and wondering what you did in situations like this. It was four in the afternoon, it wasn’t as if you could get back in the car and go looking for another empty beach. We decided to head for the beach.
By the car park there was a very neat and tidy garden that you had to walk through to get to the beach. A little notice said the garden had been created courtesy of the nuclear power station company. The garden had fencing all around, streams with little stepping stones ran through it. It all seemed sort of very natural, like those highly natural parks where they take city children so they can find out about nature. Nativity-scene nature, with grass, little streams, stones, bridges with wooden railings, all very natural, you see, but without any bramble-patches, cow-pats or horseflies. The fact is the garden suited the nuclear power station and the nuclear power station suited the garden. If we’d been in an art gallery, looking at a picture, it’d doubtless have been called a still life, and if it wasn’t still it’d have to be stilled.
Each of these thoughts or similar ones must have been going through all our heads because nobody said a word, even my little scallywags weren’t kicking each other. There was the sense of a lunar landscape about it, of plastic surgery, of science fiction, of fish fingers, it was as if something was missing but there was too much of something else, yet at the same time it was a perfectly balanced landscape. The humming wasn’t loud, it was within the bounds of what the human ear could stand. In this it was very respectful, too, like the natural garden. We ourselves were becoming a part of the balance, walking along with our stuff towards the beach, all so tiny beside the huge building.
I’d never seen anything like it. I never thought such a place could exist. Yet it brought back memories. It brought back memories of science-fiction films from the sixties. Some scientists are going through the jungle and suddenly what looked like a tree-trunk turns out to be the leg of a giant bird. It brought back memories of a picture by Castelao they’d taken to the Centro Galego, where a man like a tiny little dot was walking along a beach and this side of the beach there were some enormously tall pine trees. I felt just as tiny. A tiny shadow in the middle of a perfect world; it was as if we’d passed through an invisible veil to enter a landscape imagined by somebody.
We were all too astonished looking around us to talk or complain about the long trip. The beach was deserted. It was the beach with the finest sand I’d ever seen in these islands. It was nothing like the black pebble beaches in the south of Scotland, or the shingle beaches in the south of England. It formed a kind of cove and it was sheltered. The water was crystal clear and with little waves like when the northeasterly’s blowing in the Ria de Noia and it feels like a cold knife is cutting through your ankles.
We were all on the sand still holding our stuff, but nobody knew exactly what to do. Crisi sat down on the sand with the baby in her arms, and Johni sat at her side. I looked at my lot and waved my arms as if to say what are you waiting for, but my gesture wasn’t very convincing, and I didn’t send out any words of encouragement with it, either. Then I left my things on the sand and Rosa and the children dropped their stuff too. We were slowly taking our shoes off, spreading our towels out, all looking at each other as if afraid that suddenly the others would run away and you’d be left there alone.
Crisi and Johni sat a little apart with the baby. In the end I said, ‘What are we waiting for, we’re on the beach.’ My little monsters were a bit nervous, they seemed to want to scratch as if they had some illness, but they didn’t dare move away, either, to start throwing sandballs. I opened my chair and sat down, and Rosa stretched out on her towel. The children edged their way towards the water without taking their eyes off us. And Johni and Crisi seemed to be immersed in their new love that looked like a fig.
I was trying to concentrate on reading the paper, but I couldn’t get through a single item of news. Every so often I’d look up from the paper, to look around, to check that it was all real, that things were as I’d seen them the first time, that it was true. The humming was almost inaudible, you had to stop and listen hard to notice it was there. Rosa was tossing and turning on her towel. I decided to get up and go and see if there was a notice saying that this beach was not for public use. As soon as I put my sandals on my little monkeys came running to ask where I was going, they were afraid I was about to leave without them, and I persuaded them to stay put. I left the sand. There was a footpath parallel to the beach, but I couldn’t see any way to the road we’d come along. There was just a path that led to a farmhouse close to the road.
I sat on the slope to look around. A tractor was driving across the fields and turning on sprinklers that began to spray water in great circles. On the path we’d come down, which seemed to be the only path to the beach, there wasn’t any warning sign. There wasn’t any sign at all that we were in danger, if you ignored that humming, and the grey monster and the loneliness of the solitary beach.
I went back to my lot, to tell them there wasn’t any need to be worried. I went slowly, walking on a grass so green I couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like it before. When I got to the beach they were all standing there, in their clothes, waiting for me, in order to leave. Nobody was saying anything, as if everybody was waiting for somebody to say what they all wanted to say. Something like ‘let’s go’. Johni and Crisi were doing some sort of little dance around their daughter that looked like a sultana. They had come to the beach, they had sat down and they would leave, as if something was pulling them. They didn’t seem to know where we were, or where we’d come from, or where we were going. I wasn’t angry, not that I didn’t have good reason, but I wasn’t in any state to get angry with anything or anyone.
It was a strange situation and a strange place, there was something too much and something missing. And that something too much was exactly what was missing. It was like a beach day without a beach. It was like enjoying something that gives no pleasure. Like sitting on a beach-ball without any ball. There was a not very intense hum, the loneliness of a beach, some extremely green grass, a park too much like a park, and a couple too much like doctors, with a new house, a new daughter, and soon a new car.
Before I realized it we were all sitting in the car. We all felt some sort of relief, seeing we were putting more and more kilometres behind us. For the first time all day I’d noticed the existence of a landscape. It was on both sides of the road. Everything seemed like a dream. Nothing had happened, really. Papa’s chair! It had been left on the beach. Nobody had picked it up. All alone, gazing at the solitary beach. With a man sitting in it, invisible, non-existent. Without any man to sit in it. Without me. The headlights of the oncoming cars were more and more intense and insolent and their horns were more and more strident and Papa’s chair had been left on the beach. A tenth of a second of silence and light. All I could feel was that I was falling upwards into emptiness, as if the force of gravity was laughing at me. All the organs in my body thudded against my ribcage.
By the sides of my ears everyone was screaming and crying. They were all dear voices that fled and hid as if slipping away through secret caves and footpaths and then re-emerged to explode again, thousands of glass splinters embedding themselves in my brain.
And then it all ended. It all finished. No more noise. Absolute silence. I sense that I exist and that my dear ones are somewhere close to me, I can sense them as if they were my own flesh. I exist and we exist in some kind of state or essence. But no part of me moves. Neither I nor my thoughts seem to have any third dimension. All is absolute and cold rigidity. There’s a bench in front of me, and every so often someone sits down and looks at me thoughtfully. Sometimes groups of people come up, sometimes people come one by one. You can see they’re people of different races, and many of them have cameras hanging from their necks. They come to look from close up and then they move away with a finger on their lips, thoughtful, and look from a little further off. Others don’t, others walk straight past, and look all around. They look at the many pictures in the room and ignore me.
included in From the Beginning of the Sea – An Anthology of Contemporary Galician Short Stories (Foreign Demand, 2008 – visit http://foreigndemand.net/ for more information and how to order a copy).
Lost?
Screeching electronic hum; sunflowers tremble but the air is still. Blue skies move like ice flows over the earth. Can anyone hear them move like an old man to his breakfast? Dreamy sunbeams rouse me. I have to go see the trees. They will know where I’ve been and how to find it again. I follow a proud highway to the days end.
I had a child once or maybe just a toy. Can I never really know? Among the fur and larch I ask to be known, but no. Only the willow answers in weepy tones. It had a mother once that I could not be. So the weepy child could not help me. Lost among the trees a cherry blossom found me; and it whispered of the sea. Must I speak to the reeds; can they help find me?
Clanging metal and machinery; the wind blows but the sunflowers remain still. The clouds whip past me in a strange locomotion and the sun disappears. Shall I die? Back to light I can not move when it is night. The beasties of my mind play by night, where evil thieves might find them.
Mr. Aronoffsky standing by the street gave me an apple that made me bleed. He set them up to steal me. I went another direction to the trees and then to the seas. I left behind the peopled streets. Suburban houses all ablaze; so bright and shiny new. Mr. Aronoffsky cries. I loved the bastard and his lies. He could not find the places I’d left behind.
Hissing static and electro-shock; the flowers have all burned to dust. Purple skies of summer time shake the earth. Is this it? Women smiling speeding by; I could have them anytime.
By the sea the reeds sing. I can not hear them; deafened by surging power. I see the drift wood in the sea. It is like me. It will never know where it’s been or what it is to be free. It like me is forever trapped by the sea.
Journeying all alone; I’m a rouge air balloon in the sky. Where did I go? Where have I been? I sit alone by the sea. I can’t find my way or where I have been. My life passes by beneath the wheels of a machine.
A Drift
There is a room; this room is gray and dimly lit. The edges of the room seem obscured by darkness. A woman sits alone on a dark colored sofa. Her knees locked closely together with her hands laying in her lap, right over left.
The woman’s face is hidden by shadow and thick disheveled hair. She does not move just sits there looking grayer than her surroundings. Slowly ever so slowly she slides her left hand from beneath her right and places it on top. What little light there is, quivers as if in a power surge and then she is lost into blackness.
~ ~
A gray man shuffles down a long seemingly endless hallway full of windows and doors. Everything looks as though it is under water, as faint ripples of light undulates over the walls. The man’s shuffling stops and he turns toward one of the outlets in the hallway, it is neither a door nor a window, just an opening filled with blinding white light. The man is gone.
~ ~
Now the man’s face lays tilted to one side distorted by a sheet of translucent plastic. Breathing heavily he smiles and his face contorts with laughter. Heaving raucous laughter, he stares ahead out the corners of his eyes. The man’s face disappears in a fog of heavy breaths.
~ ~
Condensation rolls down the auburn haired girl’s window pane. Outside the sky is cloudy and gray. One of her pale delicate fingers traces spirals and curves over the misted glass. Her rich auburn hair stands out against the glass as she stares blankly at the sky and hums some sweet sorrowful lilt.
Without warning the auburn haired girl screeches and slams her fist through the window. Her hand is bleeding and she laughs pathetically as tears roll down her cheeks. Little red droplets of her blood speckle the window frame and then are smudged by the falling rain.
~ ~
It is a sunny breezy day as the auburn haired girl, dressed in a red and white polka dotted dress, swaggers along a sidewalk of her green tree lined university campus. Her red M.O.D. sandals click and crackle on the concrete as she approaches a large brick class room building.
Inside she sits in the back of the vast lecture hall. The professor, a ‘Wall Street Cowboy’ in his three piece suit and boots, scrawls notes across the dry erase board. The class would progress as usual for everyone except for the auburn haired girl. The sound of her professor’s lecture would be muted and the sight over shadowed by something else.
The auburn haired girl saw, as if projected like some old home movie, bodies writhing and pulling at each other crammed in the back of a car. The man’s body is tense and thrusting with arms tied around his body, steam covers the windows as legs tightly encircle him. Translucent and jittery the lust and animalism intensifies.
The film in her mind’s eye is unduly switched off by the slam of a door. All the students have vacated and the professor is packing away his things. She does not move until his duster is on. Then she quickly escapes out the back door. Bright sun light fills her eyes and she is blind.
~ ~
Red M.O.D. platforms crunch against broken glass on the wet tarmac and a cigarette extinguishes itself in a puddle. The night is cool and breezy; music from the bar nearby fills the air. The parking lot reflects neon colors out into the night.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl sits among techno beats and pulsing smoke filled colored lights. She is alone lost to this place, but she is not all at the same time. People sway and twist all around her to trance harmonies. Across from her two figures sit staring at her their mouths moving but she can not hear them. There is no sound to be heard, other than the droning of the techno music.
The couple seems strangely familiar and altogether foreign. One male one female: both with long dark hair clouding their faces; both are thin, pale, and dressed in black. Their body’s are still but their mouths move feverously to no avail; she can not hear them. The auburn haired girl screams and screams to these figure but they do not stop or alter their position. Her screams like their words are muted by the thunderous music.
She tries to leave to run away but she can not stand. Her body feels as though it were strapped in place. The more she fights to leave the more these figures mouth words with no meaning. Soon moving as one they descend upon her, still chattering noiselessly. Closer and closer the blank faces with ceaseless lips move to her face their hands out stretched to touch her. She is falling, falling to blackness the music fades as do the images of colored lights and swaying figures.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl’s knees and palms ache as they dig in to the pavement. Rocks and debris cut her tender flesh. Her purse and shoes fall out from within a stylish black car. When the door to the black car shuts it nearly hits her; as she is crouched down on all fours just outside it. With a roar, the gagging taste of toxic fumes and red tail lights the black car disappears into the night.
Her red M.O.D. platforms crunch against broken glass on the wet pavement as she drops her latest cigarette in a puddle. The night is cool and breezy and music from the bar in front of her fills the air. The parking lot’s wet sheen reflects neon colored light into the night sky.
The auburn haired girl feels sick as she lights another cigarette. She disappears into the night, into a bar, into a bottle, into herself. She is gone for awhile, but will soon return to click her platforms along the pavement once again.
~ ~
Little red droplets of her blood speckle the window frame and are smudged by the falling rain. She stares blankly at the sky and hums some sweet sorrowful tune. Pale delicate fingers trace swirls in the watery blood on the window sill. The words “Trust me” and “You’re special” drifts in and out of her mind. She screeches then laughs pathetically as tears stream down her face.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl sits stirring her coffee smiling. She and some friends sit talking and laughing in a very urban coffee house. The sponge painted and mural covered walls echo the nasal acoustics of spoken word poetry. The air is light and filled with the scent of coffee and vanilla. The auburn haired girl’s face is alight; she looked like the fresco of an angel painted centuries ago.
Abruptly her face is drawn and blank her angelic light gone. She immediately stands and rushes away from the table, so suddenly that coffee spills all over. One moment she is there standing in the door looking back at the jovial café the next she is gone into the lonely night.
~ ~
Alone in a gray room the auburn girl sits alone. Everything is so very dark in this little room, and she sits there in this darkness staring at the wall ahead of her. Her hands lay cupped in her lap. Within her hands is something small, shapeless, and far blacker than the darkest corner of this little gray room. A lone ceiling fan moves in this place; whooshing and creaking as it oscillates above her head.
Flashlight beams pierce the blackness of her little room. The light cuts in and out of the darkness as it moves along the windows at her back. With the fleeting beams of light comes in distinct mumbled voices; happy then furious, but all mingled with nervous laughter. The voices stay chattering in her head long after the searching flashlight has disappeared. She clenches her fist and what she held there oozes like blood from between her fingers. The murkiness all around her seems to tremble and then she is gone.
~ ~
Red M.O.D. platforms crunch against broken glass on the wet tarmac and a cigarette extinguishes itself in a puddle. The night is cool and breezy music from a bar fills the air. The parking lot reflects neon colors into the blacked out sky. Small amounts of blood trickle from her scraped knees. Her palms ache and feel bruised as she lights her lighter. Water splashes beneath her feet as she is enveloped in the head lights of a passing car.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl strolls lazily around her university campus, it is a beautiful day. The sun is warm and high in the sky. She takes off her sandals to walk barefoot in the grass; but her childlike fancy is interrupted by the intrusion of another.
~ ~
Staring faces pressed and distorted beneath translucent plastic leer eagerly out the sides of their eyes. Crude lascivious smiles creep across their knotted faces. Both mouths open, their eyes are wild as they mime laughter or maybe even screams. Condensation collects on the plastic obscuring there mouths, but it leaves the bulging crazed eyes to stare for a long while before they too disappear.
~ ~
The police officer saunters around the property scanning the area with his flashlight. The auburn haired girl stands a distance behind him making apologies for dragging him out so late at night. He is sweet and congenial as he assures her it’s no problem. She shifts nervously in place her hands moving in and out of her back pockets. “Just stay inside tonight” is all he says before driving away.
~ ~
The ‘Wall street Cowboy’ a wannabe wetback in gringo skin, watches the auburn haired girl drift around campus. Barefoot like a child she prances through the grass. She is like Daphne Zeus’s favored nymph, carefree and dreamy; but clever still. He felt a bit like Hera as he approached her, jealous of her innocent revelry.
Her face fell; she looked as though she had been caught stealing penny candy from the local store. “Are you alright?” he questioned.
“Yes, I’m fine.” She smiled nervously and looked down at her toes digging into the dirt.
“You’ve seemed distant in class lately…not like yourself.”
“I’m fine.”
“I think you’re very special and if you need to talk my door is always open. Don’t worry you can always trust me.”
“Okay, thanks.” She does not look at him just focuses more and more on her toes buried in the green earth. The professor passes by her, patting her shoulder gently. The auburn haired girl seems frozen in place staring at the ground; envisioning the worms and other creatures of the soil crawling and swirling around her foot.
~ ~
Outside the lively little café the auburn haired girl paces and sputters curses to no one in particular. She hugs herself against the cold but feels it more inside than without. Her shoes click fiercely on the side walk as she paces ranting to herself. “Fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em all. Every single one of ‘em should die and be left to rot. Fuck the bastards.” Tugging hard on a cigarette she continues to mutter as she wonders away from the light of the café.
~ ~
The man arches his back so he can push deeper inside her. Hear legs splayed one on the backseat and one on the front. He holds her wrist hard against the side of the car as he presses himself into her. She bites down hard on her lips, before letting a gentle moan escape them. Their heavy breaths fog the windows concealing the raw passion within the black car.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl sits quietly on the railing of her back porch smoking her third cigarette. Her mind busies itself with nonsense fancies; attempting to block out much darker things.
In her mind she sees a chorus of starlight dancers parading around to the exquisite tinkle of circus music. Everything seems full of magic and color at this moment. With every puff of smoke she sees some new extravagance. Fire breathing acrobats, masked and made-up clowns; all somersaulting through smoke rings then off into the night. The happiest and brightest sounds and colors fill her eyes; to perfect to be real and too real to be a dream. The auburn haired girl stares out into the night at the wonder hidden within it. That is until her daydreams are lost to real sound and motion.
Somewhere out in the darkness beyond her line of sight something hums and moves over old dried leaves and branches. Then the sound comes to her, the bitter sweet melody of ‘Gloomy Sunday’ sung by the rich sorrowful voice of the ‘Lady Bird’ herself. The song is faint but audible as it floats through the night, chilling the heart and begging for the soul to weep.
The auburn haired girl looks as if she is mesmerized my Ms. Holiday’s mournful word of unrequited longing and loss. They are reaching out to her. The tune carries her mind away, like the black carriage of sorrow, to a place she can not be followed. The song ends with the fading cry of a brass horn.
It is then that the auburn haired girl feels a rush of uneasiness deep in her belly. With the ending of the song came the slam of a car door and the hurried rustling of feet through the tree line. The auburn haired girl jumps from her familiar perch and sprints to the house locking herself in.
~ ~
A girl with cracked and broken lips lays pressed against glass washed by her tears. Her dark circled eyes stare blankly out silently pleading for rest. Then the hand of a man pulls her back and out of sight.
~ ~
The auburn hair girl paces a circle around her kitchen, cursing and sputter vehement accusations and frustrations. The man’s words churn in her brain mingled hate, fear, love, and anger. “What’s wrong with you?”, “You can’t keep doing this.”; “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” These and a thousand other painful phrases create a fervent rage in her stomach. She tears at her hair and throws herself all about the room. She tosses her mother’s dishes and appliances all over the kitchen and beyond. The auburn haired girl slams herself hard into the refrigerator. Then she lets out a scream, so powerful that she herself could not stand it and falls to the floor.
The auburn haired girl awakes on the floor with the taste of blood in her mouth and decimation all around her. She is able to move but doesn’t possess the will to. So she lays there on the floor just as broken as the dishes around her. Soon her ears are filled with the sound of sirens and great feet thudding through the house.
~ ~
A man and woman laugh and lean close to one another. They are surrounded by the smell of coffee and vanilla and the iambic droning of beat poetry. Delicately placed hands on shoulders and knees capitulates fierce enmity from eyes looking through the colored window panes.
~ ~
The music in the dark smoky club thumps its own heart beat into the bodies of it’s captivate audience. In the back of the smoky pink and purple club a small group of people stick out among the throng of dancing bodies. Their body’s are still but their mouths move feverously, two facing one. They reach their hands for each other and then they are gone first one, then the others disappeared into smoke and mirrors.
~ ~
There is a room a gray little room and the auburn haired girl sits alone here. Her hair now losing its reddish shine and her once rosy skin grows pale. She is turning as dark and as gray as her dim little room.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl sits staring out the window at the falling rain. Her pale delicate fingers trace spirals and curves over the misted glass. Her mind wanders and she hums a sad ‘Lady Day’ tune, while looking out over the dull gray landscape.
With unexpected liveliness the auburn haired girl jumps back away from the glass; as the face of a girl appears before her on the other side of the glass. The girl at first seemed very close, practically up against the window, but then seemed quite far away. Her hair was dark and plastered to her pale face. The girl’s eyes were dark and sunken in their sockets as if she were ill or very tired. While the auburn haired girl stared at this seemingly fragile imp, the girl raised her right arm reaching out to the window.
The auburn haired girl nearly fell back upon the floor as this weary girl outside her window made impossible movements. As if she was a flickering light. She appeared close then faraway rapidly changing position back and forth. The girl’s eyes grew wide and her head inclined with her mouth opening noiselessly calling out to the auburn haired girl.
Terror and confusion filled the auburn haired girl as this specter pleaded with her. This horror made all the worse by the appearance of a man’s face pressed against the glass. He sneered at her through the glass and laughed a most terrible laugh. The sad figure of the girl soon to was pressed against the glass, violently so and the blood from her lips mixed with rain water that ran the pane of glass. Then she was gone as was the man.
The auburn haired girl stood frozen, paralyzed by shock. She could not pull her eyes away from the window. Slowly she moved closer to the window once again scanning every inch of scenery for the ghastly duo that she had just seen but there was nothing; only rain.
~ ~
Red M.O.D. platforms crunch against broken glass on the wet pavement as she drops her latest cigarette in a puddle. The night is cool and breezy music from the local bar fills the air. The parking lot’s wet surface reflects neon lights into the night. Small amounts of blood trickle from the auburn haired girl’s scraped knees. Her palms ache and feel bruised as she lights her lighter.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl digs her toes deep into the dirt. She looks down at the ground mesmerized by what she sees. There on the crisp green grass she sees, as if projected by some 16mm home movie camera, bodies writhing and pulling at each other. Crammed into the back of a car the man’s body is tense and thrusting with arms tied around his body. Condensation covers the windows as legs tightly wrap around his back. Translucent and jittery the lust and animalism intensifies on the leather seats of the little black car.
The image of the lovers in the car changes as quickly as it had appeared; to the image of all the creepy crawlies hidden in the earth. She sees damp muddy earth filled with insects squirming and writhing over each other. The auburn haired girl laughs childishly pulling her toes from the ground. She skips away leaving her visualizations on the ground to be burned away by the sun.
~ ~
The auburn haired girl screeches and slams her fist through the window. Shattered glass flies every which way and pain shoots up through her arm. She weeps pathetically as her racing heart pushing blood out of the jagged gashes in her hand and wrist. Bright fairy lights like water ripple over her face catching her eye. She watches it slowly undulate over her and the walls; then she slowly fades away.
~ ~
A very gray man makes his way down a curved and narrow hallway. This hallway would be as gray as him if not for the faintly bluish white light; flowing and churning like water over everything. All the doors and windows that line the hallway are shadowed by this ethereal light and all are locked to the man.
He disappears into obscurity around a sharp corner. After a time the hallway fills with radiant white light. Everything is erased in the whiteness of the light. Then as suddenly as the light came it vanished and the hallways is lost, plunged into unutterable blackness.
~ ~
Pulsating visual flashes emerge from nowhere of the man, the woman, the light, and the dark. First slow then in rapid succession like a stop motion picture show. The beautifully melancholic declarations of ‘Lady Day’ float on the air as she sings ‘Gloomy Sunday’. The man and woman are graying changing to become pitiful shells of humanity.
“Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless; dearest the shadows I live with are numberless. Little white flowers will never awaken you, not where the black coach’s sorrow has taken you. Angels have no thoughts of ever returning you. Wouldn’t they be angry if I thought of joining you? Gloomy Sunday, gloomy is Sunday; with shadows I spend it all, my heart and I have decided to end it all. Soon there’ll be candles and prayers that are said I know, but let them not weep let them know that I’m glad to go. Death is no dream; for in death I’m caressin’ you. With the last breath of my soul I’ll be blessin’ you. Gloomy Sunday; dreaming, I was only dreaming I wake and I find you asleep. In the deep of my heart here darling I hope that my dream never haunted you. My heart is tellin’ you how much I wanted you; gloomy Sunday.” *
The song continues and the flashes change: it transverses through sunny days, tearful bloodied faces, and twisted mocking laughter trapped beneath plasticize; then through the gray little room, parking lot, car, and club.
The strobe like flashing stops and all that’s left is blackness. The ‘Lady Bird’ is silenced after one last utterance of, “…dearest the shadows I live with are numberless.” Then in the darkness of oblivion, all that can be heard is the click and crunch of wooden heels on pavement and the subtle hiss of an extinguishing cigarette.
*Gloomy Sunday was written by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933, based on a poem written by László Jávor.
Phantom Space
I was alone in my sorry little room when it all began. I was sitting at my desk just leaning back and staring at the ceiling expecting nothing. Nevertheless, there was something brewing in my small dank little chamber; something distinctive. It was then that I could hear their voices; the whispers from in the shadows. They were all around me. I can’t see them. I only hear their hum of innuendo. These voices haunt me. I can’t seem to leave this little brown room anymore. I can’t go anywhere at all, the voices won’t let me, and they follow me. They know all I do, what I think, what I feel, and they taunt me with it. So I don’t go out I stay here safe and alone.
I sit here in this room by my little window. Just sit in my tilted chair at my rickety and splintered little desk. It is here I try to write the words they say, but the voices are so quiet, so very very quiet. I strain my ears trying to hear them, but the more I listen the softer they speak. It is so lonely here. In my grimy little brown room, with only my bed and desk for comfort.
The old pot-belly stove in the corner doesn’t throw much warmth now days. You see I can’t afford to light it very often. So my garments hang all about but never dry. I’ve given up on washing them. I have no soap anyway. The whispers hiss and laugh. They think me funny or more likely pathetic; all alone wrapped in my soiled sheets.
I spend a lot of time at my warped shaky little desk. The pages of my journal lay upon it. Curled and smudged with scratchy pictures, desperate scrawls, and thick black splotches of ink. The voices come from them; from the dark and the blackness of the ink. I try so hard to hear what they say, but they won’t let me. Sometimes I sit there, at my desk, and run my fingers over the pages creating thick fluid smears of ink. The murmurs come strong from within the ink. They come from every dark space in my room. It seems like they are everywhere now in and out. Jeering me in a slur of hushed tones, but still I sit there day after day cold and itching.
The skies seem darker now; they grow grayer and grayer with each passing moment. Day into night, night into day; the difference between the two has diminished. The darkness and shadow crawls in with the gloom. It takes over every corner of my room until there is barely even a faint adumbration of myself left. The voices mutter from every corner of my room now; a roaring din from day to night, night to day. They are all around me. Yet I can hear them no better. But I feel the mockery of their tone, the harsh raspy breath of their words. I can not understand them. Why can I not understand them? All I hear are bits and pieces of persecutions and vicious lies.
There is so much noise hidden in the shadow. I can not sleep. I lay awake staring into the darkness where they live and chatter away. I’ve begun to leave my light on as much as I can, but the way the hanging bulb creaks and sways as it dangles from crooked wires is maddening. Sometimes I count the movements; left to right, left to right, over and over again. I can’t imagine why it swings like this. My window does not open and there never was a soothing breeze in this tiny room, just the creaking of a dusty seventy watt bulb. The groan of the wire rocking through the air is at times worse than all their muted utterances. I can see and hear the swishy light teasing me. But what can I do? Without my light the shadows whisper more and more. Sometimes I crouch upon my bed draped in all my grubby linens and wave back and forth with the gesticulations of the light: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
I gets lonely here, so lonely. All alone surrounded by these cracked and peeling walls. One wall is swollen and blistered from moisture. The light shines on this wall making it glisten. It looks so friendly, so safe. From time to time I find myself resting my head against the wall. I look at the soft round pouches that have formed there. And I press my hands against the blistered paint; just to watch it and to feel it move. It’s almost like living flesh: soft, smooth, and ever so slightly moist. I pretend I am lying next to someone, gently tracing my fingers over the curve of their knee or possibly the small of their back. It is silly and I know the voices laugh at me for this. I feel their murmured mocking insinuations leaking out from the shadows. There words spill forth in hushed tones as they slowly slide innuendos beneath the door.
Oh how I hate them with their secretive expressions. It’s their fault I’m like this. They are what keep me here locked away all alone. If only I could understand them. Then things would be different. Maybe they would be. They would have to. The whispering shadows are cruel taunting beasts. They will never let me hear them. They only display my inequities with their unintelligible annunciations. I hate them, but I’m certain I would be lost with out them. It is the voices hidden in the dark that let me know I’m real. I would be completely lost and ever so lonely without them. Lonelier still than I am locked away in this, my brown little room. Here where only my shabby brown walls, my desk, bed, and me live; all alone with only the shadows’ mumbled voices to keep us company.
Petra Whiteley
Rhythm of summer underscored by the indigo nights by the Seine taps on the rusty locked doors of memory when the first waft of the scorching spell slinks through the open windows. Today is just such a day although the skin the hungry rays embrace is not as young as it was then. My brief engagement in a Parisian hotel was just a speck of time in my restless existence, and I will remember it here as it happened.
That year, the sun lazily stretched golden on the cobble stones and the aroma of strong black coffee was seeping through the wall of the shivering air and mixed with the sweat of the bodies pushing in a throng on the sidewalks, hands held, eyes gazing into the windows with the only intention to giggle and tease. All these were the insignia of the season pressed into my mind without the recourse to erasure.
Our hotel was heaving with guests, although the appliances were malfunctioning moodily, the building in disrepair; the furniture bruised by its endless brush with swift, heavy, urgent needs of its variously hosted bodies.
Our manager was shouted at every five minutes by the heat irritated people – their indignation coming at him left and right; high staccato voices, fingers and the soaring pitch stabbing the air as much as long, elaborate complaints set in deep booming relentless beat filling the foyer.
Those unhappy tourists were never patient enough to be taken to his office from the gloom infested space. The walls were unevenly covered with burgundy wallpaper with its torn, flattened rose patterns, the creaking swinging doors, and the ammonia odour with the sweet smell of the disinfectant from the adjacent toilets drifting in; the bad reproductions of the Louvre’s masterpieces in their cheap frames were unwelcoming to say the least. It was the office that breathed the meaning of freshness and luxury. And maybe it was just as well he never took them there. They’d take one measure of that room and the injustice of it all, then pack their suitcases and make do even with a dirty hostel.
The boss took it with a calm, unreadable face, suspended in meditation like a great Greek stoic philosopher. Then from his pocket he unfolded impeccable father act, a very old fashioned gold watch on a chain, soothing, elegant poise and perfect intonation and unleashed it into the startled faces till they retreated. With a trace of a smile the cunning director, the impromptu Dr. Freud, finished his snake charming routine, and the hypnotised prey was thus defeated – till something else went wrong and they came back only to repeat the scene in such regulars intervals you could set the hardboiled eggs timer by it.
With the same regularity he winked at me as I was acting out the work of my trade – sorting letters, picking up the receiver and dropping it down, filling ledgers and pushing papers in general behind the haggard, mahogany replica of the reception desk. Yes, I was in on what that gesture heralded.
When the doors closed and the place grew momentarily quiet, he tiptoed from his office and sneaked upon me like an apparition of Nemesis. Every time he caught me unawares he burst out laughing in a naughty boy manner. It was a cue for me to act as if he performed a bona fide illusionist trick. He had to have an audience for his slipping from one personae to another. Then he took my hand and led me to his citadel. Why did I feel like my hand became a leash he pulled? He never was a great lover, but his act had to be admired by grateful audience. His hypnoses on me worked only partially, a part of me remained watchful, my attention sharpened, scanning.
I have had enough time to take all the details of that plush room and its nooks and crannies. It wasn’t long now till the key to the room #57 was mine with what he had amassed there. It was Freedom waiting for me to take it – the sheltered treasure in the beast’s castle. What was a little humouring in turn for that? He, of course, didn’t see this coming. To him I must have been just a naive, young girl who was there to assuage the need that pounded his flesh hungrily.
Five days…passed slowly. I counted the angels on the sideline and the devils in the flames. They were my sheep sending me from threshold of sleep to indolent awakening. That final day I held the key in my palms as I snatched it from its hiding place that was revealed to me. Who was the magus now?
The night came; I silently walked up the windy staircase. If I could I would wish that night away. It was far too easy to reach the secret chamber unseen and undisturbed and it should have been my warning. The key fitted perfectly as it turned.
The shabby room greeted me like a fist with its assault of disturbed layers of dust. I had to suppress the need to cough. I had brought my hand back to my face because a wave of a terrible stench came at me as I entered the room. Trying to ignore it, I looked for the money that my boss conjured when he was playing another of his performance tricks on the banks with his motley crew of weird friends. The hotel was a slow-turn Laundromat and another stage for him.
I looked everywhere and was about to abandon the search, when the door opened wide and with it the cops in their full glory infested the room faster than roaches. There was no escape and I found myself captured and immobilised as I looked in horror – it wasn’t the theft I so carefully – or recklessly – planned I was done for, it was the dead body of my boss’s accomplice in the bath tub.
It took me five years to try to prove my innocence. I’ve lost the endless appeals and battles in the cold draft of court and slowly resigned myself to the rot in the hole. Finally, the fortune found me with her mighty eye and with her long arm she turned the body of evidence of my ex-lover’s guilt, exculpating me of mine. I walked out free and the freedom I found tasted divine.
Although the permanent scar in the fabric of my memory still itches at times; I cannot say the time in prison didn’t teach me anything. Next time a venture came my way, I just never got caught.
Petra Whiteley
No one in the story. Does there have to be someone, anyone? Or can it be, just A bar with a bass crackling from shaded corner above the red, worn musty carpet. Must someone listen to it? Can it just linger and be? A song that’s never left. A smell that rings in the sleep. A peculiar light, a renegade witness.
Does it have to be like tea, squeezed animals swirling and sugar strained from red seas, somewhere within? Beating ant-hems of nations merrily, merrily. Nations, like old, loose pidgeons, darkeningly drunk, excreating busy-ness.
And those who are given to the other side of the story so reluctantly, so unwillingly, are moving so very, so very slowly. They are nobodies like you-me-us. It takes infinite move–ment of snooker balls to make the clock go and that, that sad, sad song to find its last note. A history of miles spent breathing flying words and bodies, left behind like they were already dead when they were just belling, contemplating the planes that weren’t moving. Destinations undeparted. Firestealers in amnesia, in ennui film sweat, sea acres of solitude.
A cut between a place and a mist that clings to walls. In the dark it looks prettier. The lonely. In the clothes on the floor, there is some hope growing within them. It is a rising steam, a mirage. Defeat of the day clothes…it came with birthing blood and residues of struggles, the expulsion tax. A tide, a glow. Now this story is not so great, so it opens a can of dreams.
Washed out in the rain, that cold, tired rain spinning in the drain.
1951: Deconstructing the Dream
At a little after seven o’clock on a Monday morning in March Harry Cartwright arrives at work and chains up his bicycle. The sky is low and heavy with cloud and a dismal mist is coming off the river. It rolls in in great, damp drifts, the kind that can defeat any mackintosh, creeping down the back of his neck and seeping through the layers to his skin. This is only the second day on what will be a six month contract so, despite the symptoms of a nasty cold, Harry has turned in early. He is hoping for a cup of sweet tea and a chance to gather his thoughts. Experience has taught him that a big job like this one means that you can’t be too careful. A moment’s loss of concentration and someone could get hurt.
Harry is still flushed and panting from his early morning exertions. There’s nothing quite like a bike ride for keeping out the cold. He pulls up his collar, adjusts his muffler, and whips off his cycle clips, slipping them into his trouser pocket as his gaze sweeps over the site. But Harry is clearly the first to arrive. The whole place is deserted; frozen, it seems, in the mists of time, and silent as the grave. All the buildings are shut up tight. Even the great dome is deserted. A few damp and peeling posters forlornly flap in the wind. Some other advertisements, long since torn down have been trodden to a much on the tarmac where rain of several days has collected to form a series of shallow pools. Here and there a packet of Weights sails like a boat along the surface, or a brightly coloured chocolate wrapper sticks in the mud like a flag. All in all, not much remains of the site’s former optimism, the laughter and gaiety, the holiday spirit and good cheer.
‘Where the hell’s he got to? ’
Harry’s tone is disgruntled. He screws up his eyes and squints into the wind. He is relieved to see, Arthur, long-legged and gangly, loping towards him.
‘Come on, lad. Get yourself down here. Let’s have a brew before we start.’
‘The lad’ is how Harry refers to Arthur who, frankly, does not care for it. Arthur, after all, is twenty-six and married with two sets of twins. Harry, however, is thirty seven and, some days, feels a thirty years older so, try as he might – and he does try, at least intermittently – he struggles to see his workmate as anything more than a boy.
It is ten past seven. Arthur has arrived a little later than usual. He shrugs this off by pointing out that they’re not due to start until eight. Anyway, he says, Harry was so early he must have pissed the bed this morning. Harry aims a blow at the joker’s head but Arthur ducks and grins.
‘What,’ says Arthur, his hands in the air in a gesture of outraged innocence, ‘now I’m responsible for the natural weakness of an old man’s bladder?’
‘Not so much of the old,’ returns Harry, ‘and my bladder is none of your business. That’s the trouble with you chuffin’ youngsters, no bloody respect.’
‘That’s right, me old china,’ Arthur says, mocking, ‘you set me straight. You’ll be telling me next how you won the war just to save my hide from the Nasties.’
He places one finger beneath his nose and gives a goose-stepping salute.
Harry scowls and falls sullenly silent. He wishes himself back in his bedroom. His head aches, his nose is running, and the back of his throat is on fire.
‘Let’s just get the kettle on, eh, and get us in out of this cold.’
‘Ok, boss,’ says Arthur and he flips a key in the air.
Arthur sings a snatch of ‘Don’t Blame Me’ as he unlocks the hut that yesterday Harry and the rest of the team set up as their temporary ‘office’. It is a ramshackle construction with a heavy brass padlock and one tiny window. They use it to store the primus stove, their coats and the tea things; and, of course, their midday ‘snap’ which they bring in every day.
The ‘tea things’ consist, firstly, of an aluminium kettle that screams like a banshee; then there is a brown glazed teapot with a chip gouged out of the spout. There are also three teaspoons, an ornate Christmas biscuit tin, some plates, and a handful of mugs. Arthur himself has his own special cup because he can’t drink tea without a saucer. The others take the mickey, of course, but Arthur doesn’t care.
Arthur takes a spinsterish pride in ‘doing things properly’. It is he, for example, who collects the tea money and records it in a little green book. It is also he who buys the morning milk and goes once a week to the Co-op where he fusses over prices and buys broken biscuits if he can. Every so often, Harry will provoke him by openly calling him ‘the tea boy’. Then, Arthur’s eyes will flash as he curses under his breath. But, mostly, the lads are happy enough to let Arthur be ‘Mother’ if he wants to. With a wife and two sets of twins at home, they figure it’s no wonder. Perhaps he comes in early to get a bit of proper peace.
‘It don’t seem right to me, though, Harry.’ Arthur is looking at the ground plan. ‘Think of all the money, I mean. It must’ve cost a bloody fortune.’
‘So it did, lad. So it did.’ Harry’s expression is thoughtful. He dips a Lincoln biscuit and solemnly shakes his head. ‘More than you or I will see if we live to be a hundred. But it’s all going, just the same. Mr Churchill has made sure of that.’
‘Bloody Tories,’ says the younger man, and he spits through his teeth. ‘It’s downright shameful is what it is, a waste of public money. And what’ll we do with it, when all’s said and done? It’ll all go for bloody scrap. A lorry load of bloody scrap metal: is that really all this country’s worth?’
‘Maybe so,’ says Harry, who, despite his sore throat, is beginning to feel a bit better, ‘but just you hang fire a minute. Things aren’t quite that simple. According to that chap on the wireless, we can’t afford to keep it. A “reckless expense” was what he said and “out of step with the times”. It was grand while it lasted, though, I’m not denying that. The missus and me, we took the kids. It cost me nigh a week’s bloody pay.’
Arthur takes a long swig of tea. He is frowning out of the window. What he wants to say to Harry is something that matters a lot.
‘It isn’t just the money, though, is it? It’s like it’s a symbol of the future. There’s a lot like us – and some even worse – who are struggling to put food on the table. We need some encouragement. We need a bit of – cheering up.’
Harry’s puts down his mug and turns to look directly at Arthur.
‘Cheering up,’ he says, ‘cheering up? Bloody well cheering up! Have you any idea, young fella-me-lad, of the state of this country’s economy? We’ve just got rid of one bloody lot that’s done nothing but spend. What’s called for now is a bit of restraint, not live now, pay later. We can do without any ‘cheering up’. I’ve never of heard anything so daft.’
Having delivered this last and most serious pronouncement, Harry turns back to his tea. He stares down into the mug and swirls around the dregs. It is almost as if he has half a mind to read his own tea leaves. Instead, however, he opens the hut door and throws out the slops.
‘Come on,’ he says, in a different tone. ‘It’s time we got down to it.’ Somewhere a clock has started up. ‘It must be eight o’clock.’
But Arthur is not ready to leave it. He squares up to Harry. He presses in towards his chest. There isn’t a great deal of room.
‘For one thing,’ he says, ‘I’m not your ‘lad’ and, for another, you want to wise up a bit. Before you go moaning about what’s been spent, you want to stop and think. What’s that money been spent on, eh, but a decent bloody future? It’s been a long time coming – too bloody long – but I for one deserve it.’
Caught off guard by Arthur’s attack, Harry is left staggered and speechless. His mouth opens and closes a bit but no words come out. And then Arthur is off again, seeing and seizing his advantage. Never before has Harry heard him talk so much at once.
‘To my mind, Labour have done alright,’ says Arthur, flushed and furious. ‘We should’ve stuck by them; that’s what I think. I think we’ve all let them down. Churchill may not like what they’re up to but Churchill aint living down my street. And he may have won the war but we shall have to win the peace.’
‘Ay, lad,’ Harry begins but he pulls himself up short. ‘Ay, mate,’ he continues, ‘that’s all fine and dandy but can the country afford it?’
‘They can afford it,’ says Arthur with some vehemence. ‘They can always afford it. But it seems to me that, unless we stand up to them, we’ll be the ones who have to pay.’
For a moment, Harry seems about to speak but then he changes his mind. Outside the hut, both men shiver and button up their coats against the damp. Harry leads off and Arthur follows as they join up with the others. Harry reaches for his handkerchief and remembers that his throat is very sore.
Forty minutes later, they are all assembled and standing in silence. Harry and Arthur won’t look at each other as they contemplate the task in hand. A fine rain is drizzling down on a circle of upturned faces. The aluminium structure that rises above them floats in its cradle like a dream.
‘Well,’ says Harry, ‘there she is. It’s a shame but we’d better get on with it.’
Arthur has been scuffing the toe of his work boot. Head down, he turns and walks away.
Abigail Wyatt
It is visiting time but there are, as usual, no visitors for Dorinda who has taken the precaution of hiding herself in one of the big winged chairs. The one she has selected looks out over the garden with its wintering and frost-bitten flowerbeds. Here and there a primrose shows, flowering against the odds. There has been a little sunshine, bright enough for a time but lacking in warmth and purpose; a pair of rooks and some sad-looking sparrows scratch and stab on the lawn.
Dorinda is hidden from the eyes of the curious by the folds of a heavy red curtain drawn against the winter chill and the last low rays of the sun. She has withdrawn here quite deliberately to avoid the awkward kindnesses of those who come visiting others. She hates it, for example, when well-meaning people insist on trying to ‘include’ her, drawing her into their family circle in as though they might actually care. Life might be difficult – and Dorinda is often very lonely – but she carries her pride like a coat of arms and wears it like a bullet-proof vest.
From inside her cocoon of wipe-clean, cream-colored, mock leatherette, Dorinda listens to the trundle and clunk that heralds the approach of the tea trolley. A selection of biscuits with Madeira and angel cake is their customary four o’clock fare. But, though, she has a fancy for a slither of shortbread, Dorinda is resolved to keep her silence. Her strategy is always to keep her head down and try to stay one step ahead.
The ward assistant this afternoon is the irrepressible Minnie whose broad smile and even broader accent grate on Dorinda’s fragile nerves. The worst thing about Minnie, though, is not her accent, nor even her vacuous grinning; it is not even her insufferable and relentless cheerfulness in the face of so much human despair. The trouble with Minnie is her constitutional inability to take no for an answer, her obstinate and utterly insensitive refusal just to leave people alone.
‘Right then, who’s for a nice cup of tea?’
Trundle, clunk, trundle.
‘Keeps out this perishin’ cold.’
The trolley squeaks to a halt.
‘There you go, Mr B. You’ll enjoy that, won’t you? Now how are we feeling? You get it down you while it’s hot. That’s the ticket, there you go. … Now, Mr B, what have you done to make old Mrs Skinner look so cheerful? … Go on, don’t you tell me – she’s been at the gin bottle again. All you people, I just don’t know, you’ve got the life of Riley, you have. I wish that I had nothing to do but sit on my arse and drink tea.’
Dorinda sits very still in her chair and all but holds her breath. She listens to the sound of the tea being poured and the rattle and clatter of the crockery, picks at the hem of her handkerchief, and waits for the crisis to pass.
‘Now then, where’s Miss Dorinda today? I haven’t seen her since lunch time. She’s a queer fish she is, a very queer fish indeed.’
Minnie’s question is altogether rhetorical because those of whom she asks it do not know the answer neither and do they care. Even if they did know, it is highly unlikely that either would be capable of answering: in the three weeks since his last admission, Mr B has spoken not a word. Mrs S, on the other hand, talks all the time, but her conversational value is limited. This is the very natural result of her having only one phrase to say: I saw him do it, I saw him do it, I saw him do it, I saw him.’ Whatever it was that Mrs S saw, it didn’t do her much good.
‘Yes, she’s an odd one, that skinny Miss Dorinda.’ Minnie’s tone is thoughtful.
‘She likes to put on her airs and graces and make like she’s better than the rest. But she’s not as green as she’s cabbage-looking is what I would say about that one. What do you think, Mr B – a barrow-load of monkeys, eh? … Come on now, you lovely people, who wants a nice cup of tea?
Dorinda breathes a small, soft sigh and turns her attention to the window. The sky has clouded over now and the garden appears cheerless and grim. Catching sight of her reflection in the big picture window, she is shocked by her shapeless appearance. What have they done with her cashmere sweaters and neatly tailored skirts?
‘She’s looking out of the window now. She’s looking at her reflection.’
Dorinda jerks her head right round to the left but, strangely, no-one is there.
‘She’s must be someone who’s silly and vain. She’s always looking in mirrors. Puts on airs and graces, she does. She’s not a good person at all.’
‘Shut up, Jackie, that’s not nice.’ The scolding is barely audible. ‘You’re just repeating what Minnie just said – and you are supposed to be my friend.’
‘What do you mean ‘supposed to be your friend’? I am your friend. Of course, I am. Who is it that picks you up every time some little thing goes wrong? Who was it looked after you, too, the night you got into trouble? Who stayed awake till breakfast time and never got a wink sleep?’
Dorinda’s eyes darken and her neck shrinks into her shoulders. She is remembering something she would very much rather forget.
‘You did, Jackie. You did.,’ she says. ‘But that was before we came here. We’re safe here, aren’t we? Aren’t we safe and sound?’
The words come out of Dorinda’s mouth as not much more than a whimper. She knows that Jackie will hear her, though; Jackie always hears.
‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ Jackie snaps back tartly. ‘Don’t be such a drama queen. I’ll look after you. You’re safe here with me.’
‘But is she really safe and sound?’
This voice is deep and full-bodied, not at all like Jackie’s. Dorinda cocks her head to one side and her eyes fill with fear.
‘Keep calm,’ she whispers to herself. ‘Just try to breathe. Keep things simple. Keep things under control.’
She huddles up in the big winged chair, presses her fingers to her temples.
‘Is she really? Is she safe and sound? Is she? Is she? Is she?’
Dorinda wonders what she has happened. Why are things going wrong? Jackie is the one who looks after her so Jackie should have kept stopped him. Jackie must have turned on her, then, and let the stranger in.
‘Look, she’s getting all upset. She might even cry in a minute.’
‘She thought she was safe and sound. Now she’s not so sure.’
‘That’s taught her a thing or two then. Now she won’t be so full of herself. She’s not a very good person, you know, not a good person at all.’
Dorinda is crying so very, very hard she doesn’t hear the trundling of the trolley. She doesn’t hear it squeak to a stop or the sound of her name being called. It is only when someone takes hold of her hand that she understands Minnie has found here.
‘Miss Dorinda, she says,’ so there you are. What you need is a nice cup of tea.’
Then Dorinda takes her hand from her eyes. They are red and sore and swollen. She blinks through her misery at Minnie’s smiling concern.
‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ she screams, and she launches her whole body at poor Minnie. It takes three people to pull her off. Minnie is seriously hurt.
Later, when the police have gone and Minnie is safely in hospital, a tall man with greying hair visits Dorinda in her room.
‘Dorinda’ he says, ‘you’ve let us all down. What on earth came over you?’
‘It was Minnie,’ she says. ‘She wouldn’t shut up and she wouldn’t stop smiling. I couldn’t bear it any more. I just wanted to be left in peace.’
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