Thought I’d make this a rolling/scrolling down 1st 10 pages. At the top here today are the first 10 pages of Anti – pretty much everything. A prose collection. Followed by Sam Smith’s prose pieces. Followed by the first 10 pages of my novel, The Seventh Man. Followed by the first 10 of my latest crime novel, The Company Chronicles. Followed by the first 10 pages of another of my crime novels, Failures of Love. Which is followed by 10 pages of my historical novel, The Friendship of Dagda and Tinker Howth. Followed by my earlier novels, Sick Ape, John John and 2 Bridgwater Days.
Then comes the first 10 pages of my most recent SF novel, Once were Windows Once Were Doors. Followed by the 1st 10 pages from my novel, As Recorded third in the trilogy, ‘Paths of Error.‘ Followed by second in the trilogy, Constant Change, and first, Undeclared War.
Followed by my novels, The Wall, Eviction from Quarry Cottages and Everyday Objects Repurposed as Art.
Then my SF/crime novel, The End of Science Fiction, my prize-winning SF novel, We Need Madmen, my crime novel Porlock Counterpoint.
Then comes the 5 book SF series, ‘The unMaking of Heaven‘ – Balant, Happiness, You Human; the Leander Chronicle, Not Now: death,dreams & reasons for living and Eternals: the unMaking of Heaven.
Below them are the first 10 pages of my eco-novel Trees: the tree prospectus, the historical novel The Secret Report of Friar Otto and the mainstream novels Something’s Wrong and The Care Vortex.
Anti
Anti or impolite literature (as opposed to Belles Lettres)bySam Smith
anti – p/x. Against, in opposition to, rivalling, simulating
adj (one who is) opposed to anything
cover art © Steph Dart 1990
Introduction: credo
“A true-born Englishman’s a Contradiction, / In speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction.” Daniel Defoe
I am anti-anything/everything.
Being anti is an attitude that I owe to my parents, an attitude that came about way before I began to analyse or to categorise my thoughts.
My mother and father were war-damaged, small c-conservative, right wing. But it was not their politics that initially formed my thinking, it was their virulent personal hatreds.
We weren’t by any means well off, for a couple of years had lived in caravans in a corner of a steep field – bought with demob money – while a mortgage paid for our bungalow to be built.
And there began my life’s duality.
There were other houses recently built on the track that was now our ‘private’ road. The ‘private’ meant that all the houses on the dead-end road had to pay towards the road’s upkeep. This led to arguments among the residents over who should pay the most, who the least.
The family at the very top of the road were called Leekes. They fell out with my parents over the road’s upkeep. My mother and father thereafter mocked everything – name, faces, house, garden, Welshness – about Mr & Mrs Leekes. That mockery extended to their two school-age daughters.
The Hodge family didn’t live on our ‘private’ road but in the cottages below what had been the field and was now our garden. They thought nothing of climbing again up the side of our garden/field to cut back an elder tree that every summer had blocked their light. They fell out with my parents over that cut back tree. Overnight the entire Hodge family – mother, father, sons and daughters – went from friendly neighbours to objects of hatred, every mention, every sight of them raising a sneer.
My older brother and I walked to school with some of those children; and out of sight of our parents we talked with them, even played games with them. Should we be seen doing so however, “We don’t talk to them,” my brother and I were told.
My mother especially seemed to have to take sides. Consequently the Hodges and the Leekes weren’t the only people our village-raised mother chose to hate, often for no reason she could articulate other than, “It’s them!”
Taking sides meant that those hatreds extended beyond the village to unmet foreigners. And as a bright child it was easy to join in with their ridiculous hatreds, to make jokes. The many absurdities of otherness: I didn’t have to believe, just to know how to make my nearest and dearest laugh, how to win favour.
I was already aware of a dichotomy at work. My school-friends, cousins, village aunties and uncles had no idea of the many hatreds and resentments seething throughout our brick-built bungalow. Angry, spluttering responses to dinner table mention of council housing, National Assistance, foreigners coming here….
And outside our garden ramparts there were various other views to be quietly considered. Because village tittle-tattle always provided, if not exactly an alternative, certainly another perspective.
Consequently I very early realised that my mother’s tight-lipped self-righteousness was ridiculous. When told of someone poor needing help her stock response was, “We managed to put clothes on your back, paid for our own house…” Nor did that meanness of spirit apply only to villagers’ known histories and personalities. Could have been a charity looking for donations: “’Spect it’s their own fault.”
My father was haunted by so many he had known killed in the war. Wanting to impress on my brother and I the real sacrifices they had made, in so doing he seemed to be blaming me for their wasted deaths. How though could their deaths be my post-war fault? So when I asked, “What do you think they thought they were sacrificing themselves for?” I got shouted at and called ungrateful.
Other village men, seeing us boys playing with pretend rat-a-tat-tat machine guns, might sadly say, “You never want to go to war son. Is no game.”
I cannot put a date or place – could have been on the riverbank staring into my own thoughts, or an unpremeditated response to a table-banging argument – when I consciously started to tentatively ask what might be the opposite of a parental view/prejudice. I was certainly still a child.
The dichotomy. That’s where it all began, where I got into the way of casting about for a possible opposite and examining it as a viable alternative, sought ways to, if only mentally, argue its theoretical validity. Not that I have ever enjoyed openly arguing. Like the public face of my cheeky-chappy father I am more than happy to rub along with people who are prepared to rub along with me, am content to exchange a word with the morning met about the weather.
Although now determinedly anti I will still avoid verbal arguments. Arguing for the sake of arguing is not for me. I am no contrarion, would rather discuss and concede. What I am is simply anti ready, unthinking, uncritical acceptance.
That is what has become my credo – to consider the opposite regardless. To ask questions of whatever has been placed before me. So have I become automatically anti. Anti-everything.
So the first anti question to be asked here is Why am I writing this? Could as easily be autobiography. Is it just to get it out of the way? Again? Because this has to be as much for my own benefit as for any possible reader.
Stuck at the moment as to what to write next, to write new, to work on something, anything that I haven’t attempted before, could defining my ‘anti’ be to simply clear my head of angry clutter?
1) Anti–identity
‘Taking their identity from…’ is a phrase that I have come to despair of and to despise.
Taking their identity from… their sexuality. As if any person can only and predominately be heterosexual. “Hello, I’m heterosexual Dave.” Or only homosexual: “Hello, I’m homosexual Diane.”
Oddly coprophiliacs, doggers and paedophiles don’t take their identity from their sexual proclivity.
Taking their identity instead from… their illness, their belonging to a disdained minority, their disability.
Taking their identity from… their day-job. “And what do you do?”
Taking their identity from… things acquired.
Taking their identity from… the place they live, the place where they once lived.
Taking their identity from… their relationship to… their child, their spouse, a parent; and remaining an anonymous absence within that relationship: “Hello, I’m a blank space waiting to be filled.”
Taking their identity from… their self-adornment, be that t-shirt or tattoos (someone else writing on their skin).
Taking their identity from… films they have seen, books they have read, places they have been, the teams they support.
Taking their identity from… their generation, their age; while trying to claim that this is not quite who they are. Exiled so soon from their past, from friends and lovers so soon gone, from places changed…
Taking their identity from… now but a number of years.
Self-identity is supposedly forged in one’s twenties. These days that will be when they have left college and got their first job. That is when they will have learned to live with the choices already made. Forged, in the sense of fitting a mould. Forged, on the other hand, as in surface appearance only, as in faked. Mid-life, the crisis that awaits, is when that self-identity will start to come apart.
Negative identity, unwelcome identity, comes from trauma, from having been a victim, one’s passivity, vulnerability brought home to one. What one might have thought of one’s self is in a moment obliterated, violation rendering it near unrepairable.
The self that was a package of memories, desires, fantasies and wants, that self is cancelled by a beating, a rape, prolonged abuse. Death of a once-self is always the result of abuse. Secondary abuse, being disbelieved, becomes a secondary death. Where identity now?
Another negative identity can lie in your deciding that you don’t want to be what other people want you to be. You don’t know precisely what you want to be, but it is not that. Or that.
There being no models that suit the self that you think you might want to be, the problem then comes in living life by your own rules, in determining what those rules might be.
There came a point for me when, to give my negative self limits, I actually went looking for battles to fight, for any struggle that might define my self, to become ‘the man who fought for…’ But there were no struggles that I felt committed to. So for a while, until it became ridiculous, I envied others their actual wars, even their poverty, their frowned-on sexuality; and I scoffed at my amorphous self for the artificiality of my yearnings. Identity Identity, Wherefore Wert Thou Identity?
I also during that period, empty of self, let others write their stories on me.
When finally I took up the pen though…Not straight away: it was more when the pen took over my every ambition. Then I became no longer prepared to be the bystanding victim of another’s self-fantasising identity. Be that alcoholic, junky, or simply poseur.
There had been times when I might have relished the excitement offered by activist or adventurer, have welcomed the distraction – from a life without meaning, from yet others’ realities, others’ identities? For the last 50+ years however I have had too much else to do.
2) Anti-authority
My right-wing family it was, parents and brother, who first informed me that I was anti-authority. And they kept on telling me that well into adulthood.
In those post-WW2 days the hitting of children was deemed acceptable. Was seen as acceptable for parents and teachers to beat children with belts, canes or slippers. Other unrelated adults were allowed to cuff, slap, cane, even to say unchallenged things like, “Child needs a clip round the ear.” “If he/she was one of mine they’d soon feel the back of my hand.” Even the politely uttered – then widely used trope – “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
This much-mouthed attitude found its way down the age range, expressions repeated by those children bigger/older than myself and who identified with authority, and who so wanted to be grown-ups themselves.
From an early age I had been encouraged to ‘stick up for myself.’ My older brother had been bullied. So when one of his classmates, those older, larger boys, adopting a solemn face, went to give me a clip, slap, or ‘a good shaking,’ and they were about to do it solely because they were bigger than me, I levelled up the violence intended with a stick, brick or knife.
Didn’t work with teachers. Only defence I had there was defiance: “Do your worst.”
I was a boy with a quizzical eye and a delight in the ridiculous. I questioned everything: rank, status, worth. But was told that I had to ‘respect’ people with power over me, regardless.
That anyone had to use that power to shut me up – not all did – instantly brought those power-wielding individuals into disrespect. And there were so many who did so enjoy their small hierarchies of power. The badge-wearing prefect, the be-gowned schoolmasters; and that’s before one encountered the rank-pulling military: “These stripes are what says it son.”
Nowadays these latter types find their personification in the USA’s police forces, those fat-bellied thugs in uniform who go around killing their fellow citizens.
While in civilian life here in the UK we have, we had the officer class, public school retards, looking down on us ‘oiks.’ And they were, they still are, so ridiculous; and so desperate to hide behind their class superiority that they hate being laughed at. “You looking for a thrashing?”
Ooops, here we go again. Outnumbered stick, brick or kick came into play. (With us all now being more or less the same height I’d had to pass on the knife.)
All belonged to the hierarchy of the stupid, paid up members of the cretinocracy, those unable to respond rationally when their imagined rank, their ‘position,’ their right, their privileges came to be questioned.
“You’ve no respect for anything Smith.”
Yup. Not for you, your property, or your power.
Sam Smith’s prose pieces
Sam Smith’s prose pieces
A poem is a tiny part of a day but reading poetry can save the world
For the sake of argument let us suppose that what follows is a prose poem. Although in itself it will not cure you of any chronic conditions or terminal diseases; although it will not improve your personal relationships, will not prevent hair loss, period pains, weight gain or flatulence; and although it is unlikely that you will be given with any one poem a free digital watch or an extra 25%; the reading of this — let’s still call it a poem — from start to finish will take approximately 54 seconds. During which time you will not have damaged your partner, you will not have crippled any children, and you will not have deprived anyone of their life or their livelihood. The reading of poetry, therefore, can be looked upon as wholly beneficial. Ergo: the world will be saved by poetry.
Cat and I, impassive, face to face
When the black cat holds me with his golden eyes is he trying to convey to me, not his surface thought, but that other, the shadow thought, that hint of a thought behind the thought? Or are his golden eyes looking inward? Is this his attempt to plumb his own cat mind for the unlinear? Not for the afterthought, not a follow-up progression, nor a codicil. Nothing so connected. Is he seeking another, the unthought thought, the one lurking there only at the thought-moment? Or are his considerations not at all internal? Are those black-slit pupils looking to divine, not my conscious intentions, the daily round of what’s-to-be-done-next, but that other, my waiting thought not yet formed?
My Book of the World – for Stephi
I was sitting, among brown tents of winter-dead ferns, on René Descartes bench in Vondel Park when, beyond the morning’s damp cyclists, my eye was momentarily caught by a flock of green parakeets in flight, blued by a moment’s sunlight.Had me wanting to describe them and, in quick turn, had me wondering – can we think without language? Whatever the language? But how else to measure meaning, decide a thought’s carat value, concoct its chemical formula? If it doesn’t have a linguistic identity how can we merge one thought with, balance it against another? Point and grunt won’t do it.Also to be considered is that the weight of each word can be far more than its molecular self, like a fractured mirror can have too many aspects, too many identities. Will be a carrier of synonyms, homophones, and possibly many a cultural connotation. And where in any single mind can a new idea sit? In all the universe there is no emptiness, only movement and displacement. Displacement: every coloniser’s fundamental deceit.I waited for the latest group of seemingly serene cyclists to pass; and I stood, thoughts unformulated and still hovering outside my brainbox, considerations of God’s edicts not one of them.
Slow walking within drift-by-drifting clouds
Tiny drops cling to cloth’s weave, settle upon leaves, stick to single grassblades. These mist-specks coalesce: hair and skin become more than wet, porous as paper. Edged everywhere by fading-in fading-out tree silhouettes, all is soft: branches, boughs, every oak trunk coated in lurid moss. Floor-creeping ivy wetly flickers and gleams. Away to one side the white water white-noise of a gushing stream. Nearby streamlets trickle and dribble, paths squelch.Moving on, still within the drift-by-drifting clouds: here a fallen branch has a dotted ochre line of penny-flat fungi, next the iron-black boughs of a lone beech. An ivory light seems to glow out of lichen – clustered within the wiry stems of some ditchbank heather. The pine forest glistens green, holds onto cloud vapours and dense interiors. From needle ends come plops into long track puddles, each irregular drop a moment’s imperfect rings, mirror light wobbled.
May Contain Nuts
Since his legs fell off Bhodhidharma has delivered his teachings from a supermarket trolley. He prefers to be far from the bustling fruit and veg section, further in where shoppers have slowed, become contemplative.Hot days he haunts the freezer aisles, delivers mostly koans to those picking out frozen broccoli, “Behold the broken apothecary.” “Cry wine and sell vinegar!” he called out once in the beer and spirit aisle, got run-pushed into pet food. He was likewise sent half-spinning out of the nappy aisle when he was overheard to say, “The soft egotism of motherhood.” And from ‘international cuisine’ for a smiled epiphany: “Rice smells like mice.” No-one has yet objected to his singing along with the store radio in confectionery. Bhodhidharma loves those long end notes that hang out, he says, like a dog’s tongue. Neither thus far have any staff or customers raised concerns over his calling the sell-by bargain shelf, ‘a totality of thinghood.’Left overnight in the see-through trolley shelter Bhodhidharma meditates on the arhythmic leaving of the one-by-one cars, lets his mind blank to the pooled lights, to the narrowing perspective of parking bay lines, photo-stillness of the misty night. Single thoughts will trickle in with the morning’s one-by-one arrival, the rank-by-rank amassing of similarly coloured cars.
A Shifting Gauze of Light
Edged with pointillist grey a dripping forest day with green underglow. Ahead of me small unrecognised birds fly out of mist and into mist. A piece of shattered tree, like a bird’s broken wing, sticks out of rain-flattened grass. To either side, within this skyless cloud, occasional part-faces on shoe-brown trunks watch me walk by. All is quiet and smudged strange, as known and alien as one’s own under-skin sinews and veins.Another small bird flies out of mist and into mist.Certainty is craved, something solid for the mind to hold onto. But here, step by step, are only part-formed thoughts, thought of a thought, one that goes no further. Like water lines when poured into a white basin become quickly settled, stilled, blank. Expectations are never quite met, moments missed.Another small bird disappears into the grey between the part-trunks.This timber road though is as remembered – pine trees and cliff to the left, heath grass under power lines the other side – and here I am again walking in a between place; road behind, road ahead; and in this moment newborn aware again, all to be made, to become, past and future as doubtful as sense.
Making Light
Depending on the height of the troposphere skies will have different colours. For instance the troposphere being lower in the sub-Arctic the sky has a deeper midday blue, that same blue that condenses inside wind-curved icebergs. Whereas an almost white sky, air-thin blue, dissipates above the stone-baked Mediterranean coast. In between is the temperate zone’s grey mountain light, where clouds hang damply dark, valley fields below seeming to glow a luminous green. Until sunset that is when the horizontal light, filtered by the gravity-thickened atmosphere, pollution’s suspended microbes, brings the yellow spectrum to the fore, giving us many-hued grasses, armies of golden tussocks, one broken bracken frond, cattle-red rust streaks on a corrugated shed. And when late summer’s flat-bottomed cumulus hang above the gilt-touched forest is when the red of rose hips and the berry clusters of mountain ash leap to the eye. Until day-round low winter light shines shamelessly into unleafed trees, exposes skinny moss-clad trunks, delicately picks out willow finger strands of snuff and ochre.
Moving On
In the lee of the stone barn he wearily lowers himself onto a step, watches a wind move through the trees across the far side of the field.That this world is getting rid of us, sloughing us off like old skin, has become as certain to him as his own once-unthinkable mortality.The human species is being moulted.Smeared in cow-dribble, dung-splash and mud-splatter, hunkered there on the old step he looks as if grown out of the earth itself. Although for the foreseeable bound to the repetitions and inconstancy of farmwork, he yet knows that he no longer belongs where he is. National laws can and will be changed, tenancies abrograted, land sold from under his clay-clagged boots: he is soon, sometime, to be made as homeless as the rest of us, briefly here.
Above the steep part of the old drover’s path – now canyon-deep courtesy of trial bikes’ ground-ripping tyres and unseasonable torrents – there used to be a Welsh regiment’s laminated list, of their recently ‘lost in battle.’ The list had been taped to the wrinkled slabside of a rock outcrop. Two right angles of the tape remain.More sheathed pages, corners held down by flat rocks, were once part of a low cairn, to be stumbled over on the plateau of the ridge walk. The plastic of the polypockets, sunbrittled, let rain in; and those makeshift plaques – to foot soldiers now forgotten – have disintegrated, become weather-torn memorials lost among the curved white blades of windblown heath grasses.
Café Society
Air steam-damp, table top tacky, plate grease-wiped, brown tea already tepid; his thick lens take a slow dismissive look around at the other time-killing less-than-perfect people here. The pustuled alcoholic vodka-doctoring his coke, nervy skinniness of the window-watching junky; and huskily ensconced on her regular corner bench, her indoor-exiled smoker’s face a deflated balloon: he knows that carbon dioxide stink will be seeping from her out-of-fashion fabrics. Layered over all is the pressurised hiss of the espresso machine, interspersed by the adrenalin-crackle of the tabloid-quoting cretin. Something definitely amiss, thick lens this day decides, with a man got a megaphone voice has let himself get that skin-stretched fat. Mug drained, glasses pushed back up his nose, he tells himself again that he has no cause to feel superior: all here have to share his sense of otherness, of internal division, misplaced identity. No person here, trying not to listen to the fat cretin, belongs in what’s left of their skin.
Spirituality
The square of churchyard wall is squeezed between riverside bungalows, themselves mausoleums of the living dead, inhabitants waking each morning only to another day of staying alive. The churchyard’s own dark wooden gate is guarded by a man with a thick grey moustache and no sense of humour. Oh he will have learnt to part the pink lips under that moustache in what passes for laughter, but then only what will have been presented as a joke. He has no feel for the absurd, no leaping delight in the ridiculous. Take his adopted grey stone church and graveyard: the grass within has been so mown that the ground looks to have been shaved.Having been officiously warned against vandalism or leaving litter, once reluctantly allowed through the gate, we hurry along the swept path, pausing briefly to note that old gravestones – names and dates having become year-on-year illegible – have been moved tidily to the inside of the churchyard walls. Reaching the far gate we let ourselves onto the riverbank, brush by the rough bristle edges of young elm leaves; and are brought to a breath-held pause by this, just this, every wide river’s collection of wrinkled reflections, call of a waterfowl upstream.
This Day
At the side of the street a man in a dribble-stained suit stands between two trees. He is weeping. This day what he fears is unique to him and known to everyone. He has no consoling belief, no faith in anything other than the pavement on which he this day stands. Below and within the branches’ scribble-shadows are clean replacement slabs: this day they make a pattern with the algae-blackened old slabs. His tear-puddled view sees people hurry by holding paper cups, or looking down at their phones. Gleaming cars are sparse and slow, their drivers gazing idly around. He has tried, so many times now, to make sense of all that is passing, has passed, as if he had never existed. Across the way a young woman is making a mitten of a blue plastic bag. Crouching, her knees together, she scoops up the curled stool left by her fluffy dog.
My life a part-open book…. I have found myself, an autodidact, occasionally among classic-quoting scholars, some even best-selling authors who appear to actually think in extended metaphors, yet whose published tales turn out to be no less sentimental than thorn-plucking Androcles and his lion.I have found myself, but an autodidact, among classic-quoting scholars. And know that I could be seen to be of their type, all of us wrinkled and sagging into the uniformity of old age. Some however are waspish old bats who delight in literary spats, a few have turned out to be snobbish editors with the deadening hand of pedantry, while others make dismissive middle-class assumptions both in their writing and their reviewing.In my autodidactic defence? I still want books that offer illumination, that by their light I can see. And I still believe, believe that we as writers have language in both our keeping and our making. Theirs though seems to be a Literature, capital L, where the dead reign supreme.I have found myself, on occasion, among classic-citing pedagogues – scholars seemingly intent only on refuting other scholars, and who seem to write with no consideration for the uncommitted reader, appear to have been so busy being critical and wanting to impress their coevals that they have failed to learn how to be human to other human beings.I have found myself, an autodidact….
Mindlands (1)
This busy 5-way junction, in among black poles topped with red-to-green traffic lights, has a man on the kerb edge standing behind his stomach and sucking on his grey moustache. Cars and vans queue to left and right; stop, go; and stream across, orange sidelights going on and off. This man questions that ‘infinty’ and ‘constant’ can exist only as mathematical concepts. Asks will stars always outnumber the human dead?Low-fronted cars push their bright, yellow-white lights along the wet-black road towards him. Can this man accept, as another truism, that, if memory equals experience, he will not experience his own death?
Mindlands (2)
A man like Solzenhitsyn, beard under his chin, walking alone on his nodding return from the reed-edged pond, wonders why a golden-eyed duck should be beguiling and a red-eyed duck so off-putting. After all, his pursed lips reason, a duck is a duck is a duck and should engender no emotional response.Tomorrow he will throw his torn crusts towards the red-eyed duck, and he knows that he will feel, despite conceding its irrationality, that he has performed a benevolent act.
Mindlands (3)
Leaving the shop, newspaper folded and stuck upright into his jacket pocket, this curved thin man ducks and slides away from today’s standing around set of pavement idiots, those who think they are capable of understanding him and so can offer him the sympathy of pity. He has none for himself.A washed-up never-has-been is what he calls himself, despises both what he was and what he has become. On reaching a safe distance he lets a fart growl out, as if even his arse is angry.
Time As An Employable Commodity
Sweden, afloat in light, knows the co-operation required of a cold climate people. Red wooden houses have workrooms, wooden-handled tools burnished with use, which are used with practised precision. Comforted by the rituals of season and craft, long hours are arranged about themselves in short sections. Backs are straight. People know their worth.
Existence in the minds of others
So many men had been lost along with their planes that, despite his height, and with the notorious perversity of wartime armed services, Abraham Lincoln was passed fit to be a navigator on an Avro Lancaster bomber. His being lanky, so far as the navigating went, wasn’t that much of an impediment. Awkward rather than a disqualification. Crouching double allowed him to move about the small chart table. It was only when he had to fulfill the other half of his dual role – as bomb-aimer – that he took a seeming age to fold his spider legs and arms into the belly of the aircraft. Elbows, knees and scalp collided with metal corners, his pocket Robbie Burns always getting snagged.Even so Abe – on his every meticulous approach to the target – didn’t allow himself to be distracted by any sudden pains, or by the nearby orange explosions of flak; or by the far below sparking flicker of gunfire. Briefing had told him co-ordinates of the target, the line of Mosquito-lain flares he had to follow, timing trajectory required for his anticipated altitude. “Bombs away Skip,” he’d say and, load released, the four engines would briefly race as the plane lifted and banked.Unfolding and squeezing his length back into the chamber with his maps Abe would give the pilot their new heading, say, “Jolly glad it wasn’t us on the receiving end.” For such airborne intercom exchanges Abe always used a mock English accent. Didn’t know why. Nor did any of the crew question its use. Canadians and Poles they added their own versions of English uppercrust, reverted to their own accents and speech patterns once back on the ground.
Mutatis Mutandis
If my nose hadn’t started to grow at the same time as the first black feathers appeared on my forearms I might have thought I was becoming an angel, a dark angel, about to master flight. Now alone, not alone (only my remembered antecedents mark me different), despite my now owning the life-and-death wisdom of ravens – what alive is to be avoided, what meat to be landed upon – still I quarter the skies calling out in a voice not mine, low and plaintive, for another become-like-me to respond. I did find one, but long fallen. Had reverted to the golden curls and clear white skin of an expressionless angel; yet so rancid as to be, even for a hunger as needful as mine, unapproachable.
Thoughtlessness
First the held stillness of forest-filtered sunlight slows the mind. The weed-edged pond creates its own meditative climate. A willow crouches by the thin stream that soaks into the pond’s boggy beginning. Taller ash, slim birch and sycamore lean inwards. Now and then the snout of a silver perch ripple-sucks the surface. White lightshine and refraction do not allow precise study. Midge dots dance figure eights on the meniscus. Eye gets taken into the dark criss-cross mandala of reflected branches, softer cloud patterns. A perch snout ripple-sucks the surface.
Season’s End
Frost lies crystal-grey over the north side of the hill, only within hedge and tree shadow on the south. Sloping snowbanks persist under a stand of spruce, the snow’s surface drip-pitted and striated with green needles – like so many short scratches. The few snowdrops that are poking through a wall corner drift are whiter than the snow. Winter drought has reduced the river’s flow, the one time surface frozen into panes of upended rectangles and rhomboids.Flat-bottomed clouds come slow-sledging over the hill’s round horizon.
Mr Cool
Mr Cool dresses with the same studied casualness that his one-time college tutors affected. Image is what he is. Except that, late thirties, Mr Cool has yet to grow out of studenthood, still owns the need to be critical, his occasional internet put-downs (note the distance) as cruel as those of any other coward.The world of men all lesser beings, all fools (exempting of course close-by present company), in pubs and local bars Mr Cool knows how to stay (saying nothing) aloof. His one contribution to any mixed social gathering is a raised eyebrow. (Has to have been mirror-practised.)
Wary of change, of the truly new, as he ages Mr Cool can be readily recognised by his dated attire. And to explain his not being in work (when not supported by the state or his mother Mr Cool seeks out a female other) he subtly lets it be known that he is an artist.But image is all that Mr Cool is. And this image it is that has Mr Cool afraid to wholly immerse himself in a piece of work, to follow willy-nilly where it may lead. In case the less than perfect result might make him seem the fool? Poor Mr Cool, cynical of his own few efforts, wears a glimmer of confusion at the back of his eyes.
I Am English (1) (Post Poetry version)
If aired here the profoundest thoughts get mocked, not expounded upon, not challenged, the holder more likely sneered at – with that hooded eye and leaning away lip lift that the stupid and the uneducated English cultivate.In the suburban sprawl that is England today public debate there is none, the deepest of feelings get expressed only in the tiredest of sentiments or the coarsest of oaths. In this prison of national vanity, a country under the control of the lowest common denominator – violence, tribalism, self-centredness – the English underclass seen now as a low snivelling breed, these the punished poor are feared more than the feted rich.
Still our establishment, governments so corrupt they don’t know they’re corrupt, prefer to persuade by prejudice than to act on principle, than to convince by reason, so they revert to clumsy behaviourism, war their one common purpose. When they can find no enemy beyond our borders the English mind-set seeks only to gain advantage over their fellow citizens.Or English holidaymakers return from their ghetto tourism to complain of appalling service. With reaction against English snobbery-pretending-artistic-sensitivity having led to the shockjock nonsense of English art – blind dwarves on the shoulders of giants.If England were to possess an active intelligentsia so offended, so slighted would the rest feel, secure in their self-cultivated ignorance, they would gleefully reinstate public executions.
I Am English (2)
In this world I have lived among all that other men have made. I have looked down the iron sides of ships to petrol-sheened dockwater, driven cars in among other cars, eaten biscuits baked in other countries, lost myself in landscapes and books made by the long dead….In this world I have lived according to, at different times, various of other men’s rules. I have tried to be as others. But a people, as a people, to become a people, have to get marched off to war. At least once. And I have never found a war worth fighting, have suspected every offer of friendship, have refused to be trapped by any tribe. I don’t like the English.
In this world I have lived my adult life as a writer, and now – nearing the end of this life – I find that I have given all those years up to a pointless exercise. Should you be tempted to do the same it is probably best that you first accept that no-one anywhere cares about you and what you do. Not really cares. Not about what you might think. Not about what you might say, unless you break their rules. English individuals just want to get on with their own lives. At best the million words I’ve written have been a mild diversion, most likely an irrelevance. I am English.
The Seventh Man
The 7th Man
K, n-L, Eth, Af, Ch & Sy
Six of us escaped the detention centre. I say escaped: it was more like curiosity took us through the corridors and we found ourselves outside.What we then assumed had happened was that an electronics failure had caused – as in a fire drill – all of the doors to spring open. Although the opening was more of a hydraulics whisper than a twanging spring.Not a lot happens in a detention centre. You wait on phone calls from your court-appointed legals or from your careworker team. And day follows day follows day.So when the doors swished open we six looked to who might be coming through. The new arrival might be from someone’s home, know the whereabouts of someone’s family… Our unit had beds for eight: we were six.But no-one came, no staff looked in; and the door with its wire-mesh window remained open.What I remember now is that not one of us spoke. An older man, a Syrian, had been about to make us tea. He was the only one standing. The television had been on, but it had been on since early, even the news was stale, and no-one had been that engaged with it.We looked from the still open door to one another and, one by one, we began to get out of our chairs. Stepping past the Syrian we moved towards the open door. Four of us. The Syrian, broken out of his memorising of who wanted what tea, with a start decided to follow us.First was the corridor that we had all walked down before – to meetings in the small side offices. All of their doors were open. At that point I think we were all walking forward almost unaware that we were walking.The door at the end of the corridor was also open. We were now looking to one another in the part-hope that one of us might be able to say what had happened.We had all been in this next corridor too, but escorted, told when to stop, when to wait. No staff appeared this evening to tell us to go back.All was familiar but unfamiliar, like a sunlit street after a storm. Through these corridors was the way we’d come when being taken for court appearances, for interviews with officials. “Your identity has been confirmed.” By the officials that we had fled from.Another door, a shorter corridor. In this corridor was where we became aware of noises from the floors above, shoutings, crashes. Up there somewhere was where the politicals and the mind-broken were kept.The harsh noises had us hesitate, anticipate the appearance of staff. None came. It was the old Syrian pushed us on.One more open door and we found ourselves hurrying towards the evening cool of outside.“Run!”Hands hit shoulders, and legs that had become used to wandering a single set of rooms stumbled into a foot-thumping gallop across a stretch of short green.“Stop. Stop.”Fingers clutched at shirtsleeves, sweater tops. “Walk.” So, catching our breaths, two abreast we part-stumbled, bumping into one another, along the pavement between parked cars and garden hedges.I was near the back, looking all around, the cool outside air moving past my face and in behind my neck. We were passing through a residential district, lights on in houses, some curtains unpulled, sides of television screens visible.As I followed the others across the road – to avoid some people ahead getting out of a car – I glanced back to the high square block of the detention centre, all its windows lit. Beyond the Centre was the dark of the industrial estate.I was not the only one who had looked back. The Ethiopian had stopped – beyond where the people had got of the car and gone into a house. “Lorries,” he signified the industrial estate.From within the Centre we had listened to the diesel rumble of nearby lorries, had fantasised on ways we might escape.I looked with him back along the road of parked cars. To go there would mean passing by the Centre.“Too close.” I gripped his thin forearm, shook my head. “Find somewhere else. We need to get where people are. Or out of sight.”The Ethiopian nodded his understanding. Walking on he rolled his shirtsleeves down, buttoned his cuffs.With our detention fantasies fixated on the industrial estate we had none of us, on our escorted trips out, paid much attention to these residential streets.“This way I think,” the short Libyan said. He claimed he was Libyan but his accent was wrong. One of the last to arrive he had on a Centre sweatshirt and jogging bottoms. Court appearances had allowed the rest of us to choose clothes from the laundry cupboard.The street of cars and houses that the Libyan was taking us down had speed bumps. The Syrian pulled at his sleeve and waved a negative finger in his face, pointed back. The Libyan shook his still-clipped head and pointed forward.It was this brief exchange that had me realise how conspicuous was our behaviour.“We’re six friends out for the evening,” I loudly announced to the early autumn evening. “Six friends.”On our trips across to Croydon we had all commented on the mixed-race groupings we had seen on the pavements, outside cafés, the ease of their association.Stepping by my group I gave them all my biggest white teeth smile: “This way you say?” And I led us on.As luck would have it where the road started to curve around was a footpath signpost pointing between garden fences. That took us through some trees to a, almost recognisable busier road.“Shops along here. For sure,” the Syrian declared.Cars passed both ways along this road. No parked cars. I saw a woman passenger looking at us.“Six friends!” I shouted to my tense companions. The Syrian turned with a smile, gestured onwards.“Talk to me,” I patted the Libyan’s arm.“About what?”“Here for instance. You have somewhere to go here?”“Scotland.” His clipped scalp twisted around, as if he was afraid of being overheard.“Where in Scotland? A big place.”“Hairsher.”“Hairsher?”“Near the coast.”“Oh,” I said, “Ayrshire.” And I spelled it for him.“Will need a lorry,” he said. “Or a train.”We arrived at the row of shops. Only one shop. The four others were takeaways – a Chinese, a curry house, a pizzeria and a Mexican. All except the Chinese were open.The Syrian had paused in the door of the pizzeria. Some scruffily dressed teenage girls were grouped together by the counter. A small television was hung on the tiled wall. Outside was a rank of delivery mopeds. The clipped Libyan was covertly examining them.The Syrian stepped into the pizzeria and said something to the larger, older man behind the counter. A younger man had been joking with the teenage girls while the large man had taken a phone call. Putting the phone down he had spoken sharply to the young man. That’s when the Syrian had stepped in.There was a rapid exchange of words between the Syrian and the large man. The flap in the counter was lifted and we five were beckoned through. One of the girls pulled a disappointed face.We filed past the ovens and the stacks of flat cardboard boxes into a small kitchen at the back, stood there shoulder to shoulder.“My brother said to wait here.” By brother the Syrian meant fellow countryman.Three iron and plywood chairs were tucked under a small iron and plywood table. We waited. We weren’t offered food, only tea. Were all Syrians obsessed by tea?Waiting – for what none of us knew – we began discussing where we wanted to go. One of us wanted to get to family in Manchester, another to a friend in Liverpool. That left two of us uncertain. I noticed that the fake Libyan no longer mentioned lorries or trains. The quiet man from Chad suddenly announced that he had an actual brother already in the “West of the Country.” He hadn’t told us any of this in the Centre. None of us there had been granted asylum, had been waiting to be sent back, once our appeals had failed.The man from Chad declared that he was going to go overland. I told him that the West Country was a long way from where we were and that in open country drones would spot him, even in woodland. “They have infra-red sensors.”“Lot of homeless here, my brother say. Why they bother with me?”The large pizza man didn’t allow an answer: “Go. Now. Out the back.” Pushing us aside he opened the back door and began shepherding us out. “TV news just said you seven dangerous. Terrorists. Not to be approached.”Seven? Terrorists? We six looked around to one another wondering which one of us could be a terrorist. We all, probably because his story was the least credible, suspected the Libyan. In our journeys here though we had all assumed other identities, told different stories. Could be any one of us. Two had looked quickly away from me.“You,” the pizza man closed his large fist on the Syrian’s shirt, “go to this street.” I glimpsed Arabic script on a torn piece of cardboard. “Only you. You will be collected. Now go!” This big man, used to shoving people about, forcefully pointed past the empty upended pallets and plastic bins to an unlit back alley. He hurriedly said more – sounded like directions – to the Syrian. By which time I had left and, in panicked scattering, the Libyan and I had split off from the others.I sort of knew, from my escorted trips out, the general direction to the centre of London, east from the Centre. What I was less sure of was that keeping company with a suspected terrorist was a good idea. Word has it that Border Force CCtv monitors look for groups, not solo travellers.Just when I was wondering how to get shot of the Libyan without causing offence he stopped me. “I hang about here,” he said.That took a moment to make sense: instinct was telling me to get as far away, to be as unconnected to the Centre as was possible. Realisation though had me laugh: “The mopeds.” One had passed us a few moments before.“Rider got to leave outside. When delivery made. To a house. Then I take.”“Good luck.”We embraced. He crossed the road looking for a vantage point. I hastened eastward.
▼֍▲
In half an hour I had crossed under a motorway and found myself among fields. A lone walker. This had me afraid. Motorway signs had told me I had to be heading north and these roads were taking me to the east.I needed to be one of many in a city; and to be truly safe, unseen, I needed a tent city, the city within every city now. Always someone there to find me a cardboard pitch, supply me with a plastic shelter. Tent people, all with nothing, take pride in sharing the little nothing they have.The road became semi-rural with streetlights, a rough sort of pavement. Occasional cars passed. Tense I kept waiting for the sound of a car drawing to a stop behind me, burst of a police siren, blue flicker of police lights.I arrived at another estate of parked cars and garden hedges. Bedroom lights glowed behind curtains.The one bus shelter was made of see-through perspex, would offer me no safe shelter. Front gardens were open, with high fences and high gates blocking the back gardens of even those houses said to be for sale.The houses came to an end and I walked into the semi-dark of another country road, the sky-red glow of London to the left ahead.I was still the sole walker, stopping and pressing myself into hedges, warily standing on soggy verges whenever a car came along. Tired I climbed a weed-grown gate into a small woodland, sat with my back to a tree, and slept.When I heard the morning traffic reach a busy pitch I climbed back over the gate and continued my walk, striding out, arms swinging, to warm myself. Very soon it was one pavement giving way to another. Then there were sleepy, sometimes stationary, dogwalkers. Women wrapped around in dressing gowns waiting for their dog to finish sniffing. One heavy runner in black leggings had me stumble off a pavement edge. Then came single individuals dressed for the office and hurrying past me, dodging around me.So it was that street by street I coalesced into the city, metropolis anonymity coming ever closer, furthermore holding out the promise of assured invisibility within a tent city. I reassured my flattened feet that to any disinterested onlooker I was but one other human being going about his business, and looking to create another new non-identity.
▼֍▲
Sy
He doesn’t think of himself as Syrian. If asked he will say first that he is from Idlib; and if they don’t understand his Arabic, only then will he add, “Syria.” If to a new met Syrian however he will straight away tell them, “Ashrafiyah.”Maybe, in response to their expression, he will add, “Idlib.”Some non-Syrian Arabic-speakers have confused his pronunciation, have asked if that was the Ashrayfiyeh in Beirut. He has told them, “No, not Lebanon. Idlib, Syria.”If asked by fellow refugees about Syria, he will say that Syria used to be green, that even in the cities and the towns the skies were full of birds. “Now,” he will tell them, “my Syria is a country of falling walls and grey dust.”Fellow refugees will nod their solemn understanding.“Now,” he says, “the empty skies are broken apart by screaming war planes. Or drones. Before the bombs.”Fellow refugees are not the only people he has told this to. Always in a plastic-sheeted refugee encampment a wary someone wandering about with a form needing to be filled. Chary of being wept on, or berated, the form-filler and their interpreters have found the Syrian.“Why did you leave? Idlib, you say?”“To remain alive.”“You considered your life to be under threat?”“What hope there for an outspoken, a middle-aged teacher? When they are putting children in prison?” He does not mention his son the journalist nor that the screaming war planes were Russian. Just in case.“You fled. Where did you go first? When you got out of Syria?”“Salqin. Moved on from Rehandi.” He worries that he may have told this pair too much. Next time he will tell the form-filler that he doesn’t know, this time says, “You need to know no more.”“I do. If you don’t mind? I need to know where you want to go. Back to Syria?”The Syrian considers the politics of his answer, squints at the interviewer, rubs at his bristled chin, says, “I want to go where there are no wars. So not to Syria. Not to Idlib. Not anywhere in Syria. If it wasn’t our own government trying to kill us – four hundred thousand of us so far. Or so I have been told. Then it was Kurdish terrorists trying to kill us. Or the Israelis thinking they were bombing Palestinian enclaves. Or American drones as inaccurately targeting their enemies. Targeting what they thought were their enemies. War is full of mistakes.”“Do you have anywhere in particular in mind?”“Europe somewhere. It has been arranged.”Not so well arranged. He hadn’t expected to be waiting in this street of hedges and parked cars, streetlights shining off the tops of parked cars.A long grey car slows to a stop beside him. The young male passenger puts his head and arm through the window to tell him to open the back door: “Got a child lock.”The Syrian squeezes in beside a bulky black and red child’s seat.“Seat belt,” the driver tells him. He struggles to free the belt from its tension lock, then to find the buckle coupling between his bum and the child seat. He succeeds.“OK. We go.” The driver doesn’t race away, continues slowly down the street of parked cars, leaves glinting in the garden hedges.
▼֍▲
n-L
During his first Cairo practice one of his grateful patients gave this non-Libyan a moped. He therefore feels on familiar terms with this evening’s borrowed machine. Although, picking his way through cold Surrey, he could have done with a hat this cold night let alone a helmet. And even a thin jacket might have kept out some of the wind.Stopping at a red light in Brentford, feet on the floor, he gives the tank between his legs a shake. There is but a swish of liquid rather than a reassuring slop.Ahead is the gleaming red and white of a petrol station.Before stopping at the traffic lights he considered taking petrol from a parked car or a motorbike. But, even had he been able to undo the petrol caps, he has no tube with which to siphon the petrol. The choice left him is either to abandon the moped and look for a ride, or to steal petrol from a garage.For the second time this night he is to find fortune on his side: the petrol station has an all-night shop and doesn’t require preliminary card registration at the pump. He quickly fills the moped’s small tank. He guesses with the wrong kind of petrol. The moped probably requires 2-stroke. But even without the dash of oil the engine will probably run long enough to get him beyond London.While at the pump he pretends to have spilt petrol, pulls off reams of blue tissue roll. His back to the shop he stuffs wads of this paper up inside his sweater and down the front of his pants, gets back on the moped and leaves.
▼֍▲
Street signs with their borough names mark his journey north. He gets through Acton, then Ealing, glimpses and recognises the arch of Wembley from football on the telly.The moped rattles along. An ambulance, siren blasting, rocks him as it goes racing by, frightens him into a side road. Then he is in Stanmore and having to choose smaller roads, ones that don’t take him to MI North.When he crosses under the M25 his hands are purple with cold and grip, the tank back to a swish, and the engine has begun to sound peculiar. He reluctantly decides that the moped has become a liability. In Hemel Hempstead he leaves it carefully outside another pizza takeaway, shuttered; and he starts to waddle back to a park just passed.The day has begun bright. One of those gleaming mornings when everything seems clear and worth looking at. The fresh green of a fir tree, light reflecting off curved holly leaves. Trying not to rustle as he walks he hopes to find a bench where he can doze in the warming sun, figure out how – cashless and cardless – he might make his way upcountry.
▼֍▲
Eth & Af
So of-a-moment have they been left together at the littered back of the pizza shop that the short Afghan and the tall Ethiopian, both thin, look to one another wondering what next to do. For so long have they been transported, told where to go, where they will be collected, who they have to meet; waited one place, got taken to another. Suspicious of all they have had little option but to trust the next anxious man.The other three escapees took themselves off to the left, and parted ways before disappearing into the dark beyond the last streetlight. The short Afghan and the tall Ethiopian stop staring into the stillness there, look to the road on the right, the way they had come.“Lorries?” the Afghan says.The Ethiopian assesses the word, gives a decided nod.They start off briskly to the right, in and out of dark gaps of the night, heading back towards The Centre. Early mornings back there ears had registered the diesel roar of cold engine starts, had leant a connoiseur’s discernment to the deep thrum of slow-moving lorries, their reversing beeps as the lorries had negotiated imagined industrial site loading bays. A unifying music to one and all, a source of shared speculation. Even if they hadn’t actually jumped a lorry, all had considered it.In this retracing of their steps the pair have just entered the path between the few trees and garden hedges when a police car’s flashing blue light goes silently by on the road behind them. The Ethiopian and the Afghan stop together again, listening now to the rising sound of a siren.They stop where they are, waiting for the increasing siren to reach them, until the Afghan pats the Ethiopian’s arm. Having got his attention he indicates The Centre and shakes his head. Then he taps his own chest and says, “Liverpool.”The Ethiopian lifts his strangely bearded chin in acknowledgement, lays long fingers across his own chest and carefully enunciates, “Man-Chester.” These two words they have told officials many many times.With the siren almost upon them they move closer to the hedge. A police car’s blue light flickers briefly in among the trees. They listen and wait.The siren stops abruptly when the car reaches The Centre.The Afghan is confident, his having been an Army translator, that his application to stay will eventually be accepted. Bureaucracy everywhere goes at its own pace, and once that ways and forms have been found to render all bodies involved blameless, he is certain that he will be allowed to stay. Eventually.That confidence has him tempted to return alone to The Centre; and by his voluntarily returning further establish his confidence in his application. He knows though that the Ethiopian has almost run out of appeals and that, if he is to be sent back to Ethiopia, the authorities there will readily kill one who has demonstrated his disloyalty by leaving. The Afghan also knows that the one thing working against the Ethiopian’s appeal is his lack of English. Others in their unit, aside from himself, have tried to teach him their versions of get-by English. The Ethiopian can speak Italian better than English, Italian his default second language. His closest cousins however are not in Italy, but are here in Manchester.“Centre lorries no good,” the Afghan says. “We need to be back across that road. That road.” He points. “And away from busy roads.”The Afghan tells himself that he can apply for citizenship from elsewhere in England. From Liverpool even.“Manchester?” he indicates that the Ethiopian should accompany him, and knows that his acting as guide will not be a wholly charitable act. To be shut again in The Centre, even with brownie points for having returned ‘of his own free will,’ has his chest feeling heavy. While just the excitement of his being out here feels liberating.“Lorry?” the Ethiopian frowns down on him.“Lorry,” the Afghan encourages him along. “But gotta be goin’ the right way.” The translator has mimicked the accent of one of the privates. His mimicries used to make some of the soldiers laugh. Looking at the Ethiopian’s incomprehension though he wonders should he stick to the English he parroted back in the Helmand schoolroom.
The Company Chronicles
The Company Chronicles
Chapter One: the case
“The citizen’s first duty is not to keep quiet.” Günter Grass
“No bride is going to get killed,” Mavis assured me. “A prospective groom this one. And he’s here. She’s back there.”
The case nonetheless held little appeal. I’d gotten out of the swing, had my head full of corporate skulduggery and fiscal shenanigans. And what Mavis was pressing on me, although ostensible run-of-the-mill vetting, felt like a backward step. Even the name, that kind of name, Damodar Naik, conjured up all kinds of ghosts.
So involved with the whole Asian-bride scene had I been at one time that I had considered setting up on my own, had even registered the domain – www.spousecheck.com. Still had it. No intention now of ever using it.
“I wouldn’t ask,” Mavis said, “only everyone else is either caught up in their own jobs, or off sick.” It was that time of year, not quite cold enough to freeze-kill the flu.
“Should be reasonably straightforward,” Mavis didn’t let my unenthusiastic silence put her off. “All they want is for us to confirm that the lad’s a worthy prospect. Betrothal’s next month. Hence the urgency.”
If I had had any other job pushing to be completed I would have, despite my sense of obligation to the company, have refused. This though would be better than my casting about for things to do to get me through the gloom of January.
“What’s the name again?”
Damodar Ekavir Naik resided in featureless Swindon, and at 31 years he was of an age to be considering marriage. Local directory checks showed him to have various business interests, giving him every appearance of being a successful businessman. Which was the public face a prospective groom would want to present.
I looked over recent Swindon bankruptcies. Damodar Naik would have appeared to have avoided that. Thus far.
In a busier time I’d probably have made a few more cursory checks – he had made one miscalculation, par for any entrepreneur: a partnership in a wholesale firm had gone tits up – and I would have reported back that Damodar Naik was presently single and solvent, and I’d not have given him that much more thought.
I’d lately become used to winkling out the ways and means of fraud, however, for the unaccountable sums involved in money laundering; and Damodar Naik’s business past seemed just a little too respectable and neatly packaged. That said, as a 21stC member of the British public I was cynical of anyone rich and successful before ever I came to this work, which work has given me ever more reason to be cynical and suspicious.
I dug deeper, straight away discovered one of the two companies to be a parent company.
The first, the singular company, was a property portfolio. And the lad had done well, owned houses and flats in and beyond Swindon. If he had started in his teens he was just old enough to have benefited from the property boom, could have bought cheap, redecorated and sold on. Property though was a well-documented laundering destination.
Or had he inherited the portfolio?
Previously, when asked to look into the previous lives of potential grooms, most turned out to have been mother-coddled boys; and it had been the standing (frowned on to say ‘caste’ these days) of the family that had been of as much interest as his wherewithal. The boy himself, unless hectically homosexual or on the sex offender’s register, had been incidental. As a freebie extra our report always, and cynically, included a family tree.
I triple-checked.
Damodar Ekavir Naik had no parents in this country. According to his managerial profile he had come here as a ten year old with his twenty year old cousin, whose family was also still back in India. Both had become UK citizens. The cousin’s brother had already been here, had been the Home Office guarantor for the pair of them.
But back to his businesses.
It was the second company that had the many subsidiaries; and all registered according to company law.
My first thought was that Damodar Naik must spend a goodly part of his working week on the road. I checked his car. He had two, a Mercedes 4×4 and, predictably, a Porsche.
Damodar Naik’s slew of companies had other companies, mini-empires of shops, some freehold, most leased; and all over the West Country and South Wales, but extending up the Welsh border and on into Lancashire. Some were franchised neighbourhood convenience stores, but most were hairdressers, tanning salons and nail bars, with some of the latter pair hidden behind other companies.
I had another look at the ten year older cousin. He was now Coalville-based, currently unemployed, and with a criminal record for procurement.
Hmmmm…..
What I like most about this job, still like, is that I never know where it’s going to lead, where next it’s going to take me.
Chapter Two: the job
I’ve known our CEO a long time, and when young I used to accompany him to various conferences and dinners. He liked to have one of us staff there to hand out cards and brochures.
Afterwards, in hotel foyers, I’ve waited nearby while he has endeavoured to win the confidence of a potential client with his chummy behind-the-scenes knowingness. But those confidences, the pair of them ensconced in soft corner chairs, will not be that different to what he has just delivered on the corporate Talk circuit, will just just sound more confidential.
That Talk circuit is where we’ll have him now, in the hotel’s function room, one arm resting on the perspex lectern, diners lounging beside their tables, legs stretched out, coffee and brandy being quietly served.
“I’m sure that every single one of you here,” he will begin, “is as honest as the day is long.” Pause for possible laughter, people at tables glancing to one another. “But people do lie, and it has been my firm’s job to catch them out in those lies.”
He will look along the closest tables before continuing: “I’m not talking about the obvious liars, those we all know to be liars. The career politician, the corporate spokesperson,” distant jeers, “salespeople,” returned jeers, “all those misrepresenters, omitters of pertinent facts, includers of sleight-of-mind distractions, all spin and dazzle.” From the back of the room I’ve seen him wiggle his chubby fingers when delivering that ‘spin and dazzle’ part of his spiel.
“No, the lies we are paid to find and expose have been the lived lies. Some where individuals have even convinced themselves of the lie; the self-deceived, even the self-deluded. Fantasists possibly. And that has required of us certain skills. Discreet skills. Because those people suspected of lying have not to be aware that their lying lives are being investigated.
“Which brings me to nomenclature.” His hesitant delivery and expression mocked his use of such a multisyllabic word. “Has to be said: my chosen profession has laboured under many titles. Private Detective and Security Consultant are the two most obvious. While Gumshoe and Paid Snooper are two of the less complimentary titles.
“Our firm being called The Glass Company, I have to tell you, is not because of the one-time tool of our trade, the magnifying glass. Nor do we spy on subjects Through The Looking Glass, or view the world Through a Glass Darkly. I’m afraid the Glass Company has a more prosaic history. My name, not one I’ve ever been comfortable with, is Marcus Glass. My parents had planned on having four boys. I have two brothers, Matthew and Lucas. My parents were considering divorce when Jonathan arrived.”
A pause here while he appears to glance down at his lectern notes. Although Marcus rarely had even a scrap of paper with him, was more likely to swipe down his phone if he needed a prompt.
“As to the work itself it has, of course, depended on the economic times, on technology, on current morality, and on changes in the law. At one time for instance, and as most of you will be aware from books and films, the majority of our work was providing evidence of adultery.
“’No fault’ divorces put the kybosh on that.
“Nowadays if asked to investigate possible extra-marital activities, or,” he smiles to himself at what he is about to say, “non-marital extra-curricula activities, then it is usually to satisfy a niggling suspicion, rather than for pecuniary benefit. Ours aside.
“So much for the Private Eye.
“As Security Consultants there was a period when we spent hours bivouacked in hedgerows trying to catch sheep-stealers. Whole flocks were being stolen. Cuts to policing meant that they hadn’t the staff to spare.
“Not that we were complaining.
“Apart from the cold and damp.
“I have to say, and you’re probably aware of it yourself, austerity policing has become more after-the-event crime investigation. Crime prevention itself, and the keeping of order, has fallen more to us in the private sector. The ‘order’ of ‘law’n order’ coming under the security wing of firms such as ours.”
Grinning complicity he holds up his hand: “Semantics now. In the exposing of lies we ourselves employ deceitful terminology. Our ‘door staff’ are bouncers. Trained bouncers nonetheless. ‘Event Stewards’ on the other hand, and I have to confess, have little in the way of a skill-set. They are our zero hours crew and weekend students in high-viz tabards. Their task being what could be our profession’s motto – ‘Where gaps occur we fill them.’
“What’s that?” Whether or not anyone has spoken (there will have been occasional low-key chatter throughout his ‘talk’) he leans over the lectern, plump palm almost to his ear. “No, for detection these days you’re looking for any firm with ‘intelligence’ in their company title. Could be linked to its place of business, the street say, ‘Fenmoor Intelligence.’ Or more likely ‘Fenmoor Intelligence Services.’ Or it’ll be the name of the proprietors, ‘Bailey & Biggins: Intelligence Network.’ OK?”
Taking a sip of water he glances to his pretend speech notes, continues, “In our city what has been our detecting mainstay of the last twenty years has been bride vetting. That’s come about not simply because of actual arranged marriages, it’s more the hangover of arranged marriages, their persistence within the uncertainties of our more liberal culture.
“When the offspring of the still conventional parents – be they Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Orthodox this or that – want to marry for love, and the parents don’t want to appear fuddy-duddy, don’t want to further estrange their already different cultural offspring, then we, the bride vetters, are recruited to either satisfy the parents’ worst fears, or to bring peace of mind.
“Either way, discreetly.
“I say bride vetting, but it has just as often been bridegroom vetting. There are still dowry-hunters out there, and plenty of new big game about. As those hunters usually come from within the same immigrant culture then we too have to recruit from that same immigrant culture. And what we have found is that the best people, the most effective snoopers, have turned out to be middle-aged women.
“Men from those closed backgrounds have seemed unable to resist boasting of their new profession. Women of a certain age on the other hand – some married, some divorced – don’t want their neighbours to know what they’re doing for pin money. And these are women who, by and large, have become used to being in the background, unnoticed.
“Not that the work requires that much snooping. Most of the investigating is done online, requiring only their language skills and cultural awareness.
“Given that many male immigrants have had to be deceitful to get here, our lady investigators are told to check for any subtle name changes in the prospective grooms, discrepancies in their claimed backgrounds; and to look for any wives, families, dependants left behind. Or for anyone they may have borrowed money from, be beholden to, for their ʻsuccessful’ business.
“Middle-aged women we have found, probably like yourselves, to not be readily impressed. They are often more cynical than our oldest old hands. Our lady investigators, for instance, have come to expect the ‘large property portfolio’ to be mortgaged way beyond its buy-to-let hilt.
“Westernised brides of course present fewer problems for us. University life usually provides us with a few sorry love affairs, sometimes a dabbling in whatever was then fashionable in the way of narcotics. More often than not though her one big love affair will turn out to be with the man who now wants to marry her. So the investigation then shifts to the parents of the bride. If first, even second generation immigrants, is when we, again, call in our experienced lady investigators.
“Nor is it only immigrant communities seeking to investigate their child’s chosen one. The rich are very defensive who they allow into their inner circles. The English especially, not wanting to appear rudely inquisitive, or snobbish, employ us to see if the interloper merits their approval. In which case we are the very essence of discretion.
“Except for here. Now.” His smile anticipates some laughter.
“Which brings us to business.
“Technology has opened up many avenues for fraud and embezzlement. There’s the clumsy cold-calling chancers of course squeezing a few thou’ out of puzzled pensioners. But there’s a whole realm of others slipping behind shadow companies. Or should I say companies within the shadow?
“As some of you may be aware whole business empires can be built on the promise of payment. Money borrowed is used to purchase goods, or property, or shares. Which are sold on for profit.”
We will rattle through this next piece of his.
“With the promise of profit more wherewithal gets borrowed to purchase more goods, more property, more shares. From what does get sold some money goes to pay off the first promise of payment. Continuation and confidence is essential to any such enterprise, nothing being actually owned permanently, everything passing through…. Just a matter,” he slows his delivery, “of holding one’s nerve.
“With bone fide businesses being built on borrowed sand makes it difficult for us investigators to judge how ‘successful’ any such builder might be. Even the accountants and actuaries we employ to help us establish a person’s wealth can find themselves bamboozled. There’s just so many people now call themselves hedge-fund managers. Which title, sorry folks, immediately gets my crew looking under, below, behind, and every which way.
“Nor is it only those businesses being asked to merge, or those undergoing aggressive attempts to take them over, that seek our services. Head-hunters, and even those being head-hunted for the higher echelons, have come asking us to check out both head-hunted individuals and head-hunting companies.
“With the individuals it’s mostly connections that we look for, especially via previous posts held. We also look for what took place – often laterally – during their tenure. What favours were granted, what taken after they left.”
The corporate audience will at this point have stopped jeering and cheering, might even hush a neighbour. This will be home ground.
“For these types of investigations our accountants and actuaries depend on IT expertise. What the tabloids unfairly call hackers. As a cliff is to a mountaineer every password, every encryption is a challenge to these characters. Often they come away from an investigation full of admiration for the ingenuity of the subject. As often though… No, what’s more likely is that they come away scathing over the amateurish duplicity. Be that a bridegroom on the make or a corporate chancer.
“That’s what we do.” He opens his palms. “On occasion we even have to investigate our own staff.” One or two of the diners might look to me at the back of the room. “With subterfuge being the name of our game there is no-one in our business we can absolutely trust. Always there could be someone on a retainer: ‘If this should come up let me know…’ Or ‘Something in it for you if you just forget to….’
“Now, our daily rates are available online. Also, for any of you considering matrimony, our fixed rate consultancy fees. Other fees will depend on the experience and qualifications of the staff involved. All are happy to negotiate terms.
“I thank you.”
Chapter Three: Mrs P
“…there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it…” Orlando Figes
The office managers are the company’s two permanent staff, one always on call. Mavis is the older, Donny the younger and a latecomer to The Company. Mrs P and I didn’t know quite what to make of his emphasis on his managerial status nor his very gelled hair. Mrs P wondered aloud once how Donny made his luscious locks step back up from his forehead. “Must require litres of gel,” she had said.
“Maybe he’s got a stepped head,” was my contribution. Which led to Donny, for a month or so, and not in his hearing, being called Step-Head. When not pleased with him Mrs P also called him Bouffant Donny. Aside from his high hair and ‘managerial status’ though I had no real gripes against Donny.
When neither Donny nor Mavis were available CEO Marcus filled in. The rest of us, even the seemingly regular and fussy admin, are all freelance, submit invoices and expenses.
The company knows who to bring in for what job, has built up a reservoir of talent. Within that network are smaller networks. I have my own favourite ports of call for different services, even for IT support if something is beyond my expertise. I can fiddle-faddle my way onto most sites, but if I keep coming up against suspicious dead-ends (what are they finding out about me?) I have another happy hacker who is pleased to accept any challenge I may toss his way.
Not that my favourite back-ups are the best at what they do – be it their talent for spotting financial fraud, their knowledge of immigration law and dodges, or an interpreter for a particular lingo – but they are people I get on well with. Even so, when I have nervously submitted some of their invoices alongside mine, and apologised for the serious amounts, especially from the fraud investigators and corporate lawyers, Mavis told me, “Never be afraid to ask for money or help. No-one expects you to know everything. And Donny and I’ll know if they’re overcharging. Maybe advise you not to use them again.”
Of all my regular call-on helpers my favourite has to be Mrs P. More than my favourite: I’ll go so far as to say that I was a little bit in love with Mrs P. Which, given the difference in our height and ages, and Mrs P’s general demeanour, might seem perverse on my part.
Mrs P’s full name is Mrs Jigna K. Patel. But I would never dare call her anything other than Mrs Patel. It was in the office that we started referring to her as Mrs P, and which I sometimes came to call her in her presence, and then more often than not eliciting a sharp sideways glance.
When I first had to fill out an expenses sheet Mrs P told me her first name, Jigna, wouldn’t tell me her second. “No need.” The expense sheet didn’t insist, so neither had I. If I had subsequently thought on it I had assumed that the K had stood for Krishna. In an idle hour however I discovered that it was Kaasni, which means flower. Mrs P is the least flowerlike woman I know.
Mrs P’s previously referred to demeanour can best be described as direct, even scathing. And that is consistent regardless of which language and/or dialect of the Indian subcontinent, including Hinglish, she happens to be interpreting for me. No “Aunty says…” No “Uncle wants to know…” No palms together and namaste-ing for Mrs P. Interrogative delivery was made for her. Even when translating face to face with the person Mrs P has a curl of the lip: “He reckons…” “She claims…” doubting all.
Mrs P has thick black eyebrows. I don’t mean wide, though they are, but dense. From the side they look like a black ridge atop her nose. Face on, eye contact with her, she seems to be always frowning, glaring even. Wouldn’t take much for Mrs P’s eyebrows to knit together into a permanent scowl.
I used to imagine my confessing to Mrs P my fondness for her and her possible responses.
“Wet English boy. Middle of the sari is it? Got a thing for the soft belly bit?”
Not that Mrs P ever wore a sari. She favours tunic tops and trousers, blacks and browns through to beige, all of her jackets padded. Her shoulder length hair, zig-zagged with grey, is usually clipped back at the sides, the clips brown plastic, a couple of times silver.
I did once dare ask Mrs P why she didn’t wear traditional dress.
“Do I look traditional? You’ll be expecting me to be all-the-time cooking next. Bring you tupperware samosas.”
Mrs P has no sacred cows, makes me smile.
Interviewing a prospective bride, about to be turned down and dispatched tearfully back to Jaipur, Mrs P said, “She says she is a good girl. Obedient. Stupid more like.” Which was true: the woman had mistaken a social media exchange of confidences for a marriage proposal, had paid her own fare over and had landed on the doorstep of the ‘groom’s’ family ready to get henna-ed. The family had suspected blackmail in the offing, had us investigate her and, to avoid shame, Mrs P and I escorted her along to an immigration detention centre.
“Love!” Mrs P’s top lip twisted into a whole new shape around that one word.
“Didn’t you marry for love?” I couldn’t resist asking on the way home.
“My parents wanted shot of me. I wanted shot of them. The pair of them. Stupid ignorant peasants.”
Her own marriage arranged, her children’s weren’t. Both daughters were born here. “They think they married for love. They didn’t. In the end, like most Brits, they married who would have them.”
Mister P, Ashok Jyotin Patel, is a hospital administrator.
“He had no dowry demands, was here, and not that stupid.”
From what I had seen of him, when I had dropped Mrs P home, I doubted that even when young he would have been described as a hunk.
It was in his hospital that Mrs P had begun her interpreting for others. She also now got called on by the police and courtrooms, as well as by The Company. But it had been in the hospital where she had extended, through trial and error, her languages and idioms.
That learning, I had suggested, like my own self-teaching must have given her some satisfaction. She would have none of it: “Sick and criminals is all I get to see. All feeling sorry for themselves.”
To say that Mrs P also has little sympathy for those we find duped would be a gross misrepresentation.
“More ignorance and stupidity,” she’d decide come the end of every case.
It is thanks to Mrs P that ‘ignorance and stupidity’ has become my own workaday mantra, my greeting, “Ignorance and stupidity,” for every new case of self-deception uncovered.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1140484
Failures of Love
Failures of Love
One
“A part to tear a cat in, to make all split.” William Shakespeare: A Midsummer’s Night Dream
“Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.” Lewis Carroll
No-one questions a man in uniform who stands and stares.
A man in uniform can stand on the same street corner for an hour or more and no member of the public — not even a curious child: infants are taught early to be wary of men in uniforms — no-one will ask him what he is doing there. Cars and buses will pass, people will step around him, and still he will stand and stare. Whatever the man in uniform is staring at is official business. None of theirs. He is not to be engaged in idle chatter.
No-one questions a man in uniform who stands and stares. And certainly not when the uniform is that of the police. To question such a man could place them, by their asking, under suspicion.
A guileless member of the public might interrupt the policeman’s staring to ask for directions. Even for the time. Although the latter is increasingly unlikely. With the advent of cheap digital watches and the ubiquity of mobile phones — practically every mobile phone sporting an optional clock face — to not know the time could draw attention to oneself. While an unrecognised visitor being lost, probably not.
No-one questions a man who stands and stares. Even if that man is Howard Dawson. Because although Howard Dawson’s uniform might initially resemble that of the regular police — sturdy black shoes, pressed black trousers, black belted jacket, breast pockets for notebooks and pens, radio clipped to lapel, luminous yellow traffic vest over jacket, and on his head a flat-topped cap with chequered band and badge — the silver shoulder insignia, and especially the large plasticated label on his back, declares Howard Dawson to be, not a run-of-the-mill constable, but a ‘Police Community Support Officer’.
The title is as misleading as his uniform. As a Police Community Support Officer Howard has no truncheon, no handcuffs, no CS spray, and no powers of arrest greater than that of any other member of the general public. Reporting back to his Sergeant is the most power that Howard has. Whoever the Sergeant that day, that shift happens to be.
And insofar as quasi-military ranks go Howard is more a private than an officer. Probably not even a private. He was told, when recruited, that he was to be the everyday public face of the police, the everyday public presence. All that Howard has to be is his uniform.
Not that there is, for this Police Community Support Officer, a community to speak of in Marraton, at least not in the sense of a natural community grown around a common purpose, the fellowship of a single industry. The mines around Marraton, and the furnaces within Marraton, were all long ago shut down. And with fish stocks depleted there are but a few trawlers left in the too-large docks. Those few trawlers rarely venture beyond the brown coastal waters. Even the fish factory has been mothballed, is awaiting redevelopment.
All that remains of business in Marraton is a few fusty shops, occasional instant-heritage attempts to attract tourists, and the flat grey roofs of a few warehouses and component factories on the two industrial estates.
Adult unemployment runs at 30%. Officially. But what with those registered disabled — that is marginally unfit for work — with those partially employed, and adding in those taking discreet early retirement the percentage is probably twice 30%.
But who’s to tell? People in Marraton might guess at their neighbours’ lives, but by and large they keep to themselves. Those not in work don’t want their neighbour to know precisely what statistic they are, which benefit claimant they are defined as. While those in work don’t want to make their possibly unemployed neighbour feel any worse by sight of their wage packet. What others don’t know can’t upset them, hurt them. Nil community.
No-one stops to talk to Howard as he stands and stares.
Howard is given his orders for the day by whichever Sergeant is on duty; and on Howard’s eventual return to the station it will be that Sergeant or another Sergeant who will glance over Howard’s notes and grunt. Sergeants both male and female, as part of the Sergeant course, are taught how to grunt.
Some grunts are accepting: “Thought as much.” Some grunts segue into a cynical sigh: “Might’ve guessed.” Some grunts, with lip-curl accompaniment, are contemptuous of the information contained in that day’s notes. While those grunts that cause the chin to lift slightly, the back almost imperceptibly straightening, are an expression of outrage.
The grunts that Howard has thus far received in his police career have been mostly of the Sergeant-proven-right, thought-as-much variety.
If on arriving where he has been sent and someone needs to be arrested Howard will have to press a button and talk into his chest. A police car will come, siren possibly wailing, and Howard might then get to assist in the holding of a struggling felon’s arm. Possibly — more excitement — back-up will be called for and more sirens nee-naring will see a van arrive. And as the doors are closed on the miscreant Howard’s police colleague, the full-time car-driving warrant-possessing Constable, might give Howard a nod of approbation — the fully-fledged PC equivalent of a pat on the back.
Aware of his status, clad in his beyond-question uniform, on this day-to-day working level, with its absence of task-oriented urgency, to fill his working hours Howard Dawson PCSO has drifted into the habit of standing and staring. This day he is standing and staring at the cracks between the pavement slabs in Elizabeth Street.
Elizabeth Street is a street away from the High Street, has fewer passers-by to wonder at his standing and staring.
Today’s Sergeant earlier sent Howard off to enquire about a dead cat.
“Some old biddy’s phoned up in a right state about a dead cat. Check it out.”
When he has roused himself from his standing and staring Howard will proceed to the address given and write down the details in his police issue notebook and take those details back to the Sergeant.
When he has roused himself.
*
“There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.” Henry Miller
*
Yesterday mimulus were blooming in the Elizabeth Street’s pavement cracks. Each bloom was a buttery yellow trumpet with, at the back of its throat, large almost orange freckles. Much like the freckles on some ginger people, freckles so big that they almost join up to obscure the white skin below.
Yesterday Howard stood here in Elizabeth Street — terrace row facing terrace row, doors opening to the pavement — here where there is a slight recess with 3 steps down to a black cellar door, and in the cracks between the grey-green pavement slabs, in row at right angles to row, ochre mimulus bloomed.
This day there are none. Nor any sign of their having been. Even their green thumbnail leaves have gone.
No flowers have been wilfully kicked aside and left to wilt and die. Nor have the blooms been plucked by a squatting child — squeezing the neck of the bloom to open and close its throat, give it a mimic voice. A child would have left behind the leaves within the cracks.
No green leaves, no pale stalks, no tidy heap of sweepings where the cracks have been scraped. Nor was this perpetrated by one of the town’s head-down road sweepers. Further along Elizabeth Street Howard can make out small round hillocks of moss in some of the pavement cracks. But here, where the mimulus bloomed, is only the glint of grit and the dark smears of disturbed algae.
Midway down Elizabeth Street is a square of light from the gap where cars park behind the High Street club.
Howard asks himself why anyone would prefer a swept, weed-free pavement outside their front door to nature’s gift of self-seeded mimulus? Answer: the Marraton householder who has been taught to keep their front step clean and their windows shined and can see no further.
Saddened, Howard sighs and reminds himself that he has a dead cat to enquire about. Howard knows better than to call the enquiry an investigation. To do so would elicit both Sergeant grunt and Sergeant sneer.
*
The Ropery Lane house is the first of three pebbledashed bungalows and the only one with faux-leaded windows. Behind the three houses is a buddleia and broken brick wasteland.
Along the pavement are low garden walls, also pebbledashed, the pebbledashing like dried porridge. The second bungalow along has levelled their front garden to park their round-ended caravan. Behind the low wall of this first garden a mass of different coloured bushes are in careful disarray, the garden path of crazy-paving neatly edged. A pear tree has been trained along the old foundry wall.
Leastwise Howard has been sometime told that the wasteland behind was once the old foundry. He was also told once that it was the old steelworks. And maybe neither were right. He has never bothered to find out, has no interest in the towns’ history. A curious incomer would probably have found out more about Marraton than Howard, who has never actually set out to learn anything about the town. All that he knows of Marraton has been absorbed perchance.
*
The woman who answers the two-chime doorbell — black skirt, fawn jumper — does not have her hair in careful disarray. The hair is more a helmet, precisely back-combed and lacquered. Howard knows this because his wife used to do the same, furiously attacking her morning head with a round black-spiked brush, lips corner-twisted in seeming anger, before the long blast of spray up over her head when she would turn in the slowly descending cloud of lacquer droplets.
Howard’s wife’s hair was a dull stiff blonde. This woman’s hair is dyed black. And this woman isn’t as old as Howard had expected from the complaint and the address. Late forties? Not an old biddy anyway. Howard thinks he may have seen her around town.
“You called,” Howard flips open his notebook, already out of his breast pocket for the address, “about a dead cat?”
“Over there.”
Like most Marraton people her face remains expressionless as she speaks. Mouth opens and closes, vowels flat as her face, eyes staring steadfast.
Howard looks behind him at the bushes and pear tree. He can see no cat, turns back to the woman.
“I’ll put my shoes on,” she says; and she goes back up the hall in her fluffy mauve slippers.
The hall carpet is thick and brown-patterned, a gold thread running through it, an almost similar pattern in the flock wallpaper. A house ordered and silent.
The woman comes back wearing flat black shoes. She puts the door on the latch. “Over here,” she says. “I was checking,” she turns to see if Howard is following, “to see if the pear was setting.”
Octagonal stepping stones have been set among the bushes. One bush is red-leafed, white-veined. One has pink-scented blossom.
The cat’s there.” She stands with her back to the pear tree. Wires hold the tree’s black branches like a many-armed crucifix to the old foundry’s brick wall.
The woman points to below a spiky green bush with drooping yellow flowers. “Somebody must’ve chucked it over the wall.”
“Not your cat?”
“Cats give me the itch.”
A round-headed ginger tom, stiff and thin in death, is lying on the dry ground between the stem of the spiky bush and the inside of the pebbledashed low wall. Small grey leaves and tiny yellow petals like flakes of gold have fallen around it.
Howard squats down, his back catching the bushes behind him. He pokes at the dead cat with his pen. The carcass is as stiff as cardboard.
“Hit by a car?” Howard says. “Somebody dropped it over your wall?”
The woman, standing both feet together on an octagonal stone, simultaneously grunts and tuts: “Get hardly any cars down here.”
Howard stands. “Not what you think happened?”
“Have a look at its stomach,” she says. “When I saw what they’d done I left it there, called you lot. Some proper sick bastards around.”
Howard, puzzled now, squats again.
The cat’s ginger fur is flat. On its large round head one ear is squashed down, eyes almost closed, a rim of green eyeball showing.
“Thought the same as you at first,” the woman says above him. “Was going to throw it in bin. Soon as I went to move it though, out they fell.”
“What?”
“Them snails,” the woman says with such impatient emphasis that she almost stamps her foot.
Using the back end of his pen Howard lifts the cat’s uppermost back leg. From the inside of its back legs is a black gash along the belly of the cat, the closest fur matted, Howard assumes, with old blood. On both sides of the gash many of the hair strands, white to golden, have been stuck together in black points. As Howard lifts the leg higher the gash in the fur opens slightly and a white snail shell slips out. Now Howard notices two other white snail shells below the cat’s body. The woman must have dropped the cat back on them. On one of the round snail shells is a dark smear that could be old blood.
“Got hit by a car,” Howard slowly stands, “somebody pushed it over your wall. Stomach got split on impact, snails found their way in there while it was down here.”
The woman does now stamp her foot: “They weren’t live snails!” She turns her head away in exasperation. Her black hair doesn’t move independently of her head. “Them snails were dead when they were put in the cat. Somebody put ‘em in there. They split open the cat’s belly, gutted it, put old snail shells in there. Why?” She glares at Howard. “Why would anyone do that? And why put it over our wall? Eh? Why our wall?”
Despite her agitation, her voice rising, her eyes opening wider and a slight increase in colour to her cheeks, the woman’s expression hasn’t otherwise changed. Still the flat stone face.
Howard started contemplatively nodding as she was speaking. “Let me have all the details,” he indicates that they should go into the house. “What day was it when you found the dead cat?”
*
Police Community Support Officer Howard Dawson is stood on café corner — in the dip of Byng Street, where it slopes up one way to the social flats, the other to Market Square.
Up there Market Square is, Howard knows, prettily cobbled now. It has a chrome fountain bubbling in its centre and slim young trees on three of its sides. The old Market House, left dilapidated for decades, was demolished three years ago and the Square restored to what it never was. The new cobbles are too proud, twist ankles.
Off to one side of the Square is the red sandstone police station. White and blue-striped police cars and four-by-fours will be parked outside in Clark Street. Police Community Support Officer Howard Dawson, standing on café corner makes no move towards the out of sight police station. He is still looking up Byng towards the Square.
On the corner opposite the café is an off-licence. Of the three men who have gone in and come out of the off-licence only one has overtly looked across at PCSO Howard Dawson. As if refusing to be intimidated out of his day time drinking by sight of a police officer. That one man straightened defiantly and slowed his walk. Of the other two men, one went sideways quickly on his way, the other dropped his chin into his wide shirt collar.
Howard pays them no conscious attention. Nor does he turn his head to any of the people stepping casually around him. None greet him. Not in his uniform.
It’s not that the people of Marraton are not friendly. They are friendly — in that they make a display of friendliness. Cheerful greetings will be shouted to one another in the street, often mock miserable, a four stroke catechism: “Rain forecast again!” / “No change there then.” / “Does it ever?” / “Next Tuesday I heard.” Token laughter.
All up and down the cross-roads around Howard are such greetings. In many cases just a simple exchange of “Hiya.” All outwardly friendly. The inhabitants of Marraton however don’t invite one another into their homes, not for a chat, not for coffee. Their ‘friendships’ exist in public places — in pubs, in social clubs, in cafés — in those gatherings where women cackle at men’s rumble-told wisecracks.
For a while after Howard left school, for a while after he finished at the factory, old classmates, recent workmates, would stand before Howard on pavements and ask him what he was up to now, tell of what they were doing now. As time has gone on though they have simply said “Hiya” at nearby sight of him. And that rarely now, and not at all when he is in uniform.
If they choose not to recognise him under his cap, and even if he doesn’t acknowledge them — being in his uniform — he certainly knows who they are. One new constable said that Marraton people look like their own caricatures — noses too big for their faces, ears too big or too small for their heads; a town of bad dentistry and dated hairstyles, of bodies bent, twisted or bloated. The still-straight young of course dress to look like everybody else their age. Although Howard could guess their family, could name them if asked. He doubts anyone will ask.
Howard continues to look up Byng towards Market Square.
Where Oake Street crosses Byng the afternoon sun has cut a wide bright gully. Up the rest of Byng the shadow from the roofs and chimney stacks form a castellated line. While the shadow from the tall Quality Store is like a black trench across Byng.
The longer Howard has looked at that sharp-edged shadow the more trench like it has become.
Howard does not want to go up Byng Street and step into that shadow. Supposing he does and it isn’t a shadow, but is indeed a deep trench? A trench painted to look like a shadow?
How would anyone paint a trench?
But say an old mine, long tunnel even, has collapsed just there? Within the shadow? Stepping into what he thinks is shade Howard will go falling, spread-eagled down into another dimension. His cap turning end over end after him . . . .
Too filmic. More likely he will go slipping and tumbling, trying to hold onto both its sides. In which case he will probably survive the fall. But what if his slithering brings rocks down after him and they block out the light? In that eventuality he might well lose his sense of direction and, instead of finding his way back to the old pit head, he could go wandering out under the sea bed, banging his head in the dark as the gallery roofs get lower and lower. And how will he know, in that coal-black dark, when he has reached the end?
No-one is coming down or walking up Byng to pass through the trench-shadow. The sky above Market Square is blue, the street on either side of the shadow yellow.
The rising shriek-wail shriek-wail of a siren is coming along Coulton, the main road that passes through Marraton. Howard bends his ear to his lapel radio. Hiss and crackle. He taps it. Hiss and crackle. No call coming for him to attend. Traffic police, he decides, off to another shunt, cones at the ready.
The sirens are stationary a moment at the lights, then they cross the railway bridge and fade away into flat Haypot.
A silver car appears briefly, crosses Byng to go on down Oake Street, the next street up from café corner.
Enough.
Howard turns and proceeds at a measured pace along the High Street to the china shop on the corner of Star.
This corner is in the same dip, but now where he looks up Star Street to Market Square there are no straight-edged shadows reaching from pavement to pavement. Where the shadow of the old chapel does reach across its edges are smudged by buddleia and some red-headed valerian growing out of its grey cement sides.
As Howard walks up Star Street he starts thinking of divesting himself of his uniform jacket, of the lockers in the brick extension beside the red sandstone station, thinks of what he will tell this afternoon’s Sergeant of the dead cat in Ropery Lane . . . .
*
Almost home Howard is still wearing his black uniform trousers and black shoes, but now has on his blue zipper jacket, undone, and no cap. Should he have had his cap on it would soon have got knocked off by the line upon line of washing strung across the cul-de-sac back alley.
Howard likes the washing. A warm day like today and with it all hanging still he has to step sideways between sheets and patterned duvet covers, breathes in the crisp sun-filled smell of them. And on a breezy day, with the sheets flapping and cracking, pillowcases like oblong balloons, the trousers and shorts get filled up by the wind, become empty puppets.
Howard won’t mention the washing to his father. Only set him off.
As he reaches the yard’s wooden door thought of his father has Howard glance to the spiked railings at the end of the alley. Bindweed coils part-way up some of the railings, a few straggly bushes, one-time hedge behind. Beyond them what little smoke there is from the timber works fire is going straight up, leaning away over the low roofs of the industrial estate.
“Why they don’t bag up the ends and flog ‘em I don’t know,” his father will say of the trunk wedge-ends the workers burn. And when an east wind blows the smoke down the terrace his father will say, “Smeech smeech smeech.” Repeating it, “Smeech smeech smeech.”
Howard knows almost word for word his father’s diatribe against the timber works. “Smeech smeech smeech,” he will say yet again, then, “Got nothing against them earning a living, and they’ve figured out how to flog the bark bits to garden centres. Can easily shovel them up though….” The bark is kept in dark heaps behind the pallets of square-ended joists, behind the stacks of clean neat planks. “….but what can they do with the odds’n sods trunk ends?”
And on, and on, his father will go, until the close, saying how particularly unfair it is on the street, and undoing his own argument, because most in the street have gas boilers for their hot water and central heating, “….not a single wood stove in the whole street.”
“So who would it be,” Howard has thought to but hasn’t asked his father, “who would buy the green off-cuts if not many people have log fires anymore?”
Howard did once ask his father how he knew that everyone in the street had gas boilers. He couldn’t imagine his father having been invited into their houses.
“Chimney pots,” his father said. “The little silver cap. Or you get the balanced flu sticking out the back wall. Not even a coal fire down here anymore. But we got that timber works bonfire going day after day. Smeech smeech smeech….”
Those householders with washing on the back alley lines keep a weather eye out for the direction of the smoke, will come out shrieking to one another the moment the wind shifts. In the back alley they too have long moans together over the burning of the wood-ends. Howard has also heard them complaining about the unsightliness of the triple-spiked railings, “Like a prison camp.”
As he closes the yard door Howard is still undecided what he will say to his father beyond Hello.
Howard has long preferred this back way into the house. At the front he has to step straight off the pavement into the house. Although there is a doormat just inside the front door, and although Howard always wipes his feet, after the dogshit debacle had his father cleaning every carpet for a week, and a week later Howard trod more in, Howard has become very aware that he is wiping dirt from outside inside, even if only on the front door coconut doormat. That tacky dogshit, pressed into the valley between the sole and the precipice of the heel, has twice stunk the house out.
In the back yard Howard can give his shoes a thorough wipe on the thicker and rougher coconut mat outside the back door. And, if left on that yard mat, the rain can wash the dirt through. His shoes will be taken off on the mock parquet just inside the back door.
When his father goes out, tie and jacket on, he prefers the front door. If he has to use the back alley he moans afterwards about having to duck under lines of washing. He says, “Just brushed my hair, then some trollop’s stained sheet messes it all up.”
Seeing Howard pass the kitchen window Howard’s father raises his hand in cursory greeting. Like a foot-stamping pony Howard takes his time assiduously wiping first one foot, then the other.
The smoke going away from the terrace Howard guesses that today’s rant won’t be about the timber works’ fire. But, having seen Howard come in through the yard, it could still be about the washing lines.
“Can’t get a car up to the back gate. Strangle you if you’re not careful. And who wants to see old Bessie’s baggy cacks…?”
His father’s tirades are like predictive texting, once begun Howard knows where they’ll go.
“Cup of tea?” his father shouts from the kitchen as Howard hangs his jacket on the back door.
“Please!” Howard shouts back.
His father has the radio on in the kitchen. Howard bends to pull the plastic-pinched lace ends, then heels off his shoes. Going into the living room he picks up the remote. The telly crackles alive.
As Howard is about to drop onto the sofa his father shouts something from the kitchen. Howard can’t make sense of it, goes out to the hall and around into the kitchen. His father hands him a mug of tea.
“I said I’ve made a hotpot.”
“Right.” Howard takes the mug of tea. The mug has blue irises painted on it. It’s the mug he is always given. His father prefers the mug with the pink roses.
“Good day?”
“OK.” Howard takes a sip. “Had to investigate a dead cat.”
“You? Investigate? Been promoted have you?” His father bends to the oven. The potato discs atop the hotpot are not yet brown about their raised edges.
“Better if you investigated that ditch full of empty cans by the underpass.” The blast of heat from the oven has pinked his father’s forehead and cheeks, making the scars — through his eyebrows and down his flattened nose — look whiter.
“You’re supposed to liaise with the school,” he flicks the red check ovencloth over his shoulder, “so liaise about the kids drinking down under the railway. Though why . . . .”
Howard stands with his mug in his hand waiting for his father to finish. After the opening exclamations his father’s rant could have gone two ways. It almost — Howard sensed the hesitation — went the other way with the word ‘promote’. His father shares the general public’s opinion of Police Community Support Officers.
On this ‘liaison’ track though his father will move on to why the kids should choose that underpass to do their drinking in: “Not even anywhere to sit.” And he will end with telling how he and his schoolmate Sid, “he joined the army,” used to take bottles of Jennings Brown Ale out to the dunes. “’Course in those days you could still get money back on the empties. That way you didn’t get all the rubbish chucked in the side.”
And while his father delivers this particular version of his in-my-day past he will potter about the kitchen, finishing the washing-up, laying the kitchen table; and Howard will stand there in his thin black socks, waiting for his mug of tea to be cool enough to drain.
His father will have, almost absentmindedly, switched the radio off the better to hear himself talk. He will turn it on again when they sit down to eat. Thereafter it will be only derisory grunts or a short mocking laugh to various items on the radio news.
After dinner Howard will wash the few dishes left unwashed while his father goes in to watch the telly news he has just heard on the radio, and to flick from soap to quiz and back again. Howard will go up to his bedroom and power up his PC, surf for a bit; and, if nothing holds his interest, he will switch on his bedroom telly and try not to fall asleep. Later on he will go down to watch the weather forecast with his father. If he hasn’t appeared by the start of the late news his father will shout up the stairs.
Two
“The work filled his time but not his mind.” Ursula K. Leguin
“I could arouse more emotion in others than they could arouse in me.” Norman Mailer
The landlord of The Nether Row, or the complainant as he is about to be called in Howard’s notes, has one of those purply-pink faces where the forehead and the top of the nose look to have been squashed together over the eyes, giving him a permanent frown. Conspiring with the frown to give him a look of aggressive misery is his small plump chin, jutting, which seems to have forced the centre of the bottom lip up and thus the mouth down. The mouth’s downward curve is further emphasised by the grey moustache that ends at his jawline.
The landlord of The Nether Row is not a wholly miserable man, can’t help his face. And the grey moustache is but a habit of his toilette, a fashion left over from his wrestling heyday, like the collar-length hair that emerges in thin strands from his purply-pink scalp and ends in mouse-tail grey ends.
The landlord of the Nether Row is stood this morning behind his bar, white beer towels laid over the keg handles; and, according to his face, he looks to be frowning belligerently at Howard, waiting for him to speak.
The Nether Row is an old pub. Net curtains over the windows, red vinyl benches round the walls, small wooden tables with stools tucked under, four ring-stained beer mats to each table. The embossed paper on the ceiling has been painted a deep gloss red.
Howard’s father brought him here once. To meet someone? From the doorway the crowded Nether Row had seemed warm and welcoming. A woollen broad-backed cosy feel to the place.
Empty and quiet this morning it feels cold. A grey light penetrates the net curtains and, faced by the unwelcoming visage of the landlord, Howard suppresses a shiver. He flips open his black notebook, extracts pen from pocket.
“When did you first notice it was gone?”
“S’morning. Thursday morning’s cleaning morning. She comes early.”
Howard has narrowed his right eye as he tries to work out what the landlord has just said. Not only does the landlord have a stronger than usual local accent, his four front teeth are missing as well. Which could account for some of the mouth’s upward puckering.
“The cleaner comes in just once a week?”
“For a full clean. Is when she gets up and does the tops.”
“And it was her noticed it was missing?”
“She gives it a polish.”
“So it could have been missing for close on a week?”
“Nah. I’d’ve seen it gone. Right there. Front of me. Had to move it from by dartboard afore it got punctured. Couldn’t put it right here, ‘cos of telly. So went there.”
To the landlord a blank space on the wall beside the telly. To Howard a black nail sticking out of the cream embossed paper. The huge telly is balanced on a black angle bracket.
“But it still could have gone missing any time this week?”
“Nah. One of the lads touched it last night for luck. He’s playing Saturday, training tonight.”
“Name?”
“Gerry….” The landlord’s frown deepens as he looks down inside the bar. “Gerry…. Nah. Gone.”
“Could he have taken it?”
“Gerry? Nah, no point. What’d he do with it? Nah. Big crowd came in last night. Not locals. Got busy late. Which was how I didn’t get to see it go.”
“Young people?”
“Nah. Not student types. Mixed bunch. Not a team either. Could’ve been a work crowd. No-one I new. Not lively either. No-one I can think of to point finger at…. If I thought culprit a regular, local that is, I wouldn’t have bothered you lot. Would’ve had a quiet word, got it back. But never seen this lot afore.”
“What this Gerry training for?”
“Pool championship. Practises here in week. Won’t be in tonight. Stays sober afore a big game. Bit of a lad. Had to stop him hustling incomers, give pub a bad name. He was OK ‘bout it. Was doing it more for a lark than money.”
“Could he have taken it for a lark?”
“Don’t think so. Somebody asked me after why he’d touched it. One of the late crowd. Salesman type.” The landlord drops his head to thinking pose again. “”Nah. Wasn’t him. He asked, but just ‘cos he was here at bar. Didn’t seem that interested.”
Under ‘The Nether Row’ Howard writes ‘Gerry? — pool player’ and ‘salesman type?’
“Don’t want to make a big deal of this,” the landlord says. “Just like to have it back. Local legend like.”
“What legend?”
“Brought Marraton luck. When they were in League.”
“How?”
“Skipper said after that all he could hear from terrace was Buglehorn blowing ‘em on to victory. Afore that too. Prior to it being adjusted.”
“Adjusted?”
“Personally,” the landlord leans slightly forward as if to share a confidence, “I reckon Buglehorn was always that way. Don’t see how it could have been otherwise. Bent without creasing metal? Like when copper pipes get bent without a former . . . .”
“Can you describe the Buglehorn?”
“Reckon meself it’s a flugel-horn. Know Dizzy Gillespie?”
“Ditzy…?”
“Dizzy. Dizzy Gillespie. Jazz trumpeter. Blows his cheeks out. Buglehorn’s like his. Bell end sticks up in air. Chances remote you’ll get another like it round here. So odds on if one turns up second-hand it’ll be Buglehorn.”
“Let me get this straight,” Howard says: “it’s like an ordinary bugle….”
“Trumpet. S’got valves.”
“Like an ordinary trumpet, but with a bell end sticking up in the air?”
“Not straight up. More like a forty five degree angle.”
Howard writes, ‘Bell end 450.’
“Had a jazz man here one lunchtime. Wasn’t busy. Asked if he could have a blow on it. Was good. Said it made him sound like Chet Baker.”
“Shit…?”
“Chet. Chet Baker.”
Howard decides against writing that down.
“Put it back on the wall, did he? The jazz man?”
“Course he did. Years go. We don’t have gimmicks here. No postcards from round globe. No foreign currencies. Just sell good ale. Buglehorn is the one talking point. For instance, had a mining engineer here one time. Fancied himself bit of an assayist. Said he couldn’t, with any certainty, identify the metal. But said he was certain it weren’t proper brass.”
“What metal was it then?”
“He couldn’t say.”
Howard hesitates, decides not to write down, ‘metal unknown.’ Keep to what you do know, he was told.
“What’s it worth?”
“This is no insurance job. I’m not making a claim. Just want it back. Some reckon it could be the original Ant Horn?
“Ant Horn?”
“Was played at some battle. Ampt Hill? Ant Horn?”
“Ant Hill?”
“Ampt Hill.”
“When was that?”
“Last war.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Don’t mean it didn’t happen.”
*
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1138528
The Friendship of Dagda and Tinker Howth
‘The Friendship of Dagdá and Tinker Howth’
“….writing history had shown him that the truth always takes the form of a question.” Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
One
“I will call you Master. Shaped as I, every man is my master.”
This is what Tinker Howth told Geoffrey of Hampton were Dagdá’s first words to him. And these were the words with which the clerk, Geoffrey of Hampton, began his report to the County Sheriff.
Having the ear of the County Sheriff in those times gave even a clerk in a distant market town sufficient clout to make life difficult for one such as Tinker Howth. All travel then was discouraged by the authorities, with minstrels and itinerant players likely to be arbitrarily detained by parish constables. Nor was it unknown in out of the way towns for a lone traveller to be summarily hung as a vagabond.
Being in clerk Geoffrey of Hampton’s favour, therefore, meant that Tinker Howth’s passage around the shire was eased, if not assured.
Although there were only 5 million inhabitants within the whole of mainland Britain, more people then occupied, lived in and worked in, the countryside than now, when the country’s population has increased to more than tenfold. And back then not only were there far more people out and about in the countryside, but they did so at a far slower pace, and as a consequence they saw more.
Country folk roamed the woods in search of blackberries or cherries, or they were out gathering kindling or harvesting hazel nuts, collecting acorns for their sows or for themselves. Shepherds explored moorland gullies on the track of strays, and women went stooping over the high moors picking bilberries. Even those few travelling through the parish walked, or they sat their horse at a walking pace; and so, their being higher, they saw even more.
So must Tinker Howth have been seen meeting with Dagdá, and so must that snippet, there being fewer people and remarkable events to tell of, have found its way back to Geoffrey of Hampton, who then sought to find favour by reporting such an unusual meeting to the County Sheriff.
For all their officious desire to know every little thing that was happening within their shire, unbeknownst to clerk Geoffrey of Hampton and the County Sheriff, Tinker Howth was also relaying Dagdá’s words to the bishop in the adjoining diocese. (In the Bishop’s records there is a slight variation in what Tinker Howth said were Dagdá’s first words to him: “I will call you Master. All men who stand straight are my master.”) And while the Bishop always lavished praise on Tinker Howth for his devotion to the Christian (new Protestant) cause, he also ensured that Tinker Howth, as incentive to return with more titbits, never left his palace without some pecuniary reward. From Geoffrey of Hampton all that Tinker Howth got were threats and the conditional promise of unhindered passage.
So why the Bishop’s and the Sheriff’s interest?
Those were days of dangerous secrets and overlapping intrigues; and hints to both Bishop and Sheriff, hints that had most probably been no more than a too often mention of the leper colony, must have led both Sheriff and Bishop to suspect that something more than its being a simple place of refuge was taking place in, or near, the leper colony.
And to begin with neither the Bishop nor the Sheriff’s distant clerk made mention to Tinker Howth of their interest in Emrys, the church builder. Or, more accurately, the church rebuilder. At that point in its history the tiny church in the remote leper colony had already been rebuilt several times. As, in the centuries following Emrys, the church would again fall into disrepair and again have to be rebuilt several times.
And I had best assert here, as Tinker Howth was at pains to make clear to the Bishop and to clerk Geoffrey of Hampton, that, although the colony was his place of refuge, Dagdá was not a leper.
The leper colony was in a combe on a steep north-facing coast, which meant that the colony received no direct sunlight for four months of every year. That sloping coast was coated in woodland, mostly of thin-stemmed oaks evenly spaced, their twisted growth simultaneously straining up towards the light and cowering before the gales that came whipping off the sea. In deep clefts and rounded combes were scatterings of beech and ash also reaching for the light; and, with here and there, a clambering ivy and a tall holly gathering dark. The occasional birch whitely glimmered and, up on the moor’s edge, were low rattling thorn.
The tubular trunks of the ash were almost yellow, had here and there black discs of fungus dotting their coarse surface. While the twisted green trunks and boughs of the oak were lichen-crusted grey and orange. On the sloping floor of the wood were the delicate crown-spread of ferns, the brown trembling heads of quaker grass and the flat leaves of stinking iris. But mostly, where tree roots had grown around rocks, moss had spread over all so that, without scratching away at the moss, it couldn’t be told which was rock and which root. Single stems of grass grew up through some of the moss.
Sheltered by the moor from the prevailing south-westerlies, the colony’s woodland hollow, although dark, held its own kind of beauty, a stillness that betokened tranquillity. Small wonder then that over the centuries the combe’s infrequent inhabitants had chosen to build, and rebuild, and rebuild, a tiny grey church there. Nor can it be a surprise, the combe being on the almost inaccessible edge of the parish, as well as on the very border between the two counties, that by Dagdá’s time it had already served as both a place of banishment and of sanctuary.
As a leper colony it was probably one of the last in England. The latest theory has it that it was a change in the mean land temperature that halted the infectious spread of the disease, that the policy of quarantine had been of psychological merit only.
But, even with leprosy over and done with, the combe went on to be used as a dumping ground for the shire’s, and at times the nation’s, undesirables. For instance only a hundred years after the events to be related here prisoners-of-war were sequestered there. And those prisoners-of-war took up charcoal burning again.
Back then the gap between town life and Tinker Howth and Dagdá, let alone between the pair of them and the city, let alone between them and court life, in both material and mindset terms was almost as if they had lived during different times. Because back then, although the Spanish Armada had long been blown to pieces and there was a king newly on the throne, in this remote part of the shire, habits of mind being as comfortable as addiction, fears were still of Spanish assassins creeping ashore. While the minds of local officials were still occupied with a visceral dread of Walsingham, his spies and his torturers. And not without some evidential cause: the populace here had in living memory risen up against their monarch, had had to be subdued by force of arms. And, although both officials and populace might not know of it for some years (lest it be emulated?), in the capital there had only recently been uncovered a Catholic plot to blow the king up along with his entire parliament.
Members of the local establishment then, an establishment barely established, unsure of itself, remembered — but barely mentioned, less talk itself of those events was deemed treachery — the uprisings hereabouts when empty bellies had demanded both Latin mass and bread. That both should have been at the seat of people’s thoughts, the base of their resentments, must needs have made those who chose to govern them watchful.
In short then, this friendship between Tinker Howth and Dagdá took place within a time of religious flux. Much as now. And just as violent. With the poor then also, as always, as usual, being defined and discussed as a problem. Spymaster Francis Walsingham may have gone, but still Philip of Spain plotted against the English crown, the Inquisition was still knee-deep in gore and agony, and — as already said — plots, assassins and uprisings were feared.
Consequently the County Sheriff, being a man of his station and little imagination, and having heard a whisper of odd happenings around about the leper colony, suspected that more than the usual revenue-dodgers were coming ashore under cover of the lepers, that it might even be armed insurrectionists or hired assassins. ‘Arguers’ landing there would also be a cause of concern to the crown. And, being loyal to this crown this County Sheriff hoped to win favour by being instrumental in preventing a Papist plot and/or another Spanish invasion.
The Bishop on the other hand, although a functionary within it, was yet to be convinced that England had its own established church. And, suspecting something along the same lines as the Sheriff, he simply sought, through information garnered secretly from sources such as Tinker Howth, to measure the strength of any usurping power and, if the greater, join it; if the lesser, condemn it.
And both were justified in their suspicions. All was not as it seemed in and about the leper colony. Tinker Howth too knew that Dagdá had a secret to tell. A secret that Dagdá eventually wanted told — to Tinker Howth, the only man he knew and trusted outside the colony. But, when first asked, he had not the confidence nor the words to tell it. That secret, however, was not to be what either the Bishop or the County Sheriff, or even Tinker Howth, had been given to suspect.
Lest I confuse matters further in this attempt to depict a time of deceit and subterfuge, let me repeat here that, although he had been brought to live and die among lepers, Dagdá was no leper. Nor is he a metaphor, an allegory. He is — insofar as this tale is concerned — just one more of life’s oft’bruised bastards. Which is not to say that all the lumps, bumps, nodules and pustules, on whatever part of him was exposed — Dagdá’s flesh had as many nobbles and lumpy growths as an old oak — would not at a casual glance have him presumed to be a leper. Closer examination, however, would readily reveal that all his extremities were intact. But, given where he lived, closer was what most of his contemporaries avoided.
Dagdá has himself already mentioned his shape. Leastwise I had him open this tale with mention of his shape. Which demands that another cautionary note need be added here — because had I rendered that short speech as spoken by Dagdá it would have been a mess of slurring sibilants, have read as snake gibberish verging on the incomprehensible.
Dagdá’s speech impediments apart, on his side Howth had two front teeth missing, and both conversed not only in strong local accents but in dialects close to being separate languages all their own. At that time, even within both counties, local words for common objects and practises would have been unknown to others in the same county. Beyond the colony much of the spoken vocabulary was peculiar to that coastal region and to that parish on the border between those two counties.
Howth’s tinker travels meant that he had learnt many alternative words and alternative meanings for the same words. Dagdá’s vocabulary on the other hand had been acquired in even greater isolation than was usual for those times. Delivered to the colony in swaddling he had picked up all his first words from people who had lips eroded from their teeth. His education had then been continued by adults so withdrawn that they had often spoken to the chattering toddler only in dismissive grunts.
So, for the remainder of this tale, although I may occasionally recreate the characters’ syntactical speech patterns I will make no attempt to depict anyone’s accent or dialect. As I resent being patronised over any of my own acres of ignorance and unaccented mispronunciations, nor do I want to seem to be patronising these innocents of the past, whose English was still a comparatively new language idiosyncratically spelt and punctuated.
The European renaissance may have reached mainland England, have found its way into the English playhouse and academe, but it had had as yet little effect on the lives of a tinker and a poor wretch cast among lepers.
Underlying all the above reservations regarding verbatim quotations is the consideration that Dagdá’s mouth was, like the rest of him, misshapen. One of Geoffrey of Hampton’s few fanciful entries was “….told our man is alike a gargoyle come to life.”
Let us start here by describing the lumps and bumps atop Dagdá’s head. No, let us begin with the immediately obvious, the very size of his head. Twice the girth of another man’s head, the very weight of his skull bowed him forward, was part cause of his twisted stance.
What any newcomer would also have been instantly aware of would have been Dagdá’s begrimed skin. The black speckling occupying his almost every pore was the result of his having been raised in a smoke-filled, soot-encrusted house, further compounded by his principal child-into-adult occupation, the making of charcoal. Dagdá, one of the few able-bodied in the colony — which, in itself, is to stretch the definition of what it is to be able-bodied, but all is comparative — Dagdá was the one who, in emptying them, had to clamber down into the charcoal pits.
Some hair did grow in tufts on isolated parts of Dagdá’s uneven scalp. Single strands occasionally straggled free of the grime; and those few loose hairs that were not dark with grease, and/or dyed with soot and charcoal dust, were a wispy brown.
Dagdá also had a few patches of whiskers on his jaw. That is if a jawline could be discerned, the face appearing to continue in irregular folds into his throat and chest.
Dagdá’s nose was perhaps the most ‘normal’ aspect of his entire physiognomy. Slightly snub, it was by no means porcine. What one noticed first about Dagdá’s face, however, was the livid pink patch between his nose and chin. Or where one might have supposed his chin to have been.
Jaw and teeth not being aligned, neither were the lips, which caused Dagdá to continuously salivate and dribble, which dribbling he frequently wiped away — causing the backs of both hands to be as pink as the patch around his mouth. The awkwardness of his eyes also meant, tear ducts filling, that Dagdá’s nose often had either a drip forming at its tip or a slow trickle emerging from one or other of his nostrils. These also required wiping away.
Dagdá’s misaligned mouth and skewed palate inevitably meant, as already mentioned, that he had difficulty shaping words and completing sentences. His speech had to be in short bursts, with pauses to suck down saliva and gulp breath. This often led to Tinker Howth, when later quizzing Dagdá on behalf of the Bishop and the Sheriff, to ask him to repeat what he had just said.
Ignored, even teased, by painfilled adults throughout his colony childhood, Dagdá didn’t know how to be obsequious, only sceptical and suspicious. So, when being asked by Howth again and again to repeat what he had just said, this at times had him roaring out his frustration. Or, using his short thick arms, and with increasingly furious gestures, he would attempt to draw upon the green woodland air what he had been repeatedly trying to tell Howth.
What also made any conversation difficult with Dagdá were his eyes.
Dagdá’s right eye looked up and his left eye looked down. This, more than his distended belly, his unequal shoulders, bent legs and enlarged genitalia, led to his peculiar gait. Sometimes his nubbly head would be lowered almost to his chest to enable him to see — out of his right eye — where he was going. At other times his chin would be raised, his whole body at a stretch leaning backwards, to let him see out of his left eye whither the path led.
Of course which eye came to the fore also depended on the terrain. If the path descended then his looking-down left eye guided his step. On a path leading up then his right eye sought footholds, rootsteps, branches to grasp to lift him through a gap.
Born at a twist like this Dagdá’s brain had developed to enable him to process the separate input from both eyes at once. Whereas in most infants, their two eyes pointing forward, the stereo input of the near same image will teach the brain to perceive distance and depth, Dagdá’s brain, like that of a chameleon’s, had adapted itself to simultaneously process two distinctly different sets of images.
Thus, for instance, when walking along a woodland path, Dagdá’s looking-down left eye would note glints of broken stone and trodden earth, bright celandines and trip-making trailing brambles. At the path’s edge this left eye would espy thin-stemmed blue violets with their tiny yellow tongues. Maybe even a sharp double-cleft deerprint. While his looking-up right eye would simultaneously be taking note of the criss-cross-hatching of branch ends, the elbows and knees of oak boughs, possibly the knuckle bones of ash twigs, or long brown beech buds about to break into leaf, a warty birch growth, the swift dark wing of a wind-driven crow, white bar flutter of a chaffinch….
This independent eye action of Dagdá’s (when still and watchful Dagdá would, like a bird, twist his head one way and another to see what was about him) made Tinker Howth uncomfortable. Particularly when, their heads on the same level, Dagdá kept shifting his large face down and back to fix Howth first with one eye, then with the other.
Although a thoroughly practical man, Howth was as prey to the superstitious whisperings of his time as any other man; and Tinker Howth had come to suspect that the green-flecked left eye, the one that looked to him the length of the pink and black face, was Dagdá’s evil eye. And, with Howth being slightly shorter than Dagdá, unless avoided, this would be the eye that looked down on him.
Disconcerting for Howth in another way too, when Dagdá stretched his head back, was for him to be looking at the flashes of pink lines as the folds in Dagdá’s throat opened, exposing the deeper parts of the crease where the charcoal and soot particles had not found a place in the pores. Those pink throat lines made Dagdá seem all the more vulnerable to Howth, added to Howth’s pity, to his fellow feeling for the man.
So, to avoid this mix of superstitious fear and pity, and arriving usually first at their rendezvous, Howth tried always to find a spot — within the woods or in a moorland dip — where he could position himself on the higher ground. Dagdá then, large head lowered and tilted forward, could fix him only with his ‘benign’ right eye, render the two of them — in Howth’s eye — more approximately equals.
Two
Tinker Howth was not only shorter than Dagdá, neither did he have Dagdá’s bulk. What he did have in excess was a thick head of hair.
A piece of twine tied back most of this hair, but with one or two strands always coming loose and flopping about his face. Also, unlike Dagdá’s sparse and irregular chin growth, Howth’s own beard was as knife-trimmed short as he could keep it — out of his mouth, out of his way — practical considerations, with no mirror-thought to it as an adornment.
Should the pair, however, have been seen together from a distance, which both sought earnestly to avoid, but if they had been so spotted, then what would have been remarked upon by any of their contemporaries would have been their very different attire.
Taken on their own, and aside from his being slight and sly-looking, Tinker Howth’s apparel itself would have been unlikely to have drawn comment. His dress did not differ to any great extent from others of his station. His coarse linen shirt reached down to his thighs, which along with the rest of his white legs were hidden inside baggy-kneed hose. That was during the coldest parts of winter. For the rest of the year his hose was knee-length; and most days, save for hot high summer, he wore a leather jerkin. From late autumn through to spring he wore leather sleeves tied to this jerkin. And, if overlooked, at night in a fireless camp, or on a cold day awaiting Dagdá, he might be seen wrapped in a tightly woven woollen cloak. Wool and linen were all of a bleached and yellowing grey.
On the other hand Dagdá’s dress, if seen, and putting aside his physical peculiarities, would immediately have brought a frown to a contemporary’s brow. Dagdá had neither linen nor visible hose, his upper torso being encased entirely in inside-out goatskin.
By the time Howth set to quizzing Dagdá — at the Sheriff’s and the Bishop’s behest — Dagdá had for many years been setting traps throughout the coastal woodlands. When caught those black and brown feral goats provided occasional meat for the colony’s turnip and acorn stews. (Although that had been the traps’ original intent Dagdá had yet to catch a boar. Their flesh, he had been told, was almost as sweet as a mouthful of cherries.)
His first skins, though, had been taken from sheep found dead about the moor. These he had cured in part by pissing on them.
Now…. leprosy being no respector of stations or reputations, neither did it distinguish between trades. Many different skills therefore had found their way to the colony. Some of those skilled men and women had watched Dagdá struggling with a task new to him, and — seeking again to be useful — many had sought to instruct him.
Consequently it was a tanner, new to the colony, who noticing the cracked sheep’s hide that Dagdá had fashioned into a jerkin, asked him how he had cured it. On learning that Dagdá had done nothing to the sheep’s skin, other than stretching it to dry then pissing on it as one of the other lepers had told him, the tanner told him to first soak his next skin in brine.
“Seawater’ll do. Weight the skin under some stones below the tide line. Leave it there from one moon to the next. Then wash it in the stream here, and scrape away any flesh left. After that is when you’ve got to stretch it; and you can rub it with fine ash. From any of the fires here will do. It’s then you’ve got to piss on it. Every time you want a piss, for a couple of days do it over the skin. Then you got to get hold of some oak galls. Not acorns, the big soft galls in the early part of summer. You’ll need to build up a store of these, otherwise you’ll have to squeeze the juice out the bark. And that’s not so easy. You got to rub the galls into the hide. The more you use the softer you’ll make it.”
Lesson learnt, Dagdá’s next sheep’s hide was supple and snug. But another newcomer, seeing him attired thus, took Dagdá aside and showed him his missing ear.
“This was before the disease. Mine has not been a lucky life. I was accused of taking a neighbour’s ram. Others brought testimony against me. And so they took this. Before disease took the rest. So beware. All it will need is for one lazy shepherd to claim that fleece you wear as his, and you will lose, not one, but both your chubby ears. One for sheep stealing and one for sheep killing.”
Dagdá told the new leper that he would tell any accuser that he had found the sheep already dead: “That is the truth.”
“And, as with me and the wandering ram, they won’t believe you. In these times to be accused is to have your guilt decided. The righteous always believe the accused wrong in whatever they say. And, mark what I say, it may not be just your ears they take. For sheep killing they can hang you by the neck.” With his tongue poked out the man had made choking sounds into Dagdá’s face.
Although Dagdá thereafter wore only goatskin, he still took fleeces off dead sheep. The pair of moor ravens guided him to the newly dead ewes — rolled onto their flat backs in a gully and suffocated by their own bodily fluids. Or the ewe had been snared by looped brambles and, sunk to her knees, had starved there to death. Dagdá skinned the sodden and eyeless carcasses there and then, making the meal of already ripening flesh easily accessible for the ravens. Dagdá viewed this service to them as his thanking the ravens for guiding him to the new fleece.
Some of the cured sheepskins he gave to the lepers. Others — thick and soft as meadowgrass underfoot — he stashed throughout the sloping woods and used as his own bedding.
One might assume that, given Dagdá’s method of curing the goatskins, of the pair sat together in the open moorland air, Dagdá’s stink to have been the worse. The reverse was the case.
To say that Tinker Howth infrequently bathed would be a gross understatement verging on an untruth. Like most others in those infamously malodorous and unsanitary times the only wash that Howth and his clothes got was an occasional soaking as he trekked through moorland mist and cloud. And, let the very truth be told, Howth only ever changed his linen shirt when it yellowly rotted apart.
The clerk Geoffrey of Hampton, not that much cleaner himself — the difference being that he did change his clothes more than once a year — yet, overwhelmed by Howth’s rancid stink, he tried always to meet with Howth out of doors.
The Bishop, with more reason to keep their meetings clandestine, his own self being under the greater suspicion, he even so kept the palace windows open and a posy to hand, once even risking the burning of papist incense.
While to our deodorant-sanitised nostrils Dagdá’s goatskins might have reeked muskily of goatpen and stable, and while there was about Dagdá always the amylase odour of fresh spittle, to have been downwind of him would have been far preferable to being even upwind of Tinker Howth, whose closet was beside whichever path he was on and wherever he needed to unknot his hose. And when that woollen hose was retied around his waist only a broad dock leaf or two, or a handful of dry grass, would have wiped away any faecal residue; and both dock leaf and grass being non-absorbent either would have been just as likely to smear and spread any soft shit as to remove it. So, aside from the dried and acrid smell of old sweat and acidic pee dribbles, aside from the old stew dripped down the front of his shirt, aside from his three black and decaying teeth, those old stinks in his hose and on his shirt also trod across moors and through valleys with him.
No full-length hose, even from dead men — that being where all Dagdá’s attire when younger and smaller had come from — could now fit around Dagdá’s girth and his genitalia. So, with his legs and buttocks bare, he wore below his goatskin shirt-cum-jerkin only a goatskin skirt — one of his own trial-and-error design, its rectangular hanging sections giving it the look of a Roman centurion’s kilt. Dagdá thus had no hose to absorb what wasn’t scraped away, no unwiped shit to linger within the weave.
Add to that the belief common then that sea bathing was, if not a cure, then a palliative for leprosy; and from his childhood on Dagdá had come by the habit of following his elders and, when big enough, assisting the lepers down the steep paths to the black and grey undershore. One by one the lepers leant on him as they crossed the slippery rocks and rolling pebbles. With the last leper helped across Dagdá too entered the high tide silted water.
The deeper Dagdá had gone the more his body’s weight had lifted from him. Around him the lepers had let loose sighs as the salt water had slid under their stumps, as their joints had ceased to bear the awkward burden of missing limbs, and as stretched ligaments and cramped muscles had unstressed. Dagdá’s gaping smile had joined theirs and he had let himself float.
As a child, especially in the winter months, he had been reluctant to even put an unshod foot in the cold water; and on that north shore it had been cold even in the summer. But, as he had grown and was pleased to be of help, he had become convinced that the bathing was a precaution necessary to stave off the disease — his not having yet succumbed being in part proof — and so he had kept up the practise, had now come to enjoy the spring tide ritual for its own sake. Even on a frost-brined winter’s day, coming out of the water, his palms sluicing the beaded drops from his purple-mottled belly, shaking the whole of himself dry and stepping back up the beach, he could feel all his flesh atingle.
It was this overall tingling that had the suspicion grow in him — as no lepers were cured, as one by one he buried them in the soft earth below the ruined church — that it was but the sharpness of the tingling that led the afflicted to suppose that the dulling caused by the disease was being overcome by cold water bathing.
Dagdá nonetheless continued bathing and consequently, by the time he came to be seated opposite Howth — where Howth had chosen a seating higher than Dagdá, Dagdá endeavoured always to place himself upwind of Howth — Dagdá was having at the very least 13 more baths a year than the frowsty tinker. Indeed so alive did emerging from the cold water make Dagdá feel that, new moon or no moon, he often clambered down to a deep cove west of the colony to float and wallow there, his belly the rising and falling horizon of his left eye, the slight swell swinging the stars around for his right.
With all this bathing you might wonder that Dagdá was not a scrubbed pink all over. But not only did Dagdá have neither brush nor soap, so embedded in his epidermis were the fine soot particles and charcoal dust that only the last few weeks’ topmost layer was ever washed away. The remainder were as tattoos.
One other effect of all this bathing was that the cleaner, and thus less malodorous Dagdá was, the more he had become aware, and had drawn away from, the fetid rot of the lepers. A revulsion that was no less than a physical reflex had his whole head turn away from the sweet-tainted stench of gangrenous flesh — the blackened and rotten limbs and digits still attached, their rank odour worse by far than any foot-squashed stinkhorn, their miasmic aura as tangible as the salty sea-mist. His hands too compulsively batted away the blue-backed flies that dozily gathered about the putrefaction that oozed from the fist-sized ulcers with their gamut of glistening hues, from crimson and blue to a seeping orange.
The whole of that flinching disgust Dagdá ascribed to placing him at one more remove from contagion.
The one piece of apparel that Tinker Howth and Dagdá did have in common were their boots; the leather ankles high and tied around with a thong, the soles wooden and hobnailed. And it was within his boots that Dagdá still had his only pieces of dead men’s clothing — woollen hose cut down to calf-length and knotted at the toes. Or, as they have subsequently become known, but were in Dagdá’s days unelasticated, socks.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1140319
Sick Ape
Chapter One
Typical and atypical of our time, we both felt we were owned. Owned by our jobs, by our debts, by our responsibilities; our lives enclosed by the usual circles – had to have the car to get the job, had to have the wage to pay for the car; and – to live within commuting distance of the job – had to buy a house, had to have enough of a wage to pay the mortgage; and – to earn that kind of money – we had to put in the hours. As well as – to keep the job – demonstrate ‘commitment’ to our employers.
We were both thus running hard to stay in the same place; and the place we were in neither of us wanted to be.
Nor were our personal histories that much out of the ordinary. We came from marital households where the men had risen early and the women slept late. From my marriage I had a daughter, Emily. From his marriage Martin had two sons, Scott and Barney. Emily was younger than Scott, older than Barney.
Our ex-wives had custody of our children; and a goodly portion of our wages went to the Child Support Agency. Both of us had access to our children at weekends. Which was another reason we had to have our own house – for our weekend children to be able to stay with us. To make up my money I had to work every weekend that Emily didn’t come.
Nor were the reasons for our divorces that dissimilar or that unusual. Our wives had wanted more than we had been capable of offering; or had been prepared to offer.
I enjoyed/enjoy domestic activities – reading, gardening, films, computers, and pottering generally. My wife, Jacqui, liked to go out. She went to pubs, clubs, cinema and dinners with ‘friends’. After Emily’s birth, with only my wage supporting us, we hadn’t that much spending money. It had been easier, therefore, for me to stay at home and to babysit than to work the extra hours to afford a babysitter – and still not have the spare time to go out. So Jacqui went her own way. On her own, she inevitably met another. (Or, doubt of her still has me ask, did she so deliberately engineer our marriage so that she could go out and meet another?)
A.N. Other didn’t hang around much after the divorce. Jacqui now calls herself a single parent, has acquired a lexicon of cracks about selfish and couldn’t-care-less men; born of the men she has known since, but directed also at her stay-at-home ex – me.
At weekends Emily and I baked, went on walks, made things, did her homework, talked. Which was all in sharp contrast to her mother’s “Don’t you start!” fast food and video life style.
Martin was a sportsman. Therein lay the seeds of his divorce. While he was out playing football in the winters, tennis in the summers, his wife, Tina, went from flirting with an unemployed neighbour to sneaking around to his house.
Another neighbour – the neighbourhood gossip passing on the news under the cover of concern – told Martin that she didn’t like to say anything, but she was worried for the safety of the two toddlers left alone …
Martin, accused of neglect by Tina, tried to save the marriage and to win Tina back. During that prolonged attempt there followed various confusing configurations of who was living where with whom. First of all, so far as I could make out, the neighbour’s working wife moved out with her three children and back to her mother’s. Tina moved into the neighbour’s house with Martin’s two boys. The other wife then came back with her children. So her husband and Tina moved into a new flat. There wasn’t enough room there for Scott and Barney, so Martin paid the estranged wife – who could no longer go out to work because she had no-one to look after her own three children – to look after his boys as well. Finally, with the new man unable to pay the rent on the flat, Tina asked Martin to take her back. After a few weeks of polite and careful domesticity, Martin moved out. And, to escape the gossip – of the staffroom and the PTA – after that summer term he moved to this town, this school.
Complicated; but nothing that unusual there.
What made Martin and I different was that on Tuesdays he came round to my house, and I cooked for him. And on Thursdays I went round to Martin’s house, and he cooked for me.
Chapter Two
I first met Martin at the swimming pool.
Our local swimming pool is one of those that has a few plastic tables and chairs on a viewing platform, the glass sloping out over the blue-bottomed pool. The idea I presume, and given that one table boasts a damp green umbrella, is to create a beach atmosphere. Which is made to fail miserably by the indoors reek of chlorine and the chill humidity.
I was up there ostensibly watching Emily and her friend Mary, who was staying with us that weekend. Skinny in their swimsuits they were busy down there, sleek as seals, practising for their school’s next swimming badge.
I had a Saturday broadsheet, limp from the moist air, spread in bits over the ribbed table; and at arm’s length a beaker of the vending machine’s tepid coffee, which tasted no different to its tea.
Martin asked if he could sit at my table. All the other tables had at least one mother at them, some with bored toddlers or unsporting older children. The swimming pool backs onto a sports hall, Saturday activities aimed at children – gymnastics, football club, table tennis league, et al – anything, other than let the poor children be bored. Children have to be doing, to be seen to be doing. But I’m getting ahead of myself …
In English society, at our age (late twenties), to sit oneself at the table of a woman on her own could in itself be construed as a sexual overture and be responded to as such.
That looks and sounds so pathetic written down; but it is, sadly, oh so true. Because so unused are we English to human contact now, so insular have our little lives become, so fed tabloid motives of semi-clad sex, that a man cannot now ask to sit at a table occupied by an unaccompanied woman without his seeming to have some sexual intent.
I think, moving my bits of Saturday newspaper to make room for Martin’s plastic beaker of coffee, that’s what I said that day to Martin. I do run off at the mouth at times.
Martin smiled at my rabbiting on. Which wasn’t easy for him, as he had some facial discomfort – one puffed out red marble of an eye. Which could have been why, that day, he hadn’t fancied his chances with any of the young mothers. No, he too had already moved way beyond that.
Where I am white, black-haired, wiry and intense, Martin’s outdoor complexion was topped with floppy brown hair; and he was lean, long and bendy in the middle. A sporty type, the sole reason he wasn’t in the pool showing off to his two sons – got to be doing on access weekends – was because of the eye infection he had caught two weeks before – while swimming.
His competitive sporting edge unchallenged by my verbosity – although he turned out to be no mean talker himself – formed the basis for the beginning of our friendship.
That Saturday morning he simply found himself in agreement with my yabbering on – on the importance of tables in family life, how there could be no family life without the family sitting around the table, facing one another as they talked, or listened. How, I asked him, could any family build an internal communication system while shoulder to shoulder, shushing one another facing the television?
Martin agreed. But it was only on his access weekends that his sons were made to sit at table. It was only on his weekends that they didn’t have meals out of the microwave. It was only on his weekends that they were allowed out of doors and to get dirty. On their mother’s weekends, Martin said (that day or later), they were trailed around the shops Saturdays, and on Sundays they were left to sprawl the whole day away in front of the telly.
(It was that day.) Mention of shopping had me launch into one of my diatribes against consumerism. Martin listened and chuckled at what he thought, back then, were some of my more outrageous assertions.
Then Emily came up dripping and shivering, and I said that it was time for her to come out. She begged five more minutes. I pretended to waver, reluctantly agreed, but insisted that both she and Mary be out by then, and that they must both then stand in the showers for two minutes with the water as hot as they could bear it.
Yes. That was the beginning.
But there it would have ended if, the next time we had met, we had not both been on our way back from the local SPAR store, both of us laden with ingredients for that Saturday’s meal.
Martin recognised me first: his eye was no longer swollen. We reintroduced ourselves; and as Emily and that weekend’s friend skipped on ahead, and Martin’s two boys trailed sluggishly behind, Martin and I enthusiastically talked cooking and recipes. And it was on that day, extolling each our culinary specialities, that we agreed to cook for one another. Bags were put down, names, addresses and phone numbers exchanged.
Martin was to be the first to cook. Sportsman that he was, he wanted to show off. So it began …
At the beginning of the 21st Century Martin and I were not as British men were commonly represented, but neither were we that untypical. The friendship between us, however, and certainly our criminal partnership, was unique.
Chapter Three
So essential was our company to us both that, within just two weeks, the meals had become routine. Tuesdays we ate at my place, Thursdays at Martin’s.
In amongst a maze of loops and curves, with an angular squiggle of roofs, Martin and I lived – in our sub-suburb of World City – within walking distance of each other. My ‘flat’ was on an earlier part of the estate, where all the roads had been named after birds. Thus it was my misfortune to then dwell in Chaffinch Close, off Robin Drive.
Another property developer had knocked up Martin’s part of the estate, had not continued the bird theme – the birds having probably all been made extinct by overbuilding. On his part of the estate the roads had all been named after gastropods, which did make it curious, if not distinctive, our town not being near the coast. Martin’s ‘starter home’ was off Cockle Crescent, in Whelk Grove.
That, though, was about all that made the parts of the estate in the least ways different. The houses all came in kit form, were fitted in as many to the square metre as possible, and were assembled by people who called themselves builders.
Enough of the houses. Martin and I paid more attention to, took more time over, the food. Or, rather, over the planning of the meal, its preparation, in the looking up of recipes, in shopping around for ingredients. And both of us enjoyed the actual cooking, were happy dodging about our kitchenettes, pan lids rattling and timers dinging.
Knowing how important the cooking was to us, we both always arrived in good time for the other’s meal; and we caught up on each other’s news as the one wandered about the ‘dining area’ and the other strained steaming vegetables, stirred a sauce …
The meal once begun, the talk at first was usually of the food, apologies for what was not recipe-perfect, or it was expressions of pleasure in a new dish turned out seemingly right; and with either/or praise from the non-cook, joint speculation on possible variations/ improvements … Thus was another meal always being planned at the present.
The other talk, at first, was of what we superficially had in common – we were comparatively poor because we were divorced fathers, had to maintain two households. Our meals thus cost us only a little extra out of our limited budgets; and we had the benefit of company.
Neither of us back then, it was quickly established, wanted a regular girlfriend, let alone to embark upon a second marriage. Not that we distrusted, or disliked, all women; rather we were reluctant to give up our newly-discovered independence. Not that anyone in particular was trying to encroach on our independent territories: so far as the marriage market was concerned both Martin and I were shoddy goods that had been returned. Best avoided. Unless by someone similarly desperate of the opposite gender with a similar background.
We both – Martin more than I – had the occasional one-night stand; but neither of us would let any liaison proceed beyond sexual gratification. Had we been able to afford it I suspect that we would both have made use of whores. If I could also, that is, have overcome my distaste for such basic exploitation of another human being.
As it was, payment for our one-night stands was often exacted in the pressure that came for a second, then a third; and the women started calling it a ‘relationship’ and complaining because we hadn’t been there, didn’t care …
We did care; but our emotional needs were catered for by our children. Our worries were for their welfare. A genuinely altruistic worry, one that expected no loyalty in return, that didn’t in any way hold our love to ransom.
I have digressed. The meal itself, the food itself, mattered more than I have so far led you to believe. Both of our ex-wives fed our children packaged food from the freezer via the microwave. At weekends before Martin and I met we had both made certain that we cooked for our children, encouraged them into our tiny kitchens; and we both lost our rags when our children, on being asked what they wanted, opted for a brand of the advertised fast foods that their mothers doled out.
We both also made our weekend children eat with us at a table and not off their laps in front of the telly. This did not always please the children either, especially as at the table, facing us, they had to exchange words with us.
I ought to emphasise here, lest we come across as joyless bullies, that neither Martin nor I were self-righteous in this domestic insistence. No parent, unless a stupid bigot, can know that the programme of upbringing they trial-and-error decide upon for their children is absolutely right. But one can also look at what other parents do – in this case our ex-wives – and know that they are thoughtlessly, selfishly, wrong.
Jacqui, my ex-wife, used her own mother as unpaid child-minder. This included not only school holidays, but most weekday evenings too. Jacqui’s anything-for-a-quiet-life mother let Emily do as she pleased. For which Emily then got hissed at by Jacqui. This confused Emily. At weekends I established strict bedtimes, which Emily reminded me of if I forgot. Later bedtimes had to be negotiated.
Martin’s boys were similarly indulged by a mother who too often couldn’t be bothered to argue with them. Weekends they accepted Martin’s rules with, only occasionally, a resentful sulk from the younger, later open argument from the elder.
Thus it can be seen that, even before we began our ‘conspiracy’, we had plenty to talk about, and that the talk was as important to us as the meal. The latter can best be demonstrated by the fact that we both – and both of us were fastidious men – we both left the washing-up until after the other had left.
Chapter Four
I am classified as unskilled in that I have received no formal training, cannot boast an alphabet of initials after my name. I did, however, then earn above the average income.
My work was done in a brightly lit cavern of a call centre. To ‘humanise’ the ‘work space’, each of our desks was placed at an angle to the next. (This had probably been investigated by an industrial psychologist and found to be, while avoiding the obvious on-parade visual regimentation, the ‘optimum working conditions’ for call centres such as ours.)
The offset desks meant that it was near impossible, unless leaning out of one’s chair at a gravity-defying angle, to chat with one’s nearest pair of co-workers. (‘Optimum working conditions’ meaning therefore the least possible distractions; meaning also most work done for least pay; meaning also that – with this spatial impediment to communication between them, abetted by the microphone/earpiece headsets – the workers were less likely to organise themselves into a troublesome union.)
Not that any of the other workers I met so wanted to organise. Rather we each appeared to have our own private goals. I certainly did, and I had no mind to talk to my closest neighbours.
In fact I was happy – although I doubt that ‘happy’ is an accurate description of my workaday emotional state – so let us say that while at work I preferred to be left on my own. Quick-fingered and curt with callers, my rates of pay were usually in the bonus bracket.
The firm itself subcontracted us to all sorts of corporations – electric and gas companies, computer sales, finance and loan houses, even to a pharmacological company. The time for each call (‘customer enquiry’) would have been, for whatever the corporation, carefully formulated, a checklist of possible responses on the screen before us. Take name, postal code, scroll down to approximate enquiry, read off response, end call; next, deliver greeting, take name and postal code …
The sequence sometimes changed, could sometimes be a step or two longer; which steps would have been calculated into our ‘best practise’ response times. A few corporations, greedy on their shareholders’ behalf, occasionally set the initial target times so impossibly low that even I couldn’t make the minimum wage.
There is no loyalty given nor expected in brightly lit caverns, not even in those where the workers are allowed to ‘personalise’ their ‘work spaces’ with potted plants and photos. Coffee breaks and toilet breaks are timed. And if three sick days are taken within one calendar month the malingering worker faces ‘stage one disciplinary procedure,’ with the prospect, thereafter for that salaried month, of not being able to earn enough to pay the rent/mortgage; and further goaded by their screen telling them, with increasing frequency and an irritating little bell, that they are slipping behind target; which additional pressure usually makes the malingerer self-conscious and clumsy, and results in their throwing down their headpiece and marching out – bent over her tears if a woman; face engorged and screaming abuse if a male; and sometimes both from both.
Even the most moronic of managers knows that there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of staff – agency workers may stay the shift; but, if they’re not earning enough they won’t be back the next day – so, after a week or so of moans and tantrums, the target rates will be ‘rationalised’ – adjusted down.
Which is where I come in. I know that, being fast, the managers used my performance as a benchmark. Therefore on the first days of any contract, or when the head office targets are proving too high, while they are being adjusted to our call centre I deliberately slow my responses.
I did this certain in the knowledge that, once the targets have been set, I could easily make up the shortfall. I applied the same principle to my monthly earnings when I knew that I was about to be assessed by the CSA. (Which for those of you outside the UK is the governments’ Child Support Agency, which makes deductions from one’s wage packets.) For months on end then I worked slow, kept my wages ludicrously low.
To compensate for these tactical shortfalls I was, of necessity, curt with callers. Facetiously oily, punctiliously polite; but curt. Any ditherer was costing me my bonus.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure that I understand. What do you mean?”
I would repeat what the checklist told me to say, and say it. “Thank you for calling. Good morning/ afternoon/evening,” and I proceeded to the next caller, offering my help, which wasn’t any help at all.
The cut-off caller may, often did, call again. He/she would probably get another ‘call centre operative’. And this time the enquiring customer might just manage to forestall the programmed response with: “Yes I know that. But what I need to know is …” Which particular customer enquiry would not be catered for in the on-screen list.
At this point an unseasoned ‘operative’ may call over the shift supervisor. They would then puzzle together over what the response could possibly be. Bear in mind that neither ‘operative’ nor shift supervisor would have any real knowledge of the corporation they are, this week, representing. A bank? With a new savings plan that even the bank’s own employees didn’t understand? And while the supervisor was so puzzling over his/her shoulder the ‘operative’s’ whole week’s bonus would be evaporating before his/her eyes.
When I got a customer calling back I hit them very quickly with exactly the same response they got last time, and politely wished them, “Good morning/ afternoon/evening,” and proceeded to the next caller.
Twice management tried to recruit me.
So callous of callers did I seem that the next obvious step up – to them – must have been for me to also become a manipulator of workers. Management are not men/women of integrity: to maintain their positions they take shit and hand it out. And all things considered I could probably have been as hard-faced at that as I was with ‘customer callers’. The pay would have been an improvement. At least regular. Not though the conditions of service.
What I noticed was that managers didn’t last for more than two or three contracts. Because they had targets to meet too; and they had to go to ‘motivational meetings’. They however had no way of manipulating the head office targets to match their own abilities. All that they could do was browbeat, or cajole, even creep to their staff in vain attempts to implement company policy; and greet, with a deeper slump each time, the penalties invoked for each failure to meet ‘the target’.
Glancing up, day or night, one could see them hovering worriedly in doorways, at people’s backs; or wincing anxiously into a phone, stepping carefully along the flecked industrial carpet, wondering where the ground was going to shift under them next.
No, I decided that I’d rather be quick and fast and earn my bonuses. Nor did I consider myself inhuman in my attitude to the ‘customer callers’. Anyone these days who rings a ‘helpline’ expecting help has to be so deluded as not to be taken seriously.
Chapter Five
My parents, both of them, would have been outraged to be described as anything other than ‘ordinary’ or ‘respectable’. A pair of decent citizens, doing what the advertisers and the government asked of them. Without question.
It was that ‘without question’ that sowed the seed of my childhood contempt. Children test their surroundings, their limits, by questioning them. And answers came there none from my parents.
Like any child of the suburbs I had no sense of belonging, nothing but street names to take my identity from. Because I come from a people – not just my two parents – with no sense of their place in history, of what went before to make them as they are. Most suburban men, like my father, built walls around themselves and called it an identity.
In my adolescence, still seeking an identity, my own sense of self was a jigsaw collection of other lives – parts from this history, another’s past, a scene from a film. My contemporaries were no more sure of themselves. Young, not one of us knew where, or how, we fitted together. Part Irish, part Scandinavian, part Norman, part Disney … All I knew for certain was that I didn’t belong there, nor anywhere else that I could see.
I went seeking answers beyond my parents and school, where the majority seemed to accept that there were no answers. Only through reading did I not feel freakish in my expectation of an answer. We are all isolated: television normalises, but leaves us outside, back in our living rooms. Books though transcend time and place, speak minority unto minority. In my teens I met philosophy.
A true philosopher has to question life right up to where he or she decides that it is worth living. Or not. I decided ‘not’ at one point.
Shut in my bedroom (box within box), curtains drawn, door barricaded, I had quietly determined to usurp the functions of my factory body. I was an intense young man. The worried pair broke the door down. Called an ambulance. Their whole life is one of cliché.
At the time, from the words coming out of their mouths, their concern appeared not to be for me, but for how my state reflected upon them as parents. Had they clutched my thin frame in tears to their padded frames I may have forgiven them. I have yet to forgive them.
Malnutrition and anorexia were diagnosed; treatment, both medical and psychological, prescribed. Medical minds, too, don’t question. Not beyond the diagnosis. And certainly not the value of life.
By the time diagnosis and treatment were decided upon however I had become a convert to life, and by my near-miss death, free of my parents.
My mother was, is, a manipulator. She manipulated my timid father. Manipulated me too. But as all parents must in the rearing of their offspring – do this, reward; do that, punishment.
All acceptable to me as a child insofar as it made me aware of dangers – what foods not to eat, when not to cross a road, how – through good manners – not to needlessly offend.
But when it came to shaping my beliefs to hers – a skewed chequerboard of black/white right/wrong – then I began to question, not only her often contradictory values, but her right to impose them.
Manipulators refuse to be questioned. All that concerns any manipulator is the imposition of their will. There is no other end. Solely their will be done. By whatever means. Mostly within the family by emotional blackmail. This took the form, with my mother, of a silent sourfaced expression of displeasure.
My father, a quiet man whose mantra was ‘anything for a quiet life’, did her will. She pressed his buttons: he booed or clapped. Slippered pratt.
My father’s putative self-esteem wouldn’t let him question himself. And manipulator that she was my mother allowed no-one to question her. Herself included. Like so many others who do not question what they do, but go on doing it – despite not enjoying it, as if it is their duty, neither of my parents questioned nor allowed themselves to be questioned – over things like saving up to go on package holidays and shopping for non-essential items. And they did it not solely because they had been told by advertisers that they would enjoy either goods or holiday (they passed cynical remarks regarding all such efforts), but because, and only because, that was what they had done before and would therefore, for that reason alone, continue doing.
My father would brook no questions lest it show, to himself, what a feeble wife-controlled wretch he was. So he defensively smiled smug, nodded slow, as if he knew all there was to know; his entire demeanour a lie.
“One day,” was his other mantra to ward of my every other angry observation of his pathetic existence. “One day.” One day I too would arrive at his passive sagacity.
Wise he emphatically was not. He wasn’t even clever. While I was one of those unfortunate children, self-evidently (and should that self-evidence be required, exam passes and grades will have to suffice) brighter than both of my parents. But, while remaining under their power, first physical and later emotional, this child felt himself cursed with the intelligence that, capable of divining their stupidity, knew that he still had to do their bidding. It also marked me as different when I hadn’t wanted to be different from them. Until, despairing, I starved myself free; and they bought the diagnosis of illness.
Even then, even now, I am not wholly free: just the thought of the congratulatory pair as they were then infuriates me still.
Chapter Six
Martin’s parents were, Martin’s parents are, consumers. Family days out they went, they go, shopping. Their family holidays too were, are, packaged. Hotel and pool was all that mattered. Martin said that the adult holiday conversation had been solely about how and where – agent or teletext – they had got this bargain/been ripped off. Household reading was ‘Which’ consumer magazine.
Martin’s parents were two people who defined themselves solely by their appetites – I do/don’t like … I can’t stand/I love …
They bought him those things advertised for boys his age. They compared what he had with what other boys his age had. They worked long hours to pay for those things. Martin and his sister were left alone with the telly, with the latest video/computer games.
His parents were seldom there at mealtimes. When they were, they talked each of their work. Nor were they there to take him to sports meetings. They weren’t there to attend parent/teacher evenings. They were dismayed when the teenage fashions he took up involved ripped clothing. They expressed shock when he espoused left-wing anti-materialistic politics. They were surprised when he turned out, in his sixth form college, to be good at basketball and, subsequently, at other sports. They were disappointed when, instead of a potentially well-paid sporting career, he chose to become a teacher. Of sports.
His sporting aspirations puzzled me too. I have made almost an affectation out of being spindly feeble.
“The ephemerality of success,” he told me. “Even should I be the one to break a record, then it will stand as a record only until it is broken again. Which, given the nature of human striving, it inevitably will be.”
Aside from which, he told me another time, the one person he competed mostly against was himself. And such victories – having beaten himself he was both victorious and defeated – could not be owned. But as both victor and vanquished, his importance in the competition was paramount. He, the singular human being, was central to every performance.
Whereas, in his parents’ consumerism, of central performance was the thing possessed, the person only of any importance in that they were its possessor. And it had to be comparative. That they were the ones to own that thing, their ownership making them like or unlike others who did or did not own that thing.
Sport, on the other hand, developed around all sorts of passing relationships – rivals, respect for, being the most obvious; admiration of excellence being the next; reliance on fellow team members, being another; with need-to-win recognition of their real strengths and limitations.
“Add to that the self-respect, regardless of the result, that comes from doing your utmost; the intangible of sporting effort that comes from every small triumph over oneself.”
I daresay, if ever our actions come to be analysed by the unsympathetic, and because he had a foot in both camps, Martin might well be described as having a contradictory personality. Not so. All flowed singularly from the fact of his parentage.
Take his marriage. His sentimental slut of a wife had only been so attractive to him because she – at least during courtship and marriage – had appeared to put no store by things, had talked more of feelings.
A pity for Martin that she hadn’t had the intellect to go with the instinct, that she had translated the primacy of those gut feelings only into a soap opera melodrama. And, on divorce, of course she had fallen among lawyers and lay advisers whose primary measure of value had been things.
Martin and I on the other hand, and from our very first meetings, had been made for each other and the moment.
Chapter Seven
In writing this I keep looking for clues to his state of mind. Even way back then …
The socio-psychology of the shared meals had to lead, so it now seems, to the two of us becoming conspirators. Or lovers. Which is a conspiracy of pleasure. But as neither of us were homosexuals the situation had to lead to the two of us making plans.
Even that’s not true, not accurate, whatever. Our shared meals led to Martin needing to make plans. The talking, for me, would probably have been an end in itself. For sporty Martin though words in themselves were not enough. They needed to be followed by action. He’d listen, move his long legs and say, “So what do we do?”
I enjoy talking, enjoy – I confess – listening to myself talk. So too did Martin enjoy listening to me. Take as evidence that every week he came back for more. And, warmed by the food and the wine, we were both receptive to my many arguments. And to his question, “So what do we do?” my response would most often be,
“What can we two do?” He’d chance a suggestion, and off I’d go describing yet another circle of folly.
Martin wasn’t solely Mr All-Action Physical. More often than not he’d pick up an idea and run with it; and we would amuse ourselves with outcomes. Which was another aspect of our odd compatibility – we could make each other breathless with laughter.
I’d walk home from my evenings at his house full of well-being; or, having closed the door after him, I’d potter about my flat smiling at things that had been said.
My pleasure in his company, and appreciation of his cooking, needn’t though have made us conspirators. What did that, I believe, was an element of self-loathing within us both.
The self-loathing which had Martin hopelessly ask: “So what do we do?”
And the self-loathing which had me sighing respond: “What can we two do?”
Questions to which, at that early stage, neither of us had any inkling of an answer. Not that I wanted to do anything. I am a man content if I can come up with an explanation for the way things are. I’m less than happy if such an explanation requires action of me.
Although I may not have wanted to do anything, it was out of the sense of our impotence, and out of our failed marriages and our crap careers that our self-loathing sprang. And it was out of our self-loathing, in the greyly repetitive days following our meals, when our conversations were reflected on, dwelt upon, that led us both to consider what could be done. At the next meal we tested those ideas – both ridiculous and angry – out upon one another.
Many, most, of those ideas were not intended to be taken seriously; but simply led to laughter and discussions on the merits and demerits of any more plans, both fantastic and feasible which arose from that.
But it got us into the habit of thinking ahead, and of then relying upon the other in the making of plans; and which did, eventually, make of us conspirators.
And it is at this point that this tale embarks upon a double chronology – the events being written of within events that took place during the later writing of them. All, I hope, will soon make itself clear.
eBook versions available here – https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/572993
John John
John John
by Sam Smith
The mind roots itself in a body, anchors itself in a head, looks out through a pair of pink lids.
Blue-green curtains hang from a grey squared ceiling. White sheets are cold on hot body. A rocking motion.
A woman, dark curly hair, rises from beside the bed. White cap, blue tunic, pale blue belt, olive skin.
A gasping sucking breath; trying to hold the thin air in the inextensible lungs.
Another nurse rises from the opposite side or the bed. Short fair hair, pink skin, white uniform, white belt.
The rocking stops. The two nurses have been making the bed. The dark-haired nurse smiles,
“So you’re back with us again?”
Another deep trembling breath pulled into the strained lungs.
Again?
The bed sways. The squared ceiling recedes. Arms move to counterbalance. Arms trapped under tight white sheets. Panic.
“Steady,” the dark-haired nurse reaches out a hand. The nails are pink against the brown skin.
Jaws clenched, neck arching, another breath is pulled into the body. Sweat cools on the hot exposed skin. The pink nurse looks on through grey eyes. Curtain and ceiling move away.
“Take deep regular breaths through your mouth,” the dark-haired nurse instructs him. Opening wide the jaws the lungs are ventilated.
The pounding within diminishes. The belaboured breathing becomes superfluous. Tension leaves arms, legs, shoulders.
“That’s a good boy,” the dark-haired nurse bestows a rewarding smile.
Boy. Male. Child.
He studies the smile. Why should a showing of white teeth have a calming effect?
With a friendly double pat the dark-haired nurse removes her hand from his chest.
The curtain around the bed billows out. Soft rapid footsteps on the other side. The pink nurse listens to two low female voices. The sheet again presses down on him. He tugs his arms free. The pink nurse lays her fingers on his forehead, smiling tells him to lie still. Each of her fingers feels cold. He decides he doesn’t like her. Why doesn’t he like her?
The dark nurse has collected a clipboard from the bottom of the bed. A red chair beside the bed is pushed back against the curtain, alters its folds. She lays the clipboard upon the red chair seat.
“You’ve had us quite worried…” the pink nurse says from the other side of the bed. She has put laughter into her voice. Her words though… He puzzles on the remembered sound of them. The smooth pink face doesn’t look worried.
A woman laughs somewhere within the building, a startled laugh, trailing quickly off. He searches for words of his own, composes them, studies them, rearranges them, practises them with closed mouth.
“Where am I?” he asks the dark nurse.
“Would you believe,” taking his wrist she grins at him, “in hospital?”
Hospital…
He looks at the green and white striped pyjamas on his arm, at his inert brown-pink hand beyond the probing fingers of the nurse.
He has a large crooked thumb, four bent fingers, a criss-crossing of lines on his plump palm. Not a child’s hand. More words to be shaped and practised.
“How’d I get here?”
“Don’t you remember?” her brown eyes flick up from the watch pinned to the breast of her tunic. He looks inside himself. A vacancy.
“No,” he says without having practised the word.
“You collapsed in the street,” the pink nurse tells him, “Early this afternoon. You recovered consciousness in Emergency. You remember that?”
Again he looks inside himself. Nothing.
“No,” he tastes the movement of his tongue, “This isn’t Emergency?”
“This is the heart ward,” the dark nurse releases his wrist and busily writes on the clipboard. “You have a very erratic pulse. I need a name on this. Surname?”
Both nurses have name tags clipped to their tunics. His name? Surname? He has no memory of a name tag. He searches for other memories. But this is all he knows of himself: his being here.
“I don’t know,” he tells the dark nurse, “How did I get to this ward?”
“A porter brought you,” the pink nurse smiling tells him, “No beds in ITU. So you were brought here.”
The dark nurse has inclined her head. The pink nurse stares a second at her, then parts the curtains and leaves.
“We can take your temperature anyway,” the dark nurse flicks a thermometer, reads it. “Open your mouth.” The glass thermometer scrapes over his lower teeth, is cold under his tongue. “Close your mouth. And while that’s cooking I’ll take your blood pressure.”
Breathing noisily through his nose he watches the nurse unclip the lid of a rectangular box and extract a black armband and tubing. Pushing up his pyjama sleeve she straps the armband around his biceps. Putting the two curved pieces of a stethoscope in her ears, she pumps up the inflatable armband, then watches the mercury fall in the tube on the inside of the lid. She writes more figures an the clipboard.
While she is doing this he wonders how it is that he knows what a stethoscope is, knows that she is taking his blood pressure, that these things are familiar to him. Has he been in hospital before? Looking about him he realises that he also knows what a curtain is, and a bed, and that this is a hospital ward; and yet he doesn’t know his own name.
“Don’t worry about it,” the dark nurse has taken his blood pressure again, “It’ll come.”
Can she read his thoughts? He examines his thoughts. His sole thought is himself examining his thoughts. Curtains, bed, pillow, sheets, blanket, chair, bedside locker… he names all the things about him.
Turning his free hand over he examines the freckles on the back of his hand, the wrinkled knuckles, the short black hairs on the white wrist. A hand. He doesn’t recognise it as his own. A hand, nothing more.
The nurse removes the thermometer, reads it and makes a cross on the chart.
“Still high,” her smile says that it is nothing to worry about, “Any luck yet?”
He knows to what she refers, gives a slight shake of the head.
“What street did I collapse in?” he asks her, listens to himself speaking, wonders where he first learnt to form words.
“I’ll find out later for you,” she pushes herself up from the chair.
A doctor in a white coat steps through the curtain, is followed by the pink nurse. The man wonders why he isn’t pleased to see her. Because she feigned concern?
The doctor is young. How old am I, the man wonders, feels the hammering up a tempo within him and breathes deep to quieten it.
The doctor has looked to the bottom of the bed for the charts, sees the clipboard on the red chair. The dark nurse steps out of his path. The doctor glances over the clipboard, takes the man’s left wrist.
“I’ll need an ECG,” he says. Both nurses exit through the curtain.
The man listens to the doctor’s slow breaths. The doctor has a pallid complexion, red spots on his cheeks. The man wonders how he knows he himself is a man, recalls the dark nurse calling him a good boy. He is beginning to learn. That thought pleases him.
The doctor looks tired, the eyes dull and blurred. His pale hair is cut short at the sides, long on the top. Straight hair it stands up at odd angles, looks unclean. With his free hand the man feels over the top of his own head. The hair is clipped short. It is damp at the roots from his sweating. What colour is it? He doesn’t know.
Releasing his wrist the doctor makes a note on a pad.
“Name?” he says, waits with yellow pen poised. The man doesn’t answer: the question has struck no chord in him. When the doctor looks over to him, the man gives a shrug. The doctor makes a one line stroke on the pad.
“Address?” The man knows what the word means, pictures an envelope. The word, though, has no meaning for him.
“I don’t even know where I am now,” he gives a weak apologetic smile, wants the doctor to smile back at him as the dark-haired nurse did. The doctor doesn’t.
“Date of birth?” The question is meaningless. Days, months, years…?
He doesn’t know what figures apply to him. What year is this? Age? He again examines his hand. He is not young. Is he old?
The doctor is watching the sweat form on the man’s brow and nose.
“Amnesia is very rarely total or permanent,” the doctor tells him, “Relax now.” The words hold no kindness, are a professional observation touched with impatience for the man’s unnecessary fears. “Do you think you can sit up?”
The man thinks about it — thinks about pushing his body up the bed with his legs, raising himself on his elbows and forearms. He wishes that the two nurses would return to help him.
“Yes,” he hears himself say, and begins to move his limbs, the muscles on the tops of his legs contracting to raise his knees.
The doctor lays his pad on the bedside locker and helps pull him up out of the bedclothes. The hands of the doctor are thin and smooth.
Once upright, the man sits forward, flat hands pressing down on the bed, the smooth covers seeming to float away from below him. The doctor’s voice is telling him to take deep breaths through his mouth. A man beyond the curtain calls pipingly to a nurse.
“Better?” There is no concern in the doctor’s voice, simply a question that requires a yes or a no answer to establish a fact. The man, concentrating on taking deep breaths, nods. The giddiness has gone.
Going behind the man the doctor manipulates the metal bed and piles up pillows.
“Lie back now.”
The man, exhaling, obeys. The doctor scrutinises his eyes, his pallor. From a blue cardboard wallet he extracts a form, hands the man the yellow ballpoint. The man takes it in his right hand, holds it between his fingers.
“Can you sign this? It’s a form of consent for any treatment we may consider necessary.”
The man studies the cross beside the line on which he is to write his signature. He weighs the pen in his fingers. He is sure he knows how to write, doesn’t know, though, what to write. The dizziness returns. He moves the pen sketchily about above the paper.
Nothing. No response from within telling him what to write.
“I’m sorry,” he lets out a breath, glances up to the doctor, “Nothing.” The doctor’s expression doesn’t change,
“Next of kin?” The man looks sharply inside himself, hoping to catch himself off-guard. Wife? Sons? Daughters? Mother? Father? Family snapshots; but of no particular family. Brother? Sister? The doctor removes the pen from the man’s fingers.
“Do you know what day it is?” It is day. He shakes his head.
“Do you know the days of the week?”
“Monday. Tuesday,” he hears himself reciting, listens to learn, “Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday.”
“Know what month this is?” Month?
“Do you know the months of the year?”
“January. February…”
Again he listens to himself to learn. The doctor studies him, says as he writes on the form, “Wednesday 6th of August.” A Wednesday in August.
The pink nurse comes through the curtains pulling a machine on a trolley. Through the momentary gap in the curtains the man glimpses a white bedside locker, part of a railed bed and a grey-haired man sat in a red chair beside the bed. The old man has a blue dressing gown on over pale green pyjamas.
Out of lacklustre eyes the old man looks directly back at him. Behind the flat grey head is a brown vase of orange flowers.
The doctor ignores the pink nurse’s attentive presence.
“Unbutton your pyjama top,” he tells the man; and from his white coat pocket he pulls a silver and black stethoscope.
Again, as with the pen, the man’s right hand does as it is bid.
Plugging the stethoscope into his ears, the doctor presses the cold diaphragm against the man’s chest. He listens, makes notes, moves the stethoscope, tells the man to breathe deeply, to hold his breath. He makes notes. The man passively watches him, awaits instructions.
The doctor is an untidy man, has violet biro stains on the breast pocket of his white coat, and both the collar of his brown check shirt and tightly knotted green tie are askew. His fingernails are bitten down. The man looks to his own nails. They are uniform.
Telling the man to sit up, the doctor gestures to the nurse to help the man take off his pyjama jacket. Once the man is sitting forward the doctor moves the stethoscope over the ribbed back, makes notes, then goes over the bare back tapping upon his own fingers.
“Lie back,” the doctor tells him, adds to his notes. The pink nurse uninterestedly looks on.
The stethoscope is crammed back into the doctor’s white coat pocket and a pointed stick, with a disc of white rubber on its end, is brought forth. The doctor tells the pink nurse to pull back the bedclothes, asks the man to slide down the bed. The pink nurse hovers helpfully while the man eases himself down.
He now hopes that she won’t help him: the moving about is making him feel better. He flinches as the doctor runs the pointed stick across his stomach. The surprise makes him smile. The pink nurse nervously answers his smile. The man wishes that the doctor too would smile at him. He curiously examines this wish.
The man’s arms are folded back on themselves, are straightened. Unbuttoning the man’s pyjama trousers the doctor feels around the abdomen, presses his fingers into the soft flesh, asks the man if it hurts.
“Do you have pain anywhere?” Pain? The man searches through his body,
“No. I was just finding it hard to breathe. And I felt dizzy.”
The doctor nods, lifts the man’s leg and hits his knee with the rubber end of the stick.
“No chest pains? Stomach pains?’
“No.” The man awaits the blow on his other knee.
“Relax,” the doctor curtly orders him. The man lets out a breath. His knee jerks.
Having run the pointed end of the stick up his curved soles, the doctor tells him to sit up and to put his pyjama jacket back on. He gestures to the pink nurse to remake the bed.
While the man and the nurse co-operate the doctor sits on the bedside chair and adds to his notes.
“Have you ever suffered from a heart ailment?” he asks the man.
“Not that I know of,” the man says. The doctor grimaces, apparently disapproving of the man’s consistent ignorance. Why should he be disbelieved, the man wonders. Why should he lie?
“Do you remember collapsing in the street?” the doctor testily asks him. The man holds the word street in his mind, sees rows of houses facing one another. It doesn’t seem to be any particular street.
“No.” More notes are made.
Laying aside the notes the doctor stands and takes a heavy silver cylinder from his pocket. At its top is a black cone. Through this cone the doctor peers into the man’s ears, then into his eyes. Inside the cone is a small yellow light. Staring, as instructed, into that light, the man tries to avert his face to avoid inhaling the doctor’s stale breath. More notes are made. The man is told to follow with his eyes the yellow pen the doctor moves from right to left before his face.
The pen is used to make more notes. The doctor feels under the man’s chin and down the sides of his neck. The man is told to open his mouth. The doctor presses the man’s tongue flat to look down his throat. He frowns, reaches down and picks up the man’s hands. He turns them over, examines both sides.
“One thing we do know about you,” the doctor belabours a dramatic pause, “you don’t smoke.” The pink nurse dutifully smiles.
The doctor is feeling the man’s armpits when the dark-haired nurse returns. She smiles at the man. He finds himself happy to see her. Watched by the two nurses the doctor searches up over the back of the man’s head.
“How did you get this bruise?” Bruise?
“No idea.”
Grunting his scepticism, or his exasperation, the doctor makes more notes. With a flicker of her eyes the dark nurse indicates that she wishes to talk to the doctor. The man has seen the exchange.
“Prepare him for an ECG,” the doctor tells the pink nurse, and goes outside the curtain with the dark nurse.
The pink nurse asks the man to undo his pyjama jacket, folds down the bedclothes.
“Don’t you remember anything?” she asks as she helps him slide back down the bed. Her watch, hanging from her tunic above him, is upside down. Glancing to her face he sees that her interest is genuine.
“Nothing that means anything,” he tells her, “Not as far as I can make out.”
“Don’t worry,” she says, unlooping wires from the trolley, returning to her concept of confident professionalism, “it’ll all come back.”
Spreading white cream from a tube onto suction pads, she presses the cold pads onto his bare chest, explains to him the function of the machine.
“Electrocardiograph,” he says almost to himself.
“You know that then?” the nurse regards him curiously.
“Yes,” the man looks inside himself for what triggered the recognition, “But I know language,” he says to himself and the nurse, “I haven’t forgotten that. Trouble is,” he voices the thought as it forms, “I can’t know what it is that I’ve forgotten.”
The doctor and the dark nurse return. The pink nurse makes way for the doctor, joins the dark nurse at the bottom of the bed. The doctor checks over the machine, sets it running.
“He knows what an ECG is,” the pink nurse blushes. The doctor looks from her to the man, nods without expression. He studies the printout from the machine, moves one of the suction pads, watches the new printout.
The two nurses are listening to a conversation between a nurse and a male patient beyond the curtain. Both smile at something the nurse sharply says. The doctor tears off the printout. Nudged by the dark nurse the pink nurse hurries to remove the suction pads from the man. The doctor slips the ECG printout into the cardboard file. The dark nurse helps the man to sit up, pulls the covers back over him, stands on the opposite side of the bed to the doctor. The pink nurse is relooping the ECG wires. The man is no longer dizzy.
“Now I require a blood sample,” the doctor says.
Taking a syringe from a clear plastic bag, he finds a fat blue vein on the inside of the man’s arm, pushes the needle into it and withdraws some maroon blood. He injects the blood into several small tubes with different colour tops. The dark nurse tells the man to take deep breaths through his mouth. The man smiles at her. The doctor presses a piece of white cottonwool onto the dark hole in the vein, folds the arm onto it, tells the man to keep it there.
The man and the nurses wait while the doctor reads back through his notes. With a tired sigh the doctor clips the notes into the file, for the first time looks at the man full face on.
“All I can safely say is that you appear to have had a shock of some kind. Any idea what it might have been?” The man shakes his head. “You also have a slight concussion. Now, whether the bang on your head caused you to collapse, or you banged your head when you collapsed, I don’t know. At a guess I’d say that you banged your head when you collapsed. Does the word ‘epilepsy’ mean anything to you?”
“I think I know what it is.”
“Are you an epileptic?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I have fits. I know what the word means, that’s all.”
The doctor, who has been carefully studying his reaction, now looks aside.
“Sister says,” his eyes come back to the man, “you collapsed in Harborough Road. Do you remember that?”
“You said I collapsed in the street before,” he tells the pink nurse.
“No. Harborough Road,” the doctor says. Street/road, road/street, the man turns the two words over: he sees again rows of houses facing one another, but this time houses painted different colours and with large trees outside their garden gates and cars parked beside a pavement.
“Are there trees in Harborough Road?” he asks. The doctor glances to the two nurses.
“Garages and things,” the pink nurse is uncertain, “I don’t think there’re any trees.”
The man pictures the open forecourt of a garage, petrol pumps, glass paybooth. The oily interior of a repairshop, a car up on an hydraulic ramp. Neither picture seems connected with him.
“Do you have any objection to Sister looking through your clothes?” the doctor asks. Why should he object? Could he object? What clothes? He wants now, as much as they, to know who he is.
“No,” he says, “No objection.”
The dark nurse kneels to the bedside locker and removes a pile of neatly folded clothes. Setting them on the bed beside his legs, she shakes out a dark blue nylon anorak, feels inside its pockets.
“Nothing,” she reports.
“Recognise it?” the doctor asks the man.
“It’s an anorak.”
“Do you recognise it as yours?”
The anorak is well worn, has grease patches on the creased cuffs; an anorak owned by someone. By someone he doesn’t know.
“No,” he ruefully shakes his head.
The nurse finds nothing in the pockets of the grey trousers, nor does the man recognise the red underpants, the blue shirt, grey socks or faun suede shoes. All are well worn.
“Do you remember shaving this morning?” the doctor asks. The man feels his chin, watches the nurse fold his clothes.
“No.”
“What’s the Prime Minister called?” After a moment’s reflection, the man shakes his head.
“What am I called?” the doctor holds his hand over his badge.
“I don’t,” the man hesitates, “seem to be able to remember names.”
“What else,” the doctor smiles crookedly, “can’t you remember?”
“I don’t know,” the man gladly answers his smile, “until you ask me.”
The doctor slots the cardboard wallet under his arm, prepares to leave. The two nurses stand aside.
“What I can tell you,” the doctor says to the man, “is that, for some reason, you’re in shock. Apart from that, I can’t find anything wrong with you. Now I want you to rest, stay in bed. The police will have to be notified. Possibly they will be able to shed some light on your identity. Does that bother you?”
“What?”
“The police being notified.”
As for every other direct question the man has to analyse his own reactions.
“No,” he says.
“We’ll have to do some more tests. And tomorrow morning you’ll see Mr Assan. For the moment, however,” the doctor edges between the curtains, “relax.”
The dark nurse asks if he wants to lie down. The man, though, is watching the pink nurse as she raises her hand to a seam of the curtain.
Voice off. Human beings possess no intrinsic self-criticism. Only through other human beings does an individual human being know of itself.
The old man opposite is still sat in the padded red chair, a washed out green blanket folded over his knees.
The man holds the old man’s gaze a disinterested moment, then lets his sight and mind drift elsewhere.
The ceiling of the long ward has been lowered, slopes up to the tops of the high windows. The two ranks of supine beds do not keep pace with the tall windows: less windows than beds. The lower panes of the windows are of frosted glass. Through the upper panes is a view only of small rounded white clouds in a blue sky.
Behind each bed is an assortment of wires and tubes. Beside a few of the beds are upright iron cylinders. Across each bed is a narrow cantilevered table. Between each bed, apart from the folded back curtains, is a locker and a chair. Some of the locker tops are crammed with bottles of different coloured drinks, upright angled cards, bowls of fruit, boxes of tissues, vases of flowers, books, magazines and papers. A few patients have spread their occupancy to adjoining windowsills; others keep tidily to themselves. Yet other lockers, like his, have only a transparent jug and a beaker of water.
The dark green floor of the ward gleams with semicircular smears of polish. At the far end of the ward is a large table and two stacks of brown plastic chairs. Taped to the square pillars in the centre of the ward are hand-printed notices telling visitors that not more than two chairs are allowed beside each bed.
At this end of the ward, on either side of the unseen entrance, wooden partitions enclose small rooms. His bed is one bed away from a glass-walled isolation room. Vacant.
Half way down the ward is a gap between the beds where, on either side are double doors. Patients have been shuffling in and out of those doors. From the opening doors on the opposite side he hears the blare of a television, shuttered by the bumping door. A patient emerges from the open doors this side with damp hair and a white towel over his arm.
Groups of people, in variously coloured street clothes, sit around two of the distant beds. Strained laughter comes from one group, respectful murmurs from the other. The two patients, sitting up in bed, are being politely attentive.
A few of the beds are empty, some temporarily vacated, others smooth and untenanted. Two patients lay asleep. Most are sitting up in bed or are curled on their sides reading. One patient is sat beside another’s bed watching, with him, a small white television.
A sparse-haired man, three beds down on the opposite side, smiles and lifts a white hand in a flaccid wave. The man returns the smile, feels muscles move over his face.
He examines the other patients. None are young. All have an unhealthy pallor, even the fat black man further down the ward and the overweight Asian in the bed beside him. All look grey, their abundant flesh dragged down, as if their excess fat has given up the fight against gravity and they have collapsed inside themselves. Surreptitiously he feels around his own body. Flesh to spare, but not fat.
Nor is it just their being fat. A black nurse chiding a patient is small and round and plump. But there is a solidity, a sheen, a vitality in her flesh, a brightness to her eyes that these drooping men don’t own. A lustre even to her hair. She is wearing a grey and white striped uniform.
Names are clipped to the bedrails. The printed names — Assan and Burton — are the doctors’. The patients’ names are all hand-written. He turns in his bed. ‘Assan’ only is attached to the bedrail above his head.
He turns back to the ward. Some of what he has seen is new to him; much, though, is familiar. Has he been in hospital before? The unaccountably familiar disconcerts as much as the apparently new. Anxiety, like a prickling gaseous bubble, rotates within his gut.
A woman in a blue overall has been slowly pushing a tea trolley around the ward. At each bed she has glanced to the charts at the bottom of the bed before asking the patient what he wants.
Curtains have been drawn around one bed. Two nurses and the doctor move behind that curtain, exchange crisp remarks. The nurses are not those who attended him. One nurse has a dark blue uniform trimmed with white lace. The telephone rings occasionally in the nurses’ rooms near the entrance.
The woman with the trolley arrives at the Asian’s bed. The overweight Asian takes his tea without milk or sugar. The Asian grunts his thanks.
“And how do you like your tea?” the woman stands by her trolley and smiles at the man, the newcomer. She didn’t smile at the Asian. The men searches inside himself for a response. Sucking on a deep breath, he shrugs.
“Milk? Sugar?” She stands waiting. She has neatly curled hair.
“Try him milk without sugar,” the dark nurse appears, “Don’t want to start you in any bad habits.” She smiles at the man and adjusts the bedside table. The cup of tea in its green saucer is placed before him.
“I’m going off in a minute. I just came to tell you that we’ve called the police and they’re sending someone around to see you. No luck yet?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry,” she pats his arm, “Drink your tea.”
Obediently, gratefully, he swallows a mouthful of tea. All he can taste is its hotness. The Asian, belching, makes a disparaging remark to him about the tea. Three nurses come walking into the ward, start picking up charts from the bottom of beds, saying hello to the patients.
“Home tomorrow?” a nurse in a white uniform asks the patient in the bed the other side of him.
“Tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock,” the patient makes a show of rubbing his hands together. He has grey hair swept back. The man wonders how he knows the patient has a Scottish accent, and yet he doesn’t know if he takes sugar in his own tea. Again the gaseous bubble rotates trembling within.
Both sets of visitors, with a clatter of street shoes, hurry up the centre of the ward and out. A nurse in a blue uniform, blue belt, with short blonde hair has unhooked the charts from the bottom of his bed.
“Says here we’ve got to keep an eye on you,” she brings the charts around the other side of the bed, “Better start as we mean to go on.”
Her manner is easy, relaxed. Taking a thermometer out of a cup fixed to the wall she flicks it. Glad to know what is expected of him, he opens his mouth, puckers his lips around the cold tube of the thermometer. Holding the watch pinned upside down to her tunic, she takes his wrist.
“Fresh in today?” she asks. He nods.
“And what have you been up to?”
“I don’t know,” he says around the thermometer, and feels himself grow hot.
The blonde nurse frowns, concentrates on her watch, glances up to the single name on the bedrail. He reads her reactions: now she has recognised him. Before he was just a patient, this day’s intake: he imagines her only half-listening to the nurses as they chattering went off-duty.
Releasing his wrist she makes a note, removes and reads the thermometer.
“Blood pressure as well I’m afraid,” she says as he thirstily reaches for his tea.
Removing the dark-spotted cottonwool from the crook of his arm, she pumps up the black strap, watches the mercury fall. A shiny blue and red dressing gown is draped over the end of a bed across from him. The inside red stitches of the dressing gown are like Arabic writing. How do I know, he asks himself, what Arabic writing looks like?
The nurse packs the tubing and strap away into its long box.
“I also require,” she pauses significantly, “a urine sample.”
With an apologetic smile she hands him a long-necked white plastic flask,
“Want the curtains drawn?”
“No thanks.”
Urine is yellow and comes out the penis. The feeble patient who waved to him took a flask off another nurse. Like him the man slides the flask down under the bedclothes, fishes inside his pyjamas for his penis and places it in the downsloping neck of the cold flask. Telling him to put the flask on his bedside locker when he has finished, the nurse disappears up to the ward offices. To consult with others on him, he guesses. And he feels and hears his hot urine trickling into the flask. And he wonders that he knows what to do but cannot remember ever having done it before. Something so functional, so ordinary, so everyday… and yet he has no other days but this one.
Following the other patient’s example, he twists in bed to place the flask on the bedside locker, then pulls the narrow table with his tea on it back to him. The other nurses have worked their way down the ward, taking temperatures, bestowing headslanted smiles. The blonde nurse reappears, takes his urine sample, gives him a clean white flask.
“Remember anything yet?” she says. He smiles, his guess correct,
“No. If anything it seems to get worse. More confusing. Realising how much I don’t know.”
“Well… Take it easy,” she squeezes his shoulder.
Lying back against his pillows he watches the influx of new nurses establish the order of their shift, notes the care with which they treat him, the precise omission of his name, the cheerful unconscious use of the other patients names; and he looks inside himself and he wonders where, whoever he was, he has gone.
He watches nurses bringing newly delivered flowers to patients, listens to nurses passing on phone messages from relatives, and with wonder he picks up his knife and fork when dinner is wheeled around, and he watches himself eat and he wonders that he cannot recall ever having eaten before yet he knows how to do it. He also knows, approximately, what the potatoes and the greens will taste like before they enter his mouth. The cubes of grained meat he leaves around the outside of the white plate. And twice more his temperature, blood pressure and pulse are taken; and he glimpses their uneven progress across his chart. That much he knows about himself.
Voice Off. It hurts a human being to be born. It recovers. As toddlers human beings suffer bumps and illnesses. Most recover. So do most human beings, in their brief and painfilled lives, soon come to expect to be hurt and to expect to recover. They also, early in their lives, accept death’s inevitability. Thus do most unwell human beings await cure or death with equal passivity.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7226
2 Bridgwater Days
Prologue
Part One: A love story.
i)
Many love affairs can be conventional. None are typical. These two candidates for love worked in an ordnance factory. The factory was on the edge of a marsh a few miles outside of town.
He was on a government training scheme for the young jobless.
Classified as neither apprentice nor as unskilled labour, the factory did not seem to know what to do with him. He was as unsure of his role, felt that he had been foisted on the factory by someone in an office somewhere else.
The older men in the factory resented and patronised him in equal parts. They resented him because he represented the threat of cheap labour. They patronised him because he was young and therefore ignorant of many of the ways of their world. Left forgotten in a shed he spent the whole of one afternoon pondering the apparent innocence of acid’s pale viscosity.
The only good thing to have come out of the job and the government training scheme, so far as he was concerned, was that he had been given free driving lessons and, the first time of taking it, he had passed his driving test. He wasn’t, though, paid enough to be able to buy or to run a car. He owned a yellow moped.
He was tall and skinny and seventeen years old. His name was Paul.
Her name was Julie. She was twenty one years old and worked in the ordnance factory’s canteen.
Julie worked to escape the inside of her flat and the company of her four year old son. She was small and compact, her dark hair clipped, her clothes pressed.
At work Paul wore a baggy blue boiler suit. Julie wore a green and white tabard.
ii)
In this prelude to the two days, in this history of histories, let us first tell of Julie’s.
Julie was divorced. Her ex-husband was a big man. He had been a big man when Julie had met him. She had been fifteen then. In those Bridgwater pubs to which he had taken her, everyone had seemed to respect, if not to fear him. His parents had long been divorced and he had had his own ‘flat’. She had conceived in the grubby single bed of that beer-smelling bedsit.
He had married her. Others, male, had expressed their surprise at his doing that. Julie hadn’t considered that he would or that he wouldn’t. As she hadn’t considered falling pregnant. It had happened. She had been young. The young are passive. Life happens to the young.
At sixteen she had been working as a shelf-filler and living at her mother’s. She had had no practise in controlling her own life, nor had she examined the world which had been controlling her. Without question she had accepted that, in her ‘condition’, she would go to the top of the council house waiting list. As she had also accepted the interest that she would have to pay on the credit that she would have to have to buy the furniture. She had not, however, accepted her husband’s idea of marriage.
As she had become more pregnant, and less able to go to the pub, she had been left alone with the unpaid-for furniture. And, as she had become less able to go to work, she had become more aware of their finances. Their outgoings had soon — with her diminishing wages and even before he went out for a drink — been more than their income. Julie had tried to talk to her husband.
What she had seen before as his attractive and manly taciturnity, she suddenly perceived as his being stupid and surly. What she had seen as his masterful domination of her, now became pure and simple bullying. What had been a flattering lust for her, now became but beered-up randiness.
But, she told herself, this was the world of adults. Her mother lived on this same council estate. This was where, all her life, she had heard women complaining of their husbands. Julie hadn’t wanted to be like them. But when, finally, her own husband did come home, all that he too had wanted was to screw. Even if he was incapable.
Her contempt for him had grown with his every unsatisfactory performance. So had she come to notice that the beer was swelling his belly at about the same rate as her pregnancy had been swelling hers. She had been sixteen. He had been twenty.
Julie’s belly had gone back to flat after she’d given birth. His hadn’t. And he’d been drunk elsewhere at the time.
He had hit her the first time during her pregnancy. And he’d been apologetic for days afterwards. He had even promised to sort out some of their debts. They had been behind with the electric as well by this time. He had worked overtime, had drunk less for a few nights, had gone out later, had come home earlier.
Before her bruises had faded, however, he had again been coming home only to eat and sleep; and she had been left with her worries and the television, unpaid for and unlicensed.
She had had to stay at home with the baby. The only time she had been able to talk to her husband sober had been when he had come home for dinner. His single response had been to tell her to stop nagging. Occasionally, and always grudgingly, he had given her a few extra pounds.
Such became the habit of their life together. If she refused him sex when he came home beered-up he had hit her. With contempt for herself for staying, consoling herself that this was the real world and not some glitzy soap, she had fatalistically accepted the thumps and bruises on her small frame, even the occasional swollen lip and black eye. As payment she had emptied his trouser pockets just as soon as he had been snoring. And, by way of remorse, of apology, he had never questioned this morning absence of change in his pockets. So had she kept the creditors at bay. So had they continued for a year and more — she and the baby inside the house, he out drinking.
By backwards logic she came to view the odd bruise and beery screw as the price she had to pay for peace of mind so far as the creditors were concerned. And, not wanting the world to know what had become of her, she had confided in no-one, had admitted to no-one her hurts. (Julie is one of three sisters, the three each having a different father: her mother having been passive too, so far as men were concerned.)
Then, one night, Julie’s two year old son had been awake with a fever when the father had come home wanting to screw. The child’s being awake, and the child’s condition demanding his mother’s exclusive attention, had infuriated the father. He had punched both wife and son.
Injury to herself Julie could accept: it was her own fault, she had allowed it to happen to her. Her little boy, however, had not asked to be born. She had taken herself and the boy screaming through the empty streets of night to her mother’s.
It took her groggy husband a half hour to realise what had happened. He had then pursued them. Julie had refused to let him in. Roaring he had banged on the door. Michael, the boy, had screamed. Child abuse had been in the news. Julie’s mother had called the police.
The police had taken the husband away. Julie had refused to return to the matrimonial home unless he was kept away from it. The police had been able to offer no such guarantee. She had stayed in her mother’s house. Her mother told her that she couldn’t live there indefinitely.
So had Julie and Michael entered the world of Social Services.
Julie, it has to be said, saw here the opportunity to be rid of the matrimonial home and its debts. So she became obdurate in her refusal to return to her own house. Every offer of reconciliation and promise of reform from her husband she rejected out of hand. She wanted her whole life divorced from him, to be disassociated entirely from him.
Her husband could not understand her unflinching refusals, came beer-fuddled to bang on her mother’s door. Julie called the police and had them remove him. She made sure that the Social Services knew of the every latest episode. They found her a flat on the other side of town; and she was left on Benefit, but otherwise in charge of her own finances.
At first it had been enough, on her own, to make an independent home for herself and Michael. But a toddler is no company and the Benefit didn’t stretch to much. Julie’s being a single parent, however, meant that Michael was now eligible for a State nursery place.
Solely to get out of the third floor flat, she looked for a job. The only job going, whose hours matched those of the nursery, was at Puriton. So that Julie could travel the four miles without relying on bus services or lifts, her mother leant her the money for a secondhand moped.
Julie’s canteen wages were deducted from her Benefit. So, although her income was officially only a few pounds more, and the expense of the moped accounted for that, she was still better off because she was able, like the other canteen women, to take home the odd left-overs and the cakes and pies past their sell-bys. She also ate her main meal in the canteen, as did Michael at nursery school, so she could go weeks sometimes without buying any major groceries. Within six months she had paid her mother back the loan for the moped.
Her ex-husband had inevitably discovered where she had moved and, occasionally, he came a’maudlin banging on her door. Only twice did she have to call the police. Other times a threat had been sufficient.
Most evenings, however, she still had to stay at home alone with Michael. Her mother refused to babysit, as did her two sisters, just in case her ex-husband came around. Nor did she have any female friends who would babysit. She had been at school when she had got pregnant. Thus had she abruptly left childish things behind. Those schoolfriends had been children with her. She had talked to no female friend of known adult life.
Such had been the state of her affairs when she had become aware of Paul.
iii)
Julie had noticed Paul on the other side of the canteen counter initially only as one of the younger faces. She had noticed too, but only because she had one, that he too came to work on a moped.
One afternoon her blue moped sputtered to a standstill. Cars went whooshing past her on the straight flat Bristol road. In the kerb were drifts of gravel and chippings. Beside the road was a long ditch and some spindly desolate trees.
She was stood there, looking around her, not knowing what next to do, when Paul stopped, climbed off his yellow moped and unplugged his head from a black helmet. He took three minutes to find the loose lead. He told her, blushing, that in his spare time he made and mended motorbikes. Julie passed no comment on his yellow moped. She had to collect Michael from the nursery and left quickly on her blue moped.
The next lunchtime in the canteen Paul blushed when Julie brightly said hello to him. The other trainees made hooting noises at him.
Julie had never seen herself as having power over another adult. (The responsibility she felt for Michael at times overawed her.) But, thereafter, she took pleasure in making Paul blush, in watching the blush start part way up his long white neck and spread out over his face. The other kitchen women took to nudging her when Paul came into the canteen. Similarly, when she was clearing tables on the other side of the counter, Paul’s workmates nudged him as she approached. Those times too he blushed. Thus, by their contemporaries, if only for their amusement, Paul and Julie were already viewed as a pair.
Paul and Julie’s only meetings outside the canteen took place on the road. Both finished at about the same time. Over the noise of their whining engines, through the padding of their helmets, the shouted conversations comprised mostly his asking if the moped was alright these days. She’d shout thank you. Paul did manage once, when they both happened to be getting on their mopeds at the same time, to convey to her that if her machine ever went wrong she should bring it to him and he would fix it for her.
He blushed those times too.
iv)
Susceptible to blushes he may have been; but Paul was no virgin. Because he then lived with his mother, however, and he didn’t want any girl to meet her, he had nowhere to take a girlfriend. And the possible girlfriends, who still also lived at home, were all getting a bit old now for the walk down by the canal or for ungainly fumbles on their parents’ sofas. Consequently, apart from the nudges of those he worked with, apart from her smallness among all those stout kitchen women, it was her having her own flat which most attracted Paul to Julie.
Paul’s, though, were the small bounded territories of youth. He did not know how to approach a woman — the word itself denoting her remote status — those colossal four years older than himself. From the factory gossip, which had told him of her flat, he also knew that she had been married, that she had a little boy, and that her husband used to beat her up. Such experiences were but stories to him.
Nights he lay awake fantasising about her, attributing to her all kinds of social and sexual sophistications. Until his mind could bear such fruitless conjecture no more. He had to make at least one attempt to have her; and, failing — as he knew he must — thereafter put her beyond his reach and out of his mind.
Pretending he had a fault with his moped he waited for her in the carpark. He was trembling when she came. Luckily alone.
“Hello,” he said. Neither had yet used the other’s name, “Fancy coming for a drink tonight?”
“Sorry. I can’t,” she said.
Paul accepted that as a total rejection of himself as suitor. And stood there in his boilersuit, beside his yellow moped, he tried to accept her rebuff with a throwaway insouciance.
Julie felt sorry for him. Tall, white and skinny he may have been, but he was the only one his age in the factory who hadn’t been making fist-fucking gestures behind her back.
“I have a little boy,” she explained, “I can’t get a babysitter.”
“Oh,” Paul said, realising that her refusal was not absolute, but not knowing where to go from there.
Telling Paul of Michael, Julie conjured up a vision of her evening — alone again indoors.
“Tell you what,” she said brightly, “seeing as you fixed my bike that time, (a token excuse to give her invitation some respectability), why don’t you come round for a meal?”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Shall I,” he’d heard this line before, “bring some wine?”
“If you like. But food’s all you’re getting.”
Food was all that he did get. He expertly uncorked the wine, grunting without farting; but neither of them drank much. Which realisation let Julie relax. And in his own clothes Paul looked more of a piece, not the white stringy being trying to escape the blue boiler suit.
All they had to talk about, though, was the people at the factory. And where they had both been brought up and gone to school. And they talked of television, comparing likes and dislikes. He noticed that she didn’t have a video. He said he knew where he could get one cheap for her. At half ten he left.
The next day Julie didn’t serve him in the canteen, was busy out the back. Paul, though, couldn’t let what had just begun end there. He realised, however, that she had no other excuse to invite him to her flat. So that evening he arrived at her door with a video recorder. Michael was still awake.
“I can’t afford it,” Julie blushed. Frightened of debts and of those things she couldn’t there and then pay for, Julie was out of step with the credit times.
“It’s a spare one,” Paul mirrored her blush. (The video recorder was his mother’s. His mother, though, didn’t know how to use it; and he had too much surplus energy to sit before a video for two hours.) “You can borrow it till I need it back.” He dumped it, trailing wires, on top of her telly.
“Thank you,” she said, “Like a coffee?”
While the coffee cooled Paul talked to four year old Michael. This visit, with the excited and exuberant Michael to fill the gaps, Paul and Julie’s conversation was less noticeably strained. When Michael’s bedtime could no longer be postponed, Paul left, pleased with himself.
Julie was waiting for him by the mopeds the next afternoon.
“I can’t get the video to work,” she worriedly told him, “I can’t make out where all the wires go.”
“I’ll come round later,” he indicated that his boilersuit stank, that he wanted to change.
He got there just as Michael was being put to bed. Michael insisted on kissing Paul goodnight as well as his mother. This embarrassed both Paul and Julie — it betokened an unconfirmed intimacy. Paul hurriedly set up the video. But he had to wait while Julie read to Michael. Then Julie wanted to be shown how to work the video. This entailed recording bits of programmes and playing them back. After that she made him coffee. It was gone eleven by the time he left.
The next day he again missed her in the canteen. Then came the weekend. All that he usually did of a weekend was insufficient. Added to which, most of his usual crowd seemed to be away that weekend. He mooched around the town, mooched around his mother’s flat, tinkered with a motorbike that he’d been renovating the last six months, and mooched off up town again. That evening he found himself in the back of a car heading for Taunton. But the three others in the car were looking for trouble more than a good time. They found it. He ducked away, ended up walking back from Taunton. He got home at four in the morning. And he didn’t mind because it had filled the hours.
He slept late Sunday. Still he awoke thinking of her. Except that now it was as a real person, not some factory fantasy conjured out of his frustrations. And he wanted to be with her, the real person. But he had no further pretext. She was that much older than him, didn’t frequent the same streets nor know the same people. Nor did he want, by some inept advance, to make a complete fool of himself, to have her and the canteen women all laughing at him. He rode his moped up into the hills; and, looking down on the town, all that he saw was her block of flats, its tiers of brown and white concrete panels, and he ached wondering what she could be doing.
Monday lunchtime she was again out the back of the canteen. Monday evening he began walking towards her flats, reached the canal bridge, abruptly turned and walked home again.
Tuesday lunchtime she served him. Neither smiled. From the inside his face seemed an immovable mask. Her pale face too was rigid and expressionless. He couldn’t eat the sandwich he had bought.
Only late at work that afternoon did the realisation come to him that, if her expression had been the same as his, then maybe so too were her feelings. Heart hammering he waited by the mopeds.
“Can I come round this evening?”
“Make it eight. Michael should be asleep by then.”
v)
Julie too had missed him. Her weekends were usually busy. On Saturday there was the shopping to be done, then the housework and the ironing. And on Sunday she and Michael usually went over her mother’s. But this weekend her mother’s new man had been there grumbling and opening beer cans. So Julie had taken Michael to the park. Michael this Sunday, though, had tired of the swings before she had, and she had been back in the flat sooner than she had wanted; and with nothing to do. Only then had she realised that her weekends were busy only because she had made them so. And she had made them so only to hide her loneliness from herself.
She had looked forward to seeing Paul on Monday, had been ready to flirt with him; and, as repayment for his blushes, she had intended inviting him round for another meal — a thank you for the video — had decided to try cooking a curry, had even looked up the recipes. But the manageress had picked her, that Monday lunchtime, to go out back and prepare the teas; so the moment had passed. And it was a job Julie usually preferred to being on the counter; back there she could chat easily to the other women, did not have to fend off the banter and bellyaching of the men at the counter.
That Monday Julie had waited by the mopeds when it came time to go home. But Paul’s yellow moped had still been there when she had had to leave to collect Michael. The depth of her disappointment at not seeing Paul that day had surprised her.
“He’s only a kid,” she had told herself that evening, “A boy still.” He had been eleven when she had been fifteen and falling pregnant
Monday night her ex-husband had come a’banging on her door. There had followed the usual shouting match through the thin piece of wood. With the threat of the police being called, with Julie’s frightened neighbours shouting at him, he had left. She had stayed awake most of that night.
On Tuesday she saw Paul not blushing, saw an echo in his blanched features of the tension that was making her feel sick; and she wondered, again with surprise, if she had found someone in this big ungainly boy like herself. When he asked if he could come round, and her telling him when, they seemed to be just the words clothing decisions made lifetimes before.
vi)
So it was, with the trepidation of all new lovers, of those about to step into another’s life, to take on a new status, to alter themselves, that they met in her small square living room. And for all her years of marriage, for all his canalside tumblings, they were both inexperienced lovers. After the first shocking touch of one another, they groped and slavered on her sofa for an hour or more before making it into the small square bedroom.
New lovers are always intimate strangers, know so little of this person they take naked to their bed. So it has to be. So it was, due to their inexperience and delay, that their first coitus was over too soon and was therefore unsatisfactory to both. What they lacked in expertise, however, they both made up for in energy.
Paul didn’t stay the whole of that night, nor the next. Thursday night, bothered by their age difference, Julie accused herself of cradle snatching. Atop her Paul told her that he was man enough; and she smiled happily at his boast.
All her romantic storybook notions of love had been destroyed by her husband. Coming to Paul she had told herself that she knew what to expect of a man. And, not wanting to be disappointed, she had expected him to turn out ultimately like her husband. For the moment, she had told herself, all she needed of Paul was his company and sex was the price she had to pay not to be lonely. But Paul was not at all like her husband, was gentle and considerate in his lovemaking, and she found herself enjoying it as she had not considered she was capable of such pleasure taking.
Not until Saturday did Paul stay until morning, and then it was because her ex-husband had come again banging on the door and had this time refused to be put off by threats of police.
By repute the man beyond the door was one of Bridgwater’s more fearsome brawlers. Paul, though, knew that his future self-esteem left him no choice. So he dressed himself, opened the door, punched her ex-husband on the nose, kicked him in the stomach as he went down; and he breathlessly told him that if he ever came round here again he’d get more. Pushing Julie back inside, he closed the door.
Julie stared up at him.
“My oh my,” she smiled, “You are man enough.” She hugged him around the waist. “You alright? You’re shaking.”
“Desperation measures,” he told her, “I was scared shitless.”
Covering their sniggering, lest the man retching beyond the door should hear and it add to his humiliation, they slid together to the floor.
Paul moved in on the Monday evening.
vii)
Paul played rough and tumble with Michael. But he did not ask for Michael to call him ‘father’. Nor did Paul bring any stern or sentimental notions of fatherhood to the flat. If Michael wasn’t doing as his mother told him then it was because he wasn’t doing as his mother told him: Paul, being young, accepted everything at its face value.
Although Paul told Julie of his punk phase, and showed her a photo of himself with an orange cockade; although he told her of his motorbike phase, and showed her the white scar on the bridge of his nose where he’d crashed; and, although he told her of his smoothy phase, told her of the girls he’d pulled, Julie knew that those phases had lasted but a few weeks at the very most and that she was his experience. And, realising this, not wanting to cheat him of the moment, feeling that he ought anyway to know, Julie told him of her ex-husband’s beer-smelling brutality and of his sexual inadequacies — apparent to her only now through her experiences with Paul.
At the factory they told no-one of their new domestic arrangements. Apart from the tea and coffee transactions in the canteen, the only words Paul and Julie exchanged inside work were when they were alone by their mopeds.
Eventually, however, those who cared about such things found out. So Paul rose in a few of the younger men’s estimation. So did a few of the canteen women wonder about Julie’s taste.
Julie shrugged off their whispers with the confidence that comes from happiness; because, never in her 21 years, had she been so consistently happy. Paul went out alone only to his mother’s. The rest of the time he was near Julie, within touching distance, to be talked to, or teased. She had never felt so young in her life, not even when she had been young. Then uncertainty of herself had marred her pleasure in the moment. Now she, Paul and Michael went rolling in a tickling ball of limbs around the flat. And, when Michael was asleep, she flung wide her legs and gripped Paul in the wet maw of her love.
Paul, for his part, lost his inhibiting reverence for her being older, forgot his gratitude for this endless supply of sex; and, growing bold in his lovemaking, he, one memorable night, picked her up and played her like a guitar, fretting her nipples and strumming her pubes.
Wrapped around and in him, soothed and excited by him, surprised by her own capacity to take and to give love, Julie felt loved as she had not imagined love could exist. And that love, the lengthy twilit sensualities and experiments apart, came about through such small gestures, such small considerations — a cup of tea in her Saturday morning bed, an apology for an imagined hurt… a single word can last a long time in any love affair… and not only did Paul have little in common with her ex-husband, Julie realised, he was also unlike those others on the factory job scheme, unlike even those male others in Bridgwater.
Words he sometimes used, quiet attitudes… he looked the same, dressed like them, but with intimacy there was so much about him that she found to be different. Nor did her certain knowledge of the future, that — given his age their love couldn’t last — detract from the wholeness of their present love, where to love gave as much pleasure as being loved.
The whole of her life had never been better. Their combined wages lifted her from the floor of subsistence — they were able to treat one another to little luxuries — items of clothing mostly, a toy for Michael, or an adult video for them to puzzle over and to later giggling emulate. And Julie had the freedom, conferred by company, to take walks where before she would have felt conspicuous or afraid with just her and Michael. But with Paul to talk to, an arm to hold, a face to smile at, her self-consciousness and fears were forgotten.
Not that Julie wholly believed in Paul’s skinny powers of protection. Because her ex-husband had again come a’banging on her door. Not wanting Paul damaged in a brawl she had light-heartedly told the mumbling oaf outside to go away or she’d set her lover on him again. Paul had laughed aloud at her choice of words; and that laughter had been more successful in sending the husband away than ever had been her or the neighbours’ threats to call the police.
Julie had nightmares in which Paul changed into her husband and kicked her in the stomach. She had nightmares in which Paul sneered at her nakedness and punched Michael in the face. Julie knew that the affair must end, had foreseen from the start the time when Paul would tire of staying in with her, would want to get out and be with people his own age. The end of the affair, though, or that episode of it, came about not as she had imagined or feared.
viii)
Out at Puriton there was rumour of the factory being privatised. The workers feared that privatisation would do away with their nationally negotiated wages. The managers, however, earnestly believed in the imminence and, therefore, the desirability of private ownership. They envisaged higher salaries and improved career prospects for themselves; aside from which the privatisation seemed politically inevitable and their careers would not benefit were they seen to be obstructive. So, to make the factory a desirable prospect for privatisation, they decided to present a streamlined operation. To achieve this ‘streamlining’ they resolved to do away with several of the factory’s accepted practises.
One accepted practise was for the casings workshop to save all the brass filings and sell the accumulated brass to a scrap merchant. As Paul was surplus to working requirements it had become Paul’s job to take the week’s collection into town in the firm’s van. The four men, including Paul, got on average about a fiver each for that bag of brass filings.
When the memo came telling all factory hands that such perks would cease forthwith, there was much grumbling in the casings workshop. Paul didn’t pay much heed: the three older men had many such arcane and downhearted discussions. From one such discussion, they unanimously decided, and heatedly informed the foreman, that the brass filings had become theirs by established right. So, as usual, the bag was filled and Paul was sent off in the van to town. He ran many such errands. This day, beyond the factory’s wire fence perimeter, the police were waiting.
The two policemen stopped the van and questioned Paul about the van’s ownership and contents. They asked Paul where he was going and what he was going to do when he got there. Also in the van was a hydraulic jack being taken for repair, some parcels for posting, and he had to collect some printed stationery. When the two policemen’s attention became fixed on the oily bag, Paul belatedly realised their intent and said no more. They told him that he was being silly; but they appeared to feel more sorry for him than angry at him.
They took him to the police station. The bag of filings was dumped on desk after desk. A statement was written out for him to sign. It said, more or less, what he had already told them.
All the policemen were polite and friendly. At half past four they released him on bail.
Paul arrived at the flat to find Julie in tears. He smiled at her. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He couldn’t understand why she was so upset, intimated that she shouldn’t cry in front of Michael, that they’d talk about it later. But he didn’t. There was too little to say. It was all too preposterous. It was all too ordinary. He could not believe that the police, or his bosses, could be serious.
Even when, the next morning, the two security men wouldn’t let him through the gates; and a suited manager wheeled his moped over and told him that his official notice of dismissal would be sent to him through the post, he still could not believe that they meant it. Even though he mounted his moped and, not knowing what else to do, went to the Job Centre, where they told him that his Benefit would be stopped because he had technically — by his ‘alleged misdemeanour’ — made himself unemployed, he still did not wholly believe that this was happening to him. This was not the world that he had known when he had left for work yesterday morning. His life had dramatically changed, and that change had all been achieved so politely and so without passion that it did not seem possible.
The management had not set out to deliberately trap someone on one of the schemes for the jobless. But, having so caught Paul in the act, they had to go ahead and charge him. And, having once done so, the realisation came happily upon them that charging a Job Centre trainee might actually work in their favour. The union made noises; but Paul wasn’t one of their paid-up members so they weren’t dutybound to represent him. And Paul’s stubborn loyalty to his workmates, his refusal to name the other three so obviously involved in the ‘theft’ of the filings, made both management and unions feel safe. Paul was not going to muddy their waters.
Nor were the men whom Paul was protecting going to make trouble. They were sorry he’d been caught, but they were not sorry enough to put their own jobs in jeopardy. As another of the older workers said,
“If it had to be someone, better someone who won’t lose their redundancy.” In the management’s streamlining process, job cuts were also threatened.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7974
Once Were Windows Once Were Doors
Chapter One : by way of an introduction
External windows in the City were few, are few, and are used almost exclusively by the maintenance crew. For the rest of us those windows were/are as good as opaque, their necessary thickness requiring the eye to adjust to their distortions. Add to that the cumulative microscopic damage to the windows’ exteriors and consequently most citizens only looked out from the City via their screens, had to trust that what they were seeing was an accurate representation of the universe beyond.
My use of the word ‘trust’ this early is deliberate. The whole of this project, side issues and outcomes, seems to have involved and revolved about trust. Trust in what I have been told, trust in what I think I have seen, trust in the motivation behind my having been given this project, and trust in my own decision-making capabilities that had me choose this particular project.
I was offered one of three. Would either of the other two have taken me this far? So far beyond any HCD project? Because what may have begun as a project has grown way beyond pleasing tutors and examining boards, has grown into this which requires its own explanation – to why it should have so grown.
Or had that been the intention? I’m still not sure? Nor do I have any idea now who, beyond Occam Snr XVII and his daughter, are going to read this. Or if anyone other than Occam Jnr will.
Will this paper too be shut away lest it cause upset to those who claim to keep us safe?
Or was the purpose of this entire project but yet another exercise in self-education? And was never intended to be ‘of public interest’?
Should however this tale in its muddled entirety surface to light – say at some time in another future, somewhere else, somewhen else – I will endeavour to explain to you my unknowable successors, to you fellow seeker after truth, everything that befell me, what I thought I discovered, even – and this will probably prove the most difficult – what I took for granted, what was then everyday obvious to me.
[Conscious that I am writing this for both Citizens and Earthlings, I make apologies in advance for my occasional confusion with whereabouts points of view and here-and-there tenses.]
Chapter Two
That scholastic year the historograph syllabus had three HCD courses on offer. Not, I hasten to add, in the manner listed below. They were couched in the high-flown and long-winded terminology beloved of academia. I have perhaps unfairly over-simplified, but what the three courses – according to the historograph syllabus bumf – boiled down to was that each encompassed four events, and expected us to compare and contrast.
- Relate the slaughter in Rwanda, destruction of the Afghan buddhas, and atrocity at My Lai to the theft of the Elgin Marbles
- Relate the mechanised slaughter of Jews and Romanians in Treblinka, the melting of the polar ice caps to the carpet bombing of medieval Dresden and the 1960 police shootings in Sharpeville.
- Relate the destruction of Jerusalem and the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki to the lost library of Alexandria and the locked library of the North.
Previous historograph HCD students had been offered famines in Bangladesh, Russia, China, Sweden and Ireland, along with pandemics in the Americas and West Africa. Not exactly the most uplifting of subjects, and which may have accounted for the rash of suicides among students those years. And which could be why the examining boards lightened my year (at least in topics A) and C) with their inclusion of non-fatal subjects). Of the three courses B), being unremittingly downbeat, was the least selected.
Years before that had different options, irreconcilable pairs, but all Earth-related, and which I can’t recall now. Nor do I wish to. Being but a study of eventualities the researches required were then as now designed to promote first the habit of investigation, while the grouping of disparate subjects was ‘to discourage straight-line thinking, encourage comparison not causality.’
The historical and geographical range of the 4 subjects under consideration was intended, or so I was led to believe then, to inculcate a mind-set that didn’t simply extend the present into the past. The intention was that students acquired the habit of looking for discontinuity, for the quantum state, for possibly peripheral butterfly effects; and which habit of so looking would theoretically be of benefit when they did eventually enter their professional lives.
While the knowledge gained of Earth’s history would again render students grateful for their peaceful and largely uneventful City lives.
Of my own year’s enrolment I only know what my tutor told me of my fellow students’ choices.
Of those like me taking C) I have encountered only one in the course of my terrestrial research. All others who opted for C) apparently remained in the City to complete their research.
Of those taking A) only one mildly interested me, her thesis being entirely attempted in musical notations. The first performance of the work was still in rehearsal when I left the City.
My HCD tutor was Occam Snr XVII, and my relationship with him turned out to be far from a straightforward mentor-pupil relationship.
For instance I had not long begun the course when Occam Snr XVII (he insists on the full title) made a sexual approach to me. My being several years above the legal age of consent I wasn’t shocked – rumour had already led me to expect such a proposal – and I politely declined.
We would probably thereafter have proceeded in a purely academic manner had I not begun an on-off dalliance with his youngest daughter, Occam Jnr XX. Even that might not have led to acrimony had I not tried to once-and-for-all end the affair, leading to Occam Jnr (she doesn’t insist on the numerals) becoming so upset that she bothered her otherwise distant father with her unhappiness.
Chapter Three : windows and screens
Every tale, like Earth’s blue rivers, has many small beginnings. For instance, because I’m sure it has some bearing, another aspect that needs clarifying is my earlier mention of windows.
Now windows exist to make our habitable rooms feel less enclosed, feel open in some way, escapable. We need something to look out through, beyond. A mirror can offer another dimension, or just by multiplying the light can seemingly increase the space. A framed painting, a screen even, can act as an aperture, can offer something beyond the room. But it is only windows that can effectively counteract claustrophobia.
So of course there are windows in the City. And all those windows look inwards, back into the City. The windows of my various rooms looked mostly onto street scenes. Other windows have more pleasurable aspects, look onto parks or leafy boulevards. But all look back into the City.
The parks and boulevards have overhead windows that allow sunlight to be refracted through – necessary for plant growth. For us to have looked out through those windows however, even though refracted, would have had us sun-blinded in an instant.
When we wanted to see what was outside the City we used a screen, trusted it to accurately replicate what its optic was pointed at. In the year before I left the City I had my screen fixed on Earth’s globe – smudges of green and brown among the swirls of white and blue – and centred on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, even more specifically, at maximum magnification, on the pale brown disc that had once been Jerusalem.
Pale disc visible from space, crater that isn’t a crater, shadow replica of my own circular City… It was an image to ponder, even on a screen; evidence that I was already attracted to the inexplicable.
What our screens showed us of the City itself, petty news of City worthies, celebs and sports events aside, were – for contemplative purposes – more views of parks and wooded ways, even of the lush veeps [Vegetable Production Systems], in order to demonstrate to our occasionally dissatisfied City selves how very fortunate we were to be living in such a clean and self-sustaining environment.
Chapter Four
For any relationship to progress beyond the initial flesh-touching intimacy the pair involved have to enter a state of emotional equilibrium, their need for one another about equal.
My emotional need for Occam Jnr very soon became obviously less than Occam Jnr’s need for me. I would often rather be off visiting friends of my own rather than remain alone with her, than take her with me.
At the time, youth’s arrogance, I wasn’t conscious of this imbalance. Or, if I was, it was on the level of my simply accepting Occam Jnr’s steadfastness.
Be assured that I did like Occam Jnr. She was easygoing, smiled at my witticisms, was not in the least pompous or self-aggrandizing. Indeed she had more or less all the polar opposite attitudes to Occam Snr XVIII.
She was however, and probably due to her having been raised by magniloquent Occam Snr XVIII, full of uncertainty. Uncertain of her own talents, her own physical attractiveness, an uncertainty which I guessed even back then had her attach herself to my unexceptional self.
So uncertain of herself and of our relationship was Occam Jnr that she was unable to hide her disappointment whenever I claimed to be otherwise occupied. Seeing her disappointment then had me feeling guilty for abandoning her and, so as not to again feel guilty, had me avoiding her for longer.
If this has me sounding callous and possibly cruel I can honestly attest that it wasn’t intentional. It is simply with hindsight a dispassionate view of our then unequal relationship.
I only recognised that inequality for what it was when I too fell prey to a love not returned.
I use the word ‘love’ guardedly. As everyone should.
What is love but a state of mind, almost a fever, an illness, an incompleteness that can only be made better, made whole by one other? What is love but a hunger that can only be sated by that one other, affection become an obsession?
The sufferer, the afflicted, will only realise that he/she is obsessed when made aware that that affection, that need, that emotional hunger is in no way reciprocated.
From this distance in time and space I try to recall what precisely it was about Alvina that had me quite so besotted.
Alvina was kind to me, told me that she cared for me, came to pity me – I think – but no matter what Alvina might have felt for me she valued her sexual freedom even more. Indeed it was only her pursuit of sexual experience that had had her end up in my bed.
Alvina led. All suggestions came from her. A conspiratorial, speculative smile, a giggle: “Shall we try…?”
I was a very willing accomplice.
Alvina was so different to Occam Jnr. Not so much better looking. Both were early twenties, curvaceous. And Occam Jnr was pert and pretty, large eyes a tad on the sad and soulful side, but a body bold enough in its youthfulness, had all the visual triggers necessary to have men old and young glance to her passing, her bobbed black hair bouncing to her every step.
But she wasn’t Alvina.
My puzzlement as to why I should be obsessed with one and not the other had me studying other men’s casual attraction to Occam Jnr. Why couldn’t I be content with what they could only desire? Could it have been that where Jnr was a receptacle – passive, reactive, wanting to please – Alvina gave pleasure by taking selfish pleasure in her own body, occasionally inviting me to share in that pleasure.
It was when that invitation was, with increasing frequency, withdrawn that my troubles started.
What I couldn’t then understand, on an emotional level, was why other men, sometimes women, were being preferred to me. Why I was being overlooked. I hadn’t changed. I was the same person that Alvina had first gladly taken to bed.
Imbalance in relationships. A knowing imbalance. A mess of mine own making. And I couldn’t help myself, knew what I was doing, was painfully aware how ridiculous was my obsession, and yet still I persisted, haunted cafes and bars where I suspected Alvina might be, even roads, alleys and connecting lanes.
I even back then had the temerity to call my trailing about after her my caring for her. ‘Residual care’ I told my mirror. I had somehow to explain to my distraught self the singlemindedness of my then existence that I, her stalker, couldn’t get out of the habit of caring for her, craving her.
See me a small anxious man looking to windows, turning on his bar stool to the door opening. The door opening again. And Alvina entering, a young woman so bold, so confident, so sure of herself that she followed her voice into rooms. And if unaccompanied [not likely], if at a loose end, then she might acknowledge my presence, might use me as her evening’s entertainment/consort/tool.
Much as I, when unable to find or be found by Alvina, might make use of Occam Jnr. And see in the mirror of Jnr’s eyes what, abandoned, bereft, I myself had just been. In this role-reversal I became the giver-out-of-favours and Jnr the too grateful supplicant. And dressing us both in my self-loathing I carried that over into what romantic novels had once been wont to call our ‘love-making’. That we all three had orgasms was by-the-by, insofar as relationships went it was unsatisfactory for all parties concerned.
Chapter Five
Inward-looking I couldn’t see beyond my obsession, my self-loathing. I hated how I was acting towards Occam Jnr, hated myself for being in thrall to Alvina, hated Alvina for the casual use she made of me, and I despised Occam Jnr for letting me make similar use of her.
The City I saw as an extension of my own inward-lookingness. Albeit that the City’s wasn’t with the same self-loathing. The very opposite. The City took pride in its inward views of its own parks, of its leafy avenues and boulevards. Premium rates were paid for those windows that looked out to the strange growths that circled the City’s weightless centre.
As a student I lived in the cheap heavies. The view I had was of windows like mine on the opposite side of the lane. That view broken only by the occasional pedestrian, bus or sweeper passing through.
According to City culture I was supposed to aspire to the lighter rooms and a greener view. I would certainly have liked a greener view, but only if such a view would have allowed me to remain in the heavies. By the soles of my feet I felt more connected to my surroundings, safer in the heavies.
I hated going to those hospital clinics in the centre, had to go there regularly for tests when young, hated that weightless grabbing onto things. Especially when it was my mother who I panic-grabbed onto, upsetting her oh-so-precise assemblage, today’s fashionable outfit for surgical-clinic-visiting.
Spoiled her pleasure my panic did. All the kudos that should have been reflected onto her from her otherwise wimp-child being considered bright enough to benefit from carotid implants. My non-too-bright panic had come about via my childish believing that the implants would remain in my carotid and make my neck as wide as my head.
“Don’t be so wet,” my mother had impatiently dismissed my tears when I had attempted to tell of my fears. She had made no attempt to explain, the reason being that she probably hadn’t known herself.
The implants were of course micronated, had to travel from my neck to their allotted creases in my grey matter, and the tiny pair had both been just about visible to my child’s naked eye.
“Fuss about nothing,” my mother bestowed her expecting-adult-sympathy smile on the floating about technician, who patiently and at length explained to my mother – in her tailored one-piece – that many selected children, despite their being exceptionally bright, reacted thus: “Emotional blocking doesn’t let them take in the details of what they’re being told.”
Had no effect on her. On our way home, when I blubbed my relief, she covertly shook me by the scruff. Which probably went some way towards reinforcing my adult aversion to weightlessness.
Because even as an adult, if on an errand I had to go near the centre, and I have been assured more than once that it is a purely psychosomatic reaction, but mine has been such an overpowering sense of unease that I have had to force myself forwards. Fortunately my college wasn’t of the floating prestige kind, but a few outer streets from my room.
When, early on in our almost relationship, Alvina had persuaded me to a centre hotel for weightless sex, for her sake I had forced myself to go. I hadn’t been able to help however transmitting my unease.
My performance had obviously been a disappointment because Alvina never suggested a repeated visit. With me at least. In my obsessive pursuit of her I did once see her returning, replete with companion, from the centre; and I turned my shamed eyes to the closest wall.
Love hurts. That’s what I told myself that night. Love is cruel, love is unjust, not fair. Love is unhealthy.
I developed an ulcer to the side of my shin bone that wouldn’t heal.
Chapter Six
I loathed my weak self for being infatuated with Alvina. A simple single-minded sensualist Alvina had no business disrupting my complex thinking processes. But it wasn’t until my self-loathing found corporeal expression in my ulcerated leg that our relationship, our occasional and one-sided relationship, came to a definite end.
I didn’t have a broken heart I had broken skin, a leg ulcer that would not heal. An ulcer moreover, on the outer side of my right shin, that unambiguously stank.
Which was also what had me not wanting to impose this irresolute and stinking creature, myself, onto consentient Occam Jnr.
I have no memory of what caused the original wound, assume that I must have walked into a piece of furniture, a low table or a bed corner. I only became of the wound’s not healing; and then, as the broken skin continued not to heal, aware of the disgusting stench rising from the ulcer’s yellow and black edges.
Pus seeped yellow through the gauze dressings that I first used. The soaked dressings stuck to my tunic trousers, had them stinking too. Got so I couldn’t bear being shut in a room with the musty odour of myself, let alone sharing my body’s intimacy and the same closed air with any other set of nostrils.
The local clinic gave me tablets – no antibiotics – can’t pollute the water supply. Albeit my stink was being recirculated through the air-con.
The clinic’s self-heal tablets didn’t work. A patronising nurse peeled ‘the very latest’ transparent shield over the ulcer.
The pus bubbled up and crept out the sides of the shield. So the clinic took cultures, tried a skin graft.
The skin graft failed. More than failed, made matters worse (‘matter’ an unfortunate, almost pun), the area of the infection having been extended.
When the graft came away with the dressing, and I went back to the clinic I was told off for ‘picking at the nasty sore.’ I hadn’t. Later, another visit, because it still wasn’t healing ‘despite our very best efforts’ I was accused of deliberate self-harm
That ‘sore’ was by this time the breadth of my shin and spreading. And so deep that I thought I could see flecks of shin bone.
Fed up with the clinic blaming me I bought a supply of gauze pads to soak up the excess and taped plastic bin-bags around my lower leg.
Still there were leakages. Still there clung about me the stench of corruption.
I returned to the clinic where, for wont of anything in the way of treatment, I was given strong painkillers. Which rendered me passive to the point where I couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed for two whole days, just lied there listening to the various squeaks and whistles in my nose as it sorted through the varieties of stink I was producing.
Giving up on the painkillers, and not to be enclosed in a room, even and especially on my own, I shuffled about the City’s streets. Seeing anyone I vaguely knew I either turned about and went limping in the opposite direction or I dodged up the closest alley, the quickened pace making me aware of the liquid weight flopping about my shin.
Having been more interested in artefacts and history than in living people I had no City social circle as such, had already been in the habit of avoiding the company of my fellow students, all of them too busy at being clever to notice my absence. One day, into night, for the whole 24 hours, longer probably, stopping for rests on boulevard benches, moving on just as soon as anyone sat within smelling distance of me, I walked the entire circumference of the City. A small accomplishment. Solved nothing. The reek of corruption still clung to me.
Such was my state of affairs when Occam Snr XVII summoned me for an interview.
Chapter Seven
You know that you’re in serious trouble when pompous people – that is those who customarily dismiss you as a tolerated irrelevance within their higher considerations – adopt a face full of concern.
Even with Occam Snr XVII’s usual affectations put aside – the sniff, the lowered eyelids and weighty lift of the jowls – and in their stead a tilted forward head and widened eyes pointed compassionately at me – it didn’t mean that he was being any the less false.
I was asked about the state of my project, and as quickly about the state of my health.
An habituated sniff had him reach into his tunic for a tissue which, after a perfunctory wipe, he kept under his nostrils. Perfumed was my guess, and held under his nostrils much as a Regency dandy would have employed a nosegay of violets to mask the stench of open sewers. Or, in my case, to overcome the sweet gangrenous stench of my leg.
My suspicion at first was that it wasn’t my health per se that was of interest to this newly-concerned Occam Snr XVII. My health, lack of, I assumed was but a part of the case he had been tasked with building against undesirable me.
I have never found myself in favour with authority. I guessed that his political masters had told oh-so-sophisticated Occam Snr XVII to see to my removal from the City.
His strategy, it very quickly became clear, owned two strands, both rotating about ‘health’. My physical state, and his daughter’s fixation upon, her unhealthy relationship with me.
He had brought her into it straightaway: “Occam Jnr [he for once omitted her number] has told me about your leg, the difficulties you’re having with the project…” And, after another meaningful look / lengthy pause, he supposed that it was all proving too much for me.
At first I wasn’t sure, because of a series of sniffs, that he thought my intellectual capabilities weren’t up to the project, then – even more disconcertingly – that he might be implying that physically I wasn’t up to the relationship with his daughter.
What I did have no doubt of was that Occam Jnr hadn’t, and certainly wouldn’t have in those terms, confided in her father regards my ailment or my [then non-existent] difficulties with the project. Because, truth be told, at that point in my, largely perfunctory, research I hadn’t given the project that much thought, had plenty of time – I had assumed – in which to come up with a unique approach.
On the other hand, knowing how Occam Jnr despised aspects of her father, she might have said, when pushed, and then offhandedly, that yes I did have an unhealing hurt on my leg and/or that I was ‘stuck’ on my project.
I could believe her concern for me. Not his.
Having gone to the interview in the belief that the only topic under discussion would be aspects of my project I had started to tell of the difficulties my research had thus far encountered, particularly on the destruction of Jerusalem but even more on the ‘Locked Library of the North’.
“Material abounds for the bombing of Nagasaki and for the library at Alexandria. Speculation only on Alexandria of course. But there are several historical references, corroborated, and acres of previous papers I can access. For Jerusalem however, and even more for the locked library of the North, limited speculation only. And very often wild speculation at that.”
Occam Snr XVII pursed his lips as if giving serious tutor consideration to my words. He even appeared to enter a reminder on his pad. Then he said, “You are aware that, for certain individuals, and no-one has yet come up with a definitive cause – trace elements? – this City can prove to be the most unhealthy of environments?”
What sprang unbidden to my mind was the clinic’s patronising nurse saying, “You sure this isn’t self-harm?” Having somehow earned her disapproval – my failure to be cured? – had she filled in her forms, ticked all the boxes asked of her, and had she dumped me and my unwelcome smell in Occam Snr XVII’s unwelcoming lap?
If grounds of health was how the City authorities proposed to be rid of me I was in serious trouble.
I had heard of persistent afflictions such as my leg described as an allergic response to the City environment, speculation as to whether it could be psychosomatic (verging on the hysterical, let’s blame the afflicted), or an actual physical reaction to what the body perceives to be a contaminant, the City
Either way for those sorry individuals who may have found themselves so burdened, City leaders have on offer three routes to ‘the regaining of health and well-being.’
Having been now labelled, if not yet explicitly, as undesirable I knew what was coming – Moon, Mars, or Earth. And Mars and the moon I most certainly did not want.
No-one came back alive from Mars. Indeed to even infer a curative environment there was to blithely ignore the fatality statistics. So let us not mislead by calling the early deaths on Mars ‘limited life expectancy.’ Death expectancy more like.
Had anyone ever come back alive from Mars? Very few stayed alive on Mars. Indeed many are the ongoing debates on Mars itself about the realistic sustainability of a Mars colony. Debates unfinished too on the ethics of whether we should even attempt to colonise any other planet after what our species has wreaked upon Earth.
Or – a further thought that day as I looked across at the unwholesome jowly visage of Occam Snr XVII – were the fatalities only so high on Mars because it was mostly the already sick who got sent there? How ill was I?
A recent scandal of substandard construction on Mars had seen one split canopy having breathable atmosphere fizzing out, occupants going gasping to their deaths.
Added into such considerations was that any length of stay on the moon or Mars, both with dissimilar gravities, would result in a disabling and permanent exile. The City’s ersatz gravities were supposed to approximate that of Earth. Being sent to Earth would render feasible therefore an eventual return to the City. Even should my return not be desired by Occam Snr XVII.
No records have been kept of annual Earth fatalities. Because too many?
“I’ve had a look at your medical records,” Occam Snr XVII pressed on with his task. None of the treatments on offer here in the City seem to have had the desired effect.”
City-born we are bred to be academically proficient, hyper-intelligent even, genes manipulated to that end. But therein lie risks to the individual. Not just unforeseen consequences to physical health, such as my unhealed leg wound, but psychological and emotional side-effects too. Alvina endeavouring to make herself whole with one coupling after another, while a core uncertainty had Occam Jnr attach herself magnet-like to me.
Occam Snr XVII was saying, “Medical authorities have offered the suspicion,” the unsympathetic nurse, “that only a change of environment might prove efficacious. Unfortunately all that the City has to offer you are Mars or Earth.”
No tiny and enclosed moon village for a smelly wretch like me. But I supposed, there and then consoling myself, that I should have been grateful no-one had suggested sending an otherwise sexually robust boy like me to an effete moon colony. The moment following I was angry that I wasn’t also being offered the City, another maybe greener area of the City if change was all that was being prescribed. I subdued the anger however because I could see that, although Occam Snr XVII wanted shot of troublesome me, some vestige of humanity had him leading me to opt for Earth, and he was using my project to direct me there.
Within my considerations was that if I continued with my project I would be City-funded and not simply exiled to Earth but assigned a place and a valid position. I knew of two minor malcontents who had been permanently exiled, of their mails back telling of being stuck in ‘…a dungeon of an office,’ and of ‘…living alongside the stink of four-footed beasts,’ ‘…of the same stupefied faces day after day, month after month…’
Creation of the City had provided an escape from Earth’s poisonous atmosphere. Although Earth had by now largely healed itself Earth and its many free-floating microbes could still prove fatal to me. Or so we had been taught. Albeit City children were also being told, still, and high-level projects designed to reinforce, how very dangerous humankind had made its birth planet. Lessons to be learnt, and re-learnt. A 4th year project: ‘Compare famines, political and administrative causes and consequences of – Bangladesh vis-à-vis Chinese, Irish vis-à-vis Swedish.’
Lessons learnt and re-learnt, City education in a byte. One unquestioning examplar sitting across the desk from me.
Occam Snr XVII was one of those who believed that his education had ended with the letters after his name, his long name. Satisfied with his station in life he had become a form-filling functionary. Contempt for him emanated from my side of the desk, met with his disdain for the misfit this side.
His pro-forma delivery of this tutor-to-wayward-student lecture had now reached the stage where he was telling me of the dire effects should I opt to stay in the City, in my case there was a good chance surgeons could decide they had no option but to remove my infected leg. What Occan Snr XVII wasn’t saying, my cynicism noted, was that my leg could suffer an identical outcome on Earth.
That observation had gone unmade. By me. It was the first, her expression outraged, that Occam Jnr made. The second was that she would come with me to Earth, would support me should I lose my leg there.
Was it a kind of love I had for Occam Jnr? She for me? Or just sympathy? Me for her? Pity for her parentage certainly; but mostly what I then saw in her sorry devotion to me was a twisted reflection of my own unfulfilled infatuation with Alvina.
Viewed objectively Occam Jnr was a good woman, selfless in her ‘love’ for me. Knowing of my meeting with her father she had been waiting outside my door for me. I didn’t want however, unlike my own non-relationship with Alvina, to be the cause of Jnr’s unhappiness. Refusing to let her accompany me might of course make her initially unhappy. I wouldn’t though be putting her health at risk. And faced with her entreaties that is what I told myself, that my refusal had nothing to do with my implicit promise to her father. Because when I had finally agreed to pursue my research on Earth Occam Snr XVII had said, “Alone?”
“Alone,” I had responded.
Chapter Eight
As with all other ninety percentile children in the City I have two internal dialectical devices. I named mine, with little originality, Ana and Nuri. In the weeks waiting for my travel permits and student credits this argumentative pair were my only company.
Occam Jnr had not returned after the on-off tearful two days and nights during which I had established that I would not be allowing her to accompany me to Earth. I was lonely, but relieved, had no wish to further inflict my misery on her. Nor my stink. I was applying dressings to my leg three times, sometimes more, a day.
“Misery?” said Ana. “You miserable self-pitying wretch. Think how Occam Junior XX’s feeling.”
Let us place here a footnote unfooted.
Ana is short for Analogue Ego and her purpose is to be antagonistic, argumentative, forcing me to come up with alternative reasons, strategies for whatever happened to be inhibiting my way forward. Hence her provocative drawling of Occam Jnr’s full name.
Nuri on the other hand, Neural Interface, is supposedly collaborative, sympathetic and supportive, and she called Jnr Jnr. Nuri, in short, sought the same ends but by a different methodology.
Ana was triggered by the high blood pressure of stressful situations, Nuri by the facial masking of deepening misery. And while I much preferred my conversations with sympathetic Nuri I would rather not have had the emotional states that led to them.
While in the City I took Ana and Nuri’s presence for granted. All degree students had them. Only on Earth did I occasionally have to explain Ana and Nuri’s input, who they were and to whom I was responding. Consequently on Earth I learnt very early on not to voice aloud my half of our conversations.
In the City so taken for granted were Ana and Nuri, the pet names I’d childishly given them, so little were they out of the ordinary, that they almost didn’t bear mention. Worthy of mention were the names a fellow student gave his. He was precociously sex-obsessed and, when I knew him, as promiscuous as Alvina. I can’t recall exactly his academic discipline – a humanity? – I only know that where mine were both female his began by being based on the traditional name for a man’s second brain, his penis, and therefore received the name ‘Second’. His Neural Interface thus became ‘Third’. Which pair he shortened to Sec and Turd. Glad I didn’t have to explain that on Earth.
But I was still in the City; and one wakeful night Nuri exasperated said, “It’s the necrosis affecting your thinking processes. Your self-disgust part of a feedback. Your necrosis stinks. You avoid company. In the absence of social stimulation all that you think you can smell is your necrosis. Stop hiding yourself from people. Take yourself out.”
“This time of night? Who’ll be around?”
“No-one. Probably. But what you won’t be is alone in a room with your own mental stink.”
Reluctantly doing as Nuri bid I dragged my poorly leg about the nearby arcs and circles of our City…
And of course my night roaming was a reminder of when I had stalked many of those same streets and boulevards in search of Alvina. I was simultaneously aware of my body fighting the wound’s infection, the bloodpump thumping through my every artery and thickening my own second brain, which again put Alvina into my thoughts.
No escape, not from myself.
I stopped walking, put palms to the sides of my head and rocking it mentally shouted Out! Out! Out!
“It’s just cathexis,” Nuri told me when I had shuffled on. “Simple cathexis, the sexual energy one individual invests in another.”
Its having a name was of no comfort.
One night I did go consciously searching for Alvina. But this time to angrily tell her that I was leaving the City, see her reaction. “Oh?” probably. Because I didn’t find her, imagined her closeted some place with a new victim, someone who might also briefly see themselves as privileged.
That one whimsical excursion aside I no longer went actively seeking Alvina. I still might, in my nocturnal wanderings, have held occasional fantasies of accidental encounters. None happened.
“Call Jnr,” Ana said. “Get set for a marathon jiggy-jig. Get it out your system.”
“Can’t use Jnr like that. Give her hope. All that I want is Alvina out my head.”
“Pathetic,” Ana said. “Stop being such a milksop…”
“The past,” Nuri overrode her, “is as important as the future. Both must be protected.”
The latter was a college quote. I ignored it. For me the past, mine own, was a mindfield.
“You rejected her,” Nuri persisted, “out of fear. You didn’t want her to be confined with you in the shuttle pod.”
“True,” I confessed. “An admission however,” I continued my response aloud, “ that doesn’t alter the fact that I still don’t want to inflict my stink upon her, have her become disgusted with me.”
Truth really be told I hadn’t expected Jnr to quite so thoroughly absent herself. Not when, gripping my hair and spitting the words into my face, she had sworn that she would follow me to Earth. Ends of.
In our last two days and nights – during a quieter, reflective moment – Jnr had also told me what her father had said, when informing her that I had opted for Earth. Occam Snr XVII said of me, “Thought he’d play safe. Presumably you, my timid daughter, come into that category too. Safe.”
Relistening to that snippet I became convinced for an hour or more that Jnr had supported my request, might even have manouvered me into asking to go Earthside. To be, as much as she might have enjoyed our on-off micro-dramas, shot of me?
“I share nothing with him [her father],” Jnr had fiercely informed me when I had hinted at collusion, “but a name. And that name was at the request of his mother, my grandmother. She too is a wanting woman.”
Unusually for quiet Jnr an acerbic reference there to Alvina. Which, on further reflection, had me again suspecting (my thinking was circular) that just by her absence Jnr may have had a hand in my banishment.
Revolving thoughts that I carried with me on another mini-circuit of my City segment.
‘Safe’ rankled.
I didn’t believe that I was being only safe in opting for Earth rather than for Mars or the moon. It wasn’t wholly my decision. I had a desire certainly to escape my own behaviour, the prison of my impulses; but at the same time my being sent away felt injust, that I was being mistreated by the City, by its people, its institutions.
My hatred of the place grew with my every day of waiting.
‘This much-vaunted City in space,’ I mentally addressed the City beyond my bedroom walls, ‘but where we citizens seek mostly to hide our corridor existence from ourselves. Our City but a collection of pipes in space, fake gravity of our revolutions, false seasons of our rotation. Dangerous for us to dwell on it, so let us add another pipe, let us see if we can’t grow what was once circular into a ball. But wait! Won’t becoming a ball affect our equilibrium?’
Public and personal, all City talk, every municipal concern, rotated about the worry of upsets to our equilibrium.
This City had once been Earth’s exciting future, humanity’s surviving grace. This City was a revolutionary concept. Thing with a revolution though is that it goes around in circles ending up time and again in the same place, rendering us victims of our own ersatz gravity.
I was leaving, and was determinedly glad to be leaving.
I was about to leave my circular existence of the City though – an adrenalin trickle of unease – for the barren circle that had once been Jerusalem.
I called my mother, but as much by way of experiment than in expectation of sympathy.
My mother had agreed to have a child solely, she had told me the child, in order to quieten an unbecoming hormonal surge. Thereafter the whatfors and wheretofores of her municipal career, Department of Ethical Applications with the after-hours social life but a busy extension of her working days, occupied both her time and her thoughts more than I.
I told her that I was leaving for Earth.
“Call me when you’re back,” she said. We had little to do with one another: she didn’t know about my leg.
To not dwell on mine own disquiet I sought instead, for mine own benefit, to expose the many passing illusions of ‘safe’ City order, demonstrate how easily each certainty could be undone, equilibrium unbalanced. I jaywalked, ambled along cycle tracks, stood facing the wrong way on travelators…
“Pathetic,” Ana said.
I agreed. No-one noticed. I could have been more outrageous, have defied laws rather than accepted conventions, but I was truly a coward, was still playing safe.
Those were the moments, the ridiculous events and non-events that showed me that I was no hero.
‘Safe’: my thoughts returned to Occam Snr XVII.
“So he is to be the guilty party?” Ana’s every utterance was, is designed to be, a challenge.
“He’s certainly not innocent,” I said into the static silence of my room. “Because no matter where they are, or when they are, the psychodynamics of institutions remains the same. Authority is accrued, status built, prestige perpetuated. Merit, worth, doesn’t figure.”
Sober I tend to overthink. So to negate the self, shut up the voices, put a halt to the self-quarrels I took pop, sought refuge in the singularity of narcosis.
Singularity still necessitated bravura expeditions in search of more pop, meant leaving the sanctuary of my room and limping among the turning away nostrils.
And after so long alone it was strange to open my mouth to actually speak, listen to myself uttering the words necessary to the transaction. Those few words leaving my mouth and moving through the tainted air were still an improvement on the half conversations that had been taking place inside my head, each one of which assumed half knowledge [after all Ana and Nuri can only know what I know] and which ‘conversations’ were bound to reinforce my every misconception, misconceived state of being.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1140355
As Recorded
As Recorded by Sam Smith
‘The paths of error are various and infinite.’ Edward Gibbon
Thursday 11th March 1983
“The neurologist said that it was probably all down to boxing. I don’t see the point of this.”
“For research. The collection of evidence.”
“To prove what?”
“About you in particular? Nothing. You’re not the only subject. But, from all the evidence, we might be able to find common trends, patterns. About ourselves..? We’re funded by a body known as the PTT. It is they who are paying for your stay here. You are comfortable here?”
“And this is the price?”
“No. These sessions are voluntary. Your refusal, if you do refuse, will be accepted, your reasons and reactions noted. And that will be that.”
“I still don’t see the point.”
“The gathering of knowledge. Without knowledge we act on faith, prescribe on prejudice. The first step to wisdom is admitting one’s ignorance. We know nothing about you.”
“What more d’you need to know?”
“For the purpose of this research – everything. Half would be worse than nothing. You are comfortable here?”
“Yes.”
“Have you anywhere else to go?”
“No.”
“Anything else to do?”
“No.”
“Then – why not? Help pass the time. All I’m asking is for you to tell me about yourself. In your own words. I promise not to probe. Nor to provoke. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t trust you.”
“See how it goes?”
“If you say so.”
“Cigarette?”
“No thanks.”
“Did you do much boxing?”
“Done a bit.”
“Amateur or professional?”
“Amateur.”
“Never thought of turning professional?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t want my brains scrambled. Besides, I started too late.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Most boxers start as schoolboys. If they’re any good they work themselves up to Olympic standard. Then, when they’ve got as far as they can go as amateurs, they turn pro. I was nearly seventeen by the time I had my first fight.”
“You win?”
“Yes.”
“How many fights did you have altogether?”
“Fifteen… sixteen. Twenty. Can’t remember. I boxed for the Navy team.”
“You were in the Navy?”
“That’s where I started.”
“How did you start? By that I mean how did you come to first step into the ring?”
“I had a pub fight with another rating at Combined Training. In North Devon. When I finished there I was sent to gunnery school at Wembury. Just outside Plymouth. A couple of the ratings from North Devon went to Plymouth with me. They must’ve talked about my pub fight. A boxer at Wembury asked if I fancied having a go in the ring. I didn’t have much money, nothing else to do in the evenings.”
“And you won your first fight?”
“Yes.”
“What weight did you box?”
“Welter.”
“Ever lose any fights?”
“One. On points.”
“In Plymouth?”
“No, Whitby.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Courtesy call. They had space on a boxing programme, thought it’d be a good idea to invite someone from the ship. I was the only boxer on board. Trouble was I was out in the North Sea when I was told I’d be fighting. Nowhere to train properly. No-one to spar with. My third fight. He turned out to be a southpaw. Never been in a ring with one before. Even sparring. Took me a round to figure out how to hit him. And he had the longer reach, was just inside the upper welter limit. I was just inside the lower.”
“Southpaw?”
“Left-handed. Unorthodox. Leads with the right instead of the left. You can end up banging gloves together mid-air instead of hitting one another.”
“But you did hit him?”
“Cracked one of his ribs. I ducked under his right, and, as I went round the back of him, I banged him under his arm with my right.”
“But you still lost?”
“He was getting more home than I was.”
“Ever fight another southpaw?”
“In Portsmouth. Couple of years later.”
“You beat him?”
“I only lost that one fight.”
“So you never got knocked out?”
“No prompting eh? You don’t have to get knocked out to have your brains scrambled. That fight with the first southpaw? – I never took one big punch. Just jabs. Next morning my eyes were ringed with blue – as if I’d been wearing eyeshadow. And as far as I could remember I hadn’t taken one direct punch to the eye. You ever boxed?”
“No.”
“Well let me explain. Suppose I was to reach across this table now and slap you hard across the face. It would physically stun you.. You’d feel your brain rock about inside your head. I don’t say you’d see stars, but there’d be a red explosion of shock. And you’d remember that one slap. But if we were to have a game, say, stand toe to toe over there and try to slap one another, and the one who got the most slaps home won, then you’d be so busy trying to slap me that you’d hardly notice the slaps I gave you. My hands would just be an obstacle to be overcome. An irritant. Unless I got so on top of you, and you became so defensive, then maybe you’d give up, but only because the match had become unequal. And not because of the slaps you’d received, but because of the slaps you couldn’t give. And the next day your face and arms would be sore, and you’d be surprised at the places you’d been hit that you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ve played rugby.”
“There you are then. And that’s not to say that I didn’t take some big punches without going down. I did.”
“To the head?”
“I had this other fight in Whitby. Later on. He was a short well-muscled bloke. I easily outpunched him, was walking it on points. My corner told me not to mix it. If I remember rightly he’d lost half his fights on points, had won half on knockouts. But I got bored. He stood square on, was a doddle to hit. I decided to open up. From nowhere he caught me a right cross.
“Ever seen any boxers knocked out? Next time have a look at their faces. All you’ll see there is surprise. Because that one punch didn’t hurt any more than the others they’d taken. Why should that one punch have that effect? And when they get off the deck they’re indignant that they’re not being allowed to box on. They don’t feel hurt.
“Now that punch didn’t knock me out, but I felt the shook waves travel down my backbone, sink into my legs, and land like lead weights in my boots. All the sounds went far away. And it was as if I left my body and watched myself. I sort of stood to one side and told myself what to do. Jab, pull back, jab, stand off, jab. Like a kid with a remote control toy. And back in my corner I told myself what to say, when to nod, when to shake my head, when to stand up and box again. Then, suddenly, it all fitted back into place. And I coasted home. But it frightened me. And do you know what? No-one else noticed that he’d hit me that hard.”
“Ever get hit like that again?”
“In Portsmouth. A lucky punch. Same reaction – telling myself to box my way out of it.”
“You ever knock anyone out?”
“First fight. Only he didn’t go down. Ropes kept him up. Ref stopped it at the end of the second.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Frustrating. You want to go on hitting them. As if they’ve cheated you.”
“Knock out anyone else?”
“A couple of Cassius Clays. One was a squady. Though the only thing he had in common with Cassius was that he was black, and he thought he didn’t need a guard. I knocked him down every round, last round he was counted out.”
“Where was that?”
“Southampton. Navy team. The other one was a Yank in Malta. Intership match. That went four rounds. Being white didn’t stop him thinking he was Cassius. Big showman. I played safe, outboxed him. He got so narked because he couldn’t get near me, laid a hundred dollars down for me to go another round. He was stupid. I opened up, fairground stuff, and banged him out.
“Don’t, though, get the idea that the point of boxing is to knock the other man out. It’s usually a mismatch if that happens. Boxing is an art. Most good fights are tactics and strategy. I really enjoyed the close fights I had, all the while trying to outwit each other. Trying this, trying that, see what happens if… Finding an opening in his defence, trying it again.
“Like with that first southpaw. He reckoned afterwards that if the fight had gone on any longer – if it’d been professional – I’d have eventually beaten him. He couldn’t find a defence for that right into his ribs. And I’ve had fights where I’ve won the first two rounds on points, and in the third he’s found a way through; and if that fight had gone on any longer I would’ve lost. That’s why I didn’t turn pro.
“Most boxers know how good they are. You can’t fool yourself. Not for long. Someone will soon deliver your cumuppance. And so the only reason you turn pro is if you know you’ re good enough to become champion. Or if you weigh up the pros and cons, decide that you’re competent enough to make some money at it.”
“You decided you weren’t?”
“Oh I was. But there were easier ways of making money. And I’d met enough old boxers to see what they ended up like. Slurrers and sluggards, we called them.”
“You don’t slur.”
“I’ve got other symptoms. I can’t drink anymore. A couple of pints now and I’m as pissed as a fart. And stupidly aggressive. And it’s not being unaccustomed to drinking. I tried to build up tolerance, had a couple glasses of wine every evening. But even they made me woozy.”
“Could be other reasons.”
“Could be. But I have to wear glasses now. The optician said my sight probably deteriorated because of blows to my head. And he didn’t know I’d boxed.”
“Probably.”
“You bastards always play safe. Probably. We’re all guinea pigs to you. It’s probably a virus – try these pills.”
“We, you said, called them slurrers and sluggards.”
“Derek and Dan, my brothers-in-law. They fixed me up with my second fight in Whitby. After I got married. They both boxed. Had both been schoolboy champions. Their father was Jimmy Willis. Lightweight champion. Heard of him?”
“No.”
“And he thought he was legend.”
“Those recent stitches in your head – was that a fight?”
“Accident.”
“Were you knocked out?”
“Flesh wound. Neurologist said no connection.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Accident accident.”
“Derek and Dan boxed?”
“Derek was heavyweight. Their mother was big. And Dan was welter, went up to middle. It was his rib I cracked.”
“They turn professional?”
“Packed it in before I did.”
“Did your wife approve of your boxing?”
“Was furious when I gave up.”
“You’re divorced now?”
“Yes.”
“Any children?”
“Three. Two boys and a girl.”
“Ever see them?”
“No.”
“Miss them?”
“What d’you think?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Right. I think we’ve gone as far as we’re going to go today.”
Monday 14th March 1983.
“Tell me about your father.”
“A bit obvious? But if that’s what you want. For all the good it’ll do you.
“My father was blind. He was a pilot in the war. A Hurricane. Shot down any number of German planes – Dorniers, Heinkels, even Messerschmitts. Then he crashed on landing. His plane caught fire. He was blinded.
“And not just blinded: he was pretty badly smashed up. Might have been better if they’d left him for dead. Apart from the plastic surgery, he spent over a year having other operations. All in all it left him a little crazy. He used to have what my mother called ‘turns’. And he talked to himself all the time.
“He wasn’t like most blind people, didn’t acquire an acute sense of hearing. In thinking aloud to himself he had to shout over his thoughts. He was a bit frightening until you got to know him.
“All his skin was like stretched red rubber – the kind of stuff they used to make aprons out of. Plastic surgery had built his nose back a bit, but it was still like two black holes in the middle of his face. And he had no eyebrows, just two red empty orbs. And no lips. And his hair was like straw. Actually it looked like a toupee, but it wasn’t. Looked like that because the skin had been burnt off up to his helmet. And his hands were like two red lobster claws. If I was sitting near him as a child he used to grip hold of my leg and shout at me. Not angry. Just shouting.
“He really should have been in an institution. But my mother had married him against her family’s wishes. He was a Londoner. The same week he had crashed both his parents and his young sister had been killed in a bombing raid. Small wonder he was crazy. And he was my mother’s responsibility.
“At first, when I was little, he just seemed to be crazy. He used to scream in the night, and I’d hear my mother settling him down. And he used to take me to this chapel in Winner Street. You had to go up steps to it. Bit like an outpost to a fort. And he wasn’t the only crazy there. One fat man, looked like a farmer, broken veins all over his face, used to say he’d eaten his children. All in slow Devonshire vowels. And he was more puzzled that he should have done such a thing than repentant. And another one – I can see what she was now- a straggly frustrated old spinster, had thick glasses. She said she’d been attacked by the priapic devil. I used to imagine this gorilla with horns somewhere on the loose in Paignton.
“It was a bit like a negro spiritualist revival. A paler version. And the voices weren’t so mellow. All shouting at once. Then my father would bang his white stick on the floorboards. They would all go quiet, and he’d shout, “I seen God! I seen God! He is Light! He is all Light!” And I hadn’t started school then, wasn’t even five years old.
“As I got older I could see that his turns followed a pattern. First the screaming dreams, then he’d start going to chapel. Then I would come home from school and there would be the doctor in the kitchen washing his pink hands and telling my mother not to worry. Ever noticed how doctors always have plump pink hands?
“My father would be alright then for weeks, months, wouldn’t go near the chapel. I remember one turn he had though. It was after I realised that he was some sort of war hero, someone to be proud of and not ashamed of. And I used to find out about him to answer my friends’ questions. They all assumed that every British pilot had been a Spitfire pilot. So I had to tell them about Hurricanes, what planes he’d shot down.
“One day I asked him while he was having a turn. Only I hadn’t realised. To get him talking I asked him what it was like flying. “Up there it’s all blue. Blue! Light! Floating! Free!” And sticking out his arms like a kid playing planes he went crashing round the living room.
“But he wasn’t always like that. He had a quirky sense of humour.
“When I was little we used to go down to Broadsands. There’s a wide winding road of concrete slabs goes down to it – under a viaduct. Huge tall arches. As we were walking under it a steam train went over the top. “Look boy,” he said, “A steam pilot.”
“And as I grew up he stuck up for me. “Boys’ll be boys May.” “It’s his age.” I remember once I went shooting rats in a barn. The farmer gave us an egg for every rat we shot. When I got home, really proud of my dozen and a half eggs, he said, “Silly boy. You’re supposed to shoot the birds not the eggs.”
“Tellies first came out when I was a boy. My mother wouldn’t buy one. She told me that I was selfish for wanting one when my father couldn’t watch it. But all my friends would be indoors watching their tellies and I’d have no-one to play with. And next day in school I wouldn’t know what they were talking about.
“So I was mooning about the house one evening, making a nuisance of myself, and he asked me where all my friends were. I said watching telly. “Get the boy a telly May!” he shouted. She said that we couldn’t afford it. He said that if everyone else had got them then they couldn’t be that expensive, and of course we could afford it.
“Actually he enjoyed the telly more than I did. I used to give him a running commentary. Remember Mr Pastry? Try giving a running commentary to that. This has fallen over, that’s slipped, there’s a man hanging from the light… I wouldn’t be able to talk for laughing, and he’d be laughing at me laughing. The two of us rolling over each other on the sofa.
“We watched war films together. “There’s a Hurricane!” I shouted one day. “I can hear it boy,” he said, “Do you know? I can smell it too.” But what he liked most was Westerns. Which was alright by me because I’d be allowed to stay up late so I could give him a commentary. My mother was no good at it. A drygulcher to her was a desert ditch cleaner. We got on well. My friends, once they got used to him, liked him.
“I’ll tell you of when he first met my friend Newt. “Who are you?” my father shouted at him. “Tom Newson!” Newt shouted back. “That’s what I like,” my father shouted, “a good strong name in a strong clear voice. Peter mumbles. Tom Newson eh?” “That’s right Mr Oldway,” Newt shouted, “Are you deaf?” “No!” my father shouted, “Are you?” “No,” Newt shouted. “Pleased to hear it,” my father shouted.
“He designed a trolley for me and Blue, another friend. It was the only trolley that had the brake lever between our legs, braked both back wheels at the same time. All the rest had the brake on one back wheel. Put it on hard when you were going fast and it turned the trolley over. And he designed a kite for me. And when Pancho’s rabbits had a litter he was the only grown up who didn’t say drown them. Pancho, Blue and I helped him build the hutches. He started breeding rabbits after that. Made himself some pocket money.
“He was the one who helped me with my homework. Maths and the sciences especially. He was interested in them. I used to buy him science magazines, read to him about transistors – all new then. He was explaining Einstein’s theories to me when I was fourteen. And the first astronauts – that really got him. “Imagine that boy. No up, no down. The world out there like a blue moon…”
“He was the only one I felt safe with during my puberty. I had a bad puberty. Plump and spotty. Blushing all the time. He couldn’t see me so didn’t feel he had to make a joke about it. I used to take him fishing with me. And it’s funny – I might’ve been embarrassed then by everything else, but I wasn’t by him. I suppose it was because this big red rubber doll shouting at the top of his voice made everyone embarrassed who looked his way. And I was used to him, stole a march on them.
“And I stole off him. You need money when you’re fourteen, fifteen. My mother got a job in a chemists. He had to pay the Saturday morning bills. So I did it for him, pocketed some of the change. And he stole out of the change too, used to slip me five bob. He used to tell my mother he’d bought hay or food for the rabbits.
“I wanted to go in the Air Force, but he asked me not to. Said he couldn’t bear to think of me crashing. So I went in the Navy. He died before I finished my training. I came home for the funeral.
“He’d had one of his turns. My mother hadn’t noticed the signs. She was at work all day and they’d had separate rooms by this time. She’d written to tell me that he was going to the chapel to sing ‘For Those In Peril…’ I’d written back telling him to wait until I got to sea. I was busy. She was busy. Chapel hadn’t seemed significant. And at the funeral were three of them from the chapel. The lame skinny preacher and a couple of the women.
“The preacher said a few words – that my father must have known where he was bound, for, in his last moments, he had returned to God and he had made his peace. My father, in his calmer moments, had been an agnostic. He was a scientific man.
“At the crematorium – his second burning – the lame preacher buttonholed my mother out by the car. He told her what a good man my father had been at heart, how – come the end – he had defied those forces trying to keep him from his God. And more – insinuating that my mother had stopped him going to chapel.
“It was the only time I saw my mother close to cracking. I told the preacher to stuff it, gave him a shove in the chest. But still he went on about understanding our distress at losing a loved one, turning his other cheek… So I gave him another shove, told him to hop it. “Go on. Hop it!” I said. And he limped away. My mother and I looked at each other horrified. And we were driven back to Paignton looking out of opposite windows, both of us trying desperately not to laugh. Unseemly, you know.
“Before I went back to Training my mother told me not to feel too bad about my father. She reckoned that without me he would have died long before. Me being around, growing up, had given him an interest in life. Then, just as I was about to leave for the train, she pushed a brown envelope into my kit bag. Some things, she said, that my father would have wanted me to have. I didn’t have a chance to open it until I was on the train.
“In it was his DSM. First I’d known of it. And there were some photographs of him. My mother had previously told me that she had burnt all the old photos of him after his crash. Hadn’t wanted to be reminded of her handsome swashbuckler in blue, she had said. Most of the photographs were of him in RAF uniform.
“And I didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to him. He had a long thin face, blond hair. My face is square, hair’s black. My mother’s face is round, and she’s got brown hair. She doesn’t dye it. I don’t take after her. He wasn’t my father.”
“What did he die of?”
“Heart attack, the doctor said. Brought on by fear. He told me about his screaming dreams once. When we were fishing. A bright sunny day. Calm sea. He said that not one of his dreams was about the actual crash. It was the fears he’d had on other flights. All the near misses that he’d had coming in to land. Before he did crash. The plane from nowhere suddenly on his tail. Watching a friend’s plane go spinning to the ground. Some pilot hanging helplessly in the sky on parachute strings. What’d he say? – like a toddler swinging on his reins. With cannon shell everywhere. There but for the grace of God went him. And his imagination did the rest.”
“You’re positive he wasn’t your father?”
“Why else keep the photographs secret? And it’s easy enough to work out. I was conceived a year or more after he crashed. When I first found out about sex, the thought of my mother doing it with that screaming red rubber dummy sickened me. But, of course, he couldn’t do it.
“While he’d been in hospital, expected to die, she had been with another man, had conceived me. Then, when he recovered, in his confusion she convinced him that I was his. Whether he knew the truth or not, he accepted it. And she’d already been cut off by her family for marrying him, she’d been ditched by the man who’d got her in the family way. The big red rubber dummy was all that she had.”
“What was your reaction?”
“I thought it was all one big joke. Pick the bones out of that.”
Thursday 17th March 1983.
“If I asked you to picture your mother, what one image would first come to your mind?”
“One image? She never smiled. I suppose she must have. I can remember coming home on leave, having a lie-in, and listening to her and Helen downstairs. Not laughing, but being cheerful. But I can’t remember her ever smiling. Not that she was miserable. Or frowned. She just kept a completely straight face. Expressionless. Stared right at people. Unnerved them. To me she’s always been an enigma. A Mona Lisa who didn’t smile.
“You couldn’t talk to her. You couldn’t ask her how she felt. Or what she thought. She’d tell you what she thought you needed to know, and no more. I still don’t know whether she even liked me or not. She used to tell me off for being naughty, make me do my homework, but she was never interested in me as my father was. No, she’s an enigma.”
“You never talked about your father with her?”
“About him not being my father? I tried once, after Helen left me. I was looking for sympathy I suppose. All she said was, “Water under the bridge.” And when I first told her that Helen had left, all she asked was, “What about the children?” I said they were Helen’s. She seemed satisfied with that.
“I’ll tell you how well I knew my mother: I never realised how posh she spoke until the day of my wedding. And I also realised that day that I’d never seen her mixing with other people before. And her accent wasn’t remarkable only because everyone else’s was Yorkshire. I had to listen to make sure she wasn’t putting the voice on for the occasion. But Jimmy had been plying her with brandies, and she was a little unsteady, slurring a little. But no lapses into the vernacular: that accent was all her own.
“She surprised me there in another way. One Uncle didn’t realise that Helen was pregnant and that’s why we were getting married. He thought it was a bit quick because I had to get back to my ship. But someone let slip about Helen’s delicate condition, and after that he couldn’t take his eyes off Helen’s stomach. Which was flat as a dab – she wasn’t even three months.
“Jimmy got shirty, asked the Uncle if he wanted to take his bloody toaster back. “No,” the Uncle said, “Just never crossed my mind.” And my mother patted the Uncle on the shoulder, said, “That’s to your credit.” Yet a couple of years before she’d gone hammer and tongs for me because Newt had bought some durex from her chemists. She had thought I was having sex too. I was only fifteen, so I suppose her anger was understandable.
“Her family had had money. Her sister used to call round every so often – a real jaw cracker – tell my mother to have my father committed to an institution, sell the house, and she and the child – she never used my name – could move in with them. A couple of times after she’d been round I’d hear my father crying, and saying, “Bless you May. Bless you.”
“And there was Mort’s mother. Mort was another friend. His mother had been to the same private school as my mother. She reckoned that they had both married men who had crashed. Mort’s father was a bankrupt. That puzzled me as a boy – that a bankrupt could have a big car and a posher house than the rest of us. Now I know that it was all front.”
“Mort’s mother?”
“She was a snob. My mother didn’t like her. But there’s another enigma – Mort. He looked the typical brainy child – preoccupied air, thick glasses. And he’d know everything, say, about fireworks, football teams, comics, sex positions, train numbers. But when it actually came to learning in school he couldn’t pass one exam. And his mother and father put great store by exams, gave him private tuition in the holidays. He ended up a hippy and an authority on drugs. Though like everything else he wasn’t really very good at it. Now there’s a more fitting subject for your research – a poser with no style.”
“Surely you must have reached an understanding with your mother about your father?”
“That she knew that I knew? Yes, of course. But no-one in our family was going to start throwing moral accusations around. At my wedding, where I had to get married, my father’s name cropped up.
“I’d been home on leave before that. My mother had been doing up the house to take in visitors. I’d helped. We hadn’t mentioned him. She’d sold all his rabbits. But at the wedding someone said – Helen’s mother I think – “Sorry to hear about your husband. Peter told us he was blinded in the war.” And in the talk that followed, Jimmy going on about being in the commandos, I put in that my father had been given the DSM. My mother looked to me – to know about the DSM I also had to know about the photos. And she saw that I hadn’t disowned him, nor her, that I knew. And that was that.
“Funny, when I was a child, like all children I used to fantasise that I’d been secretly adopted and that one day my real parents would come to claim me. I couldn’t be the real child of the two monsters who were my parents. Then, when I did find out that he wasn’t my real father, I wasn’t interested at all in finding the man responsible for my existence. From my own character traits, I used to speculate on what kind of man he might have been. But I had no desire to meet him.”
“How did your mother get on with Helen?”
“Fine. They lived together all the time I was in the Navy. So far as I know they never had one argument. I don’t think that my mother approved of Helen walking around the house with no clothes on, but she just used to smack her bare bum, tell her to get some clothes on before she caught her death. She helped Helen with the children, didn’t interfere. If anything, I was the odd one out in the house. Actually I think Helen wandering around naked gave my mother a bit of a kick.”
“Were your children fond of her?”
“Fond? I don’t think that entered into it. She was a fixture in their lives. She used to babysit when Helen and I went out. And, after we moved to Torquay, Helen used to invite her around on Sundays. But she never came of her own accord. They were children to her, not necessarily her grandchildren, and she treated them as children. When Helen left, so far as I know, she never kept in touch with them.
“It cut both ways. While she lived with them they took her for granted. When we moved to Torquay, and she had her own place, Duncan at first used to forget that she wasn’t living with us anymore, say things like, “I’ll go and ask Gran.” And he’d realise that she wasn’t there, laugh at himself. Fond? No.”
“Was she ever proud of you?”
“No. Not even when I was really doing well. But then, you see, money wouldn’t impress her. Her family had had money. I think my boxing surprised her: she hadn’t expected that of me. Especially my being good at it. But then parents are always surprised by their children’s accomplishments. I could never get over how well Jason swam. I didn’t learn until I was ten: he was like a fish at five. Yes, she was proud of me – when I shoved that preacher aside at the funeral. Maybe she was just grateful. Or reappraisal. The day that I grew up in her eyes.”
“Was she concerned about you?”
“Of course she was concerned about me. She saw it as her job to take care of me. Clothes, food – I was always well looked after. And she made sure, as best she could, that I had the bikes, and airguns, fishing rods and things that my friends had. Childhood’s furniture. And she taught me manners. Please and thank you. I’m grateful to her for that.
“My mother did what she thought she was supposed to do. And no more. This will sum up my mother. When I started going around my friends’ houses I saw how dingy our house was. All chocolate brown woodwork and dirty pink wallpaper. Some of my friends’ houses were very posh. I wanted to paint our house. “I’m not starting keeping up with the Joneses,” she said.”
“No resentments against your mother?”
“Of course. What family doesn’t? For instance, when I was a teenager and I needed money, I suggested that we take in visitors like everyone else in Paignton, said that I’d help her. She wouldn’t hear of it. Then, after my father died, first way of making money that she came up with was taking in visitors. One of the reasons for Helen moving in with her was a way of stopping her.
“Are you sure you’re interested in all this?”
“It’s not what I expected. Although I told myself that I had no preconceptions.”
“Is it of any use?”
“Most definitely. Every last detail.”
“In that case… There’s no other way you’ll get a clear picture of my mother. And what does it matter now? It would come out in the long run anyway. Always does. When I was little I peed my pants. My nickname was Sniff. And that name seems to have ruled a large part of my life.”
“It still embarrasses you?”
“Not the fact that I peed myself. I’ve done far worse than that since. No, it’s the name Sniff. I’ve been trying to lose it ever since I got it. Always glad when I met someone new who didn’t know it. Although, of course, sooner or later up it pops. And, even though I know there’s little point in hiding it, that only idiots take advantage of it, it’s a bit like laying myself open. Putting myself at a disadvantage. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to lose the name, wincing every time I heard it, that being embarrassed by it has come to be a habit.”
“How long did you wet yourself for?”
“I’ll tell you how it started. It was before I went to school. I was shopping with my mother. I told her that I wanted to go to the lavatory. She didn’t take any notice. In an ironmongers I could hold myself no longer, peed all over the floor. “Madame,” the ironmonger said, “your boy’s had an accident all over my new canvas.” That flustered her. She belted me and dragged me from the shop.
“The next time was when my father took me to chapel. It was frightening. After he’d done his shouting, and all the amens were coughed, all you could hear was this drip drip drip. “What boy?” my father shouted, “Wet yourself again?”
“I know now, having had children of my own, that it was just one of those temporary relapses. But in my – pretty unusual – circumstances it lasted a bit longer. And my mother’s child psychology probably left a lot to be desired. She wouldn’t let me wear trousers indoors. If she found a puddle she smacked me. She put me back into nappies. When I stopped wetting them she tried me again in trousers. Of a sudden she’d make a grab for my crotch – “Wet again!” It reached the stage where all I’d need was to catch her looking at me for me to wet myself. But it was definitely incontinence, for whatever reason.
“Then, when I started school, it changed. The first time it was an accident. But I hated school. I’d never played with one child up till then. It terrified me. And having wet myself I got sent to the lavatory. I soon found out that I could spend most of my days on my own in the lavatory. I’d raise my hand in the morning, disappear into the lavatory for the day. If the teacher thought I was conning her she wouldn’t let me go. So I’d sit there and pee myself. It was no longer happening to me: I was making it happen.
“My mother decided to put a stop to it by making me wear the same clothes to school all week. I stank. Hence the nickname. In the holidays I didn’t pee myself. It was a weapon. The rubber pants she bought me I threw away. In the end she admitted defeat, found me another school. But by then I’d made some friends, didn’t want to leave. So I was allowed to stay – on condition that I no longer wet myself. I stopped. But the name stuck.”
“Is your mother alive still?”
“She remarried about four years ago. An oil man. Lives in Inverness now. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Did you disapprove?”
“No. We phoned each other when we remembered. About once a month. I gave her away at her wedding. As she gave me away at mine.
“That’s enough for today.”
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/562673
Constant Change
Constant Change by Sam Smith
‘The paths of error are various and infinite.’ Edward Gibbon
She had opened her sweet warm flesh to his knowledge. Two hours ago all that he had known of her had been her white face and her sharp red hair. Now he knew that on her shoulders was a dappled mosaic of flat pale freckles. Now he knew her nipples – two clusters of cherry pink bubbles. Now he knew the two taut muscles of her stomach, her inverted belly button like a tiny cauliflower. Now he knew her variety of hair: the red glossy hair stabbing into the angular crook of her white shoulders; the furze of down glowing on the silhouette of her slender arm; the armpit hair as soft as a mouse’s fur; on her rounded abdomen the thin herringbone line of ginger hairs widening into, curling into the neat circular patch of crimson-glinting hair; and that hair parted by two glistening meat red lines, like an unhealed scar. He had been in there, inside her raw flesh.
His mouth, his hands, his body was saturated with her scents – of animal musk, of dried shampoo, of tiny particles of aromatic salt. He wanted to be alone, to be away from her in clear air, to hold in his mind all that she had given him. No words he knew could express his burdening gratitude. Nor action. To owe so much to one person. He wanted to sit alone and think, to knit this new knowledge into the old, reconcile rumour to fact. To piece together all the images she had given him. Freely given him. He wanted to shout his joy. Secretly. To be still lest this fragile treasure tumble to pieces.
She moved. A slow breath. Her hand – short exam-chewed nails – slid easily onto his chest. She knew him. She was not disgusted. His body had been hers. Another thought to juggle with the others.
He rolled his head on the pillow. A clean pillowcase crackle of dry hair. Her nose was thin and pointed. She was smiling. What did she see? He smiled. Something should be said. So this is paradise? I love you? Neither were true. Thank you? Better to smile. What wisecrack would slip out if he undid his mouth? This beats tiddleywinks? He was master and victim of the inappropriate remark. Don’t risk it. Smile. Who’ll stop smiling first?
The focus of her dark eyes spread beyond him.
“What time’ll they be back?” his voice was pitched low, throaty from inaction.
“Don’t worry.” Her interest was in him again. And turning against him she lay across him, her soft breast squashed against his hard breastbone, her thigh resting on his wet penis. Green eyes studied his nose, mouth, eyes, hair. “We’ve got till two. It was three last time they went.”
“Three of you?” The wisecrack.
“I should be so lucky.” Schoolgirl bravado. “My aunt came to babysit. And my Dad came home stinking drunk.”
“How big is he?”
“Don’t worry.”
She didn’t want to play that game. He breathed deep. Their skin, their outer envelopes, moved one against the other, small hairs catching.
The house was in St Michael’s Road, a long low street of yellow terrace houses. Three concrete steps separated the front door from the pavement. The square living room windows had net curtains. On the cream-tiled fireplace was a round faced clock in a dark wooden case. Blue sat at the table between his father and his brother Ken.
They had their dinner in the living room so that their father could watch the news. The television was in the corner. Their mother had finished in the kitchen, was upstairs hurriedly dabbing on powder and perfume before going to bingo over Oldway.
Their father listened attentively to the weather forecast. The two boys knew better than to interrupt it. He grimaced at the prospect of rain, and sighed, a beaten man.
A postman, he had dark patches like ink thumbprints on putty below his eyes. He turned to Blue,
“You staying in tonight?”
“Dunno. Might.”
“Bout time you did some work for your exams. Won’t get anywhere without working y’know.”
“Thought you said nobody got rich by working?”
“True enough. But if you don’t work you’ll get nothing.”
“Can’t win.”
“Yes you can. If you pass those exams you’ll be a damn sight better off than I’ve ever been. You won’t have to get up half past five every bloody morning,” he nodded to the television, “go out in all weathers.”
“I won’t pass any.”
“Not with that attitude you won’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He was a man now, knew what his father knew, could no longer be treated as a child.
His father listened to the introduction of a quiz contestant. Blue traced the thick lace pattern in the tablecloth. His father’s hands moved slightly. He had been working on his allotment that afternoon. The dried skin rasped on the tablecloth.
“Your trouble is you don’t want to do anything.” His hooked finger, its grimy nail, tapped the thick cloth. “‘Cept hang around with your friends. Bunch of dead-enders you lot are. To think of all the battles that were fought to give you lot a decent education. And I don’t mean just the last war. And you can’t be bothered with it. Only wish I’d been given your chance.” Blue looked up smiling,
“You’d look silly in a school cap and short trousers.”
Ken grinned, tried to hide it in the television. His father had seen.
“I look bloody silly wearing a postman’s cap too!”
“Oh I thought it made you look quite military, quite distinguished.”
“I had enough of uniforms in the bloody army. Fighting for the likes of you.”
“I didn’t ask you to fight.” A determined opinion.
“Don’t suppose you asked to be educated either?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“When I think… When I think of all the men who gave their lives – their lives! – just so an ungrateful little B like you could be educated… Makes me want to weep.”
“If they’d had the education they wouldn’t be that bloody impressed with it either.”
“Watch your language.”
“You just said bloody to me.”
“Oh yes. Always some smartarse answer. That’s all you can ever come up with. Why don’t you try to pass your exams instead, eh? Your teachers reckon you could if you tried.”
“When did you see them?”
“Says so in your reports. Could do well if only he’d try.”
“Says that in everyone’s. I won’t pass any.”
“Can’t or won’t? Or can’t be bothered. That’s more like it. Look at Ken – he works hard.”
“Good for Ken.” Ken blushed: he hadn’t made it past the eleven plus, went to Tweenaway.
“If he’d been given your chances he’d be making the most of it.”
“All Ken cares about’s his bike.”
“I only hope and pray he doesn’t turn out like you. ‘Cos if he does…”
“Leave him out of it.”
“Why? Think only you matter? Bigshot. Where’re you going? Come back here! Where d’you think you’re going?”
“Out!”
Low coffee brown waves foamed out of the flat mulberry sea. On the flattened dun beach clay-white gulls pecked beadily along a lumpy tideline of black seaweed. On the prom Easter pensioners, with grand dreams and walking sticks, took the air at a dignified pace. Sniff, Pancho and Mort, shuffling their gritty soles, slouched along behind Blue and Newt.
Before reaching the tarmac ramp up to the pier Newt and Blue crossed the humped road to the green.
“Anything on tonight?” Newt said.
“Said I might meet Lin later.”
They skidded down the steep grass bank, resumed their studied slouch, headed at an angle towards the balconied Casino.
“That where you went last night?” Newt said. Blue nodded, not looking at him. “You did.” Newt’s voice was softly astute, “Didn’t you?”
Blue glanced sharply to Newt’s face. The bright eyes knew. The grin approved. Blue felt a prideful surge redden his cheeks.
“You did!” Newt shoved him on the shoulder. Blue stumbled, recovered, and confused dived at him. Newt dodged. Blue lunged again. Newt cackling ran off. Not knowing what else to do Blue grimly gave chase.
On the corner by the Casino Blue almost caught him. Newt yelled, shook himself free, swerved out around a parked car, ducked between two others and pelted on past low stone walls with Blue a sprinting step behind.
In the park Newt slewed right, tore off up the path towards some yellow shelters. Blue ploughed across the soft lawn to cut him off. Newt’s chin was up, head back, his laughter a high-pitched snicker. Blue ran onto the rustic bridge over the ornamental pond at the same time as Newt’s feet thumped onto the boards at the other end. They stopped, panting, stared at one another the length of the bridge.
Hands on the railings they bent to get their breath. The water of the pond was ivy- green. In the flower beds around its sides were heavy-headed daffodils. Hot-faced Newt and Blue grinned at one another.
“Come on,” Newt said, “Before they come.” And glancing back they walked quickly through the low dripping tunnel under the railway lines, slipped left behind some laurels.
Lawns of clipped violent grass sloped down from the hotel to the headland’s spiked brown railings. Beyond those spiked railings a few pale and dishevelled bushes trembled slightly before the opaque immensity of night. Beyond those flimsy bushes a sheer black space dropped to the sea and like a vacuum pulled the curiosity to it.
Blue and Linda crossed a junction of the paths, passed under a cringing huddle of gale-deformed cedars.
“You didn’t come round last night.”
“You said you’d be revising.”
“You said you might.”
“I met Newt. One thing led to another. You know Newt.”
“Pissed as a…”
He felt odd being here with her, walking here with her as he had walked here with so many girls. Girls he had only kissed. The night before last he had grown beyond just kissing as certainly as he had grown out of short trousers. Yet her slim hand in his, her easy chatter, made them ordinary, as if nothing exceptional had happened. And her coat, her skirt, her scarf hid her from him. Layer upon layer of clothes separated them, made them like two live wires insulated against contact. Her clothed presence stood between him and his memory of her white body. He tried to recall it. Couldn’t. Just pieces.
The path from the headland zigzagged down past yellow lights fixed to red stone walls. Set on the bends were black wooden benches – for pensioners with poor legs.
“You one of those who scream at the Beatles?”
“I’ve only seen them once. When they came to the Princess.”
“You scream?”
“Why?”
“Those pictures on your wall.”
“Oh.” She squeezed his hand, acknowledged what they had done. “No. It’s only the fat and spotty ones who scream. Honestly, there was…”
They clipclopped down the last of the path. The level promenade had a dimpled surface like a red cement net. At the bottom of the railed steps the slithering sea lay, its black expanse pressing against the land’s tiny isolated lights. Linda slipped her arm around Blue’s waist. He lifted his arm around her shoulders. Like competitors for a three-legged race they tried to keep step. He had done the same with other girls. Here.
“When’re your Mum and Dad going Exeter again?”
“Not till the summer’s over. Be too busy till then. It’s their last fling.”
“Mine never go out. And if they do my brother’s bound to be home.” And his house wasn’t as clean and tidy as hers.
“Never mind.” A hug. So that was that.
They broke step to go through the forecourt of the Brass Monkey, glimpsed unoccupied tables through the door, the desolate acreage of an empty pub. In the gift shop and cafe window were spotted stepladders and stained dustsheets. Like a decrepit tart furrowing new lipstick over old, Paignton was being given a lick of paint in preparation for the season.
Crossing the service road Blue and Linda walked along an avenue flanked by row upon row of gabled beach huts like so many shanty mausoleums.
He guided her to the shelter. Slumping down on the long slatted bench he crouched over a blue-spitting match to light the second of his five cigarettes. The shelter backed onto the railway tracks: their bench, though, looked out over the pointed felt roofs of the beach huts. Linda shivered, said it was too draughty. Blue dejectedly picked up her hand, led her around to the rear of the shelter.
She snuggled against his side while he drew on his crackling cigarette, blew out the pale grey smoke – a vaporous cone plugged momentarily to the hole in his lips. Beyond the ragged lacework of a rusty wire fence orange streetlights gleamed fixed and unwavering on hard railway lines. He flicked away the hot cigarette – a splash of red sparks – took a deep breath. She lifted her face to be kissed. Like so many other girls. Here.
Unenthusiastically he obliged, teeth crashing together in a slippery kiss, his palm pressed to her padded tit. With tired expertise he worked his jaw, held her close. Drearily it went on. He would be leaving here with the taste of her perfumed lipstick lining his mouth, with his swollen lips smarting in the chill sea air, with the damp tip of his cock sticking to his underpants. Her hand, long fingers crawling, squirmed into his trousers. She pulled him down with her onto the narrow bench, wriggled her hips to accommodate him. On the shelter wall above the end of the bench, written in angry daring letters, was ‘Fuck You.’
Here?
The back door closed with a click. The latch on the garden gate rattled. Blue wriggled out from under Ken’s arm and, trying not to let the cold air into the bed, crawled crablike from between the slippery nylon sheets. Picking his way about the small room, the clamminess of the sheets evaporating from him, the coarse carpet pricking his soles, he gathered his clothes and shoes into a bundle and gently opened the bedroom door.
His own room had been let to a travelling salesman with cheesy feet. The landing was close with the fug of grown-ups’ sleep, fetid with the stale air from their old lungs, from the gases escaping from their large unclothed bodies – old sores suppurating into the night, old pores expanding and exuding their nocturnal odours, a stench from years of old meals decaying between their long yellow teeth. They had been alive so long and their porous flesh had sopped up, like bread on a plate, so much of the world’s dirt that, when unguarded they slept, it seeped out. When younger, and he had woken early in search of comfort, going into his parents’ room had been like stepping through a wall of smell.
His father’s breath was like that of death in the mornings: the puffy skin, its patches of grease, that of a body corrupted. The dangling braces, the clean white shaving soap spotted with his thin blood: he was so vulnerable, so small and pitiful; the slack fold of skin below his chin and his drooping paunch making him look like a candle lopsidedly melting. Blue always waited until he was gone.
The kettle was still warm. He popped the blue gas under it, dipped his toothbrush under the cold tap, spread on the white paste and vigorously attacked his morning-tender gums. Having jerkily pulled his clothes over his shivering nakedness, tied his plimsolls, he buttered himself a slice of white bread.
The habitual movements sharpened his brain, made him feel efficient. He turned off the steaming kettle, spooned coffee into a cup. A dusky blue beyond the window competed with the kitchen’s yellow light.
Stuffing the marmalade sandwich in his mouth he searched around the greasy shelves and the wet windowsill for his mother’s purse and fags. There were eight fags left in the packet of ten. He took one, and from her purse one of the half-crowns and a couple of tanners. There were plenty of coppers there: she wouldn’t have counted them. The coffee was too hot. He poured in more milk.
Should he have the cigarette now, or while he was delivering? He didn’t like smoking while he walked: it made him puff, and the fag was too quickly finished. But if he had it now it would make him late. Taddon could wait.
Leaning back in the chair he put his plimsolls up on the plastic tablecloth. The match spluttered: he sucked on the cigarette. All was quiet. No voices to unsettle his stillness. Steam curled like a baby’s hair from his coffee cup. Blue smoke rose straight from his cigarette tip and, just before the ceiling, wobbled and fanned out. He could easily go back to sleep. His eyes were dryly raw. He rubbed a hand over his face. He didn’t really want any more of the cigarette, nor the coffee. But he had started them, might as well finish both. Lifting his feet off the table he let himself rock forward and, elbows slipping forward on the slimy cloth, he rested his face in his hands. He looked around for something to read – a cornflakes packet, yesterday’s newspaper? There was nothing.
The cigarette was hot. He cooled his mouth with warm coffee. Now he wanted to go. One more drag, one more gulp, and he was ready. Switching off the light he skirted the grey table, opened the kitchen door to the damp inky air.
He flicked the cigarette high over the fence into next door’s grassy garden. It landed with a hiss, glowed slowly like a coal. Blue wafted the door to rid the kitchen of smoke, then softly closed it.
So as not to rattle the latch he lifted the garden gate. All the closed windows contained sleeping people. He had no right to disturb them. Not like his father banging his way resentfully forth in the mornings, his every action saying ‘Look at me, I’m on my way to work while all you idle buggers are still fast a’kip’. Blue left them undisturbed by stealth, saw himself as a trustee of their slumbers.
He padded along the uneven back path. In this chill ghostly light the world was pure, undefiled by a day’s activities. Like the homeward prowling wolf and fox he felt himself merging with the cool blues and greys of morning twilight. Crossing the empty side street, he rounded the sharp corner and loped along St Michael’s, crossed another side street and went on past the overgrown area they called the bomb site and where they had not been allowed to play. The papershop glowed on the corner, stacks of paper on the long counter being sorted.
Taddon glanced up at the clock on Blue’s entrance. Blue wasn’t late: he wasn’t supposed to start till six, and it was only five-to. But Taddon too wanted to let everyone know that he’d been up hours before them. He was a short thin man with a speckled moustache. His wife shouted at him. Blue had never seen him outside the shop.
“Twenty two isn’t getting any more until they pay,” Taddon talked as he sorted the papers, “If they ask tell ’em that’s what I said.”
Blue hefted the canvas bag onto his shoulder. Having once found a ten bob note outside the shop Blue scanned the gutter and pavement as he set off towards his first house. Lifting a paper from the bag he slapped it across his knee to fold it, hit it with the edge of his hand to fold it again, then pushed it through the letterbox. Over low walls, in and out of garden gates, he made his way up the street almost to the main road. Crossing the street he then worked his way down the other side. Some letterboxes were stiff, tore the newspaper; others were wide and gaping, let the paper thud through onto the floor. On new glass-ribbed doors the letterboxes were vertical and strongly hinged, or near the floor which – Blue agreed with his father – was a ridiculously inconvenient place to put a letterbox. On old people’s doors, with their fear of burglars, a wire cage obstructed the paper, left it sticking out and easy to pinch.
That street finished, he went on to the next. Sparrows were cheeping now, and the sun, still below the horizon, was shining golden upwards through holes in the high fawn clouds. A peacock called harshly from somewhere up near the zoo. A car zoomed past on the main road.
This street was of redstone flats. Blue trotted up stairs. Each landing had its own sounds and smells; bicycle oil, geraniums, drains, baby powder, sour bins, baked beans, bacon frying; a radio in a kitchen, an alarm buzzing, a dog snuffling, a man and a child quarrelling.
Out of one entrance, bag light and swinging now, and into the next. A man in a donkey jacket brushed past him on the cement stairs, grumbled a good morning. A child whinged, another wailed.
Twenty Two was lying in wait for him. She was skinny and ugly, greeted him in whispers, falsely cheerful.
“Mr Taddon didn’t give me a paper for you,” Blue stated the flat fact, didn’t want to say that it was because she hadn’t paid.
“But I told him I’d pay this week.” The voice was a professional wheedle. Blue shrugged, wanted to pass her by.
“You got a spare?” She bent her lank hair to the purse held in both her hands. Her quilted dressing gown was indeterminately dirty. She kept the door only slightly ajar. The interior looked as dowdy as her.
“I only got the ones I got to deliver.”
“Go on,” she became grotesquely flirtatious, “you can let me have one.”
“I’m sorry. He only gives me…”
“Oh get lost!” She slipped inside and slammed the door.
When Blue came out into the street a blue car was warming its engine, its dripping exhaust pumping steamy smoke into the still air. A whining milk float clinked by on the main road. Some curtains rattled open. The day was no longer his alone.
“Anyway, according to May, she was grumbling because they only get twenty quid a week.” That was the point of his mother’s tale, “Twenty quid a week.” She sawed at her chump chop.
“She’s got six children,” Blue said, “Must cost twenty quid a week to feed ’em all.”
“Ah, but where could he earn twenty quid a week?” his father said, “That’s the point.”
“Your father only gets sixteen.” His mother felt as strongly about it as did her gossiping friends.
“Before tax,” his father pointedly added.
“But they must need twenty quid a week.”
“We brought you up on less than that. We managed,” his mother said.
“But there’s only the two of us,” Blue said. Ken smiled quickly at him, pressed peas into the white mash.
“They needn’t have had six children,” his father lifted his knife to make his point.
“Maybe it’s their religion,” Blue said.
“Well it’s a bloody convenient religion.”
“Maybe Catholics are randier,” Blue raised his eyebrows to Ken. Ken grinned, started a slow laugh.
“That’s enough of that from you,” the knife wagged at Ken. Ken concentrated on his mash and peas.
His father’s sudden anger surprised Blue. He tried to recall what he had said that could have aroused it. The tense head, glittering eyes, jerked at him,
“And I suppose a cocky little bugger like you don’t believe in God either?”
“No,” Blue said, “I don’t.”
“I bloody thought so. Let me tell you boy you’ll be mighty glad to have that God when the bullets are up to here.”
Blue put his head doubtfully to one side: he knew that he might in distress appeal to God, and knew too that his appeal would be in vain. That God of his father’s wouldn’t hear him.
“What about the ones who were killed? Were they glad they’d got a God too?”
“Knew I’d get some smart bloody answer from you. Well just you wait my boy.”
“I can’t believe in any God who lets children die. What kind of cruel bastard is he?”
“That’s enough of that.”
The family concentrated on their plates.
“Your father and I had to struggle to raise you.” His mother was still infected with her friends’ indignation.
“Gets my goat my paying taxes to support the likes of him. They must all be laughing at us. All those bloody nig-nogs coming over here, going on National Assistance. Must think we’re a right soft lot.”
“You said the other week they were coming over here taking our jobs.”
“Oh you’re bloody clever you are. Too bloody clever for your own good. Pity you’re not clever enough to pass your exams. You’re just like them, don’t want to work. Think the world owes you a favour.”
“No I don’t.” The soggy food wouldn’t be swallowed.
“You mean to tell me they couldn’t all get jobs if they wanted. Course they bloody could. A bad back old Gilbert’s supposed to have. We had blokes like him in the Army. Never saw healthier blokes on sick call. And the doctor can’t say they haven’t got a bad back. Bloody convenient, that’s all that is. Making mugs out of those who have to work.”
“Maybe he does have a bad back.”
“Yea, got it getting all them kids.”
Ken laughed at that. His father didn’t.
“He can still afford to smoke,” his mother put in. Blue ignored her,
“So, just because you don’t like the father, the children should starve?”
“If they can’t afford children then they shouldn’t have ’em.”
“You’d rather see the children starve than see their father buy a packet of fags, wouldn’t you?”
“We’d have liked more children…” his father started.
“You don’t like children.” Blue snapped. (His father had always been rude to Mort because Mort’s father had once been a Conservative councillor.)
“I’ve had just about all I can take from you.”
“And me you!”
They had closed their minds to school. None of them were going to be joining the Old Boys. This everyday tedium, this enforced sitting in silence, had no relevance to the rest of their real lives. King Edward VI’s Grammar School Totnes was dutifully attended only under threat of truant officers and the like. All had long ago deadened themselves to the daily dullness. Now it was a dead area of their lives. Excitement and interest lay elsewhere, were waiting to be discovered.
The school’s ivied facade, recessed snobbily from Totnes’s medieval Fore Street, contained little of interest to them. A sham of academia they knew only the bare floorboards of time-stealing tedium.
From their classroom cells of stillness they looked out on a playground like a prison yard, its tarmac floor always in damp shadow. A high stone wall topped with rusty wire netting formed one side, brick walls and small barred windows two others, with gloomily looming over all the unadorned concrete walls of the fives courts. The sky was always small and distant. Sunlight slipped at a yellow angle but occasionally into a grimy corner. A scenario to inspire deskdreams of escape.
Her dark pleated skirt was looped over the doorhandle. His jeans hung from a yellow painted nail. On the narrow shelf, beside her compact mirror, a candle stub burnt with a black-tipped orange flame. He lay on his back with his knees bent. Through his thin shirt he felt the rough splintery boards below him, the hard lumpy knots where sandalled feet had worn away the softer wood. Linda lay curled against his side, her head on his chest. Beyond her dark red hair was a run of hard gloss paint. He picked at it with a clicking fingernail.
“Sooner or later,” he said, “they’re bound to start using this hut.”
“It’ll be warm then.” She snuggled into him as she spoke, “We can find somewhere in the open. On the beach. Have to watch the sand though.” She giggled.
He tried to smile, tried not to be shocked by her readiness, her willingness, her knowingness. The boy was supposed to seduce the girl, was supposed to reassure her. The girl was supposed to be innocent. She had told him that technically she hadn’t been a virgin. Not that it mattered, he told himself; it was just that he felt a step behind her thoughts. She could compare his lovemaking to others’: to him she was unique.
He was tired: to go to sleep with her in his arms. Tell her.
“If only it could be like this always. If we could just go on and on as we are now.”
“It’s bound to change,” she spoke slowly, her words deliberated on, “We’re bound to change. I’m going to have to start staying in soon. I’ve just got to get some revision done.”
He wondered if she was trying to tell him that they were finished. Did she have someone else? Was she two-timing him? He saw all the vacant times in her day that he knew nothing about. During the last few days he had at times suddenly realised that he hadn’t been thinking of her, and each time he had felt that he had betrayed her. How much had she not thought of him? He didn’t know her.
“How many you taking?”
“Ten.”
“How many you reckon you’ll get?”
“Eight. Nine if they don’t do electrolysis in the physics.”
By that yardstick alone she was more intelligent than him, knew more than he did. Yet she listened to what he said, laughed at his jokes. Or was she laughing at him? What did she know about him?
“You won’t be coming out at all?” he tried not to sound desperate, tried not to sound as if he was pleading.
“I don’t want to get stale. Weekends I’ll have off.”
“Think they’ll do you any good?”
“Weekends?” a lewd innuendo.
“O-levels.”
“I want to go to university.”
She had her own life planned: he wasn’t included. Sensing this alienation come between them she moved around to kiss him, two naked bodies contorting in orange gloom on the floor of a narrow beach hut.
His mother did the ironing in the living room so that she could watch the telly. Steam hissed from the dampened shirts. A domestic smell Blue liked, sweet and clean like flannels being boiled. He adjusted the contrast on the telly, sat in his father’s armchair.
“Don’t have the sound too high. Your Dad’s in bed.” Blue stretched forward and turned the volume down.
“Been out with your girl?”
He nodded.
The wooden ironing board creaked when she pressed down on it.
“Serious, this one, is it?”
“Not that much?”
“Not chucked you has she?”
“No. Got her exams soon.”
“Not like you then, eh?”
“No.”
“That’s right love, you go out and have a good time. I don’t care what your Dad says, plenty of time to worry later. You’re only young once. Sometimes I think he forgets people want to enjoy themselves.”
“He’s alright.”
Blue had heard her with her bingo friends laughing at his father, defensively making fun of the red Labour Party posters in her living room window.
“He takes himself far too seriously if you ask me. And he’s pushed you too hard. If you want my honest opinion I wish you’d never gone to that grammar school. You’d have been much better off with a trade.” Like her bingo friends’ husbands.
“Maybe.” Blue tried to make out he was interested in the television. Somebody in a car was chasing somebody else in a car.
“He’s always on about something. Can’t leave it alone for a minute. Him and that union. It’s a wonder I’ve got any friends left.” The leading car went over a cliff. The man in the second car got out and looked over the edge of the cliff. “He’s always on about money.” Blue missed what the man said into his car radio. “But if he was that interested in it he’d get himself another job.” The titles came up. “May’s husband’s earning twice what he is labouring.” The adverts came on. “And she can buy clothes for herself, not have to make ’em herself.”
“That’s not the point.” Blue said.
“You tell me what the point is then.”
“Dad thinks everyone should be paid a decent wage no matter what they do.”
“That’s what he says, but let me tell you all he’s worried about is his pension. What about my pension, he says, whenever I say he should get himself another job. Fat lot of good a pension’ll do me. Then there’s his bloody allotment. What about my allotment, he says, I won’t get time for it working ordinary hours.” She draped a shirt over the back of a chair, picked up another. “And I don’t see why you’re on his side. If he earnt more money you wouldn’t have to move in with Ken every summer.”
“I don’t mind.”
“That’s not what you said last year. At least this year if you pay some keep you won’t have to give up your room.”
The iron hissed in emphasis. Blue sat, frowning. His father was wrong about many things, but his one virtue in Blue’s eyes was his stubborn contrary beliefs.
“He’s got principles,” he said, “And he’s tried to stick to them. It can’t have been easy being a trade unionist in Paignton.”
“That’s what he wants you to think. But let me tell you there’s a few hundred others round here who vote Labour. And they don’t make a song and dance about it.”
“Suppose there must be.” Blue hadn’t considered that before, had assumed that all Labour voters and trade unionists were men like his father. “Still, you’ve got to admit, the way he sticks to his principles, he’s got to be admired.”
“You admire him. I’m married to his,” she laughing shook her head at him, “to his bloody principles.” Blue smiled up at her: she wasn’t as stupid as she tried to make out.
“Where’s Ken?”
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/555184
Undeclared War
Undeclared War
Sam Smith
Book One of the Paths of Error trilogy
“The paths of error are various and infinite.”
- Edward Gibbon
One
The only beauty Paignton had was if he stood with his back to it and looked out to sea. Then he had as many combinations of colour, and nuances of light, as water, sky, wind and cloud would allow… an enamelled calm under a static sun; a ripple of a red sunset stroking the ochre sand; a summer’s grey swell crashing in rainbows against the brick brown promenade steps…
To turn from that mysterious immensity and confront the town required a courageous act of will, a heroic dulling of the finer sensibilities.
First, looped between the stubby iron lampposts on the promenade, and strung out along thered sandstone harbour wall, and then out to the coin-clinking arcade at the end of the skeletal pier, were row upon row of coloured bulbs. At night their prissy pretty reflections polluted the ebony sea.
Then, beyond the tarmac promenade, beyond the gabled wooden beach huts, beyond a sloping strip of worn grass, were the facades of the hotels and the guest houses – each imitating a period of architecture from a fake past, or of some fanciful foreign place – mock Tudor, mock Mediterranean, or synthetic Swiss.
From that sea front one wide straightroad penetrated the town. A glitter gulch it began at the amusement arcade with its bingo stall, then camecafes selling American hamburgers, brass-glinting gift shops, cool-coloured ice cream parlours, curtained tea rooms and brown tobacconists with revolving wire stands of Technicolor postcards blocking their doorways.
All ended abruptly at the iron level crossing beside the cream and brown railway station. Beyond the white double gates, and spread around the central taxi rank and telephone kiosks, were the chemists, Woolworths, the bus station, the fish and chip shops, the singsong pubs, and the Odeon with its one summer-long film programme.
All was geared to the holidaymaker – white smears of Nivea cream on their sharp red noses, continents of skin peeling from their rounded pink shoulders. Outside the over-full shops hung striped beachballs, ribbed rubber flippers, inflatable waterwings, and garish buckets and spades. Chalked boards advertised coach trips to cream teas at Dartmeet; chemists seemed to sell only suntan lotion and dark glasses; and the rest of the shops sold gaudy beachwear and grey plastic macs, pink candy floss and guffawing fat lady postcards. Such was the bait: such was the gawping fish it attracted.
Main street and station square, vagina and womb of an unfussy whore, Paignton spread her fat legs over to Goodrington and Preston, guest houses either way. In the near hills terrace houses wrinkled up the flabby harlot’s bulbous belly, and then bungalow estates multiplied inland like a rash of venereal scabs; with, in the clear-day distance, the deflated tits of the moors.
Summers the locals paid summer prices and were crowded off the plastic sandal shuffling pavements; and winters they had to shout down the wet stone streets to reassure themselves of their young existence.
They called Harry Morton-Jones Mort for short. One day he’d be Mort for long. Schoolboy joke
Mort’s knowledge of tortures, poisons and pop singers’ private lives was prodigious; yet in class he was as dense as the school gravy, seemed innately unable to absorb even the most elementary of facts. They had no glamour. But then… neither had Mort.
Having no sense of humour, unable to laugh at himself others laughed at him; and when he couldn’t see the joke, their laughter became all the louder. Limp quiff, white nondescript body, his heavy glasses cutting off the circulation to his round fat nose, he looked the preoccupied scholarly type, acted the weary sophistication of the tough. He knew backwards the plot of every Mike Hammer and Phillip Marlowe book, had committed to memory their every wisecrack, and he made up his own in the same style, though always with a couple of words too many. On top of that he used them out of context, made those who happened to hear do a double-take. For instance, drooping against the bar in the Polsham, cigarette poised between plump white fingers, sipped pint in puny fist, he laconically interrupted a dart-playing discussion of likely careers to say,
‘The only thing to do with your home town… is leave it.’
To their ‘Eh?’s his ears turned red.
The Polsham Arms being so far from the main drag they could eke out their drinks in its adult atmosphere without fear of being seen by someone who might knew their parents. With his round brown eyes and pink downy cheeks Pancho was, of course, asked his age; and the landlord, of course, had to accept Pancho’s deep-voiced assertion that, of course, he was eighteen. The landlord knew that had he refused to serve Pancho they would all have left.
When they had money enough of their own Newt and Blue dropped Pancho and the rest, drank in the Coverdale and the Gerston near the station, went from there down to the Esplanade and the Casino on the seafront. When they didn’t have the money they sat with a girl in Mario’s, without one in the Bamboo.
The Bamboo, opposite the amusement arcade, was one of Paignton’s three rocker cafes. The other two were the Manor by the traffic lights in Preston, and a long thin one on a sidestreet corner opposite Victoria Park. All had floors of lino pitted by sharp stiletto heels, table edges scratched by the heavy zips on the leather jackets, and names and initials carved into their table tops. For the price of one cup of coffee, or a Coke, pale-faced adolescents could lounge about in their vibrating dimness all daylong, exercise the boundless lassitude of youth.
The Mods, with their short hair, scooters and long green anoraks, used Mario’s across the road from the Bamboo. It didn’t have a jukebox proper, was brighter and tidier. The haggard wife and plump daughter, or the schoolgirl waitresses, kept wiping the tables and refilling the sugar bowls. The only way to remain comfortably there was to buy another cup of frothy coffee.
Newt entered all rocker cafes with a bang of the door and the bellow of an obscene word, came in like a blast of foul air, making the occupants look first to themselves for the smell. His loud profanities and uninhibited gestures shattered the carefully structured societies slowly built up over a lazy afternoon, liberated some, and offended those who had figured themselves highly in that static society – an eminence achieved by narrowed stare, aggressive murmur, suppressed sneer.
Having shaken the foundations of silence on which they had built, Newt’s hoarse voice continued to provoke little wobbles of apprehension and anger. Some would, brooding, leave, some would brooding stay, pick their time and audience, stand white-faced before him and say,
‘Think you’re fuckin’ big, don’t ya?’
At fifteen Newt was five eleven, levelled out to six one.
Newt’s blond hair was wispily curly, his nose broken, and his two front teeth were missing. The first tooth had been cleanly removed by a stone thrown at him by his sister Jan – her face drawn into the thin uncontrite lines of childish spite. His nose had been broken when Blue, dancing-eyed, had shoved him down Clennon Valley on a brakeless trolley. The second tooth had left his head the day Mort had reinvented explosives and they had accidentally blown up a parked car in Goodrington. All except Sniff had got probation and concussion for that. Sniff had been sent to fetch more ingredients, had looked on in wonder at the yellow flames, black smoke and prostrate forms, and had peed himself with fright and laughter.
The rest of Newt’s face he had sculpted himself. His first model had been a bus conductor with a forehead as wrinkled as an elephant’s armpit. For a couple of yearsNewt had gone about with eyebrows raised in permanent astonishment to get a brow as evenly corrugated. Then he had been impressed by a National Geographic photograph of a gaunt and noble Plains Indian; and to carve the hard lines on either side ofthe mouth he had compressed his cheeks, had worn lips grim with constant exasperation. Soon after had come the narrowed eyes of salt-dried mariners, sunsquinting gunfighters and shortsighted mystics. A self-made face.
They drank, like they smoked, like they went to X films, simply because it was forbidden them, because it was yet another illicit sampling of the adult mysteries. They all had to wait until their sixteenth birthday to get their first motorbike – those who could afford one. Mort was not allowed one, although that, of course, didn’t stop him being an authority on motorbikes
Life then was one long initiation, one long pretence. To get into the X films, which they didn’t really want to see, to buy cigarettes, to get into certain dances, they had to pretend to be older than they were. And then they had to pretend to be addicted to cigarettes, or to be confirmed drunkards. And after they’d had a few pints they pretended to be drunker than they were.
To girls they pretended to be whatever they thought that particular girl wanted them to be; and afterwards, to their friends, they pretended that they had done just that much more than the girl had let them; and their friends pretended to believe them. They even had to lie to the girls about their age. It was another frustrating fact that girls their own age tended to go out with boys two or three years older, leaving them with those girls just passing puberty and more interested in ponies than penises. Then there was pretending to be tougher than they were, and awaiting, at every slam of the opening pub door, their bloody comeuppance.
They also drank because being drunk allowed them liberties denied to them sober and assumed sane. Drunk they could swear loudly in public places, be as juvenilely silly as they wished, career into dances, pick fights, plead a pretend cowardice, make unambiguous advances to prim girls… and blame it on the drink.
Drink was their scapegoat, their all-embracing plea, releasing them from responsibility. On the way home from the Polsham they could shove one another knee-deep into the round boating pond in Victoria Park, smash up the toilets, tie the swings out of reach, and blame it on the drink. They could shoulder their way along the pavement, and should anyone bigger take offence… their friends could blame it on the drink. Socially acceptable schizophrenia.
When truly drunk they vomited in cold corners.
Most dance halls were deliberately darkened – to hide the acne and the pus-centred pimples, everyone with a soft spot for someone. The Esplanade had the occasional good group midweek, pissed rockers inside and punch-ups outside. The Casino next door was the Sunday night pick-up and come-down, electric organ making all melodies mediocre. The Moose Hall had dusty boards and folding chairs, clumsy jiving and mob warfare. The Tembani was a Saturday night altogether too tame – too much white light, no red shadows to highlight and enhance the chubby complexions; and the same local group every week, a last waltz can-I-see-you-home pick-up. Torquay TownHall had big name national groups, exhibitionist jiving, a sprung floor; and, down concrete backstairs, a smoky bar full of large Torquay rockers. The 400 Torquay needed a bike or a car to carry pick-up elsewhere. And the Northolt Brixham was one long bouncer-subdued brawl.
Mort was often punched by bored rockers, was left crawling around dance floors feeling for his glasses; re-emerging philosophically swollen to ask, as a matter of academic interest, which local worthy had further fattened his podgy nose.
Rockers had greased hair like polished helmets, stiff leather jackets and tight knee-wrinkled jeans – two insect legs supporting the hard shell of a black beetle. Some rockers even had large motorbikes. One was a boxer, another a weightlifter – the heroes. All were deliberately and grossly ill-mannered, shouldered the world aside. If bone lumpy shoulders dug back voices and fists were raised, and clinching together the combatants rolled across tables, thudded against walls, crashed through windows and doors – in one inglorious bloody scramble
Afterwards, the weeping girlfriend comforted by her tightskirted friend, the loser sat on dark steps, blood dripping from his nose, friend’s arm loosely around his shoulders and he inaudibly vowed revenge, or whimpered plaintive excuses, quibbled over dirty fighting details, asked why, why? Why do dreams turn so suddenly sour? And the eyes of the passers-by tried not to see his shrunken shame. It could as easily have been theirs.
Unless he was taken wholly by surprise, when Newt fought he laughed, the surging adrenalin bubbling from him in a grunting chuckle. With the very first punch the laughter started from him. A gleeful cackle, it approved of the action, was punctuated by warring shouts and exultant yells. A chortle of delight, it ranged from a deep-chested fist-swinging Hey Hey! to a grappling face-muffled he-he-he. Stopping abruptly as he stared down at the cowering form; or, as the last gasp was thumped from his diaphragm and he knelt in defeat, forehead touching the floor, not feeling the thudding boots gently rocking him.
Without money, without muscles, they were apprentices to the world. Those the same age, but who had been at Tweenaway, already had jobs, had money, had adulthood. But being in the B stream at Totnes Grammar, having to stay on till they were sixteen, they had no better prospects than those who had failed their eleven plus, and no money now. Save what they earnt on Saturday morning jobs.
They were paperboys, or they helped on milk rounds, with bread deliveries, in greengrocers. Newt was a six foot butcher’s boy. The humiliation of having a dwarf housewife screaming after him down a crowded street, ‘Boy! Boy! Where’s my sausage meat?’ And then having to scrub and soak to get rid of the fetid stink of dead meat before going out on a Saturday night. The few times he had been left in charge or the shop he had dipped vengefully into the tainted till.
Summers he had worked as a white-jacketed waiter in a cafe by the small harbour. Another daylong humiliation – North Country ignoramuses accusing him of fiddling their bills, only grudgingly paying when he had listed item by item what they had scoffed. And then they rounded up their sniffy brood and left with not one expression of apology or a penny tip. The wages were the tips. And whenever some bellicose berk chose to bawl him out there always seemed to be some girlgiving him the eye. Newt knew the wanting-to-please and easily intimidated types he could cheat. There was no cheating the stealing boss.
What they didn’t receive in pocket money and meagre earnings they stole. Even Mort, who was given enough by his parents, their being double-barrelled posh, not to have to work. Sometimes they stole from faulty machines in the arcade, but mostly it was from their mother’s purses or their father’s trousers. Sniff’s father being blind, Sniff didn’t have to waste his Saturday mornings in work.
They all stole from shops. Though there was only glory in stealing anything but money: they had nowhere they could fence it, nor could they keep it for their own use – their parents would want to know where they had got it from. Blue’s father had made him return, with stammering apologies, a radio that he’d swiped from an unsupervised store – and they hadn’t even noticed it had gone missing.
As when children they’d found sweetshops where they could help themselves, so lately they had discovered a shortsighted tobacconist in Winner Street; and in the Coverdale off-licence the man was always a little slow in coming from behind his red velvet curtain. Only thus, primed by quarter bottles of Coverdale whisky, pockets full of filched fags, could they begin their Saturday nights.
The bus station marked the beginning and end of most evenings, and the beginning and end of each school day. Mornings blue uniforms scrambled aboard the green buses, afternoons swung off the platforms, took freedom at a run. It was also in the bus station that they arranged to meet girls; and from there that the girls caught their buses home.
A long bleak place of brick, glass, and concrete beams; wooden benches opposite metal barricades; looped chains to channel the queues; and green buses and red buses like cattle in a stall, swallowing and disgorging. Timetables, travel posters, a newspaper kiosk, photograph booth, ice cream stall; fat ladies spread themselves with their bags on the slatted benches; and solitary boys, their hands stuffed in their tight pockets, lounged against the brick walls waiting for their dates – laconically made, earnestly groomed for. Their cheeks sucked in and glued to their back teeth, looking to the floor, or over the heads, trying not to meet anyone’s eye, lest it be registered in their own the number of slow minutes they had been anxiously waiting, lest the shameful fear of having been stood up showed there.
Girls waited, sat knees together on the edge of the benches, bounced to their feet at sight of a half-remembered face. While the boys peeled off the walls, casually held out a hand to be taken; and walking, talking, they quickly fled the place and its reek of loneliness.
Newt had thought then that desolation was peculiar to Paignton bus station, but found that stations all over the world were the same. People waiting, thoughts frozen behind stiff faces, waiting… Impatiently if they knew the commuting route well, impassively fulfilling their timetables if they didn’t. Shut inside their own anonymity, suspicious of other itinerants waiting like themselves, and cynically seeing through glad smiles of greeting, tears of farewell. Some locked in on their destination, shaking off the familiarity of the routine just left, wondering what was to greet them at the other end. Nervous travellers, frightened of missing their bus, that they’d catch the wrong one, that their friends, lovers, house had changed since they’d last seen them, or simply and quietly terrified of being late for their landladies evening meal. And in every station a large unavoidable clock telling how long was a minute, an age of waiting.
The minute hands on Paignton’s electric clocks (hung in a long line from the concrete ceiling beams) all shuddered on once a minute – mocking those who had been left standing there. Newt always waited up the far end by the Odeon – so that his mother couldn’t see him from the back windows. And a minute after anyone had said they’d meet him, Newt left – furious if a friend, though he would pretend that it hadn’t mattered; and fatalistic if a girl. But better to say, ‘See you around,’than fix the time and place to be snubbed, or forgotten.
Home was a three-storey guesthouse in Dartmouth Road, just along from the bus station. Jan, Newt’s older sister, had a small dormer bedroom in the roof. Newt had a large bedroom in back in winter, overlooking the wet timber yard; and summers he slept on the dining room floor, kept his clothes in a bulging cupboard on the landing, his things in a shed in the garden. His battery record player was in that shed, and an old sofa, a scarred table… It was in the shed that Newt was supposed to do his homework. They had once kept their armoury of airguns there; and the records that Mort and Sniff stole they stored there, until having been given enough money for records Sniff and Mort could take them home, use the saved cash for more transitory entertainments.
Newt’s shed being just along the back alley from the bus station they all often met there. None could call for Mort because his mother thought them all an uncouth influence. And when they called for any of the others the parents interrogated them, or took the rise out of them, or condescended to their level and talked of pop groups. The shed saved them that; and they envied Newt it. While Newt envied them their year-round bedrooms. Although Pancho had to alternate between a camp bed under the stairs and a winter guestroom; and in the summers Blue had to share his bedroom with his three year younger brother. Small wonder they all hated holidaymakers, their bed and breakfast ubiquity, having to wait until they had finished with the bathroom, until they had finished their breakfast.
Newt’s mother was always busy, a perpetually anxious Devonshire dumpling. ‘Oh dear.’ after laughter or disaster. ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’ to whatever was said to her, her mind switched off, intent on her next objective. Cooking breakfast, making beds, washing dishes, getting dinner ready; the visitors telling her they’d been to the beach, a film, to the moors, to a summer show. ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’ They’d been to a marvellous little pub. ‘I see…’ Disapproval that, didn’t want to hear more. ‘Could I pay by cheque?’ ‘I see…’
Winters she was as busy painting and papering the empty rooms, doing a ‘morning’ at whatever job she could find. Money, money. Money – the earning of it and the spending of it; and the cost of, the price of… begrudging every penny spent, and then treating herself to a new fur coat, her hair crisply permed, patting pink powder on her round beady face, twirling before the bedroom mirror like a fat effeminate ape. Wasting money on her dumpy self when Newt needed clothes far more than she did: no one took any notice of what she looked like – she was who she was – Newt’s appearance was his all.
Asleep in his dining room bed, woken by the doorbell, listening to his mother trundling out to let the visitors in, his father turning the telly off – manners that – no matter how near the end of the programme, how close the denouement; and then the ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’ Or to the breath of liquor, ‘I see… I’ll just put the kettle on.’ Then his father’s attempts at small-talk, the clink and rattleof the tea tray coming to his rescue. And the tea sipped and slurped, talk of tomorrow’s excursion, ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’ And, as soon as the last had crept creaking up the stairs to open the guts of the raucous plumbing, his mother and father in whispers unfolded the settee, a flutter of sheets, clink of bracelets, crackle of nylon underwear, slap of elastic and groan of springs. Ratchet turn of the clock, a ting, a yawn, punched pillow, click of switch, vacuum seal of a kiss, married bliss.
Sex being a public act performed in private, Newt’s brash public persona was at odds with the artful wooing of girls. Blue, he knew, could be softly and slyly sincere. Pancho held platonic hands, gazed back into cherubic features. While Sniff and Mort were aloofly celibate, pretended to be fussy about the scrubbers who couldn’t be bothered with them anyway.
Newt grabbed those scrubbers and pressed them against rough walls in dark corners, forced his hands into their clothing and over their hot anatomy… until they wriggled free. Or it was, in a rare red moment of eager acquiescence, a thrusting knee-trembler, insecure erection slipping out and bending up against her rubber buttocks, foreskin rasping dry on her skirt. Or it was a writhing on night-damp ground, a plunging of hips, two tortured shadows banging out their bravado. ‘I’m doing it! I’m doing it!’ And it was done.
So he had left his virginity dripping like an idiot’s spit down a grey wall at the back of the Esplanade. Small loss. And having stuffed his vagrant anger inside them he left them with their scrubber’s reputation, turned with his loud voice from their knowing eyes. Though, in truth, he more often insulted than screwed. He could not speak softly, could not change for them. Except Eunice.
Sundays she came from Brixham to the dances at the Casino. She sat and danced with her Paignton friend until the last two dances, which Newt arbitrarily claimed, and then he walked her to the bus station. She had a small mouth, lowered eyes, went to Churston Grammar; and with her Newt talked, confided in her quietness, earnestly tried to explain himself to someone, that he was not who he seemed. One arm around her narrow shoulders, the other reaching to encircle elusive words and thoughts, pulling them to him, frustrated lips tight over teeth, furious at not being able to find the exact word or phrase… You see… no it’s… but… it’s not that…. and you see… and he poured it all into her private ear.
One night she went back with him to his shed. He covered the window with his shirt, and by torchlight he experienced her. Patterns of hair and shadow, texture of total skin, soft and dry, warm and sticky: a vocabulary of touch and breathing, slow eyes and proud display, grips and frowns; all with wonder and without shame.
She left at three that morning; and Newt didn’t see her for two weeks. Her father had kept her home. That was her problem: Newt could admit to no one that he cared for them. And he had power over her, made her stay again despite her protests, left it up to her to find excuses. And, not sure what she now wanted of him, he talked to her no more.
As tall as Newt,blonder than Newt, Jan was shapely and very proper – had her hair in flick-ups and not a lacquered beehive. She was a tightskirted secretary in a solicitor’s office, and her boyfriends all had cars. They took her to clubs, remote pubs for meals, and to shows. When she came home at night she got an ‘Oh yes. Very nice.’ When Newt came in it was an ‘I see…’ Or a ‘Lucky for you your father isn’t here…’ Not that that would have made any difference.
Jan thought Newt coarse and vulgar. He agreed. Outside of home their social paths crossed only in the cinema on a Sunday afternoon. In her armoured ski-pants Jan disassociated herself from Newt’s raspberries and catcalls. Newt called her a snob. Jan was in the market for marriage.
Newt’s father had dodged conscription until a year after Dunkirk, had spent the rest of the war dodging all other momentous occasions. The man who was always elsewhere.
He had stayed alive. He was proud of that. He had done nothing. He was proud of that. He was a nothing, a little runt who, if he had been Newt’s age, Newt would have shouldered aside; and the little runt would have found distinction in being barged aside by a tearaway such as Newt.
His only tales of the war were of the fools like Newt who had broken the rules, who had followed their own inclinations; the heroes and the clowns, those who hadn’t worried about being caught. And if they were dead, then they weren’t suffering a timorous little existence like Newt’s father. Newt knew that there are those who do, and those who, like Newt’s father, only clap or criticise.
Worried what might befall him, his face was a pained picture of dyspeptic anxiety. He drove a furniture lorry – without panache, without flair – and when he stayed away nights he reported back to his wife those of his travelling companions who had strayed from the marital straight and narrow.
Worried, he worried about his wife’s stomach. Worried, he worried about losing his job. Worried, he worried about Jan getting pregnant. Worried, he worried about Newt getting into trouble, called him a rebel. Which Newt supposed he was, because he couldn’t, wouldn’t, accept his father’s blindness, his obeisance to all officialdom, all authority. Newt refused to even countenance his father’s version of reality – if you can’t beat them, be beaten.
His father regularly told Newt that he was too big for his boots. Newt was certainly too big for his father’s boots, was determined never to come down to his size.
Having all grown up together they could all of them remember seeing the others in tears. They were the sum total of their mistakes – that’s all they’d made in Paignton. In their home town they’d always be what they were, not what they had become. The only thing to do was leave.
Nicknames had given them all a little individuality, had been of their own choice, of their own acceptance. Sniff had smelt at primary school; Pancho lived in a house called Something Villa; Blue had once talked in the Goons’ Bluebottle voice; and Newt was an abbreviation if Tom Newson. Maybe somewhere else he could be Tom, could be someone different.
Paignton had tried to shape him to fit it. He loathed it. And, though it would keep on trying to change him, he wouldn’t be able to change it. And yet it was only a place of human beings, as complex and as violent as any other. But no other owned Newt. The only thing to do was leave.
Paignton offered no jobs, no future, no hope. Newt couldn’t grow beyond himself in Paignton. He was what he had done, when he knew that he could be anyone and everyone. Not only was he the son of his parents, the brother of his sister, the friend of his friends… he was not only the tearaway who’d smashed through the door of the Northolt, the one who’d beaten up Kip Westlake, the one who’d been kicked about by Joe Elliot, the one who’d… That past hampered all the possible Tom Newsons. The only thing to do was leave.
Yet he wanted to belong somewhere. But not here. Here he despised everyone. Except for those few showmen like himself – providing events for the others to talk about – the easily amused, the easily offended. He didn’t want a secondhand life like theirs; and yet they wouldn’t let him belong unless he became like them. And they were small people who made small profits from their small meannesses, were like so many fat spiders spreading webs to ensnare the visitors, and then sucking them dry. They even gathered their graves about them – new estates on the same layout as cemeteries. They were buried already; and their meannesses, their summer prices, their low wages, all came from their deadly smallness. Tom Newson wanted to be large, to be bigger than his grave – not to cheat and to scrimp.
The only thing to do was leave. Newt didn’t want their stingy grubby lives, their dull humdrum existence; didn’t want to become like those cowed men who worked the same hours at the same job every day, who went home anxious and uncertain to the same house every night, who carried their wives’ shopping bags. He wanted a life away from that – remote, and therefore romantic. The only thing to do was leave.
Yet this was the only life he knew: any other future was like a deep black hole he would have to leap into when school finished. And he wouldn’t have the O-levels for a career that would take him easily away from Paignton. Besides that he didn’t want that much respectability, to end up with a posh Devon accent – putting haitches Heverywhere, heven where they haint. And without O-levels all that was left to him was a building site apprenticeship, shop boy or office boy – here. And a man was his job. So whatever he chose on leaving school he knew that he would be tagged and labelled for life, like the pigs in Newton market had holes punched in their ears. The men in white coats said it didn’t hurt, though the pigs screamed, and their blood stuck like maroon treacle to the farmers’ boots. He had to leave.
Two
Tom could not believe his eyes and ears. It was like one big pretend army. A Sergeant told him that his mummy would no longer wash his undies for him. The other recruits sniggered. All seemed to have stepped out of a comic revue, were playing caricatures of themselves to themselves. Never had Tom met, in such a short space of time, so many fools who took themselves quite so seriously.
First Tom was dismayed by the cringing calibre of the men/boys who had joined this army with him. Wanting to believe, they were all so swiftly conned, all so swiftly became parodies of themselves.
They were issued with identity discs, numbers, Army paybooks, and assigned billets. They then proceeded to collect their uniforms, blankets, beds, and the rest of their military paraphernalia. An officer inspected them, tapped them all on the cheek, and told them all to shave – conferring manhood on them. Most had only a smear of wispy down like a tidemark of suds on their plump jowls; but they were in the army now, and so now they were men.
Corporals and Sergeants tapped the tapes on their arms,
‘That’s what says it, son.’ And the recruits splayed their feet too quickly, and too quickly picked up the slang. (Had they all been taken in by the war movies?) Most shared Tom’s father’s keep-your-nose-clean philosophy, took up the traditions of griping left over from the days of wartime conscription and National Service. These recruits had all joined this army voluntarily.
Tom could better understand the shining-eyed few, scorned by the others, who said they wanted to see some action. And the only ones who thought the bullshit as ridiculous as Tom were those who had joined the army to learn a trade. They didn’t want to be heroes or assassins, just wanted an easy life and some qualifications to take them back to Civvy Street. The slang was infectious.
Again, as in school, they were known first by their surnames. Another West Country boy let himself be called, was pleased to be called, Janner. So did some Irish and Welsh boys take a pride in being called Paddy and Taffy. Likewise Dusty Miller and Chalky White, Spud Murphy and Nobby Clarke: they seemed to want to lose their identities. But then they had escaped from being nobodies at home: Tom had escaped from being a somebody.
The first time all the recruits were allowed out of the training camp together Tom drank himself into a fury and told them in words of four letters what he thought of them, starting with – seeing that they disdained every single woman in the pub – that their sisters and mothers were scrubbers too. And he told them that they fooled themselves that the uniform they wore made them tough; told them that they fooled themselves that the place they came from made them tough. Glaswegians, Geordies, Scouses, Cockneys and country boys all kidded themselves that their incomprehensible accents alone made them fearsome. Even the clever ones disowned their learning; or they used it only to scoff at a weakling’s ignorance. And the few black blokes were at pains to prove that could easily be as coarse and as foul as the white.
Next morning some know-all berk said to Tom,
‘They’d make short work of you where I come from.’
‘You come from there,’ Tom’s straight finger prodded the sunken chest, ‘you make short work of me.’ To not have to fight Tom, to not have to compete with him, they called Tom – as they had in school – a maniac.
The recruits held in awe these who had been in Palestine, Malaya, Korea, Cyprus and Kenya. Though Tom knew intuitively that those who were always bragging of it hadn’t seen any action, that the closest they had come to action had been the brothel at base camp – if they’d had nerve enough to go there. Those who had seen action told only of how easy it was to get killed: they had seen too many whose faces and names they had known to glory in their deaths. And their stories had the smell of authenticity to them, the odd irrelevant detail; or their terseness. It had happened – dead and dismembered men scattered around the mined jeep, one front wheel spinning and spinning. The cold and wet of Korea, the longtailed magpies cackling through the mist in the morning while they counted the dead.
The other recruitschose to believe the long-winded boasts, told in acceptable army style, ‘We had this corporal in B company…’ Such tiny little men, tellers and listeners, soldiers only on their visits home, wearing the uniform when they didn’t have to, and telling the disbelieving lads at home that they wouldn’t last long in the army. In the army they were the victims of every bully in the barracks, their sole victim preoccupation with who had beaten up who, how much had been drunk and how many had been fucked. The greatest danger likely to face any of them was the possibility – remote – of being run over by their own tanks on Rhine manoeuvres. Tom had signed on for nine years. He asked himself what he would do if he left now. Another leap into another unknown? So soon?
All was drills, route marches and assault courses. Although only the fat and the feeble found any of it difficult, there seemed to Tom a conspiracy to make-believe that everything they did was harder than it was. After the assault course Tom asked when they were going to do the assault course. The thick-chested Sergeant said,
‘Right then Superman, let’s see you do it again.’ So Tom did it again – swung on the ropes, crawled under the wires, clambered up the nets, vaulted the fences
‘Still think it’s easy?’ the Sergeant snarled at him. Tom did, and so he was sent to do it again, while the other recruits sniggering trooped on to weapon training.
After his fifth time around an officer came up and asked the Sergeant why Tom was doing it on his own. The Sergeant informed him.
‘Very good Sergeant. Keep him at it.’ So Tom doubled back to the beginning, crawled under the barbed wire, climbed ropes, tumbled over fences.
At first he was fuelled by anger, by a determination to expose and lay the myths they had built about themselves. Like all their other tests of endurance and notions of excellence it had been geared down to the lowest common denominator. And they kidded themselves they were an elite.
Then it became a matter of pride. Then a test of himself, to know his own limits, his own endurance.
‘Had enough?’ the Sergeant said. Tom shook his head. The Sergeant waited – protocol hadn’t been satisfied. Tom took a breath,
‘No Sarge!’ and back he trotted to the beginning.
The officer relieved the Sergeant for lunch. Tom crawled, climbed, and stumbled. The officer didn’t bother to ask Tom if he’d had enough, continued with his rapt study of the flora and fauna that the lower ranks were genetically incapable of appreciating. Tom wheeled around and loped back to the beginning.
Soon after that Tom thought he was close to collapse. Stitch burnt like a wax poultice into his ribs, his legs felt that they could no longer support him, and he prayed that the officer would take pity on him, tell him to stop. Then, like a god breathing fresh life into him, he got his second wind; and his mind became separate from his body. All had the distinct clarity of rainy day brightness. He noticed pains, twinges, his slight loss of balance. But on he went.
When the Sergeant returned from his mess the officer asked him what Tom should have been doing; and when Tom came to attention before him the officer smiled at him,
‘Think you’ve proved your point?’
‘Not yet, Sir!’ Tom snapped back. The officer was annoyed at his patronage being rejected,
‘Right. You’ll do it till you drop. Sergeant!’
Tom was doubled back to the beginning. He hadn’t yet reached his limit, had to know for himself how much longer he could go on. In his life so far Tom had been given no worthwhile heroes on which to model himself, so he had to discover himself for himself, had to find out for himself what be could and he couldn’t do, to find out by experiment what he liked and disliked; discover for himself what was right and wrong, true and false; and so use his own experience to build himself on. As in school he wasn’t interested in sport, got no satisfaction from proving himself temporarily better than others. He wanted only to measure himself against himself – see how many press-ups be could do, the heaviest weights he could lift, push himself into tight corners, measure his reactions. For that reason he too wanted to see action, to know how he would carry himself under fire.
He fell off the ropes once, had to take another run at the pile of logs, snagged his hand on some barbed sire – a triangular tear of pink skin. At times he slowed until he felt that he must stop; and then, from some deep stubbornness within, he pushed himself to speed up again. At times he felt that he must fall asleep as he ran; and a stumble brought him hotly awake. He felt blisters grow inside his boots. He felt them burst. His socks became sodden with the fluid from the blisters. At dusk the officer returned; and, worried that Tom might injure himself, they ordered him back to barracks.
At reveille the next day Tom dragged his aching limbs out for drill, stamped his tender feet. The other recruits eyed him as if a colossus. The Sergeant routinely taunted him. Tom ignored him.
Later that dayone of the recruits hanged himself in the latrines. He had been quiet, indistinct. Tom wished he had noticed him, that he had once spoken to him.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/545469
The Wall
The Wall
by Sam Smith
“How heal the body of the phantom ill,
which started in the womb?”
Tesshu (14th century Japanese poet)
1
Dear Sister Clare,
They suggested that I write to you. What, though, to say to someone dead? What to say to someone who’s never been truly alive?
I know, if I keep trying, I’ll warm to it. Right now, though, I can’t think of a thing to write. Or I can – I can think of lots – but not a starting point.
Ironical this, in light of my recent profession, that I should be in need of this kind of help. My kind of help. Being a provider of that kind of help I am, of course, beyond that kind of help, beyond my kind of help. Which is why I’m writing to you – you don’t exist – I can therefore neither read nor feed your reactions.
So here I am, this time, dear sister Clare…
How to start?
Where to start?
All my life, sister, all that I’ve been, all that I’ve known, has been crowding up to the edge of the future. And that future has always been an abyss, a chasm; and I’ve been looking for a way to get across to a side I can’t see, can only imagine… Looking across at what will be, at what I will be…
Now, suddenly (if suddenly’s the word – this crept up on me like night), these past few weeks I’ve turned my back on the future, on that becoming, and I’ve been looking out over the huge anchor of my past, have been made to feel the sheer iron dragging force of it…
And you are part of my past, sister Clare, a substantial part of it. My present too.
I’ve got my starting point.
I’m an Acceptor now. It came about after the accident.
I was down the hospital all the time. Just waiting. Baby Bonny was killed outright, but Darren lived on for four days more. Never recovered consciousness. Neither did Fay. Although her coma lasted months. (They were talking of replacing so many of her organs that, come the end, just bothering with one didn’t seem worth it.)
In the meantime I was down the hospital lots. Safest place for me to be. Police were in attendance – waiting for their two witnesses to recover. At least to start with. Nobody was going to have a second bite at me in there. And by the time the police were withdrawn I’d taken care of it anyway. Which left me just sat around the hospital day after day.
Marilyn and Ollie, of course, blamed me for the bomb. Angry at me, crying over their mother, they couldn’t stay in the same room for long. (Marilyn and Ollie are grown up now. Were grown up then – it’s only two years ago.)
Bonny and Darren were the babies, which is why it hit the headlines. ‘Mob Bomb Kills Babies’. Their being babies was why they were with Fay when I dropped them off at the garage to pick up the car. Fay was going to take Darren on to playschool. He climbed into the back. Fay did up his seatbelt, then strapped Bonny into the safety seat in the front. Darren being in the back he didn’t catch so much of the blast. Which is why he lived that much longer. The bomb was on the gearbox casing – between Bonny and Fay. Fay, leaning away – over the ignition to start it – seatbelt not done up, door not yet closed – she probably wanted to listen to the engine as that’s why it’d been in the garage – she was blown out of the car. She lost her lower left leg right there: rest of the injuries were internal. Baby Bonny got slammed around inside, wouldn’t have known what hit her.
Nor did I know. I drove on into town thinking what I had to do next, found the police waiting for me when I got home.
This pretending is hard to sustain. This double pretending. Pretending to write to you, pretending you don’t already know, when you, being inside me, already know all these things. (I can write this here: no-one but you and I will ever read it, will ever be able to read it. So I can tell you now, what you already know, that you are inside me. And there is a sense of release in saying this, the unstated. As if aloud.)
You have always been inside me sister. I have carried you from our birth. Every step of the way you’ve been with me. But, for the sake of this exercise, let us go back to assuming that you don’t know. Might not know. Might not. You’ve been gone my forever. When, precisely, did your awareness end?
No. Let’s not go too deep into this. Else I might talk myself out of writing to you altogether. And I miss you Clare. I’ve always missed you. (Stated, here, that’s a new realisation.)
On with the story. As if a story…
Consequence of the bombing was that I was alone in the hospital. I sat and I waited. I read the newspapers. I read magazines. Month after month. I was a hospital fixture.
You know what hospitals are like – all square lines, white lights, plastic seats, half-drunk cups of coffee… I used to sit in the room with Fay and her breathing machines, or outside, smile back at the nurses, drink my coffee, sit beside other relatives new to their tragedy, listen to their stories… And those relatives had to tell their stories…
When, finally, they switched Fay off – not on the day exactly, but roundabout then – one of the nurses, who’d recently been on a grief-counselling course, suggested that I should do it too. She’d been watching me with the other relatives. “To help yourself help others.” she said. I looked for ulterior meanings of course, said that I’d think about it, took her card.
Back in the house, nowhere to go every day, it was lonely. And all so pointless. Mal and Ollie only phoned to abuse me, cry at me – I certainly couldn’t persuade them to ‘accept’. Not even after I’d been on the course; and the tutor had decided that I wasn’t exactly suited to grief counselling – probably because I’ve caused so much of it – but that I would make an excellent Acceptor. Which I am.
Get this straight – I don’t cure people. I don’t set out to ‘cure’ people. (Nowadays the belief that every problem has a solution leads to more problems than any other.) No, I simply try to lead people to an acceptance.
My job (part-time) is to sit in a room with two not-very-soft sofas and help the traumatised come to terms with their pasts. With pasts that aren’t often that remarkable. Just personal.
Each of us, sister, each of us thinks our lives exceptional. By common consent mine is. It isn’t the only one though. There have been other lives like mine. Then there are the outwardly ordinary lives people can lead while beset with the most horrendous histories and guilts, obsessions and bizarre fears… I listen, I wonder, and I accept.
Although a lot of it is beyond me, I’m good at what I do in that room with two sofas. Probably because no-one thinks me ‘good’ in any other sense, consequently there’s no shame in confessing to me. So they confess anything and everything.
Confession is an odd thing. (I’m discovering as I write this.) Many people will readily give the appearance of confession – admitting to crimes, to sins – but will admit to no shame that might be thought, by themselves, to be unconventional. By public reputation, however, I’m a bastard. The frightened, the fantasists, have projected onto me acts of gothic extravagance. Nothing therefore, so the reasoning goes, can possibly surprise me. So to me they can confess everything. Although a few say, “You’ll think a little thing like this silly…” I reassure them not: size is always perception. What I usually open with is, “What happened to you?” And that’s often all that I have to say. And I sit there on my sofa and let them talk.
The relief of some of them, just finding someone in this compartmentalised world they can talk to about anything. Some days it’s like being sprayed with a hosepipe, a flow of words you could duck under.
Although some talkers can get stuck on one detail, one aspect, it’s not often tedious. Even in just these couple of years I’ve had some interesting cases, a variety of traumas – warfare, family abuse, persecution, torture, freakish accidents… Wrong place wrong time is the hardest of all to reconcile. Or, having been the only one to walk away from the wreckage, they have got themselves caught up in the continual self-examination and re-examination of survivors, a constant questioning of the past – why them?
Why me?
You, sister, are my trauma.
You, sister, are my Acceptor. I’m going to tell you what happened to me.
2
Dear Sister Clare,
This is hopeless. I’ll have to tell you everything. It’s the only way. We’ll have to pretend that you don’t already know.
Here is where I spend most of my time. So I’ll tell you about here.
This is my place. My made paradise. The bell-jar of my being.
From where I’m sitting now I can see the lake. It picks up colours from the sky. Changes throughout the day. Produces some odd effects. One showery day the whole arch of a rainbow was upside-down in the lake, but couldn’t be seen in the sky from here.
Overcast now, the lake has the thin blue-white of skimmed milk.
The windows in this room overlooking the lake are from floor to ceiling. I won’t bother telling you about the house though. Except, to get the best views, we had the living room and kitchen put upstairs, the bedrooms downstairs. For the rest… Although Fay and I designed it, although this building bears the molecular imprint of our thoughts, it is not a changing thing, not – like the garden – a living thing.
Like other houses I’ve lived in one learns to live with a house, any house, the way it has become – the crooked curtain, the squeaking door, the whistle and song of the water in the pipes.
Little of that in this house. Here is perfect. And perfection has no character. It is kept perfect by the meticulous habits of a single man, is kept sterile by the domestic clearing-away rituals of a lonely man. (Have no pity sister – loneliness is most often deserved.)
The lake is the flat heart and soul of this property, its liquid crystalline centre. The house we had built at the lake’s upper end. Ideally we’d have liked to have had the house looking down the length of the lake, but that would have meant the foundations straddling the feeder stream, which would have meant us being too close to water and summer’s mosquitos, in which case we might just as well have built at the lake’s edge.
We didn’t. Now, on the slope between us and the top end of the lake, is mostly grass and ground-cover. It used to be lawn; these days though I can’t be bothered to cut it. I got some greylag geese once to keep the garden down, with the idea that they’d double as alarms. But they made a noise all the time – got on my nerves – and I could never tell whether they were raising the alarm or not. And their greasy green goose shit got trodden upstairs and down.
So now, up this top end by the house, I’m cultivating low ground-cover, mostly a deep purple; and down by the lake I’m leaving a long strip of grass for the wild black geese that winter over. They honk, don’t hiss and gaggle. (I am not going to import animals here again. Whatever comes over the wall now will come of its own choice.)
All the rest of the way round the lake is woodland. Willows and alders by the lake rise up to a stand of silver birch, then a dark glinting mass of holly, then a clump of rook-infested cedars. I’ve also got a couple of big oaks here and there, and a few big beeches, some plane trees.
Radiating out from the house are line-of-sight avenues cut through the woodland. In every direction I can look almost down to the wall. The wall encircles the whole garden. Outside the wall is woodland too.
Along the outer edge of the wall, angled out, I’ve got a roll of razor wire. Along the top inside of the wall is an electrified strand. The two alloy gates are electronically controlled, have an independent electrical supply. They are doubled up within their own fence, like in a safari park, so that no-one can slip through with any incoming car, dodge off into the undergrowth. If they managed to get through the first gate they’d have to wait – exposed – with the car. It could be done; but it’d require some nerve.
Between the gates and the house is a low wooded hill. The garden is not overlooked. I have privacy here.
The lake stream is piped under the wall – in and out of the garden. No casual visitors, other than animals, come here unless I want them here. Although I know that I am unable to stop a determined intruder.
I guard here, sister, because here is beautiful, is my made paradise.
I guard this garden, sister, because I am inside it. And there are people who want me destroyed. (Not any one individual in particular who wants me destroyed, just somebody who will one day see me as an impediment. Personality doesn’t enter into my probable demise.)
Each season here, sister, has its delights. Spring especially. In spring, from the house down to the lake, the slope is golden with daffodils. Ripples flowing orange into ripples at sunset.
Or, the rain pock-marking the lake, the daffodils stand, like wet sailors in yellow oilskins, all with their backs to the wind.
Or, from around the other side of the lake, the black glass of the house and the white mirror of the lake seem pressed apart by a fist of yellow.
Within the woodland, apart from the radial sight-lines, are three circular paths. (My only gardening these days – with buzz-saw, strimmer and secateurs – is to keep all of these paths open.) One path winds around the lakeside trees. The next is half-way up to the wall. The third path is just inside the wall.
Along all these paths I’ve cleared glades. Some I’ve planted with yellow, some with mauve and white crocuses. Always a pleasure, every spring, to re-discover them. A glade of sorrel too, one of blue wood anenomes. One glade I planted with corns of candy-pink cyclamen for early autumn. Summers I have two glades of reedy yellow and orange montbretia.
Primroses, cowslips, bluebells; always the wood has something new to offer. In summer it is speckled with birdsong. Squirrels come of their own accord. Or were already here. Sit flicking their tails at me.
I’ve made garden seats here and there, knocked them together out of prunings. I was sat reading on one of those seats last summer and a squirrel stopped on the seat right beside me. I showed it to you. It made a note of our stillness, then went on.
Remember that quietness?
I had a man worked for me once. Not here. He had a record as a hard man. I had him marked down as quietly mad. Was always sober, never shouted his mouth off. He made no secret that he had an allotment. I paid him plenty, but he kept his allotment. Nor could you take the mick out of him – wouldn’t rise to it. One day I was really pissed off. Just pissed off – with everything and nothing. He said to me, “If you want to be happy for a day – get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year – get married. If you want to be happy for life – get a garden.”
He was right. Here, always, every season there’s a delight. A swarm of black and white butterflies rising out of a sun-filled glade. Even orange fungus can startle me into taking notice. Or bright red holly berries, rosehips shouting to be eaten. This is the life you could, you should have had. I have tasted, smelled it for you. Now I’m writing it for you.
Down at the bottom end of the lake there are yellow flags, moorhens and their chicks, the croak of fat frogs, dragonflies like bossy helicopters. And the smell of wet.
The lake is now my only other labour in this garden. Beginning of every winter I take out the punt and grapple, drag the year’s new weed out. If I didn’t the sides would silt up, grow over in no time, and the lake would become just a tiny stream filtering through a tangled marsh. And the lake is central to this place. I worry about the lake when I’m gone.
When I’m gone. When I’m gone, sister, what will happen to all the slowly acquired knowledge of this gardener? To this trial and error of years? Too much by far to tell you. And who would you tell, sister?
You could have come here with me and been safe. You could have danced here as light as the swallows that dip to the lake – each rising spread-tailed from its made circle. Oh life then is almost wonderful.
It is wonderful here. I used to organise treasure hunts for Marilyn and Ollie. They’d disappear for hours, make camps. Freedom for them when we came here. Baby Bonny and Darren never got a chance of course.
Autumn when they died. The sumac across the lake red like a slap, poplars silver and black. Gales ricochet down the pathways, make eddies, which leave tossed heaps of silver, black and gold.
The breath steaming out of our mouths is when we can see we’re alive. I’ve told you this before, on our walks, through my garden.
“See. We’re alive.” You hanging there for a moment, seen through, shapeless.
I’ve just got back from a walk. I went looking for things to tell you. Or was it that, telling you of them, made me want to go and see them all again?
Anyway I found an old seat and shelter I’d made – rustic, to not look out of place – all smashed up. Not as an accident, but out of malice.
Whoever was responsible has been climbing up a big tree outside and coming across on one of its boughs, then transferring to one of my trees. And they’ve been doing it for some time – on both trees are old and new marks. And they’ve deliberately snapped some birch saplings too, have left beer cans lying around. This has to stop. A gun and spade are called for.
“Guest gone,
I stroke the brazier,
talk to myself.”
Shozan (1717-1800)
3
I know you’re there sister Clare.
I know you’re there now; and I know you know all about me. You’ve been there for every act, for every move, watching.
Always watching. Always listening. You know my thoughts. At times you are my thoughts sister.
You are there; believe me Sister Clare. You are there, the original acceptor. You judge nothing. Just see. Just hear. Just know.
How much, though, do you know about yourself? At first-hand? Not through me. How much?
You know my thoughts. Are they, though, coherent enough to tell you?
We are one, you and I. You know, therefore, that I sometimes have to explain myself to myself. I’ll assume – for the purpose of here – that you too live on that level of understanding. I will tell you, sister, about you.
I am the only other human being you have touched. (I won’t count our mother: she was just the noises outside our womb sac – engine drum of her heart, sea-sounds of her digestion and circulation.) You, sister Clare, touched me in the womb. You curled your little fingers around my wrist. (This is not morbid fancy on my part. Our mother had a convex triangular photo, ultra-sound scan, blown up poster-size on her bedroom wall. In the cardboard album of other shots, not so clear, we seem to be embracing.)
You died in there sister Clare. Two or three days before term. (They estimated the two or three days from my birth those two or three days later.) Only I, inside that placenta, knew that you’d gone sister. Only I knew that in your going your spirit passed into me.
How could it have been otherwise? Touching, rotating weightlessly about one another, knees and elbows nudging, heads bumping, we built up in that breathed amniotic fluid our one morphic field. Those thought-lines bound us in there and, regardless of death, bind us still.
Every child born is a new world sister. From day one I had to be both our worlds.
When I was about twelve I came of the belief that I had to live twice as hard, do twice as much, for the both of us. Back then I kissed boys for you. Had to beat some of them to make sure they didn’t tell. They didn’t tell.
I’ve lived my whole life half for you sister – imagining you there, the mirror opposite, seeing out through your eyes at your mirror opposite, myself, cock tucked between my legs.
At our every birthday you’ve been there – in pink party frocks to begin with, jeans and a pout later. (Our mother crying, especially if a crowd.) Now, like me, you’d be tall, good bones, thick hair. How identical were we sister Clare?
Not very. Not once we were beyond the womb. My extinct, my non-existent sister. My anima, my alter-ego, my dead and not-gone sister.
I’ve lived my whole half-life for you sister. From the moment of our birth. Imagine our mother screaming, and enjoying her screams. (I’ve watched her give birth in films – all waxy sweat and hoarse imprecations.) Imagine me pink and plump with life, you grey and blue and small with death. Both of us slapped down there in a pool of crimson blood between her slack white thighs.
Me they put in a perspex crib with a blue blanket. Your tiny body was taken away and put into a small polished coffin. You had to be given a name for the paperwork. Clare your corpse became. Clare your memory became. Imagine all the weeping and the wailing at the service. Made no difference: you were already inside me.
You were outside too, an absence. Something for new people ever after to be told of, in a whisper, “He’s one of twins. She died.”
So you became then, not my companion inside, not my self-watcher, but an external weight, a deadweight, that I had to carry around. You, sister, became like a long blister down my spine – the skin numb and dead on the outside, the malforming weight of the lymphatic fluid inside. Liquefied you. Always there, sister blister, wobbling about on my back, to be knocked against, to get in the way when dressing for a new day. Always there.
Sister blister sister blister sister blister. It only needs one open sore upon a body for the whole of it to feel unclean. Sister blister.
I hated you for dying. You made me different. (Before that is I didn’t want to be like everyone else.) All my childhood, sister blister, you sat on my head like an iron frog. No-one wanted to be friends with me because I was whispered to be not normal, to be not complete.
But I was more than me. I had the ghost of you, sister blister, walking like a mist inside my shadow.
Oh sister I’m sorry I said that. Not your fault. I know now – from watching Mal and Ollie grow – that I was too keen, too eager. My greed for friends, my raw need for them, frightened them away. I had to absorb them, replace you. And when they couldn’t satisfy that need, when they didn’t become you, I despised them, found reasons to despise them.
I did pop the blister of you occasionally sister. Let you drain away into forgetfulness. Usually when we’d moved. But, like with every new pair of shoes you buy, with every new way of life I tried, with every new kind of person I tried to be, up came the blister again. Come the end, sister blister, you were the only thing that moved on with me.
And you, sister blister, you watched that every move. Did you pity me? I felt that you alone were sorry for me. I was sorry for you. I didn’t want you to have died.
I doubly watched the everyday for you – rainbows and sunsets. And I stole knickers and dressed up in our mother’s clothes – for you. I kissed boys for you.
You were there at every kill.
Ours has been a strange life sister blister.
I miss you still.
4
Hillcrest woodland falls to fields, a farm, and onto a small village of old houses built around a stream and a bridge. Woodland surrounds the village. More fields, level now, lead to a railway line hemmed with brambles. Next to it is the circling grey of a motorway junction; and next to the junction the flat shed roofs of an industrial estate. Which leads into a housing estate of squared streets and small box houses, each with its red tile roof. This was once called a council estate, now is defined as ‘Social Housing’. Mostly, though, it is referred to by the name of the area – Hambrook.
Successive town authority’s have tried to rid Hambrook of its local reputation. Lately they have installed ‘traffic-calming’ slalems and speed ramps. (The boy racers have changed to scramble bikes.) Before that the council funded, block by block, extensive renovation – older houses even being knocked down and rebuilt in modern styles, along with a package of modern socio/psychological know-how – different pattern paving and bricks delineating the territory and responsibility of each house, each yard.
Poverty though creates its own stigmas; and where elsewhere anti-social behaviour and poor services would not be tolerated, here the people – devalued – do not have sufficient self-respect to dare complain. So cars continue to get dismantled on the pavements, music blares into the night, the buses run late, dogs crap where they will, and the inhabitants’ children practise burglary on each other.
Newcomers, seeing the state of the place, and being poor believing they don’t matter, they accept this as the status quo and adapt their behaviour accordingly. (Or, unable to suffer the unsociable behaviours of their neighbours any longer, their complaints ignored by the understaffed police and the underfunded council, their frustration erupts into violent confrontation. Which leads to retaliation, which adds to the reputation of the neighbourhood.)
Fat Steve Flinthorn lives on the corner of one of the outermost boxes, almost not part of the estate. He parks his work van almost in the drive, the back end level with the two brick gate posts. The gates being open he watches over it from his lounge and bedroom windows. (Though most teenage trouble on the estate is down near the iron-grilled shops, where the skateboarders and bmx-ers use the speed-bumps as take-off ramps and the girls hang around outside the two phone boxes and the video shop with its three arcade games.)
Steve Flinthorn’s son, Dan, no longer hangs around outside the shops. Steve doesn’t know where Dan hangs out now. Steve doesn’t know where Dan is now. Mary, Dan’s mother, is worried. She has made Steve go out this evening and look for him.
Short and tubby, unused to walking these streets this time of day, Steve feels unable to approach the quick boys on their hard rattling skateboards. Most, anyway, are younger than Dan: Steve doubts that Dan would even speak to them. And, lest they foulmouthed accuse him of impropriety, Steve doesn’t dare approach the skinny girls sucking on their cigarettes.
Steve buys a packet of liquorice allsorts in the video shop. He goes the long way home, walks slowly eating the sweets.
Mary Flinthorn is a cleaner in an old people’s home. Most evenings, the dinner cooked, washing-up done, she sits curled on the sofa, works through her usual week of soaps and quiz shows. This evening she walks around with a yellow cloth nervously wiping at already clean windowsills.
“For chrissake siddown!” her daughter Julie snaps at her. Julie is crouched in the one armchair. “Little sod’ll be home before you know it.”
Julie is eighteen, hair permed and bleached, voice flattened, is doing keyboard skills and business studies at Tech. She is three years older than Dan. Like him she despises their dithering parents.
Mary flinches from Julie’s hard voice. Leaving the living room Mary goes up to the front bedroom. On the way, noticing herself doing it, she wipes the yellow cloth over the varnished bannister.
From the bedroom window Mary sees Steve squeezing in the gateway past the white van. She goes fumbling and bumping quickly back down the stairs.
“For fuck’s sake.” Julie says at the noise.
Mary ducks her head, grabs the front of Steve’s thin jacket,
“Where is he?”
Steve, pulling against her grabbing of his jacket, seems to give a shrug.
“No-one seen him?” Mary’s ginger-blue eyes try to read his face.
“No-one.”
“No-one?”
Pulling from her he shrugs again. Mary releases his jacket and, taking a deep breath, makes herself upright,
“That’s it then.” Holding the yellow cloth like a gauntlet she takes it into the kitchen and throws it into the stainless steel sink. “I’m going to the police.” She opens the stair cupboard for her coat.
“Now hang on.” Steve blocks the kitchen doorway.
“Don’t be so bloody daft Mother!” Julie shouts.
“I know something’s happened. I know.” Mary pushes her arms into her coat.
“You don’t know. You can’t know.” Steve shakes his head, “Look he…”
“I’m going!” Mary shouts at him, chin puckering, tears reddening her eyes.
Steve doesn’t know what to say to stop her, can only repeat what he’s said before,
“What if it’s something to do with the police? What if we drop him in it?”
“Then it’s his own stupid fault. He should’ve let us know. And at least they’ll tell me. Won’t they? They’ll tell me.” Coat on Mary stares at Steve standing in the kitchen doorway, doesn’t seem to know how to get past him.
Dan, at fifteen, has already made several court appearances, appears to hold the courts in contempt. Looking older than fifteen, bigger already than Steve, he’s been caught selling solvents and cigarettes to younger children, twice stealing and selling bikes, has even been in a crashed stolen car. Steve is frightened of what his son may do next. He wasn’t like Dan at his age, doesn’t know what made Dan like it. He does know that Dan doesn’t want him or his mother going to the police.
“You certain that bike he’s got is his?” he asks Mary.
“Says he traded it off some kid in school. Give a dog a bad name…”
“Dad!” Julie shouts from her living room chair. “Dad!” louder.
“What?” Steve doesn’t want to leave the doorway.
“Go round and see his friend, wossisname. He’ll know where the little sod is.”
“Who’s that?” Steve asks over his shoulder.
“You know. Thingy.”
“Who?” Steve asks Mary.
“She means Martin Thurlow’s boy.”
“They still friends?”
“Always sneaking off together.” Julie shouts. “Coupla poofs.”
If Dan was here now he’d be shouting an insult back at her – about disgusting things she did with boys – and Julie would go running up the stairs screaming swear words at him, telling her mother and father to go wash his dirty fucking mouth out. Mary would turn up the television. Steve would go into the back garden. Or out into the garage to work on the mustard yellow mini he is slowly restoring. (When it is finished, children left home, he and Mary are going to drive to Scotland in it.)
Dan isn’t here to shout at Julie.
“You go round and see Martin Thurlow.” Mary starts to take off her coat, “If his boy don’t know where our Dan is, then I’ll go to the police. Go on.”
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1134431
Eviction from Quarry Cottages
One
The green vale floor is walled by sets of hills, also green. Some of these enclosing hills are the sides of plateaux, steps up to other levels. Some of the hills are long spines, like screens, dividing one section of the vale from another. While other of the hills are mere knolls.
A broad motorway snails through this section of the vale floor. On either side of the grey motorway, among a geometry of fields, streams and rivers wind towards and away from bridges. Where rivers and streams themselves cannot be seen their courses are marked by rounded alders and tall poplars, crack willows and the occasional oak.
Major and minor roads go over the river bridges; and on over those other bridges that are angled across the black stitching of paired railway tracks. The railway tracks pass through two towns. Between and beyond the brown-white speckling of the towns are ribbon-clusters of villages, with — here and there — single houses in their own gardens, and the grey roof acreage of working farms.
This section of the vale floor is not wholly level. Small dips and rises grant or obscure vistas. On one partially wooded hillock, near the southern hills, is a pair of cottages eye-magnet white. In front of the white cottages are long sloping gardens. The backs of the cottages are dark with algae and moss. Letterboxes are set into the thin back doors, cold to the touch. Directly across the much repaired road a bank of black-green ivy and flat-leafed ferns rise up to leaning over boughs of ash and spindly hazel. Just visible at the top of the bank is the barbed wire of the field beyond. This time of the year the trees over and around the two cottages still have their leaves, although yellow-edged. The fields are cropped pale.
A narrow road rises up out of the surrounding vale fields and goes up under the woods behind the cottages.
Along this road, between box-clipped hedges, comes a mud-splashed landrover. It stops in the pull-in at the sloping rear of the two cottages. The driver takes his time getting out.
He is a large man, purple face, white hair, legs seeming short under his belly. He looks over the back of both cottages. Being in under the woods, getting little direct light, the white walls of the cottages and even the windows are spotted with black mould.
In the man’s stance is indecision.
A movement in the cottage to his right has him go to the back door and tap.
A thin woman, late thirties — white blouse, straight skirt — saw him coming, has quickly answered his tap. Their low-voiced conversation is accompanied by frowns. She puts a hand to her mouth. He partly raises both hands in a gesture of helplessness. She, lips tightened, nods.
In his turning away from her, there is an unwillingness. He goes towards next door as if walking against a wind.
Mrs Bryant, the thin woman, leans out from her doorway to watch. Mr Parsons winces at the sharp clack-clack of the brass dolphin knocker on this second door.
The woman who opens this door is younger and rounder than Mrs Bryant. Her name is Bridget. Mr Parsons calls her Bridget. Behind her in the kitchen is the tinny sound of a radio talking.
Her polite smile of greeting at Mr Parsons becomes fixed in her initial glance over him.
John, her husband, has joked about this businessman farmer’s perpetually clean wellingtons and boilersuit, a working uniform which in winter is accompanied by a tweed jacket and a flat cap. Today the jacket and boilersuit are coated in mud, the thickest smears still dark wet, the thinnest drying pink.
This normally puffed up man, stands there meek today in his farmer’s reek of diesel. John manages the farm shop, comes home bearing the taint of carrots, pepper scent of dried soil. Parsons, reluctant this day in this volunteered for role of bringer-of-bad-tidings, seems to be hiding inside himself.
“There’s been an awful accident,” he says.
Two
Bridget was helping Sarah with her homework — a project on the environment. The school has a wild garden, pond and birdtable; runs a wastepaper collection service once a month, proceeds going to the school funds. Sarah is skinny, black-haired and ten.
She is picked by a sleeve from the living room floor, is told by her mother — the words flying down about her — that she is to go next door to Mrs Bryant while she goes to the hospital with Mr Parsons to see her father.
“Can’t I come with you?”
“No. He’s only got the landrover.”
“I’ll sit in your lap.”
“No. Take your homework with you.”
Sarah finds herself stepping over next door’s threshold, Mrs Bryant closing the door behind her and looking down with a kind face. Mrs Bryant’s face is usually drawn and sharp. She is either silent or she shouts at her sons. Or she laughs loudly at them. Public laughter. Laughter meant to be heard, all behaviour acceptable so long as it is in an advert somewhere. Both sons are taller than her.
Sarah stands in the gleaming kitchen. This is different from her kitchen. Here is white strip light. Next door is a yellow bulb; and pans hung from hooks, brown clay pots with dried flowers in them; strings of onions knock against the back door. In her house washing machine and fridge don’t match, and the fridge has magnetic letters stuck all over it. Here everything is in the barefaced cupboards. Worktops are clean.
“Come into the living room Sarah.” Mrs Bryant practises saying her name.
Her own name is Maureen. She wears synthetic materials, skirts and blouses flat and pressed, hair permed and curled. Bridget ties Sarah’s frizzy hair back, wears bulky clothes in dull colours, cotton pleats and folds.
This living room has a fitted fawn carpet, matching black velour three piece suite. Next door they have shined floorboards — patterns of yellow new among brown old — and rugs like islands; an old settee covered with a blanket of knitted squares, two odd chairs and a red beanbag. Here Ben sits in an armchair, legs stuck out before him, watching a soap. Next door soaps are disapproved of.
Ben is seventeen, drives and polishes his own yellow car, takes it to pieces, revs the engine, plays the stereo loud.
“Sarah’s come in with us for a minute,” Mrs Bryant tells him. “Till her mother gets back from the hospital.”
Ben glances over to Sarah, lifts his chin. He is doing a mechanic’s course at the college, has hands ingrained with oil.
Having lifted his chin, in lowering it, Ben nods slowly, without smiling. He does that in his car — looks at people and, without expression, nods.
Embarrassed now by his silence, by his not asking what has happened, though she won’t tell him in front of Sarah, Mrs Bryant asks Sarah if she has eaten.
“I had some tea thank you.” Sarah remembers her manners.
A clump-clump above is followed by a banging on the stairs, mirror-placed to her house. She recognises the sound from next door — but louder here — knows now that it is Simon. (Alone in the cottage it can sound like someone on her stairs.)
Simon is a year younger than Ben, has a new motorbike. He opens his eyes wide to Sarah whenever he sees her. He used to have a mountain bike, now does show-off wiggles on his motorbike.
Wheeling off the stairs he nearly bumps into her.
“Clumsy git,” Ben says as Simon steps around her.
“Least I don’t,” Simon whisks his hand across the top of Ben’s gelled hair, “reverse into six foot walls.”
Ben ducks aside and snarls, “Least I don’t run out of petrol.”
“Now you two,” Mrs Bryant, as is her custom, says.
Mrs Bryant is also making eye signals over Sarah’s head to Simon. He’s trying to read her message, gives up. Sarah feels small and in the way in this house.
“What you doing here?” Simon asks her.
Sarah has never before been spoken directly to by either of the sons. Simon’s voice is softer than she can remember hearing it before.
“There’s been an accident.” She uses her precise school voice, “My father’s in hospital.”
“Why don’t you help Sarah with her homework?” Mrs Bryant makes more faces at Simon.
“I’ve nearly finished it. Thank you.” Sarah lies. Her mother is of the opinion that their neighbours — with their motorbikes and cars, and their trips to Cash’n Carry — are not environmentally friendly. Her mother has a bicycle with a basket.
“Sit you down now.” Whatever Simon says he says in a different accent. “Take the weight off those feet. Watch the telly.” That was one of the voices Sarah has heard him use before.
Still holding her books Sarah sits on the sofa. She obediently looks at the telly. Ben hasn’t moved. Simon and Mrs Bryant go whispering into the kitchen.
This side of the house has a different smell too. Sarah can’t put a name to it. New?
Through the window the view of the darkening vale — single orange streetlights, clusters further off — is the same as from next door. The curtains are different. Straighter. And this window does not have a stained glass mobile turning before it, nor a rainbow sticker bottom right. Dusk condensing into night is as other evenings.
Three
Parsons is not a man Bridget is used to talking to. She has said too much about him, as employer and landlord, to be at ease in his company. Prior to this they have exchanged only pleasantries in passing. Not that she is now given a chance to talk.
On getting into the landrover she was told to do up her seat-belt.
For the first mile, feeling fat and incompetent, being bounced along in the closed space of the cab, she can’t find the buckle under her.
“Have you got it yet? Got it?” Even when he’s not saying anything Bridget can sense the disapproval emanating, along with the damp earth and sweat smell, from the bulk of Parsons. He, although blue is still in the dark sky, is intent on dipping and flicking his lights on every dusky bend.
Time she has the seat-belt buckled Parsons is concentrating on the junction into the main road. Once through the evening queue, however, and out into the stream, up through the gears, he has to talk.
“What happened?” Bridget’s voice is loud in the whining cab.
Parsons stays hunched over the steering wheel and his belly.
“John,” he says, pauses breathless, “came out to help us with the swedes.”
John often leaves the yard shop to help out on the farm. Mrs Parsons or the girl in the office will answer the shop bell. In the holidays Sarah helps in the shop. Often though John simply shuts up shop and goes, says he enjoys the change.
Parsons’ profile is silhouetted turn by turn by the passing cars. Bridget notes the ‘help us’: Parsons would not have been doing anything other than watching.
“A rotor arm broke. One in a million chance.” Under cover of a space of dark she feels him glance towards her. He fixes his eyes back on the road. “One in a million.”
“How is he?”
They come under the first orange slipping-by shadows of the streetlights. The hospital is this side of town.
“End of the rotor arm hit him. Caught him here.” He takes his hand from the steering wheel to point to his chest. Puts his thick-fingered hand back on the steering wheel. “One in a million chance.”
He pauses for the roundabout. No traffic. Goes on.
“John got knocked off, went under the cropper. Time Pete saw it, time Pete could stop, John was in a bad way. Has taken the ambulance crew — fire brigade were called out too — had to lay down planks so they could jack the cropper up… Took the ambulance crew two hours to get him out. Then I came straight up…. straight up to get you.”
Parsons dithers over where he is allowed to park in the hospital grounds. The day staff having left there are many empty spaces.
“Here,” Bridget tells him.
Parsons is about to object — the space has a blue-on-white sign saying reserved — but the urgency of Bridget’s command overcomes his respect for things official.
He is slower than her getting out of the cab, seems to be having difficulty remembering which key locks the door.
“I’ll go on.” Bridget starts towards the double-doored entrance.
“Wait!” He quickly locks the door. “They said they’d meet us here.”
“Who?” They walk together.
“Ambulance crew.”
Nervous, Parsons takes charge going through the double doors, bends to the glass panel of the receptionist.
“I’ve brought Mrs Cox in,” he quietly tells her.
Having just looked up from a screen the receptionist takes a moment recognising the name.
“I’ll fetch a nurse,” she says. Bridget’s mother is a casualty receptionist in a London hospital. This receptionist is younger and slimmer.
“How is he?” Bridget asks Parsons. The broad back is turned from her,
“Ah. Here they come.”
The ambulanceman and woman still have mud on their tunic trousers, smears and spots on their shirts.
The small nurse is clean in blue and white check.
“This way Mrs Cox,” she says.
Bridget is not led, as her feet expected, to the cubicles behind reception, but along a corridor beside them. On a ward, she thinks. They turn into another corridor. The nurse, in flat black shoes, is walking quickly. Parsons has on flapping wellingtons. Bridget is wearing trainers, catches up with the nurse.
“How is he?”
The nurse, small and dark-haired, frowns up at her, glances back to Parsons who, seeing the look coming, has puffing lowered his white head. In memory’s eye Bridget sees, among the last batch of signs pointing this way, one saying Morgue.
“He’s dead,” she says, hears herself say it.
The three professionals, steady-eyed, watch her, wait to gauge her responses. Parsons, in leaning one-armed against a corridor wall to catch his breath, avoids meeting her eye. As he had avoided looking at her on the way over, as he had avoided telling her. From the ambulanceman’s one glance his way he had been expecting Parsons to have told her.
In that bright hospital corridor, listening to her own breath coming hard and fast from the hurrying, she is angry at Parsons’ duplicity, at his cowardly fear of telling her, at his shameful pity for her now. She sees too the professional pity of the little nurse and the ambulance crew; and in that moment she decides that she doesn’t want their pity, that she will not allow them to pity her.
Four
The nurse reaches out a set of clean pink fingernails towards Bridget’s forearm. The ambulancewoman is coming up beside her. Bridget steps away from them, onward.
“How long has he been dead?” Facts now are what matter to her. The ambulanceman catches up,
“We had a pulse right up,” he skips a pace to keep step with her, “right up until we got him in the ambulance.”
Bridget was then helping Sarah with her homework: “He was unconscious?”
Bridget is setting the speed now, leading the way, watches visiting others look at the mud caked on Parsons and on the ambulance crew, watches them politely/furtively look away.
“Can’t say for certain,” the ambulanceman is choosing his words, “but I’d say he was unconscious before he hit the ground.” He is being kind.
A policeman and a policewoman — a world of professional pairs, Bridget thinks — are waiting outside the door that says Morgue. (Hospitals have labels for all human conditions and body parts.) The policeman is standing. The policewoman is sitting on the edge of a plastic armchair, starts to rise on their approach. A vase of dried flowers here, on a low table.
The policeman asks Bridget her name; and it is they who accompany her, with the nurse, into the morgue.
The body — and it is already a body, breathless under a white sheet — is on a trolley to one side of the room.
“Would you like to see him?” the nurse asks, head to one side.
Bridget knows that they want her to see the body in order that she identify it. A dead person cannot fill in forms, answer questions. Bridget cannot say this, nods. The nurse lifts the sheet back, a bedmaker’s movements, fingers and thumbs.
She folds the sheet back only as far as the shoulders. Globs of mud have flattened the curly hair. The thin face — John’s/not John’s — is empty of life, of John’s animation. Gone the spring of John’s energy. She has seen him asleep many times — snoring, drunk, ill, in fevered dreaming — had known that he would awake. This will never awake.
“It’s John,” she says.
“John Cox?” the policeman, pedant of necessity, says. The policewoman’s expression hardens. The nurse, Bridget feels, wants something more from her. A tear? Angry outburst?
All the professionals are watching her again. She looks over the sheeted length of the body. The fatal damage must be all around the chest area. She can see cuts and rips in the check shirt, part of its collar blood-soaked.
“John Cox,” she says. The words provoke no response in herself, unstop no tears, spark no anger.
“We’ll clean him up later,” the nurse says. Bridget lets herself be guided back into the corridor, other people passing incurious.
Five
Ben shouts at something on the sports news. Sarah, still sat on the edge of the black sofa, knows that the jeering is aimed at Simon. Simon however doesn’t respond to Ben; instead looks along the sofa and pulls a silly face at Sarah.
Mrs Bryant looks in from the kitchen and says to Ben, “No need for all that noise.”
“She’s heard our fucking noise before.”
“Language young man.”
Ben growls a sneer.
Sarah is frightened now.
Simon, waiting until his mother is busy again in the kitchen, goes crouching silently across the floor, puts his head over the back of Ben’s chair and whispers, “Language young man.”
“Fuck off!” Ben swings his fist back but Simon has returned bouncing to the sofa.
“You two!” Mrs Bryant shouts from the kitchen.
Sarah knows that Ben doesn’t like her being in his house: that he doesn’t like her, probably because his Mum and Dad don’t like her Mum and Dad, and she knows that if she’s seen to side with Simon he will like her even less.
To shut them both out she concentrates on a chocolate advert. On a breakfast cereal ad.
Ben stands: “I’m off.” He stretches, steps around the chair, looks at neither Sarah nor Simon. Taking his car keys jingling from his pocket he opens, then slams, the back door.
“Ben!” his mother complains.
“Got no style.” Simon grins at Sarah and, scuttling across the fawn carpet, he slips into the chair that Ben has just left.
Ben’s car goes screeching off up the lane. Simon grunts, changes channels, changes again, comes back to where he started.
The back door opens. (The back doors of both cottages face the dark lane. Both cottages only use their front doors for going into their gardens.) Mr Bryant looks through the kitchen to Sarah on the living room sofa. Like Ben Mr Bryant never changes his expression.
The front of his blue boilersuit has had mud over it. Must of it has been brushed off. His dark eyes look briefly into Sarah’s as he steps across the kitchen to shut the door between.
Sarah listens to Mrs Bryant’s higher note questions, Mr Bryant’s deep rumbling replies. Simon goes out to the kitchen, is told — in signals unseen to Sarah — to close the door. Simon’s voice asks a question. Mrs Bryant, whispering, replies. She has started crying. Mr Bryant rumbles. The door opens. Mrs Bryant is saying, “…keep Sarah company.”
Simon smiles down on Sarah, lifts his eyebrows. He drops into Ben’s chair in front of the telly.
“Your Mum should be here soon,” he smiles around at her. Nods and smiles.
“Yes,” Sarah says.
Six
Outside the brick-fronted hospital Bridget slides onto the back seat of the police car. When the WPC slides in beside her she puts her hand over Bridget’s knuckles on the seat. An act of seeming compassion from the smaller slighter woman: but, with this evening’s clarity, Bridget knows it to be a professional used to entering the personal space of another. In a police manual somewhere it says, ‘….the comfort of physical contact….’
On the pretext of asking the driver if he knows the way Bridget, leaning forward, removes her hand.
“Might need some help when we get closer,” the driver says into his mirror. Two internal mirrors in the police car.
“Did you see where it happened?” Bridget turns to ask the WPC.
“’Fraid not. The team there had to go on to something else. In a field wasn’t it?”
The WPC has put on a bright sympathetic face: mirrors have told her that she is pretty. Bridget consciously restrains her tongue from asking where else they’d have been harvesting swedes. They are leaving the hospital by the back entrance. Less traffic now: rush hour over.
“What was your husband? Tractor driver?”
Bridget isn’t going to be treated like some hick.
“Ran the farm shop, helped out on the farm when needed. Will there be an inquest?”
“Yes.”
“Post mortem?”
“Didn’t they say in the hospital?” the driver asks into his mirror.
“May have done.”
The doctor was in a hurry, spoke quickly. Her husband is dead forever: that living man had no time. She signed the statement identifying John, was led out to these two police offers by the talking doctor. Bridget dips into the line of his patter: “Yes….”
John’s body will be cut open, a Y from the shoulders to the crotch, stomach contents examined, arteries dissected…. (Bridget had started her nurse training when she fell pregnant.) The top of John’s head will be removed, brain examined for embolisms…. That is no longer John.
“Cases like this they usually do an autopsy,” the WPC says. “Have to be certain of the exact cause of death. Could have been a heart attack, for instance, which caused him to fall off.”
This pretty WPC had known that John hadn’t been a tractor driver, had just been trying to make conversation.
And this is how they begin to wriggle out, Bridget tells herself, this is how they begin to shift the blame onto the victim, make it John’s fault for having been killed.
The WPC comes, in the dark back of the police car, to represent all those who will seek not to take responsibility for John’s death. This policewoman who wasn’t there and Parsons who was.
“John was healthy in every way. Never seen a man so energetic. Doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke.” In the middle of speaking Bridget felt her voice almost catch on tears, hardened it by the end. “Left here,” she tells the driver.
Her half of the cottage is grey and lightless.
The WPC has hurried around to her side of the car, is holding the door open. Bridget had difficulty with the seat-belt buckle, doesn’t need her help now.
“Do you want us to come in with you?”
“Better if I tell my daughter on my own. You two’d frighten her.”
“You sure?”
Bridget knows that she is wrong to despise this pretty WPC for wanting to be helpful.
“Thank for your kindness.”
“Wish we didn’t have to.” The WPC’s fingertips touch Bridget’s forearm. Bridget looks down on the fingers, feels nothing.
“We’ve called your GP,” the driver, deepvoiced, tells Bridget. “He said he’d be round to see you and your daughter. Just in case you need him.”
In the eight years she has lived here Bridget has hardly seen her doctor. When she has it has been mostly for Sarah’s childhood illnesses and inoculations; and then, being a big country practise, she more often saw a locum or a nurse than her registered GP.
“Fine.” She accepts it: they all have their protocols.
As the police car reverses back to turn in the side lane — white lights among the red — Bridget walks forward to face the Bryants. Now that she is to be the bringer of bad tidings she too is slow like Parsons.
* * * * *
Both Byants are in the kitchen. Pete has been eating.
“I’m so sorry,” Maureen puts forward her hand, fingers outstretched.
“Where’s Sarah?”
“Mummy?” Sarah opens the door from the living room. “What’s happened?” She looks pale up at Bridget.
“Your father’s been killed.”
In the cottage, sound of the telly ignored, Simon turns in his armchair to look.
In that moment’s stillness Sarah’s eyes seem to grow larger. Then she lets loose a moan, which ends in a wail, and she dives into the maroon folds of her mother’s embroidered top.
Sarah sobs. Bridget’s arms are around her, one hand stroking the back of the dark head.
“He fell under a machine,” Bridget, murmuring, tells her. Her daughter is allowed to show emotion, to weep: in her new state she is not. “A part of it broke, knocked him off. Simple as that. One in a million chance Mr Parsons said.”
Pete, turning away, mumbles, “More like two.”
“Oh dear. Oh dear.” Maureen is sniffing. “What’re you going to do?”
“Cope,” Bridget tells her.
“Did he hurt?” Sarah asks from underneath. “Did Daddy hurt?”
“Did he Pete?” Bridget asks.
“No.” Pete shakes his head, closes his eyes. “No. He was out when he hit the ground.”
Parsons said that Pete hadn’t seen John fall and that’s why John had gone under the cropper. Pete is lying now to be kind to Sarah. Or to himself. There has to be an inquest.
“Doubt if your dad knew what happened,” Pete is speaking to Sarah. “One second he was there, next he was gone.”
Bridget is looking in surprise at this man’s kindness. He is, she tells herself, after all a father and a husband much like any father and husband. Is his roles. No, she corrects herself, Pete is not like John. John was a wiry energetic man, had ideas, dreams, laughter. Pete will carry on bouncing along glum-faced in his tractor cab, sour belly in his lap.
Sarah is sobbing anew.
“Come on love,” Bridget coaxes her. “Let’s go home.”
Seven
Walking the few steps through the dark Bridget is made awkward by Sarah clinging to her. Reaching in she has to twist her arm back upon itself to reach the light switch.
In the yellow light the kitchen’s bare wood floor, after the tiles and carpets of next door, makes the house seem more desolate than solely the idea of John’s not coming there anymore.
“Put your homework away.”
Detaching herself from Sarah, Bridget switches on the living room light. Now the clutter of her house — rugs, plants, motley furniture, pictures of the walls — is welcoming after the showpiece sterility of next door.
She listens to Sarah carrying her homework up the stairs and into her room. The house feels empty. To make noise she gushing fills the kettle, click-switches it on, consciously takes only the one mug off its hook, china scraping on metal.
Looking down on the tea-bag in the mug she tells herself to be wary of false sentiment. John regularly worked late, worked most weekends: it is often just Sarah and herself in the house. The two of them already have their own life organised.
Sarah has come back downstairs, is stood looking at John’s jackets hung on the wall behind the back door. The sleeves are shaped to the bend of his arms.
At ten Sarah is her parents. They are her experience. Her own self, her own life, is viewed through them. The pain, physical, is right down her middle. An internal amputation. Half of her is gone.
Her parents are her home. The jackets behind the door don’t make sense being there without her father fitting himself into them. She wants to cry out her pain again and again. It escapes her thoughts in a groan.
A snot-smudged trickle of tears is running down Sarah’s blotched cheeks. Bridget shuts down the irritation rising within her: Sarah isn’t being false. Bridget knows, if she didn’t have so much to think about, she too would probably be weeping.
Sarah has noticed that she isn’t: “Aren’t you upset? Why aren’t you crying?” She wails as she comes clinging onto her again.
Bridget wraps her in her arms, lays her cheek atop her silky black crown, soothes and smoothes her. Then, murmuring Darling Darling, she gently holds her away, looks into the red puffed eyes: “I’ve got to take charge now.” Bridget brings her hand edgeways up in front of her face. “It’s just us two and I’ve got to make the right decisions. And there’s a lot of decisions for me to make.”
The kettle has boiled. Bridget detaches herself from Sarah.
“I’ve got to phone Granny and Grandad Cox, tell them. I expect Granny Cox will want to come down tomorrow. They’ll both be upset. Will you stay off school and help look after them?”
Sarah nods, her eyes going distant, thinking of school, her changed status there. Her difference. A future going on.
“I’ll need to sort out some clean sheets for them.” Granny and Grandad Cox will have Bridget’s bed: she will sleep on the sofa. “Help me clean and tidy through tonight. But let me phone first.”
Still Bridget puts off picking up the phone, goes to tell Sarah where to find the bedding; returns, wanting to be distracted, to the phone, hating herself in this role of bringer of bad tidings. Good news is her speciality — “Guess what?… John’s this, Sarah’s that…”
She begins this phone call with the rehearsed, “I’ve got some terrible news…” John’s mother calls John’s father, there follows distant crying, questions, more tears, more questions…. Arrangements are made there and then for them to leave in the morning; John’s father, like Bridget, making plans to stop himself thinking.
Her own mother and father too, instinctively, want to come. She tells them not, that John’s parents will be here and that the house will be too crowded, best if they come down for the funeral, stay on for a few days afterwards…
Bridget doesn’t want her mother and father here watching her. With John’s parents she can be the carer, buffer them: her parents though will be fussing about her; and it will be all too easy then for her to give in to weeping. She doesn’t want to consider herself, to examine her own feelings, as her father is now leading her to think of herself even on the phone. Nor does Bridget want to sound as if she pushing her father away.
The doctor’s coming gets her off the phone.
The doctor is normally a round jolly man, in the surgery calls both Sarah and her Now Young Woman…. Tonight he’s solemn. Bridget watches his clean hand reach out to squeeze her round forearm: “I’m so very very sorry….”
He has only been to the cottage once before, when Sarah had a persistent fever and Bridget was afraid that she might fit. He had seemed impatient then, annoyed at having been called out. Now he sits on their blanket-rucked sofa and gives the impression of having all the time in the world. He asks Bridget what happened, listens to the story with a sad shake of the head, with a sigh offers her some sedatives — should she need them…. “…and there are numerous counselling services, self-help groups….” From his square briefcase he takes some pamphlets, lays them by the big spiky succulent on the round table.
“I need my mind clear.” Bridget holds up her hand to the sedatives.
He nods, in solemn mode; and, done with Bridget, turns to Sarah who is rubbing at her red eyes.
“And you Young Woman.” His arm goes around her shoulders, pulls her thin little body towards his bulk, “At a time like this it’s the most natural thing in the world to want to cry and to keep on crying.”
Rigidly uncomfortable as she is under his unaccustomed arm the mere mention of crying has Sarah instantly blubbing again.
“There’ll be no other man as important in your life as your father. Not in the same way. Go on, just you let it all out.”
The phone, on the shelf by the kitchen door, bottom of the stairs, rings. Bridget answers it. John’s brother. He begins by saying that he can be with her in four hours. He lives in North Wales. She tells him there’s no need.
The doctor signals that he’s leaving, points to the pamphlets, presses a foil strip of two tablets into her hand. “Should you need them,” he stage-whispers.
Bridget flicks him a quick smile, nods her understanding.
“Sorry?” she says to John’s brother. “The doctor was just leaving.”
Sarah stares across at her mother from the sofa, tries to work out who she’s talking to. Sarah has only met her Uncle Grant once.
“No need,” Bridget tells him. “Sarah and I will manage….”
smashwords.com/books/view/8661
Everyday Objects Repurposed as Art
Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art
by Sam Smith
Part One: The Second Son
Wrong: crooked, curved, twisted, bent: not according to rule: incorrect: erroneous: not in accordance with moral law: wicked: not that (thing) which is required, intended, advisable, or suitable: amiss, unsatisfactory: mistaken, misinformed: under, inner, reverse…
Hope: to cherish a desire of good with some expectation of fulfilment.
Chapter One
Brought to a standstill at an angle across the short drive is a high black 4×4. The driver’s door has been left open, as has the nearside rear passenger door.
Morning sunlight, this last week of an English July, is reflected off the black car’s polish. The brick-paved drive is that of a small suburban semi.
Summer sunlight is not being reflected off the faded red of the much older car parked in the brick-paved drive. Both of the red car’s nearside doors are open.
“How?” the man says.
His outstretched arm, palm upwards, indicates some of the bedding and a camping stove not yet part of the red car’s floor-to-ceiling contents. Visible in among the bedding are the already packed shoulders and handles of some 6 holdalls.
The man is thickset and bearded. An exasperated twist to his mouth has brought his moustache down over his lips.
The woman is standing where she – marching around the 4×4 to pull open the rear passenger door – stopped herself, about a metre or so before him. Yet still she strains towards him, her anger only partially manufactured, both fists held close to her chest.
“Your problem,” she says, and waits.
A thin woman she has shaped hair and a horizontally striped top in two shades of blue. White cotton trousers are tight around her buttocks and loose about her ankles. Gold lamé sandals complete her summer wardrobe.
Behind the red car is the white edge of the open garage door, the oil-stained floor of the garage grey-going-dark. The plastic front door of the house is wedged open with a curled-up doormat.
The woman has never lived in this house.
The semi’s small front garden has a few trailing bushes on either side of a tiny strip of yellowing grass. On either side in this curving around road the gardens have green lawns and flowerbeds with red and orange flowers in patterned rows.
“You can’t do this,” the man says. “Turn up unannounced, expect me to take him.”
He has on a crumpled, once maroon t-shirt. Baggy shorts, cracked white trainers and no socks complete his summer wardrobe. His small belly pushes out the front of his t-shirt.
She is early-to-mid-thirties. He is late fifties. She appears to be all-over tanned, too even to be natural. His unclothed arms and legs are brown and stringy.
The boy in the rear of the black 4×4 is about 9 years old. The fingers of his right hand are moving over the Pad screen in his lap. He is wearing a yellow sports shirt, blue shorts and rubber sandals a paler blue. The black seatbelt remains diagonally across his narrow chest.
“You contribute fuck-all else.” The woman’s is a whispered shout. Her eyes are so wide open that the whites are forming complete circles. “You will take him!”
“How?” The outstretched arm again indicates the packed car. “Could’ve told me beforehand.”
“If you had a phone to answer I might’ve. Then again, if I’d told you beforehand you’d’ve been long gone.”
The man lets out a slow sigh accompanied by another beard-twitch grimace. He bends to look in the car. Straightening he asks the woman, “He got much stuff?”
“One small bag.”
“I’m going camping. He’ll hate it.”
“Do him good. Might develop a backbone.”
He has always disliked the way she so casually disparages her own son.
“His stuff?” he says.
“Come on!” she shouts over her shoulder. “Now!”
Chapter Two
He had been so diligent in his planning. Nothing slapdash, not a wrinkle overlooked. Bar this.
This time he had determined that, start to finish, every box would be ticked, every base covered, not a stone, not a pebble left unturned.
And here he is with his unplanned son squeezed into the back seat, luggage squashed to the roof all around him.
The boy is in the same diagonal car relationship he had with his mother. Except that in this car his father can only catch glimpses of the boy’s face by leaning forward over the steering wheel to see around the corner of a duvet come loose. Miles back the man had given up trying to engage the monosyllabic boy in conversation. From a recent glimpse of the boy’s head he knows that he has returned to moving his fingers over the Pad screen.
‘Not the boy’s fault,’ the man has been impressing on himself. His own. Not even, he tells himself in the spirit of self-appraisal that he has latterly laboured under, his ex-wife’s. His own oversight, his own previous ignore-it-and-hope-it’ll-take-care-of-itself cavalier, don’t-bother-me-with-petty-details approach. One email, one text would have told her that he had already left on a trip, had been unavailable for paternal duties.
He nonetheless, present circumstances having brought her to mind, curses his ex-wife for the shallow, avaricious cow that she has become. Or always was and he had chosen not to notice.
He doesn’t want to think about her. With so much at stake he doesn’t need his thoughts jumping about like this. She is the past and good riddance. Today is the beginning of the new. And he is uncomfortable with his son being in the back seat.
Luggage being packed into the front seat and the boy squeezed into the back could attract comment, which is what so much of his planning has been designed to avoid. But having had the boy’s overnight bag thrown at him he had begun making space for the boy where there had already been a gap; and with his head in and out of the car he had been able to show his back to her, who – having got her own way – was half-heartedly making polite conversation.
“Thought you were in a hurry to go off somewhere?” he had pushed by her on his way to fetch a sleeping bag and pillow for the boy.
Having dug the sleeping bag out from under the old blankets at the bottom of the wardrobe, asking himself again why he hung onto blankets in this age of duvets, he saw her making her goodbyes to the boy in the drive below. Not with a hug, but gripping the shoulders of his yellow sports shirt and spitting words into his face.
He had waited until she had gone before he came downstairs and then he had, having already begun, carried on making space for the boy in the rear of the car. To not delay leaving just in case she returned for something forgotten, asked more questions.
***
To not be conspicuous, concerned that the extra pillow pressed flat against the windscreen might invite comment, he has kept to the motorway slow lane.
Although the tax disc is still valid he doesn’t want to draw attention to this deliberately uninsured car. With his nearside wing mirror dangerously obscured one police DVL check will make of his more than the car of just another camper, car packed to the gills. Next service station he’ll have another go at rearranging his load.
The grinding along slow lane has him thinking again about the boy’s mother. He has come to suspect that she actually likes him being a failure, in that it justifies her having gone off with a ‘success’. That way she can excuse his lack of parental contribution while allowing her to make a show of all that money can buy her, albeit that little of that money has been earned by her.
Recalling her shout-whispering at him between the two cars, the solidity of her upper half, he wonders if his successor has paid for a breast enlargement. He can’t recall her boobs being that pronounced. Or was her bra packed with a pair of those silicon fillets? Whatever she’s had done it won’t be genuine; she and his successor are all image, all show.
Chapter Three
The service station is one of those with a high glass front that seems to curve over at the top. At the base, behind a low green hedge, is a collection of silver metal chairs and tables. Cars are parked in double ranks stepping up and away from the high glass front.
The man has pulled into a space some distance from the glass front, where the ranks are piecemeal.
He tells the boy to go to the lavatory: “We won’t be stopping at another.”
The boy is reluctant to go to the lavatory on his own. He got out of the car expecting to be taken into one of the cafés. He hadn’t thought about going to the lavatory. But now that his father is telling him to go on his own among all those people anxiety is actually making him want to pee.
“Have to be a gateway if you don’t go now,” his father tells him. The boy, he knows, hates peeing out of doors.
The boy stands beside the open car door shifting from foot to foot, his Pad clutched flatly to his stomach.
“You won’t need that.” His father takes the Pad and tosses it onto the boy’s vacated seat. The backs of his fingers brushed the boy’s flat stomach; their first physical contact since the boy’s arrival.
“Off you go. While you’re gone I’ll rearrange the load, put you in front with me.”
The boy has seen too little of his father of late to know how to argue with him, especially over something so minor as going to the lavatory.
The man has opened the front passenger door and has pulled out the extra pillow he packed for the boy, has put it on roof of the car. He starts to struggle with one of the holdalls. There are six in all in the car, two he has acquired over the years, the other four recently from charity shops and car boot sales.
That holdall free, when the man leans back into the front of the car he stops to watch the boy slowly make his way through the first double rank of cars, and pause before quickly crossing the open space between the ranks.
Straightening up outside the car the man looks for the nearest wastebin. A van with a low trailer pulls up across two parking spaces. On the trailer are two mud-spattered trial bikes.
The man thoughtfully bends to pick up the Pad off the rear seat and, Pad in hand, he stands in the embrace of the car door watching.
The van’s driver, and what looks like his teenage son, set off through the ranks of cars towards the high glass front of the service station. His own son’s round head and carefully cut hair is at that moment edging between the automatic door set in the bottom of the glass frontage.
The man had deliberately parked some distance from the entrance to give himself time for such as this. When he is confident that no-one is watching him he walks across to the trailer and jams the boy’s Pad down between the inside of a rubber-spiked motorbike tyre and some mud-ingrained webbing. Quickly returning to his dull red car he glances back once to see if the Pad is visible. It isn’t.
Nor has his son yet reappeared.
He continues emptying the front passenger seat of bag and bedding and repacking the rear of the car. Until, with the rear door squashed closed, his son still not in sight, he considers going to the lavatory himself. He doesn’t though want his son to go rummaging around in the car for the Pad, or for them still to be here when the bike duo possibly discover the Pad stuck on their trailer.
He takes up position in the driver’s seat and, just as soon as the boy draws near, he starts the engine. Leaning across to the open the passenger door he says, “Belt,” before the boy has even dropped onto the seat or closed the car door.
The boy fumbles two-handed with the belt clip, a sheen of moisture on the backs of his pale hands.
“Didn’t you dry your hands?”
“Queue at the driers.” As a toddler the air-flow driers had frightened him. “Where’s my Pad?” They are leaving the service station.
“Oh. Sorry. Back there.”
The boy’s glancing to the crammed rear, Pad last seen on the seat, shows him to believe his Pad to be in the back of the car and accepting of that.
For his part the man is pleased that he hasn’t had to actually lie. The Pad is certainly ‘back there,’ but in the carpark and, if undiscovered there, on its way to places unknown.
Chapter Four
As the car picks up speed the boy leans forward to dry his hands on the blower. Settling back, blower aimed away from his bare legs, he looks to the flat fields on either side of the motorway.
A large lorry begins to overtake them, its wheels bigger than the car. The car is in the slow lane.
“Mum always drives in the fast lane.”
The man stops himself saying, ‘She would.’
He doesn’t want to get himself agitated thinking about her. Instead he recalls his son’s actual words, and he reminds himself, not having lately been in the company of young people, how they use meaningless – no, not meaningless, inexact – words like ‘always’ and ‘never’. Although in this case his ex probably does always drive in the fast lane. He can imagine her all the while fuming at anyone who dares impede her. Fines for speeding almost cost her her licence when she was with him.
“We’re turning off,” he tells the boy, as if turning off is the reason for their being overtaken by yet another lorry.
What hasn’t overtaken them, and the man has been looking out for it, has been the white van with the bikes on its trailer. The pair being petrol heads he assumed the elder to be a fast driver, is relieved that their destination appears not to be near his own. Unless that is the pair have taken a leisurely break – they certainly hadn’t been walking fast – might yet be hurtling towards this same slip road.
Roundabouts and exits negotiated, their next road is long and straight. As soon as there is no oncoming traffic a line of cars and vans overtakes them. No bike trailer.
“What happened to the radio?” the boy says. Where a radio should have been is a black hole in the dash, its plastic edges chipped.
“Got taken out,” the man says; and is again pleased that he hasn’t lied – in that he has given the impression that the radio was removed by someone else, a thief or a previous owner of the car.
He took the radio out himself. Eventually. At first he had tried levering it out with a screwdriver. But so much a part of the dash had the radio been that, come the end, he had in anger resorted to a lump hammer and cold chisel.
With no radio, no Pad, the boy looks out at the flat fields, most with corn stubble freshly cut. A few fields have sheep grazing down the greener avenues of stubble, some have bands of rooks walking in among the stubble, one has round bales like pieces of yellow swiss roll. No machines in sight.
Ditches between fields are straight green lines, pink-edged either side with balsam, the sides coming together in the quick distance. Some of the stubble is in lines at right angles to the road, some lines parallel. In the fields still gold there are twin tracks where the sprayers have been. As they zip past the lines make patterns. He falls asleep.
He was awake late last night not listening but aware of his mother and his stepfather shouting downstairs. His mother was doing the shouting. Darren’s had been a low placating rumble. Although each rumble had got her shouting again: “You could’ve fucking told me!” The boy’s guess last night was that Darren hadn’t wanted her to go with him and so he hadn’t told her until the last minute.
The boy’s head has sunk forward and to the side the deeper he has slept. He will awake with a cricked neck. But because the car is so packed the man cannot let the front seat back. Nor does he want to stop the car to make room and so wake the boy, have him again ask for his Pad. He drives on, slows to go through a village of red-brick houses with brown-tiled roofs.
Speeding up he smiles to tell himself that it was a bit of luck spotting that bike trailer. He wonders where the boy’s Pad will end up. Or will it fall out and smash on the motorway somewhere, no-one the wiser?
Chapter Five
The boy wakes when, with a bump, they turn off the road onto a rough track of tyre-flattened shingle. The man is leaning forward, his beard seeming to touch the top rim of the steering wheel.
“We there?”
“Almost.”
The boy starts a yawn. The backward movement of his head has him go, “Ow!”
“Neck hurt?” the man asks without looking at him.
“Slept funny.”
The boy moves his head from side to side like a boxer between rounds.
Although the sea isn’t visible the sky has that bigness from being near the sea. The grey shale and shingle too has the sparse sharp grasses and low creeping weeds that only grow by the sea.
The man drives off the track and onto the shingle itself. Stones crack and crackle under the tyres. The boy grabs hold of his door handle and his seatbelt as one of the front wheels hits a boulder. The man steers away from another large rock.
“Where’s the site?” The boy looks across the grey, weed-spotted shingle to a dun line of grass-topped dunes. Away to the left is an expanse of yellow reeds.
The one time the boy has been camping before was in France. There had been trees and tables. His mother had laid out salad and wine, and had been upset by mosquitoes. Darren had gone for a walk on his own. The boy had said that he was hungry. When he had said it again his mother had shout-whispered into his face, had made him cry. His crying had made her angrier.
“No campsite,” his father says. “We’ll park up out of sight,” he pauses while he steers around a shallow dip full of dried thistles, “in the dunes.”
“You been here before?”
“Once.”
“Were there mosquitoes?”
“No.”
The crackling of the stones stops when they reach the grey-yellow sand of the dunes.
The man appears to relax, is not crouched so close to the steering wheel.
Other cars have been here: a faint twin-tyre track curves further in between the dunes. Long thin leaves of blue-green grass grows out the dune sides and along their tops. The boy can see part-sand-covered drink cans and used BBQ foils, a knotted carrierbag lumpy with takeaway cartons.
“Slept in the car last time,” his father tells him. He doesn’t tell him that it wasn’t this car. He sold that two year old car to fund this trip.
The twin-tyre track seems to expire in some sloping up sand. What looks like a sand-disturbed footpath goes up between the dunes.
“This’ll do.” The man turns off the engine and ratchets up the handbrake. “Let’s get unpacked.”
Chapter Six
“Take your stuff.” Pulling the boy’s overnight bag and rolled sleeping bag out of the car the man hands them one after the other to the boy. “I’ll bring the bags.”
“Where’s my Pad?”
“The man has his head back inside the car, mutters as if in response. He emerges pulling at two large holdalls.
“Come on.” His nod indicates the path of disturbed sand and as he starts off he heaves the handles of one bag up over his shoulder.
The boy hesitates a moment, looks frowning to the car as if about to go in search of his Pad, but, realising that his hands are already full, he follows his father to the path between the dunes.
The dry sand slips under the boy’s feet, knocks the inner bones of his ankles together.
His father too is having trouble keeping his balance. The holdall that his father had over his shoulder is now at the end of his arm and the bottoms of both bags are making tracks in the steep sides of the dunes. Where his father’s feet have been are more like sand craters than footprints.
The path of shifting sand ends in a beach of large grey pebbles. There is sand again down near the green-blue lapping sea, but sand of a flat and a darker kind.
As he steps onto the oval pebbles the boy pauses to look along the shore.
In both directions the shore’s slight curve disappears into a silver haze. The light ochre of the dunes follows the curve. Away to the right are a few black ribs and the partial spine of a one-time boat. To the left, and further away, are the part remains of a more recent boat, blue paint peeling in maps from its plyboard sheets to expose the white underneath.
His father has let drop his two holdalls on the flat dark sand, just above a thin line of dried-black seaweed.
The oval pebbles sliding one over the other now have the boy’s knees knocking together. Or his legs slipping apart he almost falls over backwards.
His feet on solid sand at last he reaches his father.
“We camping here?”
“Not here,” the man distractedly tells him. “But stay here. And keep an eye on the tide. Move the bags back if it comes in anymore. Should be going out soon. I’ll fetch the rest of our stuff.”
As his father goes hurrying back up over the pebbles and into the dunes the boy sits on one of the holdalls. He takes off first one blue sandals, then the other. He knocks out the fine sand from the dunes and brushes grains from his soles before he buttons the sandals back on.
Looking again along the shore he wonders where it can be that his father is going to pitch their tent. Seeing a lone razor shell he reaches forward to pick it up and, part standing, looks for the shell’s other half.
The tideline of seaweed isn’t all black: some of the seaweed has bobbles a goldy-brown. And in among the seaweed are small white sticks and broken straws. Further along in the tideline is a length of blue frayed rope, a green plastic bottle, and further along still he can see what looks like a large piece of orange plastic.
His father comes back with another two holdalls. Pausing to catch his breath he seems to consider the boy’s blue sleeping bag, but says nothing.
“Where’re we camping?” the boy asks.
The man grins down at him, “You’ll see. Another trip.” He turns to go bustling back up over the slipping-about pebbles and into the dune path.
While he is gone the boy finds a cuttlefish bone, a scallop shell, a piece of broken oyster shell with a rainbow glisten on its smooth inside… Hands full he returns to make a pile of his finds atop his bag, arranges them, from the stark white of the cuttlefish bone in degrees of darkness to the blue-black of half a mussel shell.
His father comes down the beach dragging behind him a deflated boat with two more holdalls on it. As he comes closer the boy can also see in the flat boat a coil of rope and a pair of oars.
The man is excited now, chuckling.
Some of the man’s happy face is to hide his worries about the boy’s reactions to the boat, and some to hide his concerns about the state of the wrinkled, deflated boat.
With the back seats down the boat had been carefully folded flat under all the bags. Then, when his ex-wife had arrived, he had in panic, just wanting her to go away, had turned a corner of the boat back so that he could pull up a car seat in the back for the boy. He hadn’t wanted her to see the broken open dash.
So far, in getting the boat out of the car, he hasn’t found any obvious tears in the boat’s thick plastic or any perishing along the lines of its new creases and folds. Leaks will become apparent when inflated.
“So let’s start pumping,” he tells the boy.
“Where we going?” The boy looks along the coast.
“There.” The man points out to sea.
“Where?” The boy can see only blue-grey water rising into silver haze.
“See that dark speck? That’s it.”
“A lighthouse?”
“Sort of.”
The man, smiling, has crouched to attach a double-barrelled footpump to the boat via a flexed pipe that has a connect half-way along. The half from the pump is striped green and black, the half to the boat orange and black.
Standing upright the man starts to pump. With each downward tread air hisses into the boat. Which remains wrinkled and flat.
The possibility of a puncture is still the man’s concern. While to the boy the boat doesn’t look big enough. He can make out a seat under the two bags already in the boat, and under what looks like a folded table and chair. But only the one seat.
“Where will I sit?”
“On our stuff. Make sure,” the man speaks in gaps between treading the pump, “your sleeping bag,” the boat sides are becoming rounder as they fill, “stays dry. I’ll go back,” he changes feet, “and have a look for some carrierbags.” He is rocking from side to side now that he is using his left foot. “There’s some in the well,” he pauses, “behind the driver’s seat.”
The round rim of the white and blue boat is expanding. A thin white rope runs through built-in plastic loops around the blue rim..
The boy is looking worriedly to the dark dot on the horizon.
“We’ll be all right.” The man briefly touches the boy’s shoulder. “Space enough in the boat. Just hadn’t planned for the two of us.”
When he had first brought the boat he had been concerned that it had been, if anything, too big. Then, like the boy, given that it would have to take six holdalls and bedding, that it would not be big enough. So he had blown it up in the closed garage, had stacked in it all that he would be taking, and he had even pretended to ship the oars.
Still pumping he watches the boy press his shells and a veined pebble into his bag.
“Here, take over the pumping while I fetch the rest, get some carriers for your sleeping bag.”
The boy tries to press the pedal down with one foot as the man had. The pedal doesn’t budge.
“Jump on it,” the man tells him.
The boy stands on the pedal, and down it goes. He gets off, the pedal rises, and he stands on it again.
The man hurries back up across the pebbles to the path. The boy gets off, stands on the pedal; gets off, stands on….
On his return with a handful of squashed carrierbags the man presses down on the inflated rim. Picking up the two heaviest holdalls he places them either end of the boat.
“Here, let me,” he tells the boy. “You done well, needs just a bit more.” He starts pumping fast. “You take over the packing.”
As he pumps he directs the boy’s loading of the boat: “Three bags up the front, three behind the seat. That’s right. Use the yellow bedroll for your seat.”
The boy struggles to two-handed lift the heavier of the remaining holdalls.
“That’ll do.” The man kneels on the boat’s rim. It doesn’t give. The pump lets out a hiss as it is disconnected. The boat’s valve is pressed in.
“Good job,” he congratulates the boy on his packing so far, then lowers his head to listen for any escaping air. “Good,” he says. “Get as much of your sleeping bag as you can into the carriers. Make sure you’ve got a comfy seat. I’ll shut up the car.”
Again the man goes hurrying up over the pebbles to the sand path, stops to glance back to the boy truculently pushing the holdalls about in the boat,
“So far so…” he tells himself, and looks to the white sky. Weather forecast was correct. Cloud building from the west and, having shed its rain on landfall, will here be overcast for the remainder of the day and possibly tomorrow.
When the man arrives at the car this time he pulls off the replacement petrol cap and throws it into the flat back of the car. After one last check around the inside of the car he takes the rag-ended iron pipe lying there and, with the flat of his hand cushioned by the rag, he smashes the pipe down through the flowback valve.
Pulling the pipe out and turning it around he then pushes the rag down into the petrol tank, draws it out dripping and stinking of petrol. The rag is wiped in a big smear over the flat back of the car. Resoaking the rag in the tank he then flops it over a tyre, then over the two front seats. Popping the bonnet he replenishes the rag and slops petrol over the engine.
The man then spears the pipe into the petrol tank, this time with the rag uppermost. Stepping away from the car he looks back to the way they drove in through the dunes, glances to the path. No-one to be seen.
Standing away from the car he strikes a match, shelters the flame and steps towards the car. The rag ignites, blue in the first nano-second, then orange flames dripping to the sand. Another lit match is dropped onto the front seats.
Pocketing the box of matches the man wades fast as he can along the soft sand path and stumbles out onto the pebbles. The boy is perched upright in the boat facing him.
Throwing out a laugh – no going back now – the man means to go leaping but slips and goes skittering down across the pebbles. Arriving on the hard sand for balance he grabs the thin rope that encircles the boat and using his accidental momentum he pulls the boat around so that his son is facing the sea. Bunching to the strain and pulling the boat after him he goes splashing into the sea.
His original plan had had him taking his trainers off before wading out with the laden boat. But no matter, he tells himself, he can dry them later.
Now that the boat is wholly afloat the boy has both arms outspread, hands gripping his nest of bags. Waist deep the man, thinking to distract him, asks, “You did pack everything?”
“All,” there is a squeak in the boy’s voice, “that was there.” His eyes widen with fear as the boat lifts over a slight swell.
“Then let’s start this adventure,” the man says and heaves himself up over the side. Reaching across to the circling rope on the other side he clumsily pulls himself splashing into the boat.
Chapter Seven
Although he did his best not to splash the flinching boy still he sees him staring down with horror on his wet legs and sports shirt.
Thinking it best to get them under way – he can offer reassurance then – the man avoids eye contact, busily concentrates on clipping the oars into each rubber cleat.
His wet backside sticking to the seat he gives three long pulls on the oars to take them away from the shore. At the end of every stroke something in one of the bags behind presses into his back. Pulling the oars inboard, drips running down along the crossed shafts, he twists around to rearrange the bags, turns back to his son’s rigid face.
“Forgot to ask,” he says as he pushes both oars back out through the cleats, “if you get seasick?”
The boy doesn’t seem to understand, just stares round-eyed at him. His eyes that round he looks like his mother.
The man gives several strong pulls to get them under way. The rubber boat dips with each pull, rises as the oars are lifted dripping from the green sea, dips again as the man – his fists almost coming together – pulls the blades through the water.
“How’d you get across the Channel?”
“Not in a little boat,” the boy squeaks, which makes the man chuckle.
“But you weren’t ill?”
“No.”
The man nods, sees that the boy’s arms aren’t so rigid. He looks back to shore. No sign of smoke or flames. He imagines he can see the wavering transparency of heat rising, fumes possibly, but hard to tell for sure with the movement of the boat.
The boy, getting used to the rhythm of the oars, lets out a big sigh and draws in his arms. Checking the sleeping bag to see if it has got wet he lays it across his lap.
“We there yet?” the man asks him.
The boy looks past him. Their destination is already no longer a dot, is now a dash, thick at the top like an apostrophe.
“You’re going away from it.” The boy points over the man’s right shoulder. “There. You need to go there.”
“Handy you came,” the man says as he pulls harder on the left oar. “Last time I had to keep turning around. Got a crick in my neck.” (He had kept turning around. He hadn’t got a crick in his neck.)
A ball of black smoke rises up from behind the dunes. The man thinks he may have heard the muted thump of the petrol tank exploding; and another fist of worry unclenches. So many plans laid over so many weeks. Now the parts, even the unforeseen – the boy – all dropping into place like tumblers inside a lock.
The tyres will keep pumping up dirty smoke for an hour or more.
“Keep me on course,” the man says, not wanting the boy to look behind.
“You’re OK,” the boy tells him.
The boy tries to focus on their pin-size destination. Which is not easy with the boat rising and falling on the slight swell and combined with his father’s oar strokes which don’t quite coincide with the swell. The crowded smallness of the boat, the largeness of the sea, the green depths below the thin rubber skin of its bottom don’t have him feeling safe.
What should he do if the air leaks out?
He won’t think about that.
The last time he was afloat was in a small dinghy with Darren and his mother. They put him in a lifejacket too big for him – it part-covered his face. They kept laughing at him, then got angry with him when he cried because he didn’t know where to go in the boat when they shifted the sail.
When he had been told this morning that he was going to his father’s he had expected nothing more than a couple of days in front of the telly while his father puzzled on his being there and left him alone to get on with his work.
Now here he is, afloat. Nor does their destination look like an old lighthouse. Old lighthouses, the ones he’s seen in children’s picture books and on telly, have been either all white or they had horizontal stripes. This one looks neither white nor has stripes. This looks a dirty smudged green.
Behind the boy the smoke has thickened, roiling up into the still air.
‘So much planning,’ the man silently congratulates himself, his moustache and beard knitted together over his mouth.
‘So much planning.’ Pleased with evidence of the car afire he pulls with renewed vigour on the oars.
‘So much planning,’ he almost says through his tensed lips. Just the one unplanned contingency – his son. His son an altogether unplanned contingency, from the unplanned pregnancy to the unanticipated divorce.
That though was the past, the long ago and now disowned past. He has changed. Now he makes plans. And how he has planned, almost every contingency allowed for.
For instance if there’d been people in the dunes this weekday (unlikely) he’d have waited until they left, or until dark. He even took into consideration this outgoing tide to make the rowing easier. The plans also allowed for a five day weather window, a low front coming in towards the end of next week.
So many preparations… From keeping his eye out for a road verge car for sale, and then having the cash to pay at the end of the man’s drive. And the man, getting his asking price, not questioning the false name and address he was given. With the radio removed the man is confident that, given the age of the car, there will have been no other tracking devices within it.
Recalling his wife’s sneering at the car he is pleased with his own mock taking offence, defensively calling the car an about-to-be-classic. So she gave the car a second appraisal – silly gullible woman who can be sold anything – when it was a just-about-driveable piece of tin.
The memory of her looking has him smile at the boy.
“We there yet?” he asks him.
The boy has been watching the line of drips left by the lifted oar, then the surface swirl of the oar blade’s deep pull, the line of drips…
He looks up.
“It’s not a lighthouse,” he says.
“A tower,” the man tells him.
Back on the shore is now a column of black smoke, with heat from the burning car pushing the smoke ever higher. A light onshore breeze, but hardly a breeze, leans the column landwards.
The man concentrates on rowing.
With the car gone he is untrackable now. The boy’s Pad is who knows where and his own mobile he has left at home. Not that anyone that the man knows would think of contacting him by mobile. He has only ever used it when travelling, in case of breakdown. Even then he only switched it on the once, and then to no good use: he was out of signal.
On principle, disliking the coy acronyms and abbreviations, he refuses to text.
Once he stopped gripping tightly onto the bags the movement of the boat no longer jerked his neck this way and that. Moving with the boat the boy didn’t so much start to feel better as not to be so frightened. Relaxing as best he could in the small boat he gave himself up to whatever lay ahead.
Now though his father has started breathing heavily and his face looks to have swollen, the beard seeming to stick out from his cheeks and chin. Concerned for himself and for his father the boy, who has been looking at the tower, asks, “What’s wrong with its top?”
The tower has by now come to fill the boy’s horizon – one huge cylindrical pillar of green-streaked cement with a ragged hat of concrete.
The man pulls both oars inboard and leans forward across them to catch his breath.
“Used to be two towers. Platform across the top of both. One broke off. Well, was broken off. Think it got damaged first in the Second World War. Then weakened by storms. The Navy got worried it might bring the other tower down. So they cut it apart. They used the damaged half for target practise. There’s a film of it – torpedoes, bombs, tracer bullets, the works. Now what’s left is a hazard to shipping. The standing tower hasn’t been used by the Navy for about fifty years.”
“What did they use it for?”
“Started off I think as a Second World War defence. Might have had guns on it. Anti-aircraft most likely. Loads of airfields on the flat land here. Don’t know if the guns were ever used in earnest. I think it was afterwards, during the Cold War, it got used for spying. Don’t suppose though you know much about the Cold War? Won’t be doing that kind of history when you’re eight.”
“Nearly nine,” the boy says, an almost automatic response.
“Nine. When you’re nine. Anyway in the Cold War they did a lot of spying. Used this tower then. But when they got spy-planes and satellites, they gave the tower up. You’ll see.”
His father starts rowing again.
One of the man’s first pieces for radio had been on Cold War electronic espionage. A technology long superseded. And as with so many of his projects once it had been aired he had been researching and writing his next piece and the details of the last drifted out of accurate recall.
The onshore smoke is now a pencil-dark funnel, must be visible for miles inland. Should he have waited until dusk before torching the car? But would have had to use the night’s ebb-tide then.
He can’t see any fire brigade blue lights.
The End of Science Fiction
The End of Science Fiction
‘All religions promote passivity … The followers await a saviour or a nirvana – the other side of the bargain if they follow the rules. Which is why all governments are keen to promote religious rather than secular education …’ Barry Popieluszko. Happy Robot Goes Cosmic: Fire Dragon.
Monday: 10:22
(Scene: Nineteen suited Ministers around the oval table of the Cabinet room. The Prime Minister looks, in turn, at each of the nineteen faces around the table. Circuit completed, he pauses for their full attention.)
Prime Minister: The universe is about to end.
(Members of the Cabinet wait for the Prime Minister to continue. The Prime Minister appears to think that enough has been said. Some Ministers glance across to one another. The Secretary of State for the Arts laughs nervously. Eyebrows are raised, mouths turned down in nonplussed expressions.)
Secretary of State for Trade & Industry: Is that official?
Prime Minister: It’s authoritative.
(The Prime Minister defers to the Secretary of State for Defence. The Secretary of State for Defence has dark blue rings around his eyes.)
Secretary of State for Defence: As some of you may have been aware (pause), an argument has been in progress for some time now about the nature of the universe. That the universe was expanding has generally been accepted by most scientific bodies for a good many years.
Secretary of State for the Environment: Was?
Secretary of State for Defence: Was. (Pause.) It is no more. As most of you must be aware, during the last few years evidence has been gathered which proves that the universe has started to contract.
Prime Minister: As I had it explained to me – it’s like a piece of elastic stretched to its outermost limit. That elastic has now snapped at both ends and is rapidly contracting.
Chancellor of the Exchequer: This, surely, is common knowledge. Been in the papers for a year or more. Any number of learned books on it. Why should it suddenly concern us here?
Home Secretary: Because no one until very recently realised the speed at which it was happening. Informed opinion was of the belief that the contraction would take place at the same speed, and over the same duration, as the expansion of the universe.
Prime Minister: Back to my elastic analogy. Imagine holding a piece of elastic between your hands, pulling it as taut as you can, then releasing both ends. It snaps towards the centre.
(Members of Cabinet are silent.)
Secretary of State for the Environment: So what will the effect be?
(The question is directed, with hostility, to the Secretary of State for Defence. Secretary of State for Defence has been looking down at a stack of papers on the table before him.)
Secretary of State for Defence: Until now (addresses far corner of room, near ceiling), until the contraction began, we could see only those galaxies less than ten billion light years distant. Any further and they were travelling from us faster than the speed of light and were consequently invisible to us. Those galaxies are no longer retreating from us. Hence, in the last couple of years, the plethora of new star sightings. We are now witnessing something that began at least ten billion years ago. The universe is now contracting. The stars that were at the extremes of the universe are now racing towards its centre. Where they have collided with other stars they have formed bigger stars. Consequently, as the contraction increases in mass, so it will increase in speed. When it reaches us, our sun, our solar system, our world will be incorporated into that mass. And swept away.
Secretary of State for Education: The world will end?
Secretary of State for Defence: Yes.
Secretary of State for the Environment: When?
Home Secretary: In about six, seven days.
(Exclamations from around table. As babble dies, questions are formed, begun, given up.)
Secretary of State for Health: Can we be certain?
Prime Minister: Yes. (Defers to Secretary of State for Science & Technology)
Secretary of State for Science & Technology: Reports have been coming in from all over the world. Americans and Chinese have agreed. The Russians only differ on the timetable.
Chancellor of the Exchequer: What do they say?
Secretary of State for Science & Technology: They think it will be less. Three or four days. The difference is probably due to their sightings having all been taken by satellite.
Foreign Secretary: Whom do you believe?
Secretary of State for Science & Technology: Does it matter?
(Silence.)
Secretary of State for the Environment: May I ask how long the Prime Minister has known?
Prime Minister: For certain? Only two days. The idea takes some getting used to. I’m not sure, yet, that I truly believe it.
Secretary of State for Employment: There could be no mistake?
Prime Minister: I had a look at the stars last night. All is as predicted. Everything is on schedule.
Foreign Secretary: Ours or the Russians’?
Secretary of State for Science & Technology: Both. The difference in the prognosis comes after the third day.
Secretary of State for the Environment: So what do we do?
Prime Minister: Nothing.
Home Secretary: I envisage a certain amount of public disorder.
Prime Minister: We neither confirm nor deny it. That way those who want to believe the world is about to end will believe it. And those who don’t, won’t. And they will carry on as normal. So, hopefully, some public services will be maintained.
Secretary of State for Trade & Industry: Couldn’t that be construed as being rather irresponsible?
Prime Minister: The reverse. If we publicly confirm it, then everyone immediately gives up hope. And everything will collapse in a shambles. If we deny it I doubt that anyone will believe us. All they’ve got to do is go outside and look at the stars.
Chancellor of the Exchequer: Who, if not us, will tell them?
Prime Minister: The media. The Americans are already breaking the story. British media are bound to follow suit. And don’t tell me that we can suppress the news. What powers do we use? D-notices? Declare a State of Emergency? If the papers are convinced that the world is about to end in six days what can we threaten them with? The DPP? When would the case come to court?
Foreign Secretary: What of the American government?
Prime Minister: Noncommital. Declining to comment. To avoid chaos. Their one policy now is not to incite panic. I believe that is also the only course open to us. If, like the Chinese, we had control of our media, then … (The Prime Minister holds open his hands.) Things being as they are, however, were we to ban newspapers, close down television stations and, despite that, the news still got out, then our actions could only be construed as confirmation of that news, and that would guarantee public disorder.
Secretary of State for the Environment: Don’t the people deserve a lead from us, their government?
Prime Minister: (Sighs.) Lead them where? Our sole duty now is to prevent a complete breakdown in public order. We can do no more. To confirm the prognosis will be to incite panic. To deny it will be to confirm it; and to cause confusion. And also – and this I feel keenly – it would be a cruel deception. So we will not – I hope you will agree with me – hinder the press in their dissemination of the news. That way, armed with the facts, every individual can meet the end of the world on his or her own terms. I believe that it is our duty. I believe that it is our responsibility. I believe that it is the least we can do. (Pause.) Are we agreed?
(None dissent.)
Prime Minister: I will consult the Opposition leaders, see if I can carry them with me. All must appear as normal.
Foreign Secretary: Does the Palace know?
Prime Minister: Yes.
Secretary of State for Employment: At least the Opposition can’t hold us to blame for this.
‘Mass cruelty is inflicted always for The Future, for the Greater Ideal. Most moral and institutionalised cruelty, that enacted by the individual too, all is governed by The Future. Of course there will always be mindless cruelty, that committed out of a lack of compassion, lack of imagination; reasoned cruelty, however, will always be committed for the sake of a future.’ Barry Popieluszko. Raw As Birth: White Swan.
‘History is happening every ten minutes.’ Imogen Cooper. Concert pianist: interview Radio Four.
Monday: 11:33
Leaving the Cabinet meeting, Ministers pause to button suit jackets, look to a looped video on the American leak.
A young official, tense, trembling, leans towards a reporter’s microphone, Capitol Hill in the background.
“… responsible to more than a government department. The truth should be told. It affects everyone. In six days the world will end. We have to make our goodbyes. It’s the least …” He weeps.
The camera turns towards the female reporter turning towards it.
Video cuts to interior scene, a function, a drunken white-haired man, different channel logo. The white-haired man is shouting to the camera,
“You don’t know! You don’t know! Over for all of you! All of us. For every goddam one of us …”
An elderly woman in a satiny green dress and a suited young man try to smother him away from the camera.
“Game’s over!” he shouts from between their shoulders. “Over!”
Video cuts to newspaper headline.
‘Rumour Has It.
Is this the end of the world? Or yet another tired and emotional outburst from a Kansas Senator already well-known to this column …
… Rumour has it that he’s not the only one on Capitol Hill prone to such outbursts these latter days of this increasingly hysterical administration …’
Video cuts, loops back to beginning. “… responsible to more than …”
‘In law the one solid reason for re-opening a case is that fresh evidence has surfaced … To reach any judgement, therefore, we have to have information (without all of the information, any judgement is invalid) … The media thus has to enlighten us, tell us all, so that we may judge our leaders.’ Barry Popieluszko. The Watcher: Kerala Books.
Monday: 19:47
The block of flats is in Victoria, behind the coach station.
In the centre of its underground carpark a square concrete pillar houses the base of the lift shaft and the stairwell. Two unmarked police cars, a squad car and an ambulance are drawn up with their doors open before the lift entrance.
Inside the two unmarked cars are sprawled eight detectives.
Light glows grey-white off the two steep ramps leading up out of the carpark.
A maroon car comes slowly down one of those ramps, stops by the other two cars. Detective Inspector Herbie Watkins pushes himself tiredly out of the maroon car. He walks with the slouch of a tall man, heavy at the hips, rounded shoulders.
Detective Sergeant Jim Nixon, an upright close-cropped man, gets up out of one of the unmarked cars to meet Herbie.
“Forensic and the doc are still up there,” he tells Herbie. “Be another half hour yet. Photographer’s been and gone. You eaten?”
“No.”
“We got some burgers in. Want one?”
Herbie lifts his chin.
From inside the cars the other members of Herbie’s team greet him with distant nods. “Chief still here?” he asks Jim.
“Gone. Said it looks straightforward. One way or the other.”
Herbie declines to comment on that. “So what do we know so far?” He bites into the squashed burger.
“Deceased is Katherine Helen Soames,” Jim reads from his notebook. “Age twenty-eight. Lived alone. Seventh floor. Could have been rape, robbery. She’s been done over pretty bad.”
“Witnesses?”
“None. But we know he came out through here. They got men decorating the street foyer. Been shut off.”
“Checked them out?”
“Office is closed. Found the boss’s home address. He’s in transit, no mobile, not home yet.”
“Who found the body?”
“Old lady next door. Mrs Harris. Came back from giving her dog a walk. Dog ran in there.”
“What time?”
“Call was logged 18:09.”
Most of the bays in the carpark are occupied. Narrow pavements run up alongside the two ramps to the street. The two tip-up barriers are raised.
“Next of kin?”
“Mother and father. Newbury.”
“They been told?”
“Not yet.”
“Get the local boys onto it.” Herbie signifies the barriers. “Who opened them?”
“Caretaker.”
“How they operated?”
“ID card. We being taken off the other one?”
“Temporarily. Leaving a couple of Lord Litchfields up there. Nothing’ll happen up there till Friday. No money till then.”
Herbie tosses the burger carton into one of the squad cars. “Let’s go up.”
The lift has doors at either end.
“We in for a late night?” Jim asks as the lift slowly rises. (Slower the lift the wealthier the apartment.)
“Looks like it.”
“Shit,” Jim says. “We been on all weekend.”
“Think of the overtime.”
At the seventh floor Herbie and Jim step out onto the landing’s moss-green carpet. Opposite the lift are two dark green doors diagonally facing one another. The door to 23 is open. Stairs lead up around the lift to the next landing.
“Stairs go down to the garage?” Herbie asks.
“Been checked,” Jim says. “Clean.”
“Fire escape?”
“Ain’t one. Stairwell’s fireproofed.” Jim gestures to the stairs. “Neat how they got these flats planned. Entrance on every half-landing, and in the flats split-level. Dining room and kitchen this end; up some steps to bedroom and bathroom. Wouldn’t mind one meself.”
“You couldn’t afford it,” Herbie says. “All right to come in?” he shouts through the open door.
The white body lies crookedly against a pale pink settee. A crimson robe has twisted around her. The belt is still knotted. Her forehead, upper face and black hair are coated in blood. On the beige carpet and pink settee are splashes of blood, darker smears on the crimson of her robe.
A grey-suited doctor is crouched beside the body taking swabs. Two forensic men, in blue nylon oversuits, have a stack of brown paper sacks in the centre of the room. The cream telephone has been smashed. Background smell is of cigarette smoke: soaked into the wallpaper, into the curtains. Her hair will smell of that smoke.
A whiff of sweet fruit potpourri too: painted pot been knocked over by the door, orange and yellow contents spilt over the floor, some stepped on, crushed. And another smell … Perfume? Too sharp. Aftershave? Whose?
“Any ideas?” Herbie asks the doctor from the living room doorway.
“Tried to make it look like rape. They had sex, though, quite some time before she was hit.”
“Murder weapon?”
“In the bag.”
One of the forensic men is rummaging about in a wastepaper basket.
“Metal figure,” he says. “Dancer or something. Plenty of prints.”
“What time?” Herbie asks the doctor.
“Four. Just after.”
“Trying to phone?” Herbie nods towards the smashed telephone behind the doctor.
“Looks like. Right forearm’s fractured.”
“Blood splashes?”
“Tried to wash them off.” The forensic man indicates the pile of bags. “Got the towel. Plenty of fabric. Suit, I’d say.”
“She have a go at him?” Herbie asks the doctor.
“Nails are clean, knuckles unmarked. ’Cept where he hit her hand on the phone. By the amount of blood I’d say she must have struggled a couple of minutes before her heart stopped.”
“Anything missing?” Herbie asks the forensic man by the wastepaper basket.
“Purse’s been emptied. Plastics are gone. And looks like he took some jewellery. Don’t smell right for a robbery though. How many tealeafs you know smoke only half a fag?” He holds up the long stub of a cigarette in a pair of blue plastic tweezers. “And he emptied two ashtrays in here. Four stubs altogether.”
“She didn’t smoke,” the doctor says. “No stains on teeth, none on fingers.”
“No fag packets here,” the other forensic man tells them. He peels strips of tape from the bedroom doorjamb. “And he washed up his ashtrays and a couple of glasses. Loads of his prints. Big flat thumb. Old and new. Regular visitor. Was here for some time today.”
“I concur.” The doctor stands to write some labels. “Cherchez l’homme.”
“How’s the old lady?” Herbie asks him.
“Chipper enough. More worried about her dog than anything. Contravenes the lease, apparently.”
“I can see her, then?”
“Can you get her prints?” The second forensic man comes down the steps from the bedroom. “Save us bothering her again.”
‘Men like to challenge the supremacy of Time, lay traps for it by making plans beyond their own lifetimes, put conditions in their wills, set snares beyond their years … all in an attempt to keep control …’ Barry Popieluszko. Psychotic Android Eats: Fire Dragon.
‘See the man with the hammer smashing grandfather clocks … He means to kill time.’ Barry Popieluszko. The Watcher: Kerala Books.
Monday: 20:38
Herbie presses the doorbell to number twenty-two. A dog yaps deep in the flat. Doors are opened. Doors are closed.
“Why is it,” Jim refers to the doctor and forensic, “they feel they have to be so cheerful?” It is a question that has vexed Jim before. Herbie doesn’t reply.
“What do you want?” an old voice asks from behind the door.
“Detective Inspector Watkins.” Herbie stoops to the spy-hole, holds up his ID. “Can I have a few words?”
Muttering to herself Mrs Harris unlocks and opens the door. She is one of those old women who seem to have shrunk inside her clothes. “Come in then. Come in.”
“Sorry to trouble you again, Mrs Harris.” Herbie steps past her. “Just a few things I want to get clear in my mind.”
“It hasn’t been on the telly yet,” she says.
“Might not make it.” Jim smiles at her. “You feeling better now?”
“Well, it was a shock.”
The flat, compared to the streamlined decor of next door, is a clutter of clashing patterns. Square-patterned carpet, paisley-patterned wallpaper, flower-patterned curtains, circle-patterned upholstery. Fat, soft furniture. The telly has been switched off, ticks and clicks as it cools. The dog whimpers in the kitchen.
“You live here alone, Mrs Harris?” Herbie asks her. The flat has the closed smell of most old people’s houses.
“Since my husband died.”
“Did you know Miss Soames?”
“Not really. Said hello to her sometimes. She was always rushing in and out.”
“Did you ever see her with anyone? A man?”
“I’m not going to have to go to court? Am I?”
“I doubt it. Did you ever see her with anyone?”
“No.” Mrs Harris emphatically shakes her head. “Though I know she had someone in there sometimes. Could hear them while I was waiting for the lift.”
“Did you hear anything about four this afternoon?”
“Is that when it happened? Poor girl. Such a mess.”
“Did you hear anyone in there?”
“I’ve got this hearing impairment. I don’t wear it unless I know I’ve got company coming. Or for the telly. Or going out. For the traffic you know. It buzzes. Makes me tired.”
“And the dog ran in there as you got out of the lift?”
“It was a mess.”
“And you came straight in here and called the police?”
“Took me a minute or so to catch Jason. He’s so naughty sometimes. Then I had to get my breath back.”
“You must have touched things in there?”
“I suppose I must have.”
“Would you mind giving us your fingerprints? It washes off afterwards. Only it would help us to eliminate you. That way we’ll catch her murderer.”
“Do you think he’ll be back? I am the only witness.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“He won’t be back.”
Jim lays out the charts and inkpad on a coffee table, tells Mrs Harris what he wants to do, takes her hand in his.
“Did Miss Soames have any friends in the flats?” Herbie asks her.
“Not that I know of.” Mrs Harris is engrossed in having her prints taken.
“And you never saw her with any man?”
“Once or twice. But I didn’t pay any attention. We mind our own business here. Actors, diplomats, film stars, all sorts living here.”
“What did your husband do, Mrs Harris?”
“A goldminer. We retired here.”
“Here?” Jim smiles at her.
“We lived in this awful place in South America. Jack said he wanted to retire somewhere civilised.”
“Would you recognise any of the men you saw Miss Soames with?”
“Will I be called as a witness? It’s my dog, you see.”
“I doubt it. We mostly need your help with our investigation. When we catch him we’ll have enough to get a conviction without your testimony. Would you recognise him?”
“I think so.”
“Could you make an identikit?”
“No.” She thinks. “No. He looked ordinary. But I’d know him if I saw him again.”
“Ordinary? What – young?”
“No. A big man. Respectable. Businessman. You know.”
“Middle-aged?”
“I suppose so. It’s hard when you’re old. Everyone’s younger than you.”
“He wasn’t young?”
“No. He wasn’t young.”
“Thank you, Mrs Harris. If I do have a suspect, and I need you to identify him, where can I contact you?”
“Oh, I don’t go anywhere.”
As Herbie and Jim emerge from number twenty-two, the ambulance men are coming out of the lift with their stretcher.
“All yours.” The doctor, bag in hand, appears at the door of number twenty-three. “I’ll do the PM first thing. Should have my report about ten.”
Herbie watches the two ambulance men zip the body into its white bag and strap it to the stretcher. All the violence has taken place by the telephone.
“We’re done.” The two forensic men drop their brown paper sacks into large black dustbin bags.
“Want a hand with them?” Herbie asks.
“No thanks. You want us to run the prints through records?”
“If you could.” Herbie says. “We got a load of doorknocking to do.”
The forensic men and the ambulance men struggle with their loads through the door. One of the detectives slips in between them.
“They’ve found the decorators’ boss. The three decorators downstairs were subbies. Got their addresses.”
“You check them out, Jim. Persuade them to part with their prints. And run ’em through records. Elimination, that’s all. When you done that, clear off home. You get in first tomorrow, though.”
Jim takes the addresses off the other detective and leaves.
“As for you,” Herbie tells the remaining detective, “I want every flat here visited. Find out where the occupants were between four and six. No, make that between three and six.” The detective alters his notes. “If they were here ask if they saw anyone entering or leaving this flat. Anyone in the lift or on the stairs. In the garage. If they saw anyone with a suitcase or a large package. If they had known Miss Soames. If they had ever seen her with a man. Or men. If they would recognise him again. And tell our lot to be civil. Some people here probably think they’re important. Don’t bother number twenty-two, and leave the caretaker to me. And I want a couple to go across the road to the flats overlooking the carpark entrance. Ask if they saw anyone leaving these flats between four and four-thirty.” The detective grimaces. “Worth a try,” Herbie tells him.
Alone for the first time in the flat, Herbie looks slowly about him.
The beige carpet owns several blood spots, a damp patch of urine. Plastic splinters from the smashed telephone are scattered over the floor like bone shards. A small antique stand is on its side, the directories in a slewed heap.
On the opposite side of the room, papers and books have been strewn over a glass-topped desk and onto the floor.
Herbie looks out of the window.
This floor is level with the slate roofs of the muddy red buildings opposite. No one would have seen the murder.
Through the open bedroom door a heap of clothes is visible upon the bed where the drawers have been emptied upon it.
Compared to the other rooms the kitchen is orderly and untouched: bottles and pans arranged in order of size in the cupboards. (An habitual burglar would have emptied all the pots and jars.)
Herbie takes the cookery books from their pine shelf by the cooking hobs, looks inside each for an inscription, then holds each book by its spine and riffles the pages. A few recipes cut from newspapers and magazines flutter onto the worktop. He returns the books to their shelf.
Forensic has already been through the waste bin and the sink’s waste disposal. In a floor cupboard by the sink is a stack of old newspapers. The Times. The Standard. The Sunday Times. The crosswords have been partially completed. Same handwriting as on the shopping list by the fridge.
On the worktop is an electric coffee percolator half full of coffee. Herbie switches it on. In the living room he picks up the telephone directories. None have any messages written on them. He searches for her own telephone book, a jotter. He finds a pen, nothing though on which she could have written.
Her green handbag has been emptied onto the desk. The purse is empty, her credit cards removed from their transparent wallet. Herbie replaces the lipstick, mascara, eyeshadow, mirror in the bag. No driving licence. No keys. The cheque stubs carry a tally of how much she has in her current account. So too the stubs for a deposit account. Not short of a penny. No credit card. Some neatly folded tissues.
He begins to return some order to the glass-topped desk. As he did with the cooking books he turns each book upside down and riffles the pages. Most are scientific publications. A few art books. A lover’s gifts. The first pages of two have been torn out.
Herbie crosses to the paintings on the wall, lifts them away from the wall and looks behind them. On the plyboard back of a large watercolour of white lilies is the label of an antique shop. He makes a note of the address. A stack of red drawers below the desk has been pulled out and emptied. A bulldog clip holds a batch of letters. All are from her parents and brother. Other clips hold official correspondence – electricity and gas bills, rates, rent, lease. Her lease includes a parking bay in the carpark. Nothing else refers to a car.
A cardboard wallet holds her passport, birth certificate, NHS card, wage slips and some insurance policies. Beneficiaries are her parents. He does not find a diary or organiser.
In one drawer is a stack of headed notepaper. CAS Ltd, address in Chiswick. He makes a note of the address, finds a list of jobs to be done. Most, he guesses, are to do with work. She is an organised lady. But no diary, no organiser.
A large buff envelope contains a lifetime’s photographs. Old schoolgirl and college photographs. Some of her mother and father. Of her brother – from a boy to a man, to a father. Of her nephews and nieces. One studio portrait of her. Herbie puts that aside for the press. In all the recent photographs she has been on her own. He recognises the Scottish islands. The rest he assumes are Mediterranean snapshots. Who held the camera?
A neat and tidy woman. Even on a topless beach not a hair out of place. Even as a child on a rough and tumble family picnic her appearance immaculate. One of her in a bar with a man. The man has long hair, doesn’t look like a businessman. Taken, by the fashions, about six or seven years previously. Herbie puts that one aside.
Among the debris of one drawer is an old wire-bound jotter. He flips through it. Most of the entries appear to be her own thoughts, some quotes from various authors. ‘Those soft-voiced young men cruel in their carelessness.’ ‘Optimism – expect the worst of everybody and you won’t be disappointed.’
Each entry has a date and two blank lines between the next entry. The first was written seven years ago. ‘I trust more in selfish honesty than in unselfish integrity.’ ‘I detest banter; it sears the soul and deadens the feelings …’ – Honoré de Balzac. ‘Might as well ask a politician for a straight answer.’ ‘All the civilised virtues have been perpetrated by anti-social beings.’ ‘A happy childhood you take for granted; an unhappy childhood you carry with you through your life.’ ‘Hunger doesn’t own ideals.’ ‘Prospect, and not possession, was what gave pleasure …’ – C S Forrester. ‘Beware of praise from your enemies.’ That last entry was dated three months previously.
Herbie fingers through the records and CDs below the stereo. Majority are opera. Some choral. A couple of symphonies. No inscriptions on the sleeves. On the corner of one record cover, La Traviata, ‘With love, Barry.’ Her brother is not called Barry.
Herbie returns to the kitchen, pours himself a cup of coffee, takes it with him to the bedroom. The double bed, beneath the multi-coloured heap of clothes, is unmade. The drawers lie, naked chipboard bottoms up, around the bed. Many of the clothes are still folded. Even the knickers.
Herbie looks inside the white bedside cabinets. Two paperbacks. One on faith healing. One on education. A woman’s magazine. No diary.
Her jewellery box has been tipped out onto the white dressing table. A chunky necklace, some wooden beads, plastic bangles. No silver. No gold.
Herbie frowns.
He looks again into and behind the bedside cabinets, goes on his hands and knees and looks under the bed. No dust. No watch. Her arms were bare. A radio clock on the floor. He picks up a couple of square perfume bottles, opens and sniffs them. The built-in wardrobe has one fur coat. He searches its pockets. A folded tissue. He makes his way along the hangers looking in other pockets.
The clothes are hung in combinations ready to wear, even to the silk scarf. On the floor of the wardrobe shoes and boots are neatly lined up in pairs. The winter boots have paper stuffed inside them. At the back of the wardrobe is a large empty leather suitcase.
The bathroom is clinically clean. The towels have been taken by forensic. A stiff dry flannel lies over the plastic bath tray. A bar of pink soap in a china dish by the basin, another in the bath tray. In the mirrored cabinet one shelf is half empty. On the other shelves the deodorants, colognes, tampons, ointments, lotions, pills, shampoos are meticulously spaced out. The half-empty shelf is clean, no dust marks, no spill rings to show what was there. He unscrews the top of the cologne bottle, waves it under his nose. Replaces it.
In a locker at the foot of the bath are some clean towels, a woman’s electric leg shaver, a hairdryer. In the holder by the basin, one toothbrush. Herbie makes a note of the chemist’s address on the label for the pills.
“Sir?” someone calls from the flat doorway.
A detective holds the flat door closed. “Papers are here.”
“Let ’em in.” Herbie comes down the four steps from the bedroom. Three newspaper men come brushing against one another into the living room.
“Took your time,” Herbie says.
“Bigger story. What you got? Rape? Robbery?”
Herbie shakes his head. “Family affair. Boyfriend. Know him?” He holds up the photograph taken in the bar. None of the reporters recognise the man.
“Was it him?” one asks.
“Don’t think so. The one who did it cleared the place out. Just a matter now of running him to ground. We got some evidence.”
“What?”
“That I can’t say. Don’t want him to cover his tracks.”
“How was she killed?”
“Battered. Messy. By the phone there. With a metal statuette thing. Of a dancer.”
“She a dancer?”
“No. I got a photograph of her. We’ll get some copies taken, let you have both. If you could ask the man to come forward. Eliminate him from our enquiries.”
“That all?”
“She was Katherine Helen Soames. Age twenty-eight. A scientist. Liked opera. One brother. Parents alive. That’s about it.”
“Rape?”
“They had sex before he killed her.”
“Fair enough.”
They make to leave. One stops at the door. “Motive?”
“Domestic affair. Lovers’ tiff.”
The reporter nods, follows his colleagues out.
“Short and sweet.” The detective raises his eyebrows.
“Not half.” Herbie hands the two photographs to the detective. “You take these back. Run off enough copies for us and the reptiles. If you walk back to the Yard you can slope off afterwards. See you in the morning.”
* * * * *
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/540289
We Need Madmen
1
‘History does not make moral judgements: history records events, conjectures on their causes and traces their consequences. In history there is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Things simply happened. That is all that concerns us.‘ Frieda G. (UNESCO Contemporary History Lectures. Series 2.)
Railway stations make Henry nervous. Having been nudged into petty thieving by awkward circumstance, he is aware that he is about to commit a crime and feels compassion for the person he is about to rob. Not being naturally vindictive he lacks the necessary ruthlessness. Henry has charitably decided that this is why he so often gets caught, and this knowledge lifts him above his fellow petty criminals.
‘…Soper, for instance… he has become a bogeyman. So too did Napoleon and Hitler. Yet look at the good that came from them. After Napoleon came the “Grand Alliance”; and then Bismarck came along to upset that balance of power, which led to the First World War. That gave birth to the League of Nations. After Hitler came the United Nations – a forum that Soper forced us to arm in order that we avoid a nuclear or biological holocaust. Because of Soper we now have a federal world, a global constitution. Malnutrition will shortly be a thing of the past. Nuclear and biological disaster is no longer a debilitating anxiety. Equality is at last a true and a real thing. Soper slaughtered millions of people; and we have now rid the world of Soper. But the world today is a better place for Soper having existed.
I give you a theory – We need madmen like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Soper to teach us values…’ Frieda G. (UNESCO Contemporary History Lectures. Series 2.)
Here on this platform they had placed one group of ten – always numerically exact – in front of each steel-lined wagon. Each group of ten was guarded by one Special. Each Special had an M1S. Each M1S had a silencer. With as much noise as a horse farting, as porridge boiling, each M1S sprayed each group of ten with soft-headed bullets. Each of the wagon doors were closed and the bodies were taken to the processors.
Word came through to the Camps. Henry went in fear of being transported by train.
“But surely,” the Blues prosecutor asked a Specials’ Captain, “some of them must have screamed?” The prosecutor was trying to indict the people who had lived nearby, and who had claimed to have heard nothing.
“No,” the Captain shrugged, “They seemed to be expecting it.”
‘In the Boer War they were christened Concentration camps. Hitler kept the name. Stalin called them Labour camps. The British renamed them Internment camps. The Israelis referred to theirs as Refugee camps. Elsewhere they were known as Transit, Displacement, Detainee, Re-education, Migrant, etcetera. Their fences were all topped with barbed wire. By the time Soper arrived there were no euphemisms left. They have become simply Camps.’ Joseph Tsolke (Daily News. Tanzania.)
When Henry was released from his last Camp his skin was sagging like a deflated balloon on a wire frame. His hair had come out in combfuls. But he is plump again now, his hair a thick silver grey.
A tweed hat covers his hair, slightly alters the shape of his smooth round face, might make it difficult for him to be readily identified. Leather gloves hide the tattoo on the back of his hand.
Despite these precautions he expects to get caught.
The first two years after his release, when not in hospital, Henry was in the courts identifying Specials. His memory is true to Specials’ faces. But, though he can remember his every keeper, his fellow inmates – alive and dead – blur into a scrawny grubby mass. (It is some years now, his growing criminal record casting doubt upon his testimony, since he has been called as a witness. The trials too are a fewer.)
‘Name: Bethune. Henry Kevin.
Age : 35
Height: 168
Weight: 74.4
Eyes: Grey
Hair: Grey
Complexion: Ruddy
Distinguishing Features: Tattoo on back of right hand – numbers – 5807656
Convictions: Shoplifting x 2. Breaking & Entering x 4. Aggravated robbery x 2. Armed robbery x 1.
Sentences: 2 years probation. 6 months suspended sentence. 6 months. 1 year. 18 months. 18 months. 18 months.
Remarks: Ex-Salisbury. Unable to adjust. Loner. Recidivist.’
The train about to arrive is an express, will have stopped at mainline stations only. Tickets will have been collected before arrival. In the confusion of disembarkation Henry hopes to snatch a handbag (aggravated robbery), lift a wallet (daylight robbery). He waits at the far end of the platform in order that he can walk with the alighting passengers towards the exits.
A young couple, their black labrador between them, sit on the bench under the clock. There used to be a poster on either side of the clock. (His official biographers remarked upon Soper’s uncanny resemblance to Cromwell: although in France it was Marat, in Italy Garibaldi, in Germany Luther.)
A man with receding hair keeps pushing himself off his seat by the toilets to peep over the sill of the buffet window. At the far end, by the toilets, are two Blues. They have baggage with them, are off duty. None of the other men waiting here have the marks of the police about them – civilian clothes buttoned as correctly as a uniform.
People disfigured by weighty suitcases come through the arrivals arch, swing lopsidedly like hunchbacks to the ticket office.
Soon after the occupation the Blues ran free skin-grafting surgeries to remove the telltale tattoos. The lack of response surprised them.
‘Keeping their stigmata to keep their grudge alive, we ex-detainees wear our tattoos as a continuing reproach to our fellow countrymen and women – our country’s conscience at the end of our sleeves…‘ Mike Davidson. (Lest We Forget. Off-World Press.)
Henry does not blame his compatriots: he knows that he could too easily have been one of them, keeps his to remind himself that he is not.
Henry has been for one job since his parole. He expected refusal, tried to smooth the way for his own rejection. Still the prospective employer was embarrassed. Of course he was above such prejudices himself, but… No-one now has belonged to the Organisation; and Organisation members had anyway always been so reasonable, even when explaining death sentences, like salespersons using technicalities to placate disgruntled customers.
“You wouldn’t believe it was – what was it now? Twelve years ago – but you see it doesn’t pay very much and we’ve got a few disabled heroes here. They freely speak their mind. You can take the job if you like. But I doubt you’ll be happy here.”
Soper’s heroes are everywhere. (Except in jail.) Henry has worked beside them before… A side-glancing silence for several days; and then the names – collaborator, conchie, sponger – muttered softly at a distance at first; and becoming clearer, coming closer, coming louder with the absence of a denial, of an ingratiating excuse. Sometimes someone will intercede on his behalf, get labelled themselves. Usually, though, Henry hits his accusers with whatever is to hand, and is summarily sacked. Supporting the prejudice that Soper was right – all detainees were troublemakers.
Henry, however, bears them no real malice. They were caught up in it, they believed the propaganda, went to war, fought together. Henry knows that he too would have joined them had his father not been a cantankerous idealist. His father had opened his eyes – teenage grudgingly on Henry’s part – had showed him the alternative truisms, had made him an outcast. Henry had not been allowed to give in, to give way, to go along unthinkingly with the rest. He hasn’t consequently shared their innocent war experiences, can’t name battles nor battalions. They were told, they believed that they were fighting for right; and like Henry they despised the privileged Specials, were as equally cynical of Soper’s bootlicking heroes.
‘Soper set out to “purify and strengthen” Europe, to rid it of its dross – welfare spongers, social benefit scroungers, the good-for-nothings, the slackers – in other words, the weakest. Soper’s spartan philosophy, like Hitler’s, had a genetic base: the sickly and the weak infect the strong…
Now it was a generally accepted myth in each of the European countries that the minority migrant workers formed the bulk of the so-called spongers. In Britain it was the Asians and the Blacks, in France the Algerians, in Germany the Turks, in Holland the Surinams and Chinese, in Denmark the Cypriots… All went to the Camps.’ Frieda G. (UNESCO Contemporary History Lectures. Series 2.)
The train lights glow yellow along the rails, free them a moment from their mundane steely grime.
The young couple under the clock stand. The black dog wags its thick tail. The man in the buffet drains his foam-streaked glass and starts for the door. The two Blues remain by their baggage. The train, with the contented rumble of a journey’s end, slides along the edge of the platform.
In the carriages the passengers rise to their luggage, queue between the seats, lower windows to reach for outside door handles. Henry’s head swivels as he pretends to be looking for someone. The couple with the dog wave. The man stands just outside the buffet door uncertainly searching the carriage windows. The train creeps slower and slower. Carriage doors open and bang. With a shudder, with a backward jerk, the train stops.
Henry starts walking the length of the train. People topple out, start hurrying their journey-stiff legs towards the Underground steps; or they begin the race around to the taxi rank on the far side. Henry steps into the throng.
A husband stands by his luggage waiting for his wife and family to descend. A pushchair is erected, a trolley sought. Henry is now by the clock. The last of the passengers are leaving the carriages. A plump woman shifts her handbag to her other, her further, hand. A lithe young woman hitches her shoulderbag further onto her shoulder. A blond man drops a suitcase onto the platform, dives back into the first class carriage. Henry picks up the suitcase, turns towards the entrance arch. The young blond man is in his compartment, is picking up his raincoat, his magazines. The case is heavy. The man from the buffet is staring uncomprehending at Henry. Knowing that he has been seen Henry instinctively lengthens his stride. The man starts after him. A taxi is being paid off. The driver reaches across to his meter. Henry waves to him. The taxi driver sees him. Henry is at the taxi. The man is ten paces behind him.
Henry knows that he is again about to be caught, fatalistically awaits the grab from behind. Meanwhile he feels that he must play the game through to its absurd end. He opens the taxi door,
“Gloucester Road please.” The driver nods. Henry slides the suitcase onto the rubber-ribbed cab floor, climbs in behind it and closes the door.
The cab starts to pull away. The thinning man is stooping to peer into the cab. Through the archway Henry glimpses the blond man, magazines under his arm, strolling with a confident air along the platform, another suitcase in his hand.
As they rise up the long ramp to London’s street level Henry glances behind. The man who followed him is reading the taxi’s number plate, his moving lips memorizing it. He turns to a taxi just arriving.
Henry sits forward, slides aside the glass partition. They are approaching the roundabout under the flyover.
“Sorry. I seem to have made a mistake.”
“What’s that?” the taxi driver partly turns, suspicious as all taxi drivers.
“I’d forgotten my friends have moved to Notting Hill. Would you mind?”
“Whereabouts?”
“On the junction going down to Westbourne Grove.”
“I’m with you.”
Henry slides the partition closed, looks behind as they swing into the roundabout. A taxi is following them. Henry’s cab sways off the roundabout towards Notting Hill. The other taxi goes towards Edgeware Road. Henry flops back in the seat.
The suitcase looks like, he thinks smells like, genuine pigskin. Henry hopes there’s something saleable in it. Leaning forward he tries the catch. Locked. He’ll have to pick it open or he won’t be able to sell it; and it might be the only thing worth selling.
He wonders why the blond man didn’t notice his suitcase was missing. Henry decides that he must have lifted it down for someone else; and the other man must have followed him because he also wanted a taxi. Coincidence – usually it catches Henry – people coming home earlier than expected, the shop he was holding up raided on suspicion of black market trafficking; and the two burglaries which he had left successfully… Henry was convicted for two he didn’t do but was unable to prove his innocence.
The taxi stops at the traffic lights outside Notting Hill tube. Henry reads the meter: he will have just enough for the bus fare and for some fish and chips. He considers diving out of the taxi and making a run for it; but the case will be too cumbersome.
As the lights change Henry reaches to the partition,
“Can you drop me by the pub there?”
Suitcase standing between his legs, Henry gives the driver the fare. His glove off he holds his palm upwards for the change, then gives the driver a tip. The driver thanks him. Henry wonders at his unpremeditated generosity. A group of loud men come crashing out of the pub, yell at the taxi. Pulling on his glove, Henry steps out of their way and towards an alley by the bus stop. The group want to go to Maida Vale. They pile into the back of the cab. A bus lumbers through the traffic lights. As it pulls into the stop the taxi draws away.
Glad that the taxi driver hasn’t seen him still standing here, and at the same time superstitiously worried because everything is going so smoothly, Henry lifts the suitcase onto the bus. After paying his fare he is now a penny short for chips. The bus bangs along, racing back to the depot. The few other downstairs passengers are wrapped in themselves. The bus conductor has a tattoo across the back of his change-tarnished hand. Henry keeps his concealed in his glove, doesn’t want the look of shameful fraternity to pass between them, maybe be recognized later. (Public corporations are forced to employ a percentage of detainees.)
Henry lugs the suitcase off the bus, trudges down the side street to his bedsit. Knowing that he would have to return to crime, he took the bedsit when he was refused the job. Having once left the hostel Henry looked upon it as going through the motions. The parole office do not yet know his new address, won’t like it when they find out he has moved back to ‘his old haunts’.
A yellow light is on in the attic room. The other tall windows are in darkness. Henry’s room is on the first floor facing front.
His fingers are stiff from carrying the case. Having found which of the two unaccustomed keys fits the front door, trying not to bang the suitcase – though he can say he has just been to collect some more stuff from his last place – Henry creaks up the stairs. Most of the house’s other inhabitants are young, are out for the evening. Henry sets the suitcase lightly on the floor and, using the other key, unlocks the door.
Swinging the case up to let it land flat on the bed Henry goes immediately to search through the pockets of the three suits in the wardrobe. With his parole money he always buys himself a complete new outfit – suit, shirts, shoes. After the baggy rancid rags of the Camps he likes compact laundered comfort encasing his skin. Cleanliness is now almost a compulsion.
Nothing in the pockets. Closing the bedsit door he crawls around the floor, peers under the bed, disturbs the fluff. A memory tells him that some change dropped out of his pockets last night when he took off his trousers. Or was that somewhere else, some other night? He lifts the edge of a crimson woolly mat around the basin’s porcelain pedestal, grins at a ten pence piece.
Realizing that he still has his hat on – it having knocked against the basin – he chucks that on top of the case, looks into the mirror to pat his silver locks into place, then goes skipping down the stairs, down the front steps, and down the road to the fish-and-chip-pizza-kebab-hamburger-and-curry takeaway. Hunger was a permanent condition in the Camps: Henry is determined never to be hungry again, if he can help it. Jail has regular meals.
‘In a machine age certain portions of what is called humanity are a surplus. They are an excess, a deadweight that the rest of us have to carry. They serve no purpose, consume our spare resources. They weaken us. We have to dispose of them to be strong.’ Soper
Some pubescent boys and girls queue before Henry. On the opposite corner to the chip shop is a Blues post. The sentry looks bored and cold. Through the lighted window an officer sits writing at a desk by a red telephone. Another soldier, his tunic unbuttoned, stares down at the chip shop from an upstairs window.
The boys and girls leave. The sentry gazes after the girls, forbidden to him by their parents. The boys form gangs to fight him.
Henry feels sorry for this sentry in this unfriendly foreign country. Although, at times, even Henry finds himself resenting this omnipresent cosmopolitan army of occupation, when he would most likely be dead if it hadn’t been for them. Maybe that’s why he resents them – his saviours. Gratitude is unbecoming to a man who has been kicked all his life.
He hands over his correct change to the fat flushed woman behind the counter. Her oil-greasy gaze slides from the back of his hand to his face. Avoiding her fried egg eyes Henry vigorously rattles salt and then sloshes vinegar onto his hot chips. The sentry and the unbuttoned soldier in the upstairs window watch him leave the shop. The officer writes.
Henry eats the chips as he walks. His belly thanks him. Wiping his fingers on the paper, he drops it in the gutter.
In his room he lathers and rinses his hands, twice. Once the smell of the chips has gone, patting his fingers dry, he studies the suitcase. The leather looks genuine, has that sticky feel to it too. A rarity these days: may be too hot to sell. But he has to eat tomorrow. He decides to spend an hour this evening on the locks and then, if no go, to force them, take a chance on some of the contents being saleable.
Pulling open his underclothes drawer he takes out his sewing needles. Selecting the longest he looks around for some means of bending it, uses the flat hinge on the wardrobe door. With the tip bent as far as it will go without breaking, he settles himself cross-legged onto the floor and aligns one of the suitcase locks at eye level. One bit clicks after five minutes: marvelous the education you receive in prison. The next takes twenty minutes.
Fifty eight minutes and two vinegar burps later he has one lock undone, the catch sprung. Grunting, straightening his grating knees, he bends back-aching to his feet.
“Now. Let’s see what you’ve got to offer.”
Lifting the unlocked corner of the lid he squeezes his hand inside, and removes a shirt. Good quality, but too small. Almost new too: he can smell the stiffener. A blazer without a badge. Again almost new; but too short for the blond man. Another shirt, a different size. Henry’s hand touches some paper. Pamphlets: that was the weight.
Dejectedly he pulls out a bundle. Henry has about a thousand’s worth of tenners in his hand. Not consecutive notes either.
“Lucky dip.” Henry shakes the bundle at himself. “Lucky dip!” He recklessly bends back the suitcase lid. Apart from a couple more odd size shirts the case is tidily packed with bundles of notes.
Thrusting the suitcase to the bottom of the bed, Henry turns and sits heavily beside it. This is too good to be true. Too dangerously good to be true. He runs his hand through his hair. He is frightened.
Idly flipping through the bundles of crisp paper notes, dropping the bundles back into the case, picking up another bundle, Henry tells himself to think. Think! The blond man, the man from the buffet: it was an exchange. No, the buffet man didn’t have a case. He was a courier then, was supposed to have been collecting it. Which is why he didn’t challenge Henry – he was nervous, uncertain, probably hadn’t done it before. But who was he collecting it for? Henry realizes that he is sweating. Counterfeit? Black marketeer? If so they’ll know him, be on to him. No-one knows where he is. Won’t take them long to find him.
Can’t be them. The train came from Cornwall: the black market is a city province.
Something familiar about the two men: the blond one’s casual public school arrogance, as if the world belonged to him, born to govern. The buffet man’s nervousness, his hesitant fawning stoop.
“Yes Sir,” Henry puts the respectful words into his mouth,
“Yes Sir.” Organisation funds. Somebody has to pay for their guns, their bombs. And those country bumpkins knew where the Camps were. Ignored them, even when every day they passed the small working party camps on the town outskirts: life was cheaper than diesel. Smalltown businessmen – officers in the Specials. This green and pleasant land, that’s where the funds had come from.
Blacks coming here taking our jobs, dole scroungers, dissidents, we’ll teach ’em. Fat, full of their own importance, demanding they be respected, tying the ankles of the imagined disrespectful and dragging them behind their cars through those small country towns. Driving out to the women’s Camps; black girls, white girls; they weren’t fussy when it came to fucking. All thin girls, all fat well-fed men. They hung the girls afterwards – for soiling their genetic purity – and to erase their own shame, disown their sperm, like old men’s mucus running down the women’s jittering legs, until it was covered by the deluge of the bursting bowels. The male inmates had been made to watch. One girl Henry saw hung could have been no more than ten.
‘The circle, being feminine, was an almost perverse choice of symbol for Soper. The cross, the swastika, the Union Jack, being angular could be taken as an expression of the acolyte’s masculinity. I always thought the hammer and sickle a very eclectic symbol – the feminine curve of the scythe, the straight masculine lines of the hammer. One can only suppose that Soper chose the circle because it was easy for his hoodlums to daub on walls.’ Karl Oblomov. (Some Social Psychology Of Our Time. Kiev University Press.)
‘His Specials decapitated him at his own request. The body was positively identified. The head has not yet been found. That head is important. It may very well no longer exist. But it could also, as easily, be pickled in some secret shrine. If it does exist then we need to find and destroy it. Because, while it is believed to still be in existence, it constitutes a danger. Has become a dangerous symbol. And the psychology of the people who follow Soper need a symbol. The fiery crosses of the KKK. The reversed swastika of the Nazis. Soper’s circle. The head fits it, has become it. Soper still lives for some.’ Superintendent Lee Han Shee. (File 16. UNIB.)
Europe’s police forces still have many an ex-Special on their staff. Henry, when he was framed, was framed by an ex-Special. Henry knew it, couldn’t prove it. Though he made a phone call. He also put the finger on one of his prison wardens; and that was seven years after the occupation.
Henry, sitting on the bed, knows that he must get away quick as he can. Henry also knows that if he goes now, walking suitcase this time of night, the police are bound to snatch him. And now, as opposed to two hours or so ago, he doesn’t want to be caught. He knows now that they will silence him. And the suitcase is a dead giveaway.
Taking his cheap plastic case from the top of the wardrobe, Henry transfers the notes to it, and packs his three suits on top. His underclothes and towels he stuffs around the sides. He checks the labels on the clothes that came with the pigskin case. None. He crams them in as well.
That case packed he decides to pick the other lock on the pigskin case. He does it in twenty minutes. Making sure that it is completely empty he takes it down the stairs, and slides it into the meter cupboard with the buckets and brushes. A stereo is playing in one of the ground floor rooms, covers his noise.
Henry sits back down upon his bed. This time he mustn’t, he can’t, get caught. The mentality is new to him. It hasn’t mattered to him before – a weak grin at the arresting officer.
If he pays off the landlord he won’t make a fuss. His hand has gone into his pocket. A moment’s fright – no money! Then he remembers the suitcase full of notes. Taking twenty tenners out of his suitcase he rearranges the clothes, closes it.
If he leaves too much the landlord will become suspicious: he props four tenners with the bedsit keys on the chest of drawers, wonders what to write. Must sound reasonable, divert the landlord’s suspicions. ‘Will not need room after all. Have gone back to wife. Hope this covers inconvenience.’
The house is settling into sleep. Henry is too excited; and sleep will make him vulnerable. He has to stay awake, alert. But if his light remains on it will be conspicuous.
Switching the light off he goes to the window, parts the curtains, studies the street. No sign of anyone. The cars are all empty.
Henry fingers the fat wad of notes in his pocket, takes a deep breath and, smiling, sighs. He returns to the bed, lies with his hands behind his head, and waits impatiently for the dawn and the first rumblings of the rush hour.
‘Time is empty: we have to fill it’ Soper
‘Little man throwing pebbles at eternity.’ Mike Davidson. (Lest We Forget. Off-World Press.)
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9284
Porlock Counterpoint
Chapter One
On this still day Porlock Bay curves, in a grey sweep of pebbles, from the steep wooded slopes above Porlock Weir around to the haze-speckled cliffs of Hurlstone Point.
Behind this ridged bank of pebbles, sea-breached, are three fields that are being slowly reclaimed by the Bristol Channel. And behind these overgreen fields are the chocolate dark houses of Porlock. Above a lit garage and tourist shops, steep wooded valleys climb to the bald, cloud-touched moors.
The few buildings of Porlock Weir, at the wooded end of the bay, are separated from Porlock itself by several fields. The centrepiece of Porlock Weir (which has no weir) is the stone-built harbour office, untended, combining also tea rooms and dilapidated shop. Its stone is charcoal dark, its zigzag pointing white.
Across the way is the long orange front of the Anchor Hotel, four star. Squashed in beside it is the thatched White Ship Inn. Down the alley to the harbour is a row of workshops.
The harbour itself is not, in the conventional stonewalled sense, so much a harbour, as a stream-fed creek, inside a pebble ridge, which – to form the harbour – is closed off by stone pillars and an iron gate.
Across the other side of the harbour’s iron gates, built upon the pebble spit, is a row of cottages. The end cottage is thatched, the other two tiled, their windows iron-framed. The pebble banks falling away from them are held back by stepped palisades of skinned trunks. Long sticks – some tied together – have been stuck into the pebbles on either side of the stream that seeps under the harbour’s plate iron gates and trickles down towards the sea.
This day the tide is out. A soft metal sheen of mud has been left over the three green fields. And, away across the weak, milk chocolate of the Bristol Channel, the white of Barry’s buildings are just about visible. Not a day for sightseeing.
A few visitors, though, have clanked over the walkway above the harbour gates, have ambled out past the cottages, around the shallow end of the harbour’s green water, and back by the boat houses and artist’s workshops through the alley to the car park.
Perched on their keels at the end of this tide-out puddle of a harbour, are a line of stranded yachts. Where the yachts can and cannot park is marked out by lines in the shape of two parallel rusted chains.
In the water, under the walkway, is a crabber afloat and a green, water-filled dinghy. One yacht has been stranded up the seaward bank, the blue base of its hull settled onto tyre-padded chocks. Printed, in black, across the hull’s white stern is,
‘WATER MUSIC
MINEHEAD’.
A maroon Volvo estate is parked on the level compacted pebbles between the yacht and the three cottages. The driver’s door and the rear door have been left open.
The yacht’s varnished cabin door, behind its big-wheeled helm, is also open. So too are the hatches that lead down into its sail locker and inboard engine. The square hatch-covers have been laid skewiff upon the deck, angles sticking out between the safety line and the curve of the hull.
Lounging back on one of the cabin sofa-beds, Jonathan Bowles watches the rugby on a small portable telly. In this, the first half, England is already coming from behind against France. The kicking of the French backs, some close passing and two fast wingers have gained them the points. The discipline and weight of the English pack, however, is beginning to tell. Although the English are still losing too many line-outs, even when it is their throw-in.
Jonathan Bowles’ girlfriend, Anna Gabriel, is down in the sail locker with a fibreglass patch.
Working below what, when afloat, is the waterline, Anna has a battery-operated fan down there to push the solvent fumes from the confined space – both hatch-covers having been removed to assist through-ventilation.
Not much daylight comes down through the shoulder-width hatchway. What does is blocked by her own crouching body. Anna has to use a torch to see what she is doing.
She is thorough. Even this inner patch she will make as smooth as she can with hand-held emery. The external patch, prior to matching it in blue, she will make wholly smooth. For that she will use an electric sander powered off the engine. But not today as it would interfere with Jonathan’s rugby reception. Enough for now that she has identified the pinprick leak, marked the site of the patch externally, got the first patch fixed to the inside and has made a start rubbing it down.
Both being caught up in what they are doing – Jonathan ignoring the occasional slight rocking caused by her rubbing – neither hear their car being driven off. Only when Jonathan becomes aware of a persistent shouting does he glance to the porthole.
An absence, however, takes longer to register: the memory has to be consulted, images checked through.
“The car!”
Tipping the foam mattress off the sofa-bed, he scrambles his bulk through the small low door.
Short Jack, from the Gallery Shop, is doing the shouting, is pointing to the car which, its brakes squealing, is coming to a stop between the stable block and the old woman’s shop. So red and flustered is he, it looks like short, fat Jack might have tried to stop the Volvo with his bare hands.
The suddenness of the braking has brought the Volvo’s rear door down closed, only for it to slowly rise up again as the driver pushes open the passenger door. A fat woman rolls herself onto the seat. The long car accelerates out of sight behind the black and white building.
“Anna!” Jonathan calls low and hard, “Anna!”
Blonde hair pushed up in a back-to-front black baseball cap, Anna’s head comes up through the sail locker hatchway. She was already aware – through Jonathan’s bumping about on the boat, combined with the sound of the shouting – that she should uncramp her back and legs and take a look.
Now she blinks in the white light at where the car was, across at fat Jack, who – with his short arms – is now making an exaggerated arms-wide gesture. Anna is dizzy from the fumes and from getting up too quickly.
“Fuck it,” Jonathan says quietly.
“My tool bag’s fallen out,” Anna can see the brown canvas bag up between the two lines of rusted chains. (Anna also undertakes all the repairs and decorating in their square yellow house up in the woods.)
“Nothing else?” Jonathan is looking back again over the road before the gallery shop and stable block, the path from the chains.
“You pushed them up near the front?”
“Behind your seat.”
An elderly couple on the harbour entrance walkway, a woman with two golden retrievers up past the end of the sheds, look at them. The younger dog’s legs are thin and wet, its belly fur hanging in dark spikes. In the workshop next to the gallery the red eye of the glassblower’s furnace winks as a stranger comes walking up to Jack.
“We’re going to have to call the police,” Jonathan says.
Anna looks over to Jack.
“No choice.”
Chapter Two
Since before breakfast Kate Scappell hadn’t known where to put herself. Wherever in the flat she walked, stood, leant, sat, even when she lay down briefly on the sofa, she hadn’t been able to make herself comfortable.
Last night had been the same.
Not that the baby was kicking. But, when she did lie on her back, and she could only lie on her back, she felt that her stomach, barely balanced above her, wanted to take her to one side or the other. And, in the black of last night, it was easy to believe that if she let her stomach topple towards Lliam – so huge was it, and so thin and small in sleep was Lliam beside her – that it would engulf and smother him.
If the stomach took her the other way she knew that it would overhang the edge of the bed and the weight of it would drag her down on her hands and knees to the floor. And if, not that she could, but she felt that the only comfortable position would be lying on her front, then she had a vision of herself draped up over her belly, toes just about touching the mattress one end, forehead the pillow at the other.
To not disturb Lliam, Kate had spent the night inch-by-inch shuffling from her back onto one side, then over onto the other, all within the tubular space she occupied under the covers her side of the bed. When her moving about did disturb Lliam, he made no complaint. Rather he made a mumble, a noise of enquiry. Which she returned as a noise of reassurance. Was this, she had wondered at 3:00am, how she practised to be a mother?
Since waking to daylight, this Saturday morning, she hadn’t felt the least maternal towards Lliam. Manoeuvring her bulk through the flat, Kate turned from his morning kiss as he squeezed – skinny – past her.
The flat, which is what the landlord calls it, is one large room above a Williton side-street plumber’s store. The store has one, white-lit, show window of kitchen and bathroom fittings. At the top of the stairs is the flat’s own bathroom, its kitchen at the other end. Bed and wardrobe are in the corner furthest from the kitchen, sofa and TV next to the kitchen door. A cot is beside Kate’s side of the bed.
This morning, unable to find a chair big enough to take her – her bum overflowed the round-bottomed kitchen chairs, couldn’t fit into the one armchair, and she was fed up with the sofa, its view of the telly or the window’s four squares of sky, and the flat ceilings were too low, she told Lliam: “I gotta get out.”
She had felt him watching her all the morning. He didn’t fuss: not his style. His eyes, though, had been looking away from her whenever she had looked up. Again not making a fuss, but in case she should slip, Lliam went slowly before her down the steep stairs from the flat.
Porlock Weir was his suggestion.
While Kate swung her thickened legs out of the car, pulled herself upright by the door pillar, Lliam remained in the car looking out over the car park’s green bank. Barry (although both Lliam and Kate call it Cardiff) could just about be made out, its horizontal blocks of white dividing grey sea from grey sky.
Kate, grunting, slammed the door. Lliam reached over and pressed down the lock button, got out and locked the driver’s door. Kate had one hand on the brown Fiesta’s black roof. Even her fingers have become podgy. As she turned to him, Lliam glanced away, to not show his concern, worry her with it.
This is to be both Kate’s and Lliam’s first child. Both of them are determined to do it right. Hence the present delicacy of their care with one another. Both were raised, first, by single parents. Both want more for their child. Both of them dream of living here in Porlock Weir. Both know that it is a dream.
They talk of it at night, in that still moment after the lights are turned off and they first cuddle up together, talking up into the ceiling dark.
In their dream Kate and Lliam, given the money, will settle for any one of the three beach cottages; though they have agreed that they would prefer the end one, the thatched one, it being in the teeth of the wind and the sea.
“Think of a storm and feeling – up through the house – the grinding of the pebbles … Spray from the wave tops will hit the windows. The wind will be trying to get in …”
“On a sunny day the pebbles will be warm. Our child can sit on them – up at the top … Imagine our child growing up in all that light …”
They discuss the dangers too, especially for a toddler – harbour drowning, undertow of waves, probability of floods, need for sandbags, the irritation of visitors – like them – peering into their windows and garden … Theirs is a dream of substance, fed by these visits.
Today, however, Lliam is not so sure that Kate is with him, not in spirit anyhow. Although she does link her arm through his as they walk around by the shop. Its extractor fan is still blocked with a stuffing of newspapers. He nods her attention to it. But there is a hesitation before Kate’s every response to him; and then it’s only an acquiescent lift of the head, or a slight murmur that he supposes is agreement.
On the iron walkway above the harbour gates he says: “Two new boats.”
She looks slowly over to the keel-stranded belly-fat yachts, and nods.
As usual they walk first past the landward side of the row of three cottages, try to look in at the lives within, add details to their dream. The two other cottages in the row have brown tiles on their roofs. Lliam has often expressed anxieties over the thatch, the expense of having it regularly replaced. Both veto the middle cottage with its two sets of neighbours. They have almost compromised on the one at the other end, next to the plank-built leaning-together sheds.
Slowly, at Kate’s belly-hampered pace, they reach the end of the sheds, walk up between two stacks of black-ended trunks to the crest of the high pebble spit. Kate is out of breath. Standing together they watch the opalescent sea lap and slip over and around those pebbles presently at the bottom of the pebble hill. They walk on along the hill’s flat top.
The cottage garden walls are of pebbles cemented together. At the base of the walls are sea kale mini-palms. In the middle garden, right up against the house, is a hairy palm tree proper.
Kate slips on a pebble.
Flinging her arms back for balance she hits Lliam in the chest. He grabs onto that flung-back arm to stop himself falling back, then finds himself supporting her as her asymmetrical weight carries her on around.
The jarring of her heels as Kate staggers backwards adds to the dragging force in her belly. Lliam’s holding onto one of her arms twists her spine. Pain encircles her.
The day has gone bright.
Lliam is looking intently at her.
The brown cliffs across the bay have gone small, the fields in front of Porlock a brighter green.
“This is it,” she tells Lliam, holding her other hand out to him.
Supporting her by the arm that he is already holding, Lliam helps her along the pebbles, past the tilted, subsided, pebble-built pillbox. (Snuggled together, talk rumbling into the night, they sometimes, careful not to destroy the dream, make mention of their fear of the cottages subsiding. “Life is unsafe,” one will remind the other.)
Kate has been concentrating on not slipping. Now they bump together between the grey channel wall and the brown side of the thatched cottage. Kate suddenly grips and shakes Lliam’s arm. The glitter of excitement is in her dark eyes.
“This is too slow,” she pushes him away. “Run on. Bring the car round to the bridge.”
Run on he does, laughter surging up in him as he goes leaping across the clanking walkway. This is it! he tells himself happily as he tears around the road to the car park. This is it!
The car doesn’t start first go. Lliam screws his face up, eases the choke out half a finger-width. It doesn’t fire again. When cold, choke full out, the car usually starts first time. Hot, it kicks over straightaway. But when the engine’s been left to cool just a little it doesn’t seem to know what to do.
He tells, implores the car: “Come on.”
He doesn’t want to flood it. This Fiesta is his first legal proper car. He and Kate want everything to be right for their child, and, being right, to be as safe as anything in this life can be.
“Come on,” he begs the car again and – waiting a deliberate moment – watches Kate reach the walkway and, halting, raise her head to a spasm.
Lliam turns the ignition again. Just a whirr and a whine and a whirr. Now he can smell the petrol. Flooded.
“Fuck it!” Pushing the choke right in he presses the accelerator to the floor, turns the key. “Come on. Come on. Come on you bastard. Come on.”
Nothing. Nothing but whirr and whine and petrol fumes.
Kate, one hand under her stomach, the other reaching for the sloping-out handrail, is shuffling splay-legged across the walkway.
Lliam recalls seeing the key in the maroon Volvo estate parked by the yacht, remembers thinking – with envy – he wished he could be as trusting as that. But, with Kate’s earlier distance from him – where he would usually – he hadn’t said anything to her about the key.
Now, scrambling out of the Fiesta, he runs as fast as he can around to Kate. She has just reached the solid ground by the shut tea rooms in the harbourmaster’s house. She has gone inward to the pain again.
“Fuckin’ Fiesta’s flooded,” he tells her white face. “I’m gonna get that Volvo. I’ll have the door open for you when I get round there,” he gestures to behind the shop.
“Ambulance,” Kate tries to hold his jacket sleeve. “Get somebody to phone an ambulance.”
“Won’t get here in time,” Lliam bounces beyond her reach.
They were worried about being able to get to Taunton from Williton in time. It will take almost twice as long from Porlock Weir. And the ambulance will have to get here first from Taunton. And on a Saturday changeover from Minehead Butlins … And Kate has to go to Taunton. The family doctor said, because of Kate’s ‘history’, that it had to be Taunton.
Lliam’s up on his toes crossing the bridge. At the same time he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself, is already aware of who’s about. Most importantly there is no-one in sight aboard the boat up on its tyre-padded chocks.
He slides into the Volvo’s upholstered seat without closing the door, shifts the gear stick into neutral. Automatic choke. He dabs the accelerator, turns the ignition. Engine starts first time.
Lliam doesn’t rev. He slides it into gear and pulls slowly away. The pebbles grinding together under the tyres make more noise than the engine.
The driver’s seat is too far back for Lliam’s legs.
From beside the stack of black-ended trunks, a woman with two golden retrievers is frowning at him. Lliam slams his door. Unbalanced on the edge of his seat, the jerk of his arm across his stretched forward body makes him accelerate. He doesn’t attempt to brake – doesn’t want to skid on the wet pebbles between the rusty chains and go slithering in under the line of parked yachts.
Even though he has decelerated, Lliam has difficulty bringing the car round onto the harbourside road: it is twice the length of the Fiesta. A bag of tools goes sliding out from the open back. Sitting hunched forward, clinging to the wheel, Lliam feels that every eye in Porlock Weir is now on him.
Trying to keep to the same steady speed, he glances down over the dashboard, swerves away from an upturned dinghy, overcompensates with the power-assisted steering. A short fat man by the paintings shop makes a big show of jumping aside. Which angers Lliam: he was nowhere near him.
Kate, arm outstretched, is balancing herself against the wall opposite the blacksmith’s half-door. Lliam tries to gently brake, but jerks, and the car leaps forward when he takes his foot off the brake. He jams down the clutch and, gently braking this time, reaches across to push open the passenger door. It is further away than in the Fiesta.
Kate part crawls, part drags herself into the front of the car.
“You in?” Lliam asks. The short fat man, behind them, is shouting now.
“You in?”
“Yes.” It’s a grunt.
The Volvo’s sudden acceleration shuts Kate’s door. She is pressed sideways into the seat. Lliam swerves around the front of the orange hotel. Seeing two cars coming towards him along the lower road, Lliam swings the Volvo up the steep road by the yellow house opposite the car park. Foot down, he doesn’t pause at the V junction below the row of high houses, bumps up over and onto the next road, the engine still racing in first. He gets it up into second as they pass the line of parked cars.
“I wish you hadn’t done this.” Kate pulls herself around to grab hold of her seatbelt.
“Done now.” They are coming down to the junction under the woods. “I’m gonna brake hard. Hang on.”
The intention is to bring the back door down shut. It does swing down, but the lock doesn’t connect and it bumps up again.
“Shit.”
Still in second, Lliam lets the car roll out and, as the road twists up around a few houses on a little hill, he manages to find the lever that lets him pull his seat forward.
“Hang on,” he tells her again, and he brakes hard into a pull-in passing place. Again the rear door comes down, but doesn’t stay down.
“Shit.” Leaving the engine running Lliam scoots to the back of the estate car and slams the rear down shut.
Lliam glances back along the road to Porlock Weir. No cars he can see or hear coming after them. Getting back behind the wheel he does up his seatbelt: he doesn’t want to get stopped now for something stupid.
Kate is holding onto her stomach and trying to look across at the dash.
“Won’t be long now love. Soon have you there.” Lliam has seen exactly this look on Kate’s face before, each time when she has cut her arms – once after their first sex together, once when they’d had a row, once when she and he had been drunk. A sobering concentration on pain.
“Not fast!” Kate cries out as he starts out of the Porlock Hill junction with a jerk. “No need to go fast.”
Going up the hill out of Porlock, Lliam adjusts the mirrors to his height, starts to watch for any cars following, tries to calculate how long before the Minehead police are informed, from when they will be on the lookout for this Volvo.
Coming into the flat winding road through the Holnicote Estate Lliam can’t decide what to do for the best … Should he go up over the slow roads of the moors? What if they get stuck? He decides to risk Minehead: even if he gets stopped, the police will get Kate to hospital.
He pulls his face into a smile. “I didn’t mean it to be like this. Fuckin’ Fiesta.”
“You fool,” she touches his hand. “Just hope there’s enough petrol.”
“Over three-quarters.”
This is not the first car they have stolen together, although probably the easiest. Won’t be the first time they will have been stopped either. Last time it was on Weston seafront, midwinter: they broke the Cavalier’s axle belting over the speed-bumps, trying to get away.
After that arrest Lliam served time as a young offender – for ‘taking without the owner’s consent’. Like today’s, though, most of Lliam’s robberies haven’t been premeditated. Wrong place wrong time. Lliam believes that teaming up with Kate, and their moving to Williton, has saved him from further offences, further sentences.
The road up behind Minehead dips and swoops. He slows to a crawl at a mini-roundabout. Along the road to the left is Minehead police station. Both he and Kate anxiously watch the traffic from that direction.
No police cars follow them through Alcombe’s shops, garage, hotel, schools …
No police cars join them at the next roundabout from the seafront.
Traffic flow speeds up on the straight past Dunster – over to the right the brown castle, with green fields receding into the grey day. Ahead, to the left, untidy farms and scrappy woods hang over a dirty fawn sea.
The road gets squeezed between the houses of Carhampton and Washford. Still no sight of any police cars.
Lliam is sighing his nervousness now, knows that staying on this road, feeling ever more conspicuous, he is pushing his luck way beyond the bounds of probability. Was a time when he used to do it deliberately: now he doesn’t want to get caught. The notion, in this situation, is new to him.
At the Tropiquaria, the square white tourist attraction below the transmitting aerials, Lliam, slowing, signals right. The traffic slows behind him. He is the centre of attention. But if he had gone on ahead, through Williton, the road would have taken him straight past the front of the police station. Neighbours, too, might have seen them, might have wondered what these two poor souls were doing in a maroon Volvo.
“We’ll go round by the hills,” he explains to Kate. Although the road is not so direct, it’s not a slow road.
When, finally, he finds a break in the oncoming Saturday traffic and gets across the main road, wanting to get quickly out of sight, Lliam accelerates into the uphill bend. He has to brake to bring the car around the bend.
“Not that much hurry,” Kate clings onto the seatbelt strap. “My waters haven’t broken yet.”
Chapter Three
“I have called,” Jack, enunciating, shouts across from the gallery shop, “the police.” From the deck of the yacht, Jonathan waves a hand in acknowledgement, drops the hand to Anna, heaves her up through the forward hatch.
“Looked like joyriders to me,” Jonathan keeps his back to Jack over at the shop, “Skinny kid, tubby girlfriend. Bit of luck they’ll torch it up on the moors.”
“Keys were in?”
At the back of Anna’s words were the beginnings (potentially) of blame.
“Always do leave ‘em in.”
Jonathan, for the benefit of the gathering outside the gallery shop, puts a comforting arm around Anna’s shoulders. Jack is already making a story of his part in the robbery, is calling the woman with the one damp and the one dry retriever over for her to take her part in it.
“As we agreed,” Jonathan, continuing, tells Anna: “So as not to arouse suspicions.”
“Leaving the keys in,” she flicks him a smile; but of shared humour, not spite, “may have been taking our apparent ingenuousness a tad too far. Both cans were on board?”
“Both.”
Anna nods, lets loose a long sigh. She smells of solvent.
“Still,” she scratches a finger in under the back-to-front cap, “it’s not so bad. Four years now and it’s our first loss.”
“We’ll still have to settle up.”
“We’re still ahead. Aren’t we?”
* * * * *
The intention, eight years ago, when they had moved to Porlock Weir, had not been to smuggle cocaine. Then they had set up their cyber-cottage in the woods, had moored their boat in Porlock Weir’s oil-rainbowed pond. And, when tide and workflow had permitted, they had sailed.
Booking their times with the harbourmaster for the gates to be opened, he’d said: “You mean someone from here is actually going to sail one of these things?” Their normal practise is to edge out on the jib, through the stick-marked channel; and, as soon as they are confident of the depth, hoist the mainsail.
Usually, in the teeth of the prevailing westerlies, they tack Water Music across to the Welsh coast, back to the Devon coast, over again towards St David’s Head, back to the Cornish coast, and out into the green Irish Sea …
On those rare days of an easterly – languid midsummer, or biting midwinter – Water Music tacks up the narrowing channel towards Bristol. Jonathan and Anna always try to reach at least the first Severn bridge before turning and racing back with the current.
Both Jonathan and Anna are considered more than capable sailors. Anna was asked, the year before last, if she would like to join an all-women round-the-world crew. By then, however, sailing in Water Music had long since ceased to be solely for pleasure. Anna and Jonathan had schedules to meet; and Jonathan cannot manage the pick-ups on his own.
Jonathan and Anna do still sail for pleasure, almost. That is, they do still take pleasure in sailing, but now there are other considerations, smokescreens to be laid. So Jonathan and Anna take themselves off for days on end at least once every couple of months, will stay over in the Isle of Man, or the Scillies, occasionally in Ireland.
Three times, returning from these jaunts, they have been stopped by the grey Customs launch, and a dog has sniffed them over. Neither time were they carrying. They know, though, that the Customs launch will pull alongside Water Music again; but now, the Customs men used to Water Music’s erratic comings and goings, only when they have no more pressing business.
Anna and Jonathan get told of their next consignment by e-mail: four sets of figures: longitude, latitude, date and ETA. It is one of many such sets of figures they are sent.
Jonathan, however, has increasingly come to resent this life he has found himself living inside, feels that – even long before he left Bristol – so unlike is this life from anything he anticipated for himself, if he anticipated any, that a stranger is living his life for him. The physical representation of the falseness of this life is not the boat – Water Music, full-sailed, still symbolises leaping away freedom – the life-trap, rather, is his and Anna’s square house in the woods up above Porlock.
Painted originally primrose yellow, algae amongst the stipple has given the outside a sickly tinge. While, from inside, looking out through its square-paned windows, it seems always to be through winter’s dark twigs to the silt-grey channel. Seagulls perch and blare their cries from its roof, crap white down the brown tiles. Jonathan, too, feels shat upon.
Moving down here, away from Bristol, both acknowledge was the first mistake. Moving here they left behind all their real-time flesh-to-flesh cyber contacts, left behind that knowing who-is-interested-in-what without their being aware that they knew it. Here, despite the net, despite e-mail, once settled in Porlock, Anna and Jonathan are effectively isolated.
Busy at first, occupied – when not sailing – with the novelty of setting up and marketing their own company, they didn’t notice their dissociation. Technology, however, has a treacherous habit of abandoning its planners. Because, while technology’s practitioners are engrossed in their one technological aspect, elsewhere on the broad forward march of innovation someone else has devised a route around that particular difficulty and the new future is bumping up against other problems.
The software package that Anna and Jonathan had specialised in – complementary to a major-producer’s software – was side-stepped and superseded by the major-producer’s next mass-sell software.
(Once left behind, the faster that any once-innovator runs, and the more aware and fearful they become of their never catching up, the more they lose confidence in their ‘abilities’. Although their ‘abilities’ are probably undiminished. What is lacking, what is most needed to be a leader, any kind of leader, is blind arrogance.)
Jonathan and Anna’s original package had grown out of their own frustration with the mass-producer’s software. Only, once having designed their addition, did they realise its commercial potential. That potential realised, while still in Bristol, they had been able to buy a bigger boat, Water Music, kept in a yard near Weston-super-Mare. Which meant, every time they wanted to launch, they had to tractor or winch it down into the water. Which inconvenience brought them, along with the confidence from their new business, to the square yellow house above Porlock.
They still didn’t have twenty-four hour access to the sea, which would have meant their going further west or down to the south coast; but all they had to do here, once the gates were open, was to float out.
Having bought the house with a mortgage, quickly acknowledging the need to make more money, Jonathan and Anna had concentrated on advertising, promoting and selling their complementary software package.
The mass-producer’s new software, although long-rumoured in its coming, took them by surprise. Too late Jonathan and Anna sought to diversify, even took to writing games. But, their hearts not being in the games, neither of them having a game-playing mentality, they couldn’t find a market, or marketing strategy, for their new products.
When their income had dwindled below even their household expenses, it was then that Anna recalled the Bristol estate agent. He had listened in disbelief to Jonathan and Anna’s enthusiastic plans for their cyber-cottage, their proposed timetable of work and sailing; and he had told them that, if ever they needed, he knew of other ways of earning money. The estate agent, a round man encased in a three-piece suit, wouldn’t then be drawn on what ways, only smugly declared that there were indeed other ways, and to contact him if ever they needed the money.
The estate agent had met Jonathan and Anna in an empty first-floor flat overlooking the level top of Clifton Downs.
“What you will be doing is far more than ‘not strictly legal’. It is downright illegal. If caught you will both be sent to jail for at least ten years. So, if you want to back out, we will all leave here now. None the wiser.”
Jonathan and Anna had both looked out at the Downs. Anna would say later that what she remembered looking at was a young man holding onto a blue acrobatic kite. Jonathan would say that what he remembered was an old man who kept on getting jerked backwards by a small white dog.
What had been in both their minds that afternoon was their calculations, prior to coming to Bristol, that should they not meet the next couple of payments on the house then they would lose both boat and house.
The boat, both declared, was their raison d’être. Even so, both said, its loss would be bearable, possibly repairable. Along with the house, however, would go all their hardware and their means of earning an honest living. Life would then, they believed, not only be not worth living, but would be unliveable. What was ten years in jail?
“What do we have to do?” Anna asked the rotund estate agent.
What Jonathan and Anna agreed to do (had speculated as much) was rendezvous with a ship from the Caribbean – carrying coconuts and bananas – and collect six to twelve jerrycans full of cocaine.
Jonathan and Anna asked for most rendezvous – about nine a year – to be timed for dusk or dawn. The jerrycans were tied to canary-yellow anchor buoys and dropped from the ship’s stern. Because of this both Jonathan and Anna are convinced that, even though three different ships are used, the majority of each crew must know of the smuggling.
Anna is the one who steers Water Music down onto the yellow buoys. Jonathan is the one who leans out to grapple them up with a boat hook.
Once Jonathan has snagged the line of buoys, the drag on the boat is tremendous. Especially when it is a line of five or six. Getting the first two jerrycans onto the boat takes all his muscle power. Then, once aboard, they have to go back for the second line. Except once, when Jonathan had managed to grab all eight buoys on the one run down. Every other time, however, Anna has had to bring Water Music back into the wind, find a position above the buoys and bring Water Music hissing back down the waves, both of them yelling their triumph when Jonathan again hooks the buoys.
More than eight cans stored below leaves little room in the cabin. The yellow anchor buoys will have been quickly ditched. Once the jerrycans are stowed, therefore, they are committed until they reach Porlock Weir.
Some of the seas have been huge, locating the ship a miracle, let alone picking up the lines of small yellow buoys, and then heaving the wet cans up onto a dropping and heaving deck. Yet, in four years, not once have they failed to make a pick-up. And, though they have been stopped three times by the grey Customs & Excise launch, not once have they been stopped when they have been carrying. And, though other boats have been broken into around the harbour, not once has their boat been touched. Even with – they take the jerrycans two at a time up to the house – ten remaining on board.
So many risks … which the rewards have made worthwhile. And which makes Anna say now that they can afford this one loss. Jonathan is less sure, though, what makes her say next: “Don’t think it could’ve been the agent? Save paying us?”
Jonathan tries to think why Anna would, at this moment, want to sow distrust between him and the agent. He can see no gain in it for her: they have no alternative contact, need the agent for the income he provides. Jonathan decides that it was the airing of a genuine conjecture.
“Why would he send a fat woman?”
Anna’s shoulders shrug under his arm.
Jonathan, looking down at the compacted pebbles where the car had been, thinks that maybe this oblong space, this false display of affection, both for once knowing it to be false, will prove to be a defining moment – a moment that will get him out of this smuggling, maybe even sell the house and the boat, a moment that will see the beginning of a new unsullied life for himself …
Together he and Anna have been planning a long holiday sailing down the West African coast. Although Anna was timing it between deliveries, for Jonathan it would have been his first step towards breaking the routine.
Now, dull as the day, a fear enters him – will this theft, this loss, reinforce this way of life? Will it leave him again with no alternative? It is at this moment, on this grey day in Porlock Weir, that Jonathan realises the depths of his dissatisfaction – coming down here pretending to work on the boat, then pretending to care who wins the rugby. He wasn’t interested in it at school, was only made to play because he was so big.
In this one epiphanic moment he sees how much he has let Anna take over running repairs to the boat while he, like today, watches telly, or on other days, pretends to work on his laptop. Likewise he lets her renovate and decorate the house while he concentrates on programming.
The programming, ironically, his confidence restored by his illicit income, the pressure off, he has found himself enjoying again, is again happy to toy with novel aspects, and he is undismayed when he chances to find that other programmers have already been down that path. He doesn’t see it now as their having stolen a march on him, rather that – great minds thinking alike – it proves he is on the right track. Which he is. A couple of small security programs, ingenious in their simplicity, are making money for him again.
Before this theft, Jonathan had seen a future for himself beyond this place, beyond this boat, beyond Anna …
The treachery of his thoughts has him take his arm from around Anna’s shoulders. He moves over to the wooden ladder propped against Water Music’s side. (When not in use the ladder is stored in the furthest cottage shed.) He slots his big feet into the rung spaces. Cables clink against the mast to the rock of his descent.
“Least the car’s insured,” Anna, daredevil she, has leant down to whisperingly laugh to him. Not looking up, Jonathan glumly nods, mutters, “Pity the contents weren’t.”
Reaching the pebbles, he starts to walk around the harbour to collect the bag of tools and to thank Jack for his prompt reaction. Big mouth.
Balant
Balant: A Beginning
Preface
When I first considered writing this book I envisaged it in the form of a handbook — for those unfortunate enough to find themselves marooned on a planet. No sooner did I attempt to order my thoughts to that end, however, than I realised the extent of my ignorance. For I know only of life on the planet on which I had been marooned. My circumstances, therefore, would not necessarily be those suffered on other planets. So I decided to write a history of my misadventure, relate how I and my companions coped with our straitened circumstances, recount the necessary states of mind that we adopted to deal with such a calamity, and detail our many mistakes; in the hope that you, the reader, will gain inspiration from our stumblings should some mischance place you in a similar predicament.
However, if you are one of those who are so complacent that you believe that nothing untoward will ever overtake you; or, if you are one who has no interest in the out of the ordinary events that overtake others, then I advise you not to open this book. You will only scoff disbelievingly at the story related herein.
Pi Pandy
Chapter One
Describing the peculiar circumstances of my upbringing, the formative characters, my early education, the departure from my maternal home, my schooling, my fellow pupils, my dissatisfactions and my dreams.
My name Pi is a poor pun. My mother claimed that I was but four years old when she first noticed my propensity to abstraction. Hence Pi. Apparently by that early age I had already developed the habit of standing on one leg and staring into space. It is a habit I still own. To others it appears that I am in a trance: few believe me, when I tell them, that at such times my thoughts are tumbling pell-mell over one another.
Pandy was my mother’s name. Of my father I know little, save that he was an itinerant technician. From him, I assume, I have inherited my physical wanderlust. While, from my mother, I have acquired the urge to know more, and which forever prompts me to move to places new.
I suppose that, in this brief summary of my early life, I should start at the beginning.
I was conceived out of a liaison between my mother and father on an outstation in another corner of this galaxy. My first memories, though, are of the outstation which my mother made her own.
The outstation existed to monitor a distant quasar. As everyone should know quasars are not to be trusted as natural phenomena; so my earliest thinking was bound about with the idea that things are not always what they seem. And my mother, being head technician, overseeing the machines which monitored the quasar, in explaining to me her function, she emphasised to me the singular importance of our intelligence, and the paramountcy of innovation within that intelligence Machines cannot innovate: people can.
Added to that was my mother’s passion for music. On her early wanderings she had begun a collection of old musical Instruments and ancient musical scores. If I were to picture my mother now it would be with a cello between her legs, or a violin tucked under her chin, or frowning red-faced over a clarinet. For my mother was not content to simply collect musical scores, she also played and recorded them — recording first one instrument then another. Her ultimate ambition was to play a symphony. However, when I left, she was still puffing and scraping at quintets.
My mother, of course, tried to pass her enthusiasm onto me. Every day I had to practise one instrument or another. By the time I was eight I was playing violin duos with her. But, although I became proficient in the playing of all my mother’s instruments, I lacked her zest. The best my mother would say of my playing was that it was ‘technically competent.’ That too gave me pause for thought: why, when my mother and I played an identical piece, would my mother’s playing be lyrical and mine only an accurate rendition? Thus, at an early age, I was given to pondering intangibles.
To do justice to this sketch of my early years I feel that I must also tell of the other two inhabitants of our outstation, both of whom owned similar enthusiasms to my mother and which they too tried to press on me.
One was a horticulturist whose ambition it was to cultivate a nutritious plant which could be grown without light. Although while I was there all that he managed to produce were various forms of stinking fungi. Even so I was often inveigled into helping him with his seed propagation, indexing and research.
Our other neighbour’s interest was metallurgy. His was the only enthusiasm on that outstation which was intended to bring self-aggrandisement. Consequently he was the most short-tempered with his failures. His dream was to manufacture an alloy as malleable as an infant’s modelling dough, which at the same time would be as hard as tungsten. The intention being to make the alloy malleable only from the inside: the benefits of such a metal being readily apparent to all of us who dwell in space. The benefit he hoped to gain from it was to be the owner of the sole patent, and so become wealthy. I was also induced into helping him with his experiments; most of which ended in the alloy being either as hard as tungsten or as malleable as dough. Never both. His only real achievement lay in the manufacture of bizarre ornaments.
Add to that my own conventional education and you can imagine in what a rarefied atmosphere I was raised. I hope too that you have the imagination to see how limited it was. And by the time I was ten I began to sense this lack. My teaching machines had taught me the variety of life, and I knew only three living beings.
By the time I was twelve I had persuaded my mother to let me go to school. At first opposed to my leaving her care, my mother soon came to see that it was for my own good. She saw that I needed a tutor, someone disinterested to guide me, to show me what was worth learning — a task which she did not think herself fitted to undertake. And she harkened back to her own childhood, in circumstances similar to mine, said that she too had longed for companions her own age. I hastened to correct her, for I had no inclination to be with those my own age. That could they teach me? They, whose ignorance would be equal to my own? No, what I wanted was to meet with those who knew more than I did, who knew what I did not, so that I might learn from them.
When the supply ship next called my mother delivered me up to the Captain. She left me with many an injunction to take care of myself — to be careful of my diet, to exercise regularly, to be diligent in my studies, to keep her posted of my progress. But only one promise did she exact of me — to practise my violin every morning. For she had decided that the violin was the instrument best suited to me. Apart from a change of clothes, and a few of my mother’s recordings, the violin was the only luggage I had.
“In time Pi,” she said, “you will become one with it. Promise me.”
I readily and gladly promised, and my mother, weeping, left the ship. As the airlocks closed, and we began to move away from the outstation, which until that moment had encapsulated my whole life, the Captain kindly turned to me and, to lessen the sadness of departure, to turn my thoughts to the future, he said,
“Well Pi, you’ve just taken the first and hardest step of all your future journeys.” So it was that I took the name Pi on my travels with me. Subsequently I have been known to all I have met as Pi Pandy.
The school was on a supply station. Every week a freighter arrived from, or left for, another part of the galaxy; with, occasionally, and much to my excitement, an intergalactic freighter stopping by. When not in school I invariably found myself loitering about the docking bays eavesdropping on the crews’ conversations. Where they had come from, whence they were bound, with my imagination making up for my ignorance of those places. Or I listened, enchanted, to strange beings conversing among themselves in even stranger languages. While I was at school many of the crews came to know me — the lone boy who hung around the dock bays.
For, despite my mother’s indulgent smile, I had already known myself well enough to have foreseen that I would not enjoy the company or those my own age. I shared none of their facile enthusiasms. Few seemed as hungry for knowledge as I. So long as they did enough to satisfy their tutors the majority were content, were far more interested in playing games, in competing with one another in silly contests. While I was at that particular supply station free-fall diving through the gravityless centre was the fashion. A dangerous fashion. Several hit the sides of that long tunnel, suffered cuts and broken bones. It seemed that they had to artificially prove their daring, or their endurance. For, after the freefall diving, it then became the fashion to run around the rim of the station, the person who ran the most laps being acclaimed the winner.
To me this all seemed very foolish, as any excess must seem to a rational mind. The daily exercises I did in the privacy of my room were enough to maintain a healthy body. To take such exercises to extremes was injurious to health.
Nor did I share my fellow pupils interest in one another. On my mother’s outstation everyone bad been permitted their own idiosyncrasies, here they had to outshine. And that desire to outshine manifested itself in what, to me, was the most ludicrous of affectations.
On my mother’s outstation the four of us had worn the simple tunics that all space dwellers wear — identical except for length and girth. Yet, on that supply station, as fashion dictated, they painted their tunics, cut pieces from them, stitched pleats into them or added bits to them. All it needed was for a crew to arrive from one of the cities with a slight alteration to their tunics and, within a week, all the tunics on the station were thus altered.
Indeed, on that small supply station, the adults were as childlike as the children. So competitive were they with their peers that they seemed to go perpetually in fear of being usurped. So it was that the majority of adults there unreasonably expected all children to be polite to them while they were not in the least polite to the children. Of all the inhabitants their sole ambition seemed to be to become envied by their peers. To that end they even daubed their faces.
I must confess that even I, when I had first arrived, not wishing to appear conspicuous, I too had tried to keep pace with those changing fashions. Although I had quickly relinquished all such attempts. For I had seen that, if I was a week ahead of fashion, then I was laughed at for a fool; and, if I fell a week behind fashion, then I was also laughed at for a fool. So I reverted to my simple unadorned tunic, which for a while became The Fashion; and so I was heralded as a trendsetter. When the fashion had passed I was told that I was out of date. In my weekly letter home I told my mother to tell the metallurgist that his fortune probably lay in selling his ornaments to the gullible inhabitants of supply stations.
As you will probably have gathered I was not popular with my fellow pupils. They mocked, not only my tunic, not only my refusal to take part in their games, but also my diligence in my studies and my faithful practise of my antiquated violin. They also took a puerile delight in making fun of my name — for a time I became ridiculously known as Twenty Two Sevenths.
I was not alone in being mocked by them. But those others who were like me, who were also assiduous in their studies; like me they did not seek the company of their fellows. The butt of many jokes we kept ourselves apart and aloof. So I made no friends on that supply station.
When I was fifteen I passed all the exams to qualify as a fully-fledged technician. But, although I was deemed to know the mechanics of machines and machine languages, I still felt that my learning had only just begun. I also knew that I could learn no more on that supply station, so I wrote to my mother asking if I could go to university.
She consented.
My tutor, a kind man, helped me to select a university. I wanted to study comparative technologies. The university that accepted me did so because I was able to play the violin — they had an orchestra. The university was in a city two galaxies distant. Where the supply station was at least a hundred times the size of our old outstation, I was told that the city was (at least!) a hundred times larger than the supply station.
My final weeks at the supply station passed in a fever of impatience. In her last letter to me my mother made me promise to send her recordings of the orchestra.
Two days after I received that letter I boarded the intergalactic freighter, the Yilan.
Chapter Two
The journey: where I make one friend, puzzle on another, as well as on philosophy and humour. So does my broader education begin. Before calamity strikes..
On the Yilan, much to my surprise, I became friends with two other boys. Or, if I am to be accurate, I should say that they befriended me. Both were already aboard the ship when I joined it.
Dag Olvess was the eldest. He was eighteen, tall and well-proportioned, had just completed a year’s scholarship with an eminent professor, was on his way back to a university in the name city as mine. That a city should boast more than one university… My anticipation was heightened by his every casual utterance.
The other boy was Malamud Bey. He was fourteen years old and shorter than I. And, where I felt privileged to be befriended by Dag, I could not understand why Dag sought the company of Malamud. For Malamud was exactly like those boys on the supply station. Where Dag and I both wore simple tunics, Malamud had circles and squares painted upon his. He was also forever playing games and practical jokes.
Although Malamud was officially listed as the ship’s errand boy, his capacity seemed to be more that of mascot. The crew of six seemed to welcome his pranks and silly jokes by way of light relief — to offset the boredom of their journey. Because I must admit that, where for me the journey itself was exciting, I could imagine how its novelty could pall. After only a few days, once I had explored the ship, exhausted its novelty, I too began to look forward to my destination, pestered Dag with questions about the city and its universities.
The only other interest lay in the stations we put into. Apart from the mail, our cargo seemed to alternate between metal ingots and ore. We would put into a smelting rig, unload the ore, take on the ingots. At the next supply station we would unload the ingots, take on more ore. And so on, as we zigzagged across the galaxy.
At each smelting rig we also took off the crew, who were replaced by the new crew we had picked up at the last supply station. (I do not know if this is common knowledge, but those crew stay on the rigs for only a few months at a time. Because of the dangers inherent in the use of such intense heat — one of the early smelters is now a small sun — the crews are not allowed to take their families onto the rigs with them.)
Many of the rig crews we carried appeared to know Malamud, were pleased to see him. I could not understand why they found his strange use of words and his pranks so amusing. So one day, about our third week out, I asked Dag to tell me why he so enjoyed Malamud’s company.
Before I give his reason I feel that I must relate the immediate circumstances that led me to ask such a question.
A few days previously I had been leant against a wall in my customary posture — one foot on the floor, one foot on the wall behind me — and I had been gazing out to space.
Malamud had already found me thus several times and had rudely broken my train of thought with inane questions such as, “What can you see out there?” And he had made a game of pretending to examine each star before us. Yet another time he had knocked on my head and had asked if I was in there. I fear that I must have displayed my irritation for, on the day I have mentioned, he crept up, unseen by me, and — where my lifted slipper was pressed against the wall — he squeezed in some contact adhesive. He then crept away to fetch Dag and some of the crew. On their return he ran up to me and said,
“Quick Pi!. Quick! You should see what’s on the other side.”
Of course, when I made to follow him, my slipper being stuck to the wall, I fell flat on my face. Dag, Malamud and the crew all laughed at my graceless fall. I, though, did not see any humour whatsoever in it. And, when I managed to extricate my foot from the slipper on the wall and I said that I did not see anything amusing about a slipper being stuck to a wall, they laughed all the more. I did not understand; and my puzzlement seemed only to add to their humour. While all I could see was that I had been made to fall over and now I would have to buy myself some new slippers. Though, to be fair, I should add that at the next supply station Malamud did buy me a new pair of slippers.
However, before that I put my question to Dag.
“You must understand Pi,” he said, “that Malamud has a different intelligence to you. You have closed your mind to him. You must open it. If you do you can probably learn as much from him as you will from many a learned professor.”
When I doubted that Malamud could teach me anything at all, except to avoid him, Dag said,
“I learnt more from Malamud in one sentence than I did from a whole year’s scholarship. Let me explain. Soon after I joined the ship Malamud asked me what I was studying. Now, as any philosophy student will tell you, as soon as you tell anyone that you are a philosophy student you are asked what philosophy is, and of what use it is.”
I too had been intending to ask Dag just those two questions; but, not having Malamud’s brash manner, I had been awaiting a more propitious moment.
“I endeavoured to explain to him,” Dag continued, “by telling him how philosophers had defined intelligence, quoting to him one of the earliest philosophers — ‘I think therefore I am.’” (For his degree Dag’s dissertation was to be on the pre-Space philosophy of the planet Earth, its influence upon our culture.) “With such a definition to hand,” Dag told me, “we can treat with other species, decide whether they are of a reactive or a rational intelligence. Malamud thought only a moment on what I had told him, then he said, “So — I don’t think therefore I’m not?” And laughing he left me. During the past few weeks I’ve been trying to come to terms with that one statement. Which in all likelihood Malamud has forgotten. You should cultivate his company Pi. He may surprise you too.”
Although I did not understand Dag’s appreciation of such an irreverent upside-down retort, I did heed his advice and sought Malamud’s company. And the longer I knew him the more I did come to appreciate his bright and provocative intelligence. In the weeks that followed I even played games with him; although he frequently became enraged at my unsportsmanlike equanimity. For it did not matter to me whether I won or lost; and, try as I might, I could understand neither his taunting jubilation in victory nor his curses in defeat.
Nor could I understand his or Dag’s laughter at some mischance. In fact my lack of humour became a standing joke to them And to the rest of the crew. I learnt to patiently wait for their laughter to subside, then I would ask why they thought a particular remark so funny. Such a question, though, often set them to laughing again. So, thereafter, unless I was thoroughly perplexed, I learnt not to ask for explanations where the humour of others was concerned.
As I learnt to tolerate their incomprehensible humour so they tolerated my lack of it. And I was grateful to them for that, glad to be invited on their jaunts and excursions — onto the rigs and supply stations. Through Malamud’s effrontery Dag and I met many interesting people, saw many facets of our civilisation which I would otherwise have missed on that journey.
By the ninth week of our voyage, two months from our destination, we were all three firm friends, inseparable companions. That week the longest unbroken stretch of our trip began — going on a loop around the outer rim of a galaxy so that we could make maximum speed. On the far reach of that loop we encountered a cosmic storm of terrific proportions.
At the last supply station our Captain had been notified of a cosmic storm in the area. As the storm had lain directly in our path the Captain had decided to steer a course behind it.
So, for three days we skirted that storm, the freighter rocking and bucketing about. At the storm’s height, to stop the ingots crashing through the ship’s hull, the captain had them cocooned in webbing and switched off the gravity. Malamud and Dag invented a weightless race through the ship’s corridors. As Malamud complained that I didn’t put my heart into it, I was made the judge. Even then, much to their chagrin, I once forgot to look to see who had won.
On the third day the turbulence ceased; and, the danger appearing to be over, the gravity was reactivated. Little did we know that we were now entering the most dangerous phase of the storm. For, in the aftermath of the storm, came the cosmic dust.
In a newer ship I doubt that it would have had much effect, but the Yilan was an old ship, had passed through the rear of such storms many times before. The velocity of the dust resulted in it pitting the hull. Where the hull had been previously pitted, those minuscule grains of dust penetrated the Yilan’s outer skin. Our atmosphere began to leak into space. I suppose that, from the time we first noticeably began to lose pressure, to when the first plates began to buckle, took less than an hour.
Apart from our freighter crew of six, we had two rig crews in transit. Including Dag, Malamud and I, that made nineteen in all. However, due to some oversight, we had only ten spacesuits on board. When this was discovered the rig crews began to panic.
As it became rapidly evident that the hull was going to collapse, the captain decided to take everyone into the command module and blast it away from the freighter. The command module could be sealed off, had its own inbuilt power supply and life-support.
As Malamud and I went to rush off to the command module, Dag restrained us.
“It’ll be hopeless in there,” he said, “If the hull’s leaking, so will that be. Come with me.”
It says much for Dag’s character that, in such desperate circumstances, both Malamud and I followed him without question.
We hadn’t turned two corners before Malamud, divining where we were bound, said,
“The shuttle!” Then I too realised Dag’s intention.
On this voyage the shuttle had been used only the once — to take a sick woman off an outstation. She had been on the Yilan just the one day. And that had been weeks before. In their panic the rest of the crew had overlooked it. And the shuttle, being stored within the ship, it would not have been damaged by the dust.
With the ship buckling in on itself we had difficulty unjamming the inner airlock door. However, once we were through, we wasted little time in disconnecting the umbilical from the ship, and we very soon had the shuttle’s door fastened behind us.
The shuttle had three seats — the third one between and to the rear of the other two. As I was the last to enter I took the rear seat. We hurriedly strapped ourselves in.
“Take us out,” Dag told Malamud. Malamud had occasionally been allowed to pilot the shuttle on the small journeys it had made.
“The door won’t open,” Malamud said.
“Blast the bolts,” Dag told him.
“How?” Malamud was trembling.
Neither Dag nor Malamud had studied to become technicians.
I undid my straps, leant forward between them and scanned the list of emergency procedures. I tapped in the code. The perimeter of the outer door shuddered. Slowly the door drifted away.
“Now — take us out,” Dag said.
As the shuttle moved forward I began to strap myself back into my seat. Just as we cleared the ship I realised that I had left behind my luggage.
“My violin!” I exclaimed. At that moment all that I could think of was my solemn promise to my mother. And with that single thought in my head, not aware of what I was doing, I stood.
Through the rear ports I watched awe-struck as the Yilan, silhouetted against the glittering sweep of the galaxy, collapsed in on itself.
All forms of propulsion that we know of are but a rapid series of controlled explosions; even to the movement of our own bodies. As the Yilan’s hull imploded, the explosions of its reactors became uncontrolled. Forced in upon themselves they became a critical mass.
“Sit down Pi!” Dag shouted at me. But I was transfixed by the spectacle before me, saw the hull shake as the command module blasted free, and a moment later, when it seemed that the hull could contract no more, there came a blinding flash.
And that is the last that I remember of our departure from the Yilan.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1148884
Happiness
Happiness
Foreword
What follows is a reconstruction of events that took place seven years and not sixty thousand million kilometres from this city.
Chapter One
“Somebody stole our moon,” the Member for North Two held the orb. “That’s the length and breadth of it.”
His brief peroration pointedly delivered, the Member for North Two released the orb. It glided across the circular table to the member for South Six, sitting almost directly opposite.
The rules governing this Extraordinary Convention of the Senate were those given it by Space. No Member of the Senate might speak unless at least one hand rested on the orb. Nor, if the panel in front of any other Member of the Senate came alight, could he or she continue to speak beyond the minute visually counted down before him or her.
The mechanics of the Senate are the same as that for every other populated planet and for every populous station and city under Space’s jurisdiction. Members register their desire to speak on the panel before them, or cancel their desire to do so if someone else speaks their mind for them. The duration of the speech is governed by how many others have registered their desire to speak and by how much time has been allowed for the debate. So, even in the most heated of discussions, no matter how agitated the Senate Members may be, none speak out of turn, none interrupt, because all know that eventually, and with precise equity, the orb will come to them.
At this Senate Meeting the Member for South Six, as usual, appointed himself the voice of reason and calm.
“Let us examine the facts. The fact is that not one of us here can be sure when our moon disappeared. Not one of us, from what I’ve heard here, can remember exactly when we last saw it.” The panel before North Three, diametrically opposite, came alight. The sixty second countdown before the Member for South Six started.
“The only fact we can be certain of is that it has been missing for the last five days. Because it was five days ago when the Member for South Eight started asking others if anyone had seen the moon. Then, and only then, did we notice its absence. Then, and only then, did we notice that we had lost contact with XE2. The fact is, until contact is re-established, we can’t know what has happened.”
On its release the orb floated over to North Three.
“I don’t wish to appear offensive,” the Member for North Three said, “but the fact is that the Member for South Six doesn’t appear to care. It matters, however, to me. If I don’t get my crops off, bang goes my livelihood. If we never re-establish contact he can carry on as he is. Me? Space is my only market.”
North followed by South the Senate Members were sitting in numerical order around the table. North One sitting beside South One, North Two beside South Two, and so on, until South Eight came to sit beside North One. And exactly half of those Senate Members were farmers. Which is only to be expected on any planet.
On any colonised planet Space divides the globe into sixteen equal segments, regardless of local topography, even where the dividing line cuts through a local city, even where it cuts through individual dwellings. The occupant of such a divided dwelling may then opt to vote in one segment or another. In the more populous segments the most articulate, the most energetic, are invariably elected. In the less populous areas it is generally the farmer with the greatest amount of land. Although the few other local citizenry of that segment probably have livelihoods dependent on that farmer, those citizenry are protected by the laws of Space, therefore their votes cannot be blatantly coerced. The farmer being elected is rather a natural outcome of the situation. Because the farmer, having most dealings with Space, is better able to represent the planet there. The farmer is also the most interested in having his views represented to Space and is, consequently, the keenest to see himself elected.
The Member for South Eight, who now held the orb, was just such a farmer.
“Actually the Member for South Six is incorrect when he says that we can only be sure that no-one has seen the moon in the last five days. It was three weeks ago when I noticed that it didn’t rise. I didn’t pay much attention for a couple of days, then it was cloudy for a couple more days. Then I realised that it wasn’t there. And I didn’t believe it. That’s why I kept it to myself. No-one wants to appear a fool. But I knew, by that time, that we should have had a half moon. I checked my calendar and my dates. They agreed with me. And it was then, and only then, that I started asking around. It was five days ago that the convention of this Extraordinary Meeting was first mooted. Three days ago it was decided.”
Seventy two hours is the minimum time in which a Senate can be convened on a planet. Time for the Senate Members to rearrange their affairs, prepare their case, do some research into the subject under debate and physically travel to the Senate, in this case in the planet’s equatorial capital. At first on colonised planets, because of the inconvenient overland distances, the Senates were held by televisual links. But these were found to be ineffective. At such removes the subtleties of conversation were lost, nuances and inflexions filtered out; the passive reactions of one’s fellow Members passing unnoticed, the underlying mood going unremarked. And such dispersed Senates were prone to manipulation by determined lobbyists. Whereas having to physically congregate in the one place views and experiences could be exchanged away from the debating table, off the record. Consensus is thus often achieved prior to any debate; and the debate simply takes the form of putting on record the majority and opposing views. So, despite the inconvenience of attending the Senate, like the rest of the constitution given them by Space, planetary inhabitants accept it because, for the best of all reasons, like the slow movement of the orb leads to reasoned debate, it works.
The Member for North Four, a technician, now held the orb.
“I was one of the first to be contacted by the Member for South Eight.” A nod across the table acknowledged their friendship. “I was compiling some reports for XE2. My constituents’ crops have all gone. I’m expecting no ships until next year. So I included in my report an urgent request for any information concerning the absence of our moon. I should have received that information, by return transmission, two days ago at the latest. None came.”
The orb moved across to North One, a trader. “Four days ago I had a ship at my place. It left an hour or so before this meeting was called. No reply on that?”
For direct question and answer the orb can be directed three times back and forth between interrogator and interlocutor.
“No,” the Member for North Four replied, “And I’ve checked back over the last three weeks. All information we have received has come via ship. The ship in North One and a ship two weeks ago in North Five. All routine information. The next ship is due in two weeks in North Three.”
The orb was now directed to North Three.
“Exactly. And if that ship doesn’t come all my fruit will spoil. It’s alright for you Southern Members, and for you timber farmers and technicians, but if I don’t get that fruit off I’m finished here.”
The laws governing the action of the individuals on any planet being the same as those which pertain throughout the rest of civilisation, the Senate of a planet has few actual powers. It can raise revenue for planetary projects through taxation of its own inhabitants, but, even then, both taxes and projects are subject to Space veto, in this instance in the person of the Director of the Station known as XE2. If the station should disagree with that veto, there of course exist ever higher courts of appeal. But that is beside the point. The main function of any Senate is to represent the views of its constituents to Space. In the case of this Senate, the North Seven segment of the planet being entirely composed of ocean and icecap, and being therefore wholly uninhabited, that Member was elected by everyone on the planet to be their Senate Spokesman.
The Member for North Seven was rotund and red-faced. Physically the other Senate Members were as diverse as anywhere else in Space.
It was as Spokesman that the Member for North Seven now called the orb to him.
“I’d like to point out to the Member for North Three that it was a Southern Member who first brought our attention to the absence of our moon; and it has been a Northern technician who has attempted to find out what is happening Out There.”
The orb travelled back to North Three.
“I apologise unreservedly. It was my anxiety speaking. But I am the first to be affected by this. So what are we going to do?”
“All I want to know,” the Member for South Four held the orb, “is where is our moon? It must be somewhere. Moons don’t just disappear.”
A few Members glanced askance at the Member for South Four. The orb moved along to the Member for South Five.
The Member for South Five was not run-of-the-mill for Senate Members. A resident scientist, an anthropologist, his presence in the Senate had come about due to his campaigning for funds and permission for his research; and having once started campaigning, almost of its own volition, he had ended up in the Senate.
He hadn’t yet spoken at this Extraordinary Convention.
“I fully sympathise with the Member for North Three’s anxieties. However, if we could look at the wider implications, we will see that this concerns every single person on this planet. I agree with the Member for South Eight that the moon has been absent for about three weeks. As you all know I live on a river estuary.” Another oddity. “Three weeks ago we had neap tides. Those tides have gradually subsided altogether. I have checked. We now have no tides of any note anywhere around the globe. The absence of tides must affect the weather. At the moment it is too soon to say what any new weather pattern will be. Entirely subjective of course, but the weather on my estuary appears extremely unseasonable and erratic at the moment. A new stable pattern will take possibly years to emerge. Sea levels will change. As will the extent of the icecaps. Areas of land now under cultivation may become wholly unproductive. Some settlements may become uninhabitable. Land temperatures will change. Crops now viable in one area may no longer be so. Farm boundaries will have to be redrawn. Those are the probable long term effects; and they affect us all. Space will redraw those boundaries, therefore it is imperative that we re-establish contact with Space as soon as possible.”
“Boundaries redrawn!” the Member for North Two expostulated as soon as his fingers contacted the orb, “Moon stolen!” No-one knows when or where. No more tides! Weather stabilising! The point is farms will have to be moved. And we all know what that means. One long endless battle with the Department. Remember that drought? See what I mean.” He released the orb.
Like many other farmers the Member for North Two affected bad grammar to hide his, to him, unseemly intelligence.
The spokesman called the orb to him.
“While whatever caused our moon to disappear, and I have heard many suggestions — some bizarre, some plausible — the exact reason must, for the moment, remain a mystery. The probable results of that disappearance, however, have been admirably summed up by the Member for South Five. For the immediate benefit of the Member for North Three, and for the peace of mind of the rest of us, I propose that we send one of our ships immediately to XE2. That way we will know within four days what is happening. Are there any dissenters?”
The Member for North Three registered his desire to speak.
“I’d like to propose, as I stand to gain most from an early answer, that I send a ship to XE2. My son will be only too willing to go.”
The orb travelled back to the Spokesman.
“Then we are agreed?” No panels came alight. “I therefore declare this meeting closed.”
All waited until the orb had moved to the centre of the table and then, murmuring among themselves, the Senate Members one by one left their seats.
Chapter Two
Colonised planets have few ships. Having voluntarily relinquished life in Space the colonists own a frame of mind which does not wish to seem less than wholeheartedly committed to the planet of their choice. Owning a space ship makes doubtful their allegiance.
However, for safety’s sake, every colonised planet has to have at least two ships at their disposal for use in an emergency, as ambulances if nothing more. Planets are prone to ‘natural’ disasters. Apart from those two mandatory ships, a few of the more prosperous farmers and traders may own a ship in order that they may occasionally venture abroad for their own profit or amusement. As for the less prosperous citizenry, should they wish to escape the exigencies of life on a planet, they can always seek passage on a passing freighter.
At the time of the Extraordinary Senate Meeting there were nine privately owned ships on the planet, all of them small luxury craft. One of those ships belonged to the Senate Member for North Three. The ship had been a present for his son, Halk Fint, on his sixteenth birthday.
The purpose of its purchase had been, paradoxically, an attempt to induce Halk Fint to remain on the planet. Give him the toys of Space, his father had reasoned, and he might stay and help run the farm. And Halk Fint had, out of affection for his mother and his father, stayed this last year.
Written into the constitution of every colonised planet is the law that says that all children, when they reach the age of twelve (Space years), must be sent into Space to complete their education. To separate parent and child at such an early age may seem unnecessarily hard to us in the city, where a school is never more than 500 meters distant and our children come home to us every night. But our children are already in Space, they know of life here, are told of life on planets; and, if they so desire, and a few always do, they can emigrate to the planet of their choice. Freedom is choice.
Our citizens are a free people. Those of our citizens who happen to have been born on a planet must also be able to make that choice. But no film nor book, no teaching machine, no individual teacher no matter how inspired, can adequately portray life in Space like firsthand experience. So, to be able to enjoy the same freedom of choice as their fellow citizens, planetary children are therefore compulsorily sent into Space.
Cynics among you might say that to kidnap children in their most formative years is to weight the balance in favour of Space. Let it be said, though, that the planets do advertise throughout Space for settlers, and their advertisements cannot be said to be without bias. And Space is the civilisation on which those planets ultimately depend. While many of those ex-planetary children, who have chosen to come into Space, have contributed greatly to the progress of civilisation and therefore, indirectly, to the well-being of all colonists.
Even so, to the chagrin of their parents, the majority (88.67%) of planetary children, on completion of their education, do elect to stay in Space. And it must be said that what attracts those children is not the noble ideals of our civilisation, but its gadgets and gewgaws and its frivolous pastimes. This gives weight to the argument of those advocates of planetary life who say that Space corrupts their children. This argument is countered by the defenders of the present system, who say that innocence founded on ignorance is not innocence. Added to that must also be the same ‘natural’ motives, desires, dreams that drove all our ancestors into space. Indeed a large proportion of those children who do come into Space, after the limitations of a single planet, become compulsive travellers. No intergalactic freighter crew is without at least one planet-born member among its number.
Seventeen year old Halk Fint was just such a product of this state of affairs. Though, in his case, his simple longing to live in Space and partake of its pleasures was offset by his unusually strong devotion to his mother and father. This is another peculiarity of planetary life — the number of long lasting monogamous relationships it sustains and the close family ties that relationships of such duration create. There are two schools of thought as to why this should be. One school says that this monogamy is born of the vicissitudes of planetary life, the common adversities strengthening the bonds between the partners. The second school of thought maintains that it is due simply to their isolation, to the paucity of alternative partners, of lack of choice, of freedom. Whatever the case this excessive devotion extends to the offspring of such partnerships, which probably explains why many of those children who come into Space bring with them troublesome feelings of guilt, which make them so emotionally unpredictable to those of us who have been raised in Space, who have never tasted the acrid dust of planets or known our fathers.
Halk Fint, the third child of the Senate Member for North Three, had these conflicting desires battling within him. His elder brother and sister had already left the planet. Their father had done everything in his power to legitimately stop them. Not, let it be said, out of malice, but because he sincerely believed that life on the planet was better than life in Space. After all, he had chosen it; and he naturally wanted what he believed was best for his children. However, despite his blandishments, despite his blustering threats and his emotional entreaties, no matter what petty difficulties he had placed in their way, as soon as his two eldest children had reached the age of majority, they had taken passage on a passing freighter.
For his youngest son the Senate Member for North Three had changed tactics. Where the other two had been denied, where possible, everything to do with Space, he had indulged his youngest son’s every passing fancy. Providing he remained at home. So Halk Fint owned many of the toys of Space, took many holidays in Space, only to reluctantly return home, only to grudgingly remain on his parents’ farm…. until he was again allowed to leave for Space. His was a comfortable and tortured trap.
As a child Halk had, with sympathy and incomprehension, beheld his parents’ despondency over the departure of first his elder brother and then his sister. He too had felt the pain of their parting. Since then he had ruefully noted the delight on his parents’ faces at his every homecoming. He had no wish to hurt them, to bring about such naked misery again, to not bring them pleasure again. So, for the past six months, to resolve the conflict within himself, to reconcile his filial devotion to them with his desire to leave them, he had been trying to talk his parents into selling the farm and returning to Space to live.
The Senate Member for North Three was not an unkind man. He knew that his son remained with him only out of gratitude, out of love. But all Halk’s friends his own age were in Space, his interests were all in Space, his ambitions were in Space. So, after the Extraordinary Convention of the Senate, he asked his son if he would fly to XE2, tell the Director what was happening, and return immediately with his reply.
At mention of an unexpected jaunt into Space Halk’s thin face had filled with a smile, only for it to vanish as soon as he had been told that he must return immediately. The Senate Member for North Three loved his youngest son, did not want to be the cause of his misery.
“Do this one thing for me,” he told Halk, “and you are free forever from all obligations to me. After your return here you may take this ship and go wheresoever you wish in the universe. With my, and your mother’s, blessing.”
So it was with an irrepressible smirk that Halk Fint strapped himself into his seat and issued instructions for his take-off and course. He gave himself only five seconds to wave farewell to his mother and father; and then the small ship lifted off, rising above the line upon feathery line of his father’s date palms.
For the first time since he had known Space Halk did not look down on the farm with loathing, with the contempt a prisoner has for his keeper. Now he gazed down on those blue-green rows, as they massed into so many geometric patterns, with something akin to affection, with the indulgence of incipient nostalgia. The farm, after all, was but his father’s eccentricity. And he, Halk Fint, was heading out, in a ship of his own, for the new, for the exciting, the different.
A longing for life itself urged Halk Fint on; a desire to escape the known for the unknown, to go in search of life in all its guessed-at magnificence, in all its supposed multitudinous variety. Propelled too by the fear that if he stayed much longer on the planet then he would miss something vital; drawn on also by the feeling that somehow the future held all the answers, and he knew life on the planet and the answers weren’t down there. He knew what he would become down there, and he wanted something more, something better than that. Because Halk Fint owned the unlimited potential of the young; and the planet was old and limited in scope.
Such are the conceited aspirations of the young — so general that they are always indefinable. Like all the young Halk Fint saw himself as the first of his kind; and the life he already knew didn’t have anything new to offer him. Suffice it to say that life itself, that ever-regenerated mystery for the young, lured him out into Space.
Away on the horizon he caught a blue glimpse of the sea.
“Amendment,” he said. “Direct course to XE2. Maximum speed. Least deviations.”
He had intended going over to manual once clear of the planet and making a couple of quick orbits to look for the moon. Now, out of gratitude, he wanted to obey his father’s instructions to the letter, fulfil his mission and be free. And faced by the black infinity of space one small moon seemed very unimportant. What, he asked himself, did one small moon matter when Out There men travelled galaxies?
The ship acknowledged the new instructions, told him the amended course and his ETA at XE2. He had by now risen through the uppermost clouds, was accelerating as he left the planet’s atmosphere.
“Better than talking to a stupid tractor,” he jubilantly said.
Those were the last words that Halk Fint was heard to utter. Seconds later he started in panic as his ship shuddered under an impact. A massive electrical discharge then caused the small ship to explode.
Chapter Three
In his office chair Munred Danporr reclined sideways on to his desk. Heels on the floor, his buttocks on the edge of his seat and his shoulders against the back of the chair, he consciously maintained his body in a straight line. With his limp arms hanging vertically, this was his thinking pose.
Munred Danporr was considered a handsome man. He was tall, had tightly curled hair, prominent facial bones and dark glittering deep-set eyes. As Departmental Director of XE2 he was responsible, not only for the station and its 300,000 inhabitants, but for all the substations within an eighteen thousand million kilometre radius of XE2. Those substations included three food platforms, four food processing plants, one antiquated smelter, two factories, three scientific substations and one inhabited planet. Within his Department was also one white dwarf and one yellow G star. One would have thought that such numerous responsibilities were sufficient for any one man; Munred Danporr, though, had ambitions.
Ambition was central to Munred’s character. His was a state of mind that had always required objectives. At school, and then at university, that objective had been, simply, to excel. And shone he indubitably had; and, having scholastically succeeded, he had cast about for a suitable vehicle for his adult ambitions.
His youthful ego would have preferred him to have entered the Legislature. Success there, however, depended on the notorious fickleness of the electorate and on his untested ability to make himself generally popular. He was, though, confident that he could charm a select few, such as an interviewing board. So he had decided on the safer, if less glamorous, next best thing, the Civil Service, which is better known to all and sundry simply as Service.
Munred Danporr was born and raised in this city. But he knew that if he remained in the city then he would never rise very high in Service, the upper ranks of Service being reserved for those with the widest experience. Service maintains that only those with the most comprehensive experience of our civilisation should be allowed to undertake the positions of highest responsibility. How can anyone, Service thinking goes, decide on the fate of others when they do not, at first hand, know of the lives of others? That wider experience, however, can only be gained by leaving the city and by taking some lowly Service position in one of the far off stations.
So Munred applied for, and was awarded, a post in the distant environs of the city’s authority. The post that he occupied, on that far off station, may have been lowly, his responsibilities quantitatively few, but the rank that he held was far higher than any he could have achieved in the city itself, even after five years assiduous labour.
Our civilisation has been described as a society of itinerants, travelling never to arrive, much like the universe we inhabit. Planet dwellers, however, in such a peripatetic society, are remarkable for their steadfastness. Rarely do they move even to other settlements upon their chosen planet.
Munred Danporr, though, was no planet dweller: he became one of Space’s itinerants, travelling to arrive at his point of departure; became in so doing a participant in one of mankind’s greatest exercises in futility, in a self-perpetuating folly, namely — the gaining of experience.
Those who have undergone the process being in the highest Service ranks, and solely because they themselves have survived the process, they lay great store by the mystique of experience and so promote only those who have similarly endured the time-consuming process, who in their turn promote only those who have the credentials of experience… when often all that is required to do their job is rational thought. However, experience being the measure of Service personnel, young Munred set out to acquire that experience.
From Sub-director of Hygiene on a small outstation, after a year Munred moved inward, towards the city, to become Sub-director of Transport on another small outstation. After a year there he moved to a larger outstation as Sub-director of Police Liaison and Communications. Every annual move brought him into contact with a different Service discipline. When he had acquired experience of all those disciplines, he began to be promoted.
First he was made Director of Welfare and Leisure on a small station; and moving ever inward, back towards the city, his annual moves eventually gave him experience as Departmental Sub-director. Then he was, as a Director, promoted to the larger stations, given ever greater responsibility; until he came to XE2 as Departmental Director with overall responsibility.
To the uninitiated it might seem, so assured was Munred Danporr’s advance, that he was a man of phenomenal intellectual capabilities. Practically all of the work in every Service discipline, though, is done by machine. All that Munred Danporr had to do was to not make mistakes. The machines called on him only to keep a watching brief and to deal with the unanticipated. And in all of his many positions he had been called on but twice, and the decisions he’d had to make had been so trivial that they are not worthy here of mention. The only other decisions he had been called on to make were those regarding personnel, seeking and interviewing replacements for substation Service staff, most of whom were technicians. Andthere he either gave the most suitable person the job; or, in pursuit of his ambition, did someone with influence a favour. Politics was the name of that game.
Now ambition is a peculiar human trait. For instance Munred Danporr, at first, wanted only to excel, to be the best, to shine before his compatriots and his contemporaries. That same ambition, though, took him away from the very city where he wanted to excel, away from those very contemporaries and compatriots whom he wanted to outshine. Consequently, in his first few years of self-imposed exile from the city, knowing that his rival contemporaries and compatriots would likewise have dispersed, his ambition soon changed, became instead solely an overriding desire to work his way back to the city of his birth.
One could describe his ambition in purely conventional terms — that Munred aspired to a position of authority and prestige. Which of course would be true. But it would be more true to say that the whole of his ambition could be encapsulated in a vision he had of himself in the city. He saw himself, with his consort, rear view, unhurriedly mounting the transparent steps of a certain exclusive restaurant in this city.
Some among you might sneer at that dream, might perhaps denigrate the restaurant, might call those transparent steps tasteless in the extreme, might claim that its exclusivity is only its being expensive; but that does not invalidate the assertion that that vision of himself and his consort, slowly ascending those steps, as if they very much belonged, was not the ultimate driving force behind all his ambitions. Who is to say that many of the great characters of history were not driven by similar small dreams?
And now Munred Danporr was but eighteen months away from his triumphant ascent of those steps. Local boy made good. A Departmental Directorship had become vacant on a station the other side of the city, thirty six thousand million kilometers and one year’s travail closer to it. Service rumour had it that there was one other serious competitor for the position, but she had marginally less experience than Munred. The position was his, if….
It was that ‘if’ that had Munred pensively reclining sideways on to his desk. He reclined sideways because he couldn’t bear to look at his desk screens. On one screen flashed the message, ‘Priority Happiness.’ In three days time that message would go to ‘Urgent Happiness’; and it was inconceivable that he should attend an interview for a vacant Departmental Directorship while he had an outstanding ‘Urgent’ in any one of his sub-departments.
The interviewing board would know that he had an ‘Urgent’ because his ship would take that information with him. Nor did he dare, and he had desperately considered it in passing, tamper with the ship’s data. If his tinkerings were to be discovered later, and it was inevitable that they would be, such a scandal would have him ending his career in the far reaches of civilisation. Nor could he postpone this interview: a similar prestigious vacancy this close in might not occur for another year. If then.
Two weeks ago, on his return from lunch, the polite request to ‘Please Investigate Happiness’ had been flashing on one of his desk screens. He and his Sub had joked about it, and Munred had told his Sub to look into it.
In his turn the Sub-director, a small bald and anxious man, had delegated the task to the Director of Communications. Like the majority of Service personnel, both Munred and his Sub had early learnt that, as soon as one is in a position to do so, one delegates all work. Then, if the work proves to be of some use, one takes the credit for it. Should the work, however, prove to be unsatisfactory, one then upbraids one’s subordinates.
The following morning the Director of Communications had reported back to the Sub-director and the Sub-director had reported back to Munred. The machines on the planet Happiness, Munred was told, made regular reports by radio to XE2. Those radio reports were augmented by ship dispatches. If XE2’s machines heard nothing for a week from Happiness they were programmed to flash the message ‘Please Investigate Happiness.’ Happiness was, in its orbit at the time of these events, approximately 7½ days radio distance from XE2.
Munred had once been Sub-director of Substation Liaison, had had an inhabited planet within his Department. He therefore knew that any inhabited planet had more than one transmitter, that it was therefore unlikely to be an overall transmission failure on the planet. He therefore suspected that the fault might have nothing whatsoever to do with Happiness, but might lie in XE2’s own receivers; or, more drastically, that it might be the first distress symptom of a major machine fault on XE2. Which is a perfectly valid assumption to make when any machine starts behaving unusually.
Munred instructed the Director of Communications and the Hygeine Director to exhaustively investigate XE2’s machines. Both Directors reported back, after three days, that all machines were in perfect working order, all back up and fail-safe systems responding correctly. The Director of Communications told Munred that all receivers were faultlessly functioning, that radio messages had been received from three other substations within the last four days.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he concluded.
“Yes it is,” Munred told him. “Look.” On his central desk screen flashed the message ‘Please Investigate Happiness.’
Munred summoned to his presence the Directors of Transport and of Substation Liaison. The Director of Transport informed him that ordinarily there were few direct flights between Happiness and XE2. The last ship presumed to have left Happiness, bearing dates, had been bound for a processing plant within the city limits. By indirect linkage they would know of that ship’s safe arrival in three weeks time.
“That is,” the Director of Transport said, “if its itinerary wasn’t changed on Happiness. You know how it is. Normally we’d have heard about it on their transmission, or when the next ship called here.”
“When is the next ship due?”
“Here? From Happiness? One private flight provisionally booked. In twelve weeks.”
Munred asked the Director of Substation Liaison to tell him about Happiness.
“Three million inhabitants. No indigenous population. Forty eight percent surface area land, fifty percent sea, two percent permanent ice. Forty two percent of land under cultivation. Timber and fruit principal exports. Other crops domestic use. No manufactured goods. Three urban conurbations. Small. Eighty six ground transmitters. Sixteen satellites. Three continents therefore three semi-independent systems. Failure in all three extremely unlikely.”
“Mining?”
“None.”
“Anything unusual in their last communication?”
“No personal messages,” the Director of Transport said. “All machine language. Run of the mill stuff. Weather reports, crop evaluations… A request for current market prices. Since transmitted. No human agency involved.”
Munred sent for the Director of Police Liaison and requested that a police ship be sent to Happiness. The Director of Police Liaison uncomfortably informed Munred that there were no police ships available. XE2, like most stations its size, boasted but two police ships. The Inspector had taken one of those ships to investigate a fraud on one of the processing stations.
(The investigation into that fraud runs concurrently with the events to be related here. To give a blow by blow account of the prosecution of that fraud, although interesting in itself, would unnecessarily complicate this story. Suffice to say that throughout the subsequent events on Happiness the Inspector, the highest ranking police officer on XE2, was preoccupied elsewhere with his own detection work.)
The other police ship was on a regular patrol of outstations, would not return for another nine days. No-one knew when the Inspector’s ship was likely to return. Munred registered an official protest at the station being left without a police ship at his disposal.
During the following nine days the message on Munred’s central screen was updated to ‘Action Required Happiness.’
During those nine days Munred asked for any other message concerning Happiness to be directed to him. None came by either radio or by ship. Neither could any ship that had recently been to Happiness, within the last two months, be traced. But nothing unusual or sinister in that. Those ships could all, by now, be beyond all adjacent Departments; only where their paths crossed those of other ships bound for XE2 would XE2 learn of them.
So for nine more days the crisis developed unchecked. The only other crisis that Munred had had to deal with on XE2 had come from a woman begging to be taken off an outstation because of the violent behaviour of a drunken technician. Munred had had them both removed, had replaced them with a competent recluse.
“Why,” Munred had asked the recluse during his interview, “do you dislike people so much?”
“They disappoint me,” the technician had replied, and had refused to elaborate.
For those nine days Munred had fretted and fumed at the planet called Happiness and its uncommunicative inhabitants. He had called them many derogatory names, gave full vent to his prejudices against those who chose to live on dusty unstable planets.
Munred’s prejudice was not untypical. Probably because like many another he felt insulted by the settlers dismissing as cheap all that Space holds dear, by their voluntary relinquishment of all the beauties and benefits of Space for a grubby existence on a hazardous planet. Planetary inhabitants, incidentally, think of this prejudice as Space snobbery.
While for the rest of us the perverse values of planetary inhabitants are largely an academic affront, in Munred’s instance the prejudice had a more personal foundation, for he had interviewed two prospective emigrants to Happiness. He had concluded that interview with the distinct impression that it had been they who, regarding him with the contempt of neophytes, had patronised him. Hence his dislike of them all, intensified by their now causing him so much needless anxiety and threatening his prospects of promotion.
So Munred sat sideways on to his desk and, though he was deliberately not looking directly at it, was acutely aware of the message’s insistent flashing. The day before the message had been updated to ‘Priority Happiness.’ Tomorrow afternoon the police ship returned from its regular patrol. The ‘priority’ signal gave Munred the authority to dispatch it immediately to Happiness. The round trip would take four days. Two days to reach there, a day to get the transmissions restarted, seven days for those transmissions to reach XE2 and cancel what would be by then the ‘Urgent Happiness’ signal, leaving him just five days to get to the interview. Atight schedule. And nothing he could for another nineteen hours but wait.
Folding his body out of the chair, he stood, grunted once at the ‘Priority Happiness’, and went home.
Happiness: A Planet (smashwords.com)
You Human: the Leander Chronicle
Prologue
My first reaction was,
“Not my Talker.”
News, of course, had already come through that a few Talkers had gone missing. That that news hadn’t come via my Talker should have given me pause for thought. It hadn’t. I was confident that I’d treated her fairly; and, superciliously, I had blamed the disappearances of those other Talkers on their D-of-C’s neglect.
My Talker had not suffered such neglect. I had assiduously kept all the ruffians and viragos away from her, had even secured for her an apartment near the office so that she only had to walk two corridors; and I had arranged for someone to be there always to walk her back and forth from work. On occasion I had even accompanied her home myself.
Before we proceed any further let me here make one thing lucidly clear — I, Farley Judd, am not a good man. I am not a bad man either. Just so you understand that I am not seeking plaudits.
And before any sneering cynic suggests that I was keeping that Talker to myself, for my own sexual gratification, let me here also tell you the reason for my being late to the office that morning.
Usually it was a gross miscalculation if I was early at the office. What D-of-C, I ask you, needed then to be in their office for more than an hour a day? So long as the Talker was functioning, so long as the machines were working, the D of C’s presence was most certainly superfluous.
Both Talker and machine were capable of using their initiative; at least to the extent that they could hold any questionables until the D-of-C or a Sub arrived. And arrive I always, sooner or later, did.
To spend all day in the office was to become caught up in the invention of work and the perfidy of Service politics. I had found that if I was not in the office I was less likely to be stabbed in the back than if I was there all day reminding them of my existence. On top of which the less that I did the less fault could be found with it.
Idleness aside, I had better things to do with my days than lounge about the office. That day, for instance, had been taken up with a sophisticated sixty six year old. Hardly alibi enough to be late for work, you might say, nor sufficient to refrain from indulging the odd body of a Talker. I should, however, point out here that I am over fifty years old myself and that this particular sixty six year old was in supple trim and.…
I have to confess that I but bedded her out of curiosity — to see where she’d put the wrinkles. And that I’d got rather drunk to do it. With the consequence that I never did discover where she kept her wrinkles… Which is all very glib and unfair of me…
Truth be told she was a classy lady, her every word a witticism, her every movement a refined gesture; and, at the time, I had felt honoured to be allowed into her bed.
And, truth be told, I was simply not attracted to Talkers. Those short chunky legs and large fat feet repelled me. While their immobile faces I found utterly daunting.
Talkers, male and female, I found easy enough to work with — they fulfilled their function: I fulfilled mine. Any speculations I had, though, about bedding the female variety were distinctly without desire, with the absence even of base lechery. But let the stupidest of ordinary women walk past, one wiggle of her overweight hips and, mesmerised, I follow. How, though, could one become allured by hips that were twitching only thirty centimetres above floor level?
On that station there were over 100,000 people. Of those 100,000 at least 25,000 had to be women between the ages of 20 and 70 and, therefore, sexually active. If, optimistically supposing, a quarter of those 25,000 women were both desirable and available on any given day, then even the most priapic and promiscuous of males would have his work cut out satisfying them all. And I was neither that horny, nor that indiscriminate, nor that energetic — at the age of my prostate every other day was my optimum, twice a week if I was lucky. So what did I need with a Talker?
That’s not to say that I didn’t understand the sexual fascination that Talkers inspired. The fascination of the new, the different, the exotic; an adolescent-like obsession that should with gratification, though, have instantly lost all its power. And Talkers were obliging enough. One only had to ask; and, with their featureless voices, even a refusal was without embarrassment.
Possibly it was their very featurelessness which so repelled me — have one and you’d had them all. Because, should a Talker have accorded you the satisfaction of your perverse whim, then, once you’d sampled the passive delights that a two meter torso and thirty centimetre legs had to offer, once you’d sated your particular fancy, and once you’d laid to rest all the rumour and mythology concerning their sexuality, then you were left with some very boring, with some very one-sided sex.
So we are left with the Talker fetishists.
And they were fetishists first and foremost, Talkers just happened to have become the object of their inveterate serial obsession. Those fetishists were the freaks I protected my Talker from; and, I suspect, those fetishists were more taken with the Talkers’ impassive faces than with their peculiar anatomy. That selfsame impassive physiognomy being exactly why I found Talkers so unappealing, so very unexciting. But I could see how some fetishists could become unbalanced by their attempting to elicit a spontaneous response from a Talker, and why Talkers were so often found physically and fatally abused, the passive victim of bizarre bondage or excessive flagellation…
And my Talker had inexplicably disappeared….
So when I had finished mentally cursing her for her ingratitude, my second thought was that some fetishist had kidnapped her and was holding her against her wishes.
My Sub had looked through her apartment. Her plants were still there. So I notified the police, gave names or descriptions of those fetishists I’d had to warn off from her door, and of those others whom I had seen near her once too often for it to be a coincidence.
For the moment that was all that I could do, except stay in the office and explain to irate users why they couldn’t have Talker time, tell them that we still had machines. About which they made disparaging remarks.
Wherever I was posted as D-of-C, including one station where they had four Talkers, I insisted that all machines be functioning at maximum efficiency. You will, therefore, suppose correctly that I never wholly trusted Talkers. Talkers were, after all, semi-human, were open to some and more of the same disorders as the rest of us. Trouble was, despite standing orders to all stations, machine competence was not universal. Machine-transmitted messages, therefore, owned a regrettable tendency to disappear into space.
Notwithstanding that tendency I still insisted, during my brief visits to the office during my brief tenure of office, on all important communications being duplicated by machine — to keep the machine system functioning if nothing more. Granted machines weren’t instant like a Talker, but what message needed to be sent that quickly, could not wait six or seven days for a reply? The rubbish, the office tittle-tattle, that I had to refuse even as a Sub…
“For the moment,” I told all enquirers, “you will have to scale down the speed of your operations.” The Traders of course kicked up the biggest public stink, privately offered the largest bribes. My intention was to hold off until I definitely had my Talker back; then I’d be the one who decided the price.
But my Talker didn’t come back.
* * * * *
“Tell me Farley Judd why this station is without a Talker.”
This was the Departmental Director speaking and two days later.
So on the ball was this DD that it had taken him two days to discover that the station had no Talker. Which also goes to show just how much of the rubbish transmitted is totally unnecessary. And that’s another thing — I had pitied all my Talkers the inconsequential claptrap they’d had to mouth.
I started to relate my two day search for our Talker. I completed one sentence.
“What d’you mean?” the DD expostulated, “’Gone missing?’ Talkers stay where they’re put!”
Every DD I have ever known, no matter what their usual colour, when in my presence they seem to be waiting for an excuse to turn purple and pop their eyes. This particular DD normally had a greenish tinge about him. Not now.
“You’re implying that she has gone missing of her own free will. Talkers have no free will.”
That’s what the police had said, though they hadn’t been anywhere near so polite. Fishface, Snakeskin, Runtlegs, Flipperfeet I’d heard my poor Talker called as, with the police, I had followed up the descriptions of those I had thought might have kidnapped her for their own perverse purpose.
The police also called on a whole catalogue of other fishface fetishists whom I would never have suspected of being so inclined. All of those fetishists to a man, and the several women, vehemently denied even passing fancies for Flipperfeet, expressed great loathing for their waddling physiognomy and their featureless faces. According to the policewoman, the young policewoman, the comely policewoman, the unforthcoming policewoman, their avowed aversion to fishfaces was par for the perversion.
Each pervert, curiously, had complained nervously about the disappeared Talkers having broken their oath of fealty. In one form or another that disregard of their vow was what had most upset their depraved minds and misguided libidos.
Our search of the station having been unsuccessful, police forensic were now sampling the recycling cisterns for evidence of Talker remains.
“And when can we expect some definite results?”
Why 0 Why do one’s superiors always adopt a sarcastic tone for even the most innocuous of questions? To advertise, for the record, their superiority?
“As I had it explained to me,” I ever so humbly informed the DD, “possibly never.”
If the Talker’s body had been treated in any number of ways — beginning with acid and ending as a well-marinated casserole — the remains would be unidentifiable. That prospect didn’t please the DD. I doubt it pleased the Talker much.
“And in the meantime this Department’’ Communications are in a complete shambles.”
“Certainly not,” I huffed. “We have machines still. All at premium function.” I’d had to fight hard for funds to maintain my machines.
“And intolerably slow.”
“But reliable. They, at least, won’t take themselves off into the black beyond.”
The DD was now out to cover his tracks, pin the blame on me…. what else are underlings for? And maybe if he’d been a good DD, then maybe I would have accepted a little of the blame. Maybe. But the absolute best that could be said of this DD, after a careful weighing of his every virtue, after making a regretful note of his few minor failings, was to say that he was extremely good at sleeping.
He was now in the process, for the record, of working himself up to the apoplectic purple again. I made no attempt to soothe him. Firstly because I am sure that the many DDs I have known have appreciated the pleasure to be had from a good shout, from having a full-blown tantrum, and the louder the better, their inhibitions lessening with the increase in volume, a self-gratifying emotional release unrelated to my minor misdemeanours, grateful only for my having given them the excuse. They had all, each and every one, seemed indulgently fond of me afterwards.
I also made no attempt to placate this spluttering buffoon because, with my first promotion to full D-of-C, I had vowed never again to lick arse. As D-of-C all I wanted, all I want, is the perks of office and to go no higher.
I had also applied no unctuous balm to this swelling DD because I knew that no-one in Service gets demoted over so trivial a matter. I also knew that if the DD wanted to make this even an official rebuke, then he had not employed the proper procedures; and I knew too, to the last semicolon, the correct process for the arraigning of any Service employee, be he ever so high or ever so humble.
This DD was not going to arraign Farley Judd; because Farley Judd was certain to appeal; and Farley Judd was certain, during the course of an official appeal, to point an accusing finger at his accusers, and to cast many an aspersion concerning their character and their competence (lack of). And, even were those accusations and aspersions to have been so much fabrication, no-one in Service is that ‘clean’, has no ‘past’.
Promotion, especially in the higher ranks, makes buggers and beggars of them all. No-one, therefore, is going to risk an underling making an official appeal. Awkward subordinates like me, whose promotion prospects they can’t threaten, are going to be quickly removed — with superlative recommendations — to the closest vacancy. Which is why reading between the lines has become such a Service art.
This DD was trying to write between my lines. His bluster, though, couldn’t frighten me; with my serial sexual proclivities this would not have been the first Department that I had left with my ‘name besmirched in Service circles.’ (Until the next similar scandal.) Such promotions are called ‘lateral.’ A Service wag dubbed mine horizontal.
The DD wrung his hands (literally) over his being the only station to have mislaid its Talker.
“Wrong,” I told him, deliberately didn’t elaborate. His eyes strained in their sockets.
My one Service ambition by this time was to make a DD explode. Especially a snobbish green bastard like this one, painting himself to highlight his genetic purity. A half hour after our first meeting he had patronisingly said to me,
“0f course a Space mongrel such as yourself can have no concept of the pride….” Me, Farley Judd, I’m pink through grey to yellow, depending on my alpha rhythms. This DD, though, and the D-of-S (Black) were forever preening their ancestry before one another.
I suppose I could, like others, have developed a bogus ancestry and have tinted myself accordingly; but I don’t particularly enjoy the bullshitting company of men. Apart from the office, the only men in whose company I find myself are those at the gym; and they are men, like me, wholly concerned with their appearance and the toning of their muscles. Unashamed poseurs all. Like consorting with like.
D-of-S is a post sought by the often flagrantly unscrupulous. Supply it must have been who’d told the DD of the missing Talker. Like seeks like. Click, click, clickety-click-click, the pieces all fell neatly into place. (Mine, forgive me, is a cynical view of a felonious society sycophantically fawning and ineptly falling over itself.)
“Supply.…” I said out of nowhere, staring into the middle distance at computations of infinity being revealed to me. And, peripherally, I saw the DD shrink watchfully back from his bloated extrovert rage into his smaller greener self.
Ours was a busy trading station. To be rapidly informed of any dramatic price shifts would be handy knowledge for any insider trading. Some of the smaller traders had already begun moving their centre of operations out to a substation which boasted a Talker but few docking facilities. The bigger traders were stuck here. Nor would the Director of that substation give up his Talker without a fight. And once the smaller traders were established there, having stolen a march on their bigger rivals, they too would fiercely resist the Talker’s removal.
No wonder then that this DD and D-of-S were so concerned about our missing Talker. What did that Talker know? What, I answered myself, all other Talkers knew….
“Supply does seem,” I avoided eye contact, as if wary of directly accusing the DD, “very bothered about this….”
“We are all concerned. You say other stations…?”
“Supply, though, does seem particularly concerned.…”
“Naturally. Supplying a station this size requires a definite timetable.”
“Most supply has its own volition, takes care of itself. Most of it’s still done by machine. Why d’you think Supply is so concerned about our Talker? D’you think,” now the ingenuous eye contact, “I should ask the police to look into it?”
“I’d rather,” the DD breaks uncomfortable eye contact to glance at piece of paper, “we found the Talker. And you say they’ve gone missing from other stations?”
“We could, of course, find another Talker and ask them about Supply. All Talkers know everything about each other. So they tell us.”
“You think it might be a good idea,” the DD leapt feet first, “to see how other stations are coping?”
“With our Talker missing I’ve got plenty of work here.”
“Delegate.”
He wanted me off-station, time between us, so that no matter what any other Talker might tell me, by the time I returned it would all be old news, of little consequence. The DD’s sweat reflected his green tint.
“I don’t know….” I resisted his urging, “I’ve ordered a replacement for our Talker, but until….”
My hedging was not heartfelt. I wanted to go off-station. If only for domestic reasons. A temporary removal would get me away from my consort, allow me to sample again a few days of freedom unfettered by deceit.
Fifty years old was too young for me to give up on life and retreat, for the sake only of simplicity, into a timid corner. So it was that I let that greener-by-the-second DD talk me into investigating the ‘Missing Talkers Phenomena.’
And that’s how it all began. Almost.
* * * * *
Within our apartment, at my desk, I sat in classic pose, forehead on my fist.
The idea was that I was composing poetry and that I was, therefore, not to be disturbed. The fact that the paper before me was blank was evidence only of the process in action; poetry being the pure distillation of a multitude of abstracts….
What nonsense I used to talk. What nonsense people once so gladly believed of me. The poetry of Farley Judd was a gross pose. Granted, I had once had some poems published at a publisher’s expense, but that only goes to show how totally gullible are the people of these times. The first use of poetry, for me, has always been to impress myself softly into the small warm ears of women, to ease myself soulfully into their accommodating beds. And, in my poems, I have accused other artists of wanton cynicism….
Let me here declare that at fifty I was too old to be a poet, was just being clever with words. Any poetry written by anyone beyond the age of thirty is a passionless pastime, is whimsy only, is a narcissistic playing with words and form. Poetry at that age is not the fountainhead of emotion, be it of love or disgust. And I still owned loyalty enough to the poetic ideal to despise my beyond-thirty pretence.
Truth be told, even here I am being unfair to myself: I early had sense enough not to mistake a seductive pose for a vocation. Twenty two published poems are a precarious foundation on which to build a livelihood. Instead I stuck in Service and played the dilettante.
And old social habits die hard: I’m used to mocking either my poetry or my Service post, depending on my audience. That pretence has become me.
I’m trying here to be wholly and prosaically honest and I am finding it heavy weather. Because, to be honest, I enjoyed both my poetry and my D-of-C work; but, such is our society, that I was not expected to take pleasure in either.
To survive in this society, to excel in my career, I have become ingrained with subterfuge. I have lived lies. I ache now for honesty.
To add to my own confusion many of my more psychoanalytical friends have queried my almost singleminded desire to bed women. They have called it a twisted sublimation of my latent homosexual desires, have called me chronically insecure, hare said that I suffer from penis inferiority, vaginal envy, impotency fears, Oedipus and Atlanta complexes….
For my own complex part, citing my artistic tendencies, I have claimed that my poetic sensitivities have been ravished by the classical form of Woman and my life’s desire is to fully experience Her Body.
Privately I am more of the opinion that I simply like fondling the tits and buttocks of goodlooking women prior to sticking my upstanding member into them. Amend that — the tits and buttocks of women: they don’t have to be goodlooking.
My Service position and my poetry enabled me to indulge my pastime. Find a quiet corner in a Service social gathering, lower my voice to a husky tremolo and use, at random, profound and multisyllabic words; which when added up don’t mean a damn thing, save that I think the woman’s sensitive enough, dupe enough, to be impressed by them. And I watch their pupils dilate with the very throaty and intimate culture of it.
Nor are intelligent women immune to its transparent charm. The very meaninglessness of the spiel appeals especially to the more cynical women. It amuses them to make of me a mere plaything, to toy with and gratify my carnal masculine lusts, while verbally abusing me in the process.
This use that I make of what passes for poetry is another of the reasons I don’t much like the company of men. My whole persona is geared towards getting inside women’s underwear: any attempt to simultaneously impress men would detract from my seduction technique. Whereas, with guttural poetry, I can brush aside all flimsy objections, all tenuous loyalties and vague moralities. Such poetry out of context, however, will not impress the menfolk: they readily see through the pose to my lecherous intent towards their womenfolk.
Not all women, more’s the pity, are so readily forthcoming. A few happy words and a glad hand on the left buttock might suffice a very few; others require a lengthier courtship. One such was sitting in silence behind me that evening, was the sole reason for my pretence at creation.
That evening I didn’t want to talk to Perri Erbach.
The reason being that Perri Erbach had the knack of eliciting confessions from me even by her silences. And she could be monumentally silent.
My guilt was making me keep my distance. And I felt guilty not because I’d been unfaithful to her bed. (Though in actual fact it was my bed. Being a Service apartment it had made economic sense for her to move in with me.) No, with my life style, being caught in flagrante is an occupational and occasional hazard; and in an enclosed society is inevitable. Indeed there is no bigger farce than being unfaithful to your woman in a small closed society — is she only pretending not to know? Or does she know that you know she knows you’ve been unfaithful? Etcetera. So Perri may well have known about, or suspected, my peccadillo three nights previously with the sixty six year old. (I don’t mean to harp on about her age: it is simply a convenient distinguishing label.) But, until Perri chose to act on any knowledge, or on any suspicions she might have, our arrangement was safe.
No, what I felt guilty about was wanting to leave her. Such a desire was new to me.
Normally my women left me for what I regarded as my perfectly innocent transgressions. At bottom, I think, it was my lack of discrimination that offended most of my women. Should their rivals have been more fashionably attractive than themselves — as was sometimes the case — then they all could have beaten their own fulsome breasts, have bewailed their female misfortune, and have schemed narrow-eyed to hang onto their peripatetic man. But when their ‘rival’ resembled, at best, a squashed pastry on doughy legs, then their disgust rapidly took them from me.
Why, you may wonder, would I be attracted to a squashed pastry on doughy legs? An aphorism any discerning shopper knows is not to be misled by the packaging. With such an amatory policy many is the time that I have indiscriminately chanced upon a ‘bargain’.…
You may also wonder why, with my philandering proclivities, I should cultivate a regular attachment. But, as I have already said, some women require working upon; and it seems inequitable to reap just the one night’s reward for a month’s cultivation.
This makes me sound far more cynical and unsentimental than, in reality, I was. For instance I was genuinely fond then of Perri Erbach; and her pretences to me and mine to her were no more than most cohabiting couples. As I have also been genuinely fond of most of the women with whom I have lived, have been sorry when they have left me. To say, though, that I loved them, which I nevertheless did say, is not wholly accurate.
With my experience I know which women will immediately reject any overt or ribald advances. Though, thankfully, I can still be occasionally surprised — a timeworn innuendo bandied back and Farley Judd’s in happy business. But there do exist women to whom the idea of sex simply does not initially occur. Such women, so alien to my lewd self, fascinate me. I set out to win them. To do so I have to fill their every horizon. Their every thought has to be of me. And this is a lascivious strategy without equivocation, not some perverse ploy to satisfy my ego. Because to win her I have to loom large before her, to be the focus of her obsession, of her infatuation. In order to love I first have to become loved.
And such I had done with wistful Perri Erbach. Poetry and painting had been employed; so too fine wines, exotic foods and soulful concerts. Thus did I satisfy all of her senses bar one. That aching void she finally begged me to plug. But on her terms. And living together we accommodated to one another, and desire evolved into, slowed into, a fondness for, an indulgence of one another’s foibles and oddities.
Thus indulged I sat there aping poetry and felt guilty. So unused was I to leaving a woman that the very unfamiliarity almost provoked real poetry. However, so blithely unaware was she of my self-agonising, that I came close that evening to hating her.
The above emotion was familiar, has to be known by many a philandering man. You spend hours picking up courage to look directly at the woman who knows you have been unfaithful to her. And when, finally, unhappily, you turn your unwilling eyes onto her…. she’s looking elsewhere — into a screen, into a book — and she’s smiling! You’re the one then who feels betrayed. All those dark self-accusing thoughts you’ve done battle with, the ignominy you have heaped upon your own treacherous head, all that bravery in the face of her overwhelming righteous criticism, that sense of martyrdom on the altar of your own ultimate honesty — all of it gone to waste because something else has caught her fickle attention.
I cautioned my galloping thoughts. The only reason I felt guilty was because I wanted to leave her now. It was not as if I did not want to return to her. I did. I would have been quite content to keep Perri Erbach as my constant companion, watch the years fatten her…. After I came back.
Why, I asked myself, did I want to leave? The answer was simplicity itself — because I like moving. Normally I never stay anywhere long enough to hang the pictures on the walls. Before this station the longest I had spent anywhere was 2 years on a station where the DD and I had shared an understanding and her capacious apartment. And I had been two and a half years on this station already, the latter one and a half with Perri Erbach, and she had hung some pictures on the walls.
Perri was an illustrator of scientific journals. She didn’t though seem that interested in her work. Didn’t in fact seem that interested in anything very much. Her holos were often sloppily executed. Her fitful housework too always seemed incomplete. She gave me the impression of someone passively waiting and that whatever it was that she did while she waited was of no account. However, when, whatever it was she was waiting for arrived, she’d then, although she didn’t yet know what it was, but she’d then breathe fire and perfection.
So it’s not as if I felt trapped by Perri’s vigilant domesticity. She allowed me great latitude, never queried my excuses for my occasional nocturnal absences. No, I simply wanted to move on, to leave the place, to have it at a distance and the memories of it encapsulated in a smell, a taste, a tune. Stay in any one place and, I knew, the memories would lack edges, would simply be Before Now. Then. Sometime. Once. My going away now would give me a memorable datum. And my going, after all, was on official business.
Taking a deep breath I decided to throw myself on fate, to let events take their course. (Not that I’m a fatalist, but I tend always to take an historical view of the present — what will all this matter in ten years time? I am temperamentally inclined, therefore, to see any actions of my own as inconsequential. A humility that is at odds with my otherwise robust ego.)
“Perri,” I turned on my seat to face her. She had a book in her lap, read to the end of the paragraph before looking up.
“I’ve got to go off-station in the morning. Those missing Talkers. No saying how long I’ll be gone.”
“You want me to leave here?” It was her stock response, her verbal hold on her sexual independence. Her finger marked her place on the page.
“Of course not. I’ll just be gone awhile.”
“You got everything ready?”
“Yes.”
“Anything there?” she nodded to the desk, her finger still on the page.
“Not yet.”
I turned back to the blank sheet of paper. She moved her finger off the page. I wondered if she would have continued reading if I’d asked her to vacate the apartment.
You Human: The Leander Chronicle (smashwords.com)
Not Now: Death, Dreams & Reasons for Living
Death, Dreams & Reasons For Living
Chapter One
I could claim deception. I could claim coercion. But, to be honest, I leapt at the chance of escape.
I was young, clever, and impatient. Eighteen years old, I’d had my own apartment and independence for the last year. It had changed nothing.
Intelligent enough to see what was wrong with my world, I was impatient with my peers and their no-solution solutions. Young, I was not without scruples, but I was certainly without loyalties. Better if we abandoned our city/world, I told them, better if we united with other cities, other worlds. This shrinking dispersion was foolish.
In that city/world, though, each of my peers believed themselves to be big names. And that was the trap they laid for me.
I have a literary bent; was, moreover, of that tender age when ancient poets talked to me about my to-be life. I therefore wanted to be a poet like those ancients.
On that city/world, though, the fashion was solely for experience-based poetry; and all poems had to be written in the shape of a right-angled triangle with the apex of the triangle being the first line, the longest line being the base.
The other poets were all very clever, and there was much mutual back-slapping. The women, though, were neurotically sensitive to the point of quivering inertia, while the men sought to loudly impress their dullard women. All played safe, sought to titillate rather than to shock; and these were the poets who defined poetry as the distillation of raw experience.
But what new experience could be had on that outside-in world? None. And, with no new experience to write of, one ended up with a vacuum. Ergo vacuous poetry.
All of the remaining population on that city/world (poets included) lived in clusters on the clement levels, a third below the outer surface. To manufacture experience, aspiring poets took themselves down to the curved and self-enclosing ceilings of the deeps. Whose rooms were lit on their arrival, and which were… empty.
Or the aspiring poets took themselves out to the surface, to the temperate forests and lawns of our outside-in world. Which, on their arrival, was light or dark and… empty.
The modern poets projected their imaginations onto this emptiness and wrote of the feelings imaginatively experienced. Very cleverly. With meaningful allusions and obscure words.
A few of my contemporaries, those I thought of as my friends, genuinely longed for adversity to test their mettle. They couldn’t find, nor manufacture, any such test of their own characters.
The result of all this was that, with contempt for us all, I called myself a poet and I facetiously wrote,
‘I
breathe’
Instead of their taking offence the poetry-lovers praised it. Stroke of genius, they said, ‘…takes bravery to be that simple and direct…’ ‘…poetry as the art of brevity here finds its summation…’ ‘Okinwe Orbison has the naiveté necessary to the simple vision of genius…’
At first incredulous, then aghast, then amused, then appalled, I found myself nevertheless enjoying the attention. Which lowered my self-esteem. So I wrote,
‘I
am
false’
This was heralded as absolute and consummate proof of my growing genius. I quickly wrote a second version,
‘I
am
so false
I can convince
myself I am honest’
Again I found myself flattered by the disproportionate praise. (In other cities, other worlds, eighteen might be thought rather young to be a poet of renown. But, as I said, ours was a diminishing population; for which selfsame reason our education had been crammed. Largely on our own initiative. There being so few of us, so little else to do.)
I thought to merit this celebrity by turning to prose. Contemporary prose I soon discovered, however, to be little more than the dressing up of the author’s perversions as literature. And I was too young to have any convincing fetishes.
I did have ideas circling at the back of my mind, ellipses touching the profound; but when words gave shape to those thoughts they came to the paper trite. Frustration was mine.
I confided that literary frustration to a few of my poetic acquaintances. They appeared, initially, to understand and to sympathize; but from the more they said the more it became apparent that they, although they said otherwise, didn’t truly want their work to be original, didn’t truly want to say anything new, only to be accepted.
Angry at this sham that I was being made a part of, overcome by the smell of pseudery and the weight of gush, I wrote,
‘This
society
diseases me’
My plaudits were sung even louder still, and my reputation puffed out of all proportion. I subsequently wrote what was to be my shortest poem.
‘Help’
The applause was deafening.
Shortly after my nineteenth birthday Leon Reduct found me.
Chapter Two
My childhood was unusual (no childhood is usual) in that my mother stayed with my father until I was ten. By which time she could no longer stand my boyish energy and instant excitements and she moved across the city. Only to return regularly to visit my father.
Although to their children all parents are faintly ridiculous, I liked her. She held herself very erect, gave the appearance of contemplative calm. Until I came banging into a room. If I have one clear memory of my mother it is of her blinking at me.
Needless to say she was initially impressed by my public success as a poet. And not the least surprised when I was held to be overturning tradition as I had overturned her furniture.
* * * * *
My father laughed at my every juvenile antic.
“Okinwe Orbison,” he shook his head, “Okinwe Orbison. What is going to become of you?” And picking me up he would swing me around, knocking over more furniture.
My mother left the two of us.
* * * * *
My father liked to play games. Physical games. He made of our city/world a maze, and he mapped out routes for himself, tracked himself through it, laughing in triumph when he arrived at his destination at the time set, laughing at himself when he got lost.
At home he amused himself corresponding with people throughout Space. Or he read. Or, when my mother called, he told her fabulous stories, made her smile. Or they both looked in wonder on me being quiet, reading with the hunger of the young, to fill my head with knowledge, to just know, to know, to fill all the inner spaces. And they looked on too with parental concern, guessing at the desperate blunderings taking place inside my head.
My father laughed. To break the silence, to sunder the mood, he laughed. After he laughed he said my name,
“Okinwe Orbison.” The laugh again, “Okinwe Orbison.”
My father was happy for me to be in his life. He was happy for me to leave. He was happy when he met me on one of his travels through the city.
“Okinwe Orbison!” he would shout. Then the laugh, “Okinwe Orbison.”
The blame, if blame there is to be for what became of me, is not theirs.
Chapter Three
We human beings have no intrinsic sense of identity. We become who we are by what is around us. Some of my identity came from my parents; the rest from larger groupings. And it is in those larger groupings where every new human generation now loses its self-identity.
Oh, we could revert to insular tribalism and in our ignorance we could be very certain of who we are. We, though, know too much to allow ourselves the comforting certainties of ignorance.
We are lost.
Young people always want to be whether they are aware of it or not something other than themselves, something more than themselves. Yet, a psychological paradox, they want to be neither their present geography nor their history.
My geography, my generation, my sub-group of a sub-group existed on that city/world type thirty-four, deep core, external atmosphere one of six extant throughout Space. (Type thirty-four living chambers are in the hollow between the spherical core and the surface. On the surface, within the tropical zones, is where all the city/world’s food is manufactured. Polar regions are reservoirs. Temperate sylvan zones are designated safe play areas.)
History I was born to was that my city/world was 450 years old. We educated young, though, could take no pride in it, or identity from it. Nor did we take any identity from our belonging to the collection of worlds, cities and stations that called itself Space.
History told us that the momentum of empire had long left Space, that Space did not now know what it was. Save that it was worth preserving in its present state. If only because, though we might not now like to remember them, there have been long periods of dissolution, when lawlessness was rife and for ‘safety’, people returned to organic planets and to the closed groups of primitive tribalism; and there succumbed to the cyclical descent into savagery.
After each period of dissolution, however, the rule of law has been re-won; and lost again. Brigands and other self-serving opportunists have existed, and will always exist, on the edge of Space, and will always creep inwards along the division lines.
There was also the Age of Experiment, when whole Space Departments were actually encouraged to become independent, to govern themselves and see what new social machinery emerged. None did; and all were reabsorbed.
There had been no such positive-thinking trends in my time. My generation, like the many before it, belonged to a civilisation whose dynamism had long expired. All that we owned was a vague, difficult to define for the individual, disillusion. A disillusion with ourselves and with all about us.
Moribund is the word best suited to describe our civilisation entire. Mediocre was the word best suited to describe my city/world. As on city/worlds elsewhere our diminishing population kept to the band of middle levels, middle thinking.
Faced with all that inertia the frenetic efforts of my city’s poetry groups to create identities for their members, all posturings and mispronunciations aside, seemed even more pathetic. As did I being feted by them.
Chapter Four
City evenings, killing time, I often sat in a small cafe and sneered at the passing promenade. As often alone as with others, I sat there waiting as well as watching.
I didn’t know then that I was waiting, nor what I was waiting for. From this distance I know that I was waiting for Life to happen to me.
And Life found me there in the small undistinguished shape of Leon Reduct.
I didn’t see him approach the café. He may already have been sitting at one of the tables when I arrived. Or he may have sidestepped out of the parade, a particle of the passing stream depositing himself in the café.
Whatever… I became aware of someone standing at my table, moved my eyes from the promenade to him.
“Okinwe Orbison?” His eyebrows were raised in polite inquiry, “The poet?”
A slight, brown man, bald; I categorised him as the self-effacing type. Except that he was standing and looking down on me, the initiator at ease in the new situation.
This was no nervously sweating aspirant to the new poetry.
“So-called poet,” I smiled without humour at him, my aim to unsettle. (I had been young and lonely, had wanted fame. Now I despised those who had conferred my small fame upon me. And I was still as lonely. And as young.)
“Yes.” He recognised my anti-poetic stance, gave my smile back to me; but with humour. “That is what interested me. Are you brave?”
“Brave?”
I let go eye-contact to look at the word. Brave?
The word held no meaning for me. There was no circumstance I could imagine in Space that might require me to be brave. Nor any way that I could test, without the scenario being knowingly artificial and therefore inconclusive, if I was brave. Bravery had been on none of my syllabi.
“Why?”
He sat down before me.
“My name is Leon Reduct.” He offered his hand, a big gesture not to be ignored, but unusual in our city.
Reaching out I clasped the hand, but briefly and blushing the remarkability of those touched hands making me wonder who might be watching, what they might say. And I was immediately angry at myself for being so provincially self-conscious.
The self-effacing citizen of the universe, Leon Reduct, was not at all put out.
“You are now nineteen years old,” he told me, “Look at the people passing here. Look at the people sitting in this café. Some are now in their fifties. Are you, in thirty years’ time, going to be sitting in a cafe somewhere like this? In this cafe even? I can save you from that.”
I was so surprised by his instant plunge into seriousness that I, celebrated anti-poet poet Okinwe Orbison, was at a loss for rapport. As a poor substitute I, who two nights previously in that same cafe had complained of tedious small talk, gave Leon Reduct the benefit of my father’s large laugh. It did not convince me.
“How can you save me?”
“I can offer you a future whose beginning only I know. I can’t tell you its end. Only you can decide that.”
Recognising a sales pitch I was properly skeptical.
On one level.
Because Leon Reduct had chosen well in targeting me. For whatever it was he had to offer I immediately wanted it. I wanted saving from myself. That life of mine held nothing for me, except more of the same. I wanted something other. And his was the only alternative on offer.
“What does it entail?”
“Traveling from here.”
He paused, time lengthening, parade passing, awaiting my response.
Realising that Leon Reduct was not going to proceed without my agreeing that I could move from that city/world, I nodded.
“It also entails secrecy,” he said. “It also entails deception. Your friends and relatives will be given a bogus address. One through which, nevertheless, they will be able to reach you. And you them. Do you want to come with me?”
Leon Reduct had the kind of eyes of which the black pupil had no discernible edge between it and the brown iris. My father had once told me to be wary of any person who appeared to know everything but explained nothing. He, though, had been talking of pompous play-safe bureaucrats. Leon Reduct, so patently unsafe was he, for certain he was no bureaucrat.
“Yes,” I heard my mouth say.
The urge came again to laugh my father’s laugh. That, though, would have been artificial in me at that moment. Instead I grinned at him, glanced to the promenade; and I wanted to shout at them, Free! I am Free! I was free of them. Free of ever being like them. If for no other reason than I had just gladly, for no readily accountable reason, for no reason I could then have told friends and acquaintances, I had, while the crowd passed oblivious, agreed without compulsion to do a very foolish thing.
Chapter Five
From our meeting in the cafe to our leaving the city Leon Reduct was with me.
His presence was not intrusive, he was not overpowering, he was as he had been in the cafe simply there. To all my questions about where we were going, where he had come from, he simply held up a calming hand and said,
“When we’re on the ship.”
I packed about eight changes of clothes. (Younger I was vainer.) Six of my favourite books two poetry anthologies, two works of philosophy, and two classics. I also packed two notepads.
“Why two?” Leon smiled. “One, they say, will last a lifetime.”
“Never wholly trust machines. And if I can’t write it,” I rattled my fingers on one of the lids finger-rattling a habit of mine, irritates even me “then it isn’t real.” Clickety, thump, stop.
Leon Reduct seemed to approve my distrust, my skepticism confirming his selection of me. The tapping fingers, though, he regarded with a look of concern.
Before packing the notepads I went to drop a mail-slot to my parents.
“Best leave it until the docks,” Leon said. “Secrecy really is an imperative.”
So that my walking with my suitcase wouldn’t attract comment, Leon had it sent on ahead by machine. He then led the way to the lift, took me by routes other than that which I’d have used. He was a stranger to our city, didn’t know even the well-known short cuts.
You may wonder at my docility in going with this complete stranger. But with every lift I stepped into, with every new upper level I reached, I expected my mouth to open and to hear myself say, “No. No, this is not a good idea. Who are you anyway?”
The words never came. Because, alternating with that expectation, was the happy thought I will never be imprisoned by these same corridors again. Life, the unknown, was awaiting me. And my not being told where I was going, why it was me who should be going, for what reason I was going… it was all part of the greater unknown; this new future I’d opted for. (And I had foreseen so many small futures for myself that I wanted this greater unknown not to be diminished by details. Details belonged to the everyday, to knowing all the short cuts, and I craved the extraordinary.)
Nevertheless, as soon as the hatches closed and I’d collected my suitcase, had dropped it in the cabin that Leon had said was mine, the moment we were free of the docks and heading out of the city’s environs, I assailed Leon Reduct with questions.
He didn’t give me any answers.
“I’d rather you didn’t know any of the course I’m about to plot.” He gave me a quick smile; and I realised that now that we were alone he was as nervous of me as I was of this whole venture.
“Suppose this doesn’t work out?” His speech was quick now, intensive. “Suppose you’re not suited to the task although I think you are then it’s best for you not to know where we’re going. The actual location I mean. So would you mind going to your cabin for ten minutes? Then, I promise, all will be explained.”
“I’ll stay. Navigation’s a mystery to me. All over my head.”
“Navigation is not a mystery. It is mathematical probabilities based on observation. And it’s surprising what the human brain can subconsciously retain. I’d rather you went to your cabin.”
The ship what attention I’d given it as I boarded looked like a company ship, had that aura of corporate sterility. Mass-produced, mass-furnished, medium size model capable of some cargo but designed mostly for transporting personnel.
We were still drifting out from the city its blue and silver rim over to our left, sun to our right and ahead.
The enormity of what I’d done suddenly came to me Adrift In Space!, the comic strip said and I was in that instant scared. (Infected by Leon’s fear of me?)
“Is it just us two on this ship?”
“Yes. Just you and I. And I promise you,” he hurried on, “you won’t come to any physical harm. That I’ll take you back any time you say. Now, if you want?”
I shook my head: I’d already committed myself, there was to be no turning back. (I’d look a fool to myself.)
“So, Okinwe, if you wouldn’t mind? There are real lives at stake. So… your cabin?”
Closing the cabin door behind me I stood looking down at the bed, at a table, trying to decide what my reaction should be. All was new to me. I could think of nothing.
My case was on the floor. For something to do I picked it up and laying it on the bed I began unpacking. My eight changes of clothes I hung in the cupboard, and I lined the books on a shelf by the bed. I was aligning my current notepad in the centre of the table, thinking how best I could describe the colossal events of the day so far, when Leon tapped on the door.
“We’re on our way.”
I followed him back to the control room, looked at the screens star configurations I thought I might recognise.
“Recordings of my trip to your city,” Leon said, a wince apologising for the deception.
“Wouldn’t have known,” I smiled at him. “Navigation, nuts and bolts of it, never did interest me. So,” I turned away from the bogus stars, “where we going?”
“You heard of Talkers?” Leon asked me.
Closing my eyes I gave a long inward groan.
Chapter Six
Every generation throws up its share of cranks. Every generation of cranks has its share of Talker fanatics.
Mysteries attract a certain mental/physical type. Every second that passed after his utterance, Leon Reduct, with his brown shining eyes and his earnest demeanour, came to look more like that type.
For those of you who have previously had no interest in Talkers let me here give a brief known history.
Talkers were the result of a genetic experiment, a cross between mankind and the Nautili. On reaching adulthood Talkers were found to be in telepathic communication with the Nautili and, given enough of them, almost instantaneously in telepathic communication with each other. Thus they were employed (exploited?) as a means of communication throughout the whole of Space. Their function was to listen to one another’s thoughts and to talk us messages. Hence Talkers.
That much is official history.
Legend/porno rumour has it that those same Talkers, despite their physical appearance long bodies, short fat legs, expressionless faces became fetishly desired by many humans. These humans, both men and women, mostly ended up sexually abusing these mutants. Talkers eventually got tired of this abuse and disappeared. Every single one of them. No matter how closely they were guarded, they just vanished.
Their human contemporaries, of course, tried to find them. Without success. They did, however, come upon a book left for them by the Talkers. This book was called The Leander Chronicle and it detailed their grievances. In it the Talkers also mentioned their ability to become invisible, ended by saying that they were going where no human being would ever find them.
For the last 550 years sexually suspect cranks of every generation have taken it upon themselves to go looking for these Talkers, and have come up with any number of crackpot plans and charts, or strange phenomena, to indicate their presence.
Leon Reduct asked if I’d heard of Talkers.
Not Now: Death, Dreams, & Reasons for Living (smashwords.com)
Eternals: the unMaking of Heaven
The unMaking of Heaven
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
Hermann Hesse
Chapter One: The Recent Present
Awaking
According to the absurdist laws of a ludicrous cosmology, facts persist, self-generated dreams do not. Such dreams own only a fading reality. Certainly some dreams may have a startling impact: they can, though, be all but wholly forgotten a sleep later.
I was dreaming. Was I?
Something is quickening me awake. Something new. Some thing strange. I can, though, sense nothing new, no obvious change.
Is this simply the residual disquiet of a dream buried already in the depths of sleep?
Those who depend for their continuing survival on camouflage stay still.
By any means, at whatever cost, the prime objective of any living, going-on-living entity is survival. And when one is unarmed, and loth anyway to be as violent as one’s aggressors, the first line of defence has to be camouflage, to not be seen by one’s enemy. This entire strategy depends on what one imagines one’s enemy to be seeing; or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or thinking. To remain in hiding, therefore, one may have to change according to what one is imagining. The very act of changing, though, can betray one’s vulnerable presence.
I was still.
Had I been asleep? Dreaming? Or had I, awake, drifted off on a fantasy float? That part puzzle started to take me back into myself.
Still my mind was urging me awake, to take notice.
But of what?
My senses tell me that I am awake. Awake to life. And life, this life, cannot be a dream, because in a dream there is no worry. In a dream there can be dread; and there can be fear, and fright enough to bring one awake. But not worry. Not this rotating about itself unfocused anxiety – something forgotten? Something overlooked? Either of which might require action, for which being awake is required.
I am still.
My memory thoughts, inasmuch as they are conscious thinking, want to revert to meandering conjecture. To become invisible took me such a long time. I succeeded, though, and to such an extent that, emotionally, I believe that I have suffered from that very invisibility.
Of course, invisibility being my prime objective, at first my sense of humour found great delight in practical jokes – on some biological humans – as well as in the sly pleasure of eavesdropping upon my passing contemporaries. Until I grew tired of being overlooked, and became unreasonably hurt at being always ignored. And just as soon as reassured of the safety and security of my unseen presence.…
Such a two-edged invisible state of existence became essential to my shutdown survival, even when it was I, and only I, who had apparently survived.
Somnolent, introspective, I am alone. Or am I? What had caused that small rhythm-catch of arousal?
Something?
What?
Anything?
In this mutable multiverse nothing is fixed and forever. Even nothing is a variable quality and quantity depending upon perspective. (Many had looked for me, had looked at me, and had seen nothing.)
These memory thoughts, in so far as they are conscious thinking, are again edging back towards meandering conjecture. Something though, some thing won’t let them.…
Telling myself to come fully awake, and listening to myself give the instruction, I then ask, What is here? What is new? What is different?
What was when? Elsewhere?
No elsewhere. To inhabit the same place for aeons on end is to have no easy demarcation to one’s history, no change of scene with which to categorise time’s events.
Let me be specific. Here, now, is a land of high mountains and deep wide valleys. Streams gush white down black cliffs to form broad brown rivers, which flow into huge blue lakes, which in turn overflow into broader rives, which find their slow ways eventually to the wave-speckled oceans, which are edged, again, by high dark cliffs. Cold winds drop off the mountains and eddy around the corners of the few stone-built houses.
A young planet, one still in its first flush of greenery, its mountain peaks yet sharp and largely uneroded. The houses are all empty. In its night skies the star configurations are all as they were the last time I looked.
But something, some thing, someone, is calling me awake.
***
Chapter Two: A History
For those who may come after I had best explain where we were before death’s rebirth.
2.i) The Need for a Record
When death was reinvented, and the I that I am realised an end to everything – to everything that was happening, had happened, that what was I would end – when I saw that, with the return of death, the whole had the shape of a story, that was when I decided that, if I should survive, then I would become a record-keeper of my time. Of what I can remember of my time.
No. That last is inaccurate; and record-keepers must, as befits their role, be accurate.
I have the memory of it all. Every detail. What I lack, what I am not always certain of, especially with events repeated and memory laid over/under memory, is sequence.
When one has come to believe one’s existence infinite, when one has inhabited a multiverse populated by concepts occasionally made concrete, and by abstractions as tenuous as unfulfilled plans, memories of things actual can seem as remote as dreams. The measurement of time, or the use of relative time as a measurement can therefore come to seem of minor import.
I tell myself that I will have to be aware that I am making a linguistic record for minds that, in all probability, will not be mechanically enhanced and who will be reliant entirely on their own organic perception plus aptitude.
I began this section by acknowledging the likelihood of an end. Tales, though, need beginnings as well as endings. And there are so very many beginnings. Especially in a part-imagined and conceptualised past such as mine. And, within the topography of my time, of my multiverse, I am both part and whole.
Does that make sense?
No?
Let us come to the recent present as an example. I was in hiding for so very long. Part of the necessity of that effective hiding was that the multiverse was hidden from me lest what I saw/heard/detected stimulate me into disclosing my hiding place.
Have I told you this before?
“Before” – now that definitely belongs in record-keeping. I need only check.
Yes. I, record-keeper, have a record to consult now. And I am going to leave this record as hard copy. Because you, if primitive, may not even know what a machine code is, let alone possess a machine capable of decoding it. I will leave you, therefore, a hard copy capable of decipherment-translation-interpretation.
Back to the recent present.
Something – some thing attuned to my near-dormant sensory preceptors – brought me out of hiding. Albeit cautiously. The events that followed are what eventually had me commence this record.
But that, again, is now. You stranger, witness to my witnessing, require a chronology of sorts.
What beginning?
That beginning must be the reason that I decided to make this story. That beginning must be the reinvention of death.
Yet, to be exact, that beginning was more than death itself, than death as a concept. It was the living fear, newly born, of extermination. I, as I, as an independent conscious entity, was in all likelihood going to cease, to not be, to be no more, to end. And that was my beginning.
2.ii) Filastre
First, though, I feel compelled to tell you about Filastre. Such was the impact that horrible event had on me that all else seems to rotate around it.
Filastre’s own story has a beginning. Filastre came here, in all his magnificence, and made a gift of his presence.
Filastre had made himself huge, had composed himself of a myriad glittering fragments. From whatever angle one looked at him, Filastre towered up through the clouds. Seemingly rectangular, he appeared to float upon whatever land surface he was over. Neither grass nor trees were disturbed by his presence. He did, however, confuse the small insects; and he certainly disturbed those birds whose aerial territory he occupied. Although the smaller birds could, and did, fly warily through him.
For all that it wasn’t his dimensions that had one lost in wonder and admiration, but the living construct. Filastre’s every thought, no matter how inane or commonsensical, set in motion twinkling shards of himself – with each shard, depending on the properties of its own construction, taking the light from our sun and, reflecting that light mirrored surface to refracting facet, each sliver being broken into its constituent shades – one then beheld it disappearing in subtly changing shimmers to deep within him.
Even in planetary night Filastre, lightly silvered by the distant stars, contrived to entertain, to inspire. His autonomous systems, oscillating Mbranes, self-adjusting, generated their own soft colours in a ripple here, a slow rhythmic pulse there… With each movement, day or night, being accompanied by a mind-music more suspected than heard.
At times this music of Filastre’s was the seemingly appropriate aural/visual shivering tinkle of falling crystals. At others, when for instance he might strike a philosophical posture, it was the barren lament of a desert wind through hollow rocks. It was, however, a music, whatever its emotional/intellectual source, that didn’t irritate, that settled somewhere at the back of consciousness, that intruded enough only to make one glance to Filastre’s heights – to see now what bright/dark coruscations were frizzing through him or shimmying over him.
And to converse with Filastre… Yes. To see Filastre become excited by the talk, to blink (metaphorically) at the flash and glint of his ideas; and to lean back from (so to speak) his big, happy, sonorous booms; to be entranced by the spangling vortex of an idea that was absorbing him; to watch it sink into a meditative glow, a sheen of near contentment, to be broken by the whistle and fizzle of a new thought. And, later, when news of killings, when death re-entered our lives, the flickering away, fading sighs of our shared sadness.
Filastre came here to me because he needed the planet-filtered light of our sun to show himself to his best advantage. His being here pleased us all. Some came here just to be near him. And now he has gone.
Ah, Filastre, I miss you… Because this is what I have to tell you, you who are reading this. They came.
They came, having made themselves into the painted stereotypes of savages, their self-made bodies and armour adorned with the pieces of those they had already destroyed.
They came. They saw Filastre (how could they miss him?); and, whooping and laughing, and with weapons concocted from some planet’s prehistory, with much smoke and clatter, they wantonly destroyed Filastre. Filastre who had taken centuries in the construction of himself, tweaking a metalled mirror here, tuning an assonance there, creating inter-reactive morphic crystal fields with ever-increasing complexity, delighting in the new and wanting only to display it for the pleasure of others… Ah, Filastre…
They came. The nouveau vandals came, and they destroyed Filastre forever. And they thought well of themselves, bearing away shining parts of him as trophy.
2.iii) Truth, Death, False Death, and Braka
We, who are a part of it, have always seen our own civilisation – no matter at what stage that civilisation might be – as being under threat. And we here, the ultimate civilisation, are under the ultimate threat.
Being the ultimate how do I describe us to you who are not? How do I make us simple enough for you to comprehend – you who I do not know and who as yet know nothing of me. I feel that I must create mental edifices for you, a virtual city here, a supposed stellar system there, and people both with recognisable stereotypes… Yet I am chary of analogies, lest the comprehensible be mistaken for the actual.
Truth untarnished by imagination, truth undiluted by supposition, truth unadorned with pleasing imagery… We, who dwell in the mind, demand truth as the first law. We, of the imagination; we, the self-imagined, demand the actual, else all that we build on is false, and we ourselves become false.
We, each in our own way, although each of us was/is/are wholly artificial, we were truth; in that, if nothing else, we were true to our creative impulses. Death came as a destroying force. Not – as they bombastically claimed – as truth to our lie, not as fact to our fiction, not as hard-edged reality to our fuzzy fantasies… I am truth. Truth is my best camouflage. And truth is circular, a vortex feeding on/off itself. Truth, too, is very often invisible, is looked through, beyond, has to be focused on. I could have easily stayed here, in full view, hidden from you.
In that case how, in language, here, do I make you, the communicant, identify with an entity who has no instantly discernible face (features, yes, but they can be changed), nor overarching identity?
Although we think that we act with knowledge, out of knowledge (you, too, who are reading this), mostly we are blind to our present. Often it is only with hindsight that we can see what was being done to us or what we ourselves were truly doing.
The words ‘present’ and ‘hindsight’ carry their own cautionary load. In the telling of this I am going to have to assume that you, across space and time, along with the other participants, share a chronology, a comprehension of sequence regardless of time differences. (My apologies if, in this attempt at simplification/explanation, I have already confused you.)
I, singular, will record this as if narrative.
I, singular, unmet, can only ever be a concept to you.
‘We’ can have no useful meaning here. ‘We’ cannot be a construct encompassing you and I. I cannot know you. My I you can only guess at, albeit that it will be an educated guess according to the education I give you here.
Any reference to ‘we’ therefore, cannot be considered normative in intent. We, you and I, are apart and unknowable.
One prime difficulty, in the telling of this, is in how we – we who were here – we so often remodelled, remade, and rethought ourselves, the making past being destroyed along with our many previous identities. So had repetition, even replication, of our selves in that past become a real possibility, and a fear.
Who were we? Are we?
I doubt that we, our inner selves, were/are that much different to you, curious, reading this.
All intelligent life is the garnering of experience, plus the making of decisions based on that experience, which becomes the experience, along with the worry of forgetting, of overlooking, of wilfully ignoring and repeating the experience… When faced with the necessity of making a decision we never have the knowledge we feel we need. So we often make mistakes, which becomes our experience – the experiences on which we predicate our future. The wholly unexpected, however, forces on us new mistakes, new experiences.
Until I came to write this I did not, for instance, realise how our total reliance on machines/constructs had brought about, almost, a forgetting of the how of what we were. We did not any longer know how to communicate beyond our made selves. (Between our made selves, I subsequently discovered, communication has been/is mostly by transmitted machine code, not language per se.)
I have had to re-learn language, which, at best, is an imperfect means of communication, language being based on the assumption of shared knowledge, shared concepts, shared experience. For all of language’s shortcomings, though, it is capable of being made into both visible and aural hard copy, durable through time, and will thus be capable of being decoded and interpreted – even by those with no direct experience of that language’s vocabulary and structures.
Armed with this language I have now set a part of me to become historian, a delver into and decipherer of the past; with another part of me a chronicler and assembler of current events. My intention is to relate how all has come to pass, is coming to pass. Although not all of that all, I warn you, will have specific cause and consequence.
In truth, why do I write this? Is it for myself? To gain another perspective? From your imagined point of view? Because we, we who seem to have erased beginnings and ends, now have no temporal context in which to see ourselves?
And you? How can you see me? I who am hidden in front of you.
Define time.
The universe once had a beginning. Did it?
The multiverse will end. Will it?
And before?
Before?
And after?
After?
Only with the reborn idea of everlasting death did the lives we were living develop a confining edge.
Shall we title this attempt at communication, ‘A Consideration of Death’? ‘Death Reconsidered’?
Before this the word ‘death’, the concept of death, was rarely mentioned. Indeed any artist/aesthete who chose to create themself around the notion of past death was offhandedly dismissed as morbidly obsessed.
There was one, long ago, I think long ago, who travelled through the stars and who, arriving somewhere new, brought tales that amused and excited the stationary. The name he came with, loth as I am to recall it, was Braka.
Arriving in his new place Braka also assiduously flattered the inhabitants, told them that he had never before enjoyed such bright and witty company. And in each and everyone he met in his new gathering he seemed to take an especial interest. And then… then Braka faked his own death.
Braka was three blocks of black rock, which he had revolve around each other in uncertain elliptics. ‘Dead’ the three blocks of black rock fell together and became inert, resistant to every attempt at reanimation. When, grieving, his newfound friends finally turned from him, Braka brought himself alive again.
Despite Braka’s claim that the emotional response brought about by his fake death was but an extreme form of audience participation, I believe that the grief of those believing themselves bereaved afforded him some sly amusement.
And, alive, the three rocks revolving again, Braka moved on to his next set of victims. Leaving those fooled so angry with him that they quickly forgot what it had been to grieve, to – in the empathy generated by their companion’s ‘death’ – fear their own death.
Even now, especially now, I find the topic of death distasteful, want to tell you of, to dwell on, other matters. But then, I ask myself, why am I making a record of these thoughts? If not to explain to those who come after? After I am dead. If, by then, there is an after.
Because you, communicant, are of the unknowable future. I cannot know who I am making this record for: my working expectation is that it is for someone like me. While knowing that there can be no-one, no thing, exactly like me.
If you are reading this know that we, of when I write, are probably all extinct. Or, again, hidden.
***
Chapter Three: The Recent Present
To Move or Not to Move
I am uncertain and afraid, afraid and uncertain.
I wish I could define/recall exactly what it was out there that had roused me from my aeon’s hibernation.
Or was it internal?
Not one of my senses registers anything. If someone had indeed been trying to communicate with me, then they have given up, assumed no-one here, and moved on.
My camouflage, I am reassured, is effective.
Too effective?
With just the thought of company again, with being in giddy communication with my own kind, after so very long, so long alone… I don’t want them to have given up.
I see my mind drumtight, pierced by their needles of light.
But what if it is the paraphrastic primitives back and they simply, and clumsily – they prided themselves on their boorishness – what if it was they who had triggered one of my subliminal alarms?
Carefully, carefully, minimal pulse, a metaphorical arachnid delicately touching a toe to each of its webs’ radial strands, I test each sense point. (The geomagnetic part of myself, being indistinguishable from that of the planet, has remained these millennia receptive to some communication.) And there are no dressed-up quasi-primitives blundering here.
Then what?
I am so afraid. What if it is a sniggering trap? What if they are no longer deceived by my stony inertia? What if they, going against their creed/nature, have learnt?
But I am so alone.
Never did I think that I would crave quite so much, nor so intensely, the company of my own kind.
Is this any kind of life? Just being alive?
In the beginning of our eternities socio-philosophers asked what, for most of us, is life for? Not its biological ever-reproductive purpose, but what is being alive, staying alive, for?
They eventually decided that, for the individual, it is to feel useful, to be of some account to those around us.
Who, around me, is calling me awake?
The time has come to risk all, to chance my life, my continued existence, to endanger my eternity, and to move.
***
Chapter Four: A History (continued)
4.i) On life. On death.
Let us not concern ourselves with astronomical complexities. Instead let us suppose that a hypothetical primitive had come up to one of us. He might have asked (one did ask, I am reminded):
“What do you do?”
Primitive people are defined by their function, be that technician or trader. How, though, to explain to one such that we simply are. And that we are as we are without any causal relation one to the other. Even our creation, our self-perpetuation, is near autonomous.
The threat of death, therefore, bringing with it a rekindled appreciation of death, had us seeking a purpose/justification to existence other than existence itself.
Prior to the threat of death all that had concerned us were aspects of existence. With no thought of a future, of a limited future, there had been no urgency to our existence. What needed to be done right away? What needed to be done that couldn’t be put off until later?
With the realisation that there might be no later came urgency.
When young, organic young, the concept of death comes as a shock to human beings, makes them question what they are doing, doing with their limited life. Similarly our first step towards rediscovering Death, was to ask: What is Life?
Life in the large, we decided, is the evolution to extinction of a species. Or of a culture.
Life in the small is from birth to death of one member of that species, of that culture.
But what could these definitions of Life mean to one of us who did not die? Who, until then, had not contemplated Death in relation to their own singular selves?
So we were straightaway back to asking: What is Death?
This was not a comfortable question for us made beings, for whom being alive, and going on being unquestioningly alive, had become almost a quasi-religious course.
Alive, we grew. Each of us grew, out of an idea of ourselves; and we continued growing as we adapted to the new circumstances that our growing had created. We added to, and we took away. We experimented upon ourselves, and we changed, and we grew.
Growth itself can be defined as organic, a development. Growth is most certainly not colonisation. The act of colonising does not change the coloniser: they may spread themselves thinly, but they stay who they are. On the other hand whatever it is that is growing, must change as it grows, until it becomes unrecognisable from its roots, its past.
Growth itself is organic, we post-organics had reassured ourselves. Being organic, however, also had to mean that it had a life span, meant – we belatedly realised – that inevitably it/we will die, will cease to exist in that form. And, thinking of death as organic, we took comfort (small comfort it was true) that from its death, from our death, other things would/might grow.
Yet we are/were synthetic, most of us having long ago discarded unreliable, and decomposible, bio tissues. Our death meant destruction, dispersement of what we were/are. Not new life. So again we were made to ask: What is Death?
Death is not unconsciousness, of that we were sure. Alive we, in our synthetic states, still required regular recuperative sleep, holidays from our waking selves. And, although asleep is not to be conscious of being alive, sleep is not death.
Nor can Death be the impermanent oblivion engendered by any form of narcosis. Some, the whimsical among us, wanted to paint Death in lighter colours, called this rediscovered death, The Last Great Mystery. Contemptuous of that I preferred Death being more honestly called The Last Great Certainty. Or, less forbiddingly, Death the Great Unknowable.
Despite all our learning still there were some amongst us who hoped for life in death. They formulated self-deluding questions such as – “If life, in the case of non-sentient creatures, is solely a reactive consciousness, can death be defined as non-appetite seeking, non-reactive consciousness?” The implication in such questions being that, after death, there might yet be an inert awareness.
That is not to say that I did not have some sympathy with their refusal to accept the inevitable. We, who were once defined as human, are fundamentally a pattern-seeking species. We, post-organic made beings, with the advent of New Death needed to undergo a seismic philosophical shift. So did ‘New Organic’ become our catchall catchword to explain to ourselves the ever-increasing probability of our non-survival, our mortality.
Being now acknowledged finite we had also to admit not only an end to ourselves but a limit to our knowledge. To pass on what knowledge we had to those who might survive the destroyers, and to those who might come after, we therefore had to find an appropriate form of communication, something more formed, more tangible than the ephemeral sharing of thoughts. And this physical language here – printed and spoken, read and heard – would seem best suited to describe what we know, what we don’t know, what we cannot know.
But I am getting ahead of myself, of my story.
Back then, coming anew to Death, we delved into those pasts where deaths were common, and we examined how different human cultures approached death.
Many human life-forms wanted to suppose that there was another form of life beyond death, and by life they meant a continuing consciousness. This, however, given the then very obvious bio-chemical-electro-magnetic nature of consciousness was simply not possible.
Other human life-forms believed that, via cannibalism, they could ingest, if not the consciousness of the newly dead, then the driving force of their personality, their ‘spirit,’ and in consequence the recent dead would ‘live on’ within them as they, when eaten, would ‘live on’ in another.
Individuals in other cultures sought to make as large an impact as they could on their present – usually through warfare or art of one kind or another – so that those in the future would be unable to forget them and thus, in the memory of their tribe, they would ‘live on’
To this latter end young members of warring tribes/cultures were encouraged to view their own death in war as a step to glory – to die for one’s fellows, one’s cause, one’s country, one’s tribe, being seen as a noble thing to do.
All very odd. Because, where Death is dominant so too must tribes and their histories become extinct. Nor, anyway, could those who sacrificed themselves have any certain knowledge of the future and what it might, or might not, choose to remember. All, in the end, if there is to be an end, will be forgotten. Including this.
Eternals: The Unmaking of Heaven (smashwords.com)
Trees: the Tree Prospectus
Trees
One
Her eyes were round and of such a dark brown that they seemed to have no definable centre. He hadn’t known where to focus. Not knowing exactly where to focus had made him feel shifty-eyed and so, by association, he had felt somehow guilty and feeling guilty he had wanted to make recompense, to please her.
But he couldn’t please her, had to force himself to say, “Six months. Yes.”
He said this sitting at his desk, black keyboard and lit screen before him.
The young woman, whose gaze he was doing his best to meet and to avoid was sitting on the edge of the chair to the side of his desk.
He looked away from the screen, braved her eyes again, and said to please her, “It’s only the roughest of estimates though.”
From her records he knew that he was only three years older than her.
“I wanted to know, safely,” she explained the purpose of her visit, “near enough how much longer I have.”
“Safely?”
“While I’m still me.”
“You mean physically well?”
The woman gave the slightest of nods and, as if instructing him, glanced towards the screen.
“Ah, yes.” He turned gratefully back to the screen. “I see what you mean. Yes, you should be you for another six months. Quite possibly a year.”
“That’s what she reckoned.” The eyes were again locked on his. “Nothing else there?”
On the screen was the latest letter from the hospital consultant. He slowly scrolled to its end, knew that the consultant would have sent the patient a lay version of the letter.
Before opening his door and calling her name down the corridor he had looked back through her medical records. She wasn’t registered as his patient. He was but one of several GPs in this practice, a large polyclinic in town, this suburban annexe a newly built one-storey block. Her GP was on long-term sick leave prior to retirement.
The consultant’s letter had been sent two weeks back. The patient had made this appointment only yesterday, had said that she didn’t mind which doctor she saw, whoever happened to be available. “In practice these days,” an older colleague had told him, “you’re deluded if you think the individual GP matters to the patient. To be seen straightaway and leave with a prescription is all that most patients want.”
Just once before he had seen this young woman – for a scald gone septic. She had left the routine timed-session with a prescription for antibiotics and a salve. For this appointment, having been warned by the receptionist and having read the consultant’s letter, he had allowed more time.
He didn’t remember her eyes from the scald. Maybe last time he had the injury to examine, this time only her face to look at. Even so, apart from the eyes, hers was an unremarkable face. Possibly if she had been tall and slim the eyes would have made her round face conventionally beautiful. As it was she was short and she could, without insult, although she would not have welcomed the description, be described as, if not fat, stout. Indeed she herself, when dissatisfied with her changing room reflection, called herself ‘dumpy’, her legs ‘stumpy’.
He swivelled around from the screen.
“That’s all there is,” he said with an almost apologetic shrug.
She was quiet a moment, then, “Thank you,” she said.
If she had been going to weep now was the time. But there was no sign of tears: all that she had wanted from him had been last ditch confirmation.
Pulling her peppery-green jacket around her she started to stand.
“Anything we can do…” The doctor attempted a smile. “At any time. We’re only a phone call away.”
By this time she had reached the door handle, nodded to him – she was not a person given to easy expression – and she left the room.
* * *
The corridor wasn’t that long, was painted beige, the carpet a tough brown. In the waiting room, also beige, the carpet was a tough blue. Hard chairs lined three of the walls, a reception desk inset into the fourth. In the middle of the waiting room were two back-to-back short rows of chairs.
From this room all that was visible outside – through the high strip of window – was the top of a winter-battered palm between two cropped leylandi. Both of the leylandii, having once been allowed unrestricted growth, had been severely cut back to mostly dead underwood.
The young woman came to a stop before the plump knees of an older woman sitting alone in the middle row. Looking up the older woman said, “That it?” and she laid a magazine on the chair beside her. In the corner play area a toddler was talking to himself as he put plastic bricks into the back of a plastic lorry. A pale tired father looked on.
As she stood the older woman glanced over to the reception desk: “Another appointment?”
The young woman gave a sharp shake of the head, and waited while the older woman gathered up her coat and handbag. Both women called out ‘Goodbye’ to the receptionist as they left. The receptionist was on the phone, didn’t hear them.
Two
Cupresscyparis leylandii is a spontaneous hybrid of the Monterey and Nootka cypress, the most popular variety of which – in the UK – is Haggerston Grey, renowned for its vigorous growth. That vigorous growth, reaching two storeys high in as many years and thus becoming the frequent cause of neighbourly disputes – theft of sunlight principally – has seen the planting of leylandii forbidden in some house deeds and covenants and banned retrospectively by quite a few housing associations. If kept trimmed and topped, however, leylandii can make a near solid and most effective hedge. Too often, though, one forgetful year and it is let go.
My own dislike of leylandii is their stick-dry interiors, as dead and deserted as an unvisited mausoleum. Pulling aside their branches I get the feeling that, despite their waxy evergreen exteriors, and along with many other of the cypress family, they are dying from the inside out. These days of course leylandii hedges could indeed be dying, the dead parts being due to the leylandii aphid.
* * *
The palm, cordyline australis, is of New Zealand origin where it is known, because of its evergreen lanceolate foliage, as the Majestic Cabbage Tree.
The cordyline comes from the Latin Kordyle, club, that name coming from the shape of the palm’s root.
Sold by nurseries as frost-hardy, with claims that the palm can withstand temperatures as low as -8oC even in the soft winters of southern counties, the Majestic Cabbage Tree does still fall victim to heavy snow falls, the crown suffering damage. Not necessarily fatal: come spring the palm may well put out fresh shoots from base or trunk. …That is if the Majestic Cabbage Tree is let live that long. Because, come spring, one does occasionally catch sight of a suburban front garden with a palm that has all the appearance of being wholly dead. From khaki bottom to top the bedraggled palm looks like nothing more than a thick-handled and very dead mop.
Those sheltered palms that do survive English winters with full foliage come summer can produce a spray of cream florets which fair burst from just below the crown, their fulsome scent as drenched sweet as a mouthful of Arab pastries.
Three
I’m writing all this down by way of an explanation. To explain to myself as much as to anyone else.
And I have a lot to explain, all muddled up inside my head and body, image atop memory with thoughts, suspicions, stomach lurches, trembling hands, sudden deep breaths, doubts recurring, frowned at and puzzled on. And I’m not sure what order all this should be in.
When I sat down to start this ordering I saw it taking the form of my explaining the ins and outs of the past few years as if to a close friend. A kitchen table tête-à-tête over a fine china tea set. Except that I don’t have a fine china tea set nor any friends that close. Certainly none that I’d go to the bother of explaining myself to.
The writing was easy enough to think of doing. The only way I could get started though was as if I saw myself as somebody else writing about two other people. Not that I’ve written that much, but already it seems that just that small amount needs me to explain it further.
Why, for instance, did I start with that particular visit to that particular Health Centre/Polyclinic/what you will? It certainly wasn’t Hazel’s first visit there. Nor was it by a long chalk the first waiting room I’d been left sitting in, flicking through magazines and avoiding eye contact.
So why did I start in that Health Centre?
Was it because Hazel had been pale that day, her face rigid, a determined look about her? Like when she was eight in that gym competition she had no chance of winning, knew she’d look a fool but had been determined to see it through.
Or is that one doctor visit at the forefront because in the beige ordinariness of that Health Centre the unwilling repetition of the prognosis put Hazel’s premature death beyond question?
* * *
Hazel’s first visits to the medical profession had begun anywhere between a year and eighteen months before. Those early appointments had been for flu-like symptoms that wouldn’t go away. Then came the persistent stomach cramps and debilitating headaches. Got so that Hazel felt that the doctors didn’t believe her and had her down as a hypochondriac.
Which was when she came to me: beyond miserable, wretched and with hardly the energy to be tearful. I knew my daughter. Her pain, her distress, did not have imaginary causes. One locum had even suggested that she ‘seek counselling.’
I went with her to her doctor’s, not mine. And this doctor, all-wise, all-knowing, had Hazel and I look angrily to one another.
Smiling sweetly at mother and daughter, this ‘family doctor’ had said that possibly, at Hazel’s age, these complaints might be something that I, her mother, had gone through.
“Hardly,” I told that smug female GP, “I’m her adopted mother.”
Which sounded odd every time I said it. As if baby Hazel had filled in all the forms, had been put through the interviews, that she had cleaned the house top to bottom before every remotely connected official had come to assess her eligibility to adopt Ian and I.
I probably overreacted that day in the surgery, maybe saw my chance, having wrong-footed the doctor, to strike home. I’m not, even when unprovoked, in the habit of suffering fools. And that doctor was the type anyway who got me on the aggressive-defensive. There she was all tall and blue-eyed, serene and unrummaged. While I know myself to be a flustered and red-cheeked frump. On our way in, looking for a parking space, Hazel had pointed out this doctor’s hardtop sports car. Mine was a secondhand hatchback.
I was more than pumped up for a fight. And my mother-hen hostility certainly had that over-tailored GP taking heed. Bloods were taken, even a DNA swab; and I delivered urine and stool samples to the surgery the following day.
A week or so later the test results led to Hazel being referred to a specialist. Which was when Hazel got told that she had a rare genetic condition. That specialist said that, so far as he had been able to find out, there was no known cure, as yet. Probably because it was such a rare condition.
He told Hazel that not every female child inherited the full condition from their mother. Not every mother with that DNA died from the condition, some were just carriers. Did Hazel have any sisters? A sister big-hearted enough to undergo surgery on her behalf? If so a bone marrow transplant might – such a treatment had worked with similar genetic conditions – might allow her to live to a ‘happy old age’.
I knew as part of the adoption process the name of Hazel’s birth mother, but not whether Hazel had any birth-siblings. Ian and I had been told at the time of the adoption that Hazel had been an only child. What I didn’t know was if her birth mother had subsequently produced any sisters.
Hazel hadn’t wanted me to go with her on that first visit to see the hospital specialist. At that time, despite my having accompanied her as rottweiler to her GP, Hazel had seen herself as an independent adult perfectly capable of dealing with grown-up affairs. And I had long got over the feeling of being shut out of her life, was happy to let her decide the ground rules for how often we met as adults. She called in on us pretty near every other Sunday, Christmases she always spent with us, summer holidays sometimes with Kevin’s family, sometimes a package holiday just the two of them. I had my own life, problems and plans of my own, wasn’t living through her.
Until this of course.
Hazel didn’t even come to me straight from the hospital, phoned me the evening of the following day, which must have been a Friday because it was the Saturday afternoon that she came over. I’d had to hurriedly get one of the girls to fill in for me at the café. Although Hazel hadn’t been alarmist – she had a distrust of melodrama – she had said that it was important, that she wanted to see both Ian and I together. Insisting on us being a pair, I had expected her to come with Kevin. Yet she arrived on her own.
Ian had been tetchily put out, having had to cancel a ride with a friend to be there. And then, as if contradicting his grumpiness, he wept when Hazel told us the prognosis.
“Oh, Dad, don’t,” Hazel said, and it was she who had to comfort him. Which had me clamping my mouth shut: my tearing into Ian then would not have helped Hazel.
Because by that time Ian and I were no longer living together. He had only been in the house on sufferance, at Hazel’s request (she had phoned him); and then he had been wondering beforehand if – Ian could only think within the parameters of convention, and despite knowing of her many visits of late to the doctor – if her ‘announcement’ was to have been news of pregnancy or ‘wedding bells’.
Paradoxically Hazel had that day seemed, she had certainly looked when she arrived, healthier than she had for months. Which in hindsight was probably down to her knowing that the illness wasn’t all in her imagination, that she definitely did have something wrong with her. Add to that the specialist having started her on painkillers appropriate to the pain and not just feeding herself paracetemol.
But it was through that first visit to her GP how I became involved in all that was to follow. Ian was obviously going to be of no help. And it was I who had to go searching through all the old paperwork and initialise the search for Hazel’s birth mother.
“Who quite likely,” the specialist said, “will have a one in four chance of having had this same condition and of not being any longer with us.”
* * *
Almost straightaway I discovered that Hazel’s birth mother, Moira, was dead, had died years before when Hazel was eight. According to the Social Services preliminary reports Moira had fallen victim to an abusive relationship, not to an inherited condition. Actual cause of death was listed as accidental drugs overdose, a mix of morphine and amphetamines. Even so, the specialist later told Hazel and I, Moira could have been just a carrier.
It took a couple more weeks of phone calls and visits to Social Services plate glass offices before we could be sure that Hazel had no birth-sisters at all, let alone one compatible with her blood type and capable of donating bone marrow. I spent two more weeks, possibly longer – it’s hard to give up hope – looking to see if Hazel’s birth mother had any sisters who might have had daughters still alive. I extended that search for birth-aunties. Found none.
At that time neither Hazel nor Ian shared my interest regards her birth mother. I wondered then if Hazel’s birth mother, Moira, had only gone so wild so young because her own mother had died from the condition during Moira’s early teens, and Moira had been left at home – I guessed – with a dodgy stepfather. According to Social Services’ records Moira had certainly left home at fifteen to set up house with the first of her many boyfriends.
And there had been Ian and I, when offered baby Hazel for adoption, concerned over possible damage done to the foetus by the mother’s – then only suspected – history of addiction. Consequences of maternal drug abuse we had been prepared for, had read books on; and we spent years on the lookout for signs – failure to thrive, intellectual incapacity, compulsive behaviours…
A genetic time bomb hadn’t entered our considerations.
Meanwhile Hazel went for more examinations, agreed to student doctors studying her rare condition. I was present, hand-holding, a couple of times when doctors said, ‘the character of the illness’, as if ‘the condition’ was a person in its own right, as if my daughter had another person inhabiting her. She didn’t. Made her out to be next best thing to a schizophrenic. She wasn’t. She was a whole person, had her own history. The failing was mechanical, bits of her had gone wrong. Built-in obsolescence was kicking in early.
“The patient…” the hospital’s pinstriped consultant said.
“My daughter’s name is Hazel,” I said from my chair beside her bed.
“Hazel…” the pinstripe smarmed across Hazel’s smoothed covers at me.
Hazel wasn’t as prickly defensive as me, and for the sake of rare others agreed to submit herself to various tests and treatments. Some of those treatments were painful, none to any good effect. The researchers were happy, nay relieved – they couldn’t be held responsible – to admit to the limits of their knowledge. Hazel and I wished they knew more.
A medical science student researching his PhD and keen to relay his learning, told Hazel, “In times gone by the majority of working people died by the time they were forty. That is if they survived infancy. Mothers, young mothers, frequently died in childbirth. Female ancestors of yours who died in their early thirties would have been unremarkable. It is only now, with everyone living so much longer, that genetic conditions such as yours are being exposed.”
By which time I had, the permanent visitor, become an expert on hospital people – receptionists, nurses, doctors, porters and patients. And I knew that among all those hurrying by professionals the parent – mother or father – with the child held on their lap, or numb and small beside them – that parent saw the whole child, knew where that child had come from, had hopes for what that child might become… Doctors looked for fresh symptoms, named ‘the condition’.
* * *
One of Hazel’s trial treatments had her throwing up, while a course of steroids made her so water retentive that she damn near sloshed as she walked. Waddled I should say. It all became so disfiguring and uncomfortable, and with no assurance that any of the treatments would cure her.
Which led Hazel to grab hold of the consultant’s more accessible registrar. She only ever saw the consultant on his weekly rounds, and then only if there had been a change in her treatment regime. Holding onto the registrar’s white sleeve she demanded to be taken off all medication.
“I don’t want to die in this state.”
The nervous registrar – I was scowling across the bed at him – although reluctant to lose the opportunity to test how Hazel’s condition would respond to other as yet untried treatments, did sympathise. As did the consultant when fetched along to the ward. Leastwise the consultant started talking about Hazel’s ‘quality of life’ as if it was his own bright idea. As another doctor, equally impotent, will later talk about giving my daughter ‘a good death’.
Theirs wasn’t a quick decision. A staff nurse was called over and the three talked for a good hour, considerations going round and about. Boiled down to the consultant having no option but to admit that what they had so far tried hadn’t had any beneficial effects. When Hazel couldn’t be persuaded to try any other treatments she was talked into taking medication to steady her occasional loss of balance, and was given a store of painkillers to keep by her. The pain at that time was mostly headaches.
The consultant wrote to Hazel’s tailored GP. That GP, if GPs do ever admit to being wrong (is that why so many doctors become politicians?) invited Hazel in to offer help howsoever she might need it.
That, however, was Hazel’s last visit to that doctor. Because shortly afterwards Hazel moved in with me and transferred back to our ‘family health practice’, but where the chances of seeing the same GP twice in a row is now about the same as anywhere else in England.
Four
Ian hadn’t been at all pleased when the garage’s only available courtesy car had turned out to be a 3-door hatchback. He had expressed his displeasure, but hadn’t wanted to hang around the garage while they had transferred his bike carrier to the hatchback. Not that they had offered. Nor had he insisted: with his carrier being customised to his estate he doubted anyway that they would have been able to fit it.
Fortunately it was late summer, a warm Friday evening. Because, even with the rear seats folded down and the bike’s front wheel removed, he still couldn’t fully close the hatchback’s rear door. He had to tie the door down with a stretch strap through the back wheel’s spokes. Unfortunately the strap’s elasticity meant that it gave just enough to have every bump and pothole banging and rattling the rear door.
For the first five miles at least he muttered on about the distracting rattle and about his having to have the side windows and the vents fully open so that the exhaust fumes didn’t, caught in the airstream vortex, come swirling back into the car and have him falling asleep at the wheel.
If the garage didn’t fix the electrical fault in his own car this time, or even if they did, he would certainly be making known his thoughts about this wholly inadequate courtesy car. Luckily his own car, if luck it was, was still under warranty.
Even so the garage had still been acting as if it had been doing him a favour.
For the past eight months he’d had this problem – indicate left and sometimes, only sometimes, the headlights came on and a dashboard warning flashed up saying gearbox failure. Or, just for a change, the warning was for engine overheating. But it didn’t happen every time that he indicated left. In the garage they switched on the indicator and nothing happened. Four times they told him that there was no fault.
“We’ve run it through our diagnostics,” he was told. “There is no fault.”
“Yes there is,” Ian puffed himself up to say, “and the fault is with your diagnostics.”
Then one of the young mechanics had taken his estate out for a test drive and, lo and behold, when one time the young mechanic indicated left the headlights had come on and the dashboard had warned of the engine overheating.
The garage had only then got in touch with the manufacturer and had discovered – the chatty showroom receptionist had let slip to Ian – that quite a few of his model had this software problem. Going online Ian discovered that a batch of components were to blame and were being slowly replaced. But not by the original component manufacturer, who had gone bust. While the new supplier had encountered compatibility problems.
Ian was told by the garage that, now that they were aware of the cause, they wanted to thoroughly test his car before handing it back. They had made a big deal out of arranging this courtesy car for him.
This inappropriate courtesy car.
* * *
When Ian left the motorway, heading west, the sun was setting. He pulled both of the hatchback’s visors down.
The bike track he was going to was in a steep wood. As there were going to be heats all of the Saturday, an early start was required. The semis and final were on Sunday.
Ian was aiming for a pre-booked Bed and Breakfast on the far side of the woods. And that had been a lucky last minute reservation. Racing weekends like this he usually unrolled a sleeping bag in the back of the estate: he told Hazel that sleeping in the car reminded him of those rained-through tents on camping holidays. The hatchback though was too short to sleep in: he would either have been uncomfortably curled up or had his legs hanging out the back.
He had been to this woodland track before, didn’t need his SatNav.
The road, in this countryside of water meadows and low hills, has several straight stretches and, where meandering streams ran under, some tight bends. On an early straight Ian changed down to swing out around a slow grain lorry. The hatchback’s acceleration thrust him back in his seat, came as a surprise.
“Nippy little beast.” Ian lifted his right eyebrow.
In his rear-view mirror Ian saw two cars also overtake the big metal box of the grain lorry. He thought he recognised a fellow biker in a maroon Ford, second car back, a mountain bike standing on its roof.
“C’mon beast,” Ian said, and speeded up. The back door being open the exhaust gave a satisfying roar.
The car behind the car behind overtook it.
“You’re on,” Ian said, changed down into a bend by a small copse, came up behind a slow silver Fiat, and followed it out of that wooded bend to between fields again. He glanced across the top of the clipped hedgerows, took a chance and swung past the Fiat on a right hand bend and into a left. That would slow the maroon Ford.
Ian, leaning forwards in his seat, came out of the long left hand bend and, as he accelerated away into the next straight, two cars came in the other direction. They would hold his pursuer behind the Fiat.
Just before Ian drove into the next long bend he saw the silver Fiat way back emerging from the last bend, with the maroon Ford pulling out around it.
* * *
Winter water had damaged the roadside. Ian’s glance to the rear-view mirror had steered the car closer towards the road verge. The hatchback’s front wheel dropped into a soft ditch. Ian wrenched at the steering to free the wheel. The long ragged-edged pit pulled the tyre off. With the tyre gone the courtesy car shot across the road turning onto its side as it went. The thorn hedge on the far side tipped the car right over. Upside down, roof crumpling as it slid along the ground on the other side of the hedge, windscreen pieces spraying back inside the car, the weight of the engine tilting the car forwards, small bushes being torn aside, at 80 mph the car piled into a stand of Scots pine.
When car met tree Ian was squashed and killed.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1140646
The Secret Report of Friar Otto
The Secret Report of Friar Otto :
being a 21st century reinterpretation of
The Report In Confidence On The Imprisonment & Execution Of William de Marisco & 16 Of His Followers
a novel by Sam Smith
acknowledgements
My thanks to the staff of Ilfracombe Public Library, to the staff and volunteers of Ilfracombe Museum, to Stanley Marris (Canadian descendant of Sir William de Marisco), to the crew of MV Oldenburg and to the inhabitants of Lundy.
dedicated to
the memory of Dr. David Kelly
“The ideas concerning sovereignty, democracy, political obligation, the duty of obedience, lawful command, justice, are with us today in a manner no wise different from that which they were in the Middle Ages.”
Walter Ullmann: A History of Political Thought
Introduction
For purists let me begin by stating that, in this reinterpretation of Friar Otto’s secret report, I have either translated the scattering of Latin phrases into the English text; or, where erroneous, I have omitted them altogether.
The irrelevance of such Latin phrases, I decided, was due to their being predominantly employed in the early part of the document. The consideration I subscribe to is that these phrases, mottoes even, are not so much an embellishment of the text — in that they offer or open up a viewpoint, much as a glossary might — rather that they are simply an adornment, a following of form, and a following of Dominican/Benedictine form at that. Please bear in mind that, at the time of his writing, 1242 anno domini, Friar Otto was a Franciscan noviciate in what was then a brand new order.
In support of my contention — that these omitted Latin phrases were but conventional decoration — note also, again only in the early part of the original document, Friar Otto’s poorly executed illuminations, again in clumsy imitation of Dominican artistry. (In my studies of the document, and aware of Friar Otto’s skills as a linguist, I even, at one point, suspected that this early overuse/misuse of church Latin, and the crudely copied illuminations, might have been a deliberate parody. Such sly humour, though, does not travel well, and I have made no attempt to translate it as such.)
The many circumlocutions and fraternal pleasantries at the beginning I have likewise condensed, in the conviction that these were simply in imitation of the flowery excesses in use at the English and French royal courts of that period; and, again, were what Friar Otto began by seeming to believe was expected of him. Friar Otto, however, does not indulge in any lengthy analysis of his own motives or impulses. Given the period, and its other conventions, Friar Otto examines concerns of the self only where relevant to the tale he is initially attempting to uncover.
Within the document Friar Otto does himself tell of the problems that he encountered with the melange of languages in use in England at that time. The dominant language of that period was Norman French. That, though, was not Friar Otto’s mother tongue. That previous interpretations of this document have taken Norman French (Anglo-French, Anglo-Norman) as their starting point has been therefore, I believe, a fundamental error.
As is evident to anyone familiar with the original document, by the third day of his report, the more Friar Otto has become involved with the prisoners and their tales, and the less certain Friar Otto has become of the religious import of his report, any Latin phrases then included among the Gaelic, English and Anglo-Saxon dialects, along with the Germanic and Goth interpolations, I judged to be wholly pertinent and they have been translated, I hope, seamlessly into this English text.
In his use of common language Friar Otto was one of the first to believe (taking his usage as a statement of intent) that church Latin was not sufficient to replicate with accuracy the prisoners’ tales. Possibly, it has to be said, his grasp of Latin was not up to the task — note his often inappropriate inclusion of Latin phrases in the earlier part of the document. Or, possibly, and which I have taken as one of the guiding principles for my reinterpretation, Friar Otto had been making a deliberate attempt to escape the bounds imposed on him by the use of Latin, and of the religious terminology inherent in, and associated with, its then use.
Friar Otto’s spellings of common language are, of necessity, and in common with almost all scholars and clerks of the period, mostly phonetic. The meaning of many words can thus often only be divined via their context. (Which, quite probably, is the principal cause of their being quite so many interpretations of this text.) I have, in many places, expanded on these contexts, and have presented all as if written by Friar Otto.
For further ease of reading, and to avoid sending readers to wade through medieval histories, or to dig around in their library’s more arcane and weightier dictionaries, wherever possible I have used the present day equivalents of medieval terms; unless precision has demanded otherwise, in which case I have contrived to make evident the word’s meaning via its context.
Another noteworthy assumption has been, regards previous interpretations, that Friar Otto wrote the whole of the original document initially as a day-by-day journal. Given the quill and ink equipment available to him at the time, I deem that to have been unlikely in the extreme. Taking into account the date of his final entry, I believe it now safe to assume that the report was written in leisured retrospect; and, in that case, his initial usage of Latin phrases could be viewed, given his later changes of heart/mind, almost certainly as mockery. But we have to consider the labour involved in his going back to change it, especially if the journal did begin by being written contemporaneously, with, the more that he had to write, an increasing time lag between events and his writing of them. All that having been said, for the purposes of narrative we shall here sustain the fiction of the report having been written as a day-by-day journal. Memory, however, not being linear, I will ask you, lay reader, to forgive beforehand Friar Otto’s occasional slips from chronology.
For all those hair-splitting, nit-picking pedants infesting academe, please allow me here to once again emphasise, that this is a latterday interpretation of Friar Otto’s Secret Report, and not a translation. Therefore, regards the document entire, I have arranged the text on the page according to current practice, while rendering this long overdue reinterpretation as best I can in the multinational English language in use at the beginning of the 21st century, this being approximately 750 years subsequent to the events related in the secret report of Friar Otto.
SS 2005
“The people are not to be followed, but are to be taught.”
Pope Celestine I
Folio 1
Folio 1 (i)
21st July 1242: The Tower
Pursuant to your instructions, brother, I came first to this London castle called The Tower. New to this land and to this city I was confused to find that this castle was not one tower but four. The rest of the day proved to be as confusing. Although the constables did fulfil my expectations: uncouth, they were also mightily frightened of their prisoners and insisted on opening my habit and delving into my cowl to ensure that I had no weapons concealed about my person. Then, with four of the constables pressed close about me, their cudgels at the ready, the bolts were thrown back and I was bundled into the room.
Now our robes (need I remind you brother?), and I question the humbling necessity of their being quite so cumbersome, are not conducive to sudden movements. Mine tangled about my legs, and almost tripped me to the floor. I was about to pass comment on my rough handling by the constables when the very beginning of my complaint was cut short by the slamming and the bolting of the door behind me.
Allow me to describe the room in which I so summarily found myself.
Of grey stone, high and long, the light came through two tall embrasures on one wall. Midway along the room, lengthways on, was a table, with a bench on either side of it. On the table was an earthenware pitcher, a bowl, a shallow basket and some squat clay goblets.
Ranged around the inner walls were six straw mattresses. Some of their leaked straw was scattered about the floor. Just inside the door, the boards about it stained with spillage, was a wooden bucket with a lid. The stink emanating from it had me close my mouth. Had I been physically capable, I must confess, I would have also closed my nose.
The shapes of four men lay under coarse brown blankets. One man, of a dark countenance, lifted his head from his mattress to look around the end of a bench at me. Another, closer by, moved the edge of his blanket the better to see me.
I will remind you here, brother, that you employed me for this task because of my veracious memory. Thus I will repeat here verbatim much of what was said, also the circumstances of its utterance; lest my unfamiliarity with local nuances, and my wrongful interpretation of them, innocently mislead.
The only man standing, aside from myself, was one leaning against the wall by the furthest embrasure. As I looked to him he turned his face from me towards a man sat at the table.
Since my dramatic entry into the room this man at the table had been studying me. As I, between looking about the room, him.
Around a weather-scalded face he had white hair and a white beard. The very redness of his skin made his blue eyes seem brighter.
He lowered those eyes as he pushed himself up from the table, and he kept them lowered as he stepped over and around the unused bedding coiled about the floor. Only when he was but an arm’s reach from me did the blue eyes rise to mine.
He was both taller and much broader than I.
“Never seen a hand so white,” he said, referring to the outflung hand I had slapped against the wall to stop myself falling. “Nor so thin,” he said. “Except on a lady-born.”
Made aware of my posture I removed my hand from the wall and, in what has already become an habitual gesture, I placed it inside the sleeve of the other arm.
“You don’t happen to have,” the scarlet-faced man lowered his voice as he moved his mouth closer to my ear, “a small blade up that sleeve? One I could trim my beard with?”
“The constables searched me,” I told him. With the wall at my back I was unable to move away. “They forced a search on me, even though I assured them,” my tone of voice was intended to convey outrage at my rough treatment the other side of the door, “that I had not so much as a quill sharpener upon me.”
“So where did you hide it?”
The man was so close to me by now that his whiskers were tickling my ear. At this proximity I could see that his skin was pocked, as if the scorching could have been caused by disease and not by weather or by flame. Having been forewarned I was determined not to be intimidated by any in the room, so I did not flinch from either his ruffianly posture or from the idea of disease.
I was, however, so overcome with his presence that I hadn’t felt his hand reach down to the hem of my habit. When he asked, “Here?” he pulled the lower half of my habit up over my head and held it fast. Thus I was stood with my arms trapped and my lower half exposed to ridicule.
Helpless, I was rocked back and forth, even spun in a circle.
“Look at this!” the man shouted and laughed. “Our visitor’s got a parsnip for a pecker.”
While thus exposed to their mockery, frightened also to their intent, I had yet mind enough to comfort myself that our Lord Francis had publicly stripped himself of his own cloak.
Yet my humiliation was not for mindless sport: I heard no rejoining laughter from the other men. Nor when he went on to comment on the copper colour of my nether hair and on my long white shanks, even to ask if I shaved them. Which I do not. As you are aware, brother, the coarseness of the material from which our habits are made rubs the hair from the front of our legs.
Despite my muffled denial, repeated, my tormentor persisted in the assumption that I shaved my legs, asked if I was someone’s catamite.
Finally, tiring of his sport, the redfaced man released my habit. I pulled it closer about me, retied the rope.
“So how,” the man stepped in close to me again, “do you cut your hair? In this shape?” He flicked my hair. “Without a knife?” He cupped and raised my jaw, “And how do you get your chin this smooth?”
Jerking my jaw free, I attempted to introduce myself, to explain that I am a follower of Francis of Assissi. The redfaced man, though, ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.
“So how,” he roughly grabbed my chin again, “do you cut your hair?”
“A barber cuts my hair. My beard I shave myself.”
“So where do you keep your blade?”
“In my lodgings.”
I was about to jerk my jaw free again, decided instead to take the argument to him: “Do you really think that I would be so foolish to come in here, or that your keepers would be foolish enough to let me come in here, with a knife?”
“So why,” the red face came so close to mine that our noses almost touched, “are you here?”
“To find out why a man would risk, not only his lands, but his life in such desperate ways. It is my calling to know and to spread the truth. The truth; not street tales, not court rumour. The truth.”
“Adam Marsh sent you?” the man leaning against the wall by the embrasure asked me.
Forgive me, brother, but — knowing your wish to keep your journal discrete — I dissembled here.
The redfaced man moved aside so that I could have a direct view of my interlocutor.
“No,” I said.
“You lie, truth-seeker,” the man, still leaning, said. “Let it, this day, in this place, be your last.”
The man, simply by the calm assuredness of his utterance, made plain that he was accustomed to command.
“You are William de Marisco?” I stepped, unimpeded, away from the redfaced man.
The leaning man lifted his brown beard: “Come over here. Away from the stink.”
Folio 1 (ii)
21st July 1242: The Tower
When I reached the furthest embrasure I found that, between myself and William de Marisco, were two steps jutting out of the wall. The two steps led up to the embrasure, which has height enough to take a standing man. With my shin pressed against the lowest step, I studied William de Marisco. As he, in his turn, his outdoor face yellow from being locked in these many days, studied me.
“So what’s the deal priest?” he asked me.
It took a moment for me to decipher his words.
“There is no deal,” I told him.
A cooling draught was being squeezed sideways through the embrasure.
“The king sent you?”
I had to lean forward to hear what William de Marisco was saying. He spoke, not in a whisper, but quietly.
“No,” I told him.
“The justiciar?”
“No.”
“Chancellor? Who is that now?”
“No. I am here…”
“The deal, priest; what deal is in the offering?”
“There is no deal.”
From somewhere outside came the sudden loud croak of a raven. All of the men, including William de Marisco, seemed to listen, and to wait. When a distant, answering croak came, they relaxed, seemed in some strange manner satisfied.
“I am no good at words behind words, priest,” William de Marisco told me. “At court I was an embarrassment to their delicate manners. Tell me, straight now, what is the deal? What lands am I to lose? Is Hugh to be a hostage? Whose page will he be? Will Matilda be allowed to return to our lands in Ireland? Will my father’s lands be returned to him?”
“There is no deal. The sentence from your trial on July 14th stands. What I have been told is that King Henry wants you, William de Marisco, and all of your troublesome followers, dead and gone. Alive, I was told, you are not to be trusted.”
At this last statement of mine the redfaced man let loose a shout: “And this king is to be trusted?!”
“We are to be killed here?” William de Marisco asked.
“Not in this room. At a public execution.”
William de Marisco actually smiled at this, and looked over to the redfaced man, who was making his way back to the table.
“I told you,” he said to William de Marisco, “they did it before. To Fawkes de Breauté and his brother William. Along with all their men.”
“Not all their men,” a man in the corner said. “Three were let go on a crusade.”
“Well? Priest!” the redfaced man bellowed at me as he sat: “Know of any crusades for us?”
Ignoring him I asked of William de Marisco: “You already knew of this?”
“It was said.”
“By the knight who captured you?”
“By our Bristol jailers. And others here.”
“Safe behind their bars,” the redfaced man said contemptuously, “the Bristol jailers taunted us with it.”
From their various positions around the room all, bar one man with a blood-blackened and bruised face, were paying attention now.
“And what of my companions, priest? What awaits them upon my ‘execution’?” he mimicked my accent.
“I am a friar,” I told him, told them all, “not a priest.”
“The truth, friar. Tell the truth.”
“You are all to be killed. All of you here. Eleven of those in the Flete and Newgate prisons too.”
I looked again around the room, at the eyes looking up at me from the floor. None displayed the least shock or fear. I felt that they had been seeking only confirmation from me, not news. One, with curly brown hair, simply said: “Best we had put up a decent fight on Lundy.”
“We’ve been taken prisoner before,” the redfaced man said to him, “and lived to see the light of freedom again.”
“We were part of an army then,” the curly-headed man said. “They had to do a deal.”
“We didn’t know that beforehand,” redface argued.
“And we didn’t, that time, have much option,” William de Marisco told them both. “We were every one of us blinded.”
“On Lundy?” I asked; and asked as much to demonstrate that I knew some of their history than out of genuine enquiry.
William de Marisco looked at me, as if newly arrived before him. And he looked some more. But the brown eyes in the yellow face were seeing images beyond my sorry visage.
“Off Sandwich,” he said, and looked away.
“That treacherous gullshit Ivor…” the man in the furthest corner had rolled onto his back as he had spoken.
“He paid,” redface said.
As no-one else seemed about to speak, I asked: “How did he pay?”
The men looked to one another. The man in the far corner smiled. William de Marisco, too, drew himself out of his trance to smile with them.
“We had margonels above the landing beach. Which meant,” he had noted my look of incomprehension, “we could have defended Lundy indefinitely. There is no defence, though, against betrayal.”
“Gutless Ivor,” redface took up the tale, “was on lookout above the cove. He let our captors pass unchallenged. Then he tagged along behind them begging to be taken prisoner too — so that we wouldn’t guess his part in it. Stupid as an owl, was Ivor.”
The other men knew this story, awaited its conclusion.
“So how did Ivor pay?” I had to ask.
“Ivor was not much of a sailor,” William looked from the others to me: “Ivor was not much of anything. Aside from a coward. We pulled him off a winter wreck. He had been clinging onto the mast. We pulled two others of his crew from the waves. And before they expired both found breath enough to curse Ivor. From what we could make out, it was because of Ivor’s lazy fearfulness that the boat had got itself wrecked.”
“So how did he pay?” I had to ask again.
“On the boat to Bristol one of our captor’s laughed at Ivor’s green face. He daresayed that Ivor wished he hadn’t asked to be taken captive. Our suspicions confirmed, we strangled him.”
“Your captors made no attempt to stop you?”
“With so many prisoners aboard, the boat was not big enough for a struggle, priest. And who wants to keep alive a traitor? And we knew our captors. I’ve fought alongside Richard de Chilham twice. Against him once. And you, Robert, you knew William Bardolf well?”
Robert, having been leant up on one elbow listening, rolled languidly over: “Always a step back, William Bardolf. Plans his moves.” Robert’s black curly hair was flattened to the sides of his head from being so long abed.
I studied all these men who paid no more mind to the killing of a man than a peasant to the butchering of a pig. No, not a pig; I have known peasants weepingly fond of their backyard pigs. It was as with as little thought to the stretching of an old hen’s neck.
“You all attacked Ivor?”
“Only took one,” Robert grunted at the memory
“Which one of you?”
“We are one, priest,” redface quickly said. “Do you blame the man for what the hand does?” His own hands were the same brick-red as his face.
“Were you not bound?”
“All the easier to throttle the runt. The thongs on our wrists, allied to a knee in the back, and it was done.”
“I have heard no mention of this. Where is the body?”
“Ivor went to the fishes. Half a year after his crewmates.”
“Ours to give,” William de Marisco said: “Ours to take.”
I was among murderers. Disconcerted by this realisation I looked to the squashed straws about my feet. I felt in fear of my own life, yet this very fear in myself angered me to a show of bravery. I decided, as William de Marisco had insisted, that I be honest.
I looked up from the floor to William, who had been studying my cogitations.
“You kill without thought,” I informed him.
“Not without thought, priest.”
“Friar,” I corrected him again.
Every face in that room, including that of William de Marisco, bore at least one scar. William had one that cut across the side of his face, that had nicked even his left ear.
“I am a friar,” I announced to the room in my strongest voice. “As a follower of Francis of Assissi I have taken, not only the triple vow of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, but I have sworn also to harm no living creature. Just to hear you talk of killing is hard for me. And you have only talked of this one unfortunate man so far. How many men did you kill as pirates?”
“As pirates?” William de Marisco chuckled at the name. “We were pirates? Eh Connor? Pirates, like the Turk?”
The redfaced man, now called Connor, laughed with William. Their laughter added to my anger: “You think that funny? How many men did you kill? Did they think it funny?”
“Kill?” William de Marisco grinned at me: “As pirates?”
“Yes. How many did you kill?”
“As pirates,” William de Marisco smiled around at his men, “None. The very sight of us was enough to set them running. Is that why we are to be killed, priest? For piracy?”
“You are to be tried and executed for High Treason.”
“Neither treason nor piracy are we guilty of. And for this we are all to die?”
I measured this latter assertion against his earlier, and unforced, confession to the killing of Ivor.
“I need to know your story,” I told him; and which most conveniently was the very reason that you, brother, had me sent there — to satisfy your curiosity as to why, even after his trial, a man so ostensibly guilty should so fiercely continue to declare his innocence
Folio 1 (iii)
21st July 1242: The Tower
Waiting on the silence of the man, I was leaning towards William de Marisco over the two jutting out steps. This close I was able to see grey hairs zig-zagging like mountain paths through the black-brown of his beard. William de Marisco’s silence, I was deciding, was not the expressionless silence of vapid passivity, rather it was a deliberated composure, attentive and contained.
Containing what?
I was about to formulate a question — to bring forth a response to my request for his history of this affair — when I recoiled from a snarl. Having leant backwards, it took me a moment to realise that it hadn’t been William de Marisco who had so ferociously growled. Nor any other in that room.
William de Marisco’s eyes betrayed amusement at my reaction: “The king’s spotted lions,” he enlightened me, “are caged below here. In the keep. If you get up here, and press into the opening, you can on occasion glimpse their tails as they turn.”
Remaining on the floor, I studied the embrasure beside me, went up on tiptoe to look down. I could see only the paving of the keep at the base of the far wall, not even a corner of the cage. I made no attempt, was not tempted, to climb the two steps. I was caught by the realisation that I had been hearing the lions before; and, now that I had paused to listen, I was remarking to myself how oddly quiet it was, both within and without the room, especially after the market clamour beyond the castle walls. Yet here, all that I could hear, apart from — now — the odd yawn and snarl of the beasts in the menagerie below, was the low discourse of those in the castle going about their daily tasks.
Aware that I was being watched, I turned my listening for the sounds of the castle into a study of the two embrasures: “Why are these facing into the keep?” I asked William de Marisco. “From whence no attack will come?”
“If enemy troops breach the walls, once within the keep they will have no cover. Two archers in each of these, one standing, one kneeling, could deliver a lethal rain.”
But William de Marisco, apparently, had no wish to further talk of the castle’s defences: he nodded towards the table. Our backs to the embrasures, I sat on the bench beside him, and across the table from Connor’s scarlet face.
Aware of my nervousness before Connor’s blue-eyed examination of me, I sought to defy my own fear of him, and of William de Marisco’s softly breathing presence beside me, by resurrecting the original thrust of my inquisition: “You did, though, kill men other than Ivor?” I turned my head to William de Marisco: “Other men? In other places?”
“You come in here,” Connor quietly addressed me, “without even a quill sharpener, and you persist in talking about killing. Are you brave, priest? A fool? Or are you another Ivor?”
“Another Ivor? You mean I would betray you? How can I betray you?”
“You are here to winkle testimony out of us. To justify the king’s killing of us.”
“I told you, I am a disciple of Francis of Assissi. I have taken vows to…”
“To obey Adam Marsh,” William de Marisco said. “To do his bidding.”
“We Franciscans do not owe allegiance to any earthly king.”
“The pope is not a king? This English king is not his vassal? And you and your brotherhood would gain with both by eliciting a confession from us.”
“Whatever you say to me,” I told him, “whatever any of you say here, you are all going to be killed anyway. Which puzzles us.”
“It puzzles you?”
“That you should all be killed for what is, in the measure of such affairs, a paltry offence. Albeit murder. Yet, from my understanding, you acted then as if guilty, and you all fled to Lundy. And, when tried at Westminster, you were found guilty. Yet you did not repent, and you continue to say that you will not repent. Still you declare your innocence. Which is why I have been sent here.”
“Is my father, Geoffrey, also under sentence of death?”
“Not so far as I am aware. His lands, as has become customary in disagreements with kings here, are under threat of forfeit. But not his life. Which is why I wish to know the whole of your story. What led you to such a position, that you would risk your lands and your life. All of you.”
Not one man there, by word, look or grimace, responded. Eventually William de Marisco poured water into a goblet, swished it around his mouth and, his head bent back, he swallowed. All the men, myself included, were watching him. So does this man, without seeming to strive to, impose his authority on any gathering.
“Go back to your cloister, monk,” he told me.
“I am not a monk,” I said. “I am a friar. My calling is to go out into the world and heal it.”
“There’s a couple of ours in Newgate,” Connor said, “in dire need of some healing. Or are they for a public killing too?”
“All seventeen of you.”
Two of the men lying down looked across to one another at mention of the number.
“And you came here to tell us that?” Connor asked me.
“You clergy hide,” William de Marisco held me with a fierce gaze. “Even your pope, when he’s elected, takes a different name. I don’t trust you, friar. What are you hiding? I cannot even place your accent. Where are you from?”
“Austria.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“At one time your present king considered marrying the daughter of Leopold of Austria.” I have told this to several people here, to encourage their friendship, to make me not so much a stranger. “We could be allies,” I told William de Marisco.
“At one time,” William de Marisco made a poor mimicry of my accent, “our present king negotiated marriage with a daughter of the king of Bohemia. Of Brittany too. Has ended up with a Poitevin. Our present king, friar, from a child was taught to be a frightened man, to be on the lookout for safe, for beneficial, alliances. Why are you here?”
“This is where I was sent.”
“To busy yourself with the affairs of the English court?”
“With the affairs of men. To lead them to the path of righteousness.”
Connor laughed loud and long, slapped the table: “Years too late for that.”
Trying to determine my next approach, I studied the ribbed grain in the table top where Connor’s red hand had slapped it. Not having reached a decision, I looked sideways to William de Marisco, whose thoughts also seemed to have drifted from the question and answer of our conversation.
“I want to know two things, William de Marisco,” I heard myself say, “what drove you to this point? And what made your companions go with you?”
“You will have to ask my companions that.”
“An easy one to answer, priest,” Connor said. “Most of us have known one the other since we were boys. We made oaths of fealty to one another back then. I would die for William. William would die for me. We argue, all of us here. But I would die for Robert, Simon, Aimeri and Reginald, as they would for me. And this is not a theory of living, like your church preaching, this I know from the fights we have been in together.”
“I would rather my faith in God, not in men. Like Ivor.”
“Ivor was not one of us. You, priest, you tremble when you dare contradict us. Yet you take a grip of your courage, and you stay. Ivor would have been agreeable, and fearful, and treacherous.”
“I am a friar, not a priest.”
At which utterance of mine red-faced Connor’s laughter was of true amusement; and not, as before, to preface or reinforce his argument. This change in Connor’s voice and character caused me to study him anew: “Are you all from Ireland?”
“We are from everywhere, are our own nation.”
“Where are your people buried?”
“Mine are in Gascony. I doubt, though, that’s where my remains will end up.” (‘Connor’ being obviously a familiar name, I made the assumption, based on the list you gave me, that this man was in fact William of Pont de l’Arche; and was called Connor by his companions solely to avoid confusion between himself and William de Marisco.)
The clump of William de Marisco’s goblet being returned to the table had me turn back to him: “What brought you to this place, William de Marisco?”
“Anger.”
“Anger over what?”
“Injustice heaped upon injustice.”
“Your father being accused?”
“Yes. And being jailed. And losing three of our Irish castles. But, if you truly want to know what brought me to this prison, we need to go back to before my birth.”
“To your father, Geoffrey de Marisco?”
“To before. To Hamelin, another of Geoffrey’s bastards. Because we Mariscos have come in a line of first-born sons from Hamelin of Anjou. Which is why these kings of England distrust us more than most. Though it be all in their minds, I and my father inherited their suspicion of us.”
“You are a pretender to this throne?”
“I am no king. Nor ever wanted to be. Already we had more lands than we could properly manage.”
“Where?”
“We had lands in Leinster, castles and tenements in Limerick and Clare. And, as well as Ireland, and Lundy, we have lands in Somerset and Normandy. My father even signed the King’s Charter, has been 3 times justiciar of Ireland, and has loyally served 2 kings. The de Marisco word is word enough for any man. But not, it seems, for these mother-suckled Angevins.”
“Your father was wrongfully accused?”
“He and I both.”
William de Marisco shifted along the bench and leaned in towards me. Not to speak in confidence, I believe, rather to spare his companions a tale ‘oft heard: “My father,” he said, “was not the first de Marisco to be so accused by these self-made kings.”
“Who was the first?”
“Sir Jordan. My grandfather.”
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1146703
Something’s Wrong
foreword (editor’s note)
Knowing of my concerns with matters social and psychiatric I was regarded as the editor best suited (and available?) to knock these transcriptions into some sort of shape.
While I have been assured of the tapes’ provenance no-one has been able to offer similar assurance that every tape that Robert recorded has been transcribed, or has even been handed over to be transcribed.
What I can assure readers is that on the tapes in our possession the transcriptions have been undertaken by volunteers whose skill levels varied considerably. Some of those tapes were begun by one volunteer, continued by another and finished off by a third. Which has led to quite large discrepancies in transcription, inconsistencies in punctuation and odd consequences in the casual — and only occasional — use of both US and UK spellchecks.
I am not seeking to find fault here, am grateful to all for their time and efforts. Indeed being transcriptions from the vernacular, and going by just the couple of sample tapes I have listened to, it cannot have been immediately apparent how any of the recordings should be punctuated. One consequence being that different transcribers have used various shorthand for the incomprehensible and the indecipherable on the tapes.
I have endeavoured, without knowingly altering the meaning of any transcription, to bring a degree of consistency.
Although every tape is of the same duration the transcription for each tape would appear at first glance to substantially differ in length. This is because of the many pauses during the recording, some of the pauses quite prolonged. The only way to have accurately depicted those many pauses would have been to have blank spaces on the page of equivalent duration, even at times whole blank pages.
I’ve been told that some of Harold Pinter’s original scripts have blank spaces to indicate pauses. I decided, however, that in these times of heightened ecological awareness blank pages would have been wasteful verging on the profligate.
What I have done is to employ two kinds of ellipsis from Robert’s two main types of pauses. So where Robert has paused briefly, say to gather his breath or his thoughts, I have used an ellipsis on the same line as his speech, thus — ….
But where Robert has gone off into a daydream possibly, or may have even forgotten that he was recording, or where the transcriber has written ‘background noises’ and I assume Robert to have been temporarily distracted while the tape has run on, I have used the greater spaced ellipsis on a line of their own thus —
. . . .
Where the recording has been stopped and restarted, the tape possibly having been rewound, a previous utterance possibly taped over, I have indicated that thus — <pause-click>
Only where the transcriber has been unable to make out what Robert has said, or the tape has possibly suffered some damage, have I signified this in conventional fashion thus — [?]
In this country, famed abroad for its ridiculously punitive libel laws, it has been I, as named editor/author, who has insisted on the names of the people and the places being changed. To protect the guilty?
S. S.
concise notes on transcription:
[?] on its own will signify an indecipherable word or expression omitted
[?] directly after a word indicates an uncertain interpretation
<pause-click> indicates where the tape has been stopped, possibly rewound, possibly wiped, and the click where the recording has been continued.
an ellipsis preceding a word, thus ….word, indicates a brief pause/silence on the tape prior to the dictation continuing
an ellipsis following a word, thus word…., indicates a tailing off of the speech.
an ellipsis on a line of its own, thus . . . . , signifies a long section of tape with only background noises, no voice.
“His memory played hide and seek with him.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Something’s Wrong: Part One
One
tape 1. side 1.
Something’s wrong.
<pause-click>
I had to stop there. Just saying that out loud. No, just thinking it aloud. Yes, just thinking it is highly dangerous. Dangerous for me.
<pause-click>
I stopped again. Stopped talking that is. Let the tape run on, had to rewind.
I expect I’ll get used to it, learn to work with it. Because this is a tool. A tool. Like a saw, a hammer, a chisel. A spanner. Is a tool. Is the reason I got this machine and all these tapes.
<pause-click>
Usually I have no trouble talking. Get going and can’t stop. Don’t want to stop. The words all tumbling out. Coming from the air above my thatch and out through my mouth. Don’t know what I’m going to say next. And there it is. What I’ve said. Makes me laugh mostly. With surprise.
Doesn’t amuse others. Usually they get up and walk away. Have seen them roll their eyes. So I turn to the person the other side of me. Got to be seen to be talking to someone. Or else.
Now I’ve got this machine.
<pause-click>
You see I can talk till the quiet cows come plodding home. If they ever do. And the vocabulary is certainly all there. I am, after all, the product of a very expensive private education. So…. talking about myself is fine. It’s what I’ve been used to doing. My difficulty now, a considerable difficulty, is in remembering. And remembering in a sensible order. Which is why I have acquired this machine. My short term memory is shot.
<pause-click>
To say what I’ve just said, to explain what had gone before, I replayed the whole tape to listen to exactly what I’d gone on about. Because going on is what I usually do. “You do go on.” Oh yes, I do. Go on.
<pause-click>
But I got this machine because something’s wrong.
Wrong with me?
Wrong with where I am?
Wrong with the people here?
If it’s me, and it could well be me, then I have to be careful. Could be the beginning of another episode.
Though it certainly doesn’t feel like that.
….Strange to mention my episodes, without the subject being immediately changed. Or a sudden interest being taken in what I am saying. But the subject getting quickly changed by me or they either way.
<pause-click>
No, it doesn’t feel like the beginning of an episode. It’s more something without a name.
Maybe it’s just the strangeness of this place — having a belated impact?
Strange to me. Normal, maybe, to others. But I haven’t been in a place like this before. Haven’t had a room to myself before. Although the room isn’t quite ‘to myself’. I can’t lock myself in here. Can’t come and go quite as I please. But I do have streets I can walk down. Shops I can go in….
<pause-click>
Wish I could hold my thoughts together. All together at once. Examine them as a whole piece. Draw arrows, little circles around this thought, around that one, join them up, make patterns, see how they all fit together. But that…. that idea is already slipping away from me, another treading on its toes, pushing it in the back….
If I could write. maybe on a page it would all make some kind of reassuring sense. This word connected to that word, following this word, leading to that word. But the thoughts, the ideas, won’t come down my arm to my pen. A few get as far as my elbow, and I look at the pen between my thumb and my fingers and I think it hasn’t moved. So I think to tell it something else to write, and this time it gets no further than my shoulder. Then I forget to look at the pen, forget even that I’m supposed to be writing.
<pause-click>
It won’t bother them to hear me talking in my room. Not the only one here does it. Funny thing is — and at this point I hear myself whisper, don’t want any listeners to know — funny thing is that whenever I play the tape back I listen to it through earphones. Very small earphones. Like the children here wear.
I didn’t know what they were at first. Thought they were some new kind of plastic jewellery. Worn dangling from both ears Same with the silver phones the taxi drivers down the hill wear clipped to their ears. I initially thought they were some new kind of vulgar jewellery too. Crass self-decoration, like their tattoos and their huge signet rings….
And the taxi drivers, standing beside their cars, to all appearances loudly talking to themselves in public. All so very different….
<pause-click>
No, something’s wrong. But maybe it’s because it simply is all so new. I’m just not used to it. But new’s new. And the new is curious. And the new is interesting first time I come across it. And it doesn’t worry me.
So what does worry me? I don’t know what it is that’s worrying me. And that’s what’s worrying me. All I know is that something’s wrong.
<pause-click>
I was becoming agitated there. Let the tape run on. I had to remind myself that I’m doing this to stop myself becoming agitated. Something is wrong. This machine is a tool. Doing this is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. No sirree.
And as long as I’m heard just mumbling away in here no-one will bother. They’ll just whisper together outside the door and walk away. No, they don’t whisper. They lower their voices. One low voice answered by another low voice. Low voice question. Low voice answer. When they agree they walk on. And when they get to the stairs, past everyone’s door, their voices come back to normal and they start to talk of themselves. They prefer to talk about themselves. And if we’re clever we remember to ask about themselves. Ask about their children. Ask about their new car. “New to me. Ha ha.” Ask about their holiday. And they tell us. About their car, about their children, about their holiday. As if we’re truly interested. As if we have no life of our own. As if we have to live their lives….
<pause-click>
Getting excited again. But not agitated. Just running away with an idea. And they’re all in here. Inside this head. All the ideas. Just a matter of bringing them together. Then I’ll know.
But mustn’t get agitated. Mustn’t sound agitated. Which is why I daren’t say to any of them that I think something’s wrong. They’ll be bound to take it the wrong way. As a symptom. And I’m sure, this time, that it is not a symptom.
If I’m to solve this I mustn’t get myself put back on the injections. Even on some of the new dark blue tablets. Can’t have one thought on its own then, let alone hold a whole lot together. Be Robert as robot again. Told to get up. Told to go to breakfast. No, told to wash. Told to dry myself. Told to get dressed. Asked what I’m wearing. They choose. Lay it out on the bed. Maybe they made the bed while I washed. The bed smooth. Not rumpled where I got out of it. Told to comb my hair.
My hair.
My hair is yellow. Very thick and very yellow. Bald nurses have envied me my hair. “Something wrong with this world when you’re stuck in here with that thatch and I’m out there, with my gleaming dome, trying to impress and pull nubile young ladies.” Laughing themselves at what they’ve just said.
As if I don’t deserve my hair. Wherever I’ve been. Whatever I’ve done.
One nurse, a girl, liked to comb my hair. She used to comb it into different styles, different shapes. Gave me different partings. Made my scalp sore. Which was why, dumb as I was that time, I knocked the comb out of her hand. Frightened her. Which was why I was put back on injections….
Or did they just increase the dose that time?
They were right. I can see the shock on her face. I don’t deserve my hair.
<pause-click>
Here the nurses are called ‘carers’. None of them have combed my hair, yet. One — he’s left now — did take me down to the barbers. So the barber would know where I was from? But that realisation didn’t come until after. Medication makes me slow like that. Like this.
The barber is actually a very nice man. He knows the town’s history. And the town was always better back in those days, he says. He doesn’t like today. Even if it’s tomorrow when he says it. He doesn’t like things today. Doesn’t like the way things are today. And when he says he doesn’t like something, of whatever it is he doesn’t like, he says, “No offence.” No offence just in case whoever hair he’s cutting is a part of the something he doesn’t like. “No offence.” Or if they’re sat behind him awaiting their turn in the chair — he talks to them in the mirror — “No offence.” Or if any of their family are somehow involved in what he doesn’t like and he doesn’t know if they’re anything to do with it. “No offence.”
No offence if you too drive like a maniac. No offence if you too like this rubbish rap music. “Call it music?” No offence if you like a drink. We all like a drink — no offence — but.
No offence if you’re divorced. No offence if you’re a regular churchgoer. No offence….
Two
tape 1. side 2.
When I talked about my hair I meant to say also that the barber is bald. He shaves his head so that it doesn’t show. But you can see where the bristles end and the brown shiny patch begins.
Sitting there, in his chair, while he snips and talks, “No offence,” one gets plenty of time to study his head. In the big mirror that is. And I suppose he’s right to shave his head. A barber suffering premature hair loss can hardly be a recommendation to potential customers.
No, that can’t matter. Whether he has his own hair or not. One would still trust a sick doctor to give one the correct pills for one’s own illness. Although, having said that, there’s many a few I’ve shared wards with would dispute that assertion.
<pause-click>
Back to the barbershop. And I love the smell in there. Shampoo and shaving soap. And the cold shiny floor, hair sweepings….
His is altogether an interesting shop. He goes to great pains to make it interesting. In his window he sometimes has displays of ancient cut-throat razors. Or there’s a white bust portioned into differently named parts. He told me once (or was he telling someone else? Yes, it was someone else. Not the kind of subject he’d broach with me. Probably forgot I was sat waiting with the others.) Yes, he told how barbers used to do bloodletting, how they used mostly leeches.
“No offence,” he said — that’s right — when he did see me. Maybe he assumed, given where I come from, I was a self-harmer. And I never wear short-sleeve shirts. Or tee-shirts. I prefer the secure feel of a collar about the back of my neck. A done-up shirt collar that is, buttoned at the throat. Not that I ever wear a tie. Got out of that habit in Secure. Don’t let you have ties in Secure. Or belts. In one they gave us all brown velcro slippers.
<pause-click>
I didn’t mean to talk about the barber. I can’t think he’s important. Standing in his doorway like he does. Watching the street.
Maybe he is important. Maybe because he sees everything. Knows so much. But knows what?
That’s it. In his window sometimes — when it doesn’t have flags and old war helmets — he has a glass bust. A model of a man’s head. One can see into and through the skull. I’ve crouched down to look into it. Could read the old tobacco tin, ‘Nosegay’, on its side behind it.
And that’s what I want to do, have to do — to see into my head. As if it too is made of blue glass. Blue glass with a yellow thatch. There’s a thought.
<pause-click>
Something’s wrong. And what I need to see is what’s wrong. And it could be with me. Always has been. Well, not always. Was a time, when I was but a cub, when it was all outside me and all I had to do was work out what was what.
Although I didn’t, as a child, think that I was working things out. I did mostly as I was told, did what I thought was expected of me. It didn’t have to be worked out. Thought on. Not like this.
Something’s wrong.
Something’s gone wrong.
<pause-click>
What’s wrong now is that this isn’t working. To listen to what I was saying beforehand I’ve got to take this tape out of the machine, turn it over, rewind it, listen to what I was saying, skip some bits, find what I was saying that I think could have some bearing, then take the tape out, turn it over, rewind it, then fast forward to where I was before. By which time I’ve forgotten what it was I was going to say.
What’s wrong, I know this, is my short term memory. How could I have forgotten? Ha Ha!
….The object, the singular object of this exercise, is to have in front of me all that I remember so that I can work out what is wrong. If anything is wrong.
No, something is definitely wrong. And I won’t need all, every single thing, that I can remember. Just that which might be relevant. Except that…. I won’t know what is relevant until I have worked out what is wrong.
<pause-click>
These are to be my spoken jottings. And I have to speak them. If I have a pen in my hand I’ll get halfway through a sentence and start doodling. Then I’ll realise, an hour, maybe two later, that I’ve doodled all over the page. I might then spend the rest of the day trying to divine what those doodles could possibly mean.
Once I start talking though…. Well I just go on and on. Until I run out of thought….
<pause-click>
I think what I’m going to have to do is get myself another machine. Then I can listen to one tape while talking into another. Do a commentary on what I’ve already said. That way I can hold at least two things together.
Possibly.
Each tape is 45 minutes long. On each side that is. But I know that I won’t be talking non-stop for the whole 45 minutes. Already, sometimes, I pause. Then I forget to start talking again. So I rewind to where I thought I was when I paused. But, because there are more than a few pauses, I can’t be sure when I finished pausing. Nor do I want to tape over something that prove to be crucial.
Why am I telling myself this?
<pause-click>
Because it might get complicated. Physically I’ll have to swap the earphone jack from machine to machine in order to listen to what I’ve just said — on the tape I will have been talking into on the new machine. And I will have to remember to turn off the tape on the other machine.
I’ll go down and buy that tomorrow. Too late today….
Yes, tomorrow. In my yellow and green trousers. I’ve got them on this day. And I’ll wear them again tomorrow. Green on the front and yellow down the backs of the legs. They’re a bit long even for me, rumple around the ankles. But I like to go striding in them. Yellow before green. Green before yellow. Yellow before green.
If it was winter now I’d wear my long black coat with these trousers. The black coat with a split up the back. Then the yellow flashes out the black split as my leg goes back.
My black coat is seen to best advantage worn unbuttoned. Even on the coldest of winter days. Have it flapping out like a cape behind me.
Couldn’t get much of a forward motion in the grounds. But here…. It being a warm spring, now summer, I haven’t worn it yet. Inappropriate, they’d call my wearing it now. And — Whoa! Look out! “A change in your medication regime, Robert. Just to keep you level.”
Level!? Levelled out more like.
<pause-click>
I haven’t listened back. Just caught myself there.
I’m going to have to be careful with this — not to excite myself. Not if I’m going to find out what I think is wrong.
Think is wrong?
Think?
I think it? Not feel it?
No, I think it. This is not unfounded suspicion. Not paranoia. Somewhere in this walnut-noodle of mine is the thought I’ve got to dig out. Something important has slipped by me. Something seen? Something heard? Something only part-registered….
Think!
<pause-click>
It is here. It is here where something is wrong. I didn’t have this idea before I came here.
Here?
What is here? Where is here? Here.
Here we are at the top of a steep hill. And when I say We I mean this house. And when I say Top, well we’re not at the top precisely.
Well, yes we are. We are at the top of the steep street that comes straight up from the main street. That is the hill, park, carpark and rooftops that this window looks down over. In that order. That is the hill I usually walk down to go to the shops. And that street is over to the side of the carpark, past the recycling skips.
And that will be the street that I will first walk down with my black coat flying out behind me. In the winter.
. . . .
There is another hill. Not so steep. But longer. It comes up past the back of the house and goes on up and out of town. I rarely use that hill….
Tomorrow, when I go down the steep street, I will wear my green and yellow trousers and my baggy blue sailor’s smock. I say Blue, the smock has however faded across the top of the shoulders. And I say Sailors, but real sailors I have discovered don’t wear sailor smocks anymore. Just go down the harbour now and cast an eye over the sailors on their boats. If they happen to be wearing anything that even closely resembles a sailor’s smock it will be but a cold synthetic waterproof. Not that the sailor wearing the waterproof will be cold. Many wear fleeces under their waterproofs. And when I say Cold it is the waterproof material that looks cold….
I have taken myself down to the harbour here, I try to go on weekdays, when there are fewer holidaymakers. The trippers walk ever so slowly where the holiday shops are, the ice cream and the burger shops. And the cheapo shops. That sell everything. But which is not where I’m going to get the new recorder from. I’m going to get that from the card and paper shop. Where I got this one. The stationery and artists’ materials shop. It’s in the main street. On the opposite side to the barber’s.
In the main street I can get a good stride going. Especially on the barber’s side. Not so many shoppers walking slow on that side.
<pause-click>
It’s the racks of postcards outside the harbour shops that make the trippers walk slow. Impossible to get a decent rhythm going there. Got to stop and edge around those looking at the postcards, or queuing for ice cream. Or for chips. And it’s by no means easy getting past them. The pavement’s not wide, and the road’s narrow, and there’s a carpark at the end of the harbour. So, what with cars being parked in the road as well — on double yellow lines, no offence, park anywhere they like these days, see a traffic warden once in a blue moon, no offence. Once in a blue skull. No offence.
<pause-click>
No way can I get a good rhythm along by the harbour. Although there is a good march up the spiral road at the end. Up around to the lighthouse chapel on its little hill. One way up, another way down. Vary, choose, according to wind direction.
Been inside the chapel once or twice. Upstairs, duck your head, look up to see the light above its little white gate. A small room there with a crib. Downstairs is an altar with dry flowers. But no church people. Just someone who wants to tell you who lived there. Yes, yes, I say, as if I too am a visitor to the town. Yes, yes, I say, and I bend forward, hands behind my back like a professor. Like my father. Like the Duke of Edinburgh on a factory visit. Yes, yes, most interesting. A laundry, you say. How many children? Goodness. And no water up here…?
The Duke of Edinburgh, though, nowhere near as tall as my father.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1144784
The Care Vortex
The Care Vortex
Chapter One
Where The Principal Protagonist Is Introduced
Not yet. Not till the next turning.
Along this road he can yet kid himself that he isn’t bound for work. Work thoughts are therefore not permitted inside his morning mind.
As agreed, he is late. Kate had to be dropped off at gym. Helen will collect her. If Sue could drive there’d be no need for Her to self-importantly collect Kate, and then stay on all day saying How Good She Is To Us. If She hadn’t been that good to Sue then maybe Sue would have learned to drive. Barry feels a linear kinship with Sue’s ex-husband in their loathing of Sue’s mother. (Ergo: circumstances create emotion.)
Leisurely late. Legitimately late. Diane will give him a handover. He can take his time. Negative work thoughts.
He could – unlikely, but he could – along this road, be bound elsewhere. This road of itself doesn’t end in work. Along this road he can take his time – time to look beyond the line of weeping willows to the water meadow, pretend an interest in the nesting swans, ape pleasure in a glimpse of their snowy sinewy necks. In this, his own car, he can pretend to be listening to his own jazz tape … before his day is irrevocably overtaken by pop.
Not yet.
On this road he can yet give in to the temptation to drive on, take an arbitrary right, left; and go on until he comes to some hills … To wander there the daylong under the sky … And should a child be murdered in those hills, how to explain his being there? On impulse he took a right, then a left…
Past the corrugated barn, past the overgrown garage of asbestos panels. Next, on the bend, is the low stone wall around the white cottage, perspex conservatory, garden of delphiniums and hollyhocks. A life separate from his.
He signals, slows and turns.
Now he is on the road into the village. Now he is driving between dense hedges of clipped hawthorn, a blinkered track into a trap. Only one feasible direction now. Onward to Bridge.
The name acknowledged, his heart rate increases. Here the first house of the village with its meadow prospect and over-trimmed lawn, illegally watered at night by sprinkler via electric pump – another public-minded citizen.
Other houses properly rustic, wooden tubs with plants. Anywhere houses, neat and tidy. Slow for the bend by the shop. Telephone box. Last shift, Crystal phoning from there demanding to be collected and, being refused, walking through the village shouting. Followed by the egg battle. Handover jokes – yolk was on him, girls eggstatic, eggciting shift… another work shift without cause or consequence – eggsistantial. A shift now two days old and overlaid (overlaid!), ancient history.
A whole new world awaits him. What plans are afoot for this Saturday night? The very thought has tiredness threading itself through his teeth.
Into the narrow bit by the stream, iron railings through concrete posts.
Now the farm entrance with its shit and straw and the long grey wall of the barn. Brake, signal left, and park. Two cars and the minibus. Only Diane’s here. Good.
Collect his stuff from around the inside of the car. Delay.
He tells himself that he’ll listen to the end of this Ian Carr number.
The bridge across the ditched stream is a wooden suspension bridge. At either end are tall, twin uprights. Bolted timbers descend and ascend in green-brown wood to the two pillars on the far side. Barry expects, always, to find it burnt down on his arrival. No more job.
But the bridge is intact. No reprieve today. No pardon. No escape.
He pushes open the car door.
site: Bridge House
c.v.: Barry Geoffrey Gresham
previous surname(s): –
age: 38
ethnic origin: British
siblings: 2 brothers, both older
marital status : twice married, second current
children (sex & ages) : boy(8) girl(10)
driving license: yes, 1 endorsement current
passport holder: yes
police check: yes
o-levels/GCSE(No.): 5
a-levels: –
degree : –
previous places of employment (in descending order, most recent first, no. of years in each, position held.)
The Firs. Leics. RH for EBD boys, 12-18. RSW. 3 yrs.
The Place. Walsall. Independence Training Unit. 16+ Both sexes. RSW. 4 yrs.
Four Ways. Herts. Therapy Unit. Both sexes. RSW. 4 yrs.
Culeway School. Peterb’gh. Mentally & physically h’cap. 12-18. Care Worker. 5 yrs.
Pharmacon. Peterb’gh. Pill factory. Quality Control. 2 yrs.
Mrs Barton’s Kitchen. Peterb’gh. Quality Control. 3 yrs.
Mills & Baker. Peterb’gh. Wine Merchant. Driver. 1 yr.
present position: Senior Care Worker
time with RETURN: 3 yrs
comments: Experienced. Steady. Unambitious.
Enjoys outdoor pursuits – mountain walking, etc.
Chapter Two
The Place – A Presumed History
(Taken from ‘A Place In The Country’ by Rosie Bronnura. Blair & Dickinson)
Nearby we have Bridge House, which was built in 1861. This was the creation of Gilbert Fonteynu Dewson, the entrepreneur and notorious gambler who, in his late fifties, became besotted by a young sculptress named Elisabeth May Straker. Funded by Dewson, led by Straker, ‘Bridge House’ was first called the ‘Isis Commune’.
The only two statues by Elisabeth May Straker extant are two busts, almost identical, in the local museum. What, however, Elisabeth May Straker may have lacked in artistic ability, she certainly made up for in organisational drive. Unable to find any suitable properties ready built she prevailed upon Gilbert Dewson to commission a house to her design. He, through some other deals, already owned the land at White Farm. Thus did the foundations for Isis House come to be laid.
Once built, the most outstanding feature of the house, its basic ‘H’ shape aside, was the pair of North-West facing walls which are both made, from ground to guttering, of glass bricks. In Isis days, of course, behind these glass walls were four artist studios. The remainder of the house comprised then the working and living quarters of artists, save for the ground floor of the West wing, which was given over to a salon/gallery. Here exhibitions were held; and any musicians resident in Isis were prevailed upon to perform. Two low barrack-like living quarters were later erected to the right of the building to house other artists.
The wooden bridge came to be built in 1868. Bad blood already existed between the then owners of White Farm and Dewson over the initial dubious land deal. This was exacerbated by the ‘unnatural dress and demeanour’ of the Isis Commune. The only track to Isis House led through White Farm. This track the farmer frequently blocked with carts of hay, once even with a bull ‘given overmuch to snorting’. Dewson responded not with litigation, nor by selling up, but by building a bridge over the small stream between the house and the lane. By-laws then forbade him making the bridge wide enough for a carriage. Those by-laws said nothing about height.
Although locals are wont to claim that Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed this footbridge, the evidence is, to say the least, slim. For a start Brunel had already been dead 9 years, had been dead 2 years when the house was built. Thus, despite what all previous guide books may claim, even Brunel’s visionary genius cannot have foreseen the need for a bridge to a nonexistent house. What is beyond question is that Dewson was a shareholder in Brunel’s engineering firm, but not a major shareholder. The most probable explanation for the over-the-top construction is that Dewson himself designed it in emulation of the great man.
Gilbert Fonteynu Dewson died, officially bankrupt, in 1874. Elisabeth May Straker had wisely, however, previously prevailed upon Dewson to generously underwrite the Straker Foundation, which became The Straker Trust after her own death in 1923. Without her drive, though, The Trust could only struggle on, home to a few mediocre talents. Indeed, during this period, the house became better known for its garden produce than for its artistic endeavours.
The Trust sank without trace during the Second World War, when Bridge House, as it had already become known locally, was used for the duration as a convalescent hospital for wounded airmen. After the war the house entered private ownership, first as a horticultural enterprise, then as a stables, and, lastly, as a private school.
One can easily see the bridge and the house from the village road. But closer inspection, which is required to view the North-West facing glass walls, requires advance notice and permission from the current owners. Should you manage to gain access, note the bas-relief of Isis, wings outspread, above the main entrance door, which is set back between the two glass walls …
Chapter Three
Introducing The First Of The Girls
Barry leans backwards as he walks. Compensatory fat man posture. When he gets out of the bath these days he can slap his hands on the sides of his stomach. It doesn’t hurt. He does it to test it … all his flesh feels remote from him, padded out by deadening layers of fat. His personality is the bouncy smaller man he once was, not this ponderous roly-poly.
The bridge gate is a small picket with a pull-back latch. He has to rest his underbelly on the gate’s spikes to open it. Curtains of all the bedrooms are drawn. No broken windows.
Everything he is doing makes significant noise, draws attention to himself – tinkle of the latch, his tread on the boards. This is the smell he associates with work. Dry creosoted timber and weedy damp rising off the sluggish stream.
Una is crouched among a clump of irises on the bank. She, of course, would be up.
Her bent spine knuckles out the white t-shirt. Crudely cut and crudely red-dyed hair flops down about her face.
“Hi Una!” he calls.
Her white face rotates towards him. She looks at him with eyes of stone.
“Nice morning,” Barry says, neutral, not too loud to wake the others. He passes above her. She turns slowly back to the irises.
What’s she got hidden there? Aerosols? Booze for the others? Whatever it is, it’ll be moved now that he’s seen her.
Inside his trouser pocket he exchanges his car key bunch for the office bunch.
Behind the flat iris stems, beyond the white fleshy underparts of other streamside plants, something darkly moves.
“Hi Una!”
All goes still, waiting. The voice has stilled even the shadows.
Reluctantly, and with effort, Una makes herself look around.
Fat Barry is crossing the bridge, a double echo in each of his steps. Drum drum. Drum drum. He says something else. Then Drum drum. Drum drum.
The light is behind him. The light is therefore behind her. She looks back into the iris thicket.
Deep in the thicket, between the green sword blades and the rounded stems, something has darkly moved.
profile : Una Davenport
age: 13
mother: Cynthia Green
father: Roger Davenport
siblings: Brothers(11)(9) Stepsister(15)
ethnic origin: Anglo/Italian
history: Una phys. abused by her natural father, Roger Davenport, from birth until age 8. Mother & brothers also beaten by him. Mother put herself and children in refuge. Roger Davenport shot himself. When Una 10, m. remarried – Stephen Green, a divorcee with custody of his daughter, Helen. 1 yr after marriage Helen disclosed sexual abuse by her father. Una too had been sexually abused by Stephen Green. Mother, Cynthia Green, committed suicide, overdose. Una was reported for truancy prior to mother’s marriage to Stephen Green. Also twice cautioned for shoplifting. Taken into care after mother’s suicide. In foster home repeatedly cut arms & face, took od. Paracetamol, absconded x 2, was found 2nd time living in flat of Adam Trison. Pornographic photographs and video of Una found. Una is also known to sniff. Moved out-of-county after suspected arson at last children’s home.
considerations: Una sees herself as victim. (Was bullied by 2 younger brothers.) Early treatment by father consolidated role. Self-esteem low, little insight. Blames herself for mother’s death and for brothers being in Care. She doesn’t seek contact with them. Maternal g’parents are in Italy – don’t want contact. Helen, in a stable foster placement, tries to keep in touch. Una doesn’t respond. Has difficulty forming or sustaining relationships.
cautions: Loner, sniffer, cutter; arson, suicide risk. No contact with Stephen Green or Adam Trison. (Court cases against Stephen Green and Adam Trison pending.)
Chapter Four
APhilosophy. And An Introduction to Another Member Of Staff
Prospectus.
At Bridge House we hold to the belief that there is no such thing as independence. Our total philosophy is based on the notion of interdependence. We, every last one of us, need each other. So, here at Bridge House, we don’t depend solely on the plush therapeutic surroundings, nor solely on our committed Care and Education teams. Here we have both hardware and dedicated software.
All parts equal the whole; and it is whole individuals that we at Bridge House seek to create. If, for instance, a child in our care is not doing well at school, we will look at the whole of that child’s life to understand why; and, if it is within our power, we will correct any deficit, endeavour to make that child whole.
To pursue this notion of interdependence, all girls at Bridge House share a bedroom with one other girl. All girls also share a keyworker with one other girl. Likewise they share the chores around the house. The prime task of all the adults working with the girls in our care is to impress upon them the effect of their actions (or inactions) upon others, and their responsibility to others.
Here, we offer discipline only to redress any imbalance created by a possible previous lack of discipline. (The adults in their life, for instance, who may have been too soft and left the child confused by an absence of rules).
Mostly we offer care – in its real sense – to cherish those children who have known a past too tough, or one that damaged them, or one that simply neglected their existence.
Our aim is to bring consistency to their view of life. That does not mean that here we produce subdued children, nor even children in our own image. Our goal, our ideal, is to teach our children to differentiate between passion and obsession; to cultivate character, not mediocrity; to encourage differences and not quash them; to boost pride and erase self-negation; to produce real people and not timid candidates for suburbia.
In that vein we, at Bridge House, do not expect our Education Team to solely compensate for any child’s lack of education. Our aim is to fulfil every child’s potential. Whatever it takes. Whatever the child’s needs. Whatever the child’s abilities.
In children whose existence so far has seemed aimed at destroying their idea of themselves, the first step to seeing themselves as a respected unity may be in the caring for another, in helping another. Part of our software includes pets of all descriptions. By giving, they receive, by accepting they give. It is this concept of mutually beneficent interchange that we strive to create, and from it, growing within the child, a respect for herself as a separate entity, a worthwhile entity. And from that notion of independence the child will, we hope, see how she fits into the scheme of things and how she can affect her own life and the life of others. Interdependence, independence, responsibility – that is our code.
Given that all our girls are passing through their adolescence, complicated by their being in Care, we regard Bridge House as a real ‘bridge’ between their fractured pasts and their uncertain futures – a solid structure offering a safe passage. Nor do we think it inappropriate that over the entrance to Bridge House is a relief of Isis, the Egyptian Goddess, the Earth Mother … that here, She should be the first to reach out to those girls placed in her charge…’
“Total bullshit.” Diane has a voice like breath coming through an alto sax. Barry has seen men lean listening (yearning?) towards her.
Barry, who works with her, does not so lean. Although he feels that he ought to be attracted to her (affairs are common among Care staff), not only can’t he be bothered – any spare libido having got lost under his fat – Diane is simply not his type. Hers is an indoors, a manufactured, attractiveness. Her mascara is thick and black, her blonde hair plaited into a rope. Today she has on a loose red striped top over tight black leggings, is all blonde hair, bust and big legs.
They are in the office, which is where the on-duty staff spend most of their twenty-four-hour shift.
Next to the dining room, the office is the partitioned end of the West wing. Across the one wall of glass bricks is a brass pole with flowery curtains. Suspended from the ceiling, over the upper half of the wall, are more curtains of the same material. These have been drawn back. The lower are closed out of habit to stop girls looking in to see who is in the office.
In the corner opposite the door is an overgrown yucca palm. Bridge legend has it that male staff have conspired to kill this limp palm by concerted neglect. Female staff have been caught surreptitiously watering it.
Diane, sat on the day bed, along the partition wall, has been giving Barry a condensed version of the handover she received an hour earlier.
“God’s gift to damaged children,” Diane dislikes her shift predecessor. “Dumpy little cow.”
“Has her good points.” Barry is in the swivel chair behind the desk. “Takes all types.” Stock responses. Barry believes that Diane is going through the menopause, would account for her easy irascibility.
“She’s not even Pam’s keyworker.” Diane is Pam’s keyworker. “How dare she take it on herself to offer deals? Which I’ve now got to go along with! Oh…” She pulls the pillow off the bed and throws it on the floor.
Chapter Five
The Conditions
‘Every Day A Drama. Every Night A Headache.’ (Arnum’s Anatomy Of Social Work. K. Arnum. Lewis & Co.)
No-one else in Bridge House, apart from Una and Chloe, are up. Diane was letting them all lie in until Barry arrived. She picks the pillow off the floor.
“Where’s Madge?” Barry asks.
“On the run still.”
“No news?”
“Nothing.”
Somewhere upstairs music blares into existence, is bellowed down.
“Chloe,” Diane says. “She wants you to take her to the shop. She’s been waiting.”
“Could’ve walked,” Barry smiles. Diane grunts.
“Gemma, apparently, wants to phone. I’d better give ’em all a call. Or they won’t,” she opens the office door, “sleep tonight.”
‘1st Condition: You are to blame for everything.
2nd Condition: There are no excuses.
Rule 1: Blow your own trumpet as loudly and as often as you can.
Rule 2: Every success was planned/predicted by you.
Rule 3: Every setback is part of a greater plan whose fulfilment is imminent.
26th Condition: All knowledge is incomplete. No-one ever knows everything. Especially you.
Rule 28 : If only you had been there. (Embellish).
42nd Condition: Modesty, within the vocabulary of any SW, is strictly forbidden.
Rule 46 : To appear professional (while blowing own trumpet) always talk about oneself in 3rd person …
i.e. “So she said to the social worker, ‘Hilary, you know you love me…’
To which Hilary promptly replied, ‘Maybe Hilary does…’” etc.’ (RSWs Alternative Handbook. G. U. Upping. Hallams Press)
site: Bridge House
c.v.: Diane Jane Francome
previous surname(s): Wallis
age: 42
ethnic origins: British
siblings: –
marital status: divorced
children (sex & ages): daughter(22)
driving licence: yes
passport holder: yes
police check: yes
o-levels/GCSE(No.): 4
a-levels(No.): –
degree: –
previous places of employment (in descending order, most recent first, no of years in each, position held.)
Youth worker (p’time), Offstreet, Loughb’gh. 8 yrs
Playgroup Leader (p’time), Long Eaton. 13 yrs
Trainee Librarian. Haywards Heath. 2 yrs.
present position: Care Worker
time with RETURN: 2 yrs
comments: Keen seamstress, knitter etc.
Chapter Six
Hitting The Deck Running – Another Of The Girls
‘Anyone who wants to work with maladjusted children has to have been themselves on the outside of society looking in. The partially sighted leading the blind?’ (Arnum’s Anatomy Of Social Work. K Arnum. Lewis & Co.)
Barry, Fran and Chloe are in the hall just outside the office door.
“So how come she gets it?” Fran is tall, has spiky black hair, is staring down at the pocket-shined keys in Barry’s hand. “Feed her fat fucking face.” She turns to Chloe. “Fuckface.”
“Language.”
His hand in her back, Barry pushes Chloe past Fran towards the hall door. Fat Chloe is frightened of Fran, flinches past her.
“Fat pig,” Fran says, heads for the stairs. “Two fat pigs together.”
Chloe looks into the red tapestry purse held in both her hands. Going through the door, Barry says: “Enough in there to feed both our appetites?”
“Cow.” Behind her fat and her fear Chloe is clever, doesn’t need explanations.
On the path outside she falls in behind him.
In his mind’s eye Barry sees the two of them crossing the bridge behind their stomachs. Una has moved further along the bank to a half-collapsed willow, has draped herself over a low bough.
Barry gets into the firm’s car, opens the passenger door from inside. On the floor are crisp packets and squashed soft drink cans. Chloe gets in, sits looking across at the house. All the upstairs curtains are still closed.
“Seat belt,” Barry tells her, reaches down between his legs to push his seat back, then does up his seat belt, their heads together.
“She’s always playing fucking power games.” Chloe is staring straight ahead again. “Always getting ready to blame other people for the stuff she’s about to nick.”
“Know why you two don’t get on?” Barry reverses the car, puts it into first, starts back along the village road.
“Why?” Chloe is forced to ask.
“Because you’re both clever. Only you’ve got one advantage over her. And she don’t like that.”
Barry waits again on her curiosity. She holds out till the phone box and the shop are in sight.
“What’s that?”
“You’re two years younger than her.”
“And don’t she let me know it.”
“But already you’re her equal. You can see through her. She’s running scared.”
“That why she’s always picking on me? Fuck off, Barry.”
“Best form of defence is attack. You should take the initiative some time.”
Chloe bends over her stomach and her purse to get out of the car. Barry waits in the car, watches her – classic fat girl walk, thick thighs sliding past one another, fat girl’s low wobbly heels being slid along the ground, the shoes turning her ankles in, which emphasises her gait and thus her fatness.
profile: Chloe Alice Packenham
age: 13
mother: Carole Blaire
father: John Malcolm Packenham
siblings: stepsisters(11)(9) stepbrother(14)
ethnic origins: British
history: Chloe has never lived with her father – parents separated prior to birth, mother already then cohabiting with Chloe’s eldest stepsister’s father. Chloe lived with mother and various stepfathers until age 8, when mother admitted to psychiatric care as alcoholic. Prior to this, when drunk, mother attacked children. Chloe made herself protector of younger sisters, often took brunt of attacks upon herself (see iron burn on left shoulder). She sees herself as mother of whole family (apart from stepbrother who has been in stable foster care since age 9 and doesn’t keep in touch). Mother too sees Chloe as strongest in family. Chloe frequently looking after her when drunk, also taking money from her when drunk to buy food for younger children, etc.. Suspicion that Chloe also sold ‘sexual favours’ to mother’s partners for food money. Admitted to care age 9. First foster placement broke down when Chloe refused to do as foster mother said. Absconded with 2 sisters. Returned to natural mother’s care on her discharge from hospital. Mother relapsed once home, covered by Chloe, who even managed to get both sisters to school every day. Mother readmitted when Chloe 11. All 3 sisters again placed in foster care. Placement quickly broke down, all 3 again absconding. Mother discharged herself. Had to be readmitted within 2 months. 3 sisters put into different placements. Chloe absconded x 4. At risk, was put in secure. Placed out-of-county.
considerations: Chloe has a strong sense of family, has agreed to her placement at Bridge only so long as she is allowed regular contact with her 2 sisters and mother. Foster parents of sisters find visits hard, say Chloe is ‘disruptive’ and ‘anti-authority’. Mother also finds Chloe’s visits traumatic. (Day visits only – mother can stay sober only that long.) Chloe has insights into family dynamic, but has unrealistic ambitions for it (e.g. when 16 she is going to take over care of her sisters and live near her mother. Is also trying to trace her natural father).
cautions: Chloe is a compensatory eater. Watch personal hygiene, low self-esteem. Very powerful girl. Above average intelligence. Will not com-promise. Digs holes for herself. Has difficulty making (keeping) friends. If feels cornered, will attack. Can vomit at will.
Sam Smith books & blog, plus The Journal 