Spilling Ink Review is proud to announce the winning and shortlisted entries for the
August 2010 Short Story Competition
First Prize receives £100. Second Prize receives £50.
All of the following entries will be included in our annual print anthology and will receive a free copy.
Special thanks to
Unbound Press
For graciously serving as Guest Judges!
In the name of fairness, all entries judged by Unbound Press were presented anonymously.
1st Place
Kerry Ryan
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
2nd Place
Kirsty Neary
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Shortlisted
Joanna Campbell
Alan Gillespie
Louise Halvardsson
Mark Romasko
Lynne Voyce
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
1st Place
Next Stop, Squalor
Kerry Ryan
I still think about Joan. When well-meaning people ask about the painting, I use what Stephen calls my professional voice and answer with a routine spiel about symbolism. Yet in my mind I am back in the livingroom of Joan’s tiny flat, with its yellowed anaglypta and secondhand teak, listening to Jack screech abuse while Joan snores quietly, her head tilted back on the old chair with its worn, brown upholstery. My nostrils fill with that familiar cabbage and chip-pan smell of her home and I want to touch her neat grey hair, to stroke her soft, wrinkled cheek and wake her at last. But she sleeps on, just as she always did.
Destiny moves silently, or so they say. My move to Sarah’s flat in the east of the city was fairly uneventful. My flatmates disappeared when it was time for me to leave and I was forced to lug all of my bags and boxes into the waiting taxi myself. But perhaps that was to be expected. We’d never been friends like Sarah and I were friends.
Supposedly I was doing Sarah and her boyfriend a favour by house-sitting while they were on a year-long tour of South America. Of course, Sarah was doing me the favour, allowing me to stay rent-free in a flat that made a mockery of the cramped bedsits I’d suffered since leaving home. Her parents were property developers. They had paid for her trip and for the flat, situated in the kind of area estate agents describe as ‘up and coming’. Still, it was a lovely flat and the truth is I was rather jealous. My parents preferred to use their savings to buy yappy dogs they’d take on holidays to Switzerland and Italy.
Sarah had befriended me during our first year at art school. I was never really sure why. I would have said we were close—as close as I was to anyone back then—yet in all those months of living in her flat, I received just one letter from her, no phone call, no email. She wrote in her mad looping hand of Chicomecoatl, snake women and other things I couldn’t understand. It seemed they were still holed up in Mexico City, living on credit cards after spending all of her daddy’s cash on Grade A cocaine. We fly with Gods, she wrote.
Years later I heard from someone that she was living on a wheat farm in the mid-West. Apparently, she’d become a hard-line Catholic after her husband (that same boyfriend?) ran away with another man.
That first night alone in Sarah’s flat, I celebrated my isolation with two bottles of champagne I found chilling in the otherwise empty fridge. If I remember rightly, the hangover lasted longer than the excitement of living alone did. After a few days it started to feel odd, not having anyone to talk to whenever I wanted, although in the old place I’d often prayed my flatmates would choke on that last stolen gulp of milk, that last stolen slice of bread.
Before moving into Sarah’s place I’d decided that sharing accommodation was to blame for my lack of creativity. If only I could be left alone without interruption then perhaps I could produce the kind of work which, in more optimistic moments, I still believed I was capable of. There weren’t many others who shared my optimism. In my final year at art school, a tutor I desperately wanted to please said to me quite matter-of-factly, Your work to date has been a series of empty gestures. I didn’t cry then or later when I was alone. In those days I viewed tears as a sign of weakness.
Now the critics call that undergrad juvenilia my ‘early minimalist period’ and some of those canvases change hands for mind-boggling sums considering that the tutor’s assessment wasn’t far off the mark. For years I’d found comfort in the stricture of the straight line, in the rationality of the right angle, the perfectly executed circle. I’d got stuck repeating the same old rubbish. I wanted to move on, to create something else, something different, but I didn’t know where to start or what to do. So I set up my easel in the corner of Sarah’s livingroom and waited for the magic to happen. Of course I couldn’t even sketch out a simple little box—those little boxes I once loved. Instead, I spent my time sitting on the wooden chair by the bay window, watching the people come and go in the street below.
The scents from that street still wake me sometimes. Aromatic curry spice drifted out of kitchen windows to mingle with the smell of melting road tar in what lazy little slipstreams of breeze the weather granted. It was that second summer when the UK really started to boil: Scotland’s first ever hose pipe ban, record sales of Irn Bru before the water ration cards were issued and the police stood guard at standpipes.
Once I witnessed a fight break out between locals and an English couple who were trying to smuggle barrels of water into a van. How they’d planned to get the barrels across border control I don’t know, but before they could someone called the police. A tight group of neighbours blocked the van’s exit, shouting racist abuse—some of the flats had posters in the window proclaiming: NO TO ENGLISH WATER RELIEF. When a big gorilla, wearing nothing but the tiniest shorts and terrible sunburn, punched the English man, the police waded in with tasers.
Normally though, nothing nearly as dramatic happened. It was just too hot. Bikini-clad girls and bare-chested boys, crazy with the temperature and tonic wine, kissed and argued sloppily, lazily on the close stoop, while dogs, too hot to sniff or shag, panted under the shadow of souped-up Fords. When the sun got too much, everyone went inside to their cool homes, to their own lives, and the shouts of a few lunatics too drunk to hide from the heat would be all that punctured the afternoon hush. I’d sit and watch from the window as afternoon became evening. African birds flapped in loose formation across the clay-tiled tenement rooftops while the sun, as red as mars, sank down from an alien sky streaked with purple and orange wisps of cloud.
Unable to sleep, I spent my nights hunched over the screen, buying things I didn’t need or really want. Sometimes if I was feeling low enough, I’d type in the names of people I’d been at art school with, torturing myself with their news of shows, tours, commissions. Sometimes when the heat and the self-loathing got too much, I’d rest my sweating body against the cool livingroom wall; the incessant reggae bass from the flat downstairs causing the sandstone to vibrate ever so slightly against my cheek. It fascinated me, that ancient red boreal stone, full of silica and quartz, hewn from a Deeside quarry and saturated with thousands of years of existence. I would stand there for who-knew-how-long, my face pressed against the cold stone, listening, waiting for something. What I don’t know. Perhaps for the tiny grains to reveal their closely-guarded secrets.
Days and nights slowly passed without me speaking to another person face-to-face. Isn’t it funny that now I wish I’d enjoyed the solitude when I had it? These days I’m surrounded by people— grandchildren, friends, friends of friends— who always want or need something and, of course, when I’m painting there is always someone there, watching, staring back at me from the canvas. Peace, silence, solitude was what house-sitting was supposed to provide, yet I frittered that precious time away worrying, pacing the varnished floorboards and trying to avoid the stare of the blank canvas in the corner.
The night I first heard Jack go off at Joan, I’d managed a rare sleep on the sofa. Just a few days before, I’d met the new upstairs neighbour on the stairwell and we’d exchanged a nod. She was a poor old sort but seemed harmless enough, a little doddering if anything, so I never quite expected to hear that level of noise coming down through the ceiling.
Shocked awake and half mad from lack of sleep, I staggered upstairs, knocking gently at first before hammering, beating the wood. To my surprise, the door swung open. The lock was faulty no doubt because it had been kicked in so many times. It was that kind of street back then, not the palm tree-lined executive address chock-a-block with SUVs and soft-tops it has become.
It may sound like an exaggeration when I say I felt compelled to walk into Joan’s flat. I don’t know why. Nosiness, Stephen said, but I like to think it was more than that. Perhaps it was need.
In the small livingroom, Jack was perched in his corner, stamping around and screaming obscenities in a Glaswegian accent. Joan slept on in her old, brown armchair, a sheen of sweat across her slack face and her white vest damp down the front. It was clear what was going on: a squawking attention-seeker with a sailor’s mouth and a tired old woman who’d drank too much. There was a half empty bottle of gin by the side of her chair and her hand held a glass drained of everything bar the lemon.
The room looked tired and washed out—the heavy teak furniture and ugly vinyl prints gave it the air of a dilapidated seaside B&B. Yet there was something about it. Something in this little scene that said so much. It was as though I’d stumbled in on the denouement of a one-act tragedy.
Gently I went over to the chair and tried to wake Joan but she was out cold. Jack, oblivious to my presence, continued with his swearing— something I was to become wearily familiar with as the weeks and months progressed. Later I would guess Joan’s military background had helped him develop such a range of international swear words. For from the few photographs and medals on top of the sideboard, I gathered she’d been in the army. There was a photograph of a much younger, healthier Joan linking arms with another woman in uniform somewhere that looked African: all blue skies and arid land. Beside this was a black-and-white photograph of a small girl in a starched dress standing outside the Co-op on the main road. The shop front hadn’t changed all that much, although Joan certainly had. There were no photographs of anybody else— children or adults— but pinned on a square of felt behind a glass frame were two medals awarded by WRAC, one for long service and I don’t know what the other was for. Anyway, that was how I discovered her name was Joan Dean.
That first night I didn’t do much looking around. I was too busy trying to calm Jack down and trying to wake Joan up. Realising it was hopeless, I went back downstairs and put some music on to drown him out. I promised myself I would complain first thing the next day, but the sadness of that little room, Joan’s gaping toothless mouth and Jack’s messy corner prevented me. And anyway, he’d shouted himself silent by midnight so I didn’t really see the point.
During the weeks that followed, I made an effort to say hello to Joan on the stairwell or outside the shop. Small talk seemed enough then. I never did manage to ask her when she’d lived around there or why she had come back. There was a lot I never asked and some things I never told. I never mentioned those weekly visits upstairs. It just didn’t seem right somehow to embarrass her like that.
But alone in Sarah’s flat, I came to anticipate my Thursday visits upstairs. Perhaps even look forward to them. Joan would get her pension, drink too much, and Jack would make a protest at her passing out before him. As quietly as I could, I’d push open her front door, go in and hush Jack with something I’d found in the fridge or the cupboard. At first I brought biscuits or a bit of cake until he demanded whisky. He’d developed quite a taste for it over the years. The old soak.
One week I went upstairs to find that Joan had fallen asleep with her glasses on and so slowly I took them off, placing them on the table beside her, ready for when she woke up. I didn’t mind doing these little things. I liked to think I was helping. Or so I told myself. Now I know Joan was actually helping me.
Stephen thinks I exaggerate when I say that without her my life would never have taken the route it did. But really it’s only too true. That tableau of Joan and Jack, the symmetry of it, the sadness, the stark poverty, something about it haunted me. Wherever I was—walking in the park, microwaving my dinner, watching the riots on the news—that Thursday night scene would come to mind and something sore would rise up. Old age is such a terrible shipwreck—I didn’t know who said it or when but during my time at Sarah’s that sentence rattled and rattled around my head.
Then it happened. Whatever had been snarling up inside me for so long was loosed. Yet despite how consumed, how eager I was, it still took me weeks to get Joan’s face right. I did it over and over again until the canvas was thick with paint and I had to scrape it all off and start again. I worked day and night, existing on coffee and a little take-out food I’d pick at whenever I remembered. I hardly washed. I hardly slept. I thought about nothing else except getting it right.
Each week the anticipation of going upstairs became almost too much. Sometimes I would be tempted to walk up there before Thursday but, of course, I couldn’t risk having to explain myself. So I waited.
I don’t know whether it was painting the intricate lines that made up Joan’s crumpled face or the congealed meal-for-one in front of her that I realised I had to get away from that flat before I too was marooned. Age was the only real difference between us, and at least Joan had Jack, all I had was my heart beating morbidly in my chest. So I asked my parents for one last loan and I was able to move to the artists’ colony and what happened, happened.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really think about Joan much after I moved away. I was working, creating and that was all that seemed to matter then. If I had known that that private Thursday night scene would become such a public spectacle, I would’ve returned and if she had moved, I would have found her. I would have. I could have paid her a fee for all the times she sat for me without realising it. Now, I know, it’s too late.
Everywhere I travel, I see her. In art stores and gallery shops across the globe, there she is sleeping on mugs, notebooks, bookmarks—even napkins for God’s sake—with Jack on his perch behind her chair, yelling obscenities that only I can hear.
I still can’t get out of the habit, after all these years, of calling Jack a he, but I suppose I should really say she. It wasn’t until years later, when I read a coffee table tome on the New Glasgow Realists that I was informed that I’d actually painted a female parrot rather than a male. The males are green, apparently. I suppose I just took it for granted that something that caused so much fuss had to be male.
Of course, now parrots are commonplace on Glasgow’s streets and squares—they outnumber the pigeons. When I see the hot pink, powder blue and sun-bright yellow of a thousand wings beating wildly in the air above George Square, I wonder if I should have flung that cage door wide open and allowed Jack to fly away over the rooftops. I wonder if she would have left when she had the chance.
Back to Top
2nd Place
Origami
Kirsty Neary
Marion perches on her favourite chair in the smoking room, tearing thin strips of paper from a hospital welcome pack. Each blank tongue she neatly folds, tucking in torn edges, before rolling a narrow tube. The wreckage of a garden party sprawls across the coffee table: bright confetti of torn helpline pamphlets sifting their way to the floor; a broken picket fence of paper pipes reeling between the toadstool spread of half-empty coffee cups. She keeps her eyes fixed on her hands as the door creaks open, holds her gaze even as the laminated chair to her left expels a puff of chemical dust. A clearing of throat, ruffling of papers and a few long breaths intimate a settling down. A taking of stock. Finally the newcomer speaks. A voice from the underground. Squashed tin cans and rusted spoons.
‘Marion, sweetie. It’s been too long.’
Marion’s shoulders jerk up to her ears, then curve as she leans in to shelter her torso. The smirk playing about her lips is mirrored in Lucy’ own mouth. The hospital’s success rates weren’t making much of an impression, so far. And so here they were. Reunions with former inmates were a strange kind of comfortable: so many secrets already passed between them both a blessing and a curse in terms of selecting strains of etiquette. There’s no rush to reply; instead, both women give over to the thick tick of the plastic clock over the television. Things move at a different pace than on the outside: the sedated find extended pauses necessary to slap occurrences in concrete. To take a measure of one’s thoughts, feelings, presuppositions and possible actions, as drilled by the doctors and their interminable worksheets.
‘How rude,’ says Lucy, finally. ‘Where’s the welcome home for the troops?’
Lucy’s not too bothered about the form and content of a response; a syllable, a sigh, would be enough. There’s just a real need to hear something. To confirm suspicions gathered by her senses: that she’s really back. She’s not ready to unpack, yet, not ready to settle into her room, take a look around the ward, mark changes.
The smoking room’s a port of call in here even for those who don’t smoke: always the same, reassuringly bare of therapeutic worksheets, fluorescent health posters, scuttling nurses clutching clipboards to their chests with an air of privileged information. Here, there’s nothing so important that can’t wait twenty puffs, no immediate need to get a grip. No panic over the fact that the plastic wrapping on the couch under her fingertips feels as substantial as a handful of cobwebs; the mute light glancing from the rims of the amassed coffee cups fluttering her line of sight, knocking back attempts to gain horizons, limits, edges. Stepping back into the swing of things will take time. There’s plenty of that in here.
Marion folds and rolls a further three tubes of paper, bringing the count up to a nice neat number divisible by ten and two and five and three. Under-lid glances at Lucy affirm her suspicions; the girl’s been pushing it further and harder. Time for a pleasantry.
‘So you’re back,’ she says. She sounds impressed, near-awed at the thought of the outside concerned. As though Lucy’s returned from a mission of mercy building wells in darkest Africa; hiking up mountains in the Andes; uncovering Incan ruins. Finding out more. More than this. More than that which digs violet trenches into her eye sockets.
‘Yeah. How’s it going?’
There’s no protocol for such a situation. Just a reversal. This time it’s Lucy looking like hell, dragged backward by the hair through every dead-end alley in the maze of the city; Marion slightly plumped and gently flushed by what looks to be at least six weeks of inpatient.
‘Fucking splendid. Not the point. Where’ve you been and why the hell are you back?’
‘I could ask the same thing of you, Marion.’
Brief silence; the sick girl and the not-so-sick girl tabulate degrees of decay. Marion makes no effort to screen her disappointment; it’s a far more appropriate reaction than the twinge of envy battering at the inner rims of her ribcage. Lucy’s had one more go of it; another shot at pushing every limit her imagination can supply. One failing on the part of the doctors was a sure-fire means of reinforcing the pleasure-centric benefits of sickness over health. What should, could the patients do with all that rude health?
‘Did you have time to pack this time? Bring a decent stash of cigarettes?’ Marion finally asks; there’s no arguing with currency, more readily swapped than horror stories.
‘Aye.’ Lucy digs a deck out from a pocket of her paint-spattered jeans.
‘Not…they those Silk Cut low-tar things, still?’
‘Aye.’
‘What the fuck, Lucy – I thought you’d have gotten over that little health kick of yours.’
‘I’m too used to them now. You know how it is…you can’t go back.’
The latter phrase wraps a tune, Lucy’s voice rising up to meet the prerequisite positive outlook required on a programme of recovery. An in-joke tar-thick with blackest humour.
‘Neither you can; what’s the idea? They’re easier to quit, or something?’
‘I thought since they’re rotten I’d smoke less of them.’
‘How’s that working out for you?’
‘Ha-ha…smoking even more just to get a buzz.’
‘Always the way.’
‘As I’ll no doubt be reminded.’
Marion picks her key, a sing-along cursor bouncing along the top of her words.
‘Give it time. You know how it works – you’re meant to get your bearings, first. Come to terms with your circumstances…get to know and appreciate your surroundings…’
Marion sweeps her hand across the smoking room, taking in the safety-glassed French windows, the shades of grey constituting the staff car park outside, the starving winter briars, the brew of smoke issuing from the stacks just visible over the top of the ten-foot wall.
‘Lap of luxury, eh?’ drawls Lucy, chucking a half-pack of Silk Cut Marion’s way.
‘Yeah…who needs holiday homes in the Med or penthouses in New York when you can take a motorway turn right on into Seven Oaks? Full board, maid service, organized fun and, eh…more security than the Pentagon?’
‘You’ve really been working on that gratitude list,’ says Lucy, raising her brows. She lifts a hand to the left one; she’s still not used to the bare patch left after the singeing incident. ‘I can tell. What you going for with all that silver lining? Earrings? Bracelets? A new dinette set?’
Marion shrugs, removes a cigarette from the pack, holds it up alongside one of her own rolls of paper. Almost an exact match. Perfect. She lights the cigarette, pulling a face. Might as well be smoking newspaper, for all the nip in the hit.
‘Sounds like your own could use a bit of work. If you’re back in here.’
‘That, Marion dear, is between each patient and their carefully appointed key worker,’ says Lucy, no inflection in the reply. She’s pulled between extremes: on the one hand, the relish of secrecy; on the other, the need to reveal all, make it real, make damn sure she can still pin scraps of language onto the mess in her head. Another casual pause gives Marion time to decide whether or not to push it.
‘Hmmm….these are as foul as I remember,’ drawls Marion, watching the smoke rise up to join the clot around the light fixtures, motes of dust glittering in the pale haze from the burglar-proof floodlights outside.
‘Ach, they’re alright. Good for…’ Lucy makes a mock about-face, pretending to check over her shoulder, cupping her ears around the slightest of staff-sounds. ‘…spliffs, Marion. Means you can’t taste anything but the grass…’
Marion frowns, stretches out her right leg without uncurling her spine from its taut comma. Hooking over another small card table, she transfers all the empties from one to another, freeing up space for her craft. She begins arranging her paper tubes in groups of five, then three, each grouping at right angles to the last until she has a Tower of Pisa; a stairway to nowhere.
‘No offense, but I doubt you’re back in here for indulging in purely herbal refreshment.’
Lucy coughs, growls, sprawls back on the couch in a creak of wipe-clean plastic. She stares at the ceiling, trying to pick out the scallops around the edge of the room from behind the pale curtain of smog. Formal drills from last time remind her to check herself before a reaction; people, she’s been told, are rarely as careful with words as they could be. Still, there are too may loose threads hanging from Marion’s observation.
‘Do I…do I look that bad?’
Marion begins placing her paper tubes neatly into a shoebox granted, after some less than dignified pleading, from the art therapy team. There’s no way around it if, as promised, she’s to speak only the truth.
‘Lucy…it’s not up to me to pass judgement.’
‘Nobody else will. Tell me.’
‘You look like…you look like you’ve done pretty much everything they told you not to if you wanted to stay out of here.’
Lucy nods, carefully. Any sudden movements of the head seem to send her brain drumming in her skull like a joint boiling in a soup-pot. Logical thoughts bursting on the surface even as they alight. Every time she moves to flick her cigarette into the ashtray, the tapes wrapping the bandages around her forearms whisper her very own personal truth.
‘I did. And more. I wanted to get it right, this time.’
‘You not tired, yet?’ asks Marion. ‘Not that I’m the poster child for recovery, here, but I wasn’t expecting us to meet again quite so soon.’
‘Tired? Tired…I’m always tired, Marion. It’s like….it’s like every sound I’ve ever made is playing back over and over in my head. All at the same time. It’s too loud…I haven’t slept properly since…since I left here, funnily enough.’
Marion gazes out from under a fringe of sleep-clogged lashes, getting it. Their eyes meet across the room, each permitting a shallow grin. Another hospital in-joke; when they’d adjoining rooms, they’d meet in the hall after they’d been given their sleep medication and attempt to fit as much talk as possible into the twenty-odd minutes before they began to slur and sink. A game; trying to show the shrinks they’d still a grasp on what it meant to retain ownership of their words, their bodies.
‘Those were the days, eh..? That why you went back on it?’
Lucy shrugs, allowing the it concerned to flood the room, an amorphous cloud of possibilities assuming whichever weight or shape or texture the individual user required at the time.
‘Yeah…no….maybe. I don’t know. All I wanted was not to feel so…close. To everything. Like…all these little pieces belonging to me were all demanding my attention, all at the one time…when you take control, do something else, everything moves into place. Gets small enough to fit into your line of sight.’
Marion flinches at the slight hitch in Lucy’s voice. There were places for tears – in Seven Oaks, there had to be – but the smoking room wasn’t one of them. She lifts the box of tubes and once more sets about placing them on the table, trying for words, this time. Yes, no, maybe. Light, space, colour. Love, hate, anarchy. T-shirts and bumper stickers. Steering well clear of the axioms padding the walls in the wards upstairs. Hanging on to the pause, the deepening of breath as Lucy gathers herself together.
‘What are you doing, anyway?’ Lucy asks, snorting and tugging at the front of her blouse, making a show of flaring her fingers as she lights up another cigarette.
‘Playing,’ says Marion, sharp with irony. ‘The docs were handing out these flashcards with craft ideas. Colouring in, making greetings cards, knitting, that kind of thing.’
‘Kiddy scissors,’ hisses Lucy, ‘Plastic needles. Fuck, they don’t have a clue, do they?’
‘Whatever keeps us busy, I guess.’
‘So this is…what? Origami?’
‘Kind of. I kept fucking up the swans and flowers and stuff, so…I like these. You get them all the same size, all nice and neat, and then…I dunno, make stuff.’
Lucy rises slowly from the couch, drops down into the seat next to Marion. She peers into the shoebox, withdraws a tidy stack of envelopes the size of four postage stamps laid out in a square.
‘What’s with these?’ she asks, knowing full well.
‘Wraps. It’s all I know how to make.’
‘Haven’t they noticed? Your, uh…signature pieces?’
‘Makes sense to me,’ says Marion. ‘Occupational therapy, right? Something to do with your hands, to keep them off…the bad shit. I figure, why the hell not? Like those fake plastic cigarettes you get for when you’re trying to quit. Keeps the damage below the wrists.’
Lucy trails a finger along the backbone of an H picked out in tubes; the rest of the word yet to be formed, then snatches her hand back, not yet accustomed to the sight of her gauze bracelets.
‘Oh. Cool. I guess. What’s this one gonna be, then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Lucy!’ says Marion, injecting a school teacher’s saccharine into every syllable. ‘Could be all sorts of things, couldn’t it? Hate. Hurt. Heroin. Harm. What do you think, Lucy? What would be the best words to come from this period of self-dedicated time? Remember to reflect. Does the outcome match up to your intent…?’
‘Hernia. Haemorrhage. Hedonism…?’
Marion finally raises her head from her chest to meet Lucy’s eye; it’s a case of laughing or crying, and can only be a good sign that they each plump for the former. Marion holds a palm up in a pause, snickering under her breath. Lucy watches as she arranges the tubes into HAPPY. Lucy cracks up, leans forward, provides a word of her own. HEALTHY. HOPE. Neither permits headspace to the ward-wide ban on self-mockery. HISTORY has far too many connotations; medical, admissions, abuses, repetitions.
‘If Diana were here, we’d have HOLY before too long,’ drawls Lucy, remembering the God-fearing manic-depressive who’d had the room down the hall the last time she’d been in.
‘Wait till you’ve been to dinner, or the nurses’ station. Diana’s back with a vengeance, sweetie. So’s Gavin, if you’re interested.’
‘Christ. One big, happy family, here, eh?’
‘Hmmm…what about the obvious, then? HOSPITAL? Too long? Clumsy on the Os?’
Lucy folds her arms and sinks back into the seat; working on not shaking her head, working on thinking before she speaks.
‘Marion…’
‘Hmmm?’
‘What are we doing? I mean, seriously. I’m glad you’re having fun and all, but…paper tubes and fake wraps? Playing fucking…Sesame Street? Is that all we’re good for?’
Marion curbs the urge to grab her fellow patient by the padded wrists; noting the discrepancy between doing and the unvoiced doing HERE.
‘Lucy, I don’t think either of us are in the position to be making demands. We fucked up again, no? Dangers to ourselves?’
‘I don’t see how stupid little pieces of paper are gonna make the slightest bit of difference.’
‘They don’t,’ says Marion. ‘It’s just…sounds strange, but…you can do with these what you can’t with all those…bits in your head. They do what they’re told. Stay where they’re put. And if nothing comes up, well…’
She holds up the box. Lucy snorts and lights a cigarette, half of the last one still smouldering in the ashtray.
‘I still don’t get it.’
Marion loses her temper, voice pitching up to a mockery of a sitcom teen, steeped in scorn.
‘There’s nothing to get. Do you think I’m enjoying myself, here? That this is, like, the most amazingly entertaining and fulfilling thing ever?’
‘Of course not. I just…there’s got to be something else.’
This time, Marion does reach over to touch, gently circling Lucy’s wrists with her fingers.
‘Yeah. Yeah, Lucy. I can see you’ve got that all worked out.’
‘Fuck off, Marion. You’re just…’
A rummage in the box, a flutter of fingers between paper tubes. Their eyes meet, briefly, before parting, embarrassed. Marion wishes she weren’t so pleased to see her friend; not in here. Lucy works to call up walls between herself and why she’s back. Marion helps. Best of all, Lucy would never have to say so out loud. Never have to explain or tabulate or strip to pieces for ulterior motives. Never have to write it on a worksheet.
‘I’m what?’
Lucy moves her arm to reveal her word, taking her time, squeezing the muscles of her forearms up against the taut wrappers. It’s the least of what she’ll have to get used to.
‘HILARIOUS.’
‘I’m in town all week.’
‘Makes two of us.’
‘HALLE-fucking-LEUIA?’
‘Jeez. Give me strength.’
Back to Top
Shortlisted Entries
The Path to the River
Joanna Campbell
The day he lost the last of his hair, my father fished in the river at the end of the garden. A secret path led to the bank. It began from our decrepit conservatory as an ordinary walk across the well-trodden grass. But then the lawn disappeared and became light-starved earth under racks of bracken. The trees leant forwards and pompously beckoned.
Adults always stopped at the end of the lawn and turned back to the more orderly patio or inspected the well-trained rose arbour. But children confronted the sticky ground with relish. To push through the branches, ducking the low boughs and disengaging hair or clothes from twigs, was to find another realm. Johnny used to say it was a different era. It was something else.
Bravery was required. That’s why only children stooped and thrusted through, caking their shoes with mud and snagging their jerseys. Adults preferred to remain whole. I used to say it was because they couldn’t see the sky any more. They couldn’t have those tea-stirring conversations about ‘looks like rain’ or ‘it’s brightening up’. They couldn’t avoid things by gazing at clouds.
Johnny and I developed a shell, I must admit. We didn’t fancy nettle stings and thorn-whippings every time we disappeared. So we drove a nail into the frame of the conservatory door, which almost disintegrated, and hung oil-skin coats there. We shrugged them on as we left and slid our fishing rods underneath, along our spines, slotting them under the hanging-label in the collar. Then we pulled the hoods over our heads as we arched our stiffened backs and crawled into the secret path, two tortoises with slick skins. The noise was the best part. Crashing through bracken. Cracking sticks with our boots. Oilskins creaking. We had those boots with soles as thick as sandwiches and jagged to pinch in the wet soil and leave the suede on top unblemished.
Straightening up when we saw the water was Johnny’s favourite part. He never said that, because boys don’t really chant their favourite things. But I knew. He would stand there and breathe. I knew he was filling up with the earthy damp air. He would wedge his heavy boots into the bank with his legs a full stride apart and his hands on his hips.
My father never fished with Johnny and me. He was an adult. When we came in late for tea, he looked with disdain at our filthy hands and refused to speak. My mother put a nail-brush by the soap in the cloakroom, but we didn’t use it. Only for scrubbing tackle when the mood took us. We liked our grime. A mixture of mud, bits of bait and traces of Mars. She would talk in a polite way and we would answer her kindly, glancing at my father for signs of softening. He would concentrate on his toasted sardines as if they were the most important fish he had ever seen. Taut conversation petered out. There was only the sound of persistent cutlery. I tried to keep my knife and fork quiet, even silent. But Johnny scraped his more than usual and swung his knife to collide often with the crystal cruets.
My father hated Johnny. No one ever said this, but it was plain. Johnny tested and probed, waiting for a reaction that never came. But my mother adored him. She always told the story of how she found a stiff dead shrew in his pocket and how he said he’d had to keep it because it was still warm.
It was always Johnny who introduced new things to our fishing days. The first thing was Fishing Nights. Dark cold is painful, but neither one of us would admit defeat.
The white moon-light on the black water pulled up the fish. The water was a cauldron groaning with life. It boiled with the smell of salmon. And once, a long prowling pike, baring its teeth on the grass while Johnny found a special net.
The next thing was Fishing With Mother. She was docile enough not to frighten the fish, but we knew she was longing to slip back to her pastry dough or her macramé. But she did it for Johnny. She wasn’t willing to use the secret path and so we had to escort her out of the house and onto the road and then turn right and double back along the purplish track. Then we had to haul her up the slope and she stopped looking like my mother and more like a split tomato. Red puffing cheeks and determined smile. Johnny made her touch the maggots. I hated seeing her finger in the squirming tin. And her squealing.
Then there was Fishing With Girls. Johnny was harsh and made them use the path. Maureen Hunter lost her glasses on the way and was in tears because her parents would kill her. Johnny tried to distract her with a cheese and salad-cream roll. She should have been more impressed because Johnny didn’t usually have patience with crying. And it upset the fish. I felt girls were a mistake. They kept wiping their hands and knees with tissues and asking when we could go for a walk on the main road and catch the bus to the lido.
Then there was Fishing With Masturbation. But Johnny said we had to go our separate ways for that and then I felt there was too much of me. I couldn’t relax, even with a spare coat spread over my lap and a good magazine. I preferred proper fishing with Johnny. I made him agree a time to meet up again and, when we did, I never knew whether to smile at him or not.
The path grew denser when Johnny left home. Our space vanished. I had school and homework. There was a Saturday job in a petrol station and rhythm guitar in a band.
I had a girlfriend called Deborah. She was a limpet, so I took up football and archery to avoid her. Just saw her on Saturday nights. She was as cunning as an eel. At gigs she’d turn up with a quiche. The rest of the band fell on her pastry. If I was in a match, she’d be on the touchline, blowing on her hands. I told her sometimes I was fishing and no girls were allowed. I didn’t fish though and the path grew over.
Last Spring, I noticed my father wasn’t going to work. I was revising for exams in my room one morning and he pelted his fists on my door.
“Turn that row off!”
The good thing about study leave was being with loud music. I resented my father for spoiling it. He tried to be helpful with bowls of soup for lunch and coffee every hour, but I wanted to be alone with crisps in my room. He set the table and called me in a companionable way, looking sort of humble but proud as we sat down. I was scared he might say Grace or make us use serviettes.
My mother had started a job, but he seemed to have finished his. He was awkward, as though he didn’t actually belong here. He didn’t understand home. My mother would have let me read at the table if just she and I were there. But he wanted to talk.
He thought I would like to talk about school or Deborah. I just withered him with a look and put a foot up on the empty chair next to me. He was spiking up his hair with agitated fingers and I glanced up. His spoon was drowning in his tomato soup. His slice of bread was torn in half and one half looked like a rectangle with a dent and the other rectangle had a bump to fit the dent.
“I have left work. I am having cancer treatment at the hospital. It makes me very tired and sick.”
He was like a talking Janet and John book. All concise sentences. I looked down at my empty bowl, imagining him running his index finger under each word.
“It’s in my lung. Only the one.”
There was a kind of rhyme there.
I couldn’t picture him in a long gown at the hospital. I only knew him in a suit and tie. Except today was a Monday and he was wearing loose fawn trousers with the belt not threaded through each loop. It was wrong.
“I have a chance. It might go away. We have to be patient.”
He used his teacher’s voice. He might as well have been facing his fourth form.
“Settle down, 5C, please. Turn to page 65. The heart of a fish has two chambers. A human heart has four. This is because a fish heart pumps blood in only one direction.”
“OK.” That was all I could say.
He fitted his bread halves together and passed me the plate.
He put on pink rubber gloves to wash up and I kicked the chair away and left the house. I thought ‘OK’ was enough. Males didn’t make fusses. OK was OK.
It was cooling for my eyes out in the wild afternoon. The wind bit my face. I pulled on my oil-skin and made for the path, blundering through the thick growth and breathing in the old leaves and spores. Spring was slow to produce sap in here.
I had my eyes half closed and pushed my way into the deepest part. Johnny called it The Reaching. Branches implored you deeper in, pressed against you, then yielded to your weight and closed behind you. My boots knew the path. They knew each jumble of dead roots. I didn’t need to see. I could smell the river. It was like opening a can of ginger beer or sniffing pear drops if you haven’t had them for years. Takes you back. Fits you into an old space.
It was slimy on the bank in our best spot and there was a decaying tree nearby that grated in the wind. I was sore with cold and wishing that I wasn’t concealed from the house. I wanted my father to see me from an upstairs window and come crunching through the path, the rushing sound of him coming closer and closer, hurrying to me and sweeping me up into his big arms so I could inhale tobacco and mint and Imperial Leather and press my face against his jumper.
I hurled stones into the ruffled water, harder and harder, wishing and waiting. Then rain pelted down and it felt like acid in the wind. I struggled back and found the lawn was dry and my father was hanging up the washing with pegs in his mouth. I went up to him.
“The Australian lungfish only has one lung. It uses it when the river runs dry.”
My father stared with his mouth open.
“And it sounds like a little pair of bellows.”
I went inside and listened to the drone of the dishwasher. My mother usually turned machines on at night and shut the door on them.
Deborah was ringing the door bell. I knew her ring. It was lots of staccato pings with regular gaps. She was wearing a difficult-looking dress with folds and pleats and a fiddly tie-belt. Her eye-shadow was a yellow sherbet colour to match the dress. She was sparkling at me like a determined wedge of lemon.
“Surprise! Is anyone home? Shall we go upstairs?”
Her cod-eyes flashed at me. She could hear my father. He was beating eggs in the kitchen now. She raised her eyebrows in confusion.
“Er, my old man’s at home today. Day off kind of thing. We’re going fishing in a minute.”
I didn’t ask her in, even though the wind was beating at her dress and stiffening the hairs on her arms.
“Oh.”
She never stayed defeated though.
“Tell you what, if you’ve got an old pair of jeans and a jumper, I could go with you. You could come upstairs with me and find something.”
She was angling for an afternoon of fishing with sex. Johnny and I had never done that. The girls we took to the river were just for kissing. And we soon tired of that. I nearly bit Jane Vangelly’s lip off when I got a bite from a giant carp.
I thought of frantic held-breath-writhing on my quilt with my father whisking eggs in the room below and felt sick. Deborah was grinning with her long front teeth resting on her bottom lip and her brows up under her fringe.
Then my father wandered into the hall with his glass bowl and beater.
“Oh hello, er, Deborah. Just making some batter.”
“Very organised, Mr Bateman. All ready to coat the fish. Are we having chips as well?”
“Er, no. It’s Pancake Day. Needs to stand for a while, so I’m told. So Delia says. I’ll, er, just go and wait while it rests.”
His wrist worked efficiently. The beater swirled the eggs up into long waves tipped with froth. The sound of splashing and chinking metal on glass made me think of my mother and Johnny and round after round of pancakes. My father was still wearing the rubber gloves and whistling.
I did the same when I was fishing, waiting for a bite in the drizzle for hours. I whistled between my teeth in a sort of hiss until Johnny glared and threw a hook at me.
Deborah was waiting for me to choose between the river and sex. She would snap up either option. Or both together if my father wasn’t coming. Her head was tilted, her eyes unblinking, fixed on my face. Glancing at the kitchen doorway, I could see my father massaging the frying pan with oil and then halving lemons. Citrus fumes wafted into the hall as the juice pooled on the chopping board.
“I’ve got a miniature brandy in my bag,” Deborah said, as if tempting a child with a bag of jelly beans.
My father was spearing the half-lemons onto the squeezer, cupping his hands over them, twisting them firmly back and forth.
“So what are we doing?”
Her voice was sharp. I could never take her to the river. I looked up. Johnny was on the lawn, strutting in his familiar way, shoulders bobbing from side to side, legs wide apart, trousers flapping like pennants in the wind.
“Fancy a walk later? Who’s your friend? Just saying goodbye are you?”
He looked at her with indifference. She melted away like a pat of butter in the sun. I saw the hedge was filled with damp butterflies and the cat was pouncing on a spider by the milk bottles my father had rinsed and left out for the morning. I saw the clouds sliding apart and the starlings regroup to begin their afternoon sky dance.
Johnny clattered into the hall and I waited there at the door, looking at a bush of cream roses, tinged brown at the edges, soaking the air with scent.
It was the silence that made me look at the kitchen. My father and Johnny were locked together, speechless with tears.
Johnny and I went down to the river later and I wanted to ask why they hugged, but Johnny’s mood was rancid and the fish we caught were useless. We tossed them back into the river, dark as blood in the still evening. Johnny was staring at me as I flung the last one.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Dad said you mumbled ‘OK’ and went out. Then some stuff about Australia and bellows”
“He was talking oddly and it felt all wrong.”
“Well, wouldn’t you? If you were dying?”
Johnny was standing, his long shadow staining the moss, livid green in the last light.
“I was a bit shocked. You weren’t there. You don’t know how it was.”
“He told me.”
“Why are you so bothered anyway? He doesn’t even like you.” I hated the words being out. They hung there in the fading day, the starlings wheeling above to announce the night.
I could just hear Johnny’s shallow breathing. He was packing his tackle and closing tins of bait. He spoke at last.
“I never asked him to like me. I’m Mum’s, not his. He took us both on.”
Johnny went without waiting for me. I stayed for a long time. Johnny was with the adults. I wondered if they would leave me any pancakes.
The growing summer brought the river to life while my father shrank. He sat on a deck-chair by the roses like a little old man, wheeled outside for the sun to exhaust him. Shiny head slumping, jaw slack. My mother and Johnny quietly ran the house while I watched him from my window.
Johnny whistled the day he took my father fishing and supported him out of the house and onto the road and then they turned right and doubled back along the purplish track. Then it was up the slope to just the right spot. I could follow the start of their progress from my window, even though they eventually dipped out of sight.
Back to Top
Issues
Alan Gillespie
Benny calls out whether someone’s walking past or not. ‘Bigishoooo! Err yer bigishoo.’ He stands nestled beneath a sandstone archway, and winks at me, his magazines held out like a dowsing rod. ‘Ta very much, Godblessye hen.’ ‘Much obliged sur, huvagoodday.’
His clothes are shabby but clean, frayed cuffs and wet shoes. Four magazines sell between 8am and 10am, earning him six pounds and eighty pence. The street falls quiet after the morning rush of office and shop workers. You’re not supposed to move around, he tells me, but you have to keep moving. There’s another patch near the train station that should get some traffic.
I’m shadowing Benny for the day. Tomorrow it’ll be just me, with my own bundle of magazines and a laminated tag around my neck. He’s showing me the ropes by which I’ll be tied. You need to be careful, he tells me. Can’t trespass on someone else’s territory. Can’t stand on another man’s toes. He’s not specific about consequences.
The magazines are a precious commodity, Benny says. They’re a form of currency. Take care nobody pinches them. And if someone’s got something you want, swap them for it. He winks again.
‘Bigishoooo! Err yer bigishoo.’ Benny bows and scrapes when someone pushes a cold coin into his palm. ‘Yass,’ he says, counting the metal discs. ‘Atz enuff furra bed the night.’
One of the hotels will take him for a few pounds. I’ve got something sorted as well, free temporary accommodation at Hope House. They don’t let you stay long. I’m supposed to get my name on a housing list. It’s good for their statistics, apparently.
A single bed for a single night, and then I’ll be out on my own.
That night, stuck in limbo between sleep and nausea, I wrap my legs around the sheets and imagine I’m far away, with Harold again.
Harold always had the best taste in beds. It was impeccable.
I close my eyes and we’re chug chug chugging, aboard the Orient Express, wrapped up in embroidered quilts that scratch my skin. Or we’re spread out in a four poster at the Ritz, giggling like schoolchildren, eating purple cherries with dollops of yoghurt. Or we’re sinking into waterbeds and gripping wrought-iron frames, and roll, roll, rolling through the night on an Arctic cruise. Harold was wonderful. He told me bed was like a stage. I always thought it was more like a canvas.
Not that we spent all our time together on a mattress. There were black tie evenings in art galleries, VIP rooms in cocktail bars, rooftop terraces sipping Hendrick’s and tonic with cubes of cucumber, driving his Porsche in Italian shoes, splattering each other with paint in my studio, cufflink shopping at Tiffany’s, first class flights, my penthouse apartment, walk-in wardrobe, balcony overlooking the river. Harold always left the rent money for me in an envelope on the dressing table.
I fall asleep on a stiff board in Hope House, wishing that he had never died.
‘Big Issue! Who wants a Big Issue?’
I don’t have Benny’s talent for salesmanship yet. He comes along to say hello, on his way to a promising patch outside the new shopping centre. He tells me to relax. Tells me I’ll get used to the life after a day or two. Tells me to stay away from the shopping centre or he’ll do me.
No wink.
I become invisible. Men walk past, smelling divine, ignoring me completely. Mothers push prams, facing straight ahead while their children stare. I sell one magazine, to a pensioner. She drops two grubby coins into my hand and I pat my pockets, even though I know I don’t have change. Not to worry, she says. Just you keep it, son. I thank her very much and resist the urge to throw up. The way she looks at me, the way she looks through me, makes me loathe myself.
‘Bigishoooo! Get your bigishoo.’
I’m getting the hang of this. At least I think so. Two more copies sell. Nobody takes their change, but I should get some from the supermarket, just in case. Although that means I’ll have to buy something.
When Harold died, I had some money to keep me going. When it began running out, I would shop at night, buying all the produce that was going off, at a reduced price. And when I could no longer afford that, I went round the back, through the bins. Peeling open stale sandwiches. Relieved and revolted.
I haven’t really lived since Harold died. We were together for years. He knew every fancy and fetish and I was never disappointed. He spoiled me, of course he did. Because I loved him and he loved me. But when he died, all the wealth and comfort and security went to his wife.
I wasn’t welcome at the funeral. I wasn’t mentioned in the will. I didn’t get a penny. Friends, who’d known all about us, feigned ignorance and sidled up to her. Wiped her tears, held her hand, accepted her invitations to supper. If she ever knew about her husband’s secret boyfriend she never let on. Harold never mentioned it, but I’m sure she knew. She must have.
When I was evicted from my flat, three months in arrears with the rent, it had been transformed. All the clean lines were gone. The minimalist, Swedish decor had been covered up. Blame it on artistic temperament.
I consider it my masterpiece. My homage to Harold. Onto every surface of the home he’d kept me in went layer upon layer of thick oil paint, swabbed on in dank tan and cold slate and sooty bistre, a whirlpool of everything I couldn’t say. Onto the wooden floorboards I painted a swirling, turbulent vortex. The ceiling became a stratus of foggy cloud, like bottled exhaust fumes. I made the bath sheer black. Likewise the toilet.
I did the windows last: plum and cobalt, crimson and carrot, in thin brushstrokes portraying broken glass and dead sunflowers. Stroke by stroke the daylight faded, replaced by gloom, backlit like stained glass.
If this seems dramatic, well, I’m a painter. Always have been. A writer might have tortured himself with obscure verses. A musician might have sung ballads with tears in his eyes. It was just my way of mourning. Of trying to mourn.
‘Bigishoooo! Get yer bigishoo.’
It’s raining and I’ve ended up in a rotten spot with no shelter. I’m scared to move because I’ve been warned, by a chin-scarred thug, that if he sees me near his plot again he’ll have me. He’s claimed the stairs outside the Church of Scotland for his own, been there seven years, find your own bloody patch. His clothes are new and his cheeks are plump. A middle-class tramp, of all things. I bet they bring him tea and polythene bags full of old stuff every Sunday.
My feet are sodden, breached by the rain, and my magazines wrinkle up. I wrap them in cellophane but it’s useless. The drizzle’s getting everywhere.
A policeman stops to check my ID. He’s clean shaven, clothes neatly pressed. Big black shoes jutting out from flawless trousers. I want to cling onto his arm and bury my face in his chest. Want him to hold me. Someone tried to sell me drugs last night, I tell him. He’s not interested. Maybe if I steal his hat he’ll arrest me, take me in the back of his van, throw me in a cell for the night. But he’s marching away, long legs, square shoulders.
The people walking past stare from beneath umbrellas. Eyes shifting over me. They’re wondering how someone manages to ruin their life so much they end up like this. Wondering what I did to deserve it. Wondering where I’ll sleep tonight.
I wonder too.
It’s all my own fault. That’s the worst thing. This was avoidable. I just wasn’t looking where I was going.
After I graduated from art school I sold a few paintings. My debts were deep but a list of contacts kept me ticking over for a while. I made money from time to time. When I sold a piece I spoiled myself until the funds ran out, spending months in Paris, in Athens, in Venice.
I got by on youth and enthusiasm and bursaries and the contents of other men’s pockets. And then I met Harold. It was all different with him.
I told him I was his and that I wasn’t going anywhere. He told me he was mine and that he would give me anything. And then Harold died.
It’s been years since I painted anything worth more than the cost of the materials. I’ve no pension. No income. No assets. My buttocks have sunk down low and my arms have deflated. I used to be a package, a catch, a trophy boyfriend. I never thought the day would come when I couldn’t cling onto the coattails of a repressed homosexual with money.
You’d be amazed how many men are married with children, driving the Land Rover, holidaying in Mallorca, celebrating anniversaries, double dating, dinner partying, sleeping in queen sized marital beds, all the time denying their instinct. And it’s because gay relationships just aren’t the same. It’s cruel but they don’t have that gravitas; not in the real world, where prejudice and phobias are much more commonplace than the BBC lets you believe.
In a gay relationship you rely on each other as best friends as well as partners. You’ve got yourself a friend/lover/partner hybrid. And when he’s gone, you’re isolated. Alone. Condemned.
The magazines aren’t shifting and my nose starts to drip. I pack it in and go to the underground station. For the price of a single journey I can stay down there for hours, ten feet under, going round and round the wet city in circles.
I flick through one of my magazines on the train, trying to blend in. Trying to look like a normal man who’s just bought one, rather than an outsider trying to hawk them off. One page catches my eye. It’s the kind of article I once would’ve read from back to front.
Says there’s a Van Gogh exhibit opening at the Kelvingrove museum. The Starry Night’s going up for all of Glasgow to see. Says it’s worth a hundred million dollars.
That much for one painting. It baffles me. Makes me question all those years when I stuck my nose up in the air and ooh-ed and aah-ed at things hanging from walls.
The train stops at a station. It’s late afternoon and people are going home, thousands of clockwork mice following their routine. A girl sits next to me, long legs crossed, a defensive pose. I glance at her perfect skin, can’t stop looking. I’m making her uncomfortable.
Soon it’ll be dark and I’ll be alone in the streets. I think that maybe I’ll go along to the Van Gogh exhibition this weekend.
Maybe I’ll run into one of the old crowd. One of Harold’s business associates. A friendly face. They might want to take me for a coffee. Maybe lunch. Who knows where it could lead?
The girl gets off at her stop. I wonder who’s waiting for her on the other side of the barriers. The pleats of her skirt brush my hand.
I’ve ended up right on the lip of society. I’m clinging on with fingertips but I’ve seen people who’ve been chewed up and spat out the system altogether. No passport, no P60, no state pension. Nameless people that can’t even get an NHS doctor. Some receptionist saying ‘What’s yer name?’ and ‘What’s yer address?’ and that’s that.
Can’t get a house if you’ve no job. Can’t get a job if you’ve no address.
Best place to end up is jail. You’re still outwith society, removed from the civilised structure, but at least you get a roof. At least you’re not a nothing.
When I leave the underground station it’s night. In a supermarket I buy Grant’s gin and value tonic water. No food. I walk over the Clyde, on a footbridge, swigging from both bottles one after the other. It slips down my throat like heartburn.
Shuffling footsteps to my left and Benny appears, of all people, crazy-eyed and unsteady. ‘Magine findin yoo here,’ he says. ‘Howzitgaun? A wee drink wid be magic, ta.’
I never noticed before, but he’s toothless. Pink gums between dark chops. He looks at me, scuffs his feet. Sips from the bottle and looks up and down the road. No traffic. Sips again. Kicks me in the gut and rips the scarf from my neck, twisting me to the ground. Then he’s running away, scarf flapping loose and gin slopping from the bottle, over his knuckles, into the gutter.
I hold onto the railing and pull myself up. Below, the water is inky, churning currents and frothy spit, reflected streetlights dancing in the dark. I lean over the edge, see my breath catching and crystallising in the cold air. I close my eyes. Harold, I whisper. Harold, for God’s sake.
The Starry Night’s twenty nine inches by thirty six. Big. But not too big. I know every corner of the Kelvingrove, every doorway and crevice. Used to go there all the time. Exhibitions, opening nights, fundraisers. Even a few weddings– me and Harold sitting side by side in the pews, hands folded across our laps, ankles intertwined.
Prison’s not a place someone normally desires to be. And there’s people would rather live in a bin than behind bars, but that’s them, not me. I’m not used to this. I hate the cold. I miss walls and roofs. I miss interaction. If it’s a question of survival, sheer survival, some people can handle living on the streets but I can’t. I need the system. I need society, even if it’s one running behind prison walls.
Getting in the door’s the hard part, I reckon. Once you’re inside it you can kick up a fuss, cause some trouble and make sure you’re not released. But how to get there in the first place? I can’t murder. I couldn’t handle being in a wing surrounded by killers. Besides, it seems unnecessary.
Theft it is then. And what better to steal than the medium I’ve spent my life pretending to appreciate, pretending to create? A thousand and forty four square inches of canvas and oil. A hundred million dollars. Dutch fingerprints melted into the sky. That’s the curious thing about paint: you use it wet, have a slim window of time to mould and spread it just the way you like and then it sets, and it’s solid, for the rest of your days and many more besides.
You need to get things in order when you’ve got the chance, because if you leave it too long the game’s a bogey.
So I’ll steal the painting, get caught, and go to jail. Or steal the painting, get away with it, and sell it. I can’t really see a downside to either option.
I pick a cigarette butt out the bin and light up. Feel the smoke curling down my throat. Wander up and down the path alongside the museum. It’s closing time. The lights inside flicker and fade. The staff leave. Someone’s left a window open.
The sky’s dark blue and the lights from the city drown out the stars, swirling about in a yellow-orange haze. The university tower’s bold against the backdrop, reaching up and out with boughs of brick. Rain falls, oily and black.
‘Bigishoooo! Err yer bigishoo.’ But there’s nobody around. And even if there was, I’m invisible, remember? I merge into the shadows and slip inside.
Back to Top
Lovers of the Planet
Louise Halvardsson
I just need one more lover. One more person to join me and thousands of other lovers all over the planet. One more and I can keep my job. It’s dark and the streets are busy with the 9-to-5 lot making their way home. There’s a smell of rain in the air, mingling with the car fumes. I wouldn’t like to be stuck in an office or a shop all day, but sometimes I don’t get home until the late news starts.
I need to recruit at least three lovers a day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, considering that I call at hundreds of doors, but most people peer through the curtains when they hear the bell, and retreat to the back of their houses when they spot my green uniform and heart-shaped badge, refusing to open the door, even if I press the bell long and hard enough to give them tinnitus.
The house I’m outside now is part of a semi-detached row that could do with some decorating. This one is in a particular bad state, blue paint peeling from the door. There’s no bell, so I knock until my knuckles hurt. The curtains twitch and a couple of seconds later the door opens. A whiff of something stale, like unwashed sheets and cigarette smoke, comes towards me.
‘What do you want?’ A girl, a few years older than me, perhaps in her late twenties, is holding on to the door handle. She’s got the look I’d spent hours failing to recreate: the I-just-got-out-of bed-look. Red hair in a perfect mess, baggy T-shirt with Lucky Strike logo, nipples poking out like cigarette butts, and faded jeans with big holes in the knees. Natural holes. Before I got this job I used a pair of scissors to fix my Levi’s, and deliberately spilt paint on them to make myself look like a slacker.
It had failed. The woman at the job centre said I was fully capable of doing a day’s work.
‘What do you want?’ the girl asks again. I’m amazed that she hasn’t shut the door in my face yet. I smile. It’s part of the training: look friendly. I spent a morning practising smiles in front of the mirror before embarking on my first round of door-knocking. The smile I’m giving the red-haired girl is wide as a rainbow.
‘Have you heard about Lovers of the Planet?’ I ask. ‘We’re a new charity and it’s our job to find more lovers.’
The girl runs her fingers through her hair. They get stuck in a tangle above an ear pierced with a metal stud. She looks the type, who in the right mood would care enough for the planet to give it some money.
‘So what do you do?’ she asks, fingering the metal stud. ‘Rub yourself with soil and fuck rabbits?’
I ignore the teasing twinkle in her voice and step closer. She doesn’t move or leave any space for me to enter her house. It’s a shame, because usually once I’m inside people will sign anything just to get rid of me. My climate change rant lasts about five minutes, but my throat is dry and it sounds like I’ve got a cold.
‘We’re trying to persuade the government to subsidise supermarkets who buy local produce. You and I can make a difference because …’
‘Because what?’ The girl leans forward, leaving only an inch between our lips. To my surprise her breath smells of toothpaste. Spit flies out of her mouth and lands on my chin as she speaks.
‘This planet is already fucked. It doesn’t matter where my veggies come from. If I buy them from the farmer down the road some farmer in Kenya will suffer because he can’t export his green beans…’
‘That’s not the point!’ I step back and wipe my chin with my coat arm. ‘Think of all the jet fuel and the chemicals used to keep the food fresh. We need to make people aware of what they buy, and you can’t love this planet if you don’t make conscious choices. I’m sure you’ve got £1.50 to spare a week.’
The girl sighs and her tits sigh with her. ‘I don’t really work at the moment.’
‘So how come you can afford to smoke?’
‘I’ve given up.’
‘What do you mean you don’t really work?’
‘I do some odd jobs. Cleaning and stuff. Cash in hand, you know.’
‘Then you can spare £6 a month. It’s only £1.50 a week.’
‘That’s the coffee I have every Tuesday with my friends.’
‘You’ll make new ones,’ I say, averting my gaze from her nipples. ‘We’re one big family of lovers. There are monthly sessions where we gather to meditate and send out loving messages to all living beings and …’
‘Look.’ The girl gives me a sly smile. ‘You’re very cute; I used to believe in that stuff too when I was younger, but I don’t want to waste money on people who knock on my door in the middle of breakfast.’
I want to slap her for making my knees go as weak as my voice. It’s that slack attitude of hers, making me horny and angry at the same time. Looking at her is like seeing myself when I spent my days watching daytime TV and had ice-cream for breakfast. She’s taking me right back to the dream state I existed in then, but there’s no turning back and it’s not part of my job description to hit people.
‘Have a think about it,’ I say. ‘I’ll come back later. What about seven?’
‘You’re wasting your time, sweetie’ the girl says, beginning to pull the door shut. ‘I’m growing parsley in the back garden and that’s enough for me.’
‘Don’t you want everybody to grow their own parsley?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, but not everybody’s got a garden.’
‘A lot of people have patios or window sills or balconies. We’re starting a campaign about growing your own vegetables, distributing pots and soil.’
‘Have you got any leaflets?’ she asks. I can’t tell if I’ve won her over, of if she just wants to get on with breakfast.
‘We don’t do leaflets,’ I say. ‘It’s a waste of paper. You can look us up on the net. Have a read at loversoftheplanet.com and I’ll see you at seven.’ I walk off before she gets a chance to protest.
The rain hits me like a cold shower. It’s quarter past seven and I’m standing under a tree opposite the house with the blue door. My knuckles are cracked and sore from knocking for the past quarter of an hour. I bet she’s gone back to bed with ear plugs in.
She’s my last hope: compared to the football-fan who was going to call the police or the man who set his dog on me, she was really friendly.
It feels like there’s a damp towel stuffed under my coat. It was supposed to be waterproof. If I get a cold I can’t work and if I can’t work I won’t get paid. I try to memorise what it said in the little green handbook: As a fundraiser I’m happy to be on the hourly minimum wage and accept that there’s no sick-leave. I’m doing this because I love this planet and when you love someone you should be prepared to get wet for their sake.
The rain is getting heavier. I want to go home and burn the little green handbook just to keep me warm. I decide that I can make up for this day by recruiting four lovers tomorrow, but just as I’m about to go, I spot her coming round the corner, loaded down with Lidl carrier bags.
The rain doesn’t seem to bother her; she’s wearing her T-shirt and jeans like a bikini and walks as if she was swimming down the street. I watch as she enters the house and shuts the door behind her.
I estimate how long it’ll take her to unpack the groceries and when that time has elapsed I knock again.
The door swings open, making me stumble backwards and grab onto the wall to steady myself. She’s wearing a bath robe and her hair is like a rainforest.
‘I thought you’d given up by now,’ she says, sounding amused rather than annoyed, leaving the door wide open. ‘I’m in the middle of cooking.’
I follow her through the narrow hallway into a tiny square kitchen that stinks of fish. My stomach rumbles. I haven’t had fish or any other meat for years. The girl shuffles over to the cooker where a line of fish fingers are hissing in the pan. I lean against the table on which the bags from Lidl are still sitting. I bet there’s not a single organic or fair trade item in them. On the other hand who am I to judge: the Executive Director of Lovers of the Planet wouldn’t be happy if she saw the Coke cans in my fridge either.
‘Did you have a look at our website?’ I ask, feeling as hopeful as a school girl waiting to hear that she’s passed an exam.
‘No, I was shopping.’
‘Fish fingers is the worst kind of fish you could be eating,’ I say. ‘It’s just batter.’
‘I thought that was a good thing, you know.’ The girl turns the fish fingers over with a spatula. ‘Not as many fish get killed as if I was having a fillet.’
‘Are you making fun of me?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘Then stop talking rubbish.’
‘It’s quite a rubbish job you’ve got, isn’t it?’ The girl turns and points at me with the spatula. One of her tits falls out of the robe, pale and big like the ostrich egg I once ate.
I look down. The rain from my coat and my hair has made a little puddle by my feet. I don’t want to go back outside.
‘£1.50 a week is a packet of fish fingers,’ I say. ‘Come on, you can afford to become a lover.’
‘Fish fingers are only 99p in Lidl,’ the girl says, moving closer, so close that her bare toes nudges my wet boots. ‘How much do you get an hour?’
‘W-what do you mean?’ The oil from the girl’s raised spatula drips onto my coat. I take a step to the side.
‘You deserve something better,’ she says, dropping the spatula which hits the floor with a crack. I open my mouth like a goldfish, but can’t speak. The ostrich egg is close enough for me to lick.
‘If you really want to make a difference you should go to Africa and help at a school or something,’ she says, taking hold of my heart-shaped badge. ‘How much did this cost?’
‘I-I don’t know.’
‘And what about your uniform?’ She grabs my wrists and pins me to the table. My head is crammed between the carrier bags and I feel stiff like a frozen fish finger.
‘Y-you don’t have to join,’ I say. ‘Or if you do, you could cancel your membership anytime.’
‘Sure.’ The girl heaves herself on top of me. Her red tangles fall over my face and her breath is warm against my cheek.
‘I can become your lover for free,’ she whispers in my ear.
I wriggle and kick my feet in the air, but her grip is tight. My mobile is in my inner pocket. The Executive Director told us to call the office if we experienced any trouble, but there’s something about the rain smattering against the window, and the fact that I’ve been on my feet since the morning that makes me enter that unemployed dream state. The girl’s tits are warm and heavy against my coat and are beginning to thaw me out. I close my eyes and focus on my breathing as she lets go of my wrists and unzips my uniform.
Back to Top
A Champion Returns
Mark Romasko
It had just passed 3 o’clock, but in this corner of the snooker hall it could have been any time of day or night. What windows there were stood guard over the pool tables, the view outside providing a frame of reference for those who would stay for just one or two hours. Here, fifty paces, ten stairs and one heavy door away, there were no such distractions. The brass lights over the tables illuminated them in overlapping circles. The rest of the room was dimly lit, making everything else – players, tables, drinks alike – supporting actors to the baize.
John was snookered, and when John was snookered he didn’t play in a hurry. He paced half around the table, and then back; leaned in, straightened up, coughed, scratched his neck, cleared his throat. A model of concentration.
I took a sip of my drink. Warm. Better finish it quickly and get another one. New notes from the cashpoint in my back pocket. “Done me up like a kipper,” said John, to no-one in particular. I held my cue so that the tip blocked out a lamp near me, closing one eye to see the light feeding around it as though it were an eclipse in miniature.
I only had a tenner on this one. I’d wanted to go for twenty, but John wouldn’t have it. In fact, I’d had a job getting him to accept the ten. The man wasn’t short of a couple of bob, either; he’d passed round a picture of his BMW on his phone a while ago. Only one of those little ones, mind, but still. This had caused Aaron to start showing us his Honda Civic, gleaming in silver. He was a Honda man all over. It had been shot so you could see that his house was detached. “So we can’t hear the neighbours. Well, more so they can’t hear me!” He was in a band or something. Playing this Friday. Would I come? Maybe, I said, but I knew that it was too far away.
Aaron had been more keen on the reunion; apart from me, I mean, I was the one who organised it. John had needed some persuading. In the end he said he would come, but he’d have to go home by 10 so he could get a train. I told him that the Hurricane had died and we were doing it in his honour, but it made no difference. He said he had to work. Who works on a Sunday, double time or not?
I finished my pint, stood up and took some empties back to the bar. It was a habit I’d picked up working in a pub in Stepney, back in the seventies. If a man takes empties back to the bar off his own back he’s worked in a pub before, odds on.
“Same again.” Behind me came a murmur, then an ‘oh…’, the type of noise that told me that John had missed, but not by much. When I got back with the tray he was placing the cue ball carefully behind the green, from where it had just come.
“Hey, Peter Ebdon,” I said, “slow down a minute!” He hated being called that. “Come over here. A toast.”
“To what?” John straightened, came toward me. “To us?”
“To the Hurricane, you plank. The greatest.”
“Oh, right. Well, to the Hurricane!”
We clinked glasses, drank. John went back to the table and, after what seemed like a month, played again. It came off two cushions and rolled slowly into a group of reds. We cheered and clapped and slapped him on the back and the barman looked over at us with a small smile.
Evening was starting to draw in, but I only knew because I’d been for a walk. I had beaten John twice. Aaron I had beaten the first time, then the second had gone down to the wire. I would have won it but the black had gone in the jaws and come out again and then he had fluked a snooker he didn’t even mean. I said I was going to get some fresh air but really I was pissed off and wanted to get out of there for a minute. It had been double or nothing as well so it was as good as forty quid.
When I came back Aaron must have just beaten John because the table was empty and he was strutting around a bit. I think the guy reckons he’s Mick Jagger even though he was born in Bristol and fixed computers or something. Anyway we had a break to get some food and we began reminiscing. “Do you remember the night…” started John, and he is getting into it a bit, but he is telling it all wrong so I stop him and tell it myself and do it right.
It was 1982, the local championships. Usually there’d be twenty, thirty entrants, but people had all been watching the Hurricane, God rest his soul, and now any idiot with a cue thought that he could play snooker. So they had limited the number of players at sixty-four, and we had to start earlier to get all the games in. Now the first guy I had, he was useless. I finished him off five nil, and not once did he make more than thirty. Come the end, he looked distraught, so I didn’t push it. But that was my first whitewash.
The second guy was a bit better. He was Irish as they come but he was a good lad. I beat him five one and he shook my hand and bought me a Guinness. Never seen him again. Third guy rocks up with this custom built cue and a red waistcoat with flowers on it. Stands there drinking a gin and tonic and whistling. Anyway I beat the guy five nil and tell him to get his pants down ‘cause it’s a whitewash. He won’t and I offer him my hand and he walks away. First class prick.
Now I was into the last eight and, let me tell you, this guy was the worst of the lot. He was called John and he played like Peter Ebdon. You have never seen a slower, more doddery old player than this guy. I don’t know what he’s up to now – I guess it takes him an hour to put his pants on in the morning. Fair play to him, he did take a couple of frames off me.
Everything takes so long with this guy that it was getting late now, and in this place we don’t drink water. It’s the same for everyone – it’s just what you do, isn’t it? Well, I’d been watching the guy I had next and he’d been on the orange juice all day. Now to me, that’s just cheating. Drinking’s just a part of the game. But some people won’t get into the spirit. I offered him a pint at the start of the round and he looked at me like I’d spat in his face and just shook his head. So I thought, right, you little toerag, you’re going down.
Trouble is, he was quite good. He wasn’t the best potter but he wouldn’t leave you anything. He would snooker you and then just stand back with this big smirk on his face. After the first couple of frames he would start heckling in between shots, trying to needle. He got to four three up and came right up in my face and laughed. So I went away and got a break of eighty and kicked his arse in the next one, then I went and gave him some back. Said, “How do you like that?” But he just turned away.
Now it was the decider. No-one could take control of it. It must have been about thirty all. He was needling me but I didn’t listen. Then he pulled off this great snooker, out of nowhere. Fair play to the guy, it was a great shot. He’d done me up like a kipper and I could see him looking pleased with himself, drinking orange juice in the corner.
I just shut my eyes and thought, what would the Hurricane do? Suddenly, it all looked so obvious. It was difficult, but if you played it exactly right… Anyway, I just went for it. I hit it and it came off three cushions and rolled into the reds. Now most of the pub was watching and they all started cheering. The other guy, he must have thought there was no way out from there, because his face looked like he’d just lost his house.
So I beat him quite easily from there and I go to shake his hand. “No way,” he says, “you’re a cheat.” I pushed him and told him to take it back, but he said it again. So I punched him and as he was going down I hit him across the head with the cue. He was on the floor now so I picked up the white and threw it at him. Knocked his front teeth out and he lay there and people pulled me back. The barman nodded to the bouncer, who was this big black guy, and he just said, ‘Come with me.’ So I didn’t have much choice. The man was huge! Deepest voice you ever heard.
So he leads me through this door and up some stairs and we’re in some kind of office. I thought he was going to beat me up, that was that. He said, “You need to calm down. You drunk?” I said that I’d had a few but I wasn’t drunk. He said, “You need to calm down. Me and the manager, we’ve both got money on you. So take it easy. You want some of this?” So he got some of the white stuff out of his pocket and cut up a couple of lines. “Take that.” I had one and waited for him to have his. “Both for you, my friend. You need to win this for us. Go and do us proud.” Then he smiled and he must have had about six gold teeth. Wonder how he got them? So I had the other one and went down.
When I came back the last guy was still there looking for trouble so the bouncer threw him out the door and gave him a couple to make sure he didn’t come back. Some people are just stupid, you know? Anyway, from then on I was unstoppable. The guy who made the final was pretty good, O’Brien or something. Another Irish fellow. Played some proper competitive tournaments and everything. Didn’t bother me though, I went two in front early on and started pulling off some outrageous shots. The crowd were loving it. In the end I won five two and the guy bought me a brandy and said, “You see this man? We’ve got the Hurricane and the Whirlwind… Well, this guy’s the Typhoon!” And they gave me three cheers and everyone wanted to buy me a drink. I got two hundred and fifty for the prize pot, back when that was a lot of money. Cash in hand. I felt like I’d made it.
I don’t know when I left but I decided to get a cab to London. We were going through the West End and I told the driver to take me to a casino. When we got there some guy tried to stop me as I was going in, so I showed him the money and he let me through. I went on the roulette for a bit and I was doing OK, breaking even. There was this girl by the bar and I bought her a few drinks and she came over to the table I was on.
I must have had about two hundred left at this point and I just thought I should go for broke. So I put it all on red and the guy span the wheel. Suddenly I thought of the bouncer in the snooker club and all I could see was this black face smiling with the gold teeth and I moved it onto black, but the guy must have said ‘No more bets’ because he wanted me to move it back. I said to him, “Come on, I’m an honourable man and this is my one chance.” Something like that. It must have worked because he gave me a nod and left me alone.
It landed on black and I thought that I could kiss that bouncer if I saw him again. I just jumped around for a bit and the girl took my arm and said, “Come on, let’s go.” So I cashed in the winnings and she said, “We’re going to the Ritz.” We went to the Ritz and ordered up a lobster to the room at three in the morning. Next day I had enough left to go to the Ivy so I took her out I had foie gras and pheasant and I asked her to move in with me. She said yes and I felt like the happiest man alive. Six months later I asked her to marry me. Mrs Liza Robinson. Quite a ring to it, don’t you think?
“So how is Liza?” said John.
“She’s doing alright. Don’t hear from her much. She’s in Edinburgh now.”
“Her kid just got into St Andrews?”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. Smart guy.”
“Sarah just got into Nottingham. Says…”
I let Aaron pick up my side of the conversation and left them to it. Kids. Who needs them? Either they do well and make you feel inadequate, or they screw it up and everyone blames you. More trouble than they’re worth.
John left soon afterwards. I played Aaron a couple of times and got twenty quid off him, then I got us both a whisky. He got a tenner back off me then said he had to go about half ten. I got him to stay for one more and won the tenner back and then he shook my hand and left.
I invited everyone else in the place to have a go and a couple of guys played for a frame and I beat them both pretty easily. Then no-one would challenge me so I just played by myself for a while, but I was getting a bit bored of it and when the barman called time I didn’t hang around.
Maybe it was Aaron showing me his new BMW earlier that did it but when I saw my Golf parked in the drive it was as though I could make out every speck of rust, every bit of peeling paint. There was a little crack in the windscreen that I’d never got round to fixing. If it had been on the driver’s side I would have got onto it right away. But it didn’t bother me and no-one else had really complained. If they gave me a bonus this year I’d see whether I could get something a bit better. Something with a bit of class.
When I got home I made some cheese on toast and stuck a bit of chilli on top and opened up the Johnny Walker. All the lights were off in the other houses and it seemed far too quiet and to be honest it was making me a bit nervous. So I put the Pogues on the stereo and sang along a bit, but after a while the guy next door started banging on the wall so I turned it down a bit and stopped singing and poured myself another whisky.
I don’t know why but I found myself standing in front of my trophy cabinet. Well, I call it a cabinet, but to be honest it’s more of a shelf. There it was, my gold cup from the local championship in 1982, engraved Mark ‘The Typhoon’ Robinson… then the gold cups from 1983 and 1984. Next to that, a photo of me punching the air as I took a frame off Ray Reardon. It was the first round of the Masters and I’d get another two off him. Great times. A picture of Liza next to that, lying on a beach somewhere in Rhodes and toasting the camera with a cocktail. Then a silver for the local championships the next year, then… nothing. A few DVDs. I stood there for a while trying to think back but my mind wasn’t playing along and kept drifting off somewhere else.
I got out the video of the Hurricane winning in ’82 and put it in the VCR. It must have been a bit worn as the picture was crackly at the start and the sound changed pitch like a passing ambulance, but it soon sorted itself out.
I was having a few whiskies and getting into it and shouting out my support, then the neighbour started banging on the wall again so I banged back, but from that point I just clenched my fists and clapped to myself when the Hurricane pulled off a good shot. I got about half way through and then I must have fallen asleep because I didn’t remember any more. The lights and the TV were on but at least I’d remembered to close the door. One out of three isn’t bad. When I woke up my hand was still on the bottle of whisky and I felt like shit.
Back to Top
The Scarlet Heart
Lynne Voyce
Alice Clisswell lost her heart
He threw it in the donkey cart.
Kick the barrel
With boots of Spanish leather
Brought seven hundred miles
Over land and sea
Dangling around his neck
As he walked up the lane
And set eyes on me.
My vagabond lover.
My heart.
Gone.
Kick it until it topples.
There.
There it goes.
Our father, who art in heaven …
God forgive me for I have sinned.
I have lost myself.
I am scarlet.
Mariah makes the bed with the precision of a bored and disappointed woman: if she is slapdash the painstaking structures of her life will collapse. The glint of her wedding ring in the dim static bedroom, as she smoothes the eiderdown, reminds her of this: it is heavy on her finger. If only last week’s letter hadn’t hinted at escape.
She looks out of the window, through the November twilight to the village green. Genteel in the warmer months, now a dark little island; at its centre the Scarlet Oak, born not long after Christ himself: trunk a black hollow, naked winter crown scratching the black-eye sky. Her home, Scarlet Cottage, is named after it. Two girls eke the last minutes from the day; breath a stream of laughter, ponytails flying, careless feet lodged in a makeshift noose.
Harold strides down the pavement; everything moving at speed, but for his brief case: ballast to body and mind. Uninterested, she watches the girls get off their swing, stagger, giggle, pull the rope down and drag it to the red door across the green.
“I’m home!” His sensible footfalls are on the crooked stairs. “Darling!” He stands at the bedroom door, while the cat, Mab – having appeared from nowhere – circles his ankles like a length of black rope. “I’ve a great idea: a documentary on Scarlet Cottage.”
“Our own home? A bit cheap, don’t you think?” She loves the house: the very bricks, beams and clay of the place. She felt an affinity with the building the moment she walked in. Biting her tongue she straightens the curtains and glances back out of the window. At first she sees nothing, her eyes unable to readjust but then there is a flash of red. A kite? An anoraked child? Wind blown trash?
Cupping her hands, she presses her face to the cold glass – gasps. A young woman is hanging from a branch of the Scarlet Oak like a swinging pendulum. Mariah can see every detail in the evening grey: vibrant auburn hair, full-skirted red taffeta dress, white petticoat hem, the laced eyelets of the delicate ebony boots. The girl’s indigo eyes wide open look straight at her from an impossibly pale face, marked with vein blue lips. Dead.
“Jesus Christ.” She turns. Harold isn’t there. She turns back, sick with panic, but the girl is gone.
Mariah runs her finger over the flamboyant signature and dreams of him: Vincent. “Can we meet?” he has written. Life with Vincent would have been very different.
She places the letter in the bureau, next to her passport. She hasn’t used the latter for years. Harold won’t go on holiday in case he misses an opportunity at work. Mariah dreams of travel: to the Valley of the Kings, the Golden Temple, Ayres Rock; wearing crisp white linen and straw panama. She often imagines herself different: dancing in high-heels, hair loose, an orchid at her ear; or the raconteur, waving an expressive Gitane. But mostly she pictures herself with children.
“Kids tie you down,” Harold often says, his voice softly domineering, “I’m ambitious darling. Let’s wait eh?” But they’ve lived here nine years and she’s still waiting.
“I saw you looking at this in Grey’s, happy anniversary.” Harold hands Mariah a narrow box, runs his hand over Mab; inside a necklace of fire opals flickers in the hearth light. He takes it, puts it round her neck, his breath on her cheek: “You look lovely.” They turn towards the black window, study their reflection. Momentarily she thinks she sees the hanging girl, delineated by the headlamps of a passing car but it is just a trick of the light. “Thank you Harold.” She shrugs free then heads upstairs to put on red silk, black velvet and to find a way to keep trying.
The new moon is a slip of silver in the sky and Harold isn’t home. He rarely is. “Research,” he had said. Mariah marvels at the necklace’s ever-changing stones as she catches sight of her reflection. She had looked at it in the window of Greys for just a moment. Harold had noticed. But he hasn’t noticed her boredom, something far more apparent.
There is the singular sound of an owl outside. It agitates the cat. She hears Nana Tilda’s half forgotten, boreal voice – ‘the hoot of an owl bodes ill” – shivers.
Mariah is superstitious: childhood voices are hard to silence. She grew up not far from here with her grandmother: an only child, in a lonely row of railway cottages, her sole company a rattling train every seven minutes past the hour. The neighbours – superstitious old women, prematurely widowed to Capstan Full Strength and blue-collar work – took pleasure in frightening her. “Break your egg shell,” they’d whisper, “it lets the devil out”; “don’t pass on the stairs”; “don’t break mirrors”; “don’t put new shoes on the table”. Every day infused with the fear of ill luck. If ever she has children she won’t fill their heads with such nonsense. If ever.
To cheer her self, she goes to the bureau, takes out the letter – re reads it. This is her chance of escape. She takes a slice of paper: “Dear Vincent…” But as the words form there is a flicker outside. Red. Please not again. Drawn by dreadful curiosity she goes to the window. It is the girl, swinging in the evening drizzle: hair matted, booted feet twitching, lips blue, eyes a luminous void.
“No! No, go away!” Mariah closes her eyes, uses the only means of spiritual protection she knows: “Our father who art in heaven…” There is a moment of weird perception – a collage of owls, cats, the girl’s dead face. “Amen.” Her eyes snap open. Is the spell broken? The girl has gone but the sense of foreboding has not.
Harold arrives home, wearing a sodden, satisfied grin: “I found the grave of a girl, at the far end of the churchyard; where it used to be unconsecrated.” He unbuttons his coat. “Alice Clisswell. She lived in this house all her life. First with her mother, then her husband as well. Committed suicide when she was nineteen.” Harold doesn’t notice his wife’s ghostly expression; doesn’t notice her crumple into the chair trembling. Instead he sucks his teeth at Mab, pats his lap. “Hung herself,” he says simply. “They keep the suicide note in the church. Adultery: with some drifter while her husband was at Trafalgar. The bloke moved on. Broke her heart. Of course there was the guilt, the scandal. It’s got prime time BBC2 written all over it.”
But all Mariah can hear is the intermittent hoot of an owl, far away.
Mariah drinks coffee while Harold ignores her. She breathes in home: cat in the inglenook, the flood of morning sun, the smell of slowly wilting anniversary flowers, (odd to smell spring in the midst of winter).
She has a half memory of when they viewed the house. There had been flowers then: jars of sweet peas, freesias, pansies, along the windowsills, on the tables. She had fallen in love with the place. Mrs Petit stood by the fireplace, round hipped, kids hanging from her like tree decorations, eyes and hair wired with divorce: “The children love flowers, they make perfume from petals. There won’t be many flowers where we’re going.” Mariah didn’t understand Mrs Petit’s sorrow at the time: the woman had all that Mariah wanted: the insistent, persistent, inconvenient love of children.
“Do you want children Harold?” Mariah had asked walking back from the Odeon some ten years before.
“Of course.”
They’d known each other six months. Vincent had gone to ‘find himself’ and she couldn’t bare the loneliness: a symptom of the endless days alone with Grandma.
“When?” she’d asked, as she turned her newly acquired engagement ring so it resembled a wedding band.
“When the time’s right.”
It never has been.
Was the longing for children that day with Mrs Petit the reason why now she can’t quite remember what was said? Mrs Petit had mentioned the girl. Maybe. Yes, Mariah was sure.
A raven crashes against the small casement window, startles her; brings her back to the present. It tumbles then limps off across the oyster sky.
“Bloody hell, that was weird,” says Harold as he kneels on the hearth and constructs a fire, “Oh, I’m meeting Bill, this afternoon, we’re scouting locations for the background stuff.”
“Would that include the pub?”
“Possibly.”
“I’ll stay here – talk to the walls shall I?”
“Don’t you want me to go?”
“I’m alone a lot, that’s all…”
“I thought that friend was coming.” He prods the coals.
“I couldn’t face the children running about.”
“Oh.” He says nothing else. The mention of children always silences him. He puts the poker down and goes upstairs.
Mariah goes to an ancient lime washed wall, places her two hands flat against it. In the fabric of the house she finds the comfort she never finds from Harold.
It is easier to reply to Vincent than not she thinks as she stares at the blank paper; easier to find a split edge to breath through – than to unfold the whole thing with Harold and try again. In the morning she will pack her bags and go.
The fire blazes, Mab lies on the hearth, her machine gun purr melting into the soporiphic air. But outside the rain clatters on the windows, the wind howls through the thatch and a sulphurous flash floods the house, followed – twenty counts later – by a barely audible crack of thunder.
“Dear Vincent.” The storm builds; she turns the mirror on top of the desk, so as not to let the devil in, and continues, “I think of you often.” The weather pulls at the lead casements, rattles them furiously. “I will…” One of the window latches breaks free: the leaded pane bangs violently in its frame. Mab gets up startled, dashes towards the stairs.
Unconcerned by what she might see Mariah stands and goes to the window, consumed by the sad, thrill of replying. She’d summoned the girl in the red dress herself, linked her imminent adultery to something she’d heard years ago. But as she looks through the window, the girl is there, tossed by the deluge. Through the dark their eyes meet. And Mariah understands.
Turning, not caring from where the image has sprung, just knowing she has to rid herself of it, she snatches up Vincent’s letter, snatches up her reply. The storm pelts the house as if it will sweep it away. She screws up the bruised papers, ink bleeding onto her fingers. The lights flicker and fail. The teeming rain is white noise. “Our father,” she begins for the second time in a week and throws the letters on the flames. They leap in ecstasy while the papers twist and curl in a last dance.
“Amen,” Mariah whispers.
She sinks to the floor, presses her cheek to the cold stone flags of the hearth. “I’ll stay,” she whispers, “I’ll stay and try again.” After what seems like minutes, she pushes herself up, returns to the rain-splashed window. The girl is gone; the rain has slowed; the wind passes over.
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