Duck, Son and Pinker

'The Wanderer' for Antlers Press

Sabotage Reviews on The Audience Member

UNSPOKEN

Your earliest, greatest (and perhaps only) artistic act was performed on a late April afternoon soon before you learnt to speak.

Were you nearing two already then? Sitting at Grandpa’s table, your legs swinging freely beneath your chair. The house, cold, even in spring, filled with that faint pang of gas that always carries you back there. The overcooked, cooling meat succumbing slowly to Grandpa’s knife, his voice booming, pale plates quivering beneath the patient grasp of your family. Lunch, everyone knew, was served as an after thought to his politics. You watched the fat, slick Labrador watching his hand and salivating.  

You yawned, turned your head away, didn’t listen to him speaking. Nairobi and Kampala and Mau Mau and Uhuru… the strange words had already become familiar, unlistened to.

It was too soon for you to understand the way one sentence can sometimes contain two truths, the way that stories can do battle with themselves. Too early to know that putting into words can be a means of seeking sense in chaos.

You did not yet comprehend the mystery of time: that this man with hairs in his ears and nasal cavities, and the man who was present at the end of empire, in Kenya and in Palestine, were one and the same. Like each of us a stitch that folds time back on itself, creases it- and then leaves it to run smooth again.

No one noticed you slip from the table, not even the dog responded to your tug of its tail, your invitation to play.

Outside the spring day was sunny and fresh. A damp smell of newly cut grass made you wrinkle your nose a bit and sneeze. You felt your family watching as you plodded across the patio, past the flowerbed where for a moment you stopped, bent down to prod a fleshy worm glowing against the soil, crushed it under the heel of your mary janes. For the first time you felt the power of commanding a gaze.

Let us imagine the expression that played across that innocent face as you turned your back to the dining room window, lowered your pants, squatted in your animal way, farted and then deposited on your Grandpa’s flawless garden, a not insubstantial turd. The young artist, the juvenile defecator on the English country lawn: finding, in the absence of speech, a more succinct form of self expression.  I like to imagine you smiling.

* * *

In adolescence it was harder, these oft repeated scenes at the dining table that had become altercations. You had lost your art. You found your words clattered on your teeth and fell from your mouth, hard as marbles. You were too old to be indulged, or ignored, and were then merely tolerated. That was the beginning of your own odyssey.

Others spoke of finding themselves, but your journeys were a constant dislocation. There were cities and sights that you’d read about in travel guides but it wasn’t the places that held you but the spaces in between. The night train and the border crossing. Moments like the evening in Kisumu when the rain fell so heavily that the lights went out and the water was a wall that assured your solitude. Even now they cling to your nose and tongue.

It wasn’t easy to leave Grandpa behind. You found yourself drawn to the route he’d taken, driving from Nairobi to Kampala and beyond, through the African night, so black the Milky Way formed a pale band across the sky. He’d struck out alone, left Granny in Kenya, sleeping with her knife beneath her pillow, having nightmares about your infant father being kidnapped, dreams that seeped into memory.

He was present as you hauled your heavy backpack from overcrowded ferry to the train, there in the nodding stranger on your shoulder on the minibus. He was present in the sense you had of your own audacity, in your secret pride at marking the soil with your footprints for the very first time.

His bombast followed you. You attempted to counter it by listening. Men and women in cafes, shops and bars, they all had a story, and you were their palimpsest. And then you found yourself in Kigali, that place where it began with names. With lists of names. But the bleach bone corpses that littered the land: they were forever unknowable. Unspeakable. You understood what it really meant to be speechless. You walked as if on an unmarked grave. A catch in your throat for an epitaph.

You spent a night in the national stadium, where you saw people’s bodies wracked and sinewed with the strain of their testimonies. Words became weapons. The weight of the stories was actual, and you maintained your vigil as the survivors collapsed around you, beneath the burden. By the time the colour of the sky began to change again- that dirty dishwater shade before the dawn- you were drained. Your tears had been rung from you. You could listen no more. You sat in the concrete stand with your knees clutched to you as those that were left drifted away, to return, you supposed, to their every day lives.

At last you felt nothing. Just two of you remained. It seemed natural this man should take your hand, lead you to the comfort of a motel room, to the faint musky trace of countless foreign bodies. Natural that you shouldn’t share your names. You shared beer instead.

Then: with desperate teeth and sweat you drew sound from him. That little leap over death. Gasped like your last breath. You felt the lusty thrill of conquest, and because you were strangers, how easy it was for you to love him, with all of your heart.

 

* * *

 

You see your grandfather for the last time soon after. Often you’ve imagined this time when dialogue exists no longer, often regretted the conversations you’ll never have- long before they became impossible. Questions overwhelmed by the violence of your desire for his history. The hush became a scab you longed to pick.

And now, approaching him down the chlorine-smelling corridor, seeing his slender silhouette smudged on the autumn sky, you understand he has become as all things that are passed. A Chinese whisper. A shadow on a cave wall.

Still, there’s a new peace in the quiet between you. Now he’s lost control of his tongue and his bladder, he somehow seems more real, more flesh and blood. You watch the sun set over the hospital garden, see how the light creeping out of everything turns it strange.

His face glows: it is marked with lines, certain as maps. You imagine the inside of that liver spotted scalp. The past like the stars at a great distance, set against darkness. Defiant of the human will to string them together, turn them into constellations, to reorient the void.

He takes your hands in his: they are covered in purple rivers. The skin is still tanned, and so is yours, you notice, as if the sun had coloured your DNA. But his eyes are clear and he looks at you with the astonishing, momentary perspicacity of the demented:

“What will her name be?”

His touch drops to your stomach, where you’ve just begun to feel it, smaller than an acorn: a life. Smaller than an acorn. But, even now, there are translucent, fleshy fingers that someday may grasp a pen, write a name. Even now this wordless, sexless thing, no bigger than an acorn is preparing to write its name.

When your prayers weren’t answered (after your long two minute wait, clutching the test in a public toilet cubicle), strangely the first emotion was one you hadn’t forseen: joy.

Small as nothing, almost. You began to tell it stories. You whispered to it, the miracle of life: that from tiny seeds great oak trees grow. Unfathomable mysteries, like the way the birds hang moveless on summer evenings in the sky, the secrets of the universe that cause you to view science with awe and mistrust in equal measure.

Sometimes you are silent with one another, and your fingers pressed together on your belly form a heart.

There is room for silence.

But you give this little thing a name. With it you conjure planets and empires and histories. With one word the world stops turning and everything finds its place.

‘Tumaini’

A slight furrow in Grandpa’s brow, and then a flicker of recognition, as the word rushes back to him on a bridge of memory: a past language, a past life.

‘Hope’, he says, quietly. He smiles.

head of the table

At some point, either early in the morning or very, very late at night, when the party has finished and the guests have finally gone home, Ursula, barefoot and thirsty, steps into the empty kitchen.

She moves towards the sink but when she sees the table, still bright in the moonlight, she stops.

Nothing is in its place.

The surface is crowded with soup bowls and serving dishes and bottles. Balanced on the edge of the ashtray: a cigarette, marked with coral lipstick, half smoked, tilted as if to be seized up again at any moment.  A coffee cup has been left on the table without a coaster. Ursula sees the dark ring on the pale surface, the liquid marking the wood, and she understands that something is terribly wrong.

She steps towards her Dad’s place at the head of the table and with a glance over her shoulder, a quiet giggle, sits down. This would be unthinkable normally, but it is clear (from the disarray, the coffee cup), that it is the sort of night where all things have been turned on their head.

For a moment she plays at being host. She picks up the end of a cigar and holds it between her thumb and forefinger, gesticulating like her Dad when he’s got something important to say.

There’s a wine glass in front of her, and she stands with it in hand to give an imaginary toast, taps it with the edge of her knife for attention, and then, the ringing sound echoing across the tiles is startling. She sits back down hard in her Dad’s seat, feels a bruise start to spread on her coccyx.

The chair from her Mum’s place lies on its back abandoned, its legs thrusting painfully, pathetically in the air.

There is a pool of dark liquid in the bottom of the glass, thick with sediment. With a quick movement she tips it out. She watches as it begins to leech across the wood, sinking into the grain.

Her dad told her when he bought the table that it was designed to last. That it was an investment- an heirloom. He’d run his hand over the French oak surface in the shop, tracing the fine groves with his fingers. Rapped it with his knuckles. Solid he said. You don’t get many like this anymore, he said. This table will still be here long after we’ve all been forgotten.  

The wine is spreading out now, forming a stain that could be a fist, from a certain angle. With the end of her Dad’s fork she draws the liquid out like a middle finger sticking up and smirks. Now her Dad, or whoever ends up sitting in his place, will have to spend their whole meal staring at it. Good, she thinks. The sort of people who sit at the heads of tables are usually the sort who’d deserve it.

A tumbler lies in pieces at the foot of the wall, as if it has been thrown. Ursula curls her naked toes underneath her. The moonlight is catching on the shards, and they look like tiny diamonds.

She thinks she remembers slamming doors and raised voices, the crunch of gravel beneath her Dad’s spinning car wheels, someone crying. But then again, she could have dreamt it.

Her throat is parched.

* * *

Her Mum never lets go of it, that table. Soon after, they move into a much smaller house, and then later, an even smaller one. She lugs the great weight of it around wherever they go. It is always too big for the rooms it ends up in. They live around it. It makes Ursula feel small.

Her Mum stands on guard against nail polishes, sharp knives, anything that might leave a mark. ‘It’ll be yours that, one day’, she says to Ursula, confiscating scissors, and it sounds like a threat.

No matter how many waxes and polishes she tries, the stain never goes. Ursula finds her sometimes late at night, scrubbing at it furiously, but it only seems to make it worse. Ursula gets into the habit of running her fingers across it every time she passes, which drives her Mum mad, and she tries to stop herself, but she can’t escape the feeling that if she does something disastrous will happen, and it becomes reflexive.

As she gets older, Ursula pleads with her Mum to sell it. Time has passed, and tables like this are valuable, even ones with fist shaped blemishes. Her mum says she can’t understand the way that young people give things up so easily. The glibness of it all, she says, it’s unbearable. There are arguments again, slamming doors and tears late at night.

In the end, long after Ursula has left home, her Mum finds a place by the sea like she’s always wanted. A little fisherman’s cottage with one small bedroom and bathroom upstairs. On the day she moves in, as much as they try, there is no way of getting the table inside.

It ends up in the middle of the front garden. Mum stands with her arms crossed, looking at it, for a long time. Ursula watches her back from the kitchen window. The sea beyond her is furious with wind, and her Mum, in her bobbled cardigan and slacks, looks determined as King Canut.

Eventually Ursula brings her out a cup of tea and stands beside her.  

“Perhaps we could ask the carpenter in the village to help,” she says, quietly.

The waves thrash the shoreline, pulling the pebbles into their gut, spewing them up, pulling them back, over and over again.

“Leave it here,” her Mum says.

“It’ll get rain on it,” Ursula says.

“Let it,” she says.

So the beautiful old table, the family heirloom, stays outside. It gets beaten by the weather, the wind and the spray of the sea. In time, the wood begins to crack and fade. Weeds grow up around the legs, so it looks like something that has actually sprouted from the ground, like it has been there forever, a fairytale thing, mythic.

When the grandchildren come, her Mum sits them down around it with thick felt tip pens and thin paper, unctuous pots of paint that get spilt easily. She hosts extravagant teddy bears picnics for them, wild dollies’ tea parties where there are never any drinks coasters. The garden is filled with laughter.

Then one day, finally, it belongs to Ursula. After the funeral she goes and takes Dad’s place- it has always been Dad’s place, and neither of them has ever really taken to sitting in it. She thinks of all that has unfolded around the table. She remembers the night that the mark was made and puts her hand on top of it. It has almost vanished now. It is almost imperceptible. 

The Wild Dogs

The flag appeared overnight. The man saw how the townsfolk looked up at it, decided not to notice, pulled their coats up around their ears and hurried across the square like leaves scattered by the wind.

 

The thing to do would have been to forget all about it, but that wasn’t easy for the man, not the way things were. His flat was small. The flag unfurled against the white clouds at his window like a fresh wound. He might have gone out, but he didn’t have anywhere to go, and no money, either. He could have closed his curtains but he’d never thought to buy any - never had need of them, before. He was a light sleeper, and was content for his day to begin with the rising of the sun. So for sometime, they lived together, him and the flag. He’d lie with his eyes closed in the morning and think: will it still be there? The exercise was pointless. Of course it would be. It always was.

Sometimes he was almost able to forget about it, to go on with things as usual, but never for long. He’d be doing his washing up and catch it in the corner of his eye; he’d be at the toilet masturbating and he’d suddenly spot it and find himself unable to finish. It was like a particularly pungent air freshener installed by an overzealous aunt to conceal body odours that other people might not find offensive - might like, even. After you’ve been inside with it for a while, you might forget about it, begin to think of the smell as no smell at all, but then something would happen: you’d make a sudden movement or a breeze from an open window would remind you of it and it would infuriate you with a renewed vigour. So it was with the flag.

The weeks passed. Each time the man though of the flag the anger lurched in his chest. Very little of note ever happened to him, and so it came to occupy all of his thoughts, bringing him out in virulent rashes that clung on for days.  One morning, otherwise indistinguishable from all the others, he reached a decision. He’d do it. He’d do it that very night.

The first thing was to borrow a ladder. Since no one could be trusted, he invented an explanation. He furnished it with the kind of detail that no one would ever make up.

He walked down the corridor of his block, past the bare flower boxes, his footsteps echoing in the vacant hall. A pungent smell of fresh urine swelled inside his nostrils- one of the kids, probably, marking their territory. He came to the home of his neighbour, lifted his fist and knocked with a confidence he didn’t feel. The door was pulled open, snapped against a chain. A grey eye peered out at him.

He cleared his throat.

“Could you lend me a ladder? A boy has got his kite stuck in a tree.” The eye twitched. “It is a blue kite.”

The door slammed shut. A couple of flakes of green paint fell softly to the floor. He stood for a moment, considering his options. Somewhere in the building overhead, a rat moved. He swallowed, walked along past the broken lift, and descended the empty stairwell.

He came out of his building, turned left, and walked to the end of the road, past the park, the supermarket.

It was the first time he’d been this far in a long time, and it was okay. He walked as close to the edge of the curb as he dared, caught his breath as the cars skimmed past him. At the top of the high street, there was a post office. Not that people tended to send each other many letters anymore, but somehow it had survived.

The postmistress, Miss Green, was a large, hard woman, the kind of person it would be difficult to move. The man had chosen the post office because of her. She’d known him since he was young, was an old friend of his mother’s, and so he hoped there’d be a part of her that still thought of him as a child.

He stood there, nonchalantly turning the creaking postcard stand while he waited for Miss Green, who was doing something in the back room. After a while when it seemed she wouldn’t emerge he moved back to the door and opened it fast, insuring a good jangle of the bell, at which moment she entered the room behind him and saw him slamming it deliberately, so as to make a racket.

“Can I help you?” She asked, frowning. She didn’t seem to recognise him.

He summoned a smile that he hoped was charming. “Ah, hello, Miss Green,” he said. “Could I perhaps trouble you to lend me a ladder? A boy has got a blue kite stuck in a tree.”

She looked quickly out into the street. “A ladder? What would I have a ladder for?” she let out a sharp bark of laughter. “You always did have funny ideas.”

He walked out, scuffing the toes of his plimsolls on the broken paving stones. This was a problem. What to do? There were few other people he could ask: the fishmonger had long since boarded up his windows and moved on, and the librarian, the one who was so sweet to him when he was young and always read to him, she had disappeared.

He had one friend. Oliver worked at the municipal headquarters. When they were kids they’d played football together, gone shoplifting on Saturdays. One summer they had broken into the school swimming pool when no one was about and filled it with bottles of bubble bath. When it didn’t foam up as they had hoped they stripped off and jumped in, splashed about, laughed at each other as they worried the water into a lather. Then they heard the sound of gravel beneath car tyres outside so they bolted, still giggling, grabbed up their clothes and rushed towards the raised dormer window they came in by.

The man often thought about it: how Oliver had bent down to give him a leg up, somehow managed to propel his slippery, soapy body through the gap, and then he had pulled Oliver up behind him just in time, so both of them fell back on the grass: exhilarated, happy and terrified.

But that was a long time ago. To turn up at his office, after all of these years, endure the polite enquiries about his personal life, the reminiscences of their school days. It was unthinkable. Anyway, what call would Oliver have for a ladder now? Perhaps this was the true measure of how far apart their lives had taken them: for he was, after all, a person in urgent need of a ladder. 

For want of a better place to go and for fear of being accused of loitering, he made his way back home. Unfastening the latch he was almost surprised to see it there, fluttering at his window, the colour undimmed. He sat down in his armchair and watched it. The wind poked at it, whipping it up into a frenzied dance. It was an inanimate object of course, mad to think of it as defiant, to imagine it laughing at him. But even as the light drained in the sky it glowed there.

He couldn’t stand it any longer. Ladder or no ladder, he would find a way. He would scale the walls of the hall, and then he would grasp it between his hands, rip it into shreds with his teeth. With the pieces he would make a fire in the centre of the square, douse it in petrol, set it alight and then leap into the flames, fill the town with his burning and his shouting. It is not so easy to decide not to notice such a thing.

He had a balaclava that he’d bought years ago for just such an occasion as this, and never worn. He slipped it on. His battered old jeans would suffice, but in the cupboard he found a pair of solid black boots that had belonged to his father, and a thick dark sweater with a polo neck. He caught a glance of himself in the mirror, and, instead of turning his head quickly away, he liked what he saw, and stood there for several moments, arms folded, getting the measure of himself.

When midnight came he slipped out. The streets were empty now, everyone shut up indoors. He clung to the inky shadows at the edges of the buildings. No chunk of light crept beneath a door, no TV screen flickered blue behind a curtain. He became aware he was frightened. But he thought of his reflection in the mirror, and he carried on. 

His boots crunched on the rubbish that littered the pavement. The noise set off a single note of animal howling somewhere in another street. It rose up above the town and sought him out, came falling down on his head like a sorrow designed just for him.

It was difficult to remember when the dogs had first arrived, but now it was as if the town belonged more to them than to the people. It seemed they multiplied hour by hour. By day, they could be seen gathering like flies in areas of shade, heavy teeted mothers surrounded by grubby pups, dusty pieces of raw meat dangling from their mouths. The man would give them a wide berth, maintaining eye contact until they were almost out of sight. He had always been frightened of dogs.

At night they took possession of the streets, barking, fighting, fornicating, upsetting litter bins. Now the noise of the howling began to swell as other dogs joined in, ululating and swaying. It seemed it was all around him, that he was at its heart. 

He felt the bile rise in his throat and his mind spin. He moved faster, forgetting himself, nearly shouting out. He began to run in a blind panic, not looking where he was going, just wanting to be far away from the noise, the wildness in the darkness. Before long he was lost and he felt, to his surprise, a cold tear driving down his cheek in the wind.

At last, up ahead of him, he saw the flag, curling up at the corners like a smile. He grinned right back, pushing the air out through his teeth, for once actually feeling pleased to see it. He propelled himself through the streets towards it, out into the bright square, leaving the dogs skulking in the murk behind him.

Once he had gathered his breath, he straightened himself and looked up at the town hall. It was beautiful now, the stone bleached by the moon. The huge pillars looked like something from another age, a testament to the power of man. In the pediment there were people carved into the stone- scholars perhaps, with scrolls and laurel wreaths, and words in a language he didn’t understand.

 

The flag fluttered in the gloaming. He gazed up at it. He tried to grasp the anger from the pit of his stomach, but suddenly it seemed strange, something that had belonged to somebody else, and a hollow sort of calm settled in its place.

He thought of the townsfolk, tucked up beneath crisp sheets and thick feather eiderdowns, peacefully bound by the quiet uniformity of sleep. He was tired and far from his bed.

He would go home now. He would be back before dawn and he could fall asleep, wake up the same as everybody else and forget it all as quickly as a dream.

The flag would still be there, of course. Well. He could buy curtains.

 

He was about to move off when he saw a movement behind the pillars. There was someone there, watching him.

The person tilted their head forward so the light touched their face. The man recognized a pair of large grey eyes.

His heart jumped and he stilled his desire to run. She was mostly hidden in shade but he was certain- it was his neighbour, the one with the green front door.

He held his breath, wondering if he had been seen. Then, as he looked closer, he saw she was smiling at him. She stretched out her boney finger towards him and beckoned him over, put her finger to her lips in the ‘shush’ sign. 

He hesitated; then, glancing around him, he went over and ducked into the gloom beside her. As his eyes adjusted he saw that she was not alone. There was a group of them.  He could just about make out their faces.

There were people he hadn’t seen in years. The librarian was here, even his old scoutmaster. His neighbour touched him lightly on the shoulder, moving him forwards into their midst.

The people began to crowd towards him, surrounding him on every side, but holding back a little, as if wary of getting too close. A young girl reached out to slip a hand into his, but she was grasped by the shoulder and pulled away.

How strange it was to see them all here. Once more he was struck by the instinct to flee, but looking behind he saw how he’d been surrounded.

“Thank you.” His neighbour’s voice was close at his ear, her lips almost touching his flesh. He looked at her mouth, the sharp white teeth, felt a stirring of something distant, the beginnings of a fever. He wanted to ask what she was thanking him for, but the words dried up in his throat.

There, in the middle of all of them, stood Oliver. It was years since the man had seen him, and he’d forgotten how tall he was, how he stood with his feet planted to the ground like a great tree that held the secrets of another age. He saw the man coming, and his eyes flashed with light.

Oliver was by the building, just underneath a thick decorative lip that ran around its edge, below a first floor windowsill. A can of petrol rested on the ground beside him.

A wave of nausea passed through the man, so strong it almost made him pass out.

“Come on then,” Oliver said.

High above them, the flag unfurled like a fresh wound on the night sky. 

 

BROKEN WING

When I saw you in the street the other day you didn’t recognise me. That’s OK. All sorts of things have changed. I was a different person then. But it is difficult for me to imagine things with you being other than what they always were. You looked exactly the same.

 

My earliest memories date from about the time I met you, so I’m not sure now what kind of impression you made, at first.

 

You had glasses, tightly permed and (rather obviously) dyed hair, and burgundy slippers with a fur trim that you never seemed to take off. You had cool, papery hands that you were always rubbing with Atrixo cream, and an irresistible laugh. You had an excellent toy collection.

 

During the school holidays, I spent all of my time at your house. Your furniture was at least a decade out of date. You were the only person I knew who owned a pouffe.

 

I loved you from the very soles of my little Clarks shoes.

 

I could see that you had a kind of magic in your grasp. You turned the endless afternoons into things of wonder with sheets of paper and fuzzy felt.

 

You gave us sticks of coloured chalk and together we transformed the paving stones in the garden into another world, a place of omniped creatures, smiling suns and hopscotch.

 

If we were good, you’d make faces on our mashed potatoes with tomato ketchup, give us a Smartie in each colour after lunch. My mum laughed at how easily you got us to behave.

 

One day your cat brought home a bird that had broken its wing. You saved its life. First of all you kept it quiet in a shoebox, and then when it was stronger you made a cage for it by placing a fireguard up against a wall outside, where it could be safe while it healed.

 

All summer, us kids brought it snails and worms we’d picked up in the garden or on our way to yours from school. It grew healthier. We learnt to love it.

 

By the time it had healed none of us wanted to let it go.

 

I still remember that sadness when we let it go.

The Audience Member

As this is now available to BUY and some people have actually PARTED WITH REAL CASH in order to read it, I’m just leaving a little taster up here… do get in touch either with me or the good folk at Annexe Magazine if you’d like to read more.

THE AUDIENCE MEMBER

It was his secretary that had suggested a hobby.

“You need to get out more. Meet people.”

“Meeting people is exactly what I don’t need, Janet. I just want some peace and quiet, to get on with my work.”

She’d perched on the edge of his desk, taken his hand between hers and started rubbing it with her dry fingers. She looked old, and it made him feel old, the way she acted so familiar with him, so chummy. But there was no denying that from where she was sitting she must have been getting the most spectacular view of the penny shaped bald patch on the top of his scalp.

“I just hate to think of you alone in that house every night, John.”

He’d taken care not to pull away too quickly, not to give the impression he was nauseated by her proximity, the audacity of all this care she’d taken to heaping on him. His hands fell on the desk. They felt heavy.

“Well what about- an evening course, or something like that?”

He scoffed.

“Or the theatre?”

“Haven’t you got work to be doing, Janet?”

He closed the door behind her and didn’t think any more of it, lost himself in the figures on his screen until long after the office had become empty. A passerby would have seen a lone figure framed in the window, hunched forward, his face blue with the light of the screen.  But no one passed by.

Yet something must have lingered. The day after next, which was a Sunday, the one day even he couldn’t think of a reason to go into the office, he was standing in the middle of the empty kitchen, and he found that he was unable to move. A pile of dirty plates had built up in the sink. He had just opened a ‘healthy balance’ meal from Waitrose- taken the cardboard sleeve off, pierced the film lid- and all he needed to do was pop it in the microwave and press the button. He really, really wanted to cry.

He slumped down in a kitchen chair and rested his chin on his knuckles. This wouldn’t do. He was not the kind of man that cried. So. The theatre. Why not? And before he had the chance to change his mind, to think too much, he grabbed his coat and keys and rushed out of the door.

John got off the train in the West End. He strode into the dark auditorium as if this was something that he did all the time. It was some overpriced musical, cramped up seats, horrible wine from the bar.  But in spite of himself, he enjoyed it: found comfort in sitting there surrounded by people who didn’t know him. He didn’t mind their coughing fits or if they wanted to blow their noses loudly and he liked the way they all laughed in the murk at the same jokes, even though they were strangers.

The performance happened, and then it was gone, and then they were all gone, back to whatever else it was they filled their days with. No one asked him what he thought of it. But he imagined each of them held the play like a small flame, and in time this is how he came to judge them. That theatre trip was the first of many.  Some of the plays fizzled almost straight away; others burnt bright and strong, and others flickered, seemed to have gone out, but then flared up, just when John least expected it, demanding that he come terms with them again, and it was these that he liked best, the ones that lingered. They became his passion. He, the most dispassionate of men, had a passion.

 

It’s the last day of the Edinburgh festival. It’s raining, and the ground is sticky with a mulch of discarded flyers, the wind snatching at torn strips of brightly coloured posters, billowing like forgotten prayer flags on the grey sky. John is hurrying through the streets. Just days ago they bustled with robust young people with white painted faces and musical instruments and great big dreams, but now they seem wide and empty as a yawn.

He leans forwards against the weather. Tucked under his arm is a thick, dog-eared programme, heavily marked with biro. He’s tired. In the last few days he’s been to musicals and new writing, Shakespeare and Chekov. He’s discovered performances running amok in abandoned medical schools and hidden behind the doors of Georgian townhouses. He has sat through a twenty-minute silence in which the actors on stage barely moved, but the auditorium emptied swiftly around him.

It wasn’t like him at all, the way he’d just decided to come. On a whim. “I’m going to Edinburgh to watch some theatre,” he told Janet one morning. She gave him a wry little smile and didn’t say anything.

It’s the sort of thing Clare would have done. That’s what she was like when she got an idea in her head. There was a day when she’d said to him whilst he was stumbling around at 5am, trying to find a pair of socks and cursing:

“Don’t go to work today.”

“What?”

“Don’t go to work today. You don’t want to, do you? Stay here with me and Charlie. We’ll go for an adventure.”

He sighed. “Wonderful idea.”

“We’ll all bunk off and we’ll do something insane.” She was doing her big Cheshire cat grin, you could hear it in her voice.

“And who, exactly, is going to ensure the mortgage is paid?”

“Darling, the world isn’t going to fall apart if you miss one day in the office, as much as you’d like to think so.”

Instead of smiling at his wife and finding her mouth in the gloom, instead of loving her for how spontaneous she was, how vivacious, he’d in fact felt irritated by her, that she took his job so lightly, treated it as a joke, he’d disliked her for talking to him when she should still be asleep.

When he came home that evening he found out that she’d woken Charlie up at the normal time, made him his breakfast, handed him his packed lunch and football kit, driven him to the school gates and then turned around to him and said:

“Sweetheart, how about skipping school today and going on an adventure?”

Charlie had waited up for him to get home from work just to tell him about the fun they’d had, how they’d driven down to Brighton and eaten fish and chips on the pier in the cold, played crazy golf and penny machines at the arcade. After he’d gone to bed John railed at Clare’s irresponsibility, her misplaced priorities. He reminded her exactly how many hours he had to work each year to pay the school fees, hours that he’d also rather spend gallivanting by the sea. But it was just one day out of thirteen years at school, and she’d wanted Charlie to understand that it’s not always right to do what’s expected, that doing what’s expected is a choice, not an obligation. That he was free! John thought at the time she was mad. But in fact she was pretty much the best mother in the whole wide world.

Just to be clear, this is NOT the end of the story, only the beginning… if you’d like to read more you can buy the book from the good folk at Annexe Magazine.

Interrobang

End of the line

Just found this exercise I did a couple of months ago in an old notebook and quite liked it so thought I’d share it. It is based on an old black and white photo of a man lying naked in a field surrounded by his possessions and smiling- I’ll try and track it down if I can and post it.

END OF THE LINE

One day, when you are walking somewhere, you might come to a decision. It could be that you make up your mind to leave the city, to go to the station and get on board the first train without looking at the destination. You watch the buildings disappearing, the blocks of flats like wonky teeth fading behind you, the houses with gardens. Then, the suburbs, and finally farms and cottages, and green and green and green.

The train might stop somewhere, a little village you’ve never heard of with a funny name, where the platform is empty in the sunshine and the weeds grow up through cracks in the tarmac like a reminder that human life is short. You might dismount and, watching the train disappearing into the distance, it might strike you that for the first time in a long time your breath comes easily. You are alone. You may wish never to go back.

What will you do then? Will you pick up your rucksack and stride out of the station with purpose, a man intent on never returning? Will you pause for a moment or more to listen to the bird song (for after all you are a person with all the time in the world), and marvel at how loud and clear it is, and read in it hidden clues to the secrets of living? Will you climb over a stile into the fields and forest, rip away at your clothes and let them fall down around you as if you will never have need of them again?

Or will you stroll along the river and stop in the pub for a frothy pint or three of the local ale, then find yourself in a couple of hours back on the train with the tower blocks closing in, leaning over you with a glint in their eye like a school bully?

You might remember in the days that follow how easy it seemed to be to let everything go. You might be afraid to pass the railway station on your way to work.

But at night, the passing train will make your dreams flicker.