Christmas Eve had come at last, and the house was festooned with decorations. Granny Bacon had called it ‘gaudy’ when she came to visit. Sean was fairly sure that this…
“We’ve cleaned, Chef”, she snapped back. She knew what he was feeling because she was feeling it too. Christmas week and she was already planning where to work next. My…
He sat in the churchyard, feeling the fag packet in his pocket. He didn’t want to go home where all his relatives would have arrived in black, coughing into sandwiches…
“We’ve cleaned, Chef”, she snapped back. She knew what he was feeling because she was feeling it too. Christmas week and she was already planning where to work next.
My dear reader, it was Christmas week and as usual Carl, the Chef-Patron was in a tumultuously bad mood. The restaurant had been decked with all sorts of Christmas decorations by the front of house staff because, as the manager said, that’s what restaurants did at this time of year. There were pretend gift boxes in shiny, metallic paper, dolled up with bows. There were pastel coloured paperchains and tinsel, elves and snowmen. Even the tight passageway between the 30-seat dining area and the kitchen was made even more claustrophobic by a plastic Santa in his sleigh being led by his reindeer even though they were stuck to the wall.
Although all of this annoyed Carl, his ire was derived as much from fear and responsibility as it was from seasonal humbuggery. The place was dying. His place. Deep inside himself he knew that this was his fault – and that feeling had been surfacing for months now. But Carl was a stubborn man. That’s how his many years in the business had taught him to be. From his early days as an eager potwash, full to his adolescent brim with dreams of Michelin stars and good reviews in the national newspapers, to this current sad state of anxiety and debt, he had learnt that it was his role to keep the ship of cuisine afloat.
A former and formative head chef, a large and bellicose Scottish fellow simply called ‘Chef Mac’ had smashed this idea, this ‘law of the Pros’ into young Carl’s head.
“Even if something is wrong, you never show weakness to the brigade, to the front of house and definitely not to the civilians”, he called the paying guests ‘civilians’ for no reason anybody could fathom. By ‘never show weakness’ he meant, ‘never admit it’.
“Sort it out when you can and never, ever let anybody know that you did so”.
Last Christmas Sam’s restaurant had been pack-jammed with paying customers. This year, only two tables were seated and those were tourists who had wandered in out of the snow. Of course, they’d ordered the cheapest things from the menu, and when asked if they might like wine to accompany their meal, opted for tap water instead.
Sam herself had moved on from the place decades before, sliding into a loud retirement on an island in the Adriatic. Carl had been her sous chef, and was the Chef-Patron when this story begins. He was a thin man, classically trained. By this he meant French cuisine, and only French cuisine. He was a good chef, a solid chef, a sad and beaten chef.
He bossed what he insisted on calling his brigade. This was despite it consisting of two lowly chefs and a kitchen porter called Flo’ who was always dragooned into peeling and chopping the onions, carrots and potatoes before returning to her station.
Outside in the bins area, collecting snow on their baseball-capped heads, the two under-chefs were smoking roll-up cigarettes and swapping horse-racing tips.
Amy dragged on her second roll-up of the session and said nothing. There was nothing to say. The chances were that she’d be looking for another job come the new year.
Cathal, the slightly more senior chef, butted his fag and stood up from a large drum full of rancid oil. Had Sam’s actually been busy, both the under-chefs would have been heads-down, bums-up with prep and service. Sam’s was not busy. Sam’s had not been busy for months now.
“It’s the location”, suggested Carl’s non-hospitality friends. They’d seen this on television.
Carl knew it wasn’t the location. Sam’s was situated on a pretty little side street next door to a shop that sold buttons and threads, and across the road from a beautiful toyshop. The side street, St Odilos St, led through from the Cathedral close to the train and bus stations on Corporation St. Footfall was not the problem. Not even in the Yuletide snow, especially not at this time of year.
“Maybe you could try and get Gordon Ramsay in for this Kitchen Nightmare programme?” A former friend had suggested this once and only once. Chef-Patron Carl had slammed his vodka and Red Bull onto the pub table and seethed. Gordon bloody Ramsay indeed. Carl was no amateur, no dilettante. Carl was not a civilian. Carl did not want to be a televised freakshow.
Cathal and Amy returned to the kitchen where the extractor fan’s row competed with Chef’s choice of heavy metal dirges. No Christmas carols this year. He couldn’t bear to hear them in their sugary confected glee. He could not, of course, admit this to anybody.
The two tables of tourists had departed complaining about having to tip their waitress, a young lass called Katy who had done her best to cater for their every need. The restaurant, despite the decorations, had more the ambience of a waiting area in a hospice than a place of comfort and joy.
There was an hour to go until the Sam’s closed. The front of house manager, a constantly busy woman in her fifties called Joan, wandered past the flying Santa, up the tight passageway and into the kitchen.
“That’s it, Chef. We’re empty. We’ve had three cancellations and four no-shows. I can’t see us getting any walk-ins. What do you want to do?”
Carl looked up from the pot of beef stock he had been tinkering with for want of anything else to do.
“Clean!” he snapped back.
Joan and her team of two had cleaned and cleaned again. Until the restaurant closed, they were unable to clean any more.
“We’ve cleaned, Chef”, she snapped back. She knew what he was feeling because she was feeling it too. Christmas week and she was already planning where to work next. This would hurt Carl deeply because they loved each other, had done for years, since they had both been callow and ambitious.
The brigade were back at their stations, shaking off the snow, heads down, watching it melt on the red tiled floor, listening for the most beautiful words in the language of hospitality.
Those words came from Chef Carl almost in a whisper, “Start cleaning down, you two”. Cathal and Amy, despite the 12 hour shift or maybe because of it, jumped into action. Joan returned to the dining area where her two waitresses looked hopefully at her.
“Not yet, not yet. Clean what you can for now”, she said.
Outside a small choir of charitable folk were wandering to the Nag’s Head pub. They were singing, just for the fun of it, for the season. The carol was ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and they were belting it out while retaining harmony and great good humour.
Half an hour later with his notes for the day and orders for the next day complete, Carl stood still knowing what his brigade wanted to hear most of all in the world. That was the sound or the lack of it, of the extractors being turned off. The silence of the living.
Instead a bell rang and the ticket machine buzzed like a boney finger sliding down a metal comb. Carl looked at the order from ten feet away. Three simple mains, no starters. Joan wasn’t going to let three guests go unpaying back into the night. She knew Carl would agree, she just knew him.
“Check on!” he barked. The two under-chefs got down to it despite wanting to go out there and physically ejecting the heartless bastards who had wandered in solely to wind them up. It wasn’t making the food that was the problem, that was easy, second nature. No, it was cleaning down again.
Amy – just off her phone – had agreed to meet some other chefs, on their days off, in a scalliwags’ bar called Busters. Cathal was ready for a McDonalds quarter pounder and fries or maybe a Goan fish curry.
Carl left it to them – he knew this was a sure sign that he was giving up the ghost of a dream. He buttoned his whites and then, for a reason even he couldn’t discern even years afterwards, instead of making his way upstairs to his office, he walked down the passageway of the 300-year-old building to look at the diners.
There they sat, three of them. From the look of it, a mother, a father and a very young boy. They were, as old Chef Mac would have said, “Arab looking buggers”. Carl sat down on the stool by the bar to watch as their food was delivered and they began to eat.
“Tap water?”, he whispered to Joan who nodded sadly. Wine was where the money came from.
The food was delivered and the family, each one of them said thank you to young Katy, their server. Joan and Carl looked on.
“There’s something quite dignified, quite peaceful about them, isn’t there?”Joan whispered, touching the chef’s hand lightly as she had done years before.
Carl tried not to agree with her but couldn’t. There was something quite disarmingly charming, something calming about them as they ate his food and chatted with each other. When their meals were done, instead of finger-snapping at Kate, the mother turned and smiled towards her.
It was a smile of such genuine warmth and good grace that it forced a cigarette-stained breath each from Joan and the chef. Kate had cleared their plates and the father asked her a question. Armed with the detritus of their table, the young server walked past the bar.
“Chef?”, she trembled slightly, overawed by her recent encounter more than she was scared of Carl.
“Yes”, he whispered.
“They say they’d like to see you”.
In recent months this request had resulted in either spurious complaints or, worse still, in the one of the diners explaining that they had a suggestion or two to make dishes that Carl had been cooking just fresh from his crib. He shrugged. Why not, how bad could the day get?
He checked his whites for stains, and made his way over to the table, bowing slightly he said his good evening and waited for the inevitable top tip or moan about the quality of the meat.
“Thank you Chef for such a delicious meal”, her voice was soft but, again in a way he could never explain, it was transparently honest. Her son, a slight boy with, Carl noticed, only had one hand, one left hand. The young boy’s face was scarred and had been quickly stitched together as if in an ad hoc medical facility.
“Yes, thank you deeply, Chef. We enjoyed this meal very much”. Father’s accent, like Mother’s was not local, it came from a place Carl felt he knew but did not know. The accent was melodious even as it was just a smidgeon staccato. Their son nodded and smiled up at Carl.
Young Katy came back with the bill, which she placed in the middle of the table. Mother picked it up and examined it. Katy knew that every single penny counted. Every note helped.
“However, I must apologise. We are unable to pay”, said the Mother, calmly and with good grace.
Carl looked at Joan, “I knew it. I just knew it”. The defeat in his voice smothered any anger.
Joan walked to the table. “How could you do this to us?” Any veneer of professionalism had finally departed. Desperation had taken its place.
The Mother then did something utterly unexpected. Instead of bolting for the door, she beckoned Joan to sit with the family. Carl joined her. The brigade drew closer, certain of an eruption.
“Dearest Chef, and hardworking colleagues, where we have come from, food, the preparation and serving of food to strangers – even to paying strangers”, his eyes twinkled, “are all precious. The first because it is rare. The second and third because of the skill and the care involved are the marks of great civilisations.”
Mother said, “Where we come from, no restaurants remain, no bars, no cafes, no homes remain in which such great courtesies, these welcoming talents can be enjoyed.
Carl and Joan were as still as artificial ice on artificial holly. Both had given up.
Father said, “So, we say thank you and we offer what we have of value to you.” A fake watch? Some terrible old cloth? Carl’s shoulders sank.
“Sure, why the hell not”, he said. “We’ve got nothing to lose”. The final, inevitable, nail in the coffin of Sam’s Restaurant may as well have come this way as any other.
The Son pulled a small, battered leather, draw-strung bag from under his lap. He reached into it and pulled out a small book, battered and burnt notebook. He remained silent.
Mother took his turn to speak, “In lieu of the money we no longer have, we would appreciate it if you would accept this.” She handed the book to the Chef.
The brigade drew closer still, slightly aghast at the calm that had descended. They watched as Carl opened the book and began to leaf through it. It was full of hand drawn illustrations of dishes and ingredients. Next to the pictures were neatly handwritten instructions.
“Your recipes?” said Joan.
The son smiled such a smile that his scars seemed to be dissolved by it. He didn’t speak at first but finally replied in a slight voice, as damaged as his face.
“These are recipes from our village. From the village that once was but is no longer. Our village of Khirbet Humsa.” He lowered his eyes and his smile failed for the briefest of moments. His mother took the book and handed it to Carl.
He looked at the very first recipe, a simple dish of chicken and rice that, according to the method neatly inscribed in pen, was cooked ‘upside down’ in a pot. For the first time in many years Carl’s mind was illuminated by the light of understanding. Silence descended throughout the restaurant only warmed by an impromptu crowd of singers rendering ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ like tipsy angels outside in the snow.
Carl read on.
He paused every once in a while to show this page or that to his two under chefs. “This. This one, have you seen this recipe? Look Amy. Look Cathal. Just look”.
“Is that a tear in his eye?” Chef Amy asked Cathal.
There was a tear, an elegantly seasoned tear, on Carl’s cheek as the excitement, the eagerness of his younger self flooded in. Hours passed. Blissful hours. Hours in which the restaurant seemed to take on the fragrances of each recipe. No one noticed the passing of time. Although young Katy had noticed something very strange indeed.
“How is he reading it? It’s not even in English,” Katy asked Joan nervously.
Carl and the other chefs huddled over or rather into the book. They were oblivious to every and anything else. Joan had never seen any of them as, what was the word? As beatific, that was the word, dear reader. As blissed out, as thoroughly immersed in the sheer beauty of word and image.
“It’s like they can taste the words”, said Katy and Joan agreed.
Indeed, the chefs had ingested, digested and memorised every recipe in the slim volume. Carl turned to where the family had been sitting. “Thank you but we can’t keep this, it is too precious, too valuable.”
But the Mother and the Father and Son were gone.
The next day the brigade gathered early in the kitchen and began, all four of them including Flo’ the potwash, and they planned a new menu. Meanwhile Joan and Katy took down to old signs from the front of the restaurant. Within a day a new sign was given pride of place. To honour the mysterious family, Sam’s had become, quite simply, ‘Khirbet Humsa’.
Every year since these events had transpired, Carl and Joan would clean down and then go and sit in the front of the house. Hand in hand they would wait for the return of the family.
Christmas Eve had come at last, and the house was festooned with decorations. Granny Bacon had called it ‘gaudy’ when she came to visit. Sean was fairly sure that this meant it was completely bloody brilliant.
Part 1
It was two weeks before Christmas Eve, and there was no Mum to be seen or felt in the house by a seriously minded five-year-old called Sean Baker. He was not at all happy about it. Not at all. That said, the absence of Mum merely added tonnage to the weight of Sean’s worries. He’d not been really happy since Mum and Dad had told him about ‘the baby’ that was coming into his home. His home for bloody God’s bloody sake! A phrase he’d learnt from his uncle Steve.
“Where’s Mum?” Sean was sitting at the top of the stairs, looking through the bannisters like a small animal in a particularly benign zoo.
“Mum’s in the pub with auntie Jane and Cloe from the newsagents. She won’t be long, love.” Sean’s dad was making the house look bright but cosy on this day before Christmas Eve.
Sean thought about this for a moment.
“Will she bring The Baby back”, he paused and searched himself for something grown-up to add, “finally?”
The Baby saga had been dragging on and Sean wanted to get it all over with. He wanted to face his enemy in mortal combat if needed. Him a knight in armour, The Baby with whatever weaponry it could muster. Sean felt that would be a lot given the importance The Baby was given by Mum and Dad. They never bloody well stopped talking about it. The Baby this. The Baby that. The Baby’s tests – at a baby’s age! The Baby’s crib. The Baby’s feeding equipment. The Baby even had a car seat like Sean. Bloody The Baby.
His dad laughed as he dusted the shelves in the family room.
“Not from the pub, Seany. That would be a proper Christmas miracle. Anyway, it’s not time yet. Why don’t you go outside and play for a while?”
Outside the old house it was grey and overcast, threatening rain rather than snow. The drizzly kind of rain that got into your hair and clothes. Sean shook his head and went back into his bedroom to continue drawing. His sketch pad was full of monstrous images, mostly of babies doing unspeakable things like eating his toys, cuddling his mother, going to the park with dad, sleeping in his bed, and worst of all the worse things, kicking Sean out into the savage streets with its huge, clumping baby feet.
As far as he was concerned the impending arrival of the home-wrecking interloper was – had he known the word – apocalyptic.
“Bloody baby”, he said.
“Bloody hell, bloody baby”.
“Bloody, bloody, bloody”.
He started to draw again using his favourite red, yellow and black crayons.
Downstairs, Dad had started to unpack the Christmas tree and all its baubles and variously coloured tinsel built up over the years. The angel to go on top of the tree had been in either Dad or Mum’s families for as long as either of them could remember. She was actually a crowned and jewelled ballet dancer, feet pointed, face beatific. Gingerly he reached into the box and retrieved Sean’s favourite decoration, a rocket ship with Santa astride it, arms in the air, beard spread by the high speed. Dad held it in his hand and remembered when he and Mum had taken Sean to the remaining toyshop in town, Mr and Mrs Khawaja’s, so the four-year-old could choose his own decoration. Sean, serious as usual even at that age, had taken his time before pointing at the rocketship.
Mum’s pregnancy had not been easy. Tests upon test following a scan that had highlighted an anomaly in the new baby’s head size.
The young and overworked doctor had told Mum and Dad that there was “Really nothing to worry about, we just need to check a few things”. After the first few tests, however, a grand gentleman, a Mr not a mere doctor, had stood in the background looking over the paperwork. The grand Mr had confabbed with the younger doctor quietly. She nodded a lot but even Dad could see the barely hidden frown that came over her face every so often like clouds over the sun.
Mum and Dad hadn’t bored Sean with the continuing tests. But following what they’d called ‘a very big decision’, they had finally told him that he was going to be joined by an awesomely awesome little sister.
Sean had nodded and muttered, “Bloody hell, not a girl” before returning to his room to readdress his drawing.
Part 2
With two months to go until the arrival of The Bloody Baby, Mum and Dad had sat Sean down on the couch in the family room and had explained to him that his new brother or sister was coming home soon but that everybody would have to be very gentle and kind because the baby might not be very well for a little while.
Sean pondered this and then asked, “Why can’t we get it when it’s bloody better?”
“Sean!”, Mum had said.
“Why though?” As if having The Baby invade the house wasn’t bad enough, now it seemed to Sean that everybody had to be extra specially nice to it.
Dad said, “We’re not going back to the why, why, why stage again, Sean?”
“Why?” said Sean.
Dad and Sean laughed.
Mum, smiling, said, “Seany, the baby is part of our family…”
Sean interrupted, “That’s what you said about the last one, and that one never came home”. He was right. A year previously Mum and Dad had sat Sean down in the family room and told him about the imminent arrival of a little brother. A few weeks later they had told him that that new playmate would not be coming because he had decided to go straight to the afterlife. They said that the afterlife was a very special place that people usually had to wait to get into. Some people, however, got in early.
“Why?”
“Well, Seany, that’s one of those things that we don’t know the answer to yet”, said Mum.
“Why?”
“Because we haven’t learnt enough. It’s one of the loads of things that we don’t know a lot about. It’s like how does Santa deliver presents to millions of kids with just a few elves and a slay? Or why does the daft dog Adelaide love to roll in the manure up at the allotments”, said Dad.
Even Sean had to admit that there were quite a few things he didn’t understand yet. The Santa one particularly irked him. How was that possible? Suitably distracted he went back to his own room and took to imagining solutions.
Part 3
Christmas Eve had come at last, and the house was festooned with decorations. Granny Bacon had called it ‘gaudy’ when she came to visit. Sean was fairly sure that this meant it was completely bloody brilliant. He had helped with everything except the lights, he had watched Dad fiddling and untangling and replacing the dead ones. In a most exciting fifteen minutes, he’d watched Dad ‘changing a fuse’ in one of the plugs. Dad had said a word even worse than ‘bloody’ which Sean had stored for later use.
Despite what the weathermen and women had said, snow was falling. Sean had sat on his chair in his room looking out of the window at it in wonder. Of course, he had a rough idea what caused snow from one of the books his Granny Murphy had given him for his birthday but it still never failed to slacken his jaw and widen his eyes.
As a side issue to the quietening of the world by the snow, Dad had gone to get Mum and The Bloody Baby from the hospital. After a while, Sean grew bored with wonderment and felt the need for company. He picked up his last Christmas elf hat and made his way downstairs to where Uncle Steve was playing a video game on Mum’s console. Mum wrote about videogames for a living and was bloody good at it as far as Sean was concerned.
“Uncle Steve, did you ever have a baby sister?”
Uncle Steve paused mid-freekick, “Yes, Sean mate, of course I did. That’s your aunties Eve and Sarah”.
“No, I meant a Baby sister”, seemed obvious to Sean because Aunty Eve was very cool indeed. He’d only met Aunt Sarah once when he was very young. She lived in Australia, which was a long way away.
“Well, my old mate, they were both babies once. Sarah is my twin in fact, we were both babies at the same time. We came home to Aunty Eve, who was very happy to see us.”
“How do you know she was? You were just babies. She might have been bloody annoyed.”
“She told me she was when I was a bit older, mate. About your age in fact.”
“Oh”, said Sean, a bit nonplussed.
“Sean, mate, what do you want for Christmas?”
“Not a bloody baby sister that’s for sure.”
Sean’s imagination fired up and he was about to ready to list his Christmas needs when he heard the front door opening.
“It’s them, mate. All three of them. Ready?”
Sean was not very much not the slightest bit ready. It seemed like every single bloody day for the last month The Baby things were brought back to the house. Who knew that a baby needed so much stuff. Anyway, Sean sat his ground in the family room waiting for it, for her, to come to him.
The snow kept falling, all silent and refreshing, as the Christmas lights that Dad had mended flickered and lit up Rocket Santa. Uncle Steve had turned off the video game and beckoned to Sean to meet his new sister. Sean had shaken his head. He wasn’t great with new people at the best of times, this was not even close to those. For the first time in a while, he popped his thumb into his mouth and hoped against hope that The Baby would grow up fast and be more like Aunty Eve, who was great fun, than Granny Bacon, who was stern.
After a minute or two the door to the family room creaked open and in walked Uncle Steve with Mum and Dad. Dad was holding the car seat. Mum looked tired but was smiling as she made her way to the sofa and gingerly sat down. Dad placed the car seat gently on the old, dented wooden floor. He was smiling too. Smiling fit to burst. Uncle Steve was, would you believe, wiping tears from his eyes.
“Please go over and see her, Sean,” Mum had never sounded like that, almost desperate but at the same time, underlying that, was a bigger emotion. He couldn’t quite identify it, what with it being the first time, but deep inside him he felt it. He felt that this meeting between him and The Bloody Baby wasn’t just important to her, it was the most important thing. So, of course, he walked to the car seat and stared down.
There was his new sister. Her eyes were closed, her hands were encased in mittens, on her head was a warm-looking cap.
“Come down to her level, Sean”, Dad said. Not an order, more of a piece of sincere guidance. Sean complied. He knelt by the car seat and breathed in her new smell as it mixed in with the usual Christmas smells of fir trees, dried figs, cakes and, he was sure, the snow.
The baby opened her eyes and looked back at him. They were brown, deeply so, just like his. He examined her fat little face. Even at her age, it was more like Aunty Eve than Granny Bacon. Quite honestly, he couldn’t see how she was broken at all. In fact, she looked and smelt remarkably bloody brilliant. She reached a little, mittened hand up into the air and seemed to jerk it about before it dropped back to her side.
“Go on, Sean mate, you can touch her.”
Sean reached out his hand and touched the baby’s hand, which jerked again. He knew he had to do something about that because it seemed to him that she couldn’t possibly be enjoying it. He reached in and held both of hands as gently as he could. Even through the material of the mittens he felt that he could feel her pulse, feel her new life, feel his little sister.
“What’s she called?” he asked the assembled company.
Dad looked over to Mum.
“Well, love, we thought you might like to choose her name. After all, she’s your sister,” said Mum.
The baby’s, her, hands jerked and she closed her eyes again, breathing quietly and almost imperceptibly although Sean perceived it.
He was to name her? Him, Sean, who had never named anything ever, not ever in his life. He didn’t move. He didn’t want to move. He just sat beside his sister thinking of the best name for her he could.
Outside the snow continued to fall and the world’s new silence enabled Sean to think more deeply about his great honour. Inside the house, Uncle Steve went into the kitchen to make some tea. Mum closed her eyes and leant into the old, overstuffed sofa. Dad knelt to Sean and asked, “Any ideas, Sean?”
“Bloody hell, not yet Dad”, whispered Sean. “It’s very important. You can’t rush this”.
Dad hugged him and went to sit down at Mum’s feet.
The lights continued to flicker, the house to creak, the kettle started steaming, everything seemed the same but was changed.
Sean found himself bloody well smiling. He knew what he was going to call his sister.
“Can we call her Hope”, he said.
Mum’s eyes opened, “Why Hope, darling?” she said.
“Mum, we’re not going back to the Why stage are we?” he said.
Dad laughed, even though he was visibly crying.
Sean stood up straight, “Because I hope she’ll like being part of the family”.
“Tea’s ready!” yelled Uncle Steve from the kitchen as the snow fell gently outside.
Sean walked over to the Christmas tree, plucked Rocket Santa from the tree, walked back to Baby Hope and placed it next to her.
He’d lay out a solution using his own code. I’d remind myself never to wrong-side him. Never.
O’Keefe sat at the bar and told me that he was going to retire before the business killed him. As ever, he was wearing his old grey mac, sipping a stout and had just stubbed out a Carrolls cigarette before lighting another one. O’Keefe ran all the slot machines in West London.
He was a Wexford man who had lived in the English capital for 50 years. He’d been a regular in Kevin Conroy’s pub, The Exchange but everybody just called it Conroy’s, since it had opened. Before that it had been known as Farrell’s, and O’Keefe had been a regular there too. Conroy’s was in a small lane off Praed Street in Paddington. It was small, maybe cosy, and well maintained by Kevin and his crew, which had included me for the previous six months as a barman and cook.
“The Maltese have made me an offer”, said O’Keefe. “But they’ve done that before. Only this time it involves bad feelings and guns.”
This was on the same afternoon that Kevin Conroy returned from Newbury with his prize-winning chestnut mare, “Dancing Flyer”. He’d walked the Flyer up from Paddington station, past the Alexander Fleming so the doctors and nurses drinking there could coo over it and pet it. Then he’d walked the massive beast through Conroy’s double doors, its only entry and exit.
The Flyer stood in the bar, twitched his ears, nodded his enormous head and flicked his tail. The regulars, all of whom had put money on the mighty horse to win – nothing each way in Conroy’s – cheered. The horse appeared to enjoy the accolades, and nodded again. Someone bought him a pint of Murphy’s stout, someone else gave him an apple. Then the victorious horse was backed out onto the street where its transport out to the stables, to peace and quiet was waiting for it.
“Good horse”, said O’Keefe.
“Great horse”, I replied from behind the bar, with £150 in my pocket, my winnings. “So, what are you going to do about the Maltese?” I asked him while pouring him another pint of Murphy’s.
“Did I ever tell you that you remind me of my cousin?”
He had told me this once or twice before. His cousin lived in Sydney, Australia having moved there a decade or so before from a small town called Fethard on the coast of Ireland where his family ran a pub.
“You have. How is he?” I said.
He went quiet, became thoughtful and a little misty eyed as he considered my question. He rarely if ever answered questions. I’d learned this over the months. That didn’t stop me asking them though, it was conversational, I was a barman and part-time cook. I considered showing an interest in my customers an essential part of my job. I was 18 years old, it also seemed to be the respectful thing to do. He ran his finger around the rim of his glass until it sang at which point he stopped and looked at me.
“I think the Maltese are serious. I do. I don’t fancy a war in West London. I like the place”. He took a sip and smiled. He was a small man, less than five feet nine in his scruffy brown brogues. He always wore a brown suit with a waistcoat, a thick black belt with studs, and a white shirt and red tie. Always. He was a pale man, with wispy, cobweb fine grey hair that he combed over from left to right with using his long, thin fingers to manipulate a mother of pearl effect comb, which he replaced in his jacket pocket in a delicate movement.
Conroy had told me when I started that O’Keefe was worth millions. He was part-owner of The Flyer, and he wholly owned the stables out in Hampshire. He didn’t look as if he was worth more than a regular weekly wage to me.
“There’s a reason for that”, said Conroy as he polished the bar. “It’s camouflage. Watch his temper, mind.”
Months on and I’d never seen a hint of temper from O’Keefe even when one of his towering, marble muscled members of staff came and told him about a breakage in Southall or a fiddle in Ealing Common he retained a quiet, direct, thoughtful demeanour. He’d lay out a solution using his own code. I’d remind myself never to wrong-side him. Never.
Outside, barrel chested, balding and sweating Conroy had finished manoeuvring The Flyer into its trailer and was giving the driver, a lad my age called James Plunkett, final instructions for the journey. The rain was coming on from the north and was pushing a strong gale up Praed Street past St Mary’s hospital. It was a Sunday I seem to remember.
“I think it might be time to retire. Marie is keen to go home and see more of the grandkiddies. We have a house by the sea, beautiful views, quiet, lovely and safe. Fine pub only a short drive down towards Fethard where they serve a grand beef and horseradish sandwich – not as good as yours, mind. I’m growing fond of the idea myself. I’m getting no younger after all”.
The double doors were pushed open so O’Keefe looked briefly to his left to see who was coming in. Nobody had been playing his slot machine, maybe this was a punter.
It was one of the Maltese. Black leather jacket, dark jeans, cowboy boots, slicked back black hair he removed his sunglasses and walked to the barstool next to O’Keefe. In the warm gloom of the bar two of O’Keefe’s boys shifted their weight, emptied their glasses so they became better weapons and began to stand. O’Keefe lifted a finger and they sat back down, disappointed.
“Whisky”, said the Maltese. I poured him a Paddy.
“Ice”, he said. I put ice in his glass.
“Thank you”, he said. His accent was a mixture of Valetta and Cable Street over in the Eastend.
O’Keefe and the Maltese looked at the mirror behind me, their faces sliced in the reflection by the bottles and optics. Conroy joined me behind the bar and began to clean glasses. The wind stopped and the rain began, hard, with no rhythm.
It was unheard of for any of the Maltese to venture into Conroy’s. A month or so before, they co-opted The Wilkie Collins near the station by walking in one night with sawn-offs under their coats, just visible, and knuckle dusters like a mad giant’s wedding rings on their fists, very visible indeed. That was their enclave, their beachhead out of their East London home. In Conroy’s that night, the presence of the Maltese added to the cosmopolitan mix of the pair of Lebanese, Irish, English, Sikh Indian, Jamaican and Barbadian who called our pub their home from home.
The Maltese drank his whisky. He patted O’Keefe’s hand. I heard O’Keefe’s sharp intake of breath and then his gentle exhalation. Conroy took the glass from the Maltese, finished the final pour of O’Keefe’s stout, and rang the bell for last orders and then immediately after ran it again for closing time.
“Time gentlemen please, can we have your glasses now”, he said quietly with no room for the usual, good humoured replies of “No! Conroy you cannot!”. It was seven thirty in the evening in Paddington, with the rain pelting down sending all the stray cats back to their home under a vacant office block on St Michael’s Street down the road. The customers stood up and filed out quietly, leaving me, Kevin Conroy, the Maltese, Oisín O’Keefe and two of O’Keefe’s boys to see out the next few minutes.
“You need to go now”, O’Keefe said to me.
Conroy nodded, “Come back in tomorrow, usual time”, he said.
I picked up my coat and lifted the bar flap, and O’Keefe handed me a fat envelope.
“Now then”, he said, “you remind me of my cousin, my cousin Padraig, the one in Australia. I’ve told you that. Take this and maybe look him up in Sydney for me, there’s a fine lad”.
I took it and I shook his hand and I left The Exchange, Conroy’s bar. I walked to the station feeling the weight of the envelope in the inside pocket of my raincoat. I was at work the next day behind the bar. I never did see O’Keefe again but I did catch up with his Cousin in Sydney. And I did look like him.
“We’ve cleaned, Chef”, she snapped back. She knew what he was feeling because she was feeling it too. Christmas week and she was already planning where to work next. My dear reader, it was Christmas week and as usual Carl, the Chef-Patron was in a tumultuously bad mood. The restaurant had been decked with all
Christmas Eve had come at last, and the house was festooned with decorations. Granny Bacon had called it ‘gaudy’ when she came to visit. Sean was fairly sure that this meant it was completely bloody brilliant. Part 1 It was two weeks before Christmas Eve, and there was no Mum to be seen or felt
Revenge makes you right and wrong simultaneously. Something tells you that what you want to do is wrong but by doing it, by completing their Revengers’ Tale, the world will be set right.
No one close by heard the single gunshot crashing from the wardroom. No one was there to soften the blow as Glyde’s badly damaged head slammed into the table.
“You would like to know as much about the creature who pulled the triggers, tied the knots, hammered the nails and wielded the knife. I imagine that you have your own theories on the pairings of the civilians, the note, the relationship between the eight and the reason for choosing Wallington above all other villages.
What she said added to my later tears but there were so many of those and their reasons flowed into each other so easily that I can’t distinguish their flow today.
John sat in that room and began writing and then recording audio and video about everything that was wrong with it and, therefore, with Gordon.
Stasis is never wanting to be wrong. Or right for that matter. People change their minds all the time anyway. Unless they have revenge in mind that is. Revenge makes you right and wrong simultaneously. Something tells you that what you want to do is wrong but by doing it, by completing their Revengers’ Tale, the world will be set right.
Some Revengers manage to convince themselves of this dualistic approach all the way to their graves. Their consciences vomit guilt into them.
Some don’t.
Some are so convinced of their messianic mission of revenge that can convince others of it. Even to carry that mission forward after the death or imprisonment of the original Revenger.
Some Revenger’s Tales grow and morph long after the Revenger and the original target of their revenge have long been forgotten.
You should also note before we continue that most Revengers are almost like you and I. As are the objects of the particular revenge. Most revengees look either much, much more beautiful or much, much uglier. That is how you can tell the former from the latter.
Many Revengers can disguise this difference. Some of you are even cleverer than that. Many appear to make their object’s beauty or ugliness your own. I mean, their own. Not you of course.
Subjectivity is objectivity. An effective Revenger can combine these. Pain is pleasure. A great Revenger will be able to convince first themselves and then others. The truly masterful Revenger will be able to finally even convince the revengees that, in fact, everybody has benefited from the act or acts.
At their genesis, however, the Revenger must first be able to eliminate any doubt from their souls.
Take the example of ‘John’ who hated his room in a capital city. Of course, he hated his life in the city. He hated everything about the city. It’s bright lights especially. John was not a hugely prolific though. He concentrated his loathing on his room in the house owned by a man we’ll call ‘Gordon’.
John sat in that room and began writing and then recording audio and video about everything that was wrong with it and, therefore, with Gordon.
One year in he was preparing to show Gordon written notes that detailed the noise, the damp, the smells and the fact that the shy lady in the room above him had a new splash of paint on her landing despite only having moved in three months previously. John’s landing remained wallpapered in the dark red flock of a decade before.
He showed Gordon his notes. Played him audio (John had a podcast with three listeners). Showed him the video. Gordon told him that he could always move out. So, John modified his plan and opted instead to understand the other man more deeply. John decided he could do this by acquainting himself with Gordon’s haunts and habits. These, it transpired, comprised a local bar called ‘Chicagos’, which was frequented by actors, actresses and their hangers-on. Gordon had become the second character in John’s Revenger’s Tale.
Soon, John started to eat and drink at Chicagos on a more regular basis than Gordon. He discovered that Gordon enjoyed throwing his weight around. This was strange. He was a tall man, but he was slight, he was wiry. He dressed in unrealised low-camp. Usually in white shoes, pale blue slacks and loud, Hawaiian shirts.
The people in Chicagos, as John soon discovered, were open, generous types. They took to John quickly, because he helped them with taxes. John was good with money. He helped others to find happiness in their complex relationships. He had no desire for a relationship of his own so was able to view theirs with great clarity.
John was sure not to mention that Gordon was his landlord. Gordon never appeared to acknowledge John’s presence, except for one occasion in the lavatory, following a particularly morose and drunken session. Gordon had come up behind John, who was washing his hands, and had explained – sotto voce – that he knew who he was, and he knew what he was up to.
Mr and Mrs Martini, who owned the bar, had invited John and some of the other regulars to the christening of one of their battalions of grandchildren. The party had returned two hours before to find Gordon, sitting at his small round wooden table in the middle of the bar area with a chessboard in front of him, his head in his hands. Other drinkers were scattered on various stools, at tables and of course, at the bar itself. The exclusion zone around Gordon’s table was apparent though, as were the chessmen drowning on the wine-drenched board.
John had gone to the gents, and as he was finishing up Gordon had stumbled in. After explaining that he knew what John was up to, which elicited no reaction, he told John about his room. It was cursed. Not only that but the curse would never be lifted. Gordon slurred about the love of his life, his whole life. He had died in John’s room, on John’s bed. There had been nothing he could do. The suicide had been so unnecessary, it had been so cold.
“So, why did you rent it to me?” asked John.
”Because I needed the money to pay for the funeral. Because you said you would take it. Because nobody else had”, sobbed Gordon. He told John that he wanted someone truly unpleasant to occupy the room, to suffer in the same room that his beloved had. His beloved who had let him down so badly. He said that John was perfect for the role. He told John that he enjoyed every piece of his writing, every sound from his audio, and especially every piece of his video.
He told John that his revenge on his beloved for leaving had been beautiful to see and hear.
John returned to the party. John returned to his room. Alone.
“Quivering slightly he turned some fifty pages, slowly and deliberately seeking a specific passage.”
The dear, dour cloisters of Rimmington Hall rang with excitement. Cleaning, dusting, painting, polishing, rejuvenating were the orders of the day. The young master was coming home! For the first time in four years the curtains were not drawn, the fires were alight, and the sound of music – in the form of off-key humming – could be heard in the anterooms and backstairs.
Old Joe Raggedy, the beaming butler who only a week before had been the rheumy, despondent, physically distant under-gardener hummed gently to anyone who cared to listen as he walked purposefully from one chamber to the next. His three and a half year struggle to overthrow Thamesmead, the previous holder of the master keyring and butling suit had been more successful than he could ever have dreamt. Thamesmead had not only unseated, he had also been disgraced.
“This place! Bugger me, this place! Who would have thought it? Bugger me blind!”, he whispered to himself as he cleared playing cards from one of the tables in one of the rooms in the east wing.
Outside in the stables a movement beneath the hay in what used to be Longbuck Ridge Messiah’s stall sent two mice scurrying for safety. Isis the Siamese cat tracked their location before making a quick exit herself.
“Mrs Catchmole? Mrs Catchmole?” Lady Rimmington, still startlingly beautiful despite her hundred and five years on earth, called the communication tube to her head-cook. “When are Philip and Dilip coming from the village to uncanker the chandeliers?”
“Bless you, ladyship, but they’ve been here this last two hours past. They’ve just finished cleaning the young master’s gun cabinet so I was getting their strengths up…” the lady Rimmington thought she heard some grunting and a giggle, “with a nicer cup of tea and some Kedgeree. They’ll be into the second ballroom for the decankering in two snips of a Christmas turkey’s doings.”
“Very good Mrs Catchmole, please see to it that they remember to calm the slurry pit in the back-back garden before they make their way home.” Her ladyship swept her still-blonde hair beneath her father’s fourth-best rowing cap and surveyed the room.
She sat on the bed that her son had so often vacated in order to ride to hounds, climb trees. Or simply to sit at his mother’s side, listening as she arranged the week’s menus down the communication tube. There, neatly folded just as his batman, Swallow, had left them, were the running shorts, cricket whites and birdsnesting trousers of the heir to the Rimmington estates.
These were the togs of a baby, their owner would soon be returning as a man. Next to this holy pile sat the cricket ball with which he had taken his first hat-trick of wickets on the village green at a mere twelve years of age. It was a Rimmington tradition to take your first wicket between the ages of twelve and fifteen at a village cricket match.
HMS Ingenious, now safely docked in the Port of London gave no sign of its recent Antarctic voyage – the burial at sea and fresh new coat of Buenos Aires paint had seen to that.
Captain Gerald Glyde sat in the wardroom, alone, putting the finishing touches to the twenty-eight letters of commendation he was to dispatch the Admiralty. Dotting the final “i” he laid the pile to one side, examined his sidearm and drank from the Glencairn of Glenditchdrudard at his right hand. Refilling the glass he selected a beaten brown leather-bound notebook from the stack near his left foot.
Dog-eared it might have been, yet he touched its opening page with reverence. Quivering slightly he turned some fifty pages, slowly and deliberately seeking a specific passage. On finding it, he drank another glassful before tearing out a page and lighting it over his ashtray.
No one close by heard the single gunshot crashing from the wardroom. No one was there to soften the blow as Glyde’s badly damaged head slammed into the table. Again he had failed, and now he’d have to find yet another new ship’s lad to continue to sacrifice and search he thought before losing consciousness.
“What-ho, Swallow! Pass me a towel!” Charles Bayer Ffenmore Rimmington bellowed good-naturedly to his batman as the icy water of his Sunday morning shower coursed over his aristocratic body. Cambridge had been as good to him as it had been to any of those Rimmingtons who had preceded him but today was his farewell to all that.
“Swallow, where are you with that towel?!” He knew that despite his own tender years – he was coming up for his 21st birthday, Swallow, respected and looked-up to him. What he wasn’t so sure about was where the fellow was right now.
“I will be with you forthwith sir, I was laying in a few more buds of lilac to the cummerbund draw in your travelling valise,” Swallow deftly threw the towel over the heating rail without actually setting foot inside the bathroom itself. His dexterous flick of the formed a perfect fold and the white, freshly laundered material settled perfectly as his master’s left hand shot from the stall.
“Brrr, I say, Brrrrr! That does one a power of good of a winter’s morning. Now, are we ready for the off?”.
Drying himself admiringly in the mirror, Rimmington awaited the response in the certain knowledge that his servant would still have a few minor touches to add to the packing.
Despite his lowly station, Swallow was a perfectionist. As it was, the young serving man – a mere 18 years-old himself – was indeed putting the finishing touches to the packing of the paraphernalia that had been his life’s work since the age of ten.
Making the final fold to the final shirt before laying it lovingly inside the shirt-case, Swallow patted down the pillow on the recently vacated bed, dusted off the sideboard, opened the windows that overlooked St Aspinall’s quad and breathed out.
Cambridge had been a lark but Swallow was looking forward to the thought of a week at Rimmington Hall followed by the taking up of digs in London. St James was to be the new place of residence. His young master was to take up his position as barrister at law with the chambers of Lucet, Gudgeon, Glyde, Capron and Morecambe.
Lincoln’s Inn was to be the place of work. Swallow would, within the fortnight, be surrounded by the culture, energy and life he had craved ever since he’d learned to read and write. For a young gentleman of this modish new generation, Swallow was aware that not only must he know his place, but that he must also know how to better it.
Below in the quad he could see the cab arriving to convey him back to Rimmington Hall, his home since childhood. Swallow imagined he heard the last chained step of his old life before he leap into the new, the modern, the upwardly trajected.
You snake! You dog! You dirty snitch. My brother’s got 15 years in prison because of you
Do not call me Satan. I am a man with a simple desire, a passion if you will: to maintain and then better my own standard of living. I have certain vices, as does every other walking soul on this planet. I have a code of ethics that wouldn’t have been out of place at the first sitting of the Round Table. I am not a thug or a psychopath. Don’t listen to what the scumbags say. They’re just ignorant animals.
Jeeeeesus when gossip gets out of hand, eh? Mad times. Like this, for example.
So, I’m at the bar drinking rum and coke, whistling quietly, checking out the lovely boys and pretty girls having their joys.
So, some bloke walks up to me. Big bloke. Posh it turned out. Very posh. We nod at each, as you do, as is correct etiquette between two big, ugly lads.
So, instead of getting a beer and a seat, he puts his face to mine and screams, “You snake! You dog! You dirty snitch. My brother’s got 15 years in prison because of you.”
So, I shrugged. It was an open prison. It wasn’t as if the little twat was going to get shivved by Bubba. Far more likely that he’d meet old pals from school. He was an idiot, a useful one though. He wanted to rebel against his family, his clan, his good old family tree. It worked for me.
So, he hits me. Coked out his head. I’m sure it started as a punch. That must have been his intention. I’m sure that was his intention, but the punch sort of got half-arsed on its way over and became a weak slap.
So, I parried with my huge forearms. Then I hit him back. Full-on, heel of the hand under the nose.
So, he falls over. As you do when you know that there’s not going to be any follow-up to a matter, you relax. I don’t. I didn’t. Never under-estimate the powerful stupidity of an over-educated, upper-under-class middle child who wants to show his family exactly what is what, before he accepts his lordom or sirship or whatever these things are called.
So, he says while staunching the blood coming from his nose, “Just you wait. Just you fucking wait!” He tries to get up but his legs crumple beneath him. Ugly. He swings at me from his crumpled-up prone position.
So, I was going to kick him. Instead I decided to be a bit classier than that. I’m maturing, everyone says so.
So, I picked him up, wagged a finger at his broken nose in a hardman manner. I called the barstaff to clean him down and get him home. I headed off out and down the street. Geezer should have really viewed this one experience through a survival lens, turning the experience into a learning event rather than a painful interlude in an otherwise gilded life.
The fact that he wouldn’t talk to me much more after this, until Christmas Eve at least (and this was two months away), meant that the loss was all his.
It’s a smashing street really where I live. It’s leafy, but it has an underpass beneath the motorway down to the river-front. Between these two points were two miles of shops and pubs all of which have residential flatlets above them. Lovely.
I ran a shop at the motorway end, or as the older inhabitants called it “the Meadow Lane End” – cute isn’t it? It’s not. It’s one of those names given to pits of debt by local authorities. Not a meadow in sight. Not even a tree.
My shop sells electronic equipment, secondhand records and computer games, televisions, you know the rigmarole. It’s dowdy, smelly and does not encourage browsing. I don’t encourage browsing, I don’t even encourage spending that much. However I do make my money from the shop. I pass people through it – the new gadgets. Everybody wants one sooner or later and for a variety of reasons.
I like to think of myself as an amoral kind of gent. Well suited to the modern age. Capable of coping with emotional and unemotional situations. Able to empathise, sympathise and distance. I don’t do drugs, I do drink a lot. I gave up smoking last year. I like to think of myself as literate. I do a lot of my own research into important matters. I pay tax. I am heterosexual.
My name is Wayne and I’m 29 years old. I am a depressive – bi-polar but I don’t take Prozac, Lithium or any of the others. I exercise and keep busy, when I get suicidal and steer clear of the drink and watch black and white movies – mostly “Bringing Up Baby” which bears no resemblance to my life or that of anybody I know. I like the way that Cary and Katherine really want to find reasons to avoid the obvious happiness that awaits them. I often cry for no reason. I am not a likeable fellow and have destroyed at least two dead cert relationships with malice a-during-thought.
Self-pity is huge with me. I seek out biographies of self-pitying folk. I avoid actual self-pitying people though. My self-pity is fuelled by mediocrity. I never wanted to be mediocre. It’s not my fault.
Anyway, back to Bryyyannn. He is one of the chaps who comes into my shop to try to sell me things. Brian has no chance whatsoever of anything. Brian will never even win the lottery. Brian is a deadman walking but no thoughts of suicide ever mug him mid-beer. He’s too thick, he’s a moron with more yelping sprogs than braincells.
He’s a big lad with a t-shirt, a Ford Escort, a CD-player and a colour television. He depresses me more than any of my own internal, bad chemistry ever could. Because Brian just keeps on surviving and I have no idea how. All that’s reasonable, holy and rational dictates that the 16-stone, wannabe American, shit-shoveling, shit-eating, shit-looking, shithead should have turned up his toes years ago.
But then again, I have trouble working out how he learnt to drive let alone how he makes it through a month without starving to death, walking into a glass door or simply exploding with the inward pressure of so much thick-as-shittery.
Now, it’s fairly apparent to me that the reason I don’t kill Brian is that I need someone worse than I am hanging around my life. Well, yes. But it also has a great deal to do with the fact that I’m a coward and I’d probably get it wrong. I fantasise about it though; machetes, machine guns, knives, poison, drowning, car accident, drug overdose. But I don’t do it. I give him work instead, and he lets me down. So I insult him in the pub, behind his back at all times.
Tonight though, I hit him and he tumbles. It doesn’t make me feel any better. There’s only one thing that ever makes me feel better, and that’s money.
I worry about money all the time. I never have money although I spend it. I scrounge with no compunction. It’s the only way.
Once, when I was younger, before the relationship problems, I asked the deity to let me have love not money. I was standing at a bus-stop opposite Bow Church in the City of London having just walked out of another interview for another job. I’d smiled and talked the talk and thought to myself that this was too much mammon for a young man and knew that I hadn’t got this job.
I tossed up my options and tried self-pity with God. This was during a period when I searching for my own soul. The speech was along the lines of: “I don’t want the money. I want love. I can live without money but not love”, kind of thing.
That prayer has always stuck with me because when I did get a soulmate, all we ever did was argue about money until the sense was screwed out of it all.
I was so young. Innocent. Dumb.
The deity obviously meant: “Look, you’re no good with relationships, go with the money”. I talk to God a great deal, without of course, having any belief in him.
I simply like to hedge my bets and he’s about the only one who is anywhere near me in terms of ability. You can’t second guess him. He’ll fuck you. Or if he doesn’t then fate will. And if that doesn’t get you, well Karma will, and if that’s not the case then pre-ordination will. Or there’s the class-system. There’s always a reason and there’s always something to go wrong.
I’m concerned at this time with making a lot of money. I mean £100,000 or more if the thing plays out as well as the planner thinks it should. Then I can get some good therapy that will enable me to spend some time talking about this condition to someone else. That will then enable me to make some more money until eventually I will be able to kill the condition and get on with having a relationship, travelling the world and killing Brian.
The planner is a Mr Hughes who does come from Wales, from Swansea I think. He’s like the rest of us but with more front and a 15-year old Jaguar just like you’d expect. His quirk is magic. Mr Hughes believes in the power of timeless and eternal external forces. Go figure. Mr Hughes wears a green suit with brown brogues and never carries jewellery. That surprised me because he just looks like the kind of 50-year old who loves baubles. But Mr Hughes’ Jaguar is under-stated. He sees himself as a planner, and planners never are more concerned with the life of the mind than the trappings that come with a successful plan.
I’ve worked with Mr Hughes before on a small con in Winchester. What a cutie of a county town that one is. We put up in one of the outlying villages, a small hotel on the riverbank, quiet and alive with the local pool competitions, barmaid chats and under-18s on the run from sobriety.
The con was a simple one that revolved around charitable contributions to an overseas fund for poor children. I was the aid worker who’d seen it all in Senegal or Cambudidiliia or wherever. I’d come to Mr Hughe’s attention via a mutual friend called Paul Gorse who smoked too much hashish and saw the delivery of beans on toast as some sort of sacred event. Lovely bloke. Such a shame what happened to him.
Mr Hughes is a tall, tall man and skinny. This means that he’s always cold and forever shivering. It also doesn’t help that he’s smooth skinned like a down-hill bike racer or a girl. He’s got olivey skin with a brown birthmark or mole on his left cheek. He likes to plan cons and he likes to watch them happen.
He also likes to take heroin. He tried to get me to have a bash when we moved to our second job – he claimed that it would lead to a greater mutual understanding and also provide me with much needed motivation to make the cash that we both loved. I thought he was trying to fuck me and then control the supply. I told him. He cried. We moved on.
The Winchester con involved shagging a liberal but cash-wealthy company out of cash that they would have thrown away on charity anyway. Simple con; all you need is a video, Mr Hughes’ London contacts for a decent piece of letterhead, some suitably heart-rending letters, and the right time. Mr Hughes knows this kind of thing. He’s aware of the moment.
The high seriousness of the five Special Branch officers crossed the border into absurdity when held up against what had actually happened.
George Rugley refuses to talk about the sub-post office at the end of Breaker Street in the Somerset village of Wallington. Save for a petition to have it demolished, and the ground on which it stood since 1899 concreted over, George is adamant in his silence.
Over the years local media news-puppies eager to make their name by unearthing some further titbit of scandal about the 1962 “massacre” and “sexual goings-on” would ferret him out. These encounters generally lasted two hours, most of which was spent plying the 62 year old with Teachers whisky and Bensons. They inevitably ended with a pissed George tipping pissed-off hack into the night.
The meetings always took place in the Dragon Inn on the green. George would not abide guests of any kind in his ground-floor flat in one of the converted 14th Century alms houses on the steeply sloping, river side of Archer Street.
No one in the village ever asked and George never gave invitations. You could see him through the window of his televisionless living room, at his type-writer, pressing away like someone feeling for their keys in the dark. He never looked up. One writer even suggested to a colleague after a particularly fruitless visit, that George was like an Amsterdam whore, parading his own brand of titillation to prospective punters without ever putting out unless paid.
George just didn’t like having the curtains closed and as the flat consisted of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room, he had little choice but to work at his desk in view of the street. Because the rest of the village knew to pass by looking up the street to the church, and because he knew when to buy a round, attend the amateur dramatics, and umpire during the summer it worked for him.
So, the writers, hacks and curiosity seekers would seek him out at the pub where he ate every night. He was willing to be sought, he knew they would find him, but he was far from willing to confide. He had no confidence in their story telling. So he listened and drank and remained like the frigid whore they all thought he was. At home he typed and typed, neatly filing the sheets of A4 cartridge paper away in dated ring-binders. Every month he would make the trip to Taunton and its main post office to send a copy of the most recent notes to an address in New York.
One night in June, as the rain prepared to green the surrounding hills, he’d finished his eggs and gammon and was considering a game of cards with Tuft and Parker, the two longtime companions who owned the Dragon. Before the deck was taken from its place on top of the travel draughts next to the wine glasses, in walked the kind of face that cooed “desperately interested, no really” from every open pore.
George returned to his seat, unfurled his copy of the International Herald Tribune and prepared for the worst. After ordering a pint of the local best, the researcher asked Parker: “That’s George Rugely isn’t it? You wouldn’t know what he drinks would you?”
Parker nodded and poured a large Teachers whisky with no ice: “You’re not going to get anything out of him you know, there’s little point you bothering. George won’t say a word about it”.
“We’ll see”, replied the younger man developing or trying to develop an attitude of sanguinity that was barely achievable in older pros, let alone an eleven-stone, twenty-two year old with a £4.99 book about the original Ripper murders to his name. He wandered over to George, who could almost see the opening line edging to get out.
“George Rugely I presume”, it was more than unoriginal, it wasn’t even appropriate for the occasion.
“You may as well take a seat, give me the scotch and get on with it. I take it this has turned into some form of initiation rite, if only I felt like a holy relic and not simply some… how did they put it?”
“Whore, titillating Amsterdam hooker.”
“What do you know and what do you want to know? Before you go on though, let me stop you going down any path that begins: ‘This isn’t about the murders PC, sorry Mr, Rugely, it’s a profile of you. We want to know more about the only man who has ever come close to identifying Mr Why’. It doesn’t wash, and hasn’t washed since 1976.”
There is no profile of me. I have done nothing of any note. The only reason I am of any relevance outside of the village is that every other officer with any concern in the matter has already given their side of the story, excluding of course Special Branch who are not allowed to.
Even the corner gave two hundred of his four hundred-page autobiography over to the incident. I have not, and that’s what makes me interesting. I am a potential surfeit of new, unpublished and therefore exclusive insights”, not even George was aware that he could sneer quite that effectively.
“You would like to know as much about the creature who pulled the triggers, tied the knots, hammered the nails and wielded the knife. I imagine that you have your own theories on the pairings of the civilians, the note, the relationship between the eight and the reason for choosing Wallington above all other villages.
“Also, do not tell me that you are long-lost relative of the murdering bastard and have come to admit to the discovery of a similar note to the only person who could understand or forgive. That was tried several times in the 1980s. Do not tell me that you are an honest writer who wishes to make unglamorous something that no one but the sickest of minds would possibly find glamorous in the first place. In short, please, don’t waste my time. By the way, I will need another Teachers and a packet of cigarettes”.
“It is a kind of initiation rite, you’re right there. I’m writing a book on the effects of murders and my publisher appears to be fixated with the “Wallington Horror House”. Personally I think it holds as much interest to most sane people as Manson, Jim Jones or the Wests. It’s old, old news, but nevertheless, you have to be talked to, so I’m talking to you.
Frankly, I can’t see what difference it would make to you how the information is going to be used. I’m not expecting to get anything out of this evening except maybe a lighter wallet, a trip to Somerset and the chance to wear a badge to the next Guild of Crime Writers dinner that says: ‘I’ve met George Rugley… and he’s worse than that’. That’s about the only place your legend pertains any longer Mr Rugley. Teachers was it?” He stood, and walked back to Tuft behind the bar.
George was more impressed than usual by this approach. It was possible that the reverberations from the multiple murders were finally turning from page leads into interesting margin notes for bigger, more immediate events. It was even possible that his contrariness was going to be the only thing left for the carrion-writers to chew over. All the other facts of the case were known.
Most of the perceptions had been logged, made into “True Life” dramas and forgotten or sewn into the mythic tapestry that covered the actual events. It might be the case that his own thoughts on the matter, so long suppressed, had lost any actual relevance, replaced as they seemed to be by the hunt for them. Then again it still seemed like just another angle, another way of getting him to say a name, and that wasn’t going to happen. He’d lost more than a few scotches in the decades since the slaughterhouse tipped its contents into his life. Not opening his mouth had by some accounts lost him millions, but that wasn’t close to the real value. So he wasn’t going to start worrying about it now.
George’s wife had left him as a result of the events at the sub-post office. Shortly after that he’d resigned from the force, moved from their home to rent a small flat in Wallington. She’d left because he couldn’t make her understand that he had to remain objective, that despite the nightmares, he couldn’t share the details with her. Even though her younger sister had been one of the casualties who, along with the other seven had been consigned to a closed casket as soon as she was tipped off the post-mortem slab, he still was unable to communicate anything about what he’d seen to his wife.
As the local bobby, he’s been first to the scene that at that time was still under siege. He’d cycled down from a council meeting following a phone call from a neighbour who had heard the shots and then screams. He’d called in the CID who took at least an hour and two deaths to get there. In that hour, PC Rugely had stood, as unable to do anything as the victims inside.
When they did arrive he was swiftly relegated to crowd control. As local liaison he’d been led into the place to identify what or who he could. The assassin or murderer was later to be christened “Mr Why”. He’d removed not only his own finger-ends but also his face, including the teeth, before managing to put a knife directly into his heart – speculation was that he’d fallen onto it.
George entered the sub-post office at 11:15am behind Detective Sergeants Bentley and Tucker of Taunton CID, the till was in place, unopened, a note was pinned to the grill, and that was the last sign of anything approaching normal life. Eight civilians, as they came to be called, were literally scattered around the small room in pairs tied with bailing twine into positions of close intimacy. No one retained his or her own face, hands or genitals.
Mr Why was slumped on top of the counter like some fairy-tale shoemaker who had offended the fairies into revenging torture. His crossed legs held one of the shotguns, a hunting knife and thermos flask containing the kind of hot sweet tea that was used after such tragedies. His hands held the knife and a small, plain gold ring.
The viscera was everywhere except for the till which was conspicuously clean. Both CID officers gagged, turned and ran from the scene to throw-up outside on the village green onto which the post-office abutted. George stood, too aware of who he was seeing and why they were there, to equate the piles of meat with dead people. Eight people had been there for the everyday purposes of pensions, stamps and conversations. Now they were ragged parcels, tied, packaged to strangeness.
The message of the events was yet to move past the recognition of the participants let alone reach the part of his brain that would trigger a gag reflex. He was literally and completely transfixed by the sheer out-of-the-ordinariness of this eminently ordinary venue. He walked further into the small, ten-feet by 12-feet room trying to get behind the counter to the kitchen and back yard before recalling something about not disturbing anything until forensics arrived and turned the insanity into some form of observable reality. Turning back towards the door he kicked a revolver.
George was ordered to door duty while Tucker made rapid notes and Bentley screamed insults down the phone to forensics who had still to leave Taunton. By the time they arrived newspapers and TV had descended on the village and were talking to everybody in sight. George was incapable of saying anything to anyone, he merely stood, blocking the entrance looking into some distant place.
The blood had soaked into his trouser legs up to the shins and his hands were washed red. Unlike CID, he’d been immediately aware of the identities of the eight paired victims. Standing outside the post office for four hours, he’d been able to match faces to bodies, voices to faces and conversations to voices. From the conversations he’d been able to remember their movements, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies and from that he’d been pitched straight into the depths of what they must have suffered.
Of the eight, three were women: Janet his sister-in-law, Mr Gregson the widow, and Ellen Santry the sub-post mistress. Four of the five men were in collecting pensions, Misters Owen, Crofton, Hemsley and Forsyth, while the fifth was probably running an errand for his wife. Clive and Maureen Edwards were in their late twenties, outgoing, middling wealthy and awaiting the inevitable call to the parish council.
George had played cricket with Clive and would visit him at his desk in his antiques shop two doors up from his death-place. They joked that Clive was the only dealer that the constable would ever have any trouble with.
He made a tidy living and was often out of the village at trade fairs or auctions. A stalwart of the cricket and football teams, he got drunk like everybody else and needed stamps like everybody else. He was an inch under six feet tall, sandy haired and was always in a suit and tie with a pair of brown Churches brogues shined and double-knotted on his feet. Clive’s business afforded the household a cleaning woman and several trips abroad a year.
Maureen wrote romantic fiction for pennies – substantial pennies by the means of many of the other villagers – and made sure to include at least one or two of the ladies of the five-hundred soul village in at least three of her yearly output of twelve books. She’d been writing too long to believe everything she created, but quietly within her heart she held the virtues of tempered passion and binding love-loyalty to be the saving graces when all was said and done.
Both Clive and Maureen were known, not disliked and often talked about. Now the writing would cease, to be replaced by a kind of dry, kindled mourning that would eventually ignite in her own suicide four years later.
The next time George entered the room was at eight that evening, as local-liaison. By then the place was packed with ranking officers and forensics patiently going over the scene.
The bodies had been removed, still paired: Mrs Gregson with Ellen Santry, Janet with Mr Crofton, Owen with Hemsley, and Forsyth with Clive Edwards. White chalk marks in weird patterns had been marked on the floor where they lay, squatted or hunched.
One pair that hung, strapped to nails, recently hammered into the left-hand wall, their feet a few inches from the floor, so they didn’t even make it into the Sunday newspapers with a chalked memorial the next morning.
The days that followed were sliced into sections of short sleep, CID grillings, witness reports, more CID grillings, and the arrival of snoopers from the Met who thought that one of their hardmen might have taken a country jaunt, he hadn’t. George also encountered, for the first but not the last time, Special Branch.
The high seriousness of the five Special Branch officers crossed the border into absurdity when held up against what had actually happened. All of the un-ranked and barely identified officers were dressed in dark suits with the tallest seemingly the leader. They then ranked down in size, ending at five-feet nine inches. Five-nine did all the writing.
“We know you were familiar with the civilians PC Rugley, so we don’t want you to go Mrs Marpling the incident”, commented five-foot-eleven towards the middle of the first interview.
“You’re not a suspect”, advanced five-foot-ten at the start of the second.
“This method execution is not an MO with which we are unfamiliar, we merely need you to flesh out the details”, began six-foot-one, unaware of his pomp or the raw choice of words.
George was dumbfounded by the way in which he was relegated to data conduit without ever truly being listened to. On joining the force at the age of 18, in preference to a job at the local box-making factory, he had longed for an occasion like this one where he could actually be useful. Slowly, as the years of his service had progressed, he’d grown comfortable with his day-to-day tasks in Wallington.
By the time of the post office slaughter he had learned to look on the murders, rapes, indecent assaults and other detritus that flopped onto his desk in the form of memo and poster in the same way as a weekend soldier looks at a minor war. He knew it was happening and that he was, nominally, trained to deal with it but was aware that he wouldn’t have to.
Complacency was an everyday event in a place the size of Wallington. When the most you have to deal with is a boundary dispute, the occasional drunk and disorderly, rumours of wife beating, and the annual vandalism of the cricket club’s prized sight-screens (courtesy of Mark Hornley who couldn’t abide the damn things blocking his view of the cricket so would paint obscenities on them), you grew comfortable.
But now the human abattoir had opened its doors onto the green, and the chief slaughterman had evaded any blame by deleting himself from any chance of tracing, and George wanted to do something. Instead he was left to feel unattached, peripheral and even marginally to blame for somehow not spotting the stranger. This was the only thing that was known about Mr Why. He was not a resident of Wallington nor, to the best of anybody’s knowledge, had he ever been. He had simply drifted in pursuit, or so George’s wife maintained, by his own demons and taken life.
I became intensely envious about exactly what was happening during those lunches.
Sales are filthy things even though they are the public’s gaze made concrete. The sales channels like coal mine shafts involve grubbiness and demeaning yourself for a quid. Just to feed yourself and your loved one. Let alone attain enlightenment. Even the fucking miners could get a flame from the coal to warm and light their dismal lives.
That’s not how it works with poetry. Apparently.
Poets are never the centre of a publisher’s attention. We are all alone and battling in the market.
James’s note continued, rambling, arrogant, scared, mediocre as always. Yes. he had lots more to say.
This is because the galleries, magazines and journals, the newspapers and book publishers, the labels and studio have no idea how to act around poets.
Especially us serious poets. Poor idiots that we are.
I’ve given up drinking and smoking grass. I also appear to have given up any form of structure that could count as living.
My wife, Jemma, is understanding or she is very distant. I think we are drifting apart like an elegant ocean liner (me) and its doughty tugboat (her).
Oh we really are, and none of it’s my fault.
I am more than aware that, minus the tugboat, the mighty and elegant ocean liner is just a hulk of metal full of rich people rammed up against each other like bad ideas.
I should have remembered to pick the car up from the garage. This simple act would have allowed me to do the grocery shopping. Enabled me – the car has no control over me.
That simple act would have given me the chance of a stable, maybe even a happy relationship.
James and his easy answers. A poet is he?
But I didn’t want to go out into this heat, this humidity and all those people. It’s too hot. That’s a simple fact, and there are few enough of those now that everybody has their own truths.
The thin skin of my forehead is peeling off me as raw leaves like a book in a hot shower.
That said, anybody who takes a book into a shower deserves everything that is coming to them. The book remains innocent, no matter its contents. Soggy but not to blame.
Where is that damned and damning car though? Which garage? Of course, like everything else, I have it written down somewhere.
I am a fucking poet. I produce… I produce lines that distill the human condition. I have insights. I understand and manifest beauty. I feel and express pain so you don’t have to.
On and on he goes. Dear, lost James.
I award myself a point for not swearing at this point.
I should have picked up that car. It would have got me out of the house for a few hours and I needed the exercise.
Dylan Thomas – the hero of my adolescence.
The man who set me on this path – he had the pub and the bar to visit and he couldn’t care less about his wife although he loved her and she loved him. Despite the violence.
I can no longer get out of the house by going to the pub or the bar or the bottle shop or the off licence or the bodega. Booze is no friend to me now that it causes me physical pain deep down in my kidneys. I am a coward in the face of pain. I am a poet but I am no Wilfred Owen.
I see all these other people beavering around the place, getting on with things and whether or not they seem happy, at least they seem engaged, attached, tethered to a reasonable and mundane reality.
Does this sound pretentious?
Yes, James yes.
It is my truth (which is now currency, so fuck you).
Their feet seem to be connected to the ground.
They seem to be at home.
They are fine.
Their hands grip the bannisters of stairs leading to public squares, where they sit eating pears or apples and talking on their phones.
I rather miss watching other people simply having lunch in a square hemmed in by grand buildings, or having park picnics in the cool green doesn’t make me hate them with envy and pain.
Or at least the idea of it.
As time went on though, I began to feel paranoid, as if the people were doing these things just to show me that I wasn’t, that I couldn’t.
For me, eating in public was a performance in the same way as an English exam in a big hall was.
Or making a cup of coffee for two? Always a huge performance.
Was I eating the correct fruit?
Was I eating it correctly?
Was the fruit the correct way up?
Should I be using a knife or eating it au natural?
Was I dribbling juice down my chin and drawing attention to my pale, pudgy face?
Was I even in the appropriate public place?
Would the combination of food and situation look attractive enough to ensure at least a passing look of approbation?
Had I got everything wrong, ensuring multiple looks askance and pitying?
After a while I knew that I was doing those simple things in such normal places wrong. All wrong. I didn’t have the script.
I was a fat clown who had removed his make-up by mistake. I was a poet but I was no Lorca, no Victor Jara. Nor will I ever be.
At last! Some insight. Some self-knowledge. Don’t be fooled. This is a standard tactic for getting someone, anyone, to tell him that he is as rich in meaning and heart as Lorca. That is as brave and ill-fated as Jara.
Of course, that was when I was earning enough money to afford the time to sit around eating fruit in public.
Poetry does not pay. I don’t know what she sees in me. Just a pathetic, scriptless flabby husk I am.
The telephone is ringing.
I should answer the telephone. I can see it’s Jemma calling from work.
She is a professional. She probably wants a lift home. She has been busy with work. Meetings with colleagues and clients. She is probably exhausted and wants to avoid the stink of a bus or the idle chat of a taxi.
I really do need to go outside and get that car before the garage closes. And my marriage goes with it.
Not just the car, Jimmy. Let’s not fool ourselves.
Nowadays I don’t bother to attempt going out unless I absolutely have to: to wit, my wife Jemma’s car. The one she needs for business and pleasure.
Not having to get drunk or stoned is a relief, especially in the heat and humidity.
Not waking up hungover.
Not waking up slack jawed with anxiety.
Nowadays, guilt is something I sneak out to church with.
That’s where you go! Mystery solved.
Except for the car.
The damn car.
My wife.
My soon-to-be-ex-wife.
Gave me the money to get it fixed.
It is not fixed. Or rather it is. The man at the garage sent a message electronically and told me it was ready. I wasn’t ready. It was fixed. I am not fixed.
I’m going to join a gym next week so I will get out of the house. Jemma wants me to. She assures me that not only will it make me feel better, it will also make me feel.
But I am a poet. But I am no Sylvia Plath. But I am not Vladimir Mayakovsky. Not Hart Crane nor Anne Sexton, nor Randall Jarrell.
She should really have left me by now.
James only sees love as a form of exchange. Not too poetical if you ask me. He’d like to think I’m imminently going to walk out. I am not. Yet.
Two years ago, I was indeed running my own company, selling pieces of words wrapped in designs to people who sold them on around the world. I absolutely (I am a poet) hated it.
Driving or flying hundreds, maybe thousands of miles a week, talking to people whose names escaped me just as mine were lost to them. The evening binges were different, more difficult to stick at because they required us to form relationships – these were good for growth. Me and my three partners needed growth, growth, growth. Cash, cash, cashflow. The fact that we weren’t bothering to have fun, fun, fun was by the by.
Instead of cracking on with creativity, I was flipped and I flopped into sales, which I discovered to my astonishment that I was actually quite good at.
What James means, but will never admit, is that he’s always been a salesman. Not matter how he looks down on Sales, he’s good at it. He should stick to it. We’d both be happy.
Even pissed I could retain the plot and close. Every time I closed I felt the need to get pissed and tell everybody. Every time I told everybody my partners dampened a remnant of my joy with, “You’re only doing your job”.
They were also paranoid. It was business after all and the thought of anybody outside the confines of our high-rental walls knowing about anything that happened inside filled them with fear.
The only time that they left the building was to go to lunch at the Greek bistro across the road.
I should answer the telephone.
I should go get the car.
I should get dressed.
I should leave the house.
I am a poet but I am no Emily Dickinson. No Hanshan. No Shiwu nor W. B. Yeats.
Christ, this is the sort of thing that dribbles out of his mouth after one glass of wine.
I became intensely jealous about exactly what was happening during those lunches. Not just eating. Eating and talking about me.
I had lunch with them several times. After saying how much they worry about you, James. We talked about food and finally about whether I’d like to invest a little more in the company.
One Friday I got back to the office, with a sale closed, at three in the afternoon and no one was there.
I got drunk and I stayed drunk through Saturday punctuating the hours with love calls and fights with Jemma. All of this in the house that we, she, was trying to turn into a home.
Well, fights.
I smoked dope. I drank rum. I took pills and I drove a hire car into a wall on Sunday night. Jemma was at her wits end. I was in hospital having tried to do for myself in an expensive hotel room with an expensive bottle of rum and not very expensive over the counter pills, all of which I paid for with my company credit card.
I was sacked by my partners on the Wednesday for betraying company secrets, misuse of company funds and for being an unstable addict, which I was not. I was quite stable most of the time. I was certainly an addict but it was me who was bringing home the bacon while the others played at being in business. As for betraying trade secrets, that was a bunch of hooey.
I’d stood on a table in a bar and yelled out the names of our client base and revenue (all of it down to me) at a bunch of hardened Sunday evening drinkers who couldn’t have remembered, had a few of them not recorded my performance and uploaded it to various popular internet sites.
It was in the hospital that I decided to become a poet. Unlike many poets, I had built up quite a substantial amount of savings, and various financial instruments against my old age. Unstable addict, my fat backside.
The telephone has stopped. I have just realised the best way to solve this conundrum.
Suicide!
This is where this rambling note from my husband James stops. There are two red wine rings on the paper. He doesn’t even say sorry.Never mind though. I found him slumped into the couch, drooling but alive. I’m writing this from the hospital. I’ll take him home soon. We’ll have words.
“In the absence of leadership, a group organises around its least flexible member”
We started the hunt first thing in the morning with the sun barely out of its bed. We had beer and rain. Rain so hard that it felt like it would smash us into the grass on the hill. I decided to kill Dapper Dale. Finally. Once and for all.
We were hunting rabbit. Dapper Dale and me had rifles. Craig and Danny had crossbows; nasty things in my mind. We all had knives. Those knives were big enough for rabbits and cutting a bit of undergrowth and killing our fellow man.
Like I said, it was raining hard. It was horrible. The night before when we’d set out from the farmhouse and headed in-country we’d had no warning of this wild, delaying downpour. We were already full of unsweetened porridge and drenching in summer rain.
Still, moaning about it was not going to get what had to be done, done. No amount of complaining would have dried us or made us clean. In three hours, rain and shine, we had to be back inside the house with the job done and all our hunting stories wide and straight.
I thought about Kathleen as the rain drove diagonally into my face. Going up the hill, the rising warmth was behind us. I was going to marry Dale’s daughter Kathleen later in the month. She was a beautiful girl on the outside and not plain in the head either. I had been promised.
I needed to rest but asking for a rest with this crew was not in play, not even if both your legs had been broken at different times over the years and had been set badly. No, you were not going to ask for a rest unless you wanted hours worth of hard banter.
That’s how we all were back then. Life was just that way. That’s how it worked. It could be painful if you stepped out of line; if you got above yourself. Weakness was out. And good forbid you showed cleverness because that meant you were putting someone else down.
Unless it was called for by Dale.
But once you knew the rules, not only could you avoid the pain, you could even come up smiling.
Don’t think I’m lying about this either. I was in a bar where a bloke, whose wife of 40 years had been buried about a month before, was being brought back down to earth. His mates, my mates, were tickling his ribs with some chat, like it was an act of kindness for the bloke.
One fella had his arm around the drunken widower’s shoulders. “At least you can get some takeaway later, Jim. Lovely meal for one. Anything you want. Lovely.”
“Cos’ she won’t be there to cook it for him, thank gawd”, guffawed another mate of his ramming home the point in case Jim had missed it.
“Lucky bloke, her cooking was worse than his aim!” yelled someone from the bar.
The widower tried a smile, and said, ”You bastards. You fucking lot! We’re still here though. Us we’re still here! Altogether. All the boys!”
I happened to know that he loved his Joan very much. He was broken by her death. But he knew the rules and he kept drinking. That was it for him though, he just kept drinking. He sold his house in the end. Took his pension, bought a little bungalow up north. I meant to visit him.
I wasn’t going to ask for a break at any time soon on this hunt.
The three others kept walking, eyes front, striding, not walking pardon me. We all knew the ground even after the rain had changed it. We’d made this slog loads of times before. It was a 12-mile round-trip from the bay, enough for an early start, a rabbit hunt and back in time for dinner, a dinner starting at around two and going on until late into the night.
There was a chance of boar maybe. That would be excellent. It would add time. Craig and Danny would shoot back for the truck and meet me and Dale half way. That’d be really good because even now, only five miles in, I was over it.
Kathleen and I had been up late talking. She talked about babies, and I talked, through a bit of beer, about getting away, going abroad before babies. Getting away. She said her dad had better not hear me talking like that because there were plenty of other people who would love my job and would take it for less than he was paying me. That meant she’d already had that conversation with Dale.
He wasn’t one for changing his mind, not on his daughter. Not on any subject, not even if he was wrong. Especially not if he was wrong. I once saw him inflate the price of a car he was buying.
He’d assumed it was older than it was, and a different model number. He’d got them both wrong but no one in the family was going to correct him. So, he told the fella he was buying from, that he wasn’t going to spend such small beans for a car so slick. He would pay a fair and reasonable price or be damned for it.
The other fella, a straight-up sort called Ted, we’d all known him for years, was almost pleading that the car was not worth the money being shoved at him. He knew what might happen later in the year or even decade or a day or the next minute. Everybody else knew too. Craig piped up, ”Come on Daddy, Ted wouldn’t lead you wrong”.
Dale wouldn’t walk away, if anything he pushed his face closer into Ted’s. People gathered around because of the noise and, I swear to God, because of the static and the smell. You would have thought that Dale, not a big man but forceful, was going to lay the other, bigger, fella out flat on the concrete forecourt. Dale was angry. He wasn’t going to let it go.
Ted’s son brought out the papers from the office and showed them to Dale.
“Look, here, in black and white. Check the engine block number. It’s all here”, he said as calmly as he could.
”Fuck off with your paperwork you little clerk. We’re men. We make men’s bargains”, he took the papers and buried them in the pocket of his overalls. He threw the money on the floor in front of Ted.
”See, my car now. All legal”, he said.
You could tell just by a slight movement, a sag of the shoulder, that he knew he was wrong about the deal. He also knew that he wasn’t wrong about ensuring his reputation for never taking a step back on a made decision. He held his huge right hand out for the keys.
”We are still mates, Ted. Me and you. Solid. You must come to the house soon, Ted. You must come.”
Ted went white as a shroud, and Ted sold him the car at the price Dale wanted. He sold it because he knew the rules. Even in the face of rank fucking stupidity, people respect you if you don’t back down.
Two nights later, Dale and Ted were in the pub, up the back, telling each other how they were the best buddies, the greatest mates ever. When Dale got up and went to take a piss though, I could see the other man breathe out a long sigh of relief. His hands were shaking.
Dale stood him drinks for the rest of the night.
Those were my thoughts as we pushed up the hill with the rain lashing us while the heat built up, and those were my thoughts just moments before I felt a slap across my shoulders.
“You’re taking your fucking time. Still, if you want to shuffle along like an old lady, well…” It was Dale. The punch line was coming. Just not now, not this time.
He stalked off, his muscle mass – as he delighted in calling it – driving his thick frame up and on, up and on. His middle finger prodded away the rain near his usually deliberately deaf left ear indicating something of tremendous importance that I could not understand.
I saw him catching up with the other blokes, pounding past them. I saw them trying to match his pace and failing. He slowed down. He stopped. He never stopped. I thought he was having a heart attack or, given the earlier indication, a brain haemorrhage.
The others, heads down against the rain, kept walking, talking to each other, apparently unaware that Dale had stopped. They disappeared into the rain and over the hill.
I had seen brain bombs before thought, so you couldn’t be sure. A friend’s girlfriend, her aneurysms, they should have killed her. Everybody including the doctors had said as much.I stopped.
I wasn’t going to have to kill the old bastard after all.
I began to plan what I would say at Dale’s funeral. I kept walking. It kept me walking.
A year or so after the car incident, I was in a bar when Ted the used car man slumped into me. ”She just fell down there right in front of me, she went down like a sack of potatoes, bang!” he sobbed.
He illustrated the point by slamming his empty shot glass down on the bar and looking at me for some kind of response.
I offered him a whisky. He had accepted. Ted had become a serious barfly, an old soak. He was partial to coke too.
”She’s not old,” he reminded me. ”Well, she was. You don’t expect it. You just don’t expect it is all I can tell you.”
He was talking about his wife of 30 years. Before tying the knot, he’d know her for eighteen months. He figured he was in love and obviously she was in love with him. After all he was tall, slender, dark haired and not even slightly sick.
“Got any coke?”, he whsipered to the whole bar, his face was streaked with sand and tears.
She was, or at least she appeared to be, in good overall shape. Plus they had a lot in common. They liked music, movies, walking along the beach at sunset (they were going to do that soon) and dogs.
“Doctors say she’s got maybe a week if she survives the operation. Bang!”. He drank another shot. I bought him another shot. I thought she was already dead.
I was a little shocked he’d tell me something like that in the bar. Sure, he’d been through some stuff. But it was private. What did he expect me to do with it?
Anyway, as it turns out, she had never been dead. She had been leverage for Ted to bargain for drinks with. A week later she’d had some surgery, she woke up, she said a few words, and he was back in the bar celebrating like he was the fucking surgeon.
A month after she came home he was in the bar again. He explained to everybody that they must definitely not get him wrong, he was happy that and all that, but that she’d changed a lot.
Before she’d been feisty – she hated that word – but reasonable. Now she was full of weird ideas. She wanted to travel for a start. He took another swallow of hooch and breathed out filth.
He’d had to sell his business, his life’s work, to pay for his habits since Dale had turned him around on himself.
He wanted to tell us about how much she had changed. Instead he talked about his hope. Hope was as acceptable to us to hear as it was for him to say. The fact of the matter though, was that he was no longer in love.
The more the night wore on, the more he drank and talked, and the more no one stopped him, the more positive and hopeful he sounded. But everything he hoped for became like a candy wrapper wrapped tightly around a broken bone.
It was as we were staggering and swaying to the taxi rank by the town hall in the rain that he finally admitted that he hoped that, “She might change back. I mean because she’s already changed once already. Even her mum says so.” Then he bent over and started to puke.
Dale had done this to him. Threat after threat sandwiched by false friendship, even sympathy. Dale played with him until Ted finally broke.
I was terrified of him and his ability to do exactly what he wanted and to have other folk follow along with no apparent care for themselves.
Of course that’s not entirely true. Folks, me included, did follow along with for care of themselves. Some, me included, because they did not care to be bullied with words and threatened with physical violence.
Some followed along because they thought that Dale was mightily cleverer than they were and that his ideas and motivations must also be bigger and smarter than theirs. So, they must benefit.
I just wanted him dead.
Others got behind him because they were lazy as cats and thought they were cleverer than Dale. These people were the ones who egged him on, pushed him forward and applauded his bullying: “Dale stands up for honest folks” or “Dale keeps things simple”.
These were also the people, a couple of doctors, a local politician, a volunteer policeman, the chairman of the local team, who stood by Dale “through thick and thin”, most specifically through the death of the nurse in Dale’s house at a Dale Open House party.
There was a lot of confusion and statements that contradicted other statements about her death. One thing was never in doubt though, she died in a pretty brutal way and she put up a long fight.
‘Dapper’ Dale had been arrested but denied everything. He did help the police. He had a pal who had a pal who worked on a national newspaper. Dale got his story into it. He got his story out first.
When he was finally exonerated of all charges, he made sure that everybody involved was bought a drink very publicly.
A weasel of a guy called Bradshaw who had a bad record of violence against women when he was unmedicated admitted to the charges and got 25 years, out in ten.
Bradshaw had been working for Dale up at the farm for a few years. He had replaced a bloke called Minter who had committed suicide. Having owned up to the unmedicated murder of the nurse, and having gone into a secure unit, Bradshaw was replaced by a bloke called Grimmond who was also educationally behind.
Dale always had one fella on his staff who could be sacrificed if needed.
Dale loved to thrown parties. Dale loved to throw the farm house and some of its grounds open to anybody who could get up the hill, onto the plain and into the grounds, no invitation required.
“The more the merrier,” said Dale.
These “Open Days and Nights” were where favours and deals were made. Everybody had fun, that was one of the house rules. Sometimes things got a little, to use Dale’s word, “funky”, a bit out of the hand. That was fine but God help you if you were found in the vicinity of any damaged property. If you were found actually damaging something (without permission) then not even Jesus Christ and Buddah riding shotgun were going to be able to save you from one of two fates.
Either you were going to be falling over something or you were going to be owing Dale. Not always Dale himself but certainly one of Dale’s pals. You would get invited back, in fact you would be one of the selected group with a permanent invitation to Dale’s. More a command in fact.
Definitely a command.
I’d been going to Dale’s open houses since I was very young, four or five years old. In that time I had only ever been in the vicinity of one damaged piece of property. I was twelve at the time, a small, dark, permanently worried twelve year old who could climb trees but could not catch a thrown ball or a fallen lampshade to save his life.
I looked down as the tennis ball that my dad had thrown to me in the courtyard rolled away. I looked as the glass lampshade fell onto the stone floor. I looked on as dad ran, and I looked up at Dale who had marched around the corner, one of his daughters close by. Dale was smiling at me broadly.
“Now then young man,” he said. “There is some damage, there is some damage”. As you might expect his emphasis was on that second “is” and my emphasis was on understanding what he meant. He seemed pleased rather than angry.
“Look what you did, young man. Look at this mess, this damage.”
What he said was true, there was some damage. What he meant was not true. Or maybe, I thought, maybe it was. After all, without me being there, Dad would not have thrown the ball.
I have often wondered where Dad found that ball. That ball that did for his dignity. My Dad worked for Dale, in the used car lot.
I told Dale that I was sorry but that it was not my fault.
“Then whose fault is it?”
“Not mine “, I said.
“Then why say sorry?”
He was so big. He was so right. Why would I say sorry? Because if I didn’t then it was going to be my dad’s fault. I was not about to land my Dad in it.
Dale knew the answer to his question. He always did or he’d never ask it.
“Who do you think broke my lamp?”
I shrugged and tried to look brave and innocent.
“Someone did. Look at it. Look at what’s left of it”, he said, softly.
He was right. It was broken.
“Go away now love”. His daughter danced off his arm, patted me on my head, moved on to learn about being a nurse.
I really wanted my Dad to respect me back then. Not love me, that would have been soft.
Dale turned to my dad and beckoned him over with a look. My dad shook his head. Dale nodded his. There were five paces between them. He told my dad, he said, “You broke my fucking lamp. I loved that fucking lamp”.
“Then why was it in the yard?” I wanted to ask.
My dad began to shake. Dale shouted at me, “Come over here now you!”
I started to walk on stickman legs.
My dad screamed, “Stop!”
He took a step towards Dapper Dale. He took another and another and another until he was standing within arm’s reach. Dale took him by the shoulder and pushed him into the house and slammed the door.
That was the last time I saw my dad. I saw a man who looked like my dad but was stooped over, he was crying. He walked out of the house an hour or so later. I’d cleaned up the broken glass by then with a dustpan and brush I’d found in a shed. I’d tidied up the mess. Then I’d just sat on a trestle table in the yard waiting and promising myself I’d do for Dale one day.
After we got home from that party I never wanted my dad to respect me because I didn’t respect him. Over the years before his death from a quick and easy heart attack he became smaller and quieter. He’d disappear for days at a time on business for Dale. When he came back he’d drink rum and make model kits of military vehicles on the table in the kitchen. Mum left.
My rifle was ready in case I needed to put Dapper Dale out of his misery. I felt I could do it. I even felt a jury would understand. That’s mad. That’s how much Dale filled my life. I felt he must fill everybody else’s too. They must all know what an animal he was. They’d understand that you put animals out of their and everybody else’s misery. I felt that. All I was doing was feeling.
I reached Dale. He was on his knees. His head was down. His hands were in the earth digging into the mud. Clawing at it.
“Look at this! Look at this! Fucking hell young man! Look!”
Dale didn’t die on the hill. Dale was eternal. And I have married into his eternity.
Dapper Dale had discovered a golden pendant. Not golden, gold. Solid gold, engraved, a thousand years old. The heavy, endless, pounding rain had washed away the earth to reveal it. He’d noticed a glint as he walked up the hill. The pendant had revealed itself to him.
He stood up and laughed and hugged me.
“Fucking hell young man! You’re my good luck charm!” He shook my hand, he hugged me again. “Go and get my boys!”
I’d never seen him hug anybody. He’d never shaken my hand. It felt good. It felt amazing. It still does.
So here I am. Looking at my son, drinking rum and waiting for Dale to call. There’s a party tonight.
“Some delicious soup might teach you at least one decent recipe too,” said Jane.
Dread, dread, dread. The forest is dark and full of autumn, chewed over by winter frosts and snows. There is a crunch to it as the sun sets behind the traveller making her way up the mountainside to the refuge and a warm, thick stew.
Some wolves are howling far away but still too close. Karen’s mountain hike dips, losing valuable ascent but she pushes on. The day is leaving. It’s getting dark. It’s been 12 hours since she set out from the town this morning. She walked out past the graveyard, the bar, the tourist office and the mayor’s house. Her friend, Jane, was walking with her.
The last time they’d walked together had been on the same hike but a year previously. They’d gone in the winter, in January, because that was the only time they could take off from their jobs: Karen in catering. Jane as a lawyer. They’d walked and talked about their lives. Long, involved conversations fuelled by the rhythm of their breathing, the steady beating of their hearts and the contentment of taking measured step after step with a destination and return planned and available. Ups and downs and winter birds singing around them. The pine trees’ scent, the wind in the needles above and around them.
Finally an ascent regained some of the lost height. They met a hilariously blond Swedish family coming the other direction along the sandy path: mother, father, teenage son and daughter. Tall, slim, smiling. They’d shared information about each other’s routes, drank some water. Apparently there was an ancient monastery carved into the valley side just a few kilometres ahead. A step ladder of sorts carved into the side too. The monks were the jolly kind, happy to meet and feed travellers with a vegetable broth that was absolutely delicious according to the nodding Swedes.
Jane and Karen had time. They decided to visit.
“Some spiritual enlightenment would be just the thing for a lawyer”, said Karen.
“Some delicious soup might teach you at least one decent recipe too,” said Jane.
They walked, and a few kilometres later they wandered down into the valley. Looking up into the wan winter sun they saw the monastery and carved stepladder. Steep. Steep. Steep. But the building looked amazing. White, vertical, calm, beautifully simple.
“After you”, Jane told Karen as the drizzle began to slick the steps.
“Let’s get in there before the rain really starts.”
As they climbed they chatted about the state of the world and how Jane’s marriage had finally turned the corner after her second, agonising miscarriage. She’d decided not to pursue children any further. Her husband, Craig – a teacher at an inner city state school – had taken that badly at first. He’d fought hard against it, looking for reasons and reason. Then he moved to self-blame and then to self-hate, then to hating her, then to hating everything.
They’d nearly separated after seven years of relatively untroubled togetherness because of the kids they never had.
Up they climbed. Nothing more than a dampening, slickening drizzle to mar the day. Half way up they stopped on a platform and looked over the valley.
“My god doesn’t it look brilliant from all the way up here?” said Karen. Jane nodded. She looked up. Not far now. Delicious soup. Maybe they might overnight with the monks?
“It’s not going to come to us. Let’s go. You first”, Jane prompted. They set off again in good spirits and then Jane fell.
On the approach to the foot of the mountain, on a needless detour to an ancient monastery carved into the valley side. Jane fell.
She fell maybe two metres onto the platform. Where she bounced due to her day pack. She bounced and then rolled, and she saw the platform disappearing in front of her. Terminal velocity in seven seconds. Jane fell and Karen didn’t realise for five seconds. Karen turned and stopped breathing as she watched Jane scrabbling to get a grip on the wet floor of the two metre-square platform.
Jane fell. She died. Right there. Right then.
That was a year ago.
Now Karen walks on with Jane beside her, inside and ahead of her. She isn’t going to the valley. There haven’t been any more pointless detours in the past year. She is completing the hike as they’d planned on the flight over and then the train journey to the small town where they’d stayed the night before the hike, and where they’d intended to stay the night after the descent.
In the left breast pocket of her technical top was a photograph, a piece of cloth, a tealight and a cigarette lighter.
She is going to have a small ceremony, find a memento and take it back: a pebble, a flower, anything, something. Karen keeps walking, thinking about her friend. She walks to the place where they’d met the lovely Swedish family and instead of taking a right turn a few kilometres later she walks straight on. Up and down. On up to the refuge. Thinking of Jane. Thinking of getting home and getting on with life. Not thinking about death.
She loves Jane and she always will. Jane is her sister. Jane fell and there was no reason for it.
The noodles would slip down and fill his stomach, taking away the humiliation he felt at being in debt to his own daughter.
February 9th #1
Finding the bird was easier than Leeland had imagined. He’d picked it up by the war memorial near the park. He’d taken it from its nest to replace the one he’d bought the day after his daughter’s conviction. He called it Lucy-Doosey the Third. Once he had got it back to the house, he looked after it as well as he could.
There was, of course, only one way to steady the old hands: a shower, then some noodles and a mug of something. He sorted the first, quick and cold, scraping away a week’s worth of night sweats and smoke from his hard, inflexible, old self with a rough cloth and some dishwashing liquid.
He waddled to his bedroom where he packed an old, off white Adidas sports bag with two shirts, a pair of khaki shorts, three passports, and an oilskin (the first one that came to hand). He wrapped a parcel and a block of cash. He’d buy a phone and some new clothes on the way to the airport.
Throwing the main fuse – the stuff in the fridge and the freezer didn’t matter any more, he stood on the top step outside the front door and looked back into the room. He sniffed and pulled the door shut, locked it, threw the keys under the mat and turned away into the mist and traffic of another October morning. Despite the mist it was bright out there. Then again, he thought, most everywhere was bright compared to that apartment.
He planned to eat noodle soup. Pho they called it, pronounced ‘Fa’. He’d learned after having called it ‘Foe’ for years. He would eat it on a formica-topped table in a Vietnamese cafe around the corner. It was run by a tall, tall man. It was up a flight of stairs. He would be seated at the table at the back near where an old man sat next to a massive pot in which they made the broth base for the Fa. The tall man had told him about this one night as they both sipped from cheap, bottled beer and the lights outside in the street came on.
Lots of basil, he thought.
Lots of fresh chilli.
He sped up, going nearly as fast as his chubby legs and smoker’s lungs would allow. Lots of chilli, lots of meat, some lung, some tripe and lots of fat noodles.
A mug of rum and coffee, maybe even a glass of that salty lemon/sour plum drink. Stuff to look forward to. He’d be fine after that, not only would his hands stop shaking, so would his view of what he’d agreed to do.
That bird had died, of course it had.
The noodles would slip down and fill his stomach, taking away the humiliation he felt at being in debt to his own daughter. Something to look forward to indeed. Finally being free of a debt that he shouldn’t have owed. Whichever way he looked at it – and as a man of zero honour, he had to have plenty of viewpoints – he should just have moved on.
He opened the door and stepped into the cafe, salivating and ready. Once he’d consumed this rich and sustaining breakfast he’d go about getting a gun.
Feb 10th #1
Lucy walked around the kitchen. She walked and walked. She walked around the lounge room. It wasn’t her room in her house any more, it was just a room in a house with two big, ugly capital “AYs”.
Changes had been made, to increase salability maybe? It was cold and impersonal, without things in sight. No books or magazines or things. There were photographs at strategic points. To her it felt temporary, not the home it had once been. It offered no clues as to why she had been summoned.
She made do with one of the warm, cheap bottled beers she had brought with her, and went into the garden where she sat waiting for them.
Finally, two people came out. They had fitted doors to the garden from the kitchen. What an idea. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Lucy. We had a lot of preparation to do.” It felt to her as if they were saying it in unison like a well rehearsed choir. Sickening.
She studied them closely as they walked towards her. They looked much the same as they had last time they’d all met. Perhaps a bit weathered but it had been years. Her ex-husband, Bob and his new (not new) wife, Pauline.
The beer helped take the edge off her anxiety and anger.
“Why have you asked me here? What do you want?”, she asked, feeling for the key and vaping pen in her skirt pocket.
Bob put the plates on the table in front of her, gave her a, “Are you okay?”, look. As if. As if she was and he cared.
Pauline sat down in the slatted, beautifully pre-battered summer chair and smiled. She had a large, dimpled wooden bowl of salad on her hands. She put it on the table. She reached out for Bob’s hand and Bob looked happy.
For no possible reason other than spite, Pauline said, “We’re so happy together”. So weird.
Lucy balled her hands in a tight fist on her lap. She smiled. Then she actually said, “It’s nice to be happy”.
The other woman’s reply didn’t matter. Lucy drank some more beer and wondered idly what the first best way of hurting Bob might be: a bullet in the back of Pauline’s head maybe?
“Yes it is”, Pauline replied not having expected that response from the dried up, bitter and obviously lonely and unhappy woman.
Lucy felt weary all of a sudden. Old memories like jellyfish tentacles, liable to sting, nearly visible, horribly long, coming up from the depths.
Bloody Bob and Pauline. Bloody happiness. Fuckers.
“Have some salad, Lucy.” Pauline gestured towards the bowl she’d placed on the table.
“I’d rather not,” she replied. “I have an intolerance.”
Bob’s face made an insipid, “Oh poor you” expression.
Pauline shrugged.
“Look Lucy, this isn’t easy for us either. I know you probably still hate us,” Bob’s already pathetic voice tailed off as she looked to Pauline for help.
“You said it”, Lucy.
Bob piped up, ”But we have to come to some sort of arrangement regarding Charlie.”
“You’ve got the bloody house Bob, what more do you want?”
“Charlie needs a stable family, Lucy”, stated Pauline as a fact that she considered no one else had yet noticed.
“You’ve been in prison, you need time to reacclimate to the modern world”, said Bob.
“Fucking hell, Bob, it was only five years. I’m not the Count of Monte fucking Cristo. And I was in there for you! For our family.”
Bob drummed his fingers on the table. Empty wine and water glasses rattled.
“That’s not the issue now though. Our son is. His well being is. That’s why Pauline and I want to formalise things.”
“That’s why we are adopting Charlie”, said Pauline.
“And Pauline will be another of his mothers”, simpered Bob.
Pauline nodded like artillery.
Feb 10th #2
Lucy had ended up in jail because she was stupid. That’s the word she used. White collar, fall for it, protect your man, stupid… jail.
Jail? Don’t fuck with the fine language. Stupid. Prison. She breathed in. She took some salad. She hit Pauline full in the face, she hit her with her balled fist. She wanted to cave her head in.
Bob, as usual, did not know where to look or what to do.
Meat started smoking on the heat of the barbecue.
Lucy waited for the other two to do something.
“You fucking whore!” screamed Pauline. She jumped up, spoon in hand, ready for action. Lucy hit her in the throat, flat of the hand. Bob was in what he would have called “a tizz”. This had suddenly become very untidy indeed. Pauline fell like a city centre tower, clawing at her throat, trying to breathe.
Five years for him. Now out of prison and it was a cold and shitty world. Lucy, looked at Bob who was kneeling over Pauline. Lucy spat down, turned on her heels, went indoors, upstairs, and into Charlie’s room. Of course, Bob had made sure that Charlie wasn’t in this house.
Lucy went into what had been their bedroom, shut the door, leant a chair under the handle and sat on the bed. This wasn’t helping. She looked at the phone by the bed. She looked out of the window onto the wide, safe, road. She removed the chair and felt in her bag for what she knew was in there, just to make sure. Where the fuck was he? He wasn’t there. Again.
She threw the keys out of the window so that they landed on the driveway.
9th Feb #2
Leeland woke up from a nap, he coughed. He’d been coughing for days. Too many cigarettes, too much booze, too many drugs, and all that interminable time on his hands. Cancer probably too.
The phone rang. It never rang.
His hands shook as he pushed away the bird feed, bottles and pornography to locate the receiver.
“Yeah?”
“Dad, it’s Lucy.”
He was only mildly surprised.
“Lucy-Doosey the first”, he said. “Well now. I hoped you wouldn’t need to call me.”
“I know,” her voice sounded shaky, “I need to call in that favour.”
He laughed. Then realised what she wanted from him. What he’d promised to do but only if she asked him.
“OK Lucy-Doosey, OK.”
“Tomorrow. My house. Our house. His house. Their house”, she hung up.
Leeland drank deeply from the bottle and turned his thoughts to the task ahead. He picked up the bird feed and opened the cage. He’d leave as soon as his hands were steady enough to drive.
“Can’t leave you to starve,” he muttered and reached for the bird, shaking fingers snapping its neck like a winter hawthorn twig.
He’d probably be gone a while.
Feb 10 #3
Lucy came down to the kitchen. Bob was, as usual, looking for God to descend and make it all better.
Pauline had recovered and was looking so pissed off. Lucy had to laugh.
“Pauline, you look absurdly fucked up.”
“I will kill you, girl. I will – Jesus this hurts.” She felt her throat and grimaced. She was scared, Lucy could tell.
“Bob, why don’t you do something?!” she screamed at him. He sat down in a damp mess looking more like a bag of washing than a man.
“What? What should I do?”
Lucy thought of her child, thought of Charlie, as she looked at the couple. Then she thought about the hell-strike she’d just called in. She almost fainted, at least she imagined that’s how almost fainting probably felt. It was quite pleasurable. In prison if you fainted, well, the cycle of gaining your self-respect started again. She’d only ever seen two women, only one got up. She’d seen one thousand girls faint though.
A car pulled up outside the house, coughing its guts out. A car door slammed shut. Slow, unsteady footsteps, and the front door was unlocked and pushed open. Then the door into the kitchen opened.
She was reminded of prison and her sacrifice for Bob. She smiled and said, “Goodbye”, as her father walked in.
“Charlie’s in the car, waiting”, he said as Lucy walked past him. She pecked him on the cheek.
“You don’t look so good, Dad. We’ll fix that”, she shut the door behind her and went to wait with Charlie in the car.
Maybe I am an escapologist and this is a show? Seems unlikely.
All I can see above me is a blur of someone else’s holiday-blue sky. This should not be upsetting but it most definitely is. The reason for this is that between me and that sky are two fathoms of cold, salty water. Now three fathoms. Soon four.
You see, I am sinking fast and there is no way I will ever be able to remove the chain from my legs. That chain is also connected to a pair of heavy truck wheel rims. I should be panicking more than I am.
The chain won’t come off because the person who put it there does not want it to come off and, to ensure it stays on, my hands have also been cuffed behind my back. I have no memory of how this all came about. In fact, the further I descend, the less breathable oxygen I have, the worse my memory gets. Right now, for example, the only thing I can remember with any clarity is my dog, Dapper Dale.
Dale would most certainly have come to my rescue by now but Dale has been dead since we were both 11. I wonder if I’ll see Dapper Dale again when this is all over?
Talking of animals, a shark just went past my nose, a patient shark. Just circling me. Hello shark. The shark wants no part in socialising. I wish I’d been like that. I wish I believed in Heaven. I wish I didn’t believe in Hell.
Do sharks eat live meat or is it just carrion for them? I wish I’d learnt more about sharks and less about… less about what? What did I learn in my life?
Money comes to mind. Yes, I feel in my soul that I knew a great deal about money and the instruments of money: stocks, bonds, cash, bundled futures, bulls, bears, sub-prime mortgages, Ponzi Schemes, all of those things resonate very deeply with me. I feel sure footed and clear, on firm ground, confident and even happy when I think about those words. So, I was or I am a money man.
I’ve been executed for something, haven’t I? Murdered. Bound up and thrown into the ocean deep. I must have cheated some pretty bloody hardcore types somehow. I wonder what I did? Can you defraud a criminal? Maybe it’s an honour thing? I can’t even remember my own name let alone what I might have done to a gang prepared to do away with their formerly trusted accountant and fellow gang member. Gang leader, I feel that I was probably the leader of the gang and this is the result of some kind of coup from Lefty Schmidt or One Eye O’Driscoll or Tonio Sabrini.
The sky is disappearing now and I don’t really know if I am alive or dead yet. Maybe this is Purgatory?
I can’t feel myself descending any more but I’m sure I’ve not stopped yet. I imagine this part of the lake? The sea? An ocean? Wherever it is, I reckon it must be deep because why would anybody do this to me in shallow water? Makes no sense. You’d have to be stupid psychopath. You never seem to read about stupid psychopaths. Psychopathy must be related to intelligence.
The shark is back. I know that sharks don’t lick their lips, I do know this, don’t I? But,well, I’m sure that one just did.
Why aren’t I more scared? Not of the shark particularly, I don’t know much about sharks and this one doesn’t look very large, but why aren’t I scared about what I’m about to become?
Maybe I’m already dead. How do you judge that? I think therefore I am? Really? What if there is an afterlife after all?
Is ‘do I think therefore I am’ even pertinent if you’re dead? What about in Purgatory? I must still be high on whatever they gave me to knock me out.
It made their life easier. Not much of a lesson to me though. Not if I can’t even remember what I did. How is this a lesson to others? Maybe the perpetrators videoed it? Maybe my death is on YouTube or Vimeo or TikTok or Facebook or Insta? I bet it’ll get taken down though. Maybe it’s on the Dark Web? Maybe I’m Internet Famous?
Does the fact that I’m thinking mean I’m not dead? Am I thinking? Or am I just firing off random electrical signals?
This is frustrating. Hello again shark. Really. Not knowing. I thought death would be a great deal more clear cut than it seems to be: one second you’re alive, all systems go, feeling things: hunger, pain, love, full bladder, empty heart, elation, desolation, frustration, and the next second you’re dead. A very definite barrier is crossed and things change. That’s what I thought would happen. That’s what every single thing I’ve ever read or seen or been told leads me to believe would happen. It appears not to be the case.
There goes the shark again.
I wish I’d done more research into drowning but that’s just not one of those areas of learning I really considered. I’d like to know what’s happening to my body, or what happened. As it is I’m sinking, weighed down, hands bound with no idea about me. That’s a first. I’m quite the narcissist or I was.
I’ve just realised something. This is a time dilation thing. I could be inhabiting the very last second of my life and it might just go on and on and on. This is why I can’t feel myself descending and why I can hear myself think. I’m just caught in time. In which case, that shark is moving very fast or very slow because here it comes again. Hello shark.
The existence of the moving shark would indicate that this is not a time dilation thing at all. What is it then? I don’t feel cold, my lungs aren’t on fire, I’m not struggling to be free.
How did I get here? If I could remember that then everything else might fall into place. How did I get here, in deep water, shackled and cuffed?
Maybe I am an escapologist and this is a show? Seems unlikely. I base that entirely on the fact that I’m still shackled and cuffed and I’m fairly certain that I’ve stopped trying to hold my breath. It’s getting dark now.
Am I a crap escapologist? A first timer? Can’t see it. I’ve not tried to escape.
Oh, for fuck’s sake (excuse my language, God, if you’re listening) does this darkness means I’m very deep beneath the waves or that I’ve finally died? All I want is some clarity here. That’s not much to ask is it?
Am a suicide? Once again, I doubt it. The chain-work doesn’t look like something I’d do. Not my style as far as I know. That’s just a feeling in my, what would I call it? My soul? That’ll do. Also, I can’t see me going to all this trouble, especially not the handcuffs, when a load of pills and booze, or a quick jump off a tall building would have done the job. I mean, where’s the performance here? No one’s going to find my body, not with the weights and the deep water and this shark.
Hello shark.
That definitely doesn’t feel in my soul like something I’d want. Christ, I would have wanted mourners and a story on the news, and traffic stopped in the streets and ambulances and sobbing. Not this anonymous drop to the depths and eaten by a shark? Devoured!
The shark’s just nudged my back. If sharks don’t eat carrion then maybe I am not dead. Honestly though, I can’t see any shark worth the name ignoring a relatively fresh piece of sitting duck meat like me. I’d actually prefer to be devoured by a shark than to be nipped away at by crabs or, God forbid, hoovered up by prawns and mussels.
That strikes me as ignominious.
Hold on a second, I can feel myself being pulled up! Maybe this is a time dilation thing after all and I’m just being taught a lesson by a nefarious gang, by my own gang!
Maybe this is what passes for banter in the underworld?
God, I don’t think I do want to die actually. Not that I’d really thought about it. My soul tells me I’m more of a “go for it!” than a “go with the flow” type of guy or gal.
There’s a definite tug, a pull, a wrench, a sharp one too.
I’m not actually tethered to anything that could bring me up to the surface. That tug is the shark, I think it’s taken a bite. It has. It’s taken a bite out of my back. Ouch.
Seriously, that’s painful. At least I imagine it would have been had I been able to feel anything any more. I wish I could get Google down here then I’d be able to work out if sharks eat carrion or not because that would tell me if I am dead or alive.
Oh, there goes a leg, and here come some other sharks. Big ones. My old pal has moved off quickly. Run! Run! Run! Swim! Oh, here they come, the black-eyed brutes. I wonder if once they’ve done with me I’ll still be able to think? What if one of them eats my head, not whole, but crunches down on it, swallows my brains, turns my skull into flour. Do I just stop then?
There are six of them, bickering, circling and, and, and here we go!
Their laughter isn’t loud. It is a lovely, moving event. They are gone quickly.
There’s an attractive man in the carriage of the train next to mine, stopped like mine. We’re both waiting to move in opposite directions out of a station, away from each other. I am willing my train to move. Maybe he’s doing the same with his. I want him to move away, silently, rapidly and definitely because I don’t want to fall in love.
I am no longer appreciative of love.
I lived for many years with a man who I loved and who loved me back. Our relationship was equitable and beautiful. It feels so long ago now.
He died in the summer.
In the middle of the summer after a long illness. He died at home because that’s what he wanted and because we could afford it. Strange that. We could afford not to have him die in a hospital.
He died facing the window that looked across the apple and pear trees in the orchard. Full branches reaching up and hanging down. It seemed right.
He died in the morning as the sun was coming up in a clear sky over those trees. An already warm morning like the morning we first met.
At a train station.
He really did die. This is not one of those stories in which I pretend that the fact that he stopped loving me means that he died. No, not that. He actually died. It was terrible. I cried violently at his funeral. I still cry about him.
I wore one of his coats to his funeral, he would have liked that. It was an elegant, beautiful black coat. Classy. Classier than anything I owned or had the taste to want to own. I was lucky to wear it. It was so comforting, a quality I needed so badly.
The day after the funeral I gave his coat to a suitable charity because that is also what he would have done if he’d had to mourn my passing.
I have myself regularly checked despite my caution about the illness. Not because I want to check. I don’t want an answer but I do it because he asked me to.
Surely it’s time for my train or his train to move on. The attractive man is gazing back at me. Of course, he might just be gazing at his own reflection, it’s a bright day after all. A bright summer’s day. Anyway, his gaze is making me feel uncomfortable. He looks to be in his late forties but it’s difficult to tell through the filthy windows on both our trains.
His train is moving, at last.
“The two standard class passengers who approached me outside the dining car, can they kindly and immediately join me in the dining car.”
This is an order masquerading as a request from the voice of authority on my train. The guard.
Two young people walk past me. They’re laughing and trying to hold hands despite the narrowness of the passage between the seats. The taller one is in front. Their laughter isn’t loud. It is a lovely, moving event. They are gone quickly. I like them immensely.
The southbound train stops before it can exit the station. Something must have gone wrong. I can’t see the attractive man now. There’s another man in the same spot relative to me but further back on that southbound train. He is in First Class. He is looking at a tablet computer. From what I can make out, he is grey haired, square jawed and well dressed.
I’m attracted to conventionally attractive people. It’s just the way I am. Shallow I suppose. Normal.
“You were late. You were fucking late and you have all this foreign money and it’s all bullshit and I’m sick of it,” says a woman on a phone somewhere in my carriage.
“I don’t care if it’s Euros or Francs or Dollars,” she continues. A smell of synthetically fresh flowers drifts down the carriage and reaches me.
“Thank you so very much,” she says, sarcastically.
Another woman in my carriage is dozing, I can hear her mumbling and snoring.
The man across the table from me is full of a sandwich made with a regularly squared brown bread: cost-effective, artisan-made and sustainably grown according to the packet. It smells of nothing except synthetic flowers now.
I am on this train to travel from one airport to another and to a new place to live. The idea is to fly, stop over in Singapore, buy things, fly again, land, relax, start afresh. I don’t really consider this train to be part of that larger journey.
I’d like the authority to turn the heating down. There’s no need for it. I feel like I might start to doze but I don’t want to in case I make the same noises as that woman. People will become aware of me.
The southbound train with the grey-fox man and the attractive man on it pulls away. I can see the southbound platform. It’s full of people keeping their distance from each other.
There is an excited family of two parents and three children all talking to each other and pushing and pulling each other and laughing. I think the sight of them and all their kinetic and emotional energy should make me feel immensely sad at my own loss. Instead I feel joy.
He would have wanted that. He asked me to try and feel reformed after the decimation of his death. He held my hand as tightly as he could and asked me calmly.
I had broken a nail and I was worried that its sharp ragged edge might hurt him. He told me not to change the subject. We smiled at each other. All his energy went into my muscles. He smiled and I smiled. Soon I had to hold onto his hand because he was unable to hold onto mine any more.
I am going to read my newspaper now.
My train moves on. My memory of our love moves on and stays with me. I am still in love no matter what goes on around me. After all, love lives in the freedom from the need for love.
“Imagine a place full of people making laws who have no idea what it’s like to be hungry or cold? That would be stupid.”
We touched down on the surface of the planet we’d named, ‘Zangerlünd’ with no problems and, as usual we all pressed our noses to the portholes to get the first view of the new place. It was yellow, sandy but there were trees and flowing water.
On it stood two of what I assumed must be indigenous creatures. Both were dressed in flowing fabrics. One was tall, maybe two and half metres, and was wearing red. The other was about a metre tall and wearing green. They each had two eyes, one mouth, two arm limbs, two leg limbs and flowing white hair that emerged from beneath their tall caps. They were waving at us, and smiling.
“Well, crew, let’s do what we came here to do”, I said with the confidence and brightness that I’d been taught at Star Discovery Leadership School. Frankly, after the previous first contact shit show on Agragra II where we’d spent two weeks trying to communicate with two very mossy and not at all sentient rocks, I felt neither confident nor bright.
I ordered my science officer and my chief diplomatic officer to accompany me, gave the usual order about regular communications between ship and advance party to the remaining crew, donned the regulation gear, including the universal translator and off we went planet-side.
As it turned out, the tall one was called ‘Barnyor’ and the short one, ‘Yarnyor’ and both were extremely fine guides and, as it turned out, wonderful company. They represented the Harkumstun race who inhabited this part of the planet in what you and I would call a Country or State.
Barnyor spoke first, in a high and quite beautiful voice saying, “Look, rather than mess about with information overload, why don’t we go to this bar we know and get acquainted?” Yarnyor smiled even more widely, nodded his or her head, taking the science officer’s hand and leading the way.
Within a few minutes we were all sitting on very high stools at a long, polished metal bar kicking our feet on the brass footrest. Yarnyor had bought a round of what smelt like aged vodka with a hint of lemon. It was called ‘Speetzi’ and it was the most refreshing drink I had ever tasted. We fell into conversation and soon discovered a deep and mutual love of sports. They have a game which seems at first to be very much like our soccer: eleven players per side, there is an offside rule, there are netted goals and the game is played over two equal halves. However, ‘Pleelnit’ as their game was called was played with two spherical balls.
Yarnyor explained, “One ball is for the left side of the goal and one ball is for the right side of the goal”.
I looked at him or her quizzically.
“You see, you see if the left ball goes into the right side of the goal or vice versa…”.
“Or is saved by the keeper”, Barnyor interrupted.
“Yes, yes, or is saved by the keeper, then the goalie’s side scores a point. However,” and here Yarnyor stood on their stool, “if the right side ball goes into the right side goal, or vice versa, then the scoring side scores one and a half points. It’s all very exciting as I am sure your soccer must be in its way”.
Their form of cricket also used two balls, with bowlers coming in from both ends of the crease simultaneously. As a wicketkeeper myself, I questioned how the keepers were supposed to deal with bowlers charging in.
“With great skill and courage, as is the case for all sports folks”, replied a clearly tipsy Yarnyor.
We continued to drink, answering our communications devices every fifteen minutes as per protocol until eventually the conversation turned away from sport and onto politics.
“We too are a democracy”, said Barnyor struggling a little with pronunciation. “We also have two elected chambers of government: an upper house called ‘The Shatf’ and a lower one called ‘Leibstanglethrum’.
Yarnyor turned to me and as solemnly as he or she could asked, “How long do you leave yours without food or light or heat for?”
I startled at this as did my shipmates. If anything, our elected representatives back on Earth were the best fed and people on the planet. As for being deprived of light, the whole thing sounded like a form of torture not of government.
“You deprive your parliamentarians of food and light? And water”
It was Yarnyor and Barnyor’s turn to look shocked.
“We are not monsters!” cried the taller one.
“Of course they are allowed to drink, how else can they debate if their throats are parched”, said Yarnyor.
I asked for an explanation and my Science Officer disappeared off to the heads and to make our call back to the ship.
Barnyor took up the narrative, “Well, first thing’s first: candidates for government sit general and local knowledge quizzes at a local level. They also stand for local election. Their combined scores are then totted up, and the ones with the most votes and points go forward to the nationally broadcast quizzes with questions relating to general knowledge as well as the knowledge required for them to sit on the committees, select committees and sub-committees of their choice. Once everybody is elected, the real work starts.”
“Drinks? Same again?” my chief diplomatic officer had been playing three-tier pinball with a couple of Yarnyor looking beings, she appeared to be having a lovely time. We all nodded, a new round of drinks was presented, and Barnyor continued with the Civics lesson.
“Members of each house are there to check on each other’s work and this, like the original work in committee and the floor of the Houses, is done in pitch black rooms with only Lfpsis (water) and toilet breaks allowed.”
“Why is there no light or heat?” asked my Science Officer? How can they read anything or make notes?
Yarnyor looked surprised, an expression he or she achieved by raising their eyelids to the point where the headgear nearly toppled off. “Everybody had personal recorders and anything requiring playback is played back in a calm and measured tone.”
“Many are auditioned for this narration work, only a few are chosen”, said Barnyor proudly.
“Yes, yes, yes, luck of the draw. Anyway, this way they must concentrate on what is being said and not on anything extraneous like dress or painted faces or badges or gesticulations”, croaked Yarnyor.
“Why do you not allow them to eat?” I asked.
“Because all of what they do, most of the legislation and committee work, relates to keeping the people who elected and quizzed them safe and fed. Imagine a place full of people making laws who have no idea what it’s like to be hungry or cold? That would be stupid. How would they be able to do their best work?”
My officers and I fell silent to consider this for a long while, both Barnyor and Yarnyor were immersed in a tight game of Pleelnit that finished 2.5 to 1.5 much to their chagrin. My communication device vibrated and I realised it had been doing so for at least three minutes. This was dangerous, because after five minutes of no-response, the ship was ordered to deploy marines in order to find us.
“Calm down, Janssen!” I barked, “Everything is ok here, we’re learning a lot. Stand down”, I could hear Commander Janssen swearing and telling the other marines to stand down. She was the least subtle of any of the crew members. I turned back to Barnyor and asked, “When do they get to eat?”
“Once they’ve done the work of the day and agreed on corrections to the other house; when they’ve passed or not passed legislation, amendments to Bills and such like Parliamentary activity. Then the doors are opened and everybody goes to a nice warm restaurant.”
“What if there are things they can’t agree on?”
“Then they stay where they are”, said Yarnyor smiling.
“What if they come to a sticking point and can’t agree?”
“Well no, yes, yes, yes. In that case there are two options: option one is the Compromise Box. The problem in question is recorded and the recording is placed in the Compromise Box to be reviewed next year.”
I considered this and took a sip of the Speetzi. My Science Officer prompted our hosts for option two.
“Option Two, yes, yes, they stay where they are until they can come to an agreement.”
“But what if that means starving to death! Or going insane with the lack of light? Or freezing to death?” I was appalled.
Both Yarnyor and Barnyor looked concerned by my reaction and patted my arms and head gently. The taller one spoke, “Why would you want to elect anybody who wasn’t prepared to sacrifice everything for their beliefs?”
“Or to come to a compromise?” said Yarnyor.
My Diplomatic Officer then spoke, “Friends, what kind of person stands for election when they know these are the circumstances in which they will have to work?”
Again, our hosts seemed bemused, “Why, the kind of person who wants to represent the best interests of their communities and is prepared to do so at the highest of costs, obviously”, said Barnyor.
“To be honest, they’re mostly in and out in time for lunch anyway. Most people know how this works. It’s not rocket science really, just politics”, said Yarnyor.
We chatted some more about popular culture (sing-a-long shows were big, reality shows were marginal); food (they liked food, a lot); intergalactic travel (tried it, didn’t really take to it) and relationships (yes please, lots of those) before we headed back off to the ship as firm friends.
We are now heading for the planet Xergis before we finally return home to Earth. Commander Janssen is looking forward to making planetfall as she had heard bad things about the local inhabitants.
It is not a stroke of luck to be born where you were born. Everybody knows that. Think about it.
Let me introduce you to Mike. Solid Mike. Michael doesn’t like to make a fuss. He doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. Mike’s favourite phrase, a phrase he stands by, his phrase for life is:
“It is what it is.”
Mike is determined that being honest is the only way. Honest and respectable. What else did anybody want? A straight arrow. A man of his word. A decent, everyday person. Leave him alone and he’ll leave you alone. Get up to what you want to. Within reason. Within what is acceptable.
Mike knows his business and he minds it. Your business is your business unless it interferes with other people. Watch yourself. Pull your neck in. Behave. Be good. Go careful. Don’t make a fuss.
Leave things be. Stop fiddling. Stopping making a fuss. Just get on with things.
Michael knows a thing or two about getting things done. All his life he’s just got on with it. Well, most of his life. We’ve all had our times though, when we were young. But you learn from that. You buckle down and get on.
Mike’s a worker not a shirker.
Mike can wire a house and he understands a clutch. He can grow more than weeds. He can shoot a clay pigeon and he knows one end of a scrum from another. Michael can cook a good, honest, simple plate of food and he can appreciate a gourmet night out when he has to. He can train a dog and a child. Mike’s good with money but he’s not flash. Not slick, not cosmopolitan. His mates know he’s up for a pint and a chat, game of pool, chuck of the darts, a day out at the horses, a turn around the Go-Kart track. Michael’s never taken charity from man nor State.
Mike likes limited travel but he loves home. Home is straight-up, normal. Home is made from bricks of common sense, mortar of the usual. He helped build Home. He’s part of Home. Home’s in him. Nowhere else is. It is not a stroke of luck to be born where you were born. Everybody knows that. Think about it. Millions and millions of years of human evolution, survival of the fittest, got your genes to where they are. Your parents are the fittest. Their parents, all the way back to the start of history. All that time and fighting, fighting, fighting for life isn’t luck. Home isn’t luck.
Science tells Michael this. You don’t have to be an intellectual to get this. It’s factual. It’s cold, hard science. Cold hard science is common sense. Science is about facts and you can’t change the facts. That’s obvious.
No one is born in this land by luck.
“But you’re damned lucky to be born here.”
Facts. Home. Family. Unchangeable. Eternal. Beautiful. Rock solid. But you’ve got to fight to keep hold of them otherwise you’ll lose them. They can slip away. If you’re lazy or take your eyes off, you can lose the precious lot no matter what anybody tells you.
As is the case with The Markets, Mike craves certainty because uncertainty means time wasting. Make up your mind and get on with it. Speak it. In Mike’s mind there is no point in having a mind if it’s not made up. And there’s no point in having a made-up mind if you then don’t speak it.
No need to be clever-clever. Get things done. Shit or get off the pot. No need to make a fuss. Not unless you have to. Then make a big, certain one.
“It is what it is.”
It is, and that’s common sense. Some people don’t see Common Sense at all. Some people overthink things. They make a fuss, they make a nonsense of simple stuff. Time-wasters. Know-it-alls. Clever-clogs. Talk-down-to-you condescending cunts.
When it comes down to it, in point of fact, laziness and knowing-it-all are often the same clowns just wearing different make-up. Things have to get done. Common sense dictates it.
Things have got to get done.
Mike hates know-it-alls because you have to go with what’s right. If you don’t, then you didn’t go anywhere, you just sat around navel gazing. Laziness is deplorable. You can’t stand still. You have to move forward. History tells us this. History shows Michael what straightforward backbone, honest work, and doing what’s right can achieve.
Stand up to bullies. Don’t give a fuck what they think. Show them how many fuck’s you don’t give. Show them an empty fuck bank. Bullies, know-alls, clever clogs, smart alecs, so-called intellectuals, do gooders and snobs. Stand up to all of them.
“Be the best you you can be because you’re the only one you can be.”
This is obvious to Michael. He saw it written down once and it stuck with him. “Be you, give no fuck’s for anybody else’s opinion”. Being you is the easiest thing in the world. You’re the only one who can be you. You’re the only one who knows you. You’re the only one who can know you. No one else can. Maybe your mum and dad. Maybe your mates. Of course you give a fuck about them but even they can’t be you. And even they’re wrong sometimes. But being the best you, that’s the simple trick to the best life. Find that out and all the rest falls into place.
Michael knows himself from top to bottom. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t. He knows before he even tries things whether he’s going to get on or not. That’s experience. That’s history. One thing comes after another in good order. You learn from it. Simple.
“Keep it simple stupid.”
That’s what history tells us. Someone once said that if you can’t explain it in one sentence, then it’s too complicated and if you don’t understand it how the bloody hell is anybody else supposed to. Probably Churchill or someone like Churchill.
Not that there is anybody like Churchill, that’s the problem. Today’s politicians are the problem, the Political Class someone’s called them. The Political Class is right. But they lack any real class at all. Today’s politicians are all out for themselves and their mates. Today’s politicians don’t give a fuck about what anybody thinks about what they’re up to. If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. But things have got to change. Things need shaking up. Things can’t stay the way they are. It’s time the People are heard.
Michael’s of The People. He’s proud of that. No matter where life and its ups and downs have taken him, he’s of The People and he will always be of The People. Mike doesn’t care what colour or creed or religion or ethnicity or sex or gender or team or county or town or team or street or house you are as long as you’re with The People and of The People and do not make a fuss and do not make a song and dance or a who-ha or ask trick questions or look for votes or speak out of line or deliberately put words in his mouth or deliberately misunderstand or twist meanings.
“It is what it is.”
The People have a Will and a Voice and The People speak as they find it, and the Political Class and the Unelected Bureaucrats and the rest of them need to listen to it because things have got to change.
Then he stripped to red-ochre painted nakedness and drank a bottle of gin to wash down a rattle of amphetamines.
The Fat Man is looking at a mountain exploding in front of him from a distance of ten miles. Not much distance for such an enormous explosion. The fat man is wearing a black, collarless jacket, expensive and fashionable some years ago in a different hemisphere. His white shirt is stained red, his matching trousers are in tatters, one leg missing up to the mid-thigh, which is little problem as the leg intended to inhabit it is also missing and has been for some days.
Sitting next to him is a blond woman with a china complexion and no expression other than blank indifference. Unlike the fat man, she is not sweating. All the fluid is gone from her body along with the salt and hope. She is as desolate as the scrubbed hill on which they sit.
“We’d better get going. Can you stand up?” he tries to stand, leaning on a rock for support, but he slips back down to earth. She laughs, using the same tone that a prematurely buried, suicide would use on discovering the weight of earth on the coffin lid. She no longer wants to work for him. He has killed all the talent that used to make the job fun, everybody leaves them one way or another. They travel the world, using his money and her organisational skills. They look for secrets and then get other people to write about them. They then sell the writing.
The exploding mountain isn’t a secret, never was. It was public knowledge that “tests” were carried out inside the mountain. It became common knowledge when the authorities relocated all outlying villages twenty years before. The mountain is called Ibis or in some offices in Washington and London, “Curlew”. The mountain tests theories about faster than light particle acceleration. Two thousand people worked in and around the mountain. Fifty per cent of them are hyper-specialists who understand subatomic physics, computers and paintballing. The other fifty per cent are support staff, visiting technicians, administrators and the military. There are (were) Japanese, French, Swiss, English, German, American and one Belgian human being. There are two non-whites and one non-occidental. They are all dead now. No bleeding – save for the fat man’s leg – no pain and no remains. They have all been accelerated out of this world and into several next ones.
They had isolated the Higgs Boson but this wasn’t the cause of the explosion, that was caused by what looks like a cock-up involving heat sinks, poor code, a date-related bug and a Microsoft Outlook infesting-virus sent person or person unknown.
Sandra Klept remains seated as the rest of the company Christmas party stands and applauds. They are gathered in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. They are applauding her husband, their boss, and the man that she wishes was if not dead, then at least horrible mutilated. She sneers and drinks some more mineral water. She scratches the back of her right calf muscle and sneers some more. The company, all three hundred and twelve of them, sits as her husband, Christ-like, motions for them to do so. She stands and walks away from the top table, taking her bottle of mineral water with her. He leads a round of applause for her, looking as if he means it with love and good intentions. He does, he doesn’t know that she is arranging a coup because, as she put it, she is, “Just so over his egomaniacal people manglement, talent vampirism and atrocious personality”, she goes to the lavatory to snort cocaine like the 1980s.
“This is too cool, fully,” Anderson Ballmoore hits “Reload” and the page drizzles down the screen of his Mitsubishi 56-inch multisync flatscreen, “They got it online yesterday and today they’ve gone bust… so Del put all their code libraries online just to fuck the manglement off. There’s gigabytes of the stuff here, all proprietary. Most of it’s C+++, some Java and VB and some stuff I’ve never seen before.”
Davis Dorn, teen coder and ultra-virgin, sweeps his contact-lensed gaze at the directories containing “stuff” and rocks in his seat, “That’s Logo, that’s Pascal and that’s Applescript but you’re correctamundo, that other stuff is stuff. Coolio.” He returns to a cross-legged, arm-crossed defensive mode on the floor, his laptop is on the desk, connected to his brain by an infra-red keyboard and mouse link. It connected to the world, via Novell networking, a Linux box, a Firewall (that he coded) and a T3 line. For once he is not writing code, not even a Perl script. Instead he is ripping the website to a temporary online storage folder that the company set up in one of its international mirrors. This one is in Finland and is 530GB in size. Until ten minutes ago it contained 100GB of music and video. That has been erased and the space re-formatted.
Anderson opens a window containing some text, he picks up where he left off twenty minutes previously, continuing with a letter of love and yearning. He intends to use it as the seed for a program that will create a virtual university; more accurately it will be a virtual hang-out where students will come and learn to relate to both the business and real worlds. His love letter will welcome anybody who wants to join because he realises that welcoming people is important, love is all you need and the search for that love is a massive time waster when you’re trying to work up some really useful ideas.
Dear <name_nick>
Welcome to MIT, the My Institute of Technology. We really <rand_pos_verb> that you’ve decided to enrol with us and <rand_des_verb) that you will <rand_att_verb> as much from the facilities as we do.
As today is a <rand_grand_adj> day in your life and ours, I feel that now is the time to tell you that I’ve never seen anybody as <rand_sex_adj> and <rand_sex_adj) as you. The moment you posted your profile, I knew that my life would change forever. Please keep this very much to yourself as I do not want to embarrass either myself or you.
You will find all necessary timetables, papers, notes and propaganda in your home directory. Your initial access pass is <applet code=”pass.class” CODEBASE=”/insecode/initial/runonce>.
You can reach me at <rand_lurve>@mitty.com.
Welcome once again
Jenny Rate
{You do realise that no one in their right mind is going to believe any of that shit don’t you?” A messenger window has opened up on Anderson’s screen, in it is the text of the file he has just saved to the insecure code-bin on the external server.}
{Of course I do. That’s the point, the students will also know that and they will do one of two things: ignore it or create a small cult around Jenny. I am interested in both of these outcomes. Anyway, what else am I going to do with my time and all this processor power?}
{You could win the lottery again. You could calculate the optimal method for reducing Third World Debt. You could hack a pharmaceutical company and then release its hidden files to the media. You could download porn. But most of all you could stop wasting your time on pointless sociology riffs that you never follow up. You are not going to get any students because you don’t have any teachers}
{As you well know, MITTY is a looped feedback system. The students are the teachers.}
{As I well know, that is garbage. That is the kind of enclosed loop that produces noise and no feedback. That is yet another way of looking as if you’re going to achieve something by piling up code, but never actually achieving anything other than code. How is your real work coming along?}
{Davis is keeping me waiting for the updates to the backend 🙁 }
{Davis, are you reading this?}
Davis glances into the messenger window that has crashed through his command line prompt like a garish tourist nosing around the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, decimating the sanctified calm with wolf whistles and awe-inspired shrieks and woops.
{Yes I am reading this.}
{And?}
{And what?}
{And where is the updated backend?}
{On the Minx server. Same as it has been for three hours. Please refer to my email of the 7th. Here is a copy for your reference.}
{Thank you Davis} and the message window disappears, enabling Davis to continue with his work.
{Anderson, you are a liar}
{Yes. And?}
{Be a liar on your own time}
{This is my own time}
{I am not getting into this. Suffice to say, you have entered into a contract with me and you are not fulfilling your part of that contract}
{So sue me}
{You know, winning that lottery has turned you in a socio-thug. Just do the work that is assigned to you and then I don’t care what you get up to}
{No really sue me. Or sack me. Exercise some fucking power}
{No. DO THE WORK}
And the message window closes. Untroubled by conscience or ethical considerations since winning 55 million dollars, US, on a state lottery, Anderson is surprised to discover that his hackles are up. He closes the workspace containing the MITTY model and opens another, checks into the code -safe and prepares to add some sendmail and other, largely kiddy routines that need his knowledge of the company’s security routines to the code that Davis uploaded three days before. He is sulking, at least his social self is sulking. The part of him that deals with work is causing his fingers to move an infra-red, force-feedback (totally unnecessary) mouse to highlight areas of the workspace, adding and subtracting lines here and there, compiling, linking and testing.
The fat man is not at all happy in his hospital bed in Darwin. He isn’t happy with the noise, he isn’t happy with the fact that his health insurance is in some form of bureaucratic stasis, he isn’t happy with food and he isn’t happy with his stump. This state of pissed-offness is not unusual for him, it is his natural state and derives from the fact that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he is certain that everybody else in the world, including his clients and the blond woman, are all idiots. Over the years, the rest of the planet’s population has stopped being a glob of disconnected idiots and morphed into a huge, integrated, circus of dolts, fools, cretins and clowns. No one is capable of doing anything other than throwing obstacles in his way. Even his mother, who threw more cash at him than is right and proper, is now a desolate, disintegrating blob of cells sitting somewhere in Canberra, writing longhand letters to Murdoch and Packer and, of course, to him. She travels still, even at 85, but will not come and see him because of an argument they had ten years before.
So he lies in a public ward, surrounded by aborigines (or Indiginies or black-fellas) and poor white trash all of whom are moaning or farting mouth-noises at their tribes of visitors. Having lost his travel documents in the rush away from the initial fires inside the particle accelerator, he has sent the blond woman off to the nearest Internet cafe to try to sort out his life.
He looks at his enormous stomach which he has uncovered to get cool but also to ensure that no one will come too close. He likes his ugliness mainly because other people don’t but also because fifteen years of therapy have armed him with enough false self-imagery that he honestly believes that it is really all subjective.
His ex-wife, Tara, had watched his spreading torso keeping pace with this ego in a direct anti-relationship to his hair and social skills. True, he retains charisma, in bucket loads but charisma is one of those strange character variables that won’t go away if you’ve got it. He uses it to manipulate idiots into positions where he can employ them before submitting them to a steep, ever descending curve that slices through their self-worth until they either leave his employ or are so reduced that they have nowhere else to go. He has roughly 100 to 115 such ghosts slopping away at research and hack writing in two offices in New South Wales. Every so often he choses a “favourite”, explains in some unspoken and unspeakable code to the blonde woman that this person must be treated with a smile and slightly more courtesy than she would usually use, and takes them into layer one of his confidence.
As a liar of some discipline and no small brutality, he then feeds through enough information to ensure that this person would be forced to perjure themselves if any of the companies’ less than entirely legal schemes came to the attention of the authorities. After about a month, often times less, this favourite begins their skid down the backend of the curve.
His current favourite is called Martin Closer – he never choses women – and Martin is now speaking with the blonde woman in an internet cafe just off the main Darwin drag, opposite Woolworths in fact where she recently purchased cosmetics, a can of Coke, a packet of Marlboro Lites and some sanitary napkins.
The blonde woman is not on the curve, never has been. She has the ability however, to seem less like a total buffoon than the rest of the world, mainly because she only ever does what she is told. She then takes her stress out on the ghosts and the occasional journalist phoning for an interview for some pointless profile in some pointless paper or magazine. She was going to be a doctor but smoked too much Bushbud and fell into the job as his PA. The Bushbud – hydroponically grown cannabis that musters the same effect as mildly pure heroin without the stigma – protects her from the mores of Fat Man rage. It also provides a thudding, woolly shield against the ghosts. His sociopathy has seeped into her ensuring that she never becomes attached to any of the “monkeys” as she calls the staff.
Her name is Joy. Everybody calls her Princess Lea because she always seems to be at the feet of Jabba the Hut.
Following the Christmas speech the MCA descended into a kind of null party. Not a non-party and far from a party-party. This was a party waiting to be filled like a function waiting to have its component parts related. Everybody knew what they were supposed to do but nobody, save the secretaries and “non-creatives”, knew how to do it. The support staff simply drank the drink, boogied to the music, said sentimental things, touched other support staff in a way that would usually be frowned upon and talked to the management in a way that would always be frowned upon. It was basic human interaction. Confusing.
Joseph Dyer, the “boss”, took it all in his stride, especially the abuse which, as he was honest with himself, was low level stuff and nothing to take seriously other than to deal with it.
“The second floor, up where Popular PC is, it’s always disgusting… they never clear up cups or papers or pizza or nothing. I bloody complain about them all th time but no one ever bloody listens to a bloody word. They’re animals they just don’t care.”
Billy Taylor had been with the company since it began in 1989 and was always complaining that the staffers were pigs, which for the most part they were not.
Of course, Billy Taylor is in fact, William Talforth-Taylor former emeritus professor of number theory at Monash University until 1988 when he flipped out in spectacular fashion, and published every single mote of research on Usenet silently in his office. Then he stripped to red-ochre painted nakedness and drank a bottle of gin to wash down a rattle of amphetamines. He has been Dyer’s tutor and good friend, so he had been taken in. But he would not stop complaining and he would not ever refer to his previous life as one of Australia’s most distinguished academics. He had, in fact, taken on the persona of his own family’s gardener, a deeply troubled, preternaturally surly old man called Mick Telfer who had offered the first true glimpse of fear that the young William had encountered.
Joe Dyer kept him around because this was not only the right thing to do, but also because Billy had a habit – unknown to himself – of annotating lazy spreadsheets so that they came up to some kind of standard. He did this because Joe would leave printouts in his cubby hole and retreat, the printouts would always be disguised as garbage, they would always be found in a bin by the first floor photocopier with various functions tweaked with a thick, green pencil. Joe made sure that Bill was paid well over the odds for an office cleaner – a job that he also excelled at. This exchange of crumpled paper was the only time that the psycho-armour that Billy used was ever penetrated; neither man ever mentioned it to the other.
Sandra Klept was buzzing now, riding the waves of cocaine, red-eyed and a full harridan. Her husband was talking to the old man, the rest of the dorks were spastically and spasmodically partying. She was once again trying to work out why she was feeling blue. One part of her, the part that drove down Madison Avenue in a Buick with cigarette ash blowing into her hair from the beautiful hand of a James Dean/Christian Slater/Brad Pitt/Rock Hudson/Raquel Welch creature constructed from moving denim and static, true diamond rocks; that part was a happy, sexually fulfilled, lucid, beating heartfelt person-girl, loved and loving.
The other part, the part that sat at long tables watching young vibroes still talking about work (and snowboards), targets (and holidays without partners or briefcases) not understanding why they asked for dreadful C&W like the Hanson Family, Emmylou Harris and Kasey fucking Chambers. Country and Western was trash music, disgusting, and these kids were educated at MIT and should have known better; even worse, she knew that she was just getting old like in a Philip Roth or Pynchon kind of way.
The thing that really got to her was that her upbringing meant that she wouldn’t cause a scene. She could see the sense in this gathering, she could see that people were – in their ways – simply trying to be happy by playing the game. She began to dig holes in herself with a psychological cutting spade (the kind that Qkwee-Qkway used on the whales that never satisfied Ahab).
I am too good for these people.
But if I am too good for these people, then who am I not good enough for and who do I fit with? And if there are either of those sets of people then why am not with them? And I meant, who am I not too good enough for? And now I can’t think in words because I’m not good enough for those either, not like these people who are using words with other, and the thought of them using words with each other is enough for me to a staircase with my father in a bed, with a drip at the bottom of it, and I am falling off and down and into his bed where he is not-dead.
She takes a drink from the table, a glass of red wine, poor red wine by her standards and wipes away the thinking by drinking a long draft like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come and make sense of her life. Of course, he’s still talking about war and horses with the boys; in his way. She pours some more poor wine and wonders if she should change dealer, well coke dealer at least because it seems to be losing the battle with the Ritalin and Moggies that she had taken before.
I want an evil man who thinks about doing wrong to make me feel fine. I’ve got a good man and a jeroboam of self-pity because I can’t be as good as him, and he forgives me. So I want him.
The president and the prime minister are saying dreadful things in the news over Christmas. The exploding mountain with the particle accelerator that held Higgs Bosons among other things isn’t easy to explain to the general public, even the general public with a passing knowledge from New Scientist or Scientific American or a website or ten thousand.
The media is making a mess of it, cock-up has taken over from conspiracy and all sorts of total nonsense is bleeding into early evening bulletins and “ready for air” webTV specials starring Eric Roberts. Even kids’ new spots are highlighting the man made volcano (which it wasn’t, there was no lava flow or magma stings, no Herculeanums below) as yet another reason to hate big business.
In the pub are three of the most highly educated physicists and mathematicians (Jones doubles up) the world has ever known, ergo they are all under the age of 28 years. The pub is on the campus of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. They were on a tour in Curlew that ended ten hours before it went pop. They are right royally pissed off and preparing to get drunk but first they have to argue about technical matters such as whether the satellite uplink that was supposed to be running every second of everyday to back up data on the run, was really working. They think it was one of those things that the governments told them. But they also think that it’s exactly the kind of thing that governments would do in order to rip the kind of data that you would consider to be personal.
Adam Smith was their hero.
Thomas Hobbes was who they believed in.
But they still took holidays and dressed differently enough to their seniors to make them look softly independent. By understanding physics, they also seemed to understand why their bills should be paid on time, and their cars serviced; their diets were regulated and they rode mountain bikes over distances of less than five miles. Drinking was a rare, and celebrated, event, celebrated in memory like the first time over and over again. So they began with beer, lite beer, building to the darker strengths and finally into bourbon – a manly, non-European drink. All through the escalation they talked about how many coincidences had invaded their lives since they had managed to secure tenure of some sort at Curlew.
“And the first three digits with the first alpha of my pass in were the same as my driving licence with a single, unifying digit subtracted…”
“And the key sequence for the Fermilab logon is three digits removed from my mother’s birthday, which was three digits (in the other direction) off the date of her death…”
“And the long and lat positioning for my room at Curlew is the same sequence exactly as the directory number I had at Oxford”
These coincidences bounce around, being carried away in fragments by the other alumni and staff who orbit them in an abstract and apparently unconnected manner as they drink. From time to time over the five hours during which they move from respected heads containing impenetrable truths to specularly vapid males with heads full of conspiracy, they work out that something was very up indeed.
“There was an inevitability about it when you trace the numbers down”
“The numbers are noise, the conspiracy has nothing to do with the numbers, the numbers were put there to put anybody off the scent.”
“The numbers are the human error of it all. They were put there subconsciously by a group of individuals who felt some kind of guilt… it is random noise – as random as it is possible to get – we are supposed to be presented with the existence of the scent by the numbers.”
The private hospital room is much, much better. He has ordered three televisions and a laptop, some books on string theory and a selection of sub-teen girls magazines. The Fat Man is called Abraham Roquez Durer and he is eating spinach and beef calzone, ensuring that nothing drips into him by draping several cotton towels over his torso. He is leaning on three pillows that are already at an angle due to the tilt of the bed. He is watching Ren & Stimpy, CNN and Asia Pacific News BBC World News. He would be dictating a memo into a digital voice recorder that will turn his words into bits and bytes and email them to the ghosts back at the main office in Oregon. But he can’t because he is concentrating on excavating the calzone.
He was born in Ireland, in Waterford, thirty eight years before and uses the accent when he needs to. His parents relocated to Brisbane when he was twelve years old. Being uncomfortable in the Queensland heat, he remained inside their waterfront house until he was eighteen, when he moved to Sydney as fast as the cash he’d made share trading on the Internet would allow. Once in Sydney, he had found a three bedroom flat just off Broadway with a view of Centrepoint and air conditioning. He enrolled at the University of New South Wales where he discovered that no one was as intelligent as his mother or father. He set out, with more money earned on the Internet, serving stolen hardcore images using the university’s bandwidth, to organise a group of impressionable peers into a proto company publishing street magazines about bands, and DJs; cafes and raves. Many of the events and people they wrote about didn’t exist outside his head. He told his “friends” and “partners” in the company that these random pieces of information would bring people together; their readers would head to Randwick or Liverpool or Surry Hills looking for “Sensei-sational Time Kicking Trace Nite” and find nothing other than themselves, they would “get it” and begin their own parties.
His friends believed him and came up with more and more outstanding and outrageous characters and events – even interviewing a character called Slamma Mamma on three occasions about why her events always seemed to be cancelled. He sub-let some of his friends to poster areas of Sydney with real information about real events. All the while he spoke of revolutionary sociology and life-changing human dynamics. He quoted Ken Keysey quoting Neil Cassidy quoting Jack Kerouac quoting Buddha. He siphoned off the money to property accounts in Canberra, Bali, Darwin and Melbourne.
With his degree course finished, he opened a fully fledged office in Alexandria (which appealed to his sense of classical history) and then left to visit Europe for two years. This was no big deal as by then he had parted company with his closest female co-partner and discovered the cool of the blond, china-faced woman. She ran the office with indifferent fear, sacking and encouraging others to hire, moving the focus (on his order from a hotel in Paris, a room in London or a train travelling through the Balkans) from street magazines to research work for record companies, software houses, TV companies and street magazine companies. By the time he returned, there had been two walk outs by “senior” staff and a layer of managers who knew the short term score had been appointed, all fresh from overseas or interstate.
He congratulated her with a bottle of white wine, a case of low tar cigarettes and $6,576.55 into her hand from his pocket. He told her to take two weeks off, try to smoke less grass and be back with five new ideas. Then he sat in a glass office overlooking the central atrium of the Alexandria office and went through the spreadsheets with the kind of tooth comb you’d use with a corpse you had murdered. He didn’t want to actually move anything, or even show that he’d tidied the figures, it was simply that there was money there that would serve a greater good if it was in bricks and mortar. This entailed ensuring that at least three of the new management layer found their ways out of the company.
This was a simple enough strategy to realise seeing as they’d only know him as legend or email. He called meetings at five in the afternoon on Friday, turned up late for them or cancelled them. He pitted them all against each other by pretending not to know names, ignoring emails, making speculative phone calls to voicemail. He ferreted through directories and changed documents. He had a ball and kept making money.
One sticky moment came when one of the management drones, a chap called Dams who was researching the financial history of electricity companies in NSW, had flipped in his office. Abraham had redefined this guy’s workload five times in three weeks, cancelling projects and taking staff to vaporous lines of enquiry. He’d got the guy to sack his closest colleague at nine AM on a Monday morning.
Now the guy, who had a name and a wife and was starting to engender some loyalty (asking for pay rises for ghosts), had broken up like a barnacle ridden fishing boat in the wrong sea in the wrong weather.
“Just what is your vision for this company? I thought I understood it, but I can’t get it?”
The fat man hated visions; visions were the bailiwick of martyrs and insane, female European religious figures. His company was there to make money not realise visions.
“I have no vision, this isn’t about vision,” his face grew red, his eyes dilated (not just his pupils, but the entire cavity including the vitreous body and probably the optic nerve all the way to the back of his head over his brain stem), he ran his hand over his exsanguinated forehead and stood up, “this is about reacting. If you have the money to pay our tax bill then you can have any vision you want. Your job is to get work done, understand the audience (by which he meant “client” by which he meant “mark”) and present information on time that will make us money. This isn’t a crusade, this is a business!” He was shouting outside of himself, inside he was watching and waiting for the guy’s good manners and understanding of business ethics to proffer a resignation for him. He was thinking about the other guy he had poached from the day before at short term more money and long term less. He was thinking about lunch at an Italian restaurant in fifteen minutes alone with the newspapers and a calculator.
“Well fuck you, you fucking cunt. You are a fucked up… you fuck with people,” the guy stood up and faced Abraham off over the desk, slamming his flat hand on a printed email from his soon-to-be replacement so that some of the cheap toner came off the cheaper paper onto his sweaty hand.
“Fine and fucking dandy. No vision. But no figures either, the spreadsheets make no sense at all. How can we budget for anything when the spreadsheets are all utter bullshit? I am bewildered, honestly although I don’t expect you to understand that you fat fucking thief!” He was screaming now, and had Abraham’s lapel in his hand. Spit was spraying from his mouth and his skin had washed pale as the anger became too actual for the blood to reside anywhere other than in his arms and legs. His heart was attempting to maintain some parity with the needs of his adrenal gland.
Abraham saw the signs and started shouting for help. No code words, a simple au secours to the blond woman, who immediately called a private security firm preferring not to contact the police.
They’d pre-agreed this some years before in a fun game of watching the angles.
What really pissed him off was that he hadn’t pre-empted the reaction of this particular guy. He was slipping and this meant that he had to exert some physical force in order to retain the power position. Well, okay so he didn’t have to, but it was fun in its own way. He didn’t seek out situations wherein he could indulge in bashing people, however, if one presented itself, he was well prepared to smack the hell out of anyone who put him to the challenge. This was made even easier by the fact that everything else in his persona suggested that he was an abject coward.
This situation was trickier than a standard slap and run. If it did get to court, the fact that he’d beaten the guy half to death with a relatively inexpensive piece of office furniture combined with the fact that the guy had been recruited by a highly respected head hunter who would be more inclined to provide character references than shut up, could mediate against him. On the other hand, it might not get to court in the first place.
By the time they woke the next day was already half over. The primary focus for the conversation among the three physicists was optimal hangover cures. There was some argument about whether optimal meant losing the bulk of the hangover quickly enough so that one could be basically functional, or it meant losing the hangover completely. Obviously, losing it quickly and completely was the answer, but they squabbled anyway.
They had strategised and shared war stories about ungrateful, ignorant, vile little journalists
Money was blowing all over the street in front of the bank. It was blowing all over the street in front of the store and the school. Money was blowing all up Grant Avenue, down Sills Street, and money was whirling around the traffic lights at the intersection of Brown Street, Croyd Road and Bellinger Road.
The staff at Kerrigan’s Bar and Restaurant were throwing Kerrigan’s lottery winnings away again.
Out it came like expensive ticker tape, into the air, floating to the ground. Well, almost to the ground, most of it was gathered up in butterfly nets by the visitors to town whose turn it was to benefit from the largesse. Orderly queues and a stacking system had been in place for some months by this point; people were very courteous, relationships were formed.
Kerrigan had won the Lottery 57 times, straight. Entire primary and secondary companies had been set up around Kerrigan’s winnings when it became clear that nothing illegal was happening. That was after Week 15. Despite highly educated and completely expert opinions from the best of minds, the economy stubbornly refused to collapse under the regular showers of liquidity from the upper floor windows of Kerrigan’s.
Despite mile upon mile of commentary online and off from the most informative of the informed social and cultural commentators about how this kind of singular chance would soon result in popular revolt, the People insisted on continuing to purchase Lottery tickets, week-in and week-out even though by week 30 they knew that only one outcome was likely.
Until Week 15 none of the wins had been any less than £106,000,000, and none had been made generally public. However, as soon as the legality of her continuing winning streak had been established, Kerrigan’s mind changed with regard to publicity and she had agreed that the world was about ready to find out.
On the bright and wintery morning of her 82nd birthday she had informed the Lottery people of her decision. She then called around to see Mir Andrew Moffat at the Express and Gazette newspaper in town and she, “gave the old bastard the scoop of this life.”
The Lottery sent its best Public Relations people down to the town in what had been an arduous plane and hire car slog that took up almost two days. They had strategized and shared war stories about ungrateful, ignorant, vile little journalists. They had assured each other that as gatekeepers it was their task to ensure that the best of all truths were made available. They were an efficient team. They pulled together. Nothing got in their way.
At 82 years of age, Angela Kerrigan was stood slender, straight and tall at five feet and eight inches in her flat shoes. She was silver haired and acid tongued. She vaped. She vaped a lot. She was shrouded in vanilla flavoured steam most of the time. She had explained to her local YouTubers, Toby and Ellen Moran, that they should, “Stop asking dumb fucking questions.
“How do I feel about all this winning? I feel cheated. All this dumb fucking luck and I’ve got no time left to enjoy it as far as I can tell. I feel like God is a cheap joker, a buffoon who plays pranks to show off his all powerful being. And you can most certainly quote the fuck out of me on this, for what it’s worth.”
They most certainly did. But they moved on to more newsworthy articles within a few hours. Their video went wild; scifi horror virus viral. Mad times. Toby and Ellen couldn’t count the money fast enough. They bathed in the scorch-light of their success, they enjoyed every single second.
Kerrigan didn’t. She died three weeks later, one week before the events unfolding now. She died of lung cancer, she was quite aware that it was coming at her. It pissed her off because she knew that no matter what she tried to do in order to defeat her own cellular growth, she was going to fail. She had too much remission, too many remissions.
Her cancer was inevitable and when it eventually came, it was unremitting. She had spent many decades smoking cigarettes, joints and cigars. She had surrounded herself with other people who did the same.
She was cremated and her ashes scattered half around the statue of the unknown soldier (“I knew him, the beast, the lovely, sweaty fucking beast”); and half at the front bar of her own place (“right under my stool”.)
And obviously, obviously the legendary Pie Pie with Evening Cream and Bolted Sandor Pollen.
Of course the bloody space fleet had restaurants on their swankier spaceships and space stations. Of course the space newspaper had a reviewer who visited the restaurants during times of peace or diplomacy. Of course the cuisine was usually tremendous.
And, of course, no one wanted the reviewer gig. Why? Space sickness, possible enemy action, lost time in stasis, the phrase “usually tremendous”. For every beautiful, sense-loading, delightful Arganidian Mezze there were five stodgy, try-hard authentic Saloptranian IV banquet “tristes”. Every mouthful of Bulgraum Desert Soïd Soufflé had a murky Triamarind Soup lurking in the background.
Galaxy-wide cuisine was in the grip of “good honest food” again and boy was its unadorned, fashionable gloominess contaminating every other half-decent chef, battalion, bistro, restaurant, up-market cafe street food van, and pop-up from Vangloss Prime to Teatar.
“Get on the shuttle, Reeves, you’ve lost the lottery of life. You’re heading off to Regnis 8, the latest SuperCruiser in the fleet to review Goût XIV, the latest restaurant in the fleet. All top brass and fizz for you lassy.”
“Goût?” asked Reeves, still slightly hungover.
“Goût. It means ‘tasty grub’ in Drabbish apparently. Get packed, you leave in 15 space minutes.” The Editor of Galaxy Travel Magazine was a diaphanous cloud of pan-universal filligree but she was a hard bastard who you fucked with at your peril.
“But boss, why me?”, Reeves whined. “Last month it was covering another fucking Royal Wedding, and now this shitty job. What did I do to deserve this?”
The Editor levitated a photograph of the young reporter arm in arm in arm in arm in arm with Stan Ensills, publisher of Moderniste Space Plating magazine. “This, now fuck off out of my site and give this restaurant a good review.”
Reeves slunk out of the office, into a waiting cab and out to the shuttle port.
While she went through security, she checked up on the new joint she was supposed to be giving a glowing review too. First out of the traps was the name of the chef: Barkus Fords. Excellent. An old friend from finishing school. Barkus had married Jula Crops, another old friend of hers back when he was an under-chef at a grand old hotel that had hung onto its three Argon Thruster Stars for centuries. Luckily, and totally outside of the love of the two beings, Jula’s father owned the hotel as well as a chain of others and quickly installed Barkus as head-top chef in one of them that was unlikely to go under no matter what came out of the kitchen. And the rest was history. Barkus was a whiz with figures so even following the divorce he and Herr Crops Senior carried on as successful business partners.
This partnership also meant that unlike other chefs who would inevitably have fallen hook line and sinker for heirloom Frumberries or artisan Quillum Flakes, Barkus was obsessively Moderniste. If there was a dish to be reimagined, smashed all over the ceiling to drip into the mouths of the waiting acolytic diners; painted onto hoverboards and then toasted, then Barkus would go the entire hog, or cow or Flibbian Angel Shark.
“Food at this level is experiential”, she had explained to Reeves as they dined at her previous place – ‘Aspire’ on Prebbish 1. ‘Aspire’ was as doomed a venture as Prebbish 1 as it went.
Reeves wrote down the sentiment, underlining “at this level” twice and “experiential” three times.
“You have to imagine that most diners – no matter who they are – want, no desire, no they need, to be wowed by you. Anything else is simply undermining your talents and their expectations. Whoever I cook for must experience at least one mind altering, sense licking sensation for every dish we place in front of them, or over them, or hide from them in another dish that we then reveal is in fact a 3D print of a dish that they might have at some point in the future. What we do is not ‘food’ per se. It’s more life on thrusters.”
That was Barkus and that was what got printed alongside pictures both moving and still of the 22.5 course set menu that took eight hours to consume and another 400 analyses.
During the short life of ‘Aspire’ menu items had included:
Flame-Boosted Carillion Chewchew Flank
Frūm
Collapsed Jappa Lung Flaun
Klinper Breads with Slow Sauce
Yapper Milk Sausage
Calculon Plants with Live Gralick Toasties
Muzzilion Calf Skin with Stope
And obviously, obviously the legendary Pie Pie with Evening Cream and Bolted Sandor Pollen.
Reeves made it through security with a minimum of bullying, groping, hard faced microaggressions and straight out cursing into her face. For a historic period in which the SuperDrive™ had made interstellar travel a reality, no government ever really liked to see its people travel. The sheer leeching of tax money and people talent mediated against it. The constant warring among planets – and in two cases, moons – made the authorities suspicious.
Because the only people who could afford to travel to space stations or cruisers were wealthy or on expense accounts, there was no need for travel classes. It was very much a case of sit where you liked – that was democracy in action. So, Reeves found a window pod and settled in for the three week flight.
Three weeks later she woke up. She showered, brushed herself and settled into a seat for some food as the shuttle made its five hour descent to the SpaceDock™.
Shuttle food was good. It was still a few years behind the times so it usually came with treats, lots of flavours and textures, and fun. It was the antithesis of “good, honest food” in fact. Sooner or later it would catch up with the worthy, puritanically healthy fashion of the now but until then – and deep in the storm of tsking, tutting, and eyebrows raising that surrounded her – Reeves enjoyed the hell out of the meal that had been synthesised for her.
It was as she was chewing the fat from the last tiny leg of Grillian Grouse Doused in Shimma Wine that she realised exactly how she was going to write up ‘Goût’. She was going to make a sensation. She’d calculated, possibly in her sleep, that the Good Honest revolution had been rioting through the eateries or the universe for about five Universally Agreed Years by this point and that this was about long enough.
Someone had to be brave and insightful enough to end it by starting something new. Craig Jaroo had done it with his Moderniste review of Aspray Arnaz’s ‘Fold’ restaurant. Monoc the Grand’s “12 New Rules of Eating” feature in “Yum! Yum?” magazine all those years ago had introduced Molecular Cookery with its sauces and, well, molecules. Both of these writers were legends. Reeves wanted to be a legend. Barkus was a nice sort, a bit behind times but time was rapidly becoming a negotiable idea anyway, so what the hey!
She began to Thinktate the opening of her review into her Thinktaphone™.
“Goût is a new way of thinking disguised as an old stager but don’t be fooled by the brilliantly retro stylings of the magnificent Barkus Fords, this place is setting standards not sticking to them. What we have with Goût is new-healthy, it’s taken authentic ingredients and techniques and injected more new life into them than you could force into a Spaltic Capone with a syringe from Dr Vvamton’s kitbag.”
She smiled and relaxed. She was looking forward to catching up with Barkus.
So, it was with some chagrin that as the news that the war with the Fidgeon Empire had restarted and both Goût and the Prebbish were blasted out of the sky in front of her eyes.
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The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
