Jenny Holden

Hendrickje poured the tea, and remembered her dead. Who was it now? Simon, with his long nose and seriousness. He was already old when she met him, and tall as a larch. Cord trousers. He liked her waist, and her buttocks, he was incorrigible. She smiled, and a late afternoon sun made it down the years and through her kitchen window. A pigeon cooed somewhere, and on her forehead the light rested. Her cheekbones formed hollows, but her hair blazed; white fluff. Her forehead had a strength, a barrel prominence that made her, as a younger woman, formidable. She looked like Danaë in Rembrandt’s painting, strong under duress, and covered in gold, a liquid warmth in her bones and in her crevices. Hendrickje had known too, and Simon’s fingers about her shoulders were marvels, long and pale and knotted, and though there was a little pain, there was joy also. A daughter, Lara, who called him daddy long legs and climbed up his frame, holding his hands. She flipped herself all the way over while he supported himself against the work surface, and every time it made her mother gasp. Hendrickje could be serious too. She was named after her Oma, but that head made her all Rembrandt’s, his shamed second wife. Not puffy sweet Saskia, but Hendrickje, his companion. He outlived her, and the rest.

She tore the corner off a sugar sachet. We are put on earth to bear these things, and if we can lessen another’s pain, so be it. The teaspoon’s clink made the noise which is pleasant to hear if you are susceptible to cosiness, to the state of nestling in, settling down. Three bars on the heater, and the oven light on, crumble inside. She drank it the proper way, without milk, in a glass with a handle. She was leaning on the sink and watching the sky. The palest blue, and empty of anything of note. A tree stuck its limbs out, but it was naked, and she remembered Joost before they moved over here, when she was not short of suitors. He walked with her and held her arm, or let her ride on the back of his bicycle. His hair was red, many coils which she thought of now, and wondered what it would have been to have touched them. There was Penny, from next door. She was dead, and fat, and silly too. Like a pigeon, forever head-butting something invisible.

Two teenagers pushed bicycles down the path beyond Hendrickje’s back fence. She heard fuck sake, and then a mobile ringing. They spoke differently now, expressing the violence latent in youth. In a way, she admired them. She had sworn at Simon only once, after visiting his sister’s children. He had been over the top, bought the boy a model train, the girl a first edition C. S. Lewis. Gone on and on in the car home, what darlings, how well disciplined. She called him a bastard, and closed the door firmly on the car, and went into the house, and felt nothing else. There was nothing to let out. Everything he said was true. They were impeccably behaved, like miniature people, not children at all. Lara, at that time, was unimaginable. Even the idea of a child – it was simply outside the realms of thought. Not that Hendrickje was choosing a career instead; what he never could understand was her deep commitment to their happiness. She saw the world in terms of wasted energy and selfish excess. What she had, she would preserve, and nourish, without fuss. Hendrickje sipped her drink, and saw the sky. The block of them laid out supine on the bed, and the first light through under the Velux. A white sheet revealed them, two interlocked pairs of hands laid across two chests. They were lacking only a spaniel at the foot, a book under his head inscribed with numerals. Hen, she remembered, and his hand breaking the symmetry, plunging below the covers and looking, without sight, for a warm crevice, some resting place about her. She had wanted to preserve this, and was quite firm on the subject. There were ulterior motives behind everything, sex most of all. Things looked patchy, for a while. And then, a slip-up. And after – what she would have to live with. That she’d have aborted it, from the off, perhaps without telling him. She’d always had reserves, she knew her own mind. Her mum dying young had done that, or the move to England.

The best thing in life is the ability to change. When it came to it, Lara was the best person she’d known, and Hendrickje allowed herself to put on a little weight, and worry less about Simon’s long hours and their shaky income. Lara learned to draw, the table, a kite and doll, anything. Nothing on earth had such a capacity for concentration, tongue out, solemn at her paper. Mother watched daughter, who watched only her fist and pencil, learning how to make a world, and live in one too. Life could be good.

The afternoon had passed, and soon she would be late. She had known skies like this – deepening blue, with a low moon growing brighter and fatter – and known people, with whom she’d talked. Some she’d loved. She was going to be late, but perhaps supper would wait, until after. Lotje was dead, and Simon’s brother Eric, who was a perpetual charmer, until he died of something horrible and told Simon on his deathbed that it should have been Eric at the last, with the name, and the life, and the missus. Simon had always thought his brother was gay, and was quietly satisfied that this was, after all, not the case. They had been in competition after all – and he, the lankier, mousier brother, had won. This was not spoken, but Hendrickje knew, and would never judge him for it.

She watched two birds together, dipping, black on blue. If she moved from here, from where she supported herself on the sink, legs stiff as soldiers, if she went to turn on the lamp by the TV, or to put a jumper on for outside, or apply a swipe of lipstick – if she was efficient and capable in any of these ways then there would be no edges to the hell she was living in. The cat, eventually, would have to be fed, and it would begin. But now. There was tonight, and there was Hendrickje, a small, stout woman with the forehead of a Rembrandt, her hands spread on the sink.

At Simon’s college she had met some of the other fellows, they flirted with her and liked her jokes, she was a terrific little woman to them. Formal hall, high table. Passing the port round, and all of these great men’s faces, made beautiful in the candlelight. She laughed for them, and was interested in their research. Of Simon’s field she was sweetly naïve, knowing enough about the English madrigal to tease out a professor’s superior knowledge in the subject. She said she liked Carole King, and blushed. She said she liked your Peter Grimes, because of how its salt air took her home. They had holidayed in Norfolk, she and her husband, but she leaned in to hear about Florence, and California. She was certain that if she had travelled so widely, she would not describe it in these terms – the Uffizi, but the locals coarse, or the Redwood, and a Syrah to die for. She wanted terribly to know whether this or that Fellow had seen bears, or eaten Lebkuchen, but never asked. She praised the food, and knew how to make her features still and self-contained for the Latin mass. The textures of the language were different from her native Dutch, more even-tempered and insistent, but she was beguiled all the same. She perched on the oak bench, her weight on her rump, trying to balance her handbag on her lap and reach the food. After those nights she discovered she had pulled unfamiliar muscles, and developed a taste for rabbit. Once, she tripped across Front Quad, aware of each step because she was a little tight, and tried two staircases before she found the toilet engaged. A recently appointed Law Fellow emerged through the ancient door and closed it behind him. He was a large man, ridiculous in all that flapping material. The Dutch Wife, he said, putting both hands on his hips. His wings, and his paunch, stood between her and her bladder’s relief. Too much wine, he said, and, I’ve seen you. You’re a little tease. You’ll forgive me, he said, taking two steps towards her. She took two back, and felt wall. Excuse me, she said. That Laphroaig, he said, it’s terrific, and pressed his groin against her womb, to do which he had to lean back slightly, to accommodate his stomach. No – she said, having always hated Scotch, and wedged her hands between, prodding at too much flesh. She kicked his shin, and he lost balance, and swore. All these men, and she was guilty before them – for what? And as she dipped past him she thought, confusedly, that Simon would be so cross, and there flashed in her mind his body and hers, and cold plaster against her bum, and this was wrong, too. He’d never know, but that night she dug her fingers into his back, wanting to be rid of something. Stepping across the quad, the moon bobbed in the corner of her eye, and Hendrickje was forced to notice such things; a spire, pale greeny-blue with a yellow lamp somewhere within, and points of wetness the moon picked out on the grass.

Hendrickje thought of home, of white pavements and the chill of the North Sea blowing in behind Centraal, she thought of the Begijnhof and its courtyard silence, generations of women who knew, as she did, how to soothe, and suppress. That she was descended from one of them, she had no doubt. It didn’t matter that there was no Our Lord or Blessed Virgin, the very will of the beguines was subtle, and it spoke to her bones.

It was gone half seven. A telephone was ringing, somewhere off in the house. She would answer it. She would not. How her heart had been used to go at the sound of it, wondering who would be on the other end. Baby – a lover might address him so. This happened to other wives. For a period after Lara had started at university, Hendrickje would apply herself to her daily tasks and, nearing the time of his return, would lose all stomach for them. She would put on the oven but forget to feed it, instead would curl like a comma in the bed. That he made her jealous was some feat – Hendrickje, the toast of the Jordaan – and he did it by a certain indifference, or staid acceptance of her love. She loves me, sure! He was incapable of malice, was as soft as his best cashmere wool pullover, folded up in a box in Lara’s room – the spare room – stalled halfway to the charity shop. To doubt him was to doubt herself – how terrifying that was! With a little effort of will, she regained her surety of touch and motion. She would think of other men – it was a particular pleasure of hers to summon Omar Sharif into the bedroom – and feel the scales shift once more. Roses, for no reason other than it being a Thursday, other than her being his Hen. The first draft of his paper, for her eyes only, and the dedication at the beginning, from the Song of Songs. The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters firs. There, so. She saw how the power went back and forth between them. Having learned this, she had to forget it, in order that they might continue. Her husband, at the end, admitted no infidelity into the house of their marriage. He died – in his sleep! And he slept so little, down the years. For death to find him there, and with precision stop the breath in his throat and close up his eyes – there was skill in that. There was some comfort. He would work early in the morning and she would roll into his half. Here the sheets around her were cool, and the change of location would alter the substance of her dreams. She would lie spread-eagled, one foot keeping her own corner’s counsel, and a nightmare in which she was failing someone would ebb sweetly into some new narrative, a gathering, or a celebration. She slept well when he was not there, and loved him all the more for it.

Hendrickje turned on the tap. Its noise was startling, more so than the telephone. These were the things of which man was once afraid; fire and flood. She had never been scared of the dark, not of anything really. Mice, perhaps, or snakes. Both unlikely visitors here. She scrubbed the teacup, rinsed it, laid it on the sink. There was the dishwasher, sometimes she forgot. The stone sink from her childhood she remembered now, and the smell of gritty soap powder as her mother washed clothes. How the shirts billowed out and then with a great shhhlup you pushed them under. Her mother’s hands were red and coarse, and beautiful to her fourth daughter. She was dead – sometimes Hendrickje forgot. Oh my God, someone said. This was not some pious relative, speaking through her. This was Hendrickje. The sound of her own voice was the most startling of all. It was low for a woman’s, and it betrayed age. Something had happened to Danae, with her fine forehead and her excellent grammar. It was the word of the town, Kijk naar haar rimpels! Lotje was rushing up Prinsengracht, carrying eggs and bread and trying not to trip. Hendrickje could hear her calling, though the face was not clear. This was certainly not her sister’s body, straddling a chair, dressed only in strips of leather and backlit red. They had walked past the red lights, together, just once. She told him not to be such a prude, and took his hand and was proud how they beckoned, these poor, extraordinary women. Her English man, with his hand in hers. Their bodies were hers, after all, and what he felt was desire – abashed, conflicted. This was as it should be. She begged him to try the hashish, but he would only take a little of the biscuit, and insisted that it was juvenile, that he felt nothing. She pointed out to him how the air admitted the depth of her foot, how it fizzed minutely around each toe. He told her she was imagining it, and she was glad to believe him, and in him. It felt good to be told she was wrong.

She sat down. Her legs had taken her to the living room, there was an easy chair next to the phone. If only it would ring again! She would be late, and had perhaps learned how to be scared, late in the day. A plane passed low overhead, her right foot was tapping. Well, so. All those bodies up there in that metal barrel. The food on trays, and the girls with their painted lips, offering you things. Her daughter had once stated a desire to serve in this way – an air steward, it was called now. She was so stubborn, her Larenka. Knitting her fingers together on her lap and making her two thumbs orbit each other, Hendrickje realised her daughter would not suffice. She had grown thick around the waist, and there was a lumpen complacent way about her. Her eyes focused just through, or above, your head; that simply would  not do. It was her father’s; it was infuriating and dear to Hendrickje in equal parts. In almost equal parts.

She was crying now. She found a handkerchief in her sleeve, and held it to her face. The concert would have started, and so – this was the decision she had made. There would be other concerts, just as there would be days and days to live in. She would ask someone to go with her next time. She would call up Joan, Dr Weston’s widow – those two used to enjoy the opera. One summer the four of them saw Figaro al fresco, and Robert Weston brought a Japanese rice wine which they drank, swallowing with it some of Mozart’s giddiness. They would go to the Far East, they would set up a magazine! They were blind drunk: you could have too much of joy, that’s why she and Simon preferred Bach. Even-tempered. No, Hendrickje would go alone to the next one, if at all. She switched the lamp on beside her and bowed her head, thumbs still circling. The hoovering. A cake for Sarah down the road, with her new baby. A boy, was it? But still, she didn’t move. The bulb had warmed up now, and the window was a black square, which showed her nothing. Traffic noise, a too-empty sky over Oxford. Soon they would be preparing for Christmas, and everything that it entailed. Shopping, and a handful of recycled traditions, cut off from their meaning. In Holland it was different, waiting for Sinterklaas to ride in on his steamboat, surrounded by the Zwarte Pieten – the first sight of the procession, the first gluhwein of winter. Lotje always kept her house stocked with kruidnoten, which Hendrickje would tip into her palms and work through until they were gone, savouring each ginger button. A clock upstairs struck the hour. She should have used the dishwasher – she saw the cup upside down on the sink, tapped her foot in irritation. Back to the kitchen, and picked it up, placed it by itself on the top rack of the dishwasher. Came back. Her thumbs, the motion of them, made a little noise. Her bones were good, for her age, she was strong. A cry, from somewhere, and the heating clicked on, its hum filled the air as though the house would take off. When will he be home, she wondered?

Now Lara was an infant, between them on a back pew of St Barnabas Church. Only a few weeks after they had moved, they discovered the church, an egg neatly ensconced in their nest of streets. The complete Bach cello suites, and a home they were settling into. A winter sky pressed down on pastel-coloured terraces, children playing on the street. There was a health centre, and a pub; its oak and grime not so different to the darkened interior of a brown café back home. Jenever would be a while coming; perhaps when this corner of Jericho caught up with its rapidly modernising front-face. Hendrickje would take little Lara to stroll up bohemian Walton Street and stare in the windows, hand in mittened hand. Delicatessens, second hand clothes. Bookshops, bookshops. This was not the western canal belt – and this was not the Westerkerk – but there was something which kept them here.

Lara’s feet didn’t touch the floor, and she leaned her head against her father’s arm, put a finger in her mouth and listened. She closed her eyes, and her feet stopped swinging. When it was over she pressed her hands together dazedly, but the roots of the music had got in. Hendrickje thought the cellist handsome, thought the playing somewhat mannered, the music beyond words. She looked left – at the other aisle of listeners, and wished she was a painter. Heads off this way and that like boats and their wake seen from an aeroplane. Varying looks of contemplation. The dances were dances, and then were something more. She looked across at Simon, who frowned a little. His hair needed cutting, his mouth was open, slightly. Light showered down from the clerestory, on the audience, and on the musician. Imitation Roman, built for the workers of the nearby Press. She thought it ugly, and liked it. After the ebullient third suite, Hendrickje noticed something. An old woman, a row in front but to the left, sitting alone. Each time applause filled the church, the woman’s head jerked upwards, like a time-lapse flower visibly growing towards the light. Once the cellist had settled into the opening bars of the next dance, down it would go, as though she were praying. The silences of the fifth’s sarabande revealed the quietest of snores. Hendrickje tried, and failed, to erase the memory of the hair, so thin it exposed the scalp beneath.

They got home, and ate chips off newspaper. They got home, and squabbled over the TV, and read Lara a story. It was possible she would never remember which. It didn’t seem to matter, terribly.

The phone rang. Yes? It was a girl’s voice on the other end; how are you today? she asked, as though they were previously acquainted. This was acceptable, apparently. Everyone was your friend, now. Hendrickje didn’t catch the next rush of words, couched in the awkward phrasing of the script-reader. Not enunciating clearly; falling far short of Lara’s beautiful RP. She had resisted throughout her teens, dropping t’s and g’s and speaking lower than was natural, almost in a whisper, to her friends. Mates, they were called. But she found the accent again in adulthood, she grew into it. Sometimes, Hendrickje thought she sounded like a little old lady already, saying such and such was awfully something or other. She had been angry, ferociously so. She stood in opposition to this and that. Her skin was sensitive, and she couldn’t stand dogs. It was terrible. There was nothing else you could say, or think. And still this girl was banging on, in some call centre in Newcastle or Delhi or wherever they put them these days.  Something about a computer, a network problem in her area. No, I – my daughter deals with all that for me, thank you. Only after she hung up did she realise the mistake. Perhaps she had gotten old, after all. The muse of Rembrandt, the toast of the Jordaan. Hendrickje’s hand was still on the receiver, and she heard then the noises of the city about her, of other people, trying to live. She would buy flowers for the kitchen, and avoid excess sentimentality. She would make a cake, and grieve for her daughter. Tomorrow she would go to the vegetable market.

___________

Jenny Holden is a writer based in Oxford, where she is working on her first novel. She has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick. She was runner-up in the 2009 Harper’s Bazaar/Orange Short Story Competition, and longlisted in the 2010 Short Fiction New Writers Competition and the 2011 Cinnamon Press Short Story Award. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in nthposition, Horizon Review, Brand Literary Magazine, Fuselit, Fractured West, Junctures Journal, likestarlings and (Short) Fiction Collective. 

Mrs Blythe was a mother of two. She lived with Mr Blythe and their daughter Clara in a four bedroom house in an expensive suburb of Milton Keynes. Mrs Blythe was five foot two and naturally blonde. The tip of her small, severely upturned nose reached almost to the point between her eyes. The interior of her nostrils was clearly visible. Her narrow mouth seemed similarly to be drawn upwards to the point between her eyes and was set in a natural frown. The lower lip fitted neatly into the upper. Her eyes were blue and tidy and she had short, stubby eyelashes. She wore black, grey, navy blue, brown, white and tan. She drove a big car and had to press a button on a remote control to open the gate which let her in to the exclusive housing complex in which she and her family lived. There were a few framed photographs on the mantlepiece above the fireplace. The kitchen smelled clean and cool and the black marble surfaces were bare and shiny. Everything was out of sight. For everyday use Mrs Blythe favoured the kind of cutlery and crockery that had writing incorporated into the design: ‘knife’ was etched on the knives and ‘spoon’ on the spoons. Her bread bin said ‘bread’ in bold white letters and her mugs said ‘mug’. For special occasions she asked Mr Blythe to stand on the step ladder and reach into the back of a high cupboard for the big box of silver cutlery which they had received as a wedding gift from the Blythes. Mrs Blythe appreciated the position of a well located postbox and had several pairs of identical shoes. For her, the mark of a good home was the presence of a well used utility room.

Mrs Blythe believed in ‘deep down’. For example she knew ‘deep down’ that cats do not suffocate babies in the night while the house sleeps but she still got rid of Mable when her first child was born. She also knew ‘deep down’ that her children were not going to save themselves until their wedding nights but this did not mean boyfriends or girlfriends were permitted to spend the night. Moreover she knew ‘deep down’ that God probably did not exist but she prayed to him for protection just in case. She was an advocate of the just in case style of life and therefore always had tissues and an umbrella in her handbag.

Mrs Blythe’s daughter Clara Blythe had been my friend for a few years. Her mother approved of me because I wore a helmet when I rode my bicycle and my parents were still together. Clara had inherited the just in case philosophy as well as the intimidating blondness but carried condoms and spare black tights instead of tissues and umbrellas. The dark blue of her eyes sat like engine oil in a puddle. For Clara’s birthday one year Mrs Blythe took us out for dinner in an expensive restaurant before we went out out with our small gang of friends. We wore sober colours and filed and lacquered our nails. I asked my mother what people talk about in fancy restaurants and she said ask about the family and don’t mention money as she folded tea-towels and smoked duty frees.

The waiter – who wore a white suit – pulled our chairs out for us and placed our napkins in our laps with a flourish. He called Clara and I mademoiselle and Mrs Blythe madame. We sat on the same side of the table facing the window and Mrs Blythe sat opposite facing the restaurant. Mrs Blythe smiled without showing her teeth and said ‘lovely,’ when the waiter gave us our menus. Our view was of a bus stop and an overflowing bin outside a Costcutters.

When I asked about the family she told me Clara’s cousin had had twins and I nodded. Then she seemed to remember something else and looked happy with gossip, but also portentous and forbidding. She pushed her plate forward a little then pulled it back and lowered her voice.
‘Timothy’s not been well,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I replied. Timothy was Clara’s older brother.
‘They thought it was appendicitis.’
‘Oh no,’ I said and Clara looked at me.
‘But that was only their first guess,’ Mrs Blythe said and licked her lips with a small movement.
‘Guess?’ I asked.
‘When Sarah called -’
‘Who’s Sarah?’
‘Sarah’s Timothy’s girlfriend. Lovely girl. They’re still in Bali but they’ll get married before they live together here. Anyway she called and said, “Mrs Blythe, Timothy isn’t well, he’s not well at all.” So I said, “Sarah tell me immediately what’s wrong or I’ll scream.” Of course I would never have screamed but it seemed to do the trick.’

The waiter came over to take our order. Mrs Blythe ordered sea bass and pancetta in a white sauce. I never order saucy things because you never know what’s really in them, so I chose fish cakes because I was nervous and you can see inside them. Clara bravely ordered seafood linguine. She said linguine and everything. She didn’t just point at the menu and say that please. After the waiter left Mrs Blythe leaned in and cleared her throat:
‘“But doctors don’t guess” I said to Sarah, “they diagnose.” She said Timothy had been feeling poorly for days and had lost his appetite.’
I nodded and frowned.
‘He’d been up the night before with a terribly high fever and awful sweats.’
‘Oh no,’ I said.

The waiter came back round to pour the water. I thought of cups of warm sweat. Mrs Blythe said thank you and nodded after each glass was filled, wincing at the abrupt splash of ice cubes. Clara crunched one with vigour against her costly orthodontistry.
‘And diarrhoea,’ Mrs Blythe mouthed elaborately.
The waiter left and she continued:
‘So he behaved as you do with a fever and had some paracetamol, drunk lots of water and tried to rest, and good thing Sarah’s there with him you know, because after he’d gotten some sleep,’ she said and broke a bread-stick in two, ‘he woke up running to the bathroom needing to vomit,’ she took a bite of one half, crunched and passed me the other half. Clara picked up her own bread-stick. Mrs Blythe spooned her ice cubes out of her glass and back into the jug. ‘Well,’ Mrs Blythe continued, ‘it didn’t stop coming, both ends now and because they’re abroad – you know, Sarah thought they ought to go to the doctor.’
‘Sounds sensible,’ I pitched in.

Clara rolled her eyes and scraped her chair back, ‘I’m going out for a fag,’ she said. Her mother knew she could not chide her on her birthday but winced just the same.
‘So when they eventually got to the hospital, which was a chore in itself because of the you know what,’ she said in a hard whisper and wiggled the fingers of one hand near her mouth and the other hand behind her at seat level.
I smiled a tight smile and looked down.
‘Well they did all sorts of tests and stool samples -’ the waiter politely put our food down and we looked up and said thank you. Clara saw and flicked her cigarette into the gutter and came in still exhaling.
‘Which bit are you on now?’ asked Clara salting her food without tasting it – another wince from mother.
‘Your brother’s stool samples Clara,’ Mrs Blythe said, ‘now tuck in.’ Clara clenched her jaw. ‘So, they thought it was appendicitis or food poisoning but after ruling them out,’ she paused for effect, ‘they discovered it was an amoeba.’
‘Oh! My cousin had one of them once!’ I said, making it sound like a designer dog or once treasured collectible.
She ignored me and said in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Now I don’t know if you know but some amoebas can be highly dangerous,’ she paused and arched an eyebrow, ‘highly dangerous.’ A piece of fish fell off her fork as she was raising it to her mouth and landed in the sauce making a flat silly splash. ‘But mostly they’re treatable,’ she continued quickly and speared the fallen fish firmly with her fork. ‘How’s your food girls?’ She asked.
‘Good,’ I replied blandly, dissecting the filling.
‘It’s OK,’ Clara said, mouth full.
‘Yours Mrs Blythe?’ I ventured.
‘Mmm, good. So, they’ve given him some standard amoeba killing antibiotics and he felt a bit better.’ I smiled ready to express relief with a kind and common phrase. ‘But a few days ago,’ I set my face back to concerned, ‘he started behaving strangely.’
‘Is that so?’ I said like a detective.
‘He’s been hallucinating,’ Mrs Blythe said putting down her fork and pursing her lips.

Hallucinating is a word I’ve never know how to react to. I took a big chug of water and looked at the ceiling. ‘Thirsty,’ I said and put the glass down.
‘Sarah called me,’ Mrs Blythe insisted, ‘in the middle of the night on Tuesday because she could not get Timothy to stop banging his head against the bedroom wall.’
‘Oh my,’ I said for the first time in my life.
‘And she said this had been going on for days, three days.’
‘Why?’ I asked, stupidly.
‘Because the brain provides the perfect environment, I read it on the web, for the amoeba to live. He’s trying to get it out.’
‘Mum –’ Clara interjected looking briefly up from her food.
‘It’s a parasite Clara which hijacks the brain.’ She lowered her voice and sat authoritatively back in her chair.
‘Not exactly -’ Clara corrected, flailing.
‘It enters through the nose from infected waters and travels into the brain and spinal cord, and begins destroying the tissue in the brain.’
‘Mum,’ Clara pleaded looking around her, ‘that’s enough.’
‘But he can feel it eating his brain,’ Mrs Blythe tapped her temple with a manicured nail. ‘He can feel it running around between his brain and his skull,’ her eyeballs bulged with conviction.
‘It was a hallucination Mum.’
‘An hallucination Clara and no, I think you’ll find it was quite real. It’s woken him up every night with its…its scuttling about. And it’s multiplying, growing.’
‘That’s unlikely.’
‘I think I know when my own son’s brain cells are being eaten Clara. And I’ve researched -’
‘A Wikipedia stub doesn’t count Mum.’
‘Nevertheless, it, the amoeba, cuts into the neurons and feasts on the nutrients that spill out. It protects itself with a coat called a cyst which is impervious, impervious Clara, to the immune system. Then, you see, it sheds the cyst,’ she slowed down, fascinated, ‘you see, it changes its shape and continues gorging on his mind.’ She paused and took a smug bite of fish. ‘Sarah said there’s a stain forming on the wall where he bangs his head.’
‘They don’t even know what type of amoeba it is yet,’ Clara said slowly.
‘He goes back to the same spot of wall every night.’
‘They said there are two types of amoeba, an intestinal one and an extraintestinal one.’
‘I know which one it is though I can’t pronounce it.’

She beckoned the waiter over and asked for a pencil and paper. Clara blushed. Obligingly he returned. Mrs Blythe forgot to say thank you this time. I busied myself with a rigorous analysis of what remained on my plate. Mrs Blythe cleared her throat and began to write. After the letter n she said to the pencil, ‘This is no good,’ and asked for the waiter to come back. ‘Do you have a pencil sharpener?’ She asked. Clara’s neck reddened. He nodded and returned shortly with a sharp pencil. Mrs Blythe said, ‘That’ll do,’ and started again, ‘N-a-e-g-l-e-r-i-a F-o-w-l-e-r-i’ she wrote and turned the paper around to face us.
‘So?’ Clara said.
‘The mortality rate for those infected with this,’ she circled the name with the pencil splintering the tip, ‘extraintestinal amoeba is ninety seven per cent,’ she quoted. ‘So let’s hope it’s the other one.’
‘It most likely is.’
‘Then tell me, why can he feel it in his head?’ suddenly innocent, and then, ‘really Clara sometimes I think you live in a fantasy world. The doctor said the types were morphologically indistinguishable.’
‘OK, but they have different effects. He would be worse if he had the brain eating one and it’s super rare so I don’t think you need to worry.’
‘Super rare? Is that a medical term? And why aren’t you worried?’
‘Because it’s unlikely he’ll die and it’s probably a side effect of the medication.’
‘No Clara. Absolutely not. Confusion, seizures, fever, disorientation,’ she rattled them off counting on her fingers, ‘are not side effects. These amoebas are primitive, the most primitive form of life.’ Her small blue eyes filled with tears. ‘They have no ethics, no morals.’
‘They’re single celled organisms Mum, they don’t have most things.’
‘They are free living organisms. Do you know what that means?’
‘No,’ I said. Clara sighed through her nose and her mouth squirmed in irritation.
‘They can survive without the host.’
I wondered where Mrs Blythe had heard a word like host and said, ‘Oh.’
‘You like etymology don’t you?’ Mrs Blythe asked me.
‘Well yes,’ I said, thinking I love etymology.
‘The word amoeba comes from the Greek for change. It was originally named after the God Proteus, a shape shifter. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Yes,’ I hesitated.
‘It’s neat, it’s a neat explanation,’ she repeated, ‘that’s what I love about clean, honest words.
‘Mum, eat your dinner,’ Clara said looking down at hers. Fleshy bits of orange mussels squelching in the thick white ribbons of pasta. Curled prawns fat and pink to suck out of red crunchy tails.
‘It’s been days now and he won’t listen to me when I beg him to come home and go to a proper hospital.’
I scraped around on my plate.
‘If it was the extraintestinal thing,’ Clara said twirling her long fat pasta around her fork, ‘he wouldn’t be alive.’
‘But the doctor said it can take weeks to grow and even longer to identify.’
‘But he also said the medication may have severe, unpleasant side effects which can be unpredictable and no decisions can be made at this stage.’
‘Now Clara I know it’s your special day but I won’t have you paraphrasing so crudely.’
‘Would you prefer if I paraphrased more elegantly or would you rather I avoided it altogether?’

I smiled and Clara put her foot near mine under the table and squished my toes with her shoe in frustration.
‘No Clara, that’s not it. You know it’s not the medication but the amoeba,’ she gritted her teeth.
I looked at Clara. She clenched her jaw and said, ‘I’m going out for a fag,’ and tossed her napkin down on her chair.
There was a long pause. I smiled idiotically whenever Mrs Blythe caught my eye.
‘Do you remember the story about the porridge?’ Mrs Blythe said pushing her plate forward.
‘Er -’
‘You do, you must do. The poor little girl goes into the forest and is kind enough to share her little bit of food with the old man. So he gives her a magic pot in return.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said vaguely.
‘And he says all she has to do is say “cook little pot cook” and it’ll make plenty of porridge. So what did she do?’ Mrs Blythe asked me.
‘Went home and said “cook little pot cook”?’ I said hopefully.
‘Exactly. And then what?’
‘Then her poor family could eat?’ My voice increased in pitch.
‘Yes but the pot overflowed didn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And it flowed out of the pot onto the floor, into the house, out of the door, down the steps, into the town, onto the road and filled the town, almost drowning it all because the little girl couldn’t remember the magic words to stop it cooking. It was multiplying itself you see, infinitely increasing and taking over. Can you imagine how the little girl felt?’
‘Frightened?’
The waiter came over and took our plates. Mrs Blythe said, ‘the dessert please,’ and he nodded.
‘He says he can feel it like a worm, then the worm divides into two and the two halves divide into four and so on and so forth. He says he can feel it multiplying and making clusters, like a black cloud moving around his brain, getting bigger and bigger.’

Clara came back in and sat down saying, ‘Coffee?’ ‘Oh yes, and,’ Mrs Blythe nodded at the waiter behind us who brought over a small slice of tiramisu with a flickering candle in it and a sparkler. He started singing Happy Birthday and Mrs Blythe and I joined in, fumbling over the high notes. The other diners turned their heads and smiled and sang along, leaving out the bit where the name goes so Mrs Blythe and I ended up hollering Clara out flat and dumb. She blew out the candle but the sparkler wouldn’t stop, until eventually the waiter picked it out of the dessert with his long fingers and dunked it in a wine bucket full of ice.

Robert Earle

Thomas Frankenthaler—nicknamed “Doubting Tom,” or just “Doubter,” because he questioned the belief that there were things mankind could know and yet be unable to affect—initially gained fame for pens that improved handwriting. His first pen—the Gyro—revolutionized primary education by enabling young students to produce what Frankenthaler termed “Phillips 66 Cursive Supreme,” or simply, “Cursive Supreme.”

Frankenthaler explained his inspiration in a 1976 PBS documentary: “Every year when I was a kid we’d enter writing samples for the Phillips 66 handwriting contest. This was in the 50s. I never passed the first cut. People said I was born to be a doctor with handwriting that bad, but I hated doctors, always have. What do they know?”

Gyro pens corrected handwriting by interlocking a miniature brass gyroscope with a gimbal; this design counteracted variations from Cursive Supreme, forcing the writer’s hand to render all letters and punctuation marks properly. The more a writer struggles against it, the firmer the pen’s internal physics.

“Once you were used to it,” Harvard handwriting expert Margery Williston commented, “you learned to do what the pen told you to do. The lettering came out beautifully. But we saw many cases of carpel tunnel syndrome in the late 70s as a result of the Gyro before we even knew what carpel tunnel syndrome was.”

Now a collector’s item, the Gyro was succeeded by Frankenthaler’s NanoBall Standard, the pen that has enabled people all over the world to duplicate any typeface available to a computer user. Frankenthaler recollected in a 1992 interview: “‘Doubter,’ I said to myself, ‘All this Cursive Supreme is getting boring. There has to be a way to counter resistance variables with multiple responses. Now that’s a complicated problem, and it’s why I started focusing on the ball in the ballpoint. I thought that if you could get the ball to desolidify just like the ink at critical junctures, and load it up with the right software, you could teach it any of the great typefaces.’”

A combination of chaos theory and nanotechnology, the NanoBall Standard exponentially enhanced the range of cursive possibilities available to the average penman.

“The chaos dimension of the variable point understands immediately where you’re going to make a mistake,” Frankenthaler said in the 1992 interview, “and pre-corrects through nano-adaptation. It’s a pretty simple algorithm once you figure out the interaction between a given type design and human fractal distortion.”

Frankenthaler rejected complaints that his technological innovations in penmanship “dumbed down” the writing public and undermined forensic handwriting analysis. “Oh, the Germans with their handwriting tests for job applicants. That was as bogus as phrenology. Are we a better world and workforce because we all write beautifully? The answer’s obvious.”

NanoBall Standard technology has been credited with diminishing depression, building personal self-confidence, and reengaging a visually oriented TV-watching public with self-expression through words.

A self-described slothful dreamer Frankenthaler was considered the greatest inventor of the second half of the 20^th century. “I liked to doodle and sketch and make little word pictures as a way of loosening my mind. The actual implementation of my ideas was more difficult than coming up with the ideas themselves, but still, I maintain that if you can think it and know it, you can do it.”

In one famous sequence of creative association, Frankenthaler used a Gyro pen to jot the formula “ball…joint…hip…zip…flip…flow…Mississip.” Historians of science rank this formula on a par with E=MC² . Two of Frankenthaler’s major inventions emerged from it.

“The first one came to me watching my first wife Gladys limp around the house. The doctors said she needed a hip replacement. The procedure was typical doctor-level caveman stuff—stick in a big old metal hambone and send her thumping on her way. So I sit down with my pad and jot the formula and whammo, easy peasy. We just take the ball, which I had mastered through nano programming, and transpose it outside of the pen. Then we shoot the nano goop into human joints and while we’re at it, we program the extended movement patterns so that you not only walk pain free but beautifully. I mean, what is the real difference between the way you walk and the way you write by hand? Change one joint, and you can change them all. The whole body frees up.”

Frankenthaler Free-Joints are now in use by the elderly, professional athletes, dancers, arthritis sufferers of all ages, and accident victims. They are made of SmartInk, the Frankenthaler invention that is injected directly into the damaged joint and recalibrates movements according to the three major “classics” of human kinetics: the actor John Wayne, the pre-injury baseball player Mickey Mantle, and the prima ballerina Dame Alicia Markova.

“From there I asked myself, what is our biggest problem outside the body? That’s one place I hadn’t really considered. I have no idea why I finished the formula with Mississip, but here we’ve got the energy crisis, global warming, and a world that wants to move and is going to move, and we don’t have the common sense to tie it all together.”

Mississippi Marbles, Frankenthaler’s trillion dollar trademark, are the “bruisable” spheres that have been placed on nanotube axes near Natchez, Mississippi (and in 340 rivers around the world, at last count) to read water flows and transfer their hydraulic energy directly into the national electric grid through ultra-lightweight turbine transformers.

Caltech cosmologist Kenny Arya has described Frankenthaler’ invention as verging on the divine. “Frankenthaler has an intuitive appreciation of the three basic features of the universe: points, lines, and the energy-loss discontinuities that make them inevitable. He still thinks his pens are the best thing he’s ever done, but come on: he’s stopped global warming and lowered the cost of electricity to essentially nil. Today there is no need for gasoline-powered engines, nuclear reactors, or mountaintop coal mining.”

“For me,” Frankenthaler wrote in an essay in 1999, “the whole idea of the hip joint, movement, and the replication of the human body in land and water forms had to have come out of the pens, really, and my bad handwriting notwithstanding, I suppose the pens really came out of my fascination with reading when I was a kid. What we’re looking at when we read is the bodiless ground of consciousness across which it is easy to move in a better way than you could do on your own. Shakespeare or Swift, who is a big favorite of mine, and Twain—he’s another—make you think in the pre-selected terms of perfection that most people can’t muster on the best of their best days for more than a few seconds. Loan them your mind and they loan you their genius.”

“I never considered that I might become such a writer myself, but the analogies between mind, body, and physical setting overwhelmed me sometimes. I’m talking about the great analogies, implicit and explicit, you find in a compelling story, why things turn out the way they do. Anyway, when I was a kid, I’d look at the examples of perfect cursive letters across the top of the chalkboard, and I couldn’t understand how I could be so far from that much beauty when it lay right at hand. So there you go, the rest is history. Now there’s not a kid in the world who can’t have the experience of seeing his or her thoughts well-dressed in gorgeous typeface.”

Doubting Tom Frankenthaler’s first major life crisis came soon after he wrote those cheery words, typical of his self-confidence and optimism; it was provoked by Gladys’ death of pancreatic cancer, a stealthy disease that typically does not manifest itself until the metastasis has gone beyond the pancreas itself.

“No warning, then death,” Frankenthaler commented. “Just like that, or no, check that: all sorts of things, rotten things, and then death. Malaise, that symptom always fried me. What is malaise? I asked myself, ‘If life and death are so indistinguishable, detectable only as a mood when death is settling in, what is the difference between the one and the other? Why can’t we tell what’s going on? Why didn’t I see it? This was important, goddammit. Here was death, and I missed it.”

After losing Gladys, the simple question, “Why didn’t I see it?” almost drove him crazy. This was followed by tougher questions: “Should everything be visible? How could it be? How could you know, if you saw everything, what it was?” But the basic question was that first one: “Why didn’t I see it?”

He was living in Santa Fe and, until that final night in the hospital with Gladys, had been oblivious to his real joy. A man that famous and that successful has it all in a place like Santa Fe. The air is pure; the lines are clear; no noise, no fuss. Doubting Tom liked that. He felt settled there, a churning brain in an untaxed body. Good scents in the earth and vegetation. A rareness of vista, old rocks that always looked new. Plus there were colleagues to kibitz with up in Los Alamos at the national lab and down at Sandia, the other national lab, and gathered together in a wide-open think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, which was always pestering him to sign up with them, but he couldn’t see the point. Too busy, too tied up…too blind.

He had a son and a daughter-in-law, Tom Jr. and Karen, who were living in what they called “the cottage,” sort of a pool house cum fireplace. Karen took over the kitchen in the big house when Gladys passed, fixing elaborately simple meals of exotic fruits, vegetables and grains. She told Doubter politely but firmly that being vegetarian was good for him. All right, why not? He liked the fact that she at least gave him a thought. Tom Jr. kept on doing more of what he’d always done, basically nothing. Diddled with real estate development. Bought in and out of restaurants, a natural gas bus company, some geothermal energy projects.

It wasn’t long before this homeostasis was troubled by a worry Doubter couldn’t shake: What if they were dying? What if Tom Jr. had coronary problems that he worsened by ordering big slabs of beef for lunch at restaurants almost every day? Boom, heart attack, gone. What if Karen was developing breast cancer, which could be as bad as pancreatic cancer? Doubter regarded these possibilities with increasing anxiety. No physical property of existence was unknown to him. He’d mastered everything, but the actual detection of everything eluded him.

If you built the right kind of glasses, he thought, you could see into the human body and everything else. Beyond that, you could correlate your detection method with what he came to think of as an hermeneutic turbocharger. All you had to do would be install a translucent shield in the middle of the lens so that the nano rays you bounced off your object of study were not simultaneously backed up into your own skull, killing you with the flux of knowledge, as it were, or maybe, here was a scary thought: turning you into what you were looking at—look at a sunset and become a sunset, albeit a little one, or look at a cup of coffee and end up in someone’s mouth.

The result of this train of thought pulled into the station one day as the Real Sight Googling Goggles, a somewhat playful jab at Google and the worldwide web. Put them on and you could see, on a smooth gradient, right through the clothes and the skin into the organs and molecular strata of a human body. You also could see, by looking up and to the left, a label naming what you saw, be it fibula, or calcium, or carbon, or water or ligament or leukemia. Beyond that, if you looked at a tree and didn’t know its type, you could find out: California cypress, loblolly pine. Or at rock: schist, granite. Or at clouds: these are cirrus, those are cumulus.

His prototype Real Sight Googling Goggles weighed three pounds, required a head harness to keep them in place, and was almost impossible to pry off the person using them, usually Doubting Tom, because he didn’t want to stop looking through them.

Berkeley epistemologist Mervin Pink, who came down to Santa Fe for a look-see, called them, “…either Linnaean…or Darwinian…or possibly Kantian: the true categorical imperative.” Doctors in Santa Fe, whose failings had inspired the Googlers, for short, went nuts over them. Of course the first thing Doubter did was check out Tom Jr. and Karen and see that they were all right, not a cell acting up, but after that, he was enjoined to spend twenty hours every week at the Santa Fe hospital, examining all comers. At times people lined up for over a mile just to “be seen” by Thomas Frankenthaler, the great visionary inventor, and get his assessment.

And wow, think of the other implications: no more terrorism because bombs could be spotted anywhere anytime; no more backroom deals in politics because neither cigar smoke nor whiskey fumes could fog over secret meetings; and most significantly, an end to human ignorance and stupidity because once Tom convinced himself that he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, he realized that there was a kind of electromagnetic veil fused to the human brain that, depending on its thickness, made folks dumb or smart. And the analysis provided its own remedy. Turned out that said veil, which was folded and stuffed and smeared all over the Byzantine wrinkles of the cerebral cortex, melted off like sunstruck morning mist once exposed to the Britannica-scale jolt of a one minute Googler session. And in ten minutes Doubter could look a person right up the I.Q. scale and provide a master’s quotient of knowledge about every object and substance in the room.

Who, some asked, would want to know all that? Tom himself began to ask himself this question. Since he could and did wear the Googlers for days on end (especially after he had nano’d prototype #2 down to a reasonable size and weight, indistinguishable from Ray-Ban Wayfarers), he was more trapped than anyone else on the planet in what was what. The demands on his time were incredible: he had bridges to inspect, old master paintings to validate, oil basins to assess, chicken farms to condemn.

The shock came when he didn’t see Karen leaving Tom Jr. One morning he walked into the kitchen expecting breakfast, and it wasn’t there, not even a pot of coffee. His first thought was to go get the Googlers and check out what was going on over in the cottage, but hell, why not just walk over and ask? He didn’t need to Googlers to do that. Tom Jr. sat inside alone, miserable, not wanting to talk. Doubter pushed him, though he was very upset himself.

“Did you know this was coming, son?”

“Sure, of course.”

“But why?”

Tom Jr. said, “I can’t explain where the feeling went, but it sure went. She said to me, ‘You don’t love me anymore,’ and she was right, and I admitted it.”

“What about breakfast,” Doubting Tom asked, trying to think where they could get some, maybe Tia Sophia’s off the Plaza, some sopapillas and honey.

“Dad, my wife just left, my life is a mess, and you want breakfast? Go fix your own fucking breakfast!”

That struck Doubting Tom as reasonable, so he did (not at Tia Sophia’s, at Pasqual’s), but he was perplexed and found himself mourning the loss of Karen much as he had mourned the loss of Gladys but stymied by a new, somewhat disconcerting thought: how could you possibly “see” emotions? Or put another way: how could you “see” relationships, which were the interconnection of two sets of emotions, the his emotions and the her emotions, or the father emotions and the son emotions?

He wondered if he was looking at the evolutionary limit of human intelligence, what you can’t know as a physical phenomenon with a physical organ—the weightless, substanceless, vagueness of feelings. And he did have feelings. He really liked that girl and was hurt she hadn’t said anything to him, asked for his help, or even told him goodbye.

Back home he looked out his window at the patchy mountains and felt very tired and confused. There was something about being a triumphant guy like him that made setbacks and defeats particularly awful. He felt stupid. Wouldn’t know what to write about his…oh, no, malaise?…if he picked up a Gyro and started putting it all into words. He had told the world a kind of a lie, and the world had kind of believed him. Didn’t need the glasses to figure that out. He missed Gladys so much that he felt sliced right across his chest. Tried to remember her, get her back in his mind. With those fucking glasses, he could see her in her grave, which was why he never went. Are you kidding? But really see her as she was, alive? No.

The brain, the brain…what to do about the brain? He rapped his noggin. Not much hair there anymore, probably less brain matter, too (he hadn’t looked recently). He thought of the chunk of Kennedy’s brain skidding across the trunk of his limo, Jackie scrambling to catch it. He thought of Einstein’s brain highjacked by that nutty doctor, floating in mason jars for twenty years, and Gauss’s brain and Lenin’s brain. Of course he knew all about these things; he knew everything: the weight, the enlarged Sylvian fissure enigma, the ratio of Glial cells to neurons. Didn’t know how those guys felt about things, though. Einstein posed as a bit of a believer in the metaphysical but who took him seriously? He was a physicist, a scientist, and there was nothing to know about whatever he might have believed in. This Doubting Tom knew for a fact, and it made him feel quite empty and depressed.

To cheer himself up, he went and got the glasses and sat there in the kitchen having a look into the cupboards, the stainless steel, the cans of soup and boxes of tea and the tea itself, the milk itself, the vinegar itself.

Informative but meaningless. Through the back window he spied Tom Jr. standing in the cottage door. Didn’t need Real Sight Googling Goggles to look at lot of nothing just like his dad, could see it just fine with basic issue eyes, wondering, no doubt, where Karen had gone.

Doubting Tom took the Googlers off… paused… put them back on… paused …took them off again. This began to make him uncomfortable, but he was interested in the headachy vertiginous sensation he was developing through what might be called an admixture of knowledge and awareness. He knew Tom Jr. over there had an elevated heart rate and a sludgy metabolism—odd combination—but he also sensed that he was beating himself up. It was just a feeling, an intuition, whatever you want to call it, nothing tangible, couldn’t be weighed or measured, all that stuff.

Off and on, off and on…. Doubting Tom began to feel his brain function changing. Was there another veil in there, an insensitivity veil that lay under the stupidity veil? He charged over to a large mirror in the parlor and peered intently into his own skull. Couldn’t see anything but it was there, he knew it: the throbbing pain struggling to get loose told him so. He had never been a bad man that he knew of; had never done anything that justified this awful sensation, but there it was, and he had to get after it—the loneliness, the sense of incompleteness, the indefinable vacancy and mystery.

What was going on? To his horror, Doubting Tom Frankenthaler began to see himself dying. He spotted the aneurysm swelling right there on his parietal lobe and he watched it begin to give way and he saw the spectacular 4^th of July burst of blood spurting into the nighttime darkness of his cranium. It made him sick, to tell the truth. This was death, and death felt bad. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t stand, he fell hard and knocked over the fireplace instruments, and their loud clatter brought Tom Jr. running, although it was too late.

Doubting Tom’s dying brought Karen back to Tom Jr., but then there was the question: what to do with the glasses, and what about Doubting Tom’s brain (which admittedly was all messed up because of the aneurysm)? The whole thing, it seemed to them, needed to be addressed at once. They put the glasses on Doubting Tom and before anyone in the greater scientific community could stop them, they had him cremated. No one saw it coming—losing Tom Frankenthaler and his greatest invention all at once.

In the middle of her private turmoil, Ellen couldn’t avoid recalling the plot of The Cask of Amontillado which was the topic of her students’ next week quiz. An English professor, she breathed literature and sweated grammar. Or as her sister said, she defecated syntax patterns. Her colleagues at Santa Fe College could always count on Ellen to solve obscure linguistic issues. And yet, Ellen hated her language sensibility. When people around her used double negatives or spat ain’ts or referred to the liberry she would feel literally nauseated. “But nausea isn’t a problem when you sit on your fat butt all day, gulping down chocolates,” her malevolent sister pointed out.

Ellen had a fat butt and chocolate had burdened her with thunder thighs and love handles that Papichulo, her Cuban husband, disrespectfully called lonjas—slices of lard. There were few things that she enjoyed more than eating a dozen Godiva truffles while reading a hair-raising story. Particularly in the winter, when the proverbial wind blew outside and the proverbial cat purred at her feet and handsome Papichulo sat nearby, doing his ESL homework and often turning to her to solve the mystery of a prepositional phrase.

But Papichulo (whose real name was Santiago, but who preferred a nickname that, literally translated, meant daddy-pimp) wouldn’t sit by her anymore. Ellen wouldn’t help him polish his Cuban-accented, broken English again. After the discovery she had made the previous night, her life, and his, were bound to change. Inevitably and for the worse.

I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser, had written Mr. Poe. Ellen knew she couldn’t run over Papichulo in her VW beetle, no matter how much she longed to do so. She would be the primary suspect because The Santa Fe Police Department would find out in one day what had taken her two years (and luck, if that should be called luck) to discover.

“What a cochino, what a Cuban pig!” Ellen said aloud, shaking her head. “After all I have done for him!”

Ellen met Papichulo in Cuba; she had travelled to the island with the only purpose of seeing the land where Che Guevara (whom she idolized) was buried. Papichulo was sauntering around Che’s mausoleum in Santa Clara, wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that showed his tattooed arms, when he offered to be her tourist guide. “Gratis for free,” he said with a sunny, mango-and-coconut smile. “Just because you are so beautiful, reinita.” They had kept in contact by mail and lengthy phone calls until she finally agreed to marry him and bring him to the United States. Once here, Ellen had supported him for over two years and sent money to his family. She hadn’t even asked him to work full-time, only to improve his English so he could get a well-paid job someday.

All that, however, hadn’t prevented him from betraying her. Her colleagues, and most likely her own students, knew all about the Papichulo’s affair. Everybody had known and laughed at her while she had had the pink blindfolds of denial and happiness fastened tight around her eyes.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

Not only had Papichulo cheated on Ellen, but he had also said that a forklift—a forklift, for Apollo’s sake—was needed in order to lift her off the ground. Ellen knew she was roly-poly, but she wasn’t hopelessly overweight, at just two-hundred pounds. After all, she was five feet eight. And hadn’t Papichulo whispered in her ears, back in Cuba, how much he loved her ample, fleshy nalgas?

She sobbed.

Truth had slapped Ellen in the face when she least expected it. It had snowed the day before and few students attended her evening class. She dismissed it earlier and floated on a cotton candy cloud all the way to the house. Papichulo would be enchanted to see her. He would pinch her ass and call her mi reinita. She would take him to his favorite place, a cozy New Mexican restaurant in San Francis Street…

The garage door was still half-open, as it had been for the last three days. When they tried to close it, it would come down at high speed and slam against the floor; then it went up again, in slow motion, and stayed mid-way. Ellen had asked Papichulo to find out what was wrong and try to fix it but el perezoso had been putting it off, just as he always conveniently forgot to mow the backyard lawn.

“No one would sleep with an open garage door in Cuba,” he said, “but here everything is different. People are so… so nice.”

“There are thieves here too, and we’re spending over two hundred dollars on electricity every month. Heating is expensive, Papichulo, and an open door isn’t going to help!”

She had felt so mean afterward, like a grudging old hag. She avoided talking about finances with her husband because his contribution to the family budget was practically cero.

That evening, Ellen had come in the dining room through the garage. The stereo was at full blast, as always when Papichulo had the house all for himself. (Later, of course, the neighbors complained to her.) A Cuban salsa song, which turned out to be prophetic, was playing: Se acabó el querer. Love is gone. Papichulo, sprawled on the sofa, had his back turned to Ellen. “Sure, Madeleine,” he said. “See you tomorrow in class.”

Ellen was going to call him, but a premonition stopped her, a chill that ran through her spine. Madeleine was a student at the language department, a tall, slender twenty-year-old New Mexican.

“No, I can’t make it before,” he went on. “The vieja has office hours until four and will be around. We have to be careful. What? Come on, chica, don’t be so silly. Are you going to be jealous of la gorda? A gal so fat one needs a montacargas to lift her off the ground!”

After living with Papichulo for two years and a half, Ellen had learned a few words in Spanish. Mi amorcito was my love, my little love. Vieja, old woman, was self explanatory. (The injustice, she sniffled. The exaggeration! She was only three years older than he.) La gorda, the fat one, didn’t leave much to the imagination, either. And a montacargas—she had to look that up in a dictionary—was a forklift.

Ellen tiptoed out of the house while Papichulo continued the conversation with his amorcito. She drove to the Chocolate Factory and went on a desperate, calorie-loaded shopping spree. Three hours later she returned home, feigned a headache and went to bed while Papichulo remained in the living room until midnight, watching Univisión.

In the morning Ellen smiled and prepared breakfast as usual, resisting the urge to sprinkle Papichulo’s ham-and-cheese omelet with Ajax. Neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. She didn’t go to work. The headache was still bothering her, she explained.

“I’m so sorry, pobrecita,” Papichulo said, after kissing her on the forehead. Ellen felt like spitting on him.

When her husband left, a number of possible reprisals sprung up in her mind like grass in their neglected backyard. They ranged from a Shakespearean-style vengeance —burning up the house with Papichulo inside—to ridiculous retaliations like scrubbing the toilet with his toothbrush or pouring urine in his favorite wine. The first one was rejected as too risky and the other two because (a wrong) is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Ellen looked at her watch. Papichulo would be leaving the campus now, unless he and his amorcito had decided to go out together. That day the fat vieja wasn’t around, Ellen told herself bitterly. They were free.

What a Caribbean jerk! Wait until he comes back. Just wait.

Ellen heard his car approaching. That is, her car; she had bought it. Papichulo couldn’t even afford a bicycle. She ran to the garage and Papichulo waved at her.

“You feeling better, amorcito?” he shouted from the driveway, lowering his window. “You okay now?”

“Are you feeling better?” Ellen corrected him. “Are you okay now? Mind your verbs!” And she blew him a kiss that faded on the chilly Santa Fe air.

“Ay, vieja…You can’t wait until I get home to start correcting me!”

He parked the car on the driveway and started to come in the garage. Ellen pressed the opener as he crossed the threshold. He yelled only once; she started laughing. Her chuckles sounded like the jingling of the bells on Fortunato’s cap.

Mike Snelle

The night that Rachel’s father came into her room and told her he would kill for her, she’d known that, drunk or not, he had been telling the truth. He had been her first love and her best friend. What she hadn’t understood that evening, and still doesn’t, is why that wasn’t enough. Rachel’s Dad killed himself that night. She was eleven at the time and each day since had been the strangest of her life.

Jeffrey was thirty five and his marriage was already over when he saw Rachel for the first time. She had the darkest eyes he had ever seen. They were black. Jeffrey and Rachel didn’t speak beyond the usual exchange. She bought one book. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives. The dust jacket had a picture of a blue nineteen-fifties American car on it. He had never heard of the author and didn’t like the cover. But that evening he took a copy home with him. Sam, who owned the shop, had told Jeffrey that the job didn’t pay much but he could take any book away to read so long as he returned it to the shelf and didn’t fold the corners. At that moment in his life it had seemed like a good deal.

That night he dreamt about her. She was a little girl, perhaps seven or eight, and was running out on a string of rocks into the sea, jumping from one to another, further and further from the shore. He stood on the beach watching her. He wanted to call out to her, tell her to be careful. But he didn’t know her name. She got so far out that she became a speck on the horizon and then vanished. He walked back to the car park and got into his car. It was the one from the cover of the Bolaño book.

Jeffrey woke the next morning uneasy. His mind turned to Anita. They hadn’t fought at the end. What had there been left to fight about? Or for? He couldn’t have lived in that house any longer and she couldn’t have moved out. They had drunk champagne and had one last sad fuck on the living room floor. Afterwards she’d cried until there was nothing left and she’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t been able to comfort her. He’d sat in silence. He had felt nothing. The next morning he had moved out.

The months passed and they had still called each other. Clung on. Although there had been nothing left to say. At least nothing they had been willing to talk about. Then one time he’d called and the line was dead. Anita had moved back to Wales. He had emailed. She’d told him not to contact her any more.

It was a month later when Rachel came into the bookshop again. She asked for The Book of Embraces. They didn’t have it but he liked the title.

It was raining the first time Jeffrey and Rachel went out together. They met in the Italian on Rivington Street. She was late and drenched by the time she arrived. They both started to laugh. His laugh sounded like gunfire. It made her think of her father. He had laughed a lot. It wasn’t until after he had died that she realised his laugh had been mechanical, joyless. She wondered if he had always laughed like that, long and loud and empty. She joined Jeffrey at a table by the window. He told her he had bought the Bolaño because she had, and he thought he might know something about her through it. He imagined her reading it at the same time as him. Strangers each in their own world but connected through a book. The idea made her smile.

Rachel was nervous and talked too much, told him her life and even as she was speaking it felt like the history she was recalling couldn’t be her own. She felt distanced from it, as if it were a dream where the details are remembered but the message forgotten. She had no doubt that Jeffrey was one of those people that others found themselves confessing to. Her father had also been. Strangers in the supermarket would unload their troubles in the check out queue. As a child she’d thought it normal. Later she realised how rare it was, a gift and perhaps a burden. People came away lighter, having passed something on. Maybe that’s what had deadened his laugh.

Rachel started to wait for Jeffrey outside the bookshop at closing time and they would walk to his house and spend the evenings together. They cooked and told stories and laughed. Sometimes he felt guilty. When she got excited the words chased each other out of her mouth before she suddenly went quiet, as if waiting for her thoughts to catch up. At times her excitement would turn to tears, at the too muchness of it all. He worried about her. She seemed fragile, in the way that children are. It frightened him.

It was a few weeks before Rachel invited Jeffrey to her apartment by the canal. She had all these quotes typed on sheets of paper and taped to the wall. Her tiny flat was covered. ‘Some demons have to be prayed out, sweated out, and some shaken out by force’ was the first one he read. He assumed they were quotes from books she’d read. Rachel was shy at first. She told him that since childhood she had scribbled down what the people around her had said. It was her way of understanding the world. It seemed enormous the first time he saw them. Each one captured a whole human being at an instant in time.

Later Rachel told him that when her dad had died she’d spent weeks trying to remember that last thing he’d said to her. It was in this one unremembered quote that her grief had chosen to manifest itself. That if she could live that time again she would etch each word into her memory so she could close her eyes and remember at will. Since then she had collected other people’s words.

They had been together a few months before he told her about Tallulah. Rachel had asked about his marriage of course, about what had happened. He told her that he and Anita had grown apart. Rachel wasn’t satisfied but didn’t push. They were walking in the park one day when he started to cry. They had been happy that day, or at least not sad. It was early one spring morning and for the first time that year the sun was warm enough to feel comforting on their faces. She had stayed with him the night before and slept well, felt safe next to him. They had woken with their limbs wrapped around each other. He sat on a bench and sobbed, hiding his face. Rachel noticed that the wood was still wet with the morning dew. It was the playground that did it.

Jeffrey told her that each night before he went to bed he used to walk quietly over to where Tallulah was sleeping. He watched her sleep, her perfect open face. He’d look for the rise and fall of her tiny body but didn’t trust himself, not until he held his breath to listen for hers and placed his hand gently on her chest. Then late one night he stood over her, as he had done a hundred times before. Only he didn’t see the rise and fall of her chest. He didn’t hear her breath, not even when he held his own. He waited. Nothing. Not even when he placed his hand on her. She was dead.

Rachel and Jeffrey talked about how their lives now were mostly made up with what wasn’t there, the world offering a thousand daily reminders. How words and objects had taken on different, more painful, meanings. He told her it was a wonder they could communicate at all, language no longer being shared, each word steeped in memory. Loss had made the world appear in negative. They understood each other. It was a comfort to Rachel that she mistook for love.

‘What we want most from God is not forgiveness, but to be understood,’ she said.

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ he replied.

He asked her who had said these things. It didn’t matter, she answered, she never wrote down who the quotes came from and there were so many that it was impossible to remember. Jeffrey wondered aloud whether not knowing who had said each quote changed their meaning and whether that increased their power or reduced it. Rachel shrugged her shoulders.

The first time they argued Jeffrey been trying to persuade Rachel to make a book. He told her that her collected quotes would make something that other people would like to read, and that it might be published. She told him she didn’t think so, and anyway she didn’t care. He couldn’t understand that. They were having dinner that night. He told her that a single handmade book of her quotes would make the most precious of gifts. Rachel didn’t reply but wondered if he was trying to implant the idea so that she would make it for him. The thought unnerved her.

Later in bed Jeffrey told her that he had dreamt about her after he had seen her in the bookshop but before they had met. Rachel was flattered and asked him what the dream had been about. She teased him, pulling down the covers and asking if her body was as good as he had dreamt. He turned to face her, resting his head on his hand, and smiled. But he didn’t mean it. Rachel didn’t register what he said about the dream but only that in it she was a child. She asked him if that is how he saw her, vulnerable and defenseless, someone to be protected and pitied. He denied that that was his image of her, said it was just a stupid dream. She tried to believe him.

Jeffrey loved like he laughed, tinged with desperation, as if by acting out some remembered feeling he might make it real again. Rachel didn’t know, or perhaps she did but wasn’t willing to believe. Maybe some part of her understood that her father had been the same. He had loved with an intensity that his death had shown to be an empty. As if he had thought he could save himself by making a desperate show of affection and hoping the feeling followed.

It was her sister who said it out loud. Sylvia was visiting from New York. Jeffrey had helped Rachel carefully take down the quotes and hide them away before she arrived. Sylvia had confronted Rachel several years ago, thought the habit stopped her from moving on. Rachel had pretended to stop. The three of them had dinner together in Rachel’s flat. As he listened to them catch up and tell stories from their past he wondered how they could be related at all. Sylvia was so confident of herself, her memory and opinions, that it was difficult to believe they had shared a childhood.

‘Dad’s dead,’ Sylvia said as soon as the front door had closed behind Jeffrey.

‘What do you mean?’ Rachel replied.

‘Stop being a child. You’ve been looking for him all these years and here is this man who reminds us both of him. Jeffrey isn’t Dad.’

Rachel arrived at Jeffrey’s door in tears. She wouldn’t tell him what was wrong, and he didn’t push. They were unusually tender that night as they made love, finding ways to communicate beyond language. It was afterwards as they were drifting slowly towards sleep and his arms were wrapped around her that it happened.

‘I love you Tallulah,’ he whispered.

Image Copyright: Robbert Van der Steeg

Michael Martin

The leaves of the poplars flashed like a thousand eyes opening and closing. The wind sizzled in the tree tops. A hand pressed on Austin’s arm.

“Can I help you, Mr Austin?” said the Security Guard.

“I don’t want to be here,” said Austin. His gaze drifted between the Guard and the building behind him.

“Then you won’t mind me escorting you off the facility.”

Austin shook the Guard’s hand off his sleeve and looked at the road beyond the close cropped lawn and the sparkling fountain, oblique in the breeze.

“I don’t want to be here,” said Austin again, stroking the spot where the Guard had touched him. “But I feel I must stay.”

“All right,” said the Guard, holding his hands up. “So why don’t you come inside?”

Austin looked back at the glass frontage of the brutalist building, through which he could see a reception desk and nests of sofas. “Inside there? No. Never.” Squinting against the glare of the glazing, Austin stared at the Guard as if for the first time. Then he reached forward and pushed the man’s peaked cap so that his eyes came out of shadow. They were blue.

“There was no need for that,” said the Guard, breathing in sharply. He removed his cap altogether and wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked at the darkened interior of the crown.

“It was quite bad of me,” said Austin deliberately. He stood back to consider the effect of what he had done.

“Not like you at all.” Leaning away from Austin, the Guard put his cap on, cushioned on his thick hair.

“Maybe I’m changing,” said Austin.

“Come on.” The Guard spoke quietly. “Come on, Mr Austin. It’s your turn. Nobody wants to miss out.”

“I’m not coming in. I’ve already told you.”

“No one’s going to make you.”

Austin coughed.

“Feeling OK?” The Guard reached out.

“I’m fine.” Austin flinched at the anticipated touch. “Nothing wrong with me.”

“There’s something wrong with all of us,” said the Guard. “They say we’re all dying. What’s the phrase? The only certain thing is death and taxes. They’ll have to change that one, eh Mr Austin?” The Guard stood to one side and made a motion of gently ushering Austin into the building. But Austin shook his head and backed away. He stumbled over the box hedge, then turned and walked away until he disappeared through the rainbow spray of the fountain.

The Guard returned to the building. The receptionist looked up and smiled at him. She was talking into a mouthpiece but held up a finger to indicate the Guard to wait. She put the call through then spoke, “What did Mr Austin want, Tony?”

“The usual. He doesn’t know what he wants. I tell you what I want, I want him to make up his mind one way or the other.”

The headquarters of I-Mortality were in a new enterprise zone on the edge of town. Clients were not supposed to come directly there and were guided to convenient clinics in town centres but staff were instructed that if clients did come they were to be made welcome. Somebody would always see them.

“He turns up more often than some of the staff,” said Liz, the receptionist.

“We should invite him to the Christmas party.”

The lift rang as the door slid open and Elaine came into the lobby. “Where’s the client?” she said.

Liz and Tony looked at each other. “Sorry,” said Liz, “the client had to leave.”

“Was it the same man?”

“Yes,” said Tony after a moment’s hesitation, “Sorry, I thought he was going to stay this time.”

“Well, it’s not your fault,” said Elaine, shortly. “Some people are just ungrateful.”

“Don’t know what’s good for them.”

“Precisely.”

At the café, from where he could still see the enterprise zone, Austin sat with a cup of tea. Droplets from the fountain soaked into his shirt in perfect little dots.

“If I had the million quid,” said the café owner, “I’d buy the Voucher and be straight round the clinic for the jab. I don’t know what’s stopping you.”

“I’m scared of dying,” said Austin.

“That’s what I’m saying. Get stuck in lad. Get yourself the jab.”

“And live forever.”

“Live forever,” said a man in a hi viz jacket reading a newspaper on the counter. He put his finger on a word and looked up. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the Voucher and haven’t done it.”

“I’m worried,” said Austin. He winced as the urn steamed and saucers clattered on the counter.

“I’m worried too,” said the man in the hi viz jacket. “I’m worried you’re a nutter.”

The cafe owner said, “Give us your voucher and I’ll do your worrying for you.” The people there for breakfast laughed.

The man in the hi viz jacket spluttered. “I’d better get back to my sweeping. It’s going to take me a few roads to make my first million. See you later all.” He banged his mug on the counter, screwed the paper into his pocket and walked to the door.

“I’m not being funny.” A woman leaned over the back of her seat to look at Austin. “But if you’ve got the money you get the jab, if you haven’t you don’t. That’s all there is to it. Worried? Please.”

“No, listen,” said the road sweeper, standing at the door, “I know what it is. You think it’s unfair, am I right? You have to be rich to afford the I-Mortality jab but you feel guilty about us poor buggers who have to die. Well don’t. None of us would stop for a second if we was in your shoes. Get the jab and good luck to you.”

“It’s not that,” said Austin, “I don’t care about you.”

“Charming,” said the woman turning back to her table.

“You’d think everyone would be able to afford the immortality jab,” said a young man at a table by the window. He hadn’t taken off his dark overcoat. His greasy hair hung over his face. The thought had just struck him and he let the ketchup drip from his sandwich as he followed his thought through. “Once you’ve had the jab you live forever, right? So why not offer some finance deal. Pay it back, high interest over one hundred, two hundred years. We’d all be able to afford insane interest rates because we’d live forever. I’d get one for my kid too. Not his mum though.”

“Oh listen to the genius. Immortality for the masses,” said the sweeper. “He’s saved us all. Dear bank manager, please send me one million by return of post. I agree to any interest and will pay you back some time in the next eternity. Yours etc. A Roadsweeper. PS can I have another million to keep me going? Cheers.”

“Why not?”

“He’s yanking your wotsit,” said the woman. “The banks won’t allow immortality financing. Apparently it would undermine the economy if we all took out never ending loans. You’ve got to come up with the cash for the Voucher.”

“You got the Voucher on you?” said the young man to Austin.

“Must have if he’s come from I-Mortality,” said the sweeper.

“Stop it.” The woman looked nervously at the young man. The ketchup made a pool of red on his white plate as he gazed at Austin.

“He must have the million quid Voucher on him. Right now.”

“He’d have just made enquiries,” said the woman. “He wouldn’t be carrying the Voucher around.”

“That would be dangerous,” agreed the road sweeper. “Tempting fate. Anyone could bump him on the head and take the Voucher to I-Mortality themselves.”

“I’ve got it here,” said Austin. He took a brown wallet out of his jacket pocket, placed it on the table and slipped a large embossed piece of paper from it.

“That it?” said the young man.

“Exchangeable for one immortality inoculation.” A rush of steam from the kitchen made the Voucher shuffle along the table. Condensation shone on its glossy surface. Austin held it down with the sugar shaker. “I go to the I-Mortality HQ every day, but I haven’t stepped inside. I don’t want to die but I’m frightened.”

The sweeper let the door close and he stayed in the café. “You’re taking the wotsit, mate. We’re all decent people here but…”

“That’s only for one treatment,” said Austin. “After you beat me to death you’ll have to kill each other till there’s only one of you left.” He looked at the young man who stared back. “My money would be on him.” No one spoke. “But I wouldn’t be around to collect the winnings.”

The others all looked at the young man who in turn could not take his eyes off the Voucher; its hologram of a regal head glistened. The strip light reflection on the tea shook as Austin sat back, kicking the leg of table. Across the floor, the young man stood up and put his sandwich down. He walked over. Austin drank his tea and made no motion to stop the young man sliding the Voucher from under the sugar shaker and holding it up to the light.

“I feel calmer than I’ve felt for weeks,” Austin said. “I was given the cash for it last month. I was so excited, filled with joy. Then I was terrified. Now I feel as though I might be happy again. Soon.”

“I’m taking this,” said the young man in a steady voice. “I’m going to put it in my pocket and walk out. Nobody will stop me.”

“I won’t stop you,” said Austin.

The young man put the Voucher into his coat pocket and walked towards the door. The sweeper stood aside, his mouth twitching and his hands clenched. The young man grasped the door handle and then stopped. He leaned against the door and breathed shallowly and quickly. At the sound of rattling everyone in the cafe saw the young man’s shoulders shaking, his head knocking on the door. After a moment’s silence, he released the handle and wiped his hand on his shirt. Avoiding everyone’s eye, he turned back into the café, walked to Austin and replaced the Voucher on the table. Austin had not watched the young man’s movements and did not move to pick up the Voucher which fluttered in the disturbance left by the sweep of the young man’s long coat.

“You said you were given the cash,” said the woman. “Who would give someone a million pounds?”

“I’ve always been a good man,” said Austin.

“A good man doesn’t need to tell anyone,” said the sweeper angrily, “he keeps it to himself and lets everyone else see it for themselves.”

“I’ve always been good and moral. Done the right thing. There’s always been a cost. I didn’t get everything I wanted because I put others first.”

“That’s easy goodness,” said the woman. “It’s doing things that counts; putting yourself out, not putting others first.”

“I’ve never stinted. I never crossed to the other side of the road; gave my money away if I had more than I needed. No, I’ll go further, I’ve gone without to help others.”

“No one here is impressed.”

“Do you know the effort it takes to be good?”

“You arrogant sod.”

“You’ve got to be on your guard all the time. You can’t afford to miss someone in need. No injustice can be ignored. I’ve never indulged myself knowing others to be in want.”

“I see. You’ve got such a high opinion of yourself you think you deserve immortality.”

“Not me. A group of people I’ve helped. Friends, people I’ve worked with. They collected the money between them. They were horrified by who was getting the jab: bankers, kidnappers, oligarchs, jewel thieves, footballers, blackmailers. You know who I mean?”

“Good luck to them, I say.” The sweeper’s voice shook. “They don’t know if it’ll make them any happier.”

“Maybe not,” said Austin, “but they’ll rule the world. They’ll always be there and when our children grow up and their children grow up and their children…”

“We get the point,” shouted the young man, back at his table staring at the ketchup stain on his plate.

“And their children grow up.” Austin paid no attention to the interruption. “These rich immortals will be waiting for them. They’ll pounce on them, use them up; devour them, and then do the same to the next generation. So my friends decided we needed to make sure some good people are there to protect our children, to make sure the rich immortals don’t have it all their own way. You see what I mean?”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” said the woman.

“There are groups clubbing together. Individually they can’t afford immortality but through cooperation they can make sure a core group of moral immortals continue.”

“And you’re one of the moral immortals.”

“Not yet I’m not.”

“So what’s stopping you? Your friends must think a lot of you,” said the woman. “And you know, it’s tempting. To be immortal.”

“To be immortal,” said Austin.

“And good,” said the woman.

“If I got the jab, if I was to live forever, how long could I go on before I stopped being good?”

“Now what’s he on about?” said the woman.

“How long before I did something terrible?”

“You’re just being fanciful.”

“I’m fifty years old and this morning, for the first time in my life I pushed a man’s hat so that it nearly fell of his head.”

The sweeper burst out laughing. “Oh my God, nearly fell off his head. You bad, bad man.”

“I was curious. After I’d thought of the act, I wanted to see if I could actually go through with it. But what happens in another fifty years and I’m curious again? I push to the front of a queue? Fifty more years and I betray a loved one. Two hundred years and I murder a child.”

“You’re just talking about probability.” The young man was standing up again pointing at Austin. “You could just as easily say that if you were immortal at some point you’d write an opera, swim the channel and open an orphanage.”

“Yes, those things too.” Austin shrugged his shoulders. “But if we all lived forever, how long before we each of us committed every sin in the book?”

His hands hovering over the Voucher, Austin stood up. Then leaving the Voucher where it lay anchored by a smear of spilt tea and sugar, he walked to the door. The café owner, the sweeper and the woman all gazed at the Voucher. The young man sat back down and faced the wall.

At the door Austin turned back and, trying not to look directly at anyone, said, “It was two weeks ago they came to me. Exhausted after a long day dealing with budget cuts, requests for help, the usual meetings and a really difficult case visit, it was late by the time I was leaving the office. Five of them representing the union, a charity, trustees and some other contacts I’ve got. That’s when they put it to me. What I’ve told you. I get the immortality jab and be here for the future generations. Can you imagine what I felt? No, you can’t. Anyone of you can grab that piece of paper but I was chosen. Flattered? That’s too weak. I felt huge. I’ll spell it out for you: they wanted me to be the father for all these children who are yet to be born. The protector of the weak for all time. I would always be here for them. Always. Watching them. The guardian. You get it now. But then they walked away from me, leaving me with the money. Leaving me with the world. They went home to sleep, to die. They had done their work and left me to mine. Now I’m walking away.”

The door closed behind him, and the plate glass shimmered. Austin passed in front of the window, quickly. A lorry obliterated the view of the business park, a couple on the pavement stood aside to let Austin by and he disappeared among the pedestrians, the traffic. A cloud darkened the street. Spots of rain smudged the window like an oily screen.

_________________________

Image: Robbert Van der Steeg

Image Copyright: dryicons

No lofty purpose in mind we have just fallen to earth. This happens now and again a common occurrence but never on camera. Never to be seen on a Sunday afternoon nature show we time our falls well. We take a moment to gather ourselves before we return to the air. We are waylaid but the North will soon realise and reclaim us. For now let us rest. Let us lie here. Make sense of none of it. We are simply here a neat mess of white flockflesh and feathers. Just towelling wrung from the sky.

There is nobody to blame there is nobody to patiently explain things to us. There is no use in blaming planes or speculating on sleeping balloonists when more than likely our bodies just decided to stop our muscles decided to stop our concentration became and we fell to the ground arranged neatly around this picnic table a beer garden who knows where.

We are not in pain which surprises us we fell such a way.

Parts of us spill onto the road skirting this place. Bicycles avoid us their cyclists ignore us. There are two men in the beer garden they ignore us too. They are arguing. Our attention spans are short we lose interest before we can piece together their argument. They are impossible to tell apart they look so similar. They may be twins they may be exactly the same person. They repeat the same movements. Their bodies are interchangeable. One leans in and waves his fist the other waves back. One man shakes his head the other presses a finger into the table. They swap roles. Simultaneously at once they grip the table edge and thrust away their jaws gritted. As birds we know little of body language little of facial expressions but enough about ballet though this is not in the least bit elegant. We are fascinated but like we say our attention.

Bit by bit we return to ourselves. We start to distinguish our necks and feet and beaks from one another. We are increasingly conscious of what is ours what is not ours but not one of us is yet confident enough to say that should they flex a muscle in this direction say precisely this lump of ourselves would respond. For the while we are all still too exhausted to try. We wait we refuse to wonder we try not to wonder.

We will be off when we have fallen for long enough. When we cannot say but. We will be rid of the city and the men and the girl. There is a girl too. Who knows why such a small creature chooses to hang around such angry men but there she perches on the end of a bench hands held about her knees watching us recover.

Impossibly she catches our eyes all at once. Her pupils are huge it is difficult to make out the colour circling them. We are watched we wonder. Whether she is too old to still have her plush toys us stuffed. Whether she is too young to have heard the stories told about birds like us. Old stories. Bearded gods dressing up like us swallowing princesses in our feathers and kissing with beaks. This would not be a terrible thing. At her age whatever her age is it is far better far safer to imagine doing things with a creature than doing things with a man. No harm in picturing beaks and wings against her chest nothing so far from the horror of the real naked gentleman. Even so we ruffle self-consciously.

Our stares meet. By now we are strong enough we can match her. The colour of her hair is hard to tell like her eyes. We blame the glare of the sun but this is no comfort. We are so obviously white but we cannot agree on her. It would be consoling to see through those uncertain eyeballs into the easy-bruising muddle of childhood behind them skullwards.

But there is none of that. Her eyes are as rigid as the tarmac we are soon to leave and we will be just as glad to leave them behind. Were someone to chalk the pavement with a hopscotch grid would she go play or stay as she is stay watching things fallen from the sky. She makes sense nowhere but this bench still and silent. There is nothing to her beyond the beer garden and these two men swapping themselves in an argument. As birds we know little of fashion beyond what is made from us but these men must surely have dressed each other they are dressed the same. Or that is their argument perhaps. Two men strangers encountering themselves in the street unable to deal with their double in dresscode. They circulate their taut wrists and foreheads but the girl exchanges nothing. She has nothing to offer no hand to hold out for a howdyoudo. There is no awakening sexual or otherwise in our neatly piled bodies for her. We flatter ourselves. Our bulk grows stubborn and spurned and we consider an assault but we are sure to lose.

There is a rumour doing the rounds that we are not improving that we are not coming to ourselves that we have fallen for good this time. We argue back that it is probably stage fright we have never been observed before there is a lot of pressure. It has never taken this long to get up and go is the counterargument. We counter swiftly as birds we know little of time on this scale only seasons the twin big hands of South and North. There is no counter to that only a flockwide shrug. Secretly though we all begin to suspect that the North has abandoned us. We watch the girl we wonder whether.

James Clarke

It was only now, later on and standing on the lawn, lathered in oily sweat and with one arm swinging the leaf blower in a lazy slow motion arc that he considered the dreamlike quality of the valium he had taken and how much he was enjoying himself.

His hooded eyes blinked steadily beneath his sunglasses like a pair of sheets on a washing line, coolly rising and falling in their docile summer manner. The vibrations from the leaf blower skittered and shuddered pleasingly, sending a constant rhythmic massaging up his load bearing arm as it swung left to right in that 180 degree turn, scything the leaves and hubris into the packed brown earth at the sides of the lawn with its breath.

He stood, feet locked into position on the lawn and slowly, after letting go of the ignition trigger and allowing the blower to die out, lowered it. It hung from the strap on his shoulders loose by his side like a firearm. His arm still felt the residue of the vibrations, much like an eardrum that’s been too near to a powerful speaker. His muscles felt muffled, warped and fuzzy and the sensation pleased him. Swaying slightly in the closeness of the afternoon and the haze of the drugs he surveyed his handiwork so far. A spotless lawn.

There was still work to be done though. The rolling grass of the Radford families’ garden still needed cutting, the expansive flowerbeds had to be weeded thoroughly and the willow tree out front needed pruning. It was hard work and involved long hours but it would please his father to see him do it, never mind the fact that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. At least it had got him out of the house on a good day; he couldn’t argue with the weather.

He ran his tongue along the backs of his top teeth slowly, stopping at the right hand side of his mouth and poking his tongue out of the corner. He tentatively felt a solitary downy hair that protruded over the edge of his top lip – a survivor from last night’s shave. The tip of his tongue poked at it gently, flicking it and enjoying the dextrous pinnacle of contact between hair and soft flesh.

Crickets sounded out in the afternoon air and the sky was a piercing blue. The shade was almost exactly the same fulsome colour as the eyes of his Aunt Deb’s old dog Princie. The dog was deaf and stupid and brought nothing but bad odours and soiled carpets with it wherever it went. He remembered seeing Princie’s grave in Aunt Debs back garden some years previously and recalled feeling nothing but contempt for the little punk and the way that it had died, running out into the road and getting splattered over the tarmac like a little bundle of paint splattered rags.

Globules of sweat formulated on the back of his neck, convalesced at the top of his spine and ran down the bare stretch of skin that met the edge of his vest like the shore meets the bubbled cream of the ocean. He spat a long lazy jet of phlegm infused saliva, failing to notice it splattering onto the tip of his steel toe capped boot. He surveyed the garden around him and the thickening heavy cloak of atmosphere that the heat created and decided that he didn’t really mind being out here in the sun. This community service could turn out to be alright.

Later on he had moved onto the flowerbeds and was knelt in the hot powdered soil. Steadily he plunged his trowel around the green based stems of the weeds, forcing the blade down under the shallow roots and gouging the plants out roughly. Afterward he tossed them over his shoulder into the wheelbarrow that stood behind, solemn and expectant.

He had realised by now the effects of the drugs and couldn’t help but feel grateful that Grandpa Ted had shattered his pelvis, leaving that veritable goldmine of pharmaceuticals at home ready to be pilfered. The old man sat stupefied in his wheelchair all day, occasionally moving his drooling head to look down and change the channel on the television using the TV control that was gaffa taped to his armrest. He never noticed anything let alone a few missing tablets each day.

Valium made the work a mildly surreal experience. He found it hard to concentrate, every few seconds he would find his attention slowly wondering off whilst his body continued to work away at its monotonous task. He felt as if he was in a pleasant dream and his brain was full of light feathered candy floss. His vision was clouded and white and his thoughts were inconsistent and tangential. Nothing mattered.
After a time he found his scattershot attention wondering aimlessly towards the Radford families outhouse. They had left it open so that he could access the assorted gardening paraphernalia contained within. Seemingly in no time at all and without knowing how he had got there, he was standing in the doorway swaying and surveying the place. It was a small stone building. The building reeked of organisation and seemed to have the idea of intent but absolutely no evidence of use at all, almost as if it was someone’s idea of something that they should own just so they could say they owned it rather than say they used it.

His attention was caught by the large refrigerator that stood proud and gleaming in the far left corner, resplendent in white with the fiercely minimal logo emblazoned on its door. He glided over to it immediately and tugged it open. Inside he found precisely what he had hoped would be there. He helped himself to a six pack.

The shuffle back to the flowerbed and the glare outside was decisive and quick and soon he was sat in the dirt chugging down the beers and drifting off in a glazed fantasy entirely of his own making. He chose not to think about the job at hand or the commitments and promises he had allowed himself to make to his father and that septic judge at the court. As he drank he lay on his back, propping himself up on an elbow, his head falling backwards happily, his sharply featured face and sweat licked hair lolled dreamily in the sun. The bright red handle of the trowel protruded from the ground next to him, patiently buried and waiting to be removed like poor little Princie in Aunt Deb’s garden all the way across town.

It was at least three hours later that he awoke – flat on his back and gently reeling back to the land of the living like a handful of sand tossed down the windshield of a car, tumbling wayward and steady; irregular but true.

Confused, he tugged his sunglasses off and saw the cans of beer scattered all around him. Specks of dirt peppered his arms where he had lain in the dirt. The sky was by now carrot orange and darkening fast.

He rose steadily and began to pick up the empty cans, loading them into the wheel barrow along with the few odd weeds, roots and leaves he had cleared from the flowerbeds earlier and pushed the barrow to the top of the garden as fast as his legs would allow him. Once there he quickly scrabbled in the dirt, making a hole with his hands and cursing his forgotten trowel. When the hole was big enough he threw the empties in and hastily kicked the dirt back over them and pushed the good earth in with his boots, stamping on it hard. He emptied the contents of the barrow on top.

After wheeling the barrow back down the garden, filling it with tools and transporting them all to the outhouse, he was getting himself ready to leave, all the while preparing the lies that would be required to explain why the day’s work quota had not been met when the sound of a car pulling up on the driveway stopped him short.

The floodlight came on as the car door opened, anticipating the night no doubt but unnecessary in the crepuscular glow of the late summer fade. The sound of the hard soles on the paving slabs as whoever it was climbed out of the car echoed out. He was reminded of the sound of the corridors at school, of the hallways of police stations and of the emergency room. The car door shut crisply and the footsteps drew closer. The driver of the car was alone, there was no other discernible sound coming from fellow passengers.

The gate swung open as he stood there awkwardly still and shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. He was suddenly illuminated by the false glow of the floodlight, no longer covered as he had been before by the criss-crossed shadows of the wall and the vinery that climbed up it. Mrs Radford stopped as she saw him. He could only make out her outline which was lit from behind. He blinked but said nothing, he tried to make out her features but he could not.

She took a step forward then and walked towards him. She was svelte and lithe with her narrow waste. She wore a white summer dress with a large black belt. Her hair was made up in a late 60’s style bouffant bob. It was shadowy brown and probably dyed but it was hard to make out.

“You the gardener?”

“Yes.”

“Working a little late aren’t you?”

“I guess. Just finishing up actually.”

“It’s David isn’t it?”

“No its-”

“What happened to David?”

“I don’t know. They sent me.”

“God. No one tells me anything.”

He stared back at her blankly and suppressed the urge to shrug.

“You drink?”

“No.”

“What?”

“You heard me I’m not drunk.”

“Slow down. I’m asking you if you’d like a drink.”

“Oh.”

“Let’s try this again…Do you want to come in for a drink?” She repeated herself slow and sarcastic as if she was talking to a retard.

“Yes.”

She nodded towards the French doors that led from the patio into the house directly into the lounge. He stood silently as she sloped over.

Sloped is a good way to describe Mrs Radford. She moved quickly and coolly, swaying slightly from side to side with her bouffant head drifting and her perfect behind shuffling after her in a narcoleptic drag of movement. She didn’t look at him as she pulled the keys from her bag put them in the lock, turned them and opened the door and walked inside. He followed her.

As he surveyed the lounge area of the house in all its softly lit ambience he was struck by the capricious nature of the place. Seemingly old and homely bits and pieces lived incongruously with intellectual and modernist looking items and furniture; as if two different minds had clashed and compromised in some kind of uneasy alliance. A battered leather chez lounge was stationed next to a minimalistic and expensive looking metallic table whilst a large shelf of old dusty novels with yellow pages lived right next to a black marble plinth upon which rested some shapeless and challenging stone sculpture. The carpets were cream coloured and clean and the 4 lamps that stood in each corner of the room were tall and heavily shaded in 30’s style Chinese imitation velvet with tassels at the bottom. He didn’t like this place all that much – it didn’t fit. They didn’t even have a fucking TV.

Mrs Radford was busying herself on the other side of the room, crouched down and flicking through a wooden box of records with her painted dextrous fingernails. She found the one she was looking for and put the record onto the hi-fi with great care and attention. He stayed where he was; close by the French doors and slightly unsure of himself and his surroundings, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and the sweat on the back of his vest drying out slow.

After the initial tinny fluffy crackling sounds an acoustic guitar picking out a haunting melody drifted out of seemingly every corner of the room.

“I insisted we get surround sound,” she explained matter of factly after noticing him turn his head quizzically. “It’s the only way to listen to music. As soon as technology becomes available – you invest. That’s progress.” He nodded his head slowly, his eyes not leaving her. He wondered when that damn drink was going to arrive.

“Leonard Cohen,” again she nodded at the stereo. “I don’t expect you to have heard of him. This song is about the French resistance in World War Two.”

“Oh.”

“You have heard of France haven’t you?” She smirked.

Again he said nothing. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

She smiled wryly at having failed to get a rise out of him and walked exactly four paces to her left to the sideboard that stood against the wall where she started to prepare some drinks.

“I like to listen to him every night. His voice on his earlier recordings has a hauntingly bleak quality that helps me relax. I can relate to the tragedy in his voice because I’ve experienced a lot of tragedy in my life.”

“Yeah I bet.”

“Whiskey Soda?

“Ok.”

She held the drink up in one hand, offering it to him without moving and smiling at him as she did. After a moment he realised that she wanted him to come to her. He obliged, leaving a trail of muddy footprints on the cream carpet as he went that stretched from the French doors to just one step in front of her, some twelve ft covered. Her green eyes flicked down to look at the stains.

“Do you know what else I do when I come home?”

“No.”

“Bring me my bag.” She said smiling broadly.

He turned his head. He was still high he realised.

“It’s on the table over there.” She pointed and sipped her drink, clunking the ice against the inner ridged indentations and sides of her glass. He could hear the lemon fizzing. She wanted him to walk past the two creamy blue leather couches and go to the large glass topped table on the far right of the room where her bag rested.
He trudged across to fetch it and brought it back to her leaving fresh footprints along the carpet on the way. Why not? It didn’t bother him in the slightest to do it. In actual fact he enjoyed it.

“Thank you dear.” She touched a hand to his elbow, “Sit down.”

“Thanks. My legs are sore. From the work I mean.”

“Get much done?”

“A little. I fell asleep though.”

“Oh?”

“I was tired.”

“Mike is just gonna love you.”

He could only assume she meant Mr Radford. He looked across at the photo on the wall. The grey hair, side parted, the gold rimmed wire glasses, that beaming smile and the felt tip red coloured tie and powder blue suit. He sure looked like a Mike. He looked like a fucking prick.

“Yeah it was hot.”

Mrs Radford pulled out a small Tupperware box from her bag and sat on the couch next to him. She was close enough for him to be able to smell her hair and make out the freckles on her thin nose and the tiny blonde hairs that coated her top lip in ever so faint brushstrokes. His tongue flicked at the rogue hair at the corner of his own mouth as he looked at her.

“It certainly was,” she said, removing a long thin joint from the box and lighting it.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“And why are you here?”

“You asked me.”

She held the joint up and waved it slightly, as if she was writing her name in the air with its tip.

“This is something I like to do; it helps to break up my day…And believe me my day really needs breaking.” she giggled, “I mean why are you here today? What did you do?”

“I stole a car.”

“Oh? What just one?

“No.”

She laughed.

He accepted the joint from her and sucked at its tip greedily, his lungs inflating and ingesting the smoke. They were a pair of bellows inside him.

“You don’t say much do you?”

He smoked, surveying the back of his hand and looking at the distance between it and her knee, how the distance between their bodies caused his spatial focus to shift ever so slightly in a noncommittal visual shift.

“I like that,” she continued, “God knows I hear people talking all day long and I swear that not a single one of them ever actually says anything. You should hear my husband. He thinks so much of himself – he thinks he’s so damned smart in his suit and his office and with all of his money. But really what’s money Mike? What is it? Happiness is coming home at the end of the day and being satisfied with everything that you’ve done. Bob Dylan said that you know. You’ve probably never heard of him.”

She slouched in her seat still further as she talked and talked but he wasn’t really listening to what she was saying. He didn’t really care. She was boring. All the goddamned adults and parents always found some reason to feel dissatisfied with the lives they had built for themselves. They all found ways to blame circumstance for the way things had gone rather than their own goddamn shoddy decision making. He was tired of it. Stupid people and their stupid lousy tiresome ways. Everybody had their own fucking agenda, he wished they would just admit it and stick to it and stop blowing off about it and bothering him with their problems.

“Are you hungry? I could kill for some olives. Do you like olives?”

He did not like olives.

“No I don’t want any of your damn olives.”

“Well I do. Be a doll and get me some from the kitchen.”

He didn’t move

“Listen kid, I want some olives and I want to sit in my house and listen to my music. Do I need to remind you who is here on community service and who is the owner of this house? Mike had them imported from Sicily. A young man like you should love olives – they’re sophisticated and delicious and it’s important that you try them.”

He rose without a word. Sometimes it’s best just to let people have their way. It saves time.

He floated through the lounge into the hallway, hovering to the sound of the soft acoustic guitar with his head lolling and rolling around like the ice in his empty glass that he was still carrying by his side. He could faintly hear Mrs Radford singing in the lounge.

Before he knew it he was in the kitchen opening the overstocked fridge and removing the jar of olives and then he was turning and walking right back to the lounge. This felt like a lucid dream. The slow burning soft unreality of the day and the sound of the judge’s voice booming down at him in court and the sound of his father’s disappointed voice and the feeling of not actually caring about anything except yourself and not feeling guilty about it and not feeling obligated to do anything you don’t want to do just because someone else thinks you should do it. This was the uncertain sensation of knowing something is out there and knowing that maybe you want it and feeling that maybe you’ve got a God given entitlement to it but knowing that you’ll probably not be able to do anything about it and that you’ll feel bad about it but at the end of the day it really just doesn’t matter that much.

“Wow the whole jar. How spontaneous of you.”

Sarcasm washed over him. She laughed to herself a little. “I want you to try one of these. I guarantee you’ll like it – it’s important for you to like them because they’re new to you and you should always try something new and because they wouldn’t make them if they weren’t good.”

As he reluctantly held his hand out he heard a key turn in the door.

Mrs Radford placed a handful of olives in his palm and turned towards the doorway that led through to the kitchen and through to the rest of the house. She smoothed her hair down and ran her hands over her behind.

“Mike’s home.”

She turned and placed one hand on one hip and stood defiantly with her legs apart firm and implanted on the carpet like the gardener had been implanted on the lawn earlier that day. She was watching the doorway intently as they both stood listening to the sounds of Mr Radford arriving, the shuffle of his shoes on the tiles of the kitchen, the sound of his keys being placed on the kitchen table and the sound of him sighing heavily, punctuated by a silence that could well have been him rubbing his bleary eyes beneath his glasses or him running a hand along the smoothed line of his jaw.

“Hello husband,” she said as Mike walked into the room.

He looked just like his photo, jowly and fortyish and wearing the wire gold framed spectacles. He wore a grey suit and grey shoes that matched his grey eyes and his grey hair. He looked tired and small.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to our guest?”

Mr Radford didn’t say a word; he just looked down at the footprints on the carpet.

“I said aren’t you going to say hi darling?”

She was actually pretty drunk. He looked at her in profile as she stood up and pointed at her husband with her drink. She was still a pretty fine looking woman; he had to give her that. She had all the right things in all the right places. It was just a shame she had to be the same as all the others.

“You know what Mike you arrive here late again and you don’t even say one word to me. Not a single word of greeting. Not only that but you also don’t even look at me. Not a glance. Nothing at all! You walk in the door and your first thought is to look at the floor. I just can’t believe you. I’m your wife Mike. I’d have been the mother of your children too if you’d have been fucking capable Mike. Even now I’m talking to you, addressing you like a real life grown-up and you don’t have the guts to talk back or answer to me! You can’t can you!”

Mike Radford followed the footprints on the floor with his eyes. He slowly looked at the gardener.

“I’ve had more goddamn words of wisdom from this boy in fifteen minutes than I’ve had from you in a damn lifetime of marriage!” She smoothed her hair down again but only succeeded in knocking it out of place. The gardener looked on. “You know I look at myself in the mirror and all I can see is potential. I’ve been wasted and I’ve been squandered and it’s a goddamn tragedy! You’re a lousy husband, you’re a lousy man and you didn’t fucking nurture me the way I should have been nurtured! I’m all your fault!”

She swayed slightly as she stood, pointing at her husband accusingly, her teeth bared in all their white brilliance like perfect little stalactites. She’d obviously been building up to that for some time.

“I’ve said it before Mike and now I’ve said it again. And I still mean it.” She reached into the jar and pulled out an olive and popped it in her mouth and chewed furiously as she started to cry.

The gardener stood watching the Radfords. Mr Radford watched his wife. She was chewing olives and crying in loud cloying choking breaths in between removing the olive stones from her mouth and dropping them onto the floor petulantly. She stamped her feet and made little sobbing and whinnying noises in between chewing. It was dark outside but dimly lit in the room. The record played on.

God he thought to himself. It’s like some people enjoy being unhappy. They’ve got nothing else to talk about.

Mr Radford took off his jacket. He tossed it onto the floor over the footprints and went to get himself a drink. He didn’t care.

Upon seeing this, Mrs Radford gave an almighty sob. It had been no good; her words had just bounced off him. After she exhaled with the cry she bent over, then as she stood back up she inhaled sharply. Too sharply.

Suddenly before she knew it she was choking on an olive. Mr Radford watched as his wife hunched over where she stood, coughing loudly in a series of quick painful braying contortions. Her face was red and blotchily purple as she struggled for breath and there was unbridled panic in her eyes. Her bouffant hair wobbled wildly as her hand clutched at her lovely neck and she looked about desperately. She simply couldn’t breathe. She looked up, trying to signal what was happening to her.

He looked over at Mr Radford who had not moved and was watching his wife choke, impassively sipping his drink and ignoring her with the immutable face of a Roman statue.

There was only one thing for it, his hand had been forced. Cursing loudly the gardener quickly grabbed Mrs Radford from behind, hitching his interlocked and fisted hands beneath her ribcage and heaving inwards and upwards as hard as he could. Mr Radford watched the whole thing play out calmly, never taking his eyes from his wife for a minute.

When it was all done with and the olive stone stuck in Mrs Radford’s airway had been dislodged after three hefty and costly heaves he stood away from her. She crouched coughing away on all fours like a dog. Like little dead Princie used to do when he fouled up the carpet somewhere. Mr Radford had not moved a muscle. He still hadn’t even spoken.
The gardener breathed heavily as the record came to a grinding halt. He opened up his fist and looked down to see the small handful of olives crushed up into a paste and smeared on his palm. He wiped his hand on the expensive looking couch cushions.

No one spoke and it was pretty clear that it was time to leave so he did. He didn’t say anything to either of them. He knew he probably wouldn’t have to.

The important thing is to convey heat. The camera is pointed directly into the sun before offering the viewer a wide shot down cliffs on to a villa and pool, below which are the sea’s waves. The colours are highly saturated and, amidst the blues and whites, the attentive viewer will notice the sportive reds and greens worn by Jean and Christophe as they work on the villa’s roof. In a second shot, the camera takes in the villa’s roof and the glass doors that open onto the pool. A close-up reveals that the boys are in their late teens and are wearing shorts and t-shirts. Soon the doors will slide open and, shot from the pool’s farthest corner, a slim, tanned woman in her early forties will walk the length of the pool in high-heels and a white two-piece swim-suit before laying down in a lounger facing the house.

At the moment though, the camera is not rolling, but awaits the entrance onto the poolside scene of Karin, currently in the villa where motivation is summoned and maquillage is re-touched. The camera itself is ministered to by its two attendants. Its cables require the hunched teamwork of a new form of insect life, ready to drag its prey back to a lair that can never be entirely left. Indifferent to this activity beside him is the mountainous presence of the late, and now impotent pornographer Jugen Lang, disgusted by his surroundings, his colleagues, but most of all his own failure.

It had been Lang’s art to delay and hasten men, in giggling company or utilitarian solitude, to climax. He was good but with digitizing of desire came its democratization. The bottom of the porn industry did not so much fall out, as prolapse, and Lang, like so many of his aging stars found himself self-consciously inadequate and irreparably damaged under the bright lights of an anonymous warehouse in bad part of town. For years Lang had woken in a sweat from dreams of anointed young flesh, ecstasy on the face and ejaculate on the webcam, the games of college dorms streaming into suburban basements. But where once there had been the grimace of simulated pleasure behind the smiles, there was now a smirk that implied paid tuition fees. Unable to raise capital, Lang was unable to raise even the quiver arousal.

These anxieties have spilt into his latest work which even now recalls his own youthful summers, spent labouring on the roofs of similar villas as the price of oil soared higher than the airliners seduced by beige A-lines accessorized with a Kalashnikov. Now, at a time when many of his peers, lured by the Russian Federation’s superabundance of youth and poverty, are producing unholies (boys, emaciated and grey, cigarettes emerging from their rectums) Lang has moved upscale into arthouse films. Such offerings are in any case poor imitations of the bespoke market where the perfect anguish of a handpicked child (a rival politician’s, perhaps) can be obtained and enjoyed.

A cultured man, Lang had put aside his Juvenal some years previously. The clean money, he felt, lay in gesturing to an image, a feeling known to the collective conscious but as yet not manifest, a child-star with a barbed-wire crown, Marie-Antoinette in ecstasy as the milk flows between her legs. All the latent clichés of popular culture.

As the space between director and audience has diminished, so too, according to Lang’s reasoning, has the distance between imagination and screen widened. It is for the director to show this space and for the audience to fill it with whatever he or she wants. Nevertheless, his departure from the industry, in which he was a figure of some stature, had not caused the stir he had hoped for. “For the past one hundred years cinema has satisfied the public’s fantasies. Now its task is to show them their dreams,” he had announced at a Hamburg trade convention. Foreclosure is his first venture into this new genre, but still, he cannot help thinking that this retracing of his youth is just another act of cowardice.

It is his decision to continue film-making outside of pornography that has brought him to this pointlessly frigid poolside on the edge of the Baltic which, due to the financial imperatives, stands in for the Mediterranean. His aim in Foreclosure is to capture Juan-les-Pins in the nineteen-seventies. Everything must conspire to this, and Lang’s choice of film stock has been meticulous, but as he gazes across the pool to a point where blue shades to grey he enlarges his bulk with the addition of a second coat, necessary to fend off the wind. Wishing to act his own part, he arranges a scarf in the style of a Hezbollah cell leader beneath an earflapped hat and sunglasses. The augmented layers give him the appearance of the last outpost of the Salvation Army. The scarf, though, is Hermes.

Even now he worries that the ebb-tide of the global finance will wrest this location from him and put an end to his filming. A fall in the price of oil, the collapse of a Bahamian hedge fund, either, anything, could see Taliya, a former star of his earlier productions, and now the mistress of a Russian oligarch, dismissed along with the villa and its gilt-edged tea-cups and piles of Swarovski. He glances nervously at his phone, but he knows that such financial collapse is unlikely to affect his filming. In any case, Taliya is not going to call him if, no, when, time or money decree her unnecessary. She is too smart to be sentimental, and while banks silently collapse into the vacuums of their inflated balance sheets, she will be making another diamond-laden trip to Zurich. Others, meanwhile, question the coming storm. “Are we falling?” they ask, and nervously recall the last recession, even the Depression. The terms do not compute though; prices rise, credit is short, but bills are paid and money flows, if more haltingly, stagnating in larger though more infrequent, pools. If this is a crash, Lang thinks, we seem not to have had the weight to fall.

Cowed by the world’s indifference to his aesthetic pronouncements, he is less vocal, and increasingly it is his wife and long-time assistant, Marta, a robust vision of Teuton cheer, who translates his lacunae into something more fungible. It was she who called upon Taliya to lend this retreat. Next week, she will be twisting the arm of an Austrian hotelier to provide the location which will trap early twentieth-century aristocrats in a mountain spa as war rages on plains beneath them. On set, his distaste of speaking directly to his cast has grown, and Marta is his joyously determined mouthpiece. With efficiency as assertive as the yellow and magenta of her scarf, she is on the roof rehearsing with Christophe, manipulating the curly-haired seventeen-year-old into a position of enigmatic desirability. “Most erotic,” she cries, ignoring the boy’s expression of pained reluctance.

With an echo of heels on marble, Lang sees that Karin is strutting towards the lounger and that the insect has left his side. She removes a fur coat and settles down for the close-up. Marta abandons the scowling Christophe, and struggles down the ladder from the roof, pausing to create a noose for her clipboards and pens with her scarf before marshalling the poolside activity.

“You must look erotic. And bored,” she booms in a deep, accented voice, after consulting the clipboard that contains her English vocabulary. Uncurling from her braced position, Karin shifts in the lounger. A retired exotic dancer for the politicians of Berlin, Marta’s request is easily fulfilled, and Karin assumes an expression identical to that which she wore when she took Lang’s own flaccid penis into her mouth. She recalls its cold inertness lying on her tongue, surprising, given the suffocating warmth of his body. The camera presses into her face. Sunglasses are removed and the prescribed gaze is dutifully offered to a roof-bound brace of boys. As tedious and as freezing as the occasion is this is the best offer she has had lately, better to freeze in Latvia than work the Tiergarten. She calls up to the boys invisibly working on the roof with a stock invitation to a drink and a swim. Inadvertently she scratches her left shin with her right foot as she speaks.

“Most erotic,” bellows Marta, with which, before Lang call an end to the shot, cast and crew break for lunch, dashing into the house to escape the cold.

Inside, despite the animated speech, there is no actual conversation. It has become the established practice to greet overtures in English, the only common language, with the disdain of willful incomprehension. Each member of cast and crew contrives at privacy by speaking into a mobile phone in his or her own mutually unintelligible language. In this one-sided Babel, Jean and Christophe are the exceptions, but they having eaten only cake, are in sugary fits as Jean re-applies Christophe’s tan. A trickle of saliva slides down the boy’s laughing chin, and Lang, incapable of desire, remembers filming this same child, laid out on a table, surrounded by fruit and masters of the universe. “These were your empty pleasures,” he thinks before ordering them all to the roof for the afternoon’s work, and wondering if he has ever seen anyone laugh in pornography.

The fake tan has been mixed with a gold solution to give the boys a radiant look. Once again the problem is the cold, now intensified by the sea breeze that is stiffer on the roof. These sungods must be seen to sweat as well be tanned. Water can be applied to good effect to their shirts, but these must come off and Lang wants close-ups of sweat-beaded stomachs against sky and sea. Water being too fluid for this, an oil-based solution is applied using olive oil misters of suburban kitchens. This brings its own problems and the oil corrodes the golden skin, revealing the chilly and pallid flesh beneath. To prevent this, the ever-present Marta has set aside her clipboard and has re-mounted roof. Armed with bottles of tan, spatulas, and a variety of brushes, she is attentive to the merest hint of grey, which will be vigourously obscured while the frigid boy in question stares determinedly at a distant patch of sea.

From his vantage point on the far side of the pool, Lang watches Marta harass the boys while the camera crew weaves trailing cables between them. A digital feed, his only concession to twenty-first-century technology, means that Lang is not required to ascend to the rooftop. Through the viewfinder he follows the length of Jean’s arm, the flat of his stomach just caught in the right of the frame. The image arrives at Jean’s hand as it works through the debris caught in the gutter. There is the glimpse of a pile of tiles on which rests a box of nails and a hammer, apparently in readiness for some minor repair. The notion that the hammer could be usefully employed by either one of these boys is absurd. Their lives consist in rejoicing in youthful vacuity, a perpetual diet of magazines, accessories, and the internet. It is Lang’s vision that later we will see Jean and Christophe’s beauty disintegrate as they labour. But this will only be the simulation of hard work. He wishes he could make it really happen. To see the skin of these boys torn on nails, to witness the anguish of souls crushed by the struggle with heavy and unfamiliar tools, that would be pornography.

Glancing up from the tiny screen, he sees the other boy clutching his arms to his body, as Marta busies herself with the mister. “You must look empty and erotic,” she screams, inches from his face. Such is the reality of Lang’s belief that only the truly vacuous can be truly beautiful. Jean, who has momentarily escaped this indignity, has pulled on a parka and is crouched down on the sloping roof. From beneath its hem his perineum is offered, apparently to anyone who might set up the necessary scaffolding. Encased in bright red shorts, it resembles a motorcyclist’s helmet. Lang, entranced by its firm and glorious promise, wonders how it will fare once the season’s bear market has got its claws into it. He never thought to fall back on his until it was too late. It might have been amusing. Thinking of Karin’s expression, he knows that it would not have been amusing. Now, he that repels even himself, he looks at the red bauble and finds it incredible that he was once in possession of such a body. He realizes now that as much as it might have been sold it could never have been bought, that youth is a promisory note, but one which can never be cashed. In his old films he sees that he only created his youthful summers as he would like to remember them – a sun-drenched celebration of erotic playfulness. Now, he finds himself on the edge of the Baltic re-creating the truth of those wasted summers and that all he has is the memory of a fantasy.

In the next shot Christophe will look at Jean, brown eyes looking into blue, but this reverie will be interrupted by a call off-camera from the supine Karin. Returning to Christophe’s eyes for a moment the audience will be teased by the possibility that the boys will not answer her call but fall into each others’ arms, right there on the roof. But as they saunter along the length of the roof and the audience think they are about to go to earnest work on Karin, the boys’ heads will turn to a second call, and the camera will follow their disconcerted gaze, cutting to a fourth, as yet unseen character. Dressed in blue overalls, he is the boys’ patron. He too is a figure from Lang’s teenage summers. He cycles, urgent and wheezing, up the dusty path to the villa to tell them to stop their work: the bank has foreclosed on the villa. Jean’s face furrows in dumb incomprehension, and the picture cuts to Karin protesting to a dark-suited man before an underwater shot of recently served documents floating on the surface of the pool.

That brown water too rye makes stink me dog-breathed gassoping on swallowed air, please to eat down his hair. Till next morning all-over powerful my hand in every toilet, and that one and this one, coldly it seems steeped aah, vomitus, vomitus, Vomitus Erronious, how I have wrong’d thou/thee? No matter, eugckh! no glove! Must be pukka-upped, gut-ruts jumble pro-testy, gnarled fooden terrain mimick ivory lunar surfacesz.

Aah, routine, backandbacktothat again, precise, divide, incisor to incisive mind feeding-back processesz please keep me in tune, no dissonance now, not here, nor ever, never again, the noise…glove needs first, gloves must then wetness other way out, peel back skin as pull on sheath, reminds me, vinyl-latex layer removed sensation, every finger a struggle needling into place grip changes cool metal is dimmed, when flex it’s ribbed, bland textures numbed blunts the scratch of my nails, take-off stretch hairs out from skin spots some missing, plucked.

This drip smucxk hand pull on every lip, lift lid, the naked lunch never seen, they re-use and leave, why would you look? There’s a question! Not keen to discover, see that crust same as biting back on fingernails. Carrot lump, bulk on knuckle, hello clockety-bump, try roll shiny dime style, always shlip-slippering near drain edge, woop! oostill! too squarey plip-offed, between finger legs, knuckles as knees too slow on ther grip, basin-bounded. Real legs skid row in V, needs to be VandUp, right and early, ‘nother daysz working-to-do, from the floor more peace, dull-head take Merrick bowling slid all over, Born into world of worry, heavy on his noggin-loaf but there’s no respect, got to push up, I will catch me, if I should falls.

First through the slit nurse bug-eyes curious intent once over me as she slips into water flicks drops, vaguely to me, ignore it, wipe on black trunks then amble gone suspicious askance edge off round cube column.

Not too bad, to the sink is – it is, some release. Water shot sprack-spat at me, vehement plumbing bummed-out, underneath we’z missing pipes, copper up to gold? Nevermind, now it’s against the soul. Go Nursian: secrete pukka-up hand in leg pouch scram around, get it finger-web wiped off and out, cleanest thistle!

Wipe around shellfish edges slid, smear me powder blush see the face back in the phosphor, tough grimag’d from bleach each sprout drips an inch drag same hair round for walkeach falls random, chrome handles threaten to glimmer they alternate and it’s warm warmer pressed still with finger touch as is life series of lone drips, it’s dry chalky aftertaste, wait for them to swell refract this little scene inverse now I’m upsidedownandheadshrunk, wishing for it willing it to go as waiting on a dream, but no pattern you can determine forget about it till the next day, and rinse.

Written on the walls. Focus. Serial reminders: proper use of soap and other hygiene advice. Deck the halls in legitimate graffiti, do this, wash that, have faith, trust us, be patient. Scream, scream through this promenade of command, shout you down as you pas, all must be obeyed, functions required to meet targets. They lay it on heavy, graphics made to fit slogan, internal media assault the mind in rhyming puns, black-back posters show stained cells cut in familiar signs, bacteria as hamburgers, red on blonde, rugby balls and musical notes, real cute and bad taste, but it strikes no chord all falls flat (use their humour against them) any commonplace thing to suck us in, to keep us entertained and educated, seep into imagination routine becomes the daily dream, but without real sleep dreams you die inside. At first we rise grateful, validated, touched at their concern from afar, notion of some hidden pride, I get it, clever enough, good for you, but really, no need. I’m not neurotic or paranoid, don’t need to watch over me all the time, why monitor over my shoulder if already they know what I’m going to do? Fifteen steps to cleaning cupboard, why follow on?

Green for yes, red for no.
Simple.
Enough?
No?
Used for green, go, go on ahead, carry up, hurry on, get to it, di di mao. Raus! Raus! still not finished yet?! Red light. Stop. Think, but only as an afterthought, consider why we rush you; must prevent infection help boost ratings, every step internet people are analysing and dissecting pick our holes apart rip new media-entry orifice, do as you’re told, keep death tolls down (counting on you to rescue our target bonus). All they really want is to predict a better future with no basis, but real lives can’t rest on blind-faith.

Rapid they go, more rush of birds flicker in/out, “Flu Heroes” these silent exposures rise as reflux, “Taking Care. Nationwide.” seen it all before; each one a little piece of your soul eyes pop out blind to the wood, the subliminal expresses itself. No need to resist it’s already in you unconscious acceptance of all that’s written, performance glitters gold, but you already know that. More you see, the more it informs your world, another piece of the social furniture taken as fact as long as it bears the mark of the officious ones. As the sky is blue and swans are never black, we say: smile, die happy, you know everything now, just enough to deceive yourself, uninterrupted, seeming content, life lived as a lie.

No one cares to listen or take further notice. All too busy, nurses dashing away fleet horses, try to get through five-page memo walking on by, others hard at it, tatt-heavy man bleeding from head wound shouts out angry Fs and Cs, then another raw voice in the rush of background noise, junkie teen’s vomit running chin nailed down splayed out on the floor tries to flirt with forty-year old crackhead, sinking in his knees, thinking on all fours trying to catch a new fix, crawling into her, between the heaves odd dirty smirk, nurses and other others try to separate, it kicks off, pretty nurse smackback cracked in the face jerk to move but other hands already in to help, panda-blind patches swell, lightning flash struck across the nose. In the flurry grabbed elsewhere, now to fill in the endless forms, set the parameters of the incident, private security stand avatar for the public too little too late, drag him off wrap whites overhead , vodkatise the girl, restore the quiet, slumped see feet stuck out from behind column, they cancel all the breaks, one giantbootblack, other simple nimble soul. Girl sent home on annual leave, never see the face hair slumpt bloody over, she’s the guilty one, caused more paperwork, stretching out the shifts, no after-hours counselling, no legal support, official directive: “Requiem unto bed.” Sits home alone cries face-askew, not so pretty anymore, crushed butterfly underfoot beats broken solemn with four to the floor.

No time for thinking, the flat voices still calling, always calling me, to look, see, all screaming out to freer dimensions. When do we get the time to read the latest, always come in early, leaving late, into action before blink or breath, missed the meeting should’ve got here first. Every day, every week; a new release, heads-up, keep quiet on that, deny all knowledge, mutated virus strain, attend vaccine session, next week that vaccine was viral, now must attend secondary injection to correct the first, all double standards, hell of confusion, no one keeps tabs, what’s really going on? We glance at spewings of your finest wordsmiths, speechwriters, PR lions can’t catch an eye for more than few seconds, too much pace no one attempts, too demanding, all change weekly, then back again assimilation should be easy, we know nothing and show them so, then nothing is expected simply taken for granted, eyes slip into silence, their bright layout slew of words fade into background stance and so silence, then other subtle orders creep in, treat them as disease, expired, dead-letter messages fall stillborn from the internal-hack’s printer slit, no spread, they bleed ink, walk on by, down cupboard sides, desk gaps, down draw-backs, urgent memos flipped over to take notes, a waste of effort, printing on money, you blind advertise make hospital corridors whispering wall to the deaf, words beg at the shoulder, kick off at lower leg. In fields of dull eyes: your propaganda falls dead.

More than one way to make love secure and maintain their interest: right amount of chemicals in a defined area, a certain space pre-sprayed, or better, placed effusive dispensed with, a million smells to counteract, but it never leaves, cumulative, that hospital smell you know so well, steeped inside clings to everywhere, so familiar never fails to remind where you are, when it hits slapped déjà vu; every dentist appointment, drop-in visit to a side-lined relation, sat in A&E to get few fingers clicked back into place dull throb ache as you pick at spare lint, vasectomy in a cold pale room, MRI scan everyone wears lead and never smiles, tonsils out, smear test pull curtain over let you sit and think as you wait paper gown pulled around naked knees bubble up, just a quick blood sample faint prick at the skin, probably nothing to worry about flooding back those watershed hurts you try to shut away. Longer you stay out they die drop off become easier to forget but the smell strikes catalyst, pulls you back into that dead little world, another lonely cell in the system. Signal shot straight from nose tongue mouth wound round that U-bend tube, glowing remembrance just a few seconds adds up in the lifetime when it hits sensation streams through, the bile rises up in you from you to medeathdecayhygieneinfectionreliefsweatbodycongestionbowelemptinessnilbymouthstomachcrampsdrywhitecrustingmouthedgespoonconcavefingernailscowtongueleatherdryturnbodypressonabcessexplode every turn of the nostril brings another blast of that plastic fug the unique scent speaks to the blood, enlivens mucus brains, break out in saliva drips, no denying the truth, you can taste the atmosphere lungs invaded flooding remembrance of place.

Hot air rising from infection bins, lid up, some reactions happening, orange-yellow glow rip-off plastic apron, polyethylene stretched fantastic as the colour pales out in streaks see wrecked hexagons divide as carbons split, let go of those colours you like yellow and green coughed up and onto sheet s you sleep in, purple blue bruise whatever the reason smacks of abuse, gushing red split, cracked white body as chalk, twirl that ten-for-two shroud in anarchic wheel, when it shimmers in resonant arcs sparks crackle spit cutting the quiet air with electric whorl I see through it even though the shimmers captivated by static, generates its own dead-zone hairs rise on end, that’s where the power goes, like Ophelia interred under water just a time-sink ratio going down fade to ice stick you in the back of the fridge chill blains ran branches as trail in snow caught for the moment singular ebb and flow descending permanent sleep, lid -slam- pushed out waft of trapped air smells curl up at edges evil cauldron bubble out and over no end to the detritus spill, ripped it drifts, infects and spread so unpleasant a stale trap exhumed.

From faecal matter, burnt toast (again) and formulated evergreen of the n-teenth toilet rinse descends iron cloud no escaping our touch and taste evaporate fingertips another failed memory. Enough years you got used to it, can’t block out the crushed scent of a thousand clinical actions mapped precise in the mind, to the outside just more comings and goings, all blend into one rush, nose cut numb, frostbitten in spite, you can try to ignore but you never forget.

Off my tongue all the wild smells go. Like it was cut fresh, the cells fading in/out, dead and alive at the time. The stump left flailing, nowhere to grow. Stalwart brother Orwell used smell as a moral barometer, finds unpleasant tastes a kind of wrongness in the air of the narrow slave kitchens and coal swept streets, and the mud-dust fall the bombs on Catalonia streets, the catalyst forgotten, that same stench of death and betrayal he followed, a virulent bloodhound found continuous stain wreaked across every putrid surface of cold, uncaring and treacherous world, something stinks on those perfect-green Eton battlefields naturally transposed to every blood-specked foreign soil and British sitting room, same war fought his whole short life. Now new smells seeping on home turf George cannot be at peace whilst war by numbers/button presses errs on human error some say wheat is growing thin but British hops always plentiful here, we shuffle on in decay, not bothered enough, let it go as you close your eyes to watch the other side die.

Patients set themselves, heavy application, bottles of shampoo and over-ripe products specific in design to smell distinct, regain the individual by wearing the same smells, just like everyone else. But even for the regular ones every substance applied was quickly swallowed up, absorbed in the harshness of layer-peeling bleaches revealing the ugly underneath Desire to improve takes hold gathers flight, to cut a sweetish figure through the medicinal fug, like Dr Swan gliding gilded through dust and disease sodden in aquatint-peals leading off every new shape-shifting Molotov deified by branded-alcohol (not to be taken orally). The holiest reach for transcendent scents to rise above their own ego, a self-love equally shared but so painfully divided. All mixed up, the waning hormones beat impulse to entice the confused and tricks the needy rube, wilful ones too eager to follow and in turn become product, easily consumed spat out, chewed up and used, air they breath only oestrogen and nicotine forsaking pale earthly airs, oxygen’s a bore nowadays, she hooks audience in transit, faintly clung wires caught blonde in sun, even in harsh glint of neon bulb eyes alight where she treads movements weave angel hair tremulous faint tint of jagged azure in scarlet bloom clawing itself round dark side of the peach, he-is-she-is that forbidden thing nameless, shapeless, unknowable, unloveable, outward they go raise the gay men jealous, flip the hetero-john forced to confront undisclosed desires doubt every firm impulse ever rested upon so sure, now any notion of permanence wavers for the sake of wandering allure overriding the hospital’s ugly sheen escaping a few seconds from the condition of a patient, contemplated at length and taken with deep heaving breaths neither encouraged or forsaken curiosities’ peak was IT, the dullness of their flesh could not keep up and waning energies lose interest, difficulties not the body it’s believing one’s inner-strength, behind exhausted eyes they sit and stare hacking still their noses and lungs alight, left with the mark of those decadent airs but lacking grace.

Official attempts have been made. Them upstairs hit upon the “Aura” experiment, to counteract “insidious influences”. Nurses all against it, per their usual, complain constantly but never acting, the familiarity like returning to a second nest normally so eager to abandon dug their heels in spirit only. Any changes to routine, upset the set-pace, a certain way of doing. The project aim was to make a deal with environment enhancement company, Fplag Inc. and use their “Aura-Model” to drench corridors in sickly-sweet shades of synthetic Britannia. Some mystical aura, ill-defined, but blind supported. Blurb made to reflect: “what it means to be British and with a sense of Britain’s history” (better read: symptomatic decline, neatly bottled).

Every gauche flower brought on from trivial cuttings, some weeds, harvest of shady allotments built on old lead pits, soily hands wiped on trouser, lined-out gardens boxed in by cheap wire racing-green diamonds, rife with adopted species adopted to fulfil an identity quota. Haggard shrivelled-in spectres shape of ugly ruffled sleeves, none of the refinement of daggerish points, avoiding that other continental persuasion; lilting slender necks or stiletto barbed lips that empyrean nova of Venus extended physical, instead hopelessly calculating with dandified flowers chalked sugar-sweet windowsill pledge, oh-so quaint and outmoded blur English borders with crippled scents skewed musky odours as upright and clean-bred as Richard Nixon III, form hybrid in-with already muddied family line the bastardised fifteenth-gen-carnation, it’s spoken name alighting to many so like the turgid procession of royal ascent (to keep buggering on is equivalent to progress?) vast number living hidden, somewhat ignored, under the floorboards those dreary wilted garden-lovers, patio-patriots blind and ready dead martyrs, shelves lined with Mail lies, no cause but faith in the upper-joneses, take a cue from anything they do, trapped in static polyester, belt pulled tight, so dead from the waist down, a flower is mispronounced then tagged as secret ingredient of turgid yellow mess chicken-cubes sold as a legitimate, rhododendron, the tepid Pink Lady blossoms tasteless and devoid of grace, no lotus flower spilling out inviting, no lily persisting delicate, deny orchids vulgarly exotic, the sexless woman shed all sensuality for dead-end practicalities of the day to day grinding hours wrought in shadows, now count them in years, passion flower dried-out, emaciated, no feeling left for anyone but donkey charities love comes cheap from ideal of pulp romance and all magazines offer endless hollow chatter ease into slow pulse thrombosis some kind of dialogue to stem rowdy quiet she buys flowers for herself trims emphatic and neat to keep busy withhold tears, only flash of pale colours irregular break the silence.

Dance-around legal semantics the system’s installed without a blink, everything else breaks down around us. Already something stinks, behind initial manoeuvres there is shady intent at quick cash cow. Non-narcotic fragrance inducing altered states, verging on non-voluntary drug abuse toeing the line so close to poisoning with semi-legit. chemicals from East-European overspill. Patients and visitors complain of runnynoseredeyesachesallover.

First hits it’s that tone of annihilating sweetness smell moves a force four-hundred times that of sugar, crushed pills spread their dust in the air feeling the crackles spark on my ready tongue and as it touched begin to retch on the chalk dust breeze so redolent of ten-pence Parma Violets designed for parents to trick and subdue their children into a weeping snivelling mess, acceptable tear-gas, unable to protest behind sleeve wipes and drips then marched away to clean their bedroom carrying on if only with the promise of a clean glass of water to wash away the taste, all soapy, foaming at the mouth.

At first we all coped, same as with the asbestos, shrug it off another fact of working life and carry on. But still leaves you sick inside; every blatant attempt to dumb it down deny pain and protest of jobs in the balance, treat us as already palliative acting drones, dangled tails between two cruel claws drifting, twirling in wind so laissez faire an object soon to be removed, doubled up the resentment, the mountain of lies. to let myself suffer willingly such blindness, too easy to pretend, the blurring of reality by sentimental smells, fake stats and power-embracing choke on slogans eerie electioneering make everything seem alright, almost good, a reminder of something better, a time you’d never known but can feel yourself starting to remember somehow the hurt that cannot be ignored, their scum always rises. Aura a tip to trick to remind us of Old England, now-dead with the last veterans gone and their medals pawned or behind glass museums, held apart from the modern dust and decay exempt from time’s harsh reality, so we remember them, sometimes to forgive, but never to forget; covet grass clippings that will grow back again and rumble on about the last time we won the Ashes, forget apartheid lies and denied the freedom to play, easier to forget our own mistakes. Same ill-gotten greed as the legacy stench of Brunel’s second iron age, child-slaves to industry stare through soot-black eyes we look away, can’t face the glare of their clean whites but nothing’s really changed we just contract abroad. As one man struggles, so another can relax. Always on our side the big wheel keeps turning on hinges still greased in residues of the Bismarck diet, the traces of Empire look at stern firm bridges trains on it that slide so well, all this to a head buck stops with the lady who refused to turn, so well-spoken but acting without grace leave her four more hours before one last spin then her memory can be buried and forgotten, send her dust down the shafts she helped to bury, a right-wing martyr and a waste of public space. Still learning, re-learning to forget the present undercurrent with revolution of our public-image (unlimited) more powerful than the original, the first man stands tallest in shadow, new history devours actual events, the carrying of ones and twos, last year’s, ten years many double-figures ago when we were winning and smiles seemed genuine if perfumes can cover up sins and the economic dead-weight of epic mismanagement then the PR machine can conceal or confess at their leisure, not ours, and when the records are finally stamped “Deceased” they will surely erase me out of it.

_____

This story won Third Prize in the 2010 TLC-Literateur Competition.

‘Living Through Saccharin’ is part of a larger novel; please find more details at Adam Steiner’s Politics of the Asylum website.