Author: Kirsty Lewin

serial

The Cloud. Episode 41

1966, Sydney.

A police inspector drapes an arm over the bare shoulders of a young woman. The woman’s face is hidden under the flop of a wide-brimmed hat. A yellow polka-dot ribbon swings from the hat, tickling the sun-bleached hair on the Inspector’s arm. The arm spans an age gap of eighteen years.

A man spinning clouds of pink candy floss has lost a shoe. Children notice and point. Parents keep their eyes on the prize. Maybe the missing shoe is part of the sell. Maybe not.

The bar across the beach is tasselled with dogs waiting for their men. The dogs pant pant piss. Most of the men piss out of sight. At least three of the dogs will be named Bluey.

A small child runs into the legs of the police inspector with a melting ice-cream in a cone. The Inspector’s navy shorts are dolloped white. The Inspector laughs, wiping at the cream with his fingers. The child’s mother offers the Inspector a red balloon on a long string. He shakes his head, no.

Eucalyptus rubbed between the fingers is a medicament for some. A memory of something lost by others. The woman selling it from a basket promises an end to flies and a future flushed with fortune. New migrants invest handfuls of unfamiliar coins in her augurs.

So we sailed up to the sun. Til we found the sea of green. Try to see it my way. I’m picking up good vibrations. We can work it out. She’s giving me excitations. Smooth tanned feet everywhere drumming to the beat.

Immigrants are surprised by the rain’s vertical nature and its mocking insistence on dribbling where it shouldn’t. Most didn’t pack umbrellas. Those that call themselves locals lie on the beach, face up, and just carry on.

The young woman has never seen so many people on a beach. Has never felt sand so hot. Has never smelt that salty sun oil barbecue sweet. It’s her first time out in a bikini top and a matching mini. She could be on the cover of a magazine.

A police inspector leads a young woman down through the crowds onto the steaming sand. He is holding her hand. Guiding her steps. Picking past the picnickers. Kicking a stray football back to a group of running lads in black shorts. He takes her to the edge of the water. Removes his sandals. Then hers with a grinning bow. He throws them all back up the sand.

The water will be colder than it looks. He lifts her up. She shrieks. He wades in deeper, holding her just above the ocean. The waves crash up to his waist. He is soaked. She is salt sprayed. She is laughing. She has her arms around his neck.

The kiss yokes the Inspector to a murder. The kiss yokes the young woman to the Inspector’s yet to be declared bastard child.

To be continued.

Tags cloud, mystery, serial, Sydney

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 40

February, 2020. Edinburgh

A scene. Katherine’s living room. Early evening.

Inside a large opulent living room. Curtains pulled. Lamps switched on. JEREMY is sitting in a large armchair. KATHERINE is standing by the fireplace. JANET is sitting on the edge of a chaise longue. BESSIE is sitting on a sofa. All have glasses in their hands.

Katherine: I propose a toast.

Bessie: To us. The Cloudbusters.

Jeremy: Mother, for God’s sake…

Bessie: Jeremy, allow me some fun for once in your life.

KATHERINE and JANET exchange glances across the room.

Jeremy : Fun? This is organised crime, Mother.

Bessie: You’re so like your father.

Jeremy: Every time you bring him up. Every goddam time.

Bessie: There’s a reason for that.

Katherine: Heh, come on. Drink to whatever you want – but drink!

Janet: To Cyril.

Jeremy: A cloud…

Janet: Clouds have rights too

Jeremy: I’m not saying they don’t.

Bessie: You signed up for this, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Only because it was your long lost friend with a, let’s say (he pauses), an odd background.

Katherine: Don’t be an arse, Jeremy, not in my house.

Jeremy: Just saying how it is.

JANET stands up, walks to the fireplace and puts her full glass down on the mantlepiece. KATHERINE pats her arm and takes a slug from her glass, which is nearly empty. She tops her glass up from the bottle. She offers it to JANET. JANET shakes her head.

Bessie: I’m sorry, Janet. He’s just tired. Such a long drive to come up here. He’s an expert you know. On all these gang things. Kidnappings are his speciality. Doesn’t leave room for charm.

Jeremy: You’ve no idea what my speciality is, Mother.

Janet: Jeremy, if you don’t want to be here…

Katherine: There’s the door, Jeremy. No room for men like you in my house.

JEREMY puts his glass down on the floor and stands up. He steps towards the door. BESSIE stands up, follows him to the door and takes him by the arm. Whispers in his ear. He whispers back. They appear to be arguing.

Katherine: Anyway, did you hear the news? There’s been another cloud kidnap. In Glasgow. A car parked in the Merchant City apparently.

Janet: Can’t believe anyone would leave their cloud in a car. How irresponsible.

Katherine: Really stupid. Must have going to the theatre or something.

BESSIE and JEREMY come back to the centre of the room. JEREMY sits down, puts his hands on the back of his head.

Bessie: He’ll help.

Jeremy: Correction. I actually said I’d lead if we keep it professional. It’s not a game. I’ve got two days here then I’ll be managing the operation by phone.

Katherine: Who decided you’d be in charge?

Jeremy: It’s obvious, isn’t it.

Janet: Does it matter? I just want Cyril back.

JANET turns her back to the others and faces the wall. She takes a slug of wine from her glass.

Bessie: See what you’ve done, Katherine? Why not just let Jeremy take charge? He knows what he’s doing. He’s trained. The military and everything. He’s even been to wars. To top tables. Remember that piracy case in Somalia. The one with the oil tanker?

Jeremy: Could you please leave it out.

Katherine: I don’t know what oil tankers have to do with clouds. And I don’t need a man telling me what to do. I’ve enough of that at work.

JANET turns around and faces the room. She has her glass in her hand and it is empty.

Janet: It’s my cloud. I just want him back. If you can’t agree just leave. (There is a long silence.)

Katherine: OK, OK, Jeremy, but mess it up and you’ll be responsible.

Jeremy: If you let me do my job nothing will be messed up.

Bessie: That’s it. We’re agreed. I propose a toast!

BESSIE raises her glass. JANET follows. KATHERINE AND JEREMY do not look at each other and raise their glasses half way.

To be continued.

Tags clouds, Edinburgh, kidnap

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 39

1966, Sydney.

Philip’s death shunted his parents’ ages forward a decade or more. Bernadette’s fingers gnarled into the twisted uselessness of broken twigs. Her once straight back diminished to a stricken stoop. She seemed perplexed when asked a question. Bewildered by mundane tasks. She’d start and stop. Or finish then start over again. She’d leave the broom, brush end up and colonised by spiders, parked up against the mantle piece in the living room for days. Or abandon a bucket of dirty water in the middle of the kitchen until Edward would kick it over and step wet grime through the house. She’d sit in the tin bath, knees up, arms wrapped around her legs in cold shallow water until Eric, prompted by Edward, would remember to rescue her before her skin wrinkled to a shrivel.

Eric’s thick dark hair moulted into a thin white cap. He became a man with only two moods – melancholy or fury. The moods flipped as probabilistically as a spun coin. Heads for melancholy. Tails for fury. Or heads for fury. Tails for melancholy. Janet came to predict her father’s mood by the feel of the old house as it pre-empted Eric’s emotional status. It sighed and settled in sorrow. Or it was taut and crackling in anger. Even in his absence, in the long hours that Eric was out at work, the house kept the dark sentiments going.

Edward went to school, came back, and went to school. He was alone, then in a pair, and finally promoted to the most popular group of boys in the school. His leather satchel developed an uneasy rash of stickers. His skin oxidised, his hair bleached and he extended upwards beyond his father. He patted his mother’s arm, nodded to his father, and cleaned his rugby boots on the back step. He was never in the same room as Janet. He ate his meals in the back garden, or stood, tapping his foot at the kitchen door, until Janet got up to leave. On Saturdays he disappeared with a rolled up towel, a packed lunch, and his bus money, returning late in the evening with salt-slicked hair and grazes on his shins. Sharp lines separated brown skin from pale, denoting the length of both his shorts and his sleeves. One evening he turned up with a black coral necklace scooped around his neck. No one said a word.

Janet enrolled at the University of Sydney in the school of law. She would start in the following February. Neither of her parents noticed the accolade that this should have brought upon the family. Nor did they notice Janet’s sudden switch in interest from English literature to the legal profession. In the meantime Janet searched through the classified ads for an admin job in a criminal law office. Two months after her arrival in Sydney, she would pull on a smart blue skirt, tie her hair back into a sharp tight pony-tail, and start her new role for Mr Shepherd LL.B.

The new arrivals had, like all new arrivals, attracted attention in Macaulay Road. Did the neighbours know about the Waters’ bereavement? If so, they kept schtoom. And if so, they behaved magnanimously. (Or they held a dark fascination for the horror the family was suffering and they wanted to get in closer to have a dig around in the misery.) Grief is not a social butterfly. It isn’t invited to dinner parties or trips to the zoo, or a family day out to Manly Beach. And if, on occasion, grief is invited to these events, it declines through reticence or silence.

So the neighbours in Macaulay Road, despite their unswerving and collective efforts, didn’t manage to get over the Waters’ doorstep for months. Instead they left entreaties just inside the garden gate. A passion fruit pavlova in a Tupperware box. A small rubber plant in a large hand-painted terracotta pot. Pretty white crocheted doilies with dinky weights on the corners to keep the flies off food. Handwritten cards in smudged ink with telephone numbers and invitations to barbecues. Janet would rescue these offerings and dump them on the kitchen table. A day or two later her father would caress the objects with both hands before standing up and dropping them silently into the bin.

The Inspector was the only person to visit the family in its first season of mourning. His visits were initially regular, and greeted with angry questions from Eric and pleas for further investigation from Bernadette. Did the Inspector obfuscate? Perhaps. He mentioned the coroner. The lack of a body. The complexities of the law of the sea. Maybe there’d be an inquest. Maybe not. He was working on it. He’d wipe his brow down with a cotton handkerchief and Janet would bring him a glass of cold water. Sometimes she let her hand brush over his. And sometimes his pinky would move just enough for Janet to pinken in the cool glum of the kitchen and hold out hope that something more than the rub of a finger would be forthcoming.

To be continued.

Tags grief, immigrants, Sydney

memoir poetry

Broxburn Born and Bred

My name is Gordito and a woman buys me from a farmer for a fiver. To save him the effort of drowning she says. Then she puts me on Gumtree for forty quid.

My name is Gordito and I am tapped poked stroked. I am up and then I am down and then I am spun and then it is dark.

My name is Gordito and I am boxed up in Broxburn. I am the cargo in city car club. That makes me right on. Rescued from the Bronx with my pox in a box.

My name is Gordito and I have developmental issues. I overshoot the litter tray. I jump and miss. The ball. The fly. The moth. I vomit hairballs onto the only white mat. I am two weeks behind and I never catch up. Ever.

My name is Gordito and everything is black and white. I see colours but I can’t name them. The worms did that. Squirrelled into my brain and ate up too many words. Words for wine or a sweater or the cushion I’m allowed to scratch.

My name is Gordito and I want for nothing. My whiskers are white and my paws are black and I try, every evening, to catch the tip of my tail. Sometimes I look in a mirror and I see nothing. Nothing I understand at all.

My name is Gordito and I am very soft. Soft in the belly and soft in the head. Humans bury their face in the warmth of my underhang. Sometimes they cry. I like that. A lot.

My name is Gordito and I lie lengthways along the radiator. Always the one way. Never the other. Always in winter. Never in summer. I’m not stupid you know.

My name is Gordito and I have cancer. It grows on my back like a great round stone. It makes me run like a fool. I can still jump up, though. That’s the test.

My name is Gordito and if you look into my eyes all you will see is love. Nothing else. I am pure. And I am stupid. And I am here only for you.

My name is Gordito and the children pat my ashes into the deep square hole for the sapling. The children are serious. Now they know about death. This is my proudest achievement.

Tags cats, grief, pets

blog

Don’t Expect Applause

We were together. I forget the rest.[1]

The residential Warriors for the Human Spirit training course, led by Margaret (Meg) Wheatley, and organised by Collective Leadership Scotland, seems a lifetime ago. The world in which I got up on a sunny morning in early March, walked out with my backpack and my fold-up bike, and got on a train to Perth, is not the world we live in now. My backpack has collapsed in on itself, slumped over as the despair of millions. My fold-up bike is on offer to any frontline worker that might need it. I’m more likely to travel on a spaceship than I am on a train.

We’re all less mobile now.

I started writing this six weeks ago. But I’ve had to rewrite it. My mood has shifted. For so many of us there is discombobulation. Anger. Fear. Helplessness. There is a constant, tattering edge. Emotional detritus washes in and out on a fractious tide.

The new temporary rings out the daily bells of the dead. But church bells don’t peal any more. The bells are, instead, line graphs that rise, octave upon octave. Funeral services are live-streamed. Mourners, limited in attendance by risk assessments, stand two metres apart. No words can replace a hug.

We’re all bereaved now.

I’ve been listening to Tunnel 29. It tells the story of a group of students who tunnelled from West Berlin into East Berlin to help their friends and relatives escape. What bravery, what leadership. The group was infiltrated by a Stasi informer. We are not living in that world. But the state has, on the back of the COVID-19 crisis, taken extraordinary powers that impinge upon our liberties, particularly those of the poor. Citizens are encouraged to inform on their neighbours. And, according to the police, they have been doing so in droves.

We’re all being watched now.

Life-affirming leaders, or Warriors for the Human Spirit, are leaders, activists, and citizens who want to make a meaningful contribution in this time of increasing assaults on the human spirit and all life. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated a clear need for this type of leadership. And indeed, these warriors are emerging. They are not common yet, but they are here. We catch a glimpse of them on television. On social media. On our streets. In our shops. In our new on-line world. In our places of work or worship. We speak to them when they call us to check that we’re still okay.

Could I be a warrior? At the beginning of March I was on a career break. I wondered whether I should offer to go back to help out with the crisis. Surely more hands would be needed? But words from Meg’s training gave me pause. ‘Don’t rush in to fix things. Ask yourself: what is your work and what can you do to serve?’ So in those early days after that intensive residential week in Perth, I carried on writing, and I carried on my voluntary work, supporting local efforts to improve conditions for walking, cycling and wheeling.

I spoke with my new friends from the warrior training. What were they doing? How were they coping? Many talked about taking their seat – the daily mindfulness practice at the core of warrior work. Taking our seats, being present, dignified and grounded, is essential if we are to make meaningful contributions to both our own lives and those of others.

No, I haven’t meditated every day since the course. Nor do I practice with my eyes open as Meg had instructed. But the regular practice has helped me identify what I think about the most, where my anxieties lie, and how to deal with some of the thought processes I find most difficult. I know what my work is right now. What it will be in two or three months, I’m not sure. I haven’t yet offered to go back to my paid employment. But the request for volunteers has come in. And I have three days left to decide.

We can all take our seat.

There was so much to think about at the warrior training. For me, the essence of it seems to be that we behave with decency and dignity in the service of others. So in lockdown, I have taken the opportunity to observe myself.

I notice first that my writing has taken on a darker more fantastical edge. My stories have become dystopian. I have embraced magical realism, played with shape-shifters, and ordinary household objects take on human qualities. I break creative writing rules, make up words, leave sentences undone. Has lockdown set me free? On quality perhaps. But not on quantity. The first draft of my novel, completed in November, remains untouched. Short pieces are easy. Longer pieces are still fragments to be knitted together when my edges stop tattering.

Warriors, we were told, don’t expect applause. Expecting applause and not getting it can result in anger, disappointment and pain. It is not easy, though. I yearn for affirmation with my writing. I want people to tell me that my experimental work prompted them to think differently. Or that they liked the rhythm of my words. Or that they got caught up with a character that I’d invented. It seems I’ve still got a long way to go on this warrior trait.

Can I prevent the hurt that comes from lack of acknowledgement in the future? Perhaps. Focussing on the work, or the service that needs done, without needing praise, is a selfless act. And I have found that I am generally able to do it with my voluntary work. Staying in the background, and getting pleasure from something I’ve worked on with other people, turns out to be enough for my self-esteem.

We can all do without applause (but it’s hard).

Warriors create islands of sanity. We can all imagine these. Swinging in a hammock under a coconut palm or a Caledonian Pine. Everybody respects everybody else. Compassion and trust are the cocktails of the day. Warriors put the qualities of relationships at the heart of their leadership on these islands. And learning and reflection are the conditions required for our survival.

I had struggled to see the relevance for my own situation at first. In my previous paid work, yes. But my voluntary effort would surely be too small for island creation? And, on top of that, I know I’m not a particularly calming person. Island building would be too hard for me.

In my work, four (or sometimes five or six) of us pull together to get things done in and around our local neighbourhood. The who does what depends on who has the time, or the skills, or the contacts. I am the leader only in as much that I saw that the work needed done, starting doing it, and people came along to help.

In the COVID-19 crisis my local fellow activists are juggling home schooling, working from home, and enduring the mental fatigue of lockdown. The people that we are working with (the Council, stakeholders, other communities) have the same challenges. So I have attempted to create an island of sanity. So far, its boundaries are not clear. It’s not apparent who’s on the island and who isn’t, although all are welcome. Sometimes I get side tracked. I forget about the coconut oil and pick up a jack hammer (for this I apologise). But then I take my seat and get back to the serious business of focusing on the quality of the relationships, rather than the transactional elements. Not just between ourselves in our small clan, but between all the people that we are working with on the projects we’d like delivered.

We can all create islands of sanity.

Of course, focusing on the quality of relationships means doing so with those that you don’t get on with, as well as those that you do. In our training week we spent a bit of time identifying what triggers us, why we are triggered, and what the impacts of those triggers are. Triggers for me are someone or something that stokes my rage. Tightens my chest. Drops a rock in my belly. Triggers hurl a response out of my mouth before I’ve taken time to reflect.

Most of us are probably triggered by something that links back to a lack of respect. For us. For others. For the planet. So on our island, we understand what triggers us. And we aren’t triggered. The red flag goes up. We pause. We create space. And most importantly, we treat trigger individuals as if we’ve never met them before. We erase our common history and start again.

We can all learn not to be triggered.

As with all of aspects of warriorship, the theory is easier than the practice. Meg encouraged us to be grateful to everyone. Yes, even the ones pulling the triggers. The person that made my life hell. The person that threw me under a bus. What can I learn about myself from that person and their actions? About my reactions? I learn to focus on my own behaviours. To be respectful and decent. To be less transactional. To waste less energy being angry over someone that I can’t control.

We can all be grateful to everyone.

There’s one more thing I want to say about this island of sanity. It is an island without hope. Hope, according to Meg, is an addiction we cling to. As I understand it, she asks us to replace hope with being present. Being present prevents us from toppling into despair when our hopes are not realised. I was resistant at first. But I was also relieved. We all know it’s the hope that kills you.

Working in climate change involved so much hope for me. Hope that it would be prioritised across the globe. Hope that every organisation would do the right thing. Hope that if I could just be better at my job I’d get better results. All those hopes dashed, despite the efforts and successes of so many, by the interminable height climbed by those lines on the graphs. Letting that hope go feels lighter. On our island we might use the word hope. Hope your folks are okay. Hope it works out for you. But we won’t be hopeful, we’ll be present instead.

We can all live without hope.

Our warrior training continues. The group from Perth meets every month on-line. In between those sessions we exchange messages. A photograph of a sunrise. A virtual hug. A reading about futures. A poem about grief. There is shared love and dark humour. All of us in wonder about how it came to be that we entered that hotel outside Perth to start our training in one world, and came out, wide-eyed and bewildered, in another. We were together. I forget the rest.

Now I watch and listen to other leaders with my warrior hat by my side. Senior politicians leading their countries with humanity and integrity. Chief executives working with their staff on the collective transformation of their businesses as they adapt to pandemic life. Team leaders providing a space each morning for colleagues to express their fears and concerns. Women keeping calm order in panicky supermarket queues. Bus drivers reassuring anxious passengers; and cleaners, everywhere, keeping the show on the road.

We can all be leaders now.

This blog was written for Collective Leadership Scotland. It will appear in the StoryBook in the chapter on Warrior Training.

[1] Walt Whitman.

Tags leadership, warriors

fiction Flash fiction

Protected: Test and Protect

Post author By Kirsty Lewin
Post date May 29, 2020

Tags covid19, flashfiction, trackandtrace

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 38

2020, Portobello Edinburgh

‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ Bessie’s voice has been de-husked since they last spoke. Had she given up smoking? Janet tapped up the volume on her phone.

‘Well, it is.’

‘Happy new year! A new decade. So exciting!’

‘Happy new year to you, too.’

‘After all this time. I can’t believe it!’ Bessie paused. ‘Has something happened?’ She tailed off, coughed and waited. Janet waited too.

She was sitting on the small chair in the bathroom, her feet solid on the floor in her green slippers. The chair wasn’t really a chair at all. A curious person would wonder at the depth of the seat, tap the top, hear the hollow, and prise open the lid. Inside the chamber, not a treasure but an old white ceramic commode bowl.

Janet had never used the commode, not in that way, but she found it comforting to sit on, a chair with an inner secret, a chair privy to our most elemental needs, a chair that just might have started its life in a forest on the other side of the world, and, picking up woodworm on the way, had somehow ended up in a charity shop in some antique shop on the wrong side of the Edinburgh bypass.

‘Are you there, Janet?’

‘Yes, sorry. Was thinking about the commode.’

‘The commode?’ Bessie sounded baffled.

‘Yes, you know, where the wood came from, who cut down the tree…’ She stopped, and looked up to the corner above the shower where Cyril used to live. There was nothing to show he’d ever been there. No misting on the shower screen. No odd feeling of cool dampness. No heavenly tinkling. What was she doing on the phone to Bessie? She didn’t understand why she’d called. And now she wished she hadn’t. She had nothing to say.

‘Are you alright, Janet?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s been, what, fifteen years? I can’t believe it’s been that long. Time is amazing isn’t it. So fast. Especially at our age!’

‘More, maybe.’ Janet crossed her legs. Her slipper dangled from her shaking foot.

‘I heard your mother had died. I’m so sorry.’

‘Did you?’ Janet couldn’t think how Bessie would know that, not with her living in Kent or wherever she was now.

‘Jeremy saw it in the paper. Cut it out and sent it to me.’ Jeremy was Bessie’s only child. Janet hadn’t seen him since he was around ten. He’d been an intense curious little boy with big glasses and big questions and a perplexing attention to detail. He must be in his forties now. Probably working for GCHQ.

‘Yes, the undertakers did that.’

‘I didn’t think you’d written it. You always had such pretty writing. The piece about your mother, it seemed a bit perfunctory.’

‘What would I have written? I regret to inform you that Bernadette Waters, mother of three, and wife of dearly departed Eric Waters, died without speaking to her daughter for decades?’

Bessie’s reply took a long time to come. She said ‘she’d lost both of her sons, Janet. Both of them. And her husband. No one could have borne that. The grief. Imagine losing two sons. God, if I lost Jeremy…’

‘I was still alive.’

‘Yes, you were but…’

‘But she thought I killed them? Is that what you were going to say?’

‘What is this, Janet? You called me, remember? We should get together. It would be lovely to see you properly. Celebrate old times!’

‘She always blamed me.’

‘Well, I guess she can’t anymore. She lived to quite an age though. And fit as a fiddle until the end?’

‘You’re right.’ Janet pulled her slipper back on. Felt the floor again solid under her feet. ‘New Year. Just rattles me you know.’

‘It’s okay. Jeremy’s the same. Always a bit tetchy at this time. Worries about all the resolutions he needs to make. I just say let’s see what happens.’ Janet stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. A long black hair had sprouted from a mole on her left cheek. She hooked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and tried to pinch the hair out.

‘Are you still there, Janet?’

‘Yes. What’s Jeremy doing these days?’ Janet abandoned the errant hair, went through to the living room and sat down heavily on the couch. She listened to Bessie talking about Jeremy. His fancy job that he wasn’t allowed to talk about in the military. But a mother knows! Her cottage in Dorset with its walled garden. Her collection of dinosaur bones. Best in the county! The death of Martin in a car crash six weeks after he’d left her for an older woman. Karma! The new lover she’d found on the Internet. Colin. An absolute sweetie! Amazing cook and green fingered too. He’d made a set of shelves for the bones out of drift wood. So handy! How she’d given up smoking. Colin had helped. So caring!

Janet put her feet up on the couch and lay back. A tiny beige clothes moth was making its way down the wall beside her. She reached for it, hovered a finger until it stilled, then pressed it firmly into the wall. She’d forgotten the way Bessie punctuated everything good about her life with a gleeful exclamation mark. Janet had no use for exclamation marks but perhaps, secretly, she wished she had. Exclamation marks were ebullient. Joyful. Energetic. Over the top. Exclamation marks didn’t shuffle around in green slippers and pine on woodworm-ridden commodes.

‘Enough from me Janet – you know how I go on!’ Bessie laughed. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘Well, the thing is, Cyril’s been kidnapped.’ The words were out before Janet could retract them. Think of a way to explain. Bessie’s intake of breath was sharp and voluble.

‘What? Who’s Cyril? How awful! How did it happen? The police?’

‘He’s my cloud. My pet cloud.’ Janet started to cry. Thick fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She tried to gasp them back. Clenched her eyes shut. Gritted her teeth. The harder she tried the more they came. Her chest shook. And then the sobs came. Anguished waves that rolled up from her belly, heaved through her chest, and blurted out through her mouth. Bessie was saying something but Janet wasn’t listening. She put the phone down and let herself weep.

Sometime later, she couldn’t have said how long, she sat up and checked her phone. Bessie had hung up but she’d sent her a message.

SEND ADDRESS AND I’LL COME. CAN HELP WITH CLOUD. JEREMY HAS CONTACTS. YOU NEED A FRIEND NOW! BXX

Janet managed a smile. She tapped in a reply. It would be good to see Bessie. And perhaps Jeremy wasn’t so awful after all.

To be continued.

Tags clouds

fiction Flash fiction

Kiss Me Quick

‘Kiss me’, she said crying. Jesus Christ. Is that Maureen’s voice? I put the watering can down and lean over the stair banister to have a look. No, can’t be. Yes. No doubt about it. It’s Maureen. With, bloody hell, with Peter. Maureen and Peter, my two neighbours on the ground floor, locked in a grotesque embrace. Never mind social distancing, I’ve seen his pants on the line and they were practically crinoline.

‘I can’t’, Peter says. His arms are all the way around her waist. His fingers, stubbed off short at the best of times, are doing their level best on an intertwine. I gulp some air.

‘Why not?’

“I just can’t.’

I get up on my tiptoes and lean over further. I am four storeys up, and the light is not as good on the ground floor. Their faces are three or four inches apart. Even in the gloom, Peter’s neck is flushing deep pink. Maureen’s hands are trembling on his back, her long baby blue nails digging deep into his spine under his grey cotton mix cardigan. Her purple skirt has slipped out of kilter.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

I’m not ageist and I know it’s not kind to say this but you need to know that they’re both the wrong side of sixty and Maureen’s supposed to be in lockdown with her new fancy man on the other side of the high street with an adult-only tree house. And I know it’s not about what you’ve got but who you are but Peter’s only got a dumpy one-bed caravan with the curtains never washed to even get a chance of being shrunk on the boggy side of Glen Tarbert. I know where my loyalties would lie.

She pushes her lips to his. He tilts his head away.

‘I do want to,’ he says.

‘So why can’t you?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Just for a second.’

‘No.’ She pushes her lips again. Again he tilts his head. I used to have a doll like that. Giggles her name was. She came with a plastic spoon with a heap of green on it. Every time I put the spoon to her mouth she shook her head. Her lips were permanently pursed. I raged at her obstinacy. If I had to eat spinach why shouldn’t she? Ah, Maureen’s speaking again.

‘No one’s looking.’ I sense her coquetry. I snigger and back away from the banister. The holes in my ears are doing the things pupils do when their owners have taken drugs.

‘It’s not about someone looking,’ he says.

‘What is it, love?’ Love? She called him love? What have I missed? Where have I been? Laughter is welling up my gut, about to spill all over the landing. Even the wilting petunias, waiting in growing exacerbation for their daily watering, perk up. ‘Is it me? My breath?’ she asks. Her purple skirt is skittish now. Frisky even. He coughs.

He says ‘it’s my teeth.’

‘What about your teeth?’ I see the shine of his bald crown shimmer. Then shake. He sounds like he might start crying. She pushes her groin into his. She rocks her hips. Where is my phone? I need to get this live. I pat my pockets down. Nothing. Damn thing must be inside. I lean forward again.

‘They’re not in,’ he says.

‘What’s not in?’

‘My upper dentures.’ The words are whispered. She leans back in his arms.

‘Let me see,’ she says. There’s a sound that could be a choked back chuckle.

‘No.’

‘Pretty please.’

‘It’s private.’ Her right arm has moved from his neck to somewhere deep around his front and a bit below his waist.

‘It wasn’t private last week.’ God Almighty, even I’m embarrassed now.

‘Please Maureen, don’t make me.’ He turns his head from side to side but he doesn’t look up. Must be checking to see if anyone’s about. Jesus Christ, is she for real? Can she not see his torment? But I want her to continue. Force him on. Fine tune her lustful torture. It’s the most fun I’ve had since lockdown started. A phone rings in one of the middle flats. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. Maybe I should nip in now for my phone. But what if I miss the best part?

‘No.’

‘We’ll go inside. So I can put them in. Then…’ She interrupts him.

‘Let me touch it.’

‘What?

‘Your gums.’ There’s an interminable and dreadful hiatus before he replies.

‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’

‘Because it’s sexy, Peter.’ His stubbed off fingers jump on her back. He just hangs on to his intertwine. His pink flush has turned deep cherry red. Her right hand reappears from somewhere down there and a multi-ringed finger lands on his lips.

‘Open up, honey.’ She is dentist talking to a wayward child. I am transfixed. My mouth opens in harmony with his. I lean further over, the wooden railing digging into my stomach. She’s poking around his mouth with the finger. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s really rather cute.’

‘Cute?’ He manages to get the word out despite the finger.

‘You know, innocent, adorable.’ I can’t watch. I mustn’t watch. I can’t stop watching. It is appalling. Arse-tightening. Erotic. Dreadful.

‘Really?’ His tone has changed.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You like it without my teeth?’

‘Like it? I love it.’ Their heads move together. There’s a long squelching sucking noise. The sound of suction. I kick a foot back and knock over the watering can. There’s a stifled scream. I can’t tell whether it’s male or female. I’m too late to move away. I stare down into the gloom. I am paralysed. Two pink cheeked faces look up. They are both open mouthed. They are hungry chicks desperate for a feed.

And, dear readers, as far as I can see, there’s not an upper tooth between them.

Tags lockdown

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 37

1966, Sydney

It’s not easy to sleep on your first night in an old house in a new country on the wrong side of the world on the back of the death of your brother.

When your living brother, snoring softly up the hallway, knows you’re a murderer.

When your parents, still whispering and snuffling on the pining wooden chairs in the kitchen, wouldn’t use the actual word murder but you’re sure they’re sure you had something to do with it.

When the cicadas outside are thrumming your brother’s name.

When the large spider on the naked white wall is scuttling out his initials P.O.W.

When the night scent of the garden flowers is bristling the bitter sweet of funeral laurels through the fly screen.

When there should have been five in the new old house and now there are four.

When one small brown leather suitcase remains conspicuously unopened and unpacked just outside your door.

When some bird has cocked up the dawn chorus and has ramped up a solo so euphoric, so ecstatic, that it could bring a whole congregation to its knees.

When it’s your first night on dry land in six weeks and your bed, with its pre-slumped mattress, pitches and shakes and fouls your stomach until you’re retching into your pillow.

When you ache for the night to keep on going but the moon is already sweeping into its dying arc and cold white light is readying itself to turn warm golden rose.

When the sweat is weeping down your back and across your buttocks and you’re so so thirsty but you don’t know if the water out of the tap is safe to drink.

When you plot escape plan after escape plan, each more outlandish than the last, until you remember you have no money.

When you want the water out of the tap to be mephitic and pestilential, and you see yourself standing in the dark in a long white nightdress, gulping down glassful after glassful.

When you draft the first family breakfast scene in your head and you try every which way to change the chronicle but there’s no way that you can stop your father throwing you out into the street before you’ve even had your toast.

When the mantel clock, brought by your mother on a whim in her hand luggage, is so upset by the epic nature of its journey, that it chimes four then three then two then one.

When every creak is the footstep of a passing ghoul.

When your sheets, too white and starched stiff, crab and scuttle with every toss and turn.

When the whine and buzz of a mosquito becomes a sharp angry welt on the side of your neck. And then again between your breasts. And then again on your cheek.

The night was long, and when Janet finally came to in the dim grim of the morning, Philip was still dead and nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.

To be continued.

Tags cloud, grief, guilt, serial

exercise Flash fiction

Still, no one speaks

The sudden silence is so loud, so brash, so charged, I stumble. My bare heel slips out of my platform shoe and I grab at the nearest chair to catch myself. My glasses steam up and the silence jumps an octave. I force my heel back into my shoe and rub my glasses with a finger. The Café Royal melts into focus.

The serving bar, a long fat oval, is in the centre of the room. Everything in it and about it is flashy and tiled and chandeliered. Johan had chosen the bar and I wasn’t surprised. On-line at least, he’s a flashy sort of guy.

There are mirrors of mirrors of mirrors. Multiples of multiples and shattering vulgar light. I’m confused. Are there five people or ten or fifty? I settle on around twenty including the three barman.

Across from me a woman leans on a chair by the door. She is older than me, and flustered. She is wearing the same yellow shoes. The same cropped jeans. The same neat black jacket. I frown at her and she frowns back. We blush together as we understand our idiocy. I want to scan the bar for Johan but now I’m too humiliated to look.

Still, no one speaks.

A barman, neat in a moustache and a tight black waistcoat with a tea towel draped over his shoulder, studies me. His appraisal is slow and deliberate. I pull my shoulders in. Shrink inside. He releases me, turns away and leans over the counter to a young bloke in a suit. They exchange whispers and money.

The young bloke swivels on his stool and faces me. He’s looking but not looking. He has a banknote in his fingers that he rolls and unrolls. Something gold flashes around his wrist. He doesn’t seem to blink. I drop my eyes. Sticky acrid bile catches the back of my throat. I imagine it yellow. Then green. I cough. The bloke keeps looking not looking rolling unrolling.

Still, no one speaks.

The bar is dim and cool. Everyone in it is cool and dim. Except me. I am hot. I cannot control my breathing.

I cannot control my breathing. Breaths coming short and fast. Too short and so fast. What’s wrong with these people? It can’t be me. How could it be me? I try looking to my right.

There’s a trio, standing in an alcove. A fiddler, a guitarist, and a woman who probably sings. She’s in a red dress with matching flat shoes. They are not playing music. But they’re not resting. They’re a livestream on pause. The fiddler, a tall man with angles and rough cheeks and a blistered nose, still has his fiddle under his v-shaped chin. The arm with the bow is stuck, crooked in the air. He sways lightly. He is looking at the bloke on the stool. His eyes seem distressed.

The guitarist is also looking at the bloke on the stool. He has more of a querulous look. His guitar hangs on his chest from a leather strap over his shoulder, and his right hand is a frozen pick at a fret. The woman in red has her belly out and her mouth open in preparation for a high note that does not come. She is looking at me. Where is Johan? He must have seen me by now.

Still, no one speaks.

My short fast breaths need reassurance. My hands are sticking with sweat. I try looking to my left. There’s an old woman sat on a high chair at a fruit machine. She’s wearing a sleeveless crocheted waistcoat, nicotine taupe, over a rumpled white shift. Her eyes are pulled to the line of odd fruits. Her fingers are on the red button. The fruit machine is not flashing. Its lights are stuck on glare. The woman’s right shoe makes a rapid tap tap on the wooden footrest below her. It’s the only sound in the bar. The only sound apart from my short fast breaths.

The silence blisters. A mobile phone. It rings and rings until it rings out. It comes from the far corner of the bar, the corner I can see. It comes from a group of four men with dominoes splayed out across their table. Two of the men are looking at the bloke on the stool. The other two have their hands flat on the table.

Still, no one speaks.

I feel sick. This is why I never go into bars first. Why I always wait outside. Wandering about on the pavement pretending to make a call. Maybe this is Johan? A test? A test for a first date? But how would he set the whole thing up? He wouldn’t know all these people. The woman at the fruit machine sneezes. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. I’m the only person that looks.

I need to leave. I let go of the chair. I set my face in an air of oh well nothing happening here I’ll just head home. I swing around on my platform shoes. The bloke on the stool hops down. He is bigger than I expected. He moves fast. He moves to the spot between me and the door. He is close enough to touch. He smells of onion and metal. My adrenaline roars.

I look back around the bar for help. To the trio of musicians. To the woman at the fruit machine. To the men with the dominoes. To all the others sitting in silence with their gazes anywhere but here. Someone drops a coin on the floor. Someone on the other side of the musicians. The coin bounces and spins. I can’t help but watch it. The bloke in the suit has breath that is warm and gummy across my hair.

The coin settles. It settles beside something red. Blood red. A trail of blood. The trail leads to a man. A man lying face down all crooked under a table with a couple sat each side of him. No one bends to retrieve the coin.

And still, no one speaks.

Postscript. This was a writing exercise on building tension.

Tags mystery, tension