Author: Kirsty Lewin

Five truths

I have two legs. This much is real. There was a time, a moment without a screen or dignity, or let’s face it, basic common decency, when I might only have been left with one. Later he blocks me on Twitter.

I am an interrupted civil servant. This much is real. The civil is diminishing, the servile is harder to poison. I get a pay slip with zeros all over it every month. One day, HR will come after me. I have no talent for career choices.

I read shite writing. This much is real. I say it isn’t fit for purpose, this road safety audit. The Road Safety Officer says you don’t understand. That is your subjective judgement. I say two people are dead.

I have a father. This much is real. He is dead. My father is responsible for all the traits I despise in myself. It is easier to blame the dead than the living. I sip peppermint tea. Practice mindfulness on a red felt chair. The chair is the same colour as the Bakelite phone that used to ring on Sundays.

I am not a cat. This much is real. If I were a cat, I would spend much of the day under a Colombian hand-woven blanket contemplating my part in the catastrophic decline of small mammals. As I am not a cat, I spend much of my day under clothes contemplating my part in the catastrophic decline of everything else.

Tags truths

fiction

Skipping

A clear out, they say. We’ll feel better after a good clear out. Blow the cobwebs away, they say. Freshen ourselves up.

And so it was with Janis and him.

First the two wooden tennis rackets and their buckling guts of cat.

Then four bamboo fishing rods (two snapped in thirds) with their tangled twines, their rusting reels, and the small grey plastic carry box with its pull-out trays of colour-coordinated feather-swatted flies.

Four lobster pots next, three made from orange rope, the other twisted marine, then a dozen creels, a bouncing yellow buoy on a rusted chain, and his crab net, still hooked and levered and terribly, yes terribly, embattled and embittered.

It takes three shots, the crab net. Some memories are harder to toss overboard than others.

All of it on her back, under her arms, between her legs, up the fourteen steps from the cellar to the narrow hall, out the front door with the drab rose trailing over the drab brass bell, down the path between the leaning preening lavender bushes, across the pavement, past Mr Bishop’s three-wheeler, a dance across the cracked paving stones and their peering puddling push up daisies.

And into the skip.

The woman who delivers the skip, off the back of a lorry as orange as her lips and as grubby as her otherwise neat fingernails, smokes rollies and keeps a stick of chewing gum behind her right ear. Her name badge says Yvonne, but she calls herself Fiona and Janis doesn’t like to ask so she didn’t call her anything at all.

Janis quizzes the woman about skips. Tell me about the culture of skips, she says, offering the skip woman strong milky tea from a white chipped mug with a hand drawn badger humping a fox on it.

What are the social norms? she asks. Would people, and by people she means the Blackfords (MBE and OBE respectively) across the road, would people judge her by the contents of her skip? Fiona or Yvonne does not reply. Fiona or Yvonne drinks half of the tea, keeping the chip well away from her orange lips, slings the rest of it on the leaning preening lavender, tells Janis to sign here I’ll be back in a week don’t overfill the bastard, and leaves.

Janis watches the skip woman’s thin denimed arse climb up into the lorry. She fancies herself in that decaying leaf lipstick. And that neat squat jump up into the truck.

Skipping is addictive. As is cellaring, bedrooming, kitchening and halling.

After the crab nets, her white silk wedding shoes (the right one still with its Blue Curaçao stain), her Great Aunt Celia’s incontinence pads, and the gunmetal safe with Uncle Eric’s secrets.

Or so it is said. No one has ever worked out the combination to the lock, and no one has ever thought Uncle Eric scintillating enough to get violent and force it open with a crowbar or a claw hammer or whatever one uses for such a hatchet job.

The chipper white mug with its fresh orange smear. Janis runs a finger along the half sticky rim. Applies the deadening leaf to her lips.

The teddies are next, sent out in order of size and age. Carlo Bambino the last to go. Hand knitted in Sicily with an actual metal gun between his teeth.

A moment’s respite for Jemima Puddleduck and her one overwashed duckling. Hold her up to the light. Whatever happened to the other one?

Henry’s first soiled nappy. Alicia’s afterbirth kept neat in the freezer for twenty-two years.

Her appendix, coiled curious in a plastic specimen jar.

Who needs rugs anyway. Their sole purpose on earth to ruin a woman’s back with hoovering. Rolling them up one by one. Ooft – heavy. Especially the one with him tucked inside.

And as for the retaining wall, what is she even trying to retain? Borrows a jack hammer, dons a climbing helmet, ties a teatowel across her decayed leaf lips as the dining room ceiling settles down about her.

A hailstorm of monstrous confetti and retainment and derangement and how she laughs.

His mother Whilma’s fishing trawler, Mary, who calls a boat Mary, winched out of Fisherrow, listing hard right on top of the whole sorry pitching shebang.

She overfills the bastard, that’s for sure.

Tags rubbish, skips

fiction Flash fiction

Jesus

The room is the size you would expect. Just big enough for the single iron bed on the right with its matching low iron hoops at its head and foot, its thin brown straw mattress an inch or so too narrow for its rough wooden slatted base. A pale unbleached linen sheet is slung across the bed, a lumpy pillow in a matching case is where it should be, and a short scrap of black woollen blanket, more of a baby shawl than something that would cover an adult, lies in a huddle where you are presumed to put your feet.

Above the bed is a dark wooden cross, compact enough to hold in your palm. Jesus, also of wood but in a lighter stain, is nailed to the cross, his crowned head lolling down to the left. His naked body casts the lightest of shadows onto the white adobe wall. Aside from Jesus and the bed, there are only two other pieces of furniture in the room, a wooden commode containing a red plastic bucket to the centre of the left wall, and a short metal shelf to the right of the door overlooking the foot of the bed. An empty toilet roll and a sliver of green soap lie in the middle of the shelf. Both are covered by a thin layer of black dust.

The window, directly opposite the door, is head-sized and circular, a porthole latticed with ironwork. The door, painted grey, is metal and dense, without a handle on the inside. Splashes of grey paint fleck the floor and the bare frame around the door. In the centre of the door, at a height suited to an average-sized male, is a peephole. A peephole that only operates one way. The floor is unpolished pine plank, splintering around the feet of the bed and the commode. An animal, a rat perhaps, has chewed a walnut-sized hole through the edge of the floor on the window side of the commode.

The room is blessed with a bare light bulb dangling from a fraying brown cord. The light is off and there is no switch in the room, nor any electricity sockets. The room has the pale dull feel of an autumn evening after a heavy rain shower, thin strands of light spotting and dissolving across the bare floor.

If you stand on your tiptoes at the window, your face hard up against the iron lattice, you’ll be rewarded with a restricted view of a bright white gravel yard, the stones too sharp to walk across in your bare feet. Containing the yard, perhaps twenty metres from the window, is a tall mesh fence topped with great spirals of razor wire. It is not possible to see beyond the external walls of the room to the rest of the building. How big it is. How small. Whether there are others. Or just her.

Alicia sits on the bed, cradling her head in her hands. The mattress digs hard into her tail bones, and she shifts from side to side trying to find relief. She lifts her head to look at Jesus on his pointless cross. Was he there to taunt her? To give her solace? Or was he simply the only decoration they had available? She clenches her fists and spits gob onto the planks between her bare feet. The gob, white and frothy and imperfectly round rests there, just rests. Her eyes follow the line of the floorboard to the other side of the room.

A wolf spider scuttles out of the rat hole and up onto the wall beside the commode. A bluebottle buzzes after it, bouncing on and off the wall. She focusses on the creatures. The fly following the spider. Everything is the wrong way round. She shouldn’t be here. Not her. This place is for other people. She was only doing her job.

She stands up, shivers, takes four steps to the window, raises her hands to the metalwork and grips it hard. Shakes it. It stays firm, solid, the wall at least a metre thick. Outside, the yard is empty. She knows what happens there. There’d been rumours. Stories whispered on the move. Always outside. Always in places of confusion and noise. Never told by anyone who had been there. Her belly contracts. Bile rises up her throat. They were just stories. Attention seekers, the soldiers said. Agitators stoking fear and foment.

She lets go of the bars, glances at Jesus, approaches the metal door and pounds it with closed fists. The lack of sound surprises her. She can make only soft thuds that are almost doll-like. She hammers again, harder, clenching her jaws as her knuckles thud and scrape blood onto the thick metal. No response. Not even the echo of her own violence. She doesn’t know how to shout. She turns, slides down the door and sits hard onto the floor. She was just doing her job. Keeping her head down. She remains on the floor until she’s driven onto her feet, stumbling with a dead right leg, by the roar of an vehicle engine.

Back at the window, pulling herself up higher, she can see the tall wooden watch tower. The red, white and black flag sags in the haze of smoke from the fires that have been burning in the foothills as long as she can remember. The smog gives the tower a two-dimensional feel, as if it was cut from cardboard, a children’s toy. Even the phalanx of rifles does not seem real.

The fly buzzes past her hands, glances off her neck and disappears behind her. She turns to watch it. It has settled on the bare bulb, with a clear view of the spider now on the wall to the right of Jesus. The bulb trembles as a cold breeze pushes acrid dust into the room, wafting burning rubber and diesel.

Alicia, wearing thin black cotton pyjamas, forced onto her on arrival, pulls the sheet off the bed, wraps it around herself, and tucks the scrap of blanket around her neck. She stalks the room. Round and round and round she stalks. She is a ghost, a fighter, a beggar, a hag. Splinters trace the soles of her feet. And then the floor shudders. The wall vibrates and Jesus shakes and rattles. The vexing roar of another engine.

It’s a mistake. Her ID expired. Someone with the same name. The same employment history. Another engine roar. And another. Heavy tires on thick gravel. Acceleration and power. Outside, men’s voices in a language she doesn’t understand. Shouting. Commands and responses. The clack of metal on metal, the clunk of wood on wood. The tinkle of glass. The roars moving and diminishing, moving and diminishing. Fewer and fewer voices.

The spider is on the wall above the shelf, the fly closing in from the top edge of the empty toilet roll.

They are leaving. In their tanks and armoured cars. With their stamping boots and annihilations. Acceleration. Power. She kicks the metal door with her bare toes. Her tongue searches her mouth for sound. Pushes over blistered lips. She throws off the sheet. Clambers onto the bed. Steadies herself as the mattress shifts and slides beneath her feet. She splutters as more diesel smokes into the room. With one hand on the wall to steady herself she pulls Jesus and his cross off the wall, steps off the bed, and approaches the door again.

The spider is dangling from the ceiling. Spinning, spinning. The fly hovers and buzzes, ever decreasing circles just below the spider.

Alicia twists Jesus in the red chap of her scaling hands, in the grouted grime of her life lines, across the bloodied smear of her knuckles. Then, gripping him by his feet in her right hand, she takes a step back, bends her knee, and batters him against the door. Again and again and again.

Battering him until splinters of his thorned crown dance across the room.

Battering him until each arm of his cross has cracked and broken and fallen.

Battering him until his face is an empty hollow wound.

Battering Jesus again and again until the bluebottle is trapped in the fresh web, the wolf spider is resting, and the only sounds are buzzing and whining and thrumming and rousing.

memoir

Fish Tank

We are in his flat, and it has been some time since we have seen each other. We stand apart and we look past each other and we do not know how to begin because we began already.

We are young and we were together and now we are not.

After our end there was a period when we were both in Australia, on either side of a great divide. He was doctoring and I was grouting sauna tiles and picking melons in heat that would be obscene in our own country. I arrived first and I did not know he was coming and I still do not know how he worked out where I was.

He wrote me a letter about being hungover on night duty in a fly-blown outback clinic, falling asleep in a bathroom, and being carted out over a matron’s ample shoulder. Take me, Matron, I am forever yours, he wrote with a smiley face as a full stop.

His handwriting flowed neat neutral black loops across the pale blue page. I was with Penny as I read out the letter, standing up and acting it out, beating myself over the back. We were laughing too hard. Sculling cheap rum in a budget hostel above a greasy takeaway in downtown Townsville.

I wish I still had the letter. I wish I still had Penny. Penny will die of breast cancer decades later and I will be broken for weeks.

He was in Darwin when he wrote the letter. Or Katherine. Or Nitmiluk Gorge. I cannot picture him in any of these places. All that ochre nature dust. His buffed polished shoes. Squat brown stubbies of lukewarm beer. His crisp white shirts. Termite castles. His milk soft hands. Sweetwater Pool. His city grin. Christ, the flies.

I was packing mandarins before dawn in a vast shed in Queensland. I was picking tomatoes in Victoria for a gang master. I was weeping over onions in the Northern Territory. Our paths never crossed.

And now we are in his flat in Glasgow.

It is a dark flat, the walls are pine forest green, and one of the walls has an inbuilt fish tank that you can see both in the tight living room and the hall. It is the late ’80s and I do not now recall how we have hooked up again or why.

It is a dark flat, the furniture is utilitarian, modest, and brown. The fish tank spills light and shimmer onto a floor that is not as dark as the walls. We drink half a bottle of red wine from amber glass tumblers, we share stories about flies, and our tongues and lips stain cephalopod ink.

It is a dark flat, he lives alone, and he works shifts at a university hospital. I look in his fridge and it is as spare as his flat. I do not ask about his heritage although I used to. I do not ask about much at all.

It is a dark flat, his bedroom is small and plain. The duvet cover may have a pattern, if it does it is subtle, and the bed may not be properly made although I do not doubt it is tidy. When it is time to sleep we sit down on his bed. Both he and the bed feel clean. We talk about the fish tank. There is routine in keeping the water just right. Later we will make unruffled, almost certainly silent, love.

In the morning he leaves early and maybe he explains to me how to lock the door, maybe he touches my arm as he goes, and later, after I feel the shiver of the tenement door slam, I stand in his shower and he has two soaps, lime and Pears, and I choose the lime and I lather it all over and rinse it off, and then I use his only towel, and my stomach knots. The knot is the shape of the things unsaid.

I stand naked in front of the fish tank. The water bubbles. The aquarium houses a miniature sunken forest that willows and sways in rippling undulating song. There is pale yellow gravel on its floor. And a tiny black wooden wreck. There are no fish. No fish at all.

I make myself a coffee and my heart beats too hard and my fingers shake and I have to find the Yellow Pages, he must have the Yellow Pages and I find them in the drawer under his black phone with its curly cord. I dial the number and I stretch the cord around my fingers around and around and I cannot help myself, my voice trembles and I could be sixteen instead of twenty whatever it was.

I leave and I take a bus and my feet tap and I breathe his lime from my skin and I sit in a yellow room on a plastic chair with frothy magazines and bowls of condoms and a tableau of women who are looking at their feet or in their bags or anywhere but each other. I am in this room because I could not get the words out and neither could he and now I am in a panic room, and I have to tell a stranger a story.

It is easier to talk to the stranger about the shape of the knot in my stomach than to the man with the sterile fish tank.

The stranger, who wears important shoes and wafts lilac and mild disinfectant, washes her hands and listens to my confession, my confusions. She is reassuring. She asks only what is necessary. She offers me free condoms, for the next time she says, but I shake my head with hot cheeks and a stammering thank you and go on my way. Back to the bus station. Back to my city.

The thing I cannot remember is his face.

Tags memory, relationships

musings poetry

Rate My Late!

Rate My Late – Buy Your App Here!

The trouble with Late is that she can’t exist on her own. She’s not a thing to point at, to put on a mantlepiece, to dress up with pearls (fake) or a sympathetic diamond (real).

Late requires clocks, calendars, appointments, cycles, physiology, intent, heartbeats.

Late needs lovers, children, employees, unprotected sex, traffic jams, a fatal collision on the M6, a flat tyre, a lightning strike, a network outage, a forgotten password, a printer out of ink, a dead battery.

Late loves unreliability, pompousness, disrespect, people who don’t read the time, people without phones, without watches, without effective chairs (the people, not the furniture).

Late wants capitalism not socialism.

Late wants liars not truth seekers.

Late wants socialites not loners.

Late thrives on wankers and low tyre pressure, on mislaid keys and handbags left in cafes, on getting on the wrong bus and buying a last-minute soya chai latte while running for a train.

Late is normally with Wait. But not every time. Sometimes Late shacks up with Early.

Early is anxious, Early doesn’t’t sleep well.

Early is fatal with safety catches and red traffic lights and dynamiting derelict housing association towers.

Early is fatal at baking Victoria sponges and making mayonnaise. And sex.

Early worries. Is Late under a bus, in jail, got a better offer, been tasered?

Early has Velcro instead of laces, studs instead of buttons, and a purse always full of just the right change.

Early has spare bus tickets, tampons, a water bottle, tissues, lip salve and a wad of toilet roll all to hand.

Early pants and sweats and waits and swivels on bar stools and is talked to by waiters and memorises menus and bus timetables and is hated by her late friends, really hated.

Early hears secrets at the end of other people’s meetings, catches mistresses leaving management offices, learns the lives of cleaners and clicks her fingers click click click.

Early doesn’t need a dinner plate, eats out of saucepans, and has never eaten her lunch off a table in her own flat, never, never as Early must eats on the move when she can.

Early is thin and in a rush and bites her nails and forfeited the last question in her final exam, what with the need to get the right train home.

Early is pinged and notified and sent reminders on apps apps apps.

Early is ANXIOUS with capital letters and no full stop.

Early didn’t arrive in a bulrush basket. Early exploded out after ninety-seven minutes of labour at thirty-five weeks. Early is small and fluttery and clings to edges. If Early could crawl back in and cocoon to full term she would.

Heh Early! Take some deep breaths, love.

Early waits for Late like we watch Planet Earth. Squatting behind the couch with fingers over our eyes. Lion stalking Zebra, creeping creeping, ready to pounce and bloody. Early is black and white striped with a fly-blown swishing tail.

Early is rushing for the ad-breaks to make a cup of tea and always misses Lion’s final gouge or Zebra’s just in time escape. Early cannot stand to know what happens in the end. Ever.

Early is not a completer finisher. Early is so fast off the blocks she’s constantly disqualified.

Early turns up to fetes while the bouncy castle is still flaccid flat.

Early attends the funeral of the earlier corpse.

Early witnesses the wrong wedding and throws confetti at the wrong couple.

Early stands shivering on empty platforms and Early leans shivering in empty ballrooms.

The trouble with Early is that she can’t exist on her own. She’s not a thing to point at, to put on a mantlepiece, to dress up with pearls (fake) or a sympathetic diamond (real).

Early requires clocks, calendars, appointments, cycles, physiology, intent, heartbeats.

You can see where this going. Except on the App.

There is no Rate My Early. There could never be a Rate My Early.

Tags early, late, time

Flash fiction

On Syrup Markets

There was a time when it was all over the shelves. Stacks of the stuff. In the baking aisle. In the beverages aisle. Even in the aisle with all the condiments you slap on toast. Irene’s Granny Taylor swore by Lyle’s. Look at the colour of it, Ire, she’d say to Irene. The way it slides off the spoon like golden oil. Almost a miracle the way it does that.

Back in the early 2020s, Irene’s granny was big on her syrup and her Gold Blend instant coffee. A full teaspoon of each and a thirty second stir. Waste not want not, she’d say, touching the hot spoon to her lips. Waste not want not. Or at least that’s what Irene assumed she was saying what with Granny Taylor’s lack of teeth. There was just the one tooth at the upper front, bang in the middle. Irene’s grandad said that was simply for show so that no one would call Catherine Mavis, his wife of fifty-nine years, a toothless whatever.

So there was a time when it was all over the shelves. And then there was a time that it wasn’t. That time didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t like a Border Control Raid, or an Armed Smash and Grab, or a Hostile Hedge Fund Takeover. And The People, they didn’t notice at first. Not all of them anyway. Not The People that drove to the hypermarkets in their souped-up vehicles larger than the average housing association flat (what was left of them – certainly less of them than the souped-up vehicles). Not The People who got their groceries delivered by thin sweating men in ragged sweatshirts and worn jeans with eyes that darted from their phones to the hands that didn’t tip and back to their phones again. Not The People who’d had the wisdom, the inside track, the foresight, and surplus cash to stock up on Absolutely Everything after Brexit or the Great Fire or the Great Flood or the Great Plague or the Great Inflation.

There were a few passing comments.

Didn’t you order two tins, Babs, you know I always like to have an extra just in case? Aye James, of course I did but they’re after saying we could only have the one.

You forgot the syrup, Harry. I need that syrup for the cricket tray bake on Saturday. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times. Sorry love, it wasn’t in its usual place. And I was worried about the car. You heard about Alan’s Toyota? They won’t give him insurance now. Only if he doesn’t leave home.

And then there were a couple of months when Tommy’s favoured great value supermarket own brand wasn’t there and Irene had to choose a more expensive one and she didn’t dare tell Robbie for fear that he’d put a fist in her face again which he’d come to do with the frequency of what used to be a one in a hundred year storm event but were now pretty much every week.

And it wasn’t just the consumers. Wee Annie down the Supply Chain with her disabled lad Eric and the sudden loss of her job in the canning factory threatening to put them out in the street. Adam in Logistics in the Shipping Yard about to propose to Arlene, three months pregnant what with condoms no longer available in the village or even online, standing in front of Jealous Jesus Jewellery when his phone pinged. Don’t turn up tomorrow, lad, there’s nowt to do they’ve let us all go. And the Sun kicking up hell on its front pages SYRUP SHORTAGE SLAPS SECRETARY OF STATE FOR CAKE ON THE MAKE

Or words to that effect.

What about the dentists? Surely they’d love a syrup shortage what with their vows to save the nation’s teeth plastered over every bus, every bridge and every flying car hangar. Not so fast. This is 2032 and the Dental Robots (just call me Dr Blatnoyd) are only in it for the chip and pin and frankly the more syrup The Proles eat the more ping ping the apps peel out in the tax havens for the Syrup Barons who horde and sell horde and sell, keeping The Proles sweet and anxious sweet and anxious in an ever decreasing cycle of gloom.

Back to Irene. Irene has been to three supermarkets and two corner shops, had a scroll through ebay, Amazon and Stores4Us. She’s been on the dark web, to the black market and down the alley behind the vegan fish and chip shop. She’s called friends and neighbours and Women’s Refuge and pleaded and cajoled and wept and genuflected. She’s kneeled for Jesus and offered her bare breasts to the devil. She’s scrubbed her mouth with carbolic and slashed at the chip in her wrist with an old razor and the sweet ruby droplets of blood have left a bright red crumb trail across the bathroom floor.

Robbie’s on the night shift and it’s syrup on toast at six pm sharp or it’s a hard slap across her right ear and a shove backwards into the kitchen sink and a shaking fist thick into her privates. It’s four in the afternoon and Irene is on the floor, leaning against the kitchen cabinet, the empty syrup tin tight between her clenched knees. It’s not easy to finish a tin of syrup, not easy at all, but Irene learnt a lot from Granny Taylor back in the day and she’s staved off Tommy’s fist for three days longer than anyone else might have thought possible.

Why doesn’t Irene leave Robbie, you say from the comfort of your velvet armchair and a view over the lapping floodplain that was once a burn full of eels and kids with short yellow wellies and is now a lake where you occasionally sail but mostly just point out to your guests that trudge out from the city and gasp and sweat from the hundred step climb up from the carports. Why doesn’t she just run?

Where would she go? Haven’t you understood that when the syrup market goes tits up so does everything else? Syrup shortage ramifications ripple far and wide. They ooze sticky sadness and form glugs of austerity and they sour the relationship between The Proles and The State if there ever was one to sour, and they pit rogue landlord against shivering tenant, and they drop mortgaged to the hilt houses into sink holes, and they push crumbling cliffs onto beachside cafes, and they play havoc with satellites and communication systems and so no one can answer the phone at Women’s Refuge because it doesn’t ring it doesn’t ring it doesn’t ring.

I plan to work this idea into a longer piece.

Tags markets

Flash fiction

Postcard

Every day waiting. Standing in her bedroom upstairs just far enough back that the neighbours can’t see her. Mrs Skeers forever at her throat. You heard from him yet, lass? Aye, it’s a long way, the other side of the world. Aye it is.

Ida blushing and twisting her fingers into the knot of hair that is thinning and matting by her right ear what with all the blushing and twisting.

Magic Donahue, the postman, arriving on a groaning black bike his ma bought for him for Christmas when he was fifteen, so Ida’s ma says and even though Magic Donahue is now more than fifty-two according to Mrs Rannoch over at number twelve, he still rides that damn bike which is just as well for Ida because she can hear the screech of the worn down brakes and the rattle of the bike’s metal basket as he hurtles down the sharp cobbled incline of Cannon Lane before sweeping into Inchview Drive giving Ida just enough time to run upstairs and stare out the window and hold her breath and pray to the Holy Jesus please Jesus please Jesus let there be a postcard today.

Ida keeps a calendar under her single bed beside the box of her dead brother’s metal farm animals and Teddy George that’s she’s now grown out of but can’t quite give up. Her da says fifteen is too old for Teddy George and she should hand him over to the church for the African babies but Teddy George has the same smiley expression as Tommy and lifting Teddy George is like being lifted by Smiley Tommy if she shuts her eyes real tight and lets her heart sing.

Ida, prostate under the bed coughing away dust, puts a pencil cross through each day the postcard doesn’t arrive counting and not counting, a hand on her belly as it spreads and burls in line with the thick lead crosses. Under the bed she reasons with the calendar. Six weeks, he’d said, to get to the other side of the world. Forty two days with no postcard. No post office on a ship of course, and then, what if there’s a storm, there’s sure to be storms on the other side of the world, another five days for that. Forty nine days, no need to panic, no need to panic at all.

At eighty five days letting her blouse hang loose over the skirt she’s let out at the waist. They’ll not have given him a day off at the farm, there’ll be no post office within reach, maybe there’s no pens, maybe he’s frightened, all that way on the other side of the world.

Come down from there, Ida, what’s wrong with you all the time hanging around up there moping get down here and fill the coal scuttle.

One hundred and four days and Magic Donahue rattling and sweeping into Inchview Drive, swinging his leg over the chippy black frame, leaning the bike up against the rowan tree in fully ripe berry bloom, walking towards number six, their number six, Ida forgetting the neighbours her face pressed up against the glass hand on the murmur of her belly, Mrs Skeers staring up her from her washing line full of pink floral sheets, her ma out there on the path greeting Magic Donahue in her apron.

Not a postcard but a thin brown envelope, Smiley Tommy never mentioned a brown envelope, a postcard he said, as soon as he arrived he said, Magic Donahue standing there waiting for her ma to open the envelope, ma staring at that brown paper in her hands, Ida still up hard against the glass, her da shouting from the scullery out back, is that mail for us, Agnes, what a surprise there’s nae bills due this week we’re all up and paid and everything.

Ida’s ma turning to look up at the window, catching Ida’s blinking eyes, Ida’s ma’s face crumpling as she opens the brown envelope and reads the slip of paper, Magic Donahue turning to stare up at Ida shaking his head and Ida, Ida stepping back, Ida sliding down the wall to the floor, Ida reaching for Teddy George, lifting Teddy George, he said there’d be a postcard, he promised, he absolutely promised.

Tags emmigration, postcards

fiction Flash fiction

marriage

This story is dedicated to my good friend Liz Moir.

The white wafer is too dry, too big and too rice cracker for his taste. He’s just never got used to them. Ralph is kneeling on the thinning red rug, having had his turn, and his belly sours and boils. Kathleen makes him come to mass, she says, for his penance, the penance that he should have done when he met her five years ago. His knees hurt. Why they make them all kneel for so long is beyond him. He isn’t even Catholic.

Kathleen told him not to mention this to anyone. She said what they don’t know can’t kill them. She also says the same whenever she’s doing something she shouldn’t. It’s Kathleen that should be doing penance. What with crushing their wee Tommy’s favourite plastic roll-a-dog deliberately under the rear car wheels when she reversed out of the garage, or sprinkling chilli powder in the neighbour’s cat food when she thinks he, Ralph, isn’t looking.

Of course Kathleen isn’t at mass this Sunday. It’s your job to keep up appearances, she says, tickling his chin with her manicured violet nails. Tell them I’m sick, she says, every Saturday evening. Migraine. Or make something up. Kathleen’s been sick every Sunday morning four and half years now going on five.

Ralph shouldn’t have married Kathleen. She is garish, bilious, has disgusting piles, and laughs like a horse.

But when there’s a gun to your head, literally, what else can you do? It was ordained, Billy her father said, when you stuck your prick in her you little shit. Kathleen had leant back with her round belly and pouted and giggled and stubbed her cigarette out on Billy’s smoked glass nest of tables.

On reflection, Ralph doesn’t believe he’d had much choice in the matter. He’d merely been helping out a woman in distress. Coming back from the office late, still warm in the glow of a just above average performance appraisal, he’d seen her trip in the street. Fly off the kerb in her hefty platform soles and land spread-eagled face down in the loading bay outside Pizza Express. The early Tuesday evening drinking crowds had stared a bit and walked on past her. Assumed she was drunk. What was a civilised man to do? He’d helped her to her feet, picked up her bits and bobs that had strewn from her handbag, and offered to flag her down a taxi. Let me buy you a drink, she’d said. And he had. Remembers it so clearly. A whisky sour with a healthy handful of crushed ice. She had chosen it. Then put a hand between his thighs. And ordered him another.

The wedding had been fast, furious and full of men with shaved heads in sharp suits with bulges in their right hand pockets. The flowers had been sickly ivory and the food had been fried and guillotined and divined to play certain havoc with Ralph’s acid reflux.

There’d been a champagne fountain. A six tiered cake with a photo of Ralph and and Kathleen on the top and a photo of Billy and his third wife Irene on every other tier. A pyramid of presents, many suspiciously long and thin and heavy, greeted the guests in the great marble hall.

After Billy’s speech, which ran over by several chapters, Ralph had escaped out to the hall, and picked up one of the gifts, wrapped in red velvet with a luxurious navy satin ribbon bow. It was a large square box, heavy, and when rattled, it sounded like metal. Ralph had held it up to his nose. Tried to smell it. I wouldn’t do that, said one of Billy’s henchmen, wouldn’t want to blow your pretty lips off your face would you? The henchman had laughed and dragged some woman in a silver boob tube onto the dance floor. Ralph had put down the present, rushed to the gents to powder his nose, throw cold water on his face, and hide in a cubicle until he was flushed out by his brand new father in law Billy Menoza kicking the door in.

Ralph didn’t invite his own family to the wedding, he didn’t feel it was safe. It was just small, at the registry office, he lied, the day after he and Kathleen came round to make the announcement. Ralph’s mother had sighed, smiled at Kathleen, and turned the pages of her crochet book, looking, she said, for baby mittens. Apricot or peach she asked in a breathy voice. Ralph’s father poured them all a sherry, except Kathleen of course, and said we may as well toast the bride even if she’s pregnant. Kathleen had demanded a gin and tonic, she wasn’t missing out she said, and what they don’t know can’t kill them. Ralph, at thirty three years old and only now leaving his parents’ house for the first time to live in the penthouse apartment Billy was providing, could think of nothing to say in response.

So Ralph sits, the wafer refusing to melt in his mouth, staring at all the other pennants, the other hapless victims of Billy’s bilious daughters and nieces, and hatches a plan. Ralph will escape. He can’t take Tommy, that’s for sure. If he takes Tommy, they’ll come after him. And at the very least, kill him, Ralph. No, the boy will have to stay behind. They’re good to the boy at least. Treat him like some sort of heir. He’ll get a private education too. Billy had already paid the school for the next five years. In cash.

Ralph seeks out the eyes of the priest. The priest is busy down the end of the line. The priest has rather lovely shoes. Ralph studies his clothing. The vestments look soft and comfy. And Ralph has never had a problem cleaning, his mother always says that. He’d have to get up early, that’s for sure, and the food’s bound to be a bit boring, and it’s probably freezing in the winter, but one thing’s for certain, Billy Mendoza would not dare enter a monastery and neither would Ralph’s monster wife Kathleen.

Father, he will say later to the priest at the door of the church, I’d like to have a talk with you if I may, and Ralph will pause, drop his eyes, and continue, I believe, he will say, I really believe I may have had the calling.

Tags marriage

blog memoir musings

On touch

I am lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket with my back up against the sofa. On the sofa, a friend sleeps. On the other side of the room, another friend sleeps on another sofa. The room is full of soft filtered light only found in east coast dawns. The light has a filmic quality about it. Translucent gold. It is my room so I should really be in my own bed. The friend behind me dangles his arm down, brushes my shoulder. I put my hand up. Our hands touch. He takes my hand. And holds it. Our fingers tighten. I feel his warmth in my palm, along my knuckles. In my heart. I am holding hands in my dream and I never want it to stop. It is Tuesday the 18^th May 2021. Hugs are now ‘allowed.’

I am having a parcel delivered. It is in the time of covid. The delivery man has climbed three storeys worth of stairs. He is pink and puffing. I put my hand out to take the parcel from him. Our fingers touch in error. We both take a step back. Our eyes implode. The parcel drops onto the floor between us. He runs back down the stairs. I hear the beep beep of his app. I lift the parcel and I go inside and I wash my hands. I am careful not to touch my face for at least an hour afterwards.

I am on an Internet date, maybe seven or so years ago. It is the third or fourth time we have seen each other. We are walking along Queen Street on a cold dark afternoon. We are going to a bar in the East End. The man says something about my reticence, that I am always holding back. I laugh and I frown. I say, I can do it, really I can. I take his hand. Look I say, I can do it. He releases my hand. He doesn’t want to hold my hand in Queen Street. It takes a while to bounce back from that.

I am on the 21 bus, going to a medical appointment. It is in the time of covid. I am trying not to look at the other passengers. It is only the second time I’ve been on a bus in a year. I am listening to Bob Dylan’s Red River Shore, My lips move along with the music. Some of us turn off the lights and we live in the moonlight shooting by… I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is the man on the seat behind. He is asking me something. I am shocked at the touch. The man hasn’t meant any harm. I see the man again on the return journey. That makes us almost friends.

I am on an isolated beach in Sydney. I am alone, it is the late 80s and I am young. A man approaches me, older than me, maybe in his forties. He offers me a massage. I do not want a massage but I do not know how to say no. I did not have the anger in me then, the anger I have now. The man uses some sort of lotion. On my back, then lower. He slips his hand between my legs. I get up, confused, frightened, mortified. Gathered my things together. Walk across the hot sand towards the bus shelter in my flip flops. I wait for ten minutes. The bus does not come. The massage man stops in his car and offers me a lift. The car is silver grey, low-slung. The man is blond, over-tanned. I shake my head, no, no. The bus will be here soon, I say. He insists. I get in the car. I am terrified but I get in the car. The man does not touch me in the car. Nor does he mention the massage.

I am in Germany with my partner. We are staying at his mother’s house. We are in bed. I don’t speak or understand German. I am anxious and discombobulated. I never seem to know what is happening. We go to bed. I need him to hold me. He doesn’t. Maybe I don’t tell him about my needs. I expect him to be psychic, or at least perceptive. He turns his back on me. Rolls towards his edge of the bed. We never do get over our cultural differences.

I am a wee girl, just a baby, still getting about in a pram. I do not let anyone touch me. When a pair of hands come down towards me I open my mouth and scream.

I am holding hands in my dream and I never want it to stop.

Tags touch

fiction Flash fiction

so ordinary

The beach is so ordinary. This was a mistake. A terrible mistake. Jacob pulls his jacket in tighter and bites his lip. Tastes blood. Carole is lying beside him, spreadeagled on the pink beach towel, belly down, in a dreadful navy and white polka dot bikini. Jacob checks his phone. It is ten degrees. Admittedly there is sun, but still. She’d insisted. It will be good for us, she’d said. After all that. A day out. Somewhere new. You know. She hadn’t finished the sentence. She didn’t need to. Neither of them spoke about it. She couldn’t and he wouldn’t. But he can’t let it go.

That poor woman and her poor child.

The beach is the most ordinary beach Jacob has ever seen. It is full of dull ordinary people walking their dull ordinary dogs with their dull ordinary children and their listless loveless lives. Jacob is not ordinary. He’s known that since he was around fifteen. Dragged himself out of the bungalows and up up until he forced his way past middle management and into the board room of a company gambling on sub-orbital space tourism. Not on the Board, but as Director of HR. God he’d been proud that day. His first board meeting. The way they all looked at him when Michael, the Chair, introduced him. The way they paid attention as he stood up and walked around to the full wall LCD screen. The way they studied his charts. His models of organisational behaviour. His commitment to the team. The way Michael stayed behind after the meeting and mentioned his club.

But Carole, Carole hadn’t managed to keep up. Carole had said she wouldn’t like to go in a rocket it wasn’t really her thing but well done darling anyway. Then Carole had announced she was pregnant in a bawdy voice and had gone out and bought a peach onsy. Carole had demanded a pink nursery for baby Jemima before the baby was even born, and had ordered an oversized satin violet SUV with personalised plates and a matching child seat. Carole didn’t know how to do money. Carole was ordinary and he should have realised and now he was stuck with her.

That poor woman and her poor child.

Rub my back will you, darling? Jacob doesn’t want to rub her back. Or even touch her. He shifts his buttocks across the sand until he’s just out of her reach. His eyes follow a young couple striding across the beach in matching denim cut-off shorts and thick down navy jackets and bobbing yellow bobble hats. The couple pause to stare at a fat family crouched behind a windbreaker over a disposable barbecue, smile at each other, kiss briefly, and stride on. His hand is on her arse. Probably counting their steps, Jacob thinks. Before they head for home and have frantic sex in their red Mini Cooper in a layby overlooking an artificial lake.

Carole chose the beach because they needed to get away. Not far, she said. I can’t you know. The road. She’d tailed off and Jacob hadn’t helped her. Hadn’t filled in the blanks. Carole said the train, we could get the train, it’s years since I’ve been on a train. Jacob had poured himself a drink and walked out to the balcony. Leant on the wooden railings and looked up at the clouds. A cuckoo was calling in the valley below.

Devon, she’d said, just you and me for the weekend. My mother’ll take Jemima. This house is driving me mad. And no one is answering my calls.

That poor woman and her poor child.

A small boy toddles up to them, just in a disposable nappy and a red baseball cap. He stands in front of Jacob, sways, puts his fat arms out and says ball.

Ball. Ball.

Jacob studies the child. The child totters. His blue eyes swivel, one in towards his nose, the other one out to the left. The boy’s parents must have been disappointed by that. But there are operations aren’t there? They could fix it right now. What’s wrong with people? The boy totters and twirls and turns away. Stomps barefoot off through the sand towards a beckoning father. Arthur! Sorry about that, the man shouts to Jacob, he thinks every man is me.

Jacob nods and shifts his eyes to the sea.

After the whole Carole thing came the first real twinges of doubt. Not about her, but him. He knew who she was alright. But him? Jacob? Director of HR. With her. There was Carole’s picture on all the front pages, her hand across her face. Their was their lifestyle bigged up in supersize red font. There was their million pound ‘mansion’ with its five bedrooms and its tennis court. There was a photograph of her ridiculous car and that dreadful number plate, the pixelated image plundered from facebook. There was the text, word for word, of Carole’s pleading in court.

She was sorry, terribly sorry.

Before, he wasn’t ordinary. And now he is even less so. The subtlest of shifts in the office. Not copied in to social emails. Everyone hurrying out after meetings. Newspapers left open casually with all the finger pointing and blame. Tony, his best mate, patting him on the arm. Such a tragedy, he said. And never calling him again. It wasn’t me, he wanted to scream. It was Carole. For fuck’s sake it was Carole.

He tilts his head back, follows the contrails of a jet as it eases over the horizon. He would have been one of the first up there. Michael had said as much that second night in the club. Get this right, Jacob, he’d said, leaning back and crossing his legs, and you’ll have earned your seat and more. Him, Jacob, out of the bungalows and up up, spinning around the earth.

That poor woman and her poor child.

He stands up. Brushes the sand from his legs. Am just going down to the water, he says to Carole. To see how cold it is. He takes his shoes and socks off. And his jacket. Folds the jacket neatly and places it on his shoes. He looks around. The little boy with the red baseball hat is now dressed in blue dungarees and eating ice-cream with his father. The young couple in the matching shorts have disappeared. The fat family are pushing towels into plastic bags for life. Carole mutters something and remains face down.

He scans the beach for a quiet section. There’s no one over by the by the rocks that tumble out through the waves on the other side of the safety flag. That will do. He gives the sky one more long stare. The contrails have melted. Clouds are pulling in across the sun. He sets off.

In the pictures the little girl is wearing a green sweatshirt and a blue corduroy skirt. Her ginger hair is tied back in two fluffy bunches. She is clutching a wooden rainbow in one hand and a balloon that says FIVE in the other. She has the most wonderful smile.

He will remove his sweater. And his shirt. And his trousers. He will think about this as he walks down the gentle slope towards the sea. To the grey green waves that are now pounding up the shore with the incoming tide. But not his pants.

To remove his pants would not be ordinary.

Tags aftermath, relationships