Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud – Episode 53

Janet has been awake now for a week. So Sergi says although with all that white kit on she can’t really see him never mind make out what he’s saying. He reminds her of astronauts. She could have been an astronaut. Imagine that, being fired into space with a rocket under your seat. Little earth all green and blue and spinning, spinning. Imagine being weightless, throwing your lunch to your colleague, playing a guitar upside down. How does sound work in space?

‘You’ve had a tough time, Miss Waters,’ he says as he rubs Vaseline across her lips with a small sponge on the end of a stick. ‘We’re all so proud of you.’

Janet lies back on the hard mattress and the hard pillows and lets him get on with it. Everything is too white and too stiff. Someone has pulled blue curtains around her bed and she doesn’t understand whether she is alone or whether there are others. There are too many tubes in too many orifices and her bladder feels strange. Full and empty at the same time. She’d love to sit on a toilet. Sergi smells of bleach and antiseptic. Sergi tells her his name every time he approaches her. It’s Sergi, Miss Waters. Here to give you a wash. It’s Sergi, Miss Waters, just checking your catheter. It’s Sergi Miss Waters, the doctors want a word.

Nearly a year, she hears him whisper to someone. No one thought she’d make it. Strong as an ox, someone else says and he whispers shush, shush, she can hear you know, don’t go round calling my patients oxen it’s not kind. A year of what? She can’t work it out. Who are these people in their cosmonaut suits and their visors and gloves and their tired eyes and their flitting from one thing to another and all that beeping and clicking and all those tubes?

A head pokes through the blue curtains. Hi, Miss Waters, it says behind its visor and mask. I’ve got the menu for tomorrow here. Doctors say you can have something soft. I’ll leave it with Sergi and he can fill it out for you.

Something soft? Janet isn’t hungry. She shuts her eyes. She hears Sergi pull the curtains back. Light lands on her face. It’s warm the sun. Warm and bright. She turns her hands over and lets the sun alight on her palms. She curls her fingers, catching the light, holding onto it.

‘I’m afraid you aren’t allowed visitors, Miss Waters,’ Sergi says, ‘but we could set up a phone call. Is there someone you’d like to speak to? A friend?’

Janet struggles with the thought. A friend? Does she even have any friends? There was a friend. But he left. Or he disappeared. Or someone took him. She’d been searching for him. That’s right. He’d been important. More important than anything. She’d been looking everywhere. Even in the sky. With the cosmonauts. With Laika. Laika sniffing through the stars looking for her friend. Barking and running and barking again at the endless iridescent trails.

She opens her eyes. Sergi, she says. The ferret. Who is looking after the ferret?

to be continued

Categories
blog musings

9th April 2021

On this day a ninety-nine year old man dies.

On this day someone receives an AZ vaccine shot in the arm in a drive-through out of town clinic that should be a university.

On this day rich old white men line up to talk about a dead rich old white man.

On this day someone orders My Struggle – Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgard translated by Don Bartlett.

On this day Masterchef is cancelled because a rich old white man is dead.

On this day someone orders Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.

On this day someone has an online physiotherapy appointment in their study and the therapist pulls green curtain screens around herself.

On this day a dead rich old white man doesn’t displace the Friday Archers because covid replaced the Friday Archers eons ago.

On this day some red white and blue flags are flying at half-mast.

On this day someone buys cocoa butter formula with Vitamin E.

On this day someone picks up a prescription of small blue pills.

On this day rich old white men are still going on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

On this day someone prepares an omelette with three free range eggs and a teaspoon of plain yogurt.

On this day someone wonders about the side-effects of the AZ vaccine.

On this day someone measures out new dental-care biscuits for a cat.

On this day someone places bets on how long rich old white men will go on and on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

On this day a family that lives in a big house is grieving.

On this day DMX dies, aged 50.

On this day organisers of a secret Paris dinner say ministers did not attend.

On this day scientists are talking about clots.

On this day politicians are telling lies.

On this day 382 people are estimated to have covid in Edinburgh.

On this day there is golf.

On this day a 3,000 year old ancient city is discovered in Egypt.

On this day rich old white men are still going on and on and on about a dead rich old white man.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Unfinished business

Standing, hand on the sign. Feeling its rough. Bloody communists. ACORN ALLOTMENT COLLECTIVE – hand daubed, painted, green on blue with a peace symbol. Someone has scrawled fuck off in black paint across it. Bend down, push in through the low circular gap in the fence wire. Hole the size of a small boar. Catch the back of my jacket. Damn it. Is it torn? Can’t see. Twist neck, Christ that hurts. Must ask Hannah for a massage. Her fingers… Hole cut with wire cutters by the look of it. Bloody bastards. Shouldn’t be in here at all. Private property. Dandelions everywhere.  Don’t they know how to weed? Eleven or twelve allotments but loose on the boundaries that’s communism for you. Place pinched and cooped up in the space left over from the developers. Couldn’t even give them time to refinance. Parasites. A high rise on each side, not bad for affordable housing, views of the sea and the castle, apart from the third and fourth floors – bloody thugs the lot of them up there, council wastes services on the likes of them, leylandii hedge at the end, no one can get through that. Too much shade to grow much here. All of them must have to crawl to get in, not for the faint hearted, or the disabled, just those that like to break the law, gives them a kick, what is it they say? Property is theft. Idiots. Brush leaves off trousers. Mud on my bloody new shoes. Whole place smells like vegans. Rotting vegetation and tea made from tired lawn cuttings and something fresh, vodka tonic, must be mint or lemon. Free, the plots here, if you can get your hands on one. So they say. Would she have buried him here, Samantha Pryce? That soil on her fingers. The frown at the sausage roll. All that chat about permaculture. All those books on gardening in her home office. Doesn’t seem her sort of place, though. She’s more fresh linen than blind peasant woven hemp. No scratches down that beautiful back. But definitely an allotment. Sure as I’ve ever been sure. Got to be. Where else does a greenie bury a body?

Back in the Jag. Sink back in the soft. God that pigskin turns me on. Switch on the radio. Forth FM. You’re the devil in me I brought in from the cold… Fingers tapping to the beat. You’re coming on strong… Chemical Brothers. She’s got every album, Hannah. Knows every line. I’ll tell you now it’s just too bad. Light a cigarette. Who are they kidding with their Smoking Kills ads? Yawn breathe inhale yawn. Could do with a shag. She was off this morning, Hannah, right off. Muttering and tutting and slapping cornflakes in front of the kids. Couldn’t look me in the eye. Monthly probably. No concept of my needs. Carnal aint it. Keeping her in vinyl. In satin pants and strawberry handstitched bras. Milk delivered in bloody bottles with the cream still on top. Toss the fag out the window. Spin the wheels. Frown at the three neds hanging off the third floor balcony. Give them the finger. The hurled bag of shit bounces off the rear window and lands a foot or so behind the car. Get the fuck out of here.

Parking up. Maybe this is more like it?  Beechnuts Allotments – KEEP OUT! Large sign, commercial print, large plots, each numbered, in orderly rows, flower edged (marigolds?) high fences (electric?). Mr and Mrs. Surnames at all times. A code of conduct behind a glass sign. Who knew there were so many rules for veg? Owners here have turned their front gardens into SUV parks and quite right too. Didn’t the neighbours have a plot here for a few years. Forever back and forward with their trailer of soils and manures and bags of worm ridden bloody horse shit. Andy right up his own arse. His Aileen not far behind. Those jodhpurs of hers. Should be banned on anyone over a size twelve. Not keen on a large arse. Out of the car and take a  long peruse. Security cameras everywhere. Doesn’t look like a place for burying a body. Apples trees flattened hard up against brick walls. On remand. About to be searched. Leeks a soldierly six inches apart. Weeds banned and children banned and the faint smell of bought-in peat and bleach and the soft murder of pesticides. Silent Spring – she would have been pissed off, that Rachel woman. Hannah forever reading out quotes. Fifteen year waiting list, if you’re lucky, and three years on the committee before you can even get on the list. So Andy said. Might have been exaggerating mind. No, Samantha Pryce is only twenty three. Would stand out a mile. But could have talked her way in? Has the accent and the gall that’s for sure. But every bloody plot a fresh mound of earth. Like that leprechaun story Father used to tell. Someone would have seen something, would have reported it. One of those misters or missuses. Sit down on a bench. Hand on balls. Still there. Bloody Hannah – more time for the kids than him. Not even her kids. Not that she ever mentions Della. Della can’t manage an ice cream now never mind two boys under ten. Shut eyes. Sun on cheeks. Scratch balls. Shadow across him. Woman in a pinny and wellies right there in front of him. Green gardening gloves. Soil on her cheek. Can I help you with something, she says. You haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary have you Madam? No, of course you would have phoned if you had. Absolutely. Well, here’s my card if anything turns up. You don’t look like a police officer she says, studying the card. Looks me up and down. Not fit enough.

Can’t get a bloody car park anywhere near Hazel Loan Allotments – hate walking, what’s the point. Oldest in the city, so Hannah says. Funny how she knows that stuff. Used to like that about her So old, doesn’t have a sign, she’d said, trying to tell him how to get there. I’ll use the Sat Nav, right. Suit yourself she’d said, pulling a jumper over George’s head. Should have listened to her properly. Can’t get a bloody signal. Down Bury Loan, turn right or was it left. Something about a narrow footpath and a style. Sweating. Hot. How would she have got a body all the way down here. No way. Unless a wheelbarrow? Here it is, clamber over the style 100 metres, fuck right in the ghoolies, really need to get fitter, that’s what Hannah says, alright for her, twenty years younger.  Here we are, well look at this – must be at least thirty plots each with a clapper board shed, a metal bench (painted black) and a stack of communal wellies for sharing at the beginning of the path. A dozen faces turn. Leaning on spades. What are you all looking at? The faces don’t speak. Turn back to their spades. Pungent and fresh sweet peas and clambering wild rose and sticky ivy. Piles of crap in each corner. Must be those beetle banks the kids keep going on about. Hannah talked about  a gardening ghost that plucked aphids from tomatoes and flies from carrots down here. Give the silent mooning faces a card each. No nothing strange, they all say, eventually. In chorus A bloody choir. They go back to their corduroys. But feel free to have a look around officer. Take as long as you like. But don’t touch anything. Biodiversity is precious you know.

Sycamore Collective. Laminated sign tied to the barriers with a zip tie. On the large roundabout on the city bypass. No sign of a sycamore or a collective. No sign of tyre tracks. Do they even have cars? Must run across the road at their peril. Wonder none of them have been killed. Drive up onto the grass and park on a potato patch. Demarcated by a channel dug with an old can by the look of it. The kids round here call it the Sick More Moat. Little shits. Highways Agency threaten the users every year or so. Gypsies here now and again with their fires. Traffic hellish. Nothing freshly dug. But look at that, butterflies. Little blue ones. Hannah would know the name. They were busy here at the beginning. When it all kicked off. Digging for country and all that. Looks like potatoes mainly. Though how would I know. Hannah does the cooking. But winter greens. Know them a bit. But as a kid. Plucking handfuls of slug spun spinach and kale that curled right up in your hand after picking. From living to passing my mother used to say. She knows a lot about life. Find a stick and poke around for fresh earth. Nothing. Not even a worm. Easy access, though. Could come at night. People likely to keep their mouth shut. But so many drivers. Someone would see something surely. A slight of a lass like that dragging a man nearly twice her size. A brute their neighbours called him. Her best friend said he’d been beating her for years. So why didn’t she come to us before? Why not report it? Easy excuse. Bit of a slut that friend too. Way she looked at me through them false eye lashes. Women these days. Think they can get away with anything.

Back in the Jag, wait forever for it to reverse out. Love that it does it for you. What’s the point of a car if it won’t pander to your every need. Tell it to turn up the heating on the driver’s seat. Feel that warmth working up my backside. Car more of a turn on than Hannah’s fingers these days. One last visit before heading home. Other side of the city in the new tech industrial estate. Park up in the electric charging point nearest to the entrance.

DIGITAL GREENS – iAllotments. Flash my phone, smile at the camera, it checks my iris or maybe my teeth.  Can’t make the bloody thing work. Shout at the kid on the other side of the fence. Open up will you? Police. Smooth clunk clunk as the gate opens. QR codes everywhere. Must need an app. Over three hundred plots here. Hundred on each level. All look much of the same. Not a flower in sight. Except geraniums. Line of orange down the centre of each plot. How does that all work then? Hydroponics? Looks like a multi-story car park in perspex instead of concrete. Soil doesn’t even look real. Each plot must only be a metre deep. Less maybe. Impossible surely. Unless she cut the body up, or sliced it through. God forbid. Put some overalls on will you, the kid says. Biosecurity. Over there. In the red glass hut. Pull on the overalls. Bit tight round the gut. Just as well there’s Velcro. Ignore the net thing for the hair. Barely any left anyway – Hannah prefers a shaved head. Makes you look younger she says. Each plot marked out with sound barriers. We don’t sing to the plants here the kid says. We fry them alive with our big tech our fintech our Greentech our smart tech. Is he taking the piss? He doesn’t stop talking. Attend weekly or sacrifice you plot. High productivity low turnover. Perfect for burying bodies. What was that, I say? About the bodies? Just having you on, he says. Walk through the disinfectant if you go any further, mate. Don’t want you contaminating the crime scene.

Categories
poetry

can you see the sun on my chin

I remember holding buttercups under my chin and asking can you see the sun on my chin can you see the sun on my chin can you see the sun on my chin

I remember plucking sorrel from laybys on the single track road and chewing on the sweet sour with no worry at all about dog piss no worry at all

I remember having knock knees or bandy legs and a pink dress above the knock knees or the bandy legs and an unnamed flower, yellow maybe, in each hand   the photograph assures my memory I was smiling   maybe so

I remember so many first days at schools I’ve forgotten what order they were in and even what flag fluttered in the playgrounds where I was too feart to play British Bulldogs or some other nationalist brag

I remember falling over drunk and skinning my knees outside Bannerman’s Bar and meeting a boy man I’d never meet again

I remember when we realised the driver of the purple or was it lilac Combi was illiterate and we’d missed 17 turns to Lismore in 13 hours

I remember the trapped pink in my cheeks when he told me he was a male model and what was he thinking being with me

I remember marrying a man that doesn’t share memories with me anymore

I remember feeding the blind Pekin bantam from a teaspoon every day for a week until we found her, me and the man that I no longer share memories with, stiff feet up, slaughtered by her feather-footed cousins

I remember wanting to kill them, to wring their necks with my ringed fingers, but what would have been the point of that

I remember, with another man that I don’t share memories with, being passed a baby wrapped in pale rags through a train window and everyone weeping except the baby, was it even alive?

I remember I was at physio and she was twisting turning twisting my arm neck shoulder and there were three missed calls and my father was dead

I remember when I fell over in the street running for the 26 bus, wearing a fake leopard skin knee length coat and Austrian brown ankle boots with a little pink bow at the side of each heel

I remember that he wore glasses and so did I

I remember losing my flip flops in a Peruvian mud forest and hanging onto the bare-footed guide with tears in my eyes and a squadron of fantastical leaches carving up my calves

I remember falling in love with a moto-taxi driver in a town full of bandits as my helmet with no strap dipped and dived as we slid around corners the exhaust burning a belting stripe across my bare ankle

I remember times when I didn’t understand that chaos was the natural order of the world and now I don’t remember the way back to that world not even the first step

I remember tramping in moss soaked hills and through gum seared mist and I remember the moment I knew I’d never go tramping again

I remember laughing at his corduroy suit and then not laughing when he died

later, a day later

I remember the other man I don’t share memories with and it startles, this lack of memory, and I pick a buttercup and I say

can you see the sun under my chin

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

nest

she’d made the nest in a hollow under the red robin hedge, gauged it out with a stick over several weeks, lined it with a blanket pinched from Mrs Watson’s washing line, Mrs Watson at No.3 not Mrs Watson at No.18 she’d never nick anything from that Mrs Watson but the other Mrs Watson sow of a woman snorting and poking her nose in all sorts of business that didn’t concern her stinking bitch her mother called her snooping stinking bitch always trying to dob us in

the nest is neat and round and big enough to fit a summer calf and it’s shallow and glitters when the sun cleaves through the red leaves the glitter from the school Christmas party the year before handfuls of small shining grab me quick plastic tubes red green silver gold plucked from the box of decorations and thrust into a coat pocket when Miss Hales was busy up the ladder shouting at Sarky Simon to help her pass up the tinsel and Sarky Simon peering right up her skirt mouthing slut slut dirty slut glitter scattering through spread fingers across the yellow blanket and all over the warped wooden cigar box too with her precious everything precious box of things

at first the nest was for special occasions when she needed to think space breathe shut her eyes shut them all out her mother the school the social worker Andy in his doc marts and his stupid friendly sympathy Candy Swanson who kicked her every time she walked past and pinched pinched blue green purple into her neck and bare arms that nothing would take the pain out of them not even a half squeezed lemon

special private occasions more and more in the nest, after school before school then during school instead of school stocking up the nest with a plastic comb and an orange lipstick and a half squeezed tube of toothpaste red blue white striped her favourite and a jar for spitting the froth to keep the nest clean must have it clean not like the house the scum pit of a house her mother can’t clean won’t clean too busy shouting at Mrs Watson both Mrs Watsons and drooling in the morning and out all night passed out all day need somewhere clean soft quiet away from the passing out of her mother

lying in her nest on her back eyes half closed catching the light and glitter and the wail of the pipes Angus the piper eleven or is he twelve every Saturday down there outside the Scotmid with his tweed hat for the thrown coins and his wee kilt and his wee pink salmon cheeks he’ll make something of himself that wee lad Mrs Watson from No.18 always says and she throws him a pound sometimes twice once on her way to June the hairdresser and once on her way back and once she beckoned her, Ailish, out off the front green beckoned her with a wink and a wee finger and Ailish went over expecting a pound and held out her hand and Mrs Watson shushed and looked around and dropped a small round cool smooth into her hand and she’d run back to the nest and squeezed in through the gap in the hedge and lain down on her back and opened her hand and it was like nothing she’d ever seen only on rich and celebs the old ones not the young ones a pearl a real live fresh water pearl

It is months after they realise that she has disappeared that Andy finds the nest, finds the empty nest with its all the colours glitter and yellow blanket and layer upon layer of mouldering leaves and a single mute feather of what might have been a wren or maybe something else. Andy isn’t great on bird identification.

How he’d found the nest he isn’t able to explain, not really. Maybe it was the glitter or a flash of yellow, he says to Officer Connolly, or maybe it was when I stopped to tie my shoe lace and looked along instead of looking up. Whatever it was Officer Connolly isn’t interested.

Just kids, the officer says as Andy keeps trying to explain, tapping his finger hard on the wooden counter. The officer picks at his teeth, and shouts at a lad behind Andy to sit down sit down and wait your turn. Andy taps again. Listen to me, he says. She’s only fifteen.You’re wasting my time, mate, says the officer. You must have had a den when you were a lad. Just kids. I told you to wait your turn! Andy says, but the jar with the spit, the toothpaste spit, that’s not just kids, Officer. Aye, Andy, you’re naïve son, they need the toothpaste for the smell of the booze. Probably nick it from the Scotmid.

Andy leaves the police station. Walks the four streets to the gap in the hedge. Studies the lampposts and sign poles. Chooses the one nearest to the gap in the hedge. Pulls everything he needs out of his bag and lays it on the ground.

The MISSING poster includes her name. And a carefully pressed finger print of red gold. Glitter. And a feather for her hair.

.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Her, me

White pink tulip bursting into rose. Bowing lamp peering into what doesn’t concern. Her not me. Should have been her. I would have loved them more. Cared for them. Arranged them with choral fanfare. Harmonic grace. But she. She lets them topple. Unconcerned.

Pills to pop it all away. Her mother said no. There are other ways. Not the pills, love. I know a man. He’s very nice. Marla goes to him. I can pay for it. Really. Turn my back on her. Sun fidgeting around haloed hair.

Later she hides on the beach. Hiding in full view with all the other bobbled hats heads down watching their prints follow and fade follow and fade. Sand sliding through grit of grateful toes

Starlings all of a thither. He gave her flowers not me. Not her.  

Heh, Missus watch out! Och, Donny she made me do it she made me! Petulance from the waist down. Trip over flailing little feet. Catching her balance before she fell. Footie between duffle coats   goal!  

He’s not worth it, my mother said pouring camomile tea into a mug without a single chip. Let him go. Little Donny has chocolate ice cream all about his chin. Smeared down the belly of my coat. He know the tulips were mine. My thing. She’d always loved tulips. The way they swayed scarlet yellow in drunken armies across flatlands stolen from the sea. Rumba to the right. Tango to the left. Festival flowers. Flowers in her lair.

She’d told him about the tulips the first time. Stomping through the hush of svelting snow. Keeping him at arm’s length. She’d measured. Kept measuring. Not too close. You need to let them in, my mother always says. In different ways but she means the same. That’s why they leave you, love. You never let them close.

Look, he’d said, his hand on the fear of my arm. The first spring of blackbird. Pointing with his free hand. And so it was. I said the weirdest thing, then. I said, yes, grapes, oh and oysters – that’s the feeling. She doesn’t remember what happened next. Or whether anything happened at all. Pills to pop it all away. Sudden need to sit down. Leaning up against the hard fail of the groyne. Pulling her socks back on. Purple lilac handknit socks. Her, me. Every time.

This piece was written during a writing class based on Ann Quinn’s Berg.

Categories
Flash fiction

Don’t Marry the Fly

‘It’s not my fault, Arthur.’

‘What do you mean it’s not your fault. Of course it’s your fault, Harriet. It’s always your fault.’

‘How could it be, though. I told Heidi. Over and over.’ Harriet sighs.

‘Oh, you told her alright, the same way you tell everyone in that sad little wilting voice but you didn’t actually stop her, did you?’

‘Come on, love. No need for that tone.’ Harriet strokes Arthur’s head, feels the softness under her fingers.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘hop down here onto my lap.’ Arthur drops down from the lampshade tassels, spins a couple of times on his thread, and lands gently on Harriet’s brown satin pajama pants. He stretches his eight legs out, doubling in size. She strokes him again. Under his chin. Or where she imagines his chin to be. So soft. Softer than fur. Than velvet. Than the rosebud lips of a fairy or a princess. He looks up at her and blinks. His eyes flash gold ink.

‘If anyone’s to blame it’s you,’ she says under her breath.

‘I heard that,’ he says, jumping on to her arm. ‘There you go again. Passive aggressive blaming. If you’ve got something to say then say it to my face.’ Arthur turns his back, jumps onto the wall behind her, runs up it, lands on the ceiling and then spins down until he’s hovering in front of Harriet’s eyes.

‘Now, he says. You were saying?’

Harriet curls her fingers. Squeezes them into tight fists. Harriet would like to bat Arthur away with a finger, puff him onto the floor with a long hard breath, maybe, dare she even think it, position him carefully under her shoe and then lower her foot, ever so slowly until, with a dull crackle and crunch, he is no more.

‘I was just saying,’ she says, ‘that she’s done it now anyway. What more can we do?’

‘You’re going to let it go then? Our only daughter? Eighteen years old and engaged to that… That…’ He sputters and splutters and spins again. ‘Engaged to that toilet sniffing corpse stomping blue nosed… buzzer?’

‘Arthur, for Christ’s sake!’ The shout is out before she can stop it. The shout with its rush of air, the rush of air that catches Arthur, hurls him tornado style, spinning him across the room until he lands, on his back, on the cat’s purple and green feathered wind up mouse. The cat, waking from her afternoon slumber on the back of the couch, stands up, arches her back, and tiptoes along the back of the couch to have a closer look.

‘Oh Arthur, oh God, I’m sorry, really I’m sorry.’ Harriet is on her feet, walking across the room to pick him up but she’s too late. Arthur has righted himself and has scurried under the low mahogany-stained coffee table just out of reach of Harriet, but not quite out of reach of the cat. Harriet lowers herself onto the floor, lies down, and stares under the coffee table. Arthur’s eyes have turned a shifty shade of zinc green. He doesn’t blink. He bristles. He does a little dance. Two inches away from the stretch of Harriet’s fingers. Always two inches away from Harriet’s stretch.

‘You shouldn’t have said that, Arthur,’ she says, careful to breathe and speak out of the side of her mouth.

‘Always blaming me, aren’t you Harriet. You wouldn’t pick on someone your own size now, would you?’ Arthur scuttles backwards and forwards, jumps, and scuttles again.

‘That’s hardly true Arthur and you know it. Before. You know. Before this this thing I would have said the same. It’s not my fault you had the…’

From the hallway a loud buzz and then a jangle. The doorbell. A muted cheerful female laugh. The metallic scrape of a key in a lock.

‘That’s them,’ she says to Arthur, getting to her feet. ‘For god’s sake be polite. And don’t trap him love. I know it’s tempting. But remember the last time? The damage you did? You’ll only break Heidi’s heart. And you’ll expect me to clean it all up.’

Categories
found poetry poetry

Last Words

Protecting them, their protective wall. No regrets. It was there he found his father, waiting for him on the shoreline, as if they’d never been apart. He would write from Auckland. She called in her soul to come and see. There is something to be said for the quicker death. That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole. Mrs God rolled her eyes, taking her identical sandwich and pickles back indoors where the afternoon stretched like a cat between naps. – all sleeping the deep deep sleep of England from which I sometimes fear we will never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. Night and day. This is our place. It fucking better be. He loved Big Brother. And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman. In such an hour one stands up and speaks to the ages, to history, and all creation. Allow me. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden. Experimentalists perhaps, do after all stand out from the normal mass of human error. Just like playing boules. Excuse me. Shoot, create situations. Sorry. – everything I know is gone, and all that remains is the call of gulls and the slow insistent motion of the waters, slow and far away and barely audible, turning on the shore and on my mind. Farewell. Perhaps by the very end of his life, in 1880, he had come to believe that a people, a nation, do not create itself according to its best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge. My mother. Bless you. Brushing against each other, they both knew that they should do that only once or twice, and only when  no one was watching them. No, you go first. Jesus isn’t real. And he will not know it happened long ago, and had merely been waiting patiently for him to notice. Can I get past. That it’d all be fine. But he did not move a muscle, not until the objects around him, that had so far been merely listening, started up a nervous conversation (the sideboard gave a creak, a saucepan rattled, a china plate slid back into the rack) at which point… the desire of the moth for the star: the innocence, the virginity, the graves not opened yet for gold, the mine not broken with sledges. “It was delicious.” Could you excuse me. And the last sound we hear is of the Folly Brook, chuckling on past the Old Oak Pool, as it has done for a thousand, thousand cuckoo years, on its long journey to the distant sea. Bye, bye, you say goodbye, no you, I did, hang up then, no you hang up, no you, bye, bye.

This piece is (mostly) made up of the last lines of random books piled high on a low table in my south facing living room.

Categories
found poetry poetry

I’ve been away for a while

The cover of this issue is a painting by Tom Hammick. She was French. I’ve been away for a while. I left Fife and went to live in Glasgow when I was eighteen. The court settled for damages. In the middle of this the course of our life, I stopped and everybody got out of their car. Could you tell us about the race that’s documented in the photos? In the spring, about two weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself thinking about cholera. In Sri Lanka – this was 2017 – between a golden temple and a shop selling car seats, we found a steel-roofed shack, with, strung across the entrance and the makeshift walls, countless laminated photographs of missing people. Just at the time of the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran in 1988, an infantry platoon discovered that they were in a minefield. On 4th January 2020, a few days after the New Year celebrations, I returned from a trip around Sicily to my girlfriend’s parents’ home in Pizzighettone, sixty kilometres or so south east of Milan. Beside the rainy hog shed, the county food bank forklifts pallets of old bread, blue with deep mold and tints of February. In the first of Gus Palmer’s photographs of the morgue at the Greenwich Islamic Centre I can’t find the horizontal. In the wood I hear the beautiful call of a bird I do not know. When my father died, his sister Mary  – his twin – sent me an email. I paid him no heed at all.

This found work was produced by taking the first line from each piece in Granta 154, and finishing it with the last line in the last piece. The image is a cropped photograph of Tom Hammick’s painting from the front cover.

Categories
musings poetry

Take your seat

Present resonance happenstance heretic feather wick fourposter troll poster Animal Kingdown Jacki Weaver live from the Apollo Take your seat Jacki Weaver matriarch and septic tank Jacki Weaver sea shanty plea bargain double take triple vision seven million viewers can’t be wrong, I am not a cat I am not a cat, Imagine a string from the top of your skull to the ceiling feel the ground solid at your feet sleet sheet meat world beating supernova sputnik vaccination wars chores mores laws truth twisters mouth blisters Cornish wafers strawberry pastries sunlit uplands cornucopia of utopias, look at the unicorns look look look you’re not looking hard enough up there in the knot snot your lot will never be happy Your mind wanders that’s what minds do shoe slow flow crow more snow so much snow Keep your spine away from the back of the chair now, breathe wreath bequeath underneath the eaves bats or rats chewing on hats or cats I loved that hat wore it to the garden party Princess Ann only three feet away still have that hat or do I forced to flee up a ramp so many charity shops cops mops strops five dead six including the suicide Focus on your breath coming in through your nose exposed at the window is anyone looking adjust your slump the bump in your thoughts tripping on fallowed furrows Bring your mind gently back to the breath escort it cavort it import it, stop the steal stop the steal, time porting is not a word teleporting television the neighbours watching day time tv Jeremy Kyle must be a repeat repeat repeat repeat after me fake news fight like hell Bring the breath back all the way down and all the way back breathe into your toes your fingers no snow on that roof climate murderers, Feel the pause between the inbreath and the outbreath cat on the mat the perfect leap of faith from the cat that flew yes flew from the sill to the bed rocket man sprocket men nothing good ever comes of self flight height Feel the present stay in the present instant coffee instant noodles instant rice Uncle Ben instant thrill instant pill instant gratification edification eradication Agent Orange pretty instant burning of peasants, with you in a moment momentito nice Bring your mind back to your breath present pheasant plucked and razored the led pellets removed and turned into anklets bracelets Pretty Priti and her desperate servants of doom hostile environment battle bus what happened to our money all of our money to donors moaners rewarders shysters, Bring your attention back to the breath one hundred thousand dead we did everything we could we’ll wrap our arms around care homes Use the silence now for your own practice now now no you didn’t didn’t at all liars liars dead on fire ideas as clouds push them through a show of strength body bags shopping bags at least the dog jacket shop is still open must keep the economy moving defence immense clouds sewing seeds of need instant pleasure dead in an instant he wouldn’t have felt a thing died instantly hit and run the definition of being present.

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