Category: fiction

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Puddled

In this puddle there is a beginning, a middle, and some steam. Not just any old steam but a thin volatile funnel of pearly mist that twirls up and eastwards towards the burnt out monastery on Blackheath Hill.

Abigail, aged eleven and a half, stands in the centre of the puddle, the water so deep it’s just an inch from the top of her blue wellington boots. She cups her hands around the vent of steam, the cool damp tickling the chill of her fingers.

‘What says you?’ she coos to the drizzle. ‘What says you, Steam?’

Up the hill in the burnt down monastery the breeze bumps cascades of plump brambles against blackened granite walls and the berries sigh and simmer, their gossip hushed as they wait for the little girl to come up from the valley below.

Abigail, in her black velvet frock, white ribbons in her red pigtails, is on her own. She doesn’t have a basket for the brambles, but she does have pockets and two large navy cotton handkerchiefs. When she was ten she tried collecting the brambles in her wellington boots. On seeing Abigail’s purple and pulpy bare feet when she’d come in from the scullery that day, her Aunt Lydia swooned in a dead faint, hit her head on the squat wooden bear that kept the kitchen door propped open and never fully recovered.

Something crackles in the undergrowth in the conifer forest between Abigail and the burnt out monastery. A branch breaking or a stone tumbling. Might it be a wolf? Alas, we are in Scotland and wolves are yet to be reintroduced. The last wolf in Scotland probably died alone in a cave, tired and fed up, in around 1700. This was well before the invention of blue wellington boots and long before anyone had the audacity to name their daughter Abigail.

Nevertheless, Abigail stops messing about in the puddle and pulls her hands back from the steam. Her cheeks tighten and her hands clench to fists. Eyes are upon her, animal eyes. She knows this with a certainty unusual for a little girl that has spent most of her short life living in a pleasant suburb with a cathedral and a swing park and only comes to the country for an annual two week holiday to give her melancholic mother a break.

Should she turn her head to look to the forest with its regiment of trees and desolate carpet of decaying needles? No, that would be too obvious. She looks up at the sky. The steam has disappeared, afraid of the animal eyes or afraid of Abigail’s clenching fists or, perhaps more humdrum, it’s just burnt off in the sun that’s now blazing down behind the scorched monastery.

So now in the puddle we’ve lost the steam but we still have the beginning, the middle, and Abigail. Abigail pulls herself together. As there is no end, there are no animal eyes. Nothing to see here. She wades out of the puddle, shakes her wellington boots and skips up the path into the wood towards the fat berries waiting to be plucked.

The wolf, when he tears and rips and bloodies, is so silent even the brambles don’t notice the kill.

Image taken from Wikipedia Commons.

Categories
exercise fiction

Queue

He queues. Red coat. Green gum boots. A prune-coloured bowler hat. He queues for the bus but the bus does not come. He stands there anyway. Stomps from foot to foot. Hunkered underneath the tweed red coat grandfather had left him after the death. The family calls the death the death because the death was the death of all deaths, grandfather’s death and nobody else’s. He queues and stomps and looks at the wee woman swathed in violet blue, a yellow scarf across her cheeks. Black-eyed, the woman. Grandfather’s dead black eyes. Across from the woman a toddler alone. No mother no father no-one at all. Just a toddler that screams for the bus. No, not screams, more throaty growls, arms that wave and bare feet that stamp stamp stamp all out of sorts. He queues for the bus she queues for the bus and the toddler stamps on the concrete all out of sorts.

The burst, unexpected. A burst detergent. Bubbles all over the place everywhere. The queue jumps and leaps, grasps and snatches. Bubbles that shatter flaunt and scatter. The man wants more bubble bomb bursts. Explode over here, he shouts. More bursts and more bubbles! The bus does not come. Not now, not ever. Not a bus stop after all. A laundry shed. A shed full of bumble bubbles. The man walks off. Crosses the road. Leaves the black-eyed woman and the fowl smell of the toddler. Laundry? Pfft! No need for that!

The man has long left when the bus comes. The bus comes for the laundry and the queue and the bumble bubbles. The woman enters the bus. The bubbles enter the bus. The man cannot see whether the bare-footed toddler enters the bus or not. He walks up the road. Spots another bus stop. Rubs his prune-coloured bowler hat. And queues.

Categories
exercise fiction

Demons

Twist and curl, fist and whirl, blissed and hurl, christ. He sits cross-legged on the bare stone slabs weaving the strands into shapes, not shapes, dolls not dolls, demons (he loops his lips around the word). Demons. Demons for the local market.

Sits there in the scratchy light he pitches forward and back, pulling out handfuls of straw from the bale listening to the hale on the hot tin roof, stuffing their arms shaping their bellies gutting out their mouths with a swift gouge of his only knife.

Lays each incomplete demon out flat, tall and lean to the rear, short and rumpy to the front there in the bare room where he lives without furniture without props without comfort just the rusted out chassis of a Ford he’d pulled from the burn one November night the fish scattering the phosphorus dimpling purple green dragging it back leaving a chassis shaped gash through his field of post-wheat blue.

Gives some of them eyes, the males at least, red map pins, the child demons get green, none of them a nose or ears or cheeks although some, perhaps one in ten, the lucky ones, they clutch a three-pronged pitchfork fashioned from number eight fencing wire he cuts from rusting coils on a farm on the other side of the village.

Perches those fully spawned fiends on the chassis, hither and thither, turning them into couples each facing the other down those with eyes lording it over those without, the candle spluttering their shadows into some demented stage.

Sleeps when he’s finished his work for the night on a narrow mattress of incomplete baby ghouls the half worked shapes yet to have their mouths plowed his body flattening them into a semblance of wary hunger and furious refinement.

Does he, a sleeping man of some inordinate age in a loin cloth and a rag that may once have been a t-shirt of rainbows and unicorns, does he imbibe these infant fiends with life actual life? If he was asked and why would he be nobody else knows of the ghoulish mattress but him, he’d shake his head slowly his lips parting then pausing then pursing and closing.

Erects his cardboard sign ‘pay what you prefer’ on his grass pitch at the market with his fifty demons grinning wheat ear to wheat ear and sometimes perhaps once a month the old woman selling dried herbs in the stall beside him brings him a nice cup of chamomile tea.

Categories
exercise fiction

The early makings of Virginia

I was born on a breathless Tuesday in January 1882. My mother wanted to name me Virginia, my father Adeline. They tossed a coin at the goose for him to choose.

South Kensington was all frocks, frills and crinoline. Our nanny had an index finger missing from her left hand and a right hand too quick to slap.

From the age of three I slept not in my cot but under it. Anything to avoid the glass eye of Ivory, the woman who polished the wooden floors on her hands and knees and emptied the potties. It wasn’t her fault but she smelt like my mother’s bottom.

I was the seventh child of Julie and Leslie. I didn’t learn their names until I was six. We weren’t a household on first name terms. 

May-Ann taught me Latin and Greek from books Father kept behind glass and up a forbidden ladder. I was fluent in both by the time I was ten, surpassing both May-Ann and Father. 

We did it for the first time in the maid’s cupboard just off the women’s library. I was fifteen and her kiss was all coal hair and inky fingers and cigarette snuffle.

Of course I wanted a goose of my own. What young independent woman about town didn’t – especially one who was known to wear trousers? I named him Morris. Mother refused to let him into the house after he’d built a nest in the kitchen woodpile using feathers pulled from Father’s prayer cushion. 

Was I lonely? Not with Morris. Although I would have preferred that Morris was a Maureen or, better still, a Mariah. Morris had a tendency to squawk and lunge when things didn’t go his way. Habits that I was to first copy and then adopt for the rest of my life. 

May-Ann preferred my Latin poetry to my Greek. Amo amas amat she said without moving her lips. May-Ann’s lips were sewn together with pig bristle sutures – or so she claimed I had written in Greek. 

May be continued..

Categories
fiction

Layla on the tiles

Tiles. Always tiles. Ever since her nanna had left Layla alone in the Italian tile shop at the bottom of Rosebery Avenue in Saffron Hill with an orange lipstick, a pack of crayons and a jumbo bag of gummy bears. There was a scene with the owner, Mrs Acerbi. Flailing arms and screaming and the police arriving. 

Put her in handcuffs the crazy little dame, shouted Mrs Acerbi. Layla, aged seven and small for her age, shook her red plait and held out her wrists with a trembling lip and knees bare all a quiver. The three officers of the law backed off and stood in an orderly line to inspect Layla’s masterpiece on the Calacactta Gold Premium marble tiles – a sticky lipstick wax crayon fresco of Michelangelo’s The First Day of Creation, with Big Bird in the centre and Dougal, Ermintrude, Dylan and Zebedee as the supporting cast.

Where was her nanna, Mrs Hodge, who’d taken her there? Mrs Hodge didn’t rescue her. Mrs Hodge wasn’t with the officers of the law and the howling Mrs Acerbi or the crowd who’d stopped to peer at the fuss and were making bets with Mr Fattore on what would crack first, Mrs Acerbi’s glutinous make-up or the shop front window. 

Was this just a naughty prank, a little girl going mad with crayons? Or was there something else more invidious? We can’t glean much from the notes her father Frank took during a series of medical appointments after the third graffiti display episode in as many years.  

When I interviewed him some years ago, Frank told me that after fifteen years in the gravel pits on the excavators with no ear protection, he struggled to recall instructions if he didn’t write them down. He frowned, patting his ears when I spoke. It’s just one of those things, he said, as he handed me the notes. He was circumspect when talking about his wife. Maureen, he admitted, couldn’t write, was always working and sent Frank to school meetings, medical appointments, and anything else where Maureen’s shame might out itself.  Frank, I’ve come to realise over the two decades I’ve followed this story, is a man who wants to do what’s right, but doesn’t try beyond what fate sets out for him. 

Layla, according to one doctor, had developed a marked disinhibition for inhibition. A tick, Frank wrote, keep an eye – come to nothing – talented –  danger – don’t leave strangers – avoid temptation – healthy diet. Some of Frank’s words were indecipherable, even to Frank. His pen petered out at critical junctures. Words rose at the end of lines, giving themselves up as hanging chads. 

Following the doctor’s advice, Frank permitted Layla to desecrate one bedroom wall (he tiled it with Arabescato Vagli marble using molar pearl grout after a week of tears and smashed plates), forbade her to enter shops and galleries alone, and cajoled her into eating greens, oranges, and yellows. Maureen banned the Saturday trips with her nanna and forbade her, her own mother, to visit the family unannounced. Layla spent her weekends creating and destroying frescos, carving impassive friends out of the candle ends Maureen brought home from work, and thumbing through the art magazines that arrived from an anonymous donor.  

In her first term at secondary school, Layla wanted to draw big, spread her arms, go beyond full-size into giant. Her art teacher forbade it. Stick to your pad, Layla Carlaw, Mr Williams told her every time she reached for the sky. If I let you do it, they’ll all want to and then where will be be?  And try something other than Sesame Street and the Magic Roundabout. 

Emma, then a plump girl in wire-rimmed spectacles who won school art competitions for her miniatures of fairies, fungi, and frogspawn, would lean across and squeeze Layla’s hand. Layla’s other hand would scratch and fret the eczema on her scalp until Mr Williams moved on to someone else. Layla didn’t or couldn’t give up trying. The sores on her scalp oozed and spread.

Years wore on.

Layla developed a susurrant sacrament, laying her hands and left cheek on the mute mineral wall in her bedroom after her morning shower, tracing the veins with her fingertips, burbling incantations.

Frank continued his extra shifts for the never-ending payment damages cycle to the Acerbis. His headaches spasmed and bellowed. 

Layla’s nanna, Mrs Hodge, continued arriving at the door with large boxes and heavy paper bags and continued being sent away by the scolds of her daughter or the urgent mutterings of her son in law, her trembling arms still full of whatever she had for Layla. 

The blue pencil lines on the hall wall marking out Layla’s height continued upwards in an orderly fashion, stuttered, and stagnated to a level well short of average.

Maureen stooped and sighed, continued to stroke the growing bulge under her right arm between cleaning shifts at the Premier Inn and scrubbing the bathroom tiles whenever Layla went off-piste with a gold pastel or a black kohl eyeliner. 

In the community centre at the end of the street, neighbours pursed lips and tutted over the Carlaw’s shrill shouting and door slamming. That Carlaw family always smelled of turps, they said to me when I popped into one of their coffee mornings last year to ask about Layla. Mavis Brown, the elderly coordinator, serving tea and Victoria sponge with more clatter than was necessary, was content to go on the record. That generation of women be damned, she said. Someone should have stopped them breeding. (The cake, I must say, although a touch on the dry side, was delicious.)

Layla was sixteen, according to Emma, when rooting through her nanna’s lavender-scented lace garters and blush-nude fishnets in the cabinet beside the coal skuttle, she discovered the truth in a newspaper cutting. There, on page three, under a lurid photograph of Layla’s original tiled artistic triumph, was the story of her nanna. According to two anonymous witnesses, Mrs Shirley Hodge, aged fifty-seven, a widow with two sons, a daughter, and one grandchild, had been out the back of Mármol Italiano del Sr. Acerbi in the cement store, knickers at half-mast, with Sr. Acerbi’s large Italian hands firm on her flaccid buttocks. 

Emma is sure that no one in the family had mentioned the humiliation to Layla before then, even when Mrs Hodge, never one to miss a commercial opportunity, had gone on to set up a lucrative hot-line business as an agony aunt for women seeking the thrills of both straying and getting caught. Mr Hodge, known by everyone as Granda, who’d spent much of his life digging graves and what was left of it tending Multiflora petunias, retained a dignified silence in his beige plastic urn on the Carlaw’s mantlepiece. What did Layla make of this? You’ll need to interpret her diary entry for yourself  – a line drawing of a woman in a polka-dot bikini, her back kyphotic and her belly concertinaed, a walking stick in one hand, a packet of condoms in the other.  

 I digress. 

After being expelled from school in her final year for lacerating the underpass with bloody renditions of Bert, Oscar, and Clementine, Layla did a combination course at the local higher education college in construction and fine art. Emma was on the art course, too. The reparation bond her father was forced to post to the college was lost following damage incurred in both departments in her first year. Psychologists were hired. Mentors provided. Professionals came and saw and left. The staff room was, one senior lecturer said later, abuzz for the first time in a decade as the pro-Layla freedom camp and the anti-Layla conservation camp went head to glorious head. 

The college provided a security detail for Layla, ‘to keep her safe’. While on campus, she was followed at an indiscrete distance by two stout women in navy polyester until the student union threatened the management team with a human rights challenge.  Layla didn’t seem to care. She attended classes, achieved decent grades, developed her own adaptive fresco techniques, ate her meals alone or with Emma, and spent most of her spare time at the brutalist fountain in the quadrangle or in the washrooms, studying grout imperfections.

When she wasn’t at college or making and crafting, Layla sat in her bedroom at home on a low stool holding the stiff hand of her life-size wax boyfriend, David. Emma believes it took Layla at least six months to sculpt him. David stood, brooding and biblical, by the end of her bed, staring unseeing at the fallen oak in the abandoned children’s playpark across the road. David was naked unless Emma was visiting.

As Emma, by her own admission, was not one for the flagrant display of male genitalia, Layla wrapped her companion from the waist down in a yellow-checked towel, securing his modesty with an iridescent fish-scale brooch she’d lifted from her nanna’s drawer. This was typical of her, Emma said later in an interview with Art Monthly following her own successful miniaturist exhibition in the Hague, she was always so careful of my feelings.

Maureen died when the lump overcame her. Or maybe it was Layla’s inability to ‘stop her spoiling’ that finished her off. Frank, without Maureen to defend and preserve, ebbed into a fog of fretful mourning and hasn’t spoken to Layla or his mother-in-law since. Neither parent attended her graduation. Mrs Hodge turned up to the amphitheatre with a polaroid camera and a pink fascinator, sat in the second to front row, and stood up for several seconds too long clicking and shouting and cheering well after Layla had left the stage.

A scurrilous two-page article in the local paper the following week slammed the college for allowing a wanton vandal to graduate. It included a previously unseen picture of Layla aged six, her red plait tied with a yellow ribbon, hunched over a drawing paper on the floor by a Victorian fireplace with pink and cream tulip tiles. The source of the photograph is unknown, but I’ve been told Mrs Hodge had a fireplace like that at the time.

Eight years after Maureen’s death, unemployed with a string of sackings and three police cautions behind her, and still living with her silent foundering father, Layla came into money. The source was never clear. Premium bonds or the lottery or a series of lucky flutters at the greyhounds with her nanna or some cumulative mix of them all. Previously absent aunts and uncles were suddenly attentive. Inglorious liggers proffered safe-keeping advice and pyramid investment schemes. Layla listened only to her nanna. Design your own destination, Mrs Hodge said. Carve out what you love. 

Layla, sucking a strawberry gummy bear, wrote a list on the back of a paper plate: 

Lipstick, Crayons, Pig’s blog, Marble,  Sesame Street, Grout, Screwdrivers, Claw hammers, Torsos, Garters, Candle wax, Drawing, ReImagining, ReCreation, ReDestruction, Nanna, Magic Roundabout, David, InDependent, Michelangelo

On the front of the plate, she wrote, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ That paper plate, protected in a toughened glass case, is now on permanent display in the Design Museum in the Layla Carlaw Room.

Layla launched LC ReDestruction with a tap-dancing drag queen, a display by the local car crusher (electric SUV, darling), and a graffiti competition for the over seventies on the newly tiled exterior rear wall of her premises. The Acerbis, all agog and ancient, were the first to arrive. The brass band was valiant in its blistering efforts on Tosca, Emma handed out flutes of peach bellinis, and Mrs Hodge, now reliant on a walking frame, conducted the speeches from a smashed up wooden dais. Layla remained out of sight, reportedly etching Grover out of the Crystal White marble tiles in the disabled toilet with a Philips screwdriver and pigment pots of hematite and azurite. 

As Mrs Hodge explained to the invited guests, the concept was simple. Walk into the expansive gallery. Provide your credit card details. Select a panel of Italian marble tiles from twenty options. Put on an apron, choose your make-up, art product, tool, and sticky sweet, and get to work. Once you’ve finished your creation, LC ReDestruction recreates the effect on the wall of your choice in your home. Layla, Mrs Hodge promised, would personally seal a signature gummy bear in the upper right-hand corner of every finished work to guarantee its authenticity.

Readers – as you all know, it took off. It started with a tweet here and there by those at the opening. Not by Layla. Layla was not one for public relations or marketing, preferring, as Mrs Hodge said in her speech, to let the redestructors do the talking. From Twitter it moved to Instagram. Hollywood A Listers did redestruction selfies with Bianco Perlino bathroom panels or Bardiglio Imperiale kitchens. YouTubers got in on the act, strutting viewers through their daubings, scratchings and simperings with vacuous smiles and decorated teeth, hurling fake pig’s blood onto fake marble panels. Tenors and sopranos popped up out of retirement offering ‘sung for your pleasure’ backing vocals for #SeeMeSeeMyReDestruction. Those that couldn’t afford the divas ripped off DIY sea shanties from TikTok. Marble-cracking hammers with spangle-laminate handles sold out at B & Q. Pseudo-Defecated grout could be bought by the ten-kilo bag at Aldi, with the genuine article available at every Waitrose in the UK beside the potted plant sections. 

Fawning features appeared in Home and Garden, Country Life, and Cosmopolitan. Grand Designs devoted an entire series to ReDestruction, as middle-aged high-income couples with big hair and matching fawn slacks allowed wrecker artists into their homes. Teary-eyed by the end of the episode, they stared straight to camera, gushing about their spiritual redemolishments and incorporeal sabotage.  Layla, who refused all interviews and guest appearances, was rarefied as a prophet, a visionary, a god. Statues of her rose in Milton Keynes, Skelmersdale and Peterlee. A chalk cutting of her face in profile turned up on a hillside a mile from the Uffington Chalk Horse. 

At some point in amongst this, under cover of darkness, Layla moved out of her father’s home. Commentators said she’d gone to Brixton, Milan, or New York. Or she’d taken up with the homeless under Tower Bridge. Or she was in an old miner’s cottage in Wales, happily wrecking. Occasionally she was snapped on a bicycle near her small office in Saffron Hill, London, her dark red plait now the length of her back, her signature white anorak always too big and too loose over her small frame. 

A rumour, started by the Mail Online, surfaced about Maureen’s ashes. A cleaner swore he’d seen Layla pouring ashes from a crematorium bag into the grout mix when she was installing her new interactive exhibition in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. Layla had been crying, he said, and hadn’t let him comfort her. Told him to f*ck off when he’d approached. The Tate would not comment on the story, except to say they’d fire the cleaner if they identified him. I have been unable to ascertain whether the family ever picked up Maureen’s ashes from the funeral directors. 

Investigative reporters with more resources than this humble journalist followed the money. Mrs Hodge, the Times alleged, was building an empire around LC ReDestruction.TM Luxury peregrinations (coach, train, or walking), pre-chipped homeware, shredded clothing, mineral art products, even ReDestruction cakes and bakes all had the gummy bear seal. There was talk of shell companies and bitcoin. A limited-edition (500) of platinum hammer-proof watches with pre-shattered faces for £35k each sold out in twenty-four hours. Mrs Hodge was papped in the Four Seasons Hotel in Moscow, the Cayman Islands Yacht Club, and Annabel’s in London. Each time she had a walking frame more whimsical than the last and a rump of rowdy rinsed middle-aged men at her heel. She was never with Layla.

The backlash, when it finally thundered in, was graphite and pre-Raphaelite. Greenpeace hit out at the ‘wanton destruction of a precious natural resource that took millions of years to form’. #LaylaPlanetHater trended off and on for several weeks. The art critics, always one bend behind the curve, sniffed and censured and told everyone to move on, they’d said from the start it was plebetariat nonsense. BBC Radio 4’s the Moral Maze asked if ReDestruction could ever be Art with the clear intention that the answer was Certainly Not. One female panellist made an impassioned plea against misogyny but was cut off in mid flow as ‘off-topic’.  Enough of this, Middle England shouted. Enough of this, the Far Left agreed.

Emma and I got engaged. She proposed and I accepted. Say what you want about the age difference, it makes no odds to me. I stopped thinking about Layla, stopped following the odd story about redestruction and focussed on other projects. We moved to the country. We had a baby. She, Cleo, turned one. We invited Layla to celebrate with us, an intimate party, just for close friends. She declined. And that would have been that had Mrs Hodge not gone viral. Again.

Mrs Hodge organised a live feed statement, In Defence of Layla’s Realm, from the shade of an umbrella palm, cardboard or genuine I couldn’t tell. She kicked off by telling us, the world, that Layla was left-handed, like all creative types, and that’s why she, her loving nanna, had encouraged and protected her from the start. And then, she said, dropping her eyelids, there was that incident.

Layla had just turned seven and Mrs Hodge was babysitting. The pair were walking back to the family home, when at the other end of the street, a bus stopped outside estate entrance. A woman got out, staggered, tripped, and pawed at her stomach. The back of her coat was stained red, and red was smeared around her stockings. The woman was trying to cover the red with her bag of shopping. She struggled across the road causing some drivers to swerve and brake. Just as Mrs Hodge recognised her daughter, Maureen, Layla shouted Mum, Mum! Mrs Hodge grabbed the little girl’s hand, turned her around, and ran. 

Mrs Hodge, breathing heavily, her eyes damp, her slumping cheeks high pink, stepped closer in to the camera. She had to protect Layla, she said, and had taken her to the community centre, asked the team there to watch her for a few hours while she hurried to the house to help Maureen. There was an exhibition about Michelangelo, and a space for children to draw on paper pinned to the walls. Layla spent a couple of hours there and was taken home by the community coordinator for the night while Mrs Hodge did what needed to be done. She’s sensitive, went on Mrs Hodge, an only child with a tragic past. You can see this in her creations, her conceptions, her sculptures. She paused to clear her throat.

I implore the critics, the greenies, all of you, she said, to leave her alone. Snobs and hypocrites. Misogynists. Bullying her because she was brought up in a council house. What do they know? They’ve never picked up a hammer in their lives. The public loves her work. Every exhibition sold out. If you support Layla, bring your redestruction plans to me. I’ll see you right. And with a teary wink, the feed went dead.

Days after this live feed, a group calling themselves ReDestruction Sisters and Sinners flash mobbed several London underground stations, rendering the original tilework ruined with anti-capitalist pigment and a jack hammer. All wore Layla masks over scarlet balaclavas. The Turkish Baths in Harrogate were graffitied with lude images of savaged male genitalia and signed off with gummy bears. As the CCTV system was sabotaged on the night of the incident, no one has as ever been charged for the offence. 

Soon, at least according to the Daily Mail and that rag the Express, half the country was running amok, going the whole hog, despoiling their houses, moving on to their neighbours’ relatives’ and even colleagues’. Anything with tiles was fair game. Georgian council offices, Victorian schools, city fountains, even the snake house in Whipsnade Zoo. Politicians called on Layla to proclaim a cease and desist, to apologise for the pillaging mobs, to pay compensation, to take the blame. Layla stayed in the shadows. Kept redestructing. Mrs Hodge presided over the openings of new LC REDESTRUCTION branches in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Cardiff. The V & A hosted a pop up for three weeks in Dundee. The police kettled protestors and the pop up was shut down a week early, only to reopen again when the police were distracted by similar events in Aberfoyle and Leeds.

When Layla was finally tracked down and detained under what many human rights organisations claimed to be trumped up charges, and two years later found guilty at a trial without a jury, the foreign media referred to it as a kangaroo court. You all know what the British media said.

There are no tiles in Layla’s cell. According to a Ministry of Justice tweet it was a condition of her incarceration. A further tweet with a photograph shows the cell as elephant grey, the light scant, with a square window that looks out onto a concrete yard and a discrete electric fence. The glass is smeared on the outside with the remnants of Atlantic storms. There’s a built-in single bed with grey linen, and two white shelves above the pillow. In the right-hand corner of the photograph, we see the rear of a woman’s head and her back, the crinkled red hair in an orderly plait. The woman is wearing thick khaki canvas. Is this really Layla’s prison? Is this really Layla?  We have no way of knowing. 

Layla has been denied requests for lipsticks, crayons, and pencils by the Ministry of Justice. Further requests for Play-Doh and water colours have also been refused. Even paper plates. The Sun reports that Layla tried rubbing mashed swede onto her cell wall, which, had it stuck, would have been a milky pale umber. It didn’t stick, didn’t even stain. Later, one prison guard has claimed, she tried mushy peas, the fading green svelte of abandoned summers. It didn’t stick either. Anti-food art prison paint. Peak 2022.

Frank Carlaw has never been to visit. Neither has Mrs Hodge. Emma is the only non-family member with prison access rights. She doesn’t want the details of her visits made public. She has crowd-funded two legal challenges without success to get Layla out. But whoever detained and charged Layla, first under the Mental Health Act, and later under public order regulations and anti-terror legislation, knew what they were about. 

Layla has never done an interview or spoken in public beyond speaking to her clients. We must assume that Layla Carlaw means for her art to stand for itself. We, those of us that have followed her career, want her out of there. Alas, it looks like we’ll be waiting for decades to come. It was the institutions that got her in the end. Put at end to her art because she was putting an end to them.

Or was she?

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Mind that child

Even Tony is heading for the beach. On Giles Street, mothers haul kids out of oversized cars, men brush dog hairs off khaki cotton jackets, taxi drivers push sun-drunk women out of cabs. On Giles Street, Tony limps, side-stepping the dog shite, stepping over cracks. Careful now, careful. The bear, his mother had said, step on a crack and that dirty great bear’ll get you. He pushes past the Maxwell’s overgrown hedge, gives it a shove with his elbow. Thorns tear pink at the loose scoop of his skin. A momentary bloom of pain. The air smells of chip fat, Chinese takeaways and candy floss. Not the sea. Council tractors put paid to that. Ploughing and hoovering the seaweed off the butter-white sand every morning before the mobs arrive. The dirty great bear, his mother had said. He’d reached for her hand. For pity’s sake, Tony! And then the shove. His wee mouth popping in shock. He’d tumbled, legs scrabbling away from the bear. Did he scream? 

 A rabble of students pushes past him, forcing him further into the prickle of the hedge. All fake tans and canned laughter, blackcurrant aftershave and plastic bags of cheap booze, shorts right up their arses. Rude wee shites. Feels in his pocket for his folding knife. Strokes the wooden handle. Can’t beat a cheese piece cut from a polished blade. Remembering that knife grinder in the leather apron, shouting his wares as they got home from school. Flustered mothers sending running sons out with blunt steels. All the sons but Tony.

A blackbird lands on a garage roof on the other side of the street, bursts too much beauty too much tune over the whole damn lot of them. His father running his thumb along the freshened steel, the oozing blood an obedient pulsing track. Tony pauses, leans hard on the iron gate at No.5, catches his breath. A woman squeezes past him, her fat hip soft on his. A hot rush of human touch. His free hand slips to his groin. She’s sour sweat and Persil Automatic, belly cut off at the midriff with a purple t-shirt proclaiming GOD. GOD? No, DOG damnit. His mother swore it was the devil that summoned his father every weekend to the dog races. He wouldn’t have gone there on his own, she whispered. But it was God that sent his father home with an empty wallet and sick-sweet vodka sighs. Also fists.

He pulls his hand up from his groin. That sound, Greensleeves? He frowns, looks around. An ice-cream van pulls in, turns and parks by the promenade. That summer of the bear there’d been an accordion player bashing out Greensleeves. With a three-toed monkey and a red felt hat and a moustache that curled twice around each ear. His sister sucking on the stick of blue rock with black lettering down the centre that he couldn’t yet read. 

And now, look at that. A wee girl running towards the tinkling van on the other side of the street, a pink balloon tied to her gold plait, a note clutched tight in a pale hand. She is, perhaps, five. She jumps every crack. She knows. She knows about the bear. She beams for ice-cream. His father had held him low above the slam of the beer-froth waves. Swinging him hard side to side. Lower and lower until the sea was grasping at his back, yanking down his shorts, soaking his bare bum. ‘Heh Grandad,’ a bloke says to him, ‘going to hang onto that all day?’

Tony lets go of the gate. Shuffles aside. He hauls up his dodgy leg. Steps over the first crack, drags his leg, steps over the second. His father shouting and laughing. His sister calling from the safety of the sand, her hand tight in their mother’s. ‘Me, Daddy, now me!’ Tony praying away sharks. Tony dribbling fear spittle on his father’s wet denim sleeve. If he doesn’t step on a crack, the blackbird will survive the winter. If he doesn’t step on a crack. The wee girl stumbles, twists to look at Tony, smiles, regains her step, runs again. His father scolding his mother. He’s got to learn, Agnes. Stand on his own two feet. Don’t molly coddle him. His mother replying, her voice stuck on tremble. Show him some love, Arthur. He’s only five. Tony crouched in the cupboard under the stair with the reeking mop and the scum-rimmed bucket, covering his ears. His sister sat on the kitchen table sweeping a finger round the cake mix, her face a muddy chocolate blur.        

He’s tempted by the path that turns into the Samaritans, swept clear and wiped of sin. His dodgy leg aches. He checks his feet. Both feet on the crack. No, no. Oh Jesus, no. His feet together all neat over the crack. His full weight through the buttercup in the crack. The blast of a horn. A shriek from the blackbird. Every window from every Victorian house leaning in, aghast. The wee girl on the road. Red skirt and white socks. A pink balloon, a golden plait. Tony wobbling on the crack, reaching for the Samaritans sign, fists punching off the bear. The wee girl on the centre white line of the road. The driver’s eyes rolling white. Two white eyes slingshot black through the tinted windscreen of the black truck. Crying. Not his crying. Greensleeves trilling and jivvying. Didn’t cry over his mother’s missing hand even as his feet jerked and thrust away from the bear. People screaming police ambulance police! A herring gull swooping down beside him, stabbing a red crisp wrapper from the gutter, lifting off, giving up the bag in flight. All about him coconut sun cream and laughter, stalled. Taking off in the wind, the red crisp bag, so high, higher, spiralling down over the wee girl on the road, the wee girl spreadeagled face down on the road, so much noise in so much hush. Tony’s shoes glued to the crack. A Velcro strap come undone, over the canvas fade a loose tongue. 

Image by John Purvis.

Categories
fiction musings

Notes on a scandal

Once upon a time a queen died. She was 96 years old and she died in a big old castle in Scotland in 2022. The Queen, it is said, was a constant rock throughout her 70 year reign over her subjects, which isn’t hard because if a rock isn’t constant, it’s probably not a rock. She had blue eyes and an enchanting smile. She dressed like a stick of Blackpool rock and her hats were always the same colour as her frocks. She even had matching handbags but nobody knows what was in them, if anything at all. She liked horses and corgis and she shot birds out of the sky that had been especially bred just for that. She made sure that many laws that applied to her subjects didn’t apply to her or her land but she was the Queen so you be the judge on whether that was right or wrong.

It is said that one of her dying wishes was to see the end of Prime Minister Johnson, a flabby man that didn’t dress well or own a comb and had so many children even the Queen’s Mathematician couldn’t count them. She didn’t want him dead of course, just out on his ear.

Since the Magna Carta, a paper that says royals can’t be naughty and abuse their power, queens and kings have had to be careful with prime ministers. They don’t have to like them, though. This queen, Queen Elizabeth II, she thought Prime Minister Johnson was a bampot.

Prime Minister Johnson had made the Queen sad by having parties when the Queen’s husband died during the plague. He also made life a bit embarrassing for her by advising her to suspend the Parliament. He did this to stop Members of Parliament asking difficult questions about the Government’s crazy plan to leave the European Union (known as Brexit). Leaving the European Union would cause all sorts of problems for the people and animals and make many of the people cry but the Government said this was just ‘project fear’ and the people who didn’t want this Brexit were ‘talking down this great country’. Later project fear came to pass but that’s for another time when we look at the break up of the United Kingdom.

Anyway this suspension, known as prorogation (that was a big new word for lots of people in the country), was all very humiliating for the Queen because she ordered the suspension on the advice of the Johnson government and then the highest judges in the land said naughty naughty, that was against the law. What was a queen to do?

It was a man called Pincher, who was said to have groped two people at a dinner party (groping is a VERY BAD THING) that eventually brought Prime Minister Johnson down, not the naughty suspension of Parliament or the plague parties or any of the other one thousand and one scandals.

The United Kingdom was a funny old place then and the people were coming out of a plague that killed 190,000 and you just never knew what mud would stick and what mud would slide but either way a mud pie was a mud pie and we all liked slinging them, right?

So the Queen’s dying wish came true and the Queen said goodbye to Prime Minister Johnson and hello to Prime Minister Truss who wasn’t elected by the people but planted by an evil group of plotters who wanted to make the rich richer and the poor starve and freeze. Prime Minister Truss became famous on Twitter for her footballer curtsy and her witch’s hat and her strange fascination with cheese and pork markets.

After she said hello to Prime Minister Truss the Queen died and the people got a new king, King Charlies III. Some people thought that Prime Minister Truss poisoned the Queen but nobody dared say it out loud because in those days any old thing was treason even standing in the street holding a blank sign.

The Queen loved her subjects, and she also knew that all 68 million of them enjoyed a queue. So the Queen, whose favourite pastime was playing Snakes and Ladders with real snakes and real ladders, decided to gift her people a queue. This gift was to make up for the one thousand and one scandals under Prime Minister Johnson and the decimation of public services and the bedroom tax and all the sewage in the sea and rivers and the fact that people had to go to food banks and that fat cat landlords had got fatter and fatter and climate change was destroying everything and low traffic neighbourhoods were a war on the motorist. The Queen wasn’t that bothered about climate change but her son Charles was so she threw that in for good measure.

So the Queen prepared to gift to her people the longest most respectful queue in the world as part of her funeral arrangements. A queue for the Guinness Book of Records. A queue fit for the 21st century. A queue fit for the fifth longest-reigning monarch ever (Louis XIV beat her by two years and was more stylish by a country mile). The problem was she had to die to make the queue.

The Queen was very religious and although she was a Christian we don’t know if she prayed to the God of Queues. The God of Queues is interfaith and was available to everyone in the United Kingdom no matter what their religion or creed. We are still learning about the ceremonies associated with the God of Queues and whole departments in universities are dedicated to researching these curious rituals. The Queen wanted to make a queue to die for and she must have planned it for a long time, or at least have had her servants plan it. The Queue, for it had a capital Q just like the Queen, became a Thing.

There was an Edinburgh Queue and a London Queue but I refer to them here simply as the Queue. Both of these Queues involved people standing in a line for a very long time waiting to see a coffin with the dead queen. The coffin was closed and so the people could only see a box not a dead queen but the people didn’t mind this, they wanted to see the box.

Some famous people made sure they were seen by the box in their best hats. Prime Minister Truss wore a witch’s hat. The wives of the Queen’s grandsons wore large wide-brimmed black hats even though it wasn’t summer. A little princess wore a boater hat last seen in a children’s book in 1867. A lot of men wore funny hats that you have probably seen in museums.

Back to the Queue. The Queue had its own micro-climate, its own App, fans, critics, fawning journalists, tickets, security, sonnets, experts, anthems, selfies, signs, joining instructions, an unwritten constitution, pavement games, Dunkin-donuts, dancing police officers, commemorative memorabilia, three French hens, Twitter threads, TikTok memes, pickpockets, B-list celebrities, Facebook adverts, has-been footballers, jumpers, hipsters, bedazzled toddlers, history makers, history takers, dog creches, fish and chips, chicken salads, gin flasks, tea flasks, tea dances, felafels in wraps, Marks and Spencers hampers, bottled water, first-aiders, blank signs, sugar free Pepsi, men that were dragged off by the police, women that were followed by the police, hawkers, snake-oil merchants, litter-pickers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, socialists, monarchists, marxists, scientists, florists, breakfast TV has-beens, and a lot of shite spoken about very little at all.

The Queen, a wee old lady who died of wee old age and gifted her Queue to the masses, would have been thrilled.

Categories
fiction monologue

Lizzie

The queen is dead. Heavy shite. Saw it coming. Told you she was on her last legs. Told you two weeks ago, pal. Course I did. That wee shuffle. Practically fell out of her baffles. You calling me a liar, pal? Another pint, pal, aye, Tennents. Poor thing. Couldn’t even get back to Windsor for the end. Imagine dying in this shithole. Hardworking right up to the line. Dedicated. True patriot. Don’t make them like that anymore. Must have broke her heart to see Boris go. Judases the lot of them. Best thing ever happened to Britain Boris. Not that Truss is bad. Quite the opposite. But shouldn’t have come to this. Seven quid? For a pint? You a bampot or what? Bring on the tax cuts. What do you mean I don’t pay taxes? Boris would’ve cut them if it hadn’t been for that out of touch Sunak. Couldn’t even put petrol in someone else’s car. Jumped up wee bawbag. Him and his green card and his snickering wife. Most overtaxed country in the world Britain. Lost our backbone. Nats put this country on its knees. Rubbish everywhere and now the rats. Ma poor Mam dying waiting for an ambulance after the rat bite. You don’t believe me, pal? Place was swarming with the fat wee vermin. Saw the toothmarks myself. Puncture wounds that neat could have been a serpent. Everything broken is broken by the nats. All that oil in the north sea and the nats still taxing the shite out of petrol. Change the subject? I haven’t even started, pal. National Mourning, it’s like the sky’s fallen, pal. I’m in National Mourning. Move your head, pal, don’t wan’t to miss it. Fine curtsy and everything by Lizzie there. Just the way I like it. Not like that robot May doing the lumbago to Prince Harry. Or was it some Saudi prince? Not overdressed either. Just the right humbleness. Suits her, black. I’ll tell her that, first time I write. She could do with something to hide her neck though. Scrawny when they’re over thirty. Scarf maybe. Or one of those velvet chokers with a dangly silver bit. Didn’t I tell you she was on her way out? You don’t remember, pal? Course I did. The colour of her hands. All grey around the wrists. Dead giveaway. Two Lizzies together. Dream team. Of course that’s her diamond. Better off here, be nicked otherwise. Anyway all above board. Salt and Vinegar, no, not Cheese and Onion, plays havoc with ma heartburn. Would’ve been a dream team. Lizzie Squared. And her eyes. I could see it in her eyes. Clouded, you ken, like she was jetting off to the milky way. Joining her Philip. Now he was a man’s man. Said it how it was. None of this woke shite, pal. Clean shot at the pheasants every time. Gave him a bad press they did for saying what’s what. All that bollocks about Andrew that lassie was making it up. That idiot journalist. What was her name? Emma something? Got sacked anyway. Heard that on good authority. Could see it in that lassie’s eyes. Mingin wee gold diggers those American kids. One sniff of a prince. What? Course he isn’t a nonce. Not with a mother like that, pal. Her Maj got the new PM over the line. Slipped away. Glad I got that last letter to her. Would have been comforting reading those words. Good at writing I am. Ken Charles would make an arse of it. Pompous pond life. Sucker even gets booed in Edinburgh. The way he treated Our Di. Our Di. People’s Princess. Should have been thrown out then. Defrocked. What do you mean that’s priests? Don’t contradict me, pal. You got Candle in the Wind on the juke box, pal? Barry tune that, barry. Remember that stuff about the tampax what a shitey wee jessie.  Told her that myself in some of my letters. Go straight to Will, I said. Jump a generation. Kept saying. Women need told things a few times for it to sink in. Didn’t get a reply but she’s a busy woman Her Maj so no hard feelings none at all.  Aye, pal if you just wipe the table down a bit. Toasting our Maj, need a clean table! Couldn’t get to the coffin what with the gammie leg and all. Hero Her Maj hung in there to the bitter end. Poor Lizzie. Shouldn’t blame herself. She will, though. Decent woman. Human, you ken what I mean? Caring. Going to put stuff right. All those trade deals and everything. Cheese wasn’t it? Put us on the straight and narrow. On the global map. Growth and what was it? Proclivity, that’s it. Won’t take no shit from no one especially that Nicola. Aye dead right to just ignore her. Polite way of putting it. Lizzie Truss, fine name for a fine leader. I mean they were gunning for Boris. All of them. Not Her Maj but that Sturgeon, Salmond, all of them. That snidely wee Javid. That time Sturgeon snubbed Her Maj. Didn’t even curtsey or nothing. Refusing to let her in the parliament. Vile wee munter. BBC didn’t even report it. They weren’t going to let her in after independence. What pal? Course that’s nae a lie. Apologised for her in one of my letters. Well not for her. You ken what I mean, pal. Stopping her at the border. Imagine. Pond life. Of course it’s true. You’re either not looking or you’re stupid, pal. That woman devoted her life to this country and they were going to boot her out just like that. Marxist wee shites. Taking the castle and looting the jewels. Sturgeon that stopped ma benefits. Aye denied it but we all know. What do you mean it wasnae her, course it was, pal. And her taking dark money too. Hiding behind them fancy shoes. Who goes to work in shoes like that? Can’t even get the traffic flowing. Bloody cycle lanes holding everything up. Can’t even get parked in ma own street. Even refused to put Her Maj on Scottish bank notes. Pathetic. They wanted her off the passports, too. Sent her one of ma passport photos in a letter. Women like to see a face behind a name. Shed a tear when I heard the news. More than a tear. I greeted, pal. Proper greetin. We all did. Bet she was pissed to die in Scotland where the nats hate her. Aye, all pretendy now. Gushing. Don’t’ know what I’ll do without her. Got ma jubilee mug, though. What, you don’t have a jubilee mug, pal? You glaikit wee shite! Only the one chip after all these years. Charles and all that shite about the climate and tampax. Jesus we could do with some more warm in Scotland what with the nats cutting off the energy and free tampax for everyone. Scunnered the economy the pricks. We’ll rue the day that’s what I say you ken we’ll rue the day the queen is dead.

Categories
blog fiction musings

On beauty

I am not beautiful. I know this because a damson-faced man in a sad silver Mercedes (circa 1990) called me a fucking wee slag. Fucking wee slags are not beautiful. Especially when they’re the other side of fifty-five. Damson-faced men with concertina-slabbed bellies know a thing or two about beauty. They practically invented it. There they squat in the spill of an autumn morning, their foxy grey y-fronts cutting deep circumspect lines where their waists might have been. Damson-faced men drive with a psoriasis-spun elbow out of the smudged grease of a window that no longer shuts, not even close.

I am not beautiful. I know this because a tall beautiful man I lived with took it upon himself to grab me, to force me up against our kitchen bench, to push so hard my hand, of its own trembling accord, reached around behind me for a knife I knew I couldn’t use. This tall beautiful man had history. Her turquoise violation lingered for days in amongst crisp white sheets and reclaimed hardwood floorboards.

I am not beautiful. I know this because a shorter beautiful man with skin woven from chitins grew bored of our planned life together, ending it after a scramble of life decisions already made and briskly undone. Still, this shorter beautiful man continued to play me a bit-part, pulling my knee-strings, indispensable for walking, How those of us who are now ugly clamour for a nod or a touch from those who remain beautiful, refuting the adage that beauty is only skin deep, how can it be when they have everything and we have nothing?

I am not beautiful. I know this because I have a job in a building with a toilet mirror that pitches my lower lip, that punnets my cheeks, that reptants my neck (is that even a word?). Mirrors in shops are liars, we all know that. They groom us and swoon us, shaking us down into frocks we don’t need, careening heels that will murder us on escalators (manslaughter at least). But office mirrors? Are even they in the misogyny game now?

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Coiled Snake Inn

It hangs there, the sign, you know, like in the movies. A bullet hole through the centre of the o. Peeling green paint and its corking curls. The left hand chain rusted through, swinging loose, free. The sign cockahoop and clanking.

She digs wax out of her ear and rolls the soft orange yellow into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. Flicks it to the ground with a spit and a whistle. Squeezes her thighs into the horse’s flanks. She hadn’t meant to bring the gun, not this time. Christ, she barely knows how to hold the thing never mind load it but she’d said, her mother had said, ‘Laura he’s dangerous, that husband of yours,’ and so she’d saddled up, grabbed the gun from her father’s safe, and ridden into town cloppety clop, clippety clip.

Grit blows up into her eyes, she rubs, rubs again, the sun is a pink scald on the back of her neck, and she is across the road from Coiled Snake Inn with its o shot out and its S bleached out and the dot above the i lost in a crack or a flake or a gun blast or maybe all three.

Picture the scene. An empty dirt street lined with wooden shacks and their wildly-painted jaunty lean-tos, a dark-haired woman with thin lips and a smooth moustache in a blue check shirt astride a palomino or a bay or a fleet-bitten grey, take your pick, her gunpowder eyes fixed on the batwing doors of the only saloon in town, a bunch of tumbleweed rolling on past (that perfect gif), the rifle loose in her lap, the horse dancing, up on its toes, cloppety clop, clippety clip.

The tumbleweed is in amongst the horse’s hooves and the horse rears and Laura drops the rifle, metal on metal as the gun and horseshoes spark and clash, there’s a shout and a scream, the audience grabbing at each other in the dark, sucking salt sweet popcorn into gloating cheeks, a middle-aged woman choking on a Malteser, actually properly choking, CALL AN AMBULANCE someone’s shouting in the velvet pitch of the old town cinema, the one with the horses tethered outside, even someone’s pig, I mean Jesus H Christ who brings their pig to the movies?

The truth is Pete Crab Feet wanted to bring the sow in, even offered to pay her ticket, ‘Come on, love,’ he’d drawled to the usher ‘she’ll sit on my lap Daisy she’s as good as old gold,’ and the usher saw red and banned them both and now there’s Daisy and Pete Crab Feet both haltered up on the railings outside the One Tree Dominion in amongst the horses, and inside the woman who chokes on the Malteser has heaved it out with venom-spiked phlegm.

Laura’s horse is rearing up and bashing its pure white head on the Coiled Snake Inn sign with the o shot out and the sign falls with an alrighty clatter and the audience roars and Laura’s man staggers out through the batwing doors, out of the saloon, out into the platinum scald of the afternoon, bow-legged and randy-eyed and he trips over the unloaded gun and falls under the flashing hooves of the rearing wall-eyed horse and takes a fatal blow to the head and the cinema audience roars and cheers and the usher shouts LIGHTS UP FOR ICE-CREAM SALES.

Wrapper rustles fade out, the light dims, the audience shifts and shuffles, eyes blink and pupils adjust, the usher heaves open the plum velvet curtains and there’s Laura on the dirt eye to eye with the dead man who raises an arm, raises a fist, a flash of steel, and Laura’s horse drops to its knees, down on the road, puts itself between the dagger and sweet Laura and the audience sucks in an audience-size breath and there’s a pig-shaped squeal and in bursts Daisy, Daisy the sow, Daisy settling herself in the front row in the best seat, directly in front of Malteser woman right at the critical point and someone’s calling the manager, the usher, anyone, and on-screen there’s blood all over the horse’s white head, and Daisy the sow has found the choked out Malteser and has sucked it straight up her left nostril, all attention’s on the pig, what do you know, what do you know?

Credits roll.

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