Category: fiction

Categories
fiction

Skipping

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

And so it was with Janis and him.

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

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

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

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

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

And into the skip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her appendix, coiled curious in a plastic specimen jar.

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

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

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

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

She overfills the bastard, that’s for sure.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battering him until his face is an empty hollow wound.

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

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

marriage

This story is dedicated to my good friend Liz Moir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

so ordinary

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

That poor woman and her poor child.

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

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

That poor woman and her poor child.

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

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

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

That poor woman and her poor child.

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

Ball. Ball.

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

Jacob nods and shifts his eyes to the sea.

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

She was sorry, terribly sorry.

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

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

That poor woman and her poor child.

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

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

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

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

To remove his pants would not be ordinary.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Old Mr Rasmus

He sits in the shade on what’s left of the sawn-off log towards the north west boundary of the park. Knees up around his chest. The breeze, still bitter, is at his back, round his kidneys. They ache. Tommy tightens his scarf. Should have worn a thicker coat.

The log is being devoured, oh so slowly, from deep within its interior. Trickles of spewed out wood sit in miniature pyramids beneath Tommy’s feet. He senses, rather than feels, the vibrations. The gnawing. The microscopic mandibles. The marching and carrying and breeding and laying and hatching and marching again. He’s out of sight of the other folk drifting around the park, behind the raspberry canes and the blackcurrant bushes and the gooseberries that the kids never dare pluck because of Old Mr Rasmus.

Old Mr Rasmus is, of course, not a man but a tree, a great gnarled bowed overhung overwrought weeping creature that spits tears and fires needles and curses in the wind and sighs in the sun and sends little children to their certain death in the shallow pond under the willows by the swings.

One child has died in the pond. One that Tommy knows about anyway. But it doesn’t stop the fear of Old Mr Rasmus running through generations like perilous DNA. It was sixty years ago, maybe even seventy, and only folklore provides the details that vary on the who tells and the season of the telling and whether the teller is anywhere near Old Mr Rasmus at the time.

Wee Kathie is the expert with the lowdown. It was an awful affair, according to Wee Kathie, she being not that wee but being the daughter of Kathie Ronald, one of several Kathies in the area, and there’s a need to discern who is who. Wee Kathie is pushing 75, crooked with spondylosis, a proper fairy tale limp and a mouth that won’t stop gobbing.

Wee Kathie was there on the day, so she says, sitting demure, her words, all of these are her words, under Old Mr Rasmus, with her aunt Mathilda, her Uncle Ben and her cousin Big Donald. Big Donald would have been ten, eleven maybe. A soft spreading tummy on the lad, fat pink cheeks and a scramble of ginger curls damp around his forehead and pinned back behind his ears.

Aunt Mathilda is pouring thick dark tea from a metal flask for her and her husband Ben, and Wee Kathie is pouring home-made ginger beer for her and cousin Big Donald. Woman and girl pouring, man and boy waiting to be served.

It was like that in those days, probably still is, Wee Kathie says, pausing to hoik and spit in the docken leaves behind her under the oak tree, or to blow her nose hard into an already used tissue in the community shop, or to take her tea two sugars no milk, hen, in both hands to hide the trembling and stop the spilling.

Well they are both pouring and Uncle Ben is leant back on the big green and black tartan blanket, borrowed from the sofa in the front room, leaning back on his rolled up tweed elbows, taking a puff of his pipe, when there is the most almighty scream.

Jesus wept, Aunt Mathilda says and the spouting tea shoots across the blanket and scalds Wee Kathie’s bare knees. Wee Kathie shrieks and in turn dodges and twists and the spouting ginger beer shoots across Big Donald’s belly and into the groin of his shorts. Looked like he pissed himself he probably did, her eyebrows raise on the telling. Another scream, this one different, louder, even more blood curdling.

Both screams from over there, Wee Kathie always pauses at this point and waves a hand in the general direction of in front of her. By the pond. Well of course we get up and we run. Run towards the screams. All four of us although Aunt Mathilda isn’t’t that fast on her feet what with her good shoes and her Sunday dress and not wanting to leave the best blanket unattended you couldn’t trust anybody in them days not even on the Sabbath.

Tommy rocks back and forward. Tips his head back and stares up at Old Mr Rasmus. The branches spin and jitter in the breeze. Something jumps up up leaping from branch to branch. Needles whirl to the ground. A couple land on his knees. A squirrel? Too fast and too camouflaged to see. The tree smells of disinfectant. The stuff he used to clean floors with. Before pine went out of fashion and they all moved to peach and bleach.

It was such a sunny day, you know, warm, and the park was full of folk, families mainly and when we get to the pond, at this point she always drops her voice, well, you couldn’t believe it.

There’s a boar, you know the black ones with the bristles and the patches of pink and the great tubular snout that is iron-fisted in its strength that boar is standing in the pond with the Keenan’s wee lad under its front trotters, only three he is, that boar, it has him face down in the water and it’s pushing him down pushing pushing, and the boar is roaring and stamping and no one can get near all of them men running into the pond and trying to haul the boar off but it’s too late far too late, that boar did for him, Bob Archer’s prize boar killed wee Jamie Keenan right there in front of us all.

Tommy hugs his knees tighter in. A brown ant crosses his red sneakers, then another and another. Several seem to be carrying tiny grains of white rice. A chain of ants with work to do. He doesn’t have work to do, not this week, not any week. He shakes his feet and the ants keep going. Sticky feet cling-ons. Ants so busy they don’t even notice they’re trucking over his shaking shoes. Him so out of work he doesn’t even notice the day of the week never mind the time.

There’s a plaque on Old Mr Rasmus, about as high up as a small boy could reach on tiptoes. It doesn’t mention the boar, or the wee lad by name. It’s wooden, square, dulled coffee brown with age, the size of a large dinner plate. It just says ‘Prayers’, likely done with a hot black poker, and there’s an outline of what could be a balloon on a string. The plaque is right there on Old Mr Rasmus, like the tree was somehow involved.

But how come the tree, anyone who can think things through in logical steps always asks Wee Kathie in a tone challenging enough for enquiry but not enough to be rude.

Tommy plays through the possibilities. The boar hiding behind the tree. The boar hiding in the tree. The boar waiting to take its chance.

They say Old Mr Rasmus helped the boar, Wee Kathie says, rubbing behind her back with fingers that have long since lost their shape and willingness to scratch. Wee Kathie stops then. She’s got things to do. People to see. Honestly she doesn’t know why she gabs so much.

No one can remember who first found the plaque or even went it went up. You see, says Wee Kathie on other days, no one went to the park for a year or two after that, not even the men with their pipes, certainly not the women. The women took the tram across town, kept the children close. Bob Archer gave up the pigs. No one spoke of the Keenan lad, no one mentioned his name. You didn’t in those days, Wee Kathie says. It was awfully bad luck. No one wants to be touched by that do they. The Keenans, well they moved away. Some said they went to Airdrie, others mentioned Paisley. Either way, they needed a fresh start. You would, wouldn’t you.

Tommy studies Old Mr Rasmus. His bark, his crooks, his knots, his intertwines. He spots his own face up where the trunk separates in two. It’s definitely him. The square jawline. The drooping eyelids. The right ear with its torn lobe. Wee Kathie’s face is further down. He sees the knitted hair. The mouthy lips, the neck too puffed up by thyroid.

And just below, to the left of what might be Wee Kathie’s shoulder, the savage curl of a boaring snout. Around its nostrils a glimpse of bristles. Thick boorish whiskers that stub across its face. Above the snout drilled out holes that are surely eyes. A bee hovers, buzzes, and disappears into the left hole. A fly lands on a protrusion – what must be a tongue. Down on the ground dirt is kicking up on its own. The prints on the ground are cloven. There’s no doubt about that.

Old Mr Rasmus grunts and rumbles. His needles blather and gab. The ants on Tommy’s shoes about turn and march towards the pond. All of them gone. Not a single straggler. Tommy stands up, shakes his jacket. Takes a step towards the trunk.

From deep within Old Mr Rasmus a throaty gargle. A whine that starts shallow and ends deep. A slice of bark falls to the ground. Then another. And another. The Prayer plaque trembles and loosens, its right hand screw falling, landing in the soil that is still digging itself out of the ground. The plaque stills, skewiff.

The smell has changed. From disinfectant to sulphur. Sulphur and urine and shit.

Behind Tommy a rustle, somewhere beyond the raspberry canes. He turns. A small face in amongst the leaves. Blue eyes. A red sunhat. Old fashioned somehow. A chubby hand reaching towards him. Something like pond weed in his grip.

Old Mr Rasmus splitting and cracking. A terrible rupturing roar.

Tommy thrown to the ground by a stinking heaving bristling gallop. Left winded on his back across the log. His head leaking thick sticky blood.

The shriek of a small boy.

And then an adult.

Jamie!

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Irene

She’s standing staring into the window. Nose pressed hard on the glass. Steam builds up in the shape of her face and every few seconds she wipes it away with a tissue, and presses harder. The glass is uncomfortable, too cold, but it doesn’t deter. If anything, it makes her more determined.

The two women inside the shop, those with the name badges and the pursed tangerine lips and the pencilled American tan eyebrows and the tight electric green pencil skirts and the arms that fold firm across large white satin covered chests when they don’t get their own way, those two women, they’ve noticed her. They stop fidgeting and faffing and pinning the ivory gown in the centre of the shop to stare back at the elderly woman hard up against their window display.

Irene doesn’t catch their eyes. Irene has learnt from experience that it is a mistake to catch anyone’s eyes but the eyes she needs. Especially shop assistants. Best thing is to keep going. Keep leaning in. She switches her weight from one leg to the other, puts her shopping down on the pavement, and heaves her bosom to the glass. Her breasts flatten, and the bulge of her stomach moves towards her hips. Behind her, the voice of a small boy. What’s that lady doing, Mummy, is she trying to get in? Shhh, she hears a woman say. It’s rude to stare.

Irene moves her nose from side to side, up and down. Does a little jig. The two women in the shop have stopped fretting over the gown and have moved towards Irene, but kept behind the window display, the mannequin bride with the crimson wedding dress and the mannequin mother of the bride in violet teal tulle. Irene lifts her arms up, flattens both hands on the glass. She’s a glass angel, spreading her wings. Her nose is blue white disappearing into the gap between her cheeks.

Irene feels a crowd building behind her, muttering and whispering and rustling with the artificial click clicks of camera phones. Then a cooling of sound and an authoritative voice.

What’s all this then, the male voice says.

Irene presses her knees to the glass, swivels her eyes towards the crimson robed mannequin bride. The perfect breasts, the beautiful calves, the long blue lashes, the pure curving smile of the pouting lips, the impossibly held in waist. That colour, crimson, though, it’s no good with the model’s skin. Irene is skilled with colours and that dress is all wrong for that woman. Irene wore crimson once. Low cut and above the knee, a white chiffon train, scarlet lips, green eyeshadow and a shimmering ruby in her crown. She walked a crimson walk, talked a crimson talk, and danced with a crimson king.

Move back everyone, move back.

Hand on her shoulder.

Irene presses still further into the glass. Plants her old feet firm and far apart. Resistance is everything. She is resisting.

The two shop assistants have backed away. Put the counter between Irene and the glass and the mannequin bride in the wrong coloured outfit. One fidgets with the pile of white tissue paper. Another is filming Irene with a large phone.

Step away, Madam, you’re frightening the other customers.

Irene doesn’t answer. She kicks her foot hard backwards into the officer’s shin. He gasps and clucks his tongue.

I said step away, Madam.

She’s wearing the wrong dress, Officer.

What do you mean the wrong dress.

It’s Miranda, there in the crimson gown. It’s all wrong. Does nothing for her skin tone. Makes her look dead. She’d be far better in brink pink.

The officer’s hand comes down on Irene’s shoulder. The fingers tighen through the thick of her wool coat.

She kicks him again. Another gasp. He lets her go. A voice from the crowd says something about leave the old lady alone, she’s nay harming no one.

Irene taps her finger on the glass. Tap tap. Over here. Tap tap. The mannequin bride turns to look at her. Catches her eye. Irene motions to the gown. Shakes her head and her hand with a no, no.

I know, the mannequin bride’s lips move. They made me put it on. I much prefer the salmon pink.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

thongweed

Nobody says a word. I mean, would you? I push my way into the circle and it widens to let me in then closes in again. The way a puddle pulses out and in out and in when you drop a stone in it. There he is, naked but for the faded yellow swimming trunks and mismatched socks, one brilliant white, one olive green, face down on the sand, spread-eagled, his long dark hair thick with limpets and winkles and thongweed.

Muttering.

Call me old fashioned but I prefer my corpses dead. And silent. But this bloke, well, he won’t shut up. The crowd had gathered by the time I got there. Encircled him, the way it does a belly dancer or a pair of prize boxers or a princess bride. The crowd gives him space, mind. A good four metres so the circle must be eight metres in diameter at least. The safe distance may, of course, be for the smell, not the respect. For he smells, alright. Not so much in a nauseating dry retching sort of way, but more fantastical, out of this world.

Ever wonder what a mermaid smells of? Well this is it. Salt, brine on the spine of the wind, Nori seaweed served up with California sushi rolls, the sugar dusting sweetness from a candyfloss machine several metres downwind. Undertones of arcades, slot machines, of a Scottish summer, of vinegar on chips, of a long sunny beer-riven day that isn’t quite warm enough but taps-aff anyhows.

Muttering.

The circle is silent but for the clicking and burring of camera phones. Can they not leave him alone, the fully sprawled man? A man in one of those swimming dressing gown robes that everyone seems to wear these days pushes a small boy forward. You can touch him if you want, he says, to see how cold he is. The boy shakes his head and purses his lips and buries himself under the robe between the man’s legs. The man tuts and taps something into his phone.

Muttering.

Leave him be, I say. Then louder. Leave him be. The circle shifts and shuffles and studies hands and phones then starts up again, staring and recording and instagramming. A yellow helicopter is hovering down the far end of the beach, buzzing and prancing, apparently searching for a safe space to land amongst the gathering onlookers. The rotors whip up the grey waves and flush them up towards us. Towards the sprawled man. Somewhere beyond the Promenade sirens scream and the beach flashes blue white blue white before dropping back to bleach. A small black and white terrier barks and falls silent. Then barks again. Then digs violently, kicking up sand over the second layer of onlookers.

Muttering.

A young man muscles in beside me. He smells of mint and cucumber and deodorant ordered from a parfumerie. I’m a doctor, he says. Let me through. His hand is cold on my arm. His fingers stiff. I watch the tremor of his wrist. Note his bitten down nails. The purple scar that leers around the back of his neck just below his hairline. Shall I help you, I say, if you need a hand. He shakes his head. Hold them back, he says. Hold them all back. I regard each of them in turn with steady eyes. I am proud of my unflinching. Three seconds is enough to hold their eyes until they drop. Straighten my back and widen my stance. Go home, I say. There’s nothing to see here.

Muttering.

A girl in a navy sweater and red shorts that cling too tight around her thighs blushes. Tugs open her bag and drops her phone into it. Turns away from the muttering man. Come on, Jay, she says to the boy beside her. We’d better go. She takes his hand and leads him up the beach, his head twisting for a final view. They both wear their sneakers tied together and strung around their necks. Two others follow them, and then two more. The circle splits. The splitters trail up the beach for a minute or so then stop, and turn. There they stay. If they are not tall they stand on tiptoe. Tenterhooks. Nothing to see here. Except for a helicopter and flashing blue lights and a man in faded yellow trunks with turquoise painted finger nails that glitter tiny stars and half-moons and a knotted silvery ring on every finger apart from his thumbs. I return my gaze to those intent on staying.

Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor kneels in the sand beside the man’s bare shoulder. Places a hand on the square of the pale back. He concentrates, the doctor. He may be counting. Or checking for breath. Can’t he see, the doctor, that the man is muttering. I should tell him, look I should say, listen I should say. The man is muttering. He may have something important to tell. But I don’t say this. I don’t say this because I have just understand, right this minute, that I am the only person who understands the man is muttering.

Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor beckons to someone to pass him a coat or a towel or something to cover the man. A woman, too old to be hanging around the beach rubber-necking a corpse, passes him a pale grey cardigan with mother of pearl buttons. The buttons flash and guild. The doctor drapes the cardigan over the man’s shoulders, tucking the sleeves in under his chest. He strokes the man’s hair.

 Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor twists his neck to look at me. Get rid of them, he says, I can’t concentrate with all that glare. I want to argue with the doctor, tell them yourself I want to stay. Instead I shoo the people. Shoo them with my flapping arms the way I used to with the twin lambs when they tried to follow me home after their bottle feed. Please, I say. You’re not helping here. You need to go away.

It’s alright, the dead man says, I’m used to it now. Let them do their thing.

The man who says he’s a doctor is flushing red. The leering scar cannot stop the flush. Colour leaches up his neck and through his ears and across his cheeks. He pulls the cardigan up over the man’s head. I’m only a student, the man says. In my third year. But I know the man is dead.

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
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
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.

.

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