Category: Flash fiction

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Innocent

She’s never regarded herself as innocent. The judge had been clear, though. Patting her arm with his gaze as she left the court. An innocent victim, he said. Rina hadn’t met his eyes. Seamy eyes under a thick black eyebrow that hung across his forehead like a slain lampost.

She’d dodged the reporters and the rubber-neckers on the way out, pulling her scarf up over her head, leaving the lawyer to make the statement on the steps. You do it, she said, say whatever needs to be said, she said, declining the hugs, the victorious raised fists.

She hurries down the street and ducks into the first close on the left. What does he know about innocence, the jumped up tosser? In the close, in amongst the mouldering, the light declined, the broiled piss and the previous night’s chips and gobshite, she trips her fingers behind the grill above her on the wall and finds the half-smoked joint. She lights up and takes a long deep breath. What do they know in their trumped up gowns, their lacquered hair, their plump pecunious lips?

Above her, a small cat slides out through the only window in the close. Orange and white, pock-marked and scabbed, it jumps down and scrolls about her feet. She puts her free hand down and the cat teeters up on its hind legs, rubbing its head against the rough warmth of her palm. Its left eye weeps pus. She feels about her pockets. Nothing to offer it but a tightly rolled bus ticket.

Innocent victim. She takes another long slow toke. She almost believes it herself. That’s what happens, her mother used to say, if you tell a sorry often enough. Her screwed up mother and her screwed up sayings.

Never hold your wheesht.

The nights are fair drawing pastels.

The early bird is tired and wanton.

If pigs could fry.

She would chuckle when she spoke, her mother. Could barely string a sentence together what with all of that chuckling. A happy drunk.

Don’t judge a book by its lover.

Once bitten twice sighed.

The cat is climbing up her black polyester slacks, digging its claws into her right knee. She’d bought the trousers in a charity shop the day she’d got her mother out of care. Every day she’d worn them in court. Every one of seven days.

She shakes the cat off the trousers. Places the remains of the joint back behind the grill. Leans against the smooth damp drear of the wall to get her balance. Pulls her boots off, the stone slabs shocking her bare feet. Then she takes the trousers off, bundles them, and throws them into the corner with the chips and the piss and the half-hearted crimson leaf that’s blown autumn into the always winter close.

She pulls her boots back on. Her mother still chuckling almost to the end. The sudden tight surprise of the what? mouth. Mottling skin and spittle. The cat jumps back up onto the window ledge. Mewling. She relights the joint. Finishes it. Rolls the sleeves of her blazer up to reveal the blue cotton cuffs of her old school shirt. Pats down her sensible flesh coloured hipster knickers. Stoops under the entrance to the close and walks back out into the high street.

A group of tourists all in the same cheap saltire rain capes turn and stare. Aim their camera phones at her. Click click click. She taps an impression of an Irish jig. Then gives them the finger. They laugh and look again at her legs and herd on, following a wet cardboard sign on a stick. She rolls spit in her mouth. Changes her mind. Doesn’t spit.

She studies herself in the window of a cashmere and tartan tat shop. Does a little dance. Kicks up her bare legs. Spins. Around and around and around. Arms out, head wild. Wide-mouthed scarlet-lipped howl. Hair asunder, twirling whirling tripping ripping pulling her jacket off Fred Astaire. Ginger Fucking Rogers.

Two police officers. Men. Coming towards her, radios spattering, arms outstretched. Four male hands coming for her and she’s up on her tiptoes. Hula hooping past them. Jiving, surviving.

Innocent. Fucking innocent victim.

Liar liar pants on wire

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Mistletoe Lane

He has told her to fossick in the hedgerow at the bottom of Mistletoe Lane behind the cemeteries. The new cemetery and the old one. That’s what they call them. New Cemetery and Old Cemetery. Helen doesn’t understand. They both look of the same vintage. The pleats and pleadings of the granite stones. The dustings of silver and amber lichen. The low shrubby birch trees that circle clusters of graves like a party game. Both cemeteries spill down the shallow slope below Hincombe Oakwood, separated only by a low drystone wall, three headless scarecrows flapping about in faded denim dungarees, and a rusting sculpture of what the village has agreed, after several years of indignant and family-rupturing debate, is surely a calf with three legs suckling its mother.

But they’re just the same, she says to Charles the shopkeeper as he hands her the grey metal bucket and the green cotton gloves. Aye, he says. But one’s old and one’s new. Which end of the lane has the best fruit, she asks. He winks. That’ll be for you to decide.

She opts for the longer walk, fossicking in the briars at the bottom of the lane behind Old Cemetery with her bucket on her left arm and her green cotton gloves pulled tight up her wrists and she plucks the fat brambles one by one, holding them up to her face, checking for worms, dropping the unsullied into the bucket, the pre-eaten into the grass wet about her feet. 

I’ll cook what you gather, he says. She laughs. A pie, he says. You don’t know how, she says. Aye, he says, of course I do. All the men around here cook. Well at least scrub your nails first, she says. He puts his arms around her. Pulls her in. I should go, she says. Before it gets dark. He spins her round. Releases her with a flourish. You’ll need flour, she says. And butter for the pastry. The pantry’s bare. 

She hums as she picks, a meditative hum, the cool damp of the wind on the back of her bare neck and the nettles rude about her calves. Plucking, examining, leaning in, scowling at the stings, stretching, leaning, plucking, examining.

The villagers that work in the fields are heading home. Carrying sticks and scythes and hoes and sacks. In twos and threes, they trickle down the outside of Old Cemetery and New Cemetery, none of them taking the central path past the scarecrows or the suckling calf. As they come closer, she waves. None of them wave back. She drops her hand, flushes. Refocuses her attention on the fruit.  

You’ll love it there, he says, heaving her suitcase up the steps of the bus. The light. The fresh air. And the river. The kingfisher is practically tame. I’m sure he’ll bring me a fish one day. She waits for him to choose a seat, sits down beside him, allows him to take her hand. I’ve never been away before she says, never this far. She doesn’t ask about the kingfisher. And later, when he points out the first blue flash of the bird on the other side of the bank as he drops his wormed hook into the smooth dark of the pool, she’s disappointed. She’d expected something more. Something imperial.

The lane is rank. Rank with dog piss and rotting leaves and fetid mud and sprays of mouldering funeral wreaths and a great mound of pig manure by the wooden style into the graveyard. She tries not to breathe through her nose. Her belly curls. Just another twenty minutes and she’ll have enough.

She shares the lane with a long row of squat corrugated iron sheds in blue green grey. Each shed has a padlocked door, a trail of irascible dandelion flowers about its front edge, and black hand painted signs with names and dates. Harrison 1924. Garvald 1919. Morecombe 1923. The blue shed has a different sign. God is dead 1917.

Her bucket is nearly half full. Dusk is skidding down the two cemeteries, swallowing the graves set by set.  She squints through the leaves. Spotting. Plucking. Inspecting. She moves slowly along the verge away, the sheds at her back, the dead on the other side of the wall behind the brambles, and behind her, the iron duct that runs the line of sheds at neck height pipes poison into a wide wooden cask barrel. 

She hums as she picks, picks as she hums and the rain picks up, heavier now, splattering her bare head, her metal bucket and behind her the poison duct pouts and strains, gargles and stretches and she picks and hums psalms and a Viennese chorus, plucking a harp with her plum stain gloves, the poison duct pulsing and bubbling. 

Bubbling. She stops, listens. Squeezes a handful of the red purple fruits between her gloved fingers. She feels it before she sees it. The subtle shift of the air. The smell of eggs. Sulphur. Sinister. Her eyes prick. She coughs, her lungs clogging. Turns to look.

The pipe is breathing. Great spumes of yellow breath spewing out and hunkering about the lane, shaping and shapeless, morphing and stacking, burying the corrugated iron sheds scrubbing out god is dead deleting Harrison dissolving Garvald.

She pulls her gloves off. Drops them in the bucket. She’s disorientated. Which way is the village? A new sound. Wheels in mud. A vehicle, then another, and another. In they come, nascent in the buttery smog, all of them long, low, glossed, black. Behind them a trail of villagers in dark suits and dresses, mud spatters about their legs, dismal hats, aloft their tattered black umbrellas.  

Helen is not in the lane. Helen is not picking brambles. Helen is buried in New Cemetery. Helen has been entombed since 1927. What’s left of Helen silts and filters through the peaty soil below the granite with her carved angel and the clinging lichens and a petrified bunch of lavender. 

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
Flash fiction

On Syrup Markets

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

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

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

There were a few passing comments.

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

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

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

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

Or words to that effect.

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

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

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

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

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

I plan to work this idea into a longer piece.

Categories
Flash fiction

Postcard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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