A young man sat by a window in a harbour bar and watched the waves roll in.
His chin nestled into the pale palm of his right hand. His left hand lay still, cast across the table, encircling an empty pint glass and plate like the harbour arm outside sheltering the fishing boats. The thrum of an outboard motor cut the sound of the breeze, coughed to itself as the throttle caught, then quietened into a low murmur which disappeared into the noise of wind and water. A yellow nylon washing line snapped and spat, tethered at one end to a bowed apple tree and the other to a stainless steel pole wedged into the ground. The sky was a uniform grey, but it was darkening in the west.
He remembered the first time he had been out at sea in a storm, with his grandfather off Dymchurch. He would have been six years old then, and his grandfather would have been in his late-sixties, upright and able. They had gone crab fishing, and had put out creels earlier in the day. The storm had come out of nowhere, and the raging gale had blown away all memory of the summer breezes that came before. The world and its usual compliant angles had been reduced to a pitching trough of arcing water, and funnels of stormlight shone down tubes of black water. His grandfather had been at the tiller, smiling and gritting his teeth as he fought to rein in the small boat, roaring out instructions to his grandson happily.
The young man raised his drink to his lips absently, and drained the last of the bitter down the foam channels of the pint glass into his mouth. He swallowed the last dregs, and straightened the knife and fork on the plate. He swivelled around to say good-bye, but muted thumps from the kitchen signalled the landlord was out the back changing a barrel. Deciding not to bother him, he stood up, pulled his collar up to protect him against the salt wind, and opened the door and left. The bell above the door rang as he walked out.
The wind was building. Angled quills of marram-grass rustled in the dunes. The young man put his hand in his coat pocket, probing the lining vaguely with cooling fingers, and drew a thin roll-up and a plastic disposable lighter from the depths. He pushed the roll-up between his lips, and cupped his hand like a bird’s wing round the cigarette. He craned his neck, and tried to light it. Whichever way he turned, rivers of air gusted through his fingers, and the little pilot light shivered and went out. He ducked under the pink and pale yellow awning of a caravan’s canopy. The ball of his thumb was calloused into a hard welt from striking the rough ignition wheel. There was the brief smell of butane.
He held his elbow with his free hand, pulling the rough cotton of his coat against his body for warmth. The waves on the quay were falling over themselves now. A cat’s paw of wind flicked each swell into a serrated crest, and the sea beyond the harbour arm spat like a boiling pan. The wind was not yet strong enough for heavy waves, and so there were still boats out to sea, little shapes under a dim sky.
He watched a small yacht disappear as a swell blotted it from view, then saw it rise as the wave dipped, There was a hole in the sky above the yacht, and a halo of blue showed through it. Streams of sunlight fell from the opening and lit up the ocean. Like bright shoals. A tern crossed the open sky, then banked into the sea.
He watched the shadow-play of clouds on the sea and the flight of birds across the water for a moment, then turned inland. He ran his hand through his frond of black hair, now flattened with salt particles from the gusting wind, and walked down an empty street and past the newsagents. He then turned left down a rutted track. A heavy industrial cable, wound steel gone to rust, hung limply from a girder at the industrial works. It swung like a pendulum, and made a noise like a dampened finger on the rim of a wine-glass. He walked past the gutted remains of a security hut. The flanks of a white-painted generator to its left were barked with rust, streaks of torn open metal. They reminded him of the decking of a P&O ferry as a child, standing on the peeling deck as they came into Calais.
The last time he had walked through the industrial estate had been a few years ago, at the start of a long summer. He had avoided the place since then, even though the cooling towers and empty warehouses loomed over the village like a mountain range. Back then, the sun of an early summer had lit up the derelict site, and the smashed windows and steel gauges of fuel pumps that jutted out of the shingle like bones over the winter were then wreathed in honeysuckle and dogrose. The buildings, split open like stricken stumps, were vague shapes under clambering briars and the white vase-flowers of bindweed. Back then, the whine of steel cables and the drone of the cold wind had been replaced by the drowsy murmur of bumblebees and the hiss of the warm breeze in the grass.
He had wheeled his grandfather out into the morning, and even then, with the sun beating down with a strength more suited to early July than late April, his grandfather was still swaddled under two tartan blankets.
He remembered the skin of his grandfather’s hand, etched with blue tributary veins, as he stopped the wheelchair in the leeward side of an abandoned warehouse to pass his grandfather a whelk shell. His grandfather had turned it over and over in his hands, smiling gently, then assimilated it into the sun-warm blankets before they moved on.
They continued along a freshly-laid tarmac track placed down by the council to allow visitors to walk through the nature reserve. They arrived at the remains of a burnt-down church. Eleven years ago, there had been an explosion at the industrial estate – there were the usual clutch of conspiracy theories, but it was later revealed to have been caused by naphtha tanks rupturing – which had swiftly grown and engulfed the local church, a knot of houses on the fringes of the estate, and an old boy’s cottage that stood on the outskirts. The church had been the hardest blow to bear. Back then, there was still a steady congregation of perhaps forty or so pensioners and fishermen and even the local publican, and the church was as much informal social club as a house of worship. With the destruction of the church, the community dispersed. A chapel was built on the rim of the housing estate, but it was perhaps half a mile away from the centre the village, and as the remaining pensioners succumbed to age, infirmity, and the care home near Rye, the church was forgotten.
He and his grandfather had gone inside it that morning in April, and the sun shone down through the burnt spars of the roof. The apse window, a leadlight fresco of John The Baptist, had been beheaded by a nave beam giving way from the roof and shattering half the window, taking with it St. John’s head. The remaining stained glass glowed, and motes of dust twirled in the warm air. Little dunes of ash and dirt drifted along the pews. They sat quietly, the young man still in a pew, his grandfather at his side in the nave aisle. They said nothing, and listened to the wind ruffle the grass outside. His grandfather coughed.
This is nice.
The young man was surprised. His grandfather said little nowadays; mostly timid replies to gently posed questions.
What is?
Being here. I’m a broken old man now, they don’t let me out much. They think I get tired. Your mum and dad.
The young man smiled softly, and laughed.
And don’t you? You’re more than welcome to walk. That wheelchair isn’t exactly easy to steer.
His grandfather laughed.
Well, you’re young, you need the exercise. I am an old man, after all.
Make up your mind!
They both sat contentedly in the still light. Little shadows washed over them as a formation of gulls swooped overhead. An Oystercatcher piped quietly in the drainage canals.
I get tired of sitting inside. That bloody television. They think I like antiques programs.
His grandfather chuckled and looked ruefully at his blankets.
Or documentaries. On the war. Saw enough of that fiasco in Monte Cassino, rather not revisit it.
He continued to stare listlessly at his blankets.
The young man leaned back, and arched his arms over the sculpted back of the pews. His elbows dipped over the oak backrest.
I’m sorry. They just want to make sure you’re alright. You gave us all quite a scare after Christmas.
Eh. I’m fine. Except for this wheelchair.
His grandfather rubbed the wheels with his palms, rocking the wheelchair backward and forward.
Silly contraption.
The young man smiled again.
Perhaps, but it got you out of the house and away from Bargain Hunt, didn’t it?
Bloody right.
The door at the back of the church creaked open, and the young man glanced back. A chubby middle-aged man in an Arran jumper peered in, a heavy-looking Nikon camera slung around his neck, with a telephoto lens hanging on his utility belt. There was the shadow and suggestion of another person behind his back, and a mild female voice behind him confirmed it. The man looked around for a moment, his eyes lingering over the burnt rafters, and then he pulled back and shut the door with a conciliatory smile. His grandfather cleared his voice, and said gruffly:
Tourists?
Probably. Had a good-sized camera. Could be a nature photographer.
There’s a lot of them around here, these days.
It’s an SSSI. Apparently.
A what?
A Site Of Special Scientific Interest.
Ah.
His grandfather looked thoughtful.
Why?
The young man looked slightly abashed, then said:
Because we’ve got some rare moss. They say. I did my geography project on it a few years back.
They both went quiet for a moment, and there was nothing but the sound of the wind thrumming the telephone wires. His grandfather looked thoughtful for a moment.
Do you need a telephoto lens to photograph moss then? Doesn’t move about much, does moss. Thing about moss is, if it’s far away, you can walk over to it.
They both laughed, and his grandfather coughed and wheezed until the young man patted him briskly on the back. They sat in the sunlight for some minutes, until the breeze shifted direction and a crosswind began to blow through the broken windows. The young man rose to take his grandfather home.
Come on, it’s getting on for lunch. Pint in The Arms? We could get a ploughman’s, they’ve got a deal on.
There was no reply. He stiffened instantly, and bent down.
His grandfather’s small chest rose and fell, and shallow breaths whistled through his parted lips. His head was bowed into his breastbone, and in this place, in the cool of the noon wind and the spangled light of the stained glass, he looked like he was praying.
There was a sharp retort of broken glass, and the cold day came back to him. The blasting wind had knocked a few beer bottles from a window ledge – the industrial estate had become a popular place for the local kids to drink, and the area was littered with green beer bottles with damp pulped labels and fat plastic cider bottles.
The sky was black now, slicked with oily clouds.
The church stood on the edge of the estate, away from the ruined fuel tanks and storage silos. It had degraded further since his last visit. The apse window had blown out in a winter gale, and the buildings’ wooden skeleton had begun to succumb to damp and the endless blasting of the wind. The young man sat on a clump of rye-grass, his knees drawn in tight, and sat with his head bowed as the wind and rain caught him. He stared at the ruin of the church and the ruin of the sky.
He stood up after twenty minutes, and began to walk along the cracked tarmac track. He paused at the edge of the estate. A wash of blue was beginning to brighten the sky in the west, and new light lit up the track and gate ahead of him. He bent down to the shingle, and brushing aside dirt and grass stems, he picked up a coiled whelk shell. He picked it up and turned it over and over slowly, then let it roll to a stop in his open hand. He looked at it in his palm for a moment, then placed it in his pocket, and turned for home.
Sunday 19 December 2010
Wednesday 24 November 2010
Pelagy
November beach near Dymchurch
On the cusp of saltwater.
Ice-cracked footsteps
On the black and tan dunes.
Boats breasting the spires of cooling towers.
Grey-sun sealight mounting the flanks of Dungeness.
Tar-board shinglespray shoring the walls of Prospect cottage.
Seven ceramic seahorns in the cast of a tusk of root bole.
Gull skull in a wash of flicker grass.
Sandsprint bones
In the runnels of seawater.
I was
Rootwater
Shootwater
Fly-catcher & archer.
Flaxlight and dust
Rustbark follower.
You were
Sprint-air
Haunt-wing
Skylark & swallow.
Leanlight and breathshot
Cloudspat drifter.
I was
Arc-sea.
Wave-train.
Goby & blenny.
Tideline and benthos.
Athletic water.
You were
Arch-limb
Vein-thin
Head & heart.
Lungwater and coppertongue
Short-shout.
I am,
Rootwater thief.
Marine-snow sleeper.
You are,
Air-dark ellipse.
Spent-lunged passer.
You were.
Going.
You are.
Gone.
On the cusp of saltwater.
Ice-cracked footsteps
On the black and tan dunes.
Boats breasting the spires of cooling towers.
Grey-sun sealight mounting the flanks of Dungeness.
Tar-board shinglespray shoring the walls of Prospect cottage.
Seven ceramic seahorns in the cast of a tusk of root bole.
Gull skull in a wash of flicker grass.
Sandsprint bones
In the runnels of seawater.
I was
Rootwater
Shootwater
Fly-catcher & archer.
Flaxlight and dust
Rustbark follower.
You were
Sprint-air
Haunt-wing
Skylark & swallow.
Leanlight and breathshot
Cloudspat drifter.
I was
Arc-sea.
Wave-train.
Goby & blenny.
Tideline and benthos.
Athletic water.
You were
Arch-limb
Vein-thin
Head & heart.
Lungwater and coppertongue
Short-shout.
I am,
Rootwater thief.
Marine-snow sleeper.
You are,
Air-dark ellipse.
Spent-lunged passer.
You were.
Going.
You are.
Gone.
Wednesday 3 November 2010
Portway, Plaistow.
Through the cracks in your eyelids you look at the room. All the night condensed into a cupful of cinders.
There is the phosphor of a lit TV in a room full of sleeping strangers. Everyone becomes strange when they are asleep. All the wrinkles of foreheads and lines round the mouths and all the wide eyes of the wide-awake days have disappeard with the chorus of catarrah in the lungs and the limp muscles of quiet people.
We are all ageless when we sleep. Our faces become unlined and smooth and depthless and timeless, but there is age there in the set of the face and the lapse of the body, and all the joys and sadness and cares of our lives so far resting in the set of the jaw and the upturn of a soft palm holding an unshaven chin.
There are coiled bodies under makeshift quilts of coats and jackets.
There is one of us reading quietly by the light of a tungsten filament, in a 40 watt peach bulb, in a calico lampshade.
The shadows of dark hair fall around the book and there is the leaf-rustle of a turned page. The title is invisible, turned as it is away from the light. A furrow in his bottom lip is lined with dried blood. There is a faint smudge of moisture on his palm where the sweat of the night has settled, and his thumb traces his jaw-line.
What news could reach us under the heavy warmth of so much silence? What tragedies could harm us under the net of narcosis? The man on the BBC murmurs reassuringly as flames rain down in the pictures behind his back. The slushy sibilants and faint Hampshire burr clash gently with the mugshots of pig-eyed close-cropped men in a police ident.
The electricity ran out at 4am when the bare bulb went dark, so we trickled coins into the meter and someone put the heating on and we fell asleep. One by one, people lay down where they sat, or slouched into limb-caverns, or slumped cross-legged on the floor. Your eyes wander over the recesses of dark-grained jaws and pale fore-arms clasped around skulls and shoulder-blades. Candle wax pools under globes of flame from four tea-lights on the mantelpiece.
Somewhere upstairs is the moan of a turning sleeper, and the faint hiss of Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads singing to itself on repeat.
You join up the pontillist cigarette burns on the muted shine of the walnut table, pale scratches in the finish like ochre whorls in an Aranda painting. There is an armadillo frozen mid-trot and the arc of an oak bough in the patterns before your mind fills up with white noise.
He is dreaming now. You can see it in the tensile framing of the face and the ripple of eyelids. All the spangled lights of chemicals nights when he was awake have dissolved into the creamy foam of the waters of the Bosphorus and the sky-drift of souk smoke as a single dreary Serbian strikes up the liturgy to himself under a soft sky. There is a velvet smell of incense and hot frying oil and diesel as the sun comes up and the dawn begins to settle on your skin. The faintest tremor of the District line morphs into the bass note of a cruise-ships horn. The Serbian raises his head to the papery clouds and exhales the ocean.
She is under a red-brick pavement and looking upwards through the lichen and dandelion fronds between the stones. There is the tread of boots and heels and the tension of insteps and the tottering of cautious walking-sticks and the rattle of pram wheels. She sleeps within her sleep and settles back into the clay.
He is walking on a Christmas morning on shale, with his eyes shrouded by saline mist. All there is the repititive crunch of shingle underfoot and the puff of lungs and the promise of the warmth of home, past the pier.
The morning broke around us and hibernal bodies unfolded as you and I snuck out the front door and walked out under a shadowing sky and ignited the days first roll-up. We walked to the shops quietly under thuggish clouds. I can't remember what we bought as we sifted through the flotsam of small-denomination coins we'd pinched from the living room table.
As we walked back, the rain shattered on our up-drawn hoods.
By the time we got back, people were stirring, and the kitchen was all fugged up with warming steam from the kettle as people sleepily placed their orders. Serried ranks of memorial tea-cups and discoloured sugar in a bone china pot. You fried eggs under a cobalt haze of oil with your back to me and rambled amiably and sighed repeatedly as I scalded my tongue happily with bitter unsweetened Nescafe.
From the living room, the murmur of voices, and we both smile as someone experimentally coughs the first line of Once In A Lifetime.
There is the phosphor of a lit TV in a room full of sleeping strangers. Everyone becomes strange when they are asleep. All the wrinkles of foreheads and lines round the mouths and all the wide eyes of the wide-awake days have disappeard with the chorus of catarrah in the lungs and the limp muscles of quiet people.
We are all ageless when we sleep. Our faces become unlined and smooth and depthless and timeless, but there is age there in the set of the face and the lapse of the body, and all the joys and sadness and cares of our lives so far resting in the set of the jaw and the upturn of a soft palm holding an unshaven chin.
There are coiled bodies under makeshift quilts of coats and jackets.
There is one of us reading quietly by the light of a tungsten filament, in a 40 watt peach bulb, in a calico lampshade.
The shadows of dark hair fall around the book and there is the leaf-rustle of a turned page. The title is invisible, turned as it is away from the light. A furrow in his bottom lip is lined with dried blood. There is a faint smudge of moisture on his palm where the sweat of the night has settled, and his thumb traces his jaw-line.
What news could reach us under the heavy warmth of so much silence? What tragedies could harm us under the net of narcosis? The man on the BBC murmurs reassuringly as flames rain down in the pictures behind his back. The slushy sibilants and faint Hampshire burr clash gently with the mugshots of pig-eyed close-cropped men in a police ident.
The electricity ran out at 4am when the bare bulb went dark, so we trickled coins into the meter and someone put the heating on and we fell asleep. One by one, people lay down where they sat, or slouched into limb-caverns, or slumped cross-legged on the floor. Your eyes wander over the recesses of dark-grained jaws and pale fore-arms clasped around skulls and shoulder-blades. Candle wax pools under globes of flame from four tea-lights on the mantelpiece.
Somewhere upstairs is the moan of a turning sleeper, and the faint hiss of Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads singing to itself on repeat.
You join up the pontillist cigarette burns on the muted shine of the walnut table, pale scratches in the finish like ochre whorls in an Aranda painting. There is an armadillo frozen mid-trot and the arc of an oak bough in the patterns before your mind fills up with white noise.
He is dreaming now. You can see it in the tensile framing of the face and the ripple of eyelids. All the spangled lights of chemicals nights when he was awake have dissolved into the creamy foam of the waters of the Bosphorus and the sky-drift of souk smoke as a single dreary Serbian strikes up the liturgy to himself under a soft sky. There is a velvet smell of incense and hot frying oil and diesel as the sun comes up and the dawn begins to settle on your skin. The faintest tremor of the District line morphs into the bass note of a cruise-ships horn. The Serbian raises his head to the papery clouds and exhales the ocean.
She is under a red-brick pavement and looking upwards through the lichen and dandelion fronds between the stones. There is the tread of boots and heels and the tension of insteps and the tottering of cautious walking-sticks and the rattle of pram wheels. She sleeps within her sleep and settles back into the clay.
He is walking on a Christmas morning on shale, with his eyes shrouded by saline mist. All there is the repititive crunch of shingle underfoot and the puff of lungs and the promise of the warmth of home, past the pier.
The morning broke around us and hibernal bodies unfolded as you and I snuck out the front door and walked out under a shadowing sky and ignited the days first roll-up. We walked to the shops quietly under thuggish clouds. I can't remember what we bought as we sifted through the flotsam of small-denomination coins we'd pinched from the living room table.
As we walked back, the rain shattered on our up-drawn hoods.
By the time we got back, people were stirring, and the kitchen was all fugged up with warming steam from the kettle as people sleepily placed their orders. Serried ranks of memorial tea-cups and discoloured sugar in a bone china pot. You fried eggs under a cobalt haze of oil with your back to me and rambled amiably and sighed repeatedly as I scalded my tongue happily with bitter unsweetened Nescafe.
From the living room, the murmur of voices, and we both smile as someone experimentally coughs the first line of Once In A Lifetime.
Junkpile Writings
Bits and bobs of unpublished, unfinished and in most cases, ill-advised drop-outs from the cutting room of MS Word. Most were written, god help me, in my mid-to-late teens; a few were written perhaps three years ago or so. Please be advised - I was young, nobody had told me to go easy on the adjectives yet. A few were salvageable; most were/are shit. Regardless;
Leaf & Bough, extract.
It rained and it rained and it rained. Black water trickled from boughs onto loam. It ran through the peat, stop-starting in rivulets. A drop would split from its companions and head south, shelter under a root and then slide down a bank. Another drop would filter through deep green lichen and emerge, splintered, at the far end. The fragments merged back into the whole, and continued under a rocky alcove. Each droplet ploughed its own furrow in a field of soil, matted and knotted with leaves and stones, a pilgrimage of water travelling over fields of raw earth.
Sitting on the bank, oblivious to the rain, was a figure of a man. Scuffed trainers harboured stowaway water, rowdy piratical rain that soaked the fabric and burrowed into the skin beneath. Jeans that had dulled from blue to grey were smeared with grime – muddy cumulonimbus on a sky of denim cirrus.
The noise of the forest merged with the movement. Each wave of wind was accompanied by the woodwind section; each spasmodic cloudburst was symphonised by flutes; each crack in the forest of a branch giving way was bracketed by snaps of percussion. Every colour, from green to blue to brown was paired with correspondent noise; each sound had its image. The woodland was a riot of muted sobriety – faded colour and minimalist sound, a wild study in subtlety.
A bike languished in a tangle of brambles. A Hawthorn craned its boughs over the frame. Rainfall ran down the bark and skittered across outrigger branches, which in turn dripped on the hollow frame, a resounding, sonorous Tik. Tik. Tik, a verse of patriarchal solemnity, little echoes inside the hollow frame praising the preacher, hollow supplicant, rust songs, a natural hymnal to the coupling of iron and water. Drips fell on the spokes like lyrics, rust songs, an unlikely Orpheus. The wandering wind spun the front wheel thoughtfully.
Despite the restless forest, the figure did not move. The eyes did not follow the water slapping against the banks of the stream, nor did they watch the lone crow flap drearily in the canopy. They chose to ignore the rocks; steady, conservative buttresses under the wishy-washy liberal petitioning of water bashing feebly against their stone ramparts. Every so often a splash heralded the death of a leaf as it fell from the green roof overhead. These he watched – the leaves’ nobility in the face of rioting water. The excited horde, crowing damply, closed in and over, until the leaf was broken on the waves and shoved to the banks, where it would rot and decompose, its tissue drained and bled by mycological intestines. He watched the ripples and tides. Would a parallel current signal an omen of good fortune? Would a serrated ridge of wavelets herald solar auspice? He watched the water until the rain stopped.
He had meant to only stop briefly, but found himself confined within the jail of a copse. Cold and damp though it was, it was preferable to beyond the branches - ice and wind that howled round the spinney, a wolf of air baying at his shelter. His eyes caught a shape in the stream – a bird, half-gone, a fluttering current replacing fluttering wings, suspended in the current. He watched it round the shoreline, catch on a dam of sticks, dead leaves and baling wire, drift through a cataract and out of sight.
The rain had stopped: a little sun appeared. The wind dropped to a forlorn sigh. Primroses and Wood Anemones shone shyly in the pale light. Somewhere a bird sang warily. He brushed the worst of the mud from his shoes and jeans, ran his hands through the spray of a small waterfall, and pressed on.
Outrider
‘Is this going to take long? I have a lady to meet.’
The barber nodded curtly, murmured a rattle of rapid Jaipuri to a watching urchin and gestured sharply with a grooved and whorled hand, and turned to the grimy mirror to prepare his tools. The man feigning insouciance – badly - in the battered armchair viciously kicked an inquisitive chicken with rather more spite than the situation demanded, and scratched his arm on the tufts of horse-hair protruding from the chair. Then he swore.
‘Hey. I said, is this going to take long? It’s just that, you know, if you’re going to be a bit longer I should probably…’ he trailed off, partly out of the wash of fear constricting his vocal chords, and partly out of the wads of cotton that were pushed into his mouth.
‘Actually, I think I probably don’t need this after all.’
Which actually emerged as:
‘Acthtuallee, I thinkth I plobably don’t need thith after alth.’
Summoning up what small reserves of dignity he had left, the man in the crumpled and travel-stained suit rose up out of the chair stiffly. And was pushed forcefully down again. The burly surgeon grinned a broken smile at him, little wrinkles creating whorls and ribbons round his almond eyes, and proffered a smeared glass of sweetlime:
‘For the pain, yes?’
That rusty-toothed smile again, wider this time. A gold crown sparkled warily in the dusty glass.
‘Will it work?’ asked the man in the chair, with a slight inflection to his voice that was almost, almost a frightened squeak.
The barber straightened up. His eyes looked thoughtfully to the middle distance, which was about four feet inside his shop, with all its accoutrements and religious trinkets and blaring Hindi pop music. He appeared to be giving it a great deal of thought. His ran his calloused hands through his black, wiry hair. A fly orbited his head like a noisy moon. He reached a verdict.
‘No. No, I think probably not.’
The man in the chair deflated like a punctured tyre, and emitted much the same noise; one long, mournful sibilant. The barber clapped a huge hand to his shoulder and grinned a final megawatt grin.
‘But my friend, you will have the rot gone quickly and sweetlime tastes nicer than blood.’
‘Ah’ said the man.
‘Hmm’ he said, after a pause.
And rose from the chair, threw the man a wad of rupees, drained the sweetlime and ran.
He ran down through the dust-strewn alleys, vaulted a child who was playing in the dirt, apologised hurriedly to a stooped matriarch who gabbled a stream of what were almost certainly curses, leapt over another child, stepped on a chicken, slipped on the mess it had made in fright, and swore loudly, to the effect of:
‘Bastard bastard bastard’. Each word bled into the other one, shame and vitriol cementing the snappish consonants together.
Ah, but it felt good to be running. The wind whipped his face and sand blown from the desert stung his eyes. The warm smell of cinnamon and cloves, the chemical reek of car fumes, the cloying, gossamer scent of blood from the drains in the meat market. Deafening taxi horns, furiously clashed gears and the perennial squeal of Hindi pop-starlets throbbed the air with washes of noise.
It was, Alex supposed as he sprinted gamely passed puzzled pedestrians, a sad truth that the relief of running was inevitably better than the dread of doing. Occasionally, a thought danced the notion that facing up would bring rewards of its own, but soon these thoughtful tachyons drifted into memory, shut down and shut out. It was an embodiment of the coward’s law – that the easy path rewarded sparsely, and that the difficult road paid handsomely. Those who took the noble path would be rewarded with the glow of good conscience. Equally, those who slipped out of the back door of Responsibility, those who hid and fled from Morality would be blighted by a grasping hand of weakness and shame for the rest of their life. Yet a portcullis in his mind dropped whenever guilt crept in and banged on the walls of shame.
This was the coward’s modus operandi. One day the bill would be presented, slipped under a cerebral door in unconscious hours. Sometimes, as he dreamt, he thought he could hear its footsteps, catching him up. But, for now, under the bright sky and amidst the heat and stench of the old town, the snare felt distant, and the pure pleasure of avoidance burned hard in him.
He slowed to a jog as he rounded the glowing walls of Hawa Mahal. The Palace of Winds stood like a trapped sunset, the rock containing the hot light, monumental, built as a bastion of totemic dignity and celestial heraldry by the Pink City’s ruler and astronomer Maharaja Jai Singh II. But this was lost on Alex, as he straightened his tie, brushed his dusty black hair back out of his face, coughed roughly, fumbled idly for his sunglasses, and strolled in to his hotel.
‘Mr Alex Ray. I believe you have a reservation for me. Under party name Taylor.’
Never build yourself a prison you can’t escape from. If you must run, make sure you do it on details that aren’t yours and pay with money that you don’t have. And if that means booking your reservation under a different name, then so be it. The fact that he had pre-paid with a card that didn’t belong to him was… inconsequential.
‘Oh yes, welcome Mr Ray. Will it just be you checking in? Have you any baggage for us to take to your room?’
A masterful straightening of the back and a slight hint of haughtiness to the voice.
‘Yes, thank you. Just me. My wife is ill, I’m sure you understand.’
The statement was posed as innocent, but it was not open to exploration and had barbs all over it.
‘Oh, I am sorry Mr Ray. I’ll call the baggage porter right away. My we take your cases?’
There was the faintest suggestion of a twinge on Alex’s face. Presenting them with his one battered, dust-streaked Globetrotter suitcase, full of his worldly goods – namely painkillers, lethal Krakatoa cigarettes, a few changes of clothes, a copy of the Rig Vida (foisted on him by a toothless beggar outside the airport) and a dog-eared edition of Just Sixteen – would not create the right image. The trick was in the completeness. Complicity could only be achieved without cracks in the mirror of his adopted persona. Thus;
‘My cases were stolen,’ he said coldly.
A pause. Frost formed on the words not said and melted into nothing in the heat.
‘I will be contacting American Express shortly. Your police here were… less than accommodating. The contents of my cases cost a great deal of money. I am sure you understand how inconvenient this is for me. I am a very busy man.’
Right on cue, his phone bipped an affirmative text message. The relief was palpable – the prop was welcome - but the fear was not; it rose in his throat like bitter bile. He swallowed it, and continued the charade.
It was a form of mental Indian wrestling, and there was an aposite metaphor right there; the pressure for an explanation facilitated the outright lie; the outright lie took on new meaning and power through fear of discovery; and the net result was a masterpiece of blasé bullshit. Outrage twanged between the syllables. The theft happened in your city, you live here, and however tangential l the connection might be, you will be made to answer for it. The clerk gibbered a reply. Beads of sweat, seeping from his forehead, chilled quickly in the air-conditioned air.
‘Oh, I am sorry sir. The urchins in this city are dreadful, truly dreadful sir, but we try our best. The crime level has actually dropped somewhat, and…’ his words tumbled to an end.
Alex essayed a little wave of complex mirth and performed an elaborate proto-chuckle, designed to convey relief and release with just a little contempt.
‘Good lord man, don’t worry about it. We cannot all be held to ransom by the whims and inconveniences of idiots and thieves, no?’
He issued a short, nasty grin.
‘Besides, financial documents, a copy of last weeks New York Times and, sadly, my favourite suit will make an excellent present for some ragged beggar’s toothless mother, don’t you think?’
He smiled like a tiger.
‘And so I will take my own case up. I will return shortly to telephone American Express. If you could have the number to hand…?’
He left the sentence hanging in the air.
‘Yes, of course Mr Ray. I’ll organize it post-haste’ gabbled the clerk. Alex nodded regally, stooped from the knees to pick up his case, and with the considerable élan, turned and strolled calmly to the lift.
His face was blurred in the brushed bronze of the lift doors. He saw the sharp cheekbones and sunglasses, hiding as they did his bloodshot eyes. The stubble on his chin was barely a day old, but already it had speckled his features with black grain. A nick under his chin, an old scar from his athletic days. Foppish black waves of hair, dandyish, framing a aquiline face and an eagle’s beak of a nose. His eyes lingered over his sweat-streaked shirt, and down and over his expensive mohair suit. His eyes moved back to his new metal face and fixed on his impassive countenance. His eyes followed his limbs, and back to his reflection. In the cool of the atrium,, he raised a hand to his bronzed likeness and gently caressed his face. Far away, footsteps clicked on the marble floors, and echoed down the corridors.
The lift doors opened. A wave of embarrassment broke over him. He walked in, much of his self-assurance and put-upon pomposity left washed into the lazily rotating fans and shredded like so much hot air. He walked down the darkened corridor, and it was warmer here, with the same arid ambience. The preposterously thick carpet was downy and decadently soft. Each foot was muffled in silence and swaddled in soundlessness. Each step required additional effort to remove itself of its lecherous trappings. The air smelt of perfume, expensive wines, bath salts, cigar smoke, with the faintest tang of spices and sweat and shit from the old town, and, beyond that, the thin, simmering, clear smell of the high desert.
He unlocked his room, walked soundlessly inside, and shut the door. He slumped wordlessly against the door. His fingers slipped weakly from the smooth leather strap of his suitcase, until his muscles trembled for release. The case slithered to the ground. The window had been left open, and a cool breeze bathed the white lace curtains in air, and danced the fabric into undulating waves. He lay on the bed, crossed his hands across his chest, and stared upwards at the hypnotic ceiling fans. A hawker spat and howled in the street outside. The incessant car horns blared. Exhaust pipes cracked explosive retorts. Somewhere in the halls of the hotel, classical musical played: a Bach piece, picked out in incongruous silver notes. And always, always, the gabble of a million people, perpetually hot and dusty and argumentative and hopeful and insufferably alive, forming a singular note, like a hive condensed into one reverberating sine wave. And laying on his cold linen sheets, guilt whispered its bill into Alex’s ear. And slowly and inexorably and by degrees, he fell asleep.
Breakers touched the shoreline. In the western skies, a confection of cloud lit up the horizon. It caught the edges of sunlight and highlighted itself in the azure expanse. A boat tumbled and bobbed in the surf. Small waves slopped and slapped the oiled palmwood hull. Fingers of blue water licked up the sides. The black body of a sailfish knifed through the ruffled ocean twenty feet away and a fathom below.
Where the water met the sand it sailed up the shore with a sigh, all hissed sibilants and muffled consonants. Where the white water foamed, it caught the attention of a million spawning crabs, each dancing in the surf, claws to the sun in supplication, eggs baptised in the foam, black-bulbed eyes rolling in fertile frenzy.
The fisherman’s eyes watched the cloud and the surf and the crabs and the ripple of the sailfish surfacing, and it watched a great deal else too. Sad brown eyes traced the greenleaf smoke of cloud on the horizon, and thought of omens.
“When there are little pieces of white sky on the edges of blue sky, that, I think, means the Bonito will come.”
But the solitary cloud was painted on the sky, and no wind moved it. The fisherman lay back in his canoe and pulled a switchblade from a fold in his tunic. It was barked with rust and palm oil had not lubricated the spring, as motor oil would do, but it was serviceable, and a great deal better for gutting and scaling than a machete would be. The machete would be needed when the big fish came. He had lost the strength in his arms that would be needed for braining the big trevally.
“When the bonito come, they sometimes bring the big trevally that follow the bubbles they make. They can smell their excitement I think. The bonito is too small to have much care, but care would hide them from the big trevally when they follow their restless breaths. And this is better for me.”
He hauled his gaunt frame upright. Humming a tune one of the men from the big, smoke-belching trawlers had taught him, he sung softly as he made incisions in the flesh of a small yellowfin.
“But you were always on my mind. You were always on my mind.”
The alien syllables caught in his teeth and rogue morphemes darted like the nameless silver fish in the lagoon from his mouth, but he sung anyway. It was a song of the sea, if you like. The words were not native, the rhythm decidedly unorthodox, but it had brought him great fish in the past; his cages had been full of lobster; and he’d even managed to trade more tobacco than he’d really deserved in Port Taina – the yellow men from the China sea did not know the value of tobacco as he did; when the spawning came, why, the yellowfin were as thick as milk on the coastal fringes! You could catch them with your hands! Yes, a man with tobacco was a man who knew well the lusts of tuna.
He chuckled happily. Little thoughts skittered along bright neural pathways.
“This is a holy song. I wonder why the trawlermen gave it to me? It could have been there’s, but instead they gave it to me. I wonder, am I a prophet of sorts? I call the fish to sermon and they come, except on Sundays. But it was wrong of me to search for fish on Sundays, and I am chastened well.”
By now a little wind had scuffed the surface of the lagoon, and the white sky had increased. He shifted his weight to the left, picked up an oar and headed out, beyond the maw of the lagoon and into the dark blue water where the big fish flocked.
“Quite as often, as I should have. I guess I should have told you, I’m so happy you are mine.”
The little cuts he put in the belly of the yellowfin would draw the bonito to him, into the open arms of the fisherman and into his fatherly embrace.
“Perhaps I am a prophet. It would not be irregular. I go to church, when I can and I am near buildings. I build little piles of stones, that the small Gods may hide in its cracks from the sun and wind. I preserve my fish with turmeric and eat them with sago, though it has no taste and little wetness to it. I have never eaten a fish I was not grateful for. I wash my boat with fresh water and scrub it well with oil to prevent it from cracking in sun. It is my vessel for salvation, as it was for Noah.”
This summary pleased him.
A gull circled in the sky, and winged west with the stiffening breeze.
“Ah, the gull has wisdom we cannot see, but we know of nevertheless. He has eyes like sparks of mica in the sand on him, but they are not his treasure. His prize is his height, and his speed, and his ability to hide in the clouds and dive to great depths when the bonito come.”
“I wish I could live in the sky like him. He sees the dark flicker of fish in the blue water, and down he falls. I wish I could live in the sky like him.”
“Little things I should have said and done”
These are no thoughts for a holy man. The thought came suddenly, like when faces and shapes and birds come in the moon at night. He smiled with a mouthful of broken but white teeth, which lit up his ebon face like a silver tuna in the current. He grunted with laughter and set about his task. When the wind comes, and the white cloud walks high into the blue, that, I think, is when the bonito come, he thought,
And maybe even the trevally. Following their restless breaths.
The Autumn Taint
The blackened sky hovers above
The rusted tusks of stump fields.
The murder of crows wanders above
The benighted bog and its churned cargo
Of peat, dead leaves, amphibians.
A rusted bicycle meanders along
Invisible pathways under the soil.
Dragged under and along the subterranean roads
By the mire’s glowering movements.
A badger skulks in the brambles.
A coiled muscle rises in a coarse shoulder.
Blackened rough-neck hairs prickle on steel-shod ligaments.
It plods through mud and thorn and limpid water.
It barks a greeting to the green wood.
Beyond the rusted tusks of stump.
An English Condition
This is a true story.
The nine-oh-five train puttered out of Hastings station
Trailing a five-carriage assortment of humanity.
Laden with coffee with the flavour of water.
Crisps with the flavour of exotic chemicals.
The Guardian with a flavour of liberality.
A commuter rubs his red-rimmed eyes and checks his watch
And straightens his tie.
And opens his paper.
And glances guiltily at Page Three of his fellow passengers Sun
And chastens himself for doing so and reminds himself of his wife.
Two daughters.
One son.
And a dog called Alfred.
Lucky, lucky, lucky.
The nine-oh-five train (out of Hastings) skitters along the line
Trailing tired tourists, crushed stock-marketers, bellowing children.
Our man (the commuter) reads the headlines, tuts in his head at the vagaries of man
And reaches for a biscuit, which he munches away at absently, eyes tracing columns glazedly.
The Times’dry dissertation soothing him.
A man across the seat
A similar breed.
Note paper.
Note discomfort.
Note serial watch checking.
Note (perhaps) stable family unit.
Watches our man eat the biscuit
With something like incredulity.
And reaches for a biscuit of his own.
From the same packet.
Our man looks down to see his fellow passenger take a biscuit from the pack
(His pack) and crunch it down with ease and leisure
But the cold look in his eyes betrays icy displeasure.
Our man is hurt.
This man’s a cad
For eating our man’s biscuits!
And not enough, to just steal, but challenge too.
Well.
That’s just not cricket.
So our man reaches for another.
And the other man does too.
Eyes flash angrily across the table.
Jaws set in hard lines.
And not a word is said.
Mouths masticate in furious self-righteous chomps.
Each man reads the paper with mega-watt stares.
Daring the other to make the first move.
So.
This game of feint and riposte
Darts and weaves to Haywards Heath
Then the packet is exhausted.
Students bustle into the carriage
Single mothers hustle off.
An Indian gent brings the buffet cart round
And our two commuters, locked in grimace
Brothers of contempt,
Fellow soldiers of disdain,
Both ask for cups of tea. Please.
This charade continues all the way to Victoria station.
Each man concentrating on his paper, with fierce determination.
Each inwardly humming a sort of Buddhist mantra
To block out the other’s influence.
The commuter stands
And leaves the carriage.
Our man stands too
And lifts his bag
(Which was on the table)
And looks mournfully, miserably, pathetically,
Writhing in the fires of crucifying embarrassment
Impaled on the spit of discomfort.
At his unopened, untouched, unsullied,
Packet of biscuits.
Leaf & Bough, extract.
It rained and it rained and it rained. Black water trickled from boughs onto loam. It ran through the peat, stop-starting in rivulets. A drop would split from its companions and head south, shelter under a root and then slide down a bank. Another drop would filter through deep green lichen and emerge, splintered, at the far end. The fragments merged back into the whole, and continued under a rocky alcove. Each droplet ploughed its own furrow in a field of soil, matted and knotted with leaves and stones, a pilgrimage of water travelling over fields of raw earth.
Sitting on the bank, oblivious to the rain, was a figure of a man. Scuffed trainers harboured stowaway water, rowdy piratical rain that soaked the fabric and burrowed into the skin beneath. Jeans that had dulled from blue to grey were smeared with grime – muddy cumulonimbus on a sky of denim cirrus.
The noise of the forest merged with the movement. Each wave of wind was accompanied by the woodwind section; each spasmodic cloudburst was symphonised by flutes; each crack in the forest of a branch giving way was bracketed by snaps of percussion. Every colour, from green to blue to brown was paired with correspondent noise; each sound had its image. The woodland was a riot of muted sobriety – faded colour and minimalist sound, a wild study in subtlety.
A bike languished in a tangle of brambles. A Hawthorn craned its boughs over the frame. Rainfall ran down the bark and skittered across outrigger branches, which in turn dripped on the hollow frame, a resounding, sonorous Tik. Tik. Tik, a verse of patriarchal solemnity, little echoes inside the hollow frame praising the preacher, hollow supplicant, rust songs, a natural hymnal to the coupling of iron and water. Drips fell on the spokes like lyrics, rust songs, an unlikely Orpheus. The wandering wind spun the front wheel thoughtfully.
Despite the restless forest, the figure did not move. The eyes did not follow the water slapping against the banks of the stream, nor did they watch the lone crow flap drearily in the canopy. They chose to ignore the rocks; steady, conservative buttresses under the wishy-washy liberal petitioning of water bashing feebly against their stone ramparts. Every so often a splash heralded the death of a leaf as it fell from the green roof overhead. These he watched – the leaves’ nobility in the face of rioting water. The excited horde, crowing damply, closed in and over, until the leaf was broken on the waves and shoved to the banks, where it would rot and decompose, its tissue drained and bled by mycological intestines. He watched the ripples and tides. Would a parallel current signal an omen of good fortune? Would a serrated ridge of wavelets herald solar auspice? He watched the water until the rain stopped.
He had meant to only stop briefly, but found himself confined within the jail of a copse. Cold and damp though it was, it was preferable to beyond the branches - ice and wind that howled round the spinney, a wolf of air baying at his shelter. His eyes caught a shape in the stream – a bird, half-gone, a fluttering current replacing fluttering wings, suspended in the current. He watched it round the shoreline, catch on a dam of sticks, dead leaves and baling wire, drift through a cataract and out of sight.
The rain had stopped: a little sun appeared. The wind dropped to a forlorn sigh. Primroses and Wood Anemones shone shyly in the pale light. Somewhere a bird sang warily. He brushed the worst of the mud from his shoes and jeans, ran his hands through the spray of a small waterfall, and pressed on.
Outrider
‘Is this going to take long? I have a lady to meet.’
The barber nodded curtly, murmured a rattle of rapid Jaipuri to a watching urchin and gestured sharply with a grooved and whorled hand, and turned to the grimy mirror to prepare his tools. The man feigning insouciance – badly - in the battered armchair viciously kicked an inquisitive chicken with rather more spite than the situation demanded, and scratched his arm on the tufts of horse-hair protruding from the chair. Then he swore.
‘Hey. I said, is this going to take long? It’s just that, you know, if you’re going to be a bit longer I should probably…’ he trailed off, partly out of the wash of fear constricting his vocal chords, and partly out of the wads of cotton that were pushed into his mouth.
‘Actually, I think I probably don’t need this after all.’
Which actually emerged as:
‘Acthtuallee, I thinkth I plobably don’t need thith after alth.’
Summoning up what small reserves of dignity he had left, the man in the crumpled and travel-stained suit rose up out of the chair stiffly. And was pushed forcefully down again. The burly surgeon grinned a broken smile at him, little wrinkles creating whorls and ribbons round his almond eyes, and proffered a smeared glass of sweetlime:
‘For the pain, yes?’
That rusty-toothed smile again, wider this time. A gold crown sparkled warily in the dusty glass.
‘Will it work?’ asked the man in the chair, with a slight inflection to his voice that was almost, almost a frightened squeak.
The barber straightened up. His eyes looked thoughtfully to the middle distance, which was about four feet inside his shop, with all its accoutrements and religious trinkets and blaring Hindi pop music. He appeared to be giving it a great deal of thought. His ran his calloused hands through his black, wiry hair. A fly orbited his head like a noisy moon. He reached a verdict.
‘No. No, I think probably not.’
The man in the chair deflated like a punctured tyre, and emitted much the same noise; one long, mournful sibilant. The barber clapped a huge hand to his shoulder and grinned a final megawatt grin.
‘But my friend, you will have the rot gone quickly and sweetlime tastes nicer than blood.’
‘Ah’ said the man.
‘Hmm’ he said, after a pause.
And rose from the chair, threw the man a wad of rupees, drained the sweetlime and ran.
He ran down through the dust-strewn alleys, vaulted a child who was playing in the dirt, apologised hurriedly to a stooped matriarch who gabbled a stream of what were almost certainly curses, leapt over another child, stepped on a chicken, slipped on the mess it had made in fright, and swore loudly, to the effect of:
‘Bastard bastard bastard’. Each word bled into the other one, shame and vitriol cementing the snappish consonants together.
Ah, but it felt good to be running. The wind whipped his face and sand blown from the desert stung his eyes. The warm smell of cinnamon and cloves, the chemical reek of car fumes, the cloying, gossamer scent of blood from the drains in the meat market. Deafening taxi horns, furiously clashed gears and the perennial squeal of Hindi pop-starlets throbbed the air with washes of noise.
It was, Alex supposed as he sprinted gamely passed puzzled pedestrians, a sad truth that the relief of running was inevitably better than the dread of doing. Occasionally, a thought danced the notion that facing up would bring rewards of its own, but soon these thoughtful tachyons drifted into memory, shut down and shut out. It was an embodiment of the coward’s law – that the easy path rewarded sparsely, and that the difficult road paid handsomely. Those who took the noble path would be rewarded with the glow of good conscience. Equally, those who slipped out of the back door of Responsibility, those who hid and fled from Morality would be blighted by a grasping hand of weakness and shame for the rest of their life. Yet a portcullis in his mind dropped whenever guilt crept in and banged on the walls of shame.
This was the coward’s modus operandi. One day the bill would be presented, slipped under a cerebral door in unconscious hours. Sometimes, as he dreamt, he thought he could hear its footsteps, catching him up. But, for now, under the bright sky and amidst the heat and stench of the old town, the snare felt distant, and the pure pleasure of avoidance burned hard in him.
He slowed to a jog as he rounded the glowing walls of Hawa Mahal. The Palace of Winds stood like a trapped sunset, the rock containing the hot light, monumental, built as a bastion of totemic dignity and celestial heraldry by the Pink City’s ruler and astronomer Maharaja Jai Singh II. But this was lost on Alex, as he straightened his tie, brushed his dusty black hair back out of his face, coughed roughly, fumbled idly for his sunglasses, and strolled in to his hotel.
‘Mr Alex Ray. I believe you have a reservation for me. Under party name Taylor.’
Never build yourself a prison you can’t escape from. If you must run, make sure you do it on details that aren’t yours and pay with money that you don’t have. And if that means booking your reservation under a different name, then so be it. The fact that he had pre-paid with a card that didn’t belong to him was… inconsequential.
‘Oh yes, welcome Mr Ray. Will it just be you checking in? Have you any baggage for us to take to your room?’
A masterful straightening of the back and a slight hint of haughtiness to the voice.
‘Yes, thank you. Just me. My wife is ill, I’m sure you understand.’
The statement was posed as innocent, but it was not open to exploration and had barbs all over it.
‘Oh, I am sorry Mr Ray. I’ll call the baggage porter right away. My we take your cases?’
There was the faintest suggestion of a twinge on Alex’s face. Presenting them with his one battered, dust-streaked Globetrotter suitcase, full of his worldly goods – namely painkillers, lethal Krakatoa cigarettes, a few changes of clothes, a copy of the Rig Vida (foisted on him by a toothless beggar outside the airport) and a dog-eared edition of Just Sixteen – would not create the right image. The trick was in the completeness. Complicity could only be achieved without cracks in the mirror of his adopted persona. Thus;
‘My cases were stolen,’ he said coldly.
A pause. Frost formed on the words not said and melted into nothing in the heat.
‘I will be contacting American Express shortly. Your police here were… less than accommodating. The contents of my cases cost a great deal of money. I am sure you understand how inconvenient this is for me. I am a very busy man.’
Right on cue, his phone bipped an affirmative text message. The relief was palpable – the prop was welcome - but the fear was not; it rose in his throat like bitter bile. He swallowed it, and continued the charade.
It was a form of mental Indian wrestling, and there was an aposite metaphor right there; the pressure for an explanation facilitated the outright lie; the outright lie took on new meaning and power through fear of discovery; and the net result was a masterpiece of blasé bullshit. Outrage twanged between the syllables. The theft happened in your city, you live here, and however tangential l the connection might be, you will be made to answer for it. The clerk gibbered a reply. Beads of sweat, seeping from his forehead, chilled quickly in the air-conditioned air.
‘Oh, I am sorry sir. The urchins in this city are dreadful, truly dreadful sir, but we try our best. The crime level has actually dropped somewhat, and…’ his words tumbled to an end.
Alex essayed a little wave of complex mirth and performed an elaborate proto-chuckle, designed to convey relief and release with just a little contempt.
‘Good lord man, don’t worry about it. We cannot all be held to ransom by the whims and inconveniences of idiots and thieves, no?’
He issued a short, nasty grin.
‘Besides, financial documents, a copy of last weeks New York Times and, sadly, my favourite suit will make an excellent present for some ragged beggar’s toothless mother, don’t you think?’
He smiled like a tiger.
‘And so I will take my own case up. I will return shortly to telephone American Express. If you could have the number to hand…?’
He left the sentence hanging in the air.
‘Yes, of course Mr Ray. I’ll organize it post-haste’ gabbled the clerk. Alex nodded regally, stooped from the knees to pick up his case, and with the considerable élan, turned and strolled calmly to the lift.
His face was blurred in the brushed bronze of the lift doors. He saw the sharp cheekbones and sunglasses, hiding as they did his bloodshot eyes. The stubble on his chin was barely a day old, but already it had speckled his features with black grain. A nick under his chin, an old scar from his athletic days. Foppish black waves of hair, dandyish, framing a aquiline face and an eagle’s beak of a nose. His eyes lingered over his sweat-streaked shirt, and down and over his expensive mohair suit. His eyes moved back to his new metal face and fixed on his impassive countenance. His eyes followed his limbs, and back to his reflection. In the cool of the atrium,, he raised a hand to his bronzed likeness and gently caressed his face. Far away, footsteps clicked on the marble floors, and echoed down the corridors.
The lift doors opened. A wave of embarrassment broke over him. He walked in, much of his self-assurance and put-upon pomposity left washed into the lazily rotating fans and shredded like so much hot air. He walked down the darkened corridor, and it was warmer here, with the same arid ambience. The preposterously thick carpet was downy and decadently soft. Each foot was muffled in silence and swaddled in soundlessness. Each step required additional effort to remove itself of its lecherous trappings. The air smelt of perfume, expensive wines, bath salts, cigar smoke, with the faintest tang of spices and sweat and shit from the old town, and, beyond that, the thin, simmering, clear smell of the high desert.
He unlocked his room, walked soundlessly inside, and shut the door. He slumped wordlessly against the door. His fingers slipped weakly from the smooth leather strap of his suitcase, until his muscles trembled for release. The case slithered to the ground. The window had been left open, and a cool breeze bathed the white lace curtains in air, and danced the fabric into undulating waves. He lay on the bed, crossed his hands across his chest, and stared upwards at the hypnotic ceiling fans. A hawker spat and howled in the street outside. The incessant car horns blared. Exhaust pipes cracked explosive retorts. Somewhere in the halls of the hotel, classical musical played: a Bach piece, picked out in incongruous silver notes. And always, always, the gabble of a million people, perpetually hot and dusty and argumentative and hopeful and insufferably alive, forming a singular note, like a hive condensed into one reverberating sine wave. And laying on his cold linen sheets, guilt whispered its bill into Alex’s ear. And slowly and inexorably and by degrees, he fell asleep.
Solimar
In memory of Rachel Carson, in debt to John Steinbeck, in shameless adolescent plagarism to Ernest Hemingway.
Breakers touched the shoreline. In the western skies, a confection of cloud lit up the horizon. It caught the edges of sunlight and highlighted itself in the azure expanse. A boat tumbled and bobbed in the surf. Small waves slopped and slapped the oiled palmwood hull. Fingers of blue water licked up the sides. The black body of a sailfish knifed through the ruffled ocean twenty feet away and a fathom below.
Where the water met the sand it sailed up the shore with a sigh, all hissed sibilants and muffled consonants. Where the white water foamed, it caught the attention of a million spawning crabs, each dancing in the surf, claws to the sun in supplication, eggs baptised in the foam, black-bulbed eyes rolling in fertile frenzy.
The fisherman’s eyes watched the cloud and the surf and the crabs and the ripple of the sailfish surfacing, and it watched a great deal else too. Sad brown eyes traced the greenleaf smoke of cloud on the horizon, and thought of omens.
“When there are little pieces of white sky on the edges of blue sky, that, I think, means the Bonito will come.”
But the solitary cloud was painted on the sky, and no wind moved it. The fisherman lay back in his canoe and pulled a switchblade from a fold in his tunic. It was barked with rust and palm oil had not lubricated the spring, as motor oil would do, but it was serviceable, and a great deal better for gutting and scaling than a machete would be. The machete would be needed when the big fish came. He had lost the strength in his arms that would be needed for braining the big trevally.
“When the bonito come, they sometimes bring the big trevally that follow the bubbles they make. They can smell their excitement I think. The bonito is too small to have much care, but care would hide them from the big trevally when they follow their restless breaths. And this is better for me.”
He hauled his gaunt frame upright. Humming a tune one of the men from the big, smoke-belching trawlers had taught him, he sung softly as he made incisions in the flesh of a small yellowfin.
“But you were always on my mind. You were always on my mind.”
The alien syllables caught in his teeth and rogue morphemes darted like the nameless silver fish in the lagoon from his mouth, but he sung anyway. It was a song of the sea, if you like. The words were not native, the rhythm decidedly unorthodox, but it had brought him great fish in the past; his cages had been full of lobster; and he’d even managed to trade more tobacco than he’d really deserved in Port Taina – the yellow men from the China sea did not know the value of tobacco as he did; when the spawning came, why, the yellowfin were as thick as milk on the coastal fringes! You could catch them with your hands! Yes, a man with tobacco was a man who knew well the lusts of tuna.
He chuckled happily. Little thoughts skittered along bright neural pathways.
“This is a holy song. I wonder why the trawlermen gave it to me? It could have been there’s, but instead they gave it to me. I wonder, am I a prophet of sorts? I call the fish to sermon and they come, except on Sundays. But it was wrong of me to search for fish on Sundays, and I am chastened well.”
By now a little wind had scuffed the surface of the lagoon, and the white sky had increased. He shifted his weight to the left, picked up an oar and headed out, beyond the maw of the lagoon and into the dark blue water where the big fish flocked.
“Quite as often, as I should have. I guess I should have told you, I’m so happy you are mine.”
The little cuts he put in the belly of the yellowfin would draw the bonito to him, into the open arms of the fisherman and into his fatherly embrace.
“Perhaps I am a prophet. It would not be irregular. I go to church, when I can and I am near buildings. I build little piles of stones, that the small Gods may hide in its cracks from the sun and wind. I preserve my fish with turmeric and eat them with sago, though it has no taste and little wetness to it. I have never eaten a fish I was not grateful for. I wash my boat with fresh water and scrub it well with oil to prevent it from cracking in sun. It is my vessel for salvation, as it was for Noah.”
This summary pleased him.
A gull circled in the sky, and winged west with the stiffening breeze.
“Ah, the gull has wisdom we cannot see, but we know of nevertheless. He has eyes like sparks of mica in the sand on him, but they are not his treasure. His prize is his height, and his speed, and his ability to hide in the clouds and dive to great depths when the bonito come.”
“I wish I could live in the sky like him. He sees the dark flicker of fish in the blue water, and down he falls. I wish I could live in the sky like him.”
“Little things I should have said and done”
These are no thoughts for a holy man. The thought came suddenly, like when faces and shapes and birds come in the moon at night. He smiled with a mouthful of broken but white teeth, which lit up his ebon face like a silver tuna in the current. He grunted with laughter and set about his task. When the wind comes, and the white cloud walks high into the blue, that, I think, is when the bonito come, he thought,
And maybe even the trevally. Following their restless breaths.
Rame Head
Plumes of white-browed foam crashed and boomed against The Winterset’s hull. The ocean licked and spat at the keel, clambering wetly up the rigging. Smashed surf punched the sails.
Away from the prowling wind, serenity reigned. In the For’Castle, the reassuring, hesitant beep of the radar, the glow of a tasselled reading lamp, and the bosky whiff of Old Holborn. The light was reminiscent of a certain kind of pub; light which didn’t so much illuminate the room but outline the darkness. The smallest objects cast long shadows, and the room was daubed with dark corners. Despite the maelstrom outside – the spray now lashing the windows as the ship lurched into the cupped hand of a swell – the cabin was hushed, with the murmur of Radio 4 (Something about feminist literature in developing countries, half a world away) the spit and flare of caramelising apple-wood in the stove, and the faintest crackle from the pipe of the old man.
The old man. Arran jersey-clad, trencherman’s trousers flecked with Castrol oil (The aromatic chemical smell complimenting nicely the room’s musky odour) rust from the bruised iron of the hull, and seawater, which lent the entire room a saline tang. No matter how hard he tried to keep the ocean out, it always found a way in – through a hairline crack in the bulkhead door, seeping out of his soaked jersey, creeping down a much-mended shattered pane of glass.
He puffed on his pipe meditatively, and stoked the dottle with an impervious forefinger. The pipe was a lovely piece; beautifully stained and etched with age and fire to a warm rufous, it had belonged to his grandfather, who had claimed it was carved from Indonesian camphor, from his days as a merchant seaman, trading sandalwood in Timor and coffee from Borneo. The tiny golden initials of J.H Royal, London, 1842 belied its exotic origin, but it was a necessary fiction, and the associated recollections bought his grandfather a great deal of pleasure, and the story enraptured the old man, back when he was young.
His mind wandered away from the lilting Cornish accent, all glottal stops and coarse dactyls, and broadened to the soft oriental light of other oceans, strange constellations in a warm, dark night.
In a dry-stone cottage on blustery April nights, with equinoctial tides lighting up the bay, with the kettle singing on the hob, next to the hearth with his grandfather, they both took the same journey, wandered the same warm currents and walked the same soft sands, one from memory, one from imagination. His father before him had played the same actor on the same stage, and the pipe had been handed down to him, and thence to the old man himself.
He turned it over and over in his horny hands. Huge hands, whorled and crevassed with age, rope burns, whisky dehydration, dried seawater. Each line on his palm was implausibly large and deep, like the canyons in the bark of an oak. His fingers were like branches on a hornbeam, multiply broken and awkwardly reset, ivory nails warped by zinc deficiency, cracked by toil, stained by nicotine.
He turned the pipe over again, the rotations slowing as his mind wandered further afield.
Connor. Connor O’Sullivan. He exhaled a blue blast of Holborn smoke. Now there was a man who’d travelled. The old man’s face cracked into a distant smile. Deep wrinkles writhed and snaked around the his mouth.
The man was all piss and vinegar. He’d once said to him (The young man sitting by the fire nursing a half-pint of illicit bitter by the stove, the craggy apparition thundering into the pub, striding towards the stove, shaking like an old shaggy dog – not a bad metaphor, thought the old man, and he grinned again), “Son, there are bastards, and there is bastards. There’s men out there who’ll gut you as soon as look at you, sure enough, and there’s stone-jawed dockhands with hearts of gold, somewhere under all the shit and stubble. Problem is, they look the same. Good luck finding out which is which.”
Con O’Sullivan was something of a legend in The Portway. His whimsical mutterings earned him the reputation of local madman, but it had this in it: while most of his murmurs and bellows were coarse and rude and inconsequential, there were occasionally little sparks of wisdom in his otherwise obstinately unlit mind. The process was not dissimilar to hunting for gold in streambeds and about as frustrating. Of course, mulled the old man, everyone listened when Con spoke, because Con had a wicked temper and a stout walking stick with which to vent it with.
Con used to come in at 9.47pm, sharp. Like many madmen (and the old man did not doubt that he was mad, but it was a specific madness, a madness honed and sharpened like a pin, a madness with, at it’s heart, a tiny indestructible stubborn core of sanity) he ran like clockwork. He’d throw a handful of what were usually coins but more generally what he found in his pocket: bottlecaps from Guiness Export bottles, lint, viciously barbed fishhooks for snaring Conger with, a much prized fountain pen which would then claim the barmen had stolen. This accusation happened, on average, four times a week. The barman would pour him a large whisky for the sake of a quiet life (and just occasionally, Con would throw a fiver absentmindedly at him, if he’d had a good haul of lobster, for example, and the barman would quickly pocket it and keep quiet) and then Con would shuffle over to the fireplace, stab it violently with the poker, eye the embers suspiciously, and, after a few more experimental jabs, would eventually be satisfied that the flames had been sufficiently placated, and would get on with the serious business of achieving oblivion in a hurry.
A fist of water thumped the hull of The Winterset, and the boat shuddered as a cloak of water wrapped it in wintery foam.
“Borealis is well underway now, m’lad. Don’t mind that bastard Tailor, he’ll get his, soon enough. Worry ye not, as the poet puts it. Har har.” Con narrated his diatribes with extravagant relish, taking great delight in highlighting the obscene, the debauched, the graphically violent and bodily coarse. His arms flapped wildly at his side, and sometimes he would stop, sit completely still, and then swat the air with his stick, obliterating a rogue dust mote. He would then beam proudly, tombstone, pub-piano-key teeth reflecting the firelight, and continue with his happy ranting. “Yes, yes. We all know what happened to that gobshite. Don't we, that gobshite. Went under near Cape Wrath, right under the waves. Cracked his skull on those granite boulders, he’s sideways now.” He sipped appreciatively at his pint, looking absurdly genteel for a moment, crossed himself and spat “Bastard mental, so he is. Was. Maybe still is, in St Peter's fine care. I'd sooner sup with tha' deel. Wouldn’t want to be in the same room as him, unless you removed his teeth first. Even then. Ho. Ho.”
The Autumn Taint
The blackened sky hovers above
The rusted tusks of stump fields.
The murder of crows wanders above
The benighted bog and its churned cargo
Of peat, dead leaves, amphibians.
A rusted bicycle meanders along
Invisible pathways under the soil.
Dragged under and along the subterranean roads
By the mire’s glowering movements.
A badger skulks in the brambles.
A coiled muscle rises in a coarse shoulder.
Blackened rough-neck hairs prickle on steel-shod ligaments.
It plods through mud and thorn and limpid water.
It barks a greeting to the green wood.
Beyond the rusted tusks of stump.
An English Condition
This is a true story.
The nine-oh-five train puttered out of Hastings station
Trailing a five-carriage assortment of humanity.
Laden with coffee with the flavour of water.
Crisps with the flavour of exotic chemicals.
The Guardian with a flavour of liberality.
A commuter rubs his red-rimmed eyes and checks his watch
And straightens his tie.
And opens his paper.
And glances guiltily at Page Three of his fellow passengers Sun
And chastens himself for doing so and reminds himself of his wife.
Two daughters.
One son.
And a dog called Alfred.
Lucky, lucky, lucky.
The nine-oh-five train (out of Hastings) skitters along the line
Trailing tired tourists, crushed stock-marketers, bellowing children.
Our man (the commuter) reads the headlines, tuts in his head at the vagaries of man
And reaches for a biscuit, which he munches away at absently, eyes tracing columns glazedly.
The Times’dry dissertation soothing him.
A man across the seat
A similar breed.
Note paper.
Note discomfort.
Note serial watch checking.
Note (perhaps) stable family unit.
Watches our man eat the biscuit
With something like incredulity.
And reaches for a biscuit of his own.
From the same packet.
Our man looks down to see his fellow passenger take a biscuit from the pack
(His pack) and crunch it down with ease and leisure
But the cold look in his eyes betrays icy displeasure.
Our man is hurt.
This man’s a cad
For eating our man’s biscuits!
And not enough, to just steal, but challenge too.
Well.
That’s just not cricket.
So our man reaches for another.
And the other man does too.
Eyes flash angrily across the table.
Jaws set in hard lines.
And not a word is said.
Mouths masticate in furious self-righteous chomps.
Each man reads the paper with mega-watt stares.
Daring the other to make the first move.
So.
This game of feint and riposte
Darts and weaves to Haywards Heath
Then the packet is exhausted.
Students bustle into the carriage
Single mothers hustle off.
An Indian gent brings the buffet cart round
And our two commuters, locked in grimace
Brothers of contempt,
Fellow soldiers of disdain,
Both ask for cups of tea. Please.
This charade continues all the way to Victoria station.
Each man concentrating on his paper, with fierce determination.
Each inwardly humming a sort of Buddhist mantra
To block out the other’s influence.
The commuter stands
And leaves the carriage.
Our man stands too
And lifts his bag
(Which was on the table)
And looks mournfully, miserably, pathetically,
Writhing in the fires of crucifying embarrassment
Impaled on the spit of discomfort.
At his unopened, untouched, unsullied,
Packet of biscuits.
Friday 22 October 2010
Sea Triptych
Tideline
I have lived next to the sea all my life.
I have heard the boom of smashed water on sand in December, and I have heard the hush of little waves collapsing in August. I have smelt the different scents of the ocean in all its moods – the living smell of an equinoctial tide, all wilting kelp and the breaths of a million limpets. I have breathed in the salt wind in winter, and swallowed the narcotic air of slow summer breakers.
And as long as I have lived near the beach, the old man has too.
It was the autumn of my fourth year, and with autumn comes the south wind, warmish tides of air from the tropic of cancer, propelling in front of it big white clouds, which are what gather in early autumn in great numbers. ‘Happy clouds’, my mother calls them – big, doughy, matronly clouds, ambling in from the confluence zones of the tropics to throng the skies.
After the warmth and light of September (And it is the light I remember: the sky a dream-struck mother-of-pearl for weeks on end, silky golden fronds pointing upwards, a Bay of Naples kind of light, an amateur watercolourists ideal) came the north wind.
When the wind came – hoarse and thrashing in the thick darkness - it was as if September had never been. There is something nullifying about a storm, especially over the sea, and especially at night – instead of the senses awakening, they shut down completely, leaving you with dead nerves in the teeth of the gale. With no reference points on land and no light to navigate by anyway, the world and its usual compliant angles is reduced to a pitching trough of arcing water and Mandelbrot waves - everything is a derangement of the senses; vision is canted to the diagonal; line of sight is funnelled down tubes of dark water, and perspective is reduced to the blink of jagged moonlight on a serrated wave-train. It is as if an explosion has knocked out not just your ear-drums, but your nose and eyes and hands and tongue, leaving you with nothing but a ringing in all five senses.
Which is when I first saw the old man. It was sometime in November, and I was perched on my father’s shoulders, proudly surveying the sweep of the beach – my beach - and watching a line of surf light up the bay. From my lofty height, I watched the lippy breakers smack down on the shingle, and then suck pebbles back into the splintering foam. The sky was darkening, and the wind was strengthening minute by minute. Two black-headed gulls wheeled in a ring of blue, before clouds blotted out them out. And over to the west, clambering up a dune, was a man.
Not a tall man or impressive man – I could see that my father was much taller– but there was something odd about him that caused my four-year old eyes to widen. He trudged slowly up the hillock, in that clomping, tiring way that all dunes are be faced (It is impossible to look graceful on a sand dune) and stopped abruptly at the top. The rising wind snatched a fragment of song over the sand to me, though all I really heard was one gruff note in a mosaic of wind. I thought that maybe it was God, and told my father so. My father chuckled and said that didn't God have a big white robe and live in the clouds? He probably didn't reek of pollack guts which could be smelt a mile away either (Raising a smirk on his part and an owlish blink on mine).
I asked my father if God lived in those clouds - I pointed at the glowering thunder-heads that were piling up in the west - and he laughed and said no, God lived in nice September clouds, which were on holiday in the Azores. I didn't know what the Azores were, but I did know that clouds were wet, so it must have been a bit uncomfortable for him and all his angel friends. I considered the situation in that extraordinarily sombre way small children have when they think they're being serious. Maybe God decided to take a break from His damp house in the sky and go for a walk along my beach – after all, I liked my beach, and with the single-mindedness of the young, assumed that everyone else in the world did too. So maybe that was Him stooping on the ribbed sand and turning a razor-clam shell over and over, thoughtfully it in His calloused hands, squatting in a storm of his own making. God has come to my beach. That's nice, I thought.
My father told me that the wind was getting up and it would rain soon, and would I mind walking because his shoulders were starting to ache? I was carried off his shoulders – and at the top of the arc, as he lifted me over his head, I was tall enough to look down upon God himself – and placed me on the ground. I removed my mittens and put my hot, gummy palm in my fathers’, and we walked home. I looked back every few paces, watching the hunched outline go into soft focus in the growing mire, and then blur, and then disappear altogether behind curtains of mute rain.
Several times I saw the old man over the next few years, and I begin to discover the nature of his existence. Firstly, he was not God – my increasing years began to infuse me with the cynicism that overtakes us all, in the end – and anyway, God (If he existed) lived Up There and this one definitely lived Down Here, in a disused rail-way carriage that was permanently parked on faded sleepers behind the dunes. Sea Kale and chard grew between the slats of the railway line. Little cairns of stones and shells surrounded his encampment, and in summer, a bird-shit streaked blue plastic tarpaulin was strung out between the railway carriage and two upright poles to form a sort of droopy canopy. It looked like saddest thing in all the world, and the mottled surface and hanging folds of the plastic when unfurled looked like a permanent flag of defeat.
The old man had a liking for washed-up artefacts, and I did too, but his collection was better than mine (Not that I cared, I told myself, although I did – I was poised between the tail-end of childhood, with all its eagerness and interest and forthright views, and sullen, quiet adolescent, where to be overt was tantamount to enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was analogous to being deeply and irretrievably uncool).
Pride of place in my collection was the unspeakably sad little skull of a tern; Arctic, Common, Roseate or Little, I never did find out. Second place was given to a perfect circle of milky, worn glass, like a blue eye filmed over with a cataract. I had a secret library hidden under a spider-haunted floorboard that could be eased up with a penknife blade, which was full of shells (Various, organized roughly by species, size, colour and condition), dried husks of bladder-wrack, driftwood corroded down to its ribbed heartwood, continental – and on one occasion, African – soft drink bottles or cans, the glass faded to a pearlescent glow, the labels of the cans faded like relics in a desert from before an apocalyptic war, cuttlefish cartilage, the beak of either a small octopus or a squid, and the anterior teeth of a small shark, probably a dogfish. I had bottles of muddy seawater containing trembling anenomes on star ascidian and limpet encrusted rocks, a small tank with four translucent shrimps which jetted across the sand when startled, and an ancient, depressed looking Blenny which my father had named Oblomov, which peered myopically out from behind its submerged home and only moved – tiredly, like a fat man roused by the doorbell – when I bought it a handful of beach fleas.
The old man, however, had a piece of sheet metal in the shape of a teardrop, I guessed bronze, which the sea-water had discoloured and tarnished to a million lustrous shades of blue and green and even purple, which all ran together like oil in a puddle. I had never seen anything like it. One night, I decided to steal it.
I devised my plan at home, selloptaping a Halfords torch to an aging Canadian Farmers Union (Owned by my grandfather and given reverentially to me when he retired to a condominium just outside Toronto; it was a totem of the soil, this cap; the beating sun, noisy machinery and the vast skies of Ontario, and was worn by me on days when I felt daring and brave, or, paradoxically, worried or uncertain), laying out a sheet of paper in military style on the carpet, carefully drawing diagrams, escape routes, numbered primary, secondary, and tertiary retreats, equipment lists (Torch-hat, waders, gloves, pen-knife, unfortunately bright blue balaclava), and so on. My little sister watched owlishly from the top bunk, kicking the heels of shoes with soft clunks against the side of the bed. “What’s that for?” she asked, pointing with a sticky pink finger at the hat. I sighed loudly, took a pompously deep breath, and explained its various merits, but by now she had stopped listening and was playing with my balaclava, so I threw some Lego at her. After she had run off crying, I breathed a self-righteous lungful, consulted my finalised plan gravely, and marched off down the stairs.
I walked down the lane in the dusty rays of a late July day. Little winds criss-crossed the road at ankle height, and a mulititude of dust spires wound round my legs and spun through gate posts. The air was lit with drifting motes of pollen, salt particles, road mica, and the dancing dust. It was nudging six o’clock in the evening, and the air was warm and languid. A sound carried for miles, as I discovered when I experimentally kicked a dusty pebble down the road, each bounce raising a clipped “Tshck!” from the warm asphalt. Rufus, my neighbours aging labrodor, raised his sorrowful eyes from the tired grass. The only sound was the wash of wind over the machair. I walked along the lane, then veered right past a small pond, capped with the Capuchin domes of coot's heads, then down to the sea.
I waited until I was sure the old man was foraging for watermint and dandelions which flourished by the canals, growing by the rich water, teeming with algae and run-off nutrients, kept anti-septic and healthy by the salt wind, and invaded his campsite.
I crept over to his washing line, a length of thick-gauge nylon, originally used for snaring Conger, and unstrung the hanging metal. It was oddly, even unnaturally warm, with that human warmth that all bronze has, and I untied the knot that had been threaded through a bore-hole at the top. Spangled bluish lines radiated out from the hole where the metal had splintered and scratched from the drill-bit.
“Nice, isn’t it? Found it in the winter tide of ’87. Wicked sharp at the edges, but I sanded it off into its present form. How are you? My name is William”.
Beneath the canopy was the old man. Two beady blue eyes scanned mine, and never has the phrase, ‘Beady blue eyes’ been used with more accuracy – they were twin bolts of sapphire, uniformly one absolute definition of colour: flawless, unblemished blue. Framing them was a blockish, hewn sort of face, barked with age and whiskers and chasmic wrinkles. He looked quietly pleased.
“So you like it enough to” – a grin flickered like a shoal across his mouth – “... steal it?” Rogue syllables darted between his broken teeth like little fish. He smiled brightly.
“I’m really rather pleased, you know. Most people think I’m a little... eccentric. Certainly not worth stealing from. Who wants to steal from a man who smells like Pollack guts?”
I stiffened slightly, and memories skittered along neural pathways. He had fixed his eyes on mine with that last comment, and they had lingered there for an uncomfortably long time. There is no-way he could have heard what my father said, three or four years ago. He must have been perhaps two hundred yards distant. And yet there was a curious suggestion to his voice, an insinuation that this was not guesswork.
He looked at his mangled tennis-shoes for a long time.
“I am a perceptive old bugger. I hear things when other people hear only the sighing wind, or the little chattering voices inside their heads. Seldom do we really think. But who would understand an old man who, admittedly, does have a certain tang of expired fish?” He smiled sadly.
I stood without a word. What could I say?
He raised his eyes to the distant and watched the waves flicker.
“The birds. The little slender sea-horses. The hermit-crabs. They are as close as I have to neighbours, nowadays. Take the metal. I can find more”. He smiled, turned around, and shambled off into his carriage. A few seconds later, I heard a click, then the beginnings of water in a kettle growing restless with heat. I heard the click of a teaspoon in a jar or cup. I heard the faint creak of wicker under stress, then nothing at all. I clutched the sheet metal to my chest, and walked away into the breeze.
Three weeks later, I was sitting atop the highest dune, knees tight around two ears of ryegrass, perched on top of sandy shoulders that were not my fathers but nearly as familiar. I had not seen the old man during that time, and I felt guilt creep into my head and take up lodgings. I had come to return it to the sea. I don't know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. I stood on the shore and hurled the driftmetal into the waves. It thrummed through the air, and hit the water. Bubbles crowded and slopped round its wake, and within a minute, both metal and bubbles had disappeared. I returned to my dune and watched the waves whisper down the length of the bay. High above, a cormorant floated in the late summer sky. It spiralled down and pierced the water at the exact point where the metal had sunk, presumably hunting the shoals of mackerel that strayed into the shallows. I didn't realize until I saw the same bird winging inland, its beak cross-hatched with mackerel, that cormorants also have bright blue eyes.
Fairlight
There is a bench perched on the lip of a cliff, and on it sits a seven-year old boy. Below the bench is a slope of chalk, and beyond that the sea. Around the legs of the bench are shallow bowls of sand and soil, and out of each grows little fronds of kale and purslane. The boy kicks his legs heels back and forth against the little trench excavated by the heels of dug-in boots. He is holding a hermit crab, which peers suspiciously up at him. Out of his pocket juts a rib of driftwood, worn down to cords of heartwood.
A man trudges up the path, grunts an acknowledgement, and walks on. The boy lifts himself off the bench – seasoned ash, cut into eight slats. The seat is worn to a grey sheen from the shifting of bodies and the blasting of winds. Each plank is secured with four rivets, and each rivet is mottled with ochre rust and lime lichen. The boy watches a gull circle, then walks downhill.
There is a pathway that runs down towards the salt marshes and the main road. The path veers left at first down a woodland ride. The path is hemmed in by pleached trees, but at this time of year, the tunnel is covered in fruiting hawthorn spurs. The boy picks a sloe off a branch, brushes off the powdery bloom and pops the bitter berry into his mouth.
At the bottom of the path is a car-park and a tarred shed, open-fronted with blackboards resting against either shutter. At the counter is a man with a beard stained the colour of flax. But that is not what the boy looks at.
Sitting by the left back wheel of a Ford Orion is a little girl, her head canted downwards between her shoulders.
The boy walks over and squats down awkwardly. What is wrong, says the boy. From within the cavern of limbs, a tiny voice says: I can’t find my brother.
Where is your brother, says the boy, and this time the girl raises her head a bit and says: I don’t know. My Mum shouted at him and he shouted too and ran back to the car and I asked my mum could I go back to the car too and she shouted at me so I followed him but he’s really fast and when I got to my mum’s car he wasn’t there so I now I don’t have anyone at all.
It’s okay. It’s alright, says the boy.
The little girl wiped her nose with her forearm, and looked critically at her shoes.
My shoes are wet.
I know, says the boy.
And so are my socks.
Yes, I can see that.
Will you stay with me until my brother comes back, says the little girl.
Yes. I mean, if you want me to. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, unclenched his palm, and on it sat a coiled whelk shell.
Here. This is called a hermit crab.
Pelagic.
I have walked the beach in November.
On sift-water sands near Dymchurch
My ice-broken footsteps
On the black and tan dunes.
Tanker on the summit of a cooling tower.
Sub-sun sealight mounting the flanks of Dungeness.
Tar-board shinglesong on the walls of Prospect cottage.
Seven ceramic seahorns in the cast of a tusk of root bole.
One gull skull in a wash of machair.
Sandsprint bones.
I was.
Rootwater
Shootwater
Fly-catcher & archer.
Flaxlight and dust
Rustbark follower.
You were.
Sprint-air
Haunt-wing
Skylark & swallow.
Leanlight and breathshot
Cloudspat drifter.
I was.
Arc-sea.
Wave-train.
Goby & blenny.
Tideline and benthos.
Athletic waters.
You were.
Arch-limb
Vein-thin
Head & heart.
Lungwater and coppertongue
Short-shout.
I am.
Rootwater thief.
Marine-snow sleeper.
You are.
Air-dark ellipse.
Spent-lunged passer.
You were.
Going.
You are.
Gone.
I have lived next to the sea all my life.
I have heard the boom of smashed water on sand in December, and I have heard the hush of little waves collapsing in August. I have smelt the different scents of the ocean in all its moods – the living smell of an equinoctial tide, all wilting kelp and the breaths of a million limpets. I have breathed in the salt wind in winter, and swallowed the narcotic air of slow summer breakers.
And as long as I have lived near the beach, the old man has too.
It was the autumn of my fourth year, and with autumn comes the south wind, warmish tides of air from the tropic of cancer, propelling in front of it big white clouds, which are what gather in early autumn in great numbers. ‘Happy clouds’, my mother calls them – big, doughy, matronly clouds, ambling in from the confluence zones of the tropics to throng the skies.
After the warmth and light of September (And it is the light I remember: the sky a dream-struck mother-of-pearl for weeks on end, silky golden fronds pointing upwards, a Bay of Naples kind of light, an amateur watercolourists ideal) came the north wind.
When the wind came – hoarse and thrashing in the thick darkness - it was as if September had never been. There is something nullifying about a storm, especially over the sea, and especially at night – instead of the senses awakening, they shut down completely, leaving you with dead nerves in the teeth of the gale. With no reference points on land and no light to navigate by anyway, the world and its usual compliant angles is reduced to a pitching trough of arcing water and Mandelbrot waves - everything is a derangement of the senses; vision is canted to the diagonal; line of sight is funnelled down tubes of dark water, and perspective is reduced to the blink of jagged moonlight on a serrated wave-train. It is as if an explosion has knocked out not just your ear-drums, but your nose and eyes and hands and tongue, leaving you with nothing but a ringing in all five senses.
Which is when I first saw the old man. It was sometime in November, and I was perched on my father’s shoulders, proudly surveying the sweep of the beach – my beach - and watching a line of surf light up the bay. From my lofty height, I watched the lippy breakers smack down on the shingle, and then suck pebbles back into the splintering foam. The sky was darkening, and the wind was strengthening minute by minute. Two black-headed gulls wheeled in a ring of blue, before clouds blotted out them out. And over to the west, clambering up a dune, was a man.
Not a tall man or impressive man – I could see that my father was much taller– but there was something odd about him that caused my four-year old eyes to widen. He trudged slowly up the hillock, in that clomping, tiring way that all dunes are be faced (It is impossible to look graceful on a sand dune) and stopped abruptly at the top. The rising wind snatched a fragment of song over the sand to me, though all I really heard was one gruff note in a mosaic of wind. I thought that maybe it was God, and told my father so. My father chuckled and said that didn't God have a big white robe and live in the clouds? He probably didn't reek of pollack guts which could be smelt a mile away either (Raising a smirk on his part and an owlish blink on mine).
I asked my father if God lived in those clouds - I pointed at the glowering thunder-heads that were piling up in the west - and he laughed and said no, God lived in nice September clouds, which were on holiday in the Azores. I didn't know what the Azores were, but I did know that clouds were wet, so it must have been a bit uncomfortable for him and all his angel friends. I considered the situation in that extraordinarily sombre way small children have when they think they're being serious. Maybe God decided to take a break from His damp house in the sky and go for a walk along my beach – after all, I liked my beach, and with the single-mindedness of the young, assumed that everyone else in the world did too. So maybe that was Him stooping on the ribbed sand and turning a razor-clam shell over and over, thoughtfully it in His calloused hands, squatting in a storm of his own making. God has come to my beach. That's nice, I thought.
My father told me that the wind was getting up and it would rain soon, and would I mind walking because his shoulders were starting to ache? I was carried off his shoulders – and at the top of the arc, as he lifted me over his head, I was tall enough to look down upon God himself – and placed me on the ground. I removed my mittens and put my hot, gummy palm in my fathers’, and we walked home. I looked back every few paces, watching the hunched outline go into soft focus in the growing mire, and then blur, and then disappear altogether behind curtains of mute rain.
Several times I saw the old man over the next few years, and I begin to discover the nature of his existence. Firstly, he was not God – my increasing years began to infuse me with the cynicism that overtakes us all, in the end – and anyway, God (If he existed) lived Up There and this one definitely lived Down Here, in a disused rail-way carriage that was permanently parked on faded sleepers behind the dunes. Sea Kale and chard grew between the slats of the railway line. Little cairns of stones and shells surrounded his encampment, and in summer, a bird-shit streaked blue plastic tarpaulin was strung out between the railway carriage and two upright poles to form a sort of droopy canopy. It looked like saddest thing in all the world, and the mottled surface and hanging folds of the plastic when unfurled looked like a permanent flag of defeat.
The old man had a liking for washed-up artefacts, and I did too, but his collection was better than mine (Not that I cared, I told myself, although I did – I was poised between the tail-end of childhood, with all its eagerness and interest and forthright views, and sullen, quiet adolescent, where to be overt was tantamount to enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was analogous to being deeply and irretrievably uncool).
Pride of place in my collection was the unspeakably sad little skull of a tern; Arctic, Common, Roseate or Little, I never did find out. Second place was given to a perfect circle of milky, worn glass, like a blue eye filmed over with a cataract. I had a secret library hidden under a spider-haunted floorboard that could be eased up with a penknife blade, which was full of shells (Various, organized roughly by species, size, colour and condition), dried husks of bladder-wrack, driftwood corroded down to its ribbed heartwood, continental – and on one occasion, African – soft drink bottles or cans, the glass faded to a pearlescent glow, the labels of the cans faded like relics in a desert from before an apocalyptic war, cuttlefish cartilage, the beak of either a small octopus or a squid, and the anterior teeth of a small shark, probably a dogfish. I had bottles of muddy seawater containing trembling anenomes on star ascidian and limpet encrusted rocks, a small tank with four translucent shrimps which jetted across the sand when startled, and an ancient, depressed looking Blenny which my father had named Oblomov, which peered myopically out from behind its submerged home and only moved – tiredly, like a fat man roused by the doorbell – when I bought it a handful of beach fleas.
The old man, however, had a piece of sheet metal in the shape of a teardrop, I guessed bronze, which the sea-water had discoloured and tarnished to a million lustrous shades of blue and green and even purple, which all ran together like oil in a puddle. I had never seen anything like it. One night, I decided to steal it.
I devised my plan at home, selloptaping a Halfords torch to an aging Canadian Farmers Union (Owned by my grandfather and given reverentially to me when he retired to a condominium just outside Toronto; it was a totem of the soil, this cap; the beating sun, noisy machinery and the vast skies of Ontario, and was worn by me on days when I felt daring and brave, or, paradoxically, worried or uncertain), laying out a sheet of paper in military style on the carpet, carefully drawing diagrams, escape routes, numbered primary, secondary, and tertiary retreats, equipment lists (Torch-hat, waders, gloves, pen-knife, unfortunately bright blue balaclava), and so on. My little sister watched owlishly from the top bunk, kicking the heels of shoes with soft clunks against the side of the bed. “What’s that for?” she asked, pointing with a sticky pink finger at the hat. I sighed loudly, took a pompously deep breath, and explained its various merits, but by now she had stopped listening and was playing with my balaclava, so I threw some Lego at her. After she had run off crying, I breathed a self-righteous lungful, consulted my finalised plan gravely, and marched off down the stairs.
I walked down the lane in the dusty rays of a late July day. Little winds criss-crossed the road at ankle height, and a mulititude of dust spires wound round my legs and spun through gate posts. The air was lit with drifting motes of pollen, salt particles, road mica, and the dancing dust. It was nudging six o’clock in the evening, and the air was warm and languid. A sound carried for miles, as I discovered when I experimentally kicked a dusty pebble down the road, each bounce raising a clipped “Tshck!” from the warm asphalt. Rufus, my neighbours aging labrodor, raised his sorrowful eyes from the tired grass. The only sound was the wash of wind over the machair. I walked along the lane, then veered right past a small pond, capped with the Capuchin domes of coot's heads, then down to the sea.
I waited until I was sure the old man was foraging for watermint and dandelions which flourished by the canals, growing by the rich water, teeming with algae and run-off nutrients, kept anti-septic and healthy by the salt wind, and invaded his campsite.
I crept over to his washing line, a length of thick-gauge nylon, originally used for snaring Conger, and unstrung the hanging metal. It was oddly, even unnaturally warm, with that human warmth that all bronze has, and I untied the knot that had been threaded through a bore-hole at the top. Spangled bluish lines radiated out from the hole where the metal had splintered and scratched from the drill-bit.
“Nice, isn’t it? Found it in the winter tide of ’87. Wicked sharp at the edges, but I sanded it off into its present form. How are you? My name is William”.
Beneath the canopy was the old man. Two beady blue eyes scanned mine, and never has the phrase, ‘Beady blue eyes’ been used with more accuracy – they were twin bolts of sapphire, uniformly one absolute definition of colour: flawless, unblemished blue. Framing them was a blockish, hewn sort of face, barked with age and whiskers and chasmic wrinkles. He looked quietly pleased.
“So you like it enough to” – a grin flickered like a shoal across his mouth – “... steal it?” Rogue syllables darted between his broken teeth like little fish. He smiled brightly.
“I’m really rather pleased, you know. Most people think I’m a little... eccentric. Certainly not worth stealing from. Who wants to steal from a man who smells like Pollack guts?”
I stiffened slightly, and memories skittered along neural pathways. He had fixed his eyes on mine with that last comment, and they had lingered there for an uncomfortably long time. There is no-way he could have heard what my father said, three or four years ago. He must have been perhaps two hundred yards distant. And yet there was a curious suggestion to his voice, an insinuation that this was not guesswork.
He looked at his mangled tennis-shoes for a long time.
“I am a perceptive old bugger. I hear things when other people hear only the sighing wind, or the little chattering voices inside their heads. Seldom do we really think. But who would understand an old man who, admittedly, does have a certain tang of expired fish?” He smiled sadly.
I stood without a word. What could I say?
He raised his eyes to the distant and watched the waves flicker.
“The birds. The little slender sea-horses. The hermit-crabs. They are as close as I have to neighbours, nowadays. Take the metal. I can find more”. He smiled, turned around, and shambled off into his carriage. A few seconds later, I heard a click, then the beginnings of water in a kettle growing restless with heat. I heard the click of a teaspoon in a jar or cup. I heard the faint creak of wicker under stress, then nothing at all. I clutched the sheet metal to my chest, and walked away into the breeze.
Three weeks later, I was sitting atop the highest dune, knees tight around two ears of ryegrass, perched on top of sandy shoulders that were not my fathers but nearly as familiar. I had not seen the old man during that time, and I felt guilt creep into my head and take up lodgings. I had come to return it to the sea. I don't know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. I stood on the shore and hurled the driftmetal into the waves. It thrummed through the air, and hit the water. Bubbles crowded and slopped round its wake, and within a minute, both metal and bubbles had disappeared. I returned to my dune and watched the waves whisper down the length of the bay. High above, a cormorant floated in the late summer sky. It spiralled down and pierced the water at the exact point where the metal had sunk, presumably hunting the shoals of mackerel that strayed into the shallows. I didn't realize until I saw the same bird winging inland, its beak cross-hatched with mackerel, that cormorants also have bright blue eyes.
Fairlight
There is a bench perched on the lip of a cliff, and on it sits a seven-year old boy. Below the bench is a slope of chalk, and beyond that the sea. Around the legs of the bench are shallow bowls of sand and soil, and out of each grows little fronds of kale and purslane. The boy kicks his legs heels back and forth against the little trench excavated by the heels of dug-in boots. He is holding a hermit crab, which peers suspiciously up at him. Out of his pocket juts a rib of driftwood, worn down to cords of heartwood.
A man trudges up the path, grunts an acknowledgement, and walks on. The boy lifts himself off the bench – seasoned ash, cut into eight slats. The seat is worn to a grey sheen from the shifting of bodies and the blasting of winds. Each plank is secured with four rivets, and each rivet is mottled with ochre rust and lime lichen. The boy watches a gull circle, then walks downhill.
There is a pathway that runs down towards the salt marshes and the main road. The path veers left at first down a woodland ride. The path is hemmed in by pleached trees, but at this time of year, the tunnel is covered in fruiting hawthorn spurs. The boy picks a sloe off a branch, brushes off the powdery bloom and pops the bitter berry into his mouth.
At the bottom of the path is a car-park and a tarred shed, open-fronted with blackboards resting against either shutter. At the counter is a man with a beard stained the colour of flax. But that is not what the boy looks at.
Sitting by the left back wheel of a Ford Orion is a little girl, her head canted downwards between her shoulders.
The boy walks over and squats down awkwardly. What is wrong, says the boy. From within the cavern of limbs, a tiny voice says: I can’t find my brother.
Where is your brother, says the boy, and this time the girl raises her head a bit and says: I don’t know. My Mum shouted at him and he shouted too and ran back to the car and I asked my mum could I go back to the car too and she shouted at me so I followed him but he’s really fast and when I got to my mum’s car he wasn’t there so I now I don’t have anyone at all.
It’s okay. It’s alright, says the boy.
The little girl wiped her nose with her forearm, and looked critically at her shoes.
My shoes are wet.
I know, says the boy.
And so are my socks.
Yes, I can see that.
Will you stay with me until my brother comes back, says the little girl.
Yes. I mean, if you want me to. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, unclenched his palm, and on it sat a coiled whelk shell.
Here. This is called a hermit crab.
Pelagic.
I have walked the beach in November.
On sift-water sands near Dymchurch
My ice-broken footsteps
On the black and tan dunes.
Tanker on the summit of a cooling tower.
Sub-sun sealight mounting the flanks of Dungeness.
Tar-board shinglesong on the walls of Prospect cottage.
Seven ceramic seahorns in the cast of a tusk of root bole.
One gull skull in a wash of machair.
Sandsprint bones.
I was.
Rootwater
Shootwater
Fly-catcher & archer.
Flaxlight and dust
Rustbark follower.
You were.
Sprint-air
Haunt-wing
Skylark & swallow.
Leanlight and breathshot
Cloudspat drifter.
I was.
Arc-sea.
Wave-train.
Goby & blenny.
Tideline and benthos.
Athletic waters.
You were.
Arch-limb
Vein-thin
Head & heart.
Lungwater and coppertongue
Short-shout.
I am.
Rootwater thief.
Marine-snow sleeper.
You are.
Air-dark ellipse.
Spent-lunged passer.
You were.
Going.
You are.
Gone.
Friday 8 October 2010
Young Old Man.
Today I was caught picking up conkers on the way to University. Caught by two parties, actually - one a mother and child, and the other a pair of multiply pierced and tattooed young people who were obviously much cooler than I am. The mother looked at me with a mixture of pity - as if I'd suffered extensive brain-damage through some terrible mishap and was reduced to slouching around town slack-jawed picking things up and muttering distractedly under my breath - and distaste, as if I was fondling, shall we say, a dead Magpie and cooing over it.
The second party were obviously trying quite hard not to laugh. I railed at this, actually, but since I am not very tall, genetically scruffy, and shaved off my homeless beard, I am not a very imposing figure, not that I necessarily was pre-beard.
All of which made me think (As I strode indignantly along, sucking furiously on a cigarette and stomping more than was strictly necessary) that said conker actually meant more to me as an adult (I use the word with caution) than as a child.
When I was a child, the only things I cared about were essentially Lego and the pursuit of Monster Munch. Oh, there were things like family and the embryonic flickers of an interest in writing and stuff like that, but no, pretty much the only things I clutched close to my heart were making extravagantly beweaponed space ships - or failing that, gluing torpedeo tubes and lasers onto my sister's Sylvanian Family toys; everything is improved with a weapon of mass destruction taped to it, even Kinder Egg toys - and Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. God, how I loved Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. I would've mugged the most hazel-eyed, tousle-haired hobbity toddler for a pack of them. Still would.
Conkers were fun in the playground - I eventually found that the basic boiling-conkers-in-vinegar hardening process could be reinforced with a superglue glaze; risky, seeing as UHU Superglue is one of the most lethal substances known to man; I once glued a Spitfire to my forehead by mistake and went around with the imprint of the RAF on my forehead for some days afterwards - but there the buck stopped. Once you'd demolished your opponent and had been carried round the playground by squeaking minions, lordly declaiming your mastery of the fruit of the horse-chesnut, you'd sort of reached the end. Anyway, conkers were only about for a little bit of autumn, and then you had to go back to pretending to be Sonic The Hedgehog and tormenting the weakest or indeed most ginger of the group.
I am aware all of this makes me sound like one of those children who motored around the playground solo making whooshing noises while the other children shunned them in case they, you know, bit them or something. Nothing could be further from the truth; I was a sensitive, cornflower blue-eyed and radiantly blonde and charming child with, admittedly, a terrible, terrible haircut.
Anyway, the ginger kid in question was, I promise, pathologically insane and continues to be a dangerous person to this day - I believe he has diverted his mania into Manga these days, which is at least mildly reassuring, even though I believe Manga is for lonely, lonely people, more so then Leonard Cohen and heroin, even - and the hair colour is in this case only relevant for reasons of categorization, obviously.
Now, on the other hand, there is something deeply satisfying about a shiny, organically tough horse-chesnut. Or walking around a corner just as the sun comes out. Or pulling your hood over your head when it rains and being encircled by warmth. Sometimes just being is enough - life is a litany of experience and moments, obviously, but sometimes, the walking to and the ending of is reward in itself, at least for me.
I often walk around the lake by the broad after or before a seminar, and I seem to be the only one that does so. Again, there are other people about - joggers, buzzing like metal wasps with their ipods on full blast - and a sprinkling of dog-walkers, generally bowed old boys with equally rheumatic wheezy dogs ("Come on Stanley, wheeeee" "Woof woof, wheeeee, bark bark") and upright middle-aged ladies with expensive highlights and Hunter wellies - but I appear to be the only one who sits on a bench with a coffee and cigarette and book and ruminates a bit. I cannot begin to calculate the ammount of kindly walkers that have almost certainly pitied me, sitting on my bench with a notebook open on my lap and a moorhen tutting at me behind a frond of bullrushes. One day I may bring a sign with me and hang it over my resident bench, bearing the legend, "I have friends, I certainly like a drink, I am on this bench by choice, I have not had a crisis, familial or otherwise. You concern is appreciated, but I promise, without cause. Thank you".
It is possible I am reading into this too much.
The second party were obviously trying quite hard not to laugh. I railed at this, actually, but since I am not very tall, genetically scruffy, and shaved off my homeless beard, I am not a very imposing figure, not that I necessarily was pre-beard.
All of which made me think (As I strode indignantly along, sucking furiously on a cigarette and stomping more than was strictly necessary) that said conker actually meant more to me as an adult (I use the word with caution) than as a child.
When I was a child, the only things I cared about were essentially Lego and the pursuit of Monster Munch. Oh, there were things like family and the embryonic flickers of an interest in writing and stuff like that, but no, pretty much the only things I clutched close to my heart were making extravagantly beweaponed space ships - or failing that, gluing torpedeo tubes and lasers onto my sister's Sylvanian Family toys; everything is improved with a weapon of mass destruction taped to it, even Kinder Egg toys - and Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. God, how I loved Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. I would've mugged the most hazel-eyed, tousle-haired hobbity toddler for a pack of them. Still would.
Conkers were fun in the playground - I eventually found that the basic boiling-conkers-in-vinegar hardening process could be reinforced with a superglue glaze; risky, seeing as UHU Superglue is one of the most lethal substances known to man; I once glued a Spitfire to my forehead by mistake and went around with the imprint of the RAF on my forehead for some days afterwards - but there the buck stopped. Once you'd demolished your opponent and had been carried round the playground by squeaking minions, lordly declaiming your mastery of the fruit of the horse-chesnut, you'd sort of reached the end. Anyway, conkers were only about for a little bit of autumn, and then you had to go back to pretending to be Sonic The Hedgehog and tormenting the weakest or indeed most ginger of the group.
I am aware all of this makes me sound like one of those children who motored around the playground solo making whooshing noises while the other children shunned them in case they, you know, bit them or something. Nothing could be further from the truth; I was a sensitive, cornflower blue-eyed and radiantly blonde and charming child with, admittedly, a terrible, terrible haircut.
Anyway, the ginger kid in question was, I promise, pathologically insane and continues to be a dangerous person to this day - I believe he has diverted his mania into Manga these days, which is at least mildly reassuring, even though I believe Manga is for lonely, lonely people, more so then Leonard Cohen and heroin, even - and the hair colour is in this case only relevant for reasons of categorization, obviously.
Now, on the other hand, there is something deeply satisfying about a shiny, organically tough horse-chesnut. Or walking around a corner just as the sun comes out. Or pulling your hood over your head when it rains and being encircled by warmth. Sometimes just being is enough - life is a litany of experience and moments, obviously, but sometimes, the walking to and the ending of is reward in itself, at least for me.
I often walk around the lake by the broad after or before a seminar, and I seem to be the only one that does so. Again, there are other people about - joggers, buzzing like metal wasps with their ipods on full blast - and a sprinkling of dog-walkers, generally bowed old boys with equally rheumatic wheezy dogs ("Come on Stanley, wheeeee" "Woof woof, wheeeee, bark bark") and upright middle-aged ladies with expensive highlights and Hunter wellies - but I appear to be the only one who sits on a bench with a coffee and cigarette and book and ruminates a bit. I cannot begin to calculate the ammount of kindly walkers that have almost certainly pitied me, sitting on my bench with a notebook open on my lap and a moorhen tutting at me behind a frond of bullrushes. One day I may bring a sign with me and hang it over my resident bench, bearing the legend, "I have friends, I certainly like a drink, I am on this bench by choice, I have not had a crisis, familial or otherwise. You concern is appreciated, but I promise, without cause. Thank you".
It is possible I am reading into this too much.
Sunday 3 October 2010
Music for the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.
It has rained a lot lately. Norwich is almost entirely flat, except for two hills, one of which I live on, and one of which is almost alpine by Norfolk standards, two and a bit miles to the north-west, crowed by the mossy burren of Mousehold Heath and a big retail park. And the world's most dangerous crossroads - a four-way hellmouth of implausibly wide roads, frothing joker-faced drivers, and nano-second timed traffic lights - just enough time for you to take one ill-advised step before the Multipla horde crushes it to the texture of a rillette.
The point is, when the land is as flat as it is around here, and pock-marked with strands of wan trees, mainly poplars and sad little elms, nothing drains. Things that get wet stay wet for a very long time. My front garden has been squishy for over a week now. The garden path is turning into a rectangular strand of Rannoch Moor. The only thing that seems to enjoy the rain are the Garden Spiders - those bulbous, tawny-coloured ones, each with a white cruciform blaze on its abdomen - which have strung up webs like silk awning from every surface. Each strand is spangled with dew-light in the morning and is bright and lovely and easily avoided, but by evening is rendered entirely invisible and makes walking up to the front door an excercise in limbo. Still, few things are more entertaining than watching a guest perform a mad spastic dance in the front room, squeaking frantically, after realizing that they are liberally coated in spider web and are probably the new target of an exceedingly large and miffed garden spider.
Rain does different things to different people. Generally it makes me brood at the window, hands knotted behind my back like the shade of Peter Cushing. But this time around - probably because the persistant damp and me being struck down with flu basically turned me into an unshaven hermit for the best part of a week - it made me listen to lots of old music and read lots of old books, wander about in my head and rummage in dust-boxes and thought of the tails of summer and the beginnings of autumns that weren't quite so wet - some of them weren't wet at all - and put them together as a playlist.
Making a playlist is my kneejerk reaction to peaks and troughs. Each playlist is a bit like making a very exact, very subtle, very responsive puzzle - each placed piece turns a remembrance or a smell or a quality of light in my head. Each song has to compliment the others but not be identical to it. Each song has to lead you down a path somewhere and hopefully give you some kind of destination that is natural and progressive to its beginning.
This all sounds very muso, and I don't mean it to be. The best way to think of it is just another kind of story.
The inspirations for this playlist for me were a handful of the following:
* Being clonked over the head with an oar by mistake by a friend of my parents while boating on a big pond in August when I was four, maybe five. I remember seeing Great Crested Newts flitting under the amber water. That, and a big bump on the back of my head.
* Trying to run on a black-tarpaulin sheathed hay-bale in the manner of a running machine. And failing. Falling off was fine, being crushed underneath said bale was not.
* Drinking a strange blue energy drink and eating Discos on top of an abandoned tank-trap in a valley in Northiam in the dog days of summer, or having haphazard BBQ's in that same place in the pissing rain, each one of us druidic with our hoods up, blue cordite smoke unwrapping from within the hood as we puffed on our Lambert & Butlers. The very particular scratches on the legs and forearms from cornstalks.
* Sitting on a bench on what is probably my favourite place in the world, The Firehills near Winchelsea, on an fiendishly foul November afternoon, with the sky nothing but a boiling pan of shredded clouds and fucking great ball-bearings of rain smashing into your raincoat. If you sat very still at a very particular angle then it was possible to be completely circled by warmth and bone-dry while the gale whirled around you. The slightest twitch to the left or right and you'd get a mouthful of blasted sea-spray and rain to the face or a jet of frozen wind down the sleeve, and that was part of the fun.
* The public bar of The Rock pub near Chiddingstone in Kent. We moved when I was eight, but the bar-tenders, locals, the lot of them are friends with my parents and have been, as far as I can see, more or less from the year dot. Some friendships are rooted in the bone, and some familes are outside of the blood. The Rock has a paved, slightly uneven brick floor and low oak beams that are slightly warped through years of rising beer fumes, pipe smoke, the braying laughter and spittle of a certain kind of Kentish local and the steamy exhalations from a hundred dynasties of damp dogs - some of them quiet working-dogs, some elegant and docile Dalmatians with peanut-sized brains toted by ladies from Tunbridge Wells with spotless Hunter Wellies who would cautiously circumnavigate a puddle in their shining Range Rovers in the pub car-park after a hearty Ploughmans and maybe a half of IPA on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.
What you take from it is up to you - suggestion and insinuation are much more fun than dictation, after all.
http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/4FJrndb8FPw44jmRXZ77KT
Love, Nick.
The point is, when the land is as flat as it is around here, and pock-marked with strands of wan trees, mainly poplars and sad little elms, nothing drains. Things that get wet stay wet for a very long time. My front garden has been squishy for over a week now. The garden path is turning into a rectangular strand of Rannoch Moor. The only thing that seems to enjoy the rain are the Garden Spiders - those bulbous, tawny-coloured ones, each with a white cruciform blaze on its abdomen - which have strung up webs like silk awning from every surface. Each strand is spangled with dew-light in the morning and is bright and lovely and easily avoided, but by evening is rendered entirely invisible and makes walking up to the front door an excercise in limbo. Still, few things are more entertaining than watching a guest perform a mad spastic dance in the front room, squeaking frantically, after realizing that they are liberally coated in spider web and are probably the new target of an exceedingly large and miffed garden spider.
Rain does different things to different people. Generally it makes me brood at the window, hands knotted behind my back like the shade of Peter Cushing. But this time around - probably because the persistant damp and me being struck down with flu basically turned me into an unshaven hermit for the best part of a week - it made me listen to lots of old music and read lots of old books, wander about in my head and rummage in dust-boxes and thought of the tails of summer and the beginnings of autumns that weren't quite so wet - some of them weren't wet at all - and put them together as a playlist.
Making a playlist is my kneejerk reaction to peaks and troughs. Each playlist is a bit like making a very exact, very subtle, very responsive puzzle - each placed piece turns a remembrance or a smell or a quality of light in my head. Each song has to compliment the others but not be identical to it. Each song has to lead you down a path somewhere and hopefully give you some kind of destination that is natural and progressive to its beginning.
This all sounds very muso, and I don't mean it to be. The best way to think of it is just another kind of story.
The inspirations for this playlist for me were a handful of the following:
* Being clonked over the head with an oar by mistake by a friend of my parents while boating on a big pond in August when I was four, maybe five. I remember seeing Great Crested Newts flitting under the amber water. That, and a big bump on the back of my head.
* Trying to run on a black-tarpaulin sheathed hay-bale in the manner of a running machine. And failing. Falling off was fine, being crushed underneath said bale was not.
* Drinking a strange blue energy drink and eating Discos on top of an abandoned tank-trap in a valley in Northiam in the dog days of summer, or having haphazard BBQ's in that same place in the pissing rain, each one of us druidic with our hoods up, blue cordite smoke unwrapping from within the hood as we puffed on our Lambert & Butlers. The very particular scratches on the legs and forearms from cornstalks.
* Sitting on a bench on what is probably my favourite place in the world, The Firehills near Winchelsea, on an fiendishly foul November afternoon, with the sky nothing but a boiling pan of shredded clouds and fucking great ball-bearings of rain smashing into your raincoat. If you sat very still at a very particular angle then it was possible to be completely circled by warmth and bone-dry while the gale whirled around you. The slightest twitch to the left or right and you'd get a mouthful of blasted sea-spray and rain to the face or a jet of frozen wind down the sleeve, and that was part of the fun.
* The public bar of The Rock pub near Chiddingstone in Kent. We moved when I was eight, but the bar-tenders, locals, the lot of them are friends with my parents and have been, as far as I can see, more or less from the year dot. Some friendships are rooted in the bone, and some familes are outside of the blood. The Rock has a paved, slightly uneven brick floor and low oak beams that are slightly warped through years of rising beer fumes, pipe smoke, the braying laughter and spittle of a certain kind of Kentish local and the steamy exhalations from a hundred dynasties of damp dogs - some of them quiet working-dogs, some elegant and docile Dalmatians with peanut-sized brains toted by ladies from Tunbridge Wells with spotless Hunter Wellies who would cautiously circumnavigate a puddle in their shining Range Rovers in the pub car-park after a hearty Ploughmans and maybe a half of IPA on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.
What you take from it is up to you - suggestion and insinuation are much more fun than dictation, after all.
http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/4FJrndb8FPw44jmRXZ77KT
Love, Nick.
Tuesday 27 July 2010
St Elmo's Fire
I.
I pulled over into a lay-by and wound down the window just after the Bedminster services. The forecourt had been doused orange from the light of sodium lamps, and a till attendent had muzzily counted out change from my purchases of twenty pounds worth of unleaded and a bottle of blackcurrent-flavoured mineral water that didn't really taste of blackcurrents. I switched the ignition off and breathed out exaggeratedly through the open window. Streamers of steam unwound from my mouth like a chameleon's tongue. Fieldfares churred in a thicket of hawthorn, and marsh frogs burped from a unseen pond. A bat - a Pipistrelle, from its size - curved round the moon.
I dimmed the headlights as a post-van sped past, then switched them off altogether. An arabesque of shadow flickered through the window, and the dark traceries of an elm bough shimmered on my lap. The patterns of shade looked like calligraphy. They wavered on my legs. I stared at them for a while, then leaned back and nuzzled into the skin-warmth of the leather seats.
I switched on the radio, and heard through the faraway static the murmur of moustache-stroking commentators in the West Indies, quietly contemplating England's off-swing - "Let's see what Wisden's has to say about that inswing". There was the clack of a cork ball off a willow bat, and then the hiss of applause dissolved into the sea-wash of interference altogther.
Dark blue light lit up the eastern sky. A few crickets simmered in the verges.
The moon was bronze-shod. Dust and pollen in the summer atmosphere blending with the diffuse light of the sun coming up, giving the moon the warm glow of newly-fired metal. As it began to fall towards the horizon, it deepened in colour and softened in outline, taking something of the tarnished copper of a carp under the water.
Frank used to swim in the Tavy River as a child, and in between sitting cross-legged on sand spits mid-river, leafing through John Buchan novels and fencing off Sticklebacks into limpid pools, and later, annotating Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders in a self-concious high romantic fashion, lying back in the current and watching cloud nebulas collide and seperate in the skies of August, he once told me that the algae that proliferated in the mid-august river used to turn his underwater limbs a rusty orange, so that while doing the breaststroke against the streaming current, his gold limbs resembled a giant frog.
The engine ticked itself cool.
II.
Frank’s funeral was on Tuesday. I had driven over from Bristol on Monday, to attend a wake with Frank’s oldest friends, his partner, and – written into his will – a case of vintage damson wine, which Frank had bottled on a balmy, narcotic summer night in 1983, and which was to be consumed by the congregation at the earliest suitable occasion following his death. Frank’s quick, flowing handwriting was etched in blue India ink on each fawn-coloured label, and both his writing on the labels and the explicit ordering of his will was classically Frank – robust, generous, and timeless. Frank's neat copperplate was adorned with playful curlicues and baroque flourishes; a Alexandre Exquemelin pirate, a suave corsair. The end effect was that of an East India Company buccaneer struggling to reign himself in.
The ink smelt of juniper, and rose up from the pale label as we handed the bottle around.
Frank was aware of death, in a vague, puzzled way, but I don’t think he ever really expected to die. I don’t think anyone did. Frank was less a human being and more a force of nature on legs. At sixty-three, he woke up at 6am in the summer, 7am in the winter, happily splashed himself clean in a tin bath in June, amiably plunged his head into the freshly-broken ice of a water-butt in December. Two years ago, he told me how he woke up at 5am, shouldered a hatchet and flask of applejack, walked to Wiskit wood glugging the brandy contentedly, felled two yew saplings, and, packing the branches in the back seat of his Reliant Scimitar – a vehicular version of himself, powerful, dependable, noisy and increasingly with age, backfiring – drove towards Bristol.
I remember the confusion of that morning. I had been up since 6am, mostly sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the whorls and burls in the walnut grain, blearily superimposing pontillist drawings and paleolithic finger fluting onto the doodling in crayon of my daughter. In the cool light of the morning, the vivid Crayola weals turned into hematite and ochre daubings.
At 8am, after a pint of coffee, and several cigarettes, my stomach was distended and my thoughts scattered, and the nerves were still there. I went upstairs to shower and shave, prepare my suit, and check the calendar for my parents arrival (Multipy ringed in red marker), my father’s memory being what it was. As I rose from the cane chair, I saw a movement at the window.
A bark-like face hoved into view like a new moon. Frank’s teeth, yellow, tomb-stone things, beamed impishily back at me. I opened the French windows.
I asked him patiently what he was was doing lurking in my garden at 7.30am on my wedding day. I was too tired to be surprised, and anyway, this was Frank.
‘Ah, well, I broke in. I was going to knock, but I thought you’d be asleep and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I vaulted the wall. Not as easy as you'd think, your brick-work is in terrible disrepair. I've got my trowel in the back of the car, I'll patch it up for you tomorrow.'
Frank scratched his chin with an audiable rasping sound and looked please with himself. 'Still, hopped over alright and landed on Jane’s begonias, which broke my fall nicely, although you want to have that blackthorn stump out, because’ – he peeled a few crushed petals off his jeans, in no way embarrassed by wholesale flower destruction, and grimaced - ‘I landed right on it. With my arse’ he said gravely. ‘Got any secateurs? I wouldn’t say no to an egg’.
I smiled despite myself, sighed like a prince, and asked him if he wanted anything else with it. Like champagne.
Frank looked blankly at me, like a cow that’s been shown a card trick.
‘Bit early for champagne. I'll have a cup of tea though, while I'm waiting'. His eyes shone, and a few laughter lines unfurled on his cheeks.
I asked him if he wanted it soft or hard boiled.
‘Neither. I’ll have it fried ‘til it clangs and slapped between white bread, thanks. Lots of ketchup’ said Frank, rubbing his calloused hands and peering interestedly around the kitchen.
He launched himself towards a sea-shell on the mantelpiece, one I had found near Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden, near Dungeness in Sussex, bleached white by the saline winds and deeply furrowed and punctured by boring worms.
‘Nice little piece. Jarman’s, of course. That’s theft, that is’. Frank’s face cracked into a wide grin. Early sunlight glowed off his tombstone teeth. My mouth may have begun to open in half-hearted protest, but was stopped by Frank, who was now draped artfully over a kitchen chair and looking thoughtful.
‘He always artificially bleaches them, y’see. Couple of bags of salt, boiling water' said Frank conversationally, leaning forward and turning the shell over and over in his hands. 'Change and replace three times, and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. Those grooves were made with a file, too. Look, he’s nicked a chip in it here, see?’.
I glanced down to see a tiny notch in the calcite, clearly made by tools, before he whisked it away, grabbed a pair of secateurs on the sideboard, snorted, and ambled out the door. A moment later, there was a knock at the window and a glimpse of a tuft of mad grey hair heading off down the path.
‘Coffee, Jake, and lots of it. Three teaspoons, same of sugar. Imagine you’re paving a road with tarmac. That sort of consistency. Think gravy, Jake, think gravy’. And he crashed off into the foliage.
III.
Frank Taylor was, in some ways a rural throwback. While other people in his adopted Suffolk village had installed central heating and double-glazing throughout, Frank cut chestnut logs, cleaving the green-wood into logs and drying them in sheaves for the winter, or sheared them into quarters for kindling, the axe squealing through the sappy heartwood.
When his friends conceded the battle to arthritis and cataracts and did away with the steering wheel, or bought new mild-mannered cars to pop down to the shops in, Frank tinkered away on the ancient Scimatar until the engine bellowed like a rutting stag and clouds of Castrol exhaust smoke swamped the lanes around his house like haunted mists.
Frank called his car either The Car or That Bastard Car, depending on cirumstance but his friends called it (with a faint grin and well out of earshot) The Colonel - partly because of its noble form, moustachio-like front grill and decisively military acceleration, but mainly because of its resemblance to a puce-faced, hard-of-hearing distinguished gent, roaring at everyone to speak up.
I pulled over into a lay-by and wound down the window just after the Bedminster services. The forecourt had been doused orange from the light of sodium lamps, and a till attendent had muzzily counted out change from my purchases of twenty pounds worth of unleaded and a bottle of blackcurrent-flavoured mineral water that didn't really taste of blackcurrents. I switched the ignition off and breathed out exaggeratedly through the open window. Streamers of steam unwound from my mouth like a chameleon's tongue. Fieldfares churred in a thicket of hawthorn, and marsh frogs burped from a unseen pond. A bat - a Pipistrelle, from its size - curved round the moon.
I dimmed the headlights as a post-van sped past, then switched them off altogether. An arabesque of shadow flickered through the window, and the dark traceries of an elm bough shimmered on my lap. The patterns of shade looked like calligraphy. They wavered on my legs. I stared at them for a while, then leaned back and nuzzled into the skin-warmth of the leather seats.
I switched on the radio, and heard through the faraway static the murmur of moustache-stroking commentators in the West Indies, quietly contemplating England's off-swing - "Let's see what Wisden's has to say about that inswing". There was the clack of a cork ball off a willow bat, and then the hiss of applause dissolved into the sea-wash of interference altogther.
Dark blue light lit up the eastern sky. A few crickets simmered in the verges.
The moon was bronze-shod. Dust and pollen in the summer atmosphere blending with the diffuse light of the sun coming up, giving the moon the warm glow of newly-fired metal. As it began to fall towards the horizon, it deepened in colour and softened in outline, taking something of the tarnished copper of a carp under the water.
Frank used to swim in the Tavy River as a child, and in between sitting cross-legged on sand spits mid-river, leafing through John Buchan novels and fencing off Sticklebacks into limpid pools, and later, annotating Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders in a self-concious high romantic fashion, lying back in the current and watching cloud nebulas collide and seperate in the skies of August, he once told me that the algae that proliferated in the mid-august river used to turn his underwater limbs a rusty orange, so that while doing the breaststroke against the streaming current, his gold limbs resembled a giant frog.
The engine ticked itself cool.
II.
Frank’s funeral was on Tuesday. I had driven over from Bristol on Monday, to attend a wake with Frank’s oldest friends, his partner, and – written into his will – a case of vintage damson wine, which Frank had bottled on a balmy, narcotic summer night in 1983, and which was to be consumed by the congregation at the earliest suitable occasion following his death. Frank’s quick, flowing handwriting was etched in blue India ink on each fawn-coloured label, and both his writing on the labels and the explicit ordering of his will was classically Frank – robust, generous, and timeless. Frank's neat copperplate was adorned with playful curlicues and baroque flourishes; a Alexandre Exquemelin pirate, a suave corsair. The end effect was that of an East India Company buccaneer struggling to reign himself in.
The ink smelt of juniper, and rose up from the pale label as we handed the bottle around.
Frank was aware of death, in a vague, puzzled way, but I don’t think he ever really expected to die. I don’t think anyone did. Frank was less a human being and more a force of nature on legs. At sixty-three, he woke up at 6am in the summer, 7am in the winter, happily splashed himself clean in a tin bath in June, amiably plunged his head into the freshly-broken ice of a water-butt in December. Two years ago, he told me how he woke up at 5am, shouldered a hatchet and flask of applejack, walked to Wiskit wood glugging the brandy contentedly, felled two yew saplings, and, packing the branches in the back seat of his Reliant Scimitar – a vehicular version of himself, powerful, dependable, noisy and increasingly with age, backfiring – drove towards Bristol.
I remember the confusion of that morning. I had been up since 6am, mostly sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the whorls and burls in the walnut grain, blearily superimposing pontillist drawings and paleolithic finger fluting onto the doodling in crayon of my daughter. In the cool light of the morning, the vivid Crayola weals turned into hematite and ochre daubings.
At 8am, after a pint of coffee, and several cigarettes, my stomach was distended and my thoughts scattered, and the nerves were still there. I went upstairs to shower and shave, prepare my suit, and check the calendar for my parents arrival (Multipy ringed in red marker), my father’s memory being what it was. As I rose from the cane chair, I saw a movement at the window.
A bark-like face hoved into view like a new moon. Frank’s teeth, yellow, tomb-stone things, beamed impishily back at me. I opened the French windows.
I asked him patiently what he was was doing lurking in my garden at 7.30am on my wedding day. I was too tired to be surprised, and anyway, this was Frank.
‘Ah, well, I broke in. I was going to knock, but I thought you’d be asleep and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I vaulted the wall. Not as easy as you'd think, your brick-work is in terrible disrepair. I've got my trowel in the back of the car, I'll patch it up for you tomorrow.'
Frank scratched his chin with an audiable rasping sound and looked please with himself. 'Still, hopped over alright and landed on Jane’s begonias, which broke my fall nicely, although you want to have that blackthorn stump out, because’ – he peeled a few crushed petals off his jeans, in no way embarrassed by wholesale flower destruction, and grimaced - ‘I landed right on it. With my arse’ he said gravely. ‘Got any secateurs? I wouldn’t say no to an egg’.
I smiled despite myself, sighed like a prince, and asked him if he wanted anything else with it. Like champagne.
Frank looked blankly at me, like a cow that’s been shown a card trick.
‘Bit early for champagne. I'll have a cup of tea though, while I'm waiting'. His eyes shone, and a few laughter lines unfurled on his cheeks.
I asked him if he wanted it soft or hard boiled.
‘Neither. I’ll have it fried ‘til it clangs and slapped between white bread, thanks. Lots of ketchup’ said Frank, rubbing his calloused hands and peering interestedly around the kitchen.
He launched himself towards a sea-shell on the mantelpiece, one I had found near Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden, near Dungeness in Sussex, bleached white by the saline winds and deeply furrowed and punctured by boring worms.
‘Nice little piece. Jarman’s, of course. That’s theft, that is’. Frank’s face cracked into a wide grin. Early sunlight glowed off his tombstone teeth. My mouth may have begun to open in half-hearted protest, but was stopped by Frank, who was now draped artfully over a kitchen chair and looking thoughtful.
‘He always artificially bleaches them, y’see. Couple of bags of salt, boiling water' said Frank conversationally, leaning forward and turning the shell over and over in his hands. 'Change and replace three times, and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. Those grooves were made with a file, too. Look, he’s nicked a chip in it here, see?’.
I glanced down to see a tiny notch in the calcite, clearly made by tools, before he whisked it away, grabbed a pair of secateurs on the sideboard, snorted, and ambled out the door. A moment later, there was a knock at the window and a glimpse of a tuft of mad grey hair heading off down the path.
‘Coffee, Jake, and lots of it. Three teaspoons, same of sugar. Imagine you’re paving a road with tarmac. That sort of consistency. Think gravy, Jake, think gravy’. And he crashed off into the foliage.
III.
Frank Taylor was, in some ways a rural throwback. While other people in his adopted Suffolk village had installed central heating and double-glazing throughout, Frank cut chestnut logs, cleaving the green-wood into logs and drying them in sheaves for the winter, or sheared them into quarters for kindling, the axe squealing through the sappy heartwood.
When his friends conceded the battle to arthritis and cataracts and did away with the steering wheel, or bought new mild-mannered cars to pop down to the shops in, Frank tinkered away on the ancient Scimatar until the engine bellowed like a rutting stag and clouds of Castrol exhaust smoke swamped the lanes around his house like haunted mists.
Frank called his car either The Car or That Bastard Car, depending on cirumstance but his friends called it (with a faint grin and well out of earshot) The Colonel - partly because of its noble form, moustachio-like front grill and decisively military acceleration, but mainly because of its resemblance to a puce-faced, hard-of-hearing distinguished gent, roaring at everyone to speak up.
Saturday 24 July 2010
Dust Jacket.
Nobody loves a book just because of its dust jacket. Still, it's an incentive to pick up a book, leaf idly through it, scan the blurb, and then either trundle off to the counter with it, or shelve it if it turns out to sound naff or is by J.D Salinger.
Which isn't to say that cover art should be neglected despite the book it shields. David Pelham - designer of the cover of A Clockwork Orange - is vaunted as the godhead of dust jacket artists, and probably rightly so. Paul Rand has more sway over modern writing than some publishing dons, and authors clamour to get his off-hand signature scrawled on the inside cover. Elaine Ramos's covers are a slanty netherworld of colour blocks and monotone fissures; she rakes in a fortune each year designing book covers and, not co-incidentally,architectural designs for art galleries, including The Tate Modern.
Sometimes the writer or photographer who complements the book becomes iconic, sometimes not. Sometimes the author creates their own mock-up; sometimes not. Sometimes the dust jacket is connected explicitly with the book; sometimes, merely obliquely. As a general - very general - concept, the cover echoes the feel of the contents, binds theme and form, and refines literary technique into a image.
All of this doesn't mean you actually have to like the book itself though. Everyone knows a Famous Five cover (By that I mean an original, slightly foxed tatty version in a second-hand bookshop), but I'd rather blind myself with carbolic acid and fire ants than read a single word of the racist old bint's writing. I felt that way when I was five, I see no reason to change now.
Regardless, I like dust jackets very much. Even if nobody else does. Which may be the case. With that in mind, here are some good ones - some scanned in, some pinched off the internet. Permission has not been sought; as such, lawsuits from the illustrator or author are expected.I would say in my defence, however, that this is technically a form of advertising, and as a corollary to this, any publishers, authors, or cover artists who wish to send me a cheque, please message me when convenient and we can discuss figures. Thanks.
Which isn't to say that cover art should be neglected despite the book it shields. David Pelham - designer of the cover of A Clockwork Orange - is vaunted as the godhead of dust jacket artists, and probably rightly so. Paul Rand has more sway over modern writing than some publishing dons, and authors clamour to get his off-hand signature scrawled on the inside cover. Elaine Ramos's covers are a slanty netherworld of colour blocks and monotone fissures; she rakes in a fortune each year designing book covers and, not co-incidentally,architectural designs for art galleries, including The Tate Modern.
Sometimes the writer or photographer who complements the book becomes iconic, sometimes not. Sometimes the author creates their own mock-up; sometimes not. Sometimes the dust jacket is connected explicitly with the book; sometimes, merely obliquely. As a general - very general - concept, the cover echoes the feel of the contents, binds theme and form, and refines literary technique into a image.
All of this doesn't mean you actually have to like the book itself though. Everyone knows a Famous Five cover (By that I mean an original, slightly foxed tatty version in a second-hand bookshop), but I'd rather blind myself with carbolic acid and fire ants than read a single word of the racist old bint's writing. I felt that way when I was five, I see no reason to change now.
Regardless, I like dust jackets very much. Even if nobody else does. Which may be the case. With that in mind, here are some good ones - some scanned in, some pinched off the internet. Permission has not been sought; as such, lawsuits from the illustrator or author are expected.I would say in my defence, however, that this is technically a form of advertising, and as a corollary to this, any publishers, authors, or cover artists who wish to send me a cheque, please message me when convenient and we can discuss figures. Thanks.
Thursday 15 July 2010
Seamus Heaney; Toolbox.
I've had, for about as long as I can remember (And I can pin-point when, come to think of it; I'd just tottered in out of the rain on a fog-bound October day, where I'd been lurking in my den (A mossy alcove behind the log-pile my Dad built, clumping about in his work boots with a liberated - and lethally sharp - hatchet, clomping about like the wild man of the woods in size twelves) and was soaked through, covered in bark shreds, mulch, churned mud, lichen-dew, livid weals of crayola etc, when I found a green cloth-bound book, which turned out to be a Seamus Heaney anthology. I went to my secondary den place (behind a heavy velvet curtain; crushed, red, mothy), something of an obsession with Seamus Heaney's poetry. The first time I read this strange, bog poetry, which felt oddly as if the outside had been transmogrified into words (all the caked mud and leaf rot and squashed wood-worm on my boots and mackintosh, condensed, raw and cold and damp, into words), it was uncomfortably visceral. You could feel the hoar frost misting on your skin and flaking off in shards of rime; feel the spring and hear the hiss of air bubbles trapped in the springy lichen. Being behind a curtain with a glass of overproof Ribena and a monstorous, blue-furred spider of a hot water bottle didn't help much; it was still like being on the red moors and wracked dunes with a salt atlantic wind grazing your cheeks.
Anyway, it left me with a slightly uncomfortable shiver, hooked in and around my spinal cord; I kept getting petrified bog-men and slanted silver rain and deathly famines in my dreams. I carried on reading naturalist writing for the rest of my life; Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, E.M Forster, Thomas Hardy, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Adam Nicholson, Robert MacFarlane, and so on (I will write this up at some point, promise). Regardless, if the unthinkable has happened and you're not aware of Seamus Heaney, here's some of my personal favourites, bar the whole work of District & Circle, which I couldn't find illictly on-line and quaked a bit at the thought of typing up from scratch.
Seamus Heaney is, as far as I've discovered at any rate, the most sensitive, even-handed, elegant, languid, calm, and above all - this is what makes it work, I think - the least showy/understated poet I know of; adjectives are a killer sometimes. However, here they are, in no order that I'm aware of.
Lovers On Aran
The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas
To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.
Strange Fruit
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
Death Of A Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
The Docker
There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.
That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.
Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Anyway, it left me with a slightly uncomfortable shiver, hooked in and around my spinal cord; I kept getting petrified bog-men and slanted silver rain and deathly famines in my dreams. I carried on reading naturalist writing for the rest of my life; Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, E.M Forster, Thomas Hardy, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Adam Nicholson, Robert MacFarlane, and so on (I will write this up at some point, promise). Regardless, if the unthinkable has happened and you're not aware of Seamus Heaney, here's some of my personal favourites, bar the whole work of District & Circle, which I couldn't find illictly on-line and quaked a bit at the thought of typing up from scratch.
Seamus Heaney is, as far as I've discovered at any rate, the most sensitive, even-handed, elegant, languid, calm, and above all - this is what makes it work, I think - the least showy/understated poet I know of; adjectives are a killer sometimes. However, here they are, in no order that I'm aware of.
Lovers On Aran
The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas
To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.
Strange Fruit
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
Death Of A Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
The Docker
There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.
That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.
Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
