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.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
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.
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