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First published by Alma Books Limited in 2012
All works © the authors
Cover artwork: Lightship © Alice Beasley, 2011

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

ISBN: 978-1-84688-288-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84688-289-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

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Contents

Introduction

Short Stories

Bofill · Stephen Beechinor

The Money Pill · Tim Weed

Durban Poison · Andrew Dawson

The Free Lunch · Peter Crockett

The Eggman · Madhumita Bose

Sunny Beach · Mari Lunde

The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop · Richard Kopley

A Skulk · Timothy Jarvis

Cockleshell · Julia Prendergast

The Images of Ourselves · Alice Frecknall

Poetry

Then Sometimes You’ll Think · Julia Deakin

Zapatos · Christopher Athorne

The Hippo · Jonathon Edwards

Making Hay · Will Johnson

Repair Manual · Liz Thompson

Transition · Chloe Daniel

Wrestling with the Bears · Rommy Collingwood

Dorothy Parker on theLegacy of President Calvin Coolidge · Jacob Appel

Cognito · Tom Roberts

Ken Russell at the Bedlington Café · Judi Sutherland

Flash Fiction

The Elephant · Sallie Durham

Accidents Will Happen · Eli Hastings

Fashion Cut · Harold Mally

The Proper Execution of Verbs · Erika Olsen Stefano

The Disappearing Thread · Shalamaya Rider

Starfish Wishing · Lindsay Fisher

Wild Life · Alison Earls

After Hours in 901.02 · Jennifer O’Connell

Minotaur · Sandra Jensen

Wrapped · Mark Allerton

First Chapter Award Winner

She Wore Pants · Martina Newhook

Prize winners

Judges

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Introduction

This is the second year of the Lightship International Literary Prizes. Thank you to our honorary patrons for their support: Hilary Mantel, Christopher Reid, Cynthia Ozick, Andrew Motion and Lindsay Clarke. And thank you to our judges this year: Andrew Crumey (Short Story); Sean O’Brien (Poetry); Vanessa Gebbie (Flash Fiction) and M.J. Hyland, David Miller and Alessandro Gallenzi (First Chapter).

More and more writers seem to be discovering Lightship at www.lightshippublishing.co.uk. There were entries from all over the world and the overall standard of the writing was extremely high, so well done to the thirty-one writers who made it onto the shortlists and into the pages of Lightship Anthology 2.

The four winning entries from the 2012 competitions are brilliant pieces of work from very talented writers who will no doubt go on to do great things after the beam of the light from the Lightship moves on.

SHORT STORY £1,000 PRIZE WINNER
Bofill by Stephen Beechinor

POETRY £1,000 PRIZE WINNER
Then Sometimes You’ll Think by Julia Deakin

FLASH FICTION £500 PRIZE WINNER
The Elephant by Sallie Durham

FIRST CHAPTER PRIZE WINNER
She Wore Pants by Martina Newhook

Thank you to Alessandro Gallenzi (Alma Books), Alex Billington (Tetragon), Bryan Karetnyk, Ellie Robins, Amanda Low and Rachel Long, for their help with editing and publishing this anthology.

– Simon Kerr, 2012

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Short Stories

Bofill

Stephen Beechinor

Maybe it becomes second nature to question loyalties outside the family, but my father kept faith with Bofill longer than any man was worth.

Bofill was obtuse. He was the first in the valley to sell land to the consortium. The first to sell, and he got the worst deal from the developers because of it. For years we had been talking about the ski station – it was the pet project of the Mayor, Codol – a development that would heave the valley into the new century and create a stream of revenue the whole year round. And for that they needed to buy up holdings left, right and centre. Now, all that our family owned was the ground around our house in the lower part of the valley, on which our apple and almond trees stood, and our petrified beehives, plus the chalet we bought off a relative of my mother’s by the old trout farm. And since the plans neither affected nor much included us, the Mayor normally saw little or no reason to stop and talk to my father. Bofill, however, owned a piece of land on the lower slopes of the mountain. A key site for the development: that was the phrase he was fond of repeating after he signed the papers. Then, as those around him held out just enough before agreeing terms, and he heard about the prices they were getting, Bofill would bite down on his bottom lip whenever the plans for the slopes, hotel and apartments came up. All that was left now of what his family had once owned was a clearing above the stream that yielded him butterflies and hazelnuts. My sister and I went swimming in the stream when it got warm enough and I was home after exams, but we made sure Bofill was never around because he could be seedy and annoying.

My mother wouldn’t have Bofill in the house, either. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, my father always took him hunting. When Bofill had his phone connected, he would call up, and I’d answer and pass the phone to my father and say, “Your boyfriend wants to talk.” Maybe if I had taken an interest in hunting, my father would not always have brought Bofill along with him. But then I never took the interest, so that’s all a hypothetical.

That indifference wouldn’t prevent my father from popping his head into my room at five in the morning to ask if I wanted to go tracking izard with him, as his way of letting me know that he was taking someone important along, not just Bofill. The Mayor wasn’t so big a deal either, but it wasn’t every trip he was acting as a guide for a man with his own private jet, a property developer from A Coruña who was involved in the future ski station. My father wasn’t from the valley originally, but he had come to know it so well, men who visited for the hunting often asked him along as their guide.

The sun was moving over the mountain behind our house by the time we sat down to lunch, and my mother had seized on something my father had said about Bofill.

“The man is weird, plain and simple,” she said. “He gives me a bad feeling.”

“You always tell me how Bofill is this and he’s that. Don’t forget that he was good to us when we first moved here.”

It was never explained how Bofill had been good to them. He just had.

“You’d have to pay top money to eat this at a hotel,” my mother said.

This was her way of placating my father so that the four of us could all eat in peace – it was a pantomime my parents had adopted before I could remember. My mother had been preparing the food since mid-morning. Shoulder of izard in a plum sauce. The game was incredibly rich, and the fact that my father had hunted the animal himself and so few would ever get to sample such meat made us savour it all the more – even my sister was tempted to make an exception.

The developer whom my father took hunting had flown from Madrid to Barcelona in his jet and from Barcelona to the valley by hired helicopter.

“Renting a helicopter,” said my mother. “Would he not buy his own if the man is so rich?”

“What do we know?” said my father. “Maybe he is saving up for one.”

And as though from experience, my father began describing for us how a private jet accelerates steeply after take-off, gaining altitude much faster than a commercial passenger plane. His arm shot up to simulate the developer’s jet ascending.

“Like that, it goes, straight up into the sky. Like that – bwoah! Incredible.”

My sister and I were shaking with laughter, since Papa had never boarded an aeroplane in his life.

“And was the developer as bad a shot as Codol?” I asked.

“Our Mayor is worse than useless with a rifle,” said my father. “Along for the show. And Bofill acting the clown. Trying to impress.”

Whether it was because the subject had gone back to Bofill or something else that had got on his nerves, my father pushed his plate away in disgust.

“That meat is too much for me,” he said.

He jerked his thumb towards me and I saw the dark ridge running through the broad thumbnail.

“Let him eat it,” he said to my mother. “I can’t digest all this stuff any more. Give it to him – doesn’t he want it?”

Not to be put off by his sudden change of mood, I mopped up what was left on the plate while my mother looked at me in that silent, challenging way she had. My father was sitting on the arm of the sofa, watching the TV blaring on the other side of the dinner table. If the man’s hearing was already quite bad by then, it was aggravated by the fact that he found less and less of what was being said around him worth listening to.

“What kind of shot was he, the developer?” I asked, louder this time.

Asking my father a hunting-related question was one sure way of getting him to turn down the volume on the TV.

“Who, the man from A Coruña? That gentleman hadn’t the slightest interest in the meat. He shot two izard, gave one to the Mayor and let us have the other. Of course, Bofill had to put on a show. Carrying on like the food was in surplus at the shed he lives in. He wouldn’t accept half. No, he insisted I take the whole animal. I told him I wouldn’t, that I didn’t want all of it.”

To find out now that the two men had fallen out over the izard somehow tainted the meat for me.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” I asked him.

“What difference does it make? Eat what’s there – what’s stopping you? The meat is good.”

Since my father retired from the water company, mealtimes had become volatile like this, as inclined to upset as his moods, the peace coming and going like his appetite. He was no longer the engineer with the water company, no longer the man to talk to, and we didn’t have to answer the phone and pretend he wasn’t at home any more, because people didn’t call. When my sister and I were young, Papa was always out the door in the morning, before the rest of us were up. These days, whenever I came home from university, I would find him spread out on the sofa – which wasn’t getting any younger either – watching TV in the afternoon, half dreading and half hoping some outrageous event might someday involve us.

He had grown old too soon. For months he hardly stirred from the house, he fell out with Bofill and he wouldn’t even go hunting. We were lucky in that we had the chalet my parents had bought from my mother’s uncle. They had never done anything with it besides use the garden for planting root vegetables and chard. My mother kept her hens and rabbits there. In that way she was more engaged in the world than Papa; she maintained daily vital contact with living organisms that still depended on her. My father would spend time at the chalet digging or opening the windows, until he got sick of his own company and it was time to come home. In the old main bedroom I set up my circuit equipment so I could go up to the chalet and work out. Nearly cracked my neck walking in the door one evening because my father had covered the floorboards in new potatoes and all the shutters were closed.

“Papa,” I said to him afterwards, “why did you leave all the potatoes on the floor?”

“It’s summer!” he shouted. “The chalet is dark and cool!”

It became impossible to talk to the man.

I started preparing for a triathlon, since nothing else on the horizon was likely to flatter me as an achievement. The physical regime at least meant I could return to the city fitter and gave sense to my going home.

The route I biked took me along the asphalted road beside the floodplain of the river, the flat green belly of the valley where the nine-hole golf course would be built. From there, up a rocky path through pine forest, the steep track snapping back and forth for kilometres before flattening out above the treeline. I came across a perished cow, left there long enough for the hide to dry out. Black vultures were reintroduced in the nearest nature reserve and farmers left sick or old cattle on the mountain. The vultures had made the most out of this carcass, chewed out all the soft tissue, the tongue and black lips and asshole.

After a level enough ride for about twenty minutes, the path descended steadily, the chunkier rocks mixed in with looser, dangerous scree. I tensed up on one corner, braked too hard so that my front wheel locked up and the bike went from under me. Put a hole in the shoulder of my new cycling top, but apart from that just a few scratches and enough blood to confirm I was still alive.

As the track bottomed out, the route took me past the fields that Bofill had sold. Even though he had signed over his land, Bofill made some arrangement with the developers, and through the intercession of the Mayor, his cabin would remain standing until they finally cleared the slopes, and that wouldn’t come until the final phase of the development.

“I had a falling out with that man,” he said.

By that man, he meant my father.

“I fight with him, too,” I said. “Actually, when we’re not fighting, then you know something very serious is wrong.”

The weathered face became like a child’s, he was relieved and reassured, and yet there was a brutal cunning in him.

“I’ll make this observation about your papa,” he said. “We know he may not always be right, but he’s never in the wrong.”

I knew Bofill was testing me, using however I reacted to gauge the seriousness of the disagreement between him and my father. It was all I could do to resist cycling off and leaving him standing there. He was tending to his cow and she looked ready to burst. His mood darkened when I told him about the carcass I had passed on the mountain. When circumstances dictated, as when they had to feed their own chicks, vultures were known to attack live cattle that were vulnerable.

The full beast lay in the short grass, oblivious.

“You’ll have to watch out for those vultures when her time comes,” I said.

He blew a jet of air out the corner of his mouth, almost whistling.

“If I see any vultures around here…” he said and tried to shake the thought out of his head.

“Then we’ll see which one is the protected species, hey, Bofill?”

He laughed like he didn’t entirely understand what I was talking about, laughed while looking at my teeth.

Bofill’s grey cat was sitting coolly in the branches of a paper birch, its leaves covered in cement dust. A cute cat except for a defect in the corner of its eye that initially seemed like an infection but you knew it would never clear up. At one stage Bofill had a woman living with him, but she was long gone. She left him for a dog-food salesman, so Bofill would tell anyone willing to stop and listen how he was driving up the valley the day the woman ran off and he found the kitten mewling in the middle of the road, refusing to get out of the way.

“So who do you think got the best deal?” Bofill asked. “I got this cat, and all that bitch got was a dog biscuit.”

Practically every time I stopped to have a word with Bofill, he said this to me. And if I stopped to hear it in the morning, but only saluted him in the evening, he would find cause to get odd with me regardless.

With money from the sale of his land, Bofill bought himself a big silver all-terrain vehicle, which he could hardly afford, according to Mateu from the hotel, key site or no. My father, who had been driving the same Passat for twelve years, resented that, too, on account of not having the money to fritter away.

“Not bad for a man that hoses down trucks for a living,” Papa mused. “But well, let’s see how long he lasts in that job.”

Still, the development of the ski station and the apartments created a general momentum that soon brought my father out of his rut. For the first time in his life he began working for himself by taking on subcontracting and building jobs in another part of the valley. So the Mayor now found the time and the incentive to talk with him, because Codol knew the usefulness of someone like my father. And luckily for us, my father recognized how far he should allow himself to be used. Tradesmen respected him because if he agreed to a thing, the thing would happen, and people knew where they stood by him. On these new jobs he employed two men from Peru and another from Fez because they were cheaper. Papa was a shrewd customer, but fair. Like he saw to it that they all got paid, even if their wages had to come out of his own pocket.

It was a positive time. Finally, at this hour of his life, he answered only to himself.

“Maybe the work will dry up tomorrow,” he said. “And if it does, I’m not going to lose any sleep.”

But he was the happiest man in the Pyrenees, you could tell. And the work didn’t dry up. The subcontracting gave way to building a retaining wall in another village, and then a couple from Malta who were friends of Codol contracted him to renovate an old farmhouse, a job likely to take twelve months.

As for the ski-station development, after the power lines were set in place and the slopes were marked out, building started on the accommodation. First a blue crane went up, then yellow cranes. If the valley remained wary about the plans, fearing that the projected transformation wouldn’t materialize, once they cleared a section of the woods on the lower slopes of the mountain, people agreed it would be practically impossible now to turn back. It takes us a while to recognize progress as irreversible.

Once the first phase of chalets was complete, faced with dark slate, strangers who drove up to the valley were no longer coming purely for hunting or trekking, but because they were interested in buying. The ground for the pharmacy and information centre hadn’t been broken yet, while part of the future golf course was fenced off and used as a site for storing materials. The developer invested more capital in the project, then sold it on to another property development company, and time to completion was brought forward by two years.

Also over those months the first uniforms of the Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, appeared in the valley, as they would soon be relieving the Guardia Civil in the region. In the past there was always a Guardia Civil posted locally, who was housed in the valley and lived there, whereas the nearest Mossos d’Esquadra station would be forty-five minutes’ drive away. A regular patrol would be sent out.

Anyway, two new Mossos set up a practice checkpoint one Sunday morning about ten kilometres down the road from the village.

“And they had the bravery to flag down your father’s boyfriend,” my mother said.

And whether because he was over the limit, or for issues with his tax and insurance, or simply being asked for his licence in the wrong tone of voice, Bofill had no choice but to get out of his car and stretch the new policeman out on the road.

After Bofill lost his licence, my father offered to take him on, and he even drove him to the job in the morning. At this point my father had nine men working for him most weeks and projects lined up for the next eighteen months. It was like he had reached a point of balance, as if he was through with ageing and greying and television in the daytime.

We were having dinner one evening when my mother did an unusual thing. She got up and stroked my father’s cheek with the back of her fingers.

“You were always too good to people,” she said. “Driving the man to work in the morning and home again in the evening.”

He smiled for once, but it was like he was making an effort to suppress it.

“Don’t exaggerate,” he said. “I wouldn’t be helping him at all if it didn’t suit me.”

Rather than get back on his feet, however, Bofill became a running joke. There wasn’t a cent left of the money he got for the land he sold to the consortium – and there were rumours that he hadn’t been paid in full, because his cabin was still standing – and work hadn’t even begun on the slopes yet. He was living on a patch of ground that he no longer owned.

He used to set out scraps for the foxes right up until his cow calved. By the time he stopped this practice, they were already accustomed to coming around. Finding no scraps one night, the foxes attacked the calf and ate its tongue.

“I used to leave food out for the foxes,” Bofill said to Papa. “From now on I’ll be feeding them lead.”

My father felt sorry for the man. That was my father’s mistake of course, to take pride in being able to help another, without seeing that it was thankless, without looking to the danger.

“Whenever he runs into Codol these days,” said Papa, “Bofill is all talk about getting a loan from the bank to buy back the land. Using his car as collateral.”

It burnt up any patience I had within me to hear my father repeating all of this, as though persuading himself that Bofill’s situation was somehow workable.

“What does he have to show for all the money he’s spent?” I asked. “A cat. The man isn’t even thinking straight. He’s not a good person to have around. You should just get rid of him.”

I was aware, too, that if my father and Codol seemed to meet on more equal terms for now, the Mayor would keep some advantage in reserve, he would need to remind Papa that his late independence and fortune didn’t simply materialize. On the other hand my father ensured that he wasn’t entirely dependent on building projects that the Mayor had put his way, that he maintained other commitments, although there was no getting away from the fact that these smaller commitments didn’t add up the same.

Codol asked my father to act as a guide for him and two family members who were on the board of the property development company. I had planned to go on a long ride and I was sorting out my bike so I could get an early start while my sister was helping Papa to load up his car in the morning. When I met her as I was coasting past the hotel, something had altered her mood.

She said that Bofill had come up to Codol and his guests as he was putting his hunting dogs in the back of his all-terrain. Bofill tried to engage with the two investors outside the hotel like he still maintained the illusion of recovering his lands, and even raised the possibility of objecting and preventing the ski station from going ahead. Codol didn’t suffer fools easily, and to discourage the man from making any further representations, he started making a mockery of Bofill.

“And Bofill stood there and took it,” my sister said. “Like the abuse might be worth tolerating and bring him closer to getting back what he wanted.”

“Is that all that’s bothering you?” I asked her.

“Codol’s dogs were barking their heads off at Bofill,” she said, “and then they caught sight of his cat. And the dogs went after it and they’ve torn it to shreds.”

Which sounded comical enough to me that I laughed my head off. But she wasn’t laughing.

“Papa told me to go up to the house,” she said.

“Go up, then.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she answered.

And it was she who stopped Bofill from walking away to fetch his rifle and put an end to the dogs that belonged to Codol, and my father all the while calling her over to him above the sound of the engines. I stood back, watching the Mayor get into his all-terrain first, before driving over to Bofill outside the hotel.

Mateu was standing close to the men and my sister when all of this was happening. He had never seen fear in the Mayor’s face before.

“And I was telling him that he should listen to the young miss and have the dogs destroyed,” he said.

“And how did Codol react?” I asked Mateu.

“Oh, the Mayor agreed on that particular. Promised your sister he would take them to the vet to have them destroyed the week following. And Bofill offered to save him the vet’s bill, but Codol was halfway up the mountain at that point.”

My sister wasn’t a naive person. She realized that whatever promise Codol had made about destroying the two hounds, he never had the intention of acting on it. Even a man like Bofill had to understand that, too. It was merely a few words of conciliation said while the man’s temper was running high.

My sister still made the point that Codol should not have said anything, and my father objected, thinking she was refusing to understand sense.

“Where’s the practical good in any of that?” he demanded of her. “An animal has been killed, so you want two more animals to be killed. If they don’t know any better, where’s the sense of it?”

“I’m not disagreeing with you, Papa,” she said. “But if the dogs had belonged to Bofill and the kitten to the Mayor, we wouldn’t be having the conversation—”

“Because the dogs would already be in the ground,” he said, giving in to what she was saying.

“Provided that Codol wasn’t the one doing the shooting, right?” I asked.

My father looked at me like I was a clown trying to distract him while serious business was in play.

There was no making it up to Bofill about the loss of his cat. There was a kind of obtuseness to him. He took everyone at their word, right or wrong, and the Mayor had made the mistake of saying that he would do something that he had no intention of going through with. It taught me the importance of measuring carefully what you say to people who are not very intelligent.

Codol, perhaps afraid for his hunting dogs or because aware that he had wronged the man and fearing a justified reprisal, took the offensive and set about making Bofill’s life more awkward. According to Mateu, Bofill was staying with his old girlfriend – the dog-biscuit salesman had left her – and for a while he was even sleeping in the house belonging to the Maltese couple, in the middle of renovations. We tried teasing my father about what great value he was getting out of Bofill as an employee, now that he was acting as night-watchman as well.

My father would laugh like when he was in company: false, dark sounds, trying to hide his discomfort. He was now driving out of his way to collect Bofill in the morning and then bringing him home in the evening. Yet when Codol decided to ostracize Bofill, my father became nervous. For one thing, the Mayor was close friends with the Maltese couple, and Papa was worried that Codol would see his friendship with Bofill in a bad light and start interfering with the renovation projects.

After two smaller jobs went to another subcontractor, and since my father didn’t know how to take the indirect approach with craftier men like Codol, I suggested that I go with him to talk. My father didn’t think this was such a hot idea, but for once I insisted without losing my temper.

“You think it’ll do some good if he sees you there with me?” he asked.

“Maybe no good at all,” I said.

“Fine, only remember to keep your distance. You don’t want Codol thinking that we’re trying to crowd him.”

So we called in on the Mayor in the hotel restaurant because most mornings Codol could be found there having coffee. Mateu made himself busy elsewhere when he saw what form my father was in. Light poured in through the net curtains.

Codol enjoyed his own company and liked to take his coffee undisturbed. He was eating carquinyol biscuits, crushing the clear plastic wrappers in his fist, the wrappers unfurling on the table and falling on the floor. The Mayor nodded at me and whatever way he did this, it seemed to hold me in check at the zinc counter.

When Codol addressed my father by his first name, I didn’t like it. But then, regardless of how the man spoke to you, there was an unpleasant shade to his voice.

“Unfortunately, your problems don’t surprise me,” said Codol. “Because as long as you have Bofill doing work for you – a man that no one wants to have around – how can you expect to have it all fall into your lap? The man brings trouble on us… Anyway, enough. And how is that pleasant couple from Malta?”

My father glanced over his shoulder at me keeping my distance by the counter. I hadn’t seen that look before; it was like his face was a set of parts that didn’t fit together properly.

“And in what capacity are you here this morning?” the Mayor asked me.

“Independent observer,” I said.

“Independent?” replied Codol, nodding at my father. “You’re not going to be of much use to him until you take sides… But don’t get me wrong. Look, my belief is that in a small place such as this, we all rely on one another.”

I don’t want to go into the falling out between Bofill and my father: basically the working arrangement came to an end. We tried telling Papa that he had done the intelligent thing by cutting the man loose, but after he did, it was hard to know which man my father was more disgusted with, Bofill or the Mayor, for putting him in such a position.

Bofill’s cabin was finally levelled a week before construction work and the entire development was put on hold and the builders’ wages were suspended.

The pylons for the ski lift had just been completed – they were waiting for engineers to hang the cables – when the property developers went into receivership. Subsequently there was plenty of talk about how the search was on for a new developer to bring the remaining construction – the slopes and the medical centre and the golf course – to completion.

That topic was still in the news the morning my sister passed Bofill outside the hotel with a rifle over his shoulder. He didn’t stop to talk. She thought the Mayor must have finally paid Bofill the money owed to him because he was wearing a brand new hunting outfit.

“It was the first time I ever saw him dressed properly for anything,” she remarked later on.

Instead of taking the path up to the wood, Bofill walked straight into the hotel where the Mayor was having his coffee and carquinyol biscuits. Mateu said he was lucky to find himself down in the cellar at the time. My sister heard the two shots clearly. Both were for Codol.

When Bofill stood trial for killing the Mayor, my sister and my father both were called to appear in court. She handled the experience well, my sister; she was cool and resilient. Papa wasn’t the same afterwards, though. The man had made himself responsible for Bofill and for what Bofill had done, and that was his ruining.

After that, having slowed down ageing once before, it was as if my father accelerated towards his end, like he was trying to get life over with.

The Money Pill

Tim Weed

Suppose a beautiful woman catches your eye on the street. A complete stranger, you understand, but unbelievably attractive, like a Cuban version of Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie. When she has your attention she gives you this smile, a smile meant only for you, and so full of sexual invitation that it stops you in your tracks.

Or maybe she touches you on the arm as you pass on a crowded sidewalk. A little guitar pluck, somewhere between a caress and a grab, and she gives you a little wink as she does it. So again you stop, and you turn to watch the elegant sway of her hips as she walks away into the crowd. But just before you lose sight of her she turns and gives you this mocking look over her shoulder that says, Well? Why aren’t you following?

My first Cuban girlfriend was only nineteen, slender and pretty, a student of Accounting at the University of Santiago. She caught my eye across a mobbed cathedral terrace overlooking the annual Burning of the Devil in the main square. A few minutes later, magical coincidence, she appeared at my side. We gazed down on the crowd filling the plaza: bare chests and shoulders shaking to the conga, black umbrellas bobbing like voodoo talismans to the rhythm of whistles and drums and old hubcaps. We talked about America, the embargo, politics. She professed to be astonished by the fluency of my Spanish. Her fingers brushed my forearm, then came to rest there, as if we were already lovers.

Down in the plaza they set fire to the effigy. Yellow flames licked delicately around the sides of the horned straw-man, tasting it, then leapt explosively, consuming the Devil in a roaring conflagration that illuminated the walls of the square and the faces of the crowd in flickering orange light.

I told the girl I had to go. Her pretty mouth formed a pout. “Truly? You’re leaving me?”

I leant in and raised my voice over the loud drumming that had resumed down in the plaza. “I have a tour group coming in tomorrow. I have to be at the airport first thing. Otherwise, I’d stay.”

“I thought we were going to be friends.”

She appeared deeply crestfallen. I hesitated. “We can be friends. Give me your number.”

She didn’t have a phone, but she wrote down her name and address in my daybook: Lisbet Romero Morales, Calle Alfred Zamora No. 51, entre 5 y 6, reparto Santa Bárbara. “Ask anyone where is Santa Bárbara,” she said, gazing meaningfully into my eyes. “And if you come, don’t bring the tour group.”

I couldn’t get Lisbet out of my thoughts. Why not pay her a visit? I asked myself. What harm could it do?

So two nights after the Burning of the Devil, once the exhausted retirees were tucked in at the hotel, I stuffed a roll of convertible pesos into my pocket and stepped out onto the teeming street. It didn’t take me long to locate a ’57 Buick to commandeer as a taxi. The driver was a hulking criollo with a brushy Joe Stalin moustache. I told him to take me to Santa Bárbara.

“I don’t know the address,” I lied. “Just take me to the neighbourhood and I’ll walk.”

The driver nodded, gazing at me in the rearview. The fact is, he made me feel uncomfortable from the beginning. He kept glancing at me in the rearview, his eyes full of some vaguely unpleasant emotion, sadness or envy or anger.

Through the rolled-down windows the street noise was as jarring as ever, loud salsa music and cracked mufflers and the rattling undercarriages of decrepit trucks and recycled Canadian school buses. Santiago is a hilly city, like a disintegrating San Francisco. French-style colonial townhouses and slumping hardwood bungalows from the city’s heyday as a pirate capital mingle with teetering post-1959 cinder-block monstrosities. Soviet tankers rust in a polluted harbour ringed by oil refineries and barren mountains. An old man in a red beret and an olive-drab uniform, sweat-stained and threadbare from half a century of wear, hawks newspapers for the equivalent of a penny. The stagnant air smells of diesel and urine and cigar smoke.

The driver let me out on a quiet street. I asked him to wait two hours. He grunted in agreement, watching me with his resentful eyes.

There were no working streetlights in the neighbourhood, and it had a menacing flavour at night. Man-shaped shadows prowled the alleyways, and there were no police or soldiers on patrol. I concentrated on making my stride purposeful, unassailable. Images of Lisbet kept appearing in my mind. Long, slim fingers. The taut arc of her thigh and buttock pressing against my thigh on the crowded cathedral terrace.

The address written in my daybook matched that of a small wooden bungalow, not, I was relieved to find, one of the crowded cinder-block buildings or subdivided mansions. The pale blue light of a television seeped out through gaps in the ancient hardwood planking.

I climbed the steps to the crooked porch. I hesitated a moment, then knocked.

Lisbet answered the door wearing purple Lycra shorts and a faded military tank top with no bra. Long-legged and barefoot, she appeared both surprised and pleased to see me. Three small children craned their heads around to peer up at me for a moment before returning their gaze to the television. The whole room was bathed in that ghostly blue light.

Lisbet took my hand and led me down the hall to a back room lit by a naked bulb. A younger girl whom I later came to know as her sister was sprawled out on the bed reading a dog-eared novel. Lisbet got the sister up and shooed her out. As she was leaving, the younger girl paused in the doorway to favour me with a very lewd wink.

“Maybe this isn’t the best idea,” I said when the sister was gone.

Lisbet shook her head, smiling. “Qué va. I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you would.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the lumpy foam-rubber mattress. The bed was a sheet of plywood propped up on cinder blocks. I attempted to keep my breath even and slow down my racing heart. You might not believe it, but this was the first time I’d done anything remotely like this.

She knelt on the floor and put a cassette in a paint-spattered boom box that must have been at least twenty years old. A lukewarm breeze came in through the window slats as we both undressed. The cassette was Joni Mitchell.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d had girlfriends before. Nothing like this, though. Not a girl I’d met in the street and come to visit for the specific purpose of having sex. But then, I’m not the only foreigner who’s behaved differently in Cuba than he would at home.

After it was over, Lisbet and I lounged on the bed in silence. The Joni Mitchell tape ended and down the hall the muffled television blared. At risk of drifting off to sleep, I got up and started getting dressed. Lisbet rolled over to watch me, a teasing smile playing around her lips. “Don’t dress. I’m not finished with you.”

“I have to get back,” I explained. “The tour group, you remember.”

She stopped smiling and sat up, not bothering to shield her large, inquisitive breasts. “Stay with me. You can get up early. I’ll make you a good Cuban breakfast.”

“No, I really have to go.” I took a roll of twenty peso bills out of my shorts’ pocket and saw from her dismayed expression that I’d made a mistake. But it was too late to change course. She watched in wide-eyed alarm as I pulled three crisp bills off the roll. I held them out for her to take and she glanced at them in distaste.

“I’m not a prostitute,” she said, quietly indignant. “I’m a student of Accounting.”

I was taken aback. “I know you’re not a prostitute. But I also know you can use this money. Please, take it, as a gift, for your family.”

She shook her head. Her eyes had filled with tears. I sat down beside her on the mattress and put my arm over her naked shoulder. It felt awkward, so I took the arm back. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. But you do need the money, don’t you?”

After a moment she nodded, tears flowing, and held out her hand for the twenties.

If you’ve ever been to Cuba, then you know that the island has a peculiar magic for visitors. It’s a gritty time capsule, a rustic communist never-never land. Cubans are handsome, well educated, and literally starving for cash. Doctors and engineers have to skip meals in order to stay afloat. There are food-ration coupons from the government, but it’s never quite enough. If you’re a tourist – if your pockets are filled with dollars or euros – everybody wants to know you. You possess a special kind of magnetism unlike anything you’ve ever experienced in your home country. It’s like one of those amazing dreams where you discover a new superpower. It’s as if you’ve swallowed a pill that has transformed you into Hugh Grant or George Clooney. It’s easier than you might think to lose touch with reality.

My second Cuban girlfriend was older than Lisbet, and somewhat less educated. The retirees had gone home, pleased with the sanitized experience of Cuba I’d provided for them, and I had a few independent days before the next group came. I rode out of the city in the same ’57 Buick taxi as before, the driver having been pleased enough with the tip I’d given him to lurk constantly outside the hotel as my personal chauffeur. We took the western highway, past rusting tankers, billboards with anti-imperialist slogans, and oil refineries chugging out their clouds of poison. I told the driver to stop at a small beach overlooking a shipwreck. A Cuban tour guide had pointed it out to me several weeks earlier, a Spanish ironclad from 1898 visible as two massive rusted gun turrets jutting out at weird angles from the bright turquoise sea. In college I’d done a term paper on Teddy Roosevelt, and it was my intention to snorkel out and explore the wreck.

Stepping down off the highway onto the pleasantly shaded beach, I nearly bumped into Yanita. Lovely Yanita, with bracelets on her wrists and a thick Pocahontas braid teased forward over one nut-brown shoulder. Sexy Yanita, her curvy body only minimally concealed by her threadbare yellow sundress. She sold me a polished conch shell for a peso and offered to watch my duffel bag while I snorkelled. Her availability for other services was clear from the beginning, but I’d come to explore the wreck. Grinning sheepishly, I took my roll of convertible pesos out of the duffel and stowed it in the zip pocket of my swim trunks. The undivided attention of a woman so fetching was making me feel like an awkward teenager.

The water was clear, fading out in all directions to voids of opaque blue. Not far beyond the beach the bottom dropped away, algae-covered rocks slanting down to a distant blue basin of featureless sand. I hate deep water; it makes me feel vulnerable to attack from below. The wreck was further out than it had looked. Several times I almost panicked and turned back. But the basin slanted up again, and I began to see fragments of the ironclad. Soon I was drifting slowly over the prow of the ship, its well-preserved outlines encrusted by coral. The hull had been split in half by American mortars, but otherwise it was surprisingly intact. Beneath the coral crust I could make out the steam drivers, bunk-rooms, a bodega, and of course the bases of the two artillery turrets, one of which I climbed to take a rest. Dripping and pleased with myself, I took off the mask and breathed in the rich tropical air. I gazed at the distant shoreline: the sea grapes and gently swaying palms. I could make out Yanita in her lemon-coloured dress, waiting faithfully beside the black speck of my duffel. I waved to her, and she waved back. I decided to head in.

She was waiting in the shade of an old sea grape, leaning against the smooth sweep of the trunk with the duffel on the white pebbles at her feet. She handed me my towel and watched intently as I dried off and put on my T-shirt. Her desire for me was exaggerated, almost slavish, but I believed (and still believe) that it wasn’t entirely artificial. I sensed primal forces brewing within Yanita’s alluring frame. Deep loneliness combined with a lust willed into being by actual gnawing hunger.

She took me by the hand and led me to a rough wooden shack hidden in the mangroves at the far end of the beach. The shack was empty and there was of course no electric light, but bright slats of sunlight streamed in through gaps in the weathered planks. I could make out the ashes of a small cooking fire, and a military-issue cot with rusting sidebars. Yanita gestured toward the cot and I sat down. She shrugged off the sundress.

There’s no point in going into detail about what happened next, other than to note that her hands were callused from manual labour and that she was passionate, beautiful, and quite vocal. There was no formal transaction, though I left a few twenty-peso notes tucked discreetly under a skillet on the bare earth next to the fire pit. It pleased me to think that this was probably more money than she would make in an entire year. That she and her children – and I had no doubt there were children – would be well fed for at least a few months.

On the way back into the city in the ’57 Buick I sang aloud to an Eliades Ochoa tune I was listening to on my iPod:

Como no tengo dinero, tu cariño es falsedad.

Falsedad, falsedad, tu cariño es falsedad.

The driver turned to me with a look of disgust on his big mustachioed face. “Why you sing that?” he asked in English.

“I don’t know,” I replied, momentarily caught off guard. “I just felt like singing, and this is the music I’m listening to.”

He turned his attention back to the road. “So you do everything you want?”

“Sure. As long as it’s not hurting anybody.”

He shook his head and the conversation was over. My mood had soured, and I resented him for it. He seemed to believe that he’d gained some insight into my character that I couldn’t see for myself. I decided it was time to find a new driver.

My next Cuban project was Marisleysis, a dancer. She was one of a half-dozen salsa instructors at a rooftop studio adjacent to the main plaza where I’d arranged lessons for a museum group from Chicago. The way she moved her body attracted my attention. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was striking, with ice-blue eyes and the light freckled complexion Cubans associate with Galician ancestry. Her face had a solemn, serious cast that I found intriguing. When she danced, it was pure magic.

I kept trying to catch her eye, but she refused to take me up on it. So I joined the line to learn the dance step myself. When my turn came up Marisleysis was polite, professionally courteous, and cool. I found her reserve intriguing. I determined to win her over.

The Chicagoans were enthusiastic. They wanted to keep going beyond the two-hour lesson, which would end up costing extra and eating into my profit, but I didn’t care. My gaze kept returning to Marisleysis. I loved her self-contained grace as she moved through the flamboyant salsa steps. When my turn came I revelled in the sensation of my hand resting on the tight curve of her dancer’s waist.

After the lesson I paid the studio director and gave him a generous tip to distribute among the dancers. I waited by the stairs for Marisleysis. She’d changed into street clothes, jeans and a black T-shirt. She had a book bag slung over her shoulder and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, which gave her an irresistibly studious, schoolgirl look. “Can I talk to you a moment?”

“Of course.” She nodded, eyeing me coolly from behind the lenses.

“Thank you for the way you interacted with the group. It was impressive. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it.”

“It was nothing,” she replied with a modest wave of her hand. “We collaborate. Each one plays a role. I am glad you are satisfied with the class.” She glanced towards the stairwell.

I felt myself reddening. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to give me private lessons. I would pay you well. In dollars, of course.”

She regarded me with a stony expression. “Private lessons for foreigners are against the law in Cuba.”

“So are private taxis,” I replied, “but they still operate.” I glanced at the studio director, who was standing just out of earshot, pretending not to watch us. “Listen, we could keep it between ourselves. No one would have to know.”

She turned towards the stairwell. “I am glad the class was successful.”

“Think it over,” I called out as she vanished down the stairs.

I got her schedule from another dancer, one who was more pragmatic about the power of foreign currency. Three nights after the salsa lesson, with the museum group wrapped up and headed back to Chicago, I walked over to a small theatre near the university to attend a performance of what my source had called a “baile folklórico.”

It was carnaval in Santiago. The streets were filled with lean, sweat-soaked revellers drinking white rum out of plastic water bottles. The mood in the air was tense and watchful, a feeling of repressed violence just beneath the surface. The theatre space offered some refuge from the sweating mob outside. A few other foreigners had found their way in, possibly feeling equally discomfited by the atmosphere in the streets, sun-bleached Australians or Germans from the look of them. Other than those few, the patrons were entirely Cuban.

The other foreigners stood sheepishly against the back wall, but I wanted to get closer to the stage. Some of the other audience members turned to glare at me as I shouldered my way down the centre aisle. Their expressions were aggressively contemptuous, reminding me of the look the taxi driver had given me when I started singing to Eliades Ochoa on my iPod. I began to wonder what exactly these people thought they saw in me, but I quickly shoved that thought into the back of my mind. Marisleysis was so beautiful. I had to see her.

The performance began with rattles and bells and a weird low chanting in Yoruba, an African language. At first it seemed predictable enough, with the dancers filing out one by one in costumes representing the Orishas or deities of Santería, an African religion that has been passed down in secret, much like Haitian voodoo, since the days of slavery. Marisleysis came out in a lacy white wedding gown. There was a veil covering her face, but I recognized her immediately from the way she moved. When all the Orishas were out on stage it became clear that each one was associated with an element, such as fire or water, and some other state of being such as purity, anger, or crippling illness.

Two of the drummers brought out a large slab of rusted steel. It might have been a part from a giant truck or a tractor. It was shaped like a plough, and something about the sight of it caused the hairs on the back of my neck to prickle. The drummers struck it with pipes. It made a sound like a bell, only flatter and more atonal. It was a deathly sound, and it chilled me to the bone. I had to struggle not to get up and leave.

Meanwhile, the dancers launched into a frenzy. Their movements were rapid and mechanical. Their faces had gone blank with an almost sexual ecstasy. One muscular dancer who’d been hobbling around on crutches pretending to be a cripple fell into what looked like an epileptic seizure, clenched and twitching and literally foaming at the mouth. Another, dressed in black, lit three torches and began to juggle. Suddenly the drumming stopped, and the lights in the theatre went out. The crowd gasped. The dancer who’d been juggling guzzled a clear liquid from a plastic bottle and then spit out a long tongue of fire that leapt across the crowd, filling the room with a ghastly orange light. The people around me, delighted, touched their hair to see if it had been singed.

I, however, was transfixed by dread. I couldn’t escape the fact that the fire dancer’s eyes, glinting like coal in the flickering light, were staring directly and accusingly into mine.

After the performance, I was a bit shaken up, a bit disoriented. But I was still determined to talk to Marisleysis, and I found myself following her as she left the theatre. The crowd parted in her wake. She seemed to possess some kind of innate authority that even the drunkest of the revellers instinctively honoured. At the door to what I assumed was her apartment, I stepped out of the shadows to make myself known.

“You! What are you doing here?” She was surprised to see me, obviously, and not pleased.

I held up my hands and gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry! I saw your performance, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to check back with you about the private lessons.”

“You followed me home?” She was staring at me as if I were a giant cockroach that had just crawled up from the gutter. She was more beautiful than I remembered, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with those librarian-chic horn-rimmed glasses.

She took out a key and pushed open the door to her apartment. “Goodbye,” she said, half turning. “Please do not follow me again, or I will be forced to call the police.”

“I only wanted to talk,” I protested, deeply stung.

Inside now, she was about to swing the door closed. Seeing that this was my last chance, I darted through the door before she could shut it, and there I was, inside her small apartment. She lunged for the phone. I grabbed her forearm, which was strong, but not strong enough to escape my grip. “Look, all I ask is that you give me a chance. I could help you out, you know, in a number of ways.”

Her face was deeply flushed. She looked angry, but not frightened. Above the phone there was a signed photograph of a young Fidel Castro, a tall bearded youth in a forested landscape with rumpled fatigues and a rifle in his hand. I’d never been able to understand his appeal for Cubans, but now, looking at this picture, I could see how someone like Marisleysis might find him heroic. “You are a pig,” she spat. “You and your whole yuma world are pigs.”

Suddenly ashamed, I let go of her arm. I quickly apologized and let myself out. As I shut the door behind me she was reaching for the phone.

I spent the rest of that night lying awake in my hotel room, bracing for the knock at my door.

The knock never came, and in that respect I suppose I was lucky. The whole incident left me in a depressed, self-loathing mood. I found myself replaying in my mind the events of the previous weeks. I began to wonder what kind of person I’d become. The thing was, I’d always thought of myself as a decent guy, someone worthy of affection and respect. But the look in Marisleysis’s eyes – like the taxi driver’s, and the people at the theatre – told a very different story.

I found my thoughts returning to my first Cuban girlfriend, Lisbet. Her playful friendliness. How she’d asked me to stay for breakfast. How she’d cried when she took my money. Was I wrong to imagine that she’d actually liked me for who I was?

After a few days of indecision, I decided to pay her another visit. That night, as on many nights, there was a widespread blackout in Santiago, and there was no moon, so most of the city was drowned in deep tropical darkness. I sat in the back seat of my new taxi, a blue ’58 Oldsmobile, as the driver guided me through the inky night to the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood. This time, not relishing the idea of walking alone in this blackness, I gave him the address.

As I stepped up onto the creaky porch my heart pounded with excitement. My intentions are pure, I told myself. I looked forward to seeing Lisbet again, getting to know her for real this time, and letting her get to know me. It almost felt like a homecoming.

The younger sister, Lisbet’s lighter-skinned double, answered the door holding a candle. She wore a tank top that glowed yellow in the light of the single flame.

“Buenas noches,” I said with a brotherly smile. “Is Lisbet at home?”

The girl shook her head. “She went to Havana.” I couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t wearing a bra; the outlines of her nipples were clearly visible under the threadbare cotton. Behind her the house was dark and silent.

Before I could say anything else she’d taken my hand and pulled me inside. There was candlelight coming from the back bedroom where I’d made love to Lisbet. The girl led me there, and I didn’t protest. On the window sill two guttering candle stubs illuminated the louvred window and a hardcover novel lying spine-up on the bed. The girl had been burning incense as she read.

“I’ll return later,” I said. “When do you expect her back?”

She was already peeling off the tank top. Despite myself, I felt stirrings of arousal.

“What’s your name?” I asked. The words came out in a whisper. The girl stood in her panties with her arms crossed self-consciously over her chest, gazing at me in the flickering yellow light like some kind of attention-starved wood nymph.

“Hiawatha.”

“Hiawatha? Really?” I smiled sadly. Picking up the hardcover, I closed it and squinted at the spine: Pride and Prejudice, a well-thumbed Spanish translation. I rested the book on the window sill.

Slowly, she let her arms drop to her sides and then opened them slightly, as if offering herself for my delectation. She was long-legged and as lithe as a gazelle, little dark-nippled breasts high and budding in the candlelight. I felt dizzy. “How old are you, Hiawatha?”

“Seventeen.”

“I don’t believe you. How old really?”

She frowned and shrugged. “Fourteen.”

“Fourteen?”

“Fourteen.” She raised her eyes and took a step towards me. “What does it matter? As you can see, I’m a woman already. And you are a man, no? An American?”

I fled that house like you would flee in one of those nightmares where you’ve committed a crime, and you don’t remember exactly what the crime was, but it doesn’t matter because you know it was bad, and the consequences will be bad, and there’s nothing you can do to make it better. On my way out I tossed a roll of twenties into a plastic bowl that was resting on the television. It was whatever was in my pocket at the time, maybe a few hundred pesos.

Out on the porch, heart racing, I stopped short. Suddenly I could see myself clearly: the person the taxi driver saw, the person the people in the theatre saw, the person Marisleysis saw. I thought about going back to get the money out of the bowl, but it was too late. There was no way to take it back.

Durban Poison

Andrew Dawson

Dylan spoke to me at his funeral service. I was sweating in the back row of the Westville Methodist Church, Mom stiff at my side and the fans high above rotating like surveillance satellites, doing nothing to cool the air. Dylan had already been cremated by that stage. All that was left to do was for his dad to talk about him like the model student and perfect son that he wasn’t. Dylan’s dad possessed a chunky moustache, à la Magnum P.I., and a measured style of speaking that made you think he was a really nice guy. However, everyone in our suburb knew that he kept his Alsatian chained up all day and released it at night to patrol the garden, angry about its incarceration. When Dylan spoke to me I wasn’t at all surprised. It was the kind of thing that he would do, because he was that kind of ou. You know, the kind who plays tricks on people. He had once covered my seat in Maths with superglue right before I sat down. Very funny. I had to tear a square from the back of my trousers and walk around with my underwear on display. When Dylan was punished, I was also called in and lashed three times, because they couldn’t believe that us partners in crime hadn’t planned this caper together. Hilarious. He shot himself, Dylan, with his dad’s handgun the same night they bombed the Post Office. The limpet-mine explosion had nothing to do with his death, because it occurred hours after he pulled the trigger. It was just a coincidence. Still, that didn’t stop the rumours. According to the story that had appeared like an infestation of flying ants in the playground the next day, Dylan was a terrorist. I was a terrorist too, by association. I had to hang my head in shame, a pariah even from the outcasts – not that I knew what pariah meant. Apparently, I wanted a country governed by the masses, which in this case were the people who hacked back the bushes that grew wild in our yards and polished the ever-growing piles of dishes in our kitchens. I’m not even going to pretend that I was in the least bit politically aware when I was fifteen, but even to me, in the state I was in, that didn’t sound like such a bad idea. Anything was better than the country as it stood: hot, rugby-mad and with very little on TV, thanks to sanctions. When Dylan spoke to me in that church, he said “Hey, bru?” He didn’t sound concerned, apologetic, happy, sad or angry. He just sounded as if he wanted to tell me something. “Hey, bru?” I’ve since grown up and studied creative writing (a big hello to my old classmates from Adult Extension Course E341), and am of course aware that I should have started a new paragraph for a new speaker. But the event didn’t occur as a separate line in my mind. It happened right there in the middle of a funeral service attended by everyone I had ever known, a voice, bang in the centre of my head: “Hey, bru?”

Inappropriate laughter is surprisingly common and nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, psychologists called it a “positive” symptom, as if it were something to rejoice in, like a touching hymn or a baby’s first bowel movement. Try telling that to me fifteen years ago. Try telling that to Mom. I had already giggled, sniggered, chuckled and chortled at choice moments over the preceding six months. I was officially in Mom’s bad books. An accountant at Dad’s firm (which was how they met), she kept a mental ledger of my misdeeds. And she forgot nothing. I know this because her jaw stiffened a little more with every one of my indiscretions and never quite relaxed. To think, she had once been beautiful. I laughed whenever Mom and Dad introduced me to one of their friends or business associates. I laughed when I had to speak in class. I just laughed whenever, really. I wasn’t doing particularly well in school, but it was the laughter that was causing the grey hairs and the wrinkles. I was also struggling with concentration, with focus. And it was difficult, for some reason, for me to meet people’s eyes. I was in a dwaal, as Dad once put it. And no one likes someone who’s in a dwaal. So when Dylan spoke to me in that church, I thought, Great, this is all I need. “Bru, bru?” I looked at Mom. She was full of starch and listening to Dylan’s dad go on about his wonderful little angel, who had apparently never been drunk or stoned or caught shoplifting. I was too scared to break her concentration and doubted anyway that she would believe me. I reached down into my bag and pulled out my Walkman. The tape inside was a copy of a copied copy of a Metallica album. They were my favourite group at that stage of my life, because their music was the closest thing to sitting on a boat out in a heavy sea and feeling the swell rise and crash beneath you. Mom wasn’t impressed. She ripped the headphones off my head, thrash metal spilling everywhere, and fumbled with the tape player to switch the thing off. A man with glasses turned around and glared at her until she finally managed to kill the music. “Bru?” Dylan said to me. “Bru, bru, bru?” I could feel that if Mom hadn’t been an accountant – if she had been a hundred kilograms heavier and a professional wrestler, for instance – she would have torn my head off. She smoothed down her suit, slammed her unpainted lips together and stared ahead, listening intently, pretending that she hadn’t once called Dylan’s dad a philistine. I had to laugh, really, because I found the whole situation hilariously strange. All these people were gathered to remember someone that most of them didn’t even like – or approve of, in Mom’s case. So, I laughed. Mom was ready. We were seated on the edge of the back row for a reason. She grabbed my arm and ripped me to my feet. I barely had time to grab my bag. My laughter wasn’t loud, but it was uncontrollable and it didn’t want to stop. Dylan’s dad halted his speech mid-achievement and gaped at me. I think Dylan was about to have joined the Scouts, an organization that kicked him out soon after for wrapping the flag rope around his neck and pretending to have hanged himself. The entire congregation turned around to stare at me. I had blond hair, a healthy tan and expensive teeth. I could pass for any one of them, except I was laughing. I wasn’t supposed to be laughing. Certainly not according to Mom, who slammed her car to a halt a safe distance from the church and began to beat the steering wheel with her tiny fists. It wasn’t her style to cry.

The next afternoon, a Sunday, Dylan’s dad came round to my house. He knocked on my bedroom door and opened it immediately, without waiting for a reply. I could have been naked in there. I could have been doing anything (for the benefit of my more sensitive readers, I won’t go into details). Still pretending to be a hell of a nice guy, the man smiled, allowed his aftershave to invade the room and said, “What are you listening to?” I was sitting cross-legged on my circular rug, the spot where I used to play with Lego, and my hands were crushed against the headphones over my ears. I was still trying to block out the voice that said, over and over, “Bru, bru, bru.” I hadn’t been brave enough to tell Mom about the voice, but here at last was a direct question, a chance for me to unburden. “Dylan,” I mumbled. The man’s lips wobbled at the mention of his deceased son’s name, but he managed to hold it together. “You know, son,” he said, smiling again, “I used to listen to him too when I was your age.” I mumbled that Dylan hadn’t been born then. He insisted that Dylan had in fact been around since the 1960s, which was when many of his more recognizable hits had been recorded. I realized that we were talking about different people. I stared at the rug beneath me while Dylan said, straight into my brain, “Bru, bru?” Dylan’s dad interrupted: “I came to tell you that there are no hard feelings.” Without looking up, I said, “About what?” He took his time to say the following, through gritted teeth: “You ruined my boy’s service.” I muttered an apology. Yes, I was a real little mutterer in those days. And, as Dad would have said, no one likes a mutterer. My face began to burn from the shame, because I knew that what I had done was wrong and horrible. My pores erupted with perspiration. “What was it that you found so funny?” he asked. I shrugged and did my best not to meet his gaze. “Are you listening, son?” Dylan’s dad said. I nodded noncommittally. I couldn’t quite work out what he wanted from me. I hadn’t laughed intentionally in the church. It had just happened, slipping out like vomit from the mouth of a very sick child. But how could I explain that to him? How could I explain it when I didn’t even know what was wrong? “Bru?” asked Dylan. “Bru?” “You have no manners,” said his dad, “you know that?” I could feel rather than see his presence above me. I nodded, while all I wanted to do was run. This was my bedroom, my poster-filled sanctuary, and it had been invaded. “You’re the one,” declared the voice above me, “who got him into that rubbish, that dagga.” I didn’t reply, when I could have in fact told him that it was Dylan who, as a precocious thirteen-year-old a couple of years before, had procured our first bankie of weed from a shebeen with his pocket money. Dylan’s dad hammered down again with his voice: “And now my son is dead – because of you.” I shrank deeper into the rug. The truth was, Dylan never smoked that much weed. Me neither. I think we both just liked the notoriety of being known as those hippy oakes with the long hair (pushing school regulations to the limits by creeping all the way down to our ears). Looking back, I realize that our behaviour was classic cry-for-help stuff. I misbehaved because I could feel that something was going wrong inside me. Dylan’s reason was that he didn’t like what was happening around him. His parents had split up when he was little, his mom leaving for parts unknown and his dad never finding a permanent replacement. The cruel pranks, the drinking and smoking – they were the work of an oversensitive teenager who lived with a man who keeps a dog chained up all day. No wonder he killed himself. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without love either. And to blame me? It wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t. His dad had been wrong to say that. You can’t hold a fifteen-year-old boy accountable for your son’s suicide, even if that boy was strange and antisocial, and growing stranger by the day. “Get out,” I finally growled at the rug. “Don’t tell me what to do,” Dylan’s dad snapped. “You got that, boy?” Flinging back my head, heedless of the consequences, because I was a cornered animal, as good as a dog chained to a fence, I screamed, “Get out!” “Bru? Bru? Bru?” Mom rushed to my bedroom door demanding to know what was going on. Dylan’s dad said something about having to leave and about how we were only joking around, weren’t we? Mom offered him some tea and he shook his head. I stared at them both. “Bru, bru, bru?” Mom glared at me. On his way out, Dylan’s dad murmured a brief phrase. I couldn’t hear it, but I’m sure it wasn’t complimentary – about me or Mom, because I remember her saying that she also thought it was best that he left. Oh, and where was my own dad during all of this? If I remember correctly, it was a Sunday. He was out sailing.

Our old family doctor was no help. Looking back, he wasn’t that old, but to my junior self, he was ancient: an oak tree, knotted and gnarled and all the rest. He was probably only about forty and in fairly good shape. I think he was a runner or something. He listened to my symptoms, as described by Mom, and nodded curtly at the end. I was awarded a thorough examination: cold steel against my chest, a stick that sucked all the moisture out of my tongue, lights in my ears and eyes. My blood pressure was ascertained, my weight noted. The oak tree said that there was a lot of this going around. “A lot of what?” Mom asked, getting straight to the bottom line. She had taken the afternoon off work, a Monday, and damned if she wasn’t going to be productive. “M.E.,” the doctor said. “Yuppie flu?” Mom shot back. The doctor looked at me. “It would explain the tiredness.” I looked away, guilty as ever. While they negotiated the terms of my treatment, which seemed to involve bed rest more than anything else, Dylan whispered “Bru, bru, bru?” I wondered if I should tell them about the voice, but I was deep enough already in Mom’s bad books. And the old doctor? He seemed so certain of his diagnosis that I didn’t want to add something new and unexpected to the mix. Before I left, he gave me a vitamin B injection and a patronizing smile that I couldn’t reciprocate. “Bru, bru, bru?” Dylan said to fill the silence in Mom’s car. I was disorientated. I was withdrawn. I was as sad as anyone who has ever lost a childhood friend. That was possibly the worst point of my life. After that, things went downhill. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, not properly. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, not for more than an awkward split-second. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t enjoy music. I could barely communicate. I was a prisoner in my own, otherwise healthy, body. As recommended, I was yanked out of school and instilled in my bed. A portable TV was brought through, not that I could concentrate on any of the programmes. I couldn’t sleep either. What’s the point of being prescribed bed rest if you’re not getting any rest? I would leap up in the middle of the night and wander around, once accidentally setting off the alarm system and waking the whole house, both Dad and Mom appearing from their bedroom armed, trigger fingers twitching, because they were expecting a black person or two, the beginning of the revolution, not their wayward son. And Dylan wouldn’t leave me alone. Bru means “brother”, if you haven’t worked it out already, and I had absolutely no idea why he kept saying it. It’s the kind of word you don’t even notice if you live in Durban. Like the humidity and the scent of sugar cane that pervades the city, it’s just there. Without homework or a friend I could count on (even if it was to trip me up when I wasn’t looking) I was just there too, existing without really living. There is no twist in the belly of this story, no revelation to make you think, “Well, well, so that’s how life really is,” only the slow deterioration of a teenager over a period of weeks and months that turned into years.

The whole town knew I wasn’t right in the head as my wanderings through the house became sojourns around the neighbourhood. I developed a deep tan. I started stealing – from Mom, Dad, anywhere – and buying beer and dagga from my new pals, the black men who lived in the back rooms of petrol stations and in the servants’ quarters of our oversized gardens, who would laugh and call me names in Zulu that they thought I didn’t understand. Being wasted made me sort of normal (in my opinion) and it worked wonders in blocking out Dylan. I’m also sure that it amplified some of my less desirable positive symptoms, like the laughter. Yes, everyone knew. It was obvious. The only people who remained in the dark were Mom, Dad and our beloved family doctor. Disapproving looks and long silences were all they gave me (with the doctor adding vitamins to the mix). Years later, I would ask Mom why they couldn’t tell that there was something wrong with my head and she answered, “Because that was how we were in those days. We didn’t know.” I can’t be too harsh on her, because when it came to denial, I was also something of a champion. “Bru, bru, bru?” I reasoned (ha!) that if I didn’t tell anyone about the voice, it would eventually go away. Until then I had methods of coping, usually contained in a bottle marked “Castle Milk Stout” or rolled up in a page of the previous day’s Natal Mercury. “Bru?” Dylan would ask as soon as I woke up. If you think I’m writing it too often now, imagine having to hear that all the time. “Bru, bru, bru.” To my credit, I never replied. Maybe I should have just told him to shut up. He hadn’t exactly been a great influence on me while he was alive. Dead, he was even worse. I never went back to school. Like a ghost, I drifted around town. People avoided meeting my eyes. All the while, my parents probably thought I would wake up, snap out of it and sing ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ before trotting off to find a job. They didn’t know? Oh, they knew. Parents, eh?

Things came to a head when I was caught masturbating in public. We were already packed up to leave the country by then. The Berlin Wall had come down and Dad had sold his company. Were these two things related? Possibly. Dad’s business involved the export, through Durban’s harbour, of hardware from the country’s largest defence manufacturer. Without a communist threat to pretend to fight, the USA no longer had a reason to support some of its less salubrious friends, the kind of friends you don’t say hello to in public. But I didn’t know any of that back then. I was insane, remember? Our house was full of boxes marked with our new address in Suffolk. The piano had disappeared. Mom and Dad – and my older brother who has nothing to do with this story except for his participation in this sentence – had already been over to see the new house. They hadn’t, for some reason, invited me. They insisted that the move would be a “fresh start”, looking pointedly in my direction, “for everyone”. Dylan, when I wasn’t drunk, spoke ever louder the closer it came to our emigration. “Bru,” he said, always on the verge of a great revelation that never came. “Bru, bru, bru.” My most vivid memory of “the incident” is sitting in a police holding cell on my own and wondering where all the other criminals were. I’m glad I didn’t get to find out. I remember the woman who came to speak to me, a neurotic-looking lady with wild hair and a body about as thin as the bars of a prison cell (though my cell didn’t have any bars, just walls and a gloss-painted door). She asked me all kinds of questions and I managed to answer some of them. While we talked, a uniformed policeman watched over us. The woman asked me if I was hearing voices. It was one of her first questions. I was amazed. How did she know? I think I asked her if she could hear Dylan too, and I think maybe she cracked a smile. But I was studying the Formica tabletop, and wouldn’t have noticed what her lips were doing at the time. When she left, they put me in the back of a police van and drove for what felt like hours. There was no air in there, only a pervasive atmosphere of rubber. I arrived at Town Hill, my home for the next couple of hours. I can’t claim to have had the full experience, because my parents quickly came to my rescue. Their decision to let me sweat it out in the police station had been made to instil some character in me and all of that. A mental hospital is something else altogether. It’s a wake-up call, delivered by a psychiatric officer with frazzled eyes and kinky hair, who tells you in her dead voice that your son is on the other side of the river when it comes to sanity and doesn’t know how to swim. They came as quickly as they could. There was a trial, of course, but I was cushioned, I’m ashamed to say, by all the money behind me. Dad provided the legal experts, a team of two ex-rugby forwards packed tightly into blue suits and flown up from Cape Town. My defence was that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t. Really, I didn’t. The old lady who saw me in Mitchell Park – the witness who called the police – was cross-examined to feel like an idiot, a forgetful, contemptible old crone. She started sobbing, but without producing any tears, as if she had long ago dried up. It was horrible. She reminded me of my deceased grandmother. That old lady, the witness, is probably dead too by now, and one of the last things she saw, while out walking her corgi, was a skinny white teenager, tanned to the colour of crispy bacon, with his pants down and his arms flailing away at his most private possession, while he leered at a magazine that he had found in a bin. The magazine wasn’t pornographic or anything – I remember that much of the event itself, even though I would rather not. It was called the National Beekeeping Journal. And the picture I was fixated on was of a woman with one of those netted headpieces they wear so that they don’t get stung by the bees, like a tent for her head. I couldn’t see her face, or even much of her body under her baggy protective outfit. But it was enough for me to know that she was a woman. They produced the magazine in the trial. A policeman sniggered. I could feel my parents’ shame gusting like a hot southwesterly across the room. I could feel something else from them too, something they had never shown before: pity. They treated me differently after that, and I began to go to therapy. The therapy was pointless and the pills made me swell up and stiffen like a dead rat, saliva pooling in my mouth. But Dylan went away. And I haven’t heard from him since. So whatever you have to tell me, bru, will have to wait till I come down there and join you. The pills have improved and they say that soon they’ll be able to identify what was wrong with me before I was even born. Does that mean I can go back in time?

Two weeks ago, I returned from a trip home. I will always think of Durban as home, and when I write “Durban” I mean my particular little patch of suburb, even though I did my best to make myself unwelcome there. I went with Mike, who used to be one of my carers and still visits to play chess or chat about music or whatever. He’s also into thrash metal, stuff like Exodus, Slayer and Anthrax, from when things were simpler. We’ve become close, me and Mike, like I used to be with Dylan. Mike even has that same sense of humour, and he unscrewed, with a wink, the cap of a salt shaker at the airport restaurant, to give the next customers at our table a surprise. He must have been a terror when he was young. Mom wasn’t too impressed that I paid for Mike’s tickets, but she understands that with Dad gone I need all the people I can get. When we drove around Durban, Mike was shocked by what he saw as extremes of wealth and poverty waving to each other across the road in an otherwise developed country. As far as he could see, it was all still black and white. I felt as guilty as ever and managed to explain that when I was growing up we didn’t know. That was how it was in those days. We didn’t know much of anything. But I may as well have told him that we had only been following orders. The other thing of note that happened during our trip was that we saw Dylan’s dad. I couldn’t believe it. He’d put on a few decades and lost so much weight that he looked like a pencil sketch of his former self. The moustache was gone too. He was coming out of the off-licence (more correctly, the “bottle store”) at the Westville Mall, stooped over and nudging a trolley loaded with a single six-pack of Castle Lager in the direction of a luxury four by four. I froze, unable to move. The old man halted the trolley and looked me up and down. He checked out Mike too. We’re not exactly kids, me and Mike. Mike’s hair is gone and mine is at low tide. But Dylan’s dad recognized me as the boy he knew. He lifted his finger, trembling, to pick me out, before barking, “Where is he?” I wanted to tell him that his son was dead, but I couldn’t speak because my ears were clogged with a ghostly voice, nothing more than a memory, saying, “Bru, bru, bru?” Dylan’s dad shouted again: “You took him!” I had missed Dylan so much, and for so long, and his dad still had the audacity to accuse me of having something to do with his suicide. My insides twisted. I swallowed deeply, a nervous habit that I have developed. Mike’s training took over and he stepped between us, took hold of my arm and ushered me on. We were inside the shopping mall, Dylan’s dad out of sight, when Mike turned to me and said, “Who was that?” By that stage I had recovered and said, with a confident laugh to go with my cocky swagger, “Some crazy old man.” Actually, I didn’t say that, but it would have been brilliant. I shook my head and kept walking.

The Free Lunch

Peter Crockett

One blue sponge, one red sponge, one yellow sponge. Red one first, blue second, yellow last into the plastic bag. Always in that order. Four loops of the rubber band and in the cardboard box. No talking. Just the whirr of the conveyor belt and the plop of bags dropped into boxes – like the dull thud of orchard windfalls dropping onto soil. Don’t be cross, Fred. I blew the twenty-three grand. Had to. Benefits people claimed part of my pension credit was means-tested. Any savings over eight thousand and they’d recoup what they paid me. Who stitched me up this time? Probably that snidey cow in Flat Three. Copper’s nark. Two of them came. Suited and booted. Thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and slammed the door in their faces. Save they weren’t there to save my soul. Blinking fraud investigators. “It is of no relevance that it is life-assurance money, madam. Excess funds constitute overpayment.” “Madam.” As if. I’m a Mrs – Mrs Malone, if you please. They didn’t do my constitution any good – near wet myself. Bent bankers bring the country to bankruptcy and they have the gall to go after me for your hard-earned dosh. Bugger them. Not doing community service like I had to in ’86. Went down to the travel agents’ on the High Street – you know, the one beside the British Heart Foundation charity shop. Gave them all your clothes by the way – hope you don’t mind. Apart from your hats which I gave to Luke. Didn’t seem right for strangers to wear them. Holiday to Thailand. We never did do much travelling. Furthest we’d been was a campsite in France with the kids. Tried to go to Disney World in Florida but the Yanks wouldn’t let you in on account of the wounding conviction when you bottled the chid-molester. Except he wasn’t a paedophile but a paediatrician. Easy mistake to make with your dodgy hearing. Eight years you got. Well, I got nine and a whopping fine. Visited you three times a week. No family visits for me. Where are the children when you need them? Bit unrealistic to expect Luke and Helen to get here from Worthing, I suppose. Not one letter in two years. Had one visit, though. A slip of a girl from the British Consulate. Looked about seventeen. Said I was lucky the drugs weren’t discovered in China otherwise I would’ve been executed. As if. Having a laugh. I’m a pensioner who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Said I would be deported halfway through to serve the rest of my sentence in an English jail. How I miss you, sweetheart. “Marry a man ten years your junior and you’ll be in clover to the day you die.” Trust me to marry a toy boy with a dodgy ticker. One minute, we’re laughing and joking on the allotment, next you’re keeled over the spade, clutching your chest and face-down in the rhubarb. Took me a while to realize you weren’t larking about. Dialled 999 but the silly sods couldn’t get the ambulance down the track. Suppose the allotment’s overgrown now. No more rhubarb, strawberries, onions, potatoes or runner beans. Cultivated the best spuds in Sussex. Delicious with a dollop of butter. Got rice coming out of my ears. Rice for dinner, rice for tea. When I get back to England I’m going straight to the chippy and I’m going to gorge on chips and I won’t care if they’re all fatty and greasy. Remember our Saturday night treat? Takeaway from the Shanghai Express. “Two portions of flied lice.” How we laughed. Don’t care if I ever see a bowl of rice again. Miss the cuddles. Nobody’s cuddled me in three years. Miss your big strong arms round my tummy, your warm breath caressing the butterfly tattoo on my neck and whistling through my hair, your manhood snuggled against my backside. Remember how shocked the other residents were when they found out that we slept naked the night Mavis set off the fire alarm with one of her fags? Jealous prudes. No one will ever take your place. Warts and all, we were truly happy. A marriage made in heaven. Thought I was on my way to heaven the day the earthquake shook the penitentiary. Didn’t have to bow to the guards or call them teacher that day. Scared as we were. We slept out in the exercise yard. Prayed like I’d never prayed before. “Don’t let me die in Japan, God. I’ll be good, I promise.” That’s my greatest fear: to die here thousands of miles away. What do the Japs do with dead bodies? Burial or cremation? Asked the consular official whether they’d repatriate my body and she fobbed me off even when I said they could deduct it from my pension credit. Told me not to be so foolish. I’ll have to hang on. Don’t mind dying, as long as it’s on English soil. Then Luke will scatter my ashes under the big oak tree by the cricket ground where we first used to meet behind Dave’s back all those years ago and where I scattered your ashes. Gouged a big X on its bark and a big heart with the words “Always Love You, Fred Malone. Rest in Peace.” Had to put a marker on the tree. You know what Luke’s like. Waterworks are playing up. It’s their strange tea. Not proper tea with a tea bag and milk but lukewarm water with a few sticks the colour of cloves. Need the loo. This is the difficult bit. Right hand up in the air. “He-rah-gah-nah.” Weird language – a mouthful of syllables. Hurry up, I’m bursting! One of the guards is coming over. Bow. She knows what I’m going to say. “Kan-ji.” Funny loos. Holes in the ground like the loos on the campsite. Remember trying to get our money back? The campsite owner insisted it was more hygienic because your bottom didn’t make contact with the porcelain. Didn’t understand the term “substandard sanitation” from a British plumber. Still he gave us three bottles of the finest local wine to shut us up. Mind you, after drinking them, we did need the Frog loos a lot. Squatting doesn’t do the arthritis much good. No privacy either. Back to the production line. Red one first, blue second, yellow last into the plastic bag. Four loops of the rubber band and in the cardboard box. Three sponges. Very particular they are. “Three – I’m free,” the bingo caller used to shout. Wish I was. Women to the left and right. We’re a little cluster of English-speakers. Except we can’t speak. Not allowed to. Mandy reckons there’s over 195 in the factory. Strange how so many women make so little noise. Whirr, whirr of the belt and the dull plops of the bags. Well, Fred, I was the toast of Bangkok. Never had so many friends. Cocktails, guided tours, five-star hotels. You would’ve loved it. So much better than the karaoke in the Three Lions. Before I know it, I’m down to my last five hundred quid. I know: “crap at budgeting”. Having such a good time though, didn’t want to go back to the sheltered scheme and the Gestapo from the DWP so I took a train up to Chiang Mai. Couldn’t afford the hotels. Chatted to this kind lady and ended up living with the hill tribes in the Golden Triangle. Yes, me. Who would have believed it? Karens. Christians they were. Not like the hypocritical happy-clappies over the road in the converted warehouse, but gentle people with silky skin and colourful costumes. Dwellings straight from a theme park. Big huts on stilts with corrugated roofs and animals underneath. Allotments too. No potatoes though. Some of the men smoked odd tobacco. Nothing like the fragrance of Golden Virginia. More like some of that Dutch rough stuff Helen smuggled from Amsterdam. When I listened to the pitter-patter of rain on metal I thought of you and me cuddling in the allotment shed during a storm – our bit of paradise away from the sheltered scheme. Their patience started to wear thin and I suppose I became a burden. Didn’t know what to do. A man in a flash four-by-four started to give me bundles of baht (that’s Thai money). “No such thing as a free lunch,” you used to say. After a while, my sugar daddy changed, got very nasty, produced a gun from under his shirt and insisted I had to work for him to pay off the debt. A gun. A blinking gun. Where were you when I needed you? Took the line of least resistance. Had no choice. The first trip I near wet myself going through customs carrying bags with false bottoms. Didn’t look to see what was inside. Sealed anyhow. “Ignorance is bliss,” was another of your sayings. Anyway, no one was going to stop a frail sixty-eight-year-old from Bognor. Wrong! They stopped me on my seventh trip. “Seven – lucky for some.” Not for me. Amphetamines, whatever they are. Four kilograms – about the weight of four bags of sugar, the consular girl reckoned. The judge didn’t understand I was death on drugs and how upset I was when we found out Luke had got expelled from school for smoking a spliff in the woods and that I would never have anything to do with drugs. Thought they’d let me off with a conditional discharge. No chance. Two-million-yen fine plus nine years. Millions? Having a laugh. I’m a pensioner, not a lottery winner. Near had a cardiac arrest there and then. You wouldn’t remember Uncle Bill. Before your time. Silly sod got taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore. Half his comrades were worked to death on the Burmese railway. Never the same when he came back. Broken man. Drank himself to death. Won’t happen to me. Don’t like alcohol. Well, apart from special occasions when I get tiddly on ginger ale. In any case you drank enough for the two of us. They didn’t take me to a railway but to this prison. Worked off my debt in eighteen months in the workhouse. Now in the main prison. The workhouse was tough. Horrible guards. Must’ve been Korean. Bill said the Koreans were crueller than the Japs. Guards here are not so bad as long as you remember to be quiet in the factory, bow, and say “Hiragana” if you want the kanji. Some are quite human and practise their English on us. Weather’s extreme. You never minded the cold. In the winter the cold rises from the concrete floor through a paper-thin mattress, gnaws at your joints so they balloon in pain. Sometimes my hands are so swollen that they take me off the production line. Summers are humid. Steamier than a jacuzzi. Flies, flies everywhere. We’re forever swatting the blinking pests. Remember when you installed a jacuzzi in the garden and the warden told you to dismantle it? Some people have no sense of adventure. You wouldn’t approve of the sanitation. Two showers a week. Production line showering – eighty at a time according to Mandy. The other days it’s a bowl of water in the morning – face, armpits and privates. How you used to moan at me for spending hours in the bath pampering myself. When I get back I’m going to spend half a day in the bath, covered in bubbles, eating chips and drinking gallons of ginger ale. Considering it’s the land of the rising sun, haven’t seen a proper sunrise or sunset since I’ve been here. The windows are frosted. Even the exercise yard is shrouded in shadow. You used to say, “Nothing like a Sussex sunset.” Hand in hand we used to watch the sun set behind the Downs. A constantly changing tapestry of different pink and red hues and it felt good to be alive and bask in the soothing rays and glow in each other’s love. You brought out the poet in me, sweetheart.

Loved you more than boring Dave the policeman married to his job. Went ballistic when he caught us in bed. My Mister Perfect. Even if you did have that fling with that floozy from Flat Seven. Still, wasn’t your fault she snared you with the pretext of a leaking tap, barricaded you in and plied you with Irish whiskey. Forgave you. Needed the cuddles. Got a telly. Six channels. All Japanese. No EastEnders or Corrie. Sometimes, there’s an English film with subtitles. Grease last week. You were no John Travolta with your lumbering size elevens. Couldn’t walk properly for days after the Tango lesson at the social club. In the house block, we are fourteen English-speakers. Seven Aussies, one Kiwi (she gets upset if you call her Australian), two Yanks and four Brits. Mostly youngsters and mostly drug offences. Silly girls. Nobody likes the Scot – Lady Macbeth, Mandy calls her. Stuck-up and silent. We don’t know what she’s in for. Murdered her lover, Debbie reckons. She has that vacant, haunted look of someone who’s had a cherished one suddenly taken from her, like the look Helen had after she lost the baby. Eyes open but far, far away. Probably never be a grandmother now. Luke’s too stoned and Helen’s grieving. Said she’d never go through another emergency caesarean. Don’t blame her. Giving birth’s like passing a pineapple. Send a letter a month to each of them and not one reply. Don’t suppose they ever forgave me for leaving their father all those years ago. Luke got very spiteful when I refused to give him any of the money. He’d only have frittered it away on sex and drugs. Didn’t appreciate I was only thinking of his health. Strange how Dave came to the funeral. Said I broke his heart. Didn’t stay for the wake. Just pecked me on the cheek and gave me his number in case I needed help in the future. Couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t be right. The girls call me Nan. When the arthritis gets too much they help me up from the mattress, wash and dress me. Even feed me sometimes – whoever invented chopsticks wasn’t arthritic. Mandy and Terry (that’s short for Theresa) sit beside me on the production line and do my quota when it’s just too painful before the guards catch on and escort me back to my empty cell. Kindness, real kindness.

They hug me when I’m low and cheer me up. Suppose they’re my family now. Don’t want to go back to the sheltered scheme and end up with all the other widows losing their marbles and bitching like there’s no tomorrow – for a lot of them, there isn’t a tomorrow nor much of a today. Much happier here. Don’t get cross with me if my ashes don’t make it to the oak tree. Couldn’t trust Luke anyhow. Red one first, blue second, yellow last into the plastic bag. Four loops of the rubber band and in the cardboard box.

The Eggman

Madhumita Bose

He made the best omelettes ever. They watched him casually toss away the halves of the egg to land exactly on top of the other eggshells; as he put in the green peppers and onion, waited twenty seconds before pouring the egg into the well-oiled iron plate with a flick of the wrist, swirling it once and then deftly tossing it on to the paper plate. The entire operation took exactly a minute. He had counted. He made five hundred omelettes a day. Five hundred minutes. Thirty thousand seconds. Eight and a half hours. The flame from the stove had darkened his face and hands, and the starched cotton towel he used to mop his face was limp as his dish-rag by the end of the day. He never complained.

“That’s what feeds him,” Rana proffered the unnecessary explanation. He was doing Economics and he was onto his second omelette. Economics was grand larceny by the government, he liked to joke. The government decided policy.

They asked him how he managed to get it perfect every time. The salt, the texture, the taste, the aroma, everything was exactly right. He never failed. It was the iron griddle, he said. The heat had to be exactly right and the time shouldn’t exceed a minute. Too much and the omelette would burn, too little and the texture would change. Did they want an omelette or a scrambled egg?

“It may feed him; but to him it’s a lot more. Something goes into the making of those omelettes, something that’s hard to explain and harder to define.” Meeta frowned.

“His soul?” Rana offered. Anything intangible had to be soul. Rana was amiable, not given to much thought. These were the best years of his life, and he was going to enjoy them.

“I doubt whether we’ll ever have such skills,” Meeta pointed to the ancient bamboo basket near where they sat, on the hard wooden bench. It brimmed white with eggshells halved neatly, symmetrically broken; a glistening white pyramid rising high in the shimmering afternoon heat, an ancient temple to which they did homage after classes, and sometimes in between. “My grandmother ate twelve eggs a day. In this weather! I remember her eating them in the bathroom so that my mother wouldn’t catch her at it. I believe she once had eighteen in a single day.”

Rana took another bite of his egg using his forefinger and thumb, deftly wrapping it around a slice of bread.

“To each their own. What did she die of? Surely not an overdose of eggs?” He was lucky to be her boyfriend. She was a catch.

“In a way. Guess.”

“A thyroid reaction? A heart attack? A stone in the gall bladder. What?”

“Constipation.” Meeta looked around. Predictably there were those with their eeshes and how gross! “The stuff went in but wouldn’t come out. But they couldn’t write that, of course, in the death certificate, so, therefore, she was finally and officially declared dead of brain seizure. She had a stroke. Better dead than left paralysed.” Meeta automatically touched her forehead and chest in the gesture she had made since she was a child.

“You made that up,” Bicchu accused.

“It’s absolutely true.”

“How come your mother didn’t catch on? There must have been eggshells lying about.”

“Grandmother paid the maid to throw them away. She was an enterprising woman; didn’t believe in leaving evidence lying around.”

“But surely your mother would have realized from the inventory,” Bicchu persisted.

“My mother isn’t much of a housekeeper. The maid does the shopping and is moody about accounts. Besides, grandmother had money of her own.”

“Which she spent on eggs?”

“There have been people who have thrown their money away on worse.”

“It’s so difficult,” Bicchu said, “to control the body’s cravings. I know I can’t.” She passed her hand around her middle, lingering over the hips outlined by the tight jeans.

“It isn’t the body, it’s the mind.” Gordon was superior. Gordon was tall and thin, an Anglo-Indian. He had a tufted chin and Jesus tattooed down his arm and at the base of his throat. Gordon played the piano and was in love with Mona.

“The mind, if you say so. Imagine! I can’t control my mind when I see food, and there are people who want to control a hundred minds, a thousand, a million, a billion.”

“That’s because you’re laid back. You hang around here in between classes. Come back again in the evenings where we do this: talk and smoke up. You let others control you.”

“You do the same,” Bicchu pointed out. “Except you play the piano beautifully. I don’t do that. I don’t do anything. I can’t do anything.”

“Why do we love eggs?” Meeta’s question was addressed to no one in particular, specifically to shut up Bicchu. There were eight of them there that afternoon: Meeta, Rana, Bicchu, Shonali, Gordon, Kaushik, Priya and Anik.

“I hate eggs.” Anik spoke quietly.

“But then you hate everything” – Bicchu was forthright – “these days.”

“I’ll have another omelette,” Meeta put in quickly.

“So will I,” said Kaushik.

“Thanks to you people, I’ll never starve,” the Eggman laughed. In his more private moments he thought of them dispassionately, not without contempt. At least their predecessors, in their muddleheaded desire to do something, had looked for ways to fulfil themselves, even if it meant going to jail or facing bullets for protesting; and not just protesting, but protest accompanied by soda-water bottles and homemade bombs. This lot was content to, as they said, sit around and talk or paint walls, do second-rate theatre, and figure out how to brew acid in their chemistry labs. Ganja was the only constant, the unchanging thread. Except, there were those who went further. He could easily spot them, the evasive look in their eyes; their restless fingers and their thin bodies. There were boys, too, among them, who took pride in their bodies, their fitness a challenge to the debilitating effects of the drug, which won in the end. Most came out of it; but there were always two out of ten who didn’t. He kept his counsel. They might be at an American university. Sentences were punctuated with more fuck and shit than he could count, and dude was every second word. They would get real yet.

His remark about starving had its effect. The focus of conversation shifted almost automatically to the scandalous rotting of grain in government godowns. Those were the headlines of the day, safely removed, at a distance. Rana was not the only one relieved. Bicchu was so tactless. At least no one had looked at Anik meaningfully. He had always been a quiet sort. He had just grown quieter. He had gone off omelettes lately, preferring to smoke instead. He was overdoing it. Rana was just a little anxious, but not too much. Anik seemed perfectly steady as he got up and walked home after they split up. He lived nearby.

“Is it the eggs, or is it him?” Mona was thoughtful. The Eggman intrigued her. That was a man who had lived. “Are the omelettes the objective or the by-product?”

“It’s kind of interrelated isn’t it? I know that I’m here because he makes such fantastic omelettes, but then again, I’m so comfortable sitting here.” Shonali echoed what they felt. They swore by the Eggman. He had been around as far as they could remember and was always ready with advice, as with omelettes. His little lectures were more interesting than anything their course taught, Rana declared, and the others agreed. Dialectical materialism, ramifications of the year in the Chinese calendar, the global meltdown, the rich and the famous, gurus and politicians, the future of the country; the Eggman had the answers.

He was listening now. No matter how many eggs he tossed and how deftly, from his special high chair parallel to the high counter that housed the stove and paraphernalia, the Eggman heard everything.

No one knew his exact antecedents. But they all knew that he had been jailed and had lost the use of his left leg, the nerves damaged beyond repair. From regular beatings they presumed. They were used to seeing that atrophied calf outlined through his whitely transparent pyjamas, thin and wasted, a testimony to their worst fears. At first, some of the new students had rushed to support him when he accidentally lurched against the table. He had pushed them away with his right hand. They looked at the bunched up muscle under his rolled up sleeve and withdrew. Fewer still were sure of how that story got around. The reason why he had been jailed was obscure. The original story was he was jailed because he had Maoist sympathies. Then someone brought information that he had actually been involved in the ambush of a police jeep. It was some years later that somebody else again brought the news that he had been held because he had been caught running guns.

This was a longer story. He had somehow got caught between two groups while delivering a consignment. There had been a fight. Neither group knew he was supplying to the other. It was when carrying arms wrapped inside a holdall that he came across the fight, and recognized a friend in a tight corner. The friend saw him drop the holdall. Fifteen minutes later he emerged bleeding. By then, the holdall had burst open and the contents were out in the street for everyone to see. So what were they to do with him now that his cover was blown? They couldn’t use him any longer. He had acted irresponsibly; their verdict was ominous. If he couldn’t be given responsibility, they couldn’t trust him. If they couldn’t trust him, they had no use for him. If they had no use for him, there was only one thing they could do with him. They had caught him in one of the threadlike lanes, against a crumbling brick wall.

He survived, but the bleeding had been considerable. The police found him hunched against the wall. Who knew where the truth lay, and what did it matter? The story, filtered down the years, brought him hero worship. They were in search of a hero. All they did, Bicchu said, was sit around, roll their joints and eat omelettes till the time came for them to think about their future. They were sitting around now, in the morning, because the college was under siege. The student union had bearded the principal, demanding that the failed students were made to pass. Classes were suspended.

But the jail story was confirmed by the Eggman himself.

“Why did you learn to make omelettes?” Bicchu had asked. “Why not chicken pakoras or fish chops or something?”

Not chicken sandwiches, rolls or pakoras. The Eggman was decisive. It had to be omelettes. And omelettes with his distinctive stamp. Nothing else would do. He was a specialist and this was the age of specialization.

Did their seniors ever drop by to sample the omelettes once they left the campus? Did they ever come back? Was this a temporary or a lasting thing? Did he represent universal wisdom? That was the great debate. The Eggman did not simply represent university tradition, he was legend. His omelettes had been famous for three decades. Nothing had changed in the little tarpaulin-covered space on what used to be a footpath before it was dug up, by the bus stop. His space consisted of three long benches that he picked up practically for free, before old and abandoned furniture was discovered and revalued at a premium: a broad and sturdy table, two chairs with peeling varnish, a baby’s high chair that suited him fine and held the imprint of his skinny bottom over the years, three baskets and a stove. One basket held the eggs, another shells, and the third, paper plates. His crutches were propped up against the back of his chair for easy accessibility.

His reputation had spread fast. The cabin was the roadside coffee house, a clubhouse with select membership; snobbery that clubs with their corporate memberships and golf courses would be hard put to match. No one knew who first discovered the Eggman. Those who had been the first to come here had discussed books, films, the symbolist movement and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the following generations the discussion had moved from the French existentialists to civil-rights movements and, subsequently, the newly rediscovered Mao. Input was provided by the Eggman, who added Trotsky for good measure. He didn’t do Che, did he? Someone had asked long ago.

Why do they copy when he knew the original by heart?

These days it was mostly life and how it sucked. Somebody’s parents were getting divorced. Someone’s father was beating up the mother. Someone’s mother was having it off with someone else. Someone’s father was screwing someone young enough to be his daughter. Someone’s girlfriend was screwing his best friend. Someone’s boyfriend was screwing the entire English department – and she, poor thing, didn’t know. Someone, a part of their group, was in hiding because a four-minute video was doing the rounds showing her blowing her boyfriend. Everybody had had a look.

Not that it hadn’t happened before. Earlier it had been considered infra dig. Now the muck had become cult, and exaggeration and hyperbole had taken over. It didn’t do to seem middle class any more; but middle class they were. Other times their unhappiness spilled over. Fights with their parents, with their girlfriends, were poured out to the Eggman, who took them seriously.

He wasn’t particularly interested in students who had completed their degrees and moved away. He looked forward to fresh young faces, fresh young minds. Minds unexposed to anything outside books as yet. Minds, bored with existence, sickened by the hypocrisy around them. Soft minds from well-to-do backgrounds, belonging to people who, despite their earnestness, wouldn’t know how to slum it. He would show the way, offer ideas, and teach them how their lives could be materially different. He had shown others before them.

“But they all went away, didn’t they, abroad?” Rana asked. He would, he knew, and so would Meeta and the others. There was no point sticking around here. The future was always elsewhere: in a different country, in a different time zone, in a different space.

Shonali covered her face with a towel as a bus passed by, belching black smoke. She routinely carried a towel in her shoulder bag. They were sitting at a bus stop after all. People were getting on and off all the time.

“I’ve got my subject for my thesis,” announced Kaushik, who studied Sociology. Why was it that the new government buses with spanking new interiors and less pollution by far ran empty?

“It’s the autos. Why take a bus when you can hop into a three-wheeler that conveniently stops for you right in the middle of the road and drops you exactly where you want to be dropped and costs less than the bus fare?”

“It’s just a rupee less.”

“For a rupee, people set streets on fire.”

“In that case, I could do my doctoral thesis on exhaust emissions. How people walk about, eat, work and shop, even if they can’t breathe. It’s a miracle,” Bicchu declared.

“I know someone who’s doing a thesis on Pride and Prejudice actually being chick-lit.”

“How about garbage vats?” Mona asked.

“You don’t do garbage vats even if they are overflowing. Academically not acceptable. Poverty, yes. But no garbage vats.” Meeta was firm.

The basket, full of broken eggs, to Rana’s eyes, loomed large. They hadn’t really considered it before. Eggshells added to that mountain of garbage; but as everyone knew, you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Where did the Eggman empty the basket at the end of the day?

In the empty lot right behind. They make great fertilizer. To grow anything you need input. Vegetables grew there. They couldn’t arrest him for trying to grow vegetables.

The silence that followed was momentary.

“Was it very bad?” Bicchu was, if nothing else, persistent.

Yes, but there had been a bonus. He had learnt to make the omelettes while in jail. For two weeks he had been the favourite whipping boy. Till someone else had come along. He had watched things change within forty-eight hours. After the slapping around was over, he waited for the newcomer to be taken inside, hung upside down, the soles of his feet beaten till his legs turned numb and he could feel no more. He had watched in contempt as the newcomer passed out. The next day the newcomer passed out before the real beating began. On the third day, he found him in his cell eating an omelette. There were to be no more beatings, he had fixed things, the Eggman was smugly informed, when he asked. His eyes slowly noticed the unfamiliar things. A mat with a pillow, a sheet and a stove in a corner. “I could have had food brought in,” the newcomer offered, observing the strange dishevelled young man holding onto his cell bars, “but I prefer to do my own cooking. The provisions arrive tomorrow.”

How had he managed to square the guards? Cash?

Of course, but it wasn’t just the guards who were to be squared and that took more than just cash. Would he care for an omelette?

It was then that the omelette sessions began. And it was also then that he realized he had a mentor.

“You can’t have a revolution without guns,” the newcomer was matter-of-fact. Somebody had to arrange for these things. It was easy. You traded them for something else. Everyone was fighting someone. In the meanwhile guns had to be delivered.

Was he being propositioned? What was in it for him? It wasn’t much fun being an impoverished physics master, even with the tuition. He had been picked up for distributing pamphlets. A friend’s older brother had asked him to. It would be a break from the monotony of his existence.

It was later that he learnt that his friend, the omelette-maker, had turned approver and would soon be released. Then the Eggman himself would be released. Before his friend had left he had scribbled a phone number on a scrap of paper.

“As for you lot,” the Eggman paused, “your parents have jobs, connections, houses and flats, and you know you’ll get by. We were the ones who risked everything for nothing. But then we had nothing, except an education. About the only person I know is the zookeeper.” That was true. He had gone to school with him. Now his zookeeper friend earned a government salary and would get a pension when he retired.

“That’s being hard. We aren’t harming anyone,” Rana was taken aback at the attack. It was unlike the Eggman to be so critical. He was on their side, wasn’t he? That was what they had always thought.

“Have you thought about what you want to do? Really want to do? We knew.”

And look where it got you, Mona wanted to say. “Why?” she asked.

“Because freedom is important. Of course it wouldn’t mean anything to you. You’re free already, or so you think. But there are others who are less free.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

“Think.”

“About what?”

“Just think. Think of what’s happening around you.”

“I can think of nothing else,” Anik’s voice seemed strangely disembodied. He had grown so quiet the others barely heard him. They had almost forgotten he was there.

They all knew about Anik’s father. The best thing to do would be to leave him alone till he came out of it.

He wanted to change his name, Anik said, after the incident. They went with him to find out. He would need to make a declaration for the affidavit: Aniket Ghosh henceforth to be known as Anik – what?

“Anik what?” the lawyer asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Just leave it, Anik,” someone suggested.

“Don’t be stupid. He has to sit for his exams. Go for job interviews. Get his passport and voter’s ID card.”

Those petty bribes his father took weren’t even a drop in the ocean of commissions, his mother said.

A dog somewhere yelped; someone had kicked it. Anik got up to investigate. He was an animal lover.

“He’s upset, can’t you see? I’m worried he may do something.” Meeta looked worried.

“He won’t do anything.”

“All the same, it must be pretty terrible knowing that your father was responsible for twenty-four deaths.”

“Anik’s too sensitive. These things happen.”

“It isn’t your father.”

It wasn’t Anik’s father’s photograph splashed over the newspaper pages. That was reserved for the promoter. Somehow that made it worse. They had assembled among the stone throwers. Anik had insisted. He had been the first among them to throw a stone. There had been public outrage. An entire multi-storey building had collapsed, with people in it. Anik’s father, an engineer, worked for the municipality. The building had been illegally erected on a filled-up pond. Bribes had been offered and accepted for the sanction of the building plan.

“He’s home on bail,” Anik had declared the following day. There had been talk of suspension. Someone’s head was needed on a plate. An example had to be set. Anik, who had always been close to his mother, was hit hard by her defection. She intended to stand by her husband. He had no girlfriend. Bicchu had sent out tentative feelers and had been rebuffed. Anik wished to be left alone to brood. His remark that he could think of nothing else, was to be interpreted as a plea for help, Rana decided. But what could they do? It was up to the Eggman to suggest something. It was two months since the incident, but Anik showed no signs of easing up. Everyone else had practically forgotten, except of course the victims’ families.

Rana contemplated the smouldering stub left behind by Anik in his rapid dash to the dog’s rescue. Even in the open air he could smell that distinctive peaty smell. Where did the stuff come from? The supply never ran out. It was expensive, but there were buyers. He had always managed to take a drag for free; but there were those who were making money from this, and good money.

“It’s time for dissent. There’s plenty to protest about. It stops you from getting lazy.” The Eggman, they recognized, was about to enter one of his moods. “Remember, the most important thing in life is freedom. It’s only those who have an abundance of it that can afford to be cynical about it.”

“Isn’t the catch that we’re not really free? At a larger level, it’s all destiny? And at a lesser level we’re never given much choice?” Rana was doubtful as usual.

“At a lesser level do you know how it feels not to be able to go to sleep when you’re dead tired, to be kept standing all night? Or, not to be able to pee when your bladder is bursting?”

“Will dissenting stop it?”

“It could be a career. At least I won’t have to worry about what to do after I get my degree. I can’t see myself studying further and I can’t go to work in an office.” Priya was decided.

So was Mona. Her father had enquired whether she intended to live in the Anglo-Indian quarters permanently. She had said yes. In that case she had better pack her bags. She had assented. She didn’t like the Marwari who had come to buy her house. Her father had actually been grateful for the price offered.

“Dissent how?” Rana frowned.

“Do something that will make a statement.” Bicchu was eager.

“The last time someone tried that, half the student population was wiped out. All that’s over and done with.” Shonali shook her head.

“All we ever do is talk.” Bicchu sounded disappointed.

“No violence.” Rana and Kaushik spoke simultaneously. Gordon had removed himself, shaking out his pockets, looking for a match. This conversation wasn’t his scene.

Anik was back, hot and bothered; the dog at his heels. It looked half starved, limped and had evidently been well kicked. “An omelette. What are you people discussing so seriously?”

“For the dog?” The Eggman looked at the animal, which cringed on seeing him. “No omelette,” he announced. “That dog’s an ingrate. Keeps barking whenever it sees me.”

“It’s your leg that frightened it.”

“Nonsense.”

“The crutches then. Maybe it can smell the ganja you’ve got in there.”

“That? That’s for my pain.”

The others looked at the Eggman, sensing something new.

“Nonsense. You have an entire consignment of whatnot stashed in there. Why don’t you admit you sell the stuff? The omelettes don’t bring in money.”

Meeta perked up. This was too good. “You really love that dog, don’t you? And why are we having this conversation anyway? I thought we were discussing something else?” Why did Anik have to open his mouth? Those who knew kept their mouths shut. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Your situation. We’re discussing your situation.” Bicchu looked innocent. She knew. Ice-cream man. Candyman. Eggman. Comfortman. That sounded funny. There had been comfort women. No Anikman. She had offered herself to him. She would be his comfort woman. He had preferred the Eggman.

Anik settled himself. The dog lay quietly next to him. “What about my situation?”

“No more stone-throwing. It’s useless. We need something more effective.”

The Eggman concentrated on the omelette in front of him. “I may have a suggestion to make.”

A month later it was news. Someone, or more than one person, had entered the zoo in the dead of the night when everyone was sleeping and let some of the animals out of their cages. The city was despairingly vociferous. What next? They thought they had seen everything. Animal lovers were uncertain how to respond. The results were grim. Ten people, all zoo employees, had been mauled to death. Five, though badly injured, would live. The body of an unidentified young man had been found near one of the cages. A student most probably. The viscera report mentioned cannabis. He had been half eaten. Drugs made you do crazy things. It was a good thing that it had happened during the night, otherwise the casualties would have been enormous. They dug up parallels: the young man, many years ago, who had jumped into the tiger’s compound while drunk, challenging it, and had been instantly killed. The things people did.

It was a cleaner who had managed to escape, and who brought news of the carnage, as much as he could see of it. They had gone in with paramilitary troops to collect the bodies and to do a preliminary survey. They had never been quieter, or more alert. The unidentified man suggested the key. But there was no question of detailed investigation yet. The zoo was sealed off, and would remain so till normalcy returned. The animals couldn’t have gone far. The tigers were probably in the deer enclosure, the lions yawning and the elephants taking a walk.

The important thing was to get the animals back into the cages.

Sunny Beach

Mari Lunde

Rina came home with a pink eye. “That’s what you get from a facial in the Eastern Bloc. Pink eye is the only logical outcome. She should have known that, really.”

According to Anniken, Rina had met a Bulgarian in a bar. Anniken had finally turned eighteen and was going to vote for the Progress Party at the upcoming municipal elections, because she supported their views on immigration and cheaper fags.

So, Anniken told everyone that Rina – who she didn’t really know, but had added as a friend on Facebook because she thought she was beautiful and that both annoyed and fascinated her – had met a local ladies’ man in a bar. Rina had felt the contents of his jeans pocket pressed against the back of her left butt cheek, and the size of his package had won her over. Rina kissed her friends and told them she would be back in the morning. “Don’t wait up,” she smiled and left hand in hand with the tall, dark man with a thin, black pussy-brush decorating the centre of his chin.

When they reached his shitty shed of a house in the outskirts of Sunny Beach, he offered her a shot of vodka and a cigarette. They sat on the dirty ground, leant their backs against the bins outside his house and inhaled the smoke. His accent charmed her and she let him undress her, fuck her without protection and ejaculate in her face. And in her eyes, apparently. Anniken had seen a picture on Facebook. “She was wearing that slutty pink tank top she uses as a dress, you know. It was bound to happen, like,” Anniken explained to her audience in the school cafeteria, first day after summer.

*

Rina did meet a local man in the bar Grabbarna Bus, and felt his equipment pressed against her butt. He played with the tip of her wavy, blond hair that reached the middle of her back, and his mouth slowly approached her right ear. Her friends photographed her with the man, who was now more like a hairy lump on her back, while she posed with two ironic thumbs up. “Excuse me, could you get your thing out of my butt, please?” She turned around and passed him her fiery look of rejection. “Yes, sorry me,” he replied with an accent. And the pussy-brush turned around and swept the room for the next blonde, Northern victim.

Dansband music pumped out of the massive speakers like a force of Scandinavism. The floor was packed with young, drunken Scandinavians spending their summer on the Bulgarian coast to drink, dance and pull. Their happy faces and floating eyes were barely visible in the dim lighting. Disco lights soared across the floor, painted green spots on their gleeful expressions and occasionally pointed out the very, very pretty boys. Rina had been approached by another stranger, but this one had a shaved chin and spoke her language. She left it at that.

When the clock struck four in the morning, the three girls left the bar. Katrine and Hanne stopped by a burger shop, and that’s when Rina kept walking and lost them. She felt tired and thought she’d go for a swim in the ocean.

The wide beach, usually packed with tourists, lay completely deserted. Moonlight reflected off the water and painted the warm air cold and blue. Colourful beach beds were stacked together by the boardwalk. She tried to wriggle a bed out of the pile, but the combination of effort and alcohol made her trip and fall. Later, she would find sand in every possible place on her body. Eventually, she climbed to the top of the load and fell asleep.

A beach worker shook his head at the sight of the young girl curled up like a ball on the beach bed, her hair dishevelled and dark eye make-up smeared around her eyes. As he carefully approached her, he saw that it wasn’t just make-up on her face. He suppressed a laugh but yelled at her to wake her up. He had beds and umbrellas to arrange before the other tourists would hit the beach.

An hour earlier, a seagull had circled the beach in the low morning sun. It took a dump.

So Rina woke up with seagull shit on her face. It had landed right above her right eyelid, and ran into her eye when she opened it. Confused and blinking, she sat up on the bed and looked down on the beach worker. “Morning,” he said politely and went to rake the sand surrounding the stack. She put a hand to her eye and touched the pulp, looked at the white excrement covering the tip of her finger and screamed in a high pitch. She jumped down from the stack, fell and rolled around in the sand, ran into the Black Sea, dove her head under water and scrubbed her eye. The beach walker whistled a tune as he raked and evened out the sand where Rina had landed.

On her shameful, wet walk back to the hotel, she stole a massive watermelon from a fruit stand. She was still drunk.

Katrine and Hanne had forgot about their missing friend. They didn’t tell her that, though, and when they heard her desperate knocks on the door that morning they greeted Rina with a huge hug and told her they “had looked everywhere”.

“Oh my God, a bird shit on me!” she screamed, and threw the watermelon on the dilapidated, purple velour sofa that decorated the little room. “And what the fuck is that?” She stared at what her hands had held moments earlier, grunted, and let her aching body drop to the couch. Carefully poked the melon, laid her head on the armrest and feet on the fruit. Hanne and Katrine exchanged a smile and shook their heads as their friend fell asleep in a second.

When Katrine’s brother, Anders, picked them up at Gardermoen Airport a week later, he asked about his sister’s bandaged finger.

“What happened to your finger?” he said when he drove the car out of the short-stay car park.

“Oh, nothing, just a stupid accident,” Katrine shrugged her shoulders.

“Katrine was in a wet-T-shirt contest. Aren’t you proud of your sister?” Rina laughed.

Anders knew what his competitive little sister was capable of. Over the years, multiple board games had been flung through the living room, dice flushed down the toilet and PlayStation consoles crushed under her furious feet.

So, Anders assumed Katrine broke her finger throwing a tantrum after losing the competition. An assumption he passed on to his mates, who found his little sister “extremely fit” and stalked her Facebook account to find pictures from the contest. They were out of luck.

Katrine had won the competition.

Her friends didn’t support her participation, but she wouldn’t listen. “Hey, I’m in freaking Bulgaria. I’ll do whatever the hell I want.” So it was settled.

She purchased a white T-shirt at the beach shop, put on a pair of jeans and took off her bra. Rina and Hanne were envious. Her tits were amazing. They didn’t sag, like Rina’s, and they weren’t flat, like Hanne’s. They were round and full, and Rina pondered whether her best friend had had an operation. But they were natural, and a sassy complement to her classic beauty. Her brown hair reached her shoulders and was naturally thick and straight, and her electric-blue eyes were framed by long, black lashes and a thick brow.

A blonde, saintlike girl from Sweden cheated and wore a black tank-top underneath her white tee. To her right stood a chubby girl from Skedsmokorset, the tackiest town in eastern Norway. Her pierced tongue licked her lips awkwardly. When she poured water down her top, she whipped her greasy, yellow and black hair from side to side. Her massive breasts juggled around her belly button.

The last of Katrine’s competitors was from Denmark. Her dark hair extensions stretched beneath her plastic boobs, which she shook at the encouragement from the men at Grabbarna Bus. At that time, the Dane’s biggest obstacle was the stiletto heels she balanced on. Katrine laughed scornfully and, with a barely noticeable little nudge, she sent the Dane flying off stage.

Three Swedish boys, one of them Rina’s hook-up from the dance floor a couple of days earlier, went with the girls back to their hotel. They had hardly stumbled across the doorstep before the boys noticed the watermelon.

“Does the melon want to come out to play?” Axel asked with his arm around Katrine’s shoulder. He had noticed her firm breasts onstage and wanted to undress her.

Katrine carried Rina’s watermelon out on the big lawn in front of their hotel. She placed it at the centre of the grass, and Rina and Hanne took the kick-off for Norway. They both shrieked after kicking the heavy melon barefooted. Eric immediately won the ball for Sweden, kicked it to Axel on the right wing and Axel ran for the goal. Katrine jumped around between the imaginary goal posts, eager to defend the Norwegian goal. He shot at her right corner. She dived to catch the melon, and caught the tip of her index finger on it. The pain was immediate and sharp, and she responded by whipping her hand to shake it off. She couldn’t contain herself, let out a loud cry and fell dramatically to the grass.

Hanne was the only one who came home to a Facebook friend request. At the sight of his name, her heart hammered uncontrollably. She reluctantly accepted.

Katrine noticed the new friendship and called Rina. “Why didn’t I get one?” she cried.

“But we just got back.” Rina was annoyed with Katrine’s reaction. “It’s not like what you and Alex had was anything compared to them. What they had was special. Hanne barely sleeps around, and the night they had together was magical. She said so herself, you know. She must have fallen hard, she looked so upset when he left.”

He messaged her but she didn’t reply.

The reason Hanne didn’t reply was that she was ashamed. She was so utterly embarrassed that every form of interaction on his part made her blush. The friend request came from the third Swedish boy. His name was Jonas and his chestnut-coloured hair was slicked back with the perfect amount of hair gel. It didn’t look greasy and it always stayed in place.

Hanne didn’t notice him before the watermelon match. His ice-blue eyes examined her chest and face and he grinned. His pearl-white smile broke down her strict, preppy appearance and she blushed. Her eyes searched the brown-and-green grass for nothing in particular, and her long, brown hair fell in front of her face. She hoped it did the trick and hid her fresh, red skin colour.

So Katrine went down with a broken finger and Rina went with her to the emergency room because of her inflamed eye, which had eventually started to worry her. When the girls arranged for a taxi, Jonas took Hanne’s hand. It was cold, in spite of the warm night temperature. They walked back to the party street, arm in arm and pieces of the shredded watermelon in their spare hands.

A pool of body fluids and chlorine water filled the club’s backyard with its turquoise colour and girly squeals. Wet and drunk girls and boys staggered in and out of the pool. Long manes were pasted like glue to the ladies’ necks and black make-up was smeared around their eyes. Their rosy nipples were visible through soaked cloth. One girl pulled her white dress over her head and hung it to dry over the black railings that separated the club’s posh backyard from the dirty Bulgarian streets on the other side. Wearing nothing but white panties and black high heels, she squeezed her way in between a group of young men occupying a black leather couch. She took a half-full drink from the table in front of them, started sipping on it and let her breasts rest on her thighs.

A young boy tripped and fell into the pool. His name was Mark, he was from Ireland and he exaggerated his drunkenness. Hanne looked at the crowd with a mixture of amazement and disgust. “How anyone can sink to this level is beyond me.”

Jonas chuckled and put his arm around her waist. “Want to ride the water slide?” When he unfolded his massive, white smile that revealed his dimples, her head turned blurry. It was usually a thing she wouldn’t even consider, but this Swede was a hottie. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt her reputation or dignity, she thought, to live a little. Just once.

They climbed the flight of stairs. It was slippery from water and sticky from alcohol. She suddenly found herself at the top of the slide, staring down at the dirty finish line. She thought about her expensive shoes and took them off. She threw them over the railing, and almost hit a group of girls sat by the slide. It was the last she saw of them. He threw away his shirt, trousers and shoes and sat down behind her at the top of the slide. He pulled the end of her dress for her to sit down, and she obeyed. She sat down between his legs, butt to crotch. Put the piece of watermelon halfway in her mouth. With his arms tight around her belly, where rapid butterflies flapped their wings, they dragged themselves over the edge, and glided down the sticky slide.

When she got up from under water, she rubbed the skin under her eyes with her fingers. “Du är vacker,” he said in beautiful Swedish. Her breasts touched his chest. The flapping in her stomach wouldn’t subside, and she blushed. He pushed her backwards through the water towards the big, artificial rocks that decorated one side of the slide to give the backyard oasis a natural look. Her toes barely swept the blue tiles as she tiptoed backwards.

With her back against tiled wall and head against artificial stone, he put his lips against hers and they opened their mouths. Their tongues rubbed against each other’s rough surfaces, warm and wet, and twisted like whirlwinds. His right hand pulled up her left leg and stroked the back of her thigh. Her leg automatically wrapped around his waist, and the right one followed. He put his hand in between her thighs, and softly rubbed the outside of her underwear. Somewhere around them, a flash went off. People rushed down the slide, jumped into the pool and splashed water on them but they didn’t notice. He pushed her underwear to the side, and gently let a finger slide into her. Her moan hid her discomfort as he pulled up her dress and down his boxers. He massaged her vulva and, with a sudden jerk, he penetrated her. She moaned again.

Red watermelon liquid floated around their tangled bodies, but blended in with the water before anyone noticed.

The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop

Richard Kopley

I’m certainly not an old man. I think of myself as kind of a late bloomer, still ready for something – a new beginning, I hope.

I’m an adjunct English instructor at three different universities. I began when the good grey poets were still good. I’m OK, though, with agency and intertextuality. I like the Other. In fact, I may be the Other.

But what I really love is a used-and-antiquarian bookshop. Yes, the Internet is fine, but I miss dust and shadow and heft – and the imaginedness of a lost world. I’m always on the lookout for a neglected Brattle, a forgotten Serendipity. And I’m especially happy to find an impossibly arcane speciality shop. Some years ago, I was delighted to come upon Tell It Slant Books, where only volumes with acute and obtuse angles were sold. This was an Irving Penn sort of place – not a right angle in sight, customers leaning and jutting without complaint. And then there was Marginal Values, which offered only annotated books. Here readers interested in earlier readers bought marked-up copies for marked-up prices – most desirably, first editions with first additions. But of all the used-and-antiquarian bookshops I’ve ever seen, the most remarkable was surely The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop. This was the place that I never wanted to leave.

I didn’t have a number. I was just wandering down Fourth Avenue one morning, thinking of the legendary shops of the vanished Book Row, the great good place. I browsed in the only bookshop I knew of there, the brave and welcoming Alabaster, then walked farther south, ever hopeful. Not quite halfway from Union Square to Cooper Union, a block over on Twelfth Street, stood the noble Strand.

But this morning I was looking for whatever might be in the old place. Something obscure and mysterious – perhaps utterly unknown. Maybe a secret Arcadia or Eureka, lately returned for my pleasure. Or something new – The Sign of the Lonely Albatross, perhaps, or The Inside of a Dog.

It was clear and brisk, a fall day that invited expectation. The gritty sidewalk seemed infinitely patient. Walkers and bikers passed unhurriedly. Cars edged uptown unhonkingly. I passed a deli, the subway, a key shop, a takeout shop. And then I noticed the simple black lettering of a white sign in a basement window: “The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop”. I paused, rereading, savouring the words. With ease, I grabbed the cold rail and swung around, down the concrete steps. I pulled open the creaky wooden door and breathed in a delicate mustiness.

The aged proprietor sat at an antique desk at the right, his deep-sunk eyes and flaring white hair visible above a disarray of relics and remainders. He glanced up at me, then returned to his promising chaos. His skin was worn to a soft glow. He might have been William Gowans himself, come back to appraise some enigmatic tomes. I thought about asking a question, but the telephone rang. The old gentleman lifted the receiver and growled, “Hideous and Intolerable.” I couldn’t hear the other voice. I headed deeper in.

The shop extended backwards. Its walls on the left and right were red brick. I could see, through the moteless air, barely illuminated by the window light, a back wall full of books. The three bookcases were high and broad, but everything was still within reach, invitingly available. My eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and ranged down the spines on the leftmost bookcase.

There was Dante’s Divine Comedy in sombre scholarly volumes, illustrated editions, gorgeous elephant folios. There were copies of Everyman below and several shelves of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, including deluxe copies in leather bindings. I scanned further, impatient to see as much as I could, quickly. There were Milton’s Comus and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Keats’s Endymion. I recognized American and British first editions of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, with paper labels intact. And there were handsome firsts of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s The Confidence-Man. I sidled to the central bookcase, observing varied and enticing copies of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I saw Butler’s Erewhon and then Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With seeming incongruity appeared Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, Eliot’s The Family Reunion and Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, among others. In the final bookcase, on the right, were boxed sets of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and his Space Trilogy, as well as elegant copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. There was a first edition of Camus’s La Peste, in original wrappers. Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Faulkner’s A Fable were followed, improbably enough, by Dr Seuss – including Horton Hears a Who, Yertle the Turtle and The Butter Batter Book. And on the final shelves were crisply dust-jacketed copies of such books as Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association and Sendak’s Brundibar.

There is a unity here, I thought, waiting for it to emerge. I looked up and noticed the high tin ceiling, with a large hammock hanging from one side. Before I had had a chance to try to make sense of this, the front door creaked open, and I turned to see, entering tentatively, a woman in a white peasant blouse and tan slacks. She hesitated near the preoccupied proprietor, then passed back towards the shadow of the wall of books, where I waited.

She approached slowly, casually, with a slight swing in her step. She was about thirty-five or forty, medium height, curly brown hair, trim yet ample – an Eileen Fisher sort of woman, with a hint of the sophomore year of college. She had crinkly eyes, a crinkly smile. I could see that she was comfortable in the bookshop. I liked her before I knew her. Maybe if I’d seen her at a cocktail party, she’d have seemed a bit cooler, more distant. But here in The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop, she was alluring and close.

She browsed the titles as I had, stopping at Lewis Carroll. Withdrawing a volume of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gently, by the middle of the spine, she then cradled the book in her left hand and paged through it carefully. I couldn’t think of what else to say, so I said, “Who are you?”

She looked up, crinkling, and replied, “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present.” That was all I needed. She had me.

I introduced myself, “Andrew”; she reciprocated, “Helen.” And we began to talk. I asked why she’d picked that book in particular, and she said that she’d loved it as a girl. I wanted to hear more, but she didn’t follow up. I took a chance and declared, “Once, I was a real Turtle.” She didn’t seem to think that that was idiotic. She compressed her lips slightly and was quiet.

I shifted topics. “Have you ever been here before?” No, she hadn’t. “What do you think is going on with this place?” I ventured, gesturing towards the singular wall of books. She read more titles and seemed puzzled. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a survey of something or other.” She brightened – and crinkled – and suggested, “Let’s ask!”

OK, I agreed. With determination, she led the way towards Mr Gowans, her sandals clicking quietly on the wooden floor. As the light grew, I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a ring. I didn’t wear one either. My divorce had been years ago.

My new friend let me do the talking.

“Excuse me.”

The venerable bookman raised his head but said nothing.

“Excuse me, but we were wondering about this shop – the books – the name?…”

He paused, trying to gauge us both. And he responded, with a frown, “Do you not see the reason for yourself?”

Well, no. I shook my head and looked at Helen. She looked as mystified as I felt. I was not sure whether to push on or let it go.

But he added, “Two for the price of one.”

Hmm. He was having some kind of fun with us. Neither she nor I understood. I just shrugged. He humphed and spread his arms, with palms up, as if the answer were obvious, as if to ask, impatiently, “Well?…”

We just didn’t get it.

He tilted his head slightly and said, simply, “Allegories. They’re all allegories.”

Aha. I thought back to the titles. I should have figured it out.

“I see,” I replied. “Very interesting. But – why did you choose this… focus?”

Gowans leant back in his chair, enjoying our perplexity. He drummed his fingers on his Mac.

He looked from me to Helen and back again and explained, “It’s a way in – it’s a path to what’s hidden.” She and I briefly glanced at each other. I was encouraged.

“OK. I understand. But – why the name?…”

Gowans pointed to the locked glass case between us, which offered just one book: a first American edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. It was a beautiful copy – and, according to the description card, it was unsophisticated, in its original boards. It was opened to pages 226 and 227, in Chapter 45, “The Affidavit”.

“Did you know that Melville once lived across the street?”

No, I had no idea.

He went on, “In Moby-Dick, his greatest work, he states his fear that the story of the white whale might be taken for an allegory – what he calls, specifically, ‘a hideous and intolerable allegory’.”

He added, “Look at the bottom of the page on the right.”

I put on my reading glasses and looked; indeed, I found the phrase. Helen leant in and found it, too.

“However,” he added, “for all that, it is an allegory.”

“Of what?” was my only response. I did remember a former teacher humorously commenting, “The conflict of Ahab the sea captain and Moby Dick the white whale represents the conflict of all sea captains and all white whales.” But Mr Gowans was no humorist.

The professorial owner continued, “Melville tells us in the first chapter that the story of Narcissus is ‘the key to it all’. We are looking for the reflection of our selves, ‘the ungraspable phantom of life’ – Platonic Ishmael in the sea, mad Ahab in that demonic ‘snow hill in the air’. Both risk death in the search for themselves. Moby-Dick is a whaling allegory of the story of Narcissus.”

Helen was rapt. Perhaps I was, too. Who was this guy?

He added, with a surprising mildness, “I wanted to take Ishmael a step further. Plato wrote ‘The Allegory of the Cave’. I wanted to create a cave of allegories.”

So there it was. No purposeless splendour here. Mr Gowans watched our amazed expressions with satisfaction, then returned to his piles of books. Helen and I returned to the back wall, understanding the place for the first time.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s astounding. Incredible. Maybe – maybe we’re all part of some larger allegory that we can’t see…”

I’d been thinking the same thing. We glanced at Spenser and Swift, Kafka and Faulkner, Seuss and Sendak, with new recognition.

At that moment, we heard a familiar creak. A narrow fellow in a bow tie – apparently a clerk – stepped into the shop, exchanged a few words with Mr Gowans, and then took the proprietor’s place behind the desk.

We returned to the books. I looked more carefully and found a first edition of Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe; I told Helen how this allegory had so coloured my college years. She came upon a first edition of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax and remembered reading it as a child and first worrying about the environment.

We replaced these two books, and I pointed out what looked like firsts of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (without the dust jacket), mentioning that I taught Huck as an allegory of Moses and Gatsby as an allegory of Jesus.

“And what do your students think?”

So I explained what I’d learnt from them about the film The Matrix. And we quickly thought of other allegorical works in popular culture – from ‘American Pie’ to ‘Hotel California’ to episodes of Seinfeld.

We were happily sated with allegory. I told Helen about my three teaching jobs; she told me about her sporadic book-reviewing. And then she noticed, to the far right of the bookcases, in a small alcove, a table with the folded sign “Write Your Own”. So we ventured to the table, sat down, picked up our pencils, faced our blank yellow pads, and thought.

It took a while. But we settled into our own worlds. And when we finished, we traded paragraphs. Helen had written about discovering, through a door in the back of her linen closet, an unknown spare room. She wondered if she should tell her super. And she wondered what she should do with it. I had written about visiting the Met and finding a triptych that I’d never seen before. In the left panel was a landscape – an expanse of grass reaching to an expanse of blue sky. In the centre panel were the stacks of some library, stretching on for ever. And in the right panel was – nothing. It was empty. A curatorial label read merely “In process”.

We didn’t interpret; we didn’t interrogate – we just accepted each other’s stories. She took two pushpins and posted our little allegories on a small bulletin board above the table. Then, with elbows on the table, she folded her hands and rested her chin upon them, looking at me with soft eyes and raised eyebrows. I thought, for a moment, I was home. Why would I ever leave?

But there was a movement in the distance – the clerk beckoning to us. Helen and I rose uncertainly and walked back to the antique desk.

The skinny guy, who had a too-eager look, was sitting in Mr Gowans’s chair. He ignored the tumbling jumble, concentrating on us. His face was pointed; his eyes furtive. “Have you found what you were looking for?” he asked, imitating solicitousness.

I didn’t respond. Neither did Helen.

“Where’s the owner?” I parried.

And the clerk said merely, “He stepped out.”

Then he confided to Helen, “I have something that might interest you.” His fingers darted about the keyboard of the laptop, and he turned the computer to her. “The boss has written this unbelievable book. It’s not published, but it’s here on his hard drive. It explains a lot about this place. You might enjoy it.”

She stalled him half-heartedly. “Are we really allowed?… Maybe we shouldn’t?…”

She folded her arms for emphasis. He waved away her concern.

Then he paused, for effect. “It’s called ‘The Key to All Allegories’.”

He let the title resound, stir, entice. He said no more. I hesitated – Helen looked at me with a touch of anxiety – then glanced for a moment at the flickering screen. And she fixed on the words.

“I think we’d better go,” I murmured, but she countered, touching my arm. “Wait. Please wait.” And then, slowly, “You really should see this.” And she pushed the laptop my way.

I looked around briefly, then turned unresistingly to the shimmering text. Scrolling down slowly, I realized what this was: a Unified Field Theory of Allegory. Gowans had mastered the history and scholarship and was presenting here an analysis of the underlying dynamics of allegory not only in literature, but also in dreams. Borders disappeared, reservations faded, and a single hermetic pattern emerged.

“This is great,” I nearly whispered, unable to stop reading. And then I heard a shifting above.

The clerk looked on smugly as Helen and I caught sight of the burdened hammock and a scowling face peering over the side. I shut the laptop’s lid, and we hastened to the shelves, astonished and ashamed and afraid. Gowans sat up in his hammock, took hold of a nearby stepladder, and clambered down. He gruffly called, “Where are you people?” Then he quickly found us in the shadows.

He looked fierce. I apologized, adding lamely, “I wasn’t sure… We didn’t know…”

Helen tried to help me out, adding, “He told us… He said that…”

His face tightening, Gowans turned to his assistant.

Smug no longer, the narrow fellow shrank as if to receive a blow. The proprietor spoke with a calm bitterness: “Get out of this shop.” And then he added, “You’d better lie low – soon everyone will know what you’ve done.” The agitated clerk slid from the chair and out the door. It creaked shut.

And now Gowans faced us. There was a sadness, a grimness, in his eyes.

“You could have stayed, you know. I would have been happy to have you. But now…” He stepped to the door and opened it wide: “Of course, you can never come back.”

My look of appeal yielded nothing. Helen and I, huddled against one another, hurried out the door and up the steps of The Hideous and Intolerable Bookshop. The door whined closed. We blinked in the sunlight, lingered for a moment, then headed past the takeout place towards Union Square. We couldn’t help looking back for a moment with regret.

But Fourth Avenue was all before us.

I decided to ask for her number.

A Skulk

Timothy Jarvis

The following is an English rendering of the text, originally in Polish, of a typescript discovered under a bush on Tooting Common in south London: a bundle of yellowing, mildewed papers tied up with string.

—

In the glare of the street lights, the drizzle looked like sparks from a weld. Wacław, on his way home from a late night working at the site, was walking along the edge of the park. Passing a tunnel through a railway embankment, he heard wild laughter, dull crackling, and, beneath, growling. He peered over, saw that several youths, baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirts, had penned an old vixen against the mouldering brickwork under the arch and were fleering at her, lobbing squibs. She was grizzled about the maw, scrawny, fur mangy; her ribs were in frantic spasm. Cowering back from the fireworks, she turned her head this way and that, snarling, tattered ears pricked.

Wacław, though sickened, was mindful of the teenagers’ violent air and of the day’s wages in cash in his pocket, and, shaking his head, turned up the collar of his pea coat and kept on, head down.

But then he heard a yelp, glanced askance to see blood welling from a gash to the vixen’s side and a glint of steel, a chef’s knife, and stopped, stared on. One of the gang darted at the fox, kicked her in the head. She tottered, fell down in the filth, lay on her side, whining.

As Wacław stood there racked, a woman crawled out from under a nearby bush, and ran, stumbling, towards the youths. She was barefoot, wore a scanty, tattered floral shirt-dress and a number of charm necklaces and bracelets that jingled as she ran. It was hard to gauge her years, for her face was caked with grime, but Wacław hazarded she was perhaps in her late thirties. A pennant of red hair flew behind her.

“No,” she howled. “Leave her alone.”

Her voice was rasping, like that of a heavy smoker or someone unused to speaking, and her accent was generic south London, though with a faint trace of upper-class drawl. The teenagers turned to face her; the youth who held the knife stepped forwards from the pack.

When the woman closed with them, she tried to push her way through to the fox, but was tripped. The gang closed round, giggling, lashing out with their feet.

It occurred to Wacław later that, had he been a settled Londoner, he might well have turned away, gone home. But he had not been long in the city, was an interloper, illegal, incorporeal, conducted himself according to the mores of the place he still thought of as home – a kinder society. He was not yet inured.

“Hey,” he challenged.

The gang, as one, snapped their heads round to look at him. The one with the knife – gangling, grease-glistening pimply face – yelled back, chin jutting, “What?”

“You should leave her alone.”

“You should fuck off.”

The pack sniggered behind their hands, eyes gleaming, then crossed over to Wacław, slowly, insolently. He held his ground. Behind them, the woman was moaning lowly.

A squall gusted across the common; Wacław narrowed his eyes against the driven rain. The armed youth darted forwards, but, tripping, stumbled. Seizing on this, Wacław stepped forwards, struck out, knocked him down, then, crouching, wrested away the weapon, and rushed the rest of the gang, scattering them, before wedging the blade between two paving slabs, snapping it off at the heel, and hurling the handle across the common.

The fallen lout got unsteadily to his feet, tottered off after the rest. Looking over, Wacław saw the woman laid prone, the fox on its haunches beside her, licking her face. He crossed to her. Nearing, he could see her shoulders heaving and hear her sobs. The vixen’s flank was blotched with darker red where her fur was matted with blood.

Crouching beside the woman, Wacław put his hand on her arm.

“Are you all right?”

She choked her whimpers, turned to look at him.

Studied close up, she had a certain pinched prettiness. Wacław was attracted to her. Her dress had ridden up, exposed the pale flesh of her thighs.

He held out his hand. She took it, and he helped her up. She was very short; Wacław, though not tall, dwarfed her. Her dress was dishevelled and filthy, her hair tousled, but apart from a bruise mottling her check, she seemed unhurt. She reached down to pet the vixen’s mealy muzzle, then looked up at Wacław.

“Where are you from? No, don’t tell me.”

She winced, pressed the heels of her hands to her temples.

“Poland.”

“My accent.”

“Shush… Poland, yes, but where? Ah, it’s Poznań. But you weren’t born there, were you?”

She grimaced, groaned, hunched over clutching her stomach. Concerned, Wacław stepped towards her, but she waved him back.

“I’m fine.”

She stood straight once more, glared at him.

“You were born in Sosnowiec. In the bedroom of an apartment on the seventh floor of a concrete tower block. It was snowing heavily that day; drifts made the streets impassable. Your mother was attended throughout her labour, which lasted nearly eighteen hours, by the old woman from the flat next door, who’d been a midwife, and, during the Second World War, fought with the resistance in Warsaw, spent weeks hiding from Nazis in the city’s sewers.

“After you were born, when the old woman had cut and tied off your umbilical cord, cleaned you up, and handed you back to your mother, something remarkable happened. The snow stopped falling, the sun broke through the cloud cover, lighting a world swaddled in purest white, and a large bird, with jet plumage and a bright red pouch at its throat, alighted on the balcony rail outside the window, perched there a moment, nostrils ghosting the air, peering in with beady eyes, then nodded its head, as if to bless the birth, flung out its wings, and swooped down, out of sight. At least that’s how your mother tells it. She thought the bird some odd kind of stork.

“Am I right?”

Wacław stared at her.

“I am, I can tell. Don’t worry, I’m not going to eat you.”

“Eat me?”

“Just an expression. By the way, the bird? It was a frigate-bird escaped from a zoo in Katowice. It died, froze to death, not long after your mother saw it.”

She turned and began walking off across the wet grass.

“Hey!”

She paused, turned back.

“Oh, and you’re Wacław, aren’t you? I’m Melanie. I’ll look out for you.”

Her large nipples could be seen through the rain-sodden fabric of her dress, and Wacław’s brain throbbed with desire. She stifled a giggle with her hand, then flitted away, the fox scampering in her wake.

Wacław lived close to Balham station, in a cramped bedsit in which there was barely room for a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and the small desk and chair, salvaged from a skip outside a local school, at which he ate his meals and sometimes sat reading, or in contemplation, or at his electronic typewriter, writing. A squalid kitchen and bathroom were shared with the other tenants of the converted Edwardian terraced house. It was a fairly miserable place, but Wacław liked how bright it was on clear days; the windows were large, let in a lot of light. The view from them was dull, though: opposite and slightly to the left, a new complex of flats, built in anticipation of the time, then still a few years away, when some younger financial workers, priced out of Clapham, would move a little further down the Northern Line; a little further off, on the right, was the embankment that carried the overground railway.

One morning, a few weeks after the incident on the common, Wacław, standing at the window, brushing his teeth, saw, from behind, in one of the new flats, a young woman kneeling before a mirror, blow-drying her hair. Apparently unaware she was overlooked, she was naked. He leered down a moment, at the knotty ridge of her spine, at her hunched shoulders, at her calloused soles, at a soft, full breast, a small dusk-rose nipple, glimpsed in reflection, then, catching himself, he turned away, shamed.

That night, walking home from a party at a friend’s house in Dulwich, he was passing by Streatham Common when he stopped, staggered by the glister of moonlight on a gossamer filament strung across the road, from one pollarded elm to another. As he stood there, two young men rushed him, brandishing knives, demanding his wallet. He gave it to them meekly, yet still they pushed him to the ground and set about him, began punching and kicking him where he lay, stamping on his hands. He curled into a ball, wrapping his arms around his head; his assailants jeered and the blows came harder and faster; he tasted the salt tang of blood in his mouth, felt pain in his side. One of the young men had sallow greasy skin, like spoilt cheese, the other, a poorly done tattoo of a cartoon budgerigar in a cage on the side of his neck. They yammered abuse, a bizarre litany of invective.

“Fucking prick wanker Polak nigger whore poof cunt…”

Spittle spindrift in the glare from the street lights, sparks from a weld. The tattooed thug became so agitated he pissed himself. Wacław was sure they would kill him. Then something came snarling out of a stand of scrub at the edge of the common and flew at the attackers, savaged them, drove them off.

Wacław was roused from a half faint by the fox licking his face. It peered at him a moment, then scampered away. He got to his feet and went on his way, as fast as he could, broken and bruised as he was.

He went to hospital the next day. After a wait, he was seen, prodded, X-rayed; one of his ribs was cracked and several of his fingers broken. He was off work for nearly six weeks convalescing.

The afternoon of the day he returned to the site, he and another builder were crouched down, side by side, examining the damp-proof course of one of the blocks of flats, when a piece of scaffold came loose overhead, tumbled in the air awhile, then struck the hard hat of Wacław’s fellow a heavy blow. The man grunted, sagged, fell over on his side, and lay, curled up, whimpering, one leg kicking out, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits. Wacław turned to him, crouched down, and took hold of one of his hands.

The man’s eyes were rolled back in their sockets. The massy pole had stove in the crown of his hard hat, cracked his skull.

Looking about him, Wacław saw that though some had put down their tools and were gawping, most worked on, ignorant of what had happened.

Catching the eye of the site foreman, who stared over, slack-jawed, Wacław called out, “What are you doing? Stop the work, call an ambulance!”

After the paramedics had stretchered away the injured man, work was halted for the day, and a session in the local pub proposed. The crew changed out of their work gear and traipsed off to this establishment, a rough boozer, the Horse and Hounds, and caroused till the early hours of the next day, drank the place dry.

Only Wacław didn’t take part in the revels, though he gulped down his share of booze. He had thought himself well enough liked, but that night had the sense he was being shunned. Finally, over a glass of whisky, he spoke to the foreman about his discomfort.

“You don’t know, do you?” the foreman said.

“Know what?”

“They’re suspicious of you, frightened even.”

“Why?”

“That scaffolding. It was falling such that, I mean, it should’ve hit you. It seemed just to…”

The foreman took a slug of his whisky.

“…To jink in the air at the last. It was like witchcraft, you know?”

“But… What?”

“Don’t worry about it. Give it a few days; it’ll blow over.”

Wacław nodded slowly.

“Like witchcraft?”

“Like something was protecting you.”

Lying in bed later, the room gyring, Wacław repeated, again and again, under his breath, the conversation with the foreman. Every time he mouthed the word “witchcraft” he saw, stark, in his mind’s eye, Melanie, naked, groaning, the vixen twined round her legs, nuzzling between her thighs.

Sometime before daybreak, Wacław woke sweat-slick, got up, and crossed to the window to open the curtains and let in some air. Looking out, he saw a faint light in the flat of the woman he had seen drying her hair the morning of his beating. After a moment, he made her out, lying supine on her bed, naked, caressed by a television’s glimmering incubus. He lingered there a short time, then returned to his bed.

The following morning Wacław woke early, headsore, gutsick, took a gulp of water from the glass by his bedside, heaved, then, after struggling out of bed, made for his bathroom with a lurching gait, knelt by his toilet, and brought up a mess of bile, drink, and kebab. When he had finished throwing up, he fell back and sat huddled on the tiled floor for a time, shaking and sweating.

Perhaps he dozed, for it was much lighter outside when he was roused by the doorbell. Cursing, he got to his feet and stumbled, head reeling, legs unsteady, out of his flat, and down to the front door of the building. On opening it, he found Melanie standing there on the doorstep. She had washed and wore a skirt and blouse that, though creased, were in good repair.

“What is it?” he asked.

Looking up at him, grinning, she revealed that she had been hiding, behind her back, clutched in her right fist, a bunch of weeds tied up with twine.

He grimaced. Crestfallen, she cast the posy to the ground.

“It’s no good, it’s no good,” she raved, pulling at her hair, stamping her feet. Then, calming herself, she reached out and took Wacław’s hand and said, in low, imploring tones, “Can’t you see? I love you, I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Wacław gently withdrew his hand.

“I’m sorry Melanie, but I don’t…”

He shrugged.

She balled her fists, yowled high and loud, stamped her feet.

“I’ll show you, I’ll show you, I’ll show you, I’ll show you!”

Reaching down, she picked up the spray of weeds and darted off down the street. After she had gone but a little way, she stopped, turned back.

“Curse you!”

She spat on the ground, then flitted away.

Wacław went up to his flat, got back into bed, and waited for his hangover to abate, clutching his head from time to time.

A few days later, Wacław – who’d had ambitions to be a writer as a youth, ambitions he’d had to smother when in his late teens, following his father’s death, it had fallen to him to support the household, something that bothered him, though only in the same distant, abstract way he regretted never speaking kindly to the strange, lonely girl at school whose wide face and old-fashioned braided chignon he found beautiful, but mocked along with the other children – was sat at his desk in front of his typewriter, working into the night on a lengthy autobiographical poem he was composing, in a neologistic blend of Polish and English, about his immigrant experience, when a light came on in the young woman’s flat. He looked over, curious. Seemingly drunk, reeling slightly, she stood by her bed, undressing. She had stripped down to her underwear, when a young man approached her, shrugging off his coat. The couple grappled and fell down on the bed. Pinning the man down, the girl scrabbled, slightly frantic, at his clothes. The man fumbled with the clasp of her bra a moment, took it off, then sucked at one of her breasts, as if suckling. Wacław pulled down his blind and returned to his verse, but he could no longer concentrate. Switching off the light, he crossed again to the window, pushed the blind aside, and looked out. The couple were fucking on the bed, the girl on top, her head thrown back. Wacław watched them a moment, but felt sordid. After turning the light back on, he got down his well-worn copy of Sanatorium pod klepsydrą and lay reading in his bed until he fell into a doze. When he woke, a little while later, he went over to the window, looked out once more. The girl and young man lay naked, ensnared in each other, iridescent, moonsheen on a slick of sweat.

One Saturday night, some time after this, Wacław stayed in alone, rented a horror film. He sat down to watch it with some beers, rolled himself a joint. The film began well – a bizarre, brutal opening – but then palled, settling into stale stalk-and-slash. A little drunk, a little stoned, Wacław found his mind drifting to other things. He thought back to the morning Melanie had appeared on his doorstop and fell into a reverie in which, instead of making bizarre romantic declarations and obscure threats, she, naked but for sheer underwear, fell to her knees, pulled down his pyjama trousers, and took his cock in her mouth. Then his thoughts turned to the woman in the flat opposite his window.

He only half watched the rest of the film. Once it had ended, he switched off his television. In the ensuing quiet he heard a sound, somewhere between a gasp and a groan, coming from outside. He looked out of the window. It didn’t take long to identify the source: the young woman was lying on her bed frigging herself with a vibrator. She was sat up against the headboard of her bed, legs spread, knees high, grimacing with pleasure, grunting softly as she drove the vibrator into herself. Wacław turned off his lamp, then returned to his window, stood rapt, watching her. When she began caressing her breasts, he reached down, and started touching himself, at first discreetly, stroking himself through his trousers, as if afraid he was being observed, then openly: he unzipped his fly, took out his cock, and fell to wanking himself off.

He came quickly, on the window sill. At that moment, the girl cried out and cast the vibrator from her. It droned on, gyring on the carpet. Her features twisted, she shuddered, wrapped her bedclothes about her. Leaning forwards, Wacław pressed his forehead to the cool glass of the window. Then he saw, standing on the railway embankment, Melanie, grinning wickedly. She waved up at him, then fled, like a wild thing, up the embankment, and into the crape-swathed arms of the night.

Wacław looked over at the girl’s flat, but she had turned her light off, and he could no longer see in.

About three weeks later, Wacław saw the girl on the street, railing bitterly at the young man he had seen in her room. She ranted, wrung her hands; he stood, knuckling his eyes, shaking his head, and repeating her name, “Holly”, over and over, wearily. As Wacław neared them, the young man turned to go; Holly put a hand on his arm to restrain him, but he shrugged it off, walked away. She sat down heavily on a low wall at the side of the pavement, fists in her lap, nails digging into her palms. Passing by, Wacław saw a smudge of mascara on her brow, a cinereous daub.

“Are you all right?”

She looked up at him, grimaced.

“Fuck off,” she responded, but wearily.

Wacław continued on by, but after a few paces, heard Holly calling out to him.

“Hey.”

He turned back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap. Things… You know.”

Approaching her again, he said, “I know. That is, I guess I don’t know.”

“It’s all right. You were only trying to be kind.”

“Drink?”

She laughed bitterly.

“Well, why not?”

They went together to a local bar. Wacław had a pint of lager, Holly a cocktail, garish pink; they both sipped warily, peered at each other over the rims of their glasses. He was reminded of Grażyna, that strange, lonely girl; Holly also had a wide face and, that day, her hair was done up in a coiled plait; but such things had become modish again then, and Wacław saw he was not alone in his admiration – several of the other men in the bar looked over at her.

After they had sat in awkward silence awhile, Wacław made a comment about the weather. Though dull, unpromising, this opening initiated a long and easy conversation; they were soon chatting like old friends. Holly talked about her job, as an administrator at an art college, and her home town of Margate, of teenage summers spent loitering with school friends in the amusement arcades, and underage drinking on the sands; Wacław told Holly of Poland, camping as a teenager on the banks of the Warta River, a friend whose father made okovita in a still at home, how drunk it would get you, and how bad the hangovers would be afterwards. They spent several hours in the bar, were slightly soused by the time they left. When Holly told him where she was headed, Wacław feigned surprise, told her he lived close by, offered to walk her home.

Outside Holly’s building they tipsily kissed and exchanged numbers. Wacław went on to his, a feral sweetness in him.

The next morning, Wacław was on his way to work, nearly there, when Melanie attacked him. She tore barefoot off the common, clutching, in a two-handed grip, a gnarled and heavy stick, with a fox’s skull nailed to one end. She bore down, smote him repeatedly with this fetish; he tried to fend her off, but she was strong, bizarrely so. But though she clubbed him to the ground before turning and running off, she stopped short of real injury; he was merely sick and shaken, not much hurt. He got up, staggered on, blood running from a cut above his eye.

The foreman, standing out front at the site, smoking, watched Wacław approach.

“Been in the wars again?” he said, when Wacław drew near. His tone, if concerned, was also a mite sardonic.

“Which wars?”

“Wacław, who beat you up?”

Wacław explained about Melanie, told the foreman much of what had passed, holding back, though, both the weird and the sordid aspects.

The foreman drew pensively on his cigarette.

“You know we’re building on the site of an old nuthouse here, don’t you?”

“Nuthouse?”

“You know, loony bin, erm… asylum, mental institution.”

“Ah. No.”

“No?”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Right. Well, we are. Only closed down a few years back. The thing about such places… Well, this is bad ground, steeped in madness. You hear tell of things… But then, who believes such stuff, eh?”

He clapped Wacław on the back.

“Come on then, let’s go and get that cut seen to.”

That night Wacław called Holly, guts all ravelled. She answered after a few rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Holly? It’s Wacław.”

“Yes. How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m good. How are you?”

“Not so bad, you know…”

“Listen, I was wondering if you wanted to go out again sometime?”

Wacław crossed to the window and peeked out. Holly was sitting on her bed, wincing away from her phone.

“Well… Look, I had a really nice time last night, but there’s someone else, you see, and I… I know we got on, but I was a bit drunk… Do you see what I’m saying?”

Wacław flinched back from the window.

“How could I see what you are saying? I can hear what you’re saying…”

“Sorry? Look don’t… I mean you’re a really nice guy and I hope…”

“I know, I know, not to worry. See you.”

“Yeah. See you around.”

Wacław jabbed at his phone to end the call, hurled it across his flat.

Some days after this, Wacław was walking past the front of Holly’s block and saw the young man, the one he had seen with her, in her bedroom and on the street, waiting outside. Slowing his pace, he watched asquint, saw Holly answer the door and the young man reach into his bag, take out a bottle of wine, present it to her. She stared at the young man as if she had never seen him before: bemused, but placid. He clasped her hand. She began shaking, and he loosed his hold, stepped back. Huddling down in a corner of the porch, she retched a few times, then spewed an off-white froth. The young man moved closer once more, muttering comforts. Holly began to wail, high and eerie. Reaching out, the young man went to stroke her hair, but flinched away on touching her. He dropped the bottle. It smashed, and the wine flowed out, pooled in hollows. After staring aghast at Holly a moment, the young man turned, ran away. She ceased her keening, grinned horribly. Then, looking up, glared at Wacław. There wasn’t the faintest sign she recognized him. Shuddering, he hunched into his coat, walked on.

Over the next months, Wacław often skulked by the window of his flat, slyly watching Holly. Her belly swelled. She waned wan and sickly; it was a hard pregnancy. During this time, several ranting love letters from Melanie, scrawled on crumpled, filthy sheets of paper, were pushed under his front door, but he didn’t see her again. Work continued on the block of flats, but it was slow, held up by bad weather, defaulting suppliers, disagreements between members of the site crew. Wacław passed through these days in a kind of fugue, present in body, but in mind, elsewhere. Everywhere he looked, a phantasmagoria of his homeland overlaid the drab, grimy London streets. He stopped writing, couldn’t find it in him to do it any more.

Then, one night, following a week of muggy weather, there was an electrical storm. Wacław, woken by thunder, got up from his bed to watch the glaring knouts from his window and to smoke. After a time, the clouds burst, and it began to rain hard.

A moment later, Holly’s bedside lamp came on. By its faint light, he could see her sitting up in her bed, naked, wan, wracked, shaking, sweat-drenched. Her mouth gaped, but her yowl was lost to the rain’s dinning tattoo.

Then her eyes rolled back in her head, her face went slack, and she slumped against the headboard. Something within the bulge of her swollen midriff writhed. Wacław gaped on, as drum-taut skin split, and something tumbled out from amid her ravelled guts. She roused then sat up, howled; this time, the rain having eased, Wacław heard her cry. He could also hear the snarling of the creature that worried her unspooled innards. It was vulpine, gory, raw in places, as it if had been part-flayed, snaggletoothed, its eyes jetty orbs. As Wacław watched, it left off gnawing on Holly’s entrails, turned to the window, then sprang once, twice, pounding with its skull, webbing the glass with cracks. On its third leap, it crashed through, tumbled in the air, landed, a writhen heap, on the gravel beneath. The girl, insensible once more, lay sprawled on her bed, weltering in gore.

A twisted hind limb kicked out. Though all awry, it seemed the vile beast lived on. It snarled, showing perished rubber gums, keened, high and eerie. Then, getting to its feet, it reared up and tottered on back legs a moment, before falling to four and darting off, up the embankment. Wacław turned his head to watch it go and saw someone on the tracks, stark against the city haze. The foul thing ran to her, nuzzled.

He careered downstairs, unthinking, out the front door, and round to the back of the house, barefoot, one arm in a sleeve of his coat, the other flailing for an armhole. After clambering up the embankment, he looked left and right, sighted his quarry a little way down the line, fleeing towards Tooting Bec Common, hallooed, and gave chase.

Something in the pocket of his coat bumped against his hip as he ran. His mobile phone. He took it out, called the emergency services, told them he’d seen a bad birthing from his window, gave them Holly’s address. He doubted they could save her, found, oddly, he didn’t much care either way.

He ran Melanie to earth on the common, in a ramshackle shelter bodged from half-rotted timbers and hidden in a stand of thorn bushes. He followed her inside. The place reeked of damp. Fox skulls were nailed all round the walls. In one corner was a threadbare, broken-down armchair; in another, a pallet of stained rags. There Melanie knelt, the front of her shirt-dress gaping, suckling the monstrosity.

Here a swathe of Wacław’s memory is gone, reaped.

When I came to myself, I was sat in the armchair; Melanie lay on the pallet, her neck broken, her brain pan stoved in, her fetish beside her, slathered with blood and matter; and the creature was curled up on my lap. I looked down at it with paternal pride.

Sometime later, I fell asleep. And I dreamt I woke, still sitting in that fusty chair. Sore thirsty, I went outside to find some water. The shelter stood alone in the midst of a waste strewn with fox bones. The sun was low in the sky, feeble, with a reddish taint, sinking. I picked my way across the plain for some time, but found no water.

Cockleshell

Julia Prendergast

It was a head-fuck of a place. The nothing killed everyone’s conscience. If you drove down the streets late at night, if you opened your windows and drove slowly, there was only the smell of pancakes and the nothing.

They churned out pancakes like it was a craze, a sweeping trend, pancakes with lemon and sugar, maple syrup, jam and cream. The town could have been named after it: Blairgowrie – home of the pancake.

I didn’t go for the pancakes – I’m a garlic and tomato man. I like Mum’s pan-fried meatballs with the diced tomatoes and the fresh basil. I love the chard and feta parcels, with the buttery garlic pastry and the caramelized onion. They smell like Mum’s sweat, the pastries: sweet, slightly claustrophobic.

Point is – the pancake town was not for me. It was festering in the nothingness of its own nothing. They didn’t seem to realize that the rest of the world had picked up pace and pancakes at home were a thing of the past.

Mum and Dad were right at home. The seaside life suited them. Wog mums like mine, they make everything from scratch, and Dad always said, “If you want a decent tomato, grow it yourself.” I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t prepared to put in the hard yards.

Sometimes I kid myself that it wasn’t that bad, but it was – the place was brimming with nothingness, it was overwhelming. At first all I could think about was getting the fuck out of there, but then I met Annie and I probably would’ve stayed in that ditch for ever, just to be near her, only because of her, I would have stayed, but then she left and I bailed, too, within a few days of her leaving.

Okay that’s bullshit, but it’s what I’ve taught myself to remember. Truth is I hung around for two years, in limbo, waiting for her to walk back through my door. In my heart of smashed up cockleshells, I knew that if she left without saying goodbye, she wasn’t coming back, but I hung around for a bit anyway, just in case.

I’m skipping over the being together and the leaving because it’s over and done. I loved her. So what. Everyone thinks love is such a positive thing but it’s a piece of shit, a destructive chemical mix; it fucks with your ability to reason.

Maybe I wasn’t in love with her anyway. I was in love with the game and the sex. The bottom line, the long and the short of it, I liked to be in control and Annie prostituted herself to get dope for a deadshit.

When we moved to the nothing town, I was in my last year of school. My parents wanted me to get to know the locals, establish some friendships. I wanted to stay in Melbourne, see the year out there, but they would have none of it. They wanted me to learn the family business. “There is so much opportunity here,” they said, but all I could see was a maze of Ti tree, dirty sand.

The people were different. The more I got to know them, the more different they seemed: weird, slow-moving ocean people. At school, when the bell sounded, everyone lifted their heads like a cool breeze had just rolled off the water, but no one moved; no one hurried to pack up their books, even the teacher only paused and then kept on. One lesson rolled into the other because no one gave a shit. It wasn’t just the dopers.

In the beginning, I spent most of my time in the bungalow. It was in the back corner of the yard, up against the fence. All the original beach places seemed to have bungalows: semi-detached living, Dad called it, more like semi-detached strangeness. Suited me though, I suppose, the separateness.

Mum and Dad lived in the big, old house at the front. They were building their dream home a few doors down, and when they moved into that, they were going to knock the old place down, build a dream for someone else.

It was a ghost town, full of fibro houses, old and empty, cobwebbed and depressing. It was like something left over from a boom period, except that the boom must have been a dream – the nothingness made it impossible to believe that the place was ever pumping.

Dad was under the impression that it was about to boom again, a growth suburb he called it, sure-fire money to be made by the astute property developer. “It’s all timing,” he said. “You just have to know when to make your move.”

I wasn’t convinced.

Everyone smoked dope. They smoked it to fill up the nothing, but it was like grass, literally, didn’t have any kick, so I scored some good shit from my mate Eddie. He lived around the corner from my old house, ten minutes out of the city.

I’d never been into dope, not really. I’d have the odd toke at a party but nothing serious, no breakfast bongs or anything. I didn’t plan to start dealing the stuff, but I pulled some out after a few beers and they were all foaming at the mouth. Word got around that it was good and that’s how I met Annie. She collected the mull for her boyfriend: Deadshit Dean. He smoked a fuckload, fried his brain.

If Dean knew about my thing with Annie, he didn’t let on. If he hadn’t gutted his brain, he would have known because there was no way that he could afford what he was smoking. He must have known, and cockled himself into believing that he didn’t. Sometimes people do that: pretend they don’t know, when they know.

When Annie told me that she was pregnant, I was so angry with Dean; I was fucking ropeable actually because he was making life harder for her than it already was. She already had one kid, and no fucken money. It sounds almost magnanimous except that it wasn’t. I was in it up to my eyeballs. Mum says that Dad is magnanimous. She’s proud just to know the word. She says it belongs to Dad because he gives without counting the cost.

I told Annie to get an abortion. I said I’d pay for it. I said all of this with the deadshit in mind. It was a pretty crappy environment for a kid anyway – like once, when Dean and his mates had the munchies really badly, although they would say real bad, they broke into one of the holiday homes down the street, raiding the pantry and the freezer, arriving back to Annie in fits of laughter, with armfuls of stuff, chips and ice creams, biscuits and assorted jars.

M-J stole a kettle while they were at it, because his was on the blink, and a hairdryer and some perfume for his girlfriend. Annie wasn’t happy about it, especially because the young boy was still awake and she didn’t want him to get wind of it. I think she was sorry that Dean didn’t think to bring anything back for her but she never said that. He was such a brainless fuck.

Anyway, that’s the life I was picturing, that shitty sort of drug-fucked life, that’s what I had in my mind when she told me about the baby. The thing is, water washed in and out of that place every day, the tides turned and everything came up fresh and sparkling, but nothing changed, everything was the nothing-fucking same. It was a town of random wasters.

Annie knew that I loved her. She must have. You might think that I treated her like a whore but you have to remember that she was fucking me to get the gear. That’s how it was the first time, and whatever we had later on – well, it was defined by that day.

It’s not a cop-out. I’m not copping out. It’s true. You can’t turn back time and I chose a bad time to make a move. After that, I couldn’t ask her what she wanted unless that’s all it was, pipes for pipe dreams, ghost-ship sex and smashed up cockleshells.

She never refused me, not outright. A couple of times she pushed me away. She said that it was a bad time for her, well, a fruitful time really, but a bad time because she was fertile and the risk of pregnancy was really high. I was weighing the dope and bagging it up. I didn’t say anything because, if you didn’t interrupt her, she just kept talking, and it was like a song. She went on for a while about cycles, and peak fertility, and mucus.

She was like some sort of earth mother and she was talking to me like I was another woman. It was secret-club talk and I was enjoying myself, even though I wasn’t following the half of it. She talked about her body like she was talking about tide-times, with fascination and utter respect, and she said she had tried going on the pill but it made her sick, and it made her cry all the time, so instead, she learnt to know her body like the back of her hand.

When I’d finished weighing and bagging, I put the dope packets on the end of the bed. I took off my shoes and lay on the bed, closed my eyes. I didn’t say a thing, not a thing. Her body was her end of the bargain, her business. I wanted flesh on flesh.

Annie left in a hurry that day. She scratched my neck, under my chin, drawing blood as if she were in the throes of passion. I had her up against the wall. Her hair was tangled in the pins, stretched like cobwebs between the islands, on my map of dreams…

It was the stillness that fucked everyone. It was like Andy’s farm. Dad and I used to work there over summer, odd jobs. Andy only had one hand. Dad called him Handy. It wasn’t a joke. He added the “h” where there wasn’t one, and dropped the ones that were supposed to be there. It’s a wog thing.

On Andy’s farm, the generator died at ten, everything shut off without warning. There was nothing to do then but wriggle into your sleeping bag, only your dick for company. That’s why the Melbourne choof knocked their socks off, because of the stillness – no, the nothingness. It was more than stillness, bigger than silence: it was a fucking vortex.

Word got around about the quality of the gear and they begged me for more. Supply and demand, that’s all it was – they demanded, I supplied. I learnt to talk the talk: purity, potency, five dollars more for the happy-birthday mix, ten dollars more for the blow-job variety, and that was A-grade stuff, or so they all said.

I charged them all twenty bucks more than I paid for it (per gram) and I got a discount for buying in bulk, so it was win-win. I never charged Annie, though. I figured that if I didn’t charge her, she would have more money to spend on herself and her kids. She obviously thought I could have done better than that though because, when she left, there was four grand missing from my stash.

I kept the money in a tackle box. Only Annie knew where I kept the money, and anyone else would have taken the lot, of course. She took the money and left me some coloured pins, she took them from the map that I had on the cork-board. The pins were stuck into all the places that I wanted to go.

When she came to my room, I would show her the map. She must have known that I wanted her to come with me. I thought we could visit all the islands and then she could decide which one she liked best; we could live there for ever, happily ever after and all that shit.

I would take her hand and make her touch the places. I’d make her push the pins further into the cork, my chest against her warm, bare back, speckled with freckles like my map of dreams.

I don’t know why she left me the pins. It didn’t make sense. There was no rhyme or reason as to which ones she chose, as far as I could see. I tried to plot it out (which pins and why), the possibilities (the nothingness). She left some shells in the box too, cockleshells, cracked ones, and that broke me I have to say, even though I didn’t really understand.

I thought maybe she dropped the shells in the box accidentally when she reached for the cash. Annie always had shells in her pockets so it’s hard to tell whether they were a sign or not. She loved the beach. It was her best place.

I’d have given her anything, silver bells and cockleshells, but she never asked for anything, except that once, the first time, and that was my mistake: I asked for something back, nothing magnanimous about that.

She didn’t tell me that she was leaving town because I didn’t deserve to know. I treated her like a whore and I’ve suffered for that, and I deserve to suffer, no doubt about it. I loved her and I don’t know if that makes what I did worse, or better. I think worse.

That’s the story, in a nutshell, or a cockleshell. That is the nothingness of her absence. It’s the smell of the rain on the road when she left and the smell of her skin. Some people say that rain has no smell but that’s bullshit, only the rain smells like what was and what might have been. If only, if only…

The problem was the beginning. The start was all wrong and then it defined us. Forever after, I was frightened that she didn’t know how much I loved her and I was shit-scared to tell her. If only we’d begun differently. If only I hadn’t moved in on her just then, when she was desperate for the gear, when she couldn’t pay, when she had no choice.

Now I’ll never know if she loved me. I’ll never know if she knew how much I loved her, how much I love her, I should say, because it doesn’t really go away. I wasn’t prepared, I suppose, and when I saw my chance I jumped right in, without a second thought for her, without a first. I was busy counting my own costs.

It wasn’t premeditated. It started out the same as always. I went back to Melbourne on the Friday night to pick up the dope. Everyone was at Eddie’s on a Friday, having a coupla pipes, a few beers. I didn’t have a drink with my old mates because I had to drive, and there were always pigs on the highway. I could have stayed in Melbourne for the night but I made out like it was pressing that I go.

It didn’t bother me that I couldn’t have a beer with the old crew. In fact I liked being sober and straight when everyone else was getting messy. I had a few tokes, just to get a taste of the mood, but I kept it together, kept my mind over everyone’s matter, and it made me feel invincible. Power is a drug too.

Truth is: I couldn’t wait to get back and see Annie. She usually came around straight away to score a load for the deadshit. I sat around and waited for her, that’s all I did, waited for Annie, and when I wasn’t waiting for her, I was thinking about her – the way her fine hair fell around her face, slicing in on an angle under her pale cheekbones. Her face looked like it was chiselled from stone. Her hair and eyes softened her but even when she smiled, it cut.

She was incredibly beautiful but hard as a rock. She was protecting herself and I could understand that because I was afraid too. I was afraid she wouldn’t love me back and that’s why I couldn’t tell her how much I loved her. But she probably never loved me at all and I never gave her any reason. I was so scared she wouldn’t love me that I just made sure of it. I pretended to be a hardass like her deadshit partner, but then she would have done anything for him…

When I got back from Melbourne, there was a party on. That’s what Annie told me and so I went straight there. By the time I arrived, things were in full swing and I was the guest of honour, of course, because I had my backpack, chock-a-block with the goods. I stayed a bit squared off from everyone because I was dealing the dope. I sat on the grass and they swarmed around me like seagulls.

Annie didn’t go to the party: it was late, she had a child, but Deadshit was there. Her absence was like the nothing, depressing as fuck, full-hollow, like deserted homes and cockleshells. You can’t look at those things without imagining the life that was, what might have been.

I sat on the grass for a couple of hours, stiff-backed, keeping my eyes on the prize, making sure no one was swindling anything, and I understood why Eddie was one step removed from the Melbourne crowd. He needed to stay aloof. He couldn’t do favours for one person and not the next. It was pay up or fuck off, pure and simple.

Eddie was the best, the bomb. I learnt from the master and I thought I knew what I was doing but I was just a scared little love-virgin. I knew I was hooked all right, but I figured that love was a nothing bitch and I told myself to harden the fuck up and get on with the job, dish out the stash and smoke up the nothing. I became semi-detached, like the bungalow.

Dean smoked it up that night, as usual, but Annie was back in the morning anyway, asking for more. She wanted some dope on the house. That was our first time – it was the beginning of us – a beginning that had nowhere to go, but if only…

I didn’t really consider what she was saying. I’m not sure what was going through my mind, exactly, except that she was right there, and she wanted something from me. She needed me. All I could think about was kissing her. She was desperate, it was like an invitation, and so I tried it on.

“Do you know what Dean will do to you? He can be vicious,” she said. “Brutal,” she added, spitting as she spoke. She left then, closing the glass door quietly, shoulders hunched. She didn’t look back.

It was a fucked-up beginning.

I switched on the telly and I rolled a big number, hoping it would blank me out for a good while. I sucked it down so hard that my eyes were watering. I’d been mooching around that seaside dive for nearly three years, wasting my life in a town of seaweed and missed opportunities. The Melbourne guys didn’t give a shit about me any more. I had become a part of the fucking nothing, for fucking nothing.

The spliff I rolled was fat enough for ten men. I was off my head in no time and it took me a while to register the sound of the knock. I turned and saw Annie. She was standing at the sliding glass door. I lifted my arm and motioned for her to let herself in. How long had she been gone, five minutes or five hours? It felt like she’d always been gone.

I was living in the big, old house at the front by then. Mum and Dad were living in their dream and they were letting me live in the house awhile. If I agreed to stay, they would build me a new house, right there, but only if I was committed to stay, to learn Dad’s work.

I could have offered Annie a brand new start, but I thought she wouldn’t want me.

Annie stepped inside and closed the door. I tried to sit up but I was feeling a bit shell shocked. I tried to explain (about the shell shock) but the words became ridiculous and hysterical and I knew that I was off my face. I said it a couple of times: “Shell shocked, shell shocked.” The words morphed around me and changed shape, just like my reflection in the funhouse mirrors at Luna Park. (We used to go to Luna Park sometimes, me and Eddie and the Melbourne crew, stoned off our tits. Those were the days.) I said it one more time: “Shell shocked,” and I laughed, loud, wheezy, stoned laughter, hysterical for a second and then gut-wrenchingly empty.

When I stopped laughing, Annie asked me again for some gear. She said she would fix me up at the end of the week, definitely. She was chewing her bottom lip with her big, white teeth, her blue eyes were sparkling under the tears. She was pale and her breathing was off. She’d been doing some serious crying. “Dean…” she said, but then she stopped.

I wondered whether she went home and told Dean that I kissed her. Maybe she was too scared to go home without the choof. She was staring at me like she was waiting for something.

I said, “Sorry I tried to kiss you,” (especially when you couldn’t pay, like you’re a prostitute or something).

She stared at me, said nothing.

“Tell her you love her; tell her you love her,” I said to myself. But the voice inside my head didn’t sound like my voice: it was all warped, close and far away, changed-up like my picture in the funhouse mirrors. I couldn’t say it. I didn’t say it.

She was still staring at me. I thought she was disgusted by me – flat out on the coach and stoned off my head like her loafing sloth-bag of a boyfriend. That’s what the dope does, it makes you feel like everything is about you, like you’re a piece of shit and there’s no way out, like everyone thinks you’re a piece of shit and, quite frankly, you’re inclined to agree. I don’t know why people smoke the shit. I have no fucking clue.

Annie started crying then, really hard, and I said, “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” I stood up to comfort her but I got really dizzy and I felt like I was going to throw, so I lay down on the couch, blowing the air out of my mouth like I was blowing out candles, one at a time. I told her that I was feeling a bit under the weather. I didn’t say shell shocked this time but I thought about it and giggled. Then I thought about the nothing and I stopped.

I started to tell her about the Greek islands but I was talking like a stoned, lonely freak. I got all tongue-twisted, trying to explain, saying that I had a few tokes of the potent stuff because I was feeling like an ass. “I’m not really a smoker,” I said, and I told her that she could have the rest of that lot because I’d already had a little go at it anyway (and it was laced with some mind-fucking shit).

She was upset and it threw me. She was so tough and so fucken beautiful. She was crying and I thought she was unbreakable. I would have given her anything. I wanted her to want me.

Annie sat down beside me, near my stomach. I was stretched out on the couch, trying to get the air in. She wiped her tears away with one hand and felt my head with the other. “You’re a bit clammy,” she said. “You might be coming down with something, or maybe the stuff just doesn’t agree with you. I can’t smoke it,” she said, still sniffling. “It makes me depressed. It makes everyone depressed. I’ll get you some water.”

She walked to the kitchen and ran the water. Then she took a tea towel from the oven door and held it under the tap, wringing it out hard, twisting it so that her triceps twitched. She stared out of the window a moment and then she came back to me, laying the cold cloth on my forehead.

“You can have the rest of that lot,” I said, pointing to the gear on the coffee table. “Make sure you tell Dean to mix it well with the tobacco, just crumble it until it is fine and sprinkle a little bit in, otherwise it will blow his fucken head off, and don’t tell ANYONE I gave you this without payment. This is between you and me; it’s only for you, Annie. If anyone finds out that I’m giving the stuff away, that will be the end of me.”

She needed the dope and it got all confused with me needing her. She kissed me on the head and I cried a little because I was coming down, way too fast, but then I was as tingly as all shit and I wondered if I was still on the way up – I was crying because she didn’t kiss me back and because she was wasted on that scumbag.

I wanted her to know I loved her. I wanted her to know that it was separate and pure. I mentioned the Greek islands again: “You and me,” I said. She didn’t flinch. “You can bring your boy,” I added, putting my hand on her back and rubbing it gently; I couldn’t resist touching her.

“Go to bed,” she said. “Sleep it off.”

I went to my bedroom and she followed me. I handed her two Gs of the regular stuff. “Our secret,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.” I climbed into bed, fantasizing all the while that she wanted to root me senseless.

Shivering, I pulled the covers over myself. I closed my eyes, lulled by her presence, but I was dizzy and the darkness made it worse. I was dipping and rising in the still darkness as if I were stranded in a cockleshell, out in the middle of the cold wash.

She sat on the edge of the bed and felt my forehead again. She was brushing the hair away from my face and I was groaning a little, between sleep and something else, but closer to sleep. When Annie pulled back the doona and took off my shoes, I worried that it wasn’t really her and I wasn’t really me. My bare skin was crawling with the nothing.

She said, “What is it with these shoes you wear?” Her voice was just right and her hands were good, so good. My shoes were very long at the front end, with a narrow, square tip. All of my friends in Melbourne wore the shoes and I loved the way they clicked against the bitumen when I walked the beach streets. They were quite feminine and yet utterly manly.

I always walked the beach streets after Annie left me, and the shoes reminded me that I belonged somewhere else. I walked the nothing streets, taking note of all the empty houses, trying to calculate the average permanent residence, per street, per block. I got confused, walking that crazy maze of backstreets – one street ghosting into the next without warning.

If I was definitely lost, and totally desperate, I would head towards the water. Somehow it was easier to find my way home from there. I could always find my way to the water because I could hear the nothing of it, like a big empty echo. I just walked towards the silence.

I would stare out, paralysed, listening to the whisper of the foamy wash on the sand. I’d freak out that I was never going to get away from there. I was as empty as the nothing, as hollow as a cockleshell. They say if you hold a cockleshell up to your ear you can hear the ocean, and so I would stand there and put a shell to my ear, but all I could hear was the nothing, all I could see was Annie. When I think of intimacy, that’s all there is: Annie and the nothing.

Annie climbed under the covers with me. I wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe I was hallucinating. I didn’t move and I kept my eyes closed. She rubbed my neck and my back, she rubbed herself up against me, reaching her arm around my chest and pulling me to her.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said, and I wanted to say more. It was now or never. (I love you; I love you. Say it; say it.)

She unbuckled my belt, pulling at it and throwing it on the floor. “Our secret,” she whispered.

I could hear the water in her whispering. I was too weak to stop her. I lay there like a dead dog. I wasn’t hard but she fixed it. She did everything because I was a mess.

The Images of Ourselves

Alice Frecknall

The light of the outside world filtered in through the glass panels that formed the entrance of the Turbine Hall. Dust hung in the air, a detail; I watched it and hoped for a hint of inspiration, a quenching droplet of some sort. In its post/pre-exhibition state the space was vast; the mottled beige stone of the floor moved out, desert-like, to a distant horizon. I stood and gazed. Along the walls, groups of people littered the view as they congregated for their fill of squashed sandwiches and tepid drinks, before embarking on what they hoped to be a cultural journey. For me, it was a visit to the cemetery.

It seemed odd to me that the world had become so protective of art, of paint on canvas. Put the paint on a wall and one may lean against it, touch it, even nail things into it. Put the paint on a canvas and then put that canvas on the painted wall and all that is on the canvas becomes prestigious. It is protected with layers of varnish, glass, rope, but it remains paint on a canvas just as the paint behind it remains paint on a wall. So, either the canvas is unduly protected or the wall is unfairly exposed. The media will mourn the loss of artwork but give little, and accusatory, attention to the burnt warehouse that stored it. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just interesting.

A year ago I had a marriage. Clare was the most stunning woman; she wasn’t perfect but was stunning in her imperfection. And she had chosen me. For a reason I will spend the rest of my days trying to fathom – she had wanted me. She had kissed me for the first time and I had realized in a moment of utter fear how unlikely it is, in the millions of millions of people, how unlikely it is that the one person you want above all others and all else would want you too. Her lips had pressed against mine; I could feel the heat of her skin. In that moment something inside of me had broken and I told myself I would never give her up, not for anything.

So, when the vague thought of parenthood had drifted across the threshold of reality into our lives we had embraced it with a thrill of terrified joy. The days became insufficient to cater for the number of ideas that swarmed my mind. I was producing four or five new paintings a week and they were selling. I was a success. A successful husband, lover, father-to-be, and (for the first time I had dared to label it) artist.

Clare had lain on the clinical bed, beaming in anticipation of seeing it, our baby. She had slotted her delicate fingers between each of mine – glowing flesh beside my tough, paint-covered skin. I had looked down at her, feeling a new disbelief creep through me that I could feel such complete and intense love for something, someone. But the doctor hadn’t spoken; she had continued working the scanner at one angle and then another, moving sides, moving back. She had pressed harder, causing Clare’s stomach to dimple. The disbelief in me changed and grew darker. I heard the words “I’m sorry…” but the rest were lost to a rushing noise that filled my head.

Clare and I had left the hospital together, each clutching a hand of the other. We had got into a car that I had driven, arrived at the apartment we both called home, and had gone to bed in the place where it all began. The next day we had awoken as strangers.

As I stood in the open space of the Turbine I felt there was something beyond my grasp, some purpose or meaning. I watched the people filter through, each person an echo of the one who had passed before them. The emotion I had refused to feel on that day at the hospital was no longer available to me. I was a failed painter, a university lecturer in Art History who kept a studio that held little purpose. A pining for the days I’d spent at art college swelled from the base of my stomach; this building had been my refuge.

I headed into the gift shop, passing the “Optional Donation (suggestion £3)” sign with a mild, very mild, pang of guilt. A tall and slender figure with waves of dark, dishevelled hair flapped a postcard at her pink cheeks whilst perusing the other shrunken artwork on offer; she misjudged, caught her chin, and sent the card drifting autumn-leaf-like to the floor. I saw a rectangle of vivid blue on one side, and knew that the words “IKB 79 Yves Klein (1959)” were printed on the other – I owned a copy. Whilst at college, in what I had, no doubt, meant as a demonstration of artistic rebellion, I had left a worksheet blank apart from two small observational drawings (not in the spaces provided). One was a stickwoman version of Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and the other IKB 79, which had consisted of a rough outline of a rectangle with an arrow labelling it “blue”. Not my best work.

Her open coat revealed a thin, boylike frame, but one that lacked the usual suggestion of ill health – she was what Clare often referred to as a “lucky bitch”. The girl bent to retrieve the makeshift fan causing the deep red scarf she wore to unwind its way from her neck. I felt my gut twinge with pleasure.

“Blue.” Perhaps single-word interjection was not my greatest tactic.

Two dark-hazel eyes shone on me like spotlights. I must have seemed old to her.

“Sorry?” Her voice was soft.

“Sorry. The, err… the postcard. It’s a unique pigment of blue; Klein, the artist, he created it. He created loads of different ones. International Klein Blue – IKB.”

“Oh, right.” She delivered one of those smiling nods that reeks of discomfort.

“He was trying to move beyond…”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to… Sorry.” She slotted the postcard back into the wall as she turned and walked in one motion. The red enabled me to follow her progress out of the shop, along the window side, across the desert of beige, and out through the exit. I took IKB 79 to the counter and paid my fifty pence. This souvenir was not one of artistic rebellion.

—

Clare spent New Year visiting her sister and I retired to the company of my studio to research the next bout of classes I was expected to deliver on “Art and the Renaissance”, before returning to the red-brick surroundings of the university.

The chill of the lecture theatre allowed me to retain my jacket and slurp plastic-infused brown water from a vending machine cup until the dripping-in of students subsided.

“Right, let’s start. I know it’s early and bloody freezing but, rest assured, however little you want to be sitting there right now, I want to be standing here even less. So let’s humour each other for the next hour or so and make this as pain-free as possible, shall we? I’m John Rayne, some of you will have seen me last semester, and some of you won’t. This is ‘Art and the Renaissance’.”

I clicked the mouse and raised the question “What is ‘Renaissance’?” onto the wall behind me. I felt, rather than heard, the rehearsed speech leave my mouth and bounce around the room. Every fifth word or so was lost to the coughs of a cold-infected girl seated in the second row.

Twenty minutes in, the door clicked open and a boy peered through. “Boy” is not an accurate word. He was dressed in careful observation of the current fashion, his hair curled and sculpted across his forehead and cropped down the sides.

I waved him in: “Quickly, quickly.”

Hushed conversation could be heard from his side of the door.

His pointed leather shoes and dark cords highlighted my own worn attire; he thought image equalled intellect. Prick.

The door was pushed wider and he stepped through it followed by two others – a straight-haired version of himself and a girl with a familiar deep-red trim. She came with a muttered apology that was clipped short by recognition.

—

My office door swung open and Clarkson, Head of Department, strode forwards, already launching into conversation whilst giving a cursory knuckle rap against the wood.

“John, I need you to take a look at a student for me. Err…” He perused a piece of paper. “Carter, I believe… Yes, Elaina Carter.”

“Oh?”

“She transferred at the end of last semester and I’m not sure she’s settling too well.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Her grades have plummeted, her attendance is off…”

“And her last place said she was good?”

“One of the best. Transferred for personal reasons, sick brother or something, I’m not sure of the details.”

“I see.”

“So?”

“Hmm?”

“Will you take a look? She’s one of yours. Arrange a meeting, nothing heavy. See if you can’t suss her out a bit.”

“Right.”

“Oh and, John – before the end of the week.”

“Will do.” In an attempt to make this last assertion more convincing I sent a finger-point combined with a thumbs-up in Clarkson’s general direction.

“Excellent.”

A hand positioned in this way holds a strong resemblance to a gun; as the door clicked shut my inner child took aim.

—

I opened the office door to a girl, her arms wrapped around and clutching her own waist as though an invisible punch had found its target. I opened the door to diverted eyes and long dark hair that the wind had aggravated into a tousled border. I opened the door to a lip being chewed, to a slight shiver, to a deep-red scarf. Elaina Carter.

A pause stretched out far beyond subtlety, and almost touched on rudeness. She managed to transfer her stare off the floor and move it to me, but her eyes flicked downwards every few seconds, defying her will.

“Perhaps I should come back another time?”

“No.” I cleared my throat. “No, sorry, no. Come in, have a seat.”

She moved past me and towards the chair I gestured at.

I went to perch on the desk but, deeming this too informal, too forward, I positioned myself behind it and began shuffling papers in the most natural unnatural way I could.

“It’s Elaina, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t realize you were… I mean, I didn’t know you…” My words trailed off into another throat clearance as a rouge tint crept up her cheeks. “Sorry. Elaina, Mr Clarkson asked me to speak with you, as you know. He seems to have it in his head that you’re not settling in here as well as you, perhaps, could be. I understand you transferred between semesters?”

A nod.

“You like it here? You’re happy with the course?”

Another nod.

“Clarkson also mentioned your brother. That he had something to do with your decision to transfer?”

The nod didn’t come this time and once again her gaze fixed on the ground, causing the hair to fall from behind her ears and curtain her expression.

“He’s ill? Your brother?”

No nod.

“Elaina, let me assure you that everything that’s said within the walls of this office is confidential. I’m here to support you, not condemn you. It’s in my best interests that we sort out a way for you to continue your studies in a more positive way.” This was the spiel I was supposed to give.

Still nothing.

I relinquished my position and took up a seat on the desk; perhaps informal was the way to go with this one. “Look, we can put structures in place to help you. There are forms you can fill in that will take personal matters into consideration when it comes to marking, deadlines, all those things. Of course, that’s only possible if you have a qualifying reason…”

She pushed her hair back. A line of water edged its way along the side of her nose.

“Elaina, let me help you. Please.” I reached out without any conscious decision to do so, and squeezed her shoulder.

Another tear went chasing down.

“He’s got worse this last year. He has cystic fibrosis. I thought if I lived closer to him I could help more. Or at least be nearby if… from here I can be home in half an hour by train.”

“So you’ve been travelling home a lot?”

“Sometimes I get back late and then I sleep through classes.”

“What if I were to offer you a mentor? I could meet with you once a week and go through anything you’ve missed or anything you’re unsure of. That way you’ll at least be able to keep up with the rest of the class. As for your other subjects, well, I’m sure I could shed some light. What do you think?”

She wiped the tear tracks so that only her pink-tinted eyes were left to divulge her emotion. A nod followed this attempt at composure.

“If this time is good for you we could stick with it?”

I saw her to the door and shut myself in once more. She had left a dip in the cushioned chair.

—

Each meeting became easier. Most, but not all of Elaina’s nods were replaced with words. A few weeks in I took her to my studio, just around the corner from the university. I brought out some of my own paintings and began making comparisons, explaining developments, and noting departures. She liked my work. Her liking it seemed to validate it and, in turn, to validate me.

I pushed something towards her: “I know you would have bought this if…”

She looked at me.

“Well, anyway, here.”

The solid blue rectangle stood out in the whitewashed studio, like a plughole embedded in enamel. It sucked us into silence. In that moment I felt that we existed as a separate entity; the world outside left us alone, the world inside left us alone. She was there because I saw her, could hear her breath, could smell her scent. And she saw me. It is not only beauty but existence itself that stands in waiting on the threshold for a willing eye.

“Why do you like it?” My voice was hushed.

“Sorry?”

“The painting – why do you like it?”

“Oh. It, err, it sounds stupid really, but the colour is so intense, so deep. That depth is like none I’ve ever seen in a painting before, it’s so… freeing.”

Another pause. Not of embarrassment, but consideration.

“Not stupid at all. That’s the point; the technique used creates an illusion. That illusion is the depth that you see.”

“You think it’s all technique?”

“The painter creates the illusion. You, the viewer, decide if you want to establish the reality.”

She smiled as though this theory amused her. Under the cold studio lights she looked more fragile. The blue of her veins tinted her flesh, giving it an almost silver quality, accentuating the pink and hazel details. All the time she studied the postcard. I was staring. A strand of hair had fallen down her forehead; slicing her eye in two, it rested on her cheek – a delicate margin. I felt my hands clench and I forced the fingernails into the beds of my palms. The beginnings of panic bred in my chest and heated my cheeks.

“I think we’ll leave it there for today.”

I climbed the stairs to my apartment. The foundations of panic that had stayed with me all afternoon began to evolve. With each step, a want, a need drove me upwards. I quickened my pace and my breath followed, by the time I reached our floor I was taking two steps in one.

The door swung behind me without aid, I was halfway down the hall before I heard its click. Clare was in the kitchen, stirring a mug with her back facing me. I was swallowed by another wave of agitated want. She turned only seconds before I reached her, and I pressed my kiss against her mouth. Rigidity met me but began to soften at the memory of old familiarity. I tightened my grip around her shoulders as she relaxed her chest into mine. I was holding her almost to the point of hurting her, leaving my prints, my claim. She didn’t object. I wanted to tear into her, to absorb her.

—

Without allowing the sun a chance to establish itself I dressed and crept back to the studio. A month had passed since that first night. I had a new collection that was starting to come together. After each meeting with Elaina or hour in the lecture theatre feeling her staring down at me, I returned to Clare. After each time with Clare I returned to the studio to spend several hours in its quiet coldness.

I began to see that success is quantitative. It’s no use producing one stunning painting in a lifetime; you must produce several, no matter how mediocre, for every year of that lifetime. Otherwise you may as well have never picked up a brush. The blue rectangle is significant because Klein wouldn’t have created over two hundred pigments, two hundred paintings of that nature if it weren’t. It’s significant because he told the world, through quantity, that it is. The average couple has sex between two and three times a week. It doesn’t matter that I was once Clare’s lover or that we were once going to have a child; if I ceased to sleep with her at all, the doctors may as well have cut off my prick at birth.

I heard Elaina’s steps. I was sitting in the middle of the studio, on the floor surrounded by a circle of paintings. I’d made an outside edge and continued inwards until I was encased, held in with paintings. They were my varnish, my rope. Two empty tins of paint were discarded at the foot of a wet blue wall.

“John?”

I continued to sit – knees to chest, chin to knees.

“I’ve run out of paint.” My dry throat tried to strangle the words.

“Why are your pictures laid out?”

“There’s still one wall to go. It won’t work otherwise. Freeing depth. You said, ‘It’s so freeing.’”

“When?”

My eyes felt hot in my head, as if they would burn right out. I pressed my palms against them and felt the warm damp of tears. I hadn’t realized.

“Clare’s pregnant.”

Neither of us spoke.

“I’m leaving her.”

Nothing.

“‘It’s so freeing,’ that’s what you said. You want it too.”

“If you leave her you’ll have nothing.”

I looked into her face; the colour had left her cheeks but her eyes looked darker. I felt my own complexion change as a rushing noise threatened to fill my head.

“You couldn’t.” My voice shook.

“Who would they believe, John?”

Nothing.

—

Elaina left. I waited for what seemed like hours in the calm of silence that followed. The light in the studio reflected off the blue walls, making it softer and dimmer than the harsh white I was used to. My mind felt empty. The clashing of thoughts, one after another after another, had ceased. A feeling of resignation rested in me. I picked a pathway through the floor of canvases and, gathering my keys and wallet, headed out for more paint.

By the time I got home Clare was sleeping. I pulled the door to our bedroom closed, headed into the lounge and began moving furniture around and sorting through the cabinets. I took one of the drawers out to use as a storage box for anything that might be worth holding on to. Determination bred in me.

“It’s almost midnight.”

I jumped at the disruption. I had hoped to be finished before Clare woke, but she stood in the doorway with the pull of tiredness clear in her eyes as she questioned the half-packed room.

“John?”

I realized I was going to have to tell her. “I thought we could turn this room into a nursery. I’ve bought some paint, yellow.”

Clare was quiet and still. The only response came in a gathering of tears at the edge of each of her base-lids. I waited. As if it was being pulled by a thread the corner of her mouth began to twitch upwards.

“I’ll find some brushes.”

Her words broke a wave of hope over me. I laughed – I had gone to jump, envisioned the fall, and stepped back from the edge.

We painted the whole room, ceiling and all, and squeezed the furniture into other areas of the house. As the sun crept up we collapsed on the carpet, our faces, hair, arms, everything covered in flecks of “Summer Lemon Pie”. And I laughed.

I began to see that success is quantitative, but that quantity is an illusion of success. We create images of ourselves, and through those images people establish our reality. Unless you have someone to acknowledge the images, this reality can’t exist, you cannot be a success. Without others the illusion will always remain just that; without others, it would be as though you had died in the womb.

—

I arrived home from work to a darkened apartment, just one shard of light was leaking into the hallway from the bathroom. I caught sight of Clare lying on top of our bed in the shadows. Her body rocked back and forth in the foetal position, and her shoulders shook every now and then indicating the weight of a sob. Since the start of the pregnancy Clare was prone to dissolving into tears; at the rate she was going, overcooking the dinner would get a not dissimilar reaction to someone dying. Eager to urinate, I continued to the bathroom, wondering what would be to blame this time.

The sudden intensity of light gave me an instant headache. Slipping on a wet floor tile, I lost my footing and clung to the shower curtain. A dark red/brown smear, about an inch wide, followed the course of my foot. I hadn’t been aware of any pain, any cut. Against the white of the tiles the deep colour screamed out. Steadying myself I began probing the sole, I peeled off my sock to reveal tinted flesh but no source, no sign of injury. Aiming the sock into the sink on the far side wall I saw more of the same colour dotting a line. Parallel, I walked its trail to the toilet basin; I threw my hand against the wall as my stomach lurched – the force was so great I felt someone had punched my gut from the outside whilst another pulled it from the inside. It came again, again, again. And then the force brought with it a hot flood of bile that swirled within the red-stained water that had triggered it. Clare’s cry was audible now.

I ran back down the hall, thumping every light switch as I went in the hope that things would look better. They looked worse. I reached the bedroom, the one room still in darkness. I stopped. The monochrome objects were softer on the eye. Clare looked so small curled in the centre of our bed. She was beautiful in black and white. But a darker ring had formed beneath her on the bedspread. Another gut-punch threatened to land. I swallowed.

Placing an arm behind her knees and another behind her chest I pulled her off the bed and held her, cradled, against me. I staggered down the stairwell, strapped her into the car, and drove.

They had to operate. I sat in the corridor. The floors were mint green – blood wouldn’t scream against that. I hadn’t locked the door. The lights would still be on. The doctor said they needed to stop the bleeding; it was unfortunate, one of those things, but sometimes nature knows best, he said. I had left the lights on in the apartment. Everywhere was mint green. I still had one sock on and one sock off; dirt clung to the base of my foot where the blood had dried. I hadn’t flushed the toilet. And then, “You can go through now Mr Rayne,” was spoken in the gentle tones of a voice trained to deliver bad news.

I didn’t go through. Call it selfishness, I prefer self-preservation, but whatever the label I couldn’t go through those doors and hold her hand and see the disappointment. I couldn’t pretend it would be all right. So I got back in the car.

The regimented university dorms lined the corridors seven to one. I had only been there once before when Elaina and I had run on late and I had seen her home, so I found my way by counting three floors up and four doors along. I knocked, but the sound beat out to no answer. I tried the handle, it was open.

A lad stuck his head out from the kitchen at the end, fixing me with a questioning stare.

“I’m looking for a student, Elaina Carter?”

“Gone, mate: she moved out last week.”

His head retreated.

I could taste the sour residue of vomit as I looked at my reflection in the polished wooden door.

I shut myself inside the room. A wardrobe and bedside cabinet stood open and empty, the bed was stripped to its mattress, and shelves that once housed great masters of art, were bare planks jutting from the wall.

A scrunched piece of paper stuck out from under the bed, highlighted by being the only non-furniture item in the room. At a touch I realized it wasn’t paper, but card. Flattening it out, I revealed a rectangle of solid blue. I laughed.

I tore the card down its centre, quartered it, placed it on the bed, and left.

Clare’s delicate fingers once again slotted between my own as I curled up beside her on the narrow bed. The mint green walls created an illusion of tranquillity as my body shook with every sob she released.

‌

Poetry

Then Sometimes You’ll Think

Julia Deakin

of greenhouses – which are not green but transparent, not named for themselves

but for a quality they might engender: their panes flyblown, crusty – frames crying out

for a lick of something tender, like the care their charges get.

And you may think of the word monocotyledons for seedlings’ two first leaves –

those small arms waving look, world, we are here – forgetting too soon

the disintegrating glass womb that they still need.

And you may think of greenhouses’ secret armpit smell and damp peaty hug,

surprised how something so weak-looking can contain such heat, comforting at first

then coaxing you to put down roots, mutate into some freak vegetable;

and of their mess – the runtish tools. Yogurt pot archive. Margarine museum.

Plastic bottles with “harmful” crosses. Something blackish brown, in a jar. On the floor

a once-red watering can, now faded to old-lady pink. The pink of that geranium.

And you may think of how they all need attention. Think of old ladies – their shared air

of resignation, life interrupted, things unsaid: trays and eccentric crockery set out

as if somebody longed-for has turned up and then, as unexpectedly, just left.

Zapatos

Christopher Athorne

Tango-Slim, thin, paper-sharp

in snake-skin zapatos

pivots on the light, the dark

cusps of cast shadows.

Knife elver-flash,

reptile flick beneath dry leaves,

pares, peels with router heel

each shaved twist of light.

Leads the lady with the lizard’s eye,

the lizard’s second skin to be

cast away

wriggled from

sloughed off

unsheathed

unzipped.

Whose toothed caress

of uncut diamond

flays the gentle hand,

who slips

a lizard tongue’s

insinuous longing

in Slim’s ear.

Delicious this,

the insidious hiss

and tell.

The Hippo

Jonathon Edwards

is solo, hobo, incognito,

two boulders curving out of Dettol-murk,

in a zoo his photo advertises,

doing a sponsored sitting-still all day.

Stop being a cliché, hippo, or I won’t

write a poem about you. Then you’ll be sorry.

What is your body but the verb to wallow?

What is the water but a part of self?

Google says you can crush a Ford Sierra

between your jaws. They don’t say how they test this.

Candyfloss-high boys crowd your glass, betting

they could hold their breath underwater longer,

they could leap from one boulder to the other.

I abandon you

for the giraffes, stupid as window cleaners,

the lions, sunshine with teeth,

but keep coming back:

if you were to rise, show your eyes, your mouth,

would you have Martin Sheen’s bandana’d head,

breaking smoke-water in Apocalypse Now?

Closing time. One last go. O please, Hippo,

don’t be so self-effacing, so tight-fisted.

Come on out, don’t you know

we love you? Wait. Is that a flash of flesh,

a hippo peepshow, or are you still snoozing?

A little girl says, Dad, that island’s moving.

Making Hay

Will Johnson

this is the peartree of peartrees

in the dell of dells

in June light

near the beginning

the air deranged with pollen

the under swathes

lacquered with dew

where the tribe has gone down

with maker’s fever

and it’s left to a waif

with a sawn-off pitchfork

to finish the tedding

knowing no other home

neither brick nor straw

nor future shelter

he shuts his gaze

on what seems

like a beneficent star

unaware that the suture

is permanent

and all that shines hereafter

will be a glare in the head

or the moue that “glare”

makes in drowning

ignorant that coming back to it

after fifty years that field

would produce nothing but vertigo

not so much in memoriam

as an insurrection in memory

the light that made the hay

already far beyond Pluto

far far beyond anything

he had hoped for in time

or the leavings of time

or time given over

to longing

blind from the start

that everything saved

from that great dereliction

every mistake of love

or topography

would lie ricked and uncured

in the body

and uphill breath

of a changeling boy

Repair Manual

Liz Thompson

[the year she stopped rowing] she learnt in time

to veer left over rough ground, at the piano

those depressed pedal marks on the music’s

glossy paper had put her off, on chord

with her listless voice, caught in a dampener

of events before she even started

she sat rigid in semi-darkness watched

her fingers descend the scale note by note

over-stretched, tendons strained she walked away;

and now she is this girl who folds herself

barefoot into a boat she posts herself

backwards, has raw hands wrapped overnight in

Epsom salts, a stout fruit drink with added salt

her clothes are roiled once in wool wash, heater

hung for six hours or more – to rest not overheat

or they spoil; it rains, if not the water

what is rowing all about; she learnt how

everything after those flat notes happens

at tempo, it’s the breaks in the middle

that count, marking the hours she eases out

from the bank into the stream of music

Transition

Chloe Daniel

It was decided in a taxi from St John’s Wood,

that the living room had light enough

and we would fit our clothes in two

small wardrobes.

That night before I slept alone, knowing

where I could find you from now on.

I awoke with the bleak thought, I would

never sleep in old underwear again.

And I will forgo those hidden moments in

loud dresses and tower high heels –

just the Argos mirror and me.

For the better, so

I stack my books in boxes – old bags, plastic

jewels and forgotten flames for the dustmen.

Until I find those photos I will

always keep in a bottom drawer.

When the suitcase closes, I am bagged up,

and through the open door night

air breathes across the newly swept floor.

Wrestling with the Bears

Rommy Collingwood

Wrestling with the bears and wretched. Sheering

off the side of a slant in blackened snow.

I thought I heard a voice that was calling

from the labyrinth of the dark below.

Wrestling with the bears and watchful. Falling

off the edge of the world where time is slow.

Dead wood drifts twirling in a dam, veering

north beyond the sun’s pale and oil-dark glow.

Wrestling with the bears and shrieking. Basking

in the roots of the mountain cold. The bears

are packed tight as truffles in dirt. Grumbling

like thousands of bees in a comb, their lair.

Wrestling with the bears and stamping. Keening

rain runs upriver, the tide in a bore.

The drift of the whirlpool spirals meaning

cascading with the red thud of the thaw.

Scaling off the shin of the scarp, winter’s

white cracked ice like cellophane. A splinter

of light but the den is reeking. Grey shale

of wind, cave leaking, but all hope is stale.

Hungry and cross in the cool of the camp

I follow a trail that leads to a spring.

And as the thermal waters bubble up

the needles of my solitude prick skin.

Storms abating. Bears still hibernating.

Dorothy Parker on the Legacy of President Calvin Coolidge

Jacob Appel

Interview that clod? That mud puddle? Me?

And on the radio? It takes some nerve

To draft a gal who clouted Jack Dempsey,

Made Chaplin piss his pants, threw Ruth a curve

Under the sheets – and I’m a Democrat!

Yet it takes even more nerve to refuse,

So I asked him, “Would you care to say what

You’ve done for your nation. Please, share your views.”

And he said, “No.” He would not care to say,

(Not to me, at least) which was just as well,

Since six months later to the very day,

Cal croaked. I ask myself: How could they tell?

Next time, of course, He’ll get my vote and thanks,

I do my part to help God pull off pranks.

Cognito

Tom Roberts

They had renovated a path

that hugs a side

of the County Antrim coast

and on Sundays,

when you can smell kelp

from the foreshore,

there is a jamboree of legs

in a turn of walking trips.

I’ve bumped into cousins,

but once-familiar faces

can grow into bother.

If in doubt, I nod.

She was a dog-walker

and her features regrew surely

under a crop that’d been a bob,

until I tipped her hello:

Clare, is that you?

She acquiesced in a phase

that traded updates on

acquaintances.

Then it came:

You just stopped calling.

It was her eyes first

that bolted to the yonder,

before the tug of her Labrador

passed me by.

Ken Russell at the Bedlington Café

Judi Sutherland

Pass this place in the afternoon

and it’s the incongruous greasy spoon

of fashionable Fauconberg

Road, rickety tables at the kerb.

By night, transformed, a chichi place

with random cutlery, odd Pyrex plates,

the hot-oil scent of Pad Thai spice,

meat skilleting in woks, jasmine rice.

That man in sheepskin coat, silk scarf –

isn’t he famous? He has a public laugh;

on a staged night out he’s slumming it,

self-conscious with the pavement kitsch,

now, racing-driver-like, he shakes

a fine champagne – the cork takes

off, missiling towards my face

the fizzed slipstream, like tracer

fire, rifling past my lashes.

You would think he might send over a couple of glasses.

The cork has landed in my lap.

I consider, for a moment, throwing it back.

‌

Flash Fiction

The Elephant

Sallie Durham

One day my husband came home with a baby elephant. The kids begged me to let it stay. Still in shock I said, “Okay, but I want nothing to do with it,” and so my husband became the elephant’s minder. He took it for long walks. Everyone in town made a fuss of it. The schoolkids adored it. Soon the elephant became a local celebrity.

We kept it in the kitchen. This made cooking tricky as the elephant was always in my way. Also, it was greedy and stole from our plates when nobody was looking. It barged into the hall to eat cat food, or sneaked muesli from the rabbit hutch. Outside the school it swiped ice creams, waving them high in the air before gulping them whole. That really upset the kids – but they still loved the elephant.

I needn’t tell you how much dung that elephant made. My husband ran behind it with plastic bags and a shovel. When it decided to pee, he’d have to hose down the patio. My husband lost weight with all that running, but the elephant got fatter. Before long it was too fat to sleep under the kitchen table, so we took away the table and ate our meals in front of the telly.

The elephant liked to follow me. Once it tried to go upstairs, but I wasn’t having it. I didn’t want squashed cats – or squashed kids, for that matter. I got my husband to put up the child gate.

It annoyed me that the elephant was always blocking the door when I was about to go out. I never took it with me. It used to try and grab my umbrella. We were having a lot of rain that spring, and my husband was continually mopping giant muddy footprints.

One day we took the elephant to the park. We were surprised to see that other people had elephants, too – huge, lumbering adults the size of the family caravan. While the kids were playing ball and dodging the elephants’ treelike legs, I noticed the strain on my husband’s face. I knew he was thinking of the extension he’d have to build. The sheer cost of it. I could see he envisioned a lifetime of shovelling dung.

We got talking to the other elephant owners. They all agreed that elephants were docile, loving pets. “But,” they said, “wait till it’s a teenager.”

Later, my husband and I had a conversation – our first for several weeks, as he’d been so busy with the walks, and I was forever trying to smuggle food past the elephant. On top of this we had jobs to go to.

My husband admitted to feeling stressed. He loved the elephant but it was restricting his freedom. He was beyond tired. I burst into tears. I wanted my kitchen back.

He told me about some elephant fanatics who could rehome our pet. They had five already. They’d recently lost a beloved, elderly male and were looking for a calf. Their elephants lived in a field with a large barn and a bathing pool. Our elephant would be happy there.

The kids were distraught. We promised they could choose a small caged rodent instead.

A man came in the middle of the night to collect the elephant. He said to us, “You’ll have to help me into the van with it.” It was raining. I felt a tap on my shoulder. The elephant was holding out my umbrella.

Accidents Will Happen

Eli Hastings

“Y’know, I think, really, it’s just, like, that our timing was wrong.”

I hated the words as I heard them; hated myself for uttering them; hated him for making me that person; hated the fact that they were bullshit, too. They bobbled around the pickup like invisible, durable bubbles, glancing off the windshield, the headrests, the gearshift. I swear I watched Clint brush one out of his beard in annoyance. He hadn’t even raised his eyebrows. He was reacting to the symbol of the words, not the words themselves. He turned up NPR a little.

Clint had caught a fellowship ride to an English Ph.D. at the University of Washington and I’d followed him out from Athens, Georgia. I served him a PBR. He had a ragged copy of David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System under the arm of a corduroy jacket and he looked me in the eyes as he licked the foam out of his moustache and I felt this collision of impulses: to let him fuck me savagely behind the bar or to hurl him his change and spit up some bile.

Savage fucking was the verdict. It was tender violence at first – I’d wake up with his hairy forearm wrapped around my neck and his fat lips pressed to my spine, him snoring hard. At first my feelings got hurt when he’d leave me with the dirty dishes to jot angry notes on James Joyce for the freshman class he was teaching. I’d welcome it when he rolled me onto my face after midnight and pounded away, breathing cheap Merlot fumes and curses into my ear.

But then I interrupted his late-night lesson prep after an Elvis Costello show (to take out the recycling) and he winged his mug of coffee straight through the little window over the sink. I watched the little blip of ceramic somersault over the greenbelt below and felt my sentiment go out, like a match in a toilet. I started rehearsing things to say that would get me back on a jumbo jet to Atlanta with the least resistance possible.

Because of all the tyres spinning, it felt like rain was rising up from the asphalt as much as coming down from the sky. The interstate was pretty busy. We were behind a flatbed tow truck with a beat-up Chevy Blazer strapped to it. The fat yellow straps whipped out behind it like streamers. The old wipers screeched. One of the yellow straps suddenly shot out like a bad trip and the metal clip kissed a star into the windshield. The back end of the Blazer shimmied and then slid straight back. Clint only had two fingers on the wheel and he pushed it, almost gently, to the right. The Blazer hit the pavement to the left of us and, for an instant, it looked like it belonged there. Then a taxi hit it dead-on and the morning exploded in retrograde.

I twisted around and stared back between the boxes and duffels that contained all my worldly possessions as the wreckage slam-danced: vans, trucks and taxis rolling and flipping, headlights sweeping the rainfall. Big smoke and tiny fires. People dying. Clint hadn’t slowed down. He watched in the rearview for a second, then looked over at me and raised his eyebrows like, whoa! He took a sip from his travel mug. Just a couple of miles south a 747 lumbered off the runway, vanishing into the dark clouds. There was nothing, really, to say.

Fashion Cut

Harold Mally

Nervously I walk around the block, smoking cigarettes, returning to the garishly painted window. I’ve read that sign over and over. Fashion Cuts While U Wait. I am amused by the sign and wonder how they could do it any other way, apart from while you are waiting.

I try to pluck up enough courage to walk inside. I want to get it done. All of the coolest people have them, but I’ve heard stories about how painful it is. Of course, nowadays reputable artists use safe, sterile, painless methods, so there is really nothing to worry about. But there is still that initial fear. I take a deep breath and walk through the door.

The girl on the counter is really cool. Both arms are covered in diagonal cuts and each cheek has a lightning bolt carved into it. She smiles at me. I avert my gaze uneasily from her and move to the other side of the salon.

I study the feature wall, adorned with colour photos of the cosmetic artist’s work. Faces beautified with scars, arms and legs displaying decorative mutilations and cute amputated fingers and toes vie for space on the cluttered montage. They are works of art. I stare at the pictures, wondering what would look best on me.

When scars first became a fashion item I thought the concept too extreme. People hacking into their flesh with knives or driving their cars into walls just so they could acquire a new scar was too painful and dangerous a step to take for the sake of beauty.

But after a while I could see how rugged some men looked with a well-placed facial slash and how cool guys at the beach appeared with those jagged incisions in their chests. Now that salons have started to offer scars, it’s time to think about it.

After all, they do it in a safe, sterile environment, so there is no risk involved, and the cosmetic artists who perform the mutilations are trained professionals. Besides, I’m sick of being the only uncool guy on my block.

I agree that some people go too far in their quest for beauty. Chopping off fingers or toes might be okay for models or actors or others who make their living in the beauty industry, but for ordinary people like me there is a need to be a little conservative in one’s choice of mutilation.

The girl with the lightning cheeks catches my eye again. I smile shyly, take a deep breath and walk over to her. I tell her what I have chosen.

I have a tasteful slash cut all the way down my left cheek. It is not too obtrusive, but I think it is quite beautiful and makes a real statement about me as an individual.

When I get home, for some reason Mum is upset. She says it’s sick for people to cut themselves in the name of fashion. I don’t understand. I tell her it’s certainly more authentic than her tatts and piercings. But that’s the older generation for you. They just don’t understand fashion.

Now I walk down the street proudly displaying my mutilated face. It makes me feel like a complete person. There’s no doubt about it; the girls love it, too.

In fact, I’m so happy with my scar, I’ve started thinking about my next mutilation.

I saw this guy on TV the other day with the top joint of his finger chopped off. While a whole finger seems a little pretentious, one missing joint would be just so cool.

The Proper Execution of Verbs

Erika Olsen Stefano

I never knew verb tenses had names until I began teaching English. I have used, have been using, and would always have used verbs tenses without knowing what they were called.

Verbs in English are treacherous, of course. There is always one student every year who will, with great intelligence I believe, learn “drink, drank, drunk” and extrapolate “think, thank, thunk”. I’ve thunk many times, so I know where they are coming from.

I like using the verb “behead” to help students learn tenses: for instance the difference between “I have beheaded my neighbour” (and here is her head) and “I have been beheading my neighbour” (but haven’t finished yet, and will continue later). These examples stick out, especially when I bring a saw into the classroom.

What’s even more treacherous are the verbs that technically exist conjugated in many different ways, but some of these tenses can never be used.

“Love” is the worst of the lot. It’s been introduced to the present continuous by the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it,” which never existed before. And while I’ve wished it existed in the imperative, it just doesn’t. There is no such thing as, “Love me!”

I tried with boyfriends, cats, even my mother. I can scream it, whisper it, cry it into my pillow at night. Love me, love me, love me. But she doesn’t. When she dies, this will require the use of the future perfect; she will never have known what she missed.

The Disappearing Thread

Shalamaya Rider

I visited Rosie at the usual time on Friday evening for our fish-and-chip supper. Eager to speak to me, she almost pounced on me in the hallway. She waved away the food; supper could wait, but not what she had to tell me. I put a few chips on a side dish for us to nibble at while supper was being kept warm. She urged me to sit down at the table opposite her and insisted on pouring me a cup of tea despite her shaky hands.

“You must not be afraid, but it happened like this,” she said, looking directly at me.

On my last visit, I had brought her a bag of mandarin oranges. They were packed in one of those fishnet bags that the supermarkets use for citrus fruits. Rosie held up a large piece of the shiny orange mesh. It was at least fourteen inches long and six inches wide. She had cut away the metal clasps that had held the ends of the bag together and cut down the side of the mesh tube.

“Look,” she said, “I’ll show you what I did.”

She carefully teased out one of the orange fibres from the piece of net and laid the snaking filament on the table. It must have been nearly two feet long. Then she extracted a second strand the same length as the first. After placing the ends of the two threads together, she coiled the strings around her index finger and looped them into a knot. She held them up in front of her face and she pulled them apart to shorten the ends of the knot to barely a few millimetres in length.

It was quite a feat: it was impressive to see her tie the knot with such intense concentration, while her eighty-year-old hands shook, and she had already lost the sight in one eye.

In order to crochet with it, she said she must lengthen the strands and secure the ends together. I wondered why she wanted to use this stuff because she already had lots of yarn at home for knitting and crochet.

Rosie put the threads she had just tied on the table and looked at me steadily as I was putting another chip to my mouth.

“Well, Kate,” she said, “I repeated this ten times and placed them on the table in front of me. No one else was here and the threads just disappeared right before my eyes. I searched for them everywhere. I brushed the carpet. Still nothing. It’s unbelievable,” said Rosie, raising her brows.

I reassured her that they had to be somewhere in the flat, that they could not just vanish. I got up and looked about – under the table, around the chairs. Then I spotted them nesting beside a pile of newspapers on the carpet.

“Look, Rosie, here they are,” I said, lifting up the orange tangle. Rosie blinked.

“These must be the ten knotted threads. I’ve found them,” I said.

“Oh no, that’s not it,” Rosie said, shaking her head. “I did a second lot.”

“What do you mean you did a second lot? You’re confused! You’ve forgotten!”

“And where’s the two that I just did for you to see? They’ve disappeared now. It’s unbelievable: thread disappearing right before your eyes,” said Rosie.

She sat with her arms folded in front of her and watched the table as if expecting something to happen, then, glancing up at me, told me not to be afraid.

Starfish Wishing

Lindsay Fisher

Kersin does not go to school today. He meant to. That is why he has his book in a bag and his shoes on and the shirt they make you wear. Kersin sets off at the same time as every other day and he walks the path that would take him to school if he let it. But today he does not go. Passing the beach he sees something. Kersin sees a thousand starfish hands lying on the sand, in golds and purples and reds. And Beach-House Grandma he sees also, and she is folded in two, picking up the stars, one by one, and returning them to the sea.

Beach-House Grandma, thin as sticks and as old as trees can be, tells Kersin that he must do as she does, and for every star he saves he can make a wish. “For last night was the night of a thousand wishes,” she says.

Eleven children do not go to school today. They all see what Beach-House Grandma does, and Kersin tells them about the picking and the returning and the wishing. So, eleven children and Kersin do not go to school today and Beach-House Grandma sings them to work so they do not notice the time passing or the tide retreating and the farther and farther that they must walk to put the starfish back.

When the sun begins its climb down from the top of the sky, and all the remaining stars are stiff and dead, and still the children cradle them in the shallow cups of their hands and walk to find the sea and make another and another wish, then Beach-House Grandma stops her singing and wipes away the salted tears from her cheek. She tells the children that the stars will be fewer in heaven tonight, but thanks to them there will at least be stars, and she smiles for a moment. Then Beach-House Grandma shoos them away, like they were eleven chickens and Kersin scattering, and they run laughing up the beach.

When the running is breathless and stopped, and Beach-House Grandma’s new song hangs in the air thin as breath, Kersin is alone with Dita and he finds courage and he asks her what she wished for. Dita, pretty as flowers and her voice as soft as yellow birds singing in cages – in Kersin’s head, at least. And Dita smiles and she says she wished for dresses in all colours, and shoes more than can be walked in, and bangles of silver and gold for her wrists, and earrings, and ribbons and brushes and books. And she wished for a sharp knife for her Papa and fish hooks, and that every meal might be pempek served on china plates, and onde-onde – more than can be eaten. And for her mother she wished for rest.

Kersin listens to the list of Dita’s wishes, but he does not find the wish he wants to hear, the wish he hoped for. Kersin has made only one wish, the same wish he made on other starfish days, last year and the year before.

They come to the fork in the path that will take Dita from him again, and Kersin watches Dita dancing till he can see her no longer and all he can hear is Dita’s birdsong voice still calling out the list of her faint and fainter wishes. Then she is gone and suddenly Kersin feels a pain inside, and he thinks it might be hunger, though it is something else.

Wild Life

Alison Earls

“In Australia, there are birds that scream and shout,” he said. “Raucous and loud as anything you’ve heard. It’s not a place for gentle tweets and chirps.”

He was an old man then, remembering days that had shone with the colour that his life no longer held inside that beige North London room.

“The tropics are a wild place and the creatures that live there are as bold as the weather and vegetation that surround them… but I felt alive there,” he said. “A little of that bright intensity might have seeped into me just for that time.”

He let out a tired breath.

“I wanted to be like one of them – those tough, brown men with their brittle barks and sighs. Nature attacked them but they took it and moved on… bones like rods of iron, skin cracked and dry that would never soften – no matter how much liquid they poured in at the end of every day.”

He smiled at his memories. “I was just a pale boy to them. Not made for that place.” He turned and the light from the window washed the subtle meaning from his face into its glare. “But they were kind… in the way, I suppose, that you’re kind to a clumsy child.”

The soft chirrup of a sparrow in the tree outside brought him back.

“Those birds,” his said, and shook his head. “As brazen as vultures, they were… strident… and as big as dogs, some of them… It’s a different world out there.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d been to Sydney. That I’d sunned myself at Bondi Beach and danced at Mardi Gras parties. That I’d kissed one stranger with a sequinned headdress and done more with another with a studded collar and wide, bronzed shoulders.

His tropical adventure was different to mine.

His tough brown men were clad in a masculine armour that mine would have shaved and moisturized.

“You should go there sometime, Mikey,” he said as he began to melt slowly into sleep. “Everyone needs a bit of wildness in their life.”

And then he might have winked at me. Just as the sleep had properly swallowed him.

I held his hand and watched him drift, hopefully into some happy times that he’d lived before the illness had crept quietly in.

He had loved me, my granddad. He had loved me through the anger of adolescence and family friction and the wholehearted immersion into a life he couldn’t really understand.

I hadn’t told him everything but I’m sure he had known more. He wasn’t blind to the world.

But, whatever he had thought, he had never been against me. He had never been ashamed or given up. I was always Mikey and he had always loved me. And that was all I’d wanted. From anyone.

I watched the laboured breathing tug at the body that, flimsy as it was, had become his unwieldy weight to bear.

And then, when it finally stopped, when it was over and he was truly still, I didn’t call Joe. I didn’t call anyone. Because there was no one to call. No one to know.

No one who knew me the way that he did.

So I stayed with him and thought of my times and his. Ours together and apart. Our colourful, brash creatures.

Wild times for two pale boys.

I saw him then. I saw what we were and what we both had been.

Then I let go.

So that I wouldn’t remember how it felt to have his hand cool in mine.

After Hours in 901.02

Jennifer O’Connell

You find all sorts of stuff. The things you’d expect: socks, sandwiches, condoms – not all of them used.

And the things you wouldn’t: letters to Santa, scrawled on pages torn from copybooks. Once, a prescription for lithium dated May 1982, placed between the pages of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Then there’s the “performance art”: some gobshite carving out a coffin-shaped chunk from the middle pages of The God Delusion, and inserting a rosary.

You meet all sorts, too. There was the fella who used to come in, change in the loo, and leave as a lady. He’d come back for his stuff the next day, looking at no one, a copy of the Irish Times held fast against his suit. We gave up moving the blue plastic bag to Lost Property and left it where he had, stuffed behind the cistern in the unisex cubicle.

After a while, he stopped coming. I like to imagine he gets dressed up at home now, and walks out his front door, the primrose dress with the tiny cats flapping about his knees.

I wasn’t thinking about him when I was cleaning up that day. I was thinking about shepherd’s pie, the one I was going to have when I got home. It was a Thursday, which meant Tesco Finest. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were Value Range days. Friday was always fish and chips and a glass of red.

I was about to switch off the lights when I saw it, sitting on the table in 901.92, between Medieval and Renaissance History. One of those yellow Post-it pads. I went to pick it up, and that’s when I saw the drawing. It was the tiny figure of a woman, with short hair, a crooked nose and pendulous breasts. It’s embarrassing to say, but I knew right away it was me.

Every page was filled with the same miniature character, each fractionally different from the last. When you flipped the pad with your thumb, she seemed to dance.

The things she was doing – it was pure filth. But it was beautiful in a way: careful and controlled, like a Japanese illustration. I put it in an envelope, and put the envelope in my bag.

For weeks afterwards, I waited. I found myself perusing the faces of clients for evidence of improper thoughts. But they all looked like normal midweek library users – tired, hungry, preoccupied with everything but sex with the woman scanning the barcode on their books.

I was fastidious when I tidied up on Thursdays, but I never found another Post-it pad.

Roly, the head of Inter-library Loans, appeared one night as I was putting Collingwood’s Analysis of Historical Explanation back on the shelf in 901.

“Looking for something, Grace?” he asked. He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew by the red of his cheeks; the tooth pressing into the lower lip.

“You weren’t supposed to find it.” He seemed so miserable, I couldn’t let him suffer.

We’ve been together ever since, Roly and me. Most nights now, we have fish and chips and a glass of red.

Minotaur

Sandra Jensen

It wasn’t as if I planned on killing my mother when I started up the sacred mountain.

“You’ll make a sacrifice at the summit,” the shaman said, her eyes cutting button-sized holes into my defences. I’d already started leaking out during the drumming. Pieces of me stuck to the ceiling, watching my attempts to look entranced. I didn’t commune with wolf spirits. No bears feasted on my intestines, no elementals whistled into my ears.

We walked in silence, twelve of us, to meet with the Great One, our spirit guide. The shaman was short and Jewish. “I’m glad you’re so small,” I said when we first met. What I meant to say was, “I thought you’d be bigger.” You know, being a world-famous shaman.

She instructed us to hold onto our question as we walked. She’d given us our questions after the drumming. Mine was: How does the myth of Knossos relate to my life?

Pain stitched into my head thinking about my question, so I moved on. My sacrifice. “You’ll know what it is,” the shaman assured me when I’d asked for suggestions.

Two women veered off into the forest, gathering stones and feathers. I kept to the path. Cougars had been spotted in this area. I found a tiny grey stone embedded in the packed earth and struggled on, the last to reach the top.

The others were already busy: one woman danced like a dervish. Another snipped her hair with nail scissors. That’s it, I thought, my hair. I should sacrifice my precious hair.

But I had no scissors. I fingered my stone. I wanted to take it home with me, a memento from California. Of my struggle to find myself, to find something, anything at all.

Our shaman raised her hands to the red-ribboned sky, her face enraptured. Someone lit a page with a match. I watched flakes of ash scatter in the breeze, thinking, Isn’t there a law against fires here?

The sun was just a molten sliver. I had seconds left. My mind raced frantically. Then it came to me: I had to sacrifice my mother. I had to bury her, right there on the mountain. My mother, a living, breathing being, thousands of miles away in a damp cottage in Ireland, her suffering lodged deep into my chest like a splintered spear.

I fondled my stone. I dug a little hole. I put the stone in the hole and covered her up. I didn’t pray. My mother was an atheist. I didn’t know what I was.

As the sun finally dripped into a bloody darkness, our shaman guided us back down. I worried my mother would feel alone and afraid in her little grave. A tendril of myself reached back, but it was too far. I was entirely motherless and weeping. I stumbled behind our shaman who chanted words I couldn’t understand.

As we headed towards the SUV that brought us to the foot of the mountain, a puff of moist air stroked my cheek. That’s your own breath, stupid, I told myself, sucking back my tears. But I knew it wasn’t. The beast’s grassy breath filled my lungs, his heartbeat vibrated my belly. I wanted to kneel down right there, to press my forehead to the hot black tarmac but everyone was bustling past and into the vehicle. They’d had their epiphany, their meeting with their spirit, exactly where and when they were supposed to, at the summit of a sacred mountain as the sun made way for the moon, while I met mine right there, in the neon-lit parking lot.

Wrapped

Mark Allerton

“What do you mean, you don’t want to open your Christmas presents?” This was my mother.

I was happy to visit but I didn’t want to open the presents. I liked wanting them. Wrapped. Waiting to be opened. In case she’d finally got the right things. So I took them home.

I rented storage space, a concrete room with no windows, and arranged the presents in a neat pile. They made a pathetic sight, such a small collection. There were many other things I wanted, it was no trouble adding clothes, books and CDs. I wrapped them all. The pile really grew with the music system, state-of-the-art computer and home-gym equipment. I labelled all of them, “To me, with love.”

I learnt how to induce suspended animation. It was complicated and took years. My first attempt was on a gerbil. I never wanted one, but I didn’t want to try it on something bigger in case it went wrong. Pleased with the result, I wrapped several desirable women in paper of different colours and sprinkled them with glitter. One was the love of my life, Janine. I used a red ribbon for her; she was special. Then I wanted children, girls and boys. I wrapped some of each.

One morning I decided it was time to unwrap the presents. I glimpsed my reflection in the bathroom mirror and caught my breath. The eyes that looked back were old and empty.

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First Chapter Award Winner

She Wore Pants

Martina Newhook

PART I
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

I’m good at love, I’m good at hate
It’s in between I freeze.

– LEONARD COHEN

Martin Rhys-Davies – Notes for a Treatment

Some people ask if Shylock is a hero or a villain. I don’t. Neither did Candace. It depends on your point of view, what biases you bring to the question. Before I grew old for my age, my idealism steamrollered. Before cynicism replaced it, my father told me never to judge a book by its cover.

“Think about your own cover for a minute, Martin,” he said in between small sips of sherry. “Do you really want people to assume that you are an empty vessel of inherited privilege? A limp product of an irrelevant aristocracy? All I’m saying is you should extend the same courtesy to others as you might wish to receive from them.”

For most of my life this philosophy allowed me to develop social capital, as it predisposed me to the kind of open-mindedness that turned me into the confidant of many people, including Candace Cerise Pansenkosky.

From our first moment together, I sensed something gorgeous about Candace, masculinity unlike any I’d ever previously known. She was tough. With a mouth like a sailor, she spat nails. And yet there was something irresistibly endearing about her, a lusty integrity and romanticism unlike any other, because she lived her own cover art. If she were a book, her cover would be made of luxurious nappa leather, her spine lovingly hand-sewn with the strength to survive abusive openings, her artwork painted from the finest organic inks with the ability to morph with her mercurial moods: a technology yet to be invented. She was ahead of her time, some might say out of step with reality, but she turned out all right in the end.

It was the rest of them who were rotten. Worse, some were wilfully ignorant. It took me a couple of years to piece it all together, to comprehend the senseless tragedy that happened right before Easter 2008. We were in Memphis on a family vacation where we feasted on barbecued ribs and then visited Graceland not an hour before it happened. We saw it all. Daisy, Jordan, their baby boy, and I witnessed something terrible that changed our futures and ended our illusions. Nothing would ever be the same again. Jordan insisted that I write it all out, everything I remembered and everything I’ve learnt since, to build something he called a “treatment” that we can hand over to a screenwriter. This isn’t how I expected to land in the movie business, even though that’s exactly what I’d set out to do before the economy collapsed. Funnily enough, I would never have met Candace had I not ventured out to California with a silly dream about making movies and distinguishing myself from my brother. Life is strange that way. You never know who you’ll meet when you leave home alone, but we risk it anyway and take chances on those who live beyond the fence.

Chapter One

How I Met Candace

My family consists of a fading crew of aristocrats who live modest lives on an impossible estate passed down to the eldest male Rhys-Davies since one shrewd ancestor eschewed Catholicism and sailed to Virginia with Raleigh, thus establishing both an earldom at home and a toehold in the new world. When my grandmother agreed to allow tours through the “public” rooms of the house in order to finance the upkeep, my father decided it was time to give London a try and went into the bond business there. He did well enough to maintain Rhys-Davies illusions and provide a respectable continuation of the tradition of primogeniture for my older brother and me. My brother, MacPherson, aka “Fierce”, went into the family firm and I eventually took my trust to California to escape something that no longer sustained me. What that something was, I can’t say: a definition of being, I suppose, a way of life that served others but not me. London had become confining, an imposition. It seems crazy now, but I wanted to make something, I wanted to make films. Trouble was, I hadn’t the foggiest clue how. In the spring of 2007, I rented a slightly dilapidated Santa Monica bungalow, circa 1925, with Arts and Crafts details and redwood floors, a few blocks from the beach, below Chautauqua Boulevard. Under a delicate mauve canopy of jacaranda trees and the consoling proximity of the rich and beautiful, I settled in to learn about the movies from books by the likes of Robert McKee and William Goldman.

The house next door had recently been renovated; a second storey dropped on top of a ’60s rambler created an imposing modern design that dwarfed my own humble abode. In time, my neighbour’s house would fit in with the rest of the street, as several homes displayed demolition permits. Eventually the little yellow house with the brick-red shutters I affectionately named “Soleado” would be the one out of place.

My cousin Daisy lived in Brentwood at the time, and one afternoon, in between sips of white wine under my jacarandas, she told me, in the whispered tones of those who like to let you know that they’re in the know, that my neighbour was a secretive film producer always on the prowl for project financing: Jack Winger. I’d never heard of him and she told me I wouldn’t have unless I paid attention to the final credits of his films. He was famed as much for avoiding all personal publicity as for his discreet dinner parties, and the who’s who of the film industry made a competitive sport of clambering for an invitation to his table. Daisy herself had been invited to dine at Winger’s table the following Saturday night along with her husband, Jordan Hiller, the independent television producer who’d made a fortune from some vampire series I’d never seen.

“Well, score one for you, my dear,” I said and sipped my own gin and tonic.

“Score one for you, too. I managed to get the invitation extended to include you.”

“Really? How? I’m nobody.”

“You’re his new neighbour and a titled aristocrat; of course he’d want to meet you and show you some hospitality.”

“Daisy, you and I both know that titles do not necessarily indicate positive cash flow.”

“Jack’s an American, he has no idea about these things. He assumes that old money remains moneyed throughout the ages.”

“Well, darling, thanks for looking after my social calendar.”

She raised her glass and grinned at me with the same optimism she’d had when we were teenagers playing tennis at grandmother’s house, her spotless tennis dress glowing in the summer sun, and her newly fixed teeth whiter than the dress. Daisy could always be counted upon to maintain high expectations, and life always seemed to deliver what she expected. Such was the coercive power of her charm.

“What sort of gift should I bring my host?” I asked.

“Organic dog treats from the Bark and Wag Bakery on Montana.”

“Pardon?”

“Jack has a pair of French bulldogs and you’d make a good impression if you took something special for them.”

“Why haven’t I seen the dogs in the yard?”

“He takes them with him to work; they’re his constant companions.”

And so it was settled. Carrying an environmentally friendly sack of dog biscuits, I’d meet up with Daisy and Jordan at eight o’clock the following Saturday night at Jack Winger’s house.

That’s how I met Candy. She stood in the foyer, a dirty martini in her hand, and studied a Harrington canvas that hung on one of the biggest walls I’d ever seen. Unlike the kinds of places in which I’d lived my life – damp old houses organized as a series of cluttered rooms with a specific purpose – Winger’s house was practically doorless. Like the continental expanse and big sky discovered by the Europeans who’d moved west, it inspired optimism, gave one more than enough space to breathe.

“Martin, glad you could make it,” Winger said. I handed him the fifty-dollar bag of dog cookies, which he accepted with a genuine smile. “How thoughtful of you. I hope Issy and Felix haven’t woken you in the night. They’ll bark at anything that moves in the yard before bedtime.”

“I’m sure they’re wonderful dogs, I’ve hardly noticed them.”

“Come in, a few people are already here.”

“Any sign of my cousin?”

“It’s early, they’ll be along shortly.” In fact it was already nearly thirty minutes after the appointed hour. Daisy had tutored me on the finer points of being fashionably late. “This is Candace, a friend from back east.”

In her heels, Candy stood nearly as tall as me, no easy feat for most women because I’m tall for a Brit at six foot one. She smiled and extended her right hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Martin Rhys-Davies, a pleasure, Miss?…”

“Pansenkosky, but please call me Candy. Where are you from, Martin?”

“England, north-west of London originally.”

“What fine manners you have, much more naturally refined than most Americans.” The way she said it, with a slight dip of her gaze and a tilt of her head to one side, deceived me at first into thinking she was a typical female who relied upon flirtation.

“Thank you. How do you know our host?”

“Business, mostly.”

“Mostly? Is there a personal aspect to your acquaintance?”

“We share an alma mater.”

“And that would be?”

“My, you are English,” she smiled. “Wharton, MBA class of ’92. You?”

“London School of Economics, 1999.”

“No, I meant how do you know Jack?”

“Oh, sorry, I live next door.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She did it again, gave a beguiling tilt of her heart-shaped face and smiled with her wheat-flecked green eyes.

“Where does one get a drink like yours?” Our host had slipped away.

“Follow me.” Her walk was steady and flowing; her long white linen trousers floated above strappy three-inch heels and licked her painted toes with each step. A different man might have noticed the roundness of her derrière and commented on the undulating motion of her hips, and I did notice these things, but was immune to their impact. Her sleeveless blouse revealed toned shoulders kissed by the sun and long trim arms. Clearly I’d met a woman who knew how to care for herself and oozed the kind of self-confidence that couldn’t be bought. A portable bar stood by the pool, surrounded by six other guests. This intimate dinner party as described by Daisy was no small affair; I’d counted ten people milling through the house and pool area as we passed.

“How big is the dining table?”

Candace laughed her original and delightfully unforced laugh, a sound that remains imprinted upon me as indicative of her true nature. “Smaller than the Queen’s. Don’t worry, there’s room enough for everyone.”

“My cousin is meant to be here, have you seen her? Daisy?”

“Daisy Hiller is your cousin?”

“Yes.”

She made an O with her mouth and then lifted the corners into a smile. “Lovely woman, charming husband, haven’t seen them yet tonight.”

The bartender handed me a gin and tonic, which I promptly lifted to my lips. This could be a very long night. Her small gesture had made it abundantly clear that my ignorance of the group’s interconnectedness might result in my social life ending before it had begun. A well-groomed woman, whose figure resembled silicone grapefruit on a broomstick, an aesthetic that I had a hard time believing anyone actually admired, swooped upon Candace and led her away. She’d probably become a grotesque imitation of her younger self and didn’t recognize the difference. It made me sad.

Daisy and Jordan arrived a few minutes before we were called to the table. Her sea-green dress draped over her curves and she wore her strawberry tresses loose, cascading over her shoulders. There was something ethereal about her skin; her face glowed like the North Star on a clear night, a quality that had escaped me when we sat in my garden. Her legs, lean and tanned, shimmered to perfection, the shadows of her muscled calves highlighting the effects of her new climate. My English cousin, player of tennis and field hockey, wearer of riding breeches and wellies, had transformed herself into a California girl. On her arm, her husband looked equally dashing. Also tanned, he moved with the kind of assuredness only money and commercial success could buy. Everyone flattered him with deliberate greetings.

“Can’t stand that guy,” Winger muttered over my shoulder.

I raised an eyebrow.

“I know he’s married to your cousin; I should probably keep my mouth shut.”

“I’ve only met him three times.”

“That should be enough for you to know what I’m talking about.”

“No, not really. I always felt that Daisy had done well for herself.”

“It’s just business, I suppose.”

“Well, why did you invite him to your home if you don’t like him?”

“Like I said, business.”

“Movie business or monkey business?” I don’t know why I said that.

“Money business. He has plenty of it and his name brings credibility in some circles.”

“But not yours?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted it. I meant his circle, not his name, but this was too awkward to explain.

He looked straight down his nose at me and said, “Let’s eat.”

Three tables had been set up on the terrace that extended from the living room to the pool, each with eight place settings. Candelabras with actual candles hung from the vine-covered pergola above each table, creating both intimacy and flattering light, while soft jazz music drifted in the air around us. White camellias mixed with lemon leaves and herbs decorated the centre of each table. Judging from the layers of cutlery on each side of the plates this would be one of those confounded degustation menus, a fashion in restaurants that made little sense to me. Why should I sample all of the chef’s best tricks at once? Place cards designated seating arrangements and I was relieved to find mine next to Candace’s. This could be the first time in recorded history that a Rhys-Davies dined next to a Pole and looked forward to it immensely.

“I moved your name tag,” Candace said when she sat down. “I wanted to sit next to someone real.”

“Excellent. Just curious, where was my original seat?”

“You were behind me, next to the host.”

“Are you sure you’re the one who switched my name tag? I fear I may have offended Jack.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

The other guests had taken their seats at our table and we introduced ourselves, everyone doing their best to adhere to the social niceties they may or may not have been raised with. All of them were somehow connected to show business, although none of them were of the creative classes. Mostly they were suits: lawyers, marketing executives, agents and production types. Making small talk with them proved excruciating and the effort made me tired. And there were six courses to go.

“Who’s catering this thing?” I asked Candace.

“Jean-Paul.”

“Am I supposed to know who Jean-Paul is?”

“How long have you been in LA?”

“A couple of months.”

“Jean-Paul is the current ‘it’ chef, and Jack hires him for all of his dinners.”

“I feel silly for having to ask.”

“Don’t sweat it. But you need to know these things around here.”

“Candace, why are you here and for how long?”

“I’m helping Jack work some financing with his investors.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m helping him figure out how to use other people’s money instead of his own to get his current project made.”

“Sounds vaguely immoral.”

“It’s how this business works.”

“What’s the nature of this project?”

“It’s one of Eastwood’s pets. He optioned it years ago and hasn’t been able to green-light it.”

“Eastwood?”

“Shhh… keep your voice down.”

I can only assume she meant Clint Eastwood. Since then, I’ve learnt that Candace is better than most at keeping secrets and that she’d probably dropped his name deliberately, perhaps for the benefit of our dining companions, but ultimately for the financial enrichment of our host and, as a consequence, of herself. The rest of the conversation had grown tedious and it occurred to me that for some reason the others were freezing me out. Whatever faux pas I’d committed was a mystery to me; maybe I’d revealed too much of my foreign origins. Perhaps they understood that I could do nothing for them; couldn’t even make them laugh when I told them about how the tourists mistake my grandmother for a prop in her own home, expecting her to whip out scones and cream before launching into the story of our ancestor, Robert Pell Davies, who had, according to family lore, told Elizabeth I that she looked tense and that he had the antidote under his codpiece. Blank stares, followed by frozen smiles, accompanied an uncomfortable silence before they all looked away and engaged each other in whatever qualified for light conversation in their world.

With four courses remaining, I stood up and refilled everyone’s wine glass, beginning with my own. Another faux pas, a double faux pas actually. I should have let the Guatemalan waiter do it, but frankly that seemed too pretentious and the whole thing began to depress me until I felt a hand squeeze my knee. It belonged to the well-manicured Candace. “I’m not that kind of boy,” I whispered. “Although I could make an exception.”

“Don’t worry, your virtue is safe with me. Follow my lead.” She pushed her chair back and announced to the table that she needed to be excused.

“Candace, can you show me the way to the loo?” I leapt to my feet and offered her the crook of my elbow.

“Martin, you’re quite the gentleman.”

Inside the house, she relieved the bartender of a bottle of Tanqueray and practically levitated up the stairs towards the roof timbers that criss-crossed beneath vast skylights. Unfortunately, the stars were made invisible by the metropolis’s light pollution. In her white ensemble accented with gold, swinging the Tanqueray in her free hand as she rose higher, I realized that she could be my hero, my saviour from a tired lifestyle that had made me soft. Certainly she had some superpower. How else could she know Tanqueray occupied a special place in my heart? She kicked off her shoes when she reached the top and abandoned them. I wondered if I ought to do the same; it was tempting, a non-verbal fuck you to the people below. Candace disappeared into a room at the end of the corridor and, not wanting to lose sight of the gin, I followed.

“Whose room is this?” I asked. It was large and modern, and its floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view into the back yard, which explained why she’d left the overhead lights off. Feminine flourishes, such as the gynocentric O’Keeffe print over the bed, deviated from the sensibility of the decor evident in the rest of the house.

“Mine, at least for the moment.” She busied herself rinsing out a glass in the bathroom. “Make yourself comfortable, take your shoes off.”

“You live here?” I did as she suggested and settled onto the chaise longue near the window.

“Only when I come to LA. Jack always freaks if he finds out I’m staying at a hotel.”

“Where are you based?”

“New York. I come here a couple of times a year, whenever I feel like a break. My excuse is that I need to spend some quality time with clients.”

She filled the glass half full with gin and handed it to me. “Hope you don’t mind if I drink from the bottle, I don’t want to go back downstairs for another glass. If we stay out of sight they’ll forget we’re gone.”

“By all means, go ahead.”

We drank against a backdrop of laughter, chatter and music rising up from outside. Candace settled onto the king-sized bed, holding the bottle as gently as she might a small bird in her hand.

“This is a gorgeous room; you’re lucky to have such a generous friend.”

“Check out the closet space.”

“I don’t feel right looking at your personal things.” I’d noticed this peculiar obsession with closets amongst Americans before, as well as their openness to sharing their contents.

“Go on, you won’t believe what Jack did to the freakin’ closets.”

I opened the door closest to me. Like in a refrigerator, lights turned on automatically, and I was confronted by a room as large as my London bedroom. Candace had placed her belongings on the shelves and racks closest to the entrance and I was enchanted by the most beautiful collection of Hermès scarves I’d ever seen. She’d neatly folded them into the compartments provided for men’s ties; row upon row of hand-dyed printed silk organized in a rainbow beginning with the deepest reds and ending with violet. Hanging above them were white shirts unique in shape and colour. If they were paint colours in a hardware store their names wouldn’t be white but latte, alabaster, ecru, honey harbour, sea shell, Jersey cream, passion-fruit sorbet. Each incarnation of white provided a complementary canvas for the scarves. Beyond the scarves and shirts, shoes and pants, lay a cavernous wasteland waiting to display more things. The sheer emptiness of the shelves, racks and cubbyholes compelled me to return my gaze to the comforting beauty of the scarves. I picked one up and shook it open, a delightful batik of aqua and tangerine, the giddiness of it made up for the loneliness of being the sole occupant of Soleado. “I’m relieved that you couldn’t fill the closet.”

“Overwhelming, isn’t it? Imelda Marcos couldn’t fill that closet.”

Very carefully I refolded the scarf and laid it in its place.

“Candace?” Jack’s voice broke the spell. “Are you hiding up here?” The bulldogs followed at his heels, their bodies bobbing on little legs, dripping tongues betraying their sensitivity to the unusually warm night.

“Crap. Busted.” She sat up and hid the bottle beside the bed. “In here Jack.”

“Are you feeling all right?” He entered the room and spotted me in the closet “Oh, umm, sorry. I thought you were alone.”

“It’s okay, Jack, you can come in. I just needed some quiet for a while, and I wanted to get to know Martin better without the voyeurs taking part. Forgive me for being rude?”

“You can get away with murder in this house, but not snubbing Auggie and his Lemon Tart.”

“Jack, they’re insufferable, a living cliché.”

“That may be so, but they know people we need to know.”

Auggie had sat at our table with his bottle-blonde, Pilates-toned silicone-enhanced bride. Neither had bothered to acknowledge me. I had no idea as to the nature of Auggie’s importance beyond self-importance.

“I don’t need to know anyone associated with that egomaniac. He’s your problem, Jack.”

“My problems are your problems.”

One of the dogs, the boy, Felix, sniffed my feet and I bent over to make friends with him. He licked my fingers and I gave him a gentle scratch behind the ears, which caused him to fall down and roll over onto his back, an invitation for a belly scratch. At least the damn dog liked me; maybe the evening wouldn’t be a complete disaster as far as Jack was concerned.

“Jack, let’s not bore Martin with business talk.”

“Hey, he likes you,” Jack said. “Felix rarely approaches people the first time they come to the house.”

“Dogs and babies. What can I say?” I clasped my hand over the dried jerky in my pocket. The other dog had found Candace’s gin and licked the drips off the outside of the bottle.

“A whole bottle of Tanqueray, Candy? What am I going to do with you?” Jack sounded like a father. He picked up the dog. “Come back downstairs and share the gin around.”

In order to satisfy Felix’s desire for more belly rubs, I sat down next to him. In a flash he was chewing at my pocket and had Jack not been looking right at us, I would have ceded its contents. Instinct told me that revealing the bribe would have been a mistake. Better that Jack believed the dog liked me for myself. “Later, Felix,” I said, giving his ear a final scratch before I stood up.

Jack retreated to the corridor and the pooches went with him.

“That was close.”

“What have you got in those pockets?”

“Never mind, let’s be social. You can show me the rest of the house. Bring the bottle.”

“Nope, not until you empty your pockets.”

“It’s jerky,” I said showing it to her.

“Martin, you are truly wicked. You know that Jack’s a Buddhist, right?”

“You mean there wasn’t a single meat or fish course in that confounded meal?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t miss anything then.”

“Here,” she passed me the bottle. “Fortification.”

“Are we about to do battle?”

We padded barefoot to the staircase, towards the guests and Jack. The grand view from the top step invigorated my longing for something new and elicited a refreshed boldness within me. A huge painting dominated the wall next to the stairs. An abstract, the kind of piece that some people denounce as something their six-year-old is capable of and therefore worthless. What amazes me is that an adult can retain the creative freedom and sensibility of a six-year-old; I’d pay good money to be able to recover the sense of play and artistic self-confidence of my own six-year-old self. For a mournful moment I gazed at the painting. At the bottom of the stairs I moved back so as to gain greater perspective. The balance of colour and the sweeping brushstrokes pulled me inside the work; my imagination mined the deepest recesses of my life’s experience and pulled out a smile. Fuck those people, whoever they might be: six-year-olds rock. I admired Jack for daring to place such a huge piece in his home.

“Like it?” Jack asked. He held Issy in his arms.

“I do. Something about it makes me happy, it transcends description.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “That’s the most honest response anyone’s ever given.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

“Most people do one of two things: try to tell me what they think I want to hear or they try to show off their own knowledge of art.”

“I can’t claim to be a reliable art critic.”

“Nor should you want to, it’s all bullshit anyway.”

“So why do you collect art?”

“Because it gives me a chance to stand still and feel.”

Felix nipped at my trouser leg and I ignored him.

“Go ahead, pick him up, he likes you.”

I didn’t want to hold the dog, my hands were still greasy from handling the piece of jerky in my pocket, but neither did I want Jack to think that I didn’t like the dogs. Felix was going nuts on my trousers, there was a good chance he’d tear them, and his nails scratched my bare feet, so I capitulated and bent down to reach for him. With bullet speed, Felix leapt up and jammed his head into my pocket, grabbed the jerky along with a chunk of fabric in his teeth, and then took off through the garden door.

“What the hell?” Jack said.

“I think I’d better go,” I said.

“What was in your pants?”

“Beef jerky,” I said, backing away. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were raising the dogs vegetarian.”

“For the love of God, have you no respect?”

“Calm down, Jack,” Candy said, coming to my rescue. “He’s a dog, for Chrissakes, they’re supposed to eat meat.”

“Tell me it was grass-fed beef at least.”

“Are you listening to yourself? Get a grip.” Candace laughed and handed me the Tanqueray. “Stick around, Martin, this party’s finally started.” She punched Jack’s arm. “Be a good Buddhist and detach from your anger; you like Martin, I can tell.”

I took a swig of gin. It didn’t matter whether I stayed or went, either way it would be a long night of wanton longing because I’d fallen in love with two people.

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Prize winners

Short Story

Stephen Beechinor Bofill

Stephen was born in Cork in 1974. He studied at University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin. Following placements in language-teaching and financial services in north-east France and Luxembourg, he moved to Barcelona where he worked as a legal interpreter and then as a technical translator of Spanish, French and Catalan. He has read at Trilengua, the multi-language forum in Barcelona, and at Ambit magazine’s monthly event. His stories have appeared in the Dublin Review, Barcelona INK, the Irish Times, and online at NotesfromtheUnderground.co.uk. He lives in north-west London.

Poetry

Julia Deakin Then Sometimes You’ll Think

Julia was born in Nuneaton and worked her way north via the Potteries, Manchester and York to Huddersfield. Widely published, she has read on Poetry Please and won several competitions. Simon Armitage wrote of her first collection, Without a Dog (Graft, 2008): “Crafted, tender poems, written with passion and purpose.” Anne Stevenson “read it straight through at a single sitting”, enjoying its “mature wit and wisdom”. “Real linguistic inventiveness,” said Ian McMillan. “Bold, irreverent and wickedly funny,” said Alison Brackenbury of her Poetry Business Competition-winner, The Half-Mile-High Club. Her second collection, Eleven Wonders (Graft, 2012) is out now.

Flash Fiction

Sallie Durham The Elephant

Sallie lives in West Sussex with husband, young daughter and too many pets. She attended three universities and teaches English to all sorts of people. Sallie is shamelessly addicted to writing poetry and fiction. She won the 2011 Plough Poetry Prize, judged by Sir Andrew Motion, for her short poem ‘Other People’s Lives’. Her poem ‘Festival’ was published in the winter 2011 issue of The New Writer; she had a poem shortlisted for the 2011 Bridport Prize and her flash-fiction story made the Fish 2012 longlist. Sallie has written a novel and is close to completing a second.

First Chapter

Martina Newhook She Wore Pants

Martina was born in Hungary and raised in Canada. An emerging writer, she is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing Ph.D. program at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Over the past decade she has studied with Marnie Woodrow, Ken McGoogan, Eva Hornung (Sallis), Jane Rogers and Brian Castro. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Beach Metro News, Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Australian Writing, and online at The Rumpus.

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Judges

Andrew Crumey won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award for his most recent novel, Sputnik Caledonia, which was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Scottish Book of the Year. His other novels include Mobius Dick (a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize) and Mr Mee (longlisted for the Booker Prize and International IMPAC Dublin Award, winner of a Scottish Arts Council book award). He was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday from 2000 to 2006, and has written for the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times and other newspapers. He has been a Distinguished Fellow of Durham Institute of Advanced Study, and is lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University.

Sean O’Brien is a poet, critic, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He grew up in Hull and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and 2007 recipient of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award. His selected poems, Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976–2001 was published in 2002 and his new verse version of Dante’s Inferno in 2006. His first six individual poetry collections have all won awards, most recently The Drowned Book, which won both the 2007 Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes, the first time a book has won both awards. A book of short stories, The Silence Room, was published in 2008; Afterlife, his first novel, and Night Train, a collaborative work of poetry and drawings with Northumberland artist Birtley Aris, were published in 2009. His new poetry collection, November, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Forward Prize.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer of stories of all lengths between ten and a hundred thousand words, many of which have won awards. She is the author of a novel, The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury, 2011), two story collections, Words from a Glass Bubble and Storm Warning (Salt, 2008/2010) and contributing editor of Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt, 2009). She is also a freelance creative-writing teacher and writes (and occasionally publishes) poetry. Thanks to all this, she is fairly hopeless at other things.

M.J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne and achieved an honours degree in both. How the Light Gets In, her first novel, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2004), the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award (2004) and was joint winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award (2004). Hyland’s second novel, Carry Me Down, published in 2006, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, won both the Hawthornden and Encore prizes in 2007, and was also longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007. Her third novel, This is How, published in 2009, has received widespread critical acclaim, has been published in more than ten countries and, in March 2010, was longlisted for both the Orange Prize and the International Dublin IMPAC Award.

David Miller was born in Edinburgh and educated in Canterbury and Cambridge. He joined Rogers, Coleridge & White in 1990, becoming a director in 1997. He served as Treasurer of the Association of Authors’ Agents and, in 2008, was awarded the Orion Publishing Group Literary Agent of the Year Awards. He has been an adviser to the Literature Department of the British Council as well as the Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University, and is the author of a short novel, Today, (Atlantic) published in 2012. His clients include Nicola Barker, John Burnside, Nigel Farndale, Kirsty Gunn, Victoria Hislop, Magnus Mills, Cynthia Ozick, Tim Parks and Kate Summerscale.

Alessandro Gallenzi is the founder of Hesperus Press, Alma Books and Alma Classics, and the successor of John Calder at the helm of Calder Publications. As well as being a literary publisher with almost ten years of experience, he is a prize-winning translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist. His collection of poetry, A Modern Bestiary – Ars Poetastrica, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim. His satirical literary novel, Bestseller, was published in 2010 and his second novel InterRail was published in 2012. His Italian verse translation of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock won the Premio Biblioteca di Monselice Special Award in 2010. He lives in Richmond with his wife and two children.