An eighteen-year-old male, short, face of a cherub that was partial to a drink, kiss curl, and large succulent lips employed no doubt for kissing the damsels and smacking pleasurably after imbibing. He fancied himself as a journalist, did he? The editor studied the new employee unenthusiastically. Another cub reporter who head-to-toe would prove to be unsuitable for the Evening Post.
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Have you ever wondered about that egg,- the one desperate Nagaina dragged with her into the abandoned rat-hole we called home? The one that Kipling doesn’t mention again. I was that egg. Now I am full grown. I’ve re-located. Living in another country you can deceive yourself that the past is insignificant, even that it never existed. In my reformulation, the story would have ended so very differently. Mostly I can forget that I was born an orphan, with 24 siblings slaughtered by that treacherous Rikki Tikki Tawi. I prefer the condensed moniker RTT;-to grace him with his full name may re- flesh memories preferred forgotten. Still, on hunting nights when the moon is waxing, I sometimes find myself involuntarily hissing it’s entirety, so magic-ing -up his mongoose wraithness.
Mom, you remember, perished but not before hiding me under the dung-enriched earth of a side alcove. Snakes,-cobras in particular,- have an excellent sense of smell and near-perfect recall. The offensive sweetness of desiccated rat-pellets mingling with the stink of jubilant mongoose, the muffled distant cries of Man as Mom was murdered, the jubilant rasping of RTT as she lay dying, these are my earliest memories.
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Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m just telling it as I saw things, without bias of species or kind. Everyone knows that fairies are generally delicate, helpful, magical creatures. Even so, like every species, there is a rogue element amongst the fairy community. My kindred gnome brothers and sisters have long known this. If we have rogue elephants and rogue humans, rogue fairies are inevitable (I’m not saying gnomes are perfect either).
We’ve all shouted ‘I believe in fairies’ to make sure Tinkerbell is revived and her light is rekindled. That’s a decent, humanitarian, cross species response to a kind creature in trouble; a very worthy fairy. But we also have to talk about those fairies who have fallen from grace.
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I think I may have been born to be wild, but it’s worn off a bit, Em Roberts thought.
She watched her husband shambling across to the tower blocks. His body, tall but stooped, seemed to have a demolition notice on it. ‘I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and now I’m paying for it,’ he’d whine to his lady listeners. ‘Had a motorbike when I was younger, chased after the ladies, partied till I dropped, lived for the day.’ A life of being on the razzle, and motor bike crashes, had left him as a crumbling exterior. His inside, Em believed, had been similarly gutted.
All he did was sit at home and mope, or limp about the estate, both legs stiff like their bones had motorcycle steel embedded in them. In the summer he’d be outside a tower block, trying to impress this man’s wife, or that man’s woman, with recollections of his glorious past. He still liked the ladies, and if you scrutinised his shambling body, and his unkempt grey hair, you might find a trace of former good looks, like a tint of blood at a road-crash decades after the event. Em had long stopped such scrutinising.
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Trudging home from work, Billy Thomas ran into Owen Davies and his brother.
”Hey Billy, do you fancy a night out in Swansea. The rugby boys have hired a bus and there’s one seat left.”
After a moment’s hesitation Billy thought why not, he’d never been to Swansea on a night out. Rumour had it the girls were fair game and the beer was cheap.
Owen warned Billy that he would have to do the ring of fire as it was his first night out with the rugby boys.
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The first time I saw it, I was thirteen. I thought maybe I was about to have a migraine. Mum always said she saw flashing lights before they came on. It was a ring of fire, whirling like a vortex above my Grandad’s hospital bed.
“What’s that?” I said, as Mum tearfully held his mottled hand. His breathing rattled like Darth Vader.
“What are you talking about, Jake?” she sniffed, distracted.
“That circle over Grandad’s head?”
“They’re just wires. Medical equipment, that’s all,” she said.
“No! That ring of fire.” I said. It blazed larger and brighter by the second, the heat melting me, though everyone else shivered with cold.
Then the machines started beeping and the doctors came running.
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Siegfried, the scout, was running out of hope and time. His return journey home would have to be within the hour. He pushed on a little longer and finally found his tribe’s salvation. A remote village with a river running alongside nestled in the foothills. He circumnavigated the dwellings in the moonlight, giving it a final check over before he returned to speak to the elders.
As dawn broke, the villagers resumed their daily chores. The priest attended to his duties of administering help to the sick and giving the last rites.
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Charlie looked down at his shoes. They were scuffed with curves of light-brown roughened leather where the door panel he kicked in earlier that morning scraped across the shiny toecap. He tutted and reached into the glove compartment for his shoe-shine kit. He always kept one in there, along with a tub of hair gel and a clothes brush.
Charlie liked to look smart. He thought it gave him an air of authority, a kind of lawyerly feel, judicial even. He chuckled at that: Charlie was no judge. In fact, he never made judgements. Things were simple in Charlie-World, there were just three states of being: a problem, not a problem, and no longer a problem. Simplicity was his byword, which was just as well because having too many thoughts about his line of work could lead to problems.
Continue readingBilly and his gang were at their Headquarters in the park. It was in the middle of a huge bush, where the Park-keeper, nosey old Mr Davies would not be able to see them.
Huw Parry had arrived last incognito. He wore a big black coat and sunglasses.
Gladys Morgan had been temporary enrolled as an honorary member as the boys needed a girl’s perspective on their problem. Owen Davies sat drumming his heels on the park bench that he had “borrowed” for the meeting.
“Come on Billy, spit it out, I have n’t got long, I told my mum I’d do my homework before tea.” Billy whinged.
“OK, I’ll come to the point. Have any of you heard about some bloke called Dai Lemma?”
“Never heard of him, he’s not in our school. How old is he?” asked Gwyn.
“I’m not sure, probably about the same age as my sister, fifteen going on eight.”
“Is he good looking?” Gladys asked, hoping for some new talent to arrive on the scene soon.
Billy glared at her, because he always thought she was hanging around for him.
“Look, all I know is that he keeps on visiting our house, Mam’s always saying it’s a right Dai Lemma, and every time she says it, my sister bursts into tears. She’s keeping me awake half the night with her crying her eyeballs out, I can hear her through the walls.”
Gladys, sensing the situation needed some women’s insight asked Billy
“Have you asked her why she crying?”
“Don’t be daft, she pretends I don’t exist, and I thought, maybe, possibly you could speak to her?” asked Billy pleadingly.
“Okay, I’ll try but you owe me big time Billy Thomas.”
Continue readingThey were in bed together, his thick legs heavy as floorboards on her thin legs. During the wine and the satisfactory curry, he’d alluded to moving in with her. She suspected he was going to return to the topic now under the sheets; put the question to her more directly, like a large bill you’re not sure you want to pay. They’d been dating six months, they were inching forwards perhaps, but they certainly hadn’t arrived yet.
Instead though he said, ‘Tell me about Jack. Why did you turn him down?’
Jack? With his dark straight hair resembling hers, and his similar green eyes, people had taken them for brother and sister. They were both of middle height and slender. ‘Is he an artist?’ friends asked. ‘He seems so sensitive, so delicate like precious china. Does he write poems to you, Ellie? Surely he does?’
She’d never felt such joy. They were just nineteen, and then one day Jack had opened up, told her he loved her, wanted to marry her, wanted children with her. ‘Not yet,’ she’d said, frightened, yet exhilarated, the emotion within her like a vortex she needed to understand before she gave in to its force. A week later he’d died of an undiscovered brain aneurysm.
‘Not yet.’ The words chimed about the bedroom, and she felt again that whirlpool turning her round and round. She’d meant let’s wait, we’re meant for each other, but let’s develop a little, more can we? Had Jack understood? Had she made herself clear before his brief life had been blown out? She still didn’t know. She still regretted that she might have caused him some hurt, her precious, porcelain-delicate love.
‘Jack?’ Baz was asking again, his sausage-sized fingers on her cheek.
‘I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t old enough.’
It was the truth, wasn’t it? She’d had to mention Jack to Baz, you couldn’t keep him wholly under cover. But it was like you might show a jewel to an acquaintance: carefully, keeping hold of it, not wanting them to know its value, not wanting them to touch it.
‘And are you now?’
‘I’m older, more mature. As for, am I ready? Well…’
‘I get the sense that if I asked you, you wouldn’t tell me to wait?’
Was he telling her he loved her? That he wanted to marry her? Was he just taking her for granted? He was rubbing his lumpy knee against her thigh. She felt his rough carpenter’s fingers exploring her stomach, felt like fine pottery being handled crudely.
Continue readingAll the phrases she could think of to do with dilemmas seemed spiky and harsh: between a rock and a hard place; the horns of a dilemma; in a cleft stick, no avoiding the discomfort.
Louisa had systematically cracked all her finger joints (again) and had returned to pacing the length of her small room whilst twisting bits hair round her right index finger when the doorbell rang. It was, she knew, Julia. She knew, because she had summoned Julia to help with the insoluble decision-making process. It is possible that Louisa had dramatized, maybe even over-dramatized her predicament, of this she was also aware.
After a restorative hug the two settled to their task
‘I’m so glad you could come round so quickly,’ Louisa managed to get out between sniffles.
‘Well of course I came, you’re my oldest friend,’ soothed Julia, at least she hoped it was soothing.
‘Oldest?’.
‘Look, we’re the same age. OK, my longest serving friend. Get us a couple of glasses, I’ve brought Prosecco and Pringles to help us get through this. Oh, and I promised to meet Charlie at 9 so we need to get this wrapped up before half eight’.
Prosecco was drunk and Pringles were munched as the skeleton of the dilemma and its potential for resolution were laid out for consideration.
Julia attempted, to no avail it must be noted, to de-escalate the problem:
‘It’s a matter of the road not taken. There will be regrets and doubts but at least you will have made a firm decision for one path. And it will be the path that seems to be the least painful’
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Since my last visit to Cartagena, a pair of aerial fig roots, previously just hints, were dangling near the statue of the eighteenth-century actor, Isidoro Máiquez.
“I’ve been away too long,” I thought as I brushed sun-dried leaves from the statue’s base and looked up at his Shakespearean pose.
Máiquez, although famous, is interesting to me as the father-in-law of Manuel Tamayo-y-Baus, author of “Un drama nuevo”, the object of my student’s study. My student, a young woman by the name of Analia is, in turn, the object of my secret desires.
I settled into a café chair facing the plaza, ordered a coffee and flicked open the binder of notes I made on her thesis.
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Rushing up the path, my nan, Iris, was waiting.
”Here’s the keys honey, have to rush as the girls are waiting for me. See you Tuesday and thank you for house-sitting for me.”
In a whirl, she was gone. Opening the patio doors, glorious weather, sunbathing for me. Five days of rest and relaxation on my own. Bliss. Wandering back inside after a few hours, my attention was caught by the birdcage rocking as a cat darted past. With my heart in my mouth, I looked into the cage. Nothing. The door wide open, no Bobby the budgie. Knowing how much the bird meant to her since my granddad died, tears welled up and I sank onto the sofa crying.
Continue readingI was living the dream, although I didn’t know it back then. Detached house, two children in public school, a husband with a well-paid job, two cars, flying off to exotic places every summer and skiing in the winter. How things can change within a few months.
My so-called friends wouldn’t recognise me now, let alone cross the street to talk to me. It’s the kids who have lost the most though, I realise that. What with their father committing suicide, our house repossessed, having to leave the school they loved. I keep on thinking back, trying to remember if Clive had been acting differently for the last six months.
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DCI Will Bailey eased his car into gear. The sun peered sleepily from behind its blanket of clouds as the six o’clock news pips sounded. The only other vehicle, a bin lorry, crawled up the street, its rhythmic beeping and flashing almost lulling Will back to sleep.
One of the bin-men, his old school friend Danny Hiller, waved as he passed. Will smiled. The great thing about living here his whole life was that no-one was a stranger.
His former school slid into view. He remembered playing in those fields, throwing down school jumpers for goalposts. When the jumpers inevitably got muddled up, the teacher would complain that no-one ever labelled their uniform. But the children were adept at identifying one another by smell, and the jumpers would quickly be tossed to their owners.
Continue readingIt took quite a while to perfect walking across the ceiling but I got it in the end. Just takes practice. As the boot prints attest, this has become a favourite way of taking exercise. And life takes on a fresh perspective.
Jan next door likes to fly. I often hear her talking to seagulls and launching herself off the window ledge. She sometimes drops a fish or part of someone’s pie and chip dinner on my doorstep. Always grateful for a food delivery, and I’m not going to complain about seagull poo on the window.
Continue readingShe’d keep some of his jackets and shirts; they were comforting. They smelt of him, his sweat and pipe tobacco. He was almost a presence.
A week after the funeral she unlocked the wardrobe because his absence was niggling, and ran her hand over his nice check jacket, an expensive one from Marks and Spencer. She felt something in its inside pocket. It was a letter which simply said: ‘What a great day yesterday. Love you lots, S.’
Who was S? When was the letter written? Don hadn’t been a romantic man, not one for giving flowers or chocolates. He was steady in his feeling for her, rather than ardent or demonstrative. He wouldn’t have kept a love letter: for this was a love letter wasn’t it?
Continue reading“What shall we do now Mummy?” Claire, my six-year-old daughter asked.
“ Yes, what shall we do now?” Her brother Andrew asked.
“I know” I said, let’s Skype Granny, and ask her what she use to do when she was a little girl.”
“Boring” stated Andrew, “ it will all be girls stuff anyway.”
“Okay, well let Claire ask Granny and you ask Grandpa.”
Pleased with myself for remembering things from my childhood that did not include the use of computers, I eagerly awaited my parents’ response.
The answer was not what I had expected or hoped for.
Continue readingI’m trapped in a tiny flat with my two mortal enemies.
We were okay at first, seeing each other in small doses but now lockdown’s struck, all we can do is either sulk in our cramped bedrooms or spend every second in each other’s company. As it turns out we really don’t like each other very much. Oh, sure before we’d sometimes go to the pub or go to the cinema but by and large we were casual acquaintances, which is how it should be.
John’s a carefree kind of guy, enduring in some circumstances and pretty damn funny. Samson’s the adventurer, the walls of his bedroom are covered in photographs of him standing by the Grand Canyon and the Great Pyramids and even riding elephants.
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The boys were all there: Huw Parry with his bow and arrows, dressed in his Indian outfit, headdress and all, Gwyn Griffiths with his spud-gun, Owen Davies with some firecrackers and matches he nicked from his brothers’ hidden hoard. And finally me, Billy Thomas, with my sling and small stones.
Venturing into the wood, we were determined to catch the small fox that had been causing all of us to be kept at home for the last few weeks. Gwyn told us all about it after overhearing his parents talking about it.
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