Thursday the 21st of April, my 6th birthday. A day indelibly etched on my brain. It was the day that I received 2 tickets to go to the circus with my friend Susan.
On the morning of that momentous day I was bubbling with anticipation at what my gift would be. My curiosity was soon satisfied when I opened my birthday card and discovered the tickets.
That was the beginning of an arduous but long and exciting journey that led me all over the world.
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That time in the quays when his da had gone to the toilet. O’ Flaherty, his smirk as big as the froth on his stout, had put his hand on his knee, then moved it higher to his genitals. Keegan had had the sense to stand up and follow his father.
‘Full bladder, son?’
Keegan told the old man what had happened. The latter’s face became hard, dark like the exterior of Kilmainham jail. ‘And him a priest!’ On returning, he said, ‘There’ll be no more welcome in our house for that bastard.’
Now Keegan was the sole mourner at his burial. Why had he come?
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Phil tugged at his beard and grinned at Jim, who sat to his right cradling his Epiphone. “You know, I think I ought to stand up for this.”
“Stand up, stand up for Jebsus,” warbled Jim, “you do what’s right, Phil. Just make it good. INTRODUCING mister Phil McSnorty on the vocal banjo.”
“What’s a vocal banjo, Jim?” Greg – dark eyes and darker demeanour.
“It’s like a Jew’s Harp, only with very little harp and not much Jew.”
“Okay, are we rolling, Graham?”
Graham Jimson gave a thumbs up from the control booth.
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Julie: We always thought it was funny to dress the same and pretend to the guys that we were sisters. We used to have great times together, we were always in each other’s homes.
Now it just seems that she is stalking me. Since I’ve been going out with Brad I find her presence unsettling. I wish she would find someone special for herself and leave me alone.
Samantha: Julie always seems annoyed at me these days, I just don’t know what I’ve done. That Brad is a right creep, she deserves someone better, and she just can’t see it.
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Sol Western blanched as he regarded the display cabinet’s shattered glass. The outer strongroom door with its array of locks and tumblers was intact, the silken white cushion still there, but the pea had gone! Probably his job as well. After three decades in the Corps of Commissionaires, concluding his working life in The Museum of the Pea had promised an effortless journey towards a comfortable retirement. Now all was in question.
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A DIALOGUE
Persons: Gilbert and Algernon. Scene: the drawing room of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking Green Park.
Algernon plays the piano; Gilbert reads a book.
Algernon: Gilbert my dear fellow, what is that book that has you so absorbed?
Gilbert: Oh, I’m just reading the latest from Christopher Crouch. Sorry, as I understand it, seeing anyone enjoy an author you thoroughly detest is torture.
Algernon: You like Crouch’s work? That’s fine, you’re perfectly entitled to bad taste. Although I find that getting angry at Christopher Crouch is rather like being enraged by a blank sheet of paper, what’s there to hate?
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As a writer yourself, you will know that lots of writers have given accounts of their craft. This doesn’t tend to progress much beyond the foothills of rocket science. They shut themselves in rooms without distraction, they stick to strict schedules and they eavesdrop on unwitting people. As someone slightly lacking in discipline for the first couple of points of writerly consensus, I embraced, for a while, the eavesdropping advice. And I have to say, this doesn’t always end well.
Like other writers wishing to capture ideas and observations, I too carry a notebook and pen everywhere I go. Get a small notebook – not so small you can’t fit much on one page – in an unobtrusive shade of beige, plus two biros. When I started out, I bought a pack of bright pink notebooks with ‘Britney is fab’ – reduced in Lidl – and a pencil with a pink feather on top to match. This may have seemed lacking in seriousness, and so many people commented on the pencil that it kind of blew my cover. Plus I didn’t have a sharpener. So beige and biros is the way to go, I think.
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Your two-up two-down is in a row of terraces on a scratch of land between Manchester and Stockport: a molehill overlooked by high-rise concrete. A secret pleasure is flicking through channels while he’s out at his club. A hundred stations yet nothing on. Then you are held by a figure, grey hair, less a face than a tombstone resting on a neck. An air of gravitas in that stony apparition. You pay attention.
The figure, well-spoken, a smoker’s cough like brown smog, is talking about his ‘artistic evolution’. The Slade, the teachers and influencers, the bohemian friends: names are dropped like Pollock paint splashes. A commitment all his years to art and sculpture; up at six a.m., seven days a week. He mentions the well-off family he’d rebelled against. They’d come round when fame’s sprig had bedecked him. He could afford to rebel, of course. Opportunities in his palm like a purse of ducats.
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Jackie sighed as she heard the tap-tap of high heels approaching her office door. Forewarned by Lisa in accounts, she waited as her door swung open. Leoinie crashed through sobbing, “They all hate me. I’ve never been anything but generous to them; now they call me names and snigger behind my back.”
Passing the tissues, Jackie told her to sit. “Why do you think this is happening again, Leoinie? You had the same problem in two different offices. I thought you had made friends with Dawn and were happy there?”
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It’s hard to savour every moment when everyone is fussing so much. Honestly, did half the ward of nurses really need to come? They buzz around me like polyester flies.
My daughter adjusts the deckchair, almost tipping me over in the process, asking me again and again if I’m ok.
‘The tide’s coming in, Mum, so you can’t stay here long. Are you sure you don’t want me to sit with you?’
I sigh. ‘I’m fine. You can leave me now.’
‘We’ll just be over there, ok?’
I nod, too tired to reply.
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Ensuring his surgical facemask and sunglasses cover enough of him to render his identity unrecognisable, Chris crosses the road to the dark frontage of Patel’s Stores and slides into the corner recess.
Wearing sunglasses and a mask at night might attract attention, except this is Pond Street W1, where the twenty per cent who aren’t are asking, “Would sir like to see the wine menu?”
His PR consultant boss, Gordon Price, is in the restaurant opposite. The bastard is wining and dining Clarissa Vroom, daughter of the recently ennobled Frank Vroom, a former car-salesperson, who is drinking buddies with the Minister for Greasing Palms. While as juiced as a fiddler at a barn dance, the Minister bemoaned the lack of cheap PPE to Frank.
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I worked hard in school but had few friends. When my classmates were out playing, I was busy working on my school projects or revising. My only friends were the librarians who would guide me to the books needed to help me in my revision. They taught me to use the computers and how to research for my projects.
My parents supported me in my attempts to do well in school, but through no fault of their own, both being badly disabled, there was no money to finance extras. My uniform came from the schools’ seconds’ shop. Because of this I was the outsider. Sometimes I lay in bed dreaming that one day I would be able to afford the expensive shoes and matching bags that Margaret Ford, one of the most popular girls in my class, sported. Along with her highlighted hair and manicured nails, she had everything, beauty, brains and personality.
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A group of boys were pouring over the local paper, gasping as they read the article. ‘Local Boy Jailed For Armed Robbery.’
Reminiscing, the boys thought back to their school days. Owen had always been a chancer. Selling cigarettes to anyone behind the bike shed for tuppence for one, nicking them from his brothers’ hoard in the shed. He unscrewed the clasp on the door, bypassing the padlock put on after an unfortunate incident with some mushrooms.
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Two words sprang to mind. Fat Chance. What were the odds on a crime scene being this neat? The victim, a message written in his own blood, and the murder weapon all within a few yards of each other. My gut told me something was wrong.
The boys in blue were happy enough to sign off on it. Even though the accused had a cast iron alibi, but I smelt a rat.
I went over the evidence again. There was only one fatal blow to the victim’s head. He’d have been dead before he hit the floor. The baseball bat had been wiped clean. The question was how could a dead man write his killer’s name in his own blood?
“Follow the money”, my instincts shouted. “Who was set to gain by this murder?”
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“Go,” Mother whispers, “you’re our last chance.”
I stand, confused, as she presses an activation key into my right hand, then runs along the corridor towards my father and the mob pressing against the hangar’s blast doors.
*
We’ve been spacers all our lives, living on the margins of existence. Trading goods wherever we can make credits, salvaging wreckage, fighting off pirates and raiders. The Federal Planetary Government doesn’t hold much sway out in the void, even though they’re becoming more authoritarian and imperialistic on the inhabited worlds. Rebellious types from beat poets to guerrilla militias had been crushed mercilessly according to rumour, but Father had dismissed the hearsay with a wave of his hand.
“No matter to us, girlie,” he’d said. “Go help your mother with the hull repairs.”
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Errol was reprising the success of the promotional video for the new intake of apprentices.
Marius’s erstwhile line-manager cum PR guru had stagnated whilst he, the star ascendant, rose… and then kept rising. Press releases, talk show interviews, the occasional drip feeding of the “facts” surrounding his new boss’s meteoric elevation, – Neurodiverse Apprentice of the Year to CEO of Brigham Enviro-Solutions, – were worlds Errol appeared supremely comfortable in.
“Premise. Humankind is imprisoned by the physical, physiological, and cognitive limitations of the body – limitations that BES’s programme of human enhancement has overcome, channelled, mastered.” Errol was on a roll.
“Part 1. The application of biomedical engineering principles to the ‘physical’ biology of the nervous system, monitoring the brain’s chatter through micro-electrodes, identifying somebody’s motor intent, then how the brain encodes behaviour. Somebody please identify yourself ” Marius stood to polite applause.
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We had a game where we would set up prompts and build stories together, sometimes wild, crazy stories. ‘It could so easily have been me….’ was one opener and
complicated, fantasy travel plans was another favourite. It made us laugh, and the dafter, the better. In fact we enjoyed doing most things together and even doing nothing together was better than doing nothing separately.
The ‘easily have been me’ one was a rich vat of story opportunities. We often returned to it.
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Yet another interview, let’s hope I get the job this time. I think this is the eighth or ninth job I’ve gone for. OK, I know I wasn’t qualified for some like the nanny’s job, but they could have given me a chance.
Why do they always keep you waiting? Sometimes I think they do it on purpose just to make you nervous, but today I’ve taken one of my mother’s diazepam, so I’m not fazed. The other two waiting look very la-di-da but a little nervous. One keeps dashing back and forth to the loo, while the other one is twisting her hands. You’d think she was on her way to the gallows. I think they have realised that I’m the obvious choice.
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In the stroke ward were a dentist, a heavy-metal bass player, an underwater welder, a politician, and Nat Wharton, bigshot drug dealer, whose bed was surrounded by a posse of gun-toting cops, each of them as large as a truck laden with opium.
The bass player didn’t know if she was in Carnegie Hall or a hall of mirrors. She listened to the faint boom ba boom of her hapless heart, trying to detect the backbeat and ascertain if the instrument was in four-four time.
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‘Aspen?’ Bill spat out the letter ‘p’ like it was a bitter pill. ‘What sort of name is that?’
I stroked my swollen abdomen and gazed out the window for added wistfulness. ‘Mum would have loved it.’
‘Hazel still rules our lives from beyond the grave,’ he muttered into his tea.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I stood up, losing my balance. In an instant he was easing me back onto the sofa, my vulnerability softening him.
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