Tobermory held his daughter’s hand as they walked along the corridor, their footsteps echoing from the stone walls. He sensed her looking up and gave her a little squeeze.
“Don’t worry, daddy,” Eleanor said, “I’ll be okay.”
“I know, Pumpkin,” he said, displaying a sad smile. “We’ll all be okay.”
“Did you bring Flibut?”
Tobermory pulled the stuffed, one-eared camel from his bag. “Yes, he’s here.”
“Because I couldn’t go without Flibut.”
He looked down at her earnest features, a pixie face in a halo of red curls. Just five years old, he thought, how could there be a god?
He could have scooped her up right there and bounded back down the corridor. But he knew the guards would pick him off before they got out. And a stranger would make the long walk with her.
The pub had familiar liturgies: football, beer, women, and Aristotle, although not necessarily in that order. Set upon a hill in the backstreets of Uplands, it also had a fine literary history, a meeting place for luminaries such as Kingsley Amis, who could often be found, in days gone by, luring students to certain reputational doom in the snug. And, it is said, Mary Shelley, when visiting her mother in Laugharne, would stop over for a bevvy.
‘You take that arm, I’ll take this,’ Evans directed him, murmured ‘Now’ and the two of them hauled the collapsed old man onto unsteady feet. They continued to hold him mistrustfully.
‘I’ll be alri`,’ the man said. His large jowls, as if transplanted from a boxer dog, wobbled with the rest of his plump body. ‘What was the sc…?’ Did we wn?’
Sclater Street, Brick Lane, and Cheshire Street don’t quite form a crossroads. There’s half a house difference, where 182 Brick Lane forms a dog leg with Cheshire Street. But that’s what the comrades called it.
“Meet you at the Brick Lane crossroads,” Mikey said at the branch meeting. “Sunday. Early. Make sure you get there before the trots.”
Rich and Larry nodded, joined in with the Internationale, then wandered off into the Whitechapel night, hoods high against the rain, not talking. Rich didn’t like Larry. He was flaky and didn’t have the level of commitment Rich thought appropriate for a true revolutionary, so it was no surprise when he found a note pushed through his door the next morning. It said, “Can’t make it, sorry. Larry.”hoods high against the rain, not talking. Rich didn’t like Larry. He was flaky and didn’t have the level of commitment Rich thought appropriate for a true revolutionary, so it was no surprise when he found a note pushed through his door the next morning. It said, “Can’t make it, sorry. Larry.”
“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
This was it. I’d had my share of bad luck. After decades of caring for my ailing parents and alcoholic husband, then losing all of them, one by one, it was time to put myself first. Midlife, I decided, would be a new beginning. The mid-point of a novel, after all, isn’t the end of the story, but the moment the protagonist takes charge of their own destiny.
Where better to kick-start a change in fortune than Las Vegas?
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” Nina slurred, and we all clinked glasses.
“Don’t look now,” she shout-whispered into my ear. “Hot guys, by the Blackjack table.”
I cringed. “We’re old enough to be their mothers!”
Watkins, a whole platoon in a single body, clumsily barged open the door. The committee room became a lot more crowded with his entrance. ‘They can’t deliver today,’ he said.
Davies, his face communion wafer white, said, ‘Why not?’
‘Strike at the depot.’
‘For the best,’ said Jones.
‘This is going to be a success!’ Davies insisted.
‘It’s meant to be a do to celebrate Phil’s passing, for god’s sake.’ Jones sat up aggressively in his chair. ‘Why do we need bloody fireworks?’
While the world waited for Armageddon with tightly clenched fists, tear-stained faces, and racing thoughts, Sir Michael Peckham waited for morning.
He glanced at the silent smart-slab sitting insouciantly on his bedside table. It said “02:14 – 5 Nov” on its face, but it was the things it wasn’t saying he was most interested in. He wanted it to ring and not to. A conflict of such breadth it seemed analogous to the sabre rattling provided nightly on the talking head shows. The hawks and the doves making cases for greater or lesser annihilation.
For two weeks, the world stood on a precipice, while his world sank into the abyss.
“I don’t fear death,” said Polypherous, “I fear not being able to say something original about it.”
As he sauntered across the freshly blackened road, its newly laid tar still odorous, to Quinit’s bakery on the corner of Beach Street, where the paving stones were still reddened by the blood of martyrs, and overflowing flowers in iron baskets bedecking the sills of tiny apartments filled with shouting boat-wives, hung like curtains, affording cool in the midday heat, he turned to Archegoron walking alongside, and asked him, “Do you fear death, Arch?”
He seemed nervous. ‘Good to meet you after the messaging, Cassie.’
After that, he Cassied her at the end of practically every sentence. Put him at his ease, butter him up, she thought. ‘You’re even nicer than your profile!’ she told him, and was chuffed when he blushed. No big ego then.
‘I’m more of a listener than a talker,’ he said. She smiled sweetly at this, holding his gaze with lingering craft. She hadn’t forgotten how to flirt.
‘You won’t replace me – not unless it’s somebody frigging desperate!’ Those were the words of Bill, ex-husband number two, on his departure. His words had nagged at her for a while, but here she was back on the dating game. Her confidence was breaking out again.
She’d chosen the café upstairs in Tesco. A late morning cup of tea before she went to work. Malcolm was a compact guy, a few years older than her, a couple of inches shorter . He was barrel-chested, making her think of a bullfrog. A gentle froggy: tender, a nice nature. She’d made mistakes with men before, but this one appealed to her. He was courteous and it was odd how she felt at ease talking with him, once he’d broken the shackles of silence.
‘I was brought up by my gran,’ he said, when she’d mentioned her three adult children in Blackburn. His mother had done drugs and had mental health problems.
Message to herself: Malcolm might need a mother figure. It could be arranged.
‘You’re local, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Belper.’
‘Handy.’ And she gave him a little come-on look. A sheepish expression on Malcolm’s face. She did like his shyness.
‘What do you think of me, Malcom?’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘Smitten?’
‘Well I… you know…’
‘You soon will be,’ and she gave a dirty laugh. No point beating about the bush. She was fifty-one, of large build, and she knew she’d never win a beauty contest. She wanted a man for love, friendship, and nookie. Malcolm would do her nicely.
‘So…?’ he said.
‘You’re sweet,’ she said standing up. ‘Fancy popping over to South Normanton to see me?’
‘Well I… yes…’
She gave him a peck on the cheek, and tapped his bum for good measure. That ought to get the message across. ‘Got to go to work, love. I’m in the next couple of evenings. Okay?’ He nodded, the same mix of embarrassment and interest. She was driving the show, and he didn’t seem to mind.
‘Soon then,’ she said, about to depart. ‘Hey, are you OK?’
Malcom was shaking, then he slid to the floor. For a nanosecond she thought of a frog slipping into a pond. Then her nurse’s instincts kicked in. She used her jacket to cushion his head, loosened his collar and tie to aid breathing, then turned him on his side when the convulsions stopped. She stayed with him until the ambulance came. Needs occasional nursing as well as mothering, she noted, as she drove to work.
The summer city riots had spread to the rural north. The news eventually filtered through to the isolated mining village of Brookover. Its pit had long been closed, a sportswear assembly unit squatting on its corpse. It was the main employer for miles, the owners having brought in scores of Eastern Europeans on the minimum wage to toil there.
The presence of the ‘foreigners’ was a grievance: Polish shops, strange languages in the market square. Their healthy diet marked out the incomers too. They were thin and fit, not paunchy and panting like some locals.
I take a drag, the nicotine hit combined with the rush of seeing you again proving a heady concoction. My legs twitch with such an urgency to run that I fear they’ll carry me down the hill, unbidden, towards you. I force myself to remain seated, hidden from view.
You’re smoking now too, leaning against our tree, our connection as natural as thunder and lightning. I can’t believe you’re there. In the place we said we’d meet in twenty years’ time if things hadn’t worked out.
“I mean,” she said, “clearly there’s something not quite right here, something’s missing.”
DI Jenkins sighed and bit down a sharp retort. Of course there was something missing. In fact, there were a few things – eyes, fingers, liver, lungs, kidneys, and, possibly most disturbingly, the victim’s trousers. His dentures had also been removed and were in the middle of a damp stain on the carpet.
He was just grateful that whoever had done this had stopped the mutilation there. After all, he already had one young constable throwing up in the back garden, and his sergeant was looking a bit queasy too.
“Fantastic imagination your kid’s got,” the emergency plumber said. “Reminds me of my two when they were ‘is age. Always makin’ things up. Really convincin’ too, told our vicar that the people next door was wanted by the coppers! That took some explainin’, I tell you…”
I smiled, mostly to hide the grimace at the amount it had cost to get him out on a Sunday morning.
Well, why not? Seven tasty days and nights with her in that holiday camp, fifteen years ago. She’d said she lived in the Swansea valley, place beginning ‘Ys’, on an estate. Probably married now and moved. Probably wasting his time.
Atop Ystalyfera, a couple of streets clinging to a hillside, a deep valley dizzying below. A faded place: dogs, kids, toys on the pavement. Even the evening sun seemed grubby. He was getting in the car, about to go, when, standing by a front door, a blonde, thirties, curvy, nice.
‘It’s day three hundred and sixty of the kids singing and the band playing, and I’m starting to wish it wasn’t Christmas every day,’ I said, my paper hat falling down over my eyes. ‘I’d feel rude sending my family home though.’
Sombre nods spread around the circle, everyone at the Christmas Song Support Group feeling my pain.
‘I hear you,’ said Bethan. ‘When the first partridge in a pear tree arrived, I thought, how romantic. But by day six, my neighbour with the bird phobia had called the police. It was the twelve drummers drumming that got me evicted. I didn’t have the heart to tell my true love that it was too much.’
Daniel was the longest-standing member. Every year without fail, he gave away his heart only to have it cruelly given away on Boxing Day. Despite his resolutions to give it to someone special next time, it inevitably happened again.
“Can you picture her face?” My words tumbled out of my mouth as soon as my sister picked up the phone.
“Huh? Whose face?” Evelyn replied.
“Mum’s,” I said.
At sixty years old, I had just learned that
most people possessed a superpower. They could visualise objects, places,
events and people in their “mind’s eye”. I could not. Suddenly the darkness of
my mind seemed blinding. What’s more, I felt the loss of my mother more acutely
than ever.
Our mother had died six months earlier, after a
long battle with cancer. Evelyn and I had nursed her until the end. Now there
was a gaping hole in my life. It was Larry, my husband, who had suggested
giving meditation a go.
I first met Jose Luis Vercas on the concrete apron jutting out into the mouth of the Targus where the splendour of the Manueline Port of Lisboa ends and a wide expanse of river divides the city from Alcântara. He was short, but well-muscled and possessed of that curiously Portuguese combination of a mane of swept-back, black and wavy hair; and a forehead so high it begged to be labelled, “domed”. He said he too was a teacher, but offered no hint of subject or at what level he taught and, to be frank, my interest did not extend that far.
“Do you have it?” I asked in my formal Portuguese. He smiled
and nodded – a slight movement of his head, causing a lock of stray hair to
struggle free. Patting his messenger bag, he said in accent-free English, “It’s
here.”
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