I Am Your Special Friend

Northern Gothic

2011-07-06T13:59:00.001-07:00

This summer is keeping her own sweet time.

In-between homes and seasons, I cannot choose between an open window and closed. Equally afraid of drought and flood I keep one curtain open, the other closed; one window flung to the backyard fence, the second, tight-lipped in its plastic frame. I imagine this a fair compromise. The bedroom objects nightly, swinging like a schizophrenic. The evenings are socked and sleeved, the mornings drenched in a glasshouse sweat.

My teeth have taken on a strange, metallic taste. There are dangerous rooms in every door.

On the third night of the second week I fall asleep early with Flannery O’Connor, wide open, on my lap. It is a mistake, a sin perhaps, to fall asleep under Flannery O’Connor. Neither Southern nor Catholic, or even dead, my dreams are not quite old enough to keep pace.

Flannery O’Connor could not care less. She adjusts her reading glasses and bears down on me like a wall-mounted crucifix.

“How did you get in?” I ask.

“You left the window open,” she replies, “You want to be careful about leaving the window open. All sorts of folks get in through an open window.”

I find myself admitting fault. In the future I will keep my windows tightly closed, guarding against all manner of unwanted writers: Joyce, Poe, Steinbeck and the impossible horror of Heaney, humping all those mucky, potato dreams.

“Might I just have one small corner of the bed,” Flannery O’Connor asks, meek as Mary, legs crossed at the ankle, “The smallest of corners, just a tiny place to rest?”

I do not trust her. I can tell she is sizing up the wallpaper, already critiquing the showy swirls and coronets. She is writing me plain, blunt-faced, over-nosed for a Northern woman. She is casually undermining my intentions, both best and worst. I do not trust her. I am, however, jealous for her gall.

“I don’t trust you,” I say, “You almost always see the worst in people.”

“That may be true,” Flannery O’Connor replies, “But honey, don’t it make for a real, good read?”

And with that, Flannery O’Connor takes over the entire bed, occupant notwithstanding. Two miles shy of Dundonald, with a mobile telephone quietly keeping time on the dresser, I dream a dark, Southern dream; a guilty, Catholic, murmur of a dream, so well dreamt I doubt my own authorship.

The end of the world has fallen, not this time upon the Southern States, but rather upon a County Antrim cul-de-sac. The sun has quit her shining. The moon has ceased to be, and I, dressed for Sunday service, am waiting on a ride to some place else.

Though the end of the world has come and gone, I am righteously convinced there is a switch, an ordinary, electric switch, capable of turning the world back on. I stumble between bungalows, fingers fumbling for just such a switch. As I walk, hesitantly at first, and then with the growing confidence of a full-time drunk, my bare knees make contact with bricks and shrubs, small garden ornaments, the head of a silent, lawn sprinkler. I graze easily. I have always grazed easily. Having grown up grass-stained and sun burnt in provincial suburbs, I am well-accustomed to garden clutter and expect to encounter such obstacles, loitering in the pitch.

I am not expecting the creatures.

Save for the short life of a green-gilled budgie, a goldfish and a seething gaggle of schoolroom tadpoles, I am not accustomed to creatures. I am not a lover of creatures. I am not a dreamer of creatures.

I am not expecting the creatures; dozens and dozens of creatures, both homely and exotic, brushing fuzzily against my ankles, my shins, my elbows and, on one unsettling occasion, the outer rim of my left ear lobe. It is impossible to proceed through this sightless soup of fur and fang. I hunker down on the pavement and, too terrified to breath or refrain from breathing, await a slobbering end.

Flannery O’Connor drips across my lap, dragging downwards like a two ton rosary. “What d’you expect honey child?” she asks, “Nothing ever turns out nice in my stories.”

I hold my tongue. It seems pointless to protest. I imagine Flannery O’Connor infinitely eloquent when it comes to the last word.

In the dark nothing I find myself acknowledging God’s unquestionable justice, for the light and the darkness- original players on the primordial stage- have vanished first. The creatures, coming later, are granted an extra day. People, I suspect, will be last to leave. I take dry comfort in this thought. What strange world, I wonder, will we occupy on this very last day; lightless, groundless, airless and empty, will there be being at all in such a vast vacuum? Will sin persist without a captive audience?

“Course it will,” mutters Flannery O’Connor, “there’s always sin, girl,” and without warning or sound of retreat, strikes the lights in every window, so the whole street is suddenly blushing, naked blond. There are entirely ordinary people standing in each window. These people are frozen, illuminated, and framed by their velveteen curtains, posing confidently with a paper back book in hand, with a pipe, a dry martini, a finally sleeping baby, a smooth jazz record rotating on the turntable.

“Look at them folks,” says Flannery O’Connor, resorting to Southern-ease, “them folks ain’t no nice folks.”

“They look pretty nice to me.” I say, “They’re just ordinary folk standing in their living rooms doing ordinary things.”

“It’s just cos you far away. Step on closer, girl,” she says.

I step closer. I venture into flowerbeds and picture book lawns. I stand ankle deep in shrubbery. I cannot believe my own gall. Flannery O’Connor is right. The ordinary people are not nice. The ordinary people are animals; wild creatures and prehistoric beasts hiding inside ordinary people skins. A big, jagged zip runs from chin to stern, suckering the outside in.

I am shocked. I had not expected wild creatures. I step back, tumbling butt first over children’s toys and ornamental flower pots.

“What is the meaning of this?” I ask but Flannery O’Connor isn’t greatly given to meaning, preferring as she does, dialogue and death and elaborate, acidic endings. She stands upon an upturned bucket and adjusts her reading glasses, making good with her extra foot of judgment.

“Don’t ask me,” she chides. “I just write them.”

“Why don’t you write something nice for a change?” I say, “A happy ending can’t hurt every so often.”

“Folk’s don’t buy no happy endings. Folks likes a good tragedy. Tragedy reminds folks of home,” she quips, and turns me slowly by the earlobes, so I can take in the entire cul-de-sac.

With the lights up and the world no longer ending I can see there are wild creatures on every doorstep. Leopards fornicating on the front lawns. Lions pacing the gum-pucked pavements. Domesticated goats, Labrador dogs, sheep, cows, bandy deers and kangaroos congregating by the garage doors. One-armed sloths and prehistoric beasts are swinging from the telephone wires. A solitary crocodile winds its way towards the telephone box, green tail grooming the asphalt into loopy ribbons.

I am shocked. I step back and then, remembering the inside creatures, suddenly forwards and wobble there, hesitating in the flowerbed, caught between the lesser evils.

“Curious?” asks Flannery O’Connor, and despite the teeth I admit to a certain amount of morbid curiosity.

“Step on closer, girl,” she urges, placing a small, sweaty hand on the base of my spine, “take yourself a nosy look at them wild, wild creatures.”

I step forwards. I take a long Northern look. The creatures are people, ordinary small and larger people, wearing contact lenses and false teeth and kindly smiles as they hide inside wild creature skins. A big, jagged zip runs from chin to stern, suckering the inside in.

I am shocked, I had not expected ordinary people.

I examine my neck, and sure enough I am also zippered. The metal teeth begin at my chin and disappear into my shirt collar some six inches below. I look at my feet and, encased in high top sneakers, they offer no further insight. I examine my hands curiously. The left is flesh, the right fur.

“Hey,” I whisper, addressing a small crowd of stationary creatures. “Am I one of you or one of them?”

None of the outside creatures answer though the crocodile looks capable of swallowing me whole.

“No point in talkin’, honey child” explains Flannery O’Connor, “Them folks can’t hear you. You be having a dream.”

Flannery O’Connor and I are finished. Tomorrow evening I will fall asleep under someone nicer, someone distinctly less Southern; Enid Blyton most likely.

Connswater (with Christmas in her fingers)

2011-07-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

We are made of miracles, my family and I.

My Da says we are magic but I resent the association. Magic is mostly tricks and cleverness: a choreographed hand swipe, a well-concealed trap door, a Devil’s deal between head and eye. Magic is a weekend pursuit, an occasional evening during summer season.

We are much more permanent.

We are everyday with our wings, and our fire, our songs, our stories, and our odd, invisible ways. We are almost always about the others, bound by the desire to better and bless; to bind the duller things.

We are occasionally reluctant, often afraid. We are without the option of a weekend off.

My Uncle Nigel died of it. Driven insane by the itch he took a cheese knife to his wrists and worked himself free. I was seven at the time. It hadn’t started in me.

“Can you stop it from happening?” I asked my Da.

“Why would you want to stop it child?” He replied. “Do you want to be ordinary your whole life?”

“Aye.”

He clipped me round the ears with the television remote. It started when I was eleven.

It was a gradual thing, like the flu. For the first two weeks the thought of it went rumbling round my head; stop, start, rushing like the final fling of a washer cycle. It kept me up at nights. It was not pleasant. Neither was it awful.

It split me.

I saw it in the others and, though I did not realise at the time, began to hold it responsible. Because of it, my Mum was often absent. We had fewer and fewer proper dinners, resorting to Marks and Spencer’s pre-packs for every meal but Sunday lunch. My brother was odd and approachable now. He made lists and accomplished things and rarely lost his temper or smiled. My Da had grown thin on it, always asking for a larger dose.

It split me.

I was afraid. I was also drawn. I was a hospital; cancer and cure chasing tail round one slim space.

“Can you have it just a little bit?” I asked my Da. “Like, maybe just at weekends?”

“Course not, child. It’s all or nothing,” he replied. “Once it starts you’ll be wanting all you can get.”

“I don’t think so,” I whispered and took to praying nightly- praying to the Jesus God and the foreign God and the fancy God with very, many arms- asking for a small dose, a teaspoon rather than a bucket full; asking that I would still be me and not a strangling girl when it finally arrived.

My Da was right. Once it started, I was an avalanche.

I cornered my Mum over the Sunday dishes.

“Mum,” I asked, hands shoved deep into my pockets, “Were you ever scared of it?”

My Mum kept right on scrubbing at the roasting tin as she answered. “Everyone’s scared of new things, Sweetie. You just have to choose not to be scared. Your Da made that choice and I’ve made that choice and look how happy we are. Look how many people we’ve been able to help. Just accept it, Louise. I’ve never met anyone who regretted it.”

“What about Uncle Nigel?” I asked. My Mum ignored me and moved on to the gravy boat.

By the time I was fourteen it was part of me- an extra limb, a secondary tongue, a skinny glow; a remarkable life which only seemed odd in comparison to the every day people. And, while I was not my Da, and I was not my Mum, and I was almost entirely opposite to my brother, the same strange sap ran, like dental floss, through all our arms and legs.

Beyond the flat we were spectacle.

Other people paid good money for spectacle.

Other people were occasionally inclined to entertain the possible in a well-played spectacle.

Other people were split; spectacle was fine in moderation but could never replace the bread and butter religions which kept them ticking from one weary weekend to the next.

For years we performed in living rooms, in Leisure Centres and Orange Halls around the city. My Da breathed fire. My brother turned himself invisible and walked through walls, through doors, windows and, when the crowd were particularly insistent, through individual people. (This process, he claimed, kept him insomniac with heartburn for several days after).

My Mum flew, removing her waterproof anorak to reveal a pair of fully-fledged swan wings. She flew limited laps of the ceiling, clashing occasionally with the light fixtures and fire alarms. She bruised easily. The following morning her shoulders would begin to bloom; a drunken constellation of blue-hued rounds and rings bursting from her shoulder blades. Short on cash I bound her shoulders with Flora margarine and toilet paper.

My Mum smelled like a fresh-baked croissant. Undressed, for bed or bath, her back shone with a saintly sheen; one part heavenly anointing, one part unsaturated fat.

I touched things and they turned to Christmas.

This was not what I’d prayed for. In fact, having taken a terrible shine to the very, many armed God, I’d spent the last few years expecting glossy hair and extra limbs.

Instead, I touched things and they turned to Christmas: dark nights, fairy lights, tinsel, mulled-wine and stomach-churning good cheer, even in July.

I did not like to do this in public. I was a nervous child and acutely aware; a telegraph pole in an empty field. I had yet to grow into myself. My arms were pencils and, when fully unfurled, brushed the beginnings of my knees. I wore men’s trousers, two sizes larger than necessary, having convinced myself they gave the illusion of presence.

I did not know how to hold my mouth in front of strangers.

I had hoped that when it arrived it would be loud enough for both of us. I had hoped it would hold my arms easier and offer me extra words and phrases. I had hoped it would feel like the certain possibility of dancing, someday soon, while my legs were still young. Surrounded by the more spectacular arts, I struggled to see the point in Christmas.

For years and months after it arrived, I sat in the back row, knees pulled to chin, sweatered up like a polyester cocoon. I pickled slowly from the back seats, raging against my family as they flipped and fired and flew us further and further away from normal.

I raged against the ordinary people. I raged against their staring faces and their mobile photos, taken discretely under cover of chair backs and coat sleeves. I raged against the next day anecdotes and mockeries, and louder still against those who would press crumpled five pound notes into my hand; sweating testimonies of pity and intrigue.

Watching these ordinary people as they “oohed” and “aaahed” and clasped their hands over each small miracle, faces unfolding, momentarily forgetting the national disposition to gloom, I began to rage against my own selfishness.

On the eve of my fifteenth birthday I borrowed my Mum’s best dress, a powerfully-flowered Sarah Ashley number which barely covered my thighs, and took my place centre-stage with the rest of the family.

My Mum was delighted, my brother jealous and my Da, preoccupied by his own waning powers, barely aware of my presence.

My Mum flew. My brother turned invisible and my Da flamed a little before fizzling out in the damp, over-conditioned air.

I touched things and they turned to Christmas.

I began with foldable chairs, proceeding quickly to salad sandwiches and, after a large trestle table had proven my worth, moved on to actual, ordinary people.

I asked for volunteers. (It was best, my Mum assured me to begin with volunteers. “Half the battle’s getting them to admit the possibility,” she said.)

“Could I get a volunteer?” I asked, “Someone who hasn’t felt much like Christmas for years now.”

No one moved.

“Make it more specific,” my brother whispered, leaning into my ear, “They won’t come up unless they think you’re talking specifically to them.”

“Someone…” I continued, “Who’s wearing brown shoes AND hasn’t felt much like Christmas in years.”

A sound like the rushing of paper plates descended upon the room as dozens and dozens of elderly individuals hoisted trouser legs and raincoats to examine their feet. A hand raised at the back of the room, a second hand, gingerly on the very front row. I went with the front row. It was closer.

“Can I ask the lady on the front row to come on down?” I said, shoving my shoulders back to summon up some sense of swagger. I could feel the vomit ascending in my throat. I’d lost all faith in my own fingers.

Rising on a pair of sticks, the lady shuffled to the front and lowered herself into the foldable chair we kept for just such occasions.

“Right,” I said, “What’s your name?”

“Sandra,” she replied, already fishing in her sweater sleeve for a balled up Kleenex, “I wasn’t going to come up. Sure when you get to my age and your man’s long gone and you’re all crippled up with arthritis, well you can’t be expecting to feel like Christmas any more, can you? I wasn’t going to come up, but then you said about the shoes and I knew it was me you were after. Go on love. Do me. I’m ready for it.”

She held out her hands then, Kleenex resting wearily in the left, and prepared to receive what was coming to her.

Ordinary people, I suddenly realized, were much more complicated than sandwiches or trestle tables. I wasn’t sure what to do next. I looked at my Mum. She smiled encouragingly. I looked at my brother but he had turned himself invisible and my Da was nowhere to be found, having stomped off in an unfiery rage after failing to light so much as a birthday candle.

“Umm,” I continued, “Can you close your eyes Sandra?”

Sandra closed her eyes obediently. If it hadn’t been for the forty odd folks watching I would have taken the opportunity to slip out the fire exit and high tail it home.

“Umm, I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. Nothing spectacular happened. I put my other hand on her head. Nothing spectacular happened. I waited thirty seconds.

“Ummm, sorry, Sandra,” I mumbled, “I might need to practice on a few more sandwiches before I try people again.”

Sandra opened her eyes and smiled like a string of fairy lights. She stood up triumphantly and then, casting her walking sticks to the far side of the stage, clambered on to the foldable chair and launched into an impressive performance of the Macarena.

Pausing briefly to beam down on the audience, with all the undiluted effervescence of the Bethlehem star, she cried, “Oh it’s wonderful! You need to try this folks. I haven’t felt this Christmas since I was six years old. “

And with that, the entire room shuffled forwards, arms aloft, demanding a touch of festive cheer. That night I quit my hesitating and made forty seven pounds in crumpled fivers and pocket shrapnel. The money was one thing; the shimmery joy settling over strangers’ faces, another thing entirely.

I became incredibly good at Christmas.

I became more popular than my Mum and my Brother, (my Da, disappointed and increasingly bitter, had long since quit the miracle scene and passed his days at home, watching box sets of CSI and lighting cigarettes off his smoldering fingertips). I was making a fortune in small change.

In the Orange Halls and Leisure Centres I did Christmas without reservation. I touched people and, though I could see the war in the way their mouths set suddenly, they had no choice but to turn to Christmas, right there in front of everyone and their ordinary friends.

My confidence grew. I stood straight, no longer embarrassed by my six, lank feet.

Sometimes I was cruel, taking my old reservations out on the strongest skeptics. I enjoyed nothing better than forcing my miracle upon the gloomiest shoulders: the teenage boys, the curious spinsters and middle-aged men who were there under marital duress.

“Is it wrong,” I asked my Mum, in the car on the way to school, ”to pick folks you don’t like? You know, to do Christmas on them, just cos you know they don’t want it.”

“Well, Louise,” she replied, “That’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself. You’ve a duty to be responsible with what you’re giving away.”

“Aye, but it’s a really good thing. You’d be daft not to want it.”

“Not everyone thinks likes us, Louise. We’re not the same as the ordinary people.”

My Mum didn’t need to remind me of our oddness. I led a double life; miraculous by night, dripping ordinary by day. Between nine and three thirty I kept my hands shoved deep into my blazer pockets, purposefully avoiding eye contact with all seven hundred and fifty three girls who shared my school corridors.

In the early days it was controllable. Christmas only seemed to come out when I wanted it too. By my last year of school I was leaking everywhere, Christmas slipping free every time I touched a hockey stick or calculator. I took to wearing gloves indoors, claiming stress-related psoriasis each time a teacher complained. I was careful to keep my fingers to myself.

It’s amazing how reserved a girl can be when committed to keeping queer and isolated. I was a well-fenced field, a single bed, a museum for my own quiet thoughts. Even the teachers, aided as they were by registers and rotas and detailed attendance records, struggled to place me in a crowd. I left school at sixteen with three and a half GCSE’s. Save for the weekend miracles, I had not made contact with a single person in almost eighteen months.

Two weeks after I left school my Mum sent me out to work.

“It’s like this, Louise,” she said, waking me early to avoid a confrontation, “your Dad’s not well.”

“Is he going to die?” I asked.

(This was an appealing thought.

My Da had assumed squatters’ rights on the flat’s only couch. The living room curtains had quickly pulled rank, sealing in the sour stench of middle-aged sweat and Old Spice aftershave. A small mountain of toenail clippings and flaked dandruff had descended, like dessicated coconut, across the soft furnishings fending off all but the bravest television viewers. It had been almost two months since I’d last seen Hollyoaks.

My Da was clearly wading through another long night of the soul.

It had been over a fortnight since he’d last set anything on fire.

The previous week my Mum had purchased a cigarette lighter in the weekly shopping. Deeply humiliated by his own failure my Da had been unable to voice the need for a lighter. Instead he’d handwritten the word on a short shopping list, placing it directly below shower gel, soap and scouring pads, and above dental floss.

The toiletries were a decoy; a necessary buffer to cushion the bite of his own shame.

Though he’d only asked for one, my Mum bought a three pack of cigarette lighters, buying herself three times the grace period before the conversation arose again.)

I was rather hoping my Da would die. We had little need of him around the flat.

“Of course your Dad’s not going to die!” My Mum maintained, “There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s all in his head. He’s been huffing ever since he stopped being able to do his miracle.”

“Uncle Nigel died,” I added hopefully, “It was all in his head too.”

My Mum ignored me. She flicked an imaginary bug from the sleeve of her bathrobe and continued, “As I was saying, Louise, your Dad’s not able to work and I have to stay home to coordinate the bookings for shows. Your brother’s already earning. Now you’re sixteen you’re going to have to start contributing.”

“You want me to get a job?” I asked. My voice grew teeth and slid down the back of the headboard, becoming almost indiscernible in retreat.

“I’m not asking you to donate a kidney, Louise. I am simply asking you to get a part time job. Most sixteen year olds have part time jobs. It’s not too much to ask.”

“I have a job,” I stated bluntly, “I do miracles.”

“That’s not a job. That’s a service we do for the ordinary people. That’s not for making money.”

I pulled the duvet over my head, caving the hot, red heat blustering across my cheekbones. My Mum knew nothing of the small fortune, accumulating in shards and coppers at the bottom of my underwear drawer. My Mum was not the kind of lady who approved of accepting money from the elderly.

“Miracles are NOT for making money,” she repeated, “You need to get a real job- something normal in a shop or a hairdresser- bring a little bit of money in. It’s not forever, Louise. You can start college or do whatever you like once your Dad’s back on his feet. But for now you need to get a job.”

“I can’t,” I said and sat up regally to show just how serious I could be.

“You can AND you will, young lady. You’ve two weeks to find yourself something or I’ll get you a job in the old folks home at the end of the road, wiping bums and spoon feeding custard.”

“I can’t get a job, Mum.” I found myself howling. “I’m not normal. Everything I touch turns to Christmas. I won’t even last a week.”

“Wear gloves,” my Mum fired back and left me hyperventilating quietly into a flowery pillow.

Three days later I started on the checkouts at Tesco, Connswater. I wore a red polo shirt, a name badge and a pair of last year’s winter gloves, elastic banded at the wrist for extra protection.

Things were difficult. I did not fit in. Connswater was not ready for miracles, and I was leaking them all over cash register.

Ordinary gloves were not strong enough. There were accidents. I was afraid of my own fingers. I did my best to avoid the public, taking fifteen minute toilet breaks and twenty minutes for every cigarette. Forced strange by fear I developed the ability to breathe smoke back into each cigarette stretching the paper to saturation point.

On the checkout I kept my eyes down, ignoring my customers in favour of the smooth black fan belt as it ushered item after item into eye line. I learnt the marks and dips in the belt, anticipating with each fresh rotation, the egg shaped stain, the scotch tape permanently puckering and the perforated mark where the belt was bound together.

I did not speak. I was rarely spoken to. I did my best to appear foreign. No one spoke to foreigners in Connswater.

I was terrified of being touched; accidentally, purposefully, curiously, with careful intent. Every part of me, I suspected, was equally charged now, my earlobes and elbows just as capable as my fingers.

Miracles would not rest easily in Connswater Tesco. I kept my head down and my elbows in. I prayed nightly to the Jesus God, to the baby God, the grown up God and the God with very many arms.

“God make me ordinary,” I prayed, adding, as an afterthought, a penitent, “please.”

I continued to be miraculous, openly, in public, without consent or hope of respite.

Ordinary gloves were not strong enough to hold the Christmas in. Precautions became a necessity. I took my Mum’s advice and began wearing a pair of mismatched oven gloves; the right, baby blue gingham, the left, virginal white with a pink bow at the wrist.

The oven gloves made things awkward. Certain items were entirely manageable: potatoes, carrots, bananas, cardboard boxes containing cereal and icing sugar and washing powder. Anything large or lumpy could be manhandled, indelicately, from one end of the checkout to the other. I prided myself on managing.

Smaller items mocked me: individual packets of crisps, garlic bulbs, batteries, ball-point pens, Kinder eggs. Slippery items simply slid through my hands, landing with solid judgment on the conveyor built or, on the worst occasions, shattering at my feet. Despite my Mum’s best efforts with bleach, the laces of my work shoes were tinted a permanent burgundy, pink; bearing bloody witness to the half dozen ketchup bottles, Bolognese jars and Tesco-brand Merlots which had slipped from my grasp.

I operated the register with my elbows, occasionally resorting to tongue when my supervisor wasn’t looking. While my condition officially qualified as a disability- a term taking in physical limitations and the kind of headly madness afflicting our family- and thus allowed me “up to thirty extra seconds processing time per customer,” and the reassurance that I might, “utilize all means necessary in the efficient fulfillment of my job description;” use of tongue was actively discouraged by management.

On the second day, alarmed by my ability to process frozen food from point A to point B using only my tongue and well-sheathed, left elbow, my supervisor took me aside for a quiet word.

“Is there something wrong with your hands, Louise?” he asked, all the while nodding, nodding, nodding, and smiling with the clownish bravado of a children’s doctor.

I lied. I had, over the last few years, grown increasingly adapt in the art of glove-themed lies.

“Ummm, yes,” I said, “I had a double hand transplant last month.”

Untruth came easy to me. The lie grew momentum, suckling smaller kid lies until it threatened to engulf the entire supermarket.

“Yeah,” I continued, chin bobbing in time with my supervisor’s own empathetic nods, “I got hand cancer. It’s hereditary in our family. My Uncle Nigel died of it and my Da lost both hands cos he couldn’t beat it. They took mine off before it got to the elbow and, as luck would have it, they found a pair of donor hands to replace mine.”

“So, you’ve got a dead person’s hands?”

“Well, it doesn’t sound very nice when you say it like that, Mr. Greene, but yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“And the gloves?”

“I have to keep things sterile for at least six months.”

A short silence ensued during which the fire alarm began to bleat in the shop unit next door. My supervisor seemed to be weighing up the odds, deciding whether to believe the lie, question the lie or simply keep the status quo by carrying on regardless.

“It’s not that we don’t sympathise with your, ummmm….situation, Louise,” he eventually concluded, blushing as he tried to both look and not look at the place where the oven gloves met my wrists, “It’s just that the customers might not understand. It’s a little unsightly….and unhygienic. It’s for your own benefit really. Management don’t want you picking anything up off the till. Best to use your elbows where you can. Keep the teeth and tongue for when you’re at home.”

Sometimes teeth were necessary. The carrier bags refused to peel. The till receipts un-torn, began to snake towards the shop floor like a trail of unraveled toilet paper. I struggled to work the credit card machine.

On my fourth shift I arrived to find the till now bore a hand-made cardboard sign; “cash sales only.” I took the liberty of adding, “correct change, welcome.” Coins, particularly the pennies and five pence pieces, had begun to pose a problem.

The older customers were sympathetic.

“Is it a religious thing, love?” asked an elderly gentleman in a Glasgow Rangers tracksuit.

“Sort of,” I said and smiled with forced gratitude as he compared me to the “foreign family what has moved into the end of our Mikey’s street and keep their women folk all wrapped up.”

Others asked if it was an illness, some sort of skin condition, and I found myself once again nodding while a series of vociferous East Belfast ladies lingered over their groceries imparting advice on the treatment of shingles and psoriasis and eczema and trench foot.

The comedians asked if I was cold. “Gloves in the middle of July? Times are tight, eh?” they joked, beaming over their six packs of weekend beer, “are they trying to save on the heating?”

I smiled and said nothing. The girl at the next till had been fired for complaining in front of a customer. I could not afford to lose this job.

I lasted two weeks and three days. This seemed as much a miracle as anything emanating from my fingertips.

On the third day of the second week I arrived to find the next cash register over occupied by a middle-aged lady in a Doreen badge.

“Hello love, “ yelled Doreen, exploiting a brief break in the grocery parade to introduce herself, “What’s your name? I’m Doreen.”

I could not bring myself to answer. Hollering across the empty space between registers seemed like a surefire way to draw unwanted attention. Instead I raised both shoulders simultaneously affecting a shrug.

“Doreen,” yelled Doreen, smiling loudly like a geriatric nurse. “Who are you?”

I said nothing. I elbowed a watermelon from one end of the checkout to the other, using the tip of my nose to operate the buttons on the electronic scales.

Doreen stared. I could feel her stare, climbing into the back of my head.

“Ugh, I’m sorry, love,” she mouthed, a little quieter on account of the customers approaching her till, “I didn’t realize you were handicapped. That was very insensitive of me. Do you need some help?”

I felt my neck muscles contract, beginning the process of nodding out a definite “no” and then stopped myself, suddenly realizing I’d been feigning ignorance. I said nothing and continued pointedly nudging canteloupes and sweet potatoes across the grocery scales.

Doreen, unperturbed by my silence, turned to the lady on the next register, nodded in my direction and, with an East Belfast accent thick as thunder, asked, “Is that wee girl all there?”

“Aye,” replied Margaret from the next till over, “She’s canny as you or me. She’s just up herself. Wouldn’t bother with the likes of you or me.”

“I dunno, love. She’s the look of being a bit special needs. Sure, she’s wearing a pair of oven gloves to work.”

“Just ignore her. You’ve enough to be getting on with and your man from the office doesn’t like us to be bothering with Louise.”

“It’s my Christian duty to make sure the wee girl’s alright. Sure what sort of a woman would I be if I just left her there doing the register with her chin and everybody laughing at her behind her back.”

I heard the entire conversation from behind a mammoth box of washing powder, praying silently to all the Gods I could think of. Asking for Doreen to be struck dumb or dead. Either option would count as a miracle in my book.

“I’m just going to check on her,” shouted Doreen, “Would you take my customers for a wee minute?”

The next sentences were lost in a scurry of panicked squeaks and scratches as I abandoned the washing powder, the customer and all hopes of holding on to my job, and attempted to tunnel my way under the cash register.

After a few seconds I peeked up. Doreen moonish face, huge and haloed in the strip lighting, was peering over the credit card machine.

“Hello sweetie,” she said slowly, her entire mouth caving over each syllable, “Nothing to be scared of. Nothing I haven’t seen before. Sure, hasn’t my youngest got a wee touch of autism; goes pure hyper on the Smarties, so he does.”

She smiled. I glared darkly upwards. The wheels of my chair were beginning to bite into my ankle.

“Come on out now. Be a good girl. We’ll go into the staff room and put the kettle on. It’ll all be grand after a wee cup of tea.”

She smiled again. I folded into myself, massively unsure how to hold my mouth.

“There’s a silly girl, trying to use the till with a pair of oven gloves on. Sure, you won’t be able to use the buttons.”

Before I could brace myself to bite, to kick and stab and defend Doreen against the coming miracles, she reached behind the register and whipped my gloves off; right first, and then left.

Christmas came out, all of a sudden, like a vomiting bug. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help her. I stood up, six feet tall with the sensation of simultaneous loss and gain leaking from my fingertips. Everyone quit packing and passing and shuffling groceries to stare in my direction. I could feel their stares poking me like toothpicks pressing through my polo shirt.

Doreen did not stare. Otherwise preoccupied, her mouth fell open like an old-fashioned drawbridge. I could clearly make out the fillings in her bottom teeth. A strange noise came rushing out of her, something similar to the sound created by an oxygen tank.

People quit staring at me and stared at Doreen. It was pleasant to be periphery for a change.

Doreen sat down and then lay down, forming a stranded snow angel on the linoleum floor. Her hair- grey, gold, speckled- came loose around her head, flaming upwards in the direction of the trolley store. Her hands were starfish, swimming easy at the end of each arm. She looked drowned and lovely. It was on her like sunburn. I could not be sorry when the Christmas was this thick.

“Oh,” said Doreen and her smile went funny, all up and down at the sides, all into her eyes and cheeks, “oh, it was so lovely. Can you do it again?”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose so,” and I did Christmas, liberally, outrageously, without reservation up and down the aisles of Connswater, Tesco until even the frozen food section melted out of sheer, rosy, good cheer.

When the management began to notice strange things blooming on their radios and CCTV monitors they came rushing down to the shop floor and fired me in full view of tinned vegetables.

“Don’t you know where you are?” they screamed, “This is Connswater, Tesco; no place for miracles!”

And they gave me extra money- an entire month’s wages- to leave immediately, to say nothing of this to the local press, to promise I would shop at Sainsbury’s from now on. And they were careful in their calmness- fearing litigation and the local press- to state that I was not a bad person, that Christmas was a good thing, far too good for Connswater, Tesco, better perhaps for an upmarket place: Marks and Spencer’s perhaps, or House of Frazer. “You give these folks a good thing free,” my supervisor explained personally, “and they’ll always be wanting more.”

Then they escorted me from the premises, officially under the watchful eyes of three security guards, carefully prodding me with a broom handle lest the littlest part of them make contact.

Though they could not bear me in the public places, they were waiting in the car park, loitering by the bins, awkward and hungry, hands wide open, asking for a touch, just a small touch, the littlest slice of Christmas.

“The chance,” they explained uncovincingly, “might never come again.”

They would not meet one another’s eye.

And they would not raise their heads when I touched them. They would not say my name. The next day they would deny all, the following day feign ignorance. Only in the moment, when the Christmas came rushing over them, like hoops and drums and tinsel crowns, did they smile and allow themselves the enormous pleasure of possibility.

For Izzy on Your First Birthday

2011-06-17T04:15:00.001-07:00

Dear little bug,

On the eve of your first birthday- before the next year blesses you with a loudly tongue, and teeth, and any number of gracious words- It seems timely to level with your silence.

I should like to say you are much better than I’d expected. You are nobody’s second. You are a furious thing; a five act play, even at one. You are all fists and flyaway hair and laughing, laughter grins. I would think you wonderful even if you were not ours.

I should like to suggest that baby is much too small a word to contain you. For you are lightning moods and whirlwind beauty and a pair of tiny, concrete heels, already capable of holding ground. You are a dolmen girl, dancing on your chubby thighs, defying all the powers of gravity, of good sense and childly sorrows. I am occasionally jealous of your ease. People- friends, family, complete strangers at the corner shop- smile when you smile. You are kindly infectious. You are a wall against which your brother bounces and builds and grows, daily blessed by your unswerving regard. You are everything I asked for him, and more.

I should like to admit my prayers are sometimes selfish. Father God, keep her small and holdable and chiefly ours. Bless her with books at an early age, if only to hold up the other side of conversation. Pickle her smile so it will not shrink with the advent of years, so it will grow and glow, like Christmas blooming in the dimmest places. Give her a homely heart, and permanent feet; the kind inclined to root down mere miles from the front door step. (Secretly I suspect you may be strong enough to circle the entire world, stringing one grand story to the next.)

I should like to say I love you in a handful of hurried details.

The songs you sing, one part Papa dirge, one part kitten purr, as you kick up your heels, driving the swing set dangerously high. They say, at your age, I hummed like a halfwit when I ate. It is good to raise hymns to our tiny pleasures.

Your arms, thick wristed and grabbling, which stick like strawberry jam around my neck. Your little legs digging, climbing me like a cat pole, making a break for the ceiling, the roof tiles, the flight path thereafter. Your pillowy butt bunching until you form a wriggling mountain on my left shoulder. I could wear you like this for years; warm and clutching and shampoo smelt, the ultimate accessory.

Your forehead which puckers in exactly the same manner as mine, forming corregations of sincere concern just below the hairline.

The way you laugh like a shipyard worker. The way you gulder like a Free Presbyterian minister, single finger driving home the punch line. I find your confidence remarkable in quiet places and coffee shops.

Your hair, which defies clips, bands, hats and all sensible attempts to contain its wild, molten halo, and swirls about your forehead like a flock of wily swifts circling for a good place to nest.

The way your father calls you Izzy, “destroyer of the universe,” and you willingly oblige. You are a wrecking ball when it comes to Duplo, dinners, train sets and make believe shops, selling all manner of make believe goods.

Your name, which has graciously accepted each fresh adaptation like a hook, like a button or a well-placed stitch, altering intonation to better fit your shoulders. Your name, which is mostly Izzy and sometimes Isabelle, occasionally Iz, or in comic moments, Izzle and, in one instance only, Belle. Your name, which is always, only underwritten by the purest promise of God himself.

Driven domestic by your oatmeal curls, those summer dresses and the cut of your ankles in dolly shoes, I am currently stitching you something simple and sweet: Isabelle perhaps, a Bible verse, a wonky heart or ladybug. I have commenced this project with love and good intention, with thumbly fingers and no such plans. I feel you will agree this is the best way to begin anything monumental. I am progressing slowly. After a week’s efforts, one side of the letter B has emerged. I am confident of completion though it may take very many months to sew you down. I am aiming for your eighteenth birthday now, or your wedding day, whichever comes first. I am finding you terribly hard to summarize in one small frame. You are half an inch more marvelous every day.

Paul Erdos* Almost Speaks

2011-06-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Jan McNeill's artwork and a Radio 4 Documentary about the prolific, Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos*

“Mathematics,” she explained, “is permanent. I prefer words. Words are negotiable. Words are flighty; finely-feathered creatures, perfectly capable of adapting to order.”

(The man who loved only numbers said nothing. There were fractions for the kind of thing she was doing to him.)

“Supposing,” she said, “We have a conversation.”

(The man who loved only numbers thought this highly unlikely. The likelihood of conversation he calculated at 0.003456 %. )

“And,” she continued, “I hold my own. But you take your end of the conversation and run with it, out the door and down the street, never stopping to drop the thread of thought. Do you think your words will hold form fifteen years from now, stretched thin, over three continents or more?”

(The man who loved only numbers plotted his response on graph paper. Indifference crept slowly along the horizontal axis. Sheer boredom clawed its way upwards on the vertical. The man who loved only numbers fell somewhere in the North Eastern quadrant of the page).

The man who loved only numbers was far from permanent.

He did not marry.

He produced no children with which to monument his achievements.

He kept no possessions besides a small carry-on suitcase, in which, logic supposed, he kept a change of underwear, a toothbrush and a selection of Roman numerals in both upper and, easy-to-use, lower case.

Whilst he maintained the physically deceased had simply, “left,” individuals who had stopped doing math had, in the opinion of the man who loved only numbers, “died.”

For sixty two years the man who loved only numbers moved from one house to the next, begging sofas, spare bedrooms and fold-out beds for the simple purpose of temporarily shouldering his enormous mind.

Very occasionally the man who loved only numbers would find himself hesitating in the thirty second grace between one calculation and the next, a space as slight and godless as the silence sandwiching detonation and explosion. On these occasions the man who loved only numbers would turn to those who happened to be in the room- academics, journalists, retired academics and the belligerent wives of academics- and, with exceptional eloquence comment on the friskiness, the sheer, magnetic appeal of a well-turned out number.

The man who loved only numbers could not commit to one continent for fear there were numbers- eights and nines and unfulfilled sevens- waiting to be discovered in foreign cities.

The man who loved only numbers could manage no more than one month of permanence. Even then, his mind galloped forth, across oceans and mountain ranges, multiplying illicitly with perfectly innocent numbers on the other side of the world.

“Ah,” she said finally, having found the man who loved only numbers, waiting on the doorstep of this, her seventh home of the season, “I apologize, Sir, I jumped to conclusions. I see now, numbers are just as fleeting as words.”

(The man who loved only numbers formed a quick quadratic equation on the doorstep; numbers over words. Top-heavy, the equation ran to some sixteen thousand configurations, all the time refusing to resolve. The man who loved only numbers could not find the words to express his dissatisfaction but the number 9.37 seemed adequately morose to do the job).

“I’m the same with words,” she continued, “I can’t seem to stand still for following the story.”

(The man who loved only numbers counted 59 individual letters in her sentence. He could not be held accountable for punctuation having always believed it to be somewhat excessive, a snide flourish with no mathematical equivalent).

“It’s strange,” she concluded, holding up a single carrier bag containing one crimson heel, two blue biros, an ancient toothbrush and a well-thumbed copy of Wuthering Heights, “So many words. I had expected an answer by now. Yet I seem all the more inclined to questions.”

(The man who loved only words clutched his own suitcase firmly and pushed his way over the doorstep. After all these years he was more than capable of spotting a case of long division).

* nb. Erdos should be spelt with two dots over the o but I can't work out how to do this on my lap top

Fine Cutlery

2011-05-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

Cuts were coming. The cutlery drawer was no longer capable of housing them all.

The specialists were safe: the grater and garlic press and hand-operated can-opener. Each occupied a niche market, inconceivable to the average utensil. The commons grumbled over a solution.

“What about the ice box?” asked the spoons who were, by nature, negotiable, idealistic and prone to accommodate anything short of a microwave oven. “Couldn’t we move to the ice box, settle in with the frozen peas and fish fingers? We’re flexible. We could slide down the sides unnoticed.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” answered the knives, blunt as always, “Who ever heard of frozen cutlery?”

“Besides,” whispered the forks, (fence sitters each and everyone; on salad days and pastas, siding with the spoons; in sterner matters: steak, pie and politely eaten pizza, with the knives), “It’s not just us, everyone’s getting it tight these days. I heard things were particularly frosty in the ice box.”

“Best to stay put,” suggested the potato peeler, safe in the knowledge that no one, not even a well-intentioned cheese knife could steal his spot.

“Decide among yourself, otherwise they’ll just get rid of you all,” advised the corkscrew and held his twisted tongue on the theme of sporks and splades and all the other futuristic kitchen solutions suggested by the early eighties.

“We’re staying,” argued the knives, “You can’t cut shit without us. And, as an aside, we could even spike in an emergency, though only softish foods, ideally cheese.”

Though loathe to lord it over their neighbours, the forks turned, demonstrating with silver quick stealth their ability to cut all but the most stubborn meat products. “And,” whispered the smallest of all forks, a dainty desert number, polka dot patterned on the handle, “You can ALWAYS spike with us.”

“Spike my arse,” yelled the spoons, abandoning all notion of compromise, “We’d like to see you spike soup, or ice cream for that matter.”

“Or yogurt,” added the knives, and fell suddenly silent as their own limitations crept slowly, like cataracts, across their aluminum blades. Fearing a coup they turned upon the spoons, metal teeth flashing, “and what, pray tell, would you do with a roast chicken; scoop it into submission?”

“Of course not,” the spoons retorted, “but we’d like to see you serve the mashed potatoes without us.”

“We’re screwed,” cried the teaspoons who were, by their own admission, the least necessary of all and as such, too small and shrill to dilute their mounting panic.

“You’re only solution,” suggested the corkscrew, who could spot the quiet life, approaching, “is retreat.”

“Retreat,” echoed, the potato peeler, the soup ladle and all three measuring cups, “jump before you’re pushed. You’re far too multi-functioned for your own good.”

And thus thirty six pieces of cutlery came to cast themselves headfirst down the back of the drawer, settling with tinny determination into the dusty bowels of the kitchen cabinet where they rusted gently for weeks and years, safe and smug and justified in the knowledge that mere hands and fingers could never replace them.

Jan Carson's 115th Dream

2011-05-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt that Bob Dylan was my godfather.

It was the singular best dream of my thirty one years.

(Previously this slot had been occupied by the dream where Phil Mawhinney and I were invited to join Band of Horses on an underwater stage, fashioned entirely from newly-sewn grass. I am no longer as fond as I once was of Band of Horses.)

Last night’s dream took place in the living room of a close childhood friend. The décor was exactly as it had been in 1986 but the television set was showing a recent episode of Desperate Housewives; sound set to mute.

Bob Dylan entered stage right. He appeared in the guise of Love and Theft era Bob, casino mustache, bolero et al. (This instantly struck me as odd, having spent the last three months fixating on the baby-faced ‘60s era Bob.)

I was sitting on the sofa watching Desperate Housewives with the sound turned off. I remained sitting in the presence of Dylan, and due to a nervous inability to control my hands in awkward situations, reached for a copy of the Woman’s Realm sitting on the coffee table in front of my knees. I flicked absentmindedly from back to front- a dream note no doubt reflecting the colossal amount of time I’ve spent in the Belfast Synagogue of late.

Bob Dylan did not speak for ninety seconds or more. He turned his back to me and moved along the mantelpiece, examining the Royal Doulton figurines, the framed family photographs and the carriage clock belonging to my late grandfather; a retirement gift from the good folks at Harland and Wolff.

After almost two minutes of silence Bob Dylan turned and removed his hat, (did I mention the hat; a single-striped affair, better-suited to a fictional detective?) and addressed the coffee table.

Bob Dylan: “I am your godfather.”

Me: “Really?”

Bob Dylan: “Yeah, I just remembered after thirty one years. Sorry, it took so long.”

Me: “It’s cool, Bob. Really this is perfect timing. I’m writing a dissertation about you. Maybe you could help me out.”

Bob Dylan: “I’m not really into that sort of stuff.”

Me, (even in a dream like state coming to the humbling realization that I’m not that interested in having Bob Dylan for a Godfather if it doesn’t lead to acquiring cool stuff, at the very least a few interesting anecdotes,): “Oh….well, could I come on tour with you? In the last good dream I had, Band of Horses let me be in their band and they weren’t even related to me. You’re my godfather. The least you could do is let me on to the tourbus.”

Bob Dylan: “Ummmm probably not….I could get you some free tickets to a Wallflowers show.”

Me: Stony silence.

Bob Dylan: “And a copy of my greatest hits.”

Me: Stony silence during which I regret jumping ship from Bruce to Bob.

Bob Dylan: “It’s signed…I’ll just leave it here on the coffee table beside the magazines.”

Me: Stony silence during which I formulate my epitaph.

Bob Dylan: Awkward retreat backwards through the living room door, replacing hat as he exits.

Me, hollering after Dylan’s retreating forehead: “Hey Bob! I’ll let you be in my dream, if you’ll let me be in yours.”

The disappointment wakes me up. It is the size and shape of an entire continent, Australia most likely, and lodged in the space between my throat and ribcage. I remember that Bob Dylan is not my real godfather. As a third generation Presbyterian born and raised, I have never had a single godfather, not even a thoroughly disaffected one.

The disappointment dissolves in the shower. I watch it swirling round the plughole, mingling with the post-lather shampoo. I listen to “All Along the Watchtower” nineteen times on repeat. I cannot hold my grudge against Mr. Dylan. He won’t stand still for long enough.

The Trouble with River Cities

2011-05-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

The celebrated architect, Charles Lanyon, finding himself far too busy to bother with death, will be 199 years old on his next birthday. He is the world’s oldest living architect and, having never grown tired of drawing or building or undrawing or rebuilding, is personally responsible for approximately forty thousand free standing structures within the greater Belfast area.

(This number is a conservative estimate of course, and precludes Lanyon’s forthcoming “virtual Village,” project plus several dozen post-modern parking facilities designed by the anonymous, guerilla architect LCD, a moniker widely believed to be one of Lanyon’s many pseudonyms.)

Charles Lanyon and I are enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee in the Botanic Avenue premises of a local coffee house chain. Charles Lanyon is having a latte. I am saving the magazine twenty five pence by opting for the house drip. The back of Lanyon’s head is reflected in the mirror, also my front. My posture is terrible. I am glad I rarely see myself in a seated position.

“Well,” says Charles Lanyon, opening negotiations, “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”

I am nervous. I do not know how to hold my mouth. It feels like an undone shoelace. I can feel the customary hotness begin to spread across my breastbone. Charles Lanyon is a notoriously awkward interviewee.

(“It’s not like you’re interviewing him,” my colleague in Arts and Culture, has warned me, “It’s more like he’s interrogating you.”

“Bring some tissues,” added the assistant editor, “I heard he had the lady from the Tatler in tears.”

“Psshhh,” I replied, making a sound like a pair of disgruntled curtains, “It’s architecture. How difficult can it be?”

Thereupon the assistant ed gave the colleague from Arts and Culture a loaded look, suggesting, with one semi-raised eyebrow, a tactical retreat. They scurried off into the tea room with every intention of out moaning each other over the ginger snaps.

“I,” the assistant ed, no doubt began, “once interviewed Van Morrisson on an empty stomach.”

“ ’s nothing,” the colleague from Arts and Culture would hiss, “I covered the Balmoral show three years running…in heels.”

And on and on and on until the electric kettle emitted a climatic yelp, heralding a temporary tea cup sized truce.

At the magazine horrendous assignments past, present and future are commemorated on a weekly basis; rolled out for display like a series of second hand medals on Remembrance Sunday. )

Charles Lanyon is a 198 year old architect. I am an accomplished journalist with various certificates and an expensive notebook to prove it. I select a pen from my extensive arsenal of stolen stationary, pop it into a point and take the opportunity to formulate an opening question. Slickly bypassing the usual drivel- the ‘where did you grow up?’ and ‘what do you do for a living?’ and ‘isn’t this a great wee run of weather we’re having?’ sort of questions, which form the backbone of provincial journalism- I settle for something simple and wedge-shaped, a casual slide into the meatier material. Then, with tremendous professionalism, I draw my unlaced mouth into something roughly resembling a spade and begin digging.

“Best thing that’s happened to Belfast in the last hundred and ninety years?” I ask, casually offering him two thirds of a cellophane wrapped pack of bourbons. He declines with a slight inclination of his left palm.

“Easyjet,” he says and pauses for a mouthful of coffee, “It’s a lot easier to get out now…cheaper too.”

“Well, to be honest Mr. Lanyon…or is it Sir Lanyon now?”

(It seems inconceivable that, after 198 years and a mid-sized town’s worth of Victorian facades, Lanyon would still be sitting here, a mere Mister whilst the likes of Elton John found himself decorated for orchestrating the Lion King soundtrack.)

He doesn’t answer. He’s doodling all across the coffee table: floating skyscrapers, ten mile tunnels, underground fountains and what appears to be an underwater escalator.

I plough on regardless, “Mr. Lanyon, I think our readers were looking for something a little more architectural…a bridge perhaps, Stormont, the City Hall, even a leisure centre would do at a pinch.”

He plucks half a dozen sugar sachets from the bowl and balances them on the table top, forming a tiny, fairly-traded, Stonehenge approximately half way between our respective coffee cups.

“It doesn’t have to be one of your own,” I prompt. Any building would be fine. Even a road.”

“The Westlink,” he says.

I start to write this down.

“That was a joke,” he says.

I put a thin biro line through the Westlink. I take a long, slow sip of coffee. It’s already turning lukewarm in the cup. “Next time,” I tell myself, “I will take the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Anything’s better than covering the never dead.”

Lanyon interrupts my thoughts.

“I’ll tell you what really troubles me,” he says suddenly.

I pop the point on my pen to imply interest, “yes, Mr. Lanyon, what exactly really troubles you?”

“The electric doors at Connswater Tesco, they trouble me greatly. I think they’re on back to front or something. They only open from the inside. It’s no good…no good at all. When it’s raining you get soaked waiting for someone to come out and then you have to run through before the doors close. It’s not a dignified way to get your groceries…It really troubles me. Write that down, lady, maybe somebody will do something about it.”

I pretend to write this down. In reality I write my own name, slowly with loops. Our readers do not shop in Connswater Tesco.

“Great,” I say, struggling to keep the sarcasm in check, “Any other changes you might like to suggest Mr. Lanyon…apart from the doors at Connswater Tesco, of course?”

He stirs his coffee, three complete revolutions of the cup with a wooden stir stick.

“The parking spaces outside Marks and Spencers on the Newtownards Road are ridiculously tight. It’s a wonder people don’t get jammed in. And the Donegall Road has started to smell funny…not bad, just funny, like the inside of a hamster cage. The floor tiles in Castlecourt are far too slippery when it rains. And there are a disproportionately high number of murals featuring George Best. What about a nice one of Liam Neeson, maybe from when he was in Star Wars?”

I reach for my coat. I will venture on to Wikipedia when I return to the office and write a nice, retrospective piece, highlighting the monumental highs and lows of Lanyon’s career.

“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Lanyon,” I say, “Good to hear you’re still interested in Belfast, even after all these years.”

Charles Lanyon looks across the breadth of the coffee shop’s interior. He appears to be scrutinizing his reflection in the mirrored wall opposite. He sticks a finger in his mouth and, using his own saliva, sleeks first his right, then his left sideburn into submission. He checks the mirror again and smiles, satisfied with the results.

“The trouble with river cities,” he says, even though I haven’t asked, or even thought to ask, “Let me tell you about the trouble with river cities.”

“Right,” I say. I haven’t the slightest idea what Charles Lanyon means by this. I pause to consider the best way to escape quickly, fearing a further forty five minutes of elderly rambling. “What exactly is the trouble with river cities?”

“Well, young lady, there’s one unenviable constant flowing like a broken tap through every one of these unfortunate cities, Belfast included.”

I’m scribbling all this down, emphatically, in short hand: his posture, his timing, the thing with the sideburns, his slightly archaic turn of phrase. Our readers enjoy the work of local poets. This is exactly the kind of flowery shit they go for.

“Do continue,” I say, and some long-buried memory of my grandmother causes me to sweep my hand regally across the tabletop. Half way through the movement, somewhere approximately twelve inches above Stonehenge, I feel idiotic and snap my arm back into my side.

“What is the trouble with river cities?” I snap.

“Eventually everything sinks,” the celebrated architect Charles Lanyon replies, “Or flows far out to see and forgets. The trouble, my dear, is in telling the difference.”

Gold Pen

2011-04-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

He woke early with a butcher boy’s mouth.

The sycamore outside their window had leapt forwards with the sunrise, great arms fumbling like fine-fingered tentacles against the double-glazing. The room was swimming in underwater light.

Not quite conscious, he dreamt himself a submarine, rising and sinking with each neat turn of the ceiling fan.

He did not move. It was pleasant to imagine himself drowned and clean and empty inside and out. “Like a launderette,” he thought and smiled, for he’d always favored chlorine and soap powder and furniture polish above all the other sensual smells; the adult musks and mellows of seduction. “Like a swimming pool,” he thought, “first thing in the morning, before the swimmers.”

He lay for a moment watching the leaves jungling like antique wallpaper up and down the bedroom walls. Without thinking he held his hand to the light and, palm flat, caught a fistful of tangled, light leaves. He felt nothing, but the fine hairs on his arm had already risen in anticipation of something soft, something parched and comforting. He withdrew his arm, disappointed.

The sky was tissue paper blue, peering nervously beneath the curtain pole.

He insisted upon sleeping with the curtains open.

“It’s better this way,” he explained to her, “You wake naturally, sort of slowly, not all of a sudden like an alarm clock.”

At first such idiosyncrasies had charmed her. She’d tolerated his curtains, his insistence upon ankle socks, his over use of the word, “therefore.” Lately, she’d found herself rising in the night to tug the curtains shut; a pair of linen continents coming in for the crash. Though she’d never admit it, even in jest, it was worth the nightly interruption to rise in the morning, already in possession of the upper hand.

The larger things she could manage: the well-buttoned job, the politics and parents, the way he held a steering wheel, insistent and delicate as her own elbow.

He drove her crazy in the little details.

They’d drifted apart in the night, rolling against the undulating incidents of the dream world until her spine set against his like a pair of angry bookends. He could feel the hot space between their shoulder blades sweating in the early April heat as if backs could breath and break and bend to bear another’s needs. Back to front and faceless it was easy to recall at least five separate reasons why he’d chosen her above all other girls:

Her eyes.

Her shoulders, capped as they were with hurried constellations of marmalade freckles.

The small gap- a grand canyon in his estimation- between her front teeth, which allowed her to out sing him, to out whistle him, to out smile him in the company of friends and strangers.

Her hands which were surprisingly masculine and yet- with their crabby bluntness, their tiny, lemon-shaped slithers of nails and squat palms- seemed to promise long years and capability, home cooking, child-bearing and old-time endurance.

The sly tide of her personality which came rushing forth with impossible strength and shot home just as quickly and could not be measured, nor predicted, nor prompted with gentle hand or harsh.

He did not disturb her. These days she was easier to believe in backwards.

Disentangling his ankles from the duvet, he swung himself upright and sat for a moment on the bed’s edge allowing his blood to readjust. He reached into the bedside cabinet, recovering his watch and the gold pen which lived there neighbors to his High School Bible, his reading glasses and the contraceptives she’d been insisting upon since their second date.

He slipped the watch unto his wrist and glanced at the time. Half a second later he could not recall any of the numbers displayed. He looked again. 6:17. It was a digital watch, fashioned from metal rather than plastic, each slat linked by springs to the next so the entire wrist section expanded and contracted to fit neatly around his wrist.

Over the months the watch had gnawed on his flesh leaving permanent indentations, like a gum pink ladder ascending and descending the plain of his right wrist. He’d come to trace the crags and gulleys of his own arm nightly, a nervous habit engineered to help him fall asleep.

Though she never thought to raise the subject during their waking moments, it drove her crazy to feel him twitching and testing on the far side of the duvet.

He pinched the lid off the gold pen and lifted it to his nose, drawing deep on its chemical stench- sugar and poison and metal plastic- his nostrils thrilled in response. He turned the pen upon its head and righted it suddenly, relishing the weight and welt of the little ball-bearing dashing from one end of the tube to the other.

The gold pen had been the very first purchase of their marriage.

He’d angled for a toaster, the only necessity not covered by their comprehensive wedding list. She’d insisted upon the gold pen.

“I can’t be doing without toast,” he’d argued, “I’m not a cereal sort of guy. I need my toast before breakfast.”

“Toast be damned,” she’d said and slid her hand suggestively inside his shirt, “I want people to know you’re mine.”

He’d paid for the pen himself. It had been expensive for a pen; the same price as an entire pack of felt tips. He’d complained at the till. It was in his nature to complain, “most expensive, bloody pen, I’ve ever bought. It’d better last forever.”

She’d chided him for his stinginess, laughing through her gap tooth until the check out girl began to harmonize and he could not help but relinquish his own thick spirit and his head swam warmly, puddling in the middle like a soft-boiled egg.

“It’s a bargain,” she’d said, “when you consider what you should have paid.”

“I’ll buy one,” he’d promised again, “As soon as I get the rest of the wedding paid off.”

And she had understood. She’d always been good at understanding. Even at the altar, with the quiet shame of a borrowed wedding band binding their vows together, she had been more than understanding. She had hers, and he would have his as soon as the wedding was paid off, and in the mean time they’d make do with good will and gold pens. And she had continued to understand every morning like clockwork for the first three months of their marriage. She had been the one up early and insistent, bearing down upon his finger, marking ownership in semi-permanent ink. She had been the one to retell the story with cavernous, good humor at dinner parties and office get togethers and, in January -over luminous cocktails- at next door’s wedding. She had found it odd and charming and symptomatic of just how uncompromising they could be.

And it was only in the last few months that she had stopped understanding and he had had to remind her, first with words and then, when words had failed, with simple shapes and pictures. He had understood enough for both of them then, waking with the leaves each morning to apply his own wedding band in gold, marker pen.

He shook the pen a second time and pressed its fibred point into the cushion of his fingertip. Withdrawing the pen’s nib he anticipated the usual glob of gold varnish. His fingertip came away Northern pink and virgin. He pressed again, harder this time, feeling the flesh rush to invade the underside of his fingernail. Nothing. The pen had run dry.

There were other gold pens of course, other rings and other solutions, other ways to bind the basic gaps together. All these, even the simplicity of other pens, failed him in the moment.

He turned upon her sleeping spine and, full-fisted, knocked as if pounding upon a stranger’s door.

She woke angrily, her first thought the open curtains.

“Ow,” she said, “Quit banging on my back. What do you want?”

“The gold pen’s done,” he said.

He waited for her head to arrive at the same small ocean, to contemplate it and claim it and charge it in tandem. Whilst waiting his lungs ascended towards the ceiling fan, badgering, en route, good sense, reason and that fickle switch which triggers nausea in the easily ill. His rib cage shrunk to the size of an average pear. His breath tightened eagerly. He was a submarine struggling to surface.

“Oh well,” she replied, “It was a silly sort of idea anyway; like something teenagers would do.”

He did not move. It was an end of sorts to know himself finally drowned and clean and empty inside and out. “Like a launderette,” he thought, and could not bring himself to look at her.

Ten Things Worth Remembering At Three

2011-03-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

For Caleb

A year is a small jar for so much cluttered happening. You are three hundred and sixty five times more adventured than you were last birthday.

I have started a collection, a grand museum for your smiles, your snorting, toddler laughs, your small sorrows and monster stories. I am keeping you in case the individual years begin to merge or slip unnoticed down the back of the living room sofa.

I am keeping you in crayons; perfectly scribbled masterpieces tacked lightly to the bedroom wall so they slip loose during sleep, tumbling into my dreams with all the unclipped imagination of the very young; the very, probably possible. I am keeping you in stories, both specially written and borrowed. I am almost an expert when it comes to tall tales. I know the Gruffalo by heart now, (also the Wild Things.) I can name up to sixteen fictional, tank engines and keep a pocket reserve of “guess what Caleb said,” stories, handy for dazzling the hometown cynics. Against my better judgment I am also keeping you in the daily muddle of toddler life: abandoned hats and wellington boots, plastic figurines, (both whole and partial,) sand pit sand, grating between the duvet and bed sheets in my childhood bed and those two muddy footprints on my dashboard, like Hollywood hand casts marking your role in our latest adventure.

Also pictures. “No more pictures,” you say, and refuse to stand any which way but upside down. “Too many pictures,” they’ll say, “We could paper the living room in photos,” and thank me later when it’s harder to recall your hair at two, the cut of your grin before teeth, the tight wonder of your debut days. “My pleasure,” I reply, fresh-blessed by another season thick with pictures worth holding on to. In the shuffling I choose ten tiny snapshots, a mere spoonful from the jar but representative of this your third and loudest year yet.

1.

Father God calls you up on your Mother’s mobile phone. The conversation is short and somewhat one-sided. Father God, you inform your Mother, is hanging out in W5 waiting for you to come join him. Father God, it seems, is just as excited about interactive science experiments as his three year old sidekick.

2.

You are reasonably obsessed with poor people. You ask me about them in the bath, (where we almost always have the most earnest conversations.) You want to give them moneys and home made buns; top hats most likely, for my culinary skills stretch no further than microwaving chocolate, and you relish the way Smarties can be pre-licked. You seem to think I am a poor person. You give me twenty five pence with the express command that I use it to buy food. When refused, you cause a distraction and slip five single five p’s into my wallet. For a little kid you are very good at teaching grown up lessons.

3.

You are so very loved it’s been leaking out of you for years now. Everybody loves you. We pray these people at night, individually, without the use of the letter C which, even at three, still comes out T-shaped. It takes up to ten minutes to complete a single rotation. Towards the end you begin to list domestic animals, cartoon characters and a third repetition of Uncles Mick and Danny, who are still dominating your charts. When the prayers have been stretched to snapping point, the toothpaste sucked, unbrushed, from your toothbrush and the prerequisite two library books consumed, you are canny enough to instigate another sleep, scuttling conversation, (“amazing,” I often think, “the things a toddler will invent- social injustice, dinosaurs, theology, more dinosaurs, cellular phones, the water cycle notwithstanding- to avoid that last lights out moment.”) You are directly responsible for the fact that I haven’t seen the first fifteen minutes of Holby in almost a year.

4.

After twelve speaking months of demanding the yellow cd, followed by the blue cd and then the yellow again, and once more the blue, in bipartisan rotation from Belfast to Ballymena and back, you finally change your tune. Aged just two years and eight months you climb into the front seat, slip on my heart-shaped sunglasses, (upside down, so your button nose disappears into the frames and you look like a very small and approachable, Elton John,) and you ask for Bob Dylan by name. I could not be prouder. Super Nanny is right. You can teach a toddler to willingly partake of anything- boiled vegetables, bed-making, grizzly-voiced folk singers- through persistent perseverance.

5.

You emerge from the ball pit at Mookie World bare foot. Your Father spends twenty minutes crawling through primary-colored plastic balls in pursuit of your lost socks. We buy you new socks from a sock machine, (this, I’m sure, is some kind of sock scam; who ever heard of a vending machine dispensing underwear for pre-schoolers?) You look very little in the ball pit, like a storybook pixie. I suspect some older boys have stolen your socks. For the first time in my life I nurture the desire to beat up small children.

6.

You call jigsaws, jig puzzles and parrots, pirates. Sometimes you make words up, (this seems to run in the family.) No one corrects you. Starbucks is Barbucks and we go there often for cinnamon swirls and good conversation. Returning home after one such coffee date your Mother asks, “what did Auntie Jan buy you today?” and, with perfect comic timing, you reply, “alcohol.” (This, I assure your parents, is another made up statement.)

7.

Boxing Day is a kind of measured explosion: crackers, gift wrap, high-pitched Christmas music. It seems like a good idea to chorale the children in the living room with a Bertha dvd. Twenty minutes later you appear at the door, herald witness to a terrible accident; the Christmas sweets have leapt, unaided, from the mantel piece, scattering themselves liberally across the floor boards like golden, chocolaty manna. “Tidy it up,” we say and, with the willing help of Cousin Naimh and Gwynneth, you tidy the entire stash into your mouths. Half an hour later we find the three of you upside down on the living room sofa, sock-soled, sugared up and giggling, like a trio of baby bottle rockets.

8.

Half way through the year you go through a rock star phase. You have a leather jacket, ripped jeans, up-spiked hair. You are ten times hipper than the rest of us combined. We form a band. I play keys. You play a Tesco’s badminton racquet. Izzy slabbers over a tin whistle. We have artistic differences. You always want to do that one shouty song from Little Vines. I want to do the Rolling Stones. The band splits up. You are more than capable of doing the shouty song by yourself.

9.

The summer gives you a little sister. By six months she is almost the double of you. It takes you two short weeks to understand that she is neither a brother nor a dinosaur nor a temporary fixture. You love her like a light bulb. You show her things, most notably, at little more than a month, how to eat an entire slice of pan loaf. You tiger hug her all over the living room rug and lend your plastic figurines (both whole and partial) liberally and generously. You cut a brave trail for her to follow all the way into her grown up days.

10.

Your head is heart-shaped. It takes me three years to notice this.

Slight Return: Two Weeks on the Lesser Roads

2011-02-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

"for all the little boats who sailed with me these last few weeks."

1. One

There are two boats which sail to Scotland every Saturday morning. One is for stripy green people, the other for the blues and reds. It becomes immediately apparent that I have boarded the stripy boat. I am, by fortunate accident, wearing a green scarf and reading a second-hand copy of “Monsignor Quixote.” I feel like an undercover spy.

2. Two.

Burns Night, (to include the apostrophe or not?), is a mystery to me. Ninety five percent of the spoken bits are beyond my comprehension, settling to the extreme East of my Ulster Scots upbringing. I share my innocence with an eighty something year old man in a kilt. “Dinnae worry,” he says, removing a hip flask to add a generous splash of something Scottish to his coke, (The stealth seems entirely unnecessary with a full bar, located at the end of our table,) “Sure, I’ll explain everythin’ te ye.” And explain he does, in painstaking detail. “This is the bit where there should be bagpipes,” he whispers and we make the noise of a dozen simulated bagpipes. “That there’s haggis- it’s a Scottish delicacy.” I feign ignorance, surprisingly impressed by what is, in essence, sheep flavoured oatmeal. “This next bit is the ceilidh dancing.” No one asks me to dance, not even for the Gay Gordons which I actually know how to do. I am transported back to the County Antrim barn dances of my awkward teenage years.

No explanation is forthcoming for the enormous glass of whipped cream and marmalade which arrives in front of me. The concept, I imagine, would be lost in translation.

3. Three

The best place for a theological “discussion” is the Criterion. The second best place is the Central. From time to time, weather permitting one might also find the cobbled walk home a surprising source of revelation. If no other venue is available the chip shop in Anstruther will suffice. However, the fish is a constant distraction. Even Stanley Hauerwas would struggle to compete with the battered haddock.

4. Four

It takes almost three hours to wind from Stranraer to Glasgow. To quell her stomach, which lurches upwards with every wiggled bend, and will not bide her so much as a second thought for the Maltesers sweltering in her backpack, she closes her eyes and listens to Teenage Fanclub’s Songs From Northern Britain. This record has always, or at least since 2002, reminded her of the grey skies and public toilets, ‘watch out for deer’ signs and lay by picnics, characteristic of all those Carson family adventures in this neck of the woods. Even now, far too old for camp beds and kid things, the songs settle like radio jingles for a bygone era. She feels far less inclined to throw up. Eight hours later in a church hall in East Glasgow, five elderly musician with banjo’s and woolly hair quit their Scotch traditionals to hum their way through “Ain’t that enough.” It’s as if the evening has read her mind. She carries a haggis all the way home and falls asleep in a ghost room. It is a magic time. Almost anything might happen.

5. Five

The world’s first computer is located in Bletchley Park, ten minutes from Milton Keynes. It is personally responsible for the birth of all future computers and computerish things: Ipods, Ipads, Sonic the Hedgehog, Skype, Bill Gates and probably holograms. It was designed to decode important German intelligence messages during the Second World War.

The world’s first computer appears to be built from Meccano and Christmas tree lightbulbs. It constantly eats and emits reams and reams of old-fashioned printer paper, the kind with hole punch holes along each side. It is housed in the sort of porta-cabin normally used to contain rural Sunday School groups. A stuffed squirrel has been lodged comically between its circuit boards and switches.

The world’s first computer looks mortified.

6. Six

I spent the weekend with an enormous cheese. Though amply contained on a single table, I later described it the size of a small roundabout. This cheese had traveled, with wine and wine and wonderful sausage, from France to Milton Keynes in a stranger’s suitcase. On Sunday evening it traveled from Milton Keynes to Belfast, (a somewhat pyrrhic escape,) in the pit of my belly. Safely situated on the Donegal Road it slowly turned prophetic. For three nights straight I dreamt and dreamt and dreaming, paced its birthplace, Le Route de Fromage; a cheesy version of Jacob’s Ladder.

7. Seven

An Indian gentleman on the tube between Wembley Park and Amersham has lost his tie. He is becoming increasingly distressed. “Twenty one years,” he confides, “twenty one years working for London Underground and I’ve never once lost my tie.” He intends to ride the tube, up and down the Metropolitan line, all day, until he locates his missing tie. He fingers the collar of his shirt nervously as if hoping for some kind of polyester miracle. Distressed as he is he hops off at Harrow-on-the-Hill to cajogle myself, and my enormous suitcase unto the correct train. I shake his hand. I say, “don’t worry too much about your tie. The open-neck look suits you... nice and casual.” He smiles. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me. I wish I had a London Underground tie and twenty one years to give him.

8. Eight

Clenched between a rock and a radiator, four and a half hours from Glasgow to London town, I begin to overheat. The man to my left is enormous; hungrily assuming one third of my seat as he munches through four Greggs pastries whilst reading up on Celtic linguistics. His fingers leave grease stains, like watermarks, on every page. I am reading a book about Bob Dylan- the first of twenty three this season. I try to read without using my elbows. This proves impossible. I progress towards the sung sentiment. Outside the window, the North goes seething past in a trickle track of trees and warehouses and terraced houses. Rain sweats sideways on the window. A fresh-baked Dylan is prophesying in his Minnesodahr drawl. “A hard rain’s a gonna fall,” he shrieks and like a migraine it seethes across Prestwick and Oldham, Carlisle and Manchester. Forty years old, coming on fifty, the rain’s as hard as ever. The music is beating on the windowpanes, urging the weary, the over-coated and anonymous, to slip this hothouse carriage and take their chances with the hardy elements. I press my fingers into the glassy darkness and, miles between here and there, consider all the hard rains falling, fell and yet to fall upon my latest days. And, far from exhausted, I feel cleaner, keener, less drag for all the drenchings. “I’ll know my songs well before I start singing,” concludes Dylan, and washed free of all extra limbs, of sentiment, sin and dull ambition, the words and bones are wonderfully apparent.

9. Nine

“Commeniality.” They tried to tell her it wasn’t real, a made up concept, a misspelling, a mere slip of the imagination. Meanwhile they drank the wine and passed the bread and grew butter fat on stories. And when the good humour was dripping down the walls, pooling under the dining room chairs and stripping the years from their wrinkled foreheads, she could not help but call a spade. “Commeniality,” she said, “all my faraway friend sewn together with knives and spoons and sing sought liturgy. And the food is just right and the wine is ample and the pudding still frozen but well-intended. Such an evening as this deserves a label: “commeniality.” “You’re thinking of “commensality” they explained gently, pointing out the Oxford English definition; “fellowship at the table; the act or practice of eating at the same table.” They were right. She often took liberties with the Oxford English. However, on this occasion she argued back. “Commeniality,” she stated firmly, “A brand new word, wider than any wave of commensality, for there’s not a table on God’s green earth big enough to contain this.”

10. Ten

Caleb to Jan on the occasion of her thirty first birthday: “I am going to break you with hugs.”

Jan to Caleb: “Ok, then Bud, you go ahead and try.”

He opens like a crocodile and swallows her whole. He hugs hard for a little kid. She wears these hugs like bracelets and bangles; overcoats against the adult years. Far from breaking, with each individual hug she feels less prone to fracturing. She is stronger, shinier, Christmas-full; polished as God intended.

Folds

2011-01-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

One:

On the third day I woke to find my forehead had folded in the night. Peering through fog-furled eyelids I counted, “one, two, three, four,” perfectly symmetrical lines running parallel with my eyebrows. I brushed my teeth with the travel toothpaste. I parted my hair to left, to larger left and finally, to unfamiliar right. I observed my forehead with the bathroom door open, partially shut, and then-craving the absolution of utter privacy- fully closed and bolted.

I was not yet horrified. Permanence was yet negotiable. I could not bring myself to admit I’d been anything short of smooth before bed.

The lines were an anomaly; a yet-to-be-investigated oddity like every other item in this unfamiliar bathroom. I swept the room for tweezers, towels, other people’s conditioner, wash bags, wet wipes, cotton ear buds, cleaning products; anything stranger than the canyons, creeping horizontally across my face. I found nothing more distracting than a half-used stick of deodorant.

“Damn it,” I thought, and gave the mirror my full attention.

I smiled. I frowned. I appropriated vacant. I forced myself to consider serious things: death, politics, the ongoing absence of Charlie Fairhead, architecture. From all angles the folds remained. I could only conclude that corrugated was my natural, resting position. This made much sense of the many older men and bus drivers who have, over the years, in at least two, or possibly three, continents, turned to me, and with little consideration for the mostly summersome contents of my head, muttered something along the lines of, “cheer up love, it might never happen.”

I was both devastated and vindicated, in a single, squinting breath.

With one eye closed the lines seemed less permanent, smoggy even, like end of evening eyeliner or typed sentences sheathed in greaseproof paper. I ran my finger along each in turn, expecting a washing line, anticipating the Grand Canyon, wondering if I could read my own head like thin strung brail. I felt nothing. Last night’s make up came off on my finger. I turned the bathroom light off and then sharply on again. It took several seconds to flicker into being, allowing four, short staccato glimpses at the mirror. When the lights settled and it was finally summer, they were still there, lining up for take off.

I reminded myself of my father, with his furious eyebrows, and my brother, who crinkles about the eyes in a permanent state of mirth, and my small niece who fluctuates between those deep-joyed dimples and frown knots old enough to carry the world’s weight home for Christmas. “We are a folded family,” I reminded myself, “we wear our best thoughts like freckled fury. We read like a sixty foot billboard. We are terrible liars, each and every one.”

The thought warmed me. With a thousand more of these thoughts- soft, unworried, soothing as a sponge bath- the lines would most likely erode, unwinding into themselves like fumbled mumblings and unfinished sentences.

Besides, I thought, I was not yet thirty one and rounding down could potentially claim a hold on the last of my late twenties and this, I reasoned, was too young, much too young by decades, for permanent worry. Also, I continued, examining my soul over the bathroom sink, I was less stressed, less prone to insomnia and loss of appetite, less inclined to alcohol and marathon sessions of X Files and extra shots at Starbucks than ever before. AND I had recently taken a holiday at the most inappropriate time of the year and indulged in a decent lie in just one day previous and was on good speaking terms with all close friends, neighbours and extended family, (excepting the odd people next door who complained when we closed our gate and were prone to dispatching the battered remains of their fish suppers into our front yard.) I barely worried and on the occasions upon which I did succumb it was, more often than not, anxiety related to a fictional situation; a particularly harrowing episode of Holby City or yet another attempt to conquer Cormac McCarthy, unscathed. It was not fair, I concluded, or even plausible, to be permanently corrugated so young in life.

Having pride myself on ignoring the small and persistent voice of my Mother- purveyor of Avon cosmetics to the ladies of Rathlin Drive, Rathmore Heights and beyond- (though never crossing the Circular Road for fear of reprisal from other Avon ladies who’d already staked their claim on certain estates,) I began to regret the host of tubs and tubes of time-defying potions which had been falling down the back of my bedside cabinet for the past three years.

I considered sellotaping my forehead straight during sleep. This had not worked with my dinosaur toes and seemed unlikely to erase my forehead issues. I wondered about the use of a sweat band or tennis visor of the sort favored my Mike Pacchione. I contemplated a cull on all head shots, past, present and future.

All efforts, I finally concluded, were of the too little and too late variety. I would have to live with lines as I had come to live with dinosaur toes, dwarfish fingernails, a missing freckle, a dog tooth, and, worst of all, the trinity of silver gray hairs which had lately come to differentiate themselves from the dirty blond. If they could not be dissolved or rationalized into oblivion the, “one, two, three, four,” tracks running across my forehead would simply have to be incorporated into the story.

“A musical score,” I thought, “A short sonata, not yet fulfilled, singing from one side of my temple to the other.”

It was a lovely thought, better suited to fiction than the bathroom mirror. Later I would admit to my own confusion. It was five minutes to seven, after all, and far too early for romanticism.

Two:

On the very same day, eight hours removed, having struggled to find a seat in a crowded, Dublin coffee shop I sat sandwiched between a velvet lady and a pair of European gentlemen -a Pole and a German- practicing their English over a latte. Moving swiftly past the textbook banalities of unlocatable youth hostels and visits to the local supermarket they were indulging in a more advanced and oddly existential conversation. I plugged in my headphones, pretended to switch my music on and listened in.

“Are you content in your work and friendships?” asked the Pole.

“I do like your hat. How much did it cost?” replied the German.

“Do you find yourself hopeful about the prospects of this New Year, 2011?” asked the Pole.

“Yes,” the German replied, and as if, the anecdote was in some way related to hats and hopes and inner contentment, continued, “Once I knew a forty two year old man, an American gentleman, and he looked ten years younger than forty two and he did not have a single wrinkle on his face, even on his eyes. Do you know how this came to be?”

“No,” answered the Pole.

“It was because he did not have to work for nine years in a row and the lack of worry made him ten years younger.”

“How did he manage not to work?”

“As a teenager this American gentleman received so much money for his Bar Mitzvah that he was able to set himself up in a business where he didn’t have to work for nine whole years.”

“And this is why he looked ten years younger and had no wrinkles?”

“Indeed.”

“Makes you wish you were a Jew doesn’t it?” said the Pole and they both laughed extremely hard in English but with distinct ethnic intonations.

And I wondered at the coincidence of overhearing just such an odd anecdote, recounted in broken English, on the very day I first began to fold.

Thanksgiving at Christmas

2010-12-26T15:30:00.000-08:00

Such a long year and I am incredibly thankful for all the little lights (you know who you are) who've sailed with me and am hoping that 2011 is a new chapter in the story

“A cold coming we had of it;” the longest year in living memory.

Having begun, butter fat with possibility, the Winter skimmed us- slice by slice, rain by drowning rain- until teeth grew tight and tender love, gray, and it stung to smile, even in the holiest moments. Occasionally we wept. Jesus wept too. The noise only added to our confusion. The world was woven- blue, green and funeral black- with grand decisions. Incapable of alighting upon a lesser evil we hung back, becoming pillars of salt and stone, red raw with the memory of firesome days. It was cold, too cold by far for theology. We stumbled over doctrine. In our smallest moments the only prayer slight enough to recall; “even so Lord, quickly come.” The coming, we eventually allowed ourselves to admit, felt much more like a departure.

“Don’t worry,” the wise souls said. “Hold tight for the Springly days. Things always look better in bloom.” But the resurrection was a long time coming, hesitating on her green, green heels like an obstinate teenager, like an elderly cat, like God himself holding out on the blessing. We were tired then, too tired for words. We had grown accustomed to the instantaneous. We allowed ourselves to fall under a heavy god- a scoop-clawed, snatching god- more prone to take than ever give. We slept through the garden. We slept through an entire month of Sunday mornings. We slept thickly through the glory. We kept our eyes glued shut against the possibility of disappointment. “It’s supposed to be Spring,” we muttered, through hand-sewn blinders, “But it’s dark as death in here.”

Finally, when the Summer grew too sweltering loud to ignore, we woke to a world, teeming with distant blessing. The Earth was luminous green and cleaving. Trees tremored like monstrous heads of pea green, brocolli. Flowers flowered, skies blued, babies talked themselves into being born and conceived; and many, many individuals, with little warning or regard for good sense, fell in love and married at the drop of a Summer hat. Blessings bloomed unhindered. All of these wonders, even those falling on our own doorsteps, occurred at a distance of some several feet; unfolding with great hesitation, as if unrelated to our own thin souls, as if viewed through the opposite end of a very long, telescope. We were slight-skinned then, easily bruised and bruising, and the bright, white grace of blessing came upon us like sunstroke. We could do nothing but call earnestly for the former shadows. Everyone else appeared to be furniture. We felt like disposable cutlery. We could have stabbed them for their good fortune. We were loneliest by far in the Summer months.

In the Autumn we fell- hard and deep- swimming through empty air so we could neither anticipate nor even imagine an end to all this taking. The laughter had left us. The blush and freckles bleached slowly from our cheeks. Our stories, silly as they had been, slid forgotten down the back of the bookcase and last, but lowest, the hope came trailing loose, stitch by tight little stitch, like an unraveling pullover. We were ribs, nails and occasional bruises. We were teeth and tears. We were dust in the very final instant. Everything else washed clean in the flood. It was only then, naked as eternity, that we finally stepped back to admire our fine skeletons. Dead as we seemed, all bones and brokenness, we had never been simpler, never stronger, never more dependant. We found ourselves Christmas, at just the right moment.

And when the lights came up- slowly at first and then with blinding enthusiasm- we saw ourselves bound tightly by hand and heart, holding each other together in the thinnest places. And we were much thicker for the struggle. And we could not leave each other alone, for, individually we were mere sticks, but vast fortresses in communion. And we laughed, though it hurt, and possibly bruised, to feel dead muscles tensing and memories suddenly resurrected. And we sang and were suddenly capable of tasting the words in our lungs and bellies and the farthest shores of our imaginations. And we could not believe our own good fortune. “All this,” we said, “From one long year, from one thin century, from one death well-lived.”

“We should be glad of another death,” we prayed, and felt loud enough to be hopeful once more.

Feet

2010-11-25T16:25:00.000-08:00

She lay on the floor beside the man. She did not know his name, nor he, hers.

“A Michael,” she thought, “Most likely a Michael, or perhaps a Peter.” The assumption was based entirely upon his balding head.

It was dark in the closet; the only light, a mottled stripe, streaking, uninvited through the air conditioning vents. They were zebras in the darkness; zebras and deep-stripped tigers, shot dead most likely, with little hope of resurrection.

She lay on the floor beside the man and thanked the Lord of coat closets for the privacy of darkness.

The walls were another matter entirely. They progressed as if fit to fall at any second. There was no room for a retreat. She could feel his rage rising and falling beside her; fifteen thin surrenders per minute. The closet shuffled around them. The silence swole in the small corners of her lungs and teeth. She imagined herself aging at a righteous clip, speeding, under the scrutiny of raincoats and Wellington boots, towards her second and third lost century.

“Damn, your own stupidity,” she told herself, “You’ll be hard pushed to get out of this one with your dignity intact.”

It was not her first closet.

She spent the latter part of most social functions, secreted in the coat closet, the pantry or -in desperate situations- the downstairs bathroom. She had anticipated the darkness and the coats, the claustrophobic jumble of tennis shoes and broken umbrellas. She knew what to expect from a closet.

She had not expected a prostrate man in a dinner suit.

She was unsure of the next move. So many terrible things had already taken place in the closet, on the floor, with the lights turned out. Even now, in the funereal silence, they were hardly strangers. The entire closet was a museum to their ongoing intimacy: her right shoe, come asunder, his top button, torn loose, her party hair, deflated like a drunken soufflé, the crumpled carrier bags climbing the walls suggestively.

They were hardly strangers, even now.

She could not bring herself to consider him a friend.

She held her elbows tightly, tucked to her ribs like a caged chicken. She did not want the man to feel the shruggling shudder which was taking possession of her body, progressing violently from ankles to earlobes. She held herself like a flatbed truck and waited for the man to make the first move.

It was her custom, long learnt and lived, to always allow the man the pleasure of the first move. She waited by his side, dumb as deep-fried chicken.

Waiting was lead. The floor tiles passed judgment on her naked skin. Her shoulders were two scoops of ice cream, seething in the cone. Her head was a fifty pound melon. Her breasts, twin bruises forced far into the belly of her rib cage. Finally, after an ocean, she raised herself up, balancing on the palm of one hand. The pressure lifted. She breathed deeply, savouring the possibility of a conversation.

“Sorry,” she would begin, though certain sure she’d already apologized a thousand times or more in the struggle. “Sorry,” was the only thing worth saying in such a situation. She began to consider making the first move.

The man made the first move.

He pulled her suddenly to the floor so their faces fell level like a pair of middle-aged bowling balls banging in the gutter.

From such a distance she could smell the alcohol on his breath; beer and whiskey and something more meaty- a cocktail sausage perhaps, or chicken wings from the buffet table. She forced her own mouth shut, sealing in the suspicion of garlic bread and one glass more than she’d promised herself.

She tried to smile. She pictured the effort as mildly terrifying for she was not the kind of girl who could smile without teeth. The man did not smile back. Even in the striped darkness she could see he was not smiling.

His nose, she saw, had stopped bleeding. The blood had started to coagulate around his nostrils like the gummy residue at the neck of a ketchup bottle. The front of his dress shirt, missing at least one button and a silk necktie, was gradually seeping a deep, Satanic red.

“Sorry about your nose,” she said. Her words came out in the kind of halting splutter, atypical of the breakfast table. It was half an hour at least since her last attempt at conversation. Her voice had already begun to hibernate.

“Shhhh,” hissed the man, “I don’t want her to hear us.”

This came as a shock to her. She had imagined herself the only girl in the closet. Without raising her head, she glanced downwards along the length of her left arm and could see no one, not so much as a small child, hiding in the bowels of the closet.

“Her who?” she asked, confused.

“My wife,” he said, and though the implication was clear enough, raised his left hand to confirm a gold band on the second finger.

“Is she in the closet?” she whispered urgently, her chin inclining towards the man’s right ear.

“What are you lady, some kind of damn fool and clumsy with it? There’s no one in this bloody closet except you and me.”

She colored. Her cheeks turned radiator red, even the left cheek- nestled as it was against the floor tiles- roasted.

“Look,” she said, “There’s no need to be rude. I’m sorry about your nose. I didn’t see you in the dark….You don’t expect a man to be lying on the floor of a coat closet.”

“You don’t expect drunk girls in heels to come barging into coat closets either… “ he retorted, “at least not on their own.”

“Touche,” she said. She was moderately pleased with her own wordery. It was not like her to recall the correct comeback at exactly the right moment. She was not, as a rule, comfortable in the presence of men, or indeed women, or children, or any animal sized larger than a domestic cat.

She was a slight girl, given to nervous twitches and early escapes. A solid third of her waking moments were passed in mute silence, mind-mapping the improbable. Though she was too pretty to avoid the party circuit, she found it impossible to form sentences in social groups of three or more.

The man on the floor was a realist. In certain circumstances- relationships mostly- he exhibited slight paranoid tendencies.

“Why are you hiding in the closet?” he asked, picking surreptitiously at the crusted blood which had formed a mustache across his upper lip.

“I’m not hiding. I was just taking a phone call, you know, looking for a bit of peace and quiet to be able to hear.”

To ground her alibi she levered herself a couple of inches off the floor and began to root around in her bra. Sandwiched between the left breast and padding she located a twenty pound note, a stick of lip gloss and a miniscule mobile telephone.

Ignoring the money, the lip gloss and her left breast- which, was significantly smaller than the right and often utilized for storage capacity- she removed the mobile phone and held it to the man’s face.

“See,” she said, though she was unsure what she was trying to prove.

Glancing briefly at the screen, she noted, and chose to ignore, a text message which began, “where the hell RU? I feel like a…”

(It was almost fifteen minutes since she’d made the usual excuses, (bathroom, cigarette, urgent call from her brother,) and left her date, hovering on the dance floor with a side plate of party nibbles. Experience suggested that anything short of half an hour was plausible. It had been fifteen minutes at most.

She pushed his message to the back of her head, filing it alongside other minor irritations; the office Christmas party for example, and the missing button on her good coat. It sat there, sharp and insolent, itching, like a patch of persistent eczema.)

She flipped her cell phone closed and slid it back inside her bra. It was still blood warm to the touch.

“I came in here to take a phone call.” she stated bluntly, “What’s your excuse?”

“I’m spying on my wife,” he said, “I suspect she’s going to make a move on the guy with the pink tie.”

She knew exactly which guy the man was talking about. His name, she remembered, was Philip; Phil for short. He’d already attempted to hit on her in the line for the downstairs bathroom. He was exactly the kind of guy who usually hit on her. He was not a bad guy she suspected, just easily distracted. She had a nose for these things. The guy didn’t have the look of an adulterer, but she’d bet good money on a recent divorce. The indentation on his marriage finger hadn’t even risen yet.

“I’m sure you’re wrong,” she said. She was not sure. She did not know the man from Adam. She did not know his wife. For all she knew the man’s wife was out there right now screwing every man in a one block radius. It felt good, however, to tell the man what he wanted to hear.

“Do you really think so?”

“Definitely. For one thing, what sort of dopey cow would make a move on another man while her husband was in the building?”

“She thinks I’ve left. I told her the alarm went off at work and I had to go sort it out. I wanted to see what she’s like when I’m not around.”

“Oh,” she said, “sorry.” It was far from the right thing to say but she felt it comprehensively covered the man’s nose and his wife and the whole regretful affair. “I expect you’re still wrong though, and even if you were right… and I don’t for a minute suspect you are…would it not make more sense to spy from behind the curtains, or under the table, or somewhere you can actually see your wife?”

“I’m watching her feet through the air conditioning vent,” he said, and without asking permission pulled her cheek next to his so she too could see through the slats, “You can tell a lot about a woman by her feet.”

She looked through the slats and saw nothing but the gilted legs of an antique table. The hall was entirely empty.

“Yeah,” she said, attempting to make light of the situation, “My feet did a great job of telling the back of your head what a clumsy bitch I am.”

He rubbed the back of his head as if polishing something fragile and barely-remembered. For the first time in the five minutes of their mutual acquaintance, he chanced a smile. The dried blood around his lips crackled under the strain and came loose, raining small, raisin-like beads all over his shirtfront.

“Yuck,” she said, anxious to change the subject, “Your face is a bloody mess. I take it your nose is broken.”

“I suspect so,” he replied, pressing the tip gingerly, “I heard it crack when you stood on my head.”

She had stood on his head; accidentally, of course, but with uncharacteristic confidence. It did not yield. (The human head was more solid by far than she had previously assumed.) Lurching forwards as her foot met the arc of his skull, she’d poured a full glass of Merlot into the small of his back.

It was not her fault, of course.

She was three feet into the closet before she’d noticed him, lying face down and perfectly still amidst the outdoor boots and school satchels. At first glance she’d presumed him dead. It was too late, by then, to halt her flight path. Social anxiety, stronger than gravity, propelled her towards the back of the coat closet, as far from the dance floor as the architecture would allow.

“Lucky,” she’d thought, as she toppled towards the back of the closet, “to have gone with last season’s wedges rather than the usual stiletto’s.”

She imagined the unpleasant possibility of punctured skulls, of bloody heels and the inconvenience of surgically removing her favorite stiletto’s from a stranger’s head. Though it was not an appropriate moment for contemplation, pivoting as she was on an unfamiliar skull, she’d smiled at her own foresight.

“Urrrckkk,” cried the man, mouth forced full of carpet.

“Urrrckk,” he’d continued, somewhat more urgently, as his nose met solid floor and unceremoniously broke, emitting the agonized sound of a snapped carrot.

Thereafter there had been a tussle. She had toppled like the Washington Monument, tumbling, forehead first, into a coat rack. The coats had caught her, embracing her in a heavily fluffed hug. Small strands of mink and rabbit attached themselves to her lip gloss. Her first breath had been thick with the smell of dust; her second, elderly ladies and parma violets. Unpleasant as the stench was, she’d felt suddenly safer than she had in weeks. She’d drawn the coats about her and considered the possibility of ignoring the man on the floor, and the man she’d arrived with, and all subsequent men who might demand her consideration; of spending the rest of the party, the rest of the whole dreadful Christmas season perhaps, bound like a baby kangaroo in someone else’s jackets.

It was at this moment, with a bloody Nile gushing from his nose, that the man had risen from the floor to draw her, by the arm, into his side. No words had been exchanged. A more rational girl might have questioned the intimacy, insisted upon medical help, made her excuses and fled the closet. Instead she lay down beside him, her party dress puddling in a pool of nose blood, her right shoe come asunder, her lungs thunder-drumming on her rib cage.

It was the oddest thing she’d ever been party to.

She felt a responsibility to the man. His was the first bone she’d ever broken. Broken bones, she assumed, required compensation. She’d have slept with him, right there in the coat closet if he asked. She owed him for the nose.

The man did not ask to sleep with her. (It was refreshing, she admitted later, to meet a man who did not wish to sleep with her.) Instead, he asked her to lie silent beside him and watch his wife seduce a stranger. She obliged unquestionably. She was Florence Nightingale. She screwed her eyes into a telescope and peered through the air conditioning vent. She was in it for the long haul. After all, she owed him for the nose.

“Where did you meet your wife?” she asked, hoping to begin a new line of conversation.

“At a friend’s wedding,” he replied.

“How lovely!”

“Not really; it was her wedding.”

“Oh,” she said once again, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m not a monster. I fancied her instantly but I didn’t make a move for years. Those guys were long over before I asked Christine out.”

A rush of something similar to relief ran the length of her spine. She shuddered involuntarily and smiled into her own hand. Having known the man for no more than ten minutes, she could not explain her own need to exonerate him. It was linked, she suspected, to the broken nose though she was not sure why.

“And how long have you been together?”

“Six years in the New Year?”

“Kids?”

“God, no! We’re too selfish to even consider a Labrador.”

“And you’re happy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you know that you’re happy until you’re not happy anymore. It’s one of those things you can only measure after the event.”

“Like being drunk.”

“Exactly Sweetheart, just like being pissed out of your head. So, the answer to your question is, I haven’t a clue if we’re happy, but I’ll tell you one thing; I don’t trust that woman as far as I could throw her.”

It struck her, suddenly, as she traced her fingers back and forwards through a tacky puddle of the man’s blood, that she was happy here in the coat closet; happy like she hadn’t been on the dance floor, or by the buffet table, or in the backseat of the taxi with a second date stranger, leaching over her shoulders.

“I think I’m happy now,” she whispered, “And it’s not even over yet.”

“What’s that you say?” the man whispered back and suddenly fell silent. A pair of clip clap heels approached the closet door, followed by the dull plod of corporate brogues, sniggering across the laminate flooring.

They fell silent, squinting through the air conditioning slats.

“Is that your wife?” she whispered.

The man nodded his head slowly; chin stroking the closet floor.

“And that’s the guy with the pink tie?”

He nodded again, like a tree struggling to hold its head in a cyclone.

Her shoes were blood red; bloodier by far than any of the actual blood solidifying on the closet floor. His shoes were black, polished with silver t-bars straining, in the absence of laces, to hold the bridges of his feet together.

Their shoes looked good together, like a television advertisement. They came to rest two feet removed, toe to toe, not yet touching but sizing each other up. It was difficult to tell, through the air conditioning vent, if a kiss or a sharp, shin kick was more likely.

Something was said. The closet door caught the words, filtering out all but the furriest intonations.

The man tensed and set like a series of thick concrete slabs. She felt his shoulder tighten against her neck.

Outside, in the hall, the pink tie guy turned on his polished heels and left the room. The man’s wife waited a respectable thirty seconds- rubbing one foot against the other in a parody of nervous distraction- before following him back towards the dance floor.

Once the door was safely closed, she turned to the man. He was crying quietly, fat, phlegmy tears drawing the wetness out of his bloodied face. He was neither old nor young enough to get away with crying so the tears made her uncomfortable. It was not right, she reminded herself, for a grown man to cry. This man could very well be mentally ill or properly depressed.

“Why are you crying?” she asked, “It all looked perfectly innocent to me.”

The man snuffled audibly, attempting to suck the snot back into his broken nose.

“Didn’t you see her feet?” he asked, “I know my wife and I know her feet and I know she’s upstairs now, screwing that poor guy in the spare bedroom.”

She thought about reaching for his hand, covering his wrist with her own small palms but his hands were fists, balled in fury. She glanced at them briefly. There was no place to land.

“Now, now,” she whispered, and the words sounded comforting and faintly patronizing as they slid from her tongue, “I’m sure you’re reading too much into your wife’s feet. She’s probably out there now, wondering when you’ll be back.”

In a galaxy full of misunderstandings, this was the second worst thing she could possibly have said.

The man rose up on his elbows and, with the wild, gutteral cry of a soul which has finalized arrived at its own epitaph, dashed his broken head against the floor.

His nose exploded.

Small flecks of blood flew backwards and forwards, splattering her eyebrows with the detritus of rage.

“Damn the woman,” he cried, “She can rot before she gets her hands on the house.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” he cried and began to list the ways in which he intended to destroy his wife.

“Slow down,” she said, “There’s probably a perfectly innocent reason for all of this. You need to talk to your wife before you even think about strangling her. Besides, your nose is pulp and your face is bleeding all over your suit. Let me get you a tissue.”

She sat up, gearing to leave the closet in search of a tissue or, at very least, a roll of toilet paper.

“Don’t leave,” he muttered through the blood, “women are always leaving me at the worst possible moments.”

He was hysterical now. He was a microwave oven.

“I’m only going to get you a tissue, I’ll be back.”

“You don’t need to leave. My wife, for all her sins, always keeps a pack of Kleenex in her coat pocket. The least she can do is lend me a tissue. That’s her coat there,” he said, indicating with a bloody finger, a knee length wool coat in dogtooth check.

She fished in the pockets, first left, then right and finally interior, all the time mouthing platitudes like mentholated toothpaste: “You’ll be fine.” “Your wife loves you, I’m sure of it.” “Later we’ll all laugh about this evening.”

Her fingers found the Kleenex still sheathed in its plastic skin. Diving deep for the packet’s corner, she caught her nail on something smooth and cold. Without thinking she pinched it curiously between thumb and forefinger. It did not yield. She saw it in her mind’s eye; a perfect band, indivisibly sealed in solid gold. It belonged on his wife’s second finger. It clashed terribly, she suspected, with her cheating shoes.

“Here,” she said, emerging with a handful of luxury tissues, “Let’s get that nose sorted out. You don’t want your wife seeing you in that state.”

She said nothing about the ring, of course. She owed the man for his nose.

Think Little

2010-11-02T17:08:00.001-07:00

There was a hole in the church carpet, roughly the shape and size of a Lambeg drum.

Though it was a substantial hole- the largest ever recorded in the hallowed pages of the Presbyterian Herald- with care it was possible to ease one’s self around the edges, passing unhindered, from one end of the sanctuary to the other.

Services were still possible. However, the young minister noted with abstract frustration, the consequent tendency- widespread amongst the older, less agile members of his congregation- to occupy only the backmost pews in the sanctuary. Following discrete investigations, instigated for the most part by the young minister’s wife- a floral lady of diminutive girth and godly intent- several dozen reasons were offered for the growing gulf between pulpit and congregation.

These included:

“There’s a bloody, great hole in the church and we’re too old to get round it.”

And,

“It’s warmer at the back of the church than the front.”

And,

“It’s traditional to sit at the back. We just look farther away these days cause there’s less of us.”

And, perhaps most tellingly,

“You can get out quicker at the end.”

Services were still possible, though health and safety legislation demanded the permanent erection of a luminous, yellow warning sign on both sides of the vestibule. Whilst necessary, the gentlemen and solitary lady of the property committee noted with frustration the fact that luminous, yellow signs neither matched nor complimented the lofty aesthetics of the building. It was widely suspected that the hole and the signs and the general, though unrelated, decline of the Minor Hall guttering, had already ruled the church right out of the running for the annual Best Kept Building- Mid-Sized Category- Award. The Catholics up the road- who kept their begonias trim, their car park well tarmac’d and their carpets, consistently unholy- would no doubt steal the prize for the fifth year in a row.

It was difficult to pin point the exact moment when the hole had arrived.

Sunday evening had been the Harvest supper service; an annual event comprising of “special” musical pieces by a visiting soloist, tree branches Sellotaped artistically to the church walls and, afterwards, the apocalyptic hope of tea and tray bakes in the Minor Hall. Having exited the sanctuary via the doors located to the left and right of the choir box, progressing slowly towards the Minor Hall and that most provincial of all sacraments, the congregation would later swear to the general health of the carpet circa 7:45pm.

Two unnamed members of the Youth Fellowship- a young man and a young lady of twenty seven years combined- were later coerced into admitting that the carpet had been similarly whole at 9:45pm when they’d found themselves alone in the sanctuary, vandalizing the mandarin orange sculpture which, on Harvest Sundays, was traditionally arranged along the length of the communion table.

The young minister, over-tired from preaching three separate Harvest sermons, blessing the tray bakes, counting the retiring offering AND supervising the distribution of Harvest flowers to the sick and elderly, had to admit he’d left the building at 10:30pm without completing his usual post-Sunday swoop of the sanctuary and halls.

There was no way of knowing when the hole had appeared, and subsequently no means of establishing a cause or confidently assuring the congregation that there would be no further holes.

The caretaker was first to officially note the hole; rushing from the sanctuary to phone the police station, the fire brigade and the coast guard, only at the last second remembering the young minister. The police constable, arriving on the scene mere seconds after the local press and a somewhat bemused member of the local coast guard, recorded the time at twenty past nine on Tuesday morning.

(The hole had been discovered twice already and purposefully ignored for good reason and bad.

The organist, having slipped into the sanctuary on Monday evening, exploiting the caretaker’s day off, as was her weekly custom, had almost fallen into the hole. Gathering her sheet music to her ample chest, she’d immediately slipped out the fire exit, reluctant to be caught practicing secular music- Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Weber and Burt Bacharach- in full, sacrilegious, view of the King James Version.

The young minister- whose excuses were always simple and driven by sheer exhaustion- had discovered the hole at 9:30 am on Monday morning, whilst retrieving his glasses case from the pulpit. “Damn it,” he’d thought to himself, “If it’s not a funeral on my day off, it’s a great big hole in the church.” Confident he hadn’t been spotted entering the sanctuary, he too left via the fire exit and spent the day pottering, unhindered, round the back garden.)

A committee was formed to look into the hole.

It was vital, they concluded, to cover up the hole before too many people noticed. “We can’t,” they said, reporting back to the young minister and the Kirk session, “Become the church that’s known for having a hole. It’ll have to be covered up quick sharp.”

A circle of royal blue carpet, roughly the shape and size of a Lambeg drum was ordered and subsequently fitted. One hundred pounds was temporarily diverted from the Minor Hall extension fund for the purpose of purchasing and fitting this carpet. “It’s an emergency,” the committee said, “The Minor Hall extension will simply have to wait.”

The carpet could not disguise the hole. It sagged ominously in the centre, puckering like a drained blister.

The following Sunday, almost two dozen separate individuals lodged complaints concerning the hole.

The young minister noted their reservations on the back of an order of service and did his best to reassure the congregation,

“Yes, it was a safety hazard.”

“Yes, there was a committee currently looking into the hole.”

“Yes, he was fully aware that the carpet was only a quick fix solution; something would have to be done about the hole before one of the many ill-disciplined grandchildren who populated the building took a tumble head first into the abyss.”

“No, he could assure them all that the Minor Hall extension fund would not be diverted into the hole.”

(The young minister felt a little guilty about this fib but consoled himself with the knowledge that it was only a hundred pounds. The hole, he reassured himself, was troubling enough without adding a number of conspicuously irate, anonymous benefactors to the problem.)

The young minister held his tongue and prayed for a miraculous sealing of the hole.

Having read the King James from cover to cover- eye skimming over the geneologies, the entire book of Leviticus and sundry repetitive sections- he had come to assume that God was not greatly inclined to sealing anything besides the gates of Hell. The Almighty, it seemed, tended towards miraculous openings: bouldered tombs, deaf ears, Red seas and the like. The young minister prayed on regardless. “Lord God,” he explained, every morning for a week, “There’s a hole in our church that could really use filling.”

No miracles were forthcoming, so, after a respectable week’s hesitation the committee forged a plan for human intervention.

“We can no longer ignore the hole! It must be filled as quickly as possible,” the young minister announced to his eager-eared congregation, as he stood before them the very next Sunday, “It’s a big hole, and deeper than it looks. We’ll need to work together as a church if we’re to have any hope of filling it. I’m asking you all to donate what you can. The right hand might not see what the left hand gives but the Lord surely does, so you all need to prayerfully consider your donations.”

“Amen,” agreed the congregation and spent the duration of the sermon, silently planning what could be given for maximum impact at minimum cost.

On Friday morning, when the doors of the sanctuary were thrown open to accept offerings for the hole, the young minister was disappointed, though somewhat unsurprised, to find the usual suspects waiting piously on the church steps, clutching carrier bags and cardboard boxes and potato sacks stuffed with second-hand tat.

Filing one by one to the hole’s edge, each individual made a tremendous show of tipping their offerings into the hole. Old Beano annuals, dried flower arrangements, polyester blouses and sundry coppers fluttered showily into the hole, tinkling like porcelain music all the way into the darkness. “Gosh,” they said, as they purged their junk, “I really loved those shoes/records/ill-disciplined grandchildren. It’s such a sacrifice to give them up but we must give everything we can to get this hole filled.”

“Amen,” muttered the young minister who- despite his long-standing hatred for the mean-tempered creature- had made a similar stink of sacrificing his Yorkshire Terrier to the hole. “The Lord loves a joyful giver.”

The church was full of joyful givers. If nothing else, the hole had given them a righteous excuse for a Spring clean.

When the giving was done and the joyful givers had retired, still joyful, to the Minor Hall for yet another round of tea and Jaffa Cakes the young minister paused to repent of his Yorkshire Terrier.

“Sorry, God,” he said, “I suppose you already know how much I hated that dog. Here, take this instead.” After which he removed his wrist watch, both shoes, and as a second thought, the monolithic King James which had, for almost a century and a half, reigned imposingly over the communion table.

These, and other similar gestures appeared to go unnoticed. The hole remained as open and angry as ever.

The young minister found himself, not for the first time, an unjoyful giver. The young minister raged silently in his sock soles. If, the young minister reasoned, the watch and the shoes and even the King James itself, (a genuine antique, he assumed,) hadn’t made a single ounce of impact on the hole, then he’d jolly well prefer to have them returned forthwith. (The Yorkshire Terrier he could live without.)

Lowering himself on to his backside he perched on the edge of the hole, legs dangling towards the centre of the earth and stared deep into the darkness. At first the young minister found himself hoping, very simply, for a glimpse of his sacrificed treasures. After a few minutes he began to find himself, tremendously intrigued by the hole. He removed his glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on for a better look.

At no point, in the last two weeks, had it occurred to the young minister, the congregation, or even the Kirk Session to question what might be at the bottom of the hole.

The young minister allowed his mind to run circles round the possibilities. Suddenly, mere inches from investigation, it seemed ludicrous, ungodly even, to have ignored such a large hole for so many days.

Whilst he felt faintly ridiculous and his voice emerged as a thin, pubescent whisper, the young minister leaned forwards so his chin shot out beyond his nose. Balancing himself with both hands he spoke into the darkness, “hello,” he started, “there’s probably nothing down there, but if there is, ummmm, well, I’m sorry we’ve been ignoring you all week, and also I’m really sorry about pitching all our crap on top of you.”

Though afterwards he’d swear, in a distinctly un-Presbyterian fashion, that the hole had answered him audibly, and in a thick, East Belfast accent, the young minister had merely heard the slightest suspicion of a response; a rustled “hrrmmph” which could just as easily have originated in the wind, the central heating or a litter of the marauding rats, endemic to rural, meeting houses.

However the young minister, who had once, in his even younger days, entertained the notion of missioning in deepest darkest Africa, saw the opportunity for a grand adventure, long-denied. Loosing his clerical collar, he levered himself off the edge and fell, gracefully, twenty feet or more, into the hole, whereupon he came to a premature halt upon a bag of second-hand school uniforms.

It was dark in the hole, the only light coming from the white light halo twenty feet above his head. With difficulty, for his glasses had become detached in descent, the young minister was able to squint at the face of Jesus, marooned on his stained glass cross above the pulpit. From such unsightly depths, the young minister was able to draw little comfort from what had previously been his favorite of all the fifteen stained glass panels.

Checking his limbs for fractures and ruptures, the young minister rose gingerly to his feet and steadied himself against the wall of the hole. It was not, as he’d suspected, mud, but rather a sleek, black marble, similar to a kitchen surface. His hand came away ice cold.

It was only then, disorientated and shivering, that the young minister realized he was not alone. There was no noise or discernible physical movement in the hole, simply the unnerving, embryonic feeling of being watched. Using his mobile phone as a makeshift torch, the young minister made a sweeping orbit of the pit highlighting, as he turned, the faces of approximately half a dozen other grown up people.

The young minister was not afraid. It was not creepy.

The people in the hole did not look particularly angry or odd or evil. They were wearing normal clothes and did not appear particularly under nourished or unkempt. One lady was wearing the King James version balanced on her head. She looked vaguely perplexed and pitched like a garage extension. A second lady sat cross-legged in the corner, reading back issues of the People’s Friend by the flame of a cheap cigarette lighter. An elderly man, bound like a beached earthworm in a torn, sleeping bag, was dozing in the corner. Each of them was as familiar as his own ankles.

They did not seem surprised to see the young minister.

“What’s up?” said the youngest of the six, a blond-haired boy in an Arsenal shirt, “Did you fall in too?”

“It’s easier than you’d think to end up down here,” added the King James lady, nodding so the book began to slip from her head.

“No, “ said the young minister, visibly disorientated, “I didn’t fall in. I climbed down to help you. I’m a minister. I can get us out of here. If we just shout together the Church will come and pull us out.”

The group smiled knowingly.

“Oh, we’ve been trying that for ages,” said the Arsenal shirt, sleeking his hair back with one hand, “I expect they can’t hear.”

“We just gave up yelling after a while,” added the King James, “It’s not so bad down here, except when people drop their rubbish on our head.”

“Look,” said the young minister, who was more than a little claustrophobic and already beginning to sweat at the thought of re-encountering an angry Yorkshire Terrier in close confines, “Let’s just give it a go. I know they’re all up there and seven of us screaming together should surely be able to get their attention.”

“It’s worth a shot, I guess,” agreed the Arsenal shirt who appeared to be the self-appointed leader of the group, and reluctantly the other five agreed, grouping together in the middle of the hole.

“After three,” the young minister announced, “One, two, three…”

“Help!” all seven screamed in unison, emitting, as the young minister had suspected, a preternaturally East Belfast intonation to their yells.

Twenty feet above their heads, feet could be heard, progressing towards the edge of the hole. A black, circle blob appeared at the hole’s opening, momentarily blocking both the light and the face of stained glass Jesus.

“See,” whispered the young minister, “You just had to yell louder. We couldn’t hear you before.”

Somewhere, seemingly miles above their heads, a member of the congregation though momentarily troubled by the hole, felt the need for a second Jaffa Cake tugging him, (or perhaps her,) back towards the Minor Hall.

“Gosh,” they said to themselves, as they retreated, “We’ve got to do something about that unsightly hole.”

As an afterthought they paused to tip a box of aging hymn books over the edge.

Twenty feet below, the young minister found himself unceremoniously pelted with three dozen Church Hymnaries. Though it was too dark to be sure, he assumed there would be bruises.

Church

2010-10-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

I should feel safer by far
In a second-hand bookshop;
Where there is no inclination to buy,
Only browse for hours
In sepia stacked corners,
Swapping footnotes
With my dog-eared friends.

(this is the first of hopefully many proems... they are the hybrid offspring of poetry and prose distinguishable by their lack of rhyme and meter, their brevity and flamboyant disregard for the normal rules of punctuation. Thank you Anne for my lovely new proem notebook.)

Apples and Pairs

2010-10-24T10:38:00.001-07:00

“In the future, knowing everything will become dull,”

Douglas Coupland, 2010

Adam was not so easily persuaded.

“I don’t like those sort of apples,” he said.

She was clasping a Granny Smith; pea green and well-waxed so he could see the cut of her teeth, pearl blind, beaming from the apple skin. She had perfect teeth and perfect skin, perfect hair and perfect seamless heels. With no one to hold in comparison, everything about her had always been unquestionably perfect.

(The apple was also perfect. Furthermore, the trees, the leaves, the roots and even the soil from whenceforth poured the trees. After a certain period of time- six days perhaps, or six thousand years- perfection had started to lose its appeal.)

She adjusted her ankle length hair, maintaining the sort of coy modesty which would soon appear on the pages of Ladybird books and Nursery room walls, the world over.

“Things would have been a lot simpler,” she thought, “If I’d got here first.”

Her rib cage throbbed in reproach.

The damn apple was lead in her hands.

“Do you have anything in red?” he asked, “A Braeburn ideally, or even a Pink Lady? Green apples always get stuck between my teeth.”

“Look, Adam,” she replied, “I’ve already run through this with you. It doesn’t even have to be an apple. It can be any fruit you fancy.”

“What about a tomato?” Adam asked, just to be awkward, for awkwardness was not yet considered rebellion, “There’s widespread debate on the classification of tomatoes!”

(This was indeed true. With the absence of war, famine, disease and celebrity, the classification of tomatoes was just about as controversial as any of the other pressing issues of the day. These included the wetness of water and what should be considered funny, the necessity of sleep, weeds, and how to tell when the weekend had finally arrived.)

“Tomatoes are fruit,” she pronounced with stoic intent, “However, if you’re Hell bent on a vegetable, I can check if that would work.”

“Nope,” he said, “I’ll settle for a tomato.”

She reached deep into the branches, fumbled for a moment and withdrew holding a perfect beef tomato.

For a moment she stood like justice balanced; apple in one hand, tomato in the other. Her arms formed perfect right angles at the pit. Adam admired them from a distance. Despite the persistence of perfection there were relatively few straight lines, perfect circles or ninety degree angles in existence.

(Adam would later come to admit, he’d always been an engineer at heart.)

“I guess you won’t be needing this then?” she asked, holding the Granny Smith up to his nose.

For a second Adam saw his face reflected in the apple’s sheen. Having not yet thought to look into any of the very many lakes or pools available for his entertainment, it was the first time he’d seen himself proper. He saw himself upside down on the apple skin. Unsurprisingly, this mutation raised a lot of questions.

He nodded his head slowly from left to right. The apple reflection oscillated in reverse.

She dropped the Granny Smith into the grass. It rolled for several feet before coming to a cruel halt at Adam’s feet. The grass parted reverently around the apple, and like green-fringed, octopus tentacles, ushered it into the depths below. Thirty seconds later an enormous apple tree was sprouting from the ground beside his left ankle.

“Right then,” she said, “You’re going with the tomato. Let’s get this over and done with.”

There was a bluntness to her approach he’d never noticed before. He had his suspicions about the blackberry stains, bleeding all over her hands. When she smiled, the seeds were still apparent in the gaps between her perfect teeth. Her perfect elbows twitched like squirrel tips. Her pupils were pin prick stars posing in a broad constellation of blue. Tomato in hand, she was not quite the girl Adam had come to call his own.

She leant backwards, wedging her shoulder blades beneath the bottommost branches of the tree and pushed the beef tomato towards his chin.

Adam took a step forward and allowed his fingers to hover two inches above the tomato top. Their knees collided, like naked knots circling for a comfortable place to land. Above their heads the tree bent to brush their golden hair, crowning them kings and queens of the infinite possible.

They had stood like this many million times before; two split cells, straining to be united. Today was different.

“Run the whole plan by me again, please,” Adam asked, unnerved by the very definite cluster of blackberries hanging from the second branch up.

“Gosh, Adam, you’re making such a big deal of something really simple,” she said, brushing his lips with the tip-most top of the tomato, “You eat the fruit and you know everything instantly. I can’t put it any plainer than that.”

“And if I don’t?” he asked.

She had not considered the possibility of disagreeing. They had not once disagreed in all their very many mutual days.

“I guess,” she pondered, her perfect face creasing in consternation for the very first time, “You’ll learn things slowly. Maybe you’ll never get round to knowing everything.”

“I’ll do that, then,” Adam said, “I’ll learn at my own speed.”

“Are you mad?” she asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to know everything right now?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Adam, “Call me old-fashioned if you want but I’d rather take the World at a more manageable pace. I’ll get myself a card when the library opens. I’ll talk to strangers in coffee shops. I’ll take some trips to faraway places. I’ll keep a diary to remind myself of all the things I’m learning. I think I’ll pass on the fruit and vegetables for now.”

She drew back suddenly. The tomato crushed to pulp in her hand. Her perfect teeth were five times sharper than they’d ever been.

She left blackberry stains on his ribcage.

“You’ll regret this,” she shouted, “You could know everything right now; the whole World in an instant.”

“I expect you’re right,” Adam replied, “But I think I’ll take my time. You don’t fully appreciate things when they’re just handed to you.”

The Future

2010-10-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

“In the future being alone will become easier.”

Douglas Coupland, 2010

1. The Future

The future arrived on the Larne Caernryan ferry. It was much too big to travel by air.

The future arrived unannounced at 6:37am on a particularly grizzly Tuesday. Most people missed the moment for they were either fast asleep or fixing the children’s packed lunches. Local radio stations did not cover the future but the BBC breakfast service devoted a six minute slot in the space between sports and weather. Hugh Grant, who was in the studio poised to promote his latest romantic comedy, was asked for a comment on the future. Hugh Grant suspected the future would be shiny and preternaturally inclined to see his latest rom. com. on opening weekend. The future had nothing to do with Hugh Grant.

The future was not as shiny as expected. Up close, in the early morning mizzle it was exactly the colour and consistency of an over-used saucepan.

The future was sliced into one point six million individual packages. There was great debate over the exact number of cuts. In certain sections of the country there was no demand for the future. In the city centre, outside the kingdom of shops, the more cultivated members of society had been queuing for weeks, seething over the rumour that London, Edinburgh, Liverpool and even bloody Cardiff, had all received the future first. “Typical,” they said, fuming over their mispronounced lattes, “They always forget about us, stuck over here.” Regardless of need or demand, the future was sliced equally into one point six million individual packages. In the provincial port of Larne extra hands were required for the circumcision.

The future did not divide easily.

The future would not fit through an average sized letterbox. Across the province thousands of businessmen and working mums returned home to find the future had not been delivered. The Royal Mail was stormed by lines of angry individuals mounting vigils outside their depots as they demanded their fair share of the future. Dispensing the future required extra hands.

The future, once installed, swole to encompass an average-sized home. Most families and couples- both married and co-habitating- felt the future had given them a greater freedom in which to live and breathe and have their being. “Before the future,” they said, “It felt claustrophobic here, like an island or something.” Most people who lived alone wrote public letters in praise of the future. In secret, by themselves, they sipped from the same bottle of Merlot for the third night in a row and observed the future suspiciously from the farthest corner of the sitting room. The future was not as shiny as they had expected. “Gosh,” they admitted secretly in the pit of their wine, wet hearts, “Since the future arrived this feels more like an island than ever.”

The future was old enough to know better.

2. Old People

In the future there were only two problems: old people and lonely people. Whilst the lonely were all but invisible, occupying office jobs, single-cell apartments and mid-sized motor vehicles; the old people were painfully apparent.

In the future old people were everywhere. Almost one point three million of the one point six were older than they had been before the future arrived. (The remaining point three million- an unholy mish-mash of exiles, aliens and conscripts from the free state- were unsure if they officially existed, and as such could not be counted.)

In the future old people moved en masse like a flock of arthritic pigeons, shuffling their diseases from the shopping malls to the bus shelters and back to the pubs in time for the Weakest Link. They dragged the future behind them in tartan-print shopping carts and Tesco carrier bags. They had not yet taken the trouble to unwrap the future but noted it, smiling, each time they added a fresh pack of Bran Flakes or a library book to their stash. “Isn’t it lovely?” they said, fumbling at the corners of the future, “It’s much shinier than I’d expected. It’s almost too nice to open. Maybe I’ll just save it for Christmas in case I don’t get much this year.“ With willful disregard for the future, the old people continued to wear ill-fitting, knitted accessories, to buy the People’s Friend in hard copy and to favour cinnamon above all the futuristic flavours now available.

In the future old people were a problem like global warming or lung cancer. The experts- heavily suited gentlemen, and ladies from London with briefcases- felt certain that the old people, like lung cancer and global warming, could be fixed with just the right mixture of restraint and advertising.

In the future old people were expected to be younger. Though the percentage of old people with youthful haircuts had dramatically risen in the future, these haircuts had no substantial influence upon their musical tastes, or for that matter, their politics or their propensity to pick their teeth in full view of the general public. Despite scientific research and the development of a Government task force on age prevention, old people were just as old as they had ever been. Whilst the future was well-established and experiencing marked success amongst the young, the middle-aged and the working classes, in certain parts of certain towns the old people were actually growing older by the day.

In the future old people did not have jobs or important roles in clubs or societies.

In the future old people spoke a different language. Certain accents and intonations were similar to the future but the ordinary people found it hard to understand the old people in crowded bars or on mobile telephones.

In the future old people made everyone feel bad for being young. “I don’t want to see old people everywhere,” the young people said to each other, over after work pints in corporate pubs, “They make me feel like I should be doing something more important while I still can.” “Screw that,” they replied to each other, over two for one meals in the very same corporate pubs, “In the future, everyone is important just because they’re here, in the future; everyone except the old people.”

In the future old people were forbidden from congregating in groups of five or larger. “There’s something vaguely threatening about a group of grown men with sticks, standing in a mall, speaking a different language,” explained the Home Secretary, “If they refuse to embrace the future, the future’s sure as Hell not going to bend over backwards for them.”

In the future old people could be donated to the lonely. The government, fully aware that old people were making the future look bad, offered a small incentive of thirty pounds stirling for every old person donated. A yellow, shipping crate, emblazoned with graffiti- style caricatures of a lonely person, weeping was positioned in the centre of every major town. Old people could be deposited in these crates between the hours of nine and five, Monday to Saturday. On Sunday the crates were closed for business allowing the managers a decent lie in. Armchairs were provided for the comfort of the old people. The future was ruthless but not cruel.

In the future old people were part of the solution whether they liked it or not.

3. Lonely People

The future was hard on the lonely people.

The future required two hands to open. Many lonely people had lost arms and legs in the war. Some lonely people had both hands busy, juggling careers and cats and dogs and dead parents and bouts of minor depression. Other lonely people were too tired out from being lonely to contemplate the future. “Is it like flat pack furniture?” they asked, examining the future from all four angles, “I can’t do flat pack furniture by myself. Once I bought a bookshelf from Ikea and it’s still sitting in the garage. I can’t do the future if you have to make it for yourself.” “Perhaps,” suggested the man from the Royal Mail depot, exacerbated by the ever-growing line outside his door, “The future might seem more manageable if you asked your neighbours for help, or joined a religious group of some sort.” “Oh, no,” said the lonely people, flushing beetroot red, “They might think I was lonely or something.”

The future was easy to ignore at first. The lonely people simply chose to pretend it hadn’t arrived. During the week they religiously avoided the staffroom at lunchtime when talk of the future was as inevitable as the air conditioning.

The future was worse at weekends.

The future was unbearable on Bank Holidays and annual leave, which, though publically anticipated, in private felt like a two week death sentence. The lonely people, embarking upon lonely little pilgrimages to the holiday destinations of their childhood, slept in starchy, guest house sheets, read library books in plastic sheathes and consumed joyless ice cream cones from the staunch comfort of their winter coats. The thought of the future hung like a migraine headache over all their meals, prophesying another decade, perhaps two, of similarly lonely holidays.

The future, when finally un-wrapped, sat awkwardly in the average lonely person’s living room.

The future did not match the wallpaper. The future left indentations in the laminate flooring. The future openly mocked the Royal Doulton figurines parading up and down the mantelpiece with their Victorian frocks and parasols. The future made every tiny detail of solitary life seem tired and lonely and somewhat frugal in comparison.

The future did not work for everyone. The old people seemed quite content to ignore the future whilst the lonely people grew lonelier by the day, frustrated by the fact that they simply could not get their futures started.

The future was slower than expected. Whilst most members of the community noted with forced bravado the head-spinning pace at which the future was progressing, the lonely people examined their users’ guides and wondered why the future refused to get going for them. “Does the future require batteries?” they asked, flooding the Government-run help lines with their lonely, little questions, “Does it need a jumpstart? Is there a shop where you can get your future fixed if it has problems getting started?” The Government-run help lines, scratched their collective heads and put the lonely people on hold to the tune of various, futuristic Bowie hits. “Hmmm,” they said collectively, examining all the statistics available, “it seems as if the future isn’t working for everyone.”

The future was not as popular as anticipated.

4. Old People and Lonely People in the Future.

In the future being alone became easier.

In the future every lonely person was entitled to their very own old person, free of charge, delivery included. Most lonely people over the age of thirty, made good on the offer. “It can’t do any harm to have another person around the house,” they said, clearing a space on the living room sofa, “the future will be much more manageable now I’ve got someone to talk to.”

The future remained a mystery to the old people. The sharpest wondered audibly if the future had commenced without them. The more senile elements talked of the future in wild outlandish terms, quoting Shakespeare and Star Trek and the book of Revelation. These old people were often unpleasant to be around, and prone to outbreaks of physical prayer or violence when cornered. The majority of old people however, shoved the future down the side of the sofa and determined to forget all about it. They grew old in defiance and refused to be drawn into any conversation attaining to or regarding the future. “The future,” they said, with fake exacerbation, “Sure it’s nonsense. If you believed everything they said on Tomorrow’s World, we’d be floating up and down the Sandy Row in tinfoil jumpsuits.”

The future was only available to those who could imagine it.

The future had not yet begun for the lonely people. They considered asking the old people for some wise words regarding the future but had no idea how to begin such a conversation. Instead, they smiled at each other politely like actors on an instant coffee advertisement, and cried in the bathroom with the bath taps running, and made endless cups of silent tea.

The future was an awkward topic for outsiders. The future was like religion or modern warfare or open-heart surgery; only the experienced were granted rights to an opinion.

The future proceeded without the lonely people and the old people. The future grew more futuristic by the day. Within six months even the original skeptics had begun to admit the future was just as shiny as anticipated, perhaps more so. The lonely people were the first to agree, publically and with notable enthusiasm. The old people put the kettle on and watched yet another BBC2 documentary about the times before the future arrived. “Those were the days,” they mumbled, between mouthfuls of custard creams and fig rolls, “You knew you were on an island in them days.”

In the future being alone became much easier.

In the future many people found they did not even have to leave the comfort of their own living room in order to feel alone.

Jusqu'a la fin

2010-08-27T16:42:00.001-07:00

The final few weeks were centuries. She struck them off individually on the kitchen calendar, beginning with days and hours, and, when the minutes suddenly slowed to turtle pace, resorting to seconds.

The bathroom taps ran thick with lukewarm kisses. The morning toast took on a jealous stench. The bedroom lamps bristled; five hundred watts for her, permanently fused for him. It was months, decades perhaps, since both bedside lamps had glowed simultaneously and with equal fervor. They made excuses, blaming the season, the neighbors and the economic climate, which made everything, even love sharing, seem like an exercise in thrift.

Every breath was an argument waiting to burst.

When the pressure grew too much for her, she slipped from the room and emptied her oaths into a series of sterile, pickle jars borrowed many months previously, with good intentions, from her late Mother. She kept her frustrations lined and labeled at the very backmost section of the larder behind the Balsamic vinegar, which was seldom, if ever only on special occasions, used. (He kept a similar shelf of angry, diesel oil canisters in the garden shed.)

They took great trouble- carrying out intensive internet research, consulting library books and well-versed, work colleagues- in finding fresh ways to add insult to injury. With little encouragement the insult grew wings and hovered over the dining room table, casting a permanent shadow over the dinner salad. The injury tunneled under the carpet bruising willfully beneath their naked heels. They drove each other senile with good manners: well-laid tables, polite conversations and sugar sigh compliments, not to mention many, many doors in many, many buildings held open at exactly the right moment and inclination.

Beneath the surface they plotted bloody murder and knives.

He grew his beard to meet his armpits. Sheer rage stimulated hair growth at exactly three times the normal rate. She took to wearing her wedding band in a tissue, tightly balled inside her jacket pocket. In less than a day the half inch indentation on her marriage finger returned to normal. It had been six thin months from start to finish. “Six months is only enough for two thirds of a baby,” she told her best friend on the telephone, “Two thirds is either the baby’s legs or its arms I suppose. It’s not enough for both.” It was an odd thought, and deeply unsettling for her friend who had never liked him from the start. “Best not to think of it like that, Sweetie,” the telephone friend replied, “Best to settle things quickly and move on. Try not to get too morose.”

He left via the bathroom window, departing as he’d first arrived. He left on a Monday morning, three and a half minutes into her pre-work shower. She heard the window close behind him but the sound of shampoo, foaming in her outer ears, muffled all but the most obvious cruelties. “Ah,” she thought to herself, “he’s letting the cat out;” and thus reassured herself for the next five minutes- right the way through rinsing, conditioning and half a leg’s worth of shaving- that he was finally, after all these months, doing something right.

He took the cat with him, leaving nothing but a post-it note and a dust ring where the cat’s food had previously been stored. “I took the cat,” he’d written in block capitals with an eyeliner pencil. That much was obvious.

He took the cat, and in his haste to escape, neglected to remember several pairs of shoes which had taken up residence under their bed.

She found them three days later, searching one-handed for a suitcase in which to store their wedding day photos, (she was not yet large enough for a permanent clear out.) “Damn,” she thought, as her fingers fumbled upon muddy lace and soccer studs, “he’s left his bloody shoes behind.”

Thereafter, though it was raining in a fashion rarely seen outside the Old Testament, she took a spade and buried his shoes in the back garden. (She was not the kind of girl prone to dealing with problems and had made a habit of burying most everything more worrying than a common cold. The back garden was puckered with buried problems: tax forms, old boyfriends, both parents, recently deceased, and a suspicious looking breast lump, long-ignored. It was her intention, when the sun came out and her skin grew thick enough for wrestling, to dig these problems up and deal with each individually in a mature manner.)

She buried his shoes between the compost bin and a small pile of beach pebbles marking the spot where she’d temporarily deposited her sixth grade math teacher; a man with thick-rimmed reading glasses who made her feel chronically mediocre. “It’s just for a week or two,” she told herself, and made a note on the kitchen calendar, “I’ll dig them up as soon as I work out what to do with them.”

It rained for forty days and forty nights. The back garden puddled and pooled, and on the third day, rose six feet to form a fully-fledged lake. All but the deepest problems found themselves suddenly unanchored and swept far out to sea. (Eventually they would come to rest on foreign shores and oilrigs, forming reef-like clusters of problems for other people, many of whom could not even understand English.)

Standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing her sixteenth wine glass of the week, she smiled smugly and assumed his shoes long gone, beyond consideration. Imagine her surprise when, on the forty first morning, she rose to find both the prerequisite rainbow and a husband regrown from the ankles up.

She dropped the seventeenth wine glass in horror. It shattered on the kitchen tiles, dispersing tiny droplets of Cabernet Sauvignon all over her tights. (The tights were fortunately black and fully capable of concealing all but the whitest of domestic stains.)

In the garden, by the compost bin, her recently regrown husband chewed his fingernail furtively and attempted to make his second escape of the year. His size nines, anchored as they were inside a pair of subsistence brogues, refused to budge more than a half inch upwards or downwards. From her vantage point, stooped beneath the kitchen blind, she watched as he wriggled this way and that, attempting to un-anchor his feet. From such a distance, with no prior knowledge, he appeared to be break dancing. A patch of dandelions had taken root about his ankles and were beginning to make their way, vine-like, up his shins towards his crotch. In other circumstances this arrangement might have been charming. From the kitchen sink it appeared as vulgar as any of the excesses he’d submitted her to over the previous six months. Besides, dandelions had always been her least favorite of the common British weeds and he, her least favorite husband so far.

She drew the blinds sharply and pretending to rinse a series of already clean forks, individually, and with puritanical care.

“Hey,” he yelled, when he’d all but exhausted himself attempting to escape the lawn, “I know you’re watching. I can see your chin under the kitchen blinds. Come out here and talk to me.”

The neighbors on either side, thrilled by the possibility of war, opened their upstairs curtains for a better view. The lady on the left, who’d almost always lived alone and never so much as considered the possibility of taking a lover or even a cat for company, fixed herself a French Press and settled in for the duration. Over the years she’d been party to almost two dozen of next door’s burials, but this was the first resurrection she’d ever witnessed. She took notes in a mid-sized binder, which she’d previously used to store receipts and itemized telephone bills.

“Come out here now,” he yelled, straining to raise himself up on a pair of sunken feet, “Come out here, or God help me, I’ll never speak to you again.”

She gave the forks another rinse and turned the radio up. “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was shrieking away on Radio Two. It was a song she’d often admired for both its tune and sentiment. Today, with a regrown husband sprouting out of the back lawn, she detested it beyond all other songs, and/or including the collected works of Queen, which had previously been her benchmark for atrocity. “Love will tear us apart,” she raged into the cooling dishwater, “A chance would be a fine thing.”

Her husband, meanwhile, was taking root in the back yard, toes steadily sinking like pale tentacles into the crumbly mud until they delved deep enough to make contact with the gas and sewage pipes which formed an ancient, spaghetti language under the lawn both back and front. Against his will he found himself firmly entangled in the bowel’s of their marital home, monitoring, with his overly-sensitive big toe, all the house’s vital intakes and emissions. Thus entwined he confessed himself more familiar than ever with the comings and goings of his wife’s fragile whims.

“Come out here this instant,” he screamed when September began to look more like Winter than Autumn, and the dandelions finally threatened to infiltrate his beard. “Come out here and dig me up. Neither of us wants me here any longer.”

And she, watching from the bedroom window where the inclination to hibernate all through this awkward stage had come upon her suddenly and without respite, tugged her left earlobe and wondered just how long it would take for the Autumn leaves to bury him completely.

“It’ll only be for a season,” she whispered towards the lawn, aware as she was that the double glazing sensored all but the loudest screams, “Just until I can work out what to do with you.”

Sofa

2010-06-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Having finally succeeded in the invention of a time machine capable of skittling between this now and the next, (not to mention all those long-lost nows of their younger years,) he fixed himself a whiskey neat and fell asleep on the living room sofa.

This was an enormous sofa, capable of comfortably containing the man, his young wife, their recently acquired and soon-to-be-named Beagle and a pair of brown corduroy cushions, late wedding presents from the lady who cut her hair. The sofa was ten feet long and, much too large for normal entrances, had been ushered into the room via an accommodating third floor, balcony window. Having arrived awkwardly, the sofa took no small time to oust a bookcase, an elderly telephone table and a battered leather reclining chair. It now sat smugly, eight and a half upholstered feet inside the living room, one and a half feet, peeking shyly through the kitchen door.

The sofa was a superb conversation starter at the dinner parties for close friends and colleagues which the couple hosted weekly.

“Man,” Mike from accounts would inevitably mutter upon entering their living room, “looks like someone forgot to measure their sofa before they brought it home.”

“Must make it a little awkward getting in and out of the kitchen,” Mike from account’s, partner- a somewhat angular girl from North Dakota- would continue from her position, roughly one and a quarter feet through the kitchen door.

“Gosh, no,” the man would say, “we like it this way. Keeps things fresh, doesn ‘t it honey?”

And his young wife, clambering over the last foot of sofa to offer everyone a pitcher of homemade lemonade, would agree heartily, her eager nods sending a shower of lemonade and ice drops over the living room carpet.

The enormous sofa was just one in an infinite list of impromptu wonders which kept the young wife permanently blushing at her own good fortune. Two weeks into their courtship there had been a bicycle, built by hand, including wheels. Subsequently there had been an ice rink for the attic, (constructed with special attention to privacy so no one saw her stumbling attempts at pirouettes and teapots.) There had been tomato liquor, an opera in five parts, an imaginary kingdom, crowded into the footspace at the end of their home built bed and, on their wedding day, a crown of bees, carefully cultivated for their stingless beauty.

Buzzing up and down the aisle accompanied by her well-shod husband, a bouquet of recycled light bulbs, (still glowing peacefully,) and a twenty foot train of perfectly manicured bees, the young wife imagined herself the luckiest girl in the Pacific North West.

Finally, there had been the time machine. Driven by the desire to rewrite the wrongs of their much-mangled early days, he had first bought her a notepad, then a laptop computer, and finally, when her protestations grew too loud to ignore, agreed to the invention of a fully-functioning time machine.

Having screwed the final screw and bolted the final bolt, noting all his calculations, in pencil on the living room wall, the man removed his hat, tugged his left earlobe absentmindedly, as was his usual custom, and pronounced the time machine complete. Suddenly he felt the need to sleep, long and loose, dragging dumbly on his eyelids and elbows. He curled up on the enormous sofa, knees to chin, elbows to knees, bent double like a paperback novel, and slept the sleep of a newborn cat. The weight of invention- five years of frantic scribblings, of misplaced birthdays, forgotten anniversaries and dog-eared notepads toppling, Babel-like, from the coffee table- was enough to keep him comatose for the better part of a week.

He slept deftly, chest rising and falling like a stock market trend.

In his absence the season turned stubbornly from summer to fall; five leaves fell from the Oak tree in the back yard, settling on the sill outside his window. His young wife collected these leaves individually- pressing them between the covers of his Old Testament; one each between the first five pages of the Psalms- fully intending to use them as evidence, should he ever question the close of summer.

Thereafter she tip-toed round him for six days straight, proud in part, a little itched from the reverent nuisance of removing her outdoor shoes at the door. As a very young girl she had once been uncharacteristically outspoken during a Sunday School lesson on the subject of respecting one’s elders and, as a result, had been permanently cursed with dinosaur toes. Her left foot inclined due East with every step. Her heels clunked like loose change on the wooden floor. She took the stairs like a newborn elephant. Out of respect, and the slow-learned habit of placing her new husband’s needs before her own, she now walked round the apartment barefoot, shouldering the October chill as it wormed its ways into her ankles. “Penance,” she assumed, “for all his latest efforts.”

When the man finally awoke, flush and thick-tongued, right cheek permanently indented with the florid pattern of the sofa’s upholstery, his first thought was the time machine, his second the hunger rumbling in his belly. Only in the third instance, having consumed an entire grapefruit, ice cube cold from the fridge, did he consider his young wife, sleeping, as normal girls do, on the left side of their bed.

Thus piqued he gave the time machine a tertiary spit and polish- using, for this purpose, the tassled end of her winter scarf- tossed the grapefruit rind and approached their bedroom door at speed. Whereupon the sight of his young wife’s naked arm, curled thoughtlessly around the place where he would, most normally, sleep, stopped him suddenly in his carpet slippers. It was just gone 5 am and she was sleeping thickly, one shin protruding from beneath the duvet. The man watched his young wife from the bedroom door, spellbound for several minutes. He was a lightning sleeper, capable of dozing on trains, planes and quieter park benches. He was almost always, except in moments of illness or fury, the first to fall asleep, and had never once in all his married or courting days, taken the trouble to watch her sleep.

The man lowered himself on to the corner of their bed and held his young wife by the heels. He felt this was the correct gesture, for her face, innocent as a clipped cloud, and her arms and her hair, halo’d in wild auburn swoops, seemed all the time capable of imminent flight. Eager as he was, the man felt it timely to resist the inclination to rouse his young wife, to bounce upon the edge of their bed- individually crushing each of the seventeen thousand trees, bridges and two storey buildings which made up their imaginary kingdom- to kiss her five times round her elegant neck, fashioning a kind of damp and earnest necklace, until she awoke suddenly into the realization of their ability to move both backwards and forwards in time.

He rose quietly, rooted around the floor space at the end of their bed, and upon finding a reasonably fresh t shirt, swapped it quickly for his own hibernation shirt. After which he quit the bedroom, walking backwards to capture the moment in its fullness, and prepared breakfast: two chocolate croissants and a French Press of instant coffee, for they were all out of the good stuff.

It was 5:20 am and the sun was beginning to peek through the kitchen skylight. The man felt reasonably capable of convincing his young wife it was much later in the morning. (Though militantly opposed to duplicity, the man and his young wife were somewhat inclined to bend the truth slightly; favoring exaggeration, flattery and the occasional white lie, in matters of romance and fiction. They would not dream of lying to anyone outside their own earshot, and had, on occasion, been respectively punched and run over by an elderly man in a golf cart, for telling the truth in a difficult situation.)

“Darling,” he cried, as he levered the door open with one hip, ushering the breakfast tray into their bedroom, “It’s eight o’clock, and I’ve finally woken up. Wake up. I’ve made breakfast.”

It was rare for the man to make breakfast on a weekday and the shock of this, rather than his unexpected return to waking life, instantly roused his young wife.

Stretching both arms to meet the ceiling, she slid into a sitting position, tucked her hair behind her ears, and prepared to receive the breakfast tray. Without speaking, the man smoothed the bed covers over her lap and positioned the tray under her chin. He poured two cups of coffee and handed the stronger of the two to his young wife.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “It’s only instant.”

“No matter,” she replied and rested her empty hand on his knee, “I see the time machine’s finished.”

“It is.”

“Does it work? Have you tried it yet?”

“Not without you!” he retorted adamantly. And then, realizing that he’d been asleep for many days, possibly weeks, asked quickly, “Why, have you tried it yet?”

“Not without you,” she replied, for this had been well-written into their marital vows; “no time traveling, one without the other.” However, his young wife, unsure of how long her husband might sleep on the enormous sofa, had once- on Wednesday- almost, seriously contemplated the possibility of a dervish jaunt into her early days for one last shortbread coffee with her dear departed, Grandmother. She would hold this almost lie like an evil twin for four further years, until a particularly poignant sermon at the church they would come to call home, caused her to confess all, tearfully in the passenger seat of his hatchback. Whereupon he would forgive his young wife earnestly and buy her a leopard print coat and take her out for two steak dinners, the second of which would prove the setting for a similar confession of how he had almost, once seriously thought about spending her birthright on a pair of airstream trailers. Thereafter all would be well in the world and they would fall asleep full-bellied and clear of conscience, confident in their own honesty.

The man and his young wife sat on their bed, pretending to drink their coffee- which was unfortunately instant, and not even one of the more expensive brands- and staring at each other in the half light.

“Well,” the man, finally said, “shall we?” and his young wife found herself all of a sudden unsure of his intentions, incapable of telling whether her husband wished to make love, or transport her to another decade. As a means of clarifying the moment she shrugged slightly, coaxing the strap of her slip off her freckled shoulder. She placed her, still full coffee cup on the bedside cabinet and slid her hand further up his leg.

Realising her intentions the man started slightly, dripping hot coffee over his fingers, “Oh no, not that, sweetheart,” he said quietly, “I meant, do you want to have a go in the time machine?”

“But it’s almost a quarter past eight already,” she replied, “I have to be in the office at 9:30. I’m not sure we have time this morning.”

“It’s only half past five, really,” he replied, “I lied. I couldn’t wait to wake you up.”

This came as no surprise to her, for she had often woken her husband up at ungodly hours of the night and morning, just to reveal a particularly vivid dream detail.

“Well, ok then,” she said. “Just let me brush my teeth first and… should I change? Do you think it’s a bad idea to time travel in a nightdress?”

“You might be cold. We could end up in the winter. I’d bring a cardigan to be on the safe side, maybe some slippers too.”

She slipped out of bed and made her way into the bathroom. While she brushed her teeth and combed her hair, and completed all the morning rituals which kept her trapped in their en suite, for some twenty five minutes each morning, the man located one of her winter cardigans and a pair of sheepskin slippers, and finding he still had a few minutes spare, finished off the remnants of his young wife’s chocolate croissant.

Ten minutes later they reconvened on the enormous sofa.

“Well,” the man asked, holding his young wife’s hand, lightly in his own, “Forwards or backwards?”

“Backwards of course,” she replied, “You know we’ve talked about this darling, let’s go all the way back and fix the unhappy times. I can’t bear to think about them and if we fix them I won’t have to remember them any more.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I want us to be as always happy as we are right now.”

“Ok, then, I’m setting the dial for the very early days. I’m warning you though, I remember us dreadfully unhappy back then. This could be very messy.”

The man pushed a number of buttons on the time machine, switched a switch and braced his heels against the living room floor. He had no idea what to expect from a home made time machine and was well-prepared for some sort of wild, static shock or stomach upset. The enormous sofa lurched, once, twice and on the third shudder launched itself into yesteryear, dragging two feet of the kitchen doorframe with it. The feeling of traveling in time was oddly pleasant, comparable in parts to the intoxicating resignation of a well-delivered anaesthetic.

Seconds later, or perhaps centuries, it was hard to tell in the soupy darkness, the man and his young wife, found themselves supine on their enormous sofa, supplanted in the grounds of a well-kept church. Through the evening drizzle they could make out the back and front of their younger selves, positioned on the church steps.

“I remember this,” she said, turning to face her new husband who was flicking small pieces of masonry from the upholstery of their living room sofa, “this was very early.”

“Less than a week in,” he replied, “It could have gone either way at this stage.”

“After this things got really hard.”

“And then they got even worse.”

“And the ocean felt like an eternity.”

“And the days felt like months.”

“And I couldn’t think of things to say on the telephone.”

“And I got too tired for letters.”

“And we almost gave up and got old.”

“And then, when it was nearly too much to carry, things got a little better.”

“Slowly at first, but better every day.”

“Until one day, we woke up on the same side of the ocean and things were almost amazing.”

“And we couldn’t remember how we got here.”

“But we were exceptionally glad,” he said, and kissed her on the back of the wrist.

Fifteen feet away, on the church steps, in the Friday evening drizzle, the younger man reached for the lapels of her winter coat, and held her like a statue. Dozens and hundreds of cars drove past, some well-lit and some, confused by the denim blue hour, not yet ready to turn their headlights on. All these cars, and their speeding occupants, chatting and thinking and singing along to the local radio stations, were not quite as happy as the younger man and his not-yet wife, standing like bridged statues on the steps of the church. Thus inclined, and occupied they had not yet become aware of the rain, mussing her hair into felted peaks, drenching his wool coat from the outside in.

They did not notice the cars or the streetlamps nor concern themselves greatly with future problems.

“Gosh,” she said, from the safety of their enormous sofa, “I think we were happy even then.” And the man agreed and would not change a single thing.

After which they traveled through time, arriving just in time to cycle downtown for proper coffee, in proper mugs and morning papers and half an hour’s conversation before work. That evening, under cover of the night, the man and his young wife hoisted their time machine off the Burnside Bridge. It sank without trace, and unknown to the city’s residents transported ten square feet of the Willamette four hundred years into the future, where the river had run unexpectedly dry and been replaced by a somewhat ill-conceived ice rink.

Watching his time machine sink, the man considered all the nuts and bolts and moleskin notebooks squandered in its invention.

Turning to his young wife he whispered, “I don’t regret a single minute of the last five years,” and not a word of this was a lie.

Shark Week

2010-06-21T13:59:00.001-07:00

One:

There was a tree, and beside the tree a bench and on the bench sat a young man with the most elegant fingernails she’d ever seen.

She sat down beside him, resting her beach bag against her ankles.

“How long ‘til the next bus?” she asked.

The young man said nothing. He neither spoke nor acknowledged her presence.

She was well-used to going unacknowledged having, for the last fifteen years, fulfilled the role of dull and stable associate to an ever-circling gaggle of brash, blonde friends and their wide-mouthed sidekicks. She was an unremarkable girl with an honest smile and the propensity to freckle in lieu of an actual tan.

Unbeknown to her, the young man found freckles charming, particularly the sun-born shoulder variety he could see peaking from beneath the straps of her sundress. He was, however, a master in the art of appearing unconcerned, and could often go weeks without offering even the smallest of compliments.

Though he was well aware of her freckling shoulders and the smell of her, which was rich and thick, and undoubtedly composed of coconut bronzing oil and pineapple juice, he continued to gaze far out to sea as if caught in the act of staring down the midday sun. His brows- two thick flicks of coalsome black- met in the middle, arching furiously over his nose. His nose was too large for his face. It interrupted the continuous line of forehead and chin, forming a point of concern, approximately three inches into the future. He was well aware of the fact that his nose preceded him into every conversation and, as such, made a conscious effort to lean perpetually backwards, giving the impression of a better-proportioned man.

He was twenty three years old; three parts human and one part shark.

His lineage, a truth only recently revealed to him had yet to take on the exotic appeal of middle age, when any deviation of skin, tongue, racial or sexual persuasion, would seem an enormous blessing against the multitude of by the by and balding men he worked alongside. Aged twenty three and six thousand miles from home, being one quarter shark was an embarrassment akin to a chronic, speech impediment.

The young man leaned back against the bench and felt the pressure of his fin grating into the concrete. It was a small fin, barely perceivable to the naked eye, sheltering undisturbed at the base of his spinal column. He continued to stare straight ahead, purposefully ignoring the girl to his left.

He found himself pleasantly irked by her continued presence. The realization of her was telescopic; a feeling roughly comparable to a particularly satisfying sneeze.

His fin throbbed. His immaculate nails strained purposefully, burrowing 2.5 millimeters into the open air. Under cover of his tightly pursed lips he ran an anxious tongue along his gum line and found his teeth approximately two times sharper than the previous evening. The young man felt his quarter blood acutely. A thin line of perspiration formed on his upper lip, beading seductively like the sweat on a soda pop can. He held himself like a breeze block, temporarily incapable of movement, cut perhaps, from the same concrete slab as the bench they perched upon.

She watched him from behind her sunglasses, forcing them further up her nose to afford maximum cover. It was hard to tell what he was staring at so intently.

In the middle-distance, perched reassuringly between their bench and the edge of the horizon, a pot-bellied father attempted to balance two young children on a luminous orange lilo. They stood momentarily, silhouetted clumsily against the Mediterranean sun before losing balance and tipping hysterically into the ocean. Two girls sunning themselves spine up, turned simultaneously- like a pair of hot, cross sausages- the brunette momentarily exposing a white shock of undercooked breast. The local man who kept the sun lounger stand, fanned himself lethargically with a copy of yesterday’s paper; the front of his hair rising and falling in opposition to the day old news.

“How long ‘til the next bus?” she repeated, and when he didn’t bother to answer her second question, she assumed the young man a foreigner, or perhaps one of the few locals who had not yet grasped the importance of tourist minimum English. She answered her own question hesitatingly; “I think the buses come every ten minutes or so. I expect there will be one any second now.”

As if to illustrate her suspicions she shoved her sunglasses heavenwards, scraping the hair back from her forehead, cupped her eyes with a damp hand and scanned the road for an approaching bus.

He turned to watch her half-heartedly. His hair was still damp from the ocean. There were small particles of sand caught up in the gravelly remnants of his beard. Pleased to have elicited a response of sorts, she smiled knowingly. It was an honest smile. Her lips parted briefly, revealing two rows of perfectly normal teeth, well-spaced. Without thinking he smiled back, exposing a complete set of Alpine points and peaks.

The shock of his teeth caught on the base of her spine. She jumped slightly.

She was the sort of girl prone to start suddenly like a character from an old-fashioned movie. When surprised, her arms and legs bucked wildly, acting without conscious thought or restraint. She had once kicked a complete stranger, square in the back of the head during a particularly jumpy movie. It was not unknown for her to fall over unannounced, having temporarily forgotten the fine art of balance.

In the act of recoiling, she managed to upset both the young man and her delicately positioned beach bag. It tumbled over, releasing a bellyful of spreads and creams, two beach towels, and the damp remains of the morning’s bikini. Embarrassed and more than a little afraid, she instantly dropped to her hands and knees and began groping under the bench, shoving all her belongings back into the hold all.

Down on all fours, amidst the puckered remains of once-chewed gum wads and ice cream wrappers, she found herself eye to toe with the young man’s feet. Empty Evian bottle in hand, she paused to take in the toffee colored tan line, the tiny black hairs, curling like silk-spun Velcro over his ankles and the immaculate toe nails, polished to the pearly tone of clam shells. Her hair, falling all of a sudden free of her sunglasses, came cascading over his feet and, beneath the bench, the moment turned quietly Biblical; urgent and old and terribly sharp.

She came up blushing. The young man was waiting for her. She caught him staring at the back of her neck, silently trying to work out where her freckles ran out.

“Sorry,” he said, through his lips, with not so much a hint of tiger teeth.

She was unsure why he was apologizing but accepted it gratefully.

“It’s ok,” she said, “I’m terribly clumsy. Always dropping things when I get flustered.”

“Did I fluster you?” he asked, still tight-lipped, “Was it the teeth?” Upon which, feeling uncharacteristically brave, he flashed her a second full set smile and quickly clamped his mouth shut, registering the look of horror which had flashed across her naked eyes.

“No, no, of course not,” she answered, all her words, tripping and stumbling out of her mouth, ever-anxious to avoid the obvious, “It definitely wasn’t your teeth.”

“Well you were staring at me?”

“I was not. I was watching for the bus.”

“Bus, my ass. You were staring at me. Do you fancy me?”

“No… I mean you’re a nice enough looking fella but you’ve got a funny nose… oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that….sorry. Forget what I said about your nose. Honest to God, I don’t fancy you and I don’t think your nose is that terrible… I was just sort of staring at your nails. They’re kind of amazing.”

Her freckles glowed luminous peach against her reddening cheeks. A single freckle, approximately one quarter inch in diameter, had appeared on the lobe of her left ear. From a distance it would undoubtedly be mistaken for a piercing.

He laughed, raising a hand to cover his mouth, and once his mouth had returned to its resting position, extended the same hand to reveal five, perfectly cut and manicured nails.

“My doctor says I have the growiest nails he’s ever seen.”

“Growiest isn’t a real word.”

“It is where I’m from.”

“And where’s that?”

“Hard to say. It’s a long story. I could tell you about it over dinner tonight.”

“Well, I don’t usually go to dinner with strange, young men.”

“I’m not a strange, young man. We’re old friends now. You’ve seen my fingernails. I’ve seen the contents of your purse; we go back forever.”

And partly because of the fingernails and partly because she was on holidays- exempt for one week from the ordinary rules of good sense and safety- but mostly because nothing of any romantic consequence had ever occurred to her before, she said yes and made spoken plans to meet by the phone box in the plaza and quiet plans to paint her own toe nails a mean, slut red, and began to wonder if she could risk the strapless dress with the floaty hem.

And the young man, bit his own tongue out of boldness until he drew blood and leaned so hard against the bench back that his fin receded two whole inches under pressure.

“Lovely to meet you,” he said when the bus finally arrived.

“You two,” she replied, “I’ll see you at eight.”

She swung her beach bag over her shoulder and mounted the bus, expecting the young man to follow. He didn’t. He remained on the bench for several minutes, maintaining his shoreline vigil. She watched him shrink and finally dissolve through the steamy, bus window.

It was only two stops later, as she inspected her shoulders for the first burnt pinch of a good roasting, that the realization struck her; she did not know his name.

Two:

She arrived first, positioning herself on the wall behind the plaza’s only telephone kiosk. From her vantage point she could spot the young man’s arrival and then wait a casual ten minutes before making her own entrance.

She had a longstanding horror of being first and yet- no matter how slowly she walked, no matter how many errands she ran en route, no matter how many anxious circles of the block she made- she always seemed to arrive earlier than anticipated.

She raised her watch to her face. It was seven minutes to eight. She looked at the clock tower across the plaza. It was two minutes to eight. She split the difference and called herself a respectable five minutes early.

The telephone kiosk cast a shadow across her bare legs, turning her shins a particularly British shade of grey. She crossed her legs at the ankle and thrust them into the sunlight, admiring her blood red toenails and the tiny silver ring on her last but one toe. “Gosh,” she thought, lifting her skirt to compare the slightly more pallid flesh of her thighs, “I’m really starting to tan.”

The thought cheered her immensely. She slid off the wall, smoothed her dress out and wandered over to the telephone kiosk, in the vain pursuit of a full-length, reflective surface. (The hotel room she was currently sharing with a young lady from Stockport, named Lisa, though amply equipped for trouser pressing, Spanish television watching and the cold storing of miniature-sized beverages, was pitifully ill-equipped in the full length mirror department. Consequently, it had been almost eight days since she last viewed her legs and torso at the same time.)

The telephone kiosk was papered in amateurish, calling cards.

The British tourists, mostly families, who populated the resort during the summer months were wont to complain about the state of these local phone boxes. “Last thing I want the kids to see, when they’re phoning home to Gran and Gramps,” they’d mutter over their hotel reception desks, demanding swift and decisive action. The tour reps, too busy promoting their weekly quota of pool-parties, coach excursions and Mamma Mia-themed karaoke evenings, delegated to the local police. The local police feigned indifference, grumbled over their mid-morning espressos, and, when threatened with upper management involvement, finally responded, invoking all the lackadaisical enthusiasm of a weekend siesta.

Subsequently each morning saw a junior police officer dispatched from the station on an official tour of the resort’s seventeen telephone kiosks. Armed with a damp sponge, a garbage sack and a plastic spatula, he made his way round the village, wearily removing postcards and fliers, returning each phone box to its original, virgin state. This young man, or occasionally lady, acted without enthusiasm or speed, stretching an hour’s work all the way into lunchtime. He felt the futile nature of his task and secretly longed for a proper assignment; a murder investigation, a hit and run, or, at very least, an opportunity to dive, truncheon first, into one of the resort’s daily, alcohol-fuelled altercations. By early evening the kiosks were freshly plastered. A series of laminated Spanish ladies in small bikinis, reclined on satin-sheeted beds, twisted telephone cords seductively and doubled over, leering into the face of innocent phone box users, with an expression which could just as easily be mistaken for appendicitis as sexual ecstasy.

She was a reasonably modest girl, prone to knee length skirts and turtlenecks. Anything falling above the knee area could be contemplated only with the modesty-sparing inclusion of a pair of thick black leggings. The scantily clad ladies on the phone box, fascinated her.

Without permission her hand reached for the closest of the cards, slid it free of the kiosk’s casing and raised it towards her face. Up close the young lady photographed appeared ten years older at least. Wearing a white, lace bikini she arched awkwardly, raising her hands to the heavens, as if attempting to escape through the upper left corner of the card. Her hair- clearly blessed by the timely use of a soft focus lens- was jet black, voluminous and appeared to be glowing around the edges, haloing her face with the kind of reverent hum usually reserved for Mexican Jesus. “Call me,” she’d written, “for a fun and wild time.” A mobile phone number was hastily scrawled below, the original number Tippex’ed to make room for her latest digits.

The young woman had neglected to include her name.

“Gosh,” she thought to herself, as she attempted to return the card to its original position, “Does no one in this bloody town have an actual name?”

Just then the young man arrived, striding across the plaza in a pair of faded board shorts and a white cotton shirt. She colored instantly, dropping the card on to the cobbled street.

“Hey,” he said, as he approached her, “You dropped something.”

“No, I didn’t,” she snapped back.

“You did, I saw you.”

He bent to retrieve the card, dragging it from beneath her right sandal, where she had made a half-hearted attempt to conceal its existence.

“Call me,” he read, smirking, “For a fun and crazy time. Is this a friend of yours?”

She snatched the card from him, ripped it in two, exerting substantial effort to make it through the laminated plastic in one drag, and dropped it back on to the street.

He laughed generously, his chin dropping into the deep v of his shirt. Unhinged, she inspected his open mouth and was surprised to see the points and peaks of the early afternoon had been replaced by a set of perfectly mundane teeth.

“Calm down,” he said, still chuckling, “I was only joking. Have you eaten yet?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But I don’t mind watching you eat over a glass of wine.” It was a lie but the thought of eating in front of strangers- running the risk of spinach-flecked teeth, of dribbling or slurping, or, perish the thought, appearing provincial or gluttonous in her menu choices- filled her with abstract fear. “I’m stuffed, to be honest, but maybe I could squeeze desert in later.”

“In that case, do you mind seafood?” he asked, “there’s a great little place my mother raves about, down by the pier.”

“Sounds perfect.”

She shifted her bag from left to right and hooked her left arm through the crook of his right. It was an uncharacteristically bold move on her part but she felt the need to make amends for the telephone box.

“I’m Susan,” she said as they started out across the plaza. He neither replied nor acknowledged that he’d heard.

“I’m Susan,” she repeated, giving his arm a perfunctory squeeze. The young man smelt like sea salt and laundry detergent and fresh cigarettes; an odd combination of innocence and danger. His fingernails, she noted, were perfectly manicured, a good half inch shorter than earlier in the day.

“Nice to meet you, Susan,” the young man said and reached across his chest to pat her hand lightly, mimicking a move he’d once seen on Poirot. He was determined to make it through the evening without revealing anything about himself.

His Father, a slick little man, originally from Greece, had long ago warned him of the danger of revealing too much, particularly to a woman.

“Keep your cards close to your chest, Son,” his Father had said, several glasses into a voluminous pitcher of Ouzo, “the less you tell, the less they’ll have to throw back in your face. Get in there, take what you can and get out before they get so much as a return address.”

His Father was fifty percent shark, the, often alluded to, product of an unfortunate incident at the local aquarium. At the age of thirteen he’d developed a prodigious appetite for female flesh, and acutely influenced by the permanent fin protruding between his shoulder blades, was almost as likely to bite a lady as to bed her.

The young man’s mother, one hundred percent human and Northern with it, had, in the late-eighties, enjoyed a short holiday romance with his Father. Blind as a bat, behind her mirrored sunglasses, she’d gone two weeks straight without noticing the fin, or the teeth, but the perfectly manicured nails had been a constant source of delight to her. At the end of her vacation she’d returned to Blackpool, great with child, and covered all over with toothy perforations. It was only in her third trimester, when the baby had started nibbling her from the inside, that she’d hoaked out a hastily scribbled phone number, and contacted her Greek lover.

“Here,” she’d said, when the bar owner had finally managed to locate the young man’s father, “It’s Pauline, from Blackpool… the one with the curly hair… remember we did it under the pier, after the Abba night? Look, do you remember me or not? You do… good. Well, the thing is I’m up the duff and the child is eating me from the inside out… never mind how far gone I am, seven months if you need to know. It’s definitely yours and it’s chewing on my guts… look is there anything you want to tell me?”

And when he’d admitted to the unfortunate incident in the local aquarium, and the teeth, and the fin and the fact that occasionally, he liked nothing better than eating fish straight from the ocean- live and slippery, guts and all- she dropped the phone in horror, so it swang wildly on its cord, dangling like a hanged man against her parent’s telephone table.

Later, after the Ten O’Clock News and the weather, and the regional news, Manchester-based, she’d called back, nursing a hefty gin and tonic in one hand. “You could have warned me,” she’d said, suddenly understanding his propensity to chew on her earlobes and lips, “You could have been honest with me from the off set. But it’s done now. I’m having the baby in April, if it doesn’t eat me first. I don’t want money nor nothing, but I want you to explain everything to it. When it’s old enough, it’ll be your job to tell it who it really is; aquarium and everything. Can you do that?”

The young man’s Father had reluctantly agreed, and on his fifteenth birthday, suddenly appeared at the celebrations; an unexplained presence, bearing fifteen birthday cards, never sent, and an out of date Everton kit, gift-wrapped.

“Happy Birthday,” he’d said, announcing his arrival to the entire restaurant, “I’m your Dad,” and then twenty minutes later, whilst they pissed in silence, side by side in the gents’ toilets, “You’re going to notice some changes, Son. Your teeth will get sharper, your nails longer; the skin on your shoulder, tough and scaly like old wallpaper. Of course, you’ll already be aware of the fin. You’re turning into a shark; like your old man.”

Driven by the shock, and the odd nature of the revelation, the young man had lost control of himself, pissing in ever-decreasing circles, all over his birthday sneakers.

Even now, eight years later, the shock of it still came upon him suddenly, first thing in the morning with the curtains closed. Bending a reluctant arm under his back, he’d check for the fin, and finding it still there, slightly enlarged, would curse his father and the local aquarium and his paternal grandmother, a trainee diver, who could not bare the feel of wetsuit against her naked flesh.

The young man disentangled his own arm from Susan’s and draped it around her shoulders, drawing her in towards his side. She stumbled slightly and complied. She was a tall girl with an unnaturally short neck. Her shoulders fell several inches above the young man’s. Buckled together they waddled across the plaza, bobbing slightly, like a pair of ocean-bound buoys.

“Gosh,” she thought, “What sort of degenerate refuses to tell a girl his name?” A small and elderly part of her rose in consternation. The better part of her thrilled like a regular deviant.

“Damn it,” the young man thought, “She seems like such a nice girl.” He knew he had the potential to bite her head off.

Three:

“Take your shoes off?” he said, leaning forwards so his chin appeared to rest on the bread rolls.

“Why?” she asked, somewhat alarmed by his insistence.

“Because you’re not supposed to.”

She felt the rough thrill of his naked foot, grating urgently against her ankle, attempting to loose her sandal, heel first. And, when his foot ventured south, lingering on the back of her left calf, she found herself starting suddenly, leaning back in her patio chair, arms and legs twitching nervously.

She was not accustomed to being touched before the second glass of wine.

“Bread roll?” she asked, shoving the basket awkwardly towards his side of the table.

He stopped it with his hand. His fingernails seemed two inches longer than earlier in the evening. They curled deliberately round the wicker basket.

“Sure,” he said, reaching for a piece of French bread, “Take your shoes off first though. Food tastes so much better in bare feet. Trust me, you’ll feel like a savage. It’s a great feeling.”

She was not the kind of girl who removed her shoes in public.

Even within the confines of her own home- a boxy little two by two on the outskirts of Stoke- she religiously toed the line between indoor and outdoor shoes; sensible Clarks for out doors and the office, carpet slippers for everything beyond the front door step. The thought of removing her shoes under the table, of sitting there secretly naked in an expensive restaurant, filled her with abstract shame.

She twisted the tablecloth slowly, feeding the gingham material backwards and forwards between the fingers of her right hand. Both shoulders rose to meet her ear lobes, flexing, as they often did, under pressure. Three feet beneath the table, oblivious to the bread rolls, the olive oil and cutlery, she forced her sandaled heels deep into the patio; an act of open-boned resistance.

Even as she leant forwards, digging her heels deeper into the Spanish tiles, she felt the weight of his expectation, hesitating as he was, sliced bread hovering half way between the tablecloth and his open mouth. She found herself caught between long held convictions and the possibility of the girl she could be; a wild-haired, singing girl, unrehearsed, exuberant, capable of eating dinner stark naked at a stranger’s table. She folded her arms across her chest and wished her name was not Susan.

She could not bring herself to remove her shoes.

“Come on, Susan,” he coaxed her, “Scare yourself a little.”

Reluctantly she agreed and went through the motions of pretending to remove her sandals- first left, then right- shaking her legs delicately as if wriggling free of a particularly sticky problem. Once done, she lent back in her chair purposefully and forced her face into an attitude of mock satisfaction.

“There,” she whispered, stretching her hands and fingers across the table top, in vicious tandem with her still shod toes, “That feels so much better. I feel liberated!”

“Liar,” he said, and stretched to rest both feet on the bridge of her sandals. His teeth were razors bearing down on the breadbasket.

She blushed two shades stronger than her sunburn, and without further consideration, removed her left sandal, pushing it towards his side of the table. It was a concession of sorts; too little, too late.

“Oh Susan,” he said and reached across the breadbasket, grabbing her hands somewhat awkwardly by the wrists. Conjoined, like a pair of warring lobsters, he gave her hands a couple of sharp shakes, oscillating wildly so the palm of her hands fell slap, slopping into the bread rolls.

“Oh Susan,” he repeated, allowing a knowing smile to escape from his shark teeth, “What will we do with you?”

It was the sort of question elderly relatives are prone to ask, delivered in exactly the same tone. She said nothing, unsure how to reply, but took the opportunity to slip her hands free from his grasp.

“You’re a nervous little thing, aren’t you?”

And, because at heart she truly was, Susan nodded slightly and gave the tablecloth a final, reassuring tug, twisting it round her fingers like a set of particularly unwieldy rosary beads.

“You don’t date much, do you?” he asked, and when she turned her head slowly, left to right in dissent, he leant back in his chair, patting his ribcage with the same gesture used to indicate excessive fullness. “Good Susan, I’m glad to hear that. There’s something terribly attractive about innocence.”

Beneath his shirt, the young man felt the fin recede, slipping back into its resting place. Under the inquisitive edge of his tongue, all but one of his shark teeth, tapered off and turned suddenly flat top. He reached across the table, found her hand and gave it a reassuring pat. The quarter blood, coarsing in his veins, seemed thinner now, less apparent, more inclined to believe in the possibility of an ordinary thereafter, full of ordinary girls in ordinary restaurants much like this.

Bent forward, in the posture of prayer he allowed himself the luxury of imagining an actual wife, small children, a house by the sea, a future devoid of teeth and fins; a time when he no longer felt the inclination to bite.

His father, who was fifty percent shark and less inclined to struggle against his oceanic impulses, held high hopes for his son.

“Look, kid,” he’d said, only three weeks earlier, as they sat on the pier, dividing an entire octopus, still alive, “You’re only one quarter shark. The better part of you is normal. There’s no hope for me. I’m a full half and sharks will always beat ordinary people. There’s no reason why you can’t lick this thing. It’ll just take discipline.”

“I don’t know if I can, Dad,” he’d replied, “Something clicks in me and I just want to bite them.”

“Fight it, kid. It’s alright to be tempted, just don’t give in. Don’t let them get to you.”

“You’re right, Dad,” he’d replied and neglected to mention the girl in Ibiza who’d left their hotel room one ear lighter for his company, or the baby toe in Corsica or the many, many tiny scars clustering on the shoulders and bellies and thighs of various European ladies; visible signs of his unkempt rage.

The young man looked at Susan, crossed himself quickly, and prayed that he’d picked well this time; demure, innocent, incapable of disagreeing with anything he said. He smiled, and pictured himself kissing her innocently on the forehead; a portrait of innocent restraint.

Heads inclined towards the water jug, Susan was perfectly positioned to note a change in the young man’s demeanor. His teeth, previously pointed, seemed suddenly American; pearly white and capped like a line of well-kept headstones. His eyes, black coffee brown, were misty and sweating like car windscreens clamoring in the rain. His grip was gentle, reassuring; somewhat fatherly.

She raised her fingers to meet his, shuffling together like a stack of playing cards.

“Perhaps,” she thought, “he’s simply nervous. Perhaps he’s shy around girls he likes. It’s not uncommon in young men of his age, plus he has that nose to contend with. I’d be awkward if I had that nose.” She smiled across the breadbasket, and began to consider previous holidays a good topic for conversation, and resolved to give the young man a second chance.

The waiter approached, menus extended.

“Sir,” he said, speaking stop start English, with a thick Spanish accent, “would you like to hear our specials?”

The young man brushed the menus aside with a wide, condescending swoop.

“Lobster for two,” the young man said, “And a bottle of the house red.”

“I’ve eaten,” she said, raising her voice over the restaurant hum.

(She held her tongue on the red. Though she preferred the taste of red, Susan made it a habit to order white in public, guarding against the embarrassing possibility of corpse blue lips and grape stained teeth.)

“Liar,” he said, for the second time that evening, ”You just don’t want to eat in front of me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorted and though the better part of her was righteously horrified, indignant and considering the possibility of slipping off to the bathroom and escaping home, a small part of her sang at the thought of a real, adamant man; hairy as men were meant to be.

She slipped an experimental heel out of her sandal, relished the sensation of the hot tiles underfoot and firmly, repeated her long-held aversion to dinner, knowing even as she spoke, that the lobster would come and she would partake, sparingly at first and then with a purile, unladylike, greed, until eventually she was forced to admit her own hunger.

“Look,” she said, though her toes were saying something entirely different, “I may be a little bit wet behind the ears, but I’m no pushover and I don’t like it when people tell me what to do. Particularly strange men, who won’t tell me their name.”

His teeth rose so quickly, they perforated his tongue twenty two times simultaneously. He tasted blood.

“You’ll eat what I order,” he stated bluntly, his fingers loosing to grasp her firmly by the wrist. She tugged hard, attempting to release her hand. He dug his immaculate nails in, noting with shame, the extra inch which had, all of a sudden, emerged from his fingertips.

“Like Hell, I will,” she said, her voice rising in an urgent whisper, “I’ve never taken orders from a man and I don’t intend to start tonight.”

“Listen to me, Susan. I’ve been here before. You’ll like the lobster. You know I’m right on this one.”

“Let go of me now.”

“No, not until you let me order.”

“Let go of me, or I’ll scream the place down.”

The breadbasket had come asunder, spilling French bread and dinner rolls all across the tablecloth. The couple at the next table had paused, forks halfway to their mouths, staring, open-mouthed, in vulgar curiosity. Under the table Susan located both her sandals and slipped them back on, only later realizing they’d found their way on to the wrong feet.

The young man squirmed uncomfortably. His fin was six inches tall now, protruding through his white linen shirt, threatening to gash the fabric wide open. He could not lean back for fear of impaling himself on the wicker seat back.

“Damn it, Susan, I just wanted to be nice to you,” he shouted, upsetting the olive oil as he tugged her backwards and forwards across the table.

“This is what you call nice? Let go of me right now.”

“You should have done what I told you Susan,” he whispered, and pulling her suddenly towards him, bit her hard on the wrist.

For a thin second they froze, staring at the place where his teeth had entered her arm, daring the blood to hold back. The young man released her arm. It fell heavily into the upset breadbasket; red, blood gushing all over the dinner rolls.

And, as she sat there, watching the white bread turn slowly pink and orange and finally a hellish cartoon red, she could not bring herself to leave.

“Damn it, “ she thought, as the waiter thrust a bunched up handful of napkins into her hands, and her fellow diners, clamored to sympathize in broken English, and the young man, sat, restrained in his chair, awaiting the local police, “the smallest part of me enjoyed that immensely.”

The Light Surrounding You

2010-06-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

For Isabelle Grace

Dear little furious, feather-haired baby, you are the smallest person ever to make me cry.

Lately given to sentiment and homely love, the weight of you- just seven pounds shy and pineapple sized- is a monumental draw, like darling hope and magnets and gravity itself, tugging on my tear strings.

You curl into the crook of my elbow- ruler-long from toe to tip- and quit your urgent yelling. You have toothpick legs and pink gum heels, a shock of static hair, blue eyes, button nose, (borrowed in part from your older brother and also cousin Niamh,) and two pert baby lips, perpetually peaking in a curious smile. I suspect you may be a singer; the first from our side of the family. For a baby you have an exceptionally long tongue.

You have a perfectly put together name- one part princess, one part soft reminder of the God who made you, who keeps you, who holds you tightly through your future days. And though your brother called you Derek, and Jesus and sometimes Cassie and occasionally confuses you for a brother or a homecoming dinosaur, (a term of undoubted endearment in his two year old head,) we remain confident that you will grow into your real name, carrying it like a promise-prayer through all your grown up years.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made and also placed and eagerly hoped for.

Every well-knit inch of you is blessed to be; for you have a Daddy like a lighthouse and a Mummy who loves like superglue and a blonde explosion of a brother, driven by kindness and tiger hugs and wild, elastic curiosity. Your house is an open door and your kitchen table endless. Your bookcase is loaded with the very best stories and your back yard, pickled with laughter and the lingering smell of a thousand great conversations. Your days and nights and years to come have long been sewn in honest prayer. Your future failings are already bound by the strong security of prodigal arms waiting to welcome and forgive. Your hopes and songs and soaring dreams, though not yet known, are already shared.

Every ounce of you is surrounded in light; a luminous list of circling hands, of hearts, of shoulders and open-arms, of yet to be friends who are itching to hold you, to carry you through the mountainous days, to tickle the tiny joys into your armpits, to help you uncurl, stretching to fit that beautiful, baby name; to leave their fingerprints all over you. For you are a fortunate girl, and some far away evening when you are old and quiet and given to long night thinkings, you’ll take your story from the shelf and between those well-spun lines- the local tragedies, the belly laughs and fine romances- you’ll come to see the interwoven threads of all our stories, wondering with you from this day to the next. For you are a fortunate little girl, exceedingly loved with little thought for the usual constraints; time, geography and conversation, to name but a few.

Every hair on your feathery-head is numbered, more precious by far than sparrows or seashells. You belong to us as a second story and first to your Father God who delights in your every eyelash. For you are enormous to him, important enough to invoke angels, to move mountains, to love beyond all reasonable demands. And your eyes, not yet focused on the living room wall, are full of him; fresh-baked, undiluted, not yet adjusted to real world living. Your tongue- early-ordained for the purpose of praise- wages wild war on the maternity ward, pitching heavenly sentiments to the ceiling fans and the unsuspecting nurses. You are yet to know the clumsiness of adult worship, yet to feel the pinch of self-conscious thought, yet to understand the heights and oceanic depths separating the easy from the true.

Two days old and slight-skinned, I am praying a keeper’s prayer over your downy head. Asking Father God, who knows you better than I ever will, to hold you close, to keep you young, to charge you with a contagious light, to love you thickly through the thinnest days, to grow you slowly and carefully into a wise woman with the keen, quick heart of a little girl.

Love comes hurtling out of me, unexpected, enormous, tight. I could carry you for a long time; years and centuries if necessary.

Burnt

2010-06-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

She hitched her skirts up to reveal two milky knees, balancing like a pair of boiled potatoes on a stick.

Her wellingtons gaped; two sizes too large at least. He could see the very spot where her woolen socks ran out, leaving elasticated pinch marks half way between her ankles and knees. One sock was peacock blue, the second oatmeal colored. They were hand knit he suspected, for she was a great wee knitter, the very best of the younger girls.

One sock was lower than the other. He resisted the urge to slide his hand inside her welly, to pull the sloppy sock to attention, to purposefully graze the underside of her shin.

His fingers itched. He slipped both hands under his thighs to keep them still.

She wouldn’t mind. She’d come this far, cycled three miles out of the village to meet him at work. She had a fair idea where the evening was going.

“Look,” she said, raising her right leg, “this is the scar from when I accidentally fell through my Da’s greenhouse, and all these tiny little scars are bicycle injuries, and this semi-circle one was a dog. I was only three. I can’t remember it.”

She uncurled her fists, releasing two fat handfuls of material. The tails of her skirt came swooshing down, like a pale, cotton cloudburst.

“Do you have any scars?” she asked, standing over him so the back of her head partially obscured the sun. Her face turned darkly. Her hair was a static halo, framed in the sunlight.

He held his hands up. They were oven mitts compared to her little hands, and too hairy by far. He could not wear rings nor watches.

“Just the normal burn marks,” he said, “Nothing special, everyone has them round here.”

“I don’t have them,” she whispered.

“Course not. You’re a girl. You’ll never have to go through that. In fact, play your cards right, Anne, and you’ll land yerself a nice fella from the mainland, some office man with perfect hands.”

“Maybe I don’t want a fella with perfect hands.”

She sat down on the moss beside him, her skirt falling across his left thigh, and took his hand in hers, examining the smooth, pink burns on his fingers and thumbs. The skin on the tips of his fingers was dead and senseless- fingerprints gradually blurred into indecision- yet he found himself oddly ticklish under her touch.

“How far does up does it go?” she asked, beginning to unbutton his cuffs, peeling back the sleeve of his plaid shirt, “Does it go all over you, Jimmy?”

“I’m lucky,” he said, “I don’t think I have any burns beyond my wrists. I’ve never had a really rough shift. Nothing I couldn’t sort with a long-handled spade.”

She seemed disappointed.

“My Da has them all over his chest,” she said.

“Your Da’s been at it for forty odd years. It’s only in the last six months that they’ve left me by myself.”

“You can poke my Da with knitting needles and he doesn’t feel a thing.”

“Good for him.”

She ignored his sarcasm and proceeded with her examinations, unbuttoning the third and fourth buttons of his shirt, so it peeled back, envelope-like, revealing a triangular slice of sappy white Mark and Spencer’s vest.

She laughed at her discovery and ran a mocking finger round the collar. He felt her finger nail catch as it slid across the edge of his rib cage. “Bloody women,” he thought, “always looking for another rib.” He drew his shoulders back and tried to enjoy the experience. He knew five individuals, possibly ten, who’d wager their week’s earnings to be half-naked under a hedge with Anne Devine. He felt vaguely nauseous.

She ran her finger down his chest, forming a line between one lung and the other, dividing him up like a stuck pig. He crossed his feet at the ankle, dug his fingernails into the grass and thought about Auntie Doreen who had only that morning delivered her annual Easter Egg. It was a Crunchie egg this year. He preferred Twirl. “Honeycomb gives me a migraine,” he explained to his Ma over the breakfast table, “Can you ask Auntie Doreen to send me a Twirl one next year?” His Ma said it was ridiculous for a grown man to still be getting Easter eggs in the post and he should be grateful for whatever he got and quit whinging and when he got home from work could he give her a hand with painting the downstairs toilet?

The Crunchie egg had been hastily removed from its packaging and was sweltering in the saddle bag of his bike, waiting for just the right moment. Perhaps this was it.

“Anne,” he whispered, “Do you want some Easter Egg? It’s a Crunchie one, from my Auntie Doreen in Inverness.”

It was the wrong moment. He attempted to rise in pursuit of the Easter Egg. She placed her palm on his solar plexus and pushed him further into the hedge. A blackberry bramble began to work its way through the fabric of his jeans. It looked like it might rain.

“I’m not done with you yet, Jimmy.”

She removed his shirt in one circular motion, unfurling him like a caped matador.

“God,” he thought, “there’s yellow patches in the arms of this vest. If she sees them, she’ll know what a sweaty bugger I am and I’ll never get her welly boots off.”

He made a mental note to keep his arms by his sides at all cost. Thus reclined, he began to feel like a beached caterpillar. She was tugging at the hems of his vest now, dragging it loose of his belt. Unarmed and out of his depths, he felt powerless to resist her tuggings.

“I like a man in a vest,” she said, “Keeps the cold out in bed.”

He coloured slightly, nettle rash creeping over his throat and cheeks, chronically embarrassed to be caught wearing an undershirt, for he was neither young nor old enough to claim necessity, and terrified of being considered special needs.

“Here,” he said, finally recoiling from her fingers, “Don’t be doing that, Anne. Not out here where anyone passing could see us.”

He kept his elbows glued to his sides and using little more than his toes and the furthermost parts of his fingertips, managed to maneuver her off his lap and into a particularly jaundiced looking patch of dandelions. Using the same half-armed technique he buttoned himself back into his shirt which had turned itself inside out during the seduction.

She sat back on her hunches, tucking her cottontails under her legs. Her earrings- tiny, golden full stops- winkled in the sunlight. Her hair was cut bluntly over her eyebrows, higher on the left side than the right. She looked like a well-laid table.

She looked like her mother and her aunt, and her older sister, recently married, on the mainland. She looked like every other girl who’d stopped short of his undershirt. He was determined not to be disappointed this time.

“I’m sorry Anne,” he said, “I didn’t mean to push you away. I’m just scared of cars coming past, or tractors; it’s almost five, your Uncle Mick’ll be coming past any second to do the cows. Sure we’ll just go behind the hedge and it’ll be a bit more private.”

“Why should I go behind the hedge with you, Jimmy Darling?” she asked. Her chin was a paper cut against the clouding sky, “Sure, couldn’t I go behind the hedge with any fella I wanted. What’s so bloody special about you? It’s not like you’re much to look at.”

He felt pride rising up in the back of his throat. He thought he might vomit right into her cottony lap. He paused to gather his wits, examining his fingernails for an excuse.

“Tell you what, Anne, maybe I do have some more burns, maybe I have burns all over my back and shoulders, maybe you can stick knitting needles into me all afternoon and I won’t feel anything at all. Maybe I’m the most burned fella who’ll ever take his shirt off for you.”

“Honest to God, Jimmy?”

“Honest to God and all the Saints, Anne. Come behind the hedge and I’ll show you.”

He was lying through his back teeth now, utilizing all the tricks he’d picked up from his Da, who liked a pint more than his Ma would ever know, his Granda who had another wife across the Moss and his two older brothers who were picking up benefits and wee girls in three different counties every other week.

“Show me first,” she whispered, leaning into his face so he caught a sugary gush of the over-chewed Juicy Fruit she kept wedged in the corner of her cheek. He thought quickly.

“Here,” he said, dragging the collar of his shirt and vest due South to reveal a small, penny-sized patch of reddened skin. “I got this one the second night I was on duty. It went clean mental, spitting sparks all over the field. If I hadn’t gone in with a wheelbarrow full of sandbags, it would have blown. Hurt like Hell, Anne! The Boss thought I might need a skin graft. But you know what? It was worth it. I’d do it again to save the village.”

They sat for a second staring at his shoulder.

“It looks like eczema to me, Jimmy.”

“Are you taking the piss? That’s a third degree burn you’re looking at Anne.”

It was eczema, a tiny reminder of his Primary school days when the thought of the eleven plus had brought him out in an upper body rash and caused him to wet the bed on five separate occasions.

“I believe you,” she whispered with the same kind of reverence usually reserved for visiting Papal delegates, “Can I touch it?”

“Umm, alright.”

She lent forward, running a cautionary finger round the edge of the scab and finally, with the utmost delicacy, stroking the surface gently.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

“And there’s more?”

“All over my back and shoulders.”

“God, they must really trust you to let you get that close. My Da doesn’t even have the burns on his back… and you’re still so young.”

Without warning she lunged at him, suckering his entire shoulder in her mouth, like a giant, slobbering leech. He felt her tongue circling, suckling the scab like a hoover, like a cyclone, like a bloody washing machine set to spin. Every nerve in his body made a magnetic leap to his left shoulder. He glanced down and saw her wellington boot come asunder in the grass.

“I think we should go behind the hedge,” he said. Half of the sentence emerged in a whisper, the second part in a low bellowing moan, akin to a laboured cow.

“I don’t want to go behind the hedge,” she replied, coming up for air.

“Well we can’t stay here. You’re Uncle Mick’ll string me up if he catches us.”

“Will you take me to it?”

She took his face in her hands and stared him straight in the eye. He was no idiot. He knew this had been her intention all along. Her eyes were corkscrews burrowing into the weaker worlds of his brain.

“You know I can’t, Anne. I could lose my job.”

“Come on, Jimmy. No one’ll know.”

“I want to, I really do, but I can’t.”

She bit him softly right on the edge of the shoulder. A thousand fireworks flustered just beneath the surface of his skin. He was no longer capable of sense or reason.

“What the Hell,” he said and led her to the volcano. It was the beginning of a very bad thing.

At first she was unimpressed, hanging back by the hedge, surveying the volcano from fifty feet’s distance. He attempted to drag her forwards, pulling her insistently by her naked elbow, but she seemed oddly heavy, difficult to drag, like an anchor trailing along the seabed. Her feet caught on every grassy hillock. Her wellington boots fell dumb and heavy, chugging through the scrub and sheep shit. He struggled to budge her beyond twenty foot’s distance.

“That’s it?” she finally exclaimed, planting both booted feet in the turf, allowing her disappointment room to breathe, “I cannot believe that’s it! Sure, I’ve seen bigger flames on the 11th night.”

“It’s quiet tonight,” he muttered, suddenly defensive, “Sometimes it shoots thirty feet up in the air.”

“Thirty feet, my arse. That thing’s got about as much pith as a mouldy sparkler. You’se menfolk just use it as an excuse to come out here to drink and loaf about in the moss.”

He turned to face her and the distant heat immediately started to warm the base of his spine, running up and down his back like a dozen hairdryers set to full. He took her by the shoulders, roughly. (He’d watched enough daytime television to understand the importance of a forceful stance.)

“Listen, Anne,” he shouted, slightly aware of his own melodrama, “that, there is a force of nature and you do not want to be messing with it.”

She laughed; low, sly, slightly mocking. He felt ridiculous in his Da’s wellington boots and shook her slightly to release his own embarrassment.

“For Pete’s sake, Jimmy, look at it. Sure it’s a joke to call that thing a volcano.”

He spun on the heel of his welly and attempted to view the volcano with fresh eyes. After five years of night shifts and long weekends, he’d lost all perspective of his charge. With Anne at his side and the memory of her mouth still boring into his shoulder blade, he had to admit, it was a little unimpressive.

The volcano was approximately fifteen foot by twelve; little more than a postulating blister in comparison to the tropic volcanoes of antiquity and recent headlines. He watched it chumble and foam, like a Hell-red puddle of porridge coming to the boil, and though he knew that the volcano was older than the island itself and all their fields and hills, slopes and summits were the ancient outworkings of its fiery temper, he struggled to see the imminent threat.

“You never know when it could go off,” he said stubbornly.

“Bullshit,” she replied, “You’ve seen more action than that old cauldron.”

He kept his mouth shut, choosing not to retaliate for he was momentarily incapable of differentiating between a compliment and an insult.

“It could go off any time and take the village with it.”

“Catch yerself on, Jimmy. That thing’s never going off. You fella’s just keep it stoked so you’ve an everlasting excuse to get away from the womenfolk and loll around up here. If you’se had any self-respect you’d take up cricket, but no, you’se figured you were on to a good thing with the volcano watching.”

“We do not loll around up here, Anne! It’s a serious job watching the volcano. You’ve to sandbag it every time it looks like flaring up, catch the wee coals that escape, make sure the bloody thing doesn’t erupt. Sure amn’t I covered in burns from keeping it quiet. You’ve no right to mock me, Anne Devine, no right at all.”

They stood silently in the moss, their shadows stretching to make contact, ten feet behind their lonely shoulders. Thirty feet back the trampled grass bore quiet witness to the evening’s ruined possibility.

The sun was doing its best to disappear; the ghost moon already creeping, like a perfectly preserved fossil, over the hill.

He stuffed both hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, discovering a used cotton hankie and a twenty pence piece long forgotten. He grabbed a handful of snot damp cotton and clenched his jaws slowly. The moment was sliding away from him; drastic action was required if he were to progress any further than Anne Devine’s wellington boots. Many, many evenings had made it thus far and stumbled at the last stile. He was, at twenty three, more than averagely well-acquainted with the mechanics of defeat. He pictured himself riding back to town, hitching a humiliating lift on the back of her bicycle spokes, lusting into the back of her freckled shoulder blades, whipped and teased by her winding hair, incapable of sitting down for three miles straight. He imagined himself dismounting in front of the village’s only pub, scratching his bare neck where the wind and the sun and those frantic tendrils of auburn hair had whipped him raw red, waiting for the last bus home whilst village curtains twitched and old ladies tattled and the lads from the Young Farmer’s made much of his disappointment.

He could not take another close thing so he threw his boots into the volcano; first the right and then the left.

“Look, Anne,” he cried as the boots melted, a pair of fern green puddles on the surface of the lava, “It might well erupt this evening.”

And suddenly she was by his side, placing a cold hand in the small of his back to usher him forwards. She removed her wellies quickly, dragged her heels across the moss to shake them free, bent down and tossed them into the volcano. Both socks had come loose now, concertina’d round her ankles like a pair of lazy bandages. He knelt down on one knee and pulled them to attention. They stopped half an inch short of her kneecaps.

The volcano gurgled appreciatively, spitting and bubbling, burpling like an over fed infant. One tiny shard of over-enthusiastic lava made a bolt for the moon, making it six feet into the sky before losing steam.

“More,” she said, “I want to see it erupt.”

Her hand found the back of his neck, willfully pinched and struck some sort of secret mechanism inside his chest. He found himself pitching stones and logs and empty feed sacks into the volcano’s open mouth. A whole stack of peet made its way, two bricks at a time into the lava, his own shirt, her cotton skirt, hastily removed, two fence posts and Auntie Doreen’s Easter egg, still encased in its foil; anything for a bigger explosion.

She worked tirelessly at his side, hair stuck to the corners of her mouth, cursing a blue streak as she sweated in her underwear.

And when every loose object had been cast into the fiery pit, they sat back on their hunches, too tired to touch, and watched the evening sky erupt.

“One last thing,” she said and pitched her bicycle into the hole.

After which she smiled and said, “I guess we can never go home now,” and the sparks were falling into her hair and he was scared she might go up in flames and could not bring himself to put her out.

Little Birds and Larger Birds

2010-05-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

I missed your call.

It was a purposeful missing. Dinner was almost done and I knew you’d want to talk for hours. “Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” you’d say, ears sweating on the other end of the line, “but this will only take a minute.” Two hours later you’d still be there, wondering into the middle distance, promising quick fix, short term, low-maintenance solutions to the enormous, empty space we had become. You’d talk for hours. You called yourself a man of few words and talked for hours, stringing your few words into next week.

It was hard for me. I liked to talk too, but when it came to words you simply weren’t interested in sharing.

I couldn’t bear the thought of another ruined meal. Lord only knows how many meals I’d ruined over you: congealed spaghetti, stewed risotto, boiled potatoes charring in the pot. You’d talk for hours if given half the chance.

“Damned if I’m ruining another meal over him,” I said and let the machine pick it up. I had cannelloni for dinner. It was a little undercooked in the middle.

I forgot about your call.

It was a busy week.

Mother died on Tuesday.

On Wednesday I crashed my car, backside first, into a telegraph pole. The trunk folded in two like a bent back library book. It was a thing of great beauty and left the car oddly unbalanced at one end, so I drove forwards and crashed front side first into a sycamore tree. Concertina’d between two equal injuries I felt somehow more balanced, more inclined towards motoring on into the weekend. My car was a closed fist. Strangers stopped to point me out from the sidewalk.

The shop burnt down on Thursday.

On Friday morning I stood in the charred section which had once been tinned fruits and vegetables and made a pyramid of burnt baked beans cans. It felt good to order something, even a something as small as a baked beans tin. After the beans I did sweetcorn and peaches and mixed vegetables until the floor was littered with three foot pyramids, like Egypt gone awry.

I liked it there in the burnt down shop.

Most things were just the same, but darker. Only the softer items- the fresh bananas and cornflake packets- were lost. Everything solid had soldiered on. Soot skinned and dusty, the groceries had simply adapted to their new home.

Fire is a tremendous leveler.

In the morning when the flames finally subsided, everyone found themselves as pitch black as their next door neighbor. Granted, a damp cloth properly applied would have revealed the unchanged identities beneath the soot, but I had neither the time nor the inclination. Besides, I liked the idea of an entirely anonymous shop. The wine bottles had finally quit lording it over the condiments. It felt like the morning after apartheid.

Driven by the dream of entirely impartial shopping I paced the smoldering aisles in a pair of borrowed waders and marked out the possibility of a brave new store; a shop where carrots and mandarin oranges and instant noodles and Cabernet Sauvignon would all come in identical unlabeled packages. I pictured my customers- executive types in double-breasted suits and stay at home mums, trailing toddlers by the wrist- opening their groceries on the kitchen table, suddenly faced with the pickled challenge of fixing dinner from two iceberg lettuces, string cheese and a box of anti-dandruff shampoo.

The thought tickled me. It was the kind of thought you might have written on the back of a postcard. I pictured your fridge door, bent double as it always has been, with postcards and snapshots, take out menus and tax receipts, each one bearing a brilliant idea, not yet born. “It is a wonder,” I had always thought, “that your fridge does not sink through the kitchen floor under the weight of all those brilliant ideas. Perhaps you should buy a box to keep them in.”

Even then, meditating on your refrigerator door, I forgot about your call.

It was two weeks before I remembered about your call.

The memory of it came to me suddenly during a particularly long stoplight. The car in front of mine was pea green with out of town plates, and though it was nothing like your current car, or the two cars I recall you driving previously, it made me think of you and the pea green shirt you were always wearing in photographs.

“Shit,” I said, loudly, by myself at the stoplight. (Even alone I have found it important to acknowledge regret in an audible fashion,) “Shit, shit, shit.”

That evening I went through the machine for your message. It was not easy to find. The machine was stuffed to the gills with sympathy. After listening to five almost identical offers of prayer and casseroles, I learnt how to spot the sympathy messages, two seconds in. People attempting to convey deep sympathy on an answering machine universally begin with two seconds of heavy silence, followed by a low, theatrical sigh and the sort of sorry which comes, not from the lungs, but rather the back of one’s wisdom teeth. It was easy to weed out the sympathy messages. I deleted each quickly, long before they could launch into morose detail.

I found your message at the bottom of the pile. It was thirteen seconds long. “Hmmmm,” I thought, “Unusually short for a man of few words. Perhaps I should have listened to this earlier.”

You were a staple gun when you spoke. “Karen,” you said, “I have a new house. I want you to see it. Call me.”

You sounded tanned and believable. I pictured a beard. My throat slid into my lungs. I had not intended to call you but the way you pronounced my name, monosyllabic with a European pinch on the vowels, felt like a breadcrumb trail home. I picked up the phone. I’d long since removed you from speed dial so I had to look up your number in my phone book, picking out the individual digits from beneath the pen scribble where I’d tried to score you out.

“Karen,” you said. (You had yet to remove me from speed dial.)

“Simon,” I said, (for I had intent working on my side.)

“You want to see my new house?”

“Sure.”

“Tonight?”

“Sure.”

“See you in half an hour.”

“What’s the address?”

“It doesn’t have one yet. It’s behind the train shed…”

“The one where we argued over your parents.”

“Yeah, you’ll know it when you see it.”

“Ok,” I said but you’d already hung up on me. You were a man of few words.

I emptied my pockets and cycled across town, still wearing the borrowed waders. I was elephant-footed on the inclines. I had to stop twice; once for soda and once to pour the sweat from the inside of my boots. My socks were ruined. I abandoned them on the library steps and cycled on, barefoot inside my waders. It took almost two hours from my front door to the train shed.

You were waiting in the street, pinching an unlit cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Judging by past experience you were one week into your latest haircut. You were tanned and believable, but the beard was nowhere to be seen.

I heeled the sidewalk and slid to a halt six feet from your toes.

“Hey Simon,” I said, “New haircut?”

You raised one finger to your lips, motioning for silence, and held that silence, stoically, whilst I buckled my bike to the nearest lamppost, removed my helmet and bound my hair up in a thick bandana. Once finished I placed my helmet on the ground and lowered myself on to the curb beside it. You hesitated before joining me, perching your backside on the curb edge, uncomfortably close to mine.

I could feel the pulse of your leg, wriggling nervously at the heel and toe. (It was over a month since we’d last talked and the thrill of it was itching under all our nails.) I could smell the taste of your dinner- meat and onions- sweating on your teeth. I breathed you in and out, slowly like an old-fashioned joke. The house keys poking through your pants pocket were sharp and relentless, prodding me in the side. I relished the warm press of you.

You leant backwards, balancing yourself bluntly, like an isosceles triangle, against the palms of each hand. Thus inclined I turned to take you in: the memory of a red bush beard blustering on your chin, the plaid, the corduroy, the second hand hiking boots stolen from your brother’s closet, the tiny indentation in your right ear where you’d spent your twenty first and second summers pierced like a regular beach boy. The height of you, broad as a wardrobe, ill-defined as the tidal swell. I was glad to be there, gladder still for my two week hesitation. The evening was just right for reconciliation. Anything earlier would have melted.

When the moment was just right, when the sun was dead and the freeway teeming with background cars, I reached for your wrist. It was too soon, I figured, for a hand; too late by years, for a shoulder or elbow. You started at my touch, leaning forward to find my ear.

“It’s important,” you whispered, “not to move too fast.”

“I understand,” I replied, though I didn’t understand at all.

“Stand up, Karen.”

I stood up. I felt like Sleeping Beauty waking to a princely possibility. I thought we might dance right there on the sidewalk, freeway traffic speeding and slowing in time to our tripping feet.

You took my hand. You held me firmly like a small child, like an elderly aunt, like a blind man hesitating on the curb. There was no desire in your holding. I knew we were not going to dance.

You led me forward, round the train shed, down the cycle path and under the bridge. You said nothing specific but emitted a low, contently hum like some kitchen appliance gearing up for take off. My fingers, pinched between yours, were beginning to sweat. I was scared of slipping away.

“Look,” you said, as we emerged from the railway bridge, “Isn’t it beautiful.”

And it was. From fifty feet’s distance it was a thing of great beauty; an entire house built of birds.

A roof of starlings, black feathered in the moonlight. A pair of prawn cocktail colored flamingoes, spindling forwards to form the semblance of a door. Six squat penguins lining the driveway; pompous as any privet hedge. Turtles doves for walls, swallows haunting the attic and death dark crows circling for a chimney. The absence of pigeons formed six wide windows to front and back, and a single robin, red-breasted, was mounted as a doorbell.

“I built it for you,” you said.

It was hard to know what to say. You were holding me like a skin graft.

“But, I’m scared of birds,” I said bluntly, “You know I’m scared of birds.”

Your face fell into the gravel drive.

“Not these birds. These birds are different. They’re a house. I built these birds for you. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

I had to admit, it was beautiful. From the end of the driveway, on a foggy day, I might have mistaken it for an ordinary house. With imagination and the worst kind of lighting I could almost forget that this house was built of a hundred thousand feathery wings, interwoven. Up close, I could barely contain the horror of beaks and claws and beady little black eyes, baring down upon the living room carpet. I shuddered at the thought of so many birds.

“Simon,” I said, sliding free of you hand, “I’m sorry but I just won’t be able to go inside. It’s a wonderful idea, a truly inspired idea and I’m sure most girls would kill for their very own bird house, but not me. I am very much afraid of birds.”

“Nonsense,” you said, scuffing one boot toe against the other, “Every bird is different. You can’t just rule them all out because you’ve had one bad bird experience. If it’s the starlings that bother you, I can just build a new roof; parrots maybe. Gosh, Karen picture an entire roof of parrots. It’d be like following asleep under a rainbow every night. We can work this out. Think how beautiful it will be to sleep inside a birdhouse, to wake each morning surrounded by singing, to feel their feathers fluffering and the warmth of all those flying dreams. Think what we’ll save on central heating.”

But I was already scuppered and shaking on the front lawn. You’d lost me at the parrots.

“I don’t like parrots, not after the incident in the tropical bird house. Parrots are out; flamingoes too. Starlings are the pits for leaving bird shit everywhere. They’ll lift the paint off your car if you’re not careful, and crows eat meat. I just can’t stand a carnivorous bird, it hardly seems right. Doves are a blasted nuisance, bleating all evening and penguins don’t seem natural; who ever heard of a rectangular bird? Birds scare me, Simon. All birds scare me. I’ve never had a good experience with a bird. Do not expect me to step inside that house.”

I waited for you to explode. You were a man of few words and vicious explosions. I expected you to leave craters in the front lawn. However, you didn’t explode.

“You never mentioned robins,” you whispered, “what about robins?”

I hesitated. I felt a cul-de-sac coming on.

“Well…” I replied slowly, “Robins are ok, I suppose, in moderation.”

“What about that robin?” you asked, dragging me by the elbow towards the front door.

“I’m sure he’s nice enough.”

We proceeded up the driveway. Pulling you slightly sideways I cut a perfect path exactly halfway between the penguins to right and left. I did not trust penguins. Once, during the penguin parade at Edinburgh zoo, a particularly forward penguin had pinched my Cornetto. Granted, it had been a single incident, perpetrated by a single penguin but thereafter I’d felt righteously inclined to dismiss the entire breed.

We approached the front door. The flamingoes stepped aside like a pair of electric doors.

“Look at that little robin,” you said, pointing out the doorbell, “how could you be afraid of such a cute little chap?”

You were right. I pulled myself up on my wader heels, invoking every one of my five feet and seven inches. I placed my hand in yours, pointer finger extended and allowed you to guide my finger across the robin’s back. At first I felt the need to recall rising like nausea in the pit of my throat and then I began to enjoy the sensation of feathers sliding, like furred grease, under my fingers.

“It’s not that bad,” I whispered, scared of upsetting the robin. “I could possibly be ok with a robin for a door bell.”

“And the flamingoes?” you asked.

“Well they seem to run away every time I get close, so I can’t see too many problems there either.”

“Well done, Karen.”

I stood on the doorstep of my birdhouse and felt myself swell. My insides were warm and expanding as if I’d just swallowed a hot water bottle. When you stepped over the threshold I followed, keeping close to your heels.

It was dark inside the birdhouse. Of course there were no electrics, the only light came via six small windows, feathered on all sides by the sap grey plumage of six dozen turtles doves. It smelt like air and clouds; the very second you step out of a long distance flight. I was pleasantly surprised, having expected a pet shop stench. Furthermore, though I’d never give you the pleasure, I had to admit to a pleasant felted sensation, freckling under my sweater, something akin to the crush of sheepskin on naked flesh. The birdhouse, for all its feathery horror, reminded me of a den I’d once made under the dining room table. I had, since my childish adventures in this rug-lined snug, always found walls a little uncompromising, doors and windows somewhat too solid for their own good. To find myself suddenly sheltering again beneath the blankety kindness of something soft and insular was a welcome retreat.

I was sold on the front door step. I couldn’t let you know you’d won.

I pressed my nose into the space between your shoulder blades and peeked around your neck, feigning terror.

“Simon,” I whispered, “I have my reservations.”

You said nothing but crossed your legs, right over left at the heel.

“Don’t you have terrible trouble with bird shit on the carpets?” I whispered into your shoulder blades, “Does it keep the rain out? What about coyotes? Will they migrate in the summer?”

“Pssshhh,” you said, and I could have lived for years in the cave created by your deflating lungs, “Semantics, practicalities, trifling details. Lie down on the floor and tell me this isn’t the most shit scared, happy you’ve ever been.”

And, with the fear of bird shit running up and down my spine, we separated and fell back flat on the living room floor.

“Shhh,” you whispered, placing a finger across my lips. You tasted like a handful of nickels and dimes.

I peered up at the ceiling, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, began to pick out the shapes of individual birds; swallows and starlings and racing pigeons, wings wound together like crushed velvet drapes, drawn for the night. And as you kept the silence comfortably underfoot, I began to hear the feline purr of bird breath, the occasional chirp of an aviary dream and the unbearable lightness of restrained flight yearning for the open blue. I felt my shoulder bones stretch, petitioning the Lord for a pair of wings. I felt my arms ache with the hope of feathers. I sang Icarus songs to the highest heights. I dreamt us endlessly safe and still in the birdhouse behind the train shed, on the very edge of town.

“It’s perfect,” I whispered, inclining my head towards your ear. “Let’s spend the next fifty years flat on our backs under a turtle dove ceiling.”

“Hmmm, “ you said and reached for my ankles, which were almost already rising off the floor. You were a man of few words and startling gestures. “Just be careful Karen,” you whispered, “Beautiful as it is, you’re not a bird. You belong down here with me, on the carpet with the coffee table and the patchwork rug and the occasional spattering of pigeon shit.”

I could feel my ankles aching for the second storey. My arms were already aloft, grabbing for huge, greedy handfuls of the night sky.

“Let go of me, “ I said.

You held tighter. You imagined yourself acting in my best interests.

“Let go of me,” I said, louder this time with a small measure of vehement spit, “Can’t you see I want to fly?”

You dragged me downwards, and when your arms were no longer strong enough for anchors, you sat on me, pinning me belly first, to the living room carpet.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, “I thought you were ready for this. It wasn’t meant to be this way.”

“What do you mean Simon? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I want to be up there, right now, flying round the attic, settling on the telegraph wires. Why won’t you let me fly? Let me go right now!”

You lay across me, all four limbs floundering like dead weights and dumb bells.

“Let me go!” I yelled, “You were never able to let me go.”

And the sound of my voice sent an earthquake oscillating round all three floors of the birdhouse. And my heels thrashing on the living room carpet ruined everything. Startled, as if from a deep wine dream, the birds rose as one. The rush of it was furious, rolling over my exposed arms; a hundred thousand feathered wings beating the darkness into a powdered frenzy.

In a moment they were gone, vanished like a plague of locusts over the train shed roof. The entire house had flown away, leaving you and I, two stubborn souls wrestling on a shitty bit of carpet.

The Selfish Pilot

2010-04-16T16:30:00.001-07:00

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of limited means.

Her haircuts came with coupons and often expired half way round her head.

“Don’t stress,” she whispered to a series of anxious hairdressers, both male and female, “I can’t afford to pay for the back of my head, but it’s fine. I can only see the front in the mirror and it looks like a million bucks.”

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of small appetites and frugal choices.

She survived on a diet of shredded wheat and string beans. Sometimes she ate the string beans first. On other days shredded wheat seemed like the natural place to begin proceedings. On Sundays and Wednesdays she went hungry, “Makes me extra thankful for Mondays and Thursdays,” she explained to a serious of anxious parents and inconceivable friends. “Look,” she continued, raising her shirt to graze her chin, “I’m just as fat as ever.”

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of small sacrifices and manifold pinchings.

She purchased all her toiletries in the dollar store, and when the ninety nine cent store moved to town, shifted allegiance long before the doors could open. “It’s all about the nickels and dimes,” she explained to a series of anxious strangers, lining for an opening day bargain. “I’m saving up for a college education.” Alice Margaret Collins saved her nickels and dimes in an old tube sock, suspended from the corner of her bed. When full, she moved on to a pair of ancient nylons; sixty denier, black, with scuff marks on the heels. Their capacity for expansion was tremendous.

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of limited means and massive loves.

She took a European lover fully aware that the Atlantic would keep their expenses to a minimum. Separated by seas and the greater part of mainland Europe, their dates cost half the price of ordinary dates. For seven dollars fifty, Alice Margaret Collins could enjoy a lovely evening at the cinema, scrunching popcorn and thinking about her European lover. She was unperturbed by his physical absence, though occasionally missed the pleasant sensation of being treated to a nice dinner. Alice Margaret Collins kept a tab at the back of her Bible; the European lover had saved her three hundred bucks already this year.

Occasionally the European lover called, using the emergency telephone beside the Autobahn to save money.

“What is the point of being lovers if I never see you?” he asked. His name was Gernot Loeffer. His father owned a bread and bakery shop outside Eindhoven. Once fully-grown he planned to start a company selling German breads and baked goods worldwide, via the internet.

“The point,” said Alice Margaret Collins, struggling to be heard above the muffled din of articulated lorries, “Is that we love each other and we are also saving money.”

“This,” Gernot Loeffer replied, with frugal German diction, “Sucks. You must come over here or we can no longer be lovers.”

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of limited patience.

Ultimatums sat uneasily on her sloping shoulders. However, as she quickly reminded herself, there was the possibility of unlimited baked goods awaiting her in rural Germany, AND the black nylons were, by this stage, bulging with nickels and dimes, AND it would be rather nice to finally see what her lover looked like.

Alice Margaret Collins cashed in her tights and bought a one way ticket to Berlin. After haggling, the airline company agreed to let her travel for half the price if she could fit all her luggage inside her coat pockets and agreed to clean the airplane bathrooms thoroughly after the flight.

Alice Margaret Collins, agreed instantly. She stuffed an extra pair of socks into her jacket pocket, filled her cowboy boots with paperback novels and, stringing her toothbrush from a piece of dental floss, wore it as a necklace. Thus attired, she boarded the red eye, JFK to Berlin.

Once in the air, Alice Margaret Collins undressed, arranging her luggage on the empty seat to her left. Suitably sleek, she reclined her chair until her knees were knocking the in flight magazine rack, and prepared to doze her way across the Atlantic.

Somewhere over Iceland with the ghost of an ill-spent volcano still tickling the airplanes innards, the pilot had a change of heart. Germany no longer appealed to him. Tokyo, however, sounded like the perfect town for an emergency landing.

The pilot was a selfish man. He demanded first choice of the in-flight meals, often insisting upon picking the carrots out of three or more of the chicken option. “A pilot needs a decent helping of carrots if he’s to see any further than the end of the runway,” he offered, as justification. The pilot was a selfish man. He monopolized the cockpit stereo, driving his co-pilots concrete, gray with the best of Peter Gabriel. The Pilot was a selfish man; off duty he wore jaunty, pink shirts and kept a lover on every major land mass.

The pilot’s name was Richard. It was a perfectly good name for a pilot and had, in part, dictated his choice of career. As the airplane fumbled its way over Ireland the pilot made the decision not to go to Berlin after all. A middle-aged lady was waiting for him, on the third floor of the Holiday Express, beside Berlin Airport. She was not yet fully naked, but had removed her sandals in anticipation. This lady was somewhat older than the pilot had intended and, in the throws of passion, wobbled slightly around the midsections. The pilot poked at his triple helping of microwaved carrots and determined to head for Tokyo, where a much younger lady was stacking the shelves of an all night convenience store, unaware of his imminent approach. This young lady was flush and feisty, and unlikely to oscillate under his attentions.

The pilot picked up the intercom speaker, depressed the correct button and spoke confidently into first class, business class and steerage.

“This is your captain speaking.” He announced, “I’m happy to inform you, there’s been a change of plan. We are no longer flying to Berlin today. Instead we shall be landing in Tokyo. You’ll thank me later. It’s a much nicer city by all accounts.”

After delivering his message, the pilot passed control to his co-pilot, who was understandably irate, but, having flown with the selfish pilot many times previously, surprisingly unsurprised.

“Damn you, Richard,” he muttered through his headphones, “I was looking forward to a proper pint tonight.”

The selfish pilot simply shrugged and locked the cockpit door, guarding against an onslaught of angry businessmen.

“You know me, I do as I please,” he smirked through a mouthful of limp carrots, “And tonight I just fancied Tokyo.”

In steerage with her unsocked ankles resting on a stranger’s shoulder, Alice Margaret Collins woke to the unsettling realization of Tokyo. She thought of Gernot Loeffer waiting by the arrival doors with an armful of fresh-baked Brioche, she thought of an entire lifetime of German baked goods mouldering out of the picture and she thought of all those nickels and dimes and bulging tube socks, wasted in pursuit of her European lover. She threw her elbows in the air and let out a plaintiff yell.

An air stewardess, fearing an onslaught of stress-related DVT, appeared at her shoulder instantaneously.

“Ma’am,” she said, automatically returning Alice Margaret Collin’s tray to its upright position, “What seems to be the matter?”

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of limited words and charging sentiments.

“I,” she said, “Am bloody furious. It took me fifteen years to save for Berlin and now we’re not even going.”

“Tokyo,” replied the air stewardess, who was well-acquainted with the frugal set, (the ladies who slipped extra pretzels into their handbags and the men who refused to return the complimentary headphones,) “Is almost twice as far as Berlin, for exactly the same money.”

Alice Margaret Collins was a girl of limited means and frugal choices.

“Ahhh,” she whispered, “A bargain. I do enjoy a good bargain.” After which she inclined her chair towards the waiting floor and slept straight through to Tokyo. Her last waking thought, the mistaken belief that the European lover might get the picture all by himself, alone, by the baggage reclaim. “Damned if I’m phoning him,” she thought to herself, “Criminal waste of twenty five cents.

Dig

2010-04-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

It was a simple enough question.

“Can we go to Disneyland this year?”

She approached the study door with caution. Her brother, four years older and blessed with a modicum of well-worn sense, lingered on the hall stairs, ear cupped for a good answer. The study door was closed. The study door was always closed. Father was writing another book.

Father was almost always writing another book. These books were not for children. They spent their days sucking dust on the uppermost shelves of the good bookshelf, wasting time with all the other leather-bound, “just for looking,” books.

She pressed her ear into the wood. Through several layers of laminated plywood she heard the mumbled fuddle of Father’s fingers clicking up and down the computer keyboard. Father typed like a concert pianist, coaxing another crisp symphony out of his battered PC. Father typed two handed, wrists leaning against the corner of the keyboard so a permanent crease had recently formed; diagonal stigmata, slicing just above the cuff line.

Father’s wrists were a bone of contention.

“Henry,” said Mother, grabbing his wrists as he reached across the expanse of the dinner table, angling after another scoop of mashed potato, “Please don’t lean so heavily on the keyboard. It can’t be good for your circulation. It’s leaving an unsightly mark on your wrists.”

“Hmmmphhh,” muttered Father and persisted with the mashed potatoes, stretching his sweater sleeves to conceal his wrists.

Father typed two handed. Mother made mashed potatoes and proper veg. for dinner every evening but Saturday. Saturday evenings were kept for fish suppers.

She knocked on the door; once, twice, three times, tapping her plimsoled toe in time to the raps. She had butterflies buzzing round her stomach; a small burp of sick trapped at the base of her throat.

“Enter,” bellowed the door. She entered. Father was seated at his desk. The window was open, both curtains fluttering like elderly ladies in the breeze. This morning’s newspaper, abandoned on the chaise lounge, rose and fell in time with the wind as if breathing all by itself. Two dozen coffee cups had congregated on the right side of Father’s desk, forming damp circles in the carpet, furring in places where time had worked her foggy evil.

“Papa,” she asked, twisting the tail of her petticoat to itch her nerves, “Can we go to Disneyland this year?”

“You want to go to Disneyland eh?” Father asked, removing his spectacles for a better view of her pigtailed face, “What’s wrong with Portrush?”

“Mickey Mouse doesn’t live in Portrush,” she answered. It was the correct answer. Father’s face split in thirds horizontally. The corners of his mouth crept up to meet his eyes. His eyes creased. He laughed like a pair of bellows, suddenly depressed.

“Mickey Mouse indeed,” he said, dragging her on to his corded lap, “Well, my clever girl, if it’s Mickey Mouse you want then we shall have to consider somewhere farther afield than Portrush. I tell you what. If you and that brother of yours can dig a tunnel to America I’ll take all of you, Mama included, to Disneyland for a whole fortnight.”

She had many questions, important questions: where should the tunnel begin? How far was America? What about the Atlantic Ocean? But an audience with Father was always a brief pleasure and he was already lifting her about the waist, depositing her on the lonely side of the study door.

“He said yes,” she said to her brother, recently removed from the hall stairs, “We just have to dig a tunnel to America.”

It was just past Easter, the entire Summer stretched like a three lane motorway in front of their sandaled feet.

They began to dig. At first they used hand trowels and dinner forks, picking round the daffodils at the bottom of the flowerbed. They removed the stones by hand, arranging them in a small mountain around the base of the Sycamore tree. After a week they progressed unto sandcastles spades. The ground grew softer, the soil dirtier, they hit water, not a lot of water, just enough to necessitate Wellington boots.

They dug six days a week. They dug after school and on weekends. When the Summer holidays began in earnest they stepped up their endeavors, paying the neighborhood children a generous proportion of their pocket money to assist. They swapped their sandcastle spades for gardening spades and stood shoulder deep in the hole. They dug six days a week, sun up to sun down. On the seventh day they rested. Sundays were for sitting in the good room, reading Enid Blyton books and playing quiet board games in your sock soles.

“My,” said Mother unaware of the tunnel now stretching from the bottom of their garden into next door’s flower bed, “You two have been busy little bees this Summer. It’s good to see you outside enjoying the sun. What have you been up to?”

“Digging,” she said.

“Football,” her brother said; somewhat louder, for he understood the importance of a well-placed surprise.

Three weeks before the beginning of School it became possible to crawl, on hands and knees, approximately ten feet under ground. It was difficult to tell in the dark, with the soil scratching the top of her head, but she was reasonably sure the Atlantic had been bypassed and America finally reached.

She approached the study door a second time. The study door was closed.

“Papa,” she said, when the study door finally opened and Father spun one eighty to lend her his full and temporary attention, “John and I have reached America, may we go to Disneyland now?”

Father seemed surprised.

“Would you like to see our tunnel, Papa? It’s at the bottom of the flowerbed. You might need to put your Wellingtons on.”

Her brother was shoulder deep in the entrance hole as they approached, demonstrating the enormous capacity of the tunnel.

Father seemed reluctant to set foot on the flowerbed. He stood on the lawn’s edge in his carpet slippers and leant forwards, bending like a paperback novel.

“Well I never,” he said and scratched his belly, just above his belt and leant backwards as if afraid to fall in and laughed like bellows deflating. “Well I never, indeed.”

And she knew they would not go to Disneyland this year, and was sure that August would find them languishing on the White Rocks as per usual. And she felt like a tunnel falling into itself, all of a sudden, by mistake.

Hell Among the Yearlings

2010-04-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

(Based upon a Dave Freeburn musing.)

Dave shuffled his tray from one end of the counter to the other, ignoring the ceramic dishes of crusty lasagne and pre-filled baked potatoes.

The tray was sweating. Beads of condensation ran rings around the corregated surface and pooled in the lower left corners. The plastic edges were still humming slightly with dishwasher heat. Dave balanced the empty tray against his thighs, wedged it against the counter top and surreptitiously wiped his hands against the backside of his cords. He thought of the damp door handles of public bathrooms, the soap slopped floor of communal shower rooms, umbrellas sweating under cinema seats, breathy condensation running down the inside of Ulsterbus windows; the unpleasant sensation of other people’s wetness. He wiped his hands a second time and dragged the cuff of his sweater over his fingers. Thus protected, he nudged his empty tray towards the till, bypassing the apple tarts, the stoic wedges of fresh fruit pavlova and glutinous banoffis; already slice and plated with a complementary dollop of whipping cream on the side.

He felt faintly nauseous. Lately Dave had struggled to differentiate between hunger and stomach cramps. It was a problem which often led to late night Frosties and Peptobysmal.

“What’ll it be love?” asked the lady on the tea machine, “Any hot drinks?”

This lady was approximately forty years old, wearing a disposal white apron fashioned, no doubt, from Tesco carrier bags, recycled. Dave did the calculations in his head. At very most she was ten years older than him. Perhaps she had even been a sixth former whilst he languished in the lower ranks of the junior school. He looked her straight in the eye, taking in the wispy grey hairs haloing her skull, the jaundiced teeth and the hint of a heavily concealed mustache, beginning to sprout on her upper lip. He struggled to picture himself similarly situated in less than ten years.

Dave had plans; large plans involving subsistence farming, novel writing, world travel, five-a-side football and finally making it out of Lisburn. All this he planned to accomplish before his thirty fifth birthday. On the morning of Good Friday 2010, Dave was almost thirty three years old and still in the planning stages.

“A latte, please, “ he replied, taking great pains to pronounce the word with the sharp consonants and clipped vowels it deserved and rarely experienced in rural Ulster. Pausing to catch his breath he quickly pre-empted the tea lady by saying, “Medium, white, to sit in, please.”

“Right you be. Anything to it?”

“Ummm, I’ll have a Twix and a bag of salt n’ vinegar crisps.”

“Help yourself love,” she replied, indicating with her elbow, (for both hands were involved in the pouring, stirring and frothing of Dave’s coffee,) a wicker basket of sweet and salty snacks. “I hope that’s not your lunch.”

“Nope,” answered Dave, “I already had a Twister for lunch.”

Dave’s latte came in a disposable cardboard cup. He burnt his fingers transporting it from the tray to his table. Eventually after several attempts to hold the cup through his sweater, he went back for an extra cardboard sleeve. This felt like admitting defeat. Real coffee drinkers, Dave imagined, had developed calloused palms and Pyrex fingertips from nursing a lifetime of sleeveless, disposable cups. Dave only drank the occasionally cup of coffee, preferring soft drinks and hot chocolate when pushed to order in public.

When he did choose coffee, Dave preferred his coffee in mugs.

Mugs were solid, like brick houses and dolmens, pronouncing permanence upon the recipient. Mugs were too open-ended to be portable. Mugs were not made for window shopping or sipping cappuccino on the commute to work. Mugs said, “I’ll be here for half an hour at least. I require a seat, and should things proceed in a civilized fashion, possibly a newspaper also.” Dave was a mug sort of man.

This was the kind of place which didn’t have mugs.

All drinks- both warm and cold- came in takeaway cups. Buns and cookies, scones, and even the odd pancake were displayed on glass-fronted shelves; stretch and sealed to guard against sticky-fingered infants and unwashed, senior citizens. Sandwiches came in pre-packaged cardboard triangles, cellophane-fronted to expose a gooey mess of egg mayonnaise or Dijon mustard oozing between the bread. Everything, aside from the lasagne, and most likely the vegetable broth, came pre-packaged and shiny, as if ready to make some sort of futuristic leap into the next millennium.

Dave thanked the lady for his portable latte and prepared to linger. He resisted the urge to quibble over the ten pence difference between sit in and take away. He was not a cruel man and ten pence was a tiny price to keep the mustached lady sweet and unperturbed.

He chose a table by the window. The table was fixed to the floor by four massive star head screws. Even with the screws it still managed to lilt willfully from left to right at the slightest touch. Dave sat down on a molded plastic seat- red with flecks of festive gold glitter running through the mix- and arranged his accoutrements carefully on the table top, shifting the salt and pepper cellar to make the necessary room. Latte to the left, in close proximity to his drinking hand. Notebook and pen to the right, right wrist leaning, as had become his usual custom, purposefully against the spiral binding so his arm had taken on the permanent imprint of coiled wire. Salt and vinegar crisps gaping in the centre of the table, Twix lingering maliciously on the edge of the scene, both fingers waiting on the desert course.

Before beginning Dave peeled the plastic lid off his coffee and tipped two sugars into the cup; one brown, one white, for he was bipartisan in his preferences for coffee sugar. The coffee mountained up on the frothy surface of the latte, turning crystalline like crème brulee, and finally burrowing down to do business with the dark heart of the caffeine. He took a wooden stir stick- a glorified toothpick- and stirred the mixture five rotations clockwise before screwing in his headphones and settling down to work.

Dave did not work as ordinary Lisburn folk worked, populating a series of carpet-backed office cubicles at the civil service, tilling the fertile fields of Lambeg or propping up the counter at the Carphone Warehouse. Dave drew and occasionally wrote, and when the notion took him, or he ran out of notebook space, composed songs on a Casio keyboard. These songs were often centred around Dave’s darkest, most intimate desire; the hope of a future beyond the Lisburn city limits. The people of Lisburn struggled to see the point in Dave’s work.

“Are you writing a wee book, Son?” the older men asked him in the pub. The majority of these men were Guiness-faced and fumbling with it. They rarely paused to hear Dave’s response; a mumbling master plan of conceptual art and wild birds, and potentially folk music, if the Arts Council could be tapped for extra funding.

“Do you want to do face painting for the weans at mums and toddlers?” the church ladies asked, “We need somebody arty to do face painting and lead the chorus time.”

“Are you going to try out for the Eurovision?’

“What about writing a wee section for the Church magazine?”

“If you done paintings of the town hall you could sell them in the Tourist Information.”

Eventually, worn down by duty and the ever-present provincial rumble, Dave had grown his hair long, purchased a coat with a massive and much-used hood, and begun wandering round the streets of Lisburn, face cast down to avoid eye contact with anything more suspicious than an inner city pigeon.

Dave popped the cap on a blue biro, flipped to an empty page in his notebook and began a rudimentary sketch of his now empty salt and vinegar crisp packet. (In the corner of the sketch, just out of focus, he added a half inch of salt cellar, two empty sugar packets and the ghost of his own left hand, resting on the table top.) As he sketched he sipped on his latte and considered the possibility of cracking into the first of the Twix fingers.

The coffee shop stereo system was permanently stuck on Cool FM. Dave was just beginning to enjoy a spot of Meatloaf- his first Meatloaf song of the year- when his eye was drawn to a commotion just outside the window. A large man in a forest green fleece was dragging an enormous wooden cross down Lisburn main street. The horizontal branch of the cross was hooked awkwardly over his left shoulder, rubbing incessantly at the spot where his head met his shoulders so his neck now flared luminous pink. The man was reluctantly clean-shaven. Even from a distance of ten feet, Dave could tell he’d have preferred the protection of a voluminous beard.

As Meatloaf warbled on, the fleecy cross bearer was joined by a large flock of Christians. They appeared, rat-like and shuffling, from shops and cars and side streets, rushing to catch up with the cross. Several seemed somewhat confused, as if necessity called them to continue with the purchasing of potatoes and braised steak and Fairy liquid, but Christian duty, suddenly called them to a higher allegiance. Red-faced and perturbed, they stepped away from the greengrocer’s door, turned full circle and set their faces towards the cross.

The Christians came, as Christians often do, in all shapes and sizes, though limited ethnicities, for this was provincial Ulster after all. Dave noted several senior Christians, strategically placed at the head of the parade thereby holding the advance at a manageable pace. Two smaller Christians had come on their bikes, no doubt bribed into submission by the promise of a post-service romp round the people’s park. There were several stout Christians and a handful of rangey middle-aged men, red-faced from the windswept world of dairy farming. One Christian was clearly of African descent. A second might well have been foreign, or just as easily, recently returned from Magaluf. A diminutive man in a dog collar and purple shirt, brought up the rear of the parade, shooing the slower Christians up the main street, like a shepherd charged with a particularly eclectic bunch of sheep. His face, emerging from the clerical collar was a perfect picture of patient martyrdom.

As they passed the coffee shop window Dave counted forty six individuals, plus several push chairs containing junior Christians, too unsteady to determine their own worship preferences.

Dave leaned forward in his plastic chair to see where the Christians were headed. In the pedestrianised area outside the town hall- normally reserved for local stall holders, sellers of everything from clothes pegs and tea towels, to cellophane-wrapped caramel squares and beetroot chutney- a small garden gazebo had been erected; sheltering beneath its stripy, canvas arms, two pole-mounted loud speakers, a small, portable generator and a large keyboard, complete with local worship leader.

Around the edges of main street, no doubt pre-warned of an imminent open-air meeting, several Nissan Micras full of elderly women had parked and lowered their windows in anticipation. In one particular Micra, a group of older ladies, driven by the evangelical need for a good spot, had arrived at 8am and were now starting into a thermos flask of sugary tea and shortbread fingers.

As Dave watched, the cross came to rest against a telegraph pole. Relieved to be unburdened, the fleecy man half-dropped, half-flung it at the ground where it wedged firmly between the gum-pocked pavement and a flier advertising 80’s night at the local discotheque. The Christians arranged themselves in a half moon around the gazebo, distributed a series of photocopied programmes and launched into a spot of lukewarm, outdoor singing.

Twenty five feet removed and cushioned by two layers of glass and the easy listening sounds of Cool FM, Dave could not make out the particular hymn, but watched amazed as the Christians chewed the air, singing with slack-jawed enthusiasm.

He felt the primeval tug of kinship. He felt the need to run away rather fast, and possibly throw stones.

“Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to look,” he told himself, “I could always write a wee story about it afterwards.”

He wrapped the second Twix finger in its own skin and nestled it in the bottom of his coat pocket, between a half-empty pack of Wrigley’s and a Kleenex, peppered with already chewed lumps of Wrigley’s. He downed the dregs of his latte in one sugary slurp and made for the door.

Outside, the strains of the Old Rugged Cross were drifting purposefully up Main Street. The Christian crowd had swollen to include approximately seventy individuals. “Perhaps,” thought Dave, “If things continue in a similar vein, we might see a latter day feeding of the five thousand, before supper.”

He allowed his mind to wonder in the direction of a modern day miracle. He pictured the C of I vicar, breaking bread, (Ormo, sliced pan,) with a side of battered cod and feeding all seventy odd Christians with one fish supper. He went further; water turned to wee individual bottle of WKD, WKD turned into orange Tip Tops, ready to quench the thirsts of the younger wedding attendees, Tsunami’s stilled, suicide planes stopped dead in their tracks asthmatics and diabetics and babies with chronic excema, suddenly returned to perfect health, the NHS faced with an empty bed crisis, spectacles and contact lenses outlawed and lost sheep found, (this one was infinitely imaginable, possible even.)

Dave had never seen a first hand miracle but he’d heard talk of them. Every missionary Dave had ever heard had a cracking miracle story to share. As far as he could tell, Africa, India, and certain lesser-developed sections of Asia were saturated with the miraculous. Healings, revealing and timely raisings from the dead, were much more of a rarity in rural Lisburn.

It started to drizzle. Within a matter of seconds every Christian was clad in a waterproof anorak. It was a miracle of sorts. Dave had never seen so much Gortex in one place.

He moved closer. It was compulsory.

The man from the Pound Shop had abandoned his multi-pack deodorants and cheap nylons to lean against his own window. With one foot balanced against a red plastic bucket of dishcloths, he peered up the street looking faintly perturbed and terribly Asian.

Two young girls with a heavily-laden pushchair, desperately tried to negotiate a path through the wasteland of Christian legs, walking sticks and golf umbrellas.

“Bloody Hell,” the older of the two muttered, “Could they not just keep to singing in their own churches so we don’t have to be tripping over them all the time.”

The three outdoor tables, propping up the entrance to Café Nero were playing host to a theological struggle of epic proportions. Driven indoors by the Christian din, several young couples left their half-finished cigarettes still smoking in tin foil ashtrays, only to have their seats snapped up by the evangelically-orientated middle aged, angling for a skinny cappuccino, a place to rest their Dunnes’ carrier bags and a better view of proceedings. Dave watched the battle from the far side of the street. He thought of musical chairs at the Sunday School Christmas party, and the entire history of the Crusades, in no particular order.

Dave was unsure which side of the fence he himself sat on.

On Sundays he attended a Church service, one service only, most often in the morning. Anything more than one service would smart of enthusiasm. Dave was anything but enthusiastic about the Northern Irish church; both the church with a capital C, and small.

Dave had been a Christian for approximately twenty six years, having once, at a tent meeting for children held in his uncle Davey’s back field, simultaneously prayed a prayer and raised his hand. For this brave gesture Dave had received his own copy of the Gospels in paperback, two pink flumps, a hearty handshake from the local minister and a lifetime of crippling indecision. Whilst indoors, in official buildings, with other Christians encroaching upon his anorak space, being a Christian made little sense to Dave. His religion felt like a pair of mammoth angel wings, capable, in theory of flight, but more likely to leave him wedged awkwardly in small spaces and corridors.

In a field, with a pen and a quarter of cola millions, Dave felt entirely different. The whole ridiculous package- Jesus, God, eternal life, mountain moving et al.- felt infinitely possible and rather appealing, back flat in a sea of sheep and clover.

“Church,” Dave thought, “Seemed like a simple thing made chronically complicated.”

As Dave approached the edge of the semi-circle, the C of I vicar stepped up to a hastily erected microphone and began to mumble something from the Bible. With the wind and the drizzle and the tinkling sound of an imminently approaching ice cream van all competing for air space, it was impossible for anyone to discern the passage in question but several stoutly-ankled ladies were nodding in vehement agreeance with every word. Dave assumed they had an open-air Gospel meeting channel on their hearing aids, specially designed for such an occasion as this.

The Bible reading finished. Dave could tell the Bible reading had finished for the C of I vicar had closed his leather-bound copy of the KJV, wedging one finger in the passage to mark his place. He then moved on to the exposition part of the service. Despite being incapable of hearing anything, Dave could tell the vicar was preaching for he had raised his hands in the posture of a politician and braced himself upon his heels, as if awaiting some mighty revelation of God himself.

The Christians- small, medium and for the most part, large- leant back on their golf umbrellas, pulled their anorak hoods a little tighter and silently willed the vicar towards a climax. Approximately seven minutes into the sermon the vicar rocked backwards upon his heels, then forwards, simultaneously clasping his hands in front of his chest in the motion of prayer. All seventy odd Christians shuffled slightly and let out a communal sigh, as if suddenly released from an enormous game of musical statues.

Heads bowed, eyes closed, Dave took the opportunity for an uncompromising stare at the Body of Christ, Lisburn-based.

They were an unlikely band of warriors, more prepared for a bus run to the North Coast than an epic struggle with the forces of evil. Gortex-clad and pack-lunched, they clasped their massive Bibles and prayed into the blinding drizzle. In the corner, by Boots the Optician, an elderly lady Christian removed her hand from the pocket of her two-tone waterproof and thrust it firmly into the pocket of her husband’s matching waterproof. Through the moss green fabric, Dave could make out the indistinct shape of two shrinkled hands, holding.

He could not bring himself to despise the Christians. Neither could he bring himself to step into their ranks.

He stood on the edge of the circle and ate the second finger of his Twix and when the hymn singing recommenced with a lack luster rendition of Up From the Grave He Arose, Dave did not sing, but half muttered, half hummed through a mouthful of biscuits and wondered if this drizzled, ambivalence was exactly what Peter felt before the bloody hen started shrieking.

Villages

2010-04-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

Sarratt and Chipperfield are two small villages in rural Hertfordshire.

Sarratt comes first, independent of the direction of approach. Chipperfield is always second. The entire Earth spins to keep Chipperfield endlessly second.

The villages struggle forward like conjoined twins, pinned together at the ribs. It is impossible to say the word Sarratt without also invoking the spirit of Chipperfield. It is equally inconsiderable to say the word Chipperfield before the word Sarratt. “Chipperfield and Sarratt” is an incongruity unlikely as “Dec and Ant,” “Breakfast and Bed,” or, perish the thought, “Spencer’s and Mark’s.”

Sarratt has a green. Chipperfield has a common. The difference between a common and a green is calculated in trees, Labrador dogs and proper ducks, per square foot. There are only two trees in Sarratt but one is approximately two thousand years old and keeps the ground in constant communication with the angry sky. Sarratt has a metal wheel. Chipperfield has a cross.

The people of Chipperfield are suspicious of the people of Sarratt.

Sarratt folk drink slightly more than Chipperfield folk. Occasionally they stumble home red-faced drunk from the Boot and the Cricketers, cutting a brave path down the main road. It is not uncommon to find drunken Sarrat residents, unconscious in a ditch, victims of drive by landrover incidents. Without luminous clothing it is impossible to spot a drunken farmer on a dark night. The Chipperfield folks recognise their limits. As a race they are slightly less red in the face, more pallid and inclined to leave a party just before the dancing begins.

The people of Sarratt are suspicious of the people of Chipperfield.

They resent the long-standing split between the two village churches.

Back in the days when the Sarratt tree was barely one mile high, the villages had required one church and one church only. God was louder then. He spoke directly from the soil. He sang from the swinging branches of the sycamore trees. His face could be seen, beaming from the polished surface of the village duck pond. The people did not require a church but enjoyed the thought of talking with God in a room where the rain could not get in.

The village church was duly fashioned from shop-bought bricks and local branches. Primaries one, two and three were excused from class to polish pennies and buttons for the altarpiece. Twenty thousand boiled sweets were melted down to form panels for the stained glass window. The ladies of the Women’s Institute worked six weeks straight, baking more than enough shortbread biscuits to tile the roof and feed all two hundred attendees at the dedication service. When finished, the church at Sarratt and Chipperfield was a thing of great and godly beauty.

With an extendable measuring tape, borrowed from the local builder, the vicar- welly-clad and well-insulated- set out from the front steps of the vicarage to pace the distance between one village and the next. Exactly half way between Sarratt and Chipperfield he paused and planted an upturned bucket to mark the spot. This bi-partisan point was destined to form the foundations of a truly neutral village church.

It was a field, much like any other field, featuring grass and hedges and a triple-barred gate, granting access and exile to all those determined to cross the threshold. With great care the ground was leveled off, half a dozen Jersey cows shooed in to an adjoining field and a large, and official sign delivered from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal store of church signage.

On the first full day of spring, the people of Sarratt and Chipperfield congregated in the back yard of the farm where the newborn Church had spent her first winter. Tenderly, fingers wrapped in tea towels and gardening gloves, each person grabbed a piece of church, braced themselves- arthritic backs and knee joints singing in admonition- extended their arms, and lifted the church to shoulder height. Though it took the entire afternoon to make the slow pilgrimage from one end of the villages to the centre point, each and every lifter, from the youngest to Mr. Herrington, aged ninety three and balanced upon a pair of rickety maple canes, declared it to be well-worth the effort to see the church fully settled in its new home.

The people of Sarratt and Chipperfield were greatly enamored with their new church. Holy souls from Amersham and Chesham, came by coach to admire the architecture, to pump the pipe organ and sample tea brewed in the industrial-sized coffee urns. The people of Amersham and Chesham, not to mention all the Chalfonts, were green to the gills with church envy. Pride fuelled the worshippers of Sarratt and Chipperfield right into the third parish winter.

It was during the third winter of the shared church, when the people of Sarratt were just beginning to make the move from the right side, to mingle with their Chipperfield brethren in the middle pews, that the woolly hats began to go missing.

Ivan Wellstock was the first to lose his hat. On an evening much like any other pre-spring, Sarratt evening, whilst waiting for the Watford bus, beneath the second of Sarratt’s enormous trees, Ivan was suddenly taken with the need for a bar of Fruit and Nut. Abandoning his gloves, his woolly hat, (a home-baked Christmas present from the Friendship Club’s knitting circle,) and a stack of well-thumbed romance novels, he dashed across the green to the village shop.

Ivan was gone longer than intended. Distracted by the two dozen different chocolate bars on sale in the village shop, not to mention the cigarettes which were banned in the Wellstock homestead but could be smoked surreptitiously at the back of the bus shelter; it was past six before he got his foot out the door. Upon returning to the bus stop he found his library books rearranged in alphabetical order and his woolly hat vanished. Ivan Wellstock was a man of measure. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” he muttered under his breath. Thereafter he smoked his way through a pair of Marlborough lights, ate the Fruit and Nut in three large mouthfuls and determined to forget his woolly hat. Ivan Wellstock was well-used to losing things; three Fresian cows, half a finger and a perfectly good wife in the last decade alone. He was loathe to break a sweat over something as small as a woolly hat.

Within a week the second woolly hat had gone missing; pinched from the coat stand outside the village hall. It was not yet an epidemic but the Boot was thick with the talk of it. The most recent victim, a youngish man named John Upton was so embarrassed by his recently exposed balding spot he immediately took to wearing an empty seed sack over his head. The children of Sarratt were terrified. The vicar got involved. A replacement hat- canary yellow with a crown of daffodils- was resurrected from the lost property box. Wondering round the village fields in his brand new bonnet and overalls John Upton was often mistaken for a half-wit.

By the end of the third week, six other Sarratt residents had reported similar stories; woolly hats left on fence posts, abandoned in the backseat of landrovers, temporarily removed to form a pair of makeshift goalposts and then suddenly, suspiciously vanished. The elderly members of the community took to tying their hats down with parcel string. Two stalwart ladies from the Women’s Institute ran a class in the village hall entitled, “how to keep your hat when all around are losing theirs.” The class was very well-attended and included demonstrations and photo-copied handouts suggesting inventive places in which to hide one’s woolly hats, (ice box, underwear drawer, chicken coop,) and how to react if one spots the woolly hat thief, (locate a loose thread and unravel at speed.)

A vicious, and ill-founded rumour of localized Wellington boot theft, began to do the rounds of the mums and toddlers community. All over Sarratt children were sent out to play, blue-toed and wailing in flip flops and carpet slippers. “You’ll thank me,” their mother’s said, “when the welly thief comes to pull your feet off and you haven’t got your wellies on.” The children of Sarratt were terrified. They stayed indoors for days on end, building jigsaws and driving their mothers’ insane with constant wheedling.

The farming community panicked. Hats were one thing, but how could the agricultural industry move forwards without their Wellington boots? A local farmer and his matronly wife were admitted to Watford general with a bad case of super-glued wellies. “Aye,” said the farmer husband upon admittance, “I did surely fill my wellies up with superglue. I don’t be wanting them thieving bastards from Chipperfield to be getting their hands on me boots, do I?”

“No, you do not, William,” said his matronly wife who had unfortunately lost a corny toe to the experiment.

Woolly hats continued to go missing all over Sarratt. The children from the village school began to spin tales of a multi-headed hat man who leapt from the hedgerows to steal naughty children’s hats on the way home from school. “He’s got twenty five heads at least,” claimed young Alexander Greene, “He needs twenty five hats to keep all his heads warm.” For this revelation Alexander received a clip round the ear, an early bedtime and two buttered digestives, no more, no less, of an evening meal.

It was not long before the people of Sarratt began to cast aspersions upon the people of Chipperfield.

It was a well-known fact, twice removed, that Chipperfield was two degrees cooler than Sarratt. This fact was unequivocally accepted across Hertfordshire and evidenced by the knowledge that the snowman on Chipperfield common had lasted two days longer than a verisimilar snowman well-placed on Sarratt green. Sarratt was also closer to the equator and boasted more hairdryers, radiators and heat emitting sources than any other village in the area.

Suspicion fell upon the cold headed residents of Chipperfield.

“I bet their ears are cold over there,” claimed Ivan Wellstock over his fifth stout of the afternoon, “I bet they took our hats to keep their ears warm.”

“Surely to goodness you are speaking the truth,” agreed his drinking buddy, “The Chipperfielders are stealing our hats.”

“Stealing our hats right out from under our noses, giving us head colds and ear ache.”

“Making a laughing stock of us at Chesham market.”

“Mocking us openly from three miles away.”

“Scaring the living shit out of the little ones.”

“Driving the women folk to distraction.”

“Sure, I didn’t tell youse this for fear it would start a riot,” exclaimed the bar man, one Jimmy Williams, who was almost as well-lubricated as his clientele, “but I seen the post man from Chipperfield in a blue woolly hat last Monday. Wasn’t your hat blue, Walter? The one you got nicked from the back field gate?”

“It was indeed Jimmy, blue as the afternoon sky,” replied Walter, “There you have it, those thieving rascals from Chipperfield have been pinching our hats all winter and we’ve nought to show for it.”

Over the course of thirty seven pints of stout and bitter, well-spread, an evil thought was birthed and nurtured towards adulthood. That evening, under cover of darkness with tin foil wrapped round their heads to keep the cold air out, the men and stouter women folk of Sarratt set out on a mission.

Using a pair of hedge clippers they split the church in two, right down the middle. Even in their anger they favoured fairness and used a measuring tape to ensure equality. When complete, the Sarratt folk simply lifted their half of the church and carried it back to Sarratt. Just to drive the point home, they placed their brand new church in close proximity to the Welcome to Sarratt sign.

“That,” said Ivan Wellstock, “Will teach those Chipperfielders not to steal our woolly hats.”

The hat thefts continued well into the next winter. In retaliation the Chipperfield folk slid their half of the church a little closer to home. Both Churches were chilly and somewhat depleted and fuelled by righteous difference for an entire generation.

In their haste to split, Sarratt had chosen the thinner side of the church. Later, when the sun came up, they realized their mistake. Chipperfield had made off with both toilets. And thus the worshippers at Sarratt, bore the repercussions of their own swift judgment for the years to come. Anyone caught short in a Sarratt service would have to cross the road to the Cock Inn to use their facilities. The good folk at the Cock Inn were extremely tolerant but the bathroom arrangements would always be superior in Chipperfield.

Foxes

2010-04-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

One:

Fox count fifty four and rising.

They only appear on the perfect evenings: sniffing upturned wheelie bins in Chorleywood High Street, circling the roundabout by Rickmansworth train station, darting between the wheels of next door’s Audi. Sometimes I turn off the headlights and try to make contact. The foxes of Chorleywood do not speak Northern Irish.

One evening, between Little Chalfont and Chalfont St. Giles I fleece God for a sign. “If you’re really out there, holding your silence,” I shout, “show me a fox, right now, this instant before I get to the main road.” I flick my full beams on revealing two foxes, a badger, a baby dear and two dozen bob-tails, flush framed in the headlights. I have stumbled into Farthing Wood. I am Saul on the road to Damascus. I am eternally repentant.

Foxes are my spirit animal now. They replace wolves, (and previously, tigers.) Wolves are just fine in theory, but hard to spot in rural Hertfordshire.

Two:

In the last days, when Belfast was calling, beating on the bedroom window with all the bloody-minded persistence of driving rain, she began to build a boat. For this purpose she stole things. She limited her theft to smaller items, expendables which could feasibly fall out of someone else’s budget.

She was not Noah and had no use for animals, nor reluctant sons or even the reluctant wives of reluctant sons. She built a small boat, big enough for one lost soul and a suitcase of moderately good ideas. It came out of the oven six foot by ten, entirely constructed from stir sticks and coffee filters. For bindings she used pipe cleaners and the furry endings of fifty two Pritt Sticks, excavated from the pre-school cupboard. She stole a single magnet from the magnet box. It was neither noticed, nor missed.

She set the sail- magnetic North- and, fuelled by the thought of Friday afternoon silliness, Sunday evening pints and a hundred thousand Jesus songs, sailed directly home, oblivious to the churning ocean.

Three:

I have killed one frog and one, or possibly two, squirrels since I arrived here. I killed them all with my car. I am more sorry about the squirrels. Though I felt the crunch I saw no definite road kill with the second squirrel. I am confident he lived to limp another day. Both squirrels, and a third squirrel, whom I swerved to avoid, ran across the road, purposefully at the very same point, just past the M25 slip road. I can only surmise this bend to be either some kind of squirrel suicide hot spot, or the location of a squirrelly drinking den.

The frog did not bother me so much. It was slow. I was quick. The squish mark was still stuck to the road five days later.

Four:

That winter it snowed for two centuries straight.

The common looked like something sliced from a Victorian Christmas card. The pond froze, several ducks turned to ice and were mistaken for provincial statues, someone built a gargantuan snowman in the middle of the cricket green. It was the most exciting thing to happen to a cricket green in the entire history of the sport.

The snow came quick, catching us eating Quality Street in an upper room. We slid home, skating through a cotton wool world, wipers shot to fluff and nonsense. In the dark with the snow and the quiet and Christmas crushing our every waking thought, Chorleywood looked like one enormous well-iced wedding cake, each house huddled fondly into the next.

When the thaw came, three hundred years and one hand-knit scarf, later, we realized our mistake. The whole village was made of potholes, loosely looped together.

Five:

On Tuesday I tried to join the Friendship Club. (The Friendship Club is a gathering of senior citizens who enjoy reading magazines, eating Shepherd’s pie and occasionally indulging in a spot of seasonal craft; knits and stamps, floral art and the like.) The Friendship Club meets in the same room where I like to eat lunch.

Though less inclined to Shepherd’s Pie, I was greatly enamored with knitting. I had recently completed a four mile scarf, knitted entirely in the pitch black back of Watford cinema. It was wider at one end than the other, somewhat holy in places. I was anxious to join the Friendship Club knitting group, if only to improve upon my ability to knit in a straight line.

“Hello,” I said to the thirteen elderly ladies gathered in a circle of stackable chairs, “I see you are knitting. I too am knitting. I’m working on a scarf. What are you knitting?”

Circular silence ensued, while thirteen elderly ladies laid down their needles and glared in my general direction. I persisted.

“Can you do hats? I can’t do hats. I can only do scarves; or maybe blankets. A blanket’s really just four big scarves sewed together, isn’t it?”

Silence. Persistent glaring. The focused wrath of the Friendship Club knitting circle, descended upon my shoulders. I sat down anyway, selecting the only empty stackable chair in the circle.

Finally, after an eternity of elderly silence, punctuated by the homely smell of Shepherd’s Pie, wafting from the kitchen, one old lady broke rank to answer me. Channeling the undead voice of Miss Marple, mixed with Nora Batty, she looked me straight in the eye. “We don’t know who you are,” she wheedled.

I raise my hat to the Friendship Club for instilling the importance of Stranger Danger in the senior residents of Chorleywood.

Six:

Jan to Jonny on the way home from drug club, “Good grief Jonny what is all that fuss about? There seem to be three whole police cars parked outside that field. I did not know there were three whole police cars in Hertfordshire.”

Jonny to Jan, curiosity piqued, “And the sirens are going and everything.”

Jan to Jonny, slowing the car to a snail’s pace, “Perhaps someone has been murdered or stolen or sold to marauding bandits from Kent. Perhaps crop circles have appeared in the field. Perhaps there has been a six car pile up on the edge of Chorleywood.”

Jonny to Jan, “Actually I think it’s an escaped donkey.”

Seven:

I did not know flapjacks when first I arrived.

From the outset I was skeptical. Being from Ballymena one enjoys complicated traybakes; chocolate chips, crushed Maltesers, glace cherries or at very least a light dusting of desiccated coconut. In PWA circles, more is always more, when it comes to buns. Flapjacks appeared to have less than three ingredients combined. For two months I resisted, preferring Penguins with my tea. The English persisted with the flapjacks; over tea, after dinner, with coffee, circulated in a Tupperware box just before staff meeting. I succumbed. I am all about the flapjacks now.

Eight:

Her small nephew, aged just eighteen months at the time, may well believe her dead. Advised by a well-meaning Mother that Aunty Jan has gone up to the sky, he stands forlornly in the back garden pointing towards the heavens and the flight path for the George Best Belfast City Airport, waving “Aunty Jan,” at every passing plane.

Each time she visits he seems surprised by her presence and reluctant to let her go; co-ercing her into yet another round of the Very, Hungry Caterpillar, demanding water and Wiggles and late night snuggles, anxious to delay the moment when the angels or Easyjet steal her away to heavenly heights.

This breaks her heart, one ventricle at a time.

Nine:

Lately she has become known as the girl who wears headphones. It is a fair summary of her personality. Sometimes she feels anonymous on trains and buses and the underpass beneath the Rickmansworth roundabout. Middle-aged men, mostly Asian, hit on her when she removes her headphones. She is no longer young enough to be amused and not quite old enough to be flattered. She keeps her headphones on long after her i-pod dies.

She cannot work without headphones. The chapel sounds leak through the walls like the endless muffled hhmmmpphhing of two hundred politicians, condensed. People pop in and out, rifling through the confectionary drawer, swirling round the floor on well-wheeled desk chairs, borrowing costumes from the dress up box. The office is a swing door, wedged open. Mostly the movement keeps her ticking towards the next instant coffee. Sometimes she prefers the inside of her own head. The headphones keep her well-insulated.

Occasionally she thinks about removing her headphones, throwing back her head and singing along. However, it’s been six months, nearly seven and she still can’t pick up the tune.

Ten:

There’s a pub here called the Cock Inn. This never ceases to amuse her, though the amusement seems to have bypassed the locals. The roof hangs low in the Cock Inn. A sign over the toilet door reads, “Duck or Grouse.” She finds this absolutely hilarious.

Finish Your Drink And Stay For The Weekend

2010-03-29T10:11:00.001-07:00

It was a small dog; white with the occasional brown spot blistering over its rump.

It was a Jack Russell in parts and also a terrier of indiscriminate breed.

Approaching its eleventh year it still insisted upon barking at hairdryers, Hoovers, washing machines and anything louder than the microwave ping. Occasionally it started into the six o’clock news, hacking along to the Big Ben chimes. The neighbours did not seem to notice nor mind. Eventually they had grown to ignore the barking.

It answered to several names.

For the first three years of its life- a period marked by occasional bouts of affection and extreme, unsettling violence- its collar read Spot, (though it had quickly learned to respond to “Boy,” to “Girl, and to a simple staccato, “Here,” adapting its name to the master’s mood.) During its six weeks of incarceration in the local dog pound, it had shared a small cage with an overly arrogant Poodle, and answered to the name Patch. This was something of a misnomer it knew, for the brown spots blistering over its back and butt were far from patch-like, freckled at best. “Fricking Patch, my arse,” the poodle had muttered under her breath, “Your butt looks like it went twenty rounds with a barrel full of buck shot.”

They called it Kip.

Having never been properly informed, one way or the other, it was unsure of its own gender.

It was their last mutual possession.

The house had gone; sold and split in two to cover two separate mortgages on two smaller houses. Records and books were ceremoniously split into yours, mine and ours; neatly divided. The cars they kept, for they had always driven separate cars, sensibly keeping the insurance in their own names. The furniture went with the house. “Like, I’d want to sleep in that bed again,” she’d exclaimed bitterly over a pair of tense vodka tonics, and promptly donated their King Size to the Salvation Army. Over the course of six separate years the crockery had broken and been replaced, various appliances went the way of moth and rust, plants died, friends took sides and drifted into the middle distance, mother-in-laws passed away. This was no big loss on either side.

There were no children to divide.

Kip had been an issue. Dividing a dog was somewhat more awkward than a record collection. She’d suggested joint custody and he’d said, “Don’t be daft, Lorraine. We’re not bloody Americans. We’re not bringing the lawyers into this.”

“I’ll keep Kip then,” she’d said, “I’ll put it in writing if you need it.”

The accountant in Richard- the sensible voice which had him keep a spare pair of shoes in the boot of his Renault- acquiesced. Three weeks later he’d appeared on Lorraine’s doorstep, dog leash in hand.

“He’s my dog too,” Richard had said, “If we’re going to be petty about this, I got him from the dog place, I paid his vet bills, I bought his food. Technically he’s my dog. I seem to remember you calling yourself more of a cat person.”

“Touché,” Lorraine replied and manhandled Kip over the threshold of her brand new apartment, “You can have him for the afternoon. It’ll be nice to get the laundry done in peace.”

A casual arrangement commenced. Richard had custody of the dog between the hours of one and five on Saturday afternoons and was also willing to mind Kip during any of Lorraine’s holidays or increasingly frequent business trips. Lorraine began to save her laundry for Saturday afternoons.

During the second and third year of their arrangement Lorraine enjoyed a long-distance affair with a retired dentist, Birmingham –based. Richard was not aware of the circumstances. He suddenly found himself in custody of Kip every third weekend, whilst his ex-wife escaped to the Midlands under the auspices of various speaking engagements, conferences and women’s retreats. Richard was pleased to help out. He had recently started seeing a therapist, two evenings a week, and was channeling his negative thoughts into kindly acts and interior design.

At forty seven Richard was beginning to consider a change of career. At fifty one Richard was still considering the very same change of career. The night class brochures, three years out of date in most cases, lay dog-eared and forgotten under a stack of electricity bills and circulars from the Reader’s Digest.

In an uncharacteristic display of daring, Richard met and married a lady from his Bible study group.

The lady was three years older and recently widowed. Her name was Pamela. Richard called her Pamela to her face and in the third person. Only her girlfriends- a cackling gaggle of over-made Sue’s, Sandy’s and Mel’s- were permitted to address her as Pam. Pamela was wonderful at Hoovering. She kept the house like a hotel suite. She fixed a proper roast every Sunday and three separate veg. most weeknights. Under Pamela’s supervision, Richard began to swell around the middle. His Marks and Spencer’s slacks progressed an entire size upwards in one short month. He was happy like a small boy, having not yet considered the possibility of demanding more.

Pamela washed her hair three times a week and on the second and third day of unwashed hair, was canny and unapproachable, as if balancing a nest of Faberge eggs upon her head. Pamela did not permit animals of any kind in the house. Once as a small girl she had found a lost kitten on the way home from Brownies. This very same kitten, Mr. Fluff as Pamela had fixed to call him, had relieved himself twice; once in each of her father’s outdoor shoes. Pamela’s father had consequently drowned Mr. Fluff in an empty, catering-sized mayonnaise tub. This experience had taught Pamela a valuable lesson: animals did not belong indoors.

Exhausted from the effort of a church-based seduction, Richard was reluctant to press the issue of physical relations. They kept separate bedrooms and slept together only twice; once in his bed, once on the living room couch, both occasions pre-empted by red wine and a particularly stirring romantic comedy. It was not an entirely unpleasant experience. Richard would have liked to give it a third go, believing that all things- crosswords, knitting, ten pin bowling and marital relations included- improved with practice.

Pamela was reluctant to give it a third go. Richard had not yet broached the subject but her answer was implicit in the way she set his dinner plate in front of him each evening. Richard did not press the issue. He was very fond of Pamela. She was a tremendous help with the grocery bills.

Meanwhile, Lorraine had taken up pilates.

During the second year of her affair with the Birmingham-based dentist, Lorraine had found herself unceremoniously dumped for a dental technician named Lizzie. The insult had gone straight to her hips. For the next three years she spent every Tuesday and Thursday evening, plus Sunday mornings, sucking and stretching at the local gym. Her torso tightened, her biceps tensed and retracted like a pair of un-pinched rubber bands; her waist was one inch smaller than on her wedding day.

From the neck down Lorraine was a twenty seven year old cheerleader. Chin up she appeared somewhat strained. Her face had poached the colour of stagnant tea water. Her eyes were over-made and witchy. Her mouth was drooping to meet her ankles; she looked constantly perturbed. Strangers in the street- post men and old souls in electric wheelchairs- hailed her across the pavement to shout, “cheer up love, it might never happen.” When she remembered, Lorraine forced herself to smile in public.

Lorraine dated men named Kyle and Trent and Graham; IT consultants every one. They were universally divorced, the most recent sporting a slight indentation, not yet fulfilled, on their second left fingers. Only the most inexperienced mentioned previous partners.

Lorraine found these men on an internet dating site named Late Love. Late Love specialized in meaningful relationships for the post-forty five set. Sixty three per cent of Late Love users had found meaningful relationships using the service. The other thirty seven per cent were presumably too ugly or socially incompetent to find love, even on the internet.

Lorraine kept Late Love tabbed on her bookmark bar, sandwiched between Tesco online and Slimmer’s World. Occasionally, between browsing for avocados and hair conditioner, between balancing her calorie intake or online bank account, Lorraine would pick up a new guy. Her profile shot was a top to tail number, featuring a slightly younger lady encased in a blood red cocktail dress. It was easy to get hit on from a distance. Lorraine dated most every Friday and Saturday evening, rarely seeing the same Graham twice.

More often than not, they met in inner city wine bars and chain Italian restaurants. The men came straight from work in pinstripe suits. They removed their ties in the car. Lorraine wore flats, for fear of intimidating the shorter specimens. Lorraine was five feet eleven inches in her sock soles. She rarely wore socks.

Over the years Lorraine became increasingly adept at nodding enthusiastically over a bottle of dry white wine. Over the years the smell of bryll cream and executive sweat began to bypass her senses. Halitosis, arrogance and the occasional fleck of well-kept dandruff were no longer deal breakers. Lorraine trained herself to spot a six figure salary at twenty paces. She shaved eight years off her birth certificate, kept the lights on in the bedroom and cooked a mean paella. It was not long before she hooked a CEO.

His name was Lawrence. He had three full grown children whom he supported financially and stabled at various Ivy League universities across the U.S. He was only required for family business during Christmas, birthdays, and by long distance telephone, on Father’s Day. He was almost entirely bald and kept the remaining few inches of hair neatly clipped, close to the palate, in order to avoid dandruff. Lorraine loved Lawrence with all the fervour normally visited upon recently acquired soft furnishings. Lawrence was the perfect accompaniment to her post-divorce existence.

As he helped her, elbow first, into taxi cabs and train carriages all across Britain, she felt French and young and terribly flirtatious. At forty nine, she began to experiment with neck scarves, tied jauntily to the left and right. The effect was distinctly unsettling, drawing attention to the tea-died pallor of Lorraine’s face which was now several shades swarthier than the rest of her body. However, Lawrence assured her she looked fantastique, working his Gallic tongue into the space behind her ear. Lorraine continued to wear the jaunty neck scarves long after good sense told her to refrain.

Marriage seemed little more than an inconvenience, so they kept their separate names and their individual apartments, alternating between his and hers most nights of the week. Sixteen months into the affair Lorraine had yet to mention Kip. She kept the dog locked in the laundry room every time Lawrence came round. Lawrence was ill-disposed to animals of any kind. As a small child he had once offered next door’s horse a Fox’s Glacier Mint. The resulting tug of war had left Lawrence with a set of permanent teeth marks around the base of his right thumb, and the deeply held belief that all animals, equine and otherwise, were nothing but trouble.

During the sixth year of their separation, Kip turned ten.

From Richard he received a ceramic water bowl with his own name painted on the side. From Lorraine he received a brand new, shop bought bed; fleece-lined. Kip was reluctant to sleep in this new bed for it smelt strongly of hairspray and packing plastic. He wanted his old bed back. It had come to smell comfortingly strong of piss and beef. The new bed would take at least five years to ripen. There were no cards. Richard and Lorraine had never been the kind of couple who bought cards for their dogs, or indeed, sent cards on behalf of their dogs. They considered those who indulged in such frivolity slightly unbalanced, or in some sense lacking.

At six thirty on the evening of Kip’s tenth birthday, Lawrence had been suddenly taken with the need to make love, urgently in Lorraine’s bed. Consequently Kip had spent the entire evening celebrating by himself in the linen cupboard. The new bed made the whole cupboard smell synthetic. Overcome with the stench and the crippling pinch of betrayal, Kip attempted to bark the house down. Lorraine ignored him, cranking the stereo to disguise the sound. His voice ran out after ten minutes. For the first time in ten years Kip considered the possibility that he was no longer the puppy of his youth.

Though incapable of understanding the full implications, Kip was now a reasonably elderly, little dog.

His eyes went first. The browns turned milky white and opalescent, like marbles curdling in the sun. Occasionally he fell off the sofa, landing chin first on the living room carpet. He struggled to differentiate between occasional strangers, though the regular inhabitants of his world- Lorraine, Richard, the Post-Man and the sound of Lawrence leaking through the bedroom walls- remained sharp as scissors, snipping at the foremost front of his conscious.

Kip was little concerned with the thought of going blind or deaf. His pleasures were simple- scratching, sniffing, Pedigree Chum and the occasional gratifying snuggle on the living room sofa- and easily enjoyed without the use of eyes or ears. Legs were another matter entirely.

During the Christmas holidays Kip’s back legs succumbed to gravity. It was arthritis; enormous, crumbling lumps of it, burrowing deep into both knee joints. Kip wondered if the situation could have been avoided. Could he have jumped a little less, chased fewer cars, spent the odd Saturday evening in front of the television rather than chasing neighbourhood tail? In some small way, Kip felt that the disfunctional legs were his own fault. This realisation made the humiliation worse. From time to time he was able to walk unaided from the front door step to the larger holly bush where he relieved himself five times per day, punctual as the tides. More often than not however, he was reduced to dragging his hind legs from one end of the house to the other, incurring carpet burn in the living room and frostbite off the kitchen tiles.

Kip was humiliated. He wanted to die or get fixed. He was incapable of asking for either. His barking became more erratic. Even the quiet could now set him off.

His kidneys quit during the weekend of Valentine’s Day. His stomach bloated enormously, simulating the appearance of a rugby ball, swallowed straight. His feet struggled to brush the floor every time he managed to haul himself upright. He hadn’t pissed in days. He was in tremendous amounts of pain. Lorraine could tell he was in pain. He hadn’t barked in weeks.

The meanest little part of Lorraine was relieved. She booked Kip into the local vets and spent a guilt free, long weekend, following Lawrence round the streets of Barcelona. She had never mentioned Kip to Lawrence. The perfect moment had yet to appear. Of course she’d informed Richard. It would have been cruel not to.

“Ummmm,” she’d said on the telephone, twirling the phone cord round one perfectly manicured nail, “Kip’s on the way out. I’ve left him at the vet for the weekend. You can visit him if you want. It’s the one in the High Street, opposite Blockbuster Video. Sorry, although it is sadder for me because I see him all the time.”

“Shit,” muttered Richard, (it was rare for him to profane. The Church had kicked all sorts of nasty habits and interesting stories out of him.) “I’m gutted about Kip, I truly am, but I can’t do this weekend. We’re having a thing at Church for singles. You know… because it’s Valentines Day.”

“You’re not a single anymore,” said Lorraine, allowing herself to be unwittingly drawn into the conversation, “You’ve got Michelle now.”

“Pamela! Her name is Pamela and we’re helping at the Singles thing. Why are you always having a go at Pamela?... Look, despite what you think, I am really upset about Kip and I do want to say goodbye. I just can’t do it this weekend. I can come round on Monday night after work, before Bible Study.”

“So long as we’re not putting you out.”

“Oh, shut up, Lorraine.”

But she had already hung up the phone and returned to packing the three pull on suitcases she would drag to Spain and back.

Lawrence and Lorraine went to Barcelona and there enjoyed three days of early sun and a blistering row over his choice of restaurants. “I can’t stand it when they serve the steaks still bleeding,” Lorraine found herself yelling; her voice carrying all the way across the piazza and into the early evening sunset, “you know I hate my steaks bloody Laurence. You never listen to a word I say.” Laurence was characteristically disinterested, eyeing up a pair of French-language students, drinking gin at the opposite table. “Whatever you say, darling,” he answered and his indifference smarted like cider vinegar in an open wound. It was the first of five similarly themed rows, the fifth of which, scheduled to take place in early June, would lead to a permanent split, a Harley Street brow lift and a hefty alcohol problem.

Richard and Pamela spent the early part of the weekend arranging chicken and ham volauvents on large, plastic platters. Pamela cut the volauvents using a heart-shaped cutter. “Because it’s Valentine’s Day,” she explained and Richard faked amazement and wondered if tonight, with the stench of romance thick in the air, might be the very night to give it a third go. “Wonderful, darling,” he muttered in Pamela’s ear, “The volauvents are wonderful. This evening will be wonderful. You are wonderful, darling.” He placed his hand purposefully in the small of her back, dangerously close to the swell of her ample backside. Pamela resisted. Richard spent the rest of the evening presenting volauvents and After Eight mints to a gaggle of balding single-men and tartan-clad ladies. Richard and Pamela slept in their separate beds and slept well, glad to have each other as a buttress against the terrible world of single living.

Neither party gave Kip a second thought.

On Monday morning the vet drained the fluid out of Kip’s belly. For this procedure he used a long needle and a foot of rubber tubing. The fluid was orange yellow in colour and collected in a small, plastic bottle, similar to those used by long-distance runners. There was enough fluid inside Kip to fill a good-sized electric kettle. Emptied of all the bile and bad intentions, Kip deflated to half his previous size.

At 5:30pm Lorraine arrived from work, wearing her work clothes and clutching her lap top bag.

She caught sight of herself in the window of Blockbuster Video and questioned the appropriateness of her own outfit. “What should one wear for a death?” Lorraine asked herself, “Is a pin stripe two piece a little too antiseptic; disinterested even? Should I have changed after work, made more of an effort? Should I be wearing my funeral dress? Or pyjamas?” Pyjamas, Lorraine decided, would have been just right for the occasion. Grief had always caused her to curl into herself, to retreat under blankets and duvets for entire weeks, to require loose clothes and elasticated waists; as if sadness were capable of physically bloating the mourner.

Lorraine slipped out of her blazer and draped it over her right arm, concealing the lap top case. She shivered in her Marks and Spencer’s blouse. It was only February after all.

Kip seemed reasonably pleased to see her. He lifted his head half a centimeter off the operating table and opened his mouth as if to smile. His huge, pink tongue lollopped out the side of his mouth like a slice of boiled ham taking the opportunity to escape. The tongue lay there, disembodied and gargantuan, much too large to contemplate recoiling.

Lorraine felt immensely sorry for the dog. Lorraine felt a stronger sense of sorry for herself. She slipped her mobile phone from her handbag and typed out two texts in a matter of seconds. The first message went to Laurence, “Can’t do dinner tonight,” it read, “I have a migraine coming on.” The second text went to Richard, “Kip’s dead,” it read, “can you come round and say goodbye. We need to talk about the body.”

The second text was a little pre-emptive but Lorraine had always been a well-prepared woman. Long before the gender revolution of the early nineties, Lorraine had insisted that Brownies simply weren’t for her and subsequently elbowed her way into the local Scout troupe, where she’d opened the floodgates for other female Scouters and learnt how to be pre-prepared for every situation conceivable. Lorraine always planned ahead. Lorraine never left home without a second pair of nylons, secreted upon her person or luggage.

Lawrence did not reply. Lawrence only replied to messages which required a specific answer.

Richard replied almost instantly. “☹ 7pm?” It was extremely like Richard to use emoticons in a serious message. Lorraine resisted the urge to tell him where to go. “Kip’s his dog too,” she said as much to the vet as to herself, grimacing as she raised her mobile phone to stab the point home.

The vet understood. He often treated animals with ownership issues. Just last week, he’d been offered a great deal of money to tell a certain middle-aged man’s ex-wife that their Labrador had died on the operating table. “I want him all to myself,” the man had explained, “this way she’ll never have to know. It’s easiest on everyone. It’s what Sandy would want. He’d tell you himself if dogs could talk.”

“Should we delay the procedure?” the vet asked, “We can wait a few minutes for your…. partner,”

“Ex-husband,” Lorraine corrected.

“Indeed, well we can definitely wait for him to arrive. I understand the need for sensitivity in situations such as yours.”

“Richard’s not coming. He’ll say goodbye later. Can we just get this over with?”

The vet injected Kip himself. A blue-scrubbed nurse stood in the background proffering kidney dishes and cotton wool buds and carefully rehearsed sympathy. The death itself was surprisingly swift.

Afterwards Lorraine could not bring herself to touch him. She was sure he’d feel different, deader somehow, even in the texture of his fur. She did not cry in the surgery but bawled all the way home, wiping her nose surreptitiously with an overused Kleenex, extricated from the bottom of her blazer pocket. A piece of pre-chewed chewing gum was wadded in one corner of the tissue. It was difficult to avoid. In the back seat, Kip had been placed inside a cardboard box previously full of computer paper. The vet had curled him slightly to avoid the possibility of protruding limbs. Rigor mortis would catch them all off guard, leaving Kip pretzel-shaped for the infinite hereafter. A tartan picnic rug had been laid across the box top.

Lorraine had taken the trouble to fasten Kip in with a seat belt. The thought of a dead dog shuffling backwards and forwards across the backseat of her car had been too horrid to contemplate. She kept the radio off as a mark of respect. The journey home seemed twenty minutes longer without the distraction of background babble.

Back in the house Lorraine placed the box, still blanketed, in the middle of the coffee table and fixed herself a generous vodka tonic. As she finished her first, second and third tumblers she contemplated the box from all angles. She nudged the blanket off with the corner of her foot and, emboldened by the vodka, went down on all fours to stare the dead dog straight in the eye. The veterinary nurse had forgotten to close Kip’s eyes. Perhaps dogs were different from humans; open-eyed corpse might well be perfectly acceptable in the animal kingdom. It unsettled Lorraine to think of him staring endlessly into the middle distance. Using the base of her thumb she attempted to drag the eyelid shut, reverently at first, and then with a growing sense of frustrated pressure as the rigor mortis resisted her touch.

“Damn it,” Lorraine muttered aloud, conscious of her own inability to master the situation and the now-empty vodka bottle winking from the coffee table and the single unit house and the box garden, tarmac’d to front and back; hideously ill-suited to the burial of a medium-sized dog. For the first time since the Birmingham-based dentist, Lorraine allowed herself the smallest slice of self-pity. Dead dogs, she knew, should not be faced alone.

She stood up, catching her balance on the corner of the hearth, and put an Elton John record on the stereo. Lorraine felt old and wobbly, incapable of making it through the evening alone. She took her mobile phone from her bag and composed a raunchy text message for Lawrence’s benefit. Reading it back to herself, it sounded forced and untrue, slightly unhinged in places. She deleted it, one digit at a time, and typed in a sorry little text saturated with love and loneliness and the need to be gently held for a rather long time. Though more or less true, this text was desperately unsuited to Lawrence’s inbox and so Lorraine forced herself to refrain from pressing the send button.

Lorraine opened a second bottle of vodka and retired to the living room sofa, positioning the cardboard box gingerly on her lap. It seemed wrong to watch Coronation Street but the silence was driving her head first over the edge. She looked at her watch. Richard was twenty minutes late already.

Richard was almost forty five minutes late. Pamela had insisted upon preparing chicken kievs from scratch. In the dining room, over dinner, she stretched her leg beneath the table, pressing the toe of her sheepskin slipper deep into his thigh. Richard knew this was no kind of come on. Richard was experienced enough in the ways of Pamela to recognize the calculated acts of a middle-aged lady, marking her territory. He removed his thigh, ran his plate under the hot tap and placed it in the dishwasher.

“I shall only be an hour at most,” he said, “I’ll be straight back home as soon as we get Kip buried. Can you set the video player to record The Bill while I’m out?”

“Hmmmphh,” replied Pamela, patting the tips of her birds’ nest hairdo, in an act of silent aggression, “Don’t be drinking with that women, nothing stronger than a coffee! Do you hear me Richard? I’ll know if you’ve been drinking.”

Pamela lived in quiet fear of drinking. Drinking had taken her father to an early grave and left her first husband diabetic and riddled with the kind of complications which kept him permanently out of work and under her feet.

Richard was forty three minutes late. He let himself in with the spare key. The spare key was an unasked for bonus in the dog-minding arrangement. Occasionally Richard used it to let himself into Lorraine’s house during her weekends away. During these moments he indulged in the clandestine thrill of watching slightly more risqué television programmes; American shows like the Soprano’s and Sex and the City, which Pamela heartily disapproved of. Sometimes Richard took a quick nip off Lorraine’s brandy bottle, rested his feet on her plush, white sofa or went through her underwear drawer for kicks. All of the above were absolutely forbidden in the house which Pamela had built. For Richard, visiting Lorraine’s house alone was something akin to a weekend in Butlin’s.

Lorraine had fallen asleep, nylon clad toes resting on the sofa’s arm. Kip, dead in a cardboard box, was balanced upon her middle, rising and falling with every breath. A snail trail of drool had leaked from the left corner of her mouth and was beginning to form a damp patch in the Laura Ashley cushions.

Richard stood in the doorway and took in the scene. He switched the television off, took a generous swig from the vodka bottle, relishing the place where Lorraine had left lipstick marks, and lifted Kip from his box.

The dog had gone stiff already. He was coiled; almost perfectly circular with one paw thrust forward as if ready to Hi-Five God. He was cold and solid, somehow denser in death than he’d ever been in real life. Richard balked at the sensation. He placed Kip back in the box and wiped his hands, palm flat, across the ridges of his Mark’s and Spencer’s corduroys. He perched himself on the edge of the sofa and wrapped both arms round the box, reluctant to let go of the dead dog.

Lorraine slept for twenty five minutes. Richard watched her. It was hard not to. The only other thing in the room was a dead dog.

She awoke suddenly, confused and reluctant to admit her own confusion.

“Richard,” she said, swinging her legs to sit upright and straightening her skirt hem in one smooth movement, “How did you get in? What are you doing here? Where’s the dog?”

In answer, Richard inclined the box edge to reveal Kip, stone cold and curly, with both eyes open.

“Oh,” she said, “I forgot.” She stood up and took two steps towards him. Richard could tell she was well oiled. “Would you like a drink?” she asked, “I have wine and beer and half a bottle of Jamison?”

“Vodka’s fine,” he replied. She fetched two pint glasses from the kitchen and split the remainder of the bottle between them.

“Do you want lemon?” she asked. It was a joke.

They sat on the sofa, thighs touching. Richard stared at the spot on her heels where her tights had rubbed thin. He lifted Kip from the cardboard box and balanced him on their laps; head on Lorraine, hind legs digging into his upper thigh.

“He was a good dog wasn’t he?” Lorraine said. Her hand hovered over his ears. She could not bring herself to touch something so obviously dead.

“He was alright.”

“You remember the way he used to bark at the microwave?”

“Sure, do you remember when he ate my gym socks?”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d had more time with him.”

“Well, you know you could have if it wasn’t for Margaret being so bloody anal about her carpets.”

“Her name’s Pamela, you know her name’s Pamela.”

“Pamela, Margaret, Sandra; what’s the difference? She’s one of those sort of women. I bet she buys her blouses from the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.”

“She doesn’t buy her clothes from the bloody Edinburgh Woollen Mill.” Even as he defended his second wife, Richard finally admitted just how ungainly she was. She was more than capable of a matronly blouse, well-accessorised. He waited half a beat for comic timing. “She’s more of a BHS woman.”

They both laughed. The vodka began to make his toes curl. It was six months since he’d last had anything stronger than a half glass of sherry. He felt dangerous and masculine and inclined towards a last ditch, drunken seduction. One arm loosed itself from the shoulder and found its way forwards, draping across the middle distance between sofa cushions and Lorraine’s neck; elegantly exposed. Richard placed his second hand on the dog’s back and edged it half an inch closer to his lap.

It was important, he realized, vitally important to claim his full half of ownership. In the past he had settled for a third, a quarter at times, of all that should have been his. Pamela had him over the coals; painfully reduced to a meager tenth of his husbandly rights. He received his orders weekly, magnet-taped to the refrigerator door: bins out, Tuesday, Prayer Meeting, Monday, “don’t forget you’re only allowed semi-skimmed in your cereal,” Friday morning, Mother’s appointment with the chiropodist, smiley face, Pamela x, (the x symbolizing an imaginary kiss, Richard had yet to receive.)

Richard was slowly being removed, one rib at a time. A line needed to be drawn and Richard was drawing it; exactly half way down Kip’s middle. For the first time in his adult life he was holding on to what was rightfully his. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered under his breath, “Before I let go of my end.”

Lorraine sensed the shift, dead dog claws catching on her nylons. She eased the sleeve of her dressing gown over her wrist, and with her hand sufficiently protected, dragged Kip half an inch back towards her lap. Lorraine was not a woman accustomed to losing. She dug her slippered heels into the living room carpet and prepared for a battle.

Both parties took a long swig from their separate tumblers. Richard made an assault on Lorraine’s neck, extending a single finger to brush the tiny hairs which clustered around the slope of her shoulders. Lorraine shivered.

“We’ve both been drinking,” she said.

“Pamela wouldn’t like it,” Richard replied, running his fingers upwards through her hair which felt like lady’s hair should; thin and shiny, like cross-stitch thread, conspicuously free of the lacquer and peroxide which held Pamela together.

“I’m certain sure I won’t be telling her.”

They set their tumblers on the carpet. Lorraine’s toppled, spilling luminous liquid all over his feet. He stamped the dampness out of his feet, rubbing them against the sofa base until the worst of the wetness had disappeared. He leaned in to kiss her. The dead dog was in the way.

“Ummm,” he muttered, “I’ll just move Kip, so I can get at you.”

Lorraine’s hand shot out of her dressing gown, grabbing the dog about the neck. Without warning Richard’s hand responded likewise, clawing at Kip’s hind leg. He pulled slowly at first, and then as he felt her tugging against him, with a growing sense of frustrated abandonment. She pulled, abandoning all efforts to protect her hands, she pushed her sleeves to the elbow and went at it like an Irish washerwoman.

And, as the dog stuttered backwards and forwards erratically from one side of the sofa to the other, Richard made furtive, stumbling assaults on Lorraine’s mouth, more often than not landing a mouthful of ear or hair, occasionally brushing the corner of her lips. Lorraine made no obvious attempt to encourage or ward him off.

Slowly, purposefully, like the first blush of nervous laughter, Kip began to uncurl with the pressure, advancing from pretzel to question mark to properly-positioned terrier. Preoccupied with tugging and warring neither Lorraine nor Richard noticed.

“You always took more than your fair share.”

“You never listened to anything I said.”

“You never quit putting yourself first.”

“You’ve always loved yourself a little bit more than me.”

“You couldn’t even bring yourself to split the duvet evenly.”

“I deserve this,” he said, on the very pitch of midnight.

“I deserve it too,” she said, half a second later.

They could not bring themselves to agree.

They spent the night on the sofa, drawn and divided by the dead dog which had fallen asleep on their lap.

When the morning came, creeping under the venetian blinds, he finished his drink and poured a second. He stayed for the weekend. He stayed for many weekends thereafter. He could not bring himself to let go of his end.

Beds

2010-03-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

Or: On Working In A Furniture Store And Finding One’s Self Inappropriately Drawn To The Bed Section.

It is hard not to. The beds are everywhere.

They know about the beds. They say, “best to stay in chairs for the time being.”

I try my best to stay in chairs but I can’t stop thinking about the beds: unslept, unsung beds, lolling naked by the back wall. Sheetless bellies upturned and baking beneath the strip lights. Fresh tiny pastel flowers appear daily. I push my fingers deep into these mattresses, daring them to disappear like so many synthetic freckles and moles. And each satin skin obliges; wrinkled, dimpled, softly puckering into the kiss.

Chairs are necessary of course, but beds are something worth believing in. Beds are cigarettes and paperback novels; Sunday morning romance. These days I think about little else.

They have cornered me without explanation, in chairs.

It seems they know about the beds. I take lunch breaks with the beds: tuna salad on rye between two fat twins. They watch me in their mirrors. There are mirrors everywhere here. Mirrors on the mantelpieces, mirrors on the wardrobe doors and freestanding mirrors, good for nothing but quiet reflection. “Mirrors,” they say, “Are a necessary part of this outfit. There will always be a market for mirrors.” But we all know the truth. Mirrors are good for spying on the staff.

I can see myself in the mirrors, eating my tuna salad on the edge of a pale blue twin. My posture is terrible. I should work on my posture- balance a book on my head or some such shit. The mirrors are everywhere. I correct myself when I notice. I am careful. “Careful,” I whisper between bites of tuna and rye. Yesterday I was a careless kid. Not carefree, never carefree since they cornered me in beds. Yesterday I was a careless kid, eating with my mouth open, leaving crumbs in bed. There’s the smallest seed of a mustard stain seeping into the mattress. I am covering the stain with my left thigh.

“Best to stay in chairs,” they say, “Chairs are safe. Better still wardrobes. Wardrobes have doors. You can hide in a wardrobe but only the smallest soul would chance sleep.”

I know my chairs: dining room chairs, foldable chairs, stackable chairs, chairs with fancy lattice work and padded seats. Ask me about chairs. I can look you up and down, note the slightest twist in your spine, the odd way you drag your left shin, gage your exact height in inches and introduce you to the perfect chair. You’ll be impressed. You’ll pay me a little extra for my trouble, recommend me to a colleague perhaps. Believe me I am good with chairs but it’s hard to go wrong with four legs and a seat for sitting. Chairs are just fine and necessary but it’s difficult not to think about the beds.

January is the busiest time for beds. God only knows why. Perhaps the Winter looks more like Summer from the flat of your back.

Chairs sell all year round. Only the obnoxiously straight refuse to sit down. Chairs come cheap; twenty quid a pop in the chain places. Chairs fold. Chairs stack. Chairs conform to meet the needs of the space and the occasion and the man, (or woman,) in question. Chairs have been chairs since the dawn of time, since the very first moment when God Almighty, somewhat fatigued from the act of creation, required a quiet place to rest his legs.

(God does not require a bed. I am reliably informed that he never sleeps.)

The average individual has approximately 4.5 chairs at his or her daily disposable. The same man or woman will only have access to one, or in some cases, half a bed.

Chairs are hard to share. Beds are where the romance is at.

It is hard not to. The beds are everywhere. I am a much more interesting person when asleep.

30. Van Morrison: Into the Mystic

2010-03-24T16:20:00.001-07:00

I lied, as I often do.

After thirty years of denying the possibility, I have finally come to admit that I have a single favorite song. Though the number one spot is eternally secure and has deviated not one jot to left nor right in the ten thick years since I first heard this song, everything else is a jumble of mood and moment and fluctuating fashions.

I was a very little girl when I first got born.

I got born in a hospital by the people’s park duck pond. The first thing I remember with any clarity is the burgundy, velvet wallpaper in the living room. Until I was almost five we lived in a semi-detached house at the bottom of a hill. At the base of the hill was a gigantic, crater-like rut. On one occasion I flipped my bicycle, head over heels on the edge of this rut. I wore an enormous Elastoplast bandage on each knee for the better part of a fortnight. When the plasters came off, a purple bobbly scar had formed on my left knee. It’s still there, a constant reminder of my early existence. Ballymena had left its mark on me before I’d even had a chance to escape.

My Grandfather was an orange man. There are pictures of him holding me on the twelfth. I am wearing brown marl, dungarees. It’s characteristically difficult to tell whether I am a boy or a girl. My Grandmother worked in the linen mills, walking, if you believe the stories, three hours down the Antrim line to work and back each day. She kept a scullery with bone-handled teaspoons, a vegetable garden and two dozen gnarly chickens. There were rats in the feed shed. I couldn’t bring myself to go in there, though the smell stuck to my bones, keeping me good and country all the way through my city days. My father did his time in the shipyard. My mother spent her teenage years, piano-deprived, in Gospel Halls all over the country. We ate potatoes with most meals until the pasta revolution of the early nineties offered us a secondary dinner option. We were a typically Northern Irish contingent; tee-total, caravan lovers with a penchant for fish suppers on a Saturday night.

I grew up on a very small island. On good days it measured two hours wide at the thickest parts. On the worst days it was barely big enough to contain the cul-de-sac I called home. I escaped via the Ballymena library, reading my way from one wall to the next, until the real books ran out and I hit the romance section. I moved to Belfast. For several years the big city felt big. I liked the way people looked when you didn’t know them. I liked the beach at Helen’s Bay and various quiet pubs. I was less-enamoured with the multi-storey car parks. Eventually the constant rain, the shopping centres, the politics and the Friday afternoon battle with the Westlink, shrunk the entire city to a quarter of it proper size.

I am an Ulster girl. That much is obvious. From one side my face appears blunt as a butter knife, from the other I am all cheek bones, nose like Cave Hill. My intonation exposes me wherever I go. I hear soft consonants, extra vowels and nasal cadences sticking, like Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, to the roof of my mouth each time I part my teeth. I am an Ulster girl, Hell bent on bridging the Atlantic, over eager for an airport existence. I ran six thousand miles to shake the Ballymena accent and bumped into Liam Neeson, who was once again playing the voice of God, speaking just like me, but smarter. I caught the next boat home; Pride of Rathlin, Caernryan to Larne. I could not get away from myself. I continued to try.

Van Morrison fell under the needle like a good true thing. Van Morrison was one third Sandy Row, one third Southern dive bar and one third innocent of anything more concrete than a catchy hook. Van Morrison sounded just as map lost as me. Van Morrison became a mobile home for me on trains and planes and passenger ships all around the world.

Some day when the airport no longer seems seductive, when the grass is green on both sides of the fence or I find a man blessed with two extendable arms; some day when the fog lifts and the rain catches its breath and the Atlantic turns to ice, creating a brave new continent, I’ll think about settling.

I will be ancient by then; thirty five at least. Over the years I’ll have accumulated an accent indistinguishable as Irish Stew. I’ll order a six floor library just to hold my stories. I’ll grow my hair long enough to last the winter. I’ll read the Bible cover to cover in fourteen different languages. I’ll build a house of paperback novels. I’ll put up curtains and draw them firm against the dying of the light. I’ll think about dancing, one last time before my feet form roots and rivers running far into the eternal rocks beneath.

Chances are I’ll be dancing alone. Chances are I’ll be white and wonderful and blushing like a home-baked blessing. And the song will be Into The Mystic because I am an Ulster girl and also an alien and a stranger and a siren waiting for the ships to finally come in.

29. The Killers: All These Things That I've Done

2010-03-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

“I got soul but I’m not a soldier.” I could write a book on those eight little words.

It begins, as all good stories begin, once upon a time in an airport lounge; an ordinary airport lounge, much like any other, but smaller. I am both writer and character in chief, though it’s not an autobiography in the strictest sense; it deviates too far into fiction around the edges. Occasional incidents are entirely made up. My hair is longer than strictly necessary, exposing three inches of under dye closest to the scalp. It is August, and I, with little regard for air conditioning am wearing five layers of clothes including two cardigans, a corduroy jacket and woolen scarf. I am wearing builder’s boots, in August. My feet are two fat swimming pools, adrift.

I have four pieces of luggage in total: a duffel bag, (borrowed indefinitely from Joan Adams in 2001,) a pull on suitcase, a backpack and lap top case, stuffed to the gills with soundbites from home. I am a walking, sweltering time capsule. I have the rest of my life ahead of me. I am considering a quickfire backtrack to Belfast, which, though impossibly grey, is in the very least sense familiar, safe, several light years from the Pacific North West.

To smooth the middle distance I have packed four tons of plastic jewellery, a picture of the Small Brother and wife, recently married, two bars of Dairy Milk chocolate, a Bible and copy of Uncut magazine, (twin pillars of tidal resistance,) and a solitary Amazing Pilots Cd. (I will later discover, the box empty, the Cd furring helplessly under my sofa bed, six thousand miles hence.)

I am a pilgrim father. I am a righteous spy, sounding out the Promised Land. I am sweltering in my winter clothes. I am absolutely, very alone.

Three years later I am twenty eight coming twenty nine. I am leaving home for an older place. I am an empire; a kingdom of adventures and failures and high-topped friends. I am easing my roots out, one small toe at a time. I am taking half the tarmac with me. I am freckled with real life summer, well-watered with proper winter. I am a bicycle rider, occasionally struggling with hills and telegraph poles. I am a spoke in a wheel which sings as it spins, forming constellations and solar systems with all the wildest, well-meant wheels. I am a long distance road tripper, a performance artist, a poet, a red wine dancer, a bonfire builder, river swimmer, sidewalk stepping coffee drinker. I am almost a grown up.

I stay up all night reclaiming the best songs, pounding them into the living room floor. I am surrounded by the best people in the whole world. We pin the pictures on the refrigerator door. We make movies of the moment. It is somewhat legendary; the red wine, the bad hair, Molly’s hips, Chris, smug as a pedestal should be; the nail varnish flying everywhere. We pinch ourselves against our own good fortune. The only song we dance to is All These Things That I’ve Done. Given the right moment even Mike Pacchione will make an attempt at moving to the Killers; stomping in time to the choral parts.

We are not satisfied with six people. The world is enough of a warehouse to invite everyone along. The song swells. Three years takes its toll on the thinner places. Each soul is in need of another soldier; a third, a fourth, a whole beaming legion of similar minds and hearts and hard-dancing heels. As the departure gate looms I begin to see these good friends as indispensable. They hang over me by day and night. They form bridges against the distance. They drive me to the Hutch when I need to feel American and dress up stupid at the slightest drop of a hat. They eat cheap burritos in their pajamas and turn the living room into a well-strung fort. They hover round the communion table waiting to grab the blessing both handed.

When I am finally good and gone I miss them like Christmas uninvented.

The very last night is a vineyard on a hill. Katie is married. Noah is also married. Most people are dancing. We are hiding out behind the men’s bathroom crying great lumps of snot and loneliness over the picnic table. I feel like my lungs are leaking into my bridesmaid dress. I am deflating. I may well drift away.

“Dance,” they shout, and I do not think my feet are capable. “Dance,” they shout, and my teeth balk at the thought of singing. “Dance, “ they shout and I do and the only thing holding me up is the sheer volume of hands and elbows and familiar circling faces.

Arms up, teeth set, bridal skirts trailing, we stamp in the new order. There are one thousand days of my life swirling round the dance floor. There are stories done, dusted and yet to be. There are tears and triumphs and five thousand gin and tonic conversations. All These Things That I’ve Done we sing and there are shades of Chesterton echoing under the grapevines, “it is something to have been.”

28. Ryan Adams: Come Pick Me Up

2010-03-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

Ryan Adams and I go back an awfully long way.

I had barely caught my breath from Stranger’s Almanac when a pre-release, American copy of Heartbreaker arrived on the corner of my desk. I considered it from all four angles, tried to bury it under a stack of noisy Brit pop guitars, succumbed and, nine songs in, lost an entire decade of good sense.

Come Pick Me Up is ten years old today. It plays like a brand new baby. It sounds six centuries old. It ‘s the only thing worth listening to when one small tragedy becomes two small tragedies and inevitably leads to the land of who gives a damn anymore. It’s a ten drinks too many, burn the house down, sell your birthright for a bowl of stew sort of song. It’s a wildly satisfying sing a long for the lost, the lonely and the recently screwed. It has, on several occasions when Springsteen seems just a little too optimistic, guided me, elbows first, down various rocky roads.

In my more innocent days, when my thoughts were pure and my tongue guarded, Come Pick Me Up was a tooth teaser of a sing a long, requiring superhuman powers of restraint to avoid the climaxing profanities.

During my time in Portland Ryan Adams, Heartbreak era, formed a bridge from the big rock guitars of my music collection to the French gramophone artistes and sparse Scandinavians who populated Nate Grubbs’ record rack. Ryan Adams and his country-loving chums formed the sound track to many short and longer road trips in various dubious cars. On one notable occasion a timely run through Heartbreaker and the desperate need for Dairy Queen incurred by the subsequent Americana nostalgia, kept us half an hour late for Neko Case in Eugene. As a result I missed Eric Bachman’s entire set and consequently felt compelled to apologise personally, (imagining for some unknown reason, that our absence had been duly noted from the stage.) This ninety second interchange has gone down in history as just about as smooth and successful as my previous attempt to win the heart of Willy Mason through conversational means. I blame Ryan Adams for everything.

In my university days Come Pick Me Up found its way on to each and every mix tape, pre-empting a sudden swing towards the hard-heeled country of Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons and Gillian Welch. With hindsight “screw all my friends and steal my records,” was perhaps not the best message to be sending out to all the perspective lovers I have ever presented with mix tapes. Come Pick Me Up pinnacled my very first Ryan Adams show. Two rows from the front I watched in abstract horror as Ryan climbed down from the stage and advanced towards me clutching a wilting bunch of carnations. At the last minute, to my endless relief, (having nurtured an unquenchable fear of being hauled to the front of a performance, every since Scarborough 1988 when a man in roller boots plucked my mother from the audience, and attempted to jump over her in a track suit,) the carnations were offered to the bespectacled teenager directly in front of us.

It has never been my intention to know Ryan Adams personally. I suspect that he might be a reasonably terrible person in real life. The most talented people often are.

Over the course of our distant acquaintance Ryan Adams has taught me many terrible things:

Just keep writing- eventually something marvelous will work its way out of your fingers. Disregard the mountains of pap you produce in the process. Sell it if you can.

All is well and good, and infinitely amusing, until you fall off the barstool.

Tragedy doesn’t pinch so tight when you lock it down in an acoustic guitar. (This one goes hand in hand with the moment after you fall off the barstool, greeting the cold, hard floor with the grim realization of just how unfortunate things have lately become.)

Fall in love with any chance soul, capable of mastering the slide guitar.

I once saw Ryan Adams in the S section of Powell’s City of Books, Fiction Room. I was buying Salinger; Nine Stories, second hand with adolescent love, graffiti’d along the spine. It was impossible to make out what Ryan was buying. At the time it was unclear to me that the only other person in the S section was actually Ryan Adams. He was fatter in real life, but similarly tattoo’d. His hair was enormous. I often wonder what I might have said to Ryan Adams if I had recognized him in the S section of Powell’s City of Books, as opposed to three hours later whilst flicking through the pages of a music magazine.

I might have kicked him for the punk years, for Mandy Moore and crimes against Beth Orton.

I might have fallen at his spur-clinched heels and offered grateful thanks for Heartbreaker, for Demolition, for all the Cardinals records and Whiskeytown and finally redeeming Wonderwall in the Ambassador theatre last Fall.

Most likely I would have mumbled something incoherent about the greatness of Dave Rawlings, and he would have mumbled something incoherent about the greatness of Gillian Welch and we would have returned to our S themed novels and short stories, red-faced and wishing we’d never swapped thoughts.

I never want to meet Ryan Adams in person. I hold tight, however, to the heartfelt belief that every third or fourth record to proceed from camp Adams, will safe my life a little bit at just the right moment.

27. Wilco: Kidsmoke (Spiders)

2010-03-21T16:41:00.001-07:00

I was many thousand miles away the day you started to be born. It was a Friday. I cancelled my plans and stayed home for the weekend, staring at the silent telephone. On Saturday your Nana rang. “No news,” she said and I hoped you were worth all the effort.

After thirty six hours the updates stopped. I began to think you were an imaginary baby; an enormous air pocket, burp, lodged in your mother’s belly. I phoned the home house four times per hour, letting the rings run into the answering machine. I paced the upstairs landing for hours. I prayed in short staccato bursts, like machine gun fire rattling across the Atlantic. I couldn’t sleep. At forty eight hours I got desperate. I started phoning unrelated people, following an information breadcrumb trail, backwards and forwards from one kitchen to the next.

I went to church. It was six thirty in the morning. I couldn’t pray. I could barely remember my own name. I was barefoot when they told me, holding myself upright by the elbows. You were born between the first and second services, in the alley where they store the dumpsters. “Are you healthy?” I asked. “Do you have one head and ten toes, correctly placed?” It was a long-distance line. It sounded like two pieces of tin foil kissing. I forgot to ask if you were a boy or girl. I forgot to ask how big you were, if you looked like me, if you had our dinosaur toes. I felt like a bubblegum planet, imploding.

I was sure we’d already met.

Your father sent pictures. You had enormous hands and a second-row face, nose screwed into your forehead. You were bright pink and clearly contemplative. You’d arrived on the maternity ward with a perfectly good name, well-worn. There seemed little point in arguing over alliteration. I looked at your face for five minutes straight. I was sure we’d already met.

It was the day before St. Patrick’s. We toasted your ankles in cheap, red wine. We sang and ate and danced a thin place in the living room boards. Condensation formed on the inside windows. By the time we finished you were already two days old. It was dark out, Summer threatened, pickling the front porch honey-vine sweet. Most evenings we were plagued with raccoons; rowing, wrestling and copulating angrily beneath the floorboards.

I excused myself from the table, found the flip flops I would later snap whilst chasing you round your grandparents’ sofa, and left the house.

Portland has always seemed kinder from the backstreets. Trees bend arthritically, brushing the hair from your face. Cars come, cars go, gently reversing and stalling, gearing and grinding, tugging and slugging against the ever-turning earth. Windows open and close, administering ten second blips of family drama. Cats scoot behind garbage cans, allowing free passage. Garbage cans advance, like castles and villages making their stinky assault on the sidewalk. Lawn mowers mow, sprinklers sprinkle, oblivious to the ever-present drizzle. Occasionally there are bikes.

I found myself flip flopping towards the hospital. I was not sick. I was simply in need of silence and also noise. I was wearing the lower half of my pajamas, a pair of golden flip flops, a sun dress, parka and bucket headphones, recently redeemed from the office chuck-out pile. I positioned myself firmly in the middle of the freeway bridge, grasping the mesh wire fence for balance. I pulled the hood of my parka over my head, limiting my periphery vision to a twenty centimeter square circle, rimmed with synthetic fur. I watched the buses and trucks, the cars and motorcycles blurring up and down the freeway. Occasionally a train rattled underfoot, forcing feedback deep into my heels and ankles.

I thought about you. I listed to Kidsmoke by Wilco. It was very complicated. It was very simple.

I closed my eyes. I could see your face like a photograph. I could remember you like you were actually there. It was an odd sensation, never before experienced, never again repeated. I understood everything. I would have to move home.

Kidsmoke was much too messy for the walk back. I listened to Theologians. My flip flops were beginning to bite.

26. Bob Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone

2010-03-19T07:07:00.001-07:00

Bob Dylan has saved my life on several occasions.

In the bleak mid-winter of 2009 when the scented candles of Ballymena had all but snuffed the mystery out of life, Nate Grubbs gave me a copy of Slow Train Coming. Walking home from work in the rain, coat hood drawn like a diving bell, When He Returns hit me like a slow, rumbling milk float. I found myself perching on the neighbour’s fence, kicking sticks ‘til I got my breath back. Bob Dylan sings. You pull up your socks and stumble on, freshly convinced that thin as things may be, there’s a song in there somewhere.

In 2001, when I only drank diet cokes and the occasional tumbler of Baileys, heavily undermined with ice cubes, Brian Houston played four weeks straight upstairs in Auntie Annie’s. We sat on the right side four weeks in a row, stretching our solitary student cokes across an entire set. Amidst the inevitable jokes, (“denial? It’s a big river in Egypt!”) the loud, loud ladies from the East, making assaults on the set list and the end of evening charge through We Don’t Need Religion, one could be certain sure of a Dylan cover. The first time I heard Positively 4th Street it was Shipyard-style, courtesy of Brian Houston’s acoustic. Though it lacked the swinging clip of Greenwich village, the righteous wrath sat remarkably easily in a Belfast bar. “Gosh,” I remember thinking, “this is a really mean song. I probably shouldn’t like it. But I really do.” There’s something about Dylan, something old and inscrutable and faintly prophet-like. He’s Job wrestling a vindictive God for answers, Jacob going sixteen rounds with his midnight angel. Dylan gets away with saying the things the rest of us get struck down for.

Visions of Johanna has held me still these six months past. “This is what salvation looks like after a while,” running like a benediction round the inside of my head; confession, supplication, adoration, heavy-feathered, hope shot realism. Bob Dylan’s God is a great deal bigger than mine. He understands the importance of a well-placed question. He holds his tongue when the journalists jump in. Each new era finds him well-weathered, familiar and fresh as a new mint nickel.

I fell in love with America, old, new and imaginary, through the words and works of Mr. Bob Dylan. Mop-topped acoustic, pin-piped electric, beat neck, red neck, post-folk, pre-punk, purist, anarchist, poet, prostitute, thief; Dylan taught me more about the heartbeat of casual America than any DC politician. Every word was a question, burrowing into the next, driving me furiously backwards forwards into Guthrie and Lincoln, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Warhol and Springteen and Martin Luther King. Dylan was a seven-armed signpost, pointing twenty thousand directions in a single-stanza’d song.

Picking a solitary Dylan song, is like opening the dictionary and demanding you choose a favorite word. All are necessary. All add, and in some sense subtract, from the others. Side by side they form an enormous canon of insight which offers absolutely no definitive picture of the man behind the guitar. If pushed I could possibly be drawn to five. Visions of Johanna, When He Returns, Sara, With God On Our Side and I Shall Be Released, (though the latter is primarily through association with the enormous all-star rendition at the end of The Last Waltz.) Like A Rolling Stone, is by no means my ultimate Dylan but it’s the one which haunts the American conscience like a un-itchable nervous tick. I’m choosing Like A Rolling Stone, simply because it refuses to leave me alone.

In 2004ish, for a birthday treat, I spent almost one hundred pounds on tickets to take the Small Brother to see Bob Dylan. It felt like a rite of passage deal- if I could only defer the blessing of Bob upon my brother everything in his life would progress swimmingly from there on. (Dave Eggers talks of similarly thrusting his younger brother under the nose of Bill Clinton in his autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Dave Egger’s brother was six at the time. Mine was cruising towards his 22nd year, and a little too heavy for lifting on stage.) To cut an extremely long story short, Dylan was characteristically terrible. The entire set was delivered in the style of the Gruffalo. However, the encore was Like A Rolling Stone, and it was historic, epic, an event necessitating a building of its own. It was a song, epic and expansive enough to act as an instant amnesiac, wiping away all traces of the previous two hours. We left glow-faced and vindicated.

I have lost track of how many individuals of various socio-economic, ethnic and geographical ilk’s I have found myself sharing a backseat, bar stool, bedroom floor with when those infamous drunken organ notes kick in. “Once upon a time you dressed so fine,” we yell, whining on the upper notes. Everyone knows who they’re singing too. Everyone has a rolling stone or two, progressing through the back pages of their life. Though I’ve yet to witness the wonder of Like A Rolling Stone in Thai or French or Mandarin, I’m pretty sure it translates wonderfully into every worldview. I’m pretty sure it sews people together all over the world; a karaoke favorite for the cynical corduroy set. “How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home?” we sing. No answer is forthcoming but it’s more than worth the mystery of asking.

Finally I found myself in an enormous house, sandwiched between Sandy and Burnside. The wine grapes were budding on the front porch. The smell sauntered half a block over on either side. Twenty six musicians were crammed into the living room, perched on the dining room table, hanging through the open windows, cramming fiddles, banjos, guitars, pedal steel, trombone, stand up bass, triangles and any number of biscuit tin lids into a very small space. “How does it feel?” we screeched, making a joyful noise all the way round the neighborhood. We were young and the porch door was open. We were rolling stones, trundling down the very same hill. “How does it feel to be on your own?” we sang, instantly comforted by the sound of twenty five similarly lonely souls.

25. The Jesus and Mary Chain: Just Like Honey

2010-03-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Portland’s a bitch for late night Laundromats.

Other cities- Chicago, New York, even the seedier sides of London- keep their laundry coming all through the night. You smell it whispering through the air conditioning vents. Socks and pants and Levi 501’s new-baked, born again, still steaming from the industrial press. The ghost of laundry escapes in willowy, cotton puffs between downtown bars and all night Rite Aids; breathy evidence that the city is not yet dead.

Late night Laundromats reek of romance.

Paperback novels on plastic chairs. Dishwater coffee in Styrofoam cups. Artistic types, shirtless and brooding in over-washed bathrobes. The smell of fabric softener, lurid and comforting as the stench of summer side chlorine. The never-ending search for just enough quarters to keep the romance spinning.

You enjoy paperback novels, fabric softener and the rumbling hum of a well-tuned washing machine. You are infinitely more luminous by night. You are well-disposed to finding love in a late night Laundromat. With every intention of ending up naked you let your clean clothes run out; shirts first, socks, pants, sweatshirts and jeans, until all you’re left with are funeral suits, sweat bands and a solitary pair of swimming trunks.

You revel in the pinched panic of necessity. “Right,” you say, “I shall have to spend the evening in a Laundromat.” You are careful to imply martyrdom. You are extra specially careful to pretend a preference for Gin and Tonics, for mountain climbing, movie theatres, late night swimming and television sitcoms; anything aside from Laundromats. Laundromats, you assume, are not an option for the balanced romantic. You smile all the way down to your sockless heels. You slip into a funeral suit. You leave home in search of a late night Laundromat.

After midnight, Portland swims.

You are listening to Lost in Translation, marveling at the way entire building, streets and signposts, slide into each other. Architecture suddenly unloosed from its foundations, forms bridges and bullets, bi-lingual conversations with the buildings next door. Telephone wires and tree branches bend like stringy puppet masters, pulling the city up by her shirtsleeves. The Willamette pauses momentarily, catching time with the tinsel drums. These small details are important. They staple the city together. Soundtracked such, the ordinary interchanges- parking lot arguments, cross street cigarettes, dogs, cats, back alley couplings- take on a strange euphoria, as if viewed through a piece of greaseproof paper. People move underwater, muddy with the music, capable of terrible acts of sin, beauty and black and white photography.

You are inside the mind of a glossy car ad; sleek, untouchable, eternal. You have more affinity with the tires, skating six inches above the asphalt, than God himself, who for the moment seems big and beyond and incapable of spotting the secrets in the grime. The Jesus and Mary Chain sound like blood, advancing and retreating through the hole in your lungs. You are a city kid. You could not be less enamored with the greens and browns of country living.

You drive miles- yards and yards and many miles- in search of a late night Laundromat.

You venture past 82nd and all the way into the early hundreds. You find yourself many hungry miles from home; Noah steering a last stop ark through the red, red lights, the used car streamers, the liquor stores and Mexican restaurants proudly advertising three buck burritos and watermelon soda. You feel sleep-set aquatic. You’d sell your funeral suit for a fully-functioning Laundromat.

Eventually you find an all night outfit. There is no sign, only a row of well-turned out tumblers and screens.

It’s in a strip mall, sandwiched between a Teriyaki joint and the kind of store which sells themed party novelties; green for St Patrick’s, Palm Tree-printed for the Summer. The plate glass beckons, bright white, bold as a drugstore. The door is open. The machines are cycling endlessly. The stench of laundry detergent and fresh-baked babies has leaked all over the parking lot. It sticks to the soles of your feet. It comes off on your fingers, leaving feathery traces on your computer keyboard, permeating the very pallor of your emails. It worms its way into the asphalt via the pin-prick pocks in all four tires.

You follow your nose. You drag your funeral suit behind you. You are the filthiest thing in the room.

You stand knee deep in the romance and realize the plastic chairs are empty, the Styrofoam cups are noticeably absent, the washing machines endlessly cycling thin air. An alarm sounds. You wonder what you’ve done wrong. You leave quickly dragging your dirty bags behind you.

You listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain on the way home. You feel twenty four hours awake, incapable of sleep. You watch your laundry in the rear view mirror; two black garbage sacks, bloating across the backseat. You feel like throwing your things, butt first, off the Burnside Bridge.

For Caleb At Two

2010-03-15T04:29:00.001-07:00

I am just about always falling in love with you.

I am particularly taken with your hair. After much anticipation it has finally arrived. It is both curly and straight in one feathery breath. It effortlessly combines key elements of the comb over, the soft wave perm and the barest beginnings of a mullet. When wet, you could pass for a Wall Street Tycoon. We are extremely proud. Your mother calls you the Nutty Professor, tugs your curls affectionately and cannot bring herself to contemplate the barber’s chair.

Your teeth are yet to tighten. You leave dinosaur bites in the cheese. (“This unquenchable thirst for cheese,” we say, “Is payback for your father who ate nothing but grated cheddar all the way up to Primary One.”) You refuse the ordinary eating options, insisting upon pineapple chunks in your tomato soup. I imagine you enjoy the colours.

You dance like a hip hop star, legs squatting, palm flat pushing on thin air, well-padded butt brushing the pavement. You dance without shame in public places, naked if possible, hysterical on the kitchen lino, cutting a wild gyre to Brian Wilson. You have impeccable taste. Occasionally I dance circles round your kitchen strut, turning you upside down to let the giggles out. I am never more than a satellite hanging from your heels.

Your forehead forms waves when you paint, hesitating purposefully over the pink and purple pots. You tend towards abstract expressionism: uplifting, yet intense. I watch myself writing in the mirror. Your face, from the nose pinch up, is a baby twin of mine. I am flattered to share a frown with you.

You laugh at things you do not understand. You fart loudly when everyone is listening. You turn cyclones in your cot each night, circling for a good place to land. You have two tin drums in your heels. You bang and stomp and cast yourself head first off terribly high things. You call all birds, both great and small, “ducks,” and run head first into their midst; pigeons, ducks, Canadian Geese and belligerent swans scattering like shrapnel at your feet. You are fearless. I am a braver girl chasing you down the street. You are infectious. I itch when you’re not around.

You enjoy books. You have recently grown out of eating them and, having chewed your way ironically through The Hungry Caterpillar and The Amazing Book Eating Boy, are now occasionally interested in reading the stories.

You say at least a hundreds words, maybe more, stringing them together with yards and yards of wild, woolen gibberish. “Father Dod,” you say over dinner; hands clasped across the tomato soup, eyes wide open, lest you miss a solitary beat. “Starbucks,” you shout with disturbing clarity, long before you’ve mastered, “please,” or, “thanks,” or, “Auntie Jan.” “Wub oo,” on the telephone, long distance from the other side of the ocean; an after thought on your part, a bright, white crown on my entire week.

You know your people. You poke them in the ribs, prodding their tickles into the open air. You drag them thumb first, through the back door and down the garden. You yell their names from three miles out; “Niamh” and “Katie” and “Owen,” echoing endlessly down the Newtownards Road. You kiss like a piranha, open-mouthed and ready to consume a tummy-full of love. Occasionally you resort to the forehead kisses of your first year, frontal lobes clashing in a gesture of misdirected affection. You do Church like a family reunion, pounding from one old friend to the next.

You are such a large, big ocean away, growing one inch wiser with every absent day. Though I send postcards weekly, printing my name in capital letter, I am scared you will forget the funny things we do together. I am scared you will get to twenty five and remember my face, always leaving in the back of a taxi or waving from the departure lounge. There are so many hungry aunts in the world, I am afraid you might mistake me for another.

I have news for you wee man. You are a magnet I can no longer resist. I am coming home to hold you upside down until all the missed memories pour over the backyard lawn. After which we will build homemade jokes and jigsaw stories from all our far gone days.

Hold your breath for three weeks straight. Grow not one dot stop bigger or braver than the way I remember you. Wait for me in the window, nose pressed against the glass so the condensation forms a pillar of cloud and homely love, leading me all the way back to the East. I am coming home by boats and trains. I am coming home for weeks and years. Most of my best laid plans begin and end with you.

24. Bon Iver: Skinny Love

2010-03-14T15:34:00.001-07:00

On the way home from the beach I shared a backseat with Mel Brown. I was watching the coastline retreat and thinking about how to build a brand new set of Pacific memories. The older days- campfires and phospheresence and parking lot arguments- were still bruising, forming deep indentations between the lines of my stories.

“We need to go to Nashville,” said Mel Brown, and though I barely knew her, I found myself having to agree.

We formed a plan. It was a whimsical affair fashioned from popsicle sticks, sheer bloody-mindedness, and the briefest hint of artistic merit. We took professional headshots in the photo booth of the Ace Hotel. In these photos Mel is smiling. I am frowning into the camera, nursing a morning after headache. We’re black and white, in plain shirts. You can barely tell which century we belong to.

Between the hours of Winter and Spring we wrote many, many emails, inferring friendship with people we barely knew. Doors opened, hands extended, phone calls flew backwards and forwards across the Midwest. In anticipation I bought myself a pair of second-hand cowboy boots. We were amazed at our own ability to charm. We were sure we’d soon be famous.

We wore our very best dresses; homecoming blue with a modest hem. We drank coffee with Smoky Mountains boys; thick-fingered boys, tinsel-toothed and feathered in sensible shoes. We were just about always falling in love. The cyclones were coming and we couldn’t help but wish for a second pair of well-anchored arms. We stole a borrowed convertible and drove round town; a pair of silver screen failures, singing Skinny Love with the cyclones tangling in our hair. We couldn’t wake up without Skinny Love. It was almost a prayer, the only thing worth considering before morning coffee. It sounded best with the rag top down, crouched behind a pair of saucer-sized sunglasses. We ate fried green tomatoes with the windows turned out. We slept on cowboy pillows, played dark-stringed banjo on the front porch, held our dinner plates fast against an early exit. The cyclone was everywhere, flinging one day into the next, sucking the soil from under our feet. Each morning, another year had been removed. By the end of the week we were teenagers, six sizes smaller in our cowboy boots.

Everything seemed possible; imminent even.

Nashville was kind to us. A thousand miles inland, she smothered us with mountains and creeks and good time whiskey. The coast line receded quickly; a hundred years per minute, until even the bravest bonfire was a far gone flare, diminishing on the horizon. Skinny Love with time grew thicker, bound us up in a bruise-proof blanket, called us well-heeled wonderful kids, more than ready for future coastlines. Soon it was safe to go home.

Six months later, we found ourselves sharing a sofa with the man from Bon Iver. “I can’t sleep,” he said. So I offered him Richard Buckner and a mildewing copy of Wuthering Heights. Later, when the songs were sung and the photographs taken and the small room, large with well-intentioned strangers we talked basketball hoops and brothers, Jesus, Jesus and good things to write on an empty arm.

“Be not so fearful,” I said.

“Be not so fearful,” he sung.

It was a moment worth pickling.

“Thank you,” I said, and felt bad that we had not brought an extra crate of beer.

“No, problem,” he said and I thought about saying other things. “Your songs are lead weights and anchors.” “Nashville sounds like Skinny Love. Even the grocery stores stink of it.” And “You should sleep backwards for a thousand years, waking in a world where people still fight with swords and worship their poets and have not yet invented the microwave oven.”

I kept my mouth shut, (though the latter would have been sheer kindness on my part.)

23. Architecture in Helsinki: Do the Whirlwind

2010-03-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

I’m not expecting many readers to have heard of Architecture in Helsinki. (Upon asking people, “Do you like Architecture in Helsinki?” I usually anticipate a response akin to, “Don’t know, “I’ve never been there,” or, “What? Do you mean like bridges and shit?”) Truth be told, I only know one Architecture in Helsinki song and I only know it because Jud, (she, of the extensive eye shadow and ice skating lessons,) once put it on a mix cd alongside the Muller Rice song.

It is, however, a fantastic song. Indeed I’d go as far as to propose Do the Whirlwind, as the world’s best song for robotically dancing to, whilst inside a mid-sized family saloon. Should the traffic lights consent to cooperate and your driver, drive like a star fighter pilot on speed, Do the Whirlwind is exactly the right length to keep you dancing from Powell’s Car Park to the Doug Fir, (a three quarter mile strip which offers all of an average individual’s needs, from coffee and books, pizza slices and feminist-themed comic books, to beer and sketchy lap dancers.)

Thankfully, for the duration of my stay in Portland I was well equipped with a driver, more than capable of impersonating a speed-fuelled, star fighter pilot. Her name, in those days, was Katie Overlien. Her hair was blond, brown, copper and verging on black for one Winter season. Her steed of choice was Toxic Sunshine.

Toxic Sunshine was less a car and more a state of mind.

Toxic Sunshine- christened by a gang of local hoodlums who’d tagged her with a can of neon spray paint- was slate gray and blessed with an unfortunately worded bumper sticker. Some well-meant previous owner, (most likely Christian and thus predisposed to read every set of three digit numbers as a Scripture reference,) had left a Café 4:20 bumper sticker on T.S.’s rear end. Katie Overlien, despite the children’s ministry tags hanging from her mirror, was regularly offered soft drugs by Hispanic men at local gas stations. For the most part she politely declined.

Toxic Sunshine, like her owner and regular co-rider, was only predisposed to moving forwards. The car had terrible issues with retreating. For approximately three months in 2008 Katie Overlien was incapable of reversing so much as half a foot. Not to be dissuaded we prayed fervently for drive through spaces, circled endlessly round the block whilst one passenger ran necessary errands, and, when Paul Barger could not be coerced into giving us a somewhat belligerent, push, made friends with strange, able-bodied men in car parks, hoping for an extra set of arms.

On the dashboard of Toxic Sunshine resided a large lump of what appeared to be melted blue bubble gum. It proved impossible to remove so we stuck things in it; fingers, coffee mugs, incense sticks, a ceramic angel, rescued from my Mother’s Christmas package. It added to the interior décor of the car. The backseat was a no-man’s land of bulk-buy Graham Crackers, Baby Wipes and carpet-sized rolls of Kitchen Towel. No one had ever opened the trunk. It was rumoured to contain an entire continent, as of yet, undiscovered. We considered buying a trailer just to transport our packed lunches to work each morning.

Katie Overlien enjoyed music. The music which Katie Overlien enjoyed fell neatly into three well-worn categories: Christmas Music, (which could feasibly be moved into heavy rotation at any point post-July 4th,) worship songs from Women of Faith conferences and the Soundtrack of Rent, (which Katie could sing in entirety, employing different voices for the male parts.) Toxic Sunshine naturally refused to play these songs at an audible level, instead choosing to blast them down Burnside at four hundred thousand decibels. Katie Overlien, it seems, would have got along well with my late-Grandmother, (she of the ear-ache inducing Male Voice Choir tapes.)

The noise was one thing, the driving another thing entirely.

Katie Overlien was born to break the speed limit. Despite her innocent demeanour, most journeys were completed in a third of the normal time and often involved oatmeal eating, coffee drinking, cell-phone chatting and high speed praying, (thankfully of the open-eyed variety.) Stops were all of the emergency variety for Toxic Sunshine seemed more than normally fond of sniffing the bums of other cars. As a result I spent one hundred per cent of my time in Toxic Sunshine, gripping the dashboard in a position most air stewardesses would describe as “Brace, Brace!”

In a vain attempt to both calm my own driving nerves and break Katie Overlein’s Mid-Western cycle of Praise/Frosty the Snowman/Musical Soundtrack, I began introducing Toxic Sunshine to mix CD’s. Do the Whirlwind was a favorite, though we also liked Ryan Adams and the odd spot of Take That, (“they’re massively influential at home, sort of like Radiohead, ” I explained to the uneducated Americans.) Do the Whirlwind came with its very own dance; a kind of robotic, pop and lock, arm scissoring gyration which caught us daft and openly-mocked at several downtown spotlights. We didn’t care. We were deeply into robot dancing.

Unknown to Katie Overlien I would keep one eye on my robot arms and the other on the car in front, ready at any time to scream, “Brace, Brace,” or execute an emergency roll from the passenger door. (Hands otherwise employed I kept my knees firmly levered against the dashboard as a kind of insurance policy.) As you can imagine this kind of coordination stretched my rather limited rhythmic capabilities to breaking point. I lost track of how many times I saved Katie Overlien’s life.

Now she’s Katie Locke and I’m stuck on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s Noah’s responsibility to safe her life on a daily basis. I hear he does most of the marital driving.