Cassandra Voices

Tag: Cassandra Voices fiction

  • The Death of My Marriage and JFK Junior

                It happens. After four years of marriage, I’m madly in love…just not with my husband. I feel like Diane Lane in Unfaithful, guilt-ridden, and giddy as I face my new reality. I am a terrible wife…but…I was becoming a fantastic girlfriend. 

    You may deem me a horror, but the truth is never a fairytale. Only weddings are, and mine was no exception. In Camelot fashion, I rode to church in a horse and buggy. I should have known something was wrong when looking out the lace-framed carriage window I thought, “I could escape through the woods in this thing.”  To say we have one soul mate, one person we marry until death is to commit to madness. However sour that sounds, I still believe in love. I believe in Rocky and Adrian, couples who meet and mate for life. There are swans out there, and then there’s me.

    As my horse clickety clacks through the trail to church, I thought of where we met. My soon-to-be husband and I were waiters for an elite caterer who specialized in spoiling the rich and famous of New York. On any given night, we served an array of society members, rich bitches, charming bastards, and boring bankers. They all had the same nose, the same stifling perfumes, the same board-certified plastic surgeons. There were exceptions, rare guests that made even the most jaded waiters’ hearts skip a beat. There was Princess Dianna, who graced The New York State Theater with a presence that was otherworldly and English garden. Then there was our homegrown prince, John Kennedy Junior. He was intelligent, handsome, rugged — a bona fide American hunk. The only son of the late President John F. Kennedy was often alone, then later in the company of his wife Carolyn. She was stunning and stepped into the Kennedy dynasty as if the glass slippers were hers all along. Whether they were holding hands or mingling separately at a party, they were always in sync.  I thought of how secretly jealous I was of them, of their inexplicable beauty, and the life of ease they were born into. I thought of all the splendor we lavished on John and Carolyn, and how ironic and lovely that we were finally having our splash of an event.

    My future husband Robert was kind, respectful, and a planner. Everyone loved him and encouraged our flirtations. “Robert is one of the most emotionally mature men I’ve ever met,” said a co-worker. On the surface she was right. He was grounded, and generous – the opposite of the selfish tools I had experienced. But a deeper dive into his psyche revealed a gully of childhood trauma. I came to learn, in graphic detail, how his father had taken his own life when Robert was just a boy. And how his unspeakable death released a brutal barrage of white water on his family – for just as one wave of unrest was cresting, another would hit.

    Initially, I found Robert timid, but as our dating progressed, the sheer goodness of his nature won me over. On the morning after our second date, I was treated to a romantic poem left on my voicemail. It was impressive as Robert was a trained actor who sidelined his dream for steady work teaching. Though flattered by his gesture, I was puzzled by his spontaneous outburst. What had I done to deserve this? I perceived that our spark was not the brightest. He didn’t ask me many questions. So…was it my looks? Right face, right time? I didn’t care. He needed a place to put his love, and I needed a safe place to land.

    Our relationship progressed as he spoiled me with thoughtful gifts and a steady stream of attention. After three and a half months of dating, I moved into his place. I never thought of marriage as my life goal, I had already turned down proposals from two different men. But I was at that age where dormant domesticity busts through DNA, like weeds in cracked concrete. For there I was, a few months later, saying yes to this man who fell to one knee on a foggy night in July and asked me to marry him.

    Four years later, I wasn’t just breaking my vows, I was pulverizing them beyond recognition. Like all first-time offenders, I felt culpable but soon grew accustomed to my crime. My brain became an IV, slowly dripping rationalizations to assuage my conscience, conveniently removing all traces of guilt from my heart. The merit of my sins softened, as I recalled the things my husband and I had and hadn’t done. We HAD sex, TWICE…on our two-week honeymoon in Italy. I never got kissed under that Bridge of Sighs, I got a sweater. It was a really nice sweater. Every time I wore it, I remembered Venice – the churches we lit candles in, the canals we floated over, the arches we never made out under.

     

    I’m not a modern girl. I never had one of those razor-chopped haircuts, I had cookbooks. On any given night you’d find me making dinner for Robert like an old-school Italian wife.  Yet here I am, standing barefoot on my lover’s kitchen countertop and I’m not even cooking. I’m five feet off the floor at his insistence; “Take off your shoes and climb up,” he says. “Changes your perspective. Right?” I must have nodded yes, but in my head, I’m thinking, “My husband would never let me do this. He barely lets me in the house after he mops!” I met Jack at a master acting class in Manhattan. The teacher was a famous Beverly Hills guru. He was part Scientologist, part psychic. If you had a chink in your armor, he sniffed it out with vampiric accuracy. Once, when sitting in the hot seat after my scene, he noted the following, “You’re a passionate woman. But you exist in a passionless relationship, yes?” I take a breath before I answer, “Oh my husband’s…very supportive.” I’m barely exhaling as the guru stares through me. He needs no words, for the truth he sought was shifting in my eyes of a thousand lies. I panic, knowing I’m caught. But like a dog suddenly surrendering a steak bone, the guru lets me go and turns his attention back to show biz. He tells me to straighten my curly hair and rise above the middle-class vibe I’m projecting. The guru makes it clear that being middle-class is akin to poison and kills the spirit of an artist like slow-moving arsenic.

    About 2 weeks after the start of the first class, I’m slated to work with an actor named Cal. Now Cal was a loose cannon who pulled an actual gun on a woman in rehearsal, but I didn’t care. He was interesting and I was primed for artistic arousal. But word had it that bat shit, crazy Cal booked an acting job and wouldn’t be coming to class anymore. The director of my scene needed someone to take his place and chose Jack as my new partner. I admit, I was disappointed to miss out on loose cannon Cal. I could have used a gun to the head, and the only thing Jack was pulling out of his pocket was wax for his surfboard. No, he wasn’t a surfer, but he looked the part. One day during a lull between scenes, Jack reaches a row behind him, extending his hand to me. In a hushed tone he said, “Hey, it’s you and me.” I was thrown by the warmth of his gesture and the excitement in his voice. His friendly spirit and enthusiasm didn’t match the story that played in my mind. I had seen him outside of class many times pacing downtown Manhattan like a caged cougar in search of his soul.

    Jack was cocky, opinionated, an artistic bully at times, a 360 of my pragmatic husband. He confessed crazy things; like how he made 200 grand one year and had nothing to show for it but the pants on his ass. When I asked him where the money went he said calmly, “Jeans?” He was gentle, yet rough. He threw me off balance yet managed to keep me standing…barely. Once, during rehearsal, he got so pushy, that I almost quit. I couldn’t handle being terrible in my scene with this guy. How could I convince the guru I was more than middle class? In our scene, Jack was supposed to kiss me, and when he did it was forced, mechanical, the worst kiss I ever had. I’m supposed to be attracted to this? How could I desire a guy I wasn’t even sure I liked?

    One day after rehearsal, I find myself walking with Jack to the subway. I would later discover that his train was nowhere near mine. He had walked me out of his way just for the sake of my company. In Manhattan terms, it was a trek from our director’s Lower East Side apartment to my Brooklyn-bound F train. “F stands for failure,” I say with a laugh. But Jack’s dead serious and starts rapidly firing questions: What was my childhood like? My father? Mother? What were the parts I played, and wanted to play? As I answer his questions, I wonder why this man with a resume that dwarfed mine, was interested in my meaningless credits and boring Jersey life. “Hey, I grew up in New Jersey too, a town away from you, young lady!” he says with a cheeky smile. I’m five years older than him, but I love that he’s made me younger. As we wait for the train, we discover that we even shared the strange dentist at one point. Learning these trivial commonalities should have dimmed his light, but it only sharpened his luster. For me, he became the boy next door – the one I never met and would never be allowed to love.

    Jack knew I was married from my first confession in class and told me about the young woman he’d been dating. We both had significant others, and I rationalized that our friendship was safe. Our master class had been extended, so our weekly meetings progressed to impromptu hangouts. After lunch one afternoon, we find ourselves amid a torrential downpour. As we take cover under a storefront awning, I’m grateful he’s inches behind me, unable to see my burning red face. The air is thick with the obvious, our relationship was NOT safe. It’s downright dangerous, and I don’t fucking care. For the rain had passed, and when I turned around, I saw this man, the one I thought I detested – and like lightning strikes a steel rod in “The Omen,” I was smitten.

     

    Trying to describe why I loved him is like making a case for lasagna. It’s just lasagna, and It’s delicious. I’m not a high-risk person. I never wanted to climb K2. I’m the type of person who’d get to base camp and say, “I’m cold. Let’s go!” Even standing on his kitchen countertop was freaking me out. Now I’d been to his apartment before but class was over. I was now coming to his apartment on purpose. Nothing had happened, but we knew we were headed. We went as far as making plans to spend the weekend together. I considered backing out, but when I called him the night before, his enthusiasm for my visit won me over. “Morana…I feel like it’s December 24th.” That’s what he said. I couldn’t back out now. How could I bail on a man who just called me Christmas Eve?

    Months before our tryst, I went on an auditioning warpath, rising at ungodly hours to stand in packed performer lines in mid-town Manhattan. After weeks, I finally got cast in a summer stock production of “Bells Are Ringing.” It was a throwback musical conceived for Judy Holliday – a comedic film star of the 40s and 50s. It was her Broadway bust-out vehicle; a story about a quirky woman named Ella who worked at an answering service. Ella gets so involved with her answering service clients that she falls in love with one of them. Now I didn’t get cast as Ella, but as her best friend, Gwen and I’m fine with it. I was quite frankly too fucked up to carry an entire show. So I welcome the second banana distraction, for it took me from Brooklyn to Vermont, away from my husband and my burgeoning affair.

    After three weeks of intense rehearsal, “Bells” is up and running. Our cast is wiped out and excited to have off two days in a row. Now I could have stayed in Vermont, gone to a cheddar cheese tasting, a blueberry patch, or just slept. But when two of my male cast mates said they were missing their boyfriends and driving back to the city, I jumped at the chance to ride along. I was missing my boyfriend too. My fellow actors drop me off at 42nd Street. It’s midnight and I quickly put on my Jackie O. sunglasses, because I’m a proper adulterer now. After the slowest cab ride on Earth, I arrive at Jack’s. I’m standing in front of his apartment door poised to enter. I know it’s open because he never locks it. An emotional epidural of jubilation and terror shoots through my spine. I feel my lower half may melt. If my husband in Brooklyn finds out I’m in town, I’m fucked — and not in a good way. How would I justify my sudden arrival in New York? Our marriage had become combative and lackluster. If I got caught, I’d have to kill myself before Robert killed me. Maybe I’d turn around and taxi back to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. In light of my sins, it seemed fitting to walk into oncoming traffic. I consider it but know it won’t work. The “BQE” as we affectionately call it is so congested that with my luck, I’d never get hit…So I knock.

    As he opens the door, I move to embrace him…” Wait! Lemme look at you.” he says. Seconds pass as his eyes travel the length of my body. Then like a kid in a candy store, he says, “Okay!” My overnight bag drops as I plunge my face into his chest, sucking one glorious whiff of the cigarettes and cologne on his freshly laundered shirt. I’m finally home, and this is so fucked up.

    I wasn’t the only one taking a risk this weekend, Jack was too. If caught, he’d face the wrath of a freight train, a locomotion of shame he couldn’t handle. His girlfriend was rabidly jealous, suspicious of every stray hair on his bathroom floor that did not match hers. Jack and I had stayed respectful. But on the very last day of class, he kissed me for real backstage, behind a curtain. It was spontaneous and special until he made a huge mistake. He told his girlfriend. She went ballistic, calling him every name in the book, throwing comparisons to her philandering father, and then threatening to tell my husband and destroy my marriage.

    I was not ready to be kicked to the curb. If my marriage was going to end, it would end on my watch, not with tantrums from a 20-something. I get it. I’m horrible. She’s the innocent victim, Anne Archer, and I’m bunny-boiling, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. But I hated her for threatening to invade my life. I had crossed the line, but not with her…Jack did. And by throwing that kiss under the bus, he was running me over too. For what? Relief of his guilty conscience? I was furious, but mostly at myself and my lousy luck. Out of all the men in the universe to have an affair with, I had picked the ONE guy with scruples!

    Cussing him out would have been futile. He made a mistake and couldn’t un-ring the bell. The person who should have been an angry, suspicious, freak-out mess – was Robert. Weeks prior, I had my brush with getting caught. Robert was a neat freak. Everything in our apartment had a place. Disarray equaled discontent. He came from spaghetti on the walls abuse, and anything that came into our apartment was put away – immediately. This included my class prop bag.  It contained my costume, wax paper from an eaten Italian sandwich, and all objects used in my scene. At the bottom of the bag was also a handwritten note from Jack. We agreed to do this corny exercise where we wrote each other notes in character.  It was my idea, and I wrote him a whopper of a love letter. My note to him was an in-your-face, admission of lust.  Jack’s note was different. It was simple, and sophisticated and concluded with the poem “What If You Slept” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

    I was home no longer than 20 minutes before I realized Robert had unpacked for me. It wasn’t a favor; it was a violation. My prop bag was empty, not even a crumb from my Italian sandwich remained. That’s how thorough he was. I shook my head in disbelief and then remembered the note. It was not in the bag.

    “If something’s going on, you need to stop it.” That is what he said. I had fast-tracked it to the kitchen, like a zombie on speed. Now I’m standing here – caught like a kid, my right arm, elbow-deep in the garbage. He spoke low-voiced and parental. I remained silent and took my scolding like a pro as I let Jack’s note fall back in the garbage. We didn’t have sex that night. We never did. I lay there pretending to be asleep, then waited patiently for his first snore. Robert slept like a marine on watch, so I had to creep back into the kitchen without waking him. As I open the cabinet to the garbage can, I find remnants of Robert’s dinner splashed on my love note. I blot it off delicately, careful not to smear his handwriting. I flatten the wrinkled note as best I can. I could hide it, I thought, or ram it down Robert’s throat while he slept.

    Something in me turned that night, for what should have scared me straight, sent me crooked. It was not on purpose, or out of revenge. I gathered it was just my nature, bending me back towards the separation I’d always felt as a child. Why was I like this? I thought as I pumped my legs on a swing set. And where would this weirdness, “the left-out-ness” of my personality would take me? I felt akin to my guru, who shared stories of his grunt years as a butcher in the meatpacking district. I felt how he stood there, in a bloody apron and gut-splattered shoes, a reluctant Sweeney Todd, watching beatnik actors and would-be famous directors walk by his meat locker window.

    My pedicure was barely dry as I fly out of the Korean nail salon. I was slinking around the Upper East Side like a jewel thief passing time while I waited for Jack’s return. Closing his door with my wet nails, I feel my dream happening now, not in the past of our combined mistakes, or the future of whatever may never be. The brick walls of his apartment are warm like him – framed posters of all the movies he loves surround me. I soak in everything – his candles, his books, his oddness. With his return, we catch up on our uneventful day. And then I feel something bad is about to happen, like that moment before you throw up. He looks at me with the sobering awful truth in his eyes, “Meeting you was the BEST and WORST day of my life. Best because I met you, worst because you’re married.” In less than 24 hours, the laughter, the lovemaking, and the friendship will end. I’m back to the middle class, to second banana status in a dated musical in Burlington, Vermont.

    I want to stay in his place forever, but he won’t let me. “It’s not that I love her more, I’ve just been loving her longer.” That’s what he said. He was telling the truth, and I knew it. Now I’m the vampire reading his mind. He loves me. That’s the worst part. She’d just gotten there first. “Congratulations,” I say to myself. “You are the unfortunate recipient of less time in.”

    He was moving to California with his girlfriend. I was going back to Robert in Brooklyn, but not just yet. The curtain was closing on our silly little musical. Thank God, because I was starting to hate this show. But I loved my review: “Isabella Morana is the only actor in Bells Are Ringing, that plays an authentic New Yorker.” You see theatrically, I’m authentic, real-life…totally fake! I hadn’t the guts to leave my marriage or the wherewithal to stay and make it work.

    My husband visits me in Vermont for the last few performances. We’re staying in one of those generic motels, the kind where even the soap isn’t interesting enough to steal. I’m sitting on a flowery bedspread while my husband putters around our room. We were set on doing some crunchy granola stuff that day. Maybe we’d visit a covered bridge, a maple syrup factory, an open hole in the ground — who cares! I needed our day occupied, away from the awkwardness that had become us.

    I turn on the television while my husband changes his clothes. My summer top smells like Jack, but I refuse to change it. I want another whiff of him. I’m an adamant, adulterous, high-rolling bitch now. If Robert smells Merit Lights and men’s cologne on me, I’d blame my cast-mates. Chorus boys are notorious smokers. It was believable. I switched stations to the Mets who were losing, so I’m grateful for the break-in: “We interrupt this program for this special report. John Kennedy Junior’s small plane, The Piper Saratoga, is missing over the coast of the Atlantic. Kennedy was flying with his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. They left Essex County airport and were scheduled to land in Martha’s Vineyard, before continuing to a wedding in Hyannis Port.”

    July 17th, 1999 was not the glamour year Prince sang about. It was hot, weird, and getting weirder. I see too much open water and an empty blue sky on every channel. Helicopters and the Coast Guard are all out and looking for John. “But why are they searching the ocean,” I think. “They should be searching Central Park because that’s where he rollerblades!” Pictures start flashing on CBS: a shirtless Kennedy skating down Columbus Avenue, another shirtless shot – John playing frisbee on the back lawn of The Met Museum. Robert stops what he’s doing to watch with me. I read his thoughts before he speaks. He’s got this habit of regaling stories I already know; how he did private home catering for the Kennedys, how friendly and real they were, and on and on. His comments on the impending tragedy made me want to scream, “I’m the tragedy. I’d rather be him…MISSING…Free from explanations of my whereabouts, but wholly at peace in the knowledge that I…AM…Free.”

    Turn off the television. Let’s drive to the county fair. We’ll drown our sorrows in maple syrup. We would, but we’re glued to the set. John, Carolyn, and his sister-in-law Lauren are still missing, and the photos keep coming. Only now it’s the two of them: John and Carolyn leaving their apartment, at their wedding, walking into a gala, out of a gala. I notice how in almost every John is kissing her from behind, and how effortlessly his arm drapes around her shoulders. He was always turning her to the camera as if he were treating the world to the elusive beauty that was his bride. That’s what I’m missing, I think — someone who resembled ease, who wanted ME more than the IDEA of me. With every flashing picture of John, I realize the man I married was the opposite of ease. I chose wrong, and like the current disaster unfolding before me on national television, it was in fact, preventable.

    After two days of scouring the Atlantic Ocean, it surfaces…a piece of luggage with Lauren Bessette’s name. Then more pieces, bits of a rubber tire, some carry-ons, and finally the bodies; all three, upside down in the water, still strapped to their seats. The autopsy reveals that John, Carolyn, and Lauren all died on impact, a minor comfort in a sea of sorrow.  For years I’ve read accounts of every flight instructor, pilot, and disaster specialist. I became a non-expert, “expert” in all things crash-related. I had to know what happened. If I couldn’t figure out my disaster, I’d solve someone else’s. I’d find that fateful ejection lever that leads to the end. There were many details, and countless contributing factors that led to the crash: the traffic they hit, their late departure, the weather, and the moon. But in the end, it didn’t matter, for this domino effect of unfortunate events kept pointing back to one thing…John. He didn’t have the experience to be flying in that weather, on that low moonlit night. He fell victim to something called spatial disorientation. It happens to pilots who are visually trained, but not instrument-rated. John knew this and planned for a daylight departure, but the traffic Lauren and Carolyn hit in Manhattan would push them into a twilight departure. A flight instructor at the airport who knew John was inexperienced at night, offers to co-pilot. But John refuses saying, “I want to do it on my own.” John would be flying solo in the dark, relying solely on his senses. But instead of landing safely in Hyannis Port on that hazy July night, his senses send him 1000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean. He couldn’t tell Earth from sky and neither could I.

    The wedding of Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey was postponed that day. I can’t imagine how that bride and groom felt when the celebratory atmosphere became funereal. How could they reconcile that the happiest day of their lives would be forever laced with what-ifs?

    I pictured the Piper Saratoga going down in that ocean as if it were my life. The pictures of that plane in pieces morphed into memories of my engagement night. I recalled how Robert knelt in the sand, on a small beach in Martha’s Vineyard with a poem, his nerves, and a tiny black box. I recalled the wild waves thudding the sand with the sounds of the upcoming storm. I laughed, remembering how uncharacteristically lit my future husband was — a combination of too many cocktails and proposal butterflies. And how utterly responsible his drunk ass was, as he handed me the keys to our rental car, “You’re driving,” he said. I remembered how blindly I drove into that dense fog, relying on nothing but my impaired vision to guide me. With my high beams on, I still couldn’t see. I was guessing. Instead of my senses guiding me safely down the road to our quaint hotel, they send me the wrong way, down a one-way street…right into the warning lights of a police car. I was caught, but not arrested, for Robert came to my rescue, taking my left hand and proudly displaying my sparkly new ring. “Please, let us go officer. See? We’re engaged.”

    July 19th, 1999 – The National Safety Board concluded that there was no instrument or navigational failure on the Piper Saratoga that night. John’s disorientation sent the plane into a spin, a graveyard spiral of epoch proportions, due to the pilot’s error. I had found my lever, in an answer that yielded no relief. The death of my relationship will always be synonymous with July 19th, 1999. You might say I was lucky, to never get caught, to land safely in the comfort of my slickness. I did it. I decimated my wedding vows. I did this to a man who was kind to me. That day, I knew my marriage was over. It took me six more years to leave the party.

    Feature Image: Jacqui Kennedy Onassis, 4 November 1968, London. Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo.

  • Murphy Walked into the Bar

    It was just after opening time when Murphy walked into the bar. He wasn’t welcome at any time of the day really. The Fat Landlord’s lazy wife, a picture of early morning sourness probably let the nuisance in, but who cared? It certainly wasn’t me. She was a miserable, cold unfriendly woman affectionately known as Choc Ice Lil. She rarely spoke, and never ever smiled.

    The bar itself was an ancient Edwardian masterpiece of metropolitan public house architecture. It was a pub by day, and a venue at night. Once a collection of snugs, billiard and dining areas it now consisted of two vast rooms, separated by a large square bar. Pulsing lights, throbbing speakers and yard upon yard of dangling wires now disgraced its crumbling ornate pilasters and fine baroque ceiling.

    Murphy paused in the sunlit open doorway scanning the long empty space before him. To describe him as a scrawny necked wreck would have been a kindness. Murphy had spent years living on the streets before ever I knew him, and it showed. Loose skinned and old enough to have lost several teeth he was as decrepit as the pub was.

    A long shadow of him now stretched across the greasy red carpet giving the remarkable impression that he was at least nine feet tall, which he wasn’t. Framed in dazzling sunlight the strange illusion of a giant Murphy cast across the empty bar was very soon extinguished. Instantly snuffed as the brown heavy door with head shaped dents in its leaded panes, bearing hints of dried blood closed silently behind him.

    The emptiness was an illusion too. As Murphy’s eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the natural order of the light inside, he would see that the early morning bar was not quite so vacant after all.

    I was there.

    I’d been working till past three in the morning the previous night, doing the sound desk for an astonishingly amateurish death metal band called Bugger Babies. Enthusiastic and young its members took themselves far more seriously than their dreadful racket could ever warrant. I was back by opening time, slightly shaky and enjoying the nutritious charge of a breakfast Bloody Mary. Extra Tabasco pepper to clean the mouth and put fire in my belly. I was waiting as usual for our very own host, The Fat Landlord to surface from his morning slumbers and pay me my money for the night.

    So I was there, unnoticed and unpaid in the musty corner facing the damaged door, and The Lion Tamer was there as well.

    I think his name was Dave. He was the doorman/bouncer in the bar and I’d actually known him for several years, but like most regulars he carried a moniker. Names in the bar were given, not told. He perched on a tall barstool like a giant daddy long legs. His tiny kneecaps pointing in opposite directions as his open legs splayed against the dark panels of the square wooden bar.

    Murphy was halfway across the floor before he even noticed there were people on either flank. He paused, and a slight nervous twitch showed upon his face before he broke into an exaggerated jaunty saunter towards the bar. Then, launching himself onto a nearby barstool, sideways to me, and facing The Lion Tamer, Murphy licked his skinny lips and stared.

    The Lion Tamer was a tall, solid, gawky looking man of well over six foot. His long spider legs and monkey arms were wrapped with sinewy muscles, like the intertwining strings of a sailors’ hairy rope. His feet and hands were unfeasibly large. The hands were a mass of gristle and scar tissue. Flattened knuckles and broken digits pointed crookedly in several directions, as if he’d been typing all day and his fingers had frozen in mid sentence.

    His huge feet were encased in dull black boots that looked like two leather ammunition boxes, and would anchor his towering frame to the floor. But it was his face that made him unusual. It was ordinary, even quite benign looking at times. Stuck on the front of a too small head. A face without mark or blemish. When he wasn’t being the doorman at various cheap clubs like ours he was a bare knuckle boxer in late night warehouse fights, and he must have been good at it.

    The Lion Tamer had a trick he used to show to the punters, especially those who he thought he might have a bit of trouble with later. He would line three coins carefully along the back of his hand. Then he would quickly flick them into the air and snatch each one of them individually with the same hand before they fell to the ground. It was a neat trick, and it carried its own unsubtle message. The Lion Tamer wanted you to know something. He wanted you to know that in the length of time it takes for a coin to fall to the floor, he could punch you three times.

    Murphy continued to stare. Apart from occasionally running his dry tongue round his lips again he did not move at all. He sat with his long bony spine completely straight and perfectly aligned to the square legs of the wooden barstool. It was like he was an extension of it. Murphy and the barstool, fused into one immovable staring object. I don’t know why Murphy stared at The Lion Tamer like that. It was odd.

    I mean anyone at all who drank in the bar could tell you The Lion Tamer didn’t really like Murphy all that much. It was even more confusing  because Murphy tended only to stare at people who gave him things, and who he trusted would be obliging enough to do so again. In fact it seemed to me to be his own unique and favourite way of asking for anything. Murphy would just sidle up to someone, touch their arm and then stare dolefully until they couldn’t stand it anymore. Eventually they might give in and offer him something, usually something he could immediately consume, but sometimes more, if he was lucky.

    Murphy was always in the bar on a Sunday lunchtime. That was when they put out bowls of sea food, cockles and stuff on the bar, free to help yourself. Murphy would help himself alright if he could. He had a particular thing for the shell on prawns. He actually liked eating the heads as well. It was fascinatingly disgusting to watch him cracking the hard pink exterior with his few remaining teeth and sucking the rich fishy stew from inside. He couldn’t get enough of them, but it did nothing for his halitosis.

    Some people spoke to him but I didn’t. I couldn’t see the point really. I found him interesting enough and I saw him alright when I could. You could say we sort of shared the same living space even. Murphy came and went as he pleased though, and in truth I wasn’t really all that bothered about him. It certainly wasn’t possible for me to engage him in any viable, intelligent conversation as such, and I didn’t pretend to try.

    So there I sat watching from the gloomy corner. Waiting to be paid and struggling to guess what on earth Murphy thought The Lion Tamer was possibly going to give him. Whatever it was, from where I was sitting I couldn’t imagine it being anything less substantial than a swift and hefty kick up the arse.

    The Lion Tamer was not very well known for his bonhomie as it goes. He was now showing some pretty clear, and menacing signs that he didn’t really want Murphy to keep on staring at him like that. Murphy on the other hand showed no sign that he understood any of this at all and just continued his relentless staring down of The Lion Tamer.

    Finally he could take no more. Just as he was running his red tongue slowly round his narrow lips again, The Lion Tamer suddenly leaned over and poked his own one out. Murphy looked genuinely shocked. His tongue paused in its circular journey round his lips but now protruded from them foolishly, and in a similar gesture to that of The Lion Tamers’.

    There for a few long seconds they sat, eyes locked and poking their tongues out at each other. Murphy’s eyes wide open with surprise and The Lion Tamers’ half closed, and narrowed with intent. I sensed that Murphy was about to attempt a rapid exit from the bar sometime very soon and I was poised and ready to grab him when he did.

    Just then there was an all too familiar tap tap, tap tap sound fast approaching the bar in staccato quickstep. The bar room door suddenly flung open at the same time as a painful, high pitched screeched “Helloooo” assaulted our ears like a dentists screaming drill. The Tightrope Walker entered, spinning coquettishly into the bar. Her six inch pencil thin stilettos, silenced now by the aged Axminster were certainly no less obvious.

    Tightrope skeetered across the floor, like a marionette on a gyroscope. Brassy, blonde and now in her late forties Tightrope was a woman who would take no prisoners. From the moment she arrived anywhere it was immediately and sometimes painfully apparent to everyone else in the building that she had. She would have it no other way. Age and the drink had left but a vague imprint of the earlier sex grenade she had undoubtedly been. She was however, still explosive. Tightrope could hurl herself confidently into any congregation, like an immortal suicide bomber. Burning shards of her barbed wit sliced easily through any crowd she encountered, cutting them all to size without mercy or care.

    She could still draw men to her in an instant alright though, like flies to a cow’s arse, and she could shrivel a dick just as quick. She would cavort, cajole, flirt and entice. Thrilling and daring her gawping spectators to join her in her own hedonistic whirl of imminent self destruct, only to cast them casually to the ground. Tightrope would remain of course, teetering but intact in the limelight.

    Whenever Tightrope was around and wanted to play you knew for certain sure that someone somewhere was going to take a tumble.

    So Tightrope burst exuberantly into our small gathering, Choc Ice, The Lion Tamer, Murphy and me. Her eyes immediately lit upon Murphy. Surprisingly, and despite her hard exterior she did have quite a soft spot for him. I could never quite understand this one and Tightrope wasn’t the only woman who used to dote on Murphy. In fact he seemed to attract quite a few women, but if you ever found your face too close to him, you’d find he stank a bit. I’ve been told it’s a maternal thing. Somehow Murphy was some kind of surrogate for the children they never had. I found that thought quite disgusting myself.

    Tightrope certainly had some maternal affection for Murphy, which quite frankly baffled me. Anyway, whatever the reason, Tightrope made a direct beeline for him and poured herself onto his neck with that awful mawkish, “Awwwwww,” usually reserved for babies and cuddly toys. She then planted a long squeaking kiss on the top of his beaming head as a sort of bonus.

    Now this was all fine and dandy, even if a little peculiar to my mind. There was just one complicating factor that promised to add that little bit more excitement to the mornings’ entertainment. The complicating factor being that Tightrope was currently The Lion Tamers’ girlfriend, and The Lion Tamer was a very, very jealous man.

    I’m sure that Murphy didn’t realise any of this at all. He simply wouldn’t be capable of understanding how The Lion Tamer might think or feel about anything. The personal lives of people in the bar were meaningless to him. But even if he could read The Lion Tamer’s mind, the idea that Murphy could pose the merest waft of a threat to him about anything at all was just wrong.

    But then jealousy is a funny thing.

     

    The Lion Tamer had a very strong sense of propriety actually. He had his own very rigid code of ethics which he stuck to like they were The Ten Commandments. Only he had just three. He told them to me late one night when we were having a drink together, hours after the bar had closed and all good folk were long abed.

    In his slow, deep ponderous voice he leaned ever so slightly drunk into my face and said,

    “There are three things you must never never do to me. You must never rob me. You must never lie to me, and you must never, never never ever, talk to me while I’m eating”

    So there we all were. Murphy, The Lion Tamer, Choc Ice, Tightrope and me. Me still waiting for the Fat Landlord to pay me my money and getting a bit hungry now. So I decided to have another filling Bloody Mary, but this time with a packet of crisps. I was beginning to enjoy this. The whole ridiculous spectacle of The Lion Tamer wriggling around on his stool fuming like a stovepipe was just too good to miss.

    Tightrope cooed and fawned over Murphy, completely indifferent to The Lion Tamers presence. I noticed a small blood vessel pulsing on the top of his shaven head which reminded me a little of the valve on the top of a pressure cooker. Eventually he cracked and standing up said, “Oi! What about me then?” This was met, or rather ignored by Tightrope plonking yet another kiss on Murphy’s head. She then responded with something to the effect that The Lion Tamer should immediately buy her a drink and that he was also a bastard, which he duly did.

    Tightrope was very good at getting men to buy her drinks as it goes. Like the Lion Tamer she had her very own special bar room trick for the boys.

     

     

    Tightrope would go into a bar somewhere and spot a group of chaps out on the town. She’d teeter past and “accidentally” spill one of their drinks onto the floor. She would squeal and say she was very sorry. She would buy him another drink. It was her birthday. She didn’t normally get to go out very much. Then she’d add she might be just that, tiny tiny, weeny bit tipsy. All this followed up with plenty of eyelash flutter and a quick totter on the high heels. Her womanly bosom would squash against his manly chest of course, and her hand would steady herself casually upon his bum. Ten times out of ten her mark would be buying her the drink. “Oooh thanks darling, a large Vodka and Tonic please, ice and a slice dear.”

    She knew how to spot them alright. Rumour had it that that’s how she met The Lion Tamer in the first place.

    So there was Tightrope, standing next to Murphy with her drink in one hand and the other one casually stroking the back of his neck. She continued to fawn like an adolescent schoolgirl over Murphy as wafts of steam continued to rise from The Lion Tamers’ ears. While all this was going on Murphy still had his back to me and was completely hypnotised by the soft caresses on the back of his neck. Then it happened.

    Murphy ceased gazing adoringly at Tightrope for a moment and looked over towards The Lion Tamer. Since the arrival of Tightrope he’d taken over Murphy’s previous activity of staring and momentarily their eyes locked again. For some reason this appeared to trigger something in The Lion Tamer, and he began to rise slowly to his feet.

    The whole bar jumped into the air as there came a terrific rumpus and banging on the small side door leading into the bar. The one that nobody used anymore. It was unusual in that the handle was on the opposite side to where you’d expect it to be, but it still opened inwards as all doors do.

    Whoever was on the other side seemed to be frantically pulling at the handle towards them, while simultaneously kicking the door forwards in the opposite direction.

    We couldn’t see any of this of course. The entrance was sealed off from the bar by a heavy blackout curtain. This stretched in a curve from the door to a cast iron support pillar standing by the bar itself. Anyone entering there would find themselves in a small darkened closet area completely surrounded by a blackout curtain, which incidentally opened on the bar side for exit and entry.

    Eventually we heard the door burst open and the sound of our visitor tripping on the step and hurtling themselves heavy footed and rapidly across the floor. A single dull clang announced their precise moment of contact with the iron pillar. We then saw a great flurry of the curtain as the person behind it made their way back from the bar where there was an exit, towards the opposite wall where there wasn’t.

    Once there we witnessed what appeared to be a fight going on behind the curtain before the hapless visitor blindly felt their way back towards the bar and eventual escape. A further short flurry of curtain followed before a large sweaty head, topped with a pork pie hat burst breathlessly through. Red faced from his exertions and red nosed from the drink, he had an impossible grin and mad eyebrows. It was Coco the Clown.

    Swinging a bulging Bag for Life as if it were a counter balance the rest of  Coco swiftly followed. What came next in fact was a short obese man in said pork pie hat wearing cheap pinstripe trousers an inch too short and a grotesque green checked jacket. An orange T shirt proclaiming,” SAVE THE WHALE” in large bold letters across his chest and, “A SEAT ON THE BUS” written underneath, completed today’s ensemble. One thing you could say about Coco was that he didn’t have good fashion sense.

    Another thing you could say about him was that he had stupid feet, and he fairly flapped his way into the bar.

    I thought The Lion Tamer had incongruous kippers but Coco’s were in another class entirely. It was a wonder he didn’t fall over his feet more often they were that big.

    Coco was a wonder on the dance floor, and he often had significant amounts of it all to himself. I’m told he used to be a very good swimmer as well. Anyway, his feet seemed to have paddled himself right up shit creek here and Coco’s entrance could not have been worse timed.

    Blowing effeminate kisses to Murphy he pranced smilingly into the company. Now The Lion Tamer didn’t like that sort of thing at all and he already had another beef going with Coco anyway. The jigging vein on his head, which was already going like the clappers suddenly accelerated into a near perfect Fandango. Even Coco couldn’t fail to be aware of the penetrating glare emanating from the opposite corner of the bar for long. Eventually he stopped popping silly little kisses at Murphy and looked up, square into The Lion Tamers fierce, unwelcome gaze.

    Now apart from his red nose Coco had quite a pallid complexion at the best of times. Watching his face drain instantly from a light pastry to an urn ash grey was something I’d never seen before.

    Coco, among other things was a leading member of that noble band of cowboy builders that grace our green and gullible land. He could turn his hand to almost anything. He could mix concrete, do a bit of brickwork, carpenter, even put in the electrics, and he made a complete pig’s ear of the lot. In fact it wasn’t his appearance that earned him the name Coco the Clown at all. It was his remarkable skill in bollocksing up just about every job he was ever given.

    Typically he’d turn up ok the first day and do a fairly good job. The second day he’d be gone by lunchtime to buy tools or something. You can forget the third. On the fourth he’d turn up at eleven and need a sub to pay his rent. Then you wouldn’t see him until he was broke again.

    The job goes on so long that it never actually gets finished. Eventually someone else has to come in to complete the work and repair any damages the idiot has managed to do.

    How anyone could be stupid and trusting enough to employ Coco to do anything at all was frankly beyond me. But this of course was why The Lion Tamer was not at all so very pleased to see him today. The fact he’d come in smiling didn’t help one bit.

    Somehow Coco had recently managed to blag a few days’ work doing a bit of plastering round The Lion Tamers house. Typically of course, he had left quite a bit of mess on his nice new carpet. The Lion Tamer wasn’t very happy about this at all. Only yesterday he had to retrieve Coco mid drink from the bar and politely suggest to him that he might like to straightaway come back and clean it all up again. Well, Coco miserably got hold of an old carpet sweeper from somewhere and once back at the Lion Tamers’ he began to push it along, sweeping up his scattered bits of rubble and plaster.

    Still dreaming of his unfinished pint no doubt he was pushing along as fast as he could when he felt the rollers stiffen. Undeterred and too bone idle to actually stop and clear them of plaster he carried on, pushing even harder than before. Pausing to wipe unearned sweat from his brow Coco briefly glanced behind him. It was then that he discovered why it had been such hard work pushing the sweeper. Somehow during the course of his slovenly labours a piece of Stanley blade had got stuck in the roller. Coco had just cut a six foot slice straight up the middle of The Lion Tamers brand new bit of Persian.

    So there we all were, Murphy, The Lion Tamer, Tightrope, Choc Ice, Coco and me. The Lion Tamer positioned three coins carefully along the back of his hand. Raising one crooked finger into the air he beckoned poor Coco towards him. His smile upturned now Coco slowly removed his hat and gently placed that and his shopping bag on the nearest table.

     

     

    Then, shaking like old Shylock he took his more than several pounds of flesh up for negotiation with The Lion Tamer. I reckoned his best bet now was to rely on his solid reputation as a professional idiot, and hope to gain some sort of staff discount or something. With a bit of luck there could still be plenty of him left. In truth though I had the near certain feeling that I was about to witness one of life’s great clichés, the tears of a clown.

    Tightrope had sensibly turned her back on the proceedings and was repeatedly pumping pound coins into the fruit machine. Choc Ice was totally absorbed smearing bacteria round a dirty glass with a manky tea towel, and would see nothing. Murphy didn’t know his own good fortune. I could see Coco pleading desperately with The Lion Tamer but his face remained stony and unmoved. A long silent pause filled the room with an unbearable tension when suddenly he flicked three coins high into the air.

    Pandemonium finally broke out. A great shout of, “Oi! You thieving little git!” bellowed across the bar.

    It was Coco.

    Spotting an opportunity Murphy had slipped unnoticed off his stool and made his way over to Coco’s bag on the table. Caught red handed, he was having a right proper rummage through everything he could find.

    Coco came running furiously round the bar, faster in fact than his oversized feet would allow. His bulbous nose crashed into the carpet as Murphy fairly scampered off towards the gents toilets to escape. This seemed to lighten The Lion Tamers mood somewhat and he fairly roared with laughter.

    Breathless with rage Coco clambered to his feet and looked inside his bag. “Flipping hell” he yelled. “He’s only gone and had me bleedin’ prawns away!”

     

    The Lion Tamer slapped his thighs and roared again. “He’s had you. He’s had you alright”, was all he managed to say between triumphant blasts of laughter. Coco, with his nose even redder than before, stood glaring angrily at the toilet door.

    I knew Murphy wasn’t hiding in the Jacks.

    There’s a door back there leading into a small enclosed yard where the empty barrels and rubbish are kept. I’d taken a few crates out earlier for Choc Ice so I knew it was left slightly open. I also knew Murphy had used that particular exit many times before.

    He was no spring chicken alright but Murphy would have been out, over the wall and far away by the time Coco had even counted his missing prawns.

    The Great Prawn Robbery would be told and laughed about in the bar for weeks to come. The Lion Tamer finally managed to declare he’d never really liked Murphy all that much before, but he’d gone right up in his estimation now. Wiping tears from his eyes, and evidently in a better mood than before, he made Coco an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse.

    The Lion Tamer had just got hold of an allotment. Coco was to dig it all over and paint the little shed as compensation for the carpet. Furthermore, he was to buy Murphy his own large bag of prawns every Sunday lunchtime until The Lion Tamer told him otherwise.

    Justice of sorts being served The Lion Tamer turned his attention back towards Tightrope. She in turn informed him he should immediately buy her a drink, and that he was also a bastard. Planting a kiss on his head she added reassuringly he couldn’t really help it, and that she loved him anyway.

    A crestfallen Coco was putting on his hat in readiness for his second trip to the fishmongers and I was losing hope of seeing any money that day. It was nearly lunchtime now and The Fat Landlord had still not surfaced. I decided to go back to bed for the rest of the day and try again later.

    It was only a short walk from the bar back to my flat. There was some instinct or smell or something that told me I was not alone. I was being followed. I had a strange sensation of something running past me, just out of sight as I cut across the play area.

    It happened on the stairwell on the way up to my flat as well and there was a short familiar snap sound like a large mousetrap going off. I was glad when I put the key in the door and got safe inside. I knew what was coming next.

    I walked the few short steps into the front room. The curtains were closed and there on the sofa, staring into the unlit gloom was Murphy.

    Our eyes briefly met and I made my way into the kitchen to get a can from the cupboard. I’d barely begun to open it before Murphy suddenly leaped off the sofa and came running top speed into the room.

    I could feel him writhing and weaving himself round and round between my legs. I emptied the contents into his dirty old bowl and placed it on the floor by his saucer of milk. Then, for the first time ever, I actually spoke to him. Bending down, I scratched behind his ear and looked deep into his eyes and said,

    “I love you Murphy.”

    Feature Image: Lyonel Kaufmann

  • Fiction: Change

    Neil went to tea break for the gossip, to find out what was going on, although he screened out the small talk about football and politics. The canteen overlooked the carpark with the smoking shed at the other end – another good source of information. It was raining the day he heard a replacement boss was coming at the end of the month. She was something new, a bit of an innovator. The rain continued as the men discussed this new woman. Some were dismissive of anyone making a difference. Neil was silent. Sometimes change was a good thing, there was certainly no point in avoiding it. He had joined the organisation five years ago after college and he still daydreamed about the future. Nothing would stop him, he smiled slightly. He had his plans and maybe this new woman would help him.

    By three thirty the rain had stopped, but the roads were flooded, pooling around the drains in large puddles. It was dark when Neil got on his bike to cycle home and, on the way, he was soaked through by unforgiving passing cars. His mother was in the kitchen boiling potatoes the windows running with condensation.

    ‘I have a lamb chop for your tea,’ she said accusingly.

    Neil took off his backpack and hung up his wet jacket in the hallway.

    ‘How’s the captain of industry?’ his father asked amiably as he passed.

    One day Neil thought, they’ll all see. He ate his dinner without comment reading The Evening Herald unenthusiastically and then went to his room. It was his belief that things would change, his life would be transformed. He was certain of it.

    The office was a large room on the third floor. Desks were mainly clustered around the windows with managers discreetly hidden behind wooden framed screens. They were the middle managers; the senior managers had their own offices filled with books and manuals of all kinds. One of them kept a full set of golf clubs leaning against a cupboard under the window while a framed picture of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca hung on the wall. Neil wasn’t even a middle manager; he was an executive assistant which meant he was a nobody. In the afternoons after lunch he let his thoughts wander to his amalgamation project. Imagine consolidating all the programmes and centralising the funding. Think of the savings! He’d done the research, and it was possible. Why had no one thought of it before? It came up at his last annual appraisal. They were in the process of discussing his Key Core Deliverables when he took out his folder with all his ideas and the costings to back them up.

    ‘That would be a matter for Corporate Affairs,’ his supervisor said primly.

    Neil shouldn’t have expected more from Amanda. She’d been in the job so long she could remember when they’d worked things out on their fingers.

    Down in the pub he complained to his mate Kevin.

    ‘No one can see the bigger picture,’ Neil said taking a gulp of his pint. ‘They’re all so busy squirrelling away at their own jobs no one puts their heads above the parapet.

    ‘Good way to get it shot off,’ Kevin said glumly.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘Well if nobody does anything then nobody makes a mistake.’

    Neil had to admit to himself that Kevin was right. He was having doubts about spending much more time in the place anyway. He’d already done two competitions for promotion without success largely because Amanda had commented that he needed to improve. She said he needed more training to bring him up to speed on the organisation’s mission and objectives. It was a polite way of saying he didn’t know his job, but the idea of training wasn’t a bad one and he toyed with it over his ham and cheese sandwich in the canteen. He thought about the training courses he’d done so far in management skills and accountancy. He really needed to get a qualification like a Masters of Business Administration. Meanwhile the replacement manager was due to arrive on Monday. Rumours spread wildly, on the one hand describing her as a ruthless manipulator to a listening ear on the other. Neil decided to wait and see.

    Over the weekend he googled admissions criteria for an MBA. None of the colleges were taking applications until the spring, still it was something to aim for. He took out his C.V. It wasn’t impressive. For the last five years he had been working for Amanda in the same job. It didn’t look good, and HR had blocked his application for a transfer because of his poor performance at his appraisals. On Monday Kevin emailed him:

    ‘Just met the new boss. Her name is Stella Reynolds, and she has the corner office across the hallway from the D.G.’

    So she was a highflyer, well that could be a good thing.

    Usually Neil didn’t discuss work with his parents. Occasionally his mother asked him if he was happy at the office. It wasn’t a question he asked himself. The job wasn’t about happiness. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves Amanda was fond of saying. He had good days when he got something done and he felt satisfied for a little while. A lot of the time though the days were long and tedious. He was twenty-six and Neil didn’t consider himself young anymore. At this stage he should be getting on with his career, things should be happening! Instead he woke each morning with a heavy feeling of apprehension about the day ahead. He looked at Kevin’s email again and wondered if he was fooling himself thinking there was anything significant in her arrival. At tea break he skipped the canteen and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin was there smoking and drinking a can of Red Bull.

    ‘Everything OK?’ Neil asked cautiously.

    ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kevin blurted out. ‘I’m going to my brother in New Zealand. He says he can get me a job.’

    ‘When are you going?’

    ‘Next month.’

    So Kevin had found an escape route. Neil was envious, but also felt a surge of energy, now he really had to do something. When he got back to his desk there was a notification about a presentation on Financial Efficiency in the board room on Friday at three. Stella Reynolds was the lead speaker. So this was Neil’s opportunity to meet her. He accessed the slides for the talk and the topics covered coincided with the work he had done on amalgamation. This was it; this was his chance. Kevin once asked him if he believed in God. Neil was so surprised that for a few minutes he didn’t say anything. Then as if it was obvious he said:

    ‘No I believe in myself.’

    ‘But what if you’re not enough,’ Kevin said. ‘What if you try and try and it’s still not enough.’

    Was that why he was going to New Zealand? Was Kevin looking for God on the other side of the world? It wasn’t true that Neil just believed in himself, he also knew that luck had a large part to play in it. Even the best plan could come asunder if you were unlucky. He thought about Stella Reynolds and looked up her staff details on the HR link. She wore glasses and peered anxiously towards the camera. It wasn’t a good picture. She was probably nervous about having her photo taken. Then he looked at his own staff details. The photo wasn’t too bad, but he was wearing that striped shirt that always made him look like a wide boy. On Friday he would look his best and his most confident. If this plan didn’t work, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t make the effort.

    On Friday morning he left for the house early and noticed that the day was fine and dry. The trees were still bare and wintry, but there was a brightness in the sky that suggested spring. At his desk he took out his folder and went through his spreadsheets again. It wasn’t perfect, but he was sure some of his ideas would work. Then he looked up and saw Amanda was standing beside his desk.

    ‘Come with me,’ she said tersely.

    He followed her to a large cupboard hidden by a row of filing cabinets at the bottom of the room. She opened the cupboard to reveal a mess of documents lying higgeldy piggeldy on the shelves.

    ‘These have to be ordered by subject and date then filed away.’

    ‘But this will take days.’

    ‘Have you anything else on hand?’

    ‘I wanted to go to the presentation.’

    ‘This takes precedence.’

    Neil reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by getting angry and set to work. He tried to work quickly, but the task was more complicated than he realised. By Friday evening he reckoned he was about halfway through. He took a break around four and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin looked up and asked the obvious question:

    ‘Where were you?’

    ‘Don’t ask.’

    ‘Let me guess, Amanda. Why not bring your stuff up to Stella Reynolds anyway? You’ve got nothing to lose.

    The two young men sat in silence for a few moments, smoke hung in the air and the light faded gradually as the day ended. They talked about New Zealand and staying in touch. There was a note of sadness in their conversation. Neil finished the filing job although it was difficult to tell if Amanda was happy with it. She was nowhere in sight when he left the room and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. He walked slowly to the corner office, the door was open, he went through. Stella Reynolds smiled at him and said:

    ‘What can I do for you?’

    ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Neil said.

     

  • The Last Christmas

    The afternoon of Christmas Eve, just as it’s beginning to get dark, Mum opens the  black oak sideboard in the hall.

    We crowd around, the little ones shoving and pushing. Frantic to see the treasures inside.

    The whole house already smells of Christmas – the ham simmered overnight in its blanket of floury paste, now stripped and baking in the oven with bay leaves, cloves and onions. The Christmas tree, fetched by Dad with two of the bigger ones earlier in the day, waiting for its decorations in the dining room, smells of forest and cut wood. A wobbling stack of ivy pulled off the granite walls in the garden for winding through the bannisters, sprigs of holly for tucking behind pictures, sits by the stairs.

    Mum lifts the fairy lights up from their bed of tissue paper, dried needles from last year’s tree rustling in the hollows in their cardboard Mickey Mouse box. The tissue paper,  re-used year after year, feels like soft cloth.

    It’s Eldest Brother’s job to check each bulb inside its plastic casing. ‘Gently’ says Mum.

    The lights never work first time.

    Eldest Brother, breathing hard, protruding tongue clasped between teeth, his go to concentration mode, says it’s a closed circuit. It can’t work until all the bulbs are A.1. I’ve no idea what closed circuit means. But I like the sound of the words. Closed circuit. A One.

    The little ones, jigging with impatience, carol: ‘Put them on the tree!’

    Eldest Brother hunts through tissue paper for spare bulbs. Miraculously two appear. Sellotaped to a piece of card and stowed safely away by Mum last Christmas.

    The spare bulbs work! The little ones go silent as Eldest Brother gingerly carries the lights over to the tree. A bump against Dad’s chair and they all go off again. No!

    Everyone has ideas where the lights should go. Up higher! You’ve missed the bottom branches! The yellow ones are hidden!

    ‘Too many bloody Indians’,  Eldest Brother complains.

    Mum is now taking out the glass balls and bag of tinsel. One ball has smashed, its jagged edges sticking up like a broken eggshell.

    Next the cardboard box marked Calor Gas tied with yellow satin ribbon. Inside are the crib figures wrapped in more tissue. A larger cardboard box, decorated with ivy, a painted yellow star inexpertly fixed over the centre, awaits. The figures, sent by Mum’s cousin in Germany, are very beautiful. A young Madonna, a baby Jesus with a detachable gold crown and upraised arms in a crib made of briars, old man Joseph grasping a shepherd’s crook fixed through a hole in his fisted hand, forever getting lost as the little ones take it out to play with. ‘Where’s Joseph’s crook?’  There’s a lying down brown cow, a standing grey donkey. The three kings bearing gifts must be hidden behind the box until after Christmas and its their turn to arrive.

    After Christmas? An unimaginable concept.

    The little ones argue over who gets to put Baby Jesus into his manger. The bigger little one thumps the smaller one in the back: ‘You did it last year.’

    Howls of outrage.

    ‘Look’ says Mum, ‘here comes the music box.’

    Also from Mum’s cousin in Germany, the music box is a wooden cylinder painted gold and indigo. Wound up, it solemnly twirls, plucking out Silent Night, sending kneeling angels holding golden trumpets, around and around.

    ‘Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!’ goes Eldest Brother. ‘What?’  ‘German for Silent Night’, says Middle sister.  Eldest Brother claps his heels together and does a Nazi salute. All the big ones laugh. But I feel afraid. Everything about Hitler, the Nazis, the War, the terrible camps, frightens me. Could it all happen here?  A tank appear at the end of our road?

    The little ones jostle to wind the music box up, send the angels twirling.

    Mum holds up ‘Flying Santa on a Goose’. Bought in Woolworths by one of the big ones he immediately stole the show. Looped from the light over the dinner table, Santa, a skinny rakish version, sits astride a goose with articulated, real feather wings that go up and down as he sails backwards and forwards over the heaped plates, the crackers, the red wine, the silver candelabras – until OOPS! he’s sailed too close to the lighted candles.  A strong smell of burning. The goose feathers, Santa’s beard, are singed! Dismay from the little ones: Santa. The big ones shout with laughter. Mum laughs so she gets tears in her eyes.

    Finally here’s the Christmas fairy. She’s from Mum’s childhood and has her own box. The little ones are a bit frightened of her. She looks like one of those dolls that might snap awake at midnight and do stuff.

    A perfect china face, china arms and legs, a soft fabric body. Real, pale blonde hair, a small pursed mouth, blue eyes, a tiny patch of rouge on each cheek. She is wearing an ankle length dress made of real satin trimmed with lace.

    Eldest Brother, standing on one of the dining room chairs, ties her to the top of the tree using the yellow satin ribbon that holds the crib box together. We crowd around the tree: ‘A little bit to the left!’  ‘No a little bit more to the right!’ Eldest Brother gets fed up: ‘She’s fine.’

    Christmas fairy, a little lopsided, looks down disapprovingly.

    It’s dark. Dad comes in. He’s smiling a lot. His hat on the back of his head. Even before the front door closes the young artist who took him out drinking is speeding away from the house in a battered cream estate.

    Dad walks unsteadily around the hall, arms out: ‘My darlings’.  Mum goes: ‘Oh for heaven’s sake’. Dad can’t stop smiling: ‘All my ducklings.’ He puts a hand on my shoulder. He avoids Mum’s eye.  ‘I shink maybe I’ll go up to bed’. ‘Good idea’, Mum says in a voice that means Goodbye and Good riddance. ‘Happy Crissmass’ Dad says, standing swaying at the bottom of the stairs, waving a bony hand.  ‘Go on’ Mum says.

    None of us says anything. We don’t mind Dad being drunk. But we don’t want Mum to be cross. Not on Christmas Eve. One of the big ones goes down to the kitchen.

    When all the glass balls, small ones and big ones, have been hung on the tree, the tinsel draped and the crib set up with the music box beside it, the big ones say they’re going to make supper in the kitchen. There’s ‘too much going on in the dining room’.  The big ones have made Mum sit down and have a sherry while they cook. The bottle says ‘Dry Sherry’. No matter how many ways I try to think it , I can’t work it out: how can a liquid be dry?

    We’re allowed our first slices of ham. It’s delicious! Sweet and warm and juicy and chewy all at the same time.  I wonder how long can eating and happiness last?

    *****

    It’s Christmas morning! We’re all awake before it’s light. Mum and Dad have left a long, grey, hand knitted stocking at the end of every bed. The bulging stockings, knitted by Granny, spend the rest of the year in the sideboard. They all have that special Christmas smell.

    We reef open the Santa presents – a potatoe gun, bubbles, a false nose and moustache set, a board game with a wooden spinning top. At the bottom, always, a tangerine.

    We stand outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom door. ‘When can we go down?’ Sleepy voices from inside call out: ‘Go back to bed. It’s not even six o’clock.’.

    By eight Mum and Dad have come down. Big Sister has started breakfast. Everyone is hungry. Us young ones because we’ve already been awake for hours. Mum and Dad and the big ones because they’ve been at midnight mass, wrapped presents and sneaked them into our rooms in the Santa stockings.

    The big presents are still all under the tree. Dad says we have to line up, outside the dining room door, littlest first, . He puts the Messiah on the gramophone, the hundred voices swelling up and filling the house, Hallelujah! Halleluhah! Ha,le,eh,eh,luh,jah! He tells us Handel cried when he first heard it performed. In Dublin. We only half listen. All we want to do is get inside.

    One, Two, THREE – and Mum opens the door.

    We thunder in.

    Mum and Dad stand either side of the tree, calling out our names. There are the big presents under the tree from them first. Then presents from Granny. Then smaller presents from uncles and aunts. The big ones get presents from girlfriends and boyfriends.

    Silence as presents are ripped open. Shouts of delight. Everyone makes a pile in separate areas.

    By the time the excitement has started to die down the big ones are bringing in breakfast. Because it’s Christmas they’ve cooked extra, piling the rashers and sausages, the black and white puddings, the tomatoes, onto the big oval dish. They bring the eggs and the toast in separately.  It’s always the best breakfast of the year.  Mum and Dad, at either end of the dining table, give each other a quick look: first stage of Christmas successfully completed.

    The preparations for the big Christmas dinner start immediately after breakfast is cleared away. Chopping onions, squeezing sausages out of their skins to make the stuffing for the turkey. Scrubbing and peeling the enamel basin full of potatoes. Making the bread sauce. Getting the plum pudding onto the stove for one last boil. Cleaning the brussels sprouts. Scrubbing the carrots. Checking the trifle in the pantry has properly set. Shoving fistfuls of stuffing into the turkey’s  yawning cavities.

    Next a small party of us are off with Mum and Dad to visit the maternity hospital where Mum’s father was once Master. The matron, large and spotless, has coffee, sherry, Christmas cake, mince pies laid out. Fig rolls and squash for us younger ones. She treats Mum like a beloved, special daughter. Mum looks beautiful in her green tweed suit, the gold watch brooch she won for a Point to Point on the lapel.

    Every year Mum brings in ‘layettes’ for the new-borns whose own Mums don’t have much money. Mum and the sewing lady who comes to the house to ‘turn’ sheets, make clothes, re-line old jackets, ‘turn’ cuffs, make a few every time the sewing lady comes. They’re set aside in the sewing chest of drawers, ready for Christmas.

    Mum and Dad both have sherry. Then coffee. We have mince pies, burning our tongues on the scalding fruit.

    ‘Why are they called ‘mince’pies’?’ we ask Dad in the car on the way home. Dad says it goes back to the 16th Century. They used to be made with real meat. Even, sometimes, tripe. ‘No’ we scream, making getting sick noises. Dad, who can persuade us to eat almost anything, hasn’t succeeded in getting anyone to eat tripe. It’s good for you!  Every so often Dad buys some in the butchers and cooks it up in a saucepan of milk with half an onion. Mum says it smells horrible. I say it looks like floor cloths.  Mum says it smells even worse than floor cloths. Nobody will taste a mouthful.

    ‘Dad. No! Yuck!’.

    By the time we get back to the house the older ones have Frank Sinatra on the gramophone and the house is filled with the smell of Christmas dinner cooking.  We younger ones bring our presents up to the drawing room where Eldest Brother has lit the  huge Christmas fire  – long curved black turves, chopped logs that smell of Sundays in the country.

    Dad goes to collect Granny, Mum’s mother, to bring her over for the big feast. We sit her in Mum’s chair by the fire.

    We hear screaming downstairs. A plate smashing. Big Sister and Mum have got into a fight. Dad goes down to calm things. We hear raised voices.  A door slams. My brother laughs: ‘Madame having one of her fits’. He means Big Sister. Granny pretends not to hear. Dad comes back: ‘Help is needed’ he says. The middle ones, groaning, get up and go down.

    Finally the call comes: Dinner’s ready!

    We force ourselves not to charge down the stairs shouting and jostling,  remembering Granny and how old she is. Her arm feels like a dry stick inside her soft woollen sleeve. Dad, holding out a crooked arm, says he will ‘escort’ her.

    The dining room is beautiful. The sideboard and the table are lit with candles, decorated with ivy and holly, a circle of crackers in the centre, the sideboard crowded with huge glistening turkey, the ham, bowls of heaped mashed potatoe, a dish of roast potatoes, bowls of brussels sprouts and carrots, silver boats of bread sauce, the gravy boats, a dish of cranberry sauce.

    All the best cutlery is out. The best china. The nicest glasses. The best napkins.

    Dad carves. There’s quiet as everyone waits. Another wait for gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce to be passed around. You look at your plate, so beautiful with the meats and stuffing and roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and sauces.

    Everyone has to wait until the last person is sitting down, before you can begin.

    Yes!

    Pieces of delicious turkey meat dipped in gravy, roast potatoes cooked in turkey juices, mashed potatoe with butter dripping down the sides, ham with cranberry sauce, stuffing. Every mouthful is delicious. The turkey bought from a farmer Dad knows in Meath. The ham ordered from the pork butcher in town. The potatoes, brussels sprouts and carrots from Dad’s garden.

    The grown-ups and the big ones have wine. Granny, no higher at the table than the little ones, a shrinking doll in satin and pearls and silvered hair, raises her glass, smiling. To Christmas! shout the big ones.

    My brother, carving knife and fork raised, calls out: ‘Who’s for seconds?’ The adults decline as we smaller ones line up. My brother always gives himself the best bits when he carves, and seconds never taste as good as firsts, still, I can’t resist. ‘No thirds’ Mum says, ‘that’s just greedy’.

    More Christmas please, more!

    A rest and then, puddings.

    The dinner plates are cleared. The plum pudding is carried in. Then the trifle. Dad pours a glass of brandy over the plum pudding and holds a match to it. Blue flames dance and curl around its moist sides. We all want to get bits with the blue flames still going but they flicker out as the plate lands. Brandy butter runs down the hot sides. There’s trifle for those who don’t like plum pudding. Or for greedy ones – like me ! – who want both.

    For the grown ups there’s a special wine Dad has bought for Mum – a desert wine. ‘Do they make wines in the desert?’ The big ones laugh. ‘Of course not!’ ‘It means a wine you have with your pudding, silly.’

    Finally it’s time to pull the crackers. You cross your arms in front of you and share a cracker with the person either side. You pull like mad because you want to get the toy, the hat and the joke. Even though the grown-ups say they’re always rubbish, everyone pulls hard. There’s a little explosion, the smell pop guns make, a scattering of rolled up paper hats, toys and jokes. One of the littles sitting beside my brother screams. ‘He got TWO!’ Dad finds another cracker and pulls it with them, making sure they win.

    We all hope to get  good joke and make everyone laugh:

    ‘What did the stamp say to the envelope? Stick with me and we’ll go places’.

    ‘How did the human cannonball lose his job? He got fired’.

    ‘What is the nearest thing to Silver?  The Lone Ranger’s bottom.’

    The grown-ups, now in great form, laugh like anything. We young ones all want to own the fish that middle sister got in her cracker. It’s made of red, see-through cellophane. When you lay it on your outstretched palm both ends curl upwards – as if the fish was alive.

    Finally it’s time to clear up.

    When the last dishes, cup, plates, have been carried into the kitchen and washed, the meats, puddings, turkey, ham, trifle put away in the pantry, everyone gathers upstairs in the drawing room where Dad has stoked the fire up into a fresh blaze.

    Granny is going to stay the night. She tells us stories about growing up in Chile. About how Mum and her brother used to ride out on their ponies, for miles and miles. How Mum was afraid of nothing. Mum looks stern. We know, though she never says, she doesn’t like Granny. We don’t really know why. Big Sister says Granny was very bossy when Mum was young. We can’t picture it. Tiny ancient  little Granny was so bossy she made Mum cross? Forever? It doesn’t make sense.

    Dad suggests we all play the ‘truth’ game. Mum says no, that game always ends in trouble. We take out the new Cluedo. Eldest Brother wins: Colonel Mustard. In the study. With the rope. Mum says, ‘that game is going to give them nightmares’, but she’s not cross.

    *****

    It’s January by the time the tree has to come down. The soft, early dark light of December has been replaced with the harsh grey blue light of January. There have been fights. Big sister has broken up with her boyfriend. ‘Oh do blow your nose,’ Mum says, which makes Big sister howl even more loudly and rush out of the room.

    The tree has to be taken out of its bucket filled with stones and pulled out through the back door and down into the garden.

    Middle sister says how come there is always one ball left on the tree no matter what? The ball this year, a small purple one, clatters across the tiles as Eldest Brother drags the tree out, leaving a trail of pine needles. Mum says, ‘Someone get the hoover’. ‘Hey Someone! Get the hoover would you!’ says Middle sister. ‘Don’t you be cheeky’, says Mum .

    In the garden my brother hacks off the Christmas tree branches with a small red handled hatchet, piling the lopped branches up in a rough stack. ‘Stand back’ he says and throws on a cupful of paraffin. Whumpf! The hacked branches, the armless tree, spitting and crackling go up in a shaking blue haze. I see Mum looking out the window. Suspicious. Her face saying: What did that boy throw on the fire to make it blaze like that? I thought I’d told him not to.

    Inside everything has been packed away into the sideboard – the Mickey Mouse Christmas lights, the crib figures from Germany, the singing angels from Germany, Flying Santa on a goose with his singed beard,  the plastic bag of tinsel, the glass balls, the long grey hand knitted stockings.

    All back into the dark of the sideboard until next Christmas.

    Middle sister has taken out the hoover. Pine needles go rushing up the metal tube in a storm of clicking. Like dried out, dead insects.

    *****

    Dad is in bed. He’s not feeling well.

    Christmas is over.

    How could any of us have known it was to be the last Christmas? The last happiness?

    How could any of us have imagined it was the beginning of the end?

    We didn’t. How could we?

    Feature Image: wikicommons

  • Friended

    We were best friends, each the other’s trusted wingman and sometime sponsor and crude litigator who called each other “brother” and “amigo” and “hermano” and “bud” and “homeslice” and took our shoes off politely at the entrances to one another’s new apartments and asked who we were seeing now and exchanged woes and lent each other a few bob and discussed books and listened to eclectic music and watched old noir flicks or so-bad-they’re-good karate or horror movies and told long uncurbed jokes and smoked and drank and pilled into the pallid dawn and chilled each other out when someone went too far or had taken too much or had gotten too hectic and revived one another with tea or coffee or biscuits or something stronger after a particularly spectacular nose-diving whitey and said “I know, man” and “Forget about her, dude” and “There’s plenty more fish in the sea” after a bad break-up.

    Best friends, except for that time he got off with the girl I told him I loved in Greek and Roman Civilization before I had a chance to ask her out and I flirted with his Russian girlfriend after he had asked her out and he tore my favourite shirt doing a headstand during a pub crawl and I roundhouse kicked him after he’d been in a street fight to show him the correct way to execute the maneuver and he crashed his motorbike into a snowdrift with me on the back on purpose to give me a near-death experience and I told him to fuck off and get someone else’s notes or maybe read the fucking Iliad himself or — hey — maybe even try going into a lecture every once in a while and he split owing two months’ rent and I chopped his upright piano into firewood when he was in Madrid for the Christmas break and he smoked all my weed when I was in my parents’ over Easter and I borrowed his Bukowski books permanently and he told Sharon Sullivan I was gay so he could hook up with her and years later I told her he’d joined the priesthood after they broke up and it took years before she found out the truth and he almost choked me to death, drunk on the Gaza Strip one night and, if we hadn’t been laughing so hysterically, I might be a good-looking corpse right now and I nicknamed him “Dracula” when he grew his sideburns out and he broke my kitchen window with a snowball and I told him the ending of The Usual Suspects before he’d seen it and he ruined The Exorcist by laughing through the whole thing and I ridiculed him publicly when he went head-over-heels after barely four seconds on a bucking bull machine in a dusty Texas bar and he loaned my favourite leather jacket with the perfectly faded folds to his brother, Bill, who lost it and I got him fired from his job because he didn’t show up for work after he twisted his ankle when I persuaded him to try walking home from Malone’s blind and he got me thrown out of Fibber’s for doing coke with his sister in the gents’ and I got him kicked out of hot yoga for shitting his pants a little doing the Pavanamuktasana pose, of all things, and he had me escorted from a writing retreat for plagiarizing Bukowski and I got drunk and fell off his roof through his favourite rose bush and bled bright red droplets all over his new cream carpet and he slept with my sisters, Kate and Elizabeth, and I slept with his aunt Geraldine and he threw out a painting I did of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart that I was quite proud of and I threw up all over him while cooking him a meal and he moved house a day after I’d helped him paint his new flat, in fact did the majority of the painting, and he rubbed it in viciously when his football team beat mine in the final of the Champions League and I poured salt into his wounds when my rugby team beat his in the final of the Champions Cup and he didn’t come to my mother’s funeral and I was a no-show at his father’s and I successfully wooed Carrie Fitz  to “Hold Back the Dawn” from Storyville by Robbie Robertson before he did, even though it was his album and he’d met her first, and he didn’t change the water in my goldfish Bob’s bowl the whole time I was in Rome, even though that was the reason I’d given him my keys in the first place, leaving such a Gordian tangle of fish shit that I had no choice but to bring Bob’s bowl with Bob in it down to the river, a walk in congested traffic that felt like the Calvary scene in On the Waterfront with the morning iridescence scintillating the bowl into a disgusting lava lamp so that everyone knew so absolutely where I was headed and what I was going to do that I may as well have taken out an ad and each step resonated with my failings as the slow grey river waited with vigilant eyes and eager jaws lurking in the cinereous muck like devil inmates in hell waiting to jump a fresh, still sparkling, soul and afterwards I realised he’d also cleaned out my copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and the first time I saw a picture of his beloved grandmother I said “Hey, it’s Elvis!” and he pissed into my sink one night when he was drunk on cheap boxed wine and I broke into his house and took apart his bed and left a spanner and a note on the pieces saying “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it” and he brought a prostitute to a dinner party at my boss’s house and I settled down and had a family and got boring and betrayed our friendship and he never showed his face again, never came to any of my weddings and never met my children and never saw me again and disappeared into the internet and became a fucking crank.

    But sometimes we Like each other’s posts.

  • A Meeting

    Snow fell wild and windy on the city of musicians. A boy, brimming with morning light, stepped out of the doorway into the street. He was greeted with a dancing of snow. The boy looked up into the whirling snowflakes and imagined them carrying musical notes on their backs as they fell to earth. Their movement weaved a melody, building harmonies as they moved, until the entire snowstorm became one great magnificent exploding symphony.

    An old woman that happened to be walking past noticed the electrified expression on the boy’s face and wondered on his mental state. Whether there were clouds. It had something to do with the gaze within his gaze. It was impossible to say exactly where his music itself was sourced, whether it was the soul acting in nature, or nature acting in the soul. Or if they were one thing united, indivisible.

    He had been sent to Vienna by his father who desired his son to experience newness with an independent air and by doing so expand his already prodigious talent. His father, who himself was from a musical family, recognised a genius in his son that he didn’t himself possess, which was a catalyst for his heavy drinking. However, he saw his son’s potential, and the potential therefore for the entire family. That decided it. As he walked along the crowded thorough-fare of the metropolis the boy hoped to dedicate his life to music.

    Earlier that morning he had captured the moment when the snowfall begins. That miraculous event when you look out of a window and it starts to snow. “There are miracles in nature.” He thought. The intensity of its beauty moved him deeply. Only air to behold, and from this nothingness nature creates a fleeting thing that remains permanent in the soul. It was these moments, these emotions, these experiences, that he wanted to behold in music. The boy felt like a stranger in the city, but he didn’t feel alone. He was already registering the burgeoning of his precocious talent by degrees, art and architecture yielded as the unshielded metropolis wielded. Not quite sure what the rules were, he was nevertheless intent on breaking them.

    He had been told by Franz that his hero lived somewhere nearby, and he kept the address safe in a buttoned pocket. Being in Vienna was the fulfilment of a kind of prophecy, rather than the search for mere work, mere sustenance. The scope and beauty of the city was gifting him an excitement he hadn’t experienced before. Music re-entered his mind uninvited. He could hear the sound of violins above his tinnitus. (The first symptoms of his deleterious hearing were beginning to manifest but he was able to carry on regardless). He looked back up at the snow but this time there was silence. He wore only a shirt and a waistcoat under his overcoat and as he re-entered the world from his dreams he began to shiver. He tilted his head forward and stamped on through the snow to adventure the city, hoping to collect its offerings. His hair was getting long and unkempt and the breeze fluttered in his curls. He pushed his scarf back under his coat and trudged on, making a rhythm from the crunching snow underfoot. He walked on and soon came to St Stephen’s cathedral.

    The boy’s hero was also a musician, based now in Vienna. His fame had spread across Europe. The boy had first heard his music through his music tutor Herr Neefe. It was a bellows. He recalled the moment as he walked, and it was in that moment of wind and snow the boy thought ‘Is it the purpose of my life to serve myself? My own happiness? Or is it to serve others? Which should I prioritise?’ He paused for thought and looking up saw an old man sitting on an icy step in a doorway begging for money. That seemed to make up his mind.

    Not far away from the pensive child stood his hero by a high window watching the snow falling between the buildings. The street was busy with the morning throng and the snow just added to the ebullience of the moment. The older musician was now thirty-one years of age and his brilliance was flowing like spring rivers. One snowflake in particular caught the musician’s eye and he followed it down to the street where it landed in the boy’s outstretched hand. He smiled and returned to his billiard table where the score of his latest symphony was fanned out on the purple baize.

    A knock on the musician’s door sounded out and a servant girl said that there was someone there to see him. She passed him a letter of introduction from Max Franz who knew them both. They would gift the world an immense joy, inventing a new kind of wonder. The kind that belittles warmongers, the kind renders borders and nations obsolete, the musicians became inventors of the means of redemption. The older musician was put out as he was at work and told the maid to tell the boy to return at one o’clock when he would be pausing to eat. Delighted, the boy agreed, asking to wait indoors because of the cold weather. And so he was offered a chair in the lobby where he sat and dreamt of music. He thought about what Neefe had told him in between bars of invention. He listened in the hope of hearing his hero play but no sound came from the salon. At last the boy was asked to follow the maid into the room where the musician waited. The man with the large blue eyes looked up from the billiard table as the lad entered the room.

    “Welcome.” The boy looked nervous as he beheld his idol. There he was. His face apparent, his keen wide eyes glowing. To the boy it was like looking at a figure from history, a legend of the past, even though he was living and breathing in front of him. He gazed in awe at the face that for all future generations would remain mysterious. His wig lay on a seat and the composer’s fair hair curled chaotically over his forehead. For a moment there was silence. It was like seeing a cyclone visible on the horizon. Verging on bewilderment the boy blurted,

    “Thank you. You are Herr Mozart?”

    “Well of course. Haha. You have come to see me, Franz sent you is that correct?’ The boy nodded eagerly. “He recommended you highly.” Something in Mozart’s expression however, remained aloof, distant almost, but still engaged in the moment.

    “Come, play me something.” The older musician poured himself some red wine from Chianti. The boy remembered his father and worried it was too early in the day to be drinking. Mozart sat in his comfortable chair near the billiard table and looked over at the piano. A roll of his hand and the subtle raising of eyebrows suggested to the boy he should begin to play. Now was his chance.

    With some trepidation the boy walked over to the piano and sat down. He could not hear the silence through his tinnitus but he could imagine it, and through his imagination he got the measure of its feeling. It was through his imagination that breakthroughs were made, the music and the mind could not be fused without it. His imagination was the reality he trusted best. He played a piece, and the elder musician listened. The boy’s technical ability wasn’t in doubt but his imagination had yet to be revealed to Mozart who waited expectantly. The boy finished the rehearsed piece and Mozart rolled a billiard ball across the table, nudging another ball back towards his open palm. Mozart said nothing. The boy, anxious to please, became worried, even though his performance was faultless.

    “Perhaps”……………..They both said simultaneously. Mozart laughed loudly. Then the boy said,

    “Perhaps I can improvise something?” Mozart suddenly became alive.

    “My sentiment also. Well, what do you have in mind? Or shall I decide?”

    “You decide. If I decide how will you know I am improvising?” Said the boy. Mozart smiled. The child had him stumped, a sentiment he did not entirely welcome. He paused a moment keeping his eyes fixed on the boy at the piano. Then he walked over to the billiard table, picked up the score he was working on and put it on the piano stand so the boy could read it.

    “Try this.” He said. The boy looked up at his hero afraid to smile, as if emotion could wrong foot him somehow. Just by looking at the first few lines of the piece the boy could detect Mozart’s hand. Then he began to play, improvising without rehearsal on the initial charge. His performance roared into life, solving galaxies. Mozart, who had been sitting, sprung to his feet when he heard the collision of instinct and imagination the boy was displaying, and stood fixated, eyes closed, with his hand slowly rising upwards. From an adagio in D# he moved unexpectedly into a sublime allegro that seemed to build and build from divine foundation. The boy ended the piece in a crescendo that reeled in a way that almost wrong-footed Mozart, but not entirely. The boy still had a long way to go. A lot to learn. Then there was silence. Mozart didn’t applaud but instead walked over to the piano where he stood in front of the prodigy. The boy looked up at him not knowing what was going to happen. A loud throbbing ringing sounded out in the boy’s head increasing in volume moment to moment and his smile turned to an expression of pensive anxiety. Mozart coughed, and then again. The third cough was loudest. ‘Marvellous.” Said Mozart. Beethoven smiled.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Fiction: Fez

    December light spills down the halka, through the shutters and across my bed. Living in Fez, the small daily chores take me back to a country lane in Ireland that houses a thatch cottage where my mother and grandparents lived. As the days and months pass, I harbor my habit of disconnection. Studying Darija has been an opportunity to hide, mostly because it reminds me of studying Irish in primary school and living in Ireland as a teenager in 1996. My grandmother is pacing the kitchen floor puffing from a packet of No.6 cigarettes. She is dressed in her brown skirt covered in black diamonds. She lifts up the blue plastic jug from the kitchen counter full of whipped dream-topping cream that I love to lick. It’s the same duck-blue color that surrounds the framed picture of the sacred heart above her head. In the background the crackling muffles of the radio as I sneakily throw my unwanted dinner in the bin behind her back.

    When I open my shutter, the man across the way peeks in. I recall the incident from yesterday, when he flashes me on the street. He lifts up his Jellaba and reveals his wares. My reaction is underwhelming. He is looking for a fight. I, on the other hand, decline and walk away with a slight chuckle.

    Today the light is sharper, shining through the soft rain casting my reflection on the Zelig tile in the Dhar. I remember the squelch of my grandfather’s boots entering the back hallway, him being careful not to drag the dirt from the garden onto the floor of our house, reading the Irish Independent newspaper in the worn-in armchair, and when I coax him, he plays scrabble when no one else wants to putter about with words and language.

    I am in the upstairs room in Fez. My roommates are two men, one an American named John and the other an Irishman called Patrick. John is the caretaker of the house and graciously allows Patrick and I to stay for free, despite the detail that it’s not his house. Patrick is a broke writer who somehow finds money to travel. Eggy, who lives around the corner, is from the Midlands in Ireland and wears his grumpiness like a lace collar around his neck. A notorious expat, he scurries into the house to announce his current woe: he doesn’t have a washing machine. So, he arrives on our doorstep to borrow ours.

    I remember our old washing machine in Ireland, it has a roller on top to squeeze the water out of the clothes. We didn’t have a dryer in those days. It is in an outside shed with an extra toilet that had faulty plumbing. One day I was in there pretending to be a grown up, twisting the roller to flatten out one of my bottle-green school jumpers, when the nearby toilet overflows and sweeps me out of my long darn of a daydream. It is a complete interruption. The water gushes around my feet, and as I yell for help, I leap up and lean toward the door as my grandmother comes out, cigarette hanging from her mouth, to observe the catastrophe.

    On this particular morning in Fez, the lashing rain pours in the center of our house because there is to no roof.  Eggy approaches, wet from the rain. John, Patrick, and I sit around a breakfast table, comfortable as sin that would overflow a beer bottle. This day is a refrain to my past, when days were idle, chores were playacting, and the whole entirety of my being was to dither away the days.  Rain pokes mischief out of a quiet endless afternoon as nothing moves. Inhabiting that static wind or picking that blackberry from an unruly bush becomes my familiar idle country lane.

    Mid-conversation we joke, and up walks Eggy wet, frustrated, and irksome. In an explosive moment, he emphatically bursts out, “I hate the whole feckin’ lot of yez!” A moment of silence follows, before I seriously respond, “that really hurt my feelings; did that hurt your feelings?” I ask the others. Quickly the table churns in solid laughter that almost stops the rain. Eggy marches off in a giant sulk as we all stare at one another flabbergasted.

    When trouble is brewing back home, when you knew to duck behind a chest of drawers or under a bed or climb into the attic, you go to be alone and inhabit that private world that only you knew, a world where ignorance sits without judgement. Staring out a window at a green hedge daydreaming at the big cow’s head helped me push through.

    Last night Patrick snuck in my room with the excuse that he was cold. I was watching Jules and Jim, and he claimed he wanted to see the film. He strolled in, singing a line from a song, “I’m moving to the country; gonna’ eat a lotta peaches.”

    It didn’t bother him that years ago, we were in a single bed in my parent’s house in Ireland, when he tried and failed. He still tries his best to put his hand up my shirt. My mind is elsewhere, chasing the hum of the winding clock or limping around a fragment of a memory that’s far more intriguing, a postcard moment in a day where an image floats and lands in a pin cushion. Like the first time I cried or let go of anger or hid a feeling so deep I fell into a dark well.

    I am not overwhelmed by him then, yet there he was again beside me, breathing in my ear, his head on my pillow. Pulling on the blanket, creating a draft, he leaves to use the bathroom. He returns with a completely white face and mutters, “there’s a rat in the toilet, what should I do?” I sigh, “take the rug in the corner and put it over the toilet seat.” He walks back out to complete the task. Then as I turn my head away from him, a scent blows in that pulls me into my grandparents’ bedroom. My grandfather is walking around in his long johns, and I am lying cozy between my grandmother and grandfather, knowing that as soon as they fall asleep, I will sneak into the giant brown wardrobe to try on my grandmother’s dentures and fur coat and become an alternate version of Frankenstein for Halloween.

    The following morning after breakfast I recall Patrick leafing through my collection of DVDs the night before. Upstairs he is packing his bags. I stick my head out the window; he is outside now and turns his head as my DVD of Bad Timing falls to the floor. I turn to pick it up and open the cover…the DVD is missing. I poke my head back out the window. He’s walking away singing “I’m moving to the country; gonna eat a lot of peaches.” I shout at him, “did you steal my DVD?” He turns around momentarily nodding his head and then sneaks away. I smile furiously, wishing I had a can of peaches to throw at him. He is headed back home for Christmas.

    I glance down at my clothes on the bed, feeling a combination of shame and guilt. I am in my parents’ living room, hiding behind the green couch next to the old piano. The velvet feels so soft against my skin. If I crouch down more, the wind will stop whistling, and I’ll disappear.

    Yesterday I got free milk from the local shop owner. I had forgotten my money. He says, “ghedda inshala,” tomorrow, and when the strap on my bag broke, the cobbler fixed it for free. I am walking down that school lane, the one that steals your thoughts, and the goat with the long rope around its neck terrifies me when I pass, he is staring me down. If the milk comes from there, I won’t drink it, I will implement a milk boycott.

    I am friendly with this British chap who is skinny and likes to chat. He wants to shop for a rug. We are walking around together a bit in the old city of Fez, which suggests to the locals we are an item, but that isn’t the case. He regales me with a story about two large ancient doors in the medina that disappeared one night, transported out on donkeys. I can’t get my head around how no one noticed. The doors were incredibly valuable, cherished items. It was important to retrieve them. The British chap tells me eventually the doors reappear at a fair in Casablanca and have to be returned to the original owner.

    The sound of two knitting needles click together and then break apart, three plain, one purl,  I imagine that time is fixed, that the windows and doors reflect my discomfort. When all is silent, and I resurface from behind the couch with a new brave face promising to high heaven to narrate a new reality for myself, a dander of a day, a different continent.

    That day, I bought a red rug. The British chap bought a mauve one. He asks me “if I’m romantic.” I wonder if he is hinting that I should be. But I am away from all loved ones, stealing solitude, chasing that country stream and thatch cottage all in the misshapen name of a familiar childhood lane. The lane with the well I almost fell down so deep and full of dark mystery that I can hear the refrain in my head; it has an enchanting  rhythm. And the comfort of a different  cozy velvet couch as I sit in its arm, talking to Mr. Kenna who bought our thatched cottage and the amazing sugared pink Easter eggs from Spain with a massive bow. He gifted me them after paying my grandparents the sum of five hundred pounds for the house. I liked him but is this a kind of thievery?

    The British chap appears for dinner; pasta is mostly served, but he contributes chocolate and a hot water bottle. In Fez, it’s freezing during the winter because the houses have no heat. The halka keeps the house cool in the summer, though it’s really cold in the winter. Houses in Ireland are cold, too…everyone arguing over who gets to put their backside in the range oven when the winter evenings drive you quickly indoors as one arrives home from school.

    My house renovation in Fez is proving challenging. It is the first time I speak to my father so frequently in a long time. I ring him from a pay phone at the top of the medina and ask him what work should I be doing to my house, rewiring the electricity or putting in a septic tank.  Diligently he advises me what to look out for, how to proceed, the renovation happening in Darija. Growing up speaking to my father was hard. He was constantly working, and when he wasn’t, the words didn’t come.

    An American architecture student wants to rent my house. In true medina style, we barter. I ask him what he needs for the house, and with the money he pays me, I buy a mattress, a kettle, and other necessities he agrees to. I tell him there is one rule: “Lock the door to your bedroom; this house is a construction site.” He agrees, and we shake on it.

    Three days later, the American student has a problem. His phone has been stolen. I ask, “where did you leave it; did you lock the door?” He forgot. So, the following day, I walk over to my Dhar and call a meeting with the work men. They all stand around, and I, a white western woman from Ireland, talk to my “mallum,” the foreman. We begin to discuss this “mushkill,” my problem.

    When I was a teenager, my brother worked at Quinnsworth and had this mad notion to rob sweets, Milky Way Bars. As we rode our bikes up the hill in the dark, his bundle of stolen chocolate rattled on the back of his bike. His friend Plug persuades him that the stars in the sky are aliens, and we are being invaded. As the darkness descends upon us, my brother crashes into a ditch. Our stolen cargo, the Milky Way’s, swim away in the dirty ditch water.

    All the men stand upright with their arms folded, and my plumber Adil walks into the house. He is coming from the mosque. Dressed in an elegant white jellaba, he looks very respectable. Some of the other men point their eyes in his direction, blaming him. I look at him, and he shakes his head slowly, a solid convincing no, while looking me straight in the eye. Okay. I observe for a second and decide to call their bluff.

    One man, is talking incessantly. I can only understand some of the words, but not all of the sentences. I look around the room and have my mallum translate, “I don’t want to have to call the police,” I say. This is followed by silence, then the man who is talking non-stop mysteriously climbs up the stairs and lifts the mattress. The phone reappears. No ditch water rights the wrong. It reminds me of the wandering doors, a journey back to Fez from Casablanca.  The American student gets his phone returned. All is forgiven. I am slowly learning the ways of the medina.

    Is it any different than going to Brophy’s? Brophy’s is the local sweet shop; the dogs would piss on the briquettes, and Mr. Brophy, with his crooked glasses, would nearly poke you in the eye with his stare. But my brother knew how to rob the toffee eclairs or a packet of silver mints, slip them in his side pocket, and dash for the door. Brophy would yell after us, “you little scuts!”

    A Moroccan man at the Red Eye Café asks my flat mate if I am married to either of the men I live with. Am I being judged? I find it amusing. I quite like the Red Eye Café; he is a local man and super cordial. He makes the most aromatic coffee with such care and dedication. He reminds me of my grandfather as he cooked stewed rhubarb and nettle soup in our kitchen. I call home and my parents are asking if I’m coming home for Christmas. I look at my bank account, which is very low, to see if I can afford an airline ticket. I don’t want to admit that the money isn’t there.

    I find myself on a Ryanair flight to Spain. I buy a bottle of champagne. As soon as I land in the airport in Spain, the Christmas songs are playing on a loop. The decorations are full throttle, and I gaze up at the large tree, which momentarily delights me. It is a moment of delving into my Christian roots. What did I cherish from that whole experience? I like the ritual of putting up the tree, some of the songs, but what draws one back to a homeland? Not the judgmental Edenderry head, a not-so-favorite, not-distant-enough family member.  She is odd out, wouldn’t give you the steam off her porridge! Ah, it must be the cows or the sheep.

    Strolling around the airport, I decide I’m one of those floaters who paraglide between continents, in search of an alternate reality. I can smell Faran Koicha, a street in the medina, the dead sheep skins, dead chickens and smokey hash. Suddenly that lingering loneliness floats and pulls me into its net and it feels like drowning. This makes me uncomfortable, too private to contemplate.

    I remember traveling to Punchestown races on a double-decker bus, carrying my First Communion handbag. It is white. I made my grandfather take me to the top of the bus to look out the window. I feel special, except that I left my bag with all my Communion money inside, a small fortune. I am so enthralled with the day’s outing and the company, everything else fades into soft focus.

    I am carrying my grandfather’s written memoir with me back home. My aunt who is now gone had typed it up into a book. His father took him to Punchestown races on an ass and cart in 1916. Now he’s passing on the tradition and taking me. I remember the bus slowing down and stopping. That floating feeling returns, uncertainty and unease, as the drifting continues. And I carry on, climbing the steps of the plane. I land in Dublin airport, champagne in hand.

    I hop on a Dublin southbound bus, and a woman next to me chats at me about how she is visiting her mother. She, too, moved away and seems chuffed about her good-looking husband and two daughters. “It’s well for some,” I thought. She announces she is doing well for herself, maybe she is another Edenderry head. I gaze out the window at the Irish hedges, and the misty rain swims like racing fish down the glass pane. I have forgotten it is Christmas Eve. I am headed to the family gathering.

    As I step off the bus, the barren trees, I look around to observe the factory town. It has changed since my last trip. I dial the number as my discomfort rises. I want to focus on my feeling more, but it escapes me. Uneasiness drags me down. What is this resistance. Distracted by a discarded coke can on the ground, I kick it down the road until I am tapped on the shoulder. It’s my mother.

    In the car driving with mother, I remember a day I got lost. I was dressed in my Communion red trousers suit and a white t-shirt, no shoes, my feet bare. In Co. Wicklow, we were headed off on holiday with our cousins from England and my gran-uncle, thirteen of us packed into a small green Ford Escort Estate. I didn’t have a seat.  I snuck out of the car and discovered a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by a water fountain.

    Enchanted by the water fountain, I fell into the longest daydream, losing myself. I’m seven years old. When I return, the family car has left without me, and the rain makes me cold. As my feet shiver, I cry until an unknown man takes me into his car to shelter from the rain, his wife and daughter huddled with us. They give me a packet of KP peanuts. It feels like a bag of gold. An hour passes and my parents return to collect me, finally noticing I’m missing.

    I remember the Virgin Mary statute from that day, and as our car pulls into the driveway for the Christmas party, a mutinous feeling spreads across my chest. Why do memories restrain me, hold me so tight? When I walk into the house, I see my father in his chair. I carefully walk towards him and lean over and whisper for a long while in his distended ear.

    He listens, chokes up, a tear runs down his cheek. The air moves about the room. The light shifts as a door bangs. The sound of a barking dog steals my focus, but I remain still as traditional Irish music breaks through. It is my first Christmas home in Ireland in seven years. We are ready. Readiness inhabits doubt, courage tasks the common good, and the lunacy of life marches us on its way, through the stolen door to arrive, and that is the work.

  • Fiction: Old Poetry

    It was because of Daniel that Mary Ann remembered Tom again; because she’d found out about Daniel’s latest affair. “Latest” was how she would position it to everyone now; one of an incalculable number—whether spaced apart or pressed together didn’t matter anymore because Mary Ann could only see a faceless mass of paramours sprawled one across the other like bacteria floating desultorily beneath a microscope.

    Daniel had played the only card he had left, complaining about how long she’d sat on the knowledge and how she’d chosen to confront him when he was about to catch a flight to visit his sick mother, probably to see her for the last time. He’d used the word “scheming” as he punched his arms into his jacket, and she’d laughed at his big baby anger. But, as he stepped his shoes on, he seemed to think his way into a movie scene and returned to place his hands on her shoulders and to tell her he was sorry, and that he loved her.

    “I’ll call you when I land,” he’d said.

    “I’ll put you onto the girls,” she’d replied, closing the door slowly but firmly.

    She’d heard his shoes crunch forlornly and forcibly on the gravel driveway and heard him grunt “Bitch!” before the clunk of a car door and the long electronic whine of his Uber leaving.

    Alone, she poured a glass of white wine and watched a reality TV show about affluent Londoners almost half her age where the weekly relationship melodrama depended on the word-of-mouth testimony and half-remembered memories of a hard-drinking and careless cast. Of course, she’d always accepted that the premise of the show would disintegrate if the cast members were allowed to sprint pitch side to confirm what had really happened, like a referee in a football match ruling out an offside call. In this way, she’d allowed herself to enjoy the participants’ antics without committing to the idiocy of the premise, but the sudden debilitation of her own love-life had brought the previously unappreciated reality element of the show into sharp relief and after twenty minutes of rumour-fueled enchantment followed by a series of cruel and common betrayals she switched the TV off and turned on her laptop.

    She mixed a loose gin and tonic and surfed old 90s music online; frantic, dancer-laden and game semi-or-fully-dubbed live performances from shows like Top of The Pops. Even though, in some cases, the recordings were almost thirty years old, the participants still glowed with the sheen and irrepressible beauty of youth.

    The Spice Girls daisy-chaining to “Wannabe” like a toolbelt of pop perfection, Britney rocking her wireless headset like a sexed-up call center operator. Saffron from Republica performing “Ready to Go” and attempting to gin up a listless audience by shrieking repeatedly into the front row.

    She didn’t recall Tom until she hit Suede’s Saturday night, the opening guitar riff and the light yearning of Brett Anderson’s falsetto melting into her ears.

    He’s not her usual type. She normally goes for clean-cut, blonde, smart-casual types but he’s slim and dark-featured, his black denim shirt spilling over his blue jeans, the top button undone, the dark gully of his tanned neck visible in the sticky light of Coppers nightclub.

    He’s moving rhythmically and casually towards her, passing in and out of view as he rolls through the crowd with an ease that makes everyone around him seem insubstantial. Everyone but her, because the dark, smiling eyes stay on her as he navigates the swaying press.

    Now, he is so close, she can see the tiny circles of light swaying in the darkness of his irises.

    As the song builds, he takes her hand in his and she feels the warm curl of his palm as their fingers interlock and the tiny overture of a nail travels along her spine and he moves into her space and she into his and they inhabit the music while their lips, at first tentatively, seek, then fiercely, pursue.

    The sun empties upon their naked bodies as they wake in her single bed, unknotting slowly and experimentally while they exchange amazed smiles, as though recipients of an unexpected gift.

    Even dressed, he takes five attempts to finally leave, returning each time to touch noses and kiss her and to remind her how beautiful she is and, each time, she replies with a bright, clerical “Why, thank you” which makes him grin until finally he is gone and she examines his name—his full name—and phone number carefully inscribed on a torn section of tissue box and she swings her naked legs about and laughs.

    For their first real date, they go to the cinema. The film is a mainstream romantic vehicle; his suggestion but while they get drinks and popcorn, he stands apart from her with his head down as though hiding his identity. The shyness of the brightly lit foyer gives way to the comfort of darkness, and they touch and kiss and might even pretend the burgeoning onscreen romance bears some affinity to their own until, at the moment of consummation, as a slow song beckons the first onscreen kiss, the voice of a man in the audience nearby launches a distinctive, full-throated and uncontrollable laugh which the rest of the audience, including them, join into until the whole theatre is a roaring, hooting, vibrating mess. The romantic denouement, when it comes, plays out beneath an undignified aftershock of giggles.

    She goes back to his flat in a three-story Georgian house on the Southside. The downstairs hallway smells of curry and old smoke damage and the corners rattle with the enraged dither of trapped bluebottles, but his apartment is surprisingly spacious and clean, and she feels an exotic charge as they undress slowly in front of each other under the high ceiling with the bulbs blazing around them.

    Afterwards, she is lying against him, a pond of blond hair spilling over his chest. The main lights have been turned off and the orange glow from the lamp reminds her of a spotlight and lends a theatrical immediacy to their conversation.

    She points at the wall of books.

    “Have you read them all?”

    “They’re mostly to impress my sexual conquests.”

    She strokes his face to hers and gives him a long teasing kiss.

    “Mmmm, it’s working.”

    “You’re a scientist, right?” he says.

    “Student scientist,” she corrects.

    “You think the World Wide Web will kill off bookshops?”

    “I don’t think so.” She smiles. “People will always need places. We met in a place, didn’t we?”

    “What a place.”

    “My grandfather used to say that we’re only ever born in one place but when we die, we die everywhere.”

    He stares thoughtfully into the shadows on the edge of the lamplight.

    “Your grandfather sounds very wise.” He laughs. “And a bit dark. If this internet thing of yours catches on, maybe that’ll change and we’ll finally be able to die in one place, though knowing my luck it’ll probably be Geocities.”

    She gestures to the wall of bookshelves.

    “If it does catch on, I can always come to your place to get my fix of old-fashioned printed words.”

    “Anytime. You know old-fashioned printed words can save your life?”

    “Oh yeah?”

    She is waiting for him to make a playful joke. Instead, he slowly disengages from her, from them, and, still naked, scans the shelves gravely and returns with a slim, unadorned paperback. When he’s reintegrated beneath her, he hands her the book and she studies the title conscientiously.

    “Darkness Visible?”

    “Uh huh.”

    She turns it around and reads the blurb and the reviews on the back then turns to look him in the eyes.

    “This saved your life?”

    He nods shyly and she caresses his cheek and ear and kisses him tenderly.

    “Oh baby.”

    But she has imprecise reservations.

    He is everything she isn’t. Dark. Wounded. Opaque.

    When she talks about her family and their modest but supportive upbringing, he nods and smiles but she can see in his eyes that he has no frame of reference for this, and she may as well be relating a popular myth which he is only hearing for the first time.

    He says next to nothing about his family, except to imply he hasn’t seen them in a while and what he hears of them now are whispers he would prefer remain unamplified.

    She tells him about her college courses, specialties and plans; plans that stretch into a far flung tomorrow of homes and children. He is amazed that anyone can plan so far ahead and in such detail. All his plans begin in maybes and end in places that sound like the start of a movie in which the protagonists all die horribly.

    “Maybe you can come visit me over there someday,” he says but then shakes his head, embarrassed at fastening her to such whimsy.

    “Someday,” she says with a smile and a kiss.

    They have their first fight a week later. They’re in Coppers again and they’ve both drunk too much. He’s angry about the never-ending parade of guys hitting on her every time he returns from the toilets.

    “What can I do?” she says.

    “You could try not being so damn friendly,” he says. “You like those guys in t-shirts that are two sizes too small for them. Wait and see: you’ll end up leaving me for one of them.”

    She laughs but her denial isn’t quick or passionate enough for him because they end up exchanging mis-heard provocations in the club then shouting at one another, no less incoherently, on the street outside and she cries and takes a cab home alone. He lights a cigarette and smokes sullenly as she gets into the taxi and she imagines him watching as her cab is absorbed into the exodus of lights on Harcourt Street.

    The next morning, she mopes around her apartment, finally drawn to the mailbox downstairs where she finds a hand-written unstamped envelope with her name on it. She recognises his handwriting.

    She extracts and unfolds a single sheet of white paper with a poem carefully handwritten on it:

    Breakfast, Morning After

    Everything on this plate is overcooked,

    I am too.

    Last night’s sentimentality boiled over,

    Now, it’s stuck on the pan of our two minds,

    Like incomprehensible glue.

     

    It’s the first time she’s received a poem that wasn’t written by a greeting card company.

    She returns to her apartment and dials his number, which is on the same piece of cardboard he’d first written it on, and which has sat by the phone since she got home the night before.

    His phone rings for an antagonistically long time but she keeps it to her ear until, finally, his downstairs neighbour answers it by bellowing the name of his company followed by his own name.

    Before either of them can say anything else, she hears a noise in the background and a smile in the neighbour’s voice as he somewhat demurely adds, “He’s coming now.”

    A few seconds later Tom’s voice gasps, “Mary Ann?”

    “I got your poem.”

    “I need to see you.”

    They last another two weeks. Two weeks of late-night club-crawling followed by all night lovemaking and all-day shut-ins. She misses so many classes that the head of her department calls to check if she’s okay and, at Tom’s encouragement, she bereaves herself of a beloved aunt-or was it was an abhorred uncle?

    Both feel themselves on the cusp of something, but neither can square the circle of difference that lies between them; the forking of paths already beneath their feet.

    Fittingly, it ends in Coppers.

    They both sense what’s coming and this foreknowledge lends an astral tenderness to the night. They sit in the beer garden so they can speak.

    She breaks the deadlock.

    “I’ve got to go back to classes or they’re going to turf me out.”

    He laughs and takes her hands in his.

    “I’ve got my plane ticket,” he says.

    “You’re really going? That’s great, baby. I’m so happy for you.”

    “I guess you shamed me into it with all those plans of yours that stretch into 2050.”

    They drink and make out and, near the end of the night, Suede’s “Saturday Night” is played. They rush inside and slow dance to it, folding into the mass of people on the floor until it feels like they are alone, the pirouetting axis of a cosy circle of darkness.

    Her memories slip on the gleaming surface of the past and when she recovers the memory, he is walking her to the taxi rank one last time, made debonair in her reconstruction with his jacket on her shoulders against the sudden cold.

    “I’ve got a confession to make,” he says.

    “What’s that?”

    “You know that movie we went to, where the guy started laughing during the love scene?”

    “Yeah.”

    “I went to see that film the day before I brought you, to make sure it was romantic enough to take you to. It’s not really my area so I needed to do a bit of research.”

    She stops to caress his cheek.

    “Oh, that’s so sweet baby.”

    “It was, until that guy tore the arse out of it.”

    “I guess now we know why he was laughing.”

    “Yeah,” he says. “I guess we do.”

    She reaches the head of the queue and hands him his jacket and they kiss one last time.

    “Good luck with the future,” he says.

    “You too,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see you in a place there someday.”

    “Someday.”

    She imagines herself not looking back and allowing him to disappear unseen into the anonymous crowd, but she can’t help seeing him standing there, staring at her taxi as it fades into the night, so perhaps she did look back one last time. She imagines their eyes meeting in that final look and something, unsaid, passing between them but can’t remember if that’s really what happened or only what she wanted to have happened.

    Mary Ann snaps back into the moment. Her phone shows three missed calls from Daniel but she scorns them and the voice in her head and pours herself another drink.

    She searches the internet for Tom using his full name and studies the images that come back, trying to match them to an imagined Tom who is 24 years older or to remove 24 years from the faces she sees but none of them have the dark eyes she remembers so vividly.

    She feels wrong about Googling the poem after all this time but a sudden wave of doubt that it might not have been original persuades her to search for it and the resulting screen of irrelevances prompts a loud sigh of relief.

    She searches Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, imagining as she does a settled-down but still-handsome Tom, spared a paunch and receding hairline with the concession of just a few strategically placed lines about the eyes and an intrigue of grey above one temple. A Tom who is finally free of doubt, hauling a wife and kids into a boring, normal future. A Tom who offers chirpy updates or pithy quotes. But this Tom is nowhere to be found on Google or social networks or anywhere else on the internet so, with a narrow pout of satisfaction, she imagines an unplugged free spirit in a remote beach bar on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and she imagines a transistor radio on the small bar playing Suede’s “Saturday Night” and this Tom pausing to remember her, perhaps even this very night.

    She goes back to YouTube and replays the song and closes her eyes, remembering again the two of them dancing inside that cosy circle of darkness.

    But Tom is not sitting at a beach bar by the Caribbean Sea. He’s not had a wife or kids and he’s never used Facebook or Instagram or Twitter because in 2003, when Mary Ann was on secondment for her company in Seattle, Tom was walking his dog by the Grand Canal in the early hours of the morning, not two miles from where she is at this moment, and the dog jumped into the water by the lock. And Tom, without a moment’s hesitation, dived in after it and got into trouble, the dog somehow escaping but Tom’s hands scrabbling uselessly at the slippery walls until the air poured out of him and he sank into the dark water, the circle of light, that was the sun, diffusing into darkness above him.

     

     

    Feature Image: René Magritte, The Lovers II, 1928.

  • Mary Dances

    In normal times Mary used to catch glimpses of the dancers. On his cigarette break from his work in the galley he had started to station himself on the promenade deck outside the large porthole with its closed ruched curtains and watch snatches of “rehearsal”. That was a new word for him. Amongst the many languages of the service decks, English was the common language of command but the word “rehearse” was not in the kitchen vocabulary. Karim said to him one day “It’s a rehearsal” and “They’re rehearsing” and he gradually understood that it was to do with practising the dances and songs that were part of the twice daily shows. The kitchen staff didn’t come into contact much with the dancers although three of the troupe, Patsy, Greta, and Abdul had all been assigned duties serving cabin meals to passengers who were too lazy or too old to come to meals in the restaurants.

    Looking into the Moonlight Lounge through the lavender haze of the drapes he started to get an idea of what these rehearsals were. The boys and girls were usually in ordinary clothes but as soon as the playback started beautiful smiles appeared on their faces. Sometimes the Boss stopped the playback in the middle of a song and made them go back to the beginning. Once Greta and a boy he didn’t know were chosen to show the steps to everyone else. Another time poor Abdul was chosen as he was doing it wrong and he had to do it again and again in front of the rest of them until he got it right. Mary thought he saw Abdul looking at the porthole where he was stationed and wondered if he’d seen him there outside, watching.

    The boys and girls in the kitchen had given him his new name, Mary. He liked being called Mary. The Blessed Virgin had always been important to him and his family, and in his space in the dark bowels of the ship his only contribution to its dismal look had been an embellished photo of a statue of Our Lady that made him feel better every time he caught sight of it.

    When the Coronavirus happened everything changed. No-one quite knew what was going on but after several days of trying unsuccessfully to put into various ports eventually Empress of the Oceans managed to dock in Lisbon and all the passengers and most of the crew were tested and taken off. Mary stayed on as for some reason his work in the galley washing-up and cleaning was considered essential. He was moved from his dark quarters in the hold to a beautiful cabin two decks above from which he had a view of the docks and the city of Lisbon. His family back in Manila kept him informed of what was going on at home and as always their lovely faces on the tiny screen made him happy. They told him Lisbon was in a Catholic country and he was pleased to see the white bell towers of churches that were not completely unfamiliar and he occasionally heard their bells ringing out across the city and the river.

    But the “rehearsals” had stopped and when he went to take his station outside the curtained porthole for a cigarette in a break from his much-reduced duties there was nothing to see except the dimly-lit stage and the empty seats, not a soul dancing or singing, no hint of the happy smiles or the playback, all now signs of different times.

    Abdul had also been kept on for some reason and was assigned the cabin next to Mary’s. He was Algerian and although not Catholic or even Christian, they seemed to have a lot in common. For the short time before everything changed he had enjoyed doing the shows and learning from the Boss and the other dancers but, as he confided to Mary, he had always felt a bit of an outsider.

    As days turned into weeks and the virus continued to keep the world in stasis and the tethered ship immobile, the empty city of Lisbon, sunlit, rain-swept or mist-shrouded, continued to feature outside their windows, and Mary and Abdul became friends. The almost deserted ship became their universe. They talked, in English mostly, though with bits of French, Tagalog and Spanish thrown in, and they talked about food and their families, yes, but mostly about dance moves. Abdul was happy to share with Mary what he’d learned from his short time as a dancer. The Boss had gone but he’d left Abdul the key to the Moonlight Lounge. Abdul would put on some lights and the playback, and to the sounds devised for the pleasure and nostalgic recall of elderly North Americans he showed Mary the moves he’d learned. They kicked, they twirled, they leapt, Abdul lifted him and he felt wonderful.  At a certain point it suddenly struck Mary that he was “rehearsing”.

    In the inactivity and fearfulness of these virus-hit days the two of them were happy to be dancing while the huge ship around them echoed emptily and without purpose. The docks were deserted and grass was starting to sprout between the paving-stones but the monstrous white hulk of Empress of the Oceans loomed over the city and its broad river. Apart from the thin muffled beat of recorded music from the illuminated Moonlight Lounge the ship was quiet and dark.

    When Mary and Abdul finished their “rehearsal” of I Will Survive, Abdul went and sat in the audience where the boss used to sit. Mary went over to the porthole and looked over the silent and deserted city through the lavender haze of the drapes. He could hear the distant bells clanging for a Sunday evening mass that was not going to happen. When he looked down at the quay there were two men with a dog, and they were looking up at the lit porthole of the Moonlight Lounge.

  • Fairy Story

    Then the fairy spread her wings and flew off. People came from far and wide to hear the tale of their adventures, and when it was told, they grew up loving and loved, with the fairies for their friends and protectors, ever ready to help them if they were in trouble; in time they were married and lived happily together – that is the end of the story.
    (H.H.H. Nine Little Fairy Stories: A&C Black, London 1923)

    London April 1919

    Mr Mancini, the stout and mutton-chopped proprietor of the private hotel, had made an exception and allowed Henry Herbert possession of a front-door key, a privilege that was extended to no other of his residents. The outside doors of the slightly dingy establishment, with their stained glass panels and flanked by cream-painted Etruscan columns, were locked at 11pm every night and after that hour it was only Henry Herbert who was permitted the luxury of drawing up in a hansom and letting himself in, or, having walked home carefully in opera cloak and top hat and maybe a little woozy from the champagne consumed in the Crush Bar, of fumbling just a little with the key as he effected his independent entrance.

    Somewhat willowy and slim of waist, with daintily barbered moustache (although he may have been getting a little thin on the top), Henry Herbert was a dapper fellow and while he might not have inspired an overriding impression of manliness, most onlookers found it gratifying to observe this tall gentleman with his neat cravat and swinging his cane as he bravely and confidently occupied the London pavements on his determined way to wherever he was heading.

    Henry Herbert occupied the first-floor front, the finest rooms of the narrow five-storey building, overlooking the communal gardens with their protecting iron railings, their locked iron gates and their sooty plane trees. But this was in truth not to claim much, for the Frazer Private Hotel was, at best, a modest establishment in an unfashionable area and had few pretensions beyond its respectability and convenience. However, for Mr Mancini, Henry Herbert, with his fabled money and supposed connections was indeed a catch and an embellishment to the house, somewhat belied by his private ways and apparently modest way of life.

    For Henry Herbert it was a two-way transaction. True, money was no object to him, but in exchange for what must at best be considered a somewhat frowsty dwelling he was given freedom from what could be called the attentions of the greater world and the demands of society as well as the quiet and peace he needed to finish his collection of Nine Little Fairy Tales and get them ready for publication. Although South Kensington was near to everything that the great world revered, and not half a mile from his place of birth and his childhood residence, it was, in 1919, a place in free fall from its glory days, the great houses being broken up into flats and rooming-houses, and its great cream stucco façades looking increasingly tired and begrimed as leases expired, families fled and ownership splintered.

    On this day, in April 1919, at half past seven in the evening, Henry Herbert walked back to the Frazer Hotel after not having attended a concert of Mendelssohn and Schubert at the Aeolian Hall. The reason for his non-attendance was that the concert had been cancelled because of the “influenza epidemic” and, as he walked back to Queen’s Gate, past the groups of delivery boys waiting with their bicycles, the cabbies at the rank, the loiterers around the Gentlemen’s subterranean convenience and those few intent upon some business, he was for the first time hit with the realization that although the terrible war was over, something equally terrifying had taken its place, something that was evident in the subtly changed activity and atmosphere of the London streets. He had also taken note of a story that had been buried in the middle pages of most newspapers and variously reported as “General Dyer defends the Empire as illegal meeting broken up at Amritsar” to “Two hundred natives killed in the Punjab.”

    Henry Herbert knew he was different from other men but after over 40 years of life still hadn’t quite worked out what it was that made him a constant outsider. Although he maintained decorous relations he was certainly at odds with his commercially-minded family to whom turning a decent profit took precedence over matters of the heart or art. As the only son of seven children, the preponderance of females put a terrible weight of expectation upon Henry Herbert’s narrow shoulders, far, far greater than the modest expectations placed upon his six sisters – that they should marry, and marry well enough not to bring disgrace upon the family. Four of them had accomplished what had been asked of them, not spectacularly but respectably, two were unmarried and certain to remain so, a disappointment to their parents but a minor one compared to Henry Herbert’s earth-shattering failure to do even the most miniscule part of what was expected of him, the only boy.

    He loved his nephews and nieces, he adored his mother, he doted on his sisters, especially the unmarried youngest, Olive. He liked music and books, he loved pictures, he wrote fairy tales, he did illustrations, he collected engravings, he disliked sport, he was uninterested in politics, he was largely indifferent to the business that kept the great Empire turning. And now, for the first time, as he made his way through the streets of Kensington back to the Frazer Private Hotel on this day in April 1919, he had a flash of consciousness that not only had a major change come upon the world, wrought first by the terrible war that had just ended and now being consolidated with the palpable but hushed-up horrors of the influenza epidemic, but also that he himself, Henry Herbert, embodied this change in two ways. First in an awareness of how singular he was and the infinite vistas that opened because of this and how unlikely it was that the new world would be able to accommodate him, and second, that at the same time he was a part of this mass of human beings he encountered every day. This filled him with equal measures of fear and hope, putting him into a kind of stasis, and for a moment he was almost unable to breathe.

    He stopped for a few moments by the church on the corner of Queen’s Gate to catch his breath and regain his equilibrium.

    Having to some extent recovered, despite having soiled his lavender gloves on the sooty railing, he continued on the last stretch back to the Frazer Hotel.

    This crisis of the imagination was to be replicated by real events a few moments later. Hardly had he put his key in the door than it was opened from within by Mr. Mancini. Behind the bewhiskered and sweating landlord centre-stage was a supporting chorus of residents and servants in what seemed like a tableau of outrage.

    So what was this all about? After a lot of fevered explanation on the part of Mr. Mancini, it turned out that Miss Stratford-Tuke, the horsy girl from an impoverished county family who occupied the fourth floor back, had put in a complaint about a supposed visitor of Henry Herbert’s who had been encountered the previous day in the exceptionally dingy and dreary drawing room on the ground floor. This dark-skinned and hirsute young man, having been taken for a servant by Miss Stratford-Tuke and challenged for lolling in the chintz-covered armchair in front of the sulky heatless fire whilst perusing a year-old Illustrated London News provided by the establishment, had apparently proceeded to “insult” her.

    After many fevered accusations from the angry chorus. Henry Herbert got to the bottom of it. The visitor was a acquaintance of his, a certain Tommy Stephanides, a young cockney Greek whom he had met amongst the etched glass and chandeliers of the Salisbury Tavern on St. Martins Lane. Tommy had been sitting at a nearby table with a glass of beer and a small volume of poetry which Henry Herbert eventually recognized as identical to his own copy of Towards Democracy, a revolutionary collection in the style of Whitman by Edward Carpenter. The sight of this familiar green book had the unusual impetus of emboldening Henry Herbert to initiate a hesitant conversation with the young man sitting at the next table.

    From this interchange he learned to his amazement that the fellow had actually visited Edward Carpenter’s Uranian commune at Millthorpe in Yorkshire and the flyleaf had been signed by the man himself.

    Tommy Stephanides with his crisp black hair and sharply defined moustache had something of the extremist about him, uncompromising and fundamentalist almost, no apparent softness and yet, somehow, the softest, most revolutionary person Henry Herbert had ever met. Clever and sketchily-educated though he was, Tommy negotiated the world in a way that Henry Herbert could only dream of. He lived with his mother in a tiny flat near the market in Spitalfields and he worked as a typesetter at a nearby press that turned out pamphlets and manifestos for revolutionary causes. He had been born in London along with the 20th century. He’d always felt constrained by his circumstances and had always felt that there must be something better for him and his mother. He had a Portuguese pal who had gone out to British East Africa and had made a better life for himself.  But he lived his life as it was with a certainty and a commitment that seemed to spring from some source unavailable to Henry Herbert. He had a hunger for art and music and was doing his best to educate himself by attending evening classes at the Worker’s Educational Association, but his enormous energy still allowed him to find time to be outside the factory gates with pamphlets at least three evenings a week. It was, in fact, Tommy’s very certainties that made him able to be so soft. His negotiation with the world around him was without nuance, an absolute rejection of the rules by which the world was governed. This gave him an incredible freedom, including the freedom to be soft.

    Henry Herbert found Tommy physically alluring and was also cautiously attracted by his brave radicalism and his uncompromising vision.

    As the explanations unfolded against the background of anaglypta wallpaper, oleographs of  Osborne House and gas mantles in the dreary vestibule of the Frazer Hotel, it soon became clear that the ‘insult’ to Miss Stratford-Tuke was entirely in the young lady’s mind and that while Tommy may indeed not have behaved like a gentleman, his comportment had been largely reactive, a modest response to the pent-up fury in the young lady when she perceived that her accusations were empty.

    Henry Herbert had indeed invited Tommy to call on him at the Frazer Private Hotel. He loved the boy with the love of a true innocent. It was significant that it was Edward Carpenter that had brought them together. He knew well that he himself was not made for family life, the pursuit of money or the service of Empire but had never seen himself as any kind of revolutionary, while recognizing and accepting the fact that he was different. Picking up boys from the rich and hazardous street-life of post-war London, however tempting, was not Henry Herbert’s way. The terrible lessons of Oscar Wilde just over twenty years earlier had made him cautious. He sublimated his libido into his collecting, his daily routines and his fairy stories.

    *  *  *

    Glasgow docks, Berth 5, April 1923

    Olympia Stephanides in her widow’s black waited at the foot of the gangway of the RMS Doric bound for Mombasa with her case and bundle while her son  negotiated with a couple of officials. A motor taxi drew up and a dapper figure in a dark overcoat and with a cane emerged. The taxi-driver extracted a suitcase from the back.  The man tipped the cabbie and took charge of the suitcase. He looked around and, fixing his eyes on Mrs. Stephanides approached her, took her hand briefly and inclined his head to hers. Tommy finished his dealing with the officials and joined his mother and the gentleman.

    The ship’s horn sounded three times and suddenly the somewhat static scene of the wharf burst into frenetic life. The visually monochrome but socially divided crowd fast sorted itself into separate queues for the two gangways. To the observer it became evident that one was for steerage passengers, the other for first and second class. The man with the cane was seen to have a moment of hesitation, but after a brief consultation with Tommy, he joined the mother and son on the steerage gangway.

    The rain which had been threatening to fall started as the ship’s horn sounded again. The comings and goings ceased, the crowds on the wharf dispersed and the Doric drew away from the wharf and heaved slowly off into the grey Clyde and the world beyond.

    Whether the dapper gentleman had left the ship before it sailed or whether he had remained on board was not observed.

    Feature Image: John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow Docks 1881.