Tag: Dominic Mallen fiction

Fiction: The Cliff

“It’s been two days. We gotta to do something. It’s gonna go rotten.”
“I know. I’m thinking.”
“About what we talked about?”
“What?”
“Get on the Great Ocean Road. Out past Martyrs Bay.”
“Yeah. I know the place. Near the twelve apostles.”
“We were there with Jessie that time, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. Alright. Let’s do it then. Get some sleep, we’re leaving here at two.”
“In the morning?”
“Course in the fucking morning.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“We’ll get there before sun up.”
‘I’ll get the weights.’
“On ya.”
Wilko and Daz settled it that night. How to get rid of the body. They had bought half a kilo of speed from Jock Cooper up in Melbourne and things had gone wrong. In the fight, Daz shot Jock dead and now they had him wrapped in carpet and duct tape in the boot of Wilko’s blue Ford Cortina. They had never killed anyone before and both had a dread feeling about their circumstance. They were consumed with dark emotion. At this point they were the only ones that knew about the murder. No-one had heard the gun shot. The next farm house was four miles away. Anyway, the sound of gunshots out there wasn’t uncommon even if someone had. Shooting kangaroos was one of Wilko’s jobs. In short, no one was looking for them, yet. They hadn’t left Wilko’s farm since the killing. They had been living with the body for two days, wondering what to do.
The adrenaline rush of the kill surprised them by its force. The weight of becoming a killer threatened to overwhelm Daz, but the two days he had spent with the body had given him time to meditate on their situation. The fury that led to the murder was now partly subdued by a lack of remorse. Daz had pulled the trigger, but their history was intertwined closely, and to betray each other would be to betray their childhood selves. A notion beyond their imaginings. They were in it together and they knew it. They both understood that if they didn’t keep cool heads they were done for. And now, after two days, the time had come to act. There had been a heavy rain storm that day and the area around Woodend was drenched through. There was a chill wind in the evening air.
‘Fucking cold.’ Said Wilko as he put on an extra sweater and zipped up his coat.
“Chat.”
Perhaps that’s why the country exists in the first place, so the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish didn’t have to suffer the winters any longer. Wilko looked out the kitchen window as it was being battered by the rain.
“We’ve fucking gone and done it now.” He said to Daz.
“If you haven’t got anything useful to say don’t say it. Alright? Now get ta fucking sleep. We’ve got work to do. If we don’t get it right it’s thirty-five years in the slammer. So, I’m only going to say this once. You be careful hey. Or I’ll fucking kill ya.” Daz turned out the light and soon after began snoring, but Wilko stayed by the window watching the rain. He was too alive to sleep. The game was on. Wilko looked over at Daz sleeping and burned a cigarette, each draw he took carefully and deliberately. Looking carefully, he became fascinated by his sleeping friend. Wilko was scared of Daz at times. Ever since they were kids there had been a hierarchy. Daz was both older and stronger and those two factors clinched it. If it had to be called, Wilko was probably the cleverer of the two but there wasn’t much in it. Neither of them had a handle on science, or God for that matter, they were men who were characterized by action rather than thought. And that, if the truth be known, was how they found themselves in the situation they were now in.

*

The alarm clock went off at precisely 2.00 am and Daz was up and dressed in seconds. He splashed a bit of water on his face from the sink and lit a cigarette, trying to prepare his mind and body for the grim task ahead.
“Oi. Get up ya fucking bludger, we gotta go. Get a move on!” And Daz kicked the edge of Wilko’s cot. As Wilko rose up quickly in the bed something went wrong.
“Ah fuck!” Wilko let out a low, doleful whine.
“Come on, what are ya waitin for?”
“Me fucking neck mate. I’ve pulled a fucking muscle in me neck. Ah ya cunt.” Wilko sat up and almost screamed with pain but managed to suppress it with a chuntering kind of sigh.
“Oh, this is fucking all I need. Where’s the fucking beer? I need a fucking beer. My neck’s fucking crook mate. Ah fuck.” Daz went over to the fridge and pulled out a six pack of beers. As if his mind refused to believe it, he tried to move his neck in a normal way and there it was again. The intense pain of a pulled neck muscle.
“Come on get ready. No drinking in the car though. We gotta keep our heads down and out of any copper’s sight.”
“What about me neck?”
“Fuck ya neck mate!” Came suddenly, shouting. We gotta get rid of him. You hear me? I’m not fucking joking. Get your shit together, we’re leaving. Now.”
A forlorn looking Wilko stood up, clasping his neck, and followed Daz out of the farm house and towards the truck. The rain was coming down hard when they opened the farmhouse door. Wilko looked up into the rain as he stepped off the porch to wake himself up and the pulled muscle gave him a shooting pain that rattled his whole body. He grimaced and left his hand firmly by his throat to remind him of the pain he had suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. The rain pounded them as they walked towards the car, and there was an audible ‘fuck me’ from Daz as he put the key in the door and turned it. Wilko could now only move the top half of his body in a robotic way. If he needed to look in a certain direction he had to move his whole torso towards the object, keeping his head and neck as rigid as possible. As Wilko sat down and shut the car door he turned too quickly and again an intense shooting pain bounced from his neck muscle to his brain. He grimaced and found himself unable to muster words. He felt acutely miserable. He put on his seat belt slowly, taking great care not to turn his head. He still had sleep in his eyes. ‘Drive slow and safe, I can’t move me neck.’ Daz turned the key in the ignition but even the engine starting wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of the drumming rain on the car. The headlights came on and they started moving cautiously along the country lane in the wild storm. Before long they turned on to the main road that would take them south towards the twelve apostles, the great rising stones that awaited them in the fortress of the swirling sea. That would be the three of them. Daz, Wilko and the dead, now decomposing body of Jock Cooper in the boot.
One of the bonuses of trying to dispose of a dead body in Australia is its vast emptiness. It has half the population of Spain spread over a continent almost the size of Europe. The only problem was that driving that late at night might arouse suspicion, in the unlikely event of them passing the police. There had been no sign of the law as they reached the Great Ocean Road. They glimpsed the Southern Ocean, singing in the moonlight. Wilko had one hand on his neck as he lit a smoke and opened the window a few inches, only to feel the rain speckling his face.
‘What do we do if we get pulled?’ Asked Wilko.
“Stay calm. I’ll tell them I just found out me mums had a fall and we’re on our way to the hospital. I’ve done it before. It’s about the performance.”
‘Bit of an actor hey? Fair play. So, what’s the name of the hospital?”
Daz didn’t know.
“Fuck’s sake.” Wilko said in a disappointed, worried way and looked out the window, suddenly mesmerised by the glimmering ocean light. As Wilko turned naturally to take in the view, pain pulsed through his neck and he leant forward with a sigh. They both fell into a melancholy silence.
The one thing they knew to be well careful of was the potholes. Ruin the suspension or burst a tyre out in the wilderness in a storm and you were done. It was still pitch black when they reached the Great Ocean Road and the pelting rain turned the Ford Cortina into a kind of bongo. There was almost no one out there. Every ten minutes or so they would be passed by the rolling headlights of a car, with their eyes peeled for the coppers.
“How much further d’ya’reckon?” Said Wilko.
“Get the map out, it’s in the glove compartment. We’re coming up to Lorne.”
“Righty-o.”
As Wilko studied the map in the passenger seat, a sign flew past in the rainy lights that said ‘THE TWELVE APOSTLES 145 KMS’. They both thought about the body in the boot of car, driving on in silence with the storm making the music about them, Wilko with his head down to the map and Daz with his hands high up on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, unblinking. They would be there at the cliff in a few hour’s tops.
“We’ll get there well before sun up.” Daz reiterated. ‘Rain’s slowing us down.’ Forgetting about his neck momentarily, Wilko turned to look at Daz and felt a fierce shooting pain shot through his neck again. Now, the agony rendered him silent, and he slowly closed his eyes, wondering whether it was all worth it. Life. Was it worth the suffering. Daz looked at him and knew he wasn’t faking. Then there was a flash of sheet lightening as Daz turned his eyes back on the road and in the illumination, he suddenly saw a fully grown female kangaroo bouncing across the road in the headlights.
“Fuck,” Shouted Daz and he hit the brakes. Never swerve a roo was a thing his dad had taught him from his earliest years. As the pain in his neck subsided Wilko opened his eyes to the sound of screeching wheels, and the first thing he saw was the Kangaroo smashing into the windscreen with an almighty bang.
“Cunt!” Shouted Daz in the death flash. After the great thud there was the sound of shattering glass, then the airbags, and then the halting tyres on the tarmac. Finally, the falling rain from the womb of the car. Inside silence. The vehicle was still on the road as they came to a complete standstill with the dead Kangaroo up on the bonnet, dead in the broken windscreen. Time passed before they began to stir. They came to their senses almost simultaneously.
“Fuck a duck.” Said Wilko. Daz laughed a mad laugh. Wilko turned his painful neck to look at him and Wilko registered the bright red and scarlet in Daz’s face as he laughed, as the insignia of a maniac. The body of the Kangaroo was half inside the car and Daz could see its dead eyes staring vacantly between the air bags.
“Fuck.” Came the groaning Wilko, he now had whiplash on top of the pulled muscle. Daz pushed the airbag away the best he could, opened the door and stepped out into the rain. He retched a little and spat out bile but there was no puking. His heart was beating fast, getting wetter by the second in the downpour. The sight of the dead Kangaroo on the bonnet increased the mania in his laughter. He was feeling the overwhelming sense of providence that surviving death can invoke. He did a little dance in celebration with his arms in the air. Then he heard Wilko’s voice screaming out of the darkness.
“What are doing ya mad cunt?! Remember what we’ve got in the boot? What if someone sees us hey?! Get in the car. Fuck’s sake. Come on. Get in the fucking car! Let’s go.”
Daz looked up and down the rain soaked, night time highway. There was nothing out there, except the great swaying trees and the night. This was the boundless country. They both became lost in thought as they tried to keep calm. Using all their strength they took hold of each end of the dead kangaroo, lifted it off the bonnet and dropped it on the grass by the side of the road. They both stared down at the dead animal, their silence revealing the quick flow of their thoughts. They got back in the car and drove away.
The night sky over the sea, illuminated by the hiding moon, glowed in the grey mist. The seaward clouds cloaked the galaxy from sight, returning their minds to the here and now, to life, the thing that matters only. They were alone on the road. The coast was theirs, the marvellous world around them, brimming at oceans edge. The headlights of the car were being studied by the birds in the sky riding down the dark road, swinging down above the electric headlight beams to investigate this unnatural thing stalking the marsh. The two men in the car drove on in silence. They had survived. The storm came rolling over them, the rain beat down on the windscreen, and nature, the sea, the sky, the rain and the wind, went on behaving as though they didn’t exist. They tingled to be alive.
Rain was seeping through the broken windscreen as the front left wheel hit a pothole and they bumped and lurched violently making Wilko’s neck spasm in agony. He muttered to himself. He took the pain. He knew it was nothing compared to what was to come if they didn’t get rid of the body. Their minds now had a steely focus. Once the body was in the sea their trouble would end. Their worries would be over. Jock Cooper hadn’t even been reported missing. Nothing on the news. The police were nowhere to be seen. If the body was swept away by the ocean and devoured by the bottom feeders, they would be home and dry with only their consciences to trouble them, which wasn’t any real danger at all.
The rain quietened and the forest gave way to barren scrub. They both looked up out of the windows and saw the parting of the clouds revealing the glowing white disc of the moon. Wilko slowed the car and dimmed the headlights. When he was sure there was nothing in their way he turned them off. In the far distance the faint outline of the twelve apostles signalled their destination approaching. The giant cylindrical rocks worn through eons by the punishing waves seemed strange and lonely. They had been forged by time, and birthed by the undying sea.
“Fuckin’ bonza.” Said Daz. It was the first time he had smiled in a while. They took a moment to appreciate the spectacular view, surely one of the rarest on the entire continent, and then trundled on down the vacated road, towards the cliff.
They took the last turning and slowed the car to a crawl. The headlights were off but there was still enough moon light to navigate. They parked the car next to a grass knoll about fifty metres away from the edge. Daz turned the engine and lights off and they sat there for a few moments in the hope the rain would pass.
“Where did you put the weights?”
“I already tied ‘em on. Don’t worry we’re strong enough. Come on. Let’s get a move on.”
They got out of the car and were greeted by a sweeping drizzle, not the heavy battering rain of before. Wilko opened the boot wide and they both looked down at the rolled carpet, with a pair of black shoes visible at the end. Daz took out a Stanley knife and began to saw at the duct tape. Soon the carpet opened and the lifeless corpse of Jock Cooper was revealed, his eyes open, with an eerie, surprised expression on his face. They both were able to ignore it, because of contempt. Daz was tempted to spit on the body but held himself back. “Focus. Focus.” He said to himself, and himself alone.
“What are we going to do with the carpet?”
“Cut it up and burn it.”
“Right-O.”
“Get his legs.” Wilko reached down, obeying the order. Daz threaded his arms under those of Jock Cooper and they headed out towards the cliff with their heads tilted down. The wind was whipping up strong enough to give them the feeling it was raining from the ground.
The cliff was giant. Not as high as the Cliffs of Moher, or the cliffs of Dover, but high enough to put the fear of God into them both. Both of them were scared to look over the precipice. As they approached the edge, the wind came up again and rain began to beat down harder than ever. Maybe nature was trying to stop them. Maybe the wind and the rain did know after all. That’s what Wilko thought as he trudged to the edge with the body, slipping on the muddy, rain sodden grass. It was Daz who was terrified of heights though, but he was the one who did the killing and he was the one who had the idea to throw the body off the cliff and into the sea.
“Nearly there!’ Shouted Daz through the howling wind and rain. Their hair and their clothes were already soaked through after a quick two minutes. There was a slight incline rising up towards the precipice and as they reached it Wilko lost his grip on Jock Cooper’s legs and they fell, splatting into the muddy earth.
“Fuck’s sake!” Shouted Daz, his voice carrying on the wind. “Careful ya fucking dumb cunt!’
“Don’t crack the shits, I’m fuckin trying alright!!”
“Fuck I got blood on me daks.”
“Burn ‘em later.”
“Ah me fucking neck! Cunt.” Wilko had dropped the dead legs hard into the mud, the pain in the muscle in his neck was too much to bear.
“Come on, lift! We’re nearly there!” Shouted Daz. Wilko straightened up his back as the rain beat down on him and the pain subsided enough to grab the dead legs and lift them back up. On they went in the dark and rain.
The wind was coming at them so hard they had their heads bent down towards it like they were pushing in a rugby scrum. The wrath of the storm had no mercy. When they were about ten metres from the very edge, they both lay down and began to roll the body. The wind felt less fierce on the ground but they could feel the wet cold mud and grass soaking through their shirts. As the dead body rolled over, the dead arms of Jock Cooper kept getting stuck underneath the weight of his body. The eyes were now closed as if he were sleeping drunk, getting rolled into the bed after a long night.
The wind abated as they got the body to the very edge of the cliff.
“Alright!” Shouted Daz. “After three, push as hard as you can!! One, Two…. Three!!” And they both simultaneously launched the dead body off the edge of the cliff into the crashing sea below. They both lay there motionless for almost a minute, experiencing an emotion not unlike a mountaineer at a summit. They had no words. It was done.
“Look over the edge.” Said Daz.
“Get fucked! You look over.”
“Fuck that mate.” The wind was blowing so hard it felt like it was pushing them towards the precipice.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.” Said Daz, keeping his vertigo hidden. They felt the rain again and crawled backwards on their bellies before they stood up, turned and started running back to the car through the night tempest, shouting and cheering and jumping for joy as they went. Daz had taken his shirt off and was swinging the waterlogged garment around his head, laughing the relief of the prisoner freed. They jumped into the car, turned the engine on and sped away down the back roads and country lanes that led to Melbourne.
The body of Jock Cooper fell lifeless from the edge of the cliff. Down it dropped. Fifteen metres below was a ledge the size of a living room. And there the body landed with a quiet thud, made silent by the storm. It bounced slightly forward coming to rest at the edge of the promontory, his left-hand peeking slightly over the edge as if it were a man clinging to the side of his bed. And there it stayed on the ledge, twenty metres above the sea.

*

Almost two weeks went by. Early in the morning Noel Manning and his son Joshua got in their trawler and headed up the coast towards the Twelve Apostles to see what the fishing was like, as they had a couple of times a week for the past few months, concentrating their work in the waters to the west. It was a calm, beautiful sunny morning and the white horses were resting. They went at a steady pace of eight knots, with the nets strung out behind them. They sailed a couple of kilometres from the coast most of way and then turned starboard to see what they could find in shallower waters. Noel turned the engine off and they bobbed a hundred and fifty metres or so from the land. Joshua’s keen eyes spotted it first by chance as he glanced up at a flock of seagulls swooping to feed on the cliff. He saw what he correctly thought to be a human hand, dangling.
“Dad. Can ya see that?”
“What?”
“Up there on the cliff. Is that a hand?”
“You’re havin me on.”
“Look.” Noel went in to the cabin and fetched a pair of binoculars that he used for birdwatching. He stood there on the deck and pressed his face against the eyepieces. It took a few moments to get the binoculars in focus against the edge of the cliff and he tracked the ledge from right to left. He paused as his eyes and brain joined. He put the binoculars down a couple of inches and then back to his eyes in disbelief. A human hand and a denim shirt cuff dangling over the grassy lip.
“Alright I’m turning the boat around. Get on to the police.’ He told his son.
That afternoon a police helicopter swooped in and identified a body on the ledge and before nightfall it had been recovered. Daz and Wilko had stripped the body so it took a while to identify the body, but Jock Cooper was a well-known face around Melbourne and had been reported missing less than a week after his disappearance by his girlfriend Tammy. The cadaver had been partly eaten away by scavenging birds and his remains were a disgusting sight to behold. Tammy had to identify the body and was left a traumatised landlady in Alice Springs.
The forensic team discovered the bullet hole almost immediately and a murder investigation was underway that night. Almost two weeks had passed by but the crick in Wilko’s neck was still giving him jip. He was still holding his neck in his hand as Daz switched the TV on and slumped down on the sofa next to Wilko with a can of VB and a lit cigarette. It was a news story saying the remains of Jock Cooper had been found on the ledge of a cliff near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria. When Wilko and Daz said ‘cunt’ in unison, there was a kind of musicality to the syllable.

– –

Feature Image: Richard Mikalsen

December 4, 2025
The Dish Washer

He put on the yellow marigolds with some difficulty, while at the same time remembering something a wise Roman stoic had once written that went ‘dig inside yourself. Inside there is a well of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging,’ and wondered if he had learned the line while studying for his PHD. Perhaps it was earlier when he sat long evenings in the library at Senate House attempting to become a master of arts. He couldn’t quite remember. His past was becoming a single entity, where once it had been fractured. He had woken up early that extremely cold winter morning to become a dish washer, or kitchen porter as it was advertised, and he wondered as he battled through the arctic weather, what had become of his long and arduous education. All those hours worrying about exams, all those times revising, researching, reading and editing and now at the age of forty-three he had seventy-three pounds to his name. He poured the washing up liquid into the large metallic sink under the instruction of the young Romanian woman and turned on the hot tap. “The water must be hot” she informed him. He looked into the mountainous bubbles as they slowly rose in the basin and in them, saw a galaxy emerge. Bliss came over him when he thought he could kill boredom with his imagination alone, and the silence of the universe out-manoeuvred by a simple playfulness of mind.

As he began to scrub the dirty dishes, he wondered what his thirty years of education had all been for. It couldn’t have been for the money. Like the pieces of paper tucked away in a draw in the old homestead, his past successes were quietly hidden now, to mention them a suggestion of either boastfulness or failure. The first pan he washed had burnt black crusts of pastry stuck along the sides and he began to scrub it with a wire brush. It was stubborn and he applied more washing up liquid, and gave some extra elbow grease to remove it, but the dark stain wouldn’t budge. Minutes rolled by to the sound of scrubbing. The steam from the hot water was like sweat on his face. The harder he worked the more intense his feelings of failure became. The failure of his life’s work up until that moment. Was he ‘better’ than this? Was he better than washing dishes for a living? Scrubbing dishes to make ends meet. He must be ‘better’ than this he thought, as he finally removed the last piece of caked in pastry, but he couldn’t exactly work out why.

Minh, the old Vietnamese lady that had worked in the kitchen for many years, smiled at him as she passed to go about the morning chore of cutting the bread for that afternoon’s school lunch. Her smile brightened his spirits. Three more dirty trays arrived and he submerged them in the suds. As if stuck on a treadmill like a hamster in a wheel his thoughts returned to his predicament. Only a job and a place, that would certainly change in time, as all the times and places of his life had changed up until then. He remembered another thing the Roman stoic had said, about change being a constant of all life, and was contented.

Maybe now, at his age, he should be making more money than he was. He never really cared about money if the truth be known. If he had enough, he had enough, and enough was enough. It was one of the reasonings in his life to which he stayed true. The main thing that he got out of his philosophical studies was the idea of becoming good. Then, being good, was the natural state. We shouldn’t be kind to others for our own sake but rather because being kind brings the universe, the whole, into alignment. He looked around at the clock on the wall and it was exactly noon. Then he did an hour’s worth of thinking and when he looked back up, it said four minutes past. ‘Most work is trading your life, or time, for money. Maybe the whole of nature is just hope, manifest’ he thought as he gazed down at the collapsing suds. His imagination had awakened in the uneventfulness of the morning. He felt the warlike silence.

He emptied the sink and then spent a while picking the soggy pasta and vegetables from the plug hole and decanted them into a bin bag. Then back to the sink to refill it with soapy hot water. He looked up and out of the window, and saw a crisp blue winter sky. On the thin branches of a leafless tree, glistening crystal droplets of rain shone below the grey sky of the recent Atlantic storm and his work came to a discreet standstill. Two robin red breasts danced on a twig. Behind the January tree was a road and a queue of people, some with umbrella’s waiting in the flour mist, waiting for the bus that would take them away from this same old place. None of them had noticed the rain-dropped leaves in the downpour, each one a kind of planet, a world within worlds, making up the whole.

There was an old cockney woman that worked in the kitchen that liked nothing more than power, driven on every morning, through every day, by the smallness of her sad world, butchering the language with her soulless rants and dull observations. She walked into the kitchen and ruined the moment for him by talking for twenty-two seconds about the steam that was coming from the oven. The words that came from her mouth had no value or interest to the dishwasher but it was important for her to hear her own voice to remind others that she was in charge. In charge of this small kitchen, and in charge of her small world. He didn’t attempt to say anything to her, but he thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was kinder. More dirty plates were dropped with a clang into the soapy water which meant more work, which meant more money for him, even though he was being paid minimum wage, his presence alone was earning. ‘This is the way society says self-worth is achieved of course. That in some way or other life must me earned, it’s not good enough just being born. Born poor I mean.’ He thought.

Then he thought back on his education and experienced a sublime uplift when he reasoned that learning in and of itself can never be a waste of time, but then his gladness abated as he considered the other side of the coin. What if, like those that had been brought up in religious cults, an entire life of thoughts could be wasted. If the truth lay south and you walked north for 84 years where would that leave you on your death bed? Lost, presumably, but perhaps happy and content. Perhaps not. He considered different belief systems in the world. The only wisdom he could glean was to avoid dogmatism at all costs, and to cast doubt on certainty. And then he thought that must be easier said than done when he thought about the importance of conviction, and the humiliations it is heir to. To work, to seek meaning for a lifetime, in a lifetime, and then have it robbed at the finish line may be too much to bear. Maybe Epicurus was right, in the end. Also, maybe hedonism has a value. To dance, to sing and play was good, and better than the opposite. He saw a side-burned face in the suds, ‘lose your sense of humour and you’re fucked’ came the Burslem voice from the sink water. His memory played games again. And then from nowhere the voice of Jeffrey Bernard on Desert Island Discs. Dying, and with the cigarette smoke almost travelling with the radio waves saying to the interviewer ‘to me Mozart is divinity’ and then pressed by her on the regrets he had now he faced death he replied matter-of-factly ‘I wish I had been a better person. It’s as simple as that.’ The dishwasher thought there was a beauty in this acknowledgment, in the recognition of the fact.

The dishwasher began to dream of the mountains of Scotland where he had once lived, and where he had felt, once upon a time, a thousand years pass in the afternoon rays. Memory, and dreams of a future past, vied together as if they were one entity. Why do we have to earn what we never chose? Born and demanded to work. He thought. It was a melancholy meditation. He thought ‘If life is a competition, then maybe we are just cunts, to use the proper Saxon vernacular’. For the rich to stay rich the poor must be poor, this was the application of pure logic to him, a revelation in its simplicity. It’s matter-of-factness. What if everybody was rich? What if there was no-one to wash the dishes? What then? The old cockney lady continued talking because it was something to do, but at the end of her soul destroying jabbering’s she said something that interested him very much, when she described how when she was growing up in the east end of London it was ordained in her community not to get above yourself and say or act as though you are better than anyone else, ‘because you are not.’ He witnessed a different, more humane side to her. He mulled over her wisdom, intrigued by her comment, until only a few minutes later when she described her joy as she waved her flag on the Mall up at the balcony where Prince Andrew and ‘their highnesses’ stood and waved back. His democratic socialism and her monarchism were spiritually incompatible. He began to load up the plastic tray with cups and turned on the machine once more. To the dishwasher, her way of thinking was more toilsome even than the constant repetition of washing dishes. As the machine came on, the noise allowed him to think for a moment. It didn’t matter how many material things he had. How much money. What mattered was what was felt, what was thought, what could be imagined, what could be created, out of thin air. He looked up and saw that Minh was smiling to herself as she thought a happy thought, not knowing anybody was watching.

The following morning, he arrived to work early and felt content working for a while alone, preparing for the day. That was a good time of the morning, full of potential. The dishwasher tingled with dreaming. Or was he a philosopher? With his mind and hands at work simultaneously he could be both. The plump old Cockney woman barged into the kitchen fifteen minutes late for work just as he was thinking about definitions of love, and to placate her anger at being late, began to talk at him in a loud condescending voice about the floor not being mopped. He said he would do it calmly with his body language saying ‘if you would politely leave me be.’ He remembered the word ‘Ataraxia’ which can mean ‘freedom from disturbance’. She continued talking loudly and when she said ‘we was’ for the third time he drifted off into an internal debate and wondered how many people in England who disliked foreigners and foreign languages as she did, and said so, understood that their handle on the English language was ungood. He felt certain if he brought the subject to light he would be hated for it. He would be damned as a language snob or worse, a snob. He said nothing. He thought the language of accents reflect souls in their own ways. The accent reflects belonging. ‘People who change their accents no longer wish to belong. The new tribe outweighs the old.’ He thought. He wondered about the imagination and whether it is built from the world we see, the world we experience, or is it born from something separate, like the unconscious mind being born from ancestral dreams. He had looked into Buddhism and concluded he didn’t want to free his mind of thought. Also, he didn’t want to reach Nirvana because he felt from there, there was nowhere else to go. The trick of life was to keep on learning, imagining, until all faculties are lost. A huge pile of plates came in after lunchtime and this was the signal to keep his head down working, until he clocked off at 4.30pm. He had a take away that night as he had become sick of the sight of unclean plates, and the endless necessity of washing them.

He went home to his bedsit with his fish and chips in a bag and sat down in front of the TV with a six pack of beers and a packet of cigarettes. ‘No point working if you can’t enjoy it’ was the persistent thought he had on leaving his places of work. For relaxation he played computer scrabble as a form of meditation but he found writing, the thing he dreamed of doing, difficult, and rewarding only very occasionally. He would sometimes strum away at the acoustic guitar in the corner of the room which he had had since university. It brought back good memories, just being there. All the dreams he had when he was a young man were now living memory, the whistle blown on stardom, but then he concluded his youth was hard enough without the added complication of fame. He had been friends with a man at university that had been desperate for musical stardom, and years later he had heard through the grapevine that the man had taken his own life by throwing himself into the Thames. He wondered whether the suicide and the reality of unfilled dreams were interconnected and concluded that they probably were. The sad thought was silenced by the cracking open of a can of cold lager. Television, which was once the drug of the nation, had been replaced by the internet, almost overnight, or at least while no-one was looking, but he was hanging on by his remote. He went to bed half tipsy, taking care what he wished for.

Early the next morning he was on his way to work when he saw the crowd at the bus stop gathering around someone on the floor, there was an obvious commotion. He went over to see if he could be of any help and when he leaned over the shoulders to see what was going on he saw Minh, the old Vietnamese lady he worked with, lying on the floor clutching her heart. The sight of her suffering made him panic and worry deeply. He told everyone he was her colleague and then asked if someone had called an ambulance to which they replied they had and it would be there any minute now. He leant down as she opened her eyes and she registered his presence with a smile. He smiled back. Then she closed her eyes and the hand on her heart relaxed as if she was falling asleep. He called out to her but she made no reply. In this moment the paramedics arrived with the whirring of sirens and took over. Very shortly afterwards she was on a stretcher being carried into the ambulance. He explained he was her colleague and asked if he could accompany them to hospital. They said yes. As they left, he turned around and the assembled crowd reminded him of a herd of wildebeest that look on as one of their own is devoured by a lion. He wondered what the Roman stoic would have thought and concluded it would probably be, ‘this is the way of thing’s’ or words to that effect.

At the hospital he was told the sad news that Minh, the kind Vietnamese lady that he worked with had died. He travelled back to the school kitchen where they worked by foot. Everything on the walk took on a new state of life. The glittering frost now had the soul of symphonies, the barren trees proof of nature’s fight, the foggy veil of the sun emanating a magical winter light away above the horizon. He walked through the kitchen door with the sorrow in his face reflecting the sad news he had to tell and was greeted by the plump old cockney lady who in a loud voice said to him before he had a chance to speak ‘what time do you call this you caaant!’ He looked her in the eye. ‘Minh is dead, and so are you, to me.’ He tossed his apron back on the pile. She looked shocked but instantly refused to apologise. The dishwasher looked at her and said ‘I was wondering if I was better than this job. No, I don’t think so. But I am better than being bullied by you. Dig?”

“Go on then. Do one, get aaaat!” She said loudly and waved him towards the door. He turned to leave and saw the large pile of washing she would have to do if the agency didn’t have anyone. They probably did though. There are always people who have to work for poor wages. That provides the surplus, but I suppose that’s a story for another time. He hadn’t lasted long in the job as dishwasher. ‘I can’t be having that’, he thought as he closed the door behind him and walked out into the freezing day. He carried on down the icy sludge path to freedom and recalled the Roman stoic, ‘Pain is neither unendurable or unending, as long as you remember its limits and do not exaggerate it in your imagination’. Jobless for the foreseeable, again, he was hit by the thought that his life could be ten or a hundred times more fulfilled, joyful and meaningful as someone who earned ten or a hundred, or a million times more than himself, if he had the right frame of mind. It was the destiny of the dishwasher to live in his imagination, and his imagination didn’t pay by the hour.

Feature Image: Gillian Gamboa

September 3, 2025
Psychopomp

The magic place lay under a blanket of snow. On the ridge of the park he walked, a silhouette shifting, hunched and thoughtful under night. The lone trudging figure, wearing a long black wool coat and a brown fedora, moved carefully through the virgin white crunch towards the warren of streets by the Thames. He paused and felt the cold wind on his face as the panorama light of London grew before him. The city had grown to block out the starlight. Everything was quiet. The park was locked but he had jumped the fence and wandered in the snow past the general’s statue that stands watch over the sleeping city. He had something particular in mind. This would be the night of his death. Above the bridge, watching the river, the angel quietly waited.

His thoughts were closing in on him, condensing the entire galaxy into his field of vision. Every sinew, every hair on his legs and arms, his liver and his feet, his knees, his fingertips, and his nose, were simply a mortal vehicle for his thoughts. A carriage for his soul, for his fleeting being, anchored in evermore. The falling snow was now resting on him, but he was happy to let it settle, comforted by the nature’s way. He had spent most of that day walking the city streets, seeking aloneness among the architecture. He could ignore himself in the crowd. He thought to himself “The London crowd will only end when mankind ends. Maybe that’s why it can be so pitiless.” The blizzard had arrived hand in hand with sundown and the snowfall continued into the night. It sought the soul that cannot flee, that will not hide. It sought the lone figure, who’s spirit was in rebellion. He had decided to murder the endless voice in his head. It was however indecision itself that had brought him to this sad moment.

London was keeping him alive like a patient on a drip. The breathing history of the buildings, the ancient lineaments that welcome each generation, giving the children clues as what to do next, held him in its familiar embrace. The ghosts that had built it had walked him home many times. Now they had fallen as silent as the snow. He looked out at the skyline and registered how it had changed so dramatically within his short lifetime. The glass towers becoming a money made monolith before his eyes, but somehow lacking Manhattans punch. The lack of stone in the shining spectacle reminded the man of the impermanence of glass and metal. Not like good old St Paul’s cathedral, smiling in the vista. He looked ahead down the pavement and saw that the white drift was untouched.

He looked at his phone. One twenty-three in the morning. Maybe no-one had been here. He looked back and saw the single line of footprints he had made being slowly erased by the blizzard. He looked around. There was no-one. He suddenly felt the familiar loneliness, that old dog, the pang of memory. It was the city itself. Empty as the soul of sorrow. Every single generation now gone, every one up until these last living three, vanished, returned to oblivion. He looked up at the snowfall in the lamplight and it eased his troubled mind. He had wanted to die. Not now though, not in that moment, registering the long-forgotten struggles, the long-forgotten victories of the unremembered ones that had brought him here, to this moment. Mesmerized, he stood still for a while. London lay before him like an eternal thing. That night the falling snow was beautiful, and he stayed long enough to understand.

There was one place open. A private party in someone’s house going late into the night. The house stood on the edge of the river with a Christmas tree of white twinkling lights in the window. There were cheerful voices inside, warm in the snowy night. It was a birthday. The stranger wearing the brown fedora and the long coat opened the door and the patrons registered his presence with a dart of the eyes in the candle light. Dancing between the chattering voices was music. The beautiful sound of violins. He sat down in a black leather chair and closed his eyes. He started wondering about music. Music the liberator, the soul of dreams, emancipator of captives, of slaves, uplifter of the downhearted. He wondered whether music was evidence of something unique in us. Music, sorrow and saviour. Creator of dark and light. The meaning of barren planets. The fertile spirit of the wasteland. Crying tears of sorrow and tears of joy. It is both winning and losing. It is hope. It is delight. It is anger tamed. It is dancing. It is the life in the smile, somehow surviving the death of the world.

Above the bridge the statue of the angel with its wings set to heaven watched the Thames flowing, waiting in silence under the falling snow. ‘It has the power to make you brave enough to die.’ He thought ‘Who masters who? The music or the musician?” The lone figure walked out onto the street and lighting a cigarette looked up at the sky as if it was watching him. When the cigarette was done and the cold of the snow had been felt, he re-entered in search of one more drink. He sat back in the chair with another glass of Jameson. The people at the party knew him but he didn’t know them, because he had garnered some fame. He regretted not being inconspicuous in the world. ‘It would have helped my art if I was unknown’ he thought to the point of melancholy. He had been drinking whiskey heavily the night before and it had burnt his brain-peace. When he slowly opened his eyes that morning, registering the havoc lonely rocking and rolling can have, and not just on the liver, he realised his mind-zone was also faltering. Between his brain and his mind he now found himself floating. It had taken him the whole day to recover from the hangover. He had laid in the single bed long enough for it to become uncomfortable. He got up, washed his face only, lit a cigarette and looked out of the window into the pale winter glow of the street and remembered he was young enough. Life took on new meaning, a subtle charge of being, without foreboding or fear. Someone offered him a line of cocaine on a recently microwaved plate. The crisp twenty-pound note bit gently into his nostril as he breathed the powder up his nose feeling slightly invigorated against his drunkenness. He smiled as he handed the plate and note back, but stayed seated as if the party was a film and he was in the theatre just to watch.

Next came the green faerie. He looked into the glass of absinthe as if it was a beautiful painting and as he lifted the glass to his mouth he thought of her. How could he not? As it hit his throat and he swallowed, all he heard was music in his head, above the chattering of the kitchen party. The white lights of the Christmas tree made his eyes glow. He suddenly felt at home in his wanderings for the first time that day. He drank another whiskey back and sighed a great sigh of relief. It took him a minute to adjust to its potency. He realised he was drunk and experiencing a curdling head rush, so he stood up out of the leather chair and walked slowly and deliberately, giving accidently the false impression he was sober. A sudden rush of energy came over him, like the surge of a cold shower. He thanked the strangers who implored him to stay so they could indulge in his celebrity, bade them farewell and exited the place in favour of the snowy streets. The sweet noise of the party evaporated on the lane. It was the middle of the night and he was alone again. Still darkness. The angel watched the river from high up on her perch.

He trudged on through the thick snow. The labyrinth of London was not unfriendly. He made his way forward, trudging through the whirling white, back towards the heart of the city. Now the thing that tormented him didn’t need to be killed. It had gone into hiding. The strong drinks he had consumed were coursing through his veins, but the falling snow had begun to retreat, its diminished ferocity had tempered his awe. His mind returned to its once contented state. It wrapped itself around his body again until he could feel no cold, and see only the hollow of the night.

The lone figure had walked nearly a mile when he looked up and saw a police car with its main lights off, driving slowly alongside him. Annoyance, followed by a dim throng of adrenaline. Could be fun to run. He avoided eye contact with the passing car. He noticed a taxi cab on the other side of the road. The man waved him in and the snow fell from him as he sat down in the car and closed the door. He smiled to see the police lights disappear down the road and gently kneaded the bag of powder in his coat pocket. He said ‘Shaftesbury Avenue’ and the car began to move. He rested his head back and watched as the snowy city passed him by, knowing for sure, for certain if he lived, that some years from now he would only be able to remember glimpses of this undiluted beauty. How can someone remember their exact sequence of thoughts when so much time has passed? Memory is an image in which sometimes lives a feeling. He conceived again his plan. Perhaps the end of pain approached, the end of suffering for good. He began to tremble.

Thoughts of Soho re-emerged in his mind’s eye. That’s where the lonely people go. That was his tribe. He thanked the driver and got out and saw he wasn’t the only one lost. He walked past prostitutes who beckoned him to join. It was a potent mix, desire and loneliness. Perhaps the most potent. Disregarding humiliation, the cause of almost all violence, his temptation was reflected in his change of pace. He carried on with the melting appearance of a fake smile. One of the prostitutes dressed in a skirt of red leather asked for a cigarette. He spontaneously turned around and handed her one. The lack of mercy and compassion in her eyes chilled his spirit more than any winter night. He sensed something wicked deep inside her, but then thought it was only himself, reflected. He concluded as he turned and walked away toward the river that she had killed more innocence than most. ‘Good old London. It is beautiful in the snowfall.’ He thought. Sometimes people have been able to achieve this rarity, to build an environment that reflects their imagination. As the white haciendas of Andalusia are built for the sun, so London is built for the people now forgotten, the barely remembered past of the world, and its unintelligible, mysterious future. The lone figure had bitten and hit himself countless times and cried bitter tears deep into the night. Now he understood why. Now his life was nearly over, in ruins, he finally understood what his tears had meant. They were what he was destined to become. And how he had been ordained to die, by his own soul. He turned and walked down elegant sideroads to the river.

He looked down an empty street and saw no one. Then, from behind the corner at the end of the block he saw the head of a stag, with large antlers, slowly emerge around the street corner. The large, strange eyes stared straight at him. He blinked to awaken himself, to catch his senses. It was obviously a prop, being worn by a man. But the man was obscured by the wall. Then the arm and hand appeared, a long black arm with hoofs for hands rested on the wall, but still the weird head, motionless, stared out at him.

“What?” He thought. Only questions, only surprise. It offered no immediate threat, but its rareness induced fear. The strange looking animal head stared at the lone figure, immovable and unflinching. They stood there staring at each other for long drawn-out seconds. Then slowly, the stag’s head with its large black eyes retreated back behind the wall leaving the lone figure totally alone. In the unexplainable moment it began to snow again. He quickly span around to see if anyone was there, if anyone had seen what he had just seen, but there was no one. Only the snow, falling from the night.

He took a half-drunk miniature bottle of whiskey from the deep pocket of his coat and drank it back, skilfully opening his gullet to allow the fiery liquid to pass. The aftershock nauseated him so he washed it down with a quick cigarette and walked away from the other worldly scene with a quick pace, rolling his ankle on the snowy cobbles as he went. He stood still in the falling snow, unable to detect any psychodelia within or without his senses. He made his way quickly to the river.

Soon he reached the dark brooding swirls of the Thames and it seemed to him that the river itself was dancing. He looked over the iron railing. The Thames devoured the snowfall as if it had dominion over the sky. In the near distance was the bridge, devoid of all movement. With clumsy drunken movements he climbed up on the wall and as he stood up, he realised his feet had fissured the untouched, untainted snow. He stood there alone and looked out at the old magnificent buildings on the other side of the river. There was no-one there, no-one to tell him to get down. But a part of his soul wanted to die. A great part. He was unexpectedly reminded of the beauty that humankind holds in its hand, but the boundlessness of its potential was somehow being blocked out like starlight behind the blackness of clouds. London was singing. The falling snow was obscured by the black river night. He looked at the distant bridge and saw the angel. There it was, made of stone, waiting still.

And then, from on top of the bridge, the stags head slowly ascended above the grey brick wall. The lone figure rubbed his eyes. The weird stag was up on the bridge staring down at him. How he had got there so quickly the lone figure didn’t understand. His breath was swallowed up by the adrenaline rush of fear. His footing felt unsteady on the snow-covered wall and he had the sudden sensation he was about to fall, fall, fall down into the dark river. The wind and snow took up and blew the lone figure’s hat clean off his head. He wobbled as he quickly stretched for it but it had gone into the babbling darkness below. He caught sight of it in the light of a street lamp, right way up, riding the white washing waves of the river. It sank beneath the gloom. He sighed sadly to see it drown, like departing an old trusted friend forever. He looked up and the stag was still there on the bridge staring down at him, with those strange, dark eyes. The wind stormed in and blew his hair up into his face, but now he only had the will to let it do its work. Staring through the swirl he saw the stag looking directly at him, motionless in the blizzard. Then the arms of the stag man raised and his hands rested on the antlers but still those black eyes were fixed, penetrating the stormy night. The lone figure, terrified, looked down at the river and heard the sound of the rushing waves calling.

And then, he heard music rising. The melody exploded through the curtain. His soul began to shine. Hiding in the visible, the music burst in colours, lighting the lone figure’s eyes like underwater lamplight reaching the surface of a lake. The music. The beautiful music. The lone figure wept. He remembered kindness. Through his tears he saw his hat re-emerge on the surface. The dream world came back to him. The world of imagination. He looked up and there was the stag man, now standing up on the wall of the bridge. He suddenly felt frightened to see the pagan thing. The stag man stood still, looking straight at him. A feeling came over the lone figure to jump down off the wall. But he stayed. It was as if he was beckoning the strange apparition to make the first move. The cold wind whipped up. The adrenaline surging through the lone figure’s body kept him warm enough. Then the man on the bridge took off the stag’s head and stared down at him. ‘It can’t be’ said the lone figure out loud as he looked at the man. ‘No! It can’t be!!’ He screamed at the night. It was his own face up on the bridge, staring down at himself. Tears burnt through the freezing air. The stag man smiled and dived off the high bridge with a look of joy on his face, down into the Thames and under he went. The lone figure could feel his heart beating fast as he looked at the place where the stag man had landed. It was time. His pain would soon end, and his joy. Heaven and hell waited in the waves. He leapt from the wall into the mist, with his arms stretched out in front of him, his hands hitting the ice-cold water first. Unwatched by any living soul, the lamplit murk of the river consumed them both. They were seen no more. High above, the stone angel watched the scene, her tears made of rain, her open wings gathering the falling snow.

Feature Image: Marina Azzaro

July 4, 2025
Rain in the Face

Dawn sun, distant mountains, red cliffs near, white clouds scattered, still world, until a breeze caresses the desert floor, and a scorpion awakes, resting on a piece of earth where no human ever stood. In this wilderness stands a horse, and sitting on the horse a rider. Tail swishing, standing still, a motionless man watching, intently, an eagle high above, hunting, alive, living to fly. The warrior wears the painted face and the feathered headwear of his long fathers. He looks up at its broad wings, he smiles, the way eagles can’t.

The dream maker is hiding. Morning departs, lifest part of the day, sleep distant, last night’s dreams evaporate. The man and his horse make the wilderness less lonely. Every day he starts at dawn. The man is thinking, no words, words know, within their boundaries. He wonders whether his friend, the horse, thinks thoughts. It is his destiny to be chieftain. Kick the stirrup, the horse moves on slowly, distant mountain west, snowy summits beckon, through sand, clip clop, the scorpion lifts her tail, otherwise still, the horse and man wander away, red cliffs of hues, scorpion watching, like she always does.

Horse walking in the desert, solitary in the wilderness, desert sands have no mind, just beauty, the thirsty horse knows. The thirsty man sees the distant river. The world was made for him. He thinks. He doubts. The dream maker dances in the flames of the fire the man has made, to keep him warm in the night and to ward off evil spirits. He is safe near the fire, under the stars. His tribe is at home, sleeping in the teepee, but he must search, with his horse, for his spirit guide. Then he will discover his name, and finally reach manhood. Now they are far away, beyond horizons, past the setting sun. Four months he has been gone, alone, searching, travelling where the stars are strange, waiting for the spirit guide to reveal itself, now just wilderness, loneliness, risk becoming destiny. Look to the clouds, a formless shape, no sitting bull, no crazy horse, who found their spirits in the shapes of clouds. His spirit is hiding, somewhere in the world. Like the dream maker does.

The horse drinks from the river, the man stoops beside it, water in a cup of hands, he drinks, life itself returning, fear turns to laughter, there was never a first time, there was never a last. The sun sets, night falls, the universe emerges from the sky, the horse sleeps, the man is awake, seeing other worlds, not understanding, only understanding here, this world that created him, from nothing. He watches the stars at night, he is life, as much as the horse, as much as the river and the forest, the bear, the antelope, the eagle riding high in the morning, and the stars become memory, in his learning mind. At night, by the fire, he searches for his spirit guide in the galaxy rain.

He raises his head, they see mountains, the horse knows and they walk, through the day, upwards, high near the summit, stone cliff juts, they stand on the precipice together, horse and man, looking out, over the great valley below, and above, the grey wanderers, summoning thunder, electric flashes in the distance, their hair blows, they are unwavering, a galloping storm approaches, they alone are conscious, they remain still in the oncoming storm, the man looks up, the skies open, the spirit guide arrives, he looks to the universe hiding, down comes the water, beating like drums, front hooves rise high, and the man speaks for the first time in months, “Rain in the Face’. It is done.

Feature Image: Frank Cone

May 12, 2025
The Dog that Sang the Blues

It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

“Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

Feature Image: Hector Perez

April 1, 2025
Fiction: Dos Lunas

The Gallego, Dos Lunas, sat on the low wall of the Mirador San Nicolas hurling abuse at the tourists that passed him by. ‘Idiotas!!’ He shouted with his hand waving about in the air, until his mind soothed and he returned to the comfort of his can of Vol Damm (at 8% it was the strongest beer available in the Albaycin and his favourite beverage of all. Water, the elixir of life, flopped over the line a bedraggled second). His long black grey white hair fell about his shoulders which he occasionally used as a disguise by leaning forward, especially when the Guardia Civil were on their rounds. I said to him ‘Mira’ and started to sing Hotel California while pointing down the white painted lane at the orange orb sun, as it hovered over the branch of a tall palm tree. He laughed as he connected the song to the image and drank back the rest of his beer, letting out a long sigh in the afterglow of the gulp.

As the first star appeared in the evening light, a young man approached us on the wall from the other side of the mirador. It was the head the ball Ignacio, resident of the road, almost toothless, wan and thin. He had been kicked out of his home in Valencia and after making his way south alone had been living rough on the streets of Granada. Dos Lunas noticed him and raised his can in acknowledgment of his arrival but said nothing else. Ignacio’s clothes, caked in dirt and dust hadn’t been changed for many days and his shoes were held together by miracles. I was sitting close by and heard their conversation. Ignacio asked Dos for five Euros to which Dos belched loudly whilst simultaneously managing to produce the word ‘no’. Someone nearby laughed. After the third time of asking Ignacio picked up his belongings and left, making his way down the cobbled path that leads to the Alhambra.

One of the most spectacular aspects of Granada are its sunsets. As the day draws to a close the setting sun can sometimes be enough on its own but for the really spectacular ones what is needed are clouds. As I looked across over the Alhambra, I saw that one great cloud that stretched away like a canopy over the mountains had become an orchestra of light. Within the sun set, I counted no less than seventeen colours in the sky. How many shades I couldn’t tell. Perhaps thousands. Born from a blood red sun it danced its way west through oranges and yellows and greens and ochres, stretching its arms to a colour I didn’t know the name of, before pirouetting on a turquoise pillow, and finally it took a bow on a golden river of light.

Dos Luna’s eyes glazed over as he stared into the middle distance. I was sitting next to him, untalkative and drinking also, as the sun thought about bed. In the summer, time moves differently in Andalucia than it does in other parts of the world. I had the slightly disconcerting feeling that anything that could happen probably would, but I was able to put my fears aside and we sat there boozing under the cloudless Andalucian blue. Dos Lunas seemed fixated on something on the other side of the mirador. It was as if he had seen a ghost. In the scope of his vision, balancing precariously between the past and the future, between regret and hope, was the veil that protects life from death. That is the veil that men named God. Dos Lunas had neither name nor care for such an entity. He felt that God had betrayed him a long time ago, so his illusion failed, doomed as he was to a certain reality. His eyes returned to the mirador and his expression lost its fire.

He tilted his head slightly back and again drank deeply from the warming can. Again, the reaction in his veins apparent in his eyes. The dark nectar poured through his body chasing away his conscience for another moment, and then he burped loudly, lifting his leg only to replace his foot on the cobbles, immediately fearing he may follow through. He knew that he hadn’t eaten anything but rubbish in the last week, half eaten sandwiches gifted to him, left over tapas outside the Albaycin bars, that kind of thing. He suddenly became at ease when he realised that he hadn’t shit himself in public and a smiling countenance returned to his face. A woman walking her Pomeranian nearby reeled slightly in disgust as his gnarly teeth became visible in his smile. “OOP EEE!!” He sang out as they made eye contact. She extended her middle finger at him as if she were simply waving hello and carried on down the steps without altering her pace. Her bluntness made him laugh out loud. Tears of joy welled in his eyes. For Dos Lunas mirth and offence were often intertwined. He finished his can with a crushing fist and tossed it against the side of the adjacent bin. The two recently arrived Guardia Civil officers either failed to notice or tried to ignore the attempt. They knew him well. For thirty long hot years he had made the Mirador San Nicholas his home. He had seen them come and go. The two officers looked over at us, arms folded with their guns in their holsters, presumably ready to fire at a moment’s notice, or what’s the point? It was often hard to tell their intentions as their eyes were permanently hidden behind dark glasses. They knew as well as us that the eyes were the window to the soul.

It wouldn’t be long before those old demons would be back to claw at his brain like the hungry cats the old gypsy woman shooed away with her straw broom outside her cave house up in Sacramonte. It was a cave house Dos Lunas knew well, but only from the outside, having passed by it a thousand times on his zig-zagging walks home to his own cave, which was situated on the far side of the hill. The walls of the old gypsy’s cave were patterned with blue China plates and red and yellow flowers. There was a certain aesthetic, a certain beauty about her home where the old gypsy woman had lived since she was a little girl. Now well into her nineties she had looked out on this city since before the name of Franco was even a whisper. Dos Lunas had never been invited into her home. In a way, he feared the gypsies, and lived outside their world. She thought he was slightly mad, but not dangerous, like almost everyone else in the barrio did.

There were times when the sun was high in the August sky that the demons he housed in his brain would begin to boil and bubble his mind, like the hot cobble stones under his feet.

“Idiota!!” He shouted out.

“You’re the idiot!’ Someone replied and he laughed again, glad of the interaction. I was becoming increasingly embarrassed by his behaviour and wondered if one day my friendship with him would result in me getting beaten up. It was possible. Some people court disaster more than others. And there are people who are simply dangerous. He took the opportunity to ask for money from a passer-by and another middle finger was raised firmly in his direction.

Work to him was as mysterious as heaven. He saw others engage but had no evidence of it himself. He regularly saw the bin men and road sweepers doing their rounds but paid it no mind. He had turned loafing into an art. His aversion to work put the flâneurs of Montmartre to shame. He was now in his sixties and had been punched many times, (on no less than twelve occasions in the face), as a direct result of his method of instigating conversation.

He knew that this wall that he sat on all day, every day, was in the heart of the tourist quarter, and that those that he interacted with he would almost certainly never meet again. His actions were soon forgotten, which is perhaps why he repeated them so often. Many timeless summers had passed since his first day in the Albaycin. Long, short years. He was young when he arrived and the glowing sense of joy he felt as he looked out on the Alhambra, framed by the snow tipped mountains of the Sierra Nevada, put a kind of lock on his soul. But that was thirty years ago. Or “thirty fucking years” as he was fond of saying. The arduous living of life sometimes felt to him like eons, with its tedium and sorrow, but its recollection as old age approached felt like a fleeting moment in time, all those years lived, only a lightening flash over an ocean storm.

The truth was that when the sun was hot in the sky and he had enough money to drink and smoke, he didn’t fear death. It’s true. He would often say it. ‘No tengo miedo.’ And his eyes would glaze over, truly unable to understand the conundrum of deaths reality. But when winter drew in and the nights turned cold and he felt the long years he had lived as cold in his bones, and all those hungry mornings came begging, he would whisper secretly to the cobbled ground ‘I am scared.’

One day in the middle of August he asked some hippies that had just moved into the caves if they had a cigarette paper. He grumbled and cursed when they replied in the negative. ‘Hippies de mierda’ he said. It was a solid part his life now, to beg, and he had resolved many years earlier to accept the rough with the smooth. Ten or so minutes later he saw a cigarette paper tumbling across the cobbles in front of him but he was too lazy to get up and fetch it, and when he asked someone else to do it and they refused, he grumbled a moan tinged in bitterness. I went and got it for him. He said thank you as I passed it over to him but I wondered if here was a man who thought he had learned all the lessons life had to teach him, which is why he sat in the same place, doing the same thing, day in day out, through the changing seasons, year in year out. The superior attitude he had towards menial work was what had beggared him. His grandiose dreaming, the beating heart of his vagrancy. He was not the only one in the Albaycin guilty of this.

Noon came and went and by two o’clock when I returned from the shop with a fifth consecutive litre of Alhambra the fierce sun was high in the sky. It was one of those Granada days where even the stray dogs wouldn’t leave the shade. The electronic thermometer near Plaza Nueva read forty-eight degrees. The Granadino’s had absconded to the coast and left the city near empty.

Just before midday he saw a flash of light on the floor and to his amazement, he noticed a two-euro coin someone must have dropped. His heart leapt and he whispered under his breath, ‘God will provide’. He was always willing to denounce his atheism for money or drink. On that occasion he did move, but not to the shop, he got someone else to do the errand for him. The old Gallego was fussy about the coldness of his beer, a trait found in many who inhabit the region of Andalucia. When he felt the ice cold can of Vol Damm against his leather brown forehead he tingled with familiar glee. There would be life.

He hadn’t returned to Galicia for decades and it was starting to show in his soul. Strange he never left Andalucia for a man that loved the rain as much as he did. There had been no rain in Granada for months. The Galicians are a sea-faring people, as his own ancestors were, but he was anchored in the mirador. I looked over at him and thought perhaps it was the memory of the sea that kept him in the mountains. Perhaps something bad had happened that he had put to the back of his mind. I looked again at his silent, half-drunk expression and knew that the truth, in all likelihood, would never be known.

The police took their time but eventually got in their car and drove away. I sat by Dos Lunas on the baking hot wall in the silence of the siesta drinking cold beer and feeling young and happy. Looking out on the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada’s above the Alhambra never quite fails. He was wearing his shit-catchers and a vest T-shirt (no doubt gifted to him by someone or other). His clothing revealed the young man still in him, the one that wouldn’t relent. He seemed fully alive with the new can of cold Vol Damm. With another drink, another momentary lease of life.

At the middle of the siesta the mirador was empty save for a few people with nowhere to go. There was no-one there to call idiot, except of course for myself, which he obliged when the can had been drained and he had crushed it in his hand and thrown it at the full bin, doing nothing when it tumbled to the ground with some other detritus. He burped loudly, farted callously, (all previous concerns about shitting himself had vanished) and then the same old vacant expression came over his face as he wondered where the next drink would come from.

He began to check through his pockets as one of the blow-through hippies that had recently arrived up in the caves in Sacromonte approached him, nervously playing with one of the metal rings in his dreadlocks. The story the man had to tell brought a black cloud to the clear sky. The mad Ignacio, the slender youth with burning blue eyes and tanned skin who wandered around the Albaycin looking for food in the bins had been murdered the night before. Two differing stories emerged about the method of execution. One said he had been stabbed to death by a gang, the other version, told by another man who had arrived by the wall a short time later, said that he had been killed while sleeping during the night by the stream that runs under the Alhambra by someone throwing a heavy rock down on his head, crushing his skull. The hippie was unsure. That’s what he told Dos Lunas. One thing was for certain, Ignacio was dead, the death confirmed by others, including the police. I looked over at Dos Lunas and saw that all the mirth had been extracted from his soul. The Gallego’s face was weighed with sorrow. The burning sun had lost its charms as Dos Lunas began to tremble.

The hippie retreated when he saw the Gallego’s mood suddenly change and he violently launched his foot out and kicked the bin in frustration. The empty cans that teetered on the top scattered on the ground and the noise of the clattering turned heads. I thought a drink might calm him down so I suggested we walked to the shop and get a beer. He was too lazy, so I performed the simple task alone. I looked down and saw the sun tan on my arms was coming along well. Sad tale I thought, on the walk down the cobble lane. The bright day, and the colourful flowers, reds and purples and blues and greens in the pots outside the houses made me forget the terrible event for a while. The heat provided me with a blessed, constant thirst. That was life in the summer for us in the Albaycin, cold Alhambra from the bottle was just petrol for the car, without it, moving was impossible. When I returned with the beer, I saw the solitary figure of Dos Lunas hunched up and bent forward like a crooked old lady. The embers of his eyes had been extinguished. He had retreated completely within himself. I passed him a can of Voll Damm and to my amazement he didn’t open it.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“He was my son” he said.

Feature Image: Miquel Rosselló Calafell

February 17, 2025
Fiction: Everything Human

“Have you ever been alone in an old theatre at night? There are no places on earth more haunted than theatres. An old theatre houses the ghosts of all things, at least, all things human. Cemeteries are where bodies go, not lives. Not like,’ he paused and looked up at the ceiling, ‘the theatre. We must use the imagination gifted to us. I mean, use the spectre of the performance, the trace of bygone acts. I don’t mean the supernatural. I mean the real ghosts, the people who really did live and die. Odd, that the supernatural would create the natural and then stay hidden within it. Anyway, I’m losing my train of thought, where was I? Ah yes, I remember. Think! Of all the actors and musicians of bygone centuries who have been forgotten, left to the wind whispering. And what goes for actors goes a thousandfold for humankind. I’m talking about the ones who made the theatre from nothing. The ones who brought the whole thing into existence. Most have been forgotten certainly, but have they been forgotten without trace? Hardly. We are actors because we want to make the thing last. What dreams they must have had! Yes, what dreams.” He turned his head away, fighting tears. “Think to when they were back stage on their opening nights, those sacred nights. Butterflies turning into eagles, soaring high to the Gods.” Fenwick made a quick flitting gesture with his hand accompanied by a half whistle through his teeth. “I remember that night better than any night of my life. With my fellow students. There on the stage we bowed on the final night of the run. It was a beautiful thing.” Now tears showed. “The faces of the audience were partially obscured in the dark, but we heard them. And how. How we wept with happiness. Joy swept into our souls, and kept.” His eyes glazed in the light of time’s memory. “And in that moment, everything was possible. To be loved, by strangers, and have evidence of it, to really feel it, that was their dream. And ours. To win and to be loved. To become a part of a dream, and know it. The most beautiful thing in the world, to save a life out there somewhere. That is our hope. That is us.”

“My mother used to say you can tell the goodness of a person in their eyes.” Said Mary, who was one of the young actors.

“Did she?” Replied Fenwick, after deliberating for a moment or two.

Fenwick reclined in the tattered leather-bound chair and craved for the tobacco he had recently prohibited, knowing that he would likely soon succumb. He planned to keep going until all the hairs on his head were white, and then, and only then, give up. Fenwick was sitting with the young actors in one of the dressing rooms of an old London theatre, the mirror bordered with lightbulbs, surrounded by his ghosts, and speaking to the youngsters as if they were an audience that had paid to see him act. He wasn’t officially their teacher; it was more a play of mutual admiration. There they were, the younger ones, just sitting on the cushioned floor looking up at him through their smoke and hanging on his every word. He paused for a moment and took a good drink. He listened carefully to the gentle rattling of the melting ice cubes. It warmed his whole being and in the electric light he suddenly felt at one with the entire universe. No fear at all. His wide-open eyes seemed to be glaring past his surroundings, deep into some other place.

“There was a woman I once knew that had the same dream as us.” His face became suddenly melancholy. “In her small hometown by the sea in the north of England her beauty was infamous. It had driven at least one young man to take his own life and sent four more completely mad, and they are only the ones that are known of. She was a legacy of the Viking shield maidens, a daughter of Freya, marooned in the twentieth century’. They waited for him to continue and glanced at each other before looking back up at him, cajoling him into revealing some secret worth knowing. They thought, perhaps because of the way he held his age, that he possessed wisdom.

“Yes, she was beautiful.” He looked back in time. “Beautiful in an other-worldly, divine way. She had that thing that is impossible to describe in words, one of the things in this world that are beyond language. She possessed the genius of evolution. How it affected her I can’t really tell, but whatever it was, it became a desire to escape her little home town by the sea. That’s what she told me. She had walked alone on rainy northern nights, through the empty streets, thinking her beauty and talent were being wasted with every passing day. So, when the opportunity came to retake all those lost moments she grasped them in her fist, put them in her mouth and breathed them back into her soul. No one could ever take that away from her. And no-one ever did. Her moment of first success was her first true love. When the crowd cheered her for the first time, that night in the theatre in Manchester, she changed, because her soul had been satisfied. That’s what happens when you get what you want. You change.”

“What happened to her?” His melancholy expression turned even more grave.

“I suppose I will never know.” He said and returned to his whiskey.

The two young actors had just graduated from drama school and were at the theatre to audition for a new play about a man who had gone rogue through music. For the last two years they had both been players in an immersive theatre company, which is where they had met. They were eager and anxious to learn. Spending time around Fenwick gave them solace, and occasionally invigorated their ambition. He reminded them that inspiration is only a part of the thing. They both imagined the woman he spoke about in their minds and wondered who she could have been. Mary looked up at Fenwick and said,

“But surely as actors it is what is within that counts? Soul marks us out, as a profession I mean.” Fenwick smiled. The innocence of the young actor uplifted him. The moment made his own soul glimmer.

“Yes, my dears. Quite right. Quite right.” He said. He went to silent thinking, and then Charles said,

“But in our profession, how you look has meaning surely. I mean how you appear, and people prefer beautiful things to look at don’t they? Or you put on make-up and prosthetics to make the character look more ugly, more despicable. But the appearance is still there, dictating to the audience thoughts. To engage the audience’s perception, isn’t that our work? I think ours is the shallowest profession of them all, the one most based on appearances.”

“Our job is to tantalise.” Said Fenwick. He rattled the ice cubes among the whiskey. “We don’t save lives. Like doctors.”

“Oh?” Said Mary as her eyebrows raised like they were being winched to her hair. “I’ve seen it happen, oh yes Fenwick I have. Those at the end of their tether with life, inspired by what they have seen, art I mean………….’ She paused for a draw on her cigarette, ‘so he could ‘live on.’ At this Fenwick’s expression flickered between reminiscence and hope.

“It happened to me with music.” Said Charles.

“Aesthete’s value image, but that doesn’t make us shallow, necessarily. In the English language at least, image is close to imagination.”

“As sophistry to sophistication” added Mary. She stood up in search of the next glass of wine. Fenwick wobbled momentarily due to the speed of her response.

“Yes.” He said before he continued. “It is soul but then again it isn’t. It’s pretending. We are actors. We pretend. The nurse or the soldier deal with actual misery, actual death. We are pretenders. But that’s alright, it’s not a sin in itself. Real beauty can’t be pretended. So don’t take it for granted.”

“But surely some performances, on stage, contain real beauty?”

“Well in those moments they are not pretending then. They can’t be. They are acting out real emotions, do you see the trick? Be thankful for the gifts God has bestowed upon you. I wish I had your looks! Things could have been a lot different if I had. I was destined to rely on character more’s the pity, it was ‘you know who’s decree’ and his eyes reached to the heavens as his index finger joined in the upward.

“But isn’t that what theatre is about? Character? If not, aren’t we just models on a cat walk?” Fenwick returned to his Glenlivet as Mary smiled, first at Charles for his remark and then more broadly at Fenwick who seemed to her in momentary retreat.

“Our job is to make them gasp. Draw them out from their armchairs. Those pompous in their happiness we must encourage to remember the grave. But, don’t overdo it of course.” He tapped his fingers rapidly on invisible air. “We must make those that won’t forgive weep. That is our job. Our solemn duty. We must leave the rest to the writers, or do it ourselves, if inspiration takes us.”

“Have you ever written anything Fenwick?”

“Oh yes, but it’s true most of it went on the fire. When it comes to writing I only have one piece of advice. Write what you want to hear. Maybe it’s something no one else will say. And don’t let bitterness guide your pen. I must have thrown a thousand reems on the fire to discover it.” The young actors didn’t understand what he meant. Charles looked up at the clock on the wall. Soon it would be time to mount the stage and nerves were jangling.

“I have to go in five minutes, can I ask you, may I be so bold……. any advice for the audition?’ Charles asked the slumped Fenwick as he stood up and brushed himself down. The reclining actor’s response was immediate.

“Use your nerves. Let’s not call it fear quite yet. And remember, when you go on that stage, it’s life that you go to honour. Remember those that came before, and those yet to arrive of course.”

“I shall try and remember that. Thank-you Fenwick.”

“A ti.” Said Fenwick as his fellow actors kissed him goodbye and left the dressing room. The door closed and Fenwick’s world fell again into silence. He poured a little water into the ashtray to aid the extinguishing of his cigarette and then gazed into the dressing room mirror. He wondered why it was common in theatrical dressing rooms to have the mirror so well lit. All those light bulbs. He himself always wanted to hide before a performance. ‘The actor needs to know his own face is why’, he thought again. It was part of his character to keep coming to the same conclusions. He stared at himself unconsciously in the mirror. He didn’t even notice he was doing it until the wrinkled lines of all those long years jumped out at him. He hadn’t always looked like this. So strange how time changes the body, he thought. He could just make out in the reflection his six-year-old face and ten and fifteen and twenty-one and thirty-three and forty-eight and fifty-seven and all the fast times he had spent in between.

The eyes in his head connected with the eyes in the mirror. They had lost none of their fire. He wondered what happens when dreams are fulfilled and wondered also whether the reward was happiness. The inevitable cannot be avoided. Old age was forcing him to ask certain questions which he didn’t seem to will. Questions that he never asked when he was young. Even though he was on the verge of old age he had the strong feeling that the great adventure always lay ahead. Maybe the great adventure was death. Maybe not. He didn’t know. Perhaps the true nature of things was a ludicrous sort of beauty. Then by accident he detected a flicker of fear in his own eyes. He wasn’t, in his nature, a man that dwelt on death, life provided enough of a preoccupation. When death or the expanding universe arose in his mind, neurons would fire, and his imagination would malfunction, sealing him in the firm grip of reality’s laws. He preferred the primary to the secondary world, unlike Ireton. He didn’t regard his imagination as one of the senses.

Still the face in the mirror stared back at him in the unwavering light. With each moment the image became less and less familiar until in the silent stupor of the room his mind registered the reflection as an imposter. A stranger yet to be understood, let alone befriended. But the expression in the reflection suggested the image wanted to converse with him. There was something that talking could expose that thinking never could. The image in the mirror dissolved and suddenly reappeared, metamorphosised into a man he used to know. It was an actor he had worked with in a theatre in Bristol when he was young. He saw the image of the face of this man from his distant past and became overawed with a dreadful panicked sense of fear that had within moments brought him to a fevered nausea. “Hello again.” Said the face in the mirror silently. Fenwick’s teeth began to peel back over his lips in terror and he put his arm over his eyes as if to protect him from the terrible light. He shouted “Go away!” Trembling with emotion. He rubbed over his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket but when he looked again in the mirror all he saw was his old face looking back at him in astonishment, framed by the glowing lightbulbs.

Fenwick picked up a handkerchief and dabbed at his sweating face. He recalled beyond doubt that the shocking vision he had seen in the mirror was an actor he once knew. The actor’s name was Joseph. He had committed suicide by throwing himself off the Woolwich ferry into the black soul dark murk of the Thames only one week previously. It had been reported in The Evening Standard in a small clip on the back pages and he had been alerted to the news by one of his colleagues at the theatre. The news had caused a fissure in Fenwick’s mind. He didn’t mean for the man to die, he just wanted the job, that was all. It wasn’t malevolence. Charles and Mary went to lunch the following week and sat by the window of a pub near Holborn as the rain against the window made them both tingle.

“I met Fenwick this morning.”

“How is he?”

“He seemed a bit troubled. A bit distant.” Said Charles.

“You think so?”

“Something has got to him. He was wan looking. Like he hadn’t slept properly for a while. He looked depressed to me. Like he was suffering.”

“Poor Fenwick. I wonder what it could be.” Said Charles. Secretly Mary knew. The summer before she had stayed briefly with Joseph on the Isle of Wight. They soon developed a symbiotic friendship which had fully blossomed within a few long days. When news reached her that Joseph was dead, she fainted in front of the cast of the play, a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the repertory theatre at Frinton-On-Sea. And now as she slowly caressed the edge of her gin and tonic tumbler a look of great sadness came naturally in her eyes, a look that Charles registered. He knew her well enough and for a fleeting moment thought that she might be hiding something, some secret perhaps.

“I was hoping you might know.” She said.

That same afternoon Fenwick, (pronounced Fennick to himself and those that knew him and Fen-wick by those who didn’t, postmen, dole officer’s and the like) decided to leave the theatre and go for a walk over the river into the west end. It was an autumn day in England, the perfect conditions for facing depression and for clarifying moods. He walked through the thousand colour park and nature extracted his fear and anxiety. He became calm, like he was a child again on the green leafy sidings on the railway tracks on summers days in south London, where death did not exist.

He liked to walk alone sometimes. But only sometimes. He would occasionally boast to people how happy he was in his own company, but the reality was since his childhood and all through his life he needed the company of others almost, at times, to the point of craving. That’s why his hermit allusions were myth. But then again, he saw the ability he had to delude himself as a great strength. He walked from his small flat on the council estate where he lived alone, along the busy streets of cars and buses until he came to the bridge that spanned the river and stopped to light a cigarette. He looked over the water and used imagination and memory to envisage Soho in his mind’s eye, an area of the world that was to him in hiatus. He recalled what the man had said to him about the glory days of London in the late 1960’s, the colour and the genius. “The best place……………….’ he paused for thought ‘in the world.’ His dreaming continued after the cigarette had singed his fingers. “Where are they all now?” He wondered. He imagined bodies in graves, decomposed, eaten by millipedes and worms. “There is a kind of beauty to all truth, even the most melancholic kind’ he thought. The autumn wind picked up and dry, dead leaves began to hit against the lower part of his legs. He walked across the bridge and stopped half way where he turned three hundred and sixty degrees to take in the scene. “Good old London.” He said aloud. Once he had imbibed his fill he carried on his way, concerned if he looked too long, he might break the spell. To Fenwick, London was a country. It was its own entity, its own nation almost, with its own particular history, its own customs, its own laws and above all, its own imagination. It could never be one thing because it was always changing. He would smile inwardly when the claim was made that there were greater cities in the world. He looked at the sunlight dancing on the Thames and saw Blake and Shakespeare in the mortal impermanence of the water. ‘Even Mozart has played here’ he thought.

For the thousandth time he got on the escalator at London Bridge station and descended to the bowels. It was, until that day, the place he hated most. The dreary concourse churning out the same old stream. He looked at the crowd like bees in the hive, heads down, eyes fixed and drifting, ignoring each other as they went about their dull games. It was as if everyone’s life was on pause until they got somewhere else. He felt the old rancour conjured up by the soulless place. And then, suddenly, as he glided down the escalator, he saw it all differently. He saw the man with the hands in his pockets on his way out of London to visit his elderly Grandparents. It was kindness extant. He saw a woman carrying a violin case and wondered what music might be played soon. He saw two old friends meeting. What he had loathed, shunned and dreaded for so long, in a moment, became the source of all love.

When he was away from the river and walking the streets towards the Strand, he retreated into his private thoughts watching the people busying themselves going here and there. His mind turned slowly to his own work. Out of all professions, the aging process is perhaps strangest of all for the actor. There are ways of making a young actor look convincingly old, but not the other way around. That’s how it was, at this time, for Fenwick. He no longer desired to look at his own face, (at least not for long anyway). He felt he had the face the people who rejected him deserved.

He sometimes walked around London on his own precisely because it made him lonely, or perhaps more accurately, because it made him feel alone. As if he were apart and a part from, and of the human race. Once, when he was walking through Victoria Underground Station at rush hour, he saw a man lying on the floor having a heart attack. It’s true there was a ticket guard that worked there crouched over the ailing man calling his colleague for assistance but he never forgot the image of the droves of people that walked by en masse, as if they were a great herd of wildebeest, and a lion had come to take one of them away.

It was just after midday. Thinking a couple of drinks would underpin the excitement and freedom of the morning he thought he would walk in the direction of one of his favourite London pubs, The Forlorn Hope, to greet midday with a clink. The one thing that could correctly steer his aimless London walks was booze or ‘the sauce’ or ‘the source’ as he was sometimes heard saying.

Fenwick had become an actor at the age of sixteen when he appeared in a local play at the amateur dramatic society. He only had one line ‘I haven’t seen him today; did you try the Red Lion?’ a line which he never forgot. He was an actor constantly on the cusp, like the vast majority of that said profession, but he had had some good roles, some in west end theatres and a few notable television and film appearances during the 1970’s and 1980’s but by the last decade of the twentieth century his career had waned and, as in his private life, he struggled for even a walk on part. The keen glimmer in his stare remained true however. As he approached his 67^th year he had remained remarkedly untouched by a lifetime’s hard living and he expected to keel over any day now, or worse, the thing that he really did secretly fear or let us say did well to keep locked away at the back of his mind was some sort of illness that would gift him a slow, lingering death where his memory would die before his body. A great insult he felt to those who never lingered when they did have life in them.

Dark clouds appeared overhead and doused Fleet Street in rain so Fenwick made a twenty second walk to the nearest pub whose sign outside seemed to him like two open arms ready for a hug and he ducked in through the door just as two patrons were leaving with their faces contorting to the prospect of getting wet. He thanked them for keeping the door open for him and entered. He thought of what he had said about the ghosts that haunt the theatres and concluded it must also be true of pubs. He pushed his damp white hair to one side and he pressed his handkerchief to dry his face which came alive at its removal at the spectacle of the pub he had overlooked for many years. He used to go to Fleet Street in the great days of the newspaper, when the secrets of Whitehall were disseminated over strong beer and ploughman’s lunches. Now it was no more. Modern technology, or ‘progress,’ had seen to that.

It would do until the rain passed, or he found someone to share a cab into Soho with. Hackney carriages had always been a great luxury to Fenwick, when it came to drink and walk or be driven sober, he would without exception opt for the former. He looked around the pub and saw the youngsters in suits on their lunchtime sojourn knowing that every working person there, which was almost the entire clientele, would soon vacate and he could even have the pub to himself.

“Can I get a large Rioja please?” He spied the assortment of crisps and nuts behind the bar but then decided against eating as it was a Monday and he remembered that was the day he liked to fast. He turned around to see a man hunched at the bar and smiled as they made eye contact.

“What the fuck are you looking at. You ain’t fucking Millwall.” The man spiked in an aggressive way. Fenwick turned his head and looked away and remembered the irrefutable logic of an old friend of his that had once said in response to Fenwick’s story about being the victim of a robbery ‘there’s cunts out there old son.’ Fenwick turned to the aggressive stranger and said “Wonderful thing chance. Have a good day.” He smiled at the aggressive young man and absolved himself of spiteful thoughts. The slightly bewildered man had no response. He turned, tutted and absconded, confused at having been forgiven.

Fenwick had arranged to meet Ireton at the Dog and Bell but the torrential London rain was keeping him ensconced for the duration of the bottle of claret. Paradise. He savoured every mouthful of the elixir, courting the rain and venerating all that grows. He looked out at the people rushing around on fleet street in the rain and realised not only was he alive, but that he had done some good living. “Heaven is dying and knowing you brought at least a little love into the world. If I could write a letter from heaven that is what it would say. Alas, it looks like there is only oblivion out there.” He looked up at the clock on the wall and noticed that he was already late for his meeting with Ireton. They were old friends, different in character but similar in spirit. They had been friends since their early twenties. Fenwick had a dislike of British politics and a liking of England, Ireton had a loathing of Thatcher and her clan, and a strong desire to leave England behind. ‘Too many memories’ he said in an all-encompassing way. He had never welcomed the thought of a life in one place. He had in fact lived in many places and claimed once to Fenwick that he was only in London for work and it had been ‘twelve long dark years since’.

Ireton entered the near empty pub and breathed in the aroma. He swirled it from his nostrils to his senses and then finally his mind as he rolled the smell of the carpet and the dish washed stagnant beer tang around, as if they were at the bottom of a wine glass. He looked around and saw Fenwick in the corner reading the racing post. This meant he was skint until payday. He always gambled when he was down to his last. It had always been like that. Resting by his glass of mild was a collection of Heaney’s poems. He was like that too.

‘Ah. There you are. I thought you were getting the bus,’ said Fenwick.

“Solvitur ambulando.” Replied Ireton.

‘On the sauce already?’

‘The source?’

‘The sauce.’

‘The source of the sauce?’

‘No, I mean the sauce of the source.’

‘What is this sorcery? I can assure you I am in no way indebted to the black arts.’

‘Glad to hear it, I had my doubts.’ Unglazed, the eyes of Ireton made their way to the bar where he ordered two Glenfiddich’s, a pint of Guiness and a pint of amber ale from a landlord in a shirt and tie.

“So, how have you been? Any work on the horizon? I see you’re reading the racing post. You’ve been thespianing.’ It was their euphemism for unemployment. To the two old friend’s unemployment was nothing to be ashamed of. In their own ways they had had the best times of their lives when unemployed, poor by choice, and free, with the constant support of sunshine and music. It was much harder psychologically to have nothing when it was cold. This, explained Fenwick, was the motivating factor of western history. “There’s an audition next week for an advert for a gin company. They want someone to play the waiter in some restaurant or other. Worth getting out of bed for.”

“When are you going to try and do some serious work?”

“You mean the comedy?”

“Yes.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Cheers.” And they lifted their glasses and clinked. Before he downed the drink, he took a moment to notice the light shining through the amber gold liquid which made him think of the universe and evolution at almost the same moment, as he had done the night before. The whiskey rolled down his throat leaving the afterburn of the Scots in its wake.

“How about you. Still at the same place?

“Do you mean have I been sacked since last week?’

“Yes.’

‘No.”

They sat in silence in the corner of the pub both having the simultaneous thought that work was becoming more relevant and less interesting the older they got.

“Let’s go outside for a smoke.” They bemoaned the smoking ban as they walked outside into the cold day but although they missed the freedom of the old days, they both accepted it was probably for the best. The thought of cancer always invigorated Fenwick, but never enough to ever make him give up.

“I read this today.” Said Ireton and he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘The highest goal of art is not to show the world as it really is but to show it what it could be.’

He looked at his friend long and hard.

“Maybe the worst thing in this world is to live in fear. Or should I say, devote yourself to comfort? Did you have the chance to do different things with your life but worried always about the loss of what you have. When you die you lose everything, and die we must. We only have our adventures, in the end.” Said Fenwick, in a failed attempt at a direct response.

The next day Fenwick received the news he had failed the audition. In the moment of rejection his mind turned to Joseph, and to her. Her memory becoming more distant and vivid as each season changed. He looked into the shaving mirror, splashed the razor around in the foamy sink and wondered to himself whether enough books had been written, or was there still room for more. Should there be a new literature for this century, or should we just borrow from the past from now on. He felt a flex of guilt at even thinking the thought. He thought about Ireton’s note. ‘Of course there should be new art’ he said to himself.

Feature Image: Donald Tong

December 17, 2024
Fiction: The Sea of Pearls

TEL AVIV – SEPTEMBER – 2023

Noah Artowski, by now a six-year veteran of the Israeli Defence Forces, looked out towards the azure, glimmering sea. He imagined it melting like water colour into the blueness of the sky. He stood on the balcony of his aunt Sarah’s apartment in Tel Aviv, where she lived alone with her two dogs. His hands rested on the warm metallic bar as he became trapped in the sea’s embrace. How beautiful the sea, alive in the sunshine, beyond the human ways of things. He knew that it would live on, unaware of death, even to the end.

“Would you like tea or coffee? Or perhaps something stronger?” It was his day off.

“Coffee please.” He said with a smile, and when it arrived he lit a cigarette and took a drink, savouring both flavours simultaneously, stoking the warmth of the morning like bellows on a midnight fire.

“A beautiful day’ he said sitting down on the balcony chair, and his eye caught the sea again.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got something to show you” said Sarah. Her dogs followed her inside and back out onto the balcony where she placed a shoe box on the table.

“I found this box of photographs when we were cleaning out Grandma’s house. Take a look, there are some interesting ones.’ Noah took the lid off the box and gathered the photographs in his hands. The first one was taken in the 1980’s judging by the fashion of the clothes, and was in colour. It showed his mother and father smiling on their honeymoon in Portugal. They looked happy. The next one showed his mother in military fatigues. He went on slowly flicking through the pile with his index finger. He came to an old photograph, black and white and faded. There was an old crease mark where it had once been folded away. He turned it over and saw ‘August 1939’ had been written on the back. He turned it around and stared at it for a while. It was a family portrait. The smartly dressed mother and father sat in chairs and in front of them their three daughters sat on the floor, all of them looking directly into the camera. As was the custom of those days, no one smiled.

“Who are they?”

“They are your Grandmother’s cousins. From Lodz.”

“Where is Lodz?”

“Poland.”

“Did……………………..” He paused. The sea had caught his eye again. Or perhaps it was the blue.

“They are all dead. They were sent to Dachau.”

“Yes, I remember. She told me. I haven’t seen them before. In a photograph I mean.” She thought about saying how sad it was, but the silence did the job for her. He looked intently at the photograph. Without any sense of urgency he studied each one of their faces, one by one. There was a kind of stoicism in their expressions. They had no idea what was coming. Looking at the photograph he didn’t feel the benefit of hindsight, but knowing what became of them, he was able at least to attempt to touch the lives within the picture frame. To connect somehow. He noticed that one of the little girls, the youngest one, was holding a bracelet made of pearls. She was the central point of the portrait. That she was holding the pearls in her hand seemed strange, in such an austere setting. Maybe she had began to play with it and neither the photographer or her parents had noticed. He looked closer and detected a twinkle in the little girls face as if she was indeed about to burst into laughter. He carried on looking at the photograph, particularly at the young girls face and the pearl bracelet that she held, captivated by the image. Then he thought about what became of her and her family. He looked back out to sea. The sun was beginning to set.

KHAN YOUNIS – GAZA – SEPTEMBER 2023

Heba, which means gift, stood up with her doll in her arms and followed her mother into the kitchen. It was the birthday of her older brother and members of her extended family, including her grandmother and her aunt had been invited over that evening to share a meal. When her uncle Meerab arrived he picked Heba up and took her out on to the balcony with her doll still firmly clasped between her arms. The sun was setting in the west and they looked out at the fire dance sea. There was suddenly no need for words.

“It’s like we’re in jail” said Meerab.

“How?” Said Heba.

“There is the sea and we’re not allowed to sail away on it. Can you think of another people who live by the sea and can’t sail?” Her silence was her answer.

“No. That’s alright. There is a lot your generation must learn about. About our people, our history.” Heba looked up at her uncle and then back out to sea. The sun had almost passed over the horizon.

Heba’s mother came out on the balcony to call them in for dinner. There were large bowls of maqlubeh and a plate stacked high with taboon, bottles of soft drinks and jugs of water. The family sat around the table and began to talk happily and freely. When they were together around the table as a family, eating and drinking and talking, they were free.

By the end of the meal however the conversation had taken a serious turn. That almost always happened at their dinner table when politics became involved. Meerab said the politics had been imposed and where politics is imposed, suffering always follows. Meerab had never left Gaza. He was now twenty-three years old. Every day he looked at the sea and wondered what lay beyond and as each year passed into another, Heba wondered the same. She was becoming the same as her uncle because she asked the same questions.

When the quarrel abated Heba’s Grandmother, who had been listening quietly to the whole conversation, began to speak.

“When I was a little girl, I lived in the mountains. We never saw the sea then. It was like it never existed. I was near Heba’s age when I first saw the sea. I remember when the soldiers came and told us to leave.” Suddenly, a distant expression, woven in sorrow, came over her face. Some memory too painful to linger on, entered her inner vision. She carried on speaking to sooth the memory away. “We travelled here to Gaza, my family, your grand-fathers family and many others. Almost our whole village came. I remember seeing the sea for the first time. It was beautiful.” She looked at Heba and remembered being her age. They smiled at each other, but Heba didn’t really know what they were smiling about. She thought it was the sea.

When the meal was done and the plates were being washed Heba’s grandmother called her over and sat her on her lap.

“I have something to give you.” Heba looked up at her grand-mother and smiled. She loved presents but she loved surprises more. She wondered what it could be. The old lady reached into the large side pocket of her dress and produced something in her open palm, showing it straight away to Heba. Heba looked down at the object and then looked up at her grand-mother.

“Here. It’s for you. I had it when I was a little girl and now it is yours. I want you to keep it. Maybe someday when you have a grandchild you can pass it on to them.” Heba looked down. There in her hands was a beautiful white bracelet made of pearls. It glowed and shined with equal beauty. She put it on her wrist and looked at it in admiration.

“Thank-you.” Said Heba. And they held each other for a while.

“There is an answer to all our problems in this part of the world. Sometimes I think no one has thought of it.”

“What is it?” Asked Heba.

“Love.”

OCTOBER 7^th 2023 – TEL AVIV

Noah lay on the sofa in his apartment looking through the photographs that his aunt had entrusted to him. He was an early riser but had laid in bed for an extra hour that morning. He enjoyed coming in and out of dreams. They would usually evaporate like morning mist with the dawn alarm. That morning he had written the dream down immediately after he had woken up, slightly disorientated by its vividness. He had walked out of the gates at Dachau with the little girl in the photograph who held the pearled bracelet and as they passed out of the camp he woke up. They were holding hands as they left. Once he had written what he remembered of the dream down, he tried to fall asleep again and re-enter the dream. It didn’t work. He just lay there, staring at the wall.

He placed the photograph of his family, and the girl holding the pearl bracelet, on the floor. He sat up on the sofa and drank from his coffee cup. Then he took the television remote and turned on the television. It was the news. Bewilderment and fear. ‘Israel invaded by Hamas.’ ‘Many killed and captured.’ Noah sat there in his apartment with his mind in many places at once. His mobile phone buzzed and he picked it up off the coffee table. The message was from an old friend and simply read ‘Sons of Satan.’ Each lineament of thought continued on its path to the same conclusion. War.

The more information that filtered through on the news the more tense he became. With the kidnappings the anger turned to fury. Just after noon that day his mobile phone buzzed and he picked it up once again. It was the army. He was to report to duty the following morning.

OCTOBER 7^th – KHAN YOUNIS.

Heba was woken by the sound of a barking dog below on the street. It was just after dawn. She got out of bed with her doll in her hand and walked out on to the balcony. There before her lay the great shining sea with all its mystery and secrets, and all its possibility. The sun was rising up over the land, warming the balcony by quick inches. Heba sat there with her doll, listening to the silence.

The morning warmed. Somebody in the kitchen turned the radio on. At first it was just a noise but as the newsreaders voice rasped, the words began to solidify, creating their own gravity, somehow filling the air with weight. The report was clear. Hamas had penetrated the fence border between Gaza and Israel. The death toll was unknown. Heba’s family gathered in the kitchen to listen to the radio reports coming through. A new dread fed them all. It didn’t even need to be spoken. Something terrible was about to be unleashed.

Heba’s mother took her by the hand and led her into her bedroom.

“Pack up your things. We may have to leave soon. She looked up and saw her father at the doorway with a look of worry on his face. She had never seen him scared before. His expression frightened her.

“What’s happening? Are we leaving?” Asked Heba.

“We may have to.” Said her mother.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be alright God willing.” Said her father and he smiled at her. The worry on his face had gone, even if only for a few moments. She smiled back at him. She took out the suitcase from under her bed and began to pack her things as her parents had asked. She left the pearl bracelet on her wrist.

DECEMBER 7^th 2023 – KHAN YOUNIS

Noah opened his eyes and then shut them again, wondering where the edge of dreams lay. Then there was shouting. He rubbed his face and stood up. All notion of dreaming vanished as he saw his army fatigues hanging neatly at the end of his bed. He rubbed his face and stood up. He knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. This was the day his platoon was going to enter the city of Khan Younis in the south of Gaza. The north had already been laid waste.

The fear of death was on him. If there is a nature to war it must be that, death, fear and suffering. Except for those in charge. He knew that he was too young to die so well that he had stopped thinking about it. To think about death was to give into it. He sat down on the toilet and released his bowels and then had a quick cold shower. He looked into the mirror and felt ready for the mission. It was time to go.

His platoon moved slowly down the empty Gazan street. It was a waste land. As he looked around, images of Hiroshima came to Noah’s mind. The buildings skeletons, the people gone. It seemed the place was haunted. They walked on, ten feet apart, and came to a small square. This is what they had been trained for all those years. This was when they were told their soldiering would count. They were told it would be of value. Noah’s keen eyes scanned the square, up and down, south, east, north and west. There was no one there after the heavy bombing. The civilians had either left or were dead. The intelligence they had was that there may by some Hamas fighters left, likely in tunnels underground. That was the mission of his platoon, to flush them out and kill them.

Noah’s OC ordered him and three other soldiers to head west along the street that led out of the square for one block and to enter the building on the left side to see what they could find. Once it was secure they were to reconvene immediately at their present position. The soldiers took the order and left in single file moving cautiously along the street ready to fire in an instant. Slowly they went with guns raised, still ten feet apart, alert to the possibility of an ambush at any given moment. They entered the building by forcing a door. When they were inside Noah took the corridor which led to a courtyard at the back. Filled with trepidation he went along, now feeling the sweat on his face. He had to overcome the fear of being killed and of killing. He remembered why he was there. He took off his dark glasses and used the back of his shirt sleeve to dry himself. He couldn’t hear a sound on the bottom floor so he went on down the long passage way until finally he came to the end.

He put out his hand and opened the door. He suspected they were lying in wait for him outside. Vigilance was critical. He stepped out of the open doorway and stood still. The place had been virtually destroyed. His eyes tracked along the courtyard to the other side where a broken wall was still standing. His eyes carried upward where he saw a dead girl hanging from the wire at the top. The force of an exploding bomb had left her there. He stood motionless, his eyes and soul at odds. His eyes and his soul in conflict. His eyes and his soul falling. Tangling in the wire her hair fell backwards to the ground, almost parallel with her right arm. Her doll lay below her. Heba’s eyes were closed. He stood there looking. The colours on her dress becoming more vivid. Becoming brighter. His eyes followed down and there he saw the pearl bracelet on her wrist, undeniable. He remembered his relative, the little Polish girl. He swayed in sickness. The unfading beauty of the pearl bracelet seemed through his eyes to be pulsing with the life of us all. It passed through time, across generations, beyond the fathomless sea. He felt himself falling, falling slowly through the air, falling to the place where there is no light, and the end is only dreamt.

March 1, 2024
Wouldn’t You?

Summer was winding to its natural end but the evenings were still warm in London as Michael Maybrick made his way on foot through a crowded Covent Garden on his way to Long Acre. He was immaculately dressed, wearing a black evening suit with a velvet bow tie, polished to the shine black shoes and a smart top hat. His moustache was trimmed to perfection and the rest of his face was freshly shaved, knowing this was to be an important meeting at the grand lodge. A pretty young prostitute approached him with a basket of flowers to disguise her intentions and offered him ‘relief from his hard day and trouble.’ He stopped and turned to greet her eye to eye. The face that glared out under the rim of the hat froze the young woman’s soul. His expression, as intense as it was vacant, sent a sudden shock of fear through her. She had the morbid sensation someone was laying flowers on her grave. He saw fear in her eyes and a smile cracked side to side on his lips. There was a malice lurking. He turned his head away without saying a word, and with a tap of his cane on the cobbles, disappeared into the London crowd. The woman looked down at her flowers disconcertedly as Maybrick performed a pirouette in a strange, uncoordinated way.

Maybrick was a musician by profession and was a well-respected member of his Masonic lodge. He was seen by his brethren as a decent sort of fellow but his brooding and melancholy moods had been commented upon. On one occasion he had struck a bell boy around the face for merely being late with his luggage. He had been rumoured about by some of his colleagues. “Given to fits of anger” was how one of his fellow Masons described him at a lodge meeting in Marylebone, a meeting at which Sir Charles Wheeler, the head of the Metropolitan police at that time, was present. It had been noted in the minutes.

When Maybrick reached the corner of Neal Street and Long Acre he stopped still. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarette case on which was inscribed the letters “TALJ” and then placed it back in his pocket. He put a cigarette in his right hand with an empty box of matches. The case had been a gift from a fellow Mason of high ranking who was grooming him for promotion. He pushed the box open with his thumb and saw that there were no matches left. Again, as if the city were made for the thing, a pretty young woman on the street corner selling matches caught his eye. This time, as he watched her standing on the street corner watching the crowd go by, a cloud of hate itched under his black hat.

He approached her slowly from out of the shade of an awning and put his hand in his pocket to reach for a half penny. With his eyes obscured by the rim of his hat she handed him the box of matches and he put the coin in the palm of her hand. He gently folded her fingers back over the ha’penny so her hand was making a fist and clasped it between his large, strong hands. He began to squeeze her hand, gently at first, but then gradually harder. And then harder still.

“Please sir, no!” She said in a squeal as she tried to wriggle her hand free. He began to laugh and then let her go. He turned his back and then lit his thin cigar before making his way on. She looked for a policeman but to no avail. The London crowd milled along Long Acre, behaving as the London crowd always does, as if it were somehow immortal. It does what it does fearlessly and without worry of ends. Two thousand years is only the opening chapter. As long as humanity lives on this planet, there will be London, bathing in the dark and the light. As Maybrick was fond of saying “The pure soul lives in light, the eternal soul under night.”

He walked on with purpose, gripping his cane tight in a hand. He was riddled with nerves but as he approached the grand lodge he began to take hold of his emotions. He became endowed with a sense of reverence as he entered the building. Filled with fluxing passion he entered the great hall and slowly craned his head backward. He gazed upward at the all-seeing eye. They met each other in an unshakeable stare, back and forth from heaven to earth. The eye sat proudly and distinctly at the centre of the ceiling. Unblinking. He took his hat off and then craned his neck back further still and marvelled at the image for the thousandth time. His heart soared to see it. It was for the glory of God he lived, and through the lodge he had made a solemn vow to work most diligently for his glory. It would be his life’s work. In the stillness of the quiet, near empty chamber, he heard the voice of God speaking to him directly through the great all-seeing eye.

“Go forth and do my work.” Said the voice. “Obey my command and you shall live with me forever in glory.” The great booming words echoed around his head. Tears welled in his eyes. They fomented through his ecstasy dilating pupils giving an extra sparkle to their blackness. And then they changed. The joy in his eyes turned to fear and he trembled.

“Yes” he said, with a solemnity that brimmed with emotion. One of his brethren, who had been reading quietly on one of the pews, looked up and peered over the top of his reading glasses. He was a journalist at The Times called Graveney. He saw Maybrick in a trance like state, staring wild eyed, up at the image in the ceiling.

“I shall do thy bidding.” Said Maybrick softly, and the fear in his expression suddenly turned back to joy.

“Maybrick! Maybrick there!!” Shouted Graveney. Maybrick looked over at him with a start, as he was suddenly jolted from his trance. The dreamlike state of his aloneness with God, his state of grace, had been punctured.

“Everything alright Maybrick?” Asked Graveney.

“Yes. Quite alright” He replied, attempting calm. Graveney noticed the sweat on Maybrick’s brow. Maybrick discreetly wiped his forehead, regained his composure, and returned the hat to his head.

“Good fellow.” Said Graveney encouragingly, even though he was now tinged with suspicion. His brethren colleague was certainly acting in an odd manner, one certainly unaccustomed to the lodge. Maybrick nodded at him calmly and made his way to the study to prepare himself before that evening’s meeting began. As he went to leave, he turned to Graveney and said unexpectedly,

“Call me Jack.” He smiled, turned and walked away leaving Graveney in a state of slight discombobulation, and definite concern.

When the meeting was over and the brethren were milling about in idle conversation, Maybrick, without informing anyone there, left quietly and made his way clicking down the marble stairs to the back entrance of the Masonic head-quarters in Long Acre. It had begun to rain so he waited a while in the porch for an opportunity to hail a cab. By the end of a thin cigar the cab had arrived and the horses were whinnying in front of him. He opened the door and turned to the driver whose face was covered by a large hood that he wore to protect him from the downpour. Maybrick said one word at him. “Whitechapel.”

He shut the door behind him and pulled the curtain to, leaving just enough space that he could peer out at the street through the slit. The driver whipped the horses and soon there was nothing in Michael Maybrick’s head but the sound of the wheels and the hooves on the cobbles. It was as if he were void of consciousness. As they made their way east along the Roman road, the summer air began to turn foul.

Within the east end of London was the pitilessness of human existence manifest. The warren of streets were dark and labyrinthine. It was easy to disappear from sight. Maybrick placed his index finger gently on to the curtain and pulled it back slowly to give himself a better look. He saw two prostitutes talking on a street corner and a sudden volcanic surge of sexual energy coursed through his veins. He could feel his blood heating up in the furnace of his rage and supressed himself from crying out by putting his forearm firmly against his mouth to muffle his excitement. He bit into the arm of his coat hard as the ecstasy turned to euphoria.

Soon enough they had reached the east end as the pubs were shutting. The quiet of the city night approached. He tapped his cane hard three times on the roof of the cab and it came to a halt half way down the Commercial Road East. He was about to get out but the heavy rain changed his mind. He had somehow lost his nerve. He shouted to take him to the west end where he lived and told the driver he would tip him when they arrived. He looked at the women talking and then closed the curtain and then rested his head back with his eyes closed.

“Soon.” He said. And with a huge grin that exposed all his large rotting teeth and his blood red gums, and with his eyes as wide as could be, he sat there between his imagination and his reality, conjuring the future images of what he conceived to be the genius of his diabolical game.

———

Warm days passed by. Then on the 31^st of August 1888 Maybrick left his house, and shut the door carefully behind him, humming the melody to a song he had written entitled “They All Love Jack.” Night had fallen but before long he hailed a cab and asked again to be taken to Whitechapel. The night was cloudless and there was no sign of rain. He looked at his pocket watch as the cab began to move. It was just after 11pm. He wore a long coat with deep pockets and about it a black cape and by his feet was a dark carpet bag. That night he wore a bowler hat which was tilted slightly forward. On the inside on his pocket watch was a depiction of the all-seeing eye and when he saw it he went into a kind of flux. His head began to shake softly and his eyes rolled back to a hypnotised state. “God’s work’ said the voice, “Gods work” again until a jolt of the cab’s wheel on an upturned cobble awoke him. He rubbed his face and lit a cigarette and then carefully, as he had done a few nights before, he pulled the curtain back an inch and looked out. If it wasn’t for the noise of the city he would have been able to hear the thumping of his heart. Adrenaline seeped through him, but then diminished, leaving him unfilled in the charging moment, the unrequited eroticism begging him towards the fire. Making sure the curtains were pulled shut he unsheathed one of the knives he was carrying, allowing himself for a moment to admire the sharpness of the glinting blade. He then put it back in its sheath and concealed it in the specially made pocket in the inside lining of his cloak.

When Maybrick arrived in Whitechapel it was just past midnight and the pubs were beginning to empty. “Hehe” he giggled in a mad way. The sound of his own laughter let off a madness in him that he boiled to repress, sinking his face into his hands and then scratching the back of his head with dug in nails. He rocked backwards and forwards a little. A sweat had began to form around the edges of his hair. His eyes were so dilated they were nearly totally black when he opened them. He got out of the cab and paid the driver, taking care to obscure his face. He thanked him and said goodbye. There was life sounding out of the various pubs and a few people milled around including a drunk, swaying on gin, holding on to a wall to keep himself upright.

Although the road was badly lit there was still enough light. Not like the side streets and back alleys that were lit by the stars and moon. A light that could be doused by the movement of clouds, plunging the back alleys and courts into pitch blackness. As he stepped down onto the cobbles a man walked past him with wild, incendiary eyes. The man’s name was Kosminski, one of the many immigrants that had arrived in east London, causing the city itself to swell. Maybrick had once commented that the east end was like a bloated abdomen. Rats and sewage festered. Conditions and sanitation in some places, especially the doss houses, were unfit for living, and the stench in places so bad, especially in summer, as to make an unsuspecting visitor retch. But London could cope, as it always has and always will, with change and misery.

The two men caught each-other’s eye. Their madness met in a fleeting glance. There was a sudden moment, as there is before fights, fuelled by adrenaline. But they turned their heads away from each other and there was no conflict. They had out-madded each other. Kominski carried on, muttering to himself as he walked down Commercial Road East and Maybrick carried on into the sullen heart of Whitechapel, to be among the night wanderers.

One of those night wanderers was a woman by the name of Mary Anne Nichols. She had been turned out of her lodgings and needed to go and make some money to pay for her bed. She said to the woman that ran the doss house “With me pretty bonnet I’ll soon get me doss money” and she left the place with her shawl wrapped tightly over her shoulders. She had been drinking that day and had a head full of booze but was compos mentis in terms of what she felt she had to do. She staggered a little when she walked but not too much. Almost an hour passed without her getting any business. As she slowly sobered up the night became quiet. The badly lit street where she waited offered no sound. It was almost half-way through the night when she smiled at the opportunity of her luck changing. Walking towards her across the empty road was a tall man with his hands in the pockets of his long dark cloak and with a bowler hat tilted forward. As he crossed the street towards Buck’s Row and to Mary, he said to himself in a controlled monotone way:

“All this I most solemnly, sincerely promise and swear, with a firm and steady resolution to perform the same, without any hesitation, myself, under no less penalty than that of having my body severed in two, my bowels taken from thence and burned to ashes, the ashes scattered before the four winds of heaven, that no more remembrance might be had of so vile and wicked a wretch as I would be, should I ever, knowingly, violate this my Master Mason’s obligation. So help me God, and keep me steadfast in the due performance of the same.”

This was a part of his Masonic oath. An oath to which his mad mind clung. By the time he was close enough to speak to her he had stopped speaking. She didn’t hear him say a word. When he arrived he stood two feet away from her and waited for her to make an offer.

“Hello kind sir. I’m hoping I can be of service. How do you like my new bonnet?” He lifted his head up and looked at her from under the rim of his hat. The moonlight caught his face. She looked back at him and paused as she registered his glare. In a fleeting moment she thought she may have seen some sadness there, some forlorn soul within. However, she was eager to get paid and back to her lodgings to sleep.

“Yes.” He said. Where can we go?”

“Just here by the gates. No one can see us.” She said. He followed her calmly into the darkness.

In Buck’s Row by the stable door she turned and faced him and they looked into each other’s eyes. She knew who he was. That is certain. As did the other four. The canonical five as they eventually came to be known. Including the ripper himself there are six people to know his identity for sure, six that we know of. To actually know his face and his eyes.

As they looked at each other and she put her hand in his belt he put his hand over her mouth and taking the large knife from his pocket slit her throat causing blood to spill onto his maniacal face. She tried to cry murder but he muffled her cries and she bled out as he began to slash and stab wildly at her if indeed making some crazed attempt to cleave her in two. He stabbed her vagina on purpose. For four minutes he cut and hacked, nearly salivating as the intensity of the moment started to dry the roof of his mouth. Four minutes that felt to his soulless soul like the release of a life-long prisoner, repressed and caged. The laughter had gone out of him, extinguishing some remnant goodness with every vicious slash of the knife. He shook violently as the life left her body. Looking up to the heavens he gave thanks. With his power over life he was now in direct communion with God.

He suddenly heard the sound of footsteps and dropped her lifeless cadaver to the floor where she fell with a thud. Her eyes remained open though she was now dead. The ripper fell back into the shadows. A man called Charles Cross walked up Buck’s Row on his way to the early shift at work. He was used to walking this street through the dark of the night and saw what at first he thought to be a discarded tarpaulin.

“A tarpaulin’ he said aloud as he came near, but the moonlight revealed something sinister.

“Oh Jesus” he said. The ripper heard him speak as he stood motionless in a pitch-black alcove with his back to the street less than fifteen feet away. Within a few moments another man named Robert Paul who was also on his way to work saw Cross standing there and curious at the scene approached, unaware of the grim spectacle that lay in store. Cross touched her face which was still warm with life but her hands were deathly cold. With her eyes open in the bad light there was some confusion between the two whether she was dead or merely unconscious.

“Let’s find a peeler” Said Paul to Cross “I’m late for work as it is.” This piece of information did not go unnoticed by the man in the shadows. He closed his eyes and concentrated intensely on his hearing. He listened to two pairs of feet making away, and when the sound had disappeared around the corner the ripper emerged from the blackness, ignoring the carnage he had made as he made his way swiftly in the opposite direction through the rabbit warren of Whitechapel’s streets which he had learned so intimately, making his way west on foot in the wake of the rising sun.

In the lodge of the Freemasons in Great Queen Street Sir Charles Wheeler sat with five other men, including Graveney who had witnessed Michael Maybrick’s bizarre trance like behaviour a few weeks before.

“Odd kind of fellow” said one man.

“But he is one of us.” Said another.

“And a fine musician I hear.” Wheeler sat pensively averting his eyes from the ceiling. Then he spoke.

“Don’t be troubled. It seems he was having an episode. Thank-you for informing me and I would be grateful if you could all monitor the situation and keep me informed of any developments. Both Maybrick and the Whitechapel murders. It’s possible……. they are connected. Remember, he is one of the brethren and for that he WILL receive our undivided loyalty. No matter what. Do I make myself clear?”

“On our honour.” They all replied to him in unison.

Wheeler learned of the second murder soon after it had occurred. Her name was Annie Chapman. The mutilation was even more vicious than the last and initial reports said the two murders were connected. But there were other pieces of information from the first report he received that perturbed him greatly. Things that may connect the murders to themselves. It was about her abdomen. It had been removed by the killer and placed over her shoulder. At once Wheeler thought of the Masonic oath. Then he thought of Maybrick. When the double murder occurred he had personally rushed to Whitechapel and had seen above the bloody apron of Catherine Eddowes the graffiti on the wall which ran ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ Wheeler had personally ordered the writing to be removed.

He suggested to himself it may have been coincidental, but he was in reality overwhelmed with doubt. But then he learned about the farthing coins that had been laid deliberately and ceremonially around the body. When Wheeler found this out a grim, unflexing look of despair came over his face. He immediately sent word to the commanding officers on the case and demanded that everyone with knowledge of this event must not tell a soul. Any details with Masonic connections must be excluded from the reports. Wheeler said specifically to those involved in the investigation, especially those who were in liaison with the press that the facts about the meticulous arrangement of the coins and the entrails being placed over the shoulder must be kept secret from the public as it might jeopardise the investigation.

That was the official line. In private, he recommended caution and vigilance to the brethren of the lodge concerning the Whitechapel murders and then disbanded the meeting. He sat alone that night looking out of the window brooding on the recent horrors. One thought obsessed him and one thought alone. If the killer was a Mason he would have the most solemn task of keeping these despicable events from in anyway tainting the brotherhoods good reputation. Again he thought of Maybrick. At first, each hour, then each minute, then each second until the whole business began to obsess his mind. Graveney, the journalist-Mason that worked on the Times said to Wheeler “If we can make the killer out to be a fool of some kind… the important thing is….. that we are in control. Perhaps I can invent a character for this murderer to live up to. Create some publicity. As a diversion. A crafted idiot, a dunce with a vicious soul. Something for the masses to wonder about. I can put them off the scent. It will be good for us in any event.” He smiled a broad smile. Wheeler looked at him and with a slight nod of his head, gave his tacit approval.

“But remember” said Wheeler “this is no cause of laughter.” Graveney knew as well as Wheeler that if news got out about the macabre nature of the carefully placed farthings, or the compasses that had been carved into the flesh of the victim, or indeed the fact that the small intestines had been placed over the right shoulder, then it may bring the eye of suspicion on their fellowship. It was this line of thinking that led him to his ingenious idea. He would create a character that would divert public scrutiny. They could benefit from the confusion. He would have to create someone stupid and semi-literate in their ways of thinking. If he made him a Cockney the East Enders might start bickering among themselves, and stoke the fires of suspicion. Then, in Whitechapel, they would need the police even more. They would seek protection. Their power would be upheld.

One night before the double murder Sir Charles Wheeler looked out of the window of his high office at the lodge down on to the west end street below and saw Michael Maybrick himself standing quite still on the other side of road, staring skywards into the night as he puffed away on a cigar that hung on his lips. Slowly Maybrick began to sway and then to the surprise of Wheeler began to dance slowly with his arm up as if he was doing a waltz with an invisible woman. Wheeler looked down at him from the high window noticing that rain was beginning to hit the pane. But that didn’t stop his dancing.

Graveney approached Wheeler and stood by him at the window with a blank sheet of paper in his hand. He looked down out of the window with his brethren friend and also witnessed the spectacle, the two of them looking down at the street in silence, through the rainy glass. Graveney turned and went over to the desk, leaving Wheeler by the window. He was unable to hide the smile of inspiration in his expression. Then he dipped his pen in the red ink pot that he had especially purchased and bent over the table as he began to write;

Dear Boss,

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours truly
Jack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade name

PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha^[5]

When it was done he showed the letter to Wheeler who then called the most high ranking Masons into his office to share his proposal. When he finished reading the letter out loud to the brethren they cheered heartily. ‘Well done that man!’ Said one of the Mason’s.

“I will send it to the central news agency now, should take some of the heat off brother Maybrick.” They said to him “well done old chap” again and in celebration of Graveney’s moment of creativity Sir Charles Wheeler opened a bottle of Glenfiddich and began to pour. When their glasses were filled he went over to the window to close the curtains, and looking down on the street, noticed that Maybrick had gone.

Feature Image: Michael Maybrick (1841–1913), English composer and singer, best known under the pseudonym of Stephen Adams who composed “The Holy City“, one of the most popular religious songs in English.

February 8, 2024