Cassandra Voices

Tag: Fiction

  • 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

  • Horses

    Linda phoned me. They found him lying on the ground again. It seems like he’s serious this time. As we were saying goodbye she said, “Tell me if you need money.” I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but I only said, “All right, thanks.” I don’t know what I expected from her. Apparently Papà fell while he was out on his bicycle. Not that he fell off his bicycle. He just fell. At six o’clock he still hadn’t come back so Amos went to look for him and found him by the Dora, lying against the fence. Then my aunt called to tell me that she couldn’t cope anymore and we would have to deal with him. “There are those damned horses too,” she added. As she was talking to me, I looked out the window, trying not to slam the phone down. Anyone would have thought she’d just been waiting for this moment to have a go at me. I told her I was coming back to the village. She snorted and started grumbling again. I said goodbye and put the phone down. I wanted to cry, but the moment passed. I lit a cigarette and looked for the train timetables. Papà is still alive, and I bet she won’t even let him drink a glass or two. She’s that stupid.

    I went to work and, without really thinking about it, I told them my dad was dying and that I needed at least a week off. Lots of people shook my hand, like when I manage to close a deal.
    In the end they gave me the time off. I accepted a few more demonstrations of respect caused by the imminent death of Papà, and left.

    The mist still hasn’t evaporated and I don’t think it will today. I pull my cap down over my forehead until it’s just above my eyes. The air smells damp, fending off the sun. I’ll get the 11.20 train.
    As soon as I get home I call my aunt.
    “Zia, pass me Papà please,” I say.
    “Your father’s tired and won’t get up,” she says.
    “Just pass him to me.” I can hear Papà saying something in the background.
    “Come here so you can talk to him,” says Zia.
    She’s worried I might change my mind and not go to free her from that burden. What can I do? Take Papà with me and show him the shithole I live in? No, I know she wants something else.
    “So you’re not going to let me talk to him?”
    “Your dad’s unwell, why won’t you understand?”
    “It’s going to go like this: if you don’t pass him to me now, I’m not coming.”
    “You’re irresponsible, your dad doesn’t deserve this.”
    “Ok, goodbye Zia Say goodbye to him from me.”
    I put the phone down, and make myself a cup of tea. Then, I don’t know why, but I turn the radio on and end up with one of those singers who put vocal embellishments on every line, and wonder why I bothered. I roll a little joint, light it and a swirl of blue-white smoke floats halfway between the floor and the ceiling of the living room. The radio grates a little but perhaps it’s better like that. Then I feel the telephone vibrating. It’s Zia’s number.
    “Hi Jimmy.”
    “Hi Pa. How are you?”
    “I want a little drink.”
    “As soon as I get there we’ll have a couple of glasses.”
    “Can you bring something? Marina doesn’t approve.”
    “Ok.”
    “It’s been two days since anyone saw to the horses.”
    “What about Amos?”
    “I don’t trust Amos.”
    “Got it.”
    “When will you get here?”
    “Around one. Shall we eat something together?”
    “You can forget that. She has me eating at half past eleven.”
    “Don’t worry, see you soon.”
    “‘Bye.” I put out what’s left of my joint in the ashtray and open the window. I’m a little bit fuzzy and my tea is getting cold. I realise I should get a load going in the washing machine. My clothes stink.

    I must have made the journey at least three hundred times. Each time the same as the last. I’m in a compartment with two kids skipping school. They’re a little bit drunk. The man sitting next to me has a crooked nose and pockmarked cheeks. He’s wearing a pair of too-big corduroy trousers. Every part of him is jiggling, he can’t stay still. It looks like his clothes are causing it. The train enters the plains like a blade, cutting through newly frosted fields, and the horizon looks very close, just a few metres from the tracks. The man with the corduroy trousers unintentionally kicks me. I don’t even turn though I hear his whispered “sorry”. Papà was happy when I left our village. So was I. He told me not to worry because he had his horses. He’d made an effort after Ma passed, and had fixed up our grandparents’ old house. It was a small property outside the village. In winter evenings it had always seemed enormous and menacing in my eyes. Zia and Amos had left him to it, and it was too late when they realised that Papà had absolutely no intention of renovating the house. In fact he actually knocked down some of the walls and built a wooden hut. He spent nearly a year getting it into shape. Of the old house only the portico remains, with Virginia creeper climbing all over it; and my grandparents’ living room where Papà has put a bed, his bottles, a gas heater, an old radio, a gas ring, and various books. He always said he wanted to be left to read in peace. He told me he wanted to read the classics. When I asked him what exactly, Papà sighed instead of answering, something he did quite often when I was small too, in the most unexpected moments. Sighing was his way of retreating from things, or that’s what I think now.

    The train is crossing the bridge over the Dora. The river is a bed of mist. I can’t see the water. The man in the corduroy trousers is looking out the window too, but when our eyes meet, reflected in the glass, he snaps his gaze away and goes back to looking straight ahead.

    Papà pulled down the posts that held up the grape vines and freed the garden from grass and weeds, leaving only an old oak tree growing in the middle. In the summer it gives a bit of shade. Then he bought four male horses: three big ones and a smaller one, not Shetland small, but a pony rather than a horse. I’ve never understood anything about horses, even though Papà explained to me meticulously what to give them to eat, how to ride them and how to clean them. All I remember is that I felt really sorry for them in the summer when they would surrender to the heat and stand under the oak tree, flies buzzing around their eyes. Papà said that when you come into contact with horses you feel a strange sensation you can’t describe. You feel a long way from everything and everybody – they’re solitary beasts.

    Every now and then he would ride into town. I think people thought he was a bit crazy. They probably thought he had lost his mind without Ma. People always need to find reassuring explanations. Papà asked me to take some photos of him riding by the river. One of them had come out really well: my old man bending over a black horse, eyes small and sharp, and behind them spring nature, dirty and wild. Now that photo is hanging above my bed.

    The train starts to hiss and tilts slightly on the inclined tracks. I get up from my seat. Every now and then I like to imagine that while I’ve been away something’s changed even though I know it won’t have.

    I’ve brought Papà a bottle of red wine and a bottle of vodka that someone gave me. Along the way from the station to Zia’s house a bicycle makes a hole in the fog and passes me. I’m beginning to get hungry. The village I was born in has no points of interest, it doesn’t even have a story to tell. Every time I go back it always looks old and tired. It takes ten minutes to walk from the station to Zia’s house, and everything looks the same.

    The house has two storeys, upstairs, which is where my family lived before Ma passed away, is not lived in any more. Zia prefers it to be empty rather than renting to strangers. Her dream is for me to go back and live up there and look after Papà, and that all of a sudden things will start to go really well in every way. Of course she’d also be perfectly happy to send Papà to a retirement home or something like that. Even if she can’t say so. Also she’d like to get rid of the damned horses and sell my grandparents’ house. Except, because of what Papà has done to it, she’ll be selling the land, not a house any more.

    I ring Zia’s bell. I can hear the sound of her wooden clogs coming to the entrance.
    “Thank goodness you’re here!”
    “Your old man doesn’t want to eat. He wants to wait for you.”
    “How is he?”
    “Oh Gianmarco, I don’t know what to do. The doctor came, he said Pietro has to take things easy. But you know what he’s like, he gets so worked up.”
    “Is he taking anything?”
    “The doctor gave him Vigabatrin. Come in, it’s cold.”
    The fire is crackling in the fireplace. The kitchen is stale with the smell of soup and closed-in spaces.
    “Are you hungry?”
    “Where’s Papà ?”
    “He’s in there, watching sport. Tell him to come and eat.”
    Papà is sitting in a rocking chair. He is wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare jeans.
    He is skinnier than last time I saw him.
    He really does look like a sick man.
    “Hi.” Papà turns his head a little and just hints at a hello. I put my backpack on the floor and crouch down next to him, resting a hand on his arm.
    “Can you smell the stink of that stuff?”
    “The soup?”
    “Liquids are for drinking, you eat solid stuff, not the other way around,” he says.
    “How are you then?” he asks me. I can’t tell him the truth.
    “Well enough.”
    “Ah, me too, well enough. Bad enough.” Papà laughs and grips my arm. Then he comes closer to my ear.
    “Have you brought anything to drink?” I nod.
    “What do you want to eat, Gianmarco?” Zia asks from the kitchen. I look at Papà . He shakes his head.
    “I’m not hungry right now, Zia,” I say.
    “But it must be half one.”
    “I ate something on the way here.”
    “At least tell your father…”
    “If I eat I’ll die,” my father interrupts.
    “Oh get away with you…”
    “You’ll have me on your conscience…”
    “Pietro!” Papà mimes putting two fingers down his throat. He is happy to see me and is behaving like when I was a child. He always did want to make me laugh. Not that I gave him much satisfaction on that front. Then he comes closer to my ear.
    “Let’s go eat with the horses. Bring the bottles.”
    Papà gets up, giving himself a push with his hands.
    “Give me a shoulder, I get a bit dizzy when I stand up.”
    I put an arm around his shoulders, a bit clumsily. I can feel the outline of his protruding shoulder blade. Zia has turned back to the stove, but as soon as she hears us get up she asks us where we think we’re going.
    “Can’t I spend some time with my son?”
    “Gianmarco, be careful.”
    “Papà, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go out.”
    “Ah, neither do I. But it’s not good to stay at home either, watching television all the time. It makes your eyes burn.”
    “You see, Gianmarco, he’s always wanting to go out. You try to tell him.”
    “Zia, Papà isn’t a child…”
    “Look at you, always defending him…”
    I can hear a hint of self-satisfaction masked as indignation in her tone, the martyr of the family, what’s left of it, in knowing that the two of us are for some reason together.

    Papà and I leave and start walking through the weeds alongside a ditch. My socks are getting wet.
    “I’m not at all well,” he says.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I’m not doing great.”
    “Are you taking your medicine?”
    “Jimmy…” I understand what he means. The houses peter out and the fog gets lower and denser. We’re shut in a box without walls.
    “What have you brought me?” he asks.
    “A bottle of wine and a bottle of vodka.”
    “Vodka?”
    I open my backpack and hand the bottle to Papà. He’s finding it hard to unscrew so I make him give me back the bottle and open it. Papà wets his lips with it, clicks his tongue, then takes a more determined pull. He sighs. “Where did you get this?”
    “It was a gift.”
    “It’s good,” he holds the bottle by the neck with both hands and raises it slowly to his mouth.
    “Marina wants to sell the horses. She says they’re a burden.”
    Papà takes a sip. I don’t say anything.
    “She says at the rate I’m going, trying to look after those horses will kill me. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get anything.”
    We have reached the front of my grandparents’ old house. The paint on the door is peeling off leaving a layer of rust. Papà struggles to open the door, he has to push it with his foot. The house is just as I remembered it. There’s a dog too.
    “You don’t know him. His name is Hanky.”
    He’s a handsome sheepdog with a leonine mane and big expressive eyes. “Hanky, this is Jimmy” Hanky comes closer. I brush his head with my hand. “I got him from the dog’s home, they wanted to put him down.”
    “You did the right thing.”
    “He is my right-hand man with the horses,” says Papà . Hanky follows us into the living room.
    “Shall we eat something?” Papà asks. I nod.
    “The dog’s hungry too,” he says.
    “Go and get some water.”
    Grabbing a large saucepan, I go into the garden. The water pump is next to the horses’ barn. I take a peek inside. One is eating something and doesn’t seem to have noticed me. The others are standing still. Just one is a little smaller. I go back. Papà has filled two glasses with vodka. I light the little gas ring.
    “I saw the horses,” I say.
    “Did you see the criollo?”
    “Papà, I don’t know anything about horses.”
    And he sighs.
    “Ah, as far as that goes, neither do I,” he says, “I’ve never understood anything. I thought maybe you could tell me which one it is.” Papà laughs and drains his glass. Hanky is watching him intently.
    “Which one is the criollo?”
    “It’s the brown one with the black mane. The biggest one. What were they doing?”
    “Nothing, they were just standing still. One of them was eating.”
    “Do me a favour would you, open that cupboard door.”
    Papà gets up, takes a packet and pours it into the pan I brought the water in. Hanky barks. I go to the table and drain my glass of vodka. Papà says to follow him. We go out. There are bales of hay leaning against the back of the barn and Papà sticks the hay fork into one and lifts. His back bends, I can see the line of his spine. I try to lift a bale of hay with my hands. It’s bulky but I manage. Hanky follows us without making a sound. I wonder why the horses prefer to stay in the shadowy interior of the barn rather than going out into the garden. Papà puts the hay down in front of one of the horses that were standing still. The horse that was eating neighs and almost rears. Hanky barks. I go to Papà .

    “Where will I put this?”
    “Leave it there.”
    The smallest horse comes towards me. He reaches my shoulder. I gather up a handful of hay and hold it out to him. He bares his gums and opens his mouth. His breath is really warm. He chews noisily, opening his mouth in an exaggerated way. Papà heaves himself up.
    The one that must be the criollo is looking at me. His muzzle twitches.
    “Are you hungry too?” Papà asks me.
    The packet he emptied into the pan is an oat, spelt, and chickpea soup. He pours a ladleful into his plate, one into mine, and one into Hanky’s bowl. I open the bottle of wine. The soup is insipid but hot, and that’s enough. We eat in silence. Papà has already finished when I’m only halfway through, and he fills his glass.

    “So how’s it going with you?”
    I answer, “I don’t know,” which seems the most honest answer I can give.
    “You start.” I say.
    That sigh, again. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I only know I like horses. No other reason. Y’know, I thought I might come to understand some things. I researched breeds, their feed, how to behave around them. And, perhaps that I would become a better person. Then I discovered I can’t understand them. I can’t teach them anything either.”
    I fill my glass. The afternoon outside is already making room for darkness. I go to the window. Hanky barks. He’s finished his soup.
    “We are just lonely beasts, like the horses, and whoever doesn’t admit it is only being unfair to themselves. There are people who become passionate about something, people who keep warm, who eat, who drink, who work, and people who think about money. They’re all lonely beasts, too, hunting for anything to relieve their solitude.”
    The front door creaks.
    “Did you leave it open?” He asks.
    I go out to check. The wheel of a bicycle is coming across the doorstep. It’s Amos. He rests the bicycle against the wall. His fingers are thick and rough and when he shakes my hand, he almost crushes it.
    “Hi, Gianmarco. How are you?”
    “Well,” I answer, “and you? You’re looking well.”
    “Ahh, working as hard as a mule.”
    Amos is still shaking my hand.
    “Is your father here?”
    I nod. “He’s inside.”
    He shakes his head gently.
    “Your old man should be taking it easy,” he says. “Did they tell you that the other day we couldn’t find him? It’s not the first time either. I was out for two hours looking for him. Luckily I saw him before it got dark. He has blackouts, loses his balance, y’know.”
    Hanky runs out barking. I calm him, stroking his head. “I’ve brought his medicine,” Amos says.
    Amos and I go into the living room but Papà isn’t there. “Now where’s he got to?”
    “I’ll give him his medicine, Amos.”
    “Gianmarco,” he says, “your sister is coming to dinner tonight. It would be nice if you and your father…”
    “Of course, we’ll be home in about an hour.”
    Nice for who, I wonder. I say goodbye to Amos as I accompany him out, then I go to the horses. Papà is standing there stock-still, a concentrated expression on his face. I show him his medicine. He grimaces slightly.
    “Is Linda coming?”
    “Yes.” Papà takes a tablet and flings it far away from him. For a moment I’m tempted to tell him off, then I decide to leave it be.

    When we get home Ricky’s car is already parked outside in the street. On our way there Papà didn’t say a word. I try to clear my mind as much as possible. An early evening frost is tickling the edges of the ditch. You can see the prints of Ricky’s BMW tyres on the road. It will be like Christmas dinner, I think as I ring Zia’s doorbell.
    “Gianmarco, is that you?” she asks.
    The door clicks as we go through. Linda appears at the front door. She’s wearing a checkered apron, but her high heels betray her.
    “Jimmy, Dad, where have you been?” By the expression on her face anyone would think Papà and I are about to be washed away by a river in flood, without any chance of resisting. Actually, I don’t get a chance to reply before she yells at her kid and turns back to the stove. Papà says hello, Linda tells him off for something, then kisses him on the cheek, while Zia mutters something under her breath, as if she’s addressing God. It’s a script they always follow. My nephew is playing on his iPad. Linda scolds him because he hasn’t said hello to grandpa or his uncle. He says hello without lifting his gaze. It’s far too hot in the kitchen. The male component of the family is missing from the roster, they must have gone together to check out a water leak in the garage or something. On these occasions I am a kid, and have been for years now, I’ll probably never be a man and Papà has regressed to an infantile state, a few steps below mine. Linda is so upright and maternal with us poor orphans.
    “Guys, it’s ready,” she yells, “c’mon Tommaso, you too!” she says trying to shake my nephew from his listlessness.
    “Jimmy, you’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says.
    “I’ve been doing a lot of sport,” I answer.
    “You should strengthen your shoulders a bit … Papà , what are you doing?” Papà is leaving.
    Zia who when Linda is here has no choice but to retreat to a supporting role, manages to grab him by the arm.
    “Pietro, where do you think you’re going?” she says. Linda unties her apron. But Papà can’t get out because in the meantime the men arrive. Ricky is wearing a pair of red trainers.
    “Hello,” he says and shakes my hand. He picks up my nephew and brings him to the table. Then he greets Papà affectionately. He calls him Papà. A stupid laugh escapes me. Linda notices and asks me if I can give her a hand in the kitchen.
    “Jimmy, Ricky loves dad. Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?”
    My blood runs cold.
    “Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?” She doesn’t have the least idea that she’s a bit of a bitch. I don’t understand how she doesn’t. Linda doesn’t even consider that being a bitch is part of her. It’s incredible. There’s no sense in answering her. She’s won. I follow her and we sit at the table. Amos is already sitting down and eating bread sticks.
    Papà’s place is at the head of the table. The veins on his temples are standing out.
    “What a nice party,” he says.
    Zia brings two serving trays of raw meat and flakes of Parmesan to the table. Tommaso has started playing with his tablet again and says raw meat tastes of iron and he doesn’t like it. Linda is talking about the gym. Ricky, apart from having the hint of a tan and the gaze of an accomplished man, every now and then shows small signs of crumbling. He blinks and has minute nervous tics. I think, day after day, he’s realising he has made some terrible mistake, though he doesn’t remember what. Zia is proud of Linda and the little boy, who is decidedly too quiet for a five year old. Amos’ conversation varies from politics to work, from young people to football. All I can do is listen in silence. Every now and then I nod. Linda is talking about investments. She says that she and Ricky are thinking of expanding. Then the conversation turns to me. Linda asks me if I’m working. Amos says something about young people. Zia says I never get in touch. Ricky says everything is going well, next year they’re going to open another gym. Linda is talking about the difficulties of finding reliable employees. Then she asks me again if I’m working.
    I have a project, I tell her, and leave it at that. Amos says young people have to be encouraged. Zia is faded in the background, but she seems to be reassured by seeing the situation is under control. Papà eats, bent over his plate. Amos pours a glass of wine for Papà even though Zia seems against it. Papà is taking very small bites. Then Zia brings in the agnolotti. Linda says they are exquisite. Ricky compliments Zia. Amos tries to say something to the kid, but nothing doing. I’m thinking about the horses. Linda says we have to talk. She starts saying we all love Papà and we’re all interested in his well-being. Papà looks at me.
    “So we thought he needs to be in a place where someone can look after him. One of our clients, a good person, has a villa in the hills. It’s not a retirement home, it’s a kind of residence, with a bar, televisions in the rooms, and a restaurant. We can go and visit him whenever we want, and he can walk in the garden which is huge because it used to be one of the Savoia hunting lodges.” There we go.
    “Linda,” I say, “I know you love him, but I have to remind you that as well as being your father and my father he’s also a person, with his own will.”
    “Jimmy,” her voice rises, “I am trying to help him. Papà needs …”
    “Tell him, tell him what he needs. He is here, tell him to his face…”
    “Jimmy stop using that tone of voice!” says Zia.
    “Papà, as you’re not stupid, you must have understood what your daughter is saying …”
    Papà is chewing slowly.
    “I don’t know why you always have to behave like a child …” says Linda.
    “Come here Tommaso,” says Ricky. The kid snorts and asks if he can take his tablet. Ricky says ‘no’ sternly, and they leave the room together. Amos pours himself another glass, waiting for the right moment to add his two cents.
    I take a breath.
    “Linda, I promise I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to shatter your illusions, and you’re my sister, but I have to tell you. Linda, you’re some bitch.” Zia jumps to her feet and tells me I should be ashamed of myself. It’s a pity Ricky isn’t here, I’d love to see him struggling to repress his desire to thump me.
    “Guys, we’re not here to argue …” says Amos.
    “Jimmy,” says Papà , “your sister is right.”
    “Thank you Papà ,” says Linda.
    “Papà …”
    “No, Jimmy, she’s right.”
    “What about the horses?”
    “Ricky wants to renovate our grandparents’ house,” says Linda, regaining her normal tone of voice, “he says a house with all that space is wasted on housing four horses. He wants to buy some more and open a riding stables…”
    “So?”
    Ricky comes back with the kid. He sits down. It looks like they’d planned this move. The kid picks up the tablet again.
    “Jimmy, let’s talk, man to man,” he says, “once your grandparents’ house has been fixed up it will be half ours and half yours. There will be two apartments with gardens.”
    “And you don’t have to worry about contributing anything for the residence,” Linda adds.
    I look at Papà. He motions me to come closer.
    “Come with me Jimmy, let’s go outside for a bit.”
    It was as if this moment had been in the air.
    “Papà , I don’t understand …”
    “It’s obvious Jimmy, you couldn’t possibly understand.”
    “Don’t you realise they’re treating you like a child?”
    “Won’t you realise maybe I’m ok with that?”
    “[…] What about the horses?”
    “I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say they’re mine. They’re free animals.”
    “Papà, do you really want to go to a … residence for the elderly?”
    “Perhaps one day it will happen to you too, and you’ll think of me. Now, I know theses are stupid words but you have to listen carefully. Your grandparents’ house doesn’t belong to the family, it’s mine, and until I die it will stay mine. In my will I’ve stated that that house will be yours, and don’t you dare let Linda and her husband, or your aunt or Amos in. Nobody must go in there, only you. Amos will have Hanky, and I’ve already given the horses away, they’re coming to get them next week.”
    I feel terribly lonely. I light a cigarette and blow out an exaggerated mouthful of smoke.
    “So you knew about everything?”
    “Of course.”
    “And you’re alright with it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s time to experience new things … c’mon, let’s go back in.”
    At the table the situation has calmed down. Amos is telling them about when he goes wild boar hunting. Zia has brought the roast to the centre of the table.
    “Linda,” asks Papà , “when are you taking me to the residence?”
    “Whenever you want Papà .”
    “Tomorrow morning then.”
    “Oh, Pietro!” says Zia, “you’re always exaggerating.”
    Linda’s face lights up and she looks at me.
    “Well done, Papà ,” she says, “then you can take it easy, and enjoy life in peace. And when you want we can come and get you and spend some time together. Isn’t that right, Tommy?”
    “Yeah,” says the kid listlessly. Amos starts talking about something else. I take a slice of roast, but I’m not hungry. I try to listen to what Amos is saying, but his words flow unendingly and I can’t make myself interested in his story. Linda is glowing. Her verve is irrepressible. She tells Zia she’s going to make coffee and asks me if I want to go in and give her a hand. I get up from the table.
    “Jimmy, thank you. I knew I could count on you”, she puts her arms around me but let go immediately. “It’s the best thing for us all,” she says. “Not least because we can’t leave this burden for Zia to carry.”
    I feel terribly lonely again. I let her hug me, but don’t return the gesture. I really can’t show her the same affection she seems to feel for me. I get the six-cup coffee pot ready and she does the four-cup one.
    “We were thinking of taking Papà to the residence at the end of the month. What are you doing over the next few days?”
    “I want to spend some time here with Papà .”
    “Y’know what, I was worried. I thought it was going to be difficult for you.”
    “You’re right, it is.”
    “You’ve always had a special bond with Papà … I’ve never managed to be as close to him as you are.”
    “Linda, if Papà wants to go to a retirement home, it means he’ll go to a retirement home.”
    “Oh, thank you Jimmy …” She hugs me again. “And please, if you need anything you only have to ask. For your project too, all right?”
    “Yes.” The coffee is rising simultaneously in both pots. Linda turns off the gas and pours the coffee into cups. I give her a hand taking the tray to the table. The kid has turned the tablet off and is telling his dad what presents he wants for his birthday. Ricky rests a hand on his son’s head. Amos pours a drop of grappa into his coffee. He asks me if I want some too. I say yes. I think about the photo of Papà riding. I watch him fiddling with his coffee cup. It all seems still, immobile, crystallised. It’s as if time is filling up with tiny, innocuous, totally ordinary gestures, as if everything is already a memory, many years old.

    Translated by Sally McCorry A special thanks to Kevin Hagerty and Tom Hall

  • Dog Years

    Then the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.” – Genesis 18:20-21

    They were an ancient and patient race. Sympathetic. Considered. Sarcastic.

    The first they knew of us were radio waves which pierced their silence like dilating klaxons. At first, they couldn’t fathom the meaning of those faded, tinny excretions. Their initial thought: a cosmic butt-dial of some distant world’s collective mental breakdown. After prolonged examination, the significance of the messages became clear and, even clearer, what they needed to do about them.

    It took time to get psychologically and technologically prepared. There were details to be drawn out. Matters to be pondered.

    Through a freak of physics I cannot explain, they reached Earth long before the messages which dispatched them to us. They were a little disappointed when they learned they would have to wait a while for Eurovision and the last season of Succession and for Dr. Pimple Popper but, as mentioned, they were a patient race and took some comfort in having arrived just in time to witness firsthand the legendary fall of Troy.

    It was to be their first encounter with humanity’s propensity for exaggeration.

    “This shithole?” one of them exclaimed on first sighting the mythical city of horses and discovering it to be a place of meagre towers and ramshackle fortifications, behind whose crumbling walls lay a sprawl of hovels.

    “Neither epic nor poetic,” someone remarked.

    “A packed lunch might be in order,” another cautioned, indicating the worrying proximity of food preparation to sanitation.

    They thought it best not to bust right in. They didn’t quite have the saying “First impressions…” but it was close enough. They brainstormed the best approach and decided to remain in stationary orbit over a different country for fifty years each, and to quietly observe (occasionally shop). They took our word that countries or political states were the best way to chunk the task up. Boy, did they come to regret that.

    They held position above us and watched carefully over years which became centuries and centuries which became millennia, waiting for the right moment.

    They picked up and discarded accents, nurtured short-lived loyalties in the manner of ardent telenovela devotees (which they would also eventually become) and squandered hope on numerous lost causes (including, eventually, many of the aforementioned telenovelas).

    Again and again, they were bemused by our ability to disremember, or to downright forget. They saw whole civilisations lost to memory: Atlantis, Arcadia, dusty old Troy. Again and again, they witnessed reality turned inside-out and history stitched from the torn lining.

    “Do these people write anything down?” they frequently wondered.

    They never failed to be impressed by our ability to bend the truth, to sweep inconvenience beneath the most conveniently located carpet and to normalise the most extraordinary fuck ups.

    Many of our greatest achievements, they viewed with distrust or scorn. Despite having had a ringside seat for the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal, they could only view these projects the way we might a child’s meandering sandcastles: estates driven by ego rather than necessity.

    “Hanging, my arse,” one concluded acidly.

    “Oooh,” another cooed, “you can see it from all the way up here.”

    “Not at all a massive waste of bricks,” someone deadpanned.

    They were stationed over Britain during the industrial revolution and watched with contained alarm as six million tonnes of coal was ripped from the ground each day to feed mankind’s growing appetite for boiling water.

    “You can see why they might think this is a good idea,” one noted.

    “What could go wrong?” another sighed.

    They saw Hitler coming from miles away. Literally.

    “The facial hair doesn’t exactly scream stability,” one observed.

    They were not overly fond of wars or revolutions. Not that they were squeamish; it just meant a lot of re-work. All that coming apart, then coming back together, resulted in devilish admin. Political pacts and alliances meant more red tape. The Foedus Cassianum, Treaty of Versailles, the EU; each gave them pause but, in the end, they stuck to their guns and to fifty years per country.

    In this way, they’d covered sixty-four countries and had been over the sixty-fifth, Ireland, for about forty-five years when word came through.

    It was time.

    Mary and Dessie were given the assignment and they took a small craft down to the surface, coming in low over the Irish capital.

    “Should I engage the cloaking device?” Dessie asked.

    “Have you seen their air force?” Mary said.

    They landed on the grounds of the official residence of the President of Ireland but not before they’d made a spectacular pass over North Dublin.  A group of young men in loose-fitting leisurewear (embellished with the branding of a mid-table American basketball team none of them had ever seen play) briefly suspended their assault on two German tourists to allow their jaws tip wordlessly open as the silver craft banked overhead with a loud, satisfying whine.

    By the time they disembarked, a hurried cordon had been thrown around the craft, which Dessie had parked somewhat inelegantly between a waterless fountain and a stone bench on the large front lawn of the estate. A steady stream of curious citizens trespassed onto the parklands along the northern boundary, edging closer with each minute, as news of the visitors spread.

    A local news crew had been diverted from interviewing dog walkers about the amount of dog shit on surrounding pavements in the nearby Phoenix Park and now perched at the opening of the cordon, hand-combing windblown hair and assembling game-faces while allowing themselves full-contact daydreams about Sky News discovering them and the opportunity this might afford to invite Mister Feeney, their dictatorial news director, to stick his maggoty job sideways up his hole.

    The president, a short, ancient, scholarly man with a friendly face but accusatory eyes which lurked beneath scurrying eyebrows, tarried on the edge of the lawn, torn between a sudden clench of self-preservation (spawned by vivid recollections of sensationalist Cold War films in which proxy commies in rubber alien outfits rampaged through cities with ray guns) and a bone-deep drive to fulfill his solemn duty as welcomer-in-chief. With a stoicism born of a hundred rugby international red-carpet greetings he came down on the side of duty.

    The president was flanked by his wife, the first lady, and his aide-de-camp, a military woman with a serious, square face, thick angry eyebrows and a ceremonial sword which she stroked mercilessly.

    The president’s wife, a sturdy, astute Cork woman, piloted her husband with the merest contact to his elbow, weaving a delicate path through growing numbers of police, soldiers and officials as a long liquidy gangplank telescoped out from the silver craft and the two occupants made their way slowly and carefully down the ramp towards them.

    The visitors appeared to be a regular man and a woman in their late twenties, dressed in what the president would have called “casual attire” if he hadn’t thought it might earn a tired eye-roll from his wife. The president’s wife recognized the female visitor’s blouse as one she’d considered for her own daughter’s birthday during a shopping trip on Grafton Street a few weeks earlier.

    “Céad míle fáilte,” the president said, bowing somewhat pompously as the two lithe, youthful-looking figures reached them.

    “Go raibh míle maith agat,” Mary answered in stumbling Leaving Cert Irish.

    Dessie smiled and whispered something to Mary but she cut him off with a silent elbow to the ribs.

    “You speak our native language?” the president asked, somewhat confused but permitting his face to emit only professional delight.

    “Just at an Irish level,” Mary answered with an impertinent wink.

    “Excuse me?” the president said.

    “That was a joke,” Mary said. “I meant badly. Like everyone else here.”

    “Ah, right,” the president said with a nervous laugh. He was a proud Gaeilgeoir but wasn’t sure his beloved cultural heritage warranted a full-blown inter-galactic diplomatic incident so he pumped a curious, jolly smile into his face and said, “Very good. I’m glad to see you share our…” he hesitated, “Earthling sense of humour.”

    The visitors exchanged a brief smirk and the president’s wife observed a florid diffusion in her husband’s cheeks.

    “Well,” Mary said, “You might say we are distant kin of yours.”

    “Might you,” the aide-de-camp said, directing an incredulous look towards the president who was too busy casting his hands in small, delighted circles to notice. His wife tightened her smile patiently. She loved her husband but this was his second seven-year term and sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t married into an intricately stitched straight jacket.

    Timid introductions were made. The president’s wife noted the visitors’ accents: the female’s an inner-city crumble, less frequently heard in recent years; the male’s a ringing specimen of the west Dublin twang; machiney and discordant.

    “I must say,” the president remarked excitedly, “I was expecting you to have more…exotic names.”

    “Those names are very exotic where we come from,” Mary said.

    “Ah, of course,” the president said, trying to recall some alien names from what little science fiction he’d seen or read but only coming up with “R2-D2”.

    “We like to adapt ourselves to local customs wherever we go,” Dessie explained. “We’re very…” he cast about for the right word, “adaptable.”

    Mary rolled her eyes and shrugged apologetically.

    “Those names were all the rage when we came to Ireland first, in the early 80s,” she said. “These days,” she offered a small shrug, “not so much.”

    “The 1980s?” the president’s wife exclaimed. “You’ve been observing humankind since then?”

    “Since long before then,” Mary said. “That was only when we came to this country to observe your people more closely.”

    The aide-de-camp fixed Mary with a baleful look.

    “I suppose,” she grumbled, “you’re the ones going around the place abducting innocent folks and subjecting the poor craters to cavity searches and mind probes and who-knows-what indignities.”

    “I can assure you,” Mary said, “we’ve no interest in abducting you and even less interest in your cavities.”

    “Must be someone else,” Dessie assured them.

    The first lady wafted the aide-de-camp’s remarks away with the back of a hand and gave Mary — what she hoped might be — a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

    “J’know, I can’t believe you’ve been here since the 80s,” she said. “Sure, you don’t look a day over twenty-five, dear.”

    Mary’s lips lingered in a smile.

    “Well, you should see the daily beauty regimen I have to go through to look like this.”

    When the introductions had been completed and small-talk indulged, the president suppressed thoughts of ray gun-toting aliens blowing his beautiful furniture to smithereens and gestured towards the Greek-style portico, saying, “Won’t you come inside?”

    The small group made their way past official seals, lithographs and stately pictures, acquiring more unsmiling security and glum secretarial staff as they moved further into the building. The aide-de-camp stroked the brass hilt of her sword urgently now as she entertained visions of alien necks careering against its blade and springing into the air like popped champagne corks. She tipped the silver scabbard forward and back in time to her metronomic step, like the implacable arm of a grandfather clock.

    When they were seated around the large conference table, food and drink was offered but Mary waved it away.

    “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said, “but we have something very important to speak to you about.”

    “We’re all ears, as the Americans say” the president said with a modest guffaw, his palms upturned inoffensively.

    “No doubt, the Americans will be along very soon,” Mary said with a bitter smile. “As will others. This matter affects everyone.” She unclasped her hands and spread them on the table and looked around the room. “Very well. To get right to the point, we are here to let you know that your time is come.”

    There was a collective gasp among the presidential party, security staff, dignitaries, secretaries and service staff.

    An unpretentious tea lady from the Northside of Dublin was in the process of filling the president’s cup. She looked up suddenly and said, “Ya bleedin’ wha’?”

    The misdirected teapot scalded the president’s hand and he released a shrill yelp.

    “Watch what you’re doing, Molly,” the president’s wife scolded as the president hurried the meat of his hand into his gob and the maid withdrew the pot, staring fixedly at Mary with her mouth tipped open.

    “What do you mean, our time is come?” the aide-de-camp prodded.

    “I’m sorry for putting it so crudely,” Mary said with a shrug. “Our leaders felt, given your history, the message might carry more weight if we used stark, biblical language. What I mean is: the human race is to be destroyed. In precisely seven days.”

    A new collective gasp surpassed the first in volume and participation.

    “Destroyed?” the president said removing his burnt hand and emitting a nervous purl of laughter. “This must be an elaborate joke. Why would you want to destroy the human race?”

    “To prevent a fate worse than death,” Mary said.

    “What fate could be worse than the death of billions of humans?” the president asked prodding his burnt hand delicately.

    “The fate which will happen if humans remain on their current path,” Mary said.

    “And what fate is that?” the president’s wife asked, wetting a napkin in a glass of water and dabbing blindly at the burn on her husband’s hand.

    “Untold suffering for humans and the total destruction of all life on this planet,” Mary said as Dessie provided an accompaniment of tight-lipped nodding.

    “That’s a bit vague,” the aide-de-camp said.

    “I doubt you’d enjoy us being more specific,” Dessie said with a wink.

    “How can you be so certain that this is our fate?” the president’s wife asked.

    “Because,” Mary said, “where we come from, this has already happened.”

    “Happened?” the president said, almost in a daze. “To whom has this happened?”

    Mary pointed at him and then allowed her finger to roam about the room,

    “To everyone here. To all of you. It was—will be —a global event.”

    “But that can’t be.” the president spluttered. “That’s simply incredible.”

    The aide-de-camp’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

    “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” she said.

    “You don’t,” Mary answered, “but whether you believe it or not will have little impact on whether it happens. What we are proposing is the only humane option available. Your destruction is happening one-way-or-another. I think you know this.” She looked around the table. “Deep down, you all know we speak the truth.”

    A few people among the wider staff allowed their faces to sink into devastation. Some stood rigid with anger. Most slumped in naked awe, unable to process what they had just heard.

    “Wait,” the president’s wife said. “Does that mean you’ve travelled back in time? Doesn’t that also mean you can go back in time again and change the course of history to avoid this disaster?”

    “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,” Mary said.

    Dessie nodded glumly.

    “Time is a tricky one,” he said, “and time travel a very tricky one. It’s not like your movies. Unpredictable as hell. For example, we’ve been here much longer than we’d intended to be.”

    “How long, exactly?” the aide-de-camp asked.

    Mary and Dessie exchanged a look and Mary nodded her consent.

    “Thirteen or fourteen thousand years,” Dessie said. “Give or take a few hundred years.”

    “Fourteen thousand years!” the aide-de-camp gasped. “For fuck’s sake. Why haven’t you warned us about this before now?”

    “We have tried in many ways,” Mary said, “but you appear to need to be on the brink of destruction before you pay a blind bit of attention to the reality sitting right under your noses.”

    A burst of static came from a red-faced man with a blonde crew cut and a white earpiece and he leaned into the president and whispered something which lifted him out of his seat.

    “POTUS?” the president said breathlessly and the red-faced man turned a shade redder as he nodded carefully.

    The president sped excitedly to the windows, as though the leader of the free world might suddenly spring from behind the emerald green curtains. He performed a rushed, unpersuasive chortle and pointed out the lights of various news helicopters as they dipped and clattered over the nearby parkland.

    “You’ve certainly got our attention now,” he said, turning to them, his face a mask of grim determination. “The world will listen. Humankind will change. I’m absolutely certain of it, given this second chance.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said with a curt shake of her head. “Your destruction is inevitable. This is just us giving you a chance to make peace with your end.”

    The group stared back at her in silence and disbelief and with the helpless anger of those who feel certain they have been cheated by fate.

    Mary looked at Dessie and they exchanged a silent nod.

    “Our leaders thought you might struggle to accept our message,” Mary said. “They felt a parable from your bible might be apt and may help to explain the severity of the situation you face: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; two ancient cities which brought destruction upon themselves through their own actions and inactions. I believe most of you will be familiar with that story?”

    “Of course,” the president said, “the Cities of the Plain in which God—”

    “Oh, shut up Maurice,” his wife scolded, “and let them speak.”

    “Thanks,” Mary said, “but, to be honest, I didn’t have much to add. We just wanted to establish the reference in your minds. We’re not big on unnecessary elaboration.”

    The president fidgeted nervously with his good hand. Like most Irish people of his generation, he was more than a little familiar with those passages of the bible. It was a tale which had scalded many a young mind, including his own.

    “But that story talked about terrible evil,” he said in an imploring tone. “Irredeemable evil. Surely that doesn’t apply in our case. Humanity has made some mistakes, I’ll grant you, but we have so much potential for good.”

    “Unfortunately,” Mary said firmly, “it is your potential for destruction which you seem to have fulfilled.”

    “That’s rather harsh,” the president said belligerently. “Humans have done incredible things. Music. Poetry. Literature—”

    Mary cut him off with a raised hand.

    “Yes, yes, incredible things, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re…” she hesitated, searching for the right words.

    Dessie nipped in.

    “A bag of fucking spanners.”

    “I was going to say terrifying procrastinators,” Mary said, “but that works too.” She turned to the president. “I’m afraid we are not philosophers or debaters. Our people are relatively plain-spoken and among them we are considered direct. We were chosen because it was felt we understood your culture best and might have a better chance of being listened to.”

    “What will happen in seven days?” the president’s wife asked, the simplicity of her question and the terror in her voice provoking a sudden silence in the room.

    “Don’t worry,” Mary said, “it’ll be very peaceful. You’ll barely know it’s happening. It will be as though you’re being swept away in a storm of sweet ecstasy.”

    “Jesus but don’t you make global euthanasia sound fierce comforting altogether?” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly.

    The president’s wife had been raised on the same terrifying Old Testament stories as her husband and struggled to contain images of fire and sulphur raining down on them but, in that moment, the biblical reference suddenly offered a chink of light. She held a single index finger aloft to register her thought.

    “In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said with something approaching a litigious tone, “didn’t God give the citizens a chance of redemption if his angels could find just fifty good people?”

    Dessie nudged Mary but she shook her head as she swished an outstretched index finger decisively before the first lady’s nose.

    “Oh no, no,” she admonished, “you’re not pulling that ‘fifty good men’ shite.”

    She indicated Dessie with a flick of her forehead, “Sure, this eejit would spare the lot of ye just to save Lionel Bloody Messi. No, no, no. We’re not going down that road.”

    Dessie shared a sympathetic frown.

    “It’s not like we’re happy about the situation,” he explained with a shrug. “We’ve become very attached to you and your ways. I mean, I’m only three seasons into Breaking Bad and my team just got a new manager. We might finally get somewhere.”

    “For Christ’s sake,” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly, “mankind’s fate is in the hands of fucking Man U fans and we all know they’d rather the world end than see them relegated.” She glared at Dessie, “Which they fucking will.”

    “Caroline!” the president scolded his aide-de-camp. “These people are still our guests.”

    “Sorry, sir,” the aide-de-camp said as she comforted herself with the molded end of her sword.

    “It’s okay,” Dessie said with a shrug. “She’s probably right about United facing the drop.”

    Mary waved her hands for calm.

    “I am sorry,” she said, “but this is the only way to avoid the terrible conditions which will occur if we don’t intervene. You have seven days. I’m afraid there isn’t much more to say. Of course, we’re happy to reiterate the same message to your television cameras.”

    “Do you think you could hold on a few hours?” the president said, looking nervously at his watch. “The American president is on his way.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said.

    The president’s wife looked around the room at the growing despair and confusion.

    She rose and held her hands out for silence, then faced Mary.

    “I believe you,” she said, with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I believe every word you’ve said. You’re right about us. We can’t seem to stop ourselves acting stupidly. To anyone sane, we must seem hell-bent on our own destruction.”

    Mary nodded quietly to Dessie who nodded back as the president’s wife continued.

    “But we deserve more than seven days to make peace with our end. If you are as straightforward and honest as you say, you’ll have to admit that’s fair.”

    Mary seemed to consider for a moment.

    “How long do you suggest we give you to make a good end?” she asked.

    Without hesitation, the president’s wife said, “A year.”

    The rest of the group exchanged questioning looks and the president’s wife cast an interrogating look back but no one seemed able or willing to provide a correction to her timeline.

    “A year?” Mary repeated and she looked at Dessie who bobbed his head in consideration.

    The president’s wife completed her scan of the room and nodded somberly but certainly.

    “Give us a year to make a good end,” she said.

    Mary rose.

    “We are not negotiators, nor are we empowered to make this decision, but I will take your request to those who are and we will provide an answer within twenty-four hours.”

    “How will we know if you’ve agreed?” the president’s wife asked.

    Mary gave an ironic smile.

    “We will give you a sign,” she said with a light chuckle. “If we agree to your proposal then you will see a red sky at sunset tomorrow evening.”

    “A red sky at night is a common occurrence this time of year,” the president said. “How could we be sure it was your signal?”

    Mary smiled again.

    “I doubt you will have seen a red sky like this one,” she said, “and I doubt a red sky everywhere is a common occurrence. There shouldn’t be any doubt.”

    They held their press conference. By this time, reporters from television stations across the world had gathered and the words of the visitors went out live around the globe.

    The American ambassador was keen to revisit the timelines. His team suggested detaining the visitors — by force, if necessary — until the matter could be thoroughly unpicked but this was politely rebuked by the Irish presidential staff and, with the cameras of the world’s press filming them, the small group made their way back through the crowd towards the visitors’ craft. As if by magic, the silver ramp extended from the ship and touched the grass in front of the party.

    The president’s wife hugged the visitors. Tears jeweled her eyes but she retained a determined look. She pressed Mary’s hands lightly in her own.

    “If we can change in this year, can disaster still be averted?”

    Mary looked at her with pity.

    “You have the means,” she said, “but it is unlikely that you will change. It’s better you make your peace with it. Whatever happens, you will not see us again so I’ll say goodbye now.”

    “All the best,” Dessie said and he pumped the president’s limp arm.

    The visitors waved once and walked up the gangplank through a salvo of camera flashes as the beams from overhead helicopters sliced the thickening gloom as though portioning the very air above them.

    The silver ramp disappeared into the craft and a low drone built as the ship slowly rose into the air above them and spun in a light smooth manner that could not be confused with any human vehicle. The disk bobbled in the air with a fluttering ethereality before surging suddenly into the sky and vanishing in the dark thunderheads which had formed above.

    Every word that had been spoken was reported and analysed in minute detail in the hours and days that followed.

    The American president, along with other world leaders, arrived in Ireland soon afterwards and an emergency summit of countries was hastily convened. The general consensus was that the Irish officials had handled the situation terribly. The Americans, in particular, castigated their hosts for the meek surrender of a one-year extension.

    “Fucking amateurs!” their officials lamented. “The opening pitch should have been ten years minimum. And how the hell did nobody mention money?”

    “It wasn’t that type of discussion,” one Irish official protested.

    “It’s always that type of discussion,” her American counterpart replied.

    But, for all the debate and self-important statements, all watched nervously as the sun set the following evening and crimson streaks filled the sky across the world, as though the sun were a gigantic blob of paint wiped across the firmament by a huge inestimable hand.

    Theologians and scholars scrutinised the visitors’ reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Much focus was given to the use of that story rather than — what many felt would have been — the more fitting tale of the great flood and Noah’s Ark. It was cogently argued by some parties that the visitors had chosen very carefully in order to send a clear message for humanity to get away as fast as possible. Noah, they argued, had taken his time, constructing a vessel enormous enough to contain samples of every animal as well as humanity so that the world could be rebuilt. In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, only Lott and his immediate family were evacuated and this was done with great haste and at the last possible second.

    Despite this, several Ark-like projects were initiated by tech billionaires with the goal of saving mankind, or more specifically, themselves, along with those tiny portions of mankind which might prove useful to a tech billionaire fleeing a doomed planet. Each contemplated the long hibernation necessary to reach distant, uninhabitable rocks with minimal potential for life and all considered the security of their person and their holdings during such a hibernation. Very little consideration was given to more practical concerns or to the fate of those who had no recourse to a tech billionaire. Nor did any of them attempt to save any other species. The visitors had been ambiguous about the prospects for other creatures and this had established a moral vacuum on the matter into which mankind poured their apathy.

    The concept of dog years took hold with many people. This was the idea that one could minimize sleep and use each second of each day more productively to eke out more value from the limited time we had. As with all human undertakings, it was carried out obsessively and profitably. Dog years became a huge industry with plans, training courses, gurus, TV shows and all manner of proselytising. To all intents and purposes, it became a new religion.

    Religions themselves — that is, the more established ones — felt strongly vindicated by these events. Priests and proponents relished the opportunity to say “I told you so” on a global scale but it was something of a pyrrhic victory. Imminent apocalypse had always been more useful when it was less imminent.

    Some efforts were made to change mankind’s path but these remained fragmented and unpopular. Again, the visitors were blamed for being too vague about what needed to change and many governments argued that the lack of specificity was proof that climate change, rampant consumerism or other obvious ills had never been the issue. More coordinated effort was put into the construction of sophisticated weaponry to enable humans to turn the tables on the visitors when they — so to speak — attempted to call time on us. Air forces and militaries spent huge quantities of time, money and effort scanning the skies above and launching physical and electronic attacks at sections of the atmosphere suspected of harboring enemy spacecraft. They were supported in this by a small residue of tech billionaires; those not busy planning their escape from the planet or who hadn’t already decamped to New Zealand in the misbegotten notion that changing their zip code and getting a new passport might spare them. These various maneuvers must have recalled for the visitors that legendary event — which they had witnessed first-hand — of Emperor Caligula’s troops futilely beating back the waves of the English Channel with their swords.

    Governments sent communications heavenward demanding more time or threatening legal action or sharing fudged statistics demonstrating mankind’s steady progress towards net zero, reforestation, world peace or any other targets they felt might sway the visitors. No reply was forthcoming and, as the year progressed, these upward communications became more desperate and self-aggrandising.

    For the majority of people in the world, however, surprisingly little changed. A year was an impossible horizon for those who did not know where their next sip of water would come from or when they might have their next mouthful of food. Also, for those who wondered when they might feel the next sudden kick through a thin, wet sleeping bag, the next rape, the next beating, the next honour killing. For these people, life continued as it was before. For these people, the end of the world was just another unaffordable luxury.

    Of course, the president’s wife was widely vilified for her role in events. Numerous conspiracy theories circulated online and in the pages of sensational publications, accusing her of having been in league with the visitors from the beginning. She was globally decried as a double-agent who had sold out humanity to save herself and her family.

    The president’s wife cared little for these lies. With her husband, she retired from public life. Their daughter made the bold decision to have a baby with her partner and it was as if the daughter’s body understood the great need for haste, because she became pregnant at the first attempt and, although her son was born two weeks premature, he was pink and healthy and went home the very next day.

    They named the baby Cervantes after the author of his mother’s favourite book, and the president’s wife, along with her husband, moved in with her daughter.

    Apart from his initial punctuality, baby Cervantes did not conform to the script demanded by the limited timescales. By day he was sweet and cherubic but, as the sunlight waned, he transformed into a despot and a sadist. All household members were called into action to walk, rock and coo the tiny screaming dictator into an unattainable sleep. They no longer spoke of dates or calendars anymore and, in their own exhausted way, found the dog years others craved.

    Sometimes, when the president’s wife saw her daughter with Cervantes, she wondered if they would all have been better off if she’d not asked for the extension, if it might have been easier to accept a single week to make their peace with everything, but she quickly dismissed these thoughts and joined her daughter and together they smiled and cooed at the child and spoke of a future that would never be. As all people must.

    Feature Image: Mark Bryan, Prime Directives.

  • A Grand Lady Must be a Hundred Years Old

    I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942, the place, Staraya Russa.

    But Staraya Russa is not the way to begin this story; it belongs in the second part of the middle, closer to the end.

    The beginning was in Moscow, a few years before the October Revolution, yet I won’t begin this story in Moscow either. I’ll begin it in Riga, Latvia, with my grandfather Stephan taking my seven-year-old father to Old Town Riga. My young father was happy because he knew they would go to a stamp store after his father’s grown-up business appointments. My seven-year-old father loved nothing more than looking at stamps and nudging his father, “Look at this one!” or “This one, from England, is the most beautiful one ever!” There were also stamps from Russia, from the time before the Bolsheviks, and they were not at all old, as you might think, reading these lines in the 21st century, which is the only century in which you can read them. Stephan Kossman, my father’s father, didn’t like the Russian stamps, even though he had lived in the center of Russia’s capital for years, which was quite unusual for a Jew since in Czarist Russia, Jews were not allowed to live in the capital. My grandfather Stephan was a merchant of the First Guild, which was why he and his family could live in Moscow, in the very center of it, on Pervaya Meshchanskaya Street, in a ten-room apartment, which my young father remembered very well, no matter that he was only two and a half years old when, in February 1918, they had fled in a hurry, leaving everything behind, and made their way to Riga in a cattle train, commonly known as teplushka, which was not at all the way his parents used to travel, as his mother was an aristocratic lady who read Heine every night before bedtime; who dressed like a German countess, in beautiful floor-length dresses and elaborate hats, and treated her servants with that special gentleness, a sign of a very well-brought-up lady. They had three live-in servants in their Moscow apartment: his mother’s maid, a governess, and a cook. Sometimes his mother mentioned a fourth one – a maître d—but my father did not remember him, and he told us only of the ones he could remember himself. In London, where Stephan, my grandfather, lived before his marriage, with his father Leontii, his mother Rebeka, and his seven brothers and sisters, the number of servants must have been greater, but, as I said, my father told us only things he had remembered and seen with his own eyes.

    “Papa!” my seven-year-old father would say, pointing at Russian stamps from “that time,” as he called the time before the revolution when his family had still lived in Moscow, “Please Papa!” But when Papa said no, he seemed to become hard of hearing and, at the same time, very kind, as though by refusing, he was becoming aware of a debt he owed his son, and then he would buy all the new stamps in the store, the ones that came the week before, since their last visit. But he wouldn’t buy the Russian stamps for his son. “Why not the Russian stamps?” my seven-year-old father whined on their way out of the stamp store.  “Because … you know, Lyonia, if Mama sees them, she might become upset. She has memories of …” His voice trailed off.

    My seven-year-old father knew why his mother might become upset looking at the Russian stamps.

    ***

    My father’s sister Nora, who was just five years older than him, liked to pretend that he was just a little boy and that she was a grand lady.

    “Some grand lady! A grand lady must be a hundred years old,” my father (who was this little boy) would say to her, “Not seven!”

    She laughed and told him that he didn’t know a thing. She said almost no one lived to be a hundred. “You can be a grand lady at twenty, fifteen, or seven; all it takes is having enough of the grand-lady material inside yourself.” And she had it, she said, and he didn’t because he was just a little boy. “You’ll never be a grand lady,” she said.

    The little boy who someday would be my father countered, “Who wants to be a lady anyway?” He would be a grand lord instead of a lady because lords were in charge of things, and ladies weren’t.

    She said again that he was just a silly two-and-a-half-year-old little boy and didn’t even have a governess. “Our governess is just for me,” she said. She went on and on like this, teasing him and saying things she knew he didn’t want to hear like French was only for girls, and that’s why Mademoiselle gave French lessons only to her, not to him.

    He wanted to say: Mademoiselle teaches you French not because you’re a girl but because you’re older! But as soon as he opened his mouth to say this, he stopped his tongue and said to himself: don’t say this to your sister, or she will win, and you don’t want her to win, do you? You don’t want her to say that you admit you’re just a little boy, that you’re only two-and-a-half.

    So, he bit his tongue and didn’t say anything. Sure, he could say all sorts of things to her, for example, that he may be only two and a half, but someday he would be a journalist! But then she’d say, “No one becomes a journalist at two and a half!” And then he would say, “And what do you know, you’re just a little girl yourself! Uncle Nikolay promised to take me to the scary places he wrote about! And Uncle Nikolay is a real journalist! He says he might go to jail for that! He says in our country, they put only real journalists in jail, not just anyone! Only if you write the truth! He says that going to jail for journalism is like a batch of honor in our country! That’s what Uncle Nikolay says, and he can’t be wrong!”

    His sister would laugh at him. “A badge of honor, not a ‘batch,’” she’d say, and that’s why the little boy who someday would be my father didn’t say anything about Uncle Nikolay this time.

    ***

    My father (who was still a child, remember?) admired Uncle Nikolay because he was a journalist and a traveler. Yet, he was not the only one in the family who admired Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist.  Uncle Zhenia also admires Uncle Nikolay for being a journalist.  Although both Uncle Zhenia and my father looked up to Nikolay for being a journalist, there was a big difference between the two, my father and Uncle Zhenia, simply because Uncle Zhenia was Uncle Nikolay’s brother. Besides, Zhenia was an adult, and my father was a child – a little child, as all members of his loving family loved to repeat. And every time he said, “Don’t call me little! I’m not a child,” they just smiled and touched his head in that caring gesture they called “гладить,” which means “to stroke” in Russian, my father’s third native language. His second native language was Latvian, while his first language was German. He knew German better than Russian or Latvian because he spoke it with his mom. She was from Riga, where the educated class spoke German as their first language, and she wanted her children to know it; therefore, she spoke only German at home, and everyone understood her, even if they replied in Russian. Mademoiselle was the only exception: she was the only one who responded to his mom in French. The little boy (who someday would be my father) didn’t like French.  If you asked him why, he’d say only Nora, his older sister, got to learn French at home, that’s why. It’s not that he wanted to learn French, he just didn’t like being left out. He heard so often that he was just a little child and that, as such, he couldn’t understand grown-up things that sometimes he began to believe it, and to stop believing it, he made up stories in his mind about the future, about knowing what will happen someday. And the strange thing is that some of these stories came true, not because he had foreseen them but because they had already been written into the fabric of reality when they had occurred to him! For example, he knew that his Uncle Nikolay would emigrate to Austria and that he would write for a newspaper called Neue Freie Presse. He also knew that Uncle Nikolay’s first book would be titled “Uncle Joe,” the first book ever to tell the naïve Westerners that a monster ruled Russia. He knew this book would become famous in Austria and Germany in the period between the wars. Years later, as an adolescent living in independent Latvia, my father learned that poor Uncle Zhenia called his brother Nikolay from a Moscow phone booth and paid with his life for a few plain words he said to his brother. Like many phones in Moscow in those years, the phone had been bugged. Uncle Nikolay would continue writing for Neue Freie Presse, while poor Uncle Zhenia, who loved him so much, would be shot v zatylok – in the back of his head – at Lubianka prison, where tens of thousands were shot v zatylok in those years. As an adolescent in Riga, my father would think of his Uncle Zhenia, who was not a journalist, a writer, a politician, or an artist––just a regular guy, a bit of a drifter, a bit of a dreamer, and my adolescent father would ask myself why Uncle Zhenia was killed for a simple phone call to his brother Nikolay. Many more years would pass, and, as an adult living, once again, in Moscow, he would be given only silence to answer his old questions. The silence was useless to his intellect and to that deeper part of him which the nineteenth-century Russian poets called “soul,” which had fallen into а strange disuse by the middle of the twentieth century.

    ***

    As I said, my grandparents’ apartment in the center of Moscow had ten rooms, no matter that more than half a century later, my father remembered only three of them: his nursery, the dining room, and the kitchen, which could have accommodated some twenty people and was ruled by the family cook Dasha’s iron hand. That dining room had stained glass windows or, as everyone called them, vitrazhi––a French word with a plural Russian ending. My father (who was still a child, remember?) spent hours looking at them, not only during family meals but whenever he had nothing else to do, and as a very little boy, he had days with nothing to do. Vitrazhi were made of many colorful pieces of glass that formed a picture in which images shifted depending on where in the room he was sitting or standing when looking at them.  In the center of the main vitrazh, was a horse which changed into a wolf, but the wolf appeared only when my father was in a bad mood after hearing his parents talk about scary monsters they called “Bolsheviks” who would kill them if they stayed in Moscow. Most of the time, though, it was just a horse with muscular legs that were a different brown shade of than the rest of its body. On top of it sat a man. A horseman. Mother said he was St. George – Georgii Pobedonosets—and Mademoiselle Duzhar said, “Ce n’est pas Georges Pobedonoset. It’s a headless horseman who appears in times of trouble”. Mother said, “S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle, don’t scare the children! How can he be headless? There, I see his head. It’s where it’s supposed to be. On his shoulders.” Sometimes my father (who, as we pointed out earlier, was a child at the time) could see the horseman’s head, just like his mother did, where it was supposed to be, sometimes he couldn’t, like Mademoiselle Duzhar, who was so scared of the “Bolsheviks” that she acted like a kid herself, or like little Lyonia, my father, who saw scary things instead of beautiful horses and horsemen in the dining room vitrazhi. Poor Mademoiselle was so terrified of my grandparents’ plans to leave Russia that whenever she thought she was alone where no one could hear her, she talked to herself, which was how my father and his sister Nora learned that she would have nowhere to live and nothing to live on if they were to abandon her. She whispered furiously, “Who needs a French governess in this terrifying city now? Who will take me in? I can’t flee anywhere, where can I go? Où, où mon Dieu?” Many years later when my father came back to Moscow after the war, no one knew what happened to Mademoiselle Duzhar. She disappeared like so many others in that time and place.

    ***

    In this part of my story, my father is no longer a small child in his parents’ Moscow apartment on the eve of their escape from Russia in February 1918.  He is a young man in Riga, trying to talk his mother into escaping back to Russia before the Germans enter Riga. She said no, she would not leave Riga.  He knew she would say no, and she did, but he wanted to try one more time to talk her into escaping. She remembered too well fleeing from Moscow on that teplushka train and had ample reason to believe that the Bolsheviks would be after her, not only for being a “burzhuika” (a lady bourgeois) but, most importantly, for leaving Russia twenty-three years ago. That is why, in the summer of 1941, she opted to stay in Latvia. Like many others who chose to stay, she believed the Germans were a civilized nation, especially compared to the Bolsheviks, and she feared them less than the Soviets. My father thought he was the only one in real danger because his work as a reviewer of Riga’s Jewish Theater productions for Cīņa, a Communist Latvian newspaper, made him a prime target. He thought he had missed the right moment to leave because boarding a train to Russia was getting harder each day. The place was empty when he walked into the editorial offices of Cīņa with an article about a recent production at the Jewish Theater. He thought everyone had already escaped; why else would it be so empty?  Yet when he left the building, he saw a car parked in a side street, and there was the whole staff of Cīņa, about to depart. This was his last chance to leave Riga before the German army entered it, but he couldn’t leave without trying, one last time, to talk his mother into leaving. He went back into the building and made one last phone call. As before, he was expecting her to say no and wasn’t surprised when she did. If she could have seen the future, her no would have turned into a yes in a split second. But the terrible future would not reveal itself to her, and even if it did, she would not have believed it. He went back outside. Cīņa editors made room for him in the back seat, and as soon as he got in, they drove off, past buildings set on fire in anticipation of the Nazi takeover. They spent three days in that car, driving past Latvia’s forests and villages, crossing borders – first the Estonian border, then the Russian one. On July 1, 1941, the day the German army occupied Riga, they made it into Russia, abandoned the car, and boarded a train going east.

    There was not much to do on the train, and the editor-in-chief of Cīņa entertained his friends with antisemitic jokes. He had spent many years in jail for political activities where the daily fare of antisemitic jokes was simple entertainment. He should have known better, but he didn’t, and neither did his colleagues. My father didn’t miss an opportunity to part from them, and when the train stopped in Nizhny Novgorod, and everyone got a chance to stand on the platform for some ten minutes, he left the station and walked to the city. His Russian wasn’t so good yet, but he hoped it would suffice for simple communication. In Nizhny Novgorod, he developed a terrible headache, and since he didn’t know anyone there and had nowhere to go, he went to a police station. He just walked in and asked for help. A militsioner* promptly took him to a nearby hospital where he spent the next few days. He was discharged with two young men from Riga who, like him, had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. They didn’t have a lot of options, and after weighing what little they had, they decided they had more chances of finding a place to stay in a small town rather than in a big city like Nizhny Novgorod. They each went to a small town of his choosing, and my father went to Chkalovsk, a small town not far from Nizhny. Its small size was helpful: wherever he went, he was still in the center, so he had no trouble finding Ispolnitelnyi Komitet*. He was promptly given coupons for dinner at a local dining place and an address to get a bed for the night. Several families lived there, and an elderly couple took him in. My father ate from a common pot with his hosts. There were no plates; everyone put their spoons in the common pot. That common pot was my father’s first encounter with Russia. He stayed with the couple for two weeks until one fine day when he walked to the pier and boarded a ship to Astrakhan, an old Russian city on the Volga. He was young and wanted to see the world, even if the world was in the middle of the biggest war ever. Onboard the ship, he met a kind lady. They talked, and although he didn’t mention it, the lady understood that he had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. She spoke with a cook, and my father was given free meals in the ship’s dining hall. Another woman on the ship gave my father her address in Astrakhan. When he got off the ship in Astrakhan, he went to her place, hoping to get a place to sleep, but soon enough, he realized that the woman expected him to become her lover. He thanked her for offering him a place to sleep and returned to the pier to wait for a ship back to Nizhny Novgorod.

    In Nizhny Novgorod, he met the dean of the law department of the University of Riga, where he had studied before the war. Of course, the dean was no longer the dean but a refugee, like my father. They spoke German with each other, and the former dean showed my father where he lived and invited him to visit. That night my father slept in the park. At about 10 am, he decided to visit the dean. Just as he rang the dean’s bell, he was approached by a militsioner, told he was under arrest, and given a German newspaper. “Read it aloud!” said the militsioner. My father had no time to think this over and decide what to do.  If he read the German text aloud, the militsioner would think he was a German spy. Therefore, he said, “I can’t read this because I don’t know the language it is written in.” A couple of minutes later, he was free again.

    He spent the rest of the day searching for a place to stay, but he didn’t know the city and found nothing.  Finally, he asked two female passersby where he could find a room. They said, “Take streetcar 12 and get off at the last stop.” So he took streetcar #12 and got off at the last stop. It was a good neighborhood, with many new apartment buildings and trees. Nearby he saw a group of boys playing soccer. My father was wearing a Belgian jacket, and it was this Belgian jacket that got him in trouble. A Soviet citizen would not wear a Belgian jacket. A Soviet citizen would not even have a Belgian jacket! A Soviet citizen would denounce a capitalist jacket! Soon, he was surrounded by a crowd of some fifty people shouting, “Take the German spy to the police station!”  The crowd made way for a militsioner who told my father to follow them. When they arrived at the police headquarters, the militsioner said,
    “You must understand that telling us what brought you here is in your own interest.”
    My father said he had nothing to tell except that he was a Latvian refugee looking for a room and had been told to take streetcar #12.  But the militsioner didn’t believe him and demanded to see his documents. The only document my father had on him was a letter from the Latvian newspaper he had worked for. It was written in Latvian and had a hammer and sickle on top. To verify my father’s identity, the militsioner called the Evacuation Committee, where all refugees had to be registered on arrival, and gave my father’s name. It took them half an hour to find my father’s registration card. “Next time, be more careful,” the militsioner said. When my father left the police precinct, it was late evening, and he still had nowhere to stay for the night.

    Finally, he realized there was nothing for him in the Volga region and that the army was the only place where he would have a place to sleep. It was evening when he arrived at the Latvian division headquarters. He was given a uniform and sent to his unit. Soldiers slept in tents. My father found a tent where he would spend his first night.

    ***

    I owe my life to a bullet that pierced my father’s skull. The time was July 1942; the place, Staraya Russa. My father was taken to a field hospital where a young surgeon from Moscow drilled a hole in his skull, without anesthesia, to extract a bullet that, if it had gone just one-tenth of a millimeter deeper, would have been fatal. After the bullet had been extracted, he was put on a train for wounded soldiers and taken to the Far East.

    My father’s only words were, “Am I going to die now, tovarish lieutenant?” “You’ll live, Kossman!” was the response of the lieutenant, who would be killed in battle two days later, together with most men of the Latvian division. (Only six survived).

    My father’s inadvertent savior was Gottlieb, a fellow soldier whose tobacco my father had borrowed for a minute. Several things happened simultaneously: Gottlieb was cleaning his gun; my father was returning Gottlieb’s tobacco; Gottlieb leaned on his gun to take back the tobacco from my father; Gottlieb’s gun fired; my father fell, bleeding from the head. That same day, Gottlieb was sent on a reconnaissance mission as punishment for endangering his comrade’s life through negligence. Sending a man on such a mission in Staraya Russa, a town in the Novgorod area, where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers fell between 1941 and 1943, and where even today, more than eighty years later, kids stumble upon skulls and rusting helmets in local forests, was an equivalent of a death sentence. It goes without saying that Gottlieb never returned from his mission. His name is absent from the Book of Memory, which lists the names of Latvian Jewish soldiers who perished in the war. (I was asked to translate these lists a few years ago here in New York). Perhaps Gottlieb’s body had never been found and is awaiting one of those nostalgic youngsters who join an annual search for soldiers’ remains. If found, the remains are reburied with Soviet-era pomp, usually without a name, because only the lucky few are discovered with their papers, still legible, on them.

    Wherever you are now, Private Gottlieb, greetings from the daughter of the man you saved with that stray bullet.

    NOTES

    *Militsioner – a Soviet policeman
    *Ispolnitelnyi Komitet – an executive committee, usually known as “ispolkom.” Every Soviet city and town had one.

    Feature Image: Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1944

  • The Death of My Marriage and JFK Junior

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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

  • Murphy Walked into the Bar

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

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

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

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

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

    I was there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But then jealousy is a funny thing.

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

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

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

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

    It was Coco.

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

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

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

     

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

    I knew Murphy wasn’t hiding in the Jacks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I love you Murphy.”

    Feature Image: Lyonel Kaufmann

  • Fiction: Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Down in the pub he complained to his mate Kevin.

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

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

    ‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘Everything OK?’ Neil asked cautiously.

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

    ‘When are you going?’

    ‘Next month.’

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

    ‘No I believe in myself.’

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

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

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

    ‘Come with me,’ she said tersely.

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

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

    ‘But this will take days.’

    ‘Have you anything else on hand?’

    ‘I wanted to go to the presentation.’

    ‘This takes precedence.’

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

    ‘Where were you?’

    ‘Don’t ask.’

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

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

    ‘What can I do for you?’

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

     

  • The Last Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

    The lights never work first time.

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘Too many bloody Indians’,  Eldest Brother complains.

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

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

    After Christmas? An unimaginable concept.

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

    Howls of outrage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Christmas fairy, a little lopsided, looks down disapprovingly.

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

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

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

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

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

    *****

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We thunder in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘Dad. No! Yuck!’.

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

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

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

    Finally the call comes: Dinner’s ready!

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

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

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

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

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

    Yes!

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

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

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

    More Christmas please, more!

    A rest and then, puddings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Finally it’s time to clear up.

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

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

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

    *****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *****

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

    Christmas is over.

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

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

    We didn’t. How could we?

    Feature Image: wikicommons

  • 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 67th 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