Cassandra Voices

Tag: Fiction

  • Ode to the Christmas Pub

    – A seasonal riff on the opening paragraph of Moby Dick –

    Call me Andy. Not long ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me amongst mortal company, I tended to sail about a little in Dublin City, brought hither and thither on impulsive winds to see the more ignored though not necessarily unexplored taverns of this dirty old town. It’s a way I have of driving off the spleen, of regulating apathy, of cracking through the thin yet heavy crust of my autopilot’s baked-in habits. Whenever I feel myself grown grim about the spiritual loins; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; when I find myself involuntarily pausing before a coffin warehouse, or randomly bringing up the rear of every Stag or Hen party I meet (before being politely asked to leave); and especially when my temper gets such an upper hand of me, that it requires a Herculean moral effort to prevent myself from deliberately stepping out into a road of oncoming traffic, or to move myself on from idling beneath a city crane’s precariously borne weight of 50 tonnes of devastating concrete, or methodically pushing people’s children into the street – then, I account it high time to retire to the nearest, most obscenely and prematurely festively decorated Irish pub, as soon as I can: least I be, gentle reader, the tragic cause of some senseless tragedy done. The Christmas pub is my substitution for the poison and the noose. With a philosophical flourish I can throw myself upon the white rails, on the mirror and the razor-blade. And I quietly take to the drink. For I hunger and I thirst not for the brittle unconsecrated words of the Living but for the grave-bitten guidance and the admonitions of the Dead; for those same words with their different sense are only spoken to me from the lipless mouths of the ghosts of my Christmases past, future and present. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men, in their degree, sometime or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the fairy-lit darkness of this time of year.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

     

  • Friended

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

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

    But sometimes we Like each other’s posts.

  • A Meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Thank you. You are Herr Mozart?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Fiction: Fez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fiction: Old Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    She points at the wall of books.

    “Have you read them all?”

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

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

    “Mmmm, it’s working.”

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

    “Student scientist,” she corrects.

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

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

    “What a place.”

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

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

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

    She gestures to the wall of bookshelves.

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

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

    “Oh yeah?”

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

    “Darkness Visible?”

    “Uh huh.”

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

    “This saved your life?”

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

    “Oh baby.”

    But she has imprecise reservations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What can I do?” she says.

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

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

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

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

    Breakfast, Morning After

    Everything on this plate is overcooked,

    I am too.

    Last night’s sentimentality boiled over,

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

    Like incomprehensible glue.

     

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

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

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

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

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

    “I got your poem.”

    “I need to see you.”

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

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

    Fittingly, it ends in Coppers.

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

    She breaks the deadlock.

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

    He laughs and takes her hands in his.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What’s that?”

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

    “Yeah.”

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

    She stops to caress his cheek.

    “Oh, that’s so sweet baby.”

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

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

    “Yeah,” he says. “I guess we do.”

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

    “Good luck with the future,” he says.

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

    “Someday.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

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

  • Mary Dances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fairy Story

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

    London April 1919

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *  *  *

    Glasgow docks, Berth 5, April 1923

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

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

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

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

    Feature Image: John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow Docks 1881.

     

     

  • Visiting

    In February Anne faced the days with her usual shaky stoicism. She opened the curtains to cold stunted mornings glimmering through the window and at the bottom of the park the pathetic trees. At lunchtime Ryan’s was full of the office crowd so she went at three when she only had a couple of old timers and the occasional dog for company. The barmen knew her and brought a large one to the table when she had settled herself, then she felt OK and had another one. Anne thought about the letter in its pink envelope. She hadn’t opened it immediately but left it on the windowsill pretending not to notice it. When she put her coat on, she picked it up and turned it over to see if there was a return address, nothing. Finally, she slid a butter knife under the gummed flap and tore it open. At first it seemed like the letter was written in a foreign language, she couldn’t understand any of it. She looked again at the name and address on the envelope.

    It was getting on for five thirty when Anne left Ryan’s and crossed the road to Dunnes. She wandered through the shelves of fruit and vegetables, the brightly coloured packets of rice and pasta, put a net of oranges in her basket and a sliced pan. Just a sandwich this evening, cheese or a bit of ham maybe biscuits or a fruit cake? Well no. At the checkout a woman was emptying a full trolley, must have a few to feed at home Anne thought. The woman unloaded several packets of mince and a red pepper. This was going to take a while. There were a few people waiting now, the woman was nearly at the bottom only a couple of bottles of Fanta and a bottle of Coke to go. Anne put her items on the conveyor belt. The boy at the checkout looked at her briefly as he put the bottle of Smirnoff through. Tomorrow she’d go to Tesco’s.

    The letter was waiting for her when she got home. She smoothed out the page and put on her reading glasses. After she read through it quickly, she sat back. There could be a mistake there must be plenty of Anne Wilsons. How could her mother be alive after all these years with no word It was forty years since that night when Anne was nine years old, the night her mother disappeared. The bottle was within reach, and she poured herself a stiff one. Forty years is a long time still Anne could remember it clearly. It was a Friday night, and her birthday was next day. Ten years old, she would be a big girl and allowed to stay up late. Every detail of that night stood out sharply in her mind, but there was no warning that her mother wouldn’t be there next day. Her father said nothing and said nothing until the day he died. From then on was sad, the brightness was gone. It was worse than if her mother had died then Anne and Dad could have gone to the grave and put flowers on it and cried.

    Anne ordered the taxi for six. It was raining and traffic was slow. The taxi driver was listening to the evening news on the radio. Anne sat very still in the back seat waiting for the lights to change as the windscreen wipers swept back and forth making a squeaking noise on the windscreen. The news had given way to ads: insurance, face cream, cold remedies. Anne listened and looked at the lights smudged against the rain spattered glass. The lights turned to green, the taxi inched forward and then sped on unimpeded. It was moving steadily now making its way through gleaming wet streets. She was rarely in this part of town, the buildings seemed darker, the streets emptier. It stopped raining as the taxi drew up to the hospital entrance. She climbed the steep steps and pushed open the gigantic door. Anne’s memories of her mother were all bound up with her disappearance. No child can accept abandonment, there had to be a reason. All through her teens she was haunted by a phantom mother, a mother that didn’t leave. At eighteen she had her first drink. It was in the Palace Bar sitting on high stools with Paul a guy from her class in college. Anne raised her glass of orange and vodka to her mouth and the pain she wasn’t even aware of vanished. A comfortable numbness gathered around her neck and shoulders. In that instant she knew she needed it and that she wanted more.

    The hospital was vast and gloomy, there was no sign of her. How would Anne even recognise her? She went to the nurse’s station, but there was no one there. Wandering aimlessly, she eventually noticed some movement from one of the beds, a tiny woman was waving frantically at her.

    ‘Come here, come here,’ she gasped.

    Was this her mother? Maybe she had expected a monster not a little bundle with snowy hair and a soft pink bed jacket.

    ‘It’s you I knew you as soon as I saw you. Do you hate me? Please don’t hate                    me I couldn’t bear it’

    Anne sat down.

    ‘What should I call you?’

    ‘Oh, call me Margaret,’ her face dimpled into a girlish smile.

    ‘Why are you here? Are you ill?’ Anne asked carefully.

    Margaret’s smile faded she plucked distractedly at her bed jacket and blew her nose.

    ‘Yes’, she said in a small voice. ‘I’ve got cancer’.

    Anne caught sight of herself in the window her hair grey and unkempt, her skin greyer still. She didn’t feel able to offer sympathy. It was forty years too late, but still she had the decency to pretend. She was well practised at passing herself off as a decent human being. She turned to her mother.

    ‘I’m so sorry is there anything you need?’

    Her mother’s blue eyes were closing, she tried to say something, but she was overcome with sleep. Anne stood up and bent over the sleeping woman pulling the blankets around her then left the way she had come.

    After she graduated Anne and Paul got married and bought a house. They tried to be like everyone else. They had a normal mortgage and a normal car. They got up in the mornings like everyone else and went to work, but that was where it ended. At home with the T.V. turned up loud so the neighbours couldn’t hear they argued heatedly and without inhibition. Alcohol no longer sedated Anne’s anger but seemed to fuel it. There was guilt, shame and above all the need to escape. Still, they went to the pub, on her third double vodka Anne convinced herself this was a good life, the only life she deserved and then the drinks would work their magic once again. One night Paul collapsed and was brought to the cardiac care unit in James’ St Hospital. A year later he didn’t get that far. The house was empty without him. The silent kitchen reminded her of the angry words that had passed between them. She hadn’t told him she loved him for a long time. In work it was harder to hide that things weren’t the way they should be so when she told her boss she was planning early retirement he didn’t discourage her.

    She was alarmed to see her mother wasn’t there when she visited again. Then behind her a voice called:

    ‘Yoo hoo it’s me I’m not dead yet.’

    Margaret grinned impishly at her from the confines of a wheelchair.

    ‘Will you get into the bed for me,’ the nurse cajoled.

    When she was settled Margaret turned to Anne and said:

    ‘Oh, good now we can have a nice chat.’

    Anne stiffened.

    ‘I think you need to tell me where you’ve been all these years.’

    ‘I met a man who was kind to me,’ Margaret said seriously. And I thought love was the most important thing in the world.’

    ‘It is,’ Anne surprised herself by saying. ‘But why didn’t you take me with you?’

    The older woman started to cry. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

    ‘You have no idea how many times I asked myself that and then time passed so quickly, and I thought it was too late.’

    ‘You don’t think it’s too late now?’, Anne asked bitterly.

    ‘Was it hard for you?’, Margaret ventured.

    ‘You could say that.’

    Anne leaned back in her chair. Then from somewhere deep in her chest she started to laugh. At first Margaret looked shocked and then soon she was chuckling too. Before long the two women were bent over with laughter. It resounded around the ward, down the corridor and out into the star-studded night.

    February gave way to March and at the beginning of April when the light is beginning to brighten in the sky Margaret slipped away in her sleep like a child exhausted by play. It was a small gathering at the funeral just one or two nurses from the hospital and some other people Anne didn’t know including a tall man with curly hair wearing a long grey overcoat. She found herself leaving the crematorium with him.

    ‘Did you know her well’, he asked.

    ‘No, I really only got to know her recently, but you could say we go back a long way.’

    ‘I’m her son David,’ he said smiling a familiar youthful smile.

    Next morning when Anne opened the curtains pale lemon sunshine washed the famished lawn. Eggshell blue sky, fresh and limitless roofed the world. Spring had arrived in person and to Anne this time it seemed different. There was nothing special about the daffodils clustered under the trees even the birds’ carefree song had been sung a thousand times before, but there was a detail and Anne had noticed first thing. When she opened her eyes this morning she hadn’t wanted to escape.

    Feature Image: Irina Iriser

     

     

     

  • This Is The Leg I Use When I’m Thinking

    His blue look was on the ground, as though it held the reason for the last five minutes. She took him all in. The hair was wavy on top and cropped tight at the sides, sprinkled grey. He looked down at her on the step. Are you ok?

    My hero? she ventured.

    From her seat on the steps in the archway, she watched the rain come fast and heavy on the lane.

    He laughed, lowered his head and folded his arms, looked at his shoes then at the rain, searching for the next thing to say.

    We should bring you to the hospital.

    No, she said. No hospital.

    The steps led up to what looked like two apartments with dark, imperious doors. Across the lane, the open back door of a commercial kitchen, wheezing steam, chattering work and a churning smell of Italian food mingled with the food bins parked by the door. The rain was the type that felt like God tipped over the sky and the blue was washing away. She loved it. She wanted to ride down a newborn river crashing through the buildings, forests, mountains, meat till she reached the ocean and swallowed it. But she had just been hit by a car so instead, she wanted her seat.

    Do you live near here? he said, biting his lip.

    He sure wore that black suit.

    Sorry I slapped you, she said.

    Ah, he waved his hand. You were in shock.

    Ask me the next thing.

    Are you drunk? he said, smirking.

    No. I just want to go home.

    It’s just I saw you in the restaurant –

    I want to go home.

    I’ll take you.

    No, she said, trying to rise.

    She stopped because she lacked the strength, so she concealed it by instead shifting to fish out her purse from underneath her.

    Were you drinking? he pursued, worrying his lip again.

    Ignoring him, she lit a cigarette, and blew a drag at him, careless, spent. With something like tiredness, her long lashes closed slow and long on him. She felt languorous, suspended for an unknown interval, free and anonymous on a step behind the rain. Her head rested on the wall.

    A pack of girls in hotpants skittered trilling and swearing through the alley like a fuckle of turkeys, their jackets held high over their heads as umbrellas. Celine could taste blood on her tongue.

    Gimme one a’those, will ya? he said, dabbing his face dry with the cuff of his jacket.

    His finger grazed hers when he took the packet – a shock of intimacy worse than his manhandling when he cowboyed her clear of the road, away from the traffic and chaotic onlookers. Snatching her lighter from the air between them where she threw it, he moved closer. Her palm massaged the hip that caught the bumper. The car that hit her threw bawls of abuse out the window, taking her for drunk as well. It struck her how much taller than her her rescuer was when he was close, the way trees get taller when you walk toward them.

    So what are you fallin’ all over the place for? he said, squinting down at her.

    Fuck off, she said, quietly.

    He laughed. Is it your birthday or something?

    She looked at him.

    Well, you’re all decked out in leopard print and silk and eating alone in a restaurant. And falling all over the place drunk.

    I’m not drunk, she said, emphatically flat.

    Really? he smirked.

    And I’m not engaging your asshole-ishness either because if I do collapse and start spitting up blood you’ll know I’m not drunk and that yes, you tool, I have a condition. Tachycardia.

    I don’t care.

    Jesus.

    Because you’re just so fucking beautiful I can’t think of anything else.

    She laughed, a great blart of a belly laugh.

    Fuh – I haven’t laughed like that in a while, she said.

    Well at last, he beamed, A fuckin’ smile outta ya.

    You think this is funny?

    I do, a bit, yeah.

    She spiked him an awful look.

    He retreated and exhaled, letting the air flupper his lips like a horse.

    The rain was thunderous on the cobblestones and rooftops.

    And I’m not a l-lady, she stammered, I’m a strong woman. I’ll take it from here.

    I’m Bob by the way.

    Ya. Call me a taxi, will ya?

    I can drive you.

    No.

     

    Bob followed Celine’s taxi in his car without her knowledge. It brought her through Shantalla and dropped her at the University Hospital. The night was dirty green and umber with trees and street light. He parked outside Mr. Waffle and watched her in the mirror walking away from him toward the building where she was born.

    He shadowed her to the ICU. In an open plan of a dozen beds, she rounded a corner and was gone. Staying hidden, he spied out from the corner and saw her. Four beds down, stopped at the one near the window. The bed contained a small figure, a child.

    As she faced the bed with slumped shoulders, Celine’s expression was sombre. Her heart separated through water. She stood still at the foot of the bed and raised a hand to her mouth.

    You won’t let me leave, wee one, she whispered to her fingers.

    The child’s small, closed eyes, with the tubes up her nose and down her mouth. Her daughter hooked up to the Matrix, and not the Ribbon, where it was easier to spend time with her. Celine softly traced a curl on the sleeping forehead. With soundless poise, she placed herself on the plastic grey seat next to the head of the bed, and lightly rested her hand on the bedspread. The night drank the place down. Beyond the window, it painted with hate.

    You can’t out-G me, she said to it. I’ll hate you dead.

    She wished she knew what she thought. In that moment she was blessed with the truth that it was not possible to know anything, not even that you didn’t know, because you often did and had no excuse. And what did knowing and not knowing at the same time do to each other? Give birth to something, anything you wanted. She wanted freedom. In that moment, she had it. But the guilt of having it swept in to rob her of it. Nothing after nothing, and she was herself again, for the first time that day, without self, nobody, happily, with all the answers and no way or wish to convey them. She was without her body, left with a voice that would not speak, wiser than her and uncontrollable until the time called for it, and it just came to cut through the ugly and vulgar. She almost worshipped it. She hesitated to call it truth, in case it taught her a lesson in manners about labelling and chose never to speak to her again.

    Christ, anything but that, she prayed.

    No, it wasn’t gone. It would hold its peace. It would hold all the pieces.

    Maybe it will be today, she thought. On your birthday, Polly, pet. I’ll be there to welcome you. Here or there, in the next place. Don’t be scared. Ever. When it comes time to go.

    Polly hadn’t moved. Not a twitch or a sniff, in her deep sleep. Did she sense her mother? Celine did not aspire to that level of vanity. She loved her daughter, she wasn’t in love with her, and didn’t expect the same in return, she didn’t expect any love.

    It will cleanse you, she said silently, covering her mouth with her fingertips again, afraid that the world might see the words.

    Your death, love.

    Something selfish made her acknowledge death; where it was in the room, where it came near and pulled up a chair. It carried the details, and the world’s ‘reality’: the floating world, a weaponised litany of details masquerading as facts, aiming her memory at her with diagnoses, prognoses, projections, reflections, incompetence, fallacies, failure, contingencies, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, deny God, deny faith, accept death, a reality that did not accept the agency of free will, but stole it and sold it back in the form of vanity branded as truth. Untraceably, one’s own truth. Good or bad.

    Details. She didn’t want charts, names of medicines, names of doctors, nurses. Let death slobber over those. But she had them. Like a disease, she couldn’t get rid of. If she had them, Polly didn’t have to have them and if Celine tossed them, they’d be far from Polly. Either way, Polly was free. Either way. She would be free.

    And with that endorsement, Death reached a hand out toward her child. Celine caught the wrist. It was like catching solid air. It struggled. She put its fingers in her mouth, and bit down. They slithered down her throat and fizzed in her oesophagus. Peristalsis saw them to her stomach where they were corralled in a dance of digestion. She swallowed all the death in the room. And felt better.

    The pain of envy struck Celine’s breast. Polly was closer to birth, and therefore death, and was the only guide Celine had to her own point of origin, the point in space and time where she was born. Yes, Celine was caught in vain self-preservation and all its grey shades. With a shock, she realised that it had been here in this very building, thirty years ago in two days time. Celine was born into this on September 17th 1988, perhaps on this very spot. It was violent genius, divine.

    Polly or Celine. One or the other would go. The old way. Barter. No. Not that way. It was what Celine would mean it to be. For one to live, the other did not have to die. No deal of Celine for Polly. Or the threat of what no intervention would bring – Polly for Celine – with nature favouring the robust. She appealed neither to the god of nature or the one who was supposed to control it. She blessed herself and thanked whatever was the most honourable aspect of God, the one who protected the meek, for her life and for Polly’s. She had always accepted Polly’s immortality. For the first time she was able to accept her mortality, two years into her small but powerful life. If Polly lived, her mother would live. If Polly died, her mother would die, she promised God. But she swore neither of them would die and she put her foot down.

    If she dies, she said to God, I’m coming for you.

    Bob, watching her from the corner, saw a small curly brown head on the pillow above a face of rosebud features. A potted plant sat on the bed stand. He was struck by its dark green leaves and bright red flowers, a liminal vigil above its small human ward. What he saw – mother and daughter – he couldn’t process at that moment, and slipstreamed into an oblique thought.

    Bob considered the watering of a potted plant, why it could never be a good thing to pour water from a jug down on top of the soil. It would only wash the nutrients away after the manner of a flood. For another thing, if plants were sentient, and he had some doubt as to whether they were not, it would become distressed, and he couldn’t abide the thought of that. For the overall health of the thing, at least, it was better to be gentle with watering, like rain, as gentle as nature is when it waters. Even heavy rain distributes water evenly, hitting the ground lighter than a jug’s spout aimed at a stem.

    The roots took in water from below, he acknowledged, watching Celine’s face. The leaves took in light from above.

    Be water, said the martial artist once.

    And the meek inherit the earth.

    Feature Image: Kaique Rocha

  • Fiction: The Sea of Pearls

    TEL AVIV – SEPTEMBER – 2023

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

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

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

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

    “Yes.”

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

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

    “Who are they?”

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

    “Where is Lodz?”

    “Poland.”

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

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

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

    KHAN YOUNIS – GAZA – SEPTEMBER 2023

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

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

    “How?” Said Heba.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What is it?” Asked Heba.

    “Love.”

    OCTOBER 7th 2023 – TEL AVIV

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

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

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

    OCTOBER 7th – KHAN YOUNIS.

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

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

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

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

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

    “We may have to.” Said her mother.

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

    DECEMBER 7th 2023 – KHAN YOUNIS

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

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

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

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

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