10 Things…with Tom Benjamin

Crime author Tom Benjamin, whose second Bologna-set novel, The Hunting Season, is due out this May, answers our questions.

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THE JAVELIN by Sam Simmons

St Pancras, Central London. A station was opened in 1868, to serve the Midlands. The grand building at the front is a hotel that has slept on the Euston Road since the station was built. Behind the Grade One listed exterior are boutique shops to suit the needs of the modern clientele that frequent the station – from its new destinations of Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam on the international rail link. Also, from the far reaches of the continent and beyond, reached via train services from Gatwick and Luton airports. It’s a bit like an airport terminus since St Pancras station had ‘International’ added to it in 2007, although there’s no duty free (it’s more like double the price).

Sometimes I see mice run across the concourse, looking for food in the city. Sometimes I’ve seen them run under the rails, looking for a place to hide. Trains here are served by overhead cables, so I’d hope the mice would run on to somewhere else when they feel the rumble of a train. I want to be the mouse, creeping out gently, watching the comings and goings, rather than being a part of it all, rather than be the briefcase rush hour model image. But I guess we are all a part of it. Our lives are in the hands of the six-car service to Margate, whether we like it or not, whether our journey is for work or pleasure. I want to take my time and buy my M&S avocado sandwich and eat it, before I’ve boarded the 140mph High Speed train. I want to enjoy my expensive artisan coffee before I leave the big smoke (which probably isn’t the big smoke anymore). I’ve been looking at new ways of naming it, and so far, I’ve come up with ‘the mega million gigabyte’ and ‘the big vape’. I don’t think either will catch on though.

The barista is abruptly asking me if I want ‘hot or cold milk’ with my Americano. The question of milk becomes more of a question of having a quick answer. I’m abruptly asked again. I’m being too slow. A train that connects London to Kent in no time at all is waiting for its load going from city to sea. It has the comforts of Wi-Fi. There’s never much chance to socialise here, so I guess we’ve got to take those moments of me, myself and Wi-Fi when we can. A modern train for a modern society. I spill a bit of coffee down my front during a power walk and don’t have time to care.

The train has nestled into platform 11. I slot my ticket through the machine and the barrier grants me entrance. A conversation is going on with a passenger and the guard as I walk through to catch the train.

‘Moorgate? You want the Northern line.’

‘No. I’m going to Margate.’

‘Oh, Margate? You want platform 11 for Margate.’

The train is getting busy, loaded up with pushchairs, back packs, suitcases, and of course city boys and girls in their best clothes (no coffee stains down their shirts). The digital board says ‘MARGATE’. Echoes of Chas & Dave.

Our service leaves St Pancras along a railway that passes over the Regent’s Canal with its narrow boats afloat, and the canalside gas holders that have been turned into offices or luxury flats. Camley Street Natural Park brings greenery to the area. We pass a bridge that has ‘HOPE’ painted across it. We head out towards the east. Our service sinks into a tunnel, then it picks up a bit of speed, and all we can see is our reflections in the windows. Oyster tappers are reminded to get off at the next stop as their fares won’t be valid any further. The ticket holders’ border.

We pull into Stratford International, where the international trains do not stop. The station has an unfinished look about it and sits in a concrete ditch. There’s the big shopping centre, Westfield, wedged between the international and mainline/underground Stratford station. The signs lead you through the shopping centre. I worked out there’s a short cut around it, if you walk past the depot where the HGVs are unloading their unholy goods. It’s a different world from the Stratford Centre, which at night, is a shelter for the homeless to put down their duvets for indoor sleep. Where the Olympic Stadium now engulfs the land was previously a mountain of fridges, which was said to be the largest collection of dumped white goods in Europe. Why didn’t they build the stadium out of old fridges? Next to the stadium is a supersize Helter Skelter.

 As soon as news of the Olympic games were pulled out of the hat, the Javelin would be the one pulling us into the new Olympic park through shuttle services using the newest train technology that these Hitachi-made Class 395 fleet could offer. Each train has the name of a famous British athlete on the front, complete with their signature and the words ‘Britain’s Fastest.’ Dame Kelly Holmes is an important one, being from Kent.

Celebration Avenue. Victory Parade. Anthems Way. Olympic Village. Olympic sized shopping centre. Olympic Park. Olympic Javelin throwing you into London in record time. Shaving minutes off your journey. Increasing capacity on the network. Room for more. Squeeze in. Hold on tight. Come January the fares will go up again. This is the price we pay for a celebration. If the London yellow stock brick was still in building fashion, the high speed would be lugging them up from the clay pits of Kent to Stratford, because building is happening quickly in the outer zones.

Onwards we go, slipping through into another tunnel. The hum of air pressure. You really notice that it’s picked up speed when it launches itself out of the tunnel and into the wastelands of the London/Essex border. It flies through the area like it’s a forbidden zone. I try to take in as much as I can, every time I pass here. I don’t want life to just be a blur we speed through.

It’s Ford Dagenham territory. MOT centres on the roadside at Ferry Lane. The industry buildings and work yards of Eddie Stobart, Rainham Steel, Scania Purfleet, Tesco and the glowing ‘M’ of fast food in the distance. It doesn’t have the dramatic feel of being on a two-car diesel pacer train, slugging past the dead British Steel works between Redcar and Middlesbrough. But this is what modern industry has become. The A13 runs alongside our tracks. Pylons sending electricity, fast, across Rainham Marshes. This is the land of Iain Sinclair’s orbital ramblings. Cobelfret Freight ferries anchor at Purfleet. A dangerous sighting of ‘Daily Mail’ beside the stilts of Queen Elizabeth II bridge brings on terror. Motorists are still required to pay the royal fare to cross. More shopping precincts at Lakeside, Thurrock, somewhere over there. Bluewater, the other side of the Thames estuary. The train rocks like a rollercoaster, red squares of rows and rows of Biffa bins blur past, and we catapult down through a tunnel under the river.

When the HS1 resurfaces again, we arrive at Ebbsfleet International. They seem to have stuck ‘International’ on every station. Intentional? Will they still be ‘International’ if this Brexit thing goes ahead?

Ebbsfleet is a made-up place on the Kent side of the Thames estuary. There’s not a lot there. Just a car park for commuters to park their motors before boarding a quick one into town. Two churches sit on the chalk cliffs that surround the station. Its location is somewhere between Swanscombe, Northfleet and Gravesend. Ebbsfleet does exist, but as a hamlet, some 55 miles down the line, at the mouth of the River Stour, near Ramsgate. I’m sure this new Ebbsfleet will exist soon. From the train window I can already see the men in green jackets surveying the alien lands. There’s already an Ebbsfleet United football team. I can’t see any goal posts. Perhaps they have a kick about on Rainham Marshes?

Ebbsfleet really is commuter land – most of the passengers that get on or off here are cradling laptops and holding leather satchels. The trains come fitted with handy plug sockets, and the modern commuter’s best friend, Wi-Fi. A lake is in sight of the platform, a pretend natural feature for passengers to glance at. Mark Wallinger’s commissioned White Horse (or Angel of the South) was planned to be built near where the rail goes under the A2. The white horse being the symbol of Kent. It was going to be taller than the Angel of the North, although no signs of the giant gee-gee as we leave Ebbsfleet Valley behind. Whether it exists or not, we start moving like a race horse again. We pass where the A2 was re-routed to make way for the tracks of this new rail link, and then we go into the fields of this home county.

The Javelin is the heron of UK trains – the only one superior is the Eurostar. Although the routes have been perfectly timed, that we rarely see the mythical beast pass us on our journey – only in its London nest, back at St Pancras.

We cross the River Medway, side by side with the M2. We see Rochester Castle crumbling on the riverside. It’s been haunting the riverbank since long before Dickensian days. It’s a picturesque view of Medway, whichever way you look out the window.

We flee consumerism in the fields. If I was standing on the field, the train would look like a Hornby set. Faster we go, into the hop growing county, we see the wooden poles that help them grow. The hops get dried and land into liquid form eventually. Two or three oast houses grouped together around the county, looking prestigious in their places. They were used as kilns to dry the hops and many have turned into homes, since beer is produced on an industrial scale now. The hop pickers would have caught the High Speed 1 if it had existed then. Down to Teynham, Faversham and Paddock Wood. London to Ebsfleet in 17 minutes. To Ashford in 37, Canterbury in just under an hour.

The murmurs of conversations, phone calls, and a faint hum of headphone music. The snoozer resting their head on the window. Oblivious to where we are. Just waiting for the train announcements to confirm it. Others glare on at their phones, immersed in emails or their favourite new TV series. The person behind me accidently knocks on the back of my seat. I feel it reverberate down the spine.

I watch the blue circle move across Google Maps on my phone. We get close to the M20 and move almost twice as fast as the cars. Shiny modern saloons, lorries, logistics…all moving across county and country, but not as quick as us. A corrugated metal barrier suddenly blocks our views, as we head into Ashford.

At Ashford International, it comes off the overhead cables – ‘ding’. The station looks like a glass spaceship, that has landed in a random town. Sometimes a Vic Reeves sighting, he catches the HS1 from Ashford. This is where the train joins the regular tracks with the mainline trains. There’s three lines coming out of Ashford – towards Ramsgate, Folkestone or Hastings and above is a monorail, where the Eurostar tears up into the sky, towards mainland Europe. Although some of the continental trains stop at Ashford, adding the international. The only international signs I can see is the word for exit in French, sortie. There are several javelins parked in the sidings, next to a building – ‘Hitachi – Inspire the next.’ Opposite sits the Millenium Dome-esque Ashford Designer Outlet, and the Batchelors soup factory. A clash of Andy Warhol’s soup factory and a naff pre-Millenium architectural panic attack. They have a face off across the tracks. We tune into regular speed now, getting the currents from the third rail.

Wye, Chilham, and Chartham. We sail through these places, while the Stour gently flows past. ‘Why kill ‘em and cart ‘em to Canterbury?’ Grandpa Tom once said to me. The slow stopper from Charing Cross opens its doors at these villages on the Kent Downs. Near Wye, there’s a white horse engraved on a hill. There’s a few of them on hills around Kent. Still no clip-clop clip-clop at Ebbsfleet though.

I hear a man on a phone say, ‘I’m off to that dump of a place, Canterbury.’ A slight irritation grows inside me to say, ‘it isn’t a dump.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard the place I was born called that, though I’ve heard my hometown be called a dump many times. Herne Bay – cracked manhole covers with the words ‘Pryor & Co Ltd, Dalston Junction’, ‘Haywards Limited Makers, London’, and ‘T.Hyatt & Co, Farringdon Road.’ Perhaps in the future, when BT have done their broadband job, these will be ultra-fast portals to London.

‘We will shortly be arriving at Canterbury West.’ Across a level crossing, a sighting of the Westgate Towers, and the traffic queued up along St Dunstans. We pull into the Archbishop’s city. From the station you can see the Gothic cathedral poking up. No, it’s not a dump. It’s built on history. This is where Chaucer and his storytellers pilgrimaged from London. It’s where Saint Thomas Becket was murdered by the king’s followers inside the cathedral in 1170. In Roman times this ancient city was called Durovernum Cantiacorum. In the early 2000s, Tony Robinson and his Time Team came to the big dig, where 2000-years’ worth of artefacts were found. The diggers took the artefacts and now a modern shopping arcade sits in their ancient place. Nowadays, the cobbled streets are packed with students and ‘I love London’ T-shirts. My Great-Great-Grandfather’s pink plaster mould cherubs are still intact on one of the buildings half way along the High Street. They’ve been there since the 1930s. Much of Canterbury was bombed during the Blitz, but the cherubs survived World War II. Beside Canterbury West, is a goods shed, which has been turned into a farmer’s market displaying the best produce from the Garden of England.

We roll out into the edgelands of Canterbury, heading towards the seaside. There’s a power plant and electrical wires firing in many directions. Pylons waving for miles. Car showrooms with brand new Jags, Mercs and BMWs on their forecourts, overlooked by a landfill site on a high mount, where seagulls scavenge. A permanent private gypsy site the other side of the tracks on Vauxhall Road. We pick up moderate speed across the level crossing past the village of Sturry. From the Javelin window, we see the glistening lakes of Westbere, where I did cross country running in my school days. We pass the derelict halt of where once stood Chislet Colliery. The colliery produced coal from 1919 to 1969. It would have powered the steam trains. The only remains is the station platform. The Stour joins trackside again at Grove Ferry, where boats and amateur fishermen while away the day. We glide past the fields beside Stourmouth and Sarre. During the summer you can read the crops on the fields. We go over the River Wantsum, which in the past would have been a channel of fast flowing water. It separated the Isle of Thanet from the mainland. These days it’s just a piddling stream. Wantsum Brewery sits nearby, and worth a sip if you like an ale. Better than the river water, it’s said.

The real Ebbsfleet can be seen from the train, but I can’t quite pinpoint where. It’s near where the concrete tea cups of Richborough Power Station used to be, and the only reminiscence of those cooling towers is a small wind turbine.

 We slow down and go under some concrete bridges of dual carriage way and pass Pegwell Bay. William Dyce famously painted ‘Pegwell Bay, Kent – A Recollection of October 5th 1858.’ The painting was inspired by a family day out the Dyce’s had spent on the sands. A concrete platform sits near the bay, where the hovercraft used to inflate and glide to Calais. It discontinued in the 1970s. The port of Ramsgate can be seen from here, and that’s pretty much derelict too. Now the bay is a place for birdwatching across the marshes and sands.

‘We have now arrived at Ramsgate.’ The doors bleep, several times, and open. If you’re sitting or standing near the door, you immediately feel the breeze of the seaside air. Ramsgate has many regency squares, and a large number of blue plaques – including one to Vincent Van Gogh, where he is said to have spent his happiest times as a teacher. From the window, all I see is another red Biffa bin and seagull shit scattered across the platform. (Even over the yellow line.) The station is a bit of a way from the town centre and the sea, so don’t let the first sightings put you off. It’s home to a royal harbour, where barges and yachts slowly bob on the twinkling harbour waves. On a clear day from the clifftop, you can see France. Perhaps it should be named ‘Ramsgate International’?

A viaduct takes us out of Ramsgate, affording us a panoramic view of the town. A voice comes from the tannoy. ‘Welcome aboard this service to Margate. Calling at Broadstairs and Margate ONLY. If you see anything suspicious, please do report it to a member of staff or the Police. The next station stop will be Broadstairs. Thank you for travelling with us today.’ Every time we stop, another town gets dropped from the digital screen. Then, the most common of all train interactions, ‘tickets please’, comes into the carriage. I look for today’s ticket, amongst my wallet full of expired journeys. I’m wearing a beret. The ticket man approaches me and says, ‘Bonjour! Paris is that way.’ He points, laughs, nods at my ticket and stamps it.

‘Tickets, please.’

I then overhear a conversation between a passenger and the ticket inspector.

‘I’ve got a ticket here somewhere. Can ya come back in ten minutes, mate?’

‘I’ve got plenty of time. I don’t mind waiting.’

‘I swear I just bought a ticket. Bugger. I can’t find it.’

‘Well, if you can’t find it, you’ll have to buy another one.’

And when it comes to the price.

‘Fucking hell, has it gone up? I swear it was cheaper than that before.’

‘Yeah, it goes up every January.’

‘Nah, you’re joking. It couldn’t have…ah! Will you do me a discount?’

I guess the guy doesn’t want to fare dodge, but who can blame him when prices go up? We slowly cruise through Dumpton Park. There’s weeds and wild grass growing in the cracks of the island platform.

Pavements full of litter, unemployment, teenage parents, family struggles, stroke services in jeopardy, mental health issues and a corrupt district council looking after everything. Welcome to Thanet.

Broadstairs station hangs on a slope at the top of its High Street. Welcome to the Turner & Dickens way. Dickens’s Bleak House lives on the clifftop and looks over Viking Bay. With windfarms on the horizon, as is much the same along the Kent coast. It has the best of the bays in the area and is regarded as the quainter of the Thanet towns. But much the same as the other towns, a lot of the High Street shops have moved to the out of town shopping centre, Westwood Cross – a mini Westfield.

We cross a field out of Broadstairs, pass an estate, and the train slows down as we approach the town where the journey ends. The unfinished town. Bits being propped up and just about held together. ‘MARGATE’ rolls across the screen. People start to prematurely stand, collecting their bags from the racks and heading for the automatic doors. I stay where I am, until we pull into the terminus. Somebody is playing music on their phone, another is answering a call and says, ‘I’m just on the train, but I’ll be there in a few minutes and will walk up to the clocktower and meet you.’ The railways aren’t public anymore, since they were privatised, but you still get no personal space.

We see the brutalist architecture of Arlington house. ‘BLOCK BREXIT’ in one of the windows of flats. Next to the re-vamped funfair of Dreamland, where I spent a summer working the dodgems and the tea cups. It’s been a theme park since the 1880s. It went into demise and ruin in the 2000s. The old owner set fire to the scenic railway, and it was derelict for years. But money has been put into it, and now it brings the tourists back in for more days of play. The scenic railway is making the kids put their hands in the air again. The Turner Contemporary has attracted artists and art lovers, the ribbon cut by Tracey Emin, who grew up here. It’s seen trendies from Hackney migrate to Margate via the High Speed rail, still within a commutable distance of the office, but who cares, you can work from home now. Or just work from your favourite local that offers coffee, and yoga and records too. A man with a beard is also flogging bars of soap, and candles made from local seaweed.

Margate’s always been a place for artists and holidaymakers to escape the city for cleaner air. The famous lines of T.S.Eliot ‘On Margate sands, I can connect nothing with nothing.’ He wrote some of The Waste Land in a shelter across the road from the station. Eliot’s poetry writing shelter is next to some toilets (his anagram). Turner came here to paint the panoramic sunsets across the harbour arm – smudged gold in the naturalist form. Tracey Emin has moved back and laid her bed in the Turner Gallery, and also married a rock. Dreamland is an all-day disco again. Sea bathing might not have come back just yet, but people still come to cleanse city pollution from themselves in salt water.

‘We have now arrived at Margate, where this train terminates. Please remember to take all your personal belongings with you when leaving the train. And when alighting, please mind the gap between the platform and the train. We have now arrived at Margate. All change, please, all change.’ Could the announcer not have put it as simple as ‘we have arrived at the sea – wash your sins away.’ I step out of the train, at the end of my journey, on the threshold of where the land meets the sea. There are no ticket barriers at Margate, so I just wander out onto the seafront without getting my ticket out of my wallet. I hear a seagull cry, I feel the sea salt breeze, I’m back home beside the white horses of the waves.

Sam Simmons is a beret wearing poet. He was born and read within seagulls’ cry of the splashing North Sea waves in Kent. He is a writer of geographical ramblings, poems and a painter of pictures. Sometimes he uses crayons like a three-year old would. He has an interest in psychogeography and enjoys long walks. In 2020, Sam graduated with a BA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck with a psychogeograpical dissertation titled ‘The Turtle’.

Julia Roberts by Len Lukowski

I was in bed with Julia Roberts, drinking wine at her Hollywood mansion in Notting Hill. She wore the slinkiest black underwear and kept touching me. When I leaned in to kiss her, she did not reciprocate, just froze for a couple of seconds, then moved away, kept talking as though nothing had happened. Soon she stood up, began putting on her dress and saying we had to go. We had to get ready or we’d be late for the party her Hollywood friends were having. Then came my turn to freeze. She had not consented to that kiss. Was I another of those creepy Hollywood men like Harvey Weinstein? Are you ok? Are you coming? she asked. I said, are we were alright? Told her I was sorry for trying to kiss her if it’s not what she wanted. Hey, it’s OK, she replied. It’s just I’ve never been with a woman. I’m not a woman. You know what I mean. I did. I love hanging out with you though, it’s so boring spending all my time with those posh, rich people, you’re much more fun. I nodded.

 

The party was in another Hollywood mansion, bigger than Julia’s, with a marble staircase and a red ballroom where the party was held. It was a hot L.A. night but Julia Roberts did not sweat. She wore a dress like the cocktail dress Richard Gere bought for her in Pretty Woman, a Mona Lisa smile fixed to her face. I wore a dinner jacket like all the other guys at the party, but mine was too big. Julia Roberts waved hello to her friends Hugh Grant, Richard Gere, Dolly Parton, Denzel Washington, Cameron Diaz and Maggie Gyllenhaal, smiling radiantly before kissing them hello. I was afforded a brief word of introduction, but most of the men ignored me and the women giggled as though my presence was embarrassing. I couldn’t stop staring at Julia Roberts, amazed I was there with her and that she’d told me I was fun. I held on to this even though at that moment she was ignoring me.

 

Julia Roberts sent me to get drinks and I was grateful because it meant, for the first time since we arrived, she actually spoke to me. It was unnecessary — the waiting staff, who all looked a damn sight smarter than me, flocked around her, always at the ready to top up her champagne though she waved them away, to make me feel less impotent I suppose. I returned with a champagne glass for her and a whiskey for me. Caught some of her girlfriends giggling and a whisper from Maggie Gyllenhaal as I approached: he’s shorter than her!

 

I didn’t know what to say to any of Julia’s friends so I went out to the balcony, where Julia Stiles stood, silently smoking a cigarette, looking out into the night and the view of Los Angeles. I stood next to Julia Stiles, smoking too, wondering if these people believed their luck. If every day they pinched themselves to check this was real. The Angels. Maybe none of this was real. Julia Stiles threw her cigarette over the balcony, fiddled with her phone and returned inside.

 

He’s so short. I heard a shriek from inside — Maggie Gyllenhaal could not get over my lack of height. He looks so young! exclaimed Cameron Diaz, is he eating properly? Oh he’s— I thought I heard Julia Roberts say. So are you—? Maggie was saying. With ‘him’? Where had Rupert Everett sprung from? Does he have a—? Well, that’s not—? So you’re a—

 

Julia Roberts was in hysterics when I returned to her side, like a faithful but neglected pet. Looking at her I felt something snap in me and my eyes watered a little. I requested champagne from one of the waiters who sneered at me as he handed it over. Rupert Everett, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Cameron Diaz were nowhere to be seen and I had to question whether I’d really heard what I thought I had, or if my ears had misinterpreted the hubbub of the guests. Julia Roberts was laughing with a producer now I did not recognise. She kept touching his arm and I gritted my teeth because it hurt to watch.

 

After the party we lay in bed together once more, she in expensive lingerie, me in boxers from Target. We drank more expensive champagne as we lay, passing the bottle between us. She kept rubbing my shoulder with her hand and I kept thinking, this is it, but every time I moved towards her, she retreated, turning away from me to the cabinet beside her bed from which she pulled out glue and scissors and paper. Make something for me, she commanded. Julia, I have to know— Just cut. She pushed the paper and scissors into my hands. What am I to you?— Let’s not do this now. But. Cut please. Cut cut cut—

 

Len Lukowski is a writer, poet and performer based in Glasgow.

POEM OF THE MONTH: BOY IN VARIOUS POSES by Lewis Buxton

Lewis Buxton reading Boy in Various Poses

 

A Boy Runs 

 

                 out of his lungs like they are a coat held by a parent at a school gate. The world around him is closing, the shops pulling down shutters as he turns into a cemetery where his heels push the dead further into their graves. He feels his weight on the ankle that crumpled beneath him months ago. He didn’t listen to the physio or do the exercises she gave him. He hoped he would heal himself, that in deepening the wound he would make it more heroic, grow back into the bruised ligaments till his breathing is a spooked horse again. Spittle rattles from his cheeks, the bit between his teeth worn away by worrying, the whip of a hundred fathers keeping him going, going, going.

 

 

Boy in Various Poses

 

The boy is an orange, an apple, a banana, a portrait by one of the Dutch masters, his armpit, a water lily, his dick, the sunflowers. He tries not to move so his twitch won’t break someone’s line. His back is arched so he won’t look so fat, so the light won’t catch his acne scars. They asked him to keep his shoes on, black leather boots beneath a body scuffed by living. He can’t see the sketches but feels the paint slipping down the stretch-marked canvas like beads of sweat from his temple. He feels himself up on the easel, cross legged & naked, his spit turned to acrylic, his peach soft skin, arsehole pink & dark as the pip.

 

 

A Boy Does a Magic Trick

 

            appears in a black suit & striped collared shirt, a new tie & shows the crowd his empty palms. There are doves in his pockets and aces up his sleeves. A rabbit quivers inside the hat of his heart. Boys know sleight of hand so people are always looking somewhere else as their houses of cards fall apart: pick a card, any card this boy says, vanishing into his own head, folding his fingers together like iron rings failing to escape the box he has locked himself in, and being dumped into the Thames. He is gasping but is so magic that no one comes to help him.

 

 

Born in 1993, Lewis Buxton is a poet, performer and arts producer. In 2020 he won the Winchester Poetry Prize. His first collection Boy in Various Poses will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2021. He lives in Norfolk.

THE BUTCHERS by Jonathan Morrow

I like to walk after therapy. I don’t feel ready to be normal again, or like I want to let go of the conversation yet. I follow the train line to the next station, or the one after that, depending on how it went. The city is coming together in my head. On this walk: the Vietnamese restaurant where I met Mary Lou; the roastery where I did coffee training; the kebab shop where Ross explained to me what a HSP is. A map of personal landmarks. For the first time I consider if Melbourne is my home.

There is a butchers by the next train station. Today I walk on its side of the road. There is a sign in the window seeking a cleaner in the evenings. It would fit in with my other job. I feel embarrassed to be looking at the advertisement. But I’m desperate for money, and here is an opportunity. I take a photo of the email address with my phone while a man walks behind me.

            I come back next week for a trial shift. I smoke outside to pass the ten minutes until 4 o’clock. I don’t know why I’m unsure of myself. I think, It’s just a cleaning job. I meet Matt, who takes me to the back and shows me where to put my bag and where to change into the uniform: a black chef’s jacket, a grey flat-cap, white wellies, a blue plastic apron. The apron is too long on me and I have to hold it up when I walk. I can keep on my own trousers.

            Matt shows me a laminated sheet on the wall – the cleaner’s tasks. He’ll help me out today and show me where things are. I clean a hundred black trays, scrubbing off meat, fat, blood and marinades, making sure I get the corners, then rinse away the suds and stack them to dry on the shelves above the sink. I do the same with deep blue and white buckets, ten or so, but wash them on the floor because they’re too big for the sink, and stack those to dry too. I take apart a saw, a mincer the size of a bath, a smaller mincer, a burger machine, a sausage machine and a tenderiser with a big American flag on the side. I wash the components in the sink, then scrape off the bone dust, cartilage and leftover flesh from the machines themselves, and scrub away the bloodstains and hose them all down with hot water until the stainless steel is shining and the air is thick with steam. I empty four bin bags and put them in a dumpster, and break down the cardboard boxes from the day and put them in too. I lift the heavy bucket of animal waste into a yellow dustbin kept in the chill room, and clean that bucket too. I scrape yellow fat off the long plastic cutting boards, douse them in white bleach and rinse them, and wipe the splattered blood off the walls above the counters. I put the machines back together. I clean the sinks. I mop the floors with water and red soap, and pull the suds and bits that everyone has dropped throughout the day to the drain in the middle of the floor. I empty the basket from the drain, wash it, and put it back.

            It takes longer than the three hour shift. Matt tells me I will get faster, and helps me to finish when it’s almost 7. For all three hours I try to ignore how humiliated I feel. I try to walk more naturally in wellies that are too big. I try to think about something else when I push the dumpster through the car park and see my reflection in the shopfront of the IGA, when I catch the eye of a man getting out of his black Porsche, and a woman in athleticwear tying her beautiful Golden Retriever to the tree outside the laundrette. I fear Im not better than this.

            Matt and I stand next to each other in the back after everyone has gone home and survey the room. He tells me it’s a good clean. I say that’s great. He asks me if I can come back tomorrow, and I thank him three times. I change out of the uniform and say, See you then. I walk to the station. I smoke two cigarettes waiting for the train. I tell myself I deserve them. 

I work at the butchers three or four nights a week. I don’t make friends with anyone. There’s little opportunity to because I work in the back. And there is a hierarchy in our uniforms that I feel as keenly as being new. I tell myself I like the break from talking and smiling to people all day in the cafe. I can put in headphones. I only need to say hello and good night. I can think or daydream or eavesdrop. I tell myself they’re dull anyway, working in a butchers, that I’m not missing out on any real craic. On Thursdays, there is a guy who reads out quizzes on his phone. I say the answers to myself, and get more right than they do. I am above them and beneath them.

            There is one guy who sometimes talks to me. I think his name is John. I don’t have much choice if he decides to start a conversation. He finds me at the sink, and asks questions that have one word answers and segue into another story, fact or opinion. I guess he’s in his early 30s. He always makes self-deprecating jokes about his height, like when he asks me to pass him one of the black trays I’ve washed from the shelf. When he serves a customer who annoys him, he turns away at the end of the transaction and paces to the back and shouts, What a fucking whore, or something, after the automatic doors have closed.

            On Valentine’s Day, John asks me if I’m doing anything after work. No, I say. I don’t want anyone to know me, as if that will make my time here less real. Then I repeat, No, nothing really, because I feel awkward in the silence between us. Me too, he says. Just me and my dog at home. Doing the three C’s together. He waits for me to ask him what the three C’s are, which I do. Cocaine, cocktails and ketamine, he laughs. I smile at him.

            I move through the cleaner’s tasks faster now, like Matt said I would. Today I finish before 7, and say good night as John is still putting cling film over each tray. I take the tram to Ross’. I can smell bleach and blood on my hands, on the sweats I’m wearing. I have to get off early when a ticket inspector comes on because there’s no money on my Myki. I wait 15 minutes for the next one.

            I pick up some dinner from the store and walk the rest of the way down the high street. It’s getting dark, but it’s still warm. I feel excited to see Ross. I wonder if he will have got me anything, but I know he won’t have. I don’t have anything for him. There are a lot of hairdressers in Toorak village. Barbers with leather sofas, mini-fridges stocked with craft beer, dark wooden floors. Salons are painted white, with good lighting and magazines and indoor plants on side tables. Every chair in every hairdressers is taken. Everyone is preemptively dressed, in tall shoes and shiny shoes, looking clean. I like looking in the windows. I find this funny and sweet, and think of all the ways it’s important and unimportant. I see my reflection in the clean glass. When I reach the end of the high street it’s dark, more quiet.

            I pick Ross up when he lets me in and we kiss. We are staying in because I said we can’t afford much else. He orders an ice cream sundae on UberEats while I shower and change my clothes. I sit down with him and find a film to watch on the projector. I wait to press play until his housemate finishes talking and goes back to their room. I tell him about the hairdressers, but he doesn’t laugh or seem to find it interesting. I think it’s because it was Australian, and he is Australian. We are quiet, and I feel sore. I wanted him to laugh because it would make me feel like he understands me.

            He falls asleep next to me while the film is still on. There is a pool of ice cream left in the box, but the thought of hearing the spoon scraping the styrofoam is unbearable so I put it down on the floor. I can still smell bleach on my hands. I do not watch the film. I’ve already seen it. I imagine walking past restaurants in the dark, seeing two sat either side of a small table with a bottle of wine. I tell myself it is natural to feel left out. I wonder if Ross feels that too but didn’t say anything.

 

Jonathan Morrow (@jonathanmorrow0) is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and theatre. He is Irish, but has lived in the US, Australia and is now based in the UK. His work is due to appear in The Rumpus.

The Ahp by Kaliane Bradley

He came to like a submarine creature breaking the tension of the water. It was morning. He couldn’t remember going to bed. Not because he had been drunk or exhausted the night before – he had been neither. But the edge of his memory had snagged on something, stopped abruptly around 10 pm.

 

Vision and colour crowded in. She was awake too; he could feel her wakefulness through the mattress.

 

She rolled over and said, “Thank you for not destroying my body while I was out.”

 

He wasn’t sure how to respond. “You’re welcome?” 

 

It was 7 am and already the room was too warm. He could see that she’d bitten her lip, and the blood had dried in the shape of a bird.

 

*

 

The year before they’d allowed the garden to grow wild, both agreeing that it was better for the bees and the local wildlife if they didn’t pull up the weeds and mow the lawn. By May the garden was overrun with henbit and dandelions.  Foxes used it as a toilet. The seed bomb they’d tossed at the ground from the kitchen door had produced two poppies and a wilting patch of borage that was quickly felled by the foxes. Bees, on the whole, did not visit. They decided to get very in to gardening. 

 

She had explained that she was an ahp at the beginning of the summer. He had been kneeling in front of the tomato plants, which he’d grown from seeds, and gently tying them to bamboo canes. They occupied the sunniest corner of the garden, next to a trough where he had planted sweet peas. 

 

He had paused in the tying. “Could you say that again?”

 

“An ahp.” She must have seen him tense up. He’d never gotten over this habit – panic-freezing whenever he misheard her, or when conversation veered off into ambiguous roads. 

 

“In Thailand they call us krasue. I think in Malaysia it’s a penanggalan.” She’d paused. “I looked up the other names on Wikipedia.”

He’d run a nail down a tomato leaf. The earthy-treacle smell filled his nose. “What does an ahp do?”

 

“We’re women, but our heads come off at night. We detach from our bodies and fly around the neighbourhood sucking the blood of cattle. All our guts and things stay attached to the head, so we’re basically a floating digestive system.”

 

He’d twisted one of the leaves right off the stalk. “Not many cattle around here,” he’d murmured.

 

“We can eat carrion too.”

 

“Oh. Does it hurt?”

 

“The detachment? No. But the hunger does. And if you crush the body I leave behind, I’ll die in terrible agony.”

 

He could never imagine the ahp without the smell of tomato plants, and he mixed up the smell of tomato plants with the smell of blood.

 

*

 

When he was a child, he had been praised for his imagination. He wrote and illustrated stories about a superhero fish called Starmix. He played games with his siblings, where they pretended to visit an ultra-safe version of Jurassic Park. An imaginative child. It was even better than being a clever or well-behaved one. 

 

In one of their earliest fights, she had accused him of having no imagination, and his mind had skipped back to the school reports stuck to the fridge, the craft materials his mother had lovingly provided them. These domestic images glitched. They seemed to chase one another in a circle, losing focus but increasing in saturation and colour with every repetition. Later he learned to recognise this as a symptom of a panic attack.

 

“You think you’re so fucking clever,” she’d shouted, “but you can’t even begin to imagine. You just guess. You fucking copy-paste from the world. You have no fucking idea what trauma is.”

 

After he learned that she was an ahp, he made an effort to imagine what it was like. He tried to imagine the flying: the ground dropping away, the trees sliding past, the air biting down as he left the muggy heat of the street and reached the cold, cold night above. Then he realised he was fantasizing about leaving the punishing summer weather, and had to start again.

 

There was a time when he’d tried to imagine trauma, the actual localised existence of trauma. He did this because he wanted to stop visualising the incidents that caused trauma, which he had started to do compulsively. So he thought about trauma as a passenger, hitched to the medulla; trauma rode the body with its fingers curled inside the skull, ready to squeeze the brain through its fingers if there was the slightest hitch in the journey. He thought about trauma as an itch, a wound, a door in the attic. He thought about her face, the way it changed mid-argument, like something living in her throat had reached up and wrenched her tongue back.

 

*

 

His therapist, who he’d been seeing for about six months, at her insistence, suggested that the ahp was a metaphor.

 

“She leaves her body behind in the bed,” said his therapist, “while her mind and her guts, as she puts it, sail out the window. It’s interesting to me that ‘guts’ can mean ‘bravery’. So she deserts herself, gutless. And her body stays in bed.”

 

His therapist was looking at him with an expression he translated as expectant (although, as said therapist pointed out, he often read silences as expectant).

 

“In bed with me?” he volunteered.

 

“Yes, she is, isn’t she?”

 

They looked at one another across the small room, inexplicably upholstered in white and indigo paisley. 

 

“Where are you now?” asked his therapist. 

 

“We’re- I’m in bed with her, I suppose.”

 

“What’s that like, being in bed with her?”

 

He had been waiting for the moment that his sex life would come up in his sessions. They’d already exhausted his relationship with his mother.

 

“Good,” he said. “She’s very confident.”

 

“How does that feel, her confidence?” 

 

He wanted to say: when I first met her she’d hold my throat if she wanted to kiss me deeply. I understood the concept of surrender after she did that: it’s not just submission but desire. You have to want to give in, really badly.

 

“It’s…nice. It’s nice to be with someone who knows what they want.”

 

“Do you know what you want?”

 

He wanted to use the bathroom; he wanted to go home and play video games. He didn’t really know what this question was supposed to mean. Who still had their childhood dreams tied to their backpacks? Who wanted anything out of the day except a little kindness?

 

*

 

Sexually she was curatorial. Quite early on she’d been interested in measuring the length and width of his penis. She’d hidden her interest among breathy exclamations of oh-my-such-a-big-cock, but the erotic interest for her was in cataloguing him. 

 

When they got to know one another better, she stopped hiding behind porno coyness. That summer, one of her interests was calculating his median heart rate at the point of orgasm. He had to lie still and not exert himself or he’d ruin the data; he would be tidily fastened to the bedposts, or a chair, or the radiator. 

 

“I’d like to record breathing too,” she said one afternoon. “I need to work out a way to suspend a microphone.”

 

He stretched against the wrist ties, cracked his shoulders with a satisfied grunt. “Okay. Cuddle me?”

 

She crawled over him and tucked him under her. He felt her front teeth pressed lightly against his neck. They were both sweating in the heat and it changed the way they touched each other, or rather how she touched him – careful, fastidious, not wanting to discomfit him too much. No one really talked about the heat anymore. It was too sad to keep hearing the same thing. New temperature records were being set every week. On walks up to the shops he’d noticed several birds flitting from railing to pavement with their beaks parted and she’d told him they did it for the same reason any animal dropped its mouth open and looked desperate: they were thirsty. He started leaving flat dishes of water out in the garden after that.

 

“Do I wake you when I go out flying?” she asked him.

 

“No,” he said. 

 

“Sometimes I take bites out of foxes,” she said. “But never cats. Cats and I have an understanding.”

 

He had an itch by his hip, asked her to scratch it. “Would you ever eat any of me?”

 

“No, baby. We have an understanding too.” Then: “And I love you. I don’t want to harm you. Anyway, ahps are always married, or at least with a man. Part of what makes an ahp an ahp is the return to the whole woman form. If no one wanted her to come back to her body, why would she bother?”

 

*

 

“Do you feel that there is inequality in your relationship?” asked his therapist.

 

He thought about her thunderous rages, which used to leave him frozen, not like ice but like a broken computer programme, stuck in the last working frame, brain spinning in place. He thought about packed lunches she would make him if she was working from home and he had to go in, her furious indignation whenever someone was rude to or dismissive of him. He thought about how often she called him beautiful, and wrapped his long hair around her fist so that her knuckles showed white through the strands when she squeezed.

 

“Um, I suppose so. I’m not very brave.”

 

“Tell me more about that.”

 

“I don’t really like confrontation. I don’t like arguing, I get exhausted and I just give in anyway so it’s a waste of energy.”

 

His therapist nodded, as if he had confirmed something they’d already discussed and signed off on. “So it’s less effort for you if you let someone else have their way.”

 

“Mm, I suppose so.”

 

“How does that make you feel?”

 

“Sort of ashamed, which is also exhausting.”

 

“Do you find these sessions exhausting?”

 

He couldn’t stop himself from bursting out, “Honestly?”

 

Later, his therapist suggested a new metaphor for the ahp: her non-white body was a burden to her, but also a fundamental part of her identity that she experienced most strongly in the presence of a white man. Perhaps their sex life was a microcosm of reclamation and annexation; perhaps the ahp was both coloniser and colonised.

 

He didn’t think therapy was helping him much. He worried that he was doing it wrong.

 

*

 

On the way home from work one Wednesday, he found a group of his neighbours gathered in the street. Most of them were barefoot, and several of the men were topless. Everything seemed stained a greenish yellow, as if he’d been rubbing buttercups on his eyes. The air shimmered. Summer was here.

 

“That’s the third one in a month,” one of the neighbours was saying, in a modulated bleat that carried like a siren. “I think we should get the police to write a report up. I’m serious. Whatever does that to a fox is a danger to humans too.”

 

The neighbours were straggled around the remains of a fox. Something had torn it open and almost entirely severed its head. Rotten-looking tubing and the occasional moon-white lump shone on the pavement. There was, he realised, less viscera than one might reasonably expect from a dead animal. Some of the crimson liquid pool it lay in appeared to be bubbling. 

 

“Jesus,” another neighbour exclaimed. “Is it, is that, like, cooking? Is the blood cooking?”

 

“It is ridiculously hot,” someone else said.

 

“This needs to be cleaned up,” said the bleating neighbour, to a murmur of assent. No one volunteered. No one called the police, either. 

 

*

 

“My mother says back home, ahps sit in the trees on lonely roads and sing. They all have long black hair and it hangs down the trees like moss.”

 

“Do you do that?”

 

“No, someone would throw a shoe at me. I just fly and eat. Ahps have to be a secret. You can’t be a public ahp, because then you’re not an ahp, you’re just a freak.”

 

They were lying in one another’s arms, or rather he was lying in hers, with his own arms tucked between them like a dropped parcel. 

 

Every window in the bedroom was open but there was no difference in temperature between the room and the street. It gave their domestic life a bizarrely communal feel. Barriers between public and private were melting, merging. The evening before he had seen the neighbour from across the road, a woman in her early forties who lived with her sister and her wife, leaning against the wall of her front garden. She was wearing nothing but a tank top and Care Bear patterned knickers, and was smoking a roll-up while tears streamed down her face. 

 

When he’d come closer to ask her if he could help, she had sheepishly explained that she was not weeping but having an allergic reaction. What are you allergic to? he asked. I don’t know, she replied, it only started happening this year. Her feet had been bare on the pavement and nothing about her outfit had seemed odd until he relayed this story later.

 

In bed, starting to slip into a mud-like calm, he asked, “Will you fly tonight?”

 

“I fly every night, baby. I get hungry and I have to.”

 

He pressed his mouth against her forehead. He wondered what it was like, that driving hunger that charged moments, changed landscapes. He dreamed of it sometimes, from the point of view of the prey: peaceful under a pair of jaws, falling effortlessly into a cosy eternal void.

 

Kaliane Bradley is a writer, editor and dance/theatre critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Willowherb Review, The Tangerine, Somesuch Stories and Granta, among others.

A WEEK IN A DAY by Anna Kirwin

A week in a day

by Anna Kirwin

 

Promise explodes from her gossamer wings as she crosses the threshold. Under the gaze of none but the cockroaches, clicking and clacking across the torn lino, she releases a commonplace flutter of ordinary plans for a future unconsidered. In this unsullied opportunity for such a hollow vessel, unblemished by thinking and weighty with confidence, she knows to stay light. Beyond our demands for beauty, little is asked and less performed. Her wings flutter unhindered, still transparent, still unreachable, and we gaze, transfixed by symmetrical hypnosis.

She is not the sum of two halves, but a half repeated. In this demi-world of possibility, she thrives, twice of the half that she is. But a controlled half is far from a dangerous thing, they think, and let her fly free. Young for the old guard, she is welcomed by the admirals and with their desire, not to mould her in the vision of themselves, but to follow and nod and follow and nod, so she flies just like a child: unrestricted, unrestrained, unreliable. She feigns experience and expertise, keen to prove a point about herself.  Unaware of the pitfalls of the pack, the turbulence of the ripples of air which push randomly across her path trouble her.  She only thinks she has the sense of age. Her wings heave.

Up, she ascends, surrounded by the troupe, at heights too lofty for her to breathe. Birds circle, but the threat comes to nothing. Beauty encourages confidence over competence. She copies the frogs. She mimics the spiders. But repetition doesn’t build empires.

The flutter can’t flutter together forever. Pandemonium reigns in the chaos of nature. First one, then another disappears. It’s easy to be beautiful when you’re the only one left.

Change has come to her now too. As she transforms, her wings recede, just tiny little secrets, tucked in, hidden. Her features collapse into discs which collapse into caterpillar soup. Retracting her skin, reducing her food, she tips over on her twig and, shedding the leaves upon which she had feasted to plump herself strong, she rolls herself back into her silky cocoon, folds back into the egg and shrinks into a larva.

 

Anna Kirwin is a writer and artist, living in London, but dreaming of the Arctic. Her last published piece explored the strange glow of European cities by night, but more generally, her recent work deals with language, thought and time. She sees light in the darkness.

 

THE ARTIST WHO LIVES HERE by Claudia Lundahl

I keep paints and brushes and bottles of solutions around to remind myself that I am an artist, or, rather that I want to be an artist or to just be considered one. As though through the surveillance of the items on my desk, I can be encouraged to see myself that way. I have bottles of things with fancy names like gouache and varnish and I know what they do but I’m not totally sure I’ve ever used them correctly. I have a wooden paint chest that was given to me as a gift by someone who looked at me once with my messy hair and eccentric clothing and thought “I know just the thing.” 

I have based my artistic pursuits on the idea that all art is art, or, art is whatever you want it to be, or, there’s no such thing as bad art. I do not actually believe any of this is true. The truth is that I like looking at the art materials on my desk and thinking “an artist lives here” and the artist in that sentence is me or some version of myself that I am perhaps creating or molding myself into through the things I have purchased from the little shop on Old Brompton Road (near the hospital) which allows my dog inside and smells like old books and clay. The thought pleases me because it makes me see myself as an outsider would; like I am a character in a film which makes me feel capable of transforming my circumstances into something more interesting for myself, the me who is also the viewer. 

The truth of the matter is that I’ve hated anything I’ve ever created with the exception of blind contour drawings which is only because there’s no accountability when you’re drawing without looking at the paper. Talent doesn’t really come into blind contour – there’s no need for finesse or exactitude or understanding perspective or depth or shadow or hint or hue. These things are necessary when you’re drawing perhaps a building or a basket of fruit or a sad child or a running deer, etc. but not when you’re just moving your pencil or charcoal or pen around on the paper while staring at a thing.

I was once tasked with drawing a crystal bowl in an art class I was taking and I couldn’t catch the light, I couldn’t form the shape I needed out of pure illumination. It was frustrating in a way I still can feel when I think about it. I tore a hole in the paper with erasures. I wanted to be able to draw the light, goddamnit. I’ve felt since failing at that exercise that real artistic talent will always be out of reach but I feel important when I gesso a canvas. I feel significant when I mix a little bit of linseed oil or turpentine into my oil paint. Here’s a girl who knows what she’s doing, I think as I struggle to create something I’ll be happy with knowing full well I won’t. 

 

Claudia Lundahl is a writer from New York City who now lives in London, England. She has a husband and two dogs. Find her on twitter @claudrosewrites.