Category: Fiction

The king has been a prisoner

And a prisoner long in Spain

And Willie of the Winsbury

Has lain long with his daughter at home

Liz wipes a tankard dry, humming along with the fiddler and the singer in the corner. The tavern is only half full tonight, a crowd of beardless students daring each other to one more ale, and a few older men scattered about the place.

At the bar, across from Liz, the scholars continue their bickering.

‘This ballad? It’s about a king who finds his daughter playing at St. George with a chamberlain. Ha! Must have taken a good hiding from the King, I am sure,’ says the physicist, with a wink. He is wide, with a swollen red nose and a curtain of beard.

The historian jumps in, his voice as mousy as his demeanour, all whiskers on a gaunt face. ‘She did not take a hiding. Listen carefully. She marries the lad, in the end.’

‘Sure she does. Tell me, what kind of king gives his daughter away to some chamberlain?’

‘Actually, according to my sources, it was Francis I,’ offers the American, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sleeve. He is squat with a headful of curls, like a child. Indeed, Liz hears them call him by the name Child. But his eyes are bright and intelligent, and the other men keep quiet, curious to hear him speak. ‘And your chamberlain, Willie of the Winsbury, is no other than James V of Scotland, or so it has been suggested by the folk-tellers. I should know; I have collected this very ballad in my English and Scottish Popular Ballads.’

The historian’s eyes twinkle with curiosity. ‘By heaven, if Willie is James V then Janet must be…’

‘Madeleine of Valois.’

‘Madeleine? Wasn’t her head taken from her grave ‘bout a century ago? They said it still looked beautiful, two hundred years after her death.’

The three men sip their ale and listen to another verse:

Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown

You stand naked upon the stone

That I may know you by your shape

If you be a maiden or none

The historian turns to the men and tuts, his mouth curling up in a grimace: ‘What kind of princess lets herself be seduced like that?’

With a bang, Liz places three copious tankards of ale on the bar, and the three men jump on their stools.

‘And how would you know that she wanted to be seduced?’ she says, hand on hip, looking down at the historian.

The three men stare, their mouths hung open, until Child clears his throat and adjusts his spectacles. 

‘Well, all of my research into variants of the ballad tell the same story. The girl lies with Willie Winsbury, falls pregnant and the King secures their union.’

‘The ballad only says that Willie lies with her,‘ Liz insists. ‘The girl never asks to lie with him, nor to be disrobed like that in front of her father. It is only the men from your ballads that love to pry inside of women’s bellies,’ she adds, holding her own flabby belly and shaking it up and down.

Child and the other men look at each other with amused grins. 

‘But he’s only helping her, miss,’ Child says. ‘Making sure the boy will marry her, rather than leave her with child. If I have learnt anything from these folk tales, it is that times used to be simpler than they are now.’

Liz scoffs. ‘Do you really believe that everything is simpler once a woman is married? What if she did not wish to marry him?’

The physicist is incensed by this. Liz can tell from his cheeks, which are turning bright red. ‘If she didn’t wish to marry him, she shouldn’t have lain with him, should she? Anyhow, Mr. Child here is a folklorist and he understands the meaning of these ballads better than yourself.’ He empties his tankard and bangs it on the bar, although he manages little more than a hollow clatter.

Liz cackles a big belly laugh that makes all three men nearly fall off their stools. ‘And weren’t these folk songs written by common people like myself?’ she mocks. 

In the corner, the singer sings another verse:

And will you marry my daughter Janet

By the truth of your right hand?

Oh, will you marry my daughter Janet?

I will make you the lord of my land

Liz stares wistfully towards the musicians, her arms crossed over her chest, a frown creasing her forehead. 

‘You scholars have a lot to learn about the business of laying and the business of marriage. And, it would seem, the business of queens,’ she says. ‘Forget your history books, I will tell you what happened.’

*

It is the night when the Scots insist on their time-honoured tradition, even though their King is not yet arrived in Loire. There will be plenty of time for Scots and Frenchmen to discuss their old alliance, but for now the halls are decked in holly and ivy and the men cry for misrule.

Madeleine sits at her father’s place in the dining hall, staring down at the sprawl of men. The loudest and brawliest of all, a yeoman known as Willy Wynnesbury with fiery red hair, has already done the rounds of the King’s wines, and is now taking out his lute and shouting out the old folk songs, more and more obscene as the night wears on . His voice is raucous and harsh, but not at all displeasing. From where she’s sitting at the high table, Madeleine can see that, despite his tongue, his face is sweet and radiant like the perfect child of Venus and Mars.

Now Willy is drawing the crowd of Scots into chant, raising a storm of voices with the lift of his arms: Will, Will, Will, Will, Will, Will.

The chorus reaches a crescendo, and then he wills it to quieten by lowering his arms and stepping onto the table.

‘Christmas is upon us!’ he shouts.

‘Yea!’

‘Let us celebrate!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us eat!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us gamble!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us drink ‘til we drop dead!’

The ruckus begins once again. Yea, yea, yea, yea!

In comes a page boy, just a child—younger even than Madeleine—in his hands a chapeau with goat horns and asses’ ears. The boy climbs onto the table and raises it to the yeoman’s head and, as he is crowned Lord of Misrule, Willy Wynnesbury makes the backwards sign of the cross and the Scotsmen howl with delight.

Willy now prances towards the high table and stares directly up at Madeleine, his eyes burning into hers, as flaming as his red hair. Madeleine’s heart beats hard, but she doesn’t look away. He may be Lord of Misrule, but she is the King’s daughter and will not give up her authority so easily. But, by heaven, is he handsome. 

There is a mischievous grin on Willy’s face as he bows down, his chapeau of horns almost falling off his head. ‘A dance, m’lady?’ he says, and this sends the Scotsmen into sniggers. 

Madeleine feels her cheeks burn. Dance, with a yeoman? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Madeleine shakes her head no, and Willy turns to face the Scotsmen, bending over in mock despair, shaking his head with its goat’s horns as if Madeleine had brought him to tears.

This is more than enough to set the Scotsmen off once more, and they roar with laughter, lifting Willy onto their shoulders and parading him around the hall, while the yeoman shoves his body to and fro, mimicking acts of obscenity.

By midnight, Willy Wynnesbury has driven the court to madness, and Madeleine is retiring to her sleeping quarters. Winter takes a toll, even in Loire, and the cold has already begun to spread up her chest and to take hold. The cough always comes at this hour, and her neck feels swollen like a baby’s belly. Madeleine climbs under her covers and closes her eyes.

It feels like two shakes of a lamb’s tail before she is awakened. The draft is making the embers of the fireplace blink.

There is a presence in the room, and it stirs. She can see its outlines in the darkness. The air around the figure is different, wispy and ghostly.

Madeleine shuts her eyes. She is not so sick tonight that she should pray. Whatever it is, it will go away.

A creak of floorboards breaks the spell and Madeleine’s heart thrums in her ribs.

‘Who is it?’ She meant for her voice to sound strong, but she is too frail and angry to realise that she is afraid.

The ghost makes its way to the fireplace and, in an instant, a gleam of light fills the chamber as he walks towards her bed, lantern in hand. Red flushes his cheeks and his hair, and the hint of madness is still in not quite gone from his eyes. Madeleine sits up quickly, bringing the covers up to her neck.

‘You.’

He is shushing her, his voice soft and low where before it had been loud and rowdy. ‘Quiet, my lady. I am not who you think I am.’

‘I know who you are,’ she hisses, the hairs at the back of her neck spiralling into a panic. ‘You are William Wynnesbury. How did you get in my chamber?’

Willy grins and he sets his lantern on the ground. ‘It was easy to arrange. As I was saying, I am not who you think I am… Perhaps you would care to make a guess?’

Madeleine stares carefully at his face. It doesn’t take her long to surmise. His reputation precedes him, after all. It’s not been three months since he went to see Mary at St. Quentin, and don’t the rumours say that he went to her in disguise, as a commoner? And every nobleman at court has heard the other stories. How he likes to travel around his kingdom, playing his lute for pennies.

‘James,’ she says. ‘Your Grace,’ she hastily adds.

James looks very pleased with himself. He extends his hand and takes hers. His skin is so hot it is almost scalding.

‘And you are the lovely Madeleine, the one who has eluded me for so long. Do you know how many times I have asked your father for your hand? Ever since I first saw you at that hunting-party. Although, it would seem, I did not make the same impression on you.’ His grin widens, but Madeleine makes no response. ‘Now tell me, Madeleine, would your father still object to our union were he to find me in your bed?’

James is drawing closer, but it is not the sweet child of Venus and Mars that she sees upon his face now, but something dark and more urgent.

‘Yes, he would,’ she tries to say. Her voice is trembling, and when she tries to move away, her back only comes against the wooden frame of her bed.

Outside, in the hallway, silence reigns over the dead of night. Only many long hours will bring the dawn.

Weeks pass in this manner, and Madeleine grows resigned to her fate. She wants, more than anything, to find in James’ face the signs of his beauty, the sweet countenance she first remarked upon. But there is only ugliness in his burning eyes, and under the flicker of the fireplace, he is nothing more than St. George’s dragon, romping over her like a beast.

It is only a few weeks before the whispers begin to spread among the maids. She can tell from their looks. Then, one morning, she is too exhausted to climb out of bed, and when the chambermaid brings her the pot, she retches into it.

‘My lady, you are ill.’

‘Be quiet,’ she snarls. ‘I have always been ill.’

It is no use. Soon after the King returns to Loire, he calls for her. She is surprised to find him in his chamber alone, except for one of the old nurses with a dry and sober face, more lines than flesh, and a stare that makes Madeleine look away.

‘Father!’ She runs towards him to embrace him, but the King’s arms do not wrap themselves around her. Madeleine looks up at him. King Francis’s eyes are purple with weariness, and his beard conceals the downward curve of his mouth.

‘What is it, father?’ Madeleine can’t keep her voice steady. She stirs, knowing what’s coming.

‘Cast off your gown.’

Madeleine starts, his words sending her into a panic. She grabs onto her skirts, but her father will no longer meet her eye, so she attempts her sweetest voice, to invoke her father’s love. ‘Father?’

‘Cast off your gown.’

Madeleine is rooted to her spot, but King Francis turns to look at the nurse and nods his head, and the woman walks towards Madeleine, her mouth small and ugly like a sprat.

Madeleine sinks to the ground, her arms crossed over her chest, her teeth ready to bite. But the nurse’s fingers are stiff like the dead and Madeleine can’t slip away from them, not until she is naked upon the flagstone, bare as the day she was born, her hands endeavouring to cover her body. But her arms can’t hide the signs, which her father reads like the sky.

Madeleine is pale and wan and her belly is bloated. Her breasts are heavy and tender and her haunches are round. She kneels upon the ground, her spine white like a sheet, until King Francis picks up her gown and throws it over her furiously.

‘Well? Was it with a lord or a duke or a knight? Or was it with one of my serving men?’

For a moment, Madeleine wants to tell him who it really was, to see relief in his eyes, perhaps even pity or sadness. But she is angry now, and when she bites her tongue she tastes venom.

‘It was with William Wynnesbury.’

The King dithers, his face blank. Then he walks out of the chamber and calls out to his men. ‘Fetch me William Wynnesbury.’

Soon enough, they return. ‘William Wynnesbury, Your Majesty.’

His hair looks redder in the light of the King’s chamber, like dancing firelight. As he enters, he smiles broadly at the King, bowing excessively. 

‘Most Christian Majesty.’

The King is about to speak when he stops, as if he’s seen a ghost, squinting at the boy in front of him.

‘King James?’ he drawls.

‘In the flesh.’ And, of all things, he curtsies.

The King’s anger is seeping away from his face now, to be replaced by something more like fear.

‘What is the meaning of this?’

‘I believe the meaning is quite clear,’ James says. ‘We have an old alliance to upkeep. And you, Majesty, a lovely daughter. I will leave the rest to you.’

He bows once more, and he is off.

Madeleine looks at her father. The old King’s lips are trembling, and she suddenly feels fondness for him. She wants to hold him, and to feel him protect her like he always used to. But before she can touch him, he has turned to her, and his eyes are sad.

‘You will be married, of course. I will make the arrangements.’

Madeleine feels last night’s cold slice through her bones.

‘Father, I swear I did not go to him. Please don’t make me marry him. I can’t go to Scotland. You know I must stay here with you, where the weather is mild.’

‘You are carrying his child!’ King Francis looks at her with an expression of both pity and distaste, and it catches at her breath. 

‘I did not want his child!’

King Francis turns away, towards the window, and Madeline stands, waiting to hear what is to be done with her, hoping that her father will pity her. That he will understand that it was all against her will. 

But when her sentence comes, it is her father’s voice, rather than his words, that deliver the verdict. He is bitter and resigned, and underneath it all there is not a dreg of compassion.

‘You will wed him and, as early as Spring, you will travel north to Scotland.’

The nurse, tucked away in the corner, clears her throat and motions to Madeleine to follow. There is much to administer.

The wedding, like all royal weddings, is widely attended and splendidly decorated. James wears a red coat that offends all dignitaries, civil and royal, and they note he cannot speak a word of French.

As they say their vows, Madeleine feels herself suspended in mid-air, looking down upon her own pale body and at how the red of the coat is swallowing her up.

Afterwards, there is much jousting and merry-making. It is only a matter of months before the weather becomes reasonable, Her Grace’s health finally permitting that they travel north.

This is how Madeleine finds herself on a ship one Whitsun Eve, five months and eighteen days since the day she was married at Notre Dame. The air is far from the temperance of the valley of Loire, or even the mild chill of the streets of Paris. Here, it is icy sharp, and as she stands on the deck, her fingers holding onto the bulwark, she feels how the cold has been sucked up into her chest, settling around her heart.

The fleet of ten ships that set off from the north coast of France a month earlier approaches Leith, and in the distance, the shapes of the Scottish coast bob sharper, like a blotch of ink filling her vision with each swell of the freezing waters.

Madeleine can feel the weight of her life in the cellars below her feet and the surrounding ships: furniture and clothing, ruby and oriental pearl, silver cups and plates. Each of them the most magnificent in Europe, and the most expensive. These precious possessions will fill the treasury of the Scots, a gift of generosity from King to King, father to husband.

When the anchor drops and she steps on the Scottish land, she is immediately sick, the shaking worse than it has ever been, and two maid-servants help her onto the ground. She is swollen all over and there is a persistent pain in her belly; she could vomit up her entire innards. She looks down at her skirts and then she sees it, the blood flowing out from her body in a perfect circle, coming from between her thighs—

*

‘That is certainly not what happened!’ wails the physicist. Liz has come to learn that it takes a strong stomach to be a woman, and that men usually lack that quality. 

‘I tend to agree,’ adds Child. ‘There is no record of any pregnancy, or loss thereof—’

‘There is your beloved ballad,’ objects Liz, her hand resting gently on her belly, her eyes long and forlorn.

‘But you cannot base your story upon your favourite parts of the ballad with unequal judgement! These songs reflect the desires and longings of the common people, passed down through the generations. They are rather… How can I say…? Symbolic representations of our historical events, and not accurate ones.’

‘Child makes a good point,’ offers the historian. ‘And as pertains to Madeleine, we only have to turn to the historical records to learn what happened to her.’

‘And who wrote these records of yours?’ protests Liz. ‘Were these historians in Madeleine’s bedchamber when James slipped in to see her? Did they witness the exchange between father and daughter when the old King announced that she should marry the Scot? And what happened to Madeleine, after the wedding? Did she live happily ever after?’

The historian replies, hesitant. ‘If memory serves right, didn’t Madeleine die just a few months later? Her poor health didn’t carry her through to Scotland. It’s why King Francis didn’t want to give her to him, at first.’

They fall into silence, thick like ink, and with nothing left to be said, Liz hands them all fresh tankards and walks around the tavern, picking up empty ones to wash and wipe.

It is only as she returns behind the bar that she catches a waft of speech from the physicist who, it appears, can contain himself no longer.

‘If it isn’t a slap-up ballad though,’ he says.

 

 

Cristina Ferrandez is a Birkbeck graduate interested in the feminist revisionist fairy tale and mythology tradition pioneered by writers such as Angela Carter, and in exploring relationship power dynamics and trauma through the lens of folklore. She is currently working on two novels: a YA fantasy novel inspired by traditional witchcraft practices in the West Country and ’90s pop culture, and a literary novel exploring the lives of three generations of women in a small town.

The tape unspools, spilling The Beach Boys into the small, dark room; a garage probably, connected to a suburban house. Of course, it’s an unwritten policy never to use an actual police cell for this sort of work. The music is tinny, possessed of a treble and dynamic range guaranteed to suffocate the inconvenient noises an interrogation sometimes produces. 

Small-Hands leans towards you. You think, perhaps he was chosen to question you because he has a sympathetic face and his superiors have decided you will respond to sympathy.

They’ve hit your face so much now that it’s numb. Something that might have been your nose flops onto your cheek as you turn your head. Inside your body, things grate against each other like powdered seashells and glass. 

You are tied to an ancient rattan chair. Your guts are full of splintered wood, and you hug your insides because something deep inside them may burst at any moment. Apart from the overpowering copper smell of your own blood, everything is metal and dirt. 

You know these people. You were these people: relics from the 1980s. Trench-coated assholes who transferred from the security services into the Department of Memory as soon as they could. Men with faces both hard and soft. Faces that hide things even from themselves.

You think, in all probability, Small-Hands and his partner, The Other One, wouldn’t have beaten you so much if there was any chance of setting you free. You know how it ends: they shoot you full of morphine and throw you from a helicopter out at sea. There’s even a witty name for it: the submarine. You hit the water to never come up again. 

“What did he tell you?”

“Who?” you say.

The Other One hits you. 

Small-Hands riffles through a slim, leather-bound notebook. The sort carried by all the memory men. They lurk in cafes and at street corners, hats pulled over their faces, coats belted; sniffing for contraband; scribbling down the recollections of those they observe: 

• the expression of the only woman you ever really loved the moment she broke your heart.
• the smell of your childhood backyard, after the rain. 
• the satisfaction of flushing your brother’s goldfish down the toilet. 

That sort of thing.

No-one really knows how the regime learned to do this. You’ve heard all the stories: a UFO crash off the coast of the Malvinas or a breach in the space-time continuum deep in the Patagonian wilderness. Maldonado, your old partner in the department, swore blind the instructions had been handed directly to the president by La Virgen de Luján. She had emerged from a spaceship just outside Córdoba, saying they were a gift from the Amazon women of Venus.

You pointed out to Maldonado that, of all the theories, this seemed the most unlikely, as it required the president to read.

“He’s got staff,” Maldonado would say with a shrug.

Small-Hands breathes heavily and begins to read your recollections from his notes, licking his lips to punctuate the sentences:

“You met Jorge Luis Carizo, or shall we call him what the papers used to: ‘The man who remembers forwards’? In Cafe Rulfo, near the Recoleta cemetery at 11am. You’d gone for a stroll early, but stopped for a couple of negronis at La Biela.

You looked at your reflection in the cafe window and straightened your tie: a navy sports jacket and thinning, slicked back hair. Enough Campari and you might still be attractive to a lonely boy art-student or gallery-crawling widow with low expectations.

Cafe Rulfo was the same as always. A nicotine yellow ceiling hunched over fake Greco-Roman columns, fake brass candelabra throwing sickly light over its fake-tanned porteño clientele. You spotted Luis almost immediately, leaning back in one of the red studded leather chairs reserved for regulars. 

He looked the way he had when you’d last seen him. The wrinkles in his face were so deep he seemed a million years old, but he was only a year your senior. You had never expected to see him again. Until this moment, you had thought he was dead. 

Like a ghost, you slipped between customers until reaching his table. He appeared to be expecting you, but then, it’s entirely possible that he was.

‘Forgive me. I can’t quite place you, but I feel like I know you,’ he said, raising his head to present a glassy smile.

Luis’ table was engulfed by hundreds of overlapping napkins carefully arranged to create an enormous paper flower. Each napkin bore one of two markings – a circle or a cross. Most were branded with words that no human tongue would even be capable of pronouncing.

‘What is it?’ you asked, pointing at the scraps of paper bound together by scotch tape and string. 

A ball of melted chocolate popped to the top of his glass of warm milk, bobbing there like a shipwreck victim.

‘It’s a map of time,’ he replied in that reedy, lisping voice. From a silver case, Luis produced a cigarette wrapped in liquorice paper, lighting it with a flourish to blow sweet scented smoke in your direction.

‘Why make it here?’ you asked.

‘Many reasons,’ he replied with the air of an Oxford don addressing a slow undergraduate. ‘But mainly it is because they have the best napkins. Do, sit down, dear boy,’ he said, gesturing at the empty seat in front of him. 

You sat and ordered another negroni and a coffee. Your drinks arrived. You bolted the coffee and then took your time over the Campari and bitters.

‘My name is Bartélo,’ you said. 

He smiled a polite smile of non-recognition.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘We have met before, have we not?’ He extended a long-fingered hand, the tips yellow and stained with black ink. The cuffs of his shirt too, were covered in ribbons of this scrawl. There were notes to purchase milk, buy bread. Names and places had dates and times marked next to them. Many of the dates were in the future.

‘I was a friend of Sibil,’ you replied. Luis didn’t flinch at the mention of his dead wife.

‘One of the peculiarities of my condition,’ he said, ‘is that I don’t recall what has occurred. Rather, I can only call to mind what hasn’t yet happened. It’s all a question of perspective, I think. If we are the sum of our memories, one might say I am reversing gently out of existence. I suppose the most boring part of it is that I know exactly how it will end. It is rather dull, this memory of my own death.’

You stirred your negroni and sipped, grimacing at its bitter taste.

‘I thought you were dead,’ you said.

‘I was, but only for a little while,’ said Luis, stroking the remaining hairs brilliantined to his scalp. ‘And mostly just for tax reasons. I had to, really. I was banned from casinos. Couldn’t make a living. The security services were chasing me constantly. At least my diaries tell me that was why I did it.’

You knew all of this already. He was as blind to his past as the day he had joined the roaming carnival you called home. Back then, Luis had been little more than a boy with an ugly face and an odd ability. Birthed somewhere in the dark of the interior, discarded and then picked up by the travelling circus.

‘I always like to take a constitutional before lunch,’ he said and stood. ‘Would you like to accompany me?’

 He wore a blue woollen suit shining with age. Its lapels were too wide and the trousers too long. Despite his age, he looked as though he had been dressed by his mother.

He gently folded and packed his map into his briefcase, then stretched out an arm and threaded it through yours. Swaying, you stepped outside and the damp blanket of summer embraced you, soaking your shirt before you had gone three paces.

Luis led you into the park adjoining the cemetery. It started to rain, but even though he carried a Malacca handled umbrella on the crook of one arm, he left it rolled together. Instead, he used it as an ersatz walking stick, pressing its tip into the asphalt littered with gum and dog-faeces.”

Small-Hands stops reading. You’re drifting off. His partner, the one with the feminine face, cuts a hand across your cheek, flicking you across the room like a bug. You hit the floor and the glass shifts under your ribs. You finger the empty sockets of your gums.

“We’ll tell you when it’s time to go,” he says.

The pain is in every part of you now – a thrumming chord of ache and blood. The Other One returns with a glass of water and places it on the table. Small-Hands begins reading again:

“You and Luis came to the end of the park and entered the Recoleta cemetery. The rain had become heavier and yet he had still not opened his umbrella. This was exactly the sort of place you had avoided since resigning from the department. While Luis was the man who could remember the future, you had other talents that made you valuable.

You paused to find shelter under the leaves of a tree as the warm rain intensified. Luis’ sightless eyes looked into the distance.

‘Can you do an old man a favour?’ He asked.

You nodded.

‘Tell me something precious. To be specific, a beginning. My regret is how my life is full of endings. It is only those endings that I am able to recall. So, tell me, when was it that we met? Tell me the temperature. Were the fuchsias in bloom? Were we very drunk?’

You licked the raindrops from your lips and were about to answer when Luis flicked the cane upwards. He snapped open the umbrella just in time to fend off an unseen shower of pinecones tumbling from the tree. They bounced into puddles on the concrete.

‘We met at university,’ you lied. ‘It was September. Twenty? No, twenty-two years ago. At the end of one of those winters that never seemed to end. The sort where you’re forever shuffling between parasols in the morning and shopfronts during the afternoon downpours.’

You were interrupted by a laugh echoing from the other side of the cemetery wall. Luis took you by the arm and led you past the groups of tourists gathered to visit the tomb of saintly Evita, past the government posters advertising ‘Re-election not Revolution,’, ’Truth and Stability’ and ‘The President is the congress. The congress is the People’. 

The regime, so undeniable, had always been an act of supreme faith. The president at its centre held all its contradictory forces in balance by pure force of will. Without him, it would all fly apart like pennies on a spinning top. 

And then there were the rumours; the president was sick and with what no-one knew because his hatred of bourgeois experts stretched even to doctors.

The chatter of the dead rose, like the whisper of autumn leaves on paving stones, interrupted your thoughts. You listened for a second before blocking their voices out. It was the usual stuff – muttering gossip, complaints, sudden explosive guffaws. The dead whistled and sighed to one another, griping about those itches they would never scratch.

Luis turned to you, his eyes as blank as moth balls, and nodded as if to say: ‘You can hear them, can’t you?’

You remembered more of your childhood in the pampas. How you would wake up every morning and look at the dawn lurking on the wide horizon. How the spring air always seemed damp and heavy with the promise of storms. How Nestor, the camp vaquero, with his tiny, clipped moustache and long greasy ponytail, shouted at everyone to strike camp and get the tent down because the wind was coming to tear it to pieces.”

Small-Hands throws a glass of water over you. The Other One produces a Buenos Aires telephone directory and beats you with it. This time, they ask no questions. 

“It isn’t personal,” says Small-Hands. “This is just what we do.”

He pulls his chair out from under the desk, scrapes it across the dusty floor, rotating it so its back faces you. He sits astride it as though riding a horse and for a second, you think of Nestor galloping across the pampas. He undoes his cuffs, rolls up his sleeves and rests his hands on the back of the chair. His arms are pale.

This man’s forearms should be rippling and brutish, but they’re thin, delicate; the arms of a habitual poetry reader.

“Shall we continue?” he says and consults his notebook, licking his finger to help him locate the page. 

“Cigarette,” your voice sounds alien – a gasping wheeze punctuated by the whistles and bubbles of blood and missing teeth.

He gestures toward his jacket lying at the back of the garage and The Other One retrieves it. Small-Hands takes the carton of Gauloises from the breast pocket and taps to eject a cigarette. He places it between your swollen lips and lights it with a match from a Café Rulfo matchbook. He notes your surprise at seeing it. 

“Yes,” he says. “We’ve been watching you for a while, my friend.”

He clears his throat and looks down at his notebook again: 

“So, while you listened to the dead turning in their graves, scratching their buttocks and repeating the last jokes they ever told, you thought of Sibil and Luis and the carnival.

Until Luis arrived, you and Sibil had been the only children in the camp. Sibil was the daughter of Madame Zouzou, the palm reader. The old woman had taken you under her wing after your parents had died from the smallpox they’d contracted in Brazil. 

Nestor had found Luis playing in the dirt outside the camp one morning. He’d picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket and dropped him at Zouzou’s feet, as though he was one of her chickens.

You were sitting in front of Zouzou’s trailer playing with a miniature tin top. It was just a small metal disk with a spindle at its centre, painted in a rainbow of colours and overlaid by a patina of rust. When you spun it, the colours blurred together into a creamy pink, like milk mixed with blood. Simple, yet it made you so happy; filled you with a hope you couldn’t articulate.

You took Luis in all at once. He was short and dark, like a twist of pigweed, rangy and tough. His eyes were shut and the only part of him not covered in dust were the tear tracks beneath his eyes. 

You murmured, ‘Hello’. 

Luis ignored you, leaning forward to grab the top. You punched him in the ear and then Nestor cuffed both of you and made you shake hands.

Luis rubbed his face and apologised. You turned and ran. As you passed Zouzou’s trailer, you saw Sibil peeking over the curved roof of her caravan, staring straight at him.

When you came back to the camp, the two of them were playing together, burning a train of ants into smouldering smudges with your old magnifying glass. They watched you arrive in silence. He held the glass and she held his hand in hers, steadying it as they selected their victims. You never saw your old tin top again.

Over the next ten years, Sibil and Luis were drawn to each other like opposing magnetic poles. You watched from a distance as he captivated her with his deliberate grace and elliptical speech. He always was a charmer, wasn’t he? Ugly or not. 

You caught them together once, behind Zouzou’s trailer.  You were fourteen by then and Sibil a year older. You were playing hide and seek. She had decreed that you should hide. You found a place between some rocks and the bank of a nearby stream. You squatted down amongst the pampas grass. The sun burned hot on the back of your neck and the sharp grass dug into your knees and prickled your shins. You waited and waited but no-one came. 

Convinced you’d won, you strolled back towards the camp, picking up a dry stick and using it as a blade to cut down the tall stalks in front of you. 

You heard a muffled cry. You recognised Sibil’s voice as the root of the gasp and, for a just a second, you thought she was in pain. You called her name but your voice was swallowed by the dead afternoon air. You had stumbled onto an outcrop overlooking Zouzou’s trailer when you saw them. 

At first you thought they were fighting, twisted together in mortal combat. You were about to jump down to break them apart, but Sibil’s gasp came again and something about its breathlessness halted you. You dropped to the sun warmed rock, your cheek resting on its rough surface. The leathery leaves of the romero pichi nodded in the breeze as you watched the couple make love. 

You were fascinated by her control – how she led Luis in a wordless dance for which she alone knew the steps and music. When they finished, he stood up and buttoned his trousers, stumbling away, lost in something you couldn’t place. Self-loathing? Satisfaction? But Sibil remained on her back in the tough grass, soaking up the sun. She looked proud and unashamed. 

You watched them and you wanted that, didn’t you, Bartélo? Hardly breathing, just watching her, you jerked off and came in the dirt.”

Small-Hands lays the notebook down. 

“You ran away to the capital after that, just as the Junta took power. According to your file, you could hear them by then. The corpses, I mean. What’s that like, hearing all those dead voices?”

“I avoided it,” you say, “until I joined the department. It felt good to be useful. There weren’t exactly a lot of jobs for people like me.”

Small-Hands nods to The Other One, who places a worn manilla folder on the table. Small-Hands opens it, leafing through the crackling carbon-copied sheets within. He nods approvingly. 

“You did a lot of good work for us. Didn’t mind getting your hands dirty back then. Why so bashful now?”

Sibil’s face flickers into the memory conjured by his words. You squint to block out the image of her lifeless blue eyes. You grimace into a smile that is mostly blood and gums. You try to wink, but your eyelid spasms. 

“We had other cold readers, but you were the star performer. What did they call you back then? The Corpse Whisperer?” he says.

“The department’s detainees had an unfortunate habit of having accidents. Reading a gunshot victim is tricky,” you reply, your missing teeth turning your S’s into F’s. 

“Of course. We could always just do that to you now,” says Small-Hands.

“Risky though,” you reply. “I don’t think the regime has any cold readers left. Running around with all those secrets in our heads. We were very accident prone too.”

Small-Hands looks down at his book and smiles.

“It wasn’t until Luis became famous that you had your chance with her, correct? At the party the President threw in ’82, back when he was only the Commandante Supremo, of course.” 

You try not to remember the reception, but memory is both a curse and a privilege: 

You recall how Sibil had arrived as tall and straight as the pampas grass. Luis wore the same suit he had been wearing when you met him in the café. Sibil recognised you straight away but said nothing. 

Halfway through the party you went out onto the balcony for a cigarette, your heart galloping. The door opened behind you and there she was. She offered you a cigarette, a cheap one. She never did grow out of her prairie tastes.

“Nestor and Luis looked for you, you know. Nestor was never quite the same once you’d gone. He passed the following spring; complications from rheumatic fever,’ she said.

“What’s it like?” you asked her.

“Being married?” she replied, “Or being married to him?”

Sibil looked out at the lights flickering on and off over the town like broken constellations. The guerrillas had launched their own celebration just the day before, hitting a string of substations in the city. She blew out a stream of smoke that rolled into the night.

You were about to reply, but she put a finger to your lips and kissed you. You uncoiled the rope of golden hair around her neck and she pressed you to her and all you could think about was that afternoon when you had watched her and Luis.

You close your eyes and push the memory away. Things untether inside you. Unconsciousness starts to encroach, slipping in around the edge of your vision with its blackened fingers. The thick smoke from the cigarette fills your lungs. You cough. 

“Did he find out?” asks Small-Hands.

You shrug and needles prickle in your shoulder blades.

“He must have known though, right?”

You shrug again, ignoring the pain this time. 

Small-Hands reads from his notebook:

“Luis folded his umbrella and stood for some minutes, letting the rain fall onto you both. The thin raincoat you wore was soon soaked through. 

You wanted to ask him so many questions, but the words wouldn’t come; the cacophony from the necropolis drowned your thoughts. You just stood there, letting the rain trickle down your collar.

‘Well. I must be going now. They will be expecting me back at the nursing home,’ Luis said. 

He turned and hugged you. He was insubstantial beneath his suit, not much more than a collection of skin and bones that could be blown away in the wind and the rain. He was as flimsy and frail as the forgotten futures he held within him. 

He pulled his suit lapels together and walked away. You watched him recede until he turned up one of the cemetery’s marble lined avenues, disappearing as though he had never been there.

You walked in the opposite direction, glad to be leaving the babble of the cemetery behind. We met you right as you stepped out of the gate. You remembered the smell of the hood we put over your head, bitter like bad breath and almonds. And then we took you here.”

“Thanks for the lift,” you say. 

Small-Hands smiles. He puts down the notebook and closes it. 

“So how is the president’s health?” you ask.

The Other One hits you and you spill from your chair. Your face radiates agony. You want to stay on the floor. The concrete is cool on your forehead. You taste the dust on your swollen tongue.

“He is fit and healthy. He is the foundation upon which our nation is built,” says Small-Hands, glancing at The Other One. “And he is almost certainly guaranteed to outlive you.”

He drops onto all fours, his face hovering over yours like a sweaty moon.

“What was the last thing Luis said to you?” His tongue protrudes between tiny, neat teeth. It’s the same pink as the lipstick on Sibil’s lips the last time you saw her.

Sitting upright and immobile, she was in a place not very different to where you are now. You knew she was dead as soon as the unreeling spiral of her final thoughts began to trail through your mind like a tickertape.

You had always thought that you would be the one to pay the price for your affair, not her. Never her. She was Luis’ wife after all, and Luis was too useful to the regime with his whispers about the future. He may have even trained agents in the Department of Memory. That was your theory, the one you never shared with Maldonado. 

The two agents who had killed Sibil looked at each other like naughty schoolboys when you had arrived on the scene. 

“A regrettable accident, Agent Bartélo,” the shorter of the pair said, nodding at her silent face. 

“To think she was so close to the boss and helping the guerrillas all along,” said the taller one. 

They were bland and pasty-faced, this Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Not much different from the two beating you now, they were too young to grasp the horror of what they were perpetrating. The regime was a project of youthful enthusiasts naive enough to believe in the idea that there was only one truth, only one future. You recognised that yearning for order although it had long left you. 

At first you thought the pair were on to you. But then they handed you the file and asked you to listen to her. You were too numb to do anything but comply. 

The folder was rough beneath your fingers. The room was soaked in the smell of disinfectant. Your mouth was dry. You tried to avoid the purple weal circling Sibil’s throat. You closed your eyes.

It was always the same, even with her. That feeling of entering someone else’s mind, like dipping your toe into the surf of a beach on a sunny day only to find yourself sucked in by the undertow. 

You listened, pushing past the circular trail of images and words heralding her end. A dizzying swirl of panicked stars. People’s final thoughts were always tragically quotidian. A mixture of, “have I left the gas on” and “I should have spent less time in the office.” It never failed to touch you. 

There was a lot of Luis in there, of course, but there were other things too. A date and a time. A diagnosis. A headline snatched from a future newspaper and scrawled in Luis’ hand. Whatever it was they had been looking for, she hadn’t told them.

Small-Hands sniffs. He slips a hand into his twill trousers and fingers something. All the memory men have a little token. Something to focus on as they lift the latches on their victim’s innermost thoughts. Slipping in and around like long fingered shadows, to pilfer and riffle, search, sort and classify. Small-Hands closes his eyes. He’s in your head now, trying to see what you had seen in Sibil’s mind.  

You close your bloodied fingers into fists. You take the secret and bury it deep. You push further back into the things you found inside Sibil’s head, past her feelings for you: an upended oak tree of lust and pity. Back to the day when you saw them lying in the dirt, fucking like animals.

The heat ripples through her hair and the stones bite into her neck. Luis is already walking away from her, full of shame. But she sees you, Barteló, watches you lurking behind the rock. It’s always disorientating seeing yourself in someone else’s memories. She watches you as she lights a cigarette. The nicotine rushes into still-tingling fingers and toes. 

You black out.

Salt air stings your face. You’re cold, wrapped in a sheet. You’re strapped on a metal bench running the length of a darkened fuselage. Your stomach whoops and dives as the helicopter swirls in the sky. Your feet are wrapped in chains. There are blocks of concrete set into their rusting links. The wind whips your hair back and forth. 

Small-Hands sits at the rear as the aircraft skitters and jibes in the air like a sick metal dragonfly. He grips a handhold over his head. You can see how white and tight his knuckles are from where you’re sitting. 

“It’s not the flying. It’s just being up in these things,” he says to The Other One, dabbing at his mouth with a cotton handkerchief. 

Small-Hands gazes out of a porthole. He looks at his watch and pulls out his cigarettes. He nods at The Other One and pulls you onto your feet. You rock inside the aircraft as it winds down nearer the water. They haul the door open.

All at once you hear them. The siren song of the others they’ve drowned here, growing from the seabed with roots of concrete and steel, swaying with the weeds.

“Come on in. The water’s lovely,” says a woman’s voice.

Small-Hands offers you a cigarette. You shake your head. You want to say something, but the last words you will ever say catch in your throat. The grey water scuds below. You breathe in sea-salt and kerosene. Your knees are weak, and you retch and belch drily. You put your hands into your pockets to remind yourself of what nonchalance feels like. Your hand closes on something you didn’t expect.

Then, before you’re ready, The Other One grips you by the shoulders and heaves you out. You are tumbling, gasping and flailing in the ice tipped air.

There are long seconds for you to ponder what it will be like to drown. The water doesn’t force itself into you, you’ve heard. You invite it in when your lungs are burning for air. You open your mouth and breath in the bone aching cold.

It’s safe to remember what Sibil showed you now. Late-stage, asymptomatic dementia. A sketch of the Presidential funeral cortege draped in the blue and gold of the national flag. A nation mourns. 

“Nothing lasts forever,” Luis had whispered in your ear as you parted. 

You open your hand and you see it, the child’s top he had slipped into your pocket outside Recoleta cemetery. The wind spins it briefly in your hand. A sunbeam catches its rainbow disk and as you hit the water, you smile.

 

 

Philip A. Suggars is a British writer with a single yellow eye in the middle of his forehead and a collection of vintage binoculars. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Persistent Visions, Interzone and The Best of British Science Fiction anthology series as well as being performed by Starship Sofa, Far Fetched Fables and Liars’ League. He’s won the Ilkley Short Story award, been runner up for the James White Award and longlisted for the BSFA short story prize. He lives with three hairless primates and an imaginary cat called Schrödinger.

Visit him at philipasuggars.com  or @felipeazucares on Twitter.

The first time I saw Brentford I was thinking about the Roman invasion. Yet within the year the same forces were back in Gaul, taking no good memories with them; they would have done better to have high-tailed it back across the Channel before then, after the terrible scrimmage in the shallows just outside what today is Dover; yet Brentford had been something of a bright spot, with a glimmer of success, glimmer being an appropriate word, as on the river bank Severus, his gladius drawn back at the ready, leapt into the middle of the fray, stabbing, extracting the said gladius immediately to thrust into the guts of the next Briton, downing all around him, leaving the disembowelled hardly time to clutch their stomachs before pitching into the mud—Severus, the general, the only true Roman besides Caesar, the invader, his imperial self looking on from the southern bank.

I wanted to pass this on to Maria, listen, Caesar was—here, I told Maria as we leaned into a corner, me the stiffer of the two, her with elbows pumping, hair bobbing, on the end of a faster section she calls the threshold. Here—I gasped—maybe—not just him—the route is paved, with celebrities—who came this way, there was Humph—rey—Bogart—filming—so I’m told, at which moment it struck me I had no idea why Maria called this stretch the threshold; but whatever, again we were out of breath, leaning on railings by a silvery wall, its wavy surface etched with fish, where a scrawny fifty-year-old was reflected in metal shards, alongside flashes of pink and lime, there was no confusing who was which, who more the amateur and who professional, who was scrawn and who the real, athletic thing; as if to underline the point Maria checked the data at her wrist, as we gladly breathed in what oxygen west London had to offer, thank the skies our breaths were slowing, when she stretched a leg in lycra along a rail: That was then, she said, now Brentford is the HQ of Brompton Bikes, to which my reply was to nod, a small nod, as the last of my energy allowed, after which I immediately put my head in my hands, resting, hiding from any further unanswerable remarks, during which my picture of the Roman struggle remained, it was astonishing it would persist so easily, for what with the wall with fish, not to mention the canals and docks, Humphrey Bogart and Brompton Bikes, Brentford is a cluttered place, more wind blowing than in most places, gusts and swirls. But the skirmishing, the routing scene continued: a clash of wood and metal, oddly wordless, on the muddy bank, wordless but with vowels of pain, wordless because the one side, soldiers with names like Severus, or Raguel or Leo, had no common language with the other, who I imagined interrupted from games of dice or hastily dropping bowls of gruel, only to receive the infamous Roman stabbing sword between the ribs or, just in time, to manage to drop-kick a jaw or crack a groin with a well-aimed knee—but jogging was activity enough, especially with Maria factored in, adding a kind of social stress to the physical, the exhaustion, so I was more than glad to fish out my bottle and be drinking water, to have no more to cope with than that sucking feeling on my tongue, indeed I was almost refreshed, even able to point out to Maria the canal, and say: Underwater stakes were found there. Even as I spoke I sensed it was a mistake, it wouldn’t lead to anything, I wished I could uncouple myself from the remark, so not wanting to join Maria in her stretching I looked around, to be blinded by the sunlight off the GlaxoSmithKlein tower to the north, just as Maria continuing with the other leg said, Stakes? after which she turned all advisory, saying I should roll my shoulders. Don’t you want to roll your shoulders? she’d say a dozen times, so that a dozen times I’d be reflecting, for the dozenth time, that most talks I start with Maria end very close to where they begin, either that or she takes over, either way there was no harm in holding out my bottle as I said again about the stupid stakes, Yes stakes, remarkably like those Julius Caesar freaked out about, probably in that very water, although even more remarkable finds have been made—drink? whereupon she just looked at me, eyes greyer than ever, Your shoulders creak, she said. —And? —They shouldn’t. —Tell them that. Maria’s face made a Huh? without a sound emerging, effectively ending the exchange, until I resumed the same foolish blabbing, I don’t know what had got into me, well I do, a little, I wanted Maria to at least acknowledge there was such a thing as history, as poetry, so I was saying, And, even more remarkably, lines of Virgil—poetry—have been discovered in digs up north, Up north? she said, adding Digs? At Vindolanda, I answered, delighting in the internal rhythm of the name, whereupon she said Vindaloo? I might have guessed she’d say something of the sort, but I suppose I asked for it, to the occupation of half an island that lasted centuries Maria devoted one second of her existence, but that’s how it is nowadays, don’t be hard on her I told myself, those may have been centuries of toil, deaths and mud, but what can she do about that, nothing, and it was really long ago; despite which, in the here and now of Brentford, the Roman presence lingered; such is power.

Not once looking back, not even for cyclists, let alone for legionaries, we headed off, passing the sheds along the towpath, then the surprising sight for a Sunday of boat repairs, the flash of acetylene flaring; as we zigzagged through the docks, our destination Richmond, I told myself: with Maria, stick to basics, she’s not out for the conversations, we should simply run together, companions of the urban track, she calls us, so it was best not to try and deal with Brentford, present or past, best I tried losing every thought of the Roman invasion, deciding like her not to devote more time to that half millennium of sweat, the baths and drains, the plagues and rapes and poetry readings; so to help dispel those spirits, to stop them closing in on me, I would change tack, I did change tack, I mentioned the local connection to the 1951 Bogart and Hepburn film The African Queen—the canal was used very briefly as a location, as were some studios in Isleworth—The African Queen was a film Maria recollected having seen on TV, as it happened, and she was away, if something had been on TV she would always be away, anything that appeared on a screen was like an injection of a drug for her, already she was asking, addressing me or the world I’m not entirely clear, how she would clamber back into a boat like the African Queen half-naked, in front of a strange man, which was a problem for Audrey Hepburn—Katherine, I corrected her—but rather than tackle how own question Maria, now a busy bee under the influence (ask something, and she will glance off the subject, slip onto another) to point out how I could improve my running style by not thudding so, there was too much heel on the ground, and how much better everything was now she had flexible working hours, uh-oh, she was off on a major dance around her brain, I sensed it, rightly, as she flitted on, to how some houses closed their upstairs rooms for parties and others didn’t, and how she loved sex, from where she slid on—don’t be hard on her—went on to some sighting of Ringo Starr in Brentford, and how little Ringo Starr meant to most people nowadays, her best friend Fiona had never heard of him, to her too he was just a name, but the man shouldn’t be bitter, she was sure he wasn’t, Fiona had moved anyway to Brighton, she missed her being around; and if I might sum up rather than recount such details, I can say that listening to all this was to be caught up in other gusts and swirls, the up and down winds of Maria, leading me to shake off the Romans, if not The African Queen—I still saw the leeches on Humphrey Bogart, one last time I told myself, the leeches one last time, then no more, no more African Queen for now, if I could put this film decisively behind me then Maria, who so to speak almost never flits back to the same flower, would put it behind her too; for she does not do depth or details, she does flight, a covering of distance, to boot in neon pink kit and upwards of 30,000 steps a day as measured by her phone, her hair would bob 30,000 times, or is it half that, so I gladly let her step ahead, already the street signs were saying Richmond, it was a moment I sensed appropriate for summing up, it would help expunge the soldiers and Humphrey Bogart who in my mind was no longer allowed to have anything to do with leeches, they would have been made of rubber anyway, that helped too; I could run with her and I talk to myself, unfortunately I have to think of something when we’re running; anything, so keeping the thoughts to myself as we pounded the local paving stones, I mulled over a different aspect of the Bogart connection, turning to the person himself, as I know from a biographical source I’ve no reason to doubt: Humphrey Bogart had been here, hereabouts, he was assigned a first floor flat on the Goldhawk Road, he may have been a star in the days of double-breasted suits but not everything was glamorous, in the evening gloom he would kick about Shepherds Bush Green, largely unrecognised, and it was there, standing on benches, he practised his hippo imitations; these were in the script, as a means of wooing Katherine Hepburn; on screen he also did monkey imitations, which one critic said could not have been hard for him, but that’s by the by, more pertinently it has been further suggested west London edginess rubbed off on him, creating the hint of grit to go along with the neckscarf and general on-screen softiness, as they drifted in an old torpedo boat down the Congo, a combination which somehow led to his one and only Oscar, these were the thoughts I’d had while running, until now, as we shuffled on the spot waiting at a light to cross, as it went to amber then to green I glimpsed again those stakes protruding from the mud; I visualised a line of troops, assembled in the aftermath, awaiting orders—were they to march upriver?—it was easy enough to imagine that tramp, tramp—OK, interrupted Maria, we’ve passed the threshold, Good I said, yet again passing up the opportunity to discover what this threshold meant, Yes she said, at which I had a funny feeling, something had altered now, in the air, was it them I heard, behind us? I listened for more, wondering how exactly I might tell a cohort of tramping soldiers from, say, far-off hammers swinging in a boatyard, in any event we had to move on, me feeling I had underestimated Maria for a moment, since she too had noticed something, she was asking What’s the matter? to which I simply said I was thinking of the stakes again, the stabbing swords, So how many were there? she said, How many what, stakes, soldiers? Invasions, she said unexpectedly, Well, a couple, more if you count Caligula—the things I could tell you, Tell me what? said Maria, reaching at her headphones: Wait, let me lose the music she said, moving them to her neck, as heat hit us from a large passing vehicle and a 237 bus rattled by.

Down an alleyway we found a wall to lean on, offering respite, the opportunity to reflect that even if the route through the docks hadn’t been enough to confuse the cohorts, I could be reasonably confident Severus and the rest would clatter past here without seeing us, after all they would be duty-bound, they could hardly pause for a Roman smoke, smoke incidentally was not a word to use before Maria, who now shut her eyes, I’ll do another threshold on Friday, she said with her eyes still shut, I heard her but was distracted by other sounds, a commotion, Did you those voices? Maria? What voices? Agitated voices, I said, feet. I’ll do Friday on my own, she said, you can run with your Caligula then—a curt dismissal of history again, enough for me to react, to press her by saying Caligula made his horse a Senator, her reply to which was Sounds nuts, I then came back with But don’t worry, he never even got here. How close did he get then? she said without real interest, but a question is a question and I said The other side of the Channel, adding the fictive claim that he sat, enthroned, gazing towards the same thin line of white chalk cliffs, the same troublesome coast Caesar had gazed at, which he fooled himself into thinking he could see despite the rain, as winds lashed the imperial tent … How do you know? said Maria, was it on TV? Something like that, I said. We’ve stopped long enough, she said slapping her thighs, I don’t like it here, That’s too bad, I said, you won’t get to hear how the seas off Calais heaved, so much that he ordered his troops to attack the waves, Let’s go, Maria countered—I wasn’t finished but on we went in silence, until another opportunity arrived, as we marked time at another light, At Calais it stayed stormy, I said, so he told his troops to collect seashells, this only made Maria remark that it was too bad he never got this far, he would have added colour to the streets of Brentford; just as well he never got this far, I thought, it was enough to have the first wave of troops after us, behind them Ringo Starr, and there could be a horde of fans, after him, after us, after him Humphrey with another entourage, just as Humphrey the hippo lolloped back along the Goldhawk Road, hangers-on trailing him on account of the gin in his coat pocket, while on another rung of the Hollywood hierarchy Katherine Hepburn was housed in the grounds of Chiswick House—assigned the biggest room, because, as she had warned the director in advance, an actress had to have a place to pace up and down while learning her lines; in The African Queen she has the shorter lines, lines like Could you make a torpedo? and Breakfast can wait, making, if I’m brutally frank, a moot point of the need for a large room for learning lines, but there she was, I was resurrecting her so as to have something other than corpses in the mud to think about. Could you make a—torpedo? she says to a Hogarth cartoon on the wall; to the maid bringing tea she says, Could you make a torpedo? You mean one of those American sandwiches miss, you’d need to show me how. And if you’ll pardon me saying so miss, I wouldn’t have the ingredients together until breakfast. Oh never mind, says Katherine, breakfast can wait. Mn, no, let me say it this way: Breakfast can wait, how did that sound? Well, if you say so miss. Alone again, she summons her concentration before running across the room and collapsing into a pile of fabrics on an armchair—to practise her fits of laughter at Humph’s animal antics, but all is not well, she hates the script, she telephones across the Atlantic to object to several lines, notably, after Humph is to say We might find somewhere quiet behind an island, then we could talk, she insists she must stay out of shot for a long time, Pan to some giraffes, she says, pan onto an island, on his hairy arms, anything but me, Somewhere behind an island was just the kind of thing to rile the critics, they could hardly wait for the opportunity to call that ‘tough’ guy a marshmallow—and you know how scared he is they’ll think he’s a pansy, so cut that line or leave me out of it, clear? and tell him to quit that drinking, are you there? Operator? Hello?

It occurred to me fresh galleyfuls of Romans could have swanned up the Kent beaches, saying oh don’t worry this is a film, we’ll just do the one take and we’ll be gone, they were already above the cliffs, setting a solid marching rhythm, their destination the Thames, in no time they would be striking water at Lambeth before making light of Battersea: now, after shearing a way through the docks, bearing down on Isleworth, I reckoned any serious pursuers would have hands ready on swords as they marched, a gladius worked best if the pursued turned to face the pursuer, I reckoned, I was getting all the eventualities covered, it was best to run and not to turn, run, faster, here we are, Maria and I, obviously with no military experience, not even a martial art between us, just feet out of step, eyes ahead; we passed a sign welcoming us to Richmond, where I glanced for the umpteenth time at Maria’s bobbing hair, as her steps seemed to pass through the paving stones and up into mine, as we dodged shoppers, our minds now set on Richmond station, but not entirely, as mine was still back with Caesar’s troops and their later generations, wondering at their solidarity, they might shake Twickenham bridge with the rhythm of their steps, to a beat Ringo knew how to drum, making the bridge tremble, the same bridge which the hippo would reach at any moment, so with luck they might all tumble into the Thames, into mud and crabs and crayfish, whereupon I pictured the leeches on Humphrey Bogart, maybe one or two were real after all, I saw him remove them with Katherine Hepburn’s help, not tugging them off until she dabbed them first with powder, it was a reason to feel shivery, a reason to run faster, until on the road to Richmond station there came the last echoes of the time I first saw Brentford: crowds that seemed to scatter, the vestiges of the stories the place had summoned, like in the breaks in the making of The African Queen, with Katherine saying There are two kinds of actor, those who act only for the screen and those who exploit their skills in real life, Oh yeah, said Humphrey, which one am I? You tell me, said Katherine, You kidding? he said, I never told you nothing, nuttin, except that I’m gonna take a stroll to the Bush, you coming? She laughed: a stroll to a bush, what’s that?—a riposte which prompted him to leave grabbing his hat, only for it to be stolen from him as he stopped at a local stall, where he was busy, too busy to watch out, haggling over buying a bottle opener, following which he returned in anger, You there? he called out to nobody, What the hell, he said flopping on the bed, I’m not going to be missing no one when I’m gone; much as I don’t miss Maria when she isn’t there, once she’s waved goodbye, indeed she had a ticket for the train and waved goodbye, farewell until the next time, assuming there would be one, and I raised an arm to her, I faced the ticket barriers and didn’t once turn around, I understood that for the fleeing Britons that could have been fatal, I didn’t turn, I did what anybody would have done, I snatched the swiftest of looks, there, over my shoulder.

 

John provided the contribution from England to Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2018. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies including Best British Short Stories 2016. He is a member of the European Literature Network and lives in London. More information can be found at his website, www.johnsaul.co.uk

Born early, writhing and screaming at 11.17am. 

If the train is on time, stone dead by 11.21. 

Once a boy. Now a man. Always a son. He used to bombard his father with questions as he cleaned his gun.

His tears dry fast on his face: unyielding Texan sun.

It has shown no signs of appearing by 11.25.

11.26: He has started to notice the people around him. The balding man with his daughter on his back, who is holding a bucket and spade; two women smiling and taking pictures with a selfie stick.

11.27:  He considers that if he does stop the train, then dad and daughter won’t go to the beach today.

11.29: In fact, he might ruin their lives.

16.55: That was our last stop, this train is now out of service. Do you have somewhere to go?

“Home.”

 

 

Camille Lewis is a writer, avid reader and self-proclaimed Plathian who lives and learns with borderline personality disorder. She can be found residing in South West England, crossing off days on a calendar until the next installment of the A Song of Ice and Fire” series is released.”

A cute steward walks down the cabin, the personification of busyness. He’s wearing a royal blue waistcoat and a blazer striped with flashes of dandelion gold. In tight trousers, his behind looks pert. When he walks back, I try to catch his gaze but he’s trained to avoid mine. 

Ayyoub notices this. He exaggeratedly sniffs and returns his hero nose to his book. A shock of sunlight pierces into the cabin, turning his eyes the colour of polished timber. The eyes that tell me, I need you; told me this last night.  

The double-page spread in Attitude is dedicated to weekend trips to Morocco and its ‘Red City’. With the Medina, the famous Jemaa el-Fna square, with its night market, and time together in a foreign country – Ayyoub’s country – I’ve worked hard for this. I try to sleep but the pilot announces there’s turbulence ahead. The words in my magazine combine and collide: Gays Marrakech taste swindle thyme. 

I’ve been to Morocco once before. It was five years ago, on the coast. Essaouira was what my uni mates, Liam and Clare, had been pining for. Jimi Hendrix’s hangouts nestled between the Atlantic shoreline and the sky-scraping sand dunes. They bought Bob Marley t-shirts from rundown kiosks and sought out vegan cafes where they could drink and smoke. In the low season, it was windswept. Reflecting on it, I was lonely. Mum had left; men rarely looked at me. 

Why isn’t Ayyoub looking at me? 

On the final night with Liam and Claire, I remember wanting to absorb the last of the January sunshine, leave the lovebirds be. Finding the only guidebook on Marrakech stored by the riad’s reception, a jumble of pages from the early 1970s that on a flick through, smelt like corked wine, I asked for directions to Jemaa El-Fna. I wanted to take photographs of men lumbering with metal trolleys, ready for a night’s work. 

Men dressed in djebella contradicted one another when I ended up lost in the Medina. I felt uneasy as a young boy of about nine or ten hovered feet in front of me, regularly turning his head to see whether I was still there. When I turned a corner, he waited to see which direction I was going in and would walk with me to see whether I was gullible enough to pay him to be my guide. The smell was of incense and ginger tea. The boy motioned me past the door of an inconspicuous mosque, dozens of men’s tatty pairs of shoes and ragbag babouche slippers lined up neatly outside. 

‘Thanks, but I can manage on my own. Chokran,’ I remember saying to the boy, turning around to see who else was watching and whether I was being set up. 

My mind’s getting tired now. Why does Ayyoub look upset? 

Thinking back, the Marrakchi boy said, ‘Uncle watch you follow. You pay us.’ Something sinister like that, determined it seemed to blackmail me. I turned away and bought bars of soap I didn’t need. 

‘We’re only joking, come on. Laugh.’ The boy tugged at my coat. His ‘uncle’, dubiously young, grinned a tea-stained smile. I asked a policeman for help and headed back to the riad. That had been Marrakech for me. 

       

My visual focus shifts when a stewardess touches my sleeve. ‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but the pilot has signaled we have some bad weather ahead and asked everyone to fasten their belts.’ I need the loo, and cast Ayyoub a confused glance across the aisle. This time he reciprocates. My heart slows seeing his eyes performing a play, dancing crystals of light, spotlights on a stage. 

I take care to avoid my shirt sleeve getting caught under the Japanese woman next to me’s puffer jacket, which stirs even as she sleeps. Ayyoub and I didn’t sleep well last night, so that makes three of us. My magazine on my lap, I’m staring at words I don’t intend to read.

The plane leans east towards the Atlas Mountains, which are sprinkled white. Below I see settlements in the foothills, rusty on the underside like our copper dirham coins. I made a big fuss promising Ayyoub I’d get our currency from the exchange off the Edgware Road, the one that accepts five-hundred-euro notes. He seemed calmed by our afternoon there, the two of us side-by-side, hot toweled afterwards waiting for our shaves in a Turkish barber shop. 

 ‘Madam?’ The stewardess bends to speak to the Japanese woman. ‘You must stow your table tray and sit in an upright position. Can I please check, sorry Madam, you need to,’ the stewardess gulps, ‘sit up straight.’ The plane jolts further to the right. 

 I jig my legs and sip my Coke Zero.

‘Stewards, please get ready for landing.’ The cute one with waxed brown hair purses his lips as first he catches Ayyoub, and next to the window, sitting across the aisle from Ayyoub, me.

I turn my body to look at the earth from 15,000 feet. Freeing myself from the Japanese woman’s tangle of hair, there are foreign colours now, pinks and greys, ochre and the faintest of yellows, as if applied to the land in brushstrokes. Two mud mounds, one much larger than the other, rise out of the earth as a tortoise might lift its head out of its shell.

‘Oh wow, so, so sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise how tired I was,’ the Japanese woman says with an Americanised lilt. 

‘I didn’t want to wake you up; I hope I didn’t?’ I ask.

‘No, no, not at all. I was out of it. I’m between jobs, so, yep, I’m exhausted,’ she says pointing to her face and drawing me a smile in the air with her fingers. She tells me she’s a photographer for fashion houses. She zips up her travel pillow in one of her bags and her frown lines crease when she sees the headline in my magazine, Rock the Casbah this Spring in Marvelous Marrakech. 

‘Do you come to Marrakech often?’ I ask. 

‘Too often. I love it, and hate it, like all in one. Whatever you think it’s going to be, think again. So, tell me, do you haggle?’

‘I can’t be bothered. I always want to know the price, not spend time sussing out what something’s true value is.’ I roll my eyes.  

‘You’ll need to! Haggle, I mean. I’m Aki.’ 

‘Stephen.’

‘Hey, Steve.’

Ayyoub mouths something at me from across the aisle, but I’m distracted. The pilot jockeys the misbehaving plane into land, and we’re told we can switch on our mobiles. As she adjusts her jacket, Aki is a shower of loose limbs, obscuring Ayyoub’s moving lips. He WhatsApps. ‘Go ahead when we get to the terminal. I know you need the loo. I’ll follow.’

‘Let’s just go together,’ I type back.

‘So, who’s the hot guy?’ Aki giggles.

‘Ah, just a friend, you know.’ I lower my voice, turn around to see if anyone Moroccan is listening, and check Ayyoub hasn’t heard me.

‘Well, some friend. I may need to photograph him. I have my own private work too, here’s my number.’ Aki slips me her business card.

Another WhatsApp. ‘See you the other side of security,’ Ayyoub begins typing. ‘That way you can get in the queue quicker than me, as your queue will be longer. British people get asked questions sometimes.’

The stewardess plays a ditty celebrating the fact the flight has arrived on time. ‘We’re first in Europe for punctuality.’ 

I watch Ayyoub. Tiredness makes me horny. First, I look at his finely cropped hair and smooth forehead, next at his curved neck. I imagine my lips on the whisper of his black moustache. His nipples would come next. They’re earthy and taste like moussaka. He stretches for our overnight Herschel bag from the locker above, only the one. I don’t know why, but I gently poke him, which makes him smile. His eyes betray him, though, as I also receive something bordering reproach. He’s wearing my favourite green and red lumberjack shirt of his. I can’t wait to take it and his jeans off to expose his unblemished skin, his goosebumps the wiring beneath my hands.

I’m on the first bus to the terminal but I feel a dull ache in my upper chest and groin. There’s a mix of first-time tourists with their wide-brimmed hats and baggy shorts. One English woman is even wearing a Fez, presumably for a hen do. An Arab woman looks at her and pulls her baby’s pram closer towards her chest. 

The queue in the security hall, clinical with strip lighting, is long. The bathroom is a reprieve and smells of orange blossom. At the urinals, I drill myself. ‘I’m staying at Riad Zenia close to Mellah. I’m a writer. I’m only staying for the weekend. I’ve come alone.’ I need to forget all references to ‘we’, and what the fuck am I doing, saying I’m a writer? I’m a manager, that’s good enough for the guy who will ask me. How about this, the line I teased Ayyoub with, pretending I’d say it for a twenty-quid dare: ‘I’m staying at Riad Zenia. I’ve never fucked a Moroccan twink. I don’t know about Article 489. I didn’t know same-sex acts were punishable because they are lewd. They can land people in jail? I’m so sorry to hear that, I wasn’t aware.’

As a toilet flushes, I think back to the trickle I heard after Ayyoub rose from our bed last night and spent ages in the bathroom. 

‘Born in Stratford-upon-Avon?’ a beige-uniformed official asks, flicking through the many stamps on my passport. ‘The city of Shakespeare. What stories!’ he exclaims with what echoes in the low-ceilinged hall as a desire to sound important. 

Out I go through what feels like a needless scanner to check people’s suitcases – surely, our luggage was already checked at Stansted? – into the arrivals hall. Past the one open store, which is selling sim cards, dozens of people embrace. Women in overalls mop the shiny floor. I could buy a local sim card but I’d rather organize everything with Ayyoub. 

‘You can’t stay here, carry on to the exit,’ says a man who scurries to my side. He has the pinched face of a man whose cheeks, eyes and lips look like they’ve been clamped together with a stapler. Another angry-looking official approaches.

‘Excuse me, all passengers must proceed to the exit.’

‘I’m just waiting for a friend.’

‘You can wait for them outside the terminal.’

‘Je voudrais attendre. We travelled together; I’d like to wait.’

The official consults with the man with the pinched face and they look at me over their shoulders as they walk to a glass door in the wall. The Arab woman with the pram is with an older woman and the two are laughing. Aki passes by with her three large bags and gives me a wave. ‘Call me,’ she shouts. 

Ayyoub’s not outside. Dozens of men stand close by, hugging, bellicose and uproarious. Many are taxi drivers waiting to escort newly arrived tourists to this or that riad. One catches my eye, a guy in a beaten black leather jacket, holding a sign, Riad Bernadette written in blotchy red script. Ayyoub advised me that a friend from our accommodation would be waiting for us, but I have no idea who he is or what he looks like. I wonder if Ayyoub entered the same queue as me, the one for non-Moroccans. He said something about choosing to travel with his French passport. 

Again, I think about last night; me drinking water in the kitchen to rid my mouth of saliva, and Ayyoub behind the locked door, retching one second, and later, clearing his throat. 

‘For fuck’s sake. Hurry up.’ My phone’s struggling to recognise the new network, bloody hell, it takes so long. Another plane comes into land from the UK, so does a Ryanair. More tourists. More people join the queue. No messages. When I visited five years ago, scrolling through Grindr cost me seventy pounds, so I switch the phone off again. In the distance, I hear the wind of traffic circling the airport, and crickets begin to chirp in the long grass.

When we met last summer, I was struck how placid Ayyoub was. How unfathomably calm. He told me his older brother had died only weeks before. After months of living separate lives, my ex, Marouane had left the house by then, well, just. Ayyoub’s different. Self-contained. He’s a refuge for me, and always in bed by midnight. 

It was my idea to come here. He favoured somewhere ‘easier’, but I didn’t probe when he refused to answer a simple question about his family. I wanted to give Marrakech another ‘go’. Tomorrow we’re having breakfast at a cooperative run by women, which only serves vegetarian food. Then, we’ll visit the Yves Saint Laurent Museum and the Majorelle Garden. I have picked out my favourite deep blue and yellow striped bowling shirt. I hope Ayyoub wears his cream white shirt and faded blue jeans. I’m doubting our schedule. 

I’ll head to Departures, the only way to enter the airport. 

‘Are you on the flight to Lisbon? You have to hurry, check-in has closed.’ A young woman in a flowing gown hurries me along.

The arrivals board shows five flights have landed since ours, from Pisa, Frankfurt, Casablanca, Amsterdam and Seville, passengers all filing past. Tour groups. Entire families. Septuagenarians enjoying retirement. I no longer recognise any of the passengers from our plane. All of them have presumably got their taxi rides and have settled down somewhere for a thé à la menthe. That’s what I want to be doing, or running a bath, or stripping off, stroking Ayyoub’s mop of wet hair.

It is now tar-black outside. ‘Text me. Call me. Are you okay? It’s been an hour.’ The tightness in my chest swells and the doubts Ayyoub seemed to carry about our trip fill my lungs. Ayyoub’s Herschel bag contains the mobile phone chargers. Soon I’ll run out of battery. 

At Lost Property, the man only speaks Arabic. I try to make myself heard but I’m competing with the high-pitched whine of a vacuum cleaner that a woman is crashing into chairs. I find a shred of scrap paper the lost property agent has on his desk, but he seems bewildered. 

‘Please, if someone comes for me, say I have gone to the hotel. Here it is, Riad Zenia. Call me there,’ I plead, but the agent’s eyes are closing. 

The oddest Ayyoub has ever acted was when we went to the Cotswolds for his birthday weekend in October. He went for a walk, which was meant to be brisk. He returned two hours later, drenched in his thin mac. He said he’d found a new path. As soon as he entered our hotel bedroom, I pretended I was reading a book by my old Oxford tutor, but I was scrolling hook-up apps, and I am sure he knew. Either way, he was happy I ran him a bath afterwards and happier when I joined him. 

‘Mr Rose?’

I turn around and a middle-aged man with a moustache that screams for a trim, gestures that I need to follow him through the same glass door in the wall that I saw the two angry officials walk through earlier. He’s wearing a uniformed blue shirt and is chewing gum. 

‘Are you here in Marrakech on business?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You are Mr Rose? Your passport, please.’

‘Yes, but I—’

‘I will need to ask you some questions. Here.’ He moves a seat towards me but it’s the kind you’d find in a classroom, far too small to comfortably sit on.

I’m in a partitioned area with cubicles, perhaps as many as half a dozen. Silhouettes form on the other side of the perspex wall. I hear muffled voices, but I can’t hear or see Ayyoub.

‘We found a bag deposited by the toilets. It has your name tag and books inside belonging to you. There’s a photo, and some documents. Are these yours?’ He’s pointing to the Andrew Christian jockstraps, but I don’t recognise the scratched Adidas bag. The folds of the security official’s jowly cheeks expand and contract like an accordion. Jocks? Not the smartest item to pack, perhaps, but they were my gift for Ayyoub. I don’t get what this is, why I’m being questioned. Why would this bag have our names on it? Why was it in the toilets?

‘We also found another item, which is not permitted in Morocco, and which carries a fine. I must take a few moments to photocopy your passport. Sit there please and don’t move.’

Ayyoub put a few of his things into our overnight bag, but what? I hear echoes of cabinet drawers and distant doors closing but most of the cubicles have their curtains drawn back. It’s nine at night.

‘The prohibited item. It is sealed in this bag. Yours, no?’

It’s a paperback, but I’ve never seen the book before. It’s not something I’d read. It must be Ayyoub’s, but it’s bizarre. It doesn’t look serious enough to be one of his. There are lithe, tanned male bodies on the front cover. One of the men is obscured by a large shadow over his abdomen.

‘You can’t bring in materials like this. Articles like this. No. Not permitted.’

‘I understand.’ I nod. The choking noise of a central heating fan extracts what air remains in the room.

‘You alone, or family too?’ He seems undecided whether to be strict.

‘No, I came with a friend.’

‘A taxi will wait for you outside to take you to your destination.’

‘But the book, it’s—’

‘About San Francisco. Aids. No. Not permitted. Nothing like this.’

‘But sorry, I have to know where my friend is, I have to meet him.’

‘There will be time for all that later, first we’ll take your photo, stand here. Fingerprints. Who told you you can come to Morocco with a book like this, was it a Moroccan? Are you planning to sell it?’ I tell him it was for my own leisure, but I agree, it must be confiscated, I am here for tourism and tourism alone. I’m fined one-thousand, one-hundred dirhams. 

       Rain patters the windows. It’s not obvious to me this is the route, I don’t remember the Old City looking so bare. I mentally leaf through the confiscated book in the back of the cab. I had never heard of the author before and I still don’t have news from Ayyoub. Searching Google, I learn the book is about a detective of some sort. It doesn’t even get listed in Amazon’s section of erotica. 

The entrance to Riad Zenia is inauspicious. A beggar is sitting cross-legged with a hand-woven pouch to collect coins, but as soon as I enter and hear the trickle of the fountain in the forecourt, I exhale. 

‘Yes?’ asks a woman from a cavernous study. 

‘Hi, I have a booking, for two in fact, Stephen Rose.’

The woman approaches the reception desk. ‘Rose? Let me look, we’re not expecting anyone.’ She licks the tip of her forefinger and lowers her spectacles down her nose. Leafing her way through her file, she looks up at me and with a pointed expression, lifts her spectacles to study me closely. ‘You have a friend?’ 

‘Yes, maybe that’s the booking, sorry, a friend, do you mean?’ I was expecting a friend of Ayyoub’s to greet me; someone expecting us, and prepared for our arrival with a tray of tea. 

‘You’re staying with a friend, a Moroccan man?’ the woman asks, a newspaper folded underneath her armpit. 

‘Yes, my friend, Mr Berrada.’ It’s a trial pretending we’re not partners. 

‘He’s upstairs. Here, you’re in room two on the first floor,’ she says, handing me a rusty key with three prongs and a Hand of Fatima dangling from it on a silk thread. Ayyoub must have come here wondering all this time where I was.   

As I climb the staircase, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet, I notice old maps of Essaouira on the riad’s brick walls. I wish Liam and Clare were here, stoned and straightforward. I turn the key. Inside Ayyoub’s boots and his faded blue jeans are strewn across the scratched purple and brown rug. I can hear the shower running from the small ensuite and the door has been left ajar. I look for my reflection, but a mirror above a desk is steaming. 

‘Thank God,’ I say, walking into the bathroom.

Ayyoub’s scrubbing himself, tearing at his skin with his fingernails and a pumice stone. 

‘Hey, come on, what’s wrong?’ I ask. 

‘I need a few minutes, I’ll come out in a bit,’ Ayyoub says, barely turning his head from behind the shower glass to look at me.

I look inside our Herschel bag and start to unpack. It’s peculiar. I don’t remember us packing any of this stuff. There’s a traditional djebella and a copy of the Koran. I start to shake. He enters and sits alongside me on the bed, his head cradled in his hands. The meringue-white towel clings to his torso and contrasts with his oak tree skin. 

‘They searched me,’ he says with a child’s voice. 

‘Did they take stuff?’

‘Yes, my phone, all my clothes and yours, for what they say is a DNA trace. They’re lying.’  

‘What now?’ I ask. ‘This is fucking crazy.’

‘Not as crazy as coming here. I told you,’ Ayyoub says.

‘I don’t get it. What are we supposed to have done wrong?’

‘They saw the video, I should have deleted it. You’re such an idiot.’

‘On your phone? But that was in London, what, they can’t—?’ 

‘You objectify stuff. Idealise. Things. Morocco. Me. It’s not always what you want that makes something real, you know.’

‘But come on, we’re hardly in Dubai. Or Riyadh. This is Marrakech.’

‘That’s not exactly my point. My family can’t be connected with this stuff.’

‘Is it the video that pissed you off; I haven’t sent it to anyone?’ I ask, sensing the real issue. 

‘Yes. But more to the point, one of the guys at security was my parents’ neighbour. He recognised me.’

‘And?’ I ask.

‘Well, the last time anyone saw me here, I can’t right, it’s complicated. But we shouldn’t have come.’

‘But last time you were here was your brother’s funeral, what’s wrong with that?’

‘I can’t, I just want to sleep.’

‘They made all this stuff up about a book in San Francisco, Aids, it was so fucking weird. It turned out it was just a crime novel, airport shit. I’m freaked out right now,’ I add.

‘They’ll do anything to freak us out.’ Ayyoub looks at me. ‘This isn’t Tangier, it’s not the 1960s. You’re not Paul Bowles. We don’t get to breeze in with videos on both our phones of you fucking me. And you know what, Steve, you’re not a fucking porn star, either.’ He’s sweating. He twists his body when I go to hug him and all I’m left with is his curling dead skin. Minutes later, he anticipates my hug in the s-shaped space between our two foetal positioned bodies. His nose whistles a tune as he gently breathes into sleep.

The Muezzin’s call to prayer wakes me up. I turn and stretch to stroke Ayyoub but it’s his two pillows I touch. I scratch at a bedtime mosquito bite on my ankle and see the lace curtains caressing the wooden window shutters. The bathroom’s empty. Outside the wrought iron window grill, the sky is stale and sits heavily on the Medina below. On my mobile phone, half-a-dozen WhatsApp messages from a Moroccan number I don’t recognise, and scrolling, it’s the video of the two of us, me filming, him and his widened eyes, looking up at me. 

The messages are written in Arabic, stuff I barely understand when I copy and paste it into English on Deep L Translate. There’s messages from Ayyoub’s sister, telling me there’s a flight at 15.20, ‘you should go back to Britain’. 

One message is from Ayyoub’s father, telling me if I don’t go, they’ll send someone to the riad to arrest me; the family has ‘friends in high places’ and he’s not sure I know this, but what I’ve done could see me charged. They see this as assault on their heterosexual son. Buttoning my shirt as I walk out to the mezzanine courtyard, I look to see if Ayyoub’s taking his breakfast early. The receptionist finds me on the landing outside our bedroom. What’s that stern look for? My jeans aren’t zipped. 

I sit on one of the divans placed on the landing and one of the riad’s cleaners sweeps the dust around my feet. Greenfinches sing. I realise I missed a WhatsApp message from Ayyoub amid the flurry of texts from his sister and father. It arrived at twenty-past seven. 

‘What you did the other night was weird, it didn’t make me feel good, the way you thought I was okay and you filmed, well, you know what you did. I’m not saying it was bad, but, just think, slow down. I better go and see my family. I’m going to be there for some time.’

Out of the darkened riad hallway, I buy a charger from a stall in the Medina. Later, I buy myself some deodorant. It was this time of year I visited five years ago, but everything seems dustier now, and I don’t know what to do. I could still go to the Majorelle Garden but as I walk, dazed, past the El Badii Palace, for lack of any other plan, I purchase a ticket. The guide says in stunted English that the Sultan wanted the Palace to ‘charm the eyes’, that the Saadian dynasty covered the capitals of its columns with ‘molten gold and fine gold leaves’. It’s all about the impressions we leave, I think to myself, and I stumble on an uneven stone as I receive another message. 

‘Make sure you’re on the plane. Otherwise, stay here, and we’ll press charges. My father is not playing. My brother’s engaged to a woman and you’re never to speak to him again.’

It takes me back to school, to Dad, who I was never in trouble with, but whose stilted conversations made it clear he didn’t approve; in the 1980s. I’m in Warwickshire, and remember Dad’s frowns across our kitchen table, Mum sighing. I scroll through my phone, shiver, and message Aki. We arrange to meet at a rooftop cafe. 

‘He didn’t seem that into you, if I’m being honest,’ Aki says, handing me her share of cash to pay the bill.

‘But we’ve been together seven months, it was a big misunderstanding, that’s all. I know he’s in trouble.’

‘Look, I get it, I do, but sorry, I hate to ask.’ Aki pulls her chair closer to me. ‘Do you think you’ve read the situation, like, how can I say this? Correctly?’

‘Possibly not, there’s the bag they found in the toilets, the weird book; I can’t work any of it out.’ 

‘And?’ Aki motions me to hand over the cash to the waiter.

‘Ayyoub smiled when he fell asleep last night. You can’t fake a genuine smile.’

A cab picks me up outside the riad at half-past one and with my free guide to El Badii Palace, and the best part of four-hundred euros in currency, I head back to the airport. I pass through Departures. Blotchy-eyed, I buy a coffee and try to avoid attention. As we take off, from my window I see a golf course with tear-shaped ponds and a lagoon surrounded by condominiums. There’s a huge neon sign advertising shaving products and the crisscross of traffic heading down Mohammed V and the city’s main thoroughfares. I put my hands on my lap like an obedient schoolboy but a few moments later I’m a fidget, so I open Ayyoub’s message. He was happy enough the night before our flight. Does he mean to say he wasn’t happy? It was stuff we’ve done before. There’s no way he could have a fiancé. When I’m back in London, I’ll find his friend’s details, the one who wasn’t at the riad. 

‘You know what you did.’ What a bloody weird thing to say.

With its wing dipping, the plane tilts its hat towards the pink clouds. Ayyoub’s message is obscured by shadows.

‘Just think, slow down.’ 

The mid-afternoon sunshine licks a cute Moroccan’s face, maybe a guy of nineteen. He’s sitting across the aisle, but I force myself not to stare. That night at home, Ayyoub’s head was on my chest, and he slept right away, and last night too. It’s our pattern, me holding him, me as the Dad. He needs me, right? 

From right-to-left my eyes scan Ayyoub’s text. 

‘I’m not saying it was bad’. 

I’m going to spend the flight re-reading.

Andrew Kauffmann is a writer and coach whose prose has been published by Untitled Writing, Polari Press, Streetcake Magazine, Clavmag and Queerlings. He is a genealogy geek and is currently working on a number of non-fiction projects. A 2020 winner of The Literary Consultancy’s LGBT+ Free Reads competition, he is also a winner of the 2021 Scribe UK and Spread the Word competition for first chapters of creative non-fiction. He blogs on storytelling and wellbeing at www.andrewkaufman.co.uk

Read Andrew’s story ‘Dressing’

The vial of semen in the breast pocket of David’s denim jacket bounced against his chest as he walked down Harley Street. The heat pack next to it warmed his heart.

Everywhere rich people faded from hospital buildings that looked like grand houses into glistening cars and black cabs. A group of nurses huddled together for an illicit cigarette break. 

David thought of the baby-photo profile picture of the man whose sperm he had bought online – donor 5288. Dark hair, brown eyes, grinning gap-toothed, all drool and dimples. He wondered what the man looked like now, who he had grown up to be. One of the rich men, perhaps. Or one of the taxi drivers. Or maybe they’d danced together in a nightclub; or he’d developed David’s photographs, cut his hair, fired him from one of the many jobs he’d lost. 

A fat drop of water landed on David’s head. He stopped, looked up, surprised; the hot sun shone in an empty sky. Above him carnations hung in a wire pot that looked to be filled with dark straw rather than soil. It dripped again. 

For most of the walk from Oxford Circus he’d had his head down against the sun’s glare but shading his eyes with his hand he now surveyed the heights of the street. Although at first it appeared to be all iron and stone, there was life everywhere. Flowers bloomed from troughs lining windowsills. Baskets hung from balconies, from lampposts and from the facades of buildings. Small trees stood in huge pots on either side of stone steps leading to glossy doors. Grasses and miniature hedges lined banisters. Succulents peeked from inside windows.

Someone bashed into him, then swore at him. He forgot that people didn’t appreciate dawdlers this far into the city. Flustered, he got confused by the one-way system when he tried to cross the road. A van beeped at him. His instinct was to swear at the driver, but by the time he’d gathered the nerve, the van was gone. 

There were as many vans as there were plants, scattered around the street. White transits, big box vans, small caddies, a Royal Mail van pulled up on the curb with its hazard lights blinking. Their drivers dipped in and out of buildings like bees whirring from flower to flower. 

Then there were chauffeurs, shop assistants, builders, hospital cleaners hauling sheets from cars, and the gardeners, perched on baffling ladders angling strange hoses and tools at the plants on windowsills. 

The door of the sperm clinic was navy. He rang the buzzer, and after a few moments, the door was unlocked to let him in. The receptionist didn’t look him in the eye, just gave him some forms on a clipboard and asked him to take a seat. 

He’d never been inside a private hospital before. The chairs were the same tacky vinyl and metal as in his GP’s waiting room, but there were real lilies in a vase on a table and a wrought iron fireplace. On the mantlepiece a lone orchid was dying. Its blossoms drooped as if in mourning, the green stick holding them up was livelier than the flowers. 

He turned to the forms, which asked for much of the same information as the application he had filled out online a few weeks before. 

David is Caucasian. His mother is English. His father was Russian. His eyes are brown. His skin is tanned. He is agnostic. He has a degree in photography. (True).

He has two children. A fiancée. He is a professional photographer. There’s no history of heart conditions, cancer, mental health problems or cognitive or hereditary disability in his family. (False).

He is five foot ten. (A slight exaggeration). 

He gave the receptionist the forms and waited, thinking of the photograph of donor 5288. It was a good photograph, the baby on a sunny sofa, half closed curtains creating a natural vignette. He wished he’d been the one to take it. 

The doctor was thick-set and middle-aged, with heavy black eyebrows and light brown skin. He wore a white lab coat and expensive, gold-rimmed glasses. 

“David? I’m Dr Demir.” He had the trace of an accent David couldn’t place. Middle eastern maybe. He shook David’s hand. “If you’d follow me.” They climbed broad, curving, cream carpeted stairs. The bannister was soft and cool under his hand. 

At the top of the stairs a heavily freckled man wearing a Spurs FC polo shirt tucked into jeans, a huge ring of keys attached to his belt, straightened a framed print of a sunflower. “This is Greg, our maintenance man. Most important man in the building is Greg,” said Dr Demir. 

“I wish they’d bloody pay me like I was,” said Greg in an Irish accent without a trace of humor. Dr Demir laughed gaily as if he was not included in ‘they’. 

In the doctor’s office heavy curtains blocked the heat and noise of outside. It gave the room the same quality as David’s mother’s house, where words never lingered, being sucked instead into the soft acoustics of the building.  

On the doctor’s desk a pink orchid thrived beside stiff pictures of his wife and four children. “What brings you here today, David? Why would you like to be a donor?” asked Dr Demir. 

“I’d like to help people, you know, people who want to have children but can’t. The money is a bonus of course, I’m saving for a wedding,” he smiled, “but mainly I want people to have what I do.”

Dr Demir glanced at the form. “You have children yourself?”

“Yes, boys, two and four,” he rolled his eyes, “they can be a bit wild but they’re lovely lads.” David pulled out his phone and showed the doctor a picture of him with his two young cousins.  

“They look just like you,” said Dr Demir. “Do boys run in your family?”

“I suppose they do.”

Dr Demir made a note. “And what does your partner think of this?”

“Sarah. She’s supportive. Her sister struggled with getting pregnant.”

Dr Demir asked David many of the questions that he had already filled out, on the website and downstairs. David almost believed the answers himself by now. 

“It seems all is in order. I’m going to take you downstairs for a basic physical examination, height, weight and so on. Then we need urine and sperm samples. If you’re successful we’ll have you back for blood work and next steps including a psychological examination. I don’t know if you saw on our website but only 5-10% of men meet donor requirements, so don’t be disappointed if we can’t take you forward. It’s nothing to worry about, you already have children, but we need particularly high sperm counts and sample sizes. Any questions?”

“When will I know by?”

“You’ll get results in around two weeks. Is email OK?”

David nodded.

They went back down the stairs, then down again, into the basement. Quite unlike the upstairs it was a hard place. Air conditioning blew in full force. David shivered. Glass walls and doors, some clear, some opaque, some clear at the top and opaque at the bottom, segmented the space into a multitude of rooms. The black and white chequered tiles of the floor, matt steel counters, glass walls, and silver door handles created a house of mirrors effect. 

The doctor lead David into a room with clouded glass walls. Inside it was like any doctor’s room; a bed, a desk, a computer, and various cabinets and files. Dr Demir measured his height, weight and blood pressure, then gave him two sample pots, one labeled urine, the other sperm, with his patient number, 87890, printed underneath. Did this mean nearly 90,000 men had been here before him? For all he knew donor 5288 could have been one of them. Sharp envy bloomed in his stomach. 

“The toilets are the second door on the left. The sample room the third door on the right. When you’re done leave the samples at reception and we’ll take them from there. Any questions?”

No questions, only hopes, fears. “No, it was nice to meet you.”

“You too David. You too.”

Dr Demir shook his hand as they left the room then walked towards a scowling Greg who began complaining loudly about the state of the carnations in the hanging baskets outside.

Metal and porcelain glowed under the fluorescent lights in the bathroom. As David stood by a urinal Greg came in. “Don’t mind me,” said Greg and began to urinate indulgently. 

David wore a packer that allowed him to pee standing up, so without much adjustment his urine flowed from his urethra through it and into the cup. He slipped it back into his boxers, zipped up his black jeans, screwed the lid onto the cup and placed it by one of the three sinks on the opposite wall to wash his hands. 

Greg washed his big, calloused hands at the far sink and nodded. “Good luck.”

Urine in one hand, empty cup in the other, David opened several dark offices before finding the sample room. Some effort had been made to make the room homely. A vase of red roses sat on a coffee table in front of a leather sofa – a romantic gesture. The wall opposite the door was painted forest green, a Henri Rousseau print of a tiger stalking through a jungle at its centre. A bowl of potpourri rested on a cabinet, just like the bowl that sat on the chest of drawers in his childhood bedroom in Milton Keynes, where he was once again living. 

He was grateful for his mother’s easy welcome, that she hadn’t fussed as he carried his few belongings up the stairs to his bedroom, but the room had long since shed any trace of him. The bowl of potpourri, the smell of it mixed with that of damp clothes, was his mother’s. As were the lilac tartan sheets she’d put on his single bed. The shelf that ran across the top of the room, packed with black ring binders stored her recipes, notes, sheets of music, pictures of David as an infant covered in porridge, pictures of him as a teenage girl, scowling. He didn’t begrudge his mother her memories of having a daughter, but they were her memories, not his. The condensation that ran down the single paned window in the morning was hers. The view over the allotment behind the house, framing the people cultivating, digging, watering, resting – it all belonged to her. 

The only things of his were his laptop, camera, phone, the clothes in the chest of drawers, and the dicks in the suitcase under the bed. 

Somewhere along the line he had lost count of his dicks. He had royal purple dicks, pearly pink dicks, even a burgundy one that looked like a tentacle. He had thick veiny dicks, smooth dicks, nine inch dicks and five inch dicks, both small and big flopper packers, some that hardened when he inserted a metal rod, and an ultra expensive, ultra realistic one that showered water out when he squeezed the tip. 

But none of them carried him, carried life. Perhaps if they did, he would be happy and he wouldn’t be stuck in his mother’s house hiding dicks under the bed. 

A small television was mounted on the wall of the sample room, a few DVD’s beside it. David put one on, and the room was filled with fake moans and cheesy electronic music. A trailer flashed outdated porno; a woman with huge tits and long blonde hair in a Bay Watch costume kissed an anonymous penis. An overly muscled man handcuffed a woman to a bed frame. A woman wearing empty framed glasses and a tie was bent over a desk. David turned down the volume and looked at the magazines sitting next to the potpourri. Similarly white, hetero porn filled the pages.

He sat down on the edge of the sofa and retrieved the vial of sperm from his jacket. It looked like the thin icing that formed a shell over the birthday cakes his mum made when he was a child. He unscrewed the lid and poured it into the cup marked sperm and waited for a few minutes, watching the Bay Watch woman run, slow motion, down the beach and into a shack, where a surfer was waiting for her. Before they got started David switched off the TV and left the room, both cups in hand, one opaque white, one pale yellow. 

As he turned into the hallway Greg bumped into him and he nearly dropped them. “Careful lad,” said Greg, “important stuff in there.”

The reception was empty apart from a small plastic box on the counter with a printed sign that read: Leave samples here. He hesitated for a moment, then smiled, what did he think would happen? Someone would steal them? Swap them? They were barely his anyway. He placed them carefully in the box then left. 

He saw a woman emerge from the egg bank opposite smiling. Her hair and eyes shone with hope. David felt hopeless. She caught his eye and smiled at him, as if they were colluding on a great plan. Everywhere flowers wilted in the heat. 

When he got home, he found his mother absent mindedly frying onions, cigarette smoke hovering around her before being sucked up by the extractor fan. 

“You shouldn’t smoke mum,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.

“I’m fine love.” She waved away smoke but not his annihilating fear of losing her. “How’d the interview go?”

“Alright, I’m not sure I want it much. It’s just taking pictures of places for an estate agent. Anyway I probably won’t get it.”

“A job’s a job. When d’you hear?”

“Not for a while.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it; you always took such nice pictures.”

Two weeks later he received an email from the clinic. “We regret to inform that you have not been successful at this time…” His sperm count wasn’t high enough. He could call back for more details. 

He looked out of the window at the allotment. A man struggled to dig the dry, hard soil.

 

Sian Bride is a Jewish non-binary person from South West London. They got their PhD in English Literature in 2017, left academia, and became a post-person. The kind that delivers mail, not the kind that isn’t a person any more. When not putting things through people’s doors around Croydon they can be found writing, playing punk music, and coveting dogs.

  

Photo is by Deon Black at Let’s Talk Sex

We had to go out, head toward the water and then maybe over to Leith, because the angel was back, fighting Dad in front of the flat, just really kicking the shit out of him. Something inherited, Dad says. So Libby and I made our way downhill through the weekend crowd. I held tight to her even when she tried to squirm her little hand out of mine and made that whiny noise that’s just an impression of crying.

We stopped at The Star, and round the back, next to Mr. Munro’s Škoda Fabia, there was a football lying on the ground. I let go of Libby and practiced shots against the brick wall and after a while some regulars came out to watch. Watch and smoke. Pam from the Scotmid even bought us chips, but Libby ate all of them in ten seconds, like a hog.

When we got to the pier I remembered what Dad always says about smiling at the new waitress at Scampi Globe, the one who came over from the most, most, most eastern part of Africa, because it wasn’t safe for her there, but when we looked inside we couldn’t find her. We hung about anyway. I hoped Libby would put her sweetest face on, so some visitors from across the bridge would buy us goujons, but no such luck. 

Libby said she had to piss and there was a queue for the toilets, so we went down to the water, watching our feet carefully as they moved over the rocks, so we wouldn’t slip on algae. The firth stretched out flat and endless, and from where I stood squinting, the rock formations seemed like a rope net floating on the water, letting the light hit. I’ve seen pictures of electric grids before. It was like that. I know that in the gaps between that rock there are little ecosystems that mostly get mashed up when the posh families from Trinity go wading out, but I think there are probably some un-mashed worlds, too, safe and busy and invisible, growing and growing, ancient, so ancient maybe it has something to do with what Dad inherited, what I guess I might inherit someday.

I told Libby to get in the water, even if it’s cold, go waist deep and go; piss. Some women started shouting from way far away, saying it was dangerous, what was I thinking, that the little girl needed to get out of there, but by the time they reached us Libby’d already finished. She got all the piss out. And she was taking my hand.

There was an old lighthouse behind us, about halfway to Leith. It’s still painted red and white and even though it doesn’t light up anymore, doesn’t do anything at all, and people take photos of it like it’s worth remembering long after they’ve gone back to wherever they came from. And I don’t know why, but walking off toward home just then I started to feel like it shouldn’t be there anymore. I had this sudden feeling in my gut that we don’t need to cling onto every old useless thing, even if those things are dead tall or were once very helpful, once served a purpose. I don’t want to say that I felt it watching our backs – it wasn’t anything as stupid as that – but I felt like it might have been watching something.

It was a funny feeling to have while the sun was all golden and lovely and everyone was staring off across the water. I should have just given into feeling nice. And why should anyone listen to me? I’m not much older than Libby, who was a baby not even all that long ago. Everyone must feel that way from time to time: that something big and old and admired might be planning something. It’s nothing to worry about at all.

On the way back to ours we saw the waitress at a bus stop. She was hunched over something that was playing music, and she was smoking. She’d untied her pink apron. It was on her lap, and it had collected some ash. I told her I was going to smile at her because my dad told me to, and that made her laugh. She asked what my name was. I told her , and I think she remembered something, because then she asked what name my dad went by now, and I told her I wasn’t sure. It’d probably be different by the end of today, unless he won the fight, that is. But that had never happened. The waitress said that my little sister was shaking pretty badly, and she was right, but Libby wasn’t whining or anything, so we took our time.

The angel was gone when we got home. The door was unlocked. Dad was drinking a Tennent’s and pressing something against a wound on his hip. He was making noises at it, but didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other marks on his body, which glowed hot, and also he had a new name. He asked where we’d gone and I told him. He asked about the waitress. I thought maybe Libby would want to say something, but when I looked, she was having a nap on the couch. A hog nap.

“You go into the water?” he said.

I nodded. 

He nodded back. In a minute, he was asleep, too.

The name-changing thing is only a problem for everybody else. Libby and I never call our dad by his name. So joke’s on the angel, really.

 

Arianna Reiche is a British-American writer who moved from California to Scotland as a teenager. Her fiction has appeared in Ambit Magazine, Berlin’s SAND Journal, Fugitives + Futurists, Popshot, Joyland, and Glimmer Train, who awarded her first prize in their 2017 Fiction Open. She was nominated for the 2020 Bridport Prize and the PANK Magazine Book Contest. In March 2021 she won the Tupelo Quarterly 23 Prose Prize. She currently lives in east London.

Francine chased her cereal with the spoon, while in the other room Cornice received another hiding. The milk had overwhelmed the wheat flakes and they were soggy and broken down. Hiding was the word Dale always used, as in I’m going to give you a good… but it was often visible and always audible.

Personally, Francine felt Dale needed to learn his own lessons about the art of concealment; she herself had been stashing cigarettes and coins in odd places around the house for years, and not for any other reason but that she could. Even now, Cornice might empty a cupboard and a penny would roll out; or discover that the mousehole in the baseboard was not abandoned, but discreetly blocked with a decomposing Morley. Francine drew circles in the milk and assessed the severity of the lesson being taught on the basis of Cornice’s feedback.

Dale was a supply teacher and he was going above and beyond his duty, he said, to provide home schooling to Cornice. It wasn’t clear to Francine exactly what this particular lesson was about, because the ceiling fan’s troubled rotor masked much of the content. Dale was forever saying he’d fix it, but maybe there was a reason why he didn’t.

Francine grew tired of the pretense of eating. She dumped the mushed cereal in the bin, along with the spoon; another emerging habit. Cornice was always despairing at the perpetual disappearances of things like cutlery or clothing. After a moment’s consideration Francine tossed the bowl in too, covering it up with some newspaper. Once, she’d thrown Dale’s good lighter away, but regretted doing so when he’d subsequently educated Cornice on the importance of looking after his personal property.

Dale came into the kitchen and sat down to finish his breakfast. Cornice could be heard slow-ascending the stairs. Francine filled the sink and washed the pans on tip-toe. She could feel Dale’s eyes on her, then thought it was funny how she could feel anything that was so intangible. She wondered if she was wrong, that maybe Dale wasn’t looking anywhere at all – and she’d begun to doubt her instincts – but when she turned around, there he was, one hand held out, frozen in a gesture, as though he’d made an important point that she’d missed.

 ‘People need to learn,’ was all he’d say. And it was true, thought Francine. They did.

She announced her intention to go to school, as if this was an unexpected development, then put on her camo jacket and squeezed through the back door, sidling through the rainbow strips that always felt like they might, at any moment, become descending spiders. Francine waited outside for a few moments, to see what the house was like without her. It seemed less weighty, but still uneased. She calculated alternative habitation combinations: Francine + Cornice, Cornice + Dale, Francine + Dale, and knew which one was preferable, but what she couldn’t calculate was the formula by which it could be achieved.

 

From the bus stop across the road, Francine looked at the upper windows of the house. Through a gap in the curtains, she thought she could see Cornice, but the morning glare made it hard to be certain. The bus arrived and departed without Francine. Without thinking too much, she walked in the opposite direction to school, towards the industrial estate, where most of the town ended up working.

She saw enough people she recognized, but no one noticed she wasn’t going the right way. Possibly she just looked like someone who belonged there, a consideration that opened up new possibilities in terms of blending in, a skill she’d been honing since a young age. 

On her first day of elementary school, for example, when she’d stuffed herself into the cupboard beneath the sink in Mrs Johnson’s homeroom, and it’s taken the janitor and a pry bar to get her out. Or years later, when she’d infiltrated Miss Garbarino’s English group, in order to avoid attention in Mr. Naden’s much smaller class, whose forensic focus was unwelcome. That she’d been able to convincingly forge a letter from the principal sanctioning the transfer was a matter for the board, but it was also something Dale had taken in hand, given that he’d uncovered the deception during a rare appearance at her school.

 

But when Francine got to the estate, she kept walking, because there was no job yet for her to go to. She cut through empty lots, squeezed through fences and struggled over neglected areas whose prior purpose it was hard to figure. The further she walked, the more desolate and overgrown everything became, until she came to a place where the natural world asserted itself. She entered a copse that was dark and deep green; the air undiminished. Francine thought she might stay for a while. An hour or two. Forever.

The copse thickened and became woodland or a forest. Francine was unclear about distinctions between gradations of vegetated areas, but she was aware that beyond the estate was an expanse of land that was constantly being fought over between developers and conservationists; the sort of place that in later years she might be expected to frequent with her peers in the name of teenage transgression, had she been anyone other than herself. 

Slender trees broadened into mighty oaks. The forest – she had decided – became looming and dark. But at one point, over a thickerousness of felled or fallen trees, a glade opened up, in the center of which lay a body. Francine cleared a stump of leaves and took a seat to consider the matter.

 

The body was clearly a body, although it didn’t look like a person; a formerly-alive thing. It was supine, in the pose of a fallen asleep: one arm over the face as though post-faint, the other splayed out all a-drama. Francine thought about poking it with a stick to verify life was extinct, but something – an abstract and unclear idea – told her all she needed to know.

She wondered if a person stopped being a person when not alive, or if there was some other reason she was reluctant to apply a term more intimate than ‘it’. But she didn’t fret about this; Francine was familiar with such notions as separation and distancing with regard to coping and survival.

The body was dirty, but clothed. It was unclear as to how it might have gotten there, or what had happened post-arrival; there were no tracks, although there was trash, which included a packet of supermarket-brand potato chips.

Francine looked up and around. There were nests in the tree branches and hollows in the trunks. There might be any number of witnesses, if you counted animals, which – she imagined – no one did. Some of the clothes were torn and one of the legs was twisted the wrong way. Or else the other was; it was hard to tell. Regardless: things were out of place.

Francine had seen a body once before, but it was presentable, not like this. Outside of movies and TV, she wondered how many times the average person might reasonably be expected to be faced with death in any such way. Cornice had found one of her colleagues on the floor of the toilets that time, and Dale claimed to have discovered the chemistry teacher he was subbing for in the fume closet.

She walked around to the other side to see the face, but it was hidden by the arm, which pointed at Francine, offering up the ring on its finger. Not wanting to touch it, she put on her gloves. It made the operation tricky, but eventually the ring came off – a bright and heavy silver – and she placed it on her own finger, over the glove, where it just about fit. Nothing about this felt odd or surreal to Francine; much of what came to her in the world, she accepted. She placed a pebble at the head of the body and left.

 

Francine walked back the way she came, never certain if she was retracing her steps, or if the path she was taking was new, but certain signs gave her confidence: a brook looked familiar; so too a run of neglected fencing. Soon enough, the metal-stink of the estate filtered through to her, along with the echoing Doppler’s traffic. She was dry-mouthed and tired; an absence of appetite didn’t mean her body ceased to require food. Francine’s return to urbanicity felt like crossing over from an area of low pressure to high, with the corresponding pop in her ears.

She emerged into the oversprawl of the estate, not far from where she’d entered. The return leg coincided with the end of the day shift. Francine joined the rest of the workers walking home. She felt at ease among her people. There were many different jobs on the estate. Cornice had worked several times. Francine would be suited to at least one or two of them, but was indifferent as to what they might be.

Back home, Cornice was unseen, but her presence could be felt. Francine had never been able to explain it; it was as though she vibrated the air. Dale, on the other hand, seemed to exist constantly, even when not around. On this occasion, however, he was demonstrably present and might not have even moved had it not been for his shaved face and change of clothes; a gesture, in the event of a work summons, although he hadn’t been called up for weeks that seemed like months.

The table was set for dinner, but all three plates were empty and there was no aroma of the pending meal. Dale rose as Francine entered. She guessed that the school had informed him of her absence and wondered if a make-up lesson was about to be scheduled. It might have been, but Dale saw the ring on Francine’s finger and pulled at it, taking her glove off too.

No words were spoken and she was sanguine about the matter. Dale sat back at the table, appraising the item. Francine made a sandwich for herself and took it upstairs. Through a door ajar, she could see Cornice on her bed. Francine knocked softly, twice, and received the same in return. Satisfied, she went to her own room, then took up a pen and wrote quickly.

 

Nothing was said about her absence from school, but a few weeks later, Dale was arrested. Neither Cornice nor Francine attended the trial. Instead, they read about it online. Dale denied the charges and there wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty, but he’d tried to sell the ring, which hadn’t looked good.

The police interviewed Francine, of course, because Dale had told them where he’d gotten it from, but she claimed to have no knowledge of anything. That alone had probably damned her somewhere further down the line, but it was a matter for future Francine to worry about. We do some fucked up things, she thought, but: no. It was more that sometimes the world oriented people in the direction of fucked-upness and they chose to walk towards it. Dale had been unable to account for his whereabouts during certain and particular dates, so he ended up being charged with the lesser offense of obstruction of justice and given a year in Gilmore.

Cornice told Francine she wouldn’t be taking him back when he was released. Even so, the announcement hardly seemed newsworthy. She might have said they were switching to skim milk, or that it was going to rain later. It was possible, Francine supposed, that Dale was innocent and that a person who bore responsibility for a thing was out there somewhere, escaping justice and amazed at their good fortune. But even then, she reasoned, if only for a short time, there was one less bad man in the world.

JL Bogenschneider has had work published in a number of print and online journals, including The Stinging Fly, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Interpreter’s House, Necessary Fiction, PANK and Ambit.

If he met her, I know he’d find her charming. Doesn’t everyone? But I won’t taunt myself with doomsday prophecies. I won’t let her gate-crash my dirty weekend.

As we gobble up tarmac on the motorway, I pinch myself. I’ve waited eight weeks and eighty lonely summers to be swept off my feet.

“I’d like to take you away somewhere,” he said. “My treat.” 

My heart was booming, but I maintained an outward calm. As if I picked up propositions at Tesco’s deli counter, with my fifty grams of Cheshire and my slice of boiled ham. “Thank you, Tommy. I’d love that.” I didn’t mention it would be my first time.

I could have told him. He’s a sympathetic sort. He’d know of girls schooled to save ourselves for marriage, virtue banked for sunny days. Our mothers didn’t tell us what to do with unclaimed capital. They assumed their darling daughters would be wives like them.

Our mothers swore by courtship economics: a lady cloaks her real self with a comelier veneer. Never show your face without make-up. Never reveal the natural colour of your hair. Never express an opinion. Never admit your age. 

Some rules are eternal. Time turns others on their heads. My once-prized virginity is shameful now I’m eighty-three. So I’ve added another step to my bedtime routine. When I’ve put away the dental floss and cold cream, I’ve practised with a dildo and a tube of KY jelly. If my mother knew, it would disgust her. The thought sustained me through a rigmarole as peachy as a cervical smear.

Of course, I dreamt of pleasing Tommy. He’d hate to hurt me, but a man has needs. Although we’ve touched no more than hands and lips, I know he’ll want more.

Giddy with my daring, I reach across the gear stick to stroke his thigh. He flashes me a smile and reroutes his gaze to the road. Mirror-shoulder-signal before overtaking, and cruise control at a steady sixty-nine, he’s a careful driver. I’m in safe hands.

I was a bag of nerves this morning, hovering in the hallway with my pink trolley-case, as time ticked on. I couldn’t mistake the date, it being Mum’s birthday. Was the whole escapade a joke? A decade younger than me, Tommy could have his pick of widows, bachelorettes and divorcees. Why select a dusty spinster from a long-forgotten shelf?

Such a magical beginning, in the books, discs and knickknacks section of the Oxfam where I volunteer once a week. Tommy brought a box of 78s in vinyl and shellac and we bonded over Glenn Miller. After our chat, he decided to keep them. For helping him realise how precious they were, he offered to buy me lunch. I assumed we’d nip into the Angler’s – they do a pensioner’s special on weekdays – but Tommy fancied Chinese. We wrangled with the chopsticks, splattered sauce on the tablecloth, noodles missing our mouths. But I wasn’t embarrassed. It was part of the fun.

Now the traffic slows, the display boards on the gantry flashing 40 above all lanes. Tommy sighs. “Seems the stars are aligned against me.”

I repeat what I said this morning when he finally arrived to collect me, blaming poorly-flagged diversions down one-way streets. “Don’t worry. We’ve got all day to get there.”

He jiggles the gearstick. The car slinks to a crawl. “Not really. I’ve reserved a table for afternoon tea.”

“Let me ring up and cancel. There’s no point getting frazzled. Besides, if we stop for lunch I won’t have room for tea.” He doesn’t answer. Have I offended him with my indifference to cucumber sandwiches and clotted cream? “Tommy? Do you want to give me your phone?”

“Let’s hang on, shall we? See how it goes.”

“Whatever you think best.” I force a smile. “Still keeping our destination a secret?” All I can deduce from the road signs is we’re heading north.

“All in good time, my dear.”

My dear! As if I’m precious. My dear! As if I’m his. I ought to be thankful I’m claimed, but it weighs on me like itchy blankets from the dark age before quilts. 

I slip off my shoes, stretch out my legs, not bothering if it looks ungainly. I feel as spent as a child on Christmas evening. Is this thanks to guilt about Mum, or qualms about Tommy taking charge?

When he proposed this weekend getaway, I took it for granted we’d compare diaries for a convenient date. So I bristled when he announced he’d booked it. I kept my counsel, but he read the frustration on my face. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I should’ve run it past you. But the suite looks perfect on the website and this was the only available slot.”

I’ve never stayed in a suite. Always a single room in a B&B. “Don’t break the bank for me.”

“For us, my dear. For us. But I’ll cancel if you’re unhappy. I’ll lose the deposit, of course.”

I didn’t want Tommy losing money. And I so wanted to be an us. But it was Mum’s birthday. Unable to explain why that made a difference, I pretended Betty had tickets for Gilbert and Sullivan. Tommy still looked miffed. “I suppose she can pass mine on to someone else.” To be fair, I’d said in the Chinese restaurant I stayed in most weekends.

Whereas Tommy hasn’t a spare moment, jetting here, there and everywhere, visiting his children and grandchildren, and managing his rentals in France and Spain. Churlish to insist a man with a business and a family synchronise his schedule with the whims of a woman with only a weekly commitment at Oxfam and lawn bowls in the summer months. No friends apart from Betty. No relatives apart from Mum.

I mustn’t get uppity and sour our weekend. Not after denying Betty my company at a fictional performance of The Pirates of Penzance. Not after squandering my pension on a vibrator and lacy lingerie. I stifle a giggle as the traffic speeds up again. Maybe I can enjoy a man deciding for me. Maybe I will manage afternoon tea.

It took two strong coffees to summon the courage to walk into Ann Summers. Coffee that comes crowned with foam and backboned by a tot of whisky. I expected to feel like a vegetarian in a steakhouse, but it was closer to browsing in John Lewis. Half the doodahs there are a mystery.

When an assistant approached, I thought she’d redirect me to the local library. Yet if she was surprised to encounter an octogenarian on the premises, she didn’t show it. She was politeness personified, the way I imagine Tommy’s children and grandchildren to be.

He let me see their pictures on Facebook, proud as a peacock. And why not? It must be wonderful to create a living, breathing human being. Playing God. But if they were damaged, would you be the devil? Just as well marriage and children passed me by. 

I hope to earn a stake in Tommy’s offspring eventually. He’s hinted he plans to introduce us, but they live so far away. If this weekend works out, I’ll apply for a passport. Be primed if Tommy needs a partner for a family wedding or big birthday. I’ve even considered potential outfits for winter and summer; soothing thoughts as I thrust that replica penis up my fanny. 

“How hungry are you?” he asks me now.

Did he hear my tummy rumbling? Breakfast was hours ago: a digestive biscuit and a pot of PG tips. “I am a little peckish.” We might find a country pub near the next junction. With exposed beams and a log fire. Instead, Tommy eases the car onto the service-station slip-road. “If we grab a sandwich and get off sharp, we’ll make that booking. If that’s all right with you?” What can I say? He can’t do a U-turn.

As he helps me from the car, I stumble, but Tommy catches me. “Damn hip,” I say. I wobble to the concourse, trying not to drag on his arm.

Inside, franchises clamour for attention. Dazzling lights suck moisture from my eyes. Tommy steers me towards a smell like pollock and chips at the Angler’s, and parks me at an empty table. “Sorry it’s so basic. I promise you’ll have every luxury at the hotel.”

“I’m not fussed about luxury, Tommy.” The luxury is being with you. “According to my mother, a service station is where a holiday begins. When it opened, we took a coach trip to Watford Gap.”

He looks at me as if I’m an idiot. A senile fool. As if I’m a generation older, not ten years. Swapping his frown for a smile, he asks what sandwich I fancy. I don’t mention I’m cutting back on bread.

Watching him weave between the tables to the counter, I imagine he’s as fatigued as I am. When we reach the hotel, I could give him a massage. Unpick the tension knotted in his neck.

I slide my fingers under my collar to ease the strain in my own shoulders. Why did I mention my mother? Like unlocking a wildcat’s cage. Surely Tommy won’t ask where she lives or how she is. He’ll assume I’m an orphan, like most OAPs.

The mere thought of her unsettles me, however, puts a dampener on our weekend. Was I rash to come away on her birthday? 

It’s more than the date that’s put me in a stew: we’re encroaching on Mum’s stomping ground. I don’t drive, but I can read road signs and Leeds is less than an hour away. Yorkshire born, Mum hankered to settle there. For thirty years, I’ve kept my distance, in case she has.

Oh, it’s preposterous at my age. At her age, too. One hundred and eight and confined to a care home. How can she harm me now? 

Demoralised by silly anxieties, I’ve lost sight of Tommy at the sandwich bar. I study each grey-haired man in the queue and at the counter, each person crossing the room with a tray. He’s left me. He can’t have. He’s taken me at my word – or my mother’s – that the service station’s part of the appeal. I’ll be like that man trapped at an airport in a film I saw with Betty, rinsing my smalls in the Ladies’ sink. Already in debt after paying for the negligee and lurid pink suitcase, I’ll be destitute by morning. Tommy promised to pay for everything.

When he plonks a tray on the table, I almost beg him to take me home. Instead, I unload plastic-wrapped sandwiches and lidded polystyrene cups. “They’d run out of beef,” says Tommy. “Chicken okay?”

I could be in my quiet kitchenette spreading cottage cheese on oatcakes. Filleting a lettuce, imagining meat. “Where are you taking me, Tommy? We’ve been travelling for hours. Aren’t there any nice hotels closer to home?”

At the adjacent table, a woman with a nose-ring sniggers. Tommy walks past her to sit beside me on the bench. He takes my hand, brings it to his lips. “You’re right, I should’ve chosen somewhere nearer. I’ve upset you, when I meant to treat you like a queen.”

Already, I’m ashamed. “I’ll be fine and dandy when I’ve eaten.” My hands shake as I tear through a packet labelled coronation chicken. “It’s harder for you behind the wheel.”

“I don’t mind. It’s you that matters. Listen, I reckon it’s an hour and a half to the hotel. Can you last until then?”

Will ninety minutes get us through Yorkshire? 

“Or we can jack it in altogether,” he says, “Spend the weekend at the Travelodge.”

I laugh, hoping to restore both our spirits. As Betty says, you can always act cheerful, regardless how you’re suffering under the skin.

Back in the car, Tommy reclines the passenger seat so I can snooze. I let him, but I daren’t doze off in case I snore. Besides, my mind’s too busy: in Mother’s Own Country, and on her birthday, my thoughts belong to her.

I’ve been reckless. Got carried away like a girl. Tortured myself with that damned vibrator, as if virginity were the issue. I should’ve spent today as I’ve spent all Mum’s birthdays: under the duvet with a book. 

You’ll have to come in two years’ time, she cackles. It’s a biggie. 

I won’t. I’ll see her, as I do every year, in the papers or on TV.

There’s nowhere to hide, so don’t think it. Them reporters have ways of winkling you out.

Some bright spark will try to stage a mother-child reunion if the oldest woman in England lives to a hundred and ten. But Tommy will protect me. Take me far beyond the media’s reach. Two years from now, I’ll feel robust enough to confess.

Will our relationship prosper, if it’s founded in deceit? My mother advised building marriage on artifice, but wasn’t that a lie? 

How to explain without appearing callous? Or inferring my head’s as dodgy as my hip? It’s unnatural being scared of my mother. Obscene rejecting the woman I owe my life. My advanced age lowers the likelihood of being outed. Hers intensifies the disgrace if I am. Will Tommy ditch me if I disclose that my mother’s alive, but I don’t see her? Except as a national treasure on TV. 

 

The tick of the indicator and crunch of tyres on gravel jolt me awake before I’m aware I’ve nodded off. “We’re here,” says Tommy. “Are you ready for afternoon tea?”

He stops the car. Through the windscreen, wisteria drapes a sandstone wall. “We made it in time?” 

As Tommy unbuckles his seat belt, I prepare my stomach for gluten, my mouth for tooth-tingling jam. Is this what having a partner means: fasting when you’re hungry and feasting when you’re not? Yet our appetites tallied at that Chinese meal.

I’m wriggling out of the car when Tommy takes my arm. “You needn’t be so independent,” he scolds. 

Now, I understand: men find strength in women’s weakness. Living alone, with no-one else to rely on, I’d blocked the principal lesson of my girlhood.  Tommy would love to shield me from my mother. I only have to ask.

With his assistance, I haul myself out onto the forecourt. Rub my hip until I’m confident it won’t collapse. “Tommy, there’s something I should’ve told you.” It’s a gamble, but silence is worse: if I’m tetchy, Tommy should know it’s not his fault.

“No problemo. You can tell me over tea.” 

Inside, my heels sink into the carpet. The staircase could’ve come from Downton Abbey; the coat-of-arms above the reception desk too. Tommy inclines his head towards a door. “Have a seat in the lounge while I get checked in.”

“I ought to freshen up first.” 

“There isn’t time to go upstairs.” Is he indifferent to my appearance, or simply ravenous? Nevertheless, I have my standards. The receptionist directs me to the loos.

Pastel tissues, cotton-wool balls, single-use terry towels, perfumed soap and hand-cream: as sumptuous as the Ladies’ in my beloved John Lewis. Cloned by legions of mirrors, my face is more lived-in than jaded. As I embellish the exterior, I remind my reflection of the scars underneath. 

Not every mother is the wellspring of loving. Mine thought loving the job of her child. And I was a dutiful daughter. Before I could talk, I’d slain my own desires.

Brushing mascara through my eyelashes, I conjure Tommy across a tiered cake stand.

Friends were unwelcome. Boyfriends taboo. I stayed at home, doing her bidding, growing stale. When I realised I wanted her dead so I could live, I cut the cord.

Having touched up my lipstick, I clamp cherry kisses on a tissue and toss it in a basket. One for every ten Tommy will give me when he hears my confession and absolves me from my sin.

Even after thirty years’ estrangement, I quake at the thought of bumping into her. Like a Venus flytrap, she’d lure me in. I’d melt into her. Be reabsorbed. 

Tommy won’t let her. I exit the Ladies’ Room keen to embark on the next stage of our affair. 

My hero rises from the shadows of the entrance hall. “Come on, everyone’s waiting.”

Everyone? As we shuffle along, arms linked, Tommy seems tense. Am I to meet his family? I’m glad I powdered my nose.

Opening a rosewood door, Tommy steps aside to usher me through. The chatter halts as people swivel in their seats. As I try to match them to Tommy’s Facebook photos, I hope I look agreeable. 

Blinded by a camera flash, I stagger. Why didn’t I bring my stick? But now Tommy, dear Tommy, is beside me, guiding me towards a wizened woman enthroned on a high-backed chair. A glittery banner on the wall behind her: CONGRATULATIONS 110 TODAY! Didn’t he say his mother was dead?

As he leads me through a funnel of beaming faces, it dawns on me they’re not Tommy’s relatives. My mouth dries, my palms swim with sweat, but I’ll be all right, won’t I? You have to flout your fears to be free. 

I can tolerate Tommy discovering I’ve held things back from him. I can tolerate Mum deceiving her own daughter about her age. I can tolerate missing my chance to tell my side of the story, as long as I can have my dirty weekend.

As I’m pushed towards my mother, a man brandishing a notebook blocks our path. A reporter to snatch a quote, I presume, yet he ignores me to pump Tommy’s hand. “Thanks, Baz, I owe you.”

Baz? Baz! There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, but Tommy doesn’t flinch. In the press, they’ll show Mum’s triumph, and my grimace, airbrushed into old-fogey versions of joy. But the internet will favour the unadulterated version. With sound effects. My plaintive howl at Tommy doing the dirty on me. Over and over, on an infinite loop.

 

Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is inspired by her previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital. She has published almost 100 short stories including “With a Small Bomb in Her Chest” published in August 2018 by MIRonline. Website: annegoodwin.weebly.com

It’s three in the afternoon, and the flight from Hong Kong has not been kind. The highway flows freely and the sky is a periwinkle blue Dana loves to come home to, but neither the welcoming horizon, nor the prospect of recognisable beer and home dope, nor the thought of cruising the Castro, where the crew will likely jolly and hop until they bleed tonight, interest Dana at all. On his ride downtown, he can only think of the years that have elapsed since he joined Meridian, a big blur of code and aeroplanes and meetings in dimmed rooms with presentation screens. Dana is tired of pitching. Tired of development sprints and late nights. Tired of three AM messages and value propositions. The buyouts and partnerships. The endless chorus of middle-aged men trying to understand and keep up, eating from plates of carved fruit, hoping sugar will break their desperation. Sandwich trays and security checkpoints, cocktails with tiny red straws. Today, the Bay Area. Next week, China again. Then Wisconsin, New York, Rotterdam. Eighty-nine cents a share on his options, still thirteen per cent to vest on the long trail to freedom. He has been on this highway, coming back from the airport, perhaps hundreds of times. The long curve around South San Francisco’s bald hill feels too familiar, adding to Dana’s ongoing deja vu patterns, his unhinged rivulets of time, a continuing storm of comings and goings, endless capitulations and hollow regrets, his circadian rhythms cycling through seventy-two-hour diffusions that keep him locked into an everpresent present. After seven years working at Meridian, Dana can no longer remember who he was before he joined. It is hard to imagine a future outside of it. Hard to fathom any kind of future at all.

Traffic’s not bad, says the driver.

It’s not bad for a Friday, says Dana, looking at the gulp of swallows settling on the power lines by Brisbane Lagoon. He wonders what cliff they’ve nested in and how long their flight back to their proper South American homes will be, wanting to follow them, wanting to disappear in their murmurations, one of many, no-one at all.

You going out tonight? The driver asks.

Dana wants to tell him that there will be massive parties, huge gatherings, debauchery on a world-beating scale.

Nah imma stay home probably. Too tired.

Dana showers and watches tv in bed. Eating a pickle from a jar, he pours some vodka into a Nutella glass and takes several large gulps, flicking through streaming sites, scrolling through rows of movies that won’t do, like so many vulgar and insidious offerings.

He opens his laptop and drops the gym pants he ambitiously put on when he came in. He needs oblivion. On cam sites, he can be someone else entirely. Another self, without a face. Only a body doing whatever it is instructed, abandoning all semblance of control, all vestiges of identity. A meat robot following orders.

A few random men click through. He takes his t-shirt off, pulling his underpants down. The vodka bottle rests on his hip, obscuring his crotch, a demure mechanism to invite its removal on command. A large, hairy belly and thick, uncircumcised cock fill the screen.

Can you hear me, son? says the belly, implying a dominant protocol with which Dana is familiar, a nominative paternalism that he is happy to accept. Gruff voice, mid-sixties maybe. The hand holding the cock is wrinkled and foxed with sunspots. A thick, well-worn wedding ring presses urgently on his fat ring finger. He’s perfect.

Yes I can, he says, his voice changing already, going up in pitch, evolving into a persona his body reacts to with immediacy, grateful to be released from its suited form, arching his hips backwards, accentuating his effeminate, slender frame.

How old are you? asks the belly.

Twenty-one, Sir, Adam lies, adopting the submissive parlance he knows dom daddies expect.

Are you sure you’re not younger than that? You look young.

He does, though he is much older than his lie, which is why he never shows face. His body looks like he’s still a teen, courtesy of his Hispanic heritage. Men on cam sites often want him to be much younger than he is, and often, though he feels keenly the horror of their intention, he obliges them so they’ll give him the oblivion he wants.

Maybe, he says, afraid he’ll lose him if he doesn’t play the part. He doesn’t want to go back to random rolling. He needs to get out of himself now.

That’s ok. I don’t care if you are. Better that way, actually. You ok with that? I’m fifty-three.

Yes Sir.

What are you, Asian?

Hispanic.

Are you a good boy? says the thick cock, his wedding ring flashing dully in the screen’s light.

Yes Sir, Dana says, losing his breath a little, trembling. He can feel the man’s commitment now, his first order on the tip of his tongue, and he anticipates it with a longing he cannot explain, a hunger that soaks him through, its passion and surrender an obligation Dana feels as devotional, as an inevitable servitude. 

Grab that bottle, boy. I want you to take a really big swig of it and then put it down, ok?

Yes Sir, he says, doing what the man wants, swallowing several times, the ethanol burning his throat. He stills an urge to gag and puts the bottle down. He is already hard, and he can feel the man has noticed, his breath accelerating. The jerking motion of his arm makes his face shake. His beard rubs on the microphone, producing small rasping noises Dana feels as electrostatic tingles across his scalp, running the line of his spine downwards towards his buttocks and inner thighs.

Good boy. Slap that cock for me, boy.

He complies.

Harder, you little faggot.

He slaps himself again, ignoring the word, familiar with the way doms use it, unrelenting in their marital regret and dire need to dispense hurt. The pain travels through him, taking with it his memory and his name, his past and his future. Only his flesh remains.

Slap your balls, boy. And do it hard, so it hurts.

He does as he is told. Much deeper this time, the referred pain travels through his gut and stomach, the shared nerves and tissues between scrotum and abdomen recoiling in sympathy, tensing his whole body, locking him in. Nothing remains of him. His mind evaporates and only the pain is available, all other perceptive markers out of reach. His mouth issues a small lament, a half whimper, and he throws his head back, eyes rolling up. A comfortable and familiar blanket of nothingness engulfs him.

That’s right boy, moan for me. Now. Tuck your junk in, let me see what you look like as a girl.

This is the bit he most looks forward to, the bit he wishes all camdaddies would ask him to perform, though not all want it. It is the only time he gets to experience, even if briefly, the blissful state in which he feels like a real girl, when he sees the reflection of his ephemeral and temporary female form on their penile excitement, the acceleration in their hand as they jerk, the fat of their hairy bellies and sagging mantits shaking in febrile delight. It is the only time his too-feminine hips and hairless body make perfect sense. He basks in it for a few seconds, camdaddy moaning to himself, lost to his girlnotgirl fantasy, becoming a dump for the man’s most demeaning thoughts, his perfectly unmarital rage, his unseemly want, his morally decrepit fantasy, the screen a perfect prophylactic layer between the man and his desire to wreak havoc, his ultimate compulsion to breed and destroy. The sheer impossibility of it moves Dana, its sublime and terrible fate, and he feels for the man tenderly, open to his disaster, drinking his stupidity until he finishes, the screen going on to the next punter.

The phone buzzes.

Where are you? We’re out and we wanna play with you.

Dana sighs and taps a response.

Home. Just landed. Need sleep.

What are you, a hundred years old?

You know some people actually sleep right?

People do. You’re not people. You’re my genderfluid pansexual femboy Queen.

Yeah, ok.

You’re a split-tongue queer slut with occasional bloodplay tendencies and I want to indulge you.

Uh-huh.

I love you.

Sure you do.

And you need to leave that awful apartment and come join me.

No.

I will make your jetlag disappear.

Yes, and my health, and my dignity.

I will restore you and clean you.

Fuck off.

Come drink with me.

You’re so exhausting.

There’s someone I want you to meet.

Dana goes through a few more rows of desperately bad movies and realises that staying here will have consequences. The loneliness and absurdity of watching the obscure French movies he will eventually land on whilst getting drunk on his own. Waking up in the morning and wondering where this bed is, what city, what country, like a kidnap victim, until the slow realisation of San Franciscan gloom—leaden light licking window panes—creeps up through the apartment. An iced coffee and some diazepam later, the bus to the Valley will take Dana back to the 101, back to a desk and back to the penumbral misery of meetings and slide decks.

Ok. Where.

Where else.

Outside, breathing becomes easier. Dana’s lungs take in the smells of The Mission, mercurial and gamey, the pong and reek of piss and skunk, and he decides to walk to where his friend is waiting. The Help is a club hole with unusual and surprising dark rooms, peculiar drinks, and preternaturally queer punters. Inside, he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nostrils. Sweat and alcohol. Musk and hate and cruel little twink secrets. Voodoo-like curses and plaintive suspirations, born of carefully metered and gleefully accepted pain. Dana misses this smell more than one should admit, is homesick for it all the time, even though it represents a sort of sexual fluency as remote and unavailable to him as well-intoned Mandarin. He has never been able to engage and keep up a semblance of their protocols for long enough for the game to tip in his favour.

At the end of the club, by the darkly lit booths where the crew are sitting and holding court, there is someone he doesn’t recognise, talking to them. Tall and sombre, louring over the booth and the small clutch of Dana’s friends huddled together in what looks like admiration, he points at a couple of them, finishing some sort of anecdote Dana cannot begin to fathom but which is obviously effective, as the whole booth shakes with laughter.

Dana!

You’re such a harpie. I was about to go to sleep.

Tosh. Meet Gabriel, his friend says, intoning the name as though he might be the actual archangel instead of a portly middle-aged man who looks like drunk Santa.

Hi, he says, now smiling through his beard, remnant chuckles shaking his ample belly, still laughing at his own joke. Dana spots a Montblanc on his jacket’s ticket pocket, the girth of a fat thumb. On his wrist, as he offers his substantial hand, the familiar contours and shine of a Swiss watch Dana has seen before in corporate alpha dom daddies, its lugs and crown protuberant in the dense white hair of his wrist.

Hello, says Dana, his size kink rearing its ugly head.

After a few hours of drinking and sharing bits of various powders, Dana cannot help the temptation to find out, to elevate his ever-evolving cam fantasy, his daddy eidolon, to a physical reality. When he invites him, he relents, disarmed by his candor, by his own lack of protocol or contract, by his smile. The elevator to the man’s apartment glides effortlessly, for long enough to evidence a high floor, somewhere above the fog. Dana cups Santa’s bulge softly, wanting the quivers in his mouth to never stop. His bed is a gargantuan spread of white sheets and large cushions, and as he stuffs one underneath the soft pleats of Dana’s hips, a little sound comes out of his mouth, an unintended moan when Santa enters him, the searing pain giving over to waves of a kind of corporeal rapture Dana has never before known. The man’s ears are large and hairy, their long helixes giving over to fat dangling lobes. Dana grabs both of them in his hands, pinching his lobules first, then grabbing the lugs entirely, his fingers behind their flesh, his thumbs digging into their cavernous triangular fossa, pulling on them to bring his whole face to his. His body rests then, his whole substantial weight, on Dana’s, as he manages to pull him close enough to feel his breath. The weight takes his own breath away, and he whispers harder into his mouth in short airless grunts until he feels wet hot tears running down the sides of his face, unaware of anything else than the distention inside him, the breaking dam of his consciousness only able to hold on to the pain, a pain he has never had before, odorous and tactile and benign, the injury and its anaesthetic delivered in the same effort, as though someone has rammed their hole arm through him and grabbed and stopped his heart. He stops breathing and closes his eyes. The man notices the tears and makes to stop, pushing himself up with his arms. Unavailed of his weight and warmth, Dana opens his eyes, grabs his whole head and pushes him down again, letting him kiss the tears away at the corners of his eyes, imagining the salty taste in the man’s mouth and hearing himself breathe come come come near the man’s ear again and again until he growls, the sound of it preciously analogue and close, the needful and joyous mirror of so many camdaddy barks and snarling incantations. Dana feels him stop and become still and marvels at his rigid, quiet ecstasy, looking into his eyes, big as plates, blue as shimmering steel. He feels broken and elevated, used and reborn, refashioned out of the littered strands of his fractured mind and forged into a vital form, a vast and cacophonous sea of feeling that he is unable to contain. The man puts a hand over Dana’s mouth to contain the scream, and Dana puts his own hand over it, pushing the man’s fingers into his mouth and biting them to stop himself from screaming again. The man smiles and topples over, grimacing as he takes Dana with him. On top of him now, his head on his chest, he looks out the window at the towers of the financial district and the twinkling sea of domestic lights beyond, lying like a frog on a boulder on the man’s large hairy belly. The city looks like a shimmering blanket of fireflies as he falls asleep on him, his large hand tugging Dana’s hair softly.

In the morning, Dana shakes the kidnapped fug off and quickly realises this place is not home. High above the din and hustle of lower terrarian creatures below, this bed sits somewhere near the top of what must be, Dana realises, Millenium Tower or some such outlandish edifice, towering over downtown, surrounded by Salesforce buildings. Dana runs his fingers through the folds in the sheets looking for a warm body, for corporeal evidence. None appears, but from beyond the two-storied glass walls, kitchen noises can be heard, the comforting sound of vapour being pressed through grains, plates being slid out of their cupboards. The man comes into the bedroom holding a tray, and Dana remembers him from the bar.

You’re awake.

Dana coughs in assent.

I thought you might be hungry. And possibly hungover.

Dana lifts the sheets, half-heartedly confirming nakedness, and looks for scattered clothes.

I put your clothes on the chair.

Dark Santa is wearing a white robe, his belly partly showing through the middle. He sits down on the side of the bed and places the tray down on its own little legs. He smiles and puts his hand on the small of Dana’s back, pushing down with gentle force. Dana’s whole body responds, flashes of the night before coming through now in cinematic force. A pulse runs through Dana’s body, an electric eel of phantom innervation and rapture, and every bone relaxes and distends, hips giving way, ribs softening.

Dana looks at the tray, sitting up.

Silver-cuffed cups with steaming black coffee. Little frozen shot glasses filled to the brim with vodka. Slices of lemon. Several oysters, and little porcelain dishes of red and black caviar. Thick curled butter shavings and dark black bread slices. Little croissants, two pots of orange marmalade, unlabelled jams.

I make the marmalade myself, at my farm.

Dana takes one of the shot glasses, downs it, and then, without speaking but looking at Santa’s eyes, which appear now to have shed their sombre shadings, shining with a clear, kind and tender watchfulness, takes a sip of coffee. It tastes earthy, as though the beans have been buried in wet ground. Dana can smell mushrooms, dark promises, quiet seas and low earth, and groans with pleasure, giving in.

Santa smiles.

Sumatra Mandheling. The beans are partly dried on the ground. Wonderful acidic balance, don’t you think?

What’s your name again?

Gabriel, says Santa, on a Saturday morning when leaden skies have been replaced by iridescent blue and gloriously distant elemental clouds in the shores beyond the bridge, on a morning when Dana can no longer contain the multitudes that usually inhabit this malformed husk, this multifarious vessel that can no more explain itself than it can usually host pleasure or interest any more, perhaps until right now, perhaps until this moment when Dana looks up at Gabriel’s kind face and launches for his lips, grabbing his polar bear cheeks with both hands, kissing him deeply, thinking I can be your untamed thing, your horny pet mutt, your genderweird femboy maidwife if you want. I’ll feed you boysmell-scented poppers until you choke, embarrassed by your want. I will give you everything. I will let you rain orbital bombardment-level twink obliteration on me.

Back in Shenzhen through Hong Kong, Dana sits in his caged tower and ponders the greyness of tech cities listening to a Berlin House playlist. The long Weekend club mixes he has lovingly curated over many Meridian years to make travel bearable. A sniff of white powder from the little snuff box, crushed Ritalin from pills he knows are safe to travel. A little swig from a vodka bottle, a few CBD gummy bears (also travel-friendly as they look like Haribo). Gabriel’s message streams through.

You’re far away.

So are you.

Where today?

Shenzhen.

Fixing the world?

Undoing previous fixes. Didn’t take.

You ever wonder whether it’s worth it.

Every twenty minutes or so.

Why not try something different?

You got any bright ideas?

Come work for me. My foundation.

Cannot work for you, and you know why. And I’m not done vesting Meridian.

I don’t want you to work for me personally. I want you to run the foundation.

No boss is bossless. You’d be on the board.

Complete freedom of operations.

No such thing, Santa.

Ok, anyway. San Francisco Opera are doing Les Indes Galantes.

?

Rameau.

?

French Baroque. Gayest Opera ever. There’s a homo wedding in it kinda. You’d like it, I promise. I know the director.

Oh.

Are you back on Friday?

Yes.

Come with? We can go to my farm after. You haven’t seen it yet.

 

Dana thinks about this and realises that for all of Gabriel’s soft and profound kindness, nothing will ever balance out. The pain of countless value proposition redesigns. The sprints and objectives and key results, the performance reviews, the endless emails and messages. One could surrender. One could spearhead something. One could get off the call and refuse to leverage the leveraged buyout, refuse the next martini, become untethered, burn out and drop off, like beef falling off a bone.

On the flight back, Dana benzos his drinks sitting at the bar, the upgrade fortuitous and welcome. The ride back is strange, the 101 spitting and sputtering like something has gone wrong farther down.

I don’t know what’s going on here, says the driver.

Something’s wrong, says Dana, looking at the water, the ripples at once normal and strangely unsettled.

The apartment is also wrong somehow. Unmoored, something worrying the block’s foundations. Dana drops the luggage and comes out again, finding an app rental car and moving through downtown, driving out of the city, wanting to focus on something menial, trying to shake the energy that is quickly engulfing everything.

Clear of downtown, Dana gets on to the Oakland bridge and looks at the sign for the Treasure Island exit with some bemusement, marvelling at the colour of the sky between Treasure Island in front and Angel Island on the left, Alcatraz just visible through the side of North Beach. A long line of thin Cirrus clouds point straight to Angel and towards Tiburon and Sausalito, and the Muir Woods beyond that. A perfect cornflower blue sky, deepening to dodger blue at the top of the skyline. If one went out to sea right now, the horizon’s offing would be a thick gradient line of Alice blue, Dana thinks. The fog flows bay-ward. The smell of brine and eucalyptus mixes with the car fumes and thick truck exhaust.

Dana feels like every cell in this body, this angular and pseudofeminine traitor, is singing and humming with the world, vibrating in sync with the coiled zing of the bridge suspension cables. Howling in resonance with the sea lions below. Atomised and dispersed into the fog, caressing the hills, on its way to the deep recesses of the bay. Dana feels like the Santa Ana winds. Mysterious and dangerous. Unhinged, perhaps, but not sad. Not sad. Sick with longing, but not unhappy. There is a raft of messages piling up on the phone perching on the dashboard, coming in and out of vision as they pop up on top of the maps app, which Dana has put on for no particular reason, not knowing where to go. The car drives through Richmond and into San Quentin, merging into the 101 at San Rafael, and there’s a sense of relief, the four lanes mostly empty now.

The Redwoods to the left, the car windows down, the faintest but still perceivable smell of eucalyptus and pine. By the time signs for Olompali State Park appear in the distance, the car and Dana are in a groove, affixed to the long, sinuous curves of the 101. Hands at the bottom of the wheel, seat reclined, head on its rest, he follows the long folds and crevices of the road. Car dealerships and fast food signs are slowly replaced by small rolling hills, shadows in the dark, interspersed with the occasional town. Peta Larentia. Santa Rosa. The 101 running just above the treeline, house lights and the odd mall underneath. He is a flying suburban condor, surveying the endless spread of ticky-tacky houses. The Old Redwood Highway spreads before him in a straight line, through Windsow and Healdsburg, through Asti and Cloverdale, the asphalt grooves softly bumping him, cradling him into a waking slumber. Vineyards and eighteen-wheelers, signs with pseudo-Italianate names. 

A sudden patch of newly-paved highway swarms the car into silence, throwing Dana into a vacuum. Something stirs within him. A new framework of despair, a looser, wider, more encompassing paradigm. A flash of a night with Gabriel brings back the feeling of something snapping into place in his body. Trying to recall it, the image of a Hippocratic board comes to mind, atlas and axis vertebrae distending and straightening, like someone fixing a spine. It is a feeling of utter relief, Dana suddenly realises with a jolt, twitching and swerving, the car losing its lane for a moment.

He gets off the 101 and takes the turn for the 128, driving for a bit with high beams on, the light changing with gloaming. Pulling over right after Alderglen Springs, leaving the car at a hairpin bend, Dana walks fast up the hill in the dark, the moonlight lighting the way as he follows the lee of the hill, finding a gap towards its shoulder and reaching its brow, where it is lighter.

The climb is exhausting. Dana stands and looks down the other side towards the brae, falling down to another vineyard, and then looks up. A cloud of bats above the crag swoop in spiralling streams, a patchwork quilt of flapping high pitch sound, granular synthesis in flight.

Sitting down, Dana’s eyes adjust to the darkness. Rolling hills lay in the distance, slumbering giants with small vineyards at their feet. A lucid, piercing clarity invades him. The air is balmy, the soft breeze from the hills rolling over the brow. Laying down softly on the heather and log grasses, Dana feels the trembling deep within the hill, the rumbling increasing, the fault slip giving way, the stress at its edge overcoming the friction, the first of the waves travelling through him, unstitching him, his heart a wingbeat, a skiff on the shoaling tide, surrendering.

 

David works in biometrics software. Writing is his form of resistance. He is based in London and is currently attending the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. You can contact David here