Scalpels - wikimedia

Craig Smith

I Want To Go Home by Miki Lentin

I Want to Go Home

I lay on a stainless steel tray, the ones that butchers use to display pieces of meat. A scratchy gown tied around my neck covered my front. My arse exposed and cold against the steel. My head freezing. My body prickly with goose pimples. I shivered.

Why was it so cold?

Are you cold? A nurse asked rubbing my bare arm, her body close to mine so I could almost feel her warmth. I was parched. I hadn’t drunk anything that morning. Do you want to warm up? I nodded, and as I did, a blast of hot air rushed into an inflatable mattress made of plaster-like material, lathering my body apart from my head with heat as if I was slowly being defrosted, moulding against my sides, squeezing my arms against my body, locking me in.

I was stuck.

Just like that walk I went on with my father when I was eleven, when we got lost in the snow.

Nausea rose from my guts.

And as my body lay still, waiting for my heart to be healed, the mist, the lonely shivering feeling of being lost, huddled together, looking for a way out, came to me.

At that moment, I couldn’t quite remember how I’d got to Barts Hospital in the centre of London, on the edge of the meat market. Where blood is washed into the drains, where butchers’ whites are stained red, where entrails are tossed into bins. The day was air hair-dryer thick, the brightness of the sky made my eyes water. My head was heavy, hungover, fuzzy. How had I come to lie on this freezing steel sheet?

I turned my head and saw machines displaying blinking numbers and graphs and charts with some names I didn’t understand; suction, steriliser, evacuator, concentrator, defibrillator, c-arm, ventilator. I stared at them until they blended into a silhouette of the derelict, cavernous Hellfire Club in the Dublin Mountains where we’d walked that day.

I counted five, maybe six voices. Some behind a glass screen. Some scuttling around my body. One of the machines printed a till like receipt that the nurse tore off. Trainers squeaked. A medicinal, metallic smell of iodine. No windows. Automatic doors whooshed open every few seconds.

M had dropped me off two hours earlier. Tears had rolled down her cheeks. I told her I’d be OK, to stop worrying. If you worry and cry it will make me cry. I’ll call you and the kids when I’m free to go, I’ll see you later. Her fingers gripped mine until the last second. My arse slid onto a plastic chair in the waiting room, copies of the morning Metro lying dog-eared on the ground. Opposite me a bald man with blood blisters dotting his scalp sat bent forward, his head in his hands, as if all his life was there, between his knees.

You had to walk three miles a day. That was the rule, the doctor’s rule. Sometimes we’d walk around the block and sometimes around the park and sometimes we’d walk in the mountains.

I wanted to shut my eyes and drift off, but there was too much pulling and shoving and fiddling going on. I was being prepped. Velcro straps applied to my arms, tight socks snapped up my knees, my groin shaved, clips clasped to my fingers, my glasses removed, canular in my wrist, drip attached. I watched a drop fall from a bag of liquid into a translucent tube and wondered why it took so long for each heavy drop to slowly collapse, one, after the other.

It was a Sunday, you said you needed to walk, I agreed. We always walked in the mountains on a Sunday. Saturday was going to town day, but on Sunday you read the papers, returned to bed, had a bath and walked after lunch. I told you that it was cold, and I didn’t want to go. I’d already played football that morning and was exhausted, I said, sloping against the bannisters. I had homework. But my mother insisted. Keep your father company, but really, I knew that you had no one else to walk with. Why me? I mumbled. Why me?

Can I? Yes, the nurse brought her face close to mine. I could see her make-up caked onto her cheeks, covering dark circles under her eyes, too many late shifts. Her smile was warm, her breath sweet, her lips sticky with sleep. A nurse’s watch that was clipped to the chest pocket of her scrubs dangled in front of my eyes. It had one of those tiny second watches in the middle of the watch face, where the second hand rotates at speed. I stared at it, mesmerised that something so small, so accurate, so perfect, could move so fast. 8.30am. Yes? she asked. Can I get a drink of water please? Sorry, you have to wait until we finish. But I’m… I coughed. Doctor’s rules.

Wait. I’d waited months to get this heart ablation done. Delayed. Date. Delayed. Date. Lockdown. And then one of those NOREPLY texts that said that my operation has been postponed and there was no news when it would happen and don’t contact the NHS as they can’t help now. My GP wasn’t taking calls, so I was stuck, in limbo, waiting to be treated. But then one day, a call. Are you available? When? In three weeks? Have you been taking blood thinners? Yes. And now this procedure that I’d thought about in minutiae in my head, that would correct the jumpy beats of my heart, put it back together and stop me developing something more serious had arrived. I’d spent months wondering about the slice they’d make to the flesh of my groin. Would it hurt? Would blood spurt from my leg? Would someone speak to me while they were fiddling with my heart? But as I lay there on the serving tray, my body stiff, I felt jittery and alone. As if I was no longer in control of my body. I’d passed control on, to the voices around me.

What are we waiting for? I asked. Don’t worry, the nurse rubbed my arm again. We’ll start soon.

Overhead, a buzzing circular light, like a discus. My eyes drifted around the edge of the light, circling, until the disc became a shadow against the ceiling. My vision glistened with fractals of yellow, splodges of blue and oily filters of red, orange and crimson. Looking at the light, I felt as if I was about to float off. I had that feeling I’ve always had since I was a kid of wanting to have a bird’s eye view of my body. To see myself from above, to float, to see what the light could see.

You parked. It was just after two, but the car park was emptying apart from a few walkers who were returning from their treks with their dogs. The winter sun was low and stubbornly shone into our eyes, glimmering above the horizon. We started to walk along the gravely path towards the now burnt out Hellfire Club at the top of Montpelier Hill in the Dublin Mountains. A building once used as a den of iniquity by dabblers in black magic, debauchery and Satan worship in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, or so legend has it. I’d never been inside. You said it was unsafe, even today, full of yobs, drunks, lads who smoke, take drugs and drink straight out of bottles. You never know what might happen to you in there, you once said. I never understood why we walked to the Hellfire if you didn’t like it? Perhaps you wanted to peek inside, see what it was really like. But you could never be tempted in, and it was easier to avoid it if I was there, even though I sensed that it intrigued you as much as it did me.

Now, a little bit of local anaesthetic, the surgeon said. I moved my eyes from the light and looked towards my feet where I could just about see the point of a syringe being pressed into my groin. Numbing drip on my skin and then, scratch. I didn’t feel much and wondered if they’d notice the stretch marks pocketed around my groin, my fleshy thighs, my hairless legs. I wanted to cover up, my balls, my knees, my feet. My arms were stiflingly hot by now, tingling with what felt like sunburn that zipped down my sides. My head still cold. I wriggled uncomfortably, unable to move, stuck in this position.

The cold wasn’t bitter, but a steely breeze rushed onto our faces every few minutes. After a while the sun faded into a blurry disc, and the sky turned dishwater grey. Wind whipped the tops of the pines that danced on the edges of clouds. Birches swayed. Trunks creaked.

Going towards your heart now, the surgeon said.

I had watched an animated video that explained that to get to the heart, the surgeon needs to thread two flexible tube like catheters, with a cauteriser and a camera at the tip of each one, through the femoral artery that travels from the groin to the chest cavity and heart. So far, apart from the scratch, I hadn’t felt a thing. There are no nerve endings in blood veins, but I wondered how perfect the lens of the camera has to be so it can send sharp images to a flat screen monitor that the surgeon glanced at in front of him every few moments. There, on screen were my insides. Insides I’d longed to see, become acquainted with, feel for myself, but I couldn’t make much out. All I could see on the screen from my position was a mix of red and black, blobs of moving objects that all looked the same, floating, bobbing, sloshing in a bubbly soup.

I’m at your heart now, the surgeon said.

A cloth sheet was clipped to the arm of a tripod and placed in front of my face. I could no longer see the machines or the monitor or the pulling and tugging that was going on at my groin. The now numb bottom part of my body felt strangely detached from me.

You and I were never prepared for our walks in the hills. I would jealousy look at other walkers in their laced-up boots, waterproof jackets and walking poles and back packs that no doubt contained flasks of tea and snacks. And socks. Oh, those socks. Thick, luscious socks that stretched up the calves of walkers over their trousers. And there we were in our trainers, you in white Asics and me in tennis shoes. You wore a grey scarf wrapped around your neck, a duffle coat, and a pair of cords. I zipped my hoodie up to my chin. You marched ahead, said there was a three mile loop you were keen to do before it got dark. I followed, running after you every few steps to keep up. The route took us into a thicket of trees. My trainers snapped twigs as we walked up a steep track. The ground smelt of bog, fresh and moist, like a wet dog. After a few minutes we emerged through the trees and stopped at a pylon, where on a clear day you could see the city stretch out below and the red lights of Poolbeg Power Station.

I was now being prodded with invisible hands, played like a puppet. Needles were threaded further up a vein into my chest. And as they were, I sensed a pressure. A weight. A force, like something was rummaging in my insides. A spider spindling behind my ribs, tickling me, a lightweight pinball ricocheting, skipping from rib to artery to muscle to sinew to vein, the threads and tubes being controlled by a gloved surgeon. A puppet master, standing at my leg, using a spring loaded lever to pull at me, yank me about to his command. And me, unable to see a thing. My body now sickly hot, my head still frozen.

We walked. You with your hands in your pockets, me now dropping behind listlessly kicking stones, like when I used to kick pebbles under moving cars, enjoying the hollow sound of them rattling and echoing under chassis as they drove past. Five minutes later, you took an apple out of your coat pocket, shone it against your cords and once you’d examined its shininess, bit into it, the juice from the fruit glistening your bristly chin. You always ate apples down to the core, nibbling the fleshy edges meticulously before crushing the core with your teeth, until all that was left were the pips and stalk that you tossed onto the dense forest floor that filled the edges of the path. You didn’t talk that much, at least not on this walk. As if something was bothering you.

The pressure dropped, as if it was about to rain.

The pressure in my chest intensified.

My skin felt like it was now being stretched from the inside, and at any moment I’d see a wire or a finger protrude through my skin. Everything felt taut, snappy, wiry. The weight on my chest increased. I coughed. I wriggled with discomfort. Are you OK? another voice said from behind the screen. Are you OK? asked the nurse. I eyed the heart monitor to the right of my head that blinked and beeped. 59, 58, 57, 54. Why is my heart at 54? I asked, my voice raspy. I don’t know, the nurse said. Do you want me to stop? the surgeon asked from behind the screen. I don’t know, I wanted to say. No, I hesitated. If we stop, you’ll only have to come back. Is it safe? I asked.

My hands were now red raw. My toes tingly and feet squelchy in my damp socks. I asked you how much further? I asked the nurse how much longer? Come on, don’t worry, you said. Try not to worry, the nurse said again. Come on. Let’s get to the Hellfire Club. I’m at your heart. Keep up. Stay with us. I am.

And then it started, the snow that is. It had crept in on us. A few damp patches on my jacket at first, and then tufts drifted onto us from the tops of the trees as they hit the ground. Gradually the snow became thicker, heavier, stickier. It whitened our coats, shoes and trousers. Thick handfuls, stubbornly not melting, like fuzz. But you had to walk, every day, and I’d agreed to come, so we kept going. I’m cold, can we go back. Come on, you said. We’ll be there soon and then we’ll go. But how will we get down? Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll loop around. We always get down.

Starting to cauterise, the surgeon said.

I’d read that a heart ablation burns scar tissue on the muscle of the heart to block irregular electrical signals and the palpitations I’d been feeling these past few months. Burning my insides, charring me from the inside out. What happened to the bits of burnt tissue I wondered? Did they float away among my insides, evaporate into nothingness?

Press, the surgeon said. And at the moment, someone, I couldn’t see who, pressed onto my diaphragm. I started to hiccup. They’d warned me of this. Three minutes of hiccupping to create space in my chest cavity, to get to the left side of the heart where the irregular signals were coming from. To help me relax, they said, but it felt like I was trapped in an airlock, air spurting from my lungs.

You and I continued to walk up hill. There was still some give in the snow. Our shoes dug into pristine whiteness leaving footprints that would soon be covered. I could see the Hellfire Club at the top of the hill, its grey stone that was usually covered in ferns and moss, now sprinkled with snow. OK, let’s stop, you said. And at that moment, I looked up at you. Are you OK? I asked. Your usually blushed cheeks were pale, your eyes were blinking rapidly, your glasses water-stained. My head is cold you said, rubbing your bald scalp with your hand, and then you wrapped your scarf over your head. I laughed. What’s so funny? It’s just… you look funny. Thanks a lot, you said. Come on.

The hiccups continued. I gasped for air, my body juddering.

We walked uphill for what seemed like half an hour. The snow intensified. I could barely feel my toes, my fingers, my lips. No one else was out. The sun had all but disappeared. Every so often snow crashed in large clumps from the trees making me jump. The snow was now ankle deep, so you slowed your walk. I noticed your breathing had become laboured. You stopped every few minutes and bent over, as if to relieve a stitch, and stuck your tongue out of your mouth to try to catch a few snowflakes for water. My nose dripped. My eyes watered. My ears frozen.

We climbed another fifty metres before coming to a fence covered in heavy vegetation blocking our way up, the Hellfire Club now invisible behind the mist and drifting snow.

I can’t get to the left side.

What? I asked.

I can’t get to the left side, the surgeon said.

Call Professor Hunter. Now.

54, 52, 50.

Shoes squeaked, the light above me flickered, the door to the theatre whooshed open, closed, open.

What’s going on? I wanted to ask, but all of a sudden there was no one to ask.

Where was everyone?

There was no one near me, at least not that I could see.

Muffled voices came from what sounded like another room, probably looking at my insides, noticing an anomaly.

Something was wrong.

50, 52, 48.

Leaping now, my heart was pounding.

Sweat dribbled down the side of my forehead wetting the inflatable.

My head was still frozen.

Where was everyone?

And then the light above me went off, as if a bulb had sizzled and blown.

Hello? I coughed. No answer. Silence, apart from the beeps from the machines. Time slowed, became heavy. And at that moment, I felt very much alone, abandoned, and all I could think of was that walk, and that we were also alone, unable to find a way out, in a mist that had enveloped us. A steam room. Soupy. A certain kind of mist. The kind of mist you can disappear in. The kind of mist when you can’t know for sure what might be beyond the clouds. The kind of mist where you have to feel your way through the drizzly blank greyness with your hands. The kind of mist where even the droplets of water that teeter on the skeleton like branches of trees look heavy, almost blue.

And then I’m a child again, alone, looking up at you, wired up, strapped in, lying on your own steel tray, like all the times I saw you in hospital, blood sodden bandages wrapped around your groin, staples holding your chest together. No one else is in the ward. Machines beeping. I rest my head on your warm chest, your chest hairs tickling my face, your body so big against mine, hot tears dampening my face.

We can’t go on, I said. Of course we can, this is a circular route, you said. But it’s blocked. I know the way, we’re nearly there. This path goes up and then around. But I’m freezing. Ah come on, you said, it’s only a bit of snow. You won’t freeze. A few more minutes. I’m sure this is the right way. But there is no way through. Can’t we go back the way we came? I’m sure this is the right way, the paths are circular, they’re all circular. Come on, help me find an opening.

A rush of feet. Now then, a new voice, let’s find an opening to the left side. Pressure on my chest. Hiccupping. The light fizzed back on. I want to go home, I mouthed.

I want to go home, I said. I’m sure we can get through this, you said, as you started to shake the fence vigorously trying to open it, grabbing it with both hands, as if for some reason you were determined to break it and not let a wooden fence covered with vegetation and snow stop you from completing your walk. But the fence wouldn’t budge. All your shaking did was cover our shoes in more snow.

I shook you on the steel tray. Wake up, I wanted to shout, wake up. Don’t be like this. Wake up!

And then you paused and turned to me and quietly said, I’m cold. I’m really cold. I looked at you. You were shivering. Your scarf was saturated, matted against your head. I think I need to sit down, you said. You can’t sit here, come on, let’s go, but with one arm on my shoulder you sat down in the snow, bent your knees and put your head in between them, as if all your life was buried between your knees. You untied the scarf from your head and wringed it, letting the drops of water fall into your mouth and rubbed your head. I didn’t know what to do. What was wrong with you? Why were you sitting down? Why weren’t you saying anything? We had to go, go home, get out of the snow, find our way back to the car, but you just sat there, not looking at me, staring into the snow, perhaps waiting for the mist to cover you, leaving you and me hidden, alone.

Cauterise. Camera. Pull. Left side. Hiccup. Monitor. Screen. Head. Beep. OK? Light. Lens. Hot. Cold. Pulse. Watch. Screen. Syringe. Sharp. Voices. Voices. Voices. Three, four voices now all at once. Left side. Shit. Left side. No. Left side. Got it. Cauterise. Pull. Camera. Monitor. Three minutes. Hiccups.

I helped you slowly up to your feet. We stood looking at each other. Your eyes were wet with tears. Your voice soft. Your breath smelly. I think, you said. My heart, you said. It doesn’t feel right. What should I do? I asked. I don’t know. Get some help? I can’t leave you here. Why not. You go, son, you go. I’ll be fine. I’ll wait. Follow the path back. The path I now couldn’t see. What path? You have to come with me. I can’t. I can’t move. It hurts. You have to go and get help, you said breathlessly. Run, run.

And then I just left, left you alone. I didn’t look back. I ran, my feet at first digging into the snow, bursts of snow drifting into my eyes, my heart pounding in my chest, stumbling on rocks and branches I couldn’t see underneath, reaching my way through the mist, not thinking that I’d just left you alone, not thinking if I’d ever find you again, not thinking if you’d be there when I got back. As the path turned downhill I sped up and ran like my life depended on it. As if the snow wasn’t there, lifting my knees to my chest, my arms pushing me forward, slaloming around trees, hurdling over logs, my legs brushing against each other the only sound, longing to run away, to find an opening, the wind in my face, but not holding me back. Even though it was cold I started to warm up and wanted to rid myself of my jacket which I unzipped, an exhilaration coursing through me, enjoying the freedom, the freedom of not walking, the freedom of being alone for that brief moment in the open air, forgetting that I’d left you behind sitting in the snow.

Your hand moved onto my head that rested on your chest, ruffling my hair, tickling the back of my neck. It’s only a bit of blood, you mumbled. I’ll be OK. Don’t be scared.

I ran on. And then an opening of trees to an expanse of sky. Two walkers. A dog. And socks, and gloves and backpacks. I waved my arms. They didn’t stop. I sprinted across the ground, waving my arms. I skidded. Please, I bent over breathless in front of them. Please. My father, I pointed, my dad.

One of the walkers came with me to find you while the other went for help. You were still there, still sitting in the snow by the fence, white. You hadn’t moved. Your head was still in between your legs. I was afraid to touch you, half expecting you to be dead, but you must have heard us approach because you turned your head to me and smiled, as if you knew that I’d come back.

The hiccups stopped. The screen came down. Tape stuck to the cut in my groin. Canular removed. Velcro unzipped. You’re all done, the nurse said as air escaped the inflatable. My arms loosened against my sides. My head warmed up. My toes played. The circular light blinked back on. The heart monitor switched off. You did well, the surgeon said.

The walk with you drifted out of my mind as I was wheeled out of the operating theatre, leaving the voices, the machines, the tubes, the light, the beeps behind.

I waited to be discharged. We waited an hour. I was told I could go. Paramedics arrived. A bloody soaked bandage on my leg. A silver blanket wrapped around you. A plaster on my arm. A hat put on your head. A bruise where the canular had been inserted. A mug of tea in your shaking hands. A walk to the reception area. A stretcher to the car park. Your hand in mine, surprisingly warm.

Miki Lentin is a writer and consultant in the cultural and creative sectors. He started writing when travelling the world with his family a few years ago and then completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University. Since then, he’s been a finalist in the Irish Novel Awards, received second prize in the Fish Publishing short memoir prize, and recently was longlisted in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. Earlier this year, he released a collection of short stories with Afsana Press called ‘Inner Core’, with all the proceeds from the sales going to the refugee charity Foodkind. Miki can be found at https://www.mikilentin.net/my-writing on Twitter @mikilentin and on Instagram @mikiwriter
Westerton Station, taken by Daniel from Glasgow

Craig Smith

Anatomy of a short struggle, or, An eventful journey by train, by Mark Haw

‘Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

i. The still point neat Westerton

They had inserted a still point just before Westerton, north-west suburb of Glasgow: under the hill, beside the housing estate. Our train came to a halt there.

Behind and ahead of us the world was still turning, the east and west revolving about an axis that speared through the globe from cold north to warm south—But here, a still point.

The train ticked calmly. Nothing remarkable was happening. Was it? It seemed fantastically unlikely to me, suddenly, that here, just before Westerton, under the hill beside the housing estate, there would be a ‘still point of the turning world’. And then, before I really knew what I was doing, seized by a feeling that everyone needed to know, I stood up and announced loudly, down the carriage: “This is a still point of the turning world!”

Part of me, observing from the side, was wondering what on earth I thought I was doing. But the constraints that normally stop you doing this kind of thing? Just for a moment they weren’t there.

One or two people glanced up. To be honest most people didn’t even notice. Most of them had earphones or headphones on, listening to this or that on their devices, staring at their scrolling screens, and they probably didn’t even know something was happening. A woman glanced blankly at me, her consciousness clearly somewhere else; a middle-aged man (I recognised him, a fellow commuter, one of the suited men who work at the Glasgow City Council headquarters on George Square) just slightly shook his head, half an inch either way, without looking up. Probably thought I was one of those crackpots or drunks.

I sat down. The feeling that had gripped me, the requirement that everyone know what was happening, had gone. I half expected Scotrail to apologise. They apologise for everything else. And then the still point moved on somewhere else, and our train moved on, and the world moved on. We reached Westerton, people got off, people got on, the usual comings and goings. Into motion again.

As we passed the canal I saw a fox, curled in the undergrowth. It glanced up at me, narrow snout following the slow train, with me a shape in the window, but I shook my head.

ii. Commuters in the snow

By the time we reached Bearsden the commuters were crowding into the gaps. My set of seats was now full. (None of these people had been on the train before Westerton, they did not know I was the type of crackpot who would stand up and announce things, otherwise they probably would’ve avoided sitting near me!)

For some reason, even now I remember each one of them from that particular journey: I mean, how unlikely, given the number of times I have travelled that route, surrounded by how many other commuters. But here they were: Another middle-aged man, grey hair, a lapel-badge shaped like a little stick-man with arms and legs akimbo. As you would wear a rainbow badge to show your support for LGBTQ+, or a guitar-shaped badge to show your interest in music: he had a person-shaped badge, as if he were the Person Man, specialising in People.

And a younger woman, obviously en route to somewhere more interesting, with a wide-brimmed hat in her hand and an enormous wheeled red suitcase that kept threatening to roll out of control with the inertia of the stop-start: she expends huge effort to keep it still, while also keeping hold of the hat (it is not the weather to put it on her head).

And a young executive, gangly and red-haired, who I couldn’t help calling Ginger with a terrible lack of originality, Ginger with an iPad and generally very well equipped, a takeaway coffee in one hand, someone on the phone in his other hand talking about a lost document, lost in the Cloud, and him multitasking on the iPad on his knees to boot—Busy busy busy.

And then, getting on and slumping down to replace Person Man, who had departed, the Two Ladies of Partick, immediately spilling out stories in front of each other (and the rest of us) like overstuffed luggage spilling across the carriage, deep into narratives before we’ve even passed the expressway.

And inexplicably then, suddenly, I had an image of the whole city covered in snow, deep in snow, on our right the expressway and the river and over the river the BBC and the Science Centre and all Govan lost deep in snow; and to our left Finnieston and up the hill to the University, all lost deep, too. Commuters in the snow, I thought: or rather, and this will sound like it only confirms me as that crackpot, but I didn’t think it, I heard it: “Commuters in the snow—”

Of course, that painting by Breughel.

But also that very old poem and the image that always recurs to me: Beowulf, and the great hall, the firelight, the sparrows flitting into one gable window, at one end, through and out again through the window at the other end. Just a brief moment of light between two infinite darknesses. Person-Man, Red-Suitcase, Ginger and the Two Ladies: station to station, then gone.

We went into the tunnel, reached Charing Cross, and I alighted.

iii. The afternoon of the elephant-headed God

Now this was not quite that exact same journey so when I say above, ‘an eventful journey’, I am stretching things a bit, but it was the same day: just the return. It was mid-afternoon. I had left the office early, having found myself mysteriously unable to concentrate on anything—twice in one meeting, I’d had to quickly cover my tracks when someone had asked something and I’d not been listening. I was glad to be going home.

We came out of the tunnel heading toward Partick, river now on the left, Finnieston on the right, with the new student accommodation rentals clustered around the place where the Kelvin heads down to the Clyde. Opposite me a young mother with an infant, a little girl perhaps two or three, wearing flowery Wellingtons and staring around with great fascination. Everything that was happening was worth commenting on, pointing at. And it suddenly occurred to me: the little girl was right.

Everything was worth noticing, because this afternoon would not come again. This afternoon: look up at it, at the shelves of cloud in the August sky, the ruffled water in the Clyde, the traffic queue under Partick bridge. And closer, the ragbag of commuters, heading to ragbag homes, all books, phones and tired eyes—this afternoon will not come again!

I wanted to explain — more to myself to be honest, because I could see that the little girl already understood: we are in this billiard game, see, you and mother, and the ticket collector, and me and the bricks, buildings, iron rails, the foxes and the deer that stray sometimes along the tracks—the atoms, molecules, all the light rays—a billiard game of collisions and configurations, all statistics, all luck, all random games with entropy’s hand… And an image filled my mind: something behind the cobra’s wrist; and white noise, white noise filled my ears, and colours filled my eyes.

So this afternoon, this fantastically, impossibly unlikely configuration, will not come again. You’re only two or three, you’re so young you don’t even need to worry about where you’re going, where you have to get off, where to change trains—all the paraphernaliac mechanics of this clockwork life—your mother will do all that, with her tired, distracted look, yet total attention on you—you’re barely three but I see you understand.

And I see also who you are. As on the speeding train you flick a laughing look toward your mother

Laughing, that pointing finger

Laughing

You are the elephant-headed God. I hear you whisper, giggling: “I place obstacles, and I remove them—and I laugh! Because you are all caught in the dance, and I am not caught in the dance!”

You and your mother alight at Anniesland. I continue on home. After a good dinner, I get a good night’s sleep, and the next morning, I am feeling much better, and I am absolutely on the ball, you might say dancing, through all my meetings.

Mark Haw is a university lecturer based near Glasgow. He lives in a nondescript bungalow in a nondescript suburb and enjoys observing the nondescript lives of the local population including himself. He has written about science, about ‘the occult’, and about some other things in-between. He set up a science outreach group which has engaged with some 30000 children over the past 5 years, and at the peak of his fame he appeared in a 30-second segment of Channel 4’s ‘flagship consumer programme’ Supershoppers, discussing the science of spreadable cheese. Latest in his string of unpublished novels is a story about artificial lifeforms, AI, and vampires.
Image: Daniel from Glasgow.
roscoe-head-liverpool-bill-boaden

Craig Smith

Church Valley by Kenn Taylor

I grew up in a region that was scarred by economic decline and disinvestment. It was a surprise to me as I got older and travelled further that some people thought decaying buildings, places abandoned and boarded-up, areas of wasteland that stayed there forever, were unusual, exciting even.

Sure, I can appreciate the more interesting visual layers to be found where nature is eating away at human effort. But I’ve also experienced how so many places get reduced to just that decay. How the media will pick out declined structures to capture a picture they had in mind before they even arrived, avoiding the dozens of well-maintained streets nearby. Grab a few shots of the shittest alley they can find, then back off quickly to the better parts of London or Manchester to file their story. I’ve seen the power of such stories to distort perceptions and how that can damage people and places.

People living in communities like the one at this crossroads face many issues; a shortage of good jobs, a frustrating lack of amenities and declining public services. Parts of the media though will portray it as if that’s all there is. A litany of decay and despair for their readers to consume so they can feel that, however miserable their lives are, someone somewhere else is living worse than them, so that’s okay. Yet yards from that shitty alley, there are houses and gardens in good nick. Footy banners out. Railings brightly painted. Chalk paint on the floor from kids playing. The buildings which are empty have long faded into the background of everyday existence for those who live here, which might seem strange to those from places where every square foot is intensely capitalised. People have got their corner here, however modest, and they get on with it, despite all that is stacked against them, all that is thrown at them.

This landscape, though, visibly demonstrates the pain that its residents have been through. So much writing on urban life for the past 10-15 years has been about too much growth – too many people, too much construction, too much development. At least the writing from the richest metropolises which dominate the media, arts and academia. Yet that growth never reached many places. Such urban decay is scar tissue in a community whose environment has been wrought time and again by decades of disinvestment and bad decisions by people far away. Political stripes may change, but people still find themselves used or forgotten.

This was and is a working-class community. Unlike the London narrative of gentrification, the environment around this crossroads is what happens when first you take away the economy. Then people start to leave. Then there’s too many buildings that are no longer needed. Then so many of the things which make a coherent, thriving neighbourhood shrink away. As more people leave, especially the young, and aren’t replaced by new incomers, optimism for positive change declines. There are still useful bits of public infrastructure from when various governments had brief periods of largesse, but these are now too often falling apart, shutting and slipping away. ‘Left behind’ is the narrative frequently used for these places, but ‘fucked over’ is more accurate. What happens when a state treats a place as, at best, a problem, more often, with indifference and, at worst, with malign intent.

What was done to places like the community at this crossroads is not all they are. It doesn’t mean though, that people who live here don’t feel the pain this neglect causes to collective and individual psychology. Rundown buildings are the visible manifestation of an experience that burns into the mind of people across generations.

This is what affects middle class writers and photographers when they come somewhere like this. It’s alien to them, what others have gotten used to. When culture seekers and artists are attracted to inner-urban ‘grittiness’, they want visible vibrancy that’s rough around the edges, not people dealing as best they can with unglamorous multigenerational poverty. There’s too much edge for them here, without the soothing balm brought by street art or street food.

Perhaps such landscapes were unusual once, contained to a handful of areas that could be safely written off by the powers that be. These days, this abandonment of people and places creeps into everywhere in the UK, outside the gold-plated parts of the south east, as shops close and good jobs disappear. Now even some well-to-do areas are seeing their high streets decline. You can’t say though that the people who live at this crossroads didn’t warn them, but were told: too bad for you, but it couldn’t happen here.

Yet in the places where the new normal is the old normal, people still go on. Places where neighbours are the same for years, the families often outlasting the buildings in the cycles of clearance. Communities intertwined for decades. More so than in supposedly permanent rural idylls which have long become professional commuter towns. Those who remain somewhere that has dealt with large outward migration tend to be stoic about a place and each other.

What people don’t want in a place like this are more promises of grand gestures of change. Because most of the time, it doesn’t happen, and when it does, it’s usually indifferent to them and has often made things worse. Knocking down and rebuilding endlessly, but never really providing sustained investment in a community or addressing the lack of serious economic opportunities.

This crossroads is an amalgam of the decades: Victorian pubs, New Labour schools, 1980s bungalows, 1970s flats, 1990s petrol stations. It is not a place that’s dead though. It’s a place where the idea of catching a decent break can seem remote, but people go on. Despite the fucking over and the predominant media interest being poverty porn, people do their own rebuilding. The housing co-ops here: communities with well-built houses, plenty of green space and long waiting lists to move in. These sorts of places are often hated by much of the left and right though, neither fulfilling the nostalgic desire to have brave workers gratefully accepting their soaring new concrete wonderhomes from the paternalistic elite who designed them, nor the ruthless Home As Castle acquisition of your own thin slice of Faux Olde England. A working class which has its own ideas about what it wants is horrifying to many. As a result, their successes are ignored, and others don’t learn.

Yet, as local authorities crumble to bankruptcy, government action stumbles over the consequences of the last forty years, and the grass on sites of long demolished buildings grows high and unkept, perhaps now is the moment for those with their hands on the money and the cameras to hand them over. To those who have tried to exert positive change on their patch, despite everything. People who have ideas and skills, though are rarely given the opportunity to exercise them or to control resources. This place is the crossroads the UK stands at. The country has been here before and went a long way down a dark and now thoroughly broken path. The stakes are higher than ever. They need to learn from those who have had to deal with the mistakes of others for decades, and yet who still go on.

Kenn Taylor is a writer and creative producer with a particular interest in culture, community, class and place. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and Caught by the River to Journal of Class and Culture and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com

Image: Bill Boaden

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Rope from wikimedia

Craig Smith

Davy Jones by Kapu Lewis

Woman found drowned on pavement,
Thirty miles from sea.
There was salt water in her lungs,
She smelled of lemon suns, basil.
The crust of Tube dirt was under her nails, with the bark of the Angelica Tree.

What if I had read that before I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue that night, swinging with buttery white wine, big toes aching from prettily-narrow shoes? The clean-shaven boy bumping against my cut-price coat.

What if I’d never entered that marooned corner of the city, where High Holborn dies and Covent Garden isn’t quite yet born? But most of all, what if I’d never got my feet wet? What if I’d never got my feet wet?

Neon puddle flashes, splashes cold across my feet. That grubby muck water, the tears of the city they call it, slakes my skin, seeps through the scarlet shoes. Damn. Stained. Cursing, I stumble.

He pulls me up by my elbow. But not before I see them. Ropes: coils, splices, knots. Everything needed to bind and tie. I stand. Straighten. The shop window is lit with apricot, vignetted as the rest of its clutter recedes into the night. Ensigns, semaphore, brass shackles. Wooden blocks, sou’westers, socks. Oiled wool.

Old fascination floods me, starting from my wet feet.

A memory. Me, as a child, grease-and-salt-stuffed air. The verdant slime of the sea-weeded shore. Splash, slap, knock. A flap of sailboat oars cutting and mainsail rising. The name comes to me now, dredged from the mud of memory. “This is a chandlery,” I breathe.

“A what?” he says, fussing with the dirt on his tailored coat. So rich the wool lies flat and smooth.

“A chandlery,” I say. What a magical word it was then. A shop of wonders for sailors and boaters, but a stone’s throw from a briny shore. And yet here it is, dropped into a city of fake and fashion and futile dates. The metal and shine of the buildings sit disappointingly against the little wooden shop of dreams and bitter storms.

Davy Jones
Mariners’ Shop
Established 400 Years

“Let’s go, uh… What’s your name again?” He hiccups, impatience seeping into his voice, sensuality dissipating. “It’s freezing.”

I don’t answer. His casual tone diminishes me. His groomed masculinity irritates me.

My wet feet have a mind of their own. They walk me over to the shop window. A desire seeps up my cheaply-stockinged legs and limp skirt, clinging like cellophane, through my empty stomach and up to my throat. Thirst.

“I’ve got champagne at my place,” his voice tugs.

“Fuck champagne,” I say, uncouth and repelling.

I’ve lost interest in him and his elegance and a warm night in an expensive flat. My thirst is for something different now. Something… Something remembered. When I dreamed; when I was free.

“Hey.” He slinks his fingers inside my coat and across my skin. His touch full of fleshy promise.

I press my face against the frigid, unforgiving glass of the shop window. I turn my cheek so my ear presses into the transparent smoothness. And hears a sound centuries’ old. The splash of cramped water, reed-bound and clotted with wooden craft, coracles, skiffs.

It tells of a boat that docked here long ago. When Shaftesbury was still a river. Now hidden under tar and brick, stranded as the city grew around it. Penned-in, trussed up.

The man exhales. “Crazy bitch.” And hesitates just a second, because I’m not un-pretty. Then he withdraws his petulant hand, and turns. The scrape of his leather-soled shoes recedes down the street, dancing to the sound of oars scraping in rowlocks. I feel peace and a little fear, now that I am forsaken.

I teeter to the shop door on my absurd, tall heels and grab at the handle. It’s past midnight, but, in that moment of wine-soaked silliness, I have no doubt the shop will open for me. I close my eyes tight, turn the handle, push and enter.

The shop door clangs shut behind me. Click. Lock.

Silence.

The first thing that hits me is the smell. How different it is. Outside, on the pavement, my nose was encrusted with urban urgency: Chinese takeaway, cheap beer, his aftershave, exhaust.

In here, oh! This is a magical smell. Salt, sail wax and seaweed. The holy trinity laced with salted beef, steer, and the eggy stench of bilge water. It doesn’t smell like a shop at all. It is the scent of my childhood. The scent of something gone.

There is this moment here. It won’t ever happen again. It’s the point at which I’m presented with a possibility filled with hope. I don’t know everything yet. The full truth, or banality, hasn’t been discovered. Everything can be as perfect as I desire. So, I keep my eyes shut, and I step forward.

Creak, loud. But there – a faint clink. I step again, slower. Creak, louder. Faint clink. And a foaming, watery, lapping sound.

Fear erodes me, cracks the deliciousness. “Who’s there?” I ask, timid.

Lapping, louder. Clink again.

My eyes spring open, splayed, alert. Darkness!

The floor tips.

“Shit!”

I lurch, overbalance, arms flail, I throw myself backwards, trip over a ridge and topple with a thump onto the unforgiving wood. A shot of pain like cheap tequila fires across my skull. Everything holds still. Like a rubber-band held taught.

Light blooms, spreads, printing-paper bright. I see hawser rope, knotted wood. Thickened varnish kisses my cheek.

My body, still glued to the floor, sways. Concussion? Not the first time. Boats as a child were dangerous places. A tear loosens from the corner of my eye. “Blasted. Silly. Stupid!” I’ve probably set off one of those silent alarms. The police’ll be here before I’ve crawled, half-conscious to my knees.

I reach my arm up past my head to feel the door. But the door. Where’s the door?

Perhaps the boy’s not long gone, weaving down the street, full of drowsy-making drinks. Perhaps he’ll hear me call or –

Clink, louder now. Clink, clink, clink. A saline breeze threads its fingers into my hair. I know that clink. Clink, clink, clink: the metal stays against a boat’s mast in a soft onshore breeze.

I know this rocking.

I know this varnish.

I know this light.

Sailing light, boat at sea, wooden decking. My heaven and hell mixed together.

I scramble to my feet, knock my head on the ship’s wheel. It spins, I dodge out of the way and almost fall back over the transom and into the water. Shock forces vomit from my mouth. I scramble back from the edge of the boat, knock my knee. Bruised, I slump down into the rough seat of the cockpit, scratched through years of frantic use.

Only now am I brave enough to look.

The shop is gone, replaced by a grey rippling sea, dotted by islets of marram grass and rocky gneiss, lidded by a cold blue sky.

“Please don’t bring me back here,” I whisper.

I was born on a boat. I learned to sail before I could walk. I learned to read the wind and nudge the boat with sails trimmed to perfection to find its finest speed. I learned to love the art, and fear it. Only fools do not fear the sea.

We travelled through fog, mist, sun, rain, the terror of no visibility, the bullying of over-bulging sails. The vicious storm kings that tipped us on our side so that we could look into the sickening, boiling ocean and dream that we were not about to die.

But we dreamed; we were free.

Then he was gone, and I was alone.

And people, as strange to me as fishes are to land, took me away and bound me with rigid things like rules and shoes. And then they stuffed my dreams into the pigswill bin of their stark, saltless home for severed children.

I hate being asked about my beginning.

“Take me back to the city,” I say to no one.

“Not yet,” a bodiless voice answers.

A hysterical titter escapes my mouth and I tuck nails into fists. My chest, my throat stiffen. It’s him, I think, and an irrational fear floods me. I’m not unconscious or dreaming. I’ve died, and he’s come to ferry me across the water to the land of the dead.

“Daddy?” My voice quivers.

But this tone is too playful, too young and old at the same time. And too handsome? I change my mind. “Go away,” I rasp.

“Not until your feet are dry.” He laughs. “Now sail!” he commands, hunger dripping from the words.

I don’t like to be commanded. Especially by a dream, or a ghost or a head injury.

But the wind is rising, kicking up its pitch, flapping the unset sails; the wheel swings to the right. Foam splashes over the leeward side, and we tip. I have no choice. Sail, or be thrown to the fishes.

I grab smooth wheel, rough rope, heave and try to redirect the vessel. The wind fights me; the boat jostles me. But memory’s a funny thing. Something imprinted by fear or urgency has an eternal freshness to it. The voice may command me, but I can command the boat. After all these years, all these forevers, I haven’t lost the art.

In minutes I’m exalting, standing straight, chin up. I have the boat gushing through the water at the speed I’ve chosen, skimming the edge of a shingle beach. Herring gulls swoop, their haughty cry punching my eardrums. Confident now, I ease my body to the lee. I reach over, very stretched, so my armpit rubs against the gunwale, and drench my fingers in the lucid water. I have not touched salted water since I was a child. Nor river water. When I cross the bridges of London, I close my eyes tight shut.

Because water is remembering.

But this water is to my skin like fresh air to my lungs. I see a name painted in Easter blue on the patched wood hull of the boat.

Davy

A memory, half caught, slips away, grates with such strangeness.

Ships are rarely male.

I sail until my cheeks are salty chapped, until the wind dies and the light turns muted. I know this is ending. Whatever it is. A dream. A hallucination? A gift from some threadbare sea god looking for a friend? Even so, a chink of cheer, fresh-faced and hopeful, flushes in my chest.

“Thank you,” the bodiless voice says, almost reverent. The first time he’s spoken since he commanded me.

“‘About time,” I say. “I thought you’d died of boredom.”

“Not died. Living,” he says, a hint of wonder in his voice, someone starved now sated.

Like me. For the first time in eternity. “Who are you?” I ask. But he doesn’t answer. There’s a rhythmic sigh in the air, like someone sleeping. It doesn’t matter. I think I know. Davy the Shop, Davy the Boat. It’s all Davy. “Why am I here?” I ask. But he doesn’t awaken to answer that either. Maybe he doesn’t even know.

The promise of night freshens the twilight air, flinging down brown angular shadows across sea and land. Like a weathered hand throwing mahogany dice with twenty sides of fate. I shiver. Once, twice. A star-strung, onyx sky descends, coating us in black paint. Everything is pitch. I close my eyes with abyssal exhaustion.

Silence.

A motorbike buzz-growls.

A rubbish truck hisses and clanks, its dustmen calling to each other like kittiwakes.

A grey glow pushes through my eyelids. They open to reveal a higgledy-piggledy shop, dust-coated with neglect. Forlorn wooden counter, tin boxes, charts. Ledgers, chinagraph pencils.

Chilly morning light reaches through the glass shop door. Shaftesbury Avenue stirs, sluggish on the other side of its distorted panes.

I’m cold. I’m alone.

Yet, as the sky brightens to dishcloth white, I feel a small newness. Like one of those rich ladies might, after she’s had her face scrubbed and acid washed.

As I leave, the doorbell tinkles like a shared secret behind me. A Closed sign flaps against the glass. Faded, dogeared parchment. Shop Assistant Wanted, written below in careful cursive hand.

I take the Tube home. Bare wet footed, through stares of pity and disgust. I’m a dirty, bruised, briny smelling girl. I do not care. Davy consumes my thoughts: the ache in my shoulders, my arms, and the blue vein that pulses at the base of my wrist.

Davy coats me with curiosity, fear, desire.

Night returns in an eye blink, the day a frittered dream. Davy beckons me, and my wet feet. Back, to the shop, the boat, the sea.

I enter his musty house. My head, this time, is clear. How lonely and abandoned this place feels. A ship’s locker locked, forgotten. But I’m too full of heady expectation to dwell.

I close my eyes, ready. I can almost smell the ship’s rough resin, I can almost hear his unexpected voice, almost feel a foreign weather.

Ah… here it is. I sway to a northern breeze choked with thyme and chania. Poppies, anemones—

“Do you like it?” he asks. A quiet question. Like a shy suitor offering me gifts.

I know I will. Before I even look.

Barren and arid a hillside soaks with buxom colour of ephemeral flowers. Broken temple colour of cream, and sand, sand, everywhere. Light ochre streaked with ruddy iron. Davy’s hull glides across the limpid sea that licks the parched land.

“Beautiful,” I breathe.

I seize the ropes, and he seizes the shoreline. We slice through the water on his knife-edge keel. It is like walking with an old friend. We forge a path side by side, words and actions known but unsaid. The wind is antique, hot and dusted, and it slips under our tutelage.

The furnace of the day rises, then softens. My body is warm as amber honey. My languid fingers drift across the varnished wheel. And snag. Something alien touches my skin. I pull and tug, a bird with a worm. And look.

“Will we sail together again?” he asks.

But my mind is filled with a different question. My thumb draws like a curious kiss down the ripped silk ribbon. Trapped between the seams of rigid teak, worn smudge brown and feather-frayed. Only a slot of colour remains, where the fabric has crumpled in on itself. In that indelible fold, no thicker than a human nail, is a sliver of laurel green, shining and glossy as the day it was made.

A girl’s ribbon; a girl who liked green. A redhead, perhaps? They run well with green. But where is she now? A memory flashes, curiosity tinted with unease. The sign hanging on the shop door. Shop Assistant Wanted. “Who sailed you last?” I ask.

The boat stutters as if the water has grabbed it. Sails shake; boom clicks.

Now I have the tang of something unpleasantly true, a metal bit between my teeth to chew. I hate the taste of it. “Was she pretty, like me? Did she like it too?”

The mainsail sags, spilling wind. Anger? Sorrow?

“She abandoned me, like all the others,” he says.

The boat slows, my body stills. Late afternoon chills my cheeks and nose. “Why?” I ask. Tell me they weren’t interesting. Tell me they didn’t understand the sea. Tell me some comforting thing!

“She wanted freedom,” he says, his words bitter as mallow. “But doesn’t freedom always have a price?”

I press the ribbon’s grain hard into my finger pad. “What did you do?” I murmur, the words fearing to leave my mouth.

“Me?” The topsail flaps to his rough laugh and his words tumble as angry waves. “My crime was committed far longer ago than that. I abandoned my captain. Who cursed me to infinite solitude, so that I could not die. Men bound me and built on me. And here I stay until I call my captain back. A captain who will stay with me forever.”

“But we’re sailing, each night,” I say.

“Only for as long as you stay with me,” he whispers. “You do want to stay with me, don’t you?”

I do. I must. But, “What happened to the girl?”

“It wasn’t me. It was the curse!” he cries.

The sail flaps, poorly set. I tease the mainsheet out and in, shift the boat a fraction. I try again, and again, but I can no longer find that perfect point where the breeze bulges the luff.

My face stiffens. As my father’s used to, when time and tide were against us. When we knew the boat was no longer our friend. A raucous gust slaps the boat and barges past my face. Another pushes sails to swelling strain, and Davy heaves onto his side in yawning disregard. I fall, battered, knocked against the seaward edge, the horrid ocean but a breath away. I release the sails, spilling the wind and slamming us back flat. Crack, whip, slash, the ropes bite and spit. I snatch them back and haul them in. I will not lose our course! I will not be defied!

My chest thumps and clenches, my palms burn rough and red. Fighting the wind. Fighting him. Contemptuous nature, the most dangerous kind. And still he does not yield.

My fury blisters like a spider bite. “What happened to the girl?” I shout to clanging shackles, snapping sail, whipping ropes and the creaking wheel. “Tell me!” I say.

He rises on his edge once more. A perfect symmetry of death. At any moment, we will flip like a helpless insect, and I will plunge and die.

Rope runner jams. No release! Lockspike! I slip the old knife from my pocket, sharpened for urban nights, and raise it to hack the mainsail rope. Just one sever; a circumcision of power.

“No!” he cries.

“Tell me the truth!” I say.

We hold there. Murder in each others’ hands, moments of nothing and emptiness on our desperate precipice.

“She stayed three days,” he says. “Three days is enough. Only death can part us then.” His voice weakens to a whisper. Dying wind. “But the world of pretty things pulled, the world of warm and dry. Her heart broke. She fled one night. And now I have nothing to remember her by.”

Disgust like weevil biscuit clags my mouth and mind. “You had no self-control. You invited her to her death.”

“I begged her!”

“You let her stay too long. Knowing the truth of it.”

He weeps. And the sky turns the colour of bruised peach and mould-dusted orange. The day ends.

I open my eyes and stumble to the door. The pathetic, comforting, weak morning light. Groggy and coffee-less, I stare at my palms. Cracked and seeping from hauling rope and sheet. Davy has peeled off that urban veneer I painted on year after year. Decade after decade. Varnish of the soul.

He has undressed me. He has made me remember what it was like in the beginning. A loss so expansive it is an ocean trench. Crushing, dark, asphyxiating.

Oh, paint that varnish back on! Before it’s too late! Paint it thick with antifouling boat coat. The type the barnacles refuse to stick to; the type that sticks to your skin like skin.

I hate Davy in this moment.

My injuries belittle me, mock me. Abuse me, degrade me. And in this moment, I am sure he knows it. The sense of violation grows. In the form of rope and vicious breeze, he has taken a knife to my hands and heart and peeled the flesh himself.

Yet I can not stop thinking about Davy. The feel of him under me, the wind above me.

This brutal voyage! It is a more graphic act than any human has done to me in this city. A curse for Davy is on my lips. I sob instead, run, leave. Memories are grotesque things.

The doorbell tinkles with disdain behind me. The Closed sign flaps against the glass, the parchment rotten, acid, yellowed. Shop Assistant Needed!, scrawled below in a desperate, afflictive hand.

I trudge up the stairs. Step. Step. Twenty-eight floors. Grey choking stairwell, top floor, lift never works. The squalor seeps under the doors.

Now home, I sit.

Silver mirror, speckled with age.

I sit and look at myself, thinking of a story I once heard. A boat with a spirit that needed to be spurned.

My idea grows like a gusty ripple wind. I cackle, coarse and heady as an overripe ale.

My toes curl, un-dryable. Their sour moisture seeps into the bottle brown rug. My hands begin to crust.

I choose to wear red, red like Madder Lake, the colour of ferment and female command. I choose old shoes that grip and stride. I grasp a greasy eye stick, utter-blue, and draw wild markings round my eye. Like Tethys, bloody goddess of the deep, I will take that ship. I will make it mine. I will sail it forever and never die!

I gobble my sandwich. Dry sliced bread pushing wet in throat. Just enough for a night at sea.

Tick, tock, night turns. Tick-tock, time to go.

“What’s that blue mark on your arm?” the shopgirl asks.

“It’s a vein,” I say.

“It’s not a vein,” she says.

I don’t even look. I’m a pale girl. Blue veins. What’s there to say? She needs glasses.

“You been using?” she says. Her eyes turn matte; she lifts her body away from the plastic counter set between us.

The subconscious reflex wipes clean the air between smiley seller and unclean buyer. Our microscopic friendship, fabricated from the please and thank yous of a hundred, hundred purchases of end-of-day fruit and wilting veg, has ended. I lean back, too. Accepting the change. The little hurt.

She passes me the matches without touching my fingers.

I pocket them. “It’s a vein,” I say. But the very utmost corner of my eye tells me this is not true. Tattoo blue, the vein at my wrist is now yanked straight, pointing north up my arm from that place that’s pale as emmer flour. Like an anchor, missing its root.

I pull my shirtsleeve down, so the mark’s oddness is removed from our sight.

It’s only when I am too far away that I realise I’ve left my pitiful bag of food behind. I will not go back.

I approach from the south. The city’s tall and full and fleshy. Blaring orange; traffic light bright. Davy Jones looks ill and under-painted. Yet he beckons like a worn leather chair, like the smell of the bed you know. My feet obey, now forever clammy, sticky salty wet.

There is something I greatly hope for here. But hope is a terrible thing. Once you want something, you are a victim of fate: who will grant your wish or not? There is no alternative niceness once want has got in. Will he let me in? Will he let me sail one last time?

The door opens, I step inside. Sluggish silence, night-shop sleep.

I am not innocent. I am not the last girl he lured in here. I was born with splinters that gouged my feet, storms that ripped my cheeks like thorns, hunger in my empty belly like a sucked egg. Devoid. I am more burnished than she could ever be.

I light the brittle-tipped match, set flame to wick. The storm lamp twists in the oncoming rain. One stride, two, three, I’m at its heart. I throw open the door of the hold. The light casts, like bright cannon shot across his hidden flesh.

Charts, maps, the dust of time stood still.

Dry as tinder.

The logbook. His name, this vessel, must be scrawled in there still.

Dry as tinder.

“I thought you wouldn’t come back,” he says. A pause in the wind.

I raise a second match, spark on wick.

“What are you doing?” His voice wavers.

And touch the eager flame to the book’s cover. It guzzles the parched linen and board, reaches the powdering pages underneath—

Davy screams. Scorched agony! The boat yaws, portholes shatter. The flames scuttle, racing to finish their meal. If they burn his name, I am free.

“Thirst! Water! Let me drink!” Salted waves plunge through cracks, windows, door, overcome the ship.

I fall, head cracked on the floor. Match out, lamp out, gurgling water gluts my lungs. I roll over, push to standing. Cough, soaked, shivering. The flames are gone. The matches lost. “Let me be free!” I shout. “Let me be free…” I whisper, and cover my face with my shaking hands. “Please…”

Nothing.

Silence, like an ocean dead.

“Why?” he asks, voice cracked with pain and smoke.

“I want to go back, back to how it was!” I cry. “When it was just him and me and the boat. When I was loved and free.”

“I will love you,” he says.

“You hardly know me,” I say. A harsh laugh, guilt at my murderous actions scratching my throat.

“I’ve known you since you were a child,” he says. “I was there when your flat little feet first stepped into the bottom of a leaky boat damp on salty-varnished creaking wood. I was there when you pulled the oars too hard and close and bashed yourself in the stomach. I was there when you capsized the little dinghy with the single tan sail and the centreboard stuck with barnacles and weed. I held your hand as you sank to the bottom of the muddy saline murk, sinking your blue-cold toes into the stodgy silt. I was there when he dived in, pushed you up, released you, and then drew his last breath. And pulled the blood of the river into his ageing lungs like so much fresh air. I was there when you lost him. I was there when love died.”

An ugly chill fills my heart. The boat did not sail for me that day. It was mute.

“Do you not remember?” he asks. “I was there when they took you away. I was there when you cursed me for not letting you stay.”

Now my adult hand remembers how the heavy sails failed to rise for my tiny fists, how the rudder failed to turn for my skinny arms. How my boat abandoned me all those years and forever ago.

I peel open the logbook, soggy half-drunken pages. Oh, terrible truth!

First, his name, our ship, embossed in flaking gold. Then my father’s. Then mine.

“Why did you leave me?” I ask.

“Because I feared I would fail you,” he says. “You were a child. I was a ship.”

“And now?”

“If you burn me, you burn us both. We are bound.”

I place my arm on the countertop and examine the blue, taut vein. It peeks through my skin, like tracing paper over ink, the shape now set. An anchor. I am anchored to Davy; I am the skipper of his wooden body. I am free to roam the seas. And I will sail him every night until…

There is a coin in my pocket. And there is the scent of chips that filters through the door. Just chips for just a coin. I liked those things once. An ache. A desire to leave the shop, for a bellyful of human things.

Oh, what would have happened if I’d never got my feet wet?

A former journalist, Katharine is a now a TV consultant and writer for young people. Particular interests include youth rights and mental health. She grew up in West Wales and is fascinated by its folklore and tales of the sea. Influences include Frances Hardinge, Roddy Doyle and Sarah Crossan.
Brian Prechtel, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Craig Smith

I Don’t Eat My Friends by Jude Whiley Morton

The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

1.

13th May 20–

Went in for our meat license today. Never been so excited. Two years since I last ate meat and I still hate the substitutes.

People say they can’t taste the difference, but I’m a gourmand. My palate’s hypersensitive. Once, I could taste a leaf of sage in a drum of oxtail soup. Now everything’s bean. Bean, bean, bean.

Last time I ate meat was pre-pandemic, before the culls. I could tell you everything about it. Veal angelica, it was called: these veal medallions stuffed with asparagus and provolone cheese. Delicious.

Di says I think in food. Says I remember our wedding not cause of the dancing or the booze or the pigeons and rice, but cause we ate pork goulash with herb dumplings.

She’s wrong. I remember our wedding cause we ate a duck, apricot, and pine nut pastilla. There was pork, we had a whole hog roast for the guests at the service. But I only ate the crackling. After, I cut off the ears and fed them to our Golden Retriever, Bella.

If I think in food, then Di thinks in arguments. She remembers our wedding day because of the row we had with her mother. Di’s Mum is a vegan and was astounded we’d not given any option but the duck or the hog. She boycotted the dinner and still Di blames me, but I have no regrets. I wasn’t going to cater for a radical minority.

Anyway, the meat license. I booked our test a couple weeks ago, before the M.L.A was swamped. We were the first applicants in the county cause our tenant, Marsha, tipped us off. She was part of a government pilot scheme for the license. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to know this. The first trials of the license were controversial, and the participants signed N.D.A’s and whatever. But I caught her red-handed.

Marsha rents the top floor of our townhouse in Marrow. The house sits off the high-street, near the old butchers. It’s a mid-century, gothic conversion with an emblem of the masons embedded in sandstone above the front door. Di, Flora, and I live on the bottom two floors. Often, Marsha’s letters get lost in the family’s post, so I must ascend the stairs to Marsha’s flat and deliver it personally. That day, I was delivering a summons when I noticed this overwhelming pong of iron flowing down the staircase. It was impossible to disguise: the smell of meat, something freshly butchered. On top of that were the first notes of fried garlic. Jesus, I thought, my tenant’s a criminal! She’s buying off the black market.

I sprinted up the staircase with Marsha’s letter then drummed on the door.

‘Marsha.’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’

Behind the door, which was covered by a fresh coat of glossy red paint, I heard this clattering of metal pans and the hurried slamming of drawers.

‘Marsha.’ I said. ‘I’m like a wolf.’

For too long the noise continued; I added to it with my punching the wood. I called her name again. Eventually the door opened.

Marsha is a student of sports science with a knot of thick, gingerish hair she arranges over her head like a fox-pelt turban. Her features are pale, her chin like the bulb of a spring onion which sits beneath these lips like two deshelled langoustines. That day she wore a black cardigan over a white crop-top, and jeans, which were spattered with blood.

I made no fuss about it. Simply I said.

‘That’s something I’ve not smelled in a while. Pork?’

Marsha’s feet were bare. She scratched the Achilles heel of her right foot with the mauve-painted toenail of her left before replying.

‘No.’

She avoided my eyes.

‘Don’t lie to me.’ I said. ‘It says in the tenancy agreement, criminal offences are grounds for eviction.’

‘I’m not a criminal.’ She protested. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t explain.’

Edging my boot over the copper base of the doorframe, I said. ‘Marsha. You are covered in blood. If I convince myself that you are not cooking contraband, then I might believe you are cooking a person. So, what is it? Are you a cannibal now?’

My foot inched forward. Marsha leant on the door frame, apparently considering closing it. Then she fell back.

‘Ugh, Mr Hamm.’ She said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I just didn’t know if I could make the rent—and I had to supplement my loan somehow.’

‘Supplement? What are you selling?’

Marsha’s gaze curled round my flank cautiously.

‘Can Flora hear me?’ She asked.

Flora is my daughter. Marsha nannies her. Flora looks much like her mother, with almost opaque blonde hair she wears in pigtails, and blue-pale skin.

‘Would it be better if I came in?’ I asked.

Marsha stepped aside. I entered the joint kitchen and living room. A frying pan lay on the hob covered by a towel. The walls were wet with grease and the ventilator above the hob was making a low roar. Marsha trotted past me to a window. She opened it. Then she made us tea. The letter in my hand was now creased and unreadable.

As she delivered my tea, Marsha began. ‘I reckon I should be honest. But you can’t tell a soul.’

She paused, inhaled, then confessed.

‘The government are planning to lift the meat ban.’

My heart shot into my throat. I stumbled to a parched leather settee organised before a glass coffee table in the centre of the room. Marsha sat on the kitchen counter. She continued.

‘Within a year, we will be able to eat meat again. But there’s a caveat. Since animal exploitation caused the pandemic, the government will not permit a return to factory farming. They’ve realised veganism is an overwhelming societal good. I mean, there’s less carbon in the air now, you can drink from the rivers, all the land freed for housing—’

I took a sip of my tea. She’d added oat milk.

‘But,’ Marsha continued. ‘The government acknowledge that a total ban on meat consumption limits our individual freedoms. Therefore, meat is going to return as a luxury good. You will have to own a license to buy it. Licenses will be one to a household. Once the test is passed, you will be permitted two packages of meat a month. That’s how I got this…’

Marsha hopped down from the counter and paced back to the frying pan. The tea-towel laid over the pan was decorated with illustrations of farmyard animals. Marsha flicked away the towel, revealing a cutlet of red meat laid flat in a pool of oil. A light dusting of salt covered it and ovals of garlic were stuffed in incisions along the slab.

Slowly, Marsha moved toward me with the pan. By then, I had come down from the sofa, fallen to my knees, and was edging over the carpet, sweating. Lowering my nose to the approaching pan, I inhaled.

How could I describe the smell? I swear, almost arousing, like Di’s perfume… something I’d miss if it ever vanished.

Gradually, I noticed the sheen, the gnarled edge of the cut and the islands of blood in oily lakes. I reached out a finger to touch it, then Marsha swung the pan away.

‘You can’t taste it. I’m involved in all sorts of blood tests to see whether it affects me, whether it’s good to eat. If you tried some and got ill, the trial might collapse altogether.’

I cupped my hands, begging.

‘A bite?’

‘Not possible.’ She replied, proudly. ‘You’ll have to wait til the test is approved.’

Marsha fished some cutlery from a drawer beside the oven. As I crouched on the floor, my knee knocked the table, spilling my tea over the glass. Marsha then cut herself a cube of meat, impaled it on the fork, and observed it in the sunlight falling in through the window.

‘And what is the test?’ I asked.

‘That, again.’ She began. ‘Is classified. You’ll hear rumours, but not from me. All you need to know is, everybody in the house must pass. Even Flora.’

Marsha plucked the meat from the fork with her lips. She swallowed.

As I considered the prospect of a return to normality, Marsha noticed an itching at the door. It was Bella. Striding through the flat, leaving the cut of meat unattended, there was a small scratch of locks sounding before a ratatata of toenails on the wooden floor. Bella, her coat shedding visibly in the sunlight, trotted in and began eagerly sniffing the kitchen. Her black nose pressed to the floor, she traced a smell she found overwhelmingly tempting, then, when she had discovered it, sat at Marsha’s feet. Marsha wielded the pan still, and ate the meat blue.

‘Down.’ She said to the dog.

Bella obeyed.

‘Roll-over.’

She barrelled on the floor.

‘Good girl.’ Marsha said. She offered some meat.

‘But you said—’ I cried.

Marsha stamped her foot. ‘Seriously, Mr Hamm. Would you betray those eyes?’ Bella then edged her nose to the meat and sniffed in three loud bursts. Marsha pushed the meat toward her before the dog turned her head sharply, tucked her tail under her belly, and hurried to me. She whined, pressing her head to my chest. Marsha giggled.

‘See! We’ve all adapted to veganism. It isn’t so bad. Even the dogs prefer it.’

I cradled Bella’s jowls in my hand. Her eyes turned up to me. Various muscles in the eyebrows twitched, as if trying to communicate a concern. Then, her worries forgotten, she edged her muzzle into my fist and lapped at my palm.

2.

So, we booked our test. They were being run from the old shopping malls in the city. In the morning, Di, Flora, and I got in the car. Flora waved from the backseats at Bella, who barked from the window as our car disappeared up the road.

When we were on the motorway, Diana said. ‘You know, must we all do it? Flora too?’

Flora held her iPad on her knees and flicked at the screen with her thumb.

‘Of course.’ I said honestly. ‘That’s the nature of the test.’

‘But,’ Di’s fingers shivered in her lap. ‘What if it’s too much? She’s five.’

‘They wouldn’t make it too intense for a five-year-old, Di. I’m sure it’s a couple of questions to check we’re responsible consumers. Forget it.’

Di paused, then muttered. ‘I’ve heard rumours.’

‘You mean conspiracies?’ I corrected her.

We merged with an exit. When I glanced at Di, she was flicking through her phone.

‘I wish you’d stay off Facebook.’ I said. ‘Seriously. The algorithm feeds you nonsense. Just relax. By the end of the day, we’ll be tucking into our first roast in yonks.’

We arrived at the shopping centre a little after nine. The shopping centre is a glass cuboid running four kilometres through the city-centre. Nowadays, the buildings are occupied by government offices. As we walked down the paved alleys to the centre’s west wing, we held hands tight. Around us, old abattoir workers and butchers collected their furlough. Depressed and bitter, they enforced an unnatural silence on the hall, a silence only broken by the odd pigeon clapping its wings across the marble concourse. They built their nests in the nooks between steel girders.

After a period of walking, the silence was disrupted by protesters.

News reports had tipped people taking the test that some opposition was likely. These reports generally said that vegans, wishing to maintain the status quo, would oppose the reintroduction of meat vocally. At the entrance to the department of the M.L.A, a line of hairy men in birdwatching gear and Aztec ponchos hurled slogans at us:

Meat is murder. Eat Beans, Not Beings. I Don’t Eat My Friends.

They were held back by a police cordon and private hire security.

The interior of the M.L.A was drab. A white desk at the end of a short, wide room, was orbited by a set of itchy, fabric covered chairs. A young couple sat waiting awkwardly. On the television above the desk, government adverts promoting the thousand-year fish ban played repeatedly.

At the desk I filled out our family’s details whilst eyed by a wolfish M.L.A employee. His hair was bright red and slicked back by grease. On his finger was a thick blood blister looking like a ring. Introducing himself as Ronald, he explained he would be our examiner. He asked us to follow him through a thin dark corridor to an airconditioned room. It was empty but for a grey industrial carpet. We waited with Ronald beside us til three youngish people in yellow aprons – two women, one man – entered.

‘These are your guides.’ Ronald said.

One of the women, a thin, blonde girl with a brown clipboard and zebra-pattern scrunchy in her hair, then stepped forward.

‘Mr and Mrs Hamm. I would like to ask your consent to take Flora for her test.’

She bowed to Flora and smiled. Flora stepped forward gingerly.

‘Do you consent?’ The woman repeated.

I noticed Di shaking. Gripping Flora’s hand, she jerked her backward.

‘Does she have to do it alone?’ Di pleaded.

The three aproned kids looked toward Ronald, who surveyed Flora slow before answering. ‘Since her size likely forbids her from carrying out the demands of the test… no. But she must watch.’

Di turned to me. Flora, looking bored at the floor, then mussed her fringe.

‘You want to take her?’ I said.

Ronald repeated to the girl with the zebra scrunchie.

‘The little girl must watch.’

Then he pointed at a boy whose head was partially shaved. Jabbing a finger my way, he said. ‘Take him through. The girls can follow.’

I followed the boy with the shaved head through another corridor. The walls of the corridor were covered in a slip-shod soundproofing fabric. Soon we emerged into another sterile room where iPads on podiums stood in columns. The boy directed me to one of the screens, then pressed an arrow indicating play.

A video began. Against a backdrop of crudely drawn animals, an animated man with eyes which blinked too slow recited a monologue. It went:

‘Welcome to the Meat Licensing Association. Today’s test will return you your freedom to consume meat. We know you’re hungry to take the test, so we’ll try make it quick.’

The animation smiled. He had CGI canines.

‘Have you ever heard of Roger Fisher?’ He asked.

A small pause followed in which the animated man, whom I now noticed wore a butcher’s cap, allowed for my answer. I mouthed, no.

‘Good. Then you’ll know Roger Fisher, in the 1981 ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’, proposed what has been described as the most effective nuclear deterrent imagined. Fisher proposed that the U.S President, before she was allowed to launch a nuclear warhead, should first be presented with a butcher knife. This butcher knife would then be used to kill a volunteer who, at their behest, had the launch codes implanted beside their heart. If the president carried out the act, it would prove they understood the consequences of their actions. It forces us to ask the question: once someone is faced with the prospect of killing, can they follow through? Could they follow through a million times over?

Pre-pandemic, many of us were alienated from the consequences of the food we consumed. We did not understand, for example, that seventy-five per cent of epidemic events were linked to animal exploitation. We did not understand that, due to poor farming practice, eighty-six per cent of Britain’s rivers were dangerously polluted. We did not understand that animal farming produced a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s as much as every vehicle on Earth.

Perhaps most heinously, we did not understand the pain involved in meat consumption. With every slice of bacon you ever ate, a pig had to die, and a person had to kill it. Did you know, due to the traumatic nature of their work, there was a high prevalence of depression amongst slaughterhouse workers?’

Again a pause elapsed. Now I turned my head over my shoulder, to the boy who had led me here. He was doodling on his clipboard with a biro, his tongue stuck out a corner of his mouth. Then the animation interrupted.

‘Of course you did. As high as fifty per cent! That’s why, here at the Meat Licensing Association, we’re addressing the balance. The test today is inspired by Roger Fisher’s deterrent and aims to reconnect you with the processes that once delivered you your favourite foods. Using an animal of relative intelligence, The Test will reconnect you to the consequences of your consumption. Sound good?’

The animated man’s forearm performed a thumbs-up gesture. I looked back to the boy. Then the animation said,

‘Great. Please notify your guide. They will take you to the next stage.’

Before my attention was quite finished with the animation, my guide placed his hand on my shoulder and said. ‘Any questions?’

‘Uh,’ I began. ‘I’m not quite sure I understand—’

‘It’s self-evident,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

Together we passed into a large blue-grey room with walls as high as an aircraft hangar. Someway ahead, in the centre of the room, was a sheet of white tarpaulin. Stood erect in the middle of the tarpaulin was a metal pole with a small steel loop at the top. Through the loop was fed a chain, which lead to a collar. The collar was attached to a Golden Retriever, an optimistic looking thing with a deep white coat turned slightly blonde along the spine. Her tail made a faint hushing against the plastic laid out under her, which accelerated upon her seeing myself and the boy. For a moment she sat politely, awaiting our approach. Then she barked pleasantly twice. Soon her bum had risen and she was pattering over the tarp toward us. The chain yanked at her neck and she sat down again.

When I turned to face the boy, he had produced a long, curved, cimeter knife. It’s handle was a deep red and made of textured plastic. He held it at his side as nonchalantly as his clipboard.

‘Did you bring a change of clothes?’ he asked.

‘I – uh. No. I didn’t think –’

‘I can fetch you an apron.’ He said, matter-of-factly.

Walking to a corner of the room. The boy knelt at a wooden trunk. In the trunk was a long white overcoat. Leaving the knife on the trunk, he returned to me with the overcoat open. Feeding my arms through the coat, he offered the instructions precisely.

‘We don’t care how you kill it, but we recommend cutting the throat.’

I fingered the buttons of the coat thoughtlessly.

‘Uh.’ I began. ‘The, um. The video said that a, uh, animal of relative intelligence—’

‘Oh, yes.’ The boy smiled. ‘Slightly stupider, actually. Than pigs, at least. But a happy medium between the pigs and cows you’ll enjoy.’

‘And I just?’

‘Slit it’s throat. I’ll be watching.’

Again the boy returned to the trunk, where he took the knife in his fist. Returning to me, he offered it with an outstretched arm, the blade facing down. After, he pressed his forehead in a nodding motion toward the dog, who lay there belly-up, whining slightly. Automatically, I began edging toward the plastic. As I approached, the dog’s ears twitched. She sat up straight, her tail wagging hard, her gums smiling.

I kept the blade held at the small of my back whilst approaching. With my free hand, I beckoned the dog closer. I tried imagining all the food I’d once loved: sausages, lasagne, prosciutto, pork medallions. The dog now shuffled forward, the chain chiming. Her eyebrows ticked whilst she read my face. Then her nose jumped sideways and her snout tilted up; her mouth closed and she gulped. Think she smelt the metal of the blade.

Grabbing her by the collar, I tried turning the body over, but the back legs kicked furiously. First she barked and whined, then she howled as my weight crushed, first, her legs, then her ribs. I flipped her. Swinging the blade out, I made a brief attempt to point the spike at the trachea before forcing my weight on the handle. A yip sounded as the blade slipped in, but her crying didn’t stop for a minute. Eventually she was silenced by the blood that choked her. Her brown eye looked around frantically as I held her head in the expanding puddle of blood. She was searching to understand the betrayal. Then she died.

I dropped the knife on the tarpaulin, then turned to the boy. He indicated a bucket in which I could wash my hands, then asked me to remove the coat and lay it over the trunk. After, I followed him through a series of corridors which lead back to the waiting room.

3.

I sat alone in the room for thirty minutes. During that time, the couple we had shared the room with earlier also returned. They clasped each other tight, the male partner rubbing his girlfriend’s back tenderly, repeating. ‘You did so well, so, so well.’

At the desk they collected their first package, what looked like the rib of a cow, vacuum-sealed. When their guide pushed the package onto the counter, the girlfriend wept intensely. It was then I noticed a clump of bloody poodle fur hanging from her hair. An invigilator soon arrived and signed their license.

‘Pin it on the fridge.’ He smiled.

Di and Flora then returned. By then, having worried so long, I knew the outcome. No way would Di have carried it out. She never cared for food, like me.

When they entered the room, Di’s face was decorated in a pattern like cowhide. They were mascara streaks smudged in patches from below her eyes to the tip of her chin. Flora looked anxious, though not due to any reason she understood. All Flora had seen was a dog on a leash and Mummy crying horribly. Thank God.

Di approached me, spat on her fingers, and rubbed my cheeks.

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘You did it. You actually did it.’

Flora looked up at me, puzzled.

‘You stink of iron.’ She continued. ‘Your cheeks, your hair.’

I reached my fingers to my head. They came away bloody.

Soon Ronald stepped out from behind Di and Flora, consulting his clipboard. He spoke frankly.

‘I’m sorry to inform you, your application has been denied. Mr Hamm, your performance has been noted and can be cited if your place of residence changes. Mrs Hamm, you are welcome back at any time to re-take the examination.’

Flora gestured for Di to pick her up. Di stooped and obliged. Ronald hesitated before continuing.

‘However, Mr Hamm. Since you took the trouble today, we won’t let you go home empty handed.’

My eyebrows jerked with surprise. Di turned to me, then clenched her lips tight. Flora lay over her shoulder, exhausted. A reward, just for trying? I’d never been so thrilled in all my life! All I wanted was a taste of the foods I once loved, and Christ, I’d earned it, whatever it was.

Ronald placed his clipboard on the front desk, then moved to an adjoining room. Returning, he held a package of deep red meat in a clear plastic wrap. Handing it to me, I took into my arms like a newborn. Hugged it. Then I peered down into the packaging, questioning the cut. A whole lamb shoulder, or maybe pork belly… I smiled gratefully, then thanked the examiner.

His chin dipping, Ronald began to smile. Running a flat hand through his stuck-back hair, he chuckled and spoke.

‘You didn’t think we’d let her go to waste, did you?’

Jude Whiley is a writer from London, United Kingdom. Previously, he has studied with Faber and Faber on their exclusive ‘Writing a Novel’ course. Currently he works as a freelance writer, working as features editor for Yuck Magazine whilst writing non-fiction for various publications. His fiction has previously been published in the Spring 2022 Issue of The Moth Magazine.
bergsten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Craig Smith

Off Grid by Deirdre Shanahan

A sky-blue day. Fern leaves spike as I wade in. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave. Nubs of rose-hips bristle on hedges but the flourish of nettles sting my ankles, bunch at my knees. I could make soup. Use Dandelions and even if the blackberries are frizzled after months of sunshine we could eat them. Warm days slouch as we settle in, plant and sow. “Next Spring,” Olly says, “we’ll reap the bounty and eat like kings.”

“Hi.” He sweeps up the road on the rusty bike we found in the hut and draws to a halt, the back mudguard wavering. “Doherty’ll rent part of the field for us to grow veg. For a year at least.”

Would they be there so long? A year or longer?

“And when I was in the phone box, I saw an ad for kitchen work at the hotel. I thought of you.”
“But we’re meant to be self-sufficient.”

“We still can be. But anything you earn’d help towards solar panels.”

“I don’t want to work in a hotel. Not in a kitchen.”

“Six months only. You did before.”

“Waitressing. A summer job I hated.”

“This’d be easier. No hassle dealing with people. Besides we’ll need a bit of money. What if the bike needs tyres?”

“I thought we were going to provide for ourselves?”

“We are. But a bit of help on the way won’t go amiss. A bit of cash’d give us a head-start to buy some essentials.”

“Well, ok. Maybe for few weeks.”

“See what they offer.”

I was offered three days a week and Olly said take them, while the job is there. A train in the distance rumples my heart. We’ve travelled a long way in the last few months; a cramped top flat in Cork, a caravan in Doolin, and part of an old house on the outskirts; to arrive further north than I’d expected to have our own place. Or a place we could call our own; a green corrugated ex-army hut a farmer lets us have for free. Olly said we’d stepped out from a city that was tired after the night before. But the branches hang low and I wonder what we’ve left behind.
At night his breath rises in little gasps. The summer is too hot to talk in. Tongue thick with heat. The air is still with only the call of a creature creeping in the grass; a cat or a fox sloping by the hedge or a squirrel robbing a tree of its fruits.
The short cut through fields leads to the old hotel, tight and compact with twenty- three bedrooms. I rinse the serving dishes and fill the dish-washers after breakfast; egg cups, bowls, side plates, cups, jugs. More awkward crockery than later in the day, but less mess. Smears of cereal, gunked up porridge, half a slice of sour dough. Knives poke up. I can fill the machine with my eyes shut but taking out’s tricky. I check for cleanliness and stack plates ready for the chefs. I lay cutlery in trays so they rest like sleepers. My shifts are mostly early though they can be anytime. There are saucepans of copper, steel, non-stick. Serving dishes of every size. The French head chef has tricks in his hands. Can turn plain white fish into an exotic stew. He raises a spoon of clams and mussels to my lips and the lemongrass and turmeric aromas take hold.

I draw water from the outside tap; a dirty brass pipe. The water is better at the hotel. In pristine bottles, sparkling or still. Whatever a person wants. Olly balances a tin of baked beans on the camping gaz.

“Not too bad.” He tastes the soup. “We could do with an additional stove.”

“Bit of an unnecessary expense,” he says.

The bed is so cold we wear socks. Comical at first, then awkward. Like anklets holding us down. Keeping us for something else.

I find a spare sandwich in the fridge. Slide glasses to hang upside down in the dishwasher. Orders are called. Max follows them through. There is a sous chef and one for pastry. If it’s desserts, his work is done. Although there’s always a chef needing a hand. Duck legs wait for orange jus. Pork for dressing. Or fish to douse in lemon butter sauce. Each chef precise. Intent. Against calls of “service” or “Where’s the mains?” I get lost in the cross-fire.
I hadn’t thought I could do this but the countryside suits Olly: either the pleasure of our industry or the way we live, alleviates his condition. He told me his blood was disordered the first time we met. Or maybe the second. He’d say he liked the way I crashed through life and he couldn’t. His white blood cells multiply too much so he gets tired. Not often. Sometimes in the afternoon. He has a porcelain complexion and his body at night is taut silk. No shadows. Like illimitable, white Italianate marble on days of the most intense heat. He said there was a twitch and flicker of pain in his bones. Acute myelogenous. He spelt out the syllables and I wondered was that to scare me but I know it was down to the exactitude with which he did most things. “So there’s no confusion,” he said.
The pastry chef is rangy and doesn’t wear a hat. He leans over the counter to decorate meringues, touching the tips with a delicate puff of cream.

Olly lies on his front on the floor, when I come in, even though it’s cold in places where we haven’t covered it in rugs or off-cuts of carpet. A cobweb hangs in a corner of the window.

“What are you doing?”

“Stretching the vagus nerve. Sets the body in tune.”

“Is that a yoga thing?”

“No. But good to do. The nerve affects so much of the body. It means wanderer. Would you press on my back?” I lay my fingers down and stroked his spine. Since we’d come he’d been well. He’d coughed less and looked stronger. Fuller. More robust. “Thanks, that’s enough.”

He rises and shakes himself as if to find his body working again. “Have a good day?”

“Busier.”

“Height of the season, I guess.”

His face is pale as light, like moth wings. He wraps his arms across his chest, clinging to himself like a person drowning. His wispy fringe falls into his eyes. He’s intent upon getting stronger. His own medication. He’ll get stronger. His blood count’ll improve. He’s scoured medical papers and journals. Only a matter of time. Living in the right element will help.

I collect the saucepans from the far end near the ovens. The pastry chef blitzes a yellow paste in a mixer, swirling stops and he pours in beaten egg, holding back a little.

“Too much can ruin it,” he says.

“What are you making?” “Choux. For eclairs.”

He pipes pastry onto a tray. Little knobs, like breasts. He holds the nozzle and works along until the tray is full.

“How are they so light?”

“Water. Steam holds them. And the butter has to be right. French.”

“Secret ingredients.”

“Yes,” he smiles.

The hut is dark as evening lengthens, despite the single bulb. Olly has laid a fire in the stove and logs spill on the floor next to it. There’s a sofa, two odd armchairs and a small table.

“Wifi’d help.”

“That’s not the point,” he says.

“I’d like to be connected.”

“We will in our own way. More meaningfully.” His hair catches the light.

I lie on the bed holding him around the waist, gathering him in. He’s warm and full of sun even if it doesn’t show on his face. The walls curve to become the roof in one continual sweep. Maybe it was a garage. The farmer must have done it up, put in the stove later. It splutters and smokes. I can’t go back to what we had. The city had stifled me as well. But this? Ambling from one day to another. Living under an uncertain roof which leaked in a corner. Outside a breeze whistled and shook the trees. I can walk away. Nothing is permanent. Even his condition fluctuates.

The pastry chef works under an overhang of saucepans. Steely grey. Shimmering. Shadows of cold light. He’s always making something; chocolate leaves. Glace fruit. Icing sugar shapes. When service finishes, calm falls though it never lasts. Always a hum of irritation towards the next sitting. I take a break outside with a fag. I shouldn’t, so I stand at a little distance from the bins and near the delivery room.

“Late shift?” he asks.

“Someone was ill.”

“Glad you stepped in. Easier to work when someone’s clearing up.” He smiles and swipes around to the oven and opens the door. The tray of pastries are steaming sweet and he sets them on a cooling tray. He aims a kind of syringe into their undersides. “There.” He sucks his finger as he finishes.

I should hang around. Learn something so I can cook more than tasteless soups and lumpen bread. He dunks the pastries head first into a bowl of melted chocolate and they rise up tonsured, the sauce slicked down.

“Bit lop-sided so I can’t serve this one.” He offers but I don’t have a plate. He raises the éclair to my mouth, sinks it on my lips. Airy light. Yellow as a cloud. The cream gouges out.

“Delicious.” My mouth is silky wet. He says his name is Neil and pushes back his fringe.

“Hey, chef. Two galettes,” Max the head chef calls and Neil makes for the warming cabinet.

Pans clatter. A tinny echoey quiet. The last of the éclair is full and rich. For months I haven’t tasted anything so rich. The evening is a rush of calls and stacking plates, drying the odd one which came out wet.

Hollyhocks flourish in the sandy soil, pinky cups of petals towering. Olly buys seeds and old plant pots in town. The evenings are long and dusky. He shops weekly, returning with two bulging bags balancing on the handle-bars. We have the calm amongst fields. One small place to belong to. The Americans built the hut during the war when they were stationed up the road. After they left, Doherty used it for machinery and tractors and later it wasn’t used at all except for dumping stuff, he said.

China gleams white and shiny. Stacks of cups. Neil stirs a saucepan on the hob. Glossy rust liquid bubbles.

“What are you making? Gravy?”

“Caramelising sugar to make baskets. They’re going to hold soft fruits from the garden.” The sugar bursts and simmers and he turns off the heat. When it’s cooler, he spoons dollops on a baking tray. “Ten minutes should do.” He slips it in the oven.

I collect dirty plates from the serving hatch and when the rush quietens Neil moulds the stiffened sugar over an orange. Its zest spikes the air. He shapes the lattice smoothing it down, leaves it for a couple of minutes and the sugar hardens. An odd bonnet he upends and light falls through the crinkly lace.

“Magic.”

He smiles. Sets one down, along with others in a row. Sparkly rust, with flutes and curves.

“Where’d you learn to cook?”

“Lake District. England. Then France. Australia really fired my interest. I was travelling for a year. I met a chef from Dublin who suggested here, so I came.”

Max calls for petits fours and Neil hurries off. A clatter and yells for plating up. Shouts for bouillabaisse and turbot. Lobster Bisque. Salmon roulade.

The air is thin with the buzz of insects like distant traffic. Olly wants to read about planting. We roll apart at night on the hard metal bed. In silence I pull into myself to warm. I could go on, or leave? And then what? Back to the outskirts of a city and picking up some low-grade job in a bar or café while I work out the rest of my life? In the morning as temperatures slope to autumn, I leave for work with time to spare.

The grounds are laid with flower beds and a kitchen garden for guests is bordered by a brick wall. I don’t want to go there but when I pass the dining room, I peep in.

We need tea-towels from the linen room upstairs. The corridor is paneled and the walls have prints of the hotel when it was a house. All the doors are the same but one under the stair-case is open. I peer in. A bed takes up the space though a corner has a fitted wardrobe. In an alcove, a table with a slim mirror could be a desk. It is snug. Every bit of space cleverly used.

“What’re you doing?” Neil leans purposefully against a wall.

“Come for tea cloths. And you?”

“Off duty. Staff block.” He motions to a corridor. “Wanna sneak up here and take a look. No one’s around.” He opens a door. The walls climb with lavish leaves and huge fleshy pink petals. A tangle of luscious green and yellowy tones. The rug is zany stripped in emerald and mint. “My favourite.” He heads up the passage, going deeper into the centre of the house where I’ve never been and climbs a stairs.

You forget the house is old until the steps creak. The walls are cool blue with a bed the width of the room, the size of which I’ve never been in before. A little sofa sits under a small chandelier of blue and green glass. Thick sheepskin rugs. An armchair is duck blue. The bay window draped in heavy brocade has a window seat. Gold swags run from a pelmet with cords and I wonder at those who live with this and about their need and how a family could live in the entirety of this space.

“This room has the best view.” He stands in the bay window.

The horizon is full of light. We touch the sky. I had forgotten the sea was out there. Hadn’t realised its intense greeny blue.

“What’ll we do about the mess?”

“There won’t be much. I’ll tell the maid to come in.”

“Won’t she have been in before?”

“Maybe. But they’re nice girls. They won’t mind.” He flicks down the silky eiderdown to piercing white sheets and sits on the edge of the bed. “You can relax here.”

“How much d’you reckon this costs?”

“Three hundred a night? But this is an apartment.” He points to doors either side of a cheval mirror.

“You always look in?”

“Thought you’d be interested.” He sits next to me and smells of vanilla and cardomom. His lips. His eyes light grey. On me. Seeing. Seeing me seeing him. He presses my shoulder gently, drawing me down. We lie as cool as cutlery.

Deirdre Shanahan’s first novel,  Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, was published by the independent award winning, Bluemoose Books in 2019 and a collection of stories was published by Splice in 2020, including one in The Best of British Short Stories. She has been a finalist in the London Writers Award from Spread the Word and won the Wasafiri International Fiction Award. She was awarded a bursary from Arts Council England to have time to write and most recently an award from The Society of Authors to undertake research for a novel. Off Grid was recently shortlisted for The Berlin Reader Prize.
Copyright - HM Inspectorate of Prisons

Craig Smith

A Man’s Got Needs by David Shipley

I’ve been in prison a week and a stranger keeps telling me he’s going to kill his wife. Simon is my third cellmate. We spend twenty-three hours a day sharing a six foot by nine concrete and steel space that serves as kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. When I first entered Simon’s cell, I was struck by how unlike prison it smelled. No stink of sweat, or stale water in the steel toilet. Instead, the scent of soap and spices. He seemed nervous to begin with. I’m sure I did too; meeting a stranger you’re going to be confined with is tough. Will he be filthy? Will he be crazy? Will he be dangerous? Simon soon told me about his crime.

Now Simon spends most of our waking hours talking about his wife, usually through a mouthful of biscuits, or cakes, or sweets. He eats almost constantly, shoving handful after handful into his loose jaw, crumbs spilling down his grey prison issue t-shirt. When he isn’t eating, he scratches at the rash covering his arms, neck and back. I’m pretty sure the rash is caused by the scratching. He talks while he scratches too.

Simon’s wife, though. He became convinced she was having an affair with her cousin, and had been for years. Simon had his suspicions so he had tracking devices placed in both of their cars. This is a crime, of course. Stalking is a crime. Simon’s wife, that bitch, reported him to the police, throwing in an accusation of coercive and controlling behaviour for good measure. Simon was arrested five weeks ago and has sat on remand since. He’s already pleaded guilty, on lawyers’ advice, and will be sentenced next week. He might walk free, he might get eighteen months.

Simon’s somewhere in his fifties, an IT company director from Pinner. Never been in trouble with the police before, class and wealth shielding his recreational cocaine use from the law. I swear, I’m going to kill her, Shippers. She has to pay for what she’s done. His breathing is fast and short, his eyes bulge.

What has she done? They haven’t had sex in fifteen years, but marriage is sacred and something in this affair, in how he has been brought low, touched a pit of rage or shame. If he’s released, will he kill her? Should I say something? To who? I know what happens to snitches in prison. He calls his sons. One won’t answer; he’s sided with the mother. Simon calls the other every day, explaining his theory that she has borderline personality disorder, that she has destroyed their happy family, that she is the monster, and he is the victim. He’s calmer when he speaks to his boys, laying out the case. He never tells them he’s going to kill their mother. But he tells me. She’s turned my child against me. She’s destroyed our family. I’m going to kill her.

Simon’s in love. Not with his wife, but with a prostitute half his age. He’s been paying her for sex since he discovered the affair. He pays her £500 to stay the night. It’s more than the price on her website, apparently. Sometimes she doesn’t ask for the money but I give it to her anyway.

We’ve been confined together a few days when he tells me he’s been using prostitutes for the past fifteen years. I ask him if that means he cheated first. He’s silent, unmoving for the first time, and then he finds the explanation. That was different though. She wasn’t giving me it, and a man’s got needs.

DAVID SHIPLEY WRITES:
“I’m David Shipley. I’ve sold fork lift trucks, been a recruiter, worked in corporate finance and produced a film. I also committed a fraud in 2014, which I was jailed for in 2020. I was horrified by the prison system I saw. It is neglectful, cruel and seems almost designed to maximise reoffending. In August 2022 I was released, determined to make a difference. Now, I write, campaign and speak on prison reform. I work as a consultant prison inspector, and I’m always happy to talk and write about my experiences.”
Image copyright HM Inspectorate of Prisons
Last Candle - courtesy of Wikimedia

Craig Smith

The Last Candle by Lucy Palmer

We bought our last candle on the coldest day of the year. I remember because the weather man warned not to travel that morning, but we went anyway, wrapping up warm and praying we wouldn’t be stranded at the end of the line. We didn’t know it would be the last time; only that the previous candle was running low and we needed a replacement.

To reach Ikea in London, you take the train, the tram and two buses. It’s not an easy journey but we always pretended it was. Do you need anything from Ikea? He would ask, as if it was a short trip down the road. We could pop in tomorrow if you’re not busy. And I’d nod and forget any plans I had. We spent whole days silently shaping excuses to return. Sometimes it would be a wardrobe, or a sink, or a new bathroom cabinet, but it didn’t matter. We never picked up anything we’d noted down.

All we ever left with were candles.

I don’t remember the first time we went together but soon after we fell into a comfortable routine. We always sat in the same pretend kitchen and sipped the same pretend drinks and stared through the same pretend window. He purposefully misspelled my name in the laminated guest book and I feigned disgust when they asked if we we’d pay together. Before long, the world of pretend houses felt like home.

We started going more and more, even before the previous candle had run dry. For the amount we spent on tiny flames, we could have afforded an electric fireplace. On the coldest day of the year, he joked we should invest in something more, but when we got there, as always, we were blind to anything but candles. I wish I knew why we needed them so much. God knows such a tiny flame couldn’t heat anyone. But maybe it tricks you into thinking you’re warm – and we were both so cold we held on as if candles burn through glaciers.

The last candle began to die as soon as we bought it. I knew, even at the time, that I was lighting it too much, too carelessly. Each day, I left it burning for hours. I left it burning on afternoons where we lay on his sofa and nights when we wandered the Thames. My mother used to warn me it was dangerous to leave a candle burning while you weren’t paying attention, but we were so desperate to unfreeze our lives we couldn’t stop.

And then it was over.

Summer came, and in its warmth, he didn’t want candles anymore. The one we bought on the coldest day fizzled and slowly, agonisingly, suffocated.

I wanted more than anything to return to Ikea but couldn’t. I had this desperate fear I’d get lost without him: that I’d lose track of myself, somewhere in the maze of plastic kitchens, drinks and windows. It didn’t matter that I’d been a thousand times before, even alone, in the days before we met. The journey which used to be so easy stretched out as if I had to walk each mile.

I didn’t need another candle. I didn’t want another candle. It was summer for me too and he had always been the one to suggest going… but I still couldn’t throw the last carcass away. I kept the dead wick on the shelf for months, wandering past each day to check if it had flickered on during the night. It never did. The only movements in the glass were flashes of my reflection.

At some point during winter, my real life and the world of facades became twisted in one, until I couldn’t remember which was which. If only we’d bought something more than candles, maybe I could keep track.

Lucy is an MA Languages and Literature student at Durham University interested in the boundaries between art and life. She is currently working on her debut novel, Untitled Portrait, about two children who inherit an art collection from their neglectful father, and struggle with their conflicting perceptions of him in life and death. .

The Cormorant - courtesy of the Sidmouth Museum

Craig Smith

The Cormorant by David Lloyd

I lean back on my elbows catching sight of the cormorant, poised and ready for the first mackerel of the day. It takes off called by a voice I can’t hear, then dives, disappearing into the sea. I’ve learnt to be patient. Lighting my pipe I relish the first taste of tobacco; its amber nectar settling me as always. When the water breaks the bird’s blackness catches my attention as it resurfaces, landing on a groyne, droplets of water glistening on its wings. Then it takes off and dives again. I try to hold my breath as long as the cormorant does. I count down one minute, maybe a few seconds more. The ocean parts as it surfaces again. Secure back on the rocks, opening its plumage to the sun. I feel Stephen next to me, as if his hand touches mine, his breath on my neck. Yet it is just the tease of the breeze. Other times when sunlight dazzles, I think I see him with his hand raised at the shoreline. But when I rub my eyes he’s gone.

Grief takes different shapes they say. At times my imagination wanders as I lie awake in the early hours. When a tree branch taps my window I believe it’s Stephen out there, waiting to come in so we can lie once again, safe in each other’s arms. If a full moon’s shadow crosses the room, it fools me to thinking he’s come back to me. He’s gone forever from this life, but I won’t accept that he’s lost to me. Gone just after the Great War when we thought the worst had passed. When we thought we’d been spared. He was taken too soon after all he did, all he’d achieved as fisheries inspector, guardian of the sea, talented writer.

In the darkest of times he looked after us fisher folk, got us safer boats, saved lives. That is why he is remembered with love and affection even though he was not from round here. He had turned his back on a comfortable life, gone against his father’s wishes, coming here instead to serve the needs of the working poor. Stephen made his mark through his sense of duty. He was reliable like the engine he invented for his boat, The Puffin. I can still remember his smile, breaking through like the sun on an overcast day when the craft completed its maiden voyage. But at times he would retreat into himself, become short of temper, burdened by his way of life; a life we shared enduring looks and rumours. We faced them down together, from the first day Stephen and I moved in with the Woolleys.

We made an odd household Stephen, Mr and Mrs. Woolley and me, Harry Paynter, fisherman turned chronicler of these times. Our home was a sort of oasis from the everyday struggles with the sea. The kitchen with its big open hearth, a fit shrine for the hallowed blue enamelled kettle that kept us all going. There was a small-paned window in the North wall, then – going round the room – the courting chair, below the shelves laden with fancy china and souvenirs, and of course, fishing tackle. Beyond it was a walled garden cluttered with flotsam and jetsam for firewood, old masts, spars and rudders, and some weedy, grub-eaten vegetables. Stephen felt at home here amongst the debris of ordinary lives.

He was never strong of body or mind. When his sickness blew in, the February days were marked by prayers, hymns, silences and disinfectant fumes. Mrs. Woolley scrubbed the floorboards until they achieved the same bleached pallor of Stephen. Being devout she crossed herself each time she left his sick room. Whenever I see women washing their doorsteps I cross the road to avoid the lingering smell of those memories.

The Cormorant - Sidmouth Museum Archives
Published with kind permission of Sidmouth Museum Archive

As Stephen got worse he struggled to breathe. The fever soaked and drained him. His lungs clogged, silted with phlegm. He drowned in his own liquid, a sort of fisherman’s death. At night, during those vigils his lungs would rattle, clattering like the sound of pebbles flung about by winter breakers on Sidmouth’s beach. In the small hours I’d listen for the creak of the stairs, when Mrs Woolley would enter with fresh towels wrapped around blocks of ice. Her tread was heavy, face creased with feelings she’d rather not share. I’d take the towels and bookend Stephen, one parcel around forehead, the other around his feet. Mrs Woolley and I nursed him with fading hope in our hearts. We saw it as our loving duty to settle him as best we could, after the sudden cold made him shake.

The sickness stalked me too, but I didn’t care if it carried me off. Since that first day I caught his eye at the fish market, I couldn’t imagine life without him. Mrs Woolley never judged or asked about Stephen and me, whatever thoughts she may have had. Her love was of the unconditional kind. She kept watch like the good soul she was.

During the last time we spent together at Stephen’s bedside, her knitting needles clacked in time with his shallow breath. The scrape of them against the yarn set me on edge. The smell of decay and sweat unsettled me. I felt the room grow small as if it was closing in on us and needed the respite of a walk to the beach.
“Back in ten minutes.”
“ Don’t linger long now.” Mrs Woolley looking up from her knitting for reassurance.

I stumbled down the stairs. Sleepless nights had drained me. In the kitchen I warmed myself against the fire. I took Stephen’s smock from behind the door, held it close, smelling a confection of him and fish in the weave of the fabric. It would be these small things that would keep me going when he left us. Pushing my cap down over my face I went to the yard, lifted the catch on the back door and felt the full force of the wind as it slammed behind me. As I walked to Port Royal men were checking boats stranded by the night’s storm. Shingle lay stacked along the esplanade, sky and sea merging into a uniform greyness. I became unsteady on my feet as a south westerly found new force. Dawn crept across the sky above Salcombe Hill. Streaks of pink flecked the clouds.

I felt the full weight of Stephen’s illness on my shoulders as a group gathered around his boat. They saw my arrival, parted and looked away. Their awkwardness reminding me of those early times down The Ship Inn when the bar, alive with banter, would fall silent as we entered. We were two men, closer than two men should be and it unsettled them. In a small town like this there was talk, knowing looks were exchanged, but these faded over the years as Stephen championed the welfare of fisher folk, got them insurance for their boats, made their lives better.

Near the sea wall a group of fisherfolk pulled and turned their nets. They nodded and I touched my cap in return. One man stepped forward.
“How’s Stephen?”
“No better”.
There was no need for further words. As I looked back to the sea, its big breakers overtopping The Cob, I saw the cormorant dive off the shore. I paused and counted again, held my breath for the time it took for it to surface and settle safely on the groyne.

I returned to the house just in time. As a pale winter’s light poked through the sick room window, Stephen drew his last breath. The Spanish Flu had shown no mercy. I sat silently, my hand over his, as Mrs Woolley brought a mirror and held it near his lips. No beads of life marked it. She and I sat together, heads bowed. We offered up a fragment of a hymn.
“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind ”
It was his favourite.

The Cormorant - Sidmouth Museum Archives
Printed with kind permission of Sidmouth Museum Archive

After the formalities of doctor and undertaker the house fell silent. I was lost. The empty bed stripped of its sheets and blankets, the mattress lying exposed, the room was hollowed out by Stephen’s parting. His favourite cufflinks, with their amber stones, lay abandoned on a side table. Later that day I slept fitfully, wondering what lay ahead for me, Harry Paynter, fisherman, widower of sorts. Next morning I went down to the scullery and warmed myself against the fire. Tears didn’t come; that wasn’t our way, but I felt my heart break as I took his smock from its hook and clutched the garment close to me trying to hold onto the last of him.

In the bedroom I opened his wardrobe. Inside were the smart clothes for London, reminders of Stephen’s other life from the times when he mingled with men of letters and touched the conscience of Parliament to bring about fishing reforms. In the dresser all the clothes were folded neatly. Shirts starched whiter than the shroud that now contained him. I heard Mrs Woolley call me down for tea, caught sight of my face like an apparition in the mirror.

In the parlour Stephen’s corpse was laid out in the coffin. I kept time with him after supper though hardly any stew had passed my lips. Mr Woolley pressed a beaker of port into my hand. Its warmth took the edge off my grief and I got lost in a sort of reverie of the memory of that first time Stephen and I met a year before the war that took so many. When he picked me to work with him, invited me to share his life. Nights we spent wrapped in each other’s arms.

At his funeral people spoke quietly and warmly about him, commenting on his kindnesses, his devotion to the sea and the people who risked their lives on it. The church was packed, the ‘well to do’ alongside ordinary folk like ourselves. Mrs Woolley gripped my hand throughout.
The Vicar’s address caught the different sides of Stephen very well.
“He was a fisheries reformer but also a great writer whose work was recognized in the finest literary circles.” The sun broke through the stained glass window, shafts of gold, red and green light embracing the coffin, as the Vicar spoke of Stephen’s peculiar nature.
“Stephen could be obsessive about things like cleanliness. Indeed he hated dirt, scrubbed his hands until they were crimson, smelt his shirts to make sure the essence of soap seeped through them. Insisted they were ironed to perfection. Yet he lived and worked in a world that was full of the sweat from men’s labours and the smell of fish.”

After the funeral I went down to the beach. There would be ale later when we gathered at The Ship to toast his life. We’d sing hymns around the bar. For now I needed to be close to the water’s edge. I rolled up my trousers and stood as the sea lapped around my calves. Across the line of the bay a single trawler chugged towards home. Near the cob seagulls fought for scraps of herring.

Tomorrow I’ll return to St Ives where my life has taken a different course. Will I come back? Who knows? Yet wherever I am my thoughts will carry his memory as a precious thing tucked into my jacket pocket. As I scan the horizon I see a disturbance in the water. The sea parts.

The cormorant breaks the surface, lands on a groyne and opens its wings to the sun.

The images in this story are published by kind permission of Sidmouth Museum Archive.

David Lloyd IS based in East Devon, WHERE HE organiseS writing retreats led by published authors AND co-curateS Open mic Novel Nights. HIS main focus is historical fiction and hidden histories, PARTICULARLY lives that have not received sufficient recognition.

Poetry and Coffee - Craig Smith

Craig Smith

Poetry and Coffee by Craig Smith

I love coffee shops. They’re my favourite places to write.

I’m sitting in one right now, the Serpentine Café and Kitchen in Hyde Park, London. When I get around to copy editing this piece, I’ll be in the Estate in Streatham, or the Arcade in Huddersfield when I go home next week, or Iris and June, off Victoria Street in London, or the Rookery Café at the top of Streatham Common. A few weeks ago, I was writing in Carvalho’s, behind Streatham Leisure Centre, while the proprietor, Meire, ran my son’s birthday party. Coffee shops are a refuge, the place with fewest distractions. They simplify things.

 

Rent

A pot of tea is an hour’s rent

for a beechwood table

and a beechwood bench.

 

Something to write on,

something to read;

that’s all I need.


 

I’ve been writing my entire adult life and I can assemble a chronology of my writing career based on the coffee shops I frequented and the people I hung out with. Over the years, I’ve switched from predominantly writing poetry to dabbling in screenplays, sitcoms, radio drama, and scifi before settling on poems, novels and short stories as my formats of choice, but coffee shops (and buses and libraries and trains and pubs) have been a constant throughout.

I started writing at the kitchen table, drinking Mellow Birds with milk from tuberculin-tested cows, (that is, unpasteurised). My first two poems were written in a rush for my English Language 16+ certification because my pals were playing football in the school field behind our house and I was two assignments short of my assignment quota. I enjoyed writing them, and later, of my own volition, I wrote more. Those poems were rubbish, make no bones about it, but they got me started, and formed the connection between poetry and coffee.

I found an early platform to trial my poems at Peter Sansom’s Poetry Workshops at Huddersfield Polytechnic. Those workshops became formative events that I built my week around, and they played a huge part in my development as a writer. They served as audience, encouragement and forensic review. In later years, I spent many years as a commissioning editor and copy editor, and it’s no exaggeration to say that everything I know about writing and editing was learned on those Monday evenings in the Polytechnic staff bar.

Poetry was a lifestyle. It was all we read. We would meet in Ye Merrie Englande in Huddersfield’s Pack Horse Arcade, with its displays of medieval weaponry, and slide our latest poems across the table top as we eeked out our Kenco till our bus was due. We ran from workshop to reading to Greenhead Books to the second-hand bookshop in the Byram Arcade, spending our giros on whatever poetry our local bookshops held. I still own every book or pamphlet I bought back then, along with a folder containing all my friends’ poems from that time.

Al Avarez’s New Poetry, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry and the PN Review’s Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland were our introduction to poetry’s possibilities. Peter arranged readings at the Art Gallery, upstairs at the Zetland, the backroom of the Albert, and we sat wide-eyed as national and international poets such as Carol Anne Duffy, Gillian Clark, Michael Schmidt, Kenneth Koch, Jeffrey Wainwright read from their collections and talked about their writing. They drank with us afterwards and we got to quiz them about the specifics of their poems. Our love for the form knew no bounds. We were geeks.

There were plenty of excellent poets from the region, such as Ian MacMillan, Tony Harrison, John Killick, Stanley Cook, Martin Wiley, all of whom we revered. Though a few years ahead of us, many became friends and counterparts, and they’d created an infrastructure that offered us a framework upon which we could grow. Janette and Geoff Hattersley founded The Wide Skirt in Sheffield; John Harvey co-founded Slow Dancer in Nottingham. In the print room at the Poly, we collated The North for Peter, in which many of our first poems were published, (mine included). We travelled to Doncaster, Sheffield, Barnsley to swap notes and compare experiences with poets across Yorkshire.

Those were the years before laptops and personal computers, before websites or desktop publishing. I wrote my first drafts by hand and typed the edited poems on my old Royale typewriter, with lots of carriage returns and gallons of Tippex to correct my errors. We bought carbon paper from the stationers and typed as hard as we could to create copies to distribute at the workshops. We weren’t in a position to be delicate.

I studied for a BA in Library and Information Studies at Manchester Polytechnic and spent hours in the stacks of the Polytechnic Library on the All Saints campus, working through their collections of Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, John Ash, etc. Pre-internet, it was a trial to acquire any given book, so to see them gathered in such numbers on the library shelves was extraordinary. I would request inter-library loans to source titles I’d vaguely read about in the footnotes of some other book: to hold Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems in my hands for the first time was literary bliss.

I’d spread myself out in a carrell in the circular Manchester Central Library, where I did my work placement and from whom I borrowed cassettes of Robert Frost: ‘… and that made aaaall the diff’rance’. Or I’d perch myself on a table in the Cornerhouse on Oxford Road, where I’d recently enjoyed a double bill of Lemn Sissay and Paul Muldoon. Most cafés sold lousy coffee back then, with a congealed film of cream that stuck to your upper lip, but not The Cornerhouse. I love good coffee but I hate bad coffee: if the latter’s the only option, I prefer bog-standard tea. But I discovered I liked my coffee black, and that’s been my preference, ever since.

Café

Another year in the same café,

the rain on the window

like a microscope sample,

a cross-section of watershed,

a perfect example

of our foulest weather.


 

Life was a mixture of the solitary – research, writing, editing – and the social, when I’d jump onto the train back to Huddersfield to attend readings or invite pals back to my digs in Burnage to drink cheap wine, eat logs of French loaf, and read from our latest purchases. The highpoint was a car ride to Bolton with John Ashbery, Jon Ash and Jeffrey Wainwright to see Jon read. I talked to Ashbery in the backseat of Jeffrey’s car about hanging out with Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, and was thrilled that he owned LPs by the Huddersfield Choral Society. The wonderful thing was John accepted me as a writer, though he was miles ahead of me in terms of ability and achievement. Writers are confederates. We know what it takes to put pen to paper.

Back home with my 2.2 Gentleman’s Degree, I got a job working for Greenhead Books Library Supplier in a converted mill in Milnsbridge where I’d once fitted a lift with my father. Milnsbridge was the village where Harold Wilson was born, where George Mellor worked as a cropper before being hung as a Luddite. One day in 1990, the Library Supply owner, Chris Watkins, popped his head into the tearoom to announce that Margaret Thatcher had resigned. In non-conformist Huddersfield, we cheered heartily.

I later moved to Greenhead’s bookshop in the town centre. I worked in the Academic department, and learned with sadness how few people bought poetry, even in Huddersfield, which was reputedly the Poetry Capital of Britain. We were a minority interest, and a low shelf in a narrow bay was all we got. As a bookseller, I understood why such a decision was made, but as a reader, it broke my heart. I wrote of a lunchtime in the staffroom above the shop, getting out my paper and pen while the kettle boiled, listening to cassettes of Scott Walker that the junior staff scoffed at. Then, somewhere in there, I broke my leg playing football, missed out on a possible promotion, and side-stepped into Academic publishing, where I’ve worked ever since.

Poetry is my literary first love, and it never lets me down. Whatever we feel as human beings, some poet down the years has distilled that emotion or experience into its elemental form. Poetry is language at its most perfect, the ultimate diviner of the human spirit. If we need solace, poetry will console us. If we need joy, poetry will take our soul and let us fly. As I redraft this essay for a final, final, final time, at home in my comfy chair, with shelf after shelf of books around me and a fresh cup of tea at my side, I glance across at Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghosts on my desk, sitting on top of my reading list, and I can’t wait to know what it has to say.


 

Café was published by iambapoet.com.


  Craig Smith is a poet and novelist from Huddersfield in the UK. His writing has appeared on Writers Rebel, Atrium, iambapoet and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, as well as in The North, The Blizzard, and The Interpreters’ House, among others. Craig has three books to his name: poetry collections, L.O.V.E. Love (Smith/Doorstop) and A Quick Word With A Rock And Roll Late Starter, (Rue Bella); and a novel, Super-8 (Boyd Johnson). He is currently working toward an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University, where he is the joint Managing Editor of MIR Online Twitter: @clattermonger