Fiction: Being Gideon by Penny Simpson

Being Gideon by Penny Simpson

Gideon walks out of the house, an army kit bag slung over his shoulder. I wonder if there’s someone just out of sight, pleading with him, or maybe even cursing, but the doorway is in shadow and it’s impossible to tell. Gideon steps into a patch of sunlight; the light catches in his hoop earring. He looks over, and I see his right eye is badly bruised. I turn to Anouk in the driver’s seat. Her large, red-framed sunglasses make her look like a magnificent tropical bug.

“It’s never been his face before,” I say.

Anouk is edgy. She’s gripping the steering wheel. It’s like a scene in one of her shows, just before everything is transformed by a glance or a gesture. “Go and help him with his bag, Edie.”

I get out the car and walk up to Gideon. His bag is lighter than my tote. In addition to his black eye, there’s a dried blood stain on his paisley chiffon blouse. Anouk winds down her window. “I’m over here.”

“Like we can’t see her,” I say.

Gideon smiles, then flinches. “Let’s go,” he says.

He hands me his bag and climbs into the back seat. Anouk lights up a cigarette and passes it over. Gideon doesn’t speak during the journey back to our house, just smokes. His bag is wedged behind my seat. When we get home, we find the woman who owns the fish and chip shop around the corner has taken our parking spot. We remain stationary in the middle of the road whilst Anouk swears vengeance. Gideon leans over. “Park further up,” he says. “She’s a cow. End of.”

Anouk revs the engine. “Honest to God, one day, I swear, I’ll drive through her shop window.”

For a split second, everything feels like it was before, but then I help unpack Gideon’s bag and discover his worldly goods consist of two T-shirts, some underpants, a pair of black jeans, a toothbrush, and a battered copy of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Gideon sits on the edge of the bed in the spare room, crouching over his bag like it’s a dead baby seal. He starts to cry. I’ve never seen Gideon cry before. He’s seen me cry, and he’s seen Anouk cry a thousand times, because she’s theatrical by temperament. But today, it’s Gideon who cries, and my mother doesn’t. She stands in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, her lips pinched. Anouk is angry, very angry, but not with Gideon.

“Tea in five,” she says, and heads downstairs.

I stay where I am, sat on the floor, stroking Gideon’s feet.

“Anouk will fight him, you know. Just let him try anything, and she’ll slay him.”

Gideon lifts his foot and gently pushes me over. “I’m done with him, Edie. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

Tea is a plate of crumpets topped with triangles of Dairylea cheese. After eating, Gideon swaps his blouse for one of his T-shirts. Anouk puts the blouse into a basin of salt water to soak.

“At least with this pattern the blood won’t show so much.”

“I like that blouse,” he says.

“It suits you.”

“Not everyone agrees.”

“Only those who agree will come through my door, Gideon.”

Anouk invites him to join us in the front room, where we are working on a new puppet called The Birdman. I put on a tweed overcoat and pull the collar up over my head. Anouk places a pair of bellows on top and asks Gideon whether it looks right for the Birdman’s head. He makes some minor adjustments.

“You know, I’ve an idea how to pay you back. You can take me on as an intern and I’ll help you with your show.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Anouk says. “We’re just glad you’re here. Besides, I’ll need your help because Edie’s exams are coming up. She’ll be way too busy.”

In the morning, Gideon is first up. I find him in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. We eat in the courtyard garden, a square of gravel, hemmed in by concrete walls. Gideon is subdued. I have to wait until after we finish eating, before he gives a hint of what is troubling him.

“What if he comes here, Edie?”

“Unlikely. I mean, does he want the police involved?”

“It’s not that. It’s just the idea of arguing with him all over again.”

“What more does he need to know?”

“The everything I haven’t told him.”

I lean over and squeeze his hand. Gideon has large hands with long, tapered fingers. Anouk makes plaster casts of them. There are half-a-dozen lined up by the back door, spray painted gold and decorated with astrological signs. Gideon stares at his hands.

“You know, I never hit back. I could if I wanted to, but I don’t.”

I miss my chance to ask more because Anouk appears at the back door to inform me that I’m late for college. “Get out of here now, or else!”

Gideon leans over and hugs me tight. “Best friends still,” he says.

“Always.”

Anouk throws me a Kit Kat as I run past her in the kitchen. I don’t think she’s ever made me a packed lunch. But Anouk is Anouk. When I was little, she sent me to school in a mix of regular school uniform and pieces of outlandish theatre costume. It didn’t matter. I changed schools frequently. But now I have exams, and Anouk has seen fit to anchor us in a rented house, within walking distance of the Tivoli Theatre where she’s creating her new puppet show. The Tivoli is a Victorian building in the middle of Eastbourne. It still has its original gas fittings and a peeling stucco exterior. I pass the Tivoli on my way to college. It’s where I first met Gideon. We’d just started our A-levels. From day one, he’d stood out. It’s partly because of his height – he’s six feet, four and I’m short – and partly because of his distinctive silver hoop earring (the college bans jewellery). But mostly, it’s because he’s detached from those around him, as if he walks in a parallel universe. There are rumours he’s in a band, and counter-rumours he’s been signed up by a top modelling agency. Gideon isn’t part of any clique and that intrigues me; I’m not in one either, although in my case it’s because I’ve learnt to be self-sufficient after all the school swapping.

We first spoke when he spotted me in the lunch queue, reading A Clockwork Orange. He asked me what I thought of the book, but I was tongue-tied. It was a while before I felt confident talking to him. The problem with Gideon is this: he’s very hard to keep track of. He’s always losing his mobile. For a while, I didn’t even know where he lived. And then one day he turned up backstage at the Tivoli with his arm in a sling. He said it was the result of a stupid accident. Then a fortnight later he called me from A&E to say there’d been another accident and could Anouk and I come and pick him up. We found him sitting on a bench near the main entrance. It was raining heavily. He didn’t find it easy to get up on his feet. Anouk wanted to know his address, but he asked to come to our house instead.

“I’m tired of the view at home. I want new things to look at, and there are always so many wonderful things in your house.”

On that occasion, Gideon stayed with us for a week. This time, he takes over the front room to recuperate on the leather sofa. He says he’ll be up and running by the weekend, but neither Anouk nor I are confident that will happen. He borrows Anouk’s jewellery, her wigs, and her treasured Art Deco-style dressing gown. I come home from college one afternoon and find him asleep on the sofa, a wig on his head, and my mother’s dressing gown tied tightly around him with a gold scarf, like an obi belt. I take a photo and send it to Anouk who is still at work. She texts back to say Gideon reminds her of the silent movie star Louise Brooks. I don’t know who she is, so I google. Anouk is right. Later that evening, my mother sits at Gideon’s feet as he plaits her hair, adding in little pieces of jewellery. I’m supposed to be revising, so silence reigns. Gideon is the first to break it.

“I’m not going back.”

“Have you told your parents?”

“It’s not possible, Anouk.”

“But – “

“I mean it. My parents haven’t got an ear between them.”

Anouk gives way, and Gideon stays put in the spare room. He’s turned eighteen, he says, and he will make his own choices. His number one choice is to leave home. Then he abandons his A-levels to take up a job as an assistant in the Tivoli workshop. Anouk soon discovers he has a talent for turning everyday objects into the most extraordinary puppets. His first success: he transforms two Edwardian coat stands into a magical seahorse, which moves across the stage with the aid of wires. It begins to feel like he’s been with us forever, but it’s just an illusion. Gideon’s other family has not gone away.

His mother is the first to track him down. I’m at the Tivoli reading in the stalls when she’s shown into the auditorium. Mrs Walker looks like a sugar mouse; she’s very petite and dressed from top to toe in pink. She heads straight over to Gideon, who is sitting at the production desk. He doesn’t look very happy to see her, but Mrs Walker seems oblivious to the fact.

“Dad and I have been discussing things, and you know, we think it’s just fine if you want to pick up on your A-levels at a later stage… “

“Please, go away.”

Gideon’s tone is cold, so much so Mrs Walker can only concede. Even Anouk seems unsettled by his manner. Shortly after this encounter, Gideon leaves to visit a friend in Brighton. He texts to say he will be gone for a while. Gideon has secrets, which Anouk and I guess at but don’t fully agree upon. We know questions have been put to him in the Walker household, which he’s supposed to know the answers too, but doesn’t, and that has had consequences. Anouk suspects Mrs Walker avoids asking her son much about anything, unlike his father.

“Gideon’s blouse used to belong to her,” Anouk says. “And he’s borrowed other things too. It was all a big secret, but not any longer.”

She leaves the dressing gown hanging up behind Gideon’s bedroom door. “He’ll be back for this, if nothing else,” she says. But I know she’s as worried as I am by his absence. In the end, Gideon stays away for a week. On his return, he’s reluctant to talk about anything except the new show. He promises not to go AWOL again. Anouk agrees to take him back, and I’m relegated to revising at home. It feels like a relegation, because before my A-levels, I not only helped to make the puppets, I sometimes appeared in my mother’s shows. I made my debut as a cygnet when I was just fifteen months old, lying inside a giant papier mâché egg, my wings attached to the back of my baby grow. When Anouk plucked me out of the egg, the audience had gone wild. I have a newspaper photograph of me sat inside my egg, pinned above my desk. Gideon has always liked this photograph. Shortly after his return to the workshop, he stops by my room. He asks about my revision, but he’s more interested in talking about the photograph and my stage performances.

“I envy you,” he says. “Growing up in the theatre.”

“It’s not all applause and fancy dress, you know. Right now, we need this new show to work or else we’re back living in grandma’s caravan.”

“I’m still envious. I like caravans. I stayed in one the other week when I was away.”

“I thought you were in Brighton?”

“Adjacent to. My friend can’t afford to rent anywhere which doesn’t have wheels.”

“Are they from school?”

“No. He’s a full-grown adult. But it’s not like that, Edie. He’s just helping me think through a few things.”

“Isn’t that what we do?”

“Yes, but some things I need to think about with someone else, that’s all.”

“What things?”

“Oh, you know, things. My friend’s studying law. And no, I’m not the guilty party in any crime. There’ll be no sirens at dawn. More’s the pity. It might rustle up some publicity for the show.”

Gideon doesn’t seem to want me to pursue my line of questioning. By way of diversion, he asks if he can borrow the photograph. “You know, I think it’s time to resurrect this little tableau. I like the idea of making a puppet baby. And the show is all about a missing baby boy. Besides, you’re way too big to play the role now.”

Gideon isn’t being cruel. I’ve read Anouk’s script. It’s based on a fairy tale my grandma used to tell me about an orphaned baby prince whose life is threatened by a wicked uncle who covets his crown. A kind wizard hides the baby inside a magic egg and protects it using a spell which none can break if their intentions are evil. This story originally inspired Anouk to turn me into a baby swan for a show’s encore, but now she’s using it to create a full-length drama about a missing baby boy. I tell Gideon I think his idea might well work. He sets off to find Anouk to convince her of his plan, and I return to my revision. When the doorbell rings, I assume it’s Gideon, and he’s forgotten his key, so I am surprised to find a tall man in a blue suit on the doorstep. He doesn’t look like a bailiff, and Jehovah’s Witnesses usually come in twos. Anouk and I don’t really know anyone else who wears a suit in the daytime. The man smiles, but his manner is awkward and that’s when I spot the resemblance to his son.

“Is Mrs Claudel in? I’m Gideon’s father.”

“Anouk is at the theatre.”

He shows no sign of leaving, so I offer to accompany him to the Tivoli. “You’ve not met Anouk yet, have you? I’ll introduce you.”

At the theatre, we find Gideon working downstage, attaching Anouk’s plaster cast hands to the fly system. I think Mr Walker should be interested in what his son is doing so I explain that when the lights are set, the plaster hands will be transformed into a shower of surreal rain. He ignores me and strides on to the stage. Anouk appears from the wings. For a minute, it looks as though the three of them are in a play and Mr Walker has forgotten his lines, but then he springs into action, snatching Gideon by the arm. “You’re an embarrassment. Hanging around with these people – I mean, who are they?” Gideon doesn’t reply, and this makes Mr Walker angrier still. He grabs him by the collar of his boiler suit. Gideon tries to release his grip, but it turns into a vicious wrestling match.

“Stop that! Right now!”

Anouk’s voice rings out, and father and son freeze. I’m about to run on to the stage, but Anouk cautions me to stay back. Mr Walker holds up his hands, a gesture of defeat.

Anouk orders him to leave and follows him into the wings. I’m left alone with Gideon. His boiler suit has been ripped open in the struggle, revealing the web of scars across his chest.

“This is what happens,” he says.

Later, Gideon traces his scars for me. They are cigarette burns, which possess a hidden pattern. Each scar marks a transgression on his part: wearing his mother’s paisley blouse, or her wedding veil, or her costume jewellery. My fingers follow his, and I learn his stigmata by heart.

“There was a time when I didn’t want to live,” he says. “My father has been trying to use that against me ever since. Says I’m a vulnerable adult in need of protection. But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word. And right now, he doesn’t know how much I want to live.”

It’s why he went to see his friend in Brighton. He’d thought about challenging his father in court and was seeking legal advice. But after this public confrontation with his father, Gideon chooses to bury himself in his work. His father doesn’t reappear, although Anouk puts Stage Door on standby just in case. Gideon spends long hours designing his egg, which must transform into a variety of obstacles to defeat the villains hired to assassinate a baby prince. He sketches his designs over my revision notes and then animates them on his iPad. The eggs appear like a shoal of prehistoric creatures swimming along an ocean bed. I watch these ethereal mutants morph in and out of each other; their spines like salt-crusted zips, and their antennae a blur of sea green strokes. I imagine being Gideon must be like living inside one of these fantastic entities; the very core of him, a kaleidoscope of different selves. A fortnight before the show’s opening, Gideon’s predominant self is tense, moody, and totally insufferable.

“The egg is the problem,” he says. “I don’t think I can pull it off.”

He works late, and so does Anouk. A great deal is riding on this production. Anouk has invited producers and theatre programmers to come and see the show during its week-long run. The prospect of being out on tour again is a tantalising one for all of us, but there are no guarantees. Ever since I can remember, our lives have swung between feast and famine, waiting on the verdicts of harassed producers or too-small grants from cash-strapped funding bodies. This time is no different, except I’m revising whilst Anouk sits at her sewing machine in the front room making costumes into the early hours. I do what I can to contribute: I leave trays of drinks and snacks on the floor by her work table. They are often left untouched.

In the week leading up to the opening night, Anouk and Gideon practically move into the theatre and our paths rarely cross. I have no idea how things are shaping up until I take my seat in the auditorium for the first night, which takes place the week before my first exam. The audience is small, consisting mostly of Anouk’s friends who work in the theatre and a gaggle of early summer tourists. Tom, the Front of House manager, has told me there are two producers in, one from France, the other from London. I assume one is the tall woman in a green baker boy cap who keeps her sunglasses on even in the auditorium. To my relief, there’s no sign of the Walkers.

Gideon’s egg makes its appearance half-way through the show. It’s been constructed out of sheets of metal, stuccoed with industrial cogs and bolts painted in iridescent colours. A series of projections play across it, transforming it into a fortress, a flying spaceship, a forest, and a desert. (The wicked uncle meets his end in the desert, killed by the creature Gideon created out of the Edwardian coat stands). Finally, it reverts to being a magical sanctuary for a baby prince. Two hinged doors swing open and reveal him, a silver figure also made of industrial parts. He waves his tiny fists at the audience and receives a round of applause. As the audience hollers and whoops, the baby sprouts a pair of multi-coloured wings; they grow and grow, spiralling up to the theatre’s roof, like a column of tropical birds making a flight to freedom. I take another look: they are tiny model birds threaded together to create a pair of giant wings. The audience are on their feet, cheering. I join them.

The show over, I hurry backstage to find Gideon has already been mobbed by Anouk’s friends. The show is a success. The producer in the sunglasses has whisked Anouk off for a drink. I wait for the crowd to melt away before offering my congratulations. Up close, Gideon looks shattered.

“Did I do you proud?”

“Couldn’t be prouder. I’ll buy you a drink at Giovanni’s.”

Gideon smiles a wan smile. “I think I’ll give it a miss.”

“But you must celebrate.”

“I’m not sure I’m feeling all that celebratory.”

“Come for one drink at least.”

He pulls on his coat. “Okay. Just the one. And remember, you’re buying.”

We head for the stage door and find some crew lingering by the reception desk, sheltering from the heavy rain outside.

“Let’s make a run for it,” I say. “Bet I can beat you there.”

Gideon pulls a face. It’s not much of a challenge, but I don’t want him to use the rain as an excuse to stay away from Giovanni’s. We push through the doors and take off down the street. Giovanni’s trattoria is at the far end. We arrive, soaked through.

Giovanni hands us towels and we take off our shoes and wring out our shirts. Gideon seems to have recovered his spirits. He jokes with Giovanni and threatens to remove his clothes. Giovanni feigns shock. He hands Gideon a tablecloth and suggests he wear that instead. And so, it is we arrive at the first night party with Gideon resplendent in a toga improvised from a tablecloth. The assembled guests spontaneously applaud. Gideon hesitates, but only for a moment, before he takes a bow and twirls before his audience, milking the applause for all its worth. Eventually, he comes to a halt, smiles, and blows me a kiss which I catch and return.

 

Penny Simpson is a novelist and short story writer. Currently, she is devising and running a series of creative writing workshops for NHS Wales, part of an initiative supporting patients living chronic pain.

Mstyslav Chernov, Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

Ukraine Lab: Lessons from the Frontlines

Ukraine has been often called a laboratory when it comes to global challenges in the spheres of environment, information, and security. The site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, the first target of the Kremlin’s troll farms and disinformation campaigns, the country to spark the collapse of the Soviet Union and to stand up to its neo-imperialist successor: Ukraine has been the first to face and, at times, set in motion, processes that have worldwide consequences.

Russia’s all-out attack became a wake-up call for the international community. The world was first shocked by the sheer brutality of the invasion, then by its own ignorance about the country invaded. It turned out Ukrainians were not ready to surrender to the seemingly superior military power: neither in 72 hours, as was predicted by many western intel agencies, nor seven months into the full-scale war. It turned out Ukrainians were defiant. It turned out their defiance had a history of which the world knew nothing. It turned out the outsiders’ perceptions of Ukraine were shaped by Russia’s imperialist narratives.

Today, the value of Ukrainian knowledge and experience can no longer be dismissed. The urgency to learn from Ukraine is now existential for the rest of the world.

Ukraine Lab is an online writing residency for emerging writers from Ukraine and the UK tasked with exploring global challenges through the prism of Ukraine. The thematic focus of the creative nonfiction pieces by Kris Michalowicz and Sofia Cheliak is war. ‘Luhansk, Stolen’ reminds us that Russia’s war of aggression did not start on 24 February 2022 but has been raging on for eight years. ‘Ukrainian Lottery’ takes a look at those surprising Ukrainians who reject the ready-made model of victimhood and resist the enemy with a sense of humour and a sense of purpose.

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture 2022. You can read ‘Luhansk, Stolen’ and ‘Ukrainian Lottery’ in Ukrainian here [link to the Ukrainian publication]. Ukraine Lab pieces focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.

Sasha Dovzhyk is a special projects’ curator at the Ukrainian Institute London and Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, UCL. She has curated Ukraine Lab.

Mstyslav Chernov, Visual interpretation of Ukraine Lab war theme, Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022
Mstyslav Chernov: Ukrainian MSLR BM-21 ‘Grad’ shoots toward Russian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
Mstyslav Chernov, Birds fly over the residential building in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine, February 8, 2022

Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen: Ukraine Lab

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture. You can read the pieces in Ukrainian in Тиждень. Ukraine Lab pieces by Kateryna Iakovlenko and Jonathon Turnbull, focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.
About Ukraine Lab
Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery, (In Ukrainian)
Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen, (In Ukrainian)
Mstyslav Chernov: Birds fly over the residential building in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine, February 8, 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
This is how they steal your hometown from you. This is what they did to your Luhansk.

They bring in droves of drunken russians from over the border by bus and have them hoist mutant two-headed eagles on every flagpole. The russians bully their way into the heart of the city and proclaim themselves the heroes of a ‘great patriotic war’ from long ago. They swear this city – which they have never set foot in before – has always been their city. They say it always will be; that they have returned from exile to reunite your city with them like a lost child with its mother.

Then the russians hand in their tracksuits and football tops for military fatigues. Instead of the russians tri-colour and the ribbon of Saint George, they now have small arms and artillery. They look like boys playing a game of soldiers, dressing up in their fathers’ clothes to try look like men. They belch cologne and slur grand proclamations about a country that never existed. This country is as real to them in their drunken stupor as a desert mirage and, to breathe life into it, they have to capture buildings, abduct and torture your neighbours. What they can’t rape or kill, they eat or steal.

The streets you grew up on become a smuggler’s cove; the fields you wandered, a haunted graveyard. A curfew is imposed, and at night the drunks sing songs from a war they never fought. They wear insignia and icons and toast heroes from a country they can’t remember living in. This city of strangers, they swear, is the same as the one you were raised in. These strangers were always your neighbours.

Your father took you and your mother away from the city and to your family dacha just outside of Luhansk, where the steppe opens up and only the flocks of birds stencilled into the sky keep time from coming to a complete standstill. From there, you spent your sixteenth birthday feeling the tremble of the earth beneath your feet. You watched the dull illumination of mortars and the eerie glow of tracer fire in the distance. Friends and their families disappeared to Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv. Their shelled and empty homes looked like lanterns with the candles burnt out after All Saints’ Day.

Your mother begged your father to follow the others, but all he could say (after swilling the sediments from the wine in his mouth) was Why should we leave?

Although you felt your mother’s fear in your own blood, you shared your father’s sentiment. This, after all, was still Luhansk. Your Luhansk. Who had the right to tell you which country it was or wasn’t? Who could sweep borders across the land like breadcrumbs across the table?

You looked just like your mother when she was a girl, but you inherited your father’s shining black eyes and deep, solitary attachment to the place where you were raised. Like your father did when he was as a boy, you preferred to spend all your time outside of class wandering the wild fields. You loved to stand under the noon sun and look across them, feeling like the horizons touched the very ends of the earth. You loved to study maps and languages and learn the mysteries of ancient empires, but curious as you were, you felt no desire to leave Donbas. You were open to the world, but wherever your thoughts drifted, they always came back home to Luhansk. Faraway places, with their legends and unpronounceable names, were something like curiosities and no more. Like stones and leaves you’d find in the fields, you’d handle and inspect them, turn them over just to feel how they rested in your palm, before you’d discard them and walk on.

It was the same for your father. Unlike many of the drunks recruited by russia to steal the city, he could actually remember the Soviet Union with clear eyes, the toil it demanded of a person. His twenties were lost in its honour to a dreary military service on the top of the world in Murmansk, where he kept his thoughts to himself and plotted and yearned to return to Luhansk and never leave again. His resolve to do so was so strong it pressed its shadow into you, his daughter.

Apart from making wine, your father’s great passion was fishing. You once told him about a boyfriend from school and his first question was Does he fish? You told him no and he replied Tell him not to waste another second! He doesn’t know what he’s missing! On the weekends you and your mother – the people your father called his best friends – accompanied him for lazy picnics by the river. These car trips took you further out of the oblast and showed you tributaries of the Luhan and the Mius. In an old photograph now lost, your father faces away from his wife’s camera, the lens catching only the edge of his smile as he perches on the riverbank. But you face your mother, your eyes sparkling in the shade of your father’s contentment as you proudly hold up his catch in your hands.

Your mother dressed the house in flowers and nurtured you under ferns. The bitterness of wine contrasted the sweetness of lilies and peonies. The house was full of books, both in russian and Ukrainian, and you loved to read in both languages. But rather than sneaking books to bed at night to read with a torch under the covers, you took paper and pencils. You drew by torchlight as your parents lay asleep in each other’s arms in the next room. You made diagrams of your mother’s plants and sketched your father’s rivers. You bathed in the warmth of your parents’ love. They never argued, your father never swore. Although his wine was his pride, you never once saw him drunk.

Now the city became starved by drunks who sang dead men’s songs and flew the flag of a fictitious place. But at the refuge of your dacha, facts would remain facts. The fields, uninterrupted by buildings, would still welcome you, and Ukraine would stay Ukraine. Your father still had to go into Luhansk to work. He’d see the skids of tank tracks in the streets, portraits of Lenin and Stalin like undead risen from their tombs. The drunks guarded checkpoints, clinging to their guns. Their charcoal silhouettes haunting the roads looked like scarecrows come to life to wander in from the fields in search of a brain.

You turned eighteen and your parents moved back into Luhansk, so your father could keep an eye on the garage he owned and guard it from looters. A stray cat moved in with you at the dacha and your neighbours regarded you and it as something like a witch in her covenstead. This strange girl who lived alone, who never thought about marriage or children, and didn’t eat meat. The cat watched you as you scarred the frying pan in your efforts to cook. It hunted mice and saw you endure an intermittent water supply and faltering electricity. The sparse furnishings of the dacha calmed your artist’s eye. It was no longer possible to even transact with a local bank or post office without collaborating with the enemy, so you made a living freelancing online as a graphic artist. In the evenings you read Ukrainian poetry to yourself in a faint whisper.

You were hidden from the world.

Your art was a hymn to these remote suburbs. Removed from the militarised city, it was sometimes possible – if only for fleeting moments – to pretend you were free. The images you rendered were smooth and rounded and warm. With your hands you brought to life scenes from the city outskirts. A bumblebee visiting a barefooted girl sat among wild flowers. A bike ride. A young boy sailing away in a daydream boat down the Krynka to reach the sea. A kitchen table where a cup of coffee steams next to a bowl of three beaten eggs, a fork resting on the side. Years passed and your artwork became more vivid and insular. It protected you from what was happening inside the city, where russians staggered among the ruins, delirious with alcohol poisoning.

You turned nineteen; you turned twenty. At New Year, your parents refused to toast at midnight, waiting instead until 1am so as to not celebrate at the same time as Moscow. And the safety of the world depicted in your art became evermore disconnected with Luhansk as it had become. You noticed birds of prey hunting in the trees surrounding the dacha and taking off with something weak and helpless. In a nearby village, a wolf dragged away a little boy. Every now and then a forgotten landmine, left somewhere in a drunken blackout, took someone’s life or leg. Your father’s rivers were now desiccated or bled a polluted rusty red. You still felt like you lived in a fairy-tale, but now with only the dark, sinister elements left in.

Ever since the russians shelled your street in the city and forced you and your parents to leave for the dacha, you swore to yourself you’d never worry again about anything less than life and death. You knew what could happen to a body. Bodies failed; bodies could be ripped apart. Where once there was a person, a consciousness, there is now something unrecognisable; a prop in a horror film. A bullet or a shell erased a person and all of the memories and love contained within them. That’s why in your sixteenth year you made a silent vow to yourself to never get close to anyone or anything that could be stolen from you.

But now in the silence of the dacha something was changing inside you. When you fell asleep your mind showed you images, textures, played fugue notes that collaged into a feeling. The feeling then grew hands and breathed and became a body of its own, touching you and loving you and holding you until the morning as your nails traced its back. Then it would dissolve upon awakening, and you’d sit up alone in bed, feeling like the dacha was haunted. An echo, an absence, lingered in the air. The scent of someone who was never there.

During the days too you dreamed of other things. Public parks bustling with happy families. Flags of blue and yellow. Crowds staying out late. Everyone safe, speaking their minds. These daydreams buzzed with chatter in Ukrainian and Surzhyk. To think of yourself separated from Luhansk was to imagine yourself in a vacuum. But now you felt at last the need to leave, to follow the whisperings of sleep and feel the things you saw and touched in dreams.

You stood in line with the pensioners at Stanytsia Luhanska, feeling like you were about to cross the river Styx to go back into the world of the living. The russians at the crossing asked if you had a boyfriend and looked at you like you were an item in a warrior’s harem. They were so beguiled by you in their boredom they neglected to search your bags. You wondered if all it took was a smile for you to be able to smuggle bombs for the resistance and copies of Kobzar back across the demarcation line undetected.

You followed your friends to Kharkiv and enrolled at university, where for four years of total freedom you jumped at every loud noise and lay awake at night worried for your parents. Then the russians decided Kharkiv was also their city. So once again, just like the day they shelled your street back in Luhansk at the start of it all, you crouched for the last time in fear of the murderous sky.

 

Kris Michalowicz won the Creative Future bronze prize for fiction in 2018. In 2022, he was a writing resident with the Ukrainian Institute London. He lives and volunteers in Ukraine.

 

Please note: since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians and supporters have refused to capitalise the name of the aggressor state and its people. This piece uses lower case in accordance with the author’s preference.

Mstyslav Chernov_soldier_burning

Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery: Ukraine Lab

Ukraine Lab is run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and Ukrainian Institute. It is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture. You can read the pieces in Ukrainian in Тиждень. Ukraine Lab pieces by Kateryna Iakovlenko and Jonathon Turnbull focusing on the environment have been published in The Ecologist, while the pieces tackling disinformation will appear in openDemocracy.

About Ukraine Lab
Sofia Cheliak, Ukrainian Lottery, (In Ukrainian)
Kris Michalowicz, Luhansk Stolen, (In Ukrainian)

Mstyslav Chernov, A Ukrainian serviceman in front of the destroyed headquarters of the Mykolaiv regional military administration in southern Ukraine after a Russian strike. August 5, 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022
Mstyslav Chernov: A Ukrainian serviceman in front of the destroyed headquarters of the Mykolaiv regional military administration in southern Ukraine after a Russian strike. August 5, 2022

War-time Lodgings
The small 900-square-foot apartment, built to accommodate one person, now housed five people: all had moved in here to free up their own homes to accommodate those who were forced to abandon theirs and flee into uncertainty. This was not an exception: divorced couples moved in together, long-estranged paramours did the same, relatives that had seen each other once before shared homes, and cats, dogs, and fish all got along just fine. People slept on mattresses, in sleeping-bags, on a couch, three to a double bed. But that was nothing: Ira had taken reservations for the spots on the floor of her apartment.
Anna looks up from her zoom meeting and gives me a hug that has become routine—the hug that says, “I am so happy that you exist and you are here right now.”
Maksym gives me the same hug and says, “Sofia, do a dance. We have a bottle of wine. Ira’s friend from Poland, the reporter, brought it.”
I sit down in the red armchair under the window, light up a cigarette, and realize that things are almost as they have always been. We’re about to have dinner, just like we used to, we can stop working for a bit, and perhaps, for the first time since it all began, speak in sentences longer than, “I’ve got three families from Donetsk, and I can house two, can you find room for the third?” We will have some illegal wine.

Please, Just Leave Us Alone
This was before the shortage of petrol, but after the ban on alcohol sales. Maksym picked me up from my office in his car an hour before curfew. He had heard that my guests from the East did not make it.
Maksym works in alternative education. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he has been helping teachers and students set up learning in evacuation. He also takes humanitarian aid to the regions near the front. His car was shot at multiple times. It took him forever to find replacement glass, and for a while his very expensive vehicle sported a large hole taped over with scotch-tape. He has a deferment from the military service, but he is getting himself ready to go to the front. A saint.
During those days, the highway from Kyiv to Lviv was one single traffic jam. The family with a small child who were supposed to stay with me for three days decided to spend the night in a hotel hallway. They were lucky there was room for them in the hallway. To be alone in the beginning of the war meant two things: one, that you had an apartment (which was good), and two, that you were putting yourself in danger (not so good).
Alone, you might not hear the air-raid siren and die in a rocket strike.
Nothing had hit the city yet, but you were getting used to the idea that you were mortal. And that every day you were still alive was like winning a lottery: you got lucky.
The city would empty out about an hour ahead of curfew (at 22:00); during the day, it acquired the look of an impregnable bastion, ready to take the hit—sandbags and check-points everywhere. The boot of our car was like a mobile supply depot of a military unit. We had three bullet-proof vests, four helmets, pain-killers of various strength, chemical protection suits, tourniquets, Israeli bandages, a dozen of first-aid kits, two boxes of canned food, three canisters of petrol, and a ton of various smaller bits and pieces. The following day, all this was supposed to go to Kharkiv. All this was pulled together in half-a-day, as soon as my friend heard folks were leaving the next morning. You could get anything necessary on the front-lines in the city in those days. Our city became the main sorting point for equipment and humanitarian aid that flowed into Ukraine, while Ukrainians all over Europe were raising money and buying up gear. In a few days, you would not find a single bullet-proof vest or a tourniquet in Poland, and a week later Germany was similarly cleaned out. In this manner, zig-zagging between check-points and wiring money to the military, we moved toward our Ukrainian dream: to be finally left alone, so we could just live our own life as an independent country.

Feminism in Ukraine Has Won
“It is official: Feminism has won. The girls are saving the country, and we are making dinner,” says my friend, Andriy.
He works in IT, and the war caught him on a business trip abroad. On the morning of February 24, the air space above Ukraine was closed and all flights canceled. Andriy traveled thousands of miles to get back, and finally crossed the border on foot. Men are prohibited from leaving the country until the end of the war. Andriy knew this but could not fathom not coming back. As soon as he returned, he went to the enlistment office, but was turned away.
“Someone has to make money to buy the drones,” they said. “We’ll call you if we need you.”
So: the three guys are making dinner while we are finishing work. Anna is negotiating with a group of international lawyers—we keep hearing the word ‘tribunal’ but politely ignore the conversation. Anna is a lawyer; one of the youngest to make partner at her firm. Before the war, she worked with business clients, but began taking on human rights cases in 2014. In most of these, she represented, usually pro bono, victims of political persecution, and she lobbied tirelessly for the release of Kremlin’s Ukrainian political prisoners. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Anna began collecting evidence of war crimes–the evidence that will eventually help take russia to court for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Ira is on the phone all the time. “Yes, we have a home for you in Krakow, Witek will pick you up at the border… There’s a family waiting for you in Rzeczow, they are happy to put you up for three days, until we can arrange transport for you to Vienna or Prague, wherever you want…” Before this invasion, Ira was an art curator: she organised exhibits of Ukrainian art in Europe and brought the work of European artists to Ukraine. Over years, she amassed a vast network of contacts all over the world which was now very helpful in evacuating women, children, and the elderly away from the russian bombs and occupation.
I am prepping for my next broadcast. I call a young, successful and intelligent writer to invite him to join a national marathon tomorrow: a shared broadcast by the country’s biggest channels that would run for 24 hours. He holds a pause and then says, “The intellectuals can all fuck off, I’m going to the front, I won’t be here to talk,” and laughs confidently.
I know it is himself and his previous life he is telling to fuck off as he prepares to take up arms. I laugh hard back at him. Ira interrupts her flow of phone calls.
“It’s so funny, I now talk to the air-raid sirens like I talk to my alarm clock. I make a deal and go back to sleep.”
“Got it. We’ll wake you up.”
“Can’t I just sleep?”
“We won’t sleep, so you won’t get to sleep either.”
“Either that, or we’ll get hit, and that’ll be the end of us. It’s a lottery.”
An air-raid siren wails, and we go to the basement.

The Dreamers
The raid lasted just under an hour. We returned to the apartment. We are six: three girls and three guys. In our previous lives, we worked, went on Tinder dates, flew to Berlin for parties, and bought art. We were the generation who had no memory of the Soviet Union. We were practically children when we got involved in the Revolution of Dignity in 2013, when our nation’s leadership did something unacceptable: used force against unarmed protesters. At the cost of those first lost lives and our collective grief, we won the right to determine our own destiny—until the russian regime interfered, annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine’s East. It was some time then that we grew up.
With no experience but learning quickly, we became part of the Ukrainian Youthquake. We were into fashion and art, and spoke several languages. By the age twenty, we had mastered wine pairings and gone to the world’s most important art museums. In 2014, when war began in our country, we realised we were mortal—and fell deeper in love with life. We had successful careers in creative industries that we built fairly, from the ground up, on merit and with faith in the future of our country.
And now our greatest joy is a chance to have dinner together. The guys started the water for the pasta, mixed up the sauce, and washed the vegetables for the salad, (we are the bourgeoisie who eat fresh vegetables even during a war).
The dinner was ready. We poured out our one priceless bottle of wine. It came out to about six sips for each of us.

Miss Ukraine 2022
Andriy was still on the phone, and we decided to start eating with him. Most of us remembered we had not eaten for two or three days—and not because there was no food. On the contrary, a hoarder instinct awoke in all of us, the genetic memory of previous wars and Holodomor, and ever since the first news of the possibility of a full-scale invasion started coming last autumn, we all put an extra can or two into our shopping carts on each trip. We did not eat because our bodies pumped out so much adrenaline they could only function on coffee and cigarettes. The only time you remembered about food was when someone put a cooked meal right in front of you.
Ira spoke first.
“You know, I got out of the bath this morning and saw myself in the mirror for the first time since it started. I mean, I had looked before, but just to make sure I didn’t have toothpaste all over my face. This time, I actually looked at myself. I’m all ribs.”
“Don’t catastrophise things. After we win, ours will be the land of the models, the way they looked in the 90s—“heroin”, pardon me, “war-time” chic. We’ve got our very own time machine here.”
“Listen, I never believed it when women in the movies about the Second World War had these nice tidy hair-dos, and wore dresses, and red lipstick—but look at Sofia now: full make-up and perfect hair. It’s like there’s no war,” Maksym teases me.
I realise I had not washed my face since the broadcast, so I look like I’m dolled up for a party. When I became a broadcaster, I hated that slick hair, the heels, the make-up. Now I feel like I’m one of about ten women left in the city who wear make-up. I usually wash my face and pull my hair into a bun before I leave the office; I feel very embarrassed to walk down the streets with my face all painted. Today, I forgot to do that, too. But that’s his fault: he distracted me with his talk.

Hedonism Days
“They keep bombing Kyiv,” Ivan says. He is an artist, and thanks to Ira, his work is known around the world. His pieces can be found in institutional collections all over Europe. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he designs interiors for the newly built shelters that house temporarily displaced people.
“Just think, less than a month ago, a few days before the full-scale invasion, I was dancing in a bar in Kyiv. Against the backdrop of the alarming news, we were joking that those were our last days of hedonism. I mean, it sort of turned out like that, but it was all in a previous life.”
A long silence as we open and scroll through the news. We read about the defense of Kyiv and Kharkiv, and Anna starts talking to fill the silence.
“I went and bought myself a piece of gold jewelry. I tell myself I could trade it for a loaf of bread, if it comes to that.” “Ha-ha! And if it doesn’t, how are you going to explain it to the children you will have after the war? The fact that you bought it during the war?” “Right, they’ll think you did it in between digging a trench and running around with a machine gun.” “And next to her, Sofia, with her perfect curls, flitted from one trench to the next and wished her viewers a very good day…” “I made a manicure appointment for next month: this is the only thing I managed to plan that far.” Anna at some point remembered the value of sustainable development, and determined to make plans not just for the day or the week, like everybody else, but for a month. We looked at her as if she were a mad prophetess. The war turned out to be different from what we had imagined. We would hide in bomb-shelters—but then go to a newly opened restaurant whose owner kept buying automobiles for the front. We would buy clothes from Ukrainian designers—and know that, while making the profit they needed to keep funding their businesses, they would donate a portion of the proceeds to the military. We could make a manicure appointment—thus providing employment for a woman who had arrived on the previous evacuation train from the East. Our former lives with parties and receptions to be attended in cocktail dresses felt very distant, but everything we brought back we did for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and our victory.
“We’ll cancel it for you if we have to,” Maksym jokes. He means in case a random rocket hits the building where we are. We roar with laughter. Anna has just raised the stakes in the lottery.

Basic Instinct
“Well, my friends, I have had calls from all my exes. Every one of them. They worry about me, bless them,” Andriy says, with a touch of pride.
“Calling is nothing,” Ira laughs. “Mine was coming from the safety of Europe to rescue me out of Ukraine.”
“Well, shit! What did you tell him?”
“Told him to fuck off at first. Then I told him if he was coming anyway, our shelter needed some basic drugs. And that I was not going anywhere: this is my country, this is my home, and I’ll die here if I have to,” Ira says.
“Hey, Andriy, did you tell your exes how crappy your libido gets under air-raids?”
Even here, far away from the front-lines, we had forgotten about sex and sexuality. We put on the same clothes day after day because making a different choice required an effort. The chats on our phones exploded with messages. We wrote “How are you?” to friends from the cities that russians hit what felt like every minute. Certain words lost their significance. We knew we had to tell our friends, of all genders, “I love you” if that’s how we really felt. Love for one’s own, and hatred of the enemy—this is what helped us get out of bed in the morning (on those exceptional mornings when the air-raid sirens did not do it).
“I feel the opposite,” Anna says. “I really want to have sex with those guys in uniform and to have their babies. Only how am I supposed to have babies in the world where they won’t close the sky and children get used to sleeping in shelters, and all their games are about war?” She raises her eyes at us.
“I miss my son. I keep thinking of the day I put them on the train. My son and my wife left the country, and I won’t be able to see them any time soon. I cried on my way from the station. But they will live,” Ivan blurts.
Most people left because of the children. Women bundled infants in their warmest clothes and took them to the other side of the border. They crossed an imaginary line beyond which the sky was secured by NATO and wept at the despair of having left their homes. We don’t know who has it worse: we who had stayed or those who had left. To be on the other side of the border, near or far, is to live in a normal world, but without losing touch with our broken one. When you are ostensibly safe on the other side of that line, you feel every piece of news even more acutely. The women who left put their children above their own interests or mental health. They are alone in a foreign country where they cannot afford a nanny, and do not have their parents or a partner who could watch the kid while they go for a walk alone. Their lives revolve around their children and the news of casualties in their native cities. But to remain in Ukraine would have meant to put one’s child in danger. Most do not wish their children to play the lottery.

Adrenaline Roller-coaster Park
“If you are going to spread pessimism, I’ll kick you out of the apartment. Better let me show this video of how our nice Bayraktars blow up russian tanks. Look, there was a column of tanks—and now there is not.”
I look up with tears in my eyes.
“But what if we lose Kyiv? What if we never get Mariupol and Kharkiv back?”
The waves of adrenaline that made us capable of working two or three jobs and volunteer in-between would give way to deep pits of despair. Whenever that happened, the most important job was to support the person, to pull them out as quickly as possible. And then to keep working, working, leaving no opportunity for another fall.
“Even if they take them, we’ll get them back. Look, look: a nice little Bayraktar is flying through the sky… and there are fields below it, pretty summer fields…”
Boom!
“Feel better? If not, I’ll give you my wine. These six sips are not going to make a difference.”
“Thank you, a little better. I can’t take your wine.”
We watched a lot of russian content, too, to understand what people there were concerned about. It made us sick, but we could not stop. All of us at least read russian, and this gave us the tool to, let’s be frank about it, locate some hope that their society would organise, would protest, that they would begin fighting the regime from inside while we battled it at the front. Our hopes were in vain. Instead, we saw Instagram stories about the pain of sanctions (are you serious?) and threats to our President.
We grew up very early, just like the majority of our compatriots. While people of our age out in the West spent time wondering where they would apply for college after a few gap years, we were managing enormous projects and founding successful businesses. After the Revolution of Dignity, we learned very well that we needed to live life to the fullest and take responsibility for our every action.
We finished the food and the wine. It was a few minutes before midnight—we went to bed.

The Ukrainian Dream
The other day a well-known writer asked me whether I knew how to build my life from now on.
I realised I did not. I cannot plan or dream; I don’t know whether I will be alive tomorrow. But we are all certain that none of this is in vain. We are not afraid at all. We, young, beautiful, and accomplished, slept three to a bed that night. Yes, we just slept. We spent all our savings on assistance to the Ukrainian military. We worked twelve-hour days for our Ukrainian dream. Each of us, curiously, had something unique in mind, but this did not matter. We wanted one thing: for the russians to leave us alone so we could go on developing our careers, starting families, and renovating our homes not as a means of dealing with obsession but because we were confident no enemy rocket would strike it the next day. All of this is yet to come—when russia finally leaves us alone. In the early hours of the morning, the air-raid siren sounded, but we decided to ignore it. Rockets did not hit Lviv that day; we survived, and we had one more day to be young.

Translated by Nina Murray

 

Sofia Cheliak is programme director of Lviv BookForum as well as a TV host, cultural manager, translator from Czech into Ukrainian, and PEN-Ukraine member.

 

Please note: since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians and supporters have refused to capitalise the name of the aggressor state and its people. This piece uses lower case in accordance with the author’s preference.

Roman Road by Kerry Mead

‘This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and reconfiguring’. 

Laura Grace Ford

 

Do ghosts exist? Yes, they do. I know this because I’m being haunted. The ghost stains the air around a stretch of pavement next to the park on Roman Road. Roman Road is in Easton, an urban neighbourhood just northeast of Bristol’s city centre. It is a short one-way street with not much going for it really; a mishmash of flats, shuttered shop fronts and graffiti. Overflowing Biffa bins and haphazardly parked delivery vans line the narrow pavements and pounding bass throbs in waves from passing cars. It’s around the corner from the golden glass dome of the Bristol Jamia Mosque, situated at the end of the recently regenerated and rebranded ‘cultural and culinary hub’ of St Mark’s Road.

St. Mark’s Church sits opposite the start of Roman Road. It was gutted and converted into sheltered housing in the 1980s, after dry rot bloomed and took over its wooden interior. The builders dug up a stash of gold coins as they excavated the foundations in 1848; three bowler hats full, apparently. It was called Roman Road because it formed part of the route between Bath and the Roman settlement of Abona, where the northwest edge of the city meets the Severn Estuary. Roman Road is a place destined to be a cut through on the way to other places. A site for secret stashes of gold to be buried and left behind.

I live just over the other side of the motorway from Easton. When the ghost started haunting me, I avoided walking along Roman Road for a while. Instead, I stuck to the logical paths through the city that guarantee an efficient passage from Place A to Place B. But that’s not how ghosts work when they haunt the city you call home. There’s no escaping them, and they can’t leave, either.

‘I read the past everywhere. It’s like an overlay to the city, two maps, two cities – past and present – and you can always switch your view, walk through the streets a ghost, with you as if you were a spectre.’

The Place of the Bridge, Jennifer Kabat

 

Bristol has been a port city ever since Abona was established. It’s a city of hills, basins, bridges and gorges built on migration, movement and slavery. Many of the neighbourhoods in Bristol are named after saints. Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, the labyrinthine city of marshland, lagoons, offshoots and dead ends, has his name imprinted over Easton’s streets. Water and earth rub up against each other amongst Venice’s networks of canals, bridges and squares. The footsteps of past, present and future residents overwrite each other along its walkways. All of this creates fissures and in-between spaces where ghosts can appear.

More than twelve rivers and brooks run through Bristol’s valleys to the docks, into the Severn Estuary and out to seaAs in Venice, these waterways circle around Easton and cut it off from the rest of the city. It can sometimes feel like an island. Many of the rivers have been culverted; the River Frome is one of them. It flows from its source in the Gloucestershire countryside, passes through the town I grew up in and then skirts around the edge of Easton, buried under concrete. It’s easy to forget it’s there most of the time but, even though the water is hidden, its influence can still be felt if you pause and linger. A quiet pull, a whisper.

Ghosts need straight lines to move through a place freely. Centuries ago, all over the UK, pathways called corpse roads, lych ways, coffin paths or bier roads wound and weaved their way for miles across the rural landscape. They linked villages to their parent churches and often took the most barren and remote routes. Mourners who couldn’t afford a hearse would carry their dead on foot along these designated paths to be buried. They never took a direct, logical route. Our ancestors believed that if they were straight the spirits of the dead would find their way back to haunt those left behind. They also believed ghosts couldn’t cross water. Corpse roads often cut across streams, rivers and marshland to further ensure the dead didn’t return home.

Many of the straight lines evident in Easton’s streets have been overwritten over the years. This might explain why the ghost that haunts me is stuck on that stretch of pavement next to the park on Roman Road. It’s tangled up in the rows of Victorian terraces interspersed with mid-century cul-de-sacs and tower blocks that make up the urban geography of Easton. It’s stranded on an island. It couldn’t escape even if it wanted to.

The past also teaches us that the living haunt us as well. Processions of sprites, luminescent corpse candles and wraiths were rumoured to travel along corpse roads after dark. But once a year, in April, on St Mark’s Eve, apparitions of the living, those who are destined to die during the next year, make their way from their homes to the closest burial place. In the past, villagers would gather at lych gates at midnight and wise women would watch over the corpse roads and churchyards, to see whose ghostly figure would pass.

~~~~

My steps have scored Roman Road’s paths so often that something of me must also remain for other passers-by to spot in unfocused moments. An occasional flickering glitch barely visible to the naked eye. Flesh and bones are transient, but ghosts remain to reappear again and again. I mostly drive straight through Roman Road nowadays, not leaving a mark. On my way to somewhere else in a rush, navigating the parked delivery vans or stuck behind a mum in an SUV reversing into a too-tight space, dropping her children off for gymnastics.

It’s easy to stop noticing even the most solid of things when you see them every day. In the middle of Roman Road, sandwiched between Anstey Street and Barrett Street, is a large red brick building that dominates the streets around it and houses Hawks gymnasium. I’d rarely notice it when I passed it every day. The building has lived many lives before, of both industry and dissent. Built in 1897, it was first a corset factory, then a laundry, then a storage space for engine parts used by British Aerospace. It was left empty for years until 1987, when it was squatted briefly before being gutted by a fire in 1989.

 

‘The time is out of joint’

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

 

I started noticing Hawks gym again after I had children. It has a reputation for being one of the best gymnastics centres in the Southwest; it’s probably the only reason many people from the more affluent areas of Bristol ever venture to EastonAva went to gymnastics there when she was six or so, but stopped after a term: ‘It’s too boring Mummy, we repeat the same things again and again.’ I secretly felt proud of her rebellious, independent streak. To be honest, I was also relieved not to have to drag myself out of the house early on a weekend anymore. Every Saturday morning, I’d peel myself out of bed and pile Ava and Joe into the car, both sullen and complaining, before driving over to Easton.

In my memory, every one of those mornings was grey and wind whipped, dragging Joe and Ava through the park opposite Hawks by the arms of their coats, their sulky bunched-up fists wet and cold. Head down, red wine hangover stinging my synapses, horizontal rain bursts slapping my face. Crossing the road, running up the steps, ushering Ava into the fusty, crowded reception. Since then, sometimes when I’m passing, I catch a flash of my back pounding up the steps to the entrance, Ava’s chubby fist in my hand. I am rubbing shoulders with the fainter ghosts of the corset factory and laundry workers pouring out of the double doors at the end of the day. Mothers rushing somewhere they don’t want to be, gymnasts’ feet hitting the mats in the same spot over and over, the clack clack clack of rows of sewing machines.

Hawks gym is clearly visible from the M32 motorway, a swath of Brutalism that sweeps past Easton, elevated on concrete pillars. It provides a constant background roar of traffic; the sound that has lulled my children to sleep since I moved back to the area in 2013. Work began on the motorway in 1966, a safe distance away from the gentle crescents of Angela Carter’s bohemian Clifton. The M32’s construction embodied the promise of a new, more dynamic future for Bristol. It cleaved through the streets of Victorian terraces which housed the city’s workers, rupturing the green parks and cutting Easton off from the rest of the cityThe route planned for the motorway intersected with the River Frome just upstream of Easton, so the river was redirected and culverted as it passed Easton’s western edge. The river’s natural course through the city has been altered and forced underground so many times it no longer flows freely. There is a cycle track you can take from Easton to the city centre that follows the motorway, a short corridor of grass, tarmac and graffiti. If you walk along the path and look closely you can catch glimpses of the river stagnating in the dark through metal grilles set in the concrete.

~~~~~

Opposite Hawks gym is a rank of shops. There’s Pak’s Butchers and Star Cash and Carry with its silver bowls of bruised fruit on display outside. Above the cash and carry, a small flat with a grubby closed-eye window remains unchanged since Katie lived there during the long, stifling summer of 1995. We’d both just moved to Bristol and I’d walk there some evenings from my house on Easton Road. We’d smoke a joint with her flatmate, and when we got bored she’d pull her trainers on and we’d run to the pub giggling, Katie still wearing her pyjamas. We’d pool our change on the bar for a pint each; nineteen and fearless. I often think about Katie and her flatmate when I walk along Roman Road. He ended up on smack; I wonder if he got clean.

Two doors down, on the corner opposite St. Mark’s church, is No.12, the new cafe that opened a few years ago. It’s conspicuous in its sophisticated blandness, like it’s been ripped out of a Sunday supplement and pasted over the takeaway that used to be there. Remains of the building’s previous life are still visible if you know what to look for, like a palimpsest. You can see it in a flake of white masonry paint above the new fascia revealing where grey stone used to be. Or in the long, low sill that still runs along the large windows, where a row of people would perch every evening, waiting for their orders of pizza or kebabs. Windows dripping condensation, softening the harsh strip light glitch and buzz inside.

The first time I sat in the courtyard of No. 12, it had already been open for four years. It was a hot, bright Saturday morning in 2018, the summer after I met O. He’d visit most weekends and I’d sometimes meet him off the train at the station opposite St Mark’s church. That day I’d got there early so I was killing time. I sat listening to the coffee machine puffing and screeching inside, nondescript electronica floating through the air. At that moment the café felt flat and calcified; nothing left to be added to its serene occupancy. In direct contrast, the street outside was a constant overwriting of footsteps and noise; the rich busyness and unfolding of an always shifting and building geography. I remember feeling suddenly complicit in the othering of the Easton on the other side of the courtyard’s high whitewashed walls, just by being there doing nothing with my expensive cappuccino. I quickly drained my cup, returned my book to my bag and stepped back out onto Roman Road.

I walked the long way to the train station instead, past the shops and through the summer-humming park. Before the park, unseen behind bricked up ghost doorways, are the backyards of a row of fixed up cottages. Their front doors face onto Albion Road, which runs parallel to Roman Road, like they are politely turning their backs on it. My friend Greg bought the middle cottage for £26,000 in 1999. I rented a room there for a couple of years not long after. A mossy red brick path weaving through tangles of jasmine and green led to the front door. Inside, the rooms were covered in wall hangings and full of cheap furniture, and on weekend mornings empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays left from an after-party the night before. Greg and my close friend Helen, now his wife, lived there until recently with their two boys. They sold the house for £399,000.

~~~~~

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.’

For the Sake of a Single Poem, Rainer Rilke

 

My old bedroom window looks out over the high wall onto Hawks gym, and I always glance up at it when I’m passing, but the blinds are usually down. I remember telling O they were happy times living there when we passed one time and paused by the peeling green park railings to look up at the window, but now I’m not so sure. Too many sleepless nights, whether drug or anxiety induced. Too many people passing through, not enough time spent still.

One scene comes to mind looking up at the window. I am lying on my side in bed propped up on my elbow on a dull, white-skied Sunday afternoon, with last night’s makeup still on. I’m watching a film and passing a joint back and forth with Louie, who is sat leaning against the wall on the other side of the bed. The smoke curling and mugs of hot, milky tea soften the jagged edges of our hangovers. Then the sound of drumming starts drifting up from the street outside. We both get up to look out of the window in time to see a procession passing along Roman RoadA joyful, proud collective heading from the Sikh temple on nearby Colston Road dressed like jewels. The men and boys wearing white kurtas, orange turbans and elaborately patterned coats, the elders at the front carrying blue and orange flags, the younger drummers jostling behind. The procession briefly fills the road and pavements. They are gone in a minute or so, heading in the direction of St Marks Road, leaving nothing behind except the fading sound of drums. I pop my head out of the window to try and follow their route, then I ease the sash window back down and we return to the TV. Louie moves closer, wrapping his arm around me, squeezing my shoulder and settling in next to me.

When I think about living there I also think about the black cat. Sometimes I’d feel a hint of soft fur sweeping across the back of my calves as I ran up the stairs, or I’d catch a glimpse of a black cat’s tail curling around the corner at the bottom of the stairwell as I walked back down. It happened enough times that I started to believe in ghosts. We didn’t have a cat until two or three weeks before I moved out. A stray tortoiseshell cat had turned up out of nowhere one day and would sit motionless for hours on the red brick garden path, staring at the house with intense yellow-green eyes. One day she strode into the kitchen as if she had never belonged anywhere else.

In another scene, I’m lying in bed again, but this time it’s late at night; one of the last nights I spent living in Easton. I’m in bed with the stray cat, who jumped in and curled up next to me a few minutes before, lapping her rough tongue over the back of my still hand.  I’m staring out of the window at the streetlight outside Hawks, half-packed boxes surrounding me.  It is silent and the height of summer. I don’t want to move out of the cottage anymore, but I’ve accidentally made myself homeless. I was meant to be moving to London to live with Louie. Greg had already found a replacement tenant, who was moving into the room in a week’s time. Louie had rung me a couple of days before to announce that he didn’t think me moving in was the best idea anymore.

I decided to take the stray cat with me a week later when I moved into the flat I’d found at the last minute. It had newly painted white walls and pristine polished wooden floors and was on a leafy, quiet street two miles away, on the other side of the M32. It was called a clean slate. When I moved there, the quiet sometimes deafened me, but the cat filled the silence with her warm weight across my feet at night and loud miaows at the door during the day. As I unpacked boxes and filled kitchen cupboards, I made myself a promise that, from then on, I would stop believing in anything that didn’t seem completely solid. The cat disappeared a few weeks later. I was inconsolable, but still couldn’t see the absurdity of the promise I’d made to myself.

~~~

Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.’

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

 

From the first time he came here in 2017, O seemed like he was sucking the streets dry; collecting the sights, sounds and contours of the city, then storing them away in a private, locked collection. He didn’t want to go for walks through nature reserves and parks on Sundays. Instead, he preferred to traverse the underpasses and back streets, scoring a line past the skatepark under the M32 with its sunken, burst sofas and upturned bins. Sometimes I’d wake on a Sunday morning and he would already be sat on the edge of the bed pulling his socks on: ‘I’m popping out for a quick walk’. We’d walk most Saturday nights as well, me talking, him listening, moving between gigs, friends’ houses, clubs and bars. When I walked with him Bristol felt like a new city. His presence breathed life into the tired streets.

A few months before I last saw O, he messaged me on a Wednesday afternoon to tell me he was coming to Bristol after work and would get the last train home.  It was unusual for him to visit during the week, but he told me he was bored and fancied the trip. All I heard was that he missed me. I rang around for a babysitter and met him in the pub by the station where Katie and I used to go. We sat in the beer garden wrapped in big coats under fairy light garlands and rolled cigarettes in gentle silence and smiles.

After a while we decided to head to Ricardo’s who lived a few streets away. Roman Road was unusually still, bathed in orange light, April sky full of stars. Past No. 12 and Pak’s, past Katie’s grubby closed-eye window, past the bricked-up doorway and closed blinds of Greg and Helen’s. As we walked alongside the park, he stopped in that spot and pulled me close and kissed me out of nowhere. We rarely kissed in public. We kissed for a long time, me marvelling at his solidity, his here-ness, then I pulled back laughing:

‘What are we? Teenagers?’

He laughed as well and pulled me back into him tightly and kissed me again:

‘I just can’t let go’.

We carried on walking, wrapped up in each other, paying no attention to the streets. Later, on the last train home, he messaged me with links to one-bedroom flats in Bristol on Rightmove. All I heard was that he wanted to stay.

~~~~

When O first left, his ghost haunted my house. Over time, it appeared less and less; the frequent apparitions slowly written over by the constant traffic of domesticity. New memories are painted over the old. But all ghosts reveal themselves occasionally; they can never be fully deleted if you know what was there before. Occasionally O’s frame would flicker at the kitchen table in the corner of my vision when I was draining pasta at the sink and a song he loved came on the radio. Or sometimes as I woke and opened my eyes, especially on bright, crisp, winter mornings, a long, freckled back might materialise on the edge of my bed, caught in time pulling on a sock again and again. These ghosts always disappeared when I turned to them, with my mouth full of unanswered questions.

Although the traces were faint and glitchy at home, there was still a ghost’s stain that was vivid, trapped over the other side of the river. Shortly after O left, we entered the first 2020 lockdown. I would sometimes drive through Easton and in my memory the same thing happens each time. I see myself rounding the corner past the church and No.12. There is a white delivery van stopped with its hazard lights on outside Pak’s, the open tailgate door showing skinned carcasses hanging from hooks inside, staring blindly from clouded eyes, the driver nowhere in sight. I stop and drum my fingers on the steering wheel whilst I wait, sometimes for so long I end up turning the engine off. Cars start pulling up behind me, beeping impatiently. Reggae is blaring from somewhere. I see an old man in a long white kurta and topi feeding the pigeons in the park. My eyes, against my will, are pulled to that stretch of pavement and railings that separate the park from the road. That’s where the ghost is, entangled with the street’s tarmac and airA stratum usually concealed from view. A garland of orange marigolds slung over the railings appears for a second before disappearing. A glitch; a symbol of union and mutual trust marking a sacred spot. Or an offering slung over a portrait of the dead. A point of access shimmering between presence and absence. I wince and turn away and look over towards the gym. Eventually, the butcher in his blood-stained white overalls lumbers into view, pushing a supermarket trolley. He is following the delivery driver, who is on his phone, and slowly starts unloading. When he has finished, the driver jumps back in the van and starts up the engine. As the road clears, I exhale, relieved, and pull away.

~~~~ 

Beneath all the cities we don’t recognise are stacked all of the cities we do.

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

 

At the start of the millennium, just before I Iived in the cottage on Albion Road, I lived in Barcelona for a short time. When I arrived, the city was laid out before me unspoiled. No layers of memories, no roots from which to untangle my feet. For most of my time there I walked. Like O, I wanted to suck the streets dry. I walked like a tourist who wants to take the essence of the city home as a souvenir, from the port and beaches next to the old city across to the very top of Montjuic. I walked between cafes and galleries, through secret, crumbling squares. I listened to the echoes of my footsteps in knotted networks of narrow, gothic alleyways that the midday sun never reached. I stopped to watch locals parading dead-eyed, jewel-coloured papier-mache Gegants on sombre, grey Sunday mornings. I walked alone along the wide, crowded thoroughfares that cut through the city, rain showers briefly slicking the pavements before evaporating. I’d inhale Barcelona’s heady, sweat-spiked petrichor deeply, marvelling that I’d never smelt anything quite like it, knowing deep down I never would again. I fell in love with a city.

Then, after a while, I started walking out of loneliness. The people I crossed paths with felt distant and unreachable. As I sunk deeper into depression, the actual bones of the place felt increasingly threatening and the people in it casually cruel. I started resenting the city and everyone in it. One evening I mapped the streets of the barrio around where I lived in looping, unravelling circles for hours. My restless steps echoed the heavy agitation I felt running through my arteries. I couldn’t stop but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was unable to return to my flat, turn the key in the door and admit the affair was over.

After that night I left as soon as I could. 

~~~~

I returned a year later with Louie, a few months after we first met. I felt the urge to revisit and forcibly overwrite my complicated memories with new, simpler ones. We stayed a few streets away from my old flat in a grandiose but down-at-heel pensión filled with huge blooming succulents. We gorged on expensive food and I fucked him noisily day and night. We drank cocktails in bars hidden from the street behind heavy velvet curtains until we stumbled home through the gothic quarter in the early hours. I didn’t tell him, but as we walked I was searching the streets for traces of what I’d felt when I’d inhaled Barcelona’s after-rain smell. But I couldn’t find it. Nor could I fully exorcise my ghosts.

~~~~~

‘Find a way out | Through a memorial garden | A wilderness of roses.

Savage Messiah, Laura Grace Ford

 

Not long ago, I found myself walking back along Roman Road on a steely grey February afternoon. Life had shrunk since mine and O’s Saturday night wanders had ended. For the last ten months, I’d stuck to walking the same established paths during our allotted hour a day of outdoor exercise. In the depths of the first lockdown, I’d walk with Joe and Ava up to Stoke Park along the pathway that climbed through the woods behind our house. As we reached the top of the hill, we’d stop and look out over the city spread before us, pointing in wonder at the empty motorway gliding silently past below, high above the roofs of Easton and St Pauls.

When I find myself walking through Easton again, it feels freeing to cut through the city streets on foot once more. As Hawks gym and the peeling green railings of the park come into sight, instead of following the logical, more direct route home, I change direction and walk along Roman Road. I want to know if the ghost is real or is just a by-product of malignant nostalgia left to grow unchecked throughout the lockdowns. I want to see if the garland of marigolds is still there or if it was just refracted light bouncing off my windscreen.

Just before Hawks gym, I reach Paradise Fashions, which has had its shutters down for as long as I can remember. I cross the road and walk slowly along the pavement. A gaunt man in a shiny black Adidas tracksuit sits on the park bench cradling a can of Red Stripe. His gaze is fixed in the direction I am walking from, but he seems to stare straight through me. I don’t see the garland of marigolds as I approach but I can tell as soon as I stop that the ghost is there. I sense it as a swirl of solid, dark energy and hear it as a crystalline snatch of song suspended in a cold April starry sky. A corpse candle halted, flickering mid-air. The ghost still feels brand new, and as gentle and kind as silent smiles in a pub garden, but it also feels raw, and as cruel and shocking as fresh grief. The spectre of an imagined future that failed to materialise. Caught in the city’s in-between spaces, unable to extricate itself from its surroundings. No one else knows it’s there, but it’s now as much a part of Roman Road’s geography as its bricked-up doorways, concrete, grass and air. I hurry away, paying no attention to my surroundings. Past the back of the row of cottages, past Katie’s window, past the rank of shops. A young boy of around ten or eleven comes out of Star Cash and Carry as I pass; I almost bump into him and have to step aside to let him by. He stops to tip a plastic tub of food scraps onto a knotted black bin bag resting on the curbside. His stare makes me feel like an outsider. I follow behind him as he turns and walks back through the shop door.

I decide to return a few weeks later and I swear the man in the Adidas tracksuit is sitting on the park bench again, but the ghost is very faint this time. The marigolds have yet to reappear, although I know they are still there.  The ghost and the marigolds are as solid as chubby fists in my hand, the turn of a key in a lock, a black cat’s tail, a river running under concrete. The marigolds remain there somewhere, buried like a stash of gold coins waiting to be dug up in the future.

 

KERRY MEAD IS A BRISTOL-BASED NEW WRITER, SEASONED MOTHER, AND CURRENT STUDENT ON BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY’S CREATIVE AND CRITICAL WRITING MA. HER CREATIVE NON-FICTION HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN MAGICAL WOMEN. KERRY HAS WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY FOR THE EVERYDAY MAGAZINE, WHERE SHE WAS CHIEF CULTURE EDITOR UNTIL JULY 2022 AND IS CURRENTLY A MUSIC WRITER FOR GOD IS IN THE TV ZINE. FIND HER ON TWITTER AT @KERRYMEA AND AT HTTPS://ALLLIFELESSORDINARY.WORDPRESS.COM

The Burden of Guilt by Emma Werner

My little sister Flora is two and a half. She collects chestnuts and pinecones in a small metal box. She stops on walks to smell the flowers as I lean to keep hold of her hand and the greatest problem she has ever solved: a 16-piece puzzle. She is a toddler, and if my biased opinion is to be trusted, a particularly sweet one at that. She is also the same age I was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Insidious thing, cancer. I often thought of it as a completely separate entity from my mum. The uninvited third wheel in our mother-daughter relationship. But malignant tumours arise from our own cells, so in that sense, my mother’s cancer was her. I was once told to consider the disease as a Darwinian process; species evolve by mutations and natural selection across entire populations, and so do cancer cells within each individual. Malignancy is the inevitable cost of our existence as multicellular beings. In the case of my mother, she was in her early thirties when the unwanted bill came. She had no genetic predisposition, no family history; the chances of her getting sick were laughably small. But the cancer grew anyway, and with it, an unnamed bulk of guilt and responsibility crawled onto my small back. I have flashes of her skinny figure in a vast double bed taller than myself. I doubt I understood what was happening then, but I know she underwent surgery and chemotherapy early on. The cancer hid for a while, then in 1999, it came again, this time grafting itself onto her right hip. With the benefit of hindsight and many years of biomedical studies, I now know this was the beginning of the end – once the cancer reaches the bone, there is no way to remove it. From then on, my mother’s condition was, plainly, incurable. I have no recollection of being explicitly told this, not then anyway. Any mention of Darwin and oncogenic mutations did not reach me until much later in life. But her first relapse remains brutally etched into my memory.

During the Christmas break of that year and amid a vicious round of chemotherapy, my parents took my sister and me to a ski resort. I was five; my sister was eight. Much of that holiday is a blur – and hard as I try to recall, I do not believe I was aware of the full extent of my mother’s disease. Shortly after we arrived, she fell sick and was rushed to a doctor nearby. When she returned the following night, it dawned on me for the first time in my life: one day, my parents would die, and I would be alone. I rushed to my mother for comfort. She calmed me down and said not to worry and to enjoy the rest of the holiday. But a few days later, on New Year’s Eve, while I was jumping around to songs I didn’t really know, thoughts of my mother’s health came back to haunt me, mingled with a dull feeling I could not quite yet put words on. As the millennium drew to a close, I was joined by a shadow that would stalk me for the rest of my life.

The thought that I’d burdened my mother with my own fears was mortifying; what pain she must have felt, knowing the cancer was killing her even as she consoled me. I never mentioned the incident again. Instead, I quietly carried the shame of what I considered my failure to deal with my mother’s terminal illness without causing a scene. And as the cancer cells continued to slowly but inexorably multiply inside of her, so did my own feelings of guilt. 

For the twelve years that followed, the cancer lived with us like an unwanted family guest we all did our best to ignore. Occasionally, it disappeared for a while before storming back in, each remission shorter than the last. The cycle became so familiar that I fooled myself into thinking it would carry on forever. I went about my life as normally as I could. I went to school, sang in a choir, took violin lessons, and convinced myself that things would get better eventually. Yet, at times, the horrors of my reality burst through that naive ignorance, just as they had in 1999.

When I was around twelve, my mother lost her hair. It had happened before several times, but her most recent chemotherapies had spared her this characteristic side-effect and I had almost forgotten what she looked like bald. I was the only one home when she came from the hairdresser, where she’d said goodbye to the last remaining clumps of hair not yet ravaged by the medication. I assured her she looked great, that her new black chemo hat was sweet and that we’d find a good wig anyway but was unable to mask my reaction upon seeing her. She looked so pale. So ill. All I could see was her cancer. I knew how upset she was at losing her hair again and hated myself for hating her appearance and for the half-second in which I feared the shock had been visible in my eyes.

While writing this piece, I found an email I’d sent that same year to a teen magazine in response to a story about cancer they had recently published. Written in Comic Sans and signed off with a smiley face – my attempt to lighten the mood – the message read:

“My mother has had cancer since I was two years old. I have learnt to live with it, but the older I get, the harder I find it. I am unable to talk about it with my mother, nor my family, nor a psychologist nor my friends. How can I make it easier and help my mother?”

🙂 Emma, 12 (Paris)

I received a very kind email back five days later. The editor suggested I look to artistic outlets as a coping mechanism: “drawing, writing.” As it turns out, I had spent most of my childhood writing. Short poems, mainly, though I ventured into other genres too. At primary school, I’d penned a small pamphlet in which I examined the meaning of words. In suitably morbid fashion, the first one on the list was death. I wonder what my parents made of it. 

When I was fourteen, my mother once asked me to pick up the blood test results for her, too anxious to see what they might show. Unfolding the piece of paper in the laboratory’s drab waiting room, I broke down. I willed the numbers to change, but her illness’s stubborn un-solvability stared back at me from the page. I called my father in tears. After all the pain and the treatments, how could I possibly tell her she was still dying? In the end, it was she who had to comfort me. Here I was, five years old again, unable to cope and unable to make her better. “So it’s not so good, is it?” she said as I opened the front door. “It’s ok, the doctor said the markers might continue going up for a bit.” 

I went on a trip with my conservatoire orchestra a month before her death. In hindsight, I should have known that time was fast running out when cancerous nodules were found in her liver not long before. Still, celebrating Halloween in various bars of Vienna, the cancer seemed far away. And nothing quite takes your mind off impending death like a week of underage drinking and sleep-deprived performances of Verdi’s Requiem. Reality came crashing down the same hour I got back. My father came to pick me up from the coach station on the way to collect my mother up from a therapist appointment. She climbed into the car and burst into tears. “I am not afraid anymore,” she told my dad. It wasn’t until two weeks later, when my father sent me to stay with my grandparents to shield me from the excruciating final moments, that I understood what she had meant. We had finally reached the end. After fourteen years of a life-threatening illness, I still failed to recognise death when it came.

For a long time after her passing, I dreamt about her often and every time the same scenario would play out. I would see her on a Metro platform in Montparnasse, near our flat in Paris, and I would apologise for not realising early enough that she was about to die. My mother was gone, but my guilt remained.

I found solace in biology textbooks in the gaping hole she left behind. I relished learning anything to do with cancer. I sought any mentions of the chemotherapy drugs I had seen my mother endure. Taxol. Taxotere. Any mutations I remembered hearing about. HERC2. BRCA1. “Bones are the most common metastatic site for breast cancer”. “Secondary liver tumours develop in about half of all metastatic breast cancers and often lead to liver failure”. Rather than finding it upsetting, it was like a comforting voice making sense of it all. Here for the first time was a logical justification for my illogical childhood, a coherent explanation of my mother’s illness. 

Biology gave me another, more unexpected source of healing. The same year my mother died, I took an internship at a laboratory researching cancer in Tasmanian Devils. There, I first learnt about malignant tumours in the context of evolutionary theories. The scientist who supervised me called them “biological dead-ends” – once the cancer becomes stronger than its host, it dies with them, just like my mother’s cancer had disappeared with her. In the following months, that same scientist met my dad, who’d wanted to thank her for taking good care of me. They married some years later. And so, in a strange turn of events, after cancer took my mother, it gave me a younger sister, Flora.

It has been eleven years since my childhood fear of losing a parent came to pass. My own thirties are looming large on the horizon. On the other hand, Flora is looking forward to her third-ever Christmas. A few weeks ago, she became inconsolable after breaking a small plate, and as I comforted her, I saw my childhood expectations crumble too. I had always believed it a perfectly reasonable assumption that I should know to deal calmly with my mother’s illness before I had even learnt how to read. All those failures I’d been carrying around since I was Flora’s age, my remorse, my guilt – it was justified. Now, faced with the reality of a toddler’s emotional landscape, I realised for the first time the sad absurdity of it all. 

It took over a decade and the arrival of Flora into my life to reach that basic conclusion. Sometimes in her eyes, I recognise the same carefree innocence I traded as a child for a lifetime of self-reproach. I cannot change how I grew up, nor, as I assured my mother on her deathbed and many times in dreams, would I have wanted to. But as I watch Flora play with her toys and cry over broken crockery, the burden of guilt medical textbooks never quite managed to shift slowly makes way for bittersweet relief. I was a kid who did not know how young she was. I did my best in the worst of scenarios; one day, I will accept that that was enough.

Emma Werner is a creative producer and writer, living in South London. She also holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge. She is originally from Paris, and enjoys writing in both English and French.

Where there’s bread is my country By Christina Carè

It all started yesterday, with the burning. 

Smoke rose in great plumes overhead as the men took to the fields with torches. They tied handkerchiefs over noses and lips; sweat rained down from their foreheads. Afterwards, they washed ash from their eyelashes and inside their ears. Sweetness and smoke filled their nostrils. 

This, the great state of Queensland, where plenty of land means plenty of space to grow the sweet crop. Wind whistles through bright emerald stems; cicadas and crickets hum out of sync. But the machetes sing in unison. Nature is flattened here, subjugated by sweat and blood, soil honeyed with corpses. The land fights back with clouds of beetles, moths, mozzies, and a heat that cuts the throat. If he can endure it, a man can start again with a few good years in the fields. A man can cut his way into a life of his own dreaming. Someday, Big John thinks, but not yet. 

He rings the bell at sunrise, hard as his stiff joints allow. Their shed, red brick and rusted iron overhead, has only one window – a hole, with netting nailed into each corner. Out of hammocks drop five bronzed bodies: taut muscle, callused hands. Jamie, Mikey, Davo, Little John and their foreigner, Jakob. They yawn, stretch, and fill their water bladders before slinging them round their shoulders. George – the old man who helps out – slops six giant spoons of porridge into six enamel plates. Big John says grace, got to maintain dignity, before they shovel oats in, unseeing. The cane awaits them. 

Yesterday’s blisters have popped and shrivelled into flat spongy skin; the men piss on their own hands to keep them rough enough to wield the blade. They’re real blokes.

‘Cutting the new field today,’ Big John says, ‘Get ready, boys.’

They jump on their bikes – rickety, tire treads plugged with stones – their hat strings tied tight under their chins. Cool rushes of wind soothe already sweating armpits and groins, the only moment of comfort in a long day ahead. The swell in the air should break soon, they hope. But nobody dares complain. 

From afar, the woody stems look like soft green grass from the mother country. Wrong shade, but slender and inviting all the same. The men are above temptation, though. They know she’s a false friend. She doesn’t give up her sugar easy. They steady themselves.

Today, charred strands sit ready for the cut, embers cooled overnight. A man can earn twice as much from the cut of unburnt cane, but they won’t risk the vermin. 

‘Easier this way,’ Big John says, ‘Only the kanakas, that lot, did different.’ 

Not Big John’s lads. Free men make choices. 

The men collect their weapons from the truck, each his own favourite. A broad flat blade with a hooked flick to one side. Theirs are bare hands, flimsy against a crop that doesn’t die in fire. Still, gloves are for sissies. They begin: Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. 

There’s as much water as a man can drink but they know better than to stop too long; every piss will cost you. Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. It goes on until the worst hours, when the sun pulses vengeful over them. The air itself needs cutting then, and when their smallest, Jamie, looks ready to pass clean out, Big John finally puts his blackened fingers in his mouth and whistles. The heat has dried their sweaty shirts stiff. On their bikes, the metal scalds their skin. They retreat back to the shed.

Off come shirts and trousers into the trough out front; can’t bring any of it inside. George starts the wash. Twice a day they work them, scrubbing charcoal clean from the linen. The men fall naked into their hammocks again, napping till the day eases.

The bell comes too quick – time already to collect their pickings. Swinging great stalks onto the truck, taking turns until the first bleeding of sunset. Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top. Toss her on the truck, tie her down steady. 

When they’re done, it’s a clean bald patch on the crown of the earth.

On Friday, Big John takes the boys for a cold one or six. They crash glasses, gulp it down. Pleased with his lads, he finally notices: One is missing.

‘Where’s that Jamie, then?’ Big John asks. They look at their feet. 

Jakob answers, ‘Gone, John. Back to Sydney.’ Jamie slipped away while the men slept.

‘Bloody oath, these Sydney bludgers,’ Big John looks across the room; them foreign blokes are sitting together, talking too loud in another tongue. ‘Need least five of youse come Monday. Anyone know a man keen for some hard yakka?’

Nobody answers. They drink on, light dipping, moths taking their shift from the day’s flies. Only when Big John’s had a few more does Jakob say into his ear, ‘I know a man, Big John, he works good. Pietro. Just off the Jumna in Townsville.’

Big John looks at the noisy wogs and sighs. Here we go again. Didn’t want a Fritz like Jakob at first, but said yes anyway. The lads keep drinking and laughing, oblivious. 

He already knows. He’s got to get his priorities straight. He must keep the gang earning.

 

On Monday, it’s arranged. Outside their shed waits a small, sturdy fellow, dark hair carefully combed behind his ears. Hands together, clasping his hat. He’s dressed in tight-laced leather shoes; been a while since Big John saw the like. He does his best to ignore the shoes, coming out with a big swinging handshake: ‘How’s it goin’, mate?’ Pietro looks like a child when he smiles. ‘Did ya bring ya work clothes with ya?’

Pietro looks confused, tugs at his own shirt and says, ‘My clothes.’ He follows Big John inside. 

‘Bit hot for it, mate.’ Big John mimes fanning himself but gets no reply. 

The lads are at breakfast; Jakob and Pietro shake hands, exchanging a kiss on the cheek. Spoons halt halfway to mouths. Silence descends over the chatty lads. Big John gives the room a hard look: don’t say a bloody thing. Soon as Jakob shows Pietro to his bed, they all start hooting. Bloody pooftas!

Big John watches sidelong as Pietro throws down his jacket, rolls up his shirt sleeves, pulls his tie loose, buries it in a pocket. Jakob lends him shoes for the job; Pietro tucks his own neatly away. He looks a wuss, Big John thinks, but Pietro gets his hat on and follows them out, smile never fading.

At the field, Big John says, ‘Pick your weapon, son.’ The machetes are wedged upright in the dry soil. Pietro doesn’t ask for gloves.

Stoop. Chop. Straighten. Top.

It’s an unnatural movement, sure enough, and Pietro only cuts down about five tonnes that day, while Jakob cuts down twelve. Big John still slaps Pietro on the back, ‘Not bad for day one, mate.’ Pietro tucks his bleeding hands into his pockets. ‘That’s the way,’ Big John says, and makes sure the lad gets fed. 

After a week, over yet another dinner of potatoes and gravy, Pietro says: ‘I cook.’ 

George shrugs, but Big John freezes. Pietro reassures him: ‘Good food.’ 

Big John feigns ease, can’t let the others see him panic. 

‘Alright then, mate,’ he says, but if he’s still hungry tomorrow, the man’s a goner.

He steps outside their shed for a ciggie while the men go down to nap, and sees the little man hurry out to huddle with others of his sort from nearby sheds, their tin roofs sparking in the sun from afar. They’re animated, exchanging rich red tomatoes and odd shapes in linen pouches. The chatting goes on too long. Planning to jump ship? Looking for another shed? He can’t afford it; he waves Pietro over.

And the little guy comes, hauling his sack, the hessian frayed at its edges. He’s oblivious to concern, still grinning like a fool; he disappears into their makeshift kitchen. Old George is out cold, snoring from the swing-seat on the porch.

The kitchen is a clanging symphony, but it won’t disturb the cutters, tired from another day on the field. Only when Big John rings the bell in their ears, do the bodies shift. They sniff to find the air filled with the scent of bread baked hot and meat stewed in a mix of spices they cannot place. It’s strange, but it smells edible, Big John thinks, as the lads settle into their places.

Pietro works the ladle quick, pot to plate. Their stomachs groan in answer. Big John starts, ‘Our Father…But the smell just gets better and better. He holds up his hands and says, ‘Let’s eat, boys.’ The men go fast, devouring meat, vegetables, sauce. 

They see Pietro sopping up the red from his plate with a crust and he says, ‘La scarpetta. Little shoe.’ They have no idea what he means, but they copy him, and soon the bread is all gone. They clank spoons, lick plates clean. 

They sit back and smile.

At the end of the working week, Big John gets the paper. The headline reads, ‘Olive-skinned invasion’. He tosses it aside.

In the afternoon, the rains come at long last. Heavy sky erupts with thick drops, turning every hard surface into song. The men stop their game of cricket, whooping, shirts soaked against their skin in seconds. There’s not much warning that far north.

Pietro and Jakob are not with them. 

At dinner, Mikey asks, ‘Them wogs already gone, Big John?’ He frowns at the gravy slop being ladled into his plate.

‘Looks like it,’ he says. They are wogs, after all. With-Out-Guarantee.

But the men do appear, and they’ve got another. An even smaller man, curly black hair glistening in the downpour. 

‘This Marco,’ Pietro says, and Big John huffs. ‘He work, good worker.’

Big John eyes him up. ‘No space for more of yas.’ 

It’s a lie. Since they outlawed blackbirding – the islanders sent back to their own lands, freed men – there’d always been a lack. A need for more hands. He could take this fella, or he could always end up taking one of the blackfellas sitting by the side of the road, their faces drawn and distant. He weighs it up. More hands means more cane, means more cash. 

The new man says, ‘I cook for you.’

They hook another hammock into the back room. That night, they eat macaroni for the first time.

After dinner, Big John lays down the law early: ‘None of that kissing business, got it?’ The new men start to talk in their musical tongue, and he gives them a glare. They stop, push forward a plate of dark salty meat cut into neat circles. Big John takes a bite. 

 

The men work until their backs groan; build up blisters, let them break, reeking piss and sweat and flies all day, bodies stained in charcoal. When the field is done, they watch the truck go with the glow of satisfaction. One more bit of earth beaten. 

Another field waits down the way. 

His men, Mikey and Davo, leave for easier, cleaner work down south. Instead he has Roberto, Marco, Francesco, Pietro, Jakob and Little John. Each man picks his blade. They cut into the sunset. They clink glasses, filled with ruby wine instead of tea. They cut, they load, they clear.

The wogs start their own shops, selling those meats wrapped in white skins. Big John knows he likes the finocchiona best, the sharp fennel an unexpected pleasure. And for the bread, crusty brown and salty on the tongue, Big John is especially pleased.  

War comes. Willing men can still fight for the King; Big John would rather see his face on a neat pile of notes in his coffer. His voice was only just breaking when men fought on those Turkish shores – grew into manhood on stories of that baptism of fire. A nation of real blokes was born. At memorials for Gallipoli, Big John will tip his hat. Show respect with silence. But to those stories, he now pays no heed. 

His paper reads: ‘Enemy aliens to be interned.’ He tosses it aside. 

‘Whadya make of this Hitler, Jakob?’

Jakob only shrugs.

True Aussies don’t crave great men. After all: what’s in it for them? All that marching and saluting; Big John doesn’t get it. Got enough to do, right here. 

He doesn’t hear the truck rattle up the red road. Too busy eating stewed rabbit and spaghetti. Big John’s slurping when they kick the door in. 

The coppers must drag Jakob out; he’s strong from the cane. Twisting his arms into the shackles, he’s ready to tear a throat with his teeth. 

Big John tries to argue, kicks up the dust outside. But it’s too late, they tell him. Jakob will sit on his hands until the war is over. ‘We’ll be back for youse next,’ one copper points at the shadowed faces within. Big John only growls. It is his colony still, he thinks. 

‘Pay that moron no mind, gents,’ he says, uncertain. 

But he is not the governor-general. The coppers wait until the napping hour, Big John bleary-eyed and slow. The gang of seven becomes two. 

Little John must find another shed; Big John must pack up his swag at last. Not much to it. He says goodbye to old George, who clung to the cane longer than all the rest, but now must stay with family back up in Cairns. All those years they survived that land, but you can’t work land without men. Even the blacks are being dragged to the front lines, Big John reads. They can’t vote, but they can fight, it seems. Meanwhile, his gang are off to rot. Who’s left to argue with?

At the train station, he looks back through the heat’s refraction, the swell in the air fit to rupture. The cane waves goodbye in the afternoon breeze, wind picking up from the east. He knows tonight the rains will come again. It would have been a great day for the cut tomorrow; after the shower, the land softens, just for a moment. He watches the women trading smoked meats from their carts, the few remaining blackfellas standing silent and watchful by the fence. A truck full of men passes by. He holds up a hand; their gloomy eyes meet his. They could be his men, the ones with thickened palms, who he taught to cut clean. 

In Brisbane, the newspaperman is keen for a word with a real white cutter from Innisfail. Here’s his chance, he thinks. Set the record straight. 

The newspaperman says, ‘Cane industry’s losing men, momentum, losing steam in this war. Whadya reckon?’

‘Which war’s that?’ Big John asks. The newspaperman looks at him funny. 

‘The big one, mate. We’re fighting them at home and abroad, yeah?’

‘Are we?’ Big John says, looks down at where the calluses trace ridged peaks into his skin. Where missed strokes sliced white rivers between knuckles. ‘Not out there. Out there, we’re mates,’ he tells him. ‘Don’t matter where you’re from.’ 

The newspaperman frowns, ‘We know where we’re from, mate.’

Big John shakes his head. 

He buys his own farm at last, cold hard cash. The dream. An expanse of wiry gums and thorny wattle. He builds a neat pine porch round the cottage and strings up a hammock in bleached linen. He rips silver shrubs clear from his patch, chases snakes past the fence. Sows veggies in the spring under earnest cobalt skies, has his nap at the same time each afternoon. Everything that Big John plants can be cut with scissors. 

Each night, he does his best to stir the tiny aromatic leaves into the sauce. Says grace before his dinner. What is bonded in blood and bread can’t be undone. He chooses the fattiest finocchiona, the crisp scent of fennel on his fingers. He pours more wine into his cup.

 

 

Christina Carè is an Italian-Australian writer living in London. Overly curious, she studied Architecture, Art History and Philosophy before finally leaning into her passion for fiction. She interviewed actors for Spotlight, turned data into compelling stories at Google, and has edited for the F-Word feminist collective. She is published in the City of Stories anthology 2022, was a Faber Academy scholarship winner 2020, a London Writers Awardee 2019, and has been mentored by author Kirsty Logan. She currently teaches on sustainable creativity for Spread the Word while working on her debut novel, represented by Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop.

The Joy of Living by Alexander Hewett

09:37. A late start. Water on his face, quick brush of his teeth, and he’s escaped the room. Walking down Old Compton Street to Charing Cross Road, through the entrance of Foyles. 

He heads to the top floor, to the café he can’t afford, passes a display of new releases, angry books; their enraged titles shouted from bright, bold covers, together resembling a wave of placards held up in unending protest. 

Breakfast of espresso and two slices of white bread smuggled in from Big Bite. He takes a sip, tops up the espresso with hot water from a flask. Another sip. Another top-up keeps the cup filled up to the brim with coffee. Keeps the water tasting of coffee for as long as possible. Get the most for his money. That way he can afford to keep coming to nice places. 

He looks across the café with searching eyes. He’s fairly certain the manager fancies him. Winks at him every time. He had a conversation with him once, said he hated the Chelsea Flower Show because it was too white British. Jack wonders why only gay men have ever shown interest in him. 

 

The sun is bright; golden rays shine on the customers. The windows look onto a sharp skyline of rooftops. Still, it’s cold outside. 

He watches mouths moving. Sometimes talking, sometimes chewing. Voiceless conversations. A young woman is reading a book with a flashy pink cover, titled, Misogynists Are Also Racists. His gaze drifts again, to the barista he likes to watch. Probably an undergraduate, a couple of years younger than him. Probably lives nearby. Might encounter her in the evening, on her way home. Oh hello. Hi. Nice to see you. How’s your day? Long, can’t wait to get home, do you live round here? Yeah. Me too, why don’t you come up, I’m feeling lonely tonight. 

But he hasn’t come here to daydream.

He removes his notebook and pen from his worn leather satchel and runs his eyes across the words he wrote the previous day. Notes for a novel. In the spirit of Bleak House. Large scale. London. Many POVs. Characters span all levels of society. Think Dickens in the modern day. And he is submerged.

The sound of laughter and he looks up, his eyes aching. Sees a couple sitting on high stools, holding hands beneath the table. They smile as they speak. One glances at Jack, then the other does. Their smiles say, Look at us. We are beautiful, what we have is beautiful, and whatever you think about us, and we’re sure you’re thinking about us, we don’t care. 

He can’t stand the sight of books today, so doesn’t stop to browse on his way back to his bedsit. He lets himself into the hallway and there it is, in his pigeonhole. Takes it up to his room, already disappointed. Sitting on his bed, opening the A4 envelope, a letter reads:

 

Dear Author,

 

Thank you for submitting your work to us. We have read it with interest, but unfortunately, we didn’t feel strongly enough to be able to offer representation. We hope this won’t put you off, as we are highly selective. Thank you for considering us and entrusting us with your work. We wish you luck in placing your manuscript. 

 

All the best

 

He puts the letter down and lies on his bed. It’s unusual for them to reply. So in some ways this is a pleasant surprise. He thinks about past friends who now have jobs or qualifications, who have achieved things. He remembers a bestselling British writer on Youtube announcing that descriptive writing is unnecessary. The business of literature is defunct because people can just look things up on Google images. As though the point of descriptive writing is to copy and paste images into books. She doesn’t see a future for literature. Perhaps she’s right. After all, nowadays, people want twenty-second-long TikTok videos in which people mouth the words to pop songs, suddenly cutting to show themselves in a different outfit.

He writhes in the injustice of it all, it seems everyone wants light, fluffy novels. Sterile love stories about vacuous teenage lovers. He wonders vaguely if his submission got through to the agents or whether the intern rejected it. 

 

He sits up. Tired of being miserable. What is the purpose of life if not ambition? he wonders. Perhaps it is simply meant to be enjoyed, has nothing more to offer than sensation. He rolls off his bed and pulls out a box beneath it. There’s £100 inside. His savings. Perhaps he ought to spend it. See if it makes life good. 

 

22:09. Jack stands alone in Tisbury Court, his arms crossed over his tattered Barbour Pretending to wait for someone, he watches, through the entrance to a massage parlour, down a lighted passage, a young woman sitting behind a desk. 

He senses the passersby watching him as though they know what he is about to do. And he wonders if he will go through with it. He waits as a group passes then, as though knowing instinctively that this is his opportunity, his hesitation falls away, as he is drawn through the lighted tunnel that leads to the young woman.

“You want a massage?” she asks, with an eastern European accent. There is a swelling of spots beneath her skin, beneath the layer of makeup she wears, making her face appear as though it is made from lumpy clay. Still, she is beautiful to him, because the beauty we see in others comes down less to the quality of their appearance and more to the extent of our desperation.

He searches for his words and speaks, but his voice does not project. His mouth is dry. Clearing his throat, he tries again. “I’m not sure,” he announces. 

“Would you like to look at the menu?” she asks, producing a laminated page listing different kinds of massages. He struggles with himself.

“Would you like one?” she asks again. Seemingly embarrassed, her smile glints in the light bringing out some concealed side of herself. 

He chooses the cheapest massage. 

She stands up and says, “Follow me.” Down narrow stairs, the place is not what he expected. Isn’t seedy or shabby. A pleasant perfume hangs in the air and eastern music plays in the background. The wallpaper is pink and floral and the light of a dim, relaxing softness. Off from the corridor, there are three rooms on each side. One of the doors is open, through which he sees paper sheets draped over a massage table. An aesthetic of cleanliness has been carefully cultivated.

The young woman leads him to a desk at the end of the corridor, where a woman possibly in her seventies sits. She tells the older woman which massage he wants, and the older woman demands £35 from him. Jack notices that £5 has been added to every massage on the menu downstairs. He searches his wallet for the £35, finds he has two twenties then hands them over. The older woman claws the money out of his palm, hands him a few coins. Before he can count the change he is led away by the young woman, toward a door, into a small, dark room. She flicks a switch and red mood lighting is activated. On the far wall is a mirror. He sees himself together with her. He looks quite handsome, he decides, his eyes glowing alive with a darkened light. To the side of the mirror is a small sink and table on which oil, hand wash and paper towels are placed.

He asks, “Will you be doing the massage?” she answers that she will. 

“Good,” he smiles nakedly at her. He half expected the masseuse to be the older woman. Have a young woman at the desk to tempt the customers, then reveal the real masseuse downstairs, after you’ve paid, when it is too late. She smiles back at him, tells him to get undressed, that she’ll be back in a moment. She closes the door behind her and he is left alone, in the quiet darkness of the room, listening to the beats of his heart.  Reluctant to take off his clothes when the door is unlocked and anyone can walk in. He wonders how much he is meant to take off. He doesn’t want to make any mistakes, to make any assumptions. He begins to unbutton his shirt slowly, then waits. Undoes his belt, the button of his trousers, then his flies. He waits, unwilling to go any further. 

Finally, the door opens, and instead of a cameraman bursting in to take photographs to send to his parents, like the paranoid side of him imagined, the young woman returns. 

“Hello,” he whispers. He feels a warmth in his chest. Approaching affection for this woman he has only just met. She goes to the table with her handbag while he removes the rest of his clothes. He looks at her and she looks at him. She seems to have no interest in his body, which disappoints him.

“Lie on the table, on your front,” she says and he does so. His skin, sensitive, seems almost brittle against the paper sheets. The air encases him, and something warm lands in the centre of his back. Her hands upon him, rubbing the oil into his skin. He suppresses a tremor that runs through his body in a wave.

“Are you okay?” she asks. 

“Yes,” he whispers. A moment passes. “Are you?”

She hesitates for long enough to smile. “I’m okay,” she replies. 

He wonders what she thinks of him. He isn’t her usual customer, he expects. He is young. His body appears well-toned, not because of exercise but because he is so thin. There’s nothing to conceal the muscles beneath his skin.

He likes to think he is more attractive and nicer than her average customer. He likes the idea that he is her favourite.

“What’s your name?” he asks. 

“Alina,” she replies. 

“I like how that sounds.”

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“London. I was born here. What about you?”

“Romania.”

“Do you like it in London?”

“It’s okay.” She pushes her hands down the back of his calves. “I haven’t had time to explore.”

“I see.” There is silence as she continues to work on his legs. “That’s a shame.” Another silence. 

“How old are you?” she asks, suddenly suspecting he’s under eighteen.

“Twenty-one. You?”

“I’m twenty-three. Are you a student?”
“I used to be. I graduated last year. I’m trying to get published now.”

“Really?” she asks. “What sort of thing do you write?”

“Fiction. About London. I like Dickens very much. Do you read often?” He peers over his shoulder at her. Doing so from this position hurts his neck but still he enjoys looking at her. Seeing her standing over his naked body has a feeling of uncanniness about it, as though he is seeing two things that shouldn’t be together.

“No, I don’t,” she replies. “I don’t have much time.”

“I see.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks. 

“No.”

“Why not?” Her voice is friendly, though it is the quality of friendliness which tries to relieve awkwardness. 

“I don’t know,” he replies. “Perhaps I don’t meet enough people.”

She doesn’t reply to this.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asks. 

“No.”

“I like your tattoo of the star.”

“Thanks. I got it a long time ago. Before I came here.”

He falls silent and so does she. She works up his torso to his shoulders. 

“Okay, it’s time to turn over,” she says and he does so. She dims the light slightly. 

He asks, “What are the other customers like?”
She shakes her head and says tiredly, “We get all sorts of people. All sorts.”

“I see.”

“You say ‘I see’ a lot, don’t you?”
He smiles. “Perhaps.”

“Where did you hear about this place?”

“I’ve walked past it a few times. I live quite nearby.”

“Did your friends not tell you about it?”
“No.” He looks down at her, notices that he has begun to fill with blood, has left discharge on his stomach. “I’m sorry,” he begins. 

“Don’t worry,” she replies though he’s unsure if she knows what his apology is in reference to. “Just relax and enjoy yourself,” she says. There is something quite relaxing about her voice, almost motherly.

Ten minutes before his time is up she asks what he knows about these places.

“Not all that much,” he replies. “This is the first time I’ve been to one.”

She nods, tips her head, angling her words. “Have you heard of a happy ending?” she asks.

“Yes,” he replies.

“You know what it is?”

“I think I do.”

“It’s not sex.”

“No.”

“It doesn’t come with this massage.”

“No.”

“You have to pay extra.”

“How much?”

“£60.”

“Could you hand me my coat?”

She turns, takes his coat from the hanger and gives it to him. He searches his pocket for his wallet, removes the remainder of his money and hands it to her. She takes him in her hand and moves her hand up and down. He watches her eyes, tries to establish some connection. First, she does not look his way, just stares across at the wall. Then she turns to him, making eye contact. She smiles. And he experiences intimacy for a moment.

Later on, she wipes her hands with a sheet of paper towel as he stands up from the table and begins to dress. She goes to the sink to wash her hands as he watches her, seeing himself in the mirror. And he knows that he will remember this image for some time.

Lying in bed that night, he thinks back to this scene and realises that, for a brief moment, for as long as it lasted, he had escaped his frustrations. But as soon as the moment ended they returned to him, and now he has far less money than before, and his situation is all together worse. As well as this, the prospect of experiencing the same sensation again is less exciting. And so, if he is to continue to pursue sensation, he would have to chase still more extreme sensations, each coming at greater and greater expense. Until finally he would become so desensitised that he would be incapable of experiencing the very thing he had spent his life in pursuit of. 

It occurs to him that a life lived in the pursuit of sensation could not be maintained and seems also to provide only a shallow satisfaction. Still, he cannot draw himself away from thoughts about Alina and wishes he knew her better. The joy in doing so seemed far greater, deeper and nobler than the joy of any momentary though pleasurable sensation. So perhaps, if not in ambition nor sensation, the joy of living lay in our relationships with others; perhaps it lay in love. 

 

12:32. It is astounding what people who have nothing to do are capable of. This thought occurs to Jack as he stands on the street corner, watching the entrance to the massage parlour. The men come and go. He thinks that Alina would not share with them, the intimacy she shared with him. 

She appears and he sets off, walks up beside her, and glances as if spontaneously catching her eye. His face brightens. 

“Hello,” he begins. 

She looks with hesitation, like someone who frequently feels herself to be in danger. 

“It’s nice to see you again.” 

Recognition flickers briefly in her eye and the look of apprehension grows in her expression. “Hi,” she replies. 

“How are you?” he asks. 

“Okay.” She is still trying to draw away from him. 

“It’s nice to see you again,” he repeats for lack of anything better to say, and there’s some feeble sadness in his face. Perhaps he had expected she would want to talk to him; that he would be anything more than a nuisance to her. 

She recognises this rising despair in him and takes pity; decides it is not realistic to believe this sad, skinny creature will cause her harm and that, in fact, it is wrong to assume he intends to. She permits herself to smile. 

“It’s nice to see you too,” she replies. “Did you enjoy your massage?”

He smiles boyishly. “Yes, very much so.”

“I can tell,” she smiles. “What are you doing now?”

“Going for a walk. I needed to escape my room.”

“I know the feeling,” she replies.

“What about you?” 

“Going for breakfast,” she nods towards the convenience store. 

“Let’s go somewhere together. I’ll pay.”

She looks about the street, and the thought occurs to him that she is searching for someone to help her. “Where would we eat?” she asks. 

“There’s a Wasabi just up the way. I like their sweet chilli chicken.”

“Okay,” she replies, “I’ll let you take me there.”

They go back down Tisbury Court to Rupert Street, to the Wasabi on the corner. Alina sits at a long table in the centre of the room while Jack orders their food. As Alina waits, she watches the passersby through the large, sunlit windows and enjoys this feeling of escaping from her routine. 

He returns, sits opposite her and hands her a pair of chopsticks. He has bought them both sweet chilli chicken. She breaks the chopsticks, begins eating the food. 

“So,” he begins, cheery and light-hearted. “What do you want to do?”

“Eat this,” she replies.

“No, I mean in life.”

“Oh, don’t ask me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a terrifying question. And it involves me asking myself, how am I going to get out of this hole?” 

He nods, picks at his food with his chopsticks. “I understand what you mean. I have no idea what’s waiting for me either. I don’t suspect it’s very good.”

“You don’t seem badly off. Not for someone your age.” 

“Well, I’m not as well off as I seem. I just…” he smiles, “spend money inconsistently. And things… I could be better off, if I had made different decisions. I feel I’ve wasted a lot of opportunities.”

She asks, “Why don’t you make different decisions then?” As though it were so simple. 

“I suppose I’m still hoping to have the life I want.”

She smiles. “Well, things can’t be all that bad, if that’s still possible.” 

He smiles too. “No, I suppose not. Anyway, you haven’t answered my question, about what you want to do.”

She looks up, watches out of the window. The light is a warm bright mask on her face. “I’d like to start a company, making bespoke jewellery.” 

“Really? That sounds interesting.” 

“Thank you. But I have no idea where I’d start. I make no money, I can’t get any loans so I can’t get my foot in the door. I can’t even afford the equipment to make the jewellery. With writing, you just need a pen and paper.”

He nods. “That’s true,” then looks out of the window with her. He says distantly, as if to himself, “The world has gone so downhill.” He looks at her. “No one has any interests anymore. They’re just… all the same.”

She adds, “You’re not the same.”

He smiles. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” A flame burns in his eyes.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

He nods. “Anyway,” he looks at her. “Are you enjoying your food?”
“Yeah. Thanks, by the way.”

She announces that she’d better go, that her shift starts soon, but that she’s enjoyed their time together. At this moment he is happier than he has been for months. Then the moment passes. 

“Perhaps we’ll do this again sometime,” he answers.

“Perhaps,” she says, and he offers to exchange numbers. 

Throughout the week which follows, Alina is the main subject of his thoughts. Having a project that feels achievable makes his life seem less smothering and his own company less oppressive. During this time his main source of happiness is their text conversations. However nearing the end of the week, her replies begin to peter out. She hasn’t responded to his last message for two days and though that is entirely normal, it makes evident the fact that she is more important to him than he is to her. Troubled by these thoughts, as his love takes the form of an ugly obsession, he leaves his room late one night and wanders the streets, hoping to lose himself in the crowds. 

He finds himself at the massage parlour, watches its lighted entrance before seeing her appear. Retreating into the alley’s darkness, he watches as she emerges from the light, passes him, and then waits on the corner. She holds her phone by her thigh before a smile illuminates her face. She puts the phone away and embraces one of the faceless strangers separated from the horde. They kiss then go off, hand in hand. 

Jack remains in the darkness of the alleyway. 

 

09:37. The following day. Jack sits on a bench in Soho Square Gardens thinking about love. 

The problem with love, which romance stories ignore, is the near impossibility of anyone you love, loving you. Therefore, those who put love before all else, live lives of desperate longing and unmitigated rejection. I think Goethe came to the same conclusion in The Sorrows of Young Werther. But if not in ambition nor sensation nor love, in what lies the joy of living? 

These past few months, his thoughts have been like quicksand, into which he sinks deeper and deeper, with his struggle to escape them only accelerating the consumption of him, until he is completely smothered. 

Then he spies movement. Focuses his eyes. A worm draws itself painfully across a gravel path. And each bit of progress it makes, though barely perceptible, seems won through agony, as its soft body scrapes against the jagged stones. And yet there appears to be no destination, no point in this journey, except to inflict suffering on itself. It seems driven by an invisible whip, which is its will, and to which it is a slave. But why? What does the worm expect is waiting for it on the other side? 

Perhaps that is life, Jack wonders. A blind struggle, a hard journey to an unknown destination, worth making not because of the certainty that we will gain what we earn, for there can be no certainty of that, but because, though living with hope is painful, it is less painful than the pain of disillusionment, than the pain of living after you have given up. The thing to do, Jack decides, is not to be too focused on your purpose, on your destination, but to devote yourself to the journey, to struggle, and find some satisfaction in it.

With some hope renewed, Jack watches the worm, whose existence is his model of life, as it labours on. And just as the worm reaches the centre of the path, the midpoint of its journey, a robin swoops down, kills it and flies away with its corpse.

 

 

Alex is a student at Birkbeck, studying creative writing. He wants to be a novelist.

Vincent’s Lost Letter to His Brother, Theo: October 13th, 1873 by Craig Smith

My dearest Theo

It has been several weeks now; how are you settled into your lodgings? I have been in correspondence with the van Stockum-Haanebeeks. They pass on their kind regards. It makes me glad to know they are thinking of me, but you are my preferred confidante. I have much to relate.

Dark nights have come to London. Away from the lamplight, there is danger in the corners of the city. But, though a new train track is laid here every day, still it suits me to walk wherever I wish to go, to be my own movement.

London rewards time and attention. The globes of gaslight of an evening make me feel I’m walking among the heavens. To look into the water from Westminster Bridge is to see the weeds as a widow’s shawl, lank and drawn downstream to the distant darkness. So far from the coast, the tidal Thames heaves its great mass inland or disappears out to sea to leave little but a stream in a bog of mud. I see many broken things on the water’s edge: fractured clay pipes, smashed crockery, discarded bones. The mudlarks make good work on the beaches when the river is gone.

But London fog is not like Helvoirt fog. The heavy soot of the myriad manufactories falls upon the city’s back. It makes my spit dark and thick. The mist shrouds the streetlight, leans in to tell its secrets. These are the streets of Dickens, of the lost children of civilisation, finding places to live in the shadows of ramshackle buildings that seem too derelict to inhabit. It frightens me, and, I confess, at times it excites me, too. Dickens’ old house is not far from Southampton Street, and I walk there at midday as I take my repast. I had the temerity to sketch his house on Doughty Street, but hated my work and threw it away. It was junk.

You know how I adore the work of Bunyan: his depiction of paradise is a Gothic window through which we can understand our fate. Theo, I found where the great man is interred. I walk there after work to the Bunhill Fields in Shoreditch, and sit beside his grave, where his effigy seeks to reassure me. So close to his mortal remains, I attain a rare calmness in my soul, albeit fleetingly. Blake, too, lays within a neighbouring plot, sleeping the great sleep. Defoe and his wife are nearby, consoling. It is hard to imagine being held in such reverence after your passing, though to present humanity with such deep beauty is tantamount to making real the Word of God. It amazes me to think they were once human, and walked these streets as I do.

Yesterday, an unusual incident occurred. A young woman brought to the office a hand drawing in the hope that Goupil & Cie might buy it. It was a sketch of my likeness, drawn through the sliding sash window that overlooks the street: her on the causeway, me at my desk. It was crude but affecting.

She had many drawings in a portfolio. I asked her, why draw, why not paint? She turned out her pockets and showed me the nothing there. Her clothing was of the east end tenement, her skin pallid and drawn. I gave her a few shillings for oils and canvas but she would spend it on food for her family, she said. She told me the poor are divorced from art because art costs money. They have little enough food; art is a luxury they cannot afford. We are wealthy, you and I, rich enough to pursue our fancies.

I asked where she preferred to draw, and she said Upper Norwood, where the light plays havoc with the workings of her heart.

I asked her to return to the office later in order to present her drawings to Mr Obach, but she never did. I placed the picture of my likeness in my billfold in my jacket and walked it home to my lodgings, where I tucked it into the frame of the mirror. Mrs Loyer said I was a fool to give her my money but I like the picture, Theo. I like to glance at it, from the mirror to the drawing and back, over and over, toying with the angles and the light.

This morning, as the dawn took the day, I crossed the street with a graphite pencil and sketched my boarding-house with the light at my back. My German friends complimented my efforts in the same kind way that you encourage me. I gave the drawing to Mrs Loyer’s daughter, Eugenie, who propped it behind the carriage clock on the drawing room mantleshelf. I can barely bring myself to look at it, fearing that I failed.

We used to draw, you and I, as children, do you recall? I wonder if Mother still has them filed away somewhere? They will be worthless now, I’m sure: she probably burnt them for kindling, in which case I’m glad they found good use. Remember how Father offered us coins for our artwork, and you took it and banked it, and used the money to buy berenklauw, but I refused, exclaiming that my drawing wasn’t yet finished. I suspect I would be a poor salesman of my own work. I would want to retain it to continue to work on it, or would give it away, bewildered that someone would want to own it.

I exhorted my German friends to walk with me to the Crystal Palace at Upper Norwood, this afternoon, to remind me of the dazzling light. We watched our first cricket match en route, which was amusing, if a little baffling. I said to a local, ‘My English is not good, how do you describe these positions they stand in?’ But they said my English was fine, not even the English understand their confection. The English love their sports. It is one of the things I love about them.

The Palace itself is astounding. We saw ourselves reflected in the glass, our vision distorted by imperfections in the vast panes. The engineering feats alone left me breathless. And to look to the East, as if looking toward Holland, was to see the connection between all things, including you, Theo. In such places, God appears in nature, humbling me.

As we walked home, with the lamplight left behind, a petty lurcher grabbed my jacket, intent on snatching my billfold. I fought him off with the patterns you taught me in The Hague, that excursion on the beach by the guest house. I lost my top hat as we fought. I held him by his grubby collar, interrogated him, discovered from his explanation that he needed money. I gave him two shillings and sent him on his way. I forgave him. He was poor and needed the money more than I. He called me a name I did not catch, something to do with my foreign status, but we shook hands and I begged him not to take such drastic action again. He promised he would try. The Church should look after these waifs, then they would not need to steal. The Church or the State, either one.

But that was not the first time I’d visited Upper Norwood, nor the first time the place had tested my mettle. I had been there on my own, Theo, this Spring, not long after I arrived in London. And I wept at what I saw. I wept. It was beautiful, it’s true, to get above the fog and breath the clean air, but there was something else. Indeed, I must tell you why I am writing, my Brother, for this has been long in the telling.

From Upper Norwood, I looked north to Muswell Hill to see the new palace named for Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Two weeks it had stood, open to the public, and I planned a trip there the following weekend, early-June, walking through Hampstead Heath, through Highgate, through Crouch End, closing in on its magnificence.

But disaster. Fire ran through the body of the building as I watched from afar as if I were there. The flames through the great windows were the tulips of our childhood, cupped in a vivid, scalding scarlet on the stems of the colossal lead downpipes. I was repelled and pulled forth, transfixed as the flames became tongues of demons in a tumultuous sky scarred by hellish light. The soot, climbing and crawling and creeping across the landscape like a flock of crows, was a harbinger of something I dare not comprehend.

I have thoughts such as those, Theo, that unsettle the darkest reaches of my nervous mind. The event left me changed. Did you ever sit on a chair and understand that, beneath the wild starry sky, you, of all people, were sitting upon this chair of all chairs? I found myself on such a chair tonight, a hazelwood dining chair, imagining the chair as it was, with me upon it. Then I sat upon the bed, looking at the chair without me, the chair as a chair-in-waiting, not a chair until it bore my weight but always with the potential to be a chair. I moved from chair to bed to chair to bed until Mrs Loyer begged me to stay my boots upon the bare oaken boards, so late at night in the fevered darkness. So I watched the chair under the failing circle of candlelight, wondering what is a chair, what am I. I was unable to answer, not even with the woman’s insinuating sketch, trapped in the frame of the mirror, keeping its vigil over me.

Theo, please excuse my poor handwriting tonight. I have been concerned for my thoughts of late, and I write swiftly, startling myself. My hand seems to know what my brain fears to think. I do not want to burden you but my angst gets the better of me when I think of your unfading forgiveness. Outside, I present myself with requisite decorum but within, in private, the crows have not left me. They move toward me, destined for my soul.

I may not post this letter. I may throw it on the fire. Perhaps, in that way, I can rid myself of this deepening darkness plagues me all the while.

We shall see.

Your loving brother.

Vincent

 

 

Craig Smith is a poet and novelist from Huddersfield. His writing has appeared in The North, Blizzard, and The Interpreters’ House, among others. Craig’s three publications so far are: the poetry collections, L.O.V.E. Love (Smith/Doorstop) and A Quick Word With A Rock And Roll Late Starter, (Rue Bella); and the novel, Super-8 (Boyd Johnson). He is currently working toward an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University.

Topsy by Daniel Crute

Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. 1902.

“I ain’t got rickets sir, no. Nor the pox.”

“Yet,” he said, taking hold of my jaw in a hand that was cleaner than any I had yet seen in America, “show me your teeth.” 

I opened up and he rummaged a finger all around the inside of my mouth. Removing and waving it under his nose, he grunted, and an eyebrow crawled north in appraisal, 

“No consumption neither. How long you been on the island?”

“Since last New Year’s, sir.”

“Lucky little tyke ain’t ya? Scrawny as a plucked chicken mind, but hell, so was I at your age, and look at me now!” he said, puffing up a considerable chest and flexing both arms, so the ladies tattooed there danced like marionettes. I did my best to look impressed, and it seemed to work because he announced, 

“Lucky. That’s what we’ll call you. I’m Frederic Ault,” and scooped me up onto his shoulders. 

With that we set off away from the stink of rotting fish. Away from starvation and dysentery and the filthy shoreline where gulls battle for scraps and us kids did likewise. 

Though I had little sense of time then, I did know that it had been summertime when mama smothered me with kisses and shoved me into a throng of za chlebem children, weeping as the sailors herded us up the gangplank at Gdańsk. I knew too, that fall and winter had passed at sea, for it was Christmas time when I first marvelled at Lady Liberty and joined the shoals of lost children clustering around the tourist spots, where coins might fall from pockets more easily than in the bustling city. Where I learnt to avoid the Fagins looking to pressgang us to pickpocketry, and the Bulls that patrolled the esplanade, swinging their truncheons to dissuade us from trying. Where we huddled together for comfort and safety. Neither of which we found. 

The fall breeze was a Fagin to summer’s warmth too, on the day Mr Ault fished me from these dangerous shallows, and I rode his broad shoulders, so I guess I was about nine. 

I felt I had won some kind of jackpot perched up there, my bare feet dangling against his chest, his hair pomade sticking to my picker shirt. Walking towards a life, and away from a putrid death. Wherever he was taking me, it had to be better than here.

The further inland we got, the finer folks grew. Aprons and headscarves gave way to bonnets and fantastic wide-hooped dresses. Overalls and boots became pinstripe suits and snap-brimmed hats, rolled cigarettes to pipes or long, thin panetellas. Fat-cheeked children in britches and check-print dresses gorged on yellow lumps of ice.

“Frozen custard,” explained Ault, “s’like ice cream, but sweeter. Work hard enough and maybe I’ll spring for some.” Watching the children’s rapt expressions, I made myself a silent promise to earn a taste. 

A giant Wurlitzer at the boardwalk’s end played a revolving waltz, cranked by a sad-eyed monkey in a bellhop’s uniform. Wood faded to muddy sand, and we wobbled along like drunk acrobats till we stepped onto the solid sidewalk of Surf Avenue, passing a hotdog stand that set my mouth to watering on sight. I thrilled as dandies moved aside for Mr Ault’s imposing frame, and realised that he was well known around here, perhaps even famous, when a policeman nodded to him respectfully. I’d never seen one smile before.

A short walk later, past the amusement arcades, hotels, and bars, I saw the park entrance rising over the rooftops like a fairy tale castle. Three enormous crescent moons topping a gleaming white edifice, and below, three more, set upside down to serve as archways. On each, flickering lightbulbs spelled out “LUNA”.

“How’d you like it little fella? Not bad, eh?” said my ride, smiling up at me. 

I could only nod in response. He patted my shin, and we entered Luna Park. 

It was off-season, so the rides sat empty and silent, as if hibernating. Still, at close-quarters, the Switchback Railway’s full white-trestle framework was overwhelming to behold. To think that carriages full of people flew atop it dizzied me, and I realised with a start that I had been holding my breath, as the riders must do, imagining myself aboard.

In open ground ahead, a few roustabouts wandered around the base of a half-built big top, laying out ground spikes, while flymen casually walked the beams up high, lashing and riveting the tent’s skeleton together. 

“Home sweet home.” said Frederic Ault. “Say, you know how to say shit in Italian?”

“Sir, merda, Sir.”

“É vero ragazzo mio. Molto buona. You’ve plenty of merda to shovel, and Topsy only knows Italian.”

“Topsy sir?”

“Topsy son,” he said, lowering me to the ground and pointing, “my elephant.”

“Elephant?” My mind balked at the word. Even here, in this fantasy wonderland, it sounded entirely absurd. But there she was, tethered to a caravan, being scrubbed with soapy yard brushes, her deep grey hide glistening in the noon sunshine, the rivulets of water swimming down its cracks like rivers on rocks. 

She was beautiful. Huge. Impossible. 

“She’s…” I tried.

“Ain’t she just? Come on. Let’s see how she likes you.” 

Ault marched me over and nodded to the scrubbers. The four men paused work and leant on their brooms to watch, and I knew at once that I was being tested. Up close she filled your field of vision, like seeing an oncoming ship from the waterline. Her eyes were dewy and the colour of varnished wood, her lashes long and demure. I wasn’t fearful despite her size, she seemed more friendly than most people I had encountered in my short life. Her trunk snaked around my waist, and I felt its strength. I looked to my new master for instruction, but he just smiled and jutted his chin towards Topsy,

“She likes you, so I do too. Knew I’d named you right.”

The trunk continued its glide around my body, and I admit some fear crept in as it began to squeeze, but even then, somehow, I knew it was okay. 

“Sir, I think…” But then I stopped speaking. I was rising from the ground, up over her head. She gave a throaty rumble and seated me gently behind her ears, much like Mr Ault had done earlier. The men dropped their brooms and began slapping his shoulders in congratulation.

I was in.

 

 

Dan Crute is a scribbler, waffler, circus monkey, ageing strength disciple, and occasionally, a comic book artist. He’s just completed the second year of the Creative Writing BA at Birkbeck. He lives in London, where you can find him either hunched over a keyboard trying to make sense of his own writing, lifting something unnecessarily heavy, or hanging out with his six-year-old son. Makes a damn fine cup of coffee too. @danielalexcrute