Category: Latest

If you ever come looking for me, you’ll find me sitting in my car at the Kisementi car park, listening to Radio One.  Kisementi is a shopping centre on Number 12 Bukoto Street, in Kololo, a suburb of Kampala. Opposite me are the Fat Boyz pub and Payless Supermarket. On my left are a local handicraft shop, The Banana Boat and The Crocodile restaurant, and on my right, the Christian Bookshop. From my car, I enjoy watching the congestion of boda bodas, special hires, taxis, matatus and private cars. I do this every day for a few minutes or a few hours. It all depends. 

*

A few months ago, Inayat and I were at a dinner party.

‘I hope you’re getting ready for your job at Radio One?’ Nicole said, patting her chic bob and smoothing down her pale pink dress. Next to her with unruly curls and in black chiffon, I felt like a witch with secrets. Before I could answer, Inayat said to Marc, ‘Let’s get a drink and I’ll tell you about our trip to Thailand.’ They walked across the garden towards the bar.

‘Thailand?’ Nicole said. 

‘It’s the first I’m hearing of it,’ I said. ‘These days Inayat’s living in his own world. He doesn’t pay any attention to me.’

She laughed. ‘Men have short attention spans when it comes to their wives.’  

The fairy lights in the tree twinkled and music from the bar drifted across the lawn. 

On our way home, Inayat drove past Kisementi. I turned in my seat to look at the car park. It was dark aside from the orange and green flashing neon sign, Fat Boyz: Warm Beers and Soggy Burgers.

‘What’s the matter?’ Inayat said. 

‘Nothing.’ 

‘So we’re all booked for Thailand, for the week after next.’ 

‘But I’ve got my interview with Radio One.’ 

He replied by pressing his foot on the accelerator and we swerved around a blind corner.

I spent the next day at my desk. I was in-between jobs waiting for the interview with Radio One. The role was for script editing. Looking out beyond the balcony, I felt the old listlessness coming. I ran down to the garden, went down on my knees, and started digging up the flowerbed. The soil was damp and warm in my hands, and my spirits revived.  After I’d finished uprooting all the plants, I lay back on the grass and watched the sky. It was almost dusk. Nothing was permanent; you could only rely on change. 

I heard Inayat’s car honking. He drove up, parked and I waved. He raised his hand and entered the house.

I stayed outside. The sky turned golden yellow with streaks of pink and red. A low flying creature flapped past. The night watchman whistled, switching on the garden lamps. Clouds moved across the sky, around me trees cast dark shadows on the lawn. Something brushed against my face, crickets whistled in the grass and a dog barked. I picked up a plant I’d dug up and went back to the house.  

Inayat was in the study watching television. My hands were covered in soil and fingernails were filled with mud. The back of my shirt was damp and my forehead clammy. I pushed my fingers through my hair and pulled out bits of grass. 

 ‘About time,’ he said, and turned his attention back to the television. I lifted my arm and aimed the plant at him, hoping its thin, straggly roots would land in the middle of his face. But he ducked and it landed on the rug. 

‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ he said. 

‘Nothing.’ 

The next morning at breakfast I said to Inayat, ‘Could you pass me the sugar, please?’ From behind his newspaper, he handed me the butter dish. As usual, he hadn’t been listening. I took a teaspoonful of butter and stirred it in my tea. Oil globules floated to the surface. 

Inayat folded his newspaper and stood up. ‘I’ll be late tonight.’

Butter and tea don’t mix.

Back in the study, the plant was still lying on the rug, wasting. I felt a familiar lethargy coming over me. I had to shake it off. I began rearranging the bookshelves. Some of the tomes were my childhood favourites. I’d brought them across to Kampala from Nairobi when I’d moved. I turned the pages, trying to reconnect with who I’d been and who I was now. Each book had a different smell, musty, grassy, acidic and one even had a hint of vanilla. A bookmark fell out of one; an old birthday card from Inayat. When had those gestures meant something?

At dusk, I stood on the balcony. Dozens of Kaloli marabou storks circled the sky.  One by one, they descended onto the trees in the garden, their black cloak-like wings opening and closing around their skinny, white legs and then swooped down and stalked the spot of grass where I’d lain the previous evening. They moved silently, scavenging, necks with pink throat sacs hanging like amulets, retracting and stretching. The night watchman put on the lamps, and the birds took flight, leaving their spirits lurking in the garden.  

My phone beeped. A message from Inayat: Don’t wait up. I’ll be late.  

I parked in my usual spot opposite Fat Boyz and listened to Jazz Hour on Radio One. Kisementi was packed with cars, shoppers and street sellers. Outside the kiosk in the middle of the car park, a man was roasting gonja on a makeshift stove. As usual, for Friday nights, the Christian bookshop had been converted into a bar and barbecue joint. Outside on the pavement revellers feasted on mchomo and waragi. I switched off the radio, reclined the seat and shut my eyes. 

When I woke some time later, Payless and The Crocodile were closed but near the entrance to Fat Boyz, merrymakers were still sitting around chimezas with their bottles. For a moment I thought I saw Inayat, but of course it couldn’t have been. He never came to Kisementi.     

It began to rain. It drizzled, then hard drops hit against the windscreen and the bonnet. I turned on the wipers and switched on the headlights. Everyone rushed inside Fat Boyz, overturning the chimezas and chairs. The wipers swished back and forth, the windows steamed up. 

It was after midnight when I drove back to the house. 

I stood in the study watching the nsenenes hopping around in the balcony.  Winged termites clustered around the light bulb. In the garden, the watchman had tied a plastic bag over his head and was waving a fishing net around the lamps. 

The rain stopped. Drowned insects floated in the pools of water on the balcony floor. The watchman pulled out a low stool, and sat down with an open newspaper on his lap. 

I went down to the car and drove to the gate. The watchman tapped on my window.

‘Nyabo, a gift for you.’  He offered me a damp, rolled up newspaper. Inside was a clump of dead nsenenes. 

‘Why are you giving me these?’ I said.

‘No wings, no legs, and ready to eat. Just fry in butter. Please try Madam, once you start, you won’t stop.’

I pushed the newspaper back into his hands. 

At Kisementi I parked near Fat Boyz and ate the half-eaten bar of chocolate I found in the glove-box.  My phone rang. 

‘Where are you?’ Inayat said. ‘I’ve had enough of your stupid hide and seek games.’  

‘You mean yours?’

‘What nonsense.’ He hung up.

I waited till the neon sign at Fat Boyz had been switched off, and then drove back to the house. The watchman was packing his things to go off duty. A cock crowed, and in the hazy light of daybreak the garden appeared dreamlike. The study light was on; Inayat was waiting for me. As I turned the key in the door, the light in the study went out. I left the key and returned to my car. 

At the Sheraton I took a shower and tried to sleep but the pillow and bed clothes smelt musty. I lay in bed listening to voices from the corridor, someone was saying, ‘Paralysis, paralysis.’ I sat up and realised they were calling, ‘Room service, room service.’ 

The next day I telephoned Nicole and told her what had happened.

‘You’re overreacting,’ she said. ‘That’s how all men are. More importantly, don’t forget your interview’s on the fifteenth.’  

At the end of the week I left the hotel and rented a furnished flat. I sent Inayat a text message saying I needed my clothes and books. He replied saying he’d leave them outside the front door and I could send someone to pick them.

I arranged a taxi and the driver came back with a broken box full of wet books and clothes. He said he’d found the box dumped at the bottom of the garden and complained that his freshly polished shoes had become muddy when he’d rescued some of the books from the flower bed. The box had given way when he’d lifted it. He said the watch man had asked where I was.   

‘I told him I don’t know anything, I’m just a taxi driver.’ 

I wiped each book at a time and dried the pages with a hair dryer, but they were ruined forever.

 In the evening I parked across from Fat Boyz and sat listening to the traffic updates on Drive Time. I noticed a familiar car reversing into a parking space.  A man got out and walked to the alley between The Crocodile and Banana Boat. He stopped at the stall selling pirated DVDs and fake mobile phones. My view was blocked by two passing cars and the next thing I knew, the man was standing beside my car, knocking on my window. I rolled it down. 

‘What a lovely surprise seeing you here,’ Inayat said. ‘How have you been?’ and then, ‘I’ve missed you.’ 

‘You spoilt my books,’ I said.

He looked the same, clean shaven, hair combed neatly to one side, shirt starched and pressed. Nothing had changed. Why should it have? I’d left him a few days, weeks or months ago? I’d lost track. Life had continued. 

 ‘The past’s the past,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again. We can still make it to Thailand. It’ll help you recover.’ 

‘What do you mean recover?’ I said. ‘Recover from what?’

Before he could answer, a boy sidled up to the car, his arms filled with flowers;  pink lilies, white tuber roses and yellow carnations. ‘Ki kati, Ssebo, why not give flowers to your beautiful Nyabo?’ he said.

‘Good idea,’ Inayat said, ‘I’ll buy them all.’ 

The boy looked at me and smiled. ‘Ssebo loves his Madam, she is lucky.’ 

Inayat paid the boy, took the flowers, opened the back door and placed them on the seat. The car was filled with the cloying scent of lilies. I looked straight ahead, a woman in a black dress with a dog was entering Payless.

 ‘See you soon,’ Inayat said. ‘I’ll be waiting for you. At home.’ He bent to look at me through the window, but I did not turn my head and when I did not answer he straightened and tapped the roof of my car. ‘Don’t be late,’ he said and walked back to his car parked near the Christian bookshop. 

I stayed at Kisementi listening to Radio One, until the music at Fat Boyz had faded, and the neon sign Warm Beers, Soggy Burgers had been switched off, and the car park was empty.

Farah Ahamed’s short fiction and essays have been published in The White Review, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, and other literary journals. You can read more of her work here: farahahamed.com.

The king has been a prisoner

And a prisoner long in Spain

And Willie of the Winsbury

Has lain long with his daughter at home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Madeleine of Valois.’

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

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

Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown

You stand naked upon the stone

That I may know you by your shape

If you be a maiden or none

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the corner, the singer sings another verse:

And will you marry my daughter Janet

By the truth of your right hand?

Oh, will you marry my daughter Janet?

I will make you the lord of my land

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

‘Christmas is upon us!’ he shouts.

‘Yea!’

‘Let us celebrate!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us eat!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us gamble!’

‘Yea!’

‘Let us drink ‘til we drop dead!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My lady, you are ill.’

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

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

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

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

‘Cast off your gown.’

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

‘Cast off your gown.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It was with William Wynnesbury.’

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

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

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

‘Most Christian Majesty.’

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

‘King James?’ he drawls.

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

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

‘What is the meaning of this?’

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

He bows once more, and he is off.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I did not want his child!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What did he tell you?”

“Who?” you say.

The Other One hits you. 

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

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

That sort of thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why make it here?’ you asked.

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

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

‘My name is Bartélo,’ you said. 

He smiled a polite smile of non-recognition.

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

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

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

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

‘I thought you were dead,’ you said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You murmured, ‘Hello’. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small-Hands lays the notebook down. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small-Hands looks down at his book and smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s it like?” you asked her.

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

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

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

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

“Did he find out?” asks Small-Hands.

You shrug and needles prickle in your shoulder blades.

“He must have known though, right?”

You shrug again, ignoring the pain this time. 

Small-Hands reads from his notebook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks for the lift,” you say. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You black out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born early, writhing and screaming at 11.17am. 

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

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

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

It has shown no signs of appearing by 11.25.

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

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

11.29: In fact, he might ruin their lives.

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

“Home.”

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

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

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

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

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

Why isn’t Ayyoub looking at me? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I jig my legs and sip my Coke Zero.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stephen.’

‘Hey, Steve.’

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

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

‘So, who’s the hot guy?’ Aki giggles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m just waiting for a friend.’

‘You can wait for them outside the terminal.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Mr Rose?’

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

‘Are you here in Marrakech on business?’

‘Sorry?’

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

‘Yes, but I—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, I came with a friend.’

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

‘But the book, it’s—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hey, come on, what’s wrong?’ I ask. 

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

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

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

‘Did they take stuff?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And?’ I ask.

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

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

‘I can’t, I just want to sleep.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just think, slow down.’ 

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

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

‘I’m not saying it was bad’. 

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

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

Read Andrew’s story ‘Dressing’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose they do.”

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

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

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

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

“When will I know by?”

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

David nodded.

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

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

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

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

“You too David. You too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A job’s a job. When d’you hear?”

“Not for a while.”

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

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

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

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

Photo is by Deon Black at Let’s Talk Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You go into the water?” he said.

I nodded. 

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

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

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