The Conscience of the King

Dark Cloud / Silver Lining

2011-11-14T17:02:00.006Z

.

A silent symphony of waiting. Fluorescent lit, tapping fingers. Re-read that same paragraph again. Re-focus eyes on the sign on the wall - the one that says "waiting room" in Bengali. Alcohol intake has increased, but that's mainly the hand gel. Tell more jokes. It's a captive audience (literally). Big hugs, weary smiles, safe hands. In the best possible place. Or the worst possible place. Depends on your point of view. There is no more water in the glass than before, but it is half-full now, rather than half-empty. Which came first, the dark cloud or the silver lining? Dark cloud, silver lining. Dark cloud, silver lining. Repeat to fade.
.
.

Short story: 'Stairs to the Northern Line'

2009-09-21T01:35:00.000+01:00

By Kaya Burgess

It was enough to nag at him. To flicker the odd ripple of panic across his guts, but no more.

Looking at his watch was only slowing him down as he pushed through the gates and past the woman with the torn leather bag spilling pens onto the tiles. Another woman, probably younger though with a weary look about her, clutched a small dog in a tartan jacket who looked unamused by the hubbub.

He was not late, but he was running late – an important distinction. Not so late as to have resigned himself to his fate, but rather just late enough to leave him with a fool’s hope that he could make up for lost time by shuffling with angry haste through the ticket hall of Bank Underground Station and towards the escalators. Which were not working.

A listless station worker, so thin and grey that he seemed drawn onto the background with a soft pencil, pointed a limp arm towards a doorway. There, scrawled in spidery felt-tip pen on a dust-clouded notice board, were the words “Stairs to the Northern Line”.

The station worker seemed to be looking right at him, but as he hurried past, the man’s eyes remained fixed on the middle-distance behind him. Even the eyes of a painting follow you round the room, but not this man’s eyes. His sketchy grey face housed sketchy grey eyes that stared out of a deep nothingness as his shoulders swayed gently in the hot breeze.

Ducking under the pointing finger of the station worker, he dipped his head and weaved a course towards the doorway that lead to the stairs.

Through the doorway, the steps themselves were of clanging steel, embossed with leaf-shaped dimples that clung to the soles of his shoes as he clattered down the first flight. The walls were also metallic and corrugated with deep grooves painted long ago in magnolia emulsion, which was now peeling and pallid.

The stairway was narrow and the ceiling low. Though three could walk abreast, climbers in both directions clung to the handrail on the inside. There was no stairwell to look down or up and no gap between the stairs, but only more cold metal.

He descended a second and a third flight. He left behind the daylit glow of the ticket hall to descend into the dim fluorescent light, which somehow seemed to deepen the gloom rather than lift it.

He descended a fourth, fifth and sixth flight. Old men with hollow stares panted for breath as they climbed back up past him, clutching the handrail for moral support.

With quick feet and nimble skips he danced downwards between pattering children and businesswomen with pull-along suitcases, sometimes venturing perilously close and catching a toe or a heel.

With each turn – at the seventh or perhaps ninth flight – he felt sure the next corner would yield the entrance to the platform or an opening to a footway.

But still he descended, cursing between gasps at his ill fortune and ever-receding hope of making up for lost time.

His cursing grew into a grumble as he cantered round another flight, grabbing the handrail at the apex of every turn and using it to fling himself down and round each corner. The walls were a montage of dancing shadows as would-be passengers ahead and behind ran down the steps and the steps and the steps.

And yet more steps. And yet more minutes. He slowed. As though at a given signal those around him slowed too. Still a stream of people climbed up from below. None of them ran or skipped, but rather clambered past him with weary legs.

“Excuse me, there. How far down is it?” he asked a young man with thinning hair and an umbrella he was using to support himself on each step.

The man did not answer, but rather gave a wide-eyed shrug and shake of the head before stumbling on upwards.

Before he turned the corner, the man looked back down and said, in words wrapped in a laugh and a nod: “I turned back.”

The man disappeared up around the corner and his shadow followed behind, sliding up the stairs in the dim, oppressive half-light that made the walls seem to loom inwards. Ignoring the man, he carried on downwards, slower now.

He looked at his watch as he trotted on down. Five minutes passed, which became ten and fifteen. No line is this deep beneath the city.

He caught the eye of a woman jogging along beside him. Her flat shoes clicked back and forth against the soles of her feet as she slipped her heels off the edge of each step. She raised her eyebrows slightly and puffed out her cheeks, her dark fringe lank with sweat against her brow.

“Pardon me.” A large lady with a wicker handbag stopped them both with a sausagey hand. “But how far is it to the top, please? These stairs do go on, don’t they?”

Before she had time to close her mouth, shouts came from below - far below - echoing off the walls like heavy pinballs. He stopped, as did the woman and all those around them. The slap of footsteps above and below fell into silence, punctuated only by heavy breaths which lingered like fog about their ears.

Still more shouts, now more distant, drifted up from deep beneath them. Shouts. Or sobs. Something more guttural than anger.

From above, too, there were cries that seemed anguished and set his nerves on edge.

“What! What is it!” he cried down. The clarity of his voice was raped by the corrugated walls until it did little more than add to the swell of moaning bellows from below.

Enough. He swivelled round on his heel, swishing his coat against those who stood unblinking around him, and headed determinedly back up the stairs from whence he had come. His stride took two steps at a time and then three. Now he was late. All hope was lost. It was anger, not hope, that spurred him on.

First one flight, then another, Then a third, fifth, tenth.

He reached the wide-eyed young man, who now sat on a step with his umbrella across his knees and made a tired grab at his coat-tails, but he could not stop him. He slowed as his legs cramped. He jostled for room past tired faces who still came down the stairs like a brook down a mountainside.

Fifteen minutes of climbing became twenty and then became lost in time uncounted. He forced his muscles to haul him back up the steps, using the handrail and the corrugated grooves to propel himself upwards, leaving him with flecks of magnolia paint on his hands and sleeves. The shouts from below grew no fainter, but those from above grew no louder. How far had he come? Surely by now he should have reached the opening back out onto the ticket hall. Had he missed it? Surely not, no way.

Still upwards he went through the dimness that closed in on him, breaking into a panicked jog and then a sprint that he could not sustain. A man behind him was also running. Sweat mingled with the tears in eyes that blinked in confusion and fright.

He stopped and grabbed the man by the lapels of his jacket and thrust him with a deep thud against the wall.

“Where the fuck is it! What the fuck is going on!”

The man in turn seized his lapels and drove him back against the inner wall, where the handrail burrowed into the small of his back.

“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know! Hours… I’ve been an hour down - two up. There’s nothing, no way out!”

The man’s voice cracked through gritted teeth as he said it. As he said it. No. Way. Out.

Round the next corner above him, a boy scrabbled at the rivets in the wall, scratching at the paintwork while his mother sobbed on the landing floor at his feet. The dog in the tartan jacket scampered up past his ankles, whimpering. People thudded with bruised fists against the walls, crying for help and for dear life. Their bangs and their entreaties faded without answer into the the motionless air.

By now, all along the walls ahead as he walked slowly and bewilderedly up round each flight, people sat on the stairs, leaning their heads against the handrails. Some sobbed. Others strained dry tongues at half-imagined drops in long-empty water bottles.

He turned back. Looked down. What else was there to do but begin to descend once more? Sweat coursed down his temples though his blood ran cold. The gloom tugged at him with murky fingers. He cast his eyes over every landing wall and into every nook to see a sign of a door having been closed – an opening blocked off. But there was none. The floors and ceilings bevelled seamlessly into the walls without fissure or crack.

The air seemed thin and reedy as he walked on and on. Round and round. Down and down. Trudging. Time immemorial. Time immaterial.

He walked round and round and down and down and ever down through the cloying darkness until he felt he could bear it no longer. Sometimes the shouts from below seemed louder, sometimes quieter, but never closer...

And eventually they grew silent. The sound of footsteps died down and down and out.

As far as he climbed or descended - ever-slower, ever more painfully - every step on both sides of the stairway was filled with someone – sitting there, quiet. Eyes would flicker only fleetingly up to look at the face of a man who still had not given up. Would not give up. Had to give up.

Poem: 'Red, tinged gold'

2009-08-16T16:31:00.000+01:00

.

By Thuvaraka Thayabaran

You walk into the room,
it goes red,
golden flecks litter my thoughts
fanned by a reckless walk

Blind of all senses
I wade through the sparks
that spit and bruise, the blinding heat
of the wanton sparks

Just for a moment
lost in a concept
what if you heard
what if you looked, felt this?

Red, tinged gold,
there are no more colours,

The leaf you turned over,
not extraordinary,
but red, tinged gold -
peace, said he, is now a fleeting memory

Love, warped in dimension
is blood red, savour the feel,
is obsessive, painful to taste
like the leaf, said he,

That is
red, tinged gold,
it's how I feel -
peace, said he, is now a fleeting memory

Red, tinged gold
there are no more colours
it’s the way I feel
about you,

it’s the way I see you
.

Short story - 'The Coin'

2009-08-14T12:26:00.000+01:00

By Maggie Dugan

I wonder if Broder and I will ever be lovers.
I watch him as he stirs a half-cube of sugar into his coffee, picks up the small cup and sips from it without taking his eyes off me. A miniature red lamp with a matching shade perches between us on the table and spreads a warm shadow across the bleached linens. We’re the last ones in the restaurant; it’s quiet except for the banging of pots behind the swinging door to the kitchen.
-- “Larsen,” he says. We consider it an expression of fondness to be on a last-name basis.
-- “Remember the first time we had lunch all day?”
Every time we see each other, he tells this story.
-- “We went to that little place in Chambesy,” he says. “By four o’clock we’d finished three bottles of wine.”
I lean toward him, over the table.
-- “Broder, what about the night before?”
-- “Yeah, but it was the lunch that did me in.”

The night I met Broder he was admiring a mountain-view from the balcony of a chalet that belonged to a friend of mine. I happened to walk by and my friend, a chronic over-enthusiast, insisted vigorously that I come up for an aperitif.
-- “He works at the U.N.,” my friend whispered, helping me out of my coat. “Maybe he can help you get an assignment.”
I had a young Italian in tow who spoke a minimum of English. He stood handsome, quiet, like a trophy beside me, while Broder and I plunged into easy conversation.
-- “Why you talk with him so much?” the Italian asked me, after we left.
-- “I’m sorry, it was business,” I assured him.
Broder told me to call him the next time I was in Geneva. A week later, I found an excuse – a trumped-up appointment – and phoned him to see if he’d meet me for a drink afterwards. He told me to come to the Café Mirador in the old part of the city. Long burgundy drapes hung just inside the entrance to block the cold wind from following me into the bar. I pressed my hands along the heavy velvet to find the split in the curtains and pushed them aside to see Broder sitting alone at a table. His eyes bored into mine. He stood up as I walked toward him.
-- “Let me take your coat.” He folded it in two and placed it over an empty chair.
-- “What are you drinking?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. A mirror hanging on the wall behind him gave me a full view of the waiters scuttling up to the ornate zinc bar.
-- “Nothing special - white wine.”
He picked up what looked like a shot-glass, drew his mouth around it and belted it back. He picked up a wine bottle from the table and refilled the glass to the brim.
-- “Then that’s what I’ll have.”
He waved to the waiter, who brought a short narrow glass with the insignia of the Canton de Gènève, set it in front of me and filled it with wine, though not quite as full as Broder had filled his own glass. After the waiter left, Broder picked up the wine bottle and topped it off.
-- “The glasses are small enough already,” he said, smiling for the first time.
He knocked his glass against mine and drank from it, his eyes glued to mine until he set the glass down and reached for his pack of Marlboros. He pointed the red package at me.
-- “You smoke?”
-- “No.”
He started to set the pack down on the table.
-- “…I bum.”
He nodded with a smirk of approval, picked up the pack and shook out a cigarette to offer to me. I waited for his lighter, meeting his eyes again only after the cigarette was fully lit.
The drink turned into dinner, where we drank too much, talked too long and I missed the last train home. He said he’d pay for my hotel room and drove me to the Mövenpick near the airport. We went for a nightcap at the hotel bar, the ‘Alibi.’ The barman had to turn up the lights to get us to leave. We lingered in the lobby while the night-janitor checked his watch repeatedly until he grew impatient and plugged in the polishing-machine. We talked over the hum of the cleaner as he pushed it back and forth in perfect, even sweeps across the wide tiles. Finally, I called for the elevator. I stretched up to kiss him on each cheek – once, twice, then a third kiss, traded in polite Swiss form – before I stepped back and let the doors shut between us.
I went to my room and looked at myself in the mirror. Out loud in the white, sterile, hotel bathroom, I wondered, ‘What do I want here?’ I hardly knew him. I didn’t need a lover. I needed a job. He was married. It was complicated. I couldn’t tell if these were reasons or excuses. In that late-night-drunk-and-brutally-honest-with-myself state, I looked at my reflection and I knew. That scared me.
The next morning he called me at the hotel.
-- “Larsen,” he said, “Why don’t you go home on a later train. Let me buy you lunch.”

The waiter coughs for our attention, and places a silver tray on the table. I reach for it, but Broder pulls the tray to his side, taking possession of the cheque.
-- “I drove home like a madman that night. I kept picturing you standing in the elevator. I couldn’t believe I let you go.”
I know what he’s going to say next.
-- “The next morning,” I intercept, “it didn’t take much to persuade me to take a later train.”
-- “No, it didn’t.” He smiles. “When I saw you again, at lunch, it was different. The way you looked at me, the things you told me. You were softer, more personal than the night before.”
He takes a cigarette between his fingers, twirls it, pounds it on the table to pack the tobacco. He puts it in his mouth, flips open his Zippo one-handed, sparks a wild flame, bringing it up to light the cigarette. He slams the lighter shut with his thumb and sets it down on the table.
-- “I remember how you were fixed on me,” I say. I’m aware that he is listening to me, now, exactly the same way. “And how I told you more than I’d meant to.”
I look down at the tablecloth, tracing its scalloped pattern with my fingers. That’s not really true. I’d dangled myself in front of him. I told him how I wounded my ex-husband, how I felt guilty about the failure of my marriage. I described a more recent romance, fiery at first, broken off on the grounds of boredom. I portrayed myself to him in two parts; one brutally honest about who I was, without apology, the other a careful projection, a construction of my desired self. I’d wanted him to be intrigued. I want him to be afraid.
-- “After that lunch, when we were walking down the street, I realized nothing was going to happen,” he says. “I had to get you down to the train station, out of my sight.”
He squints as he inhales his cigarette and turns his head to blow out the smoke.
-- “And after I dropped you off, I just sat there in the car, stunned.”
The waiter leans between us to replace the ashtray and nods his head again at the check on the table to beg us, politely, to pay our bill and leave.
-- “I’ll never forget that day,” he says.
I smile, helping myself to one of his cigarettes.
We leave the restaurant and walk through the surrounding hamlet, a small huddle of old middle-European houses. Three men, covered with soot like dirty snowmen march single-file up a flight of stairs.
-- “Grab a button,” he says. “Do you have a button?”
I fumble to open my coat. I find a flat mother of pearl button on my sweater and grab it.
-- “An old wives tale.” His tone is urgent, like something serious is at stake.
Broder is a man’s man, gruff, burly, bearded. He raises one eyebrow at the world. He talks about his ogre in the third person, as if some nastier demon sometimes seizes control of who he really is: the man who is softer, not quite fragile, believing.
-- “When you see a chimney-sweep, grab a button. It’s for good luck.”
I laugh, yet I do not disbelieve it. I press the button tight between my thumb and index finger, deliberately feeling its smooth surface.

The little village behind us, we amble up a steady slope protected by a canopy of trees with dark, wet bark. The leafy blanket holds the mist low and close. Rain drip-drops from the leaves like an uneven metronome.
-- “Where passion goes away, where does it go?”
-- “I don’t know,” he says. “Somehow it seeps away, little by little. Maybe it gets stolen, or one day it just up and disappears.”
-- “Yeah, but where? Where does it go?”
-- “Jesus, Larsen. I don’t know,” he sighs with his whole body. “I wish I did.”
I move closer to him. I don’t really expect him to answer. That’s the thing between us: we don’t know.
-- “I've brought a number of friends here,” he says, “I brought her here.”
I know about this woman, I know about all of them. He knows all my stories, too. We are comrades in our disappointment.
He points to a tree on the side of the road.
-- “She picked a pear from that branch and handed it to me.”
I think about me and Broder and what’s never evolved between us. Though it hangs in the air always: that slim chance that something could happen. Neither one of us has ruled it out, but neither one of us ever initiates it. Our friendship is sustained by this ambiguity. Every time we see each other we act out a slow seduction. Every time, I guess, relieved not to succeed.
-- “And then she took my arm,” he says. “She held me firmly with both hands. She said all she’d wanted was to be with me.”
We crest the top of the hill and stop for a moment, wordless, looking at the patchwork of fields around us, looking at each other. The rain starts again, just barely falling. He tips his head the direction we came. I know he has to get back to work. I have to go, too; I’ve got a train to catch.
I drop slightly behind him as we walk back down the road. I want to touch him, to reach for him, to walk arm in arm. I want to say something to comfort him. I want to tell him something about that first lunch, about every lunch, about today. I want to wrap up all the desire between us and give it to him as a present. I call out to him.
-- “Hey Broder...”
He turns and looks at me. I see the steam rise from his breath.
I think of all the things I’d like to say. He stands, silent, waiting for me to finish.
-- “Nothing,” I say, listening to the rain. “I just wanted to hear myself say your name.”
We stop at a narrow bridge where a stream roars, hurtling over rocks and stones. We watch the water press along its path, blindly, noisily.
He has to shout to be heard.
-- “Down there somewhere, there's a two franc coin on the stream bed.” He extends his arm and flicks his thumb, demonstrating for me how it landed there.
-- “She told me that even though she was leaving, I was still her amour à moi. She promised that one day we’d come back and we’d bring a big light and try to find the coin.”
He laughs. But I know it isn’t funny.
-- “Every time I drive by here I stop,” he says, “and I imagine that coin, on the rocky bottom, water rushing over it, its brightness shining for someone to see.”

I sit in a dusty train stop, beneath a wooden shelter, waiting for the train that will take me home. An auburn-skinned man looks out at me from the window of the train stopped at the opposite platform. I feel my face making no expression, just looking back into his tired eyes. I don’t turn away.
He leans against the window, safe and warm inside the train car, watching me look at him. We stare at each other. We both smile. I smile longer than most strangers would dare, until his train does its slow pull-away.

.

Birthday greetings

2009-08-13T11:38:00.004+01:00

By Kaya Burgess

You've lived this long. Congratulations. Let's face it, it's quite a feat. For all your years you have successfully avoided the increasing numbers of cars and murderers stalking the streets; have circumvented life's little disasters and sidestepped the big ones; have managed not to get yourself infected with anything deadly or speared with anything sharp. You were far too late for the Second World War and outlasted the Cold one. If bird flu didn't get you then swine flu probably won't. You didn't take that bus that exploded, and didn't get kidnapped in Morocco or shot in Mexico. Their cigarettes haven't killed you yet and booze isn't really your vice. You've been in the right place at the wrong time and the wrong place at the right time, but have steered clear of the deadlier combination. Your enemies - mostly fictional or secretarial - are far from mortal and rarely armed, and your crusades are fought with pen and not with sword. Your crashes have been minor and injuries superficial; defeats sporadic and vanquishers merciful. You have observed warnings around danger and etiquette among madmen. Your talk, though spoken with no great care or moderation, is not careless and has cost no lives. Your limbs, though sometimes twisted and grazed, were never broken. Your eyes, never dimmed nor blinded. Your ears hear what hear they must and your mind still finds the words it looks for. You have put out fires sparked in foolish kitchens and were out when the burglars came. You have won some fights and, for those you lost, the price was nought but blood and teeth and pride. Sadness has swum in your eyes and heartbreak in your stomach and your soul, but it has not broken you, not yet. You can still smile when the ship of your resolution falters on stormy seas and slips beneath the waves. Dark skies and early nightfalls darken your horizons, though your spirit still peers skyward for the returning dawn. All your luck, your happy luck, swells and swirls about a hole where something is lost. Some thing you should not look for but always miss. But the months like patchwork stretch ahead beneath your feet. Paths to tread round pitfalls as yet unforseen. To leave the mill-stone by the roadside would seem far easier, but come with you it must. Something is carved upon its face and, though time has made its image indistinct, you half guess at what it reads. You say nothing of it, though it haunts the spaces between the verses. You've come this far, and the path ahead is flat then steep so do not dawdle. Away with you. Live each day like it may be your penultimate. Tomorrow could be marvellous - though the weatherman is predicting rain.

Edinburgh, 2009

Chronicle: 'The musings of Mr Coates'

2009-04-20T18:42:00.003+01:00

For many years, a John JJ Coates has sent regular fax messages to the newsroom of a prominent national newspaper with tirades on a variety of subjects.

Some of these messages are very forthright in nature, to say the least. Others target specific groups that have evoked the ire of Mr Coates. Yet more address a fictional landlord of some ethereal pub.

He always signs his fax messages in the same format: "Dictated by John JJ Coates and signed in his absence", although he did once reveal his middle names to be Jeremy Jeffrey. None of this explains why, on another occasion, he signed his fax as Mr Jeffrey Sinatra...

Below are the selected highlights of Mr Coates's most recent correspondence with Fleet Street:

By John JJ Coates (and signed in his absence)

Now before I drink in your pubs will you allow me to embrace the parasites and worms, your extra ingredients, before you put them in the pint I drink in your pubs. And of course, as we know, this could only happen in England. However, I have my own bar in the house and you'll never see me drinking in your restaurant and eating and drinking in your nightclub, or ever buy your takeaway. Now what you need for your little virus is the antidote and we can talk about that when we have a pint together, never.

*****

My family are looking at my children on an electronic screen, and my children are 10, 12 years old. But do you know what the funniest thing is? These children are not are not even born yet, and yet there they are on screen running around me. Can we tell the future, mate? I have four children, mate, and I'm telling you about them before they're born.

*****

Dear Dad,

And I am the inventor of a mechanical fist and a mechanical fist will punch a hole in your head.

*****

Look, if you want a hit song you've got to write a song about a banana and sling your hook.

*****

How does a spacecraft travel through space and avoid the natural space litter? I would also like to know if we're travelling to a so-called Mars and if it takes us three years to get there what speed do we need to be travelling at? If we're travelling at thousands of miles per hour, how do we avoid the space particles? Which would be hitting the spacecraft windscreen like bullets. How do we avoid that? How do we avoid the natrual space debris? And you're talking about travelling through space at thousands of miles per hour which means the space particles are hitting the spacecraft at the speed it is hitting them. You can't just fly through space at any speed you like and you'd never get to Mars without the spacecraft being showered and hit by space particles. It would be like somebody standing in front of the spacecarft and showering it with bullets from a machine gun - now there's something not adding up here - would you like to explain it?

Novel: 'Oh Clouds Unfold' - Chapter Four

2009-03-25T12:42:00.004Z

.

Chapter Four

Read Chapter Three

By Kaya Burgess

All down the row of neatly terraced houses, the doorways thronged with people with wistful looks and bowed heads. Claire stood on the doorstep. Her father’s hand rested on her shoulder and her mother’s held tightly onto the tie of Claire’s cardigan, which she pulled tight over her chest. Her brother Simon, 15-years-old and small for his age, poked his head between Claire and the doorframe and watched with them as the line of boys filed ponderously down the cobbled street.

Among them was Claire’s sweetheart, Edward Palin - Teddy to those in the neighbourhood. He was not tall, but his slightness made him seem smaller. His mid-brown hair lay in a sweep across his forehead as it tumbled from beneath his cloth cap. A shadow of downy bristles lined his top lip and chin, accentuating his strong jaw and mournful pout. He may have been just a boy, but he was no fool. None of them were.

Teddy’s generation had been a lot less naïve than his father’s. This time round there was no joyous rush to volunteer, no enthusiastic dash to die for King and Country. This time there were only thoughtful queues of conscripts, who had known what was coming since Chamberlain got on that blasted plane to Germany the summer before.

Teddy was just eighteen when the notice went up at the town hall. He would always remember his father’s look as he put on his coat to walk him to the billeting station – a look of regret and resignation, laced with a sad pride. The clicking of his father’s cane, which Teddy had known since he was a child, sounded even harsher now, as it propped up the leg injured in the last war. The Great War. The war to end all wars. Or so they had said.

As the queue passed by the Merton’s house he caught Claire’s gaze and lowered his eyes. She did the same. Simon ran indoors. It would be his turn before long. Teddy and Claire both looked up together and their eyes met once more. Claire tried to smile, but her lips just tightened, making her seem more austere than comforting. Although austerity was the order of the day, she didn’t want Teddy’s abiding memory of her to be one of sullenness or worry, though she was sick with it.

Her smile could stop traffic. Once literally, when Teddy had tried to smile back and come crashing off his baker’s-boy bike at the bumper of an omnibus. The memory Teddy kept of that moment – apart from a small scar just below his knee and a bill for a new handlebar – was of Claire’s sea-green eyes peering from beneath a reddish blonde fringe, above a beaming smile which creased her elfin nose. He spent what few shillings he made, notwithstanding the few bob housekeeping to his mother, on courting Claire. So assiduous and attentive was he that he won over not only her but also her mother, who allowed them to go to the pictures once a week, provided she approved of the film and could keep an eye on them on their walk home.

When they could escape her watchful gaze Claire and Teddy would head out of Camden and up towards the heath on their push-bikes, where they could look down over a London landscape as yet untouched by the bombs that rolled off production lines by the Rhône. It was here on Hampstead Heath that they explored each other, innocently at first. In among the trees and the smell of browning autumn leaves, they would find a patch of reddening sunlight away from the path, and lose themselves in their fumbling teenage passions. Teddy’s fingertips hungrily sought their way over Claire’s body, caressing her firm, new breasts before diving over her soft porcelain stomach towards her lissom thighs which wrapped around his waist as he kissed her neck. She in turn would feel her inquisitive way down his strong back and the backs of his legs, before gazing in curiously amused wonder at his naked form, stifling her giggles when they seemed to wound his pride.

Making love in the woods didn’t seem particularly illicit to them. It was more than just fucking in the bushes. A little corny perhaps. And a little uncomfortable, not least round the dinner table when a piece of bark stares out from beneath a creased stocking. But it was an innocent time, unburdened by thoughts of responsibility and duty. How duty would grow to be a bitterly hated word. But not yet. Right now, responsibility meant being home in time for tea and checking condoms for pinholes. They had both heard stories that the government had pierced one in every ten condoms during the last war, to force a baby boom. Neither of them entirely bought the story, but could not quite bring themselves to dismiss it completely.

The drama of the call to arms, when it came, was an anti-climax. The phoney war. For long, excruciating months after having signed the conscription papers, life for Teddy continued much as it had before.

The biggest difference was in the stars. Thousands of them came out of hiding to cast their panoply over a London covered in blacked-out shadow, as if a velvet blanket had been lain over the gaslights, lamplights and nightlights of the city, and the stars were trying to compensate. The warden, a pretty but severe young woman with high cheekbones, would knock on doors and fumingly thrust masking tape at those whose chinks of light contaminated her totalitarian blackout regime. Crossing the road after nightfall was fraught with errant cyclists and invisible delivery vans whose pin-prick headlights would loom suddenly round corners, sending intrepid pedestrians leaping up kerbstones and clinging to extinguished lampposts.

Teddy attended the training sessions with the TA in Regent’s Park, which would, by all accounts, turn him into a ruthless killing machine, soon to have Hitler’s forces hotfooting it back to Berlin and no mistake. Teddy felt that the German troops may put up more of a struggle than the sacks of sand who blithely surrendered to Teddy’s kitchen-knife-tied-to-a-broomstick without a word of protest. Perhaps Prague and Warsaw had been defended only by battalions of docile sandbags. It would explain a lot. Blitzkrieg, my arse.

One night, as 1939 ebbed and faded into the wintry darkness of a gloomsome December, Teddy sat with Claire in Mornington Crescent underground station, listening to the siren that screamed up the Euston Road. They said little. Claire raised her head from the warmth of Teddy’s chest, but decided against breaking the quiet and lay her head back down, sighing out the breath she had drawn. The siren stopped outside, and reverberated off down the tunnel like a disappearing tube train, leaving the huddled crowd sitting in cramped silence on the platform. Tureens of soup steamed gently in the half-light by the stairway, and somewhere by the exit a mother cradled her baby who dozed in her arms. Some nights there was music and laughter, but stories of defeats and retreats in Belgium had dampened spirits and brought the reality of the war a little closer to home. The Pathé news reels tried to boost morale with trumpeted tales of Tommy giving the Bosch a good seeing to, but few people swallowed it. Here in the underground, the wending tunnels snaked between platforms lined with people, gasmasks over their shoulders, candles flickering tall shaky shadows against the curved walls. Children’s laughter used to echo down the lines, but most of the young’uns had by now been packed off to the countryside with a parcel of tuck under one arm and an address label tied to the other. Tonight there was an uneasy hush, broken only by the odd rustle of sleeping-bag or scurry of mouse.

-- “I love you,” said Claire.

Although it was barely a whisper, quieter than quiet, it broke the silence like a stone on a mill-pond, and a chorus of chattering whispers rippled out as tentative conversations sprung up along the platform, as if they had just been given permission to speak.

-- “I love you too,” Teddy whispered back, craning his neck to look in her half-closed eyes. He said it with a solemnity beyond his 18 years. As time eked by, it brought him closer, second by second, to his inevitable embarkation, and so he knew each word to Claire could be a farewell, in its way. He was the dying man who wanted his last words to be momentous, and so stored them up and meted them out, miserly. It lent a funereal air to their conversations, as they eschewed the trivial in favour of appreciative silences. Not awkward. Just quiet. Tender. Scared.

Soon Claire was sleeping soundly. The oceanic rhythm of her breathing soaked into Teddy’s chest and thoughts of slumber drew his eyelids down and bowed his head. He was no longer even listening out for the all-clear. It would sound when it would sound. The all-clear siren was not all that different from the duck-and-run-for-cover siren, but it was striking what a difference a semi-tone or two could make.

Teddy’s breathing stirred and he lifted his head and gazed down the platform, tucking his feet in a little to let a reservist pass with a barrow of sandbags. With slow, steady hands, he took Claire’s head and almost imperceptibly slipped it from his chest, laying it oh-so-softly onto the bundled jacket which had been supporting his back. He took his father’s worn greatcoat and laid it over her hunched shoulders, which relaxed in the new-found warmth. Teddy looked over to Simon, who sat with his short-trousered legs dangling off the platform edge above the faintly shimmering tracks. He beckoned Simon over to watch over Claire, and pre-empted any teenage protest by offering him the comics he had been reading. Clearly pleased with the deal, Simon screwed up his freckled nose and stuck out his tongue with an impish smile, before seizing the comics with his oily fingers and settling in next to Claire against the station wall.

Teddy made his way down the platform, treading cautiously over sleeping figures and outstretched limbs. As he picked out his tip-toed steps, he caught a foot on the handle of a holdall which sent him diving onto all fours, trying to regain his balance while scrambling to avoiding the banks of sleeping people who sat up to observe the spectacle. Realising the situation was fated to get rather worse before it got any better, Teddy saw there was nothing for it but to fall to one side and hope for the best. This he did, and he skidded on his shoulder for a yard or two, knocking a pile of saucepans onto the tracks before coming to rest on his back on the platform edge. The clanging ricochet of the pans filled the station in an instant, and probably woke everyone along the Northern Line with it.

He lay on his back for a moment, wincing in anticipation of the shouts of “Quiet!” which were no doubt imminent. To his undying surprise and no small relief, a round of applause broke out and fanned out down the platform, as sleeping bags rustled with chuckling onlookers. A hand on the end of a burly arm grasped Teddy roughly by the lapel and brought him sharply to his feet. At the top of the burly arm was a broad smiling face, belonging to Mr. Barrie the baker, whose bike Teddy had written off a fortnight before.

-- “Now then, young Master Palin, we can’t have you going on like a ballet dancer day and night, can we? Scattering fresh loaves and saucepans all over the shop with your twinkle toes.”

Mr. Barrie’s earthy grin belied any scolding in his words, and Teddy blushingly thanked him before hopping into the pit below the tracks to retrieve the pans he had sent clattering down. He replaced them neatly and gave a sheepish bow to the watching assembly, before shuffling red-facedly off down the platform.

-- “You silly boy, what am I to do with you?”

Teddy’s mother smirked up at him from under a large red poster which boldly proclaimed ‘YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY'.

-- “It’s not my fault they’ve booby-trapped the platform! Camouflaged blankets, knees and crockery all over the place. If only I had my knife-tied-to-a-broomstick…” He gestured like an explorer hacking a path through Amazonian undergrowth.

His mother laughed and patted the floor beside her. He flopped down against the tiles and she tousled his hair with a playful hand. Millicent Palin was young for her age, as they say, in looks and in vigour. Her shawl hung loose over her shoulders and down her chest. The red in her brown hair competed for attention with the wisps of grey, which tumbled in curled locks about her brows. Her cheeks were flushed russet-red from the stifling heat of the motionless air. Asleep against her left flank lay Alice, whose sleepy head dreamt of tanks and spitfires and other wonders her six-year old mind had heard tell of, but didn’t quite understand. She had exhausted her wee red head with questions about daddy and the searchlights, which he manned on the common – great blazing torches combing the skies for flying needles in starlit haystacks. Teddy’s mother looked from her daughter to her son, with eyes full of wist. Teddy was peering back through the forest of bodies to where Claire now sat upright with her head on Simon’s shoulder.

-- “Ask her to marry you,” said his mother, after a pause.

He looked up at her.

-- “I have.”

He smiled. A warmly mischievous smile.

-- “And...?” said his mother, eyebrows raised and leaning forward from the wall like a heron.

Teddy just smiled and tugged at his forelock as if to ask if there could be any doubt.

The engagement had arisen not so much from a proposal as from an implicit understanding. Words weren’t needed. No bended knees or half-rehearsed elegies. No tears or rings. They had lain on the heath, shoulder to shoulder. Hand in hand. Eyes fixed on the only cloud in an azure sky. Unblinking. Sun over London. Treetops caught in a crepuscule amber. Shadows lengthening.

-- “Will it be like this forever, you and I?” Claire had asked.

Teddy said yes with a kiss, and that was that.

They knew there would be pressure to marry before Teddy set sail. To join the army of whirlwind young couples streaming down the steps of confetti-strewn churches, eyes ablaze and clueless as to what they were letting themselves in for. Young girls watching through lace curtains for postmen, unaware that they were already teenage widows, waiting for letters from no-one.

Teddy’s mother grabbed him round the neck and planted a great kiss below his ear.

-- “Oh, my boy, your father will be so proud! He still has his wedding coat in the airing cupboard and my veil is good as new, should Claire want it.”

Teddy stood up and dusted his trousers down with a brusque rub of the hands.

-- “All in good time, mum. Patience is a virtue.”

-- “As is a stitch in time, Teddy,” she replied, earnestly crinkling her brow.

-- “If Claire were a sock that needed darning, I should probably agree, mum.” And with that he bounded back down the platform, leaving his shadow dancing on the trackside wall.

.
.
Go to chapter five [link to follow]

..
Read every instalment of Oh Clouds Unfold so far

Chronicle: 'The god perception'

2009-02-09T14:04:00.029Z

By Kaya Burgess

Where better to conduct a millennia-old spiritual debate than on the side of a bus?

The inspired Atheist Bus Campaign bought advertising space on a number of British bus-routes to tell us: "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". Now the Christian Party has fought back to tell us: "There definitely IS a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life."

Tit-for-tat advertising is one thing, but who is right?

The debate is, of course, unwinnable. It is as impossible to prove that god does not exist as it is to prove that he does. We all know that leprechauns do not exist, but can we prove it? Logic and reason are no counter-argument to blind faith and unquestioning piety.

Which leads one to ask whether disproving the existence of a god - or gods - is really all that important?

Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins have spent their careers telling believers they are delusional. But believing he can convince them is just as deluded.

Speaking personally, the thought that god actually does exist has never seriously crossed my mind any more than the thought that Gandalf or Mary Poppins exists. Christians and atheists alike mock Scientologists for their faith in a religion so obviously created as a work of fiction in a book, but what, then, is Christianity if not largely the same thing?

The human mind struggles to grasp two very important concepts - that of meaninglessness and that of infinity. To ask a human being to accept that their birth was merely a chance happening, and that their death will be equally as arbitrary, is to controvert thousands of years of religious doctrine which places humankind as the all-important, self-congratulating centre of a divinely created universe. Religious apologists point to the beauty and complexity of nature as evidence of some celestial design, but they fail to note that, over billions and billions and billions of years, the simple logic of probability makes almost every imaginable permutation of everything possible in the end.

Instead, cast your mind back thousands of years to a time before we knew that the Earth rotated on a slanted axis round a flaming ball of hydrogen and helium. The early throes of a cogent human mind would have sought an explanation for the passage of a blinding orb of light across the sky and would, understandably, have grasped at the concept of a being, beyond our reach, hauling the sun through the star-spangled heavens. This is how the legend of Apollo was born, in whose chariot dwelt the sun in ancient times.

Religious believers who scoff at evolution should first note that religion itself has evolved. A series of myths and ideas of polytheistic Olympus-style gods has given way to more structured monotheistic religions, thanks in part to the institutionalisation of the Church (with a capital 'C'), who soon realised the power they could wield with a Bible, or Koran, in one hand and a donation plate in the other.

Religion is the greatest tool of subjugation mankind has ever known. Create a wrathful, vengeful, punitive god and you create a god-fearing populace, whose terror of sulphurous pits and pitchforked devils will bend them to your will. Every murderous war-mongerer in history has supposedly had god on their side. Would the wise, benevolent, wrathful god of the hymn-books tolerate the rivers of blood spilt in his many names?

God is the mirage in the desert. A concept created by a human mind that cannot bear to be alone in the universe. A mind afraid to think that that beyond the skies is only space - beyond the horizon, only another horizon.

***

I put forward these ideas, yet you can safely ignore everything I say. Who am I to write as if I have all the answers? To describe what the human mind cannot grasp as if I am the only one who can?

The argument, in essence, rests on perception.

George Berkeley (himself a bishop, it is interesting to note) philosophised about the nature of perception in the 18th century. His theory of "immaterialism" (which later came to be known as "subjective idealism") set out the notion that esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived. Put simply, he asked whether the 'existence' of an object depends on our perception of it...

Picture this. Draw the curtains of your bedroom and leave the room, closing the door behind you. The bed and the desk and the wardrobe remain in the now completely empty room, but there is no-one there to see them. No-one to touch them or smell them. They are alone in an unseeable void behind that door.

-- Do they still exist?

Of course, empirically speaking, they do, but in what sense?

Let us consider Berkeley's old riddle:

-- If a tree falls in a forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

True, the air still ripples out in longitudinal waves, but what defines a 'sound'? Is it simply a rippling of the air, or does it become a 'sound' only when it is heard?

To extrapolate this, using Berkeley's idea:

-- If a tree stands in a forest and there is no-one there to see it, does it exist?

Does it exist in its own right, or is its 'existence' qualified only by the presence of someone there to perceive it existing? True, this hypocritically places human perception at the core of existence - just as I have argued that religion does - but using this theory, the question of god's existence comes to a neat conclusion.

If existence depends on perception, then god's existence becomes a purely personal question, answerable only by each individual and inapplicable to society as a whole.

If you believe in a god; sense a presence, feel a love, hear a guidance - in short, if you perceive his existence - then, for you, he does exist. No-one can deny you that. Similarly, you cannot impose his existence upon a non-believer because perception is entirely personal and individual.

The very term 'god' needs redefining, therefore. The existence of god becomes not only a matter of perception, but also one of semantics. If we are debating whether an enormous invisible man with a long white beard and all-seeing eyes dwells in a mystical cloudy paradise, then the argument becomes faintly ludicrous. However, if 'god' is a synonym for 'faith' - for the way in which someone draws on a spiritual belief as a source of solace or guidance - then 'god' exists inside whoever chooses to believe in him (or it).

What he have outlined here is a "consensus reality" - if enough people believe something to be true then, for those people, it assumes an actual truth. Whether that "consensus reality" adheres to a "true" reality ceases to matter, and indeed calls into question the very notion of a "true reality" if reality itself can be different for different people.

***

So, for me, god does not exist. For you, maybe he does. No need for militant atheists or sermonising preachers. No crusades or jihads. Each to their own.

Which leads me back to the battle of the bus campaigns.

"There's probably no god" is not antagonistic, and at the very least contains a positive message. For the Christian Party to say "There definitely IS a god" seems like a childish, playground-style reply that rather plays into the atheists' hands. But, as we have discussed, it is their prerogative to assert what they believe in, just as it is an atheist's prerogative to doubt it.

So, how about a joint campaign: "God is a concept. Each to his own. Now stop arguing and enjoy your life."

Chronicle: 'Blue Notebooks' - First Instalment

2009-02-03T15:44:00.005Z

By Philip Herd

Inspired by the music of Max Richter

Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of a sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens - say at night, when everything round about is quiet - one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall. The pendulous tock of an old grandfather clock, echoing off the barren walls. Reverberating. Resonating. Listen closely and one can hear the daylight tip-toe through the not-quite closed window, approaching silently so as not to disturb the tranquil silence, so as not to alert its shadowy gaoler to its escape. Slowly it creeps through the threadbare barrier of the curtains, beginning to fill the room, chasing away the grim austerity. Still the mirror rattles, moved to excitement by this new interloper. Still the timepiece thunders its temporal tune, trying to alert all around it to the suspicious intruder.

Now having heard the merest tremor of activity, one begins to become aware of the increasing noise. Others bustle in behind those first pioneering shafts of light, surging in with their raucous groans, rising quickly to a stampede of shuddering weight that the entire room now begins to rattle. A cacophonous din of blinding energy. A symphony of light. Orchestral energy, liberated joyously from the grim and dour gloom, screams inside one's head, pounding on one's eardrum a beat of almost divine magnitude. Caught in its swirling melodies, one rises and falls, swept around by the strident strains, energised with the very energy of the universe, dazzled by the blaring boom. The threadbare curtain disentangles itself from itself, redundant. The rattling mirror explodes under the frenetic assault, forever banishing the memory of the mournful silence, no longer will one be able to dwell on what was once but is no more. The clock continues its enduring task. And all is still again.

How enduring. How we need durability.

The sky before sunrise is soaked with light, rosy coloured tints buildings, bridges and the river. I was here when she with whom I walk wasn't born yet and the cities on a distant plain stood intact before they rose in the air with the dust of sepulchral brick, and the people who lived there didn't know. Only this moment, at dawn, is real to me. The bygone lives are like my own past life, uncertain. I cast a spell on the city, asking it to last...

Novel: 'Oh Clouds Unfold' - Chapter Three

2009-01-27T16:56:00.011Z

.

Chapter Three

Read Chapter Two

By Kaya Burgess

Monte Cassino was fast becoming a rubble-strewn graveyard. Great chunks of sandstone lay embedded on the mountainside like rough-hewn tombstones to the armies of Anzio.

Among those armies, in a fast-diminishing battalion, on a exposed outcrop, in a field littered with bodies, behind a burnt out jeep, lay Ted Palin. His face bore a permanent wince, as gunfire ricocheted off the roof of the jeep and deafening booms rattled from the mountaintop. So great was the din all around him, that he constantly felt that the next explosion would be the one to defeat his resolve and push him into madness. His teeth were gritted so hard his head throbbed, and his eyes watered down sunburnt cheeks.

He craned his neck to peer through the door of the smouldering car. The landscape was scorched, billowing up to the rugged mountain which dominated the skyline. Though it was mid-morning, the sky had a burnt orange hue, as if stained by the blood which now lay in pools in the fields. Perched on top of the mountain was the abbey of Monte Cassino. Vast and imperious it peered over the valley which fell away at its feet. It bore each thundering cascade of artillery fire with an unsettling serenity, and though each blast hewed ever greater chunks of masonry from the battlemented walls, the monastery never seemed to get any smaller or seem any less immense. Who was even in there? Germans? Italians? Soldiers? Civilians? No people ever came out – only rockets and grenades.

As Ted furtively surveyed the glowing embers of the Italian countryside around him, a silence fell. A collective breath was drawn. Eyes flitted. Ears strained. There was a pause. Somewhere among the mayhem, desperate generals stared through maddened eyes for a sign that the last onslaught had finally put paid to the resistance within the ruined monastery.

A solitary rocket flew from the rubble on the mountaintop, and was backed by a second, stronger volley.

The din resumed.

Ted was beyond incredulity by now. He ducked back down below the cover of the jeep, and sat with his back against the door. To his right lay a man whose name he did not know. He was huddled with his knees pulled into his chest and simply lay there shaking his head with wide eyes that no longer saw. To his left lay Frank. He was dead. Ted had dragged him, bleeding and screaming, across the field to where he now lay. Amidst the cacophony, Ted hadn’t noticed the screaming stop. No time to be fucked up by it now. Think about it later. Don’t think about it. Retreat inside.

His habit of planning his letters to Claire in his head had become a monologue to nobody. A narration. He was no longer a man, but a character in his own life. Watching it. He thought how disturbed that character must be by all that carnage. All that death. Death. Everywhere. Like fallen blossom on the wind, death floated and settled. Ankle deep.

Even Claire was no longer a person. She was home. She was women. She was a smile. She reminded him those things existed. Guilt racked him. Trying to picture her face and seeing only red haze. Like staring at the sun through bloodshot tears.

A gust of wind whipped round the mountain from the west and brought on it a stench of cheese. It was the gangrene. Eating men. Pillars of smoke rose from burning trees, burning cars, burning flesh. It reeked. Acrid. Foul. Death you could taste. It brought Ted’s guts swelling into his throat. He hadn’t eaten in hours. Days. He had nothing left to vomit, and so each dry wretch convulsed him, leaving him gagging on the soil.

There was a limit to how much a man could take. Beyond that there was no return, no redemption. Stares grew hollow, fading embers of hope went out, and laughter died with the troops on the battlefield. Sand and mud stuck to Ted’s brow and cloyed beneath his fingernails. Belgian mud. Greek soil. Tunisian sand. On his hands. His own? They were the hands of a murderer. Hands that had once swept the hair from Claire’s face. Hands that had once caressed her cheek as he kissed her as gently as he knew how. Hands that had strangled the life out of a German soldier, no more than 17 years old. Hands that had loaded the shells into the guns that were now smashing into smithereens the lives of men.

*** God is on our side.* *God is on their side.* *God is a dirty turncoat.* *A deserter.***

Ted had lingered long enough. He had lain in that festering field for two days, since just before the planes came. The bombers had flown over, so vast and dark they obscured the sun. Out of that steel eclipse fell the bombs. The abbey’s walls, designed by St. Benedict to withstand crossbows and catapults, buckled and fell beneath the sheer tonnage of explosives that rained upon them from the B-52s. That was February 15th 1944. Those bombers hit nothing but masonry. Nothing but masonry. Nothing. It was only last night that the defences came. Like a cloud of starlings against the twilight sky, a swarm of paratroopers fell on the mountainside and scuttled into the rubble before the guns could pick them off. And now there they were. Ensconced in their blasted fortress, hatches battened down for the long haul.

Ted bit his lip and held his breath in the back of his throat. He waited for a pause in the gunfire. None came. There was nothing for it but to run. It was a lottery. Russian roulette. Run for it. With his head bowed almost to the ground and one hand on his helmet, Ted broke cover and made a dash across the cratered field.

He had gone little more than a dozen paces when the air around him suddenly appeared to crease. In that split second, the air seemed to solidify and crack, and Ted was whipped off his feet. The blast was so loud he didn’t hear it; he only felt it as it threw him like a rag-doll and sent him crashing into a coarse hedgerow, whose brambles caught him by his uniform and bit into his skin.

***Blurs.* *Noises.* *Intermittent.* *Aching.* *Where?* *Pain.* *Stabbing.* *Blood.* *Always blood.* *This time his own.***

He tried to lift his head from where he lay. His eyes struggled for focus. The gunfire and screaming sounded somehow distant and indistinct, as though underwater. His ears throbbed and a thin stream of blood dripped from his earlobe and down his neck. Straining his gaze he saw that the jeep had taken a direct hit. The very spot in which he had just lain was now a blazing pit – a tangled mess of burning mud, steel, and bone. A blackened foot jutted from beneath the crumpled chasse.

Ted wretched as he rose tortuously to his feet, extracting himself from the clawing clutches of the thorns. This probably ranked number two. No, number three. Number three among the close shaves and near escapes of the past four years. Nearly five, now. For nearly five years he had been fighting. And for what, exactly? Stopping the forces of darkness marching all over the face of the earth, right? Or was it defending Poland? Ted could remember the tinkle of the bell on the baker’s door on the high street. The clink of that little bell died away to be replaced by the faltering tones of Neville Chamberlain crackling over Mr. Barrie’s wireless, announcing the inevitable. Withdraw their troops from Poland. No such undertaking has been received. What a shame. Ironic, too, considering it would be the undertakers who would stand to gain from it all. And where was Poland now? Somewhere beneath the swathe of black which now coloured continental Europe on the maps in The Express. Warsaw in ruins. London burning. Paris without a scratch as Nazi soldiers smoke cigars in her bistros. And Ted climbing, bloodied, out of a hedge in an Italian field. Italy, for goodness sake! What on earth it had to do with Italy, Ted couldn’t quite grasp. There was no bigger picture. Not for the guys on the ground, at least. Snatches of stories of British troops in Burmese jungles, Egyptian deserts, Norwegian fjords, that was all. But the mood had changed. You couldn’t move in Portsmouth for grinning Yanks strutting about like they owned the place. Something was in the air. A landing in France, surely. If any more landing craft and artillery arrived in Portsmouth harbour, the whole city would sink under the weight, he thought. But no. Get your things. It’s Italy.

Ted broke into a run westward across the fields. He skipped and jumped over what remained of the Royal Sussex Regiment, half of whom now lay strewn across the foothill. Gunfire that came down from the mountaintop was one thing, but Ted was more watchful for Allied shells that came screaming back and fell short, decimating their own troops. Snakeshead Ridge at the foot of the mountain was coming to resemble a Miltonian hell – a pit of bodies burning in friendly fires.

Ahead of him, the ground fell away slightly to the south-west corner of a large field, where a stone-walled farmhouse was shielded by a large oak tree, which smouldered in front of it. From the side of the building, partially shielded from the mountain’s view by the rough wall, two soldiers, probably Poles, were operating a heavy machine gun, aiming vaguely towards the mountain with shots that would never reach.

As they spotted him approach, a yelp escaped the younger of the two, and before Ted could raise his hands in protest they swivelled the gun towards him and fired straight at his belly.

***Eyes screwed tight.* *Stomach clenched.* *Palms sweating.* *Heart racing.* *Blood pumping.***

He opened his eyes. Where there should have been a bang there had been a click. The click of the gun’s hammer hitting an empty chamber.

Ted held the soldiers’ gaze for a moment before pointing at his helmet, distinctly wide-rimmed and British.

-- “Zmartwiony!” cried one of the soldiers in apology, before promptly loading another bandolier into the machine gun and aiming another deafeningly futile round back towards the mountain in the distance.

-- “Look, stop that, you fucking fools! You’re just peppering our own men, can’t you see! Who’s in charge here? Are there any Brits? Yanks? Anzacs?”

The two men, barely out of their teens, gazed back at him with uncomprehending eyes.

They gestured towards the door of the farmhouse. “Wewmętrzny, wewmętrzny.”

-- “Yeah, yeah. Look, just keep your finger off that bloody trigger and sit down, will you?” Ted stepped cautiously among the discarded bullet cases and towards the front of the farmhouse. “Save the bullets for someone you can hit.”

That the farmhouse was still standing was a miracle in itself. It was the only building that stood for miles around, albeit with great holes in the roof and windows smashed long ago. Ted kept close to the wall as he made for the doorway, which was held up only by a rotting wooden doorframe. The shadows seemed to pour out of the doorway and onto the mud on the path, making it seem blacker and denser. He took a deep breath, felt for his pistol tucked into his waistband, and ducked into the darkness.
.
.
Go to chapter four

..
Read every instalment of Oh Clouds Unfold so far

Poem: 'Cous Cous' - part 2 of 2

2009-01-26T10:30:00.001Z

Read Part One

By Dodger Phillips

PART TWO

...I honestly couldn’t make up this shit.

I turn up, I’m starvin'. Haven’t eaten all day.
Start munching away at the table display.
The place is gigantic, the biggest I’ve been in.
The decor divine. Don’t know where to begin.
Paintings and tapestries hung on the wall.
You needed a moped to get down the hall.
And everyone else is dressed up to the nines.
With best bib and tucker, they all look divine.
It might not be black tie but I did my best.
Summer time: I wore shorts and a vest.
They must have noticed my jaw had dropped,
Surprised they’d avoided the guillotines chop.
Yet they welcomed me in and gave me a drink,
Assuming I’d later throw up in the sink.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do I sound angry?
I suppose deep down I am, quite frankly.
'Coz when I’m out working all day in the street
I meet a lot of people who have nothing to eat.
A destitute woman had the humour to ask
If she could live in my invisible box of glass.

Forgive me my little class war sermon.
The hosts were both French, the guests mostly German.
We all were sat down to dine.
With the finest foods and the very best wine.
The thing is, regarding the etiquette of dinner
To be quite truthful, I’m just a beginner.
As I had not eaten, my hunger was focused
I fell on the nibbles like a plague of locusts.
Using two hands stuffing into my face,
I devoured twiglets like it was a race.
The crisps were a goner, the olives in brine,
Loading my mouth up "This is all mine!"
My primary needs now sated it seems,
In through the door comes a huge soup tureen.
I take a large bowl of the beautiful brew
And as I am slurping a thought kinda flew
Through my mind: "Have I messed up the timing here?"
My brow starts to furrow, I start to perspire.
If the food just keeps coming through,
Once I’m full, What am I supposed to do?
I can’t speak any of the languages here.
I suppose I just drown myself in this beer.

So now I’m drunk and I’m stuffed to the gills.
Having eaten half of France and had eight cans of pils.
And the food's still comin' and the other guests knew
That the food would never ever stop coming through
So they paced themselves. Little bits at a time
And now the job of entertainer is mine.
So, I tried my best, pissed as I may be
To try to put over a sense of play, be
The centre of attention, act the fool.
He who finishes first. That’s the rule.

The woman facing me, she’s a German.
Aryan hair that used to have a perm in.
She sits up straight. Probably on the pill.
Dissects her dinner with a surgeon’s skill.
The alcohol by this time has turned to lust,
Sort of find myself staring at her bust.

Fall over myself trying to impress
This Teutonic babe with the ample chest.
The never-ending cornucopia
Like a gustatory utopia
Carried on like a background hum.
'Coz now the real game of the evening’s begun,
With drink but no common language to share
I ask using mime: "Can I come over there?"
She nods to say yes, and I must confess
I wanted to know what was inside her dress.
But she still keeps on eating, I start to feel queer.
I’m immediately going off the idea.
I’ve packed myself so full of all this free food,
And she just keeps eating. I’m not in the mood.

So now I have to backpeddle in mime.
A trick I do sober, some of the time.
And I manage to somehow slur my body language,
She can’t understand that I don’t want a sandwich.
And my gorge is rising; I’ve lost my cool.
My mouth is filling with gallons of drool.
You know when it’s time to dash for the door.
But it’s clear that I can't feel my legs any more.
I get up to leave, Find it hard to breathe.
Wipe off some spit on the side of my sleeve.
Hoping to cover before I just spew
The one hundred meters 'tween here and the loo.

I made it! Of course I did. What did you think?
I’d fulfill a prophecy? Chuck in the sink?
Not me. No siree bob. Now please do excuse
If I don’t describe all of the textures and hues.
Cause I’m taking you with me back to the table
For the final chapter of this modern-day fable...

Now, a well-timed pratfall can rescue a show
If some of your audience have started to go.
And as most of the guests I had pushed out the way
While trying to stop them from catching my spray,
They may have assumed that I’d just been sick.
So I try to regain my street cred quick.

My hosts on the one hand sort of had the feeling
That unless they calm me down I’ll soon be swinging from the ceiling.
And on the other were the guests who just think this is funny
While they gobble down another plate of cous-cous and honey.
I start to think that there’s some similarity
Between the situation here and the status polarity
I use in my show, picking on a Joe
It becomes pretty obvious to me, you know?
Here I am, lowest status at the whole damn meal.
And this is the one thing that pride can’t conceal
So, It’s now time to play, Yes! I think. That’s the way.
And as I sit down, I move my own chair out the way.
Hilarity arose, but the timing that I chose
Made the German woman blow a mouth of cous-cous out her nose.

Now cous-cous - sorry to be a food bore,
But, fuck it; I’d never had it before -
Is this sort of cereal that comes in a bowl
When covered in water, expands, so I’m told.
To a size a little bit smaller than rice.
And strange as it sounds, it tastes rather nice.
But watch out if the cous-cous you wish to try
'Coz this big breasted woman looked likely to die.
With a hand filled with cereal and snot,
She tried to breath in and found she could not.
See, when she inhaled to un-clog her nose,
It did free some cous-cous, and what do you suppose?
It shot down her wind pipe, so she coughed and then
It lodged itself back in her sinus again.

This continued, she turned blue
If I’d studied first-aid I’d have known what to do.
Then this superhero type slaps her on the back.
She stops coughing and I think, "I could have done that."
Bends her down onto her knees, she throws up on the floor,
I realise I’m not saddest person anymore.
Sure she gets lots of real sympathy
While I project an air of "Nothing to do with me."

Turns out her name’s Olga and things being equal,
(Not thinking this story can stretch to a sequel)
The fact she’s still breathing not withstanding
The synal-trapped cous-cous jus' kept on expanding.
Up round her eyes man, and all round her nose.
From what I could gather this stuff grows and grows.
Her face just inflated. Yeah! Like a balloon.
Sunken-in eyes, a bit like a baboon.
The hosts took her post haste to Paris E.R.
Saying: "It's not just a serious case of catarrh."
After hearing the tale the doctors proposed
To flush out her face with a water hose.
I thought it best before my hosts return
To utilise a lesson you had all best learn:
If you’ve been a prat and vomited all over the place,
made someone laugh and cough and then explode their face,
The best thing you can do is make yourself scarce.
Miming apologies only makes things worse.

By the time I get to my place it all seems strange
After fucking up a dinner at a stately grange,
And I’m glad to impart, I am glad to say
That I saw ample Olga in my audience today.
She laughed once again when I fell to the ground
And I’m really pleased to see that the swelling’s coming down.
She came up and smiled but said not a word.
This mono-linguistic stuff’s really absurd.
I looked at her face, I looked in her eyes.
Looked at her breasts (which I tried to disguise),
But I looked at her close and I noticed a twitch,
On the side of her face, could have been just an itch
Then I realised that a sneeze had begun
Like a young Cowboy in How the west was won.
I went for my...hanky and offered it up
She quickly accepted and then blew her top.
The sneeze was so huge, it folded her in half.
When she looked back up, we started to laugh.
Then the moment was gone, she handed me my tissue.
I checked it out later; there was cous-cous in the issue.

Paris

Novel: 'Oh Clouds Unfold' - Chapter Two

2009-01-25T14:33:00.002Z

.

Chapter Two

Read Chapter One

By Kaya Burgess

I didn’t sign up for this. It’s bloody suicide. We may as well be pounding the walls of Pandemonium itself, for all the good our mortar fire is doing. We’re killing nought but brick and stone. Blasting rubble into more rubble. But they’re in there some-bloody-where. In some cellar or dungeon or dank hole. Like fucking cockroaches – just as you think they can’t possibly have survived the barrage of our guns, they scuttle back out and send a volley back down the mountainside. We send round after Sisyphean round raining down on the monastery, but to little avail. Them upstairs neglected to mention a ruddy great mountain between us and Rome. Convenient, that. What’s the line - lions led by donkeys? It never made sense from the start. Take Italy, and what next? Take the Alps? We haven’t even got enough landing craft, let alone bleeding elephants. Some soft underbelly.

Go to chapter three

Read every instalment of Oh Clouds Unfold so far

Poem: 'Brilliant burns the quiet fire'

2009-01-16T15:50:00.002Z

.

By Kaya Burgess

Brilliant burns the quiet fire.
Wandering eyes see only furtive shadows flee into the branches.
A stealthy night-time devours the twilight.
A smouldering moon, orange-faced,
Gazes half-turned upon the firelit congregation.
They stand with their boots sunk deep into the mire,
Eyelids scorched by dancing tongues of flame that kiss their faces.
Smiles fixed like eggshell paintings, more of silent fear than delectation.
Eyes strain and sweat, not really knowing what they see,
But looking nonetheless.
A forest of mirrored walls rises from marbled wharves,
Dancing in a plume of air too hot to breathe.
Lungs cannot fill with this air.
An emperor dances and parades:
He is naked and now they see it -
He fiddles while all around him burns.
Boxes clutched in bewildered arms.
It is over, but who can face it?
Selling wares that no man wants to buy.

London, 2008
.

Short story: 'Man in bedroom, Vienna'

2009-01-16T14:47:00.005Z

By Ed Chappel

I closed the window and felt immediately safer - the crazy thought of jumping out had scared me: how it easy it would have been to have just fallen naturally out or even have made a giant leap out and dramatically plunged to my death. Correcting the spelling of the word ‘dramatically’ certainly left me with my trousers down, and even the typing of the words seemed pretty artificial and false, but at the same time the thought had come into my mind to jump out of the window. And I’d thought about it before, too.

I think it must be the window - smoking cigarettes out of it was maybe not the best thing to do. I’m sure other people must feel it too, looking down at a long drop which would result in certain death and thinking 'I could jump' and 'I would die'. There must be other people who are not in any way suicidal, but the thought comes into their mind: a bit exciting, a bit scary.

But I didn’t want to smoke with the windows closed because it makes the room smell, might drift through into the corridor and mingle with the lingering smell of my landlord’s body odour. Also, guests (the many future guests who would surely come soon to be entertained) would certainly take a disliking to the smoke, especially girls who I wanted to entice into my aromatic oasis of fine-smelling bedroomshire. Many, many beautiful women who would, without doubt, consider staying over would be put off by the smoky smell and make excuses and leave. They would have no problem with the BO in the corridor. That would lead to a funny conversation about my living with a sweaty professor of aesthetics and would be something to talk about.

Now I know (and not without a little relief and pleasure) that something I could and should do is to really go all out for a wonderfully smelling room. I should buy flowers. Flowers are beautiful, flowers are sensual - a very good reflection on me, a fragrant, romantic soul who was definitely worth texting and worth staring at your mobile phone for. A man with flowers is a man of compassion, a man who is politically engaged, active in the fight for global justice in thought and deed, a selfless man in all respects, a gentleman and probably a great lover. “He had flowers and his room smelt of heaven…”

I should also buy a duvet. It is, indeed, quite possibly the objects (or lack of them) in my room and in my life which are hindering my quest for love. No girl would want to stay over and share my pitiful borrowed sleeping bag as we approach November. Investing in a duvet would certainly reward me with an active sex life.

Lost in my self-deluded meditations about how to increase my chances of making love in the near future, my crumpled Stadtplan map interjected: “Better the thought than the feeling, man. Remember, love first, sex afterwards. Go to Praterstern…..Riesenrad….to Praterstern.” As always, that map was right; reliable, honest and taking me in the right direction.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, an inspiration from nowhere engulfed me: “To Praterstern I must go, and soon,” I thought, bewildered by my own mind and its capacity for imagination.

-- “I just told you that, nutcase” boomed the map.

I laughed and accidentally opened the window and threw the map out. Defiantly moving a pair of boxer-shorts from one end of the room to the other, I decided that I should return my friend her sleeping bag and buy a duvet, not to attract girls, but for my own personal feelings of self-warmth. Yeah. I would look for love on the Riesenrad, high in the sky, I felt glad that I had worked through my problems and reached a satisfying, healthy conclusion.

Vienna, 2004

Chronicle: 'The ukelele'

2009-01-16T00:13:00.015Z

By Carles Gutierrez Sanfeliu

Humble, unsophisticated - unpleasant, even. But utterly loveable...

"The ukelele: how to play it, and why, in six easy lessons."

The ukelele is not a sophisticated instrument. Its sound is not particularly pleasing nor unique.

In fact, the uké is a very humble member of the very extended family of the stringed-instruments - a sort of bonsai-guitar. It is quite fragile and very, very difficult to tune. It is very quiet in comparison with its stringed relatives, and the strings are nylon - more like the sort of thing you'd find in a fishing equipment outlet.

The harsh truth is that the ukelele is seen as less of an instrument and more of a souvenir from a honeymoon trip to Hawaii...

But I got my ukelele on a rainy day, on my way to work. I was strolling down the street in the light and gentle rain and, having forgotten to take an umbrella with me, my clothes were beginning to feel soaking wet. A bad start. Slightly pissed off, I got into the first shop seeking some shelter. It was a music shop. I gazed through the window wondering when it would ever stop and fearing the dirty looks of the man behind the counter. Can I help you? Oh no, I'm just browsing for a gift, if I may, thank you very much. And here it was: a small thing, a brand new uké, hanging from one of the walls. I checked the price and was surprised to find out that I could just afford it with the small change I happened to carry in my back pocket.

Such are the laws of supply and demand, and they determine that in Europe, on a rainy day, an umbrella may be dearer than a musical instrument, whereas in the foyer of a Hawaiian hotel for newly-weds, the exact opposite is true. So be it.

That was my first lesson: be able to recognise and acknowledge your very own destiny, wherever you meet it, with no preconceived ideas about what may it bring to you. In other words: if you have to, use the cardboard cover of your ukelele as an umbrella.

Buying a uké is similar to buying a mobile: you get it practically for free, but then, all the extras (lessons, books, teach-yourself CDs) come at a cost. So I got to the office under a half-wet cardboard parcel, left the ukelele under my desk, and forgot about it for about a week. It was some time after that that I began stroking the strings at random, like you stroke a cat, slowly and half-afraid it might bite you.

Call it boredom or call it slackness, but one of the true advantages of the uké is that you can play virtually anywhere without being noticed...even in the office, between e-mails, ever so casually. Perfect for coffee-break relaxation, or as an alternative to the unendingly depressing solitaires and sudokus, the uké is the ultimate stress-relief tool for the overworked and underpaid, providing the instant sensual pleasure of doing something utterly unproductive.

And so to my second lesson: turn your vices into virtues, and do persevere in them.

Even so, the thing was still hopelessly out of tune. So after a week or two of lazy indulgence in tuneless strumming, I decided to seek out a tutor. The internet is full of them, generous and like-minded souls such as one fine gentleman from Wisconsin who filmed himself tuning his ukelele, along with some old country and western favourites. I would tell you his name, but then he would no longer be my tutor, but rather our tutor, and I can't have that. In my humble opinion, that fine gentleman from Wisconsin has done more for education than all the ministries, government agencies and reforms in 20th century Britain, or anywhere in the world: no lesson-plans, no learning aims, no method or procedural protocol and no bibliography BUT... he talks slowly and clearly, there is no homework, no reprimanding the students, and he is always available.

Which brings me to my third lesson: don't do it unless you really fancy doing it. Pleasure comes first. Practice only if you want to, when you want to, and with whomever you want to.

Even so, the first lesson (tuning the uké) was hard enough: if you have an inexpensive uké, like mine, it takes a while to get familiar with the mechanics of each of the four pegs, and then you have to make sure that the pitch of what you play is exactly the same as what's coming out of the computer screen. But it is worth it, and it gets easier with time.

And that's the fourth lesson: be patient and keep going, at your own pace.

Then you'll learn your first chord: at this stage, you only need two fingers: let the index finger of your left hand press gently any given string on whichever fret takes your fancy, while the index finder of your right hand gently strums down and up.

And thus the fifth lesson: enjoy what you're doing, and listen, listen, listen to the sounds you're making. The uké is the perfect instrument for those who are allergic to technique and fingerwork. Take full advantage of that fact.

Mendelsohn's violin concerto is all very fine, thank you, but playing it, believe me, is a pain in the neck, and even more so on your fingers. Look no further than where you are standing: concentrate on what you're doing, not on chromatic scales or semiquavered arpeggios. When you stop thinking about the destination, then you start to really travel, and that is when you make some real progress.

The uké is gradually becoming more and more popular. No wonder. There are several discussion groups online (Cabaret Ukelele, Ukeleles for Peace, etc.) and even a Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain [pictured]. I personally treasure two names as the highlights of perfect ukelele achievement. First, the 3CD album "69 Love Songs" (2000) by The Magnetic Fields. A truly pop album - uncontrived, popular, made and sung for the little men and women in the street and in their bedrooms, or sitting rooms, with no shame and very funny rhymes.

The second one has to be the ending minutes of "Angels in Paradise", a episode in the Charlie's Angels saga where our dashing girls, after solving a complicated case of extorsion and blackmail, relax on some Hawaiian beach and order a few cocktails to discuss the events of the day. While they're strolling down the coastline, the sun slowly goes down and turns the sandy scene into a golden and lazy haze. They keep drinking and chatting away, and you can tell that Sabrina is half-tipsy by the spark in her eyes. The music stops for a second, and then a very good-looking lad makes an entrance from behind a palm-tree and starts singing along with his uké. Soon enough, others join in, and Sabrina can't stop herself from dancing in glee, the spark in her eyes echoing the chorus of a perfectly beautiful song, unknown to me and to Sabrina. The Angels are smiling in perfect bliss to the rhythm of the infinite ukeleles. The boy with the uké shakes his hips with perfect innocence and delight. The camera zooms out and fades into the golden hue of the Hawaiian skies, while the sound of the buzzing ukés continues to fill the air. It is a cosmic vibration, the music of the spheres, the proof that a universal secret harmony does exist after all.

And that's the sixth lesson that I learnt with my beloved ukelele: if you don't know the tune, just let it be, go with it and don't you worry about a thing.

Poem: 'Cous Cous' - part 1 of 2

2009-01-14T21:46:00.009Z

.By Dodger Phillips

PART ONE

A dinner party; just fabulous, great.
And I’ve been invited, so eating can wait.
I’ll go without breakfast, elevenses too.
No such thing as a free meal? Says who?
And this little soirée is French, don’t you know?
The food will be gorgeous. My French is so-so.
The truth is, the only thing I can say
is 'je ne comprend, parle vous de anglais'?

Yes, my trip to Brittany was financially based:
I brought over a mime show. Dressed up and white faced,
'Coz mime mate, it’s great. You don’t have to depend
On the spoken word. You just have to pretend
That you’ve got a great big glass bloody box,
Walk into a high wind, darn make believe socks.
And the French are not the only ones ready
To watch a young acrobat castrate a teddy,
Or fool them he’s balanced upon a tight wire,
Or get hypnotized before juggling with fire.
The Germans, the Swedish, the Spanish - it’s true -
Portuguese have no money, but they like it too.
Artistic? They love it. You gettin' the picture?
They fold up the money a'for throwin' it at ya.

What with Jacques Tati and Marcelle Marceau -
A whole history of watching these non-verbal shows,
But this might surprise you, it really did shock me:
The only street theatre in England is cockney.
One has to be loud, aggressive, obtuse,
Must pepper ones public with verbal abuse.
No, you can’t get away with mime here in Britain
If it’s slightly artistic they start feeling threatened.

So I’d jumped on the ferry to Calais from Dover,
Hoping to Christ that my humour comes over.
First stop was Paris, the obvious choice
To start making money without use of voice.
Outside in the square of the Pompidou Centre
I premiered my brand new Spectacle. It went , er..
It went down o.k. Not bad I guess.
But learning about it is part of the quest.
One has to work at it to carry it off.
To hold the attention of beggar and toff.

See, the audience make-up is like you and me.
They run the whole gambit from A through to Z.
Butchers, and bakers, and candlestick makers,
Racing car drivers, retired undertakers,
Octogenarian dowager aunts,
Alcoholic itinerants caught in a trance,
Cocky young man who is trying to impress
His dippy girlfriend in her flowery dress.
From bourgeoisie to Mr. and Mrs. Lumpen
And I’m pissing around, running and jumping
On the back of the man with the red umbrella
An arbitrary choice, seems like a nice fella.
Get him involved, see. Now everyone is captured.
With him participating, everyone’s enraptured.
It’s very straightforward busking psychology.
They’re now all thinking " Thank fuck that's not me!"
So you know that they’ll definitely all stick around
Just to watch A.N. Other roll round on the ground.

The excuse for this abuse is purely financial
coz commandment eleven clearly states, "Thou shalt
never lose an audience", It’s not 'til the end
that you get them to part with their money my friend.

So, it’s been six weeks now. The show's up and rocking.
The laughter is hearty, the crowds they are flocking
And the cash flow is flowing; I’m talk of the town,
and I’m thinking more about sticking around,
It’s great to get paid for just showing off, friend.
I don’t think I’ll ever be working again.
And I wake each day in my rented room.
Up and at 'em by the crack of noon.
Go out and have breakfast in a street cafe,
just round the corner from where I work every day.
And I get free coffee and a chocolatine
'Coz I seem to be bringing more customers in.

And life’s really simple, but my French is still shit.
I just mime what I mean until they get it.
An intricate dance of movement and gesture
seems to work, but I must confess, ya
can only get a little bit conveyed
by dancing and pointing at what’s displayed.
Mime you want cheese. OK. Mime you want Gouda?
Like every English person, I just MIME LOUDER.
"That's it!!" I say. I must learn to converse
This Monoglot mime artist thing is a curse.
So I’ve been trying to speak in fractured franglaise,
Upsetting the locals in so many ways.
I open my mouth, their ears are offended.
Conjugate the verb? I friggin' up-end it.
Coming from the Latin word conjugari
It’s literal meaning. To have it away.
I keep trying hard, and today it worked out,
'Coz this lovely French couple invite me to their house.

So the background is covered, it’s all set out.
So we finally get to what this story’s about.
Stick with me friend; trust me it’s worth it...

Go to part two [Link to follow]

Short Story: 'Dead Metro Station'

2009-01-04T10:24:00.012Z

By Maggie Dugan

Somewhere between Mabillon and Sevres-Babylon, if you are looking out the window of your metro train, you’ll see me. I am the metro station that used to be named Croix Rouge. Along my shadowed walls, if you look hard enough, you can decipher the name in a faint mosaic of blue and white tiles, barely legible on the concaved wall. Another station in another part of the city now bears this label; I am closed, my doors locked and my stairways gated. My opening to the street is paved over, a sidewalk traversed by pedestrians who will never know what cavern lies beneath them.

You don’t look out the window of a metro train because you don’t expect to see anything but the arch of wall to ceiling blackness that hugs the train as it rushes through the underground tunnels. Most passengers are occupied by reading their newspapers or magazines. Others just stare ahead into nothing, hypnotized by the dull flicker of the fluorescent lights of the train, avoiding the eyes of other people. This distracts them from noticing that the train slows ever so slightly and enters the dimly lit station with no-one on its platform just before speeding up again into the tunnel through the dark hallways of Paris’ underground and on to the next fiercely illuminated stop.

But she notices.

I’ve seen her pass every day. Sometimes she is with him, the tall, lean, undernourished man who holds her hand but stares blankly at the seat in front of him, eyes fixed on the zigzag pattern in the upholstery. He is numb, in shock, still, even after a week of making this commute. Sometimes I see her alone in the morning; he comes through a few hours later and they return separately, at intervals. The next day it’s reversed. They go in shifts. It’s what the doctors suggested, that they take turns, to conserve their energy.

I surprised her, the first time she caught a glimpse of my empty platform. She’d looked toward the glass of the train, a window-turned-mirror because of its darkened background, and was studying the reflection of the passengers in the car behind her. She forced her eyes to focus beyond her own tired image, a harsh reminder of the sad and gruelling days behind and probably many more ahead. She sensed the train decelerating just a bit, and then, the mirroring effect of the dark windows waned as the walls around the train widened and she could see me, just barely. First the shadowed outline of my vacant benches, lit by two low-hanging, low-grade light bulbs, and then an entire platform, desolate and abandoned. I stretched out quickly before her – benign but discomforting, nearly threatening – and seconds later vanished from sight as her train was swallowed up again by the tunnel.

Now, each time she passes, she presses her forehead against the dirty glass of the train window and cups the palms of her hands around the sides of her face so that she can take me in: my ancient wood-slatted benches, the wide-lettering of an old-styled metro sign, the arched exit-doors boarded up at the end of the my platform.

This morning she is crying; tears that result from the strain of fear and fatigue. This is all taking so much more than she ever imagined she had inside her. She sits in the last car of the train so that when she exits – a few stops beyond me, at the station called Duroc – she will be ahead of the crowd of passengers climbing the dirty stairs to the street. She breathes in the shrill winter air and collects herself as she turns the corner and walks the half-block to the main entrance of the hospital campus. Inside, she follows the long tree-lined alley to port #32, the door for the neurosurgery ward. She ignores the elevator and climbs the stairs to the third floor, passes the waiting room without looking in, heading directly to the intensive care unit. She punches the code on the panel by the door to alert the nurses, who come to greet her, neutral, afraid to be too close, yet sympathetic to her plight.

She leaves her bag in a half-sized locker and pulls an indigo-coloured, papery-cloth hospital blouse from a stack on the shelf. She turns on the water tap above a deep square sink, washes her hands all the way up to her elbows. She dries her hands and turns to a second soap container filled with sterile blue liquid that evaporates on her hands. She walks down a hallway lined with rooms with extra wide doors and large picture windows. In each room there is a huge bed with a tiny body in the middle wearing a cap of white bandages, the standard uniform of the neurosurgery intensive care ward.

In one of these rooms, her three-year old daughter is lying in a coma, her little head wrapped in a helmet of white gauze and tape. Beneath the dressing, a crescent-moon shaped wound traverses her scalp from one ear to the other side of her forehead, a scar left from the emergency surgery, a permanent tiara she will wear as long as she lives. The wound will be opened again, in three weeks time, when the brain abscess, originally diagnosed as a brain tumour, fails to respond to the heavy cocktail of antibiotics. The surgeons, who surge for a living, will determine that a second operation is the only course left to remove the mysterious ball of puss and fluid that still resides in the right front lobe of her daughter’s head, an interloper that isn’t cancer but isn’t a typical abscess either. The scar will be her daughter’s story for life; a mark her lovers will caress and say, tenderly, “Tell me how you got your scar.” What will she answer? The events won’t be remembered directly, but the story will have become folklore to her: the mysterious coma, the cardiac arrest during the brain scan, the disturbing, swollen images on the MRI, the emergency surgery while her parents rushed to an airport 3,000 miles away to return home, ashamed that what they thought was a mild case of bronchitis turned out to be a nearly fatal brain abscess.

But here’s what I know. This abscess in that little girl’s head, it will not be there for long. Those doctors will frustrate this woman and her husband with their mandarin attitudes and hushed conversations. But those same doctors will operate again and remove the abscess, one day, soon, in a long surgery, one during which this couple will pace the halls after reading every outdated magazine in the waiting room and wasting arduous hours staring at cheerful snowmen and star-crowned fir trees painted on the windows of the hospital café. They’ll exchange anxious glances and pretend smiles in an awkward attempt to reassure each other. They’ll endure the long wait to learn what they are longing to hear: that the abscess has been removed, that the hole in their little girl’s head is absolutely empty.

Like me.

The trains still run between my vacant platforms, the circulation continues, all of the Paris metro is whole and intact, operating without noticeable challenge. This little girl, too, as her brain heals, will create new connections. The nerves will find alternate routes. Her brain will find a new way to function. One day – sooner than they expect – she will think, talk, run, jump, sing, and smile. She will, in fact, thrive. The space in her head – where an abscess once ferociously grew – will be simply an empty hole, a space that was once used and is no longer. Just like me, a dead metro station: empty, filled with stories, but no threat at all.

Paris, 2007

Novel: 'Oh Clouds Unfold' - Chapter One

2009-01-01T17:47:00.012Z

.

Chapter One

By Kaya Burgess

It was not really recognisable as a face, what lay beneath. As the bandages were painstakingly peeled from his head, they gradually revealed a shiny bulb where a face should have been. Once his eyes had found their focus in the dazzling lights of the surgery, they hesitantly sought in the mirror for signs of a nose, a mouth, an ear – anything to identify that glistening mess as his own reflection. A mouth there was, but with no distinguishable lips. Eyes there were, but obscured by misshapen eyelids beneath hairless brows. A nose there was also, but it hung warped to the left with one nostril gaping wider than the other.

Only now did the nurses and doctor come into focus as he regained the periphery of his vision. They only barely hid their grimaces at a sight that clearly repulsed the nurses, and disappointed the doctor, who had hoped for better progress in his patient’s recovery by now. The doctor pushed the mirror to one side and gazed inquisitively in his patient’s eyes. Those eyes suddenly filled with misty tears and his face convulsed as if electrocuted as a moist cotton pad unexpectedly daubed at his cheek, tender and red-raw. A rasping yell razored its way through the coarse, dry throat which had not uttered a sound for the six weeks it had lain in that hospital bed.

An ice-cold cream was smeared thickly over his face, which both froze and burned. The shiver which ran up his spine ended abruptly at the nape of his neck, where the skin became taut and unfeeling. Fresh bandages started to snake their way back round his forehead and cheekbones. They helter-skeltered down to his collar-bone, leaving gaps only for his mouth, nose, and eyes, one of which was duly covered with gauze and tape. He wasn’t sure if he was given anaesthetic or if his consciousness just slipped away from the effort of waking, but the spotlit surgery soon faded back into a foggy darkness and the turbulent uncertainty of comatose dreams.

As he hovered just below the surface of consciousness, his addled mind could remember only fragments. Images of Claire sitting by his hospital bedside flashed through his morphine-coloured thoughts, but so did a feeling of bitterness or loss – of postmarks bearing bad news. Memory had become confused with reverie, and his heavily sedated mind could ill distinguish between what he remembered and what he had dreamt.

In truth, Claire had hardly left his bedside for three weeks, and had only come when she had found and torn up the letter in which she had rashly called off their engagement. She had slept precious little over the last six weeks, knowing that her fiancé had been reading her letter when it happened. It tormented her that her teenage petulance was the last thing to go through his mind before those small shards of shrapnel which now lay in a metal dish on her lap.

That silver, kidney-shaped dish flickered in the rays of the wintry sunrise which now crested the valley and threw latticed shadows through the large window behind the bed. Her glance shot to his hand as his fingers stirred and his breathing deepened. A deep guttural sound from his throat grew into a gurgling, drowning cough. She sent the dish clattering to the floor as she leapt to cry for the matron, who came running down the ward with the doctor close behind. They reached the bed and pulled the spluttering patient into a sitting position. As they did so, his hand seized Claire’s arm with what little strength was left to it, and she clasped his trembling fingers as he spat into a bowl the water the doctor fed him. As the coughing fit ended, his torso went limp and he released her arm from his grasp, though she did not release his fingers from hers. She stood back as he was gently lain onto the pillow, and the doctor squeezed her arm with a compassionate glance, before hastening back without a word through the frosted doors and into the corridor.

She paused. Looking down at the bed she saw him lying just as he had a moment before, and for three weeks before that. A frown creased her brow before it faded and was replaced by welling tears. She gracefully bent to the linoleum floor to recover the shrapnel pieces and replace them carefully in the metal dish. She put it back on her lap as she sat back down in the worn leather chair. She straightened her white skirt and adjusted her black polkadot blouse beneath the lapels of her white linen jacket. The clock said half past seven. Her watch said a quarter past two. It had said a quarter past two for a fortnight now, since she had last taken the time to wind it. It seemed somehow fitting that time should have stopped for her. No sense in winding it now. Better to wait.

The woman-in-white was her nickname among the men in the ward. Men with eye-patches. Men on crutches. Men in wheelchairs with a leg or a foot missing. Men who laughed at her vigil only because they had no-one keeping a vigil for them. King Tut, they called him. The yummy mummy’s come to visit her mummy, they used to sing, echoing off the stone walls of the hospital and out into the valley beyond. She paid them little notice. Less notice, certainly, than they paid her. For six years the only women they had seen had been flown out for them to leer and jeer at, and they knew little else. Many of these men were only boys, and had known the feel of a rifle before they had known the feel of a woman.

At the start of all this, the wives and girlfriends of the fighting men were seen as heroines back home - women who had made sacrifices as real as any made by a man at the front. Now, however, there seemed to be opprobrium in the glances cast at those left behind – the widows-in-waiting who passed like shadows among the living. This was why she had sent that letter. No sooner had she slipped it into the post-box did she regret writing it, but it was too late to take back her angry words. Anger at him leaving her behind. To wait. And wonder. And fear.

Go to Chapter Two [Link to follow]

Short Story: 'The Ritual'

2008-12-31T17:28:00.006Z

By Philip Herd

She sits silently, surveying the scene with a casual indifference that gives away nothing of the thoughts and calculations streaming through her brain. One is too fat, another too skinny and so forth. Some overly enthusiastic in their desire to seem entertained by a friend's anecdote, others sitting with evident disinterest amongst their gregarious companions, but all sharing the same aim: to celebrate the beginning of yet another year.

Every New Year's Eve she likes to come to a bar like this. She sits alone, sipping slowly from a large glass of dry white wine. Loneliness is not something she fears. She looks around and easily picks out the ones who are there for the sole reason of not being alone. The ones who, in truth, would much rather be sitting at home watching telly, or simply being curled up in bed, but for whom indulging such alternatives would only invite fearful thoughts of unimportance, of marginalisation, a suffocating sense of irrelevancy in a fully-networked world. Such notions dispelled here with wit and chatter as effervescent, sweet and golden as the lager sloshing in their bellies.

She hasn't come to judge, though. Her sitting alone in a place expressly intended for social interaction is not some pretentious statement of her independence. She is sitting alone simply so as not to be distracted from the task at hand by casual chit-chat. Hers is a serious mission that requires her full concentration: she is here to find a mate.

She has never had any real problems attracting men. Although not blessed with a particularly arresting beauty, she is quite happy falling into the category evocatively labelled 'alright'. She first heard this term applied to here when, at the age of fifteen, she overheard Steve Harper refer to her in that way as an adjunct to a conversation he was having with some other chums on the merits of Samantha Thomson's glorious tits. Steve, himself comfortably in the 'alright' category, was a very tender and attentive first boyfriend with whom she shared her first kiss one evening down the alley next to Woolworth's. Unremarkably, and rather predictably, they lost their virginity to each other at a party when they had just turned seventeen. The irony was that the party was at Samantha Thomson's house. She had enjoyed reminding Steve of his past enthusiastic admiration of her chest, but that no longer mattered: her chest had developed quite well itself and was a clear rival to Samantha's. Besides, Steve, knowing not to bite the hand that feeds, sweetly demoted Samantha to the category of 'minger'. She appreciated this quite disingenuous reordering of things for the lustful end to which it was intended and let him put his hand down her knickers.

She and Steve stayed together until the following week, when, on the night he passed his driving test, he crashed his car while she was a passenger. She was, and remains, furious for the permanent scar she now has running from under her right ear towards her Adam's apple. He fared much worse though: he died from massive injuries to his head and vital organs.

Over by the bar she spots a potential target, a person who in all aspects seems 'average'. Picking the right man for her cynical end is an activity that, for her, tends more to the scientific than the aesthetic or emotional. Aiming for someone who considers himself too attractive would be futile. If they don't already have an object of their affections then they enjoy the sport of seduction and have the confident ability to pass up on an overly eager, average girl in order to 'wait for something better'. At the other extreme are those who have clearly had so little experience of the fairer sex that they would lack the confidence to go through with such a brazen act. Best is the 'average' guy who has enjoyed such delights but either hasn't had a taste for a while or has such an appetite he wants more. Fortunately for her, that accounts for the vast majority of men.

Scooping up her half-full glass of wine she wanders over to him, glances at him nonchalantly before shifting her gaze to the array of drinks behind the bar. Sliding into the empty space by him at the bar, she pretends to try to catch they eye of the barman knowing that she has won his attention.

He turns around and plants his empty glass on the bar. Before he can muster the courage to strike up a conversation she asks him what he would like to drink. He asks for another pint but she orders two whiskeys instead, ready to read his reaction. She knows he won't object, but if he does then she won't be able to lead him in her dance and will find another target.

He asks if it's single malt. She nods, noting the twinkle of interest in his eyes. It's a cruelly simple tactic but she knows she's established her dominance. She takes a sip, allowing a drop to shimmer on her lips before provocatively licking it off. He downs his in one: a sign of his slight nervousness and growing inebriation. He asks if she wants another. Why not.

-- "What's your name?" he asks. She smiles coyly. "I'm Steve," he says to fill the silence.

A fleeting paralysis, frozen lungs, a rush of pain that shoots from her stomach all around her body, settling in the scar on her throat. A momentary pain dismissed with a coquettish smile and a flick of her hair.

-- "Jessica."

-- "That's a pretty name."

She knows this. Her mother was also called Jessica. She always thought it was an ordinary name until her mother's death compelled her to explore its origins. Apparently deriving from a Hebrew word meaning foresight, she discovered that it first appeared in its current, usual form in The Merchant of Venice. A made up name for a made up character. She derived so much satisfaction from this that she took it as her own.

-- "Thanks."

-- "You want another one?" Why not, having fallen into her trap it was now important for her not to let him know it, which was best achieved by letting him feel like he was catching her in a trap.

-- "Are you from around here?" he continues inanely as the drinks are poured. "Yes," is the short answer, the answer that she volunteers, but it's not quite accurate. Where she is from is difficult to answer because she doesn't know exactly who 'she' is. Born and raised here, she only returns for a few days every year and feels like an imposter in her own town, a regular topic of conversation with those few people who, like her, escaped the town yet return often enough to recognise how much they have outgrown the place. This sense of displacement is all the more jarring for the irrefutable fact that this place is and always will be 'home', to which she dutifully returns every Christmas to spend time with her elderly father.

-- "Are you?" Of course he is.

-- "And what do you do?" he then asks, instinctively following the checklist of polite conversation.

-- "I'm a receptionist." That's cool, he offers as a soothing platitude before staying silent and waiting for her to return the question. The response to her response is always the same and is as calculated as everything else in her act. At worst, people will ask her what kind of company she is a receptionist for, to which she'll usually reply something suitably dull like an insurance company. At best, no further questions come. It is important at this point of the game to appear to have some kind of steady job, but not one that seems too lowly to put him off, nor one that elicits a stream of interested questions that delay her progress. "I'm a teacher," he adds proudly.

-- "Are you here with you some mates?" She has experimented with different responses to this question but has found that only one has the desired effect: "Yes." The spontaneous rise of his eyebrows gives away his natural surprise at her answer, giving her the opportunity she needs to progress her plan. She explains that all her friends left immediately after Christmas so it was either a night out alone or a night in alone, her father unable to stay awake much past nine o'clock. His face softens. She's not some weird loner, she's a lively young lady making the most of a bad situation. She's played the vulnerable card and he's bought it unconditionally.

This is the crucial moment in her plan. If she lets him, he will most likely continue down this line of conversation which, in a normal situation, would mean him talking himself out of any potential bedroom action. Having manoeuvred him into this situation, she must now cut to the quick so as not to waste any more time. He's either willing to go through with it or not and she needs to find out so she can move on if necessary.

It was several years ago that she first stumbled upon this practice, which she soon decided to perpetuate in this yearly ritual, when she returned home from university. It had been a particularly turbulent term both in and out of the classroom. It had also been her first. She had become passionately involved with another student called James. From London and possessing a compelling self-confidence, being with him filled her with a profound excitement and sense of possibility. He was her first since Steve and, having allowed herself to let her guard down, was particularly devastated when he dumped her. She vowed never to let anyone have that power over her again. Her chosen method for this was to never let anyone know her true self.

Christmas that year did not bring the expected glad tidings: her mother died. Finding herself alone on New Year's Eve, having acquired her new persona, she went out and used it as a chance to hone her new technique. At first standing in a corner, she began speaking to random people, finding her new identity liberating, a chance to be someone else. At first a student, then a doctor, an actor, a diplomat, a writer...she painted more and more extravagant portraits, taking note of how people reacted differently to her stories. Speaking to one guy she may have known from school, she realised that by providing fictional details at the right time she could draw him closer and closer. She hadn't intended to proposition him so explicitly but, emboldened by her new found power, the invitation came out inadvertently. That night, at the turn of midnight, their bodies intertwined, she felt a sublime tranquillity and decided the following year would be her best yet. It was thus the ritual came to be.

It takes a moment for the offer, whispered directly into his ear at tantalisingly close proximity, to register. She maintains her resolve, looking directly into his eyes to reinforce her sincerity. An almost imperceptible nod affirms his consent. She takes his hand, leads him out of the bar and hails a taxi.

Jessica, a made up name for a made up character, for her made up character, lies back and thinks to herself:

-- "Next year will be a good year."

Lancaster, New Year's Eve 2008
.

Short Story: 'Hortensa - Space Traveller'

2008-12-24T17:10:00.002Z

By Ed Chappel

One day Hortensa contacted Nasa and got a standard ticket to Mercury. Rev Rev Rev went the rocket, and off she flew. She stopped off at the petrol station on the moon and bought a milky way, which provoked a space belch, zero gravity pressure coming in from the north, gassy spells on the way. She found a really hot spaceman who happened to be in space too, but their suits were so awkward they couldn't really do much but have unsatisfying hugs that gave no impression of the shapy human bodies. Also his radio was broken, so he couldn't talk, and those big clumsy gloves allowed for only the most basic of gestures. Poo poo thought Hortensa space traveller extraordinaire. Oh well, I am married, I guess, but a holiday romance would have been fun. There's plenty of time to think out here. Where am I going in life? "TO MERCURY" replied the onboard fridge, which was helpful and grounded Hortensa somewhat, naturally in a floaty way without gravity. Woof woof woof echoed the bark of her dog Horatio in the murky subconscious of her memory. That was past, that was Earth. Naturally she would return to Earth and it would be present again, but it would be a different Earth to the one Hortensa had left.

Short Story: 'The cat and the curtains'

2008-12-15T18:03:00.009Z

.
.

By Kaya Burgess

The odd moment of madness keeps you sane, in the end. Staring out of a window at a frosty sunrise and laughing for no reason, apparent or otherwise. There’s nothing funny in the sunrise, not inherently. It’s just that it’s there, and there you are, staring at it. Maybe it’s staring back at you through sky eyes, laughing too. What an idiot, it thinks, standing there, pyjamas on weary legs, fatigue-laden eyes struggling to re-open after every blink, chuckling into an amber sunrise long-broken over the corrugated rooftops.

A white cat with no tail looks sceptically up from the garden below, eyebrow cocked in quiet purring disdain. You catch its gaze. It's as if she knows what you’re thinking, knowing to look into your eyes just in your flickering moment of insanity. Perhaps there’s someone trapped in the cat! staring out of it – a woman’s mind trapped in the body of a tail-less cat, doomed to wander the kempt gardens of blustery suburbia and stare back at half-clad early-risers still wincing from the alarm clock’s wail.

MAYBE she too once stood at a window, laughing into an oblivious dawn, when a tail-less cat sucked in her soul through its lusty old-gold eyes...

Probably not, if you’re honest. Soul-sucking cats? You really are mad.

A girl stands in a sash window facing yours away in the distance across the clipped hedgerows, like a far-fetched valentine. You think you see her smile as she stands there in a grey vest and dark shorts. She is too far away to make out a smile, but you are too far away to have any shame. You wave a modest, from-the-elbow sort of wave. She waves back and then, instantly regretting it, draws the blind. You laugh again. Pull on a t-shirt.

Bare soles seek out carpeted stairs as intrepid morning feet pad towards the cold-floored kitchen. A yawning fridge bears little of breakfastly consequence. Toast? Fucking toast. Surprised at your animosity towards toast, you rescue an apologetic-looking apple from a bowl of suicidal fruit and turn the kettle on, before remembering why you don’t like tea and heading back upstairs. It’s upstairs that things happen, you remember. Trousers, socks, underwear (chequered, today). Teeth brushed first to avoid gobbing on freshly-ironed shirt. A shirt which clashes with all your ties. Open-collared today, you think!

The cat is still looking at you, weirding you out a little. “Open-collared!?”, thinks the cat, disgusted. You slowly mouth ‘fuck - off’ to the cat, who does. You laugh. Again. What does a cat know about ties, anyway? She doesn’t even have a tail. Sartorial feline nonsense, you think - quite rightly.

You are now clothed. Most of the curtains remain closed, bathing the flat in a foreboding blue-rinse glow.

-- “Don’t go outside!!”, the curtains cry. “We can see out, trust us, there’s nothing for you out there! Mayhem and madness, only! Flocks and herds and prides and murders of the slack-jawed and foolhardy!”

You ignore the curtains (for what do they know?) and unbolt the door. The tail-less cat, anticipating your every move, waits on the front path. It seems to mouth ‘fuck you too’ before trotting proudly up the pavement with its arse.

The world appears to stretch yawningly away from your front door. The journey ahead seems like an odyssey through a nonsense world where no-one can tell what matters from what is plainly bollocks. Plainly. Bollocks. Starting with that smug bastard cat and including all and everything else. Including you, most probably. You can’t even tell if you should care. It really is far too early in the morning.

You nod goodbye to the curtains, who look sorrowfully out at you, a little bitter. The Edgar Allan Poe-faced cat has made her way in the opposite direction, where she sits with a totemic I-can-lick-my-bum sort of smirk. Your mismatching socks are safely tucked away in sole-worn shoes which carry you out into that laughable sunrise, now well and truly sunrisen and on its way to mid-morning, by which time you should really be wherever it is you’re going before whoever it is you work for berates you for not doing whatever it is you do.

-- “Cheerio curtains and cat. Until we meet again. Later, probably.”

You expect they’ll still be there later. The curtains, at any rate.
.

.
London, 2008, towards winter, a bit to the east.

Short Story: 'The Autobiographer'

2008-12-14T16:58:00.006Z

By Kaya Burgess

As usual, he burnt his top lip as he took the first sip of his morning tea. Without flinching, he pursed his scalded lips and blew lightly over the rim of the chipped cup, sending up a waft of vapour, which steamed up his glasses. With a studied calmness he removed his gold-coloured spectacles and wiped them meticulously on the lapel of his tweed jacket. When he put them back on he noticed she had come into the room.

Not again. I ask you, how many times? Will she never just leave me in peace to work?

It had been like this since day one. The imploring looks, the disapproving raised eyebrow (only ever the left eyebrow: she couldn’t raise the other, though he had seen her trying in the bathroom mirror) and the way she tutted with her tongue against the back of her teeth, which, he had always thought, made her look remarkably like one of the squirrels she so regimentally chased out of the garden every bloody autumn. Whenever she couldn’t get him to do what she wanted, she took it out on the poor squirrels. He could see them in the cherry tree up by the back wall, staring at her and plotting their revenge. Their revenge, when it came, was disappointingly modest. He had half expected them to nibble at her feet and bury her in the heath for wintertime. But, lacking the necessary squirrelpower, they contented themselves with gnawing at the washing-line a little every day until, one Wednesday afternoon, her delicates (which weren’t nearly so delicate these days) were sent billowing over the neighbourhood, leaving the street bedecked in Marks & Spencer’s half-price finest.

Aside from this episode (the Bloomers Bunting episode as I called it, much to her eternal shame and no small displeasure), the squirrels had generally kept to themselves. Of late, they seemed reluctant to approach the house, poking warily among the dead lilies which had lain browning on the patio since late spring. I envy them. Theirs is a happy cycle, burying nuts for the winter and hibernating until spring. They don’t have to watch reality television or have the Daily Mail tell them how Britain is going to the dogs. Nor do they have to spend their retirement (do squirrels retire?) poring over endless drafts of an autobiography no-one will ever read. It is only when I write my life down in words that I realise I haven’t actually lived. I have reached this conclusion not because I have found writing my memoirs difficult, but rather because I have found it easy. I had done nothing, achieved nothing in my life that I couldn’t put down in words. There were no experiences so transcendental, no emotions so sublime, no memories so inscrutable as to defy linguistic expression. When nothing one has done has been beyond words, then was any of it worth doing? I feel as though I would do better to scrawl my name on the front of a dictionary and simply provide some sort of rudimentary key at the front to guide the reader through the list of words which so tidily encapsulate my 74 years on this earth. Page 907: ‘Pleasant’. Page 1203: ‘Reflection’. Page 1218: ‘Resignation’. Page 810: ‘Legacy’.

She had always hated it when he got like this. It’s why she raised her eyebrow (it was always the left one, he remembered) and clucked at him. You’re wasting your time. Who wants to know? Why put yourself through it…?

-- “The answer lies in the present tense.”

He enjoyed giving her this response, because, in itself, it never made the least bit of sense and always sent her hurrying off into the kitchen to spare herself one of his metaphysical ‘discussions’, which were usually lengthy and involved people whose names she had never heard and didn’t much care to learn. He had scarcely spoken in anything but riddles for years. The best type of phrase, he had decided, was one which crammed all the salient information into the minimum possible number of words and one which, more importantly, no-one but the utterer can understand. He had spent his retirement trying to answer her question of why he bothered, and had whittled it down to that very succinct, typically arcane line:

-- “The answer lies in the present tense.”

To write is to drink from the fountain of eternal youth, to secure one’s own immortality. Something like that. It first occurred to me when someone said that Shakespeare is a genius. Shakespeare, they said, is a genius. Shakespeare is a genius. Not was. He didn’t used to be a genius. He is a genius. Still. Some twelve generations of men have joined Shakespeare in the dirt, men spoken of only in hushed preterits and whispered imperfects, but through the present tense Shakespeare has outlived them all. Only a figure of speech, she says! What does she know? She probably thinks that the Richard II of 1595 is the same as the Richard II of 2008. But how could she understand? She has probably never heard of Pierre Menard. I have. In four hundred years’ time I want people to read my memoirs and say: he is an old man, he writes in a florid yet sober style, he seems weary of the weight of the world. The answer, you see, lies in the present tense. I want to live forever, even if I die trying.

The squirrels stared in at the kitchen window. It was as if they were trying to freak her out. She couldn’t even do the washing-up without an audience. They didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him, only amused him. It amused him that his arthritis made his fingers crackle. It amused him that he was getting so blind that he could barely see his own cataracts. It amused him that the chipped cup of tea he had never finished that day was still festering away on the mantelpiece, which was still awash with pink and white cards expressing insincere sincerities. It amused him that his tweed jacket matched the fabric of his armchair. He always insisted that this was just a coincidence, but out of the corner of one’s eye it looked as though a bespectacled head was mounted on a thin strip of tie and cardigan in a sea of moth-eaten plaid.

And so I write. Endlessly I write. The more I write the further I seem from finishing. I feel like a ghost-writer of someone else’s story. I’m a tree falling in an empty forest. A forest being cut down to make the reams of paper that have accumulated around my armchair. She seems pale. Maybe it’s the light. When she comes in the room all she seems to see are my papers and my armchair. Our armchair. Her armchair? The armchair, I suppose. Our eyes never meet anymore. I can’t even catch her gaze let alone hold it. Not that I try. She barely talks to me now, I think she has given up. And anyway, I have no words to spare, I need them all for my memoirs, to cram them all into endless paragraphs of spiralling clauses, as if to compensate for the ease with which I can sum up my life. If my existence can be so easily articulated, then I’m buggered if I’m going to make it an easy read.

He had never let her read what he wrote. He had turned into an editor, saying the same things to her again and again, year on year, just in fewer words. While he abridged his conversations with her, he expanded his memoirs, as if they were some black hole sucking in his speech. Life moved in ever-decreasing circles. The yearly routine. It never changed. 1986 was just the revised edition of 1985, which was the slightly abridged edition of 1984, which bore a remarkable similarity to 1983…and to 1971 and 1999 for that matter. It was little surprise, he thought, that she had stopped speaking to him. But, as usual, it didn’t bother him.

It’s her loss, anyway. They’ll say of her: she was his wife. Whereas they’ll say of me: he is a great writer. I will outlive her. If I can only finish, that is. I notice that all the papers around me are blank. It doesn’t bother me. My blasted pen dried up long ago, but nothing can stop me, not even that. I watch her come and go, avoiding the stares of the squirrels at the window and ignoring the autonomous orb I have created around my armchair. My own world. It’s heaven. Well, it’s not Hell, certainly.

He shifted in his seat and began a fresh sheet of paper. He was being meticulous in his autobiography, that’s why it was taking so long, he told himself. Everything had to be arranged in perfect chronological order as he wrote. He was very nearly up to his birth. Yet he would never be born. When, in his memoirs, he was only twenty-four hours away from his own birth he described the subsequent twelve hours in one chapter. Perhaps that was rushing things? So, in the next chapter, he narrated the next six hours. Still too bold. So then the next three hours. Not enough resolution. He tried taking the next ninety minutes. Still not right. The forty-five minutes after that? No.

Twenty-four chapters later he was only one 6214th of a second away from his own birth, but was still not quite happy.

A noise in the kitchen? It must be the cat. Looking around the living room, it’s obvious how I’ve infected every cranny of the house. The whole place stinks of my woodbines and you can’t move without tripping over a pair of my threadbare slippers or crunching over one of my crumpled pieces of paper. Life with me had always been a trial for her. The way she had to wear earplugs to block out my snoring. The way she used to have to put extra milk in my morning tea to stop me burning my lip (it never worked). The way she endlessly had to tiptoe around my piles of papers, even though she’d much rather have set fire to the lot. The way…

He stopped. He thought.

I miss her. Frankly, I’m surprised she ever put up with me. Still, now she doesn’t have to.

Not since I died.

Oxford, 2007

Welcome to The Conscience of the King

1985-08-13T00:20:00.002+01:00

Where once there was en masse conscription of men to join the King's armies, there is now to be an en masse commissioning of writers to contribute to The Conscience of the King.

Hidden out there is an army of secret writers -- accountants, lawyers, bankers, journalists, doctors and clerks who secretly scribble stories, songs and poems that no-one ever reads. And we want to hear from you.

Once upon a time, such writers found outlet in the pages and columns of national newspapers and literary reviews. Many of the greatest works of our time were serialised in such publications, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.

George Orwell was once a journalist, as was Jorge Luis Borges. Charles Dickens and James Joyce relied on literary periodicals to publish, piece by piece, their most famous masterpieces.

Most of the stories and poems that make up the anthologies on our shelves today appeared scattered throughout magazines and journals around the world, and were only compiled retrospectively, years later.

The Conscience of the King is an, as yet embryonic, attempt to revive that tradition.

If you enjoy writing in stolen spare moments and have a hoard of unseen scribblings on the backs of envelopes and cigarrette packets, in deleted computer files and long-forgotten notepads, then send some examples to theconscienceoftheking@london.com - a virtual open-mic site for amateur writers and amateurs of writing.

Any submissions, however modest, would be welcomed, be they short-stories, poems, lyrics, screenplays, unfinished epics or dark dramas.

So dig out that ghost-story you wrote that now lies crumpled under your bed with the monsters that inspired it, and send it to theconscienceoftheking@london.com, along with your name, the year the piece was written, and where you wrote it.

And shyness is strictly prohibited.
.