If you are wondering – I killed a woman. It was wrong and I accept that and the punishment which goes with it. She will never again experience the thrill of life. And I may not, but I am allowed to hope. What I long for is not a particular face or voice, arms that have waited all these years for me. I know that no such thing is possible. I crave instead the bustle of public transports, merchants nodding at you, people apologising for their children. I don’t expect them to be drawn to me, why would they, but perhaps once in a while an older woman with grandchildren in tow might turn to me and ask if I’m going the same way as her or offer me directions or change for a banknote.
I wouldn’t care where I went, I don’t need to live in England, in some ways I might prefer somewhere a little less formal, India or South America, somewhere where people interact more effortlessly. It would be a joy beyond my understanding right now to sense the fertile smells of such a place, the smell of densely-packed humans, of life piled on top of life.
At night the lights are turned off for eight hours solid. When the lights are on I can hardly see out at all through the multiple layers of re-enforced glass, I have to make a tunnel with my hands to look through. While the lights are on the computer is on too and though what I can access is limited, I make the most of the opportunity to study, which is all there is really to take my mind off the longing. Sometimes I jog around my cell. It measures about 3 and half by two metres. I can do sit-ups and push-ups in it and I’ve found ways to use the chair and the desk as makeshift weights. I can even do a neat cartwheel down the wall if I move the bed to one side first. And I’ve studied things I never dreamt of: medicine, law, biology, zoology, astronomy and history. I learnt to do yoga and to meditate. The latter doesn’t help as much as I had hoped, but I am still here.
I’ve tried to hack into the computer system but it is all far too carefully monitored. I wanted to be able to send emails, to interact with people, even just people here in the cells around mine. But the walls are surrounded by vacuums you can hear nothing through and the computer system seems to have no glitches or bugs. My daily interaction is with the menu that comes up to allow me to choose my food and the hatch that opens to deliver it. Once a week I am given a mop and bucket and can throw away any waste that hasn’t been flushed through another convenient hatch that makes a worrisome sucking noise if you put anything in. I have nothing to throw away.
I have been in this exact cell for over 4,000 days, nearly twelve years. My parole has been considered twice now and the third time is coming up in a few weeks. These were just formal reviews however; there was no real likelihood of being released. Perhaps there is some this time, but only a little. Even if it is approved it would still take almost a year before I would actually be back. Along the way appeals and legal proceedings could turn me round at any time, back to this familiar cell.
When the lights are off I sit at the window and stare into the distance. I’m quite sure that I can see what I still call home there, a tiny speck of a place barely any bigger than a computer screen pixel. But if I stare for long enough I think I can see its blue, green and white shifting patterns gently revolving, unaware that I am watching with such envy.
Sunday, 28 January 2007
Thursday, 21 December 2006
Professional Suicide
By David Mulholland
The find was important, nearly as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and for Greek scholars, such as myself, it was much more important, since the language is primarily Greek. The new find, you probably heard about it several months back, was in the papers. The cache of scrolls that was found in Turkey by a shepherd? Why is it always shepherds?
For me, it has been wonderful. I am one of the people working with them. No longer am I pouring over old manuscripts that have been pored over time and time again, trying to glean new meaning from them, or simply a clever way of looking at something so that I can write an article, proposing a new viewpoint to argue and defend, but not to actually believe.
The Anatolia find has turned my life around. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Anatolia Scrolls cast light on a host of poorly understood issues, such as navigation, astronomy and trade in the Hellenic world.
Already I have been able to map some of the amber trade. I have discovered that there were two routes, the sea route around Spain and France and into the Baltic, used by the Phoenicians and a new, unexpected route through the river systems of Russia used by the Balts and Greeks. Greek wine and fine textiles were much in demand. I have also found that the Balts were unwilling to trade their plentiful bog iron, which was much stronger than the Greek’s bronze, so jealous were they of their cold and marshy land.
I was able to glean that from shipping manifests and a map that showed part of the Russian river system. A map of the Dnieper and the short overland route between what is now Smolensk and Vitsyebsk to the Daugava that leads to the Gulf of Riga. All of this two millennium before Rurik the Viking’s dynasty came and founded Kievan Rus.
It took some work to decipher the map because many of the cities that now exist on those rivers didn’t exist when the map was made. Riga then was only a small settlement by a Finnic tribe, the Livs, who lived on the muddy banks.
There is another map that is … puzzling. My colleagues and I have studied it for countless hours to no avail. It appears to be a globe, but there are no recognizable features. It had a companion map, but unfortunately, it was on the outside of the documents and exposure even to the mild climate of the cave where the documents were found was too much for the delicate image. Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to recover any detail from it.
I have taken a copy of the map to geographers. They have examined the image but have not been able to correlate it to anything. I had so many copies made that I wound up framing a large one and putting it in my living room, with unforeseen consequences.
There is debate that goes along with every discovery: do I announce what appears to be true and risk professional suicide, or do I keep quiet. If I do go public, it will endanger all the work I’ve done so far and threaten the veracity of the Anatolian Scrolls. You see, the map that has had me confounded was found in the same bundle as the rest, on the same parchment, with the same ink.
The mysterious map on my living room wall was recognised, not by a geographer, nor a cartographer, but by a friend over for drinks that does not share my musty world of human antiquity. But he nonetheless has a searching mind and is a fellow academic. He studied the map and then began pointing out features that he recognised. “Mare Muscoviense”, “Mendeleev”, “Tsiolkovskiy”, “Mare Orientale”.
“Very clever,” he said. “I like the style of this map. Where did you get it?”
“It was in the Anatolian scrolls,” I said. “Do you recognise it?”
“Yes.” he replied, “It’s the far side of the moon.”
The find was important, nearly as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and for Greek scholars, such as myself, it was much more important, since the language is primarily Greek. The new find, you probably heard about it several months back, was in the papers. The cache of scrolls that was found in Turkey by a shepherd? Why is it always shepherds?
For me, it has been wonderful. I am one of the people working with them. No longer am I pouring over old manuscripts that have been pored over time and time again, trying to glean new meaning from them, or simply a clever way of looking at something so that I can write an article, proposing a new viewpoint to argue and defend, but not to actually believe.
The Anatolia find has turned my life around. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Anatolia Scrolls cast light on a host of poorly understood issues, such as navigation, astronomy and trade in the Hellenic world.
Already I have been able to map some of the amber trade. I have discovered that there were two routes, the sea route around Spain and France and into the Baltic, used by the Phoenicians and a new, unexpected route through the river systems of Russia used by the Balts and Greeks. Greek wine and fine textiles were much in demand. I have also found that the Balts were unwilling to trade their plentiful bog iron, which was much stronger than the Greek’s bronze, so jealous were they of their cold and marshy land.
I was able to glean that from shipping manifests and a map that showed part of the Russian river system. A map of the Dnieper and the short overland route between what is now Smolensk and Vitsyebsk to the Daugava that leads to the Gulf of Riga. All of this two millennium before Rurik the Viking’s dynasty came and founded Kievan Rus.
It took some work to decipher the map because many of the cities that now exist on those rivers didn’t exist when the map was made. Riga then was only a small settlement by a Finnic tribe, the Livs, who lived on the muddy banks.
There is another map that is … puzzling. My colleagues and I have studied it for countless hours to no avail. It appears to be a globe, but there are no recognizable features. It had a companion map, but unfortunately, it was on the outside of the documents and exposure even to the mild climate of the cave where the documents were found was too much for the delicate image. Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to recover any detail from it.
I have taken a copy of the map to geographers. They have examined the image but have not been able to correlate it to anything. I had so many copies made that I wound up framing a large one and putting it in my living room, with unforeseen consequences.
There is debate that goes along with every discovery: do I announce what appears to be true and risk professional suicide, or do I keep quiet. If I do go public, it will endanger all the work I’ve done so far and threaten the veracity of the Anatolian Scrolls. You see, the map that has had me confounded was found in the same bundle as the rest, on the same parchment, with the same ink.
The mysterious map on my living room wall was recognised, not by a geographer, nor a cartographer, but by a friend over for drinks that does not share my musty world of human antiquity. But he nonetheless has a searching mind and is a fellow academic. He studied the map and then began pointing out features that he recognised. “Mare Muscoviense”, “Mendeleev”, “Tsiolkovskiy”, “Mare Orientale”.
“Very clever,” he said. “I like the style of this map. Where did you get it?”
“It was in the Anatolian scrolls,” I said. “Do you recognise it?”
“Yes.” he replied, “It’s the far side of the moon.”
Tuesday, 19 December 2006
Maps by Tristan Rogers
This secret-space, between the
Beams across the lights below
And birds' nests, roof-tiles, stars:
Monsters stalk the insulating foam.
Maps, spread out like a jigsaw
In chaotic non-tesselation,
A tucked-away means of
Storing mental rations.
How to make the whole world new
When tracks revolve like voles
In wheels that thieves keep
To slither back with keys?
Lakes pour into other lakes,
Roads caress each other's junctions,
Heights are making contact over
Origamic mountains.
There is no algebra for this,
No GPS up here,
Nothing granting magical peace
That one could wear.
Just pieces put together
In whatever way one can,
An ever-working-out
Of the lay of the land.
Beams across the lights below
And birds' nests, roof-tiles, stars:
Monsters stalk the insulating foam.
Maps, spread out like a jigsaw
In chaotic non-tesselation,
A tucked-away means of
Storing mental rations.
How to make the whole world new
When tracks revolve like voles
In wheels that thieves keep
To slither back with keys?
Lakes pour into other lakes,
Roads caress each other's junctions,
Heights are making contact over
Origamic mountains.
There is no algebra for this,
No GPS up here,
Nothing granting magical peace
That one could wear.
Just pieces put together
In whatever way one can,
An ever-working-out
Of the lay of the land.
Monday, 18 December 2006
Maps by Kate Smurthwaite
“A map is a simplified depiction of a space, a navigational aid which highlights relations between objects within that space.” Wikipedia.org
ANGIE That was it! That was the turning.
KEV What that little dirt track down there?
ANGIE It wasn’t a dirt track, it was a road.
KEV Too late now, is there another turning?
ANGIE Lets see, err, nope. So I guess that’s it then. We’ll just have to spend Christmas driving about randomly in the middle of nowhere. Hey if we just keep going by this time next year we’ll have gone all the way round the world and we’ll come to the turning again and … oops, sorry, missed it again, one more year going insane in a Mini.
KEV Well if there isn’t another turning I guess I’ll have to turn round.
“MAP (Making Action Plans) is a creative tool which inclusion facilitators can use to help individuals, organizations, and families move into the future.” Disabilityresources.org
ANGIE If you’re going to turn round then why don’t we go back to those services on the roundabout and have a coffee and a bite to eat and get some beers for the boot just in case.
KEV We have stacks of wine already. It’s not like they’re teetotal you know.
ANGIE All very well for you to say, you get a full glass every time, I’m lucky if I get a thimbleful. It’s like she’s hinting that I have a problem.
KEV She gets drunk on about a thimbleful herself. She thinks all women do. She gives you what she thinks a woman’s serving is. I know it’s old fashioned but she doesn’t know any better. Just ask for a bit more.
ANGIE I feel like such an alcoholic if I do that.
KEV Drink slowly and then top yourself up when she’s not looking.
ANGIE I’m not sneaking around looking for left over booze. What is this? Christmas in the Workhouse?
KEV Well just don’t drink so much then.
ANGIE Spend Christmas sober? Firstly that is against my religion and secondly…
KEV Look she’s not such a bad old stick, she could be a lot worse, just make the best of things.
“Map: a relation between two sets in which one element of the second set is assigned to each element of the first set, as the expression y = x2; operator.” Mathematica.com
ANGIE I dread to think what she’ll have got me for Christmas.
KEV Why?
ANGIE Well she always seems to get something that just smells like a big hint. You know something housey, like last year – fondue set, and that was a big improvement on the year before do you remember?
KEV I don’t think so.
ANGIE Oven gloves. Oven gloves?! I mean why not go the whole hog and get me a Victorian domestic servant’s outfit?!
KEV Yeah I remember you throwing quite a wobbly. Maybe she’ll remember and get you something more appropriate this year.
ANGIE Maybe I’ll just pick up your pressie by accident and then thank her profusely. She always gets something good for you.
KEV Well she is my mum.
ANGIE Yeah but my mum does the opposite. She wants to make you feel part of the family she gets you something extra-nice. One way or another I go home with a cooking implement and a box of toiletries and you get a couple of Faberge eggs, a Rolex, jeroboam of champagne, a weekend away at the sultan of Brunei’s personal harem oh and a yacht to stay on while you’re there.
KEV Are you really this stressed about a few days at Mum’s house over Christmas? I mean is there something else going on here? Something I don’t know about?
ANGIE Yeah.
KEV Thought so. Right lets go have a coffee and talk about it.
ANGIE Cheers.
“Morning-after pill: A form of contraception used after rather than before sexual intercourse. Morning-after pills interfere with pregnancy by blocking the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus (womb).” medterms.com
KEV So?
ANGIE Let me have a bit of coffee first.
KEV When you’re ready.
ANGIE You know we had sex last night?
KEV Yup, remember that.
ANGIE You know the condom broke?
KEV Did it?
ANGIE Yup
KEV Is that going to be a problem.
ANGIE Yeah, it’s really bad timing.
KEV What should we do?
ANGIE Well in any normal circumstances I’d get a morning after pill. But you have to take them within 72 hours, preferably 48. and the 72 hours we’ve got to play with are Christmas Day and Boxing Day and no shops are open and we’re stuck in Great Yarmouth where the local chemist probably has 40 shelves of incontinence knickers and a moral objection to sex before marriage.
KEV Surely somewhere will be open.
ANGIE Sure – you want to head out of your mother’s house just before Christmas dinner to go to the family planning clinic? Your mother has a low enough opinion of me already.
KEV What other options do we have?
ANGIE Wait til the New Year, find out if I am pregnant and get a proper abortion.
KEV Sounds traumatic.
ANGIE Oh there is another option.
KEV Huh?
ANGIE Erm ruin the next 18 years of our lives raising a child we don’t want.
KEV I’d quite like kids.
ANGIE Now?
KEV Not really.
ANGIE Well then.
KEV Wouldn’t be so bad.
ANGIE Well as long as you do your share of all the hard work, all the nappy changing and that stuff.
KEV Of course I would.
ANGIE Would you.
KEV Of course Angie. Don’t be daft, I wouldn’t leave you high and dry.
ANGIE Well that’d be alright then.
KEV Did we just decide to have kids?
ANGIE I don’t know.
ANGIE That was it! That was the turning.
KEV What that little dirt track down there?
ANGIE It wasn’t a dirt track, it was a road.
KEV Too late now, is there another turning?
ANGIE Lets see, err, nope. So I guess that’s it then. We’ll just have to spend Christmas driving about randomly in the middle of nowhere. Hey if we just keep going by this time next year we’ll have gone all the way round the world and we’ll come to the turning again and … oops, sorry, missed it again, one more year going insane in a Mini.
KEV Well if there isn’t another turning I guess I’ll have to turn round.
“MAP (Making Action Plans) is a creative tool which inclusion facilitators can use to help individuals, organizations, and families move into the future.” Disabilityresources.org
ANGIE If you’re going to turn round then why don’t we go back to those services on the roundabout and have a coffee and a bite to eat and get some beers for the boot just in case.
KEV We have stacks of wine already. It’s not like they’re teetotal you know.
ANGIE All very well for you to say, you get a full glass every time, I’m lucky if I get a thimbleful. It’s like she’s hinting that I have a problem.
KEV She gets drunk on about a thimbleful herself. She thinks all women do. She gives you what she thinks a woman’s serving is. I know it’s old fashioned but she doesn’t know any better. Just ask for a bit more.
ANGIE I feel like such an alcoholic if I do that.
KEV Drink slowly and then top yourself up when she’s not looking.
ANGIE I’m not sneaking around looking for left over booze. What is this? Christmas in the Workhouse?
KEV Well just don’t drink so much then.
ANGIE Spend Christmas sober? Firstly that is against my religion and secondly…
KEV Look she’s not such a bad old stick, she could be a lot worse, just make the best of things.
“Map: a relation between two sets in which one element of the second set is assigned to each element of the first set, as the expression y = x2; operator.” Mathematica.com
ANGIE I dread to think what she’ll have got me for Christmas.
KEV Why?
ANGIE Well she always seems to get something that just smells like a big hint. You know something housey, like last year – fondue set, and that was a big improvement on the year before do you remember?
KEV I don’t think so.
ANGIE Oven gloves. Oven gloves?! I mean why not go the whole hog and get me a Victorian domestic servant’s outfit?!
KEV Yeah I remember you throwing quite a wobbly. Maybe she’ll remember and get you something more appropriate this year.
ANGIE Maybe I’ll just pick up your pressie by accident and then thank her profusely. She always gets something good for you.
KEV Well she is my mum.
ANGIE Yeah but my mum does the opposite. She wants to make you feel part of the family she gets you something extra-nice. One way or another I go home with a cooking implement and a box of toiletries and you get a couple of Faberge eggs, a Rolex, jeroboam of champagne, a weekend away at the sultan of Brunei’s personal harem oh and a yacht to stay on while you’re there.
KEV Are you really this stressed about a few days at Mum’s house over Christmas? I mean is there something else going on here? Something I don’t know about?
ANGIE Yeah.
KEV Thought so. Right lets go have a coffee and talk about it.
ANGIE Cheers.
“Morning-after pill: A form of contraception used after rather than before sexual intercourse. Morning-after pills interfere with pregnancy by blocking the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus (womb).” medterms.com
KEV So?
ANGIE Let me have a bit of coffee first.
KEV When you’re ready.
ANGIE You know we had sex last night?
KEV Yup, remember that.
ANGIE You know the condom broke?
KEV Did it?
ANGIE Yup
KEV Is that going to be a problem.
ANGIE Yeah, it’s really bad timing.
KEV What should we do?
ANGIE Well in any normal circumstances I’d get a morning after pill. But you have to take them within 72 hours, preferably 48. and the 72 hours we’ve got to play with are Christmas Day and Boxing Day and no shops are open and we’re stuck in Great Yarmouth where the local chemist probably has 40 shelves of incontinence knickers and a moral objection to sex before marriage.
KEV Surely somewhere will be open.
ANGIE Sure – you want to head out of your mother’s house just before Christmas dinner to go to the family planning clinic? Your mother has a low enough opinion of me already.
KEV What other options do we have?
ANGIE Wait til the New Year, find out if I am pregnant and get a proper abortion.
KEV Sounds traumatic.
ANGIE Oh there is another option.
KEV Huh?
ANGIE Erm ruin the next 18 years of our lives raising a child we don’t want.
KEV I’d quite like kids.
ANGIE Now?
KEV Not really.
ANGIE Well then.
KEV Wouldn’t be so bad.
ANGIE Well as long as you do your share of all the hard work, all the nappy changing and that stuff.
KEV Of course I would.
ANGIE Would you.
KEV Of course Angie. Don’t be daft, I wouldn’t leave you high and dry.
ANGIE Well that’d be alright then.
KEV Did we just decide to have kids?
ANGIE I don’t know.
Saturday, 30 September 2006
The End of the Sweet Life, by Ben Sheth
The End of the Sweet Life
Peter searched through the category list on eBay’s ‘Sell your Stuff’ page to find the right one for their three piece suite. Or rather, he corrected himself, his suite, since he was quite sure that he had paid for it with some money his parents had given him in lieu of a present, to help the couple establish a household. Now that married life was coming to an end, the suite had to be removed, and perhaps split up. Although neither valuable nor attractive, it had been there for almost every day of his married life. There was even a slight stain on the backrest, hidden behind one of the seat cushions: the result of careless sex in the early days of their marriage. He was planning to omit that from the eBay description.
Eventually he ticked all of the right boxes on the online sales form, successfully uploaded the photo and decided on a price: £350 for the lot. He hinted that the chairs and sofa may be available separately. As he did this, he shuffled through a cardboard folder marked ‘wedding gifts’ to look for the suite’s original documentation. Among the cards of congratulation, he found an Ikea guarantee (with a year of the original five left to run) and instructions he had used to assemble the suite. He reflected on the bitter irony that the integrity of the Ikea suite was more dependable than that of his marriage, poured himself another G&T, and logged on again to add the guarantee to the suite’s sales description. If only he had been given a flimsy, badly printed set of instructions, translated into English via Mandarin and Kurdish, on how to put his relationship together. He transferred the Ikea documents to another folder marked ‘divorce settlement’, and drained his glass.
A few days later he received two emails from prospective buyers. “How much for delivery?” one demanded, and gave an address in a council estate where Peter was not keen to leave his van (he was a painter and decorator by trade). “I only want the chairs. No room for the sofa,” it went on, and left a name and a phone number.
The second email was more forthcoming. “We are just moving in together and think your sofa is perfect for our new flat,” wrote Maria and Paul. “We don’t need the chairs, though. We’ll pay cash and would like to collect on Saturday.”
There being no other interest in the suite, he made an appointment to receive Maria and Paul, and drew breath before telephoning the bloke from the council estate. He’d never used the internet for this kind of deal before, and was wary and suspicious. Would they try to nick his van? Could they pay?
Making sure to dial 141 before the number, Peter phoned the council estate man. The voice on the other end, who introduced himself as Trevor, was older than he’d expected, but otherwise seemed genuine. Maria and Paul were due at 11, so he arranged to take the chairs around to Trevor at 9. Trevor said that he was too old to help carry the chairs up to his flat from the van, but would arrange for his grandson to be there.
He met Trevor’s grandson Chris punctually, exactly where he expected to find him, and they got on with manhandling the chairs into the lift, along the raised walkway around the concrete block of flats, and through Trevor’s front door. Trevor was clearly looking for a bargain. The furniture in his flat was threadbare and exhausted. It turned out that his wife had died the previous year, and that Trevor now needed two armchairs to replace the rickety objects he and his wife had used, from which a few springs were now peeping out. Chris had brought his laptop round one afternoon, and Trevor had chosen from the varied offerings on eBay.
Chris and Peter eventually wrestled both chairs through the front door. Having arranged the chairs in the flat, Peter stood awkwardly, hoping Trevor would pay up quickly, but not quite having the courage to ask directly. Trevor clearly wanted a longer chat, but Peter muttered, “Best be off. Shopping to do,” and Trevor levered himself up. He hobbled over to a table in the corner of the room, and to Peter’s horror, got out a cheque book. Of all of the advice he’d sought from friends about using eBay, never to take a cheque was the most frequently mentioned. But what was he to do?
Pocketing the cheque uneasily, Peter made a mental note of the route through the walkways to Trevor’s flat so that he could return if he had to remonstrate about a bounced cheque. He drove briskly into town, pleasantly surprised to find his van none the worse for its hour parked in the estate, and paid the cheque into the bank, then drove quickly back home.
Maria and Paul were also punctual, leaving Peter with just enough time to steel himself to refuse another cheque. To his great relief they pulled out a fistful of £10 notes when the time came to drive off. Before leaving, they insisted in describing in far more detail than Peter wanted to hear how well their preparations for living together were coming on. Peter felt increasingly desolate as he watched the couple walk hand in hand to their van.
As they drove off, he grinned wanly at the young wife waving from the van window and returned to his solitary rented bedsit. More for something to do than for any specific purpose, he switched on his computer. He started up his web browser. He would probably look for that porn site he’d found a few days ago offering a free week’s membership. He found that it absorbed his attention totally, and took his mind off his loneliness, as well as satisfying other needs which his single state now pressed upon him. As the home page was loading his computer bleeped. Some new emails. Probably just demands for money from his ex, who preferred the impersonality of email to voice or personal contact.
He opened the email programme in resignation. A picture was loading in the new message box. Surely the porn site wouldn’t have sent him spam already? Then, blink! And Trevor was staring out at him. He started, shocked at the incongruity between his expectation of a naked Brazilian and fat old Trevor. He looked again. Trevor was sitting in one of the chairs, holding a mug of tea and his paper. Evidently Chris had had a digital camera with him. “Cheers!” it said underneath.
Peter searched through the category list on eBay’s ‘Sell your Stuff’ page to find the right one for their three piece suite. Or rather, he corrected himself, his suite, since he was quite sure that he had paid for it with some money his parents had given him in lieu of a present, to help the couple establish a household. Now that married life was coming to an end, the suite had to be removed, and perhaps split up. Although neither valuable nor attractive, it had been there for almost every day of his married life. There was even a slight stain on the backrest, hidden behind one of the seat cushions: the result of careless sex in the early days of their marriage. He was planning to omit that from the eBay description.
Eventually he ticked all of the right boxes on the online sales form, successfully uploaded the photo and decided on a price: £350 for the lot. He hinted that the chairs and sofa may be available separately. As he did this, he shuffled through a cardboard folder marked ‘wedding gifts’ to look for the suite’s original documentation. Among the cards of congratulation, he found an Ikea guarantee (with a year of the original five left to run) and instructions he had used to assemble the suite. He reflected on the bitter irony that the integrity of the Ikea suite was more dependable than that of his marriage, poured himself another G&T, and logged on again to add the guarantee to the suite’s sales description. If only he had been given a flimsy, badly printed set of instructions, translated into English via Mandarin and Kurdish, on how to put his relationship together. He transferred the Ikea documents to another folder marked ‘divorce settlement’, and drained his glass.
A few days later he received two emails from prospective buyers. “How much for delivery?” one demanded, and gave an address in a council estate where Peter was not keen to leave his van (he was a painter and decorator by trade). “I only want the chairs. No room for the sofa,” it went on, and left a name and a phone number.
The second email was more forthcoming. “We are just moving in together and think your sofa is perfect for our new flat,” wrote Maria and Paul. “We don’t need the chairs, though. We’ll pay cash and would like to collect on Saturday.”
There being no other interest in the suite, he made an appointment to receive Maria and Paul, and drew breath before telephoning the bloke from the council estate. He’d never used the internet for this kind of deal before, and was wary and suspicious. Would they try to nick his van? Could they pay?
Making sure to dial 141 before the number, Peter phoned the council estate man. The voice on the other end, who introduced himself as Trevor, was older than he’d expected, but otherwise seemed genuine. Maria and Paul were due at 11, so he arranged to take the chairs around to Trevor at 9. Trevor said that he was too old to help carry the chairs up to his flat from the van, but would arrange for his grandson to be there.
He met Trevor’s grandson Chris punctually, exactly where he expected to find him, and they got on with manhandling the chairs into the lift, along the raised walkway around the concrete block of flats, and through Trevor’s front door. Trevor was clearly looking for a bargain. The furniture in his flat was threadbare and exhausted. It turned out that his wife had died the previous year, and that Trevor now needed two armchairs to replace the rickety objects he and his wife had used, from which a few springs were now peeping out. Chris had brought his laptop round one afternoon, and Trevor had chosen from the varied offerings on eBay.
Chris and Peter eventually wrestled both chairs through the front door. Having arranged the chairs in the flat, Peter stood awkwardly, hoping Trevor would pay up quickly, but not quite having the courage to ask directly. Trevor clearly wanted a longer chat, but Peter muttered, “Best be off. Shopping to do,” and Trevor levered himself up. He hobbled over to a table in the corner of the room, and to Peter’s horror, got out a cheque book. Of all of the advice he’d sought from friends about using eBay, never to take a cheque was the most frequently mentioned. But what was he to do?
Pocketing the cheque uneasily, Peter made a mental note of the route through the walkways to Trevor’s flat so that he could return if he had to remonstrate about a bounced cheque. He drove briskly into town, pleasantly surprised to find his van none the worse for its hour parked in the estate, and paid the cheque into the bank, then drove quickly back home.
Maria and Paul were also punctual, leaving Peter with just enough time to steel himself to refuse another cheque. To his great relief they pulled out a fistful of £10 notes when the time came to drive off. Before leaving, they insisted in describing in far more detail than Peter wanted to hear how well their preparations for living together were coming on. Peter felt increasingly desolate as he watched the couple walk hand in hand to their van.
As they drove off, he grinned wanly at the young wife waving from the van window and returned to his solitary rented bedsit. More for something to do than for any specific purpose, he switched on his computer. He started up his web browser. He would probably look for that porn site he’d found a few days ago offering a free week’s membership. He found that it absorbed his attention totally, and took his mind off his loneliness, as well as satisfying other needs which his single state now pressed upon him. As the home page was loading his computer bleeped. Some new emails. Probably just demands for money from his ex, who preferred the impersonality of email to voice or personal contact.
He opened the email programme in resignation. A picture was loading in the new message box. Surely the porn site wouldn’t have sent him spam already? Then, blink! And Trevor was staring out at him. He started, shocked at the incongruity between his expectation of a naked Brazilian and fat old Trevor. He looked again. Trevor was sitting in one of the chairs, holding a mug of tea and his paper. Evidently Chris had had a digital camera with him. “Cheers!” it said underneath.
Monday, 21 August 2006
Punishment, by Ben Sheth
With what delight could I have walked thee round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of hill, and valley, rivers, woods and plains,
Now land, now sea, and shores with forest crowned,
Rocks, dens, and caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries… (PL, IX 114-122)
Karel and Miroslav were excited. They were taking Karel’s new car (not, admittedly, new in the sense of shiny and leather-scented, for it was a venerable Lada, dating back well into the Communist era, but it was the first Karel had possessed in his own name) for its first drive. Out of their sleepy country town in southern Bohemia and into the soporific countryside, leaden and slumbering before the arrival of capitalism would shake off the dust and bring it leaping back to vivid, fecund bucolic splendour.
“This is freedom!” Karel exclaimed as they put-putted rustily round a corner. “We are capitalists now! We’ll drive to Britain, work as plumbers (they’d heard it was easy to make money this way) and find beautiful girlfriends! We’ll be millionaires!” At that moment, with a roaring swoosh, a shiny VW shot past them. They just made out a GB plate on the back before it disappeared round a bend.
“That’ll be us!” They said in unison.
Michael and Paula were tired. They had been sitting in their VW Golf all day, thrashing across the undulating, ordered landscape of central Germany and the surprisingly arid, empty plains of the western Czech Republic. What had seemed like a good idea when the wedding invitation first arrived had become a chore.
“Let’s drive,” Michael had called to Paula in between mouthfuls of organic, Omega-3 enriched muesli at breakfast at 5.30 one morning. “We’ll be able to explore those lovely unspoiled Bohemian villages and really get to know the area.” He slavered a little into his muesli as he thought of exercising the muscular 180 bhp engine of the car which, in truth, he’d bought to impress the neighbours and use up last year’s bonus. “Get those bloody peasants in their tractors off the roads!”
Paula thought of the opera they’d seen last year, in which florally-bedecked country folk quaffed foaming beer and sang folk songs about the togetherness of their village. Perhaps it would be like their own village, Notting Hill. She hoped there’d be a little deli in a tastefully restored where they could get slices of organic quiche and a bottle of organic fruit presse.
In fact, even the 140mph blast down the Autobahn which they had managed just outside Frankfurt had been a disappointment. Although it seemed scarily fast to him, Germans in Porsches and huge Mercedes kept spoiling his fun by coming up close behind him and flashing till he was forced out of the way. And by the time they reached the Bohemian countryside, he was exhausted and thinking fondly of aeroplanes.
As they got further into the countryside, they got more tired, and more bored. The roads were smaller, narrower and bumpier, and above all, less well marked. The countryside bore the vestiges of a genuinely active rural lifestyle which had long since been eradicated in most parts of Britain.
Paula’s map-reading, never her strongest asset, was foxed by this landscape. Their Sat-Nav had long since given up, its space age technology bewildered by the proliferation of green lanes, farm tracks and woodland trails which escaped the definition of modern cartography. They blundered up and down these, in the hope of the magic sign, which never appeared. As they rounded a corner after the last of these, Michael found himself behind an aged tractor.
“Fucking Commie shit!” he yelled. He felt a bit like an American fighter pilot in a Cold War film they’d seen as he pulled out to overtake the tractor. As he did so, he strayed a little too far across the narrow lane and his offside wheel hit a boulder by the edge of the road. There was a bang, and immediately Michael knew as he wrestled with the squirming steering wheel that the tyre was punctured. And an instant later he remembered that they’d forgotten to replace the spare, which they’d already used after a previous accident.
The tractor driver, oblivious to all, continued sedately.
Paula pulled out her mobile, and seeing with relief that she had a signal, called Roger, the best man and their closest friend. He had been stayed at the groom’s house in the region many times and would know what to do. She explained their situation and he promised to come to collect them and their luggage.
“But look out for the gypsies!” He warned.
Gypsies! Paula thought of the scarily swarthy characters of that description who had occasionally stayed near her childhood home, but found it hard to reconcile with the images she saw around her: old men walking small dogs; children playing in the streets (when did that ever happen in Notting Hill these days?); fathers and sons out playing football. But still, Roger must know; he’d been there regularly for years. So they got back in the car, pressed what they knew as the ‘hoody button’ which locked all the doors at once, and made sure that wallets, designer labels and electronic equipment were all well concealed.
Paula managed a quick glance to the back seat of the car, on which the mid-market newspaper they had picked up free on the ferry very early that morning sat dishevelled. “Invasion of Poles!” It screamed above a story explaining that many east-Europeans had come to Britain to do the jobs no one in Britain wanted to do.
Paula scrutinised two characters who’d just got out of a creaking Lada with great suspicion. They certainly didn’t look like the reliable, leather-aproned rustics she’d been expecting from the opera. Michael got out of the car, clutching the spanner, all that was left of their spare wheel kit.
“What do you want?” he said suspiciously, ensuring that his grip on the wheel-nut spanner was tight in case of attack. Paula stayed inside, busily thumbing through their tourist guide book for details of local emergency services.
“But what do you need?” asked Miroslav, turning the question back on Michael in what he thought was a clever twist.
“We have friends here,” Michael asserted aggressively. “They’ll be here soon.” He hadn’t really tried to understand Miroslav’s question.
“Help?” ventured Karel, wondering whether this strange man was perhaps drunk and had strayed into the ditch under the influence. Perhaps that was why he was making so little sense?
“We have spare wheel,” Karel continued in his most conciliatory manner.
But he received no answer. With a roaring and a screeching, Roger’s car (another VW) turned up. “Here’s our friend,” Michael said, swinging the spanner aggressively now he was sure of himself.
Roger jumped out, eying the bewildered Czechs suspiciously. “In you get,” he said to Michael and Paula. “Just take essentials and anything valuable, unless it’s bolted to the floor. The locals have already found you out, by the looks of things. If you’re lucky, you’ll find it on bricks in the morning. If you’re unlucky, someone else will nick the bricks, and it’ll be in the ditch,” he commented sourly.
Michael and Paula scurried about collecting the essentials. Last of all Michael grabbed the insurance policy from the glove compartment. He’d read it carefully that night in preparation for the inevitable claim.
“Alarmed!” Michael shouted at the Czechs, gesticulating violently at the car to indicate (without success) the loudness of the sound. Then he hopped nervously into Roger’s car and they drove off.
Karel and Miroslav got back into their Lada.
“But I have the right size wheel,” Karel mused in bafflement.
“What a lovely car!” sighed Miroslav enviously.
“What strange people,” mused Karel, though Miroslav couldn’t hear him over the grinding of gears, as Karel headed for home. “They were so scared. But I thought the capitalist lifestyle makes you free?”
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of hill, and valley, rivers, woods and plains,
Now land, now sea, and shores with forest crowned,
Rocks, dens, and caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries… (PL, IX 114-122)
Karel and Miroslav were excited. They were taking Karel’s new car (not, admittedly, new in the sense of shiny and leather-scented, for it was a venerable Lada, dating back well into the Communist era, but it was the first Karel had possessed in his own name) for its first drive. Out of their sleepy country town in southern Bohemia and into the soporific countryside, leaden and slumbering before the arrival of capitalism would shake off the dust and bring it leaping back to vivid, fecund bucolic splendour.
“This is freedom!” Karel exclaimed as they put-putted rustily round a corner. “We are capitalists now! We’ll drive to Britain, work as plumbers (they’d heard it was easy to make money this way) and find beautiful girlfriends! We’ll be millionaires!” At that moment, with a roaring swoosh, a shiny VW shot past them. They just made out a GB plate on the back before it disappeared round a bend.
“That’ll be us!” They said in unison.
Michael and Paula were tired. They had been sitting in their VW Golf all day, thrashing across the undulating, ordered landscape of central Germany and the surprisingly arid, empty plains of the western Czech Republic. What had seemed like a good idea when the wedding invitation first arrived had become a chore.
“Let’s drive,” Michael had called to Paula in between mouthfuls of organic, Omega-3 enriched muesli at breakfast at 5.30 one morning. “We’ll be able to explore those lovely unspoiled Bohemian villages and really get to know the area.” He slavered a little into his muesli as he thought of exercising the muscular 180 bhp engine of the car which, in truth, he’d bought to impress the neighbours and use up last year’s bonus. “Get those bloody peasants in their tractors off the roads!”
Paula thought of the opera they’d seen last year, in which florally-bedecked country folk quaffed foaming beer and sang folk songs about the togetherness of their village. Perhaps it would be like their own village, Notting Hill. She hoped there’d be a little deli in a tastefully restored where they could get slices of organic quiche and a bottle of organic fruit presse.
In fact, even the 140mph blast down the Autobahn which they had managed just outside Frankfurt had been a disappointment. Although it seemed scarily fast to him, Germans in Porsches and huge Mercedes kept spoiling his fun by coming up close behind him and flashing till he was forced out of the way. And by the time they reached the Bohemian countryside, he was exhausted and thinking fondly of aeroplanes.
As they got further into the countryside, they got more tired, and more bored. The roads were smaller, narrower and bumpier, and above all, less well marked. The countryside bore the vestiges of a genuinely active rural lifestyle which had long since been eradicated in most parts of Britain.
Paula’s map-reading, never her strongest asset, was foxed by this landscape. Their Sat-Nav had long since given up, its space age technology bewildered by the proliferation of green lanes, farm tracks and woodland trails which escaped the definition of modern cartography. They blundered up and down these, in the hope of the magic sign, which never appeared. As they rounded a corner after the last of these, Michael found himself behind an aged tractor.
“Fucking Commie shit!” he yelled. He felt a bit like an American fighter pilot in a Cold War film they’d seen as he pulled out to overtake the tractor. As he did so, he strayed a little too far across the narrow lane and his offside wheel hit a boulder by the edge of the road. There was a bang, and immediately Michael knew as he wrestled with the squirming steering wheel that the tyre was punctured. And an instant later he remembered that they’d forgotten to replace the spare, which they’d already used after a previous accident.
The tractor driver, oblivious to all, continued sedately.
Paula pulled out her mobile, and seeing with relief that she had a signal, called Roger, the best man and their closest friend. He had been stayed at the groom’s house in the region many times and would know what to do. She explained their situation and he promised to come to collect them and their luggage.
“But look out for the gypsies!” He warned.
Gypsies! Paula thought of the scarily swarthy characters of that description who had occasionally stayed near her childhood home, but found it hard to reconcile with the images she saw around her: old men walking small dogs; children playing in the streets (when did that ever happen in Notting Hill these days?); fathers and sons out playing football. But still, Roger must know; he’d been there regularly for years. So they got back in the car, pressed what they knew as the ‘hoody button’ which locked all the doors at once, and made sure that wallets, designer labels and electronic equipment were all well concealed.
Paula managed a quick glance to the back seat of the car, on which the mid-market newspaper they had picked up free on the ferry very early that morning sat dishevelled. “Invasion of Poles!” It screamed above a story explaining that many east-Europeans had come to Britain to do the jobs no one in Britain wanted to do.
Paula scrutinised two characters who’d just got out of a creaking Lada with great suspicion. They certainly didn’t look like the reliable, leather-aproned rustics she’d been expecting from the opera. Michael got out of the car, clutching the spanner, all that was left of their spare wheel kit.
“What do you want?” he said suspiciously, ensuring that his grip on the wheel-nut spanner was tight in case of attack. Paula stayed inside, busily thumbing through their tourist guide book for details of local emergency services.
“But what do you need?” asked Miroslav, turning the question back on Michael in what he thought was a clever twist.
“We have friends here,” Michael asserted aggressively. “They’ll be here soon.” He hadn’t really tried to understand Miroslav’s question.
“Help?” ventured Karel, wondering whether this strange man was perhaps drunk and had strayed into the ditch under the influence. Perhaps that was why he was making so little sense?
“We have spare wheel,” Karel continued in his most conciliatory manner.
But he received no answer. With a roaring and a screeching, Roger’s car (another VW) turned up. “Here’s our friend,” Michael said, swinging the spanner aggressively now he was sure of himself.
Roger jumped out, eying the bewildered Czechs suspiciously. “In you get,” he said to Michael and Paula. “Just take essentials and anything valuable, unless it’s bolted to the floor. The locals have already found you out, by the looks of things. If you’re lucky, you’ll find it on bricks in the morning. If you’re unlucky, someone else will nick the bricks, and it’ll be in the ditch,” he commented sourly.
Michael and Paula scurried about collecting the essentials. Last of all Michael grabbed the insurance policy from the glove compartment. He’d read it carefully that night in preparation for the inevitable claim.
“Alarmed!” Michael shouted at the Czechs, gesticulating violently at the car to indicate (without success) the loudness of the sound. Then he hopped nervously into Roger’s car and they drove off.
Karel and Miroslav got back into their Lada.
“But I have the right size wheel,” Karel mused in bafflement.
“What a lovely car!” sighed Miroslav enviously.
“What strange people,” mused Karel, though Miroslav couldn’t hear him over the grinding of gears, as Karel headed for home. “They were so scared. But I thought the capitalist lifestyle makes you free?”
Saturday, 8 April 2006
Insects by Kate Smurthwaite
Queen Bee
Our eyes first met across an array of specimen jars. Part of the furniture in the evolutionary biology labs – every available surface seemed to be filled with tightly packed jars. Each one was filled with it’s own feotus-like life form, preserved in gooey brown gunk. She was mousy to the point that there had to be more to her. No-one would dress that frumpily unless they really had something to hide. She did. A treasure trove of delights awaited me behind the unnecessary glasses, beneath the knee-warming horizontally-striped jumpers and out of the school gym-class plimsoles. I love the others too, all of them, intermittently between the scratchy arguments about housework that hasn’t been done and the social and physical ramifications of drinking pasteurized cow’s milk. But I love Leila not only the most, but the most consistently too. With a softness that wrinkles my nose and makes me curl into a ball around her or around the place where she would be if it were possible for me to will her there.
Leila was the first to move in, when we finished college and came back from our gap year travelling through the orient, the jungles of south America and anywhere we could get to without it costing money we didn’t have. It was supposed to be a journey of self-discovery, but I learnt only what I didn’t want. Families living the same life over and over in town and village after town and village. The same meaningless story with the same meaningless characters. Just a different casting director each time tweaking the slowness of the needy eyes and the raggedness of the “actor’s own” costumes. I wanted to prove that things could be different. So I went back to the house left to me by my mother in her will, and Leila came with me.
For a few months it felt like a love-nest. Heavenly in its way, but ultimately unsatisfying because I had things to prove and I needed a bigger universe in which to conduct the experiment. Recruiting was easy. For those unsure about the wisdom of the philosophies themselves there were still the dual temptations of free accommodation and all the physical intimacy you could handle; with Leila, with me and with whoever else we had seduced by then. They came in ones and twos, refugees from the failed experiment we call “normality”. The house was soon known as the commune. They brought ideologies of their own which drifted in and out until a few had fixed themselves into our lives permanently: we turned pescatorian, vegetarian, vegan, we grew our own food, organically, we meditated, we performed our own theatre, we sang and danced together, the bedrooms became hobby rooms for everything from woodwork to candle-making and we all slept together on a pile of cushions in the living room.
I learnt the hard way to keep distancing them all from each other. Two of the initial round of recruitees left together to start their own place. Now if I see a bond forming that looks like it might be stronger than their bond to me, I move in, I send Leila or one of the others in. I don’t want to break the bonds, just fracture them, stress them a little. This experiment is about communal living not proximital living. And I watch Leila the most closely, I see her as my chief attendant, my lady-in-waiting. In the event of my incapacitation she assumes temporary control, she manages until I return and is responsible for matter arising which are not worthy of my attention. She would be the hardest to replace, though with the investment in training each of them I am wary of putting any at risk.
However to more pressing matters, the commune having reached a state of not only harmony but also of surplus, I took the decision to extend the frame of the experiment. I decide to have a child.
We had several applicants for the role of sperm donor. The successful one arrived as the heat left the skies on a summers weekend afternoon. We decided that to preserve the sanctity of the house itself we would allow him only into the entrance hall. I greeted him personally and Leila provided tea and cakes to sustain his energy levels while we confirmed the details of the arrangement. The intercourse was not intended to be pleasurable. He had brought a magazine as a safeguard on his ability to perform sexually. I had taken the precaution of asking Leila to ensure I was well-lubricated. He signed waivers on his right to visit or have contact with any resulting child and, there being no reason to delay further, Leila excused herself from the room and we completed the transaction.
Afterwards I lay on my back with my feet raised to increase the likelihood of conception. Meanwhile he put his clothes on and Leila came in and showed him out. Then she wrapped me in a towel and brought me through to the living room where, again to increase the likelihood of conception, by causing the cervix to dip into the pool of collected sperm at the neck of the womb, but also to remind me and the other where our true sexual bonds lay, we pleasured one another until it was dark and we were tired from the hunger of having missed dinner.
After it emerged that my third attempt to become pregnant had been a failure, Rhiannon had the temerity to suggest that perhaps she or one of the others should take the role of child-bearer. I saw it as little short of a direct challenge to my leadership, my control and ownership of the commune, but it didn’t bother me. I told her that I would be happy for others to have attempts at conception on the same basis I had and that anyone who wanted to do so should let me know and I would arrange it myself. By allowing them only to mate with individuals of my choosing provided a deterrent and left me firmly in control. Also I knew something they didn’t - I’ve been adding contraceptive chemicals to their tea and coffee since they first arrived.
My fourth attempt at conception was a success. I sincerely hope the child is female since we have little use for males here, though we would attempt to make a decent job of his formative education before sending him out into the “wild” of the 21st century to fend for himself.
Saturday, 21 January 2006
Saline Sodom, by Ben Sheth
Saline Sodom
“Bugger!” said God, as he looked down from his cloud upon the smoking ruin of Sodom, which he had just condemned to destruction with armfuls of burning sulphur. He changed his exclamation to “Fiddlesticks!” when he spotted one angel blush with embarrassment and another smirk at the irony of the remark.
“I really didn’t want to do that. But they left me no choice. I’d given so many warnings, explained their iniquity to them so many times. One can’t go on warning without taking any action,” he muttered wistfully. The smoke below began to disperse, revealing the once sophisticated metropolis now reduced to low piles of ash and rubble. He cast an annoyed glance at the still sniggering angel. “I’m no toothless lion. That’ll teach them not to take me seriously…”
In the far distance, had he been looking, God could have seen straggling groups of survivors inching their way across the plain away from the carnage of their devastated homes.
Lot and his daughters were part of that group. They struggled through the heat, watering the desert with tears which evaporated within seconds of touching the sand (though they left a tiny trace of salt on the surface of the desert: the only salt which they would know now). They looked back to the hill, six miles behind them, where they could make out the large pillar of salt erect on the top. That was all that remained of Lot’s wife.
When evening came, the rag bag of escapees stopped walking and tried to restore a certain community feeling by gathering together to eat, as they always had done in Sodom. A goat which one family had brought was slaughtered, a fire built, and the solemn group sat around the fire, trying to remind themselves of happier times. The feebleness of the bland, unsalted meal, as well as the glaring contrast between the fun they used to have at feasts, and the misery of their current circumstances, made their losses and deprivations seem all the more stark.
“This doesn’t taste of anything,” one boy complained. “Where’s the salt?”
“That’s not funny!” Lot growled. “She only looked back to make sure our daughters were coming too. God got the wrong end of the stick, as usual.” With that he picked up a piece of gnawed goat bone, and threw it at the boy.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” the boy whimpered. “It’s just that since our town was destroyed, everything’s been so dull. Even after a bad day, I used to cheer myself up with some really tasty, salty roast goat. But now there’s no salt – that idiot” (by which he meant God) “used it all up on his wife” (with this he cast a resentful look at Lot) “and I can’t even enjoy my food any more. This just tastes of grease,” he added, tossing his tasteless, half-eaten piece of goat shin into the fire. There it sizzled and crackled, and the escaping fat threw up a little glare of flame, which illuminated a ring of glum, weary faces.
There was silence as they all turned and looked out into the barren, featureless desert. There was nothing but sand and rock in all directions. Yes, they all thought to themselves, life without salt is really not worth living.
***
It was Saturday afternoon in the lively, desert metropolis of Sodom, and the preparations for that evening’s party were in full swing. Far across the desert Sodom was renowned for the liveliness of its feasting, drinking and dancing. The desert had been turned, through careful planning, the good fortune of a few water sources and the conviviality of its people into a centre of cosmopolitan glamour, which offered the most sophisticated entertainment, and, it was rumoured, the freest attitudes towards sexual congress for hundreds of miles in any direction.
The atmosphere was joyous, as couples, groups, families and individuals of all ages and both sexes conversed and caroused. Later on that night, after the eating, drinking and dancing had finished, everyone went back to their huts. Though quite a lot of people did not go back to their very own hut, but to the hut of someone else they’d met that evening. Sounds of salty, sweaty, straining satisfaction emerged from the huts until well into the early morning.
God was watching from high up in the sky. His omniscience enabled him to see what was going on at the festival. He could not see through the walls of the huts, but he could imagine it. He looked around at his androgynous, anodyne angels. None of us is sweaty, salty, or, frankly, satisfied, he thought. So why should they be? And his brain began to boil with the indignant, intimidating intimations of enforced moral improvement, which he would tell them in his daily Godcast the next day.
“I want men with long beards to run your society,” he practised to himself. “And women will cover themselves up so that all sexual feeling is repressed. And men who want to lie with men will also have to repress their feelings, although if they grow a long beard I might turn a blind eye to what happens. I will tell the men with beards what to do every day, so you mustn’t question their decisions, because they’ll just be doing what I tell them.” That sounds much better, God thought. Then they’ll all be as bored and repressed as I am.
But he knew in his heart that they wouldn’t take much notice. Why would they, when they were having so much fun? So he began to collect pieces of burning sulphur as well. That’ll really sort them out, he decided.
Moab and Ben-Ammi had just woken up.
Moab stuck his head out of the window of the hut to look at the day, and tell the time from the shadow on the hut peg.
“Oh, just in time for the Godcast,” he observed.
“Can you really be bothered?” Ben-Ammi asked.
“It looks rather gloomy up in the sky, and there’s a sulphurous smell in the air,” he said worriedly. “Maybe God has a warning for us?”
“Oh, don’t take any notice. Come back to bed, darling!” He grabbed Moab’s arm, pulled him back into bed, and they had passionate sex, and rubbed salty semen into each other’s skin.
“Bugger!” said God, as he looked down from his cloud upon the smoking ruin of Sodom, which he had just condemned to destruction with armfuls of burning sulphur. He changed his exclamation to “Fiddlesticks!” when he spotted one angel blush with embarrassment and another smirk at the irony of the remark.
“I really didn’t want to do that. But they left me no choice. I’d given so many warnings, explained their iniquity to them so many times. One can’t go on warning without taking any action,” he muttered wistfully. The smoke below began to disperse, revealing the once sophisticated metropolis now reduced to low piles of ash and rubble. He cast an annoyed glance at the still sniggering angel. “I’m no toothless lion. That’ll teach them not to take me seriously…”
In the far distance, had he been looking, God could have seen straggling groups of survivors inching their way across the plain away from the carnage of their devastated homes.
Lot and his daughters were part of that group. They struggled through the heat, watering the desert with tears which evaporated within seconds of touching the sand (though they left a tiny trace of salt on the surface of the desert: the only salt which they would know now). They looked back to the hill, six miles behind them, where they could make out the large pillar of salt erect on the top. That was all that remained of Lot’s wife.
When evening came, the rag bag of escapees stopped walking and tried to restore a certain community feeling by gathering together to eat, as they always had done in Sodom. A goat which one family had brought was slaughtered, a fire built, and the solemn group sat around the fire, trying to remind themselves of happier times. The feebleness of the bland, unsalted meal, as well as the glaring contrast between the fun they used to have at feasts, and the misery of their current circumstances, made their losses and deprivations seem all the more stark.
“This doesn’t taste of anything,” one boy complained. “Where’s the salt?”
“That’s not funny!” Lot growled. “She only looked back to make sure our daughters were coming too. God got the wrong end of the stick, as usual.” With that he picked up a piece of gnawed goat bone, and threw it at the boy.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” the boy whimpered. “It’s just that since our town was destroyed, everything’s been so dull. Even after a bad day, I used to cheer myself up with some really tasty, salty roast goat. But now there’s no salt – that idiot” (by which he meant God) “used it all up on his wife” (with this he cast a resentful look at Lot) “and I can’t even enjoy my food any more. This just tastes of grease,” he added, tossing his tasteless, half-eaten piece of goat shin into the fire. There it sizzled and crackled, and the escaping fat threw up a little glare of flame, which illuminated a ring of glum, weary faces.
There was silence as they all turned and looked out into the barren, featureless desert. There was nothing but sand and rock in all directions. Yes, they all thought to themselves, life without salt is really not worth living.
***
It was Saturday afternoon in the lively, desert metropolis of Sodom, and the preparations for that evening’s party were in full swing. Far across the desert Sodom was renowned for the liveliness of its feasting, drinking and dancing. The desert had been turned, through careful planning, the good fortune of a few water sources and the conviviality of its people into a centre of cosmopolitan glamour, which offered the most sophisticated entertainment, and, it was rumoured, the freest attitudes towards sexual congress for hundreds of miles in any direction.
The atmosphere was joyous, as couples, groups, families and individuals of all ages and both sexes conversed and caroused. Later on that night, after the eating, drinking and dancing had finished, everyone went back to their huts. Though quite a lot of people did not go back to their very own hut, but to the hut of someone else they’d met that evening. Sounds of salty, sweaty, straining satisfaction emerged from the huts until well into the early morning.
God was watching from high up in the sky. His omniscience enabled him to see what was going on at the festival. He could not see through the walls of the huts, but he could imagine it. He looked around at his androgynous, anodyne angels. None of us is sweaty, salty, or, frankly, satisfied, he thought. So why should they be? And his brain began to boil with the indignant, intimidating intimations of enforced moral improvement, which he would tell them in his daily Godcast the next day.
“I want men with long beards to run your society,” he practised to himself. “And women will cover themselves up so that all sexual feeling is repressed. And men who want to lie with men will also have to repress their feelings, although if they grow a long beard I might turn a blind eye to what happens. I will tell the men with beards what to do every day, so you mustn’t question their decisions, because they’ll just be doing what I tell them.” That sounds much better, God thought. Then they’ll all be as bored and repressed as I am.
But he knew in his heart that they wouldn’t take much notice. Why would they, when they were having so much fun? So he began to collect pieces of burning sulphur as well. That’ll really sort them out, he decided.
Moab and Ben-Ammi had just woken up.
Moab stuck his head out of the window of the hut to look at the day, and tell the time from the shadow on the hut peg.
“Oh, just in time for the Godcast,” he observed.
“Can you really be bothered?” Ben-Ammi asked.
“It looks rather gloomy up in the sky, and there’s a sulphurous smell in the air,” he said worriedly. “Maybe God has a warning for us?”
“Oh, don’t take any notice. Come back to bed, darling!” He grabbed Moab’s arm, pulled him back into bed, and they had passionate sex, and rubbed salty semen into each other’s skin.
Friday, 20 January 2006
Salt by Kate Smurthwaite
Death of a (Good) Salesman
One of those days I suppose I should say
Pride first, then the fall
Up one minute, down the next
Or to better explain it all:
This morning I get the trophy: best sales record this year
Another one for the shelves
I don’t need trophies for the gadgets we sell
I always say: They sell themselves
I’m not like the other sales guys though
Trying to make ends meet like every other graduate
Before prematurely giving up
Getting old and bald and fat
They don’t understand sales is about creativity
Finding ways of getting the client before the other guy can win
It’s like doing the Oakey Cokey though
You’ve got to throw your whole self in
Then this afternoon the results came through
Routine check-up, nothing new
Normal, normal, normal, normal,
Continued on page two
I’ve never smoked, I don’t take pills
Never more than a social drink
I’m not the healthiest eater alive
But I’m better than most I think
But there it is in red highlight
Between “History of Cancer: none, as stated”
And “Liver Function: regular”
“Blood Pressure: dangerously elevated”
It stops me dead in my tracks
I look back at my lunch in my lap
Salt and vinegar crisps
And a half-finished floury cheese bap
It’d be strangely emasculating
Eating celery and low-sodium dips
But I’ll do it if it gives me a few more years
Than the battered cod and the chips
My knee-jerk reaction to the salt-laden crisps
Is quickly to throw them away
But it seems like a waste while the bag is still sealed
So I leave them for a healthier day
Martin comes over to tease me
Says the award should have gone to Tim
So I give him the crisps then I’m sorry I did
I don’t really want to kill him
One of those days I suppose I should say
Pride first, then the fall
Up one minute, down the next
Or to better explain it all:
This morning I get the trophy: best sales record this year
Another one for the shelves
I don’t need trophies for the gadgets we sell
I always say: They sell themselves
I’m not like the other sales guys though
Trying to make ends meet like every other graduate
Before prematurely giving up
Getting old and bald and fat
They don’t understand sales is about creativity
Finding ways of getting the client before the other guy can win
It’s like doing the Oakey Cokey though
You’ve got to throw your whole self in
Then this afternoon the results came through
Routine check-up, nothing new
Normal, normal, normal, normal,
Continued on page two
I’ve never smoked, I don’t take pills
Never more than a social drink
I’m not the healthiest eater alive
But I’m better than most I think
But there it is in red highlight
Between “History of Cancer: none, as stated”
And “Liver Function: regular”
“Blood Pressure: dangerously elevated”
It stops me dead in my tracks
I look back at my lunch in my lap
Salt and vinegar crisps
And a half-finished floury cheese bap
It’d be strangely emasculating
Eating celery and low-sodium dips
But I’ll do it if it gives me a few more years
Than the battered cod and the chips
My knee-jerk reaction to the salt-laden crisps
Is quickly to throw them away
But it seems like a waste while the bag is still sealed
So I leave them for a healthier day
Martin comes over to tease me
Says the award should have gone to Tim
So I give him the crisps then I’m sorry I did
I don’t really want to kill him
Friday, 28 October 2005
Home by Kate Smurthwaite
“You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.” Maya Angelou
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man
“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” Jane Austen
There’s no escaping “home”
I have to go there
And I’m supposed to like it
Him and his dirty plates
Never a hint of gratitude
Piles of laundry
(He never wears things more than once)
He doesn’t know how to use anything
Except the TV
He doesn’t move for hours
He doesn’t even watch anything good
Just junk-vision, garbage, dumbed-down nonsense
I need to unwind after work, is that really too much to ask?
They never seem to sit still
And their needs are never-ending
Meals, snacks, drinks
Help with their toys
With their homework
(Usually nothing more worthwhile than colouring)
They need to be supervised and assisted
While they wash
Clean their teeth
Pull the clothes I’m always repairing on and off
Not this jumper, it’s scratchy, I don’t like it any more
It paces about, panting wetly
Threatening to soil the carpet or the cupboard under the stairs
(Like it’s punishing me for not paying it more attention)
Needs to be walked
Needs to be fed, watered, brushed
Needs to be de-wormed and de-flea-infested
Sheds it’s stinking fur on every piece of upholstery in sight
Rrrrufff rrruff ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff
Saturday, 8 October 2005
Holiday by Kate Smurthwaite
The Litter-Picker
I hate the summer beach
They won’t let you wear trousers
You have to make the most of the weather
And so your jeans don’t get wet when you go paddling.
Then they stare at me
Because I don’t look like them
There’s nowhere to hide things
In the little bag of navy lycra that’s all you can wear.
If I want to go in the sea
I have to wear big orange armbands
As if I didn’t have enough funny lumps and bumps
They give you extra ones.
I like ice creams
But I let a dog lick my ice cream once
And they all laughed at me
Now if I get ice cream they tell me over and over I mustn’t let the dog have any.
Now it’s the end of summer though
The noisy children have all gone to school
That’s where they study writing and numbers
I don’t have to do that. Not unless I want to.
I don’t want to study today.
I want to go litter-picking
With my gloves and my big black bag
You mustn’t pick up anything you’re not sure about.
There’s no-one here today
Just me in my long trousers
Lolly-pop sticks and bits of plastic and funny stones with tar on
And Ruthie watching me from the path.
When my bag is full I give it to Ruthie
She says don’t I want to stop now
But I don’t want to stop until I’ve filled all the bags
And picked up all the litter all along the beach as far as the end.
Ruthie says it’s making her tired just watching me
She says we better have a break after this bag
So I fill it right up
Until I can’t put one single more piece of litter in.
Ruthie puts the bags in the skip
She always skips to the skip
She laughs when she skips to the skip
Sometimes I laugh too.
We have to go to the shop for hard ice cream
The ice-cream van has gone now, I don’t know where
The man in the shop says he’s seen me working hard
I don’t say anything
The man says do I like dogs
Then I say yes
Ruthie tells him I like to feed ice cream to the dog
So the man gives me an extra pot of hard ice cream
For the dog.
I hate the summer beach
They won’t let you wear trousers
You have to make the most of the weather
And so your jeans don’t get wet when you go paddling.
Then they stare at me
Because I don’t look like them
There’s nowhere to hide things
In the little bag of navy lycra that’s all you can wear.
If I want to go in the sea
I have to wear big orange armbands
As if I didn’t have enough funny lumps and bumps
They give you extra ones.
I like ice creams
But I let a dog lick my ice cream once
And they all laughed at me
Now if I get ice cream they tell me over and over I mustn’t let the dog have any.
Now it’s the end of summer though
The noisy children have all gone to school
That’s where they study writing and numbers
I don’t have to do that. Not unless I want to.
I don’t want to study today.
I want to go litter-picking
With my gloves and my big black bag
You mustn’t pick up anything you’re not sure about.
There’s no-one here today
Just me in my long trousers
Lolly-pop sticks and bits of plastic and funny stones with tar on
And Ruthie watching me from the path.
When my bag is full I give it to Ruthie
She says don’t I want to stop now
But I don’t want to stop until I’ve filled all the bags
And picked up all the litter all along the beach as far as the end.
Ruthie says it’s making her tired just watching me
She says we better have a break after this bag
So I fill it right up
Until I can’t put one single more piece of litter in.
Ruthie puts the bags in the skip
She always skips to the skip
She laughs when she skips to the skip
Sometimes I laugh too.
We have to go to the shop for hard ice cream
The ice-cream van has gone now, I don’t know where
The man in the shop says he’s seen me working hard
I don’t say anything
The man says do I like dogs
Then I say yes
Ruthie tells him I like to feed ice cream to the dog
So the man gives me an extra pot of hard ice cream
For the dog.
Friday, 7 October 2005
A Holy Day, by Ben Sheth
A Holy Day
The grass was browning around the edges, and the buildings of the oldest quadrangle in the school seemed to be groaning in the heat. The dull glaze of the stone seemed to be suffering in the intensity of their re-baking. Their shimmer seemed to be a silent scream, the occasional cracking of bone-dry twigs the wretched climax of a torture session perpetrated by the climate on the ancient institution.
In a shaded but still stiflingly baked office, Francis Hyde sat at a modern, faceless chipboard desk with what appeared to be a duvet of paperwork over him. Despite the heat, this duvet seemed welcome, and Francis was fiddling about with the papers before him with the apparent abandon of a child released to its sand pit. Before him were drafts of a few documents he had been preparing. As deputy head in charge of development, a suitably vague title which enabled him to interfere in any area of school life which he felt needed ‘developing’, he had had a few ideas which he thought would help the school modernise; run in a more up to date, corporate way.
The pupils had left the school some ten days ago, and most of the teachers had followed quickly on their heels, fitting in as much genuine, uninterrupted holiday as they could before the publication of exam results and the flurry of next term’s meetings announced the arrival of autumn far more grimly than any change in the weather could. The atmosphere of the school, therefore, was one of a city once busy, now abandoned. Perhaps Rome before the Visigoths arrived had the same unhealthy feverishness to it?
First on Francis’ list, if he could find the paper in the crazy tessellated jumble on the desk, was the updated risk assessment for staff taking pupils out of school on trips. No more would be the carefree, spontaneous minibus excursion by the History department to see the Saxon village nearby; forbidden would be those Geography trips to the chalk hills, the Biology trips to the nature reserve, or English trips to the theatre. So messy; so many unidentified risks, leaving the school liable for untold damages and adverse publicity. No, in future it would be necessary to secure a term’s advance permission (from him, of course), including details of exactly who was going where, what they were doing, how they were getting there, and exactly when they would leave and return.
But this was trivial compared to the next project, keystone in his modernisation project, which was a super, overarching scheme of work, to be computerised, so he could, at the click of his mouse or press of his key, see what every teacher in the school was teaching. Every teacher had been required to submit details of every course they were teaching, to every class, and provide a lesson by lesson breakdown of exactly when it would be taught. It was so important, thought Francis, that he could supervise this, to ensure all modern methods were used whenever possible, and flag up possible difficulties when inspectors next visited. Francis didn’t of course, have many lessons to teach himself – he was too busy checking on everyone else – but was nonetheless the school’s acknowledged expert on planning everything from genetics to Gawain and the Green Knight.
Last, his best plan yet; the plan which engendered such massive pride. The innovations list. The hopeless, backward teachers who spent all of their time on such backward, IT-free tasks like marking, or, much worse, reading books (when so many texts were available for the whole class to use on the internet!), would now be held to account. How many new methods or procedures had they invented in the past term? None, in most cases, unlike Francis’ prolific record. This inadequacy would now be ruthlessly exposed by the list, which would be updated daily on the school’s intranet page. And the first innovation on it? The innovations list, of course!
At last it was done, and a glut of satisfaction settled over Francis. He didn’t know what day it was (it didn’t terribly matter) and hadn’t noticed that in the meantime it had become dark outside. The peculiar, mystifying changes of nature held no interest for him. Tidying the completed documents into a few neater piles (order from chaos, like the best creators) left a few bald holes of wood veneer peeping through the ruffled snowy top of the desk, but that, for once, was not what Francis was concentrating on. A balmy, comforting glow of self-satisfaction was spreading from within. The stale, hazy evening heat in the room seemed to acquire a nourishing warmth. He surveyed the piles of completed documents, looking like so any ancient burial mounds, with increasing satisfaction. He noticed that above, on the shelves above his head, the red box files made a cross shape among the black ones. For once, he allowed himself a few moments’ repose. He created it, and he knew that it was good.
He was still there, dozing in his office chair the next morning, when the caretaker came round with the morning’s post. He was woken by the slight scuffle sound of a small, brightly coloured card rubbing against the carpet as it was shoved under the door. It was from the headmaster, on holiday in Turkey. “Hope you’re enjoying the break too,” it said, among other generalised expressions of goodwill. Francis looked up disdainfully at the little token. He realised it was of no significance and went back to sleep.
The grass was browning around the edges, and the buildings of the oldest quadrangle in the school seemed to be groaning in the heat. The dull glaze of the stone seemed to be suffering in the intensity of their re-baking. Their shimmer seemed to be a silent scream, the occasional cracking of bone-dry twigs the wretched climax of a torture session perpetrated by the climate on the ancient institution.
In a shaded but still stiflingly baked office, Francis Hyde sat at a modern, faceless chipboard desk with what appeared to be a duvet of paperwork over him. Despite the heat, this duvet seemed welcome, and Francis was fiddling about with the papers before him with the apparent abandon of a child released to its sand pit. Before him were drafts of a few documents he had been preparing. As deputy head in charge of development, a suitably vague title which enabled him to interfere in any area of school life which he felt needed ‘developing’, he had had a few ideas which he thought would help the school modernise; run in a more up to date, corporate way.
The pupils had left the school some ten days ago, and most of the teachers had followed quickly on their heels, fitting in as much genuine, uninterrupted holiday as they could before the publication of exam results and the flurry of next term’s meetings announced the arrival of autumn far more grimly than any change in the weather could. The atmosphere of the school, therefore, was one of a city once busy, now abandoned. Perhaps Rome before the Visigoths arrived had the same unhealthy feverishness to it?
First on Francis’ list, if he could find the paper in the crazy tessellated jumble on the desk, was the updated risk assessment for staff taking pupils out of school on trips. No more would be the carefree, spontaneous minibus excursion by the History department to see the Saxon village nearby; forbidden would be those Geography trips to the chalk hills, the Biology trips to the nature reserve, or English trips to the theatre. So messy; so many unidentified risks, leaving the school liable for untold damages and adverse publicity. No, in future it would be necessary to secure a term’s advance permission (from him, of course), including details of exactly who was going where, what they were doing, how they were getting there, and exactly when they would leave and return.
But this was trivial compared to the next project, keystone in his modernisation project, which was a super, overarching scheme of work, to be computerised, so he could, at the click of his mouse or press of his key, see what every teacher in the school was teaching. Every teacher had been required to submit details of every course they were teaching, to every class, and provide a lesson by lesson breakdown of exactly when it would be taught. It was so important, thought Francis, that he could supervise this, to ensure all modern methods were used whenever possible, and flag up possible difficulties when inspectors next visited. Francis didn’t of course, have many lessons to teach himself – he was too busy checking on everyone else – but was nonetheless the school’s acknowledged expert on planning everything from genetics to Gawain and the Green Knight.
Last, his best plan yet; the plan which engendered such massive pride. The innovations list. The hopeless, backward teachers who spent all of their time on such backward, IT-free tasks like marking, or, much worse, reading books (when so many texts were available for the whole class to use on the internet!), would now be held to account. How many new methods or procedures had they invented in the past term? None, in most cases, unlike Francis’ prolific record. This inadequacy would now be ruthlessly exposed by the list, which would be updated daily on the school’s intranet page. And the first innovation on it? The innovations list, of course!
At last it was done, and a glut of satisfaction settled over Francis. He didn’t know what day it was (it didn’t terribly matter) and hadn’t noticed that in the meantime it had become dark outside. The peculiar, mystifying changes of nature held no interest for him. Tidying the completed documents into a few neater piles (order from chaos, like the best creators) left a few bald holes of wood veneer peeping through the ruffled snowy top of the desk, but that, for once, was not what Francis was concentrating on. A balmy, comforting glow of self-satisfaction was spreading from within. The stale, hazy evening heat in the room seemed to acquire a nourishing warmth. He surveyed the piles of completed documents, looking like so any ancient burial mounds, with increasing satisfaction. He noticed that above, on the shelves above his head, the red box files made a cross shape among the black ones. For once, he allowed himself a few moments’ repose. He created it, and he knew that it was good.
He was still there, dozing in his office chair the next morning, when the caretaker came round with the morning’s post. He was woken by the slight scuffle sound of a small, brightly coloured card rubbing against the carpet as it was shoved under the door. It was from the headmaster, on holiday in Turkey. “Hope you’re enjoying the break too,” it said, among other generalised expressions of goodwill. Francis looked up disdainfully at the little token. He realised it was of no significance and went back to sleep.
Wednesday, 21 September 2005
The Six Fifty-Seven, By Ben Sheth
The Six Fifty-Seven; 21 July 2005
An inescapable feeling of unease pervaded the air, as it had done for the past few months whenever Venkatesh Subramnian got on the train. He was dressed in standard business attire, though his respectable-looking soft work-bag had perhaps too big a bulge in it for the peace of mind of all aboard. It was full of slides of malignant brain tumours which he would that afternoon present to a medical conference in London. He was not Muslim and for the most part enjoyed living in what was, after all, his country of birth; but it was clear that the majority of his fellow passengers did not perceive either of these points. People looked up, then very quickly down at their feet again; they shuffled, fidgeted and twitched, trying to disguise their disquiet that someone who looked, to them, like a suicide bomber, had sat within shrapnel range of them. Occasionally someone made a more militant display of their ignorance by getting up and walking through to the next carriage when he entered. No one settled in the carriage; it was as if an especially aggressive colony of ants were swarming the seats, but no one wanted to get out of their seat altogether in case someone else took it.
Slap! Whack! Went the rolled up copy of yesterday’s Standard Lite against the stained, grimy window of the WAGN SuperExpress Shuttle, its diesel engines bleating and whining in anticipation of the haul from Cambridge to London King’s Cross.
Rev. Janet Weatherburn looked up, irritated by the kerfuffle, and saw a large man with a large gut swishing and swatting at a bluebottle. The fly was annoying, she thought, but even more so was the fat man, who had neither the speed, accuracy nor nimbleness of footwork to do anything more than provoke the fly to even more piercing frenzies. It seemed to be headbutting the window, and had clearly failed to grasp that the glass presented a permanent barrier.
The train stopped at a small, flat, tarmac-ed commuter village. This was not, its residents would assert with animation, a wild, inhospitable part of the country – neither the Wild West nor the craggy reaches of the Caucuses – yet there was a queue of 4x4’s leading to the entrance to the station. Each had a wife in the driver’s seat, and husband, shaven and scented, leaping out in turn and heading for the platform. The engines were running, and the deep throbbing of the enormous engines, and the quiet leaking of white gas from the exhaust seemed strangely sinister in the otherwise comfortable domestic scene. But no one looked up from the carriage.
Janet looked back at the clutch of papers she was trying to concentrate on. She was preparing a funeral address for a school friend who had recently died of cancer, aged thirty-seven. Janet hadn’t known Clare very well, and hadn’t been in touch regularly since they had left school. Clare’s closer friends had felt it appropriate, however, for Janet to conduct the service. It saved them fishing around for someone else, and they were less worried about the crassness of the address (at least Janet would remember the name of Clare’s partner). Janet was less taken with the plan. She had never known Clare to express any remotely religious sentiments. What was she to say? “We gather here to wish our friend a good time in Hell”? She had cobbled together some predictably anodyne comments, but was worried that they didn’t do justice to Clare (whose Epicurean lifestyle could only be celebrated in the most weaselly manner by a vicar), to herself, or to God, though no one seemed to think of him much any more. Swat! Crash! (The fat man had tripped over another passenger’s bag mid bluebottle-hunt and fallen heavily).
This series of loud bangs set the mood of the passengers even more on edge, but it did at least divert their attention from Venkatesh, sitting in the corner nursing his bag of tumours. He took advantage of the distraction to peer over his neighbour’s shoulder to get a glimpse of what she was reading. He thought he recognised Lorraine van Redewell from a neighbouring college in Cambridge. There being nothing to be gained for either in furthering their academic acquaintance (their disciplines being so different that routine academic back scratching would be fruitless), no eye contact was made. But Venkatesh was very interested in the academic paper she was reading. He was fairly sure she lectured in English, and had a quiet scientist’s contempt for it as a serious subject. But there was nothing lightweight about the text she was holding: “…symbolic rupture of signifier and signified posits the narrator’s mortality…” Venkat (the abbreviation he preferred for acquaintances) scratched his head, made no sense of it and tried again: “…paradigm of premature termination, enhanced by recent ground-breaking bibliographic research revealing many aborted re-issues in manuscript form, which confirms current interpretations of a revolutionary cell of Protestant thinkers among the minor clergy of Somerset…” He gave a reassuring glance at his tumours and got out his Daily Express.
The flat, brown countryside outside was flashing by, segmented into film-roll-like rectangles by the train windows and various vertical obstacles outside. No one felt this piece of virtual cinema worth any attention, however.
The fat man, to be known as X14 for that day, was going to an underground meeting of football hooligans at an undisclosed location. Their topic for that day was to be fighting tactics: how to inflict the maximum injury on an opponent. To judge from X14’s blundering ineffectiveness with the rolled newspaper, he might not be suspected to be much of a threat; but with some broken glass, and the undefended proximity of an unnoticing opponent’s white flesh, he was very savage.
At the last stop in north London a school girl got on and hurriedly extracted a battered exercise book, which she flicked through hungrily but without any organised purpose. She had a biology test first lesson, and hadn’t summoned the enthusiasm to revise the night before. It was about decomposition of plants and animals, and the variety of factors which controlled the speed of decomposition. After some vociferous requests from a few of the boys in the class, they had been shown some laboratory slides of decomposing corpses to provide some visual aids for the topic. One of the noisiest boys had been sick on the way out, but Vicky found herself fascinated, and was looking forward to conducting a long coursework essay on the subject for her A Level investigation.
As they approached central London, the change from dull suburbia to the incomplete building sites abutting the train line aroused the passengers from their restless rest, and people got up, collected baggage from the overhead shelves and rummaged. When they arrived, Venkatesh was allowed off first. No one made eye contact, but several passengers ensured they got on a different tube line.
As they left the train, none of them noticed that the fly had just expired, exhausted by its attempts to escape the glass. It was lying on its back on the window frame. Its legs seemed to be twitching minutely. Or was it the breeze?
An inescapable feeling of unease pervaded the air, as it had done for the past few months whenever Venkatesh Subramnian got on the train. He was dressed in standard business attire, though his respectable-looking soft work-bag had perhaps too big a bulge in it for the peace of mind of all aboard. It was full of slides of malignant brain tumours which he would that afternoon present to a medical conference in London. He was not Muslim and for the most part enjoyed living in what was, after all, his country of birth; but it was clear that the majority of his fellow passengers did not perceive either of these points. People looked up, then very quickly down at their feet again; they shuffled, fidgeted and twitched, trying to disguise their disquiet that someone who looked, to them, like a suicide bomber, had sat within shrapnel range of them. Occasionally someone made a more militant display of their ignorance by getting up and walking through to the next carriage when he entered. No one settled in the carriage; it was as if an especially aggressive colony of ants were swarming the seats, but no one wanted to get out of their seat altogether in case someone else took it.
Slap! Whack! Went the rolled up copy of yesterday’s Standard Lite against the stained, grimy window of the WAGN SuperExpress Shuttle, its diesel engines bleating and whining in anticipation of the haul from Cambridge to London King’s Cross.
Rev. Janet Weatherburn looked up, irritated by the kerfuffle, and saw a large man with a large gut swishing and swatting at a bluebottle. The fly was annoying, she thought, but even more so was the fat man, who had neither the speed, accuracy nor nimbleness of footwork to do anything more than provoke the fly to even more piercing frenzies. It seemed to be headbutting the window, and had clearly failed to grasp that the glass presented a permanent barrier.
The train stopped at a small, flat, tarmac-ed commuter village. This was not, its residents would assert with animation, a wild, inhospitable part of the country – neither the Wild West nor the craggy reaches of the Caucuses – yet there was a queue of 4x4’s leading to the entrance to the station. Each had a wife in the driver’s seat, and husband, shaven and scented, leaping out in turn and heading for the platform. The engines were running, and the deep throbbing of the enormous engines, and the quiet leaking of white gas from the exhaust seemed strangely sinister in the otherwise comfortable domestic scene. But no one looked up from the carriage.
Janet looked back at the clutch of papers she was trying to concentrate on. She was preparing a funeral address for a school friend who had recently died of cancer, aged thirty-seven. Janet hadn’t known Clare very well, and hadn’t been in touch regularly since they had left school. Clare’s closer friends had felt it appropriate, however, for Janet to conduct the service. It saved them fishing around for someone else, and they were less worried about the crassness of the address (at least Janet would remember the name of Clare’s partner). Janet was less taken with the plan. She had never known Clare to express any remotely religious sentiments. What was she to say? “We gather here to wish our friend a good time in Hell”? She had cobbled together some predictably anodyne comments, but was worried that they didn’t do justice to Clare (whose Epicurean lifestyle could only be celebrated in the most weaselly manner by a vicar), to herself, or to God, though no one seemed to think of him much any more. Swat! Crash! (The fat man had tripped over another passenger’s bag mid bluebottle-hunt and fallen heavily).
This series of loud bangs set the mood of the passengers even more on edge, but it did at least divert their attention from Venkatesh, sitting in the corner nursing his bag of tumours. He took advantage of the distraction to peer over his neighbour’s shoulder to get a glimpse of what she was reading. He thought he recognised Lorraine van Redewell from a neighbouring college in Cambridge. There being nothing to be gained for either in furthering their academic acquaintance (their disciplines being so different that routine academic back scratching would be fruitless), no eye contact was made. But Venkatesh was very interested in the academic paper she was reading. He was fairly sure she lectured in English, and had a quiet scientist’s contempt for it as a serious subject. But there was nothing lightweight about the text she was holding: “…symbolic rupture of signifier and signified posits the narrator’s mortality…” Venkat (the abbreviation he preferred for acquaintances) scratched his head, made no sense of it and tried again: “…paradigm of premature termination, enhanced by recent ground-breaking bibliographic research revealing many aborted re-issues in manuscript form, which confirms current interpretations of a revolutionary cell of Protestant thinkers among the minor clergy of Somerset…” He gave a reassuring glance at his tumours and got out his Daily Express.
The flat, brown countryside outside was flashing by, segmented into film-roll-like rectangles by the train windows and various vertical obstacles outside. No one felt this piece of virtual cinema worth any attention, however.
The fat man, to be known as X14 for that day, was going to an underground meeting of football hooligans at an undisclosed location. Their topic for that day was to be fighting tactics: how to inflict the maximum injury on an opponent. To judge from X14’s blundering ineffectiveness with the rolled newspaper, he might not be suspected to be much of a threat; but with some broken glass, and the undefended proximity of an unnoticing opponent’s white flesh, he was very savage.
At the last stop in north London a school girl got on and hurriedly extracted a battered exercise book, which she flicked through hungrily but without any organised purpose. She had a biology test first lesson, and hadn’t summoned the enthusiasm to revise the night before. It was about decomposition of plants and animals, and the variety of factors which controlled the speed of decomposition. After some vociferous requests from a few of the boys in the class, they had been shown some laboratory slides of decomposing corpses to provide some visual aids for the topic. One of the noisiest boys had been sick on the way out, but Vicky found herself fascinated, and was looking forward to conducting a long coursework essay on the subject for her A Level investigation.
As they approached central London, the change from dull suburbia to the incomplete building sites abutting the train line aroused the passengers from their restless rest, and people got up, collected baggage from the overhead shelves and rummaged. When they arrived, Venkatesh was allowed off first. No one made eye contact, but several passengers ensured they got on a different tube line.
As they left the train, none of them noticed that the fly had just expired, exhausted by its attempts to escape the glass. It was lying on its back on the window frame. Its legs seemed to be twitching minutely. Or was it the breeze?
Thursday, 21 July 2005
The Whole Truth, by Ben Sheth
The Whole Truth
Dear Reader, there can be nothing higher to which we may aspire than the truth. Few of us reach it, but even the attempt is noble. It justifies our actions; adds moral lustre to our mundane pursuits. Hearken, then, to a fable, and tell me wherein the truth lies.
It was a sunny day. The light bounded ecstatically through the faded, peeling window frames of the Church Hall. Sunday, 11am, and the fresh young minds of the small rural town were assembling for moral edification while their parents contemplated their mortal souls, to the accompaniment of a tambourine, next door.
Inside, Miss Trixie Turnover was preparing her teaching aids. A wobbly line drawing, extending outwards in random directions from a central blob, emanated transcendent moral truth. In the front row were the keenest pupils, consciences alert and thirsty for the dewy precepts about to drop from Miss Turnover’s lips.
‘Little’ Jack French, Priscilla Doe, and Johnny Bull were seated in the front row. Jack’s slicked-down fringe, Priscilla’s blond bouffant and Johnny’s military parting were instantly recognisable across the town. Usually the first to arrive, they were known to be the local gilded youth, destined for success; above all, avid for truth.
Even they were having difficulty, however, with Miss Turnover’s drawing. There was uncharacteristic chatter from them as they disputed its meaning.
“It’s grandma’s hairnet, look! With her bun in the middle,” construed Little Jack, this being the closest to irreverent humour which these model children permitted themselves.
“It must be a diagram of the spinal column of a kangeroo,” ventured Johnny, whose interest in the natural world rather exceeded, for the moment, his understanding. His suggestion was the more cautious for the knowledge that Miss Trixie disapproved of too scientific an approach to the natural world, seeing it instead as a source of twee illustrations of God’s bounty and beneficence. Priscilla was aware of this, and suggested accordingly,
“I think it’s God controlling the universe.” She was used to the sort of metaphors favoured by Miss Trixie, and their general intent. “Look! His reach extends everywhere!” she lisped.
“Now children,” trilled Trixie, “our theme today is –“ at this Trixie assumed a tremulous tone –“deception! Who can tell us what this little image has to do with it?” Trixie flourished her hand in the direction of her drawing, and the hall went very quiet. The children’s eyes temporarily assumed the wobbly spiral pattern of the drawing as the puzzled at it.
“I think it’s Gr…” piped Little Jack, till he was suppressed by Priscilla’s hand, tactfully stuffed in his mouth. (You will applaud, dear Reader, her spontaneity.) A few of Little Jack’s friends, who’d already heard the witticism, giggled.
“It’s the wicked spider!” Trixie declaimed, the moral force of this declamation emphasised by much noisy sucking in of breath. “I’m sure your parents have all told you the saying, ‘What a tangled web we weave, when at first we do deceive’? Well, we learn this from the depravity of this sly, creepy beast, which traps unthinking creatures with its camouflaged web. In everything you do, children…”
“Miss! Miss!” Johnny called out. “My Dad says that spiders play an important role in reducing pests in Nature. They’re really very clean and prevent the spread of disease by flies.”
“Johnny Bull! What nonsense you are talking! It’s a fallen creature, like the serpent, damned for its underhand ways! And it teaches us all a lesson, not to do the same!”
Well, Dear Reader, I’m sure you’ve heard enough of this sort of thing. It continued for some time in the same vein, until the children’s jaws could drop no further.
Little Jack, in particular, sat in open-mouthed awe at the persuasive force of this disquisition. He knew exactly how to apply this teaching, which confirmed the urgency of some straight talking where his family was concerned. Grandma French was coming for Sunday lunch, and he was really going to impress her with his respect for the truth.
Johnny was bemused. His father, the local biology teacher, had frequently impressed upon him the amorality of animals, the fact that they followed instincts, rather than moral rules. But if this spider was so wicked… well, Johnny would have some things to say to his sister’s cat, which had been terrorising Polly, his parrot, when he got home.
Priscilla was now feeling very frustrated. She had long wanted a little baby brother or sister, and despite some very persistent nagging, her parents had failed to produce one, though they had never adequately explained where it was they had to go to get one. Surely Miss Trixie, therefore, with her determined devotion to the truth, would be able to tell her.
“Well my dear,” Miss Trixie spluttered, “what a question! Have your parents not explained?” Assured they hadn’t, Miss Trixie controlled her blushing and continued: “There’s a stork, a very kind stork, who lives in the woods at the far side of town. If you ask him very nicely, he will bring you a baby. But go and see your parents about it first.” Her awkward duty discharged, Trixie flounced off.
Dear Reader, I think you will agree that our search for truth has not begun well. How many obstacles, human and inhuman, moral and immoral, get in its way! How many diversions and distractions there are in the long, winding path to its summit! As our dear children find out when they go home, zealous for the truth.
Little Jack was seized by the elbow immediately upon arrival and frogmarched to the bathroom where his fringe was slicked down again, and his face scrubbed till it shone, prior to being sent to see Grandma.
“Grandma, we’ve been learning about truth today at Sunday School, and how important it is to tell the truth always. It’s lovely to see you Grandma, but I have some suggestions for a strict weight loss programme for you. And I think you should try Listerine. It works in 98% of cases, apparently, and even reduces the bact…”
Dear Reader, I think I need only add at this point that it took Mrs French several days of levering with a screwdriver to extract Grandma’s false teeth from the wall in which her outrage had implanted them.
Priscilla, meanwhile, made her way to the woods in search of the stork. After some creeping about, she spotted some movement in a hedge, and approached with her most winning smile.
“I want to know where babies come from,” she declared, stopping suddenly when she realised it was not the stork she was addressing, but Kevin from the bus shelter, as he was universally known in the town, a feckless drop-out regarded as a largely innocuous nuisance. “Oh, I thought you were the stork who brings babies,” Priscilla explained, failing to hide the disappointment in her voice. “You see, Miss Trixie told me that the stork could get a baby for me.”
“Oh no, my dear,” Kevin leered. “It’s not a stork. It’s more like a rat.” At this he beckoned her towards the shelter of his hedge. “Let me show you…”
Dear Reader, fear not for Priscilla’s virtue! The force of her character saw her through and the encounter ended when she yelled:
“Ugh! Ugh! That’s not a rat! It’s a shrew!” She thumped it viciously with her Sunday School Bible, and ran home, determined to confront her parents more determinedly than ever about the scarcity of both babies and storks.
Her journey home was interrupted by more shouting and animal yelping which aroused her curiosity. She got close enough to see Johnny, holding his sister’s cat up by the tail, and beating it with a toy spade.
“Wicked, wicked cat!” He was yelling. “Don’t you ever dare threaten Polly again!” But Priscilla had bigger fish to fry. She still hadn’t found the stork.
Well, dear Reader, have you found the truth in all of this? Is it a beaten cat? A pulped rodent? An outraged grandmother? Or a wily spider?
Personally I think it’s the stork.
Dear Reader, there can be nothing higher to which we may aspire than the truth. Few of us reach it, but even the attempt is noble. It justifies our actions; adds moral lustre to our mundane pursuits. Hearken, then, to a fable, and tell me wherein the truth lies.
It was a sunny day. The light bounded ecstatically through the faded, peeling window frames of the Church Hall. Sunday, 11am, and the fresh young minds of the small rural town were assembling for moral edification while their parents contemplated their mortal souls, to the accompaniment of a tambourine, next door.
Inside, Miss Trixie Turnover was preparing her teaching aids. A wobbly line drawing, extending outwards in random directions from a central blob, emanated transcendent moral truth. In the front row were the keenest pupils, consciences alert and thirsty for the dewy precepts about to drop from Miss Turnover’s lips.
‘Little’ Jack French, Priscilla Doe, and Johnny Bull were seated in the front row. Jack’s slicked-down fringe, Priscilla’s blond bouffant and Johnny’s military parting were instantly recognisable across the town. Usually the first to arrive, they were known to be the local gilded youth, destined for success; above all, avid for truth.
Even they were having difficulty, however, with Miss Turnover’s drawing. There was uncharacteristic chatter from them as they disputed its meaning.
“It’s grandma’s hairnet, look! With her bun in the middle,” construed Little Jack, this being the closest to irreverent humour which these model children permitted themselves.
“It must be a diagram of the spinal column of a kangeroo,” ventured Johnny, whose interest in the natural world rather exceeded, for the moment, his understanding. His suggestion was the more cautious for the knowledge that Miss Trixie disapproved of too scientific an approach to the natural world, seeing it instead as a source of twee illustrations of God’s bounty and beneficence. Priscilla was aware of this, and suggested accordingly,
“I think it’s God controlling the universe.” She was used to the sort of metaphors favoured by Miss Trixie, and their general intent. “Look! His reach extends everywhere!” she lisped.
“Now children,” trilled Trixie, “our theme today is –“ at this Trixie assumed a tremulous tone –“deception! Who can tell us what this little image has to do with it?” Trixie flourished her hand in the direction of her drawing, and the hall went very quiet. The children’s eyes temporarily assumed the wobbly spiral pattern of the drawing as the puzzled at it.
“I think it’s Gr…” piped Little Jack, till he was suppressed by Priscilla’s hand, tactfully stuffed in his mouth. (You will applaud, dear Reader, her spontaneity.) A few of Little Jack’s friends, who’d already heard the witticism, giggled.
“It’s the wicked spider!” Trixie declaimed, the moral force of this declamation emphasised by much noisy sucking in of breath. “I’m sure your parents have all told you the saying, ‘What a tangled web we weave, when at first we do deceive’? Well, we learn this from the depravity of this sly, creepy beast, which traps unthinking creatures with its camouflaged web. In everything you do, children…”
“Miss! Miss!” Johnny called out. “My Dad says that spiders play an important role in reducing pests in Nature. They’re really very clean and prevent the spread of disease by flies.”
“Johnny Bull! What nonsense you are talking! It’s a fallen creature, like the serpent, damned for its underhand ways! And it teaches us all a lesson, not to do the same!”
Well, Dear Reader, I’m sure you’ve heard enough of this sort of thing. It continued for some time in the same vein, until the children’s jaws could drop no further.
Little Jack, in particular, sat in open-mouthed awe at the persuasive force of this disquisition. He knew exactly how to apply this teaching, which confirmed the urgency of some straight talking where his family was concerned. Grandma French was coming for Sunday lunch, and he was really going to impress her with his respect for the truth.
Johnny was bemused. His father, the local biology teacher, had frequently impressed upon him the amorality of animals, the fact that they followed instincts, rather than moral rules. But if this spider was so wicked… well, Johnny would have some things to say to his sister’s cat, which had been terrorising Polly, his parrot, when he got home.
Priscilla was now feeling very frustrated. She had long wanted a little baby brother or sister, and despite some very persistent nagging, her parents had failed to produce one, though they had never adequately explained where it was they had to go to get one. Surely Miss Trixie, therefore, with her determined devotion to the truth, would be able to tell her.
“Well my dear,” Miss Trixie spluttered, “what a question! Have your parents not explained?” Assured they hadn’t, Miss Trixie controlled her blushing and continued: “There’s a stork, a very kind stork, who lives in the woods at the far side of town. If you ask him very nicely, he will bring you a baby. But go and see your parents about it first.” Her awkward duty discharged, Trixie flounced off.
Dear Reader, I think you will agree that our search for truth has not begun well. How many obstacles, human and inhuman, moral and immoral, get in its way! How many diversions and distractions there are in the long, winding path to its summit! As our dear children find out when they go home, zealous for the truth.
Little Jack was seized by the elbow immediately upon arrival and frogmarched to the bathroom where his fringe was slicked down again, and his face scrubbed till it shone, prior to being sent to see Grandma.
“Grandma, we’ve been learning about truth today at Sunday School, and how important it is to tell the truth always. It’s lovely to see you Grandma, but I have some suggestions for a strict weight loss programme for you. And I think you should try Listerine. It works in 98% of cases, apparently, and even reduces the bact…”
Dear Reader, I think I need only add at this point that it took Mrs French several days of levering with a screwdriver to extract Grandma’s false teeth from the wall in which her outrage had implanted them.
Priscilla, meanwhile, made her way to the woods in search of the stork. After some creeping about, she spotted some movement in a hedge, and approached with her most winning smile.
“I want to know where babies come from,” she declared, stopping suddenly when she realised it was not the stork she was addressing, but Kevin from the bus shelter, as he was universally known in the town, a feckless drop-out regarded as a largely innocuous nuisance. “Oh, I thought you were the stork who brings babies,” Priscilla explained, failing to hide the disappointment in her voice. “You see, Miss Trixie told me that the stork could get a baby for me.”
“Oh no, my dear,” Kevin leered. “It’s not a stork. It’s more like a rat.” At this he beckoned her towards the shelter of his hedge. “Let me show you…”
Dear Reader, fear not for Priscilla’s virtue! The force of her character saw her through and the encounter ended when she yelled:
“Ugh! Ugh! That’s not a rat! It’s a shrew!” She thumped it viciously with her Sunday School Bible, and ran home, determined to confront her parents more determinedly than ever about the scarcity of both babies and storks.
Her journey home was interrupted by more shouting and animal yelping which aroused her curiosity. She got close enough to see Johnny, holding his sister’s cat up by the tail, and beating it with a toy spade.
“Wicked, wicked cat!” He was yelling. “Don’t you ever dare threaten Polly again!” But Priscilla had bigger fish to fry. She still hadn’t found the stork.
Well, dear Reader, have you found the truth in all of this? Is it a beaten cat? A pulped rodent? An outraged grandmother? Or a wily spider?
Personally I think it’s the stork.
Saturday, 16 July 2005
Cheating by Kate Smurthwaite
Cheating
In my early twenties despite, or perhaps as a result of being a well-educated woman with a good job and all the customary trimmings I was frequently temped to be violent. Sometimes I was. It felt so good to land a punch, smack, in an eye-socket and see the surprise, the fear and the pain in the reeling face, to feel the hatred flowing out of me and the power in through my sore knuckles. Drawing myself up I inhaled, watching for their next move: repent, retreat or retaliate? Safe in the knowledge that I had already inflicted some damage. And breathing out again, breathing quickly, I could feel all the parts of my body, my arms, my legs, my torso, my neck, and I narrowed my eyes and sucked my cheeks in a little without ever taking my eyes away from my victim. It’s called adrenaline and you’re never so much alive as when it’s coursing through your veins, pounding into your heart. You never forget those moments when it defines you. Years later you can picture every freckle, every hair, every pore.
It’s been a long time. I’m not as strong as I was back then, but I always do a few extra on those machines at the gym after my personal trainer has left me. I get out the weights he optimistically asked for a few years back and used once on Boxing Day and never again. Or I use bean-tins in the kitchen while the eggs are boiling. Twenty reps, thirty, fifty. In my head I’m still a fighter, the head is more important than the body. I still wanted to be a fighter all along, but you can’t, you have to face up to your responsibility. Small children, a home, a family, him.
Yes him. The bastard. The last eighteen years of my life. I wanted him so badly I pretended to be a NICE girl. I played the whole role. I quit my job, I did his stinking laundry, cooked his favourite tea, pretended I liked his awful music. I raised his screaming brats and I didn’t complain when he spent his weekends on the golf course and they barely knew who he was. I moved home with him time and again though it took me away from everyone else I ever loved. I cleaned the toilets; did he think they cleaned themselves? I organised our lives, made sure there was milk in the fridge and biscuits in the box for him to grow fat eating. I didn’t get fat, I didn’t get lazy, I didn’t reject him. I didn’t start screwing around with some little trollop client who’s had more botox than the rest of us have had hot dinners.
What does she think she’s doing? Someone else’s husband. She probably says to herself “It’s not me that’s cheating, it’s him.” She shouldn’t have to feel bad about it, but of course she does. She probably imagines me as a quiet mousy type. Of course she imagines that, I’m being walked all over. He probably tells her I nag him, I irritate him; he can’t stand me shuffling about the house, my smell, the noise I make when I’m eating. He tells her he’s too good for me. I wonder if she knows my name. Elaine. Elaine the mouse. I’ve been creeping around like a mouse lately. Or maybe more like a fox, a sneaky fox. I know everything about her.
Her name is Jennifer Warrington; she works as a marketing executive for Bromley Media Associates, 24 Eastcheap, near Bank Station. Her home address is Flat 14, Clove House, North Avenue, Maida Vale. That’s where she fucks my husband. Very nice area, nasty ex-council flat though. She owns it but she has a lodger, called Ruth, who she drinks with at weekends and they both hang their expensive skimpy lingerie out on the balcony to dry and to let the world know what sexual “goddesses” they are. Sometimes she visits her parents at the weekends, they live in Gloucester. When she does they always take her out to a restaurant on the river. The Blue Room it’s called. I go there some week days when he’s out; sometimes her parents are there for lunch. I chat to them. They think I went to the same school as Jennifer. I would have been a few years older than her of course, but they tell me she swears she remembers me. If I ever get away at the weekend she’s dying to meet me. I know where she has her lunch, where she does Pilates, where she goes rollerblading (I think it’s undignified at her age), I know everything about her. She wears size 6 shoes, size 12 clothes and a size 34C bra. She wears thongs and culottes in the summer with wispy floral tops and some strapless support. In the winter it’s dark suits and white shirts and the leather shoulder-bag. She has her hair cut at Tony and Guy near her office, dyed auburn to hide the grey and to betray her true harlot nature.
Once a fighter though, always a fighter. I am ready for her now; I am waiting for my moment. I have it all planned. I want him to see me too, to see how much stronger than her I am, and to realise what a fool he’s been to walk all over me, what a fool she’s been to steal away the only thing that really matters in my life.
They’re going to a Christmas party next week. It’s a client do, for everyone from his office and all the important clients are going to be there. Of course I wouldn’t want him coming back late at night, drunk, and disturbing the children. So he’s oh-so-kindly offered to stay in a hotel. The Wardour Intercontinental, where it turns out the porters take bribes. He hasn’t told me this bit himself but I’ve heard he’s treating her; he’s booked the executive suite. Jacuzzi, marble bath, jet shower, drinks cabinet, balcony, four-poster bed, complimentary champagne, a basket of fruit, lounge room, dressing room, king-sized bedroom, view of the city, oh and one little extra they didn’t know they’d ordered: me.
I’ll be sitting in the back room, I may even open up the champers for a spot of Dutch courage, I shouldn’t think they’ll fancy it when I’m done. They’ll come in and probably start kissing in the lounge, he’ll have the blue and white dress she’s ordered specially off at one shoulder and be cramming his greasy hand down it, grasping his whole hand around her breast, trying to free it so he can start sucking on it. I won’t interrupt them. I’ll wait for them to spot me. Wait for them to notice the smoke from my cigarette drifting through the doorway and shuffle to peer through to see me reclined, champagne flute in one hand, cigarette in the other. I’ve ordered a dress specially for the occasion too, it wouldn’t be right to show up in jeans. Its gold and reaches to the floor but with gaping slits up each side to allow for maximum fighting manoeuvrability. It cost a lot of money but it won’t show up on his credit card bill until next month and he’ll have much bigger things to worry about by then. I’ll be calm and un-moving, my eyes staring at them coldly. I’ll let him start to explain, to apologise, to beg me not to over-react, not to be unreasonable.
Then I’ll get up, showing off the full effect of my dress, a lot more glamorous than her corporate function number. And I’ll throw my first proper punches for twenty years. Her first, left hook. Then him with my stronger right. If the first blow knocks her over I’ll step across her so I can hit him before he stoops to help her. The taller they stand, the further to fall. I doubt I’ll floor him, he’s out of shape but he’s sturdy.
I don’t know what will happen next. I know I’ll be ready for it, breathing deep fast breaths from the bottom of my being. Perhaps she’ll hit her head on the doorframe on the way down and lose consciousness. It’s easier if she does, she might be weak but two on one isn’t a fair fight. Will he decide he’s strong enough to take me on? Or will he crumble, beg me to stop, try to negotiate me out of what he perceives as my insanity but I well know will be the first moment of truly clear thought I’ve had in a very long time. Perhaps he’ll call for help. It might kill her, the corner of the bed-post or the desk, thunk, into the back of her head. How would he handle that? Coming face to face with a murderer? His adoring homely little wife, frumpy nagging Elaine, Elaine the murderer?
He has no idea what he’s up against. Mouthful of bread and I’m looking at my reflection on the back of the cooker, saying “I coulda been a contender”. Nice. “I coulda has class, I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am”. Footwork, footwork, footwork, backwards across the freshly-polished kitchen tiles. “Float like a butterfly”. Left hook, right hook, block. Keep the neck loose, stay on your toes. I know how to fight, I’ve seen the movies, I’ve read the books, I’ve studied self-defence, boxing, kick-boxing, Judo, Karate, Tae Kwan Do, Capoeira, everything. I have to do something to pass the daytimes when the kids are at school and he’s busy whispering secrets in her overpriced bachelorette pad.
And what if he hits me? What if he hurts me? Don’t make me laugh. What could he possibly do to hurt me from here? I’m as hurt as I can be already. The physical throbbing would take my mind away from the pain it feels all the time, would numb it. I’d be grateful for a good hard clout to start the tears rolling, to burst the swollen balloon of unbearable feelings and let them all come out.
I’d like to kill her. To be sure she was dead. I don’t want to take a weapon though. That would be cheating. I want it to be me that does it, not something I bought in a hardware store. Anyway you take a weapon it’s pre-meditated, its murder. You do it with your bare hands and get a decent lawyer its manslaughter; you can be free in five years. Free. What a stupid term. I haven’t been free for the last eighteen years. I’d love to go to prison for killing her. No kids to look after, no housework to do, leave it all to him. And no possibility of him fucking her in the afternoon while his secretary tells me she’s not sure, he must have just popped out.
What a great thought, him on his own. No me, no Jennifer and just the three kids who hate him anyway and need picking up and dropping off and taking round to their friends houses, feeding and shopping for, organising for, consuming all his time thanklessly. He’d live his life day in day out with no hope of feeling that warmth of human skin against his. The only skin on skin feeling that could ever be better than the feeling of a good punch connecting. The feeling that reminds us we’re human, that we all crave, me as much as anyone. If only I didn’t crave it, I might have lived my life out otherwise, without him, been a great athlete or a fairground boxer. World’s strongest woman.
In my early twenties despite, or perhaps as a result of being a well-educated woman with a good job and all the customary trimmings I was frequently temped to be violent. Sometimes I was. It felt so good to land a punch, smack, in an eye-socket and see the surprise, the fear and the pain in the reeling face, to feel the hatred flowing out of me and the power in through my sore knuckles. Drawing myself up I inhaled, watching for their next move: repent, retreat or retaliate? Safe in the knowledge that I had already inflicted some damage. And breathing out again, breathing quickly, I could feel all the parts of my body, my arms, my legs, my torso, my neck, and I narrowed my eyes and sucked my cheeks in a little without ever taking my eyes away from my victim. It’s called adrenaline and you’re never so much alive as when it’s coursing through your veins, pounding into your heart. You never forget those moments when it defines you. Years later you can picture every freckle, every hair, every pore.
It’s been a long time. I’m not as strong as I was back then, but I always do a few extra on those machines at the gym after my personal trainer has left me. I get out the weights he optimistically asked for a few years back and used once on Boxing Day and never again. Or I use bean-tins in the kitchen while the eggs are boiling. Twenty reps, thirty, fifty. In my head I’m still a fighter, the head is more important than the body. I still wanted to be a fighter all along, but you can’t, you have to face up to your responsibility. Small children, a home, a family, him.
Yes him. The bastard. The last eighteen years of my life. I wanted him so badly I pretended to be a NICE girl. I played the whole role. I quit my job, I did his stinking laundry, cooked his favourite tea, pretended I liked his awful music. I raised his screaming brats and I didn’t complain when he spent his weekends on the golf course and they barely knew who he was. I moved home with him time and again though it took me away from everyone else I ever loved. I cleaned the toilets; did he think they cleaned themselves? I organised our lives, made sure there was milk in the fridge and biscuits in the box for him to grow fat eating. I didn’t get fat, I didn’t get lazy, I didn’t reject him. I didn’t start screwing around with some little trollop client who’s had more botox than the rest of us have had hot dinners.
What does she think she’s doing? Someone else’s husband. She probably says to herself “It’s not me that’s cheating, it’s him.” She shouldn’t have to feel bad about it, but of course she does. She probably imagines me as a quiet mousy type. Of course she imagines that, I’m being walked all over. He probably tells her I nag him, I irritate him; he can’t stand me shuffling about the house, my smell, the noise I make when I’m eating. He tells her he’s too good for me. I wonder if she knows my name. Elaine. Elaine the mouse. I’ve been creeping around like a mouse lately. Or maybe more like a fox, a sneaky fox. I know everything about her.
Her name is Jennifer Warrington; she works as a marketing executive for Bromley Media Associates, 24 Eastcheap, near Bank Station. Her home address is Flat 14, Clove House, North Avenue, Maida Vale. That’s where she fucks my husband. Very nice area, nasty ex-council flat though. She owns it but she has a lodger, called Ruth, who she drinks with at weekends and they both hang their expensive skimpy lingerie out on the balcony to dry and to let the world know what sexual “goddesses” they are. Sometimes she visits her parents at the weekends, they live in Gloucester. When she does they always take her out to a restaurant on the river. The Blue Room it’s called. I go there some week days when he’s out; sometimes her parents are there for lunch. I chat to them. They think I went to the same school as Jennifer. I would have been a few years older than her of course, but they tell me she swears she remembers me. If I ever get away at the weekend she’s dying to meet me. I know where she has her lunch, where she does Pilates, where she goes rollerblading (I think it’s undignified at her age), I know everything about her. She wears size 6 shoes, size 12 clothes and a size 34C bra. She wears thongs and culottes in the summer with wispy floral tops and some strapless support. In the winter it’s dark suits and white shirts and the leather shoulder-bag. She has her hair cut at Tony and Guy near her office, dyed auburn to hide the grey and to betray her true harlot nature.
Once a fighter though, always a fighter. I am ready for her now; I am waiting for my moment. I have it all planned. I want him to see me too, to see how much stronger than her I am, and to realise what a fool he’s been to walk all over me, what a fool she’s been to steal away the only thing that really matters in my life.
They’re going to a Christmas party next week. It’s a client do, for everyone from his office and all the important clients are going to be there. Of course I wouldn’t want him coming back late at night, drunk, and disturbing the children. So he’s oh-so-kindly offered to stay in a hotel. The Wardour Intercontinental, where it turns out the porters take bribes. He hasn’t told me this bit himself but I’ve heard he’s treating her; he’s booked the executive suite. Jacuzzi, marble bath, jet shower, drinks cabinet, balcony, four-poster bed, complimentary champagne, a basket of fruit, lounge room, dressing room, king-sized bedroom, view of the city, oh and one little extra they didn’t know they’d ordered: me.
I’ll be sitting in the back room, I may even open up the champers for a spot of Dutch courage, I shouldn’t think they’ll fancy it when I’m done. They’ll come in and probably start kissing in the lounge, he’ll have the blue and white dress she’s ordered specially off at one shoulder and be cramming his greasy hand down it, grasping his whole hand around her breast, trying to free it so he can start sucking on it. I won’t interrupt them. I’ll wait for them to spot me. Wait for them to notice the smoke from my cigarette drifting through the doorway and shuffle to peer through to see me reclined, champagne flute in one hand, cigarette in the other. I’ve ordered a dress specially for the occasion too, it wouldn’t be right to show up in jeans. Its gold and reaches to the floor but with gaping slits up each side to allow for maximum fighting manoeuvrability. It cost a lot of money but it won’t show up on his credit card bill until next month and he’ll have much bigger things to worry about by then. I’ll be calm and un-moving, my eyes staring at them coldly. I’ll let him start to explain, to apologise, to beg me not to over-react, not to be unreasonable.
Then I’ll get up, showing off the full effect of my dress, a lot more glamorous than her corporate function number. And I’ll throw my first proper punches for twenty years. Her first, left hook. Then him with my stronger right. If the first blow knocks her over I’ll step across her so I can hit him before he stoops to help her. The taller they stand, the further to fall. I doubt I’ll floor him, he’s out of shape but he’s sturdy.
I don’t know what will happen next. I know I’ll be ready for it, breathing deep fast breaths from the bottom of my being. Perhaps she’ll hit her head on the doorframe on the way down and lose consciousness. It’s easier if she does, she might be weak but two on one isn’t a fair fight. Will he decide he’s strong enough to take me on? Or will he crumble, beg me to stop, try to negotiate me out of what he perceives as my insanity but I well know will be the first moment of truly clear thought I’ve had in a very long time. Perhaps he’ll call for help. It might kill her, the corner of the bed-post or the desk, thunk, into the back of her head. How would he handle that? Coming face to face with a murderer? His adoring homely little wife, frumpy nagging Elaine, Elaine the murderer?
He has no idea what he’s up against. Mouthful of bread and I’m looking at my reflection on the back of the cooker, saying “I coulda been a contender”. Nice. “I coulda has class, I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am”. Footwork, footwork, footwork, backwards across the freshly-polished kitchen tiles. “Float like a butterfly”. Left hook, right hook, block. Keep the neck loose, stay on your toes. I know how to fight, I’ve seen the movies, I’ve read the books, I’ve studied self-defence, boxing, kick-boxing, Judo, Karate, Tae Kwan Do, Capoeira, everything. I have to do something to pass the daytimes when the kids are at school and he’s busy whispering secrets in her overpriced bachelorette pad.
And what if he hits me? What if he hurts me? Don’t make me laugh. What could he possibly do to hurt me from here? I’m as hurt as I can be already. The physical throbbing would take my mind away from the pain it feels all the time, would numb it. I’d be grateful for a good hard clout to start the tears rolling, to burst the swollen balloon of unbearable feelings and let them all come out.
I’d like to kill her. To be sure she was dead. I don’t want to take a weapon though. That would be cheating. I want it to be me that does it, not something I bought in a hardware store. Anyway you take a weapon it’s pre-meditated, its murder. You do it with your bare hands and get a decent lawyer its manslaughter; you can be free in five years. Free. What a stupid term. I haven’t been free for the last eighteen years. I’d love to go to prison for killing her. No kids to look after, no housework to do, leave it all to him. And no possibility of him fucking her in the afternoon while his secretary tells me she’s not sure, he must have just popped out.
What a great thought, him on his own. No me, no Jennifer and just the three kids who hate him anyway and need picking up and dropping off and taking round to their friends houses, feeding and shopping for, organising for, consuming all his time thanklessly. He’d live his life day in day out with no hope of feeling that warmth of human skin against his. The only skin on skin feeling that could ever be better than the feeling of a good punch connecting. The feeling that reminds us we’re human, that we all crave, me as much as anyone. If only I didn’t crave it, I might have lived my life out otherwise, without him, been a great athlete or a fairground boxer. World’s strongest woman.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)