a seventy ninth story...'an excoriation'

There was a chink of light cast into the hallway from the half-ajar bedroom door.  Julian hesitated.  His right hand, holding a whiskey tumbler, was shaking with emotion, his whole body feeling post-fight adrenalin coursing through it.  But he stayed where he was on the landing.  He was old enough to know that to rush in and resume hostilities would only make both of them feel worse. 

Back downstairs in the drawing room, unsteadily he poured himself another whiskey, and slumped back into his deep, crimson-red leather arm chair.  The maritime clock on the wall said a quarter past midnight.  Julian rubbed the skin between his left eye and the bridge of his nose, took a sip of his whiskey, tried to calm down.  There was silence all through the building, but in Julian’s mind it was an uneasy silence, the echo of her shouts and screams still resonating.

‘Typical’, Julian scoffed, and took a gulp of his whiskey.  She always had to ruin everything, when everything was so much fun.  Another spike of anger rose within him, and in a flash he recalled all the other times.  And then her ingratitude at all the things he had done for her, and how he coped so admirably when she made scene after scene. 

Julian put his feet out in front of him on an oak footstool, and drained his glass.  Sorrow will come soon he thought, and he kicked the footstool away, rising groggily to fix another drink to keep the recriminations at bay.

Then a strange thing happened.

The soft, yellow lamp lights in the living room flickered and went out, plunging the room into inky-blue darkness.  Julian felt a sharp pain searing into his shin bone.  He had caught the low edge of the satin-wood coffee table.  ‘Fuck’, he cursed under his breath; the coffee table - yet another one of her purchases. 

Rubbing his shin, Julian lurched across the drawing room to the fuse box, behind long, heavy curtains that concealed the casement view of the garden and the Surrey Hills beyond, but just as he was about to get there the lamp lights flickered on again.  Julian stopped.  ‘Fine’, he said, and turned around to find his whiskey bottle.

~

Gah! Julian woke suddenly and with a chill down his spine.  He swore he had heard a window being broken, or had he simply been dreaming the all too vivid dream of someone who falls asleep hurting?  He rubbed his face vigorously as if trying to massage his head into a state of alertness.  The soft, yellow lamp lights were still on, but the maritime clock had stopped.

Julian looked at his wrist watch only to remember he had left it in the bed-room some hours earlier.  The maritime clock, stopped?  A family heirloom, it had run and run for years, but all things must end thought Julian, hauling himself into an upright position, and yes, there was the reason for his waking – his whiskey tumbler lay shattered across the varnished wooden floorboards, small, amber pools of liquor forming around the smashed glass fragments.

Julian’s head was thick. however, the thought of having to creep upstairs to bed and slide silently and apologetically under the bed covers, before confronting his wife in the morning, teary-eyed and fragile, ready to snap at the slightest sleight, brought him swiftly and uncomfortably to his senses. 

Before anything else, he had to sweep up the mess he had made.

~

The utility cupboard where they kept dust pans and brushes, floors mops and so on, was naturally under the wood-panneled main staircase.

Opening the utility cupboard door Julian was greeted by the rich, tart odour of shoe polish.  The new maid was still putting things in the wrong place. ‘It belongs in the garage’, Julian muttered, groping for the dustpan and brush toward the back of the cupboard, at once entertaining the idea of an extended morning in the garage scrupulously washing his sports car, and why not tomorrow?!

After a few fumbling moments his fingers found the unfamiliar shape of the dustpan, with a small hand brush lodged inside.  A sense of purpose had galvanised him, and he backed out of the cupboard, but as he did so managed to misplace his footing and suddenly he was tumbling backwards with mop and broom falling loudly with him. 

The clatter echoed on into the silence. 

And then, fffft, the lamp lighting in the drawing room down the hallway went out again.  Julian was pitched into the dark once more.

~

A power cut thought Julian as he began to re-stow the utility cupboard, what else could go wrong!  For such an old house things tended to function remarkably well, not that being in the Surrey Hills was exactly being in the middle of nowhere; still, there were days, nights even, Julian conceded, as he quietly propped up mop and broom once again, when it did feel lonely, and there were corners where shadows remained at all times..

..The time!

High time I went to bed, Julian decided, and made to move back towards the drawing room to the fuse box, to the light.  But he was stopped in his tracks for there was a glow emanating from the upstairs passage, filtering strangely into the stairwell where he stood, still – it seemed to be coming from their bedroom, the door, half-ajar. 

Another chill in Julian shot away to anger at himself, he had woken her, or perhaps she fell asleep with the light on? The next thought.  Julian grimaced in the gloom.  The decent thing would be to go and see if she’s OK.

~

Climbing the stairs, past the elaborately framed hunting portraits of yester-year, Julian kept an unusually tight grasp of the banisters.  His body was tensing again, and the adrenalin was running higher with each step toward the light.  The light was indeed from their bedroom door, half-ajar, inviting and repelling in the same instant. 

Julian had nearly reached the top of the landing now, and before venturing further paused a moment underneath a painting of a young woman posing on a lavish bed in an ivory white dress, her head curiously to one side.

I’m scared. 

Scared of your wife??

Julian felt perspiration break from the pores on his neck.

Don’t be so foolish he told himself,

Be a man!

And so Julian stepped onto the landing and with every hair standing on the back of his neck, and the sensation his spine was freezing, shielding his eyes, he approached the bedroom door, the light, now a glare, beckoning him on with an awful sense of the unknown, an awful sense of..

There with her back to him, sat bolt upright on their bed was his wife, head lolling on her shoulder, the reading light on the side table throwing a bold tone across the room, and with a jolt that nearly stopped his heart, Julian saw the crimson-red pool of blood pussing from under the seat of his wife’s ivory white night-dress.

And the coat-hanger that bought it all rushing back to him, abandoned by her side.

a seventy eighth story...'rosebud'

‘Look what the storm blew in, Joan.  Look!’. 

Joan sat and stared.

In a room upstairs a door slammed shut.

‘It’s an Alsatian puppy’, Gordon continued.

‘Look at it!  It must be soaked to the bone’.

Joan’s glassy eyes gazed into the near distance.

Somewhere deep inside a blue flame still flickered. 

But the fire would never return.

For the fire had already destroyed her body, and left Joan trapped inside the cauterized attic walls of her mind.

Gordon half knew this, half pretended he did not.

‘Come here’, he said, sweeping the puppy up in his great arms.  ‘You are wet, aren’tchyu’.

The wind came again, and rattled the window panes, precarious in their old lead lattices.

Gordon was a big man, in a big woollen jumper and heavy duty black jeans turned up at the bottoms, his rain-swept dark hair gave him the look of a mariner, so too his big, ruddy features, fat, bristling side-burns.

Joan blinked.

But these days she never missed anything, for she could not, stationed and impotent, and yet ever vigilant. 

She found in her state of paralysis she saw, and in one sense felt so much more, the tragedy being she could express so much less.

If the Alsatian puppy were to break from Gordon’s woolly embrace, dart across the front room and bound into her lap, and begin licking her face, she would sense for the first time the whole coarseness of an animal tongue, even if she would not be able to feel his dancing little feet on her lap.

The grand-father clock in the hallway chimed the half hour.  Where time for Gordon moved too fast, or indeed too slow, at least for Joan it was now a steady trickle, with an end not far off.

‘Cup of tea?’, Gordon asked.

Joan blinked again.

‘Right then’, said Gordon. 

‘Bet you’re a hungry, little fellow’, Gordon said to the puppy, his voice trailing away into the kitchen with the damp thud of his heavy boots.

Life is lonely, and life is too long, thought Joan to herself and no one else.

And the puppy barked, and the wind whistled through the house.

a fifth reflection...'hope, faith and the chicken's egg'

Oh, were it not for the faint odour of hope!  The sweet, sweet whiff that disappears as quickly as the smell of a baker’s dozen on the breeze, but locks in the sense memory and leads one into a continual cycle of promise, disappointment and recrimination.  For in life, as in the throes of death, we are forever on the edge of something beautiful; and yet how many of us really trust to leap into the foggy gap and have faith!?  Faith in what you may ask, where, to begin with at least, faith in anything will do, whether it be God and all his many mis-shapes, moaning pop-stars washed in by a tide of faded glories, eleven unlucky boys of Red, or simply faith in good company and the restorative powers of the amber poison (up to a point!). 

Above all the key to achieving more than transient joy is perhaps to understand the interplay between hope and faith.  Life coaches, business managers both half strangled by their corporate ties will preach from under corporate wigs the importance of ‘expectation management’.  In the simplest essence they mean don’t get ahead of yourself, and yet in the race to the grave who is, in fact, tripping over their shoe-laces with haste?  We want to live, we want to love, but we don’t want to catch something we might become ashamed of.  And to be unhappy in these day-glo days is to present a pasty face, inviting the often meaningless, and impossible to answer platitude: ‘are you OK?’.

Are we OK?  Well, we hope so.  But we are only OK, or sometimes happy, as far as circumstances allow.  And circumstances rely on other things being in order, often outside of our direct control.  For when the old woman in us all dies, without a developing basis for faith, surely the dog in us all will follow soon thereafter, stricken by an internal, bleeding grief?  When the bright, vivacious and life-giving young drama student in us all departs, without a developing basis for faith, surely we’ll feel so very old and redundant?

Chicken and eggs, egg and chickens - not by the way a hangover cure - but which comes first, hope or faith? Maybe it is enough to have some kind of faith in a dream that can last, or a life that can regenerate, and then hope can linger, even in the great swamp of human existence, rather than turn putrid, sully the heart, and scourge the soul.  

What is the point of learning science? - initial reflections of a science teacher

Science, in spite of being a method rather than a subject, is considered part of the core curriculum for UK school students. Students are expected to be initiated into a vast body of knowledge, recalling a relatively random selection of facts from the immeasurably huge set of information that has been discovered using the scientific method. Students are also expected to spend some time learning about how a scientific experiment is performed, and most likely having a go at a few.

This is taken for granted as a key part of a modern education, and is not commonly questioned. Although I believe that students do indeed need to study science in school, I think the focus is somewhat wrong-headed.

Some students will go on to study sciences at university. These students require a strong grounding in scientific principles, and a keen memory for the endless facts uncovered by hundreds of years of research. However, these students are in the minority.  A slightly larger share of students will study science A-levels. To be successful in these, they need a reasonable understanding of key concepts – like photosynthesis for biology, atomic structure for chemistry and the idea of an electron for physics. These concepts become assumed by A-level, and they underpin the content taught at this standard. However, again, these students are in the minority. This means that the need for simple knowledge of content is important for a number of children, but not most. For them, the point in learning science is always preparation for the next stage. The actual facts are not as self-evidently important to all other students’ lives as, for instance, vocabulary. For them, the majority, memorising scientific information is not really good use of their time.

So far, this sounds pessimistic about school science. Maybe so, but this is because the actual content of science at school is not very relevant to most children (why do they care about the composition of Earth’s atmosphere three billion years ago?). Science as a school subject, and indeed as a professional occupation, is generally presented by schools and in the media as an existing body of knowledge, a set of difficult facts, which can be learned verbatim if you choose.

In fact, the development of the scientific method has been arguably the greatest cultural revolution in the history of civilisation. Prior to the appreciation that testing an idea in controlled conditions, over and over, knowledge was unsystematic and predicated on a wise individuals’ personal opinion or impressions. The rise of the scientific method as the preferred window onto nature (and later, human behaviour and relations) led to a mind-bogglingly rapid development of our understanding of the cosmos and gave rise to technology that changes faster than most of us can keep up with. However, most students leave school still believing that science is a kind of authority (hence the terrible, annoyingly common, misleading and grammatically incorrect phrase ‘according to science’) that is able to pronounce on many issues of concern to us all, like human health and whether the Earth is warming up, but is often not the only opinion in the room. People (school leavers!) don’t appreciate that the scientific method is the most rigorous and most reliable path to truth on, I would argue, almost all avenues of human interest. Science is frequently presented as one truth among many options, with the opinion of more-or-less informed people being placed at the same level of importance. Thus, the ‘scientific perspective’ is offered as one opinion among many, where scientific evidence is pitched against personal perspectives, as though the two are comparable in validity. A classic example of this was the controversy (sic) surrounding the MMR vaccine, where ‘expert opinions’ were presented alongside the view of Cherie Blair and her dangerously ignorant life coach. The key problem with the media presentation of this was that the expert opinion seemed to be the personal notions of this old academic, rather than being conveyed as a statement supported by the very best evidence available – in this case, that MMR is completely safe. This example is instructive too, since it shows the danger of leaving decisions like vaccinating one’s child to ill-informed opinion – children who went unvaccinated have subsequently died from measles. In a way, it would be more useful to have the scientific evidence presented by a well-informed layman, rather than an academic. This would remind us that most scientific findings that pertain directly to our health are fairly easily understood by anyone prepared to take the time to read about them; one doesn’t need a degree in epidemiology or some such discipline. This would also remind us of the point made earlier: that an expert opinion is not worth anything unless the expert is interpreting the evidence correctly. The crucial thing is that properly collected scientific evidence leaves virtually no room for personal opinion, and this is what sets it apart.

So, in school, students need to develop a far more thorough, deeper and broader understanding of what the scientific method entails, why it is the gold-standard of evidence collection (there is even a ranking system for the quality of data based on the type of methods used, with randomised, double-blinded, controlled trials being the ideal for any health intervention), how to interpret the results of scientific endeavour and how to unpick a piece of scientific research. This is difficult. School science experiments tend to be very discrete, in that students are given a set of equipment to find out a particular piece of information; with any luck, their findings match the theory and everyone goes home happy (most especially the science teacher). This approach is very useful for teaching students that carefully changing only one variable, assiduously keeping all other factors the same, and measuring the impact on a variable of interest means that only the factor that was changed could have had the effect. Clearly, manipulating multiple variables at a time is self-defeating, since you won’t be able to say which one caused the change in outcome. This principle is fantastically important in scientific discovery, so it is very constructive for students to learn to value it, but in fact it misses a key aspect – the most creative aspect – of ‘real’ scientific research: the selection of what to look for and what to alter to see its effect. I argue that students should begin their science education with the teacher pointing in the direction of the appropriate variables to choose, to develop the concept, but later on there has to be the freedom to choose their own and thus take research in directions they choose. This would be powerful in that students can begin to understand that the forefront of scientific research involves a fair amount of blundering in the dark. Moreover, research is often considered ‘good’ when it generates more questions on a topic after answering a couple. This generation of questions as a direct result of experimentation is almost entirely absent from the school science narrative.

These questions, which arise as a natural consequence of finding one thing out, help to direct the generation of scientific models. Scientific models are the bread and butter of school science, although many students and even teachers don’t really appreciate this. A timely example is the standard model of particle physics, which recently received dramatic further verification through the confirmation of the existence of a particle called the Higgs’ boson. And yet, the very idea of a particle is a model of reality – a description, accessible to anyone with the time and inclination to read about it, of how things are in (relatively!) day-to-day language. Every relevant experiment has found support for this model, which is why it is lauded as the greatest and most complete model of reality. Perhaps a more pertinent example for an article on school science would be the particle theory, of a different type. Readers may recall drawing little circles to represent the arrangement of particles (meant quite differently from the particles in the standard model!) in solids, liquids and gases during their time in school. This particle model of matter is fantastically useful for explaining phenomena such as melting, conduction of heat, convection, evaporation and so forth. However, the recognition that this is a model, a simplified conceptual framework to describe how the world actually is, often goes a begging. It could be argued that it is too difficult for young teens to understand that you can explain natural phenomena with a model that is not, very strictly speaking, ‘reality’. Yet models of thinking underpin any intellectual endeavour, not just science. There are models of geographical processes, of language and linguistics, of psychological processes and so on. Grasping that accepted paradigms are taught to you in school, but they are liable to shift with new evidence, seems to be a vital lesson on the way to the overarching goal of education as I see it: to learn to think for yourself.

The largest leaps in scientific progress happen when someone makes an observation that seems a little fishy given the accepted paradigm. A lovely example is Edwin Hubble’s observation of nebulae – these vast space clouds had been observed before, but were thought to be within the Milky Way. Hubble was suspicious of this accepted model of the universe, and was creative enough to go looking for evidence that contradicted the paradigm. Through observations of Cepheid variable stars and attendant brightness/apparent brightness calculations, he stimulated a paradigm shift to a picture we now take for granted: the universe is not limited to just our galaxy. Historical examples like this can be enlightening; however, as outlined above, scientific evidence tends to be presented as finished fact – a sort of end point. The reality is that it is built of fluid models, subject to change. This Hubble example is not taught within standard science curricula, which is a shame because it would appeal strongly to children’s irrepressible curiosity about things like the size of the universe. In fact, school science becomes very bogged down in the applications of science to ‘real life’ and everyday technology, at the expense of the big questions. There seems to have been a misguided sense that students will find science more interesting and relevant if it applies to their lives – thus students learn about how plastics are made and how electricity is generated. Nothing particularly wrong or even boring, in such subjects of study, but science has certainly tackled many more immediately interesting topics! There is no reason to avoid studying the size of the universe, the effects of purified laudanum on the body, necrotising fasciitis, how a blue whale can hold its breath for so long and other simply interesting things. These are interesting because they are spiritual, involve high risk, are gory or are extreme. You could say: the kinds of topics you’d see on a science TV show. This is a rub for some – the idea that the noble quest for truth represented by application of the scientific method would be dumbed down and reduced to pop science. However, that is to forget that long before career scientists even existed, progress was made by hobbyists with time and money on their hands, who were interested in how the world works. This intellectual curiosity has not gone away, it is still apparent in even the most disaffected teenagers, and is the route into teaching science as a huge project to make sense of the universe. Thus, not only does the emphasis of school science need to change as described earlier, the topics through which the scientific method can be taught also need an overhaul.

Finally, while developing an acute awareness that science is the greatest intellectual movement of all time, students should learn the limits to what science can find out. Ultimately, it is one method of interrogating the world around us for understanding, and can answer the vast majority of questions on how things work and why things happen. However, the insatiable human need for meaning is unsatisfied by answers in terms of the Big Bang, gravity and evolution on a planet in the Goldilock’s zone. Human beings will look elsewhere for emotional fulfilment – I’m not bitter about it – and science will not help them. Passing sensible judgement on what science can and can’t find out should be the final lesson learned by students in school, so they can decide for themselves on issues that attract and affect us all. 

a seventy seventh story...'cow with a parasol'

Eric was the sum of his misfortune.

The sad equation was written into his face.

He had been waiting around for his wife to die for six years.

Only now she was gone did he understand how much of her there had been in him.

And how many of his friends were, in fact, hers.

Nevertheless, Eric had a daughter.

Eric’s daughter was an actress.

She would visit him from the city once a month.

When she came she would find the house, the family home, in a state of neglect, and her father dressed in the threadbare remnants of his flagging spirit.

‘Come on, Daddy’, she would cajole him, ‘you have to clean up after yourself’. ‘You have to make more of an effort’.

‘I know’, Eric would sigh.  And then there would often follow a lament for his departed wife.

‘But you’re still alive, Daddy’, his daughter would say.

And Eric would nod, even though, in truth, he knew he was more than half-dead.

Seeing Eric’s mordant expression, his daughter, out of a mixture of pity and sympathy, would ask for him to go and stay with her in the city.

Eric always resisted with what resistance there was left in him.

The city was full of life.

Indeed, the shock might have killed Eric when all really he desired was to be whisked away in his sleep – to his wife, wherever she was.

~

Before his wife became ill, Eric was a successful art-dealer.

He had loved art almost as much as he loved his wife, or so he used to imagine.

And yet even his passion for his one time favourite, Chagall, had dimmed.

Although he would still sit in the living room where ‘Cow With A Parasol’ hung above the mantelpiece, these days he looked at the painting less with admiration, more with growing despair.

In the top left hand corner of the painting was the white-veiled spectre of his late wife, embracing a young man.

The young man, of course, had once been Eric.

What troubled Eric most about ‘Cow With A Parasol’, now his wife was dead, was the fact it had come to appear in the painting that where the eyes of Eric, the young man, were fixed firmly on his bride, the eyes of Eric’s wife gazed distractedly into the living room.

When his wife was alive, and they would sit together in the living room on the leather recliner after dinner, and drink wine, Eric had never noticed this.

Nor the expression on his wife’s face in the painting – was it sadness? Or worse, indifference? Barely concealed disgust?! 

At any rate there was something disconcerting in her appearance.

~

Like Eric, Chagall, the man who painted ‘Cow With A Parasol’, lost his wife before he was lost to her.

When the Nazis invaded France, Chagall’s wife, Bella, died from a swift and fatal viral infection during their traumatic escape into exile.

Chagall, who movingly described Bella as his ‘soul’ and ‘inspirer’, was naturally devastated.

And yet for Chagall, Bella would live on for him in his paintings, paintings - including ‘Cow With A Parasol’ – that in their spinneys of vibrant colour and rich pastel shades helped Chagall reconcile his spirit and express his loss fruitfully.

Unlike Chagall, Eric’s association and love of art was coloured by money.

It had bought him happiness while his wife was alive, indeed he had been glad of it; but now she was gone, he realised it all added up to nothing.

Lo, there grew in Eric a desperate and wanton feeling he had mistaken greed and lust for something altogether more luminous and sacred.

And when he looked at ‘Cow With A Parasol’, with the dispassionate glut of knowledge he had of it’s creator, learned as wrote when an art-dealer, and the miserable expression on the countenance of his wife, it was akin to looking through a window into his perhaps vacant soul.

~

Incidentally, Eric had once met Chagall at an art fair in New York after the war.  He remembered with a mixture of fondness and sorrow, how his wife had so charmed the famous painter with her wit, when he had been tongue tied in the presence of someone he had learned was a genius.

Since his wife had died, this half-buried memory had found a new and rather more malignant form in ‘Cow With A Parasol’, only seeking to reinforce Eric’s feeling that without his wife his existence was worthless.

Then one evening after a particularly difficult day, at least half of which Eric had spent in his dressing gown, nursing a scotch, slumped in the living room on the leather recliner, gazing at the painting, an idea miraculously swum to the surface of his befuddled consciousness.

He sat bolt upright; suddenly resolute for the first time in a long while.

Action was needed.

The painting had to be go! 

Could he even bring himself to destroy it?

~

After Eric had paced up and down the living room for a few moments, letting the idea breathe a little and develop more of a life of it’s own from where he would be able to have a better perspective on it, it became clear to him the best solution was  to persuade his daughter to take the painting back to the city with her, following her next visit.

It shouldn’t be too difficult, Eric thought, to persuade his daughter.  After all, having an original Chagall in her London home would surely appeal to the exhibitionist inside her.  Moreover, actresses liked to entertain and be the talk of town.

And so it proved easy.

Two days later his daughter came to visit, and again in part out of pity and sympathy, in a greater part out of a vainglorious wish to be the aforementioned talk of town, she quickly acquiesced to Eric’s wish.

‘You seem more cheery, today, Daddy’ she remarked, and Eric for once agreed.  He did feel better.

Moving the painting to his daughter’s house meant he wouldn’t have to part forever with the memory of his beloved wife, not to mention a jolly expensive work of art, but instead, that the psychological torment ‘Cow With A Parasol’ had recently been inflicting on him would be alleviated.

The painting, he thought, might take on new meaning at his daughter’s house, where, on visiting her (perhaps the city wasn’t so bad after all these days), Eric mused he might joyfully rediscover it, or at least, be able to derive satisfaction from the painting the way he used to.

Therefore, after tea, and before his daughter was due back in the city, together they went into the drawing room, and stood for a while, on Eric’s request, to take in ‘Cow With A Parasol’ for one last time hanging on the mantelpiece in its place of the last thirty years.

‘Any regrets, say now!’ said his daughter.

‘It’s coming to stay with me otherwise’.

Eric looked into the beautiful green eyes of his daughter, and to his surprise felt a sense of calm descend.

‘No dear’, he said, ‘none at all’.

And without further ado, he moved across the hearth to lift the painting from the wall.

But as he did so, a folded up piece of paper, stained yellow with age, fell from behind the canvas.

His daughter moved passed him to pick it up, while Eric carefully leaned the painting against the adjacent wall.

Then he turned around.

His daughter had unfolded the piece of paper and was looking at it with mouth open, a confused and pained expression forming on her brow.

‘What is it, dear?’, Eric asked.  ‘What does it say?’

Eric’s daughter put her hand to her mouth, and took a step back.

‘It’s a love letter’, she said in a low voice … ‘between Mummy and..

..Marc Chagall’.

a forty fifth poem...'an old shilling'

Walking the dog

One dismal afternoon,

I found myself among

A sight-seeing platoon,

Passing the iron gates

at Buckingham Palace.

There I was along

With the usual throng

of American tourists:

Gee-whizzing,

Holy-rolling, or

Simply scratching

Baseball-capped heads..

..Fretting with the lining

In my cast-off-coat pocket,

The rough edge of a round sprocket

Turned out to be

An old shilling.

Ever keen/willing

I tossed the thing,

 Said:
‘Tails you win’,

To Cromwell - My King Charles Spaniel..

..But he, instead,

(As is his wont)

Was up to knavish tricks,

More bothered about

The steaming pile of horse-shit

Left behind,

By a house-hold cavalry steed,

To pay mind,
Take heed

Of all the ironies

Inherent therein

That happy (and glorious) moment.

Saving the Human Race

Troy and Beth were umm-ing and ahh-ing about having a baby. They were rattling around in that old cage, made of poorly paid jobs and ideas that, in another time, it would be considered gentlemanly to call ‘above their station.’ There was also their age: both must have been late thirties by now and much publicity about Down’s syndrome wriggled into their self-perception, giving them a kind of pre-parenthood guilt. However, the greatest cause of their inertia was Troy’s illness. He had a diagnosis of mesothelioma but no prognosis. His doctors muttered confusedly about unclear MRIs; it seems Troy’s scans were muddy, and thus, so was his future. The cause of his cancer was supremely obvious, on the other hand. Troy had been on a team stripping an old warehouse who realized a little late that they were tearing asbestos from the ceiling, letting the lethal insulation rain down on them. The construction firm was arguing in circles about the payments; Troy and Beth were in perpetual hope of a windfall, but the apples were held fast to that tree, at least for now. In sum, the loving pair didn’t know what to do. When they had sex, Beth’s injections made the decision for them. While at home together, they’d all but given up discussing babies. When they went to work, it seemed that their colleagues were in a malicious league against their procreating.

Troy’s boss seemed to spend all weekend reading broadsheets and came in on Mondays, eager to impart the lessons learned to Troy, since he was polite enough to listen. One lecture resounded in Troy’s mind, and as an overweight man, it was hard not to take it personally.

‘I read this really good article about epigenetics,’ Troy’s robust, balding boss with a tattooed neck expounded. Troy looked at him blankly. The boss continued: ‘You don’t just pass on your DNA to your kids you know. It turns out that when you have children, you can sometimes pass on your bad health as well as your DNA. So if you are unhealthy, your kids are more likely to be too. Say for example, you are obese, this fucks with your sperm and your kids are more likely to be obese too. Makes you think.’

Troy’s boss always ended his accounts with ‘makes you think.’ Often, Troy wasn’t sure what the homily to Sunday papers was supposed to make him think, but this time it was quite plain. For Troy, this was yet another way in which the errors of generations gone were delivered, unmarked but with their targets profoundly clear, onto the next. He thought that his boss’ story just went to show that ruination of your offspring was inevitable, and yet he couldn’t avoid that tenacious feeling, which has saved the human race really, that somehow he would do it better, if only he had the chance.

Beth, for her part, worked in a school office, where no one liked children. She guarded the confiscated phones, sold the uniforms, sent the letters to the parents. Beth also minded the counter where students came with their endless pathetic problems. It gave her pause, dealing with teenagers and their vacant personalities. However, in another twist of human psychology that has saved us from extinction, the teenage years just felt so different from her pre-pregnancy position that they couldn’t seem to relate to her unresolved desire for a little tot.

The couple received much more badgering about breeding from Troy’s family than Beth’s. Troy’s Jamaican mother would sit in her floral armchair and shout over the radio, which was constantly tuned to live healings and righteous condemnation of all the sinners, pointing conspicuously at Troy’s crotch, ‘Why haven’t I got any grandchildren yet?’ Troy’s father would sit in his mismatched tartan chair and just look quizzically from Troy to Beth and back again, the epitome of nonplussed husband. This usually happened on Sunday afternoons, after Troy’s parents had been to their histrionic church. The ministering, of the same flavour as her preferred radio stations, tended to put Troy’s mother into something of a fervour, and she would clutch Beth’s arm and say, ‘I can get the Reverend to bless you, just say the word. He can mend a rotten womb you know.’

Beth would regard the cats, perched all over the little sitting room, and say, ‘Thank you, Sandra, but there’s no need. We need to know about Troy’s prognosis before we think about that.’

When the conversation took this turn, Troy would usually stand up and shake off his long loose limbs, grab a biscuit for the road and announce their departure. Like his dad, Troy was what a women’s magazine would call an ‘issue avoider’. (The pun apparently lost on the editing team.) His father always said the same thing at this point: ‘Already, son? Well, you two go easy out there.’ As though ‘out there’ was a place, or state of mind, foreign to him.

Beth’s obfuscation around Troy’s parents masked her genuine mounting broodiness. It went from vague feeling to concrete decision one evening at her best friend Mary-Beth’s house. Yes, they were Beth and Mary-Beth, two peas in a name pod, as their teachers had once moronically said. Mary-Beth called up Beth and asked if she and Troy wanted to come for dinner.

‘We want to tell you something,’ Mary-Beth said elusively.

Mary-Beth’s husband was called Floris, a slightly simpering man whose most striking physical features were his skinny wrists leading to huge hands. They were all out of proportion, so he looked like Michelangelo’s David if David was pigeon-chested and had wrinkled eyelids. Floris welcomed Troy and Beth and pressed cold bottles of beer into their hands.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said, bowing slightly in pretend deference, and shook Troy’s hand. Troy had an urge to wrap his thumb and forefinger around that wrist, but he resisted. Mary-Beth bustled in from the kitchen; she looked like first prize at the fair. She smiled hugely and kissed both the guests.

Mary-Beth sipped wine along with the others, confusing Beth slightly. Beth glared at her, wiling her to break the news they obviously had. They waited until after dessert and after Floris’ overlong story about a guy he worked with who received half a million pounds in his medical settlement. There was silence a moment then Mary-Beth nudged Floris and stage-whispered, ‘Let’s tell them now.’

Floris breathed in arrogantly through his nostrils. ‘As our best friends,’ he began, looking at Troy carefully, who didn’t flinch. ‘We wanted to tell you first that we have decided never to have children. It just isn’t for us. I had ‘the snip’ last week.’ He said ‘the snip’ like that, bending his fingers in the air ridiculously.

Troy had no idea what to say. He didn’t know if this was meant to be some kind of consolation for his troubles, or an act of tremendous solidarity.

Troy was a competitive man, one of those bum-grabbers and ball-clutchers in Sunday league football. He looked casually at Floris, wondering selfishly whether this was some sort of challenge, a little game of one-upmanship, since Floris made so sure to tell them that it was the snip. So they’d never suspect fertility problems when children failed to be born to them. Floris just smiled sentimentally at his wife. Beth thought she detected a feather of falseness in the smile that Mary-Beth gave back to him.

Later that night Beth and Troy near broke the bed. Afterwards, she said to him, sounding like an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine, ‘Damn it all Troy, let’s risk it. I know you’re going to be fine, and we’ll get the pay-out.’ For Beth, a child would bring meaning to their chill pain. Or maybe she wanted one for Mary-Beth, on her behalf, as it were. Either way, no one deserved a child more than them, because for no one else was it such a hard choice.

Beth said, ‘If you agree, I won’t go for my next injection.’ He rolled over, looked away, but he said ok.

However, they were to be foiled by the tumours in Troy’s lungs. Suddenly, his cancer got worse, with timing that made Beth unavoidably think something appalling: that this was a kind of perverse evasion. It archly stopped responding to treatment. The doctors were as bemused as ever.

Within three months Troy was bedridden. Treatment stopped as the options were exhausted. Beth was on leave to care for him. To this day, however, Beth has never told how her husband managed to get her pregnant in his pathetic state, especially since it may have been what finished him off.

They had tried for as long as Troy was able, but, cruelly, Beth’s hormone injections were still wearing off. Eventually, Troy didn’t have the energy. ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ he said mournfully. ‘You’d be a single mum.’ Yet Beth was a strong-minded woman. With Troy on a dearth of time, Beth bought a huge naked shot of his preferred porn star, a choice pitifully apparent from opening the search history on the laptop. She stuck the four-foot poster on the inside of the bedroom door and woke her husband. She put her hand under the covers and whispered, ‘Look at that.’

Troy stared through half-lidded eyes and his wife felt some interest under the sheets. After a minute, she could move her hand rhythmically. As Troy began to sigh, Beth grabbed the jam jar she had assiduously sterilized and used it to gather her husband’s final contribution to this world. She immediately capped it and placed the jar in the freezer. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Troy was at peace, a serene smile on his lips.

And in the end? The construction company gave the pay-out the following week – Troy’s death finally snagging their guilt. Beth could pay for the IVF and she bore Troy’s daughter, who became a happy, if sometimes listless, child with clear eyes and chapped lips. As foretold by Troy’s tattooed boss, she grew to an enormous circumference by thirty, but it seems spiteful to blame a father who absurdly inverted an ancient trend to become a man who died during conception, or at least his part in it, rather than a mother dying in childbirth. 

a forty fourth poem...'retirement three'

Rise,10AM:

Make sure

Radio Four

Is on

For no good reason

Except..being on.

Butter scone,

Make tea,

Read Daily Telegraph

Front page,

Back three.

Think about (one day)

Owning bees.

Contemplate

Donation to charity;

Decide against,

Give instead

To the Conservative Party.

Draft letter for

Errant-son-

Number-one:

‘Call off engagement,

She’s half your wit,

Weighs a tonne’.

Signed: Your Loving Father.

Have second thoughts,

After - 

Then stamp and post

The damn thing anyway

Amidst fits of..

..Laughter.

a forty third poem...'the sea'

When I sleep

I dream of waves:

Sheer walls of water

Climbing toward me,

Steeping crests

On the brink of breaking

Over my head.

And you,

You who led me

Down

To the ocean,

Standing on a siren rock,

Waiting in white robes

To be washed

Away
By the sea.

a forty second poem...'the loggers'

Woke up this morning to the rumble of logs,

An engine revving,

Men in oily dungarees, check shirts

(or, so I imagined)

Shouting;

The whole cabin, shuddering

Sheet glass in the single pane windows,

Shaking.

‘What’s going on?’

My wife asked, drowsily,

Her bare back to me,

The eiderdown half covering

Her head of

Tousled black hair.

I swung my legs out of bed,

Put both feet on the splintered wooden floorboards,

Rubbed the sleep

From my eyes,

‘It’s the loggers’,

I replied.

‘Louie won’t like it’,

My wife said again.

Louie is our Labrador.

He’s not up to much.

‘Louie won’t like it’,

I repeated.

Knowing what was coming next.

‘Are you going to go on check on him?’

- My wife, once more.

‘He’ll be whining’, she said.

Oh heck, I thought.

‘He will’, I said.

‘Go on then’, she said.

‘Alright’, I said.

A chainsaw screamed into life outside the cabin.

I hated the loggers then.