a twenty first new story...'bad objects'

Justin walked straight up to me and said for me to put it down. He said: ‘You shouldn’t carry bad objects around’. I said: ‘Yes, Justin – I’ll put it down’. ‘Why have you still got it anyhow?’, he asked, eyes hard and mean. ‘I don’t know’, I said, ‘in case they come back’. ‘They isn’t coming back’, Justin said, and took the bottle from my hand, I let him have it. ‘Stay out of it’, he said, and went away to talk to the people in the kitchen. The lights were off in the bar. I let my hands fall to my sides and thought about following Justin into the kitchen, but Jim was still in there and I didn’t want to see Jim after he shouted at me. Besides Jim was bigger than me – even bigger, Justin said. ‘You big lummox’, Jim said. And together they dragged the man away who was causing trouble. The man had blood all over his face and his shirt was soaked with blood, and there was blood on the floor of the bar. ‘Don’t worry’, said Justin, ‘we’ll sort this’. The man was sleeping with blood all over him. ‘Where did he get that bottle from?’, Chef asked, meaning me.  Jim shouted at Chef too, and he nearly went for Chef, but Justin held Jim back, and the man kept on sleeping. And I kept a tight grip on the bottle in case the man waked up and went for me again. Then Justin came back and asked why I still had the bottle. I let him have it and waited while Justin and Jim and Chef and the others talked in the kitchen. I wondered where the man who caused the trouble was sleeping. There were harsh voices coming from the kitchen. And yellow light spilling out into the bar where I waited. And some more men came around and threw a rock at the windows of the bar, one of the windows smashed, and there was lots of shouting and glass, and Justin, Jim and Chef called for the police. And they came with their blue lights and big, square faces and clubs and heavy black boots and they wanted to talk to me as well as Justin but Justin wouldn’t let them, said I couldn’t talk anyway and so I didn’t say anything, and when they went Jim came over, pulled my cheek and said I done well. I asked him if the man who caused trouble was still asleep, and Justin said to Jim they had better go and check and Chef gave me a glass of water and waited with me until it got light and Justin and Jim came back with long, tired faces – and Chef started crying and saying he never meant to get into this game, and saying what about Elaine? And what about the baby?

a twentieth new story...'rubber man'

The Advent work party: Edwin’s boss, a Christian, wanted to put up a stand against faith neutral festivities. Partners are welcome too, after all what would Jesus do? And as ever Edwin’s wife was being charming, engaging, appropriately dressed as an angel. And Edwin was all sour cabbages, a Brussels sprout. He had come as the overshadowed Joseph. Does my breath smell? And now found himself in a conversation about school days, salad days?

At least it wasn’t work, salary hikes, promotions.

But school had been dull.  Lessons had dragged into what seemed like the next century. The teachers were all on medication for depression – or most of them. So Edwin had passed the time picking his nose. And one day he had got a pencil rubber stuck in his nasal passage. Cue two decades of sinusitis, until Edwin finally divulged the incident to his wife, was operated on, and thereafter became known as Rubber Man – among family, friends, now, work associates.

‘The Rubber Man who works in plastics!’

Edwin smiled weakly, already regretting his attempt to be self-deprecating and funny at the same time. ‘Yes’, he said.

Oh! The hilarity! The company made Perspex for exhibition and retail display, as well as kitchenware. And all the ‘team’ here, at an awkward grown up nativity.

‘Of all the jobs!’, Martin from Sales was saying, the conversation apparently not changing tack. Of all the jobs! Edwin thought to himself - The Rubber Man in plastics. ‘But I suppose I sell kitchenware and I can’t even cook’, scoffed Martin, pastry falling from his mouth and onto the shag pile carpet. Thus, ‘real’ life like school continues interminably Edwin mused. Still, there was drink – he sniffed his mulled wine. Drink and music – palatable mulled wine – and the occasional good film of book, book of film – evidence for God?

‘The Wicker Man’. Boy’s conversation arrived at last. Terence (Marketing) had joined the fray, always had something to say. ‘Good film?’ Edwin wondered aloud. ‘A cult classic’, asserted Terence, self-styled movie buff, black-framed specs, sculpted quiff. ‘Don’t tell the boss’, said Edwin trying to wink. He envied Terence. ‘The boss is a Christian’, added Martin helpfully, crumbs on his Christmas sweater...‘The boss makes an unconvincing wise man’, said Terence. Then back to movies: ‘They should make a feature about you!’, Martin –  joking and clapping Edwin forcefully on the shoulder, cider punch in his spittle. The Rubber Man.

‘What would be better or worse for the crew – the acrid smell of burning artificial elastomer, or the scent of human flesh on fire?’ Edwin replied. So bitter these days both Martin and Terence confided in another party guest further into the evening. And Edwin overheard.

You can’t win.

But can you really lose?

A philosophical question of the middle classes Edwin considered often enough. And any existence that involved being born and subsequently dying … did it matter what the Average Joe did in between?

‘Whatever you do, turn out a nice boy’, Edwin’s mother – Eleanor – had said to Edwin on her death bed. Edwin was fourteen when his mother died. And by eighteen he had decided being a nice boy meant mostly keeping one’s mouth shut, smiling with eyes, laughing charitably in the company of others – sells kitchenware for a living and he can’t even cook. Hahahaha!

It was painful.

‘There are no revelations’ said Edwin to his wife in bed that night, reluctantly engaged in a little pillow talk. ‘No revelations?’, said his wife. ‘What about us? Married happily or otherwise for three years, together for seven’.

‘True’, Edwin replied, and they kissed. 

What a nice boy.

His wife’s lips were full and moist.

What a nice girl.

‘I think you’re experiencing low mood’, she whispered, stroking his cheek, her breath all red wine, cheese and digestive biscuits.

‘I don’t dream anymore’, said Edwin, blindlessly to the darkness.

‘I dream about living in a medieval castle in the middle of Central Park’ said his wife.

‘That’s really something’, said Edwin.

‘Don’t be cynical’, said his wife, and kissed him again.

‘Good night’, said Edwin.

‘Good night, Sir Knight’, said his wife.

~

Next morning they woke late, went for coffee at Grind.  ‘Does that sound wrong to you?’ Edwin asked as they pushed through the swing door. The sign outside read: It’s beginning to feel a Latte like Christmas. Inside, the wait staff, bedecked in seasonal red and green, wore hair bands with reindeer antlers; the duty manager, a Santa hat with flashing LED bobble.

They found a table, sat down and squinted at the menu.

‘I’ll try the vanilla macchiato’, said Edwin when asked what they wanted to order by reindeer woman who had trotted over to them smiling like a moose. Edwin’s wife went for a double espresso.

‘It’s cold isn’t it?’ she said, rubbing her mittens together, as reindeer woman went behind the counter to inscribe their names in felt tip on their Styrofoam cups. ‘Between two and six degrees’, Edwin replied opening the newspaper at Weather Report, then news of mass murder at a synagogue in Bethlehem.

You can’t win.

But can you really lose?

Unable to stop himself, he pushed the article in the direction of his wife, watched her expression for traces of irritation, pain, anger, fear, revulsion.   

‘Shall we get mistletoe at the DIY store?’ she asked instead by way of reply. The light shining in her eyes – bright, bright, bright …

Edwin felt low and mean, quickly snatched the newspaper back and thrust it deep into his bag.

‘Sure’, he said.

And tried to wink. 

a nineteenth new story...'beyond saying'

Sandra worried about Joel. She worried he had never been at the centre of things – in life. Sandra felt she looked in a mirror and saw herself.  She blinked, put on her make up, got dressed and went to work.  She worried Joel saw someone else staring back at him – the great undiscovered artist, the alter ego, the latter day Van Gogh. Joel had once painted his left ear blue: Was this a sign?

Joel was big, clumsy, but with delicate hands; he played Spanish guitar, wrote flamenco protest songs about champagne socialism formed from bits and pieces he read online or in magazines left lying around in doctor’s and dentist’s waiting rooms – The Economist? National Geographic? He was capable of enormous generosity. And astonishing naïveity. He could be self-centred.

Recently when Sandra had come home early from work she heard Joel on the toilet talking to himself. Quietly she had slipped off her shoes, tip-toed up to the bathroom door, pressed her ear close.  Joel was conducting an interview with an imaginary music journo. The difficult third album? Yes … At an earlier point in their relationship Sandra would have laughed and banged on the door: Shut up you silly fool!! Instead she crept back down the hallway and started to make dinner.

In fairness Joel had a few gigs here and there. He played in pubs, clubs, wine bars – though not the trendy ones. He was a good player. One of the reasons I fell in love with him Sandra would tell girlfriends. What were the other reasons? They would respond. Can you imagine having his babies?

Sandra had imagined having Joel’s babies a thousand times.  She wanted babies. Her girlfriends now had babies, and for some reason Sandra was part of a Facebook group, but she had long since given up reading posts about morning sickness, or following links to articles about the pelvic floor.  When she held babies she came over all motherly, when she saw Joel holding them she worried about their soft little heads.

Joel had dropped a stack of six plates in front of dinner guests before. He could be pre-occupied.

‘What are you thinking?’, Sandra would try during their evenings on the sofa together in front of one sitcom or another. ‘Nothing’, Joel would reply. Sandra’s idle moments were filled with anything and everything. And worries about Joel. ‘You are distant today’, she would continue. And Joel would say ‘no’. The sitcoms they watched were invariably filled with broken lives, heads, broken people fighting with blind eyes in broken beds. The two of them: At least they could share a space beyond words.

Joel made love gently. And Sandra was thankful for this. Making love to Joel was not like exploding through the cosmos, nor was it like scratching an insect bite.  It was something in between, something almost serene – Zen? It was also when worries in all shapes and shades were left under the pile of clothes on the bedroom floor.

an eighteenth new story...'biting into limes'

Miles opened the bedroom door with a jolt, then with the deliberate actions of a drunk attempted to close it behind him quietly. And then he stumbled over Judy’s shoes, arranged neatly by the bed, cracked his head on the bedroom wall. Judy closed her eyes. Miles cursed in a harsh whisper. And when Judy broke, rolled over, turned on the bedside lamp, Miles was on bended knee trying to rearrange her collection of heels. He looked up, blinking, like a big racoon caught red-handed stealing whatever it is racoons steal or try to steal. ‘Alright?’ he said dumbly.

In the end neither of them could sleep and Miles suggested they watch a video.  ‘How’s your head?’ asked Judy, touching the throbbing lump erupting from Miles’ scalp of matted hair, dried blood? ‘Gnnn’, said Miles in stoic code.  ‘What do you want to watch?’

Judy didn’t know, didn’t care, never did – films were Miles’ thing, documentary films, man-eating bears, serial-killers, climbing accidents on Mount Everest; Judy would watch the first five minutes, doze off on his chest. Although Miles always offered her a selection and when she said ‘you choose’, he often chose Into Thin Air. ‘Frostbite can be deadly’, he would tell her, Judy half in a blanket of sleep, ‘Snow blindness too’.

‘What did you see out there?’ she had asked once shortly after Miles’ return. Picked a bad moment: noisy city basement bar, among people they knew, several drinks down. Miles had simply wandered off to the gents, saying nothing. When he returned he bought shots for everyone – breathe out, lick salt, down tequila, bite lime. Then they went home. Next morning Judy cuddled up to him said, ‘that was a generous thing you did last night’. Miles looked non-plussed. ‘The shots … for everyone’, Judy said. ‘Oh’, said Miles, ‘it's nothing, the military pension …the military sort you out alright’.

A police siren came and went somewhere outside. ‘I was a bad kid at school you know’, said Miles, reaching around the back of the television set to check if the VCR was plugged in. Judy was propped up on one arm watching his back.  Miles was a big, strong man, running to fat, the drink, the not working – ‘only one true friend in the world’. And Judy.

The light on the VCR showed.  ‘It’s on’, Judy said. Miles came from the other side of the television set, gut hanging out from underneath his grey T-shirt. ‘It’s on’, he repeated, pausing for a few seconds as if something hadn’t properly registered, or was registering. All fours he looked up at Judy again. ‘Don’t go to sleep this time’, he said, 20th Century Fox appearing on the screen behind him, searchlights left, right.

‘It’s late’, Judy said, yawning.

And then, taking her hand from her mouth, ‘so, we’re starting at the beginning?’ 

a thirty eighth new poem...'tour de fraud'

PC Pemberton caught

Bradley Wiggins red-

Handed doing wheelies

On a Boris Bike outside

The Lord Mayor’s office in

London. Then and there

Pemberton gave Wiggins a

Seventy-five pound

Fine and asked him to

Sign each bank note, before

Going home and framing the petty

Crime above his mantelpiece.

Pemberton’s wife wasn’t so

Chuffed. She hated the

Tour de France.  It had ruined

Their summer holidays

For nearly fifteen years, especially

Her husband’s insistence that

They try and keep up with

The peleton at every stage, and

Now there was a constant reminder

Above the television set – yet

She said nothing about corruption,

Pemberton hadn’t spent

The money she supposed.  He could

Give it back to the commissioner

At any time ...

Oh! But he

Couldn’t stop going on about it,

And during their last dinner

Party he interrupted main

Course to take guests into the

Living room and show them

Bradley Wiggins’ signature

On all eight of the notes.

Wiggins had paid with

Seven tens, one five.

‘Why an Olympic champion

Had cash on him I’ll

Never know’, said Pemberton,

Although in truth there were plenty of

Things in life that remained

A mystery to PC Pemberton,

Including his

Wife’s Osgood-Schlatter’s,

Most French vocabulary, and

The fact Wiggins’ bank notes

Were robbed from the mealy

Purse of a single parent

Mother with disabled child after

Wiggins - gone wild - had mistakenly

Pawned his gold medals, then

Defaulted on the loan.

a seventeenth new story ... 'all the best lines'

‘I love you and I want to trust you’, Julie to her husband Giles.  They were lying in bed after a boozy night at the school play – performed by the children, with the teachers (naturally) the stars of the show … all the best lines. Ha!

‘Do you love me?’, mumbled Giles in reply. ‘Yes’ said Julie. And Giles turned over on his side, was fast asleep within minutes, snoring, farting. And Julie tried not to think about their sharing a bed together, sleeping, eating habits, married life, outcomes – decided instead to focus on income. Giles is richer than my wildest dreams thought Julie, nevertheless she stayed awake until morning.

It was three or four weeks later that Julie began to sense Giles might be having an affair.  ‘Darling, I am snowed …’, he would say, calling from the office, ‘I’ll be home late’.  ‘Again?’, Julie would ask. ‘Yes, again!’, Giles would counter irritably.  Julie would then prepare dinner for their five year old, put her to bed, sit in the living room and drink. And in these moments of personal solace she reiterated to herself that she loved Giles and wanted to trust him, yet if he was having an affair, then she was in a chain, waiting for her husband to recover his moral imperative (?) in his own sweet time. As if waiting on a fucking house purchase. But what space would be left to move into if Giles decided his own sweet time was now with someone else? If he was having an affair.

So Julie made a plan, choosing to ignore the hard truth that plans can fall through, so often they do. ‘I’ve bought us tickets to the ballet’, she announced after four gin and tonics when Giles staggered in late from work as ever. ‘And I’ve arranged a baby-sitter’.

Is it me or is he walking funny these days? thought Julie bitterly to herself, though trying to smile, if to Giles it might have looked like she was about to have her wisdom teeth pulled out with rusty pliers. ‘Ohh’, said Giles. And there followed a lot of hmmphing, umming, arraagghing … Open wide! Julie went to sleep wishing she was somewhere, anywhere else … even the back-street dentist.

In the end Giles generously agreed to accompany his wife to the ballet – he told his new partner it was out of pity, sympathy, guilt on ‘a Catholic scale’, not love. And he insisted to his wife on a baby-sitter.  ‘I know someone new, someone more affordable’, he told Julie. ‘How much?’, asked Julie. ‘Free, so long as we provide a bottle of good wine’. ‘Fine by me’, said Julie. My wife is a drunk and a nag Giles had also told his partner … and the way she smiles at me these days!

The ballet was a modern dance interpretation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  Julie found herself wishing Giles had legs like a Roman praetor, Giles found himself remembering with almost unbearable prescience the ballet’s famous Act III.

When they returned home Giles’ new partner had taken the child and, as agreed, a suitcase full of Giles’ clothes. It was left to Giles to decide whether to play the role of Brutus or Judas. Being a weak and cowardly man he went for Judas.

As Giles kissed his wife for the last time, Julie drove a corkscrew through his jugular. ‘BLEED FOR THE SAKE OF JUSTICE!!’, she screamed over Giles’ twitching body.  And then she ran out of the house into the dead, black night.  

a sixteenth new story...'double beds'

So this is it. Bag on her lap, Una gazed from the back window of the airport saloon taxi, jaded and simultaneously irked by the urban degradation, environmental catastrophe, visual noise like two saucepans banged together.  People actually live here!  Dehumanised – minds, souls dislocated from bodies.  Animals? But not like animals. Animals have a natural sense of being, of moving.

The taxi driver asked gruffly through the plexiglass if she would like the radio on.  Una said ‘no’, but he didn’t hear her, put it on anyway. Springsteen singing Born to Run - but from what, who? Ourselves?

A meat truck passed by, heading in the opposite direction and then shortly after a refrigerated lorry. Una imagined cow carcuses strung on hooks, row upon row, the same way you would hang fur coats, mink, Christmas decorations. What was Christmas without a good side of beef anyhow? On her lapel Una wore, had worn for yonks, a badge that read: ‘Cows are not for Christmas Dinner’. She had to concede though, in general, she liked America, or the notion of it – DIY meat culture aside. And she did once admit to having a crush on Bill Clinton.  Bill who? Her boyfriend had said.

Una was on her way to stay with her sister in Chicago.  Her sister had moved out there years previously with her husband. ‘We’ll be back within a few months’, they had both said, and Una had felt a horrible jar in her stomach.  ‘What’s the matter’, her sister asked, ‘oh nothing’, Una replied, went to the bathroom of her Chelsea flat, was sick. Man and womankind commiserated with all the doe-eyed boys who stumbled out into the world with high-fluted notions only for them to be left crushed and deserted, but what about the girls? The girls who weren’t allowed high-fluted notions in the first place! Half the time.

‘I just want to be with someone nice’, she had said at college to friends, and she had got someone nice, and she had felt smothered, as if she was being buttered and fattened up for the oven. Then she had thought she liked the thrill of the chase, but the two boys she had chased were smarter, or rather more heartless than her and treated her like a rag doll, Jessie from fucking Toy Story but without cowboy boots and hat … except perhaps at hen-dos – Una had been on far too many of late.

Una remembered her sister’s hen. They had gone deluxe camping – glamping? - in the woods somewhere near London. She had really tried to be happy for her sister, and join in the general uproar but something in her told her that this would never be for her, oh, and then he got down on one knee … the Spanish steps …

She turned her attention back to the radio - there was an advert for beds, double beds, and then a news article about Hilary.  

a thirty seventh new poem...'emotional tourettes'

Shit. Fuck. Shit. Shit. Piss. Fuck. Hell. Hell. Aaagh. Aaagh. Fuck. Shit. Pain. Shit.  Pain. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Shitting Fuck. Aaagh. Hell. Horror. Hell. Aaagh. Aaagh. Jeeeeeeesuusss!

Crap. Shit. Crap. Shit. Voice of Calm. Voice of Reason. Fuck. Hell. Hell to Fuck.
I Will Eat Myself. Ich Will!

Ill. Ill. Shit. Piss. Fuck. Hell. Aaaaaaaghh. Fuck. Shit. The Pain. Paaaiiin.
Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Shitting Fuck. Hell to Fuck. Hell. Horror. Hell. Why O Why O Fucking Why!

Deep Breaths! 

Go ... and ... get ... some ... of ... God's ... good ... air.

Three Half Lives

It was at mass, attended by only ten lingering faithful, that Gabe had his first post-meltdown meltdown. In the depths of the sermon he’d flung his arms aloft. The priest was initially filled with righteous pleasure as he saw his holy words inspire his congregation to religious ecstasy, forgetting, as many preachers do, the weird contradiction of losing control and speaking in tongues or some such temporal madness inside a religious building and the usual self-control demanded over, for instance, one’s zip-fly and one’s covetous desires. The joy was brief and quickly curdled as Gabe stood and yelled, ‘I’ve had enough of this platitudinous bullshit!’ (a difficult word to deliver at volume – it was only possible due to his rehearsing it in his head many times before doing it) and stormed from the church, leaving the door banging in the brisk north-westerly and the candle flames lurching.

This was four days after the meltdown. Unlikely individual events piled up in a tottering probability pyramid, a bad-luck confluence of failed pumps, ignited graphite rods and explosions in the core. A demon plume, Satan’s beacon for casual cosmic observers, his piss-stain marking his latest hell on Earth, laden with heavy particles of unthinking DNA-shredding capabilities. The unusual wind took the smoke over Gabriel’s town; had the prevailing breeze been a-blowing, it would have taken it the near-opposite direction: another reason for hapless Gabriel to curse his luck.

Thirty workers were killed on the day by explosions and steam jets through the fissures in the ruptured pipes. The authorities poured water from the skies over the reactor, and in desperation brought in the earth-movers to cover and attempt to seal the man-made cave of unholy menace. This just churned up the radioactive atoms and doomed the soil for half a million years. Whenever Gabriel thought of the radioactive waste being spilled and scattered, he pictured that woefully misleading drawing of the atom, with the little circles looping around the cluster of other circles, that symbolised the Progress of the Nuclear Industry, with each part live and fizzing, glowing by turns toxic green and blinding white. In truth, one such isotope could remain harmless for a billion years, or could blast you with radioactive particles in the next instant: it was more unpredictable than the next move of the good lord, and the latter was feeling especially random to Gabe by this time. Sick with the sheer mindlessness of it, Gabriel first sought solace at the Church of the Holy Mother. The priest said the usual stuff about knowing, or rather not, the mind of God. It had relaxed Gabriel somewhat, but unsurprisingly he felt helpless and hopeless. The town was being evacuated. Infantry trucks loaded comrades, one suitcase or shopping trolley apiece, and took them to the emergency refugee centres on the edge of the capital – gymnasia and church halls and so on. Gabriel, along with a few others, decided not to leave.

At the hour of the meltdown, he had been with a group at the church on the hill over the town, the Holy Mother that is. Had they been inside worshipping, the thick stone walls would have reduced their dose of radiation by absorbing some of it, and they may have got away with no more than a significantly increased risk of cancer. Instead, Gabe, the priest and a selection of other volunteers were outside on ladders, cleaning the impressive stained glass window at the head of the nave. Each received around three Sieverts of radiation according to the suited emergency response agent who spoke to the group – about the same as eating 30 million bananas, as it goes – enough to be fatal, usually within a few weeks. Some reasoned they should get out, so the exposure couldn’t go up much more, but for those like Gabriel, a disturbed despondency set in and they thought ‘what the hell’. Gabriel had a history of heading for the dead ends, in his career as a press photographer and in his love life, which was peppered with jilts and slow-burning disappointments.

So he stayed in the mostly abandoned town, to become a desolate orphan of the state, a refugee unusual since the world moved below him while he stayed still.

Gabe hid from the soldiers drafted in to help with the evacuation: he hadn’t clue whether they could force him to leave, but he didn’t want to risk it. With the lights off he lay down on the sofa below the window so they wouldn’t see him. Once the sound of engines and shouting had dissipated, Gabriel walked around. It was thrilling, to feel like the only human on Earth. He noticed, walking through town, that all the shops were unlocked and the stock still on show. He felt an illicit pinch of joy when he took a newspaper from a rack. The front page was about the prime minister’s successful visit with the American president in Washington. Gabriel went and put it back. He stepped into the main square, up to the stone cross memorial, then spun around in front of it with his arms spread wide. He shouted, ‘Meltdowwwwwn!’ at the top of his voice, then hastened for home with his collar turned up as he saw a figure down one of the streets off the square. Even in the madness of the situation, embarrassment – or its avoidance – was always the most pressing feeling.

Others had stayed too, a few of them: the priest, of course – the madness of martyrdom had afflicted him, the noble urge to protect his flock: protect their souls, as their bodies were long beyond protection now. In a way, his calling had become a more pure pursuit, for the asceticism and rejection of requirements of the flesh required by close reading of Saint Paul were made good. Too little, too damn late, said another stubborn stayer, of the priest’s new motivation. Gabriel met her over the telephone initially; he called the number on every lurid card pinned up in the phone booth – she was the only one who answered him. Cleo was a prostitute, yes, or ‘sex worker’, as her social worker had insisted on saying (before she split town), as though they were on the level. Gabriel found out the going rate and said fine. He went to her place, having asked if that was the usual thing. When he walked in, he gave her an awkward one-arm hug, from which she shrugged quickly away. The money was to be paid up front. She was Gabriel’s first prostitute, as he put it. He said: ‘You are my first prostitute,’ in that curious way in which one avoids even a euphemism for sex, to which she retorted: ‘When you first went to the dentist, did you say “You were my first dentist”? Or how about the first time you were served a beer? What did you say to the barman?’

Gabe, flummoxed, over-apologised, as he tended to do. She wasn’t too offended, though, she was used to the causal disparagement of her job choice, even by those who paid for her body, and welcomed his return business. At their third meeting, Gabriel asked Cleo why she had stayed in the condemned town. They were eating withered grapes from a bowl at her small Formica-topped table.

‘I don’t believe in radiation,’ she said.

For the second time in her company, Gabriel was nonplussed.

‘What do you mean? Radiation, well radiation is everywhere, you can’t choose not to believe in it.’

‘You can’t see it, feel it, smell it or taste it,’ said Cleo with finality.

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t real!’ The finality was lost on Gabe. ‘They still know it’s there. Scientists measure it, measure it with those…’ Gabriel hesitated. He had no idea how they knew it was there. He changed tack.

‘You can’t see or smell or anything things like… democracy. Still real.’ Gabe chose the generic example of an abstract noun, other than love, which would have been a bit much. His brain felt sluggish, fighting uphill.

‘No one’s claiming that democracy will kill me.’

Gabriel heard this uncompromising barrier, and realised that he was really attracted to this woman. He avoided whispering, “Whether you believe in it or not, it’ll still kill you.” His last word problem was a common stumbling block in Gabe’s relationship building. It sat uneasily with his constant apologising and eagerness to please – when it came up, it was a moment where his urge to be right, and to be seen as being right, trumped his urge to be liked. This time, though, with a huge act of willpower, he stopped, became accepting, and gave Cleo a kiss. It was a magic moment for him. This was on the evening after he marched out of mass. There was a niggling sense that his moral downfall was completed by the short walk from church to boudoir, but Gabe felt gorgeously liberated. He was so drunk on the feeling that life was being lived, for that evening he forgot his death was imminent. He was the mess it up, somewhat, but not until a few days later.

In the meantime, Gabriel took some photographs, for the first time since the meltdown. He turned the lens to deserted streets, the loitering plume of smoke that crept through the mound of earth, abandoned cars and an empty roundabout. In truth, it was as obvious as one could get with photos of a deserted, irradiated town, but the papers in the capital were keen for dramatic images of the tragic town. Gabe organised a portrait of every remaining townsperson (except the priest, who he was still avoiding), which won a double page spread in the national paper’s Saturday magazine. He shot them in black-and-white, to give the feeling that he was preserving something already lost.

Cleo was typically ambivalent about Gabe’s pictures. Bored-looking, she sifted through his prints and described them as nice. They aren’t nice, he exclaimed. ‘They’re supposed to speak of desolation! Of… of a town being screwed by a giant faceless, unaccountable company, and the desperate persistence of the remaining few!’

‘Oh, sure, I see,’ she said.

This time, the need to be right was leading.

‘Do you? The paper said they were iconic!’

‘I’ve never been that into photography.’

Gabe was frustrated. He let it show by changing the subject.

‘How long have you been a… prostitute?’

Cleo just looked at him. ‘Don’t start,’ she said.

But after the slight regarding his photos, Gabe felt she owed him. What, he wasn't sure. To be offended too?

‘Well, why did you get into it?’ He could feel the pointless, insulting, patronising shape of the conversation coming into focus, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Cleo sighed. ‘I like being a whore.’

‘Well, good for you, but surely you’d rather do something else? You’re a smart girl, you didn’t need to…’ Gabe managed to stop himself saying ‘sell your body’, but later, when he reviewed the whole talk over and over in his mind, he’d berate himself for the words ‘smart girl’ – who did he think he was?

Cleo gazed at him, not angry, more resigned to the idea that he was like so many men she’d encountered. They fell into two camps: those who had sex with her and saw it as she did, a business relationship. They didn’t insult her, barely spoke to her, and certainly thought of her as beneath them. Worse were those like Gabriel, really, as he turned out. Some men believed she needed saving, looking after, a good man to take care of her. So she was used to this conversation; it made her feel endlessly tired. Cleo was past frustration with this attitude, and besides, she still quite liked Gabe – plus, who else would pay her now? The town was basically forsaken. Not that she particularly needed the money now – you could help yourself to food at the abandoned supermarket. No one except those on radiation sickness’ death row would touch the stuff so it was a free for all. One morning Cleo was in there, collecting the last of the fresh fruit – rot was setting in, appropriately – and she saw a man collecting half a shelf’s worth of tins of sponge pudding. He just shrugged and smiled glumly when he saw she’d noticed him, and headed out with his trolley once he was done.

There was no ‘pulling together’, Blitz spirit, or any romantic sense of an embattled community bravely facing their end together. This may have been partly to do with the radiation sickness itself, which tended to bring feelings of overwhelming lassitude along with the nausea, headaches and bloody shits. So people kept to themselves; there was comfort in that familiarity, anyway. Gabe and Cleo were descending into sickness at about the same rate. Sometimes in her little flat they were queued to throw up in the toilet. The plughole in the shower was becoming clogged with hair: black – hers; faded brown – his. Although each was as pathetically ill as the other, they weren’t much more than strangers to one another, so the implacable feeling of faint disgust at someone else’s fading body – an ancient instinct of self-preservation – set in.

Cleo died first, with her eyes only half closed.

She died one morning, during the lie-in she said she needed. Gabe went in with a cup of green tea, and she was even paler than before, still. He sat pensively on the edge of the bed and sipped the tea. His lined hands shook slightly. He felt weakened by it, and panicked. How the hell did he know what to do with a body? He said to Cleo’s body: ‘Now you’re a corpse. Another dead prostitute.’ His own humour shocked and troubled him. He went to see if the priest was in.

The priest was named Father Simon. He was ambling around the graveyard when Gabriel got up to the church; drawing a tasteless joke about being the walking dead from Gabe.

‘I’m sorry about my outburst last week,’ Gabriel said. ‘I was very upset.’

‘You need not apologise to me,’ said the Father. ‘Have you prayed about it?’

‘Yes,’ Gabriel lied. ‘Will you hear my confession?’

‘My role is to serve.’

The pair went to the booth. Gabriel had always felt more relaxed with the grille between them. In meetings with editors, he’d always hated it when they came from behind their desk to sit opposite him on the big easy chairs they all had.

‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned.’

Gabriel couldn’t get any further, however, due to his sudden and intense need to vomit. He spewed until bile and blood came up, and sat on the linoleum floor by the toilet for a while, panting.

In the booth, the priests head was resting on the grille. Gabe got up and pulled back the black heavy curtain. Father Simon was lifeless, his right hand loosely grasping his rosary. Gabriel stepped back and pulled the curtain back across. He went to the altar and got down on bended knee. He didn’t know what to say, so he just said the Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t feel enough, so he said it again. He stood, genuflected, and walked out of the church.

In the graveyard, Gabriel looked at names and dates on the tombstones. He selected one Margarita del Pilar, who had died 120 years ago; she sounded exotic and fey. Gabe lay down on the grave, with his head by the headstone, and waited. Eyes closed, he imagined he could hear the church organ playing. For the first time since the accident, he felt calm. When the nuclear power station had first been built, Gabe had read a book about nuclear power. Now he recalled one passage from it:

“While the half-life tells us exactly how many radioactive atoms will remain after any given time, it is impossible to know in advance which particular atoms will remain.”

Like life, Gabriel thought. Death: predictable. Who and when? Now you’re asking.

a sixth new reflection...'the continuing armstrong delusion'

‘We wouldn’t be sitting here, if I hadn’t gone back’.

Lance Armstrong to Oprah Winfrey – Oprah had asked why-o-why Armstrong decided to return to cycling and compete the Tour de France in 2009, only to be exposed by erstwhile team mate and (fellow) drugs convict Floyd Landis, when Landis was dumbly refused by Armstrong a place on Armstrong’s ’09 team after having served a two year ban for taking illegal amounts of testosterone.

And shamefully, the subtext underlying (no pun intended) Armstrong’s answer to Oprah runs something like ‘I might otherwise have gotten away with the biggest sports-related fraud in history’. ‘And I would never have owned up to it’.

It took me eighteen months to catch up on the Lance Armstrong story – and all because of a book published this summer by his former masseuse to which we will return; one and a half years to read into the real story, and not the devious and far-too-good-to-be-true version of his life and cycling career that existed before January 2013 – although I did not fail, perhaps could not have failed to be aware of it. Rumours that Armstrong had been living a lie, and shilling a whole lot of rubes for serious money along the way is old news, and was always suggested in certain sections of the media, simultaneously hotly and heavily contested (to the weight and cost of umpteen legal actions) by Armstrong himself.

To hear Armstrong finally admit to taking various band substances in the opening ‘yes’ and ‘no’ section of his interview with Oprah, came neither as a surprise, or, something entirely expected.  However, what could perhaps have been expected was how, in spite of everything, Armstrong, in spite of himself, and also because of himself, still came across as largely unrepentant and patently untrustworthy during much of his supposed ‘confession’. He, in fact, reminded me strongly of former PM Tony Blair when he lied repeatedly, or at least told half-truths, on national television over Iraq and WMDs.  Same steel in their eyes.  Same conscious self-delusion.

Also during the Oprah ‘confession’, Armstrong lamented how he lost a whopping $75 million in one day after sponsors (whom he had conned out of millions over the years) dropped him in lighting quick succession.  Yet, it wasn’t (and isn’t to this day) enough to make you feel sorry one iota for Armstrong, cancer survivor or otherwise.  The money wasn’t rightfully his in the first place.

But whether money was a significant motivating factor behind Armstrong’s competition cheating is surely debatable given the man’s absolute and unrelenting desire to win, and to appear a champion at all (and sometimes disastrous) costs.  Some of these costs were made of flesh and bones: former friends and colleagues including Landis, Tyler Hamilton and Frankie Andreu, Andreu’s wife, Betsy, and masseuse Emma O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, ten years after giving journalist David Walsh a major exclusive interview at the height of Armstrong’s fame that suggested Armstrong was taking performance enhancing drugs (to which Armstrong replied by calling her a whore with a drink problem), has now published her new take on proceedings entitled: The Race to the Truth. And in deeply ironic fashion the foreword is by none other than ... Lance Armstrong.

The two seem to have made up of late which is all well and good, but read the tone of Armstrong’s preamble and once again it is the usual aggressive self-serving spin as performed on Oprah and countless occasions since.  O’Reilly is different from ‘others’ (I wonder who?!) because she has found it in herself to forgive now-humble-ole'-Lance, who, after all, as he said on Oprah, and says again in TRttT, was only one of many drugs cheats in cycling in the nineties and noughties.

Armstrong against all odds remains popular.  He has 3.5 million followers on Twitter.  I can only imagine they are still with him because of the power surviving something as deadly as cancer holds in people’s minds.

I would never ever wish death on Lance Armstrong (let alone any living creature), and he has a new chance at life now, a chance to rehabilitate, start anew and attempt where possible to reconcile the past. However, if Oprah, his foreword to O’Reilly’s book, and all the Blairite rhetoric in the intervening months, not to mention his Twitter blurb (‘Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously’) are anything to go by, the latter will prove near-impossible for him.  

a fifteenth new story...'empire state'

It shouldn’t have, it wasn’t, was never meant to happen like that, BUT ... it did! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Gerald sank another cocktail, propped himself up on the bar again.  ‘What are these called?’ he slurred to the bar girl, polishing wine glasses. She told him he was drinking an ‘Old Fashioned’.  ‘Yes’, said Gerald, hiccupped and ordered another.

Macy had always been a flighty one, but perhaps, thought Gerald in rare recent moment of clarity, he had mistaken Macy’s flightiness for charm? Whimsy? And in front of all those people!

Gerald dimly imagined sightseers returning to their hotels and gossiping about that failed proposal at the top of the Empire State.

‘Nevermind the view’, they would say, ‘you’ll never guess what we saw!’

‘Did he throw himself off?’

‘No, he just collapsed like a bag of bones and curled into a ball!’

And then the women would gush about the time their spouses had proposed to them, and the spouses would exchange glances, smile wanly and sip their champagne?

Well fucking done!

‘Would you like another, sir?’, the bar girl asked somewhere in the background – Gerald lost in an alcoholic cloud of remorse (the juke box playing Sweet Caroline).

He turned slowly and unsteadily around on his stool, looked at the bar girl as if she had just stepped from the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ‘Colours’, he spluttered. Red, green, blue - on, off, on off, on, off, onoff, onoff, onoff.

When Gerald came to he was back in his hotel room, fully clothed, sprawled like a drunken sailor across the double bed in the now presumptuous honey moon suite. Gerald rolled over, saw his thick, red features in the adjacent free standing mirror. His tie was around his forehead. Uggh! He lay motionless for an hour, whole body paralysed with booze induced lassitude, blinking stupidly – half human, half slug.

Some time, any amount of time later there was a knock at the door and a cleaner came in, followed by a member of staff from the hotel.  The cleaner started up her hoover, and after some smart remark about Rambo lost against the ensuing din, the hotel member of staff slid back out of the room, leaving an envelope on the side table. Gerald closed his eyes, but not too tightly because his sinsuses hurt, tried desperately to forget he was still alive. Perhaps he had jumped? Perhaps he was dead? Perhaps this was purgatory?

Nevermind! Nevermind!

So to the letter: ‘I have gone to stay with my sister in Boulder, MA. Don’t follow. I will know you are coming’.

Gerald ripped it into little pieces, let them fall over the edge, dead confetti, and to the horror and amazement of the assembled crowd, stood up on the parapet, spread his wings and dived like a pelican, his coat tails lifting and catching a terminal air current as he hurtled towards gridlock on 5^th avenue. 

a fifth new reflection...'diana memorial playground'

(from the Daily Mail letters page)

Dear Sir:

I went to the Diana Memorial Playground last week in Kensington Gardens, Kensington, with my THREE YEAR OLD, and was disgusted to see so many toddlers not even fresh out of nappies clambering all over her remains. Where has RESPECT  disappeared to in our society? Not to mention good old traditional BRITISH VALUES!  I was so appalled, defiled and dirtied I had to trek across Hyde Park and bathe in the sacred, healing waters of the Diana Memorial Fountain to feel right again.  My three year old, by the way, was baptised there (the Diana Memorial Fountain).

Diana was a shining beacon of light in otherwise dark times for Britain.  When she died I cried and cried and cried (and cried). I also stopped believing in God.

Diana was the reincarnation of Boadecia and Florence Nightingale made flesh. We still have the Queen – Amen – but when she goes how are we going to cope? Paedophiles will give Cliff Richard diabetes, Chavs will start mating with hard-working families, Gypsies will ruin our mortgages and the Euro will rip the face off the Great British countryside.

And what about government when both Diana and Queen Elizabeth are DEAD? Where will our leadership come from? How will we manage on the international stage? Will there be more FILTH on television? Will the BBC make our daughters impotent? And we have to ask ourselves now (especially in view of my recent visit to the Diana Memorial Playground) are loony left TEACHERS dumbing-down our children?

What the crux of this letter BOILS down to is that there are so many BIG questions that the UK Independence Party will have to address when it gets into government next May (so long as Labour hasn’t infected the silent majority with cancer and they do something daft with their vote).

While it is evident to any hard-working, honest, decent Anglo-Saxon, British citizen that gay marriage could trigger THE END OF THE HUMAN RACE in perhaps twenty years, and that the French are obviously responsible for our recent spate of HORRENDOUS WEATHER (our worst since records began), the key issue on the agenda for Farage (and no it isn’t all that yellow bellied baloney about ‘mental health’, and ‘depression’ – which exists to the same degree as climate change, i.e. not at all) should be Princess Diana’s legacy: No one wants cyclists or Muslims destroying her name any further.

Yours,

Edward Andrew Thomas Balls.

a fourteenth new story... 'yoga class'

Erica felt fat, bloated, like a sponge pudding, so she took herself to yoga class. Her best friend Caitlin came along.  It was Caitlin’s idea.  Most things were Caitlin’s idea – Caitlin had an answer for everything, and you couldn’t tell her anything.

‘Well, I feel swell’, said Caitlin as they changed out of their lycra back at Erica’s flat, two hours later.  ‘I really feel I could get into it’. Caitlin had a zest for life that made her attractive to vacuous, boring men, and often enough unbearable to interesting women.  Erica was struggling to take off her pink jogging bottoms, hopping up, down on one leg, her other cocked diagonal – the Fucking Tree Position!

Once they had showered and dressed, they sat at the glass table in Erica’s kitchenette and drank dandelion tea. ‘If we are to do this properly’, said Erica, ‘you realise we are going to have to give up caffeine and alcohol?’. ‘And chocolate, saturated, and mono-saturated fats, negative carbs’, added Caitlin, ‘besides caffeine and alcohol decrease your muscle tone’.  Erica excused herself, got up and limped to the bathroom.

Next morning, Erica awoke having slept lumpily.  She blinked tiredly at her white-washed bedroom ceiling, trying to figure out whether it was raining outside, or whether it was just the water pipes, or the shower in the upstairs apartment.  Eventually after much self-cajoling Erica managed to drag back her bed covers, heavily swing her legs out of bed.  It was raining: a fight with her umbrella and the inevitable prevailing wind would ensue on her way to work, where she would turn up looking like a drowned and bedraggled, wigged guinea pig in a dress.

‘It’s nothing to feel demoralised about’, offered Caitlin, as they sat lunchtime in the office canteen, Erica picking at her Caesar Salad (no mayo). ‘He simply wasn’t, isn’t good enough for you’. A drowned and bedraggled guinea pig?! Erica shoveled a mouthful of cruton and ice berg lettuce into her mouth. ‘Who needs a man who pays you no attention anyway’, Caitlin continued, delicate hands cradling a Styrofoam cappuccino. Those rings, thought Erica, they are so bogus.

And then it was Thursday and yoga class number two. Caitlin had bought some new sweat bands for the occasion, for wrists and forehead.  Day-glo Steffi Graff? While, Erica felt like a pregnant sow going to abattoir. They arrived early, rolled out their mats, and the instructor – Charleze? - suggested they sit tight, close their eyes and try and access deep mind while they waited for their fellow keep-fit friends. Erica imagined herself as a piggy bank, her mouth a slot through which people forced cheese sandwiches, liquor chocolates, chocolate coffee beans.

When all the women had assembled, varicose veined, lithe and nimble, they began with yet another ‘beginner pose’ – The Pigeon.  Charleze demonstrated as if it were something she did after brushing her teeth every morning – it probably was – or, in between conference calls at work. ‘It’s a great pose’, Chareze was purring, ‘it makes you feel you’ve been coupled up all day’.  Coupled up to what? Erica mused, a whole refrigerator unit?

So they took their beginner’s stance and Charleze began the commands. ‘Step one: Expand your chest’.

Suddenly, Erica felt a rush of nausea. ‘Inhale’. Sick, sick in her stomach. ‘Gaze upward’.  The sports hall lights were blinding, dizzying. The corrugated-iron roof was swimming. 'This is for your sciatic nerve', sang Charleze. Erica’s whole body felt trussed up, arched over, suspended awkwardly in mid-air like an insect lava in a synthetic bright pink cocoon. What do I care about scia - The music of the pan pipes Aarrrrgh.

‘Repeat!’ Charleze barked. 

And Erica dropped.

When she opened her eyes again, she thought she was in hell.

a thirteenth new story...'shit-faced by tomorrow'

‘You are going to get crucified by life anyway. You might as well get crucified for something or someone you believe in’. And with that Aidan cracks open another beer. The stars are out, the night is cold. They have blankets, blankets and beer, and thirty years behind them, sixty between.

Clay spits into the dark off the back porch. ‘I believe’, he says. ‘I believe because I have to believe’. ‘However impossible …’ says Aidan. ‘However impossible it may be for some people, I have to believe, otherwise it will never happen’.  The two of them, two old friends making sense of the world, the wreck of the past, the present getting wrecked, and the future - whatever will be.

‘You have a connection’, says Aidan, tugging at the ring pull of his beer can. A connection. Clay sighs: ‘Don’t sound like my female friends’. Clay has three female friends, four fingers and a thumb on a hand, two hands. ‘What do girls want?’ asks Aidan, half rhetorically. Clay makes a hissing sound through his teeth. ‘Money’. ‘Money, and a guy with big brass balls’. ‘I’ve a gold tooth at least’, says Aidan. A mayfly appears, buzzing grossly, stupidly in the glow of the porch light. ‘They don’t want gold teeth’, says Clay. ‘It’s worth a cent or two’, says Aidan. And a big hole in your face.

‘Remember Clementine’, says Clay, and takes a slug of beer.  ‘You’ll get misty eyed’, says Aidan. ‘Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, Clay warbles, stamping his feet in mock jollity … ‘Oh my darlin’ Clementine’. The mayfly has settled on the roof beam running the length of the back porch. ‘Know the next line?’ says Aidan.  ‘Gone forever’ says Clay. Clementine – stalwart lover, first, second, third, and every other. ‘She’s married now: two kids, two dads’… ‘Sex in the Laundromat?’. ‘Yes’, says Clay, ‘and after that we sat and watched our clothes merge in the tumble dryer’. ‘Hot’, says Aidan. ‘She was five years older’. ‘Still is’ says Aidan. ‘The rhythm of life …’ says Clay, smirking, winking at Aidan. ‘Two steps forward, one back, that’s what my father used to say’, says Aidan. ‘Non-linear’, says Clay. ‘Like driving an old Sedan wonkily along the road to nowhere, engine spluttering, cutting out every half hour’. ‘Or a pick-up with a three decades of crap in the back’. ‘Sitting in a crock of shit’. ‘I’ll drink to that’, says Aidan, and starts laughing harshly, hoarsely. ‘Pass the smokes’, says Clay, ‘time is staggering on!’. Here today, shit-faced by tomorrow.

a twelfth new story...'garnish'

‘Just put a basil leaf on top’. They were arguing about garnishes again, and their dinner guests were waiting. ‘It doesn’t make a jot of difference to the flavour’, said Annie, who preferred to dice herbs and mix with Bolognese, where Roger preferred to keep flavours clean, simple – bland, Annie often complained.

‘It’s because you’re smoking again’, said Roger, hovering behind Annie like a culinary sex pest; Annie, bent over the gas light stove browning the meat. ‘Your taste buds are shot to pieces’. Annie reached for the salt. ‘And no more salt’, said Roger, putting his hand on her forearm, authoritative Gary Cooper style. ‘Why not?’, said Annie.  ‘Are you going to give me a Chinese burn if I do?’ Roger let go, moved beside her.  ‘Less of the backseat driving’, said Annie, jaded, her face red from the heat and steam.  Roger stuck his long, thin nose into the pot, an anteater, or a common rat? ‘You know both Jenna and Ian smoke?’ Annie continued, ‘and don’t give me anymore shit’. They hadn’t had sex since Roger’s accident. Roger sat down on a stool in the kitchen behind her, the meat was nearly brown enough.

‘Why don’t you go back through to the dining room?’, asked Annie. ‘Don’t mix in chopped basil’, said Roger. ‘Right!’, said Annie, ‘go back into the dining room and ask everyone if they want their basil chopped and mixed, or, if they’re happy to make do with a basil leaf on top’. Annie was getting mad, feeling the strain of catering to Roger’s myriad demands.  Sectional interest! Aaarrrrghhhhh! Why couldn’t she be more like a politician in her marriage and simply pay no mind? Roger stood up again, began tugging at his shirt collar. ‘It’s too hot in here’, he said. Annie laughed, short and sharp.  ‘Well, darling, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’.

Once Roger had slouched back through to the dining room, Annie reached for the salt and added another desert spoon, shut off the hob and chopped up the basil into the smallest, meanest pieces she could, stalks and all, then mixed with the Bolognese.  She could hear Roger in the dining room: ‘Who wants their basil mixed in? Or as a garnish?’. This is too much, thought Annie, I will have to file for divorce, failing that find a new front of house.

In the event, of course, nobody cared. And even Roger agreed Annie’s Bolognese was a winner.  Later, in bed, Annie asked: ‘When do you think it will heal?’ Roger put down his book – Churchill: the War Cabinet Years. ‘What will heal?’, he asked, seemingly oblivious to the fact his penis wasn’t working. Annie sighed, ‘nevermind’, she said. Nevermind: or failure, resignation, terminal decline!

an eleventh new story...'beethoven was deaf'

Elaine let herself be immersed in the full swell of the orchestra, felt a rise in her tummy: butterflies!  She looked to her left, and there was Wayne, staring vacantly ahead as if he were stationed in front of Telly Tubbies with their two year old – father, son time. Fuck him, she thought. Fuck him if he has the intellectual capacity of a fence post.  Fuck him. Fuck. Him. And his cultural intransigence. Da de da de da. Fuck him! People like Wayne were probably responsible for killing painters, writers, classical musicians in Nazi Germany anyhow. Da de da de da. Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him!

Down in the orchestra pit, the conductor, tall and lithe, was working himself into a frenzy as the movement built to crescendo. The whole auditorium, the whole building seemed alive, throbbing with the sound of strings, woodwind, brass, Beethoven. Elaine had never been to a classical music concert before and this was most certainly exceeding expectations – oh yes! And Wayne’s complete indifference was not going to spoil it this time – oh no! And Fuck him again!

Tears gathered in her eyes, a lump, one of those beautiful lumps lodged in her throat. She could have swallowed it, but she wanted it there, and she wanted the tears, let them come, hot and fast - she wanted to be moved. She wanted her body to ache with unfettered joy and profound sorrow all at once, she wanted to be humbled as if in the presence of God, she wanted to be carried away on a tide of feeling, spun out in an emotional whirl. Fuck Wayne. What a fucking Nazi! A Nazi Zombie bequeathed in suede!

... She knew what he would say when they got home.  Do we have to do that again? And she’d want to scream: Yes, WE will fucking do that again, you fucking Nazi! ... Six million! Six fucking million! And then she would regret it, and Wayne would give her that admonishing look, naughty school girl look, say: Cool it with the anti-semitic remarks. And she would take a few deep breaths, put the heel of her hand to her forehead, think: I feel faint. Carbon Monoxide? Or just the intoxication and claustrophobia of married life? Married life with a big, stupid, jeaned up fan of Pink Floyd and fast cars.  Which one is fucking Pink anyway?!

But, she would walk over to him, put her arms around his waist, say: Not if you don’t want to (YOU LUNK!). And Wayne, his face would brighten, like their two year old when the purple Telly Tubby popped its head out of a hole in Telly Tubby House, just after Telly Tubby Bye Bye, going Da de da de da; Wayne, would smile like a smug and yet pathetic pastiche of flesh, bone and middle aged man, pull her close, close enough to get the full force of his halitosis, closer still, and dumbly start singing Jimmy Nail. 

Did Beethoven ever thank Jesus he was deaf?

a tenth new story...'small, crap towns'

Alun feels another shit concocting in his bowels, building with the rumble of gastrointestinal thunder. Mild? Medium? Or Hot? Innocent questions, answers - drastic, gastric consequences.

Small, crap, provincial towns, cheap kebab vans, vans selling cheap kebabs.  Pizza Express have a new menu, sign at bus stop said. Hmm. Alun frowns, forehead sweaty with effort, keeping bomb doors closed, one, perhaps one and half miles from home?  Stale real ale, served with zero aplomb, I hate small, crap provincial towns. And the countryside where you find these places. Death traps, no airs, graces.

A rattling car passes by: five spotty white youths crammed inside, playing gangsta rap.  Small... crap... Shakespeare would have cried. But London was a sewer in his time; today, only the British National Party, bless ‘em, consider it a shithole, at least of the multicultural kind.  

Alun checks his wrist watch: six hours since conference end, three since pointless agony of business dinner; ‘business friends’, ‘associates’, where small talk reigned, or did it simply rain? The accountant from Cardiff, showered him, accidentally? On purpose? with cava. What a palaver! Another small, crap town.  The accountant: Rees? Whose dignity disappeared at the merest whiff of cheap booze.  Wales: born to lose – even Dylan Thomas hated, despised Welsh choirs … Walking on roadside briers, small, crap towns make one mean, nasty: out here on the perimeter, stalking the wasteland, T.S.Eliot seems fraudulent.  And then in the distance appear purple neon signs for the sanitised purple hell hole that is Premier Inn.

Alun thinks: After my poo, will it be BBC World: World Business Report? Or ‘Calendar Girls Strip Naked’, on encrypted channel seven hundred and twenty two?  

a thirty sixth new poem...'paperback fancy'

I wear your face in the morning,

Your print on my bones,

Ink on my lips

And the press of your nose.

a thirty fifth new poem...'art of the brick'

My friend Marvin had

A compound nervous

Breakdown - poor guy.

Now spends his

Time playing with

Lego bricks, making

Miniature monuments to

Misfortune for small

Kicks. He says

He may try sell

Them one day, which

Makes anyone present

Wince perceptibly and

Turn, flushed, away.



Fifteen

I’d been up the woods for two months before I found Huck, or he found me. It was really hard to begin with, since Ma hadn’t let me have the gun. The man whispered to her: he must have said don’t give it to me. Ma trusts me, of course, but the man always gave me suspicious eyes.

So it was hard to kill my first bunny rabbit. The airgun didn’t work over any sort of range. I set a trap instead. Four days before a rabbit was snared. It didn’t die, though, it wriggled and bucked. I had to put it down. I have a knife, but I held it in front of the rabbit a while and couldn’t quite use it. I shot the rabbit instead, with the airgun. I put the muzzle right in its ear. Two shots, it took.

Skinning it was the trickiest part. It’s very messy, skinning fresh game. I probably wasted a bit of it: more practice needed. Cooking it was easier, browning a few bits of meat at a time and eating them off the point of my knife like a real Wildman.

Otherwise, I’ve eaten the cereal bars I brought along, although I don’t have too many. There are berries this of year, and I’ve found oyster mushrooms on rotting stumps. All other mushrooms, I’ve left alone, just in case.

My shelter is an abandoned pickup, rusty boils on its body and branches in the back. It has a full width front seat so I can lie down in my sleeping bag. Sometimes I hit my head on the steering wheel and curse it. I don’t want to try to take it out though, because sometimes it’s fun to pretend I’m on a racing trail through these woods. Adrenaline dulls your hunger.

Just like Huck to turn up out of the untamed blue. Now I’m fifteen, I know he isn’t real, but who can deny the evidence of his senses? That sounds like a quote from a famous person. Huck was starving and dirty. He hadn’t an airgun, see.

I fed him a cereal bar and later, we caught a rabbit. I build him a shelter from the branches in the back of the pickup. He’s weaker, now. The forest has worn him down. Still, I sleep with my knife in hand, just in case.

When we first saw the loggerman, it was Huck’s idea to follow him. We kept back; he didn’t see us. The loggerman had a can of paint. He put circles on some trees, two horizontal lines on others. If there was a pattern to his choices, we couldn’t see it. He was easy to follow because he had on an orange jacket with shiny white taped seams. Eventually he led Huck and me to a wooden cabin, in a part of the woods I’d never been to before.

When the loggerman went inside and we saw warm light from the window, Huck said we should go ask if he had any food going spare. I got angry then, I’ll admit. I told Huck we are wildmen of the woods, and we don’t take handouts. I couldn’t believe how the forest had changed him. He who had been my teacher of survival skills showed little of the mettle he preached. Huck had always talked a seductive talk, but I desire to be a man of action now and he wears my patience.

So we went back to the pickup. However, once I heard Huck had fallen asleep under his bower I took out my torch and headed out for the cabin. I had resolved to take what I wanted, to be a man of action. In the woods, survival is a challenge for all us mad creatures. I stowed the airgun in my belt and my knife in my boot. The loggerman answered my knocking at the cabin door with a cup of liquor in his hand. Inside were a fire and a lantern on a little table.

‘You lost?’ he said.

I elected to scheme rather than just have a go straight away with the airgun.

‘Yes. Can I come in?’

‘Alright. What’s your name?’

‘Huck,’ I said.

He sat me down at the table and poured me a tin cup of the liquor. He didn’t ask anything and I made a show of gratefully warming my hands and feet at the fire.

That grievous first taste of liquor was like rabbit liver straight from the pan: metallic and hot as rage tears. Ma had never allowed liquor in the house, so this was my first go on it.

The loggerman saw my grimace and smiled.

‘How old you?’

‘Fifteen,’ I said.

I looked around the cabin. There was a door to another room, a stove on another table, a shotgun leaning on the wall; plenty of cans of food and a couple of liquor vessels under the table beside the gas bottle. Riches, even to a Wildman. I tapped my teeth with my fingers and thought.

Before long an opportunity presented its crimson self. The loggerman stood with a grunt and went outside. I heard his piss splashing on a tree. I looked at the shotgun, but my nerve with that failed me. Besides, I didn’t know if it was loaded. So I put the airgun in my right hand and my knife in my left and stood up facing the door.

When his lurched shape was on the threshold, I fired at his head. Owing to the liquor, I reckon, it wasn’t clean and I just took off the top lip of his left ear.

He growled ‘Damn you,’ and tilted at me. Honestly, I was panicked. He swung and I bent down and stuck my knife in his thigh. The loggerman yelped like my snared rabbit and fell down. The wound was deep and lurid blood gambolled to the floorboards. The man tore his shirt and tied it above the knife. I danced forward, the Wildman in his woodland trance, and yanked the knife out. He cried out again, and looked at me with fear in his furrowed eyes.

I opened the door to the other room. There was a grey pad and sleeping bag on the floor. I grabbed the loggerman under his arms and dragged him into the bedroom. He attempted to club me with his fists, but his strikes were feeble. I shut the door and wedged one of the chairs under the handle that my prisoner was secured.

I stood at the doorway and pointed my torch out into the forest night. I took a step back into the blood when my beam caught Huck, winding down through the trees. I shut the door and drew the bolt over.

Now I’m in a real situation. I’m enraged because Huck got me thinking about this loggerman and what I could get, when I should have stayed the Wildman. And now he’s banging on the door while the loggerman groans in the bedroom.

Outside, there’s me; inside there’s his victim, I’m in the anteroom between hateful reality and half-lit hell. 

a thirty fourth new poem...'beer not cheese'

'I want beer,

Not cheese',

Slurred the drunk

To the shop assistant

At Neal's Yard Dairy.



a thirty third new poem...'natural look'

Roy Keane

Broke Alf Inge

Haaland’s leg

Because he

Thought Alf had

Used hydrogen peroxide

In his hair,

And Roy strongly

Cared for the

Natural look.

a thirty second new poem...'the picnic'

Alex Salmond went

Fishing.  He sat on

The banks of the

River Clyde and

Watched the grey

Mass of water

Slide by.  His bulbous eyes

Were moist, sad as

He was that his wife

Had forgotten the picnic.

a thirty first new poem...'nature'

The dog looked at the cat.

The cat sat on the mat.

The dog broke wind.

The cat licked its whiskers.

Their owners were outside

In the garden, burying

Another dinner party victim.

To the cat at least this was

Nature – chaos, hostility,

Murder. And then the

Dog farted again.

a thirtieth new poem...'dutton'

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How did you

Get to be thirty?

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How on earth did

You reach this age?

When you were

Cabbaged on booze

With sick on your shoes,

I never thought I’d

Write these words

On this page.

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How, why did you

Get to be thirty?

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How the hell did

You make it all this way?

When you crapped

On a beggar after

Too many Stellas,

I never dreamed

You’d ever live

‘til today.

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

Pray how did you

Stagger to thirty?

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How is it

You reached this age?

When you were

Poleaxed on prozac

Hangin’ out of your

Arse crack,

I never imagined I’d

Have a poem
To gauge.

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

Please tell me how you

Got to be thirty?

Chris Dutton

Chris Dutton

Christ, Dutton!

How the Dickens did

You make it all this way?

When you didn’t

Appear a full three

Days at New Year,

I never guessed

You’d ever stay alive

Until today.

a twenty ninth new poem...'erica'

Erica Roe

Erica Roe

Erica Roe.

What man

Over the

Age of

Forty can

Forget

Her?

a twenty eighth new poem...'rowling'

J K Rowling wanted to

Be taken seriously –

She was fed up of being

Associated with a nauseating

Teenage wizard and

A series of plagiarised

Books for children fresh

Out of nappies. ‘What do

I do?’ she asked her

Publisher.  Her publisher

Suggested she take a

Pseudonym and apply for

Work at the Serious

Fraud Office.

a twenty seventh new poem...'words into action'

Ian talked a good game

Of football from the

Sidelines, but since he

Had no legs

He struggled to put words

Into action.