an eighty sixth new poem ... 'fully automated luxury communism'

When the machines

Take over and demean

My work, force me

To shirk away

From a

Hard day’s labour,

I’ll wager I won’t

Waste in my lofas,

Glue-gunned to the sofa;

Instead I’ll garden and

Paint, run around the

Block ‘til I faint,

Make scones, bake

Cakes, breed Stick-

Insects on my

Tea breaks, learn

French, then bench

Press the weight of

The world, two fingers

Up at Atlas.

an eighty fifth new poem ... 'satsuma'

Keith wept so hard

At the blatant

Injustice of the

World that

His eyes dried up

Like the Aral Sea

And great salt deposits

Appeared around his

Temples, and,  after a

Week blubbing

- Ignoring all his

Callous mates out clubbing -

His head had shriveled

To the size and constituency

 Of a month old satsuma.

Decision Makers

That the bonnet has been lifted I can see as I turn into my row in the car park. I have a large box under my arm – birthday present for Cody – and it is slipping uncomfortably down my hip. I should have accepted a plastic bag, but you know how it is with a cupboard already overflowing and you don’t want to add to that problem along with anything else. What I can’t see at first, thanks to the bonnet, was the man looking inside. Then I see him step into view and turn to the car facing mine in the opposite parking space; I stand still, to work out what to do. I know I should go in all ‘Hey, that’s my car, get out of here!’ But I test my voice and it does not sound right. I am seven cars down the row. Hitching up the box, which contains what they call a smart TV – Cody, only turning seven, wants a smart TV – I approach my car.

‘That is my car.’ No challenge, but you never know, maybe the words hang like a non-specific threat. It doesn’t seem to come off that way though. The man steps to my side of my car, a good German saloon. I can see now that he has attached jump leads from wherever you are supposed to connect them under my bonnet to the points under his own. His car is a large pickup truck, dusty, dented, unpleasant and somehow improbably American on this car park. He looks me up and down. Now that’s something I rarely see. As someone who pays close attention, I know how people look at each other, and while their eyes usually flick down, check out your clothes, maybe your crotch or chest, they soon settle on eyes and mouth, or, worst case scenario, some horribly distinctive feature, like my overlong nose. But this man, who has appropriated my car, without permission, looks me fully, slowly up and down as though I have invaded his space and he is assessing me. He wears a leather jacket, and tattoos were visible skulking out from the cuffs to the backs of his hands. One can rarely trust a person with tattoos, let alone leather jackets. He smiles broadly and shows me a gold tooth – I mean, come on.

‘Is this your car?’ he asks, a dense but fluid accent. He could do advert voice-overs, or at least be a football pundit. I know that he knows it is, because I’d already said so. He is stalling.

‘It is my car, and it seems you are helping yourself without permission.’

‘Aw, well, sure, but you’re helping a brother out, and a car like this,’ he rests his hand on the car in a deeply proprietary fashion, ‘it can spare me a bit of juice to get me started.’ He says this like it justifies it all.

‘How did you even open the bonnet? Or start the engine?’ He is standing between me and the wires, and besides, I had the TV box under my arm: there is little else I can do.

‘Ah, nothing to it,’ he says mysteriously. He obviously isn’t going to tell me, and I am struggling to get any power in the situation. Not knowing what else to do, I unlock the car (so much for immobilisers) and put the TV in the boot. Unencumbered, I feel ready.

‘Even if you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’m sure if you’d have asked..’

‘No one about to ask, unfortunately. And if you’d have said yes if I had asked, what difference does it make in the end?’ His logic is horribly reasonable.

‘Well, are you nearly done?’

He looks at his watch.

‘Almost.’

We stand and look at each other.

‘This is a nice car,’ he says. He is setting up for something. I say nothing – usually, it is better that way.

‘What’s your line of work?’

‘Insurance.’ I say it blandly, trying to make it uninteresting.

‘Really? Broker are you? Look at this – could be your lucky day!’

My lucky day?

‘My company is looking for new insurance. I’ve just grown the fleet.’

His company? As if this man runs a company. Next he’ll tell me he is royalty.

‘Oh, vehicle insurance isn’t really my area of expertise, I tend to look at bigger projects, insurance for housing developments and so on.’ Had I overshared? I may have just been caught by the simplest of sales tricks.

‘Nonsense!’ he declares. People with tattoos and gold teeth shouldn’t use this word; it is divertingly incongruous. ‘Look, have you got a card? I need to get moving now, but I am genuinely interested in getting your services.’

Dazed, I bring out my wallet and hand him my card, passing it between index and middle fingers, as you’re supposed to.

The man positions himself with his back to me as he leans over my car’s engine and whatever other parts they keep there under the bonnet, so I can’t see what he does to cut my engine and disconnect the cables to his car. He makes a meal of winding them up, stowing them in his back seat foot well, dusting his hands and rubbing them on his jeans. Only then does he take the card.

‘Well, you really helped a guy out. You’ve done me a huge favour.’ He sticks out his hand and I shake it. His hand leaves a little dark smudge on the side of my first finger, which I look at almost constantly on the drive home.

He does call me, after a couple of weeks. I had found myself wondering with some frequency whether he would. ‘Hey buddy,’ he says. The man’s speech patterns change with alarming regularity.

‘Uh, hello.’ I try not to let on that I knew who it was straight away.

‘So I wanna talk insurance.’

Before I knew it, I am inviting him over. I was working from home all that week; sometimes management let me do that, when I needed to.

He walks in, wearing similar things to the time in the car park, hands shoved in the back pocket of the jeans, which pulls them tight. ‘My wife will be home with my son before long.’ I don’t know why I say that. ‘Just one kid, huh? I’m on three,’ he replies.

I hadn’t imagined that he had children. A vision of his erection swells in my brain, threateningly fertile and febrile, and I feel my own rising in my trousers. ‘I’ll take a beer,’ he is saying. I don’t recall having offered. There is some in the garage – it will not be cold. But what do I care about impressing this man? We sit in my office; he almost puts himself in my orthopaedic chair, but there are times when my glare looks the part. I have never whistled through my teeth in my life, but find myself doing so as we put numbers to his needs. Most people think insurance is dull. I don’t argue with them, but there is nothing like the gentle comfort blanket of pecuniary protection. It is responsible and adult, as I need to remind some of my clients. To be insured is the greatest gift you can give your loved ones, I tell others, with deepest sincerity.

When my wife gets home, she asks him to stay for dinner. She has this naiveté, which is sweet when it isn’t catastrophic. She cooks: some meat, indescribable greens. He overpraises – she thinks it charming. I don’t like how they go on, like old friends. He asks her too much, and expects too much. After he leaves, I go to the bathroom and throw up, strands of nasty khaki tangling in the toilet bowl. My wife rubs my feet in bed, talking about him. After a bit, I pretend to be asleep so she stops.

He sends me an email. I can’t imagine those meaty tattooed hands at a keyboard. He is a more atavistic being than that, I had supposed. The grammar is acceptable – within the normal range of ability found among adults these days. It is about our arrangement, adding details, correcting things he had got wrong over at my house. I can’t understand a person who tries to simply remember the facts they need. The brain is hopeless, hopeless, at getting them right.

That weekend, my wife goes to visit her mother. I am not invited, and this time neither is Cody. My wife says he tires her mother out. Yet her mother has always claimed to be young for her age. She overly defines people in terms of their age, or at least how their age appears to her. I spend most of Saturday preparing my response to the email while Cody sits on the edge of his bed watching his new TV; eventually striking the tone of professionalism with a breath of deviance that I sought. Tired but wired, I collect Cody.

‘Let’s go out to eat.’

He made a face, eyes still on the cartoons.

‘Where would you like to go? How about pizza?’

This gets his attention. My wife is dairy-averse, so this is a treat. We talk about his teacher and the little girls and boys in his class.

I miss the telephone, and thus the news that my wife died on her way to her mother’s, because I take Cody cruising. He has fallen asleep in the car, so I figure it makes no difference to him. I pull my auto into the forgotten car park on the disembowelled industrial estate outside of town. A musclebound youngster with tight blue jeans, white singlet and pierced eyebrow promptly approaches the car. I can tell he is one you have to pay for, rather than a thrill-seeker, from his confident, business-like walk. What is it about this car that encourages people to take advantage of me?

At my open window, he sees Cody asleep in the back, and pulls away slightly: not too much though. He will have seen stranger things, I think.

‘How can I … crumpet your trumpet, old boy?’

Suddenly terrified, I gun it and drive off. Fellating couples peer my way momentarily. Cody wakes up, but neither of us say anything. I wonder if he was asleep at all, but then find myself questioning whether I care, so I stop wondering.

‘If you’d invited me too, or made me feel welcome, ever, maybe she wouldn’t have died.’ On the phone to my mother in law, I was getting a little mulish.

‘You’re a fucking idiot.’

Cody watches as I pretend she hasn’t hung up, continuing the conversation as naturally as I can.

I call the man. There’s no-one else to call. He answers with a long hello that means he hasn’t saved my number into his phone. A hello with a question mark. I ask if he wants to get a beer; I know how to talk to ordinary folk. Cody is at school, a place of low virtue and low standards.

He says ok. Men like him always have time, and are just waiting for the reason for a beer, a reason he can give his wife.

Two beers become four, eight, doubling like microbes, as they do, and whiskey, and then a gay club. This isn’t like places I’d been before, which had deliberately dark corners for whatever you wanted: there was always someone willing. This is a smart place, doormen, not bouncers, cocktails and elegant glasses of lager. It is his suggestion – he says you could have more fun in a place like this.

‘Not going to run into any of the boys from work!’ he laughs. We party with bears, squares, tearaways with a youthful freedom, not to say desperation: creeping around the edge of their conversations. I am dubbed a kindly old faggot; my companion they call biker while they call me sidecar – if this means something more, I cannot say.

Cody says: ‘The house is dirty. Where’s mum?’

‘Let’s go out for tea,’ I say.

Truth is, I haven’t noticed and don’t know what to do about it. I am thinking about the conclusions to last night’s fun times. The greasy gayboy was spitting out his teeth when the man and I had finished with him, a pathetic husk. They glinted on the moist ground in the alley – he must have had whitening treatment.

‘You homophobes,’ he was still mustering at this point. I looked bland and pure of expression, at least I think, but the man still had a red fog over his eyes, lip curled like a baited boar, and he put the shoe in one more time, aiming for what he called the boy’s disgusting stained balls.

‘Pizza?’ Cody was saying.

I swear to god, my son has no imagination.

As we pull up to the house after our food, my wife’s father’s car is outside. He’s at the wheel, two hands on it, in fact, like an actor in front of a blue screen in an old movie. He gets out and starts shouting.

‘Cody, you’re with me!’ As though he is picking teams, and I am bottom of the wish list.

‘You’re a f … fuck,’ he directs at me. He says it like he’d never used the word before.

He hands me an envelope, fat with legalese. He says, ‘Cody has to live with us now. It’s all in there – don’t argue.’ How little my father-in-law knew me.

Cody says: ‘Can I get my TV?’

His grandfather ruffles his hair and says: ‘We have everything you need, not to worry.’ To me: ‘She was always too good for you.’

Then they are gone – I am childless, like before Cody was born.

Left to my own devices and deviancies. I think about the man, think about gathering all the power tools I can find in the garage – stupid people often give them at Christmas – stowing them in the boot of my good German saloon, picking up the man, shopping for a leather jacket of my own, and heading for my cruising spot of old, reinventing myself as a vigilante, the greatest yet, with a tattooed sidekick, a vigilante of a new morality, where permission for your permissiveness comes from insurance men and delivery company owners: we are the decision-makers.

an eighty fourth new poem ... 'in his defence'

On debut

It was observed that

Leeds United's new

Attacker - signed from
Hartlepool - was heavily

Left-footed. In his

Defence, he had worn

A polio shoe since

Birth.

an eighty third new poem ... 'pedigree'

Terry said he was thirty,

When he was actually forty.

His father, who sodomised

Labradors and once swallowed

- as a dare - 

A whole tin of Pedigree Chum,

For reasons unknown,

Falsified the son-of-a-bitches'

 Birth certificate. 

an eighty second new poem ... 'pantomime'

During the three weeks

Agatha had her parents'

Body parts stored in the 

Refrigerator, she still

Couldn't forgive them for 

The incident after Christmas

Pantomime seventeen years

Previous, the idignity 

Etcetera - it was,

Perhaps, a childhood trauma

Writ large, acted upon

Even, but not
Altogether come to
Terms with.

an eighty first new poem ... 'kittens'

The apparently 
 Nice newly weds

Moved in from

Their bed and breakfast to
Next door, ground
Floor, last Monday.

Tuesday, they went

Out and bought two

Chipper, blue-eyed

Kittens - christened

Them Fred and 

Rosemary.

an eightieth new poem ... 'privy council'

Corby wore his state

School tie and blazer

To the Privy Council, no
White rose.

It was HEADLINE prose -

“Our Liz snubbed”.

Meanwhile, Putin invaded

Athens, took residence in

The Acropolis and

Humpty Dumpty blubbed.

a thirteenth new reflection ... 'corbyn and the media: stop me if you think you've heard this before'

The British media have been nauseating this summer in their treatment of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Labour leadership, and now in the aftermath of his landslide victory are resorting to desperate, sub-tabloid smear tactics to dirty his name and discredit the newly revitalised and politicised left-leaning element of the UK proletariat. Anyone who has read or knows the premise of Chris Mullin’s political novel A Very British Coup and sided with Harry Perkins should be pissed off, worried or both.

Indeed, the latest attempt en masse to undermine Corbyn’s natural and honest appeal is to scream at him for choosing not to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial service this week. While it is to be expected of The Sun to claim Corbyn’s choice of respectful, contemplative silence over joining in a hymn to an enduring albeit unelected head of state and our warmongering jingoistic past a ‘snub’ to the Queen, what is more concerning is that BBC Radio 4 Today ran this as their headline news story – and what’s more featured a less-than-objective discussion on why Jezza didn’t have his top button done up either; scandal of deceitful type proportions!

Then again, if The Sun and the Great British Broadcasting Castle are to be sided with, PM David Cameron’s tweets about Corbyn should be taken seriously too – JC is a ‘threat to our national security’, to ‘our families’, and if given the chance would hide shrapnel in your breakfast cereal. Indeed Cameron’s Twitter feed of late reads like a series of Daily Mail headlines; we shouldn’t be surprised. But as the Telegraph, the UK’s ‘leading broadsheet’ so eloquently put it yesterday, the new Labour leader has even gone so far as to ‘appoint  a nut job’ as shadow chancellor in mad-as-a-gentleman’s-hat-shop tovarishch, John McDonnell.

However, we all know newspaper circulation is plummeting in the UK, by half a million in the last eighteen months as the Guardian reported in April. And while tabloids and now broadsheets alike resort to attention-grabbing headlines and dim-witted sensationalist journalism, many people are simply not paying serious attention any more.

Simultaneously, the rise of uncensored and untampered with political comment and opinion online – while there are down sides – has provided a forum, a space for clued-up, free and deep-thinking individuals including the likes of Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani (Novara Media) to have their voices heard and to discuss politics with politicians in a manner that allows the latter to finish their sentences; moreover the Twittersphere, where much of this debate is communicated, often favours accuracy and the proliferation of statistics over unruly and simplistic editorial shmuck from those at the behest of Murdoch and Co (ironically, including David Cameron).

Opinion forming is increasingly happening online away and apart from traditional print and broadcast media. Corbyn’s huge mandate this summer can in part be explained by this; so to the realisation of self-determination in Scotland at referendum last year, and most recently it is important to note that the broadly-speaking sympathetic reaction to the refugee crisis did not begin at No.10 Downing Street (which was then barricaded against impending ‘swarms’) or the offices of The Times in Thomas More Square. And, of course, there’s the rising awareness of austerity and related inequalities which has been getting plenty of coverage on the internet as well.

But to return to the Battle of Britain – it was yet another disaster set within the wider unremitting tragedy of the Second World War. The young men and women who gave their lives, and were remembered this week, went to their deaths in the hope of protecting families, loved ones and in the name of freedom. Freedom from a political elite hell-bent on cleansing British (and European) society - if given half a chance; a political elite that also relied heavily on traditional, national print and broadcast media to try and control public opinion (how about that for a loaded paragraph no doubt The Sun would be keen to exploit).

Nevertheless, putting hyperbole firmly aside, when you wake up tomorrow, walk past your local news stand and read that Jeremy Corbyn wants the Royal Air Force grounded or National Treasure Cliff Richard’s gold teeth removed and melted down to create new pound sterling with which to aid quantitative easing, stop and ask yourself if you’ve heard oh so much of this before!

Spares

Sarah smiled as her dearest friend Fi talked cheerily about her husband. Sarah smiled because she knew that now she’d had Hektor the once, the levee had broken, washing up the affair she so desperately wanted. In years to come, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Oh yes, with Hektor I had such a torrential affair. It was gloriously passionate, but could not last. C’est la vie.’

Sarah had moments like this so well mapped out she was certain they would happen, this one probably in a café on the street under a parasol, her seated in a black cast iron chair in her elegant early fifties. Wearing large sunglasses like a starlet.

‘He has been so good with India these last three months, and the other one of course, but India adores him. I swear her eyes get wider when the door goes for him coming in from work, and he’s quite adept with the changed board – you know those things can be a bugger, I’m sure you remember even with Holly coming up four now, if you don’t get their little legs just so – yes, Hektor really is a doting father. I’m so happy it went that way, you do hear of some men being kind of standoffish in the pre-talking, pre-walking phases.’

Fi was prattling on. This was the first time she’d left India (and Mindy) alone with the nanny so she could pop over to Sarah’s for a coffee. Sarah was half-listening, half enjoying observing her own internal advocate taunting Fi, saying, I fucked your husband, that same voice of What If that gave her palpitations when she was on a high bridge or somesuch and it said What If you just suddenly lose control of yourself and spring athletically over the railings to your certain death? Or more ominously, when she was with Rico, the voice said What If you developed superstrength and lost control and threw your husband over the edge? Sarah listened to it with quiet amusement, tasting the feeling of devilishness and relishing it, and it must have shown, as Fi asked:

‘Why are you grinning at me?’

‘I’m so glad it worked out for you two. After the third round failed …’

‘Well, we can’t all be as fecund as you and the heffe, unfortunately.’ Fi didn’t sound jealous, in spite of the plosive wording, and Sarah wouldn’t expect her to be; Fi was pathologically incapable of negative thoughts.

‘True. The MZ twin induction injections are no picnic, let me tell you,’ said Sarah. ‘At least you were spared that.’

‘Of course, sorry, I didn’t mean …’ Fi also had a pathological fear of offending people. She changed the subject. ‘Have you been watching ‘Father of the Year’?’

‘Yes, Rico loves it. He’s a wonderful armchair father.’

‘I’ve been voting for Daniel from the start. He’s through to the last eight. Did you see him in the Fitness Boss round? He was quite handsome actually,’ Fi admitted, hand coming to mouth.

‘He wasn’t so good at the emotional support bit though.’

‘Oh, who wants a dad who’s too tender anyway?’

Like Hektor, Sarah thought, heartlessly busting homes.

‘Rico liked Ambrose in the homework challenge round.’ She picked at some non-descript fingernail muck.

‘Hmm, he was fast at the maths problem, but solving it is one thing, helping your child to understand is another.’

‘Having It All is the thing for men now, just like it was for us twenty years ago.’

‘I’m looking forward to the Car Journey from Hell this week. Will Holly be taking part?’

‘What do you mean? How would she take part?’

‘Oh, you haven’t seen? You can use your webcam to be one of hundreds of small screens that’ll be in the back seat in the driving simulator. The dad in the front will be able to hear them all complaining and see them if he turns around, and see them in the mirror.’

‘First one to break, is it?’

‘Yes, I s’pose. Cruel really.’

‘Well, to earn the title…’

‘True enough.’

Fi stood and cast about her like she’d lost something. ‘I’d better get back.’

‘Sure, thanks for stopping by.’

Soon after seeing Fi off, it was time for Sarah to get Holly from accelerated nursery. She had a quick look in the back room before she left. It was squatting on the bean bag and pushing the foam bricks around the floor. It glanced briefly at Sarah as she opened the door. No issues. Sarah shut the door and went to the car.

There was a real hullabaloo at the nursery. Amelia Featherstone, a woman Sarah knew a bit and had always thought of as a person who looked like she was perpetually in receipt of a randomised bonus deduction. Featherstone was tearing a strip off Dr Ashaye, the accelerated nursery director. Dr Ashaye was doing her best.

‘Lead lined walls are actually the only totally reliable defence, Mrs Featherstone, and I really don’t think exposing these children to lead is in their best interest …’

‘But Eric’s chip! Look at him …’

‘I’m aware of the boy’s condition, Mrs Featherstone. Please bear in mind that even with lead-lining or somesuch, once the hackers have those basic details, they could strike at any time. We all have to be very wary of this information becoming public.’

‘Oh no, don’t put this on me. It happened here, how do we know your nursery wasn’t responsible for leaking our children’s data?’

There were uncomfortable murmurs from the gathered mothers and nannies.

Dr Ashaye addressed the crowd now. ‘That is not possible. Our firewall, as you know, is state of the art.’

The child in question, Eric, was slumped on the soft-landing tiles by the swing’s upright. He looked utterly glazed, like an empty cabinet. It was possible to overcome a chip-intrusion, if you were quick enough. You needed to plug in so was safe to come off the grid temporarily, and the broken connection could force the hackers to move on. Featherstone really needed to get him home to have a chance. But she was here arguing. People never have a contingency plan, thought Sarah. She was forever bemused at how badly organised other people were.

At this point in the confrontation, Featherstone’s friend and ally, whose name Sarah wasn’t sure of, Rene or Rianne or something, stepped forward and touched Amelia on the arm.

‘I have an idea.’ Everyone could hear this, but not the idea. They were to see it, however.

*

‘I think the authorities would call it, “having your cake and eating it”,’ Sarah said to Rico after he was back from work. Rico was a trader, just like everyone. With automated agriculture and manufacture, the products in question had become a near irrelevance, and besides, the best money was made in trading the derivatives of the derivatives rather than getting your hands dirty with exchange of calcites, taro, bioethanol, or whatever. A wealth creator, he and his kind would say.

Rico sipped from his glass of wine and regarded his wife.

‘So how long did the transition take?’

Sarah explained the two steps: the hormone-rebalancing injection to bring brain and body development up to speed – in the case of Featherstone’s kid, this wouldn’t take long as he was only three – and the brain chip transfer.

‘Amazing really, these DIY kits. It beeps when you’re at the right spot at the top of the neck, you just click fire and in it goes. Painless. Or so Amelia’s pal was saying after she came out of Dr Ashaye’s office. Shameless gossip, but I’m not complaining.’

‘And did you see the new kid?’

‘Yeah, Amelia brought him out pretty quick, Eric, or the former Eric, I suppose, trundling behind like a regular spare. Hell of a day for him, not that he’d know, what with chip coming out.’

‘Same tool for chip removal and insertion?’ Rico asked.

What was it with him and the technical details? Sarah wondered. He couldn’t fix a squeaking hinge, let alone anything else.

‘Yup.’

Rico stood up and stretched. ‘Huh,’ he said, finishing the conversation. ‘I’m gonna watch Father of the Year.’

Sarah could see her husband from the kitchen as he wafted through the channels from the sofa to find this week’s Father of the Year episode. He had left his glass of wine on the counter – Rico showed little interest in drinking these days, preferring to dull his mind with TV instead.

The presenter was explaining this week’s twist, which Fi had spoken about earlier. Rico grunted with pleasure at the idea and turned to look at Sarah.

‘I’m gonna get Holly,’ he said, boyish and excited.

With his daughter stationed directly opposite the webcam atop the TV and appropriately briefed, Rico opened a connection to the show. He selected Daniel to irritate from his virtual backseat.

‘That guy is so smug,’ he said to no-one in particular.

While contenders were in the driving seat of the simulator, the screen was split so viewers could watch the backseat antics too – and of course, check whether they got on. Holly, directed by Rico, was having no luck.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered. ‘Wait there,’ he said to Holly.

Sarah listened, still in position at the kitchen counter and armed with her glass of wine, as her husband went to the back room and opened the door. He hadn’t really looked at the spare, as far as Sarah knew, since it was old enough to shut away – about twenty months, typically. Sarah had to feed it, of course, and keep up-to-date with the injections. She sometimes took it out into the garden for a little runaround, but only when she was sure no neighbours would notice. You didn’t want a reputation for sentimentality about these things.

‘Molly, come over here,’ he said, like he was cajoling a dog.

‘It’s Polly,’ called Sarah. ‘You chose it! I was too dosed up, remember?’

‘So I did, now. Huh. Polly, come to me.’

Next, Sarah heard some clattering as Rico stepped in to pick up the spare. He walked back through to the lounge with it under his arm at the hip like a slippery rugby ball. He was grinning at his own mischievous inspiration.

Plopping it down on the sofa beside Holly, Rico checked the webcam feed and restarted his connection to the show. Polly stared docily around, her infantile eyes coming to rest on Holly.

‘Dad, it’s looking at me,’ she whined.

‘Just keep doing what you were doing, Hol,’ said Rico. He stared at the dozens of small screens that poor Daniel would see on his back seat, all screeching and groaning about how far it is, being bored, hungry, thirsty, desperate for the toilet and on and on.

Then he yelped, ‘Yes! We’re on!’

Sure enough, one of the many small screens showed Holly shouting and gesticulating, with her spare gazing at her. The show’s set up included a commentator and panel of pundits, like a sports match. Now, the commentator declared, ‘My God, is that a spare?’ Holly and Polly’s screen expanded to fill their whole side of the split screen. Sarah watched Daniel’s face. It was mapped with lines of confusion, shock and more than a little disgust. He turned in his simulator seat and promptly crashed the virtual car into a fence, and, with hokey light relief, a cartoon farmer came running towards his windscreen video feed, brandishing a crook.

The event was talk of the show thereafter, other contenders’ driving attempts somewhat overshadowed. Rico was thrilled. He kept pacing back and forth behind and in front of the sofa, ruffling Holly’s hair as he went by her each time. Sarah stepped forward after a bit and squirrelled the spare away in the back room. For once, it stood in the middle of the room until Sarah left and closed the door, rather than immediately settling down among the bean bags and soft blocks. Sarah felt a dull thud of vague anxiety settling in.

And for good reason.

The next morning, getting there in good time so Rico was still in the house, Population Services came by. The family was under suspicion for having, or at least behaving like they had, two children, rather than one plus a spare.

The woman snooped around the house, checking the spare’s storage area and looking, Sarah supposed, for evidence that the spare was more a part of their lives than it should be. The man addressed the family in the breakfast room. He gave a sermon on the continued need to keep the population in terminal decline, hence the one-child policy, for the sake of balancing the books, figuratively and literally, and the priviledge of the spare heir in this perilous world, whose role should be only that, and the dangers of forming a parent-child relationship, because of the revocation of the right to a spare at one’s child’s reaching reproductive age, but they knew all that didn’t they. Sarah listened blandly, watching her husband trying to chip in with his side. The man paid him no mind. He looked overworked, and undervalued, like most in what was left of the public sector. His face had begun its slide into bags and jowls.

When the woman returned from her inspection, the man said to Rico: ‘You and your daughter need to come with us for some questions.’

Abruptly, Sarah was alone in the house with the spare. She phoned the nursery and said Holly was sick.

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ People asked this much more than they used to. They meant, ‘infectious’.

‘No, don’t worry.’

In a half-daze, Sarah went to the back room, knelt down, and put her arms around Polly, squeezing her until her daugher’s subhuman twin mewed a little.

Afternoon came without Rico and Holly’s return. Sarah had done little. She had phoned Fi, drunk coffee, watered plants. A visitor came around four: Hektor. Despite everything, Sarah had a shudder of excitement as she let him in. Hektor: tall, blonde, cut from the cloth of King David.

‘Are you alone?’ he asked, grimly, like a police detective, not the salacious lover she wanted.

‘Yes. Well, me and the spare.’ She had no idea why she mentioned that. Accordingly, Hektor looked at her blankly.

‘Why would you mention … never mind. Good. I left work early to come here.’

He was restless, like a child on a long journey. Sarah put her hand on his forearm, but he jerked away; all contact felt illicit, once you’d broken your vows.

So early, Sarah could tell her fantasy was giving way, and had already begun resigning herself to the embellishments needed for telling the tale over coffee or cocktails as she envisaged. She felt she had heard it all before, in TV shows and airport novels, as he explained why it was over, couldn’t happen again and on and on. Sarah let the situation infuse her brain, like his words were a sprinkling of tea leaves into a pot.

When he’d finished, Sarah realised her eyes were closed.

‘Sarah?’

‘The authorities are holding Rico and Holly for questioning.’

‘Jesus Sarah. Why didn’t you say?’ He said it in that way that makes it sound like not immediately mentioning the problem was a greater concern than the problem itself – people do it all the time, listen out for it. ‘Why?’

‘Did you see Father of the Year?’

‘No, but Fi said Holly was on … and her spare.’ Realisation slotted in for Hektor.

‘Jesus. What … can I do anything?’ Forever the decent guy.

‘No. Just go. Tell Fi we’ll be fine.’

Hektor did as he was told.

Eventually – it was going on midnight – Rico and Holly returned. Rico sighed onto the sofa, his feet hanging over the armrest. Sarah stood at the end, looking down at him.

‘I think … it will be fine,’ he breathed.

Things went somewhat back to normal after that. At the nursery, Featherstone’s spare had become a near-perfect Eric: the succession complete. Everyone stopped talking about chip-hacks, for now. The news kept the population figures rolling on the tape.

‘Still falling nicely,’ purred the newscasters. Rico was disappointed when Ambrose missed out in the final of Father of the Year to Stefan, who won the sympathy vote because both his child, then his spare, had died of the same infection. ‘There’s just something weird about a guy without any kids entering a Father of the Year contest,’ said Sarah.

Rico was subjected to a randomised bonus deduction when his payout came through, but he rolled the dice and got away with just a 54% tax.

One evening, she drinking, he not, she said: ‘It’s been so stressful. Let’s get away this weekend.’ Rico begrudgingly agreed and they trudged to the Isle of Wight. On the beach, Holly slipped in and out of the waves while her spare squeezed wet clods of sand in her fists. Rico escaped into infanthood, building sandcastles and diving into the surf. Sarah read the posters taped up along the sea wall. They were wanted posters, as though they had come to a blustery wild west. There was a poor photo of a grizzled face. He was wanted for sub-murder: the unlawful revocation of the right to a spare heir, a right which had to be revoked once the child got to sixteen anyway. No doubt it was a cut-rate service, for those too squeamish to do it themselves or too tight to see a licensed provider. Sarah looked at Polly and her stomach turned.

Rico waded up to her through the sand.

‘Holly wants to go see the Needles.’

‘Alright.’

On the headland, Sarah had a dim recollection that she’d seen a photo of these rock pillars, and there were three, but here were two. She squinted as though the missing one might resolve itself. She looked at her family, spread along the rail, sheer banks falling away below them, before cliffs that jammed into the water. Sarah heard the persistent voice in her head, but couldn’t decide whether to vault the rail herself, or tip over Rico, Holly, or the goddamn spare. 

a seventy ninth new poem ... 'a brief history of poo'

Petunia’s first book was entitled:

‘A brief history of poo’ –

It made for a bit of light

Toilet reading, could be used,

And flushed easily.

a twelfth new reflection ... 'corbyn for labour leader'

As the time for Labour members to cast their votes for a new leader of the party draws near with the announcement of the winner of the leadership election coming on September 12, it seems likely, as Stephen Bush in the New Statesman posited this week, that Jeremy Corbyn may triumph as the various polls at the close of the leadership hustings indicate and as Corbyn mania sweeps the media.

I hope Bush and the polls are proved to be correct and that the media continue to give Corbyn a platform to talk politics. He is the man to resurrect and rejuvenate Labour.

Where rival leadership candidates Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper in particular stress the need for electability over policy and Andy Burnham comes across as increasingly desperate in his pleas for Labour members to elect him (he’s been raising his voice a lot of late in attempt to appear assertive and persuasive when really he’d struggle to coax a dog with a bone - in spite of his mother-me-eyes), Corbyn places emphasis strictly on ideas; ideas about how to make UK society more just and more inclusive, in doing so reinforcing his identity as one of the most experienced, principled and downright sensible politicians in recent memory.

It is clear the Labour party cannot compete and should not compete with the Conservatives on the centre, centre-right ground of UK politics. The Conservatives are better at spin and electioneering and in David Cameron and George Osborne have two politicians that positively thrive there; secondly and most importantly, a Labour move to the centre, centre-right makes the party less distinct from their Tory rivals and carries the simplistic and misguided assumption that the electorate as a whole is somehow predisposed to be right-wing in individual and collective outlook.

Corbyn, of course, is left-wing but he is not so far left as to be a communist, moreover his rhetoric is increasingly sounding like the politics of the future embraced by the youth of today, the core-voters of tomorrow what with his pro-diplomacy/anti-war stance, desire for more investment in the quaternary sector, an amnesty on tax-dodging international corporations (Boots, yes Boots is the latest!) and the frivolous, ultimately exploitative TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), not to mention more prevalent, better funded and implemented green policies. Indeed, it has been suggested in some quarters that if Corbyn was elected, the Labour party would have to rebirth and reform as in ’97 with New Labour (hopefully minus too significant a Blairite influence) and in this scenario it would be interesting to see whether the Greens would be willing to unite behind or combine with a Corbyn led Labour party – after all, he wants a broad church, a wider grass-roots movement driving change.

Even Alex Salmond at least hinted the SNP could do political business with a Corbyn led Labour party which might enable Corbyn to go some way to achieving a kind of reparations with the Scottish left-wing (pinches of rock salt at the ready). But Corbyn’s politics is that of encouraging dialogue, and it’s a dialogue he wants to begin at all times outside of Westminster, among the people – you and I, north and south of the 'divide', north, south of Hadrian's Wall.

One of Ed Miliband’s endearing characteristics was that he tried to listen to the people, even if his efforts to respond were sometimes political double-speak or intellectual gobbledegook; for Corbyn both listening and responding in a clear and dignified manner come naturally. I would venture to say our current PM believes so wholeheartedly in his blinkered vision of how society should be run and who for that he might as well leave his ear trumpets at home, while of Corbyn’s rivals for Labour leadership, Kendall can hear nothing but the sound of her own voice echoing in a barren, empty room, Cooper a radio jam, while Burnham’s favourite band is the Courteeners (ahem!).

Joking aside, it’s hard not to like Burnham, Corbyn's main challenger: he resembles a well-groomed extra from Captain Scarlet and is something of a man of the people with the ability to appeal in a tonal sense to the masses, some of whom voted for UKIP over Labour in the recent GE – but he seems, paraphrasing Tony Benn, to be a political weather-vane rather than a sign-post pointing the way to a better future. Nevertheless, he was gracious enough to say he would consider standing in a Corbyn led shadow cabinet whereas Kendall and Cooper were not, in the process delegitimising the views of thousands of Labour members at one gesture. Kendall said it would be ‘disastrous’ if Corbyn got elected which does lead one to wonder what she is doing in the Labour party. As an aside, her statement was endorsed by Chukka Umanna, a man who in this instance would do well to remember the trials and tribulations of his Streatham constituents who loyally voted him (Labour) in by a landslide in May.

Corbyn’s election to Labour leader may upset some in the party but only those who are actively encouraging Labour toward the centre ground, where the movement will be stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place and be easy prey for the ghoulish spawn of Osborne and Cameron Incorporated. That is to the say the end point of a drift to the centre will also bring about a split in the party, but one that will leave remaining very little of principle to build on from a left-wing past that has given the UK the NHS, the National Assistance Act and public ownership of (other) major industries and services. Labour needs to reclaim this past now and take it (and some elements of Blair’s more aspirational, wealth generating policies) into the future. Corbyn is patently the only candidate to do so.

a seventy eighth new poem ... 'mike smalling'

Van Gaal radioed for Giggs

To ‘get Mike Smalling up

Here at once’. Giggs was

In the middle of a game of

Chess with Rooney. Luke Shaw

Was hanging around in the

Background with Blind talking

Hair gel. Mata was there as well,

Head-phones on listening to a

Linguaphone cassette. Van

Gaal’s assistant  - Albert -

Sat opposite his boss
Preparing to win their bet.

a seventy seventh new poem ... 'destiny of froome'

Froome sat on his

Pantomime horse and

Surveyed the French

Countryside: fields of

Gold and an old, tumble-

Down farm house,

Crumbled with time,

Humbled with weeds,

Wind in the telegraph

Wires above. Froome

Swigged brandy from

His water bottle and

Thought of war, law, love
And a very long

Engagement.

a seventy sixth new poem ... 'corked'

Dominic uncorked

A third bottle of

Echo Falls, Stewart frowned

Being tee-total and

All. Gooch’s sun,

Sand-blasted

Face mooned into view;

In his batting glove he

Held a white plastic cup.

‘Fill us up’, he said.

Cork poured:

Most of it

Went on the dressing

Room floor, some splashed

On the dressing room wall.

Stewart frowned

Being tee-total and all.

a seventy fifth new poem ... 'tms tea'

Vaughan knew he shouldn’t

Help himself to another

Slice of Victoria Sponge but

Something in him couldn’t resist

The lure of jam and cream and

Butter, so he wrapped his

Yorkshire chops around a slice

As big as an adult shoe and the

Cake crumbs and icing sugar fell

On his shirt, settled on his ECB tie

Like dandruff and snow flakes. 

a seventy fourth new poem ... 'moeen's bread'

Moeen’s beard could

Hide all sorts of things:

His bank card, chip

And pin, in case of

Emergency, cucumber

Sandwiches, linseed

Oil for his bat, a water

Bottle full of Lucozade,

A piece of graph paper

Showing Cook’s field

Placings by way of

Reminder, throat

Lozenges and a few

Frank words for Warner,

Clarke, any of them

Aussies really.

a seventy third new poem ... 'summer of root'

Root bounced into the

Changing room, danced

And swerved

Along the bench to where

His kitbag lay,

Tore the Velcro from his

Batting pads, whipped

Out a Gameboy, began to

Play, blithely ignoring Bell

Who sat sniffing,

Nibbling sadly at a

Soggy pitta.

a seventy second new poem ... 'royal box'

Parker-Bowles arrived in the

Royal Box, Centre Court, and

Started lobbing expletives at

The French umpire: the C word,

F bombs, and so on; a Palace

Aide said later that Camilla had been

Simply ‘a little, er ... head-strong’.

a seventy first new poem ... 'inverdale'

Inverdale blundered into the studio

Drunk on Guyana rum, tripped

Over a satellite cable and split his

Temple on the corner of a video

Monitor, got to his feet again

Grinning manically, blood leaking

From his skull all over his pink

Polo shirt and made a

Lunge for Lindsey Davenport, attempting

To snog her flush on the lips.

a seventieth new poem ... 'sue barker'

She shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary her, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning on
BBC Breakfast we will remember then – 
She is still alive, still well, forever flirting
Shamelessly with John McEnroe, laughing
Generously at Tim Henman's 'jokes'.

a sixty ninth new poem ... 'fed'

The ball girl blushed

Deep red like royal

Cheeks when, before the

Tie-breaker, Federer

Unzipped his fly and

Urinated in an empty

Bottle of Robinson’s

Fruit and Barley.

a sixty eighth new poem ... 'tennis'

Simon shrank back

From the net – shaking –

Having shot his

Doubles partner dead.

a sixty seventh new poem ... 'wimbledon'

Jill and Jack

Packed a picnic –

Strawberries,

Cream, champers –

Into one of their

Two picnic

Hampers and

Set off to Wimbledon

In hope of watching

Murray (not Judy, or

Jamie the handsome one,

But snaggle-toothed Andy)

Serve, smash

And volley, thrash

Some wally from the

Former USSR, but

They crashed their

Car into a lorry

And the whole day

Was ruined sorry,

The car:

A write-off. And

They both had

Their feet amputated.

a sixty sixth new poem ... 'the scot'

Donald was a Scot.

He drank a lot.

Bloody lots.

He drank like

A fucking fish –

Jonah’s whale, or

The Loch Ness

Monster if it were

To get pissed.

a sixty fifth new poem ... 'hewlett-packard incident'

Gregor looked sheepish,

The silly bastard.

He had just reversed over

His brand new Hewlett-Packard.

The hard

Drive was buggered,

And could he get the CD-Rom

To run again? Could he

Ever!?

Never, nada.

Yawn, yawn, yada, yada – Gregor

Would bleat about his misfortune

For months to come, one

Time he even cried about the

Incident in front of

His Mum

(Hewlett-Packard said the

Warranty had expired;

Gregor said he’d been

Fleeced, had the wool

Pulled over his

Milksop eyes).

a sixty fourth new poem ... 'wine tasting'

Wendy went wine

Tasting, Tuesday night,

Threw back five

Glasses of red,

Snouted six of

White; Wednesday

Woke up

Face down in a

Bowl of Cheerios

With the sad, mumbled
Morning light.

a sixty third new poem ... 'second practice'

Hamilton put down an ‘office copy’

Of FHM, thumbed his TV-sized

Mobile telephone for Twitter updates,

Pictures of gangsta mates

Playing GTA, Call of Duty, perused online
Beauty tips from Top Shop for men and then,

Feeling his sweet tooth,

Fumbled in the pockets of his

Nomex safety clothing for loose

Change and went to find Mercedes’

Chief Race Engineer or a steward to

Operate the paddock vending machines

And procure a can of brand

-ed  fizzy-pop, perhaps a packet of
Pringles, all the time tugging
At his fugging
Diamond-studded ear-ring,
Hearing engine noises and
The shrill tones of his zoned
Out wife.

a sixty second new poem ... 'leberwurst'

Merkel frowned darkly

When the cheese trolley

Was wheeled beside where

She sat and kept her shrivelled

Hands severely in her liver-
spotted lap. FFS,

THERE WAS NO MORE

LEBERWURST!!

a sixty first new poem ... 'vegetarian BBQ'

Stalin ate like

An absolute savage,

Stuffing spuds and BBQ'd

Broccoli down his

Wobbly gullet, burping

Like a horse in between

Mouthfuls – or so

Adolf thought as he

Chumbled wetly on

A salad leaf.

a sixtieth new poem... 'shame'

After publicly disowning Ben

As well as the
Flower Pot Men,

Bill sank deep into a

Compost of shame –

The root cause of course

Was vainglory and
Fame, fatal fame.

a fifty ninth new poem ... 'tiger'

Tiger’s tee shot

Ended up somewhere off

Interstate 70, so

He removed his shoes

And walked barefoot into

The desert.

Ken Brown, meanwhile,

Had already hired a

Reconnaissance plane.

a fifty eighth new poem ... 'boycott'

Geoffrey walked to

The wicket with a

Yorkshire pudding on

His head, batting pads

Made from butcher’s

Sausages and a stick of

Rhubarb under his arm.

a fifty seventh new poem ... 'PMQs'

Less loony-left politics, more photo opps,

Astride a Trident Missile, in a field of GM crops?

Sleeves rolled up, pint of ale on one's head?

Brown nosing with George, George and Jeb?

Less loony-left politics, more Twitter pics,

Coddle a Sun model, safe hands over tits?

Play balalaika outside the Kremlin, Russia?

Have a bloody ball while the rest of y'all suffer?

So, less loony-left politics and more FB snaps

Less about NHS health care plans, how on earth you fill the gaps;

Less trash talking Murdoch, Dacre and the gutter press, and please

Forget the riff-raff, since one couldn’t care less. 

a fifty sixth new poem ... 'gazza'

Gazza grinned from

Ear to ear, eyes wide,

Winking at the cashier

As he passed

Through check out

With a trolley load of beer.

a fifty fifth new poem ... 'cuckoo'

Tick-tock, tick-tock - 

The clock was …

Still ticking, even

Though the Cuckoo

Had died  as a consequence of
Resistant Hypertension days ago.

a fifty fourth new poem ... 'the boss'

Springsteen slid his

Greasy fingers up, down the

Neck of his steel guitar; hard

Lips saturated in

Motor oil, face

All man sweat and corn

Stubble, his skin the

Colour of solvent red diesel, when

He spoke his voice was

Like rubble, gravel in the gears of

A big truck. Even at sixty

Five Charlize thought he’d

Be a good fuck. 

a fifty third new poem ... 'big potato'

Someone called Bert

‘Big potato’, which hurt, was

Strange to Bert since

He’d always been told he

Looked more like a turnip –

Plump, purple, bulbous; he

Also had Swedish roots. 

a fifty second new poem ... 'light-weight'

Archie was a light-weight:

Three sniffs from a can of

John Smiths and he’d

Be pissed, rat-arsed,

Passed out in his own

Wee or gesticulating

Dementedly to nobody

In particular, extra-

Curricular drinking sure

Muddled his thinking, linking

Words, actions,

Reading advertising captions:

‘Don’t drink before you drive’,

‘Feel alive, Five Alive’ all

Contrived to make no sense,

Archie wasn’t dense, just

Another cheap date, fundamentally

Speaking a light-weight.

a fifty first new poem ... 'in the soup'

Frank smuggled an apology from his beard.

He had a ketchup stain on his chest the

Colour of tomato soup, some other

Gloop.

Eileen sighed

And sombrely ate a chip – Frank had

plied them with too much vinegar,

As usual.

She thought about pretending

To wretch,
But in fairness it would

Have been churlish, childish, so

Eileen fetched

A napkin instead,

Wiped underneath her eyes, red,

Turned down the corners of

Her mouth and screamed

Like a new born baby.

Maybe Frank would understand

For once, instead of

Being such a c**t.

a fiftieth new poem... 'contending for a living'

It’s about the traps,

The bears,

Bear traps,

The taps turning on

In the morning

Running with water

Cold in the night,

When ice covers

Wind blasted walls,
Snow falls on

Grey streets
And the paving stones

Hard underneath

Club feet,

And your beard

Frozen to your

Cheek, numb

Touch black fingers

Nails bitten such

Down to the bone -

There’s no place

Like life, about

Face. Home.

Would Like To Meet

Truth is relative, and so is happiness, thought Alex as she composed her personal ad. She struck out ‘Keep it simple’ as an opener; visions invaded of men seeking a mentally deficient mistress to clean for them and scrape their feet. She decided to write down all her faults, see herself as her stepmother would, pegged down as she had been by jealously at the frightening Elektra complex of the teenage Alex and her doting father. She wrote: ‘I have a stubborn small belly, my long nose gives me a horsey look, my hair is too fine and my nails are bitten to the quick. I’m pathetically damaged, moody and a spiteful loser.’ Reading it back, Alex felt curiously unmoved. She was old enough to have faced the icy feel of pitiless self-honesty, and ridden unscathed through the death-wish, making her less reflective, not more. She considered putting the ad in as it was, one of these breaths of fresh air that people liked (until that air went stale). The problem with that, amusingly subversive as it would be, was that Alex did actually want to meet a nice man. So she turned it all around, wrote instead about her winning smile, fondness for design, long walks (the obligatory one for women in the ads over fifty, to show you weren’t fat, but also weren’t some Pilates-chewing skin and bones), and photography. The last one wasn’t exactly true; Alex didn’t take any more photographs than anyone else. Then again, she did have a brain emblazoned with stand-out images that stayed with her – she supposed unchanged by time, but details always drifted off into some fuzzy wasteland of memory, until she convinced herself it was a certain way even if the particulars were commandeered from somewhere else. For instance, the image of her mother face down in the pool of a Devon holiday cottage they had rented one summer had rhododendrons crowding to the edge of the tiles that had never been there. What was unmistakable, and unshakable, was the sight of her father at the bedroom window upstairs, fading into the dark as he stepped back when Alex, aged fourteen here, turned from the pool screaming. The artless functionality of death and the naively human rejection of its long hand, lifting the log for just long enough for us to scurry around in excitement at the sudden light, became horribly apparent to Alex. She turned cynical, in the fullest sense. She told people she was damaged by her mother’s drowning, since that’s what they expected, but more she was hardened and made restless. Now her husband was dead, now an orphan late in life, what she wanted was comfort to lose herself to, a pillow of a man to bawl into, someone who loved her. She didn’t care whether she loved him so much; that was how it had been with her late husband, Mack. Sometimes Alex had caught him staring at her with the most helpless affection. And she could not take him seriously. His buffoonery laid in wait and surprised her at odd times. He was the kind of man who watched reports of a massacre on the TV news, whistled through his teeth and went to put the kettle on. Yet his self-awareness, which would fit into a pisspot, was perhaps what made her so fond of him. This was what Alex sought now she was ‘getting back into the dating game’ as her friend Sebastian would say. The last thing she wanted was a philosopher, a man of angst or self-righteousness. Alex was one of those intelligent people who thought that intellectual conversation was self-aggrandisement.

Alex carried on reading the classifieds in her local paper. She snorted at few of them: ‘Seeks zany, wacky F’; ‘Stunning stag seeks delicious doe’; ‘No boy scout, but WLTM a goodish girl guide to explore’. Alex marvelled at how many commented on their solvency – was this to reassure readers or to invite gold-diggers? She really enjoyed ‘Ugly, Bald Bloke, M, 52, barely literate, dodgy social skills, seeks F. Please form an orderly queue.’ Alex thought about getting in touch. She wondered at the defensive ‘emotionally sorted’ in one ad. She immediately rejected anyone looking for ‘friendship, maybe more’. Who had time for that? ‘Tactile’, she assumed, was code for ‘high sex drive.’ Alex was most drawn to the ad headed ‘Peaceful, Kind.’ Peace was probably what Alex most wanted. He was the right age and also listed photography as an interest. Nervously, she called the mailbox and left him a message and her number.

Their first meeting was in a coffee shop in town, the kind of place that had local jam stacked on scuffed shelves, an odd mix of chairs (‘reclaimed’), where comfort was a lottery. Alex arrived first, swapped her chair, and sat facing the door. She’d told him she would wear a red scarf. It was a bit warm to keep it on, but she wanted it to go right. On the phone, he’d been patient, listening carefully and pausing nicely, peacefully, before responding.

When he walked in, he stopped just inside the door and looked around every table in the small place, making sure. Then he smiled a little smile and approached Alex. He proffered his hand.

‘I’m Leslie. Sorry, you were waiting.’

He was quite small; Alex likely had an inch on him. He dressed and moved delicately, in a kind of studied manner that made him seem quietly sure of himself, but without any brashness. The old-fashioned definition of self-confidence, thought Alex. While not especially handsome, he had a sort of grandfatherly warmth about him, bright eyes and neatly combed hair. He was a precise package of a person, seemingly without all the raggedy tentacles of disappointing memories, pent up emotions and missed chances that haloed most people. Leslie was a librarian, and, as it turned out, photography was no casual interest for him. His photo of a trio of swans just taking flight, ideal backlighting making trails of water from their wing tips shimmer brilliantly, was often reprinted in nature magazines. It had won an award some years ago. He didn’t seem put off by Alex’s apparent disingenuousness about her own interest in photography; he was just happy to talk about his own hobby.

‘He was simply lovely,’ Alex told Sebastian on the phone, later.

‘He sounds a little humdrum for you Alex. A librarian, you say? You couldn’t make it up.’

‘And part-time photographer. He was just nice. And Simple.’

‘Divorced?’

‘No, Leslie never married.’

‘Perhaps you ought to wonder why?’

‘Hadn’t met the right woman. I did ask.’

‘No one really believes in right do they? Not at our age at least. Just what you’ll settle for.’

Conversations with Sebastian often went this way, a sort of arch look at everyone else’s blinkered foolishness. This was when he would just editorialise for a while, and Alex doodled on the pad.

~

Alex saw Leslie many times over the next two months; they did go for long walks, they had coffee, lunch, dinner and went to an exhibition of wildlife photographs. Leslie looked at them for far longer than most visitors, who spent more time on the captions than the pictures. Alex was realising that he wasn’t much like Mack, but that he was more considerate, poised, quiet; he did possess that uncomplicatedness she wanted.

One day he bought her a gift. It was a photograph, framed. The image was a very dark silhouette against a late dusk sky. Trees in the foreground, nearly black, gave way at one side to a high rise block, with lights on in some windows making no particular pattern.

‘It isn’t beautiful, but it is magical,’ he said. ‘Most people I’ve met wouldn’t like it, but you can see.’

Alex, until now a little unsure of how it was going, was cautiously flattered by the crediting of her intellect. It was hard to stay objective when someone noticed what she took to be her best asset. This is when anyone becomes helpless and impressionable: a compliment on your chief source of pride.

After that, not to say due to that, she took him back to her place. Alex ran her own business; she’d done it since her husband had died, prompting all the talk about his holding her back, in their lazy psychologising. People said she’d flourished; as though success was a product of a reckless death. Alex lived above the shop though; she’d sold the house, the big, indifferent house, to fund the business. The children never materialised, like the two of them had just forgotten somewhere along the way that there was a plan. So she ditched the place, went into kitchen design and fitting. It was a premium place; she’d built a proficient reputation. Some of the older kitchen fitters flirted with her, but they were all married, with teenage kids or older, never a hope in handsome hell.

Alex led Leslie upstairs, gave him peppermint tea at the counter. They slept together; he was considerate, slow, closed his eyes when he should. Afterwards, he smiled, and he waited for her to go to sleep before he did. Mack always went straight to sleep after sex, a thick, blank sleep, devoid of form.

Leslie took his turn and asked Alex back to his house after a delightful bistro dinner.

Alex felt enlivened – she felt full. 

Leslie lived in a maisonette. It was unfussy, clean, elegant in décor. There were no tropes of bachelordom, no black leather sofas or stainless steel. His eye for colour and framing, there in his photographs, was present in the rooms. Leslie opened a bottle of port; he did not ask whether Alex liked it, which she appreciated. It was nice to have refined taste assumed.

They settled in the lounge, which was lined with shelves on two walls. There were books on one, photograph albums on the other, more than a hundred probably.

‘I have been more or less obsessive for most of my life,’ Leslie confessed.

‘Show me the highlights.’

Leslie smiled and pulled down two or three albums. He sat beside Alex on the sofa and she shuffled close to him. She loved listening as he set the scene for selected shots, talking about the time of day and the weather, and how long he had to wait for the moment he wished to capture.

‘Photography is about patience,’ he said.

He showed Alex beautiful wildlife photos, from birds feeding in his garden to shots of deer on holidays around the British Isles. There were landscape pictures, but frequently a little unusual, a strange juxtaposition.

‘You’re very talented,’ she declared.

He just smiled and went on, accepting the compliment that way. The port kept going down, vivid and sweet, and Alex could feel it on top of the wine with their roasted and glazed chateaubriand.

‘Excuse me,’ Leslie said, and slipped to the bathroom. Alex stood to try to clear her head. She studied the photo albums. They were all the same, splendid leather-bound volumes, made to last. At the bottom corner of the bookshelf, one stood out by how creased the spine was, and how it was pulled away at the top from being lifted out so many times. Curious about what made this one special, Alex took it out and seated herself again. She opened the book; this was different to the ones Leslie had shown her so far. Alex looked at the pictures in the first few pages slowly, then sped up, racing to the end, heart fast, horror pouncing as a repellent realisation set in. All the photographs were of children, different children. In parks, at the beach, leaving school gates. On beaches and at swimming pools and in fountains on sunny days, there were naked children, boys and girls, all young. Alex became inert, looked aloft, felt absent while the album lay frightfully open on her lap, and Leslie walked back in.

He paused, in his way, at the doorway. Then he fell heavily into the armchair, opposite Alex. She stared. Leslie’s head was in his hands, his shoulders began to shake as tears, thick with salt, started to fall.

‘I’ve never hurt anyone. I don't ... touch children. I don’t have a computer. I would never … act on how I feel. But I couldn’t help just …’

‘Don’t,’ Alex interrupted. ‘You can’t …’

She looked at hopeless Leslie, down to the album, and over to the phone, trying to work out what to do, what it was worth.