Thursday 20 October 2016

MONSTERS WITHIN


Mister Tindall runs the sweet shop. Mister Tindall lives alone. Mister Tindall has no friends. Mister Tindall is a monster.

Me and my brother call him names: yellow fangs, pus breather, custard eyes and banana ears; these are our yellow names for him.

He is the ugliest man in the street. He is the ugliest man in the town. He is the ugliest man in the world. He isn’t even a man.

Once he was wearing sandals and I saw claws where there should have been toes. He has a hairy back that’s way too hairy even for a very hairy man. He has spikes where they have no right to be. He owns a tail.

Dad says he’s the sort who would sit behind a screen in a darkened room and target bombs onto innocent streets and faraway playgrounds. Mum says Dad is being ridiculous but asks us each day if we’ve actually seen his tail.  She has a strange worried look when she asks this. Like she’s remembering a nightmare and isn’t sure if she’s our Mum anymore.

That’s the effect Mister Tindall has. He upsets everyone and everything. That’s why we don’t go into his sweet shop, except when he’s not there.
There are pink gums, red gobstoppers, small stacks of Dracula milk teeth, and jars with body chunks floating in formaldehyde.

A new rumour has started going around town. It says Mister Tindall is fearful of his own reflection, and is as scared of us as we are of him. He’s a coward and can be got at! Last week Dad rounded up a posse and they took flaming torches and stood outside his shop for hours not saying a word. 

We still hurry when we pass the shop on the way to school. In class we all daydream about him. On the way home we write graffiti on his walls, like ‘leave our town’ and ‘you’re not welcome’. At night we hear him rubbing away the words, and once we heard him cry.

Wednesday 19 October 2016

AN UNHOLY GRAIL
























Quiet now. The night is Devil black.
Sleep now. The Knight waits for attack.
They mass behind. They storm and plunder –
The giant evil birds, the filthy scalded cats,
The tombstone tenants, faces racked by thunder.

Hope shines out from the door in a negative of night,
The moon above is full and on the other side of dawn
The cheats and murderous burst out of the earth,
The horned devil finds a good place from which to strike,
All light gone and night undone, the Knight waits.

Conker





























You said to bring a conker
I did?
To play conkers
I did?
Look, I’m not sure why you keep saying that
I did?
Yes, that phrase, I’m not sure why . . .
Can I see the conker?
You’ve got one too?
Can I see the conker?
I think I’m going to go
Can I see the conker?
I’ll leave it here; I don’t want to play any more
You’ve got nice conker
A nice conker?
You’ve got nice conker
Bye then
Nice conker
Excuse me?
Nice conker
I’m off
Conker

CREAM CRACKERS


Mum always said I was simple but vain: a lethal cocktail in her book. Granddad said I was ‘as smug us a bug in a rug’; whatever that meant. But I’ve always had this notion that I could be a hero, something, someone to look up to, a pinnacle –‘
‘An icon, lad,’ Mum said. ‘They call this an icon.’
‘Not on a plinth to stare up at, but a fully fledged blood and guts hero.’
‘An icon!’
‘So how do I do it?’
‘Do it?’ Mum said. ‘You’re crackers, lad. Just stop with all the dirty talk, your brain is made up of crumbs: crackers plain and simple, that’s what you are.’
Jacob’s Cream my brother used to call me. Only he meant it in a sly, saucy Old Testament way.
‘You’ll end up with a permanent spot on Looney Tunes like your brother if you don’t shut down the hero talk!’ Mum warned.
My bother had shut it down. He’d followed the words of an angry bishop who said radical Muslims were damaging status quo. Devoted to Saint Francis (Rossi,) my brother tried to crucify our neighbour, Mister Khan’s cat. Cat would have none of it and backed him up in an alleyway and clawed at his face.
I visited him by his new bed in his new room. ‘Cover my foot in coal dust and hand me a bandana,’ Granddad used to say to us when we were small. We had no idea what he meant but it always made us laugh. I tried the line again but my brother didn’t even smile. ‘Still spitting crumbs, Jacob?’ he asked, rubbing the scratches on his cheeks.
When it was clear he wasn’t returning, I tried to shut down the hero impulses for good but the hero words just kept coming.

Many years later, Mrs Vance, who lived next door, got her self in a spot of bother.
‘I’ve got myself in a spot of bother, Thomas (“that’s my name. Please, remember it!”).’
Sidney Groat was a moneylender, old school. Kneecap Sid some called him: one tap on each knee with a hammer for each day you were late with a payment. Mrs Vance was four days late, plastic hips, plastic kneecaps and all.  ‘Call me the bionic woman,’ she used to say whilst pulling out her dentures, and then holding them above her head to make chopping shapes in the clouds.
‘Could you help an old woman in distress, Thomas?’ she asked.
‘I’ll sort it, whatever it is!’ I said.
I lay in wait for his next visit. Tap he went on Mrs Vance’s door, which I was sure she felt as a threat deep in her (knee) bones.
I burst out of a bush with my nephew’s Spiderman mask on. ‘Step back, Mister Groat or you’ll be spinning in my web and eating worms for dinner,’ (another of Granddad’s phrases).
‘Who, the fuck are you?’
‘Jacob Cream,’ I said.
He laughed, and this gave me my chance.
I took out my carrier bag (‘5p, daylight bloody robbery!’ Mum would have said if she were still alive), and pulled it over his head and tied. His arms waved; his face made moving shadows inside the bag, an angry wide mouth. He fell onto his knees after a while.
Mrs Vance stepped out. ‘ What have you gone and done? I only meant you to warn him off!’
Hard this hero stuff, hard to know where to draw the line. I didn’t fancy ending up sitting on a hospital bench next to my brother making hedgehogs from pinecones so I ran.
Mrs Vance helped Mister Groat up and they looked down the street to see if they could spot me. Mrs Vance should have got out her dentures: I was high up in the trees beside the clouds.

I’m up here now. If you look carefully you can see fine crumbs falling from the sky when I speak. And if you’re in trouble, I’ll stop talking and come down and help you. Like most heroes I’m a better listener than talker anyway, ‘a transistor radio with knobs on and no battery inside’ as Granddad used to say.

POLICE! CAMERA! ACTION!


Police! Camera! Action!
Another disaster programme done and dusted, and the TV anchor-man made from slime and Milk Tray slips away to the park. Clothes off, neck hair swept back, his metamorphosis into a creeping creeper creep happens within his own moving fog of smug. His form glides as much as it hunches and when he arrives in the park he sets about worrying the deer by whispering crime statistics and the phrase ‘buckled Austin Princess’ into their hot felt like ears. ‘Bastards’ is a word he savours for unsettling the stags, their bony coat stands tensing as if they might rut and cut at any moment. But as quick as he was there, he’s gone again. Back to the studios and into his early evening television suit, a Chaplin dung stain mopped off his top lip by his adoring assistant, his tiny hooves clasping the calf insoles of his smart heeled shoes.
Smile! Smarm! Action!

QUINCY



‘I swear I saw it, I did, I did,’ says the lippy horseman pointing back towards the island.
‘You saw what, may I ask?’ asks the armless one.
‘Fungus Face, Mister Mask the Fungus Face! He made some bad ju ju down there.’
‘Do do?’
‘Ju Ju! He do an autopsy or something on someone or something, I don’t know what. Couldn’t make it out.’
‘You should go back and make it out,’ says the armless one.
‘Come on! Who do you think I am, Poirot or Quincy?’ asks the horseman
‘Quincy.’
‘And who do you think he is?’
‘Quincy.’
‘Well, I’m not going back, not for you, not for no one, not even for Quincy.’

Saturday 27 February 2016

TRUMPS



‘I’ve got the whole world in my hands, I’ve got the whole world . . . oh, hello, there.  What do you think I should I do with it now?’
‘Behind you!’
‘You want me to put it behind me?’
‘Look behind you!’
‘Ah, you want me to drop the world in the volcano? Okay then, here goes. Drum roll, please . . . ‘

HEELS!



Ere, want me to help you with your heels?
No thanks, I’m quite okay.
Heels!
Yes, heels.
Rhymes with feels.
Yes.
Can I?
No.
Heels! I like heels. I like your heels and I like saying ‘heels’!
It’s a free country.
Heels!