4 short new stories

 

IT'S OVER

 

That whole polluted mass thing, sub species of the sea, nets, giant flotsam, carrier bags, batter scraps, its stinking skeleton and head like a pumped up trout, waddled its way over the waves to introduce itself to Ulsterman Michael Fish junior, the son of the famous weather disseminator Michael Fish senior.

‘Get back to the tidal waters, ye sardine sons of Satan!’ cried Michael Fish junior.

‘We are harbingers of environmental and maritime catastrophe.’

‘The climate doomsday scenario, eh? That’s the cunning tongue of Papist dogma, and you are the fish spawn of vile Vatican venom. Back to your deep dark waters, I bid ye.’

‘In you we have picked the wrong human to warn mankind.’

 ‘Take your wicked wilful words and drown them in your long Roman robes of blood and Piscean blubber.’

‘We’ll be off then but don’t say we didn’t warn you.’

‘Hook off, and don’t ye think leaving any of your sick roe or landing any one of your repugnant thought processes over here – not amongst our great united band of brothers, you won’t.  No more, I tell ye. No, bloody more!’

‘Ungrateful or what?’

And the polluted mass thing dragged itself back over the shallows, and, reaching the drop of the sea shelf, sunk itself into the tarry deep chill of ocean and disappeared.

Michael Fish junior met his father for a mug of tea and fish and chip dinner.

‘The high priest of tricks and tuna came, Da, and tried to say the waters were drying up and going bad.’

‘Eat you cod, Junior, and drop the Paisley talk.  Everything is going to be just fine.’

 

Barnaby Benson

In all their agonising and perpetuating of the myth that hard work leads to achievement,

Barnaby Benson was an outlier, a slow-down, even-breathing sage of the virtues of doing nothing.

Eschewing the inherent stresses of searching for enlightenment by following mantras and rules,

Barnaby’s approach, if it could be described, was as fresh as the melting rush of a mountain glacier: 

‘Listen to metal and drink coffee and beer if you like them, rant at the television at night if it helps, 

 just allow yourself a moment to breathe and empty your head and feel the ground under your feet’.

It was as simple as that and though Barnaby Benson had no followers or friends or underpants of note,

And spent lots of time ranting at the television, sometimes he was as quietened as a deserted school at night.

When WE WILL RUN FREE

When billionaires blew rockets to burn, we filled balloons

with spittle, and flew like Icarus towards the sun,

skinned up palms to escape ourselves, to rescue a neighbour’s cat, 

shouted in cones, ranted from rooftops, 

held umbrellas just to caress the currents.

Once we mingled, cycled in an umbilical cord, 

a lycra chain-gang, in parks, in cities,

crossing  squares, linking hands on skyscrapers, 

thoughts of jumping banished by who we might fall on, 

a lonely road now with just our breaths, and memories.

After this, the clamp, the civic shut in,

will come the release, the new build,

going into shops like entering a circus, the shrill cry that follows the roar, 

the kiosk sign that says all fear gets left inside,

we’ll find each other then, clowning around, ignoring hoops for the air outside.

THE OPTIMIST RECYCLIST

In the low tide scrub hinterland fringing the canals of East London, all manner of life is exhumed: carved out cats, whose missteps had fatally wrong footed them into a starving badger lair; an empty marmalade jar divested of its fairground retro goldfish prize (three consecutive hoops on a roadside cone); a deflated helium balloon crash-landed from a child’s party; a bird spectacularly entangled and carried away by a goal net unfastened in a gust of wind. 

Under this moody sulphurous globe of late autumn, amongst all the death and detritus, a woman walks, head down, wringing her hands in a vain attempt to wipe away thoughts, her brain frazzled and beset by fear. She doesn’t notice a resurrected, reborn half-dog-half-cat holding a Dyson leaf collector in its reconstructed paws; nor the legless, one-claw-one-hand surgical philosopher with his chest clasped tight in fish gut. It’s a pity for his words are exemplary:  

‘Do it to yourself, do it to others, patch up the armless and fill the poor souls with their stuffing taken out, put crows eyes on crows feet, jumpstart a de-frosting Iceland salmon and sew an aqualung through its spine, taxidermy the taxi driver who lost all recall of his knowledge, give him a dog’s memory for treats and plant a Satnav into his frontal lobe  . . . ‘

 

As he speaks, his lone claw chops creative life shapes into the sky, whilst his hand reaches in his pocket for a long discarded Strawberry Quality Street.  ‘I hate these,’ he thinks. ‘If only I had the power to summon new life, not just resurrect and re-shape the lifeless, I could bring forth a chocolate caramel, or a purple clad toffee brazil.’  He spits the strawberry cream out and the half-dog-half-cat hoovers it up.

‘Waste not want not,’ munches the half-dog-half-cat.

The surgical philosopher, who has been closely watching the rejected chocolate disappear into his splendid domestic creation, is suddenly struck by a big idea. ‘Pass me the leaf collector,’ he commands, ‘for I can fashion something from it that may have benefit for life-form as we know it, something for the greater wellbeing of our planet.’

His words take flight towards the angst-ridden woman, who had passed by only a moment before: ‘Madam, would you allow me to adapt the leaf blower into a strimmer and splice it directly into your brain? Not only might it help you shed unnecessarily negative thoughts but it might shape burdensome worries into manageable bite-sized chunks’.

The woman turns: ‘Are you insane: some kind of DIY Jesus with ideas above your station?’

‘You’re not ready,’ the surgical philosopher surmises. ‘It’s understandable, I feel your pain, your confused state. But when you are ready, you know where to find me.’

‘In the looney bin,’ she replies, and yet even as she say this, she finds her feet taking small steps forward, drawing her imperceptibly towards the surgical philosopher, to a life without worries, a life without hands or feet.

Man in shower

       

Man in pane
Condensation
Man get hot
Palpitation

Man bit stuck
Constipation
Man do fart 
Fumigation!

 

THE HIKE


  ‘Oh, lone is the path that turns its head, that coils the slopes, and reaches unseen peaks.’

A ramble no more amongst congested city parks, devils careering on wheelie boards, arses slung from low-hung jeans, bins stocked full with detritus: used pampers, split micro-brewery plastic tankards and tomato splattered pizza cartons.

Out into the big sky and mountainous ranges, the air rare and tight, the urban hiker takes his beard for a wild unanswered whistle and a solitary testing climb. No mobile reception, no wifi, just him and his lightly groomed, much-coveted facial hair.

‘Beard, I like it. I like it very much,’ he says.

The beard tenses, its follicles frosting with the cold, tightening its grasp on the skin around his master’s mouth to produce a satisfying satisfied grin.

‘I want to shout, “I’m smiling because I’m happy!”’

The beard has other ideas and tightens its hold further so the hiker can speak no more. He is forced to sit down with his beard at the mountain’s peak and listen and watch, the cold mist rising from the valley to join his own exhaled plumes of breath, his heart slowing to a single beat, everything laid out before him.

MILLICENT MARTIN

Millicent Martin was a man on a mission.  He’d already mentally left the fog and fug of his life behind: the screaming child, the nylon duvet that gave him shingles, the carpet that rucked up each time he tried to do a squat jump on it. So what was Millicent Martin intending to do? Millicent Martin was going to raise havoc. He went into the loft and bought down the Maasai spear from his holiday in Kenya when he eighteen. His wife cried ‘No!’ but Millicent Martin cried ‘yes, bloody well yes,’ and set off down the high street to find an impala to impale.

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.

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.’

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!

THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN SITTING IN A PARK DRINKING BEER.

 

There’s more to life than sitting in a park drinking beer.

Says who?

Says I. Just look around, Jack: what do you see?

A bunch of twats?

The man with a dog: what’s he thinking?

I can’t feed my dog so he’ll eat me.

Your view is jaundiced.

The wide-faced twit on stilts will get his stilt stuck in a drain and fall on his tit.

What makes you so angry?

People saying ‘there’s more to life than sitting in a park drinking beer’.

Okay, do want another one then?

Does the Pope wear Speedos?

I don’t know what you mean by that.

Please yourself.

Promise you’ll lighten up when I get back?

Pinkie promise. Now, piss off and get the beers.

When Arnold is gone, Jack’s heart suddenly bursts and tiny splinters pour out and scatter onto the ground.

When Arnold returns he finds his friend lying on the ground

Jack is speaking softly and Arnold bends close to hear what he’s saying: I see it now, lovely birds, lovely people, lovely friends!

And then he’s gone.

The night falls onto the park. Arnold drinks both beers, and then lights a bunch of splinters to find his way home.

Steps of rain

Plink it. The rain it does.
Take it from me it says it does.
It rain. Refrain. It stain.
I, it drain.
For all man kind.
For brethren for friend it rain.
It pain.
And again and again
it fall.
The rain
                ..
                   ..
                        ..
                              ..
                                     the rain.

THE END OF THE KNOB

THE END OF THE KNOB

It was a strange mission and details of it were kept secret even from the

climbers. The team chosen were all experienced, veterans of the Himalayas,

and set about reaching base camp with a unifying sense of professionalism

and a common desire to get to the end, wherever it was.

At base camp they were told they were to climb Peter’s Knob.

‘Non heard of dis one,’ said Pascal Piste, the team leader.

‘It’s a penis, gentlemen,’ replied the Base Camp co-ordinator: ‘my name is

Peter and the penis is mine!’

The tent was silent for a moment for this was an astonishing thing to hear, but

then one by one the elite climbers began to laugh.

‘You can laugh all you like but tomorrow morning you begin my ascent. I

commend your aptitude and skill and wish you all the luck in the world.’

‘Mes amis,’ spoke Pascal. ‘Le Knob de Pierre, c’est dificile, mais un climb est

un climb, non? Nous must travail et succeed, oui, oui?’

‘Yes, wee,’ said the climbers and the next morning they allowed themselves to

be miniaturised and set to work.

It took seven arduous hours, jagging and faltering amongst bumps and

crevices, vein cracks and old love scars, but eventually they arrived at Peter’s

Summit, where they planted their flag.

Peter looked down at them disdainfully, and with a series of monkey like

scratches sent them plummeting into a dark abyss.

‘Never said anything about planting a flag you egotistical amateurs!’ he cried.

‘Are we in a cave?’ asked climber Two.

‘It’s warm and the odour is profound,’ said climber Three.

Climber Four kept coughing, and Pascal voiced what surely they already

knew: ’how do you say dans le postérieur dans Anglais, mes amis?’

‘It sounds almost the same in English,’ they said, before a terrible thing

engulfed them all.

FROM CHAOS

 

FROM CHAOS

From low, the semi-elongated-dwarf–bird-cat looks up at the absurd magnanimity of the metropolis and sighs. A cloud drops low and showers the steps before him. He will go no further.

Up in a bone tree in the high part of the city, a squat owl surveys everything. He has nothing wise or profound to say. He is looking for mice.

It is left to a parakeet busy sucking on the trail of a tsetse fly to explain but it’ll take a near eternity to hear his words, as birds either cannot speak or we cannot understand them if they do.

No matter, we know a bird who swallowed a fly . . .