Creative Writing at U3A
I joined the Creative Writing group at Preston & District U3A about nine years ago. The format was very simple. Meeting once a month the group leader suggested a subject (or brief), we went away and wrote, and read the result out at the next meeting. The pieces were mostly (though not necessarily) fiction with a suggested length of 500 words – any longer and there wouldn’t be time for all dozen or so to read them out.
For those of us who write for pleasure it was a great system. A major frustration for us casual scribblers is getting people to read the stuff. As an artist as well as a writer I’m aware of the difference in commitment required of your friends and acquaintances between glancing at a painting and reading a piece of prose, of whatever length. Even a page of A4 takes longer than looking at a work of visual art.
I was not personally a member of the group for the whole nine years, apart from anything else COVID happened and I got into some longer and more personal writing. But there are more than thirty of these small literary gems – if gems they are of course but, as already mentioned, they’re mostly very short so you won’t be wasting too much of your time in reading the odd one.
They aren’t in any particular order – Nos 4 and 5, for example, are quite recent, the first three and the half a dozen that follow are all older. After that it’s a mixture.
When I rejoined about a year ago it was to discover a new group leader and a much smaller group. One consequence of this was that the stories became longer, settling down to around 1000 words. The exception is No 15 which was written over two session and runs to over 3500 words.
Below are a list of the stories. Just click and read, in any order – there’s a link back to the contents page at the bottom of each one.
Contents
1. The Door
It was very ornate as doors go. Full of carvings of figures in various poses and juxtapositions. The small brass knocker kept up the theme. It too was a figure, of a naked male torso facing the door. He looked like he was clutching a trapeze; his legs bent backwards from the knees. It was by grabbing his feet that you knocked; a suggestive movement that made me feel slightly uncomfortable.
But not as uncomfortable as the creature who opened the door. She was dressed in black. I say ’dressed’. She actually looked like she’d been dipped in matt, black plastic – or was it latex?
“Err…” I began.
“Come in,” the woman replied, swinging the big door a little wider. She moved her right arm backwards, her palm open, inviting entry. And she smiled. A big wide, inviting smile.
I must say that the combination of costume, smile and undoubted attractiveness did unnerve me somewhat and I found myself entering in silence. There were words there to be said but my mouth wouldn’t say them, or rather my temporarily overloaded brain wouldn’t let it. So in I went – like lambs reportedly do on their extended journey to the supermarket.
The hallway was large and sumptuous. There were several panelled doorways and a wide, maroon carpeted staircase bisecting them. On the walls between the doors were oil paintings, also of figures and just as suggestive as the door knocker had been though the bodies depicted in them were mostly female. Beneath were luxurious, three seated sofas in soft teak coloured leather. It was to one these that she guided me. I’m not sure how she did this but before I knew it, there I was, feeling swallowed up by the soft, brown leather. She placed herself (the word ’sitting’ doesn’t really do justice to the way she descended and arranged her latex enclosed body) at the opposite end of the same seat.
“Let me guess,” she now said in a velvety voice, her tone soft and sensuous enough to wrap priceless porcelain in. “This is your first time.”
“It is here,” I managed to croak.
She greeted this with a slight tilt of her delicate head, her eyebrows gently raised – an expression which said “Oh yes? Perhaps there’s more to you than I had thought.”
I tried to smile. I doubt I achieved anything as disarmingly radiant as the one that beamed back at me.
“You’re younger than the ones we’re used to,” she observed.
“Am I?”
“Yes,” she said simply. Her smile moderated now; became less a display of teeth, more a gentle widening of the lips. If anything it was even more alluring.
And then one of the doors opened and a man appeared. He was immaculately dressed in a dark suit, pale shirt and darker tie.
“Ah, Gerald,” said my companion, unwinding herself from the seat until she was standing, fully erect, in front of me.
“Could you show this young man to the utility cupboard. He’s here to read the gas meter.”
2. Elizabeth meets Victoria
‘We are not amused,’ said Victoria.
‘No, well why would you be?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘I haven’t said anything yet’.
‘Don’t you mean WE haven’t said anything?’
Elizabeth looked at her ancestor and sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you could go and haunt somebody else, could you? Does it have to be me?’
‘We are not haunting. We are merely making contact.’
‘Look Vicky – you don’t mind if I call you Vicky do you? It’s quicker than great, great grandmamma – you are a ghost and when ghosts make contact it’s called haunting.’
Victoria adopted a look.
‘And I’m sorry,’ continued Elizabeth before here ancestor could say anything, ‘But I can’t go around saying ‘We’ – I get mocked enough as it is.’
‘By whom?’
‘By everybody and his great, great grandmother,’ said Elizabeth, not without a hint of sarcasm. ‘That was a joke, incidentally. You can be amused now, if you like.’
‘We would rather not.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘Do we? We weren’t attempting to.’
Elizabeth sighed and pointed at a young gardener who was tending the flower beds some distance from the bench on which the two queens were seated. ‘Why don’t you make contact with him, for example?’
‘But he’s a servant.’
‘Yes he is. His name is Simon and he’s quite well educated as it happens. He’s only doing this as a holiday job.’
‘You seem very familiar with him.’
‘Well one’s got to make an effort.’
‘But he’s a servant.’
Elizabeth turned to the diminutive figure beside her. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong Victoria but, if I read my history correctly you weren’t averse to communicating with the odd servant yourself when you were alive.’
‘Well one has to talk to them occasionally. They wouldn’t know what one wants otherwise.’
‘No they wouldn’t, would they?’ said Elizabeth with what seemed like a knowing look.
Victoria ignored her. ‘And anyway,’ she said. ‘He probably wouldn’t be able to see us.’
‘I think he can see me all right.’
‘No, I meant US.’ She pointed at herself.
‘Yes I know exactly what you meant. It was another joke. Not a very good one, I admit, but you could at least smile.
‘But we are not….’
‘Yes I know – you’re not amused. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go and have a chat to Simon?’
‘As we have already said – he probably wouldn’t be able to see us. Very few people can.’
‘So how did I get so lucky?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Victoria. ‘One would have to ask one of those clever fellows at the Royal Society.’
‘I doubt they would even accept that you exist. They’d probably just assume I was delusional. Am I delusional? Or are you actually there?’
‘We are definitely here,’ the ghost of Victoria assured her.
‘Well assuming that you are, and since we were talking about servants: you know you and John Brown?’
Victoria remained silent.
‘Did you and he… you know..?’
Once again Victoria stayed silent.
‘Where you lovers?’ said Elizabeth, finally. ‘Did you have sex?’
At which point Victoria began to fade. And she continued to do so until all that remained was a faint red glow where her cheeks had been.
I hate this place! I do, I rotten hate it.
“But why,” you cry. “It’s beautiful!”
“Beautiful, possibly,” I will reply. “But exciting it is not.“
It might be all right for some old geezer with a navel to contemplate or a novel to finish but for a young woman like me it’s dull. Dull, humdrum, drab, spiritless, tedious, and any other word you can think of which means boring – with a capital B – in bold, italics AND underlined, in red. Life in this particular piece of yodel-land is about as fulfilling as straightening grass – by hand – which I have been known to do on occasion – in the many spare moments I have between milking, chopping wood and polishing cow bells.
“Don’t you worry,” says he, that skinflint of a father of mine who insists I call him ’Papa’ – ’miserable old scrote’ more like. “I’ll take you down to the valley,” he says. “And introduce you to some nice young lad.”
I bet you will, thinks I. Like the ’special’ 18th birthday present you promised me. What did I get? A giant lump of cheese. Cheese! On a dairy farm, in Switzerland! He has as much imagination as a slice of stale bread. Which is no doubt what I’ll be getting for Christmas this year.
Can you imagine what kind of ’young man’ he’s likely to introduce me too? Some hairy faced, lederhosen clad yokel whose idea of a Saturday night out is to stand at the back door and blow on his aplhorn. Well I’ll tell you what: if the old scrote thinks I’m going to live on another mountain and milk somebody else’s cows and polish their bells, he’s got another think coming. I, my friends, am heading for the city.
What’s more, I have a plan.
In the barn is some wood, which, on the pretext of making a new wheelbarrow I have fashioned into a sled. First decent snowfall I’ll be down that mountain like a cow pat off a shovel. You won’t see me for snowflakes and ice crystals. Whoosh! I’ll be gone.
“But what about money?” you ask. “Won’t you need money?”
Yes I will. But I know where there is some. That is ’Operation Get Heidi Out Of Here’ part two. He makes a few schillings does the scrote, selling the milk and its by-product (which I manufacture needless to say). And he bungs it all into a big jar which he keeps hidden under the floorboards in his bedroom. He doesn’t think I know about it but I do. At the first hint of bad weather, whilst he’s out counting his cows and checking that their bells all work, I’ll be in there with my knapsack. Once it’s full, and the jar half empty (I only want my fair share), I will store it in the sled with my fur lined boots, wooly hat and overcoat and that’ll be me, ready and primed to go.
Hang on a minute! Is that a snowflake I see floating down past the window? I do believe it is.
Wish me luck everybody. Wish me luck
Sam had charisma. He had it in spades. Everybody like Sam. So I felt more than pleased to have him as a particular friend. During our schooldays we were inseparable. We sat together, played sport together and generally hung out. We were a pair.
We began to drift apart a tiny bit at sixteen when Sam went to sixth form college. I could have joined him there – I had the grades – but the lure of the family bodywork repair business and the money it brought was too strong. There was also pressure from my dad to learn the trade so that he could eventually pass the business onto me.
Sam and I still socialised though, particularly on the sports field.
The real split came when he went to university. We did meet during the holidays but as time went on the bonds of our friendship began to slacken slightly. There was no animosity, we were still mates, it was just that we were becoming about different things. Sam was studying – something connected with medicine I think. I, meanwhile, was knocking out the dents in Ford Focuses or doing spray jobs on VW Polos.
I suppose it was inevitable when we lost contact altogether. Sam left the area completely after university and became a pharmacist – down south somewhere. I suppose we could have kept in touch through social media but we didn’t.
And then Covid happened. And people suddenly weren’t driving anymore and, more importantly they weren’t driving into to each other.
I don’t know the details but basically the business folded. We went, in the space of a few months, from being financially comfortable, potentially more than comfortable, to massively in debt. We lost the house; we lost everything. I was suddenly a member of the underclass.
And that’s where I found my new friends.
In the pubs and clubs where I sought escape from the downturn in my misfortunes I found like minds; minds who sought explanations. It obviously wasn’t our fault that we were suddenly struggling to make ends meet. So whose fault was it?
It was then that I encountered the word ‘woke’, amongst others.
I can’t tell you what it means, only what it describes: lefties who are more concerned with giving out freebies to the undeserving than helping us ordinary folk. Like the gays who flaunt their immorality by parading through our town centres. And then of course there are the immigrants, who invade our shores only to be given all manner or stuff whilst we who were born here struggle to get anything at all.
The politicians don’t help of course. They are all liars, feathering their own nests and those of their buddies. But truth is out there if you know where to look. The establishment might control the mainstream media but they can’t control the internet.
I did my research. And I began to learn the truth. I became aware that there was one politician who seemed to say the things I wanted to hear. He seemed more genuine than the others, drank pints and smoked fags, a bloke you could connect with. I voted for him and even joined the party. I became quite active, becoming a member of The Friends of Reform, a group of mainly young men who became the work horses of the movement.
Five years later, the Labour Party had failed to deliver, and Nigel swept to power.
He did many things but one of the most significant, as far as this narrative was concerned, was the setting up of the Special Protection Zones. These were areas in the country where various minorities could feel safe. They were mainly for Muslims at first though other groups were included as time went on.
Of course not all members of the designated groups wanted to go to the SPZs and there was certainly opposition when the Tiered Identity Card System was introduced. But the latter made it easier when the full Zoning Laws came into force. We Friends had been given Special Constable status by this time and were responsible for helping the police to enforce the new laws. Which is how I reconnected with Sam.
We went to a house in Bridgeport. It was a largish residence, home to a family of four, down to be relocated to an SPZ near Birmingham. I was just a member of the support group so was several feet away when the front door opened to reveal Sam. Sam, I should point out, was only the name by which we knew him back in the day. His real name was Samir and he was, of course Asian – not that I’d been conscious of that detail when we were sitting next to each other in Geography, or fielding at slip together on the cricket field. But now he was being read the court order by our team leader.
“But that’s Sam,” I found myself saying. The team leader looked me with furrowed eyebrows. “What planet are you on?”
He turned to those members of the team nearest the door. “Get ‘em in the van.”
After that I could only watch. Inevitably Sam saw and recognised me. I expected him say something nasty but he didn’t. What he did was worse.
He smiled at me.
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He’s all right, Frank – or Detective Chief Inspector Frank Orpington, to give him his full title. He’s the man in charge and pretty good as people in charge go. But he has his limitations. He’s a plodder is Frank. In fact the nickname ‘Plod’ could have been coined for him. Leave no stone unturned is Frank’s motto, literally in the case of the Sycamore Street murder. He dug up the whole patio at No.17 when I could have told him which six paving stones the body was under.
How did I know this? That’s a good question and I’ll get to the details later. Because in a sense I’m Frank’s polar opposite. Call it a refined sensibility, call it intuition, call it magic if you like, but I just know things. The boss man does recognise this but he doesn’t really trust it – trust me I suppose. It simply isn’t in his nature. Hunches and feelings are alright for parlour games and they can be useful in the job on occasion, but in Frank’s eyes there’s no substitute for hard graft and attention to detail, however irrelevant that detail might seem.
But digging up patios wasn’t going to work with the brothers. For a start the body was in plain sight.
It started with a 999 call from Oscar, the eldest of the two. “There’s been a murder!” He announced to the operative. “My brother’s killed my sister.”
Which seemed straightforward enough, until we arrived at the scene. There we discovered that the other brother, Charles, had a different version. “I didn’t kill her,” he announced. “Oscar did!”
What was certain was that the sister was definitely dead. She was in her own bedroom, on her own bed and had been strangled. Such was Frank’s opinion at any rate and it was later confirmed by the Forensic Pathologist.
But who had strangled her was not so simple. Frank interviewed them both and each told the same story, with obvious minor differences. Oscar said he had been in the greenhouse, feeding the tomato plants and had returned to the house to find Charles behaving oddly. He had discovered their dead sister and immediately phoned 999. Charles, in his interview, had claimed that it was he who was feeding the tomatoes and returned just in time to discover Oscar completing his emergency call.
It was an impasse, and one which Frank couldn’t resolve. Forensics weren’t any help. Both brothers had traces of visits to the greenhouse on hands and shoes. As to the murder itself, nothing that the scientists could identify revealed which of them had had their hands around their sister’s neck.
But I knew. I knew for a very simple reason: I could smell who’d done it.
Because I’m a dog.
We canines have a sense of smell that is 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than a human’s. (Why you ‘oh so clever’ humans can’t pin it down more accurately than that is not for me to say but it is true that we can smell stuff that you humans can’t get close to). Not only can my 200 million olfactory receptors – compared to your 6 million – detect the smallest of traces, we can tell how old they are. People leave evidence of their passage but, more importantly in this case, that evidence diminishes over time. So not only could I detect that both Oscar and Charles had visited the greenhouse recently but Oscar’s traces were slightly newer, meaning he had been there after his brother, which is not what he said.
Oscar was the killer and when my handler, Jenny, allowed me to approach him I could smell the tiniest traces of his sister’s perfume on his hands, the scent of which I’d detected earlier on her neck.
That was the clincher.
And now I come to my limitations. My detecting abilities might be first class but my communication skills are less than basic. All I could do was bark at the man, until Jenny pulled me away. She went over to Frank.
“The dog thinks Oscar did it.”
“Does he now?”
“Yes,” said Jenny who was more aware and accepting of my skills than most. “And I trust his judgement. I reckon Oscar did do it. I’d put money on it.”
“We’ll I don’t see how you’d collect. We can’t go to court with ‘we know he’s guilty because the dog barked at him’.”
Which is where it ended as far as I was concerned. How they resolved it I have no idea, they don’t keep the likes of me informed of such matters. There was one final twist though. I’ve been trained to detect cancer and I could detect it in Oscar. He not only had it but it was fairly well advanced. The criminal justice system may not be able to get him but biology was definitely going to.
My working life didn’t begin well: I spent the first two and a half months jammed down the side of a photo copier, between it and a stationary cupboard. I wasn’t alone. I was in a box with 249 of my fellows,
We’d been knocked there, two weeks after being delivered, by a cleaner who made up for her poor attention to detail with an excess of vigour. Our predicament was finally discovered by Rachel from accounts when she and Amanda were photocopying their breasts at the office Christmas party.
And so it was that my first proper job was holding up the right hand corner of an A3 sized poster with the legend: “Whose Boobies are These?”
It was a short term contract. Mr. Prenderghast of Human Resources took the poster down the day after muttering, in a curmudgeonly way, about ’young girls today’. Whether he guessed correctly who the owners of the flattened mammeries were I have no idea.
It isn’t my place to know such things.
I wasn’t unemployed for long.
Within half an hour or so I was holding up a copy of the on-call duty roster for the festive period.
I had a quiet Christmas.
Things livened up once the new year got underway, though my buddy and I remained in place until well after Easter. By the time the office manager decided on a spring clean there were three more notices pinned on top of ours. But afterwards I held nothing, I was just lined up in a neat column with umpteen of my fellows down the side of the display board.
And there I stayed for a couple of weeks until Rachel, she of the breasts, took me out and accidentally dropped me. Thus it was that she completed the circle – first rescuing me from relative oblivion and then returning me to it. Needless to say I was lying point up and it was only a matter of time before somebody stood on me. The somebody was Shane, the internal post boy.
I went home with Shane – my single pointed limb embedded in the sole of one of his Nike trainers.
We went clubbing that night.
It was a long night during which Shane seemed to enjoy himself. I don’t know in detail what he did during those hours – I wasn’t in much of a position to notice. All I can say is that whatever he did get up to, he didn’t take his shoes off to do it.
He discovered me the following morning, extracted me, and gave me to his little brother.
It took little brother about five minutes to bend my prong against my slightly domed head. This wasn’t the act of vandalism I first thought, however. With black paint on one side and a generous application of glue to the other I found myself transformed into the eye of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I spent a month or two on a display board in the local primary school before returning to the wall of the lad’s bedroom – from where, with luck, I can see him through to adolescence.
Dear Aunty Margaret,
Thank you for your list of suggestions regarding my New Year’s Resolutions. I welcome your input and do appreciate your concern for my physical, emotional and spiritual well being. Having said that I’m not sure that all are a perfect fit for me personally. The first three I can’t quibble about of course. I do need to drink less, eat more healthily and get more exercise. But then don’t we all?
Your fourth suggestion I feel a little less sanguine about. Yoga, I’m sure, is an admirable activity and I did, I confess, briefly envisage myself surrounded by fit young ladies in leotards but a moment’s reflection suggested that the reality might be somewhat different. So I think this product of eastern religion will have to continue without me for the time being.
Talk of religion brings me to your No.5: that I should attend church more. I fully understand the well meaning nature of this suggestion – I know you yourself take much comfort from ’The Lord’, as you call him. And I am aware that you have concerns for my immortal soul but, as a practicing atheist, I feel attending church would be more than a little hypocritical. And it would, of course, interfere with my Sunday golf.
Which brings me to item No 6 on your list.
I don’t feel I do play too much golf. I have a handicap to maintain and that takes practice. It isn’t exactly a religion with me but it is important.
As is item 7 – the house and garden. I am, as I have said on many occasions, grateful for being allowed to live in this house, which you do of course own, although I must say that the peppercorn rent you refer to isn’t quite as peppercorn as it used to be; that’s why I have housemates these days to share the financial burden. They also share the maintenance, causing me to question resolutions 9 – 14.
Simon, for example, who is of a practical bent (more so than I am, certainly) has already sorted out the bedroom door that suffered the hinge malfunction during the small get together we had before Christmas and Wendy, bless her, has proved a magician when it comes to removing stains from carpets. Once we’ve sorted the dishwasher out everything inside the house will be back to normal.
As to the garden: none of us really wants one of those twee, over manicured areas that the television makeover programmes specialise in. We prefer the natural look. And the two goats which we borrow from Trish’s parents now and again are more than adequate at keeping the growing stuff under control. Better than any lawn mower in my opinion. It’s just a pity that they can’t reach to tops of the hedges.
Anyway, thanks Aunty Margaret for your recommendations. I have ’taken them on board’ as some of my work colleagues are wont to say. As to your final suggestion, rest assured that as soon as the right girl comes along I will settle down though I don’t, in all honesty, feel particularly unsettled as things currently stand.
Finally, with reference to items 7 & 8, which I have not yet touched upon: I have no wish to learn the trombone and I believe No.8 to be both physically and psychologically impossible.
Your loving nephew
Archibald
I had an interesting view. It was a pitch black evening, which meant that nobody could see me but I, on the other hand, could see lots.
It is amazing how some people are happy to live their lives in full view, leaving their lights on and their curtains open.
Like the fat man in the window directly opposite, watching his television with a can of lager in his right HAND and bowl of tasty comestibles at his left elbow. And when his left hand wasn’t dipping into the comestibles and transferring severel to his mouth it was scratching. I won’t mention which part of his anatomy was his favourite scratching point, I feel my audience is best spared that detail.
More interesting anyway, was the window next door where the couple were obviously not having a good evening at all. I’m often fascinated by how well you can read a conversation without being able to hear any of the actual words.
“I need a clean shirt for tomorrow,” he says.
“Is that so?” she replies, glancing down at the pile of ironed bed linen on one side of the ironing board and the unironed pile still languishing in the large, grey, plastic basket on the other.
“Yeah, the one with blue stripes,” he says, picking up the television remote from the coffee table on front of him and changing channels.
“I’ll tell you what,” says she, placing the iron gently back on the ironing board. “Why don’t you iron your own effing shirt.”
These may not have been the exact words but I’m willing to bet that they’re close, given the fact she then exited stage left and he ended up with a pile of unironed washing in his lap.
The couple one window down and two across were a lot less argumentative, and a lot closer. In fact they were seated next to each other on the settee and, judging by the way he finally managed to slide his arm along the settee behind her, HE at least wanted them to get even closer. As to their ages, they weren’t actually wearing school uniforms but it seems reasonable to suggest that this was only because they had earlier changed out of them into something more fashionable. And then she whispered in his ear and he the got up and closed the curtains. I mentally wished them well and hoped that his or her parents didn’t get back too soon.
And suddenly I became aware of how cold I was.
Time to get on.
I reached into my equipment pouch and extracted the precision instruments that would enable me to open the doors behind me.
It took me about ten seconds, following which I entered and went in search of something small and valuable to put in the bag marked ’swag’.
There are days when the world conspires against you. Days when you can’t afford to be late because you’ve been late twice already this month, and three times is a sacking offence. Days when you can’t find a clean shirt, the toast turns black in the toaster, and your wife wonders if you could just check the plug on the washing machine before you go (definitely no clean shirt tomorrow if you don’t).
By the time I got into the car I had forty-five minutes for the journey, forty-five minutes for a journey which, on a good day, takes thirty-five.
But, as I’ve already said, this wasn’t a good day. Every traffic light seemed to change to red as I approached it, usually behind a car who’s driver wasn’t on a final warning for lateness and who consequently didn’t jump red lights, or even amber ones come to that.
“Stuff this,” I said to myself, when I came to the turning which led to the road around the docks. It is longer but it’s also traffic-light-free.
A no brainer – or so I thought.
I’d forgotten the swing bridge at the entrance to the marina. It’s there to allow tall masted sailing boats to get in and out. I’d only ever seen it open once before. I was on foot at the time with a pint in my hand from the nearby pub. On that occasion I enjoyed the slow ballet as the fifty odd yards of tarmacadamed roadway first sank a few inches before swinging gently round until it lay neatly on the side of the narrow waterway. The boat’s progress was leisurely too as it’s owner first unmoored it and then guided it through the newly created gap.
I didn’t see it as leisurely today. I found it excruciatingly, screamingly, job losingly slow. And the damn bridge still had to make the return journey.
By the time the roadway clicked back into place my clocking in time was already passed, and I still had another quarter of an hour of driving left. I spent it trying to think of a convincing family disaster which would explain my lateness and, just possibly, get me off the hook.
But when I finally got on site all such thoughts were driven from my head. The place was in chaos. And the reason was immediately obvious – a giant, tangled yellow lattice of twisted metal was lying across the site. It was a tower crane, one of those tall, skeletal, lopsided T shaped armatures that populate the skyline of every city in the world. But this one wasn’t just any crane, it was mine, the one I sat on top of every day.
“What are you then? Psychic?”
It was the site manager, suddenly standing at my shoulder.
“When did that happen?”
“About ten minutes ago.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“No. We were all in the canteen, waiting for you.”
And then he put his arm around my shoulder and spoke quietly into my ear. “I should sack you,” he said quietly. “I’m actually going to buy you a pint.”
Augustus Smallwood, Gus to his friends, was chronically shy With females. So whilst he did quite regularly fall in love – at first, second or third sight – he was incapable of acting upon his infatuations. All he could do was gaze at the object of his adoration like a helpless puppy. And attractive though puppies are, particularly the helpless ones, they do not possess the qualities that most females look for in a Mr. Right. The consequence was that Gus lived in an almost permanent state of frustrated disappointment.
Until, that is, he met Henrietta, at the office Christmas party.
Henrietta was not, it should be said, a classically beautiful young lady by the standards of the day. She was somewhat generously proportioned for one thing – not dramatically so but more than is deemed desirable by the photoshopped reality offered by today’s media. Having said that, the plumpness suited her and whilst it did deter many would be suitors it didn’t put off Gus who was soon gazing longingly at her and trying to summon up the courage to make an approach.
The courage never arrived but Henrietta did. Having become aware of his gaze she crossed the several metres of office floor which separated them and introduced herself.
It was three short, whirlwind days before Henrietta took Gus to her bed. But once she had, the effect on him was profound. Almost magically he acquired a previously missing confidence. Of course it wasn’t just the sex which inflated his previously shrivelled ego but Henrietta herself. She saw in Gus a potential which no female before her had noticed. And with her at his side, on his side and having in due course taken his name, he started to realise it.
Gus began to make something of himself.
As the years went by he rose up through the company until the day came when he crossed the threshold of the Managing Director’s office not as a visitor but has its full time occupant.
Henrietta had long been an ex employee, spending her days dealing with their almost adult offspring, tending their luxurious and spacious home and fighting a not overly successful battle with her body’s tendency to expand. She still retained an interest in Gus’s business activities though, and it is fair to say that many of his more important and successful decisions had her fingerprints well and truly on them. The exception was his choice of personal assistant. Had she been consulted, it is almost certain that Henrietta would have vetoed the employment of the girl/woman called Emma.
Emma was Henrietta’s polar opposite. She was slim, conventionally attractive and young, a taker not a giver and not particularly good at her job. What she did have in common with Henrietta was ambition.
When Henrietta found out about the affair she acted with her usual decisiveness. It was a two pronged attack. Her first move was to employ a firm of private detectives who uncovered a good deal about Emma’s two timing, selfish and generally unsavoury nature; her second was to reveal to her husband the extent to which his fortune was under her control. She had, after all, not been doing the family books all these years for nothing. Gus agreed to kick his mistress into the long grass, both personally and professionally. Henrietta then forgave him.
Several years after that he retired. They now live in The Cotswolds where he enjoys gardening and the occasional game of golf. She, meanwhile, breeds Labrador puppies which she nurtures with much love and considerable expertise.
11. Harry Potter
So there’s this kid who’s a wizard, right? But he doesn’t know he’s a wizard which is why he doesn’t react when his non magical foster parents lock him in a small cupboard under the stairs and only let him out to do the dusting and wash the dishes. You’d think, given the sense of grievance he must have felt that he would have accidentally used his magic to blow the doors off the cupboard and fly off up the chimney on one the household brushes. But no, he just waits until a million letters arrive from this magic school in Scotland (at least I think it’s in Scotland – it looks like Scotland in the film).
I haven’t the space, time or knowledge to explain why the magic school doesn’t just magic him there but they don’t. They make him get an old fashioned steam train which goes from an ordinary station (though you have to walk through a wall to get to it – the train, that is, not the station).
The school, when he gets there, turns out to be even more old fashioned than the train; a cross between Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars and the place where Tom Brown suffered in his Schooldays. The magic school makes a lot less sense than these half forgotten derivatives though, and not just because it’s magic. It has four houses, for example: one for nice children, one for evil children and two for everybody else. Whether you’re nice, nasty or narratively irrelevant is decided by a talking hat.
The headmaster of this school is a kind hearted superwizard, which makes you wonder why he’s managed to appoint (and continues to appoint) the dodgy teachers that populate the staff room, not to mention the incompetent but malevolent caretaker. Then again, why did he take so long before rescuing the above mentioned boy from the cupboard? Perhaps he thought that spending the first eleven years of his life under the stairs would be character building.
Perhaps it was; at least that would help explain how an eleven year old, aided only by a stupid red haired lad who blasphemes a lot and a soppy girl who’s good at lessons, takes on the incredibly powerful forces of evil that the superwizard has allowed to permeate the school. He turns out to be quite good at this because he is, apparently, a very special wizard himself, which fact will have us, if we’re not careful, wondering about that cupboard again.
Anyway, when he’s not doing battle with he who must not be named (except they all do – he’s called Voldemort) the boy turns out to be also very good at the single school sport – yes there is only one. It’s called Quidditch and makes even less sense than everything else. It involves chasing various balls around on broomsticks and chucking them through big hoops whilst knocking seven bells out of the opposition, a strategy particularly favoured by the nasty house team of course. Eventually, something called the snitch makes its appearance (or was it there all the time?). Capturing this little flying ball scores so many points that it overrides all the previous activity, thus making the whole game null, void and a complete waste of time and effort.
I could go on, but shortage of space and word restrictions means I must call a halt. Just suffice it say that I can understand why 12 publishers rejected the original manuscript. Having said that, those twelve must wake up in the night covered in sweat and chewing the duvet recalling the opportunity that they, albeit understandably, missed.
If only I hadn’t crossed the road. If I’d stayed where I was and not unthinkingly stepped off the kerb the cyclist wouldn’t have had to swerve to avoid me, the Volvo estate wouldn’t have swung out to avoid the cyclist, and the lorry, coming from the other direction, wouldn’t have driven off the road and destroyed the function room of the Dog and Duck. Fortunately there was no actual function taking place at the time so nobody was hurt. With the possible exception of the lorry driver who apparently almost choked to death on the ham and mustard sandwich he’d been eating at the time of the accident. Then again, the choking didn’t cause any lasting damage; once he’d been sick at the side of his lorry and comforted by a couple people from the pub he seemed fine. Fine physically. He did still have a problem or two obviously; both cyclist and Volvo estate had continued on their way leaving him to explain how and why he’d driven his ten and a half ton Scania off the highway and sideswiped the Dog and Duck. I wasn’t going to step forward; me stepping forward had, I felt, done enough damage for one day. I did continue across the road though, to talk to Wendy, my reason for attempting the crossing in the first place.
“Are you all right?” I asked her, with what I hoped sounded like genuine concern.
“I am now,” she said. “I thought I was goner for a second there. What happened?”
“I have no idea,” I lied. “Perhaps he was on his phone or something. Scary moment for you though; I suspect you could do with a drink.”
“Do you think they’ll be serving? Given that half the pub’s just been destroyed.”
“I was thinking of the Rose and Crown further down the High Street.”
She looked at her watch. I could hear a siren now and see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle heading towards us down the road.
“Just a quickie,” I assured her.
“I think we’ll just stick to the drink for now,” she said with an impish grin.
You see that’s what I liked about Wendy. She has a definite twinkle – in addition to being heart-stoppingly attractive. Mind you, she doesn’t take fools gladly. Fools who step into the road without looking, for example. Which is why I kept quiet about my part in the incident, and why I was so pleased when she turned and started walking towards the Rose and Crown.
“It isn’t everyday that you come that close to death,” she said ten minutes later over the top of the half a pint of Parson’s Nose I’d just bought her. “It’s making me feel quite randy.”
“Mm,’ I murmured, taking the top off my own drink. The day, after a bad start, seemed to be taking a decided turn for the better.
Then Andy arrived.
“Shouldn’t you be talking to the emergency services?” he asked me cheerily, before going on to give an accurate and detailed account of the accident and my part in it. The change in Wendy’s facial expression as the tale unfolded was alarming. It ended up registering something between disdain and disgust.
“Here,” she said, offering the untouched half pint to Andy. “I’ve gone off the idea.’ And she left.
If only I hadn’t crossed the road.
Spring was a mixed blessing.
For most people spring means crocuses and daffodils, budding trees, and an increase in the intensity of the colour green.
For me, in this particular seasonal transition, colour was not the issue. There was no colour. I had spent the last few months gazing out of one small window at an unrelenting, unchanging whiteness.
The fact was that I and my climbing partner Mark had not had much luck with the seasons. Autumn had barely existed being nudged out of the way by the early, vicious onset of winter. Which is an inconvenience when you’re at sea level. Up in the high Andes it can be disastrous.
We had been climbing one of the higher mountains in the chain, had already reached the summit and descended as far as a small plateau atop a vertical cliff face when the light started to go. We decided to bivouac for the night.
It was as first light permeated our canvas shelter the following morning that we became aware of the snow. It was coming down heavily and obviously had been doing for most of the night. Actually ‘down’ is slightly inaccurate as a description of the snow’s trajectory. Down suggests vertical, this stuff was moving almost horizontally. The almost meant it was landing, and getting deeper by the minute, forming enormous drifts disguising the contours of the rock and ice beneath. As I sat, peering out of the bivouac entrance I couldn’t see how we could go anywhere. We were stuck. Mark, however, had other ideas.
“We could go that way.” He was pointing at the edge of our small plateau, towards what must be a 400ft drop.
“It’s the only way. We each have 60 metre ropes. Tied together they should reach.”
“Might reach,” I corrected him.
“Well, we can’t stay here. And wasn’t there an old miner’s hut down there? At least we’d have shelter.”
“But what if it doesn’t reach.”
“We’re climbers aren’t we? We can climb down the last bit if we have to.”
Which is where the discussion ended and where we set about attaching the ropes to each other and one end to a piton hammered into an exposed rock outcrop.
Mark, inevitably went first – it was his idea after all. Wrapping the rope around himself in what, if memory serves, is the dülfersitzs method, he began to move backwards over the edge. He was quickly lost from sight, leaving me to watch the straining rope and it’s occasional tiny movements as he manoeuvred his way downwards.
After what felt like an age the rope went slack, meaning that Mark had reached it’s end and, with luck, the base of the cliff.
It was my turn.
The blizzard conditions continued unabated as I wound the rope around myself and backed towards the overhanging snow at the cliff’s edge. Crossing it I was reminded of how uncomfortable this technique is; the rope bites into some sensitive and delicate areas. But the physical pain was quickly replaced by the psychological discomfort of hanging over a four hundred foot drop supported only by a thin nylon rope. At least I couldn’t see the drop, but then I could hardly, given the conditions, see my own feet.
I descended slowly, feeling for the rock face with my barely visible boots. And then came a overhang and I couldn’t even do that. I finally reached the knot where the two ropes were joined, an uncomfortable, not to say painful transition, as that moved around my body, but at least it meant I was past halfway.
That, though, brought a new concern. If the rope didn’t reach the bottom, how was I going to know when I’d reached the end and avoid simply abseiling off it?
I tried to count the metres as a descended from there but in fact when I got near to end I could tell by the feel that there wasn’t much left. That was the good news, the bad was that or hadn’t reached the bottom of the cliff. I was going to have to climb down the last bit. The trouble was I couldn’t reach the rock in front of me.
With a certain amount of effort I managed to get the rope swinging backwards and forwards and finally did make contact. It took a few more swings before I could grab a handhold.
The rest was relatively straightforward. I am an experienced rock climber after all and I managed to descend the twenty-odd feet to the bottom.
Which is we’re I found Mark.
He was lying on a rocky outcrop protruding from the drifting snow. How he’d fallen I had no idea – there were plenty of points in the descent where it could have gone wrong – but he had obviously fallen some distance.
I was suddenly on my own.
I don’t want to go into too much detail of the following few months. The memory is not a comfortable one. I found the miners’ hut that Mark had mentioned and managed to dig my way to the door. It provided shelter but, unfortunately, no food.
But I survived.
And now I’m now looking forward to the oncoming spring. But I’m doing so with mixed feelings. As the snow melts I’m going to able to get off this wretched mountain. But others are going to be able to get on it. And find Mark.
Or what’s left of him.
It was the toaster that went first. Suddenly, without warning, it ejected the two slices of brown bread it was supposed to be toasting. And by ejected, I don’t mean a click and the normal two centimetre rise into visibility. These two pieces of Warburton’s Thick-sliced Wholemeal left the toaster completely, at speed. They ricocheted off the underside of the unit above the toaster and ended up on the floor.
I peered into the twin, rectangular orifices from which they had so dramatically emerged.
I’m not sure what I expected to find, something broken or unattached I suppose. There wasn’t anything visible. I picked up the two bread slices from the tiled floor and put them in the bin, noticing as I did so that they were actually toasted – to perfection in fact. I was contemplating sticking in two more, in the hope that it would behave itself, when the kettle boiled.
I ignored the toaster for a moment as I grabbed a cup, added a teabag and an accurate measure of boiling hot water, and stirred. It was as I was adding the milk that I realised I had no memory of switching the kettle on. Not that this was of any great moment of course. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had no recollection of having done something; like driving to the shops or locking the back door before going out. I’ve been known to check the latter four or five times before the memory of doing so takes.
Then I heard voices from the next room. I was quite startled for a moment – I live alone – and then I realised it was the television. Now I definitely hadn’t switched that on. I was, momentarily, a bit unnerved. But hang on, I told myself. We live in a time of technological marvels – it is what’s called a smart TV and connected to the Internet. It gets software updates in the middle of the night. So the idea of it switching itself on wasn’t too crazy. Not normal admittedly, but not PARAnormal.
Paranormal? Now where did that idea come from? I’m a rational individual, I don’t believe in that kind of stuff.
Which is how I was calming myself down when the fridge door swung open, across the exit to the living room. I moved to close it and discovered a piece of cabling had become wrapped round my ankle. Goodness knows how that had got there; the end of it disappeared underneath the dishwasher.
It was then that the washing machine clicked into life, without any help from anybody. It didn’t fill with water as it usually does, it went straight into wash mode, the drum moving backwards and forwards in the normal washing motion. But not for long. The spin cycle began quite quickly, causing the machine to vibrate. And as I watched, transfixed, the speed of the drum increased and with it the vibration, so much so that the whole machine began to move. Slowly, but inexorably, it began to emerge from beneath the unit and head out into the room, and then, towards me. I felt the cable round my ankle tighten.
Excerpt from the journal of Francis ‘Frankie’ Wolstenholme.
Let me tell you something about myself. I have no morals, no morals at all. Morals are for idiots. Why should I consider the needs of others? They can look after themselves (or not, but that’s their problem). Because let’s face it, nobody’s ever looked after me. They said they would, after my mother turned into an alcoholic junkie and left me wandering the streets at the age of seven.
“Don’t worry little fella,” they said. “We’ll look after you.”
They put me in a children’s home.
Looked after? They looked after us all right. Provided we looked after them. Fothergill was the worst, the disgusting pervert. Be ’nice’ to him and you got treats. Treats for treats. Well I gave him a treat all right. I stuck a knife in the revolting old scrote. Well in his old scrote to be exact. That cramped his style for a while, of that there is no doubt. There was blood everywhere.
They put me in a secure unit after that. And to be honest that was better. We weren’t abused there, by the staff at least. The inmates were another matter. It was every kid for himself.
But I survived, in fact I more than survived; by the time I was old enough to leave I was pretty much top dog – or one of them at least.
Out in the world I got into some very dodgy activities, which is easy to do when you have a moral compass stuck permanently on ’off’ and the best education any criminal could desire – from the other inmates, needless to say, not the staff. No shop, home or business was safe when I was on the prowl. I even picked a few pockets.
But whilst I didn’t get caught, I saw enough that did and although it was usually down to stupidity, luck played a significant role too. So I went legit. And that’s when I made my big discovery.
Provided you’re willing to put the time in, an eye for the main chance combined with a natural ruthlessness, takes you a long way in the so called legitimate business world.
I’ve done very nicely thank you. It’s taken a lot of effort but I now own more than one company, including a couple of retail chains whose names you’d recognise if I listed them.
There have been failures but I’ve usually managed to get out in time and let others take the financial hit, and the blame more often than not. People even look up to me, despite me being only five foot six and possessed of the morals of a starving hyena. There’s talk of a knighthood which would be nice. In fact I might go into politics. With my skills (and morals) who knows where I’ll end up.
*
Andrew Kowalski had little time for the people who lived on Park Avenue. He didn’t know them personally, had never met or even seen a single one, but he knew they weren’t his people. Park Avenue had wide pavements edged with strips of neatly mown grass and punctuated along its length by a variety of trees. But it was the houses which told the tale. Not that you could see much of them; they were, for the most part hidden behind substantial, electronically controlled gates set in high walls. The extent of the walls gave a clue to the size of the properties and the buildings within them.
These were not the homes of poor people, or even the financially comfortable. These walls said rich.
It took a while for Andrew to walk past them to the entrance to the park which gave the road its name. Opposite the gates to this area of public greenery was Valley Road which ran down the side of the grounds of the last of the properties. As its name implied this narrow lane meandered down to an actual valley, though it was in fact a wide, flat field which only merited the name valley because it had wooded areas rising gently up a couple of hundred feet or so from each side. These woods led up to various areas of habitation but the side Andrew was interested in, to his left, backed onto the palatial houses on Park Avenue. It was there that Andrew headed.
What his detailed intentions were, as he made his way through the tussocky grass which made up the valley floor, where as yet uncertain. What was clear were the circumstances that had led him there.
Andrew Kowalski was not only broke but in debt, and in danger of becoming homeless, of losing the flat he’d been living in since his foster parents had thrown him out nine months earlier. ‘Thrown him out’ was actually an unfair description of what had happened when Andrew reached his majority and the arrangements which had financed his upkeep up until then had come to an end. Standing on his own two feet had always been the deal allowing his long time foster parents to take on another child. The state had provided some support, including finding him his relatively cheap bed sit, but what they hadn’t done was told him how to manage it all, and particularly how to avoid the trap of going the pub every night and inviting his mates round afterwards to celebrate his new found freedom. In consequence he was now desperately short of money, a commodity of which the owners of the houses on Park Avenue obviously had plenty. The idea of relieving them of some of it had definitely formed, the details of exactly how to go about it had yet to emerge.
As it turned out the the houses weren’t nearly as well protected at the back as they were at the front. The reason for this was that the field behind them was for most of the year a swamp, impenetrable to anybody not wearing waders. But Andrew’s attempt to cross it coincided with the end of an unusually long dry spell, which meant that he managed to find his way to the wooded hillside with little more than a soggy left foot. The quality of the fencing he found himself facing provided little in the way of a barrier and he was soon on the hillside where he found a set of steps leading up to a well tended garden. Here he stopped. It was decision time.
‘Andrew Kowalski, Burglar’ wasn’t really how Andrew saw himself. Not that he had a particularly strong moral code, but becoming an actual criminal wasn’t exactly the career choice he wanted to make. But then he reminded himself what the alternative was. Homelessness, sleeping rough in shop doorways. Which might not be too bad in the current dry spell but far from comfortable even so. And then what?
If he could just make enough to get back on his feet, a more normal, legal future could become an option again. He touched the kitchen knife, wrapped in a piece of towelling in his pocket – for protection and intimidation only, he had told himself – and then made his way through the rhododendrons towards the palatial edifice of the house itself. It was a traditional though relatively newly constructed building which looked, to Andrew, to be unoccupied. It was a hot day yet the French widows leading onto the extensive patio were closed, the garden chairs positioned for neatness rather than use. The place just had a ‘not currently in residence’ look about it. Mind you, there was one window open. It was a small horizontal, upwardly opening window known, though not to Andrew Kowalski, as a transom. All that Andrew was aware of was that small though it might be it was large enough, just, for him to squeeze through. Which he did and found himself in a small toilet.
Once inside he paused and listened. Hearing nothing he gently opened the toilet door and listened again. The place was silent – no radio, no television, no music playing, no signs of human occupation at all.
His confidence growing, the young intruder tried the door next to the toilet and discovered a broom cupboard. But as he closed this he saw that the one at the end of the corridor was slightly ajar revealing what looked like a living room. It was to this that he headed.
Directly through the door was a ceiling high bookcase atop a set of drawers. Amongst the books were expensive looking ornaments which Andrew decided to pass over as impractically bulky. He reached for, and opened, the top drawer.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” said a voice from somewhere behind him.
Andrew Kowalski turned, his hand reaching into the pocket where his fingers encountered the cloth-wrapped knife. It took him a millisecond to locate the source of the voice in the large, well furnished room. Tucked into a corner, next to an imposing house plant, was a chair. It’s occupant wasn’t a big man, quite the the reverse in fact, and to Andrew’s startled subconscious he looked vaguely familiar. But consideration of that thought was fleeting, thanks to a more obvious feature of the man’s appearance; the fact that he was holding a double barrelled shotgun, resting on the pivot of his crossed knee and pointing in Andrew’s direction. He was controlling this with one hand, in his other was a mobile phone which he held up and waved slightly.
“I’ve been watching you since you broke through my fence and I’ve got to say I’m not impressed. You didn’t check for cameras, of which there are several in those woods, and you didn’t check that the place was empty.”
“How could I do that?”
“Chuck a brick through the window and wait. If there’s anybody home you’d soon see ‘em. And once inside you didn’t even check this room, stick your head round the door, before entering it; you just went for the drawers, which you should, incidentally, open from the bottom up so that you don’t have to close each one in order to see into the next.”
“I’ve never done this before.”
Andrew’s voice was explanatory rather than apologetic; said with a control that surprised even him given that the man in the chair was pointing a double barrelled shotgun at his midriff. He was conscious of the feeling of the knife which his fingers were partly closed around. It gave him some small comfort though he couldn’t have really explained why. And it certainly didn’t last.
“And what’s that in your pocket” asked the man in the chair. “I think we can agree that you’re not pleased to see me.”
Andrew said nothing.
“Let’s see it. Slowly. Very slowly. Move too quickly and I’ll blow your kneecaps off.” His tone was conversational. He didn’t need drama in his voice, the gun provided that, the more so as he raised the stock slightly, directing the twin barrels at the boy’s legs.
Andrew withdrew the knife from his pocket, still neatly wrapped.
“Now what can that be? Unwrap it. Slowly remember.”
Andrew unwrapped the knife, and as he revealed the blade, the man raised the mobile phone and took a photograph.
“And now I can shoot you and plead a completely credible self defence. You being an armed intruder.” He waved the phone. “Modern technology eh? Don’t you love it?”
Any residue of confidence which the boy had been feeling disappeared like a puff of smoke in a sea breeze.
“But first things first. Let’s get rid of the knife. Put it in that drawer you’ve just opened and then close it. And close the door while you’re at it. No sudden moves of course.” And for emphasis he put the the phone on his chair arm and took hold of the gun with both hands.
“And now sit down.” He Indicated the soft, white, Italian leather sofa in the middle of the room and, once Andrew was seated, propped the gun against the wall beside his chair. “Don’t get any ideas. I really don’t need a gun to defend myself, at least not against a loser like you. Talking of which, what’s your story? How come you’re trying to so incompetently rob my humble home?”
No longer facing the the menacing black eyes of the twin barrels, Andrew relaxed slightly and looked around. “Humble’s a bit of a stretch.”
“It’s humble compared to a couple of my other properties. This is just my little place in the sticks; somewhere I come to for a bit of peace and quiet, away from the the rat race. Even if I am amongst the chief rats these days.”
Which is when Andrew Kowalski realised who he was.
*
Excerpt from the journal of Francis ‘Frankie’ Wolstenholme.
I think I must be going soft. This kid breaks into my house and by the rules of the game I’ve always played by I should have taken his kneecaps off, as a minimum. In the world I come from it was always dog eat dog and I’ve devoured more than my share over the years.
But there was something about this kid. I can’t really say he reminded me of myself – his childhood had been a fairy story compared to mine. But he’d been let down by his natural parents just as I had, he’d just been luckier in what happened afterwards.
Having said that, it wasn’t all down to human understanding, certainly not at first, there were more practical considerations. My plan to move into politics meant I had to think about my image. Blowing the kneecaps off an out of luck teenager wouldn’t play well with the media. Ruthless businessman Frankie Wolstenholme might have got away with it, parliamentary candidate Francis Wolstenholme could be fatally damaged.
The weird thing is that once I’d made the decision on practical grounds and put aside my natural tendencies to exact brutal revenge something else kicked in – something I hadn’t realised was there. I actually started to feel sorry for the kid. Stupid, I know. Empathy is for losers.
*
Andrew Kowalski was feeling a range of emotions wide enough to span the world’s more substantial rivers. In the last half hour he’d gone from the guilty excitement of breaking and entering, through believing he was about to lose his kneecaps, if not his life, getting a reprieve and then realising that his potential murderer was a famous super rich businessman who he’d seen on the telly. And the latter’s behaviour was also confusing. He’d changed somehow too – from confident, gun wielding psychopath to something less definable.
“So what do you do, when you’re not trying to rob people?” the uncertain psychopath asked, now that Andrew had told the story of how he arrived at the point of denying his principles and resorting to attempted burglary.
“I work in a supermarket. Shelf stacking mainly. It’s really boring.”
Frankie Wolstenholme contemplated for no more than a millisecond offering the boy a more interesting job in one of his many businesses. The flame of empathy which had briefly flared was already spluttering. He was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with that part of himself.
“So what do you do when you’re not stacking shelves, apart from getting pissed with your mates, that is?”
“Mess about with my computer.”
“What? Games?”
“ No, just figuring out how it works and stuff. And trying to improve it – get the best out of it.”
Frankie Wolstenholme thought for a moment. He needed rid of this kid, but in a way which had no comeback. But being Frankie he needed some kind of win.
“So you’re good with computers.”
“I wouldn’t actually say good, but I sort of know what I’m doing I suppose.’
“It’s just that I’ve got this old lap top that I use for my own everyday stuff. I obviously have people who do all my tech, and they’re top people, but they’re not up here and anyway, this is just personal, nothing to do with the business. But it’s running a bit slow. I’ve bought a new one but I don’t know how to transfer all the files and so forth. Can you do that?”
“Probably.”
“We’ll, here’s the deal. You sort out the laptops and I’ll give you two hundred quid for your trouble – which is more than you’d have got from robbing this place, given the level of competence you’ve demonstrated so far. And after that you bugger off and I never see you again.”
“Er, okay.”
Wolstenholme rose from his chair and picked up the shotgun. “I’ll just put this away. We don’t want you getting any more silly ideas.” He locked the gun in a cabinet in the corner of the room.
”Come with me.”
Andrew Kowalski woke up with a hangover the next day. There really had been only one way to respond to the events of the previous afternoon: get catastrophically drunk. Yet doing even that hadn’t been straightforward. The fifty pound note with which he’d attempted to pay for a bottle of whisky turned out to be a forgery. This, needless to say, was one of the four that Alfie Wolstenholme had given him and when the checkout girl had explained how she knew it was forged it didn’t take him long to confirm that the other three were as well. (“I should report it,” she’d pointed out but seeing the devastation it was causing him said she wouldn’t).
“The bastard!” Andrew Kowalski said to himself as he stood outside the supermarket and contemplated his options. There was nothing he could do about the forgeries. He certainly couldn’t go to the police. He’d tried to burgle the man and in the process allowed himself to be photographed wielding a knife. And he wasn’t about to go back and tackle him – he had a gun. Andrew Kowalski was back to square one.
He reached for his debit card. The account it gave access to was already so far into the red that it was probably blocked but he tried it anyway and was surprised when it gave him the twenty quid, enough for the bottle of scotch and a burger on the way home.
Now, the following morning, he was wishing it hadn’t.
But one of the benefits of being eighteen is that hangovers don’t last as long as they do in later life and after a bowl of oven chips, which was all he had in his tiny flat’s fridge freezer, he felt well enough to open the email he’d sent to himself the previous afternoon, and most importantly the attachment it contained: The private journal of of Francis ‘Frankie’ Wolstenholme.
Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel as an explosive but as a metaphor it has come to describe the kind of revelations which Andrew Kowalski found himself reading during those post hangover hours.
It was a longish read and took a while to get through, partly because he had to go back and read some bits for a second and even third time to check that they said what he thought they said. It’s creator had held nothing back – but then he had obviously never intended it for public consumption.
Francis ‘Frankie’ Wolstenholme was, by his own admission, an evil bastard who had caused a good deal of misery in his time. He was a vicious man. Andrew glanced down at his kneecaps and then back at the document open on his computer screen. A cold sweat at what might have happened and a warm feeling of gratitude that it hadn’t fought for dominance. What cut through both was the knowledge that this monster was intending to go into politics.
*
Excerpt from the current journal of Francis ‘Frankie’ Wolstenholme (written with pen on paper).
The annoying thing is that it’s been the defining principle of my whole life. Look after number one. I only learned the word empathy in my late twenties. It isn’t, after all, a disability I’ve ever normally suffered from. And it is a disability. Seeing the other person’s point of view is only useful if it allows you to find their weak spots.
But there was something about that damned kid.
Having said that, I still don’t know what came over me. I could have shot him, I’d have got away with it, I had the evidence. Instead I let him access my personal laptop.
It’s this politics thing. The idea that I needed to appear to be a caring individual momentarily affected my psyche. It got into my head, like an infection. Not that it lasted long – the old me, the real me, soon reasserted itself. I thought I’d had the last laugh with those dodgy fifties.
And then the phone started to ring. Had I seen the Daily Mirror?
‘FRANKLY FRANKIE’ was the headline, ‘The villainous story of Francis Wolstenholme in his own words’ was the subtitle beneath it.
The little swine had downloaded my private journal, this journal, or at least the part that was on my laptop at the time. How, I don’t know, I don’t understand computers. And now he’s sold it to one of the tabloids, presumably for a big bag of money. He’s solved his money problems after all. And ruined my chances of political power at the same time.
Or has it? As someone has just pointed out to me, it’s success that matters, not how you get there. And, in fact, even the latter can be a plus. Look at Trump. The more bad stuff that’s said about him, the more popular he gets. Perhaps. Just perhaps.
16. The Market
When I asked him where we were going he was a bit vague. He said did I remember the J.M.Barrie quote from Peter Pan: “Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning,”? I said yes and he said well it’s a bit like that but it’s a different star and we’d be there by about twenty-five past three.
I must say I don’t remember much about the actual journey and the place itself isn’t completely clear. I don’t recall an entrance for example. One minute we were outside, the next, in – memory of a transition is somehow missing. He said it was a market but is wasn’t like any market I’ve ever been to.
Having said that there were stalls but they were more experiences than actual structures. They did have names though, plus themes and slogans, and they were certainly interesting. Take the one called ’Aunty G’. Aunty herself was standing beneath a slogan which read: ’Lift it and Leave It’. On offer, it seemed, was some kind of levitation device. Well, I say device, it wasn’t a thing, more of a process – a facility, which Aunty G demonstrated using a small rock. She lifted this to shoulder height and then let go. Instead of falling it stayed where it was.
Good trick I suggested.
“It isn’t a trick,” she said with a smile. “It’s a skill. And a useful one. Imagine you’re at a party or a reception of some kind and you end up with a glass of wine in one hand and a plate of food in the other.” I didn’t need to imagine it, she was suddenly holding just such a combination.
“How do you eat the food? With Aunty Grav it’s easy.” And so saying she let go of the plate, which stayed, selected a sausage roll and mimed eating it. “Simple.”
“Impressive,” I admitted, imagining myself wowing people at parties, even doing a stage act.
“So could I do that?”
“For a price.”
“How much?”
“A mere three percent,” was her smiling reply.
I nodded with pretended understanding. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Three percent of what? My monthly income? My savings?” I asked of my companion, once we were out of earshot.
“Something like that,” he replied. “I’ll explain later. There’s more to see first.”
And there was. Like a transportation system à la Star Trek called ’InstaGo’ costing 6%. ’Send anything anywhere, instantly – including yourself’ was its slogan. There was ’AdaptaPet’ at 4% where you could get a custom made pet – a super friendly and cooperative cat, for example, or a dog that washed itself and dealt with its own excretions. More expensive, at 28%, was a beauty salon called ’Get Gorgeous’. But you did get gorgeous – I saw a very ugly woman enter the cubicle and come out moments later looking breathtakingly, film star quality beautiful. There was even, I now noticed, a bank.
“They do a very good deal,” my companion said, seeing where my gaze had landed. “Not cheap of course, in percentage terms.”
“Percentages again. Percentage of what?”
He smiled. “Your soul, of course.”
It occupied a bench outside the town hall – a life size bronze sculpture of a bloke in a tweed suit, with a pipe in his mouth. Come rain or shine he sat there, providing company for the occasional vagrant and a regular photo opportunity for passing teenagers and devoted parents.
The subject’s name was Arther Hambleton who’s claim to fame was inventing something called the Hambleton Switch. Now I’ve nothing against Arthur, or his switch, but I do object to the sculpture. It doesn’t look anything like the man for one thing – and there are plenty photographs of him – and it’s a rubbish piece of art for another.
So when some bright and presumably drunken soul painted glasses and a beard on Arthur in bright yellow paint I was able to see the funny side. Not so, many of my temporary colleagues, the worker bees of the council offices. (I say temporary, it’s really me who’s the casual labourer, working there during my summer holidays). Anyway, they, were up in arms – not least because they were charged with rectifying the damage.
All of which brings me to the moment when I was eating my egg and cress sandwich at Deidre’s workstation one lunchtime. Dieidre herself had gone out for lunch. Since I, being a poor post grad Art student, couldn’t afford to dine out AND had no workstation of my own, there I was sitting at Deidre’s.
Touching the space bar on her keyboard was an accident but it awakened the computer. The screen flicked into life and I found myself staring at a work order, instructing the council’s manual worker bees to – and I quote – ’Remove the paint from the seated Bronze Sculpture in front of the town hall.’
The temptation to lean forward and delete the phrase ’the paint from’ was overwhelming and took about two seconds. The work order then read ’Remove the seated Bronze Sculpture in front of the town hall.’
Of course I expected Deidre to change it back, and failing that, the workmen to question it.
But neither of them did. Before you could say ’Hambleton Switch’ Arthur was off to the recycling yard, where he was, apparently, recycled – it’s amazing how fast these people can move when you don’t want ’em to
To say that the faeces hit the air conditioning in the ensuing days doesn’t do justice to what followed. A picture of the empty bench made the front page of the Evening Chronicle; Facebook and Twitter went into overdrive; even the telly turned up. It made the nationals the day after. You’d think old Arthur had invented a warp drive from the reaction. The council offices went into crisis mode.
Now I know what you’re wondering – did I own up to the dirty deed?
Well, no. My dad wouldn’t let me. He’s the mayor you see. He’s how I got the job in the first place. “I can see the headline now,” says he. “MAYOR’S SON DESTROYS STATUE OF TOWN HERO?” I don’t think so. It’s bad enough as it is.” So I had to keep quiet.
Which is not to say that the consequences of my action weren’t catastrophic. They were, extremely so, just not for me.
In fact it turned out quite well or me. I’m making another Arthur in clay as my final college project. And given my family connections, and my considerable talent of course, I have every confidence that it will be cast in bronze and end up in front of the town hall.
It’s an ill wind.
Once upon a time there was a knight. His name was Jeremy which in itself made him different. But he was different in other ways too. He wasn’t much into questing for one thing; he preferred a good book. And he was reading one, sitting on a fallen tree in the enchanted garden, when Princess Sophie came along.
“Hello,” said Sophie.
“Hello’” said Sir Jeremy, though as a rule he didn’t use the Sir bit in normal conversation. He moved along the tree trunk a little to make room for the girl to sit, an offer which she accepted.
“Shouldn’t you be out killing dragons?” she asked, once she’d finished arranging her long white skirts so that they fell neatly to the floor revealing just the right amount of red velvet slipper.
“I don’t kill dragons.”
“Why on Earth not.”
“Because they’re nice creatures. Well as long as they’ve got plenty of room. They’re not good in confined spaces, and if you find one there don’t make it laugh.”
“Laugh?” said Sophie whose fair haired, regal head had never previously encountered the concept of a laughing dragon.
“It’s the flames. I once tripped over a bucket in front of a dragon in the village. It burst out laughing and accidentally incinerated the local candlemaker’s – there was wax everywhere.”
“It laughed because you tripped over a bucket?”
“They’re not subtle when it comes to humour. Slapstick is about your average dragon’s limit. But they mean well, mostly.
“So why do people like Sir Lancelot slay them?”
Jeremy laughed. “Lancelot’s never slayed a dragon. He’s too busy with his hobby. He isn’t called Lancelot because he’s good at jousting, you know. He can’t keep it in his tight’s can’t Mr. du Lac. No serving girl’s safe when he’s around.”
“He’s never tried anything with me.”
“Well he wouldn’t would he? Your dad would have his Crown Jewels if he did.”
“Has he got jewel’s as well? I thought only my dad…”
“It’s a euphemism,” explained Jeremy. “Or possibly a metaphor.” He pointed downwards and raised his eyebrows.
“Oh.” She blushed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just that this place isn’t always what it seems.”
Sophie looked puzzled, or possibly just more puzzled.
Jeremy tried to smile reassuringly but worried that the princess would take it the wrong way, given what he’d just been pointing at. He decided on a change of subject.
“I mean, take that round table of your dad’s.”
“What about it?”
“We’ll its supposed to be round so that everybody’s equal.”
Sophie nodded her not unattractive head.
“So why does your dad have a bigger chair than everybody else?”
“We’ll he is the king.”
“So everybody isn’t equal are they?”
“You do say some odd things,” observed Sophie, though not, it should be said, in a particularly unfriendly way.
Jeremy unfortunately, didn’t notice. “It’s an odd place,” he said. “I mean where do dragons actually come from? They don’t really fit in with the rest of the flora and fauna round here do they?”
“I’ve never really though about it.”
“And what about this particular place?” – he waved his harms around him – “this so called enchanted garden? Is it not just enchanting?”
“Oh it’s definitely enchanted. I saw a unicorn the other day.”
“What colour was it?”
“Purple.”
“You know there are times when I find myself questioning whether all this is actually real. It’s like somebody’s just made it all up.”
It has four fingers and a thumb, a palm, which some claim they can read, and knuckles that go white when a ride gets scary. It’s located at the end of the arm, on the other side of the wrist and from there it contributes much to our lives and language.
Objects close by are handy, if they are difficult to control they can be a handful, but if the need arises we will lend a hand to a friend Or a hand up to someone below us. We ring them at times of crisis, shake them on greeting and wave them to say goodbye. The unscrupulous can be underhanded, the clumsy heavy handed and things go wrong when they are mishandled.
For most of us this useful appendage has a partner which can be smacked against its fellow repeatedly to give those who entertain us a big hand – for some reason the latter is singular, despite it taking two to make any sound at all and a good number of pairs to create the full effect.
They can be turned to many things, these five fingered manipulators (from Latin manipulus meaning handful), but not everything can be touched; in some cases it’s hands off. But generally, if you demand perfection, you may well need to be very much hands on.
Use them well and you will be dexterous – another Latin derived word: it’s from dexter, meaning right hand. And for 90% of us the right hand is the better of the two. So much so that our most reliable helper will be our right hand man. On the other hand are the 10% for whom the Roman word is sinister. Which is, of course unfair; the left handed are more sinned against than sinisTER; scissors don’t work properly for them and writing goes in an inconvenient direction.
When it comes to the animal kingdom we measure horses in hands, but not cows. Nor do cow hands belong to cows; they, like stage hands and farm hands are people – but people with hands, which they use to shift, form, control and make.
They’re good at making, these digitised body parts, providing their owners are handy, possessed of a good pair of hands. If it’s hand crafted it’s thought to be special, superior to the machine made, and if it’s particularly special it may be hand picked, perhaps after being handled and handed round from hand to hand. Permanently passed on to another, though, it becomes second hand.
Finally, connect the word adjectivally to a man and we have someone who can turn his hand to anything – in theory at least. Like the self styled handyman who was asked to turn his hand to various jobs around the house. But his work was poor. His woodwork was cack handed, his decorating ham fisted; even his fingers turned out to be anything but green.
“I thought you said you were handy!” cried the householder as one disaster followed another.
“I am handy,” insisted the incompetent fixer. “I only live round the corner.”
The stairs down to the cellar at 17 Church Parade were the kind that heroines descend in scary movies. “Don’t go down there!” the audience silently screams, “Are you mad?!” But down she goes anyway and meets whatever dreadful fate awaits. The creaky wooden steps into our cellar had all the characteristics: bordered by patchy whitewashed walls and cold, iron topped bannisters they disappeared inexorably into a forbidding blackness. There was a light down there but whichever sadist had installed it had put the switch at the bottom. You had to enter the darkness in order to reach it.
But enter I had to, occasionally. The two bedroom flat that my partner, Emma, and I rented on the first floor of the the old Victorian building was too small to house all our possessions comfortably and the additional storage space that the cellar provided had been one of the attractions of the place. But if we wanted access to anything stored there, descending into that forbidding blackness was unavoidable.
On this particular occasion I was looking for a paperback, a popular science book who’s author or title I couldn’t recall, but one I would hopefully recognise when I saw it. I was going through the third of about ten stacks when I heard the voice.
I should have explained that the cellar isn’t one room but several, each one serving a different flat. The voice was coming from one of the others. It was a woman’s voice.
“This is impossible,” I heard it say. “I’m going to be here for ever.”
I’ve got to admit, there was something about that voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand sharply to attention. Who was it and how had she got there? She surely hadn’t been there in the dark when I entered the cellar and I hadn’t heard anyone come down those creaky steps after me.
I don’t know how long it was before I regained a measure of control – I had, I realised, been frozen rigid, unable to move. I put down the paperback I’d been clutching and tried to calm myself.
“Hello,” I ventured into the echoing cellar. There was no response. I briefly contemplated having a look in the other rooms but courage failed me; I abandoned my paperback search and made my way up the wooden steps and back into the welcoming daylight of the main house.
It was back in our apartment that Emma offered a possible explanation.
“There’s another staircase, at the back of the house,”she explained. “It was for the servants I think. Mrs. Prenderghast from upstairs told me about it.”
A bubble of relief formed in my brain at this information, only to be rapidly popped by Emma’s next utterance.
“Let’s go and have a look.”
I’ll admit it; I wasn’t keen. But playing the scaredy-cat in front of my partner of not much more than a year wasn’t an option, so down we went.
One good thing was that, in my hurry to leave the cellar, I’d left the light on so the descent wasn’t quite as forbidding as it might have been.
The whole cellar was empty – of people at least – and we found the door to the other stairs fairly quickly. At least we assume it was a door to the stairs, we couldn’t open it. It was locked shut by two stout bolts, bolts that were full of rust, bolts that hadn’t been drawn for years. It was as we gazed at these that a voice behind us said:
“It won’t open. I’ve been trying to get out through there for a very long time.”
The town of Gniezno is in Poland these days; for much of the 19th century it was called Gnesen, and was in Prussia. Not that this mattered to Jacob Schinkel despite the fact that he lived there. 22 year old Schinkel didn’t concern himself with such things. He had a single obsession: Art. He was a painter – a talented one. Not that anyone new of his talent, he never showed his work to anyone, not even Herr Kippenberger from whom he bought his art materials. He found people difficult and didn’t for example have much in the way of friends. His only real acquaintances were the butcher, the baker and, of course, Herr Kippenberger. He did visit the local library, and art gallery and, perhaps surprisingly, the local café. But he didn’t go to the latter to socialise – far from it. He went there seeking subject matter for his art, would sit in a corner and draw. The other café dwellers were used to him and left him alone. For which he was grateful.
But what Jacob lacked in social skills he made up for with his artistic ability, and not just in drawing. He was also an experimenter. He wasn’t content to paint in the style of the artists whose work he saw in the local gallery. He wanted something more; he just didn’t know what.
It was a problem.
There was a possible solution, but it was one which filled him with dread. He needed to go to Paris. Paris, he knew from his readings in the library, was the centre of the art world. If anything was happening in art it was there
For someone who had barely left his home town, a single trip to nearby Poznan being the extent of his wanderings, the idea of travelling most of the way across Europe was offputtingly daunting. So put it off he did, for over a year. But the dissatisfaction with his own paintings was growing. They were good, he felt sure, but there was still something missing. He needed fresh input and he wasn’t going to get it in Gnesen. It had to be Paris.
After all, he could afford it – his banker father had been old when Jacob was born and died before the boy reached adolescence leaving him well catered for – money was never going to be an issue. It was his temperament which was the problem.
He actually surprised himself; once he was committed his fears started to diminish. And on the train he felt more comfortable than he expected and even slightly optimistic. It helped that he was travelling first class; had a compartment to himself. It was a long journey, involving several trains but he slept for some of it and enjoyed the changing scenery when awake. So he arrived at the Gare du l’Est, tired but full of expectation.
He was not to be disappointed.
It was 1874 and in April of that year a group of young artists rejected by the official Paris Salon were exhibiting their controversial work in the studio of the famous photographer Nadar, at 35 Boulevard des Capucines. They described themselves as the ‘Anonymous society of painters, sculptors, engravers, etc.’ They were later better known by a simpler name, first used as an insult. Impressionists.
The effect of the these paintings on Jacob Schinkel cannot be overstated. The everyday subject matter excited him for one thing – it offered a reality that the so called grand themes of the Academy paintings came nowhere near to. They gave his own café sketches validity and worth. He was excited too by their approach to composition, particularly in the case of Degas. But it was the way that Monet and his friends used paint which thrilled him the most. Paint in the hands of the Impressionists wasn’t just a substance useful for creating illusions, it was thing of joy in itself. And not let’s forget the colour – the vibrant new hues which the Impressionists were using, the product of the burgeoning chemical industry, excited Jacob beyond measure.
When young Pole boarded the train at the Gare du l’Est for his journey back to Gnesen it was with several boxes containing the latest colours currently available in La Ville Lumière – the city of light – some encased in the new metallic tubes which made painting out doors so much easier.
It would be nice, as this narrative progresses, to report that Jacob was a changed man when he returned from his trip to Paris. In one sense, of course, he was: Jacob Schinkel the painter was transformed. Jacob the man, however, reverted to his old, insular, uncommunicative self. In fact, his desire to experiment following his exposure to the paintings he had seen at the Boulevard des Capucines meant that he became more isolated. He locked himself away and painted.
The work he produced was ground breaking and could have been exhibited comfortably alongside the works of the Post Impressionists, of Cézanne, Gaugin and Van Gogh – and would have been as fated as they were – eventually. But unlike Van Gogh who also remained undiscovered and unrecognised in his own lifetime, Jacob didn’t have an art dealer brother or, more importantly, an Art savvy sister-in-law with a business sense. He was a solitary individual living in a Polish backwater. He and his paintings remained unknown and unrecognised. And they still were when he succumbed to a bout of influenza at the age of forty-two.
Without heirs his large house became the property of the state and was sold to a local businessman. What happened to his paintings remained a mystery. They certainly never saw the light of day.
With one exception – a single painting. It was a development of one of his café sketches and had been given to Chaim Abersztan, the café’s owner, by Jacob as a thank you for protecting him from his other more inquisitive patrons. Abersztan was Jewish and in the decades which followed he left Gnesen. The story of his, and the painting’s, adventures and the disasters which befell him are for another time but our story moves forward to the twenty-first century and a house in Bethnal Green. For it was in the attic of this three story property that the painting was rediscovered, behind a water tank which was being removed in the process of up grading the heating system.
Two days later it was in the hands of Gregory Wolstenholme, youngest member of the staff of Sotheby’s London. Gregory not only had a Master’s Degree in Art History, he also had taste. In the Schinkel painting he recognised not only skill and quality but that undefinable something that artists describe as ‘edge’.
It was with some excitement that young Greg took the painting to his boss, Sir Clive Morton.
“Who’s it by?” asked Sir Clive.
Greg admitted that he didn’t know, that the painting was merely signed ‘JS 1894’ and he’d been unable to find any record of any artist that fitted.
“Pity,” said Sir Clive.
“Why Pity?” wondered Greg, with a politeness his lowly status demanded. “It’s a really good painting, and quite adventurous given its date.”
“Because without a history and other works by the artist, it has no status.”
“But doesn’t it’s quality give it status and therefore worth?”
“Quality in Art, young man, is a matter of opinion. You might think it’s a good, even a great painting, and I might agree with you but it’s still an opinion. Great art, great artists, are only recognised in context, who they were associated with for example. But the very minimum is a body of work. A single painting, without context simply can’t have any substantial worth, regardless of how brilliant we or anybody else thinks it is.”
“That’s sad,” observed Greg.
“It is. But that’s life. So stick a reserve of a couple of hundred on it and let’s see how much it makes.”
Postscript.
The painting actually sold for a £1000, which sounds good until you learn that a work by one of Schinkel’s contemporaries, and fellow Post Impressionist Paul Cézanne, had sold for $137 million two years earlier.
But things were about to change. Workmen tasked with laying new carpets in an old house in Gniezno in Poland discovered a trapdoor. It led to a cellar which contained several hundred paintings, signed with initials JS. The £1000 painting was about to increase in value.
The palace of the Snow Queen wasn’t big by normal standards but it did have a certain style to it – when the conditions were right. Unfortunately, conditions weren’t right, as the Prime Minister was only too well aware. He was sitting in an anteroom with his two man cabinet, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister for Transport. Politics, it should be said, wasn’t a big thing in the land of the Snow Queen. She made all the important decisions leaving them with little to do. But when the current crisis began she started demanding answers.
“IS there a crisis?” the Chancellor wondered.
“Is there a CRISIS?” asked the Prime Minister, unable to keep a slight screech out of his voice. “Have you BEEN outside?”
“Of course,” said the Chancellor, not without a certain petulance. “I’ve only just come inside.”
“And did you notice anything unusual?”
“Well, the snow’s gone?”
“The snow’s gone,” repeated the Prime Minister quietly. ’Yes! THE SNOW’S GONE! Here we are in the land of the Snow Queen and there’s NO, SNOW! You know there are times when I wonder why I appointed you.”
“I’m your brother-in-law.”
“Ah yes. Thank you for reminding me.”
The Minister of Transport allowed himself a slight giggle. He enjoyed other people’s discomfort.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” said the PM icily. “The queen’s transport situation isn’t currently ideal, is it? That sleigh of hers might look dramatic but it doesn’t work in mud. She hasn’t been able to go anywhere for three days. Her subjects are actually starting to cheer up a bit.”
“It’s a tricky one and no mistake,” admitted the Transport Minister.
The PM controlled himself, albeit with difficulty. He took a deep breath.
“Fortunately, some of us have been a bit more proactive.”
“Have you?” the other two said, almost in unison.
“Yes. I’ve appointed a Minister for Weather. He’s a bright lad. Goes by the name of Kevin. Been to university and everything. He’ll be here soon.”
And as if on cue the door opened and in walked a young man. He was wearing shorts and a T shirt with the words “Global Warming is Real” emblazoned across it.
“Nice day out there,” he beamed.
“Don’t let the Queen hear you say that,” cautioned the Prime Minister.
It was at this point that the doors to the queen’s apartments flew open and the lady herself emerged. She was wearing simple clothes, a beaming smile and holding a tray of Ferrero Rocher. “Anybody fancy a choc?” She asked the cowering politicians (and Keven)
“Do you know,” she went on as they each removed the gold wrapping from their selected comestible, “I think I fancy a walk. I’ll go and find some boots.” And she disappeared back into her apartments.
“Did that just happen?” said the shell shocked Prime Minister.
“I think the explanation,” said Kevin, “is that the warmer temperature has melted the ice crystals in her heart, with the consequence that she’s actually become nice.”
“I thought Global Warming was supposed to be a bad thing,” said the Chancellor.
“Oh it undoubtedly is. But you know what they say – ’It’s an ill wind.’”
“Oh hello,” said Ug, looking up from the flint arrow head he was idly napping. “To what do we owe this enormous pleasure?”
“Wife’s spring cleaning,” said Og. “I decided to make myself scarce.”
“Women,” said Ug. “What’re they like eh?”
“Tell me about it! Cave looked all right to me. There were a few discarded bones lying around and the odd pile of wood shavings and the like, but nothing excessive.”
“Yeah they’re a funny bunch. I think it’s the blow on the head that we give em when we get engaged. That and the dragging by the hair and the ravishing.”
“I thought they enjoyed the ravishing.”
“They may do to begin with,” said Ug, looking momentarily wistful. “But it doesn’t last does it? Before you know it, it’s ’Sorry love I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ closely followed by ’Look at the state of this cave! It’s like a pigsty! – as if we could afford a pig.”
“What’s a pig?” asked Og.
“A kind of domesticated wild boar.”
“Just a boar then, really.”
“Well yes, I suppose it must be.”
“I can see how one of those could be messy.”
Ug poked the fire with a stick and the two cavemen stared for a moment into the dancing flames that the action provoked.
“Hey up,” said Ug, suddenly. “Crazy man approaching.”
“What?” said Og, turning.
“Mad Mungo. Coming up the path. Crazy as a box of frogs is Mungo. You can tell he’s crackers from his name. I mean who has a name with two syllables?”
“What’s that he’s carrying?”
“Dunno. Another of his ’inventions’ I imagine.”
“Ug. Og,” said Mungo, a couple of minutes later. He tossed the vaguely spherical object he was holding into the air and caught it.
“Go on then,” said Ug. “What is it?”
“It’s a boar’s bladder, full of air.”
“Was it wild, the boar?” asked Og.
“Well it wasn’t happy,” replied Mungo, throwing the bladder up his back, over his shoulder and catching it at the front.
“Very clever,” said Ug. “So what’s it for?”
“Dunno. Haven’t decided yet. You could kick it.” And he dropped the bladder onto his foot and flicked it back up into his hands.
“Yeah, that’ll catch on,” said Ug, sarcastically.
“Actually,” said Mungo. “I was wondering if you two fancied going down to that flat patch by the old ford. We could pick up Ig and his lads on the way there.”
“What, just go and kick a boar’s bladder around? I’ve got to say I’m not immediately attracted to the idea. I was thinking of having a kip – I’ve been making arrow heads all morning.”
“Arrow HEAD,” pointed out Og. “You’ve only made the one. And I’m not sure that’s finished.”
At which point a shrill voice came from inside the cave behind them. “UG!” it said. “Could you come and help tidy this place up. My mother’s coming round this afternoon.”
“But it’s Saturday.”
“So?”
He looked at Mungo and the bladder. “Sorry love,” he called into the cave. “There’s something urgent needs sorting out down by the river apparently. I’ll be back for tea. Say hello to your mother for me.”
And thus it was that football was born.
“Anything from GCHQ?” asked the Minister.
“There are always things from GCHQ, Minister” said Sir Godfrey. “Several boxes of the stuff every day. They do monitor an awful lot of traffic.”
“Can’t they just send us the interesting stuff?”
“They claim to, minister.”
“Then I suspect that their idea of interesting and mine are somewhat at variance.”
“Indeed Minister.”
“So is there anything worth a look?”
“Well, they did manage to catch a conversation between Presidents Trump and Putin.”
“Really? You’d think the Americans would have a scrambler that would prevent that.”
“They do, Minister, but we think Trump forgets to switch it on – or doesn’t know how to. We suspect Putin decides not to.”
“So what did they say?”
“I have the transcript here, minister. Trump begins the conversation. You’ll excuse me if I don’t do the accents.” He adjusts his half moon glasses and starts to read:
’Hi Vladimir! Isn’t this great. That we can talk like this. When we’re so far away.’
’It’s only a telephone Donald.’
’Yes, but it’s a great telephone. The best. I only have the best telephones, Vladimir. This one’s green. There’s a red one too but that’s got a lock on it.’
’That’s reassuring.’
’Anyway,’ says Donald. ’I just wanted to thank you for backing me up on the hacking thing, the one that the fake news keep going on about.’
’Ah yes. Fake News. We don’t have that here. Those that peddle it keep having accidents. Getting themselves shot and so forth. So now we just have news. Our news. As to confirming that we didn’t interfere with your election, you’re welcome Donald.’
’You’re a great guy Vladimir. Really great. And the stuff you gave us about crooked Hilary, that was good too.’
’Once again you are welcome,’ says Putin. ’There will, of course, need to be a quid pro quo at some point.’
’You want us to pay you? In English money? Quids are English money, right? And who’s the Quo guy. Is he Chinese? I’m good with the Chinese. Their president, Jinping – that’s his first name by the way, even though it comes last. His last name’s Xi, with an X. That comes first. Mike Pence explained it to me. I get it. I’m very smart. So Jinping came to my place in Florida. We had a great time.’
’Yes Donald. I heard. No, the phrase was Latin. It means you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’
’Doesn’t Mrs. Putin scratch your back Vladimir? Melania used to scratch mine, but she doesn’t anymore. I don’t know why. I have a great back. But Melania’s too busy. These day I get one of the secret service guys to do it.’
’That’s very nice Donald. I was simply meaning that we should work together.’
’We should.’
’After all, as your predecessor, Ronald Reagan, put it: it takes two to tango.’
’Tango? That’s a dance right? I’m a great dancer….’”
Sir Godfrey stopped reading and removed his reading glasses. “It goes on in much the same vein. I think you have the gist of it.”
“Good, good. Thank-you Godfrey, Perhaps we should move on.”
“Yes Minister.”
“You’re leaving?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Are we allowed to ask why?”
“Something’s come up.”
“Has it now?” She grinned and glanced briefly downwards. “What’s she like?”
“It isn’t a woman – well, not in the sense that you mean.”
“It isn’t a woman but it is a woman? What is this, a riddle? Do I get twenty questions?”
“It’s just a bit complicated.”
“So it is twenty questions.”
He didn’t say anything, just carried on pushing items of clothing and other personal effects into his large canvas hold-all.
“But you’ve only just moved in. We decorated the spare room. Bob spent ages on it.”
“I’m sorry Kath. I am grateful. But I can’t stay.”
She waited for him to explain but he didn’t.
“Mark, I’m your sister. Your big sister. I’ve been looking after you since you were a baby. If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”
He carried on packing.
“We were so pleased to see you when you came back. Three years you were gone. All we ever heard of you was the odd postcard from some exotic place or other, with a couple of words on the back. ’Doing OK’, ’Everything Fine’ or something equally brief and uninformative. Of course we were happy to have that; at least we knew you were all right. But you didn’t actually keep us informed, and you haven’t been all that forthcoming since you got back.”
Mark stopped packing and gazed at his sister.
“It’s a long story sis, and I’m not sure you’d want to hear it. And as of this moment I don’t really have time to tell it.”
She folded her arms. Her expression forced him to continue.
He sighed. “Basically I ran out of money. In South America. I was desperate and I agreed to carry a package for some people. Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up in Thailand of all places. And by this time I wasn’t just broke I was in debt. I’d had to borrow money to get out of the trouble I was in. But I borrowed it from the wrong person. Or, more accurately, I ended up owing it to the wrong person. A Chinese woman call Hsu Ai. Hsu Ai!” He laughed. “It means ’calmly loving’. She’s about as calmly loving as a cornered rattlesnake. Except she doesn’t rattle, she smiles. Normally her face doesn’t wear any expression at all. And then she smiles. And you know somebody’s in trouble. Normally the person she’s smiling at.
“Anyway, I got out. Naively I thought 6,000 miles would be enough. I got a text this morning from a friend. Turns out it might not be. So I’ve got to go.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know yet.” He smiled briefly. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
He pushed a last couple of items into the hold-all, hugged his sister briefly and made for the door. Seconds later she was standing at the front of the house watching him drive off.
It was three quarters of an hour later that she heard the car door slam. She thought he’d returned. But when she looked out of the bedroom window she saw a black 4 X 4. Two men had climbed out of it and were heading up the drive. Two oriental looking men wearing suits.
We’re not all alike. I, for example, am completely undemonstrative; I like to merge with the background and never make a fuss. Most people would describe me as ’quiet’, shy even. The exception of course is on a Saturday afternoon when The Reds are playing. Standing on The Kop with twenty-odd thousand other Liverpool fanatics I can get as loud and extrovert as they come – but that apart I never say boo to a goose.
So it’s great for me to have a mate like Alex.
Nobody would ever call Alex quiet. He’s the life and soul of every party he’s ever attended and, on an individual level, has the knack of turning every stranger he meets into his best friend. Unremarkable physically – being neither tall nor muscular, or particularly good looking, really – he makes up for these shortcomings through personality alone. I’ve seen him walk into a room full of uncommunicative strangers – strangers to him and each other – and have them laughing at him and with him, and talking amongst themselves like long lost friends within ten minutes flat.
’Charisma’ on legs’ is how I’ve heard him described – by a woman more often than not, though the blokes love him too.
Alex is a journalist by trade, on the local rag. It’s a job he’s good at. Not because of his writing, which is workaday but unremarkable, but his ability to get the gossip. It isn’t easy to keep a secret when Alex is beaming the full 20 kilowatts of his charm in your direction and convincing you that you’re the bestest friend he’s ever had.
There is a downside to the job of journalism though, at least at the level that Alex is at – the pay is terrible, with the consequence that he’s always broke. This does tend to put something of a strain on his longer term friends amongst whom I count myself one of the longest. It’s almost always your round when you get to the pub and if I ever decided to call in all the fivers and tenners I’ve lent him over the years I would be truly rich. Well I would be if he could pay me which he never will be able to.
But I feel it’s worth it. I’ve met people I would not otherwise have met and been to places I would never have been to because of him. Admittedly, things did get a little strained when I found about his dalliance with Barbara. Sleeping with a chap’s wife would test any friendship, and things did get rocky for while. But they convinced me in the end – she with tears and he with a calm but obviously deeply felt sincerity – that it had only been a fling, something and nothing really and definitely over.
I was truly convinced of the latter when Katie came on the scene. She, apparently, was like no other woman he’d ever met. She was the one, he said, the one he wanted to share everything with: his life, his allegiances and his soul. It was the second of these which caused the split between Alex and me. After all those years we had to go our separate ways. There are some things, it turns out, which are definitely beyond the pale. Katie, I discovered, the woman whose allegiances he was determined to share, was an Everton supporter.
There are two of us, and we both bring differing skills to the relationship. Jules is the more outgoing, more capable out there in the world. I call him the bread winner, though he doesn’t care for the description. But then he doesn’t care for much of my phraseology – says I’m unnecessarily flowery, a bit too baroque. He prefers the simple and the straightforward; calls a spade a spade, he says – not that he’s ever been near enough to a spade to call it anything. As for me, I stay at home with the flowery thoughts. I’m happy that it’s Jules who plays man the hunter, takes the family car and heads off into the world each day to wheel, deal and bring home the bacon. Someone needs to keep the wolf away from the bijoux residence we call home.
He doesn’t like the expression ‘family car’ either by the way. He says a) it isn’t a car and b) it’s actually his, not ours. And to be fair, he did inherit it from Uncle Billy after the old reprobate went off to meet his maker last New Year’s Eve. They said it was the cold that did for Billy but really it was the booze. Billy was a prodigious drinker. He’d drink anything. The only real mystery about his death was that it hadn’t happened sooner. Of course he wasn’t Jules’s real uncle, or anybody else’s as far as we could tell. Nor was he particularly avuncular, apart from during that relatively short period between getting his hands on the vodka and finishing the bottle. Everybody called him ‘Uncle’ because he was old and had been around a long time.
But when he did finally get on the outside of his last can of Special Brew, popped his clogs and went off to listen to the choir invisible, Jules inherited his transport.
Ok, it’s time to come clean.
As Jules insists, said transport isn’t really a car, family or otherwise. It’s a shopping trolley. And our bijoux residence is only bijoux in the sense of being small. It certainly isn’t jewel-like in any other way. It’s made of cardboard.
To be fair, compared to the other fragile structures which nestle under the arches holding up the rail line to Guildford, it is relatively palatial. And that is down to Jules, since he supplies the building materials. These are mainly cardboard and newspaper, both of which are good insulators.
But it isn’t just the practical stuff that he brings back. One day he brought back a trolley load of signs that he’d found at the back of the exhibition centre. They must have been hosting a trade fair for the magazine and newspaper industry. These six inch wide strips of cardboard were presumably hung above the stands. There were a few familiar names. All the daily newspapers were there – Mirror, Mail, Express and so forth. As were the well known magazines such as OK, The New Statesman and Reader’s Digest. My initial thought was to decorate the inside of our place with them, but then I had a better idea. They were perfect, I decided, for going on top of the various residences that make up our version of cardboard city. They certainly brightened the place up and even came to represent the individual structures and their occupants – as in “I’m just nipping over to The Spectator to have word with Scotch Sally .” The Sun was where Crazy Colin lived, at the Mirror you’d find Three Fingered Dave. James the Hermit said he didn’t want one but I stuck The Independent on top of his cardboard cave, which I thought was fitting. They weren’t all appropriate. Vogue didn’t suit Stinky Pete for example and Hello was far from perfect for ‘Orrible Ian . I personally fancied The Guardian but The Professor (real name Darren) insisted on having that so I chose one of the other broadsheets to give our place its name.
Which one? I hear to cry.
Well, to borrow a well know phrase, it’s The Times in which we live.
Max and Jemima were looking at a quiet night in. They had briefly contemplated going out – to the pictures maybe, followed by a meal – but once afternoon had turned into evening the idea lost its gloss. Autumnwatch was on the telly, followed by that new drama on Chanel 4. Suddenly, the cold streets outside the front door, cinema and restaurant notwithstanding, had become uninviting. So Max rustled up a panful of spag-bol, Jem dug out a nice bottle of Merlot and their evening in began.
And thus it was, my fellow members the U3A writing group, that I reached decision point. Was it to be “Things would never Be The Same Again” or “An Unwanted Visitor”? It could be both at this point. But who would the unwanted guest be? The one who would effect such change? Jemima’s mother, perhaps, announcing that she had finally left her ogre of a husband, Jemima’s father, and could she stay with them for a few days? Cut to the following year’s Autumnwatch and mother still in residence.
Or maybe it’s the next door neighbour who pays a visit, to excitedly announce that the planning permission has finally come through for their extension, the one that, Max and Jem believed, would turn their suntrap of an open patio into a brick sided, shadowed prison.
Did the visitor even have to be human? A mouse could have Jemima jumping onto a chair and screaming, or Max doing so for a more modern or humorous take. Whoever responded the incident could presage a potential infestation, the latter to be tackled the following day by a pest controller ripping up the floor and pulling away skirting board to uncover goodness knows what?
Why stop at a mouse? It could be a rat, or even a twelve foot python escaped from goodness knows where.
Either of the latter could be prefaced by noises, suspicious scratching sounds heard as the last forkfuls of spag-bol were being silently consumed.
Which brings to mind a new potential plot line. Are those sounds being made by a bodied creature at all? Could their source be disembodied. The Exorcist, after all, began with scratching sounds from the attic. Perhaps Jem becomes possessed leading to all sorts of horrors being visited on the once happy couple – foul language, rotating heads and hurtling furniture, to mention but three.
An unwanted visitor to be sure, that last one. And life would certainly never be the same again.
You know, if I were Max and Jem, I’d have gone to the pictures.
“So anyway,” says Harry. “There’s this fella and he gets these three cards.”
“Which three?” asks Tom.
“The two black Jacks and the Queen of Hearts,” says Harry. “And he does this trick with them.”
“Three Card Monte,” says Dick, who was generally quite clever.
“Never heard of it,” says Tom, who wasn’t.
“It’s a confidence trick,” says Harry. He leaned across to the adjacent table and picked up a pack of cards from next to the cribbage board. He spread them in his hands, selected the cards he’d mentioned, and placed them face up on their table.
“So,” says Harry, now picking up the three face cards. “What this geezer does – Alec his name is – what Alec does, he takes the cards and he bungs ’em down on the table like this, shuffles ’em about a bit, and you have to guess which one is the Queen.”
“Easy,” says Tom pointing at the middle card.
“Of course it is. And so when Alec asks if you’d like to bet the next time, you do it, and guess what? You put your tenner on the one you know is the Queen but when he turns the card over it isn’t the Queen at all; it’s one of the Jacks, and you’ve lost.”
“Three Card Monte,” repeated Dick. “Sleight of hand. What he does is, when you think he’s dropping the Queen he drops the Jack instead. I watched a YouTube video. But it’s so fast, the average punter can’t see him doing it.”
“Anyway,” says Harry, a little put out at the way Dick was taking over the conversation. “This Alec bloke has asked me to be his Stooge.”
“Stooge?” said Tom, the not so clever one.
“An accomplice who places a bet and the Alec bloke lets him win to encourage the real punters.”
“Isn’t it all illegal?” asked Tom.
“Yes,” says Dick.
“You gonna do it?”
“I’m gonna have to. I owe him money.”
“How come?”
Harry looked embarrassed.
“You didn’t!” said Dick.
“Didn’t what?” demanded Tom.
“He lost it betting on the Queen of Hearts.”
Harry’s flushed cheeks confirmed that this was true.
All three took a moment and a swig of their drinks.
“I’ve had an idea,” said Dick when their glasses were back on the table.
“Oh yeah?” said Harry.
“I’ve watched these guys. I know how they do it and I can spot it. Once you’ve done your stooge bit, I can place a few bets and win back what you owe.”
“That would be good,” admitted Harry.
“So what went wrong?” asked Harry that night in the pub.
“Beggared if I know,” admitted Dick. “I was sure I’d got the right card. All four times.”
“So who’s buying?” said Harry. “I haven’t got any money.”
“I’ll get em,” said Tom, extracting a wad of notes from his pocket.
Dick and Harry looked at each other and then at Tom.
“There was a horse called ’Three Card Monte’ in the 2.30 at Haydock. I put ten quid on it at 15/1 – and it won!”
It is my belief that everyone has a special skill, something that they can do which the majority of others can’t. The problem is most people aren’t aware of theirs, don’t realise what they are actually capable of. I certainly hadn’t been aware of mine until that day at my sister’s house.
My sister is not someone I visit frequently, in fact I wouldn’t do so at all if there was an alternative. My sister makes me feel uncomfortable, or at least the disparity in our circumstances does, particularly since she enjoys reminding me of it. She lives in a large detached house in a nice part of town and has a husband who works in finance; I, in contrast, was sacked two weeks ago from my shelf stacking job at Tesco. I’m now in danger of losing the humble bedsit I call home. Which is why I was visiting. I needed a loan.
I was confident that Samantha would give me the money – I was her little brother after all – but, being Sam, she had to make me earn it. And she did that by having me appreciate what a success she was. On this occasion by taking me a tour of the garden.
It was, needless to say, a big garden, well maintained (with the help of a part time gardener) and containing a couple of greenhouses. It was into one of these that Sam took me to show off her tomato plants. These were, I had to admit, impressive. She wouldn’t be bothering Waitrose for that particular salad ingredient any time soon. Each plant held a mass of round red fruit. Except for the plant near the door. To say that this had wilted was an understatement. It had no fruit and its few remaining leaves looked ready to fall off.
I couldn’t resist pointing out how this was letting the side down. “This one’s looking a bit sad.”
“Mmm,” murmured Sam, unable to hide her annoyance at me identifying this blot her otherwise perfect horticultural landscape. “I don’t know why it’s struggling. It’s getting plenty water. Maybe there’s a draft.” She ran her hand over the door’s edge. “Can’t feel anything. I hope it hasn’t got some dreadful disease which will spread to the others.”
I don’t know why I then touched the plant, possibly to annoy Sam because I actually stroked it in a kind of ‘poor thing, why is the wicked lady doing this to you?’ sort of way.
And that’s when it happened.
It’s difficult to describe the feeling. There was a connection, but it wasn’t just the nerve endings in my fingertips reacting to the textured surface of the plant’s stem. I experienced a kind of flow; first a tiny weak one from the plant to me and then a much larger one from me to it. It only lasted for a few seconds before I broke contact. I was left feeling slightly drained. It wasn’t a bad feeling, quite the reverse. It felt good, the kind of good you feel after vigorous exercise.
“Are you alright?” asked Sam, “You’re looking a little odd.”
“No, I’m ok.” I assured her and reminded myself of why I was there. “I’m just a bit worried about the flat and stuff.”
“Don’t worry about that, I won’t see you homeless. Now let me show you the azaleas, they’re spectacular this year.”
It was several days later that Sam rang me. I was expecting her to wade straight in and ask me if I’d got a job yet but she didn’t. She wanted to tell me about the tomato plant, the one ‘I was so dismissive of’, she said.
“It’s a miracle! It’s really rallied. It’s produced new leaves and it’s starting to produce fruit. They’re only tiny yet but they’re definitely there.”
“Amazing,” I admitted though I chose not to explain why I personally found it amazing – the connection between what I had experienced and the plant’s apparent revival. Sam wouldn’t understand and I’m not even sure that I did.
“So how’s the job hunting going?” was how the call ended.
In fact the job hunting was going remarkably well. I had a job, at the local garden centre. Surprising even myself I’d just walked in and asked if they had any vacancies. I said I was fascinated by plants (which I now was) and they said when can you start. My motives were not completely financial of course, though that was obviously a factor. I wanted to touch plants and see how it felt. And what I did feel was interesting.
I did experience a connection when I touched them but it was nothing like the feeling I’d had with that tomato plant. And I began to realise why. They were healthy. They were getting what they needed from the water and light they were receiving, they didn’t need any help from me. The odd wilting plant did and I spent what time I had between the general carrying, lifting and sweeping giving them attention. But, little as that was, it was surprisingly draining. Those few struggling plants were literally taking it out of me.
And then I made my second discovery.
I was put on clearing a neglected area in readiness for planting. This essentially meant clearing it of weeds. And these I discovered, were different from the cultivated, nurtured, even mollycoddled thoroughbreds that the centre sold for people’s gardens. These plants, the gardeners’ enemy, didn’t need any help; unchecked they spread like wildfire. The life force in them was strong and aggressive. And when I touched these plants the flow went the other way. The energy flowed into me not out.
Now I don’t want to overstate the case. It wasn’t that I could sit in a field of dandelions and soak up energy to the point where I became the Incredible Hulk. I was more like a small heat exchanger, taking energy from the robust wild plants and giving it to their struggling cultivated cousins. The ‘taking’ part was, I realised, for the most part unconscious, it just happened. Merely walking through the countryside could build up reserves which I could then use to help the struggling domesticated varieties – the shrubs, plants and bushes which make up the average garden.
That was a couple of years ago now. I’ve come a long way since then. My ability to rescue plants which would otherwise be discarded began to be recognised by the other staff at the garden centre and eventually the management. I was promoted. More importantly when customers came with their gardening difficulties they were referred to me. This was a slight problem because although I could offer some advice – picked up from working at the centre – to solve the serious problems I needed to be quite literally hands on.
So I began visiting people’s gardens and solving their problems in situ; I produced some dramatic transformations and my reputation spread.
Of course no one knew my real secret. They put my success down to experience, knowledge and that light hearted phrase ‘green fingers’. Light hearted it may have been but it is, of course, a lot nearer the truth than they realise.
For me it is doubly rewarding, not only do I have satisfaction of breathing life and vigour into their struggling flowerbeds and borders but they pay me handsomely for the privilege.
I paid Sam back the money she loaned me a long time ago, but I’m grateful to her for more than that; it was, after all, in visiting her that I discovered my special skill. I visit her garden regularly these days and have turned it into one of the best gardens in the area. It wins prizes. Her tomatoes are particularly spectacular.
Fiona hadn’t been to Jake’s before and was looking forward to it with a certain level of anticipation; you could learn a lot from where and how a chap lived. She was expecting a typical young man’s apartment; maybe tidy, maybe not, but fairly cluttered anyway. Anything from a bike in the hallway, sports equipment propped in a corner to a table covered with paper and magazines – neatly stacked or otherwise – and some form of computer.
But Jake’s place was nothing like that. There were no bookshelves for example. But then Fiona told herself, many of their generation do their reading on line these days, through Kindle and other portals; an absence of the printed word between cardboard covers didn’t necessarily indicate an uneducated or uncultured mind.
“I’ll take your coat if you like. It’s fairly warm in here.”
“Thank you.”
Whilst Jake put her coat in the hallway Fiona had the chance to take in the room in more detail, not that there was much detail to look at. A large, curved settee occupied the centre of the room. It was fairly luxurious and comfy-looking and covered in a plain grey fabric that was slightly darker than the walls and carpet. It faced a large expanse of wall to which, in most homes of their generation, a large flat screen tv would have been attached. On Jake’s there was a single painting, Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows‘. It was a remarkable reproduction, you could see the texture of the paint. Must be one of those new 3D prints she’d heard about. 
The only free standing item in the room other than the settee was a black metal wood burner in the corner. It had two compartments; the glass fronted top one contained the fire, currently burning merrily and providing the room’s heat, the lower was filled with spare wood.
“Nice fire,” Fiona said to Jake as he returned from hanging up her coat. “I suppose It’s nice to have something to look at in the absence of a tv. Although there is the Van Gogh,” she added impishly.
“It isn’t real,” Jake admitted.
“We’ll, obviously. The original’s in Amsterdam.”
“No, I mean the fire. It isn’t a real log burner. It’s gas. The burning logs are actually ceramic.”
“Then why the wood?” She indicated the lumps of wood in the compartment below the flames.
“Just for show. They’re not even real wood. They’re some kind of plastic.”
“Is anything real any more?””
“Good question.”
“So why no telly, if you don’t mind me asking. I know our generation isn’t into broadcast television these days but most of us have a decent sized flat screen for all the other stuff, like Netflix, games, social media and stuff.”
He smiled and then waved a hand towards the settee.
“Have a seat.” And as she did he joined her and picked up a remote control device from the nearest flat topped arm.
“I don’t have a flat screen tv because I have something better. Take the painting, for example. You said it isn’t real. You also said it isn’t the original because that is in Amsterdam.” He waved the remote control and pointed it at the Van Gogh painting. “That certainly isn’t real but it is the original.”
”I’m sorry?”
He pressed a button and the wall began to change. Not the Van Gogh, just its surroundings. The painting was still there, on a wall, but somehow not this wall.
“This is a live feed from the museum. That is Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows‘.
Jake did something with the control and Fiona suddenly felt she was moving. What she was looking at changed from
this:
to this:
And then he panned around to look at other parts of the gallery.
“How does it work?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “I don’t understand it fully myself. It does all sorts of stuff; we don’t have to stay in Amsterdam, for example.”
And suddenly they weren’t. They were in an apple orchard in the English countryside. Fiona could hear the twittering of birds.
“Nor do we have to stick to the present.”
He held the control to his mouth and said, “Dinosaurs,” and suddenly they were on a hilltop looking down on a herd of grazing brontosaurus.
To Fiona it was as though they were actually there and she looked down and touched the seat of the settee, seeking comfort in this tiny remaining section of the previous normality.
“Is this real?” she found herself asking of the scene they seemed part of, simultaneously feeling foolish for even giving mental houseroom to the question, never mind voicing it.
Embarrassingly, Jake laughed, and then apologised, briefly touching her arm in reinforcement.
“No, it’s a scene from a documentary, remastered for this platform.”
“It looks so real.”
“Ah.. but what is real?” he wondered. “This is real, isn’t it?” and they were suddenly looking at the bare wall, no painting or anything. “Whereas this obviously isn’t.” And just as suddenly they were on the back of a dragon hurtling between volcanoes over a bright blue sea.
“Woah!” said Fiona, despite herself.
“Sorry,” he said again and took them back to the orchard in which there were now two sheep gently grazing.
“That is amazing!”
“Isn’t it though. But I think that’s enough for now.”
The room returned to what it had been, large, off white wall with Van Gogh’s painting on it and the log burner with its apparently burning logs. Jake was looking at her with gently raised eyebrows.
“So what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Everything looked so real.”
“But, as I said, what is real?”
And suddenly the whole space changed. The wall disappeared and so did Jake. The room was bigger, a different room – a laboratory. Fiona herself was no longer sitting on a grey settee but in something like a cross between an airline seat and a dentist chair and she seemed to have various wires attached to her. The largish space she occupied was surrounded by people in white coats sitting at computers. Directly opposite her was a woman, also seated and also wearing a white coat.
She smiled at Fiona.
“Welcome back to reality – we think.”
Did you know 73 was a magic number? No, neither did I, but it is. It’s the number I scored at the darts stall at the travelling fairground last Friday night. I’m actually rubbish at darts and only decided to have a go because Emma, my girlfriend of the last two weeks, provoked me into it. She challenged me over who could get the highest score. We paid our pounds and threw three darts each. I was aiming at the treble twenty when I hit the single eight, followed by seven and then, completely fortuitously, the treble sixteen.
“You jammy…” began Emma, who’d scored 47.
She was interrupted by the stall holder.
“73,” he announced. “The magic number!” And he pointed at a very large teddy bear with a small card stuck to it with “73” written on it. He took the toy from its shelf, removed the card and handed it over.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” I said not completely convincingly – it was nearly as big as I was. As we turned to go I offered it to Emma. “It was just a lucky shot,” I explained. “It should be yours.”
“I don’t want it. My bedsit’s smaller than yours. There’s barely enough room to move around as it is.”
Which is how I ended up with Alfred.
I called him Alfred after an uncle. Said uncle is no longer with us but he wasn’t a nice man when he was. Mean as they come was Alfred, counted his pennies. He also counted other people’s, in order to acquire them if he could, however he could, by fair means or foul. Nor was he any better with family. He was a swine with my mother, using his money to abuse her. Mum was a single mother to me and my sister, always short of money and often in debt. Alfred used to bail her out – at a price. He used her as a skivvy and the amount of work he demanded was always more than double what the money justified. My sister and I got roped in too; I remember spending ages polishing the small bust of Shakespeare that sat on his mantelpiece. Needless to say, he left us nothing when died, though I did manage to ‘liberate’ the small bronze bust before the executors stepped in. I’ve still got it; small recompense for the way he’d treated us though. We all hated him, my sister with particular venom and I’ve often wondered if she had a particular reason.
So why did you name a big cuddly teddy after him? I hear you cry.
Because the damn thing reminded me of him, is the answer. There was something about that bear’s face that wasn’t quite right. It’s eyes were too small and too close together, its mouth, theoretically a straight black line, seemed to turn down slightly at the edges giving it a mean look. It just reminded me of the old bastard and I named it after him and took pleasure in abusing it. Verbal abuse at first but then by giving him the odd punch in the face as I passed him on the way to the kitchen. He became quite useful, psychologically, somebody to take it out on when I’d had a bad day. Like when Emma ended our relationship. Old Alfred didn’t half get some stick that day; I picked him up and bashed his head against the door jamb.
Which pretty much summarised our relationship for a while; he sat in the corner being Uncle Alfred and I reminded him what a miserable old scrote he’d been in life and punched him.
But then after a while, that facial expression, particularly given it’s resemblance to the obnoxious Alfred, began to get to me. I felt he was looking at me all the time so I either turned him to the wall or had him facing the bust of Shakespeare. I kind of liked the idea that he was forced to look at one of his valued possessions in the hands of someone who despised him.
As you may have noticed, in my head the bear was actually becoming Uncle Alfred.
Too much so. Lying in bed that evening playing with my mobile phone, I looked up to see him staring at me. I was just about to get up and turn him around when he spoke. Yes, you did read that correctly, he spoke. And it was in Uncle Alfred’s voice.
“You are a waste of space aren’t you. Look at this place! How old are you? 29? Nearly 30? And this single room is the best you can do. The only thing of any value in here is that bronze, which, of course, you stole from me! You can’t even keep a girlfriend!”
That didn’t feel like it was in my head, unless I was going crazy. I got out of bed, grabbed the bear and flung it into the corner, face down.
Back in bed I tried to distract myself by scrolling through TikTok. The distraction was only slight but it allowed me to come up with another explanation – that I had been dreaming. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that I’d slipped into a dream at that time of night only to realised afterwards that it was a dream because of the absurdities I was recalling. And what could be more absurd than a talking bear? With this realisation I fell asleep.
I awoke around dawn with his words still there, bouncing around in my head. Which wasn’t pleasant. The product of my own unconscious they might be but they were difficult to live with, they contained too many uncomfortable truths.
Damn bear.
I needed rid.
I stuffed it into a black plastic refuse sack, took it downstairs and dropped it into my flat’s grey bin. It was, I knew, collection day and I went back to bed comforted by the knowledge that when I resurfaced at a more civilised hour Uncle Alfred’s furry lookalike would be on its way to the tip.
A couple of hours later, I was tucking into a plate of beans on toast when Shakespeare piped up.
“You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
“Are you sure you know where we are? I mean all these streets look the same to me.”
“Stop worrying. The map in my head is second to none. Indeed there’s a rumour that Google based their internet version on it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all. And didn’t we just pass that tobacconist ten minutes ago?”
“It’s a different one. Those things are all over the place, like Spar shops at home. They all look the same.”
“If your sure.”
“Sure as the day is long.”
“Speaking of which, do you realise what time it is?”
“Quarter to eight.”
“In other words, it’s getting late. You know what it’s like round these parts. They don’t do dusk; one minute it’s daylight and the next it’s black as pitch. And I don’t see too much in the way of streetlights.”
“There’s ages yet. But since you’re worried we’ll take a short cut. Down here.”
“Are you sure. This isn’t a street it’s an alleyway. We could end up in somebody’s back yard? Or an opium den.”
“Trust me.”
“Last time I trusted you we ended up paying a tuc tuc driver a king’s ransom to get us to the gate of the Forbidden City where the coach was actually picking us up.”
“I was misinformed. They definitely told me it was the West Gate.”
“Of course they did. Is this alleyway getting narrower or is my claustrophobia kicking in?”
“It’s definitely you. Not far now though, I can see the end.”
“Now I will have to trust you; all I can see is the back of your head.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? What d’you mean ‘Oh’?”
“I was expecting a park.”
“As opposed to this enormous river with ships, cranes and piles of containers? The Sahara Desert is more park like than this place.”
“Well..”
“We are lost aren’t we? Completely lost.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far. We’re just a bit misplaced.”
“Misplaced!? You are joking, aren’t you. I haven’t been this misplaced since you signed me up for the girls’ synchronised swimming team at uni.”
“Now that was funny.”
“Unlike our current situation. If we don’t get to somewhere recognisable before it goes dark we’ll be sleeping on a park bench, which is optimistic when you think about it, it means we’d have found that park you were expecting.”
“You worry too much.”
“I don’t think so. We’re in a third world city, it’ll be dark in under an hour, we’ve walked miles and I, for one, am completely knackered. We are lost. Why I agreed to leave my mobile behind is beyond me.”
“You said it needed charging.”
“It wasn’t completely dead. And you said we were just nipping out for a short walk before dinner, not wandering halfway across the city and checking out the country’s maritime facilities. And why didn’t you bring your mobile?”
“I did.”
“I should, at this point, be lost for words. As it is, I’ll merely ask you to explain why we’ve just spent the last hour wandering around this godforsaken city like two drunks in Hampton Court Maze when you’ve got your phone?”
“I just fancied the challenge.”
“He just fancied the challenge.”
“Ah, here it is! Maybe Google Maps does have the edge. The hotel’s that way. Come on, it’s not too far.”
It started on Christmas Day. There was a knock on the door which I opened to find two workmen. At least I assumed they were workmen – they were wearing overalls. Though why they were knocking on my door on this particular day gave me a moment’s pause for thought. Only a moment though because one of them spoke.
“Where do you want the tree?”
“Tree?”
He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb indicating a pickup truck on the back of which there was, indeed, a tree.
“There’s a bird as goes with it,” said the other man whom I would later learn was called Derek. His companion was called Wayne.
“You do realise what day it is.”
“Tell us bout it,” said Wayne. “No rest for the wicked though, is there?”
“Apparently not,” I admitted. “I’ve got to say I’m a little confused,” I didn’t add that I was also hungry and conscious that, behind me, several slices of turkey were getting cold, along with all the trimmings.
Wayne reached into the large pocket on the front of his overalls and produced a piece of paper which he unfolded and examined. “It’s from a Miss Smythe.”
“Jocelyn?”
“That’s right,” he said. “A Miss Jocelyn Smythe.”
“Joss,” I said out loud, but mainly to myself. Joss was my girlfriend, though she didn’t really like me calling her Joss; she said it made her sound like a stick. In fact relations had generally been a little strained between us of late. Perhaps the tree was a peace offering.
“So where do you want it?” asked Wayne.
I glanced at the tree and then at the extensive garden. “Down at the bottom, near the apple trees”
“Right Ho. Come on Derek, let’s get it planted.”
“That’s the easy bit,” said Derek. It’s the bird I’m worried about. I mean we can stick it in the tree but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay there. More of a ground dwelling bird is your partridge, in my experience.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best.” I left them to it and went inside to put my dinner in the microwave.
The lie-in I’d planned for Boxing Day was interrupted by the doorbell. I opened it to reveal a man from Amazon with a largish box.
“What’s that?” I asked.
‘Delivery,” said the Amazon man unhelpfully and proceeded to take a photograph.
“Well obviously, but what is it exactly?”
“Dunno. I just deliver ‘em. Could be livestock of some sort – the box has ‘oles in it.”
“Let’s have a look and see.” I ripped the brown sticky tape from the top of the box and opened the flaps, at which point two birds flew out Out, off, and away into some nearby woods.
“I think they might have been pigeons,” said the Amazon man.
It was then that I noticed Wayne and Derek, down at the bottom of the garden, planting another tree.
At which point, dear reader, I’d reached 491 words and these additional ones take me over the 500 limit. None left, then, to describe the various avian life forms which arrived in the following days, or the numerous prancing, piping and milking humans that followed them. No mention either of all those gold plated Olympic signs which started arriving on day five.
But so be it.
As for Jocelyn, following prosecution for harassment she ended up in a home for the bewildered – an expensive one needless to say, her family being loaded.
It took me most of January to sort out the mess she’d caused; persuading all those exercise mad toffs to go back to the House of Lords took weeks on its own. There was an upside though. The extended orchard’s doing well and I’m making good money from the goose eggs. The Gallic chickens less so but it’s still profit.
It’s the dairy that’s the big money earner. I had to let most of the milkmaids go but I kept the cows, all forty of them. They’re excellent milkers producing good quality milk.
It was twelve days of chaos but it all got sorted in the end. As the sage once said, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Merry Christmas.