Last night winter pressed us onto the night bus. It wasn’t much warmer on board. We took up the back rows of the top deck, pretty much the only people up there. Frosted fingers of February air poked us in the ribs. Sophie’s toes were numb. Lisa slapped her hands together and breathed aggressive blasts of body heat into her gloved fists. Walker put his arms around Kerry and rubbed his hands on her shoulders. Their puffa jackets got crushed together. Hughsie flicked his lighter on and off. It wasn’t effective in warming him or any of the rest of us, but it looked good. Shell and a couple of the others had kebab remains in paper with them. The cold got to the food before we did. The smell of the strips of meat filled the top deck, making unsubstantiated promises of hunger sated, inner warmth attained.
short story
January: Simple
I’ve learned two ways to look at each thing. In this manner I navigate from one breath to another. Sometimes things seem hopeless, and as though there’s nothing I can do. I use the two ways to make the situation turn around. I learned the two ways from some programme on daytime television, whichever programme it was is lost in a purée of memories of listless afternoons.
December: Reenie
In between the privet hedges, imperial green leaves tough and shiny, and the wooden trellises around which wind the sweet-pea flowers, wiry and heavily scented, Mick kissed Reenie for the first time. She will remember this on the day when, coming home from Mick’s cremation to a house with no garden, she decides to plant a tree for him at the allotment. In the Gardens where they first kissed an apple tree was in blossom. A bee swung lazily through the air, drunk on pollen. Reenie screamed in a high pitched voice that said, I’m not really scared but I’d like you to protect me please. Mick was bluster and gallantry, waving the bee away from Reenie, although his bluster said I am scared of bees but I’d really like to kiss you so I’ll try to forget that for now. The bee ignored Mick’s heavy hand and focussed on the daisy chain Mick’d laid over Reenie’s hair like a crown.
November: 14 Down, Mythical maze (9)
After Theseus leaves
What kind of madness can you call it that led Ariadne to this island? Wisps of it still hang like gossamer in the air around her. She tries to remember, but like a dream her memories unravel when she attempts to catch their threads. She’s sitting on the shingle, letting the sea come in around her feet, the receding tide pulls at her toes and leaves a salty residue ring on her skin. Continue reading
October: Brother Autumn
During these days in between the seasons I sprawl on my bed in my sixth-floor two-room apartment in the city that has adopted me, in a country that is not mine. I spend my time eating toast and watching people from the single small window of my apartment. There’s a woman I often see. She looks about thirty, or thirty five, or thirty six. In this weather she wears light strappy summer dresses. She hustles a black hulk of a Victorian pram and a little boy up the street past my building a couple of times a week. She wrestles the pram up and over the street kerbs, it seems improbably weighty. The little boy messes about and gets smacked on his ear for it; on their way back he is usually occupied with a lollipop or packet of crisps. The woman arranges plastic bags around the pram and her floral dress is damp down the middle of her back and sticks to her body. They don’t notice me, I think, leaning on my elbows out of my window. Continue reading
July: Stay Afloat
– There’s one thing Tommy said that’s really stuck with me, ‘I don’t hold with superstition.’ He said it to me the night before his last trip. The last time that I ever saw him. You’re asking me what it was like for us in those days? The sense of community you got back then. Well, there’s nothing to match it now. But it was hard on the boats. I heard about the ice and the being frozen stiff in your boots, and sometimes you’d get these skippers that were plain evil. The stories I heard. I worked in the docks, but I heard the stories in the pub. They all came in when they were back on land. Nothing went on that I didn’t hear about one way or another. But what Tommy said. That’s stayed with me. In those days everyone had a little something, a charm or a taboo. It were normal. Some still do. So to say, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t believe in all that.’ It was a big thing. And then for his ship not to return from the very next trip he took after saying it? Well. Some would say there’s the proof of the old beliefs.
Kate leans across the coffee table and picks up a custard cream. She nibbles it along each of the four edges in turn. Mr Osborn is lost in a reverie. His eyes flicker, seeing faces from the past, even as they are focussed on nothing in this room here in the present. Kate swallows a yawn, but even swallowed, the yawn makes her eyes water. She doesn’t want to be rude so she quickly blinks the tears away, looking into Mr Osborn’s face with extra attentiveness.
– Yes, Mr Osborn, – she says, encouragingly. Half the time he speaks in riddles, and the rest he leaps and loops around so many different subjects and time periods that Kate’s head is spinning.
The old man is pausing now. He’s ready for a cup of tea. Kate brings it over to him. He’s the third resident of this nursing home that she’s interviewed. It is interesting, she tells herself, it is. It’s just that after a while their stories sound the same to her. There’s always the evil skipper, and there’s always the lost community spirit. In the evenings the empty screen of her laptop reflects eerily onto her face. Her thesis won’t write itself. She needs their memories. Mr Osborn is ready to begin again. He has dipped a digestive into his tea and stuffed the softened biscuit between his 87 year old lips. When he talks Kate can see the grainy mush on his tongue. She looks away from him, pretending to scribble on her notepad. She tries to bring him back to talking about himself:
– What was it like working in the docks? Was that what your dad did?
– No, my dad was a trawlerman. Took me on the pleasure trip, like all the other boys at my age. I didn’t find it pleasurable. – Mr Osborn laughs. Kate can hear gurgling in the laugh, fluid in his lungs.
– They don’t let me smoke in here, – Mr Osborn says, lifting yellowed fingers to his lips in a memory of a movement. – Tommy though, he loved it when he went out with his dad on his pleasure trip. I remember he came back, couldn’t stop talking about it. About the things he’d seen. You’d think no-one else ever saw a seal or the sea frozen in plates of frost. You’d think no-one else had anything to show Tommy after that. We fell out in fact. I didn’t see him for a while. I had just got married to my wife, Lollie.
– So what was it about the pleasure trip with your dad that put you off?
– It wasn’t that, – Mr Osborn is suddenly angry. – I got on with my dad, Tommy and his dad were always at each other. It wasn’t that at all.
– I’m sorry, Mr Osborn, I didn’t suggest, I didn’t mean to suggest, – Kate says, starts to say, but Mr Osborn is already talking again. Her words have the impact of motes of dust hitting him in ineffectual mock-meteor strikes. The digestive biscuit is long disintegrated, making reappearances in wet crumbs flying on his plosive speech onto her shirt.
– I asked Tommy about it, this unbelief in the taboos, and he started telling me about his mam. I knew her already a bit. Me and Tommy used to run up and down the streets when we were bairns, so I’d met her before. Big Maggie she was known as. We was all a bit frightened of her. Tommy wasn’t, he could twist her round his little finger.
‘The thing about my mam,’ Tommy told me, ‘is that she really believes in all that stuff. Don’t put new shoes on the table. If you wash on sailing day you will wash your man away. All of that. She never let us say goodbye to our dad when he was off on a trip. He was never allowed to look back at us to wave or owt when he left the house. I used to run after him though and when we was round the corner he’d turn around and put me on his shoulders and we’d go together like that to the dock. So he wasn’t that serious about superstition and he’s always come back.
‘You look surprised,’ Tommy said to me, ‘but me and my dad we didn’t always get on so bad as we do now. It’s just me still being in the house under his roof, it does his head in. “No wife, no girl,” he says to me and it ends up in a row and we end up clouting each other, and then my mam gets upset, and then my dad clouts her and then I get involved, and we all three of us end up with a bloody nose or black eye or summet like that.’
I didn’t ask why he never got married. It wasn’t down to me to ask him about that. We’d been friends so long. We only fell out when I ended up marrying my wife, Lollie. He didn’t speak to me for the longest time. Maybe he thought I’d let him down. He almost said as much that night. We were on our third or fourth pint. He was buying rounds, he was always flush between trips.
‘Don’t you remember when we was kids,’ he asked me, ‘it was always you and me against the world. Do you remember that time we snuck into the Hellyer Brothers warehouse, how old were we then? Eleven? Do you remember how we raced jumping between crate towers, and you twisted your ankle? I was that scared that your mam would find out what we’d been doing and bray us I was shaking.
‘Nowadays it’s all, “settle down, have kids”. I’m not ready for all of that. I don’t think I will be. It’s not for me. I like it on the trawlers, all men together. It’s like the old days then, like we’re all brothers fighting against this great thing, the sea. We’re fighting to keep alive most of the time. It’s not even about fishing then, it’s trying to stay afloat. Battling the waves. Warring against your own body when it wants to collapse with the pain of staying awake and being on your feet so long. You know, ignoring your arms when they’re screaming at you for a rest. Pushing through the pain of the ice that gets right into the middle of you, so all you can feel is the cold stabbing you over and over and your hands are bleeding from the frozen rope rubbing on the gloves. But you’re there with your crew, your brothers, all standing against everything the sea wants to throw at you. And we win, don’t we? We harvest the fish, bring the catch back. That’s living. That’s life.
‘You remember my sister Jodie don’t you? She married One Cod Joe, a great trawlerman he is. He’s a skipper of his own boat now. They’ve got a couple of bairns themselves, sweet children. Jodie, she goes to me, “Tommy you’re missing everything. You’re not looking at life.”
‘But I’m not like her. Or One Cod Joe. Or anyone round here.’
And I knew what he meant. He was looking at me with those screwed up brown eyes, all sea salt worn around the edges. Red and raw. I remember thinking at the time that he looked like he was welling up to cry, but it will have just been the soreness in his eyes from staring into arctic winds. I remember thinking, I know what you mean. But I didn’t tell him. And I didn’t see him again after that night. His trawler never came back.
Mr Osborn stops talking. Kate feels uncomfortable. Something has just happened, she thinks. She will transcribe this interview tonight. She asks Mr Osborn if he has anything else to tell her today.
– No, lass. I think I’m done now. It was good to talk to you, – he says. He pats her hand and she packs up her recording equipment. She stands up to leave first; he is frail and might struggle to stand. But he refuses her offer of help and gets to his feet on his own to shake her hand.
June: Queens of Infinite Space
Huge cosmic structures of unknowable matter tug at the edges of our universe. The wind lifting the hem of Beth’s skirt is a gesture of gravity pulling at the air around us. Our universe is flowing outwards at a velocity that just keeps on increasing. We are made of the aftermath of supernovae.
Beth pushes her daughter, Rosie, on the old plastic and rusting chain swing in the neglected children’s area of the municipal park. She counts the beat of time elapsing during swings. She lets go of Rosie: one, two. Rosie reaches the point nearest the earth: three, four. The little girl powers through gravity’s grasp: five, six. She’s back at the apex: seven, eight. She’s back at her mother: nine, ten. Irresistible forces return the daughter to her mother and keep everyone’s feet on the ground. Except Mary’s.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Beth had a theory that a similar rule applied to sisters. Specifically her little sister, Mary. The sisters differed in temperament. Beth was analytical, calm, competitive, and Mary was warm, impulsive, relaxed. Beth had a wryly curved mouth, double-helix curls of thick brown hair and meditative grey eyes. Mary was half-moon smile, helter-skelter ringlets of thick brown hair and restless grey eyes. Over many arguments and tussles for sibling supremacy the two debated and attempted to define their differences.
Beth could remember their Dad refusing to speak to either of them for over a week when a teenage row had become physical. Mary had bruises up her arm, Beth had a black eye. Even now Beth’s stomach knots in indignation that their Dad punished them both for that. But she’s a mother now herself, although not a lone parent like her Dad, and she has begun to understand him more. He was trying to bring up, on his own, two wild girls who could never agree. I just have Rosie, she thinks, watching the back of her daughter’s head approach and recede. Dad didn’t live long enough to meet you, she thinks to her daughter.
He was there to see Beth graduate from Durham university, though. He looked on proud but frail in his new suit with Mary holding onto his arm in the crowd. Beth became a respected astrophysicist lecturing at Cambridge, how proud would you have been of that Dad? Mary would not be outdone, of course. She became a theoretical physicist specialising in controversial theories about the properties of nothingness. Bringing the pendulum of her daughter’s swing to a stop, Beth feels a familiar jar of irritation at her younger sister. It was never enough to be just different from Beth, Mary had to follow an almost identical path to her and then put a crazy twist on it.
Their dad had refused to pick a favourite despite the sisters’ best efforts to force him to choose. Now without him the sisters existed in separate worlds. They continued their colloquia of confrontation in irregular bursts. Mary lectured at Monash University in Melbourne – half a world away from Beth’s cosmic practice in England. Twice so far the sisters had given papers at the same conferences. Beth had sat self consciously at the back of her sister’s presentations, hoping that people wouldn’t make the familial connection between them. She’d try to control her expression when colleagues would politely say, “Doesn’t your sister look just like you?”
“Not really,” Beth would mumble, fumbling with artificial clumsiness through her file of notes until the well-wishers left her alone.
Beth straps Rosie into the child ‘bike seat and hoists the bicycle up onto its axis. Bringing it to an improbable balance she manoeuvres her daughter’s shifting weight back home.
In the kitchen Beth takes a carton of chocolate milk out of the fridge for Rosie. She looks in the glass fronted cupboard for a beaker and sees her reflection. The curly hair, the grey eyes. For a moment she sees Mary there in the light bouncing off the glass. Beth opens the cupboard door and the ghost holds her gaze even while the reflection slips away. As the cupboard door closes, the image slides back. Her face is her own again. Beth remembers one of the last arguments she’d shared with her sister. Mary had started talking to Rosie about the future contraction of the universe.
“What do you think it would be like, little bean?” She asked. “Would we all get squashed?” Rosie had just looked at her aunt, confused, as Mary slowed her voice down to a cartoon pitch, “Would time slow down?” Beth had told Mary to stop it, that there was no evidence that the universe would ever stop expanding. Mary had told her to calm down. Beth hadn’t appreciated being told to calm down.
Beth looks at her daughter and pictures her sister sitting next to Rosie. It is not hard to imagine a shadowy outline at the kitchen counter, the air trembles with the potential presence of the absent sister. Beth strokes the soft mess of Rosie’s higgledy piggledy hair and takes down the landline ‘phone from the wall. Six weeks remain before the end of the academic year. Beth wonders if Mary has even begun to think about coming over to visit in the summer break. Rosie adores her aunty Mary, as everyone does. If Mary could make it over, even for just a few weeks, Rosie would be ecstatic.
Calculating the time difference in her head, Beth dials Mary’s home number. The ringing on the other end is a flat chirrup. Beth thinks it is odd the way that ‘phones ring differently overseas. When Mary answers there is a little echo on the line, syncopating her voice.
“Professor Gerson speaking,” Mary says, her voice whirling in the cross-continental radio static. She either refuses to get a ‘phone with caller id, or this is how she introduces herself to everyone, Beth thinks.
“Mary, it’s Beth. Is this a good time for you? I needed to ask if you are planning to come over here at all this summer?” Beth counts the time lag between speaking and Mary’s response, just like Rosie counts between lightning flashes and thunderclaps.
“Beth. How are you? I’m just about to go to bed. This line is terrible! You should record this noise as evidence of cosmic fallout from the big bang,” Mary says, with her habitual lightness. Beth thinks, Is Mary avoiding my question?
“How are Ian and little Rosie? You know it’s winter here, not summer.” Mary says, avoiding the question. Beth listens to the clicks and pops in the busy air between them. For just a moment she feels the universe contract. The nothingness in the gaps between matter becomes infinitesimally small and, just for a second, Beth’s sister is right there in the kitchen, next to her.
May: We’re Chained
As I attempted to force my way into sleep I thought about Ali in the bar that evening, and how she’d stared at the ice cubes in her glass, which were making tiny twitches as the vodka melted them.
“This means something,” she said, almost inaudibly, as she saw me observing her. She made a side smile with her mouth.
“I’m sorry?” I said. Ali’s problems were her own and I could have left them that way, but I was heartsore. My chest ached with the pressure of the sadness that bore down on my ribs. I wanted to drink, and talk, and not think about the way each second, or gesture or even thought, was a second, gesture and thought further from where we’d been.
Ali shrugged. The side smile turned down into a frown. “It’s nothing.” She unbound her slippery long dark hair from the bun it was wound into, ran her fingers through it, shook worked-loose strands from her fingers, refixed her hair, sighed.
“Okay,” I looked away from her, not conversationally inspired. I examined the paper napkin the bargirl had put under my glass. It was a round frilly-edged slip. White with a green design embossed. I put my finger against the edge of it; felt the sharpness of the lasercut paper between my finger nail and the nail bed. I thought about places overseas and backlit bars where we’d sit on shiny stools whose seats span around. How once you’d been trying to get up onto one of those stools and your flipflop dropped from one foot and flicked across the room as the seat span unexpectedly beneath you. We both laughed as you hopped across the tiled floor, complaining about the sand cutting at you in between the toes of the still flipflopped foot. I should have picked up that shoe for you.
“It’s something we used to say,” Ali ignored her own long pause and continued a conversation that we’d been having in her head. “Like a lame joke. From Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Phillip Seymour Hoffman keeps making mounds of clay or something and he says, all intense, ‘This means something’.” Ali drew out the e in ‘means’, pushing the word out, her eyes shining, looking inwards.
“Richard Dreyfuss,” I said. She noticed neither her mistake nor my correction.
“So it became something we said, just at random, to make each other laugh.” She laughed then by herself, a joyless ha ha, at I suppose some slideshow playing in her mind. This is no good for me, I thought, the two of us supposedly cheering one another up with a post-work drink, and instead taking solo trips inside our heads.
“Do you still talk to her?” I asked, thinking that if Ali wouldn’t (couldn’t) break into my little sadness nest then I’d try to find a way into hers and leave mine on its ledge waiting for my return.
She drank what was left in her glass. She looked up to catch the bargirl’s eye, made a flirtatious wink at the girl (which I think she didn’t even register that she’d done) and sighed a short puff from deep in her throat. “We did try, but it was so hard, you know?” The bargirl came over, Ali tapped her glass and pointed at mine. More drinks were served, we drank. I was finding it hard to ignore myself, a sinkhole was dropping within me.
Ali knew how to glide over these stutters in conversation. She continued, “I mean, the friends thing. We were never friends before we were lovers and then you’re supposed to try and switch tracks, just like that, when things end. You know like you were on the same train headed to happy ever after or some crap like that, then a switch is flipped, you’re on different tracks going different places. You want to be able to, you know, at least stay arms outstretched fingers touching but maybe it’s just better to wave and send each other postcards from where you end up. Just look forward to getting where you’re going and try to not to fuck everything up next time.”
Ali poked my hand then. I had been focussing on the freckles on the back of it. Tracing them one to another with a finger from my other hand, like a dot to dot. “Is that what you think I should do then? Get on a train to I’mOkayThanksForTheLols land?” I said, trying to sound light but I probably came over sour.
To her eternal credit Ali grabbed my wrists and held my arms over my head. Laughing dirtily she pumped them up and down saying, “Yes, fuck it! Choo choo! Next stop ThanksForTheLols land!”
“Fuck off!” I tried to take back my arms. I could see us in the eyes of the cute bargirl, ginger scruffy man in a crumpled cotton shirt with sweat patches under the arms, being manhandled by this wiry Japanese hippy girl in denim shorts and band tee shirt. Fucking ridiculous. I am what, 150 pounds, and she’s still stronger than me. She knew I was hating this. She pumped my arms up and down again. I jumped off my stool, a douchebag move. The sudden weight shift pitched Ali forward and she lost her grip.
“Well,” she said, getting back on her stool and gesturing for more drinks with a short movement of her hand. She turned away from me, biting the skin at the side of her index finger, her hand curled around her face. I felt pressure dropping inside my ears; the sinkhole began pulling down my guts. I blinked. I followed along the round edge of the bar with my thumb.
“I mean, ‘Lols’? Seriously.” Ali said, still not looking at me.
“Yeah? ‘Choo choo’? I’ll choo you,” I said, the sinkhole paused.
Ali turned and looked right at me. “That’s what she said,” she said.
I looked at my lovely friend with her eyebrow cocked and her mouth smiling on the other side. She stared back at me. The ‘that’s what she said’ lay like a dare between us. I didn’t take it: the laughter spouted up before I could. I gurgled it. It spewed out. Ali joined me and we shared it: real laughing. It hurt. I can feel it now across my stomach.
“I missed you,” I told Ali.
“Yeah,” Ali said. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed. I felt her fingers warm with life and blood through my sleeve. The button on my rolled up shirt cuff dug into my skin, maybe it even cut me. I welcomed the small pain. I knew that this tiny injury made this moment permanent. I’m always going to remember this, I thought to myself.
Our drinks arrived. We drank.
I wake up the next day swaddled in sweat and sheets that stick to me. Cold drool is dampening my right cheek because I’ve slept with my mouth open. My skin has linen folds creased into it where I’ve crushed my face against the pillow. I am profoundly uncomfortable and unlonely.
Present and tense
Sometimes I think that I do these things deliberately – crash trains, bring down ‘planes, destroy homes, drown cities – just to see how it feels. Weaving in a stone house on the edge of the moors. Alone as storms beat their own stories into the walls. I think of my sisters and my long life and I wonder how much of what has happened in your life you would say was my fault.
Do I wield the scissors? Yes. Do I make you look this way and that and then, for some reason unknown to the people who survive you, do I make you step out into the motorway? Out into the path of the person who will break your heart? Into the path of the person with whom you will have children? Yes. I do that. I pick and twist. I shed and cut. I look at the Work and know what has to come next.
I know what happens to you next. Can blame be laid on me as a weaver following a pattern? Even if that pattern does not exist before my fingers twist it into being? Do I decide? If I do then, well, what does that mean anyway? You make decisions constantly but your choices still obey my weaving. All that time spent making up your mind and where does it lead you but along my warp and through my weft?
You feel so deeply, so intensely, bringing bright colours to my Work. Manifest emotion is a colour palette of incredible subtlety. I used to feel it along with you, you know. I felt your harrowing grief deep in my marrow. I felt that jubilant chorus singing in my heart, lifting my ribs out and wide with the fluttering wings of no longer being alone in the world. At one time I tried to weave only joy. The Work grew brighter, a nuclear emanation of one emotion. At first I was satisfied, but the blinding incandescence soon became overwhelming. My irradiated hands shook. My vision blurred. I began dropping stitches, losing threads. The Work began to unravel in places, allowing complexity to whisper its way back in. Conflicting emotions soaked in gradients through the threads as though I’d planned it that way. As if it weren’t you and your very vividity orchestrating my fumbling and mistakes.
Where do you think that glowing part of the Work has gone now? All the mounds and folds cannot be contained within my little house. The Work pushes itself along the floor, up and down the stairs, around doors, into corners, out of windows. When it reaches the outside it ages into new shades, sometimes the pattern becomes unrecognisable. I know that it isn’t the weather that effects this change. My Work is reconfigured by the way you remember what has gone before. And that’s always changing.
So before you blame me for those things that you wish hadn’t happened to you, perhaps you should take some of the responsibility. You are the thread, you make the colours, the pattern, the memory of the pattern. I’m a slave compared to you. The power is yours, even when I cut threads short or twist them a certain way. And you still ask, “How could this happen to me? Why?” And then I send the shuttle back across the loom, welcoming the new colours to the Work of all that’s ever happened to you and all that ever will.
Morning shy eye
The daylight touched her eyelids; the cloth at the window strained the sunlight to milk that then sank through her eyelids. The eyes reacted to the sun’s mild pressure by telling her mind to tell her body to wake up.
Her eyes were eager to take in the room. Details of it had been mouthed to them by the morning light while her body was still too sleep-heavy for the eyes to have peeked out from under their lids.
Her eyes had never seen anything in this room in this light before. They tracked their way over the writing, reading and listening debris on the floor. They navigated the middle-ground of shelves and desk. They traced along the ceiling, back around the door, to the chimney dirt in the old fireplace. Then they hesitantly turned the girl’s attention to the boy in the bed. He was still asleep and so the girl’s eyes took their chance to linger on the details of his face. His pores and follicles. The hue of his eyebrows. The gradient of his lips, from where the pink began and at what point it moistened to red.
The daylight cupped the boy’s face. The girl’s eyes saw his react to the morning kiss of sun and, suddenly nervous of what their opposites would see, they pulled their lids down again.
![By en:image from National Eye Institute and modified by Nordelch. Translated into Japanese by me was a bee. ja:National Eye Instituteからとってきた画像をNordelchさんが加工。was a beeがその画像を日本語に翻訳。 (Image:Eye Diagram without text.gif) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_diagram_%28ja%29.png "Eye diagram (japanese)")