Tristan and Grace in Nature

She got to the top before him, her neck shiny from the effort, dancing up the incline on rubber pedals. A red oxide gate in the high hedgerow let them look down over the valley. They slid off their saddles and stood.

He had never noticed her in class. Grace was serious and quiet and sat behind him. He was behind her now, looking down over the sloping field. She seemed French, he thought, with her hair up and her eyebrows, expressive of subtleties beyond the grasp of a thirteen year old boy, even one as tall as him.

They had met outside the bakers, both bored after Easter, both on bicycles. 'Let's ride up Peg's Hill,' she said, and he assented, through a hot cross bun.

Two sudden flashes of white amongst the stubble. The bellies of two hares stop-starting. Changing direction. One bigger, wilder of eye. They leapt at angles, twisting in mid-air, flying across the field, faster than a car, then vaulting backwards. A beautiful thing to witness. He turned to look at her, to say 'Can you believe this?' She was already looking back at him. She reached over and took his hand. He thought he was going to be sick, but in a good way. As if he might be shedding some now dead part of himself.

Yards away, the big hare caught and mounted the smaller hare, only one of them moving now, with calmer eyes.

Grace felt the boy's hand slip from hers.

Terry and Ralph

It was his ex-wife's dog, a German Shepherd with a white beard and sad, gunky eyes. She had run off with a sales rep who turned up once a month at the office where she worked. Who would lean on the tall counter out in Reception, his keys on the glass, a briefcase between his feet, smiling like a boy. She couldn't resist him, even as she recognised that he was smiling the same smile at young women all over the South-East.

He remembered the first time they'd been here, when Ralph was neutered, snarling in the back of his old Cortina estate on the way, as if somehow aware of what lay in store. Altogether quieter on the way back, trying to puzzle things out, perhaps. A new melancholy hung about the dog, but only for a while. He was doing her a favour. And they were back again five years later, married now, when she was convinced Ralph had hip dysplasia, which turned out instead to be a piece of glass, an inch of viciousness, buried in his left forepaw. Or was it his right? He'd have been seven then, half a lifetime ago, and always so healthy otherwise.

But not now. Opposite the house (emptier, quieter, since Cindy moved out) was a school. He knew the caretaker from the pub and had a key to the small gate twenty yards down the road. Every evening he'd take Ralph over there and let him run loose on the sports field and every other evening Ralph would shit in the long jump pit and he'd have to pick it up in one of those bags you put loose vegetables in which he stole occasionally from the supermarket for this specific purpose. I must love you, he remarked once to the dog, I carry your shit around in a bag. Ralph did not answer, other than by continuing, on alternate evenings, to shit in the long jump pit.

Until recently this had been the best bit of both their days. While Ralph chased around the field Terry would smoke and look at the moon, if there was one. Terry didn't know if such a thing as fellowship could exist between a human and a dumb creature, but he was pretty sure he was happy, and so was Ralph.

A month ago, perhaps a little longer, Ralph had stopped jumping up at the sound of his chain being removed from the hook in the porch. Then his back legs started to go. Terry was helpless, fucking helpless, witnessing the sudden deterioration of a dog he'd never asked for. Because a dog really can be a friend, but in at least one way a useless friend, because they can't tell you what to do. So Terry had brought him here, carrying him out and laying him on a blanket in the back of his Mondeo, and the vet had told him what to do, and he'd agreed. And now he watched the dog on the table, apparently sleeping, the fur on his side rising and falling, ever more slowly, until it stopped.

Mayday

I hold onto the last thing that you said,

each word a lifebuoy to a drowning man

adrift without your voice, unanchored.

If your breath cannot save me, nothing can.

I'm no less lost ashore though, once rescued

and blindly blinking love out of my eyes.

Where you are and I am, I am renewed;

resuscitated, panicked and unwise.

Love After Auschwitz

No poetry after he fails to find a way to say

the essence of you, finally, the thing

ness the actual thing that might actually be somehow

reduced call it an essence, a concentrate, concentrate!

A reduction, an absurd reduction the essence of you

in fact some fat some phosphorus mostly carbon

the spirit of you proof of what exactly?

Electric blinds. Perhaps so, if used

irreverently.

A womb of a room, false ceiling, panelling

in the richest of wooden veneers reproduced

here in more robust, synthetic form and the

model couple on the hotel television screen fixed

staring into an imaginary future of lost looks

and marital acrimony (suited polo shirts not guaranteeing

happiness forever).

The living creatures lie, honest at last, naked

reduced to some solution, finally. No more

poetry.

How Bill Broke His Knee

Bill had been a fine dancer, not a great one. He had married young and had a ten year-old boy who told his schoolfriends that his dad worked in an office. Bill and the kid's mother had split up some years ago, but while they were together he had refused to tour, or to take work abroad. His career had stalled as a result, and he'd done some admin work to pay the bills, mindless, soulless stuff at first, until he found an agency which specialised in third sector placements. He took longer contracts. He stopped taking classes. He lost fitness and poise, but gained an understanding of how to run a successful non-profit, and found his way back to dance.

The company made a little money from touring, more from corporate sponsorship, a steady income from classes and studio hire, sporadic lottery grants, workshops, DVDs, advertising work, pop videos and theatre concessions. Bill managed this money as prudently as the artistic director would allow. He gently pruned the administrative staff, but retained an assistant. He gave himself a pay rise and began to take classes again. Towelling down after a class he would look at the studio mirror, a slimmer, looser version of himself looking back as each week passed, and say to himself “It's not a comeback.” He joined a gym, swam three mornings a week, weights in the evening.

Bill broke his knee irreparably in Barcelona. It was late October, a few days before his thirty-sixth birthday. He didn't break his knee carrying two suitcases down the aeroplane steps, greasy with warm rain and the smell of kerosene. He didn't break his knee falling off a rented bicycle, though his pride, and the civic litter facility he had hoped and failed to avoid, were both dented. He sustained no injury playing football on the wet sand of Barceloneta beach and survived unscathed the sudden full stop of an escalator in an out-of-town shopping mall. The direct cause of the ligament damage which would end his unvoiced hopes of a return to the stage was not the stunt he pulled to impress the young female assistant he had brought along on this tour, executing a triple pirouette on the arced surface of a giant cannonball in the Placa Reial. Although it is possible, likely even, that it was this whirling motion that caught the attention of the year old Newfoundland which, slipping its leash, barrelled into Bill's legs in between him hopping off the cannonball and landing. Crushed, Bill lay on the cool paving of the square. Nausea came and went in waves, but the pain was constant. Everything lost. “Fucking dog,” he thought, his eyes full of tears.

Christóforos

Ben came down from the hills brown and peeling, his last few drachmas spent and his spirit exhausted by a month of too many stars and resin wine and the odour of sheep dung never distant. His hair, usually the colour of wet sand, was now bright blonde, standing out on his arms as filaments of gold. His jeans were stiff with dust. He walked slowly into the village. A sweat-stained shirt loose about him, and another in his bag, both appropriated from his father's wardrobe back home. A wallet empty of all but a donor card and two tickets for the Paris Metro. His passport. House keys.

He spoke very little Greek, but his thirst was obvious. An old man waved him over with his stick. A pensioner, all in white, white hat, large white moustache, an angel, Ben thought. He sat in the shade outside a bar. 'Kátse káto,' said the old man, gesturing. Ben sat opposite him. The old man shouted for water and beer. 'No drachmas,' said Ben. The old man waved away an imaginary fly. 'No drachmas, no próvlima.'

The old man watched him drink, nodding when he had finished the beer. 'Efcharisties,' said the young man, rising. The old man lifted his hat. His hair was thick and perfectly white.

Further into the village there were tourist shops and a post office, with a sea-rusted Western Union sign sticking out above the door at an uncertain angle. Ben went in. There was only one counter; behind it a small, nervous clerk on the telephone. 'Yes,' he said. And looking up at Ben, 'yes,' again. Then he smiled and handed over the receiver. 'It's for you.'

His father's voice, richly amused. 'Will a hundred quid get you back to Athens?' Shame draining slowly into relief. The clerk counting out the notes with short, slender fingers, like a girl's.

He bought a ferry ticket at a creosoted hut in the small harbour. The next crossing was at five. He walked back to the bar at the edge of the village. The old man was gone. It was too hot to be outside now, even in the shade.  

The Padlock

The padlock was heavy, a lump of polished stainless steel the size and shape of a cigarette packet. His uncle, who ran the hardware store near the cathedral, had engraved it for him. ANNA I XIMO with the date underneath, today's date. Ximo had done some extra hours in exchange, stocktaking in poor light. He felt the padlock bump against his ribs, its shape shrouded by the red lining of his jacket. Like another heart, he thought, but cool to touch, dead. He straightened on the seat of the moped.

He picked her up just after eight. Everything about her sad and dark. Her eyes made him want to cry, even as she was smiling. He had had girlfriends before, several. He had a job and wheels, after all. But Anna's sadness was irresistible, all-conquering. She dressed badly, he suspected, to avoid unwelcome attention from boys like him. She didn't speak much, preferring instead to communicate her inner pain with a broad repertoire of glances, from her large, dark, sad eyes. This suited Ximo, who himself was not much of a talker. Sometimes a gesture was easier. If you didn't know how to say what you felt, or even what it was that you felt, a gesture or an action could make feelings comprehensible or concrete.

Her father watched her put on her helmet. Silhouetted by light from inside, a dark shape, yellow all around. A big avenging angel sort of a man, in a short-sleeved shirt. He saw them pull away, heading out of the city. By the door was a large plant pot. Two gallons of dry earth and a dead aloe. He spat into it, meditatively, and went inside.

The city sat in a bay surrounded by mountains and from the lookout seemed like a gorgeous necklace around the throat of the sea. Ximo took the padlock from his pocket and showed it to Anna. He explained its purpose to her. Here, in front of God or whoever, the padlock represented their unbreakable love. That it could not be sundered. She looked at him and nodded gently, indicating comprehension, if not necessarily approval. There were other padlocks attached to the railings of the lookout, all smaller and tattier than theirs, some with initials written on in permanent marker. Ximo, for the first time, began to feel self-conscious. Perhaps he had said too much. In silence he secured the lock to the railing. Then he threw the keys over it, into the night, the drop too deep to hear them land.

The bad news came about a month later. Anna had grown increasingly evasive, but the text which ended it was shattering nevertheless. I don't want to see you anymore. Ximo put a pair of bolt-croppers, three feet long into a rucksack and swung it across his back. The handles sticking out above his shoulders like the blackened stumps of wings. He got on his moped and rode up the mountain.

Close Up

It felt good to be looked at the way she looked at him human and brown-eyed in this case dark and shining like polished stone but warm somehow amused and alive and completely present. Better still when she looked away listening to someone else but conscious of his gaze seeing him without seeming to see him responding when he smiled. She would purse her lips as if anticipating a joke that ought not be made a cruelty that might (and should) die unvoiced or a blandness she didn't have time for. Life is short. They were sad apart and not quite as sad together enduring hours weeks months apart each future meeting a misericord. This is happening now, in time, but we know the outcome. All love the same trajectory Montagus Millers renounce renounce. Love like the universe cooling and dammed passion a dry lake. How much longer he wonders can they keep finding the energy. A string of spit between her lips she looks up at him a puzzle an absurd face she tries not to laugh at the man she can't have but has anyway. Asks if he's okay. Yes he says not untruthfully after all it felt good to be looked at the way she looked at him human and brown-eyed in this case dark and shining like polished stone but warm somehow amused and alive and completely present.

Skin Deep

He woke up to a new face. He was wearing a hospital gown which was neither green nor blue but some kind of non-committal shade thereamongst with a pattern on it. The bleached-out logo of the hospital trust, perhaps, he couldn't tell. A dusty glass of water on the bedside table but no cards or fruit. He sat up and drank. The gown tied up loosely at the back and his fur and his arse visible to all, the water, as warm as the room, it being a hospital significantly warmer than room temperature, dripped down his chin, some of it. Down his chin where once, and until quite recently, there had been a beard. The water, some of it, dripped onto his chest.  He looked down and couldn't see anything, concentrating his glance no further than the bottom of his face. Nothing to see. They'd shaved him. He stroked his cheek to confirm the fact. All gone. Well.

It wasn't a castaway beard or a shaped beard, it was in every way unremarkable. A middling beard, but one which he had been very much attached to. On the left side of his face was a dressing, which followed the line of his jaw from below the ear halfway to his chin. A talking point, certainly, but at the same time a poor substitute for the hair that had of late covered the same area. He worried at the gauze, scratching at it reflexively until a nurse appeared and told him off.

His wife and son arrived some time later without the missing fruit, she having determined, quite reasonably, that it would just go off, but with a large greetings card. A cartoon bear in a pyjamas sucking mournfully on a glass thermometer. The boy was only two and was frightened at first by the stranger in the bed. He had never seen his father clean-shaven or with a post-op black eye. Hearing a fat-tongued approximation of the familiar voice though he gauged the situation and climbed onto the bed. “New daddy hurt?” he asked. His father nodded yes to everything.