tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210637302024-03-23T18:08:39.472+00:00Borrowed PhilosophySeeing what I say so I know what I thinkTom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.comBlogger146125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-8648257134018116612019-11-03T23:07:00.000+00:002019-11-04T13:24:23.835+00:00The Cost of Living<br />
<div class="Section1">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I
saw your eyes twitching. I hoped you'd wake up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Such
a voice. Each vowel a journey,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a voice
like the sweet lower notes of a cello, heard in a warm bath, whiskey in hand. A
voice which has sold thousands of mortgages, packet soups, cars and air
fresheners, has introduced popular classics on a mid-morning radio show, and
coached reluctant viewers on the savagery that exists beyond the curtains of
their living rooms. Specifically familiar to her, but part of the national experience,
instantly recognisable though unseen. She hasn't seen him much recently
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
bed shifts, all by itself, lifting her by the shoulders and straightening her
legs. Just an inch or so. Not an unpleasant sensation. The painkillers have her
floating a little. She smiles and nods off briefly. He's still there when she
opens her eyes again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Dad?
she says. Where's Mum?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Gone
to get a sandwich.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Did
you fight?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Not
much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
turns to look out of the window, tries to turn but there is pain still, unmasked
by whatever they're giving her. She looks at the wallpaper instead. Very
beautiful and expensive she thinks, gold with branches of cherry in bloom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She finds herself in a garden <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">somewhere just after the rain.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A crooked old
man is talking to her in a language she doesn't know.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">He
is telling a story, she realises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has heard all of his
stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why is he here?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Impossible old man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">So, knees knocking, fully expecting to be sent down, I enter the
Master's sanctuary. A cave of books. The smell of pipe smoke. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">He conjures the quintessence of this remembered space with a twist
of his fingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Straight from the RSC,
that gesture, she thinks. My Leontes was universally applauded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Denton, is it? he says. Sit down old chap. Need a favour, and
Clarke says you're the man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Nobby Clarke was the porter, you see, knew all the ins and outs.
Fat fellow. Liverpudlian.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Tells me you're down to London every fortnight. Is that right? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Yes sir, I tell him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
sister's not been well. Which was quite true of course. Never saw me gradu</span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;">ate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Sorry to hear that. Let me show you something. Opens a box on his
desk. There are two<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">rather dirty-looking wine glasses inside, nestling in velvet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Need to get these cleaned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I suppose I could have a go, sir.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Very plucky of you Denton, he says, but you can keep your Brillo
pad in your pocket. These are Cristallo, do you know what that is?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Some kind of glass, sir.</span></div>
</div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Spot on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From Venice, four
hundred years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Really?</span></div>
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<!--[if supportFields]><span
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style='mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Yes, the age of
Caravaggio, Tintoretto, all that crowd.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
bed moves again, cradling her. She feels trapped, almost.</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">A thin-lipped, sour-faced old fellow he was, the Master, but quite
a card with it. It's not a matter of national importance, he says, but I've
heard you're a safe pair of hands. I want you to take this box to a pal of mine
at the V & A. Didn't have a clue where that was. I suppose I still do that,
for a living I mean, pretend I know what I'm talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">How do I get there?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Take a cab from Paddington, he says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
dozes again, struggling to remember who is who. Doesn't matter. It's more like
music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She must have heard this voice in
utero, absorbed its rhythms there. She sang to her own children, hummed along
to Mozart as well, supposed to make them brighter. Both out of the country now,
free from their grandfather's incantations, and bright enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">So
they usher me through some important looking doors, with No Admittance to the
Public painted on 'em in gold leaf, to another old man's office. More books and
leather.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He looks the part, brass
spectacles, white goatee.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">You're
the young man Sir David has sent me then. Well, let's have a look. Opens the
box and marvels at these two grubby glasses.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section4">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">He
wondered if you might be able to clean them. Thought it might take a while so
said to leave them with you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
was out of danger, Mum had said. No-one's out of danger, she wanted to explain,
we are all terribly, terribly fragile. But she had been too exhausted or
medicated or both to speak so she smiled instead. She interrupts him, panicked
suddenly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Where's
Mum gone?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She'll
be back in a moment, poppet. Gone to the cafe. You were asleep so she thought<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">you'd
be safe with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">They
are silent for a while. She calms herself by watching him. Downcast, twiddling
his thumbs. He is the only person she has ever seen who actually twiddles his
thumbs, which is odd, she thinks, given the currency of the expression. A big
man on a small chair. She got his height but not his breadth. Spliced genes:
Dad's hair too, Mum's eyes (monochrome crescents) and narrow, round shoulders.
Her ex-husband had once compared her to a wading bird. She had laughed at the
time but the distorting mirror of their divorce reflected back ambivalence as
malice, wit as unkindness. All the men in her life scattered, her son in Hong
Kong, Tim with someone shorter, blonder, less stooped (but at least not
punishingly younger) and Dad, well for once Dad was here. She ought to be kind
to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">You
were telling me about the glasses.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
drip glugs quietly and the bed moves. Her father's thumbs cease whirling and he
looks back up at her like a large, grateful dog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">So
I leave the box with the curator chap and hop on the tube to see your
Grandparents and Kitty. She was never very strong, poor old thing. And then I
make a date with Mum <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">and
we go out dancing and before I know it I'm back up at Oxford in a tutorial on <i>Piers
Plowman</i> or somesuch and I give the Master the change from his quid and a
debrief and don't think any more about it. Mission accomplished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">A
nurse enters, preceded by a brisk knock. In rubber slippers which match her
overalls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She takes a look at the notes
at the end of the bed and checks the monitoring equipment and the drip.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">How
you feeling? Okay? Any pain?<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I'm
a bit sore when I move my head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
nurse leans over her and adjusts the drip. Magda. Polish presumably. Something
birdlike about her too, thick, curly hair pulled away from her face, like a
crest, and a raptor's nose. No kinship between them really; the young nurse belongs
to the world of the upright, the ambulant and athletic. She looks as if she
might go and play netball after her shift. Do they have netball in Poland?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="Section6">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I
be back later. Let me know if you need anything. There's a button.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Ah,
yes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
tries to turn, but is stopped once more by a rumour of pain. She reaches for
where she thinks the call button will be, groping like the blind heroine of a
cheap thriller. There.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She rests her
fingers on it for a moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">How
did you and Mum used to travel around town? Not in the Hillman, surely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">By
tube, mostly, like anyone. Everyone smoking as if their lives depended on it.
Filthy. Got some funny looks sometimes, her being, well, exotic. If we were
going out of town Dad would let me borrow the Jag. Very occasionally. We didn't
get the Hillman until after you were born. And it was pretty knackered then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
can't imagine him on the underground, silent amongst his crowding peers. He
seems too big for it, his presence too operatic to be plagued by beggars,
buskers and body odour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
met Tim on the Victoria Line, of course. His long arm reaching between the
carriages,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pushing through the void to
tap her on the shoulder. Your jumper's still got the label on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanking him, reaching for the unseen tag and
yanking it off. Standing on adjacent escalators at Warren Street, him laughing.
I'm not following you, I promise. From their very first moments together
telling her she'd got it wrong, pointing out her absent-mindedness.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section7">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Her
father is staring at her hand on the call button, daring her, almost, to press
it. Willing her to misbehave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
glasses, Dad. He nods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">A
couple of weeks into Hilary and the Master summons me again. Denton, I need you
to retrieve those goblets, there's no-one else I can trust. Think nothing of
it, I tell him. I'm your man. He gives me another quid, tells me to get a
receipt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Will
that cover it? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">What's
that, man? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
repair?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Never
mind about the repair, Denton, the curator and I will sort that out between
us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Old
boys' club, she says.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Exactly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All pretty straightforward until it starts to
snow, and the snow gets tramped down by thousands of chilly
undergraduates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By Friday it's five
below and George Street is like an ice rink.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck before I get to the station. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Her
hands are shaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She lifts them from
the bed covers and looks at them, as if they belong to someone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">What
happened, Dad?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Don't
rush me, sweetheart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">No,
I mean what happened to me?</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">How did I
end up here?</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section8">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Did
your mother not explain?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I
didn't ask.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">An
exhalation, which is neither a sigh nor a whistle but is both of these things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">They
think you might have tripped or passed out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Went down pretty
hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of your students found you at
the bottom of a flight of stairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Did
I break my neck?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">No,
darling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your neck's okay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just sprained, they think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her disembodied hands, still quivering, shape
themselves into a gesture of inquiry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why all this?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">You
banged your head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A nasty one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They thought they might have to operate,
but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>your skull's too thick, he
laughs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They've got you wrapped up like
a Punjabi, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Her
hands to her head now, finding the bandage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Fuck,
she says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How's Mum doing?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Scared,
worried.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least you've given her something to fret
about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Dad...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Sorry.
She feels a pang of unwonted tenderness towards her mother, imagines her lost
and beige, wandering the corridors. A corncrake blown in through an open fire
exit, pecking at a stale bun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Where's
my bag? He retrieves it, noisily, from the bedside table and hands it up to
her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She finds her phone and unlocks it,
searches for her mother's number. Before she calls <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">she
opens the camera and reverses its gaze. Her face, or something like it, on the
screen.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">One black eye, no make-up, her
hair sticking straight out above the bandage. She looks like a street lunatic,
a shaman down on their luck. She starts to swear again but swallows it, in
obscure, belated deference to her father, and says Oh dear, instead. The phone
freezes, as if in horror at what it is displaying, and expires.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section9">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Dad,
can you ring Mum and find out what's keeping her? I think she might be lost.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I
can try, darling, but I think she may have blocked my number.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Really?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Well,
let's try. She watches his long, thick thumb scroll through the contacts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Tomoyu?
Yes, she's awake. Just about. Where are you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Her
mother is in the room when she wakes again. She smiles at her parents, and
tries to remember how long it has been since she has seen them together. Ben's
christening?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Getting on for twenty
years, anyway. There is, she notes, something comic about the difference
between their physical presences. Dad occupying every cubic inch of available
space, asserting that he is more than just a voice. Mum next to him,
disappearing into her chair. He could probably eat her, if he put his mind to
it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Hello
Mum. Her mother answers by resting a hand on the edge of the bed. Dad was just
telling me a story. About his Oxford days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Oh.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Not
a rude story. At least not so far. Was I asleep for long?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I
got back about half an hour ago, darling. Her mother's voice has its own
charm.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">From sweetness came forth
strength.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section10">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">That
long? It's the drugs, I think. My neck hurts most of all. Funny that. Not my
head but my neck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">The
room is silent for a moment. She finds that it makes her uncomfortable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Dad,
she says.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Darling?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">You
were skidding through Oxford in the snow. Her mother nods as if to say, oh it's
that story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Well,
it was rather like the previous weekend, but backwards. Went to see Kitty, she
was better, we thought. Took your Mum to the pictures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">What
did you see? They look at each other, some happy energy passing between them,
something she doesn't remember ever having seen. Their eyes separate and fix on
the wallpaper as they try to remember. It's not important, she begins to say,
but two hands – one large and fleshy, the other slight and clawlike – are
immediately raised to hush her. It has become very important, suddenly, that
they nail this down. The moments before her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When they were still happy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Peter
Sellers, her mother says.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Yes,
yes. Inspector Clouseau. Bloody funny.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The
Pink Panther, they say at once, as if they'd rehearsed it.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section11">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">And
went for Chinese food afterwards, do you remember?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her father nods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">All
the waiters looked like Cato.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Slightly
racist, Dad. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">No,
I mean they were all dressed like that. Black pyjamas. So I had a super evening
with Mum and went back to the V & A in the morning. The old curator chap
beckons me in and there's the box on his desk. He opens it, takes out one of
the glasses and holds it up to the light. Finally, I can see what all the fuss
is about. This thing is exquisite now it's clean. A hint of blue to it, and
beautifully proportioned, golden ratio at work or whatever. Observe, the Prof
says, these very fine lines. This is crizzling. The word stuck with me,
obviously. I have cleaned the goblets but there is nothing to be done with the
crizzling. This is the worst of the two. He hands one to me for a second. It
seems solid enough, but what do I know? Be very careful with them, the
slightest knock could cause them to shatter altogether. So he puts the glass
back in the velvet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shuts the box and
hands it to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'm literally shaking,
thinking about negotiating the steps, getting in and out of a taxi, on and off
a train, skating back down George Street to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>college. The old man puts a hand on my shoulder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For heaven's sake don't drop the box, he
says, and sees me out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Cato
wasn't in the first film, her mother says. It was the one with David Niven we
saw. She watches her father contain himself, and is reminded of a python
swallowing a goat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I'm
sure you're right, darling, he says. It probably wasn't snowing either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
feels faintly reassured. This is how things are supposed to be with them. Dad
doing the talking, Mum saying very little but always managing to undermine him
somehow with <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">inconvenient
matters of fact. It was an Irish Wolfhound, not a Great Dane. I doubt she would
have eaten it, she's a Muslim. Dad barely suppressing his rage, Mum barely
concealing her delight at having thwarted him. Pulling against each other, like
biceps and triceps, and so functioning. Until she told him she was leaving and
he moved his girlfriend in a week later.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A month or so after her twelfth birthday, just before she went back to
school. </span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Dans les grandes vacances ma mère a décidé qu'elle ne voulait plus
habiter avec mon père. </i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A relief, really. Her own marriage had lasted a
little longer, hardly a source of pride. And Tim had been the one to pack his
bags.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section12">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">It
was very cold, I remember, her mother says. You had a college scarf and you put
it around my neck when we left the cinema. It was rather itchy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Her
father smiles, the crisis has passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">So
I sit in the taxi<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with this thing on my
lap, wincing at every pothole we go over and then I have to wait on a freezing
bench at Paddington, trying not to shiver, and my train's delayed because of
the weather.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
is so tired. But warm. She pities young, scarfless Dick Denton, risking
hypothermia for the sake of a couple of ancient objets d'art, sees her father
slimmer, healthier, red of lip, cheek and nose, his breath visible against the
thick air of the concourse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Wasn't
there a waiting room?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Yes,
but it was terribly crowded, as you can imagine, and I couldn't risk getting
nudged by a stray suitcase or whatever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">You
poor thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">We
get on the six fifteen, eventually, and it's still bloody freezing on the
train, some <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">problem</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">with the heating, and again I've got this box
balanced on my knees, expecting a derailment or an emergency stop at any
moment. Nothing but black out of the window, nothing to focus on but not
dropping the box.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section13">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">We
get to Didcot and a chap gets on and sits down opposite me, lights his pipe.
He's had a couple of drinks, I can smell it on him. He looks at me for a bit,
then he leans forward and says What's in the box?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as he says this he TAPS it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like this, TAP TAP, twice, with the tips of
his fingers. I'm ready to knock him into the middle of next week, of course,
but I'm somewhat hindered by my precious cargo. The fellow takes one look at my
face and scarpers off into the next carriage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
finds herself laughing at this. The restrained laughter she employs for her
colleagues' jokes in lectures. In that context more of a signal to others that
a joke has, in fact, been made. She has seen her father's face redden with
murderous intent, but he has never lashed out, not at her nor, she is sure, at
her mother who latterly has taken to sharing the worst episodes from their
doomed union with her daughter. No mention of wife-beating, though his other
faults were extensive in scope and degree. Her mother is smiling too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Were
you ever in a real fight, Dad?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Me?
Handbags on the rugby pitch, maybe, as a callow youth. And plenty of swordplay on
the boards. But no, people have tended to keep out of my way. Just as well
really, I don't think I've got the stomach for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
rather admires him for this, this rare interval of self-reflection in which he
manages to see himself in a less than heroic light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Were
they okay, the glasses?</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section14">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">At
this point, as far as I know, they remain <i>virgo intacta</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">He
has returned to the remembered present of his story. Shame on her for dragging
him away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I
safely disembark amongst the dreaming spires, thinking that by now it's too
late to trouble the Master but there's a note in my pigeonhole instructing me
to visit him at any time before midnight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So I trudge, very carefully, along to his lodgings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He opens the door himself, I'm half expecting
him to be in some Victorian sleep getup, like Scrooge, but he's still wearing
his suit and an expression of cosmic indignation. He wasn't much of a
smiler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He looks at me, looks at the
box, puts two and two together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Denton,
he says. Do come in, old chap. You must be frozen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Somewhat,
I tell him. He brings me back into his study, where there's still quite a fire
going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I put the box on his desk along
with the change from his quid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Let's
have a look, shall we? He opens the box. Magnificent, he says. Takes one out,
examines it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Puts it back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consummatum est, Denton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A job well done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Comes out from behind his desk and shakes my
hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he does so we hear a sharp pop
– her father puts one stout forefinger into the side of his mouth and flicks it
out – not loud, like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could have
come from the fire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then another – the
same gesture – and the Master's eyebrows go up, like two grey caterpillars,
levitating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Oh
dear, says her mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Nothing
but dust.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It's as if they've evaporated,
somehow.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">My knees start shaking again
and I'm sure that it's somehow going to be my fault and he's going to send me
down or tear me a new one at the very least.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">He stands there looking at the box, which is, to all intents and
purposes empty now.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Then he leans
forward against the desk and his shoulders start to shake, and eventually I
realise that he's laughing.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I daren't
laugh along, of course.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section15">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Magda
reappears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She watches the younger woman
as she moves around the bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is
real, she thinks, for everyone who occupies this bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Am I real to her?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or just a passing symptom, floating on the
sheets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today a head injury, next week a
knee replacement, a tonsillectomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With
a shiver she pictures her father telling the same story, in the same place,
holding her mother's hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there she
is, on the bed, deceased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A moral in
parallel, returned, like a piece of sixteenth century cristallo, unto
dust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or as good as.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">We'll
have to say you dropped them, you understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Not
quite sure what you mean, I tell him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Accidental
damage, he says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not insured
otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Might buy a couple of cases
of the good stuff for the college cellar, no?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Laughing the whole time, he was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">She
need to rest, Magda says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Five minutes,
okay?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They mumble and nod.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">We
should let you sleep, darling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her
mother presses her hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I
always wondered, he continues, rising slowly, if I was set up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the time for that sort <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">of
thing.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">JFK, Jack Ruby.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section16">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">You
were a patsy, Dad?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Never
occurred to me at the time, obviously, you just go along with these things. But
when I thought about it later I wondered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Was I meant to fail?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Magda
is standing by the door now, applying pressure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They lean over and kiss her in turn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">I'll
see you in the morning, darling, her mother says.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Yes,
says her father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not really committing
to anything, as has been his way for as long as she can remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: #454545; font-family: ".sf ui text"; font-size: 17.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";">Then they are gone, empty air
and two chairs left behind, and it is as if the latent pain in the side of her
neck, which she has experienced for the most part as a kind of pressure,
departs with them. It could also be that Magda has tweaked the drip to help her
sleep again. She wonders if the tension and discomfort she felt was not a
symptom of the fall but of having the two of them there. His half-disguised
reluctance and her anxious solicitude. Either way it was good to be alone, to
reinhabit her habitual state. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">This room was
really all she needed. With its soft lighting and bionic
bed. There was free Wi-Fi and the food would presumably be as
tasteful as the wallpaper. She might enjoy an occasional visitor,
perhaps coming to an arrangement with Magda that no-one should be allowed to
stay for longer than twenty minutes. Nothing much to see out of the
window, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">not until
Spring anyway, and that was five months off. Keep the blinds down
until then. No real rush, is there? She chuckled to
herself, buoyant. </span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section17">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Why that
story? He probably didn't know himself. Introspection
wasn't his thing. He was Polonius, and had never been
Hamlet. If she pressed him on it he would probably say, Oh, y'know,
every cloud has a silver lining, something of that sort. It was a
harmless enough story, she supposes, but even in her present mildly euphoric
condition there is something about it which nags at her. The thing
of beauty with a fatal flaw, a commonplace idea, a cliché
really. But what was the parallel that her father, if only
subconsciously, was drawing? Was she the gorgeous
object? Probably not. He had never been terribly
enthusiastic about her appearance. Marriage, his or hers? Love
itself? This seems the most likely, she thinks. Imagines
him delivering his velvet-voiced thesis on the fragility of human
affection. Nothing lasts forever, that's what life has taught me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">And this, in
the end, was the only story. Never mind a stranger coming to town,
or a heroic quest, the truth behind any fiction was that things
ended. Existence meant finitude. In my beginning is my
end. She feels her heart flicker slightly at this helix of thought. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Magda appears
at the push of a button.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Do you I might
have some hot chocolate, and some biscuits, perhaps?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">Sure, I bring
you. Five minutes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The woods
decay, the woods decay and fall. In a sense though, she reasons,
biting into a piece of shortbread, she is bucking the trend. Reversing
the curse. Extremely good shortbread, she says aloud. Because
something pretty serious has happened to her. And now she is
healing.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Almost everyone is getting
worse and she is getting better.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Time-travelling, almost.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">She sips
the last of her hot chocolate and lets her broken head push back into the
pillow behind her.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Like a hotel pillow,
from a nice hotel.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="Section18">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">It has rained
again, she notices. Close to evening now. The clouds have cleared but the sun
is already below the acers. The path, darkened by rain, is in shadow. The old
man is there, thin and stooped like a crane, in his black pyjamas. He is
worrying at the soil with a narrow spade. When he sees her he pushes the tool
into the earth and gestures to her. Follow me. </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";">She walks beside him along the
path. Above them the trees, none particularly tall, reach towards each other
but do not touch. There is light still between the trees and the sky a deep,
late afternoon blue. He is talking, the old man, softly, and she nods from time
to time as if she understands. She doesn't understand but she agrees somehow.
The curves of the path are mannered, artificial, as if something is being
deliberately concealed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";">The old man's patter ceases.
The path widens and turns. A flight of shallow steps, formed from crazed stone,
rises between low box hedges up to a temple. Water drips from the trees. The
red tiles on the roof of the temple glow in the fading sunlight. The old man
indicates that he will walk no further then spreads his hand, as far as his
worn joints will allow, in the direction of the temple doors. He nods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br clear="all" style="mso-break-type: section-break; page-break-before: always;" />
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The steps are uneven and
slippery with dewfall or rain. She walks up them with care, turning midway to
check that the old man is still there. When she reaches the doors she looks
behind once more. The old man nods to her, bends at the waist, exaggerating his
stoop, then walks away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-pagination: widow-orphan;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";">She pushes the left hand door
which swings open silently. She enters the temple and closes the door behind
her. It is very dark. Her eyes adjust to the lack of light.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans";"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-70583022991873093382017-02-22T17:05:00.005+00:002018-03-28T18:38:54.036+00:00Guernica and The Black Paintings (I)<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
am in Madrid with my eldest daughter, Daisy, who is fifteen and a
half. It is early August, around six weeks after the disastrous
Brexit vote, and it's very hot. The heat assaults us every time we
step out of the hotel lobby. We haven't been here long, but we're
already feeling a little aggrieved by the Metro system. Every time we
arrive on a platform a train is just leaving, it seems, and there is
invariably a wait of around five minutes for the next one. One of the
lines which serves our nearest station is closed for the summer, so
it's already a little harder to get around than it ought to be. But
the city has charmed us, proving to be cleaner and quieter than we
were warned we might expect it to be. This afternoon we're following
my itinerary, which will place us in front of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Guernica</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and some of the highlights of the Prado. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">We
emerge at street level in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, where the
streets seem to smell of last night's barbecue, and walk down towards
the Museo Reina Sofia. Closer to the museum locals and tourists are
lunching in great numbers on shaded pavements, and I am baffled again
by the instinct of so many of my countrymen, which urges them to be
more remote from civilisation (exemplified here by the cosmopolitan
mix of diners talking at sensible volume over food and drink consumed
in a spirit of leisure) rather than closer to it. No-one at the
ticket booth is in any rush to assist us, and it becomes clear,
eventually, that this is not to do with any native indolence, but
rather because admission is free after 1.00pm. Now, I was aware that
the Prado offers free admission after five, but this is a bonus. At
least I think it is.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Guernica</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is hemmed in by smaller galleries displaying Picasso's preparatory
sketches and the room in which the painting itself is hung is long
but reasonably shallow. It is also extremely crowded, so you feel a
little like you're at the back of a crowd waiting for a parade to
pass, rather than experiencing one of the Twentieth Century's great
expressions of artistic energy. The painting itself is huge, but not
surprisingly so, as some pieces already familiar in reproduction are
when you first see them. It is as if the reputation of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Guernica</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
has outstripped even its expansive dimensions. Perhaps one's
impression of the painting suffers as a result of its overfamiliarity
(though I did not find this to be the case with </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Las
Meninas</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
an earlier masterpiece which I saw later in the day and found
immensely moving, in spite of my still greater familiarity with the
image.) Perhaps it is necessary to imagine seeing the work during or
in the immediate aftermath of the war whose effects it seems to
depict, although I had just flown to Madrid from a nation which
seemed to be turning against itself, informed by a wider
reinvigoration of fascism that threatens to poison the whole
continent. Anyway I found myself focusing more on what troubled me
about the painting rather than enjoying what Picasso had achieved.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
have an idea about what Picasso was trying to accomplish in making
the surface of the canvas so resolutely matt (apparently he
commissioned special oil paint in order to create this effect). It
seems that the painting is in some way supposed to resemble a black
and white photo reproduced in a newspaper. To me though, this
flatness deprived the picture of some energy, as if he hadn't really
progressed from the drawings through to the finished work. The
contrast between flat blacks, greys and whites is not as dramatic as
it would have been had conventional oils been used. The components of
the image are more harmoniously placed than they appear in the
claustrophobic reproductions I was used to seeing, so that what I had
expected to be chaotic seemed overly ordered. At the same time I
found that the execution of the painting was almost sloppy, though I
am also aware that this may be part of an intended aesthetic, that
Picasso may have been attempting to create a tension between
composition and realisation, that the canvas, in parts, was supposed
to appear scruffy and unfinished. Nevertheless I felt a sense of
wavering conviction, as if the artist had understood, too late, that
the finished work would not live up to what was originally conceived.
</span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div align="JUSTIFY" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: 0.03cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">What
bothered me most about </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Guernica</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
I think, was its very consideredness. The tortured figures were too
neatly balanced, the cartoonish limbs and digits too mannered. It is
of course possible, laudable even, to investigate the insanity of war
in a calm and measured fashion, but this is not what Picasso was at,
if I understand his masterpiece correctly. He wanted </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Guernica</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to be a vast, mad yelp of a painting, a cry from the heart echoing
the pain and horror of conflict, but for me, standing in front of it
with a hundred or so other people, it seemed a bit too sane, too
self-conscious and too public. I would only have to wait a couple of
hours to find a more convincing and intimate argument about the
senselessness of violence. One which wouldn't seem sane at all. </span></span></span></span>
</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-73957801935012844772017-01-17T18:32:00.001+00:002017-01-17T18:32:09.761+00:00Minus the Shooting<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
Younis loved his country, all of it that he had seen anyway, and he had seen more than everybody he knew. He was a commercial traveller, buying fabric mostly, and some leather goods. Business took him south to the edge of the desert, where low, white villages were dwarfed by sand dunes, and all along the Mediterranean coast. Some mornings he would pull up beside the coast road, get out of the car, and stand in the play of wind between the land and the sea, would throw his suit jacket on to the back seat and stand there in his shirt, arms slightly away from his body, his tie flapping around his shoulders. He loved the people of his country too, a humorous nation, excitable, generous though largely underfed, speaking a rich creole of French and Arabic with countless oaths borrowed and often spliced from both. A good-looking people. More handsome than those from either side, at any rate. Younis himself was much admired, though unmarried. His moustache was broad and his hair still thick. The Lexus belonged to the company, in truth, but the apartment, in a good part of town, was his.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
He might have called himself a patriot, but here, as in certain other countries, the word had assumed some negative overtones. It had come to connote a kind of small-mindedness, and a parochial, or at least less than cosmopolitan attitude to non-Arabs. Younis regretted but understood the recent upswell in patriotic feeling amongst the lower classes. Though he was a businessman he thought of himself as being essentially of the left. He bought a socialist newspaper two or three times a week and always on a Thursday. He dressed in western clothes but maintained some local habits. What bound him to the masses, to the young men in the squares who veered between political discontent and nationalist fervour, was his passion for the national football team. This passion created a literal queasiness in him. He was so invested in the fortunes of the team that watching them made him sick. He would heave with nerves if the opposition crossed the halfway line. So he couldn't watch. Or could only watch the game's neutralities. The national anthems. The ball being shuffled across the back four. The pundits at half-time (though he would have, occasionally, to avert his eyes from the screen as attempts on goal at either end were analysed in slow motion).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
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Later on this particular September day the Desert Falcons were to play a World Cup qualifier against Senegal, in Dakar. Younis was not optimistic about the result, nor indeed his chances of avoiding the match. If he stayed in his hand would drift towards the television remote like some disembodied horror, and he would curl and cringe on the sofa until the rout was complete. Every café in the city would be showing the game, every laundrette and takeaway. Market stalls and taxis would have the radio tuned to a sports channel. He thought about driving out of the city, but again foresaw a twitching hand, one that could almost be identified as his own, fiddling furiously with the dial of a car stereo. He would have to go out on foot, he realised. Younis decided to reacquaint himself with the stuffed fauna in the Musée National. He would set out just before six, walk directly to the museum, sit in front of some paintings, be transported back to an idealised childhood amongst the tatty taxidermy in the basement, then make his way back. He estimated that the whole adventure would take up to two hours, long enough for the match to reach its unhappy conclusion.</div>
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The afternoon had begun to cool as he put on a linen jacket and skipped down the stone staircase of his building, a free man. On the corner of his street a workman and a gendarme were arguing over a flag, which the labourer had tied to a barrier. Younis listened as he waited for the lights to change. It seemed that the cop had told the workman to remove the flag because, as he pointed out (and not unreasonably, Younis thought) it considerably reduced visibility for anyone turning left on a filter light. The labourer, who seemed to be in a less reasonable frame of mind, kept repeating that the flag was 'symbolic', and it emerged besides that the flag was a permanent fixture on the barrier, had been tied to it, in fact, since the Desert Falcons had last made it to the World Cup, seven years previously, and was therefore, in all likelihood, irremovable. The gendarme then enquired if the navvy had an alternative barrier at his disposal, which enquiry was duly answered, somewhat insolently, in the negative. Younis imagined retelling the story at some later point, of The Flag and the Hole in the Road, perhaps as an amusing antidote to the disappointing reversal about to visited upon his beloved national team by the Senegalese. The lights changed and he let them, patting down his jacket for an imaginary billfold, or pack of cigarettes, a charade performed so that the two interlocutors would not think he was merely loitering in the hope that they would come to blows. He made an effort to record their continuing dialogue in his mind, more or less as it happened.</div>
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“I can't just leave the hole unprotected.”</div>
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“Well cut it off then,” replied the constable.</div>
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“I can't and I won't. The flag is a symbol.”</div>
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“So you've said. May I ask what the flag symbolises, and how?”</div>
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“It symbolises our nation. Our struggle.”</div>
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The policeman nodded.</div>
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“I'm still struggling to understand how, exactly, this dirty bit of cloth symbolises the whole nation. Isn't it just a flag? And a flag in the wrong place? Tell me.”</div>
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The lights changed again. Younis let them.</div>
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“So the white band,” the workman began, “represents the peace we have achieved.” The cop surveyed the noisome junction.</div>
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“I suppose we're not actually at war, just at the moment.”</div>
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“The red is the blood shed by those martyrs, our fathers and brothers, with which peace, and our freedom, were bought.”</div>
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“Did you read that in a pamphlet?” The workman lit a cigarette and smiled but did not answer. Younis sensed that the situation was moving towards detente. Tempers cooling like the day, energy dispersing towards the end of the universe.</div>
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“And the green?” The workman wasn't sure.</div>
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“I guess it represents the country. The green land.”</div>
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Islam, thought Younis, crossing the road, finally. Green is for Islam, spine of the nation, its laws, sacraments and customs. There was a lot of desert, yes, but even here in the north it wasn't particularly green. A strange conclusion to reach. He imagined an alternate flag, with a beige stripe at the bottom. That might best represent the country's topography, was that the word? And yet it was a beautiful country, and no greener now, after the revolutions of his lifetime, than when the French were in charge, nor the Spanish before them. So the green represented a national religion, an established faith. Younis could have done without it. People needed to forget about the next world and focus on their desires in the here and now. Want something, buy it. Don't worry too much about what you can never possibly know. At the western end of the harbour the land rose up a thousand feet. There was a Moorish fort there, and a Spanish chapel beneath it. Less close to God. Tourists were driven up in coaches to see the battlements and the icons. Once a year, on Ascension Day, some pilgrims from the city walked up there. For what? There was a café and some souvenir stalls and a view over the port. Nothing special.</div>
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The boulevard was empty. Younis strode along it at a military pace. He imagined himself as the sole survivor of some biological outrage. The whole world at his disposal but no-one to share it with. He shivered and fell out of rhythm for a moment, becoming conscious of each footstep. Ahead, four hundred metres on the left, loomed the museum. Richly coloured friezes running in a band around the building. White stucco, black railings with an occasional soft drink can impaled upon them. A border of coarse grass. Palm trees every twenty yards or so. It was, Younis reflected, a modest, colonial sort of affair. Not the Louvre, nor the Prado, but something out at the edge of things. And perhaps all the better for it. A uniformed man stood on the steps and addressed Younis as he approached the gates.</div>
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“No admission after five forty-five.”</div>
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“Since when?”</div>
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“Since I've worked here,” said the man.</div>
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“Was it your decision, then, to change the opening hours?”</div>
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“What? No, I just work here.” The two men stood regarding each other for a moment, then the security guard lifted his chin and looked back towards the port. “Go home and watch the match,” he said. “That's what I'll be doing.”</div>
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Younis offered the man a limp salute and turned around. He was disappointed, but the walk had killed some time and kept his mind off the game. He walked north, staying on the shaded side of the boulevard. Ten minutes later he turned right towards the centre of town. He had decided to take refuge in the shop of Murad, his barber, who was a Christian and possibly a homosexual. Anyway, Younis remembered, Murad took no interest at all in football, and the television in the salon was invariably tuned to an entertainment channel. He skirted the bazaar, walking through the jewellery district. This was the oldest part of the city, the blackened buildings crowding closer, gutters almost touching overhead. Most of the shops were open. Old men hunched behind heavy glass cabinets. Men who had lived through everything but had seen nothing, hidden away in this dark corridor, insulated by diamonds. They beckoned to him. “Buy or sell,” he heard repeatedly, muffled by closed doors and old velvet. Six forty-five. Half time. He sat outside a small café and ordered a coffee. He sugared and sipped it. Very good, like the coffee in Spain, he thought. A moment later his stomach seemed somehow to violently rotate within him as, looking away from the café, he saw the match score reflected in the darkened window of a shop across the street. Any other score might have taken a moment to absorb, to reverse the characters and to recall which was the home team. It was nil – nil. Gloriously and unambiguously scoreless. Younis allowed himself a brief moment of hope. Perhaps they could pull it off. But hope was almost immediately overwhelmed by memories of past failures. The team defending a narrow lead, dropping deeper and deeper into their own half, throwing themselves in the way of every shot and cross, until tired legs can no longer perform. A low drive deflected twice in a crowded box. A foot withdrawn just too late from the path of the overlapping left back. All that effort for nothing.</div>
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Younis pulled a note from his wallet and tucked it under his saucer. There was a photograph in there, sandwiched between two business cards. His niece aged about four. He had always been fond of the girl, grown up and living in America now, but the reason he kept the photo was because of an unusual quality he felt it possessed. Her hair is long and uncovered. She wears a knee length brown dress which he remembers being stitched from a heavy fabric, corduroy perhaps. She is leaning forward at the waist, her arms stretched down in front of her, her hands half a metre apart. There is a red ball in mid-air. This was the thing about the photograph. It seemed to capture not only a moment, but also what preceded and followed this moment. You could see that the girl had just bounced the ball, but also, from its position slightly beyond her reach, you could see that she would not catch it and that the ball would skip away from her over the hard ground. He had taken the photo himself, and did not remember if this had happened, but looking at the image it was impossible to conceive that it hadn't. That the girl hadn't shrieked slightly, and skipped along after the ball. He wasn't sure what significance this had, really, but he felt that it must have something to do with how humans experience time and space. This was the kind of thinking he tried to avoid, particularly when it was late, and he was alone. But his mind was generally unquiet. The little girl in the brown dress provoked another question, as he rose and put on his jacket. How, he wondered, did we get from that innate instinct to play, to the present moment, where nation was staked against nation, across the globe, where the kicking of a ball could not be an unpolitical act, if only because of the great numbers of souls, his included, who were invested in the trajectory of that act? He heard the whistle blow for the start of the second half.</div>
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There was a red sign above the barber shop window with Murad's name and line of business hand-painted upon it in Arabic, French and English. This last, lowest set of letters was smaller than those above, as if added as an optimistic afterthought. The town attracted few tourists, and those who made to these narrow streets were usually looking for hashish rather than a haircut. A tricolour was pinned up in a corner of the window, just big enough to reassure nationalists that their custom was welcomed (Younis thought of the roaddigger) and not so big as to prove distasteful to everyone else. </div>
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Murad was not busy. He sat alone on the vinyl banquette where, during the week, his customers would wait their turn in the chair. Younis watched him for a while before entering the shop. His attention, it seemed, was divided between the large tropical fish tank at the back of the shop and the television in the corner. Nothing was happening in the fish tank, nothing that Younis could perceive, anyway. Meanwhile on the flatscreen young men and women threw themselves about in silence. Murad rose as he entered and greeted him warmly. The barber's own hair was thinning somewhat, and was unnaturally black, and as he spoke to Younis he repeatedly scraped his palm over his scalp from front to back. Funny, Younis thought, that you never saw a dentist with bad teeth.</div>
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“I was just thinking about closing up for the day.” Younis stepped backwards, smiling.</div>
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“I can come back, if you prefer. I've already been turned away from the Musée National...”</div>
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“No, no, sit down.” The barber was flustered. “Not a soul for two hours. On a Sunday.”</div>
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“There's a football match going on,” Younis explained. “An important one.”</div>
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“Not important to me.”</div>
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“Well, important in the sense that it has robbed you of your usual customers.”</div>
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“But their hair will still need cutting, whoever wins.”</div>
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It was then agreed that the client's hair would be washed, prior to cutting, and that afterwards a wet shave would be in order. The great black chair was duly lowered and Younis leant over the sink. Murad's voice, sharing some gossip about the mayor and his mistress, was only intermittently audible as water and hands and shampoo and more hands and more water swilled about his client's ears. The effect was not unpleasant. As Murad towelled his hair dry Younis watched a young man approaching in the mirror. A young black with untidy hair. Murad saw him too, and made towards the door. Younis still had water in his ears. Murad explained that he was with his last customer but the young man offered to pay double as he had a job interview in the morning and felt it important that he resemble, at least somewhat, the small square figure in the photo he had attached to his curriculum vitae. Just a trim with clippers, a five minute job. Murad's resistance to the young man's appeals seemed, to Younis at least, distinctly unchristian, and as a representative of at least one minority (almost certainly two) the barber might have been expected to empathise with the plight of a fellow who was similarly marginalised by the random circumstances of his birth, and the conditions which informed themselves upon these circumstances. It was not so apparently. But Younis hectored Murad, without referring to this surmised parallel between the two other men's conditions of life, querying instead if the barber could afford to turn away a paying customer in the current climate, determined in this last afternoon to be a whimsical thing altogether. The young man sat down on the banquette, eventually, and nodded his thanks to the older man in the chair. Almost immediately Younis regretted taking sides. The young African asked if he could watch the end of the match while he waited. Half an hour to go, or thereabouts. Murad tossed him the remote.</div>
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Younis clenched each part of himself and tried not to look. The familiar nausea swelled over him as Murad, with exquisite slowness, moved around him with the scissors. Statistics appeared in the lower third of the screen. Senegal could boast eighty-five percent possession, most of it in the Falcon's half. Twelve corners to none. Seventeen attempts on goal (nine on target) to none. The away team hadn't had a shot. The sound was still off but Younis was confident that the commentator would be recycling some variation of “The statistic that really matters is the score”. Younis tried to focus on the blades of the scissors. He saw them moving in the mirror and listened to them clicking. Yick-yick-yick. It was impossible. Eighty minutes. Murad produced the small mirror and showed him the back of his head. It looked, Younis thought, reassuringly similar to the back of his head after the last dozen or so haircuts he'd had. Murad was still brushing cut hair from his neck as he rose to leave. The barber pressed him gently back into the seat. “Let's shave you.” He disappeared into the back of the shop and reappeared with a small pile of steaming towels. The Falcons keeper tipped a forceful header on to the crossbar. As Younis sat with the lower part of his face shrouded in hot towels Murad shaved the African's head. The young man pronounced himself satisfied with the job done, and paid double, as promised. Murad gave him back one of the notes. He stayed in the chair next to Younis who appeared to be ill. The older man, whose skin had taken on a grey tinge, was watching the game closely now, though his head seemed to wobble rather on his neck. He reached for the remote and unmuted the television. Forty thousand people whistling. This was odd, he thought. Did the home crowd want the game to end? Perhaps it was a cultural thing. Were they jeering their team? Murad removed the towels and began lathering his chin.</div>
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Three minutes of extra time. The whistling intensifies. Murad is saying something. His two customers urge him to be quiet. Another corner. Senegal leave one on one at the back. The corner is too close to the Falcons keeper who catches it and punts it towards the halfway line. It looks like a training drill. The ball bounces over the Senegalese centre-back and is seized upon by the solitary Falcons forward. He is smaller and quicker and pulls away towards the edge of the penalty area, but shifts the ball too far in front of him. The Senegal goalkeeper sees this and charges out to clear but gets to the ball a quarter of a second after the centre-forward who lifts it over his sliding legs. The forward is flipped, almost and the ball rolls goalward. The Senegalese centre-half recovers and hooks it around the post.</div>
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Younis remained in his seat. As the ball rolled towards the line he refused to admit the possibility that it might cross it, that the retreating defender might stumble or fluff the clearance. Three points away in Dakar was simply too much to dream of. A draw seemed certain now. Senegal were down to ten men, and without a goalkeeper, having used their three substitutions. The left-back had taken the gloves and stood behind the wall half-laughing as he directed them into position. A draw was an excellent result. So he would not rue the chance that hadn't quite gone in. The incident had secured the point. Murad peeled a blade from its wrapper and slid it into the razor. It felt odd to experience this calm, Younis thought, to watch as a disinterested observer might. He felt the blade against his cheek. The stand-in goalkeeper gave a thumbs-up to the referee who blew his whistle. Mohamed Shahili, nineteen years old and perhaps sixty-five kilos, took two steps towards the ball and poked it with the outside of his right boot, still on the toes, but kicking slightly across it. Murad began to pull the blade down over his client's left cheek, in short staccato movements. Like a Bernard Herrmann score, thought Younis, listening at the same time to the TV pundit who was explaining that the biggest difficulty from this distance was getting the ball up over the wall and down again in time for it to squeeze beneath the bar, while Shahili's strike seemed to be overcoming this difficulty in the most convincing fashion, leaving the locum keeper flatfooted as it slid down the back of the net and the ball rested there, its energy spent, an object newly weighted with history.</div>
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Younis jumped this time and the razor marked a thin red line an inch below his cheekbone. Murad stepped back from the chair and the young African pointed at the older man beside him. The cut was narrow and red and there was still white foam above it. None of the men would swear to it, and they didn't mention it to friends and family in the following weeks and months, but they all saw it. The blood beneath the wound had changed colour entirely and was now bright green, the green of the flag in the window of the small salon.</div>
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Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-75345765321443604042017-01-17T18:23:00.001+00:002017-01-17T18:27:41.586+00:00WinningHer father leaned over her and kissed her forehead, his breath sweetened already by tobacco and instant coffee. She pretended to be asleep but she had heard him on the stairs seconds earlier and had to try hard not to smile. It was very early. The sky in the gable window appeared black still. “Time to get up, pickle,” he said. He turned off the nightlight and turned on her bedside lamp, then left her to dress. <br />
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She ate toast in the kitchen, standing up, blonde and nine and a little stout, though quick on her feet. Her father went to start the car, to warm it up for the short drive to the depot. He was wearing his glasses now. Heavy-framed things, like the more serious men on the television wore. He was not a very serious man, she knew, but that was why she loved being around him, particularly when it was just the two of them. When the twins weren't climbing over him, and Mum wasn't hanging off his shoulder. She held his hand only when they were crossing the road. He would kiss her once each morning, if he didn't have an early start, and once at bedtime. Sometimes he would mess her hair up. Otherwise they didn't need the reassurance of actual contact. Nearness was enough, but nearness was better when only they shared it. And today was a whole long day of it.<br />
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It wasn't very cold but he made her put on a winter coat. She couldn't see her breath and knew he was being fussy. She didn't want to moan and spoil things. They got in the car. The first part of the journey took one and a half country songs. I'll see you in my dreams. There were wide gates at the depot, made of wire and lopsided. She remembered seeing him here last winter, standing with a gang of other men in donkey jackets. They were burning wood in an empty oil drum and singing songs to keep warm. On strike. Everyone was on strike after that, but she had the feeling that her Dad had started it all. She and her mother had brought soup and all the mugs from the kitchen. Mum was very worried, but it had all blown over, just like Dad said it would. She watched him sign in. He asked her what the time was, even though the clock was in front of him. He had been doing this ever since she learned to tell the time. It was quarter to five. <br />
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His lorry was a Scammell with eight wheels and a tank on the back. All in bottle green, with the company name in foot-high script on the side. He piloted the truck between parked cars and darkened houses. Outside, the empty streets of the town seemed frozen by moonlight, like a painting or a photograph, and made strange and new. She was reminded of the feeling she got when the family returned from holiday – visiting grandparents in Devon, invariably – and instead of finding home a familiar and reassuring space she sensed that it had undergone some subtle transformation, had become more orderly, or smaller, as if it were the house itself, rather than the perceptions of those who had vacated it, which was altered by their being away. This was a kind of holiday, she thought. Getting up early (though never this early) to beat the traffic. No school. Her father's face, handsome behind his spectacles, his lips pursed in a silent whistle, or a goodnight kiss. Seen in full profile now. Usually she was in the back seat, looking over his shoulder. She liked looking at him , but if she did it for too long without him looking back a shiver of anxious pleasure would pass through her. And then he always turned to her, somehow, even if she didn't make a sound.<br />
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She had a stuffed tiger called Ted, which she took almost everywhere, but not to school. She retrieved the thing from her backpack, down in the gritty footwell, and sat him on the sill of the cab door, looking east. “What can you see?” she asked the toy. Fences beyond the window, heard more than seen. Invisible playing fields, low silhouettes of homes outlined darker against a blueblack sky. No stars. She leaned her head against the velour flank of the tiger, feeling the road and the engine singing against the frame of the truck. The roads empty and the engine unvarying like the hum of a generator. A soothing noise once your ears got used to it. <br />
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She woke to daylight and seagulls and long rows of vehicles either side of them. Her father handed her a Tupperware beaker with a lid. There was orange squash inside, not too strong, which she gulped at. <br />
“Where are we?”<br />
“Portsmouth,” said her father. He had a cigarette paper attached to his bottom lip and was massaging loose tobacco between his fingers. She yawned.<br />
“How long have I been asleep?”<br />
“A couple of hours,” he said. “Thought you'd wake up when we stopped.”<br />
“I missed the city.”<br />
“Not much to see there, just streetsweepers and fishmongers and none of them singing like in your films. Hungry?” She nodded. “There's sandwiches in your bag.”<br />
<br />
She chewed at a cheese sandwich and watched the birds circling over the tarmac. After about ten minutes a man with a paddle appeared and began waving the lorries and cars onto the ferry. They bumped forwards one at a time up a ramp into the bow. The hold of the ship smelled of oil and seemed unfinished, she thought, as if someone had started painting it and got discouraged. It did seem like a big job. They climbed the metal stairways to the passenger deck. A strong breeze moved the water in the dock, the movement exaggerated as you went up, and the confusion between what you saw and what you felt. As the ship heaved she grasped her father's hand tighter and smiled up at him.<br />
<br />
They were first off at Ryde. Her father saluted a man on the quayside as they rolled off the ramp and the man saluted back. The town looked the same. She was disappointed. The buildings looked like the buildings everywhere else and once they got beyond the town the fields and trees looked the same. She mentioned this to her father. “We're still in England,” he told her. “Just a bit of it that broke off. The people here talk the same too, you'll be sorry to hear.”<br />
<br />
They were delivering creosote to a timber merchants in the south of the island. They pulled over once and she handed the road atlas to him. He pushed his glasses up on to his head. “Can't see it,” he said. He put the map on the engine hood between them. The mill was marked with a red dot, surrounded by a black circle, both in biro. She tapped the page, “Here.” He squinted and lifted the atlas up until it was an inch from his face. “Got it,” he said. She giggled. He flicked his glasses down and released the air brake. “Half a league, half a league, half a league, onwards!” <br />
<br />
The mill was noisy and dusty, so she stayed in the cab, flicking through the map. Coryton, Aylesbury, Watlington, Abergavenny. She would see all these places when she was grown up. Driving around in a Cortina with a sunroof, with nowhere in particular to be, just crossing names off at the back of the atlas. Buying burgers in lay-bys and listening to country songs. Please don't take him just because you can. Her father popped his head around the driver's door. “Twenty more minutes, hon, and we'll be off.” She stuck a thumb up at him. She leaned over so she could watch him in the large wing mirror, climbing up on to the tank. He banged things with a giant spanner, just to look busy, she suspected, and to let her know he was still there.<br />
<br />
Half an hour later they were back on the road. The wind had gathered and was blowing green leaves and other small debris across their path. He slowed the truck and reached across the engine hood, palm up. She put her hand in his and they drove on, north towards the ferry. <br />
<br />
There were more vehicles coming than returning, and they were loaded with perhaps twenty cars and one other lorry. The weather had worsened as they crossed the island and the boat heaved against its moorings and bumped the quay. They sat on a padded bench near the bar and she drank a small bottle of Pepsi-Cola through a straw. Her father was struggling not to spill a pint of tawny ale. She stared at the fruit machines in order to focus on a fixed point, to make herself feel less queasy. They had taught her this at ballet classes in the Methodist hall. When you pirouette, you fix your gaze on one point, and snap your head round to it each time you rotate. Keeps you steady and stops you from feeling sick.<br />
<br />
“Are you feeling lucky?”<br />
“I was just...” She stopped. “Maybe?” He made a great deal of the excavation, pulling faces and so on, before eventually removing a fifty pence piece from his left trouser pocket. He slid it across the table to her. “Win big,” he said, smiling. <br />
<br />
She stood in front of the machines for a while, studying them. They were each strapped to the wall with what looked like seat belts. She chose the rightmost machine, whose lights, she felt, moved in a more comprehensible pattern. She familiarised herself with the hierarchies of fruit and imagined what might be purchased with a win. She had been saving her pocket money towards a badminton racquet, an aluminium Gillian Gilks model, made by Carlton. Three loganberries (were they loganberries?) would allow her to buy it outright. She liked Gillian Gilks not just because she was successful, but because she seemed quiet and shy. As if she too had twin brothers who screamed and climbed things constantly. <br />
<br />
She stretched up to insert the coin then stopped. She was not a superstitious child, not really, but as this was a game of luck, she reasoned, it was probably a good idea to have your lucky things around you when playing it. She returned to where her father was sitting and retrieved Ted, the stuffed tiger. Holding him tightly in her left hand she walked back to the machine and stretched up on tiptoes to put the money in. Nothing happened. She turned to her father, who was pretending to read a newspaper. “Press the button which says 'Spin',” he told her, without lifting his eyes from the story he was not reading. The wheels settled quickly and heavily into place. The fruits were misaligned. She had not won. “You have nine more goes,” said her father, as she trudged back towards him. “Ah,” she said, spinning in place. With ten pence remaining of her initial investment a button with SUPERNUDGE written on it began to flash. She decided to press it to see what happened. The machine, which of course had a life of its own, began to inhabit this existence more fully. Its wheels spun in new and opposite directions, more lights flashed, and a deep chugging noise, as of some great apparatus from the age of steam, resounded from deep within its fake wood carcass. The wheels returned to their original position. Half a second passed, a long half a second, then the wheels began to shunt, one position, one fruit at a time, into line. Once a loganberry, if that's what it was, appeared on the first wheel it stopped. The other wheels continued to tick around until they too showed the yellow and purple fruit. The machine performed more electro-mechanical gymnastics, then reassumed its resting position. She pressed the spin button twice more, and was about to press it again when her father stopped her hand. “I think we should collect what you've won now, pickle, don't you?” He had appeared very quickly, she thought. Not like him. <br />
<br />
Her father considered the machine for a moment, its flashes and pulses, then hit a button which said “COLLECT” which was what she was going to do anyway. Then it began to chug out unfamiliar coins, foreign currency she thought at first. A voice on the Tannoy announced that they would be held in the dock for half an hour at least, because of high winds. The money, which was not the colour of any money she had ever seen, continued to be hawked up from deep within the machine, until it spilled onto the sticky deck. “Tokens,” her father said. <br />
<br />
He collected the money which was not money and took it to the bar. She went back to her seat. Her father was talking to a man in a waistcoat, behind the bar. He was shrugging in an insincere way, like a bad actor. There were six or seven other men around the bar who soon offered their opinions on what her father and the barman were discussing. She couldn't hear what anyone was saying, but it seemed as if the other men were taking her father's side, as the barman was now shrugging to each of them in turn. Her father shrugged too, then, but his shrug was real and familiar. She had seen the gesture before, usually performed in front of her mother. It meant that he didn't want to argue any more. They didn't argue all that much, not in front of her, anyway. Some of her friends had told her that their fathers would hit their mothers, but in her house it was Mum who did the slapping, but then it was only ever a joke, when her father was teasing. <br />
<br />
She saw him gesturing now, to the other men at the bar and realised that he was buying them all a drink. She didn't really know how she felt about this. It was nice that her father was being kind, and saying thank you, but at the same time she also thought that the money (which was not really money) was hers, and that she should have some say in how it was spent. Her father pushed a pile of tokens towards the barman and he pulled on a lever and the drinks appeared. That's why they called it pulling pints. Then her father came over with another Pepsi and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps for her. “Are you okay, Pickle?” he asked. She nodded. “Got your book? And Ted?” She nodded again, sucking on the straw in her Pepsi. He went back to the bar and began to talk again with the other men there. It drove Mum absolutely mad, this habit of his. He could talk to anyone, and always did. Mum was a bit of a snob, though, and sometimes she could be funny with people who she thought were a bit beneath her. Dad didn't care about that sort of thing. Ten minutes passed, during which she sipped at the straw in her drink, and alternately blew through it to make bubbles. The Pepsi went flat almost immediately as a result, but she didn't mind. As she played with her drink she read and re-read the same page of her book, which was written by a talking horse. This was a bit weird at first, but you came to accept it. The horse's thoughts were recorded in a slightly old-fashioned way but the thoughts themselves weren't, in fact, too complicated. The kind of thoughts that you could imagine a horse having, if it was a particularly clever and capable of self-expression. The boat kept lurching in the water, and it was raining now, the rain making a sound like maracas on the windows. <br />
<br />
Her father was buying another round. She was certain, suddenly, that he would continue to buy drinks for the other men until all the tokens were gone. Just to make a point. It was an expensive point, and he was making it with her money, even if it wasn't really money. She loved him very much but knowing what he would do, out of stubbornness more than anything, made her very sad. She had her own plans for the winnings, had made plans even before she put the large silver coin into the machine. She should have just pocketed it. Squirrelled it away. Put it with the other coins in the fragrant wooden box that lived under her bed. She would have been that bit closer to getting what she wanted. She felt her face reddening and her eyes getting hot, but she was determined not to cry. <br />
Her father checked on her every few minutes. After almost an hour the ferry pulled out of the dock, still rolling from side to side, but it seemed that the worst of the storm had passed, and with it the stacks of misshapen coins that had spread across the bar in front of her father. One by one he said goodbye to his new friends around the bar, and each of them passed him something and thanked him. One of the men looked over at her and blew a kiss. She squirmed in her seat and the men all laughed. You didn't see women acting like this, she thought. She couldn't imagine her Mum at a coffee morning engaging in strange transactions of this kind. Some of her Mum's friends sold Tupperware, but Mum had explained that this was more of an excuse to see your friends, minus the husbands and kids. The world of men seemed a mysterious and impenetrable place, a forbidding forest, a place where written rules were meant to be broken or circumvented but an entire constitution of unwritten laws were adhered to rigorously. She had often heard her father explain aspects of this imaginary code to the twins. They were allowed to wrestle, to be violent to each other essentially, provided there was no hair-pulling or blows to each other's private parts. Nor were they allowed to fight with their big sister, because fighting with girls was fundamentally wrong, and because she would definitely pulverise them if they tried. <br />
<br />
She knew she was her father's favourite, that perhaps he cared for her even more than he did for Mum. But this only sharpened the sense of disappointment she felt at him squandering her luck on a bunch of strangers. He sat with her at last, and tried to make small talk. She was not unresponsive but she made no attempt to disguise her chagrin.<br />
<br />
“Are you tired, poppet?” She nodded. “It's been a long day, and an early start for you.” She gave him the best smile she could possibly manage, given the circumstances and he laughed at the strain involved. As he laughed she smelled the sourness of beer on his breath, an odour as familiar as roast potatoes, and somehow associated in her mind with this other smell. As when he would return from the pub on Sunday afternoons, flushed and merry, before eating his dinner with a serviette tucked into his shirt and falling asleep in front of the television.<br />
<br />
“Did you spend all the money?” she asked. “Yes and no,” he said, reaching into his trouser pocket once more, with the same mime of effort and ceremony, and showed her a handful of coins with a crumpled note amongst them. She giggled, guessing at the business that had gone on with the other drivers. “We negotiated,” he told her. The word was unfamiliar to her. “Fifty pence in the pound, but I think some of them were a bit more generous, because I told them the tokens were yours. There's enough left for a treat.” He looked very pleased with himself, which made her happy, even though she realised that part of this was due to the beer he had consumed, rather than the craftiness of his plan. He wasn't supposed to drink when he was driving, she knew.<br />
<br />
“D'you fancy an ice cream?” She shook her head, and once again found herself trying hard not to cry. This was not the treat she had in mind. Again she considered the difference between the sexes. The twins, and Dad with them, wanted everything now. Sweets, crisps, beer. Her Mum would buy a pattern from the shop in town, then spend weeks sometimes considering which fabric she would sew it from. Looking at pictures in magazines in the big newsagents, then finding something she liked and getting the closest thing she could find. Filling the arm of the sofa with pins as she stitched a dress from lots of bits that didn't look anything like a dress. Smoking as she leant over the machine, feeding through the material, blowing ash away as it fell. The whole process took ages, but the clothes she made were always worth the wait. Her father bought clothes from the army and navy surplus stall in the market, and boiled the tar out of his jeans in a big pot on the hob, prodding at them with a stick, like a witch. They were so different, the two of them. <br />
<br />
Like Mum, she was willing to wait for the thing that she wanted. Her Grandfather gave her 25p pocket money – five bob, he called it – every week, and she put 20p aside for the badminton racket. The badminton racket. With the money in her father's pocket and the savings in the cedarwood box she could still afford it. She decided to just ask him for the money. To thank him for being so clever for turning the unreal currency into actual money but then to explain that there was something she needed it for. But not now. She thought it was best to let the matter breathe. To allow her father to consider whose money it was really. <br />
<br />
At Portsmouth the wind blew rubbish across the sloping tarmac, but the rain had stopped and a low afternoon sun appeared and disappeared between the hurrying clouds. Her father saluted another man as they pulled off the ferry. A blue Austin Allegro overtook them as they headed away from the dock and the driver sounded his horn. Her father tooted back. One of the men from the bar, she guessed. Oblivious to how his kindness was being misdirected. She hugged Ted to her and said nothing. After a while she rested the stuffed thing on the door again and pretended to sleep. And then she did sleep, waking after forty minutes, hot and slightly panicked. They were halfway back to London. <br />
<br />
“Daddy,” she began, “I think I should be allowed to spend the money we won from the machine.”<br />
“We didn't win it, darling, you did.” This seemed like an end to the discussion. She was very pleased. “But that's where the problem lies,” he continued.<br />
“What problem?”<br />
“I gave you the 50p to teach you something. A lesson about life. But it all went wrong.”<br />
“I don't understand,” she said.<br />
“You weren't supposed to win. Because no-one wins when they gamble. Gambling is a way for stupid people to lose money.”<br />
“But we didn't lose. We won. So we're not stupid.”<br />
“No, we're not stupid,” he agreed. “But if we expected to win every time we gambled we would be very stupid indeed.” She didn't like the way the conversation was going.<br />
“It was fun, though, winning. And getting those men to give you their money.” He nodded. It was getting dark. The road was busier in the other direction, the vehicles reduced to a stream of headlights curving towards them. She squinted back tears. <br />
<br />
“The men on the ferry were very kind,” he said. “So I think it would be nice to do something kind with the money, don't you?” Her despair was complete, and she began to sob. “Perhaps we could buy a present for the twins?” She hated the twins at that moment, more than she had ever done. With their dirty faces and relentless noise and bad behaviour. They didn't deserve the slightest kindness. They deserved to be viciously pinched when her parents weren't looking. She wanted to scream these thoughts aloud. She counted to ten, trying to calm herself down. Then she counted to twenty, and thought about what was making her so angry. Because she was above all a sensible girl she acknowledged that her father was right, despite the agony that it caused her. She tried to control herself once more. She was too old for tantrums. <br />
<br />
“We could get them both model cars. They'd like that.” She felt her father looking at her as she stared out at the lights shaping down towards them. Hundreds of people heading home, and not one as miserable as her. <br />
<br />
“I'm very proud of you, poppet,” her father said. She couldn't reply. She wiped her nose and eyes on her sleeve and sank into the passenger seat, wishing that she had never left the house that morning. <br />
She watched the city pass, unmoved by the shops and the lights and the great mass of scuttling humanity. The few miles north, back to the depot, seemed endless, and the country songs in the car on the way home failed to offer any sense of solidarity or commiseration with her sorry state of being. It wasn't gambling that ruined your life, she suspected, but rather the people who said that they loved you, and wanted the best for you. She just wished the day was over. <br />
<br />
She put on her pyjamas and went downstairs again to kiss her parents goodnight. The twins were already asleep. It seemed that both her parents held her for longer than usual before sending her up to bed. Her father looked at her and thanked her for being the best driver's mate ever. This didn't cheer her up, rather it caused her to experience the disappointments of the day again in a sudden rush, like a film on fast forward, but her mother, perhaps sensing this, hugged her once more and the feeling went away. <br />
<br />
____________________<br />
<br />
She could tell that her mother had done the wrapping. The present, which fell off the end of the bed as she woke the next morning, was the shape of a teardrop and was very light for its size. Her birthday was still three months away, so they had used Christmas paper and an old luggage label. 'To Our Remarkable Daughter', the label said, underlined with a row of kisses. She opened the paper carefully and established that it was the right model. She swished it a few times in the narrow, musty air of her bedroom, and considered the wonders that she might perform with it. Then she ran along the landing to where her parents lay and dived headlong between them, laughing like a girl.Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-76029506882342694132017-01-17T18:19:00.003+00:002017-01-17T18:19:33.318+00:00Quoted for TruthMy old economics professor used to tell a story, I don't know whether it's a true story but I suspect that it isn't. He told me the story in a tutorial but I also heard him telling it at department parties and so on and sometimes I would linger to witness the reaction of whoever he was telling it to, because it's sort of unpleasant. To watch them sigh or squirm or generally give him a look as if to say “Why the fuck did you just tell me that?”<br />
<br />
So there's this painter, a post-abstract-expressionist painter who was big in the sixties and seventies but his importance undergoes a reappraisal and he keeps working but his paintings won't shift. He's a drug user and supports a couple of ex-wives so despite his early success he's broke. One day he goes to visit the gallery owner who shows his paintings and asks him for an advance against some pieces he's working on and the gallery owner tells him the last thing he needs is any more work because no-one wants to buy his stuff any more. “I can't give you a loan,” he says, “but I will tell you this. Five of the world's most expensive whiskies come from one distillery. And it closed down years ago.” The artist thinks about this as he walks home. He's desperate so he concocts a plan based on the idea that his paintings will be worth more when he's dead. He stretches every inch of canvas in his studio and uses every last bit of paint he has to fill them. It's an extraordinary flowering of creativity. Then he borrows a car from an old friend, a fellow user who owes him a favour, and drives it into a concrete pillar at seventy miles an hour.<br />
<br />
He doesn't die. Somehow his drug-addled body survives the impact, but only just. He's paralysed from the neck downwards. He has no insurance and someone has to pay for his care. Reluctantly his family come to his aid. They try to sell the paintings in his studio. He's as good as dead, after all, he can never work again. But his reputation is further blighted by what looks like a cynical attempt to cash in on his own mortality and with all the new pieces suddenly available his existing work starts to depreciate and his new stuff is basically unsellable. He lives out the rest of his days crippled, and along with his wives and children, impoverished. <br />
<br />
At this point the Professor would look at his audience and savour their confusion. If they were expecting to be amused or uplifted they'd come to the wrong man. He'd pause for as long as he thought he could get away with it before delivering his punchline.<br />
“So the moral of the story is: you can cheat death but you can't cheat the market.”Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-87039451862019409872016-03-09T12:41:00.002+00:002016-03-09T12:41:22.886+00:00In the Place of Miracles<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Here is Richard Finch:
a bony Englishman, forty-five years old, in earth-tone slacks made
out of some kind of stretchy fabric and a polo shirt from Marks and
Spencer, hunched over a pushchair amongst the white marble miracles
of Pisa, birthplace of his second wife. Their child, almost two now,
is curled asleep in the pushchair, sucking at the fleecy ear of a toy
rabbit. She has never been allowed a dummy. Finch checks his watch
every thirty seconds and his wife, clearly annoyed, tells him they
have plenty of time. Her attitude may well be all <i>que sera sera</i>,
he thinks, but he likes to get to the airport early, to be at the
front of the inevitable queue, and they still have to retrieve the
suitcases from her mother's, which is not exactly between their
current position and the airport, and she almost certainly hasn't
taken into account how protracted the leavetaking is likely to be,
particularly now the long-awaited grandchild has to be said goodbye
to as well, and all the snuggling and tears and promises of an almost
immediate return entered into, and the fact that there is probably
going to be rush hour traffic, yes even here, where no-one rushes to
do anything at all. He twiddles his fingers on the crossbar of the
buggy, to stop himself looking at his watch but also as a subtle yet
unmistakeable indication of his ongoing impatience.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Mrs Finch - smaller,
slightly younger, and possessed of a honey-eyed, aquiline beauty
which makes Finch the envy of his friends and colleagues - is
altogether more relaxed. She walks alongside her husband and child
smiling at the folly of the tourists, duelling with selfie sticks to
position themselves at a position of greatest advantage for the same
photo that everyone takes when they come to this small corner of the
country she left behind. Nice to see the place anew, she thinks,
through his eyes. And when Isabella is a little older, through her
eyes too.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Don't they drive you
mad?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Why should they?
Everyone is behaving very well.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is true, more or
less, Finch thinks. No-one is actually throwing punches, but it's a
scene, nevertheless. It was her idea, this. To have a leisurely
lunch and wander down to marvel at <i>i </i>t<i>uristi, </i>marvelling
at the marvels. All good fun, but they're now half an hour behind
the schedule he had outlined in his head. Perhaps he should have
told her about this earlier.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Laura,”
he begins. His wife raises a hand. Across an angle of lush grass,
perhaps fifty or sixty yards away, a crowd has gathered, and a woman
can be heard shrieking. Finch can't see what is going on, exactly.
His glasses are at at home on the narrow table in the hallway. Laura
takes his arm. “Do something,” she says. He checks his watch
again, finding himself somehow helpless, through no fault of his own.
They're not even supposed to still be here, according to his own,
silent reckoning. She is pushing him now, towards the fracas, away
from the airport. He steps over the low swag of black chain and
starts to jog across the grass, his gait long yet inefficient, like
an old, lame wolf. The scene before him sharpens into a kind of
sense. A Japanese couple and their son, all in matching golf visors,
the father, with some expensive looking camera equipment slung over
his back as he kneels behind the boy, who is three or four years old,
and whose face is the livid purple of a drunk's cheek. The man has
his arms around the boy and is snatching them upwards in an effort,
Finch assumes, to dislodge something in his airway. Trachea, is it?
The kid is flopping around noiselessly like a dead thing.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
crowd see the tall Englishman coming and back away in expectation so
that when he arrives dozens of pairs of eyes settle upon him. The
mother is still screaming and shaking. This response does not seem
disproportionate to the situation, Finch acknowledges, which does
appear to be rather grave, but he is surprised by it nevertheless,
perhaps, he considers, because of the woman's nationality, and the
Japanese reputation for calm stoicism. He stands there for a moment,
panting slightly, and remarks to himself that the reason that we have
a word for stereotypes is probably something to do with their
unreliability, otherwise there would be no need to discriminate
between generalisations of this kind and actual fact. The noise the
woman is making, whatever his feelings about it, isn't helpful, so he
puts a hand on her shoulder and flaps his other hand up and down, as
if testing the buoyancy of a hotel pillow, in an effort to calm her
down. The father, who seems to be conforming wholeheartedly to
Finch's possibly somewhat bigoted expectations looks up at him and
says “Medico?” Finch shakes his head and points towards the
squat mediaeval gateway to the piazza through which he and his own
family had entered minutes earlier and beyond which are visible the
chequered markings of an emergency vehicle. “No, ambulancia,” he
says, complete with a bad Spanish accent. “Ambulanza.” He looks
into the eyes of the father and realises that the man's implacable
exterior is a lie, white marble over brickwork, and that he is as
panicked as his wife, still moaning to Finch's left, but at a
manageable volume.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He
reaches out to the child and puts two long hands under the boy's
armpits. The kid has the surprising density of the unconscious, and
Finch lets the small body flop onto his shoulder as he turns to run
towards the gate. As he does so a small, sand-coloured object, wet
with the boy's spit and phlegm, flies out of the kid's mouth, marking
a gentle, curved descent before nestling atop the impossibly green
grass. Almost immediately the boy comes to and starts to cough and
cry. Finch has only taken five paces. He stops and with
considerable care lowers the kid, lighter now by a more than the mass
of a half-eaten rice cake, down onto the lawn. The father gathers
his son into an embrace shuddered by sobbing. People are taking
pictures or applauding. The boy's mother is thanking Finch, over and
over again and pulling at the Englishman's sleeve, which is
annoying, because all he wants to do is check the time, though he
knows that the reward that awaits him is a missed flight, or at the
very best a long, snaking queue at the airport, and him at the back
of it.
</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-82251849106251373872014-12-29T20:01:00.000+00:002014-12-29T20:01:03.779+00:00Labouring<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Along the Embankment in
a white Transit knees knocking like marbles sun on the water flashing
low H with the Star shielding his eyes can't see my mirror put it
down man before you get us all kill dead blood in the gutter blood.
40 Mayfair on the dash The Autobiography of Malcolm X fading neath
the windscreen droll old black men and me libertarian types doing
removals. Not so old physically active older than they look but with
the stoop of the weight of what they are and what they have lifted
eyes rheumy from the low bright sun and marijuana don't defer to
no-one least of all me drinking Lucozade for energy. Salt marks on
my shirt Royal Hospital Fulham Road High Street Ken shit crashin
around in the back motorcyclist death wish he an organ donor. This
is work because things have to be moved arranged with great care 3D
jigsaw puzzle get it all in save a trip then a speed bump and the
sound of violent sundering behind our heads only me sweating and
knowing the names of things free through an accident of parentage of
second generation West Indian vagueness about facts and details.
Overladen the Transit in stately transit up Campden Hill Road need a
Sherpa for this. Unloading, stopping. Almost done. This is work
slowing now as the sun and the effort wear on the bodies of
lean-armed almost down stone steps backwards one foot arm in Idi
Amin lean-armed wear on the bodies of lean-armed black-skinned men.
Slow. Cigarette. Breathe now. Back in the van.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-22845753934222857372014-10-06T21:54:00.001+00:002014-10-06T22:16:39.178+00:00Tell It Again (Chapters I and II)<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
I</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="text-align: -webkit-center;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There was a time, which
seems distant but really was not so very long ago, when very few
people lived in cities. Back then people lived in small villages or
in solitary houses a long way from anywhere. We tend to think of
olden times as being more friendly and more simple but really people
went to great lengths to keep out of each other's way. Take, for
instance, the family who are at the heart of the story I am about to
tell. The father, well, he was either dead or working abroad for the
king, depending on who you listened to. The grandmother was so keen
to avoid the rest of her family that she had installed herself in a
remote cottage in the middle of a forest which was populated by rowdy
woodcutters and crafty, talking wolves. The mother, meanwhile,
thought so little of her only child that she was willing to send her
off into this parlous labyrinth of trees unaccompanied, and dressed
in bright clothing which was bound to draw the attention of any
ill-intentioned passer-by. The little girl? It seems that she was a
simple, beautiful soul, rather as we imagine little girls to be in
stories like this. So that's a relief.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
She was, like small
people are to this day, prone to fads. Her mother, in a rare fit of
affection, had sewn her daughter a bright red cape with a hood, and
the girl wore it all the time. The villagers thereabouts called the
girl “Little Red Riding Hood”, because it was remarkable that she
always had the same garment on, and because they couldn't be bothered
to remember her real name; they had problems of their own, after all,
what with blighted crops and talking wolves and suchlike.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
One day, Little Red
Riding Hood's mother (a name she resented, she was a person after
all, with an identity of her own) learned from a passing tinker that
the girl's grandmother was ill. She had some leftover cakes and a
small pat of butter that needed using up, which she wrapped hastily,
and put in a small basket. “Little Red Riding Hood,” she called
into the garden, “Take these things at once to your grandmother in
the forest!” The little girl, delighted that her mother had
embraced the nickname theretofore used only by the faceless populace
of the village, skipped to the kitchen step, collected the basket and
set out on her way. Her mother readied herself for a trip into the
village, to do some leisurely shopping, and to perhaps get her hair
done. She saw the floating crimson form of the child's riding hood
dwindle out of sight amongst the long grass at the forest's edge.
Then it disappeared altogether into the darkness of the wood. “Mmm,”
the mother thought. “What's the worst that can befall her?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
II</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It took a while for the
small girl's eyes to adjust to the light beneath the forest's canopy.
As soon as she had finished squinting she saw a large, low figure
approach. A wolf it was, wearing a pair of small round spectacles
and a yellow waistcoat which was a little loose, where he was hungry.
He was otherwise dressed much as you would expect a wolf to be. He
stopped a few feet from the girl, sat up on his hind legs and spoke.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Good morning,
delicious child. Where are you off to?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Good morning, sir,”
said Little Red Riding Hood, politely. “I am going to see my
grandmother a short distance hence. She has been unwell and I am
taking her victuals which I hope will restore her health.” The
wolf eyed her quizzically, not least because of the child's diction,
which seemed rather old-fashioned, even in those days.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Okay,” said the
wolf. “I won't keep you, but I would advise, since you've gone to
the trouble of entering this here forest, that you take time to
admire the beautiful wild flowers that lie just off the quickest path
between here and your Granny's house.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Oh, do you know
whereabouts my grandmother's house lies?” The wolf thought for a
moment. He wondered if the girl was perhaps not as naïve as she
appeared. His avid yellow eyes looked into hers, which were blue and
trusting. The situation was developing. His initial ruse was simply
to get the girl out of earshot of a crowd of unruly woodcutters who
were chopping things, wood presumably, in a nearby clearing. Now he
saw that his plan might be easily adapted into an
eat-one-get-one-free opportunity. He was tremendously hungry.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Remind me?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“It's half a league
from here, as the crow flies, due west. A compact, picturesque
rustic-style property with its own mature nuttery.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Made of
gingerbread?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Made of bricks,”
said the little girl, firmly.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Right you are,”
said the wolf. “I'll let you be on your way, don't want to keep
the old girl waiting. Don't forget to smell the flowers, and maybe
pick some. They're gorgeous.” And with that he fell gracefully
onto his forepaws and trotted off westwards.</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The forest was indeed
full of beautiful flowers, most of whose names her grandmother knew
or had invented. The dew wort, the badger lily, the philanderus. In
places the sunlight pierced the the leaves overhead in narrow beams,
illuminating small patches of the forest floor, and revealing every
small thing in the air above. Little Red Riding Hood lost herself in
the splendour of the moment, of the then and there. She quite forgot
about her mother and her grandmother and the wolf and her poor
father, either lost or dead or in France or somewhere even more
horrendous. She pulled her hood down and danced to the music of the
forest, which was mostly just crickets. </div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-29109087850495211882013-12-08T23:46:00.000+00:002013-12-08T23:48:22.795+00:00Mandela and MeThe plan, I imagine, was for a night in town, but we never made it that far. We stopped into the Thresher at the bottom of the hill and Mass bought a packet of More (not the Menthol ones) and then we went over the road to The Rose of Mossley, and drank dark mild, which, at 75p a pint, was not significantly more expensive than the Carnatic bar. The bar was closed for the Valentine's Ball. My girlfriend at the time, a psychology student at the Queen's College, Oxford, could not be persuaded to attend. If I even invited her. Massimo was terminally single, and neither of us had the cash to buy a ticket. We had a few and walked up the hill picking at chips and gravy, steaming in the February air. Noise came from inside the main building. Posh kids having fun. <br />
<br />
We crashed a lot of balls that summer, travelling as far as Leeds in order to do so. On one occasion Mass was completely without formal clothing, but managed to acquire a long black cape from somewhere, which he wore over his reeking jeans. This was the first such undertaking. Security lapsed after eleven o' clock, and we slid in. <br />
<br />
I think of my first spell at university as a time of immense and concentrated egoism, I suppose everyone does. I didn't have much time for politics, though I did march against student loans and poll tax in Glasgow, because I wanted a look at the place again, and there was a girl I liked who was going. I disliked Thatcher and wanted her out, if only because she was all I could remember. A limited horizon behind me. I deplored the fact that there existed, in my lifetime, in my present moment, the idea and practice of Apartheid. I didn't eat their apples. I disliked the accent. I knew who Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko were, but I didn't have a poster up. <br />
<br />
The DJ played this song:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjSzjoU7OQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjSzjoU7OQ</a><br />
<br />
And I pogoed up and down for three minutes or so along with everyone else. I was wearing Doctor Steve's dinner suit, which was a little long in the arms, I remember. Then the music stopped. The DJ, who was at least as drunk as everyone else shouted "(unintelligible) FREE...!!! NELSON MANDELA IS FREE!!!" We were all very pleased, of course, even the posh kids, and we shouted and swore. Then the DJ played this song:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgcTvoWjZJU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgcTvoWjZJU</a><br />
<br />
And we fell about the place in a boozy hopeful rapture.<br />
<br />
South Africa remains a troubled and divided nation, from what I can tell, but this moment was one of very few from my youth which history has been unable to tone. Its lustre is undimmed and its promise consummated, all because of one man. When one apparently impossible thing is achieved it tends to make us believe that other impossible ends might be reached, and maybe distant notions of a fairer world aren't so impractical. Hope persists. Nelson Mandela is free.Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-37819033946615127192013-10-29T20:44:00.000+00:002013-10-29T20:45:53.921+00:00At Heathrow<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When I was a kid, he tells her, fourteen, younger probably I suddenly became conscious of what my face looked like. What? she says. He laughs at himself, What I mean is, look obviously I'd stand in front of the mirror when I was brushing my teeth, and I'd seen photos of myself but I never really disassociated, until that point, the me that I thought about, from the me in the mirror. So I'd stare hard into the mirror, maybe it was when I started to shave, with my face covered with ludicrous amounts of foam, like a skinny Santa, so just my eyes were visible and I'd stare deep into my eyes until there was nothing there I recognised as me, or even as something human. If you stare at a word long enough its meaning dissolves and I was trying the same thing. Maybe.<br /><br />Sometimes people see her on the tube and then recognise her later and they give her a look which says, Well, how interesting that we ended up in the same place! But of course they're flying onwards and she's still here and she'll get the same tube back from the airport.<br /><br />A blur cannot be accepted or understood as what it is. Slowing into the platform other passengers, scarce at this hour, try to read posters or pick out faces. Flickering eyes you never see elsewhere. The train emerges into a blueblack dawn at Barons Court, westering over flatlands, gulped below ground at Hatton Cross. Her long fingers tapering about an old paperback chosen from a banana box under Waterloo Bridge. Standing on the escalator still reading, might as well finish the chapter, p. 129 her womb was coming open with rosy ecstasy. She tuts at Mr Lawrence, replaces her bookmark and moves into the great low sweep of the Terminal, where everything is gleaming. It is still early.<br /><br />
She is x-rayed and patted down wondering every morning if they go easy on her because of her face, her eyes reflecting mountains and her skin like a desert at dusk. The boy from the portable electronics shop who she sees some mornings eating his breakfast at same time that she does says it's no worse than working outside the airport where they search you if you're going out of the building for a fag – he doesn't smoke himself – at least in his trade. She thinks they're in the same trade though it doesn't look like it, him in a short-sleeved shirt, polyester tie, and her in her preposterous lab coat. Beauty is a science, of course, and while she doesn't know a great deal about that science, biochemistry presumably, the boy does know about cellphones and laptops and other media devices. Perhaps he should wear the coat. Milkmen wear white coats too, he reminds her, but she doesn't necessarily remember this to be true. And butchers, too. It's all the same trade, she thinks, no matter what you're selling. But the boy, in a white coat, would look more like a butcher than a scientist. She doesn't tell the boy this.<br /><br />He is talking, he has good teeth, she concedes, straight at least and not too yellow. He needs a haircut, his hair veers undecidedly about his ears, and he needs to look into her eyes. Her hair is hidden so it's all she has, her gaze. When he looks at her he looks away immediately, and it seems more like guilt than shyness. Perhaps he has a girlfriend. He wears a ring on the third finger of his right hand. Like an almost married ring. Too young, parents don't approve. Maybe if you made something of yourself.<br /><br />A flight is announced, the same flight that prompts them both to finish their breakfast and start work, which has prompted them separately, five mornings out of seven, to finish their tea or coffee or juice, to dust pastry crumbs from their uniforms and walk slowly to their respective retail positions, via the loo sometimes, and the same flight that she acknowledges they will never take together, or apar<span style="line-height: 100%;">t.</span></div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-20569210260646334012013-08-26T19:18:00.002+00:002013-08-26T19:18:54.730+00:00Shy<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="margin-left: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He came out of the
supermarket having forgotten what he went in for, holding only an
apple. At the bus stop outside a woman was attempting to wrestle a
small girl into a push chair. The child, whose hair was styled into
discrete knots all over her head performed a can-can of resistance.
He was a scientist now, he supposed, nineteen years old and up at
Imperial doing physics. He cared more about pleasing his parents
than his painting, and that, presumably, was what separated artists
from dabblers, regardless of their ability. He wore shorts and a
polo shirt with the name of his hall of residence embroidered on the
chest. His name was Lee Chen and he had never had a girlfriend.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Richard Finch headed
south towards the river in a convertible Saab he had bought for his
father with his first bonus. It was too big for the old man's
garage, the door sat at thirty degrees from vertical, nestling on the
bonnet. The bungalow in Hove wasn't built to house a man with a
large Scandinavian sports car so the big black thing had gone back
to London, whence it came, replace by a silver grey Nissan Micra
which Dad drove twice a week, to the cemetery and the cinema in
Brighton. Finch saw the lights change ahead of him, accelerated and
passed through the bollards before they were red, and across the
junction to Beaufort Street.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The car missed him by
half a metre, travelling at twenty metres per second and
accelerating, its wing mirror still closer. Lee knew the driver had
seen him, he saw a hand of apology raised almost instantly. He
wasn't the type to shout. He was infuriated by that hand, though,
there was something careless about it. The hand of someone who lived
a life without consequences. Without thinking he turned and threw
the apple at the back of the car. He misjudged the trajectory
completely. The apple flew higher and further than he intended.
Could adrenalin act so quickly, he wondered, almost certainly not.
The apple descended in a shallow parabola and struck the driver on
the left temple. He saw the man twitch at the steering before the
car thumped irreversibly into a parked UPS van. Glass exploded, the
car's airbag deployed with a great puff of powder and an unpleasant
smell that was unfamiliar to Lee. The van's alarm sounded. People
ran towards the accident. Lee walked.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="margin-left: 0cm; text-indent: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The man's face was
misshapen but he was breathing and alert. Lee stood and looked at
him for ten seconds. He counted. Then he walked back away from the
river, picking up the apple, bruised now on two sides, from the
gutter.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-18024689104744167662013-07-28T23:04:00.002+00:002013-07-28T23:04:54.186+00:00Dead Man's Jeans<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><i>A Ghost
Story</i></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
She found them in a
charity shop, run for the local hospice. An old woman arranging
nick-nacks in the window and an unhappy looking girl in her late
teens at the till. It wasn't the sort of place where she'd normally
look for clothes but she had wandered in while waiting for a
prescription to be filled at the chemist two doors along. Everything
else on the rack was labelled, and far too small for her husband, a
tall man, and oddly shaped now, after too many years sat at a desk
looking at numbers. The jeans were new, she thought, or at least
barely worn. One belt loop was unstitched but Imelda, who helped
around the house three days a week, could sort that out. The girl
asked the old woman to price them. She handed over a fifty pound
note and got two twenties, plus change, in return. She had done a
good thing, she thought, but left the rather tatty little place with
a feeling of unease.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
They were a super fit.
Comfy, yet flattering. He tucked his shirt in and they walked down
the lane to the Two Brewers for dinner. Dennis seemed more relaxed
than usual. He lingered at the bar while refreshing her gin and
tonic, and said something to Sally, the landlord's niece, which made
her giggle and blush. She watched him walk back, glass in hand. The
jeans seemed to narrow his hips, which in turn made his shoulders
appear broader. His habitual stoop had gone, or had she imagined it?
Seated, he smiled at her more than she was used to. He tipped
generously and they walked home, his long arm around her waist. They
kissed on the doorstep then he pulled her inside, slapping her
backside like a teenager. She brushed her teeth, agitated and
aroused. Stepping from the ensuite she saw the jeans at the foot of
the bed and her husband asleep, his body twisted into a awkward
shape, as if he'd been shot.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He only wore them at
the weekends, at first. He took to leaning against things with an
unconsidered air. One foot off the floor, like a cowboy, she
thought. He whistled when he wore the jeans, but not at other times.
He stood taller still when he had them on. Women noticed him, and
she noticed them noticing him. Soon he began to change into them as
soon as he got home from work. The evenings were lengthening and he
found excuses to be away from her, dogwalking, hedge-trimming. But
she told herself that nothing had really changed.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“So we've decided to
start having casual Fridays at work,” he told her. “Relax a bit.
Clothes do not maketh the man, after all. Or woman.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Whose idea was it?”
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
She watched him move in
his armchair.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“It was my idea,”
he said eventually.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
She pulled the washing
machine out from the wall and smashed the pipes off the back of it
with a glass candlestick. She put her laundry into the back of the
car and drove into town. It took three hours to wash and dry
everything at the laundrette. Five pounds for parking and handfuls
of coins for the machines. She smoked a cigarette outside, watching
the clothes dance in the dryer, then threw the packet away. Folded
everything and put it back in the basket, in the boot. Except the
jeans which sat on the passenger seat as she drove half a mile to
other end of the high street. She walked in to the hospice shop and
put the jeans on the counter. The old woman recognised her as she
turned to leave.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Didn't fit?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“No,” she said.
“Not quite.”</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Would you like to
exchange them for anything?” She shook her head and walked back to
the car.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-25497326448706986962013-07-16T21:14:00.001+00:002013-07-16T21:14:52.807+00:00Fun Run<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Everyone was expected
to participate. Those who were physically incapacitated were
encouraged to attend; to hand out water bottles or finishers t-shirts
to the runners at the end. The t-shirts were in corporate colours,
with the name of the bank on the front and the event's various
sponsors (in much smaller writing) on the back. One unlucky young
woman in HR had to push back her wedding shower, planned for the same
evening, to the following Wednesday. They assembled in the park,
numbers pinned to their singlets, already tired after a day in the
city and the journey westwards. The sun still cruelly high, the
temperature in the high twenties.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It wasn't a race, of
course, but an exercise in public relations, and <i>esprit de corps</i>.
Nevertheless talk in every office, on all thirty-three floors of the
bank's London headquarters, centred on who might win. Who looked
fittest. Who did the hard miles in the gym. On the upper floors it
was generally agreed that some rapid young associate with a past on
the track would take the honours. There was an informal club for
triathletes at the bank, who trained together three mornings a week.
Surely the prize would go to one of them.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In fact there were only
two contenders. A New Zealander called Grant something, close to
forty, utterly ruthless and hugely unpopular (who worked in Legal),
and Ibrahim from the post room. Ibrahim was only there because of
some outreach programme that one of the senior VPs had been bullied
into signing up for by his meddling other half. Freed, blinking,
from HMYOI Feltham, he sat a literacy test, got a job and started
buying food for his family from Waitrose.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Grant had run a 1500M
heat at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, and missed out on the
semis by three one-hundredths of a second. He still wore his hair
(blonde) a little too long. His handshake was dry, his eyes
blue-grey and purposeful, but he was dead inside. He crossed the
start line thirty seconds or so before Ibrahim. He was soon twenty
yards ahead of the field, coasting. Three minute Ks, he thought.
No-one's going to live with that. He checked his watch.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Ibrahim detested almost
everyone he worked with. They were, he reflected at times, idiots.
But the money was easy. Everything was easy. It was also very
unlikely that he would get shot, cut or whatever, while working in
the post room. They ran in front of him, bent forwards in abject
cadence, drones, fools. He ran in a strikingly upright posture,
dancing almost, through the bent mass of bodies, the corporation
before him. He still had his post room polo on, and some basketball
shorts, but his running shoes, which he had stolen to size, were top
notch.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The runners thinned out
as he approached the front. Then there was just one ahead, a tanned
older guy, all in black. Ibrahim stretched his legs. He guessed
they were about half way, then saw a yellow banner with 3KM on it.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Grant felt someone at
his shoulder, didn't hear him. As the track turned he saw the kid's
shadow stretching ahead of his. Tall, he thought, turning his head
slightly and flicking his eyes backwards. African? Arab? Looks
like a fucking goat. Young too. Grant realised he might have a
problem, and felt a new tightness in his legs. Not insurmountable.
Let's see what you've got. He kicked, just a gentle acceleration.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Ibrahim let the blonde
guy pull ahead, twenty metres or so, then lengthened his stride
again, easing up alongside him, floating over the turf. Saucony
Powergrid with a flame motif, a hundred and forty quid, the right
price.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Beyond the ribbons
which marked their course the park passed in a jolting blur of dried
out foliage, greenbrown, some flowers wilting to the same colour in
the heat. Grant heard the kid's feet, only just, over his own
breathing. Two paces to every three of his own. He felt a burning
in his shins and his neck, the lower pain in the bone, the higher in
the muscle, but the same pain essentially, his body telling him he
was doing something he really, really shouldn't be doing. They ran
under a kite marking a kilometre to go. Three more minutes of pain,
then relief. Like holding in a piss, but with your whole body. He
turned his head again, as far as broiled neck would allow. The Arab
boy was there, he didn't seem to be sweating even, his jaw loose,
eyes straight ahead. Who was this fucking kid?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It bothered Ibrahim
that he didn't know who the guy was. Was he someone who could have
him sacked? He stayed at his shoulder putting the ground behind him
unhurriedly. He was loose now, warm. The skin on the old guy's neck
was an unusual shade of red, like a drunk's cheek, but more vivid.
He pushed ahead of him then slowed. Everything is politics, he
thought. Everything.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Grant fell over the
line first, and heard his surname being mispronounced over the PA.
He lay on his back, and as if compelled by the motivational
talking-to he had given himself a kilometre back, urinated lustily
into his shorts.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The kid stood over him,
offering a hand of support or salutation, withdrawn when he saw the
moistened halo of dusty ground around the older man's middle. Close,
said Grant. You know, said the goaty looking kid.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-61225811950454949192013-03-18T23:48:00.000+00:002013-03-18T23:48:32.122+00:00Tristan and Grace in Nature<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yards away, the big
hare caught and mounted the smaller hare, only one of them moving
now, with calmer eyes.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Grace felt the boy's
hand slip from hers.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-60676662066243201752013-01-19T01:52:00.003+00:002013-01-19T01:53:22.205+00:00Terry and Ralph<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-17010417740045989932012-12-21T23:13:00.002+00:002012-12-22T06:47:45.808+00:00Mayday<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I hold onto the last
thing that you said,</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
each word a lifebuoy to
a drowning man</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
adrift without your
voice, unanchored.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
If your breath cannot
save me, nothing can.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm no less lost ashore
though, once rescued</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and blindly blinking
love out of my eyes.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Where you are and I am,
I am renewed;</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
resuscitated, panicked
and unwise.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-34849220689998501882012-12-21T14:21:00.002+00:002012-12-22T06:48:20.564+00:00Love After Auschwitz<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
No poetry after he
fails to find a way to say</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the essence of you,
finally, the thing</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
ness the actual thing
that might actually be somehow</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
reduced call it an
essence, a concentrate, concentrate!
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A reduction, an absurd
reduction the essence of you</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
in fact some fat some
phosphorus mostly carbon</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the spirit of you proof
of what exactly?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Electric blinds.
Perhaps so, if used
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
irreverently.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A womb of a room, false
ceiling, panelling</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
in the richest of
wooden veneers reproduced</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
here in more robust,
synthetic form and the</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
model couple on the
hotel television screen fixed</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
staring into an
imaginary future of lost looks</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and marital acrimony
(suited polo shirts not guaranteeing</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
happiness forever).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The living creatures
lie, honest at last, naked</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
reduced to some
solution, finally. No more</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
poetry.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-88234589570932936102012-12-21T00:20:00.000+00:002012-12-21T00:20:12.039+00:00How Bill Broke His Knee<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-44428622280968897842012-11-25T22:43:00.001+00:002012-11-25T22:49:34.386+00:00Christóforos <br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.' </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.'
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-3687964811939087022012-11-04T23:38:00.000+00:002012-11-04T23:39:05.797+00:00The Padlock<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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. <i>ANNA I XIMO</i> 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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-55747575525185102312012-10-20T23:44:00.000+00:002012-10-20T23:44:24.305+00:00Close Up<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-19480502483217383352012-10-12T00:35:00.000+00:002012-10-12T00:39:08.685+00:00Skin Deep<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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. </div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-50279446903599328822012-09-09T23:50:00.000+00:002012-09-09T23:50:21.579+00:00La Vita Nuova<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He hadn't turned up for
work. There had been no calls, no apologies. It was completely out
of character, that's what his fellow players said, though none knew
him very well. They couldn't tell you if he preferred dogs or cats,
tea or coffee. He was quiet, competent, and reliable, they knew
that. But that was all.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His sister raised the
alarm. She had left several messages for him, with a creeping note
of concern in her voice. The messages went unheard, she realised,
letting herself into his flat a week later and retrieving them
herself. No-one else had called. His violin, a 1914 Audinot, sat in
an open case on his bed. His dress suit hung behind the door in a
cellophane poncho, and five white shirts, similarly sheathed, jostled
in the wardrobe like commuters. She found his shoes on the table in
the narrow kitchen (the table was a hinged flap meant to drop down to
save space but there was only him and the stay underneath, disused,
was now immovable). The left shoe had been buffed to a dark
brilliance, its pair lolled on its side, streaked with dried-out
polish. A cigarillo had burned itself out in the ashtray. An open
window. The absence of dust was a kind of bareness.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He reappeared after a month. His sister had never seen him with a tan, even when they were
kids. His eyes, too, seemed more deeply coloured.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He had sat at the table
smoking, polishing. A blackbird settled briefly in the plane tree
outside his window and rehearsed, twice, a trill of pure notes. He
knew that if he did not get out right then, at that moment, he would
never get out.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He came back to sell
the violin. He'd find something cheaper and live for a while on the
difference. Learn the language, offer lessons, feel the sun on his
neck.</div>
Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-13698319243166150122012-05-17T21:06:00.000+00:002012-05-17T21:12:27.620+00:00Beneath the Cemetery<br />
There is a green plain between the mountains, and a railway line. The train pushes through the clamouring paddles of cactus and great high grasses, following the river into the city. Static caravans rust among lemon groves. A gang of dogs, cartoonishly assorted, free somehow, have taken over a roofless farmhouse. I see them every day, barking unheeded orders to each other. No-one else looks out of the window. Beyond the glass, still new to me, are empty commuter villages. Embankments thick with flowers. Doleful, tethered burros. A bronze statue of Christ on an eastern peak, arms outstretched for balance, his position never so precarious, even here.<br />
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Each morning I drive my Renault 4 (also available in white) down the mountain to the station, where the train sits humming like something from the next millennium. The garage by the level crossing where I bought the car, taxed and licensed, for 600 euros, is run by two brothers whose age cannot be determined with any certainty, though a rumour persists that they fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. Which would put them in their late eighties, at the youngest. I suppose it's the kind of thing you tell a foreigner. The two of them can often be seen roaring through the village on matching yellow trial bikes, their faces lined by age and speed and relentless sunshine. They grimace at me from beneath peaked helmets and miraculously dark hair as they buzz past. Smoking. Riding one-handed at 80 kilometres an hour on bad roads. Perhaps they are that old. Perhaps they're indestructible.<br />
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I spend my days in Malaga, trying to make myself understood. The labourers on site are Brazilian,or Francophone African. The skilled workers are from the Baltic states. There are even some Spaniards. Thankfully they all speak a little English, so we get by, particularly after an unhurried Andalusian lunch. There is something democratic about a hard hat and a hi-vis waistcoat. Everyone looks much the same in them, and everyone has to wear them, the millionaire developer from Madrid and the floorsweeper from Côte d'Ivoire. If we finish early I take a bus to the beach and sit there watching the sky change, until the flies chase me away, or night comes.<br />
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People talk on the train home. They have their own jobs to complain about, suppers and weekends to plan and disagreements with loved ones that are important while they're on the phone but will dissolve, in most cases, with the first touch at the doorstep. How were the kids today?<br />
<br />
<br />
No-one is waiting for me, not in this country at least, so most evenings I stop for a drink in the station bar. The tap hasn't worked for weeks, so Francisco - <i>Me llaman “Frank”!</i> - pours me a beer from a small can and charges me a euro. The bar is L-shaped, with a door at either end, always open and the weather blows through unobstructed. When a mist rolls over the mountain, it rolls into the bar. There's a table in one corner, though no-one ever seems to have sat there, three barstools, a fruit machine and a small colour television on which Frank and I watch Pasapalabra, a game show on Telecinco. We're obsessed.<br />
<br />
Frank may own more than one cardigan, but if he does, they are all burgundy, and otherwise identical. He is as gruff and self-contained as one might expect the proprietor of a station café in southern Spain to be, but he seems to like me, perhaps because I share his enthusiasm for Pasapalabra. Álora nestles among three mountains, and the railway station is at the very bottom of the town, so the TV reception is often poor, and when the wind picks up along the Guadalhorce and rattles the shutters and agitates the spirits bottled behind the bar it's hard to hear much. Nevertheless the charisma of Pasapalabra's winsome host, Christian Gálvez, shines through the gloom. Everyone talks very quickly. Elderly women in the post office speak an accelerated version of the language recited on my Learn Spanish tapes. Of the conversation between host and contestant on a gameshow, against the clock, I pick out maybe two words in five. Somehow this does not diminish the charm of the thing. It's a word quiz, and everyone loves those, don't they? I do well in the music round, most nights. Frank does less well, not just in the music round, but generally, which is odd, him being a native speaker. He seems untroubled. Sometimes, I suppose, what is most important is to have the right answer, even if you don't understand the question.<br />
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<br />Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21063730.post-77124877525345554092012-04-09T21:29:00.000+00:002012-04-09T21:30:14.190+00:00The Way She Says His Name<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm">There is a music in the way she says his name, but now that she's not speaking to him anymore he thinks that seeing her will be halfway or someway at least towards the experience of hearing her so he starts finding time during his working day to slip off and hang around near the coffee shop where he knows she gets her four shot latte twice a day and there's a bus stop twenty or thirty yards down the street where he can smoke and drink his own coffee and still appear to be on the way somewhere rather than just waiting like a bloody fool for a glimpse of her face and the lips he has kissed and the great mass of hair that he has tried to push his fingers through. Love it was, he supposes, for him at least though he always sensed there was something unreal about the whole thing, what with her being so extraordinary and him, well, a bloke in a hard hat she met in a pub after work, not that he had his hard hat on, but she had a trolley case full of paperwork and he'd helped her into a taxi with it and she had kissed him there in the street, a bit inexpertly, if he was honest but she was drunk so he understood.</p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm"><br /></p> <p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm">He stands near the bus stop picking little bits of dried plaster off the back of his fingers. Then he goes back to work.</p>Tom Mileshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10100040273081301943noreply@blogger.com0