Labouring

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.

Tell It Again (Chapters I and II)

I

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.

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.

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?”

II

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.

“Good morning, delicious child. Where are you off to?”

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“Remind me?”

“It's half a league from here, as the crow flies, due west. A compact, picturesque rustic-style property with its own mature nuttery.”

“Made of gingerbread?”

“Made of bricks,” said the little girl, firmly.

“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.

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.  

Mandela and Me

The 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.

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.

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.

The DJ played this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjSzjoU7OQ

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgcTvoWjZJU

And we fell about the place in a boozy hopeful rapture.

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.

At Heathrow

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 apart.

Shy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dead Man's Jeans

A Ghost Story

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“Whose idea was it?”

She watched him move in his armchair.

“It was my idea,” he said eventually.

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.

“Didn't fit?”

“No,” she said. “Not quite.”

“Would you like to exchange them for anything?” She shook her head and walked back to the car.

Fun Run

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.

It wasn't a race, of course, but an exercise in public relations, and esprit de corps. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Tristan and Grace in Nature

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

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

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

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

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

Grace felt the boy's hand slip from hers.

Terry and Ralph

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

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

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

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

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

Mayday

I hold onto the last thing that you said,

each word a lifebuoy to a drowning man

adrift without your voice, unanchored.

If your breath cannot save me, nothing can.

I'm no less lost ashore though, once rescued

and blindly blinking love out of my eyes.

Where you are and I am, I am renewed;

resuscitated, panicked and unwise.

Love After Auschwitz

No poetry after he fails to find a way to say

the essence of you, finally, the thing

ness the actual thing that might actually be somehow

reduced call it an essence, a concentrate, concentrate!

A reduction, an absurd reduction the essence of you

in fact some fat some phosphorus mostly carbon

the spirit of you proof of what exactly?

Electric blinds. Perhaps so, if used

irreverently.

A womb of a room, false ceiling, panelling

in the richest of wooden veneers reproduced

here in more robust, synthetic form and the

model couple on the hotel television screen fixed

staring into an imaginary future of lost looks

and marital acrimony (suited polo shirts not guaranteeing

happiness forever).

The living creatures lie, honest at last, naked

reduced to some solution, finally. No more

poetry.

How Bill Broke His Knee

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

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

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

Christóforos

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Padlock

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

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

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

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

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

Close Up

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

Skin Deep

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

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

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

La Vita Nuova

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beneath the Cemetery

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.

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.

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.

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?


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 - Me llaman “Frank”! - 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.

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.

The Way She Says His Name

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.

He stands near the bus stop picking little bits of dried plaster off the back of his fingers. Then he goes back to work.

Running Repairs

They arrived home within a month of each other. Toby was a year older. He had recently divorced and his wife had kept the house. He had exhausted the patience of his friends, in whose kitchens he had got drunk, and on whose sofas or spare beds he had sweated out the booze. So he had gone back to his parents, until he found a place of his own he could afford. Luke had come back to look after his mother, who was dying more quickly than expected. He worked from home, anyway, and his sister was moving to Leeds with work.

They met again as they had first met, in their respective back gardens. Toby smoking, Luke on his mobile. There was pointing, the nervous laughter of recognition and a handshake. They had fought and played here, from six to sixteen, a forever ago.

They bought a car between them, seventy-five quid each, a doer-upper from the local paper which they hunted down in fulfilment of an unrealised teenage ambition. Luke spent more time on it, while his mother slept. It was something he could fix. Toby helped him out on alternate weekends when he didn't have the kids, and when the evenings got lighter he'd change out of his suit into overalls and lean over the engine with a Haynes manual. The yellow concrete of the shared driveway camouflaged, soon enough, with drips and runs of oil. Another four-hundred in parts and a failed test and they got it on the road. They drove Luke's mother to the hospital.