The Mechanics Curse E-Book

Clive Gilson

• Herausgeber: Clive Gilson
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Mechanic's Curse brings together Clive Gilson's collected short stories in a single volume. These stories have been previously published in anthologies and online magazines. Clive's love of magical realism from writers such as Angela Carter, and the glories of traditional folk and faery tales shines through. These stories in particular mix the macabre and the fey and tradition with a loving touch. These are intimate tales, focusing on broad but subtle themes and personal recollections. Clive Gilson's stories continue to link recurring themes of fantasy with urban and future decay – splintered glass, dust motes and cracked plaster; the loss of loved ones, of the ability to remember; black and white movies of the mind; shafts of golden light shattered by war; haunted memories and the night darks.  There is a poetic lilt to the narrative, that delights in the minutiae of observation, bringing the mundane into the spotlight, giving it a meaning and beauty that is mostly lost on us busy ones; there is the terror of the ordinary, the shadow in the midday sun; and then there is the humour: sharp, cynical, painfully astute.  Clive Gilson's stories reverberate in the mind, long after they've been read. They connect us in their telling, because we relate to these deep, dark moments of human emotion that make us who we are. These are, indeed, black and white movies for the mind...

Leseprobe

I have edited Clive Gilson’s books for over a decade now – he’s prolific and can turn his hand to many genres: poetry, short fiction, contemporary novels, folklore and science fiction – and the common theme is that none of them ever fails to take my breath away. There’s something in each story that is either memorably poignant, hauntingly unnerving or sidesplittingly funny. 

Lorna Howarth, The Write Factor

Also by Clive Gilson

FICTION

Songs of Bliss

Out of the walled Garden

The Mechanic’s Curse

The Insomniac Booth

A Solitude of Stars

AS EDITOR – FIRESIDE TALES

Tales from the Land of Dragons

Tales from the Land of the Brave

Tales from the Land of Saints and Scholars

Tales from the Land of Hope and Glory

Tales from Lands of Snow and Ice

Tales from the Viking Isles

Tales from the Forest Lands

Tales from the Old Norse

More Tales About Saints and Scholars

More Tales About Hope and Glory

More Tales About Snow and Ice

The Mechanic’s Curse

And Other Stories

Clive Gilson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favourite authorised retailer.

ISBN: xxx

For the Rokers – Karen, Charlie & Guylaine

CONTENTS

Wind Freaks

Miss Jones and the Refugee

The Beast Within

A Life’s Work

All for One

Where There’s a Will

Glasshouse Tango

The Mechanic’s Curse

But for the Moon

A Question of Spin

About Horses and Microwaves

Nine Lives

Big Black Boots

Civvies

Happy Families

Devil in the Detail

Barley Sour

The Phantom of the Sixpenny Stalls

Terry’s Amazing Shin Pads

Courtyard

The Faithful Gardener

The Only Way to Know for Sure

The Television Bride

Upwardly Mobile

About the Author

Wind Freaks

IN THIS WORLD, MADE dark prematurely by a childhood illness, distance is gauged by the tap of a brass ferule at the end of a white plastic stick. The measured spaces between objects in this house are only ever changed after a considerable period of thought and an endless redrawing of mental maps. Evolution is the key. The owner of the house prefers a familiar shade and shadow. There are regular visits by cleaners and friends and helpers, and they all know the drill of place and space. The owner of this house is a time served veteran of bruise and trip and painful assimilations, having lived with this particular singularity in the old family home in North Devon for nearly half a century.

That sense of singularity, of personal uniqueness, is another key. Solitude has become a positive boon. It is a choice, and within these bounds a regularity of step and orientation allows for a three-dimensional, feeling, breathing immersion in a version of the physical world unknown to the sighted. Clues abound. There are always cyphers available if you know how to look for them. Life is a never ending, interlocking set of puzzles solved in non-visual ways. In this place of safety the answers may end up being the same as they are anywhere else in the world but the workings out are quite different. On this night all feels well with creation and heaven will remain warm and cosy so long as everything and everyone remains just so.

The bathroom, for example, is laid out in the same way whenever anyone cleans. The bather maintains that order in the interim. Bottles of shampoo and conditioner always sit at the head end of the bath, to the left hand side on a tiled ledge, shampoo furthest from the wall. The weekly refresh of soap always sits in the dish underneath the mixer taps. Care is needed here. When not using the much more convenient shower in the en suite, the bather must wait for the stored heat in the metal tap to dissipate before feeling for Imperial Leather. The bather must make a constant judgement of distance using time and innate renderings of topography. A fully drawn bath, however, is one of life’s little luxuries and always worth that effort.

The toothbrush will be in the wall-mounted holder to the right of the sink along with the toothpaste. There is a cupboard above the toilet with supplies, but here again the bather has to be careful. There is always the risk of bruising on door edges if they are left open and the brushing of teeth with ill-found Deep Heat is, hopefully, a once in a lifetime event. The bather still winces at the thought of that fire-gummed evening, especially given a supposed heightening of non-visual senses such as smell that should guard against such mishaps. The blame fell ultimately on one too many scotches in mixed company on a rare outing to the Wrecker’s Retreat bar at Hartland Quay Hotel.

In the bedroom clothes are laid out on the Ottoman at the foot of the bed. Always black; black underwear, black socks, a black tee shirt, a black jumper and black denim. There is a large wooden linen press opposite the bed, Victorian apparently, and each item of clothing has a slide out tray. Knowing the order of things is enough. Clothes are sourced on a semi-industrial scale, meaning that socks, underwear, tee shirts et al are bought in the same style and in bulk from a suitably well-stocked sports retailer. The method is straightforward. Anything other than black could easily become a garish melange and the dresser does not wish to cause offence. The near-flung worlds through which this soul walks out need no more startling. Black is useful. Black hides stains. Black is always stylish. Black has a certain moody quality about it. Black is timeless. Black is… cool.

With the latest time-check on the radio in the kitchen the bather’s heart rate drops noticeably. Wednesday night. Bath and bed. Clean, crisp sheets and a fresh, plumped duvet, under which a flushed, pink-skinned body will slide into blissful sleep. That radio is now silent, it’s comforting sounds replaced by the equally satisfying gurgle and swirl of hot water flowing into the bath. The bather kneels down at the side of the bath, regularly measuring the depth of the water against the enamel sidewall with hand-spans. This is a world where, for the want of a better phrase, pots must be watched no matter how long the boil.

When the heat of the day’s emotions and activities blend into and then dissolve in the rising, steamy warmth of the bathroom, it is in these contemplative moments that the bather tends to reminisce, and often drifts back into memories of sight. After so many years these memories are little more than impressionistic sweeps of a thick horsehair brush on an old, over-painted canvas. Fields and skies and the shades upon a wall, those huge landscapes that fill the mind of the child at such a young age, were never really, never carefully categorised or memorised. They are layers of grain and granularity that merge and bleed into one another. The blind years far outweigh the limited and unreliable experiences of childish sight.

Six years in the visual, of which the first three bear little on the memory, are too few to create a meaningful sense of loss. As a child the bather coped. As a teenager the bather railed and spat but eventually came to realise that the louder you shout at the world then the heavier the blows that rain back down upon your head. It was only when the rages subsided that the bather found the depth and the majesty that underlies the sublime nature of complexity in translation and sensory awareness. With that maturity came a new appreciation of beauty. Once again the singularity is expressed. In the same way that reading a book is far more personally satisfying in the imagination than watching a film, so it is with the bather’s unsighted perception of the world at large. The bather considers that for the unsighted there is philosophical shift, an inherent theoretical difference to the metaphysics of blindness, and all of it is expressed simply and elegantly by the Morse code tappings of brass ferules on skirting boards, on paving stones and chair legs.

At one hand-span from the top the taps are closed off. This is the “Eureka” moment in every sense. One hand-span is more than sufficient to cope with the Archimedean displacement of water caused by the ever-increasing volume of the bather’s spreading, middle-aged body. One hand-span also means that same body will be covered in hot, steamy water, and with that immersion comes the melting. Every ache and every care will dissipate and be washed away, leaving just an empty mind bobbing along as gentle ripples wander across the water’s surface while the bather settles unthinking into this amniotic comfort zone.

The bather stands up, feeling a slight pinprick behind the knees as circulation starts to flow freely after this spell kneeling beside the bath. The art in undressing is in the placement of the discarded clothes. The bather cannot simply kick the layers off for fear of mould and festering. Once the black tee shirt is removed, the bather carefully places socks, underwear and jeans inside that tee shirt and places the bundle down by the closed door, ready for the carry out to the dirty linen basket at the far end of the upper landing. If in any doubt the door’s jamming acts as a suitable reminder to do the day’s laundry.

A fleecy, calf length dressing gown hangs ready and warm on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. None of the friends and carers and cleaners has had the heart to tell the bather that the dressing gown is fluorescent orange. As the bather stands up and shifts carefully to the left there is the sound of a knee bumping against the wooden frame that hides the inner workings of pipe and valve and drain beneath the enamel bath. The bather grimaces and sucks in a short breath, but the pain is fleeting and the draw of hot water is utterly compelling. Left leg first. A slight twist of the foot to make sure that weight is anchored and there will be no slipping. The hot water tingles against the skin, but pleasantly so.

Right leg. The bather bends forward and rests hands on the sides of the bath before gently starting to kneel, feeling every inch of skin thrill to the heat prickle of submersion. Once kneeling, and feeling the water lap against belly and buttocks, the bather lifts up slightly and slides legs straight towards the taps before settling back down. The enamel head end wall of the bath is cold above the water line as a back comes to rest. Amid rising tendrils of steam, knees bending upwards slightly, the bather slides down until just a head covered in damp, greying hair is visible above the still waters.

Inner heat rises, and with it a human core drifts into sweet meltdown as water laps across stomach and breast. A mind empties, becoming one with the moment in heat and foetal simplicity. Time is forgotten. The moment lingers on. A house creaks and groans, hunkering down in the winter winds that blow up from the Southwest in Atlantic squallings that drive the rain horizontally across the cliff-tops. The sounds of boards expanding where central heating pipes run, of sash window frames shifting uneasily as gusts buffet and crack against the old stone walls, these are the sounds of long loved comfort. Deep in the heat haze, drowning under waves of still rising steam, just before the water starts to turn towards the lukewarm, the bather luxuriates.

But the moment has a purpose. The drift is sublime and yet is still a controlled moment. Reaching up and to the left behind a head, the bather feels for bottles. There are two, and while neither is of the Deep Heat variety, it is still better to test. Taking each bottle in turn the bather pours a drop of liquid onto fingers and rubs. The first bottle is the conditioner. It is out of place, but the bather supposes that these things are inevitable wherever human beings may roam. The conditioner bottle is put back in its correct place against the left hand wall. The bather sinks down into the water, covering a sweat soaked brow. Rising again, shampoo is applied and vigorously rubbed into a scalp. The process is repeated, but this time, feeling lazily replete, the bather uses the shampoo to wash down under arms, pelvis, stomach and legs. Once rinsed off again the final dose of conditioner is applied to dripping wet hair and the meditation at the head end of the bath begins again as chemicals feed hair for a moment or two longer.

A break in thought. A frown. The flat-line brainwave-drift spikes sharply. There is a call, an indefinite signal, a disturbance. These moments of equilibrium pivot almost imperceptibly on a fulcrum that has shifted a millimetre off centre. The bather senses rather than feels the chill slide of outside air as a breeze pulses slowly through the building. An impossible thing. All doors and windows are braced and barred against winter storms. This chill wind is just a gust breaking through the vent at the top of the double-glazed bathroom window. The imagined voice in the hallway is one of those momentary phantasms, a playful childhood friend obscured by mists and clouds. The familiar shade of black that remains at most other times solidly uniform behind these dimmed eyes has suddenly started to oscillate, deepening and shifting in three-dimensional planes that drag a body in towards the furthermost, darkest pit. The bather sits slowly up, feeling water run down a chest and a back from shoulders and neck and hair. The air is cold against exposed skin. Unnaturally cold. A sound. A house in motion in the black shadows exposed to a mind now very sharply awake.

Speed of thought. Sitting upright now, the bather takes stock. A storm. The house is mid-Victorian. Whatever technology and modernity is brought to bear on the place, its fabric is old and the natural world has a habit of disregarding human endeavour. This is just a natural thing, a moment of solitude writ large in the imagination. The bather considers this. Bath-time meditations are an open invitation to the monsters of childhood. A memory takes shape; a dog long gone to the sodden earth in the fields at the back of the house, but a dog that the bather sometimes fancies to see in the misty corners of the world. Perhaps that floorboard step beyond the door is a manifestation of loss. A dog is missed at times like these. The bather remembers how a dog would lie in the open bathroom doorway, facing out, guarding the alpha. A smile. A silliness. A whimsy in winter darks.

A nagging doubt. It occurs to the bather to remember the conditioner bottle. Why was it in the wrong place? A simple human error? A cleaner or a friend being forgetful or distracted? The thought is dismissed but it is too late. There is a sense of dislocation. The beam and fulcrum shift a little further from the centre and the world tilts. The bather places both hands on the side of the bath and begins to rise up, water cascading from abdomen and buttocks, making unwelcome noise, signalling a location, making the mark easy to find, but the urgency of the moment outweighs the tell.

Halfway towards the standing, neither in nor out of the foetal sac, the bather stays the move. Conditioner starts to dry out on a forehead. Again there comes that chill breath on the neck of the world. Stronger this time. Colder. The bather works hard to reach a state of conviction. Blood pulses in veins. The previously stilled heart beat now taps out the rhythms of rising panic. Unseeing eyes widen involuntarily. A catching of inner airs again, a willing of the world into familiar shapes. They are one and the same, the bather and the house, both growing old and creaking in their joints and broken skins.

The skin of the night, that shaded veneer from behind which a person might peer out at the darkling terrors, stretches taut. The hint of a footstep. That vague recognition of sweat and musk. An essence of the doorknob rattle and the bone breaker’s waltz. The bather sinks back down into the tepid waters of the drowning pool. Geography has warped. Paths and passages are bent out of shape. The bather thinks too quickly to form the familiar shapes that usually illuminate this darkness, a darkness in which the bather should be the more familiar. The bather gasps once, then twice, verging on hyperventilation. Washing over a face, these ripples, these half-formed childhood night-darks, drive an imagination in overdrive and chalk white fingers wrap themselves around a doorframe.

The bather screams inwardly, a last spasm, and then subsides, calming and stilling the beating of a heart. There is nothing more to do. The bather cannot move. The wind freaks are cracking the upper landing walls. The door handle. The door handle rattle. The half-heard howl from the back fields. The bather takes one last deep draught of air and holds a breath, sliding down beneath the black waters. Conditioner scum floats on the surface of the bath water above the bather’s head. A bathroom door opens and wedges on a pile of discarded clothes…

Miss Jones and the Refugee

(Loosely based on Andersen’s In the Duck Yard)

AN OBSCURE BUT HISTORICALLY rich family of age old standing first came to live in one of London’s green suburban idylls when those self-same suburbs were nothing but virgin fields and meadows recently subsumed into William the Conqueror’s new realm. At that time the family name was long and impressive; D’Agouteville perhaps or Cholmondley-Warner or some such thing, but, as with all families, the generations followed one after another, proving more or less that sons and daughters inherit a mixed bag of genes and ancestral memory. Despite the vagaries of birth right and ability, the family remained true to its long heritage in one respect, at least, and that was to its ancestral home. Fortunes varied, were won and lost, and the family name changed through the ages, becoming a proper product of each model of social propriety, until, at the very end of a long line of ancestors, there was but one member of the family left living. She was known simply as Miss Jones.

During the long sweep of days that passed during which the family had faded into its current state of dilapidated grandeur, the great city had, conversely, spread its teeming streets far and wide. Miss Jones and her ancient familial home now stood in much reduced status in the middle of this quiet and genteel suburban sprawl. Around her home there had come the houses of merchants and bankers, followed by the lowlier dwellings of middle class managers and finally there came the estate houses of the common workers.

The family shut themselves away behind the barrier of polite poverty, pulling up the rope ladder of social interaction. Safe behind their crumbling castle walls, the family’s ancient lust for life dissipated, and the vitality of these new lives completely passed them by. Miss Jones, as the last of her line, lived a quiet and shrouded life that was bounded by the tightness of good old-fashioned values and good old-fashioned friends. From time to time she watched the new world of alien features and fads strut and crow and found it all strangely attractive, but the rules of the game quite prevented her from embracing such energy and liveliness. It simply wasn’t done. Self-control was an art that Miss Jones and her family had perfected through many long years of carefully managed breeding and etiquette.

Miss Jones had few vices and few interests that could be described as hobbies, but she was very keen on politics. Of course, it had to be the right sort of politics, the sort that was supported by bazaars, whist drives and charity lunches attended by her sitting member of parliament. Nevertheless, and in the privacy of her own salon, she was quite vocal in her support of the poor oppressed victims of foreign dictators and of those unfortunates in far off lands whose lives were devastated by fire, famine and flood. It was widely reported in the leafier lanes of suburban south London that after the local church’s recent summer fete Miss Jones had sampled the sherry and become extremely eloquent on the subject.

“When you see them on television sitting around their fires and singing their traditional songs, well, it’s so moving. They have so much dignity in their suffering. If it were only possible I’d take just such a person into my own protection. I would be a good mother to her. It’s in my blood, you know. We Joneses have always been that way inclined. But they are so far away and there is so little one can really do to help”.

Mistress Fate heard this desperate plea and within a week Miss Jones found herself facing a very new and challenging situation, for which she was entirely unprepared. Walking home from a visit to a friend’s house one evening at about seven o’clock, Miss Jones was enjoying the last of the sun’s tree-dappled warmth. The birds sang sweetly in the hedgerows and the last of the house martins were diving and darting across the sky as they fed themselves up for their long autumn flight south. A few wisps of cloud on the far horizon glimmered red and gold as they reflected the falling of day into the purple dusk of night. All was well with the world as Miss Jones turned the corner into her own street and was almost bowled over by a young man running at full pelt in the opposite direction.

Miss Jones spun around in an anti-clockwise direction when the young man’s shoulder hit her left arm with all the force and momentum of a battering ram. She lost her balance and her grip on her handbag as she stumbled and tripped over her own feet, falling backwards into a beech hedge that bordered one of the suburban gardens. The young man managed two or three disjointed paces before he too crumpled and flaked, finally tripping over an uneven paving stone and falling chin first to the floor. As he fell he thrust out an arm to try and cushion his fall. The evening’s background sounds of bird song and bees buzzing their way from flower head to flower head were cut in two by the sharp retort of bone breaking on hard cement.

Miss Jones heard the sound of footsteps following on behind the young man and as she pushed beech leaves out of her face she was able to make out three other young boys heading towards where she lay suspended in the hedge. With a physical urgency usually reserved for athletes and Special Forces troops, Miss Jones launched herself into a standing position, braced her legs upon the pavement and picked up her handbag in the most menacing way that she could manage. The young man with the broken wrist was of some ethnic stock, while the three other youths were Caucasians and Miss Jones was no fool. She recognised the situation for what it was and reacted instantaneously.

As soon as she realised what she was doing her legs turned to jelly, her heart skipped several beats, and she could feel herself glowing all over with beads of perspiration. All that had been so clear for that vital second was now clouded in the fog of doubt and confusion. She was not the stuff of legend nor of heroism, being the sort of person who worried that she was letting her whole class down when her shoes got dirty, and here she was facing down three members of an alien youth culture, whose sole intent was to inflict grievous bodily harm on another vulnerable individual. It occurred to her there and then that if they couldn’t get to the crawling thing behind her, they would probably take just as much delight in wreaking havoc upon the body of one of the genteel classes. Her resolve momentarily wavered. Nevertheless, centuries of fine and proper blood were coursing through her adrenalin swollen arteries, and with her unwavering sense of indignation on behalf of underdogs everywhere, she steeled herself for the physical punishment that was about to pour forth upon her head.

She looked straight at the charging youths and yelled at the top of her voice, “You’ll have to answer to me to first!”

The sound of running footsteps had already caused curtains to twitch in the front rooms of the houses of those who lived close enough to the road to have heard the disturbance. The sound of Miss Jones’s defiant voice being raised in such an unlikely and, frankly, shocking way, heralded the full pulling aside of various nets and blinds. As soon as the good people of this suburban paradise realised that one of their own was in trouble with a posse of hell’s skinheads, front doors opened and at least three elderly gentlemen were pushed and prodded out onto their doorsteps.

The three white boys, while hell bent on completing their terrible task, were not entirely insensitive to the weight of evidence that was being amassed against them. Their headlong charge towards Miss Jones and the stricken young man on the pavement behind her slackened off until they came to a skipping halt some ten yards away.

The gentlemen on doorsteps started shouting things like, “Bugger orf…We’ve called the police, you know…Go on, get out of it”.

The boys shouted obscenities back, informing anyone who was listening that they knew where everyone lived and would be back later to get them. The stand-off lasted for nearly a minute before the sound of a siren in the distance saw the three of them break into a hectic run back the way they had come.

In no time at all, the entire street seemed to be filled with cars and uniformed officers, and an ambulance whisked the young man away to Accident and Emergency before Miss Jones had time to find out his name. She was, anyway, helping a very pleasant young policewoman with her enquiries and Miss Jones was on fine form as the policewoman took her statement. Truth be told she was probably a little tipsy having supped one too many medicinal Scotches from one of her neighbours’ hip flasks when she said, “They’re absolute scoundrels. Hanging is too good for them. That we permit such creatures to live and walk about on the planet! It wouldn’t have happened in the old days, you know, oh no!”

Quite what would have happened in the old days Miss Jones couldn’t actually say. She had a vague and hazy image in her head of one of her early ancestors running his opponents through with a large sword, and in her more candid moments she secretly approved of this approach. As it was she was quite content to end the day as she often did by toasting the world with another hint of single malt, safe in the comforting knowledge that the sun, like people, inevitably moves towards sunset.

Unfortunately for Miss Jones there was another sun of which she had taken no account whatsoever in her long and relatively restricted life, and at seven-thirty the next morning she was rudely awakened by a series of loud knocks at her front door. The adrenalin rush of the previous evening and the near quarter bottle of Scotch that she had drunk before bed had not mixed well and, when she opened the door to the reporter from the Sun & Mercury, Miss Jones was suffering from the unpalatable effects of her first hangover since her debutante years.

The next few moments were a horrible mixture of déjà vu and misunderstood questions, all of which left Miss Jones in a state of confused and bemused uncertainty. The photographer did at least have the dignity to let her change out of her dressing gown and slippers, but everything was still rushed, and she looked as if she’d just gone three full minutes with a welterweight boxer. The only saving grace was that the headlines painted a picture of a plucky citizen coming to the aid of a poor victim of racial abuse. Over the next few weeks both Miss Jones and the young victim appeared in the newspapers and on many of the news and current affairs programmes on the television and the radio. Their life stories were told and compared and much was made of the fact that two very different worlds had collided and, out of the chaos of the moment, had created a perfect picture of what the country should be striving for.

In Miss Jones’s case her family background was investigated, and she was revealed to the world. All of the political parties identified with her recent struggle, praising her for her actions, and she was held up as a paragon of good old fashioned and traditional values by the true blues of the political firmament. Even those who thought her type was an anachronism in these modern times were forced to agree that she was very unassuming and brave. Cameras whirred and digital footage streamed across the closed world of conservative South London, so much so that nearly everyone in the neighbourhood wanted to invite Miss Jones to their parties, to their charity bashes and to their seasonal celebrations.

The young man, of course, received some publicity as well. His face appeared in print and on television screens and his own background was presented to the world, just as Miss Jones’s had been. In his case, and although there was, obviously, just as much history to it, his family background was untraceable. He came from a remote region of a far-off nation that was locked into a vicious cycle of civil war and warlordism. As much was made of the tragedy in his homeland as was made of his broken wrist and the fact that no one could find the perpetrators of the attack.

Unlike the almost universal acceptance of Miss Jones in the media, however, some of the reporting that related to the young man tended towards the dark side. Some newspapers, tiring of the feel-good factor inherent in the immediate events of the day, started to ask questions about the presence of such people in the country. Numbers were discussed. Entry criteria were argued about and the cost of his treatment at the expense of the public purse became an issue for some of the more garrulous members of the establishment. When his story was set into the context of geography there were those who questioned whether any good could every come of a country that suffered from an apparently incurable case of Asperger’s Syndrome. The final denouement was the revelation that the young man in question was waiting for his appeal for asylum to be heard by the government and he was not yet, by any right, a citizen of the country.

For Miss Jones, however, the social breeze, which she had until now only briefly caught the coat tails of, turned into a full-blown tornado. She was invited to parties and to dinners with friends and acquaintances, about whom she often knew only the bare bones. Nonetheless, she found herself positively enjoying the concentration of interest that surrounded her whenever the conversation turned to the state of the nation and to the whole immigration issue. She felt that she finally had something to offer to these discussions, basing her opinions on her direct experience with these poor unfortunate people. She was the queen of the chicken run with a bevy of hens and cocks clucking around her, hanging on her every insight and word.

In all of this, in the hurricane of press interest that engulfed the protagonists and in the quietly ebbing tide that followed as the story wound down onto the spools of microfiched newsprint, Miss Jones and the young man never actually met. In fact, under the strains of the moment and the inevitable riot of questions and counselling in the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack, they had never even spoken with one another. Their only real, physical contact had been when the young man barged into her by accident on a street corner. In the resulting confusion, with neighbours comforting Miss Jones and paramedics aiding the young man, they had no time in which to become acquainted. Their only indirect contact was when they exchanged thanks and some brief sound bites via a television link.

It should come as no surprise that Miss Jones’s experience at the forefront of integration and social inclusion should provide her with the moral courage and the fortitude to deal with her next hot political potato. A year or so after the event on the street corner the government proposed the setting up an immigration processing centre in the borough where Miss Jones lived. Given her local fame as the woman who had a go, as the woman who stood up to racist yob culture, she was delighted to be asked onto the committee of the “Asylum Centre Campaign Group”.

As she said on local radio one evening, “We should all do what we can to make this country socially and culturally cohesive, and no one knows that better than I do. But even after all of my experiences I have to say that we, the people of this borough, do not want this facility in our back yard”.

The Beast Within

THROUGHOUT THE DARK DAYS of illness when he watched her life being sliced away in thin, almost transparent curls of prosciutto ham in the morbidly sweet-smelling delicatessen that served only the finest of cancerous dishes, Richard had never once doubted that he would cope. He thought of the slow unravelling of all that they had assumed and planned for in terms of food because she was, she had been, such a visionary in the kitchen, and ham in particular because of some long-ago account that he had read of island tribesman calling cannibalised victims of ritualistic ante-diluvian warfare Long-Pigs.

Richard cooked dishes for one now using a simple book of recipes probably designed for students. Her own library, a cornucopia of Rhodes, Oliver, Burton-Race, Fearnley-Whittingstall, Stein and David, sat on the bookshelves in his flat untouched, a small memorial to the days of splendour. More often than not now he grilled chicken breast, opened a bag of salad, and with a nod to past glories, made up his own salad dressing out of the last of her red wine vinegar and walnut oil. When the time came to replenish the cupboards, he was sure that he would find something suitably pre-prepared in Waitrose.

After one such meal, with the wine cap unscrewed and never to be reintroduced to the bottle, Richard flicked through the digitally free channels on the television and came up blank once again. Nothing of interest. This did not surprise or annoy him. Richard told himself frequently that he enjoyed being phlegmatic. He had not been able to listen to the Archers since she died. Once it had been an evening ritual or, if they had been busy, a gentle Sunday laze in bed with tea and chocolate biscuits after early morning love-making. It is what it is, he thought, so there’s no point in getting upset. By accepting the inevitable passage through the many stages of grief he was as certain as day follows night that he would surface again, would return to something akin to the skin that he had once inhabited.

With nothing on the box but the silence of his now solitary life, Richard got up from his armchair, walked across the open-plan living area of his small flat, picked up a packet of Silk cut from the kitchen worktop and withdrew one cigarette. He did not smoke in the ground floor flat, it being a rented space, a bolt hole that he could shutter against the world, so he opened the patio doors that lead out onto the communal gardens, leaned against the door frame and lit up. It is what it is.

The anti-smoking Nazi at his local Cotswold surgery, one Sister McGovern, had actually told him not to bother about giving up. He should go on holiday, get through the inevitable run of birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas, and then make the ultimate sacrifice with the New Year. He had, she’d said, enough on his plate. Richard inhaled deeply, stifling a rough, moist cough, and decided that he would not beat himself up too much about it. A drink and a smoke were fine and dandy things to indulge in given the unenviable circumstances of his life. He thought of them as strong but forgiving crutches upon which he could hobble towards normality. He mentally raised the rapidly cremating smoke together with his glass of something Tesco red to the evening sky in salutation to Fuhrer McGovern. They’re not all bastards, he mumbled to a feral cat that was twitching its behind predatorily beneath his next-door neighbour’s bird table.

A window slid shut in the flat above his, the owner, a florid, self-employed painter and decorator who made noisy love to his paramour every Saturday morning, evidently declining Richard’s invitation to join him in his passive acceptance of the way of things. The first two fingers of Richards already raised and wine bejewelled hand strayed just a little higher than true stoicism demanded.

Richard had managed sexual congress once since she left him to fend for himself, a rather unsatisfactory affair, or shag as he’d referred to her in one of his rare drifts down to the pub with his son-in-law. The physical act was about what he’d expected. The primary assault had been over in a flash, a star-spangled whiz-bang that betrayed the months of unfulfilled marital passion during his wife’s final, septic days. Richard smiled at the duality of the memories. He was clearly not as unfit as he’d thought prior to his hotel triste. The second and third waves of his sexual task force had gone in without meeting much resistance and established a strong bridgehead someway inland of the poor girl’s own stamina. Physically he’d got his rock offs. It was sex, not lovemaking. What was unsatisfactory about it was the aftermath.

Beyond the sheer messiness of sharing intimate space with another human body, all of which could be resolved by mopping up with man-size tissues, there was the inherently dirty feeling of betrayal. Ridiculous but true. His wife had been cold in her urn for months, and here he was, his ears ringing with the words of his counsellor about doing things for his own benefit now, still feeling as though he was committing treason. The thought of that night made him shudder on the doorstep. He could hear his wife cocking the firing pins for each member of the firing squad before which he sometimes dreamed that he stood. Emotional compensation; more wine and another fag.

What made it worse were the phone calls. In that moment of self-congratulatory euphoria, under the influence of the endorphin rush, he had exchanged phone numbers with the shag. Recently she had started to ring two or three times a day. Richard had added her by name to his contacts list, which meant that he could leave her to make plaintive noises on his voice mail. He instinctively deleted them after the first syllable.

In the old days, before that moment when he had looked into his future wife’s eyes and known the absolute truth of his dependence on her, he had remained resolutely single. On more than one occasion he had been the bit on the side, the other man in the cuckold equation, and it had not bothered him one little bit. Now that he was single again, and even though the object of his momentary lust was reaching terminal velocity in the divorce courts, he could not square the circle of his crime. Her breathing in of air that should have been his wife’s just made him angry.

It should, therefore, be easy, he thought, as he poured another glass of the dry red and pulled another cigarette from its snugly reassuring and mechanically sorted place in the packet, to answer the woman’s calls and tell her that this thing between them was a one off, was done and dusted. The problem, which Richard acknowledged with a flick of his finger on the rough flint of the lighter, was that he had an addictive nature. When things got desperate he would take one of her calls, apologise and say that it was a hard time for him, and they would meet for another dose of something scabrous and itchy. Richard managed a low chuckle. Why, oh why, couldn’t he take the great Billy Mac’s advice and just get drunk and watch porn?

Questions about Richard’s sexual reintegration with the wider world were, he felt, largely a distraction from the more important realisation that this thing, this disease, this inevitably bankrupting game of dice with the beast, was what is was. Acceptance was the key. Richard stepped out into the autumn evening, watching low, grey clouds scud across the tree tops at the far end of the communal garden, and was about to make for a bench over by a massive Copper Beech, when he stopped, turned, and fetched from the flat the bottle and the packet of cigarettes. If he was going to muse, he thought, best to do it professionally.

The nights were closing in now, the leaves falling with the strengthening breeze that blew in the cold winds from the northern lands, a gift from the Snow Queen of yore. Despite showers earlier in the day that same leaf stripping breeze had dried out the bench seat, leaving streaks of dampness in the wood at the margins and around the rusting screw heads that held his weight as he sat down. It was not yet the full blown season for decay but already the manicured lawn was strewn with wet, black leaves.

Looking back at the block of flats he caught a glimpse of the florid painter caught in the glare of ceiling spot lights as he watched Richard in the garden, no doubt muttering about polluting neighbours and the irony of a survivor of one cancer ineluctably feeding the tumours of his own demise. The ruddy faced little man moved away from the window the instant that he saw Richard look back and wave a misty-blue hand.