What does she see in him?

What does she see in him? He certainly doesn’t know. Her mam thinks he must be controlling. Her sister thinks he must be great at oral. Her friends go for pop psychology: he’s the manifestation of her low self-esteem, she doesn’t rate herself high enough to find a fella who’s actually attractive, or funny, or successful in any way. She wants to be wanted and he’s hopelessly needy.

They’re all wrong.

Look at them, sitting together on the bus: he fills a bit more than half of the seat, he’s got a summer cold and keeps sniffing honkily, you can see the roll of belly fat bulging in his blue t-shirt. He yawns, and at the peak of the yawn he also burps. She’s cuddled up beside him hugging his arm, with her blonde dye-job, brown roots, style-statement tilt-cornered glasses. She’s talking in his ear about nothing – oh look, the petrol station’s closed, was that one Maxol, nice new houses there, used to get off here to visit Lisa, did you ever meet Lisa, ah she’s gas, great craic altogether, in Manchester now or is it Bradford. He’s braced against his headache, leaning into the pain: left forehead, left sinus. He kept off the booze last night but at what cost. Trying to be a better man. Which man would that be, then.

The Saved

“I want to do burlesque,” said the hen. “A striptease. I’ll take my feathers off, one by one. Would you like me, like that? Would you think I looked tasty?”

The cat said nothing. Why did she have to say these things? It was the sacred rule of the Ark, the foundation on which everything rested – you didn’t eat your fellow passengers. Look, there was the lion, lying down with the lamb, not even drooling.

“Or a magic trick. Saw the head off the lady. I’ll keep on dancing. Oh, how beautifully I would dance, if I couldn’t think.”

“It’ll be over soon,” he said, without looking at her. “The waters are already receding. You can lay your eggs and raise your chicks and be happy.”

“Oh yes, of course. Repopulating the earth. The brood-mother of nations. What an honour.” She laughed bitterly.

“Look, we didn’t ask for this,” said the cat quietly. “We aren’t to blame for our luck or for what happened to the others. What kind of a world is it going to be if all we do in it is mourn?”

“I don’t want to mourn. I want to dance. I want to die of music.”

 

There were songbirds on the gunwales, blackbirds, starlings, swallows, finches, rising and calling and fluttering over each other with a constant rippling motion; below them, the sunlight dazzled on the water. There was no sail, because there was nowhere to go. Noah and his family were busy with the work of the ship, sluicing and scrubbing and tending their stores.

 

“I was a temple cat,” said the cat, “in the city of Uruk, at the temple of Ishtar. The front of the temple was faced with coloured tiles of white and blue and the white steps to the gate were washed each day. The statues were gilded and the temple women wore circlets of gold wire and gold rings in their ears. Men came to couple with the women, in honour of the goddess, and to make sacrifices. They killed doves and lambs. Then the bones and scraps were thrown on the refuse heaps at the back of the temple, which grew bigger every year and stank, swarming with rats and buzzing with flies. The dark ooze seeped from the rubbish and ran down to the river. There was always sickness in the city, but the people went on worshipping Ishtar, who brought them prosperity and made things grow.”

“It sounds horrible,” said the hen.

“It was a good life for a cat,” said the cat. “There was plenty to eat and the women were kind to me. There was one I remember. She would stroke me and share fish with me when she had some. She was trying to save the trinkets the men gave her so she could buy an inn when she was too old to work in the temple – she’d put them in an old oil jar she kept in the corner – but she never managed to save very much; she kept shaking the trinkets out again and exchanging them for new sandals or wine.”

“Was there music in the temple?”

“Oh yes, lots. Voices, flutes, drums, harps. Formal music for the goddess, worksongs for cooking and washing, lullabies for the babies, story-songs for the fireside. But mostly love-songs, because Ishtar is the goddess of love.”

“Will you sing me one of the songs?”

“My singing was never encouraged. But my point is, it was always going to end. They knew it. The woman I told you about knew she couldn’t live that life forever, that her youth was passing; and everyone knew that the stink and the filth were getting worse and worse. They talked about cleaning it up, they had a lot of quarrels and arguments, but they never changed anything. So, in the end, the change simply happened. And I suppose we have to make the best of it.”

“All my life I’ve loved music. I used to like to sit at roost and hear the people singing in the evenings. Entertainers would come to the village and I’d dream of all the places they’d been to that they were carrying in their music. I’m really not suited to be the mother of all hen-kind, you know. I’m dreamy and impractical, I was always quite low down the pecking order…”

“You’ll be fine,” said the cat.

“I wonder what we’ll find to eat, when we get off the boat? I just used to follow the flock, before. I guess there’ll be loads of, what do you call it, alluvial mud, and that makes things grow, doesn’t it? And bugs coming up, like after the rains? Well, it is after the rains.”

“I’m planning to stick close to the humans. There’s always something to scavenge where the humans are.”

“Yes, all the mice and little birds and things will stay around the humans. Have you ever had a bird as big as me?”

“To be honest I was more of a mouse man. And just stealing things and getting treats from the women.”

“Don’t you want me?”

“You’re a very fine hen.”

There was a silence and then the hen began to speak once more.

“It’s going to be hard, starting again. I’m frightened but I’ll simply have to try, because there isn’t any other way. There won’t be much time to think, I suppose – the humans will be building and sowing and chopping and making, and I’ll be fussing over my chicks and learning to forage for whatever there is to eat, wherever we end up living. But I want you to promise that one day you’ll come to me, when the sun is setting, and you’ll sing me the songs of Ishtar. I’ll dance for you, and then I’ll lie down, I won’t struggle at all, and you’ll eat me all up.”

“I promise. I’ll savour every bit.”

“I’m glad we’ve had this time together.”

 

Noah’s family had finished their chores and the sons sat down to rest on the deck while the women went below to cook the evening meal. Noah had gone into his cabin. Now he came out with a dove on his hand. He whispered in its ear. Then he raised his hand and sent it forth, and it went out to search the face of the waters, looking for the first rebirth of land.

Backwards

[Braille Face effort no. 12, based on Jot. The last of the set]

Let’s go backwards. Let’s rewind.

Ten. We’re in the ruins of Babel and your loyalty is my hate-speech and my sublime music is your god-awful satanic racket. I’ve taken the books. You’ve got the house. I sit under the cliff, by the great black wall, and listen to the scream of gulls.

Nine. Here are medications for the cruelty of the world: Xanax, Prozac, Facebook, kittens, knitting, strategic deafness, reality television. We are sealed to our separate devices.

Eight. You’re away a lot now. I say “mm” when you talk and wish you didn’t snore. There’s a fear in my gut I don’t tell you about.

Seven. On holiday we carefully study the phrasebook and memories from past lessons come back to us. We tentatively join hands with a strange place, a brief touch, and are warmed.

Six. The words and the music are one and fit us perfectly. The celestial spheres revolve.

Five. Music teaches a love looking for names. An aching in the chest, blood quickening, a sense of all the space in which you might be waiting.

Four. You throw your shoes over the power line and walk home barefoot. They dangle there, cheerfully unexplained.

Three. As a child I write words in the sand on the beach for the waves to remember.

Two. I learn jokes. Knock knock. Who’s there? Me! And a big hug.

One. The mouth speaks to the milk and the fist to the air, flailing. We have to learn object relations. The world emerges: mama, tree, mine, again.

Zero. Heartbeat and darkness.

Hold me.

Three marches

[Braille Face flash fiction no. 11. I think this story really wants to be longer: this is the skeleton of it. It’s based on Moiety and especially the track ‘Political Monsters’.]

He first met Jenny at the protest against the Criminal Justice Bill in June 1994. He was eighteen years old, about to go to university (Warwick, History), and he and some mates went up to London because they’d heard The Manic Street Preachers would be playing and also, secretly, because they were hoping to witness a riot. They didn’t witness a riot. They almost missed the protest altogether because they didn’t know London and weren’t sure where to go. It was Jenny who set them right as they walked in the wrong direction with their droopy cardboard KILL THE BILL sign. She wore purple doc martins and a tie-dye dress. He got talking to her as she guided them to Trafalgar Square, or, rather, she got talking to him. She must have liked him because he went home with her address on a slip of paper in his pocket.

They exchanged letters and, when they got to university, emails. She educated him. The world weighed on her: Tibet, the rainforests, Bosnia, underprivileged youth. She was reading Law and Anthropology at LSE. He had always been a kings and battles kind of person, but he grew interested in social history. He joined Young Labour. He and Jenny became a couple: he visited her in London and made love to her nervously in her student room, wanting to please her and unsure how to do so. After a while they split up.

 

In 2003 he was writing a PhD on social mobility in fifteenth-century Warwickshire and he got an email from Jenny: she was organizing a big group to join the march against war in Iraq. He’d been uncertain of his views on the issue, but he wanted to see her again. On a chilly February day he walked beside her in the largest crowd he had ever known. She wore a black coat and red lipstick. She had a training contract with a big legal firm, but planned to go into charity law. He felt provincial and addled with libraries. She was alight with anger at the arrogance of Bush and Blair. He rode the wonderful wave of her conviction all the way to Hyde Park. Afterwards he went back to Warwick and his manor court rolls, and wanted to email her, and didn’t think she would be interested.

In the years that followed he thought of her often. Teaching, he imagined her as an observer in the corner, and tried to show her why history was important, or at least how it was humane. He reminded himself sometimes that he was charged with the shaping of young minds, though they didn’t always seem that malleable. He was teaching about contingency, about the complexity of causes, about the mattering of minor lives; he was trying to get his students to pay proper attention. He did admin. He made submissions to the Research Assessment Exercise. He had girlfriends but did not marry.

 

In 2015 he went on a march entirely by himself. It was the anti-austerity march of 20^th June. He had made a cardboard sign, which he carried self-consciously: CUTS KILL. He was thin-skinned to the crowd, a little emotional. It was unlike him to do this, but he finally felt that he had to; everything he’d once taken for granted had eroded so far.

And by chance he saw Jenny. Somehow in the mass of people they encountered each other. She looked tired and plump now, but so, he knew, did he. They fell into step and exchanged the summaries of their lives. Hers was not as he expected: a daughter, a divorce, an illness, and now she was running a community centre, struggling for funding.

“It’s wonderful to see you again,” she said. “Remember the Criminal Justice Bill march? They passed that bill, of course. Sometimes I think we only march so we’ll feel better when the government goes ahead and ignores us.”

“Ah, but think of the chartists,” he said. “They didn’t get what they wanted in the short term, but it came good in the end. Think of the suffragettes.” He couldn’t help also thinking of the Luddites, the Britons petitioning Rome for protection against the Picts and Scots, and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Sometimes terms were very long.

“You must come and see me,” she said, “for old times’ sake. And maybe some new times too.” And he went home that day with her number in his phone.

I leave you in the corner

[Braille Face flash fiction no. 9, based on Becase.]

When he left me I talked to him more than I ever had before. He had gone, vanished, left not just me but the country, translated himself into Japanese so I didn’t even understand the characters, but he was there in my head all the time, or not so much in my head as standing a little distance away, slightly turned away from me, bodiless but present. And I wanted to explain myself to him, to justify myself. I wanted him to see my worth, which he had so deeply wounded. I still felt that if only he understood me I would be, at last, truly understood; that being known by him was somehow better than being known by anyone else.

“You’re well rid of him,” said my friends, who wanted to comfort me. “Wash your hands of that arsehole. He didn’t deserve you.”

But I wasn’t angry with him – I couldn’t be. That would be to lose all of him, not just the man himself, but the idea of him too. So I shared with him what I was seeing and thinking. I tried not to talk over the quarrels too much. They had been so petty – little disagreements about whether or not to join a dinner party or take a taxi.

We had shared, always, a delight in air and light, and as I walked up the hill I told him silently of the exhilarating blue of the sky and the crisp November cold. I wanted to paint it and I was already planning how I would choose my colours, mixing as little as I could because the intensity seemed more essential than the exact hue. “This I have,” I told him, “this capacity for delight. This ability to be open. And maybe I was awkward with your scientific friends sometimes, but I feel – you know I feel the beauty you feel.”

Then I stopped for a moment by a tree and saw on its bark a moth. If he’d been there he would have been able to tell me the name, and its habits, and why it was there so late in the year with its wings spread, quite still, on the bark of a tree. But I looked closely and I saw the filigree of its pattern, its delicate antennae and legs, the segments of its body. I knew this was the kind of thing he’d taught me to notice, because I’d never been one for insects – I liked grand things, bright colours, but he was the master of detail, knowing all the parts, and this was in any case his field of expertise. I took a picture of the moth on my phone.

Back home I decided to paint the moth. “Look at this,” I told him. “I’m giving it my spin. See, the detail, the accuracy, no distortion – you could call it obsessive. But I am putting in the sky colours. I’m putting in the green the hill wanted to be and the blinding gold of the sun. I’m doing something that talks about how bright life is even in small creatures like this one. I’m seeing it as hard as I can.”

When I’d finished I didn’t know who to show it to. It wasn’t the kind of work I normally did and gave to my friends (I’m not a professional artist, just an amateur, but it gets the best of me, I think); they would see it was good, but they wouldn’t be excited by it or realise how zoologically precise it was. So I put it in an envelope and I posted it to him in Osaka, to the real, physical him.

Two weeks later I got a letter from him, an actual physical letter. He always had that knack for an old-fashioned courtesy. The letter said thankyou for the beautiful gift. It said that he knew how much he had hurt me, that he was terribly sorry. That it was kind of me to send this but that I was only hurting myself now. That I should know he had met someone else and that he hoped, though he knew how hard it would be, that I could move on.

I felt, for the first time, real anger. And shame, bitter shame. Because he was right – and yet completely wrong. Why had he said nothing about my work, or nothing substantial? It wasn’t enough to call it beautiful – it was good, it was maybe the first really good thing I had ever done, it had taken what he had given me and made something new. And he thought it was all about him. Which it was, but also, it wasn’t.

I raised up the puppet of him I had been talking to all those weeks. I walked it to the corner. I laid it down there. And I turned my back.

Ondioline

Mermaid, by John William Waterhouse

Ondioline is a short squat nymph, singer, shape-shifter, little sister; a cousin of Echo; a worker of magic of limited means. The waves of her birth-land still hush inside her. She is incongruous sitting humbly on the carpet, waiting for him to call out her music. She is good and sweet and extremely dangerous. I look after her as best I can; after all, I am the boring one. I miss him too.

Glow

Photo from http://www.waitomo.com

I remember the drip of water into water. Or perhaps I’m making that up, since it is such an inevitable feature of any scene involving a cave in film? It’s hard to know how much I have mentally rewritten at this distance of years. But anyway, the drips, the hush falling on the chattering group as our boat slipped through water into the dark, even our pompous Maori guide (“Now we will reveal the hidden wonders of Waitomo”) silent for the moment – these are in my memory. And then the thousand lights of the glowworms starring the roof, as though the sky had been buried in New Zealand. I thought about chthonic deities, the boat of Charon crossing to the underworld, the ships of the dead in Egyptian tombs, the mystical death and rebirth of the sun-god. I thought about the agonisingly patient calcite drip of the stalactites and about how the glowworms were carnivorous and their lights meant they wanted to lure and eat something. I thought that if I unbuttoned your fly and slipped in a hand probably no-one but you would notice. But I didn’t do it. In retrospect, it was a turning point.

Get lost

Damn, that road to the left must have been the one he wanted. He’s been driving for eight hours and he’s going 130kph in the wrong direction as the sun starts to sink. He needs to make a u-turn. He slows, then slows even more, because a girl is coming round the corner on a horse. She catches his eye, she waves. He can’t u-turn now. She’ll think he’s following her. So he drives a bit further, seeing no good place to turn around, and he keeps going on as the dusk gathers, till he finds himself at the end of his energy in a town so small it’s no more than a whistle-stop, but with one hotel that must serve as bar and shop and emergency roadhouse for the whole empty country for miles around. And then

the locals are unfriendly, he’s a city boy, his car is vandalised, he goes for a walk unwisely, sees things he shouldn’t, horrible stains, guns and chainsaws, they’re after him, heart pumping panic in the dark

heard it before, try something else

Duet

The twin spacecraft of the STEREO mission (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) were launched on Wednesday, 26th October, 2006 at 00:52 Coordinated Universal Time. As they orbited the moon very slightly apart, its gravity flung them in opposite directions, the ‘Ahead’ (A) satellite directly into a heliocentric path, the ‘Behind’ (B) satellite once more around the earth before it followed. Now both circle the sun, sending back data on storms and flares that cannot be seen from earth itself. Like the eyes of an invisible face they see it in 3D. Because A’s orbit is slightly inside the earth’s and B’s slightly outside, they drew further and further apart from each other until on 6 February 2011 they were at 180 degrees, gazing on the sun from opposite sides. Then they began to move closer again. They will pass earth some time in 2023, but they will never come back down.

Like a Brother

This story is based on the song of the same name by The Basics. In view of that I’d like to stress that none of the characters is intended as a portrait of anybody.

One of the first pieces of advice I got given when I started living in shared houses was “never go out with your housemate”. This was when I was still a student, and the shared houses tended to have six or seven people in them and a lot of arguments over selfish refrigerator use and dumping people’s washing out of the machine; a recently split couple could be worse than a strong cheese for the atmosphere of such a place. Now I’m in a house of only three, but I’m remembering that advice. The other girl, Julie, is hardly ever around. She has a severe gym habit and a boyfriend on the other side of town. Most of the time it’s just me and Fergus.

Fergus is a quiet guy. Big, thoughtful, reliable. Has an office job, a civil service type thing, forms and databases. Spends his evenings tackling guitar solos in his room with the amp turned right down. That’s when he doesn’t come and sit in the kitchen and talk with me. Admittedly it’s mostly me doing the talking: he’s a good listener and I feel I can tell him things. He never needs anything explained, he always gets it. Or sometimes we’ll set up one of the laptops on the table, bring cushions, and watch a silly film together. We seem to have the same sense of humour.

And yes, I did sleep with him once. A bit over a month ago at the end of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure we simply went to the same room instead of different ones, and frankly it was rather a nice experience. But neither of us has mentioned it since and I’m not going to. I like our relationship how it is.