ÉCLAT FICTION
ÉCLAT FICTION
AN ONLINE FICTION ANTHOLOGY
EDITOR: Matthew Morgan - matthew@eclatfiction.com
www.eclatfiction.com | contact@eclatfiction.com
Copyright © Éclat Fiction 2012
CONTENTS Place Mark 9 Mandy Taggart (1st place prize winner) The Bay 16 Benjamin Judge (2nd place prize winner) The Emperor 22 Elliot Mayhew (3rd place prize winner) Black
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Lisa Harvey
Your Ghost 30
Sarah Evans
Fruit of Emperors
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Angela Readman
Patriarch
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Niall O’Donoghue
A Moment in the Snow
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Will Watts
The Meltemi James Pulford
Through the will the soul frees itself from distraction and mere dreams.
T
he imprint of Father has been smoothed from the cushions, and his ashtrays all thrown away. It’s best to do these things quickly, Mother
says, before you get the chance to dote on them. She must have been cleaning ever since the funeral. Atomised bleach slaps Stephen in the face, dries to a scab in the back of his throat. A week late but here is Stephen, with his acceptable excuse: travelling
with work, a mistake at reception in the conference centre. Of course, he was always going to come. Mother nods in rehearsed agreement, and they even manage to hug each other around the shoulders. Stephen is relieved to find that neither of them intends to cry. Mother has brought something to the door with her. “I kept this for you. I know you’ll remember it well.” She has it into Stephen’s hand before he’s ready. He looks down, and his fingers refuse to clasp over it. He could throw it to the floor, but they ÉCLAT FICTION
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would have to talk about a thing like that. The years have not aged Mother. Or perhaps she has aged, and then grown younger again. With a pretence of carelessness she invites Stephen to sit down in Father’s armchair and he does it, as if carelessly, vinyl air huffing the backs of his trousers. He still holds his hand flat out in front of him, like a butler with a message on a tray, or a child with a dead thing. The first time that he has ever openly sat in this chair, instead of sneaking into it, and it puts the twist of transgression into his stomach. He used to steal Father’s newspaper and correct the mistakes in his crossword, fill the blank spaces that had baffled him, knowing that Mother would be blamed for leaving it in his way. From Father’s view of command, the room is larger than Stephen remembers. It isn’t supposed to work like that: remembered places should be small, because you’ve grown in between times. And it’s clean. He’s never seen it clean before. He peers into unfamiliar corners: the jut of wires at the back of the sunburst clock, a dark rectangle where Father’s bookcase used to stand. Now, a haphazard pile of cowboy novels lies in the place that it left, long-shadow typeface on sunset jackets, here and there the sober spine and mortar board logo of a Cambridge Budget Classic. Some are lying open with faces mashed into the rug, and the skirting board is feathered with bits of splintered wood. ÉCLAT FICTION
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“Well, then. Remember that?” says Mother. Stephen swallows and nods, keeping his face level, trying to gauge where she’s going. “It’s the bookmark you sent him, the first year you were away. Back in the days when you still kept in touch.” Mother’s face is composed, newly waved hair settled in softness but the voice like a hand on his throat. “The special one,” she says. “I remember the day it came. He was all pleased with it, you know. He liked to show it off to people.” The navy strip lies like a bruise across Stephen’s palm and he nods. He smiles. The sentimental one, where you make your eyes go soft. “And he always used it, oh, yes. To keep his place. You knew him well, giving him that. He was so proud of you, your Father’s son. Always said you didn’t take your brains off the back stone. Of course, I was never a reader.” Stephen looks down again. Fifteen years have softened the leather, all chewy tufts and a brownness along the back, as if it was trying to go back to the colour of the animal that it came from. A few strands are missing from the fringe, snapped down to stubs with raw twisted edges. On its face, faint scratches of gold that were once an imprint of the College Chapel, echoes of letters that spelled the University’s name. The special one. So proud. A late October morning, hung over, making ÉCLAT FICTION
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his mind chatter nonsense over memories of humiliation the night before. He’d been tempted to pretend he forgot Father’s birthday, let Mother be blamed for not reminding him. But he’d made himself go out, zipped his coat against the fog, and turned into the craft market opposite the Great Gate, a friendly cluster of stalls behind iron railings. Convenient for the type of shopper who starts early and wants something different for Christmas. Cinnamon scent clogged his head as he picked up spindle-framed pictures, layered in silk, of cats and their kittens. Bubbles of glass painted so brightly that he wanted to hold them up and taste them, spangled lime and tangerine. Silk purses and hearts of padded fabric, jewelled ceramic eggs. They wouldn’t last a week before Father swept them flying off the smoky mantelpiece into the ashes. “Get him something about a boat, or gardening,” said Mother, on the phone. “Or horses.” A boat? The sliding mirror river, lapping water, Mole and Ratty, evening sunlight and honey still for tea. Father wouldn’t know about that, cleaning out mackerel at the tap in the yard, rain and black blood puddled in the gutter where the cats hunched growling over the guts. He would stamp in from his clabbery potatoes and sneer at watercolour flowers, spotless trugs and trowels. Or horses. The hunt in full gallop, a heavy shire grazing at dawn with sun-slanted mist rising off the fens. Nothing ÉCLAT FICTION
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here about the two-thirty at Goodwood and six horse accumulators. He won eighty pounds, once, and Stephen roared and screamed at the TV with him as the last one came in. He found the right place in the end. Souvenirs for the tourists, University T-shirts for people who would never go to the University. That sort of stall was usually in the Market Square, by the Corn Exchange, but one had slipped in here, quietly, when no-one was looking. Stephen knew how it felt: that twist in his stomach had burrowed in permanently. Bookmarks: they were cheap. That would do him. If Stephen were to lift it up to his face now, it would smell of the things it has absorbed. Cigarette smoke, creeping onion fog from the kitchen, blood from his hands. Whiskey and tears, and screams, and a low trace of dead animal. But Father chose to fold his own story around all that. So proud. “No, you didn’t take the reading off the back stone, either,” says Mother. “The pair of you with your heads down from morning till night. If I’d had money of my own I might just have left you both to each other.” She tilts her chin forward, daring Stephen to take her up on it. “I used to call you for your dinner five times and you wouldn’t even hear me. And when you did – oh, the face like thunder. Just like your Father.” And what if I’d taken your side, Mother? Stephen wonders. But she ÉCLAT FICTION
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doesn’t have the wit to understand that. A white petal drifts down to the hearth, all polished, and Stephen feels the familiar jolt of irritation, the flash to the muscles. But Stephen had been different. Stephen had always held his hands behind his back. He had his future to think of, so he’d learnt how to punish her without hands. “Mother, when you found it – was it keeping his place?” It’s in the clench of her neck. She doesn’t need to say anything. The pause of a thick, interrupted finger on a page. “Ah – yes, now. Yes, it was. It was inside the book that he was reading when he – when he was awake. His last place. You know, I think it was an old book of yours. One of the things that you left behind, and never came back for.” She narrows her eyes, trying to look clever and meaningful. “It’s lucky they didn’t all get destroyed,” she says. “He wasn’t good at looking after things, was he?” Stephen shakes his head and tries to smile again: the blank one, this time, that acknowledges nothing. “It’s funny, now,” she says. “I don’t remember what I did with that book. It was definitely yours. I could tell by the big words. And imagine that – I just slipped the bookmark out, without even thinking.” She almost giggles. “Dear me. Father wouldn’t be happy, would he? If he knew that I hadn’t kept his place.” She leans back in her own armchair, fragrant with plumped cushions, ÉCLAT FICTION
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and hoods her eyes. Smug, now. That jump of heat pulses again, and he sees that she always knew. The one who could never touch her. No future now to stop him, but Mother doesn’t know that. “You can take that with you when you go.” Stephen stands up. The dark blue skin lies loose across his hand, dividing one side from the other, without any story now that can bind it.
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T
1 he ghost of Unity Mitford sits on my sofa, licking icing sugar from her glassy fingers. The top three buttons of her blouse are undone.
Michael, my boyfriend, thinks I can’t see him staring at her cleavage. I can. And I can see her too, squirming with joy at his attention. When Michael walks into the kitchen to fetch another beer, trying to hide the beginnings of an erection, she turns and winks at me, like the
two of us are playing some complicated game with him. I scowl back and mouth the words go fuck yourself Unity. She laughs and undoes another button on her blouse. If this is a game, I lost a long time ago. 2 I first caught them together last month. They were in the bathroom; him half undressed, her perched on the edge of the bath. Her big eyes ÉCLAT FICTION
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simpering oh, but we shouldn’t. His clothes stink of her cigarettes. His eyes follow her around the flat as we talk. When we make love he looks over my shoulder and I have to pretend he isn’t watching her as he screws me. I have to keep reminding myself this is my house. 3 When I was six, my father took me on holiday in his campervan. It was November so we filled the van with duvets, blankets, and all weather sleeping bags. He drove for hours until we got to a little campsite with only five empty plots. Our tent overlooked a series of little pools of water separated by banks of mud and clumps of long grass. Further out, toward the sea, the grass was shorter. My father told me that this was a salt marsh. The grass was shorter nearer the sea because sheep lived on it. The land nearer to us, with the pools, was a nature reserve. A sad looking fence of rusted wire, spooled between broken posts, marked the boundary between the two. My father set up his telescope and through the lens I could see the ducks on the water. He taught me how to tell them apart; pintail, mallard, gadwall, shoveler, wigeon, teal. He showed me the waders on the mudflat. As we watched them, the one with red legs, the redshank, took to the air with a kyip-kyip-kyip-kyip. Its panic was infectious. All the ÉCLAT FICTION
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other birds around it took to the air. My father showed me why. In the air above the reserve a buzzard was circling. The buzzard had seen a dead sheep on the marsh, but the waders didn’t know that. They didn’t know anything except how to react to the buzzard’s silhouette when it broke the horizon. They didn’t know anything except how best to avoid their deaths at its claws. 4 On the computer’s internet search history I found the Wikipedia biography of Unity Mitford, Google searches for her name, image searches, maps of Munich. When I saw them there, when I saw Michael had been researching her, I pictured him staring at the screen while she leaned over him, breathing corrections and anecdotes into his ear. I imagined her spinning him around in the desk chair to reveal that while he had been distracted by her life, she had stripped down to a Utility bra and a pair of silk knickers. Then him kneeling down before her... And as I was thinking this, she was watching me. She was stood in the doorway of the kitchen and the nonchalant slant of her body, the tilt of her head, was asking What? What? I could feel tears welling up but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing them. And then I realised; there was nowhere I could go that she couldn’t follow.
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5 At the end of the weekend, my father and I packed the campervan neatly. He lifted me into the passenger seat and fitted my seatbelt. He asked me if I wanted to see a magic trick; got me to close my eyes and to imagine a roast dinner cooked by my mother. Then he started the engine and told me to count to a hundred. Before I had finished counting we were home. The campsite was no more than a mile from our house. He had driven for hours on the Saturday so that he could make the end of the weekend magical, and to show me that where I lived was magical too. I still think it is. I live in a house that stands where the campsite used to be. I have the same view now that I had that weekend. 6 I found Unity, or rather she found me, in the Landtmann coffee house in Vienna. She followed me around the city for the rest of my holiday; moping around the Secession Building while I looked at Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze; sniffing longingly at my Sachertorte; cackling what a fatty at the Venus of Willendorf. She has followed me around ever since. Wherever I went she would be dragging her heels three steps behind me. She perked up the first time she met Michael though. She tends not to leave the house so much now, especially if Michael is at home. At the top of the Gloriette at the Schönbrunn Palace she became ÉCLAT FICTION
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serious. She pointed to a medal on her chest and then took in the surroundings with a swoop of her arms. I shook my head. No. I still think that if I had let her think I agreed with her childish notions, she would have abandoned me on the steps of that folly. Instead she followed me home. Instead, she decided to teach me the lessons of conquest. 7 Michael isn’t the first. There was Joel before him. When I packed Joel’s stuff in a fruit box and sent him back to his mother’s I thought Unity would go with him, but she stayed. She stomped from room to room, broke anything delicate, interfered with the electricity, howled like a dog, but she stayed. I know that when I throw Michael out, she will stay again. It is me she wants. It is taunting me that gives her pleasure. 8 Sometimes, when Unity gets bored, she wanders out onto the salt marsh with a tiny pistol. She usually heads off at dusk so that the setting sun will glint in the metal of the gun. Drama queen, diva, medusa. She wades out into one of the pools, splashing water like a child in wellingtons, scattering geese in her wake. She pauses in the shallows, places the gun to her head, and pulls the trigger. ÉCLAT FICTION
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In death, as in life, she manages to fuck up the simplest of operations. She lies in the mud, one arm thrashing, legs twitching, a mind full of regrets. By midnight she has usually dragged herself back to the house. In the morning I get out a mop and clear up the red-brown mud she has trailed through the kitchen.
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H
e sits planted in an easy chair, deep down in fabric, eyes half closed. He breathes staccato; through cigar-tailored lungs, out of a concave
chest. He hums a little, lips open, and a tune spills out into the warm
fuzz of the room. He recites dusty, timeworn music, pom-pomming and harrumphing against the quiet of the winter late afternoon. Outside, branches rise and dip, the wind orchestrating everything in view through a vast patio door. A weather vane atop a wooden outhouse spins wildly, manically as a perching blackbird twitches, staring past the glass into the glow of the room. The old man, he of white pomade considered hair, looks right back at the bird. The electric lights above him flicker and he pulls his woollen cardigan close to him, before finishing his black boot ditty with a sigh. He turns away from the great window and the bird beyond to look about the room, from the low ceiling down to the thick white carpet, ÉCLAT FICTION
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then left and right. The space around him is teeming with clutter; books climb walls, papers burst from files stuffed with long forgotten stories, inscribed ornaments of every hue sit on shelf after crowded shelf. Three great lamps, like redwoods, tower over him from behind, making him appear smaller, lower, and deeper in the chair. He surveys these bricks, constituents of empire and sucks in the hot air. Then coughs. Suddenly the blackbird flies as if fired from cannon into the pane of glass, thudding before dropping still to the paves. The old man’s eyes are wild, convex, surveying the disaster. He reaches up with one hand, wavering, oscillating, while his other paw pushes on the arm of the chair. Eyes close, a mouth widens, a tongue exits like the last day of summer. His arms push, his back tenses, effort running from brain to body, and a chest sticks out like a stricken quail. But he does not move out of the seat. Instead he is in reverse. He sinks into the chair once again, and is lost. How far down into the soft cotton he goes and for how long, no one can say. Perhaps a thousand miles and a thousand years. Perhaps he goes beyond the confines of this world into another. Perhaps he sleeps like death. Outside, the bird spasms. There is quiet within and without. Then a white haired wrinkly head peeps out into the world of men. His ancient blue eyes look to a circular wooden coffee table nearby. They focus on a little gold bell perched on top of it. His face contorts to reflect a mind ÉCLAT FICTION
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with an acute, narrow thought. To ring is to bring. He had been told many times. But such ringing, calling for help is an admission of age, degradation and actuality. Always, even when in the bloom of youth, he has gone against the limitations of actuality. With vigour, with humour and for the love of his voice, he has fought for the building of towers, taller than heaven, the breeding of armies greater than any the world had ever seen, and the dissemination of his gospel to the four corners of the Earth. He has searched for enemies, destroyed some and created more, and cowed good friends and bad to his will. He has dreamt a way of living beyond the confines of the petty, dirty Earth of mortals, and he has brought millions into the dreamspace. For a life-age of this world he was charmed, invincible. But no longer. A finger, crooked and greyish now reaches out, extends towards the loop of the bell top. He strains, body tight again. He is closer, but cannot reach. He looks out of the window to a night drawing in. A sliver of pink twilight bleeds into the coming dark, staying it a little, lighting up the past. He hums as he pushes at the chair, both hands in unison, with renewed vigour and determination. He’s tense and hot, feels heavier than lead, but his buttocks leave the bowels of the seat for a moment as two wizened arms suspend the body of the old man a little way into space. He smiles with absent teeth, eyes wider than the sky. Swiftly, one hand ÉCLAT FICTION
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goes for the bell. It falls short and immediately the old man slumps like tired laundry into the depths of the seat. He waits. He sees a tower, as tall as his father, taller than time. He stands over it and surveys his empire; ants, women and paper swirling in the wind. The moon appears. The tune of old runs from brain to lip, and out into the balmy universe. It is rousing. The brain tries movement. He moves. It is not smooth but direct and purposeful. In one crusade, he lifts, leans, arms stretching out and down. A finger unfurls like the oldest of flags, creeps through the bell handle, perfectly guided. He hoists his hand, the bell rings loud, he harrumphs the last of the tune. The old man relaxes into his throne, an emperor deposed but dignified, regal, with a happy smile upon his corrugated face. He waits for another thousand years. An ice age. He watches as the dark drinks the pink and reds of sunset before spilling the pale white light of the moon over the sky. A knock at the door. “Yes?” he says. He coughs. A uniformed woman appears nervous and small, eyes lowered. She smiles as she creeps before her lord. He looks to her. He waits. “Sir?” she asks. “Yes?” he says. They look to each other; blue eyes to warm brown, old eyes to young, free to enslaved, and linger in bewilderment. After a time of shifting ÉCLAT FICTION
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hands behind her back, she sucks on that warm, lifeless air and says, “Can I help you sir?” The man looks to the night, blackening save for the small moon, then to her, and says as he sinks into the deep, “No.”
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E
ncroaching dusk is his favorite time of the day. The leaves turn silver, he tells me, like fish glinting on a spear. We sit in plastic chairs,
perpendicular to one another. I’m slouched in my seat, knees bent, feet in his lap. He slides a hand up my calf, absent mindedly. Desire is one of two things: it’s the shocking hunger for something
foreign and forbidden or else it’s the reliable pantry of bodies being taken for granted. I take a sip from my drink and sink into it, extending a leg, forcing his hand up my thigh. He talks about the silhouette of unnamed trees against a darkening horizon. He shows me the things I would have missed: the way the shadows come slowly for hours and then all at once like a birth. The night arrives: the day suddenly black, like the sun never existed at all. He talks about the beauty of seeing merely the outline of a thing that minutes ago was a cacophony of detail in flesh. ÉCLAT FICTION
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His hand stops the thing it’s doing on my thigh, pauses. He waits expectantly, urging me out of my world, beckoning me into his kind of darkness. He wants me to know it. He wants me to experience it the way he does. I wait, the beginning of a sigh caught in my throat, like a lock of hair in a blender, finger to the switch. “Do you hear it?” he asks. I push my leg forward; my darkness cannot be understood in absence of context. “Listen.” I listen while I wait. Night noises. Wiry crickets and the guttural dampness of frogs. I imagine snakes and ants working over the blackness of the world, blueprints for total occupation in hand. The cretins of the earth, the beasts that repulse the sun, go about their business in the dark so as not to offend. Steadfast, earnest, believing themselves superior to those who are, in reality, more uninterested than afraid. I close my eyes and take in the warm, wet smell of a country nighttime. And then, suddenly as a baby’s cry, I’m lost somewhere in between this night and that other one. I’m recreating scenes with a furious pen, aiming to stay just one page, one sentence, one slip of the hand ahead of that first draft. In my mind, I cover the ground, last minute, with a soft, thick blanket. Still, my back stings with the memory of pine needles and stones as I ÉCLAT FICTION
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take him inside me. I’m trading faces, swapping out settings, renaming characters to make the story as pretty as it needs to be. I change details for survival; it’s what a writer does. “A silhouette is like the ghost of a thing,” he whispers into my hair. His words are wet paint, and if eating them would replace my memories, I’d do it before either of us could stop me.
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I
pick up the phone and listen to the breath of silence. ‘You?’ I say. ‘I’m in town. Meet me here.’ The husk of your voice – your arrogance
– are unmistakable. It’s more summons than question and I respond the way I always do. ‘Where?’ The pause lingers and I fear we’ve lost the connection. ‘Mojos, it’s called. Know it?’ ‘Marmot Street?’ ‘Something like that. Meet me here.’ And the line dies. I still have the handset in my hand when Sean wanders into the kitchen. ‘Who was it?’ His tone is idle enough. ‘Oh,’ I say, equally casual back. ‘Just one of the girls from work. Look I’ve got to go out.’ ÉCLAT FICTION
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‘Out?’ ‘Boyfriend crisis.’ I pull a face and kiss Sean briefly with puckered lips. ‘Don’t wait up; it might be a late one.’ ‘Take care,’ he says, the words bouncing off my retreating back. It’s not the sort of bar I usually go to, not these days. Years ago and the air would have been thick with tobacco mingling with the sweet scent of green; I’d get high just on the second hand smoke. I was high on you. Even with the smoking ban, the air is stale. The ceilings are nicotine yellow. And everyone’s high on something. My eyes search the corners, seeking out a lonesome figure, except that’s far too optimistic. I find you at the centre of a rapidly laughing group. Newly made friends. I wonder if my purpose in coming has already been superseded; in the time it took to get here, you grew bored of waiting. I take in the members of your entourage. A few guys. An older woman. And a young thing, all shimmering hair and flowing clothes and wide-eyed wonder. You always did enjoy adoration. I hover in this moment of before, the moment when I can still walk away. Perhaps you sense my wavering, because it’s precisely at the point my leg muscles tense with the intention to leave that your eyes lock onto mine – without any scanning hesitation – as if knowing all along that I ÉCLAT FICTION
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was there. Your lips were already curving upwards, but still it feels as if your smile, that sardonic air of amusement, is just for me. You don’t pause amidst your anecdote to beckon me over, but that instant of resolve, of walking on by, has passed, if indeed it was ever truly there. I walk towards you, conscious of the swing of my hips and the uncertainty of my smile, wishing my hair quite so short, that I’d taken the time to dress up more, wishing myself back younger. There is no free chair and my eyes flick around, but then you move, leaving the narrowest of openings beside you on the wide stool. I push my way into the group, rude and abrupt, claiming my place, my hip jutting against yours. Your hand finishes tracing circles in the air and lands, as if without purpose, on my knee. Your voice continues. The gathered group are in thrall. I don’t strain to distil the words – I’ve heard it all before – I simply give myself over to the thrum and song of your voice and the teasing caress of your fingers on my inner thigh. An age passes and the talk and laughter are at a lull. You turn to me, your fingers gripping tighter. ‘Hey,’ you say, your voice a whispering tease. Hey. As if that’s enough to account for a year with no contact. A year, two months and a bit. ‘How’s you?’ I ask, intending to sound offhand, but my voice emerges sharp with wanting to know. ÉCLAT FICTION
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You shrug with characteristic insouciance. ‘You know,’ you say and you hold your hand out before you, palm down, and tilt it side to side. It trembles a little. The evening proceeds with slow inevitability. The crowd thins. Deprived of the wider audience, your attention focuses more on me. Even the young adorator loses hope and drifts off in search of a better proposition. It’s just the two of us. You’re quiet now, free of the need to impress, sure of yourself and of what was always yours for the asking. ‘What happened to the blonde?’ I ask, remembering the tabloid photos, the mismatch between youthful beauty and your weathered experience. You shrug again, dismissing her. ‘I’m with someone,’ I say. ‘Nearly nine months now.’ A period of gestation. Enough to deliver a verdict, though I haven’t done, not yet. Your eyes look into mine, devoid of curiosity, of jealousy, knowing the story without me having to relate it. After all, here I am and that tells you everything you need to know. ‘You want to come up,’ you say. ‘I’ll play you something.’ My heart thuds as I nod and my legs wobble as I rise to follow you. ÉCLAT FICTION
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My arm presses the length of yours in the lift. I think, passingly, of Sean and of what I stand to lose. The room has a floor that slopes and wooden beams holding the ceiling up. I accept your offer of a beer from the fridge that is rumbling away in the corner. We clink bottles then drink from them. You have some sort of miniature music player – coming with the room, or with you, I don’t know – and you press buttons until the music plays. The voice – your distinctive rasp – fills the room, slow and clear and plaintive, a man’s plea to a woman. Except you were never one to plead. You stand in the middle of the floor, feet on the textured rug atop the polished floorboards. Your arms open out in question; I step between them, letting you enfold me, and I lay my head on your shoulder. We dance. Rhythmically we sway back and forth to the soft heartache of the music and all the longing in the world drenches through. In the morning when I wake, you are gone. No goodbyes, no note, nothing but the clamminess of empty sheets and your peaty scent and the throbbing of my head. I dress quickly, grateful that it’s Saturday with no work to face, but wishing there was a way of postponing going home. Sean is sitting elbows propped on the table, nursing coffee like it’s whisky, his eyes heavy with sleep and barbed with accusation. ÉCLAT FICTION
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‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘turned into a late one and it was easier to stay over.’ Which strictly speaking is not untrue. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t make it worse by lying.’ I wonder what he knows and what my best bet is. I make myself coffee slowly and then come and sit opposite. ‘What d’you mean?’ I ask with just the smallest hint of indignation. His eyes flick up and away. ‘I heard he was in town.’ Which isn’t exactly proof. ‘It isn’t what you think.’ ‘No?’ The word rises in a sneer and I have to remind myself that he’s hurt and he hurts because he cares. ‘He’s an old friend.’ ‘Friend?’ It’s there again the sneer and it’s unpleasant and perhaps that’s why I say more harshly than I mean to, ‘an old lover then.’ ‘I wouldn’t mind the old,’ he says, switching from anger to misery. ‘If that was all.’ ‘It is all.’ ‘So it wasn’t him you stayed with last night?’ I wish there was an answer I could give that would soothe away the jealousy and distrust. Sean worshipped you too, that makes it worse I think. Sean revelled in the songs of love gone wrong and the wrongs that love compels us to do. ÉCLAT FICTION
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‘No,’ I say. ‘I did stay with him. But it isn’t what you think.’ ‘And what am I supposed to think?’ ‘We didn’t have sex last night.’ ‘You waited till the morning then.’ His sarcasm stings; he knows I like to make love in the morning. ‘No. Nothing happened.’ Not in that way. He sits there, wanting to believe me, reluctant to let go his anger, not wanting to be taken as a fool. I remain silent, wishing I could explain but unable to, caught between conflicting loyalties. I don’t want to expose what you are reduced to. Last night I lay in a twin bed with a former lover. The years of drugs and alcohol have taken their toll and that, I know, is why you rang me, rather than picking up someone new. We held each other, simply held each other through the night and I warmed you against the shiver of death, holding on to what remains, before you dissolve away to nothing like a ghost.
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T
hey were starving. There are many things a man can to do to distract himself from hunger, the old man said. His back was to the fence, the
wire no longer dug tunnels in his flesh, his spine hit the metal first. He reached for a nettle on the other side of the fence. All the dandelions had gone. The boy saw the man’s lips move. He saw the way he looked at the clouds snagged on barbed wire, but he did not understand. The old man spoke in a language with Ks that no longer sounded like they kicked anyone. Still, the old man talked. The boy cocked his head and listened to the low murmur of his voice, reassuring as distant tides. The boy thought of the sea to sweep him from his hunger. He closed his eyes and curled his toes sometimes to feel the grainy give of sand. The sun moved behind the fence, in and out of cloud. For a moment light warmed the old man’s face. The boy watched him unfold an arm ÉCLAT FICTION
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from across his ribs and slowly reach up, pick something that wasn’t there from the air. The boy stared at the old man’s hands. He could tell by the cup of his palm that the nothing the old man held was something round. He saw the lack of sharp edges in withered fingers. The man paused, bending thin wrists to feel its weight. ‘Is it an apple? Pear? I know it’s fruit,’ the boy said. The man looked at the incomprehensible O’s of the boy’s mouth and lifted his fruit to his cheek. The boy watched him brush it against his skin, court it like he was slow dancing with a girl. He could almost feel the peach, its shy velvet, the smell the old man swayed in front of his nose. The old man scraped his teeth across the downy skin, only just piercing one point. Gently, he began to peel the skin. Never, would he bruise the soft fruit. Rapt, the boy saw the old man take a bite, savour it in his mouth and lick juice off his hands. The old man smiled, turned to the boy and handed him the invisible peach. Then he leant back against the fence and closed his eyes. The boy cradled the fruit then took a bite of air. He ate till his teeth scraped the stone in his hand. Later, he couldn’t explain how it was the best peach he ever tasted, or how it kept him alive. There would be times when he was grown, a man sitting on a train, when he’d pluck a peach like it from the smoky air and hold it to his face, feel something and nothing, once again. ÉCLAT FICTION
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O
nce or twice a year my father takes to the devil drink and it makes an angel out of him. Or a cherub in a grey business suit, stepping
tentatively across the threshold and looking up at our faux-chandelier light as though he’d accidentally walked into the Winter Palace. His shining scalp is flushed red and spittle bubbles on his lips but his teeth are as white as ever. Or rather, the faded yellow of a tea-drinker. Still holding his work bag stuffed full with free newspapers, discount granola bars and complimentary leaflets he hasn’t the heart to turn down, he
steps over the doormat like a tripwire and unleashes an enormous, open mouthed grin at my mother and I who might as well have burst out of a giant cardboard box with glitter and poppers and a big pretend bow. He lets the bag drop from his hand and pulls half-heartedly at his tie, smiling at us through eyes glimmering with tears of suppressed, inexplicable mirth. The overwhelming innocence with which his dilated ÉCLAT FICTION
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pupils move sluggishly from face to face, yet beaming all the while, makes me suddenly cry out with joy; not because our father is a cold man, but rather that the absence of his misplaced sense of patriarchal decorum makes a new-born babe from this man with a silver crown. He is no longer concerned with keeping his plate still when he eats, reducing his booming guffaws into rapid and convoluted nasal exhalation or looking out over his reading glasses while his eyebrows make sure to smash together in a frown of apocalyptic proportions. Now he is in incoherent with hysterical laughter before you even start telling a joke. He can see the anticipation in your eyes before you take that preparatory breath and it ignites the bubbling well of shrieking, catholic-schoolboy glee crushed beneath a forty-four hour week in local government. His hand is up to his face in some futile effort to contain himself while creases in his soft and oily skin race across his face like ripples over water. His gargantuan nostrils flare and he draws up all the happiness contained in the molecules of air around him that nobody else is really able to notice, and knocks himself back with the sudden force of ecstasy that erupts from within. He puts a hand against the wall and looks at me bashfully. My brother is bent at the waist over the banister at the top of the stairs, so that with every laugh he bounces slightly, rocking back and forth and squeezing air out of each chortle like a broken bicycle pump. My mother has her ÉCLAT FICTION
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arms crossed and is looking at my father but I don’t think he is able to differentiate complex facial expressions at this time, and instead just assumes that we are all sympathetic and extremely cheerful. Which she is, really, because she kisses him when he throws an arm around her neck and they begin their struggle upstairs while me and my brother catch eyes and laugh. Despite being so deeply ensconced in his delirium, he recognises the routine we have fallen into through my mother’s wry smile and gestures apologetically with his free hand. She’s in a nightgown, and he still has the government garb hanging from his back while they’re making their way up the speckled cream stairs and out of the crystalline memory that sits in my drunken mind. I’m sitting alone now in the dining room, a few metres away. He’s gone but I can still smell the whiskey on his breath.
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S
tasis. No footprints, paw prints. The roads were empty. Tess leaned out the window and listened to the snow crackling. Jake clutched
at her legs; she picked him up and he folded his legs around her waist, burrowed his head in the crook of her neck. They stared at the unbroken
milky horizon and she stroked his fine soft hair. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she whispered. ‘Just the two of us.’ She helped him into his coat and pulled the toggled buttons through the loops. His lined boots still fitted, just about; she’d have to replace them before long. He stood compliant and still as she fitted his fingers through thick mittens and clasped a bobbled hat onto his head. ‘Can Daddy come?’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘He’s sleeping.’ The first breath outside was a shock. Her chest glowed with cold. The snow was brittle foam beneath her boots and the scrunch of their ÉCLAT FICTION
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footsteps sounded vast in the silence. She took Jake’s hand. It felt tiny nestled in its padded glove. When they reached the end of the garden and turned into the lane she glanced back at the house. It sat solid and square, ringed by low trees, unencumbered by neighbours; last night’s fire still bubbled gently from the chimney. Friends had laughed when Tess told them she and David were moving to Devon. Bets were taken on how soon it would be before they returned to London. Five years later and Tess couldn’t imagine ever living in a city again. Tess and Jake walked along the narrow path. Dense hedging loomed tall on both sides. Jake saw something moving ahead of them. ‘Mummy, look!’ He ran forwards to investigate. A ginger cat emerged from under the hedge, wet and indignant, collar jangling. It must have wandered here from the village, over a mile away. Jake stroked its sleek head until it started and retreated under the hedge. They walked on. The lane curved, widened, began to slope upwards. Jake found a stick and banged it against the sparse trees until dislodged flakes peppered their hair. He scooped a handful of snow and Tess showed him how to ball it tight, palms pushing together, shaping and compressing. She gasped, laughing, when his snowball thumped against her chest, then threw her own snowball, grabbed Jake and swung him giggling through the air, his coat raspy with snow, wriggling and ecstatic. ÉCLAT FICTION
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They had reached the top of the hill. As if by agreement they both fell quiet. The wind swept sharply across their faces and the sky was endless. She pointed out their house, huddled at the hill’s base, and the nearest visible landmarks– the church, the post office, the school. Under the snow, everything was unfamiliar, transformed. Tess noticed Jake shiver; she tucked him against her hip and his breath was a lozenge of warmth against her cheek. She remembered David placing Jake into her arms, the first time– the slippery feel of his skin still bleary with blood, how impotent words were in that moment, how his fingers seemed fragile as eyelashes when they curled around her outstretched thumb. Now he was almost too heavy for her to lift and a current of grief ran through her as she thought of him growing up and away from her. Tess kissed the woolen crest of Jake’s head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get back and cook breakfast.’
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The Meltemi James Pulford
T
he wind was high. Nick could hear it as he lay on the divan couch in the lounge, looking out across the bay through the long, glass wall
of windows. Every minute or so a headlamp would swing round the
headland into view, then glance over the wind-snapped sea, a cursory searchlight. Where the road turned again, leading down to the main drag of Naxos town, the light swung back indifferently. There were two glasses on the table by the couch, one empty, the other untouched. In the twelve years they had been married, Nick thought that he and his wife had argued only as much as any other couple they knew. But now it seemed that these fights had come to characterise their whole relationship. Each day could be measured on that basis — not if they had fought, but how bad the fight had been, and now Nick remembered his father-in-law telling him that conflict seemed to reign over his own marriage like a god from the old mythology. ÉCLAT FICTION
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When she’d left he’d been standing with his back to her, running his fingers through his hair. You don’t understand me, she’d said, you don’t understand a fucking thing. There was truth in that, more truth than Nick knew. In his own listless way, he told her it was made self-evident by the fact they were arguing. But he had no reply to what had come next, no reply when she said, I should have married a Greek. It was then he felt an apology coming, with all the dull predictability of the waves slapping on the rocks below the house. It had come at the time it always did in their arguments, when anything else he said would be no more than a going over of what had been said already. He would blame it all on the heat, the heat adding to the weight of their words, that was it. You can see it, he had told her many times, the heat and the sun in this country, sending everyone mad. But what happened next had stopped him. He had heard the front door bang — then the scrabble of tyres on the dirt road — then nothing. And now he was lying on the divan couch listening to the sound of the wind, watching lights on the road across the bay. Nick went to the kitchen. He washed his hands with soap, then dried them, then washed them again. He knelt by the table — long, fine, Cycladic driftwood — and started picking the fruit off the floor. Half an hour earlier he had sent the whole lot tumbling out the bowl, in one motion, without aggression or threat, but plainly on purpose and so she ÉCLAT FICTION
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could see. It was the first thing he had thought to do to upset her after they had started arguing. She’d spent an hour washing and arranging the fruit the day they arrived. Once they were all back in the bowl he washed his hands again. In front of the window he breathed deeply and watched the lights on the road across the bay. He waited until he had seen five cars go by. It took a while but he felt better for it. Then he slid one of the French doors open. He saw the wind forcing plants flat against the ground, carrying dust and dirt down to the dark sea. It was blowing then as it had the year before, as it would the next. It would blow forever, he knew that. And then, in the face of that thought, everything else seemed far off and for nothing. He got to wondering where she was. The perimeter road was seventy kilometres long and if she was doing eighty most of the way — slowing at hairpins, slowing through the towns — her light would swing round the headland in the next ten minutes. The day they’d arrived he’d told her she was speeding again. It’s only speeding if you’re a tourist, she’d said, Greeks drive at seventy and even if the police stop us, they’ll let us go when they hear me speak. He’d told her he wasn’t worried about the police, he was worried they’d end up like the wrecked Mercedes they’d seen on the road to Piraeus. But she had only told him to lighten up, to stop being so uptight. ÉCLAT FICTION
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Now Nick wasn’t even sure if he’d recognise their car in this light, at this distance. It had been a wedding present from her old Papa but he’d never liked it much, a vintage pokey two-seater which seemed to have decided for them that theirs would be a childless marriage. The day they were married, her Papa had put a fat arm round Nick’s shoulders and led him away from his friends. He had told Nick he was sending them to Naxos for the honeymoon. You won’t ever want to come back, he’d said, it’s paradise, and I swear you can still hear the love songs of Ariadne and the dim drums of Dionysus borne aloft on the wind. He’d winked and said, I like you Nick, you’re not bad for an English man. Every conversation he could remember having with Papa in the past twelve years had been peppered with the same kind of pretentious poeticisms. One month earlier he had overheard the old man comparing Greece’s economic collapse to the fall of the house of Atreus. It was affectation, Nick thought, a crude charm used on his staff and the guests he entertained at the Embassy in order to convince them that he was the real deal. And he used the same lines on the boyfriends and husbands of his daughters again and again, to have them think he was some kind of scholar. He had never really liked this pompous act, but now that the wind has high and he was alone, Nick felt something. Not quite the drums of Dionysus or Ariadne’s song, but a bond with this place, like life was as it always had been on this silent sea-slapped rock, from the peak ÉCLAT FICTION
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of Mount Zeus down to the rushing waves, all of it unchanged and still going on forever. He stepped outside. And then came words, shaping in his mouth, foetal, not the dry cut of ifs and buts, but words on the Meltemi and a sense that they would live differently this time, here, now, tuned to the whine and ring of the wind on the rocks below. He stepped back into the room and filled his glass. When she got back they would talk and make it better. He turned on all the lights so no part of the room was in shadow. This was how he wanted her to find him. Then he kicked off one shoe and tried to get used to the feel of it, so it would look like he hadn’t even noticed it was missing. That sight, surely, was the sign of a sorry man. It’ll show her the discomfort I’ve been through in order to understand, he thought, I’ll show her I understand. She would have calmed down and be ready to talk, he was sure of it, and she’d get back to find him looking shaken and withdrawn. If she saw him like that, she couldn’t get mad again. He would take her in his arms and say he was sorry, promise never to wind her up again. He’d tell her it would be better from then on — here, now — with their whole lives ahead of them. They’d hire a little fishing boat the next day, he knew she’d like that, and even though he couldn’t row, he would do it and they would have fun. He lay down on the couch again and shut his eyes. Then — doubt — swift and sudden as the shot from a bow. He walked to the ÉCLAT FICTION
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window again to feel the Meltemi blow, to have it raise in him that sense of connection, to this place, at this time. It was coming now, the bond. This must be what her old Papa had meant when he spoke of paradise all those years ago. At that moment another headlamp came into view on the road across the bay. It moved faster than the others before it, the bright beam meeting his gaze for less than a second. It hooked round and almost held straight, but then a sudden shudder, then up and round. Now, stopped and staring still across the bay. The car had turned over. No sound the whole time, but the wind and the dust and the dirt. Across the bay, everything still; he didn’t know for how long. Then fire, and the thought that it was her in their car. He saw nothing but the beam and the flames around it, and the reflection of this in the wind-snapped sea. He felt nothing but a slight shock, and his foot getting cold on the floor.
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