The Lampeter Review - Issue 1 by The Lampeter Review

the online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre

issue 1/ july 2010

DIK EDWARDS • Alan Flanders • JOHN LAVIN • Ros Hudis • dave brundage • Rhian Thomas • Maj Ikle • Donald McMann • Gillian Eaton • GILLy BURKE • Carly HOLMES • Rob Morgan

THE LAMPETER REVIEW

The online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com | info@lampeter-review.com EDITED by: John Lavin (jtmlavin@hotmail.com) DESIGNED by: Constantinos Andronis (www.c-andronis.gr) ÂŠ Respective authors

Table of Contents 5

Introduction

Throughout the whole time it rained - DiK Edwards

Three Poems - Alan Flanders

Scaffolding - John Lavin

Mynedd Bach - Ros Hudis

Going Deep - DaVe Brundage

Mermaid - Rhian Thomas

Nana Cash - Maj Ikle

Strip Malls Can Change Your Life - Donald McMann

Blanche - Gillian Eaton

Laughing - Gilly Burke

The Boy Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d Never Tasted Cola - Carly HOLMES

Number 67 - Rob Morgan

Introduction John Lavin

‘If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature if these will lead to greater depths of vision. The artist has to remember that what he is arranging is nature, and that he has to know it and be able to arrange it accurately in order to have the authority to arrange it at all.’ Flannery O’Connor

Welcome to The Lampeter Review, the online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre. Our aim is to provide a platform for the best new writing from both emerging and established authors. Submissions are welcome from everyone. This first issue focuses on work from within the writing centre and includes an exclusive short story by its director, the internationally acclaimed playwright Dr Dik Edwards.

THE LAMPETER REVIEW - Issue 1 - July 2010

Throughout the whole time it rained Dik Edwards

Reg was the first person I met when I started in the slaughterhouse. I had

moved into the small town in the West of the country where the slaughterhouse was situated, to look for work. I gathered that Reg and his family had lived there for many years. Reg was not a talkative man which, I suppose, made him intriguing but anyway not threatening. There’s nothing worse than starting in a place and the factory gossip cottons onto you. His familiarity will fool you into thinking there’s something warm and genuine about him, as if, in fact, he’s interested in you. You soon find out that he’s a bore only interested in himself. So it was not so difficult, if a slow process, to get to know Reg.

I worked mostly in the yard, what we called The Shambles because in the

old days of slaughtering, it was done in the open air in a yard without shame or concern for the people of the town in which the place was situated. Eventually slaughterhouses became just that, houses of slaughter. Reg had told me that you often get in old towns streets called The Shambles. He himself was hardcore. He worked

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at the heart of things: in with the blood and the gore and the misery of killing. One day, he came over to my place and asked if I had a chain saw; he had an old fallen tree he wanted to block up for firewood. I said I didn’t and he said it didn’t matter and did I want to come over to his place the next night for dinner. I said, yeh, thanks Reg. One thing I remember clearly about that time – apart from what happened – was the rain. I hadn’t been forewarned about this, about how the rain can set in and fall for months with hardly a day off. And it was around the time that I went to Reg’s for dinner that it started raining.

He was not a tall man – I’d say five foot six and quite thick set. He was

about forty and his still blond hair set short on his almost square head. His face was quite fleshy which stopped him from looking like a puppet but the strangest thing was how when he smiled a terrible sadness came upon his face. It was with such a smile he greeted me as I stood in his doorway the rain soaking through my felt hat on the evening I arrived for dinner.

Good to see you Doug, he said. We’re all here.

The “all” he referred to were Miriam, his wife, Melanie his older daughter and his younger one Sandra. The girls who, Reg told me, were twenty and eighteen were like copies of their mother. The three looked like sisters. They sat there beaming at me as if Reg had told them to expect a knight in shining armour or something. I’d had a drink on the way over so was relaxed enough to enjoy the warmth of that welcome. And then we had wine with the fabulous pork Miriam had cooked and I quite soon felt that I was that knight: a crusader receiving sherbet and figs from the maids in a seraglio. At one point during my immersion in sherbet and the smiles breathed from the mouths of these graces, Reg said:

I’m sorry about the rain, Doug. People should be warned about it. One thing

that gets me about the Poles is how it doesn’t get to them. I mean what kind of 7

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climate have they got over there? Sandra the younger daughter said: They’re probably just pleased to be here, Dad. For the work and good money. The rain doesn’t bother them.

Then he said: well I don’t get it and Melanie said (a little obliquely I thought):

They joined the European community. They’re entitled to be here. And it’s a great thing for them after all they’ve suffered.

It’s only my personal opinion but I felt that Reg had drunk too much and was

getting a bit irritated, so when he said: what have they suffered, I said: well they had all those years when they were under the Russians.

Miriam the mother laughed: I’m sorry Doug, that just sounded so funny!

Then Sandra said with a smile: Mummy! I think you’ve drunk too much! Well anyway, said Reg, the bloody rain gets to me! It drives me mad like I’m being hit on the head with a lump hammer! The next time I saw Reg was on the Monday in work. I said: you know, Reg, after Saturday night I felt quite lonely all day yesterday. It was such a great evening. And he said: well, you know where we are.

Just a week later we got a good forecast for the Saturday and Reg said:

Doug, how’d you fancy coming up the lake with us tomorrow? Sandra’s off to college on Sunday so it’s the last chance you’ll have of seeing us all together. For a while anyway. I said: that sounds great, Reg. Thanks. Where is it? The lake was about twenty miles from our town up in the hills before you got to the Black Mountains. There’s forestry pine up there and, on the road to the lake, a lot that has been cut down. In some places, stumps stuck up with jagged tongues as if the forest had been torn apart by howitzers. Bleak though the place was, sitting in the front of Reg’s Shogun with his three women in the back seat with faces which, when not widely smiling seemed in a state of some kind of ecclesiastical repose, I thought: what a time this is. 8

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Reg got his gear together – fishing is a pursuit I’m totally ignorant about

but one I respect for the calmess it inspires in those who do it. I watched Reg take out of the lake a carp – so he told me – and fully expected the thwack of his killing the fish by smashing its head against a stone but instead watched him delicately replace the fish in the lake. It was a moment of charm accompanied it seemed by a warm breeze endowed with the scents of the littoral. As I said to Reg: I had no idea you would do that, his older daughter came to me and said: come for a walk with us! Alright, I said, and the four of us, me and Reg’s fabulous trio set off for a walk up one side of the lake.

I said to the younger sister Sandra:

So it’s off to the city tomorrow; to university. She said, sadly I thought: you have to do it; if you’re blessed with an ability you probably have a duty to do something with it. What will you study? I said.

Medicine.

Well, I said, that’s good. That’s excellent. Her sister said: we’re proud of her. We walked on a little into the woods and I found myself beside Reg’s wife whose beauty, whose presence almost overwhelmed me. It’s difficult for me now to think of it. She said: have you noticed anything strange about Reg?

I have to say this now and it won’t endear me to you but I’ve always had

this instinct that when a beautiful woman gets close to me in a physical way and speaks to me in a way that depends on her innate sense of trusting me I will, in turn, imagine an intimacy, and if she’s talking about her man in any way that’s not simply to say how much she adores him etc., I see a weak spot in the relationship and my interest in the conversation becomes the interest of the opportunist. Without consciously thinking it, it’s as if I’ve begun a campaign to get her from him. As if I’m 9

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the hunter going in for the kill. But, strangely, that didn’t happen this time. This time I just thought of that terrible sadness I could see in Reg’s face – particularly when he smiled – and, instead, became possessed of a desire to help them. I would be their saviour. I genuinely did care for Reg. I said: Well, I don’t think that job helps. He’s there in the thick of it. There’s that smell of blood. That must become intolerable to a sensitive man. She said: Do you think Reg is sensitive?

I said: what do you think?

She said: do you know I think I’ve always been afraid to face that.

I wanted to say something really big, really profound. I wanted her to be

moved by my wisdom as though that would express the love I felt for her. I said:

I came from a family in which emotion was an embarassment. Maybe Reg’s

background is the same. Then I felt I was onto something: I hope you won’t mind me saying this but you and your girls are so beautiful, a person can’t help but be moved emotionally when they’re in your company. Maybe Reg is feeling some kind of illness of embarassment. Then she said: What an amazing thing to say! An illness of embarassment. And she said: supposing that was it; that he was ill from embarassment. How ill do you think he could be?

I said: I don’t know. I don’t think I’m qualified to speak about psychological

things. Maybe I’ve said too much. Maybe I was actually talking about myself. No, no, she said, don’t withdraw; it was a beautiful thing to say. On Sunday, the next day, Sandra left for the city. They asked me to go with them to the station. I couldn’t understand why they’d become so fond of me. When I would look at myself naked in my room at night I seemed to myself quite grotesque – not at all pleasant to look at. But maybe there was a kind of lonliness at the heart of their perfect little family that I ameliorated. After seeing Sandra off we went to a pub for a drink. It was raining and we 10

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got wet on the little walk from the car. Reg seemed furious. It was as if he saw the rain as a personal attack on him. It was difficult to get him to calm down. I bought some drinks; Reg had a double whiskey. Melanie said: don’t drink too eagerly, Dad. He said curiously: it’s not blood is it?

Miriam looked at me conspiritorially as if to say: you did say about the ab-

batoir.

I said, in order to lighten things up: I know what you’re saying Melanie

but you’d think eagerness would be a virtue in these days when so many people seem....well, a little too laid back for their own good. I don’t know if I really believe that. It just felt like the right thing to say. I suppose I thought it was the kind of thing Reg might like to hear and could lighten him up a bit. It’s not the kind of thing I would say now but looking back it’s one of those things I most clearly remember during that time. Reg said: Doug, let me get you another drink. You have just spoken a great truth. I was only half way through my pint so I said: just get me a half Reg. At the back of my mind, I’m sure, was the thought that I might be called on to drive. While he was at the bar me and the two women were more or less silent. I think Miriam wanted to talk but wouldn’t have wanted Melanie to hear what she had to say. As Reg returned, even before he sat down he said: too laid back for their own good, yes, that’s what I’d expect from an intellectual. But you’re too polite, mate. We’re facing a time of unprecedented laziness. You can get a degree in it. You can get jobs in it. Bureaucrats. And the bureaucrats in the offices pay the bureaucrats sitting on their fat arses watching day time TV. Domestic bureaucrats. That’s what they should call them those lazy, scrounging bastards. And the bureaucrats in the office are too lazy to tell the domestic bureaucrats to get off their fat arses and do something. They don’t care because it’s not their money that’s going to the domestic bureaucrats; it’s our money – the taxes we pay after working to make a living amongst the blood and shit. Blood and shit! 11

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It was such an extraordinary outburst. By the end of it he was almost shak-

ing and people were getting embarassed and on more than one occasion Melanie began to say something and got from her father a withering look which shut her up. When he finished he fell silent and didn’t say another thing all the way home. The next morning Reg killed his daughter Melanie, his wife and then himself. After the funeral, left alone as I was, I went back to the lake where I’d spent the afternoon with the three beautiful women so recently. I wasn’t sure I’d find it and remembered only that I would come to an area of forestry that had been cleared where the many stumps stood in amateur imitation of a petrified forest and that I would, if I turned my head to the right, see the lake in the distance. In my mind’s eye, it now had a brooding, unsettling feel about it.

I’d bought a small car because I knew I’d be leaving the area very soon and

I drove up the old drovers’ road at the top of which I assumed I would find the lake. It wasn’t raining on this day but there was a low mist and everything was touched with that particular western Celtic gloom. I found the forestry clearing, turned my head and saw the lake; it seemed much further away than I’d imagined. My body shivered.

I turned off the drovers’ road and followed the forestry track. For about half a

mile the track was open and then it went through the forestry itself. In the increased gloom there was only death and hopelessness. As I came out to the lakeside I passed a camper van. I parked. I got out of the car. There was silence. The lake was still like glass. I walked towards the camper. While still ten metres from it I could see through the large windscreen a naked man poised over a naked woman.

Before I had chance to turn away the man looked at me. It was Reg. And the

young woman was Sandra. I felt sick and confused, sure there was a terrible truth in this stark and bitter chimera. 12

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After the funeral I hadn’t been able to speak to Sandra who was comforted throughout by her grandmother. All day it rained. It was inexplicable why he killed the family but left her – as though he’d waited until she’d gone away. If he especially loved her why would you do that to someone you loved? I left the area and went to the city where I got a job in the library there. I was devastated. I had been in love with Reg’s women and in the tragic youngest daughter saw the embodiment of an almost theological suffering; someone whose pain had taken her beyond reason. A spell among books was what I needed. But I could not get from my mind a kind of filmic account of how Reg had waited behind the kitchen door with a hammer and when his wife had come home with the morning bread how he’d smashed her skull in and after he’d taken her upstairs and laid her on the bed how he’d waited for his daughter to come home for lunch and had dealt with her in the same way and taken her to lie beside her mother on the bed.

And whenever I ran through this film I would stop there, not because I didn’t want

to run through the footage of how Reg had tried to drown himself in the river, repeatedly, it was said, and was finally put out of his misery by the trunk of a tree torn down by the effect of more rain on an already raging river. I would stop because I just didn’t want to recall that I had seen her, Miriam, that morning. I saw her buying the loaf that she took to her executioner and as she spoke to me and I looked into her eyes I could see a pleading and knew I could have taken her away then. And didn’t. About a year after the murders, I was sitting in a popular cafe in the city, with my head over my paper when someone stopped at my table. I looked up. The woman was young and beautiful and her eyes were wide open, staring at me. And there in her look was anger and questioning and the deepest sorrow demanding that an account be given for what her eyes had been forced to see. And I was looking into those eyes and I felt as though, inside me, there was a rising of a sorrow for being a man that I couldn’t stop. I was looking into Sandra’s eyes wanting to speak. To say sorry.

I asked her to sit and she did. She looked like her mother but belonged to a

higher order of perfection. The unqualifiable beauty that exists in sorrow. 13

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She said: he built a shrine to them. In the bedroom. I saw it. I saw them. It was me who found them. He put flowers around their heads; on their pillows. He loved them. She paused for a terrible moment then said: if he loved them, did he....did he hate me? We both cried. In part, for me, it gave me an excuse to embrace her.

For years afterwards I would hear in my dreams the thwack of his hammer on the

heads of those he loved and see that lonely other daughter lost in a winter landscape where wolves prowl.

I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say anymore.

Dik Edwards

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Three Poems Alan Flanders

Sirens Give Warning Three boats at bay, oars touching, One fishing to catch, the others Looking to fine their leeway Back from they came. Reeded Flutes play, sea breeze salts figureHeads. Eyes moisten, lose oceans In a wave. Fish surface and stay For seconds. Fluorescent strips light Waterways. Fog lifts. Two oars Touch, the other casts away. The stench of death surfaces, stays, Floats fish back on the quay. Sirens give warning. Tidal waves break. Winds beat Foam. Sails fold, wings broken. Two Boats dash to one, embed at sea. 15

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Two oars shrink towards shore. Two bodies float, then anchor.

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Winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Process How unprepared we were for snow. Unprecedented, it kept falling; night; gown delicately descending. Goosefleshed, we attempt to unbury Scarves, gloves, galoshes, the rest. Iced maidenheads mounted On hard lakes transformed Yukas porcupined the yard. Pregnant limbs stretched their spinelessness. Horizons blended Bleached skies with whiter drifts. Winds whirled colorless confetti on frost-bitten noses, Eyes, (buttoned-up) and woolenfaces Heads and fingers lightened, splayed Outwards. Snowmen were the spoils of schoolessness. Laziness Defined our hibernation. Inside Fires softened bits of ice That hung like leeches from our dripping Flannel. Our bodies stretched Taut before the hearth, suspended As the logs for quicker drying.

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Seasoned and warm we window Watched: flakes falling, piling; Flints kindling, crackling, Dropping. The positions changed So slightly, I hardly saw the sun Come up ashes smoldering. How unprepared I was For the icemanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death. His hat Went first, nose carroted To earth, buttons unsocketed. The fire Stiffled, the warmth had moved outside, and Next to me you, too, had evaporated.

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Ancestor in Miniature Bones press, suspend, make pictures, Frames, chests. The desk you drape Your elbows on tracks dust, (no doubt an elderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grave), left to trace Antiquity upon your face. Dressed In black, velvet flesh and eyes, Sapphires against all that lace, a mouth That lowers waving, posed to suggest Austerity and descent, all in one Sweet splitting of the lips. What pictures These faded brown and white images Imprint behind the dreaming eyes Of a more modern mistress. With an eyeflick, ashes leaden, bones Expand in air, eyes blossom to find A skirted vision moving chin-driven Upwards, out towards the veranda, smell One almost hidden pink camellia In her hair. What is this vision That makes night fall like satin, A shawl about her shoulders draped Carelessly to the floor, drop suddenly A spell, and vanish? What would this ancestor Have said to me had my morning 19

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Been one with hers? Would the sun Have warmed that regal face, and too, The words that from it fell? Would She have found me, in my color print Too bold, too out of place with heritage Removed from her descent? To have ever been kin no less her lover?

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Scaffolding John Lavin

Mary stared at the notice in the newspaper, feeling the tension build in her head until it had formed a single, hard block of pain. The print blurred. It was impossible. But there it was: INFORMATION WANTED concerning the whereabouts of SEAN RACK; formerly of 24 Cayman Gardens, Chingford, London. Contact: samhain@hotmail.com She pressed the palm of her right hand against the hob of the cheap, new electric cooker, forgetting that it remained hot for a while once it had been switched off. It burnt her hand immediately. She screamed. Her raw noise made a disquieting contrast with the atmosphere of tidiness and caution that characterised the small, terraced house where she lived alone. The smell of burnt skin, too, gave off an alien odour that made her wince. It made her think of the electric chair and the stake; of incinerated corpses. It was because of the address that there couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be any doubt about it. 24 Cayman Gardens, Chingford was where she and Sean had grown up. Sean Rack was the name of her brother. He had been dead for twenty years. 21

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She held her hand under cold water until it went numb. Then, clutching a bag of frozen peas, she went upstairs and turned the computer on. Sean fell to the ground from a height of almost eighty feet. He leant against a loose bar in the scaffolding. No such thing as health and safety in those days, of course. The burn was that bad she had to type left-handed. She wrote: Who the fuck are you Samhain? And why the fuck are you looking for my dead brother? Why are you Why She held her finger down on the delete button, watching the words fly backwards into oblivion. Her mind wandered while she wrote a polite and perfunctory email instead; the rain spattering against the window above her desk making her think of rainy playtimes at school. How all the colouring-in and tracing books were stored inside those brown felttopped benches that were only very rarely used for sitting on, and how opening one of them up felt like opening up a treasure chest. All the childish pictures and words fingerdrawn in the steamed up glass. Until one day someone spelt sex: alien-looking and sounding like the snap of a pair of scissors when you said it. They were banned from drawing on the glass after that. They were suspended, whoever did it. Who was it now? That rough blonde boy, she supposed. With the crew-cut and the surly manner. He left not long after, at any rate. Went to a private boys school, didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t he? What was his name? She had done her best to keep away from him after he hit her across the legs with a plastic spade on the first day of school. She read the email back and clicked send. Then she went over and took the photograph of her First Holy Communion down from the wall. All three of them huddled around her: Mum, Dad, Sean. She was wearing the white dress her mum had taken her up to Regent Street to get. Sean loved to rib her that it looked like a wedding dress, not realising that that was the very reason she liked it so much. Sean: his eyes as wide and blue and full of mirth as a summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s day. 22

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Unbelievable. All three of them gone. * It was evening when the reply came: Dear Mary I’ve got something to tell you. Sean Rack was my biological father. My mother never wanted me to try and find him and for a long time I didn’t want to find him either. Then one day I did. Just like that! Of course I’ve always known there was a possibility. But he would still have been so young. 20 years! How can I get my head around that? When I’m only 19 myself. How is it even possible? My mother met Sean while he was teaching surfing in Inch. That’s in the west of Ireland. That’s where we’re from. There’s no doubt you know that I’m his son. Have you never heard of me? It would have been better if I’d written this later. But I needed to reply. Can we meet? I’m in London for a year. Could you do that for me? Best wishes Sam Haines 23

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Mary looked up from the screen. A man drawing the curtains in the house opposite stopped to stare at her. She had knocked her glass of red wine all over the desk and was sitting there with her elbows in it, letting it drip onto her knees. It wasn’t true, she knew that much. She went downstairs and poured a large brandy. Connections formed in her mind. It made a kind of sense. Sean had spent that summer, his last, working as a surfing instructor in Inch; and their parents had been worried about him when he came back. He seemed changed, they said. Apathetic and withdrawn. And here was what was most unlike him: rude. Mary was in her final year at university and hadn’t been around that much. When she talked to Sean about it he said he didn’t know what they were going on about and, knowing their parents to be terrible worriers, Mary had been inclined to believe him. But the rows back home only got worse. Dad thought Sean was on drugs. He threatened to kick him out of the house if he didn’t find a job. He found Sean the job on the construction site through a friend. Mary knocked the brandy back and poured another. She knew it was guilt that had killed their father. Time and time again he went over it: how could he have made Sean take on a job like that? Sean who was so gentle and shy? Bookish Sean who had always dreamed of going to university? But it was university that had been partly behind it all: Sean was taking a gap year and their parents were worried he wouldn’t want to go to university at the end of it. Let him see what the real world’s like for a change, Dad had said at the time. See how he likes that. Mary’s father died of a heart attack four years after her brother had fallen to his death from the scaffolding around a newly constructed office block. She and her mother moved away. They never wanted to see Chingford again. Her dad had been right, of course: Sean had been taking drugs. But Mary had hardly felt in a position to be able to tell him to stop when she and her boyfriend were regularly taking ecstasy at the free raves they went to most weekends. And so far as she knew it was nothing more than marijuana with Sean. But she worried later that he might have been stoned when he fell. 24

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He brought her a multicoloured, hand-woven scarf back from Ireland; always knowing just what she liked. They didn’t see much of each other that autumn but they would usually sneak off to the local pub after dinner if Mary came back for a weekend. What did they talk about? She couldn’t really remember. She hadn’t been paying much attention if she was honest: there had seemed to be so much going on in her own head at that time. But Sean hadn’t said anything important about Ireland she was sure of that. Only about how the Irish beaches were amazing, how the surf was amazing. Just innocuous things really. But he could have met a girl. He had been out there the whole summer so it was more likely that he had than he hadn’t if you thought about it. So why say nothing about her? Could it really have been guilt; was that it? It would certainly explain his despondency. His temper, too. But could Sean really have just left a pregnant girl behind him in Ireland and done nothing about it? No. There must be another explanation; it simply wasn’t in his nature. But here was Sam Haines from Inch. He appeared to be completely convinced that Sean was his father. And why would you make something like that up? To get at her in some way? To rob her? She was hardly well off. No, it would be ridiculous. Like something out of a particularly elaborate Sherlock Holmes story. But, of course, Sam Haines might simply be mistaken. She smiled suddenly, and went back upstairs with a tea towel. She clicked on reply. Sean had a son: somehow she just felt it in her bones. * When Sam suggested they meet in Chingford, Mary immediately began to write that it was impossible. Once they had left Chingford neither she nor her mother had ever been back: it made them cry just to see a photograph of their old house; never mind one of Dad or Sean. They had lived together for thirteen years, until her mother’s death from lung cancer. 25

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It’s for the best, she said to Mary not long after they found out. It’s for the best, she said, brushing her hair for her the way she had always done ever since she was little. It’s for the best that I get out of your way and let you get on with your own life at last. And meet a man before it’s too late, was what she meant. But Mary had long since given up any hope in that direction. She had no confidence then and she had even less now. She had become reclusive in the three years since her mother had died: quitting her job, ordering clothes and food online; rarely venturing outside. She felt extinguished: like the passion for life in her had finally gone out the same as it had gone out first in her dad and then in her mum. Only now there was Sam. She felt better than she had done in a long time. How could she deny him - Sean’s son - anything? He was the brave one: looking for a father he had never known. Coming to meet her on his own. No it wasn’t much to ask: she would meet him in Chingford. She had almost forgotten how it felt: the pull of blood ties. She had been so lonely. It was crazy but she felt like the existence of Sam had given her a second chance. Had given her a reason to live. She fantasised about what good friends they would become. How she might even be welcomed into his family as a long lost aunt. Her sense of trepidation and unease grew as the train neared Chingford. She felt like she was in a dream she had made the journey so many times in her head. It hadn’t changed a bit. She put some drops of Bach’s Herbal Rescue Remedy on her tongue, knowing it was all only minutes away. She pushed through the doors and emerged onto Chingford High Street. She had known it would be too much for her. Luckily she had made sure to be early. She locked herself in a cubicle in the ladies at Chasney’s and held herself tightly to control the shaking. To thwart the moan welling in her gut. In time, she wiped her eyes and unlocked the cubicle; meticulously putting her face back on before she went out into the foyer. Chasney’s was an old fashioned place with a delicatessen on the ground floor and a bar and dining room above, the smell of roasting coffee beans always wafting out onto 26

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the street. It had been Mary’s favourite place when she was little, the scene of many family celebrations and of occasional, ‘rescue’ lunchtimes with her grandmother, who empathised with her dread of school dinners. The bar was deserted and she looked about in vain for someone to serve her. There was a musty smell despite the aroma of fresh coffee emanating from downstairs and she noted, with dismay, the unmistakeable odour of boiled cabbage coming from the kitchen. The room hadn’t changed at all but it looked worn out. Here were the same seventies chairs she remembered from her childhood and over there the imposingly large leather settee that used to almost swallow her up. Suspended on silver wire from the ceiling above the stairs was the weird op-art light fitting that, even at the time, everyone had boggled at; its giant green glass baubles thick with dust. Sam would think she was insane bringing him here. Why hadn’t she just picked an Indian or a Chinese? Finally a barman appeared. Mary ordered coffee and a brandy and began to text Sam to suggest another location. ‘Er, is it Mary?’ a gentle Irish voice enquired hesitantly. She hadn’t realised someone was standing beside her. When she looked up she recognised Sam immediately from the photograph he’d emailed her and, just as she had done when she received that photograph, she gasped. He looked so much like Sean. ‘Yeah, yes! Sam - hello!’ He had the same thick, long black hair, the same lightly freckled cheeks, the same almost Roman nose, the same height… he even had the same way of standing. The only thing that was noticeably different about him was the colour of his eyes, which were dark brown; but even they were like Sean’s eyes just a different colour. It was so strange standing next to him that Mary didn‘t know what to say. He coughed politely to break the silence. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she blushed. ‘It’s just you look so much like him.’ She pointed to her drinks; self-consciously wondering if he would be thinking it was a bit early for brandy. ‘I’ve just got these - would you like something?’ ‘Thanks, I’ll have a Carlsberg if that’s alright?’ ‘I thought it would be nice to meet here because it’s where my parents used to take 27

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us. It used to be such a lovely place,’ she whispered conspiratorially once they had sat down. ‘But I’m afraid it’s really gone downhill - we can go somewhere else after these. What do you like - Chinese? Indian? Tapas?’ ‘It’s fine, it’s fine,’ he smiled. ‘Sure, it’s great to see it.’ She smiled back at him and then quickly looked down at her brandy; surreptitiously wiping away the stray tear running down her cheek. ‘So I have the look of him?’ he said, leaning in and adopting her hushed tone. She nodded and took the photo album out of her tote bag. ‘Here….’ She opened it onto her favourite photograph of Sean. He was sitting cross-legged out on the patio steps at Cayman Gardens playing guitar and smiling into the camera, a strand of black hair falling across his eyes. He was seventeen. She remembered taking it; it was during those two glorious, parent-free August weeks when they had invited all their friends to stay. Sam took a deep breath and looked away, covering his eyes with the flat back of his hand. He took a deep breath, ‘He was good on the guitar, wasn’t he? That’s what me mam said. Wrote his own songs. I play myself. I play in a band back home.’ ‘He used to play for your mum?’ ‘Oh yeah, ’ he looked across at her and smiled gently. ‘They used to sing in the bars together. Of course this is all news to you, isn’t it? It’s just I’ve heard it so many times it’s like a fuckin’ legend or something.’ The unexpected expletive made her flinch. ‘Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to swear, Mary,’ he said, going red in the face. ‘Oh God, it’s fine. I’m sorry, Sam,’ she smiled. ‘It’s just I’m feeling so nervous today.’ ‘I know what you mean. I was fairly freakin’ out on the train down.’ Mary laughed shrilly, ‘Oh me too - I thought I was going to have a panic attack!’ They both laughed at that, each sounding a little hysterical, and some of the awkwardness of the situation seemed to lift. He drained his glass and suggested that, if she was sure she didn’t mind, they go somewhere he could smoke.

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* ‘No the way my mam tells it, they both agreed to end it. They both felt it couldn’t have worked out with him over here and her over there, back home. Just leave it as a summer romance…. Y’know, why spoil it? Sam drank back his wine and lit a cigarette. ‘But Mam still loved him. She thought he was still in love with her too. She was sure to tell you the truth. That’s why she couldn’t understand how he could just leave her in the lurch like that. I mean, Jesus, it was no joke being a single mother in Ireland even then. I can tell you. Jesus Christ we’re talking the west here y’ know? Fuckin’ Gaeltacht-land Mary!’ Mary poured more wine. No matter how much Sean might have changed that summer she couldn’t believe he had changed that much. It just didn’t ring true. She felt angry in spite of herself; she said: ‘So did he know your mother was pregnant before he went back to England? Did he just say sorry - I’m off?’ ‘No, no. Look Mary I’m not trying to have a go here or anything, y’know? It just isn’t that easy to talk about. It hurt Mam a lot. She wouldn’t say so herself but it ruined her whole life. She was only eighteen for Christ’s sake so you don’t have to be a genius to work that out! It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt knowing it. ‘She didn’t find out till a couple of months after he’d gone. And she wrote straight away. And that’s what stung y’know? That he didn’t even reply to her letter!’ ‘Letter?’ Mary’s hand shook a little, sloshing some wine over the side of her glass; staining her blouse red. It dawned on her that a terrible possibility had been gestating in her mind ever since she received Sam’s first email. ‘Yeah. Well of course she wrote to him once she found out she was pregnant!’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You’re telling me you didn’t know?’ They were sitting on the small terrace of an Italian Bistro on the high street, their plates of pasta long since gone cold. She shook her head slowly. ‘When was this? That your mother wrote the letter, I mean?’ ‘What does that matter?’ he snapped. 29

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He lit another cigarette. ‘Sorry. Jesus - it’s just,’ he gestured to his head. ‘The whole thing does my head in. She remembers the exact day as it happens: Halloween! You couldn’t make it up! Sure she always says one of the little folk must have put a curse on her.’ He looked at Mary intently, noticing the change that had come over her. ‘What is it? What are you thinking, Mary?’ She turned the terrible possibility around in her mind, looking for flaws. ‘Mary? What are you thinking?’ ‘It was just after Halloween that Sean died.’ He stared at her blankly. ‘November the third,’ she said. And then he saw what she meant. Mary watched helplessly as his expression changed; the youthful bravado draining out of him so that he looked like a child that has been slapped across the face for no reason. Mary had rarely touched another human being since her mother’s death and so as much as she wanted to reach across and hug Sam she had no confidence that he would want her to. Sometimes, lately, she felt less than human. As though the sight of her, let alone the touch, was repulsive to other people. ‘You think…?’ Sam trailed off. He shook his head: ‘No, no, Mary. You’re wrong.’ The injustice of it was impossible to accept. But there it was. Hard and cold and perfect as a diamond. For a moment they were both imagining the same thing: that Sean was there with them. The three of them sharing a joke: Sean with his arm around the back of Sam’s chair; protectively, paternalistically; looking over at Mary, his eyes twinkling. Her brother. All grown up. A father. ‘Do you think he even got the letter?’ asked Sam. ‘I think he must have done. I mean, no letter came to the house… afterwards.’ ‘You think he got it on the day he died…?’ Mary nodded. ‘I guess I do… yeah. I mean it would have taken your mother’s letter two or three days to come from Ireland, wouldn’t it? And I just know he would have…. You 30

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didn’t know him but -.’ ‘No, that’s right, I didn’t know him!’ Sam shouted. He put his face in his hands. ‘Sam! Sam I’m sorry!’ Impulsively she reached across the table and stroked his hair. He was crying. ‘All I mean is that he was a good person. He would never have let your mother bring you up alone…. He would have been so proud of you. I know he would.’ ‘All this time!’ he said, pushing her hand away. ‘All this time she thought he’d deserted her.’ A gust of wind showered the terrace with leaves. Mary held herself tightly, suddenly noticing the cold. And there it was, and there it was.

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Mynedd Bach/ Active Duty/ Perpective. County Clareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Ros Hudis

Mynedd Bach Up here the silence is amiable, nothing but the scratch of reeds in wind and the bright plate of sea .The Llyn parts water from sky like a soft knife; a red kite arcs becomes the rhythm of my boots on turf even the peat is light underfoot, healed after ice and the windmills 32

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lift their girders as breath disturbs the kestrel’s feather, or the small life of streams continues through the mist from Chernobyl: trefoil, spagnum, heath orchid, stars of meadowsweet memoried with owl. Beneath me, the earth’s a map, it’s roots spores, seeds, twigs, small bones, stored like codes. Today in the farm downwind I saw Menna and Robert driving their cows to the top field. Their son tossed and pined in his wheelchair. Robert is slow his shirt looser: 33

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already the leukaemia that took his neighbour is taking him.

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Active Duty Some days her mother, losing it, stares at the kettle but canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t retrieve its connection to water â&#x20AC;&#x201C; sometimes her kitchen tap feeds its load beat by beat

into the bowls till they spill, and the sink is blocked again by spaghetti like hair from corpses. And when the kids melt in from school, her front door flaps on a T.V tinted desert where the presenter in his laundered kit again unbinds a snagged reel of numbers into the time-lapse grail she sleeps with every night: the one which reverses the screams of the blown.soldier his face on fire his body strafed on the blue shell light until

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it is just the four pack breath of a husband on her sofa catching sleep.

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Pespective. County Clare I’m picking my way across the scar of geological trauma – a skin of grey limestone riddled with wounds; its the grykes, he’d told me– you can fall into them. Calcite: bone and shell fused and fused again into a brittle shimmering paste, then cracked apart. Below me the Atlantic is fissured by light trails. It sifts the sky in and out of view. I can’t hear it. But the smell of it is there and my lips are caking in the salted air. I know he’s up here. He comes for the Little Blues – for the rare flicker of a gentian top wing between the crevices. Most days you don’t catch that – just the under-wing stippled rose and dun. Isn’t that good enough, I’d asked him, a bottom wing stippled rose and dun? Not when you know what the top looks like. You men, I laughed, you have this obsession with goals. Is that bad? Its hard work to live with I’m an artist – I’m meant to be hard work! I’m tired; the water bottle’s nearly empty. If I see him it will be his back view at a distance, thin shoulders shielding the air above his sketch book. It will be a copper lit outline. A contained fire, a man I‘ve struggled to reach. I’m tired. When he walked into the Atlantic, I wanted to believe he passed through a paste of shadows, pliant, shimmering. I wanted to believe he passed through a wound in the light. I wanted to reseed his after-image against the skyline. Now who’s obsessed with a goal, he would have said. Only because you created it by disappearing! It’s the rule of perspective - him This is leading nowhere - me Between cracks, I see grass of Parnassus, milk-wort, cuckoo flower, then the toe-clippings of fossils, peat dust, sheep droppings, sloughed away words. When I was ten, an uncle, a geologist, took me to a beach racked with split stone: The Black Wen, he said, 37

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pointing to the cliffs, get on your knees and dig for these – they’re common ammonites. He held out a ridged coil, shining like wet coal. Treasure. Is it alive? I asked . No. It’s what’s left behind. You know, we live on what’s left behind. We can die searching for what isn’t, I think, looking across the grykes into a sky like an unmapped canvas. I know I won’t come back.

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Going Deep Dave Brundage

It was one of those sudden gut-feelings, and I was sure Angela would under-

stand. So rather than continuing south across the Kisikisikasewan River to Home Depot, I pulled over and shut off the radio, which was discussing a book-in-progress that accused an unnamed university coach of sexual abuse. The ex-CFL player authoring the book was a former schoolmate of mine, and I could guess who the coach might be, but I didn’t give the story much conscious thought at the time. I left the Silverado outside les Années Glorieux, and dropped in to find whatever I was supposed to find.

Founded in the 1970s, les Années Glorieux originally catered to a wave of An-

glos transplanted from west-end Montreal, self-declared political refugees unwilling to deal with the rise of French power and control in their home province back east, far from the blue skies, prairie winds, and 24-7 gas and coal extraction of Alberta. Long before Starbucks with its sanitized appeal to boomers, les Années purveyed its own potent nostalgia. Mo-ray-al… Paris of North America before “they” ruined it: sin city, English friendly, centre of power, everything world class, entertainers, restaurants, smoked meat, Francophone waitresses (hot, hot, hot), and of course athletes at the top of their game.

In the far corner of the lounge was a poster of the Canon, Montreal Mohawks

record-setting legendary quarterback, pride of the CFL: Harvey Lovejoy. Harvey seemed intent on connecting with the patron seated at the corner table beneath him. 39

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And my goodness, that man in the Canon’s line of fire was none other than the former Great Canadian Hope, once likened to a young Russ Jackson—I’m referring, of course, to Dexter “Wolverine” Singleton. Seeing him at a corner table was no surprise. During high school years together in Nôtre Dame de Grâce— was it really 45 years ago—he confided to me his need to keep his back to the wall. The surprise was seeing him in public again. I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Dex in over seven years, not since his advertising firm The Winner’s Circle won that national award for entrepreneurial success of the decade. I wasn’t even sure he still lived in Gateway. Perhaps he’d delegated front-line management of the Circle to his assistant. But here he was, surrounded by official-looking papers, which he shuffled together with the dexterity of a card-shark, then secreted into his leather attaché case.

Seeing me approach, Dexter broke into an old-time smile, as in the days when

I would find him in the North Hill Dairy Queen having just led the seniors to another victory.

“Marvelous Marvin,” he exclaimed. “For God’s sake, sit down.”

I pulled up a chair, taking care not to knock over his cane. He asked me what I

wanted, and signaled for a waitress.

“You find me at an interesting moment,” he said. “I just picked up some papers in

a law firm near here. I have the urge to celebrate.”

The years parted. There we were at the North Hill DQ, Dexter about to tell me

some personal story that no one else would hear. The trade-off for my receiving intimate secrets of the next Russ Jackson was that whatever problem sat beneath the story, I’d always say what I knew he wanted to hear. I figure people have to do what they have to do. They don’t really need your advice. They just need your friendship, need you to listen them through to whatever decision it is they’re destined by character to reach.

“Hot, hot, hot,” he whispered to me as the waitress approached.

“Champagne,” he said to her. “The best you’ve got.” And to me:

“I’m through with commerce. Enfin. La chose vrai.”

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Running into Dexter after so many years, priming so unexpectedly for yet another story, let me tell you it brought back memories. We’d met when we were 13, passing the summer months in a grove of white birches, bedding down like princes under a canopy of mosquito netting, the moist Eastern breeze undulating beneath rolled tent flaps to caress our cheeks as we whispered about adventures more fanciful than real with girls, smokes, and booze. Camp Kisisokôe— nestled on beautiful Little Lake Kisisokôe in the Laurentian Mountains 120 miles north of Montreal— catered to the private-school set, boys properly unilingual in English, yes sir, whose daddies wielded brief cases, stethoscopes, and dentist’s drills, ran the financial institutions, the universities, the government, the law firms….. They were the famous “captains of commerce.”

I told a boy beside me on the long bench at one of the dozens of tables in the

dining hall that my mother played for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than a boy at an adjacent table looked over so suddenly his face seemed to snap. For a moment, his head remained uncannily reversed on his shoulders, as in depictions of possession by devils. He said that with my large build, I would be a force on any football team. I ought to lift weights with him in the intermediate hall. He said he would be going out for quarterback. I asked for which school, but he changed the subject. When we were alone in the weight room, he opened up and said he would be playing for North Hill High. I said what a coincidence, that’s where I would be going. He looked crestfallen.

“I thought you were an LWCer,” he said, the initials standing for Lord Wobeson

College.

“No,” I said. “I interviewed, but they didn’t consider me worthy.”

“But your mother’s in the bloody Symphony.”

“But my dad’s in a jazz quartet. He’s done time for a drug matter. He never

seems to make it through treatment. My parents are basically separated. I figure the 41

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LWC board knows my family history, plus I told them I thought ‘to be or not to be/ that is the question’ came from Anne of Green Gables.”

“Well don’t go telling anyone you’re going to North Hill. Just talk about your mom.

Let ‘em think you go to Seymour Lodge.” Dex calculated that for whatever reason only a few of the boys attending Camp Kisisokôe that month attended ritzy Seymour Lodge in Westmount, the second wealthiest neighbourhood in the country. Furthermore, these boys were all in the “twit section”—meaning junior camp, a separate world. Dex was considering an acting career, after football—knowing enough to realize how short-lived the gridiron could be— and he did have talent. As with so many things, he had lots of it. He showed off those gifts at Friday variety night. And again in the Indian Tribal Games. Sporting different coloured headbands for our Aboriginal allegiances, we recreated the massacre of the Weskarinis on the shore of Little Lake Kisisokôe, and Dexter promptly stabbed me to death. To hone these thespian talents, Dexter decided that as a fun experiment he was going to create the impression of someone who attended Seymour Lodge. By the time anyone suspected otherwise, he’d have won them over with his jokes, poker skills, athleticism, and condom smarts—and that’s exactly what happened. Later, when I met his family, I realized what sacrifices his mother—a seamstress—and his father—a bus driver—had made to send him to Camp Kisisokôe. Only on Dexter’s insistence did I go out for the North Hill junior football team. That’s how I met Coach Paul Curtis. He was none too impressed by my directional difficulties. We didn’t have the expression “challenged” back then—as in “directionally challenged”—but that’s what I was. Somehow I would get myself running the wrong way up or down the field, even knocking over players on my own team, and because I enjoyed playing piano so much—really, it was my only comfort—I always kept my hands right out of the picture, often tucked away under my arm pits, which didn’t do wonders for my questionable sense of balance. The others took to calling me “Marvelous Marvin” or “Hands Hands,” my father’s last name being “Hands” and my mother having never quite followed through 42

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on her resolution to divorce and re-Christen us Tezpotts.

“Hands… Hands!” the coach barked. “A cow would catch on better than you.”

Despite which, I was so huge— and scary looking, I’m told— that Coach Curtis kept me around, mainly to intimidate the other team as we ran on the field for warm-ups. Normally I played about three or four minutes a game, which was fine with me. It gave Dexter someone to mostly ignore when others were around and to confide in, when they were not— if, that is, something happened to be on his mind. Three boys were competing for quarterback: Rufus Glendower, Karem Ataya, and Dexter. After practices, you would see Coach Curtis meeting privately with one on one day, another on the next, and so on. You’d see the twosome of coach and would-be quarterback strolling off together toward Brewster Farm, a war-years subsidized housing complex with North Hill Park adjacent. A football rode under Coach Curtis’s arm, like a strange growth. When I told my mother that Coach Curtis was pals with “the Canon”—retired star quarterback Harvey Lovejoy — and was going to have him come out to help sharpen and assess the North Hill qb candidates, she rolled her eyes.

“Paul Curtis can barely grow a beard. But that little snub nose of his is growing

longer than Pinocchio’s.”

You may catch the hint that my mother didn’t care much for Paul Curtis.

She’d met him one afternoon after practice, when Dexter dropped by and Curtis tagged along. Curtis was particularly interested in meeting our tenant in the duplex upstairs. Mr. Vanderwalsh, a rising salesman with an industrial valve company, belonged to the prestigious Pine Narrows Golf Club across the Bonréveil Bridge, beside the Pine Narrows Mohawk reserve. Mother was probably right that the only reason Paul Curtis dropped by was to see if he could inveigle a membership recommendation. But she was wrong about Harvey Lovejoy.

Just a week after her skeptical remarks, I found myself sipping ginger ale in Mr.

Lovejoy’s Brewster Farm kitchen with Coach Curtis, Dexter, and four or five other boys, 43

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all of us mesmerized by Harvey’s South Carolina drawl. To this day, I find it hard to believe that a USA college star—one who went on to set numerous records in the Canadian Football League as the celebrated Canon—would not only remain in the foreign city that had employed him, calling it home, but would reside in such humble circumstances. Those close to the Canon suggested he did so in solidarity with the military families of Brewster Farm, all of whom had lost fathers in the war. Paul Curtis told us that the Canon could often be found on a ladder unclogging some widow’s drainpipe—and if she later thanked him in private, who were we to judge. That was the only time Paul Curtis alluded to romantic trysts without a strong note of disgust, even revulsion. Then it was outside for a game of touch football. Imagine running patterns for Harvey Lovejoy! But until Dexter traded me for the wind, I was on Dexter’s side. In the huddle he would devise a number of crossing patterns aimed at getting the ball ten to fifteen yards downfield. But he almost always told me “go deep.” Going deep meant risking for the big score, running your feet off- something you may guess I’m not good at. The first half until I got traded for the wind just about killed me. The idea was simply that the other team would need to have at least one defensive halfback keep an eye on the long-route runner. I was purely a decoy. The ball wasn’t ever going to arch its way 40 yards downfield into my hands, and everyone knew it.

Dexter did quite the job of trying to keep pace with the Canon, though, and while

he was at it, this pretty girl with long dark hair looked across the street at us from her doorway. Eventually she even crossed over and stood under an oak tree, watching casually. As we were winding down, Dexter signaled her over to him with a coy comehither twitch of the index finger. Man if I could have had that savois faire. Soon they were dating.

“Her name’s Angela,” he told me. “I think she’s Asian or something. Doesn’t she

look Asian to you or, no wait—what is it—Poly…”

“Polynesian?”

“That’s it. Polynesian.”

The business with Curtis and the tests happened not long after Angela and Dex44

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ter began dating, and obviously before the coach named his starting quarterback. Dexter told me about the first test a day after it happened. Little did he realize I had been watching it from hiding, wondering what in the heck… what should I do…

It followed a touch football game. Angela was babysitting for one of the Brewster

Farm families that evening. Harvey had already headed back to his unit, and everyone else was dispersing. The night lamps came on, then glowed brighter as dusk descended. I said good night and headed off toward the bus stop, leaving just coach Curtis and Dexter. But halfway up the block, feeling the cool night air, I realized I had forgotten my jacket under the oak tree. When I reached it, Curtis and Dexter were these two tiny dark figures way at the far end of the park. They turned the corner of a large fence, which would be taking them to a hedged-in enclosure that had quite the reputation as a night haunt. There had been recent cases of muggings, the victims invariably two males who had little to say about what had been going on.

Believe me, I’m no peeping Tom, but this had aroused my suspicion. I crossed

the long field at quite the pace for me, trying to be as silent as possible. There came grunts, scuffling, sounds of intensifying violent struggle. I knelt down on the far side of one of the bordering hedges that surrounded the enclosure and found a sightline through stems and branches. Dexter was absolutely ferocious, true to his nickname Wolverine. Blood was pouring from his nose but also from Coach Curtis’. Finally Curtis got the advantage, swung Dexter around so that the boy’s shoulder thudded into a tree. Then Curtis pulled him down in a pin and lay half across him. Was it 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, half an hour? It was the longest time of my life. I wanted to run out and haul Curtis off my friend, but something told me that Dexter would never forgive such a move. His life wasn’t mine to live, he would say. Nonetheless, I coaxed the blood back into my legs, determined to do something, wondering if I should just appear to be walking toward them, unawares, when Curtis got up.

“Good fight, Vincent,” I heard him say. “You pass round one.”

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Dexter not only told me about this incident the next day, he said he was pretty sure Curtis had “been getting his rocks off.” At the same time, Dexter had been aware of no inappropriate touching. He said that when he got pinned, he’d flipped an internal switch and was no longer there. Dexter seemed most bugged that Curtis began calling him Vincent—for Vincent van Gogh— alluding to his pursuit of art in a class of one boy and 27 girls. He knew that painting and doing it well could imperil his respect from the football team. Rufus and I didn’t know each other, exchanged not one word, but Karem seemed to like me all right, and once he suspected that Dexter might be confiding in me, he asked if we could talk, too—confidentially. It turned out that Curtis had “tested” Karem as well, the same rough wrestling match outdoors in the park, the same pin that went on too long with a sense of something not right. From Karem I heard allegations of the same sorts of recurring motifs in Curtis’s conversation that Dexter sometimes mentioned— references to the crotches of pants not fitting, to having to go for a regular needle at the hospital for an old groin injury, to the sickness of suburban society with double-crossers at every turn, going at it like monkeys. There was also the same reference to a certain “girlfriend” who wore a wig. According to Karem, Curtis spoke contemptuously of this girlfriend with the extravagant fashion sense—but was the contempt real or yet another test? Karem thought that Curtis did more play-acting than an actor. Furthermore, he’d concluded from watching Dexter throw and run that there was no need for further competition—Dexter was in a class of his own. Karem said he had been invited to join the soccer team, and that’s what he was going to do. He just wanted me to know, and Dexter to know, that Curtis now planned for the quarterback candidates to visit his house, shoot some pool in the rec room, then face the ultimate test. Aghast, I called Dexter that evening.

“Ya, said Dexter. He talked to me already.”

“Yes…?”

“I’m going to go.”

Over the phone, I could almost hear him shrug. 46

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It was just after this that Dexter and Angela split up. I wouldn’t want you to say that I was the lucky guy who caught her on the rebound—though I was the lucky guy—but on the rebound sounds wrong. Dexter told me he’d discovered Angela’s mother was from Pine Narrows reserve, not Polynesia. According to Dexter, Polynesians were hard workers, almost like Asians. Natives, on the other hand, well… they might not complement one’s efforts quite so well. Angela told me, however— on the other other hand— that she had challenged Dexter to drop Paul Curtis or find a new girlfriend.

“It seems he’ll do anything Curtis says— if he thinks there’s a rainbow.”

I said I was worried for Dexter’s safety, going to Curtis’s alone. Karem told me

that Curtis spoke admiringly of his linebacker friend from the McDuff Academy Warriors. Nicknamed “the Beast,” this fellow allegedly taped nails underneath his arm pads and raked someone’s calf to the tendons. Having been promised at least one take-down by the Beast, Curtis had trained his binoculars on the victim “going all snaky,” as he liked to put it. “Curtis needs help,” Angela said, “But don’t worry about Dexter. He’s a survivor.” And as she has been so many times since, Angela was right. The day after Dexter’s ultimate test in Curtis’s rec room, the coach was sporting two nasty shiners and a gashed lip. Dexter was unscathed. Not a pin the whole evening, he reported to me, at least, not by Curtis.

Dexter emerged as the starting quarterback, Rufus Glendower moved to de-

fensive safety and improved steadily to the point of becoming a league all-star. Upon graduation, Dexter chose McDuff Academy, a. because of its Ivy League pedigree and b. because of its football team, the Warriors. In burgundy uniforms fearsomely regaled with war paint, tomahawks, and eagle feathers they usually contended for the Canadian University championship. Joining the Warriors coaching staff for Dexter’s rookie season, looking all business under his war-painted burgundy baseball cap, was high school coach-of-the year Paul Curtis.

The drawback with McDuff was that Dexter now realized his true artistic talents

lay in visual media rather than acting. McDuff was solid in art history, but not studio training. So Dexter quaterbacked the Warriors to three consecutive championships, 47

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picked up his major in art history, and completed a studio program through the fine arts department of Confluence College.

CFL teams vied to draft Dexter. “Great Canadian Hope” sprang from the pa-

pers, anticipating that for the first time since Russ Jackson, a Canadian born player would make quarterback in the Canadian league. Some believed that Harvey Lovejoy had been the first to frame the young man’s promise in such terms. Heck, I even recall Harvey saying that Dex might get bites from the NFL. Imagine, a Canadian quarterbacking in the USA! Then in the last minute of the last game of the last season a linebacker rolled across his knee. Dexter Singleton’s football dream ended. Waiting for my Dom Perignon, I wondered if Dexter, like Rufus Glendower with his bookin-progress, was finally ready to step forward, disclose what had gone on, alert others about abusive pressures from coaches… get that past out of his system. Forty-five years ago, going public wasn’t an option. You were seen. The adults were heard. If there was something wrong, it was you. The champagne arrived.

“A toast,” said Dexter.

We clicked glasses.

“I’ve sold The Winner’s Circle. An unbelievable price. Simply unbelievable.”

On top of that, Dexter had been selected to illustrate a first children’s book by

Eva Tomlinson, arguably the country’s preeminent author. Oddly enough, Eva had been my neighbour in NDG. She loved classical music and used to entice me in with chocolates if I would play softly for her as she wrote. I happened to know that she disliked Dexter, and with Eva there was no such thing as a mild emotion. I wondered how this had been managed.

It turned out the person pulling the strings on both successes was a deal bro-

ker we had met at Camp Kisisokôe. Of course, somebody had bankrolled his services. That somebody was Paul Curtis. Dexter beamed. 48

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“You see, no hard feelings for those black eyes.”

He must have suspected that something wasn’t connecting for me yet.

“It’s nothing to him, ” he added, referring to the wealth Curtis had inherited with

his father’s national sporting goods chain.

But there was more good news. A major publisher – learning of Dexter’s asso-

ciation with Ms. Tomlinson—now wanted him to do a book illustrating ashrams in India.

“What’s with you?” he said, an almost menacing undertone.

Had I been frowning, losing my good-listener neutrality?

“Nothing,” I said. “I just… Rufus Glendower… you think he might ask you for

some support?”

“He already has. I told him no. That was back then.”

“Yes,” I said, “but of course…”

“Some people think adolescents lack free will.” He paused for a sip of cham-

pagne. “Isn’t that sort of like racism?”

“Well, there have been medical opinions that …”

“We could have done a Karem Ataya and gone into soccer.”

I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Not even “um.”

“Choosing CFL meant going through Curtis.”

As Dexter drained the last of his champagne, I knew something was forever changed between him and me. The final thing I heard him say on the subject came in that new, vaguely resentful tone.

“We chose…. And I’m going deep.”

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Mermaid Rhian Thomas

Flakes of snow drifted gently down to muffle the sharpest edges. It wasn’t that

sort of snow, Disney snow; it was proper Welsh snow; plain, hard and useful, in its own way. It did make everything magic though, like the massive boulders - normally slimy, grey lumps, were now exciting pillows every honest person wanted to divebomb. They were a pretty trimming to the river, dark but not menacing tonight, because with this snow there was no way in hell any of the boys would have work tomorrow. Pint then? Talking of trimmings, all the twinkling lights make the shops look attractive; it’s generally an attractive time of year though, Christmas; all the girls rushing around buying presents and getting their tits out. And the posh totty you often see down the bay these days; snooty as fuck mind. Yes, we all know what they need. Fuck off did I, she was after me! Come on boys, do I look like I’d go for that type of woman? Give me a tidy, down-toearth girl any day. Long as she can cook, clean and take orders!

Warm happy noise floods the inside, misting the panes of the windows. Outside,

flashing multi-coloured bulbs seem cosier through condensation, each glass dome a microsphere of safety, warmth, light. If this was ‘A Christmas Carol’, you’d have ruddycheeked kids throwing snowballs and expressing their joy at being physically active in a minus two wind, with no hint of imminent homework looming on the horizon reminding them of National Curriculum Levels and SATs. You’d have real holly on every door, 50

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nobody worried about that bunch of hoodies that hangs around in the dark, trying every doorhandle on the street when they think no-one’s looking. Mrs Evans up the road has still got screwdriver marks on her doorframe. Next morning at work they all agreed that there was a lot to be said for UPVC and called them little fuckers.

But the snow was pretty mind, like white tinsel along the river. This was prob-

ably the only place in Cardiff where you could still go outside for a piss. Round the back, obviously. And Bill only let locals out that way in his pub. This one again would go soon, modernised along with the rest of any real history around here; real people shipped out to the edges of town now to make room for the suits. They didn’t want real people who swore, and drank in the week and pissed round the back of the pub. It is a man’s right to take a piss in the fresh air, and why not? Women, see. Whinging about men pissing outside. Would a man whinge? No, but a woman, well, that’s their prerogative isn’t it? They shouldn’t be in pubs anyway. Is that old-fashioned? Or honest?

Moonlight is diffused by the custard sky, it’s got that ethereal light to it, almost

yellow, or blue maybe. There’s the bell for last orders; something moves, catches his eye. He struggles with his zip, must be the cold biting, he can’t get it up. Maybe he can nip in quickly without her seeing; yes, it’s a woman. She seems enchanted by the chime of last orders piercing the night air. She must really need a drink. I’ll risk it, he thinks. Better be quick! He looks again. It’s very misty, he can’t even see the end of the road, but that’s good, means he’s got some cover. She’s coming and he really doesn’t want her to think he’s some weirdo and phone the police or... His mouth opens. She’s naked.

“Er… are you allright love?” he shouts. She’s beautiful; long tangled hair and the

most luscious body he’s ever seen. His eyes sting and burn; he’s stinging and burning and those eyes, - talk about come-to-bed eyes! She just keeps staring. “Hello? Are you lost? What are you doing? You’re naked.” Yeah, play it cool. “What’s your name?” No answer, she just looks at him with those eyes…

The lads have got him a pint in. “Been flashing have you?”

“Couldn’t do my fucking zip up, freezing out there it is.” He manages to pull it up,

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ignoring the pervert comments. He reaches for his pint, is wondering how to say it, and takes a long slow sip. The boys are sitting by the bar, one arm nursing a pint, the other on their thigh. The lights have dimmed and the wooden shutters are over the windows. The air is warm and full of noise. He breathes out, relaxes. “Lads, you are not gonna believe what…”

“What the…?” Somebody shouts. He turns around sharply, and there she is. The

lads are silent for a millisecond, and then it begins. She looks frightened, staring around the bar seemingly immune to the guffaws and shouts. She begins to raise her milky arm.

Hush descends, and her finger points, at him. There’s a purple crescendo of roar-

ing, red-faced, beer-bellied oafs straining to get their pun in; breathless, veins pulsating on foreheads, beer swilling over glass tops. Beer everywhere, hot breath laced with rumladen enthusiasm and a confetti of spit to hail the hilarious anecdote of how to get your leg over with a mermaid. A mermaid. He hadn’t noticed before. He stands, staring, motionless. Her eyes are huge, delicious, glistening; she doesn’t speak, she lowers her plump, fragile arms and questions him, eyes burning into his, making him want to make love to her here and now, protect her from the lads and the hot beery air and noise and chaos. The insults come muffled through the thick air, raucous shouts, snatches of songs, fast thick pants and smashing glasses pay homage to her coming. She looks around the bar, unaware of her own nakedness, unsure of what these people are, confused and scared by the wellrehearsed rituals they all seem to be enjoying; yet she understands him. At the mercy of them all, she walks towards him, breasts golden in the barlight, only partially covered by the tangle of hair, plumptious and luscious and perfect. She is fucking beautiful, sexy little bitch, coming in here all wide-eyed and just-beenshagged-through-a-hedge-backwards, making all the men want to fuck her. She looks up at him, he can’t even blink; the savage air rings clear on a a knifeedge, nearly shatters ice into dancing fragments. Her mouth opens, breathing sacred thoughts to his; pinpricks lick his skin, icily running over his flesh, flooding his mind, pulling at him, drawing him in. 52

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Suddenly she is gone. Another smashing glass forces his brain into action; the men have soused themselves into a grog-fuelled frenzy, a phlegm-riddled cough clearing the rotten stench of cigar smoke yellow and fetid. He grabs his coat from the stand by the door; shouts and leers greet him. He rushes outside, icy air slashing his lungs. There she is. “Hey! Wait!”

She turns around in the coral light, sad, confused, questioning. He reaches out,

takes her hand, delicate pale skin silky wet in the haunting moonlight. Her hair is plastered to her back now, the snow is falling fast, long strands moulding her shape as the snow melts on her flesh. He takes his coat off, holds it in his hand. This was really difficult, she was a mermaid and didn’t speak English, he was Welsh and didn’t speak any mermaid. He’d have to rely on accepted etiquette. He leans in towards her face, but she doesn’t close her eyes. He knows this is not a good sign so decides on no tongues. She wonders why he is putting his face near hers and then he kisses her. Her eyes widen in shock. Suddenly, she can see a demon lover, is exposed and naked. She can appreciate the festering insults, unclean desire and humanity. Panic chokes her breath, shame and anger burn her chest with understanding. She grabs the coat, feeling the freezing air clutching at her for the first time. She runs.

“Stop! Don’t go! I -”

He stands, useless, as flees towards the river. She has reached the snowy boul-

ders and turns around, glistening under the pale moon, looking more bewitching than anything any man has ever seen. She looks at him over her shoulder, sorrow and regret filling her eyes; her lips move silently, silver strands floating on the air reach him. He knows it is useless to speak, even though now she would understand, but it is understanding that causes her to face the river.

“Don’t!”

In the water her hair dances around her face, her skin glows white and her scales

are soothed soft once more, but she does not look back; she glimmers for an instant, a shimmering vision, and is gone. 53

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He picks up the abandoned coat and buttons it up, blowing on his fingers to warm

them. He sighs. Women.

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Nana Cash Maj Ikle

“What’s the matter Nana?”

Chewing a sweet russet apple as she leaned lazily against the open doorway,

Patience eyed her Nana shrewdly.

Gasping with joy, Nana Jones launched herself from her chair, hugging her

granddaughter so hard that Patience squealed in protest. Then, she sat her down at the table with a cup and saucer and began to pour the tea. Nana had been busy all that morning wondering what to do with her life savings, which had arrived by armoured courier from the bank. It being a big birthday, Nana felt the need to see what she amounted to in cash. For some reason though, Nana Jones just couldn’t seem to summon up the right kind of enthusiasm. “Just all too much” Nana had commented to the cat, stacking the bundles of notes into the dresser. What could one person honestly do with that much money apart from waste it? Finally, she had it all put away but it would make getting the good china plates out really awkward.

Nana considered the simplicity of youth, everything so well defined and easy. “If

you had fifty thousand pounds what would you do with it?” Nana asked her granddaughter, casually pouring the tea.

“Hide it”, came the rushed reply.

“Whatever for?” Nana could hear the timbre of her voice sharpen.

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“To stop it from getting stolen”, Patience stood up elegantly tossing her apple

core through the open back door.

“People are thieves Nana. Wake up to my world.” She spoke with such compel-

ling passion Nana didn’t want to contradict,

“I suppose”.

Nana was the kind of person who liked to do the right thing, to reuse her plastic bags, donate her old clothes to charity, save up tokens for schools, even sometimes unpicking old sweaters to make new ones. Nana had long considered herself a wealthy woman but she liked to have, only what she needed for a happy life. The only thing she could think of that she wanted was a little almond tree costing at most twenty-five pounds and that wouldn’t even put a proper dent in this lot. These endless piles of notes made her feel a bit queasy. Rather than something to be proud of, it all felt like a burden of responsibility. Nana felt it beholding on her to do something sensible with it.

Patience Jones was the only family Nana had. Once a year, the young woman

would take the train all the way from London, just to wish her Nana a happy birthday. In recent years Patience had also taken to bringing with her a shop bought cake. Already Nana felt her mouth fill with water hoping it would be chocolate.

Grateful as she was, Nana didn’t know how much she really liked who Patience

was becoming, she seemed to be rather spoiled. Her sole topic of conversation seemed to be the latest celebrity make over and what party she was going to next. Patience put a little too much ‘grand’ into granddaughter for Nana’s liking.

Patience flicked through her magazine as she talked, “I wish I had five thousand

pounds to get some work done,” pulling at a pucker of skin at her waist. What could her Nana say apart from “bloody nonsense”? Nana Jones blamed Barbie.

In an effort to distract her, Nana revealed the contents of her crammed cupboard.

Perhaps Patience, so busy with the material plane, may be exactly the person she needed to help her dispense with her excessive fortune. 56

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Patience suggested Nana tried writing down ideas she had about what to do with

the money.

Pushing the cat off from his energetic kneading of her fleecy trousers, Nana

fetched paper and pen and wrote: Give away fifty thousand pounds. Then she underlined it. Now, that felt nicely organised. Smiling to her granddaughter, Nana took a big sip from her cup and wrote 1 with a dash expectantly next to it, “Poor people in the developing world”. Nana paused unsure what else there was to write.

“Will you give it to the politicians or to the people who might really need it?” Pa-

tience was obviously not as impressed as Nana had hoped she would be. “Can you get your head around what going there would really be like”. Nana ignored the obvious patronising tendency. It was a good idea, so Nana let her mind go on a little adventure. She pictured herself handing a suitcase of money to a proud-faced tribal elder. Nana knew she wouldn’t be able to resist indulging herself in a bit of their grateful hospitality but as soon, as was polite, she would jump on a plane and get back to the cat. In the face of their unrestrained thanks, ‘Dim problem’ she would say; Welsh for ‘no worries’. Then Nana began to see a potential problem with the idea. Nana imagined herself stopped by another the tribal elder demanding to know what was wrong with their village?’

“They’d have a point.” Patience arched exquisitely shaped eyebrows.

Nana suggested hopefully that she could do some research on the Internet. “Perhaps I could find an isolated tribe with no neighbours at all?”

“Again, not realistic Nana” Patience said, “the world is small and all of the good

places are populated.” Patience had such an air of authority Nana found herself nodding, not sure if this was a fact but it sounded utterly convincing.

“What if I divided the money equally between groups of villages so that everyone

in a whole region could benefit?”

“But…” Patience seemed to know all of the ‘buts’. “However big you make the

area, someone will always be the next door neighbour watching. And that’s got to hurt.” 57

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Patience looked intensely into her grandmother’s eyes as if daring her to contradict. Nana could see the wisdom of this so she scrapped the random village idea even though she had liked the bit about how grateful they might be. The more she thought about it, the more Nana became aware that her charity bonanza was not the five minute thing she had hoped it would be.

Patience was “bored” by the exercise of what to do with the money, declaring

herself “exhausted” she went to lay down in the bedroom moaning about the rain.

Filled with missionary zeal, Nana spent the next hour of her birthday racking her

brains on the best way to rid her of this extraneous matter. Then she found a story in the paper about an international charity that brought fresh water into places where children regularly died of disease. A large donation from her would go some way to stop that from happening, Just as Nana was about to stuff it all into armour plated Jiffy bags and declare it job done, something called her to account.

A niggling, swelling, little worm of a worrying question. The question was always

the same. How could she know the unintended consequences? Nana walked into the bedroom protesting, “What if my investment was responsible for a robbery or even a war?”

Patience feigned sleep but Nana kept on “I don’t have enough to fund them all,

how can I choose?”

“Stop worrying about it Nana, nothing can be a hundred percent good” Patience

said without opening her eyes. “Perhaps you should just give fifty thousand people a pound each.”

“Don’t be silly dear, what use would that be?” Nana wondered whether it was

good that Patience hadn’t a real grasp of the nightmare of poverty.

“I would, buy myself a little almond tree first” Patience sat up suddenly alert.

Delighted to find that the girl shared her love of nature she patted the girl on her shiny hair, “Ahh, the acorn never falls far from the tree”. Nana didn’t want to be a martyr; perhaps she would buy herself that little almond tree. Somewhat assuaged Nana accompanied Patience back to the kitchen table for 58

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more tea and accepted the proffered enormous piece of cake with a greedy grin.

“Ooh mhmm ” Nana couldn’t help herself from moaning, as she brought her lips

around the soft creamy sweetness.

As the chocolaty flavour drenched her mouth in deliciousness, Nana looked at

Patience and felt a rush of warm love. Patience wasn’t too grand to forget her Nana’s love of cake, or to get the train two hundred miles to bring a smile to an old woman’s face. Surely, she had judged the child too harshly.

“Look” Patience cried out with all the excitement of a three year old “Sun’s com-

ing out”

Miraculously the wet day was transforming itself into a glorious late summer

afternoon. The Jones’ moved table and chairs outside so they could admire the late bloomers together.

After another slice of cake, they took off for a little promenade around the flow-

erbeds and Nana got a chance to recount the tales of how she had obtained her rare varieties of cuttings. With a glass of elderflower champagne held elegantly to her face, Patience listened keenly to each and every anecdote, a broad smile playing about her painted lips. Together they picked a bunch of Nana’s best dahlia for Patience to take home as well as a whole colander of wild strawberries, which they ate immediately, lying sprawled on the lawn. Popping as many of the tiny jewels into their mouths as they could, until the juice ran down their chins, both were soon choking laughing. They even picked out a place for the almond tree.

Six o’clock seemed to come in the blink of an eye. Nana Jones squeezed her

granddaughter tight, pecking as many times as was allowed, onto the downy cheek, before Patience insisted she had to go “now Nana”. Secretly squeezing a fistful of notes into the girl’s lavishly impractical coat pocket, Nana felt intensely grateful to Patience for her wonderful birthday. Tears prickled as Nana stood at the little wooden gate watching her go. Nana scolded herself now for how tight hearted she’d been, thinking those bad 59

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thoughts about her child’s only child. As the whole garden turned to gold in the dying sunlight, Nana imagined planting the almond tree she had always wanted and burying the banknotes beneath it. She would leave it to Patience in her will; perhaps it was just the natural thing to do.

Patience for all her conceited bravado would be elderly herself one day. Hope-

fully she would be grown up enough by then, to see this coming and not fritter the money on superficial stupidities. Happy to have the issue once, and for all resolved Nana went indoors and bolted the kitchen door. Banking up her wood-burning stove, she offered the cat an early night. As cool cotton sheets stroked sun-warmed skin, Nana dunked down deep into her duvet with a sigh of pure contentment. Within seconds, she was snoring like a lion.

Four hours later, a fly landed on Nana Jones face. Although it was only there for

a moment, it was long enough to bring her immediately awake. Eyes wide open in the pitch black room Nana swiped the air fruitlessly.

‘Very bright my Patience,’ she found herself saying, as if the cat had questioned

the fact. ‘Very bright girl, indeed’.

Perhaps… perhaps Patience was even canny enough not to react excessively

to the idea of Nana donating her wealth to charity. Not react that is, except to suggest a place to hide it. Nana shook her head trying to control the ugly thoughts messing with her mind. Then she remembered her terrible dream. Patience dressed in royal purple, rhinestone-studded overalls hacking away at the base of a full-grown almond tree. Again and again, the girl had spaded into the roots of that leaf cathedral without a thought except getting her manicured hands on that boob enhancing, tummy tucking money. Rubbing the sweat from her palms onto the coverlet, Nana remembered that in the dream not one of her faithful neighbours had tried to stop Patience from apparently turning the soil with gusto. Nana replayed the images over in her head, how they had 60

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watched smiling and nodding like ‘idiot gnomes’ at the sight of the helpful girl taking on some of the heavy work the old woman could no longer manage. Fools. Nana pushed off her damp bedcovers to sit up properly.

‘Oh my good goodness. Could Patience really be that cold? The little minx, pre-

tending she was a kindred nature spirit, when all along she was making sure she knew where to find the booty. She had to stop that wicked girl, her own flesh and blood from stealing from her, for both their sakes. Nana Jones clambered out of bed, making sure not to disturb her boneless cat. Padding through to the kitchen, she pushed her bed-socked feet into fire-warm-wellybliss. Then pulling her coat on over her pyjamas and taking down her torch from the peg, she opened the kitchen door. Only then did Nana realise she wouldn’t need her torch tonight, for a colossal, cool silver moon hung low over the far end of the garden where the compost was kept. At that very moment Nana knew for absolute sure, what excellent use she could find for her so called treasure.

Paper being an excellent source of carbon when properly broken down and her

wild strawberries were always hungry for nutrients.

Of course, the notes themselves would be much too big; first, she would have to

shred them into tiny pieces. Time was getting on, who knew when Patience might arrive to accelerate her inheritance. Now where were those scissors? The End

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Strip Malls Can Change Your Life From The Coming of Age of W.T. Crossland Donald McMann

One 1975

It is mid-October and around ten at night. It’s been dark since five. Most of the

shops in the strip mall are closed – Cutting Edge Framing, Hasti-Kleen Dry Cleaning, the chiropractor’s office, and Hendrick’s Bicycle Shop. Only the Dairy Queen, deserted, and the 7-11 store are open. Margaret has not come home from her regular Thursday meeting yet – some board or other. W.T. can’t remember. Maybe the Opera Guild or the Hospital Foundation. He knows he should pay more attention. This time, he’s made dinner and is keeping what the boys have left of it warm in the oven. They are in bed. Or they were last time he checked. He’s forgotten to buy bread for the morning. That’s why he’s made the five-minute drive to the 7-11. It’s late to be shopping, but his quest is important. He has only three requirements for mornings: a newspaper, a pot of coffee, and two slices of buttered toast. He’s one of three customers. His gray Buick is parked directly in front of the door, and the car is bathed in the blue-white, fluorescent light shining through 62

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the store’s glass front. Driving up he noticed the Mustang convertible parked in a corner of the lot well away from the shops, well away from the nearest light standard. The car is just like Margaret’s. Now, as he’s about to leave the 7-11, he hesitates just inside the door. He glances over in the Mustang’s direction. As he does this, a large sedan, a Mercedes he thinks, enters the lot, stops by the Mustang, and shuts off its driving lights. W.T. is drawn to the scene; he can’t move. He watches. It occurs to W.T. that the driver could possibly observe him staring, standing there in the brightly lit doorway this way, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

“Sir?” he hears the voice of the store clerk, and turns around. “Is anything the

matter?”

“No. Sorry. It’s nothing. Just distracted for a minute. Good night,” W.T. says over

his shoulder. He pushes open the door and leaves, pulling up his collar against the chill of the fall night. He heads for his car. Once inside, he puts his key in the ignition and starts the motor. He checks the rearview mirror, and in it he can see the two cars on the other side of the lot. Ridiculous, he thinks, I should just get home. Instead, he adjusts the mirror for a better view. Minutes go by, and finally the Mercedes’ interior lights flash on. He can see two people. The driver is a man. The passenger, a woman, gets out. She closes the door, and in an instant the car’s interior goes dark again. The woman is tall, and the light from the distant lamp post catches her blond hair. Even in the dark and at a distance of nearly a block, W.T. recognizes Margaret. She leaves the passenger side of the big sedan and walks around to the driver’s door. There, she waits a moment. He must be lowering the window. Then, she leans into the car. She lingers like this – minutes, maybe eight or ten. W.T. shifts in his seat, adjusts the mirror once again. She may be speaking to the driver. She could be kissing him. Him. It is a man. This much he saw. This much he had known since he saw these two cars together, side by side. Finally, she straightens up, and walks to the Mustang. In a moment its lights come to life, and by then the Mercedes has turned around, preparing to leave the way it came. The driver flashes his lights at Margaret. She responds – off/on, off/on. Still watching in his car’s 63

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mirror, W.T. waits until both vehicles have disappeared. He shivers, and adjusts the heater. He puts the Buick in gear and drives home.

Margaret is in the kitchen when W.T. arrives. She looks at him, coolly, he thinks,

and with a trace of surprise, surprise flavoured with disapproval.

“Where’ve you been?” she asks. And then, with something of an edge in her

voice, “Are the kids in bed?”

“Bread,” he says holding up the bag, “and yes, all was quiet before I headed out.

And you?” He put the loaf on the counter, took off his coat, and hung it in the closet beside the door from the garage.

“Meeting. Foundation. We ran late. Mmm. Something smells good.”

“Chicken. Hungry?”

“Famished.”

He took her by the arm, drew her near, and kissed her month. She seemed taken by surprise at first, but then kissed back.

“Cinnamon?”

“Mouthwash.”

He paused.

“Didn’t know they made cinnamon,” he paused again, but she said nothing,

“Might be good with vodka. And a twist.”

Two 2005

Ever since they first began to appear on suburban streetscapes, W.T. thought

that strip mall development had always seemed as unlikely a path to fortune as it was unglamorous. Strip malls were just too common, really, with their ubiquitous gas bars, convenience stores, hairdressers, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, clinics, and small retail64

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ers offering ordinary things from flowers to craft supplies. Gucci doesn’t locate in strip malls. Nor Tiffany’s. Strip malls aren’t for shopping; they’re for buying. Park, buy, drive. Milk, Double-A batteries, take-out sushi. It’s a world of fifteen-minute transactions. It’s a hasty, routine world where customers make a lot of small purchases and sellers hope that many small profits add up to a decent living. Developers, however, don’t think small is small.

Ryan Crossland and his partner, for example, had owned forty-five strip malls in

Southwestern Ontario and a handful in Quebec, some off the island in Montreal and the rest near the Ontario border. These grim little concrete rectangles, each a block long with a front wall made of plate glass windows that overlook an asphalt lot of yellow-lined parking stalls, had made both men very wealthy. Then, at forty-three, Ryan sold his half of the cinderblock empire to his partner for a tidy twenty million. Like his father, Ryan was now retired. There are many things men can do when they’re retired, especially when they’re retired, young, and wealthy. Woodworking, for example. A man can build a shop, furnish it with a lot of expensive equipment, and he can turn out some beautiful pieces. Or there’s fly fishing in exotic, remote places. Collecting classic cars. Travel. Studying painting in Paris. There’s adventure like flying hot-air balloons or hunting wild animals – only to photograph them, of course. He can operate a charity, do good works, build a personal legacy. W.T. and Terri, the young woman W.T. married some years after Margaret’s death, enumerated these options and more. And all of them seemed better – or at least potentially less annoying – than the plan Ryan announced to them over dinner a couple of months after the buyout.

“You know, Dad, I’ve had one dull career; I’m not about to start a second dull

career. I mean, it wasn’t all bad. I had fun doing some deals for real estate. And I thought our projects, particularly in the last couple of years, were starting to have some visual interest. I mean, we even hired a designer – true, she wasn’t actually an architect, but she had a college diploma, and her projects didn’t look half bad. They had some colour, 65

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some texture. She came up with the idea of adding that circular display space to one corner of a mall. Visual interest, she called it. And it was fun making money. I gotta say that. And we made a piss pot full of money – pardon my French, Terri – a lot of money. But that gig’s over now, and I’m still young. Can’t just sit around and manage my portfolio. Don’t want to look out for some other underestimated opportunity, either. I mean, strip malls changed my life. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to many men, and it doesn’t likely happen twice. Now that I don’t have to work, now that the bacon has all been brought home, I want to do something meaningful. I want to make a contribution. I want to help people in the way I just couldn’t when I was developing street-side retail.” W.T. and Terri exchanged looks.

“Ryan, more wine?”

He nodded.

Terri went to the kitchen for another bottle of Zin. When she returned she filled his

glass, then W.T’s, and finally her own. Ryan had waited, silent. He was making it clear that when he made his announcement, he wanted undivided attention.

“Say hello to the future Dr. Ryan Crossland,” he said raising his glass, “clinical

psychologist. I’m headed back to school, first, to finish that master’s I abandoned, and then on to the Ph.D.”

Ryan’s face was slightly flushed. His eyes glittered. He smiled broadly.

“But, but you didn’t like it. Before, I mean. Psychology,” said W.T. completely un-

able to hide either his astonishment or his horror. “If I can recall how you put it, you said something like ‘psychology sucks – you’d have to be crazy to become a psychologist.”

“I was young then, Dad,” explained Ryan. “I was restless, wanted to get out in the

world, make my mark. Make some money, more than I ever could as a clinical psychologist. And I did that. I’ve got bags of bucks to prove it. Now I want to do something more,” he paused, “ thoughtful. “I’ve matured. Re-evaluated. It’s why I sold out my half of the business to Scott. Well, that and the fact that he offered me all that cash – through his lawyer, ‘cause we weren’t actually speaking at the time. Directly, I mean. You know, like in person. And that was another reason for selling out. Like, who can go on that way. The 66

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little prick. Sorry, Terri. But, I really think that some of the insight I’ve gained out there in the world of business, like with Scott, for example, will give me a unique perspective on helping people learn to cope with the stresses and burdens they confront. You can gain a lot of wisdom from strip malls, you know.”

“No doubt,” said W.T. He avoided looking at Terri as she avoided looking at him.

“Well,” said Terri after a pause. “Good for you. She raised her glass and gestured

for W.T. to do the same. “To Dr. Crossland.” Ryan grinned. As they continued with dinner, and Ryan explained more, it became apparent that his plan was well advanced. His old school had given him some credit for the graduate course work he had done years earlier. He had an enthusiastic advisor with whom he had already mapped out the coming years. His practicum had been discussed. W.T. couldn’t help himself from wondering if the university would have been so accommodating had its returning student not had an eight-figure bank account.

“Well, I’m happy for you Ryan,” W.T. said before his son left that evening. “But

this time, this time you must promise me something.”

“What? Anything. You know that.”

“This time, no unsolicited psychoanalysis.”

“Dad!”

“None.”

“Dad, when did I ever…”

“Promise.”

“OK.”

“Say it.”

“I promise.”

“Promise what?”

“God! Alright. I promise not to offer any unsolicited psychoanalysis.”

“Good. Thank you.”

They hugged, and as Ryan went down the front walk, he called back. 67

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“Honestly Dad, I don’t know what gets into you. But just give me a couple of

years, and I’ll have you figured out all right” Oh God, thought W.T.

“Good night, Ryan.”

“So, have you talked to your brother lately,” asked W.T. of his youngest son, Will.

“You mean the return of Dr. Freud?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“One term. I give him one term, and he’ll be out of there. In fact, it may be as fast

as part of one term.”

“You think? You know, it’s not that I don’t wish him well…”

“But you don’t want to be analyzed again. I get it. But you didn’t experience the

half of it. You can only imagine what I went through – the queer younger brother – at the hands of the good, (Not-Quite) Doctor Crossland. You have no right to complain. No right. Fact is, though, that he’s not really the academic type. Doesn’t have the patience. He’ll be itching to start some new business, build an empire of mayonnaise jar recycling or used golf balls, or something else easily overlooked by the entrepreneurial class, and he’ll be off to his next twenty million.”

“Well, I have to say I’m not entirely glad he’s out of those nasty little malls. If

there’s a dreary way to make millions, propagating them has to be it. Hate them, myself.

So if he drops out and tries some other business, that will be fine, too.”

“And if not?”

“Easy. We’ll just kill him and claim an insanity defense.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Three 1975 Their late dinner is over. So is the eleven o’clock news. The dishwasher is loaded 68

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and running. It’s time for bed. W.T. brushes his teeth in the bathroom and then rinses with the mouthwash that’s kept on the counter. It’s mint flavoured. The door is closed, and he rehearses, his whispering drowned out by the water running in the sink.

“So, what was your car doing at the mall?”

Too accusing.

“Could have sworn I say your car at the mall when I was there.”

No. Try this: “So, have you started carpooling? Thought I saw you…”

No. Still not right.

“Saw you at the mall when I went for bread.”

That might do. Fairly light handed. Not too suspicious sounding. Or this: “Who

the goddamned hell was that fat creep I saw you with at the fucking mall. You know. The one with the big Mercedes. The one you kissed. Who was that guy?” Perhaps not. He emerges from the bathroom. She’s already in bed, glasses on, reading her book. A clear don’t-bother-me signal. He brings a glass of water with him and sets it on the bedside table. He gets in beside her. Clears his throat. Looks over at her. She turns a page. He picks up his own book. Opens it to the marker. Again, he turns to look at her. She’s absolutely calm, absorbed in the book she’s reading. Not a trace of nervousness. No guilty glances. This isn’t the time. He shouldn’t interrupt her. He starts a new chapter, and before he puts the book down and turns off the lamp on his side, he reads the opening paragraph three times. He tries for sleep. Tomorrow, he says to himself,

We’ll definitely sort this out tomorrow.

Later he surfaces. There’s a light on. Margaret is still reading. He squints at the

alarm clock – 3:37. He rolls over, his back to her, his eyes tightly closed. Four 2005 “Dad, you’ll never guess.” Ryan was on the phone. “This guy calls me up last week. Says he’s heard I might have some capital itching to get some exercise. Has a 69

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few little malls in Edmonton. So, long story short, I bought ‘em. Including that one near your house. It’s a great buy. Perfect for redevelopment. Nice little package, actually.”

“But what about school? Dr. Crossland and all that.”

“This is just a little detour, Dad. Put things back a term. Three – maybe four

months, and some sound changes, this little investment will run itself. Besides, a guy’s gotta have some fun, you know.”

“Fun, you say. With strip malls?”

“Sure, fun. Doing deals. Being creative. You know.”

“The one near our place, eh?”

“Yeah. With the 7-11.”

“And you own it.”

“You bet, Dad.”

Five 1975 W.T.’s on his way home. He knows Margaret is at another meeting. She’s told him that in the refrigerator there’s a casserole to heat up. He decides to drive by the strip mall. For bread. They could be out of bread. Probably were. He pulls into the lot. There are a half a dozen cars all parked around the 7-11. Most of them have been left running to say warm against the unseasonably low fall temperatures. Plumes of exhaust billow behind them and up into the otherwise clear night sky. Just above the horizon, a huge, orange moon rises. He drives slowly and wills himself to check the dark back corner of the lot, the corner where a week earlier he had first spotted Margaret’s car. He’s holding his breath. He looks past the lights, the clouds of exhaust, and there he sees absolutely nothing.

“Empty,” he says aloud. “No cars.”

W.T. parks, releasing his aching hands from their grip on the steering wheel. He enters the store feeling almost lightheaded. He picks out a loaf of white, and a couple of 70

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candy bars for the boys. A treat. A Crispy Crunch for Ryan. A Coffee Crisp for Will, Will the strange one with the adult tastes. Margaret wouldn’t approve of the candy, but what she doesn’t know…. He’ll swear the boys to secrecy.

It’s not until he starts for home that he sees it – a Mustang convertible. At first he

isn’t sure. It’s just a glimpse from the corner of his eye, a flash from the adjacent dark street. The car’s parked by the curb, obscured by the gas bar that stands on the outer edge of the mall’s lot. He’s actually turning away from the Mustang when he spots it, but he quickly moves his car closer to the curb and then cranks wheel hard to make a u-turn. The car behind him, the car he didn’t bother to check for, blasts its horn and swerves around him. W.T. stomps on the breaks. The Buick dives to a stop. His heart is pounding. Sweat beads on his head. He’s breathing in short, sharp gasps.

“Shit!” he yells to his empty car. “Could’ve killed yourself, stupid oaf. And whoever

that was behind you.” He sits in his car watching the other vehicle’s angry red taillights recede into the night. He turns on the radio. It’s Peterson’s “Night Train.” A perfect prescription for cooling down, and he needs to be cool. After some minutes, and after checking both ways, he turns the car around and approaches the parked Mustang. He stops so that his headlights shine on its license plate. Not Margaret’s car. He was wrong.

“Fool,” he says, “suspicious fool.” And he smiles. He pats the armrest as if it were

a much-loved, loyal pet. Three blocks away there is a community league building adjacent the playing fields, and in winter, the outdoor skating rink. It’s after ten, and the parking lot is empty save for two vehicles: a Mustang convertible and a Mercedes sedan. The sedan is running. Only its parking lights are on. At the driver’s door a woman leans into the open window. After a few minutes she straightens herself and walks to her car. She unlocks the door. She waves at the driver of the Mercedes as she gets in. He flashes his lights at her – off/on, off/on, and he drives away. She starts her car, turns on the lights, and leaves.

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Six 2005

“Why were you talking about breakfast cereal?”

W.T. had just hung up the phone from a nearly half-hour conversation with Ryan.

“Oh, you mean the Shreddies. It wasn’t those Shreddies. It was Shred-Ease.

As in easily shredding things – like documents or receipts. It’s his latest scheme. Ryan, I mean. He says it’s the answer to this growing panic over identity theft. He describes those little home shredders as junk. Actually, he’s not too far wrong. I have three dead ones in the garage.”

“I know,” she said.

“Commercial shredders don’t want to deal with some grandfather and his can-

celled cheques and Visa receipts. So, he proposes to set up inexpensive shredding centers with high-quality machines that aren’t in mortal danger from every paperclip or staple.”

“You tried to shred paperclips?”

“Well, not on purpose. Who would want to destroy an innocent paperclip?”

“Still.”

“Anyway, this might just be another one of his inspirations. Imagine making

money from junk people are literally afraid to throw away. Oh, and guess where he plans to locate these centers?”

“Strip malls?”

“Strip malls. See? He’s getting swept up again.”

“And that’s a good thing, right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, Shred-Ease makes a nice departure from cleaners and frame shops.

Where do they all come from, anyway?”

“Where does what come from?”

“The pictures. There seems to hundreds of these frame shops. What are they

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framing?”

“I can tell you what none of them will be framing: psychology degrees for Ryan.”

Seven 1975

“I’ll be home at dinnertime tonight.”

Margaret says it matter-of-factly as W.T. carries his empty toast plate and coffee

mug to the kitchen from the dining room.

“But this is Thursday,” he says, “don’t you always have a meeting?”

“No. Not tonight. Not any more. It’s over.”

“Over? But it’s not even the end of the year.”

“It’s over because I quit. Things run their course, and when they’re done, they’re

done. I was finished. Time to move on.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. You OK? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Everything’s fine.”

She is now standing next to him in the kitchen, beside the sink. She puts her arms around him and kisses his mouth. W.T. tastes the kiss. Coffee. And mint. Eight 1975 Forever He’s in the parking lot. The 7-11 looks blocks away. But the Mustang is so close he can almost touch it. In a minute he’ll walk up to the driver’s door and tap on the window. He’ll know then. In a minute. The Mustang’s engine is running. The sound of that throaty V-8 is unmistakable. Everything is dark but the red taillights. They are large, bright. He’s never seen such taillights. They seem to be on fire. But he’s cold; the night is cold. And there is betrayal in the air. He pulls something around himself. The engine begins to rev, and the car begins to pull away. He starts to run after it, faster and faster. 73

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It’s speeding up. He can catch it, though. He knows he can. He just has to go faster, a little faster. He’s gasping for breath. He shouts: “Stop. You can’t do this. Stop now. Come back here now.” His arms are thrashing. It’s as though he’s being restrained by something. Is it rope?”

“W.T. W.T. what’s wrong? Baby. It’s all right. Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

Terri held his arms, trying to calm him, trying to avoid his flailing fists. His eyes

snapped open wide, but at first they were unseeing. They darted around. He recognized nothing. And then they settled on Terri. He looked at her.

“What? Where did the car go?”

“W.T., there is no car. You’re in bed. You had another dream. Just relax. Just

relax. He put his arms around her. They hugged. She felt his heart pounding against her, his chest still heaving.”

“A dream,” he says. “It was just a dream.”

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Blanche/ The Big Whisper Gillian Eaton

Blanche We sat in a corner under a poster of Lands End. Blanche was silent as I gave our order to a bored waitress with a pin through her nose.

“You don’t seem well,” I said eventually, “Not your usual self.”

“Really? What self is that?” replied Blanche.

“Oh come on, what’s up?”

“Nothing much,” she said, “Just rage, crippling, mind numbing rage. You know.”

“No, I don’t know!”

“It’s not important what I think, not like starving Ethiopians or dead whales.”

“I don’t understand.” I said.

“Men grow into themselves. Women grow away. Men ripen,” she said intensely.

“Women rot.”

“That’s not true.” I protested. “I’m not rotting, just maturing!”

“Pastel shades and a few hi-lights don’t stop the clock. Face it. We are part of the

wall paper. Absent even when present.” The table seemed to pitch sideways. The waitress poured more coffee and I saw us though her young, indifferent eyes; two middle aged women with handbags and eye 75

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shadow. I fought for breath.

“Right now,” she said, “I’m hurtling backwards into space, like an astronaut

whose umbilical has snapped. I’m disappearing. I could walk out of here without paying and no one would notice.”

“Rubbish!” I protested.

She gathered her things quickly and strode towards the door. I moved clumsily

after her. Outside, we turned and looked back through the window, the waitress was clearing our table and two young women had taken our place.

“See!” She said triumphantly, and then she disappeared.

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The Big Whisper

It may be true that the world began with a whisper not with a bang. A small out breath or lift or stir in the dark or shift of atom or eve, maybe a release from tension to peace and, like a party balloon inflated some small speck and created us all and everything we know in a gentle act simple and slow. Spring would then make sense coming as it does leaf by leaf, humming through the hedges and the trees smoothing itself across the fields, plumping up the hills with a soft hand, steadying the waves towards the land. For, sizing the seed into the egg at least or the egg into the bird or beast follows the order that is known from small beginnings great things are grown, from the snail to the star from the stone to the bone. If so then the bang could come at the end and all thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perfect and imperfect lend itself to world without world without world without Ah!

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Laughing Gilly Burke

I last laughed in 1984. It was a surprise at the time just as its absence since has

been puzzling.

I mean, I’m not a woman given to mirth. Laughing 20–odd years ago was a

shock even then as I was asleep at the time. I thought at first that I was sneezing when I awoke with this eruption, this alien convulsion. But it seemed to be rolling up through my torso in a shuddering spiral, not a staccato attack in the diaphragm. Once I’d sneezed 40 times in succession. Full-bellied, you know, out loud. This was during a workshop on incontinence. My psychoanalyst had later said that these were displaced orgasms.

“Displaced?” I said.

“Yes”, he said.

“40 of them!?”

“Oh, yes.”

Hmmmmmnnn.

I became embarrassed to sneeze again in public. But this was long ago. And

nasal orgasms, like eating oysters, ought to be discrete I felt. However, this new development was worrying. It threatened to disrupt my daily gloom. I set forth on my Buddhist practice of investigating phenomena. I meditated on the matter for a day and a half then cogitated then meditated again. I examined the 78

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remembered sensations in my solar plexus, the unfamiliar spiders there â&#x20AC;Ś I recalled the sensation of a train chuffing down tracks in my throat. I considered the twisting in my face and around the mouth area, I even practiced hurling loving kindness towards the vibrations.

I began to recall that there had been an errant smile in 1992 and something

approaching a giggle in 2001 which I had put down to indigestion. And last week, last week, now that I thought of it, that must have been a guffaw, not a coughing yawn. No doubt about it. It was a laugh.

It was the meditating that gave me the idea to go and see Harry.

Harry and I shared an amiable misery on the inherent futility of all things. We were both, if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll pardon the contradiction in terms, fervent existentialists. Travelling along the six miles to his caravan, I felt the usual sense of anticipationwould he be awake or asleep?

Harry was at his best when he was unconscious. A state he frequently practiced.

He was, however, erratic, so it was tricky to catch him in a relative state of alertness, let alone a willingness to converse. As I approached his home, his dog Aggie intercepted me and performed her usual security check on me. She frisked me thoroughly with her nose â&#x20AC;&#x201C;something I always enjoyed- and then nodded for me to go in. Stooping to go in his hall door, I saw the signs indicating his mental presence: the door was on the latch, the open fire was roaring in the grate, the windows were open 79

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and a 1953 recording of Peggy Lee’s rendition of ‘Is that all there is?’ was playing on his old stereo- the latter an indication that mental departure was being considered within the hour. I was just in time. He was standing by the bay window singing along with the bass section, sadly swaying his upper body to the rhythm and his hips in counterpoint. His beard accompanied his lower body.

I hesitated to speak. To see him in voluntary, pleasurable movement was rare.

He swayed; he schmoozed with the music and opened his eyes. His eyes widened and the eyebrows went up. He sighed out and moved his lips. If I didn’t know better I’d say he was approaching a smile.

“It’s You”, he said.

“Harry… Harry, I … there’s been some laughter…it just happened…this morning,

but also before ... and … last week …”. Harry took my hand and drew me closer into the bay window. The sky was there. And the tree. He put his hand in his pocket and emerged with a piece of paper, which he pressed into my hand. I reached for my glasses. “Not now, come back … after….” he said. He nodded in Aggie’s direction. “But Harry..,” I said. Harry blew me a kiss and turned to resume his dance. Aggie stood in the doorway.

I sat down to wait and to watch but Aggie kissed my hand, a sign that it was time

for him to depart. She wagged her tail and waited to escort me out. I shook my head at her but my nerve failed and I went out anyway. On the porch I opened the note. It said “Dancing or crucifixion? You choose.” 80

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words. But I couldn’t concentrate, there was clearly something new arising in Harry too.

Peggy Lee stopped singing. I circled around to the bay window and peeked in.

Harry was lying down on his chaise longue, already beginning his metamorphosis. I climbed up the tree and made myself comfortable in its branches. Already Harry looked noble. He was beginning to look like living marble. The last time I saw Harry do this was just before he left his job at the hospice. His ability to morph into a dead hero confused staff and upset visitors and I fully expected he would be fired but he quit saying that he’d become jealous of everybody dying all around him. The ultimate letting go, he’d said. He couldn’t wait. And so he practiced. Not fit enough to do bungee or parachute jumping, he enjoyed nearly dying as a regular past time. He contracted terminal illnesses (from which he always recovered) or had a major accident several times a year and in between went into states of unconsciousness two or three times a week -or “meditation” as he called it.

I wasn’t sure he wasn’t falling asleep but as he went into this state his features

became more sculptured. He radiated benevolence. His face, by day ruddy with heart disease, glowed magnificently. His usual droopy nose aligned itself with a mountainous bearing. Not only was his head etched royally but the outline of his body also took on a silhouette quite different from when he was ordinarily sleeping or snoozing. A cough interrupted my ruminations. I leaned forward to peer through the window; Harry was stirring! I leaned back with surprise just Aggie barked underneath my feet. I jerked away from her disapproval and overbalanced. The ground was hard and grassy, not unpleasant, but the effects of the impact made it difficult to breathe and think at the same time, so it seemed best to just focus on breathing. 81

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so I looked at Harry. His green bedroom eyes, his undertaker-like solicitousness; these were a combination I found compelling. Aggie was howling, looking wretched. I tried to reach out my hand to her but that arm wouldn’t work. She came anyway and lay down and put her paw on my shoulder. The three of us sat there “for some considerable time” as a former Prime Minister used to say, John Major, I think it was. All the time Harry was stroking my hand …and wrist… and lower arm. . There was something at once intimate and impersonal, like a doctor palpating ones body, but it was more a vibrational thing, his presence was sensuous. He was here. With me. He was giving me his time, attention and energy. I had never felt so erotic, so much like an exultant warrior, so charged with possibilities. The pain in my back had gone now and things seemed looser somehow, easier. Those fabulous eyes! I opened inside my own eyes to him. I could feel movements in my chest and throat. Then, he smiled!

“Laughter”, he said “is breaking out all over the place…I dunno… maybe it’s just

time ... changes… cosmic stuff, you know”. He shrugged and gestured towards the sky. Not a man for words, Harry preferred to let the listener receive his few words and let them flower like a Haiku. I think I was beginning to get it.

“You need”, he said “ to go now … I think…don’t you?” His usually sad eyes

looked stricken. “It should have been me”, he said. I wanted to tell him, oh... all of the ordinary things which are enormous things when you’re dying but I …my mouth wouldn’t work.

“Harry”. The flush went up from my belly into my throat and my lips seemed to

want to … move sideways. I smiled at him. It felt … good. He leant over and smilingly, oh so tenderly, kissed me. He smelled of lemon tea. He left one hand on my cheek as he drew back. And then…well… 82

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The Boy Who’d Never Tasted Cola Carly Holmes

The boy’s name was Harry. He was six years old, with chestnut curls that his mother adored, and a grin that reached up to grab both ears. When he stumbled and fell, he knew his parents would be there to pick him up and make it better; and when he was ill he could always be sure that the shadows would part at the end of his bed, and a cool hand would dive down to caress his damp cheeks. Harry wasn’t ill often, and though he sometimes fell he would rarely do more than thrust out his lower lip. He was told he was the bravest boy in the world, and he sometimes imagined himself in a magical cape and shiny boots, saving people from fires or rescuing his parents from robbers. Harry’s mother tried to protect him from all of the bad things in the world, and his father tried to teach him how to play cricket and ride a bike. His grandmother gave him whiskery kisses whenever she saw him, and his friends shared their secrets and bags of sweets. The only thing that would make Harry’s mother stern was cola. She had read about how it rotted the teeth and the brain, and made dirty pennies shiny and bright. She didn’t want Harry to drink anything but water or juice, though he was sometimes allowed lemonade as a special treat at Christmas, and he savoured the dense sweetness in trim little sips, so that by the time he’d finished a glass the last couple of inches would be flat. Harry’s grandmother often visited, and she would sit in the lounge and beam at 83

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him with short-sighted ardour. She loved all things sweet and syrupy, but she had no teeth left to rot away. She always brought a big bottle of cola and would eye him over her glass of heaven and sip noisily, saying things like not for little boys, or stop staring, Harry. Then she would cackle throatily and reach to pour some more. Harry would discuss the taste of cola with his friends, squatting under the tree at the bottom of the garden with the bees and the dirt. They would try their best to describe the experience to him, and his mouth would flood with saliva as he took the narrative from them and supplied the words himself; words like nectar and treacle. At those times he came close to tasting cola, but then he would be called in to dinner and the moment would evaporate, leaving a metallic taste on his lips and a rumbling in his stomach. He always had a pudding after his dinner, provided he ate all of his vegetables, so that feeling of loss would be satiated by syrup sponge or fruit crumble and custard, and he would go to bed contented. Harry knew not to argue with his mother because she was the cleverest woman in the world, as well as the most beautiful, but he sometimes wondered, when looking into the depths of his friend’s mouths as they whooped and squealed their way through playtime, why their teeth weren’t rotten. They were allowed cola as often as they wanted, and they hadn’t mouldered to nothing before his eyes. At parties the cola rule would always be aired, and he would smile greasily as his mother spoke firmly above his head, and promises were given. He would then be passed over at the table when the glasses were filled, and he would accept his lonely tumbler of squash with words of thanks that were tinged with longing. There were times when Harry’s yearning expanded to fill his entire world, and twinkling summer evenings would be blighted by the need to taste cola. He knew that he could trade his mother’s trust for dishonesty, and steal gulps from his friend’s bottles, but he didn’t want to betray her love like that. So he endured the sour-sweet tingle of selfdenial and wore the deprivation like a medal. It was on one of his grandmother’s visits that Harry’s endurance finally tore itself apart. After enduring a bristly kiss and watching her slurp and chuckle, he lunged and 84

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grabbed, knocking her from her chair and snapping her neck against the mantle-piece. Crouched on her chest he pulled great swallows of cola into him, wriggling with ecstasy and causing rivulets of brown liquid to run down his chin. He turned into the sound of his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s screams and held his glass up, his eyes blank with joy. More please.

THE LAMPETER REVIEW - Issue 1 - July 2010

Number 67 Rob Morgan

It was the early seventies. I was, I suppose, about twenty-two or thereabouts. A thoughtful student, in my finals year, and living at home at least from time to time; for an engagement and an ensuing early mistake of marriage called me almost as loudly as graduation. The old terraced house, number 67 in a long, indifferent street, was huge, ‘rambling’ an estate agent might say. With at least ten rooms, one an enormous ill-lit attic unused since the 1950’s when for a short time a young Gibraltarian who worked with my father had lodged with us en route for ‘the New World’; as well as a gloomy basement looking out onto the small, walled garden, an overgrown wasteland which was little used by my widowed mother or myself since my father died. Though since the only indoors loo was there, the basement was visited regularly. The remaining two floors of 67 were singularly uninteresting, but the long curving staircase, dark, and secret on two broad landings where any sensible Victorian builder would have opened a casement, had been a source of great joy to me as a place to play with the household cats and my toys during a solitary, but quite unremarkable, childhood. I was born in the house. My bedroom was high at the back, below the empty attic with one tall window looking over towards the Guildhall tower and beyond to the hospital clock. In morning a sunny 86

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room, later in the day, shady and quiet. My student floor was littered, as it would be in those busy days, with mountains of books. The bed as usual unmade, its normal state unless my mother crept in to make it. On the table next to the table lay a small, incredibly noisy, manual typewriter bought after my first essays were thrown back derisively with a comment that I should follow a career in medicine rather that teaching, since my script was illegibly ‘doctoral’! It was Winter I know. I remember. It was one of those dismal weekend days, sad short and sullen. Twilight days which limply follow on from Epiphany, and have no real start nor end. My thoughts lay with my thesis, on Jean Piaget, the great educational psychologist, alive then, and in the matter of Causality and Concrete Operations in Early Childhood, the bane of my long scribbling days, and the constant reading of my longer nights. Rummaging around the table, and among the textbooks open on the carpeted floor, I needed a title which had somehow vanished from sight. I’d been reading it the previous evening at supper, so it must be in the kitchen, two floors below. The house was quiet, apart from Radio 3 playing softly around my darkening room on the transistor radio, a working habit then as now. It was there. It was there. Crouched. Big. Immense, dark, dark brown and covered in hair, or some nigrescent and matted substance. A vast creature. A thing. Seemingly as surprised as I was. It huddled in the corner of the dark landing. Silent in the place where my boyhood set once rattled in great loops. A landing it half filled with a presence I can’t name. 87

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It was there. I saw its eyes. I felt its surprise. It was there. Unthinking, unbreathing, I stepped backwards into my room. I slammed the door and turned the key in the lock. I locked the door. An unheard of act in our house in those far off days. I listened, but heard nothing. The house was empty. My mother and my Auntie Kath gone to town shopping, and the two cats were sitting on the back garden wall, idly watching sparrows. Not a soul in Number 67. Only me, and whatever was on the dark landing. It was there. Cynical twenty two year olds don’t have visions, and there could be no link between the thoughts running through my mind that afternoon, on play in two year olds, and what was outside my thin, locked door. I couldn’t work. There was of course no telephone in my room. That was far below in the hallway and it rarely rang. My table lamp brightened as the day shortened towards dusk. I couldn’t open that door. My hands were covered in cold damp sweat, and in those days I had a head of hair, and it prickled, my skin tightening with fear. It was there. An age passed. Literally. Unable to read. 88

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Unable to concentrate. Unable to move freely about my small warm room. I sat on the only chair and watched the door, but whatever it was I expected to happen didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. Far below me, after an age of waiting, the front door opened. My motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice sang out my name and the two women bustled into the hallway. The lights went on. Below the door, I could see the warm pool glowing. My name was called again. Literally trembling, palms soaking, I edged to the door, and turned the key. Light poured in, as I called down the stairs. The landing was empty. Yet it was cold, and a damp smell filled it. Not a smell I knew or understood; but it was there, almost rancid, perceptible as wet and salt, or ancient peat perhaps, filling my nostrils and mouth. I hurried downstairs. My unusual behaviour was put down to my work, of which mother and aunt were all too aware. No more was said. I never saw it again, though the landing light stayed on whenever I was working, and I moved my desk from a position where I could always watch the door. In the following fifteen years of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, I could not sleep alone there, in the house where I was born. No. Not for all the tea in China. When my mother went off to visit her brother, the house was locked and the cats and I moved in with my girlfriend. My mother saw nothing strange at all. She encountered nothing, in almost fifty years of living there in number 67. What the cats saw, they kept to themselves. But I met it again. In a book. Oh, some twenty years afterwards. Qualified, promoted and married once more, I

found the thing I saw on the landing in a short story by M.R. James, tucked away in a Gothic volume given to me as a birthday present. The story, which I’d not heard of until the late 1980’s when I read it, once and never again, is called ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.’ Early to bed with the anticipation of another disturbed night from our newly arrived infant, I read the story, and the image from my past came back to me. Eyes, the huge darkened shape, the matted look, and crouched, surprised stature, even the faint odd salt smell was there in the story. I did not sleep, I couldn’t. Morning was never so welcome. It was there. On the landing. Long, long ago. It was there.

The Authors Dik Edwards was born in Cardiff. He studied at St David’s College, Lampeter, University of Wales, Cardiff and University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has written over 20 plays, including Franco’s Bastard, Utah Blue and The Pimp as well as the acclaimed poetry collection Walt Whitman and other poems. He also wrote the libretto for Keith Burstein’s controversial opera Manifest Destiny. In Feb-March 2009 his play Casanova Undone was produced at Kruttenden by That Theatre in Copenhagen. He is the founder and director of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre at the University of Wales, Trinity St David. Alan Flanders A native of Portsmouth, Virginia, USA, Flanders earned his BA in History at Old Dominion University, and his MA in English at Hollins College where he studied creative writing under Richard Dillard and Allen and Dara Wier. He is also a graduate of Bread Loaf Writers School, Middlebury College. For thirty years he was a feature writer for the newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, and author of eight books on maritime history. A former Fellow by Special Election at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, he holds an advanced graduate degree in English Local History from Oxford University and a DPhil in History. He hosted a regional history program in Hampton Roads on Public Television entitled “Century” which won an Emmy Award. Currently he is working on a doctorate in creative writing under Dic Edwards at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His dissertation focuses on the World War I poet Wilfred Owen and his concept of “Pity” as a major theme in his poetry.

John Lavin studied English at the University of Wales, Lampeter, followed by an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Cardiff. After several years working in the mental health sector he has returned to Lampeter where he is a PhD student. Ros Hudis Ros has been writing since the age of five and published work in her early twenties, but then took a few massive detours down other paths. These included raising a family and spending twenty years working as a professional musician. She finally realised writing was what she wanted to do in life, and after signing up for the MA in Creative and Script Writing at Lampeter, is now back on track. She has two fantastic daughters and lives near Tregaron. David Brundage grew up in Montreal, spent several years writing in New York City, and for the past 32 years has lived in Alberta, Canada, at times as a freelance writer. His poetry has appeared in pensianante deâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; saraceni, Paris, and The Fiddlehead, University of New Brunswick, and has been produced and broadcast by CBC radio. David has had ten plays produced. Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts have recognized his short fiction. With his wife Joyce, David lives off grid on forested land north of Edmonton and teaches creative writing for Athabasca University Rhian Thomas - left teaching Secondary English at a Welsh school in South Wales to come home to Ceredigion to study for an MA in English Literature. Enjoys good food, wine and friends as well as spending time growing her own food in the garden. Loves writing fiction, especially childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s literature and short stories. Maj Ikle tree hugging ego worrier that writing on a solar powered laptop is a big fan of writing against the grain despite countless offers she is determined to self publish to destroy the guilty x

Donald McMann is from the north. No, not Scotland. A different kind of north. Think snow and parkas and hockey. He’s a Canadian completing his PhD in English with the University of Wales, Lampeter. He has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bennington College in the States. He teaches composition and literature at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Gilly Burke is currently reading an M.A. in Creative Writing at Trinity Saint David, Wales Gillian Eaton, born and raised in Wales, has lived in the USA for the many years where, as well as numerous theatre awards for directing and acting, she has been honored with the prestigious Michigan Artist prize and the Detroit Free Press Award for outstanding contribution to theatre. She has appeared in numerous stage plays, TV shows and films in the US and the UK and has written for the cinema and the stage. Carly Holmes is a 34 year old PhD student, proposing to write a novel for her dissertation. So far, the novel is still at the cerebral stage, as she is a strong believer in sitting back and letting the creative subconscious go to work (preferably with a glass of wine in hand...). She has however managed over 90,000 words in short stories over the last year, and is now gearing up to embark on the long, painful process of getting them all rejected. She is working on her fake smile, to present at dinner parties when asked the inevitable question: “So, have you had anything published yet?” Rob Morgan author of ‘The Black Captain and the Golden Age of Piracy’ reviews and writes for magazines and educational and historical journals in the UK, in Europe and in the USA. His interests are Ukraine, ‘GO’ and Boules.