Haque, Issue 3, 2014

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2014

Introduction “WRITING THE NOW”

Welcome Friends,

PRODUCTION TEAM: CHRISTIAN, MIKE, LIZ, KATHLEEN, ADAM MASTHEAD DESIGN: LIZ FITZSIMON

Haque is the erratic literary excretion of the Hackney & East London Writers’ Group.

We’re a disparate band of local writers of all levels, from beginners to published authors, novelists, short story writers, playwrights, poets and essayists, most of us wearing more than one of these hats.

Attendance (and group membership) are free, and the group may be contacted at HackneyWriters@yahoogroups. com.

Think you can do any better?

Come and have a go.

Lochlan Bloom, Editor, Haque No.3

IN THIS ISSUE

Contents Cover by Priscilla Fernandes; additional images by Lochlan Bloom & various artists

The Evening and the Afternoon

by Kathleen Bryson The Misadventures of Me

by Roger Daniels Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

by Adam Marks True Story, The B

by Michael Harth Something in your eyes

by Colin Heinink Phrenology

by Liz Barnes Lost Love

by Stevan Rimkus The End of Grunge

by Kathleen Bryson Dad Again & Transformation

by Laura Stephens I Plough Through Where Renowned Authors Stumble

by I_PWN_YER_MA_84 Trade (an excerpt)

by Lochlan Bloom A Photograph

by Gwynfryn Thomas

Pg 3 Pg 7 Pg 8 Pg 13 Pg 16 Pg 17 Pg 22 Pg 26 Pg 30 Pg 32 Pg 37 Pg 42

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The Evening and the Afternoon

by Kathleen Bryson I. The Afternoon.

Bio Kathleen Bryson grew up in Alaska and after that spent a few years in Sweden.

The climate was pretty much the same in both places. This story, also illustrated

by Kathleen, is from a just-finished episodic novel called The Witch of Agnesi. Her novel Mush was published in 2001 by Diva Books and her novel Girl on a Stick was published in 2008 by Suspect Thoughts Press. She is working on a Choose Your Own Adventure novel about a little girl with antlers called The Stagtress and a science-fiction novel about chimpanzee-human inter-breeding called Hybrid Vigour.

Ideally, and in addition, she is working on her thesis in evolutionary anthropology. Thus the chimps.

She can be reached at: kathleen.bryson@gmail.com

Or even the morning before the afternoon. Carrie and Emil ate breakfast together. Carrie had her normal crispbread with butter and Swedish caviar. Which wasn't genuine luxurious caviar. It was cheap caviar. Emil had toast. Emil tried to kiss Carrie before he did the dishes after breakfast.

She let him. His lips were cheating lips. But beautiful lips. They held each other for a moment before he stepped out of the kitchen and took off for work.

The month before, Carrie went 72 hours without sleep while cramming for her archaeology final. It was her personal Guinness World Record. Such feats end badly, as did Carrie’s own hooves when, sleepless last month, she picked a fight with Emil’s gentle father and then ran out the door of Emil’s parents’ house, tears freezing on her face, barefoot on the ice and cement and snow. No coat, and she of all people knew

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how to acquire hypothermia.

So this is what going crazy feels like, she had thought at the time, I am cold, when will Emil come and get me in the car. I don’t care. I don’t care.

I don’t care.

I am Jadis the Winter Queen.

She was Jadis the Winter Queen of Narnia now, the naked truth in snow, and her nipples were novelty ice-cubes stiffening every last cocktail in the world. She was out in the snowdrifts and running across the top tier of the wedding cake. It stretched out flat, endless. She had outrun the plastic bride and groom long ago, left them behind huffing and puffing. On the other side of the flat planet was the forest; past the suburban carparks, there was the knot of the woods. The snow came down. She could go back and knock-knock-knock at the

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door. Emil's father would answer the door for the crazy girl. They called whorehouses knocking shops in England. She read that in a book. She was not in England. She was in Sweden. Who's there.

Knock, knock. She had it all wrong. The snow. She had it all wrong. The snowdrifts. And she had it all wrong.

She had stopped feeling her feet and ankles, first-stage symptoms of exposure. The white deep sink of it, the woods were real, but they were a strip of the real world; they were far away across another carpark on another side. The palms of her feet – no, the soles of her feet – stuck to the ice and the skin came off. She saw the plastic couple again, dancing in a frozen pas-de-deux opposite, near the woods, through the falling snow. From time to time, obscurely veiled, she saw a yeti; she saw Frosty the Snowman; she saw a Santa Claus dressed all in white, not red; she saw Rudolph the White-Nosed Reindeer rooted in the snow, all of him milky, his hoof lifted, as if he tried to run but then froze in place, frost-bound. Everything was slowing down but her.

The white Santa Claus wasn't moving, either. But she

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still was, across the carpark, the streetlamps making haloes against the purple snowful sky.

The snow came down.

She ran 15 minutes before she saw the white Saab and Emil flashing the lights at her, what the fuck are you doing, what the fuck are you doing. I was crazy, Carrie thought, my feet could have burned off from that cold, I went closer over the edge than I ever have before. Emil had gone over the edge of no return in another way by sleeping with someone else.

That was all a month ago.

They were both reformed.

Eden after the fall. Brave new slate and a brave new world. A Paradise! A cornucopia feast!

Crispbread and fake pink caviar: roe from the tiniest

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salmon in the world, the kind of Alaskan salmon that swim into your head and stay there.

A winter morning and normal kisses, passion and love and hope, oh god, they both hoped.

They were trying to do things differently. Carrie could have followed her usual pattern and painted all night on many paintings simultaneously for the Stockholm Open, but she didn’t do it. She painted during daytime hours in measured implements. She studied iron-age weaponry illustrations in short bursts. (In Sweden, they called an art opening a vernissage, which sounded more alluring than the cracking-open of an opening.) Why, Carrie made herself get at least six hours’ sleep a night. Emil, for his part, was totally present.

There were no secrets in his eyes. He gripped her hand hard. He held her on the same doorstep that she’d run out of barefoot. I want us to be together, he whispered to her. Oh god, I want it. Carrie kept her feet inside. Oh god, I want it too. Oh god, I want it too.

His kiss, her kiss on him was honey. They were bees.

They heralded in spring through the dwindling snow heaps of Swedish winter, they were green love again. Honey green love, emerald honey poured over the pancakes of love.

In Sweden, Carrie had grown attached to a particular confectionery of chocolate, pistachio and marzipan, called a dammsugare: a vacuum cleaner, literally a dustsucker. Not to be confused with damsugare, a ladysucker.

Back home, on St. Patrick’s Day, Carrie’s mother added green food-colouring to the maple syrup the family ladled over their pancakes.

Emil made American-style pancakes especially for Carrie last weekend. He made all the pancakes in heart shapes, which were much harder to do than mere Mickey-Mouse shapes. Pour your emerald green love all over me. Pour your sugar on me. I love you.

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* The painting was of Alaska. It was delicate; it looked like a fairyland; it looked like a dream; it had the blue onion of a Russian Orthodox domed church in the foreground. She wanted to drink blue onion soup with baby-blue soft bread. She wanted to batter blue onion-rings into her mouth. It didn’t look like that.

It looked like fairyland. It was the most beautiful painting she had ever done.

The trendy boy with the cool thick eyeframes handed Carrie her painting back without comment. It was her best. So beautiful. She would think that objectively.

“Did they have any feedback?”

The trendy boy’s eyes flickered back to her for a moment. Other people’s paintings were reflected in the lenses. “It was rejected. I guess that’s feedback enough.”

Carrie’s cheeks went hot.

She was too blonde. And too busty. She would never be taken seriously. Fuck him. Her hands closed over the painting that she’d had matted just for this occasion, the last of the month’s money; now she would live on dammsugare and water. “I beg your pardon,” she said, snottily, but the trendy boy, who looked like

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the pop singer Jakob Hellman, was already ignoring her. Not even ignoring her, which would imply contact. He had already left the room, as do all coatcheck boys when there is trouble handing back the coats.

II. The Evening.

The world outside the kitchen window has a strange cast to it tonight. It looks alien and greenish. The light has an odd quality. They say things like that in Sweden, too. The small rowhouses with red roofs look grey in the greenish light. The snow looks dirty. The snow looks clean. The snow that is falling looks clean.

Everything can change in a day. Everything can change in twelve hours. She will take the next flight home. Her heart is cold. It will not be melted into

green crushed snow. He is a cheat and a liar who has slept with more people in the last year than she knew about this morning; she is a harpy, a bitch, a freak, all the things women are when they are angry. All the emerald love in the world will not melt her heart. It will not freeze his.

Her feet are covered by boots are made for walking.

I’m leaving, she says. Don’t leave, he says. I was trying.

She is walking on green slush, slipping in, falling down.

No. It needs to be ice. She walks across a big frozen green lake called Atlantic. It is turning white in places. Don’t go, he says.

The snow outside Emil’s house turns green, the cold tips of it floating down like limes, all that frozen love.

Good-bye.

END

This is a biog for Roger Daniel. He made the comic somewhere in the midst of the words, it has words too, he's very much rebelling under a conformist agenda, if you don't play the game you don't get the fame, he just wrote that in the third person like it's a quote, he Googled it, it isn't, people have said better, similar things but not quite that, or when they did someone probably shrugged and switched their hearing-aid back on. Is there anything else, wait, no nothing more I can say about this human being, I think that’s a lot, if I’m honest he’s a bit one dimensional, his life’s a bad joke at best, personally I’d just skip the page with the comic entirely, make a cup of tea, take a toilet break, it probably wipes okay if this isn’t laminated (please delete if laminated).

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Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

by Adam Marks In discussion

Bio Adam Marks is brilliant and fearless, but short on cash.

“What if…” he paused for a moment to fully gather his notion, “what if we say Kurt Cobain killed himself but made it look like murder?”

There was some generous laughter round the table. The man chairing the meeting smiled and nodded: “That’s a twist at least… go on.”

“I mean, there are a number of ambiguous and contested facts around the Death of Kurt Cobain, the heroin dosage, the fingerprints, by which I mean the lack of fingerprints, the letter, and eyewitness reports in the days beforehand. The difficulty is motive, but…” he shrugged, “when has that stopped anybody from working up a theory…? People love a mystery and once they invest in it will do anything to defend it…”

Someone chipped in. “There really is no question of motive then?”

“What I’m saying,” he replied, “is that we’re dealing with articles of faith.

Conspiracism is a belief system in the proper sense of the word. All belief systems are strengthened by mystery… God moves in mysterious ways.

Kurt Cobain killed himself for mysterious reasons.”

“Unless,” said the Interlocutor, “you understand that he was clinically depressed, severely addicted, socially isolated and encumbered with a crippling undiagnosed stomach ailment.”

“The real reason for spreading rumours about the death of Kurt Cobain was the Department of Misinformation was out of control.”

There was more laughter round the table.

“Very true,” he said, “but that doesn’t answer the central question as to why he chose to move from the finitely certain into the infinitely unknown? Cobain was a multi-millionaire and a popular cultural icon. He was a man with no small power, certainly plenty of liberty. He was also a drug addict. Addicts are known to wield a special power over those they love and those who love them.

People cling to life in much

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more straitened circumstances with much less freedom.”

“But why make your suicide look like murder?”

He thought about it for a few moments before eventually suggesting: “Perhaps we should qualify what we said about freedom.

Freedom is of course dialectically linked to servitude… Cobain was caught in a struggle. There are good reasons and there are real reasons why anyone does anything. Most bands say they split up due to ‘creative differences’ but most bands actually split up because of money. Kurt Cobain wanted success but he also wanted to deny that he wanted success.

He was caught in a struggle over his fortune and against his own bad faith. The act of suicide was very Cobain-esque, for want of a better adjective.

It was passive-aggressive, killing two birds with one shot.

The act of creating deliberate doubt about the cause of his death was just a further twist.

He couldn’t extricate himself from his marriage or his other contracts, record company, management etc, not without great financial cost and not without defying his own welldefined personality; he was powerfully passive-aggressive.

However he could taint his wealth with his own blood and the stigma of murder.”

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There were impressed nods around the table. They weren’t laughing now.

“And, decades later, what has become of the Cobain fortune?”

The Man Chairing the Meeting said: “That’s impressive, if not quite coherent.”

“Thank you,” he said in reply.

“Do you believe your theory?” asked the Man Chairing the Meeting.

“Of course not,” he said, “this is the Department of Misinformation. This is what we do.”

Everyone was satisfied.

In theory Of course the one thing nobody questioned was why you would need to put out misinformed theories of Kurt Cobain’s death. There were two reasons, as mentioned before, there was a good reason and a real reason.

The good reason was in any hierarchical society it’s good to have crime or, at least, the impression of crime. That’s why there are so many laws.

For a proper relationship between the state and civil society it must be impossible for the citizen/subject to go about their daily lives without committing crime. In turn it must be impossible for all criminals to be prosecuted.

This means at all times any person a committing crime may be prosecuted. This creates a panoptical effect in the citizen/subjects but also allows for leeway, for concentrated force to be applied against the noncompliant.

In other circumstances, the music industry would be outlawed as a gangster racket.

Its practices and customs leave it prone to money laundering, fraud, sexual exploitation and drug abuse. It was always good to keep it under suspicion. So long as any criminal activity was catalogued it would mean that if at any moment participants in the industry became problematic or non-compliant the state would be able to move against them with swift authority.

But the real reason for spreading rumours about the death of Kurt Cobain was the Department of Misinformation was out of control. No one knew for sure when the department was created or who by, that was part of the overriding mission. Its guiding mission was control in the age of mass participation. Total Secrecy is impossible but Total Openness is out of the question. In these circumstances Total Manipulation is the only option left. The truth has to be hidden in trivia. These days,

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what with the internet, there was just so much ‘output’ to stay on top of1. You never know when a theory might come in handy, hence these brainstorming sessions.

In person Tom Nielson was very proud of his job. There was an art to what he did. It wasn’t just throwing muck and seeing what stuck. He was an expert.

In ten years on the job he had created a number of lies and legends and shaggy dog stories still percolating in the popular consciousness. He was the one who identified Twitter as the modern chain-letter. He was the one who persuaded senior officers to take out third party copyright on the Slender Man2.

He had come to the Met Police’s rescue so many times he was practically above the law.

Tom was a Conspiracy Copywriter.

Of all the people working for the secret state, Tom was one of the few agents who could talk freely about his work. No one really believed him: “OK, so that’s your cover story?”

“Of course it is,” he’d say.

It was a strong, departmental buzzword.

2 If only he could have persuaded them to start building a portfolio of real/fake sightings.

The Slender Man would have been so useful during the London Riots.

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Even if they took him seriously, Tom’s work was wrapped in such a fog of plausible deniability if anyone went for him or the department he worked for (and there was one journalist) it’s not like he didn’t have the means to bury them, sometimes literally. Most times of most days Tom and his fellow agents would develop, track and tabulate the success of their memes.

They’d report at least once a week to their line manager in a general meeting, which also served as a brainstorming session.

He was proud of his job. His memes were consistently in the seventy-fifth percentile both for reproduction and mutation. It was always so satisfying to see something he had written being reproduced, elaborated on, poured over or even rubbished. Too many agents took their theories/anecdotes/reports too seriously, he thought.

They always tried to make them watertight and logically indestructible. If someone was talking time out, say, to destroy a fictitious account of a police shooting that discredited the victim it meant they took the account seriously. This would only give credibility to the original account. Someone would believe it regardless of the

truth because it would come from a trusted source. Tom really could shape reality sitting at his desk.

Tom’s professional life left him at some remove from humanity. He was well-paid though so it didn’t quite matter. Tom lived in a luxury Thames-side penthouse, Imperial Wharf. He liked art and film and music and… that sort of stuff, though he had very little time for either, what with the work and all.

He vented some of his alienation on the Department psychiatrist in weekly one hour sessions where Tom would talk and the psychiatrist would mostly nod and say things like “uh-huh”, “I understand” and “that’s interesting, please continue.” The psychiatrist was a dupe who believed everything Tom said and Tom usually spooled out a tissue of whoppers about his past, his feelings, his childhood etc, even more outlandish than his professionally turned out stories. He wouldn’t even stop if he contradicted himself.

As for relationships, Tom didn’t have any. No friends really, though he dated quite frequently but the women he met seemed to live such little lives. They were so sheepish and trusting, not to mention easy to impress. They were ‘outlets’ at best (though Tom used a much cruder description). Sometimes his

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encounters rebounded on him angrily. He wondered occasionally if he might not be better off just using the women then killing them.

Once or twice through then dump them in the river. He’d probably get away with it too.

Tom didn’t dare tell his psychiatrist this though.

Despite his caution, little known to Tom, she still had him pegged as a delusional megalomaniac, a likely psychopath and drug user.

In conclusion After the meeting Tom’s Line Manager, who had been chairing, sidled up to him and said, “Tom, let’s, uh, one to one for a moment.”

“OK,” said Tom, slightly wary.

“It’s alright,” said the Line Manager. “Just a few things I’m… curious about… But,” he hastened to add, “don’t worry it’s, it’s alright.”

They walked, together, through the office, to the main stairwell. Tom relaxed as the Line Manager chatted with him, just small talk. “How’s life treating you, Tom?” Tom told him he was trying to bring out his feminine side more. He told him all about his baking projects. He was learning how to make proper pastry. His ambition was to make a cherry pie, just like his Mum used to. Tom was

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keeping a diary-journal and, so far, it was going well. He was also learning how to swim. A little vulnerability often goes a long way.

The Line Manager listened to him, nodding occasionally and saying things like “uhhuh”, “I understand” and “that’s interesting, please continue.” As they talked he led Tom down, down and down to the basement level. “This way,” said the Line Manager.

“Let’s go somewhere… private,” he said. He ushered Tom into a quiet, windowless room with a single desk and two chairs.

Tom was nervous again.

“Is everything OK?” “Fine, fine,” said the Line Manager. “Please sit.” They both sat. “No, I, um…” The Line Manager took the chair facing the door. It was then that Tom noticed the Line Manager had a small portfolio with him. He opened it up, took a moment and found a page. He said: “You’ve been with the Department for… ten years now.”

“Are you sure everything’s OK? There’s nothing wrong with my work, is there?”

“You wouldn’t be here,” said the Line Manager, “ten years later if you weren’t up to the job.” He flipped through some pages. “Let’s see, you’ve worked on both sides of the process, misinformation and counter-

misinformation. Good work on reviving the Fanta Legend, I see, hmm… interesting… from before when I managed this unit.” The Line Manager looked up at Tom, fixing his gaze with a smile.

“Thank you,” said Tom, who slowly began relaxing again.

“Ten years,” said the Line Manager. “In fact, I think you’re the most experienced copywriter we have now.”

That was true, though it had never occurred to Tom before.

The Line Manager perused the documents again, before adding, “And you work hard too, putting in a lot of overtime.”

“Thank you.”

“You could,” the Line Manager looked up from the file and addressed Tom directly again, “you could almost say you were psychotically devoted to your job, eh Tom?” “Sorry?”

“Fanatically devoted,” said the Line Manager with haste and emphasis. He didn’t blink, smile or break eye contact. There was a long pause before he asked: “Where do you get your ideas, Tom?” Tom took a second to think then decided to ignore what just happened and plough on. “I just take a whole load of lies and wrap an

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element of the truth around them,” said Tom. “It’s standard procedure,” he added.

“An element…?”

“Well yes,” said Tom, on edge again, “all part of making it realistic, standard procedure… Like… There has to be some element of truth, you know? Cobain was shot, I mean he did shoot himself, you know…? His brain didn’t just explode from the inside.”

Tom laughed uncomfortably.

But the Line Manager just looked at him. “He was…”

Tom wasn’t sure how to correct himself. “He did shoot himself, right?” asked Tom. “Of course he did, Tom,” said the Line Manager, who smiled again. “But that’s just the point, Tom. I ask you again, where do you get your stories from?”

“I make them up,” said Tom. “The hundred-year light bulb?” wondered the Line Manager, “the Thames whale, Mandela’s ventilator, the Chelyabinsk incident, the Sochi toothpaste scandal…?

Come on, Tom!” “What are you talking about?” asked Tom, now frightened. He tried to turn and stand out of his chair, escape, but felt two large hands press down on his shoulders.

“There’s more than just an ‘element of truth’ to these

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stories, isn’t there, Tom?” said the Line Manager, his smile turning nasty. “I ask you again…”

Tom felt a sharp sensation on his neck.

“Where’d you get your stories from…?” A wave of horror flowed through his body. “How do you know these things, Tom?” His body went quickly limp. Tom fell to the floor.

Things began to darken. He glanced up. The Line Manager was standing over him.

“We’re keeping you in, Tom, I’m sorry.”

Darkness was closing. The Line Manager’s face disappeared.

“You’ll be working late every night from now on.”

Fade to black.

END

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True Story, The B

by Mike Harth

Bio Mike Harth is readying for publication a novel about a young gay clergyman, while working on a sequel. He had also prepared five volumes of erotic stories but can’t make up his mind whether or no to publish them.

Only a man could ever have been taken in, but the dumb blonde type has always been a good deal more successful than it deserves – how anyone can seriously compare that washed-out look with the lustrous quality of really black hair, not to mention the much better complexion that goes with it, I really can't imagine – and thus I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised.

Certainly those Brothers Grimm were completely landed, hook, line, and sinker, swallowing the whole outrageous pack of lies as if she were Georgia Washington, and adding a few more of their own for what one might charitably assume were purely literary reasons – that is, if one pays their rag-bag collection the compliment of calling it literature.

I mean, I ask you: a teenage girl living quite unchaperoned in a house with a number of single men is hardly the sort of set-up that anyone with any knowledge at all of the ways of the world would consider entirely innocent. I'm not one to listen to idle gossip, but it was common knowledge that what went on there would have made Kraft-Ebbing's eyes pop.

However, because she had tits the size of melons – though if what I've been told about silicone is true, they won't stay the way they are for ever – and could put on an

ingenuous smile, the men were putty in her hands. I spoke to the Chief of Police more than once, but though he always assured me he'd look into it, nothing was ever done, and it wouldn't in the least surprise me if he was in the habit of making surreptitious visits there himself, since I know for a fact that his wife flatly refuses to indulge him in some of his more outrageous ideas.

But live and let live, I say, and as long as they remained discreet about what they got up to and didn't impinge on any of my affairs, I was prepared to more or less turn a blind eye, since I know what men are like and I've learnt the hard way that if they aren't getting what they want from one source they'll go and seek it from another. It was a sort of unspoken truce so far as I was concerned, and it was only when she really got above herself that I was compelled to step in and do something.

My son was now nineteen and I was worried that he would display the same unfortunate capacity for allowing any nubile female to lead him by the nose that his father had. Of course, once I'd married William, I'd been able to put a stop to most of that, though, even after I did my best to make sure he never got up to anything, he still continued to moon over one after another in a rather

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pathetic fashion. It obviously behooved me to find a suitable wife for Henry as soon as practicable, but while I was searching in the proper areas for someone who could fit the bill, the wretched boy came across her at some party or other and, like a real chip off the old block, was immediately smitten.

As any good mother would, I'd done my best to keep him from the sort of parties, and places, where he'd be likely to meet that type of person, but I do have rather a lot of other responsibilities, and every so often he'd manage to evade my vigilance and associate with quite undesirable types.

As far as I could gather from the fairly incoherent account he gave me the next morning, she'd pretended not to know who he was – as if every marriageable female for miles around wouldn't know everything relevant about all the eligible bachelors – and he hadn't said anything about his exalted position to her, charmed by the thought that he was fancied for himself alone, always a good line with gullible males, which I well know is most of them.

Well, I tried reason, though many years' experience of dealing with his father had told me it was almost certainly a lost cause from the outset. I pointed out that the privileges of his position carried with them certain responsibilities, so that it was incumbent upon him, etc., etc., but I might as well have been talking to a statue. He had made up his mind, and he just kept

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repeating that she was the only girl who'd ever really appealed to him; if he couldn't have her he would rather do without completely. He even hinted that he might indulge another side of his nature which certainly was unlikely to produce a son and heir.

As he was my only child, he rather had me over a barrel there, but of course I didn't let him think that, I just temporised and said we'd have to see. In practice this meant that, although I was as usual extremely busy attending to all sorts of matters that didn't just run themselves, though from his attitude you'd have imagined they did, I'd have to go and suss out the position for myself. Of course there was no way I could afford to turn up in person, which would have had to be some sort of official visit, so one night, quite late, I got one of my maids to disguise me. I must say she made an excellent job of it: I looked at least twenty years older, while she had cunningly hidden all those features which give my face its usual classical perfection, not to mention dirtying up my raven locks, which as everyone knows are my crowning glory.

So off I trotted. Because I didn't want anyone to know about what I was doing, I had to make my own way there, which was a bit of a drag, so that I wasn't entirely playacting when I knocked on the door, pretended I was faint, and asked if they could spare me a glass of water. They invited me in and gave me a chair to sit on while one of

them went off to get a glass, and I had a chance to see the set-up.

Considering that their mine was supposed to yield them a nice little profit, their place wasn’t up to much, but I didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for the state of their house. I'd gone to the kitchen door, of course, which gave me the opportunity to see back-stage, so to speak, and, well, I've been around, in my position one gets to learn a lot about the less savoury sides of human nature, but even so, I was frankly appalled.

For a start, there was this obvious half-wit, though I believe nowadays we're supposed to call them educationally subnormal, who was wandering around in a permanent state of halfundress and full arousal.

Madam was obviously used to it, because she didn't turn a hair when he came up to her clutching himself. She just chided him with 'You know I'm looking after Happy today, Dopey; you must just wait your turn.'

I gathered from this that the seven of them – and a more ill-favoured collection you never saw, not one of them much over four foot, and quite grotesque with it – each had their own day of the week when they got special attention from the lady of the house. And in fact I heard later from one of my ladies-inwaiting whose maid knows everything that goes on locally that the reason the one called Grumpy got his name – they all have these ridiculous

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nicknames, they don't seem to have proper patronymics like ordinary people – is because his day is Sunday and so far as she's concerned it's a day of rest. And according to the same source, that's quite deliberate on her part because even she can't cope with his little peculiarities, which I gather are both physiological and pathological.

As for the one called Happy, well, maybe he has got something to be happy about, but I do think he could avoid calling attention to his condition quite so blatantly.

One thing's for sure, he doesn't get his trousers off the peg. I was so taken aback I must have looked a spot ill or something, because another of them came up to me: he was carrying a little black bag, and while I watched halfhypnotised he opened it, took out a hypodermic syringe, and before I knew what happening he said soothingly, 'Now don't you worry, my dear,' and stuck it in my arm.

I gave an enormous yell, as you can imagine, while I felt quite dizzy. I broke out into some sort of warm sweat, and the next few minutes are rather blurred in my memory, but when I recovered I tightened my garments, which had unaccountably become rather loose, and, thanking them for their kindness, staggered out and made my way home.

For some reason I felt absolutely shattered, so I wasn't up to doing the whole journey on my own, I had to get my maid to come for me in

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a carriage, all very embarrassing, because of course I couldn't let anyone else know who I really was or what I'd been doing. However, eventually I got home and had a long soak in a hot bath. I tried out a new bath-essence specially put together for me by the Court Beautician, 'Black Snow-drop', and it certainly revived me, a process completed by a treatment from one of my Masseurs-InWaiting – this time it was Number Three, the black one.

By midday the next morning I was practically back to my normal self, and I realised something must be done immediately. No way could I possibly allow my poor son, a babe in arms compared to her, to continue in this entanglement. It was a time for stern measures, but of course I had to act covertly, for I knew he would never forgive me if he found out that I was responsible for the operation I was planning.

I summoned the Court Physician and put the position to him, when it didn't take him long to come up with the perfect solution. So a few days later I got dolled up again in the same disguise, and went back to their abode. I had with me a basket of apples, all of which had been carefully doctored. This might seem like overkill, but I couldn't leave anything to chance. I needed to ensure that she ate one of them, and that meant that there had to be enough for the whole grisly collection if need be.

I presented them with the

basketful 'for being so kind to an old woman' and they thanked me as they accepted them. So then I had to just endure the wait, on tenterhooks to see if they'd done the job. Of course there was no way I could easily find out through official channels, but fortunately I have this tame lap-dog at court who dotes on me, a feeling which, I need hardly tell you, is not reciprocated. But he does come in handy when there's one of these awkward little jobs to be done, so I sweetened him up beforehand by inviting him to dance with me after dinner the next evening. The bandmaster, Wolfgang Something-or-other, had the temerity to strike up a popular waltz, 'Nights of Gladness', when we swept onto the floor, but I gritted my teeth and managed to smile, though of course inside I was regretting the good old days when he would have been whipped for his insolence.

Anyway, I duly followed through with Marmaduke, and I can't complain, I've known it a lot worse. Then I sent him off in the small hours to scout around, and he came back with good news: it seemed all of them were right out. As the way was now clear, I ordered a squad down there immediately, and sure enough they found them all unconscious, and so were able to bring them away without causing any commotion. The one who'd given me the injection had presumably been greedy and eaten a couple or more of the apples, because

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he proved to have popped his clogs, as the peasants say.

I wasn't too upset at this, especially as I've heard since my visit that he was actually a defrocked gynaecologist. But there were still six left, so I arranged to have them shipped off to a travelling circus, where they (mostly) settled down quite happily after some much-needed discipline and a few months of training. Her I sent to a House in Buenos Aires where, to nobody's surprise, she proved a great success, and soon became the Specialité de la Maison. I assume she liked it well enough: at any rate, she's never been back here to bother me.

That left me with a couple of problems, which I solved with my usual efficiency. First off I produced a lad I'd been saving for this sort of emergency, made him Groom of the Bedchamber, and presented him to Henry. As the new arrival had passed the tape-measure test with flying colours, and in addition had been thoroughly trained in his duties, Henry was so grateful he was practically putty in my

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hands, and I was able to arrange a politically useful match with no trouble.

Luckily she was a sensible girl with a good understanding of the role of expediency in the governing process, and so I was able to arrange for her to go platinum, both to keep him sweet, and also so that the idiot populace could be fed the sort of romantic mishmash about love at first sight that these fictioneers cook up out of their immature fantasyworlds. She proved a great help to me in running things, while once Henry understood that all we really needed off him was an heir, or preferably a couple, and some public appearances, while the rest of the time his private life could remain private as far as we were concerned, everything was hunky-dory, and he completely forgot his ridiculous infatuation.

So eventually, as in all the best tales, everyone lived

happily ever after. The mine?

Oh, I nationalised it, of course: that way the whole kingdom would benefit rather than a bunch of depraved grotesques. I did mean to have them compensated, but it seemed that, by the time the Exchequer was ready to deal with it, the excitements of circus life had proved too much for them.

END

Something in your eyes by

Colin Heinink

A girl next to me.

On the train. Started crying.

Should have said something.

It begun with Dusty Springfield You don't have to say you love me Sodcasting Perhaps she was trying to tell me something

Sometimes I just will Burst into tears randomly Seems like no reason

Bio Colin Heinink is a primary school teacher by day and an amateur actor by night. He was first published as a poet when he was 9 years old when he wrote a well-received classic called “Hi there, satellite.”

Phrenology

by Liz Barnes

“Phrenology was a science of character divination, faculty psychology, theory of brain and what the 19th-century phrenologists called "the only true science of mind." […] It was believed that by examining the shape and unevenness of a head or skull, one could discover the development of the particular cerebral "organs" responsible for different intellectual aptitudes and character traits.” – taken from The History of Phrenology by John van Wyhe

Bio Liz Barnes: “The only things I hate writing are biographies...and online dating profiles.

Maybe I just hate writing about myself - I write mostly to escape from myself.

“Anyway, I'm a social worker in the fields of addiction and mental health. This tends to come out in my writing in some form, mainly because I'm fascinated by people and their complexities. I also like magic realism and things with a twist at the end. I'm working on a novel at the moment, and the story in this magazine uses the same characters, but with a different focus. I'm from Nottingham originally, but I've been living in London for the past 3 years. I've been a member of the Hackney Writers’ Group for almost as long, and their feedback has helped me immensely.”

The callipers clicked smoothly as George Coombe fidgeted with them. He was reluctant to acknowledge that the place made him uncomfortable, but the regular clicking betrayed him. Feeling irritated as it dawned on him what he was doing, he put the callipers away in their case. The room was empty except for the bench where he was sitting, and the whitewashed walls glistened faintly with damp.

The air was heavy and tasted faintly metallic. George cleared his throat and the sound echoed in the emptiness.

He heard the clanking of the guard’s keys and the tramping footsteps of the inmates long before they reached the door. There was a pause and he heard the key turn in the lock. They were upon him. 15 shaven-headed lads, exuding varying degrees

of misery or defiance. They were dressed in the regulation garb of heavy brown felt jacket and trousers, with an insignia sewn on the chest indicating their prison class. “’Ere you go, sir,” the guard exclaimed cheerfully.

“Shall I ’av ’em all line up for you, against this wall?”

“Yes, yes, go ahead.”

George’s peremptory tone hid his anxiety at being confronted with the stares of the young men. He steeled himself for physical contact, and called the first one forward. “You there! Come and sit here.”

Indicating the bench where the boy was to sit with a nod of his head, he took out the callipers to begin the process of measuring. He recorded the data in a small, black notebook, then put the callipers away in his pocket and ran his fingers lightly over

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the boy’s skull. The shorn hair was soft and feathery to the touch, but George was only interested in any bumps or protrusions in the shape of the skull. Finding a prominent ridge above the boy’s ears on both sides of the head, he felt a small thrill. This would help to confirm his theory; he recorded it eagerly in the book, and underlined it twice.

He repeated the same process with the other 14 boys, each time feeling a lift if he found the same ridge, and a profound disappointment when he did not. After he had finished, the guard left him alone in the room again, as he escorted the boys back to their cells.

Safely back in his own company, George examined the data. Only 8 of the 15 boys had that ridge he’d been looking for. This was not a good result, but he remained confident that it was an indicator of violent tendencies. In theory, all the boys should have had it, as he’d specifically requested violent criminals to study ideally murderers - although these were in short supply.

Still, there would most likely be something in the other data that explained why not all of them had the ridge. Some of them might even have been wrongfully convicted.

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He reflected with satisfaction on the idea that soon phrenology would make wrongful convictions a thing of the past. He hoped his research would play a large part in the new discoveries that would lead to this bright and certain future. As he waited for the guard to return he imagined a room packed with people applauding as he received his first award, and planned out the speech he would give - humble yet accepting of the accolades bestowed on him - that would be the proper tone.

The heavy key turned in the lock again and the door swung open.

“So, did you get what you needed sir?” The jailer awoke George from his reverie. He was evidently curious, the whole process must have seemed very mysterious to him, but George didn’t feel like indulging in chit chat.

“Yes, thank you. Now can you please show me out? I need to get some fresh air.”

“Of course, sir. It’s ’orrible in ere, ain’t it? Fusty like.” The guard’s cheerfulness was irritating the man clearly had an overdeveloped social drive, George could see it clearly in the long back of his skull.

Blinking, he came out into the daylight, and took several deep breaths of fresh air

before hurrying away from the fortress-like prison building.

He had an important meeting that afternoon, and was eager to write up his notes before then.

He decided to call in at the room he used as an office to write up the notes. If he went home to Alice, he would surely be distracted and end up telling her about the prison rather than working. He imagined her blue eyes glistening with easy tears as he told her about the conditions in the establishment that the young boys were forced to inhabit.

He had no such sentiment himself.

The room was small and bare, but an impressive mahogany desk stood in its centre. George stroked the surface of the desk with his sensitive fingertips. It was flawlessly smooth. He got out his small black notebook and began to punch in the data.

The typewriter keys were stiff and heavy, and his fingers became sore after using it for just a few minutes. Despite this, he enjoyed the process of arranging the data; it gave him a sense of imposing order and control over the unpredictable vagaries of human behaviour and emotion.

He paused for a moment and assessed the data again. It was not satisfactory at all, and there did not at first sight

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appear to be any other factors that would explain his poor results. The awards and tributes that he’d already mentally awarded himself began receding into the distance. He had to come up with an idea to explain why not all of the boys fit the pattern - if this didn’t work, all the previous months of research would be wasted. He knew the ridge was a good indicator; he couldn’t just abandon his theory now.

Suggesting the boys had all been wrongly accused would not do - that would upset far too many people. Perhaps there was another function at work in some of them, which could act instead of the ridge indicating violent tendencies?

Clutching at anything that might save the theory, he looked again at the measurements. What did all the boys without the ridges have in common? Then he found it - they all had abnormally small bumps at 35, indicating lack of intelligence, particularly in the area of causality. Of course! Those boys without the violent ridge had not meant to hurt anybody - they had simply not understood the implications of their actions. He caught himself; he was starting to sound as sentimental as Alice.

Still, it was good for the research - the ridge could go into the system of

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classification without question.

Feeling satisfied at a good day’s work, as well as a degree of relief, George headed home. Alice would be waiting for him, eager to hear of the day’s events. The streets were packed with carriages and bustling with people. George was oblivious to it all, lost in his own thoughts, and he narrowly missed colliding with a man carrying a crate of cabbages.

He pictured his wife’s shapely head as he continued to walk.

He had chosen her for the nobility of her brow and the well-developed features of benevolence and conscientiousness.

He’d done an extensive phrenological reading prior to proposing, and was frequently thankful for his skill in the science, which had enabled him to choose a partner with his eyes open. Yes, he’d known exactly what he was getting when he married Alice.

He pitied those poor souls who chose a mate as if groping in the dark, with no knowledge of their innate qualities or flaws. How could you possibly put your trust in mere words or actions as evidence of good character? There was so much that could be disguised. One day, he mused, everyone would insist on a full reading

before entering into a marriage contract.

He could still remember the feel of his wife’s skull as he gently caressed it with his fingertips, reading each bump or swelling, nervously anticipating a failing. They’d first met at a party. It was one of those high society affairs where everyone was trying to outdo one another, and that was less about enjoyment than about being seen enjoying oneself. It was also a good excuse for the host to get extremely drunk without incurring the wrath of his wife - which meant that he held these soirees almost every month.

George frequently used his skill in reading the heads of the guests to provide some light entertainment at these events. While he baulked at the reduction of his beloved scientific methods to a mere party trick, he suspected that this was the only reason he was able to secure an invitation to such a prestigious event, and so he obliged.

It had given him the perfect excuse to approach Alice.

He’d spotted her from across the table at supper; her golden blonde hair shone in the light and made her stand out from the other women. He had observed her easy smile and the lively banter she engaged in with her dinner companions.

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He’d seen her standing with the gentleman she’d been sitting next to at dinner at first George had feared that the man was her husband or her betrothed - but having discreetly enquired of the matronly lady to his left at the table, he was relieved to find that the gentleman was in fact Alice’s foster brother, Charles.

The woman had insisted on telling him the full story of Charles’ background, and he had to confess it was an intriguing one. He was orphaned as a boy but was taken in by Alice’s family, as their fathers had been best friends. He and Alice had grown up together as brother and sister.

George had approached Alice and Charles, made bolder by already knowing something of their background. “Excuse me, sir, madam, I am so sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I wanted to offer you the opportunity of a thoroughly accurate and scientific assessment of your character through analysis of the shape of your skull.”

“My skull?” Alice exclaimed. George had hoped she would be the one to take him up on his offer.

“Yes madam, have you heard of phrenology? It’s a scientific discipline whereby I can examine the bumps and anomalies in your head shape

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and know immediately what kind of temperament you have.”

“Oh I see, yes I have heard something of this. It sounds most intriguing. You may certainly give me a reading it’s not every day one gets such an invitation.”

“I shall leave you to your reading, you will find me losing at cards if you become tired of phrenology.” Charles was jovial and handsome; George had noticed a woman or two hovering, waiting for him to turn in their direction.

“Try not to lose every game, or we shall have a miserable journey home!”

Alice had teased him affectionately.

he didn’t want her to consider herself too good for him.

George was a professional man, a scientist, and despite his pride in the work and his fast rise to prominence in his field, he was still acutely aware that he was not independently wealthy. The boys at the prestigious boarding school he attended had given him daily reminders that he was there on a scholarship place, and his insecurity about this had never left him. It nipped at him like an annoying insect and however much he tried to bat it away; it always returned to bother him, and it was especially strong at moments such as this.

George could recall every word, every glance that had passed between them that night. He could also recall the tension in his stomach as he measured and plotted the chart from her skull. He’d taken his time with it, deliberately savouring every moment in her company, but also feeling the importance of it weighing heavily upon him.

Every moment he had feared a defect, but when he ran his fingers through her soft, fine hair, he’d found one of the shapeliest skulls he’d ever encountered. When he’d finished he gave Alice his analysis, but purposely didn’t compliment her too much, as

Despite his anxiety, he appeared the perfect picture of a gentleman. He was wearing his most stylish tailcoat and tie, and had removed his glasses following the examination. His moustache was perfectly groomed and he’d tidied away his instruments in favour of a glass of champagne. He was intelligent and sophisticated, with a fascination for this new science of phrenology that was evident in the way his eyes shone when he spoke about it.

Without a doubt, this moment was his best opportunity.

“Madame, would you permit me to call on you one day?”

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Alice had hesitated and looked down at the floor.

George had been in agony, his hopes dashed and, as he remembered, it was only good manners that held him there, silently awaiting her response.

Then, she had appeared to throw caution aside, and responded with a sunny smile.

“Certainly sir, I would be delighted.”

George was distracted by the familiar swell of selfcongratulation when he reached his front door. He let himself in and stood for a moment in the hallway, savouring the feeling of contentment. He noticed that the house was unnaturally quite; where was Alice? The maid?

He walked from room to room, glancing in to see that no one was there. Then he came to the drawing room, the door was slightly ajar and he peered in. He couldn’t see very clearly, but he recognised the back of that head, the brown curls; it was Charles.

They were embracing, no, not embracing, they were kissing.

Alice and Charles were kissing.

He leaned back and rested his head against the wall in the hallway. He felt a strange blankness where the feelings should have been. His heart had turned into a hard ball in his chest, and it was being squeezed tightly.

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As he walked down the corridor back towards the front door, it was as if he was moving in a dream. His life had been like a stage set, and now the production was over it had been torn apart like the fragile façade it really was.

END

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22

Lost Love

by Stevan Rimkus

Bio Stevan Rimkus is an actor, writer and filmmaker. In a bid to become legitimate, he is in his third year, studying for English Literature Degree with the Open University.

He was appeared amongst the rush-hour crowd like a rock star in a film, wearing a waistcoat over his muscled, bare torso, and torn jeans slashed at the thighs, which were sitting so low on his narrow hips that the top of his dark pubes were on show. I swallowed hard. My cock twitched. I hadn’t had sex for months and hot weather always makes me ridiculous: overly horny for the utterly inappropriate; the completely unobtainable.

I tried to get a better view, but a bundle of shrieking tourists spewed out of the tube and I lost sight of him.

But, when I was passing the monument, moments later, I saw him up close and I was gutted. He was a wanker. He was swaying about harassing people for change. What I’d thought was a great head-ofhair was, in fact, a straggle of thinning ginger dreadlocks. He looked right at me. I froze. He grinned with rotten teeth and his eyes looked wild, his pupils vast and empty.

‘Spare some change, pal?’ he said, making a b-line.

I held out a two-poundcoin. I thrust it out like a talisman. It was a new coin,

freshly minted, and it flashed in the sun. He swiped it from my fingers and pocketed it.

‘God bless you!’

‘No worries,’ I said, scuttling off, but he ran in front and halted me in my tracks.

‘You’re a proper gent, you are,’ he said, leaning in.

I looked down at his stomach.

He had a beautiful stomach – concaved. I have always wanted a stomach like that.

He punched my shoulder.

‘Hey,’ I cried.

‘May your God bless you,’ he said, gripping my arm, catching the skin under my thin jacket with his long filthy fingernails. ‘That’s if there is a God,’ he laughed, pulling me into him.

‘Back off,’ I said.

‘What am I like?’ he said, dancing me around the place heaving me about here and there - all the time laughing, getting in people’s way, ranting on and on, and loud, about how he hated ‘tightarsed’ Londoners and that I was ‘not like them’. I was one of the ‘good guys’.

I was trying to catch someone’s eye - anybody’s.

The place was rammed. But they all kept their eyes down avoiding us. They thought we

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were together: two pain-inthe-arse wankers out to cause trouble.

‘Relax,’ he said, backing me up against a tree. ‘I really like you. What’s the rush, pretty boy?’

It sounds really fucked-up, I know, but I was actually flattered when he called me pretty boy. I’m thirty-eight, though people always say that I look younger.

He prattled on and on. His breath was absolutely rancid, an unholy smell of dead things. Some notion was gnawing at my memory: there was something about the cut of his gib - as my grandfather used to say - that was familiar about his eyes, the grate of his monotonous accent. I’ve never liked the Black Country twang.

I’ve worked hard to rid myself of mine.

He slid his hands over my jeans. I kicked his shin. I pull away. I went staggering into the crowd, into an angular woman with a red slash for a mouth.

‘Jesus Christ!’ she said, tripping over her heels. ‘Will you two watch where you’re going?’

‘We’re ... We’re not together,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know...’

‘Go get fucked. Go get fingered. Go to hell, you sour old cunt,’ he said, pulling me back into him, into a tight

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embrace and waltzed me around, laughing.

I tried to fight him off but I could not dent him. He shoved me against the monument and his vast hands were frisking me. I couldn’t breathe. I noticed that ‘sorted’ was tattooed in elaborate calligraphy along his collar bone.

A group of Japanese tourists stopped to gawp. I tried to call to them, but he gripped my balls and I swooned into him. ‘Don’t mind my little boyfriend,’ he said.

‘He’s a bit splattered. We’ve been on a bit of a genderbender. Haven’t we, honey?’ he said, kissing me hard on the lips. The Japanese vanished.

‘You better behave yourself, pal,’ he whispered, trying to prise my wallet out of my pocket and failing.

‘Get it for out for me, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘We’ll be here all day otherwise.’

‘Okay...okay...okay,’ I said, ‘Give me some fucking room.’

‘Calm down, brother,’ he laughed, holding me out by the shoulders. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

I got my wallet out and his tattooed arm rose up between us, like a snake, and took it.

‘God bless you,’ he said.

‘Though, to be honest, I think God’s buggered off and left us all to it.’

‘Sod you!’ I said.

He punched me in the groin. I fell. There was a blur of moving figures, and distorted voices. I was sick, I think, on somebody’s shoes.

When I came to, I was sitting on the Post Office steps. I had pissed myself. I got to my feet and lurched about. My balls were aching. People swerved to avoid me, growling and kissing their teeth. I searched for my phone. He’d taken it. I saw an air balloon flashing silver in above the park.

On the way to the police station, I saw him again! I bit my tongue. I hid behind the toilets and watched him drain a can of cider. He chucked the can onto the road and tied his locks into a high pony-tail.

When he strolled off swinging his arms, I followed him to the bridge and up the hill to the park, down amongst the seminaked sunbathers who were sprawled on the parched grass, and then past the outdoor gym, where I paused to watch him to trample through the wild garden, in amongst a riot of orange poppies, where he took off his waistcoat, and tucked it into his low-slung, brass-buckled belt.

There was an eagle tattooed on his back, its wings outstretched. In the evening’s amber light, the bird seemed to fly above the orange

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poppies and the tall golden grasses, and, in such a light, he too seemed to float above the plants. He was like a wicked angel, once beautiful, now grotesque. He slipped through a gap in the railings and disappeared into the busy High road.

When I got to the road, I had to get a lick-on to catch him up. When I turned the corner into Victoria Street, I saw the bastard disappearing down an alley between a Chinese and an Indian restaurant. When I got to the alley, I peeped in to see him at the end of it, in a kind of a grimy courtyard unlocking the battered door of a singlestoried extension. He went inside, leaving the door slightly ajar and, after a while, I found myself crept into the alley, where the air was foetid with burning cooking oil and the concentration of Indian and Chinese spices.

I stood outside the extension, muttering to myself to get the hell out of there.

The back door of the restaurants faced each other, like opponents, and rubbish bins overflowed. A flurry of pigeons made me look up at the brilliant sky and I came to my senses, the rattling hum of the restaurants’ air conditioning outlets swamping my hammering heart as I turned and began to walk

24

towards the street when I was grabbed by the throat and dragged backwards through the door of the extension, kicking and choking.

My lip was dripping blood onto the filthy blue shag-pile carpet. I was bent double, winded. When I looked up, I saw that the windows were covered with cardboard, and that through an open doorway there was a toilet without a seat. A silent football match was in playing on a huge television screen. There was a mattress on the floor with a large pile of soiled bedclothes.

The place was a mess of dirty dishes and pans, half-eaten junk food and cartons, overflowing ashtrays, and other shit.

He was opposite me, sitting in a torn office chair, swivelling and sucking on a crack pipe. I’d only ever seen them on the movies. He tilted his head back and his fat lips let out a steady stream of thick creamy smoke towards the bare light-bulb. There was the sweet stench of burning rubber. It caught in my throat.

We looked at each other.

There was a gruesome hiatus.

He had a coughing fit and when that was through, he smiled at me like a Glassyeyed ghoul and winked.

‘I’ll write down my pin numbers,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise. Let me go.’

He had another gut-crunching coughing fit. I leapt up, got to the door handle but he caught me by the arm and threw me back down into the foul arm chair.

‘What did I fuckin’ tell you?’ he said.

I put my arms up to protect my head.

‘Oy...pretty boy.’

‘To... behave myself.’

‘Mind you do,’ he said, getting up and pacing the room. On each pass, kicking my chair. I saw behind him, the bedclothes rising up from the mattress and woman appearing out of them, scratching her tousled blonde hair and yawning, gesturing at him with a flaccid hand, a wrist of jingling bangles.

‘Who fuck is this?’ she said with an Eastern European accent.

He kicked my chair. ‘He’s a fuckin’ plank is who,’ he said.

‘Aren’t you? Aren’t you?’ he said, kicking the chair.

The woman got up and staggered to her feet. She was wearing grey twisted knickers and a torn bra. Her handsome face was bruised and swollen on its left side. Her hair was magenta. One side was shaved. ‘Pipe,’ she said, clicking her fingers, sitting at the cluttered table, and drinking from an open Orangina bottle.

He placed the pipe next to her along with a little ball of

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aluminium foil - which she immediately unwrapped.

‘Don’t be greedy, Pav,’ he said. ‘I’m warning you.’

“Da, da,’ she said, unwrapping a greyish lump, breaking a bit off and putting into the pipe. ‘For him some?’

‘No.’ She lit the pipe.

‘Stupid little cunt followed me home,’ he said.

She blew a line of smoke down onto the table. ‘You him rob?’ she said, coughing.

‘Yeah... I him rob.’

‘What going to do with him?’ she said, peering at me with smudged eyes, clearing her throat and spitting phlegm onto a dirty plate.

On the silent television screen, a goal was scored.

‘Fucked if I know,’ he said, lighting a cigarette.

‘Oh Derik,’ she said, getting and putting on a pink top. ‘He... very scared. What you do?’

He shrugged. ‘Stupid plank wants some more.’

She flicked the television channels, and turned up the volume on a music video. A guy with gold teeth was rapping. My mind raced. I smacked the chair with the palm of my hand. They shot me a look.

‘You’re Derik?’ I said.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Derik Tyler!’ I said.

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‘How the fuck...?’ he said, his face contorting.

‘Victoria Street. I’m Shaun, from number forty-six.

Don’t you remember me?’ I said, standing to face him and advancing as he backed against the wall, looking like he’s been shot. ‘Hiya, Derik, I’ve missed you,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought about you often, over the years.’

‘Get the fuck out of here,’ he said, unable to look at me.

‘It’s me! Shaun Valentine,’ I said, touching his bare shoulder. ‘Got to be what?

Twenty-five years? My God! Derik Tyler.’

‘You know this midget, Derik?’ Pav said, stumbling over to me. ‘You know my Derik?’ she said, swaying.

‘Yeah, I know your Derik,’ I said, preparing to bolt for the door, wanting to vomit.

‘Fuck me,’ Pav said, laughing and applauding.

‘What are chances?’

Derik turned to the wall bowing his head like a bull.

I knew he was remembering, as I was, our virginal fumbling and sucking, and eventual fucking during the long hot summer of ‘86 – our first love.

‘Fuck me,’ she said, laughing like a witch.

‘Shut it,’ he said.

‘Fuck me!’ she said, dancing about him, laughing, like a manic puppet.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Is funny, no? How you know him?’

‘Shut it?’ he said, in a low growl, turning his face back to the wall.

Pav wrapped her arms around his chest, placating and cooing. He spun around, gripped her face, squashing it, and then pushed her away.

She thudded against the fridge. She ran at him screeching and battering him with her tiny balled fists.

I was at the door. The fucking thing was locked. Pav was going for it, scrating and kicking. Derik roared like a monster and punched her on the mouth. She fell back and overturned the table, splattering blood and scattering stuff everywhere.

The Orangina bottle shattered.

Derik walked towards me. Pav crawled onto the mattress, moaning. The guy on the television rapped: It’s like what you do to me on the street / Make my heart, cock and soul skip that beat!

Derik turned off the TV, put his hands up to his head and glared at me. I smiled.

Fuck knows why, but I smiled.

There was a hollow vibrating noise. It was my phone moving on top of a pizza box. Peggy Lee sang: “Fever” – my ring tone. I rushed over and grabbed it. I glanced at the screen. I answered: ‘Hi...

Mum.’

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Derik rushed towards me, grabbed the phone and hung it up. My knees buckled under me. He yanked me to my feet.

I cried out. He shoved my wallet into one pocket of my shorts and the phone into the other. He dragged me to the door, unlocked and opened it.

He smiled at me. I smiled back. He slapped my face, hard – twice.

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‘Get the fuck out of here, pretty boy,’ he said.

END

Bio Kathleen Bryson’s poems have been published in Magma, Shrike, Krax/Rump Books (a single-author pamphlet), Forever Underground, NorthBiNorthwest, Mouseion, Haque, Café Aphra, Open Wide, Poetry Kit and Shot of Science. She received Honourable Mention for her poem “Camlet Moat, Epitaph” in the Poetry Kit Summer Competition 2013. She moved to Seattle in August 1991 and left exactly three years later for London. She can be reached at kathleen.bryson@gmail.com

The End of Grunge

by Kathleen Bryson

A guy tries to pick me up with lines like, I am the manager for Mudhoney and I’m a friend of Kurt. I mean, really.

Drink your microbrew like you drink your espresso and shut your pretty mouth.

The Comet Tavern, so full of fallen stars, The Comet Tavern, so full of spaced-out rock, The Comet Tavern, so full of black holes, or so write the disappointed young misogynists composing poetry across the street at Café Paradiso by candlelight.

In their flannel shirts that in Seattle are less a fashion statement, yes, far less like Kate Moss, despite the hype, and more what everyone can afford at the Chicken Soup Brigade secondhand store down off, what was it, Broadway.

O, how I wish I could shoot pool like my best friend’s cousin I feel it’s the ultimate seduction ruse – look tough; show cleavage.

I swear she has designs on the guy I’m fucking and it appears to be reciprocated.

He has a washboard stomach, which was a surprise since he’s practically a junky, sporadic smack and coke, though of course he’s artistic and plays trombone in a 18-man band at the Ballard Firehouse where I go and feel too feminine with my ironic waist-long bleached blonde hair and retro false eyelashes; I’m not taken as seriously as these scrubbed-face Theater Major girls, these girls who are always mousy brunettes, and when we French I feel my clit pulse.

This asshole’s as skanky as fuck and I’d give him the boot but he’s so good in bed, and by that I don’t mean he can fuck forever, I mean he wants to see me fuck forever. It doesn’t hurt that he is a great kisser but it does hurt that he lied about the condom being broken and I had to get the morning-after pill, which really fuckedup my cycle, or perhaps that was him.

I have better tits than her. I wish I knew how to play pool.

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* Of course this all being about a month before everything smells like teen spirit.

O, it kicks ass to be single, no duties except to myself, and I adhere to those, I promise, I walk home to save on cab fare, almost sober because I nursed one dirty draft all night, blaming every man within four blocks, sawdust in my hair, red platform heels in my purse (I’m practically Dorothy) and sporting snappy tennis shoes, but lately I share a taxi because Mia Zapata was raped and strangled walking home along the same route up 12th. And after Mia gone it’s River Phoenix, and just in the middle of those spicy rumours that he fucked a guy who knows a guy I knew, but we all wanted to fuck him, let’s not kid ourselves, they don’t get prettier or cooler than him.

What bone structure. Even better these days.

Fans of Kurt Cobain, did you mark today in any way?

O, that one there in the long underwear under cut-off jeans was dreaming of Cobain’s death, considering his misadventures and European overdoses before his fall.

That riot grrl to his left didn’t expect it.

Knew him from Olympia. No one wished it. He was leaving No one had murky theories about Courtney back then, it was all just sad and she was grieving.

We were mulattos and albinos, ones who broke our own rules of political correction in our anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexistravaganza just so we could rhyme the lyric stanza.

What then? Our tarnished Ken doll with a heart (shaped box) became 2-D, lost instantly to pin-up posters and T-shirt iconography, and conspiracy biography, O blonde and blue-eyed suicide blonde, our grimy Marilyn.

Let’s lionize those who stay to fight or try to fight, not those who slip away.

The Seattle Center vigil takes place on a bizarrely hot spring day.

TV crews show up and people tell them to fuck off (I like that, that’s real).

People turn their backs. This isn’t meant for you.

These days we crave lens like it’s pussy or it’s cock.

The film crews know a change is coming, the way they try to hype grunge rock.

The way they only see things in terms of image or of gloss.

They don’t see loss. They can’t feel loss. They can’t touch Courtney’s raging sorrow but then tomorrow lots of I-SAW-YOU ads in The Stranger newspaper to follow. ("I saw you with the cute secondhand green prom dress and vintage shades at the vigil – wanna hook up?") (“April 10, 1994, at the Vigil: our eyes met over the candles.

Was there a spark? Maybe. You were the guy wearing the backwards Copenhagen baseball cap and a East German army surplus coat.”)

I don't attend. It seems weird when he was just the friend of a friend of a friend, and besides I have my own life going on. I don’t attend.

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* O, I’ll go on to get my navel pierced by the sexy older guy with the long grey hair and world-weary look that hangs out at the Café Roma coffeehouse off John & Broadway.

And to be honest I’ll only know the basics of caffeine-fueled existentialist studies and the peyote rantings of Carlos Castaneda will baffle me alongside Cornish College dance students drinking cappuccinos, I swear they sit up straight on purpose, a signifier as glaring as their Evita hair-buns.

He will push that bristling needle through and he won’t make a pass, which will be slightly insulting even though I’ll think it’s honorable, because I am a hot piece and so is my friend Cindy who will tag along, and I’ll be there half naked in his piercing studio.

This guy will be writing a novel or something. He’ll be gritty. He’ll be serious.

O, I’ll go on to buy vibrators at Toys in Babeland and volunteer for the Northwest AIDS foundation, because people will be kind of freaking out, and it will be a hot summer, the kind of summer where everyone is disappearing, because last year’s landlord called Chip stole my Oxford English Dictionary with the magnifying glass and when I look him up, his boyfriend will tell me the book's gone 'cause Chip was hallucinating at the time and sold it and since has died of AIDS. And what will become of that sweet guy from West Texas, so gorgeous, 9 years positive, his name was Beautiful Buddy.

I’ll make up an ending for him. He’ll make all the way past AZT to combination therapy.

I’ll go on to wish he fucked girls even though I believe his appearance in my life was during the 3month period when I was an avowed lesbian.

O, it will be at the Comet Tavern where I first say yes to drugs, every scare saga they warned me with as a kid, story complete with a luminous pill, the nefarious fabled purple heart, and taking drugs a kind of bravery, I won’t know what comes next, no conditional tension headache, though thank god I will never be particularly brave and aside from this once instance of my guttering purple heart, the violet flame rearing and then sputtering out in nausea and cluster-B personality disorder-level paranoia, my general rule will take shape and entail never trying anything that can kill a lady, no speed, no smack, no coke, no crack and I will always wonder about that girl with all the facial piercings and the punk-rock dyke-mullet that used to hang out outside Café Roma with her dog, she seemed to have heroin issues, but she knew everyone and was awfully sweet. I wonder if she made it.

O, I think that was the end of it, alongside Mia Zapata's death.

END

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Portrait of Kurt Cobain from WikCommons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, with thanks to artist ThomasMikael.

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Dad Again

Transformation

I was going through a rough patch, I didn't know if I could stay off the booze. I woke in the mornings thinking of a drink. But I prayed and it passed. I'm out of the woods now, on a pink cloud. But I get restless and I get lazy. I sleep all day and I don't get much done. I'm not alone, I have my partner. We rub along just fine. He's mine. He's a pal. The dog is fun, she's very lively. I like the cat too. He likes to miaow and purr. My flat is old, I want to buy it. When on earth will I get my money? My dad would be turning in his grave at the amount of time it's taking. Still, I'm used to being poor. One day at a time, as they say in AA. It's rough and splintered, my mind. I miss that man so much. He was my buddy, I suppose. If only we could communicate with the dead. Hear their voices again. It leaves such a void. This Death thing. I still remember the funeral. The hearse at the door, the blazing sun, glaring white light glinting off the coffin handles.

He was inside there. They cremated him. His ashes are under my bay tree. It has grown about a foot.

An egg into a bird.

I was sitting on the steps of a temple in Thailand. I found a small blue egg at my feet. I warmed the egg up in my hands for an hour or so and suddenly the shell cracked and a small bird emerged from its shell. A wet-looking, fragile little bird. It opened its beak for food. I found it a little worm and it swallowed it down. It chirped and then sat on my shoulder. It had no mother. I will have to mother it. I get some seeds and a bowl of water for it to bathe in. It jumps into the water and ruffles its feathers. It is a plain bird. Brown with white speckles. This bird is my friend. I will take it everywhere with me. It has beady eyes and a little brown beak. It loves to eat snails out of their shells. I shall not keep it in a cage. It is a songbird beautiful trilling sounds come out of its throat. One day it will fly away. I keep it in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. It is my friend.

The cat circles round the bird and purrs deeply into its throat. It would like to eat the bird, but I will not let it. The bird sits on my shoulder and on the top of my head. It pulls out strands of my hair. I think it wants to build a nest. All day long it sings to itself and to me. It is a glorious sound. I play my flute and it sings along too. The bird learns to

by Laura Stephen

Bio Laura Stephen lives in London.

by Laura Stephen

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fly. It makes arcs in the sky but it always returns to me. I don't have a name for it, I just call it bird. The bird gets up early in the morning and pulls worms from the dirt. It eats flies and crickets. It is getting plump and round and its feathers are turning into brown and grey speckles. I think it is a thrush. A songbird.

I think about putting the bird in a cage so that I will not lose it, but I can't. Each day it flies away for a longer and longer time. One day it will not come back. I think it has found a mate. One day it will not return.

END

Image from WikCommons, public domain, with thanks to Shrikanth Hegde.

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I Plough Through Where Renowned Authors Stumble

by I_PWN_YER_MA_84 (first published in blog-form 4 December, 2013, www.darksomeschooner.net)

Bio I_PWN_YER_MA_84 can be described in many terms: eschatologist; heresiarch; soothsayer; naysayer; truth-seeker; loresmith; de facto Analyst at London’s fourthlargest data integrity consultancy. He is currently in consensual exile from www.darksomeschooner.net, residing on Twitter as @iPwnYerMa84

And so the annual festival of literary faux-self-awareness and tacit backslapping continues with the announcement of Literary Review's Bad Sex Award (http://www.literaryreview.co .uk/badsex2013.php). Once more self-congratulatory cultural pedestrians can have a hearty guffaw reading the fumbling prose of published authors. "Oh," they will think, unoriginally, "I could do better than that". Well, you couldn't.

But I did - at the tender age of 15.

Deep in my personal archive, at an undisclosed location in the attic room of a suburban house in East Belfast, I found my first, and arguably most successful[1], foray into the quagmire of literary coitus. The excerpt below was written back in 1999, a time when the illprepared despaired for their fate post-Y2K; before the lumpen masses jumped on the Tolkein bandwagon and it was considered “unusual” and “disturbing to the other students” to perform dramatic readings of the Silmarillion during lunch.

It is taken from my everadvancing manuscript for Grimla'ath: Hero of Men, a brilliant speculative work of Sci-Fantasy, that pits a sentient robot factory and an army of crows against an order

of element-manipulating monks. I'm not going to go into it all right now as some bugger might steal the concept, and I've been told in too many letters that "you can't copyright an idea".

All you need to know for now is that our hero, Grimla'ath: Hero of Men, had never even heard a woman's voice before the story began[2], and only met one for the first time on leaving The Abbey to lead a counterstrike against the robot factory-crow alliance. His unfamiliarity with, and indeed outright disgust at, anything female makes his sexual prowess all the more impressive.

As I was still somewhat lacking in "first-hand experience" at the age of 15[3], this important sex scene involves a female from the hideous subterranean Muckdaa'arg race. Again, it's worth noting that Grimla'ath: Hero of Men is doing this to a minger, so it makes you wonder what he could do if it was a proper attractive human on the receiving end.

Anyway, Grimla'ath: Hero of Men has ventured deep into the caves of his wooden planet and is making a treaty with the Chief of the Muckdaa'args.

The Chief makes a very strange request for Grimla'ath: Hero of Men to show

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commitment to the agreement...

And so, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men was placed in a rather invidious situation. He must satisfy the lurid sexual urges of the Muckdaa'arg Chief’s wife to cement the alliance, but the vile creature’s anatomy was more alien to him than even that of a surface woman.

These beings, for means of spreading their population and their environmental devastation at a hardy pace, see fit to afford their females no fewer than 6 wombs, and an attendant number of uterine vents and occasional cloacae. These spew out mewling cubs at an alarming rate, all born capable of selfpropulsion and speech to the extent that within minutes they are dextrous enough to pick a pocket and replace the purse unheeded; sufficiently verbally skilled to charm their way into the homes and savings trunks of the elderly and more naïve surface surface dwellers; and cunning enough to lodge fraudulent claims for a share of the tithes for the poor.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men would have to navigate this ridiculous vaginal minefield to pleasure the fecund chieftainess, attending to clitorises, vulvi and most likely labia both minora and majora. Unfamiliar until recently with even the screet of a woman’s voice, this would be a mighty challenge to Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, but Grimla’ath: Hero of Men

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was no Man to surrender before the petulant demands of this thing.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men strode up to the already disrobed wench and gave her foreplay. He kissed her on and around the mouth, at the top of her shoulders and behind the ear, all whilst rubbing her numerous distended mammary glands. This was exactly what she liked, and she moaned and whispered horrible subterranean curses in response to the pleasure Grimla’ath: Hero of Men had brought upon her.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men retched at the sound of her native tongue and realised that he would have to get down to the truly unsavoury parts. Grimla’ath: Hero of Men manipulated one of her clitorises and the surrounding area using a special flick of the wrist. Grimla’ath: Hero of Men’s many hours spent practising close-up magic were really paying off in this sickening context.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men instinctively knew a serviceable erection would be necessary in order to complete the hideous trial ahead. Experiencing no arousing stimulus from the beastly “queen” in front of him, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, in an act of amazing selfdiscipline – steadied by thoughts of his Brothers back at The Abbey, for whom Grimla’ath: Hero of Men was, after all, forging this alliance – in very little time, but with not inconsiderable effort, had a member which was truly

comparable with the handle of The Bursar’s sturdiest broom.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men held his breath, and with eyes closed and head bowed, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men did sex to her.

At this stage many a lazy writer would leave the mechanics of the sex act to the readers' imaginations.

Perhaps they fear that unnecessarily detailed descriptions of penetration and its resultant biological processes would disturb their readers as they wait for a connecting flight to Spitshine, Idaho. Perhaps those writers fear a harsh light being shone upon their own peccadilli. I know not these fears: Several moments later, as Grimla’ath: Hero of Men was thrusting in and out of the most important vagina of the accursed termagant, the sickening sight of a sireling’s head appeared in the vent just above and to the left of where Grimla’ath: Hero of Men was inserting his manhood. The beast scrabbled out of its mother’s parts with nimble claw-like fingers and fell hard onto the cave floor with a sopping thump.

“Here! Let me at my mother!” cawed the newborn, “I need her blue milk to gain my unsettling strength!”

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men could not abide these beings in any form, but the cubs were by far the worst. Here was one, standing naked and still gleaming with birthing mucous, impertinent enough to address Grimla’ath: Hero of

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Men in such a way.

“Go away you insolent wretch! Can’t you see we are in a delicate situation?” said Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, still penetrating the horrid queen diligently at regular intervals and occasionally giving attention to the relevant outside parts of her genitals.

The mother ignored her spawn, as is their custom, (particularly on busy market days when the calves run free, distracting merchants to nefarious ends and completely disrespecting the clearly ascribed hierarchical queueing system). However, in this instance the disregard was closely linked to her pleasured groaning and spastic gyration as a result of the wonderful job Grimla’ath: Hero of Men was doing in making her orgasm.

“Let me at a breast or I shall not be happy!” insisted the impudent waif.

“You shall feel the blade of my tremendous mind-wrought sword if you do not leave us be at once, you nauseating infant!" responded Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, short-temperedly but still in a very intelligent manner, "I must continue with this horrible business, but there is no reason why I should have it compounded by your whines!”.

“Fine!” said the wench’s issue, trying not to betray the quiver which it felt in its heart at being confronted by such a spectacular specimen as Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, (even from the rear Grimla’ath: Hero of Men’s awesome physicality was

34

obvious from his astounding lats and beautifully-defined gluteal dimples), “I shall sate my thirst by other means.

Perhaps there is a spinster on the surface whom I can confound with my wily tongue and deceptively diminutive frame.”

As the spurned suckling scrambled from the cave toward the distant light of the planet proper, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men regretted not having sliced it in twain on first sight, but Grimla’ath: Hero of Men would no doubt encounter many more of that kind against whom he could slate his wrath.

Again, not enough authors are willing to tackle head-on the issue of the dependency culture inculcated in children from "certain backgrounds" which encourages them to expect a free ride, literally from the second they are born. I knew, even years ago, that major issues like this can be cleverly concealed in SciFantasy narratives, affording me the opportunity to comment on our own society allegorically[4]. Luckily, it hasn't dated as these things have probably got worse since I wrote the sequence foresight is an amazing thing.

Once I'd subtly raised the issue of scroungers, I knew it was time to move on to the really intense/instructional stuff.

The sex act was becoming more and more tiresome for Grimla’ath: Hero of Men even though he was yet to break a sweat. Surely, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men thought, this

horrid strumpet must nearly have slaked her sickening urges? But Grimla’ath: Hero of Men had to carry on for fully two minutes before the culmination of his efforts was seen.

The harlot’s breathing had quickened to a worrying pace and Grimla’ath: Hero of Men took this as a suggestion he increase the frequency of his thrusts. This had the desired effect. She began to writhe and throw her head back screaming and moaning and banging her back up and down off the rock. Undoubtedly she was orgasming.

Once she had finished with this practice, Grimla’ath: Hero of Men quickly withdrew from the wench’s messy void.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men rubbed his instantly flaccid member on some nearby moss to remove the remnants of the sickening cavern it had diligently conquered and returned it to its welcoming home within his vestments.

You doubtless think that is the conclusion of the scene, but that is because you barely have the attention span to read this passage without me breaking it up with interjections. The hideous succubus would of course not let a hero of men such as Grimla'ath: Hero of Men escape her clutches so easily.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men strode away from the prone chieftainess towards her cuckolded husband, who had observed the whole act.

Noticing Grimla’ath: Hero of Men’s retreat, she scrabbled

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to her feet, unashamed of her obvious and disgusting nudity.

She reached both of her horrible gnarly paws into Grimla’ath: Hero of Men’s vestments, grasping for the dormant, but still impressively proportioned, phallus therein. “That was amazing,” cooed the hysterical troglodyte, “better than any of my kind could ever offer. Let me finish you off now, my sweet surface man,” she pleaded.

Grimla’ath: Hero of Men pushed the coitus-maddened slattern aside and said in no uncertain terms, “You have taken from me more than your worth in nutrients, wench. Be gone!”

On impact with the cave floor, another really ugly cub emerged from her capacious multi-womb. The child, seeing its mother prone, instinctively jumped on her nearmost teat and began to suckle greedily.

The chieftainess attempted to force the child off her stilltingling dug in order to continue her lusty pursuit of Grimla’ath: Hero of Men, but the nursling was too wily for this.

Never unclamping its jaws from around the lactating nipple, the newborn groped around on the ground and found an appropriately-sized sharp stone, then held it to its mother’s throat in a menacing manner. Once the queen had heeded this threat, the malevolent whelp brandished its makeshift weapon outwards to warn off any potential interlopers.

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Grimla’ath: Hero of Men left this loathsome tableau behind and strode off to finalise the terms of his compact with the Muckdaa'arg Chief.

So there it is. I would not normally publish so extensive an excerpt of my work free of charge, but I feel it is necessary in light of the truly terrible attempts I read on Literary Review's amateurish website.

Take heart, pretenders! Heed the lessons above and some day you may reach the heights I have scaled since August 1999.

[CONTINUES OVERLEAF]

Image public domain from WikiCommons, Monstrorum historia d'Ulisse Androvandi, Jean-Baptiste Coriolan, 1642.

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Appendix

[1] And also only.

[2] He killed his mother in childbirth, and this prodigious achievement afforded him immediate entry into The Order. Sheltered behind the walls of The Abbey, he never had to bother himself with the mundane prattlings of womankind.

[3] Obviously all this changed, and I was quite the swordsmith before my recent period of (elective) celibacy. However, to be honest, I never quite figured out what was going on "down there", no matter how many diagrams I pored over - would that Stephen Biesty produced a cross-section of the female erogenous zone to rival his Man of War.

There's a hypnotic echo of "it" in this image.

[4] You can't be too didactic with these things, but the eventual published version of Grimla'ath: Hero of Men will include an interactive survey at the end with questions like, "Did you think it was fair that the Muckdaa'arg children stole food from the deserving and expected something for nothing?" and "Did this make you think of any sorts of people in your town, or at least in London if you live in a small town?". It would only appear in the first editions, but I imagine the word of mouth would be such that fans would set up their own online version of the survey for those who were too tight to shell out for the hardback. Obviously the lion's share of the advertising revenue from the online survey would be directed to me.

END

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Trade (an excerpt)

by Lochlan Bloom

London is a jungle.

A cold grey jungle.

Bio Lochlan Bloom lives in London and does not have a cat or a dog. The following is an excerpt from the short novella Trade (a novelette) available for download online.

It had snowed unusually early and when I arrived the city was a dull, overcast ball of slush. I met Chet Bull in Sympatico’s Old St office. It was on the top floor of an ugly concrete tower. Despite the evident expense lavished on the furnishings the place felt decrepit. Chet himself was sharply dressed and clean shaven but beyond that it was hard to describe his appearance. Something about him deflected your attention.

He was energetic but his personality was hard to nail down, as if he moulded himself around you, chameleon–like, changing himself to suit your responses.

‘Very promising,’ he said, his eye darting across the projections on the screen.

‘Once the dev guys get stuck into this… we’re talking rapid scale out.’ I tried to look keen. ‘We’re expecting a Series B you know. Hong Kong’s on-board. That’s where the money is now. China.

That’s the future.’

He straightened up from the screen and took a step towards me, making a gesture with his left hand that I didn’t quite understand.

‘What do you think about the future?’

‘Oh, I don’t know really,’ I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. ‘We just, you know, it’s all about getting a quality product out.’ I smiled weakly, hoping this was what he was after.

He stopped and looked me up and down as if considering something.

‘The deal’s all set. Svil and I, we thrashed things out,’ He looked at me strangely.

‘You don’t need to sell me...’

Again he waved his left hand.

‘Oh no, I… I just meant, you know, we’re right behind this.’

Again that strange look.

‘Why don’t we take a wander?’

He put his hand on the crook of my elbow.

‘You don’t want to look at the projections?’ I pointed at the screen, quite aware that we had barely skimmed the surface of the material I had prepared.

‘No need for that.’ I thought he winked at me.

The area around Old St was referred to as up and coming.

As far as I could gather that simply meant overpriced, optimistically overpriced, with the hope that one day that unrealistic, inflated price would become the normal price and business and property owners would make a nice profit. Everyone in London has an underlying interest in profits.

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* Chet took me down in the lift to the underground car park.

‘I bought the Corvette as a present for myself,’ he said, evidently pleased with the purchase. ‘After I sold my first business, you know, I thought I had all the money I would ever need. I thought I would never work again.’

He looked at me and grinned. ‘I took some time off, maybe too much time, travelling, backpacking…’ He looked pensive. ‘I was a little wild then, you know. Until that point I’d worked every hour I could get and then suddenly…nothing.

‘Anyway, I had been travelling around Tanzania. I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it is really a beautiful country, beautiful, beautiful people, you can buy everything you want there for $100 a day. Honestly, no more than $100 and you can get anything you want - a meal, a blow job, two girls, two boys, two girls and two boys everything that you can imagine is available there, and cheap.

‘I had no intentions of going back to the States. I had millions in the bank at that point, but I barely touched it, didn’t need to. Then, I arrived in Johannesburg and one day this magnificent Corvette passes me in the street and right there, on the pavement, I had a revelation, a what do you call it…an epiphany and decided I wanted one. I had been living on next to nothing for so long, partying, travelling. It took me a long

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time to convince the bank clerks to authorize the transaction.’

We had reached the bay where his car was parked. It looked ludicrously out of place, a gross American concoction, huge and gleaming. The outer edge of the chassis was a good 10 centimetres wider than the parking space. The battered Nissan Micra in the space next to his looked like a toy car in comparison.

‘As soon as I got behind the wheel I realized something: There is no other force on earth as powerful as Money.’

I looked at him quizzically, searching for some sign of irony. He appeared to be entirely serious.

He put the key into the driver’s door and stopped, speaking to me across the roof of the car.

‘I left Johannesburg a week later and flew to New York. I started my next business the week after that.

There was no point in staying in Africa. It was all a waste of time I realized, the travelling.

New experiences are great, it’s true, but what use are they? There are no indigenous people in this world. There is no such thing as free choice, every person, every action is shaped by Money.’

We roared along the street, the engine thundering even in first gear as we crawled around Silicon Roundabout.

‘If I really wanted to be alive,’ Chet continued, ‘I decided I had to go to the source. Only money can shift

whole populations, destroy mountains. Nothing else comes close, nothing moves the imagination in the same way.

This city is where it springs; where money comes out of the ground.’

He pointed out buildings and landmarks that belonged, or had belonged, to wealthy individuals. I couldn’t really hear much of what he said.

‘I had the Corvette shipped after me and the shipping cost as much as the car itself. There is no sense in being on the edge of life, after all.’

I sensed that he wasn’t expecting an answer so I just laughed in agreement. I hoped my tone left enough room for interpretation should it transpire that he was, after all, playing some dry joke.

‘I’ve never been back to Africa since.’

We arrived at a preposterous hotel somewhere behind Kings Cross.

‘They sent me a bill for one point two million yesterday, and that’s just for the windows.’

It dawned on me that this was his hotel. He had talked about investing in hotels earlier in the day.

‘Expensive windows.’

‘The cheapest we could get away with.’

We walked up to the reception area. A triple-height roof covered half of the expansive floor. A bar, café and dining area all merged together seamlessly. I had to admit the architects or interior designers or whoever was responsible for

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the layout had been extremely skilful in creating mood.

It was hard to tell if it was the lighting or the subtle changes in the flooring and décor, but each section felt quite distinct. There were no walls but the bar area was dim and snug while the café was light and breezy. None of it felt in any way personal but there was no denying that it was stunningly well designed.

‘I’ve always loved hotels,’ he said. I got the impression he wanted to share something with me. I wasn’t sure if he was doing this consciously to charm me. ‘They are so ultimately anonymous, don’t you agree?’

This thought did in fact chime with my own thinking on hotels, but coming out of his lips it sounded perverse.

‘There is nothing personal in a hotel, beyond perhaps the room number. People can forget all the little edges that make everyday life difficult. In my hotels people can relax knowing every experience has already been analysed and priced.’

We were on the twelfth floor.

Chet was showing me an architectural quirk, an exposed heating pipe that ran across the passageway unsupported. It had apparently cost an extra hundred thousand pounds.

He stopped where the corridor narrowed before a small balcony.

‘I hope you’re not taking me seriously.’ He smiled.

I had little doubt that he was entirely serious. Chet

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clearly seemed to be trying to impress me. I wondered if he could be planning on hitting on me. Was already hitting on me?

‘You’ve done a great job with this place,’ I said.

It was hard to be sure what age he was. Initially I had taken him to be ten or fifteen years older than me but now I suspected he may be older still. I looked more closely at his face. I wondered if he had had Botox.

‘Let’s get a drink.’

I didn’t say anything, but followed him down to the bar.

They treated us like royalty.

The bar manager fawned over us both. He insisted on demonstrating his mixology skills by preparing extravagant cocktails.

I started to wonder what strings Chet pulled behind the scenes. There was something intoxicating about the power that he seemed to wield. A thick cold fog had built up outside the giant double glazed walls and somehow that seemed to exaggerate the enormity of the city.

I had been to London fairly frequently, but had never quite got my head around the place. It was a difficult creature, unbroken, wild.

There were always more parts, and layers of pretence. The expensive parts, on the slide, trying to show they still had money when they didn’t; the poor areas, thriving on illgotten gains, trying to hide the money they were making from prying eyes.

Several of Chet’s business associates came past the bar.

Mainly they said no more than a few words and disappeared into the bowels of the hotel.

They all resembled Chet in their smooth faced, easy going appearance. Everything sculpted, prepared and styled to look expensive and simple.

One associate, Darven, arrived and took a seat. He seemed to know Chet well. I guessed he was in his sixties but it was next to impossible to say for sure. His face was entirely unnatural, the work of some highly paid surgeon, his clothes spotless and trendy.

He wore blue trainers.

He was telling a story about an incident at some place called Sunset’s, several days previously. ‘Thankfully he changed his mind when he saw the money.’

‘It would cost you less if you listened to Trainer.’

‘You make me out to be such a terrible person. In front of your friend as well. As if I would plan something like that. The poor boy was getting paid to do a job. You’ve been at Sunset’s, you know how it can get out of control. It’s a shame. He looked sweet.

Anyway, my insurance paid for him to go to the most expensive hospital he’s ever going to visit. Not to mention the dentist…his teeth are the envy of all the other boys now.’

Chet smiled and shot me a conspiratorial look.

‘Apart from the ones that are missing.’

| Issue 3

‘Oh, you exaggerate. I am not Dorian Gray, darling.’

Darven stopped and regarded me for a moment and squeezed Chet’s shoulder.

‘Who is your friend? Are you not going to introduce us?’

‘He’s Scottish,’ Chet said looking directly at me. ‘From Berlin.’

‘Oh Scottish, from Berlin, how wonderful,’ the old man turned to me and I had a sudden sense of revulsion. I could only imagine what he had done to the “poor boy”.

‘You will come with us to Sunset’s won’t you?’ he leered.

‘No, I’m not sure, I have a lot of work to do.’ The cocktails were starting to work on me.

I tried to picture my father, before he had died, could he have been about the same age as this guy. There was not one fibre of similarity between the two. My father wheezing greyly in his dirty duffel coat, visiting the hospital, the nurses patronizing him, the way they spoke to my sister in that dull patient tone, the greyness that day in the crematorium, the greyness of his house as we cleared it out, there was nothing to hang on to. I felt profoundly disrespectful sitting there sipping expensive cocktails with these two aging millionaires.

The car pounded along the dark streets of North London, everything flew off the ground, whirling about me, vomited up into the air, flung passed us with violence. I was

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wedged in the back, forgotten, the Corvette wasn’t designed to have passengers in the rear seats, to have any more than two. Chet drove illegally but without the slightest error. He had a precision that I couldn’t put my finger on.

I could tell we had left the more wholesome neighbourhoods, we stopped, Darven spoke to someone, he returned after a long time, they laughed in the front seats. We took the Westway to Kensington, a fancy bar, champagne arrived, and girls.

Darven enjoyed talking to the girls, he spoke earnestly, I was drunk, I remember thinking, drunk and spinning.

The girls racked up lines of coke, then more lines, then MDMA, I swallowed a pill.

Everything tasted bitter but I was excited, I felt a tingling just above my crotch, as if my balls were being drawn up inside my belly. I talked to a girl and then we were kissing, she was gorgeous, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, I didn’t get her name.

She was gone, we were back on the road, we had ditched the Corvette somewhere, we were in a taxi, I struggled to remember if I had done something in the toilets with the girl, Chet smiled and laughed and slapped me on the back.

‘Plenty where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Plenty.’ I felt sick with the motion of the taxi. Did he mean plenty of girls or something else?

We arrived in a dark place.

The taxi bumped on uneven, gravelly ground. Large floodlights. Warehouses. A panic rose in the back of my neck. What were they planning to do to me out here? What the hell was I doing with them? Who, after all, were they? I didn’t know them.

They talked but I couldn’t understand a word. Everything was muffled and distorted.

‘Crpwa ruddem eggttt Mishazzo,’ Darven spat out, looking at me with a terrifying glare.

They laughed some more.

‘Yggetee poi sugur,’ sniffed Chet. His face came close to mine, melting.

We had stopped, it was dark outside. A warehouse.

This was it. They would do it here.

I was out of the taxi. The cold air shook me. They started speaking normally again.

‘You were out of it,’ Chet smiled, half supporting me with his arm, ‘back there in the taxi. Fresh air will do you good. We’ll get another line inside.’

‘Inside?’ I was confused. It appeared they were not going to kill me.

‘Sunset’s,’ Darven beamed, motioning towards the warehouse.

We stumbled a short distance to a small door cut in the corrugated exterior wall. I heard a distant beat, a drum beat tugging far away, the Drum Taps of Sorgie. It revitalized me. We were at Sunset’s, evidently.

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* We entered curtains. Thick, layer after layer. My heart grew excited in that giant house of curtains, pulled in deeper by the steady drumming. Darven slipped me another pill. It was warm and sumptuous. Inside there was no dirt or discomfort. The mud and gravel and security cameras and wasteland and perimeter fences and disorder and cold and confusion and inadequacy and persistence and everything outside faded away.

There were boys and there were girls. They laughed with each other. They played tricks on each other. Filthy tricks.

Filthy but innocent. I watched.

My cock was hard, I realized. A girl had her hand on it and then her mouth. I was a rock.

I turned her over, she squealed, a look of sham pain on her face, I did not care. I entered her from behind, we were an engine, oiled. I forced my finger into her mouth and she sucked on it. She had my cock in her mouth and I kept it there until she gagged. It was not enough, she wanted more.

Insatiable, she splayed herself.

I was dragged away.

We moved in a sea. Hours must have passed. Others came. We joined together.

They sucked and pulled at me, heightening my pleasure. I became filled with a power. I was invincible. I think I slept and woke. There was no time, there was only the sea. I came. And then again. And then I couldn’t come any more but I carried on. I couldn’t remember. I forgot.

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* Eventually it was later. They were gone. The light was drab and the drums had turned to a drone. Darven stood there in the dirty warehouse.

‘It’s time to go,’ he said gently. Beside him stood a young girl, a swelling bruise spreading from her cheek down her neck.

‘To go?’ I asked confused.

‘Yes, we’ve been here too long.’ Darven looked worried, his face ashen in the weak light of the place. ‘We need to leave.’

‘How long?’ I couldn’t get my head to work.

‘It’s Tuesday,’ he said hurriedly.

They took me to a taxi.

END

| Issue 3

42 Bio Gwynfryn Thomas writes poems, stories, journalism and anthropology. His poems once appeared in Haque, Pomegranate, Shot of Science and Vocal Solo. He was educated finely, if finitely, in Essex but learnt more useful things in pubs elsewhere.

A Photograph

by Gwynfryn Thomas

Under the sudden weight his neck cracked a little like the shutter-release button.

Not the weight of stories or self-aggrandised memory or shit like this: the straight-down weight of a 1971 Russian-made SLR (no matter he thought it was the same age as his father).

She focussed slowly then became a blur, a sunset on a plain.

For the occasion he wore his best 58-mil lens: factory-standard, actually, but there’s no need for her to know. He held it to her.

The smell of the ageing leather case threw her to a world of a father, breath of American lager, cigars, a green recliner and a fire.

She tossed it back, tossed off her pants, let her arch punctuate a question mark.

By chance the bottom of the case still held his father’s ‘Property Of’ label, in gold, in larger font, above his, punctuated by a full stop.

The weight on the wrist at this angle hurt. He aimed again, her sunset fell behind the night curtain shutter only to rise one hundred and twenty five milliseconds later. He thumbed the winder, finding nothing to spool, no film for the sprockets to chew, and his eyes – wide, stark – shuttered on bulb for an unfocussed time, gulping images onto the reel of his mind: thoughts of all those times lost, all those eternities dismissed with each flick of that switch; not even memories now: events, without a chance to become fading antiques coated in their tears, dust and grease.

He opened his eyes. She’s still naked, still there, more an imperative now than an indirect, seductive question.

The mirror behind her and the mirror behind him juggled the couple for an era he just couldn’t muster and, wishing for film, he pressed on the plunger: an inrush of light puffed off the back of the camera. Nothing was preserved.

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EDITOR’S NOTE Haque is back with its third issue, in which we reveal more of the weird and wonderful writing emanating from the cracked brains of the Hackney Writers. Bringing together a whole new collection of short fiction, this issue takes in literary coitus, Sweden, first love, Kurt Cobain and of course Hackney itself....