Metropolitan Lines Vol. 2 (2008)

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

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postgraduate fiction

3 8 10 12 21 24 35

William Leahy John West 42

Laura Brown Maria Papacosta

Marc Spencer Kerry Williams Emanuele Libertini Mark Woollard Jean-David Beyers

Maria Ridley Kerry Williams Shane Jinadu Marc Spencer

43 53

11 13 13 8 27 29 32 39 45 48 15 15 11

FACULTY 38 Emotional Spaceman December 1945...

UNDERGRADUATES A Lesson Learned Piano POETRY UNDERGRADUATES Pantoum - The Prophet Decadence in the Bathroom Been There, Done That Pure Research The Snail Thirteen Ways of Looking at Scissors Filth Weeping Woman CC’s Paranoia Scarf Me Up Johnny Haiku

Visit us on-line: Metropolitan Lines http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/ml/index Brunel University http://www.brunel.ac.uk/ The Department of English at Brunel University, School of Arts http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/sa/artsub/english

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Editors: David Fulton Robert Stamper Subediting, Layout and Formatting: Samuel Taradash

Metropolitan Lines is the literary magazine of Brunel University’s School of Arts. It exists to showcase the creative writing, prose and poetry of students, faculty and staff connected to the School of Arts at Brunel University.

Questions, comments or submissions are welcome, and should be sent to david.fulton@brunel.ac.uk Any submissions should be sent as attachments to e-mail in the form of .doc or rtf files. Please, check your spelling and grammar before sending.

The copyrights of all works within are held by their respective authors. All photographs by Samuel Taradash, except for page 42, which was was first published anonymously in the Soviet Journal Ogonyok, and is currently in the public domain.

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Editorial Staff

Ben Hart Carolyn Skelton Jo Hurst Johanna Yacoub Kate Simants Perry Bhandal Ali Sheikholeslami

FICTION POSTGRADUATES World Gone Wrong Parting Gift Hodge Magilligan Canal Chicken Jack Paradise, Etc.

Contents

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Summer 2008

postgraduate fiction World Gone Wrong Ben Hart 1. Trying to get to Heaven

T

he rain slid cautiously down the angel’s faces, dripping off their noses and falling to the floor.

Below them a lone hobo sought shelter within the church that they guarded, his knocking echoing out dully through the empty building.

Bemoaning the lack of response from within the church, the hobo brushed his soaking hair away from his face and staggered out into the churchyard. Pulling his battered coat around himself as tightly as it would go, he lay down on a sodden bench and did his best to sleep.

The night was a bitter one and sleep did not come easily to the hobo, but he was exhausted from the hardships of the day and eventually it took him, wrenching him away from the world and into a wholly better one of his own devising. For the next three hours he drifted in and out of consciousness, hearing the tongues of angels and men singing in unison to a tune that his mind couldn’t place.

Gradually the music began to tail off. Then it stopped altogether. The hobo’s eyes snapped open and he saw the face of a policeman peering down into his own.

‘Come on you, on your bike!’

The hobo rolled off the bench and rubbed his bleary eyes.

‘I need to speak with the Reverend,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be on my way’.

‘I’m sure the Reverend has better things to do than tend to the likes of

you!’ boomed the policeman. He grabbed the hobo roughly by the shoulder and shoved him in the direction of the church gates.

‘I have as much right to be here as anyone!’ protested the hobo, gazing up pleadingly at the concrete angels that towered above him.

‘Sleeping rough on church property is against the law. I’m obliged to move you on.’

‘Was Jesus himself not an outlaw?’ ***

2. My Name Is Nobody

M

y mind’s a mess. Congested.

Like a town centre in desperate need of a bypass. I stare out the window, notepad in hand, and chew at the skin around my well-bitten nails. It’s a fine old day outside: sunshine mingling sociably with a sweeping wind and deft flakes of snow. It’s the kind of weather that would usually sound poetic however you described it, but today my brain just isn’t up to the challenge. It blanks me, cutting my prose off before I’ve even written anything. Sighing, I clamber up from my seat and make coffee – black, no sugar. The caffeine does its best to stimulate but my body’s having none of it. I drain my cup and return to the window, its grubby pane now flecked with snow.

I’m starting to think that the world’s turned its back on me. The girl I picked up last night left before it was light and didn’t leave a number. Nobody else is answering my calls. No one’s calling either. I lie on my bed, put a CD on and spend the next six minutes listening to 3

Bob Dylan attempting to cure America’s ills by calling forth the spirit of a long-dead blues singer.

That fails to inspire me much either, so I turn off the player and lie in silence, counting down the seconds until I have to rouse myself and head off to work.

I’m the assistant manager of a video shop. Correction: a back-alley video shop. Our closed sign’s scrawled on a piece of Weetabix box and our selection’s limited. Often I try to broaden our customers’ horizons, suggesting they try something a little artier than the norm, but rarely are they having any of it. Tonight it’s particularly quiet.

There’s a new multi-national store due to open up the road in a couple of weeks and I reckon most of our clientele are saving themselves for that. It’s a sobering thought. I really don’t see how we can stay in business after it hits.

I decide to amuse myself by staring at the wall and asking rhetorical questions. Who am I? What am I doing here? Basic existential stuff. A couple of girls come in while I’m doing this and leave hurriedly, giggling. It doesn’t really bother me. I get paid the same whether they rent anything out or not. Later, about ten, just as I’m preparing to head home, the shop fills up and I find myself bombarded with videos from all angles. A Hugh Grant flick here, a Halle Berry there. One kid, obviously underage, tries to get out a Van Damme – one of his later straight-to-video jobbies.

I ID him and he presents me with a laminated piece of cardboard that he’s obviously scanned off his computer ten minutes beforehand.

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

postgraduate fiction When questioned about its legitimacy he just shrugs and asks what harm it can do.

Before cashing up I check the inbox on my phone. It makes unpleasant reading: no new messages. I turn off the main lights and complete my chores by the flickering of the popcorn machine and the second-hand rays of the streetlights outside. 2ps, 5ps, 10ps, 20ps…I arrange them all in order, in rows, just how the boss likes them.

T

4

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Ben Hart

The door flies open and a man comes barging in, collar pulled up high, his head masked by a balaclava. I draw his attention to the closed sign on the door but he doesn’t want to listen. He wants the money in the till, the money I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes arranging, the I introduced myself. Talk She was stuck in a world money that was providing me flowed freely. I lied about my day; with an excuse not to head home. she did likewise. There was a where she didn’t belong; if We struggle and the money goes copy of the local rag on the table flying everywhere. This angers and we skimmed through it. she left him then she left me. I hate to see my handiwork Seems there’s a killer on the loose. undone, and I go for him, biting everything. Gutsy little thing The press have dubbed him ‘The and scratching, trying to wrench Silver-Tongued Devil’. He went ahead and did it. the wool from his face. He’s far charms his way into people’s too strong for me though, and I houses, wins their trust and then Credit to her. find myself flung against the wall, slays them. Uses whatever’s at a knife pressed up close to my hand. Sometime last month he throat. caved an old lady’s skull in with a brick. It made one hell ‘Make another sound,’ he hisses, ‘make another of a mess on the carpet. I pointed this out to the girl and sound and I promise that I’ll fucking kill you!’ warned her against being out late at night; she did ‘Kill me?’ I chuckle. ‘I’m already dead.’ likewise. We laughed, inhaled smoke, watched it follow its tail, round and round. She was alone for the night, *** had walked out on her bloke. The barman came over and brushed aside the glasses, winking at me. We continued talking, had lots in common. Poor little thing had got involved with the wrong guy and hadn’t realised 3. The Silver-Tongued Devil until it was too late. It was a nasty situation: she was he beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had stuck in a world where she didn’t belong; if she left him another for desert. Pellets of rain clattered into the then she left everything. Gutsy little thing went ahead windows, launched from the swirling wisps of cloud and did it. Credit to her. that circled above. The clock hit eleven with a The drinks kept flowing and our jaws kept jacking, begrudging ‘thunk.’ I gathered up my overcoat, slung it hours melting into hours as we exchanged stories about on and headed for the door. a world gone wrong. Then the bell rung, last orders were called and we were out in the street, arm in arm, Outside a kid swore at a can that he was kicking; the tires of a U-Haul truck squealed; a man with a badge heading for her place. The rain still came but it was skipped on by; the smell of frying chicken aroused my almost apologetic now, its rage quelled. We bantered nostrils. I passed it all by and blundered into the nearest on the doorstep, standing in defiance of the cold. The bar, rubbing my malnourished eyes as the artificial door was opened and we staggered inside. Laughter, jostling, the smell of wet denim. lights hit them.

World Gone Wrong

The barman nodded and handed me a beer. I thanked him and surveyed my surroundings, mapping out the day. Drank my beer down and gazed out the window. Traffic flashed past, a girl in an orange dress.

The bar was filling up now; people were on their lunch, eating, drinking. Smoke hung low in the air and I had to rest my chin on the bar to escape it. Time passed and I went with it: some kids being refused admission, the whirring of a fruit machine, the monotony of the barman’s chatter. Life became a haze, a smoke-filled oblivion. My eyes strained against it, working harder than anticipated. There was a girl alone at a table – brunette, nice smile.

postgraduate fiction

The next morning I gargled, spat and headed down to the bar to face the day. The barman handed me a beer, told me the police had been in earlier, asking about the girl. I picked up the rag and browsed. He was in it again, that Silver-Tongued Devil. The opening of a new coffee shop had consigned him to page two. It was a paid advertisement.

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

I tried to reason, to understand. I knew why but not how. Couldn’t comprehend how anyone could do what he did, without remorse.

Except he did feel remorse, didn’t he? The days after the nights before

Rubbing my eyes, blinking, disbelieving, I watched as The Silver-Tongued Devil ran. I went with him, alongside him, keeping pace. Our eyes locked, trust was established. The clouds soared, the rain danced, the sun was tentative, the horizon near.

Ever since that day we’ve been brothers, the Silver-Tongued Devil and I, though some say we’re one and the same. ***

undergraduate poetry Pantoum – The Prophet The End Is Nigh!

The Prophet yells, Words echoed in the sky.

You have been told, The Prophet yells, The blasphemy of it all, You have been told, Heed Gods call!

The blasphemy of it all, Reaching to the air.

Heed Gods call!

He yells a dare.

His arms wave aimlessly, Grasping the ideas.

To those that can see They spark many fears.

Grasping the ideas He thrusts them below.

They spark many fears An unholy blow.

He thrusts them below, Words echoed in the sky, An unholy blow.

The End Is nigh!

Marc Spencer

Reaching to the air, His arms wave aimlessly.

He yells a dare To those that can see.

5

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Ben Hart

The night was souring. Water sloshed around my ankles, seeping into my socks. A crack of a twig, the dirty stench of dying. The SilverTongued Devil was there, walking behind me. I fell, hands clammy, my throat choked with dust. Footsteps moving away, slowly, then quicker.

I lay there, watching the rain flow into the gutter, wondering why he did what he did. Then the answer dawned: immortality. The death of the weak made him a God. You, me, them, she – we only live until we die.

He will live forever. And to be remembered…is that not all any of us can ask for?

The smoke was hanging around again. My eyes saw page two. Page two. He killed and only made page two. Sad, like a child deprived of a bike, like a mother seeing her boy off to war, like a man who can’t see the road for tears in his eyes. Smoke.

Everywhere. Take it back, passive, causes cancer, fuck it, we all die anyway. He’ll see to that. Nothing annoys the Silver-Tongued Devil more than being deprived of his rightful place on the front page by the opening of a new coffee shop. I was there when it happened and I doubt I will ever forget his rage: tables were overturned; cups and curses flew in unison.

The smoke was a shield, it broke.

His anger continued unabated throughout the night. He swore he’d kill again. I felt him slip from the shadows, the smoke coming down like a curtain across the latest act. The girl was gone; the police were coming; it was time for him to leave.

World Gone Wrong

Glasses were cleaned, filled and clinked. Lips touched lips. We joked about the Silver-Tongued Devil, wondering what he’d do if he caught us now. She wanted to fuck him and fuck the world. Lips again, chapped, balmed. Then the carpet, the burning, the pleasure, the screaming. I left her there, smiling, as happy and beautiful as anything I’d ever known. She was rigid, sleepy. I headed for home.

the nights were spent in bars, slumping into depression, trying to find a reason not to go home.

Eventually he’d probably find so many that he wouldn’t go back at all.

He’d just sit there, always, searching for the adulation of the press.

postgraduate fiction

I

I spent the rest of the day being being paraded around like a We pulled onto our driveway paraded around like a trophy. By some thirty seconds later. The car trophy.

By the end I had just the end of it I had just about door was flung open and I was perfected a false grin. After being coated in relatives. Some regulars, about perfected a false grin. marched around the shops and others long lost. They grabbed kitted out in the threads my and prodded me, commented on my weight loss, my muscle gain, my aged features. It mother and sister agreed that I ought to be wearing, was as though I, their former golden boy, was a rough and enduring a dinner of lamb and sweet potatoes, I diamond they were determined to polish up until I finally managed to slip away. Breathing deeply and regained my former glory. Tea was served soon after, savouring every breath, I reached the edge of the street brought out promptly on the hour. As the wine flowed and surveyed my surroundings, marvelling at how little more freely so did the chatter. I dipped in and out of the had changed in the three years I had been away. The conversation, riding it like a wave, jumping off same people still scuttled around in the same houses, doing the same things. I paused to admire the stars that whenever things got too much for me. winked out in the night sky, stately yet ominous, the real At around ten-thirty my mother decided I must be masters of the universe. tired and ushered me up to bed. It had been made up I pushed open the door to the ‘Jolly Bargeman’ and specially – duvets and pillows both uniform blue.

Thanking her, I cast aside my clothes and flopped down stepped inside. The musty air hit me and I longed to on the bed, shuffling uncomfortably as the mattress wipe it from my face. Over in the far corner sat my old sunk down and threatened to engulf me. My mother crew, drinking, smoking, playing cards, pretending not collected up my clothes and placed them in the washing to gamble. They hollered me a greeting and I raised my hand in acknowledgement. The barman had already basket.

‘Breakfast will be at seven,’ she whispered, bending poured me a pint when I got there. Someone must have briefed him about my arrival. I paid for the drink, down to kiss me on the forehead.

I murmured my acknowledgement and did my best fumbling my coins slightly, and took a seat alongside my friends. to sleep.

‘Great to have you back!’ One of them yelled ‘We’re up for a biggun tonight!’ yelled another.

It was a rough night. Free from the catcalls of my ‘Pub crawl next week? It’s Johnny’s birthday!’ fellow cons and my cellmate’s snoring, I was left at the 6

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Ben Hart

had spent many lonely, restless nights dreaming of how I was going to greet my family when I was released from prison. On the day, I settled for a rudimentary hug from my mother and sister, and a slap on the back from my old man. They hurried me out of The next morning I slouched downstairs dead on the prison gates and bundled me into the car. My mum muttered something about a party and how the guests seven and was greeted by the glorious smell of wellwould already be arriving. I smiled, seconds and even grilled bacon. After bidding good-morning to all, I minutes flashing past as a blur. My sister hugged me pulled up a chair and sat down alongside my sister. She again and told me how much she’d missed me. I forced smiled sweetly and offered to do something about my another smile. As we drew ever nearer to home the hair. The bacon was placed in the centre of the table and conversation became stilted: I had little to tell them and we all made a grab for it, laying slices out on slabs of they had told me all in their letters. Slumping back in thickly buttered bread. The taste was unparalleled but my seat, I stared out the window and watched the birds caused me to feel oddly nauseous. My stomach churning, I left the table and soar out majestically above the charged upstairs to the bathroom hills, searching for food, secure in to be sick. their purpose.

I spent the rest of the day

World Gone Wrong

mercy of my own dreams. Time and time again they came and, try as I might, I was powerless to stop them.

Snippets of conversations, half-formed figures, encounters long since forgotten. I saw my life before I was sent down, I saw prison, and I saw my future. None of it seemed all that different to me.

4. Hard Times

postgraduate fiction

5. Good as I’ve Been to You

O

ld Dougie was a local treasure.

He spent his days returning stray shopping trolleys to their rightful owners. To him they were lost sheep that were pining for their flock. He received no monetary reward for his actions, or thanks, but it gave him a purpose, a reason to exist, something to occupy his

At night he’d huddle on a park bench, sleeping bolt upright, knees pulled up close under his chin, his face crouched down below a flatcap. If the weather was bitter then he’d pull up the collar of his grubby mac to muffle its advances. The bench he most often frequented was situated near the town’s Catholic Church, directly adjacent to its huge iron gates that rose up high into the sky. Above these gates, mounted on a concrete plinth, were three concrete angels playing trumpets.

One night, as he was admiring the angel’s architecture, a downand-out took a seat alongside him and began to swig noisily from a bottle of cheap cider.

‘Lo,’ said Dougie, regarding the man with interest.

The man grunted nasally and held out the cider. ‘Want some?’

Dougie shook his head. ‘Don’t touch the stuff.’

The two men stared up at the angels, their ragged features bathed in ethereal streaks of moonlight.

7

‘How long you been out here for?’ asked the man.

‘About two years. My son was manoeuvring to put me into a home.

I ran.’

The man turned towards Dougie, his mouth quivering and threatening to gape out from behind his greying beard.

‘You’re out here on your own will?’

Dougie nodded.

There was a service in the church, always was on Thursday nights. As the clock struck eight, ringing out mightily through the caustic night air, people started to file out of the building: kids, parents, grandparents. They were laughing, joking, singing snatches of hymns. They passed Dougie and the old man by, barely affording them a glance.

‘Do you think anyone hears the music that they play?’ asked Dougie, suddenly, gazing up at the angels that stood high above him with their trumpets clasped tight.

‘Do you reckon anyone even tries?’

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Ben Hart

***

time with as he approached his eightieth year on the planet.

World Gone Wrong

‘Gotta be done!’

‘Got to!’

‘Got to!’

‘Got to!’

I wanted to stand up and scream, tell them to shut up, to shove their stupid ideas and mind their own fucking business. Their voices were relentless, piercing, incessant. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, dreaming that I was far away, in another land, another time.

‘So,’ someone asked. ‘How does it feel to be free?’

I opened my eyes and stared across the table, looking them all in the eyes individually. Finally I spoke.

‘Go find me a man who knows.’

postgraduate fiction Parting Gift

by Carolyn Skelton

H

e opened the door to her, not even bothering to hide his irritation. Hadn’t he told her only last month that it was all over? All over before it had really started, she’d said, ripping her paper handkerchief into shreds. For days after he’d found tiny bits of mangled tissue paper behind the furniture in the living room. Like a paper trail from the heart which led nowhere.

‘Ray! How’s things?’ she asked, a smile stretched taut across her face.

She hitched her tote bag higher up on her shoulder. It was then he noticed the leather gloves. They looked incongruous with her light sweater and jeans. He ignored the thought that she might be covering up some sort of self-mutilation. In any case, it would be more like her to flaunt the results of a half-baked suicide attempt, knowing it would press all his guilt buttons.

‘Hey, Carrie.’

‘I was just passing and . . .’ she continued.

‘I’m packing.’

‘For Pakistan?’

‘Uh-huh. I’ve loads to do. The flight leaves tonight.’

‘I’m not stopping. Just wanted to give you this.’ She bent her head over her bag, auburn curls flashing in the sunlight. He remembered the softness of her hair as it brushed against his thighs, and shook his head to dislodge the memory. It wouldn’t do to get too sentimental.

Not now.

She pulled out a small gold box and handed it to him. ‘Don’t open it yet. Keep it for the twentieth.’

‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘See it as a parting gift. A way of saying “thanks”.’

‘For what?’

‘Helping me to realise that you and I would never have made it.’

‘Oh.’ He felt deflated now. ‘Do you want to come in or something?’

‘Another time maybe.’

‘Perhaps. I’ll be away for a month at least.’

‘Just promise me you’ll keep it for the twentieth. You might need it out there in all that heat.’

undergraduate poetry Pure Research Outside, ominous cobwebs of tree, branches waving at the window pane, A sea of freeze-dried paralyzed limbs inside.

I hear words like dripping blood and a thunder in my right ear: Warm, delicate, sinewy, scaly, oozing with the viscosity of mud, Murderous, fleeting, shady.

Here talks a scientist in the bud, blossoms of grey crystalline cells, Alongside chrysanthemum and blue bells.

This Bourne building is a prison for my carcass, bound in flowers, a garrison for plaster and tape people, the waste bubbling up, when Enrique, with great haste, belches words about dominant negative mutants.

Unfortunate, to be all crammed in this office, like ants: Robert is indifferent, honest; Claudia, with laser beams and paper moons, idly staring at the ceiling; Christine reaches with intensity, dedication, reaches for science’s secret; Prajwal perches on the sofa, stifling a yawn; Enrique, flamboyant and patronizing, throws jargon at people; And all the while I smile arrogantly at the trees outside.

Paul, diligent, calm, argues his point with care, while Wang, vampire-like, stands in awe of his master.

Virginia sits in front of them, indulgent and benign, betraying a sense of superiority.

Michael, being English, fumbles with hands and floppy hair, while Laci, smiling like a Japanese fox, curls in his seat, ready to fire yet another question.

8

Emanuele Libertini Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

postgraduate fiction

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Carolyn Skelton

9

Parting Gift

‘Window.’ He wouldn’t see anything at night, but he hated being disturbed when others wanted to get out of their seats. He hoped the flight would be smooth – not like the last time when they’d run into turbulence somewhere over the Middle East.

A couple of security guards, machine guns strapped to their chests, glanced at him. Travelling nowadays was like being in a war zone. Particularly when flying to what were now casually referred to as ‘volatile regions.’

He picked up his passport and boarding card and headed towards departures. No doubt there would be the usual nonsense of queuing for ages only to eventually be manhandled by some bored guy with an electronic baton. Thank God he only made the trip once a year. He pitied those exhausted looking executives who seem to spend their lives shuttling from one time zone to another, permanently bloated from airline food and cheap whisky.

‘Dr Noble?’

He turned to see one of the security guards at his elbow.

‘Yes?’ ‘Would you come this way, please.’

‘Of course.’ Stay calm. Stay calm and polite. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘Please just follow me.’

He allowed himself to be steered into a small windowless room. A bench ran along one wall. In the middle was a table where his suitcase lay gaping open like a wound, its disembowelled contents spilling out.

His breathing came faster. Something wasn’t quite right with this scenario. He was Raymond Noble PhD, heading off to work on the diseased phytoplankton in the Bay of Karachi. He was the Pakistani research station’s great white hope, bringing new observation techniques to the underfunded fisheries lab.

‘What’s going on here? What are you doing with my case?’

A pair of handcuffs slid around his wrists.

The cold metal made him wince. His bowels slackened.

It was then he saw it. The little gold box, slashed and broken. The red silk cravat poking out of the tissue paper like a malicious tongue. But beside that something far worse.

The false bottom smashed and ripped to reveal a dark, oblong object wrapped in cellophane. Something which looked like an overlarge laboratory faecal specimen.

Carrie’s parting gift.

He looked down at the box in his hands as if he’d only just noticed it. ‘Sure. I’ll send you a postcard.’

‘Great.’ She bent forward as if to give him a kiss and he instinctively moved his head away. Her lips landed on his ear and he pulled back. She turned away quickly and headed up the path, only pausing at the gate to take off her gloves and stuff them into her bag. He watched her go and felt nothing but relief.

Several times that afternoon he was tempted to open the box. His thirty-eighth meant nothing to him: birthdays never had been celebrated much in his family.

But he remembered that look on her face when he’d dodged her kiss. It had reminded him of his mother’s that time he’d told her he wanted to live with his father.

All hurt and defiance. An expression designed to make you feel bad.

In the end he just threw her present into the suitcase.

He was running late as usual and he’d planned to do some duty free shopping before his flight. Of course the ubiquitous malt was out, but the research team always appreciated a tin of shortbread or a mouse mat of the Cuillins. Something they couldn’t get in Karachi.

The airport was crowded with families. He’d forgotten it was spring half term. That was the thing about not having children: you had no idea of the school calendar and were always surprised when they suddenly appeared everywhere. The queues for Malaga and Tenerife snaked out across the concourse. He dodged the track-suited families with their bulging bags, smug in the knowledge that he was travelling light. His small suitcase on wheels jerked and whined behind him like a recalcitrant dog as he headed over to the Pakistani Air desk.

‘Window or aisle?’ asked the check-in clerk, giving him one of her professional smiles.

postgraduate fiction Hodge

by Jo Hurst

D

uring the daylight hours I am a respectful returner. I don’t rampage as the menagerie up at Newstead Abbey do. I am quiet and creep around the rooms that I once had full run of.

That we only appear at night is untrue. That we choose to appear more frequently after darkness, when we are alone, when our home returns to us, is more the truth; though coming back often fills me with melancholy.

It saddens me to think that our house has become an institution.

It used to live and breathe with us, around us, through us. Now it is a just a space, orchestrated to offer visitors authenticity of times passed.

To this end, the interloping custodians have employed a cat; to maximise the potency of the recreation. To recreate me, no less.

To meander and muse her way around the parlour furniture, while strangers exhume memories of and pontificate on, my Master and His world. My Master and His Work.

That they have chosen a feminine feline confuses; though I feel it is because they believe everything they hear or read on us. Therefore let me put straight, any distortions immediately. When the Master, while I entwined myself around his leg, said to his very excellent friend, Boswell, those many years ago now, ‘I have had better cats,’ you believed that he loved me less? That I wasn’t the favourite? That those who graced his presence be they male or female, before or after me were held in higher esteem?

To those who say such things, utter such mutterings, I say this.

Whose bronze statue adorns the entrance here? Who was there when the real writing was done?

When history was made. Whose name do they remember now?

Together, my Master and I made something out of not much indeed and there wasn’t a multitude of us like there was in France. There was just the Master and His quill, and I. Hearsay can become heresy if attention is not paid. So take heed.

Take all that you hear or read with a pinch of salt and a dollop of vinegar, the way I used to take my fish down at the Wharf. Pay attention to the unreliability of scribes historical and

spirit has left all base worldly upsets in the physical sphere.

‘A domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.’

‘He is a very fine cat,’ my Master said.

And He was a very sensible Man. certain memorists with perforated remembrances.

And as you weren’t there I shall repeat the actual words spoken of me.

‘He is a very fine cat,’ my Master said.

And He was a very sensible Man. As was Poet Stockdale who wrote on me in his Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat. So what further proof do you need of my beloved status?

Of course two such intelligences living under the same thatch can often bait each other’s imperturbability. And that my Master some time later broke a little piece of my small beating leonine heart when I uncovered my entry in the Dictionary, I have put behind me. And I lay it bare, the exact words here for all to see, to show my 10

For I can assure you I was my Master’s cat and I did much more than catch mice.

For our achievements were mountainous; that the strangers whom I see here and chose to like not, have made mere curiosities of us, goads me. They do disservice our memories. Though I am not allowed to voice my disapproval. I am reminded that my memory is short and in the days before we’d gone to the Gods, we welcomed waifs and strays, strangers all.

And this is true enough.

‘Hodge,’ He says, to remind, ‘We kept our door ajar so that they could share tea and brandy with me and milk and oysters with you.

So that they could find welcome at whatever hour.’

I hadn’t forgotten. I am my Master’s cat. But a stranger once talked to is a stranger no more.

What do I have in common with these people who haunt our home now? They are not the loose moggies and prostitutes, the vagabonds and wayward tabbies and ally cat beggars that frequented our home in those days, who were all welcome. Not just welcomed, needed. We did indeed keep our door ajar for the misfortunates, because we ourselves were misfortunates. They kept us sane and although we enjoyed the company of respected human and feline folk, the melancholia we shared, my Master and I, sat well with them.

These unfortunates suffered too our illnesses, tics and complaints

Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

postgraduate fiction My Master would go and see his eminent friends for solace and I would go to the Wharf and watch the nature unfold. Freed from the confines of a house dominated by sickness; we could contemplate, ruminate, think on the reception my Master was receiving and the praise I had heaped on me for my dutiful companionship. And when we returned from the streets and to the Square, the melancholia lifted, we would thank the good Lord that we had found contentment and consolation. My sensible Master and His Favourite and Fine Cat, Hodge.

Oh, history teacher, my history teacher His shirt, trousers and socks were beige, But he was not.

He was a history teacher.

A damn fine history teacher.

The King of all Kings of historical matter.

What he didn’t know about the Tolpuddle Martyrs or the French Revolution Could be written on the back Of his unstarched, dirty shirt collar Coloured walnut brown, The same as his squashy shoes and buckled belt.

He arrived for class as unmade As the bed he’d got out of, His hair worn long and thin Greased stagnant as he breezed in.

He had what all great teachers should have: Presence.

And this Presence was Flagrant. Felt. Electric.

So electric that if your elbow happened to overhang the aisle He bestrode like a colossus, You’d feel the wrath of his nylon trousers And be zapped into participation By the static he’d built up in them Through his continual pacing.

He talked non-stop with nasal-voiced authority Constantly swirling round to engage everyone.

His bodily fluids set free.

Spittle cascading out of his mouth Like the spray off a water-logged dog drying off.

But accompanying the spittle and the sweat 11

History poured out of his apertures.

History, and nothing but.

For those forty-five minutes, you were with him.

Bearing banner on the battlefield at Hastings Holed up in the Tower, Exchanging notes through nooks.

By his side with bayonet pointing east at Flanders.

Marching on Washington, Arms and thoughts linked with belief In what should be.

So what that he looked liked a bonfire Guy Fawkes And smelt like a spare room between guests?

So what he bypassed the shower?

He was a busy, learned man With things to teach and students to be taught.

Washing was a luxury for other people.

And thankful we were for this diligence.

Thankful for those 45 minutes When we were made to feel like he felt about history.

When we became a Roman centurion A scared stiff Tommy A White Russian for a day.

Looking back, I wager there’s not one person From that classroom, Having lived half a life by now, Who wouldn’t give up their loofah and soap To feel that passionately about something.

Not one.

Jo Hurst Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Jo Hurst

For at times it did blanket and overwhelm us.

The year the Master’s beloved died, lost to age and unclean living, in particular left us heavy of heart and alone to witness the unveil of His life’s work. At times the despondency was like a fog, so thick that one had to step on to the streets for air and vision; to seek life. I forever marvelled at what I saw.

Though I had seen it a thousand times, I never grew tired of it. For to grow tired of London is to grow tired of life. And it kept us both from succumbing for eternity to our depressions.

Hodge

that visited upon us. For they like us were afflicted. We, like them, from base beginnings. And being from such base beginnings we were forever humbled, and knew what it was like to forgo experience and knowledge. To forgo such natural entitlements because we did not have the money to pay for such things. That my Master devoured books, borrowed before he could buy, was the measure of the Man’s Majesty. Myself, the same. I too was known for my intelligence and could discourse on topics of the day at my Club as my Master did at His; when the melancholia left us alone.

postgraduate fiction Magilligan

by Johanna Yacoub Employment

H

enri Magilligan, a short stocky man, seemed to stand at a lop-sided angle to his surroundings. One shoulder sat lower than the other. One leg was shorter than the other. His left arm hung farther down his body than his right arm. This right arm, visibly smaller, tucked itself into the waistband of voluminous but threadbare jodhpurs bunched up by frayed baling twine slotted through their waistband. He counteracted the discrepancy in his legs by keeping the longer of the two limbs slightly bent and positioned a foot’s length to the front. His head, topped by a burning bush of ginger hair, was graced with an off-centre crescent smile which wrapped itself around his face. He appeared to have all his teeth.

It was six thirty in the morning.

The grate had been cleaned and the fire made up, but not yet relit. The room was cold. A gunmetal sky threw its dark cloak over the chateau and the gusting wind clattered the shutters against the wall on either side of the long windows. Jeanne had lit the oil lamps. Generator fuel was in short supply and electricity was only switched on for visitors.

André twisted an old regimental scarf into a makeshift turban to protect his sensitive skin from the ferocious draught howling along the corridor. He’d wound his body in a Berber camel hair burnoose, a souvenir of colonial life. Examining himself in the mirror, he recollected the day he’d met Alexia, the spirited cavalry charge and the mock

capture of Abdel Kadir. ‘Poor Abdel Kadir,’ he thought. ‘Even you looked better than I do now. Who’d have thought I’d end up like the monster in Frankenstein.’ Then he wheeled himself unaided from the bedroom, allowing Alexia to return to her room and change. As she scuttled past Henri, she paused, gawped, looked with incredulity at Jeanne and fled.

They’d had a difficult night.

André had grown accustomed to the hospital beds and found the soft mattress unsettling. His wounds were tender and every accidental movement in the bed painful. He’d woken frequently, each time disturbing Alexia. The enormity of their problem had sunk into her head. She was ready to grab any straw within reach with both hands.

‘The name Magilligan,’ began André in his quiet voice, ‘it’s not exactly French....? Are you...were you a member of the armed forces?’

Henri wrinkled his face in concentration, glanced briefly at Jeanne, then replied, ‘Do I look like a soldier? I’ve great skill with horses and I did offer myself but neither your lot nor my lot were interested. They’ve already got enough horse copers and no-one detected the fighting potential in me. So, the answer is no, I was not in the armed forces.’

André hesitated, as if reconsidering his tactics. He started again.

‘I’m trying to find out if you’re a deserter.’

‘I was never in the army to run away, Sir.’ ‘Magilligan, if that is your name?’

André, confused, stopped. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to ask this odd-looking little man. ‘It’s not a French name yet you speak 12

French like a Frenchman. What if you’re a spy?’

He regretted the question as soon as he’d asked it. ‘He’ll think I’m paranoid,’ muttered André to himself, but Magilligan seemed unperturbed by the insinuation.

‘My grandfather was the Magilligan. Irish, but I never knew him. Drank himself to death before I was born.’

Magilligan looked at André and raised his bushy eyebrows as if to deny any involvement in the inebriated downfall of his forefather, then let them subside to their natural resting place above his vivid blue eyes. André threw a fleeting look of bewilderment at Jeanne, whose face remained expressionless.

‘My grandfather and father worked with the racehorses at Chantilly. I can ride as well as anyone but the gaffers wouldn’t let me race, so I stayed a stable lad.

Chantilly’s closed now, as you know. My mother, God rest her soul, had relatives near Chalons. I found farm work, Sir.’ Remembering the main thrust of André’s investigation, he added as reassurance, ‘Nobody would take me into the espionage. I stick too much to peoples’ memories.’

‘Do you know this man well, Jeanne?’

André manoeuvred the chair to face her. She nodded and was about to speak when André swung round again to Henri.

‘I’m looking for a valet; a very personal valet. I need a man to help me with the basic functions of living.’

André removed his hands from under the blanket and held them forward, as if for inspection. The fingers on his left hand were fused Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

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Magilligan

together though his thumb was free. He turned his gaze ‘No, Sir. God sent me like this into the world. He to Henri and asked, wanted to keep me safe from harm.’

‘What in your previous experience qualifies you for ‘I don’t quite follow?’ this work?’

Henri’s logic escaped André. Jeanne, who’d known André’s tone was sceptical. Jeanne closed her eyes in Henri’s maternal family since childhood, wondered resignation. The net would have to be cast wider. what was coming. She couldn’t follow his logic either.

Henri, however, replied with pride in his voice.

‘Well, Sir,’ Henri adjusted his stance as his shorter ‘I’ve soothed nervous foals and mares. I’ve gentled leg was getting tired. ‘I’ve prepared horses for the yearling colts to the bridle, without being bitten. You military. All the officers to begin with are like you used need a soft touch for that, and the ability to predict their to be, and often end up like you are now; that’s if they’re next move. I’ve kept their rugs clean and saddles there at all. My bodily misfortune has kept me out of the polished to perfection. What’s the difference between a fighting. At the end of it I’ll be what I was at the harness and a pair of shoes?’ beginning, not better, that’s for sure, but no worse.’

André nodded and was about to answer, but Henri André closed his eyes. It was too early in the morning hadn’t finished his self-justification. for this. He needed breakfast to unravel Magilligan’s ‘I’ve laundered silks for Rothschild’s jockeys and clarification of God’s benevolence. Turning to Jeanne, ironed shirts for the trainers. The shaving might take a he asked, bit of practice but I’ve a steady hand and to be truthful, ‘Are you sure this man is up to the job? He looks as Sir, I don’t see much to shave.’ if he slept in the stables last night.’

Remnants of André’s beard straggled in isolated Before Jeanne had a chance to answer, Henri butted tufts around the areas of less burned skin. A few strokes in. of the razor would take it off in the blink of an eye. To ‘Indeed I did, Sir. I wanted to be here nice and early overcome that uncomfortable truth, André focused his after Jeanne sent word you’d need a groom.’ eyes on Henri’s right hand. It left the waistband in a ‘I don’t need a groom,’ countered André in flash, described a couple of circles in the air, waggled exasperation. ‘I need a gentleman’s servant.’ its fingers, then returned to its resting place once it had ‘That’s what I meant, Sir. Instead of brushing down demonstrated its viability. No-one spoke. the horses, I’ll be doing you. There’s no difference. I’ll ‘You see,’ said Henri interrupting the silence, ‘It’s be just as careful with you as I was with them.’ much shorter than the other and bothers folk to look at it but I undergraduate poetry promise, it works as well as its partner. I’ve learned to drive a car, Decadence in the Bathroom even had lessons in its machinery and I’m a good shot. I can reload a Porcelain-white tiles shine with gold, The taste of blood is rich and metallic gun blindfolded. You want me to Soft candle flames bounce about the in the mouth, show you? room, Delicious if cut with tequila and lime, ‘Not at this precise moment, Unworldly.

The rouge invisible on ruby red lips. thank you.’

The drip-drop of water hits the floor, André was at a loss. Henri was Bath overwhelmed, candles, dancing Now it rages all around, not what he’d had in mind for a flames sent overboard, The golden porcelain charred. manservant. He adopted a different Waxy scent of vanilla is overcome by The heat burns, approach. the stink of burning.

Those tiny candles ‘May I ask a personal question?’

Consumed ‘By all means, Sir. Ask whatever And it started with such a tiny light, All to nothing. you want,’ replied Henri with an Dancing in the water, Now in the mirror the flame sees unconcerned shrug.

Playing with its reflection – what it’s become, ‘Your, er, disability?’ André did A metamorphosis.

The mirror glows in recognition: not wish to be impolite or indelicate. Burning, out of control.

A monster.

‘Was it as a result of a riding accident?’

Kerry Williams

postgraduate fiction ‘It’s the gas, Alexia... just keep telling yourself... your husband was gassed.’

‘May God help us,’ she moaned as she collapsed onto the sofa.

‘Well,’ said André, ‘God’s certainly with Magilligan, so maybe he’ll adopt us too.’ p

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T

hat other small room behind the library had become a building site. Old tarpaulins were spread over the floor to protect the parquet and a construction of planks on trestles provided a raised walkway round the walls, giving access to the higher reaches and ceiling. A wooden ladder leant against the doorframe, and an old tea chest with a chipped wood block over it doubled as a worktable.

Spare brushes bristled from a jar of turpentine and smaller paint pots nestled against a large bucket of white emulsion. Magilligan stirred this with a broken broomstick, before pouring the paint into the smaller pots. They were easier to manage and, if he did drop a pot, it wasn’t a disaster. He used his longer left arm for the painting, although he was by nature right handed.

Balancing on the trestles, he dipped the broad brush into the paint and began covering the walls of the small bedroom with smooth strokes of colour. He worked methodically, tipping into the cornice below the ceiling then sweeping down to the skirting board, which he’d completed the day before. Hopping on and off the trestles was tiring, but he was determined to do a neat job. At the end of each panel of paint, he feathered out the edges and scooped up any drips with the dry

brush he kept in his overall pocket for that sole purpose. Then he wiped over the gloss finish of the wood, cleaning off stray spatters as he progressed round the room.

He’d get this second coat on in a couple of hours, but would leave it to dry overnight. Many decorators thought fingertip dry was sufficient and added the next layer as soon as possible but he, Magilligan, knew better. That kind of short cut produced a patchy result as the real density of cover only showed when it had “gone off”, as his father used to say. It could look perfect at first, but the flaws soon appeared once the thorough drying process was finished.

By the next day, after he’d touched up those patches where the under-colour was “grinning” through, another of his father’s expressions, it would be ready for the final application. He’d need to gloss over the skirting boards once more, but then he’d be into the first proper bedroom he’d ever had in his twenty-eight years. It had a washbasin with a mirror over it, and a bathroom further down the hall was for his sole use.

March wasn’t the best month for decorating as the cold damp weather made it hard to leave windows open, but he needed to sleep within earshot of André. The sooner he finished, the quicker he’d be able to do that. An alternative had been a bed in André’s room, a proposal which had not appealed to anyone, least of all Alexia. She knew her husband needed quiet privacy until he was well enough to return to a more normal life. Alexia liked to sit with André in the cosy library and then in his room until as late as possible before retiring to her own bedroom on the first floor. The

Magilligan

André looked down at his hands, then at Jeanne and finally at Henri.

‘I’ll give you a week’s trial. Jeanne, can you find him something more suitable to wear? Make him take a bath. Find somewhere for him to sleep and bring my breakfast. I’m starving. In fact, send Denise through right away with a pot of fresh strong coffee. I’ve had nothing but lukewarm dishwater for the last four months.’

He wheeled the chair towards his room, then stopped and turned back, ‘And for God’s sake, light the bloody fires. I’m freezing.’

Jeanne tugged Henri’s sleeve and led him from the room. As Magilligan left, André noticed he was slightly hunched and the line of his spine skewed to one side. At that moment, Alexia entered. Henri stepped back politely to allow her to pass.

‘Morning, Ma’am,’ He greeted her cheerfully with his off-balance smile and a slight nod of his head.

‘I’ll be back to bathe the master in a moment. He’ll be spanking clean by the time I’ve finished.’

‘Come on Henri,’ muttered Jeanne. ‘I’ve got to make you presentable and set out a few rules of the house.’

‘You do that, Miss Jeanne. I won’t mind a bit and if I get it wrong you can wallop me with that big stick you hide in the pantry.’

Jeanne pursed her lips and propelled Henri down the corridor.

Despite his misgivings, André began to laugh. Alexia looked at him, her eyes wide with astonishment and dismay.

‘You haven’t taken him on, have you? You must be out of your mind.’

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unearthed a cornucopia of rubbish. Impervious to the startled scuttle of mice, or the rustle of nesting birds in the eaves, he’d patiently plodded through the spiders’ webs and mounds of dusty droppings to disinter an old armchair whose stuffing bulged ominously through its faded upholstery. Later, he’d chanced upon a serviceable chest of drawers with no apparent trace of worm, a bed and a wardrobe. He’d had doubts about the wardrobe, having nothing to hang in it but, reckoning his fortunes were on an upward trajectory, decided notwithstanding to bring it down in anticipation of his future prosperity.

Magilligan, of whom life had expected nothing, was determined to demonstrate his unacknowledged qualities. He’d already rigged up a makeshift bell system from his bedroom to André’s room. Cords, plaited out of farmyard hemp, were looped along the corridor through a series of old curtain rings he’d found in a dilapidated trunk. As he’d touched the silk velvet they’d once supported, it disintegrated in brittle shreds between his fingers but the rings were sound, if a trifle rusty. The bell, decorated with smiling cows’ faces painted on the white outer enamel and bordered by pink and lavender pansies, was a souvenir André’s father had brought back from Switzerland. After enthusiastic admiration, it had been swiftly banished to attic purgatory from whence it now re-emerged, resonant with newfound purpose. The arrangement was rough and ready, but in these hard times it was the best he’d been able to do. Above all, it was fit for the task.

He laughed to himself as he slapped on the paint.

‘Me, a gentleman’s gentleman; who’d have ever thought it?’ he repeated, pinching himself in his pride and good luck. Sad his parents hadn’t lived to see the day, he thought, and resolved never to permit their demons to flow down his throat.

‘Not that I don’t mind a little tipple every now and then,’ he said, ‘but there’s a time and a place for everything.’

He dabbed at a corner of the wall to ensure enough colour was forced into the crease and continued his monologue, ‘and the whisky bottle has no place on the breakfast table.’

Another expedition to the attic had produced a pair of cotton curtains overlooked by the legions of moths who’d feasted royally on nearly every other fabric they could sink their insect teeth into. By chance, he fell upon a couple of threadbare rugs. Clouds of dust billowed out of them as he’d staggered sneezing into the

Magilligan

presence of an extra person would have made that awkward.

She’d also listened carefully to the advice of André’s doctors. They were united in the opinion that he’d recover more quickly in a peaceful and familiar environment. For four years, he’d led an institutionalised existence. Solitude was the first real casualty of war and the hospital, Spartan in its facilities, thrust the distress of devastating wounds into his face everyday. After his injury, a high level of medication had been inescapable. Painkillers remained a necessity, but opiate sedatives had been reduced. These powerful drugs had eased his initial physical agony and pacified the beasts dancing in his mind. Now those psychological horrors, exacerbated by morphine’s withdrawal symptoms, slipped off their chemical shackles and began to torment him with renewed ferocity.

Memories of the battlefield traumatised every unguarded moment. The screams of wounded and dying soldiers echoed in André’s head. Foul imaginary smells plagued his senses, rising even from the food placed before him, and his hands trembled in the remembered cacophony of shellfire. Phantasmagoria filled his room with ghostly faces. Spectres waved from dark corners and leapt screeching from the folds of curtains. Spurts of flame from the fire in the grate became flashes of hallucinatory shell burst, pressing him into his pillows in terror. His ears filled with the crump of artillery as wind blustered through the gables of the old house. Shutters rattled like machine-gun fire and the cry of an owl howled with the horrific agony of a dismembered man.

André frequently woke drenched in perspiration, the nausea rising in his throat as he clutched his burnt face and groaned with the excruciating pain pulsing through his absent leg. Magilligan, who was sleeping in the corridor on a folding camp bed he’d found in the attic, calmed André as none other could. Squatting on a low stool by the bed, Magilligan talked to him of races and horses, of stallions and bloodlines, all spiced with anecdotes of owners and trainers. He talked and talked until the phantoms were vanquished by André’s sleep of utter exhaustion. ‘Even hellhounds get tired,’ said Magilligan to himself as he slipped noiselessly from the room until the next sortie of the banshees of battle.

The attic was a wonderland to Magilligan. Three hundred years of one family’s discarded debris lay strewn under the beams of the great house. Despatched up there by Jeanne in his quest for furniture, he’d

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harles saw the doors to his kitchen refuge close in his face. His father’s return to Chateau de Belsanges opened the house to a stream of visitors for the first time since the beginning of the war. A disorientated toddler clinging to Jeanne’s skirts was a distraction. Too busy to devote time to him as before, Jeanne now chased him back to his sisters, where he was equally unwelcome. Violette and Inez resented his intrusion into their private world of dolls, or jigsaw puzzles and skipping competitions. A governess taught them at home and the local priest supplemented Mademoiselle’s basics with extra mathematics and a smattering of Latin. There was even talk of sending 16

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them to the village school once the war ended. They’d grown out of Charles. He was no longer the baby brother they wheeled around the garden in his pram, or dressed up in their clothes for fun, but an annoying little boy who broke their playthings and interrupted their secret games.

His familiar world was crumbling before his puzzled eyes. Everyday he grew sulkier and more disconsolate.

His tantrums increased in frequency and ferocity and, to the horror of his mother, he was once again wetting the bed. Since that first dreadful encounter with his father, he hadn’t dared approach him. Alexia had tried to overcome his aversion but her encouragement was insufficient to quell his irrational fear whenever he saw the wheelchair. A reassuring grip on his hand and coaxing words, or promises of special treats, met with the same spectacular failure as threats and the occasional sharp slap. He’d come close enough to see André’s face, then wrench away his hand and run to the safety of the nursery. Once inside and with the door banged shut behind him, he’d kick his sisters’ toys around in a rage he couldn’t explain whenever Jeanne asked gently why he was so upset.

To his deepening distress, Charles saw the girls conquer their initial reserve and re-establish their loving relationship with their father, a relationship he’d never known. His singular position as the only male in the household had been usurped by this man who now occupied centre-stage in everyone’s attention. The arrival of a strange russet-haired person, who seemed to be everywhere at once, also relegated him to a lower position in the domestic hierarchy. Wherever he turned, he was excluded.

Charles crept along the corridor behind the library.

His father was resting after lunch and Alexia had left for an afternoon of local social calls. Although apprehensive, his curiosity egged him on and, lured by the smell of fresh paint, he tiptoed to Magilligan’s room.

The door was open. Charles hesitated on the threshold and leaned forward to peek inside. He was afraid to go in. The room was empty. There was no sound of footsteps pacing up and down, or a body shifting in a chair, or snoring from the bed. He took a tentative step forward, flattening himself against the side of the door to be less visible. At the edge of the door, he stopped and quickly looked behind to see if anyone was hiding there. Charles often hid behind the door then jumped out with a loud ‘boo’ to frighten Violette or Inez. There was no one. In the silence of the corridor, an irresistible

Magilligan

kitchen, his trophies held high above his head. Jeanne had screamed, ‘Get those filthy things out of here... out.. out out,’ and shooing him with the broom, had steered him into the laundry, where they were first bundled with enough naphthalene to eradicate the moth population of Champagne. The curtains had washed up quite nicely, he thought, and could be hung once the paint was dry.

He’d had a problem with the rugs. Rolled up for years, they were cracked and encrusted with dirt. Magilligan rigged up a line between two crossbeams in the stables and, slinging the rugs over it, had gone daily to shake and beat the grime out of them.

‘It’s not the dust and mildew,’ he’d complained to Jeanne, ‘They’ve been self-composting for years. There’s enough muck here to start a flower garden.’

‘What are you going to do about the tears and holes,’ she’d asked.

‘Don’t worry.’ Magilligan wasn’t concerned about the occasional hole. ‘Isn’t there a saddler in Chalons? He’ll have strong thread and those big needles with eyes like snaffle rings. I’ve mended harness, so I can mend a rug.

It won’t look great, but it’ll cover the floor. That’s all I need.’

Magilligan was excited by the notion of his own room. He’d always shared with his brothers or with other lads. On his uncle’s farm in Chalons, a boarded-off corner of the barn above the horses had been considered more than adequate for him, although the family lived in comfort in a large house with spare rooms. Washing had been at the pump by the kitchen door and his few possessions were kept rolled in a canvas cloth.

‘No, Magilligan,’ he said. ‘This is not a step backwards. Finally you’re on your way.’

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bodies climbing out of their graves and chasing you going whoooo...’

Magilligan waved his arms around his head like a ghost. Charles swallowed, sucked up a monumental inhalation of air and gathered every muscle in his body to expel another explosion of sound. Magilligan burst out laughing and clapped his hands together to emphasise how funny he found Charles’s behaviour.

The shriek died in the back of the boy’s throat with a huge hiccup.

‘That’s better,’ said Magilligan. ‘Your father’s asleep.

We don’t want to wake him do we?’

Charles didn’t know whether he wanted to wake his father or not. He stared at Magilligan and sniffed loudly. Magilligan produced a handkerchief, pressed it to Charles’s nose and ordered, ‘Blow!’ Charles blew, sniffed again and wriggled on the bed. Confused, he stuck his thumb in his mouth and wondered what to do.

‘Why don’t we take a little walk?’ asked Magilligan.

‘It’s a fine day, too nice to be cooped up indoors. What do you think?’

He stretched out his hand to the boy. Charles eyed it suspiciously.

‘Come on,’ he continued. ‘Let’s get you down from there, into a warm coat and out. A big boy like you needs to be running about. Let’s be having you.’

Before Charles could start another bout of crying, he felt himself being lifted from the bed, set down on the floor and his hand gripped firmly. Henri marched him back along the corridor, across the ground floor of the house to the garden door near the kitchen where his spare coat always hung. He lifted it from the hook and taking Charles’s arm, pushed it into the sleeve, pulled on the other sleeve and buttoned up the coat.

‘Now, we’re protected against the elements,’ stated Magilligan, as he opened the door. ‘Out we go, into the world. We’ll have an adventure.’

Jeanne, who’d heard the commotion, but had chosen not to intervene, sneaked a quick look from behind the kitchen door and watched man and boy tramp across the deserted wintry garden to the woods behind the chateau.

‘Both of them lost children,’ she thought. ‘They might do each other good, and if not, they’ll serve each other right.’

Magilligan

force gathered behind him to propel his small form through the doorway and into the deserted room.

A narrow table stood by the bed. Straining on tiptoes, he stared up at the wood-framed photograph of a man and woman surrounded by children. Rosary beads lay to the side of the photograph. A pair of round glasses in fine wire frames and a pencil sat neatly aligned by a small book. Charles wasn’t tall enough to climb up onto the high bedstead without a struggle. Clutching at the counterpane and the brass corner rail, he managed to drag himself up. His short legs thrashed the air until he was perched on the quilted counterpane.

He scrutinized the room with the intense concentration of a child. Apart from the battered chair and the wardrobe, its furnishing was meagre and bore no resemblance to the family bedrooms on the first floor.

‘Well, little man. What are you doing in here?’

Charles had been so engrossed in his inspection, he hadn’t heard Magilligan’s uneven footsteps on the limestone flags of the hall. He recoiled in shock, leaped to the other side of the bed and tried to jump down.

Instead, he caught his foot in the bedcover and crashed headlong to the floor with a thump. Abandoning his earlier attempt to escape, Charles sat on the carpet and screamed. He wasn’t hurt, only startled, but over the years he’d discovered the best way out of a difficult situation was to start crying. Everyone would fuss over him, try to silence him and his original misdemeanour would be quickly forgotten.

Magilligan limped round to Charles and said, ‘Now, why don’t you get up from there? The floor’s cold.

There’s nothing wrong with you. Come on up!’

This was not the reaction Charles expected. Why didn’t Jeanne come rushing in to pacify him? Where was Denise, pleading for calm with soothing words? He clambered to his feet and stared at Magilligan, who stared back. Charles expected more consolation than this man was offering. He began to roar with frustration, his mouth open so wide, Magilligan could see his tonsils. Charles felt two hands around his waist as he was lifted back onto the bed and plonked down with his legs dangling over the side. The hands continued down his torso, felt his arms, prodded his legs, checked that all limbs moved in the normal way and then chucked him under the chin.

‘There’s nothing broken, so there’s no need for this terrible din. You’ll waken the dead with it. Think of the

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had hoisted me out of it like a sack of pilfered potatoes.

I’m sure my father must have lifted me into his arms as a baby but I’ve lost any memory of it. Jeanne had long ago stopped doing so. I’d grown too heavy. Despite the strangeness of the experience, I wasn’t anxious. On the contrary, I felt comforted and secure, even when he set me back down on my own two feet. From my low vantage point, the turrets of the chateau were just visible above the wall but I didn’t succumb to a momentary urge to run home. I could already smell the musty, rotting odour of ancient forest freshened by the bright green aroma of sprouting grass in the surrounding fields. My nostrils twitched like a hamster’s as the herbal fragrance of ferns rose from the mulchy soil to beckon me into this woodland paradise. A wave of elation swept over me and, tearing my hand loose from Magilligan’s clasp, I dashed headlong up a moss-springy path into the shadowy dapple of the trees.

‘Oy, you little ratbag... where do you think you’re going?’

The voice followed me up the path but freedom was so exhilarating I didn’t want to stop. I felt one hand on my shoulder to slow me down as the other hand restrained me.

‘Not so fast. I don’t want to lose you in the woods and we’ve all afternoon. Now let’s just go a bit slower.’

I remember I turned and asked what I should call him.

‘Henri,’ he said, as he took my hand and led me deeper into the coolness of the woods. Pigeons gurgled on hidden branches and the wind through the treetops rustled like taffeta dresses at a ball. A

Magilligan

t the time, I didn’t appreciate what Henri did for me. I’d never been into the woods, alone or otherwise. It was forbidden. Woods teemed with savage animals; lions, tigers, wolves, even bears, all of which ate little boys, or so I was told. The truth was less exciting.

Little boys explore forests with their older brothers or with children from their neighbourhood. I didn’t have an older brother and the reserve my mother upheld towards local families reduced our everyday social life considerably. She couldn’t slip into those easy-going friendships young mothers take as a matter of course. Visits to other families with children of my age were by written invitation and involved my being dressed in my best clothes and warned to behave.

The reciprocal invitations were even worse and inevitably ended with me and at least one other child in tears, my sisters furious, and my being banished to the nursery in disgrace.

To be fair to Maman, a war of attrition was in its death throes a mere fifty miles from the gates. Halfcrazed deserters from both the French and the German armies were living rough in the dense forests of the Champagne, surviving by poaching, theft and scavenging.

The greatest danger however, apart from wild boar which rarely attacked or the occasional rutting stag, was that Champagne is a region grounded on chalk. This soil composition imparts its unique “terroir” and produces the wines for which we are famous. It also creates a network of cool, natural caves in which our glorious nectar is matured. The drawback of this geological phenomenon is that, at certain places, the upper chalk

strata, thin as a girl’s skin, is held together by the root systems of trees, the grace of God and not much else. Without warning, the land can collapse into vast sink holes or vanish down the secret tunnels carved out by subterranean watercourses. Disappearances were not unknown and on one occasion, after heavy rains, an abyss appeared in a local farmer’s yard, swallowing a plough and the unfortunate old horse hitched to it. I believe they recovered the plough but the horse was past redemption. Jeanne, nervous of the woods to begin with, was afraid to explore with me in case we stumbled into one of the smaller chasms, so my early days were restricted to the garden.

As the trees grew in whispering immensity before my eyes, I began to lag back, sensing I was stepping into an unknown world.

Magilligan’s hand held me tight and I’d no option but to accompany him, though he wasn’t dragging me. I could have started another tantrum, but by then I’d grasped he was immune to those, so it wasn’t worth the effort. And, deep inside my three and three-quarter-year-old heart, I wanted to explore with the desperation of the born adventurer.

A high stone wall protected the garden, and separated it from the estate land. There was a gate, but Magilligan steered me towards a four-step stile built at the point where the forest straggled down in closest proximity to the boundary.

When we reached it, he swung me into his arms and, despite his disability, trotted up the steps with the agility of a mountain goat. Then he rolled himself and me over the top and down the other side. My safe familiar world now lay behind those grey stones, and the man I’d spent the last two months avoiding

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Johanna Yacoub

19

Magilligan

clattering whirr of wings startled me and I grabbed cold as the stones I was offering her. She turned to Henri’s trouser leg in alarm. He laughed and, putting Jeanne and said, his hand to his lips in a shushing sign, pointed out the ‘Take the boy in. I wish to speak to Magilligan.’ white scut of a deer as it leapt silently over tangled As Jeanne moved towards me, I shrank back to undergrowth at the side of the path.

Henri, my spurned stones clutched to my chest as tears ‘Henri,’ I asked. ‘Can we catch something?’ pricked the back of my eyes. It had been the most ‘I don’t think so,’ he laughed, ‘but we can fill our wonderful afternoon of my life. In my distress, I didn’t pockets with cones and acorns for the fire. And maybe hear the squeak of wheels as the chair approached. we’ll find some pretty pebbles in the stream.’

‘Let me see them,’ said the voice. ‘Are they like the I’ve no idea how far we walked. It seemed miles, but stones in my study? I found mine in the same stream.’

I was young and this was my first expedition to the Without thinking, I went to the chair and laid them outside world. We followed the path and crossed the in my father’s lap. His scarred hands picked them up stream on the stepping stones. I was too scared to jump, and held them high against the light. Their metallic so Henri piggy-backed me over, then found some stones layers glistened like jewels in the late afternoon sun. with beautiful striations. I use them as paper-weights to ‘They’re lovely,’ he said. this day. My pockets were full to bursting. I was I was still too shy to look him in the face but my staggering like an overloaded pack donkey in an oriental horror of the wheelchair had been conquered. I was bazaar. touching it.

‘I think you’ve about had it,’ ‘Jeanne,’ he asked, ‘didn’t you said Henri as he crouched down He laughed and, putting his make an apple tart this afternoon? in front of me. Without hesitation, I think we’ll have some. Charles I climbed on his bent back, would love that, wouldn’t you? hand to his lips in a hugged my arms round his throat And I can show him my stones.’ shushing sign, pointed out and let him carry me home.

I looked at him and nodded.

Whether it was exhaustion or his Close to, he wasn’t frightening, the white scut of a deer as despite the patch over his lost left strange side-to-side roll, I fell asleep and didn’t wake until we The other eye, as blue as it leapt silently over tangled eye. were crunching up the gravel of mine, regarded me with kindness. the main drive to the chateau. undergrowth at the side of Magilligan grasped the There was a welcome party, or wheelchair and propelled my the path. rather, an unwelcoming party, as father back into the house. I my over-protective mother, followed. My mother and the Jeanne, Denise and other members of the house-staff other women were left standing on the cobbles, and not were pacing the cobblestones of the courtyard. They quite sure what to do. Papa turned his head and yelled were all frantic with worry. at my mother, ‘Where have you been?’ shouted Jeanne as Henri set ‘Come on, Alexia... don’t you want cake? And bring me down. the girls down. We’ll all have it together.’

Before he could answer, I rushed to my mother to My mother jumped as if an electric current had been show her my stones and exclaimed, ‘Look what I’ve got.’ passed through her and hurried after us into the house.

In my hurry to extract the treasures from my pocket, I Henri positioned Papa in front of the fire in the library dropped one of the stones into a puddle. The water and tactfully withdrew, leaving us together. A rattle of splashed against my mother’s leg, but in my eagerness, footsteps and the chatter of high, girlish voices announced the arrival of my sisters.

I didn’t notice.

‘André,’ my mother began, ‘don’t you think it’s better ‘And I found pine cones and saw a deer.’

I stopped babbling and looked at Maman’s face, as for the children to take their cake in the nursery? They’ll she wiped the splashes from her stockings. I shrank only make a mess here and I don’t want them to get used back, biting my lip. She was angry. Foraging in the to coming into these rooms. I’ll call Jeanne and...’

‘No you won’t,’ interrupted my father. ‘This is their forests with the likes of Henri was not her idea of suitable amusement for her only son. Her face became house until they grow up and marry someone who has a house for them to go to. One day it will all come to

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when I’m well enough, I’ll do it with you.’

Magilligan was surprised and looked at my mother, who looked at the floor.

‘Very well, Sir. Will that be all for the moment?’

‘I’ll ring when I need you.’

As he left, I observed my mother’s tense face and made a child’s vow always to look after Henri Magilligan. He had broken down the barrier between my father and myself. Papa was right on another issue. I’d spent too much time with women who spoiled and cosseted me. It was time to be a boy.

Otherwise, I’d never be a man.

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I’d pored over their every detail. I was too young to know what a fossil was. I hadn’t even started school, but their colours and textures fascinated me from the first time I saw them.

There was a soft tap at the door.

Magilligan entered with my father’s reading glasses and, before leaving, turned to my mother.

‘Madame la Marquise,’ he began nervously. ‘If I had the boy out too long, I apologise. I won’t do it again.’

Before my mother had a chance to respond, my father cut in with, ‘Rubbish, Henri. You’ve nothing to apologise about. It’s what the boy needs, so you will do it again and

Magilligan

Charles so the sooner my children get used to the rooms the better.

Anyway, I want to show them my stones.’

Maman became silent. Papa wheeled himself to his bureau, a great, roll-topped oak monstrosity with glass fronted bookshelves towering above it, and pulled open a drawer. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and followed him, all fear or revulsion I’d once felt for his disfigurement now forgotten in the joy of discovery. It was full of stones; geodes, fossils, rocks and splinters of quartz which flashed diamondbright in the flicker of the oil lamp. I gazed at this magic trove of geology and began to take them out one by one, passing them to my sisters once

postgraduate fiction Canal

by Kate Simants

H

e wasn’t a stranger, of course.

She’d seen him many times before, along that algae-lined stretch of the Great Western Canal, Tuesday afternoons and Thursday evenings, canoeing with the children. She looked forward to it, watching from her kitchen table, through the smudged windows, down to where they passed the end of her garden as it collapsed slowly, year by year, into the water.

Pauly kept her glasses near her on the canoeing days. Often, the little plastic flotilla would appear and shoot off westwards before she had a chance to search through the faces in the dripping melee, and she would slowly shuffle down towards the canal, waiting for their return leg. With a wheelbarrow and a sheet of old fibreboard leaned up against it, the apple tree she had claimed from a dead neighbour’s garden twenty years ago was enough to hide behind. When she saw the ripples on the water get jumpier, she would peer around and check the familiar faces of the children. Then she would watch him. His muscular neck, his bright teeth. The children obeying, earnest and regimental, the shouted instructions that she could not hear.

It had been years since Pauly had bothered with a hearing aid. As far back as her sixties she’d found the effort of straining was rarely worthwhile. It was easier, more dignified to stop trying, she found.

So she receded into a quiet world where her other senses compensated, doing what they could to hear for her. With good eyesight and the use of her hands, it wasn’t necessary to be told that

something was too hot to eat. If something was on fire, she would smell burning, or perish: the batteries for the alarm had long since been removed. If the doorbell rang, the dog would jump around.

But visitors were rare – the closest neighbour was the Post Office on the edge of the village.

Without her hearing she could read the general emotions of her grandchildren when they smashed into and around her home. What was detail? A sisterly feud, a ruined ice-cream, a scraped elbow – the tears would be the same, the comfort easy enough to dole out, and the drama resolved in roughly the same time. People weren’t so complicated as they imagined.

Words were of little importance.

Since sealing herself off aurally from the world, Pauly had learned to compartmentalise. An open beak signified a song, but probably one she had heard before. A relative with a hand on a hip, a sincere expression – these meant Pauly had done something wrong, something that concerned them, something dangerous. They’d want her to start or stop doing something, eat more, work less, stop smoking, move somewhere less isolated, ask for help with things. But why worry which? She too old to start appeasing them now.

She had all she needed.

Everything important was silent.

Her books. The daffodils. The passing canoeists.

One Thursday, Pauly missed the group’s westward journey. She waited behind the apple tree, cramped but concealed, hoping to catch them returning.

The ripples came later than usual. She edged out, peering between branches. The teacher’s bow came into view first, paring 21

through the bubbly scum. But the peak of the slow, chunky boat was slightly raised, as if cantilevered above the water by a weight at the aft end. Maybe he was reclining; she had seen him do it, effortless, confident. Pauly held her breath.

He slid past the branches and into her view. His black hair was slicked, clumps of it stuck to his face. His pale skin, even from yards away, appeared blotchy and translucent, its smooth surface puckered by a frown. He held the dripping oar across his legs with one hand, as if using it to balance.

He held his other arm out behind him.

He wouldn’t have seen Pauly if she hadn’t cried out.

On the back of the craft, held in place at the feet by a rope, was a child. The pink t-shirt and shorts damply clinging to the limp body indicated to Pauly that the drowned infant was a girl. She was positioned face down, the teacher’s hand holding the little head against the fibreglass. Her fingers dragged in the canal, the water bunching in front of them, then splitting into a triangular wake behind. Pauly recognised a cheap, treasured charm bracelet on the girl’s left wrist.

She covered her mouth, but the sound escaped. The teacher jumped, expertly dug the oar into the water, coming to an immediate halt. Pauly flattened herself against the tree, her aging hands pressed against her open jaw. She clenched her eyelids shut.

She waited. *

A

fter their third cup of tea, the police left her in peace. It was

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P

Canal

touching of them to have brought along the interpreter in his canoe. Arms crossed. A perfect silhouette against – a Special Constable, no less – who, though not deaf, the late autumn sunset. knew British Sign Language. The two detectives Pauly rose to her feet, disguising the struggle as best looked pleased with themselves for this show of she could. She saw him raise his oar, and took a step consideration. But as the young woman flapped and back. She felt in her pocket for her secateurs. gestured her way through the interview, her wide He paddled towards her, diagonally across the cheeks and chubby forearms reddening with exertion water, not taking his eyes from her face. She gripped the and embarrassment, it became obvious that it was grass with her toes, and didn’t move. With each plunge useless. Pauly understood not a word. of the oar, another detail pulled into focus: the hair The younger of the detectives began to write peeking over his t-shirt at his throat. The wedding questions out instead, in big half-witted capitals on band, lit by the low sun when he raised his right arm.

Pauly’s best writing paper. She waved the sheets away The serene smile, pulled slightly to the left, the lips and pointed sadly to her eyes, and closed. shifted in her seat to cover the The coil of rope, stuck with glasses-case with her hip, praying thick black tape to the upper He paddled towards her, they wouldn’t notice. surface of the back of the scuffed diagonally across the water, She could lip-read a little, but vessel. she already knew the purpose of He lay the oar across the boat, not taking his eyes from her their visit. She had seen the the fulcrum on his lap, and dipped newspaper, even seen the police the ends briefly port, then briefly face. boat going up and down a few starboard, until he came to a stop. days after Emmy had drowned.

With each plunge of the He maybe ten feet from the Been drowned. battered planks that held Pauly’s oar, another detail pulled She had nothing to tell them. garden in. Taking hold of the sides She didn’t take their pen, she kept of the cavity he pushed himself up, into focus: the hair peeking silent, shaking her head and shifted backwards, slipped into the shrugging in apology. Her blueish and disappeared. over his t-shirt at his throat. water, fingers touching her ears, her Pauly gasped. She leaned eyelids.

The wedding band, lit by forward, scanning the surface of - No. the water for him, but could see - Can’t hear a thing. the low sun when he raised nothing past the ellipses of orange - I’m blind, too. light, reflected from the sky and his right arm. The serene fractured over hundreds of little - I can’t read your questions.

- I didn’t see anything. in the surface of the water. smile, pulled slightly to the swells - I’m sorry.

He emerged, his chest and abdomen springing up from the left, the lips closed * riverbed, shooting upwards. He shook his hair. Lifting a palm, he ast the blackcurrants, where the lip of two-by-four gestured to her to join him. marked the end of the lawn and the start of the Pauly glanced at the empty canoe. It rocked water, Pauly untied her shoelaces. Squinting briefly rhythmically, the rope slipping slightly from side to side. about her, she lifted the hem of her polyester dress and The teacher waved his arms above his head for her drew her tights down, slowly, to halfway down her attention, and made a beseeching face. He beckoned thighs. She crouched and rocked carefully backwards, again. Pauly approached the water. and wriggled free, shedding them like snakeskin.

Her knees cracked as she lowered herself into a Edging forward, she rested her feet on the water, barely touching, watching the meniscus lift around her tender, crouch, then crack again as she stretched her bare legs in front of her. She was cold, but her skin felt loose on hardened soles.

Opening her eyes, her irises still readjusting, she saw her bones. Her blood thudded in her temples. him on the south side of the water. He was motionless

postgraduate fiction tarmac. The girl slides the side door of the van open.

‘Only time to tend the roses. In and out. Alright?’

Pauly doesn’t answer. Without acknowledging the others, she settles into her seat, facing forward.

She rests her gardening bag on her lap, and folds her hands over it.

Through the rough Hessian she feels the little plastic bottle of insecticide, the Brasso for the plaque, and the heavy, solid handles of the secateurs.

*

T

urning the corner into the culde-sac, a shapeless, boredlooking woman of twenty struggles to disengage her seatbelt from the socket. She curses as a corner of her white tunic tears in the mechanism.

Next to her is a man, the driver. The minibus is half-full of elderly women on their trip into town. The girl speaks in a broad West Country accent.

‘Awful, ‘bout Pauline. Saw her at the funeral. Her littlest grandkid, that one was.’

‘Ar,’ says the driver, nodding.

‘Nothing to be done now though.’

‘Nar.’ The minibus pulls up outside Pauly’s bungalow. In her buttondown mackintosh and waterproof rain-hood, she waits calmly on her step, peering out into the drizzle.

The girl gets out, opens an umbrella and hurries towards her. She shields Pauly from the rain, walks her back to the bus.

‘Just going to the cemetery today, Pauline,’ the girl says, loudly.

Pauly watches her own feet slap soundless against the glossy black 23

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Kate Simants

He clutched her shoulder, forcing his weight down on her.

They were both fully submerged, and twisting around to face him she saw his eyes open wide. She forced the thinner top blade into his left cheek and then upwards, the eye offering little resistance as the steel dug in. She tried to force the blades shut but the upper orbit was too thick to split. She twisted the secateurs in the hole. The hand on her shoulder slackened. She kicked to the surface, and filled the vacuum in her chest with air.

Canal

The teacher wrapped his fingers around her ankle. He pointed to his mouth, and spoke, mouthing the words carefully.

- You know Pauly fixed his eyes with hers, seeing his lips at the periphery of her vision.

- I do He began to pull. She kicked at his shoulder. He took her free foot, and with a firm tug brought her down, into the canal.

The water parted and closed over Pauly’s head. His fingers pushed down on her crown, holding her hair. She felt something – a foot? a knee? press into the small of her back, and pin her against the side of the canal. Her white hair floated darkly around her. Her mouth, opening to scream, filled with water, tasting metallic, leafy. She felt the canal moving violently around her.

She didn’t hesitate. Her fingers locked around the secateurs, she pushed the safety lock open with her thumb. The heavy blades sprang open. She thrust them upwards and outwards, her weak arms aided by weightlessness, until they met their target. The hand in her hair convulsed, released, then pounded at the side of her head. She squeezed the steel handles together into his ribs. It wasn’t easy, like cutting through a chicken’s wing: it took all of her strength to close the sharp edges together. The hard outer exterior of the bones splintered and crushed against the softer core. She felt a last crunch at the final effort. She withdrew, and thrust again, snipped, thrust, snipped. She opened her mouth again on reflex, her lungs frantic for air. She tasted blood as the water flooded in.

postgraduate fiction Chicken Jack

by Perry Bhandal

C

hicken Jack eased his Mercedes into the slow moving traffic, keeping an eye on the family estate in the rear view mirror that slipped in a couple of cars behind. He’d spotted the car even before the sergeant had mentioned it. Fuck did he think he was pointing out the obvious. Shit!

The day he needed a fat fuck like that to point out when he was being watched, he may as well turn hisself over to the cops. Chicken Jack smiled at the thought of the number of people that would suddenly become very uncomfortable if he ever found religion and started walking the path of repentance and confession, and along with all the associated statement-making and paperwork that entailed. He imagined the great cloud of flatus that would accompany the collective bowel bowel-emptying across the country and up and down Europe. There was just one reason why the Chickster remained at the top of his game when many around him had fallen and been buried by the wayside, stripped away like the layers of a meteorite in perpetual fiery freefall, abraded away by laziness, stupidity and good oldfashioned greed.

That reason was Insurance.

Chicken Jack’s fondness for insurance was so great that had the brokers at Lloyds of London known of it, their trading floor would be awash with semen.

It was a shame that it wasn’t that kind of insurance. He kind of would have liked to have seen that.

The revelation had come to him when he was bent over, face down in a pillow and feeling his nine year

old sphincter being stretched to tearing point by his sixteen stone social worker.

L

ife up until that point had been fairly shitty to old Chicken Jack, then known as Pierre Lumbord. He’d grown up in the parts of Paris that most tourists didn’t see, t. Those that did normally didn’t come back to Paris, or France for that matter.

Every city had a shitty part, just like every body had an asshole.

Chicken loved making comparisons to the human body, especially cities.

There was the face, good-looking, that everyone saw when they were being encouraged to come to their city and spend their cash. There was the pussy, the places you could go to get laid, there was the brain, government and business, there were the roads and railways, arteries and nerves, and there was the asshole. Sometimes there were was more than a single asshole, but Chicken’s metaphors didn’t stretch to explaining rare congenital disorders.

Pierre Lumbord had been born and brought up in the north of Paris, right bang smack in the middle of the asshole. His mother Janine was young when she had him and was already an addict, pimped out by the local hoodlum, Franco who had shot his father dead as he handed over the contents of the grocery store’s till, simply because he didn’t like his face. Janine lived with a couple of the hoodlums’ other girls in a two bedroom apartment, sleeping in one bedroom and turning tricks for 50 euros a shot in the other. Pierre grew used to the rhythmic pumping in the room next door, comforted by it as luckier babies were by the rhythmic rocking of the their cots.

24

Even the occasional scream failed to disturb the toddler as he slept in his filthy cot. Sweaty and sticky fingers eased Pierre from his cot as each of the three took in turns to feed the little boy his badly mixed little bottle of milk formula, cooing to him as he gulped at the grimy rubber teat. Miraculously, Pierre Lumbord never became ill, was never sick, no matter how badly mixed his powdered milk was or infrequently he was fed. He never had any jabs or any checkups.

He sometimes went days without being washed, yet no sore developed. He never cried and when he was picked up he would give a great toothless smile. Had Pierre become sick even once, he would have died; that much would have been obvious to any of the three women had anything been able to penetrate the drug and alcohol-induced fog that they roamed in. But he didn’t and his life went on; life as decay, a slow ruinous onslaught by ambient bacteria that was eating away at the flesh within those soiled walls, held at bay by briefly glimpsed moments of joy, a tinkle of laughter, a kiss, a hug, a giggle, each emanating from the tiny form of Pierre. Like a tiny wriggling maggot, little Pierre nibbled away at the sickness and decay that surrounded him, keeping the infected alive.

Pierre took his first steps alone and tottered across sticky bedroom carpet and stood at the door of to watch the two shapes writhe and contort on the bed. When his mother finally saw him, her face wet with sweat and saliva, and her mouth open as wide it could go so as to accommodate the large pink prick, he smiled his toothless smile and held out his arms to her.

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something that had been screaming silently inside her had suddenly found a voice, like a shipwrecked sailor marooned on a desert island, screaming at ships on the horizon, and suddenly being heard.

Janine didn’t even notice the man leave, didn’t care that he had not paid. She picked herself up and collected the few possessions she had from her room.

Keeping Pierre with her she went into the filthy toilet and lifted the lid of the cistern. She pulled at the thin string that was tied to the float and drew out a small black plastic bag. Pulling aside the waterproof zipper she checked the money was still there. She knew by taking it that she was signing her own death warrant.

This was Franco’s stash, one of many, that he kept dotted around town. She only knew about this one, drawn to it after hearing unusual clinking and scrapings that were very unlike his normal noisy exertions whenever he availed himself of their bathroom.

One thing about Franco, you always knew when he was taking a dump.

When she was sure he had gone she had searched the toilet top to bottom, gagging at the thick stench in the air that filmed her nose and mouth and threatened to bring up her meagre breakfast. Swallowing down the thick phlegm that had built up in her throat, she finally found the waterproof bag stuffed full of euros. She replaced it as she found it. At that point she was had been too scared of what Franco would do to her to consider taking it. But not now.

Janine left with Pierre, flagged a taxi to the train station. She picked a station at random, not daring to return to her hometown, as that would be the first place Franco would look for her.

Franco returned later that afternoon. He found the open cistern and the missing money bag. Janine wished she could have warned the other two girls that had shared the flat with her, but she could not have risked it.

Chicken Jack

Pierre giggled as his mother’s eyes widened in shock and she snatched her cupped hand away from the man’s balls and pushed with the other, his prick jumping free of her mouth and hanging heavily in mid air, a corpulent turgid horizontal exclamation, slick with her spit.

He laughed and tried to run away from his mother’s outstretched arms as she lunged to pick him up. Now that he was on two legs, instead of four, he put the extra speed he had at his disposal to good use and tottered round the door frame as his mother sprawled at the empty space where he stood a moment ago. Pierre staggered along the hall towards the stairs, behind him he could hear a deep shouting. Pierre liked the sound of the words in the air and tried them out. ‘Fukin bich, fukin bich, fukin bich’, he repeated in his imp-like voice as he wobbled along the landing.

Behind him he heard his mother scream his name.

He doubled his efforts, swinging his arms. Whatever it was, he liked this game; he hoped there would be more now that he was on two legs.

The deep words in the air changed.

Pierre liked the sound of these too.

The top step loomed and little Pierre chortling, ‘Blak Bich, Blak Bich’, stepped off the end and fell.

Something clamped onto his ankle and he fell heavily against the wooden steps. For the first time in a long time Pierre started crying. His mother pulled him to her and held him, cooing and rocking, rubbing his side where he fell against the stairs.

Slowly his crying subsided and all that was left was the occasional ‘Blak bich, blak bich’ as he fell asleep in her arms.

What it was that had penetrated Janine’s stupor that afternoon she did not know. She did not have the mental tools with which to analyse and dissect the reasons why one minute she was so and the next minute she was different. She had no idea what it was that changed inside her and how it had been triggered, but

postgraduate fiction She hoped that they would be spared the inevitable spasm of violence that would spout forth from Franco like the gushing of a freshly severed artery.

Jeanette worked at a local Pakistani Cafe as a washer-upper in the kitchen, then as a waitress and as the years wore on and she became a trusted member of the family, the manageress.

For a time life was good. It was hard work, but it was honest work, and she was amongst people that she cared about and that cared for her and her son.

The Pakistani and Indian community thrived along with the Italians and native French, and much was made of the success of this town in France which, against the odds and Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Party’s exhortations, had ‘integrated’. To the extent that the Prime Minister himself visited, to congratulate the town and their folk. Much was at stake in this community, for there were many detractors that sought to overthrow the convivial relations that they had enjoyed for many years. The incessant nibbling at the edges of their community by the Nationalists had threatened to overturn all their hard work. Ceaseless vigilance had 26

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or the next few years, life changed for Pierre Lumbord and his mother Janine. His name was Pierre Laforge and his mother was Jeanette Laforge. The town of Toulouse was large enough for two new arrivals to join it anonymously, but was still small enough to have the communities that made the difference between a building and a home. Keen to conserve as much of the money as possible but, equally careful to avoid the worst parts of town, Jeanette settled on a small community mostly populated with first generation Indians and Pakistanis. She liked the smells from the shops and the friendly people who greeted her in broken and funny accented French. That she was different from them was no problem. She was black, however her skin was light; unlike Pierre who had taken after his father, a deep dark brown. Jeanette settled in a small block of apartments, the tenants were all poor but proud and the place was scrupulously clean.

Many of the tenants had small children too and soon Jeanette was able to go out to work, happy to leave her little Pierre with Manjit, her kindly next door neighbour.

Pierre was a quiet withdrawn boy. Too quiet. Jeanette worried about him a lot. She had put him in a local nursery, however, after a few days it became clear that he wasn’t settling in and getting on with the other children. Then there was the incident with the two boys and a girl. Jeanette still refused to believe what he had supposedly done.

Anyway she had had to take him out

prevailed. The elder representatives of each community remained in continual dialogue. Their doors remained open to each other, regardless of the reckless and fickle deeds of the youngest amongst them. That way many an incident that could have been fanned quickly out of control by the racists withered and died, starved of the oxygen of hatred, as the community closed its ranks.

The informal structure that had been employed to such success here had been written about much within the newspapers and been the subject of scholarly works also. The French government wanted to use it those for places where the melting pot had boiled over.

In a country where the nationalistic opposition ran out of fingers when counting out illustrative examples of the great integration experiment gone wrong, this was the one the government needed to combat the growing feeling of resentment within their borders. Perhaps they would even be given an opportunity to look down on their brothers across the Channel, instead of wringing their hands and looking at their collective feet.

The choice of the face of this community was so important that the Prime Minister’s aides were dispatched to find their poster boys and girls. Their search ended when they walked into the Pakistani restaurant and saw the light skinned negro manageress discussing the layout for a wedding party with the Pakistani owner, and the white head waiter. The little black boy playing with the small light-skinned Pakistani girl was enough to make the slim, conservatively-dressed civil servant shudder in anticipation.

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of the nursery and now Manjit looked after him during the day.

School was a year off so she didn’t have to worry about it yet, but all the same it was going to be difficult to get him a place anywhere that was local. The fact that the little girl had still not returned to classes was still fresh in everybody’s mind and would continue to be until she was allowed to return. Jeanette had seen the child and had always thought her to be overly sensitive and there were a lot of people that saw it the same as her. She shuddered involuntarily and pushed the thoughts from her mind. She shouldn’t dwell on the negative; after all she had so much to be thankful for.

postgraduate fiction

Across the country, a flickering TV faithfully reproduced the live images from the cameras in the restaurant on the retina of the man sitting at the bar.

His eyes widened as he took in the coffee-coloured woman that stood next to the Prime Minister. Then he smiled, showing small yellow nicotine-stained teeth that looked like little daggers.

undergraduate poetry The Snail (after Matisse) Orange the frame, Sunset path glistening to the sea, Blue the sky the sun thrives on.

Jeanette pulled the blanket over the sleeping form of her son. Both were exhausted after this very special day.

Jeanette flopped into the armchair and closed her eyes.

She looked back on the day’s events and couldn’t quite believe it. She opened her eyes and looked around the small threadbare apartment which she had shared with her son for the last three years: the dark green two seater sofa that she and Pierre and her enjoyed cuddling up on during the cold dark winter evenings to watch the small black and white television that had a remarkably clear picture; the little dining table set against the window that they sat at for meals and homework that looked out

Green the grass where the snail sits, Yellow the slimy trail.

Pink the candyfloss beach With a rich blue sea and green seaweed.

Black, when colour is seen no more And light has gone.

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over the communal courtyard that they sat at for meals and homework. She remembered the tutting, turbaned, bespectacled form of Khansa, Manjit’s husband, as he went about the apartment at Manjit’s insistence. He tapped and pulled, inspected and noted in his little blue notebook, as he stroked the triangular orange beard that give him a piratical appearance, albeit a very cuddly and kind one. For the next three weekends he left his turban at home, preferring instead a handkerchief over his topknot, as he went through the apartment fixing and mending. When she had tried to pay him he had raised his hands up in horror and refused any money.

Jeanette told Ali, her Pakistani boss, and he smiled knowingly and provided her with the means of thanking them for their kindness.

Jeanette threw a dinner party for Manjit Khansa and their children. It was a wonderful night filled with laughter. The children all decided they wanted to stay at Jeanette’s but there was no room, they all pointed to the bare floor but Jeanette would not have it, it was too hard. It was then that Khansa brought in the red, intricately flowered rug and lay it in the middle of the room. It had come all the way from India. She remembered the smell of it first as alien as the odours that had met her when she first arrived in this block.

Alien no more, for these were the smells of home.

Jeanette looked up at the clock that sat on top of the television. It was late and the restaurant would re-open tomorrow and she needed to be there early.

With a deep sigh and to the sound of creaking joints she pushed herself off the armchair and went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She

Chicken Jack

This was as close to an orgasm as she would get for a few years yet.

The negotiations were short, the promise of the Premier’s visit and national television coverage for his restaurant more than made up for the inconvenience of having secret service men closing it down for the week prior to his arrival.

On the big day everything went without a hitch.

Jeanette was introduced to the dashing Prime Minister and his beautiful wife. Jeanette had expected her to be a stuck-up snob, especially if what she had seen of her on TV as anything to go by, but she was charming and certainly seemed to be taken by her little Pierre. Jeanette smiled at the woman, liking her despite herself and wondering what she would have made of her had she seen her son with his hands outstretched to her as she sucked off a fat man for 50 euros. Mentally she shook the image away. Damn, why was it that her mind insisted on reminding her of her past, and always with an image the depravity of which was directly proportional to the joy she felt at that point? ‘To keep you grounded, my dear, to ensure you appreciate what you have got’, the good fairy whispered in her ear, drowning out the voice of the bad one on the other, ‘...because you’re a dirty whore...’

They all sat at a large table filled with food as the newsmen and reporters quizzed the Premier and his guests. Once the newsmen had gone, Jeanette & Pierre Laforge had lunch with the Prime Minister of France.

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edge of the table. His glittering eyes seemed to suck the light from the room.

Janine coughed clearing her throat. When she spoke it was with a trembling high pitched voice.

‘Franco, please don’t do this...’ she pleaded. ‘Look, I’ll come back, I’ll start working again, make all the money back that I took from you.

Please don’t hurt him...’. The words tumbled desperately from her mouth, dashing meaninglessly over Franco’s ears. Even as she spoke them, she knew it was of no use, but she continued nonetheless, hoping that perhaps that he heard something, that something would pierce, resonate, ring, and open a path in his mind, a future possibility that appealed to him and would make him see that there was a value to her life, something that he could exploit, make money with, that she had a future value greater than what he had in his pocket now, a simple financial comparison appealing to his greed that for her and her son meant the difference between life and death.

‘I...I... still have most of the money left, it’s in the toilet behind the cistern, I used the same hiding place as you did, baby. Go-on, look, it’s there.’

Franco just stood and looked at her, an almost pitiful look on his face and she begged.

‘Please, baby, I’ll work hard, makes lots of money. I’ve kept in shape, I look good, please, if you hurt me, then you’ll make no money right, no-one wants damaged goods, right?’

Franco smiled faintly at this.

‘That’s what you’d think...,’he said more to himself than her.

‘What, what...what are you talking about...?’ She entreated, her Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Perry Bhandal

J

anine came round with a jerk, her head snapping back involuntarily trying to put as much distance as possible from the unbearable ammonium smelling salts under her nose. That was all she was able to move though, the rest of her was bound to her armchair. She sucked in air through her nose, her mouth unavailable as she was gagged.

Through blurry eyes she saw Franco put the smelling salts back in his pocket and settle back on the sofa opposite her. Beside him her little Pierre, also bound and gagged.

Her heart twisted in her chest and for a moment she felt as if she was going to throw up. She fought the nausea down with the unbearable sadness that cracked her heart; she had failed him, her little baby. She looked into his little eyes, wide, like a rabbit’s, full of fear. A stream of tears fell from her face and even the gag was not enough to stifle a wretched moan of despair.

A slight movement caught her eye and she saw that there was someone else in the room. Her eyes widened as she took him in.

He was all wrong, he had all the things that made a man in the right places, but he looked wrong all the same, like a man with too many joints.

The cut of his tailored black suit was expensive, his shoes were brand new and spit-polished shiny, his crisp white shirt, although buttoned up to the neck, still left enough of a gap for Janine’s hand, he was so skinny. He looked like a dead man dressed up for a wake, the pallor of his skin, the bloodless lips, the wasted frame. Only this one was walking, a walking cadaver. His receding hair was slicked back and she could make out pitted and scarred skin visible between the greasy strands. But it was his eyes that would have made her scream out loud had she not been gagged.

The pupils were impossibly small, almost black dots against the bloodshot eyeball.

Other objects resolved themselves around the room, a camera on a tripod and a large white light on a stand, like those found in television studios.

On her dining table, the table that she shared with her little boy was an open case; there were things in the case, they were all shiny and sharp. Janine jerked her gaze at Franco and mumbled urgently behind her gag.

Franco looked over to the other man. He considered for a moment and then nodded his head slightly as if giving permission.

Franco got up and walked over to her. He bent down and whispered in her ear.

‘You make a sound and that little nigger is dead, you unnerstan’ me?’

Janine nodded quickly.

Franco removed the gag. Behind him the man folded his stick-like arms and perched himself on the

Chicken Jack

ditched her clothes in the laundry basket, wrapped the white towelling gown around her, tied the belt at the front and walked back into the living room, her nose wrinkling at the faint smell of something rotten.

A hand clasped itself over her mouth, killing her scream.

In the middle of the room, both hands held behind his back and with a big smile on his face stood Franco.

‘Hello, Janine.’

The scream died in her throat, the chemical-soaked rag clamped across absorbed it along with her consciousness.

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F

Chicken Jack

eyes flicking between the camera and the man sat on the opposed to the exception. Franco knew many edge of the table. expendable people that no one would miss.

‘I’m sorry, Janine, I’m just not on that whoring However, this man’s appetite, and the appetites of business anymore...I found something that pays a whole the people he served, seemed without end, and the lot more.’ number and frequency of his requests increased to a Franco picked up the gag again and something in point where even Franco was now hard pushed to Janine realised she was going to die. All she could do satisfy. now was to save her son.

Franco was a bad man, he always had been. He had ‘He’s yours, Franco’ left the corpses of men in his wake as he steered a course ‘I know that,’ he replied as he moved to push it into towards the riches and power that all men of his kind her mouth sought. He had killed, methodically and with purpose ‘No, no, I mean he’s yours.’ as part of his business dealings, arbitrarily and Franco stopped, the gag held in mid air, his mouth whimsically when he just didn’t like the look of slightly open. Then he smiled at her. someone.

‘You’re good, I’ll give you that, but then again you But this man was different from any he had met. Not always were.’ many men scared Franco, but this man did. His ‘Look in his eyes and you’ll know, pl-,’ and he stuffed instincts had told him to keep his distance from this the gag back in. strange creature. Why, then, he asked himself, had he Franco turned to look behind at the man and then back to Janine. undergraduate poetry ‘This is, Mr Rollins, you belong to him now....’

Thirteen Ways of looking at Scissors: Franco sat back on the sofa as Mr Rollins skipped lightly away from I'll run; We have come I'll run all day if I want to. the edge of the table. to cut your Hammers and tear down Are any of us truly harmless? ranco watched the man as he your Wall. prepared to go about his work. You could put out someone's eyes There was once a part of him that with that.

Yin and yang would have just wanted to walk out joined by a single bolt. of here, a part of him that jarred At the start of this lesson Though they are twinned, there were thirteen pairs; against what he was about to see, they think they are one. something deep within him that Now there are nine. refused to be ignored. There was No one goes home Plant overnight. something very wrong with the man until they are all found.

In the morning, that bent and checked Janine’s pulse, harvest the cars.

Small, they are a tool. opened her gown and checked her heartbeat. When he had entered into Medium, they are ceremonial.

I used to like my fingers, Franco’s life, perpetual night had Gigantic, they are a nightmare. but I need them no more. entered with him.

Rollins had wanted disposable The Scissors of Repetition Destroyers of words. wish the Frying Pan of Doom people. He paid extremely well and Printed words, beware.

Franco had been more than happy a good day. to oblige. He had known his own Use and discard. regulars to go too far on occasion Standard utensil for emo kids; Not worth and Franco had learnt what needed a spreading method of expression, another thought. to be done to clear up after their or self-control. excesses. Now, this man only wanted expendable, so it was just a All that crisp, clean white paper case of making it the norm as makes them as hungry as you.

Jean-David Beyers

postgraduate fiction understanding the world that he was being introduced to. The little boy looked up at Franco, tears dripping freely from the corners of both eyes. Brown eyes. Beautiful eyes. His eyes.

From far, far away, Franco thought he could hear a voice.

A little voice.

A protesting voice.

headrest. Then ungagged her.

Janine could not move a muscle but she could feel every touch.

Franco marvelled at this the drug, Ketamine, that could do this.

Rollins stood back and fished out an antique watch from his waistcoat pocket. It glinted in the harsh light as he stood there unblinking, counting seconds: tick, tock, tick, tock.

M

r Rollins switched on the light, bathing Janine in harsh brightness, and then the video camera.

Janine’s eyes tracked him as he put on a plastic tunic like the surgeons wore in hospital. Taking a syringe from the case, he approached Janine and injected her with a clear liquid in the arm. Janine felt the tension drain from her and her head loll forward as all her muscular control faded. The man took a roll of tape and secured her lolling head back against the sofa 30

Pierre watched the scary man pick a shiny thing from his case and walk to stand beside his mummy.

He stooped slightly and brought the silver thing close to his mummy’s face. He could see the end was really sharp, he could see it was a knife.

Mummy had told him not to play with knives because they were dangerous and he could cut himself with them and hurt himself.

Pierre’s and Janine’s eyes locked for a moment and in them he saw the look of love, helpless, unconditional love, for the last time in his life.

The man placed the edge of the knife against his mummy’s ear with the tenderness of a lover’s caress. He paused a moment, closing his eyes,

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Streets away, an old man tugged at his dog’s leash, pulling him away from the small dried turd that he was sniffing at. ‘C'mon, Pepe, c'mon.’ A flash caught his eye and he turned to look at a bright square of light in the middle of the apartment block in the distance. The old man lingered, wondering why on earth someone would want such a bright light. Then it flickered as if someone had passed in front of it and then was bright again. The old man shivered, despite the warmth, and hurried home, away from that light.

Chicken Jack

asked him what he did with all the men, women, boys, girls and babies that he provided him with? He did not know. That part buried deep within him still regretted it. He had expected to be told to mind his own business, but instead he was handed a video tape. That night, so long ago now, he had sat in his living room and entered a world that he had only thought might exist, a world beyond his, beyond the handshakes, suitcases of money, and vans full of people driving off into the distance. Until now he had been separated from this world, cut off from it, earthbound, unwilling to step into the vessels that took the expendable across the blackness to their far-off destinations. By pressing ‘play’ on his video recorder, he had done just that, he had made the journey alongside them to their final destination.

Shadows scurried here and there around him as he sat unable to tear his eyes away from the television as the images and colours changed, slowly the blacks and browns gave way to red and the screams gave way to small, wet, sodden sounds.

Through cold, involuntary tears, and against a background of white noise and static that signaled the end of the tape, he entered a world which he would rather not have. In the carved up faces of the young and innocent Franco saw his own reflected; what he had initially reviled, he grew to like. Since then he had seen many first-hand, and a few times had even taken part. Over time he could no longer hear the small voice of protest.

Franco looked down at the little boy sitting next to him. His face stained with tears, his terrified eyes locked on his mother’s, not knowing was happening to him, pulling helplessly against his bonds, not

postgraduate fiction and sighed as if in prayer, then he opened them and pushed and everything became red.

P

ierre ran as fast as his little legs would carry him, out of the block entrance around the corner and into the alleyway. He found a dark corner and sat down, pulling rubbish over him and making himself as small as possible. He waited.

Pierre tried to calm his breathing. If he was quiet and did not move the scary man may not find him. He did not want the man to do to him what he did to his mother. He tried to remember his mother’s face, he could not. All he could see now was a red thing.

The light from the streetlamps penetrated only a few feet before surrendering to the shadows. Into that, stepped Mr Rollins.

He moved silently, scanning this way and that, looking for a him.

‘Come out, Pierre,’ he whispered ‘Your mother is calling for you, boy.’

Pierre sat still in the dark, his little breaths silent. He knew his mother was dead.

Pierre could see the scary man now, he stood in the middle of the alleyway straight across from him, looking from one side to the other, slowly, over and over. At one point he stopped, looking directly at Pierre, his eyes glittering like a cat’s. Then he turned and walked away.

Pierre did not want to move, he was too scared.

Slowly his eyes began to droop and close. In his dreams ran from red things, red things with open arms that wanted to catch him.

A little boy fell asleep.

When the refuse collectors found him in the morning, it was not a little boy that awoke but a soul beyond repair. Pierre had been lost to the abyss. What remained was something else.

The newspapers reported a brief story, of a woman attacked and killed in her home, survived by a child. The child was placed into the care of the state. The killer or killers remained at large.

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Franco looked at the small child and the eyes that looked so familiar. The man in the gown had done his work, it was amazing how much blood the human body held, much of it had soaked into the armchair that the ruined body of Janine sat in, the rest had pooled on the floor and spread, like wings of blood.

The air was thick with the smell of iron. Rollins looked to Franco and gestured to the little boy sitting beside him as if to say he was ready for his next subject.

Franco looked from the man to Pierre and back to the man. The eyes in this little boy were identical to his own.

Franco shook his head and got up.

‘Finish up. We’re done here’ ‘The agreement was for two. A woman and child.’

Mr Rollins said in a strained whisperous voice, as if the words struggled to make it past his throat.

Franco turned to face him. He gave him his ‘don’t fuck with me stare’. Mr Rollins did not seem to notice.

‘Promises have been made. People are expecting two,’ he continued.

‘I’ll find another kid for you, not this one.’

Rollins looked like he was going to argue for a moment, then the blank look returned.

‘It took you long enough to find these. You perhaps no longer have access to the supply that I need’, he replied He stripped off the gown and the surgical gloves placed them in a small plastic bag.

‘The way you’ve been going through them is that any fucking surprise?’ argued Franco Rollins toggled a switch on the video recorder and watched the screen for a few moments, nodding with satisfaction.

‘Maybe it is time to move on.’

Franco ignored him and turned to the little Pierre who still sat looking at the wrecked form of his mother.

He turned his face to look at him and removed the gag.

‘You’re mine now’ he said as he undid the bindings on his feet and arms. Behind Franco, Rollins approached silently and draped something thin and shiny over his head and then pulled. Pierre watched as the garrote slid into Francos’ throat with a gasp. Franco pushed back and they fell hard onto the floor, his weight winding Rollins. As they struggled amidst sounds of choking and spurts of Franco’s arterial blood, little Pierre reached up and opened the front door. He

Chicken Jack

turned to take one last look at his mother and then stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Pierre looked across the hall to the door of the flat belonging to their neighbours Manjit and Khansa. His mother had always told him he should go to them if he ever go in trouble or needed help.

Pierre waddled down the stairs, taking them one at a time. When he got to the bottom he heard a sound and looked up. At the top was Rollins leaning over and looking at him.

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P

undergraduate poetry Filth Oh, ok. So that's how it works.

I had no idea the world was this simple to figure out.

I was overthinking things all along.

I always thought the world was such a big, scary place to live in, with no place to hide.

But no, once you figure it out, it's all so easy.”

“See, I told you it would be.”

From the front garden of my second home, I could see a spindly old woman stalking Down the road.

She had her arms raised up above her head, And her fingers were hooked like claws.

As she was passing, She suddenly turned towards me, Letting out a guttural noise.

Her face was unclear, But despite that, The resulting wave of fear was like The closing of an iron maiden, Slamming into me And piercing my body bone-deep.

And for a long time, I was unaware That none of it Had actually happened.

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T

he headmaster looked up as the fifteen-year-old boy placed the stills of the headmaster himself and the two boys he was sodomising on his desk. The boy pressed a button on a tape recorder and the wood panelled and richly furnished office filled with the sound of him grunting with out gravelly exclamations of love. A soundtrack to the images he held in his hands, occasionally punctuated by winces of pain from two children who otherwise remained silent throughout his exertions.

His florid features looked like they were going to melt, the colour rose so quickly in them. The tips of

released to the media and the police at the same time.

The police did not worry the Headmaster, the media did.

‘What do you want?’ he asked finally, when the boy had stopped talking.

He expected a series of ultimatums centred around the halting of all abuse. He couldn’t have been more wrong. The boy wanted money. The abuse was not only to continue, but increase as

his forefingers and thumbs were white with pressure as he held the photographs. The tape finished and the boy pressed the stop button with a click.

Slowly the colour returned to his fingers as if draining from his face.

He listened to the boy as he talked, as the boy told him what would be set in motion if anything happened to him. That unless he made a phone call to a very special number every day these pictures, the tape, and everything else would be

Chicken Jack

ierre’s abuse began during his first week in the children’s home: sodomised, beaten, made to indulge in all manner of sex acts with men and other children. After a time it became a way of life.

It was whilst being pounded from behind by his sixteen -stone carer that the revelation came to him. For four years he had endured the worst kind of abuse that could be imagined. He was alive because he did not complain. Others had and they had disappeared, never to be heard from again. He had become a vessel into which was dumped the sexual gratification of others. The ones that liked him called him Chicken Jack, a nickname acquired from a certain technique in which he had become proficient. He had been fucked every which way but loose. But he had not surrendered, he had watched and he had learnt, learnt how to avoid the beatings, how to please his masters, how to hide his true feelings and how to lie expertly.

In that dark place he came to know the nature of men, their desires, their capacities, their weaknesses.

postgraduate fiction paying patrons were sought and acquired.

For the next few years the abuse continued and expanded. The headmaster became rich, as did the boy now known as Chicken Jack.

he demand for leftovers seemed to grow all the time and even Chicken Jack was finding it hard to fulfill it. More and more he was been forced to recategorise perfectly good chicken as leftovers.

He was taking too many risks, but the money was too good to turn down.

Anyway Chicken had his insurance. There were far too many people with a vested interest in keeping him free and in business. It would have been easy to get complacent but Chicken had seen too many men brought down by their own sense of invulnerability Chicken wasn’t going to repeat their mistakes. He was clever. He kept his material in both hard and electronic form. The hard was in a Swiss vault with explicit

He was in his Mercedes one bright afternoon in a car park at 33

With the arrival of Rollins everything changed. His appetite was insatiable and he had seemingly Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Perry Bhandal

T

With the end of the Balkan War and his network firmly established, Chicken chose to base himself in a place where he could disappear amongst those that were similarly coloured. In Brixton, England.

He continued to travel frequently. He liked to move around, to witness his operations working firsthand and look into the faces of those that maintained them for him. He had an eye for duplicity, he could smell it and doing the rounds kept any young Turks in check, making sure they got no ideas of their own. Every so often he would have to make an example of an upstart. Then, bathed in blood and gore, he would lavish riches upon others that remained loyal the extremes of carrot and stick.

Time moved on and Chicken’s riches grew. He began to feel an equilibrium, one occasionally punctuated by spasms of vicious violence, but an equilibrium nonetheless. He even considered the pursuit of more legitimate business ventures. But equilibrium rarely lasted for men like Chicken Jack.

The beginning of the end, when it came, was ushered by the sound of knuckles tapping softly on glass.

Heathrow Terminal 5. He’d just returned from Brazil: an anarchic country that would prove a major addition to his supply chain. He jumped at the tap on his driver’s side window. He could see a slight figure standing next to his car through the heavily tinted windows.

Chicken checked the gun he kept in his lap between his legs and pressed the switch to lower the window.

The figure bent down and Chicken found himself looking at the face of a man he thought had been lost to the past: Mr Rollins.

Rollins joined Chicken in his car.

He introduced himself and without ceremony proceeded to outline Chicken’s business activities over the last five years in worrying detail.

He gave no indication that he recognized him.

Rollins paused to let his words sink in and then went on to outline his requirements. Chicken’s mouth became drier and drier as the syrupy, hypnotic voice washed over him.

‘Can you help us?’

Rollins turned to look at Chicken: the same hair, the same eyes, everything the same. He tried to respond, but his words died in his throat. Instead he nodded like a school child.

Rollins smiled, revealing small, uneven teeth.

‘Good. We will be in touch.’ And with that he left. Chicken watched him walk across the car park and disappear. Only then did he notice the overpowering stench of rotting meat that filled his car. Chicken scrabbled frantically at the door release and fell vomiting on the tarmac.

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C

hicken Jack grew to be ruthless and vicious in his dealings and his reputation for being the man that could get you anything became quickly established in the underworld. He moved to Eastern Europe, gravitating to the edges of the war in the Balkans where life was cheap. His black skin made him stand out, but his money made him invisible once more. He spread his net wide, tendrils that flickered and hovered around places where all that remained were war-torn buildings and abandoned children.

These children, starved and forgotten, many mentally ill, were cared for, fattened and then shipped all over the world to satisfy the cravings of the insatiable.

instructions for its distribution if he did not call in once a week. The electronic was encrypted and spread across various servers, each with a countdown that only he could reset weekly and, which if he missed, would automatically fire off packets to competing global news organizations and the world’s mafia, guaranteeing a rain of fire on all his associates, whether complicit in his demise or not.

postgraduate fiction keep him out of the courts. He had greased so many palms he shouldn’t even have come close to this. But he couldn’t stop. The thought of saying ‘no’ to Rollins never entered his mind.

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A few months after their first meeting, Chicken had asked him what he did with the children and the young men and women that he sent him. He had expected to be told to mind his own fucking business, but Rollins merely smiled and offered to show him. That night he took him to an old warehouse and Chicken watched as Rollins methodically dismembered a young woman to the occasional sound of mewling and the faint whirring of a video recorder.

When he finally stopped, he had turned to Chicken and asked him if he would be interested in seeing his video collection.

C

hicken checked the rear view mirror. The station wagon was still there. The money sat in the boot of his car. The final batch of human cargo was due in the afternoon. One last deal and he was gone forever. It had been a hard choice for Chicken but he couldn’t bury the memories that had been jarred loose by that night in the warehouse. It wasn’t repentance or any such shit like that. It was survival instinct, pure and simple.

Chicken felt himself being consumed, inside and out, dissolving as if soaked in a foul toxic brine, the diluted essence of Rollins slowly eating him away.

His planning had been meticulous and quiet. He was sure Rollins suspected nothing. He had only one more stop; everything had been going like clockwork. Until this idiot started tailing him...

Chicken Jack

limitless funds to finance them.

Chicken had never been one to tie himself to one particular customer, but Rollins paid twice the market price for chicken. Problem was it all had to be leftovers.

Chicken’s operations expanded quickly with Rollins’ arrival. He began to take greater risks. Time from grooming to delivery became shorter and shorter. Mistakes were made. Some of those picked up were not as expendable as first thought. Paying off the cops and the occasional politician had been part of the deal from the outset and they had come cheap, but they were taking more heat and buying them off was becoming more and more expensive. One sergeant in particular was beginning to turn down more and more requests.

There was a momentum building here. Chicken could see that at some point in the future it would come apart. Shit, they couldn’t even

postgraduate fiction with bare metal. After the Ayatollah’s victory in ‘79, he was freed and went back to Soosangerd, his home town by the Iraqi border.

The family business had deteriorated as a result of the upheavals. His aluminium framing trade that was being managed by his younger brother didn’t even pay the monthly mortgage. People were too poor to build, and therefore had no need of new windows or doors.

The real catastrophe came in the first month of the war. Morteza was trying to figure out what he could or should do with his workshop when he heard deafening explosions and roaring war planes nearby. A few minutes later, in utter amazement, he was taken to his one-time home, which now didn’t look like anything but rubble. The search led to nothing, except the finding of his wife’s corpse and his daughter’s scattered limbs.

Paradise, etc.

by Ali Sheikholeslami ‘…a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.’

1984 – George Orwell

Summer 1984 Volunteer Training Camp – Southwest Iran

W

hen the new forces arrived at the base, Morteza was waiting impatiently for the next attack. He didn’t want to accept his results during the last one: only 4 tanks, not even close to his normal standards. He longed to make up for it. If he could destroy 10 this time, he’d feel relieved. But the trouble was it was an Iranian offensive and it all depended on the Iraqi intelligence.

If they knew about it, they’d be prepared, with tanks in place, all ready for Morteza to shoot. If not, it’d be another disappointment for him.

T

he khaki uniforms were not the coolest outfits for weather over 45 degrees in the Ahvaz region. The heated introductory talk had made the men sweat even more under the razor-sharp sunbeams. Their first day of training was taken up in getting acquainted with a new set of rough clothes and heavy equipment, learning what was where in the camp, listening to the PR clergy, and having two long meals. The second day was dedicated to basic military skills, marching, a shooting lesson with AK-47, and another talk expounding the advantages of martyrdom over dying in bed. The third day, on the other hand, was programmed for learning techniques in defusing land mines, including jumping on them in case of extreme emergency, when an offensive was on its way and there was no time to waste, which was normally the case.

Morteza lived in the barracks for almost the whole of the war. He was one of the rare few who had survived the Khorramshahr siege, as he belonged to the same province and his local knowledge saved him. He then returned to the harbour city when it was freed several months later. He participated in most of the major assaults and always carried his RPG-7, a light missile-launcher that had earned him the reputation of a tank-hunter.

‘Oh, no! I don’t believe my half-blind eyes. Is that you, Morteza?’

‘Habeeb!’ Morteza hugged the man in his forties, with a grey beard and hair, and astonishingly thick glasses.

‘You still alive, brother? I can’t believe you’ve survived it all.’

‘I did, with God’s help. They didn’t, though.’

Morteza pointed to his nuts laughingly.

‘Oh, brother. We all left something there. None came back whole. They made me quite good-looking, though. Look at my classy glasses.’ Habeeb made an actor’s gesture cheerfully. ‘Thank God you have your little princess; otherwise you’d have to live all your life with no children. They are truly the fruits of life, aren’t they? God bless your daughter.’

Morteza took a lungful of air; exhaled, looked up to the sprinkled clouds on an azure background, rubbed his hands together forcefully and shook his head, ‘Not anymore. No princess; not even a queen.’

M

orteza got married a few years before the war alarms were first heard. His daughter was growing her first teeth when he was arrested as a revolutionary by the Shah’s secret police. They confined him to solitary for quite a while in Tehran’s special prison, caressed his bare body, including his bare balls, 35

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M

orteza was busy lovemaking the whole morning. He gave it a nice massage inside out; used the best lubricant he could find in his oil box, rubbed it all over, tried every angle. People, watching him so passionately cuddling his RPG, got a sense that the time was short.

In the evening, the meal was quite substantial. A prolonged prayer session and then a cleric in uniform and turban declared the intentions of God for making nations fight wars because he loved to see how his believers were ready to sacrifice, to forget about themselves, to leave their dirty, earthly lives and turn to martyrs. Many were weeping, envying the fortunate ones that already inhabited the closeness-ofGod. ‘…Islam is in danger, more than ever before. Since the bloodthirsty vulture started his attack on our homeland; since the infidel started bombarding Islamic Iran four years ago, we’ve had a moral duty, a national and Islamic duty to defend our land and our religion, our dignity. Saddam is the Hitler of our times; he’s done things more horrific than America did in Vietnam. We’ve given blood for our Islamic revolution; we’ve been tortured by the Shah and his agents of horror.

We are prepared to sacrifice again, to sacrifice ourselves, our families, and our blood. This is only a small token of what we can give for our 36

Islam and our Iran. Martyrdom runs in our veins...’

The priest also gave a heartrending presentation of how being martyred on a mine would mean a shortcut to heaven. He described the naked angels that would come to the gates of paradise, exclusively to welcome the lads and change them out of their torn garments. He grinned while predicting the consecutive events and the different nature of the heavenly joys: that you can eat a fruit that tastes of every fruit all at once; that you can have a rock-hard erection for as long as you wish; that there are springs of milk, wine, honey, and a lot more. The volunteers were mobilised in the front, with hungry dicks and raging desires.

The shameless rain didn’t really decrease the heat, but instead turned the thirsty soil to gluey mud.

It couldn’t possibly stop those giving the commands; several regiments from different front bases had already kicked off. The artillery had been fed with ammunition during the past weeks and the air raids were perfectly planned. The minesweepers worked hard for nearly two weeks, clearing pathways through vast minefields for the troops to cross. The men were struggling, especially the ones who had suffered enormous physical pain in the prisons of the Shah, or the ones in higher age groups or of lower athletic prowess. Habeeb had it all double: both problems as well as higher spirits; he was limping with lumps of sludge stuck to his boots, nearly unable to see anything in that pitch dark; but, worst of all, he had to keep silent.

‘God! Please invite me to your side. Please let me come to you.

Please give me the opportunity to present my body, my soul, and my Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Ali Sheikholeslami

H

ave you been in contact with any of the cell-mates?’

Morteza asked.

‘I must admit, I still see Ebraheem and spend quite some time with him. I can’t deny that he is my brother.’ Habeeb was in one of his funny moods. ‘But, apart from him, I’ve only seen Majeed twice, and still keep getting letters from Alvand.’

‘Do you remember Hameed?’

‘The football-fanatic?’ Habeeb asked, getting obviously interested.

‘We lost him in Hoveyzeh, during a siege.’

‘Good for him. I’m sure he’s set up his own football team with other martyrs.’ Habeeb nodded.

‘Yeah.’

Paradise, etc.

he newcomers formed six groups of seventy-two. The plan was for them to attend the largest-scale offensive of the year on the southern front. The schedule was to start a few days after their arrival; they’d never announce when exactly till a short time before the actual operation. There was a fear there’d be a rat that the Iraqis could smell.

Even the nights didn’t cool off much. You had to own a chafieh, a one by one metre checked cotton fabric, loose and ugly, but extremely useful to wipe off the sweat and send you to sleep. After the curfew, the guys normally kept on chattering, either at the foot of the man-made hills or inside the shelters. The flies and mosquitoes never lost their loyalty to the conversations. Although the juniors had their designated holes to live in, Morteza arranged accommodation for Habeeb in his own shelter.

Habeeb was a box filled with stories of his eventful life, whose details were as hazy as his vision. When he talked about the prison days, he had a surreal calm, as if he was only talking about the daily chores of a happy housewife. He neither glorified the revolution, nor played it down. For him, the necessity of what had happened was a given, a simple matter of what was supposed to occur.

postgraduate fiction blood in your way. Let me not rot in this filthy world.’

The guy, who had just finished his studies in Quantum Physics, kept repeating these lines in his head. He knew one way of convincing God was to stick to what you wanted him to give you, ask, and ask, and ask, and he’d answer. That was the promise, that if you took a single step along his path, he’d take ten towards you.

Morteza remembered his childhood. When he was born, borders didn’t mean set in stone rules that couldn’t be changed. The people on both sides spoke to each other comfortably in Farsi and Arabic; they shared a similar way of life. The children of the villages had friends on the other side; there were lots of games to get involved in. The adults went on a pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf whenever they wished; it was easier than travelling to Tehran to go to a good doctor. But now he had no vision but busting Iraqi tanks. Everything had changed since the first border disputes; the line between the two countries had changed status, its existence had become an inevitability.

adrenaline into the heads of the remaining volunteers: they needed the way; Islam was in danger of extinction.

A

Paradise, etc.

dull sun was rising over the playground. Dried gut and prostate, odorous body contents, useless limbs and organs and metal rubbish lay silently entwined in the growing heat. A baby jackal was licking the blood off a shining RPG.

Ali Sheikholeslami

G

et down, get down, everybody get down, now!’

One of the four professional soldiers was running around, nearly shouting, trying to make the raw volunteers understand the gravity of the situation.

The sky was illuminated. The troops were showered with bullets. The bright lines of red and yellow, like gold powder, were waving all over the place. Men were down; some already encircled by the naked angels, some still struggling with panic attacks. The invaluable 3-day training acted like a stimulus: a mix of rapid heartbeat, raised blood pressure and a bizarre feeling of having a baby kicking from inside. Half the people were crawling ahead, while the others decided to remain where they had fallen. They didn’t have any other choice; they were too wounded, or too dead to move.

W

hy not?’

‘Because we’ve already lost half of our boys. Because the next unit will be here in two hours. Because we’ve miscalculated the minefields in this region; there really isn’t a route. If we don’t retreat soon, there’ll be a massacre. Every other unit that arrives will be slaughtered in no time.’

‘Just carry on.’

The radio transmission from the operation headquarters demanded the advance continued. The field lieutenant was in charge of injecting more 37

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faculty fiction Emotional Spaceman

by William Leahy

I

was six when it happened. We were eating our Sunday meal in the living room when I noticed Jenny frothing at the beak. As I watched her she seemed to topple from her perch and land gently in the sand and droppings that covered the bottom of her cage. I stared at the vacated perch for a number of seconds, hoping that our budgie would suddenly flutter upwards and come to rest upon it once more, healthy and cracking her seed. She did not reappear however, and the noise she made as she struck the bottom of the cage had prompted my brother to look up also, and he squinted at the empty silent space. He stood up and walked over to the corner of the room where the cage hung on a large, red, metal stand, next to tall yellow pampas grass that shot from a massive chocolate brown vase. On his way, he passed a dark blue and tangerine lamp which stood on a teak-effect sideboard, and a tartan table which held a wooden bowl of plastic fruit and a miniature clay donkey that contained a cigarette lighter in its saddlebags. Reaching the cage, my brother peeked over its frosted glass side panels and stopped chewing.

Dad, dad, he said quickly, his mouth half-full, there’s something coming out of Jenny’s beak. It’s all bubbly.

Come and eat your dinner and leave the budgie alone, my mother said, swallowing some meatloaf. My father continued eating, chewing his food slowly.

But Mum, there is. And she’s lying on the bottom of the cage and

looks all funny. He was almost hopping with anxiety, and stood half-turned between cage and table.

Colin! Come and eat your dinner. Right now! my mother demanded.

But he’s right! I chipped in, pointing at the cage with my knife, I saw her drop off her perch. My mother was about to reply when my father stood up quickly, pushing his chair back over the carpet. He set down his knife and fork on the tablecloth, and I saw gravy and carrot mark its purple-flower pattern. My mother’s eyes followed his as he rose, looking worried. He did not look at her but moved around the table towards Colin, squeezing past my chair as he did so. My mother turned to follow him, and gave me an unhappy look as her eyes momentarily met mine.

Just what we need on a Sunday afternoon, Freddy, she said, somewhat mysteriously.

My mother and father had earlier carried the kitchen table into the living room as they did every Sunday afternoon, for us to have a posh-lunch. It was the only day of the week that we all squashed into the room in order to eat, and the only day also on which both the tablecloth and the gravy boat appeared. We would, no doubt, have used the good crockery and cutlery had we possessed any, but we made do with the everyday.

Mother’s special Sunday trifle was intended to make up for that.

Having the table in the middle of the room presented difficulties in terms of space, difficulties my father now encountered as he pushed past my mother’s chair. Lifting it slightly, he eased his way through and reached the corner where the birdcage hung. He shoved Colin away, towards the window. Colin 38

looked over to me suddenly, his eyes widening in his nervousness. I looked back at him and, without wanting to, giggled. As Dad looked into the cage, my mother absently lifted a piece of boiled potato toward her mouth, and a spot of gravy dripped unnoticed onto her turquoise trouser-suit.

What is it, Frank? she said, the potato slipping between her teeth and into the pocket of her cheek.

What is it? My brother and I both looked up at my father and then at my mother. Her empty hand shot up to her necklace, with which she began to fiddle. Frank, what is it?

My father said nothing, but turned and moved back to the table with a look of determination.

Dad, dad, my brother halfshouted, hopping with anxiety. My father reached over and grabbed the fork from beside his plate, and I could see his knuckles turn white as he gripped it tightly. He squeezed his way back again towards the cage. My mother stopped fiddling with her necklace and my brother stopped fidgeting. I swallowed a piece of carrot. A stream of sunlight was coming into the room and thousands of particles of dust were caught by the light. Outside there was silence, or so it seemed; no cars driving past, no dogs barking, no children shouting. My father opened the spring-door of the cage with his left hand, and raised the fork in his right. In a fifteen-second burst of energy, he finished Jenny off. He repeatedly skewered her through the throat and then, using the wooden perch as a lever, rubbed her off the fork when she became stuck. Finally, breathing heavily, he watched for any movement on the bottom of the cage. With his face returning to its normal shade of smoker’s yellow, he extracted the Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

faculty fiction

William Leahy

J

Emotional Spaceman

of grass from my mouth. Aren’t you? My brother considered. I noticed the soft, blond hairs on his thighs being blown by the breeze.

No, Fred, really. It’s natural, isn’t it? You know, like birds eat worms, and cats eat birds, and dogs eat cats and so on.

Dogs don’t eat cats, I said, replacing the blade of grass in my mouth. Do they?

Well, they would if they could catch them, my brother said, raising his eyebrows. Colin was two years older than me, and I had to bow to his superior knowledge, his age guaranteeing his authority in all things. At school I often watched him with his classmates in the playground and wished that I could participate in their mature games. It was, I knew, enny’s death had been so sordid that her burial had forbidden territory, however. In the distance, coming to be grand. Colin and I demanded an appropriate from the Dipton estate, a figure climbed through the ceremony, one that acknowledged the centrality of the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the field, and began to walk in our direction. This figure kept to the path of budgie in our family life.

We should bury her next to Granny, my brother trodden grass. suggested, and say some prayers. Colin and I were I don’t want to give her to next door’s cat, I said sitting on the roof of the communal garages, around the sullenly. I can’t stand that bleeding thing, anyway. With corner from our terraced maisonette, looking across a this we were silent for a while, both of us chewing on field that belonged to Farmer Dobbs. The field was grass-sap, the sun warm on my bare legs. My eyes were part of a suburban farm and was used as a shortcut to fixed on the young man crossing the field, and high the Dipton estate. The grass was high, and the path behind him I saw an aeroplane crawling through the trodden by people walking between our estate and pale-blue sky. My brother and I continued to swing our Dipton traversed the field from corner to corner. legs over the rooftop edge, kicking the wall with the Maybe we should, what’s it called, er, create her, heels of our shoes. The figure grew larger as it y’know, set her on fire. I said this with a blade of grass approached. dangling from my mouth, swinging my feet over the We could bury her at sea, I suppose, my brother said, garage rooftop. It was barely an hour since Jenny had like they do with pirates and sailors. As I turned to look met her end and we had been sent out to play by my at him his expression suggested the impossibility of this. mother so that she could wash the dishes in peace. After If dad would drive us to the seaside, that is. We both our pudding she had shooed us out while my father knew that our father would not contemplate such a journey for our budgie, and the thought melted away as retired to the toilet. soon as it was spoken.

No, we don’t want to burn her, do we? That’s horrible. Colin What about Marley Wood? I undergraduate poetry wondered aloud. Dad might looked across the field, the long drive us there, because it isn’t that grass swaying in a gentle summer Weeping Woman (after Picasso) far. Colin lay down as I breeze. And it would be all continued, flat on his back, his smelly.

Eyes wide, white. legs hanging over the garage Anyway, I said, I suppose she Ready to rush. edge. We could take her there wouldn’t catch fire. You can’t set Green, not with envy, and bury her. We could take her fire to a bird, can you?

Yellow, not with light, right into the wood and dig a I know, Fred, my brother said, But sorrow, fright, hole and put her in and make a we should give her to next door’s So sinister and sharp. little cross with her name on it cat. and stick it in the ground. Like a You’re joking, I replied, real grave. As I spoke I became turning and snatching the blade Maria Ridley 39 Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008 hand in which he held the fork, let the spring-door snap shut, turned and walked into the kitchen. Our three pairs of eyes remained on the swinging cage as we heard his footsteps on the kitchen floor and then the sound of running water. The tap was turned off and he returned to the living room. He sat down heavily and, after shaking excess water from his fork, picked up his knife and forced it through a lump of meatloaf. He pierced the severed piece with the fork, dipped it into the gravy that flooded his plate, and popped it into his mouth.

Outside, a car drove by noisily, a dog barked and some children shouted. In the corner of the room Jenny’s cage continued to swing gently back and forth.

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he drive to Marley Wood was almost completely silent. Colin and I sat in the back seat of the car looking out of the side-windows.

My mother made the occasional comment, usually relating to the weather or to the large number of cars on the road. My father drove without uttering a word.

What a lovely afternoon, my mother said to the windscreen, so warm and sunny. Jimmy and I did not respond. So warm and sunny, she repeated. Jenny was inside a small, brown paper bag that lay next to the handbrake of the car, between the two front seats. My father had wrapped her up inside the bag, and then placed her in the car as we were all climbing in.

There are so many cars out today, said my mother, where can they all be going? She fiddled with her necklace as she spoke, staring out of the windscreen in front of her.

I hope they’re not all heading for Marley Wood. As she said this an insect smashed into the windscreen.

I glanced down at the small brown parcel on the floor between my parents and wondered if Jenny were really dead. Perhaps she was still alive, still breathing. I watched closely for a while to see if there was movement, but could not detect 40

any. I looked across at my brother who was stretching slightly to look out of the window. He was watching the white lines on the road as we sped past them, his eyes flicking back and forth. We had told our mother of our burial plans for our budgie, and she had promised to speak to dad. She had said that he was very tired, but that he might be persuaded. The fact that we were heading for Marley Wood seemed to suggest that she had convinced him to carry out our plan. As we approached the wood I felt sweat running down the backs of my legs caused by the plastic covering on the seat. I wiped one leg with the back of my hand and raised it to my mouth. The taste of salt was intense and stung my lips slightly. My brother noticed me doing this and did the same. He looked across at me with a bitter expression that became a smile. The car entered an area of shade as we drove into the wood. Trees bordered each side of the road, and sunlight occasionally flickered through their gently swaying leaves. We slowed slightly as we continued, the road narrowing as we drove deeper into the wood. I tried to see if I could find an ideal spot to bury Jenny as we passed, a clearing in amongst the trees. Colin seemed to be doing the same. My father slowed the car even more and, lifting his right-hand from the steering wheel, wound down his side-window. A warm wind rushed in and I felt the sweat on my legs immediately cool. Dad returned his right-hand to the steering wheel and, letting-go with his left, reached down and picked up the brown paper bag containing Jenny. From the corner of my eye I saw my mother’s head turn toward him. In one movement, he gripped the paper bag and tossed it out of Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

William Leahy

passed through the strips of wire and then held them for me in a similar fashion. I passed through without difficulty despite catching a thread on my t-shirt. I stood up and walked alongside my brother, returning home, silently planning Jenny’s grand send-off. Kicking a stone a thought suddenly struck me: Colin, I asked, what do worms eat?

He thought for a moment and, without missing a step replied, Oh, you know. Dead budgies and stuff.

Emotional Spaceman

excited at this realistic possibility.

My brother gave me no response, but I could see that he was taken with the idea.

And we can say a few prayers, I said, trailing off, looking at the swaying grass. The young man had almost reached our side of the field by now, and as I watched him he passed underneath us. He gave me the briefest of glances as he walked past, puffing on a cigarette and stumbling slightly. His shoulderlength hair was greasy and his face a deep red. He bent and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, almost falling as he did so. He disappeared around the side of the garage block. I looked back out across the field, still swinging my feet and searched for the aeroplane on the horizon. It too had disappeared. My brother levered himself up, took the blade of grass from his mouth and tossed it into the field. He stood up.

Come on Freddy, he said as he rose, let’s go and ask mum. Let’s see if she’ll ask dad to drive us. I tossed my blade of grass down and stood.

Yeah, alright, I said, come on then. We turned and climbed down from the garage roof, hanging with our arms stretched and our backs to the field and then letting ourselves drop. After landing we wiped our hands on our shorts and headed for the barbed-wire fence.

I wonder if Jenny’s still in the cage? Colin asked. Or if dad’s taken her out yet? We reached the fence and Colin began to climb through. I made a gap for him by holding one strip of wire in my right hand and pressing down on the lower strip with my foot. When he was halfway, bent almost double, he stopped and spoke to the ground; I hope he hasn’t chucked her in the bin, he said. I hope he hasn’t. He

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Emotional Spaceman

his open window. I stretched to watch it land in the undergrowth on the other side of the road and then disappear. Colin hadn’t noticed until he saw the bag land and, disbelievingly, glanced back in search of it. He could see nothing.

We had already begun to gain speed as my father pressed down on the accelerator. Colin sat down again and I saw water spring to his eyes.

My sight blurred as water came into mine. Dad wound up his window as the car continued to accelerate.

Mum looked to the front, fiddling with her necklace once more. Colin and I sat staring at the backs of the heads before us, trying to hold back tears. Colin succeeded, but a tear rolled from each of my eyes, one after the other. They crawled to my chin and I wiped them with the back of my hand. I raised my hand to my mouth and tasted the salty moisture. It was intense and stung my top lip slightly.

School tomorrow, boys, my mother said. Bath time, tonight. As she spoke another insect hit the windscreen and splattered like a raindrop. My father had both hands on the steering-wheel again as we reached a steady speed. We emerged from the shade and Marley Wood slowly disappeared behind us.

William Leahy

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faculty fiction crowd around you. They are mainly here to see these sporting heroes from the realm of Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe. There's nothing avuncular about the reign of the Soviet Tsar. You've tried to tell them, but they will not listen.

But you'll keep going, trying to find the words to nail this slippery, wriggling and inconvenient truth to the cathedral door. After the match you'll peel away from the dispersing crowd, head back to Canonbury Square and tap away at those sturdy iron keys, alone once more with that interrogating consciousness; the last man in Europe.

December 1945...

by John West

A

rsenal 3 (Rooke, Mortenson 2), Dynamo Moscow 4 (Bobrov, other scorers unknown)

You draw deeply from your Victory, feel the smoke expand your lungs as it goes about its lethal but invigorating work. Now you rub your mittened hands against the wintry chill, exhale and watch your breathe dissolve into the general fug, see it thicken and expand to fill the ground. You're here, at the Lane, to write about the Dynamo and the Arsenal for the Tribune. Or, at least, that was the idea. You were going to write about the game, but instead you're stood here shivering and sniffling and staring at low cloud. You take another puff of Victory. It draws a rattle from you as stirring as that of any whirled above their head by a young enthusiast. You peer out and vaguely sense there's still a pitch behind the secretive curtain of fog. You're here, at the Lane, to watch the Arsenal play at home and somewhere a clock must be striking thirteen.

You peer through the fog at where the teams should be. You can see the ghostly frames of the two Soviet linesmen, their boots hugging the chalk of the same right-hand touchline in a Soviet perversion of the norm.

The game kicks off and straight away the Russians score. "Bobrov", suggests a flat-capped cockney in the crowd. Then Rooke scores; then another two for Mortenson before the Russians pull one back and score again. There's a scuffle between the players, a white shirt arm strikes out through fug. Half time arrives, a break in the hostilities; this war without the weapons pauses for a brief cup of tea.

You're here to watch the Dynamo play the Arsenal at the Lane, but this isn't really the Arsenal. How could a team containing Matthews, Mortenson and Rooke be called an Arsenal team? That is what the Soviets will claim. And you know, if no one else does, that this is not a Dynamo team but a Soviet team. You don't want to admit it, don't want to be their stooge or help do Pravda's work for them, but deep down you acknowledge that the men from Moscow are correct.

How could it be otherwise? This is Dzerzhinsky's team.

So this will not be Dynamo v. Arsenal. This is England v The USSR. This is not football, this is propaganda; this will not be sport, it will be war minus the shooting.

The fog grows ever thicker; the restart is delayed.

Low heavy cloud obscures the machinations in the tunnel. A rumour starts to work its way around the ground; the Soviet officials will call off the game if their team has not drawn level before the end. Finally, into the murky gloom the 22 emerge. Red and white shirts flash out of the fog like plane tails plunging through low cloud. The Russians score. They score again. The final whistle blows; the air is foul.

You'll trudge back down the Seven Sisters, past beastly charred facades. Ill and filled with ill-will, you'll shuffle up the stairs. Another whooping, rattling cough as you unwind your tight pulled, 'tache tickling scarf.

You'll roll and shift and clunk and jab until gradually the black words seep and thaw the sheet of snow before you. Your spirit slowly warms. Another Victory. You let it dangle, downward pointing, held steady by a tight-lipped smile. Tap tap tap. Clunk. Tap tap tap tap tap tap as you type your weekly Tribune piece: As I Please, by George Orwell; "The Sporting Spirit"...

And you are here, at the Lane, recording the particulars, tugging on a Victory smoke and grimacing a little with every waft of the whiff of the flat-capped

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undergraduate fiction A lesson learned

By Laura Brown One: A Date with Disaster o far this month I have been on three very unsuccessful dates.

Tim the trainspotter was the first.

He awaited my arrival outside the Italian restaurant with his jotter pad open and his pen poised. Perhaps he likened me to a long awaited engine pulling into the station. As I approached and introduced myself he began to write something. It got me thinking that possibly he wasn’t a trainspotter at all, but something far more sinister, some sort of woman-spotter. For all I knew this could be a hip new sport. Under the guise of the trusty anorak, men could lurk about in groups noting down women’s vital statistics in their fusty little pads. Then on a Sunday afternoon in a country pub they could all sip from one orange juice and reminisce about the time they saw the 36-24-36. I couldn’t get this thought out of my head as he reached for my hand with his own grubby mitt that had just been wiped down the leg of his trousers.

What the hell was he wiping off? I took it begrudgingly and tried not to think of the possible bacterial infections he could be giving me.

As the food arrived I prayed he would remove the stripy scarf he had tightly wrapped around his neck, or at least take off the bobble hat. My prayers were answered and he slowly unwound the scarf and placed the hat next to his plate.

God, I wish he hadn’t. With the hat came a snowfall of dandruff that sprinkled over his pasta like Parmesan cheese that hadn’t been grated finely enough. The scarf hid its own array of sins. Once removed spots, shaving scabs and what even

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looked like a love bite were all on display. I couldn’t bear to look at him and my stomach turned as I tried to tuck into my own spaghetti bolognese. It is safe to say that I won’t be seeing him again.

A week later, outside the same restaurant, it was my turn to wait for a date’s arrival. And wait I did, for an hour and a half. As I was just about to throw in the towel, I spied what seemed to be an attractive man strolling slowly towards me. As he got nearer my heart rate quickened. He was a fine example of a man. A white t-shirt was stretched tight across his broad chest. His arms were muscular and almost as big around as my thigh. I resisted the urge to squeeze them as he introduced himself simply as ‘Ollie’. I was a little disappointed that he chose not to apologise for being late, but what the hell! A girl can’t have it all. Once inside the candle-lit restaurant, he pulled out my chair and began to ask me all the right questions that are part and parcel of a first date. It was going well and as I answered I couldn’t help but look into his giraffe-lashed blue eyes. As he quickly broke into conversation about himself I noticed that his hair was completely faultless; like Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, it looked plastic and sprayed into place. His tan was also a worrying shade of burnt umber. In the dim light he could well have been Man Friday’s long-lost brother. I looked to his wrists for the signs of fake tanning and was not shocked to see white hands with orange palms. It is amazing what lengths people go to in the effort to look good and impress. At this point I realised that for the past ten minutes I hadn’t actually listened to a single word the man had said. I nodded heartily to whatever it was 43

he was talking about and began to pay attention. For two hours I learned the perils of not wearing sweat absorbent trainers on a hot day, the best gym equipment to use to work on my legs, bum and tum and, most importantly, what colour t-shirt shows off finely-toned abs.

Surprisingly, I have actually put this man on my ‘possible second date’ list. However, as yet I haven’t called him.

The last date so far this month was with a gentleman named Tony.

I had very high hopes for this date as he’d phoned in advance and asked what food I liked and where I would like to eat. I suggested my local Harvester as the salad bar is free and there is an endless supply of white rolls. He was a little taken aback that I picked such an ordinary restaurant, but seemed happy with the choice. On the night of the date I made a special effort to look nice, I applied a face pack, shaved my legs and sprayed myself with my most expensive fragrance. Waiting for him to arrive I felt confident that the evening was going to be a success or, if not a success, I would certainly be able to fill my plate with plenty of food.

I looked around the quiet restaurant hoping to spot my date; I couldn’t see anyone that I thought could be him. There was a fat man in the corner already tucking into a plate of ribs, a young schoolboy trying to get served an alcoholic drink and a small man sitting in the corner who looked like Barry Manilow. I hoped that none of them were my man. Barry in the corner was getting up and looking in my direction. I’m not religious but I began to cross my chest and pray for divine intervention. He swaggered towards me like a 50s film star and Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

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know what to wear when you are meeting a stranger, don’t know where you are going, and would rather be staying at home watching TV. I drag out a red dress from my crammed wardrobe and root around on the floor trying to find the matching killer red stilettos. I try on the whole outfit and surprisingly it looks quite sexy. The dress hugs my size 12 curves in the right places and the high heels make my short legs seem longer. A slick of red lipstick and a shot of hairspray on my new, short, dark bob and I’m done. I emerge from my room to find Emma in the lounge chatting to my mother.

My mother offers, “Going for the lady-in-red look?” and begins to hum the classic De Berg tune.

“Thanks for that, I thought I looked quite good, actually.

Anyway, what are you doing here, all dressed up like a dog’s dinner?”

I stand with hand on hip, waiting impatiently for her reply.

“You look lovely, dear, like a plump tomato. I thought I would come along and see what it is you’re doing to scare all these dates away.”

I want to tell her that all the men she has so far picked have been oddballs and that I didn’t scare them away: I simply didn’t like them. I refrain from retorting as I catch a glimpse of her bare leg and the stark realisation of what she is wearing hits me. She has been rooting through my old wardrobe again, and managed to put together an outfit that I probably once wore when I was 15. A short, frayed denim mini-skirt with a black and white, frilly, polka-dot shirt, open to reveal a cleavage that I didn’t know she had. To top off the hideous 80s look she somehow managed to find some white plastic boots.

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dinner dates. I wonder where she found them, if she was using a website called www.weirdmen.com or something. Tonight she has assured me that I will ‘hit it off’ with her latest offering. All I know is that he is young, called Gary and that he works in a school. My friend Emma has decided that after the last three catastrophes she is coming with me as she fears for my safety and sanity.

I am thankful for the offer, as my mother has refused to disclose the date venue. It’s troubling how excited she is getting about this date and the secrecy surrounding it.

In the mirror my face looks puffy and tired, the thick cream I am rubbing into my skin is described as having ‘anti-aging oxidants’ and ‘amino acids’. Perhaps I am allergic to them or my skin is just beyond repair. I have been using this gunk for two months and to me nothing has changed. I try to get a closer look at the open pores, which are like gaping cavities on my nose, and manage to head butt the mirror.

Now I have a large red bump to contend with.

“What’s going on in there? Are you doing yourself an injury again?”

Emma is laughing as she asks me the question through the closed door, “What are you wearing? What shall I wear? Where are we going again?”

I open the door and answer her string of questions. On her advice I decide to ring my mum and find out exactly what is going on. I pick up the receiver of our battered old phone and begin to dial the number.

As usual there is no response.

“She isn’t answering. Just wear anything. You know it’s going to be rubbish anyway.”

I laugh as I say the last part and enter my room to begin the arduous task of getting ready. It is hard to

A Lesson Learned

kissed my hand. Barry was Tony and my skin was already crawling.

The food was good, really good.

The salad was crunchy and the bread rolls were fresh. I ordered half a chicken and ate it all. My date was a funny little man. Part of me wanted him to whip out a small Casio keyboard and serenade me with a medley of classic Barry hits.

Unfortunately nothing so exciting happened. Instead, I ate while he talked about accounting and told me his clients’ life stories. As we parted company he declared that I was wonderful. I doubted his sincerity, but agreed that I had also had an enjoyable evening. At this point he tried to kiss me; luckily my expensive perfume caught the back of his throat and sent him into a coughing fit as I bade him goodnight and ran into the darkness.

Tonight I am preparing for my fourth and last date of the month.

After the previous three fine specimens I don’t hold out much hope of a romantic liaison. I have gone against my own better judgement and let my mother organise another encounter of the male variety. I could kill my brother for buying her a laptop and showing her how to use the internet. Lately she has been coming out with some rather strange things, and I fear that she is perusing web pages that are highly unsuitable for a woman of her growing years. Talk of bondage, whips and crotchless knickers is not what you want to hear from your mother’s lips, even if it is just to ask why people enjoy such things.

Internet dating is the latest fad to take her fancy, and so far I have fulfilled her wishes by going on three quite frankly rubbish dates.

Tim, Ollie and Tony were hardly the best possible candidates for

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undergraduate poetry CC’s Slumped on sofas, we watch the bustling room in terror, Keeping forced mouths upturned. Coming here was an error: Pissed-up preppy girls on the arms of leering ‘flash your cash’ men.

Think its time to go to the bar and get another drink – or ten.

We manoeuvre through crowds of clicking heels, flicking hair, Take our position at the bar, packed in tight, but no one’s aware.

Glasses ring, pushed together as the punters are told.

An extortionate price tag: the vodka should be laced with gold.

Makeup- and hair-filled restroom, Choking on a dense mist of perfume, I stumble, anxious to get out.

Could leave already, without a pout.

Pulled to dance with chants of ‘under my umbrella’.

Would rather sit in my local with a pint of Stella, Listening to the drunks slurring their words, Telling me how they used to get all the ‘birds’.

Smiles still standing as I observe your jaded stance, Whispers in my ear while there’s still a chance.

It’s either get to the bar or get out the door, Quick, before friends catch us leaving the floor.

No one surrounding us seems to notice.

Lack of lustre within, something ceases to exist.

It’s only you, looking at me who seems to understand, As we escape the mass, fingers lightly touching my hand.

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orange florescent sign like a beacon over the dirty doorway. Emma is jumping up and down on the seat like a child and my mother can’t help shouting, “There it is, there it is,” like she had never seen a doorway and a sign before. As we get out of the car I find it hard to resist the urge to pull my mother’s skirt down.

Luckily it is early and there isn’t a queue of people to watch Emma and I usher my mutton-like mother into the club. The club is old and dirty and the décor isn’t up to much.

It is 6 years since I last came here and celebrated my 21st birthday and I never thought I would return sober and with my mother.

Emma breaks my contemplation as she begins to question my mum about my impending date, “So, Maggie, what is this guy like? Is he fit? What does he do?”

“He’s young, very good looking, works in a school…” She trails off, almost in a dream-like state; her enthusiasm over the words ‘good looking’ is a little exaggerated for my liking. The drinks begin to flow and the club starts to fill up with underage drinkers. Over the hustle and bustle and drunken shouting I can barely hear a word of what anyone is saying. My mother has nearly fallen off her stool twice and Emma is telling a story, which I haven’t caught much of, with so much enthusiasm she is spilling half her drink on the already sodden, ash-covered carpet.

“Where is he?” My mother shouts at me in a disappointed tone. I am about to answer when I notice she is staring at something in the distance.

“What are you staring at?”

“It’s him, it’s him….”

She trails off and jumps down from her stool. Emma and I both look in the direction she is walking.

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“Why not? I thought it would be nice to spend an evening together.

Anyway, I’m not that old.”

Luckily I don’t have a chance to reply as the doorbell rings and we huddle out to the waiting cab. It feels strange going out clubbing with my mother. Somehow the roles have been reversed and I am now the mature responsible adult looking after the clueless child. I want to make sure that nothing happens to her, yet I somehow want her to look after me. I see the bright

A Lesson Learned

I could see Emma eyeing her suspiciously, finally complimenting her and asking, “You’re very dressed up tonight, Maggie, where are we going?”

Emma tried not to laugh when my mother chirped happily, “I’ve booked a cab to take us to this really happening club in town called Loose.” I had to correct her before she embarrassed herself further.

“Mother, the club is called ‘Juice’ and it’s full of young people. I don’t think you’ll like it.”

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bellies are leeching by the bar. I feel a little disappointed that not one of them sees fit to buy me a drink. I give the fat bald headed one the eye; he looks in the opposite direction.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I take my double vodka from the spotty barman and down it in one.

“Fancy another?”

I look in the path of the voice.

This must be a joke. I’m desperate but not that desperate. The man could easily be Borat’s face- and body double.

“No, I’m alright. Thanks anyway,” I offer him as kindly as I can.

“Guess where I’m from then?”

The guy is leaning eagerly towards me.

“I don’t know, Kazakhstan?”

He looks perplexed and replies,” No, Cornwall.”

I nod and smile and back away from this very strange man. I don’t even look for my mother or Emma as I hail a cab and leave.

The flat is cold and empty as I return miserable and deflated. I sit in the dim light and try and eat the greasy chicken kebab I have just brought from the grotty eatery on the corner of my road. Bits of lettuce and blobs of mayonnaise are falling on my dress. I wish I had the selfcontrol not to buy rubbish food after a dreadful night, but I don’t.

Two: Room to Move y mother is still dating the toy boy. I have been counting; it has been precisely 3 months and 5 days. I pray to God that it is merely a platonic relationship. My brother finds the whole scenario strangely amusing and has even joked that we start calling him ‘dad’. This is not funny and won’t be happening.

Emma has just broken up with Mr

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Emma is laughing and looking over at them. I can’t stand it any longer. I decide that enough is enough.

“She is old enough to be your mother!”

I stare at him, waiting for an answer.

“So... is she old enough to be your mother too?”

His response is feeble and patronising and reinforces my hate for the youth of today.

“She is my mother, and if you don’t hop it, I’m going to tell your brother that you have been out underage drinking.”

After the last comment I realise that I am too much of a teacher for my own good. He is looking up at me with a defiant gaze in his eye.

“You do that.”

As the schoolboy and I eyeball each other, my mother is slinking lower and lower in her seat. Gary isn’t giving an inch and my mother’s bowed head proves that perhaps I should just leave them to it.

“Fine,” I murmur defiantly, shrug my shoulders and head back to find Emma. She isn’t where I left her. In fact she isn’t anywhere to be seen. I scan the seating area, the dance floor and finally the bar. Out of the corner of my eye I see her, taking a drink from Mr Rochester. The Judas, she knew I liked him. Not just any drink, it looks like a bloody expensive cocktail to boot. He is either trying to impress, or wanting to see her knickers. What do I do now? Go and join my mother and the infant or stand by Emma and watch my ideal man throw his best moves her way. I decide that neither option is a good one, and go to buy myself a large drink.

The bar is relatively quiet; only a few pervy old men with last night’s gravy on their polo shirted beer

A Lesson Learned

My god, the man walking through the door is gorgeous. Dark haired and rugged, he reminds me of a young Mr Rochester, though better looking and less weathered. Quite frankly I wouldn’t care if he had two mad women caged in his attic. If this is my date, my mother has surpassed herself.

“He is good looking!” Emma offers these words and straightens her skirt. I can tell I have competition.

I look expectantly in my mother’s direction to see whether she is leading this hunk towards me. My dream man has walked straight past her and she is talking to someone else. Even through the smog of cigarette smoke I know he is young, very young. My mother is tottering towards a table and he is kissing her on the cheek, his arm is draped about her shoulder and she is staring up at him, he is looking down on her with a loving gaze.

“Do we know him?”

Emma looks puzzled. I think for a minute, and realise that I do. He went to my school; he is the much younger brother of one of our friends.

“It’s Gary Granger…”

Emma looks shocked “It can’t be, he’s only 17.”

I look for my mother and she is still under the spell of the toy boy.

So much for ‘working in a school’.

He is still at school! I feel the urge to drag my Mrs Robinson of a mother away from her latest beau.

Yet, I also want to wait and see what happens. After all, he was supposed to be my date for the evening, not hers. What is she playing at?

“They are getting very cosy over there, don’t they make a lovely couple?”

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Personally, I don’t think being good at sex is a valid reason for moving a married man into our tiny flat.

Although, I might be tempted if one threw himself at me.

“We’ll think of something.” I offer these words with absolutely no thoughts on how to get rid of the chauvinistic imbecile.

I felt like an outsider in my own home as the evening progressed.

After devouring dinner, they decided to devour each other. Lying together on the sofa, shrouded in my expensive cashmere throw I could distinctly see a bit of fumbling going on. I was forced to sit on the floor as there is only one sofa in the lounge and the ‘happy couple’ were lolling all over it. My bum was numb and my neck sore as I had nothing to rest my back against. I would have gone to my room, but there was a film on that I wanted to watch. Just as it was about to start, the kissing commenced. Slurping and sucking, gulping and gurgling, at one point even a low moan. The TV remote was wedged between them. I needed to retrieve it before the humping started. I tried to grope and grab it. I pulled something else that was long and hard, but unfortunately not the remote. Eventually I managed to find it and increased the volume.

The kissing stopped abruptly and he demanded, “Do you have to have it that loud? I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

How dare he question what I do in my own home? What I really wanted to say was, ‘You didn’t have a headache when you were sucking my friend’s tongue like a demented Hoover.’

Instead I opted for “Yes, I do.”

Silence fell in the room and the atmosphere was tense. Finally he muttered seductively to Emma, Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

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when he said it, which sent her into a tizzy, and then winked in my direction. My door will be firmly bolted tonight.

“What’s for dinner, ladies?”

He asks chucking himself onto the sofa with his muddy shoes still on. Emma runs to the kitchen to search through our half empty fridge, “Chicken curry?”

He pulls a face, “What else have you got?”

Getting up he leisurely strolls to the fridge and starts rummaging through like a cave man. Eventually he decides what he wants and leaves Emma in the kitchen to cook it.

Walking back to the lounge he grabs the TV remote, chucks himself on the sofa and starts flicking through the channels. I actually hate him. I can’t stand being in the same room as the bendable adulterer and decide that the possible chance of poisoning him is too good to miss.

“What are you cooking? Want a hand?” I ask, hoping to merely talk and not help.

“He wants chicken pieces, marinated in paprika, with egg fried noodles and a tossed salad.”

She repeats the food order with an air of sarcasm that proves that it is not just me that is irritated by his presence.

“It’s nice to see women working in their rightful place,” he laughs at his own joke grabbing the last cold can of diet coke from the fridge before wandering out of view.

Emma stares at me with a look of horror in her eyes. “Lindsay, what have I done?”

I laugh and rub her shoulder.

“There must be something good about him.”

She thinks long and hard and finally comes up with “sex.”

A Lesson Learned

Rochester. It seems he does have a wife. Not caged in the attic as first suspected but living in a house with his two children in St Albans. She is rightly devastated and has declared herself to be a ‘plain Jane’, which I found slightly ironic. I have given up on men entirely. I am not about to become the image of Mrs Havisham and mope about my flat in a grubby wedding dress, pining for a lost love. No, I have just decided that the single life isn’t all that bad.

“Should I call him?”

Emma stares up at me with tears in her eyes and chocolate ice cream round her mouth.

“No, I don’t really think that is the best idea….”

I trail off because I see her reaching for her mobile phone and I know that nothing I can say will stop her. By late afternoon Mr Rochester is on my doorstep with a green canvas bag, begging me to let him move into our flat. I am a weakwilled pushover. He has only been moved in for twenty minutes and has already got Emma making him tea and unpacking his clothes, refolding his shirts so they don’t crease. His bag seems to be bottomless; in the style of Mary Poppins, more and more things keep flying out all over the front room. I have learnt that he is an experienced yoga teacher or, as he calls himself, a ‘master yogi’. The mat, resistance tubing and large blow-up exercise ball, which he is currently pumping up with a ridiculously small bike pump, all indicate that at least this much about him is true. The man is a terrible flirt; he has already declared that he can contort himself into all sorts of ‘positions’ and that his favourite of all is the ‘downward dog’. He gave Emma a flirty smile

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Three: Class Rules he school gate has received a fresh lick of blue paint during the 6 weeks I have been away and the wisteria over the entrance is slowly shedding its spongy summer leaves. The staff room is humming with talk of expensive holidays, new cars, and new homes. I have nothing to say; over the summer break I have done zilch but put on 10 pounds and watch TV. I scurry to the corner of the room and sit with my tea and biscuits avoiding the gaze of everyone. “ Good morning, Lindsey, have a nice break?”

I know the voice before I see the face. “ Lovely, yourself?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Wonderful, wonderful. David proposed in Dubai and the sale went through on the 4-bed in Chalfont. So not a lot really.” She trails off to a titter. I look up at the fresh blonde highlights of the bobbing head above me and realise that I haven’t answered.

“That’s great for you, how fantastic”. I try to say the words without sarcasm.

“I know, it’s a dream come true.”

She walks off in the direction of another sucker willing to hear her

‘wonderful’ news. I remember the large sad blue eyes that he stares at days in college when I helped her me with. Everyone is seated apart pass her exams. Now, she has been from him. promoted over me, is marrying a “Can you sit down please, Sam?” music industry mogul, and has a I instruct him firmly. lovely house in the suburbs. Not He takes no notice and continues that I’m envious. I, on the other to stare out of the window. hand, haven’t had a proper “Something worth looking at boyfriend in three years, live in a outside?” I ask, walking closer to rented flat, and am professionally him. overlooked. I have a feeling the day Still he gives no answer. is set to get worse.

Running out of the classroom, he My new classroom is bigger than slams the door. Maria, my my last one, and is flooded with classroom assistant, goes after him. light from a large window that Within minutes he is back, sitting at overlooks the school playing field. his desk, refusing to work. Playing As yet the walls are white and with the lid of his pen, he is already empty, awaiting decoration. I barely wearing my patience. have a minute of contemplation At lunchtime I purposely sit with before the room is heaving with Mr Trent, a small German man boisterous 8 year olds. I enjoy the with black hair styled in a slick side happy hubbub. On first impression parting. Rude and unwelcoming, he they don’t seem like a bad bunch. has few friends among the staff. As The girls are chatting in intimate he stares down my top, I ask him groups and the boys are playfully questions about Sam’s behaviour kicking one another. But one boy in last year. In between taking large particular is standing completely bites of a greasy sausage sandwich, alone. Sam has a reputation the only explanation he can offer for throughout the undergraduate poetry school as being disruptive in Paranoia lessons and anti-social Paranoia is whispers on the back of hands, towards other Paranoia is clutching a plane seat before it lands. pupils. Even though I can’t Paranoia is feeling watched as you walk upstairs, see his face, I Paranoia is finding three grey hairs, know it’s him. I Paranoia is checking your teeth when someone stares. call his name and he turns Paranoia is walking home late at night, round and Paranoia is flight over fight. stares at me dolefully from a Paranoia is smoking spliffs on your own, lowered head. Paranoia is acid changing music’s tone, He has the Paranoia is God talking on the phone. features of a cherub; golden Paranoia is a knife shining bright, blonde curly Paranoia is when your throat gets tight. locks frame his plump face and Kerry Williams 48 Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

A Lesson Learned

“Shall we retire to the bedroom?”

She nodded dutifully and followed him. Before exiting the room she turned and mouthed ‘sorry’.

I feel alone, miserable and sad.

Now, in bed, I can’t sleep. Partly because I feel sorry for myself and am worried about my first day back at school tomorrow, but mainly because I can hear them shagging.

I have never liked the first day of a new school year and the thought of a brand new class is always daunting.

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behaviour?” I am greeted with the same silence that I have come to expect of Sam. “I haven’t been at home much lately, his Nan has been taking care of him. You know how it is: when work comes up I have to take it.”

He lowers his head, and rests it in his hands. He seems to be truly torn by the need to work and the welfare of his son. I wonder for a second what work it is he does that takes him away from his family and why Sam’s mum can’t take care of him.

“He has always been a difficult child. We have had some really tough times. Lately his behaviour at home has been improving.

Hopefully, he will be able to transfer it to the classroom.” He smiles broadly at me with a hopeful raise of one eyebrow. I want to believe him I really do. As he gets up and walks away, I watch him and hope his son doesn’t improve completely.

Otherwise there will be no reason for me to see him again.

The rest of the parents’ evening goes without a hitch and as I arrive home, my thoughts return to Sam’s dad, his lilting accent, cheeky grin and sad eyes. There was something he wasn’t telling me: he knows exactly why Sam is misbehaving.

Why did he put his head in his hands and almost pull his hair out with despair? And why couldn’t his mother be bothered to come?

“Alright, gorgeous,” the irremovable houseguest is wandering from the bedroom wrapped only in a towel.

“Still here then?” Is all I can offer as he gets so close that beads of water plop from his still wet body onto my arm.

“Afraid so,” he answers huskily and looks me up and down. The man loves himself so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if he kisses a Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

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Four: Spiders Legs t has been 5 weeks since the bendable adulterer moved in.

Unfortunately, he and Emma are still dating. Emma has asked him numerous times to find his own place to live with no success. We are currently plotting his demise, but seeing as his wife has found a new man and dumped all of his clothes in a black sack on our doorstep, it is becoming increasingly hard, as he now has nowhere else to go. As much as I loathe him, I would hate to reduce him to the depths of homelessness, forcing him to buy a three-legged dog and charity shop blanket to beg for pennies.

Sam’s behaviour has worsened.

Last week he threw a rubber at my head, poked a girl in the ear with a pencil and shoved the corner of a hard back book up the classroom assistant’s nose. I am at my wit’s end; thankfully, parents’ evening is tonight, so at least I will be able to discuss his many problems. Adding further anguish to my troubles is my mother’s engagement to the schoolboy.

I look terrible. The suit Emma has leant me is a size too small, so sweat patches have formed under my arms and are visibly seeping through the fabric. The skirt is so tight, it is stretched over my bum like the skin of a drum. And to top it off I have lost a button on my shirt,

and my boobs are hanging out like a centrefold. In my haste this morning I forgot to pick up my make-up bag. With no powder or lipstick, my face looks oily and drained. I just saw the parents of the class clown and am about to talk to the guardians of the class swot. His father looks like an Oxford reject, complete with leather patched elbows and tweed trousers. His mother is, as expected, shy and mousy. I talk mainly to the father.

Expressing his wishes for his son to go to Cambridge University, he informs me he has already made the eight-year-old study the prospectus and pick a subject; I try not to laugh.

I am glad when they eventually leave and I can have a few moments respite before the next gaggle of pushy parents ambush me.

“Miss McKay…” The voice has a charming Devonshire twang and the face is ruggedly handsome. His skin is weather-worn and covered with a light sprinkle of dark stubble that matches his mop of dark curly hair. I have seen his eyes before; large and blue, they look sadly into my dark brown ones as if almost searching for something.

“Please take a seat.” I shake his hand with my own clammy one and look down my list to see which child this adult belongs too.

Before I can find the name he offers his own, “I’m James Pearce, Sam’s dad. Sam thinks a lot of you.

Talks about you all the time.” His father is staring at me now expecting me to say something in return. There are so many things I want to say about Sam, things I fear his father won’t like. As much as I want to, I can’t lie about his son.

“Sam is a very disruptive influence in my class.” I offer gently.

“Perhaps there is something going on at home that is affecting his

A Lesson Learned

the way the boy behaves is to call him a “little fucker.”

After asking several members of staff about Sam, I have uncovered nothing, apart from the fact that his parents have never attended a parents’ evening to discuss their son.

I am giving him a week to improve his behaviour and this year his parents will be attending the open evening.

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Five: Teacher’s Pet t is nearly the end of term. It has been 6 weeks since parents’ evening, and Sam has become my new best friend. Giving him jobs to

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undergraduate poetry Scarf Me Up Scarf around my neck, And the old lady in mustard leggings, Flagging Tesco bags, Gently flanks me, Serpentining through hoodies, With the goodies in her denim trolley.

A rising grey, She gazes up at me hair in disarray Eyes, Blasphemous black.

Beautiful.

She smiles, ‘Make sure you stay warm, dear.’

A scarf over the mouth, Things are different.

People edge away, Even someone’s carrier bag skirts round me, ‘Guttering, choking, drowning’ Under our windless bus shelter.

Shane Jinadu 50

do within the classroom has boosted his morale and at the moment his disruptive behaviour is gradually improving. Currently, he is my book monitor. I have become very attached to seeing his cherubic features in the morning, so much so that I feel a pang of disappointment when he is late or absent. However, there is still a tiny part of me that wishes his behaviour would slip ever so slightly. Then I would have a perfectly valid excuse to see his handsome father again. Somehow, unfortunately, I think Sam has learnt his lesson. My plan for removing the unwelcome houseguest is coming together nicely. I just hope and pray it works.

The classroom is empty, apart from Sam. I can see him placing textbooks on the appropriate tables through the rectangle of glass in the door.

“Morning, Sam,” I offer cheerfully as I plonk my heavy pile of marking on my cluttered desk, making pencils fly off in every direction. As I turn round he is opposite me, rocking from side to side, gripping something nervously with two hands behind his back.

“Can I ask you something, Miss McKay?” His voice is trembling slightly and his cheeks have turned hot pink.

“You know you can, Sam.” I offer softly and perch on the edge of my desk, so I’m not towering over him.

“Well, it’s just, if you want to. I mean you don’t have to or anything.

Only if you want to…” he trails off.

“If I want to what?” I ask expectantly. He is really rocking now and his head is lowered, I think, with embarrassment.

“Come and watch me play football on Saturday?” He asks the question as a mutter and looks up eagerly with his huge, watery blue Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008

Laura Brown

you look for it?”

Hopping from one foot to another, I can’t help but laugh at him.

“A spider?” I almost mock.

“Arachnophobia is a valid fear, you know. Not something to ridicule. It affects millions of people.” He preaches the last bit as he runs to the bedroom to, I hope, put some clothes on. I look for the feared animal, expecting to find a hairy fiend. Instead I discover a medium-sized house spider, cowering in the corner. I pick it up and set it free. Perhaps getting rid of him will be easer than first expected.

A Lesson Learned

gilt-framed picture of his own slimy visage before he falls asleep. He sits on the edge of the sofa a little too close, with his legs wide open. The towel between his manhood and my gaze is thin and I’m starting to feel a tad uncomfortable. “Are you tickling my foot, honey?” he asks with an expectant raise of eyebrow.

“No, you wish,” I simply answer.

He looks to his foot; jumps up immediately and begins shouting hysterically, “Get it off me. Get it off me. Please do something!

Anything!”

His towel drops to the floor and he is left stark naked, gripping his manhood, shaking like a scared little child.

I jump up too and begin to bellow, “What’s wrong? What do you want me to do?”

“Didn’t you see it? The spider? It was huge! It ran over my foot. Can

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hand and pulling me forward. Standing in front of him with his hands on my shoulders, I can’t concentrate on the match. All I can think about is how much I like the feel of his warm chest against my back. His hearty encouragement of his son endears me to him further and when Sam comes and hugs me at the end of the match, I feel strangely part of their family. James breaks my contemplation and asks if I would like to join them for some lunch. I find it hard to say no and after a bit of persuasion in the form of sulking Sam, I eventually agree.

The café James chooses has a large slide and numerous swings and seesaws, and after we have eaten, we venture out to watch Sam play. Sitting on a damp wooden bench, I long to ask about the whereabouts of his mother and why his behaviour has so drastically improved.

“Does Sam see much of his mum?” I blurt out the question before I have the chance to think of a better one.

“No, he doesn’t see his mum at all.” James’s voice is melancholy and staring in the direction of his playing son I wish I could take back the question.

“Oh, right,” I answer, not really knowing what to say next.

“Me and Sam have had a really hard time without her.” He pauses just as he is about to go on.

“Where did she go?” I eventually venture, trying to be sensitive to his situation.

“She didn’t go anywhere. She died.” He doesn’t look up from the spot he is staring at on the ground. “She died, giving birth to Sam.” Now he glances up in the direction of his son and smiles. “For a long time I resented him, blamed him for her death. I wanted my wife back, not a tiny baby I had no idea how to care for.”

He runs his hand through his dark curly hair and looks at me, his features full of remorse.

“It is my fault Sam behaved so badly. I didn’t care for him the way I should. I have realised now that I was wrong, and what happened to her wasn’t his fault.” He wipes away a tear, and speaks as if contemplating his own feelings for the very first time. “She would have wanted me to love him, and I do. I just went about showing it in the wrong way. At the open evening, you made me realise that Sam’s bad behaviour was because of my absence. You helped me understand that I needed to be there for him.” He takes my hand cautiously, and gently continues, “He likes you very much, but it was my idea to invite you today. I want to thank you.”

A Lesson Learned

eyes wide open. I don’t know what to say. I would like to see him play football, but I’m sure the school wouldn’t be too happy with teachers spending personal time with individual students.

“I’d like that, very much.” I answer and take the ticket from his hand. I feel strangely emotional that he has chosen to invite me to something that clearly means so much to him. The contented smile that works its way almost over his whole face convinces me that I have made the right decision.

“What shall I wear?” I shout to Emma, hoping she will hurry from the front room and assist me with my wardrobe dilemma.

“Anything. It’s a children’s charity football match, not Ladies Day at Ascot.” She looks at the red feather and crystal-encrusted hat I am holding and shakes her head.

Now she is rummaging through my wardrobe, pulling out jeans and a sweatshirt.

“No short skirt, no high heels and lose some of the makeup.” Her instructions are firm and direct and although I hate to admit it, I know that she is right.

I leave the flat with my hair tied back in a scruffy ponytail, wearing tight jeans, low heels and a fitted, black, casual jacket. The walk to the park is a long one, and because I’m running late, very brisk. The boys are huddled in a group around a muscular man that I assume is their coach. Stretching and running on the spot, they all look nervous. I stand at the back behind a group of proud mothers, who are shouting heartily at their respective sons to ‘bend down low into the stretch’, ‘take the orange segment’ and surprisingly, from one rather loud mother, ‘kick their arses.’ I feel out of place and don’t quite know if I have picked the right place to stand.

“I’m glad you could make it.” I instantly recognise the Devonshire accent. Turning round, I almost bump straight into him. Conscious of my colouring cheeks, I don’t look him in the eye as I take his outstretched hand.

The hand squeezing mine rather affectionately is rough and warm. Now looking up at him, I notice his cheeks are also reddening.

“It’s going to be a good match, Sam is a great player.

He has really come out of himself over the last few weeks.” James is smiling in the direction of his son and Sam is giving a tiny wave in our direction, big enough for us to see, yet small enough for his team mates not to mock. The roped spectator area is beginning to fill up with aggressive parents, all vying for the best view. I can’t see a thing. James is somehow managing to push his way to the front at the same time as grabbing my

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undergraduate poetry Johnny He thinks he’s a rebel, Johnny boy.

Watch on his right wrist Burberry cologne on his crotch, Dancing, and biting his lower lip With scally scorn.

The orange ladies love him He’s all smiles And beers in the air, When they’re about.

Don’t worry, son, He tells himself, You’re a rebel And they, They can’t fight their feelings forever.

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crawls beneath a large piece of bark and curls up. “What’s in the tank?” he asks, walking eagerly up to it and tapping loudly on the side of the glass with his middle finger. We both stay silent and move to the edge of our seats. He taps again. I see it gradually move, unfolding one leg at a time from its tiny ball. We edge forward again. He lets out a high pitched shriek and backs towards the door. Emma begins to laugh. I keep a straight face and declare, “Say hello to your new house guest!”

By the time the tarantula’s owner comes to pick her up, he is gone.

The only things we have left to remember him by are an empty fridge and a dirty bath. I give Emma a scornful look, as her new man gets a little too comfy on the sofa. She knows what I mean and we both laugh when she asks him “Are you afraid of spiders?”

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Six: Good Riddance t has been 3 weeks since the charity football match, and James and I have hardly spent an evening apart. I have given my blessing to my mother’s forthcoming nuptials and foolishly agreed to be a bridesmaid. So far, I have successfully warned her against wearing a white wedding dress with a thigh high split, and am currently trying to convince her that ‘Dancing Queen’ is not a suitable song to walk down the aisle to. Emma has secretly been on several dates with a

new man, even though her old one is still living in our flat, eating our food and making our bathroom dirty. Sam is still by far my favourite pupil.

“It’s horrible, I don’t like it.”

Emma can barely look at it as we both pace round the table deciding the best possible place to put it for maximum impact. “I don’t have to touch it, do I?” I assure her that she won’t have to. We decide that the mantelpiece in the front room will be the optimum place. I am positive that lifting the heavy tank singlehandedly is causing strenuous damage to my lower back.

“Perfect,” I muster as I let out a sigh of relief and step back to admire our expert positioning.

“How did you manage to get one?” Emma questions me, her mouth still agog in adoration of my brilliance.

“My brother knows people,” I shrug.

“Do we have to keep it?” Emma asks, slowly exaggerating the ‘it’. I would love to say yes, just to see her face, but I don’t have the heart.

“No. We have it on loan until 8pm tonight, so if this doesn’t work I think we might be stuck with him.”

The large pink-footed tarantula is eyeing us suspiciously out of its four pairs of eyes and leisurely touching the side of the tank with one front leg. It is definitely larger than my hand, although I’m not going to get it out and check. Now all we have to do is wait.

“Honeys, I’m home,” he shouts loudly as he slams the front door and makes his way into the lounge where we are both sitting. Emma can hardly keep a straight face. At first he doesn’t notice it, strolling to the kitchen, we both stay put. The tank looks empty as the tarantula

A Lesson Learned

“That’s alright. Sam is a very special little boy to me.” I shrug and try not to become tearful. Since my own father’s death when I was only ten, I know too well the difficulty of growing up with one parent, and hearing James’s story makes me realise how hard it must have been for my own mother, and how much I love her. We watch Sam play until the winter air makes our hands cold and our noses red.

undergraduate fiction Piano Maria Papacosta Lily

W

hen I get up in the mornings, I’m usually a very cheerful person. But today I woke up and the first thing I wanted to do was shout at the cars to stop driving by my window so loudly. I miss Freddy. His house is about fifteen minutes away by train. I can visit it whenever I want, but he isn’t there any more. The house belongs to me, but it will never be my house; I don’t feel I have the right to change it.

Tomorrow I am going to my Music Appreciation Society. There are nine of us that go every week and we usually manage to get on with each other. We meet in a little scout hut not much bigger than a bird box. It’s quite a secluded place, really. I don’t like the fact you have to walk through about a hundred metres of woodland to get to it, but it’s worth it once you get there.

Apart from me and my friend Suzie, there’s a married couple in their thirties, a man called Tony who looks like an ageing rock star; Elvira, who’s succumbed to the surgeon’s knife, whose real age must be near sixty, a boy and girl who look so young it’s a wonder they were allowed out on their own, and Ryan, the leader of the pack who is unreasonably knowledgeable at the tender age of twenty-four. He’s a music graduate who likes folk, classical and contemporary music, as well as everything in between. He tries his best to get his members interested in music they think they won’t enjoy.

Every week we hold a discussion about a certain field or genre of music. This is chosen at random by Ryan who often finds himself in the

position of fighting the right to talk about things like Hip-Hop and Dance music that, I have to say, my interest strays from. It’s a fairly democratic system though because Ryan always welcomes suggestions from others.

“I want you all to feel part of these discussions. Please tell me if you have any ideas about other topics you would like to talk about and I’ll note them down for next time.”

Ryan’s a nice boy, I like his style of running things; he isn’t too confrontational and respects what we all have to say, even if someone thinks he’s wrong. I keep telling him he should become a teacher. I never have a problem with someone so young advising me on musical topics, but others seem to display their trouble with him. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s meeting because we’re going to be talking about Jazz. I think Ryan thought it’d be a nice thing to do after I told him my cousin the jazz pianist had died.

1925 osetta Chambers was hanging out her washing in the usual fashion, when Robert came out of the James’ club. She had noticed him on numerous occasions but didn’t know him by name. She had spoken to Mr Frost only once, when he was moving into the building.

“Hope you ain’t gonna be creating too much of a racket in here, because my family and me live upstairs,” she had said, jokingly but with serious intent.

“Don’t worry ma’am, so does mine,” he added.

Since that day, Rosetta Chambers had seen all the changes made in the jazz club, but she still didn’t think it would be successful.

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53

She heard from Harry, who had an unbelievable weakness for telling strangers his family’s private business, that James was having trouble finding a decent performer.

Rosetta lived with her husband Anthony on the apartment building’s 5th floor. They had been there since they married. They were young when they moved in and weren’t fussy about it being small or having holes in the floorboards that could catch your feet and make you stumble.

Now in her fifties, she remembers her childhood as though it was a dream. She married Anthony because she was pregnant with his child. They told everyone they were in love, even though they probably didn’t know what it meant back then. Over the years they had grown to love each other and now they were closer than they ever thought they could be.

They had lived in the apartment for almost thirty years and in all that time they hadn’t dared redecorate for fear the walls would fall down around them. Hank, who was their only child, lived with them throughout this time. He was a twenty-seven year old with no real aims in life. This put a strain on his parents. Rosetta wanted him to be a minister and work in a local church where he would gain the respect of the whole community.

His father wanted him to carry on the family trade. He was a butcher who had worked every day of his life and still didn’t see the light of retirement at the end of the tunnel.

Hank didn’t care to get a job. His parents were too soft on him, so he decided to take advantage of this for as long as possible. They felt guilty that they had brought him into the

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didn’t think she would ever witness it from her apartment window.

Hank was on his way to church to practice hymns on the organ since he had no real way of rehearsing at home. There was nothing else he would get up early for but music was so important to him and he enjoyed it so much that even having a lie in wasn’t as appealing as playing out few chords.

Rosetta was proud of the fact that he wanted to do something at the church.

“And if you see Reverend Joseph, please say hello from me and tell him I’ll be seeing him at the coffee morning on Sunday,” Rosetta said as her son walked out.

“Okay, mom, he might not be there because he gave me the keys to let myself in.”

Hank was a little on the chubby side, thanks to his mother’s amazing cooking, but he was nevertheless a handsome young man. His face held within it a beauty that was young and alluring. He checked his reflection in the mirror and started walking down the stairs of the apartment block.

At the same time, on the ground floor, Robert was saying goodbye to Harry and Sandra and putting his hat on before opening the door to leave the club. He noticed the next-door open but he didn’t have time to stop. Hank hadn’t expected a man to be standing in the vicinity of his doorway so he briskly walked into Robert.

Neither of them could stop fast enough and as Robert’s hip hit against Hank’s chest, it made his satchel fall to the ground and pages of sheet music spill out like liquid.

“Watch where you’re stepping!” Hank said angrily.

“I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t expect anyone to come out of there.”

Robert stood frozen for a moment as though any other movement he made would create another mishap.

He hadn’t counted on the wind picking up.

“Oh man, you’ve made me drop all my stuff and now the wind is carrying it away.”

Hank opened his arms out and tried to run after the straying sheets. Robert knelt down on the ground and started picking up as much as he could and putting it back into the brown leather satchel. Realising what they were, he looked up at Hank.

“You sing hymns?”

“No I play them, the congregation sings.”

“On the piano?”

“It really ain’t none of your business but it’s on the church organ,” Hank said getting ready to leave.

Piano

world while they were still children themselves.

Anthony tried to talk to him about it.

“I think you ought to start making your own life, son.

Don’t you wanna have your own home with your own family and some kids too?”

“Dad, I’m too young for all that business. I still need to find myself first.”

“Well, you ain’t gonna find yourself anything if you sit here all day doing nothing.”

“I go to church on Sundays, don’t I? And I offer to play the organ too.” Hank was good at playing the accompaniment for the hymns they sang. While he was playing, he could forget about everything else in his life and concentrate on that. No other thought entered his head as he worked his fingers across the keys. He received lots of compliments at the end of the service. It was mainly from old women who said they had a nice granddaughter to introduce him to, but it was always someone he thought too unattractive, too short, too talkative or sometimes it was someone he couldn’t find anything wrong with and this bothered him even more.

“But that ain’t enough. What about working for me at the butcher’s?”

“Dad, what makes you think a career in cutting up dead animals is appealing?” Hank looked precisely like his father from certain angles. He had a prominent brow that rested neatly above his thickly lashed eyes.

Anthony had the same brow line but had started to lose his hair.

“Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s much more fun for you to get drunk listening to Fats Waller records, just so you forget what a miserable life you lead. You know what?

You remind me of a hobo. You’re probably the only hobo I know that has a permanent residence.”

Anthony didn’t like arguing with his son but it was the only way he could get his point across. He wanted his son to tell him he knew what he wanted out of life and find something he was passionate about.

Rosetta, on the other hand, knew a job that her son would love. She didn’t want to mention it though. It would lead him off the moral path she had planned out for him. Just because she conceived him before she was married didn’t mean she was going to let him be damned for life. Rosetta preferred to send her son out to do odd jobs for neighbours and friends. At least this kept him occupied. In the afternoons she would send him to her cousin Maurice to help him with various repairs around his house. She knew he would soon find out about the jazz club’s lack of performers but she

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Piano

“I'm sorry, I know it’s none of my would be much more exciting than “That’s Sandra, she’ll be playing business but I’m just trying to find rehearsing at the church. trombone, and Harry, he just…er…” someone to play jazz here at the club “I brought this piano over from Robert struggled to introduce him. on opening.”

England and we still haven’t found “I supervise what goes on here “Jazz? Like Fats Waller?” anyone good enough to play. You during the day,” Harry said, with Robert realised Hank was can practice your hymns on it. It’s slight seriousness. interested. He handed him a few the least I can do after I knocked all “Hi, nice to meet you both. I more sheets of music that had your manuscripts to the floor.” didn’t realise I’d have an audience. blown a few feet away into Maybe I can come back, if the road. you’ll let me practice on undergraduate poetry “Sort of like Fats Waller, another day,” Hank said, yeah. Can you play any of his Haiku hoping that Reverend songs?”

Joseph wasn’t waiting for “I only play hymns. I’ve him.

A tarmac tapeworm never tried to play anything Harry gazed with Lives through the blackened built heart else because I don’t own an suspicious eyes at Robert.

Of the city’s form. organ of my own,” Hank “Hey Rob, can I speak to said, looking up to his living you for a moment out here,” Cars flashing red blood room window. His mother He said, pointing towards Along the dark blackened roads, was cooking his favourite the alcove where the Shining wet in rain. dish of chilli-fried chicken stairway began. Robert and chitterlings. He hoped walked over to him leaving Headlights of white blood, she hadn’t seen him talking Hank standing by the piano.

Staving off the night's darkness, to Robert because when he He admired the glow that Lighting up the vein went back home later there radiated from the natural would be a lot of questions wood and the glossy varnish.

Orange streetlights shine, like ‘Who was that man?

It reminded him of a shiny Illuminating the path What did he want? Why apple. The restoration work Of staring cat's eyes, were you talking to him for Robert had been doing on it so long?’ was hardly noticeable. To Lining the way back Of course Rosetta had Hank, this was a new piano.

To the giant concrete heart, seen them talking and she “Is everything okay?”

Beating to the flow. knew exactly what they were Robert whispered talking about. James had “What are you trying to Burning neon signs, already told her they were pull?

You told him he could Cannon-sounding club music, desperate for performers, yet practice just so you could A flickering strobe. she neglected to mention her listen to him play.” son could play. She looked “What’s the problem?”

By road flows the blood out the window again and “The problem is that he Keeping the concrete alive saw Robert ushering him doesn’t know he’s having an Feeding the city into jazz club. ‘Why should audition.” my son play the devil’s “So?” Marc Spencer music? If his father knew he “I’m trying to say that wasn’t going to church, he you’re gonna end up would go and smack some sense Robert suddenly remembered exploiting him.” into him,’ she thought.

Before Robert could reply, Hank that Harry and Sandra were still Hank entered the dark room downstairs and that he’d have to started playing one of the hymns he without question, figuring that introduce them to this new person. was going to practice at the church. whatever was behind that door ***

undergraduate fiction Play me anytime

Oh my gosh I think he’s got it.

Put the paycheck straight in his pocket.

He can play me Anytime he likes.

Wow yeah.

Where’d you find such a specimen of musical grace?

Did you know he was this good?

Or did you think he couldn’t even play double bass?

Oh my gosh he knows how to play it: Any song, just as long as you say it.

He can play me Anytime he likes.

Wow yeah.

I didn’t understand what I was reading. The letter wasn’t dated but it looked old. I didn’t think he wrote it recently before his death. But I didn’t understand because it hinted at his death. It must’ve been some kind of suicide note. Was this a joke? I never in my life thought Freddy was gay. Why didn’t he tell me? I was upset that he didn’t confide in me. Did he really think I was going to turn my back on him like Hilary? I wasn’t just upset, I was angry.

*** Lily went back to Freddy’s place earlier today and found something that I’d never thought I’d find. As I was sitting by the piano, I opened the keyboard lid and the knock of the wood against wood made a piece of paper fall out of the bottom of the piano. I picked up the yellowing sheet. I could see the ink of the writing through the back and it looked like the veins of a creature. It was a letter:

I

*** 1925

W

here we going tonight then, Louisa?” Irene asked.

“There’s this new place just opening tonight. I hear they’re gonna be playing some hot jazz.”

“That’s what they say about every club in this town,” Irene said.

“Yeah but we might as well check it out. It’s nice to go somewhere different on your birthday, isn’t it?”

Louisa said to Bertie while adjusting her outfit.

Bertie was celebrating her 18th birthday. They heard about the jazz club through some young people at church. Their mother spoke on a regular basis with Petunia Frost, who explained her husband was opening

My Dear Elizabeth, I am sorry. I didn’t want to do this but I couldn’t go on any more living a lie. I had to battle every day living in this weird mixed up world but perhaps it is best if the world goes on without me. Lily, my darling, I love you so much and I’m sorry to leave you. It is hard to write this because you have been a good cousin and friend to me and I feel as though I have disappointed you. I have not been as truthful with you as I should have been. Lily, this is what you deserve, the truth.

You were always happy in your quaint little house. I loved visiting you there every now and then and you would always ask me why I would seldom invite you back to mine.

The truth is, I wasn’t living alone. For the last eight years, I

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Some people play with apprehension.

He knows which buttons cause me tension.

He can play me Anytime he likes.

Piano

have had someone living with me. I couldn’t bring myself to introduce you to him because I knew you would want to know so many things, I thought it was easier for me not to explain anything. He was my partner, my lover. I am sorry I couldn’t tell you. It was a huge secret to keep from you and I don’t want you to think I was deliberately hiding it from you. I didn’t want you to stop talking to me just because of my different lifestyle, just the way Hilary did all those years ago when I tried to confide in her. She said ma and pa deserved a better son than me and it really hurt me, more than she could know. Now you can see why I had to laugh off all your comments of me getting married and having children. The reason I’ve decided to end it all is because my partner left me. He said he didn’t want to be with me any more so I felt I had no-one left that could possibly understand me for who I was.

Lily, it wasn’t just you that I was hiding this big secret from; it was the rest of the world too. I want you to remember me the way I used to be: a big smile on my face, playing my piano and jumping up and down trying to make people laugh. I can’t be that person anymore. My partner kept telling me I’d changed. The problem is, I’d gone too far in one direction to change back. I am sorry, Lily, I’m so sorry.

Love you always, Frederick Chambers

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Tonight, on opening night, Sandra was going to be playing trombone. She was excited but nervous. Not so much for herself but for Harry. She wondered whether he would keep up his piano playing with so many other potential distractions for him.

Robert wished Sandra good luck but she had a feeling there was something else on his mind that he wanted to say to her.

“So you’re ready to go on then, Sandra?” Robert asked her, looking at the buttons on her blouse and wondering whether she had intentionally left one of them undone. He liked Sandra a lot but was too much of a coward to admit his feelings because he dreaded to think what her family would do to him if he told her how he felt.

Besides, he had a good idea that she didn’t like him at all so his declaration would be wasted.

“I’m ready, I just hope Hank is.

We’d better get started soon ’cause this crowd is getting restless,” she replied.

“Oh, they’re just excited,” Robert, said reassuringly. “I wonder what my grandfather would say if he could see his old piano being used in a jazz club.”

Sandra smiled at him.

The club looked so different now it was full of people. He thought back to the first day and how he walked into the empty room and never thought it would look anything like it did now. Even over all that crowd noise, he could hear the muffled voices of Hank arguing with James.

“Okay man, just a second, I’ll be out soon, besides, people love to wait for talent,” Hank wailed.

“It’s your first night. You ain’t no star yet, so don’t push your luck.”

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was too nervous to hold a conversation with anyone. He kept rubbing the knuckles of each hand together to hide the fact they were shaking. But somewhere in his nervous rattle, he was happy to see the club looking so full. He had to bring down extra chairs from his apartment because of the amount of people. James was glad that he advertised in the local paper as well as telling everyone he came across.

“Who says word of mouth doesn’t work?” he asked Harry, who was perched on a bar stool next to him.

“Well it’s just lucky we know so many people, ain’t it?”

“Is Hank ready?” James asked nervously. Hank was due to start playing in less than ten minutes.

“He’s round the back in the storeroom, probably sucking on some kinda alcohol.”

“He’d better not be! And I told you, don’t call it a ‘storeroom’ anymore, it’s a dressing room.”

“Yeah, whatever, he’s in there with a girl that he stole off me.”

“Oh really?” James said and started walking towards the dressing room to see if he could get Hank to make an appearance.

Ever since he’d been practicing his music at the club, Hank had developed a thirst for fame. It was now beginning to surface as a problem because as his talent grew, so did his ego. Apart from his appearance, he was unrecognisable as the shy young man who walked into Robert that windy day. Robert, who was currently talking to Sandra, knew that he and James had created a sexual monster. His appetite for beautiful young ladies was never satisfied. Once he realised he could impress them with his musical talent, he would try his luck with everyone.

Piano

a new place. All three girls had matching outfits on. Each girl had a floaty knee-length dress with a lace trim around the neckline and hem.

Bertie’s was powder blue whilst Louisa had the red version and Irene the white. All three had a long string of pearls and an ostrich feather in their hair that matched their dresses.

“I hope we aren’t going to stay out too late. We don’t want mom to be worried about us,” said Bertie, who at eighteen still hadn’t found the urge to rebel from her parent’s rules like her two sisters did.

“Don’t worry about that. She won’t know what time we’ll be back anyway,” said Louisa.

Bertie always worried. She’d never been on a night out before.

“I’m just saying, we don’t wanna worry her, so we’ll just tell her we’re going to Rosie’s café,” Louisa said as she powdered her nose.

“Don’t worry, girls, we’ll see how it goes,” said Irene reassuringly.

“Hey, maybe they’ll let us sing if we ask them nicely.”

“I doubt that very much. It’s a professional club ain’t it?

Sometimes, Irene, you come up with the strangest suggestions,” said Louisa.

The girls enjoyed singing. They often got together and practiced harmonising with each other on hymns and popular songs they heard on the wireless. They liked singing in the church choir but didn’t enjoy it as much as singing together as a trio.

When each of them had finished preening their way to perfection, they came out their front door, with their heels clomping against the sidewalk and their laughter rising up through the dark street.

The jazz club was pulling in a decent sized crowd. James Frost

undergraduate fiction

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“It was passable,” Irene said, her voice so unintentionally loud so that Hank and the rest of the club heard. Hank stared at her and the whole room became silent.

“Passable?” Hank asked. “I’ve been practicing piano for ten hours a day, I’ve made my fingers so sore I couldn’t even hold a glass and now someone is fresh enough to say my performance was ‘passable’?”

Before Hank had a chance to get angry, Robert jumped onto the stage and tried to calm him down. He whispered something in his ear but it didn’t seem to help matters. Hank tried to punch Robert in the jaw but he missed and stumbled onto the piano stool. Harry appeared out of nowhere to introduce the next act. The crowd was also getting rowdy and was clapping at Hank’s spectacular finale.

“Okay folks, we’ve got a bright young performer for you now. She is my niece Sandra and...” Harry stopped as Hank fell from the piano stool to the floor. “…Boy oh boy can she blow that trombone,” he said nervously and started the applause to get her on stage.

Sandra shook her head. She didn’t feel like performing now but got up on stage anyway and started playing her favourite swing medley.

Everything was a mess. As Sandra was playing, she looked around at what people were doing: drinking, smoking and laughing with a hysterical glint in their eyes. She wanted it to be more civilised. She heard the smash of glass as it hit the floor. She turned around to see Robert sitting on the piano stool, slumped against the instrument. His eyes looked exhausted. It was hot and people took their layers of clothing off, throwing them to the floor with spontaneity before getting up to dance. It wasn’t the perfect set-up, Sandra thought, but they all seemed to be enjoying it.

Robert attempted to accompany Sandra on the piano. He decided to stick to the simplest of chords but Sandra was flying off on her improvisation and he couldn’t play fast enough to keep up. The crowd laughed at him thinking he was purely there for comedy purposes. Sandra looked out at the smoke cloud that hung above the bobbing heads. In the distance, by the bar, she could see Hank talking to the woman that had offended him earlier. He had turned into such a sly dog and she didn’t like him one bit. Did everyone always have to change for the worst when they got into this business? She thought. The only person that had changed for the better was Robert. He wasn’t shy and awkward anymore. He was a more confident version of the man that had walked into the jazz club just over a

Piano

The dressing room looked a state. Hank’s clothes were draped over lamps and chairs and there where various pairs of shoes, men’s and women’s, strewn across the floor.

On the other side of the club, three young ladies entered the front door and made their way towards the tables. Realising there was no spaces to sit; they stood in a line by the bar. Louisa lit a cigarette and put it right on the edge of her lips, it was a wonder it didn’t fall out.

“You smoke?” Bertie said with shock as she looked at her sister.

“Yeah, of course, it’s good for the nerves, you know.”

“And what have you got to be nervous about?”

“Okay, you got me, I do it ’cause I enjoy it.”

“Welcome, welcome everybody to what can only be described as a musical extravaganza for your ears,” James addressed the crowd. He noticed the bright faces of people, eager to hear some good quality jazz.

“I’d just like to say 'welcome to Jimmy’s Jazz Joint’. I want you to feel at home, so make yourselves comfortable. Now, I will bring on our first act of the evening: a talented young pianist who goes by the name of Hank.”

“Honky-Tonk Hank” a voice said from behind the stage.

“Yeah, okay. Please give a cheer for Honky-Tonk Hank.”

The audience applauded as a seemingly tipsy man came to the stage. He bowed, thanked the crowd and sat down on the piano stool and began to play Laugh with me, not at me, one of his own compositions. The crowd got into it very easily, but they weren’t all looking at Hank.

“Have you noticed that people are staring at us, I wish we’d found seats,” Bertie whispered to her sisters.

“That’s because we all look so swell, honey!” Louisa said, smiling at Bertie.

“Well you girls had better get used to people looking, ‘cause we’re gonna be on that stage later,” Irene said.

“What are you talking about? We ain’t performing here, mom would kill us,” Bertie said.

“What mom doesn’t know, won’t kill her,” Louisa said.

The crowd clapped and cheered at the end of Hank’s performance. Hank bowed slightly more graciously than he had at the beginning.

“Thank you, thank you all. What did y'all think of that?”

The crowd carried on clapping.

undergraduate fiction IRENE: Baby you left me.

BERTIE: Left me, I was all alone.

IRENE: I said, baby you left me.

LOUISA: Left me out in the cold.

BERTIE: You didn’t mean to.

IRENE: That’s what you told me.

LOUISA: But that excuse is getting old.

IRENE: Woo… HANK’S SOLO IRENE: Baby it's over.

BERTIE: Ain’t nothing left for you to say.

IRENE: I said, baby it's over.

LOUISA: If not tomorrow then today.

BERTIE: You see I’m leaving, IRENE: Because you’re two-faced.

LOUISA: So don’t be trying to make me stay.

BERTIE: Oh boy, I’m leaving.

IRENE: (spoken) I should’ve done so long ago but I never had the guts to go through with it so…

LOUISA: Don’t be trying to make me stay.

***

Leaving when I’ve got the chance

***

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IRENE: They said they saw you in the back of a jazz club, BERTIE: getting friendly with some dame.

IRENE: They said they saw you in the back of a jazz club.

LOUISA: I doubt you even knew her name.

BERTIE: You didn’t mean to.

IRENE: That’s what you told me.

LOUISA: So now go hang your head in shame.

S

o what did we all think of that guys?” Ryan asked as he lifted the needle off the record. The gramophone he brought in reminded me of the one my mother owned. In fact, she told me that she named me Lily after the lily-like shape of the gramophone’s speaker.

“I couldn’t hear it very well. It was too grainy,” moaned Aneeka, the youngest of the group. “Why didn’t they make a better recording?”

“The music was alright, quite bluesy. The voices of the singers were strong but the lyrics were a bit basic,” said Tony. “No offence Lily.

I mean, they probably thought it was good turn of phrase or something but to be honest, the vocabulary isn’t that great. It could be more lyrically inventive if you ask me.”

I thought the group would enjoy the Hartman sisters' record. Why would they give me so many negative comments? These songs brought me a personal happiness that I won’t let anyone destroy…just because they think ‘the lyrics were a bit basic’. They probably didn’t understand them. This was my only copy of the Hartman sisters record.

Of course, they recorded it a few weeks after that first performance on opening night but together with the story she used to tell me, it was a complete memory. It’s a story she told me many times. She had it all planned out and spoke to Hank at church about whether they could sing with him on opening night. He agreed but said he didn’t have time to convince James or Robert to give the girls an audition. So they made up this idea of the girls being hecklers to Hank’s mock drunkenness. She always said that it was the funniest thing she ever did because it was so convincing. She

Piano

month ago. Sandra looked at him again as he sat there. They held a gaze for a few seconds. She felt something strange inside her but she didn’t know if it was attraction or just that she felt sorry for him. Of course she would never tell him how she felt, there were so many differences between them it was unthinkable.

People cheered as Sandra finished her performance. She stepped down from the stage to make way for Hank once more. He didn’t look as unruly as he did before and she hoped his performance would reflect this.

“How's about we bring some girls on who think they can sing against my ‘passable’ piano playing?”

Hank said, curling his lips into a smile as though it had all been an act.

“What is that fool doing now?”

James asked. “He's ruining the order of things.” He fumbled with his pocket watch before putting it back in his jacket.

Louisa, Bertie and Irene joined Hank on the stage.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.

Have you seen the crazy bunch of people that are watching?” Bertie said.

Stella, the woman who auditioned to James in that strange manner, was jumping up and down and fanning herself with her jewelled hat.

“Lets get goin’,” Hank shouted and pounced into the first few bars of the song that just so happened to be one the girls were practicing a few hours earlier.

undergraduate fiction

*** In Retrospect If I could cry real salty tears, My varnish would dissolve, But I’ve been silent for forty years So what would that resolve?

No warmth of human hand has played, My strong and sturdy keys.

My crevices are filled with dust, Seems more like centuries.

And what will happen to me now?

Perhaps my time has come.

To be cut into firewood, But will my soul live on?

Please play on me one last song, A hopeful melody, So music can awake once more My tuneful memory.

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“I’m not convinced. If you didn’t mention anything Lily, I think we would’ve been none the wiser,” said Elvira, who arched her eyebrow and turned her mouth up at me. “Just like if a story was inspired by a song, we wouldn’t necessarily know unless the author told us.”

“But it’s all about emotion again, you would notice it in the structure.” I said.

“He is a good pianist though,” said Simi.

“Well, you’ll be interested to know that it was his father playing piano on my mum’s record, and it’s the same piano.”

There was a chorus of “oh, okay” from all the members. I don’t think they were that interested.

“You know, for a music appreciation society, you lot aren’t very appreciative!” I said, realising I was getting angry.

I think I knew who would appreciate such a legacy that my family was leaving behind. I decided then to donate the piano to the Jazz Institute, where people could admire its beauty and wonder about the stories behind it. I think Freddy would’ve liked that a lot. I wanted to go home at that point and start planning the piano’s final journey. I sat back and tried to forget where I was by listening to the gramophone in my head that was playing Little Lily’s Swing.

Piano

managed to keep it a secret from her sisters too. After the performance, James had dollar signs in his eyes and asked them to be part of the house band along with Sandra.

“I think the lyrics were supposed to be basic. Isn’t that right Lily?”

“Actually I don’t think my mum and her sisters really cared for lyrical quality. They were more concerned with feelings and I think they did a good job of it. After all, isn’t that what blues is about?” I said hoping that someone would agree with me but everyone remained silent.

“That’s a good point Lily. Blues is about emotions above everything else.”

“Did a lot of people buy the record?” Simi asked.

“My mother and aunts made a few copies to sell at the bar but people at the time preferred to come into the club to see them for real.”

“You’ve brought along another record for us to listen to, haven’t you Lily? It’s by your cousin Fred who, sadly, passed away quite recently?”

“Freddy, yes. He was an extraordinary pianist who surpassed everything his father taught him. I have a few of his records because he did a lot of stuff throughout his life.” I said and gave him the record, which still had a shine to it, being at least thirty years newer than my mother's, which now had a matte finish. He placed it on the turntable and placed the needle gently down.

How soothing it was to hear Freddy’s opening to ‘Riviera.’ I closed my eyes and imagined I was sitting by his piano as he played.

“I couldn’t keep up with that one,” said Aneeka. “It was too fast at some points.”

“Well it was supposed to be varied. Freddy told me that he wrote this piece as a story and as he played it, he would tell himself the story so that he could remember which section came next.”

“That sounds a bit pointless to me, why not write each bit down?” said Tony, who liked to argue about everything so I saw it coming.

“The point is so that he didn’t have to write it down, he created a narrative to remember.”

“Isn’t that a waste? All the audience would experience is the piece he is playing. I'm sure they would love to experience the story too,” said Ryan, who was starting to question my explanations.

“But surely the audience does get to experience a story, because the musical structure of the piece mirrors the structure of a story,” said Dennis Ray, who up until that point hadn’t spoken.