A Prayer

Explain the world to me in my dreams
That knowing may guide my night
Though when I wake the knowledge may be gone
The having known forever remains

Know the world for me in my waking
That it may be hers through my eyes
And let this little thing forever be
A sign for those to come

Let thought the tiger abide
There is no peace here

Like a Muggins

This is my first non-fiction entry since my shamefaced, ninja-silent return to the magic of the interweb.

Good lord, look at all that blank space.

Um.

I left the internet two years or so ago, saying that I didn't feel the need to blog anymore; that it had become a chore to fulfil instead of a pleasure or even a catharsis. I deleted my blog, said farewell to my literally teens of readers, and sloped off. Well, now I need to have a corner to rant in again.

My previous effort was ridiculously frank; I bared my chest and wailed at the computer and hid nothing. This time won't be like that, I suspect. I will use this mostly to put up things that I have made, and that probably fairly infrequently, in contrast with the glut of posts so far. Photos might happen soon. There will be some ranting, though, at some point. When I began to type this entry I thought it would contain rather a lot of ranting, and maybe some expletives for good measure. However, this isn't the time.

Listen (W.I.P.)

Listen:
When this is ended, you will remember three things.

The first will come by accident
On a summer's day
You will be eating an orange in the shade
And the breeze will bring you
Memories of dancers
Of the heavy smells
And solemn mysteries.

I dreamt a world of cranes.
I flew among and over them
And though I could not see
To what purpose they swung and dipped,
I knew their work would never end
That what was to come
Could not surpass.

The fruit in your hands
Will become a sphere of my flesh,
And you will eat.

Four Things (W.I.P)

At our most desperately broke, when I’d been unemployed for a year, Jenna was chewing through every prescription drug the doctors could throw at her melting brain, and Lisa was still two years short of school, we barely lived off every government benefit we could beg in a sub-let basement studio half an hour’s walk from any recognisable area of east London; I guess it was Mid-Ham, if you want. All three of us ate, and slept, and cooked, and Lisa sang and danced and cried and ran and Jenna drew, and sat, and stared, and I wrote and self-dramatised and played at holding a family together that in fact I had no hope or intention of saving, at least in its current form, and Jenna and I almost never, ever fucked, in one yellowed, subterranean room with charcoal carpet tiles taped over the floor, excluding the hospital-green linoleum-covered ‘kitchenette’. Our bowels moved and our ablutions were performed in a peeling cupboard we shared with the anonymous inhabitants of, I think, four similar holes.

Lisa spent most of this time playing with a toy horse my grandfather had made for me. I have to this day no idea how he fashioned this little concoction of wood, springs, and wire, but however the mechanism functioned, the upshot was that, when pulled along with a string, the horse would follow, not on wheels but at a fragile trot. He could be upset by pulling too hard, or not hard enough, and any obstacle would topple him, but the horse was Lisa’s greatest joy, as it had been mine; this was a particular relief at a time when actually buying a toy was out of the question. It was a roughly-carved, childishly painted, oft-repaired thing, a fabulous thing, an object I envied every time Lisa caressed it with her fat, beautiful hands. I could not have her play with it when I wrote; the plod of uneven hooves on the carpet tiles, or worse, the slap on lino, would unnerve me with a jealous desire to be small enough to justify tearing it from her arms and cradling it and abdicating. So Lisa would be unsettled as I wrote, and Jenna would draw, always dancers and birds. What’s that, mummy, it’s a dancer, why are you drawing a dancer, mummy.

‘I like to remind myself how ugly anything can be if you pin it to a piece of paper’.

Always looking at me.

She said crap like that a lot. It really helped when she had an appointment. She always presented well, especially when it meant she could score a point, be it against me or against a medical professional. She didn’t care an inch that her daughter didn’t understand, she didn’t care an inch that her daughter understood just well enough to start crying, she didn’t care an inch that the same thing happened every day, it seemed. She held our sobbing child in our pathetic home, in her pathetic, flaccid arms, and poured recrimination from her sallow eyes, blue spots in yellow cups in a purple shroud.

Jenna Mackie died at the age of thirty-two in a nice house on a nice street a very long way from her daughter, which is as it should be. Her grave lives in my mind always accompanied by her second husband, who wanted so badly to save her. Never trust a man who wants to to save a woman who is beyond it, because he will destroy her faster than anything else, and himself too, by the by. Jenna, lovely Jenna, bitch, was an addled vortex, sucking love from whoever gave it, the more, the more quickly and ferociously. She sucked everything that sweet, kind, stupid man could give her, and when he was almost dry, she took every pill in the house, I mean, a lot of pills, and followed it up with oven cleaner, just to be sure, and maybe for a flourish. I heard from elsewhere that she’d draped some used condoms, not his, but hers anyway, around the place for the husband to find, the ultimate suicide note – not only, but also. She was naked and frothed up and four hours dead and five hours last fucked when he came home. Thank all things holy they hadn’t a child.

I would like to say that he will be better off without her, but no-one was ever better off after Jenna. That was the first of the four things she had pinned to her door when I first knew her.

You will not be better off without me.

It was at the world, and once you were swept in by the outer arms of her furious, pointless little storm it was irremediably true, forever and ever amen. She made your world smaller and smaller until there was no room in it for anything but her: not just lovers, but friends, flatmates, her ruined mother, I hope not yet our child.

My first relationship after I finally achieved escape velocity, 1000 small atrocities after I should have, was with a woman who had been Jenna’s confidante some years before; she had been discarded without warning after half a year of abuse, the solvent of her adoring company worn out. Lisa loved Anna, loved her cakes and her full, chubby black fingers which stroked Lisa’s hair as they sang together, and I loved her, because she had known my now ex-wife well enough that we could talk of her endlessly. It seemed for a time that we would spend our whole lives together, conducting a shared post-mortem on our gall-encrusted love for the irreplaceable, unforgettable Jenna: Jenna, who transcended sexuality, who overcame all objections, and became the object of every unlucky acquaintance’s jealous, horrific devotion. We talked of her, honestly and sadly, and I held Anna’s adipose hands with their mother-of-pearl fingernails and the semi-permanent burns just below both thumbs as she revealed, unawares, a love that certainly eclipsed ours for each other, and perhaps matched, in its unrequited intensity, even mine for Jenna. When she remembered Jenna fondly, Anna would smile a great cracked-earth smile and I would realise how happy a person she had been, and how much she had had taken away from her, and I would love her all the more.

What drew us together of course tore us apart, as our burgeoning feelings for each other and our eternal ones for Jenna crossed with increasing frequency. A shared notion became a cause for envy or mistrust, and the honest core of our communication, always her, became careful, tentative. The ruptures revealed how little we had in common, how little this love was in comparison to that which spawned it, and so our runt love died. At least the resigned animosity that grew up in its place bore the clear hallmarks of its progenitor, so that we could remember Jenna even as we parted, point two of her little manifesto – You will never forget me – proven at a double remove. Thanks for the memories.

I was a midway through my PhD when I first encountered the woman who would come to overshadow my life; Jenna was a surly, feral undergraduate in an introductory seminar I taught, inspiring rather unwholesome thoughts that made it all the more difficult to try to inspire bored teenagers to care about Hume. Initially, while noticing her beauty with passing indifference – as one must when tutoring eighteen-year-old girls – I had found her irritating, her sullenness overshadowing the whole class and her full, spiteful lips only parting to snap some withering and wholly unhelpful remark at one of her nervous peers. She must already have had me by then, because the force with which I reacted the first time she smiled at a crack I made in class belonged to a maiden in romantic fiction rather than a diffident, posing postgraduate.

I left Elaine, my girlfriend of three years, left my supposed soul-mate, left our shared flat, left our planned future, two months after that smile: she seemed too stunned to be truly upset, or so I thought. Many years later, when we were firm friends and occasional lovers, she told me that she had met Jenna, once, before I left, before she knew that I had been unfaithful to her with a girl six years her junior. Jenna had been hand in hand with the deputy head of our department, buying groceries and grinning; interest piqued by a truly academic love of gossip, Elaine had asked around to identify the ingénue for whom our superior was risking his career. When she realised for whom I was leaving her, she told me (with no little glee), she’d looked forward to hearing of me lying in the bed I’d made only to find it riddled with vipers. In fact, Jenna was still screwing the professor a full year into our marriage. I found out a week before the wedding, a month after her graduation, but was powerless to remove him; their affair, as bleak, which had destroyed his marriage, only ended when he suffered a non-fatal stroke that affected his speech, causing Jenna to lose all interest and leaving him in the care of his hollow wife. She informed me one evening, as though passing on news of distant acquaintance’s ill fortune, heard third-hand; she was pregnant with Lisa at the time. I could not help but think the blighted man lucky, even as a clenched fist of triumph flowered in my stomach.

That triumph was to haunt my ugliest moments. I felt it most strongly standing at Jenna’s graveside, next to her second husband, triumph over her because I’d outlived her, triumph over him because he was the one who’d spend the rest of his life feeling he’d killed her, triumph because our daughter was now mine, triumph because now, at last, every time she corrupted my dreams, I could awake and remind myself that she was gone, forever, and it was only the bit of her horror that she had gifted me that could torture me; only my imagination, so much weaker than hers, that could craft new punishments. That night I comforted my daughter, my daughter, relishing the words, suffused with a sense of victory.

In Paradisum (more Kaspar stuff)

Life as we would now understand it came to a choking end over the spring of 2044. The underground paramilitary wing of a pressure group lobbying for a decrease in the global population, despairing of progress through political means, released a virus targeted at removing all those with a blood type other than AB- - thereby destroying more than 99% of the world’s population and leaving as many people across the globe as had existed in Germany at the time of the virus’ release. By a staggering oversight, this virus happened to decimate the group itself, leaving the world short both of humans generally and of homicidal lunatics specifically.

Kaspar reflected on this as he sat, smoking his pipe, on Hampstead Heath; June 17, 2044, was his 62^nd Birthday.

Aleanna had perished in those horrible days, expiring toward the end of April, and Kaspar had wept for her for a time, wept sorely. Summer came, though, and quiet started to settle around him, and Kaspar found a peace that surprised and pleased him. He pictured Aleanna without sadness now, fond memories tinged with pain only in their last days together. She had tolerated him, and come to love him, and he would remain grateful for that to the end of his days.

The thing, however, that most appealed to Kaspar about his brave new world, apart from that lovely quiet, was that he no longer needed to be tolerated. He sought understanding from no-one, not least because he saw no-one from whom to seek it. He had spend the last four days walking to London, just so as to see this view on his birthday, and could count on fingers and toes the people he had seen. Armed in anticipation of greater numbers, he had instead found the capital deserted; as the worst came, many had crawled away from the city in the hope of escaping the disease, only to die instead in Romford, Norwich, Reading, or a smaller place, Colne Engaine or Shere. So there was almost no-one here to sully the summer-holiday school hall of London.

Looting, a perilous activity in March, was commonplace and peaceful now that so few remained; Kaspar still left some change in each abandoned store as he topped up his tobacco stockpile, reasoning that he was unlikely to have much use for the British Pound before his erupting cells claimed his life. A barter culture, he supposed, would spring up when things returned to something like normal.

He was not worried about who would run things, because no-one had shown much aptitude for it before. Kaspar assumed that the protected blood type would be spread evenly across the populace, hopefully preserving enough engineers and so forth to prevent nuclear meltdowns, but he didn’t find himself particularly troubled by the possibility that this was not the case. The tobacco and the sunshine and Aleanna

s memory and the skyline, some plumes of smoke rising darkly but unthreateningly, like a child’s Halloween mask, absorbed his whole world. Kaspar smiled.

Bartering what? Tinned goods, he guessed, at least until some industrious folk revived agricultural practices. The livestock still seemed healthy; animals seemed largely unaffected by the socially conscious plague. Each thing, thought Kaspar, carries its own end with it; perhaps the whole race had had this close encoded in it from the start. Kaspar wondered whether that was his thought, or someone else’s. Maybe Aleanna’s. Oh well. He puffed, found the embers out, and slowly tapped out, refilled, relit his pipe, enjoying the each stage and the smell and good god the tie, the ease of it all. Winter would be harder, he thought, and took a long, calming breath.

Splinters

I’ve always been interested in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die because, as I see it, if it does, you don’t; you’d just shuttle back and forth between your birth and your impending death forever as replay absorbed replay absorbed replay. Sure, to the casual observer you might be seen to die, to hit that pavement or that car or that internal, biological wall, but your personal time would, like one of Zeno’s arrows, be reduced to infinite splinters, your end unreachable. As a child I thought that this might be what caused déjà vu, and whenever I felt that strange little itch I wondered how many times I’d been through my own story, and whether I’d remember any more next time round.

During my unfortunately prolonged adolescence, as the fear of death that was to gently asphyxiate my life slowly took hold, I yearned for this eternal, purgatorial recapitulation to be our fate, but no such luck. Just before you die – at least where death comes suddenly, inevitably, and gives you just enough time to recognise it – the main sense is of mental paralysis, as if something has thrown you totally off your train of thought. If anything comes to you, it is likely to be supremely trivial; you are much more likely to think of an uncompleted chore or remember something that made you laugh a few weeks before than anything to which you can cling. It is very difficult to get a real hold on the fact that you are about to die, and where you would hope for a memory of your lover or your child or anyone who once mattered to you, you are likely instead to die thinking of nothing much at all.

So Bright

It happens like this. At some point on any given day, at seemingly random intervals and with no discernible pattern, I will notice something slip. This is the only indicator, and it usually comes so close to the start of the episode that it affords me little or no time to brace myself. A finger fumbles on a keyboard or a mug drops or someone stumbles. At first I imagined that this started it, that a small wrongness opened a door for a greater one, but now I believe that it is not causation but correlation, the seeping of the wrong time into my world - the first soft wavelets of the change unsettling one or a few things before the full effect has time to spread out and engulf everything. Soon colours alter and fade, stone-washed and pastel, and no sounds come.

A man stood on the curb ahead of me drops the mobile phone into which he was talking. The phone is safely cradled in his hand, but without the pause that seems in one's mind to precede an event or the segue that indicates cause, it’s dropping to the floor, as if hand and phone moved at different speeds. About half-way down, the object will accelerate unnaturally. The man’s expressions, his reactions, will pick up pace; now I have about ten seconds to find somewhere safe before the rest of the world is shifting so fast that I can’t move. People’s faces are a good guide, because they are changed by the sudden rapidity of movement; blinks and glances build a blurred cataract over the eyeball and a purple stain above and below, as the lids move too fast; the teeth of a person sat in conversation seem to become liquid, leaving trails. It is not that their time has become fast, but that mine has become slow; I solidify and become brittle, and they all carry on as before. I drop out of their world, unable to keep up.

An episode can last seconds or days; I think they may be becoming longer and one day I shall be imprisoned forever, though I cannot say. I have seen others, sometimes, trapped like me. Their eyes are so bright in a world of muted shades. Someone held for the first time can be destroyed so easily, stuck in the wrong path, confused, panicked, trampled by a stampede of commuters, or ripped through by paper airplanes and tennis balls that move like the inexorable bullets of bathos. You have to find a place devoid of people as quickly as you can, and it is the hardest thing you can ever do because you are running to save your life and being held back ever more with each passing moment, until you freeze, suspended in mid-air as you fall down a man-hole, jammed in a disused doorway with your trailing leg left dangling dangerously in the street. No one can see you more than five seconds in, because you fade from their sight like a myth, unless they were staring at you when it began. Then you are locked for them like a bronze sculpture in a square, and they cannot understand why you are rigid, why you cannot move or talk, or why no-one else can see you there.

The first time I saw another it was a young woman; she was crouching beside a small tree in a park where I was lying under a bench. Her eyes, so bright, were fixed on me, feeding me with hope, and we watched each other until it passed. As it receded I rose from my hiding place and ran, my limbs gradually building up speed, my body flooding with relief and with the freedom of my sudden fluidity. She seemed as though she might flee but she stayed ever so still, almost as if she were still trapped, until I wrapped my arms around her in disbelief and she yielded to me.

We talked for days, barely sleeping or eating. She had first felt time go wrong as a small child; a vase fell and her mother, running from another room, could not see her by the time she arrived. The police nearly trampled her while they searched the house. She was better than me at hiding, more used to it. She told me that there were many others trapped, but that she had never before seen two people begin and end a phase in synch. It seems romantic and absurd but it felt like a sign and I wanted to hold her to me and never relinquish that grasp because she was mine and we could always hide together.

Her eyes, so bright, transfixed me as she told me of her loneliness, of her fears, of the way that she used her slow time in her mind. She talked of the unparalleled joy and the incredulity she had felt as she watched me crawl under that bench opposite her tree, and of how she had locked her gaze upon me so as to see whether we were released together, and then I heard a door slam too loud and her eyes glazed with buzzing motion and her teeth began to drip and cling to each other and her hands blurred into a solid arc, and I tried to scream but it was too late and my mouth would not move and no sound would come. I saw her face recoil too fast with the sudden realisation that she was alone as before, and I knew that my frozen mask, unable to respond, must have made her feel sick, as I did. She left and I could not cry for three days, because for three days I could not do anything except replay in my mind those eyes, so bright, clouding over.

Fragments of Kaspar Stuff

When his parents split, Kaspar was distraught. He tried desperately to put it in perspective; he had heard storied of, and indeed known, children who had suffered much greater pains than he; indeed, as he would come to realise and, to an extent, already know, Kaspar had led a remarkably untroubled, even idyllic existence, a charmed childhood untouched by violence or poverty or hunger or fear or even a threat of any of these things; but your appreciation of any emotion can only be measured against the scale of your own experience. While the abstract spectrum of life’s possibilities stretches ever more impossibly to each horizon, Kaspar knew only his own little patch, comfortably toward the happier end of the range; for him, the end of his parents’ marriage was like suddenly developing the ability to see into the infrared.

I met Kaspar in Hyde Park in the summer of 20--, as we stood side-by-side watching the sun set over the Serpentine from the bridge at its western end. The wavelets graded away from milky black under us to shimmering pinks and off-whites around the island and the silhouetted pedaloes, bisected by a broad spit of blind white.

Just before the sun fell into the bank of clouds, there to enrich them with rubies and gold, a seagull flew towards us, banked and turned in the near-lilac overhead, and swooped low, following the narrowing white line and rising, a black kite, just as the sun dropped. The line became shorter, burnished. Herons skidded in, their undercarriages bobbing gently beneath them, and now the lake was awash with lapping pink, blue, white; the sun held itself a moment, a blazing amber setting false fire to the landscaped treetops, and fell away over a flotilla of origami seagulls.

Peace

There is a place where angels tread, and it is between our world and nothing. Sometimes time gets stuck, and then I can see them walking between us and through us. Their movements have a grace that is just a little beyond human, but they are very much alive. They have wings and dress in white, and of course they glow strangely, because that is what an angel should do. Their eyes, though, are not marble, or frescoed plain, but sharp and bright with irises the colour of amethysts. Nor are they, as I had always presumed, asexual androgynes, but male and female, sensual, tactile, and perfumed, a little like warm lilies. They hold people in their arms and whisper, stroke their cheeks and smooth their brows. They are among us at all times, and mostly we cannot feel them or hear them, and it is a shame, because they could save us, I think.

When time stops, colours change: they feel bright and old, the sea in the sunshine, the shining skin of a grandmother’s hand in your memory of childhood. People, frozen thus, take on a ridiculous aspect, for human faces only make sense in perpetual motion. In the twilight where angels move I am surrounded by carnival masks, the macabre playthings of a childish taxidermist. The angels move freely, unnoticed, unhurried. Some talk to each other, though I can never hear what they say; some touch each other and smile, great shining smiles that speak of such a capacity for joy. I do not know if anyone else sees, or knows; no-one ever speaks of it, though I understand that it would make potentially embarrassing dinner-party conversation: ‘Well, there were a couple of angels in the office trying to calm James down, you know, James from Archives, only he was frozen too so I don’t really know if it was working’, you would say, and everyone would stare indignantly at their cutlery as if it had just asked them to turn the music down. Perhaps one day I’ll do that, raise the topic over the braised whatever, ask for the salt and talk of angels. Everyone should talk of angels.

The first time I found that the world had stopped, I could only barely see them. It was more an intimation of presence and motion, a religiously unfounded hint of unaloneness, glances of light in the corner of my eye, shadows. Each time thereafter they became a little clearer, resolving themselves gently; for the last few months they have been perfectly visible, violating all I once knew blatantly and unashamedly. Sometimes I think that they know I can see them; perhaps we are not supposed to, which is why, I guess, it so rarely comes up at dinner parties.

I do not know if time stops, or if I fall out of it; the effect is of everything halting suddenly. The length of each instance and the intervals between occurrences are unpredictable; the first time seemed days long, while on other occasions it varies from a few moments to several months. Once, and once alone, I felt frozen for something like years, decades; so long that I first gave up hope of awaking, and then gradually forgot that life had ever happened, that there had been anything other than this isolated thought before an interminable showreel of angels and mannequins. Still I struggle to divine what is memory and what is imagination from that lifetime of pause. Ah, but angels. Never can you fall out of love with angels once you have seen them. Faces of sky and hands of wind and eyes of stars, a touch like a falling leaf and a voice like music that sings through your bones and all the ages and a presence like the home you have searched unwittingly for through all the long years of your life, an unexpected Ithaca.

There is an angel that walks with me now, at my side at all times. She holds me and explains things and takes away my many fears, except the one that I might lose her. All the light of the world shines through her, and her hand lies so lightly. Her tread is a finger on your cheek.

I stood frozen where angels walk when she appeared directly before me and walked forward and brought herself close to me. Her hand on my face, her voice in my mind, her eyes in my heart. I know that you can see, her voice said, and that you fear. These were not her words, nor do they have the weight of what she said; they are merely a transcription of the meaning of what she spoke, a scribbled melody only vaguely redolent of the symphony from which it is taken. She spoke in my head with image and sound, soft and simple and infinite of meaning. Peace, said her voice, and my head rang with it, tolling a sound to calm the landscape of the whole universe.

She stroked my hair and the colours changed back, not in a snap as usual, but slowly, my foot falling to the ground as if cushioned, and the world swelling back to life.

It was strange not to see her fade away, through translucence to transparency and then nothingness, as the world phased to the fore, as the lens of my life was refocused. She simply stood before me, her hand on my head, her smile eclipsing those who passed and the buildings around and the sun itself, and peace, peace, the voice still echoing in my mind but now, gentle, in my ears too, a sound of the world, cutting effortlessly through car engines and vendors’ shouts, of the same stuff as them. Her hand fell to mine, and I had so many and no questions, because peace, peace.

We walked, hand in hand, like soft glass, her hand, for many hours, silent and smiling. Once, I pointed at a small beauty, the sun hitting the windows of an old building, and she laughed, a half-full wine glass tapped by a fingernail, warm and clear and soft, like a waterfall in a cathedral.

By the river, that day or another, as we stood wrapped in my thoughts, transfixed by water, I felt panic rise and silence break.

‘How do I know you are an angel?’

Her smile subsided only slightly and her eyes showed serene insight and affirmation and peace. ‘You do know. You have seen and you have felt. Doubt will pass’, and she smiled that wondrous smile and her skin was so soft. ‘I know you struggle with what seems new and untold, but you have seen us move and heard my voice, and you know’.

Warmth took me but I felt a rebel urge, spite and envy and fear. ‘Angels can fly’, I said. ‘Fly’. I hurled myself over the wall and into the water many metres below. As I fell and she stayed, I felt taught, overstretched. The water slapped me like an errant child.

I fought my way heavily to the surface to find her standing on the water, wavelets lapping her bare toes. The bricked channel built around the river rang with her beautiful laugh, and her eyes gleamed brighter than before; as she offered me a hand, I felt ridiculous and loved and weak and strong in her, and peace.

The Sea

The sea is grey and flat and there is no-one else here. You stand at the water's lapping edge, your feet half-drowned and your legs half frozen as the wind tries to undress you, tearing at your hair and your clothes with unseemly haste while your toes curl round pebbles and your left trouser-leg slips a little. Rearrange it or ignore it? Perhaps you should skim a stone as a child might, or maybe you could run along the shore and feel free, share a moment of trite liberation with no-one but nature and me. You could wade forth into the sea, ungainly but unbowed, caring not a jot for the trousers or the woollen jumper or your watch; maybe, at chest depth, you will discard them with an unconscious flourish, and swim out with no care for the return journey.

Or you could take a few steps back, dry your feet with your socks, pick up your shoes and tramp back to the car, turning just once to look at the flat unending sea reflecting a slate sky laden with black puffs of cloud, bizarrely threatening as cotton wool rolled in soot. You could open the door, pull on your shoes and swing yourself into position just as the rain came down, closing the door, turning the key, flicking on the lights and the wipers in one swift movement, forgetting the sea as you look over your shoulder to reverse out of the gravel car-park.

Your mousy hair is criss-crossing your eyes when the rain starts and the sky cracks above you. You pull your arms around you and feel the drag of wet wool on the skin of your upper arms. Laugh just a little as your sinking trouser-leg completed its descent and plops gracelessly into the water. Your legs are sharppained now as you shake with laughter and drops sting your cheeks. Have you ever swum back stroke with the rain on your face? Let’s. You turn and walk backwards into the sea; you can just see the car, there, through the downpour. Stumbling a little, you wade back until the water is at your waste, your breasts, your neck, then roll your head back, bring your legs up, try to wipe the hair from your face, close your eyes, and start to swim. Open your eyes from time to time, it’s hard in the rain but it’s worth it. Keep a steady pace, stay with me. Don’t rush, you’ll tire and find yourself stranded in sight of land. Breathe. Gentle. Rest your arms and legs each as needs be; if you’re tired we can stop and float a while. It should have stopped raining by now, eased off a little. The water’s still so calm. Can you feel me? My hand, there. Stay. Hold my hand and we’ll float awhile. Don’t look back, don’t. What are we doing? Like stupid rubber ducks. I wonder how deep it is here. Is the wool too itchy? Are you too cold? Let’s go again, stay close. It’s letting up a little, you should be able to keep your eyes open. Don’t look back, please, it will make this so much harder. Come here. You do the legs and I’ll do the arms, keep your head on my belly. Your hair tickles, don’t laugh, I love you, don’t look back, I love you, keep kicking.

Kaspar's Dream

On the day that he would discover that he was dying, Kaspar sat in a park, reading and feeding pigeons and trying to think of anything except the possibility that his own cells were in revolt. It was early spring, and in three hours time he would be told that there was hope, that he had a good chance, that perhaps he could live for several more years. He was 61, and the pigeons’ iridescence flickered delightfully in the clean light.

He thought of Aleanna, at home and unaware that in six hours her husband would return to her to not tell her that he had cancer. He thought of her now, reading undoubtedly, occasionally raising her eyes to the strange silver light of those days as it glowed against the window, wondering whether and when and what to eat, and thinking of him, ignorantly thinking of her well husband as if he still existed. He hunched over his book to hold the pages down as the wind rose, and felt tiny prickles of rain against the back of his neck. He thought of Aleanna not feeling this feeling as he raised the curls of hair from his nape and exposed the skin to the wind, the drizzle, and the warmth, and wished she were with him to feel this and to hold his hand, and wished that he could bring himself to tell her that his body was a traitor and he would have to go soon.

He remembered a dream from many years before. In the dream, he walked into a living room – theirs, but not theirs – to find Aleanna sitting on the couch, reading an old leatherbound book. She lifted her head from the book, looking straight ahead, and then turned her face toward Kaspar – one movement, slow and fluid, no extraneous motion, like a brand new machine – looking at him with grey eyes. She said ‘I can’t read this anymore,’ and opened her mouth wide to reveal a 20 pence piece on her tongue. This she removed and offered to him, before returning to her book, once again in that single slow movement, a divine crane moving without hesitation. Thereafter she would periodically remove a 20 pence piece from her mouth, placing them gently beside her on the sofa as she read; some came forth easily, others were coughed up; she started to look as if the effort were making her ill; she raised her head again, nervously this time, and her eyes were bright blue but bruised, and she opened her mouth despairingly and it was full of twenty pence coins, and she vomited them and vomited them, wretching so much that a rupture seemed inevitable, and he rushed to her but she could not stop vomiting the coins over him; trying to sob but only bringing forth shower after shower of twenty pence pieces.

Cheap Wine

She's tall, taller than me,

With that little stoop that so many tall women have –

A little stoop, and one knee brought up slightly,

Allowing the foot to rest on its toes,

The hips swung to accommodate –

That makes her height seem almost attainable.

Her sweet, open face

Is prone to a look of happy shock,

Like a teenager in a first flirtation;

Her hands are slender and nimble.

We played backgammon

Over cheap wine,

Her fingers sliding graceful and quick across the board,

Counters clicking to some eternal rhythm,

Mine counting moves

Step by step.

Later, in the slip of orange light

Breaking from a streetlight through the curtains,

Those hands were such slight weight.

Street Fable

I heard a story that started slowly. There was a small street in a small town. The street was unregarded, and the town ignored. Things were old, but not broken, houses were dusty but not dirty. It was a quietly useful street, with a shop or two, a small school, a little police station, a doctor's surgery. One could live all one's life on such a street, die on such a street having almost never needed anything one could not get on that self-same street.

It was the sort of street that plays host to the recurring dramas of resident families, generation after generation. Nothing much had changed there in living memory, and no-one really suspected that anything much would change, except for a couple of nay-sayers who spent all their time in a corner of the pub that lay almost at the heart of the little street, and no-one had listened much to them for a long time. Not that anyone would mind much if change came, you understand; they just didn't think it would, and weren't particularly bothered one way or another.

One day, an old man who lived near one end of this street passed away, mourned mostly by the grocer and his fellow bridge-club members; he was the last of an undistinguished, hard-working line whose history in the town could probably have been traced back several centuries, if anyone had cared to try. He died intestate; after a broad search, a distanced half-sister was found somewhere on the other side of the country. She didn't want his possessions, gave them to a charity shop, where other people bought his memories for their mantelpiece and his garments for their uncles; she didn't want his house, which she put on the market. The house might as well have been granted bona vacantia to the Duchy of Lancaster, said the nay-sayers down the pub, but no-one knew what they meant.

A young couple with a young son bought the house. They were the first new people to move onto the street for some years, not that anybody really noticed. The watery-eyed locals carried on as before, flotsam and jetsam on life's tide. The new couple sent their young son to the school on the street. The husband was a lawyer, ran his own practice. After a while, they bought one of the shops; the wife ran it, worked in it, had some small plans. Sometimes the son helped.

They were bright and cheery and polite and unfailingly private. They went sometimes to the pub, but talked only in general terms of general things. The husband played on occasion for the football team, when he had the time; he played well, and was well liked. No-one knew his age, or hers. The son was eight, the other parents said. They only knew this because of the class he was in at school, though he looked young for eight.

A daughter with grand plans moved to the capital, leaving a single father, a widower, who could no longer justify such a large house; it had two bedrooms, and one other converted into an office. He moved away to another part of the town, and a new doctor, hired to work at the surgery not a month before, moved in with her lover, who, in turn, took a job at the shop owned by the lawyer's wife, with whom she became firm friends.

And so it continued. No flood gates opened, but those who had lived on the street for their whole lives noticed a circular tide. Over years, not months, maybe a decade or more, the population of the little street changed more than it had in anyone's hazy memory. There were new teachers, new children too, at the school; new nurse, new pharmacist, eventually even a new publican. These people almost always made their business in the street, not outside. New young police officers moved in with their families, transferred from bigger cities. A lot of these people talked happily of looking for a quieter life. Most of these people became friends. The complexion of the pub's football team changed a great deal. The nay-sayers had seen it coming, they said.

All these people were private, like the lawyer's family, though not so private, it seemed, between themselves. The divide between those who had lived there before the lawyer and the shop owner, and those who came after, was clear, but the street had come to depend so quickly on so many of the newcomers, and they were so polite, that there was never any trouble over it. Once or twice, a man raised on this street would get drunk and mouth off, but the efficient young police constable would take him away to cool down and he would be very apologetic the next day.

Under the supervision of its new owner, the shop had grown a little; the school too. Life on the street was continuing quite amiably, in fact. There was almost no crime there now, everyone noted. Those who had lived on the street before the lawyer and the shop-keeper came thought that things had got better, even if their own numbers appeared to be dwindling; the old neighbours moving, dying.

The lawyer's son achieved the best exam results in the little school's history, and went away to study at a prestigious university. The tide continued, chipping away at the pebbledashed old face of the street to reveal something else. None of the new people who came ever went away.

A woman stood at the bar one day, six years or so after the Lawyer's boy had gone to university (he had come back and gone into business with his father), and realised that there was almost no-one she really knew there. She had been born of parents themselves born to life on this street, and had gone to the little school with many similar children; they were all gone now, and she did not know where. In perhaps fifteen years, all the people she had known on a street that had barely changed all her life were gone. It was nice now, but she had no friends here. She resolved to move away and put her house up for sale the next day.

A few months after that, the postman was astonished to arrive for his morning round to find the street blocked off – as it happened, from both ends. Large barricades had been erected; several small signs stating such things as 'no through road' had been posted, dwarfed by the large board nailed to the centre of each barricade that said, simply, 'Closed'. The barriers were ten feet or so high; surmountable, yes, but somehow forbidding. The postman noticed that someone had inserted a post-flap into the barrier. Shrugging, he deposited all the mail for the street and went away. He did the same the next day, and the next, and so did his successor.

All deliveries to the street worked this way; the shops, the surgery, the school received packages at the barricade and slipped back inside. Those inside the street were unstintingly polite with those from outside; their fiscal dealings were impeccable. It was simply as if the privacy that locals had felt spreading inside the street had extended its boundaries to enshroud the whole length of this one, little, street.

There hadn't been a plan, really. Here or there someone who had moved to the street would invite someone else they knew and trusted, but mostly people had just felt called to the place by the promise of something different and better and away from the tumult of life outside. The barricade was not forced shut in the way that many outside imagined; people sometimes moved away (always through necessity, however), and other people, unfailingly bright, polite, private, took their place. A slow tide of people had noticed, and then accelerated, and then successfully affected a sea-change of tiny proportions and earth-shattering magnitude. Quietly, patiently, they had created something that was their own, and exactly as they wanted it. Over the many years that were to follow, a disproportionate number of great men and women would come from their tiny school; the street was a seed for a great change, but no-one knew that yet. For now, everyone outside presumed they were all a little mad; but the little street had little to offer them, so they thought, and so why should they care what happened to the little street?