Alan McCormick Writing

GHOSTS OF SAINT FRANCIS

Saint Francis Psychiatric Hospital dominated the town where I grew up. The vast red-brick Victorian asylum stood in parkland, bordered by woods that massed towards the Downs, a long spine of hills separating us from Brighton and the sea beyond. It held the longest inner corridor in southern England, a third of a mile long, where shuffling patients picked up butts, and a blurred dread and melancholy tainted the walls nicotine yellow. A village retreat for the disturbed and fragile, with its own farm, laundry and chapel, where Gran and Mum would sometimes come to convalesce after breakdowns.

In 1980, I applied to be a porter there in a year break between school and university. Dad tried to persuade me not to apply, as if Mum’s depression were enough to cope with, and working with other mentally ill people risked further contagion. In the patients’ canteen I waited to be called for my interview. I took in the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of rickety chairs and tea-stained tables, ubiquitous pale blue plastic teacups, the rude clatter of metal trolleys, women in borrowed clothes, often too short and tight, men in gravy-stained suits with absurd high waistbands.  An odd shriek amidst a slow melancholic drudge of repetition: confused conversations with no end and no beginning. I felt oddly calmed, listening, watching, distracted and sleepy in the familiar—I’d experienced it all before, already having visited Mum and Gran in asylums and discreet seaside convalescent homes—becoming so comfortable that I lost my grip, letting go my teacup and emptying its contents onto my lap. Trousers sodden and bottom sticking to the chair, I pulled myself up and attempted to dry myself in the patients’ toilet, with its rank splatter over the bowl that I’d come to recognise as heavily medicated freeform shit.

Mrs Nettles came to collect me in her grey East German prison guard suit. In the interview she didn’t mention the England-shaped damp patch on my crotch at first, but, after offering me the job, she advised me not to drink in the patients’ canteen anymore.

‘It’s very loyal and patriotic but you’re one of us now,’ she said.

I loved working there, trying my best to avoid voyeurism, being witness at a freak show. I found myself instinctively empathising, taking it all in but also sometimes revelling in the otherness, the defiantly different.

I’d recently finished reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest  and showed Mum a video of the film on her return from hospital after one of her nervous breakdowns, hoping she’d find some kind of kinship, familiarity, a home from home.

‘Why did you show me that film?’ she asked.

‘Bloody well unbelievable!’ Dad said.

Kesey’s McMurphy was a wild, charismatic rebel, a con faking madness to keep out of prison. Harry was a patient who’d been imprisoned after fighting with a prostitute in Brighton and attacking the policeman who’d arrived to arrest him. In prison he’d babbled and hurled himself at the walls and was sectioned to Saint Francis. Like McMurphy, he arrived onto the ward full of wild energy, joking and raving whilst handcuffed to a prison guard.

He was a sociopath who beguiled and wove spells. A tanned bear of a man with long blonde tousled hair, he burst through my flimsy defences back then. He ran barefoot, talked fast, harangued and freewheeled as if he were permanently drunk. Occasionally, he could be charming and funny, even thoughtful. I lent him books: Cuckoo’s Nest (naturally), On the Road (trusting him with my prized original UK edition paperback) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Orwell’s book was his favourite; he liked its subtle subversion of suburbia, the hidden humour appealing to his own disdain for the everyday and normal.

I witnessed his character change in an instant, starting with repetitive jibing of the nurses.

 ‘A fucking mess, a wonderful fucking mess! Eh, Paddy, what do you think?’

‘Less of the “fucking”, Harry.’

‘Never do much fucking, Paddy, you’re right.’

‘And less of the Paddy.’

‘Right you are, Paddy.’

‘Harry!’

‘Paddywhack, Paddywhack, Paddy whacked a Paddy.’

‘Last warning!’

Then suddenly he was running, roaring, and emptying a jug of water over the nurse. A shout for help from a crowd of cowering patients, and Harry was taken to the ground, four nurses on top of him.

‘I’m the crazy guy here, and I’m supposed to be looked after, not oppressed. What a sorry state of affairs.’ He caught me looking. ‘Hey, Adam.’ Harry never got my name right. ‘What do you think? It’s a fucking disgrace, is it not?’

A heavy knee to his chest and he went red in the face, struggling to breathe.

‘My inhaler, get my inhaler!’

Before he left for prison again, he returned all the books I’d lent him, folded page marks neatly turned back.

‘I’d like to have discussed them with you but my brain is frazzled. You know?’

I did know but I also knew not to tell him where I lived in case he came calling when he was released from prison.

Gordon was a retired bank manager on Kingston Ward. He sat on a big armchair, which he positioned to face out onto the grounds. He loved looking at the branches of a particular old oak tree and he’d sit staring at it for hours. I’d bring him a cup of tea—he preferred a cup with a saucer to a mug—and take the seat next to him. There was something relaxing being by his quietness and stillness. Sometimes he’d ask about my life outside the hospital and offer advice.

‘Keep living, son, and don’t get depressed if you can help it.’

Often he’d read.

‘The books in here aren’t really my cup of tea though.’

I wasn’t surprised. The library hadn’t much beyond Steele, Archer, Cartland and Wilbur Smith. I gave him Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, a perfect sombre book. The next day he’d nearly finished it.

‘I’ll get it back to you as soon as it’s done,’ he said.

A couple of days later I was back on Kingston. Gordon’s bed was bare. He’d slipped away from the nurses’ attention and slit his wrists in the bathroom the night before. A nurse handed me back my book. There was a note inside.    ‘Thank you, it was very kind of you to lend me the book. I’ve always liked Graham Greene and I really enjoyed this one. All the best, Gordon.’

Suicide, a familiar chill, a curse running down Mum’s family line—I shuddered when I saw the stripped mattress, I knew the form. ‘As soon as it’s done’ he’d said, but I hadn’t been listening carefully enough. Thankfully, the bathroom had already been cleaned and so I took a cup to his chair and sat for a while and looked out. The oak tree quiet and unmoved against the shifting sky.

At thirteen, I’d watched out of my bedroom window as Gran’s tiny body, hidden under a bright red blanket, was carried on a stretcher into a waiting ambulance. I’d found her unconscious in our spare bedroom. She had taken an overdose and was brought to hospital but I wasn’t allowed to see her.

I did later visit her in a large Epsom asylum. The spartan isolation room along the hallway spooked me on the way to find her waiting in the dining room. Her worn bloodhound expression, drugs pulling down her features to reveal bloodshot, watery eyes, nicotine yellowing and roughening her skin in lines and crevices, a cigarette defiantly cupped in her mouth, a cup of tea shaking in her hand. She always had a carrier bag waiting for me full of fruit pastilles and Mars bars. We made each other laugh, me mimicking Frank Spencer and Brian Clough, her playfully supporting Arsenal against my team Chelsea, repeatedly shouting ‘arse n’ all’ to all and sundry, releasing a wheezy cauldron of sound from deep inside her chest.

‘Don’t get too close,’ she said, pointing at an old lady walking in circles by the door, wringing and tearing at her hands.  Later, I had to squeeze past her to open the door. Her mouth was open wide as if she was screaming but nothing came out, but I could sense this high frequency hum vibrating through her body. ‘Is my son coming, is my son coming?’ she pleaded. I could only shake my head and say, ‘I don’t know.’ She pinched me hard on the arm and said, ‘You do know, I know you do.’

After a few months of working at Saint Francis, I was joined there by my best friend, Mark. Our friendship had grown away from the rigid confines of the town’s Grammar School, and the mock liberation of Sixth Form, where if you weren’t going round with a fixed grin all the time and having ‘a fantastic experience’ then there was something wrong with you. And they were right: there was something wrong with us.

I took every chance to blot out the all-too-real madness invading my family, and, together, we welcomed any distraction from the late-teenage sadness suffocating us both. We liked to escape with our packs and sleeping bags onto the Sussex Downs. From the highest point of the Beacon, looking north, rows of flat fields, skirted by newly planted woodland, joined the grounds of Saint Francis. We usually walked east along the highest ridge towards Lewes or Newhaven and Seaford, long stretches of bumbling hills and shallow ravines, ancient copses and stony bridleways. We would talk excitedly, sharing our outsider angst, excitement and belief that books and music mattered more than almost anything else. We both loved Jack Kerouac, The Velvet Underground, J D Salinger, Hermann Hesse and Sylvia Plath. Mark aligned himself with teenage outsider narrators Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood—the latter a thinly veiled disguise for Sylvia Plath—a curl to his lips as he viewed life through their young world-weary eyes.

Mark cut a fine figure in those days, a siren for both women and men with his tousled dark hair and delicate poetic looks. Sometimes he was Keats and other times in his tight red motorbike jacket he was Jules, the charismatic young postman from the French film, Diva.

Mrs Nettles saved certain jobs for polite middle-class boys, and weekdays Mark would often be sent to work as a theatre porter in the adjoining neurological hospital. Maybe I was harder to fathom and seen as more of a risk, as she kept me at Saint Francis. At weekends we had the chance to work together, driving the rickety hospital laundry van, with its wretched, stinking load of soiled bedding, the necessary distraction of a cigarette permanently in our mouths. Sometimes we took the van for a spin outside the grounds and rested up in a nearby field, chatting, sharing a joint, taking in the sun’s rays climbing up over the Downs.

We liked to lose ourselves in other people’s lives and stories whenever we could. One character’s life particularly touched us. Biddy was born in 1900 and had been at Saint Francis since she was fifteen, when her father had deposited her at the gates for lewd behaviour: kissing a neighbour’s boy. A farmer’s daughter still, she got up at the crack of dawn and spent her days busy and bent over, a willing helper, fetching and carrying for the nurses and tending the less able patients. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon she’d settle into her chair with her own teacup and saucer. ‘

‘My cup, see, it’s got a picture of the Queen, lovely.’

Proud, a quiet voice with no hint of rancour, apart from maybe a tinge when she talked about her father.

‘I told him I only kissed the boy but his mind was made, and I told him not to bring me but he wouldn’t listen. He had a temper, see.’

Biddy’s eyes blinked out from tight skin creases, her pupils shiny and bulbous, damaged by the lack of light of prolonged incarceration.

‘Love my tea, I do.’

Tipping the pot repeatedly into her cup and smiling.  A smile of the contented; Zen and vacant.

We admired Biddy’s spirit and enduring stoicism. Sometimes I also saw my gran in Biddy, and, in turn, a glimpse of how Mum could become, the shuffling slippers and institutionalised pallor of tranquillising medication. But in truth Mum and Gran were already defeated, finding ways to give up the ghost; Biddy had a spirit that sought to get away. On Sundays, she busied herself handing out hymns and prayer books for the patients’ morning service. As the asylum organ groaned and struck up, she closed her eyes and her voice escaped wild and shrill, like a scalded cat let loose amongst the congregation.



Under the Downs, in the long shadow of Saint Francis hospital, is a nunnery where Mark’s friends and family met, a decade after we’d worked at Saint Francis, to commemorate his life and unexpected death. I gave a talk and the wind blew and chucked like a madman. The steeple wavered, and the building groaned and slammed, the choir’s voices trilling and booming like banshees (Biddy surely joining in!) and hanging in the rafters, before dropping like mist amongst us, touching us with a sense of togetherness, otherness, in shared dismay at his life torn away.

Mark’s body was never found after his last lone mountain hike in the foothills of Pakistan. When I think of him now I remember his weary smile and soft voice, and find myself laughing about the time we shared magic mushrooms under the Beacon.

All October I’d been picking them in the hospital farm’s sheep fields. Other porters had shown me how to wipe and dry them with paper, how to make tea with them, how many to eat to make things tingle, how many to scramble the brain. Tingle was for the afternoon shift at work—I’d need maybe ten—so that the harsh lights along the hospital corridors would slowly blur into gorgeous pinks and purples, and the newly buffed floors would sparkle and glimmer like an ice rink on a star filled night. The soles of my shoes sliding and skating along, my arms out wide, my mouth slipping into a wide, beatific smile when I met the patients.

I had a knapsack full from a recent mushroom harvest when I met Mark at Hassocks station, close to his home. We shared them out on the long footpath out to the Downs, eating a small handful at a time. Within minutes the stomach cramps and swirling waves of nausea started, but we were on a mission and knew to ride it out. We waited and then took more, and by the time we climbed over a stile to Wolstonbury Hill, we were sweating, in the grip of a tumultuous tsunami, senses all churned up and at odds with each other, excitement beset with anxiety, struggling to keep a lid on the madness, the horizon moving like a seesaw, the soft Sussex Down ahead taking on the shrouded outline of an Anglo-Saxon burial mound.

I’d learned from experience that angst and sadness usually passed and so I trusted somehow that this derangement would pass too, to breathe slower and let things happen. Time jumped forward and back, and then slowed, so that we seemed to be there a lifetime, with my gaze fixed on the top of the hill where sheep moved and shimmied against the clouds, marching one minute with iron masks ready for war, dancing in brown cage aux folles knee stockings the next, the clouds behind massing, re-forming, the orange mouth of the sun grinning in between.

Rain seeped from the sky to caress my cheeks. I lay down and drank it in. Mark was near, moaning (or was it a cow in a nearby field?), crawling on all fours to examine a patch of grass, wearing a small brown felt hat, that, with his protruding black curls, made him look less like Keats and more like Chico Marx. Then I was Harpo, squeezing my imaginary horn, looking like a cherub, cheep, cheep, cheep, a wig of sheep wool, no judgement necessary . . . so that’s why the sheep were marching: to cover my head.

Mark and I looked at each other and started laughing. Big teeth monkey laughs (that’s where we originated from, then!), the sun erupting out of the clouds and the sky suddenly going Van Gogh blue.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Mark.

‘No, you won’t,’ said I, the warmth of the sun calming, healing, making me talk as if I were Jesus. The thought of me as Jesus set us off laughing again. But I wanted the laughter to stop, for that bigger connected feeling to return, and then we were lying next to each other, long rays reaching down and baking the earth and our skin, everything chiming, the scattering clouds making patterns on our eyelids, the ancient past buried in the earth revitalised and reaching out, new grass rising, a bird passing above, our breathing slow and in unison, all one, all one big united world. At that moment we were closer than ever, love pouring out for each other, for everyone, for everything.

Mum and Gran carried through with their threats and are long gone, and Saint Francis was turned into luxury flats soon after Mark died, but its memories linger, ghostly expressions at the windows infiltrating my thoughts and dreams.

Mark had a relationship with my sister and died when their son, Den was eight. I’ve kept Den close ever since, unconsciously inculcating him into the spirit of my relationship with his father, taking him travelling and eating out from a young age (ticking off a list of thirty different ethnic restaurants on his visits to stay with me before he was sixteen), pulling him leftward and buying him music and books Mark and I had enjoyed.  He’s his own person but sometimes I can see Mark clearly in him: the humane intelligence, the ever-present dry humour, the juxtaposition of steely independence and moments of vulnerability, a gentle understated communication that cuts to the core. Den is thirty-six, three years older than Mark when he died.  We’re close friends, and it’s he who recommends the restaurants, books and records now.

Somehow, I managed to keep a pictorial record of my trip with his father: shots taken from weird angles, sunlight bleaching out colours, hats endlessly swapped, our faces distorted and gurning, eyes smiling, so that the camera seemed like it was tripping with us. The pictures sit in their own album (how could they go with any others?) and when I look at them that feeling of trepidation overcome by a tidal wave of understanding and love still floods over me.

I recently stayed with Den and showed him one of the photos. It’s a miraculous close-up of me and his father, a selfie before the term even existed: we’ve come down from the mushrooms and are sitting next to each other on the grass. We’re both smiling, and there, behind us, is the blurred, outstretched outline of Saint Francis.

*

Ghost of Saint Francis appeared in last winter’s issue of The Stinging Fly.

https://stingingfly.org/product/winter-2022/

Seán met us at the airport in an old green Volvo Estate that looked like it had been reclaimed from the scrapyard.

Masks? I asked, before getting in.

It’s okay, I had it a few months ago and I’ll keep the windows open, Seán said.

You never told me.

Well, I’m good now. Grand journey? he asked, turning to Ian, who’d taken the seat up front with him.

Wish it had been grander, Ian replied. How’s the weather been?

Ah, the weather? said Seán. Good for staying indoors.

Even though Seán had the windows down, the car smelled rank, of musty worn leather and damp rotting fur. As he drove, he addressed me from time to time with a glance in the driver’s mirror: mundane questions about my work and about Carmel.

I became co-director last year. And she’s fine. Graduating soon.

Going to be a businesswoman like her Mam, Therese?

Ian scoffed.

Not if she can help it, I replied. She wants to do something more poetic with her life.

And potentially be paid for it, Ian chipped in.

Oh, right, said Seán, being paid for anything is never a bad thing.

As Seán drove – and he drove at surprising speed which I’m sure he hadn’t last time we visited – I became fixated by his sunburnt farmer’s neck, so like our father’s, the copper grey twists of hair twigging out of his frayed collar, the casual unkemptness and disregard for how he looked.

How’s Mary? I asked, hoping she might still be doing his laundry at least.

Doing a good job of being Mary I imagine.

You imagine?

Carmel must be eighteen.

Nearly twenty-one I corrected; will be a graduate soon.

Right, you said that, sorry. I haven’t seen her since she was four, it’s hard to keep track.

She was six! She wanted to come this time but –

Ah, come on: I know life’s busy when you’re young.

Will Mary be there when we arrive?

What did you say Carmel is studying?

I got the message to pull back on the Mary questioning: She’s doing literature and art.

She’ll be a teacher then, I expect.

Yes, most likely.

Or unemployed, said Ian, which made Seán laugh and drum his fingers on the steering wheel.

Well, there’s always a job here helping out if she’s desperate enough, he said.

And Ian and I fell silent, afraid to laugh in case he wasn’t joking and might think we were being disparaging about the offer.

The roads had improved a lot since our last visit and it was noticeable how many new expensive cars people were driving. Seán continued to drive his wreck like a man possessed.

What do you think of Lewis Hamilton? Ian asked. It was a sly question.

The best Formula One driver ever, it’s a shame you Brits don’t appreciate him more.

When we reached the outskirts of Wicklow, Seán said he needed to get some provisions.

Come if you like, he said.

I’ve never shopped at a Lidl, I replied.

You’ve been missing out there, Therese, he said and took Ian with him.

I was about to shout a reminder but they both put masks on before going inside.

In the car park, I could see another way Ireland had changed since I’d left. There were actually people from abroad, who looked and sounded like they might live here, mainly Eastern Europeans but also some Africans and people from the Middle East; refugees probably.

Ian and Seán arrived carrying two boxes each – wine and beer.

Ian was more than generous, said Seán.

The least I could do.

Did you get any food? I asked.

Of course, some bread and potatoes, Seán replied.

Ireland hasn’t changed much then?

I wouldn’t know about all that now.

Okay, Father Dougal, but it does look more cosmopolitan.

He knew what I meant immediately: The Grand is a refugee hostel now.

No!

Yes, but I doubt they have room service.

It’s good that Ireland is doing its bit.

Bits and pieces, but they could be doing more.

Driving along the high street, I ducked in my seat as we stopped at a pelican crossing.

That wasn’t Mrs Gleason, was it? I asked after we’d safely moved on.

The very same.

I thought the old bitch died years ago.

Well, she did but they exhumed her so she could haunt the town forever.

Horrible woman, I couldn’t go near a piano after she’d finished with me!

The town seemed to have been taken over by teenage girls, walking and chatting in small packs; puffer jackets, long hair, short skirts and spindly tan legs. After passing a few groups I realised their legs and faces were more orange than brown.

Is there a new sunbed parlour in town?

It’s fake tan, said Ian.

I thought being orange was a traveller thing, I said.

Right there, milady, said Seán, but it’s a teenage girl thing now too.

Why? I asked.

No reply was offered. Can we stop at the lighthouse? I asked, changing the subject. I always loved it there.

Of course, said Seán, sharply taking the next left turn, funnelling at speed down a tight country lane. When we passed a farm, I got the smells I knew so well, the acrid stench of slurry and rotting carcasses, the piss and shit of the yard that made me retch.

Jesus, can you please close the windows?

You’ve never called me Jesus before, Seán said, but you’ll have to wind up your window yourself, no electric controls in this car, I’m afraid.

At the end of the lane we all climbed out of the car. I tried to flick off the hairs I’d picked up on my jacket.

You still have dogs then, Seán? I asked.

I do: three of them.

Don’t tell me that Beckett is still alive?

He is, though he does the running and fetching in his sleep these days.

At the lighthouse – now an upmarket holiday rental – the land opened out, bumbling hills of yellow gorse rolling down to the cliffs and sea. The air felt so good after travelling.

Seán lit up a cigarette and offered Ian one.

He gave up five years ago, I said.

I gave up five years ago, said Ian. But I’ll have one to keep you company.

No you won’t!

No I won’t, said Ian, taking one.

I took off down the hillside; smoke plumes pursuing on the wind. At the cliff’s edge I looked down to the vast caves below, birds congregating, swooping and circling over the sea, a few hovering in my eye-line on the wind’s currents, their beady eyes fixed ahead.

I used to come here with Aoife and Lily (we smoked then too), me escaping the house when my mother was ill and holed up in bed.

Once Seán came on his bicycle and tried to join us.

Away, little gobshite, I told him, and both girls laughed.

You need to come home quick, he said.

Oh no, I said. Why now?

I looked back up the hill, and Seán and Ian downed their cans in one and waved at me.

The dogs, Beckett hobbling behind, his tail still remembering to wag, greeted us with wild hungry barks as we got out of the car. It was immediately obvious that the farm had gone to seed, a barn door perilously hanging off its hinges, small mounds of debris everywhere, filthy upturned buckets, an empty rusty water trough, the smells of defecation and decay ingrained into the ground, numbed by time.

An emaciated chicken purposefully crossed the yard, head extended out, twitching forward and back, as if it knew where it was going.

Ah, here comes dinner, said Seán.

Poor thing, it doesn’t look like it’s ever eaten, I said.

A new thing, you starve them for the pot. Fat’s bad for your heart, and only the French plump them up these days.

Is that true? I asked.

I’ve no idea, he said. Come on let’s get your bags inside.

I was about to put on my mask.

No need, we’re all family here.

What’s that? I said, pointing at a small tatty caravan in the corner of the yard.

Magda’s place, he said.

Magda?

Magda!

Magda was waiting in the kitchen with a pot of tea and homemade biscuits. She was young, naturally pretty and confident, and looked to be very much at home.

Welcome Seán’s sister and husband, she said.

Not Seán’s husband, my husband, I corrected. A weak joke I immediately regretted. But she smiled and handed me a mug of tea.

Magda, I quickly learned (from my questions) was a young Estonian – she could only be 25 at most! – who’d come over with a group to help with 2019’s harvest. When the others returned before the first lockdown she’d decided to stay.

You don’t miss your family? I asked.

Ian stepped in: bit early for the third degree, you’ve only just met the poor girl. His breath reeked of smoke.

Magda’s made up the bed for you, Seán said. It’ll work best if I stay in the caravan; give you two more room.

I bit my tongue and tried my best to hide any shock from my expression.

Catching flies there, sis.

I closed my mouth. Well, if you’re sure, I said, and Magda stared straight at me, smiled and mock-curtsied.

Our room had been newly cleaned. A rush job, dust dampened and rubbed into the grooves of the furniture, but tempered by a beautiful array of wild flowers on the chest of drawers. The drawers had been emptied, the bulging black bin liners stuffed under the bed probably holding their recent contents. The room smelled of the nineteen nineties, Harpic and cheap floral perfume. The sheets though were thankfully clean.

Seán has made an effort, said Ian impressed.

She might only be 21, and she’s been sleeping in here.

Yes, Miss Marple, that might be true.

Less than half Seán’s age!

I don’t think she’s 21: 25 at least, so not quite half.

It’s not a maths problem, Ian, it’s not right.

We don’t know that Seán sleeps in here.

I kneeled down and pinched a hole in one of the bin liners – his jumper, I said, I remember it!

He may keep his clothes under the bed, that’s all. She may have made the bed and left her scent –

I don’t like the way you say ‘and left her scent’.

And I don’t like the way you’re jumping to conclusions and judging everything.

How do we know that they’ve even been vaccinated?

We don’t but Seán said he’d already had Covid, didn’t he?

Magda’s age group almost certainly won’t have been fully vaccinated.

Not that again.

Or people from her country, she may not even be legal, so won’t appear on any vaccination database.

Just relax!

I’ve told you before that telling me to relax when I’m not relaxed doesn’t help!

Don’t relax then.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t like the way she curtsied; it was disrespectful.

I thought it was sweet.

Don’t be clever!

I forgot: you’re the clever one. My stupid arse is going downstairs for a drink. Your brother said the craft beers we bought –

You bought! No, I bought!

Relax! he said and got out of the room before I could reply.

I collapsed onto the bed. This had been my parents’ room before my mother died and Dad absconded into the small room at the back of the house. Their bed left cold until Seán moved into the room when he passed twenty-one and I was working away in London, a rite of passage for the son who stayed, the hard slats (one still missing) of the headboard, and the tarnished brass knobs on each corner of the frame still wobbling away even after thirty years. Thankfully the lumpy sprung mattress had been updated. It felt like a cheap foam one but was comfortable at least. I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, the same watermark like a birthmark above the light. Jesus, the same brown lampshade, I’d always hated that lampshade!  Even as a young girl, I’d moaned at them to get a new one.

Lying in the bed with my mother when she’d come out of hospital after her second stroke, I told her I’d paint the room and get her a new shade so the room would be brighter. She groaned and tightened her grip on my arm with her good hand and shaped a kiss as best she could with her lips.

The one wall I managed to paint before I left for university was still white, the rest of the room left shaded in vintage tobacco yellows and browns.

I closed my eyes. Dad is drunkenly obsessing around the rusted hinges of the gate into the cow field. He’s cursing at the cold, his exhaled breath spurting out plumes of steam. He drops his tools, and then he trips. The cows murmur their discontent at his inability to let them out and charge.

I woke with a start to a lone cow clopping around the yard, and the sound of hyena-like laughter from the kitchen. As I went down the stairs, I heard chairs scraping, and as I reached the kitchen door the laughter stopped.

When I opened the door, Ian and Seán were standing by the range holding glasses full of whisky, looking shifty. Magda slinked (it’s the right word) over and placed her arms around my shoulders, pulled me in and whispered in my ear: so sorry about your father, lovely person.

She meant well (I think) but I felt pangs of jealousy that this young person, a stranger, had a view on my father – even if it was simplistic, wrong – and that she had been around him in his last years. Work had been so busy and Covid lockdowns had robbed me of any chance and so I was left to . . .

Seán interrupted my train of thought: Magda, bring my lovely big sister over here; she looks like she could do with a drink.

Still hugging, Magda shuffled me towards them as if I were an invalid. Seán poured a big glass of red wine and handed it to me.

I pointed at the half empty whisky bottle behind him. One of those too, please!

He smiled warmly, his eyes red and watery, blearily sentimental like Dad used to get when he was drinking.

Sláinte, Therese, he said, raising his glass.

Cheers, I said, raising mine. Something smells good.

Chicken, said Ian.

Oh, God, not the –? I said, remembering the emaciated bird jittering across the yard.

Seán laughed and flipped open the bin and pulled out a cellophane wrapper as if he were a magician: Lidl’s best free-range chicken! he announced. We’d never kill Mary – he clocked my surprise at the name – Mary 2 is part of the family now after Mary 1 flew the nest, God Bless her – I nodded as he confirmed my suspicions – this here is a guilt free, no kill, no fly zone, he continued, aping the voice of a hillbilly Marine, and, then, softening into his own voice: but it’s also a sanctuary for abandoned strays – and he smiled fondly at Magda.

That’s lovely, I said. Now, are you are going to wash your hands?

He dropped the wrapper in the bin and then licked each of his fingers in turn like a cat. Ian laughed. The alcohol will disinfect anything; don’t worry.

Disgusting!

Magda looked sympathetically at me and led Seán in the crook of her arm, put on the hot tap at the sink, and gestured that he should wash.

Thanks, Magda, he said. I was being foolish.

She kissed him on the cheek. Yes, foolish boy, she said.

I noticed Magda wasn’t drinking. Would you –?

No, no. Wine when we eat, she said.

Above the table on the fireplace I saw –

The urn, I see you’ve noticed ‘it’, Therese.

God, its big.

Well, Dad was a big man.

I thought of the last video call I had with him in hospital: a nurse holding up his phone; him, shrunken and anything but big by then, breathless, unable to talk, eyes full of fear. It was only hours before they took him into ICU and put him on a respirator, the last time I’d see him. I waved goodbye and said he’d be okay. And now, reduced to this! I could feel emotion like a violent storm taking me over but I steeled myself like I did with my nerves when giving a talk, told myself to get a grip and took in a deep breath: Can we do it tomorrow? I said.

Whenever you like, the day after is fine too, they’ve waited to be back together all these years; another day or two won’t make any difference.

No, I want to get on with it.

Whatever you say, and it’s okay to cry; I could see you holding back. He walked over and put his arm round me.

God, what is it with this house and everyone touching me?

Ian had been about to come over but thought better of it, always the careful (a crueller person might say cowardly) pragmatist, he knew from experience when to get close and when to keep away. For that, at least, I’ll remain forever grateful.

I drained my whisky and held out my empty glass for a refill.

As he poured, Seán showed me the label on the bottle, Writer’s Tears, and winked. I’ve started at the words again, he said.

Well, I’m sure the whisky helps.

He laughed and Magda laughed harder.

No, I’m pleased for you. You always earned good marks at school for your stories, didn’t you?

Magda ruffled his hair like my mother used to.

The writing is great but I can’t help noticing that the farm isn’t doing so well.

What if you could help noticing?

I’ve sent money since the recession, and more after Dad got ill and you had to get in help.

We’ve always been grateful, Therese.

No need, but why this? I mean, where are the animals?

We have a chicken, two cows, three dogs.

Where’s Dad’s herd?

Seán had to sell, no choice, Magda said.

I was asking my bother.

Don’t be rude, Therese, he said.

How are you making money?

I’ve saved some you sent.

It was meant to help keep the farm going.

It was generous but it wasn’t enough.

What?

Your guilt money wasn’t enough.

Ian made an unlikely intervention: Steady on, Seán, no need for that.

Sorry, Kofi Annan.

That made me want to laugh but I held it in: Shut up, Ian, I want to know what Seán means by ‘guilt money’!

You swanned off to Trinity and then to your great career in London – not Sydney, not Hong Kong, not even fecking New York but fecking London, an hour’s fecking flight away – and you visited Dad and me a handful of times in thirty years. And each time you came, you acted more like Princess Diana – and by the way, that’s not meant as a compliment – and less like my sister who’d grown up on a farm, whose parents somehow found money for every fecking class she ever fecking wanted to do – French conversation, cake making, pony club, ballet, piano, orchestra, debating, Tai fecking Chi – and who had to be paid to help muck out the sheds and milk the cows.

But I never liked doing those things.

You think I did?

You could have left.

For Chrisssake, woman, I was fourteen when Mam died!

You sound like Dad there.

I’m surprised you remember. Twice he met his granddaughter, once when we came to London when she was born, and once when you brought her over when she was little more than a baby!

She was six!

I mean, did you have to make it so obvious how much it all disgusted you? How we disgusted you!

That’s not fair, take that back. I never said you disgusted me.

But you behaved like you thought it. Christ, last time you came you booked yourself into a hotel in Dublin; couldn’t find one good enough for you here –

Tinakilly was booked out –

All because you couldn’t bear staying with Dad and me in this house.

I have an allergy to mould.

She does have allergies, Ian said.

Shut up Ian, I said.

An allergy to us more like. To Ireland, to any fecking thing you once were! All that shit sniping in the car: ooh, they have fake tans, I’ve never shopped at a Lidl, look at all the travellers, refugees, potatoes. Where did you get off on being so stuck up?

You tell me.

And when you came over to nose around and witness our feck-off-all-of-you-it’s-our-turn Celtic tiger, you couldn’t bear the fact that people suddenly had money and displayed, what was your expression: ‘no taste’ in spending it. I mean you don’t have a problem in tremendous terrific Teddington, mixing with your spoilt-brat friends with their show-off identikit designer homes, live-in nannies they hate because they relate to their kids and husbands better than they do, four-wheel killer wagons they can’t even drive, holiday homes stolen from the disenfranchised French and Italians –

I always thought you would have made a good Irish Che Guevara.

Thanks, because it is about class, isn’t it, Therese? So when the Irish suddenly became middle class and started buying new cars – mostly on tick by the way – and building big arsed extensions on their dopey bungalows, going on cruises, buying apartments in the Canaries, it offended your newfound sensibilities, and you couldn’t bear it, could you?

Have you finished?

Yes, I think you ought to finish, said Ian.

Shut up, Ian!

And stop telling your husband to shut up, he’s only trying to protect you.

Yes, I’m only trying to protect you, Therese.

Shut up, Ian! We said together, and then looked at each other, smiles beginning to crack.

I’m going for a walk; leave you idiot siblings to fight it out, said Ian. Mind if I take a beer with me?

Sorry, Ian, take as many as you like, Seán said.

One will do, and he grabbed a bottle and left.

I’ve probably said way too much, Therese. But one last thing: keep Magda out of all this. She’s welcomed you.

Seán mentioning her name made me realise that she must have left the room well before.

She got out quickly, I said.

She knew what was coming, she’s clever like that.

You’re lucky to have her.

I am.

Can I ask what happened to Mary?

Mary was saved from the pot.

Ha!

Seán looked thinner than I’d seen him before, ravaged somehow.

You look tired, Seán. Are you well now?

I’m fine; it’s all the ranting.

It was good, got a bit boring towards the end but I enjoyed it.

Really?

Kind of, yes, I think I did. Will you two really sleep in the caravan?

We’ll top and tail if you like.

I didn’t mean –

Another drink?

Why not?

Let’s take them outside; I need a smoke.

Why not have one in here?

Magda doesn’t like it.

She’s got you well trained.

Well, I need training.

We drank and Seán smoked. It was dark and a light was on in the caravan.

Shall I knock and ask Magda to join us?

No, Seán said. She’s fine. I’d like to hear more from you.

There’s nothing to say.

I’ve never asked you properly about your work.

You could ask now.

What exactly is it you do?

Oh, God, not tonight, maybe in the morning, as long as you have Power Point and an expensive expresso machine.

He laughed.

And I do appreciate all they did for me you know, the sacrifices they made so I could get away.

They were really proud of you, and Dad loved it when you called Carmel after Mam.

At that moment, Beckett unfurled his bones from where he was lying, stood shakily up and staggered over, dropping himself by Seán’s feet. Seán knelt down and rubbed under his chin, and Beckett rolled over onto his back to offer his tummy – what he really liked – for a proper stroke.

You know the hospital told me that Dad died at 3.15 in the morning. Beckett howling downstairs had woken me in the middle of the night at that precise time, hours before the call from the hospital. He didn’t eat for days, stayed under Dad’s chair in the kitchen with his slippers in his mouth – he always brought them to him each morning for him to wear on the cold tiles.

Wow, I said, and started to cry.

A good old Lassie story always does the trick, eh?

What! It’s not true?

No, no, it is. You cry; you need to cry.

You saying ‘I need to cry’ makes me want to stop.

God, you’re complicated, Therese.

I didn’t know whether I was laughing or crying, but it was ugly; I was probably doing both.

I’ll get a tissue for the snot, Seán said, and went inside.

In the morning my head pounded. I took an Alka Seltzer, left Ian in bed and went to the bathroom. On the way back, I poked my head in Dad’s room but didn’t feel ready to go in, and then went into my old room next to his at the back of the house.

It was pink and white as if it was still 1990, and I was about to leave for university. The near empty bottle of 4711 left on the bedside table – that was the floral perfume smell in our bedroom! – Magda must have been sneaking a cheeky drop here and there. My childhood posters still on the walls – the holy quartet of Culture Club, Morten Harket, Nelson Mandela and Mary Robinson – still staring at each other from each wall, frozen in time.

Above my bed were photos of the family and some of my friends, alongside a series of me growing up. I looked closer, and realised that, mixed in with the photos of me at significant life-stages – just born, baptism, first bike ride, first day at school, confirmation – were complementary pictures I must have sent of Carmel passing the same milestones.

I don’t know whether it had been Dad or Seán who’d curated all this together, but it was telling that, after a sour looking one of her on her first day at Grammar school, the pictures of Carmel just dried up.

I could hear barking outside. Looking out of my window, I saw the two younger dogs yelping and chasing each other around the overgrown garden. At the far end of the garden, Beckett sat looking up at Seán, who was attempting to mend a lock on the big metal gate that led out into the fields. Seán held up a series of Dad’s tools to inspect them, as if he wasn’t sure what each of them were meant to do. It looked like he was hoping for divine intervention, and after a while he resorted to a familiar bodger’s tactic and started hammering inanely at the gate’s lock with what looked like the biggest hammer he could find. It was hopeless and desperate, and yet somehow also noble and touching in its purposeful fruitlessness. I only hoped he was a better writer than a farmer, a thought I’d tell him later, hoping that he’d take it as the compliment it was meant to be.

I rang Carmel on Face Time.

Hi, love, I said.

Hi, Mum, how’s it going? Not too squalid, I hope. Have you booked into a hotel yet?

No, it’s okay. Listen, I know you’re busy with preparing for graduation and saying goodbye to your friends.

Yes, you won’t believe what Rosie has got planned –

I can imagine but, look, I’d like you to come over, we’re going to sprinkle your Granddad’s’ ashes on my Mam’s –

Mam’s?

Yes, I say Mam when I’m here – on Mam’s grave.

It’s not a good time.

I know, but I think it’s important that you come. You can get a test at Boots today, and I’ll book the ticket for you to come over in a couple of days; Uncle Seán will pick you up at the airport.

God, okay, if you insist, but he’s not going to be really boring, is he?

Probably, but you can always put in your earbuds; he won’t even know what they are. But he might surprise you too. You have things in common: he’s a writer now, and you can get to know each other on the way down.

Well, that could be interesting, I suppose, and he might even tell me what you were like at my age.

Oh, God, I hope he doesn’t do anything like that. Anyway, we’ll stay on for a few days; there are things I’d like to show you.

Sounds ominous.

Maybe, but I’m going to show you anyway.




*Earbuds was published in the brilliant journal Southword in Autumn 2022 https://munsterlit.ie/bookshop/southword-43/

Crows massing on the rooftops of the estate, hunched-shouldered funeral ghouls in their damp satin cloaks, their talons like blind men’s sticks tapping on the slates above us, they natter and shift in the gloom before their sunrise takeoff over the shoreline and into the far-flung hills. One crow stoops on a roof a little apart from the rest, a small collapsed black umbrella, he jerks about on the spot, as if he’s trying to stop himself from inadvertently springing into action and falling off.

It’s said an errant golf ball on the nearby seaside course had hit him. Gouged out his right eye, chipped his beak at its tip, collapsed his wings so he was left unable to fly. Now he hangs about outside the fish and chip shop at night, hopping and sobbing for scraps, the town drunk, the town crier.

His accident may have disabled him but it also left him with unusual powers.  The golfer, whose drive had hit him, searched for the catastrophic missing ball in the rough by the cliffs bordering the seventh hole. As he reached out with his seven-iron to rake back the ball, he followed the momentum of his club and toppled to his death on the rocks fifty metres below. When he was found, a black wing feather protruded from his startled open mouth like an occult message, or a sign-off from the Camorra.

The blow also freed the crow to actually speak. Not in the squawking guttural scratchiness of a Ted Hughes crow, or in the mellifluous sonnet tones of John Gielgud’s narration for that strange nineteen-sixties crow animation for BBC2 – if there ever was such a thing – and if there wasn’t, there should have been – or at least there should be a remake now narrated by Derek Jacobi – ‘oh, sweet indefatigable crow, flap shut your wings and come huddle in the warmth of the beating heart of your wicker-wisp-wound nest’ – no, the crow’s voice resembled, albeit uttering un-authored doggerel, the strangely bird-like strangulated sounds of a grainy tape recording of James Joyce reading: ‘I want battered bastard chips, chip chippered chips, chip chippy chips, and I want them now, now, now!’

As I watched for the sun to rise this morning, I spotted the crow stiffen and fall back, a discarded coalscuttle bouncing along the slates of the roof, then dropping out of sight.  The sun arrived on cue and the other crows flocked into a shambolic dark cloud that grew and filled the sky.

Had the crow been able to, he might have risen to the occasion, recorded the event: ‘as he fell, the sun bled celestial fingers of light through grey dawn clouds, and the black crows rose as a congregation of departing dark-suited mourners, flying out over the fens and the Murrough, out to the hills that lie beyond Newcastle, to the Glen of the Downs, The Sugar Loaf, finding solace in the turbulent expanse of The Irish Sea.’

But no, he was dead and un-mourned, except by me, and those who appreciate a crow that crowed more than the rest.

*Crow was published on Fictive Dream, the illustration is by Jonny Voss

MONTY MODLYN

Monty Modlyn hosted a late-night phone-in on LBC in the 1970s. He was warm, cockney-cheeky and consistently upbeat with callers who rang in.

‘Monty, I put all the washing in like it said to, and it came out proper mangled. Ruined it was.’

‘Oh, sweetie, I’m really sorry to hear that. What’s your name by the way, my love?’

‘June.’

‘June, that’s a lovely name, and a lovely month. Now, June, dearest, and I’m not trying to be cheeky, but maybe it’s a chance for a new wardrobe?’

‘Oh, I don’t have money for that. Not since my husband went and everything.’

‘Oh, June, I’m so sorry, dear. When did he die?’

‘Oh, he’s not dead, Monty, he went off with my sister.’

‘Ah! Definitely time for a new start, my girl: out with the old and in with the new, as my mum used to say.’

‘Your mum was right, Monty, I’ll buy a dress in the sales tomorrow. Why not?’

‘Yes, why not, my love, and you take care and show a bit of ankle when you can.’

 Den, Paul and I were fourteen. It was New Year’s Eve, 1975. We were in Paul’s bedroom listening to Monty’s programme, taking the mickey out of him and the callers, and shutting out the world around us. Even though I giggled inanely, I was secretly seething – how had it come to this? Inwardly I longed for better times, imagining other pupils from school in reverie, dancing and necking the night away.

The numbing comic mediocrity of that night mirrored the years to come in my twenties and thirties after I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). A sentence taken in relative solitary, life happening elsewhere, ceaseless days of drudging melancholy enlivened by snippets of humour and companionship, a life stubbornly endured in the hope of better times to come. 

When I first became ill at twenty-six, my friends clubbed together to send me, like an Edwardian lady taking restorative waters, for respite cure at Tyringham Naturopathic Clinic. The residents were moderately wealthy (it wasn’t Champneys: here was faded grandeur), often overweight and emotionally fragile, mildly invalided, and occasionally included elusive celebrities seeking a bolthole from the world. A TV star was recovering from relationship upheavals in a suite on the top floor when I was there, and only appeared occasionally at breakfast in a purple chiffon dressing gown and giant sunglasses, to peruse and touch various fruits in a bowl before rejecting them, then disappear up the stairs with a steaming cup of hot lemon water trembling in her hand, her famous red hair aflame and pouring out behind her. 

In the ornate gardens, surrounded by statues of Greek gods and marble nymphs, lay the longest man-made pool in Europe. Sun worshippers sitting around the pool, mainly female, average age sixty plus, were sometimes drawn to the presence of a frail young man in a swimming costume lying by the water but never getting in. I was that young man, and was soon being mothered by various older women, and enjoying the attention. Betty told me about her daughter, who had recently been diagnosed with ME, then also known post-viral syndrome (I never liked that word, ‘syndrome’). ‘That’s what you’ve got, I stake my life on it!’ she said excitedly. ‘And what you need to do is give in to it!’ 

Tyringham was built over powerful ley lines, and attracted shamans, white witches and spiritualists. Betty’s friend, a small nervous woman with beetle-black eyes, declared that she was a healer and told me I was a healer too, but that I was too open, and my energies were being drained by negative forces. ‘Protect your centre with golden light,’ she said, her hand drawing an invisible circle around my bare stomach, ‘particularly when your mother is around.’ 

Not all medics believed ME was a real illness. Fortunately, my GP was more enlightened. He’d read about the condition and when I saw him after Tyringham, he offered the same diagnosis as Betty. The diagnosis, however contentious, would offer some temporary protection and sanctuary. There was a problem, though. I remember an Alan Bennett play shown on television when I was about fifteen. A bourgeois party was taking place in a grand house. A well-coiffed woman strode in and declared with gusto, ‘I have cancer!’ and, after initial silence, received a smattering of polite applause. Betty was well meaning but also triumphant in her diagnosis, but ME was nothing to crow about. It lacked real legitimacy, no lasting badge of honour would be awarded for fighting it or staying the course, and the controversial diagnosis soon became a curse. 

Advice for getting well was so contradictory. Rest or exercise? Fight or give in? Live with the condition or live despite it? Any kind of exercise, even gentle walking, soon exacerbated muscle pains and weakness, but should I carry on and do it anyway? Later on, medics and therapists suggested carefully graduated exercise as a possible way forward. But for someone whose energy had long gone, and who was impatient and wanted quick results, their strategy was near impossible. In any case, I rapidly found that I could do very little except lie down and fester, and dwell on my symptoms. Even reading was too tiring, my eyesight and brain fogging after a few lines. I was confused, berating myself for not trying hard enough to get well but fiercely hurt and defensive if I was disbelieved or if someone intimated – as a few did – I was faking. OK, bring it on: Pretentious. Moi? Paranoid. Who’s been talking about me? Hypochondriac. Maybe? But if I were, couldn’t I also be ill? Don’t know. Well, fuck you, then!

I left my job as a student nurse, and vacated my room in a co-op in New Cross to go back to my parents and their tiny flat in Haywards Heath; my bedroom big enough for a single bed and a small CD player. I disappeared into a stupor, lying in bed for maybe twenty-three hours a day for the first six months. Ethereal voiceless music, glorious cascading waves of kora strings, hoots and rumbles of sixties, spaced-out Miles Davis, or deranged celestial whoops and enchanted gobbledegook from the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser were a constant, sometimes soothing, occasionally unhinging, companion. My mind would be transported to somewhere else, high, tripping, heat through my temples, my body left for dead on the slab. 

I had no choice but to try and sleep my way through, getting up to eat with my parents in the evening, and watch a little television. Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective took me over and became a totem for my submerged psyche, the convoluted detective plots and blackly comic forties hospital crooning, the anti-hero Marlowe’s hot peeling psoriasis skin, his diseased erotic dreams and surreal cinematic suffering, all mingling with my own confused imaginings and disconnection from the real (healthy) world. My parents loved it too (echoing our shared enjoyment of Potter’s Pennies From Heaven when I was a teenager). We laughed at the incongruity of uptight doctors and nurses dropping bedpans and stethoscopes to suddenly tap dance and lip-synch to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters (‘Don’t Fence Me In’ carrying particular resonance), Dad smiling over at my glassy-eyed infatuation with Marlowe’s nurse played by a young, sexy Joanne Whalley. 

Listless days in a gloomy half-light were often accompanied by cassettes of books narrated by friends. These included a painfully arch reading of Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, and my friend Beatrice’s feat of endurance reading, Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, in a strange, shaky Southern States drawl, where sometimes she was so tired it became impossible to decipher what she was saying. Words and phrases got lost along the way, but the message came through and I was hooked, twelve-year-old Frankie’s story resonating with my own sense of longing and despair. Frankie is bored and trapped by life and becomes obsessed by her brother’s wedding and with his bride. Beatrice’s drawled narration created a strange atmosphere, another level of recognition and attachment to Frankie’s predicament and spirit:

‘Because she [Frankie] could not break this tightness gathering within her, she would hurry to do something. She would go home and put the coalscuttle on her head like a crazy person, and walk around the kitchen table. She would do anything that suddenly occurred to her – but whatever she did was always wrong … having done these wrong and silly things, she would stand, sickened and empty, in the kitchen door and say: “I wish I could tear down this whole town.”’ 

Another friend, Tom, sent a tape of Chinese meditation and breathing exercises, narrated in his deep, resonating actor’s voice. From the poem of Fang Sung Kung, Tom spoke evenly and encouragingly:

With a high pillow I lie on my bed;

I keep my body comfortable and relaxed.

I breathe in and out naturally,

And say the word quiet and relax silently.

I think of the word quiet as I inhale,

And the word relax as I exhale. 

I never got near to the end of any tape before sleep set in, but the familiar voices were welcome, and my friends’ acts of kindness made me feel that I wasn’t alone and helped keep me going. 

I also made tapes for them, endlessly stop-starting cassettes, jamming together ‘record’ and ‘play’ buttons, trying to find a feel, a merging flow and theme to the music, carefully nuanced to fit the mood and taste of each friend, tape boxes scattered across my bed, my head zoned in and frazzling. I was moronically obsessive, barely able to talk, let alone take a break for the toilet; nothing mattered more at that moment, and each tape completely exhausted me. Sometimes I’d finish only to find the important final track wouldn’t fit (days before digitised music and cue times) so I’d start again, taping over, scribbling again over my cramped spidery writing on the index cover, editing out the guilty overlong track to fit in two shorter ones: Fela Kuti’s expansive polemic ‘ITT’ giving way to Leonard Cohen’s ‘I’m Your Man’, neatly segueing into Al Greene’s ‘Belle’. Damn, J. J. Cale’s ‘Magnolia’ would have worked better. Start again! 

Being ill and marking time at home was familiar fare. I’d experienced fevers and pneumonia as a young child in Mombasa, a quiet shuttered room (waiting for my parents to come in and check on me), delirious daytime sleeps held in the safety and relief of cool white sheets, then repeated colds and flus throughout puberty and into my teens. 

At school in Sussex, I missed a day a week on average, often Thursdays (double chemistry), occasionally feigning symptoms to encourage sympathy and more time off. I once heated the trusty family thermometer in a mug of tea. The mercury shot fatally off the scale. When I retrieved the thermometer, its end burst and mercury dolloped onto the floor, separating then re-coalescing, then separating again as I tried to scoop it up with a spoon. A line of small silver balls slid under the fridge and I started to panic, fearing mercury was as poisonous as arsenic and as explosive as plutonium. 

In the early stages of ME, I contracted pneumonia and was sent to Guy’s Hospital. After a week I recovered enough to go onto the ward rooftop terrace. It was like a World War Two TB sanatorium garden, only high up and surrounded by concrete and glass: young men in regulation striped dressing gowns flaked out on deckchairs, basking in the sun, some with eyes closed, no longer moving, as if they were already dead, others chatting and playing cards. I shared a cigarette with a man about my age, sitting on his own. He showed me fine, hard, grey pellets running under his skin and along the veins on his arms and legs. 

‘I tried to kill myself by swallowing mercury,’ he said. ‘It didn’t work, obviously.’ He saw I looked relieved. ‘But now they’re saying they can’t do anything. The drugs to reverse the mercury’s flow haven’t worked and sooner or later the mercury will collect itself in my heart. And that will be that.’

‘Jesus!’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he replied, with a kind of grin. 

The drag on the cigarette made me dizzy and breathless. I gave my pack to him. ‘Thanks, and don’t worry, it won’t be wasted, I’ll have plenty of time to finish them,’ he said, lighting up another. He added that death would be agony, as his liver was already toxic. Yet he sounded so matter-of-fact and gave an ironic ‘thumbs up’ when I left him. His slow, monotone voice haunted me for weeks after I was discharged.

When I was a child, Mum had enjoyed my company when I was off school, sometimes colluding in my illness to keep me home. She loved our slow, giggling dances (as did I) when I returned from school for lunch, a frozen Birds Eye TV meal in the oven, Frank Sinatra’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ circling on the turntable. But when I arrived home from Guy’s Hospital, she wasn’t there. She’d suffered a breakdown and was recuperating in a small psychiatric hospital in Hove. We visited her in her dormitory, a row of pictures of me, my sister and my nephew, arranged on her bedside locker, and while we were there she never stopped crying. But she had close friends in hospitals, a strange boarding-school camaraderie, someone to look out for her, and an old woman with long, wild, grey hair came over and hugged me and said she’d been praying for me too. Mum looked on sobbing, and said, ‘I love you so much but I’m an awful mother, I should be there for you!’ 

On her return, she wanted to smother (the extra ‘s’ is mine) me, my illness relegated and merged into her own anxieties, disaster storylines and maternal guilt; the tragedy of the perfect son cut down by a sickness no one understood, and a pitiable mother who was unable to help. After her drugs kicked in, she resurfaced and did her best, an ally of sorts, and we tried to help each other. But Mum’s melancholic fateful take on things was dangerous. I tried my best to be practical and positive about my health – it was the early days of my illness, after all – but a heroic yet catastrophic narrative was sometimes hard to resist. I put my own dark comic spin on my predicament, lacing my illness with stories of slapstick medical mishaps and a surreal gallows humour. The comedy of misfortune sometimes devalued things, pulled the rug from what I was going through, and helped cast me as some kind of hapless idiot. But if I was serious and told things how they really were, I worried that I came over as needy and overly intense: one extreme to the other with nothing safe or easily digestible in between. 

Mum would wait by the front door of the flat, jumping at it as soon as Dad turned the key to come inside. A catalogue of woe and recrimination would follow, Dad fending her off and walking breathless down the corridor, his energies spent by the time he looked in on me. Once he stopped me in my tracks (just as the plaintive, lonesome whistle was about to blow): ‘I’m sorry, I know you’re going through it, but I can’t listen straight after your mum has had me. I’m tired, but I’ll come in later and you can tell me how you are then.’ I understood but my eyes smarted with hurt. I’d hear him go into the kitchen where Mum waited with an ensnaring cup of tea, and she was off. After a while came a pained roar: ‘For Christ’s sake, just shut up!’ My own voice quietened in solidarity with his plea for silence. 

My sister was worried that Dad coping with me being ill at the same as dealing with Mum’s depression might kill him. The guilty family story of Dad’s heart attacks following a marathon weekend of summer gardening in 1974 still resonated. I remember his flagging energies on that Sunday, regimental lines up and down the garden, the aggravated, guilt-inducing sound of the mower, and his obsessive impatience to get it all done in one go. We determinedly clung on inside, trying to drown things out with the TV (‘The Big Match’) turned up, feeling bad but also staking our right to relax, to be lazy and not help, justifying inaction with the rationale that it needn’t all be done in one go. 

Dad didn’t die, but after his heart attacks, any time he was late home from work would have Mum wringing her hands and saying, ‘He’s gone, I can tell, we’ve just got to get on with it.’ Now my sister was worried that my illness and its demands would finish him off for good. Life repeats itself, and, like Dad, I have no patience and rush headlong into things, hoping my fragile energies will carry me through. Moving house, I’ll frenziedly pack into the small hours for days before, and then have the new house (magically replicating the one before) settled, boxes unpacked and flattened for recycling, pictures hung, kids’ toys stacked, books and CDs on shelves, only a couple of days later; and then I let go and collapse.

It’s always been my choice to push myself and I’ve never listened when someone said ‘slow down’. Not much changes: I’m writing about past illness while I’m ill with flu, flirting with reality, those loose shadowy sentences and opaque turns of phrase. I’ve also been nursing my eight-year-old, who’s had the same flu, while writing about myself being off school being nursed by my mother. 

My first venture out of my parents’ flat to an ME sufferers’ group was new and yet also horribly familiar: the Sussex village church-hall setting, resourceful flower arrangements (‘Can they really be plastic, Vicar?’), Women’s Guild posters, Round Table litter initiatives, the generously flowing teapot, Barley Cup (I hate Barley Cup) and Fairtrade instant coffee, homespun shawls for sale for use on frozen, immobile legs. A well-meaning, parochial Archers vibe I’ve always recoiled from. Then the sight of mummified limbs bound in the same cheerfully patterned shawls, sticking out from wheelchairs parked up in the front row, overbearing, anxious parents waiting behind to ride their kids’ chariots like Ben Bloody Hur, young women crumpled in the chairs, their deathly pale faces, disarmingly insipid smiles and angry eyes, coiled in on themselves but wanting to shout: ‘Understand me, I’m sick, you fuckers!’ 

Speakers talked about gaining acceptance, applying for disability benefits and where best to buy natural sheepskin pads to prevent bedsores. It was overwhelming, the air full of desperate coping, defeat and hurt, and I wanted to escape. But I listened, my lips slowly separating into the same insipid smile, the hint of a grimace; and next meeting I’d be wheeled in on my own wheelchair. 

My rickety collapsible chair was hired from a local charity and was too small. I hated it, and I hated being in it. I felt self-conscious in public, though occasionally I indulged in the mystery and fantasy of a heroic young man (Firefighter? Soldier? Or poet?) tragically struck down in his prime.

‘Oh, it breaks my heart to see a fit-looking young man like you in a wheelchair.’

‘I ain’t fit, lady, but thanks for your concern.’

‘Oh, you lovely cheeky boy!’ 

I could stand up unaided and walk a short distance, so the wheelchair was used for journeys over a few hundred metres, to avoid exhaustion and overexerting my muscles. The wheelchair was hard to push and I’d sit rigid, my muscles tensed, my eyes closed (wishing it all away), feeling guilty for making a fuss, always questioning if I should be in it at all: cue the accusatory column (‘Monsters Amidst Us’) on page seven of the local paper with a picture of a perky, seemingly able-bodied driver climbing out of his Ferrari, which he’d just parked in a disabled parking space. Of course, there were many reasons why his sports car might have qualified for a disabled permit, weren’t there? 

But tongues like to wag, and if I stood up and miraculously walked from my wheelchair, I confounded expectations. When my friend Beatrice and I arrived on a windy day on Seaford seafront, we couldn’t stop laughing, as, first, we attempted to lift the wheelchair out of the boot, and then fold it out and reattach its missing wheels. She pushed off and a front wheel fell away and I tipped forward onto the floor. We were in hysterics. An old couple in a car visibly tutted, and the woman tapped angrily on her passenger side window as if we had transgressed some convention of disabled behaviour and use of mobility equipment. The following week’s page-seven headline could have set the letters page on fire. 

At my third local ME Association meeting (the second meeting, attended in my new wheelchair, had passed in a fevered blur) I met Adrian. As if attending an old-fashioned introductory agency for the enfeebled, an older woman spotted we were both men and both young, and pushed our chairs together. We smiled shyly at each other, but I detected a welcome energy in his obvious discomfort at being there, a glint of red and anger in his eyes. We ended up talking about music rather than being ill, a mutual way of escaping, and would meet later to swap tapes we’d made for each other, my esoteric tastes for relaxing to kora music and Philip Glass less to his taste than Public Enemy and the wonderful testosterone-filled Soweto beats he made for me. He was new to the game, and I was cast as an unwilling veteran, ready to show him the ropes, but we both preferred to hide from view and neither of us would attend a meeting again. 

I hunkered down at home, endlessly sleeping, numbing pain and unwanted thoughts with the prescribed opiate DF118: a low-key medicinal heroin, a soft landing, a warm cave to crawl into, to lie up and wait. Despite its unfortunate effect of bunging me up, it was insidiously addictive and even more soulful than the Valium I used to steal from Mum’s handbag when I was a teenager. 

I felt so ill and alone in my illness that sometimes I fantasised I might not wake up from a sleep. More often, though, I went to sleep wishing I’d wake up feeling miraculously better. But each day was Groundhog Day and I woke wrung out, a heavy head on the pillow, bones and muscles aching, brain slurring, my vision blurred at the edges. 

ME took away my ability to read books. Ironic when I had so much time, but a page would finish me off, words jumbling, my eyes dropping between the lines, white noise, sugar-melt between the letters. Brain scans at St Bart’s and St Thomas’s would later show that there was neurological brain damage, reduced blood flow at the brain’s stem affecting various cerebral hemispheres and cognitive functions. While brain stamina was reduced and the parts of my brain that took in and utilised information were compromised, the sections of my brain to do with imagination became increasingly stimulated and warped: endless fitful, drooling daydreams and deep REM sleeps full of surreal colour and vibrancy. As soon as I closed my eyes it was like I was tripping, a ready tap of Kool-Aid to turn on and dive into. The escapes were welcome and made up for my inability to take flight in the books still piled beside my bed. They became less taunting and more comforting, the few familiar ones stimulating random flashes of memory, the unread ones offering infinite possibilities and leaps of imagination from their titles alone. 

The ME Association magazine clanked through the letterbox each quarter. I eyed it warily: the crude War Cry font and cheap paper (before some ME sufferer’s celebrity parents raised its profile and turned it glossy), the black-and-white cover with a young woman in bed, curtains drawn, numerous pill bottles scattered all over her bedside table, defiantly smiling up at the camera from a chasm of pillows. There were some useful advice columns, rallying pleading letter pages, doctor and therapist trials and regimes, but just flipping through it made me relieved that I couldn’t read it properly. Its prosaic drabness, its well-intentioned mantra to gain medical acceptance and its passive-aggressive need to constantly justify and defend the illness filled me with a sinking feeling, drowning in the maudlin hopelessness of it all.

I tried diets suggested in the magazine – the worst and most debilitating being the anti-candida diet (no yeast, no sugar, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no fun) – and I kept to each of them religiously, hoping they’d get me well, but somehow knowing that they wouldn’t be enough on their own. In desperation I tried healers, some good, some bad, but nearly all well meaning and doing their best to help. In the right hands, a stranger’s light touch over the body was deeply relaxing – skin tingling, breathing slowing down, purple hues through the eyelids. In the wrong hands? Beware the self-proclaimed weekend Reiki Master, because neuroses can also be transmitted through touch! 

I learned to compartmentalise my illness, my expression of it, from everyday life. It was safer to unbuckle and let go with a therapist or healer, but less so with people I was close to. If the phone rang, and I was well enough to get up, I’d seek privacy by taking the phone into my room, my reactions initially slow, as if I couldn’t remember how to get the words out. Then I’d warm to the task, adrenaline (a sickly, destructive drug in my case) coursing through me so I’d suddenly be wise-cracking, surreally making light of things (‘Yes, the wheelchair wheel came off and I practically catapulted into the sea’). My strained laughter echoed how Mum often behaved, switching from the darkest depression with us at home to suddenly screaming with laughter down the phone. Then the light abruptly went out and I was punch-drunk, slumped against the ropes again. 

A breakout every few months from the tedium of diets and illness was to really go for it and binge. Vodka! I couldn’t tolerate a drink for years, in fact a sip of wine or beer completely exhausted me, but sometimes I would escape to Tom’s house in New Cross and drink a Stolichnaya from the freezer in one sitting, my rabid energies unleashed, singing songs at the top of my voice, clowning and yelling it all out. 

After a session when several bottles had been drunk, Tom’s housemate Ben rallied enough to drive me for my appointment at the London Homeopathic Hospital on Great Ormond Street. Hangovers blissed out everything; no responsibility or need to face up to reality. The car meandered, my nausea turned and rose, and I felt like I was parachuting, enjoying the gravity pull, out of control but somehow safe and not about to die just yet. In the toilets my piss bubbled and steamed, the cubicle taking on the smell of a doss house. When blood was taken, it spilled apologetically from the side of the needle, watered down and thin, as if from a faulty optic. The phlebotomist shook what frothy pink liquid was left in the tube and said there must be something wrong with the syringe because blood didn’t normally look like that! Alcohol, with its false disinhibiting adrenaline, had carried me like a small boat riding excitedly across the waves, to later smash against the rocks and return me waterlogged, retreating into bed for weeks to try and recover, dreaming of the next time. 

Beatrice loved visiting me at my parents’ flat. My illness, Dad’s failing health coupled with Mum’s depression, the juxtaposition of a mahogany carved chest, African sculptures and fine Persian rugs crammed into our small flat, spoke to her of faded colonial grandeur, of a family tragically on the wane. Mum came alive when certain people were around and Beatrice was in her thrall as she spun sad tales of her cruel Indian convent, of escapes to the thruppenny seats in the post-war West End. In her later stories, I was cast as the poor gifted son, always destined to be ill. Beatrice smiled fondly at me when Mum said this and then laughed sympathetically when I tried to dilute the atmosphere by making jokes. 

Beatrice told me I should write about my illness, the post-colonial malaise that afflicted us. ‘That’s your story, that’s what you should tell,’ she said, and here I am, finally well enough, writing it down.

And Monty would be proud of me were he still alive, squashing any doubts about baring myself in public:

‘Everyone has a story to tell, darling, so why not tell yours?’

‘It might not be interesting or relevant to anyone, Monty.’

‘Stop with all that, just tell it like it is and let the readers decide, and while you’re about it, show a bit of grit, or ankle if there’s any to show, people tend to like it.’

*

Monty Modlyn was published in 2021’s ‘A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology’ wonderfully edited and put together by Lily Dunn and Zoe Gilbert.

it can be ordered here https://unbound.com/books/recovery/ and here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Precious-Life-Recovery-Anthology-ebook/dp/B08GXBKQ16/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

In a photo I’m leaning with Mum against a railing in Richmond Park. I’m seven and Mum is laughing, holding a cigarette in one hand, reaching out for me with her other. It’s late autumn, and golden leaves are turning to rust and lie scattered across the grass. I can smell the familiar sweetness of her favourite perfume, which I know is called Fidji because she tells my father off if he doesn’t buy her the right one. She’s wearing a brilliant white coat bought from Bentalls earlier in the day, and looks like a film star, something of the hedonism and lived-in wiliness of Ava Gardner, but her need to reach out for me tells me she’s still my mum.

In the photo I’m looking at her laughing and reaching out to me, my expression happy but also slightly quizzical, marvelling, but already not quite believing what I’m seeing. For though I have many photos of Mum laughing at a camera, and she maintained a wicked sense of humour right up until the end, I struggle to remember many episodes of her laughing as much in life (though if I dared to dig deeper I’d remember more), the depression that took over in late middle-age and for the rest of her life, crumpling her features into a perpetual grimace, colouring my mood and memories of her, distorting the happier mental pictures I try to focus on and hold inside.

Richmond Park was where she was happy but it was also significant in her downfall. If there had been an inquest into her death in her mid-seventies, I might have brought in this picture as an exhibit, as background evidence of how Richmond and its park offered refuge but also shadowed her decline.

Between World Wars, Mum’s father had died from TB, his lungs slowly rotting away after being gassed on the Somme. Mum’s mother, who had only been eighteen when she’d given birth to her, took off to catch up on the life she felt she’d missed out on, to let it all out amidst the delirious, unbridled twenties, a debauched sepia print of her on an ocean liner, cigar in mouth, lying across the laps of two men in cockeyed sailors’ caps, who looked like they’d just drunk the bar dry.

Mum was seven, the same age as I am in the photo, when she’d been dumped in an unforgiving convent in India, spending the next ten years holed up there, never visited by her mother. Attending on a meagre army widow’s scholarship, she was treated worse than the other girls – more chores, cheaper meals, and harsher punishments – and didn’t leave the grounds until her teens, when her grandmother and aunt finally rescued her for summer holidays to their home in Richmond. In 1942 she turned eighteen, finally left the convent, joined up as a Wren, and moved in with them. ‘The war years’, she’d often say ‘were the happiest I’ve ever been’, the excitement and risk somehow enlivening her, the fleeting romances (she was proposed to three times), and comfort and delight of walks and picnics with her newfound family in Richmond Park.

As long as I can remember Mum wanted to return to live in Richmond, but she never got her wish, only posthumously getting there when she stopped eating after her suicide attempt by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills had failed. In the long shrinking countdown to her days, she repeatedly asked that my sister and I scatter her ashes in Richmond Park’s Isabella Plantation.

Months after her funeral, we stole at dusk into the plantation, so fewer people might see us, as if we were committing an illicit act best kept from view. We found a cluster of bushes away from a path and I took the urn out of my bag and dug a hole for her ashes to go in. When I opened the urn, a splutter of wind lifted a mist of grey ash over my face and hair. Hysteria took us over and we laughed and couldn’t stop. Eventually, I shook my head and spat out the ashes, and we patted them down into the soil and tried to say a few appropriate funereal words. Whether it was the cold, the hysteria, or the sadness and bitterness of her final years, it became impossible to say anything with real conviction. And inevitably when we returned a year later, we couldn’t locate the bushes where we’d scattered the ashes – more laughter, more hysteria.

Ten years after scattering the ashes I went with my wife and daughters to live in Richmond. It sometimes felt like an act of betrayal towards her, though I know she’d have been mostly happy for us too. She was everywhere, accompanying us on walks along the Thames towpath, queuing in the perfume section in Bentalls, outside her Gran’s Victorian redbrick ground-floor flat in East Sheen and most of all in Richmond Park, even though I sometimes did my best not to see her there.

There is a photo of my daughters taken in Spring in Isabella Plantation, aged four and five, in bright purple and pink Chelsea FC tee-shirts (Mum, like her mother before her, supporting Arsenal to maintain a phoney and mischievous rivalry between us), laughing and mucking about in front of a riot of Technicolor rhododendrons.

We never again tried to find Mum’s ashes on the many visits we made there, but leaving the park we had to pass the railings where I’d stood with her decades before. Mum still reaching out, pleading for me take her hand; so now, I do the next best thing and write it all down and get to hear her laughter and hold her once again.

*Richmond Park was published this year in ‘Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature’, Artful Scribe/John Hansard Gallery, Edited by Joanna Barnard. https://artfulscribe.co.uk/shop

if the head had it

counting down

V

If the head had ever had it, now it had gone. Shaping west, making out with anything that comes its way, scrambled Fray Bentos aerial, dog food brain. Made my money in cool Velcro pants that’d hug a greyhound tight, chased rabbits round and round, back to front, y oh why am I so shy? See him then, dwarf’s cap, a tight mince-pimp-walk like he’s just secreted a foil capsule up his choke and is squeezing his cheeks to keep it from falling; one eye out for the bluebottles, one eye out for a score.

‘Please, I’m all at sea, I need to land!’

‘Go, fetch!’ and he chucks it over the churchyard wall.

Over I follow, scrabbling by a gravestone and digging around the dead, my mind about to spurt.

Father Derek appears. He senses my urgency: ‘God has plans for you, Michael. God has plans for me. God has plans for everyone.’

‘A planner, this God, is he?’

‘He is.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It is.’

I see it poking from under his shoe.

‘God bless you, Father.’

Up the steps to the steeple I go, knees to elbows, lungs emptying, heart poking through the chest bone, horizons all merging at the top. Sweet unwrap; sour musk tongue, head expanding – botulism from an arse’s arse, my hands join in prayer, a diver’s poise, ground swelling up and body going down.

 ‘Some come here and jump like Eddie the Eagle, making spectacles of themselves,’ is all Father Derek will say.

‘Eddie the Eagle wore glasses,’ I might reply if I were still able to. Poor calculation for a jumper though: Eddie never reached enough speed for lift off and his bulk always dragged him down.

‘God has plans for you,’ Father Derek had said.

And that made no sense at all.

*

Passing over the rooftops, pink-grey grime of ridged Toblerone, chimneystacks belching out reclaimed pallet fumes. Mum’s house sits silent, a fog of doom, her black cloud engulfing the kitchen, Guinness pinafore bustling, the toucan cast out of paradise to crumple at her lap as she gets to polishing, casting out demons: her son, a jumper, a bailer out:

‘There’s a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a junkie standing together in a hot air balloon. The balloon is falling to the ground. One has to agree to jump to save the others. The religious men start praying.

“I’ll get my needle,” says the junkie.

”No!” the religious men shout but too late, no calculation needed and the balloon plummets to the ground.’

The whistle on the kettle screeches. Father Derek arrives to offer prayer, his dark figure looming on the glass panel of the front door, and Mum screams as if she’s seen a ghost.

*

The first time was with Katherine, artistic bohemian Katherine from the other side. Her father was an architect, her mother an art teacher, fragrant stock to a lowlife like me. A newbie at university studying maths, a geek in every sense from my home-knit Feargal Sharkey cardigans to my market-stall trainers, I was ripe for sabotage. Katherine wore cool black polo necks, smoked white filtered Kents and blew out circles above my head to tighten the noose, to rein me in. When she unfolded a pair of black silk pants from her bag, a syringe rolled out onto the mattress between us. She’d spotted the flaw, smelled desperation through the cracks, and knew there’d be no hesitation.

*

The funeral is underway, and my brother Aiden is stalling: ‘Michael, Michael, what can you say about Michael?’

Father Derek shrugs his shoulders as if to say ‘don’t expect me to answer that!’ Aiden is struggling because in common with practically every one else in this sorry congregation, he hasn’t seen me in years. Not only that but he’d never forgiven me for plaguing Mum when things had got rough, borrowing and stealing from her to pay a debt, to keep alive on the streets, to keep things going. Hypocrite that he is, with his fine infidelity suit, the serial womaniser with the brood safely tucked in at home, flaunting his pitiful giblet to any woman he could pass muster with.

‘Michael was a beautiful young boy, who was good at maths but sadly lost his way, God rest his soul. May he find peace and salvation for his sins.’

Is that it? Is that the best he can do? The mood overall is tense rather than sad. There is some general sobbing and more and more chair scraping. People want out.  Mum looks like a cadaver, the flinty cheekbones protruding under her eyes arched like chicken wings, her irises exploding bloodshot from tiny strained vessels into the white of her eyes. She looks like a junkie too now.

*

Mum in the cold clasp drape of her bed, eyes up to the cross. I blow low notes through the tiny hairs in the bassoon of her ear and she responds with a faint smile and sighs.

‘Is that you?’ she asks, and tries to sleep in case she finds me there.

I think of smothering, an act of kindness, but no, I fill her glass by the bed for her to put her dentures. They drop in with a fixed grin and small bubbles chase up to the rim. I kiss her on the cheek, and her eyes close.

In her sleep I am washed clean, and she is rocking me on her knees. Numbers silenced in my head for a moment, I cling on and try not to fall.

IV

1975, the year of being born, and me not yet fourteen, in a pair of coach seats to my own, near the back away from the dark lords and dusky maidens upfront – the brothers and nuns – and two up from the VIP sofa rear, the cool kids, their piss awful laughs and catcalling. An away-day escape to the jaunty seaside, mixing up hormones, tangling barbed wire braces, gum, stutter and smarting cheeks with the local convent girls.

Aiden is back there with tarty Frances, fingering away under her satchel, discreetly poised over her ugly lampshade gingham skirt. She’s at it too and he makes a low moan when he comes – then a handy tissue bound in gents fluid tossed (!) towards the back of Kevin Connor’s head, miraculously fixing onto his trailing locks – and Aiden tells me later that Frances holds onto his prick like no other. I think of a girl’s fingers squeezing around a racing handlebar and get a slightly sick feeling deep inside the holy pit.

‘Are you children behaving?’ shouts a Brother, too lazy or too frightened to venture to the back.

‘All Hunky Dory,’ yells a boy with a rebel-tinge of henna to his spike-top.

‘No sticky fingers round here, Bro,’ says Aiden softly enough, so only Frances and his friends hear.

The hyena giggles start quiet at first, then pump up to bursting, but before madness breaks out and revolution hits the air, they artfully puncture things, hiss it all out, hot and wild eyed, gasping like they’ve stepped out of a furnace. Frances lets go a stunted scream, finally faking her arrival: ‘took your time, Aiden,’ she says, punching him on the arm, then re-arranging her skirt into an innocent pose, satchel returned to the floor by her feet.

I recite multiplication tables in my head, temples numbing out the deluge of unwanted sounds, numbers way beyond the yellowed sweaty school texts: 22×24 is 528, 23×24 is 552, 24x 24 is 576, yes, oh, fucking yes!!!

From the top of the town, the sea arrives onto the coach window, framed beside the hairy-man driver, a carpet of cool, a flagrant call to undress; I hope we don’t get to see his gorilla arse and wild garden back parting the waves.

We straggle onto the pebbly beach, each group finding a rock to collect behind, to undress, fleeting hands sneaking modesty towels (‘too small, Ma, I told you it was too small’) away from skinny blue-white chicken flesh:

‘Do that that to me again you feck, and I’ll skin you of all your skin!

‘That makes no fucking sense, Jon, and you know it.’

‘Shit off or I’ll shit on you!’

‘That’s better, but you’ve a way to go before anyone could call you a poet.’

I find a rock of my own and start counting down numbers in elevens until it’s time to go: 233,000, 232,989, 232,978, all the while not being able to keep my eyes off the sea, its swirl, rise and fall; the grating shingle pull back, the letting go; patterns forming further out, globs and gloops, bubbles popping onto the surface; the draw under.

Soon enough the weakening sun rots amongst a mass of grey sweltering clouds. We congregate under a tin roof shelter, assemble for foul smelling sandwiches, fish paste as pink as Angel Delight. The milk is sour as sick but we drink it anyway. The Brothers look troubled in their inappropriate thick clothes, like bachelor herdsman driven out for the yearly pull, practising lines on each other; nuns huddled up too close in the cramped shelter, agitating towards the saviour tea flask for another sup.

‘You look nice in that horsehair vest, David,’

‘Thank you, Tom, you look very nice too, a grey tank-top suits you. And isn’t it nice weather we’ve been having, Sister Anne?’

Blood violates her cheeks, a faint animal sound emitted through dry untouched lips; it may be a response or a cry for help.

Sister Bernadette steps into the breech: ‘And isn’t tea always welcome on a day like this.’

A murmur of approval, an away-day Amen.

*

At the end of the pier is a concrete tower, a small derelict lighthouse. It’s fenced off by barbed wire, with a large sign saying ‘DANGER, DO NOT ENTER’, and some nut job has scrawled in red-blood-ink under: ‘Enter and you will surely die. Suiciders welcome.’

A group of lads, Aiden, naturally, now disentangled from Frances’s grip, have left the watchful eyes of the Brothers and made their way through a gap in the fence and gone inside. I follow up damp winding stairs. We meet on a small metal balcony at the top. A flimsy rusty railing holds us from the sea, circling way down below.

‘Jesus, Aiden, Mad Michael has followed us.’

‘Piss off, Michael,’ says Aiden.

I stare through them, eyes to the horizon

‘Mental boy, you’re not wanted,’ says one of the others, pushing me in the chest.

‘Leave him alone,’ says Aiden.

They let me be, and start discussing what order they should jump in. Pat, the one who called me Mad Michael, says he’ll go first. Obviously, they all want to go first but after a while they agree and he gets himself ready, the railing trembling as he climbs onto it. He tries to compose himself at the edge, taking in deep breaths, his body teetering, arching forward, the sea looming below. He’s like that for at least a minute.

‘Go on, Pat, get on with it, for fuck’s sake!’

‘I am, I am, just don’t rush me.’

‘Ha ha, his legs are shaking.’

‘Like Elvis, whoa, whoa.’

‘Shut up, will you!’

‘Jump then, you faggot.’

The boys form a chorus: ‘jump! Jump! Jump!’

‘I can’t, I can’t!’

‘You’re a frozen bloody chicken, Pat,’ says Aiden. ‘Get down’.’

Pat climbs down and Aiden takes his place.

‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’

‘Fuck this, lads,’ says Aiden after a few moments swaying at the railing.

Another boy tries. Same thing.

As he gets down, I jump up onto the railing, glance down at the sea, and go. All speeded up. The rush as I drop, breaths emptied out, my heart so heavy, it’s like it’s slipped down my chest and into my legs, and then a smack as I hit the surface of the water, a sheet of metal, which jars my body, re-aligning things so I can break through. I feel my left leg ripped sideways as if a Great White has grabbed it.  I go under.

III

Big as the house he set himself against, Dad’s bullish shoulders heaving down, the hammer striking the wall. Dust, plumes of brick ash, a one-man demolition, and the wall came crashing down. If he whacked you, you were winded for hours, flesh smarted and glowing, a bruise spreading under the skin, a sulphurous flower opening out, poisoning the bloodstream, his anger spreading through you.

Six weeks before the seaside sortie, and Mum is pushing me towards the bed in the far corner of the ward, the scent of decay and old man piss flooding the nostrils, Dad’s death trolley waiting to take him away. Only Dad is 52. Shrunken, corpse-like apart from the sorry groan to greet me, an outstretched arm, emaciated and gleaming with sweat, his anchor tattoo shrivelled in the creases of his skin.

‘Don’t smoke, son,’ he says. ‘It’ll rip you.’ He pinches my hand, an echo of his force reduced into something singular and unmanly. He winces and points to the drip by the bed.  ‘Hit the button, please,’ he says, a formal curtsey I’d never heard him use before. And he says it again: ‘Please, son. Please!’

I do as he asks and the morphine plops down the line and into his vein.

‘More, he says. ‘But don’t let Nurse Ratched see.’

Mum arrives with a carrier bag and sits by his bed. ‘I’ve bought some rhubarb and some apples.’

‘For the love of God, woman, I don’t want it. None of it.’

I hit the button and after a moment he sighs and relaxes back into the pillows, his face beatific and wan, the trace of a smile

‘It’s an air bed,’ Mum says. ‘It’s just as well he can’t smoke anymore.’

Three weeks later he was gone. Ashed. Dusted away.

*

After the dive, I was rescued by a fishing boat, heaved in unconscious. When I woke in hospital, the pain was ballistic but I knew a cure. The drip was attached and screams abated, all those sums, numbers melting away. A pale mist descending onto my eyelids, an icy rush into the vein, a moment of nausea I’d come to know well, learn to push through, and then this new delicious feeling, a cossetted weight in and around me, cocooned, released from harm and responsibility.

The ward radio is on. ‘Thank you for the music, for giving it to me’.

‘Abba, I should hate Abba, but fuck it, they’re lovely. Clean and modern, booted out in whites and turtlenecks like they’re living the Space Age: lovely.’

‘They often talk like this on the drip,’ a nurse tells Mum.

‘Will he be okay?’ Mum asks, the bag of old rhubarb and apples by her feet.

‘Fuck, yeah,’ I say.

‘Michael, don’t you dare speak like that. Not even when you’re ill.’

My leg is cast as Tutankhamen, mummified and snow white. Soon Aiden comes in and draws a cock and balls and his idea of a vagina, hormonal witless hieroglyphics, and I’ll write the names Frida and Benny in unfamiliar girlie bubble writing beside. But mostly I sleep, and pretend to be asleep when Aiden and Mum are around, sink into the mattress, slip slowly under, swim down the depths, thrilling underwater lagoons, pearl roof caves, coral cathedrals, find sanctuary with a Terry Wogan priest in an aqualung, who makes the sign of a cross with a finger through the water.

‘Waterloo: a famous battle between the English and the French? Or water loo, a form of improvised sea toilet – you can tell they’re releasing when they suddenly stand still, eyes to the horizon and pretend they’re thinking something profound – or the name of a song written for Eurovision by the popular Swedish pop group, Abba?”

‘Would I be right in saying it’s the name of a song written for Eurovision by the lovely Swedish pop group, Abba?’

‘Lovely is right, Mad Michael, you have won – ‘ 

 ‘Push the buzzer, Terry.’

And before the nurse comes running, another dose, precise and perfect, is released.

Lovely. Just lovely.

II

Once Katherine glowed, ‘a gift to the dark’ people used to say. After years on the street, any glow had dimmed. Best viewed in shadow, stressed and skeletal, ravaged like a street cat, missing teeth, clumps of hair ripped out, eyes blazing and approaching any man in the street that has a pulse.

‘Five for a blow job!’

‘I’m not going to give you a blow job.’

‘What? No, don’t be funny, please. Come on, my arse could be yours for ten, do anything for as long as you like.’

‘You don’t have an arse, you skinny bitch.’

If he carried on, I’d step out of a doorway and give him a slap: ‘run, student boy or the ghost of her teeth will chase you around town and bite off your cock!’

‘My knight in shining armour but you should just fuck off, he would have given in.’

‘Nah, don’t think so, Kat, you were barking up the wrong tree there.’

‘Woof, fucking woof!’

‘Come on, we can share.’

‘You won’t want me to do anything?’

‘Damn right, but some peace and quiet would be nice.’

We kissed, her mouth sucking me in, but if I closed my eyes her lips felt full again, tongue tipping, lightly touching where once were teeth, that tingle through my body again.

We shared a squat, damp as a paddy field, the acid smell of vomit, always losing our sleeping bags so eventually we didn’t bother. I came down with pneumonia so badly that I ended up in hospital, and when I was kicked out after two weeks, Katherine was gone.

Rumour on the street was that her parents had mounted a rescue. I always thought she’d come back, but as years passed, no sight or sound. Then, one day, I saw her across the road, kitted out like a de-mobbed nun on her first weekend away, shapeless in a flowery skirt and frilly blouse, an auntie’s wig up top, and a set of dentures that would grace a small horse.

‘Kat,’ I shouted but she didn’t so much as look up.

For good measure, an elderly couple – the retired architect and art teacher I’m guessing – caught up with her and pulled her along.

A few days later she came and begged me to help her get away.

We scored just like the old days but I hadn’t taken into account how clean she’d become. A miscalculation, and it took her away for good, eyes up to the night sky, filling with dark; the needle traces, apart from the latest, magically disappeared in the snow of her arms, her gleaming white falsies meeting in a fabulous unintentional grin.

I

After she went and died, I took up bothering Father Derek. Not the most patient of men, easily given to cliché, but at least he tried.

 ‘God has plans for you!’ he said.

I really should have asked what he meant. And a better man than me might have jumped but I actually tripped and fell. Statistics could have taken that into account and helped lessen the load.

Lying on Mum’s lap, the numbers in my head re-surface, start to count me down, 5-4-3-2-1, and I want to shout out ‘Thunderbirds’ but I’m already gone.

*

if the head had it was published in this autumn’s issue of the American journal Exacting Clam https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-6-autumn-2022/

HAND ME MY HAND

‘You can pin a maggot on a mackerel but you can’t pin a mackerel on a maggot,’ whispered the featureless child, his unheard words of wisdom floating away on the wind.

There was lot of wind on the Suffolk coast that day and it was busy dragging the kite belonging to the father of the featureless child along the far side of the beach.

‘Feck it, feck it and feck it,’ scalded Dad.

The snake on a rope thought he said ‘fetch it’ but his impulse to slither over and fetch it was curtailed by a sharp yank on the tie-rope around his neck. His trunk slinked and then coiled up into itself; his gasping tongue protruding to fork the passing currents of air.

Amongst the masses of messed up line attached to the kite emerged a giant ugly deep sea fish. It stank and shouted at a woman and a baby ahead of it.

‘Not mackerel, not a maggot, not a monkfish,’ mumbled and murmured the featureless child.

‘Mmmmer mmmmer mmmmer, can’t make any fecking sense of any fecking thing you say, lad,’ blasted Dad.

‘Sssssand shark, it’sssss a sssssand shark,’ hissssssed the snake.

Dad went to have a closer look. The stinking sand shark bit. He came back with the kite but without his hand.

‘That takes the biscuit,’ sobbed Dad.

‘That took your hand,’ corrected the featureless child.

Dad looked at him for a moment. ‘I understood that bit, lad, you’re right. Good to hear you talk normal for a change.’

The snake slithered back with Dad’s hand.

‘Thanks, snake,’ said Dad with a playful yank at his tie-rope. ‘Now let’s go home, your Mum has got some serious sewing to do.’

IT’S OVER

That whole polluted mass thing, sub species of the sea, nets, giant flotsam, carrier bags, batter scraps, its stinking skeleton and head like a pumped up trout, waddled its way over the waves to introduce itself to Mickey Fish junior, the son of famous weather disseminator Mickey Fish senior.

‘Get back to the tidal waters, ye sardine sons of Satan!’ cried Mickey Fish junior.

‘We are harbingers of environmental and maritime catastrophe.’

‘The climate doomsday scenario, eh? That’s the cunning tongue of Papist dogma, and you are the fish spawn of vile Vatican venom. Back to your deep dark waters, I bid ye.’

‘In you we have picked the wrong human to warn mankind.’

‘Take your wicked wilful words and drown them in your long Roman robes of blood and Piscean blubber.’

‘We’ll be off then but don’t say we didn’t warn you.’

‘Hook off, and don’t ye think leaving any of your sick roe or landing any one of your repugnant thought processes over here – not amongst our great united band of brothers, you won’t.  No more, I tell ye. No, more!’

‘Ungrateful or what?’

And the polluted mass thing dragged itself back over the shallows, and, reaching the drop of the sea shelf, sunk itself into the tarry deep chill of ocean and disappeared.

Mickey Fish junior met his father for a mug of tea and fish and chip dinner.

‘The high priest of tricks and tuna came, Da, and tried to say the waters were drying up and going bad.’

‘Eat you cod, Junior, and drop the Paisley talk.  Everything is going to be just fine.’

NIGHT SWIMMING

Each summer’s night Beatrice and Marie Von Sudenfed arrived for a skinny dip (though Beatrice liked to keep her pants on) under the lustrous silky moon. They skipped amongst the pond flowers on the bank that led into the water. The air swooned with perfumed blossom and the light warm scent of the young women’s skin.

Suddenly a puff of pheromone escaped the lively, watery earth like pollen from a flower sac and rose and swirled and blossomed into the form of a proboscis-quiffed teddy-boy flower, his stem straight and firm like iron; his beady eyes fixed on Beatrice. She felt the aroused intent in the air and shied away, whilst Marie Von Sudenfed, the elder and more experienced of the two, reached over to wring his neck.

He ducked down and appeared to evaporate away. But later as the moonlight cracked and seeped amongst the branches of the trees, his fine misty tentacles could be seen caressing over the water as the girls swam out to the nervous centre of the pond.

BARKING TO WOOLWICH, THE RIVER WAY

Big taxi mouth Barney Eggleston got himself and his pooch kicked out of a London cab for mouthing the dirty. Not only that but a big winged tit was dancing on the roof of the cab and taking the St Michael, so he let it have one with a five-note concord straight in the beak: a right bloody mess. In the melee his pooch only went and got himself on the wrong side of the river. Barney was straight on the blower to his missus: ‘Andy, listen up, dog’s bollocks only gone and got himself the wrong side of the river’.

‘What you on about?’ she screamed.

‘Prince has only gone and got himself -’

‘I heard that, cattle brain, I just don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘Look, Andy, he’s got south side of things and I don’t know how he got there.’

‘Well, you’d better get figuring, that dirty pooch cost a cow’s arse lick.’

He wasn’t sure what Andy meant by this but his brain had bigger things to fry. He tried to reason out things in a thoughtful way: ‘It’s like that story about the fox and the chicken and the eggs and the boat.’

‘What you on about now?’

‘I’m meaning it’s like he’s the chicken and the fox is me, and -’

‘Feck off with all that,’ shouted Andy, throwing her receiver down.

Barney put away his blower and whistled for his pooch to come over. He even tried to entice it with the wave of an Adam Smith. But then he remembered however monetarily inclined his pooch might be, he couldn’t swim a doggie.

‘Stay there, Prince my lad, I’ll come to you.’

But too late: Prince had gone off to use his return ticket on the ferry.

Barney was waist deep in Thames pong when he saw the ferry come towards him and it was then that he remembered that he couldn’t swim either. His phone rung: it was Andy: ‘the fox would eat the chicken, you ponce. But don’t get any fancy pant ideas about cooking up Prince,’ she screamed before a circling swirl of water sucked her voice and Barney down.

And then a curious stillness, save a few bubbles popping up on the water’s surface, and the passing sound of a dog’s howls deep into the heart of the river.

CRAB AND GULL

Fester Crab and Benjamin sparred all summer and autumn, trying to pluck a feather or pierce a shell. One bright December morning they met for a last hurrah before their beach was carried away on winter’s drifting sand.

‘I hold my claws up to you, Benjamin, and offer you the dance of peace.’

Fester danced a circle and Benjamin Seagull watched.

‘Old adversary and now dear friend, you dance well for a crab. But it’s time for me to say my goodbyes and bid you one last farewell.’

Benjamin Seagull flapped his wings and flew into the opulent blue sky.

‘I hadn’t finished my dance. Typical of Benjamin to leave before all was said and done.’

At that moment Fester felt a tiny pain on his left side.

‘Most likely a heart attack’, suggested a medical crab at his funeral. ‘It was probably brought on by a change in the weather.’

‘The cold,’ said Benjamin. ‘Fester never liked the cold.’

In his will Fester left his protective shell to Benjamin, who wore it on his back until it dropped off during a violent storm near Newfoundland.

WATERWORLD

An old lady and an old man sit on an inflatable sofa.

Said it was like 1938 to 1939 all over again.

I know.

Teetering on the brink, dithering in the face of disaster. All too late, nothing to do about it, we were all doomed. Doooomed! No one believed him.

Not now.

Earth heating up, waters rising, washing us away in the swell!

Leave it. Let’s rest a little.

I worked for him after they put him in a nursing home, tight as a tack he was.

Was he?

He was! I put his dentures in a tin and shaved his whiskers with my fingers to save on razors.

Of course you did, makes sense now you say it. Now, are you going to buy me a drink, I’ve come a long way.

I don’t know you, do I?

You do, we talk ever day. My drink? Please?

Another one said Noah’s ark was real, found the planks and everything.

Everything?

Don’t need Noah now, and a boat would be a waste of time. They’re building rockets to Mars: Bezos, Musk, that Branson, they’re all in on it!

In on what?

Selection! The chosen ones, they’ve been selling tickets on rockets to their friends for years. We’ll be left to fend for ourselves.

Branson wouldn’t do that. He’s got a nice smile.

Dinosaur teeth, they all have: Charles, Camilla, Cilla.

Cilla?

Black! Dead Cilla Black! My scrotum is like litmus. All that itching, it senses things, can tell a bad one from a good one, it knew the deluge was afoot.

Rained 400 days so it must have been very itchy.

And 400 nights, sandpaper on nylon sheets. I’ll get you that drink now.

Daft sod, I was teasing you. Where are you going to get me a drink now?

Their sofa wobbles in a swell, the gloop of dark water twisting and spreading under the moonlight.

Could use a cup to scoop it out.

We don’t have a cup. And we can’t drink; it’s contaminated

We’re done for then?

Of course we are.

Can you swim?

Can you?

Used to be able to.

There you are then. Why don’t we hold hands, have a kiss maybe, share some of the old air raid spirit?

My scrotum is telling me this isn’t going to end well

You don’t need your scrotum to tell you that. Now shut up and give me a kiss.

But I don’t know you.

We’ve been married for sixty years you silly old fool, now hold my hands and give me a kiss.

Bert takes Mary’s hands in his, and kisses.

Oh, your lips are dry, my love.

And a wave suddenly moves them from view as a large rocket passes over the moon.

WHAT MARJORIE THINKS IN THE SHOWER

Oh lovely teardrop, will you rain on me?

I’m but a flower under your tree.

Will you quench my heart of its ire?

I’m Marjorie small body, of large desire.

MAN IN SHOWER

Man in pane

Condensation

Man get hot

Palpitation

Man bit stuck

Constipation

Man do fart

Fumigation!

Pictures by Jonny Voss, except Man in Shower which was drawn on a shower pane by Isaac Voss.

A few of the pieces have appeared before on Epoque Press, Litro, Words for the Wild, Fictive Dream and 3:AM Magazine.

In the kind of wild campsite they liked to frequent, toilets were at a premium and not to everyone’s taste. Think basic. Think no flush. Think sawdust and constipation.

Drinking helped relax things but also added to the need to make a visit. Four pints was a typical threshold for the floodgates to open and then visits became increasingly urgent and frequent. But drink also made toilet-goers forget the warning sign at the entrance to the campsite:

‘Beware the giant bearded tree man in the forest who will hold you like a leaf and snap you like a branch.’

‘What a silly sign!’ hadn’t Harriet said, but no one had seen Harriet for days.

Peter Perves needed immediate relief and made his way as quickly as possible across the campsite field to the toilet, rolls of paper falling out of his pockets.

The sky was a dagger moon shrouded by gesticulating clouds and Peter Perves thought if he whistled everything would be okay. It was only when he got to the trees near the toilet that he felt it odd that his whistle was being returned in a loud shrill echo that made his cheeks smart and his skin crawl. He looked into the trees to see where the whistle was coming from and his head was plucked clean from his body. A tiny scream was emitted and repeated.

‘What the fuck was that?’ shouted Marjorie from inside the tent.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Simon.

‘You mean you didn’t want to hear any fucking thing!’ shouted Marjorie.

‘Shush, I can hear something coming closer,’ said Spenser.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Simon.

The sound was of ridiculously fast running getting louder and nearer.

Spenser, who had troublesome IBS, farted.

‘I heard that!’ said Simon.

Peter Perves’ head suddenly appeared in the gap of the tent’s entrance.

‘Thanks be to Christ,’ shouted Marjorie. ‘We were beginning to wonder what had happened to you?’

‘I wasn’t wondering,’ started Simon, when Peter Perves’ head dropped and then bounced along the tent floor and onto Spenser’s lap.

‘Spenser shrieked and farted: ‘what on earth do you think you’re doing, Peter Perves?’

‘He’s not trying to do anything,’ shouted Marjorie.  ‘He’s dead!’

‘I can see that,’ said Spenser. ‘But why did he land on my lap?’

‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense,’ said Simon, and he snatched Peter Perves’ head from Spenser’s lap and kicked it out of the tent.

Spenser watched Peter Perves’ head land in the field outside the tent, and then he farted.

‘Stupid fucking thing to do!’ shouted Marjorie.

‘I can’t help having IBS,’ said Spenser.

‘No, I mean it was a stupid fucking thing for Simon to kick Peter Perves’ head out of the tent,’ shouted Marjorie.

Marjorie was right, it was a stupid fucking thing to kick Peter Perves’ head out of the tent, and the next day the friends’ body parts, including Spenser’s troubled bottom, were hanging from the branches of a giant tree.

‘Should have read the sign!’ Marjorie might have shouted if she still had a body, or if she was a kind of ghost that actually spoke.

But she wasn’t any kind of ghost: ‘Ghost stuff’s all bloody nonsense,’ Marjorie had often shouted, though Peter Perves and Spenser had always believed in such things.

Years later, as trees swayed in the surrounding forest, local boys played on a football field that had once been part of a campsite. The whistle blew for a penalty, and a small boy swore that the ball winked at him as he kicked it towards the goal.

*

Wild Camping appeared in Sonder Magazine in September 2022 https://sonderlit.com/product/issue-vi-odd/

The picture is by Jonny Voss

Would you look at the house? Even from the agent pictures, it reeks damp and grubbiness: the green felt pool of carpet, the dirt tan of nicotine on the walls, the lopsided mock chandelier in the lounge. Here is a house that someone has died unhappily in: neglected, housebound and probably too weak to eat or cry out for help.

For the love of God, shut up you miserable bastard. It’s a house, and you have no right to pin any of your maudlin nonsense onto it. Leave misery well alone: a lick of paint and it’ll be dandy.

Dandy? The house is a mausoleum and if you so much as consider viewing it, then we’re both surely dead.

Now there’s a good reason for me to ring the agent first thing tomorrow.

And so it was that Eamonn and Sue Leonard found themselves walking up the pathway to the house the next morning.

I told you. I can smell destitution and decay from here.

All I can smell is you. Now shush, here comes your man.

Mr. and Mrs. Leonard, as I live and breathe, is it you I see standing before me?

It is, and you know it is because we spoke on the phone only an hour ago.

I’m sorry, Mr. Coulson, my husband has a rare and aggressive form of dementia.

Isn’t that the worst kind, Mrs. Leonard? Well, I for one hope he makes a speedy recovery. But before we make our way in, I must tell you that you will not be the first to see it.

And we won’t be the last?

Ah, Mr. Leonard, please, I’m merely trying to say that there has been some interest already.

Well say it then, don’t try to say it.

Ignore him, Mr. Coulson, it’s just his way but we both know I’ll get my way in the end.

And Mrs. Leonard did get her way, and in a more meaningful way so did I. Please allow me to introduce myself – no fanfare needed, a funeral procession will suffice: my rear extension is wide, my mouth cavernous and my appetite insatiable, for I am ‘The House’.

‘Reeked of damp’, of unhappy deaths and decay observed the astute Mr. Leonard. Well, his death put an end to anymore of that kind of talk: a celebration of sorts, a climax reached with glass confetti raining down from the ceiling – the chandelier (he should have left it lopsided) pinning him like a stake through his head and onto the floor.

Where was the wife I hear you ask, his guide to direct him, to nag a certain degree of safety into his stubborn (as yet un-fractured) skull? Unlikely, she’d have made an appearance for he’d already buried her the day before under a cold clod of earth in the woefully unkempt garden; murdered her with a degree of irritation and a smidgen of mercy, for saying for the millionth time that the house was whispering to her at night to take off her clothes and run into the dark screaming like a banshee (as she had done on countless occasions before).

I look upon it as marriage guidance, as benign intervention made on behalf of poor Mrs. Leonard. A conduit of her desire, she asked and he did as was requested: ‘For the love of God, kill me, Eamonn, put me out of my misery, I can’t breathe another day in this wretched house.’ Thwack! And her wish was granted.

And Mr. Coulson? He’s complicit with me, the sick bastard. A diary full of couples with the promise of a commission and the ghoul is happy. But if he should ever falter in his resolve he will find his way into a bricked up wall along with the other agents.

My desire is only for completion. And, as I speak, here stands another couple at my front door: a kitchen’s unearthed wire impatiently breaking free at my skirting, the foundations of my soul loosened for a tremor that will surely come, those fragile roof slates edged just a little looser for that pick of wind, as – now, what‘s her name?

‘I love it already Jack.

‘I knew you would, Lilian.’

Ah, yes, as poor little Lilian steps back from the front door and looks up.

‘Cut her in two. Never seen the like of it,’ the startled policeman will soon be quoted as saying in the local paper.

In a picture accompanying the article, I’ll be smiling my breezy front door smile, a letterbox hint of tongue, the bright bulbs from the upstairs windows indicating activity: lights on, ready for business: let them in and keep them coming, I have rooms to occupy, and mouths to feed!

Oh, and what of Mr. Jack? Well, if you will go into a kitchen screaming like a madman, then you are unlikely to notice the wire snaking around your feet, carrying enough charge to arouse the departed and electrify the living.

• The illustration is by Jonny Voss, and the story appeared as ‘The House’ in February’s flash fiction month on Fictive Dream