Square Cuts - Flax 001

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This edition published in Great Britain by flaxbooks, Storey Institute, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Tel 01524 62166. www.litfest.org

All works © their respective authors Square Cuts (flax001) © flaxbooks All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher and individual creators. flaxbooks is the publishing imprint of litfest Lancaster and District Festival Ltd. trading as litfest. Registered in England Company Number: 1494221 Charity Number: 510670 Editor: Sarah Hymas Design and layout: Martin Chester at litfest

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oreword

Lancashire and Cumbria, synonymous with some of the best-known names in English literature, are vibrant literary regions today. They are home to many talented writers – some published, some unpublished – but all producing exciting new work in a variety of genre. In a publishing industry that suffers from being London-centric, with the vast majority of publishers, scouts and literary agents based in the capital, it is vital that good writing from the regions is showcased and celebrated. Square Cuts is a very positive step in the right direction. Mollie Baxter offers a glimpse of love remembered in Thinking in Slices; Andrew Michael Hurley provides a snapshot of a relationship in Guns and How They Work; there is a tempting first chapter from Lynne Alexander’s novel Whale, and Hendryk Korzeniowski offers an expertly dry comment on commercially-bought immortality in Sleeping with Walt Disney. From the sparseness of Ian Seed’s short pieces to Peter Wild’s moving The Other Side via Jane Eagland’s unsettling Wind, this anthology gives us an idea of the breadth of writing from authors in Lancashire. Whether authors have been born and bred here, or have arrived in the region from elsewhere (is it surprising that writers are drawn to its landscapes and its towns?), Square Cuts shows that this part of the country enjoys a robustly healthy literary scene that includes some of the best that British writing has to offer. Jane Smith Managing Director, Jane Smith Literary Agent Ltd. October 2006

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ontents Mollie Baxter Thinking in Slices

1

Ian Seed Consequences

7

Andrew Michael Hurley Guns and How They Work

9

Ian Seed Shadows

14

Peter Wild The Other Side

15

Ian Seed Mine Before Night

20

Jane Eagland Wind

21

Ian Seed Until We Die

27

Lynne Alexander The Whale

28

Ian Seed All Kinds of Dust

33

Hendryk Korzeniowski Sleeping with Walt Disney

34

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Thinking in Slices

Click here to hear Mollie read from Thinking in Slices Click here for Mollie’s profile

1

Mollie Baxter

slice tomatoes in the kitchen, 50p from the kids’ stall down the road. It is the summer holidays, they are bored, so they sell their father’s vegetables. I chose the hard fruits, tight on their stems, and watched the girl put them solemnly into a bag. “Have you plans?” you say and I jump, the blade slithering through peppery tomato guts on the wooden board. “Just supper.” You drift round to my side, your face sharp, your body in soft focus. “You taste of garlic,” you say. This is a kiss. This is how you speak: through phrases I remember from when you were alive. Over time, as I forget, your vocabulary gets narrower. One day, I suppose, you will be silent. You will have to speak through your eyes again. “Have you plans?” you say softly. You are asking what is wrong. “No plans. Going to relax.” “You need to focus on the exams,” you command, confidence returned. You are blocking the way to the patio door, so I walk through you carrying my plate and glass. A sensation like the moment I watched you stop breathing. “No, I don’t. I passed them. Years ago. I have a job now. I teach.” “You need to focus on the exams,” you say, full of concern. I run out of movement, correct the slope of my plate and watch liquid circle. “I will. I promise.” I slug my wine. They took photos of your head, looked at it slice by slice, went back and looked again. Your brain was as cluttered as your desk, it took too long

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Mollie Baxter

to find the problem. Perhaps if you’d been tidier you’d still be here. But this wasn’t something that could be argued out on paper, referenced and sourced. When you died, part of me thought it served you right. I sit, my back to the patio step, and start to eat my tomatoes. The dressing is sharp. You bumble out like an old carrier bag and snag against my back. “You taste of garlic,” you whisper lovingly. I can’t feel you, even though part of your blur has settled like an arm around my shoulders. “Have you plans?” you ask, tenderly, from a great distance. You want to know how I am, what’s wrong. Drops of oil float and slosh around in the vinegar and I wish I’d brought some bread. “No plans.” “You should focus on the exams,” you reply. I look at you then, straight into your dead eyes, like those in the head of an old man in a Victorian photograph and see you looking past me, back to over eight years ago. I remember the conversation. You were in the study, reading. I was looking down the sweep of strings to the bow, trying not to tilt, and suddenly feeling a shriek in my finger. Gut had worn through skin and bright blood smeared the wood. “Great!” I spat, setting the bow down roughly, hobbling to my feet, stiff and clumsy, the cello slumping like a prudish dog. Your head lifted in a silent question. I held my fingers up. “That’s the exam written off.” “Can you not still play?” “I’ll have to.” You’d put your book down, slid in a marker, and said something that

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Mollie Baxter

I now can’t remember. Another phrase lost. I wanted you to say or do something helpful. You just sat there looking troubled, with your palms on your knees. Gentle, preoccupied, but alive. I held out my finger. You wiped it clean with your handkerchief before looking up at me with a questioning face that I’d learned meant “kiss me”. I kissed you. It must have felt like something. “You taste of garlic,” you said and I shoved you. “Alright, you were right, little cloves are stronger.” We rocked a little and I looked out of your window. That night I had cooked for us and you, a picky eater, had finished everything. “I want to cook more,” I said. “I think I’ll find some recipes. Try them out on you.” “You should focus on the exams,” you said. “What’s the point?” “Because you could do it. You could go professional.” I shiver a little and look down at my plate. All the tomatoes are gone, I need bread. If I get up, you’ll drift away, and I don’t want you to go. Your cheek is close to my ear. I tilt my head and whisper “I passed the exams.” You are silent. I wish I could hear your breath. I lower my voice further, all my senses reaching. “I need you to listen and try to understand,” I say, slowly. “I took the exams after you died and I passed them, but I couldn’t get in. Do you understand? I teach kids to play violin. It’s alright. That’s where I am now.” The heads of lilac bob and the lanterns rock.

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Mollie Baxter

“You should focus on the exams,” you say after a pause, with selfassurance. My fork slides off the plate. “Why, Richard? Why should I focus on the exams?” “Because you could do it. You could go professional.” I have no breath left. You’re an old record, a loop, an empty airwave. You don’t exist. We’re not really having this conversation. I don’t mean to, but the plate flies off my lap and through you. It lands, clattering and upturned on the patio. It spins noisy little figures of eight, the oil and vinegar caught, like dew on a web, on your shadows. I pull up onto my feet and you sink down. “Forget it!” I yell, but your body is starting to pull apart. I look down, see vinegar and oil drip onto the flags; you are a flameless, burning photograph, your face calm, benign, but odd, like a video caught on pause. I see a blue mist rise up into the night, like one of the sublimated solids you liked to write about. It tumbles into itself, rising, then the wind catches it. In a few seconds you are gone and I sink back down. The weather changes and I find myself nursing a cold, trying to remember the winter routine. The school is still in the builders’ possession when I park in a dusty space between the skip and a baffling new sculpture on the lawn. The school is quiet. The kids are still away, it’s just us grown-ups and we rustle about timidly like insects in leaves. We barely have enough presence to fill the staff room. I clean out the music store, a once-yearly job, that usually doesn’t get done even then, but I’m quiet today, have been, actually, ever since you left. I feel like I am listening.

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Mollie Baxter

I stack the brass in the corridor, dust the cases off with an old bit of curtain. Go through all the sheet music, manage to fill two binbags with rubbish. Find an old student cello at the back. Full size, basic. I hold it lightly by the neck. I pick at a dot marking off the fret, small and green like a tomato seed. I don’t need another hobby. I’ve got to take the floor up in the bathroom, get a shower put in. I stroke the fingerboard with my thumb, remembering the pull of notes. What would happen if I picked up the bow? I hold my breath and wait for you to walk through me.

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Mollie Baxter

Ian Seed Ian’s contribution to this anthology consists of five prose poems. The first of these is on the next page. Follow the navigation after each story to find more of his writing.

Click here to hear Ian read Consequences and Shadows Click here for Ian’s profile

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Ian Seed

onsequences A stone dislodged, running through grey light, the clatter of an unseen train to our left. We stop at the edge of the forest. I can still see us, strolling down the main thoroughfare of the pink town by the sea, latticed sunlight across our faces, winter forgotten. Such kids then, spirited out of the business up north, as if a promise were for a lifetime. Now afraid to negotiate beyond the sound of our own breathing in the dark.

Click titles below to read more of Ian’s work

Shadows Mine Before Night Until We Die All Kinds of Dust

8

Ian Seed

Guns and How They Work

Click here to hear Andrew read from Guns and How They Work Click here for Andrew’s profile

9

Andrew Michael Hurley

find Chris in tears on the floor of the garage. He is surrounded by parts of my guns. He tells me that he was trying to find out how they worked and had taken them apart and got the parts mixed up and thought he might find the missing parts in the other guns and so on. He has a system, though. All the parts are laid out separately on the floor and he is trying to match them up to the exploded diagrams in the manuals he has open next to him, their pages oily from his fingers. “One at a time, Chris,” I say and he starts crying again. I look at his T-shirt, which has a large number 73 on it and the word Brooklyn arching over the top. His mother brought it back from Greece last year. It was too big for him then and now it rides up his arms and onto his shoulders. “Let’s do this one first,” I say and pick up the handle of a Browning. Chris smiles and he sits down in the armchair and looks tiny again. His feet do not reach the floor and the magazines sticking out from beneath the seat cushion are scratching his calves. He sits cross-legged instead and I look at the battered soles of his trainers. When he is settled he takes an inkylooking sandwich off a plate balanced on the chair arm and bites into it and then reaches for the glass of milk on the workbench. “What’s in the sandwich?” I ask, and Chris opens it for me to see. He offers to make me one and, stuffing the rest of the bread into his mouth, goes off to the kitchen with a copy of Guns & Ammo under his arm. I look at the Browning and begin to pick out the parts I need from the scattering of metal on the floor.

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Andrew Michael Hurley

There is a bee tapping on the window and getting caught up in a spider web. I watch it for a while and after going mad it seems to settle and then remains very still. Chris comes back in with the sandwich and a glass of milk and I notice that he has washed his hands which means I am on my own now. I have taken over. “Do you know what this is?” I ask, and he shakes his head and hands me the sandwich. “It’s a Browning. A GP35,” I say, and bite into the sandwich, which is thick with ham and red onion and cheese. “It’s American,” I add through a mouthful of bread. Chris nods and puts the milk on the worktop. He watches as I reassemble the gun and asks me about the bicycle that is hanging from the ceiling. He wants to fix it up so that he can come and see me more often. He squeezes the tyres and spins the back wheel, which shudders and grates against the mud guard. All it would need would be some new wheels, he says. We could fix it up, he says, when we’ve put the guns back together. I tell him to put out his hand, which he does, and I lay the Browning in his palm. His wrist bends with the weight and he brings up his other hand and holds it steady – tiny fingers wrapped around the handle and cupping the underside of the barrel. “Try and aim it at the back wall,” I say, and Chris holds the pistol out in front of him. It shakes and he lets it fall, laughing. He hands it to me and I hook it onto the rack. He picks up the frame of the Beretta and asks me about the writing on it. “1942: that’s the year it was made,” I tell him, “and the letters are Roman numerals for twenty-one. That means it was made twenty-one years into the

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Andrew Michael Hurley

reign of the Fascists.” Chris asks me about the Fascists and I tell him while I put the Beretta back together and then move onto the others – a Mauser, a Luger PO8 with the long, sleek barrel and the Webley which, when complete, I give Chris to hold. “That was your great-granddad’s,” I say. Chris weighs it in his hands and puts his finger on the end of the hammer. “Here.” I take hold of his thumb and together we pull back the hammer until the gun is cocked. Chris smiles and I let go. “Pull the trigger,” I say. He looks doubtful. “It’s alright,” I tell him, “there’s nothing in it.” Chris aims at the back wall and pulls the trigger and the hammer snaps down. He tries it himself but can’t pull the hammer back with one thumb and clamps the gun between his thighs and uses two. He pulls the trigger again and the snap echoes flatly under the corrugated iron roof. “Look at the handle,” I say and Chris turns the pistol over in his hands. He looks puzzled. “See the bit cut out of it?” Chris nods and runs his finger over the gash in the handle. “A German attacked him with a sword.” Chris asks if his great-granddad killed the German. “I don’t know, Chris,” I reply, “I suppose he must have done.” He looks at the pistol again and says he is sorry for taking the guns apart. “It’s alright,” I say. “It’s traditional.” All the guns are fixed and on the rack on the wall. Chris asks me about bullets. He asks me if I have any. I go to the cupboard on the back wall and unlock it and take out a cardboard box. I show it to Chris and he opens it and stares at the bullets inside.

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Andrew Michael Hurley

“Take one out if you like,” I say, and Chris puts in his hand and takes one. He rolls it between his thumb and forefinger, then presses the pad of his thumb against the tip and says that it is sharp. “They used to be flat in the old days,” I tell him. “They were called manstoppers.” He wonders why they were flat. “Well,” I say, “they weren’t exactly flat; their tips were dented inwards.” He asks why. “When they hit you they exploded outwards,” I say and demonstrate with my hand, starting with a fist against his chest and opening my fingers into a star. “They were meant to knock you down, not kill you outright.” He looks at his reflection in the surface of the bullet and I continue. “If you get knocked down and injured then other soldiers have to help you, and if they’re helping you they can’t fight. It’s quite clever really.” He asks me how fast bullets go. “Depending on the gun,” I reply, “they can go twice as fast as sound; faster than anything you could say.” Chris puts the bullet back. He asks me if a bullet can be used again if it’s fired but doesn’t hit anything. I say no, but I’m not sure of the answer, it’s not something I’ve ever thought about, and I try to picture a bullet coming to rest on the ground like an aeroplane.

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Andrew Michael Hurley

hadows Brushing the dust from your clothes, you make your way into the town, as if it has been waiting for you all your life, but the town knows nothing of your existence, even after you have spent years wandering its streets. Footsteps clump past your tiny room each night. The same door slams shut at the end of the corridor. Someone calls your name. The voice is always behind you, no matter how many times you turn around.

Click titles below to read more of Ian’s work

Consequences Mine Before Night Until We Die All Kinds of Dust

14

Ian Seed

The Other Side

Click here to hear Peter read from The Other Side Click here for Peter’s profile

15

Peter Wild

t is as if they are strangers who have stopped alongside each other on the street, one of them perhaps asking the other for directions. Only in the time it takes to ask and be answered, they have lived together and married and almost raised a child. The evaporated street frightens them, its sudden lifting striking them like the base of a carbon black frying pan. They find themselves surrounded by books and furniture and clothing and memories – memories more than anything else. Where did all these fucking memories come from? How do I have memories of you, when you are a stranger? This was how she looked at him. Her bitter look accused him. It was rape, what he had done. The time they had spent together, the time they had spent becoming strangers together, the time they had wasted loving each other enough to make a child, all that time made useless. Each of them was burned out. Each of them was a burned out husk, the remains of a body, life after life has gone. Crucially, that burning – the burning of everything that made each of them an individual – left them strangers. It took what they were and left only grief and pain and unfocused rage. 2. For a long time, they slept alongside each other. The death of the child altered the way they were with each other. Where once she had curved within the S of his body – the pair of them seen above, an ear covered by blankets – now they remained apart, exclamation points on the left and right side of the bed. The middle of the bed became an uncharted

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Peter Wild

wilderness that neither dared broach. Each lay listening to the clock tick away the hours and minutes of the night. Neither slept, or slept for very long. Occasionally, she roused him, when exhaustion had proven so great he did sleep, accusing him in her rebukes about his snoring, of not loving the baby enough to stay awake throughout the rest of time. What he intuited from her pinched stings: how could he sleep when sleep was the enemy that had stolen their child? What he read in her face provoked him beyond all countenance. He wanted to rage in the face of her: I can sleep because in sleep I forget. I can sleep because sleep is like death and I want to die. When the rage gripped him, his entire soul crippled crisp upon the tip of a white hot soldering iron, he could reduce everything down from abstract pain and complex grief and civil mourning to nothing, to wanting to die. He never told her, but inside, over and over and over again: I want to die. Sleep became a kind of admission. I am guilty. It was my fault. Take it out on me. Accuse me. My grief is not great enough to keep me awake. I am a terrible man. I am the worst father. I cannot pretend to attain the lofty heights of true grieving. He wanted to tell her. In his head, the words confused themselves. Was he angry with her? Did he blame her? Did he blame himself ? Did he hope they would make it through this awful black tumour time? Or was it time to walk away from all of the cancer shadows? Was it time to call this a day? He wanted to tell her that her grief lacked honesty. He wanted to tell her that she was phoney. He wanted to tell her that the thought of his little girl weighed upon him throughout the magnified seconds of every day.

17 Peter Wild

He wanted to tell her that he had never felt pain like this. He wanted to tell her that what he was feeling was not pain, was so beyond pain as to be psychic torture, as to require a new word (wanted to tell her that this – the desire to find a word to express the sheer scale of his pain – felt like vanity, felt like dishonesty, felt like the exact thing that the silent voice in his head accused his wife of ). He wanted love then, more than anything else. He wanted each of them to have the movie reconciliation. She would break down in the kitchen. Perhaps she would stab him or throw a plate at his head, wounding him in some obvious direct way, blood – actual blood (the blood their baby never spilled) – coming between them. They would be standing in the kitchen in the first direct sunlight of the day, neither of them having slept, screaming, and suddenly the screaming would break (the physicality of a tide turning), and they would weep. She would hold him as he howled. He would hold her through her silence (because he expected her final, great period of mourning to be silent, noble, ridiculous). It would not be over. It would never be over. But, in that instant, each of them would recognise that they had crossed the blistered desert and reached the other side. He wanted each of them to reach the other side. He thought he wanted each of them to reach the other side together, but he wasn’t sure and that debate raged alongside the greater debate of how you cope with the loss of a part of yourself (a part that was greater than a limb, that combined the physicality of an arm or a leg with something else, some sensient part like memory or taste).

18 Peter Wild

3. The rest is like a battle pitched in the pocket of a wet overcoat. He looks at her and he is confounded by the look of her. She is a stranger. He looks at her and he is wiped clean like a classroom slate. He looks at her and thinks, who are you? Just who are you? How did I get to know you? And she’ll stare back with a face only the mother of a dead baby could love and say, just die, will you? Dig a hole in the ground, lie down and suck the ploughed earth over your body and take a deep breath. Take a deep breath, suck the earth up through your nose, take a hunk of that dirt in your mouth and swallow, keep on eating until you’re full of dirt and you’re made of dirt and dirt is your name and dirt is all you remember. And I’ll say fine, and she’ll say good, and we’ll stand back to back walk ten paces and fire and it’s as good as over.

19 Peter Wild

ine Before Night Come to the trick of avoiding touch, wandering through Sunday afternoon crowds by the river Po, obliged to come to a sticky end. Sudden warmth under the sheets, skin against skin, afraid for a moment she would repulse him. Power could not reside all in one room, whatever their illusions. There is another circle, unseen, behind this one. A shirt takes the shape of the chair it hangs on, the time of vacancy where we worship winners. Granted, but what can replace the heat of your hands, playful at the crucial moment? Roles crumble, delve to a deeper set.

Click titles below to read more of Ian’s work

Consequences Shadows Until We Die All Kinds of Dust

20 Ian Seed

Wind

Click here to hear Jane read from Wind Click here for Jane’s profile

21

Jane Eagland

he library windows rattle in their frames. My new suit was a mistake: far too thin for this February night and the heating’s gone off, of course. The doors swing open, bang shut. All evening a branch has been tapping morse code on the pane. I glance at my watch. 9.25. Everyone else will be at home by now, in the warm. Five more minutes then I’m off. I look at my list of appointments again. All ticked apart from one. Where are they? A shadow falls across the desk. “Miss Gibson?” A coat in a cruel shade of pink fills my view. “I am the mother of Anthony Brunstein.” Slight accent, difficult to place. Somewhere Middle European. She eases her bulk onto the plastic chair. I have a momentary vision of the chair buckling, sending her sprawling onto the carpet, like an uncontrollable blancmange… “Oh yes. Hello.” Anthony’s dark eyes in a fleshy face, chins resting on swathes of crimson scarf. Something sharp hits the window. I check my mark book then set off. “Anthony seems to have settled in well. Most of the time his work is very good but just occasionally –” She puts out her hand to stop me. “Anthony is very upset.” Her voice is deep, emphatic. “Is he? Why?” “The last essay. You gave him a poor mark.” “Yes, the analysis of Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Wind’. That’s what I mean – in class

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Jane Eagland

he’s perceptive but sometimes –” The hand waves again. “He worked very hard at that essay. He was very disappointed.” Her eyes are moist with emotion. The tapping on the window is more urgent, threatens to break the glass. I pick up Anthony’s essay. Aim for sympathetic but brisk. “I’m sorry to hear that. But it illustrates perfectly what I’m talking about. Look, this is what Anthony’s written: In these lines, the wind symbolises the potency of the male, his thrusting virility. The earth symbolises the female. The hills are her breasts and the wind is described as a knife, an obvious phallic reference … You see what I mean?” She has been listening with her eyes shut, smiling and nodding her head. “Yes, very good.” Her eyes snap open and fix on me. “So why you not give him a good mark?” I choose my words. “Anthony’s ideas are interesting, but the examiner will be looking for his understanding of style and structure –” Mrs Brunstein frowns. “The meaning is not important?” “Well, yes, it is, and it’s impressive that Anthony has such … original ideas, but it might be better if he was more … speculative. We can’t know that Hughes intends all this symbolism. Perhaps he’s just describing the wind. He’s exaggerating its power, of course, but –” “No.” “No?” “No. In this poem he is describing an act of sexual congress between Mother Earth and Father Wind.” She illustrates this with a sweep of her arm, her expression daring me to contradict her.

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Jane Eagland

It takes me a moment to respond. “I don’t think –” “Yes. It is very clear. As I told Anthony.” I swallow. “You’ve discussed the poem with Anthony?” “Oh yes. I also am studying. For a degree with the Open University.” The doors bang shut, making us both jump. Outside a low thrumming begins. I take a deep breath. “Mrs Brunstein, I’m glad you take an interest in Anthony’s work. But it would be better if he did it by himself so I can see how much he’s understood.” “But he needs my help. I thought so before and now it is clear. You are not a good teacher.” “I –” Her eyes flash. “You think the poem is just about the wind? Why would the poet write just about the wind? He is not a weather forecaster.” I try to keep my voice level. “No, of course, he isn’t. But, you see, in a way the wind is not important. What matters is the poem. It’s a literary construct, a pattern of words and images and Anthony should focus more of his attention on that pattern and not worry too much about interpretation.” A silence as she surveys me. I force myself to meet her gaze. Finally, she says, “you do not understand the spirit of literature. Obviously, this poem, like all poems, has a deeper meaning and you do not see it.” “Now look, Mrs Brunstein –” She leans towards me, and her body seems to swell. “I came tonight expecting an apology from you. I am not satisfied with your attitude.” “But, Mrs Brunstein, I –” She rises to her feet, majestic. “You know nothing. I wish to see the

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Jane Eagland

Headmaster. You will please show me to his study.” “I’m afraid he’ll have gone home.” Plucking at her scarf, she thrusts her chin forward. “Very well. I await your apology. For now, that will have to do. But that is not the end of the matter.” She sinks onto the chair again, challenging me with her stare. A flush of annoyance rushes to my face. I open my mouth to speak and all the lights go out. “Oh!” Startled, I drop my pen. The darkness is absolute. In it, the thrumming is louder, closer, and the back of my neck prickles; thick blackness presses in on me … I can’t breathe… A low moan near at hand brings me to my senses. “Mrs Brunstein? Are you all right?” No reply. “The wind has blown down the power lines, I expect.” Even to myself, my voice sounds thin. “Mrs Brunstein? We’d better make our way to the front door.” I try to sound encouraging. A gasping sound as if she too is struggling for breath. Something skitters across the window and I jump, my heart knocking in my chest. We’ve got to get out of here. A flickering light appears. “Anybody there?” “Yes, it’s me, Bill. Sue Gibson. I’ve got a parent with me.” My voice is quavery with relief. I have to stop myself from grabbing hold of the caretaker’s reassuring bulk, looming behind the candle flame. “What you still doing here? Time you was off home, never mind the power cut.”

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Jane Eagland

“Yes, we’ll have to stop.” “Here – see your way out.” He strikes a match and a second flame appears. “Thanks, Bill.” I turn back to the table. “Mrs Brunstein? Time to go.” She is still sitting, hands clasped to her chest. In the smoky light her eyes are glittering, but her breathing is steadier. I pick up my papers. “Shall I show you to the door?” “Yes, I will come.” Slowly, with difficulty, she rises from the chair. “Night then, Bill.” We make our way along the corridor past the vibrating windows. As soon as we reach the front door, the candle blows out. I stop in the porch, leaves eddying about my ankles. “Can you find your car, Mrs Brunstein?” “I think so. Outside is not so dark. I do not like the dark.” “No. I don’t either.” A pause then as if there be might be more to say. After a minute or two I break the silence. “Good night.” She sets off across the yard. I step out from the shelter of the porch. Immediately the wind tears at my jacket, tugs at my hair. I pick my way to the car through fallen branches, swirling crisp packets. The door whips open. After I’ve tumbled in, it takes both hands to pull it shut. The car shakes, gusts buffeting it from side to side. But there is no wind in here. In the calm space I take a deep breath. Then another. When I feel steadier, I turn on the ignition.

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Jane Eagland

ntil We Die All kinds of freedom. Two figures approach each other across a distance, then pass without a word or a nod of the head. We keep trying. Being poor, we are at the mercy of others. A final word, a last-ditch attempt to make us see sense. You’ll be useless one day, too. Threats and obscenities in our ears. Yet there is still a dream wondered by friends. Who will be the first to speak? Silence is an unauthorised gift. All kinds of monsters are possible, and new births with them.

Click titles below to read more of Ian’s work

Consequences Shadows Mine Before Night All Kinds of Dust

27 Ian Seed

The Whale

Click here to hear Lynne read from The Whale Click here for Lynne’s profile

28

Lynne Alexander

hapter One

For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying – the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring... Moby Dick: The Dying Whale

Wallis stood onshore with the others. The group tried to get closer but were kept back by a shore guard: “Official autopsy taking place, instructions not to disturb.” The creature they were there to witness was beached on the rocky skia about a quarter of a mile out into the estuary. “Looks like an overturned boat,” someone said. Wallis agreed. A guy with a high powered telescope offered her a look: “Try that.” She plugged her eye to the lens socket, steadying herself. She saw not an animal but a shape in space. The thing was far too big. She thanked the telescope owner, peeled off from the group and headed south towards the Point, over rocks and washed-up tide-junk: a turquoise plastic frog, its fingers so like the tendrils of dried stagshead seaweed; several red spent cartridge shell cases; miles of orange and blue shiny twine; a Premium and a Diet Coke; an 1851 marmalade pot too broken to salvage; a mauvey-pink Tupperware lid; half a blue Thermos. Most of a mammalian skeleton was scattered among the feathers and limbs of driftwood and semirotted weedstuffs. All this, she thought, our gaudy currency, thick underfoot. She picked up a small chunk of blue-on-white china. As the shore was being eroded, more and more fragments could be found among the rocks: the remains of a Victorian pottery dump. The piece fit her palm. It showed

Lynne Alexander

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Lynne Alexander

two blue people: mouse-delicate, wearing tall buckler hats and bibs; puritans, perhaps, on their way back from America. What, she asked them, was it not so great over there after all? At the next bay she found the remains of a fish. She knelt beside it. Now this had potential. Originally three feet long, she calculated, it was now reduced to its midsection. Who swiped your head, fish, eh? she asked it: your tail? Its skin was orange, pitted and dull, like the rind of a smoked cheese. It didn’t stink; no obvious blood. A collection of torn-off veins and arteries extended out of the fish’s jagged front opening like so many unfinished freeway flyovers; while one trumpet-like valve announced its once-connection with the heart, that organ presumably having been swiped along with other choice innards by herons and oystercatchers and any other seabird that could get a look-in. Wallis scrabbled for a pencil and paper but found only a petrol receipt and a furred-up pen. Never mind, a doodle would remind her. Already, she could imagine it as an installation arranged among whitened stones, its viscera reaching out to disturb the airy, tasteful space of a gallery and its even more fastidious visitors, barely identifiable as ‘fish’ in its head-andtailnessness. She almost thanked it for a find but then thought: no, too realistic, do-able: boring. Forget it. A fish couldn’t swallow a man or a giant squid whole. But then a fish was not a whale. She could still hear voices plus clankings and revving noises, then a chainsaw. The show was over. Late afternoon, a turning tide. Maritimers talked of it as the moment when the waves reconsidered. What did it take to perform that joined-up backflip? how did they get it together? But the tide

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was lapping at the rocks so she too had to reconsider. Wallis made her way back towards the shore carpark, then swung left up the path. She didn’t have far to go. Home was the end cottage in a row of former fishermen’s dwellings looking smack out across the estuary. Behind the cottage was her studio, an A-frame she’d had converted from the former garage. Wallis stood inside her porch watching as a pinwheel of knots flew over the Bay. The sky turned black or as near-black as cloudy sky can be; and then the sun, bulging out from below and laying its famous golden finger across the Bay, retracted and was gone, leaving a matt black background with only the dregs of an English glow. And the people with their telescopes, the cops with their barriers and bullhorns, the Oceanographic Institute’s Land Rover, all packed up and skedaddled, leaving the shore to Wallis and her dog-walking neighbours. The whale was the last to take off. They called her an artist with ‘an admirably focused focus’: a euphemism for small beans. But – if she had to defend herself – surely it was about limitation rather than timidity, of making work that was possible for you, on a modest scale if necessary. Otherwise, what? You’d lose it. You’d become another inflated idiot, another Turbine Hall blockhead. The whale was a waste of time. But then she had plenty of it to waste. A sandwich board outside the newsagent’s shop read: ‘Beached Whale Found Washed Up In Bay’. It had made the front page, around ten times the size of the man pictured standing beside it. “I’ll take two.” She rolled the copies up, stuck them under her arm and walked back downhill towards

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the shore. The thing about finding the thing you’re looking for without knowing you’re looking for it is that, for a while anyway, you have to look away. She flung the papers face-down on a chair and didn’t pick them up until later that night. First she took a bath, lit a fire, drank a pint of cider and wished she hadn’t. The photographer had shot the whale from below, half rolled onto her back and away from the camera, belly fore, the underside of her jaw smeared with blood, as if she’d been drooling in her sleep after a night’s bingeing on schools of menhaden: bloated blousy, mottled, the great belly blooming from a delicate to a dusky pink. The sands on which she lay appeared in the photograph to be blank. But look more closely – Wallis did – and you see they’re silvered with a greenish tinge and textured like an acid-bitten etching plate. As for the whale herself, here you’d be forgiven for thinking, what with her slackened jaw and three-quarter incline, her general roll-me-over-and-do-it-again look, that she might just be resting, a temporary hiatus in the busy life of a large sea mammal until, say, the next tide comes rippling under her, relieving her dried out pores and nearly collapsed lungs and thus inspiring her to new life. Not so. ‘The female sperm whale was seen swimming up and down the channel but, after the tide had gone out, was washed ashore. Soon afterwards the whale died.’

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ll Kinds of Dust Music was our first love, but there was little time for that. For years we assembled our ideas cautiously as we travelled from land to land, compiling our survey. One day we were drawn to a tavern by the sound of singing. A fatal error. The tune of the gipsy fiddle gave us glimpses of a reality we had long buried deep beneath the surface. All kinds of dead people came to life, an old skull, lain long in the snow, abandoned in search of something more exotic and otherworldly, whatever could be lifted and turned slowly to reflect the light coming from the next room. A fat man smiled behind the counter, shelves of impossibly coloured bottles just an arm’s reach away. A girl with a dark wing of hair across her temple approached our table.

Choose titles below for Ian’s stories

Consequences Shadows Mine Before Night Until We Die

33 Ian Seed

Sleeping with Walt Disney

Click here to hear Hendryk read from Sleeping with Walt Disney Click here for Hendryk’s profile

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he cough sounds like cancer and doesn’t stop. The smoke would like to be suggestive of seedy sixties strip joints, but it only manages to reach the level of an industrial town preclean air act, 1956. The cigarette shakes and the interviewer nods sympathetically. “Go on…” “They turned me down you know. Turned me down. Had it all you know. Everything. Know it don’t look like it but had a good job, family, respect, especially respect, and wealth. And I’m southern. Newport Pagnell may not mean a lot to you, but I would’ve put it on the map. ‘Local boy done good’. Yeah.” The interviewer nods through the smoke and tries not to breathe in. “I won the lottery you know. Despite all the petty jibes and jealously, I won millions. Millions and people sneered. Wot ya gonna blow it on? Mansion? Football club? Private island? Slags and illiterates, the lot of them. Common as muck. After I took the wife and kids to Florida” – he stops, seeing the reaction on the interviewer’s face – “well, it’s the done thing, innit? And before you say a word they had a lovely time. Gorgeous. How life should be. But I had bigger plans, oh yes. And the bastards turned me down.” The cigarette is stubbed out in an overflowing ashtray. With a shaky grace he lights another. “I did complain you know. All the time. Letters to Citizens Advice, letters to MPs, letters to the media … and I kept up my pressure on them. Oh yes. Ringing ‘em up at all hours. Once, they kept me on hold for five-and-a-half hours, yes: five-and-a-half hours! Most people would’ve hung up, but not me. Determined. Despite it being premium rate, I stuck in there, for the principle of the thing.” He pulls on the cigarette as though his life depends on it. Not anymore.

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“And when I did finally get through, and past the robotic voice with the useless options, I complained about the wait. And this tart with one O level reckoned that because their service was so unique and very, very popular with the rich and famous, delay was unavoidable, and that if I had trouble waiting for over four hours, how could I possibly be happy waiting for eternity? Cheeky bitch. So I said I could easily wait for eternity, but not if eternity meant hold music consisting of ‘Candle in the Wind’. The 1997 version. And d’you know what she said? She said, sarcastic slag, she said that the company based their choice of music on a Gallup Poll on ‘Hits That Should Last Forever’. Just goes to show people have no taste. Know nothing about inherent music value.” He sniffs his own smoke, doubling the carcinomic certainty. “ The music should’ve been Michael Jackson.” He sucks through the cigarette, its thin paper disappearing like health. “Despite these obstacles, I kept complaining. I wanted to know why they had turned me down. You know, like when you get dumped. You keep asking ‘why?’ At the interview, they mentioned places were ‘subject to status’ and I just laughed. If you can’t buy status, influence or close friends with lottery winnings what good are they, eh?” He pauses, pointing at the interviewer. “Imagine how I felt when they said ‘No’. No. No, no, no. Their only answer. Didn’t think I was ‘suitable’. And that was their last word.” He shakes his head, all lank hair and dandruff, and contemplates the end of his cigarette, now almost a butt. Looking for an answer in its end. “Found out about data protection, didn’t I? Went along to their offices in Putney, demanded to have access to what they’d said about me in their files,

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the jumped-up little undertakers. And d’you know the main reason why I was unsuitable? Can you guess? Because of my bleedin’ occupation!” Anger seems to animate his pallid face, as he selects another cigarette from his packet, his hands shaking more violently than before. “I told them they could fuck my occupation, being then ‘of independent means’, ‘a man of leisure’, a gentleman. But they said all that was irrelevant. Skills they were looking for, skills, achievements and personal qualifications. Denied immortality because I couldn’t countersign a bloody passport form. Can you believe that?” He punctures the smoky air with his cigarette as though it were a sword of truth. “I would never be cryogenically frozen for future generations because I’d only been a team leader.” Shaking his head, he continues to stab at the world with his cigarette. “Bollocks to the lot of them! Of course I’m bloody important! Civilisation will always require the middle manager! I was an official. I delegated. I often said ‘functionality’. And I readily thought up convincing, but not necessarily true statements for the general consumption of the staff below me.” He shakes his head. “Those jumped-up Saint Peters just couldn’t understand,” gazes heavenward, “there will forever be the team leader.” All that can be heard is the soft, crinkling burn of cigarette paper using up its final moments, unwitnessed. “My family went against me too. Can you believe that? My age wasn’t in my favour either. Too young. Too young! How can you be too young for something like this? To be young is to be one of the immortals!” He doesn’t light another cigarette, not this time. Just gloomily stares at his hands,

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which still shake. “Mid-life crisis my arse. So I took the company to court. Argued this was age discrimination – barring the young from living forever – but it fell on deaf ears. Came out that I’d tried to bribe one of their staff. Lost everything.” He pokes around the ashtray with his finger and points. “But I did catch a glimpse of heaven. I did see the promised land. This lad that worked for them took me down to the vaults to let me see their miracle for myself, for a small fee. Showed me the oldest client, holding on for some forty years now. I must admit I was expecting polished chrome cylinders – real hi-tech equipment, gleaming rooms, highly antiseptic. It was this dank cellar in Putney. And this old fridge, the kind they used to warn children against playing with. Anyway, he slowly opened the door, and this light blazed out, heavenly light, lots of smoke and a strong smell of plastic. When the smoke cleared … I saw the very first cryogenically frozen head. God, it was so unreal. Even had a sort of halo. I was in awe. He had no hair, granted; pipes coming out of everywhere, true, but still with the grin of a kindly uncle, albeit a bit … severe. I mentioned to their lad that those lips had tasted the last ten seconds of life. ‘Yeah’ he replied, ‘tastes like anti-freeze’. What would he know? But then he really surprised me. He flicked a switch … and the eyes opened! They actually opened. And he actually spoke! He was still hanging onto life. Sounded a bit like a dalek, but he spoke! “‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay…my, oh my, it’s a wonderful day…’ “I was gobsmacked. On my knees. “The lad nodded. ‘Yeah, not very animated, is he?’”

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