THE AUDIENCE MEMBER

I've been distracting myself from what I should be doing, ie essay writing, writing stories instead. Here's a new one- I'd love to hear your thoughts.

THE AUDIENCE MEMBER

It was his secretary that had suggested a hobby.

“You need to get out more. Meet people.”

“Meeting people is exactly what I don’t need, Janet. I just want some peace and quiet, to get on with my work.”

She’d perched on the edge of his desk, taken his hand between hers and started rubbing it with her rough, dry fingers. She looked old, and it made him feel old, the way she acted so familiar with him, so chummy. But there was no denying that from where she was sitting she must have been getting the most spectacular view of the penny shaped bald patch on the top of his scalp. Old.

“I just hate to think of you alone in that house every night, John.”

He’d taken care not to pull away too quickly, not to give the impression he was nauseated by her proximity, the audacity of all this care she’d taken to heaping on him. He let his hands fall on the desk. They felt heavy.

“Well what about- an evening course, or something like that?”

He scoffed.

“Or the theatre?”

“Haven’t you got work to be doing, Janet?”

She raised her eyebrows at him.

“Well, I have. And I’m paying you for something. Lord knows what. But can you go and get on with it, please?”

He’d closed the door behind her and not thought any more of it, lost himself in the figures on his screen until long after the office had become empty. Numbers had always had that effect on him. There was something meditative in the solving of problems, knowing there was an answer to be found. A passerby would have seen a lone figure framed in the window, hunched forward, his face blue with the light of the screen.  But no one had passed by.

Yet something must have lingered. The day after next, which was a Sunday, the one day even he couldn’t think of a reason to go into the office, he was standing in the middle of the empty kitchen, and he found that he was actually unable to move. It was winter. He looked at the sad pile of dirty plates that had built up in the sink. He had just opened a ‘healthy balance’ meal from Waitrose- chilli prawn linguini- taken the cardboard sleeve off, pierced the film lid- and all he needed to do was pop it in the microwave and press the button. He really, really wanted to cry.

He slumped down in a kitchen chair and rested his chin on his knuckles. This wouldn’t do. He was not the kind of man that cried. So. The theatre. Why not? And before he had the chance to change his mind, to think too much, he grabbed his coat and keys and rushed out of the door.

John caught a train up to the West End. He went into the dark auditorium and let himself be whisked away. It was some silly, escapist nonsense, a musical, inordinately expensive, cramped up seats, horrible wine from the bar.  But in spite of himself, he enjoyed it: found comfort in sitting there surrounded by people who didn’t know him. He didn’t mind their coughing fits or if they wanted to blow their noses loudly and he liked the way they all laughed in the murk at the same jokes, even though they were strangers.

The performance happened, and then it was gone, and then they were all gone, back to whatever else it was they filled their days with. No one asked him what he thought of it. But each of them held the play like a small flame, and in time this is how he came to judge them. That theatre trip was the first of many.  Some of the plays fizzled almost straight away; others burnt bright and strong, and others flickered, seemed to have gone out, but then flared up, just when you least expected it, demanding that you come to terms with them again, and it was these that he liked best, the ones that lingered. They became his passion. He, the most dispassionate of men, had a passion.

It’s the last day of the Edinburgh festival. It’s raining, and the ground is sticky with a mulch of discarded flyers, the wind snatching at torn strips of brightly coloured posters, billowing like forgotten prayer flags on the grey sky. John is hurrying through the streets. Just days ago they bustled with robust young people with white painted faces and musical instruments and great big dreams, but now they seem wide and empty as a yawn.

He leans forwards against the weather. Tucked under his arm there’s a thick, dog-eared programme, heavily marked with biro. He’s tired. In the last few days he’s been to musicals and new writing, Shakespeare and Chekov. He’s discovered performances running amok in abandoned medical schools and hidden behind the doors of Georgian townhouses. He has sat through a twenty-minute silence in which the actors on stage barely moved, but the auditorium emptied around him.

He just decided to come. It was totally out of character. “I’m going to Edinburgh to watch some theatre,” he told Janet one morning. She gave him a wry little smile and didn’t say anything.

It’s the sort of thing Clare would have done. That’s what she was like when she got an idea in her head. There was a day when she’d said to him whilst he was stumbling around at 5am, trying to find a pair of socks and cursing, she’d said:

“Don’t go to work today.”

“What?”

“Don’t go to work today. You don’t want to, do you? Stay here with me and Charlie. We’ll go for an adventure.”

He sighed. “Wonderful idea.”

“We’ll all bunk off and we’ll do something insane.” She was doing her big Cheshire cat grin, you could hear it in her voice.

“And who, exactly, is going to ensure the mortgage is paid?”

“Darling, the world isn’t going to fall apart if you miss one day in the office, as much as you’d like to think so.”

Instead of smiling at his wife and finding her mouth in the gloom, instead of loving her for how crazy and spontaneous and vivacious she was, he’d in fact felt irritated by her, that she took his job so lightly, treated it as a joke, he’d disliked her for talking to him when she should still be asleep.

When he came home that evening he found out that she’d woken Charlie up at the normal time, made him his breakfast, handed him his packed lunch and football kit, driven him to the school gates and then turned around to him and said:

“Sweetheart, how about skipping school today and going on an adventure?”

Charlie had waited up for him to get home from work just to tell him about the fun they’d had, how they’d driven down to Brighton and eaten fish and chips on the pier in the cold, played crazy golf and penny machines at the arcade. After he’d gone to bed John railed at Clare’s irresponsibility, her misplaced priorities. He reminded her exactly how many hours he had to work each year to pay the school fees, hours that he’d also rather spend gallivanting by the sea. But it was just one day out of thirteen years at school, and she’d wanted Charlie to understand that it’s not always right to do what’s expected of you, that doing what’s expected of you is a choice, not an obligation. That he was free! John thought at the time she was mad. But in fact she was pretty much the best mother in the whole wide world.

The morning after the accident he’d got up and got ready for work as if everything was the same. He had actually ironed a shirt. Clare had come in and had seen him folding the ironing board away into the cupboard. She looked at him and she didn’t say anything and she went and climbed back into their bed. She didn’t get up again for three days.

The ‘theatre’ is a small prefab building in the middle of an empty car park. Outside, a greasy teenager lolls against the wall in a stained red shirt with the word ‘Usher’ on it, idly picking at a spot with a grubby nail.

“Excuse me, am I in the right place for, erm…” he glances down at the flyer in his hand, which has worn folds in it like its been through the washing machine and shows a dark photograph with a single light bulb and a girl with her head tossed back in a scream. 

“Got a ticket?” The boy seems affronted by his presence.

“I’m sorry, I thought I could pay on the door. It’s not sold out, is it?”

“No fears,” He smirks, “no fears about that.”

The boy leads him inside and takes his money, placing it in a metal cashbox. Then he makes a vague gesture towards a poster plastered door, and John steps into a black room with a few rows of what look like old school chairs along one wall. He’s alone. The door closes behind him, and he wonders if he’s in the wrong place, but nonetheless he chooses a seat at the back, in the corner.

It’s quiet, just the patter of rain on the roof. He always finds this hard, sitting and waiting for the show to begin. He has to move his coat and umbrella about quite a lot so they won’t be in the way. He gets nervous that he’ll get thirsty, so he always brings a large bottle of water, but he has to be careful not to drink too much, especially not before it has even started, in case he needs to go to the gents halfway through. Then there’s the business of switching off the Blackberry. The first few times there came a point when he felt an almost physical draw to check it, felt anxious without its weight in his hands. But he’s learning to be alone with his thoughts.

He wills the play to be good. He’s never left one yet, never felt able to- he has an inexplicable sense of responsibility to the actors, like there’s some unspoken pact between them that if they are to see it through to the bitter end, so must he. So he always stays, and applauds every show so warmly it’s as if his life has been changed, no matter how much he dislikes it.

No one else comes into the theatre. It should have started five minutes ago. He suddenly realises he’s going to be the only one. Of course, the streets are empty now, he might be the only audience member left in the city. But that’s alright. In just a few weeks it will be full of life again, more young people will come, brimming with ideas and schemes to set the world to rights. Some of them will arrive straight from school, and they’ll have absolutely no idea how lucky they are, because they never do. There are pictures of them on the covers of the prospectuses that still sit on the hall table. Up and down the country parents will soon be stuffing the boots of their cars with books and CDs and pillows and clothes and kitchen utensils that won’t ever get used, extracting promises of regular trips to the campus laundry, phone calls. Perhaps John would have been one of them.

Or, more likely, he’d have been driving to the airport. A gap year, teaching in Africa, that would have been Charlie’s thing. He wanted to make a difference. Every time there was a protest he’d be the one that had spent the day before preparing a brightly coloured banner with a witty slogan, and more than once his picture had appeared in the Richmond Times. He was left wing. He tried to engage John in arguments about colonialism and the Palestine, but usually his father was in too much of a rush, or just too exhausted to care.

That evening, in fact, Charlie had been going to a meeting about climate change at the town hall. There was a group of them that were going to get together and arrange some kind of action. He was always working on something, always doing, the kind of kid who’d fidget if he had to sit still for five minutes.

What he’ll never be able to understand is why decided to drive himself. He had said he would give him a lift. He’d told him that very morning not to worry, he’d be there, he’d said he’d be there. He was only slightly late.

He would have come padding up the stairs in his thin-soled plimsolls like he always did. His footfall would have echoed in the empty hall. Maybe he was the kind of boy who sang to himself to fill silences. He was into folk music. John had found piles of CDs in the basement: Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Fairport Convention. Funny thing was it was exactly the kind of stuff he’d been into.

What was going through his head when he opened the little cupboard by the front door and selected from the neat rows the keys for the BMW? He could have caught the bus or walked, for Christ’s sake, it wasn’t so far for someone so young, someone with so much energy, someone so alive that when you looked at him you could see his breath moving under his skin, like everything about him was poised and ready for all the things that were so, so possible. It was his mother’s legacy, this impulsive way of acting with no consideration for consequences. Living for the moment. He might have gone to teach children in Africa.

At last, ten minutes late, the lights go down. He lets his weight sink back into his seat.  The girl steps on to the stage.

She’d stopped him on the Royal Mile. Ambushed him, perhaps a better word. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, eighteen perhaps, with red hair in a knot on top of her head. She didn’t appear to be wearing any kind of costume, like most of the others out flyering, just a pair of jeans with rips at the knees and a leather jacket over an old ‘Smiths’ T-shirt.

“Can I talk to you about my show?”

He smiled at her. “Go ahead.”

“Right, well, it’s Sarah Kane. You might have heard of her? If you’ve never seen her, she’s just, like, well, incredible really, just really full on, you know, it’s pretty hard hitting. It’s a one woman show. Just me.” She had that way of lifting her sentences upwards at the end that Charlie had.

“Sounds good.”

 “Will you come?” She looked up at him eagerly: big, big blue eyes.

“Yes.”

“Really? It would mean a lot to me. It’s just me on my own, y’see. The audiences haven’t been great.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Great!” She was about to turn and go but then she paused, looked back at him. “Lots of people say they will come and they don’t.”

“I promise.”

She’d pressed the flyer into his hand, looking doubtful, and he’d folded it into his breast pocket, made some poor joke about keeping it next to his heart, but she was already gone, closing in on the next potential audience member. He’d watched her for a while, her red bun bobbing above the crowds, until she disappeared.

And now here he is. He really is sorry that there aren’t more people here for her, but in a way he’s also glad it’s just him. Naturally she doesn’t acknowledge him, she’s too professional for that, but she must have clocked him sitting there, realised he’s kept his promise.

 She was right about the play. It’s brutal. Weird and fragmented, but he feels cut right through by it. It courses through his nervous system, makes his blood pulse.

But most of all it’s her. She’s wonderful. Heartbreaking. It’s obvious that she’s talented, and she’s giving it her all, throwing herself into it, he sees her muscles tense with the weight of the emotion. Really it feels like the most extraordinary gift that all of this effort should be going on just for him. He doesn’t deserve it. He feels humbled. 

As it draws to a close, tears begin to roll down his cheeks. In his mind, he’s picturing a scenario. What if, he thinks, what if, after the show, he waits for her. When she comes out, he’ll offer to take her for dinner: anywhere in the whole city, wherever she fancies, but perhaps, he’ll suggest, somewhere like the Balmoral, somewhere fit for a star. He’ll order champagne, and then as they eat, he’ll tell her that he wants to help her- to be her patron, if she likes. He’ll explain that he has a house in London, far too big for one man on his own, and the basement’s converted into a flat that isn’t used anymore, perfect for a young woman just launching her acting career. He’d like her to have it.

The end comes. He springs up from his seat, wild with enthusiasm, cupping his mouth and doing weird irregular morse code whistling, stamping his feet, fluttering his hands together in the damp, cold air, shouting ‘bravo’ and ‘encore’ like an embarrassing dad at a school concert. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s smiling, exhilarated by his adoration.

He won’t tell her yet how he’ll cook her meals for her and help her learn her lines, how he’ll pay for taxis for her to come and go as she pleases, dressed all the time in designer outfits that will make her look like a film star. Perhaps they will go to the theatre together, or she’ll be into folk music too, and they’ll listen to the CDs that he hasn’t been able to touch. If she wants to, she might come and sit with him when he gets old, tell him about all the things she gets up to.

But he will explain that he won’t expect anything in return. Or simply, for her to be happy. That will be her only obligation. To do all the things she’s ever wanted to.

The lights come up, and she looks at him, and smiles: “Thank you so much for coming,” she says. 

The tipping point

I wrote this yesterday so it's still a bit sloppy and any feedback would be massively helpful! 

The tipping point

She’s standing on the very edge of the swimming pool, her toes curled around the rim. She’s been standing like that for quite a while.

Everything is still with the special kind of afternoon sleepiness you only get on holidays. Her dad would probably tell her to breathe it all in, that she’s got to store moments like this in her memory, so on a miserable rainy February morning she can call them up and savour them.  He’s fond of saying things like that.  You’ve got to enjoy life. You won’t be dead for a million years, you’ll be dead forever. A lizard moves quickly in a shadow. She closes her eyes, tries to keep her balance.

All around the pool, the rest of the family snoozes on sun loungers: Auntie June swollen as a beached whale in her slippery swimsuit, and Auntie Sarah, her comic double, bronzen, sinewy body lying prone and oiled in a neon bikini. Baby gurgles to itself under a tree. Everyone is happy. Somewhere in the valley below her dad’s challenging the big boys, Ben and Luke, at table tennis. Best of three. Then five. He did ask her to join them but she decided to stay here, in spite of the boys’ energetic promises to annihilate her. They always get so competitive, her dad has to remind them it’s only a game. Their shouts are lost in the warm air that hovers overhead.  Even the water seems like it can only just about be bothered to lap at the edge, as if it’s ready for its siesta too. The sun blinks on the surface.

Any moment now, she’ll jump. She’ll extend her arms over her head, she’ll crouch, she’ll start to tip, at just the right moment she’ll spring, forward, upwards, sail through the air like a superhero, Gemma, champion of the world. And then she’ll cut into her reflection like a knife, so silently she won’t wake her uncle, who is obviously dreaming because his hand is doing this funny twitching thing. The rumbling of his snores lifts and dips the Daily Mail that’s come to rest across his face. Or she might make the smallest splash as she disappears beneath the surface, the tiniest trail of bubbles in her wake, a vanishing merperson. Any moment.

But for now she’s contemplating the water. It’s really deep. It’s impossible to see the bottom, it just goes murky blue. In fact one year she came running, shouting that she’d seen something down there, something big, definitely seen it, cried when no one believed her. But she’s too old for that kind of nonsense anymore. She sighs. Flexes her toes around the rim.  

She’s at her most gorgeous when she’s lost in thought. Propped up with a book in the window seat at home. Or glimpsed through the patio door, balancing her way along the garden wall on tiptoes, sucking a loose strand of hair. If she could just stay standing there like that. Puberty has come on suddenly, unannounced, swelling her hips and around her nipples. But she has her tummy sticking out in front of her, that way that kids have.  Her dark curls are wild with sun and chlorine, a mess, Stig of the Dump.

Her dad has been teaching her how it works, how you have to think about transferring all of your weight into your head, and then you start to tip. There will come a point where gravity takes over and it’s not up to you whether you want to fall or not, you just do. But before that comes a split second decision: to let go. And that’s the bit she’s been struggling with.  You can do it if you really want! He likes to sing to her, out of tune and not caring. She doesn’t even get embarrassed.

(This will pass, this magical way they have of absorbing the hours with passions shared by just the two of them. They have created their own universe, long bike rides down the old railway track, afternoons in the potting shed making things grow, late night episodes of Match of the Day. It would be easy to be jealous of it, how natural they are with each other. They never behave as if the time is fleeting.)

She begins to stretch her arms over her head, hands pointed into an upturned heart. The muscles move beneath her skin; the fabric of her costume touches her ribs, amber light catches in her lashes. She is breathtaking.  

 If she could have any gift it would be this. To always bear her beauty so lightly. There’s a time to come of Wonderbras and Spanks, shoes that give blisters, anxiety about carbohydrates, alcohol drunk to still inhibitions. They are coiled in her future. But for now she’s just so, so perfect. To always carry her beauty like a child.  And if the beholder could have just one gift it would be to keep her here. Already there’s a struggle beginning for freedoms that are not easily given up. It’s always left to the mother to put her foot down, to be the baddie. But the world has changed in ways that are frightening, and a parent has to be on guard. Her dad is right: moments like this are to be savoured.   

Trundling up the hill come the big boys. They smash the dome of quiet that has formed over the pool. How nasty boys can be, how brutish. What a blessing to have a daughter.

“Hey, look at you, fatty, are you pregnant or something?” The first one shouts, waking everyone up. He points his finger at her accusingly; “Are you having a baby?”

She looks puzzled, but Luke sticks his stomach out, digs his thumbs into his coccyx, starts waddling around the pool. Ben, unnoticed, has moved behind her, and, whilst she stands transfixed and confused by Luke’s performance, he comes running up behind her, a spiteful grin frozen on his face.  

The way the shove comes- when she’s standing with her centre of gravity at her middle, when she isn’t ready- it’s clear that this will be a belly flop; a painful one. Her limbs flail out around her, she grabs at the thin air. A wave passes across the water’s surface and her reflection looms, distorted. She looks up with an expression full of terror, from which she cannot possibly be saved. She reaches the tipping point. She falls.

AN ANGEL PASSES

Here's another stab I've had at short story writing... any feedback very much appreciated, but please be gentle, I've only just started dabbling in this!

AN ANGEL PASSES

He’s out fishing, again. Fat greasy river, going nowhere quick. He looks at the point where the line meets the water. Alone, with his thoughts, but thinking nothing. Or maybe thinking about the dirt beneath his nails, where it came from. Running his finger round the hard edge of the scab on his knee, picking at it, slightly, until a stream of hot red blood dribbles out.

He knows this spot on the towpath well- likes it, never anyone around.  Good to get away from it all. There’s the things that have been fly tipped by people who have missed the opening hours of the dump across the way, the torn posters on the shutters of the closed down supermarket, the bobbing swarm of mosquitoes over the water.  Tatty cat in an empty car park, staring up at a crow in a leafless tree.

“Here cat, catch you a fish for your tea” His voice echoes, but he doesn’t mind: there’s no one to hear. “Puss puss pussy cat!”. 

Cat just keeps on looking up at that bird. He leaves his rod and steps towards it; startled thing darts off, tail high, jumps on a rattling dustbin lid, on the fence, away, across the tip, into the forest.

“Not very nice now, just wanted to be friends!” Smiles to himself. Puts his hands in his pocket for a moment, touches through the fabric, closes his eyes, the last of the day’s sun on his face. The little cells collide under his lids, technicolour.

Then, all of a sudden, feels like he’s being watched. On the edge of the forest, there’s something there, in the shadows, can’t quite make it out in the gloom.

“Hey there? Hello?”

Slowly, low to the ground it comes out, stooped over, two legs but almost like you’d imagine they walked millions of years ago. A creature. Female. Tangled hair and body dark with sun and dirt. Just steps a little into the worn out light and stops. Looking straight at him.

Few seconds pass and he realises he’s not breathing. Pinches the fleshy skin on his palm. Bird crows on that skinny black branch and shuffles off, lazily flapping its wings in the airless sky. So quiet here now, just the buzz of the motorway overpass where it crosses the river further down. People just coming back from work probably, heading home to their wives and kids and that. Not knowing that he’s standing here, like this, and she’s looking at him. And he’s letting her get her fill.

She lifts herself up a little, spreads her arms- he’s far enough away that he can’t make out the details but the shadows from the trees are making this pattern on her body like contours. There’s a dark fuzz under her arms and between her legs. She takes another little step towards him, as if- he thinks with a swift glance about him- as if she’s presenting herself to him.

Maybe ought to go home. But he’s curious now, and not scared, not at all scared.  He’s not scared of girls. Still sees them, sometimes, the ones from his class, when he’s come off his nightshift and walking back through town. He’ll spot one falling out of some club or bar, drunk on cheap cocktails with stupid names like ‘SEX ON THE BEACH’, this fat necked Dwayne or Trevor hanging off her arm, hands all over her. Always wearing the tiniest dress, even in winter, shimmering like a thousand pearls in a tropical sea. Mostly they don’t notice him- he keeps his hood up and his head down, gets home as quick as he can. But once one of the girls, Gemma Higgins, she spotted him and said: ‘Hey, you’re that kid from our school aren’t you, what’s your name again?’ and she got the others to come over and pose for a photo with him, all pouting lips and girl band v signs. Gemma said she’d email him the pics when she got home but how could she have done when she never even had his email address? Stupid, stupid.

But this one’s not like that at all. So, seems ok, clenching his hands into fists at his side, he starts moving, slowly, slowly towards her, away from the choked up river. The whole time he never stops looking at her. All around them fridges pile up like towers of Babel or something, dead TVs chopped off at their coppery holes reflecting the pair of them on blank screens. The sun is setting and eventually he’s so close he can see his shadow there, burnt on the backs of her eyeballs.

He splays his hand out to her like a dog, for some reason, feels like he ought to give her his scent. She bends towards it, her nostrils twitch, glances, up at him, and then rubs her face against his fingers so suddenly he gasps. Then smiles, runs his fingers across her lips, up into her matted hair. She rises up again, allows him to look at her, standing there, completely naked, right there in front of him. As if she doesn’t mind. And he’s not feeling awkward, not in the slightest, he runs his touch over the surface of her with a frank curiosity it’s almost like she’s asked for.  How bony she is, all elbows and protruding ribs, and he thinks maybe she’s hungry, he takes her wrist and she resists at first, but then she lets him lead her, walking with a funny kind of waddle, back towards the river. She seems a bit surprised by her reflection, but he plunges his hand right through it, sending little ripples out, pulls a silvery fish from his net. She grabs it and gobbles it down, all blood and teeth and muscles and translucent scales.  She gets close to him, rubbing the gory remnants of her meal on his shirt, using her senses of him. Rips at the buttons and a tuft of strawberry blond chest hair pops out. Makes him feel manly. She pushes her tongue in his mouth.

But he doesn’t like having her out here, all naked, where anyone might come along and see. He starts to pull her along with him quite quickly, but she stumbles and trips, so he finds an old piece of blanket to wrap her up in. It’s itchy, probably, and there’s a bit of an odd smell about it, but he clasps it around her firmly, lifts her.  Her struggling makes him think of those great long legged spiders that he keeps rescuing from his bathtub, weightless, almost, but something about the feel of them as they wriggle in his hollow grasp sends a bolt down his spine, like he’s carrying something from another world. Stupid spiders, he’s only trying to help, stop them getting drowned. They don’t ever seem to appreciate it.

Flat’s not far away, pretty close to his old school, actually, he used to pass his block every day. Funny to think now he’d never really considered he might end up here. He can still see the kids from his window, the lads laughing and shoving each other, kicking a battered old ball about on the patch of grass outside. 

Not tonight though. It’s got late. The street lamps have come on and the moon’s like a big electric beam.

No risk of anyone round here stopping him to enquire what he’s been up to, or where he’s going, or what he might be carrying that manky bundle of old blanket for. Not really ones for talking much, people keep themselves to themselves, and that’s how he likes it. Lift’s broken again so he carries her up the stairs to the third floor, bent under her weight. Someone’s pissed right by his door, but he doesn’t notice today, he fumbles with his keys, impatient to get her in, wondering why he’s always got to lock it three times.

Inside, he looks at his flat properly for the first time in ages. Seems he has a lot of stuff. Pin boards covered with maps, old articles from history magazines, passport photos he’s picked up in the street. Abandoned filing systems puking up their contents on neglected shelves. Dust. A couple of old towels on the floor. All over the walls biro sketches of strange rare animals and extinct animals and animals that don’t exist with super powers: blue prints for evolution.

He crosses quickly to the window and pulls the heavy curtains. There’s this faint, sweaty tang when he moves them, and he disturbs a drowsy moth that has settled in a fold. It flutters like it’s really pissed off, crashes itself into the walls, then throws itself headlong at the bare light, keeps banging into it over and over and over again. She’s on the floor, cowering in that bit of blanket, watching it, not moving, looking pretty frightened actually. Eventually the poor thing dies, spirals down and lands on the carpet next to her. Then she’s up on her feet, scrabbling at the door they came in through, but she doesn’t really get how door handles work and ends up sort of flapping at it.

He goes to her, places his hand on her shoulder, smiles. She smiles back. He really, really likes her smile. She gives it to him so easily. At first her body’s all tight but when he touches her she relaxes straight away. She starts pulling at his shirt again, and he takes it off, his shoes, his trousers too, his boxers. She looks at him standing there, naked as the day he was born, and she beams.

On his mantelpiece he finds a comb and she rests against him as he pulls it into her hair, where it jams in all the knots. He chuckles and she copies him, copies him as he walks, first of all his manliest swagger, and then he minces for her as a joke, an impression of how she’ll be. Together they prance into the bathroom and in warm water he peels the filth off her surface, amazing her with her pink, pink skin, so clean and soft when he’s done she looks like a new born baby. He shows her her reflection in the mirror, and she searches for herself in the vacant air behind.

Amazing how he just touches her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d always imagined that when (if!) it happened it would be awkward, he’d have no idea what to do. Seemed like girls’ bodies weren’t for him, they belonged to the stronger boys, the funnier ones. ‘Gash’, that was their word for it, and that had made him imagine it being a bit like a wound. But it was more like- a precious ruby, or a pomegranate splitting its skin with juicy, gleaming seeds. And now, because he’s thought that, he puts his mouth to it, instinctively, and she flexes beneath his tongue, bucking like a fish out of water.

‘Go slow’, he tells himself, but she’s slippery and he can’t resist any longer, he slides into her easily. This is happening to him, and now all he knows is that he believes in the existence of angels, not angels dressed in white and shimmering like a thousand pearls, but ones that rise up from the ground, moss in their hair, skin all red with dust. Her head’s thrown back, her mouth wide open, and in the little gaps between her teeth he imagines he can see flames, like she’s bitten off a chunk of the middle of the earth. He penetrates her hard and deep, finds more fire in the heart of her. He explodes. When they awake, hours later, he’s still inside her.

He’s never been much of a one for a lie in, but they end up staying in bed all the next day, together in the tossed sheets. ‘Hello’ he teaches her. It’s a greeting. You say it when someone walks into your life who you’ve been missing. Or who you should have been missing. Or who you reckon you might miss, one day.

‘Hello.’

He’s always been a bit suspicious of happiness. Seems to him somehow untrue, or like if you were too happy you’d be missing out on real life. But now it seems like happiness is a stowaway in life’s pockets, arriving in the shape of a damp bottom lip pressed in the small of his back, or the flutter of lashes on his cheek waking him in the morning. Hard to believe but he lives in harmony with happiness now, yes, the spotty kid, the ginge. It creeps up on him from the deepest corners of her, even whilst he crushing her as hard as he can, and she’s begging him to crush her even harder, like his happiness is too much for her to bear.

He confuses her with ‘hey’. It’s the same, but for people you share more with. It’s softer. He says it to her when he pushes the door open, arms heavy with bags of pizza and beer and ice cream. He shifts her weight from where she’s wrapped herself round the last place she’s seen him. He’s been trying to get her to wear one of his shirts, a big baggy white one like he saw someone do in some film, but she’s got herself naked again, and he lifts her goose bumped body onto the bed, nearly drops her.  He wonders if she misses him when he’s gone: she’s still not talking, even though he’s taught her loads of words, it’s almost like she doesn’t trust them. But she finds other uses for her tongue, makes him understand.

The rent won’t pay itself and soon he has to return to work, leaving her alone for long dark hours. So she starts fucking him like a drowning thing gasping for her last breath, all wide eyes and gritty muscles: an ecstasy he’s never imagined.

There’s a part of him that starts to resent the happy moments. They make him feel nervous, waiting for their departure. Even when they’re happening they feel like he’s remembering something that took place long ago. Unless he can buy them and package them and keep them on his shelf, he’d rather not bother.

And if angels can fly, well, she just seems to be ruled by gravity these days. His fault really, all that junk food he’s been giving her- she’s getting heavier and heavier, and the weight begins to get too much for him, it seems like she’s sinking, like the earth might swallow her up. He starts having nightmares and he flails around in his sleep, getting the sheets wet. He wakes up and finds her curled up on the floor, as if the mattress gives her vertigo.

One day he comes home and finds her squatting down in the corner, spittle on her chin, and then he sees her fingers are jammed into the wall socket, electricity running through her back to earth. Her hair’s all static and just for a moment he feels quite afraid of her. He swallows and his throat makes a weird gravelly sound.

How are you supposed to live with someone who sticks their fingers in electrical sockets? And more to the point, can you love them? Here’s one word he’s somehow never got round to teaching her. Because what if she gets it wrong? She’s got this way of taking phrases and twisting them around, torturing them into weird meanings: ‘howareyouhowareyouowahhhhoooo’ she’s screamed at him, with strands of her own hair tangled in her palms, him balled up like a coward by the fridge.

Doesn’t seem that long ago but it’s actually been months since he was sitting there, by the river, minding his own business, and everything changed. There’s a bit of him that misses his solitude. She helps herself to whatever she fancies from the fridge, throws his papers around all over the place, douses herself in his deodorant. Sometimes he’ll lock himself in the bathroom for hours just to get a bit of peace and quiet, tries to slip out to work without her noticing, but more often than not she comes flying at him, howling like a banshee, grabs at his legs, and there’s been times he’s arrived for his shift with torn and bloody trousers.

So it’s a bit of a blessing in disguise when she starts sleeping more. She lies quietly whilst he does his thing. Stops eating so much- he’s switched her to salad now, and of course she’s not as keen on that. She’s got a bit of a rattle in her chest when she breathes, but its fine, nothing a good dose of Benylin won’t sort out. Probably ought to take her to the doctor, but he’s not really sure what he’d say.

One night, it takes him longer than usual to get home. There’s been riots in the high street, kids smashing up the J D Sports and nicking stuff from Dixons. On his way in one of them caught his eye and without hesitation just picked up this piece of loosened brickwork and hurled it at him. So he takes the scenic route back, down one of the dark back streets where the shops are long since emptied and boarded up, not much chance of running into them there.

Opens the door and she doesn’t even lift her head to greet him. Well, she never does anymore. He goes over and sits beside her. She looks so peaceful when she’s still, like someone totally untouched by the world. He picks up the comb from the side and lifts her head so it rests on his knee, gently starts working the matted strands. It takes him a long time- hours, who knows- but he finds it calming, focussing on the task in hand.

Later he stands up, moves her on the bed, lays her with her hair spread across the pillow, her hands down by her sides. He crosses to the window and pulls back the curtain. He disturbs a drowsy moth that has settled in a fold, and it flails about drunkenly, comes to rest in some unseen corner. Out in the street someone’s set the corner store on fire, and the kids are gathered round it, swigging from bottles and smashing them into the flames. Somewhere in the distance there’s the wail of a siren and the flashing blue. But he knows he’s safe up here, standing in the darkness, listening to the quiet rise and falling of her breath.

(Very) Uncertain Fragments...

This is not a story but a few fragments of something bigger that may well never see the light of day. They don’t hang together properly like this so any feedback you can give would be very much appreciated! I’m not a writer of prose at all so please be gentle… this is an experiment for me…

UNCERTAIN FRAGMENTS(!)

Your earliest, greatest (and perhaps only) artistic act was performed on a warm May afternoon soon before you learnt to speak.

Were you nearing two already then? Sitting at Grandpa’s table, your legs swinging freely beneath your chair. The house, cold, even in spring, filled with that faint twinge of gas that always carries you back there. The overcooked, cooling meat succumbing slowly to Grandpa’s knife. You watched the fat, slick black Labrador watching his hand and salivating.  

You yawned, turned your head away to the roses in the garden, didn’t listen to him speaking. Nairobi and Kampala and Mau Mau and Uhuru… the strange words had already become familiar, unlistened to.

It was too soon for you to understand the way one sentence can sometimes contain two truths, the way that stories can do battle with themselves. Too early to know that putting into words can be a means of ordering, of seeking sense in chaos.

You did not comprehend yet the mystery of time: that this man with hairs in his ears and nasal cavities, and the man who was present at the end of empire, in Kenya and in Palestine, were one and the same. Like each of us a stitch that folds time back on itself, creases it- and then leaves it to run smooth again.

No one noticed you slip from the table, not even the dog responded to your tug of its tail, your invitation to play.

Outside the spring day was sunny and fresh. A damp smell of newly cut grass that made you wrinkle your nose a bit and sneeze. You felt your family watching, suddenly aware, as you plodded with heavy, imprecise steps across the patio, past the flowerbed where for a moment you stopped, bent down to prod a fleshy worm glowing pink against the dark, moist soil, crushed it under the heel of your little patent mary janes. For the first time you felt the power of commanding a gaze.

Let us imagine the expression that may have played across that innocent face as you turned your back to the dining room window, which framed your action like a photograph, lowered your pants, squatted in your animal way, farted and then deposited on your Grandpa's mirror-like garden, a not insubstantial turd. The young artist, the juvenile defecator on the English country lawn: finding, in the absence of speech, a more succinct form of self expression.  I like to imagine you smiling.

* * *

In adolescence it was harder, these oft repeated scenes at the family dining table that had now become altercations. You had lost your art. You found your words clattered on your teeth and fell sharply from your mouth, hard as marbles. You were too old to be indulged, or ignored, and were then merely tolerated. That was the beginning of your own odyssey.

Others spoke of finding themselves, but your journeys were a constant dislocation. There were cities and sights that you’d read about in travel guides but it wasn’t the places that held you but the spaces in between. The night train and the border crossing. Moments like the evening in Kigali when the rain fell so heavily that the lights went out and the water was a wall that assured you were, if not lonely, then alone. Even now they cling to your nose and tongue.

Here it began with names. With lists of names. But the bleach bone corpses that littered the country: they are forever unknowable. Unspeakable. For the first time you were speechless. You stepped on that land like an unmarked grave. A catch in your throat for their epitaph.

You didn’t take a camera, because you didn’t know how to take photographs: precisely which moment you should choose to stowaway like that, assuring its place forever marked so vividly against the rest. You were like the character in the biro marked book you carried with you, who ‘could not rid herself of anxiety because one second of her life would remain torn out of the course of time and some stupid coincidence would make it come back to haunt her like the badly buried dead’.

Because of this it seems almost impossible now, looking back: the candlelit memorial ceremony in the national stadium where it started. A solitary, earnest white face, ready to absorb as much as it possibly could. You saw people’s bodies wracked and sinewed with the strain of their own testimonies. Words became weapons. The weight of the stories was actual, and throughout the night you maintained your vigil as the survivors collapsed around you, beneath the burden.

By the time the colour of the sky began to change again- that dirty dishwater shade before the dawn- you were drained. Your tears had been rung from you. You sat in the concrete stand with your knees clutched to you as those few that stayed this long began to drift away, to return, you supposed, to their every day lives. At last you felt nothing.

Just two of you remained. It seemed natural he should take your hand, lead you to the comfort of a motel room, to the faint musky trace of countless foreign bodies. Natural that you shouldn’t share your names. You shared beer instead.

Then: that little leap over death. Gasped like your last breath. With desperate teeth and sweat drew sound from him. And because you were only ever destined to be strangers, how easy it was for you to love him, with all your heart.

* * *

You see your grandfather for the last time soon after. How often you’ve imagined this time when dialogue exists no longer, how often regretted the conversations you’ll never have- long before they became impossible. Questions overwhelmed by your fear of the violence of your desire for his history. The hush became a scab you longed to pick.

And now, approaching him down the chlorine-smelling corridor, seeing his slender silhouette smudged on the autumn sky, you understand he has become as all things that are passed. A Chinese whisper. A shadow on a cave wall.

Still, there’s a new peace in the quiet between you. Now he’s lost control of his tongue and his bladder- words gone, senile defecator- he somehow seems more real, more flesh and blood. You watch the sun set over the hospital garden, see how the light creeping out of everything turns it strange.

His face glows: it is marked with deep lines, certain as maps. You imagine the inside of that liver spotted scalp. The past like the stars at a great distance, set against darkness. Defiant of the human will to string them together, turn them into constellations, to reorient the void.

He takes your hand in his: they are covered in deep purple veins like rivers. The skin is still tanned, and so is yours, you notice, as if the sun had coloured your DNA. But his eyes are clear and he looks at you with the astonishing, momentary perspicacity of the demented:

“What will her name be?”

His hands drop to your stomach, where you’ve just begun to feel it, smaller than an acorn, tinier than a five pence piece. A life. Smaller than an acorn. But, even now, there are translucent, fleshy fingers that someday may grasp a pen, write a name. Even now this wordless, sexless thing, no bigger than an acorn is preparing to write its name.

When your prayers weren’t answered (after your long two minute wait, clutching the test in your office toilet cubicle), strangely the first emotion was one you hadn’t forseen: joy.

Small as nothing, almost. You began to tell it stories. You whispered to it, the miracle of life: that from tiny acorns great oak trees grow. Unfathomable mysteries, like the way the birds hang moveless on summer evenings in the sky, the secrets of the universe that cause you to view science with awe and mistrust in equal measure.

Sometimes you are silent with one another, and your fingers pressed together on your belly form a heart.

There is room for silence.

But you give this little thing a name. With it you conjure planets and empires and histories. With one word the world stops turning and everything finds its place.

‘Tumaini’

A slight furrow in the brow, and then a flicker of recognition, as the word rushes back to him on a bridge of memory: a past language, a past life.

‘Hope’, he says, quietly. He smiles.

Fourth Plinth

An idea for the Fourth Plinth: a giant solid gold pigeon with a porta loo on its head.

A Song For the Dark Times

So, thoughts from Devoted and Disgruntled this weekend. I've got a few. But first, a song...

'This is the song I am singing,
I am singing this song,
This is the song I am singing,
Why don't you sing along?'

I imagine it being sung in the streets of a city in the not-too-distant future where every human activity has been weighed and assigned a relative fiscal value, and any behaviour that cannot be accounted for in terms of its health benefits, educational value, or contribution to the economy has been quashed. It is sung quietly in one or two corners of the city at first: late at night in dark empty alley ways, or whispered under covers by lovers in bed. But the sounds starts to swell, and the governors, the ones who weigh and measure from the buildings in the centre of town, catch a whisper of it on the breeze. They use their instruments to measure it and cannot understand why anyone would raise their voice to such meaningless words: they try to grasp it, to crush it, but it is insubstantial and lighter than air- it slips through their fingers.

There is something insistent in it... the melody, the rhythm... and it becomes a virus, spreading through the city. The people, hearing it, are reminded of something that they have lost. And listening to the voices bubbling skyward, growing louder every day, the governors, despairing of their inability to crush it, are forced to ask: 'why?'. And the only reply they receive is the song.

I managed to wander into a session I would never normally have chosen at D+D, in which we were invited to 'compose a song for the dark times'. This is what we came up with, and I love it. I think that some were disappointed that it didn't have a more overtly political content, but the reason why it pleased me so much was that it seemed so pure; it became a song that existed 100% for its own sake, and had no greater purpose. But through being 'only' a song, it became political for me- because at a time when we are continuely being forced into conversations about the 'value' of arts, its contribution to the economy or education or stopping knife crime, it's easy to forget to speak about art in its own terms: that art is wonderful because it is art. And so we sing this song with no greater purpose than to sing this song- but that is more than purpose enough.

This feeds in rather neatly to some thoughts from the same weekend I was going to write up in a separate post, but since they are in keeping I will continue here. I wanted to talk about a question I've been thinking about a lot in my capacity of an 'arts PR', which is how do we communicate the value of the arts to someone who doesn't 'get it'?

In fact I'm even a bit bothered by that question, because 'value' feels like it implies an equivalent measure: a system by which the worth of something can be quantified. But as I've outlined with regard to the song, I don't think we can judge the arts in this way.

Let me put it in more concrete terms. There's a recession. The government has to make cuts. You get into an argument, attempting to defend the importance of arts funding.

"Yes, the arts is important,' admits your adversary "but what if that money could be used to pay for hospital beds instead, and could save lives?"

You suddenly find yourself forced into an absurd position- you have to weigh the value of a human life against the value of 'art'. Of course it is impossible, but it is the position we increasingly find ourselves in, because if someone doesn't already 'get' why the arts matters, we have to argue for it in their terms: and so we are destined to failure, because we inevitably debase and reduce what the arts is by not viewing it in its own light. It makes me think of all the debates I used to have about the existence of God in my A level Theology class; no matter how rational and smart the Ontological Argument for God's existence is, ultimately, either you believe in God or you don't, and I'd be amazed if anyone had ever converted to religion on the strength of a bit of logical debate, no matter how compelling (and if they have I can't help but think it would be a rather colourless religious faith to have).

This was the crux of the discussion I convened about 'Theatre in the Public Sphere: are we representing ourselves well and could we do better?'. The conclusion I came to, after discussing it with those who attended the meeting, was that in order to have a genuine appreciation and understanding of the arts, one needs to have had transformational, and probably frequent, personal experiences of the arts. The earlier in life this happens, the better: before prejudices have an opportunity to form.

But so many of our early theatrical experiences are bad ones. People say 'I should go to the theatre more', the implication being that theatre is not about enjoyment, but that it is some how good for you, or an obligation: an idea, perhaps, that stems from childhood, from the painful readings of Shakespeare around the classroom or school trips to see dusty, reverent renditions of 'the classics'. Not to mention the damage potentially caused by some of the worse examples of amateur dramatics. I say 'some', because their are undoubtedly some outstanding amateur theatre programmes, and my own life long passion for and involvement in theatre is certainly rooted in my time with the Theatre Royal Bath Young People's Theatre: I think many, many other theatre professionals would identify the significance of similar experiences.

So the conclusion I reached from all this, is that if we wish for a future where the arts is a central strand of our society, we've got to start taking theatre with and for children much, much more seriously. We need to subsidise it, we need to pay attention to it, we need to respect it, we need to celebrate it, and we need to stop making allowances for bad work. How this happens is a bigger question; but at least having a consciousness about it is a good starting point. And then perhaps we can look forward to living in a country where people genuinely sing for singing's sake.

Incidentally I should credit those who participated in my session, and the singing session, with helping cultivate these thoughts- and write the song! I don't have your names but it was a pleasure talking to you- thank you!

I kept my dream in my pocket

I kept my dream in my pocket,
I tended to it every day,
But then one day I forgot it,
It fell through a hole and scurried away.