A Little Fiction – Script

Act One – Scene One: Int. A suburban living room. Edmund enters. Gilbert is slumped in a chair. His head is back, his mouth is open. He snores loudly.

Edmund: So Gilbert, the plot thickens.

Gilbert: (Surprised) What the bloody…? What? Plot? What plot?

Edmund: (Remaining calm) Plot. This plot. The plot. The plot thickens…

Gilbert: Plot. Ok, plot. Against whom?

Edmund: What?

Gilbert: Against whom? Whom… What… Who are we plotting against?

Edmund: Us? No-one. We’re not plotting against anyone.

Gilbert: But you said…

Edmund: I said, ‘So Gilbert, the plot thickens.’ It’s the line.

Gilbert: The line?

Edmund: The line. In the play.

Gilbert: The play… What play?

Edmund: This play. The play.

Gilbert sits awkwardly, confused.

Gilbert: I’m confused. What do you mean ‘The line’? What play are you talking about?

Edmund: Look, come on, there are people watching. This isn’t funny now; just say your line. Let’s move on.

Gilbert: ‘Line?’ ‘Line?’ There you go with that ‘Line’ thing again. What is this with ‘Line’? You’re acting like you’re expecting me to say something.

Edmund: Of course I am. I’m waiting for you to say your line so that I can react.

Gilbert: React?

Edmund: React. I say, ‘So Gilbert, the plot thickens’ and you say, ‘And we become more embroiled within it,’ and I react by saying, ‘Ay, there is no other way for us.’ I know it’s not exactly Shakespeare, but…

Gilbert: ‘And we become more embroiled within it’?

Edmund: Well, it’s not actually a question in the script, but it will…

Gilbert: Script? What do you mean, Script?

Edmund: Oh God! Have you been drinking?

Gilbert: Me drinking? Me? I’m not even called Gilbert. Why do you keep calling me Gilbert?

Edmund: In the play. Your character…

Gilbert: Here we go again. ‘In the play.’ What play?

Edmund: This play, for Christ’s sake. This play. The one that we are both in.

Gilbert: I’m not in a play.

Edmund gestures to Gilbert to look at the audience. Gilbert stands and walks to the front of the stage, peering intently into the auditorium. He returns to his chair and sits heavily.

Gilbert: I don’t understand. When did that happen?

Edmund: Oh come on, it’s a play. You’re just a character in a play. Stop messing about now and let’s get on with it. The audience are getting restless. They’ll be asking for their money back if we don’t get on with it.

Gilbert: But I don’t understand. I fell asleep over Doctor’s this afternoon, no biggy, often happens, but when I woke up… Is this Candid Camera?

Edmund: Candid Camera? How old are you?

Gilbert: Alright, Game for a Laugh. Are you Jeremy Beadle…? No, he’s dead isn’t he? Are you Noel Edmonds?

Edmund: No I’m bloody not. I’m Edmund and you are Gilbert. We are brothers.

Gilbert: Brothers? My mum’s not going to be happy with that. She thought that there was just me and my sister. Mind you, my sister’s not going to be too chuffed when she finds out that she’s you…

Edmund: What?

Gilbert: (Peering closely at Edmund) Is that a fake beard? It is, isn’t it? It’s a fake beard. Come on, who are you really? Is this for You’ve Been Framed? (He addresses the audience) It is, it’s a fake beard.

Edmund: The fourth wall. My God! You’ve broken the fourth wall.

Gilbert: The what?

Edmund: The fourth wall. It’s a theatrical conceit. The barrier between the actors and the audience.

Gilbert again looks out into the audience.

Gilbert: A theatrical conceit. What the…? There is no barrier. What would be the point in that? They wouldn’t be able to see us. There’d be no point. Unless it was glass or something. I suppose glass would work…

Panicking, Edmund looks to the wings. He strokes his beard nervously.

Gilbert: It is fake, isn’t it? Honestly, it’s a fake.

Edmund: (Under his breath) Yes, it’s fake. Obviously it’s a fake, alright. And so is yours.

Gilbert: But I haven’t got a…

Gilbert feels his chin.

Gilbert: …bloody hell. Where did that come from? I’m sure I didn’t have that this morning.

Edmund: I’ve just told you, it’s a fake.

Gilbert pulls the beard. It comes off. He tries to stick it back on. It is upside down.

Gilbert: Blimey… Right, just let me get this straight. I’m called Gilbert and you’re called…?

Edmund: …Edmund…

Gilbert: …Edmund. And… We are doing what exactly?

Edmund: In the play?

Gilbert: If it helps.

Edmund: I’m waiting for you to deliver your line.

Gilbert: Which is?

Edmund: Which is ‘And we become more embroiled within it.’

Gilbert: And we become more embroiled within it?

Edmund: Yes, but as I said, it’s not a question.

Gilbert: And we become more embroiled within it? But not a question?

Edmund: No. A statement. Not a question.

Gilbert: Right, so…

Edmund: So?

Gilbert: So shall I say it then?

Edmund: It’s a bit late now if I’m honest.

Gilbert: Bit late? It’s just a line. If you don’t want me to say it now, what’s the point in all the moaning? What have you been moaning about all the time? I thought…

Edmund: You didn’t! That’s just the point, isn’t it? You didn’t. You didn’t think anything. The writer did. You’re just reciting his lines.

Gilbert: Oh yes…? So, what’s with all this confusion then?

Edmund: Confusion? It’s just in the script.

Gilbert: What do you mean, ‘It’s in the script’?

Edmund: I mean it’s in the script. The confusion is in the script.

Gilbert: And the fourth wall thing?

Edmund: In the script.

Gilbert: And the thing with the beard?

Edmund: In the script. It’s all in the script. Everything. You, me, everything; all in the script.

Gilbert: Are you sure?

Edmund: Quite sure.

Gilbert: (To himself.) In the script. It’s all in the script… (He settles back in his chair.) Oh, well that’s alright then. (He throws back his head and sleeps.)

The End.

First published 23.05.2020

Unsurprisingly, this started life as a script I couldn’t somehow finish. My fondest memory is that Calmgrove liked it.

Modern Manners – Virtual Queuers

I have worked pump-side of a bar on many occasions, I know the score. You turn your back on an empty bar for thirty seconds to check the stock-levels on Pickled Onion Frazzles and when your turn back there are more people waiting to be served than you can shake a shove ha’penny board at. Never mind, the answer is simple: “Anyone waiting to be served?” you ask (patently ignoring the simple fact that everybody is) at which point the person who is second-in-line will always point at the person who arrived bar-side first and say “I think that chap over there was first,” and you serve the chap over there secure in the knowledge that the next person to be served is the one who pointed him towards you. The process repeats until the bar empties and no-one need ever make a fool of themselves by screaming “It’s me! I’m next for Christ’s sake. It’s me.” Unless, of course, they are French, when all bets are off. This is where middle aged men lead the world. This is Virtual Queuing in operation.

Today I was on the other side of the bar. I was first there and waiting to be served. The barman trudged in from counting peanuts in The Snug and stared at the serried ranks. “Anyone waiting?” he asked. Queuer number two raised his hand to point at me and opened his mouth to speak as three ladies appeared having just entered the bar and from the back of the throng shouted, “Yes, we are. Three Pinots please.” The barman looked as though he had been tasered. This defied all etiquette. We men at the bar (for men we all were) looked similarly stunned, yet there was nothing the barman could do but serve the three women whilst calling for back-up.

The back-up appeared (having ascertained that the pork scratchings were up to strength) looked around the expectant faces and said “Anyone waiting?” Number two instantly raised his hand, not wishing to be robbed of his moment again, “I think he’s before me,” he said, pointing at me and simultaneously staking his claim as next in line. The women looked along the bar as the rest of us mentally shuffled into our rightful order and, taking their wines, went in search of a table. “Sorry gents,” said barman number one, “Who’s next?” “I think he was before me,” said a man to the side of me, indicating a man in a tweed cap who responded by asking for a half of stout. Order was restored.

It wasn’t until I returned to my companions at our little table in the sunlight that I started to think about what had just happened. The silently held bar protocol has been with us forever to my knowledge, but I wondered if I might just have witnessed the beginning of its demise. Maybe it was only now adhered to by men, maybe even only men of a certain age, which we all undoubtedly were. The three women were patently not men (I mean, I didn’t actually enquire, but they didn’t look like men and… oh, this is a can of worms I am not prepared to open. They all used the ladies loo) and they were very much the junior of all the men at the bar. Maybe they knew exactly what they were doing, or maybe they simply mis-read the situation. They were laughing loudly at the table alongside us and, as always, I couldn’t help but suspect that they were laughing at me.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there was an unspoken agreement between all of us left floundering in their wake at the bar; a tacit acknowledgment that a new order may have been ushered in and, if you are second in the queue in the future, there can be no holding back. You can’t hang about these days; it’s dog eat dog, every man for himself, and only the quickest to point out they are not next is ever assured of asserting their own slot in second place…

A Close Shave

You know what it is like: sometimes the question is more of a surprise than the answers it provokes. Joy is almost always found in unexpected answers to mundane questions, but just occasionally you are forced to ask yourself a question, having absolutely no idea of what your answer might be. In short, you catch yourself completely off-balance…

I was staring into the mirror this very morning when such a question occurred to me. I would like to claim differently, but it was nothing profound: no ‘who am I really?’, no ‘where are we going’ or ‘what’s it all about?’ It was a little more intimate than that (but fret not, still above shoulder height). I was standing, not for the first time, with beard trimmer in hand, trimming guard at feet and a broad swathe of semi-exposed skin etched across my face when the question dropped into my consciousness like an Alka Seltzer into a glass of water. “How attached am I to this beard?”

Obviously I did not mean in a physical sense: this thing grows out of my face, it is not stuck there with wig adhesive. I do not fear going out in a stiff breeze lest I find myself somewhat less hirsute than when I left home. The beard is irrevocably part of me and that is where my problem lies.

I can’t actually say that I like the beard any more than I like the triple chin that it hides, my nose or my wonky cheekbone; it is simply part of me and, without it, my face is not my own. It belongs to a fat blancmange. I am Mr Potato Head with asymmetrically inserted features.

So, is the beard a mask? Well, I grew it because I hated shaving. Shaving left me sore and it took up far too much of my time. But now? Can I see myself without it? Am I emotionally attached to it? Well, it does, in a small way, represent me as an adult – not so much in the fact that I couldn’t grow one as a child, but more in the fact that I look like a fat nine year old without it.

The beard – even in its soon-to-be truncated form – is more than a mere coating to the skin. It somehow defines me. I am that short ginger bloke with the ever-whitening beard. I don’t know whether I look my age with it, but without it I certainly do not. My face bears the scars of bricks and bats, of rugby scrums and cricket balls, of high-speed skin to bark encounters, but somehow continues to look younger than it actually is.

My quandary was unexpected – even my unrivalled ineptitude with the beard trimmer never prepares me for the shock of facing a semi-strimmed face – should I trim back the rest of my beard to the 2mm stubble of my partial exfoliation, or shave it all off altogether and face the world as a younger, pudding-faced extrovert? Well, in the event, the answer was rather more straightforward than the question because I do not possess a razor and there was no way I was going to take my partially shorn face out to buy one. I would have to uni-trim first and by then, well, what would be the point of scraping the rest of it off? It turns out that I am even more attached to my beard than I am to my face…

Manifesto

Despite a stubborn reluctance to do so, I have decided to rethink my title strategy for the year. Wasting all the time and energy I have been doing into finding just the right song to link to each post has produced (I must admit) an amazing playlist, but, like a pre-election Manifesto, the headlines often bear no relation whatsoever to what follows. Like a James Joyce novel, it might all make sense to anybody prepared to battle through to the end of it, but let’s be honest, few people are that desperate. Whilst those who always read me (God bless you one and all) continue to read me, I feel sure that those who do not, are not tempted to do so by a title that bears, at best, a tenuous bond to what ensues. The song lyric envoi will almost certainly persist, but I will strive to make the post title slightly more apposite: a little more enticing for those who have no idea of what they are about to walk into.

That’s the plan, but I’m sure you know the problems that come along with plans. Plans, in my experience, like raspberry canes, seldom come to fruition. They may bloom, but the flowers last only long enough to be blown off by the first breath of Spring wind and wet rot will have set in long before the pollen is dished.

As a young teenager, most of my plans revolved around either Jenny Agutter or Jess from The Kids From 47A and were not, in retrospect, entirely wholesome. My plan to fulfilment ratio was, I suspect, fairly par for the course. I planned to write for the radio and I achieved that in the most fleeting of ways. I planned to write for TV and my success in that field was even more ephemeral – making the life of a Mayfly seem positively Methusalan. As a life-long reader of Punch and Mad, I planned to write for magazines and I did pull that one off – although I seem to have killed off every periodical that ever carried my claptrap in the process. I planned a book, I wrote a book. A good book in my opinion, although it is an opinion that nobody else appears to share. Most of my plans revolved around becoming rich, famous and respected – a man who would never have to work again unless he wanted to. I have achieved only one of these aims and that only because I have staggered past the age at which nobody expects me to work anymore and probably wouldn’t trust me to do it even if they did.

As I have grown older, my plans have become somewhat less grandiose, although no more achievable. I will make an attractive garden seat out of the wooden pallet I have just stripped down, I will get back into the kind of shape I have actually never been in before, I will become the world’s oldest overnight sensation. I know that I will never save the world – I have enough trouble saving Nectar Points…

If I was a politician – and I must thank God that I am not – my manifesto would be a lean affair, especially if, in contrast to every other manifesto I have ever heard, it consisted not of an ideological wish-list of the knowingly unachievable, but of things I know I could do. It would not trouble the printers capacity to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Plans are for dreamers and builders. Plans will almost inevitably be altered because the timber merchant has run out of 4×2 and the bricks have all arrived in the wrong colour. Truthfully, it is seldom the plans that gang aft agley, but everything else. What you end up with is rarely what you started out wanting. What you get is hardly ever what you expected.

Unless, of course, you can change the title to suit…

I am for life around the corner
that takes you by surprise
that comes, leaves all you need
and more besides
I am for a life and time by numbers
blast in fast and low
add ‘em up, account for luck
you never know… Manifesto – Roxy Music (Ferry/Manzanera) I know, I know. I just couldn’t resist it one last time.

A Little Fiction – A One Night Stand

Vivien checked her hair and make-up in the bathroom mirror: nothing special, but nothing glaringly out of place. The wisps of grey that flowed through the waves of her hair, like oil on the surface of a running stream, were highlighted in the harsh glare of the lights that surrounded the mirror but, she was pleased to note, no thicker than they had appeared the night before. She was wearing her evening make-up; what her mother always referred to as ‘war-paint’: eye-shadow was just a shade darker than she wore during the day, her cheeks a shade rosier, her lips redder, fuller and altogether shinier. She smiled at her reflection, ‘Not too shabby,’ she said ‘Not too shabby at all,’ and she turned to open the door, a delicate ghost of perfume trailing behind her as she left.

In the lounge of her tidy little flat, her guest sat silently on one side of the two-seater settee, leaving just enough room for her to settle beside him, but instead of doing so, she bustled. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’d like tea. I have some iced rings in the cupboard. I so like an iced ring with a cup of tea, don’t you? Yes, we’ll have some iced rings too.’ She hummed happily to herself as she laid a tray with biscuits, cups, milk and sugar, and patiently warmed the teapot before pouring the boiling water over the tea and carrying the tray to the small table in front of the settee.

‘Are you a milk first man, or a tea first man, Mr Pettigrew? I always put the milk in first…’ Without waiting for a reply, she carefully poured a small amount of milk into each china cup and poured the tea, spilling a little onto the table. ‘Oh, I’ll get a cloth,’ she dashed towards the sink. ‘We don’t want that dripping down onto your shoes, do we?’ She fussed around, wiping the table, topping up his cup although he drank nothing, sipping her own tea and eating iced rings for two, spinning like the dynamo on a free-wheeling bicycle, creating more energy than she used. She chatted lightly, intimately, smoothing her hair from time to time as she caught her reflection in the mirror; straightening her clothes, brightening her smile.

Throughout it all, Lawrence Pettigrew said nothing. He reminded Vivien of the strong, silent men she remembered from the films of her youth. He reminded her of her father in the photo her mother kept in her purse; a young man before he went off to fight. Before he came back as the empty shell he had become. Before then… Her guest’s reticence did not disturb her, she simply took it upon herself to fill in the silence with her own happy chatter, asking questions that required no answers, telling stories that called for no response. She was happy just to be in company and Mr Pettigrew who, whilst by no means demonstrative, was at least making no big show of wanting to leave. Fiona was, she thought without irony, as happy as Larry.

Eventually she settled beside him on the sofa and, with little hesitation or resistance, rested her head on his shoulder. It was soft, warm and yielding. She sighed gently and a small bead of saliva escaped her lips and landed on his cheek like a kiss. She tutted quietly and wiped it from his face with the edge of her sleeve; watching as his smile slowly decayed from a warm and friendly openness, to a strangely asymmetrical leer that spread across his cheek. She moistened her lips with her tongue and yawned with an exaggerated spread of her arms. ‘Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed now,’ she said. ‘You look very drawn.’

Mr Pettigrew was unmoving, helpless to refuse, as Vivien laid him on her bed. ‘This won’t hurt at all,’ she giggled lightly. Slowly she teased the rubber band that secured his balloon head away from his pillow body, and released it with an airy indifference, allowing it to bounce away towards the door. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Let me help you out of that shirt.’ She pulled the old ‘T’ shirt from his memory-foam body with a soft care, placing it at the foot of the bed before giving his body a jolly good fluffing up and, laying her head gently against his chest, closed her eyes and drifted into a dark, dream-filled sleep…

First published 08.08.2020

I first encountered Vivien in a book I attempted to write called ‘Lonely People’ which I saw as a ‘concept album’ in book form. It, like many such ideas, never reached fruition, but I remembered her and she seemed to fit so snugly here…

Insomnia

2am…

I spend much of my life awake, most of it when I should not be. Don’t fret, I am also almost invariably awake when I should be. Sleep occupies little of my life, but most of my thoughts. In the night my thoughts are febrile little beasts. I gather them up in the morning, like a shepherd might pull together a flock of nocturnal blancmanges, and try to slop them back into the appropriate vessels. Writing, for me, is like assembling a Haynes Manual for my head.

Back in the day, I would face down the night and write with no intention other than to be funny¹: no axe to grind, no tale to tell – or at least no moral to latch onto it – just a million jokes in my head and the need to release them for the world’s admiration. You would not believe the sleep I lost in letting them go, nor how many of them, like maladjusted pigeons, came straight back home to roost. I don’t do it so much now: the bagful of jokes thing. I don’t know why. It could be my age I suppose. Somehow I need things to make sense these days, but I’m trying to get over it. Logic is the death of comedy I know. If you need to explain a joke, it is almost certainly not funny. If you can explain a joke, it is definitely not funny.

Anyone who has ever attempted to define what makes anything amusing is trudging along the road to insanity. Time and place has a part to play (funerals and bankruptcy hearings seldom offer the best of audiences) as does the way you tell ‘em: we all have the capacity to bugger up a perfectly good joke. Don’t worry, it won’t cost you friends: what on earth would they laugh at if you weren’t so inept? Anyway, nobody actually tells jokes any more, do they? Jokes are last year’s funny. The chickens have stopped crossing the road.

I am by nature a joker and occasionally, like everybody else in this imperfect world, I say things that I instantly regret and I instantly say things that I later regret. My brain clicks over things that I am, at times, not quick enough to manage. It makes decisions over which I have no control, long before I am prepared to make them. I am what used to be called quick-witted, and the problem with that is that the filters often do not click into place as quickly as my big, stupid mouth. Age has given me the capacity to see it coming. Discretion waves, like Jenny Agutter’s red bloomers, in the face of the disaster-bound express.

There are times when I wish I could be more forthright, but it’s difficult. It’s not the way I was made. People (my grandma in particular) would tell you that I do not have a malicious bone in my body, and I know they are right, because I am a jellyfish. My entire capacity to cause pain lies solely in my inadvertent aptitude to stand on other people’s toes in the ice cream queue and to trap my dick in my own zip². I am the clown whose car refuses to fall apart, whose bow-tie refuses to spin, whose trousers are already full of custard. I am the bloody idiot in the bowler hat and the brightly checked suit that absolutely everybody finds annoying. The red nose is all my own.

So I think that what has happened to me lately is that I have stopped attempting to write jokes that nobody finds funny, aware, as I am, that an unfunny joke is nothing but polemic. (I know this, because I just looked it up,

after dismissing my usual method of splitting words I do not understand into constituent parts in order to get the drift, e.g. pole = stick or stand and mic = microphone. Polemic is a microphone stand. I have spent years thinking that I am full of shit, only to discover that I am actually full of microphone stands.) It is a sobering thought. Like a glass of coke and a fried egg sandwich, it shouldn’t work, but often it does³.

My younger life was shaped by Spike Milligan, Monty Python and Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg. I spent many years trying to find The lighter Side of things. Only recently have I grown to understand that most of them don’t have one. Myquest to try to find the right thing to say leads me, as ever it did, to 3am and camomile tea, to 4am and a half-lit tryst with a pen and a notepad, to 5am and coffee that stains the teaspoon, with Marmite on toast. Marmite is the last surrender. Sleep and yeast extract are like Abbott and Costello, they look good on paper, but in real life they are totally incompatible.

One of these stubbornly long nights I will stumble across the chicken that did cross the road and I will ask why it did it. Hopefully I will stay awake long enough to hear the answer…

¹ I reserve the right to believe that I once was.
² Definitely not in the ice cream queue.
³ In my own (happily limited) experience, the only fully guaranteed hangover cure.

Where does it come from?
Where does it go?
Flowing over your skin
Walking and talking
Dancing ‘til dawn
When you just can’t give in to
Insomnia… Insomnia – Wishbone Ash (Martin Turner)

Private Investigations

“…You no longer have an NHS dentist,” they said. “You will be put on a waiting list until we can replace her,” they said, “but in the meantime you still need your six-monthly check-up.”
“O.K.” I said.
“£85” they said.
My former dentist, Krystyna (whose name has been changed to protect the innocent) was, due in part to a limited grasp of the English language, delightfully direct; she patted my hand when she saw I was stressed; she called me ‘my love’. She had departed, I presume, in search of pastures new, and I can’t say that I blame her…

I have had, to my recollection, only four dentists during my adult life yet now, here I was, flat on my back, staring into a blinding white light with number five peering wonderingly into my mouth. (I am ashamed to admit that I do not know her name – and, having just checked through all the paperwork, can find no immediate way of finding it – so I cannot offer her the anonymity of a pseudonym.) “When did you last have X-Rays?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Isn’t it on my records?”
Her nurse tapped on the laptop whilst she looked over her shoulder, holding latex-gloved hands at shoulder height like a 1950’s minstrel singer. “You need X-Rays,” she said.
“O.K.” I replied.
“£30,” she said. “You need to change the way you are brushing your teeth. You are brushing too hard and for too long. Buy a toothbrush with a timer and a pressure sensor and obey it. Do you understand?”
I said that I have been married for forty years, I certainly understand ‘obey’.
“It will not be easy,” she continued, “because…”
“I am old?…” She gave me a look that said ‘not only old, but terminally stupid.’ She sighed. “…because you have been brushing the wrong way for many years.” I wasn’t keen on the emphasis she placed on ‘many’. ‘Many years,’ I thought, ‘during which I have never missed a dental appointment. It’s a shame that nobody has mentioned this to me before.’
“When did you last see the Hygienist?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. My rational brain is overwhelmed with panic at the dentist. I have always trudged from chair to chair at the dentist’s will, opening wide and closing tight as per instructions, trying as hard as I can to not think about it. God alone knows what they are actually doing.
“You need a deep-clean,” she said.
“O.K.” I said.
“£120” she said.

So that is where I have just been. I feel like I have been punched in the mouth, but my teeth are shiny. My gums are bleeding profusely, but healthy. I am told that the bleeding will stop in a week or two. Until then I must continue to brush as per the new regime. The blood (providing it is not gushing) is, I am assured, a good sign. It shows my gums are healthy. It will gradually subside over a few weeks. I wanted to ask why, if the bleeding was a good thing, the stopping wasn’t a bad one, but I didn’t want another look. If I’m honest, I really liked her: she smiled a lot, she was patient and she continually paused to give me a moment to compose myself, breathe and swallow. Laying back in the dentist chair, I do tend to put all other bodily imperatives on hold.
“O.K.” she said. “You can go now.” It reminded me of the over-friendly tone employed by a headmaster after he had administered a caning.
“I’ll book a check up in six months time,” I said.
“Better make it four,” she said.
“O.K.” I said…

It’s a mystery to me
The game commences
For the usual fee
Plus expenses… Private Investigations – Dire Straits (Mark Knopfler)

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Dazed and Confused

The moment having long gone when I may have tried to do anything about it, I feel that the time is now ripe for a terminal whine about the real reason behind our upcoming move to more ‘two old people-sized’ living quarters. It is not our current house that is getting us down, but the proximity of those that are sprouting up around it. People need places to live – I get that – even when the houses that are being built are in no way affordable by those who need them. This is a tiny island with an awful lot of people on it (and, sadly, a lot of awful people). This is not a blast about the blight on our ever-diminishing green sward, nor the impact on those who live just inches – literally – from the ringworm spread of ‘progress’, this is a whinge about the system that allows it to happen, even when it knows it really should not.

The houses behind us now loom, towering over us raised, as they are, to ‘prevent flooding’ – but more on that later…

The news of the planning application – many years ago now – was greeted with the usual howls of dismay by our little villageful of NIMBY’s. What is wrong with doubling the village’s size in one fell swoop? What difference could a mere 350 houses make to an already sagging village infrastructure? We would find out at the planning meeting. We did. Initially the meeting heard from the village Flood Prevention Officer who gave evidence that the scale of development would be a disaster for the already stressed drainage system. (A problem with which I closely identify, should I drink more than two pre-lunch coffees.) It then heard from representatives of the health centre, the schools and the shops, all of whom attested that they would not be able to cope without serious investment and expansion. It then heard from the builders who said they had a responsibility to ensure that their new properties would not flood. They intended to achieve this by building the houses on higher ground than those surrounding them. “Won’t that just cause flooding in the neighbouring properties?” they were asked. “Not our responsibility,” they said. They were asked about the potential problems caused by up to 700 new children being crammed into local schools, over a thousand souls crushed into the care of a teetering health centre, possibly 700 new cars leaving the village for the city every morning on crumbling country roads. “Not our responsibility,” they said. So whose responsibility could it be? Surely the man from the council would be able to inform us. He stood, he spoke and this (paraphrased to the very best of my memory) is what he said.

“You can object to the building,” he said, “but you will be wasting your time. This development will go ahead. The government wants us to build 350 houses in this area and by putting them all here, we won’t have to worry about anywhere else. (‘Including’ – he did not say – ‘where I live.’) The alternative ‘brown-field’ sites in the city? They will take so much cleaning up. It’s much better if we just leave them derelict. Farm land is so much easier. The despoliation of your outlook and your way of life, by the way, is not a valid complaint – so don’t bother with that one. We don’t have the money to improve the village amenities, but it doesn’t really matter because it is not our responsibility either. As for flooding, we agree that it is likely to occur, but it will be at the lower end of the village where the drainage is already overloaded, so we can’t possibly be blamed for that, can we? Besides, if you don’t like it, you could always try to sell your poor, devalued houses and move out. I don’t care: I live in one of the places that is now going to escape development. Thank you for coming – it is always important to gauge local opinion – but you’ve totally wasted your time. Goodbye…” And so, somewhat bewildered, we wandered out of the village hall, dazed and confused by the blinding inevitability of a fait that was very much accompli.

…And that brings us to where we are today, backing on to two giant, raised, five-bedroom houses that are certainly going to be the answer to the housing crisis – just the thing to help people clamber onto the housing ladder – at the fringes of a giant housing estate that develops in fits and starts whilst they wait for non-existent buyers to come forward waving wads of cash. Democracy in action. It has finally ground us down. We are moving to a bungalow that is already surrounded on all sides, happy that there should be no potential for a behemoth to appear inches from our back fence – until, of course, they tell us that next door’s forty-eight storey HMO extension no longer needs planning permission and, “even if it did, don’t be a NIMBY, it is for the greater good and, best of all, it’s nowhere near my back yard…”

Dazed and Confused – Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page) has no relevance whatsoever, other than its title…

NIMBY is an abusive acronym (Not In My Back Yard) aimed at those who strive to stop ill-advised developments by those who ensure that it is nowhere near their own, probably extensive, back gardens…

HMO (House of Multiple Occupancy) – a means of squeezing thirty-eight homeless souls into a three bedroom town house with a single bathroom and a kitchen within which it would prove impossible to swing a rat whilst becoming very rich on multiple rents and buying a house with the kind of back garden for which you would need a telescope to see whatever anyone might manage to build at the back of it…

A Little Fiction – The Discovery of Fire

The man on the raised rocky platform raised himself unsteadily to almost his full height. He was still slightly unused to standing: he felt distinctly giddy when his knuckles were off the floor. Never the less he steadied himself against the rocky outcrop and peered down at the gaggle of fellow troglodytes that had assembled below him, squatting uncomfortably on the rocky ground and checking one another for edible parasites. He raised his hand and a hush descended on the crowd, broken only by the sound of scratching and the occasional ‘pop’ of a tick caught between thumb and forefinger.
‘Come on,’ yelled one of the homunculi gathered at his feet, ‘We haven’t got all day, you know. We got holes to go to, stuff to, wosname, hunt, stuff to gather.’ There was a gentle hum of agreement; the crowd were getting restless. ‘Best get on with it,’ thought the man on the rock, ‘Before they start chucking those sharpened flints about.’
‘Fellow cave dwellers,’ he began ‘I have brought you here today to disclose my latest, life-enhancing invention, which, I am sure you will agree, will revolutionise our very way of life.’
‘I hope it’s better than that flippin’ limestone boat you had us all in last week,’ said a man in goatskin. ‘Damn lucky we could all, what do you call it, swim.’
The man on the platform gave goatskin one of his hardest stares before stepping triumphantly to one side in order to reveal the fire that flickered behind him. ‘Behold,’ he said proudly. There followed a long silence, which at first he took for awe, but which was, in fact, fuelled by indifference. Eventually goatskin spoke for the crowd.
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘What’s it do?’
‘It is fire!’ yelled the inventor. ‘It gives you warmth and light. It scares away the savage beasts of the night.’ The man in the goat skin leaned forward and rested a hairy forefinger on the glowing embers. It took him a moment to recognise the sensation as pain and, by the time he removed it, his finger was a blackened stump. ‘And,’ continued the firestarter, ‘You can cook with it.’
‘Cook?’ cried a woman examining goatskin’s charred digit. She turned to face the crowd. ‘He’s making words up now. What is cook?’
The man turned back to the fire and, with a flourish, withdrew a hunk of mammoth from the flames on the end of a stick. ‘Try that,’ he said, handing it to the woman, who took a rapid mouthful and then screamed in pain, waking the baby at her breast.
‘Not the stick,’ said the man. ‘Try the meat.’
Warily, the woman eyed the meat. ‘It’s all black,’ she said.
‘A little well done I’ll admit,’ he acquiesced. ‘I’ve not quite got on top of the timings yet, but just give it a try.’
Reluctantly, she gnawed on the wizened flesh and chewed. ‘It’s like meat,’ she said at last, ‘But hot. No blood.’ Whereupon she grabbed what was left on the stick and ate it before it could be taken from her.
‘Hold on,’ cried a woman from the back as the melee at the front began to subside. ‘How long does this cooking take?’
‘Depends on the size of the animal,’ answered the man on the rock. ‘I told you, I haven’t quite got it worked out yet. An hour or two I should imagine.’
‘So, who’s going to do that then?’ she continued. ‘I mean, whilst you’re all out hunter/gathering and we’re stuck in the hole looking after the kids, keeping the place tidy, who’s going to do this cooking?’
And even as her voice trailed away on the prehistoric breeze, every male eye in the gathering turned towards her.
‘Oh, I get it,’ she said, ‘Charming. Bloody charming…’

The Discovery of Fire was first published 18.02.2020

A Little Fiction – Nefarious Activity

The field backing onto the house was dark and progress across it was challenging. There was no option to use a torch – the neighbours would spot it at a thousand paces – and the moon, although full, was hiding behind ever-thickening clouds. Low lying brambles clawed at his ankles and nettles threatened any area of skin left incautiously unsheathed. Not that he had much of that: he was a professional. He was clothed from head to toe in black lycra. His hands were covered in surgical blue latex and his face in a neoprene ski mask. Not ideal on a night as sultry as this, but he had been too long in this game to grow slack. He had even drawn over the logo on his trainers with a black Sharpie and he had boot polish covering the small exposed area of his pallid face. He was a stealthily moving black ghost, lost in the darkness of night, his position betrayed only by the muttered curses each time he strayed into something that an animal had left behind, and the near-silent complaints that his wife had once again skimped with the shopping and had not bought the waterproof Cherry Blossom that he had instructed her to buy, aware that the sweat that was currently pricking on his brow would very soon be carrying rivulets of cheap, unlabelled shoeblack down into his eyes.

The back fence was no easier. It took an age to find a panel that was sound enough to bear his weight and, when he finally did, he found that it backed directly onto the shed. His scrambled descent from the top lowered him painfully into a stack of metal buckets and an old hosepipe that wound around his legs and tightened about him like a cobra. He suppressed a scream when something ran across his shoe. At night, the rats always came out to play. He hated rats. He had stifled so many screams that he had a callous on his tongue. Still, at least behind the shed he was not visible to any of the neighbours and he was able to take the time to quietly disentangle himself from the hose, the sprinkler end of which had posed serious challenges to his manhood.

Satisfied that he was clear of all encumbrances and able, should his information have been incorrect, to make a rapid escape, he peered around the shed corner. The security light flashed into life, but he was not concerned: it was what he wanted. The curtains did not twitch in the houses to either side: the occupiers – both cat owners – fully aware of the tendency for the lights to beam into life in response to anything more substantial than a passing moth. More to the point, nothing at all stirred in the house ahead of him. The curtains were partly open, there were no lights within, no flickering TV to light up the walls. Definitely empty. He grinned inwardly and slipped out into the open garden, never actually leaving the comforting shadows of the fence. His movement was steady, even when alarmed by the unexpected movement of bush and shrub, and he was there, pressed against the back wall of the house within seconds.

Here he paused for a few seconds giving the security light time to go out, before he slid around the brick extremities, undetected by Passive Infra-Red detectors or mid-week, wine-weary neighbours. They were all the same and he hated every single one of them: all the ‘haves’. He was tired of being a ‘have not’. He had spent too long living in a world of dark, idle poverty. It wasn’t jealousy that drove him on, it was a burning, overwhelming desire to have everything that they had: everything he did not. He dreamed of being ‘a better man’ and he was prepared to take whatever it took to get him there. He remembered the time that it had first struck him, like a light bulb in his head. He was certain of his path. He had devoted the rest of his life to it.

He carried out the rest of his task with quiet, dark efficiency and it was a matter of minutes before he was retracing his steps back across the unlit garden, over the fence and into the blackness of night…

…It was just after midnight when he found his way home. The streetlights had turned off and he had removed his ski-mask which, experience had taught him, drew the immediate attention of any random police vehicle that might pass by. He had painstakingly cultured the gait of slightly drunk man creeping home from the pub, hoping not to be noticed by his partner and was seldom bothered by the upholders of law and order. He entered his own back door, un-noticed by his neighbours who were either sleeping themselves or watching something on the TV at a volume that ensured nobody else was sleeping either. His wife was in the kitchen waiting for him with a freshly opened bottle of beer and a glass. “What have you got?” she asked by way of greeting. He took a swig from the bottle and without speaking, proudly opened his bag to reveal its contents. She peered inside. “A light bulb,” she spluttered. “What the bloody hell am I supposed to do with that?…”

This is the first time I have written on of these ‘stories’ in quite a while. I used to write my Little Fictions quite regularly, but became disenchanted with them because so few people ever read them and I have written few outside of my ‘returning features’ recently. I did, however, enjoy writing and, more recently, re-reading them so, in an orgy of self-indulgence I have decided to republish some of my past favourites in the now regular Sunday repeat slot. They vary substantially in length and in genre – reflecting, I think, my mood at the time(s) of writing – as I generally just let them tell the story – and I’ve tried not to mess too much with what was originally published (except for correcting the most jarring of cock-ups). I tried all kinds of ways of assembling them into some kind of logical order, but they beat me, so they will arrive in a totally random order. I hope you enjoy them…