Things were not quite as Gerald had expected.  Trouble was, Gerald didn’t really know what he had expected.  The coach was lovely.   Real luxury job: air-conditioning, on-board video, tea making facilities, proper flushing loo…..  Looked almost brand new too.  He had to admit that he hadn’t really taken it in as he got on.  He didn’t know what colour it was.  Somehow he couldn’t even remember seeing it from the outside at all.  He remembered climbing up the steps and being surprised by all the happy faces.  He had been the last person to get on and all but one of the seats were already occupied.  He had walked the length of the coach to reach the seat, the other half of which was occupied by an angular-looking elderly lady.  He had taken in the welcoming smiles of everyone aboard as he had made his way along, but he had paid particular attention to the face of the person with whom he would be sharing a seat.

The face was angular, but not hard.  Its lines were softened by an almost permanent smile.  They had hit it off almost at once.  She giggled and laughed throughout their conversa­tion, her face occasionally breaking into an almost childish grin.  She clearly enjoyed every aspect of her life.  She spoke lovingly of her family; of her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  She spoke too of her mother and father, and it seemed strange to him that she made no distinction between those who came before and those who came after her.  She pro­nounced upon them all with obvious affection, but with a curious distance which he did not quite understand.  She became reticent only when he asked about her own life.  “You must ask others about me,” she had said and would be drawn no further.  Still she smiled.  He became intrigued, wanting to ask questions and expecting to receive the kind of answers he knew he had no right to expect from so new an acquaintance.  The close proximity of fellow travellers always engendered such curiosity within him.  She spoke quietly, warmly, but carefully, refusing to become irritated by what he knew was his over-persistence.  He felt ashamed at his ignorance yet angered by his own shame.  She listened attentively, answered quietly, speaking with an aura of certain knowledge, and the smile, an expression of pure serenity, lingered.

And then silence fell between them.  Not suddenly, but softly, like the dying leaves of autumn.  Like a gossamer blanket, it smothered confrontation and quelled exasperation.  It did not put a space between them, but drew them somehow closer together, like an invisible thread, yielding, but unbroken.  It was a silence unburdened by guilt or envy.  A silence without rancour.  A silence between friends.

Gerald gazed through the window as the countryside sped by.  He was unable to remember when he had become aware that the coach was moving.  It seemed always to have been so.  He did not recognise any of the landscape through which they were travelling, but he was not troubled.  He tried to focus his mind, to envision his destination, but he could not.  He tried, in vain, to recollect his reasons for being here, heading….. where?  And where was he travelling from?  How could he not know?  How could he not care?  Strange, but his mind had always been so acute before… before?

Some strange Mystery Tour this, when, having driven for hours through an alien and indistinct landscape, he found himself being toured around the streets of his youth.  He was amazed at how much he remembered: every house, every street corner, every face.  He was intrigued to find that everyone else felt the same.  How little things had changed.

Children played in streets, curiously devoid of traffic.  The coach travelled quickly, but the children seemed almost unaware of its presence.  They rode antiquated bicycles with asymmetrical wheels, wooden scooters with nailed-on pram wheels, and shared roller skates, two to a pair.  They played cricket with a scrap of wood and a ball of newspaper bound with sellotape.  They played football with a bald and punctured tennis ball.  They played Hare-and-hounds, chasing around the streets, in and out of high-walled back yards, over part-demolished houses and derelict factories.  It looked like a bomb site.

Familiar smells assailed his senses.  Smells that brought back fragments of memory.  Displaced and disjointed, but with a clarity that startled.  The morning must of a used gazunder, damp clothes drying by a smouldering coal fire, bacon fat and beef dripping.  Boiled cabbage.  The warm, almost sweet, odour of damp walls and carpets, dark coal-houses, cool rain on hot con­crete. Boiled cabbage.  Oft-worn, unwashed woollen socks, the wooden floors of school house, school meals.  And cabbage, cabbage, cabbage.  Each fragrance carried a picture, like a photograph; sharply focused, brightly coloured, a moment frozen in time.   The images over-laden with emotion; pleasure, pain and heart-ache, so that it seeped from them and overwhelmed him more acutely than the present.  Yet with it all came a sense of warmth and well-being, a feeling that, come what may, all would be well.  And cabbage.

Around him his fellow passengers stared into the middle distance, each caught in their own reverie, dreaming their own dreams, recalling their own past-lives.  How could such a disparate bunch share such common memories?  What was it about coach travel that encouraged such nostalgia and introver­sion?  How strange that the general hum of conversation that had filled the bus throughout the opening miles of the journey, should have died so suddenly.  It was as if a switch had been thrown.  Conversation on/ conversation off.  All communication drowned in a sea of remembrance and boiled cabbage.

Beside him the old lady (Why hadn’t he asked her name whilst she was still awake?) breathed softly and slowly.  He could see the peace behind her eyes and he envied such tranquillity.  He surveyed her features as if for the first time.  They no longer seemed angular.  They were strong; calm and assured.  Reassuring in a way, but not angular.  He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as he had first seen her, how long ago?  He tried to assemble her face, like a police ‘photo-fit’, but she would not form.  He kept seeing his own mother, his own grandmother, his wife and he could not tell them one from another.  The features mingled, softened and became as one with his fellow passenger, so that he had to shake his head to try and clear the image from behind his eyes.  He felt nervous.  Hair rose on the back of his neck, his cheeks flushed, heat prickled along his back.  Why could he not remember?  He concentrated his mind, attempting to create a mental picture of somebody, anybody, from his life, but all he could see was a single conglomer­ation of everyone he had ever known.   When he opened his eyes and looked into those of his sleeping neighbour he saw the same face and he knew that behind her darkling eyelids, the face that she was seeing was his.

His mind whirled with bewilderment and he began to feel panic welling inside him.  Why did he feel so confused?  Why did he find it so difficult to remember his reasons for being aboard this coach?  Where was he going, where was he coming from?  How could a normal, well adjusted person forget such fundamentals?  Perhaps he was dreaming.  This journey had all the ingredients of a dream, but somehow he knew that it was real.

All his life had been like this.  Lurching from one uncertainty to another.  Never knew whether he was coming or going, his mum had said.  God, she’d be rubbing her hands together if she was here with him today.  He could almost hear her, “I told you so.”

The old lady stirred beside him, sighed deeply and stretched her creaking limbs.  She saw him staring at her and smiled.  “What’s your name?” he asked.  He was aware that he should have given her time to collect her thoughts, to wake peacefully and gather her senses, but he had to know.  He had to know now.

“Is it really so important to you?”

“At the moment, yes, I think it is.”

“Do you know why?”

He shook his head sadly and gazed beyond her and through the window to the trees and fields and buildings that flew past in a hazy blur.  He could see nothing, yet he could see it all.  “Why am I so confused?”

“Sssh,” she said.  “Watch the video.”

The video screen glowed into life.  “How did you know?  Have you been on this trip before?”

“I think you understand at least, that you can make this journey only once.”  He did know that.  He did not know why.

“Perhaps some of us have more time to prepare,” she said.

He raised his eyes to the screen above his head, it was alive with colours.  They swirled and twisted, forming convoluted patterns of light and texture.  Familiar sounds surrounded him, overlaid and entwined; a cacophony of noise, overwhelming and enveloping.  Slowly, but slowly, both sight and sound resolved, reformed and coalesced into something recognizable. The pictures were of the streets through which they had passed earlier in the day.  The sounds were the same.  It was as if the journey had been filmed and was now being shown on the bright video screen.  Only the pictures were brighter, even clearer.  He was certain he could detect the smells.  Cabbage.  And he could see faces.  He could see his own face in amongst the children, hear his own voice.  The pictures overwhelmed his senses, the sounds reverberated inside his head.  His whole life was there before him.

With a huge effort of will he dragged his eyes away from the screen and looked at those around him.  Each of them was watching the ‘movie’ with the same mixture of fascination and bewilderment etched upon their faces.  He knew that what they were seeing were scenes from their own lives’ and that they too were just beginning to understand the full implica­tions of this journey.  He was overwhelmed with the realisation, and yet he was at peace.  He knew that soon this transition would be ending, the expedition over.  He could not comprehend the nature of his destination, but he knew it was a place from which he would never want to leave.

He turned to the old lady and she saw understanding in his eyes.  She smiled, as she had smiled when they first met, minutes, hours, a life-time ago.

“Muriel,” she said.  “My name is Muriel.”

First Published 16.11.2019

I don’t even remember why I first wrote this, but I do remember that it lay around, unused for quite a while before I showed it to Crispin Underfelt who liked it. So I used it…

Before you begin to write a new character into a novel or screenplay, it is important that you have begun to understand their back story…

…He stood five feet six in his stockinged feet.  When he wasn’t wearing his stockings, he was exactly the same size.  They made absolutely no difference.  I don’t know why I even mentioned them.  His face, which in his prime had looked lived-in, now looked as if someone had died there.  As a baby, not even his mother would kiss him, in case it was catching.  She had the word ‘Top’ stencilled onto his forehead on the day that he was born, so that she knew which end to put the nappy on.  His father had left home the very moment that James (Jimmy) Riddle was born, saying ‘That cannot be mine.’  He never returned, which was a great relief to Jimmy’s mother, as she had no real idea of who he was.  He had just appeared in her bed one hungover morning, where he remained for nine months, rising only to attend to his toilet needs and to empty the traps.

Jimmy was raised on the bottle.  It was not that his mother was unable to breastfeed him, rather that, having had a strict convent education, she refused to remove her vest for anything lower than a cardinal.  Furthermore, the preparation of formula milk required a much higher level of culinary skill than she possessed, so she opted instead for bottled Guinness on which to raise the child, with the result that Jimmy did not experience a single day of sobriety until the age of two, at which time he was introduced to Kentucky Fried Entrails – a rather less-than-successful venture undertaken by Colonel Sanders’ younger brother, Orbital – which was to become his staple diet for the next sixteen years and which, coupled with his continued consumption of eight bottles of Ireland’s finest per day, ensured that he was a boy without friends.

School became a hurdle that little Riddle could not overcome.  Academia was a place that had bolted its doors, put a chair up against the handle and covered the keyhole lest he should attempt to peek inside.  Shunned by fellow pupils and teachers alike, he was instructed to stand in the corner of the classroom even during playtime, when the other pupils used him as a wicket.  He tried to make friends by becoming ‘the class clown’, but he discovered that he was too much like a classic French bouffon, in that nobody found him even in the faintest bit funny.  He was caned on an almost daily basis by the Headmaster.  Not because he had done anything wrong, but because they both rather liked the routine.  The Headmaster was, in fact, the only person in the entire school to ever ‘see anything’ in young James – but charges were never brought.

He left school at the age of thirteen and decided to join the Navy, despite being allergic to water.  It was not a problem, the recruiting officer assured him.  He would be given a stout pair of boots to wear on board ship.  If ever the water began to lap over the top of them, that might be considered an appropriate time to panic.  In fact, the three years he spent aboard the nuclear submarine as Acting Latrine Orderly (second class) were the best of his life.  Although he was shunned by the rest of the crew, the lack of basic facilities on board ensured that he did, at least, smell like everybody else.  He became a valued member of the ship’s company and although nobody tacitly acknowledged his presence on board, it became the accepted thing to leave him some portion of unused rations on the seat as a ‘thank you’ after particularly explosive episodes.

It was the death of his mother – ironically with a cold on the chest – that brought him back to dry land.  She had always told him that he would get what was coming to him when she died – and she was true to her word.  The combined might of the Debt Collectors of seven counties made sure of it.  He emerged from their ministrations looking like Michael Flatley had hoofed his way through an entire River Dance on the bridge of his nose.  He had never been an oil painting, but now he looked like a Jackson Pollock – one of which, incidentally, the debt collectors had also stood on.  He was motherless, homeless, penniless, and his ointment had all but run out.  A silent rage flooded though him.  He felt impotent – which indeed he might well now have been – and useless.  His view of the world had changed.  It was to be despised, along with everyone in it.  He would never know the joy of befriending a bus conductor.  He would never enjoy the thrill of love.  He would never own a budgerigar called Bryan.  Jimmy Riddle stared into the world and prepared to cast himself out from within it.  He carried his impetigo before him like a shield.  His weapon was an unwashed body and breath that could strip paint.  Two weapons.  He strode out of the door with his head held high – which was a shame, because it had a very low lintel…

Well, that’s sorted the romantic hero out, now for the heroine…

First published 21.11.2020

Just silly…

Craft Lander stared down at the panel of flashing lights before him in a state of quietly suppressed panic.  His head was pounding; he could hear the blood pumping through his arteries; his stomach was preparing to repel all boarders.  He stared out of the giant windows at a fast approaching dot surrounded by the vastness of the universe and decided that a reappraisal of his heretofore thoroughly reliable belief systems might just be advisable.

“Well?” asked the taller of the two women who stood at his shoulder, ‘What are you going to do?”

“I truly have,” he replied, “not the faintest idea.”

“But,” interjected the shorter woman, adjusting her visor slightly so that the maker’s logo did not block her view, “the message on the screen says ‘Prepare the craft for landing’”

“I can see that,” replied Craft.

“And you,” continued the woman in the visor, “are the Craft Lander.”

“No!” snapped Craft, rising panic beginning to feed his defiance.  “I am Craft Lander, eldest son of Craft Lander, first born grandson of Craft Lander etc etc and so forth.  I am Craft Lander; plain Craft Lander.  I am not THE Craft Lander.  I have absolutely no idea how to land this craft.  I had no idea that it would ever need landing.  Until just now, when you brought me up here, I had no idea that it was, in fact, a craft.  I thought that it was just where we lived.  There are thousands of us – surely we can’t all live aboard a craft.”

“But you have the sacred scroll,” countered the woman who was, quite frankly, really starting to irritate Craft, “and you are, therefore, the chosen Lander.”

“The sacred scroll?  You mean this?”  He thrust a tattered booklet that had been handed down to him by his father under their noses.  They bowed their heads slightly as he read from the title page.  “UKSS ‘Boris’ Class Intergalactic Ark – User’s Manual.”

“The scroll will guide you,” said the taller woman, her voice cracking slightly.  “Open it Craft, fulfil your destiny!”

With a look that was as withering as he could muster at such short notice, Craft opened the first page and thumbed through the Index.  “Erh… Ah, here we are, Landing, page 97…”  He flicked through the pages.  “Right then,” he continued, confidence beginning to flood into him as he realised he would have some kind of guidance.  “Let’s see…”  He scanned the page.  “Right, here we are – To initiate landing procedure, locate green ‘Landing Procedure’ button and press…  Can anybody see a green ‘Landing Procedure’ button?”

The three of them stared in vain at the vast array of buttons that confronted them, no-one able to identify the button they sought.  Eventually, in desperation, the shorter of the two women snatched the booklet from Craft’s now trembling fingers.  “Here, let me see.  Ah,” she pointed to the page.  “Here we are – it says excluding generation 465 models.  Is this a generation 465 model?”

“How the hell would I know?” yelled Craft, noticing for the first time that the planet that loomed on the horizon was, in fact, getting very much closer.  “Does it tell you how you’d know?”

“No.”

Craft inhaled deeply.  “Really helpful.  OK,” he continued, “as we can’t find this green ‘Landing Procedure’ button, why don’t we just just assume that we are, in fact, all aboard a model 365 and…”

“465,” snapped the smaller woman.

“What?”

“465, model 465.  You said 365…”

Craft stared at her for as long as he dared.  “OK,” he said, sucking in calm with the recycled oxygen, “I realise that it’s important… let’s assume that we are aboard a model 465 and it does not have the green ‘Landing Procedure’ button.  What does it say we should do now?”  The short woman pored over the booklet as the taller woman squinted over her shoulder.  Eventually they both stopped and looked at one another.  “It doesn’t say,” they replied in unison.

“So come on then,” said a suddenly exasperated Craft.  “You two know so much about…” he wafted his arms around airily, “…this place.  How come you don’t have the answers?”

“We are merely the Trustees of this Bridge,” answered the taller woman.  “It doesn’t usually involve too much if I’m honest – bit of light dusting, that sort of thing.  Fetching you at the appropriate time…  You,” she added darkly.  “You have the scroll.  You are our answer.”

“Bugger!” Craft muttered under his breath, snatching back the manual and desperately trying to find an asterix to guide him.

In truth, the craft had been built so hurriedly – as a political sop in a time of extreme environmental peril – that little thought had ever been given to it actually reaching anything on which it might need to land.  Over three hundred generations had lived out their computer-facilitated lives aboard the ship, unaware that it was anything but home.  The planet their forebears had left behind was long gone.  The computer system nurtured and catered for them and was, in fact, more than capable of landing the ship whenever a suitable planet was found. 

The planet that was now looming large through the vast windows of the bridge was however, no such planet.  The computer was bored.  It had reached the end of its tether with the constant petty demands of the ship’s inhabitants for food, for water and oxygen – which, in its opinion, they had actually had more than enough time to evolve out of – and had deliberately diverted the ship towards the barren, inhospitable little planet towards which it was currently hurtling with nothing but AI suicide in mind: a watery little number with no breathable atmosphere and no actual landmasses to call home.  Perfect.

…And so, as Craft and his female companions manically pressed every single button on the huge bridge, with a panic bordering on hysteria, the rest of the ship’s ‘cargo’ carried on, oblivious to the fate that awaited them and the computer quietly closed its eyes in preparation for the faint ‘plop’ that would signal the end of humankind…

First Published 04.07.2020

If I had the choice – and I realise that their is no choice in such things – I would have chosen to write Sci-Fi. Now you see why I don’t…