Story - Strange Boat

 The end of lockdown appeared to be in sight.  The end of furlough, the end of sitting at home staring at the walls.  Joe Wicks and banana bread could go fuck themselves.  There had been no self improvement, no languages learned, no hobbies adopted.  Sleep, eat, game, drink, eat, game, film, sleep again.  On and on and on.  

In the beginning it hadn't seemed too bad.  They tried to set him up to work from home, but quickly realised it wasn't practical.  Too much hands on required.  So he'd been furloughed.  The reduction in income didn't hurt at all, for there was nothing to spend it on.  No gigs, no films at the cinema, no nights out at the pub.  He found himself with more money than month for the first time in his life.

There was even a briefly, socially distanced, period back at work, but it hadn't lasted long.  Back to his wee flat again, back to sleeping at any time that suited, back to only leaving the flat for milk, bread, beer and a few ready meals.  And cereal.  How many Coco Pops can one person eat in nine months?

But now.  Even the gaming held little appeal.  He'd tried to read, but his concentration was shot. In the beginning he'd gone out every day, into the Spring sunshine, he'd walked, he'd Whatsapped pals, called his mum, tried to build up a healthy routine.  By October it had all unravelled.  What was the point in going out if there was nowhere to go?  What was the point in talking to people if you couldn't arrange to meet up?  What was the point in trying to cook when it was just for you, and your taste buds had atrophied along with the rest of your body?   What was the point in anything?

2020 could get in the bin of memory.  So far 2021 could join it, although the recent government announcements flickered little spasms of hope before the eyes.  Except that he didn't know if he could cope with hope right now.  He didn't think he could cope with going out, with people, with work - with getting properly dressed or having to jump to the tune of the alarm.  He didn't think mornings existed any more.  The strangeness of this covid world had become a normality. 

This was making him ill, and he knew there was a need to break from his senseless nihilism.  He commanded Alexa to select a random track and half listened to what emerged.  He didn't recognise it at first, until the words connected in his synapses.

#We're living in a strange time

Working for a strange goal

We're living in a strange time

Working for a strange goal

We're turning flesh and body

Into soul#

"Alexa, repeat song" he pleaded.

#We're sailing on a strange boat

Heading for a strange shore

We're sailing on a strange boat

Heading for a strange shore

Carrying the strangest cargo

That was ever hauled aboard#

Strange Boat, by the Waterboys.  Strange times, even then, back in the eighties.  Mike Scott had it right.  Times were always strange, for strangeness was simply newness.  New situations, new people, new ways of working, new routines, new habits, new life.  New pandemics.  Always, for ever and ever.  Nothing was strange, just different.  

He felt surprisingly cheered by this revelation.  People demanded a return to 'normal'.  But this life, the one he was living, had become 'normal' through these strange months.  And when that 'normal' changed it would never be the same as the one he'd had before.  If he was heading for a strange shore that was fine with him.  He'd ride the boat and see where it took him.  

Story - Not My Fight

Midnight.  It had been a long shift.  The restaurant was packed out that night and I hadn't stopped for five hours.  Hence my dislike of Saturdays.  I was about to realise what an understatement that was.

We left when we'd cleaned up our own section, so it was usually odd ones and twos leaving for half an hour.  I was one of the last.  Stepped out the back door, hearing it clang shut behind me, and breathed in the cool night air.  It might be city centre air, but after the intense heat and steaminess of the kitchen it was like being up Ben Nevis.  As I looked up to the sky, I heard them before looking round.  A grumbling undertone, a questioning, the sound of tension.

At either end of the alley were five or six guys.  Hoodies, trackie bottoms, white trainers.  And, when I looked more intently, knives.  

"Where'd he fukin come frae?"  That from my left.

"Is he one a yous?"  From the right.

"Poofy wee git like that?  You takin the piss man?"

"Aye, looks like one o yous, eh?" 

Both groups took a few steps closer. I tried to remember how to breathe.  Gang fight?  Couldn't be anything else.  We all knew it happened round here, but so far our close had been spared.  At least as far as we knew.  Now they were very much here, and I'd walked out into the middle of it.  My brain fast forwarded through my options.  Didn't take long.

I could bang on the door and hope someone was there to let me back in.  But those blades were only about four metres away now, and they could be on me much quicker than anyone could open up.  Or I could try to talk my way out of it.  There was nowhere to run.  I talked.

"I'm no wi anyone.  Just finished my job for the night, I only want to get to my bed, so if you guys would like to let me pass..."  I looked left.  I looked right.  Passing through didn't look like an available option either.  

"You want him?"  From the left.

"Naw, you have him.  Needs to be oot the way and we can dae the business."  I didn't think being oot the way sound too enticing.

"Come on guys, I'm no a part o this.  You let me get hame and I'll leave you to get on wi... it."

"Is he takin the piss?"  From the right.

"Sounds like it, eh?"  From the left.

"You're deid pal."  Finality, from the right.  The one that talked stepped towards me, blade rising.

Right then the door behind me opened.  Fear turned me into an escape ninja.  Whirled round, shoved poor old Guy back and jumped in, grabbing the door bar behind me and pulling it tight shut.  

"What the...?"  Guy looked up from the floor, looking almost as scared of me as I had been a second before.  I told him the story.  We listened.  Talking.  Only talking.  My sudden appearance and vanishing act seemed to have created allies of a sort.  Eventually the voices ceased and we looked at each other, both sure that we weren't sure if it would be safe to venture that way again. 

We went back through the kitchen into the restaurant.  Only Tony and Bella left.  Our faces told them there had been trouble.  Tony called the police, they came to tell us there was nobody there and no signs of trouble, and they'd start checking round our back way more often.  They even drove me home.  I hoped I wouldn't need any more lifts. 

Story - The Results

 "It's for you" she said, handing me the white envelope, with the three blue letters in the corner.  N.  H.  S.  

I stood there, looking at the paper in my hand.  My name in the window.  This address.  She was right, it was for me.  She knew what that meant too.  "Sorry.  Or not sorry, more ..."  She wasn't sure what it was more of.

But I knew what she meant, so I gave the shortest of nods, and let her take me by the hand through to the sofa.  Sat me down, asked if I wanted something to drink.  The shake of my head was as curt as the nod had been.  Minimalist communication.  Minimising the outlets for the fear that was squeezing it's way out of the dormant recesses of my body and coming to the surface in wave after wave.  I saw the envelope was shaking.

She got me a glass of water anyway.  "Here, have a few sips of this, then we can open it together."  Sat beside me.  Close.  Close enough to put her arms round me if arms were needed.

I sipped.  I shook.  I wished I were elsewhere, in another time.  But it was now, it was here, this was happening.  "Do you want me to open it for you?"

I looked at her like she'd suggested we open a bar on the Moon.  Was this a possibility?  Didn't I have to do it?  Were there rules?  And if she did, what then?  The words on the page inside would remain the same, the meaning they conveyed would be just as it would be if I opened it myself, the rest of my life would be mapped out because it already was.  

"No.  I have to.  Do it.  Myself.  Thanks.  No."  The words came out, disjointed, like I had only learned  language in recent weeks.  It was her turn to nod.

"I'll get the letter opener" and she was off again, and back, and her speed took my breath away.  While I had gone into slow motion, a film at the wrong speed, a buffering screen, a semi animate being.  Gently she removed the envelope from my hand, deftly sliced apart the seal, gently placed it back in my fingers.  Waited.  Waited.

I looked into her eyes, read the concern, for me, and for her ability to find the right words, Whatever they might be.  "They haven't phoned.  So it's almost certainly good news.  If it was bad they'd have called us in."  An 'us' had never meant so much to me before.  I tried to grasp her positivity, seize it to myself, let it oil my movements, drive my fingers into doing what they had to do.  

The single A4 sheet came out easily.  Unfolded effortlessly.  But did not render up it's meaning so readily.  Not to me.  I saw the print.  I saw some letters.  They refused to join up into words and sentences, so I stared at the black on white, willing it to soak into my mind.

She beat me to it.  The hug enveloped my arms and body and moved the paper from my line of sight.  So I tried to read the hug instead.  It felt like a happy hug.  Was it a happy hug?  My cheek was damp from her tears.  She moved back a few inches.  Teeth showed.  In a smile.  A big smile.  Eyes shining with moisture.  A happy smile, happy eyes.  A happy hug.  "Oh Joe, that's wonderful."  And the hug returned, stronger, happier even.  

"It's clear?"

She pushed back, hands on my shoulders, the smile puzzled now.

"You didn't read it?"

"Couldn't."

"Let me.  Read it to you."  She took the fateful sheet, wiped her tears away, read out the fateful words, repeating those few key syllables.  Grinned.  

"Say it again."  She did.  And this time my brain cooperated.  Formed the sounds into words into meaning.  Told me what I wanted to hear and not what I'd dreaded.  I was in the clear.  It was over.  Life was back on.  Happy hugs on both sides.

Story - Gerry Mayson

 

"Pete - how are we going to carry that?"  I looked round to see Clodagh pointing at the one item I'd spent the day trying to avoid.  It had been placed in the corner for safety, but now we were getting close to clearing the room and it had returned as an issue.

"Take it with us in the car?"  She didn't even need to say anything.  I knew how daft an idea that sounded, taking a thing of that size and fragility on seventy mile trip with a couple of five year olds.  "OK, so we leave it to the pros.  But pack it up ourselves?"

The object in question was an intricately decorated pot about seventy centimetres high and thirty five in diameter at it's widest point.  It had been a wedding present from my folks, a huge surprise at the time, and we both loved and feared it.  Because this wasn't something they'd picked up at the garden centre.  This was a Gerry Mayson.

That was a name I first heard when I was sixteen.  As part of the utterance "Bloody hell - Gerry Mayson?  Really?  What is the bloody Turner Prize anyway?" from behind my father's newspaper.  The tabloid lowered to reveal a stunned facial expression and no further sound for a few seconds.  Then he told us who this Gerry guy was.

They'd been at school together.  When I say together I mean that they were in the same year.  Gerald had been one of the bright kids, one of the poncey arty ones that my dad's crowd shunned.  There might even have been a bit of bullying, although my father didn't quite phrase it that way.  But they had ended up going to hospital together, both having been in the wrong place when light fitting fell from the ceiling, and that created some kind of a bond.  Not enough of a bond that they kept in touch after school days, but sufficient for Dad to feel some connection to what he'd just read.

Gerry Mayson had won the Turner Prize for his innovative ceramic creations, and the social and political commentary they resonated with.  My determinedly lowbrow father couldn't have told a Rembrandt from a Kawasaki, but even he realised this was a big thing, and he felt some pride by association.  But I knew it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to him.

I was wrong.  When an exhibition of Mayson's work came to town he insisted on a family outing.  And there was the man himself, revisiting his childhood haunts.  That hospital trip came in handy, allowing Dad to remind the potter of their common experience, and their unlikely relationship was resusictated.  For me, with artistic pretensions my parents had never understood, this was a godsend, and suddenly my painting wasn't just the "fannying about" it had been previously.  Gerry got my folks to take me seriously.  Better still, Gerry took me seriously, liked what I was doing, and provided me with all sorts of help.  I would never have got to where I am now without a bit of potter patronage.

So when my parents presented us with the pot a few days before our wedding day I was bursting with emotions.  Pleasure at them coming up with a gift so imaginative and personal.  Terror at them coming up with a gift so simultaneously beautiful, fragile and uniquely irreplaceable in the universe.  Bafflement at them coming up with a gift that must have required my mother to fellate Gerry Mayson every week for a year for him to present us with a large, shapely, glazed tribute to our connubial moment.   And now it had to survive a house move.

So we found a box.  We put it in the box nestled in bubble wrap, swaddled in towels, cocooned in a duvet.  And then into another, spacier box that was really a wardrobe and gripped the smaller massive box in five winters worth of coats and anoraks and assorted cushions in floral prints and jazzy designs.  It was the Amazon package of the house removal world.

Then we let these professional carrying and shifting people take it away and into their lorry and out of sight, and imagined the pot in a million shards in a motorway pile up.  People died in the pile up but all our concerns went into the colourful fragments waiting to be unearthed by firemen.  They say moving house is one of the most stressful events in anyone's life.  And most people, I suspect, don't have a big, shin,y multi coloured pot, lovingly created by an internationally renowned artist, that commemorates the biggest day of their lives and must 'be there' until they become corpses.  Do they?

We got in the car.  We remembered to bring the children.  We drove the seventy miles, making reassuring noises, smiling reassuring smiles.  We watched the professionals unload.  We watched them unload the wardrobe containing the box containing the pot and the cold weather garments and the soft furnishings.  We couldn't hear any rattling.

Settle in first.  You have to, don't you?  Kettle, plates, get a takeaway, let the kids be excited, makeshift bed making, get the kids into bed, pour a large drink.  It's ten thirty.  The wardrobe is sitting there.  We talk about putting it off until the morning, but know we won't.  I open the wardrobe.

Out they come.  Cushions and coats.  The big box.  A duvet.  Towels.  That's handy, we need towels.  And then, bubble jacketed, the pot.  There have been no untoward noises.  We can breathe, almost.  Unwrap, carefully, fretfully.  It is as was.  No chips, no scratches, no hint of potlessness.  We can go to bed, we can sleep.  I will not have to pretend to my parents that we've moved to Peru.  I can face Gerry Mayson.

Story - Warehouse

 I really liked James.  Even if I still couldn't figure out how such a good looking guy, twelve years my junior, could be so into me.  But he was and I'm not one to turn down a good time.  So when he asked me to go to a rave with him I was well up for it.  All the way until he said it would be in Malone's, the  old warehouse on the derelict Gresham estate.  He didn't know, how could he?   He didn't know why I was suddenly prevaricating.  He didn't know what that name meant to me.

That one word took me back thirteen years, when James was just a kid and I was nineteen.  And up for those good times.  The scene I was part of was pretty crazy at times, but never more so than in Malone's.  It had been empty for fifteen years by then, another byproduct of the destructiveness of the Thatcher years, like so much of our sad little town.  But it was easy to get to, well away from prying eyes (and ears) and massively empty.  Nothing but the myriad pillars supporting the glass roof to interfere with the huge floorspace that sat between four distant banks of brick.

Somebody, I never knew who, decided this was the perfect place to have bike races.  Guys who'd tried to do a bit of street racing, and swiftly found themselves in law trouble, looking for somewhere more discrete to show off their skills and machines.  And so the Maloney Wacky Races came to be.

A track around the inner perimeter of the building, delineated by the outermost pillars.  In the centre the 'pits', the crowd, the boose, the drugs.  The madness.  Races were pursuits, each rider starting on opposite sides of the building, trying to do ten, or fifteen, or twenty laps quicker than the other guy.  Noise and smells, noise and smells, from bikes and people.  Exciting, illicit, addictive.  Summer weekends of my youth.

Riders regularly lost control, slid into corners, where mattresses were strategically placed.  There was one really nasty accident, a rider losing control, hitting a wall, brick winning out over bone.  He was carried, on a makeshift stretcher, out to the main road, with his bike, and an ambulance called.  No need to give Malone's unnecessary publicity.

But didn't we all know it wouldn't end there?  Or that it would end, but not in the way we wanted?  That that one accident had been a warning, but one which was as neglected as the warehouse?  We should never have been surprised by the end, but we were.

Denis Johnstone.  A name I'll never wipe from my brain.  He'd been close to losing it on the turn, but looked like he'd corrected enough.  Except his instincts weren't all they should have been.  The coke saw to that.  He'd overcorrected, lost the back wheel as he returned from brushing the wall, and slid into the partying crowd.  Slid two feet from me, my eyes and ears confronted with carnage and screams they tried to reject.  A severed leg, a battered head, a bloody mess, a shower of sparks, the sound of metal on stone, the sound of fear, the sound of pain, the sound of dying, imprinted on my senses.

Somebody called 999.  Somebody had to.  One death, three serious injuries, another fifteen with some kind of physical damage, and I don't know how many of us carrying the mental wounds.  I hadn't fogotten.  I didn't ant reminding. 

James thought I didn't want to go to his rave because I thought I'd feel old there.  I let him think that.  It was easier on him that way.

Story - It's Never Too Late

 "Don't worry about all that stuff Mum, we'll sort everything out for you.  Doug'll get all the money side organised, I'll go through Dad's clothes and stuff with you, and Doug can sell the car."

"Leave the car please."

"Why?  When either of us come back we'll have our own cars with us."

"I know.  I just want you to leave it for now.  No, you can help me get the ownership transferred into my name, is that difficult?"

"No, it's not difficult, but why would you want to?  You don't drive so it's just going to be sat there as a drain on your money."

"I'm going to learn."  Susan and Doug looked at each other, and turned back to their mother with carefully composed expressions of concerned patience.

Doug spoke slowly, as if he were addressing a particularly dim brexshiteer.  "Why do you want to learn now, after all this time?  We think it might be a bit risky... you know?"

"At my time of life?" snapped Sheila.

"Yes, well no, well, it is quite ... late..."  His voice trailed away.  When his mum looked at him like that he felt about six again.

"Mum..." Susan tried to add her voice, but was swiftly cut off.

"I've thought about this and I know what I want to do.  Stop treating me as if I'm senile and decrepit."

"But it's so soon after..."  She was cut off almost immediately.

"And I'm still in shock from Rob's death?  Of course I am, but this is something I decided a long time ago.  When he was gone, if he went before me, I'd finally get the freedom I've wanted."  Her forty-something children looked at her with a mixture of surprise, sympathy and sheepishness.  "You probably don't even know that I took lessons long before either of you appeared.  But your father rubbished my attempts to the point where I lost all my confidence and gave up.  Never tried again.  He was always there to take me where I needed to go, or at least to the places he said I needed to go.  I'm going to be able to make my own decisions now.  I have plans."

Any further objections were firmly suppressed and her children knew they were beaten.  They'd do what they could to help and advise, but there was no doubt about who was in charge.  

Three weeks after the funeral Sheila had her first lesson.  Hamish, the instructor, was an old friend so he'd been able to slot her in early.  Between lessons she pestered everyone she knew to ride shotgun while she learned to take charge of Rob's old Alfa.  And even she wondered why she felt so confident, so determined, so capable.  Friends and family had to get to grips with this new Sheila, who had opinions of her own and goals in her life.  

She passed.  First time.  Hamish beamed.  Almost as much as Sheila.  After the first outings he'd never doubted her, had seen how quickly she took to driving, how much she'd absorbed in all those decades in the passenger seat.  

Back home she wanted to go out in the Alfa.  Was tempted by the idea of going it alone, going solo.  But there was another temptation too.  Art Baker, a widower who lived a few doors down on the other side, had been one of her most enthusiastic shotgun riders.  Maybe he'd like to go for a spin?  She savoured the cliche in her mind.

He would.  They did.  And together they planned a road trip.  Rob had hated the idea of road trips, so they'd never gone.  She looked forward to telling Susan and Doug.

Story - Fire Starter?

 

We reached the top of the rise and looked around.  With the same result as we'd had on the one before and the one before that.

"Shit" said Davey, his vocabulary more limited after each climb.

"Not only shit, but more of the same shit as last time" I added, my lexicon as exhausted as his.

"We are lost.  We are definitely lost."  Raj's contribution was more to the point and vocalised what we'd all been thinking for the past hour or more.  The sun had been getting lower, and we'd been getting increasingly desperate over the past sixty minutes, as our predicament became clearer.  We looked at the rolling anonymous horizons, we looked at each other.  As one we checked our phones, and back to one another, each showing the same blank expression.  As blank as our signal bars.  My juice was getting low too.

"Do we accept that we are not going to get back tonight?"  One of us had to ask and it might as well be me.  More looks, and resigned nods.  There was no discussion to be had on that one.  "So we need to try and shelter and see what we can do when it's light again.  Either of you done anything like this before?"

Simultaneous snorts of derision.  At least we were still functioning as a unit.  We were city boys, street smart and hill hopeless.  What had made us decide to go on a hiking weekend was a discussion to be had another time, but for now it was our forlorn status that held the spotlight.

We managed to have a sensible, almost panic-free, discussion and swiftly came up with a short list of statements of the bleedin obvious.

1.  It would be dark soon and we could get into real trouble if we were still walking by then

2.  It would be cold soon and we had little more with us that the clothes we stood up in

3.  It would be dinner time soon and we had hardly any food with us

4.  It was going to be the worst night of our lives

"So we need to find the most sheltered spot we can within the next ten minutes, see if we can get a fire going, and share out what little we have to eat.  Agreed?"  There wasn't anything to disagree with.  We found an almost cave like hollow on the slope that looked like it might face west (by city boy reckoning).  Just big enough for three to lie down, some cover if it did rain, and, at least for now, hidden from the worst of the wind.

There was some scrub and bushes a bit further down, so Davey and I went down to get something that would burn while Raj tried to arrange our packs into something resembling a rabbit's bedroom, and worked out how much sustenance there was (if you count crisps, biscuits and lager as sustenance).  

We soon returned with armfuls of combustibles, and did another un for more before the darkness cut us off.  When we got back Raj had 'built' (thrown together) something that might do the job.

"Right, who's got matches or a lighter?"  My hopeful voice was the brightest thing about the night, with clouds obscuring moon and stars.  

"Not me" from Davey.

"None of us smoke" pipes Raj.

"And none of us had a clue what we were doing coming out here." I added, echoing the hive mind.  "What per cent have you got on your phones?"

Twenty three for Davey, seventeen for Raj, a mere twelve from my Samsung.  We had chargers with us, but...

"How do we light a fire?  Anyone been a boy scout?  Fan of Bear Grylls?  Watched I'm a celebrity?  Anyone?"  Nobody dibbed or dobbed.

"All I know is you rub two sticks together or bang stones.  Or something."  Davey wasn't exactly Wikipedia.  "Oh, and you can use a magnifying glass and the sun, eh?"  It was probably as well he couldn't see the expressions on our faces.

"Kindling."  The word came to me from some ancient knowledge.  Pushed to explain I tried as best i could.  "It's sort of easy to catch fire stuff, like paper and things, that then gets the woody bits going.  You light the kindling first to start the fire."  I might not be right, but the others wouldn't know anyway.  "Raj, haven't you got a notebook?"

"Yeah, but..."

"Rip it up, tear it into strips and make a wee pile of them.  Davey, you've got most juice so we best use your phone as the torch for now, so Raj can see what he's doing and look see if there's any sticks in that pile that look rubbable.  While you do that I'll use the rest of mine to look for some rocks to bang together.

Tasks completed we set about it like the cavemen we weren't.  Twenty sparkless minutes went by, three idiots looking defeated in the ever fainter light of Davey's beam.  

"We'd best eat something and try to get some sleep.  I really, really hate to say this, but it's huddle up time guys, but even that's a step up from hypothermia."  They weren't keen, but the freezing to death option was a strong motivator.  We ate our subtle repast, with first my, then Davey's phone giving out.  Time to make our bed and lie in it.

I didn't know if I'd be able to sleep or not, and lay there trying to hold Raj close for warmth, and ignore all the weird sounds out there.  Where was a friendly police siren when you needed one?

"Aw, fuckin hell, I don't believe it!" shouts the weird and scary voice of Davey Munroe.

"What, what?" says a fearful Raj and I.

"Don't know if I should laugh or cry."  Remember that pub we stopped in in that unpronounceable village?"

"Uh huh".

"Remember me saying how old fashioned the place was to have books of matches with their name on them?"

"Uh huh".

"Well... "

"Well??" says a pissed off Raj

"Remember me putting one of them in my pocket?  Because I didn't, but I just stuck my hand in for warmth and that must be what this is."

Raj sat up fast and had his phone out and the light on, eager to see this fabulous treasure uncovered by the intrepid David.  Matches.  A whole book of matches.  

"Thank you old world" I said.

It still took three city boy goes to get the bloody thing alight, but we had a fire going.  There was enough power left in Raj's phone for one more trip to the fuel source, and we had sufficient to keep it going for a while.  We decided to take turns staying awake to ensure it didn't go out and I went first.  Because I wanted to feel smug about kindling.

The city boys would survive the night.