Friday 27 July 2012

a twenty first story - 'the best value in town'

‘Two pints of ale, and a packet of pork scratching’.  He was tall and thin, with big, mother me eyes, and a rakish beard.  He wore a long, lank blue-grey cardigan over the top of a red T-shirt.  ‘A packet of pork scratchings?’, I repeated, unsure whether I had heard him correctly the first time.  ‘Yeah, mate’.  ‘Right’, I said and took a pack from above the cash register and handed it to him.  He was shuffling his bank cards clumsily, eyes half shut.

‘You alright, mate?’, I asked warily.  He looked up at me, blinking.  ‘Yeah’, he replied, steadying himself against the bar.  ‘Two pints of ale then?’.  ‘Yeah’, he said again, swaying in a circular motion as if he’d just been clubbed on the head by Fred Flinstone.  ‘Sure you haven’t had enough already?’, I ventured, aware he was four sheets to the wind.  ‘No, mate, I’m fine’.  His voice was a stoned slur, but he looked fairly harmless so I poured him a couple of pints and placed them in front of him, beer frothing over the rim of each glass.

‘That will be five pounds, twenty please’, I said.  ‘Five pounds, twenty’ he mumbled to himself, and began searching in his wallet for loose change, his long fingers picking out coppers, and five pence pieces.  A small collection had gathered between on us on the counter, about sixty pence in total.  ‘There you are’, he said, ploughing the money towards me with his outstretched palm, and taking a dizzy step backwards.  ‘I think we’ll need a little more’, I replied, half smiling inside.  ‘A little more?’. ‘Yes, please’, I said and asked him if he had any notes.

Once again, he returned his attention to the contents of his wallet, and presently a pile of scrap paper had been assembled – old receipts that had been through the washing machine, train tickets that had suffered the same fate, a couple of flyers.  ‘Any notes in there?’ I inquired when the fourth or fifth receipt had been produced.  It was as if this was his way of proving he had good credit, and after a little more poking around, he presented me with a dry cleaning bill.

‘Fabric-care dry cleaning & laundry services’, announced the writing in bold italics at the head of the piece of paper, ‘the best value in town’.      

a twentieth story...'vinopolis'

It was Friday lunchtime, and it was hot and muggy in the office.  The building had long since stopped being serviced, and the air conditioning blew dust everywhere.  Michael was desperate to get out and get on with his evening plans.  But the emails kept pinging into his inbox.  If he was alone on his floor, as he sometimes was, he would have kicked off his shoes and removed his socks, put his feet up on the plywood desk and unplugged his telephone.  He was not alone.  The only mercy was the absence of his boss who bought the likelihood of the unenviable task of filing documents the company no longer had any real interest in, but were required to keep under law.

He scratched his head, scratched under his eyes, behind his ears. He picked small residues of dirt from his finger nails.  He tugged at his chin.  Another email alert came in.  He switched back to the email screen and read the ‘urgent request’ before him.  Today, there seemed something offensive and wholly irritating about the red exclamation marks accompanying these messages.  ‘Go away’, he said under his breath.  

Even the boundless prairies of the internet could not contain his anguish and boredom that seemed to stretch across the whole afternoon.  The remaining hours in the working day fell about him like a great tarpaulin, the onerous weight of which he simply could not throw off or escape from.  A vaguely defined sense of duty, and a fear of guilt at not being a useful employee kept him at his desk in spite of his inertia.

The telephone rang.  The display screen showed 155 - a general call to which the whole office was privy to answer.  He looked up in hope someone would pick up their telephone before he felt compelled to.  Three, four, five seconds passed.  His hand hovered over the receiver.  Six, seven seconds.  He picked it up. ‘Hello’, he began, but the line was dead.  Someone downstairs had taken it.  With a feeling of impotence he put the receiver down.  His shoulders were aching, and he noticed more flecks of white dandruff.  With a sticky hand he brushed them away before rubbing his face to relieve some of the wearisome tension.

When he was in this kind of mood Michael felt a strong desire to flee the city, and recreate paradise lost on a hill in a forest, yet he was smart enough to realise even the simple life could become tiresome.  How had civilisation developed to fill his existence with so many trials? And were boredom and fatigue simply the result of the loss of childike wonder, as well as the unavoidable consequence of adulthood? 

Another email came in.  Sara had cancelled their date at Vinopolis.  

Tuesday 24 July 2012

a nineteenth story...'a prelude to Crash'

Somebody’s feet were sticking through the smashed windshield.  The passenger seat was soaked with blood.  The blood dripped from the seat onto the chassis, from the chassis onto the tarmac, and half merged with a pool of motor oil.  The motor oil was seeping from a hole the size of fist in the fuel tank of the motor cycle, front wheel caught under the crumpled bumper of the motor car, back wheel still spinning.  The driver of the motor cycle was spread-eagled in the road ten yards away, limbs splayed at all angles like a mangled and discarded puppet.  The distant hum of the freeway provided an indifferent backdrop to sudden and unequivocal death.

I unscrewed the lens cap of my single lens reflex camera, and adjusted the focus, zeroing in on the dark flecks of blood across the windshield, drying in the afternoon heat; white sunlight glancing off the steel and chrome body of the motor car.  The brutality of the collision was remarkable. 

After taking a few close up photographs of the front of the motor car, I moved round to peer in at the driver with a mixture of trepidation and excitement.  The driver was a female, between seventeen and eighteen years of age.  She had been thrown violently forwards and then backwards by the impact of the crash.  A shard of window glass had pierced her neck below her right ear and a deep wound was throbbing blood at intervals.  Her jaw was a hundred and twenty degrees to the rest of her face.  She was wearing tight, blue denim hotpants, and a T-shirt with the Sign of the Cross.

I placed my camera on top of the roof of the motor vehicle, and tentatively reached inside the cockpit, searching for a pulse on her neck.  The cooling fan on the dashboard was hissing.  I had to put my fingers inside the wound.  With my eyes closed I felt around for a few seconds.  The wound was warm, and I sensed again the pristine smell of blood.  But there was nothing.  She too was dead, gone.  Gone before the paramedics could save her.  Gone before she had ever been fucked.

The paramedics.  In the frenzy of the crash I had forgotten about them.  A sudden realisation caught me:  while fate simply decreed I had been following the motor car when the motor cycle bored into it, and the motor car into the concrete reservation, perhaps it would have been expected of me to drive on by, leaving the chaos and calamity behind in the same manner as traffic passing on the distant freeway. 

In a mild panic, I swept up my camera and retreated from the accident, past the dead motor cyclist, to my Sedan on the hard shoulder twenty yards beyond.  The motor was still running, and I opened the side door, throwing my camera onto the back seat among the sprawl of porno magazines. 

About a mile along the winding B road, I pulled over again in a lay-by surrounded with trees.  Witnessing a car wreckage of such magnitude first hand had aroused something inside of me.  The afternoon heat was stifling and oppressive.  The air beneath the canopy of the trees would be cooler.  I took off my jean belt and got out of the Sedan, carrying a magazine from the back seat with me.  

Monday 23 July 2012

an eighteenth story...'sugar or granulated happiness'

‘Those glasses never suited him’ she said to her friend.  ‘And would he ever take them off?!’  She shook her head, her friend smiled.  ‘I mean talk about seeing things from one perspective!’  They were having coffee, both cups had gone cold.  ‘I never wanted it to come to this though’.  Her friend shifted uneasily in his seat, he was the silent type, people thought he was a good listener.  They looked at their plates.  The radio on the counter was playing sentimental AM rock.  ‘I don’t know’ she said at last, ‘maybe this will change him for the better’. ‘Maybe’ said her friend.  He was poking around in the sugar bowl.  ‘I was so angry at first.  We were in the kitchen and I remember looking around quickly, half intending to throw something at him’.  A cute young couple sat down at the table opposite. 

She dabbed her top lip with her napkin and wiped the corner of her eye.   ‘Would you like another cup of coffee?’ he asked.  ‘Oh, you’re sweet’ she said, and touched his wrist.  ‘Yes’ she said and sniffed loudly.  He asked if she was alright. ‘I’m okay’ she replied.  Then the waitress saw him stand up and came over to their table.  ‘Two more coffees please’ he requested.  The waitress was also young and pretty and had thick brown curls that fell to her shoulders.  ‘I’m so glad you agreed to meet’ she said.  ‘It’s good to have company just now’.  ‘I bet’ he said.  The tears were rigged in her eyes.  He looked at her hesitantly, he had a little plastic teaspoon in his right hand and kept pressing the base against the table top. 

They sat quietly for a minute and the waitress returned with two cups of coffee, a pot of milk, and a fresh sugar bowl.  He thanked the waitress and spooned some sugar into his coffee.  ‘I’m not normally one for crying’ she said to him.  He breathed in deeply.  ‘It’s fine’ he replied.  ‘In public too.  Who would have thought?’ she continued.   He began to stir.  She looked tired and unhappy.  ‘When was the last time you had sugar in your coffee?’ he asked.    

Monday 16 July 2012

Smallest Graves - a new one from Phil


On Saturday morning Izzy announced grimly to her father that Caramel had died.  “I touched him and he was cold and hard and gone.”

Her father, Iain, frowned at Izzy, regarding her small-for-her-age frame and ladybird hair clips.  Then he got up from the dining table, pressing his hands on the edge to lift himself up, and went with Izzy to examine the body.  “That’s Caramel, not Toffee?” he asked his daughter.  The guinea pig was dead alright; it looked slightly deflated and was wedged up against the side of the hutch, some brown fur poking rudely through the wire mesh.  The other guinea pig chewed on the other side of the hutch.  Iain fancied there was a triumphant glimmer in the eye of the survivor, but dismissed the thought. 

“Daddy, I think I know which guinea pig is which,” said Izzy with the tone of a six-year-old confident that are at least some things that she knows better than her father.  “Are we going to stuff Caramel and keep him?”

Iain looked at his daughter quickly.  She looked back at him with all seriousness.  He wondered at how well she was taking the loss of her pet, and with this comment, her easy familiarity with death.  He felt far more uncomfortable with the situation than she seemed to be.  Iain pictured for a moment a macabre stuffed Caramel on the mantelpiece, mounted on a bevelled and varnished wooden stand, head turned like a predator.  A conversation starter, that’d be for sure. 

“I think we’ll bury Caramel in the garden, Izzy.” 

Iain, Izzy and her mother, Sally, chose a spot at the end of the garden; it always has to be at the end of the garden.  Iain dug a little hole in the lawn, preserving the square of turf to top it off afterwards.  Sally had carefully placed Caramel in a shoebox, like a cake into a tin, having to suppress a feeling of dishonouring the dead by doing so.  Izzy laid the shoebox in the grave; she was solemn as a court hearing but still eerily composed, Iain mused. 

Spontaneously, Izzy said: “You’re life was shorter than it should have been, Caramel.  But you have been well-loved.  We’ll all miss you.”

Again, Iain was perplexed at just how adult Izzy was being.  He sighed, examined the earth under his fingernails and tried to be grateful for the absence of tears and tantrums.  He avoided mentioning Caramel’s feeding of the plants now.  Izzy looked slowly, with concentration, from one parent to the other then asked her crucial question, voice high with trepidation.

“Will Caramel be in heaven now?”

Iain and Sally looked at each other for a moment.  Iain only noticed now that Sally had an apron on; images of gory butchery, filmic in intensity, flashed across his mind.  They had spoken of how to deal with this sort of question before, and had agreed then on a shared approach.  Yet, now, at the end of the garden rather than comfortable on the sofa with a glass of red wine, it seemed so reductive, so precise and final.  Sally mastered the awkwardness first, rationality coming to the fore where it belonged.

“No,” said Sally.  “He’s just gone.”  Izzy just stared, defeated by the radical honesty of those she really expected, relied upon even, to build up the protective ring-fence of childhood mythology.  To tell the falsehoods that would keep her nascent psyche safe.  “Oh,” was all she said.


~


That Saturday night, Iain and Sally had two friends come over for dinner.  Felicity was a good friend of Sally’s from work, all swooshy hair and assurance of her place in the world.  Jock and Iain had come to know one another through their wives.  As a result, their friendship was a little more forced.  While the women chatted about work, the book club they both attended and other shared interests, the men talked in an ill-informed way about the on-going Wimbledon championship.  Jock’s hands were unusually heavy and hard, as if he had once been an oarsman on a quinquereme, although he was a manager in an online marketing company.  Iain looked at those hands now as he made some vague comment about the tactical use of serve and volley play. 

They sat around the table, Iain pouring wine and Sally serving the starter, a red onion and crème fraiche tart.  Felicity said she was starving, at ease in someone else’s home. Iain looked at the dwarfed cutlery in Jock’s hands. 

Sally was enjoying herself.  She noticed how her coral dress fit comfortably but with a little glamour; she felt her body responding pleasantly to the wine and the food she and her husband had cooked.  A thought persisted in invading her harmony, though.  Looking fondly at Felicity, she reflected on why most people’s best friends were of the same sex; these were the ones you wanted to spend time with but rarely did.  What was with this mad dash across the hall to the other side, usually in your early twenties, to where the other sex await?  You committed to a life with someone with whom you couldn’t ever be best friends.  Sure, they seemed exotic in their difference at the time, but you doomed yourself to differing interests and hobbies and tastes, incompatible with the shared life. 

Jock turned the conversation to their children, one of whom was in the same class as Izzy at school.  “We’re trying to decide whether to get a dog.  I just hope it wouldn’t be a novelty for them that wears off in a year.  Plus, the trauma of their pet dying worries me.  I can still remember our family dog dying when I was eight.  It’s almost too much for a child, I think.”  The advantages of dog ownership were self-evident, apparently.

“Funny you should mention that, Jock,” said Sally.  “Izzy’s guinea pig died this morning, but she took it so well.”

“Hmm… Do you think she really understands that she won’t get him back sometime, though?” asked Jock, probing a little unpleasantly.

“I reckon so; she proposed stuffing him!” Iain tried to add a little black humour.  “We told her straight up, he’s gone forever, too.  I think she grasps it.”  It was easy to take credit for this now.

Felicity caught her breath momentarily.  “You didn’t tell her the guinea pig is in heaven now?” she half-whispered with the embarrassment of catching her friends at some bad parenting.  She felt the way you might feel if you saw a flustered mother grab her toddler’s wrist a little too hard in the supermarket, watching but trying so hard not to judge as she marches on, red-faced, with the tearful child following like a bad past.  Felicity could sense the tension as she waited for a response.

“No,” said Sally.  Her ordinarily soft features sharpened slightly with conviction.  “We don’t believe in telling our child lies.  It betrays her trust in us, and she won’t forget later in life.”Iain could see Jock shifting around in his chair.  Then he revealed himself in a tirade on the importance of keeping childish beliefs alive.  He pontificated on the loss of innocence, on the security afforded by white lies and the heartlessness of dismembering a child’s simple illusions.  He used lines that sounded rehearsed, like: “Childhood is the only time you can believe in magic,” and: “Killing a child’s sense of mystery is tantamount to removing their soul.”  He spoke with feeling and a degree of regret.  Sally, beaten down by the lecture, could only ponder that Jock wished he could return to childhood and live without knowing.  The guest continued, speaking of the modern fostering of cynicism in young people from the off; then he went onto the arrogance of atheism.  “Who are you to say there is no heaven and there is no god anyway?  You’re brainwashing your daughter!” Jock finished, shortly before he and Felicity left, all smiles and shaking hands by then.


~


Iain awoke on Sunday morning with a bitter taste, of wine and of a good night with a left turn.  He brushed his teeth in front of the mirror, then scrubbed his tongue so vigorously he sliced its soft edge and gobbed pinkly into the sink.  Iain went downstairs in his dressing gown.  Sally and Izzy were already up, but not having breakfast as he expected.  They were at the end of the garden; he went to join them.

Iain stood beside Izzy.  Together, the three formed a little horseshoe around Caramel’s grave, heads bowed.  The burial site had been desecrated by a fox or a cat.  A pale brown shit, in three pieces of differing sizes, arranged like a witchy symbol, sat provocatively in the centre of the square of turf over the grave.  All three goggled at the scene.  Iain examined it like an artefact, and sniffed the air.

“Fox,” he pronounced as if that could diffuse the awfulness of the imagery before them. 

Izzy was crying now.  “Why would a fox do that to Caramel?” she asked. 

Neither parent could answer.  Sally couldn’t stop thinking about the size of the grave, how the smallest graves always seemed the most tragic.  She put her arm around Izzy.  Iain was contemplating the sheer improbability of the thing, trying to resist conclusions about malice in nature.  Red in tooth and claw, indeed. 

“Let’s leave daddy to tidy this up and we can forget all about it,” said Sally to Izzy.  She smiled at Iain, feeling this morning like a team with adversity bookending their weekend.  She revised her thought process of the night before with an ‘and yet…’ 

Sally led Izzy by the hand back to the house, noticing her daughter’s dancing, tip-toeing gait as though for the first time.

As they walked, Sally bent down to her daughter and muttered conspiratorially, “I hope that fox rots in hell.”    

Friday 13 July 2012

a seventeenth story...'Beyond Calais'


I walked through the double door.  Three or four of them were gathered around a high table in the middle of the room.  They all looked up in unison.  The table had wheels.  ‘He’s come to identify the body’, announced the escort, on seeing their collective complexions darken.   

The tall one in the long grey laboratory coat beckoned me over with a grave nod as the escort snapped her high heels together, and turned sharply to leave.  He had a face the colour of wet clay.  I could see the perspiration on his forehead. 

One of his assistants, a young woman with sandy hair, vacant eyes of the palest blue and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose whipped out a clipboard from behind her back and clicked the top of her retractable ball point pen once, then twice.  She was also wearing a long grey laboratory coat.

‘Your name?’ said the tall one, scrutinising me beneath his nostril hair.  ‘Luke’, I replied trying hard to tear my gaze away from the body, covered by a grey tarpaulin.  ‘I’m a friend of the family’. 

There was a short pause. 

‘A friend?’, whined a short man wearing thick, round, black rimmed spectacles.  ‘Yes’, I replied noticing the short man for the first time.  ‘I see’ he continued, fingering his putty like chin. 

‘Did he have..many?’.  The tall one inquired.  ‘Yes, he did’, I said at once, surprised at their interest in such personal matters.  ‘How many?’ The young woman interjected swiftly, ball point pen at the ready.  ‘Ten, perhaps fifteen’ I replied, rather discombobulated. 

‘His name is Daniel, is it not?’ continued the tall one apace, the beginnings of a thin and unpleasant smile forming around the corners of his mouth, ‘or should I say, was…Daniel’, he corrected himself, pausing for effect.

I was already beginning to feel ill at ease to add to my confusion.

The room was large and sparse.  Three of the four walls were fronted by what resembled enormous slate grey filing cabinets; the floor was green-grey laminate with a dull shine; the sole source of light was from four low energy bulbs attached to the ceiling in a line over the centre of the room where we now stood.

‘What happened to him?’ I asked after a moment had passed, and then rather more earnestly, as if by way of appeal to the tall imposing man, ‘please, will you tell me why I’m here?’

Thwack! The tall one brought the metal scalpel in his hand down onto the edge of the table where the body lay covered.  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed loudly, ‘Ha!Ha!Ha!’, then peering at me as if I were some strange exhibit in a museum of the human form, he sneered, ‘You know why you are here, don’t you?’.  I shrank back from his protruding jaw, his exclamations still ringing in the air like residual gunshot. 

He drew himself up to his full height, a full six or seven inches above mine and added, his voice full of revulsion and accusation, ‘you’ve known all along haven’t you.  You faggot’.  He spat the word faggot out of his mouth as if it were a scrap of rancid meat.

Instinctively I took another hasty step backwards to distance myself from this violent and verbose attack.  ‘No’, I protested shrilly, ‘no, I really don’t know why I’m here’, and then all of a sudden remembering part of the reason for my visit, ‘except, to identify the body of course..’

‘Identify the body!!!’ guffawed the tall one even louder than before, his small mean eyes popping their sockets, ‘You nasty little boy!!’.   The short man wearing thick, round, black rimmed spectacles echoed the tall one and pointed at me with a stubby finger: ‘tell us what you saw’, he whined, ‘tell us, or we may have to tell you!’

~

Oh! What hadn’t we seen?!  White marshmallow mountains, purple hills, vermillion skies, streets strewn with confetti, great towers of ice and foam melting in the perfect noonday heat, a rabbit, a hare, a fine bowler hat, a talking éclair.  How we had gurgled with pleasure, as if it were the first day of our new born lives, our pupils as big as buttons beholding the wonder of life in a thousand brilliant fragments.  And then in the evening, as the fat old sun was setting, we bathed in a river of champagne steaming with bubbles, before we lay on the warm, flat rocks by the river bank, our bodies soothed and our minds at peace with Mother Nature, God’s good air and all creation.

~

But, I could not tell them of this – the tall one, the short man, the young woman with the ball point pen.  No, they thought they already knew, and I was sure it was what they wanted to hear. 

‘What I saw where?’ I asked in reply.  ‘What you saw…when you went beyond’, the tall one replied, turning the metal scalpel over in his left hand.  The young woman with ball point pen scribbled something on her clipboard, clicked her pen twice.  ‘Beyond?’, I played along. ‘Beyond..’ repeated the tall one.  A light above our heads flickered and went out.  I drew breath.  ‘Replace the bulb!’ the tall one ordered, not taking his small mean eyes off me.  Somebody scuttled out of the room behind us.  ‘Now what did you see?’, he pressed. 

‘Nothing’, I replied as convincingly as I could.  The bulb flickered back into life almost as quickly as it had gone out.  ‘Nothing of interest?’, the short man whined, touching his bald patch sceptically.  ‘Nothing’, I said again, with a surfacing hope I was beginning to gain parity in proceedings. 

‘Do you wish to see the body?’, inquired the tall one, gesturing with his scalpel toward the grey tarpaulin on the high table.  The room had taken on the air of a mausoleum.  ‘Yes’, I replied, but waited for an invitation to step forward.  ‘Show him the body’, the tall one instructed the young woman with the ball point pen.  The young woman rested her ball point pen and clipboard on the table next to where I imagined the head to be and took the edge of the tarpaulin in both hands, between finger and thumb. 

I stepped forward. 

‘Are you sure you want to see the body?’, whined the short man, ‘dead bodies can be disturbing you know’, he added condescendingly. 

Biting my lip, crossing my palms, I asked them to show me.

Slowly and very deliberately the young woman pulled back the grey tarpaulin, the familiar crop of blonde hair emerged followed by the low brow and.. ‘Stop!’ I called out, ‘Stop!’.  The young woman stopped, and gazed at me quizzically with her pale blue eyes devoid of empathy or compassion.  I had realised in that very moment seeing Daniel dead would kill off any chance I had of ever bringing him back to life. 

‘What did you see when you went beyond?’, asked the tall one again, a measure of aggression returning to his voice, ‘we know what you saw..so tell us’, the tone carried a pre-meditated threat.  ‘I saw nothing’, I replied defiantly, ‘not a single thing..’, although fully aware lying was a trick I had never fully accomplished.  ‘Beyond..there is nothing?’, coaxed the tall man, staring at me curiously with his head to one side as if evaluating the truth in my assertion.  ‘You didn’t have any rum per chance?’, he persisted, thin smile returning to his lips, ‘You didn’t pursue any pleasures of the flesh?’, he chuckled maliciously.  And, clearly enjoying himself in the cruel way evil men do when tormenting their victims, ‘you didn’t pop and party pips, did you??’. 

I didn’t know what to say.  What in the hell were party pips anyhow, I wondered, and mercifully I was immediately saved from answering any of these questions by the short man.

‘I can smell meat’, whined the short man breaking the brief silence, ‘I can smell meat in his socks’, he went on, jabbing another stubby finger in the direction of my feet.  ‘Meat!’.  The tall one took his eyes off me at last and turned his smouldering gaze on the short man.  ‘What kind of meat?’ he asked the short man.  The short man adjusted his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles. ‘Raw meat’, he whined, his nose, a fat, bilious knob, twitching ever so slightly.  The tall one swallowed and smacked his thin lips.  ‘MEAT!!!’ he roared, and lunging forward toward me so his angry bulging features were but a yard from mine, whispered with barely controlled ire, ‘where did you steal it from?’

Confronted with such rancour and spite, I decided in an instant that honesty was after all the best policy.  ‘There is no meat in my socks’, I stated summoning a look of what I hoped would be pure innocence,  ‘I did not steal any meat’, and then almost by way of concession, ‘you can have a look for yourself if you like..’ 

The tall one looked down at my socks, back at me and then down at my socks again, unsure of himself for the first time.  ‘No…meat?’ he stammered, ‘No meat’, I confirmed.  ‘No party pips either??’, he moaned quietly, the contours on his wet clay face creasing in anguish.  ‘No party pips anymore’, I confirmed a second time, again utterly confused by this raging monolith of emotion. 

Thereupon, the tall one grabbed my shoulder and before I could react buried his soggy face into my armpit.  ‘No meat, no party pips, no rum, no flesh’, he weeped, huge wet throbbing tears staining my jacket, his right hand clenched in vicious grief around my epaulettes, his left, hanging limp from his side with the metal scalpel, no longer seemingly a menace, loose in his fingers. 

‘NO MEAT!’ shrieked the young woman suddenly, her pale blue eyes rolling into the back of her head before she collapsed in a dead faint onto the body covered by the grey tarpaulin.  ‘No Meat!’, whined the short man on his stubby little knees, his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles misting up.  ‘No meat!’, sobbed the tall one clutching to me like a giant ape.  ‘No party pips anymore’, wailed the girl, momentarily recovering from her dead faint.  ‘No rum!’ whined the short man again, beseeching some imaginary deity hidden in the celestial pattern of the ceiling above.  It was as if I had just opened Pandora’s Box and all the woes of the world had flooded out, the scene before me was of such wanton misery.

‘We want party pips!’, proclaimed the short man sorrowfully, his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles now in his outstretched hand, waiting for an arm to reach down through a crack in the reinforced concrete heavens and provide for him.  The tall one on my shoulder had stopped moaning, but would not lessen his grip on me which sent a swift shot of unease up my spinal column and into my poor overburdened brain.  The tall one was too heavy for my slender frame to sustain upright for very long.  I could feel the strain in my knees and an aching pain in my shoulders. 

Then, and without warning, the table with wheels, on which the body lay, started to trundle slowly across the floor, moving with a kinetic energy all of it’s own – the unconscious girl draped on top, her long grey laboratory coat giving her the appearance of a mythological harpy. The short man, still caught in his quasi religious entreaty failed to notice, but the tall one on my shoulder, slumped backwards and staggered around to witness the trolley come to rest against one of the enormous grey filing cabinets on the adjacent wall.  The impact of the collision, although slight, had the effect of knocking out one of the large draws and a cold vapour rose from inside.

‘No rum anymore!’ groaned the tall one and lurched in the direction of the enormous filing cabinet like a demented troll.  ‘No meeeaaaaaaat!’ whined the short man at length pawing at the divine air with his fat creamy fingers.  ‘Time to go’, I told myself under my breath, and prepared for what I imagined would have to be a swift exit in spite of all the commotion.

It was at that moment the girl shrieked again, and fell off the trolley where she had been slumbering, the tall one froze in his tracks, and the short man was taken right out of his old testament reverie.  The body under the tarpaulin was moving, the obtuse shapes of the limbs were stirring; the tarpaulin began to rise up and down as the lungs in the chest began breathing.  Inside Daniel’s head a light shone again, and his eyes opened.

The whole room was gripped by an electrifying stillness, hope and expectation had at last dropped in to pay a visit.  I shot a glance at the tall one, and was relieved to see inertia had seized him, the girl was hiding herself under her long grey laboratory coat and the short man waited in a crawl position. 

‘Dan’, I cried out, my voice seeming distant, ‘Dan?’, I tried again, ‘Dan..dan…dan….dan…..dan……..dannnnn.’. 

~

And lo, inside Daniel’s head something registered and the first traces of memory came back to him.  He had been in a garden, and there had been wooden picnic tables, and other people, real people.  And there had been the railway, and the heavily laden goods trains rolling past.  There had been fresh hay under foot and he had felt the late afternoon sun on his back.  There had been pretty bar girls, with foreign accents and fluttering eyelashes, there had been the lilywhite butterfly that had alighted on his knee. 

Yet another memory returned - a touch memory - the feeling of his warm fingers wrapped around a cold mug of beer; then came the taste of salt on his lips and the sharp acridity of lime wedges and the scald of a tequila shot cleansing the roof of his mouth.  And one by one the endless glasses of rum, the party pips, the raw meat, the holes in his old cotton socks, the dawn chorus, his nest of blankets behind the black leather sofa, the wooden floor boards, the hum of drunken conversation, singing Bon Anniversaire,  a lone traveller’s journey beyond Calais, and finally the one AM finish.     

Daniel sat up on his high table, and with every conviction said: ‘Here’s to BLOC!’