Hamlet of the Wedding Ring

The adventures of her in her future.

And her claim of an alibi, yes, we took that to be, as we say, a red herring, a wild goose chase. There was, as you saw for yourself, fresh creosote on the back door handle. The same fresh creosote as the fresh creosote on the fence, applied by her husband that very afternoon. Creosote all over the cutlery in the kitchen, fingerprints everywhere. The rain, earlier in the evening, accounted for the muddy footprints all over the floor. He had been stabbed sixteen times.

An incident at the book shop where you, fleeing from the security guard, are caught and manhandled by a group of shoppers. In the face of your obvious guilt you cling tightly to the book you have stolen, a book that is part of the group of books about to be signed by the author. As the author herself attempts to prise the book from your grip, your brazen claim that the book is yours, written by you, leads her to the conclusion that you must be mentally ill. With good grace, and ignoring the protests of your fellow shoppers - myself included - she signs your book. As you turn to leave, you twist the book apart, rip out the pages and throw them towards her as crumpled balls of hate.

Critically reviled, strung up and thrown over the back of a black stallion, you take off toward the horizon but are lost before you reach the horizon, a disappearance over that group of black hills. Back in the saloon the gunslingers are toasting the day’s bad deed: the stringing up of you etc. Boy, we sure did teach her a lesson. Coming in here, shooting her mouth off, challenging us all to a draw, who in blazes does that gal think she is? But in the corner, by the window, his hand shaking the whiskey tumbler, the whiskey spilling all over the table, the old town doctor is loudly reminiscing about the days when. When you were someone, yep, to be reckoned with. And as the doctor talks, a young buck in buckskin at the back of the room takes up his revolver, takes aim and falls – in the nick of time – from the bullet that has been fired through the room from the barrel of the gun that sits firm, steady and proud in your iron-horsed grip. You in the double doorway, Stetson cocked, pushed up by the end of your gun, a wink to the doc and a flick of a coin to Joe the bartender. Another whiskey for the doc, you say. Another whiskey for the doc.

By selling your flowers in the town square you will have the opportunity, every morning, to converse with your customers, enabling you to build a solid customer base that will, in turn, help you to develop long-term relationships that will, in turn, provide dividends by way of increased sales through customer retention and loyalty, and through the acquisition of new customers through the networking and word-of-mouth opportunities that will arise as a result of your prime retail position within this lucrative town centre spot. Your flowers will, of course, be provided for you every morning along with a clean and newly-pressed uniform bearing the company logo and strapline which must be displayed at all times. You will be free, during allocated periods throughout the day, to take toilet breaks, refreshment breaks and lunch breaks. Smoking is strictly forbidden. Please be aware that, no matter how hard you try, you are not, and never will be, the hyacinth girl. However, it is possible that, through appropriate diligence, care and hard work, your sales targets will allow you to don the much sought after mantle of Mrs Cobbett. Yes, we can see you doing that.

The woman, in her late fifties, was described by a neighbour as having a lived-in face. How so? See this horrible old gnarly thing here, said the neighbour - proffering what looked like a prosthetic nose - this was the very best of her.

The laughter was, as they always say, contagious. The table was full of people from work, people she, by and large, despised. But she wasn’t here for them. She was here for him. Him in all his magnificent management glory. So what if he never so much as looked at her? So what if he ignored her every time she spoke? So what if he returned her cards with requests to leave him alone? The main thing was that she was here, in the same room, clutching the knitting needle that she would ram, in a few moments’ time, deep into his left eyeball.

When you come ashore you must be wary of the rocks. Far above you is the Girl of Glaggormouth. She is the ghost of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter.

Terminal Investigator, I, see, never got that thing that everybody has about cockroaches. I been doing this uh job now for two years now and in all that time, you know, fitty percent of the calls have all been about the cockroaches. No, not fitty percent, more like sitty percent, yea. So it’s cockroaches, cockroaches, cockroaches. And every time I have to uh deal with these people who like running scared and you know I always tell them nothing to be afraid of before I take them away. It’s mostly, I, yea, a good job, yea. But most of the time, like I say, is about cockroaches. I mean, and I like cockroaches so it’s no problem for me, not at all.

She didn’t like the crow’s feet around her eyes but couldn’t afford Botox injections.
So what did she do?
Each night she smoothed out the wrinkles and placed a strip of micropore tape over the area to keep it in place - leaving it overnight.
What’s micropore tape?
I don’t know. Like plasters I suppose.
Plasters?
Band-Aids.
Oh.
She did this for a week.
Did what?
You know, with the tape and the smoothing her wrinkles, her crow’s feet.
Yes?
And after a week there was a noticeable improvement.
Really?
That’s what she said. I couldn’t see it myself.

A creator of bookmarks and wooden things with googly eyes. Hand crafted, delicately painted and presented with the kind of tender, loving care you just don’t get in the big, corporate chains. A little wooden shed with hanging dandles and wind chimes. No discount, no haggling. CDs full of excruciating, sleep-inducing crap that you’d have to have no ears to truly appreciate. Your own successful, one-woman business. Well done you. Here, a glowing feature in the local paper. There, a mention at the back of leaflets for things like local walks, animal sanctuaries and God knows what else. T-shirts too with all kinds of cute country nature business all over them: footprints, leaves, Latin named thingies and insects, suns, cats, dogs, various fish and wet mammals, blow clocks, acorns, strawberries, wood bits, larvae, dinosaur bones, trees, exotic fauna, dramatic landscapes, ladybirds, fireflies, mooncalfs, penguins, owls, panda bears, polar bears, koala bears, bamboo shoots, saplings, oilseed rape, seeds, herbs, wild flowers, mushrooms, toadstools, toads, frogs, sperms, dust mites, laughing stocks, breedles, deer, squirrels, boondocks, porcupines, tree monkeys, fibre monkeys, red-arsed monkeys, lickspittles, chimpanzees, dead gorillas, rhino powder, elephant dung, cheese-eaters, belly flops, flying birds, walking birds, rollovers, needlepoints, llama beans, cherry chucks, woodchucks, herman drudes, longpigs, salad leaves, marzipan, turnkeys, raspberries and doily shots.

Your blue pants and the man next door. Hung out to dry on the line. Gone the next morning. The man next door in your blue pants. The man next door, in his garden, erect in your little blue pants. You photographed him and showed it to the police.

The first day of the appointed day and there she is, boots a gleaming, hair a shining, nose a running, and not even the slightest sign of the measles that, for the week running up to the appointed day, had caused her so much grief and aggravation. It’s amazing, as her friend Janice said, what a bit of make-up and a bit of steely resolve can do. So, anyway, there she stands in front of the boss’s desk, waiting for him to finish giving her the old up and down that, due to the fact that Mr Dagger is an older man, is taking a little longer than the ups and downs she has been used to. Unfortunately, this fact, registering in her face as boredom, impatience and pity, causes Mr Dagger to explode, tinily, and order her from the room. Out there, in the vast emporium of the typing pool, surrounded by the clicks and the clacks, she feels lost, stupid and curiously overweight. All eyes are on her and she wonders, foolishly and fleetingly, whether one of the women will come to her aid. A kind word perhaps, a touch on the elbow, some tips on how to cross her legs successfully in a skirt this short. But nothing. Nothing at all.

When beauty rides this tall, what do we need midgets for? Welcome to KCMWD, coming to you live from the Blueberry Beauty Pageant. As you can see, we’ve got the full range of some of the most gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite creatures you could ever hope to rest your tired, dust drawn, poky little eyes on. Look how they glide there, across that polished hardwood floor, lighter than air, floating like angels, like goddesses on high. They glide and fly, and fly and glide, and let no man come between them. Look, in the red corner, it’s Little Miss Pisspants. In the blue corner, the lovely Lucky Lindi. In the yellow corner, a piece of deep fried ham. In the green corner, the red from somebody’s tear-stained, rosy red cheek. And here, with me, in the pink pound, our very own Beatle Babe, with her yeah, yeah, yeahs and her oodles of oooohs, Miss Patsy Clownbucket! And when I say Clownbucket, I just know you wanna fuck it! Yeah, baby! I’m Steve Dash and I’m coming to you live from KCMWD with our beautiful Blueberry beauties.

A lay-by. You selling hot dogs. Me burning the wood out back. A caravan, cooking gear, that’s all we needed. Or so we thought. Three hours we’re out there, doing a roaring trade. And then that fat get from the council turned up. You threw boiling oil into his face. I turned his blubber into ashes.

It was an omen. Sally looked out onto the street to make sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her. Yep, there was no doubt about it – written on the side of the big white removals van, in giant gold letters, were the words: JACK LADD REMOVALS. And underneath, in smaller letters: From old pad to new pad, make sure it’s Jack The Lad. Sally turned back into the room, raised her arms and let them fall as if in defeat. Jack, she said quietly, that was his name. Whose name? asked Martha. My old boyfriend, Sally replied, his name was Jack. So? said Minnie. Well, duh, said Sally, look outside. Yes? asked Minnie. It’s Jack, the same name, don’t you see? Yes, I get that it’s the same name, said Minnie impatiently, but so what? So what? shouted Sally, so what? Yes, said Minnie, so what? Now then, said Martha, let’s not fall out over this. Fuck you bitch etc. and the whole gang – Martha, Sally, Minnie, Hiawatha, Charlie and Beatrice - fell to the floor, fighting, biting and tearing each others’ clothes off. Yum yum. And outside, on the roof of the removals van, stood Jack, Sally’s old boyfriend, with one hand on his binoculars, the other in his trouser pocket.

Here, said the clown, it’s my day off today and, instead of clowning around as I normally do on my days off, I’m going to get serious for a change and get myself down to my local charity shop where I’ll offer myself up for a spot of volunteering. What do you think, eh mum - do you think that’s a good idea? I think that’s a stupid idea, replied the clown’s mum - and I think you’re a stupid red-nosed cunt for even mentioning it.

You are a wisp of ethereal. A moonbat in crystals. To reach you they have to pass through beaded doorways. To touch you they have to present you with a fistful of old fivers. For their money they get fuck-all.

There you are surrounded by trumpets, trombones and a full-scale cardboard model of the Pope. What on earth is going on? You are also, let us point out, naked. Alongside the Pope – who is looking less and less cardboardy as the seconds pass – stand representatives from the small island republic of Serotonin. Their Prime Minister, the little fat fellow in the black bowler hat, is addressing you with words of unabashed admiration. You, naturally, are blushing but do nothing to hide your modesty. The other men in the room, of which there are around twenty (men, not rooms), are gazing at you in silent wonder, their thick, heavy lips hanging open like the spill of boiling milk as it flows over the lip of a saucepan, if you see what I mean. The trumpets and the trombones, the brass, suddenly spring into rapturous life, ta-daing the arrival of yet more dignitaries from the planet Serotonin. Not planet, republic. In walk three Mayors, seven Lords, eight Cardinals, three Dukes, fourteen Sheriffs and eight Murderers. And behind them, close behind, come hundreds and hundreds of gleaming white skeletons who, wielding their shiny cutlasses, hack off the heads of everyone present. Except for you. Carried aloft by these skeletons, you smile, wave and blow kisses to the endless, eternal crowd of other skeletons who await you in the Land of Old Bones.

Had Quentin Tarantino directed Bambi, it would have looked like the film you appeared in, late in your career, that featured the deers being slaughtered by a thuggish hit man/gangster type who was, despite everything, quite charming and likeable. Had Sam Peckinpah directed your straight-to-video The Return of the Railway Children, the resulting film would have resembled that film about those disillusioned cowboys on the train and the bloodbath that ensued. Had George Romero directed that film of yours featuring all the nuns, they would have eaten each others’ brains instead of inadvertently finding the cure for cancer. Had Darren Fisher come anywhere near any of the films you were in – any of them - they would have been even more useless and unwatchable than they actually were.

You are dead. As a result of messing around with yet another love bandit. Who took you in his arms and threw you off the roof. Your head smashed on the pavement, your skirt up around your thighs. The love bandit leaping from roof to roof in search of other hearts to stop.

The face of poetry is now your face, covered in garlands, at the front of the auditorium. In the front row, seated soon standing, are the poets you consider your peers. There’s Bat Eyelid, Foo Turner, Maisie Bansai, To Fu, Lil’ Miss, Bryan Stanley, Poo Fenz, Lonnie Halpern, Dim Shermer, Erik Pankhurst, Lisa Luftwaffe, Tiger Cat, Nistleroy Hoogstraten, Biz Markie, Ten Florin, Hubert Corner, Tillie Oswert, Ny Nong, Lottie Bando and Eve Saint Paul. They are all your friends, here to shower you with yet more garlands and good wishes on this, your lifetime achievement award ceremony extravaganza evening. You are sixty-five years old. Have you really said all you want to say? Have you no more turns of phrase, no more surface sighs, no more verses of ideas that you want to share with your adoring public and grateful pals? Can you leave like this? Are you bowing out gracefully? Or will there be more to come? Will you, for instance, take to the trees to protest the deforestation of your millionaires’ row woodland private garden thingy? Will you, in collaboration with some hip young musician, set all your words to music? Will you become the grand old dame of letters and lists, trotting a new one out whenever the conservatives/republicans get in again? Will you commemorate the anniversaries of high profile chums? Will you speak out against the war, any war? Will you tell us how war/war is stupid/and people/people are stupid/look at the fat Yanks on parade/with their ballads of joy/again?

You are found lingering in the corridor. They invite you in. The hotel room is full of various lowlifes and hangers-on. Brett Blanco is in the bathroom, on his knees, being fucked up the arse by his manager, Linda, who wears a strap-on dildo. You haven’t yet witnessed this act, but you will, later. A hanger-on, let’s call him Tony, offers you a drink. You drink even though you know, because you saw him do it, that the drink is spiked. Another hanger-on, a friend of this Tony, pulls you down on to his lap. Soon you are naked. Tony is naked. His friend is naked. You are had, as the phrase has it, by at least five different men. At a certain point they let you crawl to the bathroom where you see Brett Blanco being fucked up the arse by Linda, his manager. In that instant all of your illusions come tumbling down.

A dog called Dillis and a cat called Carter will be your best friends on this journey into the unknown where you will encounter, among many wondrous treasures, the secret dreams of pirates, mermaids, ballerinas and midgets. You will march with tin soldiers, fly with fireflies and walk the moon with all manner of magical astronauts and spacemen. In the Garden of Greed, however, you will find yourself face-to-face with evil demons of every stripe and hue who will engage you in thrilling, dangerous battles that will put your mind, body and spirit to the test. But fear not, Jesus is on your side.

You’re going to die. We’re going to kill you. They said, as they clasped their hands around her throat. Give us some sweets, they said, and laughed, when she said she didn’t have any sweets on account of her being diabetic. They punched her in the stomach. They held lighters to her hair. They pulled her glasses off her face and stamped on them. They spat into her mouth. They rammed their fingers up her nostrils. They yanked her hearing aid off. They pushed her to the ground. They kicked her in her face, stomach and legs. When she returned home, an hour later than expected, her mother began to shout. But when she realised, when she got the full measure of what had happened to her daughter, she burst into tears. She threw up. She rang the police. She kissed her daughter. She ran out into the street. She undressed her daughter. She bathed her daughter. She rang the police. She hugged her daughter. She wept, bitterly. She rang her ex-husband. She laughed. She wept. She stepped out into the back garden. She looked up at the stars. She lit, and part-smoked, a cigarette. She kissed and hugged her daughter. She helped her daughter into bed. She kissed her daughter. She rang the police. She stepped out into the street. She looked up at the stars. She lit a cigarette.

It is a lonesome spot in a lonesome pub set back from the street by way of a few chairs, wooden and broken, plus the remnants of a table or two and an upturned barrel. Inside, however. The lonesome spot – which, for the purpose of creating extra pathos, could be lit by a single red spotlight – is occupied, first of all, by you. You as you are now and always will be. Next to you, a touch away, but not quite touching, your husband of these past few years, a cliché of violence, bad manners and his stupid thug dog tied, or rather, tethered, to one of the tables outside. You spoke, briefly, a few minutes ago when he went to the bar to fetch you your drinks. You will speak again, in a minute or two, when you tell him you don’t want another drink, not just yet, you haven’t finished this one.

Your first thought, when you came across your father’s long-lost tin of coronation chocolate, was how much money you could get for it. Your face then, when the man at Bonham’s told you it was worth - despite its ripe old age and unusually superb condition - only twenty-five pounds, must have been an absolute picture.

Tell me again about the time you were the drummer for that whatsit, that punk, ah, rock band. Early nineties was it, New York? You know, the year – excuse me – the year that punk broke. Seriously, I’d love to hear all about it.

What was needed, decided the kids, was some kind of intervention. At the agreed time, as she sat down to her dinner - prepared for her, as usual, by the kids - they marched into the front room, stood in line and shouted, in practiced unison: Please give up the drugs mummy! Frozen, her fork caught mid-air on its way up to her mouth, she eventually replied: No, I won’t give up the drugs. Now fuck off, I’m trying to watch the fucking telly.

The Red Blast was a tired and alone. The lonely life of a crime-fighting superhero. Where was his wife when he needed her? Well, she was out with some long-haired mush down the local picture house, her hand in the bucket of popcorn fixed afirmly to his lap.

Eat Like Shot While The Stirabout's Hot

A London Victorian workhouse sits at the top of my garden. Its inmates call out to me at night while I’m tucking into my minge supper. I try to ignore them but the cries, especially from the children, are incessant.

I have had complaints from my neighbours. They find it difficult to sleep with all the racket going on. I’ve told them there’s nothing I can do. Besides, the noise from their dogs is also incessant.

My wife says that the workhouse is a portal to the past. She says that on the other side of the workhouse lie the old Victorian streets. She says it is a wonderland of preserved Victoriana.

Minge supper?

Through the porthole, the round window, the workhouse is a shift in both time and space that results in all kinds of spooky backward and forwarding. The inmates, the paupers, are nauseating tramps, skinny in both body and mind. No wonder they, as they say, rattle their bones all over the stones. Bone munching is far too good for them.

On the other side of the workhouse my wife is proved, yet again, correct. She basks for a moment, let her bask. Indeed, as she said, those streets, those street lamps, those street performers are exactly as they were in the old Queen’s day. There, look, a pickpocket, a lamplighter, a chimney sweep, a group of half dead, pox-ridden kids. Their charms knows no bounds. And for a fig of toast, why, I’ll be blue blazed, look, it’s Mr Sherlock Holmes!

The Bash Street Kids, those runners in rags, that gang of coppers’ narks, are on the loose, up and down Baker Street.

Those Baker Street Irregulars, curly eyelashed orphans of Artful Dodger bent are a slink of eyes and ears through grates, doorways, coal bunkers and key holes. Nothing can escape their attentions. Mr Sherlock Holmes, esteemed bachelor of 221B, is a gaseous figure in these adventures, a wisp here, a shadow there, a voice in the dark over there. Our focus, as visitors from the future, is on those young boys who, let’s face it, have no future. Will they meet sticky ends at the hands of nefarious villains, Moriarty maybe? Or will disease and hunger capture them? Better yet, will they end their days picking oakum or losing their jaws from the sulphur on fire matches?

Victorian London is a cold breeze over our pampered, girly arms. It is a cool snap at the end of a small ice age where babies and children are frozen to their graves. We visit them there, make notes of their names and make a note to visit them again, sometime in the future. The Victorian pea soup is no comfort, no hiding to warmth. Its curl along alleyways is just enough to get the ladies screaming.

Old Jack of old London Town
blowing his blackness behind
a leather satchel of implements
a shine for every eye.

For the pardon he seeks we arrange to meet at the Ten Bells where, avoiding the strippers and the walking guided tour, we stare into the fall of his tiny black eyes. Blue eyes, says my wife later, he had the most open pools of blue frost it had ever been my pleasure to gaze into. He could, she continues, tear at my throat any time. But over a tankard of ale back in 1888 we are concerned, or at least I am, with the cessation of violence because, although being strict passive observers, neither myself nor my wife wish to be bound by rules that we have neither understanding nor knowledge of. That is, we are acting innocently and ignorantly, let that be our defence if we are ever called to question by the Time Travel Trust. But that tankard sinks fast and soon old Jack is baying once more for blood. Quickly we return him to his rooms where he downs, in one lusty gulp, the contents of a certain green phial. Behind the chaise longue he falls, emerging a moment later as a dishevelled, hairy regression of his former dapper self. Let the games commence! as he leaps with new-found agility on to the cobbled turrets of those Victorian London roofs. Chimney sweeps, and especially their boys, are no longer safe.

Victorian London, we discover, is a home to vampires. It is a hell hole of old satanic proportions. On every corner of every street, Madame Gurvatsky, a chain of barrow boys plying her talisman trade, a reading of cards for a thrupenny tuppence bit. On stairs and hallways, down dusty passageways, her eyes and ears are a pasted presence, observing the passage of our time, the reasons for our visit. Unable to resist her call, we take tea with her in her chambers.

Madame Gurvatsky: You - the one with the beard - you will die by water.

My Wife: Oh my! I’ll drown?

Madame Gurvatsky: Not you, him. With the other beard.

Me: Eh?

My Wife: She says you will drown.

Me: Me? Drown? How?

Madame Gurvatsky: Not drown. Die by water.

Me: Well, how?

Madame Gurvatsky: I cannot say.

Me: Why not?

Madame Gurvatsky: Eh?

Me: I said, why not?

Madame Gurvatsky: It is not in my power to tell you.

Me: Give me those!

Madame Gurvatsky: No! Do not touch the cards!

Me: These are Christmas cards!

In Victorian London, the invention of Christmas. Oh, that jolly fat fool with his length of white beard was not, contrary to your anti-establishment beliefs and better grasp of irony, invented by the murderers, thieves and child-rapists at Coca-Cola. He is wisdom caught, his twinkled eyes setting aglow every fireplace across the world’s first, and mightiest, industrial nation. Watch those sparks fly, be careful of your eye. Old Saint Nick is a transformation to grandfatherly goodness, a sack on his back as long as your arm. Nuts and humbugs, spinning tops and a kiss on the forehead. Yes, there’s snow, as accurately rendered by the detail of those greetings cards. You should see it here, you should see them go. A Scrooge simulacrum tapping his way home, the chestnut whiff passing him by, the children lit alive by the glad tidings of the season, jumping into his footprints, turning them into hooves. By morning this Scrooge will be either dead or well chosen.

Bishopgate bound and back to the workhouse, the irresistible pull of gruel and the children’s desperate cries. In this one, presided over by the tyrant McDougal, we are witness to the horrors of their daily London life. His fat wife, an expert in eschatology, captures souls by way of a buzzing light and the sulphuric flash of photography. Once caught, the transmigration of their essence into their veins guarantees these McDougals the promise of eternal life. We have a plan don’t we? pleads my wife as we peer past the black of the curtains watched, although we do not know it, by a small army of empty vampiric shells. We will, if we do not turn now, shake up the foundations of time.

Quickly, the plan, such as it was, was this: We go back to the future. We hunt down these long-lived McDougals and drag them back through the potholes of time, bringing them face-to-face with themselves, causing an implosion of such proportion that the workhouse would fly into space, its contents with it, suffer the little children for the greater, longer good. But as this plan took root, I turned.

The empty vampiric shells were all ashes and mummy. Open, yawning mouths, bound shut by infinity chains. Their leader, of a certain cast and hue: You do not be fearful. We are but empty treasures of once flesh and blood like you. We are held here as captors, back and forth through time. They suckle from us. Lift our skirts. But we are just like you. Help us.

Back home, the garden is a state. Where the workhouse once stood, the grass no longer grows. In our house, on every table, against every wall, the remnants of our Victorian past. Those empty vampiric shells crying out for dust.

The Wilderness of Glass

Her heartbreak, against the brush of his letter, is as real as the heartbreak she’s experienced in all of the five other times she’s been heartbroken since her relationship with Graham began, almost six months ago. The letter she has just read and cried over, that she now clutches as close to her heart as she can get it, is full of more of his promises and lies, full of more words of comfort and reassurance that serve to mask – and yet, at the same time, amplify – the few direct declarations of love that are also included. She clutches Graham’s letter, and creases his letter, because she is, as she always says whenever she thinks somebody needs to know, passion personified.

This morning, through the tears she has wept bitterly for the past two hours, the slight hill from her front door seems once again to be enough of a rise for her to pretend that the sea is on the other side. That is, away past the top of her garden. It has something to do with, perhaps, the emptiness of the scene, the way she imagines the blue sky dropping away into nothingness. Or maybe it’s something she remembers from when she was a girl, the pretence of the sea merely her eyes providing her with false anticipatory information based on previously noted scenes.

Some of the days she spends at home are all of her occupation. There is glass to care for and look through, as there is glass to obscure her view. It all needs a certain kind of tending. Sometimes, when she’s alone, she feels like her own curator.

It will do her no good, she thinks, at some appropriate point in the day, to sit there moping. Resolving to leave the house in order to capture what’s left of the day, she dresses quickly, stuffing Graham’s letter – which she envisages reading again while she’s out, in the clear of the day – into the tuck of her skirt. Stepping outside the front door she instinctively breathes deeply, through her nose, in order to fully capture the illusion of the sea which, of course, is lost the moment she breathes in. The short climb to the top of the garden reveals not golden sands, nor the vast eternity of undulating water, but rather a few parked cars and the drab houses, just like her own, sitting across the street. She is, as she always is at this moment, quietly devastated.

The short walk to the park is full of the dangers of the estate, the dangers that are higher on her mind today than they are on what might be called normal days, if such days exist. The fraught dangers, the hazards of leaving her house - what a fool she is! – grow with every step, with every pass of activity. The obligatory teenage gang, boys, for instance, staring as she weaves through their rude, deliberate obstruction. What, she asks herself, if she were a pretty woman, a beautiful, sexy, younger woman, what then would those boys have meted out? She passes, or rather squeezes through, the small gap between the parked cars and the lengths of bushy hedge that she could have avoided had she crossed the road, as she originally wanted to do, instead of following through on this tiny, and completely unnoticed, act of defiance. The torture of this short walk, the sheer angst of it all, is no less diminished by the fact that she is fully aware of how dramatic she’s being and how much enjoyment she’s taking from being at the centre of her own imagined battles. To the park then, in a strange kind of triumph.

Bear witness to her arrival. The four corners of the park are quickly scanned for new promises of danger. There is a path through the centre of this park, in the form of a stream, which she would most certainly enjoy were it not for the other people who, today, as every day, are mostly the young mothers from her estate displaying their children in what she knows to be their ongoing gesture of mockery. These same children who are always surprised at her indifference, her hostility even, despite her resemblance to, if not their own grandmothers, somebody else’s grandmother. The reflections she has, at the sight of these children, are fast, fleeting, but enough to catch her with regret and, yes, a small yearning. She often comes to this park, although she would never admit it, to see herself, for a short time, as she could have been. A small snapshot to complement the bigger whole.

The swings. Occupied by children, of course.

On the cool of the grass, Graham’s letter, a crushed ball, somehow burns through the tightness of her fist. It’s as if she has squeezed everything from it, neutralised it, rendered it pliant and made it work for her in some mysterious, and as yet undefined, way. Opening it up again, glancing at its contents, there is, immediately, the fantastic realisation that she has him. That this letter, with its untruths, its bold claims, its hurtful jabs in the dark, will be more valuable to her now that it has been washed by her tears and broken through her touch. She will reply to this letter, in her own fashion, with the memory of this breeze, the clarity of the moment she’s currently experiencing, ringing in her ears. From where she’s sitting, the view of the park, its transformation at the drop of the hill, suggests the sea. The ozone cuts a crisp path through her nostrils and brings everything into the sharpest focus.

Picking Apart The Particles

Glass shop front grab as sharp as pins dropping, the spats polishing the pavement, the row of these boys long past boyhood, pastel shirted pudgy fat fucks, clean-shaven, short sleeved, leather belted, pizza munching cunts cut on lager, sexual frustration and the heavy promise of violence. A laugh, all of them really, good lads, just out for a laugh. They will roll him into the river. After they have kicked him in the head thirty times, after they have endlessly stamped on his head, kicked him in the chest, back and stomach, punched him in the face, broken his mouth, smashed his teeth and stamped his face until he can neither see nor breathe. Then they will roll him into the river.

*****

Two boys, on bikes, on the pavement. Eleven-years-old, twelve maybe. The first boy, staring so hard, so viciously, with such a challenge that he could literally taste the pleasure of punching the boy full and hard in the face. Please, he thought, please demand to know what I’m looking at.

*****

I did, I told him, the first time I went round there at two o’clock in the fucking morning, asking him if this is what we had to look forward to all summer, his fucking dog day and night, making that fucking racket. And him going to me about the noise of my kids and me going but they’re kids you cunt, they’re kids, not fucking dogs! That fucking dog, all day and night. When I stamped on it, the little bastard, I felt its spine crack and the noise, I would never have guessed the noise.

*****

The stock phrases are always something like, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to throw her down the stairs or burn her arms with cigarettes. She was crying too much, always crying. I didn’t mean to. You don’t know what it’s like, what I have to cope with here on my own. Just me and her.

*****

Oh, snap. Bang. Crackk. Crashh. Smash. Klannnnng. Ker-Whamm. Bammmm. Ptoom. Clangggg. Pow. Blamm. Btok. Splak. Whumff. Kakk. Splaang.

*****

It flared like fireworks. Like matches in the dark. As soon as he walked through the door, the pain, searing. The heat of disorientation. The pain again, the strike, like matches in the dark. The voices telling him, pleading with him. In the dark, the cold of the outside, the pain again, the striking, the never-ending striking. Until it ends, becomes the calm and then the slower strikes, the pulse of fireflies frittering the black of the air. The slow twist pulled out of him. The crawl to the end.

*****

The boy’s reason for inviting her round tonight is a plan to get her first of all drunk and then to fuck her as many times as he can before she sobers up enough to object. It is a plan as old as the hills, of course. The boy, in normal life, under normal circumstances, is what you might call a fine, upstanding young man of good stock and breeding whose mother, were she to have the merest whiff of this dismal plan, would fetch him one so quick that he wouldn’t have time to make sense of the blow. The clock, as he watches it, rolls round to the appointed time giving the girl time to make the mistake of making him wait as he drinks longer and harder as the time passes longer and harder until, by the time she arrives – as she thinks, fashionably enough late, and late enough to teach him some vague lesson for some vague past misdemeanour – he is so angry and stupid and pathetic that he’s forgotten all about fucking her and all about his idiotic – though meticulously planned – plan. By the time she arrives he is so angry and stupid and pathetic that he swipes at her, fetches her one so quick that she has no time to register the amazement that her body has already reacted to. He lashes out again, with his fists, with his feet, with all of his might and it is only through the luck of him being so drunk and pathetic that this girl of his affections, this wonder of beauty and eroticism who has caused him many a sleepless night and many anguished days, is able to make a certain kind of escape, falling, falling as she realises, scrambling up, sobbing, frightened and lost, that she will have a hell of a job explaining any of this to her kind, loving parents who, after all, only want what’s best for her.

Cutting Open The Bean

I stood up for science and science stood up for me. We two, science and me, hand in hand on the path to, er, a certain kind of righteousness. Science with his white frock and mad hair, me sober in my black pants and brown brogues. What a combination.

As we clambered the mountain of enlightenment, science and me, we passed a load of greens who, mired as they were in their despicable backwardness, begged us to put an end to our journey. Get fucked, cunts! we shouted, before

Science is never a party to foul language. The ensuing investigation revealed a whole army of Tourettian Robots masquerading as the true voices of reason. Tch.

Science is also neither so tiny minded, nor so witlessly allegorical. But still, that didn’t stop science and me from bumming around together, doing Europe, seeing the sights and cutting new highways to the stars. Flight paths, we traversed them. We curled them, refined them. We took engines, blueprints and wishes, we pointed them to the very back of beyond. My good friend science and me.

Science and me caught fast in the academy. Shackles we smashed. Doors we kicked open. Stairs we climbed. In laboratories, sneaking in while they weren’t looking, we ventured our road maps for a brighter tomorrow, spreading goodness thinly for fear of being found. Thick goodness doesn’t wash when there are science hunters around.

Science and me were a boon to the future. We forced silver things through our bodies and wore them inside out. We dyed our hair, ripped holes in our trousers and did some of that robotic dancing. The future was ours for the asking and all we had to do was ask. Metal masters that we were, sleek as fingernails, poisoned saliva with cleverly disguised mechanical eyes that actually blinked. When tipped, we pissed ourselves.

Science and me stood in the garden and looked down at the earth. Green types had pitched their tents. The fucking cunts. We told them to

And always, science and me.

Grafted To The Inadequate

After a long break from harping it became apparent that Moncrieff was reasonably unrepentant when it came to the thorny question of his controversial tuna breaks. Like scattershot and bulletholes, he was forever dogged by the butt-numbingly familiar accusations associated with his creation of, and liking for, these vast and fishy escapes. His fans, however, were as loyal and as steadfast as the tuna he curated and, for them, Moncrieff was nothing less than a lone bright star in an endless wallow of dirt brown shit. Shine on Moncrieff! they implored, Shine on some more!

But a pattern emerged, as patterns often do, and soon, much to Moncrieff’s great relief, tuna breaks became the very thing that the very people wanted to do. The tide, so to speak, began very much to turn. And in no time at all – or rather, over a period of around three years – tuna breaks became as popular as tuna breaks were ever likely to become. In fact, that crest of popularity, at its highest level, lasted a good six years which, when you consider what tuna breaks actually are, wasn’t too bad at all.

Your Essential Guide to Tuna Breaks

Cold Comforts.
Set in the frosty morn of winter hills and valleys, through half frozen streams and battlements, you and your companions will spend a thorough and enjoyable experience experiencing the very best of all there is to experience in the wintry gasps and sunny delights of tuna carping.

Fish Feasts.
Through highways and byways, pole in hand, bags full of feed and noxious gases, the tuna, though half-frozen and perpetually spooked, will lay themselves open to all of your man-made charms so that you and your companions can regale yourselves on the delights of water-based and edifying fishy treats.

Tinned Dreams.
You can only go so far through your gargantuan break before falling prey to the desire to get out there and can it all up yourself, becoming a part of a process that, dating back many years, months and weeks, has kept all manner of goodly saintly dark-skinned and different-looking types in social plunder.

Dolphin Dents.
When the tuna comes so the dolphin comes and it’s the easiest thing in the world to catch one of these beautiful and intelligent creatures in your big net and bash it repeatedly about the body and face until it admits to the fact that, in terms of intelligence, there’s a massive drop-off between you and it.

Fanciful Fish.
According to the Legends of the Lochs there is no such thing as fanciful fish such as sea monsters, giant octopi and yellow snapping piranhas and submarines, despite all the evidence collated from the log books and photographs left behind by various sea captains and Long John Silvers and other sundry peg legs.

Swimming Backwards.
Like the venerated tuna you too will have the opportunity to swim upstream and against the tide in order to reach the place where your biological motivations and tickings have been telling you to go since the day you were born even though, in your heart of hearts, you know that this relates to salmon, and not to tuna.

Reel Life.
And finally, the whole experience can be topped off with a stare into the abyss and the realisation that in very real terms the tuna you have spent so long chasing downstream and up dale will always hate you, no matter how well you treat it, no matter how long you stroke it, no matter how nicely you poke it.

Not Solved By The Standard Model

By the time the universe ends we will have mastered time travel. We can go back in time and start all over again.

As a dedicated fantasist it is my intention to continue living my life through an endless procession of imagined other lives. One minute I’ll be a tick-tock, the next a clip-clop. When the wind blows, I’ll turn with it.

By the time the universe goes through its crimson expansion we will have climbed down from the trees. The low-hanging fruit should be enough to sustain us.

As a Corporate Responsibility Merchant it is my responsibility to take care of the corporate side of the business. Masks, balaclavas, costumes, celebrity get ups, face paints, face lifts and acid helmets are all part of my armoury of disguise. Your life in my hands.

By the time the universe turns on its lights we will have been in the dark for two million years. Our new brightness could well be our salvation.

As a council-employed snow catcher I have to know how to dodge the flakes of frozen urine. Mostly it is a case of avoiding the yellow ones. But occasionally my teeth ache from the slosh of chilly piss.

By the time the universe deals with its villains we will have been at the mercy of a seemingly endless parade of galaxy trotting tyrants. The freedoms we embrace will be the freedoms worth embracing.

As a fine-tuned commentator on the fripperies and fopperies of modern-day celebrity, I have to know my Zachary from my Albright. Lucky for me then that I have a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Excel. I can turn it on and turn it off.

By the time the universe ends we will have mastered time travel. We can go back in time and start all over again.

Lengthen The Life of Your Fence

He is party to, privy to, a couple in the evenings. He is, as a close friend – that Jack – once remarked, remarkably touchy for someone so thick fucking skinned. Jack though, it has to be said, was not noted for his sensitivity towards what we might call the touchy type. Not that he was really – and he’d be the first to insist upon it – the touchy type. It’s just shorthand, you know. And when I said, at the start, party to and privy to, I meant, of course, partial to. It makes all the difference.

Not only is he partial to a few drinks in the evenings, he is also partial to some of the bigger, and better, disgraces. At this very moment, in fact, as he makes love - as he likes to call it - to one of those sparky little tarts from his office, he imagines his wife deep in sexual betrayal with that fat fuck from across the street. That is, he has actively, happily, placed her there with that fat fuck from across the street. His poor broken wife who, at this very moment, is choosing a gift that will appropriately mark the seven years of marriage she believes she must have been forced to endure. An appropriate present, she thinks, would be the breaking of his back.

It is, naturally, not the first time he and his wife have been here. It’s just one sordid drama after another. He takes, she bites. Together they rumble on, crushing just about everything as they go. No time, nor inclination, for children, as they, in their sheer empty wretchedness, constantly tell themselves. Their lives, as pale, as thin, as open to nothing as they really are, would not, they believe, be better improved by the introduction of children. Wretches, as said. But somehow, unbelievably, they have what many would judge to be a successful marriage.

Who are these people?

Mid-thirtied, orange juiced and Sainsbury’s. They can afford to be who they are through everything they lack. They are car drivers and shirt buttoners. Weekend breaks and work trips to Europe. They are dedicated and serious drinkers - but only when they want to be. Animal rights claim their attention. As do curtains, outside paint for gates and fences, garden furniture right up to gazebos. The Independent on Sunday. The endless dirty bastards.

In their garden, past midnight, the curious wheeze of a fox, plaintive and terrified. As they lie there, breathing not breathing, they catch this fox in their imaginations, seeing in him a glorious embodiment of the freedom they think they want. The real fox, however, is on the back step, panting his last, a threadbare interpretation of the noise of nature. There are cats out there laughing at him, birdies awake in their trees. But our heroes, tied fast to their bed, snatch his blazing teeth, slice through their bonds and fly. The wings of the fox, they sigh, the wings of the fox to fly.

My Treasure Untouched

Happiness, they say, is a bone. And a howl at the gold of the moon. But what would they know?

I was, to all purposes and common practice, a little dog-ish. That is, where an occasion called for dining at the table, I would eat from the floor. Where I should have been making love in the soft of a bed, I would be fucking in public: on park benches, in bushes, round the back of the supermarket. And where I should have been spending solitary quality time with my girl – my girl! – I would hang with the pack.

But mostly I wasn’t at all dog-ish. I was just a bust in the dust. Because most of the time I simply stood around, pale and interesting, stooped with a carrier bag full of gin, smoking cigarettes in exactly the same way that Anthony Burgess used to smoke cigarettes.

As for Anthony Burgess. The gang – or the pack, if you will – that I hung with were extremely big on the Clockwork Orange homage thing that was once the thing for violent, nihilistic young men. We never went so far as the baseball get up, or the make up. But we did like the violence. And the book. Full of the yarbles, as we used to say.

But in time, my juvenile barbarism became a thing of the past. I became, as everyone now knows, a man of peace. A man of peace with a certain kind of bite.

Take, for instance, the time I was sniffing round that Kofi Annan. The blood from his hands dripping the floor, a trail of failure from his Park Avenue apartment to his office at the Plaza. It was all I could do not to lick him clean. So I bit him instead. And his crook of a son.

From there it was but a short retreat to my kennel. Where, on those not so moist days, I would lie on the roof, gazing at the sky, contemplating those navel-shaped clouds and thinking about how, through my adoption of peace and my rejection of the material world (and the company of others), I had somehow become transcendent through the surety of my superiority. Oh, the benevolences and blessings that were mine to award.

Yet, as many had predicted, my man of peace guise soon crumbled to the dust of artifice it had been made from. So back to the violence. Or, rather, back to the inclinations to violence, tempered by the previously mentioned man of peace stuff. The tricks and lies I’d picked up along the way.

Shrink To Reduce My Power

This desperado life, and the luck that comes with it, is sometimes too much for me to bear. I have seen them die, some of my boys, and I have seen them hurt and I do think that enough is enough. So like those that came before me, I will soon be throwing in the desperado towel. But not without first trawling through my past and going over some of the things I got up to while I was a desperado, having all kinds of illegal fun.

Desperado One.
I planted lightbulbs out back and waited for the lightning to strike. But the lightning didn’t strike. A waste of money on lightbulbs and still much too dark out back.

Desperado Two.
I gained the trust of three lovely old ladies who I later took advantage of sexually (I didn’t force them, I’m not like that) and also robbed. I got jewels, false teeth, hearing aids and all kinds of treasured items that could only have been of sentimental value. Bags and bags of old crap that I eventually chucked in the river.

Desperado Three.
The Eagles were performing at some Birmingham concert place in England. Me, my wife and six of my boys attended with the intention of leaving straight after they’d played their only good song, Desperado. Weren’t we the chumps though because Desperado was actually the last song they played, right at the end of the thirteenth encore. What a terrible evening. Apart from that Desperado song, of course.

Desperado Four.
I laughed at all the spazzers that came out of the garden centre where they’d been making themselves useful by getting out into the community, earning a minimum wage and growing their confidence. I laughed, pointed and threw stones at them so that at least half of the forty spazzers were so traumatised that it took months for them to be coaxed out of the house again.

Desperado Five.
There was a knock at the door. It was a young policeman. Come in, I said, what can I do for you? He started telling me how one of my boys did this and one of my boys did that. I tied him up, gagged his lying pig mouth and tossed him down the stone cellar steps. That was eight months ago. I should see how he’s getting on down there.

Desperado Six.
I shot a dog. Six times. Right in its ugly face.

Desperado Seven.
My wife decided that she’d like to put it about a bit. A difficult one for me, this, because while I may have been a free and easy desperado living a life of abandon without commitment or care, I was also a deeply conservative, possessive, jealous monster who flew into a rage if my wife so much as glanced at another man. Tricky. But after much deliberation I decided that my wife would be free to do whatever she liked so long as she understood that this concept of freedom would be extended to my reaction to her actions by way of whatever violent and destructive response I deemed appropriate. She would, as I explained, also be dicing with the possibility of death, depending on my mood. In the end, my wife decided, to her credit and to her own desperado credentials, that she would put it about a bit but not tell me that she’d been putting it about a bit. Result: a degree of sexual and emotional happiness for us both.

Desperado Eight.
I went zombie hunting in Haiti. I ran around houses, threw dust in the air and cut open the dead bodies of witchy women. I ate terrapins, flushed frogs down the toilet and burned effigies. We didn’t find any zombies.

Desperado Nine.
Bluto, that fat get from the Popeye stories, once stole my girl. Not my wife, my girl. One of my girlfriends. Having no option but to challenge him to some kind of duel, I thought long and hard about what kind of things desperadoes were supposedly good at. Sharp shooting? Starting and maintaining campfires? Bank robberies? Singing to the moon? Longing for home? Catching and keeping girlfriends? Well, some desperadoes were good at those things. But not me. So I challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. He won – if you’ll excuse the pun – hands down.

Desperado Ten.
I drew the line at killing the following: cripples, tramps, blackies, mentals, women and old people. I made a point of killing the following: oil barons, tour guides, lorry drivers, so-called love machines, taxi drivers, farmers and white London gangsters.

Rattle From The Breeze

Every morning, before I leave the house, I attach a prosthetic nose to my gnarly old face. Instead of a nose, which was eaten away by, first of all, cancer and then that MRSA superbug thing that I contracted during my spell in hospital to rid my face (by removing my cancer-ridden nose) of cancer, I have a big black hole in my face. It is, of course, quite disgusting. But at least you don’t have to look at it. I’m not forcing you to look at it. Just stick your finger in.

Have you ever seen anyone with a false nose? They try their best to make it look real but, you know, people can spot it a mile off. You should hear what the kids round here call me. My own kids are no better:

My mum’s got no nose.
How does she smell?
Fucking horrible. Like a pig in shit that’s just shit itself and smeared itself with the rotting, filthy guts of three dead cats.

Twenty years ago I was a loving young grandmother out for all I could get. Fuck everyone around me, I thought, as I strode the path of unrighteousness, picking up men, money and misery. Ah, but what did I know? Not much, as it turned out, as I ended up a love slave in a Persian harem where, among other dastardly things, a load of Arabs cut off my nose and pushed it up my arse.

No, wait, it was the cancer that took my nose, not the Arabs.

But anyway, there I lay, day after day, all tied up in a tent, naked and oily on a huge pile of scented pillows. What a picture. I mean, even before I had my nose off I wasn’t much to look at. Lord knows what those Arab lads saw in me. Still, at least I was having what you might call one of life’s little adventures.

The Underside of Grasses Frozen

Before the turn of the hearse, the butcher’s shop across the street. Mam (at the counter, her red purse open on the counter) pays for her meat with coins. I see the red death and count the black and white squares on the floor. The stench of iron and now sawdust where she stood. Along this road, the slight turn of death, as the hearse escapes me. My own mother. Because it takes us all, she said.

The amazement of sin, no trace of it in her sunken eyes. No measure of her fears now that she’s a corpse. The meanness of death, the way it averages everything, the clips of rubbish it leaves behind. How do we dispose of it best? Mother, I said, I shall leave you in hands more capable than mine.

The capture of drizzle, the decay a palpable show. I see it across the street, hanging above the waste on the wasteland. Black bags, curls of rotting metal, threadbare roots of carpet growth, the full spread of the terror of the lost. In the reflection of a red ball, disappointingly lifted by the wind, I see new troubles. As high as it goes, it keeps my smallness centred in the evil of its shiny red eye. How am I unique? she once said.

When you hear the sound of the bell, a faint ring from the back of the room, it will be time to enter. It would be appreciated if you could file in, perhaps two at a time. At the sight of the doors opening – those doors, the oak doors – I will press play on this tape player. You have set your tape to the right position? Depending on the number of guests, it will take in the region of five to ten minutes for them all to be seated. You would think that their thoughts would be with you. But their thoughts will not be with you. Their thoughts will be taken by the sound of the music. Your choice, I hope, will be enough to capture their thoughts.

How are you unique? I replied. I held her hand as tight as I could without hurting her. Although she never let on if she was in pain. I could have hit her in the face and she wouldn’t have made a sound. She said the bus didn’t stop near enough to home and that she remembered when it used to stop nearer, years ago. She pointed at the old tram lines, the trolley bus tracks. I would have told her about the new lines, for the new trams, but there would have been no point.

You will need plenty of cake. Tea bags. Sandwiches. Crisps. You will also need some whiskey for the men, some sherry for the women. Lemonade for the children. You will need a clean and cheerful front room and the bathroom has to be spotless. You should, at the least, account for four hours. After four hours you could start asking them to leave. Most will ask you how you are. Tell them you’re fine. They have their own feelings to cope with, they don’t want to be coping with yours. Tell them you’re fine.

At the back of the house a yard and out the back of the yard a toilet, the outside toilet, still with the whitewash flaking, the cobwebs, the dust from the red brick which she somehow kept clean all the years long after I’d left and long after the council had turned it off. She said she missed using that toilet, the fresh air, the snap of the dark, the dash in winter, the thrill of discovering how cold the seat would be. In summer staring up through broken tiles at the blueness of the sky. The ingrained smell of cigarettes, her packet of fags tucked behind the cistern. All those years her thinking that dad never knew. The smile he smiled whenever she nipped out to the toilet, pulling shut the back door, humming through the yard.

She lived her life for love of friends and family
(She was a selfish old cow!)
Neither asking for nor wanting a return
(Remember that time she charged me for dinner?)
Her days became a sunlit homily
(She never turned the fucking light on!)
With others' joy her joy and main concern
(She loved a bit of schadenfreude!)
When we were ill, she also became sick
(She made us clean it up ourselves!)
When we were cut, she, too, began to bleed
(Throwing bricks at kids, I ask you!)
Of our oil lamp she was the wick
(Got on our wick more like!)
Drawing her bright flame from our need
(Sucking all the energy out of us!)
Some say that such behaviour’s out of date
(Old-fashioned, lived in the past!)
That self-fulfilment is the way to grace
(Oh, she sorted herself out alright!)
But Mam, without much choice, then chose her fate
(She should have topped herself years ago!)
Finding greater truth in an embrace
(Two-faced old witch!)
She lives on in the sparkle in our eyes
(Squint to make sure she’s dead!)
Laughing, quiet, gentle, loving, wise.
(Miserable and stupid, always chucking her weight about!)

Parting the upstairs curtains they remember on this street the day they pulled up the wardrobe by rope and pulley through the bedroom window and how it fell, not so far when I look now, and smashed all over the pavement. Monthly payments, a whole house of stuff from the Co-Op, the fella turning up at the door every Thursday and us saying me mam says she’ll see you next week. Tell her she will, he always said, tell her she will. And the day when the squirrel somehow made it to our street, all the way from God knows where, this encroachment of nature as exciting to the whole street as a trip to Twycross Zoo. Mam caught it, wrapped it in her coat as we bundled on the bus all the way to Wollaton Park, letting it loose without first asking.

The mournful twist, surprised that she’s gone. A further turn, some time after the butcher’s shop, the last turn as the road takes her straight ahead. A stab at preservation, her protection from oblivion, by way of the things she cherished. But there was little she cherished. Not even her face on the stone. I struggled to find a picture of her. She didn’t fall asleep, she isn’t just resting. Goodbye and good luck.