Waves Wash Over It

Down the entry, past the nappies, the old shit and the piss-stained gay pornography, there’s first of all a faint smell of death. There are low walls, kicked down in parts, kids in nappies running around. In one of the yards a Sikh fella holding down a chicken. He takes off its head with an axe while the body, naturally, runs around the yard spraying out small spots of blood. The children are delighted. Despite the death, it is all somehow removed from death on this bright and significant morning.

Tapping at the window there’s Mad Tony and he’s dancing, if that’s the right word, to the music from our front room: Bad Company’s Feel Like Makin’ Love. His sister, Angela, says that my dad plays rubbish music. Strange music, she says. She eases Tony away even though I tell her it’s fine for him to continue pressing his big ugly retarded face against the glass of our window. The spittle, the slime, it’s fine.

Early 1973, Spidey has lost his mask and is forced to steal a replacement from a fancy dress shop that specialises in superhero costumes. Thwipp and he pulls it through the skylight. Of course, this mask being a mere novelty, it doesn’t have the ingenious white plastic sheets that cover his real mask’s eyeholes. For the duration of his battles with Doctor Octopus and Hammerhead we are witness to Peter’s baby blues, staring through.

Rummaging through the sack of clothes to get to the bottom, to remove the small pieces of lead that were put there to increase the weight so they’d get a few pence more, maybe an extra quid, for this sack of clothes. He chides the kids, ticks them off with relative good humour, the sort of thing he used to do himself when he was their age but tailed with a warning: make sure that this first time is the only time. His eyes brighten when he spies the folding white stick, fingers it and offers the boy two pounds for it. Yes, says the boy, glad of the money and, of course, unaware of the stick’s antique and Edwardian status.

Every Twig is Laden

Bless the corners, he’s a-coming round the mountain, his preferred route home, avoiding the highways and byways, the shop signs and caravan parks. I, he says every time he steps triumphant through that front door, once again traversed those mountainous cuts through snowy glades and jags in order to be here with you in a state that’s purer, by far, than the state I would have arrived in had I taken a different, warmer, more urban, route. And thus he spakes, this Morton Whistler, civil servant of government depts and socials, traveller of spectacular, scary views.

And though these curved journeys were outwardly blessed by Gwendolyn, Morton’s fair and naked wife, she kept hidden her dismay at the thought of how these scenic routes kept him away from her by a matter of at least three hours every evening. Hours they could have spent together, embracing and naked, making love by the fireside and piano after the kids had gone to bed. It had, actually, bugged her somewhat for years the question of whether her husband’s protracted icy journeys were, in fact, a way of avoiding the warm embraces she so fervently craved.

Gwendolyn’s dismay was open somewhat to at least a few of the friends she kept and valued who, of similar spousal neglect and hue, were appropriately sympathetic and cooing to her hot complaints. Mine, said one, prefers women of the larger knockers. Mine, said another, runs a Scout group three evenings a week and is away during the summer. Mine, adds a third, likes to stay at work, working all hours, to bring home the crusts, the crumbs and the bacon that he thinks we expect. The point, chips in a fourth, is that we all have our crosses of burden.

And what of Morton’s spark, his journey through twinkling crevasses, through ice bright glow and steely glace? Shelves shift as he passes, the hot burst of exhaust and stabs of chemicalled poison as they slowly collapse, those icy shelves, blocking old trails, creating new grooves, every different day new and unexplored, unspoilt vistas for him to tread down, to cut a lonely path through.

Gwendolyn, her adventure: rises one morning to raise his breakfast and kids, to get them packed to school early to give her the chance, while her husband organises his hat and scarf combo, to sneak unseen into the boot of his car where she’ll remain all day accompanied only by her small knapsack of torch, book, snacks and water. Warm clothing, of course.

She is discovered minutes later when Morton throws his briefcase into the boot.