As The June Light Turns To Moonlight

The pitter patter of tiny feet. Or the pitter patter of the rain. It taps, this thing, somewhere in the background, threatening to make things never quite the same.

His wife complains about the ticking of the clock. It has been there for some years, that clock, on the mantelpiece, ticking away, and for years his wife has complained about it. I make a point, he says, of winding the clock up because I know it winds you up. Overcoming the urge to take the clock and break the clock, preferably over his head, she leaves the room. She retreats, is the word she often uses to her friends, to the safety, as she often thinks of it, of the kitchen. And yet it’s still there, for both of them, even in their separate rooms, that pitter patter of either tiny feet or of the rain.

The following morning and their modest garden, all trimmed lawn, tiny flowers and teracotta thingies, is awash with flood. Gone are the tiny flowers. Destroyed, maybe, the lawn. She is at the kitchen window looking into the garden. From our outside vantage point, peering above a teracotta thingy, we cannot tell whether tears are rolling down her cheeks or whether those tears are, in fact, rain drops trickling along the glass. If tears, her response is a tad excessive. The garden will recover, after all.

So Dark, Up Above

The best thing I felt when I was asked what to feel was the sensation of falling rain drops falling on the back of my neck and then rolling, like little streams, towards the crack of my arse where, after a while, they made my arse wet, especially the hole, so that it felt as though I’d shit myself, a wet shit obviously, and a cold wet shit at that.

After a few days of that they locked me up and beat me endlessly, or so it seemed, for daring to shit myself even though I explained, over and over, how it wasn’t shit but rather the amassed puddle of rain water that had run from my neck and down to my arse and, through the washing over of the dirt on my back, came to bear the appearance of shitty brown water so it could, granted, seem as though I’d shit myself.

The beating stopped and I was allowed to go free.

But the outside world is cruel. And wet. The rain water, it terrified me and so I spent the next few years indoors, felching, if that’s the right word, off my mother and sipping endless bowls of soup through plastic, curly straws. I lost pounds and pounds and soon my own mother didn’t recognise me. Although, of course, she did. It was just something she said. An expression, she called it, a figure of speech. It’s me mum, I’d say every morning when she brought in my soupy, gruelly breakfast. I know son, she’d say, I know.

She had no tears, my mother, and wept nothing at all as I relayed to her my predicament at the hands of the evil fellows who carried me from my bed that night, subjected me to the rain water falls and then claimed I’d shit myself, wet shit, even though I hadn’t.

She stayed calm and collected. Her face a stone image of her face. Sometimes it cracked though, into a kind of smile. Grimace, as she called it.

Some years later, after I’d got over being skinny and gone back to being fat, I spotted, out on the street, bold as brass, one of the evil fellows who had taken glee from the fact of subjecting me to all that rain water and shitting myself bollocks.

But I was too fat to give chase. Mother, I said when I returned home later that day, we need to go back to the soup and straws.

But now, now that I am relatively at peace and calm over the fact of my predicament, I can, at last, enjoy the rain once more and sometimes I lean from my window, easing my head out, catching drops on the back of my neck but this time preventing their descent with the too tight towel I have already wrapped around my now slightly more slender neck.

Reinforce The Torn Places

Twenty-five years and they passed, like that. The next twenty-five years will, of course, also pass like that. It’s why he spends his days these days taking pictures of buildings, rather than people.

She said something about green issues which became the moment he stopped listening. Or stopped pretending to listen. No need for the nods and smiles now, no need for the frequent, but not obviously uniform, uh uhs. Green issues she said and he felt something biting.

The photograph in the silver frame, edged with complications of tendrils, showed at least the last time he could stand to look at himself. It helped that it was dusk, that he was partially covered by a tilting umbrella, that the taker of the photograph hadn’t kept the camera still. It had, he fancied, a slight touch of the Doisneau about it.

Terror ripped through the dorm room. Eighteen eighteen-year-old girls, without their nightdresses, dancing in panic. If he had only switched the light on.

She said something else about green issues, the environment and even, almost unbelievably, about saving the planet. This from a woman who had, as far as he could tell, no previous inclinations towards anything remotely altruistic. But, of course, it had nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with her. He had noticed this in others, too. It was something of a trend.

He photographed local politicians for a book he was writing or, rather, putting together. They sat, most of them, with an absence of feeling or force. He worked hard with the lighting. He took many shots in the hope of capturing something.

The headmistress used the word pandemonium. Never in all her career. The girls, she said, were genuinely frightened.

And sometimes when I’m alone, she said, when the kids are at school and my husband is at work, I weep over the fate of our planet. I do. I really do.

There was a pavilion. An old boating lake in a kind of art deco style. Great slabs of concrete with a tint, or hint, of yellow. Early frost and just the right amount of moisture. The sun rose and bounced off everything it should have bounced off. It couldn’t have been more perfect. Except for the twat with the boats and his fat mental son.

Doisneau my arse.

It bothers him perhaps more than it should. What was it? The lack of thought? The infantile posturing? The grandstanding? The easily adopted superiority? The sheer twattiness of it all? The sheer middle-classness of it all? You wouldn’t have time to make yourself worry about all of this, he said, if you had something genuine to worry about. Or even a job.

This idiot he knew, from years back, had recently contacted him to alert him to the fact of his, the idiot’s, recent questioning by police after his, the idiot’s, female friend made allegations about stalking and text messaging and all sorts of other nonsense. The idiot was once a friend, some years back, but had been discarded for being a nauseating, bed-wetting, self-pitying, self-aggrandising dickwad of a man. The last time they spoke, oh many years ago, he used the word dickwad to describe the idiot. And even then it seemed somehow lacking. Cunt would have been better, more appropriate.

He spends whole afternoons checking out, as the vernacular has it, his competitors’ online portfolios. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that gets on there.

He put the coffee on the table and listened as the boy in the pantry took ice cubes out of the tray. The headmistress emerged from the library, closing the door calmly behind her, her scalp and thinning hair all too apparent beneath the harsh hallway light. I think you should leave, she said, the girls don’t trust you any more, we’ll find someone else who can do the job.

It was surely no coincidence that the idiot from his past, who had, it turned out, been stalking an old mutual friend of theirs, shared the same green issue type views as the woman he now recalled, dimly, from somewhere in the less distant past. He remembered nothing about how she looked and nothing about how she was in bed except that when he came, he made a point, for some forgotten reason, of ejaculating on to her thigh. It was somehow a comment on all the green bollocks. The satisfaction came from the mild look of disappointment that crossed her face.