Short Story Compilation - by Paul Evans.

OK, I cheated - it’s nearly 2012 and I need to write a new story because the one I wrote for December has been corrupted in a document.

And I’m so busy, I haven’t had time to try and write it again. But I will do - even if I don’t get round to it till the summer.

 

“I don’t know, really. That’s why I’m here. I know it seems illogical – irrelevant, really…”

“Get to the point, Beatrice.”

“Who are you, Darren? A journalist, or something? You’re not even the group therapist. Anyway, as I was say-”

“Fat chance of her saying anything - the so-called bloody therapist, I mean. Says she’s paid to listen. Well, let’s see how Miss Goody Locked-Chops likes this. Let’s see how bloody far we can push her, shall we? Yeah, gang. Let’s insult her. See if she answers properly, instead of just asking ‘Who do you belong to?’ and answering whatever they say with ‘How does that make you feel?’”

“Haven’t you ever heard of not biting the hand that feeds you? Anyway, as I was saying, before you interrupted me, my answer to our therapist’s question is - I don’t know who I belong to. So that’s why I’m here, Darren. At least I belong here – just until I can find a better place. It’s like life itself, really: we’re all just passing through.”

“Didn’t you belong to your family?”

“Well, er – er, Miss…have you got a name?”

“Caroline. Just call me Caroline.”

“Well, Caroline, yes. But it’s a question of where my family belongs. As long ago as I could talk people used to ask my mum, ‘Where do you come from?’ and she’d say: ‘Tottenham’. And then they’d just look at her, waiting for her to elaborate - be more specific, if you like. If the mood took her, she’d just stay quiet and then they’d walk off. Although sometimes she’d say ‘Orlando East’ and they’d look at her as if to say Where’s that? Is it Robert Kilroy-Silk’s constituency? And that’s what I used to find so bloody frustrating about these people…”

“White people, Beatrice?”

“No, Caroline. Ignorant people. People who want to pin a label on you. People who wouldn’t accept my mother as British. People who, when she kindly avails them with her origins, just scratch their heads and say ‘Where?’ because they’re so uneducated that they couldn’t pin her birthplace on the globe, let alone a map of Africa. Total strangers, total idiots. There’s my mother, generous in providing them with a detailed answer, and what do they do? Do they ask her about her birthplace and let her enlighten them about one of Soweto’s oldest provinces? No. I’ll tell you what they do. They look at her with even more distant eyes and tell her they’ve never even heard of Orlando East so she must be even stranger than they thought she was. And now Mother is dead. So, you see, I belong to no-one.”

 

“Thank you, Beatrice. Now it’s your turn – yes, you. Name, please?”

“My Boyfriend’s Dick.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“And I’m Sharon. He’s sitting right here… Dick Terrapin, everyone calls him.”

“We only use first names here, Sharon. And why can’t he speak for himself?”

“Ooh, sorry Caroline. Anyway, as I was saying, Dick here is my bloke. Oh look, can I say something, make a comment?”

“If you must.”

“It’s like this: It would be nice to have a bit more – a bit more space, that’s it. It’s just that it’s a - well, it’s a big room, don’t you think? And we’re all huddled together in such a tight circle that I can smell things like aftershave, and what the other patients had for breakfast.”

“Caroline doesn’t like to call us patients, Shaz. But you wouldn’t know much about tight circles, would you? Look, Class! What’s her name and where does she come from? Well, it’s Sharon Stiletto and she’s from Essex…”

“Darren.”

“Yes Shaz?”

“Shut the fuck up. Dick isn’t the first and he may not be the last. But he’s here, with me. Which is more than you’ll ever be. You just interrupt women all the bleedin’ time. You’re nothing but an awful mythologist!”

“I think you’ll find it’s misogynist, Sharon.”

“Sorry Caroline.”

“No don’t apologise. Anyway, you were saying?”

“I was just commenting on how we’re all huddled up here together – a bit too together, if you see what I mean. As I said before, everyone here can smell my Dick.

It’s only his teeth. But perhaps next week, Caroline, it might be…”

“Yes, Sharon?”

“Perhaps next week it might be a good idea if you could re-organise the chairs. Or hold the meeting in a smaller room. It’s very bad Kung Fu in here.”

“I think you mean Feng Shui. Dick – it’s definitely your turn now. Tell the class who you belong to.”

“Difficult, this one. But I belong to Sharon, I s’pose. Bit of a long story. Has the class got time, Caroline?”

“I’m sure they have, Dick. We’re not going anywhere, are we? And anyway, young Darren here only ever interrupts women. So you’ll have no problems there. Will he, Darren?”

“Thank you Caroline. And Class. Right, well, my story goes like this…

 

                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Dick Terrapin clung to a rock. Not an easy thing to do, that – especially when the crevices aren’t in the right place.

“Did we do the right thing?” he said, as confidently as the form of his question could allow.

Sharon clutched his hand. She usually clutched her handbag, but her lover had persuaded her not to bring her baggage on the trip. He wasn’t necessarily using the word ‘baggage’ in a literal sense but Sharon was too much of a literal person to understand that he didn’t actually mean for her to leave her handbag behind. Too much of a stupid person, really.

Dick had also persuaded her to give up smoking. So Sharon was lost. She knew where she was, but she had nothing to do with her hands.

“Give you a leg-up?” he offered.

“You could give me a leg-over, except that all this rock-climbing’s wearing me out.

Lots of aches and pains, too. Still…” She giggled nervously. “It’s a good way to get me to give up all that promise-stuff you and the class were always on about.”

“Promiscuity, Sharon. Still, it is a promise of sorts, I suppose.”

 “Whatever. Anyway Dick, was it that group therapy session that made you decide to run away?”

“Let’s get several things straight,” Dick said, sounding rather formal – fatherly, almost.

Sharon thought of her father. Maybe this wasn’t right. 

“First of all,” Dick said, sternly, “I didn’t decide to run away. It’s a joint venture – it takes two to – tango. ” He hesitated when using that last word. If she’d dared to ask for a fizzy orange drink then he’d have to phone the Metaphor Police who would finally cart her off to the Planet Bloody Obvious. “Therapy, Sharon, can only enhance the decision that was already there in the first place.”

Sharon looked lost and Dick looked lustful. She may have been stupid but out here among the mountains he was an animal. She’ll do. 

And that was the real deal between these two - the essence of their joint journey.

Dick was clever and adventurous. Dick could take her places, show her things that would impress her. Even if she didn’t always fully understand. And Sharon? Well, lust-inducing and bust-seducing came into his mind. All the time.

So here they were, sitting on a somewhat unforgiving piece of rock, lost among the Scottish Highlands.

Oh, and Sharon had already forgotten the name of the mountain and Dick was tired of explaining. She’d ditched her handbag, her promiscuity – everything had been sacrificed for an indefinite period. But not her stilettos, those trusty symbols of Essex-girl-dom that were still to be found at the depths of her rucksack.

Perhaps she should’ve brought her handbag anyway and then danced around it?

Those shoes were a euphemism for how Sharon was feeling now. A weapon, almost. Though not in a literal sense. Then again, they had sharp heels…

So the shoes had to stay because there was no other reference point to her home life.

“I want to go home,” she said, simply.

“Only if you go back with me for another session,” pushed Dick.

“Oh, alright. Just one.”

Sharon was in no position to drive a harder bargain because there was no-one else to drive her home. 

                                          

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

“Good of you two to come back. Now, for the benefit of those class members who weren’t with us during our last session, can you enlighten us, Dick, with the early part of your life?”

“Thank you Caroline. Sure can. Now, I know we only use first names here, but Terrapin isn’t my real name. I won’t tell you what it is, but it’s something with ‘slow’ in it. You see, at school I was really bad at Games so it was kind of inevitable that they all began calling me ‘Tortoise’. Even the teachers used to join in, in those days.”

“Mine used to, too!”

“Christ, Class, did you hear that? Caroline actually made a confession!”

“I warned you about Darren didn’t I, people? Dick, the floor’s still yours.”

“As I was saying, Caroline, teachers were right bullies in our day. So I learned to stick up for myself by telling jokes. And then when I left I got this job in a nightclub – Flash Harry’s. In the East End. It’s not like Orlando East, Beatrice. Not that I’ve ever been there, you understand. But unlike some I do know where it is. Anyway, Brick Lane is where the club was - near where the Bagel shop is now. And Dad used to work in the Columbia Road flower market. I’d see him setting out his stall on my way home. At first I used to collect glasses. Then when I was old enough to work behind the bar, and business was quiet, the manager – Mr Whipright – used to let me get up on stage and tell a few jokes. Well, one day the boss from a brand-new club down the road came in and saw my act. If Whipright had known he was the boss he’d never have let him in – he was territorial, was Whipright, very wary of any competition.

Anyway, my act that night consisted of taking the piss out of the new club. 

Whipright, you’d think, would’ve been delighted. But he wasn’t best pleased.

Bought me a drink, he did. Then he told me that, how ever much of a piss-take my material was, mentioning the other place would only encourage punters to go down there out of curiosity, sort of thing. And then he said he was going to sack me. It was ‘nothing personal’, as he put it. But Whipright just lifted his glass and said, “Cheers”.

Which is where Bobby King, the owner of the new club, stepped in and introduced himself.

I’d seen Bobby from where I was standing on the stage, just didn’t know who he was that’s all. But I recognised him as being the guy who fell about laughing, even though he didn’t seem pissed. So I had my last drink from Whipright that night and my first one from King – one after the other.

And there, with BK as everyone used to call him, I stayed – in Heaven. At Spitalfields. Doing stand up. For nineteen years.”

“Which is where you met Sharon?”

“Yes it was, Darren. It was silly, really, but my first night working for BK was a big landmark in the career. I was on fifty quid a night and I desperately needed some new material to stay fresh – stay in work, really. In the week between working for the two clubs I’d thought about how one chapter of my career - the apprenticeship, if you like - kind of ended with one drink. And about how the next instalment began with a second drink, that pint that BK bought. And it all started there, really…”

“Your drinking?”

“No, Caroline. For Heaven’s sake! Never touch the stuff – except when I’ve just come off stage. You therapists are all the same. Always looking for…”

“A problem?”

“Yes. Always finishing off other people’s sentences, too.”

“I’m sorry. But you didn’t finish that other sentence, did you Dick?”

“No. The case went to appeal.”

“Perhaps we’ll find some time to talk about that later?”

“I’m sure we will. Anyway, then I began to develop this kind of extreme ventriloquist act.

I’d make myself a puppet - someone topical. Saddam Hussein was one of them, in 1990 during the first gulf war. And then I’d argue with the puppet on stage, right up to the point where the audience would become so hostile towards him that I’d disappear behind the curtain and turn on the sound effect of a liquidiser.

Then I’d appear up front again with what was supposed to be the puppet in liquid form and pour him into a bottle.

I’d rant and rave against the dumb effigy for five minutes or so, working the audience into a frenzy. And all of a sudden, without warning – and usually during a particularly nasty heckle – I’d make the sound of Saddam’s liquidised voice appear to come from inside the bottle. Saddam would be asking me pathetically if I’d let him out. I’d refuse, of course, then I’d tease him by opening the lid a little and his little voice would become bigger and louder.”

“Sounds like a kind of grown-up pantomime, really. To me, anyway.”

“Caroline, you’ve hit the nail right on the head. But I bet you can’t guess the next bit. You see, before you knew where you were Saddam was full-voiced again and pouring himself all over some bloke’s bird on the front table…”

“Hey, listen to that, Sharon! Dick, here, has brought misogyny to new heights, hasn’t he? Referring to women as ‘birds’ and all that…”

“And what would you know about other men, Darren? Second thoughts, I reckon you know quite a lot. I reckon you’re some kind of underground, uphill gardener…”

“Oh shut up, Sharon. And Darren. I know you’re my girlfriend, but you’re behaving as badly as he is. Can I continue with my story? Even though you’ve heard it loads of times before and you’re a big part of it…”

“Yeah. But you haven’t got to my bit yet, have you? I wanna hear all about when we met…”

“Okay. But before I tell the class, what did you mean just now about Darren being an uphill gardener?”

“I meant that he’s a closet queen.”

“Be quiet. All three of you! Well, not you, Dick. But stop arguing. Actually Dick, you still haven’t told my group how you made the transition from Tortoise to Terrapin. Would you care to enlighten us?”

“Caroline, Group - it’s like this. Mr. King thought me having the nickname Dick Tortoise would give the impression that my act was a bit on the slow side. But Dick Terrapin, he reckoned, made me seem a little bit like the famous dandy highwayman. Legendary, mysterious. Rich. I told King that he probably meant Dick Turpin. Then he gave me this little lecture about how he, himself, was a kind of Dick Turpin, coming as he did from the North where everyone believed that London’s streets were paved with gold. Then I tried to tell him ‘Don’t you mean Dick Whittington’, but he would only say: ‘Get on with it’. So I got back on stage and performed my Saddam-in-a-liquidiser act for a new bunch of punters who’d just arrived. Young Conservatives, they were. So I adapted my act slightly and got out my Leopoldo Galtieri puppet instead. And then,  putting on my best Margaret Thatcher wig, I liquidised the former Argentinian dictator and spat him out all over the girlfriend of their new chairman-elect.
Which is where I met Sharon. The Young Conservatives brought in their own headline act, you see – a bunch of Essex girls and two black backing singers from Soweto. One of them was called Beatrice…oh, there’s no need to curtesy, Bea.
Funny really; it’s like we’ve stopped being entertainers and started over as patients. So we all already know each other, this class. Which makes you, Caroline, the outcast…”
“Well what if I am? Anyway, I told you before – you’re not patients.”
 “Sorry, Doc. Anyway, Sharon was there, up-front, doing her karaoke impression of Christina Aguilera. You must know that song ‘Genie in a Bottle’? Well, I knew Sharon was capable of breathing new life into my act so I managed to persuade her that we should get together and amalgamate my ventriloquist routine with her band  and she agreed. We did it kind of unofficially - without BK’s knowledge, let alone his permission.
One night, to King’s horror, we all got on stage together and sang ‘Iraqi in a Bottle’.
The idea was, you see, that one of Saddam’s opressed citizens would suddenly jump out of the bottle, turn into a soldier – and kill him. It was the old Saddam-in-the-liquidiser act in reverse, really. Some oppressed Iraqi or other would start off as liquid and then he’d morph into a mercinary and swallow Saddam up.”
“Punch and Judy for the oppressed?”
“Very astute! Ever thought of becoming a theatre critic rather than a therapist?
Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t answer the questions. You just listen, don’t you?
Well listen to this: BK had just had a row with his wife. He was angry, spoiling for a fight. King leapt up on the stage, apologised to the enthusiastic crowd – and used all his might, not to mention his ever-increasing girth, to throw me off…throw me to the lions, so as to speak. But when I landed brain-first on to one of the cabaret tables I was the one pretending to be the liquid this time. And Sharon and the band just improvised around me, singing ‘He’s the Cockney in the Bottle, come on in and let me out…’. Then guess what happened?”
“I’ve no idea, I’m sure.”
“Well, BK did let me out. Of my contract.”
“Which is why you ended up here?”
“Yep. Turns out this bloke in the audience was quite influential at this new club called   
The Jerricho. A stroke of luck, I thought. The Jerricho, you see, was a huge comedy venue - a bit like the Jongleurs for discovering new talent. It, too, was just around the corner, only not quite as big. But they say lightening never strikes twice in the same place. And neither does good luck, it would seem. Oh, yeah, I’d jumped ship again.
But the second Gulf War was just beginning. Of course, it wasn’t really a case of the first war being any less serious - I know that. A cousin of mine knew someone who was caught up in one of Saddam’s early purges as long ago as 1980. He was shot and made an example of. That was serious. But somehow, the fact that the dictator had reared his ugly head once again in the new Millennium had somehow rendered him off comedy limits. I’m not convinced, as it happens, that this was the real reason why they sacked me - I think it was more to do with the fact that one of the barmaids I met there turned out to be fifteen. Kerry became worried that both she and her manager would be sacked if the police ever found out. And so we both cut our losses.”
“You both jumped ship?”
“Yeah, Doc. Ran away together. It was only supposed to be until we could work out what to do. And then I got arrested for harbouring an underage girl and sentenced to…”
“Not sentenced, Dick. We call it treatment, here. Or therapy. Whichever you prefer.”
“You never told me that bit, you little shit!”
“Language, Sharon. Language!”
“Sorry, Caroline. But Dick never told me that his first session here was part of a punishment… that he was being rehabituated because of his liking for under-aged
girl-”
“Habilitated – oh, never mind. Carry on, one of you… one at a time.”
“We went fellwalking, Sharon. That’s all me and Kerry did, trust me. You yourself know how treachorous the Scottish Highlands can be when you’re inexperienced…”
“Well, I may be inexperienced as a walker. But at least I’m not some little virgin you take up a mountain for a quick open-air shag. You took me to the same place? The place you went with her?” 
“Yeah, but our’s was a holiday, our trip last week.”
“Well, I’ve got news for you, Mister Liquid-Dick. I won’t be playing my tune for you anymore – not on stage, not in bed, not up a bleedin’ mountain. Not never.”
“It’s not ever, Sharon, I think you’ll find.”
“Caroline.”
“Yes Sharon?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
.
 

                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 

 

Dick Terrapin walked tentatively up the steps and on to the stage.
His first night at the Pink Biscuit hadn’t really begun, but he intended staying in slow-motion.
Terrapin stood earnestly in front of his new prop - a yard of ale glass, half full of beer.
Who would the beer become? He hadn’t yet decided, though he knew he’d better make it quick.
Dick liked to work like this.
He’d use the adrenelin of being on stage to come up with something. Oh, he had a stand-by script but as usual he didn’t need it. Adrenelin always worked.
Terrapin squinted. The lights were brighter here, the pay larger. And so, he figured, were the consequences. Did he know anyone here? Any former bosses or bird-baggage to be afraid of? Perhaps there were some future ones he could impress?
He could barely make out the gender of anyone here at the Pink Biscuit, much less give them a more precise identity. I mean, that girl over there, he thought – she could be a man. No, she looks like a woman sure enough, but this place didn’t have the word ‘pink’ in its name just for the Hell of it. Dick recognised her, for sure. Or him. “Uphill gardener!” shouted the heckler.
“Shut up, Darren!” Dick shouted back. “I’ve heard you only interupt women.”
“Well, I don’t when I am one! We’re all drag artists here, Dick. Or haven’t you noticed? You’re just the warm-up man. We’re off to the real gig later. Wanna come and join our cast?”
Memories of a review he’d read of the alternative gay musical Darren was talking about suddenly appeared inside Dick’s head. Alternative, because – guess what – none of the cast was gay. But, sure, they actually liked dressing up, Terrapin certainly couldn’t help noticing. He could spot a fake a mile off, someone who was doing it just for the money.
Terrapin’s eyes were gradually becoming accustomed to the audience and he tried not to let them drift back to the stage, just in case the spotlight blinded him again.
“Only if you join me here first,” Dick eventually said.
Darren and his fellow actors filed on to the stage, and Dick’s eyes were so in tune with the audience now that he began to notice a blonde but shadowy figure appear sheepishly at the back, just inside the exit sign.
“And who do you belong to?” shouted a sheepish Sharon, parroting Caroline’s favourite line, her black skirt and matching top standing out like a shop girl among hippies. Yeah, black; the girl was giving the impression that she was in mourning for the death of some person or other – some thing, as it turned out, a thing that was a relationship, the components of which (she thought) were very much still alive. 
When Sharron didn’t get the answer she was looking for she looked philosophically at Dick, as if she was telling herself, ‘Well, I took a gamble and I haven’t got the man. So now I’m going quietly’.     
“Who do I belong to, Sharon?” came the delayed answer from the man who deals in bottles, effegies of dictators –and, allegedly, under-aged girls.“I’ll tell you. I belong to them!”
And then the entire camp cast of the alternative ‘Little Women’ began to sing ‘He’s a jolly good fellow’, tossing Terrapin into the air during the impromptu premier of their routine that was taking place without warning and in the wrong venue.
As the crowd tossed, the comedian landed alternatively in the arms of men in pink hats and women wearing leather jackets, motorbike helmets and pelmets (or whatever they call miniskirts these days). Several times, until it hurt.
Sharon waited for the whole house to conga their way out.
Then she quietly turned around in the empty auditorium and used the exit door in the way it was originally intended.

“I couldn’t help it. It was as if something inside possessed me - the Devil, perhaps. Or one of his minions. Does the Devil delegate? In a séance, maybe, when you put your fingers on top of the marmite lid and he spins across the ouija board, spelling out the letters H-I-T-L-E-R.”
“So you’re saying that money is the route of all evil?”
“Not if you’re born into it. A leopard never changes its spots, the Devil never cuts off his horns. And during my teenage-hood - which was only very recent, of course - I’d noticed that quite a few boys at school got horny whenever anyone mentioned Jordan. In Media Studies, Mr. Moledew had tried to get the class discussing how much of a celebrity’s life is real, and how much is just pure hype. And all I can remember thinking is How much of Jordan is real?”
“And the boys?”
“They didn’t care, they just wanted to grab some of it for themselves.”
“And so did you, in a manner of speaking.”
“Yes. So when I won the quarter of a million quid I didn’t even tell Hope. That’s what money does for you. Your best friend and you - once joined at the hip, now completely annihilated.”
“You mean alienated.”
“I just mean that we’re no longer friends. It’s tragic.”

Christian picked up his umbrella. Incredibly, he’d forgotten it was raining. It had even slipped his mind that he’d dived into the woods for shelter in the first place - until just now. Until he read the interview with Chance in Bitez Magazine, finally arriving at the word ‘tragic’.
Now he was noticing that the droplets of rain, though relatively few and far between, were beginning to destroy the page of the girl’s magazine.
He stuffed the pages back into her bag without even folding them.
What irony, he thought. There Chance was - this largely unknown lottery winner from Cheddar - telling the journalist how unreal all this was.
And there Christian was, meeting the young woman who Bitez had dubbed ‘The People’s Wannabe’, and discovering that she was very unreal indeed, on account of the fact that she was dead.

The last time Christian had been out in a thunderstorm this bad was the morning when Diana had died. Back then, something had touched him - he didn’t know what, but on that occasion he’d become anaesthetised to the effects of the storm.
And (and he knew this was a ridiculous and laughable theory, because he’d tested it out on his only friend) when he’d looked up into the sky and seen the huge, electric sparks breaking up the clouds he had likened the shape of one of them to Princess Diana herself. He’d even given it a name - a private name, as you would a constellation that you dedicate to a loved one. Only this particular ‘constellation’ never reappeared.
‘Queen of Sparks’, like its near-nickname-sake, was a one-off.

But now, today, reality was starting to kick in. Okay, then - he’d been the lucky one. Lightening hadn’t struck his umbrella but, the way things were going now, he was looking at an, ooh, an eight-stretch after remission. At least. That’s what his mate Gary had once got for accidentally running down a small boy. Gazza hadn’t deliberately gone over the limit, of course - speed or alcohol. No. Some Devil-incarnate had spiked Gazza’s drink. Christian could remember the article vividly. It had eerie similarities to this one, the one he’d just read. But soon it wouldn’t just be Bitez who wanted to profile Chance Clements…

*****************************************

“Nobody can imagine what the friends and family of Chance Clements are going through as we read this. So the Cheddar Clarion has only one message to the people of Somerset. Pray.”
Hope had awoken at five-thirty sharp. She didn’t know why; she had even less idea how. And ‘why’ and ‘how’ were, indeed, the very un-rhetorical questions that last night’s newspaper editorial she was about to read had struggled to find the answers to, on account of their not even knowing that Chance would soon be dead.
Hope’s best friend had been missing for four days, now. She knew the local press were asking lots of questions but, up till that jolting moment of realisation, she’d been at a loss to provide any clues.
Hope had had lots of hope, but to the local paparazzi Hope was hopeless.

She read the article, then she threw the newspaper down on the kitchen floor.
“When Chance was little - about nine, I think,” Hope thought, out loud, “she got lost on the Common. Back then, she’d just kept walking, walking, walking. Until a young man of about Eighteen, who was wearing a very unfashionable raincoat, stopped her. Chance had told him about how she likes to walk when she has problems. How it helps ‘clear the air’ as she herself precociously put it. And how she would often stop walking, then turn round and go back the other way, once the fresh (and often very wet) Mendip air had breathed a new solution into her. Well, actually, she hadn’t said that last bit. Not those exact words. But apparently, Mum told me, the boy had remarked to her, when she finally picked Chance up safely from his mother’s house, that Chance seemed very mature for her age. I don’t know what happened to that! Anyway, the boy’s mother said that her son was ‘Seventeen, going on Fifty’. And that, had the timing been different, they might have made a good couple (Mum had tried to ignore that bit). Oh, yes, and his name was Christian. And then Christian’s mum went on and on about how you worry so much about your children. ‘Even if you have six of the little buggers like me’, as she’d put it. ‘Each one is so very, very different’.
Mum used to tell me this story so many times. And this is where I myself walk into the plot because then I got out of the car and Christian’s mum saw me, and screamed.
I wasn’t different from Chance at all, was I? It must have frightened her, I suppose.
Well, anyway, I bet Chance is out walking now.
Along her favourite route.
And I bet it’s something to do with the weather - has to be.
She’ll be sheltering in a wood, or stubbornly walking on through the rain, like her favourite song says, that anthem sung by Gerry and the Pacemakers.”
Hope threw on her coat.
Unusually for anyone who’s female-and-all-there, there was a spare button bobbing around on her knees as she ran out of her flat. She’d used the wrong holes, but as she ran she still didn’t notice.

By the time she’d arrived at the scene of her twin sister’s death Hope had already sensed Chance’s fate. She’d alerted the services - all three services, just in case.
The all-encompassing professional business that now surrounded her failed to surprise, though when the worst was confirmed it intruded upon her immediate grief.
The paramedics’ adrenelin had died with the patient, reducing their urgency to eating sandwiches. Now, they seemed like any other workers on their tea break. But the ‘forensics’ were swarming around like flies, though only the small crowd of onlookers on the common actually made any noise.
And Christian was just standing there, looking helpless, as the lone female constable asked him questions, struggling to make herself heard above the din of approaching squad vans.
The murder enquiry (including a solitary journalist pursuing her own line of enquiry) formed an unintentional ambush for any future traffic.
And when it came, the handful of civilian drivers halted and tutted. They were ‘in the know’ and therefore in the habit of using this early-morning rat-run of a virtual cart track that didn’t feature on any map. It had taken a death to blow their collective cover.
And then Christian saw Hope.
And Hope recognised Christian.
And Christian pretended to throw his brolly into the bush, in a gesture which suggested ‘I give up. I didn’t do it.’
What he actually said was: “You all think I did it, so you might as well arrest me for the murder of Hope’s twin sister anyway, and if you like you can have my DNA. It’s all over her magazine. It’s the bonus prize. After all, it was a competition that killed her, right? None of us knows exactly how - yet. But we all know the bloody lottery is responsible and so if I ever win it I’m going to buy Camelot and close it down. But I won’t, because I’ll be locked up. Because you all think it was me.
It’s a lost cause. I’m a lost cause. End of story. I’ve fallen into a trap and that’s that.”
And then Christian screamed.
He screamed so loudly that it took Hope back to about eleven years previously when Chance had done that runner as a little girl and Christian’s mum had been dishing out her speech about how each child is ’special’ and ‘different’, before seeing Chance’s twin and freaking out.
Only it was Christian himself who was was freaking now, but for a totally different reason.
He couldn’t help himself: “You’ve er, you’ve got… you’ve got no… ”
She’d only seen the eccentric young loner a couple of times subsequently. But Hope had long since sussed that the man in the raincoat was no prude.
She knew Christian wasn’t seeking a tame euphemism for the word ‘tits’.
What the young man was searching for was an answer.
And even though he and Hope both knew this was a somewhat inappropriate moment they steeled themselves for the question they both knew was coming next.
“Just tell me, Hope,” Christian said, without hesitating this time. “Just let me know. I’m sorry I need to know, but I do. You’ve got no boobs, have you? None to talk of, anyway. I’m so sorry to be so direct, but we both know its true. So did it bother you, too? Like it did your sister, I mean?”
As he said the word ’sister’, Christian symbolically and respectfully lay his brolly down where the body had been. Despite his raincoat, there was something almost innocent and quite un-dirty about this curiosity. Hope happily replied.
“It wasn’t even a source of worry for Chance. Not as far as I know. And I would have been the first to know, believe me. But when she won all that money, she just had to get them blown up with silicon. Because she could.”
And as Hope pronounced the word ’silicon’ she sort of cried a bit, laughed a bit, stuttered a bit. It was as if ’silicon’ represented both ’silly’ and ‘con’. Two meanings in one single, all-purpose word. Buy the sponge, get the carwash free. Only it was money that had cleaned away her twin sister. This was as tragic as it was laughable - funny, even, in a sort of chronic, ironic, tragically-surreal sort of way.

*****************************************

Two separate editions, one editorial:
“Nobody can imagine what the friends and family of Chance Clements are going through as we read this. So the Cheddar Clarion has only one message to the people of Somerset. Pray.”
This was a newspaper first.
Except that the identical words in today’s edition now served as a post-script to the more factual and (somewhat sadder) story that preceded it:
‘Chance Clements was killed by money, an unnecessary boob job, lightning… and a wire bra. With one strike through the heart she was whisked away from the identical sister who loved her so dearly - so ‘thoroughly’ as Hope herself puts it, in an exclusive interview on Page Nine. The twin, younger by a mere thirty minutes, tells how neither sister had been provided with a shape that ever required them to wear a bra. And so they didn’t. Until the op… ‘
Christian flicked nervously to Page Nine.
“In the end, it was the lightening on Chance’s under-wired breasts that killed her. A bolt from the blue, if you like. And you know what was really sad about this whole incident? The crumpled message to my sister, a note she always carried in her bag, but this time all screwed up next to the magazine article Christian had been reading about her operation.”
“What had you written to her?”
“The chorus line of Chance’s favourite song: ‘Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart… ‘
Only Chance had crossed out the word ‘hope’ and re-written it with a capital ‘H’.”

She’s giving me strange, fleeting glances and I’m doing the same back.
We should be ignoring each other but we’re the only ones here.
She looks bemused, confused – abused, even.
Eventually her face tells me she needs me, so I say “Harry,”
And she says: “Selly!”
“Silly?” That was a silly thing for me to say so we’re back to square one. I’m probably not going to get away with this. Then again, I can’t have been the first stranger to call her a word that means slightly less than stupid. Surely Selly has been Silly before?
 
Actually it breaks the ice, although her saturated face is still static.
She’s survived against the odds of the weather (and probably a man).
Underneath the hood of that big yellow cape she looks like a drowned rat – a rat that thinks it’s a cat that’s just been granted another life.
I’m glad she didn’t notice me before because all my senses were pulling together to fight the wind.
And now that they’ve pulled back along with the storm, I’ve suddenly uncovered another one.
Thirst.
I’d die for a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, even though I’m a man whose mother tells her friends that her son’s best pal’s first name is Jack (but not that his surname is Daniels).
 
“Selly. It’s short for Selina!”
I needed that explanation.
By the time I’d worked it out for myself the storm would’ve whisked me off to whisky heaven.
I’d better stay here with her, I’m thinking - here, in this force-ten gale.
I mean, that sheer drop to the sea - she wouldn’t, would she?
There’s a bloody teashop just up the road from the pub.
Then again, the thought of food is enough to keep me going, but cholesterol is no collateral when convincing someone that they don’t want to die.
 
Selina, I discover later, is an apparently suicidal girl whose spiritual home is among the spirits - a girl who’s focused the mind of a man away from his own brand of spirit and onto a cape and a cake.
She’s fragile this morning because last night she was nearly going to die.
 
“Can we start again?” I offer.
“I know your name but I certainly don’t know you,” she says.
I tell her what she needs to know because sympathy is the last thing you offer to someone hell-bent on suicide; sympathy is for the devil.
I must be getting something right because she’s holding out her windswept, shaky hand as if to introduce herself all over again.
I sense that she and I share compatible secrets, only unlike me her hand isn’t shaking because of last night’s alcohol or this morning’s wind.
What Selina is wanting me to know, I guess, is that she is shaking all over because her body has been frozen into a dilemma:
Shall I jump, or shall I just let the wind blow me over? That’s what she must be thinking! And I’m the one with the power to veto that decision.
So, at this moment, I’m her worst enemy – or her favourite hero.
I’m going to let her live of course, if only because I sense that any minute now her story will replace the storm and erupt all over me.
I’m going to become her friend.
Her relatives? You can forget about those.
Selina’s father, I’m about to discover, would scarcely have rattled his cup and saucer in his distracted attempt to discover whether or not Selina’s so-called suicide attempt last night was assisted by the strong Rhossili wind.
Odd that: A drink-laden stranger is ready to take on the challenge, but not the girl’s own father.
 
“My dad owns a teashop,” Selina announces, her whole left arm pointing inland.
It’s a gesture that makes Selly, in her oversized yellow cape, appear like a very young lollipop lady.  
“I’m Harry,” I offer, starting all over again.
Selina smiles.
This is good. This is working.
Maybe I should turn professional, wear a white coat and spend the rest of my life rescuing Selinas in their bright yellow capes. It beats being beaten by the booze for a hobby.
“Selina Ross,” she announces.
Then the smile drops and Selina suddenly looks scared again – as if I’m going to section her for a century.
The wind changes direction, I stop acting like a doctor and then she says:
“Go on!”
I don’t know what she means, so I stay silent.
“If you’ve got half a brain you’ll be able to work it out for yourself!”
“I’ve got a whole one, thanks!”
I don’t tell her that it’s only the weather that’s preventing me from keeping half of that brain inside my trousers.
I sense that if I don’t say too much we’re going to get along just fine.
 
And then after a long silence she announces:
“Let me tell you something.
“When I first went to senior school, Harry, it didn’t take my classmates long to sus that my name, when printed on the school register, actually reads:
‘Ross, Selly’.”
“You mean, your name is - well, sounds like - this place. Only backwards!”
I make her say it. It’s her prerogative. It’s her name.
“Ross - Selly. You like?” she teases, in tell-the-tourist-the-time mock-pigeon English.
“I’m not deaf, Selly-Ross,” I shout playfully. “I am old, though. But I’m worth it!”
 “My father’s so old that he’s never even noticed the shampoo commercial you’re referring to,” Selina says, pointing vaguely towards the family teashop again.
I tell her that she looks like the youngest lollypop lady in Wales.
She laughs.
I kind of like it.
                                  
- 888888888888888888888888888 -
 
 
For Commander Crypton, it had been a typical Monday.
The takings had hardly reached an all-time high, nor the number of customers an all-time low. An average day for an average life.
Monday morning had always been a time for staff and regulars to tread on eggshells, but not seashells.
“Seashells are this café’s livelihood, whether their contents be edible or their shells shelved,” Charles Crypton would tell you cryptically, before pointing to the café’s shelves to make you understand.
Then you’d spend as little time admiring his vast collection as politeness allows.
And then you divert your eyes to the battle scar on the Commander’s neck but you don’t mention the Navy itself because he, in turn, will divert his attention towards his staff.
“Flora, the floor -”
As I gaze upwards to a photo of the owner, in which he appears to be bathing his granddaughter in a tiny paddling pool, I observe that Crypton’s tone sounds as archaic as those clichéd Welsh stereotypes found mainly in Fifties children’s adventure books.
“And Donna – the dishes!”
This morning, I fall over a small but intimidating mongrel that shouldn’t by rights be allowed in to the planet, not just the café.
The dog yelps and threatens to snap.
“Another stay of execution for that little terror!” I say, pointing to the neo-terrier while making eye contact with its elderly, female owner.
The old bat - whose face, I suspect, hasn’t always resembled the dominant party in this animal-human relationship - remains silent in her stare.
I stare into the eyes of her four-legged boss.
“Next week, you’re on the menu!”
“What can I get you?” Flora sighs, ignoring the threat, resting her mop and bucket up against the wall.
I resist egging the pudding with mentions of canine curry and say:
“Two soup-of-the-days – to go!”
Flora looks at me blankly because she doesn’t understand and I don’t fill in the silence because I’m pondering uselessly on whether the correct expression might be ‘Soups-of-the-day’.
The mutt picks up the tension of the silence and growls menacingly.
“To take away, I mean. Oh, and a couple of ham rolls – no, on second thoughts, make that cheese!”
I congratulate myself on the choice. Selina, I reason, might be a vegetarian. And now I have clapped eyes on that pooch, I myself will probably never eat meat again.       
Crypton opens the door because my hands are full and because he’s got nothing else to do. He grunts like the dog in recognition of my custom, turns on his heal, and then I see the scar for the first time.
I brace myself for the wind, believing that he’s fought harder battles on higher seas but none, I suspect, as psychologically testing as my second encounter with his daughter will be this morning.
Will Selina still be there, or was my mission to her father’s teashop part of a calculated suicide ploy? Would I, myself, have the right to stay alive after making such a naïve error of social judgement?
After my clash with the terrier, this’ll be a walkover, I tell myself.
I am not convinced.
 
     - 888888888888888888888888888 -
 
 
When Selina comes into view, the fact that she’s still standing is the only evidence of her survival. She remains silent and motionless in her cape until, amazingly, even after my half-mile journey, the heavy-duty cartons with their almost cast-iron polystyrene lids permit Selina and I to consume the soup more-or-less in the manner that the Captain intended.
The rolls, too, are a pleasing culinary halfway house between the surly Crypton welcome and the swirling Cymru wind.
Soon after our sulky, silent snack the rain dies down and Selina responds to the sun by removing her cape.
She begins peeling off her waterproof trousers and I try not to respond at all.
She catches me taking a side-ways glance at the tantalising, tanned legs that are poking out of her shorts. I look away, and she pre-empts my question:
“Seventeen. You can look, but you’d better not touch.”
Then she settles down on a rock and draws her knees defensively towards her chest.
I resist the temptation to comment.
It’s the right thing to do.
She’s giving me a sexless smile.
She’s ticked all the boxes on my trustworthiness test.
She’s ready to tell me her story.
 
“I’d been to the Rancho Club last night with Tanya, my best mate. We’d got completely tanked up and then the bloke I met there drove me up here. He was going to kiss me. Then I noticed what looked like a scar on the side of his neck…”
“The left side?”
“How did you know?”
“A fifty-fifty guess, I guess…”
I don’t tell her that my mind is in recall mode, making a link between the boy and the battle scar on the left-hand side of her father’s face.
“Anyway, Johnny laughed it off. He told me it was only a birthmark. But I just flipped.”
 
I let her talk, trying hard to concentrate while gazing at another area of flesh that is now apparent around her bare belly button. There’s some evidence of jewellery there – almost a scar.
And I can’t help noticing that, as Selina becomes more animated, the respective coastlines of her t shirt and shorts drift wider apart until, I imagine, you’d need the Fishguard ferry to make the jump.    
“Your fella…” I say, and Selina stops in mid belly-button flow.
“He’s NOT my guy. As I jumped out of the car, I nearly fell down the cliff, On the other side of the road, over there…”
Selina is pointing again, doing her lollipop lady act, only this time without the cape. Now she’s looking more like the client of a crossing patrol attendant.
More like a schoolgirl.
“Johnny stopped for a moment to see if I was all right. I regained my balance, then nearly lost it again as I tried to catch the cape, the trousers and
the boo- ”
 “He was flinging the boots out of the window?”
 “Yes. Reversed back. Then drove off again.”
“And you slept the night there – just there?”
I’m the one who’s being hysterical, now, and I wasn’t even there. But the prospect of Selina nearly falling off the cliff in her cape, in her sleep – well, it’s making my body feel as unbalanced as Selina’s mind seems to be and I’m starting to feel protective of her.
So protective, in fact, that I say: “I’m going back to the café. And this time you’re coming with me!” 
I couldn’t possibly have anticipated her response.
Selina discards her waterproofs and runs off towards the sea, shouting:
 “No, I WON’T go back there. Crypton’s a bloody smarmy WORM!”
And as she yells, she’s pointing to the real Worm – the inanimate but historical and geographical Welsh landmark that calls itself Worm’s Head, the one that protrudes into the sea in much the same way that Selina is threatening to do herself now.
 “Chips, this time?” I offer, sounding as calm as shouting will permit.
This cod-psychology is successful; I’ve ignored the drama, and Selina surrenders.
The girl turns around, and begins walking towards the café without stopping or even acknowledging me as she passes me on the way, her one concession to a protest.
She lets me catch her up. Then she takes my hand, and drags me towards the café.
Now I’m the child.
I feel like a toddler who can’t keep up with his parents.
Ten or so minutes later she takes me to see her dad.      
   
                                     - 888888888888888888888888888 -
    
 
 
It’s ten years since that encounter took place and, I can tell you, there have been a few storms since.
Flora, the woman with the terrier, is no longer working but I am.
It’s the perfect line of work for an ex-alcoholic; Flora has become our customer and now she’s sitting in the corner of our café. She hasn’t aged noticeably, probably because a storm induced the process prematurely in the first place.
She’s been sixty for three decades now, but her dog has become placid  - and flaccid. And flatulent. But hell, the dog is forgiven because, unlike most of our patrons, its owner is there - in all weathers. She’s the antidote to all our storms.
“Young lady!”
The old bat is signalling at Selina, now.
Selly immediately responds, but refrains from throwing her out because the dog’s bite died with its youth.
Snappy fingers, snappy dogs, snappy service; it’s all part of the game, now.
“The usual, Madam?” Selina scorns.
“Thank you, young lady.”
 “Anything else?”
 “Well, dear, there is just one thing -”
“Yes?”
“When Commander Crypton left -”
“You mean, did a runner?”
Selina has never been one to mince her words. It’s one of the things that made me fall in love with her.
“Oh, all right then,” Flora concedes, “When your father did a runner, why did he take down that picture of himself splashing the little girl in the paddling
pool - his granddaughter, I suppose…”  
“That little girl wasn’t his granddaughter. That little girl was me. My so-called father is just like you. He’s always been sixty! He’s never aged, but then again he’s never there -”
I hide my schoolboy sniggering by staring intently at the photo that has now replaced it. The one that, if you think about it, is just like the snacks we offer our customers because it’s only there to fill a hole.
In the new picture, the one that his daughter doesn’t mind you seeing, Commander Crypton is decked out in full naval regalia.
Only somehow he seems under-dressed.    
The old dear with the dog beats me to it.
“Where’s the famous battle scar?” she asks.
 
- 888888888888888888888888888 -
 
“Tell me the truth, Sell. Why did your father leave, leaving this place to us?”
“Turn out the light, Harry, and go to sleep.”
I know that the revelation Selina is about to impart will be genuine. She’s always told her lies in broad daylight, saving her secrets for bed.
“Look, I know my mother was no saint. But why did Daddy have to have a son?”
 
Right from day one - ever since ‘The Storm’, when I’d stopped her from walking out into the sea - I’ve known Selina well enough to realise that my best chance of getting her to bring this story to a conclusion would be to proceed slowly.
“That afternoon – the so-called bloody idyllic day at the swimming pool…” I volunteer. I stay silent in anticipation of the response.
“I wasn’t the only one that your bloody father-in-law used to splash so lovingly with his holy bloody water…”
“Go on -”
“There was J-j-j-“
“Go ON!”
I notice that she hasn’t stuttered like this since that day when the storm had punctuated her speech.
”JOHN,” she says, adjusting the volume of her voice to match mine.
“John, MY BLOODY BLOOD-BROTHER!”
And then she tells me part of the story and it is so emotionally exhausting that we both fall asleep.
 
- 888888888888888888888888888 -
 
My dream is mainly about Selina, only it’s little Selina, from the days before I met her - the paddling pool days. But it’s also about lots of other little Selina look-alikes, male and female, crawling out of the woodwork to play; a bit like The Borrowers, in fact.
 
I wake up sharply at 3 o’clock sharp and turn off the alarm, knowing that we won’t be needing it because I won’t be sleeping again tonight.
I go downstairs. I wander into our café like a burglar and pour myself a coffee from the 24-hour coffee machine.
Then, bizarrely, I set up the ironing board and do a week’s worth of ironing - hers and mine. 
After about the eighth shirt I remember that what had woken me up was not just the bizarre dream coming to its natural end but also Selina’s mumbling.
She’d been muttering something about using an iron as a dangerous weapon but that’s all. It hadn’t made any sense, but it had reminded me of Selina’s standard cure for insomniacs and, although I’d thought nothing of her own night-time ironing habit before, I am wondering now about how it is that this seemingly innocent ritual has only just rubbed off on me.    
 
Upstairs, I can hear my wife stirring.
Then there are feet, purposefully making their way down the stairs.
“I suppose this is your revenge?” Selina screams, from halfway down.
“WHAT revenge?”
“Well, I suppose you’re happy now. You’ve got my father’s business…”
“It’s our business. OUR FUCKING BUSINESS!”
And as I emphasise the second ‘our’, at the fourth hour (and fifty-five minutes) I find myself grabbing my wife to shake the truth out of her, promising myself that I will comfort her afterwards.
Eventually, I hold her to my chest. Then we both trip up over the hot iron and her mood changes back as quickly as the iron and the bloody board fall to the floor.
“You’ve got Crypton’s bloody restaurant,” she screams.
“And now you can have his bloody battle scar, too.”
 
During one of our late night confessions, I’d learned that the young Selina had attended intensive counselling sessions designed to rid her of ‘danger obsession’. The doctor’s agenda had included fire, random attacks on other human beings…storms?
And right now the reality about Selina’s instability is hitting me like the awakening of a re-born Christian who has narrowly escaped death.
Selina is holding the iron up to my left cheek:
“Burn, you bastard. Burn!”
Remembering the time when I rescued her from her own mind as she walked towards the Worm, I calmly remove the iron from her hand and switch it off.
She leads me up the stairs, just like she did on that first trip to the teashop, only this time she’s the child.
My wife spends the rest of the night wide-awake, face down on our bed, apologising to me every five minutes while insisting that she loves me.
Eventually, I say:
“Crypton never had a scar, did he?”
Selina confesses by pushing her head purposefully into the duvet. The bed shakes as she nods. 
“He was never even in the Navy,” she confides, calmly. The storm - this new storm - has subsided.
“When the scar from the iron eventually faded away, I made him dress up in military uniform for the replacement photo because…”
“Go on…”
“Because…”
I wait patiently as she steals herself for what I believe to be her ultimate moment of truth, oblivious to the fact that there would soon be a further revelation.
“Because Dad and I had been lying about the so-called battle scar for so long that, once the injury from the iron had eventually faded away, I didn’t want to be exposed to the truth.”
“Selina, what is the truth? The truth about the night of the storm?”
“The truth is – well, I’d always resented the attention that my older brother had since Mum left. You know, male bonding between Dad and Johnny…”
“Johnny? Johnny?”
I begin repeating the name of Selina’s estranged brother, over and over again, like some sort of medieval mantra.
Then it all clicks into place.
“You’ve always called him ‘John’. I thought Johnny was the guy who threw you out of the car?”
“So anyway, I thought that if Johnny was born with a bloody birthmark on the side of his face then bloody Crypton – my dad…”
Selina finally bursts into tears when she says ‘my dad’.
“My God,” is all I can say.
“Eventually,” Selina sobs, “I gave Dad that scar to match my brother’s bloody birthmark. And I offered him an ultimatum to go with the damage. Johnny or me. Make your choice. If not, one of you gets killed next time.”
“So Johnny leaves?”
“Yeah. Fostered out.”
“And you don’t see him again – until, one night, you meet this bloke in the Rancho Club with Tanya and it turns out to be…”
“I saw what I thought was a scar. Then Johnny told me it was a birthmark, just as he was driving us down to the beach in the storm. At first I was angry, but then when my temper died down I said I’m sorry - so sorry that I asked him if he wouldn’t mind killing me. He didn’t even consider that, but he did throw me out of the car. You can hardly blame him.”
“So then you tried to kill yourself?”
“I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t do it. I’m a coward. I can burn other people with domestic instruments, but me? Couldn’t even let that clinic finish piercing my belly-button, if you must know.”
“I do know. That day I rescued you, I saw the scars on your stomach. They were pretty ugly, like some of the rocks at Rhossili, but the lush area around them more than makes up for… ”
Selina ignores my enthusiasm for these dual areas of beauty.
“Then, in the morning, after the storm, I nearly did it for real.”
“And then you met…”
“And then I met you.”
Selina is hugging me now – so tightly, that she’s nearly killing me.
“Harry, you saved my life!”
 
 

 

‘Craig Malone. Rhymes with alone, doesn’t it!’

The lonely 40-year-old ‘singleton’ had become a seasoned apologist for his sad, single fate; he’d often liken his status to a single dealing of the devil’s pack. Of cards, he’d explain. (Sometimes he’d use ‘pack’ as well, in the context of hunting wolves, because that’s how it always felt as he prowled around the singles bars of Southern England.)

‘Perhaps I’d be better off dead,’ he once admitted to Sandra, his long-suffering old school friend.

Everyone else in his Christian family disapproved of such ingratitude to their god.

They included:

Two successful, heterosexual brothers who were both the same age as him.

One glad-to-be-gay kid sister.

And Marge and Derek – the straight-out-of-a-Seventies-sitcom parents.

A clan of Christian-cardigan cut-outs if ever there was such a thing.

‘Argh!!’ he’d go, whenever he had a moment to think about it – which, as has already been hinted at, was very often indeed.

Actually, Peter and Clive weren’t really Craig’s brothers – or even each other’s brothers. But Marge and Derek were keener than most to hide their charges’ adoptive status on the grounds that if they didn’t then people would do the maths. Yes, their real offspring was 50% gay.

 

In the early Sixties, the enthusiastic Christians had been married for, well, rather a long time without conceiving. So, when net curtains had begun to twitch, Derek had gone for a sperm test and the nurse had said:

‘You’ve got balls the size of Everest, containing enough ammunition to blow up Vietnam. Only you think too much. You’re not making war – you’re making love. Now go away and have some fun!’

Which is what he did, once Marge had actually recovered from the torment of having her own ammunition being given the all-clear by an emotionless man with a collection of cold metal machinery.

And shoot me down with a spark flying off a pair of badly-connected jump leads but six months after signing the adoption papers babies Peter and his Clive were joined by geeky, gawky Craig.

And then, five years later, Lena had come along.

Craig’s little sis would reject every attempt to feminize her inherent boyishness - from burning her Barbie dolls well before they could turn into static objects of teenage hatred, to refusing to wear a dress when she was a bridesmaid on Marge’s sister Sharon’s wedding day.

‘Maybe all the angst that led to Derek’s impotency was God’s way of preventing you from shitting out that little lesbian,’ Lena had overheard Sharon saying.

She never spoke to her aunt again.   

 

So life for Marge had been terrible ever since. And Sharon, Lena, Peter and Clive were four good reasons – five, if you include Clive - why Marge secretly admitted that she wished that she and/or Derek had been infertile after all.

‘We’ve produced a cuckoo and a geek and hired two freaks,’ Marge’s husband had once actually said to the vicar one Sunday morning, on their way out of church.

When they’d arrived home his wife had silently consoled him with a reassuring massage that was about as erotic as any fundamental Christian could bring herself to provide.

It nearly provided them with another child, but Marge lost it.

Sharon had subsequently sent a ‘congratulations’ card instead of a ‘condolence’ one – ‘by mistake,’ Derek reassured his wife. Marge wasn’t convinced.

 

                                           ————————————-

 

All the above happened in the Sixties and Seventies, though, and now it was time for Craig to face the most beautiful face he’d ever been alone with; he was accepting Sandra’s invitation to the Viaduct Working Men’s Club Annual Halloween Dance.

Yes, he thought, his old mate Sandra was looking particularly fetching tonight (though he wasn’t about to take advantage of the fact by consummating his appreciation of her as he’d done back in 1992).

‘A really good friend of the opposite sex will always sleep with you once in a while,’ she’d said to him, the morning after.

At which point Craig cried.

Sandra had thought she’d been letting him down gently with her plausible explanation, back then. But because of his tears, before they both went to work she let him do it again.

They hadn’t done it since. 

But here the desperate pair still were, after a long walk from the next town – together, platonically, on Halloween night, 2005, almost blissfully resigned to early middle-aged reject-heaven. Cushioning each other from the ever-decreasing likelihood that any interested party might sweep either of them off of their single, stick-in-the-mud feet.      

‘Viaduct Working Men’s Club – why is it that shit holes are always near the station?’ Craig asked Sandra, not unreasonably.

She didn’t answer back, didn’t need to; a rhetorical question involving disused railway lines and beer that’s as well past its sell-by date as the customers is an exact science.

His escort spluttered some speculation into the cold October air instead: ‘D’you suppose Lena’s in there with her latest lesbian lover?’

‘You mean, because it’s a men’s club, Sand? Nah, they’re all homophobes, the lot of them.’ Sandra paused for a moment, attempting to eavesdrop on some high-pitched banter. ‘And all the women are wives.’

‘So what are we doing here, then?’

‘You’re the one with the tickets.’ 

She scowled at his annoying shrug and held the tickets defensively to her chest.

‘The new office manager at work’s a member,’ Sandra began to explain.

‘A right member,’ he said back, so quickly that he thought it funny.

‘He claims he couldn’t rustle up a ghouls costume quick enough,’ Sandra went on, ignoring the joke. ‘But we know different. His new wife can’t stand the place. She’s only twenty-six!’

‘So what has he got that I haven’t?’ Craig teased – hoping, perhaps, for a sexual hat trick. The pair did seem to be getting quite frisky now. Surely he was in with a chance?

‘An allergy to Vincent Price,’ she quipped, and Craig unsuccessfully stifled a laugh.

Why is this girl wittier than I am?

Aren’t men supposed to woo women with wit, not wizard outfits?

Aw, what-the-Hell.

It’s working anyway.

She’s rubbing my thighs with her slinky, kinky black boots and that Cat Woman headgear is to die for!

 

Seconds later, the doorman tore their tickets in half but still stamped their hands.

‘I feel like I’m being branded,’ Craig protested to the bouncer. He didn’t bite back.

‘As a criminal?’

‘No, Sandra darling. As a member of the Working Class.’

‘Don’t be such a snob, love.’

Don’t be so ungrateful, he thought. Even if the disco’s crap I might win the raffle.

 

Three hours and two spontaneous (or perhaps contrived) power failures later, the Committee Chairman leapt to his feet.

‘Someone’s nicked all the raffle prizes,’ he grunted. ‘Now, as all of you who are on the Committee will know, we often have power cuts here but nothing has ever gone missing. Not until now, that is - our first Guest Night of the new Millennium.

So Ricardo the Bouncer is going to come round and have a word in all the members’ ears and if no one owns up – well, we’re just going to have to strip-search all the unregistered ladies – er, and the gentleman there - and see if they’re hiding the… ’

The lights flickered again, then went off and Craig whispered the name of a likely suspect in Sandra’s ear, unwittingly timing his accusation to end just as they came back on again.

‘Ten out of ten for the suspect,’ said Sandra a bit too loudly, ‘But our girl isn’t really Superwoman. Look a little closer: you can’t act out that level of butchness unless you’re a real actress.’

‘Lena,’ said Craig and Sandra, in chorus.

‘Leeeena?’ went most of the crowd.

The club chairman cleared his throat and snatched the microphone back from the DJ.

‘Gentlemen - and Ladies. As you can see, the stage is somewhat lacking in conventional raffle prizes now – whether or not our mysterious ‘Lena’ is to blame!

But thanks to our friends at Plant, Grass and Carpenter we have for you tonight just one major ‘offering’ – and I use that word advisedly. This prize will be hotly contested!’

The Chairman broke off for a few seconds to sup beer, during which a heckler shouted:

‘Plant, Grass and Carpenter? The funeral directors?’

 ‘The very same.’ He spat out a mouthful of his beer with his laughter as Mr. Carpenter himself strutted on to the stage in a convincing Grim Reaper outfit. ‘And the winner is…

Oh, it’s not one of our members. Anyway, the winner is: Number 666. Craig who?’

‘What have I won?’ Craig was too gob-smacked to provide his own surname.

‘Here’s a clue, then, especially for you, Mister Craig Somebody-or-Other,’ the club Chairman boomed back. ‘I think the Grim Reaper has come a bit early for, er, the winner of Prize no. 666. Don’t you?’

Those members who were in on the joke laughed heartily.

As the penny dropped, Lena, Craig, Sandra and other guests willed their jaws to defy gravity.

‘And by the way, you can take your partner along for the ride, if you like.’

By now, most of the crowd was openly laughing off its collective ghoulish head.

‘You see, our undertaker friends have, er, undertaken to provide a joint ticket. So what’s your surname, Craig? I’m waiting!’

‘Malone - Sir!’

‘Congratulations then, Craig Malone. You’ve won a free funeral. You going with him, love?’

Sandra didn’t answer.   

‘Mum and Dad will be pleased,’ said Lena from underneath her thick, black Lois Lane lipstick.

She pulled out the club’s official trophy shotgun from her holster; the weapon from the glass case that guests assume is a fake.

Then she shot her brother Craig dead, before turning the gun on herself.

‘And now a word from our sponsor,’ announced the Chairman, as if nothing had happened.

Now the secret pistol (and the secret dead member) had both been revealed, the crowd demographic was beginning to change.

Instead of the room being divided between members and non-members, half the crowd had now reached the conclusion that tonight’s Halloween bash was actually a mini-murder weekend.

The other half was using its mobiles to call the police.

‘Mr. Plant, Mr. Grass and I have been partners for some thirty years.’ Mr. Carpenter was struggling to make himself heard over the club’s PA system which by now was being drowned by police sirens. ‘So we would like to congratulate our absent members, our very good friends Derek and Marge.’

‘To absent friends,’ murmured most of the crowd.

The Chairman continued with his speech.

‘It would seem that, with the lesbian and the alleged queer now safely out of the way, they now have the heterosexual family they always hoped for. So I would like to reassure the Committee that when brother and sister are due for cremation we promise to honour their prize.’      

 
 

“Would you mind stepping out of the car, Sir?”
“Would you mind telling me why you’re stopping me, Officer?”
“Sergeant!”
There was something odd about this. Trevor knew from past experience that if there was one thing police officers pretended not to be picky about then it was rank (though he hadn’t got that much experience on account of the fact that he was a well-spoken, white, middle-class, nearly middle-aged male who drove an entry-level Peugeot).
Oh, they’d be instantly flattered if an officer stopped him and he started calling them ’sergeant’, especially if they were much younger than he was and they’d just received their stripes. But basically, they just wanted to get on with the job.
And it was a job Trevor wouldn’t do for anything.
“Look, we don’t want any complications. Just get out of the car. Now! And lie down on that cou-”
“Excuse me, sergeant?”
Trevor Crouch thought he could detect laughter coming from the living room of a nearby house - a small party, it sounded like. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but the revellers seemed to be responding to the show that was going on outside, this other show.
“Ahem.” The officer cleared his throat, as if to mark the transition between momentary madness and an equally swift return to sanity. “What I meant was, lie down in the road, Sir. Crouch. If you can!”
This time Crouch could clearly hear a round of applause. The revellers were definitely showing their appreciation for the officer’s attempt to shoehorn his name into the arrest, he thought. No, he certainly wasn’t going mad; his psychiatrist kept that in check every Wednesday. So there was only one thing for it: be direct, be assertive. That’s what the doc had told him, wasn’t it?
Crouch managed both. “Why, officer, are you stopping me?”
“I’m arresting you for dangerous thoughts,” said the policeman.
Crouch himself was laughing now, only he couldn’t hear himself above the noise inside the house.

******

To Whom It May Concern.

You know what being middle-aged is? Well, I’ll tell you, as I’ve just reached that point in my life and therefore it’s fresh in my mind. If I put off letting you know, then before long I shall be gone. And that’s the point: being middle-aged is all about the ‘never-never’. It’s about realising that you’re never going to go to University and swap your job for something more fulfilling. I wanted to be a relationship counsellor, right from a very early age when all the rest of my friends used to spell it ‘councillor’. You had a gap year that you never, never filled because there was no course and therefore no gap. Then you were a potential mature student. And now? You’d just be laughed at in the refectory, if that’s what they still call it, unless the dinner ladies decided you were someone’s dad.
Middle age? It’s reaching the point where you sell the golf clubs that you thought would help you sidle up to your superiors at the chemical plant and get on in life, before you realised that leisure time is a double-edged sword. Now you know you’re never going to take up golf (or fencing, as I mentioned swords, though I did once do a bit of sparring with that bearded bloke at the Celtic theme day in our village, only to find that he dresses like that and jousts with other weirdos every weekend).
And you do the same with your guitar. Except you did take up the guitar. At college, or at school.
But now, all thoughts of playing in a proper band have gone out of the window.
And you know your wife will throw your guitar out of the window if you ever twang it tunelessly again after a row - yes, tunelessly. Because you’re so bloody angry with her that if you even attempted to tighten up those keys then you’d instantly snap the strings. And then, Christ knows, something else - something inside you - might snap. You might actually, for the first time in your life, hit… no, you can’t even bring yourself to say it, can you? You little coward.
You great, big, f*****g bully.
And being middle-aged means the realisation that you will never, never re-kindle any tiny flickering flame that might once have existed around that old girlfriend that never quite was. You see, there really was this girl once - well, I don’t need to go into all the details, do I? But I knew she felt something for me, I just knew.
But the timing was all wrong. She had a steady boyfriend. It was one of those situations where, if you did ever get your diaries to coincide and you actually found yourself at opposite sides of a coffee-house table, then you’d look into each other’s eyes for just a moment and one of you would say “Maybe, in another life’.
I still send her a Christmas card each year, but she never sends one back.
And, since the advent of e-mails - and I must just say that, for a guy of my age, I’ve taken to this ‘new’ technology better than most of my mates’ kids - now where was I? Oh, yeah. Since the advent of e-mails, I send Christie one every year on her birthday, at her work, in case she’s married. Is she? I couldn’t bear to ask. And she just sends it back with an added sideways ’smiley-face’. Look, I’ll draw it for you:
: -)
Being middle-aged means that the end is imminent for another life. Not your life. Please God, no. I mean the male and female lives that created you. And ‘never, never’ also means that, when your parents finally do die, well, it takes on a different meaning then. Being middle-aged means your mum used to pay for the washing machine (if you were lucky enough to have one) and the cooker on the ‘Never Never’.
Everything was on credit. The mortgage payments were in arrears and through the roof and the building society was threatening to un-build your roof. And here you are now, with your parents being taken away too, ironically when the end of your own mortgage is nigh. By the time your ship comes in, you’ll cop half a house. A whole house, even, if you’re an only child like me. Suddenly you’ll be rolling in bricks and bloody lawns two hundred miles away that you haven’t got time to cut. Middle age: when ‘never, never’ becomes ‘What the f*** do I do now?’
I’m on my own; I have no wife (on account of my long-term candle-carrying for Christie). And soon I’m going to be a property tycoon.
How sad is that?
I’m going out for a drive, now.
I may be gone for sometime.
All the best,
Yours sincerely,
Trevor-Never-Never.

******

Doctor Wiley rustled the crumpled piece of paper as he nervously waited for his next patient.
He wasn’t looking forward to this. This was the patient who’d been keeping him awake all night.
He was officially stressed. He shouldn’t have been a counsellor at all.
“Come in, Trevor.”
“Morning, Doc!”
“Now, just lie down here on the cou-”
Wiley stopped mid-word. He was so nervous that he’d automatically (but not routinely) asked his patient to lie on the couch.
A GP carries a stethoscope, a hospital doctor wears a white coat and a therapist has a couch.
But everyone in the hospital knew that Wiley’s couch was mainly there as some sort of symbolic reassurance for new, reluctant patients. And anyone who was unstable enough to actually use The Couch would forever remain a new patient in Doctor Wiley’s eyes, because he’d never have to deal with them again, on account of the couch being fitted with an automatic relay switch that triggers off a pager in the pocket of the nearest freelance male nurse. Wiley and the nurse would then see to it that the semi-violent patient was removed from the surgery, sedated, and then, if he had anything to do with it, sectioned.
Of course, this rarely happened because restraining patients was just a reoccurring nightmare that kept Wiley awake.
“Say that again, Doc. Say ‘Lie down on that couch’.”
The doctor obliged.
“Now, Doctor, will you say ‘Get out of the car’.”
He didn’t need to. Wiley resembled a beetroot that was about to be slaughtered, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. He’d thought the disguise of a beard, a Bobby’s hat and a policeman’s manner would be enough to fool his most frequent patient; how wrong could his arrogance be? And his proper, daytime props were being put to good use now, as Crouch pushed Wiley down on to the couch and the doctor began to take a dose of his own medicine.
What’s more it was sods law that on the one occasion that the doctor needed back-up his couch didn’t trigger off anybody’s pager. Instead, Trevor just held on to him, hands round the throat, restraining the therapist in a horizontal position.
Just like the Doc had wanted to do with Crouch in the road.
“Okay, okay,” Wiley finally submitted, under pressure. “I’m the one whose health is questionable. Great suicide note, by the way. Work of art! I often think that suicide notes should be in the Tate Gallery. After all, they only celebrate painters once they’re dead, don’t they? So commemorating the work of suicidal writers while they’re still alive makes sense to me.”
The two men pondered on this for a bit, negotiated a bit, and then Crouch eventually let go of the doctor’s neck after Wiley had agreed to lie there in a perverse sort of role-reversal, just for Crouch’s own self-amusement. There would’ve been souvenir photographs, had Crouch planned this.
“Thing is, Trevor, I never wanted to be a psychiatrist. Not since I left college, anyway, which is where I met Christie. But then she fell pregnant and my studies were going better than hers anyway. So she gave up the job, and I supported the family. And now the girls have grown up and flown the nest… ”
This was a stream of consciousness, and it was delivered so fast that Trevor could hardly take it all in, though he did his best. Wiley had been wanting to off-load this baggage for years, only being in the hospital himself he couldn’t, could he?
Well now he could.
“And she still wants me to carry on in this game, I believe.”
“And if you call it a day?”
“Then she’ll probably leave me.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to talk to her, Doctor?”
“Yes!”
“YES!” Crouch punched the air. Doctor Wiley was about to give him the number of his lost, old flame; his unrequited love, who he now learned was married to his therapist.
But just as he was about to ask the doctor his final, most important question, a plain, overweight, middle-aged woman walked in. Trevor’s old flame closed the door behind her and calmly placed her mobile phone down on the table.
“Didn’t you know that the hospital engineers swapped the pager for this mobile, oh, about three years ago, darling? Now, when the couch triggers it off, as it did then, the person on the other end can listen to the entire conversation via the speakerphone in your consulting room.”
“No, Christie, I had no idea.”
“Well, they did it because of all the legal implications, love. If a patient needs restraining and then sues, well, the courts can hear a transcript of everything that’s been said in the run-up to the detention process. Which means… ”
“Which means, Christie, that you’ve been listening to my true thoughts. Look, I can explain!”
“No need to, poor love. If I had any idea - any idea at all - just how unhappy you were in your job, then I’d have insisted that you give it up right there and then. Come home with me. Right now. Just the two of us.”
Crouch looked on in amazement as the Wileys all but renewed their wedding vows right before his eyes. It was as if he wasn’t really there. As they did so, the flame he’d kept in his torch for the sexy twenty-something of his youth died. Its replacement was middle-aged indifference towards the middle-aged woman standing in front of him; the person who had prevented him from getting on with his life, the girl who was the true incarnation of ‘never, never’. Christie was both the poison and the genie in the bottle.
“Just one moment, Chris,” said the doc, “I have to answer one more question.”
Trevor Crouch spotted his cue. “Why were you dressed as a policeman last night?”
“I was at this party and the theme was ‘Job Swap’. They were mostly doctors - all pissed, all behaving like medical students… ”
“Like a fancy dress party?”
“Sort of, Crouch. Only you had to act out the job of your chosen person instead of wearing their clothes. Mine was a policeman, so I was sent out into the street to arrest someone. I saw your car, recognised the registration number… ”
“How?”
“You’ve been coming here long enough. You always park it in the car park. And then I ‘arrested’ you. For dangerous thoughts. And how revealing those thoughts were, as it turned out.”
Wiley began to remove Trevor’s crumpled suicide note from his pocket.
He began to read it out loud, starting with ‘To Whom It May Concern’.
“I think Christie ought to hear this. It also concerns her. Lucky I stopped you, really.
You were driving dangerously, thinking dangerous thoughts.
As you, yourself, put it, in your note: ‘I may be gone sometime’.”

******

They sat opposite each other in the café - like adolescents, only twenty years too late.
Each shunned eye contact for long glances into the other’s muted mobile phone.
They were obeying a nearby sign to the letter of the law because they were both of an age where you always did - you were brought up to.
In my day, one of them might have said - had the sign above them permitted them to, of course - you wouldn’t dream of becoming too intimate beside a municipal swimming pool, for instance, when the poster proclaimed ‘no petting allowed’. So you did the next best thing. And that was: you strained to see what the artist’s impression of a couple were actually doing that wasn’t allowed. And then you went somewhere else and practised it. Petting: not here. Petting is Someone Else’s Problem, the poster should’ve said.
So here Crouch was, trying his hardest to find the right words to text Christie, from the other side of the table, underneath a sign that said No Talking in the Library, Even while Eating.
They quickly called a truce and gave up simultaneously.
“Looks like an interesting course,” Trevor whispered, glancing over at the book she’d chosen.
“It’s everything I ever dreamed of, Trevor,” Christie mouthed. “And thank God we’re both doing it, before it’s too late.”
“I’ve got my assessment for the first module, as they call it. Monday morning, Chris.”
“Mine’s Tuesday, Trevor, to be confirmed.”
“You’re waiting for them to ring you back, aren’t you?”
“If I keep staring at this phone it’ll never, never ring.”
They both laughed.
“Looks like we’re both going to be mature therapists after all,” Trevor eventually said. Then he added: “Just don’t change your sense of humour, Chris.”
“Eh?”
“Don’t turn into a typical medical student. All right?”
“Like I turned into a middle-aged frump that you stopped fancying, you mean?”
“Well I wouldn’t put it like that. What I meant was… ” Now it was Crouch’s turn to play beetroot. He summoned all his social skills and effected a swift gear change: “If you’re going into the medical profession then don’t take on their sense of humour. Don’t do what your old man did and go around arresting suicidal drivers. By the way, what’s your husband doing now? Oh hang on, before you tell me… how did your husband get his hands on my suicide note?”
“You left it hanging out of the letterbox. In my experience, ‘To Whom it may Concern’ never means the postman. Neighbours saw it, and called the cops. They checked your medical records and forwarded it straight to your doctor.”
“My God! Do you think all this will ruin my chances of becoming a therapist?”
“I think it’ll actually help. Takes one to know one, kind of thing.”
“I wouldn’t do that job for the world, Chris, would you?”
“Therapy, Trev? You mean you’re having second thoughts?”
“No! Being a policeman, I mean. Anyway, what’s your husband going to do now?”
“He’s thinking of becoming a Hobby-Bobby. A Special Constable.”
“Sergeant,” Crouch corrected.
Christie had no idea why.

Kerry took a deep breath.

This should be an easy job she’d thought three months ago when she started. She didn’t think too differently now, only she’d come to believe it was only people that made it, oh, let’s see: frustrating, contentious… impossible, on a bad day. Well, some people, anyway. A steady trickling of obstinate ones. The public.    

Today, there were a few too many trickles and she’d run out of tricks.

So Kerry took another deep breath. It made her dizzy and she nearly fell over.

“You all right?”

“I’m sorry?”

Kerry wasn’t used to other people kick-starting the questions.

“You nearly keeled over, there!”

The confident, quite-pretty girl was holding out a friendly hand. It was reciprocated, so the girl said, “Sam! Samantha Pines. And please don’t say she does, or I’ll take my hand away!”

Sam’s threat came without any malice. Kerry knew Sam wasn’t a ‘trickle’. Her questions should flow like a rocky stream with this one. Difficult, but interesting.

“Well, Sam,” she said, filling in the first answer, “This is a first! People never volunteer their names. What we’re doing here is asking you a little about your life. It’s… “

“Market Research, you’re going to say?”

“Yes. For an exciting new on-line shopping company. We’d just like to know a little about your life. For Life.”

“Well, let me see, er…” Sam was pointing to Kerry.

“It’s Kerry – there, we’ve introduced ourselves properly, now.”

“Well, let me see Kerry: I’m too busy actually having that life to hang around a shopping precinct. No offence!” (Kerry wasn’t offended because she could see Sam’s point.) “But there’s always Dave here. He’s my boyfriend and he’s got plenty of time to answer your questions. Only trouble is he doesn’t actually have a life. I do, but as I say I don’t have the time. I guess that’s, er – life! Ha ha!”

Kerry took another deep breath. She quite liked Sam, but life - real life - was getting in the way of Life, the On-line Shopping Club.

“Name please?”

“Dave Robbins.”

“Who’s the breadwinner in your family?”

“My partner Sam is. You’ve got her name already.”

“Yes, but unfortunately I don’t have any other information about her. Oh cheers, Sam. Nice to have met you, see you soon. Byeeee! Now, where were we?” 

“Sam being the breadwinner.”

“Oh, yes. Now where does Sam shop… no, that’s no good. It’s you I’m interviewing. Where do you shop?”

“I don’t. I haven’t got a job.”

Kerry had endured so many answers like this in her short career and right now Dave’s default despondency was making her feel like becoming jobless herself. That’s it; she’d hotfoot it down to the local job centre in her lunch break.

“Okay, Dave, no more questions. I’ll put you down as a ‘maybe’.”

“A maybe what?”

“Someone who might log on to Life.”

“I haven’t got a computer.”      

“I’m not surprised.”

A car full of loud lads honked by, obliterating her insult.

“What?”

“I said ‘Thanks for your time’. That lot aren’t your friends, by the way?”

“What if they are? You gonna write that down?”

“No, as I say I’ve finished.”

“Good!”

Kerry looked at her watch and remembered it didn’t work and that this job didn’t pay enough to buy a new one. Then she looked up at the town hall clock. Only five minutes to go. Why not go now? Yeah, why not. Soddit.

 

When Kerry arrived at the job centre she was greeted by a familiar-looking young woman but she couldn’t quite place her because she was in a different environment. She knew enough about the human mind to understand that it always took the juxtaposing of two events to kick-start that magical thing called Recognition.

“Where have I seen you before?” Kerry asked, when it was her turn at the desk.      

For Sam, Juxtaposed Event Number Two had just happened.

“Answering questions in the street.”

“Of course!”

Kerry read the nameplate on Sam’s desk and felt stupid.

“I apologize for Dave. He’s a real git.”

“Why do you stay with him, Samantha?”

“It’s more a question of How do you get out?”

“Well… “ she lowered her voice.

The job centre wasn’t a great place for private conversations. Deliberately so, she thought. It was all part of the humiliation process, she reasoned.

“The dumping bit’s easy if you have reasons,” Kerry continued. “If you can find a good reason and stick to it then it’s not so hard as all that.” 

Perhaps I could be a counsellor, Kerry thought. I’m enjoying this. Maybe Sam could set me up with a course?

“I already have a reason. It’s because Dave’s a complete git.”

“You’ve already said that. The git bit, I mean.”

“I know. But he is. When we met we were both students but now, well; I know I’m only a lowly civil servant but at least I’ve got a job. I don’t hang around the flat with my mates all day and night, drinking and farting and watching Sky TV. On somebody else’s subscription.”

“Tell him you’re a lesbian!” 

“WHAT?”

“I’m serious. You’ve got the bottle to dump him but not enough of it to face the consequences. Think it through. If you just tell him you’re leaving because he’s a boring, disappointing slob then how do you think he will he respond?”

“He’ll accuse me of having someone else.”

“Exactly. Men can’t ever believe they’re surplus to requirements because their ego always gets in the way. So they assume there’s someone else. And when there eventually is, even though it’s afterwards, they often go up to that person just when you least need it. There you are, in a pub or club with your new man, eager to make a new start, prove you haven’t got baggage. And then up comes the bloody baggage that still hasn’t unpacked its suitcase and says, So you were the one? You’re the bloke she was seeing when she was still living with me – well I hope you’re bloody happy together. And then your new bloke says Why do I always pick ‘em? and buggers off.”

“You know something, you couldn’t be more right. So what do I tell him, Kerry? What’s the new excuse?”

“I’ve already told you. You tell him that there is someone else but it’s not a man. Their ego can’t handle that. They tend to be out of your life sharp-ish.”

“Because they can’t make a scene, you mean?”

“Exactly. If anything, Sam, they wanna keep it a secret more than you do. If it was true, I mean. Now, if you don’t mind can we dispense with the questioning because this time it’s my turn to be busy. Got any openings for trainee social workers?”

 

That evening there were big crowds filling up the Watering Hole so Kerry pushed past sensitively. Tentatively, even. If I never need a man for any other purpose than pushing, she was thinking, well I could do with one right now. Blokes can push people out of the way. But girls? We all know the question that comes before the answer that goes, Why, love? What have you done?

“Excuse me,” she whined.

“Why, love… “ Kerry pretended not to listen. No, hang on: This was a woman’s voice she was hearing behind her. 

“Why bother, love? Why waste your effort pushing past all those bozo-boys just to get yourself to the bar,” the woman said as she turned around, “and then get so sozzled that you’re in danger of asking one of them out? In any place other than this, I mean.”

Kerry wasn’t sure what Sam meant by ‘place other than this’. “Good to see you!” was all she said. Then: “How many more places can we meet in a day?”

“After that advice this afternoon, Kerry, I’m surprised you don’t have a boyfriend.”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“I just know. Like when someone comes in to the job centre and I just know they don’t stand a chance in Hell of getting one. You look like you have to do this every time. Saw you come through the door. Saw you apologizing your way in. Saw the whole bloody sad, single picture!”

“I could get a boyfriend if I wanted to, Sam. I could. Yes, I could!”

“Could you? You’re sounding like a kid whose parents won’t buy her an ice cream so she wants different parents. I’m not even sure you’ve reached puberty.” 

“Have you dumped your bloke yet, Samantha?”

“Yes!”

“Well what’s he doing over there, then?”

“Shit!”

 

“Didn’t expect to see you back in here so soon,” Sam said, when Kerry turned up at the job centre again the next morning. “Why did you disappear all of a sudden like that? Good job you’re not my friend yet!”

The two women seemed to have a rapport with each other.

“I see you’re still speaking to me. Look, Sam, I’m really sorry but the last thing I wanted to do was intrude upon someone else’s grief. I suppose you’re going to tell me you made it up with Dave after he’d made his unwelcome appearance propping up the bar?”

“As a matter of fact it’s quite the opposite. You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Sadly not. I’m too busy doing surveys for bloody Life. And they don’t pay that much. It was supposed to be a gap-year filler. Only there was nothing the other side of the gap.”

“You didn’t go to Uni?”

“Place I wanted didn’t accept me in the end. After that it was a toss-up between Stoke and Sunderland.”

“Know what you mean. Anyway, when I met you again last night I was about to tell you that I’d already acted on your advice. Already told Dave there was someone else. And that it was a woman. And fair play to you, you were partly right because he just went. But before you walked in to the Hole he must’ve been hiding in there, between a couple of queens.”

“Are you telling me the Watering Hole is a gay bar?”

“It is now. I don’t think there’s been a straight punter in there since it was the Flirty Duck. Apart from me, that is. Why d’you think it’s called the Hole? Anyway, so much for my quiet, hassle-free drink!”

This was a lot for Kerry to take in.

“I’m not about to become a real lesbian if that’s what you’re thinking! But after your advice I thought the Hole was the safest place I could go to avoid stumbling across my nasty recent past. So how was I to know that Dave would be there, hiding behind some bloke’s skirt? Anyway, social work was what you were interested in, right? I’ll try and get you on a placement where they can arrange day release. Area?”

“Sorry?”

“Any preferences, I mean.”

“Anywhere except Stoke. Or Sunderland. Or here!”

 

Kerry walked out of the job centre in a bit of a daze. She was dreading the rest of the afternoon. The area supervisor from Quantum Research was in town, a nauseating woman with a nasal voice who would stare over your shoulder as you asked the questions, then sneer at you in front of the respondent. It always made her feel three feet tall. And here her boss was now, sauntering up to her clipboard in her floral neckerchief, looking like a cross between a hippie and Hyacinth Bucket.

“Hello, Sweetie!”

“Hello Miss Q!”

They were always ‘Miss Q’, these people, to their junior researchers.

Quantum Research was secretive and anonymous - like the recruitment officer at the Samaritans Kerry had finally been put through to last night after the incident at the Hole, once she’d managed to convince the volunteer answering the phone that she wasn’t depressed. Well, not so depressed that she couldn’t manage light-hearted remarks about one-way bungee jumps and that odd joke about her brother being the Birdman of Bognor.

“How are we doing, Sweetie? Oh, why are you scowling? We don’t want to look miserable in front of the respondents, do we? Look out, I think you’ve got a bite… treat this one gently! “

“Not him. Please, please, please. Anybody but HIM!” Kerry’s shouty whisper was so close to Q’s eardrum that the old cow turned around sharply to avoid the debris from Kerry’s throat.

And in that second, Kerry thought she had time to usher the ‘respondent’ away and so she gave it a go. Only he didn’t go.

“Conflict of interest,” she said weakly to Q. “I can’t interview this man. It wouldn’t be, er… wouldn’t be professional. Anyway, I’ve done him before… ”

“Look young lady, if you don’t do your job properly with this nice young man then I’ll have no choice but to do it for you. And if I have to do that then, trust me, it will be the last time you ever get to say Thank you for giving up a little of your time for Life. Do I make myself crystal?”

“Abundantly!”

“What are you doing now, girl?”

“I’m throwing down my clipboard Miss Q. Throwing in the towel.”

“Then why are you still here? Why are you still hanging around?”

“Because I CAN, Ker-yew. It’s a free country! And this is a public shopping precinct, albeit a heck of a snooty one now you’re here. So whether you like it or not I’m going to stick around and watch your technique.”    

“Very well. Name?”

“Dave.”

“FULL name!”

“Dave Robbins.”

“Occupation?”

“Barman.”

“Employer’s name?”

“Mister Pink.”

“Employer’s REAL name?”

“Never gives his real name.”

“Place of work?”

“The Watering Hole.”

“Partner?”

“Mister Pink.”

“How ludicr… Sorry, I mean, how long have you been together?”

“Oh, about two years. Had this girlfriend called Sam. Just didn’t know how to tell her I wanted to end it. Needed a reason. Then, one night… “

“Yes, yes, yes. I get the picture. Spare me the incidentals.“

 

Kerry was still hanging around. She picked up her phone and scrolled through her recent outgoing calls. She hit Redial.

“Thank you for calling the Samaritans.”

“It’s Kerry. I called last night.”

“Oh, yeah, I recognize you. You’re the one who’s having a bit of trouble with life. How are you spelling life? With a capital ‘L’?” 

“Not this time.”

“Joanne Hirzchemaker!”

At first she didn’t reply.
Jo hadn’t been to the doctor for years and hearing her name like that – first name and surname together – reminded her of the register at school and so she sat there, for a moment, frozen in time.
For a full minute, it seemed.
But during that minute, the rest of the surgery was far from silent.
A baby cried, kick-starting the whine from her older brother.
Mum ignored the three-year-old and so the boy kicked his sister.
More crying – and then the older children joined in.
Joanne had all that to look forward to.
 
“Joanne HIRZCHEMAKER!”

Jo had never liked that name.
No, let’s be honest. She liked the name, but she detested her lazy teachers for not doing their homework.
“It’s HirzcheMAKER,” she’d tell them. ‘Mack’ as in mackerel, not ‘make’ as in ‘make it up’.
Her classmates were cruel, but Mr. English the English teacher was the worst offender.
Jo believed that English had started it all by mispronouncing the first part of her surname as well.
He’d called her ‘Hearse-maker’ and the pupils had followed suit.
Now that she was about to have children of her own, Hirzchemaker understood that English hated the Germans.
She wasn’t German anyway.
But she was going to have a German baby.

Jo followed the dapper doctor into his room.
He was about to do his stuff – no, she was about to do her stuff.
He wasn’t going to do anything.
She closed the book she was reading, slammed it shut, as if to make the words go away.
The doctor broke the ice by asking her if she was trying to squash a fly.  

“As I was leaving the pub with my mate Sarah one Thursday night, she got into her new boyfriends car and they headed home to Pontardawe.
Dai offered me a lift but I said ‘No’ because I’d heard all about his driving and I’d had a nice night, and I wanted a nice life. It was dark, but I only lived up the road at The Hafod. So I decided to walk.”

The words that were trapped inside the book were still jumping all over Jo’s consciousness when Doctor Sherman, who was wearing a bow tie that looked so out of place in the morning that she expected it to twirl of its own accord and then light up, coughed.
Then he said, “I’ll need a urine sample”.
Jo went into the tiny cubicle and did her stuff.
Quickly making her entrance again, she experienced another childhood regression:
“Full bottle. First time!”
These were unnecessary words and the doctor looked slightly embarrassed.
Jo didn’t know it but her gawky, giggly persona had set the precedent for this role-play between the young medical school post-grad and herself.
As the appointment went on he treated her more and more like a child.
“Are you sure you’ve read the instructions on the packet?”
“’Course I’m sure. Absolutely-bloody-certain!”
Sherman gave her a look that suggested she wasn’t.
They carried on with this yes-I-am-no-you’re-not dialogue for a while and Jo’s mind drifted back to her book. 

“The plan had been to go to a club afterwards. So me and Sarah were all dressed up and Dai was supposed to be working late as a barman and then getting up early in the morning to do his building job. Burning the candle at both ends, as my mother always put it.
But the pub wasn’t busy that night and there wasn’t that much work on in the day job anyway, which probably explains why Dai’s always boracic. I mean, two part-time jobs don’t pay the mortgage, do they? Which is just as well, because Dai wasn’t ready to settle down yet and neither am I.
So, that night, he’d decided to come and pick my friend Sarah up from the pub where we’d been drinking and, I s’pose, they were going back to his place for a bit of…”

Jo contemplated the activities between Sarah and skint, skinny Dai and decided that Dr. Sherman had enough money to pay for at least three mortgages and as many babies – including this one, if necessary.
Yes she could, with him, because he was a doctor.
In a few years, Sherman could buy the bump a silly tie and no one would be any wiser.
“Talk me through it,” demanded the doc.
“It’s got to be…”
In a moment of madness, she nearly said “a registry office wedding”. The doctor remained silent for a while, just staring at the sample bottle.
Finally, she came to her senses.
The, er, penny had dropped.
“Oh, that!” she said, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
For one mad moment she’d really believed that the doctor was referring to their fantasy marriage.
It was a huge sigh. Like one of those moments when someone asks you to blow up a child’s balloon and you think you’re doing so well until, say, your mobile phone rings and distracts you, or you simply run out of puff.
Then the balloon collapses and you have to start all over again.
Joanne was certainly breathless now.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Describe it to me – the whole kit and caboodle,” said the condescending Dr. S.
Jo tried to draw a deep breath.
“Well, the kit – it was a sort of flattened tube with an oval cut-out,”
she said, taking the doctor literally.
(Someone - another professional person, a solicitor - had once pointed out to Joanne that the Welsh are not know for their irony. She’d checked her creases and, with a face straighter than her jumper, had replied: “I don’t even have an ironing board”.)   
“Rectangular, not oval -” corrected the doctor, playing along with it.
“All right, rec-bloody-tangular!”
She was even less sure about where to insert the swear word in that sentence than she had been about the mechanics of the kit.
“Anyway, it contained a piece of special paper and I had to wee on it,” she said, staring hard at the sample bottle as if she were willing it to levitate, or something.
It nearly did.
“Plenty of target practise, then!” joked the doc, tossing the bottle into the air with his right hand and just about catching it with his left.

Jo began to have thoughts about why it is that men can aim easily and properly into precise areas - no, ha ha, that’s a laugh. But they could, if they put their minds to it. Women? That’s a different story. Oh, they can have babies, and pregnancy tests and things, but this one stupidly simple skill completely eludes them.
 
“So there I was, in my clubbing gear, walking home, when a really good-looking boy with dark hair appeared from a bush and said ‘Hello’.
He was frightening the shit out of me, but we got chatting anyway and he seemed nice and so I let him persuade me to go back into town with him. I said yes because I was all psyched up and dressed up. I was thinking, ‘What the hell?’

Having spent the rest of the night at Barons, Robert told me that he only lived up the road and could we walk home together?
At the nightclub he’d seemed a bit odd - a real gentleman, but he obviously didn’t know the music. He’d questioned the price of the drinks. And, even on the dance floor, he hadn’t removed his old-fashioned jacket but he still felt cold to the touch.
And come to think of it, outside in the cold air again he’d displayed no sign of actual sweat.
Weird.
 
It turned out that his house was the one with the bush at the front, the one where he’d been hiding.
Now, I have to say here that I’m not a tart, but he did seem nice. I fancied him. So when Robert invited me in I said yes.
But once inside the house, something seemed strange. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Ah, a light switch.
I tried to put my finger on it, because I, well - I like having sex with strangers, yes, but not in the dark.
I think I’ve been like that ever since American Werewolf in London.
Or Paris. Must’ve been Paris. I was too young to have sex at the time of the American one.
Anyway, there wasn’t a light switch. This was an original Period house and there didn’t even seem to be any lights.”

“And you haven’t had a period since - ” said the doctor.
“What do you mean ‘since’, now?”
“Since the time when you believe you conceived?”
“No.”
“And you definitely saw a pink line?”
“YES!”

“Robert told me there was a power cut and I didn’t believe him because the house looked sort of unwired – kind of derelict. But he got a dusty old box of candles out of the kitchen. That seemed to do the trick.
The dust made me cough and Robert gave me a kiss.
That seemed to do the trick too.
The house actually looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years, but I hadn’t had sex for months and so I let Robert lead me up to the bedroom.
By now I was sure it wasn’t his house, but he seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing and that was good enough for me.
I asked him if he had any condoms and he replied that he didn’t know what condoms were.
There was more coughing, and then we had sex on an old-fashioned bed that had no sheets or duvet but a big brass knob at each corner.”

“Okay. Good.” said Sherman, tossing the full bottle of wee around but not so vigorously this time, though by employing this empty gesture he was making it quite clear that it was Jo’s time to go and his time to say “Next!”
Jo didn’t take the hint.
She wanted some advice about committing herself to bringing up babies. Legal stuff, financial stuff, emotional stuff.
Sherman suddenly came over all world-weary at the mention of all this but, as a new practitioner in a high-density population area of South Wales, the doctor knew his social responsibilities.
He’d read all the books.
So he began to dish out ‘Speech A’ – without a script, although Jo was certain that, every so often, he was refreshing himself from the screen of his inherited, antiquated computer. The monitor was out of focus, its text as illegible as a doctor’s handwriting.  

“‘ Did you inherit this house - from your gran, or something?’ I said to Robert, confidently.
He’d just had a little piece of me and so I felt as if I had the right to know.
Robert remained silent and went down to the loo.
I didn’t hear him flush, but then I wasn’t surprised.
Knowing the state of the house, it was unlikely that the water supply was still connected.   
After a couple more minutes, I went down to see if Robert was all right but it was too late.
Robert was gone.”

“The first thing you must remember, Jo – can I call you Jo?”
“You’ve been calling me ‘Jo’ ever since I walked in!”
“Sorry – anyway, the first thing is that we have to send the sample to the hospital.” The doctor rubbed his hands briskly as he said this – the final hint, perhaps, that she should leave. 
“It’ll take about two weeks…”
Jo yawned, and her mind wandered back again to her book.

“When I went upstairs to check that the candle hadn’t tipped over I suddenly started to shiver.
I instinctively reached for the light switch, forgetting for a moment that there wasn’t one.
Then the shiver turned to a sort of intense freeze – the same feeling I’d once had in the storeroom at Iceland.
Mum used to work there when I was a kid and sometimes she’d leave me to play among the chickens when I was only five or so.
 Once there was a power cut and I actually believed that if the ice melted then the birds would come alive and so I’d started screaming, hysterically.
Anyway, here I was now, definitely inside the right bedroom. I could even smell Robert’s funny hair gel - Brylcreem, I think he said. I seem to remember my Grandad using something like that.
But there was no candle, or any sign of wax, even. Or smoke.
I felt like screaming now.”

“I know they say ‘there’s no smoke without fire’,” the Doc carried on.
Jo thought Sherman to be a caricature from a ‘Carry On’ movie and she intended telling him so, only she didn’t.
“But when a do-it-yourself pregnancy test is positive and then you don’t have a period, well the lack of that period can often be put down to worry.
Very often, with a lot of girls…”
Joanne coughed and the doctor paused.
“Very often, with a lot of women…”
Jo hadn’t coughed for that reason.
The doctor’s first placing as a practitioner had been in London and, as such, he was mindful of a type of political correctness that was largely unheard of among the working population of Swansea.
“With a lot of women, the moment they hear from the hospital that they aren’t actually pregnant - that the pregnancy is a false alarm, so as to speak - their period starts up straight away.”
The doctor drew his speech to an end prematurely because he couldn’t be heard above the terrible din.
Without making her excuses, she rushed to the toilet again, only this time without a bottle.
He could hear her spluttering echoing around the loo. He didn’t usher in the next patient.

“I was too scared to leave the house so I tried to sleep in the old four poster but I couldn’t even manage to close my eyes.
When daylight came, instead of feeling safer I began to panic.
No sign of Robert, and definitely no candle.
I threw open the draws in the old chest in front of the four poster, scattering smelly old clothes all over the floor.
Then I came across a pile of old photos.
I decided to go through the packets after opening the brown album first. Robert, I remember, had said that his surname began with an ‘S’ – something German, I think.
I flicked through boring photos of Christmas parties, weddings, christenings –  funerals, even.
Until:
There, in the line-up at a New-Years eve party in 1959, was a dark-haired boy who looked just like Robert.
His family was standing in front of a house that looked just like this one.
I hadn’t been able to see it properly last night, and anyway I was far too interested in Robert.
My thoughts and suspicions were already forming as I ran hysterically outside, clutching the photo.
That’s it: the house in the photo.
 It was THIS house.
I ran back inside, up the wooden stairs, and grabbed my shoes.
As I hurried back down again, the dust that had settled on my feet on the way up puffed up through the holes in the sides of the flimsy night club shoes before mingling with even more dust that I’d kicked up with my three inch heels.
Coughing hysterically, I grabbed the album and ran home against the tide of shop workers walking towards me on their way to work.
Even by their standards I felt overdressed.
These clothes had appeared glamorous last night but this morning I felt like a tart.

Once safety inside my house in the Hafod, I turned on the lights so quickly I nearly blew a fuse.
I knew exactly what I was about to witness but I needed to prepare for the moment. I went to the kitchen cupboard and began knocking back neat Vodka, straight from the bottle - the first time I’d ever drank alcohol before lunch.”

Joanne threw up in the toilet but it wasn’t morning sickness.
Her coughing fit had curtailed her air supply.
She reached for her handbag and frantically opened a brand-new pack of Always. 
Within seconds she was back in the doctor’s surgery and Sherman was giving her a look which said ‘I told you so’ but she knew better.
She opened her book again, only this time she read the last line of her diary out loud to the doctor, in the style (she thought) of a female Dylan Thomas:

“Vodka in hand, I stared at the writing.
The inscription was written in fountain pen, underneath the family photo that was black and white but yellowing at the borders.
Underneath the photo there was an arrow, pointing upwards to the dark-haired boy. Someone had drawn a circle around a bush.
The caption read:
Robert Senheiser, aged 20, 1959.
Killed here, in a road accident, by an English teacher.”

One – Maxi.
 

The thing about big families is that they get, well, bigger.

I often think about this as I’m peering dreamily through one of my customer’s windows. One time, I nearly fell off my ladder.

An old lady on the twelfth floor once said to me ‘Idris, you’re family can’t be bigger than mine. I had twelve siblings – the first died when I was two, the last last week’.

I told her that my family could give the whole tower block a run for its money.

With big families, the entire brood has a take on death and, in my case, on my chosen profession.

Dad’s word (when he was alive) is ‘dangerous’ (probably even now he’s dead).

And Aunt Lucy, together with her estimated seven children, appeared to find me ‘useful’, especially when she was ‘getting on a bit, see?’ Actually, ‘Idris the odd job man’ is nearly as old as Lucy was herself when she died. 

Death-inducing places, motorways. I mean, look at that bloke in front! He looks a bit like Jimmy. He could be my son, only he’s a hippy and he’s got a model of Beckham in the back - the new Millennium equivalent of the nodding dog.

Jimmy is probably at the Millennium stadium right now, playing the real game, instead of wasting time and money on the husband of an ex-Spice Girl who gets red-carded and then sent off in the middle of England’s second big battle with Argentina – you know, the famous ‘Beckham Kick’.

I still say ‘Football is for poofs’. 

But, wait a minute.

He’s slowing down.

Come to think of it, he’s been slowing down since England – the other side of the Severn Bridge, not the team.

Beep! Beeeep! ‘You’re in Wales now!’ I’m telling him.

Play and drive like a man!

And look - now I can see through my rear-view mirror that he’s pulled up on the hard shoulder, there’s steam pouring out of the bonnet and he’s trying to call the AA!

Only the bloody poof can’t open the door of that stupid box.

I reckon they’re like speed cameras, those AA things.

Nothing in them, see!

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes. Lucy, as it happens, did, in the dim and distant past, take on another ‘odd job man’. A man, it seems, who fulfilled the very strange role of siring her extended family – quantity unknown. Not very professional, is it? I mean, what good’s a quantity surveyor who can’t accurately estimate the number of his own children. Anyway, that’s why, to me, they’re her children, not my cousins.

They can’t all be cousins, can they? I mean, two of them have birthdays that are three days apart!

So it saves a lot of energy (and presents) just to refer to the unknown as ‘Aunt L’s children’.

One time, the friendly neighbourhood posh policeman put a ‘haitch’ in front of her initial. She came out sounding like ‘Aunt Hell’.

And after she’d gone to heaven, Auntie Hell left me this old hatchback in her will. She’d told the executor that I’d spent so much time crawling underneath it that I had shares in it and, therefore, I should own it - once God had finally decided she couldn’t take it to heaven, that is. And I was pretty chuffed, I can tell you, until I discovered that she had some real shares and that she’d left them to every other relative but not to me. That’s because I’m just a stupid window cleaner, I suppose – well, I’ll show her, see? 

I hate executors, anyway. Don’t trust them.

And mind how you’re reading that word; change the emphasis on the syllables in the ‘e’ word and it comes out sounding like the person who does the shooting, not the looting.

People from big families also accumulate other people’s holidays and other people’s problems, other people’s junk, other people’s cars.

‘This old Austin’s just like you’ I can hear Aunt Lucy saying, from beyond the grave. ‘It’s too useful to die alongside its equally ancient ex-owner’.

So you know all about Lucy – all I can tell you, anyway.

She’s given herself enough rope to hang herself, as they say.

Which reminds me; someone in the family once gave me one of those little rope ladders you hang in the bath -‘not suitable for those aged under three’, according to the label. Over three, it should’ve said! I mean, nobody aged four and above would actually believe that you’d ever get rid of spiders from the bath by giving them something to climb on!

And then another someone (I forget who - big family, too many names) thought it amusing to find a little figure from the local toy shop who looks a bit like me and then glue it to the bottom rung.

So I yanked it out of the bath and now I keep it in the car. Along with –

A dirty, dog-infested rug.

Bertie the bloodhound died on that rug twenty years ago, just after the birth of my son, Jimmy.

Just before Social Services took him away.

And it’s been sitting in the boot ever since, waiting for a cold day and a faulty carburettor to collide, co-incidence-wise, here on the M4.

Sweet wrappers of varying vintage.

A box full of yesterday’s embarrassing fads (fluffy dice, a real nodding dog, a bloodhound, in actual fact. Don’t ask!)

All spilling out, again embarrassingly, are a few:

Tools I don’t need.

Because, when this car finally meets its ex-owner (together with its ex-four-legged inhabitant) in heaven, the trilogy will then be complete. Oh, and finally -

Letters. Yes, letters.

Well, postcards, mainly – from my big and extended (but now diminishing) family.

I bet the woman who was in the fast lane, the woman who keeps overtaking me, hasn’t got so much baggage, so much junk - Christ! The stupid cow’s only pulled in on the hard shoulder, hasn’t she! She’s several yards ahead of the hippie guy now, but only a few ladder-lengths behind me.

And she’s –

Bloody women drivers!

She’s only reversing back towards the AA box and now

she’s stopped,  and she’s winding down her electric window and handing the hippie a mobile phone.

And - typical!

I’m the one with a police car up my arse because I’m watching all this through the rear-view mirror and noticeably swerving a bit, instead of concentrating on the road ahead. And doing –

‘Please step out of the car, Sir!’

And doing –

‘Are you aware you were doing thirty miles per hour on a motorway, Sir? Have you been drinking?’

And doing time, probably.
 
 Two – Midi.
 
Just look at that poor man – the one in that old Austin.
Some people, I feel, are born to be dealt life’s unkind card – a yellow card, if you like.  And others – they’re born winners. Take the famous ‘Beckham Kick’. One free kick in the final minute and England qualifies for the World Cup.
His testicles - sorry, his testosterone - must’ve been showing that day because, shortly afterwards, he married Posh.
There was never anything ‘posh’ about Victoria, of course – in fact, she reminds me of a girl in my class whose Dad’s been banned from driving. And because I only live two doors down (and because I’ve got a people carrier) it’s only fair that I help that poor family out and give the girl a lift to my school – give the girl a lift in life, if you like. A chance - one chance - that could turn her from a, er, I can’t bring myself to say it….into a winner.  Besides, this thing’s big enough to take the whole class, but imagine if I spun off the road like that poor guy in front was nearly doing just now?
I mean to say, royalty never travels on the same plane, does it? (And, besides, that would be the end of my career – sorry, was I putting myself first for a moment, there?).
Am I good person? Well, good enough to help this hippie- type in the Mini. But the bloke in front? We’ll let the law take its course, shall we – oh look, the copper’s got his book out and he’s giving the man in the Austin Maxi a piece of paper.
Too late –
‘How did you get on, er -’
I’m trying to ask the hippy bloke in the mini whether he managed to get through to the AA. 
He’s already interrupting me, not arrogantly, but in a nervous kind of way because - because he’s a hippie.
‘It’s Donovan! Well, David, really. But teachers at school used to shorten it to ‘Dai’. Makes me sound too, well, Welsh – not that I’m not proud of being Welsh. But I don’t carry my culture on the sleeve of my -’
‘Granddad shirt?’
‘What’s a Granddad shirt?’
‘Never mind. I thought all hippies wore them – in the Seventies -’
I’m sounding desperate, now.
I’m sounding like his mother.
‘I’m not a hippie. I was born in 1981!’
I don’t tell him I feel as if I am his mother. Instead, I say:
‘I’m a teacher! Oh, there’s no need to jump. I don’t bite! Oh, you nearly dropped the phone!’
‘Your phone. I’m sorry!’
‘No need to be – not for something you haven’t actually done.
‘Then let me say sorry for jumping down your throat. You’re right. In a way. I am a bit of a hippie, I suppose. Only in the sense that I used to go on marches. Protests. We’d establish nuclear-free zones. But now I’m less naïve. I mean, you can put bomb-proof barriers up on every side but you can’t block out an attack from the sky, can you? So, nuclear-free areas – they’re no-go, if you see what I mean -’
‘I do! You can’t block the entrance to the sky. It’s God’s roof!’
‘Are you religious, Miss?’
‘Lord no!’
I’m laughing, now – recklessly, helplessly, at I’m-not-sure-what. And he’s laughing, too. At me, not with me, I think. But I don’t mind. Rather one hippie rip the piss out of me than the whole class. And I wouldn’t use that kind of language in the classroom, oh no. And - oh-my-gawd - there I go again! But I mean, really! He may not have actually dropped the phone but it might just as well have fallen in that big puddle on the hard shoulder it’s so damn wet with his sweat. It’s like the handshake he gave me when he was showing his gratitude for lending him the phone in the first place.
By the way, I’ve just watched that policeman finish his business with the man in the Maxi, watched him slam his book shut.
Now I’m watching him approach me.
‘It’s times like these, David – I mean Donovan – that I especially don’t believe in God.’
 
 
 
Three - Mini.
 
‘I know what you mean, Miss!’
I’m calling her ‘Miss’ because she is, well - well, she seems -  you know. Not married. Quite Beautiful, really, in a mumsy sort of way.
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Donovan. You’re not at school, now. I’m not your teacher. It’s Kate.’
She’s shaking my hand now. It’s as if she’s introducing herself all over again, as someone new.
And, last time, she shook my hand she seemed to dry it against her dress. And I seem to remember it was no longer raining. I’ll have to do something about that sweaty handshake people tell me I have – there, she’s doing it again. 
‘Can I see your license, Sir? And Miss?’ the copper’s saying.
Funny how she doesn’t seem to be telling him off – all that ‘Missing’ I mean…..
‘Look, Officer, I can explain’.
Just listen to her begging. Has she no dignity at all?
She didn’t get a handshake from him, either. Not even a clammy one! It was quite comic, man, you should’ve seen it - Miss Katie-Goody-Two-Shoes holding out her hand and getting knocked right back!
 ‘I was only trying to help Mr. Donovan, here. His Mini is nearly forty years old, you know – nearly as old as I am!’
Blimey! She’s almost twice my age and I fancy her – oh look! Here comes the breakdown truck.
‘I’m afraid I don’t keep my license in the car, officer -’
I can’t imagine ‘Miss’ being afraid of anything. Especially me. And I’m not afraid of her, no of course I’m not. But my hand was clammy just now, on the second handshake, especially, because I’d sneakily gone through her phone menu and pressed ‘home’. Made a note of the number, see? Believe it or not, I was going to pluck up the courage to call her sometime but now it looks as if I won’t have to.
‘I’m formally cautioning you, Madam.’
Funny, that. Only a moment ago, it was Miss - just now, before the policeman really meant business.
‘You must never, under any circumstances, reverse along the hard shoulder of a motorway, Madam’ the policeman is saying, ‘Even if you are being a good Samaritan -’
Policemen and teachers: Masters (and Misses) of sarcasm.
Mind you, I don’t like the pitying, condescending way the officer is looking at me as he warns her. He’s holding up an invisible placard that reads ‘urchin’. But I’m not going to arrange a protest march about that. He isn’t arresting me, after all, although in a funny kind of way I think that’s unfair and I actually want him to.
‘Please take your licence, together with your insurance certificate, into Newport police station, Miss Crawford.’
‘Yes, Officer. Of course!’
‘It’s “Sergeant”, by the way!’
‘Okay, Sergeant!’
The grovelling has turned into more teacher-type sarcasm, now – now he’s powerless to do anything more, now that she’s been nicked.
Oh, and she really is a Miss – fancy that!
And I do.
‘I’ll be there at around nine-thirty tomorrow morning, Sergeant.’
So will I.
 
Mini, Midi, Maxi.
 
Fifty years old and still a desk-sergeant. Well, I was a high-flier in the CID. Once. Seems like a different life, that.
And in that other, earlier life, the officers on the beat used to call me ‘Todd’ – after the Sweeney.
Until I had a fling, that is, with one of the snouts. Disciplinary action followed – ‘Your behaviour compromises our integrity’ the Chief Super I said; not the exact wording in the report, but it’s what he said out loud. I remember, you see. Still got a policeman’s memory. Still a good copper at heart, underneath it all – all the scandal and that.
So, anyway, after the scandal, I was back on the beat before you could say ‘Dixon of Dock Green’.
Then here.
Oh, and I nearly forgot – I tried civilian life, for what seemed like a lifetime, though it was actually just three months, sitting there behind a desk at the local van-hire outfit.
‘Vans of all sizes’ went the ad. (I can remember that, too).
‘Minis, Midis, Maxis’.
Boring as hell. Then an old colleague suggested I did the same sort of thing behind a similar desk here – at Newport police station. So, in a way, I’m like the criminals; waiting to get back on track with my career, desperate to be let out on to the street again, doing my time… 
‘Better pay – and it’s what I know’ said my mate.
It’s Okay, I s’pose. You see all sorts, of course.
Take this bloke, for instance – rushing in here with a huge bunch of roses, like there’s no tomorrow. There’s still most of today left – it’s only half-past nine.
You’ve got to laugh. People like him are usually only seen running when they see the drug squad, not an ageing ex-member of the flying squad.
Eh, up. Who’s this?
‘Kate Crawford, Sergeant’. She’s holding out her hand.
‘It is ‘Sergeant’, isn’t it?’
Why is she so concerned about my status?
Then again, I’m quite curious about hers. I wonder if she’s married?
She’s looking round now –
‘My God’ she’s saying.
‘It’s Donovan, isn’t it?’
Does she actually know this hippie?
‘Didn’t we meet on the hard shoulder – yesterday evening, on the M4?’
Funny how people play out their sordid little affairs in such public places.
‘What brings you here?’
‘These!’ the hippy-bloke is saying.
He’s thrusting the bunch of flowers into the shapely hand that’s just shaken mine - some people get all the luck.
‘It’s not necessary – I mean, it’s a very nice gesture, but not necessary. All I did was lend you my mobile phone.’
‘Dai’ the man is saying. ‘You can call me “Dai”. If you agree to have dinner with me tonight, that is’.
Blimey! He’s only been here for a few seconds.
That’s quick work.
I’ve been here three years.
I must be losing my technique.
‘Why do you call yourself Donovan, anyway?’ she’s saying.
‘Is it after that singer, England’s answer to Bob Dylan? You do look a bit like him.’
‘Britain’s answer, you mean. Bob took his name from Dylan Thomas.’
‘He didn’t sound Welsh, did he?’ the woman’s saying.
‘I don’t think he was. Never heard him talk, really.’
I think the hippie’s got the wrong end of the stick.
‘Oh, that’s one of literature’s great mysteries. I once took a class on an outing to the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. They’ve got a tape archive running, there. You should go – but not on your own. It’s kind of spooky when it’s just you and the ghost of an English-sounding Welsh poet -’
‘I was referring to the singer. He’s not Welsh -’
‘Oh, I see -’
And what’s happening now?
After this misunderstanding, the older bloke’s getting in on the act, seizing his chance, perhaps. He seems more than a bit familiar with her:
‘Kate!’ he’s saying, to the attractive woman who’s now holding the flowers.
‘It is Kate, isn’t it?’
‘Idris – you’ve hardly changed. I mean, you’re a lot – a bit -’
‘No, a lot. Be honest, I’m a bit older, but I’ve aged a lot -’
‘What are you doing here, Kate?’
‘Oh, they need to see my papers – driving licence, that sort of thing. Didn’t have them yesterday, when they caught me reversing back on the hard shoulder to help -’
‘You mean, that was you, yesterday evening in that people carrier? I thought you looked familiar, even from a distance, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, you know. You were always one to do a good turn. You were helping out that hippie -’
‘Donovan. Pleased to meet you! I’m that “hippie guy”, I think you were about to say’.
God, it’s good, this.
Better than one of the soaps.
Maybe this job isn’t so dull after all.
And anyway, I thought I recognised that older bloke and now she’s said his name that confirms it.
Used to know his old man’s sister.
And we used to call her ‘Aunt Hell’, those of us patrolling the village beat. I often spoke to Lucy. She was a bit, er, promising. And promiscuous. A bit like me.
I’d been demoted. She’d been de-flowered. Well, the last bit’s not strictly true – it’s the word they use for breaking in virgins, isn’t it. But you know what I mean.
Lucy had at least seven children by different partners. We had something in common – it passed the time of day, and that was that.    
‘And you are?’
‘Idris’.
The hippie guy is staring right into Idris’s eyes, now.
‘Did – you – say – your – name – is - Donovan?’
 His reply is taking on a measured tone now, as if it’s somehow frozen by the young guy’s stare.
‘Donovan’s taking me to dinner!’
The sexy teacher-woman is sounding like she’s proud of her conquest, but it makes me sick. She needs to be with someone older. She needs to be with me.
‘Idris, why don’t you tell him? It’s all water under the bridge now!’
‘Oh, all right.’
I do believe the older guy’s gone a bit red.
Blokes like that – suspects – used to look like that when I’d finally cornered them, in the old ‘Sweeney’ days.
‘We had a brief affair, your new friend and I -’
The hippie’s not really taking it all in. His eyes are fixed – frozen, even, only this time for a different reason.
‘She used to joke that she was only like that because she’d learned it off her mum -’
Idris is delighting in all this, now – almost enjoying it, as it were.
‘Idris,you’re a disgusting old fart -’ the hippie finally says.
‘Lucy wasn’t like that!’
The teacher’s definitely on the ropes.
‘Not really. It’s just that -’
Idris won’t let her finish.
‘Lucy? Did you say Lucy?’
‘Yes, Idris. It’s a little known fact, but my mum’s name was ‘Lucy’. I never mentioned that to you. I only call her that now she’s dead. It’s how I deal with all that Catholic guilt – a way of accepting my inheritance, if you like, how I take the money.  Anyway, Donovan -’
She’s turning to the hippie, now.
‘I finally split up with old Idris here -’
‘Hey, less of the “old!”’
‘As I was saying, Donovan, I left this man because he made me pregnant -’
She’s whispering that last word. Can’t quite hear it. But I think she said ‘pregnant’. 
‘Anyway, I had to go through with it. I’m sort of religious, you see. So I gave the baby away for adoption and that was that.
Donald, I think he was called.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
Oh dear. The young hippie is questioning her quite aggressively, now. In fact, he’s being as aggressive as a hippie ever gets.
‘Because it’s true. And after hearing all that, you still want a date, Don -’
She’s stopping in mid sentence, now.
‘Don – Don! OH MY GOD!’
She’s backtracking.
‘Donovan isn’t your surname, is it?’
‘No!’
In fact, if she were driving a car right now, I’d say she’s just reversed several yards down the hard shoulder.
And the young guy with the flowers is now giving her the cold shoulder and thrusting them right in her face and saying:
‘Belated Mother’s Day present!’
The sexy teacher’s running out of the station, as fast as the youth ran in.
Where’s my radio?
We must go after her.
Someone already has.
‘DAD!’
The older guy’s run back in again now. He’s already given up the chase.
Blimey, the old bloke’s actually hugging the hippie - that’s a pretty swift conversion to ‘love and peace’!
‘What were you going to say, son?’

 
Words: 3,800.  
 
 

                                   

 

“That house looks perfect…just perfect, Mark.”
“God, Sue, you sound like a cat food commercial. But you’re right. I reckon it is.”
“Funny, isn’t it? You stare at these customer advertising boards and then some prat nearly runs over your foot with a trolley full of Coke and then…and then the penny drops; there’s another advert over there…”
“Where?”
“There! On the other side of the board. The one just below the slimming ad that tells you to make a new beginning for the New Year…for the new Blair government.
“A Fresh New Weight for Ninety-eight.”
“Cringeworthy isn’t it? Now, stop being distracted Mark and look at this one.”
“The one that’s a different colour but in the same handwriting as the one advertising the house?”
“Yeah, it’s like they’re doing their damnedest to separate the two postcards from each other. Red biro for the house, yellow pen for the Baby Belling. Handwriting’s a dead give-away…”
“So’s the unusually correct grammar, even though the house is a local number…”
“And the one for the cooker’s a mobile.”    

  ******

“Sue and Mark Carter. Pleased to meet you.”
“Jonathan Belling. So you’re here about the house. Shall we look around?”
“Thanks. But before we do there’s one question my husband would like to ask you.”
“Don’t tell me, Mr. Carter - if we decide we like South Africa, like we said on the phone, and one of us - I mean both of us - never come back, then you’d like the option to buy, wouldn’t you? Well, fine. But just don’t ask us to refund the rent.”
“We wouldn’t dream of doing that.”
“It was only a joke.”
“Fair enough. But seeing as how you’ve mentioned, er, selling things…”
“Yes?”
“Look, there’s no easy way to put this. What Sue and I are trying to ask is this: Was the other advertisement yours as well? You know, the one for the cooker?”
“The one in the yellow handwriting? The one that says: ‘Baby Belling for sale’? Yes. It is. And before you ask, Sue, you’re both right to be cautious. You smelt a rat - a great big baby-sized rodent. Spot-on, Sue. Right on Mark! And you know why? Because this Belling isn’t your small, conventional old-fashioned stove. Baby Belling is - well, she’s a baby.”

******

Am I happy, you ask. Are you blissfully in love with life, Rick? You see - silence! Actually, it was silence all around, because you didn’t even ask me the question. The question, like the answer, came from myself. And when you’re the psychiatrist and the patient, and you’re lying to yourself while you lie on your own couch, then you know that what you are witnessing is the first real sign of madness, a madness that upstages all other embryonic forms of insanity. Even hairs on the palms of your hands, even sending Christmas cards to yourself because you want to drag the last drop of loneliness out of the unproductive year that is Two-Thousand-and-bloody-Three…
No matter. I mean, who needs friends or relatives when happiness, like all other things in a forty-year-old life is relative.
I’ve got a girlfriend called Lisa. We have things in common. We have great sex. Well, great telephone sex between her Chicago conferences. But, hell - I’m happy. Relatively. And who knows how much happier I’d feel if I was with someone else? Or how much more miserable? At least the phone sex is better than the last long-distance relationship. Here, Rick. Let’s drink. Let’s drink to sex more than once in Two-Thousand-and-sodding-Four. And, while we’re at it, let’s drink to more than one note from my bloody euphonium-playing pupil next door. Talk about a busman’s holiday! They ought to re-name it ‘Music teacher’s holiday’.
Actually, I can’t bring myself to look forward to the New Year. How can I, when nearly two years ago Lisa went to Chicago and I had a one-night stand with Monica?  Why, I hear you ask (or rather I don’t). Well, I’ll tell you. The result of this lonely little liaison was…another Monica. A little Monica. But I made sure I had the last laugh, oh yes: a sort of compensation, I suppose, for the fact that I knew I’d be paying for that little mistake for the next forty bloody years. I registered little Monica’s full name as Harriet Angela Rebecca Monica. H.A.R. Monica Stallion. Ha, ha, ha. And you know what? Big Monica went ahead and christened my daughter with that name and no one even noticed the initials ‘til the Godparents had worked their way into the third sherry bottle. Still, it could be worse. ‘Harmonica’ could’ve been a euphonium player, just like that precocious, pig-tailed prima donna next door. And there was me, exactly a year ago, thinking this house was gong to be a refuge, an escape for me from all this child-stuff. Fat chance! Just imagine if my ‘one night wonder’ had turned into a one-note wonder like this kid! God, that child must’ve annoyed everyone, ever since it woke whoever it was who used to live here squealing on its first night. I teach kids. I hate kids. I have a kid. I hate myself. No, I’m most definitely not happy. There, I’ve said it! Only I couldn’t hear myself saying it above that din. “Shut UP, you little brat!”   

******

“You’ll have to have a word with that bloody slave-driving professor, Sue.”
“He isn’t a professor, Mark. He’s just - well, he’s just plain Rick Stallion and he’s just…”
“Just a music teacher. And he’s just next door. But you’re wrong about the professor bit. He’s a professor of irritation.  Why can’t bloody Stallion teach Becci some more sodding notes? It’s just as well he’s not her maths teacher, isn’t it Sue? I mean, the bloody sadist tells our daughter to practise for fifteen minutes a day and, being our daughter, she does exactly what he says…”
“She isn’t our daughter. You know I don’t like you using the D-word.”
“I know. Oh come on, love. Please don’t cry. You know I can’t deal with this. It’s a New Year. Let’s try and celebrate new beginnings. Ok, so we can’t have a child of our own but Becci’s everything that our own child…”
 “Wouldn’t have been. Our child, Mark, would’ve been the best child we could produce. And that wasn’t good enough, was it? I could only give birth to imperfect children. And then we go and adopt one. Off the peg, so as to speak. And it turns out perfect. And just as I’m dealing with all that, getting my head round it so as to speak, Mark darling, Stallion goes and teaches her to practise fanatically for fifteen minutes a day but he only ever teaches her one note. And another thing: why is it Stallion never takes women back to that house? He’s a one-note wonder, that man. Are you sure, Mark, that he should even be teaching our daughter at all?”
“That’s better, love. You’ve stopped crying. And you’ve started referring to Becci as our daughter. Like I said, 2004 is going to be a new start. So let me finish Stallion off.
I’m going round there, right now. Going to sort this out once and forever.

******

Stupid, isn’t it? New Years Eve and I have to go down the Bullshit and Bush just to escape from one of my own pupils. Just because Lisa isn’t at home for Christmas and I’m (relatively) unhappy. And I’m the product of my own success story because here is my star euphonium pupil - well, all right, my ONLY euphonium pupil - driving me out of my own house. Next door: nuclear bloody family, doing some proper living, making a proper noise. Here? Me, living in a sort of pseudo-silence. Hearing every pin drop, eavesdropping on every fart, LISTENING TO THAT BLOODY EUPHONIUM. There she is, my star pupil at work, coming back to haunt me in my private (very private) life. It’s Frankenstein’s syndrome: If you create a monster, then don’t be surprised if one day it jumps up and bites you.  

******

“Look, Mark love, it’s New Year’s Eve. Stallion’s probably down the Iraq and Ruin.”
“The Bullshit and Bush.”
“Ok, but even if Rick isn’t drinking in the Bull you can’t just go round and confront him now.”
“Yes I can. And he’s got no life so he’s bound to be in. I’m going to knock him up. And when I’ve finished knocking Stallion up, I’m going to bloody well knock him out.”

******

They don’t call me Rick Stallion for nothing. I’m sick of listening to that child. That’s it: I’ve had my new year drink now and I’m going to bloody well bang on the Carters’ door, new year no bloody new year. And by the time I’ve finished with those bloody Carters they’ll both need to be carted off to hospital….
“What are you doing out here in the rain, Stallion?”
I could’ve asked Carter the same thing. And I did.
“Looking for you, Stallion. And asking you why…”
“Why?”
“Yep. Why. You tell me. Why did you teach our adopted daughter just one bloody note?”
“All right, all right. I hate children.”
“But you teach them?”
“I know, Mark. But after I’d had a one-night stand with Monica I had a little Monica with big Monica, Ha ha ha. And the only way she and her bloke could deal with it was to move away somewhere, to a different house. They tried to make it work, but they couldn’t hack it. Too much water under the bridge. So they ‘sold’ the baby…”
“Wait a minute, Stallion. Did you say her name was Monica?”
“Did I?”
“Yes you did. You said her name. And then you laughed. You went ‘Monica, ha, ha ha. Our Monica is so used to that.”
“But the kid’s called…shit, Carter. Your kid is called Rebecca.”
“Harriet Angela…”
“Rebecca Monica…”
“…Stallion! STALLION, SHE’S YOUR BLOODY LOVE CHILD. Listen to her now, playing that one bloody annoying note…”
“Can’t hear anything.”
“Not surprising, is it Stallion? Not surprising that Monica’s stopped playing. She’s having a break after her fifteen-minute, one-note wonder. But listen - hey! Is that silence I hear, or is our daughter learning how to see the New Year in with her new tune? Listen, Stallion! Monica’s learning to play ‘Land of our Fathers’.”