parts
A garage full of spare parts for things that do not go:
flying carpets,
time machines,
a bottomless purse,
and a mirror that reflects inner beauty.
Unwanted spare parts flaked with rust;
they squat in blue corners,
dying.
The oily teeth on bitten metal,
the broken teeth ground down to rubber gums,
arcane engines, stalled. Betrayed.
They whine and hum their
petroleum music
into my nose.
They’re useless and redundant and I hate them.
I’ll put a match to the lot,
And house them in flames.
They don’t belong and they never will.
No they don’t belong, and they never will.
bones
They built the pyre around a sackful of cats and kittens. So even before the flames licked at the witch’s feet, the screams and howls of demons filled the air all around.
In the thick brown evening the fire turned to embers. The air was greasy. Flakes of ash snowed down, coating the lane with slippy, fatty, grey dust. And in the morning all that was left were bones. Cat bones and witch bones.
The witch’s daughter waited until the hour before dawn. She crept to the ashy pile and one by one, she pulled out the bones. She put them into a sack and took the sack into the woods. She walked for a long time in the forest, a day and a night and a day. On the second night, she stopped.
She built a house with sticks and bones. Cat bones and witch bones. She covered the house with mud and leaves. She hung her mother’s skull over the door. Then she sat inside the house and wept. Her grief filled the room and her grief opened the door and stepped outside. Her grief went up to the round moon and came back again.
On the seventh night of grieving, she was visited by a silver cat. It sat calmly at the side of the house and watched the girl cry.
After a time, the silver cat spoke. “Do not cry, my daughter.”
The girl was comforted, because the cat had spoken with the voice of her mother. It padded closer, crept into her lap, and curled up there, purring. Then the witch daughter lay down and slept.
#
They stopped the lorry on the hard shoulder, and pushed her out into a grey dawn. The cold had teeth, and it bit through her thin clothing. She did not know this place. She had been lying in the lorry for a long time, in the dark, with the taste of metal in her mouth.
The man pointed along the road, and she nodded. When the lorry drove off, she walked. Not for a day and a night, but forever; an unimaginable time walking towards the brown horizon.
She had nothing in her hands, nothing in her pockets.
Then steel and iron and concrete structures rose out of the land. Cars flew past, stirring the wind. Finally she came to a house, a small, beautiful house, and she went to the door and knocked.
A white woman opened the door. She stared at the girl. She spoke to her sharply, a stream of jagged words. The girl didn’t understand. She asked her, what country is this, aunty? But the white woman shook her head, dismay turning down the corners of her mouth, pinching her face into a frown. Finally she took hold of the girl’s shoulder and pulled her into the house.
#
School was a prison, with tall metal spikes holding the children in, and rules that she struggled to understand. The girl was never alone there. Women with their heads uncovered were teachers. Women in hijab were helpers. Some of them spoke her language. She understood their words but not their meanings.
At night she stayed with a family in a warm brick house. The mother tried to hold her and comfort her, but the girl resisted. She didn’t like to be touched. She liked to sit in her cosy, pink room, with her big socks on and the family cat curled up on her lap.
They sent her to English lessons. The teacher showed her letters on a page, and she made the sounds. A is for apple.
‘Apple,’ said the girl.
‘Wonderful!’ said the teacher. ‘Do you like apples?’
The girl shook her head. She had no opinion about them.
Next time, the teacher brought a map. She pointed to Britain, a wobbly green blob. Then, over blue seas and orange continents, they found her country, tiny and brown.
‘Tell me about your country,’ said the teacher.
‘Very cold,’ said the girl. ‘ This my England home.’
‘Thank you! Wonderful!’ said the teacher.
Wonderful, thought the girl, walking back to the family’s house with her hands stuffed into her pockets. Wonderful. And the smell of November filled the air, greasy fire and sizzling meat.
witches
You can burn the witch or you can put out her eyes or you can hammer a nail into the top of her head or feed her poison berries. You can throw acid in the wizard’s face or break his bones or bury him alive.
We are in Akwa Ibom, in the Niger Delta. It is the present day.
A pastor stalks the open air church and stops next to you and puts his hand on your head, which sends a cold sweat right down your back. Your husband died last month. There must be evil close at hand. And the pastor says, ‘Satan is upon you. He is very close. He is in the… in the…’ and your mind is empty, not daring to look down at your two children, and the pastor says, ‘Where is your son?’ and then you look down at the boy who is sitting in the dust at your feet, so young that he has fat baby cheeks still.
Now the pastor takes up the boy and puts his hands on his head and shouts ‘Satan get OUT,’ and your son screams.
‘Someone has poisoned this child with evil,’ says the pastor. ‘Someone in your family.’
Your daughter is five. She goes to school. She is top of her class.
‘There is a witch,’ says the pastor, pointing at her. ‘It is she! Who killed your husband! And poisoned! And infected your son.’
The neighbours around you draw back, muttering ‘witch’. And the girl clings to you, shaking, her thin arms tight around your knees.
‘You must pray. Pray to Jesus.’
You will pray. You will. But you know that praying will not be enough. And you push the girl away from you, wrenching her arms from you. You stare into her shocked face for a second, but then you quickly look away again.
postcards from the edge of the rebel alliance
You are not my father. But I am not Luke Skywalker, nor was meant to be. Am an attendant fool – no, worse: a woman. Your daughter, Princess Leia. Princess of nothing. Princess of high heels and long hair curled into earmuffs, and tranquillizers, cocaine, and booze.
All Princesses of Nothing have secrets. They sent me to you as a spy, after all. Me, the leader of the Rebels – and yet I was dispensable. I expected it, don’t worry. It’s the same old story: I take the risks, I have my stomach pumped, I am the compliant body. I am sticky honey in a trap, in a metal bikini, with stupid hair.
You think I am weak. You can crush me under your boot. But I have watched you. I can see behind your black mask, your five wives, your rock and roll. The Force is strong with me.
once there was, once there wasn’t
A girl was married without a dowry to a man much older than herself. What was she, this bride with empty hands? Nobody special. Not a princess. But she was pretty, and her husband liked pretty girls better than anything.
He took her away to his castle, deep in the forest, and he gave her the keys and told her to be the mistress of the place. Then he took her to bed, brutally, and afterwards he left, saddling up his horse and riding out through the forest to who knew where.
The young wife was alone for the first time in her life. She walked around the castle, jangling the keys in her hands. She jumped on the beds and let the dogs into the kitchen and she rode the horses around the yard. She cooked extravagant meals and shared them with the cats and the mice and they all grew fat and happy and warm, for she made fires in all the rooms. She took up reading, and spent hours playing the instruments in the music room. She even wandered in the forest, gathering plants and mushrooms, and she dried them and stored them in jars, along with rabbitsfoot and toadspawn and other such things.
In short, she was happy and content, until the day her husband came back to the castle. He was furious with her for her wastefulness, making fires in the middle of the day when he wasn’t even home. He put the dogs out and shot the horses and damped the fires and smashed the jars and drowned the cats and burned the books and broke the instruments and built a huge iron fence around the castle so that she could not escape. Then he left again, because he could not stand to be in the ruined home, with his wife crying and complaining. He left her scrubbing blood off the kitchen floor.
After that, the wife kept to her room, eating plain meals and keeping a small fire going. She was always hungry and cold, but too frightened of her husband coming back to give herself any more warmth than this. She confined her comfort to one room. But here she soon became at home. She found pencils, and drew pictures of the forest flowers and the animals that she missed. She wrote stories like the ones she had read in books, and told them to herself. She sang and danced. And her spirits rose, and her hope.
The next time her husband came home, he brought his friends. They wanted to meet his pretty wife. They had heard so much about her looks and her carefree ways. But the castle was cold, and the wife was thin and unsmiling, and there was no joy to be had, except to torment her. They took away her pictures and stories. They laughed and pushed her from one to the other. And the husband was the worst of all. He was so ashamed of his ugly, miserable wife, who could not stop crying, who could not even keep a house warm, that he beat her until she was half dead.
Then they left, all of them, leaving nothing behind except her. They did not even bother locking the gates, for there was nowhere for such a wretch to run to. She crept into the forest, looking for herbs to heal her bruises and herbs to mend her spirits. And when she was in the forest, alone, her heart rejoiced. She listened to the birdsong and watched the sunlight slant between the trees, and she felt she was blessed. I am alive, she thought, and I can feel the sun in my head.
And when she looked up from the forest floor, back towards the castle, she saw that it was burning to the ground, and turrets of smoke and ash plumed up towards the heavens. The fire gave off a wonderful heat, and she held out her hands to it. Her cheeks grew rosy and hot. The fire warmed her through and through, until she was glowing, until she could believe that she would never be cold again.
if there was no singing, the world would be silent
They call from her hometown, asking if she is dead yet. She has brought shame on her people. They paint messages on the wall of her mother’s house. She is bad. She deserves to be killed.
She says she isn’t scared. She has lived through worse fear. This is the dress I wore when I did my beautiful dance. She holds up the ivory and silver shalwar kameez. This is the dress of freedom.
She always acts according to her emotions. She says music lifts the heaviness from her heart. She says if there was no singing, the world would be silent.
three minutes
# 1
“What kind of music do you like?”
I shrug. “Oh, a bit of everything, really.”
“Everything? You can’t like everything. That’s stupid.”
I take the bait. “Why is it stupid?”
“Do you like Shania Twain?”
“Not especially, but…”
“Do you like death metal?”
“No, I don’t really…”
“Do you like car alarm music? Do you like French pop music? Do you like Christian rock?”
“No.”
“Do you like dolphin relaxation music, Jean Michel Jarre, Shakin Stevens, elevator music? Do you like Katie Melua?”
I say nothing. I give him a hard stare, and finally he retreats and leans back in his seat, folding his arms. “I’m just saying,” he says.
# 2
“I love to travel,” he says. “Do you love to travel?”
“Well, I guess I…”
“Me too. Love it. Like, I went to South America last year? Amazing. We went in the Amazon jungle and had like this major party? And then we went to Argentina and it was so cool. The entire economy had like just totally collapsed so we were drinking champagne for like fifty pence a bottle. Awesome. So what about you? You been to South America?”
“No, I just came back from Africa. I was working on a health project in Congo…”
“The Congo? Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo. Do they all drink Um Bongo?”
“What?”
“Um Bongo?”
“What?”
He gives me his best little-boy smile and I fire back my best quizzical frown. We sit like this, silently, for the remaining two minutes.
# 3
“Tell me everything about yourself.”
“Everything?” I laugh. “We’ve only got three minutes. I hope I can’t sum up my whole life in three minutes.”
“Good point! You seem like an interesting person. I love intelligent, strong women. Tell me about your work. What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a nurse,” I say. “A tropical nurse specialist. I work for Medicin San Frontieres. Just come back from Congo, there was a lot of cholera and malaria there, but obviously we were seeing a lot of victims of violence and rape too. Now I’m training other nurses to work in areas affected by civil war.”
“A nurse? Woah. That’s awesome.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I really love my job.”
“I bet you look hot in a uniform.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Hey, we all know what nurses are like. Woo boy. I’m definitely marking your card.”
baby god
Baby has dirt in its eyes. Baby is crying dirty puddles, splash splash on the linoleum. Baby is caked with mud. I am swabbing away the dirt with balls of cotton wool and oil, gently easing it off Baby’s skin, slowly revealing the lustrous soft brown of its body. Baby’s crying is monstrous, far too loud. Within its screams I can hear pneumatic drills, ringing telephones, alarm clocks, cats fighting, cars backfiring, trees falling, nuclear bombs exploding. There are frightening little cracks as my tiny ear bones break.
Shush now, it’s alright, I say. I think I’m shouting. Through the kitchen window I can see the dog sniffing round the big hole in the garden. And it’s raining, making everything green and jungly. I want to get Baby clean and get outside and fill the hole up before everything turns to mud. If only it would stop crying! I imagine myself filling the sink with tepid water, and holding Baby underneath for a long time, until silence. Such thoughts. But then Baby stops, and tears spring to my own eyes, I am so relieved and grateful.
Now we can be a family. But Baby won’t eat. I put it to my breast and it turns its face away. I hold a rubber nipple at its lips, dripping milk into its mouth, but Baby spits everything out. Baby grows old and small, its head withering to a wispy point, its fingers twisted and gnarly.
Winter comes. Everything in the garden is dying. Rose petals turn grey and crispy, the soil hardens, the sky is growing black. Then the dog is sick. She won’t move from her bed, and whimpers when I try to touch her. Our house is too cold. There are cracks in the linoleum that I never noticed before, and peeling wallpaper and broken hinges and ceilings that sag and leak and drip water.
So I take a spade and I try to dig the hole again, but the ground is so hard and dry now. Still I scratch at the grey soil, stab my spade into the ground so hard that it jars my whole body. I pour on buckets of water, watching it run off into the drain. I dig and dig, with bleeding hands; spine breaking, heart breaking, but I must make a hole that is deep enough for Baby.
bed is a ship
Bed is a ship that sails through the night, on inky indigo waters; through silver surf, curlicued and shining. There are no lights, no lanterns, only burning cigarettes: small hot golden warnings that can be seen for miles. (I never smoke in the daytime.) The bed is haunted by the ghosts of slaves, who mutiny all night long against the piratical captain. We are monstered by giant squid, with their blindly thrashing tentacles, and fish with legs and teeth, who cling onto the headboard and crawl onto the sheets, dripping seaweed. I fight back as best I can, with whatever comes to hand, while the slaves chant, heave ho and away, as they row me ashore, or run me aground in morning’s rocky harbours.
your dreams and what they mean
If you dream of an old woman holding out her palms, this is lucky.
If you dream of the green half of an apple, this signifies virtue. If you dream of the red half of an apple, this signifies poison.
If you come across a well in your dream, this is a well of emotion. If it is dry, and a bucket clanks in the hollow space, and scrapes against the mildewed brick, this means that you must bring your feelings up on a winch.
If you dream of violence and wake up with your heart banging in your chest and thudding in your ears, and you reach for the light and switch it on and lie back on the pillow, trying to calm yourself, but the room closes in on you, collapses around you like a sack, and the old woman laughs, and a metal bucket clanks in a dry well; if you realise you are still dreaming and you force yourself to wake and reach out for the light, but you can’t touch it and your fingers fall through it; you’re a ghost, and the only thing you can grasp is the red half of an apple: if this is your dream, you have already eaten the poison.
If this is your dream, you must try to wake up.
