dead love
They heard he had died in the war, so when he came back to the village, prowling around the perimeter in his suit of skin and bones, they didn’t see him. When the children asked, ‘who is that?’ they shook their heads, saying ‘no-one, nothing, it’s only a shadow, a branch moving in the wind.’ The ghost cried pitifully, begging the villagers for food and shelter, but they didn’t hear him. They told the children, ‘hush now, it’s only the cattle lowing, only the dogs barking and rattling their chains.’
No one wanted the dead back there, hanging around where they did not belong. But the ghost would not leave.
Marya, neither blind nor deaf, saw the dead man and heard his cries. While everyone slept, she lay awake in her narrow bed and listened to the ghost’s sobs and pleas. She told herself it was nothing but the creak of the wind in the rafters. But she was restless and could not stop imagining the dead man out there: his hands curling into fists, his mouth cracked at the edges.
So Marya rose silently in the night and took bread and meat from the larder, and she walked in her bare feet and nightdress to the edge of the village where the ghost waited. When he saw her, he smiled, and Marya looked away. When she handed him the food, his fingers brushed against hers, and when she turned to leave, he called after her, come back.
She swore she wouldn’t go back. But the next night came, and with it the dead man’s crying, and Marya turned and turned in her bed and finally rose. She walked barefoot in her thin nightdress to the boundary of the village and gave over the bread and meat she had. This time, the ghost took her hand as she passed him the food, pulling it up to his mouth. She snatched her hand away from him, but not before he had put his lips against it. There was a patch of wetness on her palm where his tongue had touched her skin.
Each day Marya told herself she wouldn’t go back, but the night found her restless and lonely, and she crept out of bed to visit the dead man and bring him food. He grew stronger and filled out, until he no longer looked much like a ghost, and Marya forgot to be frightened. They talked of many things. Marya told the stories of the village without men. And the dead man spoke about the war, and the men who had died, brothers, cousins and uncles of this place. He showed her the wound on his leg, a deep gutter of seared flesh on his thigh. He spoke of hunger and cold as though they were animals that had walked alongside the army, patrolling the camps, keeping the men quiet and in their place.
It could have been pity, or love, or simple hunger that finally made Marya step across into the dead man’s arms. She could not say herself which it was. They lay together on the hard ground, Marya’s nightdress bunched up under her armpits, and the dead man’s trousers pooled around his feet, and when they were finished, there was nothing left to say. The next day the dead man was gone. Nobody remembered he had been there at all.
The baby was born dead, but Marya fed it anyway, holding it to her breast until the icy mouth froze her milk. For weeks she did this, and then she stopped. She buried the child behind her house, hoping it would grow somehow. Perhaps into a tree, or a rose bush, or a ghost.
jailfingers and jellyfingers
James Blood Ulmer stretched out his long bony jailfingers, holding them up in front of his face. He made tight clenched fists, then stretched his hands again. He cracked each knuckle and joint from the base of his thumb to the top of his little finger, repeating the process on his left hand. Finally he locked his fingers together and pushed out his palms.
“I think you’re lying,” he said.
Bob Spoon shivered. He was a sweet guy. He had jelly fingers and a milk roll; he was tender like a blancmange.
James Blood Ulmer pushed Bob Spoon up against the steel door of the cell. Bob’s flesh shook like vanilla milkshake.
“Why don’t you tell me the truth?” said James Blood Ulmer. “It’ll be a lot easier that way.”
Bob Spoon shook his head, and his red cheeks wobbled. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. There were fat tears dropping from his eyes. And James Blood Ulmer could never stand a coward. He despised the soft wet face in front of him. He took the thin shard of broken mirror from his pocket and pressed it to Bob Spoon’s trembling fleshy throat.
“Telling lies is only going to make it worse,” he said.
Bob Spoon cried. “It wasn’t me, I swear, honest. You gotta believe me.”
But someone had eaten the last chocolate biscuit, and all James Blood Ulmer knew was, it wasn’t him.
tin pyjamas
Nights she’d go flying in her tin pyjamas, flapping her arms and kicking her feet, a clanking metal fish in the blue night sky. Her aeroplane dreams were long hauls over the icing-topped world to the Far East, to the pulsing electric seas of Taiwan. Here were spare parts and wiring, robotic buffers, machines that stripped the pyjamas down and fixed them with shiny new rivets at the seams. A long time ago she had flown in bright feathers like a bird, tame, and trusting every hand that called her down from the sky. A small bird’s wings can be broken with one quick snap. Girls need armour.
skinny dog
The skinny dog who runs through the nights, who lives in my dreams, has long clever legs and a wet nose. She speaks with a voice as clear as a bell. We walk by the river and she comes up to me holding a white rabbit between her teeth. The rabbit is wearing clothes. When the dog opens her mouth to speak, rabbit falls out and scampers away, shirt tails flying in the wind. I stay the dog with my hand, and reach into my pocket for a treat, pulling out a pebble and a spider. She does not want either, so I eat them both myself.
a few words of dog
I speak only a few words of dog. I am weak. I mean no harm. I am nothing. It is not enough to allow me to travel easily, fluently, in their world. I will always be a stranger here.
I have been growing my fur, but the pale bald skin still shows in patches, and my leathery knees and hands are black with dirt and swollen with sores. Still I am proud of the way my forelock hangs down, blonde and chocolate, and my tail which can wag a little. It’s not enough to pass unnoticed, but it shows I am trying.
When the dogs come I roll onto my back and show them my throat. I am weak. I am yours. They do not want me, ugly thing that I am. But they are too frightened to kill me, in case I am holding a charm or a spell. Dogs are very superstitious.
If only my fur would thicken and cover me, and my hands and feet become paws with pads and claws, and my face grow long and pointy. If only I could be beautiful, like them. I could run with the others, leaping in the air, my ears flipping back, barking. Then later, slink into the circle of sleeping dogs, curl into them and dream their dreams of juicy bones and magic.
Instead, I sleep in the bushes at the side of the canal, around the back of the pub. I am careful not to let any people see me. I don’t trust people; their faces lie, their hands pull and pinch. People can do things to you and smile and laugh an hour later. I dream about tearing them apart with my long, sharp teeth.
the time machine’s mother
There was – or there will be – an accident with a carriage clock and a vibrator. I won’t go into details, but the upshot was that I gave birth to a time machine.
It was an easy birth. The time machine climbed into the world and stretched its arms and legs out in several dimensions. It looked like something that had been fashioned out of clockwork and clothes hangers and covered with ribbed black rubber. It had a lot of fingers.
I didn’t feel an instant bond with the time machine. Like many new mothers, I found myself in a state of shock and awe. This was made worse by the fact that I hadn’t even known I was pregnant – in fact, I hadn’t been pregnant. The pregnancy was to come later, and the conception happened sometime after that, although perhaps not surprisingly, I remembered that event very clearly. Or will remember it. I get confused.
Actually, I don’t suppose I ever really bonded with the time machine. I did try. I gave it a name – Audrey – but it never really stuck. I painted the box room yellow and put a bed in there for it. But it never slept. Or cried. Or did any of the normal baby things. And as it grew up, or down, or stayed the same, things just got worse. You can imagine.
“Bath time!” I would call up the stairs. But the time machine would only laugh. Who was I to tell it what the time was? And it was right. When I looked again, it would be bedtime or time for Coronation Street, or… 1986. I began to feel that the time machine was laughing at me, even that it hated me. Maybe all parents feel that.
I don’t think the time machine ever really understood how difficult things were for me. I was lonely, you see. Oh, there were a few men around, but once they knew my situation, they steered well clear. The time machine was jealous, I think. Once, when I was in my teens, a chap proposed to me, but just as I was about to answer, the time machine appeared out of my future and kicked him in the shin. And that was that, really.
That’s the trouble with being the mum of a time machine. It takes over your whole life.
I won’t say it’s been all bad. Some mornings I get up and find I’m seventeen, with gravity-defying breasts and my whole life ahead of me. Except it’s not really ahead of me, is it? I can’t even say it’s all behind me. That’s hard to understand when you’re a teenager.
It doesn’t even give me birthday cards, or chocolate on Mothers’ Day. We don’t have Mothers’ Day. We do have a lot of Sunday afternoons, though. They go on a for a long time, Sunday afternoons, don’t they? Millions and millions of years.
missing blue
He thought it was a nice day for it. He’d been lying on his back in the park for an hour, two hours, watching clouds dissolving in the acid blue sky. He saw dragons chasing themselves into mist, and heard the grass softly growing underneath him. He heard it. And he thought, I’ll do it today.
There had been other acts of violence. He’d taken out his own teeth with a pair of pliers; an excuse for drinking whiskey when he couldn’t think of a better one. This was different, though.
It wasn’t warm, especially, lying there on the grass. But he was wearing his coat, his woolly jacket of many colours. And in his pockets were the magic things, things he had found and been given, things he had quested and fought for. He’d travelled to the well of eternal youth, but he never drank the water. He’d saved his friend’s soul with a spell. He’d painted his stories, tapestries telling of his conquests and defeats, which no one but him saw and understood in all their complex connections.
Hospital, medicine, therapy, prison – he had tried them all. He’d been in all the lonely, dark places, the insides of boxes and the insides of bottles. He had been treated. He had been named. But he still kept his secrets, and told no one, except for Blue.
In the end, it was missing Blue that did it. There was nothing as lonely as that.
He had got into a fight with his neighbours. He’d painted runes and arcane symbols on the door of his house, played his Pink Floyd records over and over until the walls shook. They had warned him. They’d come after him with their church god, so stern and rigid. And when he was evicted from his house, they took Blue away, too. They said they wouldn’t re-house him if he had a dog with him. They never re-housed him anyway.
Lying there on his back, he could already feel the soil gently holding him, the grass growing softly through the vacant space inside him. If Blue had been there, sitting patiently by his side, or rolling her fat little body around in the sunshine, maybe he wouldn’t have noticed all the empty space he had to fill. Maybe he wouldn’t have thought of anti-freeze; he might have stuck to Special Brew that night. Or maybe he had always intended this. Maybe it was just the right time.
Johnny and the pram
Someone leaves the pram here, in the alley at the side of the house. It is old, with huge iron wheels and a big black hood. I wheel it into the kitchen, and all morning I step around it, putting away the dishes, folding the washing.
After a while I realise it would be easier to put the dishes and the washing into the pram. I start in the darkest corner and stack everything carefully. I take the cutlery from the drawers, and napkins, and saucepans. I cover everything with a blanket and wheel it out of the house, and into the road.
I push the pram for hours until it gets dark, then I come home and put everything away again, and put the pram in the little room with the washing machine and the freezer. When Johnny comes home, I don’t mention anything about it. He is hungry, and I haven’t cooked anything, so he goes out again, slamming the door behind him.
The next day I do the same thing, but this time I fill the pram with clothes and books, and I wheel it to the park. There are other women with prams and pushchairs, who smile at me, and try to peep, but I walk quickly past them, until I come to the big duck pond. Then I empty everything from my pram into the water. There is a splash, and soon after, fabric and paper swirl up to the top of the pond, drifting apart in strands.
Every day I take something else from the house, put it into the pram, and throw it away somewhere. At the weekend, when Johnny is home, I feel anxious that I cannot fill the pram. Johnny is hunting through the wardrobe.
‘Where’s my blue t-shirt?’ he asks.
I shrug, and he slams the wardrobe door shut.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he says.
On Monday, I take the stereo and ditch it in the canal, then I go back again for the computer. Ornaments, photographs, records, jewellery, telephones, clocks: they all go into the pram. The house is becoming quieter, bigger.
When Johnny comes home on Friday night, he thinks we have been burgled. I tell him yes. They even took the carpets. There is nothing left. He runs around the house, up and down stairs, opening all the doors and drawers, searching, while I stand in the kitchen, with my hand on the empty black pram, and wait.
girl in the night
She wakes up in the night, and it’s dark and the man next to her is snoring too loudly, shaking the black air into millions of blurry particles, and so she pushes his shoulder and he rolls away from her, leaving a cold shadow all along her thigh. They are both naked, the man and herself, and the room is chill. She gets out of bed, gropes on the floor for her t-shirt and, finding nothing, wonders how far she flung her clothing last night and whether she should pick up the man’s white shirt and wear that, even though it makes her think of Hollywood movies and all the thin girls who look great in their boyfriends’ shirts, with their slim thighs and smooth knees and American tans. She goes naked into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen, where the floor is icy underfoot, turns on the tap and drinks a long fresh wet pint of water, dripping splashes onto her bare chest. Back upstairs and into the bathroom, turning on the low humming light, she washes her hands in the sink, and looks up to see her face in the mirror, but her reflection is not there. In the mirror is the shower curtain and the dim light, but not the girl who goes bump in the night.
voices under the bed
There were voices under the bed. Only at night, but every night. Every night he put his head on the pillow and the voices rose up; at first a low hum, a hollow rhythm, then growing, lifting, insisting, and annotating the darkness with their serious talk. He did not know the language, with its corrugated glottal stops and throaty rolling consonants; a bit like Arabic, he thought.
Or was it the sound of burning he heard? Sometimes he thought this too, and then he imagined the bedroom to be full of smoke, which he breathed deeply in until he slept, although it gave him hot and acrid dreams.
The voices spoke with great urgency at times. They banged doors in the top of his head. Wake up! they might have been shouting. Sometimes he thought he was hearing his own language; words popped out like Necker cubes pushing through themselves, but it was too fast for him to hold the sounds. Then the voices would sink suggestively into honey songs, and he would relax again.
He believed that the voices belonged to the bed, which he had bought in a fire sale. He thought that the bed was telling its secrets: stories of love, childbirth and blood, and all the other things that happen in bed. He believed this and so he felt it a wonderful miracle that the bed belonged to him and spoke to him, and it made him humble.
His wife, on the other hand, never heard a thing. As soon as her head hit the pillow, she was asleep.
