church
We found dressing-gown man, face down in the mirror.
Mirrors don’t hold your reflection. You hold the mirror in your perception.
These were some of the things he used to say.
If you centre your conscious body in the moment and in that moment you also centre the mirrors consciousness, you can do this same magic trick.
The trick: we found him in the mirror, face down in the smooth flat glass like a painting. But it wasn’t a painting; it was a moment. One that dressing-gown man had caught and killed.
We didn’t expect him to come back, but we didn’t know for sure. Philosophical issues were always painful to discuss; it had always been dressing-gown man who told us our philosophy. What was he trying to tell us now?
We put the mirror back in his room, and sat with him for a while every day, watching his back. His dressing gown floated out around him like a sail. We missed his face.
This church is the portal to the living moment of dressing-gown man. It is also the coffin which holds the moment he killed.
Nobody worships here.
soup
All men have their faults. My father refused to eat anything that hadn’t been squeezed through a sock. Steak au poivre, jam pudding, cauliflower cheese: it all came to table in a small silver bowl, pureed, pushed through one of mother’s pop socks. He ate it in small silver spoonfuls, crossly eyeing our solid plates of food, setting the spoon down with a contemptuous tink when he was finished.
Father’s dinners made my mother miserable. I remember one Christmas, the last we all spent together, begging her to feed my father a simple bowl of soup. She was wringing a full Christmas dinner and all the trimmings through a stocking, the scalding gravy turning her hands pink. It looked obscene, biological, like she was milking a haggis. Mother, please, feed him soup, I said, but she set her face against me. That’s not what marriage is all about. One day you’ll understand. You’ll see.
Father grew thin and grey, like a mangy old whippet. He became so brief and greasy-slippy that you often wouldn’t know he had come into the room until you heard the tink of his little spoon, signalling his hunger to my mother, who startled. She grew thin and mean, paying out pennies for the soft vegetables at the bottom of the greengrocer’s cardboard boxes, testing for fruit that was about to turn. She tutted at the muscly meat in the butcher’s window, asking him for soft kidneys and tripe to take home instead. She boiled potatoes for hours until they drifted apart in the thickening salty water.
I stopped eating dinner at home. I hung around friends’ houses at dinnertime, looking hungry. At weekends, I walked the city streets, stopping to run my hands over the heaps of roadside vegetables, to sniff the curries, tagine, chicken pie smells of cooking that wafted from open windows, or to linger around the backs of restaurants, standing near the ventilation shafts, breathing in fried oil. Eventually I got a job in a chicken restaurant, and moved out of my parents’ house.
When Father could no longer get himself about, and mother was too weak to lift him on and off the toilet or into and out of the bath, and I wouldn’t move back home to help, despite my mother’s imprecations, we put him in a home. Every time we visited, mother told the girl who showed us to his room: no solids, and the girl made a special note of it. But father said the food puree was too thick and lumpy and mother was outraged at the slapdash of girls who couldn’t even make something wet and thin enough for my father to sip from a spoon. So she sat by his bed each day and expertly kneaded his food through a Pretty Polly knee high, while he turned his narrow face to the cold wall.
After his funeral I stood over his grave, imagining his bones crumbling, his body liquefying. I promised my mother then, though it was too late for her to mind, that I would never get married or eat soup.
in the bottom of the deep blue sea
It was slow, fishing. That was one of the things Ali liked. No women, no talking, no tourists to impress. No struggling with the bastard English language, trying to get a tip. No stammering conversations with his busy wife, who spun him around in convoluted circles of words. Fishing was simple: just him and the fish, and the fish spoke Turkish.
It had been his dad’s boat first, this little crate, and there was really nothing to it. Just a tiny cabin where he kept his hooks and line, which smelled faintly of raw chicken, washed over with the aniseed scour of raki. When Ali’s dad died, Ali took the boat out to sea for two days. Every fish he’d caught had the face of his dead father. Now even the fish ghosts were skeletons, rattling around the cabin, stinking up the place.
Ali had a son of his own now, but he was shy of him. His own dad had told him a thousand stories; he said he’d fished them out of the sea. Tales of magical kingdoms below, of giant fish that he had wrestled, of treasure, the secret world of the Mediterranean. For him, talking was like throwing spinning nets over the water and scooping up a hundred silver fish. For Ali it was the opposite: when he talked he felt like he was the fish, his tongue lacerated on a metal barb. He didn’t have a story or a voice to tell it with.
Here’s how Ali found his voice: it was when he was out fishing, of course. The way Ali liked to fish was to thread a row of hooks onto a nylon line, weight it, and drop it deep beneath the boat, resting the free line on his thumb, and then just close his eyes and wait for the line to go taut. On this day, he had been snoozing for a while in the sunshine when he was woken by the heavy snagging of the line. He scrambled to his feet, heaving the catch up out of the water. This was bigger than anything he’d caught before, and Ali lost his balance for a moment and slipped backwards, bouncing his tailbone painfully off the edge of the boat.
He leaned over to see if he had lost his catch, and that’s when he saw the girl in the sea. She was fighting with a mass of floating black seaweed, but it wasn’t seaweed: it was her hair.
“Shush, it’s ok,” Ali said. “I’ll help you. Wait.”
The girl was wild and didn’t want Ali to touch her. She panicked and tried to swim away, but the hooks yanked painfully against her head, pulling at her hair. Ali was already in the water, and he was carefully, gently, easing out the metal barbs from the girl’s thick black streaming hair, washing out the blobs of meaty bait. She let him do it, wide-eyed with fear, trembling with the urge to swim away.
“Am I hurting you?” asked Ali, although his fingers were aching with tenderness. He swam around her, circled wide to pick up the lengths of her hair and comb it all through with his fingers. When Ali finally let go of her hair, the girl arched backwards to wet her head in the salt water, and the blue sea poured off her body and sparkled on her pearly scales. She flipped up her silver-aquamarine tail, showering Ali and his boat with a thousand golden drops of the ocean, and then she was gone.
It was slow, fishing, and that’s why Ali liked it. Maybe one day she’d come back again, the sea’s wild girl, hair all streaming. In the meantime he fished and waited, telling himself over and over the story of how he caught his thousand golden drops of the ocean, every one of them a gleaming eye into another world, a story to take back and tell to his son.
play
The faeries at the bottom of the garden are building a theatre in which, they say, they intend to deliver virtuoso performances of the Vast Faerie Canon, beginning – naturally – with A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which the faeries say was writ by a fellow name of Tom, and not (as is widely believed) by that prolific wearer of ladies’ undergarments, Old Willy Shakspeare.
The Faerie Theatre will not have a roof or walls (or seats, or a stage), on account of how the faeries very much prefer the open air and are outdoorsy folk who have: a) a patient and accepting approach to the vagaries of our English weather, and b) umbrellas.
Performances will take place continuously, with a rotating cast of players, and in no particular order, and having no regard for the sense of things, as the folk reckon they like meaning more than sense and find you can fit more meaning into a paper bag than you can apples, especially if you take the apples out first.
Entrance will be free, but the audience will be assumed to be giving their own performances and artistic interpretations of the play, and may therefore be subjected to unexpected wild applause or light bombardments. All players shall be kept quite drunk with cider, berry wine and other alcohols, this libation being a little known but essential intricacy of the Craft. It is predicted that dancing or other merriment will break out, and scenes of vulgar abandon may be enacted, and obscene articles may be sung or spoken, and all participants are likely to be stupefied or struck dumb by love or liquor.
This is all quite natural and in keeping with the spirit of the play and the verse.
about a leg
There was this boy who thought he was his grandfather’s leg. The grandfather had lost his leg in the war, which at the time was the best thing that could have happened to him. It got him out of a heap of trouble, got him home, got him home Scott free. No, he’d never missed that leg, had never mourned it.
Thirty years to the day he lost his leg, his grandson was born. From an early age the boy claimed to remember his former life as a leg. As a small child the boy often claimed he was a leg standing on the hot deck of a boat in summer. Later, his grandfather told him of the boating trips on Windermere, before the war. There was a time of wet beds, of nightmares, when the boy dreamed of the bullet and the amputation. But this passed. The dreams stopped as he grew older.
The boy did his best to be a leg to his grandfather, but his grandfather stubbornly refused to treat him as anything but a small, strange boy, and wore his shiny plastic prosthesis anytime he needed the services of the missing leg. The boy grew disheartened. When his grandfather eventually died of old age, the boy was bereft.
Now he was a leg without a grandfather. His life felt small and lacking in purpose. He took to staring out of the window of his room for long hours at a time. He contemplated suicide.
One day, looking out of the window, he saw a man on crutches in the street below: a man with just one leg. The boy felt a delirious rush of excitement racing through his veins to his heart. He knew then that he could go on being a leg, if only he could find the missing body he belonged to.
For a leg cannot stand on its own two feet. It needs a will to direct it, a body to walk it, a heart to pump blood to its toes.
