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.
