this is what it feels like to walk in the valley
The sound of water running over stone. Centuries of rock. A tree grows horizontally out from the side of the mountain. A dragonfly flickers out of the mist, darts over the purple heather. I am so still. Finally my sadness can find me. It makes a cave in my stomach. It makes a fist in my solar plexus. It is sad but peaceful. It only wants me to listen, to know that it is there. Later, in the wood, there is a stone doorway, remnants of a folly, I suppose, overgrown with ivy, mildewed, dying. Mindfully, and making invocations to my gods, I step through the doorway. It is a different world on the other side, if one comes through the right way. I think I have done it. This is what it feels like to walk in the valley.
kinky bomb
One morning the government accidentally explodes a Kinky Bomb directly over the Asda. First we know of it is when Robbie disappears into Ladies’ Clothing and comes back two minutes later wearing stockings and a bra. Then one of the customers, this gothic-looking bird, starts writhing up against the frozen fish cabinet. She nearly falls in the deep freeze, chasing after this bag of haddock that she’s rubbing over her breasts.
After half an hour, everyone in the place is doing something that they shouldn’t. There are couples at the delicatessen counter, smearing each other with organic hummus and pink taramasalata. One man bends over, his hands on the glass counter, whilst another slaps his bare bottom with slices of ham. A pensioner in one of those mobility scooters has taken her blouse and vest and bra off and is whirring up and down the biscuit aisle whilst her care assistant watches and licks the filling out of a whole packet of custard creams while his hand pumps up and down inside his trackies.
It’s even worse in Household Goods. Marjorie and Helen have made a sort of harness out of a washing line and some coat hangers, and a customer is spreadeagled on it, a look of expectant terror on his face. A customer in Pet Supplies is being led around on a leash, holding a rubber bone between his teeth, whilst another customer lays a trail of catnip for her kitten, a lady wearing nothing but four black socks and some earmuffs.
Elaine, the manager, tries her best to restore order, but before long she too succumbs to the Kinky Fumes. She finds a pair of scissors and makes herself a crotchless Asda uniform, probably the first of its kind. Everyone wants one. Except me. I honestly think I’m immune to the effects of the Kinky Bomb. I don’t do anything special, really. I just watch. And take notes. Watching and writing… there’s nothing kinky about that, is there?
love me tender
Bridie’s got this attitude like nothing ever scares her. So this one night I take her to see the Dead Joes, in the cathedral, out back where there’s still a roof. I’m hoping there’ll be a crowd, but Bridie doesn’t even care, just runs up front with the other meals-on-legs. The Dead Joes can’t play for shit. Ex-soldiers, all killed in action back in Bermuda, decided to keep up the band anyway. The drummer’s only got one arm and the singer’s got half his face missing, but he’s the one the chicks go for. I got my whole face, but Bridie barely looks at me.
I got moonshine in my pocket and a couple of wraps of some kind of amphetamine, probably cut with formaldehyde for all I know, and Bridie’s into it so we both do a wrap and wash it down with the booze. Bridie scowls at me. I think she’s having fun. She’s wearing the kind of outfit the last surviving girl in a horror flick might wear – a flimsy sort of nightdress ripped to fuck and covered in blood and dirt. She pushes right up to the stage and dances in front of the band, even though no one can tell what they’re supposed to be playing; sounds like some kind of shuffling, gurgling cover of an Elvis tune. Maybe Jailhouse Rock. Maybe Lonesome Tonight. I grab Bridie’s arm and try to pull her back from the stage. I know what she’s thinking: after-party… but no groupie ever survived one of those.
So now I’m starting to wonder if this was such a great idea. And Bridie’s totally out of it, high on the amphetamines and the sick thrill of being so close to the band. The singer, Cold Tommy, he’s definitely seen her dancing. You can just tell what he’s thinking and it ain’t Love Me Tender. He’s kind of drooling out of the side of his head, and his tongue is lolling around out there too, and Bridie is getting seriously worked up, clawing her way to the stage, and trying to climb up on it. Jeez, what are you doing? I grab her around the waist and pull her back down, dragging her out through the crowd, and she does the whole kicking and screaming routine and then she god-damn bites me. But I still don’t let go.
Everyone’s drugs are kicking in now and I’m wondering if we might still make the last bus home. The smell of blood running from my Bridie-bite is getting some of these dudes excited, not least Cold Tommy, who fixes his eye first on Bridie and then on me, like he’s thinking, yeah, you can supersize me and do I want fries with that? We better get out of here pronto or we’re dead meat and a side of deep fried potato substitute.
We get out to the graveyard and the freezing air goes straight to Bridie’s head. She stops fighting me and I let go of her, then she looks at me like she doesn’t know whether she loves me or hates me, but probably mostly it’s hate, and I reckon this is a good time to go in for the kiss, and I’m about to zoom in when I realise the music has stopped. That’s when I look up and see them lurching out of the cathedral and shuffling towards us. Elvis has left the building, and he’s coming after us with a hungry look on his face.
Good thing about zombies is they’re pretty slow, and me and Bridie, we’re like supersonic. They can’t touch us, no way, cos we’re zipping and weaving round the gravestones like a couple of athletes; and yeah, alright, of course it’s the speed but so what? Feels pretty good. We run all the way back to the ’burbs and I walk Bridie right up to her house and push her up against the door and shove my tongue in her mouth, and when I’m done kissing her goodnight she looks at me with these big eyes and says, I had a great time tonight. Let’s do it again tomorrow.
the night shift
There’s a thick plastic screen between me and the outside, but I can see straightaway that it’s not going to keep them out. The boss says, don’t worry, they don’t come around here. Swear to god. He winks and then he pulls the shutters down over the windows and leaves me in the cubicle. As he walks to his car, the plastic distorts his figure, and it seems like he’s shimmering over the tarmac. He isn’t, of course. He isn’t the type to shimmer.
It’s alright in the daylight, but when the sun goes down, the cubicle starts to feel like a trap. I smoke cigarettes, taking packets off the shelves behind me, and I chew gum, spitting it out the second it loses freshness. I push the sliding metal sheet back and forth across the channel where goods and money are exchanged. I look at a magazine article about chicks who get surgery on their vaginas to make them more like playboy models, but I can’t concentrate on it, keep flicking my eyes up to the screen to see if anyone is there.
Just before midnight, the phone rings. It’s the boss. I tell him nothing’s up, no customers, and he sighs, like it’s my fault or something.
“Hey,” I say, “did you hear about those chicks who get their, like, vag’s fixed up?”
The boss tuts. “I don’t like you looking at those magazines. Why don’t you bring a book to work in future?”
“Yeah, right. A book. Like what, Shakespeare?”
Like, what the fuck? If I had the kind of brain for reading books, would I be working the zombie shift at his crappy 24/7?
“I gotta go,” says the boss.
“Hey boss? You sure they won’t come around here?”
“I guess,” says the boss. “See you later.”
“Hey, what? What do you mean?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘I guess’? Hey, you fucking…” but he’s already hung up.
After midnight, they start coming. I can’t see them til they get right up close to the screen and put their faces up to the plastic. Anyone can see what they are. They crowd around the cubicle, shuffling closer and peering in. I can hear their raggedy breathing through the mike. Their eyeballs are falling out of their heads.
“Alright, alright,” I say, backing into the corner of the cubicle. “One at a time, fellas.”
They shuffle closer, pushing their necrotic hands into the metal slide. I can smell them.
“What do you want?” My voice is raised hysterically high. “Smokes? Gum? Candy?”
I throw packets of cigarettes and gum into the channel, and they grab at it. One of them leaves his whole hand in there. It twitches, the fingers crawling up the curving metal. I grab the magazine, roll it up and use it to attack the hand. Okay, pathetic, I know. And the hand knows it, too. It grabs the magazine from me and throws it outside, where it flaps around in the wind. Someone catches it and the hand jumps up towards me again, and this time I have a better idea and I grab the fire extinguisher and lay right into the hand, bashing it until it’s unidentifiable meat.
When I finally look up, I realise that the murmurs and shuffling has stopped. They’re standing around, all peering at the magazine. Seems like that article has grabbed their attention. One of them sees me looking and he leans towards the mike.
“Dude,” he says, in a wet, rattling voice, “this shit is fucked up.”
He throws some cash into the slide, and slowly they all shuffle away. I almost feel insulted. What, my brains aren’t good enough for you or something? Maybe I will bring a book tomorrow, after all.
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.
