litro.co.uk » Issue-81

A Christmas Letter

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:00:59 +0000

Dear All,

Well, it’s been quite a year! Really, I hardly know where to start in telling you all the amazing things that have kept me, Bobby, Samantha, Harvey, Bob-Bob and the twins so gosh-darn busy during the previous twelve-month.

First things first: we have decided on a color scheme for the rumpus room. At last! We are going with something called “Magnolia”. It is all very exciting. Rest assured we WILL keep you posted on that one.

Other news. As well as dropping the lawsuit (finally!) Doctor Morris says Bobby’s scars will hardly be visible once the hair grows back. I must say this is a huge weight off of our minds.

Speaking of huge weights, Samantha’s diet has been somewhat eventful. My statistics show that her net gain this year was 13 pounds. Hang in there, honey: you’ll get into that wedding dress one day!

Kirk – Samantha’s latest fiancée – is incredibly patient and says he will always love her no matter how big she gets (within reason).

Harvey started at college in the fall. If he blows it again, I swear I will give up and send him back to his real parents (joke!). He is majoring in potato farming, which we all agree is very useful as people will always need fries and chips, no matter how bad things get.

Bob-Bob, meanwhile, is doing well at The School, all things considered.

Last but definitely not least, the twins: no doubt some of you will have seen them on the local news running for cover during the shoot-out. We were so proud. But even when they weren’t fleeing for their lives and screaming in terror, they managed to keep themselves mighty busy, let me tell you.

For starters, they appeared in the school’s production of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” – one of the most talked-about shows ever staged at Green Valley High. As if that were not enough excitement for two young people who look eerily similar, they have also been involved in Riverdale’s very own local newsletter – “The Riverdale Local Newsletter”. They’ve contributed recipes, astrology columns, plastic surgery tips and legal advice throughout the year.

I must say it’s a far cry from the days when they were dribbling into their bibs and having their diapers changed every thirty minutes!

On a darker note, it is with much sadness that I report the news that Bobby’s Mom, Hildegard, finally left us in April of this year. Hildy was a real character, and had lived with us for twelve challenging years. To those of you who knew her it will probably come as something of a shock to hear that she passed away peacefully, in her sleep.

Other news: We have a new dog! Yes, after the death of Bozo, three long years ago, we all of us never thought we could bear to let another animal into the house. But things change, we move on, we grow (well, some of us do). So, please say a big hello to Dolt, an enthusiastic German Shepherd with a real taste for the good things in life. He is especially fond of Bob-Bob, and chases him round the yard for hours at a time.

I also enclose some snaps from our summer holiday. This year, for a change, we did not go to Cleaver Beach where we have spent many happy holidays in the past: instead, someone (who shall remain nameless) decided it would be much more fun for us to spend two unforgettable weeks at Barker’s Creek. Well, mosquitoes, flash floods, five hungry children, an outbreak of swine fever and a buffalo stampede may be Bobby’s idea of fun but it is not mine.

Nevertheless, I thank the Good Lord every day for our happy home, our happy children, our happy relatives, and my husband.

On that note, I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year free from trauma and lacerations.

God Bless,
Jenny


Peter Higgins lives and works in London. He writes fiction and non-fiction and is currently at work on a situation comedy.

Fishing for Something

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:00:45 +0000

Terry watches the tip of the float bob up and down in dark, choppy water. His feet are like stones and he flexes his knotty, purpling hands to keep them from seizing up. It’s hard to concentrate now, but there are still a couple of hours of daylight left and he will hang on until nightfall, though the chances of catching in these conditions are slim and he knows it. He is the only angler on the lake.

A northeasterly wind has the leafless trees swaying to a new rhythm. No more the warm westerlies carrying the mild moist air all the way from the Caribbean, over the North Atlantic, to England’s shores. He knows about prevailing winds and the Gulf Stream because he learnt about them in his O-level geography lessons. Twenty-odd years on, this information is fresh in his mind. Same with Mann’s model of the British city. And the push and pull factors that lead to the development of shantytowns. He cannot, however, remember the date of his twin daughters’ birthday. Maybe if it coincided with a notable date in history – another O-level – like the Night of the Long Knives, or Armistice Day?

It hasn’t been much of a Christmas and freezing his nuts off at the lake in the local park is preferable to the sub-zero atmosphere at home. The wife isn’t speaking to him and neither are the twins. Well fine. It’s not as if he did it on purpose. He’s been busy at work and with the twins’ birthday falling so close to Christmas, it’s no wonder he forgot. The wife didn’t remind him either, he has noted, no doubt smugly satisfied at his failure to meet his parental obligations. Granted, he’s spent most of the festive season in the pub. But Christmas is supposed to be a time for letting your hair down, having a few drinks, getting in the party spirit. Not for the wife and her two sidekicks though. Christmas to them means more TV, more crisps, more chocolate, more biscuits, more cake. Suety deposits silting up their arteries. Dinners announced by the ping of the microwave. Terry remembers when his wife used to cook, not just heat things up. And she was a decent cook too. She used to take pride in it, poring over cookery books, trying out recipes, experimenting with ingredients. Sunday roast with all the trimmings and a bottle or two of wine, and curling up on the sofa together in front of a film; that was the routine. Having the twins changed all that. This year’s Christmas dinner came courtesy of Kwiksave.

It is the twins’ sixteenth he has forgotten. A milestone, it’s true. He should be fretting about them staying out late, disapproving of the bad company they keep, giving boyfriends the third degree. But no – fat and lazy, they sit around gorging on the saturated fats and refined sugars their mum supplies them with, like a boilerman feeding a furnace. And who pays for it all? Muggins, of course.

He looks up from his float to watch crows skipping across the litter-strewn park and is reminded of the winged monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. What were those creatures called? He must have seen the film dozens of times since he was boy. Did they even have a name? Terry’s taste for old films is something he gets from his dad. His Dad was in the thrall of the cinema in the way that only people born before TV could be, and he would fossick around the gutters every Saturday evening after the market had packed up, looking for dropped coins to fund a night at the pictures. Or at least, that’s the story he liked to tell. Over and over again. His dad’s love of films was mainly limited to those he watched from boyhood to young adulthood. East of Eden, The Third Man, White Heat, Rear Window, It’s A Wonderful Life. He was partial to a good war film too – his generation seemed to live in the perpetual shadow of World War II – A Bridge Too Far, The Eagle Has Landed, Night of the Generals, The Longest Day. And James Bond, of course.

Terry remembers his dad taking him and his sister to see Star Wars when they were both in their early teens. A huge queue outside the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley. An intermission and little tubs of ice-cream from the lady at the front of the auditorium. Afterwards, fish and chips from Bryan’s eaten out of the paper as they sat in the car. The windows would steam up and there would be a symphony of rustling paper, crunching batter and the sucking clean of fingers. A corner of the wrapper would be found for the wiping of lips and they’d share a bottle of lemonade before his dad took the rubbish out to the bin. Windows wound down the whole journey home to get rid of the smell of chip fat and vinegar. In the hospital before he died, his dad talked about the scene at the start of the film where Darth Vader’s flagship Star Destroyer had thundered across the screen, as though in that moment he had witnessed the apotheosis of filmmaking. It was the last time Terry’s dad went to the cinema.

Terry sighs. It has got so bad at home it’s interfering with his fishing. Normally, he thinks of nothing but the fishing. Lives entirely in the moment. One hundred percent concentrated. The rod and line somehow an extension of himself. Satisfaction to be gained, not so much from the catching of fish, but the mechanics of fishing itself: the swoosh of the rod as he casts; the negligible plop of the float as it breaks the water’s surface; the click of the reel’s bale arm; the placement of rod rests for maximum comfort and convenience; the orderliness of his tackle box, a compartmentalized little universe inhabited by weights and hooks and line. But here he is, freezing by the lake, stewing over a domestic crisis and missing his long-dead dad.

Of course, the wife and the girls will say the problem lies with Terry’s drinking. Either he becomes sullen and moody, or aggressive and confrontational. Maybe so, but it never used to be like that. Before, he was a jolly, sociable drinker. Before, he would be the life and soul. Before his wife started to nag and complain the whole time, and the girls had become listless and taciturn.

The night of the twins’ forgotten birthday, no longer welcome in his own home, Terry had gone out for a drink. He hadn’t realized his next-door neighbour, effectively the wife’s sergeant-at-arms, had spotted him in flagrante delicto by the fire exit of the Red Lion. His return home was met with a hail of crockery. It was only a Christmas kiss with the landlord’s wife, for Christ’s sake. Nothing in it. Admittedly, it probably meant a good deal more to him than it did to her. He had forgotten how good it felt to be kissed; the intimacy of it. The warmth of someone else against him. The gentleness and the eagerness to please. It was almost as though it were a new sensation. Since he now makes his bed up on the sofa each night, and the landlord has barred him from the Red Lion, the sensation is destined to remain elusive.

Laboured footsteps sound behind him. Terry turns to see a man approaching, all wrapped up against the cold. Terry can do without the small talk. Always the same questions. ‘Any luck?’, ‘What bait are you on?’ Inane comments about the weather, or tales of their own fishing exploits.

Don’t they realise he wants to be left alone?

The man walks up to Terry and stands behind him. Terry stares fixedly at his float bobbing in the water. It’s bitter cold.

Minutes pass and the man says nothing. Terry can stand it no longer. He turns to the man. “Y’alright?”

The man smiles and nods. He is late middle-aged and is wearing a shabby green parka, thick ski gloves and a bobble hat pulled down around his ears. He doesn’t volunteer anything further. Terry turns back to his float.

Again, minutes pass and the man remains behind Terry, offering no conversation. Again, it is Terry who breaks the deadlock. “Bloody freezing, in’t it?”

The man in the parka grimaces, puffs out his cheeks and nods his agreement.

“You fish yourself?”

The man in the parka screws up his face and wags his head doubtfully.

“What? Used to?”

The man in the parka nods.

“What made you pack it in?”

The man in the parka gazes down at his shoes for a moment before looking up and pointing to his throat.

“What?”

The man in the parka points at his throat again, takes a breath and a rasping, wheezy noise emits from his mouth, like air being expelled from a broken pair of bellows. Terry follows the movements of the man’s lips – ‘cancer’.

“Oh, I see. Sorry to hear that, mate.”

The man in the parka nods glumly. With the breath hissing plaintively through his windpipe the man begins to explain to Terry, with much gesturing and extravagant facial contortions, how he has fished the lake since he was a boy and recounts the story of how one summer he caught a 23lb common carp using sausage meat as bait. With an old split cane rod, it had taken nearly half an hour to land.

“You can still fish though, can’t you?”

The man in the parka shakes his head emphatically.

Silence as they both turn to stare at Terry’s float. Terry feels he should say something – something about the man’s cancer – but he doesn’t know what. Both men remain mute.

A minute passes. The man in the parka leans over to touch Terry’s shoulder and deliver a rasping “Goodbye.”

“See ya,” says Terry. “Look after yourself.”

Another frozen hour with not so much as a bite. It is becoming gloomy now and festive fairy lights twinkle from the windows of the looming high-rises standing like sentries around the park. Terry decides to pack up.

Exiting the park, Terry passes a blue Ford Fiesta with rusted wheel arches parked by the roadside. Inside, the man in the parka, still wrapped up against the elements, is asleep, his head tilted back and his jaw hanging open, yellow-grey teeth fringing the dark cavity of his mouth. From within Terry hears the car stereo and the muffled voices of a radio phone-in.   Perhaps he’s dead, thinks Terry, with a jolt of panic. But the man coughs in his sleep and Terry feels reassured.

A crow tumbles out of the sky, buffeted by a Siberian gust, and skips along the pavement. A winged monkey from the Land of Oz. Terry still can’t remember what they’re called. He looks at the man asleep in his car and then, with joints painful from the cold, heads for home wondering whether the Wizard of Oz has been on telly this Christmas, if he’s already missed it? He’ll ask the twins when he gets back, they’re bound to know.


GC Perry enjoys the festive season, though he doesn’t wish it were Christmas every day. He enjoys the music of Roy Wood and Wizard, but prefers The Move for everyday listening.

A Sort of Tradition

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:00:32 +0000

It was New Year’s Eve and I was going to knock on George Martin’s door for the sixth time, for the sixth year in a row. The house was exactly how I remembered it, an off-white Ranch with a carport set close to the street. Nothing ever changes at George’s house and even though I don’t know him I’m sure that’s the way he likes it.

This whole thing started as a fluke, or at least that’s the way I like to remember it. Six years ago I was on my way to a party at Bob Paschen’s place, this coworker of mine from the IT department. Bob’s neighborhood was a damned mess, all the houses looked the same and the streets had similar names too. I mistook Ashwood Drive for Ashwood Terrace and next thing I know I’m holding a casserole in front of this fat old man in a bathrobe and pajamas. He gave me this look like I’d spooked him. His face was red and puffy and he had these long black hairs that went over his bald spot like an old brush. He had these fat little Vienna Sausage fingers that wiggled when he gripped the door, like he was going to slam it in my face at any second. I got the feeling people don’t knock on his door that often. His place looked cozy, at least from what I could gather over his shoulder. The TV was on and it smelled like he’d been cooking hamburgers. I knew I was at the wrong place but I figured I’d clarify the situation by asking if Bob lived there anyway.
“No,” he said. “No one lives here with that name.” He arched his eyebrows and drew the words out slow when he spoke, like he was answering a trick question.

I apologized and went about my way. Boy, he looked really spooked. That was the end of that. That was six years ago, like I said.

The second year was purely intentional. I was going to Bob’s place for another one of his parties when I passed the old man’s house. I figured it’d be a riot if I knocked on his door and asked for Bob again. It took him longer to come to the door this time but there he was in his bathrobe and pajamas, looking a bit older, which I guess is to be expected. I asked the old man if Bob Paschen lived there and of course he told that he didn’t. I apologized, just like last time, but right before he closed the door he gave me this funny look like he’d known me from somewhere but couldn’t place it. It was pure gold. When I was getting into my car I picked up an old newspaper in the driveway. I saw the subscription stub and that’s when I learned his name. George Martin.

By the third New Year’s there was no turning back. Bob had taken a job somewhere else and we’d lost touch, but my wife wanted a bottle of wine so I drove to the store on the other side of town so I could knock on George’s door. I parked a few blocks away from the house this time to be safe. When George answered the door he looked even older, fatter too, but he was still wearing the bathrobe and pajamas, which I’m convinced is all he wears at this point. I asked if Bob was there and he gave me this long look-over. He didn’t answer at first so I had to ask again before I got the traditional line I was waiting for. As I walked down the street I turned around and noticed that he was still watching me from the doorway. You should’ve seen the look on his face, I’m telling you.

I’m pretty sure he was waiting for me the fourth year. Actually, I got the feeling he was waiting all day, which was really funny to think about but I’ll admit it made me nervous as I got closer to the house. I parked a few blocks away and when I knocked on the door he answered almost immediately. He looked angry, his forehead was all scrunched up and his knuckles were gripped around the doorframe. I asked if Bob Paschen lived there and he didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with these eyes big as saucers. I expected him to yell at me, I’d always imagined he’d say something like “No Bob lives here, get it through your head already!” You’d think a guy would snap by this point, but George is either dumb as a board or patient as a turtle, which one I’m not sure. I didn’t want to push my luck so I left without an answer, and when I looked back I saw that he’d followed me onto the porch.

I waived at him for good measure but it didn’t seem to have much effect.

I’d taken a promotion last year and we’d moved away to Shreveport, but I’d talked my wife into going back home for a New Year’s party. At some point I told her I wanted to get some beer so I got away from the party and drove across town to George’s place. I’d snowed hard that evening and the roads were slick so it took me a bit longer than usual to get there. I parked and walked up to the door as quiet as I could. I knocked and waited for a minute but he didn’t answer, so I knocked again. I knew I was pushing my luck standing there on the porch, I was probably waking him up and I was sure he’d be mad but I was drunk and feeling bold. I heard something from the side of the house and next thing I know George is running out of the bushes with a gun. He chased me across the lawn, still wearing those pajamas by God, swinging his pistol at me like it was a club. I ran toward the street and George tried to follow me but he slipped on some ice in the driveway and fell over. I got in my car and got the hell out of there. When I drove past and I saw him lying in the driveway I laughed all the way back to the party.

My wife fussed when I told her I wanted to go back home for New Year’s again this year. She’d wanted to do something quiet like go to a restaurant, but her mood changed when she found out her girlfriends were all meeting at a bar downtown. After making the drive I found a hotel and watched TV for several hours before going over to George’s house. It was snowing again, real light and serene, almost picturesque for the occasion. As I walked up to the house I got to thinking that I wished I knew George better. I’d wanted to tell him how much my life had changed in the last six years, I’d wanted to tell him about my recent promotion and my wife and how we were thinking of having kids. I wanted to tell him how hard it was to keep showing up like this every year, about all the effort I put into this whole production. I don’t know what George does for the holidays, but just planning this trip seriously takes up a large chunk of my time. Maybe he’s raised a family and knows how stressful the holidays can be. Or maybe he’s never had anybody, who knows.

I knocked on the door and he answered a few seconds later. He was in his bathrobe and pajamas but I didn’t see a gun this time, thank God. I asked him if Bob Paschen lived there and this time he sank into the doorway and began to weep.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I’m Bob Paschen. Please take me … I’m ready. My name is Bob Paschen.”

It was hilarious.

George had really thrown me a curveball with this one. I guess the jig should have been up, I guess I should have explained everything, that this whole thing was just something to make the time pass, a sort of tradition I’d made for myself around the holidays. But I didn’t know how to begin explaining something like that so I just turned around and left him there in the doorway, blubbering all over his pajamas.

I don’t know if I’m going back to George’s house next year. My wife and I are thinking about having a kid, and there’s always the chance I could get transferred again. I really don’t have time to play these games anymore, and to be honest it’s not nearly as funny as it was five years ago. I’ll admit there’s an attachment though. Six years is a long time to invest in anything. Seeing George every year is like another holiday at this point. I think about him a lot, too. I mean, I actually feel like I know the guy. I’ve watched him age and I’ve seen him change over time. Granted, he doesn’t change that much but that’s what I like about him. Hell, I do like him. Admittedly, I don’t know George but I’ll bet he’s good people. Who knows, maybe I’ll check in with him next year just to see how he’s doing.


Jon Gingerich has been published in The New York Press, Tabard Inn and Keyhole. A collection of his short stories is forthcoming in the Spring. He lives in New York.

A Christmas Miracle

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:00:18 +0000

My brother’s wife and I go way back. As a matter of fact, I was the one who brought them together. I am reminded of this as I watch Maryam enter through the glass and brass door of the café, a Christmas decoration to her left, flashing Santa, making her face shift red-white, red-white. She does a little twirl, takes in the room, our eyes snatching on each other’s, sudden static, white noise in my ears. A small, gloved hand comes up to wave at me, points to the counter, smile, nod. She winks and blows me a kiss. Her blue cape moves in fluid-motion, as if of its own accord, around and her back is to me, she is leaning across the counter (I imagine the round fullness of her pink breasts under that white shirt pressing against the marble, everything is breast-height to her, she is abreast with the situation, pint-sized, brother’s wife), ordering hot chocolate with extra whipped cream from the baffled boy behind it. Of course, most people look slightly baffled at a distance. I meet my own eyes in the mirrorwall behind him. Look away.

Maryam and I met at the university library. I was working extra there, trying to make ends meet. I had decided to go for my own apartment, never was much of the sharing type. You grow up with an older sibling, it’s all you get: share this, share that, hand-me-down trousers, toys, dreams. At nineteen, I just wanted something of my own, an uninvaded space, a place to just be me. Still, there on my top-most shelf: Kenny’s battered teddy, Kenny’s collection of illicit bottle caps. Stolen treasure, that I treasured the more for it. To work I wore his faded Nirvana t-shirt under my own purple waistcoat. Maryam was there every night, slaving away at her term paper. She did sociology, something like that. Social work. She was always carrying heavy books around from there to here and back again, it looked like an exercise program, a surreal version of a Victorian work-out: to improve a young lady’s posture, balancing acts with the Holy Bible, heavy stuff. After a couple of days of watching from the aisles, I offered to carry some of the books for her, I couldn’t help myself, she was so small. Myself I have always been willowy, long arms just made for carrying books, bad joke, awkward shuffle. “Oh, thank you!” she said, and after closing time she took me out for drinks. I had half expected her to be drinking girly stuff, peach schnapps, white wine spritzers, but she liked her single malts doubled, neat. I had a Guinness, two, three, straight to my head, I was scrawny in those days, and not a bite since lunch. When the pub closed she made some joke about her room mate’s noise levels, innocent wide-eyes, as if we didn’t both know she’d be coming home with me.

“Hey there, stranger.”
Her cheeks are flushed with the sudden warmth of the hot beverage. Her lips glisten like she just licked them, pink tongue, stray cream. “So,” she says, exhales, as she falls into the armchair I have guarded, hawkstyle, just for her. “I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s Glasgow treating you these days?”
“Och, you know. Same as always. It’s been too long though, Maryam, it really has.”
“I know!” She uses the o of her mouth to blow on the mug she has raised before her. “I’ve missed you! I miss us,” she says, oblivious, lips quivering slightly in anticipation of the first sip, “remember how we used to be?”

I remember how we used to be. You’d have thought I’d be over it by now, some kind of instinct of self-preservation erasing it all, the way you get with old relationships: years later you have no idea what you used to do with that person, what you saw in each other. You just don’t remember, you forget without even making the conscious decision to do so. It’s called moving on, I know. The memories are fuzzy, though, I’ll say that, dreamlike; Maryam in my bed, me in the red wing chair, and then, and then mixed up, she moves in her sleep, the duvet, my hands. Her eyes open and god and god it is everything, I think they’re going to flow over and then they do. How many nights? This game. How many weeks, months? Not quite half a year and not a word, I should have spoken, I know, it was unfair, it’s always unfair to expect the other to speak first.

“I miss you too.”
“Kenny and I are so happy,” she says, confusedly. We stare at each other for a bit, neither of us quite sure what she means by that.
“I mean,” she says, falls silent. Her fingers fiddle with the elongated tea spoon, staining the snowy napkin cocoa brown. Hidden speakers play Last Christmas. I want to rape George Michael’s skull.
“What’s up, Maryam?”

She looks up at me then, straight into me, and she smiles that smile, the dreamtime smile, the Maryam-in-love smile that I haven’t seen for so long, I was beginning to think I’d imagined it, that I’d imagined it all along. That she had so consummately wished we’d never happened she had somehow managed to erase it from objective history, if there is such a thing. Things that happen behind closed doors are only tenuously real, anyway. There’s no real link, no real link unless you leave some physical manifestation, unless there is a witness, unless you choose to make it known.

“I’m pregnant,” she says, her hands shaking. The cup clatters against the saucer, the spoon, an infinitesimal tremor moving up through the wood of the table and up my arms, into me, as she always gets into me, too easy, pitiful, into me. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

I have heard this before. Seven years ago, in the coffee shop at Queen Margaret’s Union. Maryam clutching at my hands, my foolish, foolish hands, imagining themselves quite loved, held, till death, all that. She leans into me and I blush, thinking that everyone will see, everyone will finally see.

“I am in love with your brother. I wanted you to be the first to know. I think he fancies me too.”
“I fancy you.”
Blank silence. She stares into space, her coffee cooling, untouched, on the table. Her index finger is stroking my left thumb.
“It’ll be great, you know. I want children. You know that. I’ve always wanted children. It’s what I’m meant to do.”
“Does Kenny know?”
“Not yet,” Maryam leans her head on my shoulder, playfully, for all the world to see and not to see. She looks up at me, soft eyes, soft face, soft lips. “I’ll tell him tonight.”

“I’m so excited!” She scrunches up the cocoa-stained napkin. Her mug is already half-empty, the brown milk-skins clinging to the sides like the algae in a murky aquarium. “I thought it would never happen. You know how long I have wanted to have his child. Now we’ll be a real family, for real. And you will have a nephew. My child’s aunt will be my best friend!”
“Uhuh.”

“I only just found out,” she’s glancing at her own reflection in the window, combing a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear. It has grown quite dark outside, already. The street lights tick on, one by one. Straining my eyes, I see a woman pass by, a child on her hip, her face white, orange, blue. She looks stressed, troubled. It’s in the way she walks. Something not quite right. The wean’s hands go up to her throat, as if to throttle her. Pat, stroke, pinch. They cross to the other side.

“I’m going to tell Kenny tonight. Didn’t want to do it over the phone, can you imagine it? He’d get nothing done all day. Besides,” Maryam leans in. For a second, I want to lean across and kiss her. Would she notice? Would anyone? Just one swift graze of my lips against hers, the barest caress, before it all ends. “I was meeting you today. I wanted you to know before everyone. Like it used to be. That’s what I want. We love you so much, honey. You should really come and visit more often. It gets so lonely here without you.”

“Uhuh. Look, Maryam, I don’t know how to tell you this…”
Her face is all lit-up innocence. Already the blooming virgin, haloed by multi-coloured fairy lights.
“Kenny’s sterile,” I say. Nothing more to say.


E.G. Jönsson was born outside Malmö, Sweden in 1981. She lives in Glasgow where she is about to graduate from an MLitt in Creative Writing. This story was previously published in Let’s Pretend (Freight, 2008).

Last Christmas

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:00:06 +0000

Imagine: Christmas in Surrey. The house is worth at least a million, although the son’s girlfriend, stepping through the front door for the first time, gets the overwhelming sensation that this is not a home. She is kissed on both cheeks by the mother, a plain woman with frown lines tipping her eyebrows together and thin, dry lips, and by the father, who has the same pale, freckled cheeks as the son. She follows the three of them through a painfully neat living room – polished surfaces, carefully placed magazines, gilt-framed family poses – into a kitchen that smells of lemon scented surface cleaner.

‘You’ll want to put your bag upstairs.’ The son holds out his hand and she laces her fingers in between his, walks with him up soft beige steps. No dust on the skirting boards, no nicks in the paint. She has the constricting sensation of being trapped inside a photograph, pressed up against a glossed façade.

The mother and the father sit at the kitchen table and listen to the sound of the son and the girlfriend move through the house. The mother pours tea into the everyday mugs, which are painted with smiling animals and witty remarks. She takes the mouse, the father takes the elephant. It isn’t the first time the son has brought a girl home for Christmas. The mother notes this to the father and they try – half-heartedly – to remember the others.

‘There was that blonde girl,’ the father says. The one with big breasts, straining against a cotton shirt.

‘She didn’t lift a finger the whole time she was here,’ the mother says. ‘And I gave her that necklace and didn’t see her wear it once.’

The son and the girlfriend are in the bedroom now, they can tell by the whispers of the floorboards. The mother stares into her tea and imagines, fleetingly, the girl standing on tiptoe to receive a kiss.

‘When are your parents coming?’ the mother asks.
‘About three-thirty.’

They have had this conversation before. His parents come for tea at three-thirty every Christmas Eve, have done for as long as either of them can remember. Perhaps the mother asks the question to prove she has something to say. It’s true she gets frightened sometimes. Silence has a leering, mocking quality she finds. Often her fragile strings of words – questions repeated, safe ground retrod – don’t seem enough to quell it. She tips the remains of her tea down the sink, swills the cup under the hot tap and rests it upside-down on the empty draining board. Once she’d suggested they went away for Christmas, just the two of them. That was a long time ago.

The son and the girlfriend reappear, heads angled towards the floor, eyes avoiding contact. There’s a tinge of somewhere else in the girl’s skin. Not that the mother minds about such things, but there are the father’s parents to think about.

‘Well.’ The mother claps her hands together: a tiny, flat sound. ‘Why don’t you two help me put the cakes out?’

Another mother would have baked. She thinks that. The girlfriend thinks that. Even the son thinks that. Their collective thoughts almost conjure up the smell of hot sponge cake, the scattering of oily crumbs beneath a cooling rack. The mother takes two boxes of cake slices from the shelf in the larder and hands them to the girlfriend.

‘Plates in that cupboard, just mix and match. I’ll get the tea things out.’

The silence is defeated by the sound of cardboard boxes being opened, cellophane wrapping pulled apart, a low exchange between the pair of them the mother can’t quite make out.

‘Done,’ the son announces, and sure enough there are two plates neatly arranged with machine-made cakes – symmetrical icing, identical sizes. The mother throws a look at the kitchen clock. Two forty-five. The space until three-thirty solidifies, slowing the second hand to a tired, marble-heavy tick.

‘I couldn’t steal one, could I?’ The girlfriend already has a lemon slice held to her lips. The mother looks at her easy leanness, the laugh lines at the edges of her eyes. The father stands and says, ‘I might just join you,’ bites down into sweet sharp sponge without looking at the mother.

‘Do you follow racing?’ he asks the girlfriend.

She shrugs. ‘Can do.’

The mother watches the three of them traipse into the living room, hears the flare of noise as the television is switched on. They’ll crumple the sofa covers, and she’s not sure the son’s even taken his shoes off. She lifts the Christmas teapot onto the tray, pulls the cups and saucers out of the cupboard and decides they could do with a wash. She hovers her fingers over a bakewell slice, but doesn’t take one. At least she plays by the rules.

On Christmas day, the girlfriend sits at the dinner table and thinks that even spending Christmas with her own family would be better than this. The father is uncomfortably jolly. He keeps her glass filled to the brim and she keeps drinking, feels the hum of it at the back of her skull. She notices an unfamiliar slump in the son’s shoulders, and the way the mother’s hands worry at the edge of the table cloth. Just watching the mother, she finds she is holding her own breath.

It is just the four of them for Christmas dinner. The father’s parents go down to their other son – with his sprawling house in Kent, three children, two grandchildren. They eat in the dining room, which they don’t use much these days. It’s cold, even though she remembered to turn the radiator back on the day before.
‘More bread sauce?’ The mother pushes it towards the father, a violent shove across the too-red table cloth. ‘You haven’t had any bread sauce.’

His own mother makes it herself: laced with nutmeg, thick with cream, she knows that. She watches him take a spoonful of plastic, package sauce, scoop some of it onto a forkful of turkey – which is dry at the edges despite her efforts – chew and swallow.

The mother surveys the table. There’s too much food left. They haven’t pulled the crackers yet. When should you pull crackers? She’s never sure. She looks at the son. His cheeks are flushed with wine and his hand rests on the girlfriend’s thigh, she’s sure of it. She thinks of her yoga class. Breathes deeply. But it’s like there are mice gnawing at her stomach, climbing up in a squiggling mass towards her chest.

On Boxing Day, the son and the girlfriend take the mother’s car and go for a walk. The mother had thought about inviting herself along. Instead, she stands in the kitchen and looks at the string of Christmas cards that sags across the far wall. She’d bought tiny coloured pegs to attach them, pink and blue and red and yellow, like children’s sweets; hummed to herself as she fixed them on, obscuring the framed print of a French farmyard which they’ve meant to replace for years, but have never quite got round to. She imagines the son and the girlfriend, holding hands on Newlands Corner, smiling hello to couples walking their dogs, letting the morning burn off their hangovers. They will leave, this evening, taking turkey sandwiches for the journey back, their rucksacks filled with presents that will be absorbed into the lives she knows nothing about. The mother examines one of the cards, from a friend who has dwindled into hastily scribbled annual messages. It is a pen and ink drawing of a family Christmas, tiny children surrounded by wrapping paper, parents sitting, their shoulders touching, by the fire. It was easier when the son was young, there’s no denying that. A child takes away the effort of it all. Sometimes, the mother feels like she’s playing a game she’s forgotten the rules of. Sometimes she spends whole days walking from room to room, willing the clocks to move faster, and then when she gets into bed – reluctant now to reach out and touch his pyjama clad limbs, because it never comes to anything, not any more – she can’t think where the day went to, what she’s achieved. Her own mother used to say, it’s an achievement in itself, making a home, bringing up a family. It’s something to be proud of. But what if your son is more interested in his girlfriend than in you? What if your husband would rather watch men race cars in tarmac circles than talk to you? What if you look in the mirror and aren’t sure who is looking back?

The father sits in the living room, his eyes fixed on the television. The mother stands in the kitchen doorway and looks at the back of his head, listens to the wail of rubber wheels and the hysterical ebb and swell of the commentator. She is considering asking him if he wants to go for a walk. The thought of it – the two of them making their way through the garden, past the tennis court whose surface is pocked and ruined by weather and weeds, out of the back gate and onto the muddy path towards the woods – makes her palms sweat. Easier to stay indoors. Better the kind of silence that exists between walls, softened by the television and the hum of fridges and freezers, than that which sits between two people amongst winter-bare trees.

The mother is still staring at the Christmas card when she hears the car pull into the driveway. She snaps herself straight, rubs at her eyes and drags damp fingers across her lips. She knows the kettle is full, but she checks anyway, flicks it on to boil. A nice cup of tea, maybe a piece of cake. She’ll make the father turn the telly off and they’ll all sit down together and have a chat.

The son and the girlfriend enter in a flurry of cold air and muddy shoes, the story of the spider bubbling on their tongues.

‘It was fucking huge.’ The words spill from the girlfriend’s pearl-painted lips. She slaps a hand across her mouth, her eyes widening. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to swear, but it scared the living sh – daylights out of me.’ She giggles and holds onto the son’s arm. The mother looks at the neat ovals of her nails, the young skin stretched taut across elegant bones.

‘I told you not to tell her.’ The son is giggling too. ‘She hates spiders.’

‘Spiders?’ It’s the brash speed of them, thin legs scuttering across surfaces. They make her stomach curl in on itself, her breath snag against her throat.

‘It’s fine, mum.’ He drapes an arm around her shoulder and she’s so surprised, so pleased, that she almost doesn’t register his words. ‘There was only the one, and it’s gone. We looked, but we couldn’t see it.’

She pulls away from him. She doesn’t mean to, she doesn’t want to, but once it’s done his arm is at his side and she can’t take it back. The father appears in the doorway.

‘There was a spider in the car,’ the son says. ‘A big one. Mum’s having a tizzy about it.’ Sometimes, the mother thinks, her son is not a kind person, but she can’t concentrate on this thought because her mind is caught up with the image: a huge spider abseiling from the roof of her car onto the girlfriend’s lap.
‘Don’t worry,’ the father says, and she can almost see the swell of his chest as he speaks. ‘I’ll find it.’

The mother stands at the sink as he gathers up the Dyson and the looped extension lead from the cupboard. He is animated, the television forgotten, his body tensed for action. She watches him through the window, wielding the Dyson like he’s going into battle. The car looks like a beetle, she thinks, with its wings extended, momentarily vulnerable. It is a wife’s car – a Nissan Metro, all cheeky red curves. He drives a BMW, leather-seated suave, and somehow she’s never questioned it. She repeats her mantra: an achievement – bringing up a family, making a home. Be grateful for a good man’s love and concern. She looks at his slight frame, the baggy jeans that cinch around his waist like women’s trousers, the thin Pringle jumper, navy blue like a school boy’s uniform. There was a time when he’d walk into a room and she’d feel the desire, like melting chocolate. Now, her heart strains at her ribs but it’s not from lust, or even love. Nonsense. She makes herself imagine the winter air on his face, how his cheeks will glow cold, how she might trace a fingertip across his skin and feel the familiar pattern of bones.

He has taken the carpets out of the footwells, removed the spare tyre from the boot. She wants him to stop. There is something childlike about it: his satisfaction in taking things apart and putting them back together, fixing what’s broken. He thinks cleaning the car will make a difference. She hates spiders, but she suspects she understands them better than he does. It will have tucked its legs in tight against its body, found itself a crack to hide in, safe from the blast and pomp of the Dyson. It will wait him out, and once he’s gone, rolled up the extension lead and put the Dyson back in its cupboard, placed – maybe – a dry, cold kiss on her waiting forehead, it will uncurl itself and walk silky steps across the clean upholstery, find itself somewhere to sit, and wait for her.

Sarah Butler writes novels and short fiction. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and has been published by Route, pulp.net and Pen and Ink Press. She runs a literature and regeneration consultancy, UrbanWords.
www.sarahbutler.org.uk

Turkey Republic

webmaster — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:00:00 +0000

My friends and gatherstruts. Believe only what you feel to be true and wise. Trust only those you sense have pecked long and deep.

This freedom we enjoy could never have been given: it had to be fought for and won. They, the tallstanding Formers, called that time Now, living and loving for their pecksquabbles and superscrapes, fighting their own as none would think possible, with lobbings and fear and splattings and nonsense. Their scraptroubles were fiery, some massive, some tiny, all splatty, blooding the whosoever, making nonsensical misery everytremble. That is how it was with them, friends. Blooded. Nothing more. Gnash gnash gnash they’d say, these Manthings as they crumbled their neighbours. Gnash to you all.

Some say they ate their young – which is perhaps no more than pre-Rising troublespeak – but we do know they ate so very many of our own. Dayup to Daydown they would peck and rip at us, slicing and mincing and dribbling and munching us. Tastybites they’d say, tastybites, chomp chomp chomp, have a scrumptious crunchy tastybite, have another, have another chomp chomp gnash gnash.

And so we did the Rising. Rose up as they tripped about their peckshitting and blunderguzzling, seeing no more than strut, gobble and peck as a trillion of us, more even, grubbed down upon them, cricking and cracking them, no no no more we were saying no more no more no more. And the day after the Rising, we were content. We plucked our broken feathers and lived tremblefree.

So friends, on this Risingday Eve, think of those times as you peck the seeds of your Here and After, and give thanks to your Fores for the manroast before you. Squabble not for who pecks leg and who tears arm. The treasures – the eyes, the ears, the crunch of its nose – offer first to your elders. Those moststrutted have seen much, some even the Rising itself, though most will make no mention of the nastinesses and bloodyplucks they witnessed.

Give thanks, friends. Live and peck in peace.


Martin Reed’s fiction and poetry has been published in Critical Quarterly, in several erotic anthologies and he has read at Tales of the Decongested. He has work upcoming on elimae and IS&T, and is a member of The Fiction Workhouse. Martin is learning to blog badly at Worded.