Dot

I wrote this in 2015 as a character study for a writing course I was doing, but also as part of my 'canal novel'.

Gruff, snuffling, you poke around the towpath like a dog, marking out the territory of the morning.  Your sinews are carpeted with layers: T-shirts, a fleece and wood-worn jacket, two scarfs and a cap.  Your skin hasn’t seen sunlight in years.  These incongruous Birkenstocks, large to fit socks two or three thick, have gathered the same weather as the lines on your face.  On your single ringed stove, a copper kettle sings, and you make yourself a pot, stirring the leaves, stirring.  Your eyes swivel, sharp, looking for a hole to tear through, a wavering to be demolished by your certainty.  At only four feet and eleven inches, you have boiled your powers down to a salty essence.

Inside, in the dark, peeling palace of your memory, lie shelves stacked with books of photographs, each of them labelled with a meticulous hand.  Here are the awkward and abandoned children, the worried girls-soon-to-be-mothers, the uncles with their broad whiskers and boyish eyes, the mothers raising wan smiles by washing lines, the workmen bearing their labour in their bodies, each with a glass-eyed anonymity, and those strange ones, the ones too good for the mould, who made mischief for everyone and whose feathers shone like rainbows, now levelled, like the others, by the acid of time passing.  Now, with the old ones gone, you keep their memories by your judgement, numbered prisoners trapped in your gossamer shells.

You cling to them, these faces, memorise their names, draft invisible charts of their progeny.  Soon the remembering of them is the only truth you have, a truth that fades, yellows, and cracks, and the more you grasp for this one or that, the more they crumble and dust in your swollen fingers.

Julia and the Pool

In September 2016 I submitted a version of this to the Pells Pool (Lewes) writing competition, the prize being a place in the pool's creative writing anthology.  It didn't make the cut.  I've rewritten it a number of times since then.  I've made life hard for myself by sticking close to the moment through the use of the present tense and observing through Julia's eyes, but maintaining a third person narrative.  Still, I think it works.

It’s 4pm.  The kids are back at school.  The air is thick and warm, the sky quivering on the water line.  She pays and fiddles with her luminous wristband.  She likes green.  It’s so hard to get these wristbands right.  Another lone woman gives her a nervous smile.   “Hot isn’t it?” the woman says.  Julia nods.

She stakes out a stretch of grass, puts down her towel.  My area, it says.  She wriggles through her magic towel and comes out in an aqua-marine Lycra one-piece.   A seagull lands on the grass, looking for food, cawing insistently.  She caws right back at him.  Bog off somewhere else, she thinks.

The next bit is never elegant.  She dares her first leg in the water.  God it’s cold.  Another leg, and she drops in, gasps as the water grabs her waist.  There is only so long she can remain half in/half out, sensing the mocking eyes of those who know her peril.  A deep breath, and her breasts are swallowed.  The hungry pool wants all of her.  Closing her eyes, she breaks the water.

Oh God, oh God, just keep going.  Next breath.  Right arm.  Left arm.  Repeat.  Oh God it’s good!  Endorphins rush through her wonderful weightless body.  She drops beneath the surface, arms smoothing the water, steering through the wriggling machineries of others.  At the deep end she tumble turns, her toes gently nudging the ceramic tiles as they propel her body forwards.

Later, when no-one’s watching, she sneaks out.  Her costume clings.  Earth’s gravity asserts a brutal hold.  

A quick sip of water, and her novel awaits.  Two brothers – which is the gentleman, which is the cad?  Cool streams condense on the towel.  She shivers unexpectedly.  It’s getting dark so early now.  Strangers are gathering their things, checking their mobiles.  I’m staying here, she thinks, tugging a sweater from her bag. 

After a while she closes her novel and smells the dampness of her earlier adventure.  This could be the last of the year, she thinks.  Stuffing summer back into her bag, she strides purposefully to the exit gate, pretends not to notice the darkening sky, and pulls the wristband hard until it snaps. 

The Last

Can't quite remember why I wrote this!  I've always liked the idea that love will conquer all, and that all humans are part of a single organism, so this is that idea taken to its logical conclusion!

Last night I watched the last specks of dust fall over the houses, the slow machinery giving way to steam, the coughs of engines giving way to joy.  There were whistles, whoops, as the men, women and children came out of their houses, clutching the rare morsels of their lives, mostly bedding, shelters, the odd item of romantic foolishness.  None of it was necessary.  The dawn was moving fast, and we had to go.  I looked for her hand and there is was, as smooth and delicate as the first time it fell into mine, flushed pink with a knot of gold.  It's lines and curvatures were the grains of our life together.  And as we finally met on the ridge, the whole world we had known lay before us, so small, built by children who were dreaming, lost in a game that was never packed away.  We are accidents, all of us.

We looked down on the city as the smoke rose from the factories, the houses, the shopping centres.  The fires were small at first, then took hold more powerfully.  I found myself whistling a tune, couldn't remember the name of it, and she was rocking slowly backwards and forwards, humming a song we used to dance to when we were courting.  She caught me watching her and smiled, something so warm, leading the path to this, wondering how it had taken so long.  Occasionally something big would explode, the sound bouncing from the hills, and the children would point and wave their flags as another building sank.

There was a dark fog now seeping from the edge of the city, which I recognised as the rats and other feral animals leaving.  The meat they had lived on had all but gone.  They were discovering it too, that there was another life, another world better than this.  I was crying, I realised, when my glasses became too clotted with salt to see.  I laughed when I thought about all the arguments, all the wars, and then felt a little tug where the others might have been, across the lands, on the other side of the world, having similar experiences to our own.  I would never see or hear from them ever again.  But it really didn't matter, since the distinctions that we had clawed against, killed each other to maintain, meant less than this feast of trash that was now being burnt below us.

Slowly, love in the particular was fading.  People were kissing other people's partners, playing with other people's children.  I had forgotten which were mine, but they were all so happy it didn't seem to matter.  The woman next to me, who looked familiar, rested her head on my shoulder.  “They're coming!” someone shouted.  I looked up and the light was finally upon us, and I thought about the moon, but then I forgot about that and got ready.  We didn't need it all now anyway, so I left my bedding on the hill, folded my glasses up for the last time, then followed the others down to the circle.  It didn't take long for us all to be connected, and as the last hands reached up to touch each other, I thought this is it then, this is it, then after that there wasn't a ‘me’ as such, and this was nothing to tell anyone, as we were all the same thing.  Love.

All about Rosie

This piece is part of a novel I was trying to write about new-age traveller types, very much set in the nineties and a place to explore my observations of those times.

Rosie likes having it large.  Rosie likes getting her Doc Marten boots out onto the dancefloor with her mates and fucking going for it.  Rosie took an E at 7 o’clock and has never laughed and hugged and fallen over so much, and her mates are the very best, THE best mates a girl could have, and no fucking blokes waggling their cocks around come even CLOSE.  And Rosie has a heart which is big and open and kind and takes no shit but knows how to give a sucker a break.  Rosie loves Spiral Tribe, and Back to the Planet, and a bit of hardcore.  She’ll dance to anything that’s loud and up for it.  Peanut Rosie, Rosie Tea.  One day her hair’s red, one day it’s blue, and on every arm and every leg there’s another tattoo, and this one’s to welcome you.  This is me, I’m Rosie Tea.  Yeah, she could be a slam poet too.  So why Ray?  Because she’s having a baby.  And something was kind in his eyes.  But she’s not the type to fall for that tripe.  No fucking way. 

But her mates all went off to Spain, and Ireland, and Australia, and the new lot aren’t the same.  They don’t know what it’s all about, they just want to get off their heads.  They don’t understand that it all comes from community, that’s what it’s all about.  Every time you go to a rave now, there’s some tripped up bollock groping your tits and trying to sell you asprins.  And she doesn’t dance as much as she used to.  Except when the mood takes her.  And her crew are with her. 

So, right, she had a bit of a fuck with this skinhead guy, no idea who he was but he had a lovely smile and a bottle of JD and she was feeling horny, and who are you to judge?  You don’t fucking judge her!  So they had a bit of a bunk up and his johnny split and she couldn’t get hold of a morning after cos she was on the road, so there she was, same old story, up the pudding club.  It didn’t really concern her at first.  There were plenty of raggle taggle kids on site and at the festie’s, all wised up like their mums, all skanking like their dads.  But she did the right thing and laid off the booze and the E, even the smokes though it almost killed her.  She wanted to do it right for this little babe.  So she went cold turkey, she went all natural.  Even let the colour come out of her hair, went back to the colour she’d last seen at the age of 13, she’d almost forgotten what it looked like.

It wasn’t really about the drugs for her anyway, it was about the atmosphere.  So she politely refused the lines of MDMA, the speed, the PCB, the E.  She danced anyway, touching her stomach and feeling the rhythm on the outside repeated inside.  I got a ravey baby she thought.  The social wanted her to say who the father was, fuck it she hardly knew herself and certainly wasn’t going to go looking for him, I mean he was a good fuck but happy families was for people in little boxes going doolally on TVs and microwaves.  She wanted to get her shoes off, feel the mud in her toes, get some henna done, pierce her tongue.  She took a bus down to Wales and stayed with a mate at Tally Valley for a bit, planting vegetables and meditating.  It was nice, but it was boring.  But she was getting tired.  She had Peanut as well, who is the most gorgeous bitch in the world, but still needs two good walks a day or she’s impossible, and fuck knows what she gets fed on site but the last time she was sick she had to shell out from her savings for the vet’s bill.

The she met Ray.  He was quiet.  He just got on with his business, making stuff, doing up little stools to sell at the festivals, fixing things.  He was a lot older than her, had grey bristles in his beard, and wrinkled old eyes, with a lot of kindness in them.  He knew about nature, I mean really knew about it, the names of the creatures and the plants, what they did, when they seeded, all that stuff.  It was like discovering an ancient code that had always been there, buried in plain sight.  She started reading him her poems and he didn’t laugh, or give ridiculous praise neither.  He actually told her what he thought.  She started to notice he was smiling at her, just watching her when she was cooking up the veggie slop.  He looked after himself too, he was in better shape than a lot of the site lads, and he knew when enough was enough.

They needed a few bodies up at Big Bog Farm for the hay harvest, which they did by hand in the old fashioned way, with scythes.  When it was all in there was a little gathering up at the top of the hill, and it was a full moon night as well.  A touch of magic in the air I suppose.  She found herself sitting on her own with him, talking about astrology (which he thought was bollocks), free will, how to tell a tree by its bark, the difference between punks, hippies and crusties, how to make a horn from the stripped bark of a willow.  At some point she slipped her arm around his waist, just naturally, and he felt it there, brought her head to his shoulder.  Then she stepped away, walked forward, put herself between him and the moon.  Smiled.  Span.  Laughed.  Almost fell over.  Started a jokey striptease, which took ages because she had so many layers on, but when it got to her vest, it all went quiet, and she gently lifted it over her shoulders and let it drop to the ground.  Her eyes said something beyond the world, beyond the moon.  He took his hat off, not knowing exactly why.  Cherish me, she said.  Honour me.  Be with me.

He picked up her things, joined her arm, and followed down that winding path, the glistening moonlit dew, to her van, where she pulled an old mattress out (carefully, so as not to wake Peanut), and they took it out to the edge of the meadow, lay down and fucked with the rabbits.

The beginning bit

Although I've never seen myself as a short-form writer, I have nonetheless written lots of odd little bits of prose over the years.  This blog is a place for me to collect and publish them.  Some have a journalistic style.  Some are not-quite-poetry.  Some are writing group exercises.  And many are random scenes from novels that have not yet been.  Some will date back to the 1990s, and others were written last week.  I hope you find something to enjoy.