Dignity |
David Polshaw was born David Polakow in 1953 to a Polish father and English mother in Manchester, England. He is married, has five children and two grandchildren. He has always loved fantasy and used his other passion, hiking in the countryside of Northern England, to inspire fantastic locations for stories. As well as hiking he enjoys participating in English folk music and dance. He is now retired and lives in the Yorkshire Dales where he plays accordion to his cats and can see the hills and valleys of those fantasy realms every day. |
The Gateway
She was back in Eyam, walking by the village green with its stocks and the plague cottages to the church. Playing amongst the gravestones were boys and girls of all ages. Tam and John were there, tousling on the grass as usual. Lottie and Amelia were playing with hoops and sticks. Patience, Sally’s best friend, started to skip over with a big smile until a man’s voice shouted across the churchyard
“Go away. You don’t belong here.”
The man who Sally thought she saw earlier that day stood beside her and she realised she was not a child now but an adult.
The smile faded from Patience’s face and she stood still while the other children joined her. As they walked toward Sally, to her horror, their skins began to peel. Faces fell away to reveal bones and teeth. Sally was rooted to the spot as she saw her playmates rot. As they neared, the man spoke again, louder and more urgently
“Go! Leave this world in peace.”
He spread his arms to deny them passage. The children faded into a mist that rolled over the ground before being drawn into open graves. Sally watched the man turn to face her and cried out when she saw his face, like gnarled wood with eyes glowing green while his hair and beard seemed to twist into leaves and twigs. He started to speak but a bird, a robin, popped its head out of the opening where his mouth should be. Sally sat bolt upright in bed, shaking and drenched.
The same dream repeated every night, many times, with slight changes. Sometimes she saw her father waving from across the churchyard. She liked that but it made her realise there was something she had not thought about before. The children may have been changed places or played different games but while her father was in his jeans and sweater, as she remembered him, the children were always in old fashioned clothes. She tried to recall if that was how she saw them when she was little but she could not remember. Wherever the children were though, it always ended the same. They became terrible creatures and the man who stopped them was just as frightening.
The filming had been well in advance of the day and she had not slept properly since. Knowing that the visit to Arbor Low had triggered something, she needed to go back. There was no work for a few days so tomorrow was as good a day as any. That decided, she had the first uninterrupted sleep all week, waking on Halloween morning ready to investigate. By the time she was ready and breakfasted it was late. She packed a rucksack before driving towards the Peak District and with the traffic getting out of town, it was well after noon when she parked up at the farm and dropped some change into the honesty box before heading for the stone circle. The air was still and deathly quiet, devoid of even birdsong. Heading towards the bronze-age barrow where she had seen the stranger, she was not sure what to expect but disappointed to find no trace of anything. While Sitting on one of the fallen stones, pondering what to do next, a voice startled her.
“Hello, Sally”
She sprang up and turned. The man smiled nervously.
“Are you looking for me?”
Her heart raced as she stared at him. No sign of any leaves in his brown hair or trimmed beard but the eyes, while not glowing, were the same green that she saw in her dream.
“You scared me!” She managed to exclaim at last. “What are you doing creeping up on people like that?”
“Sorry,” he replied, “I didn’t mean to startle you but it’s important that we talk.”
She calmed down and managed to put on her best investigative journalist voice.
“Yes, it seems it is. Just who are you and what have you done to me? I haven’t been the same since you first appeared”
He hesitated a moment before taking a seat on the next stone.
“I haven’t done anything to you. But you have disturbed forces here in this circle that could leak into this world unless…”
She started to interrupt but he continued.
“Please, let me finish. It will be hard to accept but I must warn you. There are different planes of existence and gateways, such as this circle, allow some movement between the planes at times. These other places and their inhabitants are usually harmless. In fact they are the root of many of your fairy tales but there are also malevolent beings that can do untold damage. Some people, such as you, are sensitive to this and can open the gates. When you were here before something tried to use you to pass though. I stopped it.”
Sally was incredulous and shook her head.
“Come off it. This is the scientific age. We don’t believe in such nonsense.”
But as she spoke, the dreams she had been having made her doubt her confidence. She stood, more in anger at herself for believing than at him for lying. Snatching up her pack she stormed back towards the car. He shouted something that she did not catch and as she started to cross the circle a cold mist froze her. She turned to see if the stranger was following but she could now see nothing beyond the old stones. Figures began to appear out of the mist. She made out small shapes and as they drew closer, she saw they were the children she used to play with.
“Come Sally. Come and play with us again” Called distant voices. She could now make out individuals. Patience moved to the fore and beckoned, smiling. Sally took a step closer to but as she neared she saw it was not Patience. The smile was wrong. The eyes were black and lifeless. The child began to grow and twist into a grotesque caricature of a human with arms ending in long claws and too many legs. The hair, blonde before, turned oily black and seemed to writhe on its head making the child's pretty face look grotesque. Sally stepped back but the creature grabbed at her, the claws cutting into her shoulder. She felt its power but managed to snatch herself back and scream at it.
Before the creature could lash out again a flash tore through the mist with a noise like thunder. A blast hit her, knocking the breath from her body as she fell.
She ended up flat on her back. The mist had gone and there were no creatures, just the stranger stood above her. He helped her to her feet with a worried look before asking if she was alright. It took her a few moments to reply as she took stock. Apart from an ache in her shoulder and a damp patch on her backside she felt fine.
“I’m good I think. What the hell happened?”
“I was trying to tell you,” he replied, “You seem to be a key into this world and they want to use you. Sorry if you were hurt but I had to send them back.”
She was still incredulous but given what she had just seen could not help but ask
“Who are you then and how do you fit in?”
“That is what I was coming to. I am a gatekeeper. I help to stop anything dangerous from moving between planes. I sent them this time back but at this time of year the barriers are thin, they are strong and they will try again.”
Sally found it difficult to take it in. Once again her mind was telling her that there were sensible explanations. A sharp pain in her shoulder told her otherwise and she started to rub at it. The man frowned.
“Here, let me see”.
She let him take a step closer and turned the aching shoulder towards him.
“Take your jacket off so I can get a better look,” he said. She was shocked to see the padding hanging out of long gashes in the fabric.
“No broken skin,” he noted. “but you need to get rest and away from here soon. Preferably somewhere where there is light and people. That will help to keep them away.”
She knew exactly where she wanted to go. They climbed into the Range Rover and started the short drive to Eyam. Her mind was racing with questions but she got the simplest over with first.
“What do I call you?”
“I am called Jack in the Green by many but I suppose Jack Green will do fine.”
“Wait, hang on,” she said. “Do you mean to say you are a Green Man? Like those we see carved here there and everywhere?”
“No so much a Green Man as the Green Man. And the carvings don’t really do me any justice”.
He grinned at that and she laughed but realised that some carvings were not too far from the creature in her dream. The atmosphere lightened though and they began an easy chat. He learned about her dreams and her childhood playmates. She was sure that they had a direct bearing. He agreed but could throw no light on what that may be. As to his part in her dreams he could only guess. She had seen him on the day the dreams started so she must have subconsciously related the two things. He would say nothing about the change in him she had witnessed. She discovered, but still didn’t quite believe, that such things as Elves and Goblins really did exist. There were points in our year when they were more restless. The turning of all the seasons was significant but they were most active around Halloween. A thought she had about the children and their old fashioned dress led her to ask about ghosts. He replied that ghosts could often be seen by others but they were not able to do any harm and his role did not involve human spirits. She tried to read a meaning into her dream. Were the children ghosts or something more sinister? How had Jack commanded them if they were not part of his remit? She needed more to go on and could not think beyond that. Besides, they had reached the village.
They pulled up and left the car near the church gate. She was reluctant to enter the graveyard but Jack reassured her that neither the church or graveyard contained anything dangerous. Still, she remembered her dreams and was wary as she made her way in. She pictured where the children were playing and how Patience smiled and skipped towards her. Risking a glance at Jack she saw that he was still human. No sign of the tree-like beast. She went to a gravestone she knew well that simply said “Alan Smith. Rest in Peace”
“A relation?” he asked.
She told him about her Dad and how he had passed away when she was little. They found a nearby shop where she bought some flowers. Returning to the grave, she placed them with a promise to visit more regularly. They then continued searching the churchyard where they found graves with the names of the children she had mentioned but she did not know if they were the same ones. It threw no light on whether her imaginary playmates were ghosts or something worse. Twilight was coming on and she was getting frustrated with her lack of answers so suggested they had a break for a drink.
The Miner’s Arms was decked out for Halloween with pumpkin lanterns and things to amuse children and adults alike. Jack sheepishly admitted that he had no money so Sally bought their drinks on her plastic.
“I see your ‘other worldly-ness’ doesn’t stop you enjoying the fruits of this one” She said as she placed a pint of bitter in front of him.
He just laughed and told her that he was on good terms with John Barleycorn. They chatted a little more as they finished their drinks and, noticing it had gone dark, decided to eat before doing anything else. Sally ordered their food from the bar. Before long the waiter brought out two plates of food and laid them on the table but as he left, the lights failed. A few people in the pub groaned as the bar staff scurried around lighting candles. A man at the bar exclaimed
“Hey, that’s good Halloween trick”
Looking to where he was pointing Sally saw the shimmering figures. Children in old costumes with Patience at the front.
A couple of the customers applauded and laughed. The bar staff looked puzzled and the waiter dropped a glass when Sally and Jack sprang from their seats. Jack pointed at them and shouted something unintelligible but frowned when nothing happened. Sally stared as the children stopped glowing and seemed to take solid form. Patience came to her. Sally pulled back but the child managed to grab her hand. There were none of the horrors that she had seen in her dreams and at Arbor Low. Patience’s hand felt warm and real. All the children looked at Sally, smiling, but their faces fell when Jack pulled Sally away and Patience fell to the floor. Someone from the bar shouted but Sally did not hear what as she looked in shock beyond the children at her father,
“Sally, you need to come with me now.” He said.
His voice was just as she remembered. Patience picked herself up and threw Jack the type of dirty look only young girls can give. Sally’s Dad made his way to her and held out his hand.
“Please, Sally. For me.”
Jack closed his eyes and spoke in a low voice as he seemed to concentrate but nothing happened. Sally was brought out of her shock when her Father took her hand and started to step backwards, pulling her with him. Jack stepped up but the boys and girls ran between him and Sally. She looked around to see Jack try to push through the children. It seemed a long way back. She looked towards her Father again as he inexorably pulled her along. There seemed to be nothing she could do. She felt nauseous as the room span towards a point of light, seemingly at the end of a tunnel. Suddenly, the tunnel ended. It was still dark and chill but she was outside, shocked and shaking. The moon was full and by its light she saw she was in a country lane. A few cottages were dotted along it with lights shining from them Children she recognised were coming towards her. She was still speechless when, with a smile, her Dad said
“Welcome home.”
The children ran to her, adults she did not recognise following them. She was still to shocked to resist when her Father embraced her and kissed her forehead.
“My, how you’ve grown” he said. “It is many years though and I suppose I should expect it. Still, my; little girl a beautiful woman. I’m so…”
She had to interrupt.
“What’s going on? Am I dead?”
“No”, her Dad replied, “Let’s not stand in the cold. Come in and I will explain.”
With no other option, Sally followed him into the cottage. It was candlelit and a warm fire was burning in the hearth. He sat himself down at the table and Sally followed suit.
“Go on then.” She prompted, calming a little, and he began to speak.
He explained that they were on another plane of existence. Before today she would have shrugged such things off as fantasy but following recent events she knew he spoke the truth.
“You are in danger in your world.” He continued. “You seem to be bridging the planes and there are things out there that will do anything to get to living people. Including hurt you. I can’t let that happen.”
Sally replied. “I have heard the same before, only today. A man called Jack, some sort of nature spirit I think, told me. He said he could protect me as well. But why me? Why now? I have always led a perfectly normal life and these things have not happened before.”
Her Father pondered a while before he replied.
“You may have led a perfectly normal life but you are far from what you think of as normal. What I have to tell you now may come as a shock.”
After today, Sally thought, nothing would shock me but she said nothing.
“Your companion is a spirit, and very dangerous. I know of his sort. Many years ago on a Midsummers eve I rested by a stream. As I slept I had a dream where a beautiful woman came to me. Only it wasn’t a dream. When our lovemaking finished she told me I would not see her again but she would make sure that I would forever remember her. As she rose I saw her for what she was, a spirit of the river. Her eyes glowed blue and her clothing swirled like mist as she blew me a farewell kiss, laughed and faded into the night. I thought I had forgotten her but no, something happened to remind me. In the Autumn of that year I met your mother and we were married soon after. On the following Midsummers eve we heard a tapping at our door and when we opened it, there was an infant, gurgling happily in a willow basket on our doorstep. When she looked at me her eyes momentarily glowed blue and I knew then what the river spirit meant by her parting words. Your mother was enraptured straight away. We took the baby in and agreed a plan to keep her. That baby was you.”
Sally just didn’t know what to say.
“Well, that was unexpected” was all she could manage. “How does this fit in with what is happening now though?”
“Do you not see?” Replied her Dad. “You are of two worlds. Mine and your birth mother’s. I don’t know why it is happening now but lately there have been great disturbances across the planes. Things from an evil place are trying to get to your world through you and I know how to stop it. This place is not for them. It is where those who have died but are not ready to leave the human world yet can rest before going on. The creatures beyond are not interested in the dead, just the living. Stay here with us and you will be safe.”
Sally was not ready for a life amongst the dead yet, even if it meant she was with her Father and her childhood friends. She had so much she wanted to do in the land of the living. Her work had made a difference to the world. Uncovering corruption and inequality had made life so much better for some. She considered letting everyone know what she had learned over the last few hours then realised that no one would believe her but her head swam with possibilities. While her Dad awaited a reply there was a commotion outside followed by a loud banging on the door. He opened it to a young woman who said, “You had better come quick”, and then darted back into the lane.
Sally and her Dad followed her to see quite a large crowd of people staring in one direction. Following their gaze she saw Jack pushing his way through.
“Sally,” he said as he neared her, “ come to me now. I can protect you from these creatures.”
She took a hesitant step but her Father stopped her.
“No, Sally. Stay here with me. I can protect you. He is dangerous to be around. You mustn’t go to him.”
Alan and Jack made their way towards each other until they stood just a stride apart. She could see the anger in her Father’s eyes as he faced Jack. They circled each other but before blows could be struck, Sally shouted “No!” and she placed herself between them. Jack stood down but remained tense. Alan drew back a step but still had anger in his eyes.
“It’s very flattering having men fight over me but this is not the way. I should get a say in my own fate.”
They mumbled apologies at the same time but it was Alan who spoke next.
“What would you have us do, Sally? You are your own woman of course but still in danger. Your friend may be powerful in your world, but not here. If you go back with him, how do I know you will be safe?”
“She does not belong here.”, said Jack. “Her time has not yet come and I can hold the creatures at bay.”
As they argued, someone in the crowd shouted out. They looked towards the noise and saw a dark hole in the lane through which stepped the horrors Sally had seen earlier that day.
The creature that had injured Sally swept people aside. Children screamed in panic as it raked anyone in its way with wicked talons. Yet another monster, with lidless eyes and oozing sores, stooped to the fallen and seemed to be feasting on them Yet more were following them. Most of the villagers ran but a few brave souls, including Jack and Alan, picked up sticks, tools or anything they could and faced the creatures. The one at the fore made a sound akin to laughing before saying, in a guttural growl
“What do you think you can do, Green Man? You are useless here. And you, human spirit? You cannot stop me. We will have her.”
“They may not be able to stop you. But I will.” Sally spoke, surprising everyone including herself. The whole scene had changed before her. Everything became clear. The children and her Dad were ghosts, transparent and insubstantial. Jack was no longer the modern man but a creature of power with tree-like limbs and a carved oak face. The horrors coming through the hole were dark, writhing things but with no substance. All the illusions she had seen before were laid bare and she knew the truth.
“Be gone from this place. You don’t belong here.” She commanded, echoing Jack’s words from her dream.
Her eyes glowed a livid blue and from her hands, gushed a silver river, washing the creatures back through the gap before the hole vanished. Everything turned to how it had been minutes before. Sally felt drained yet elated as everyone looked on. She managed a smile as she saw her Father and Jack staring open mouthed.
“Just who is protecting who?” She asked.
Jack, Sally and Alan retired to his cottage and the village went quiet. There were injuries but nothing critical. Patience, Sally was pleased to see, was untouched but her Mother had a broken arm. Others had cuts and bruises which surprised Sally because, in her moment of revelation, she saw the creatures for what they were. Projections from another place.
“Don’t underestimate the power of suggestion.” Alan had said and, in her line of work, she knew that to be true. She didn’t understand everything but she knew where her heart lay. The day had taken it’s toll on both mind and body though. She needed to eat and sleep. Following a supper, which made up for the lost pub meal, her Dad showed her to a small room with a comfortable bed which she instantly dropped on to. The last thing she heard before falling into a deep sleep was Jack say “I think we need a drink.”
“Men!” she thought before she fell into a deep sleep
The morning was overcast and cold. There was no one in the cottage so she stepped outside where Alan and Jack were stood chatting amiably. They both wished her a good morning before her Father asked the question she expected.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
“I know exactly what I need to do. But not before breakfast, I’m starving.” she replied. Bread, cheese and a very pleasant infusion of fruit and herbs were taken before they went outside again. Sally found Patience and tousled her hair, smiling.
“Sorry Patience. But I’m grown up now and don’t play children’s games any more but I will always hold you dear.”
Patience looked unhappy as Sally turned back to her Father and Jack. Her Dad nodded sadly.
“I wish I could spend more…”
But she shushed him with a long embrace before turning to Jack.
“I’ll ask you if I need help. I know where to look.” she said before hugging him too. Then with a wave of her hand a rent appeared in the village lane. It was not dark like the gate that had let the creatures in but rippled like blue-grey water in the sunlight. With a few steps Sally passed through it and the rent repaired itself.
“She’ll be fine.” Jack said to Alan.
“I know. Maybe I can now start the rest of my journey.” He replied.
A dog was startled to see Sally appear outside the Miner’s Arms but its owner was looking the other way. She made her way back to the car knowing nothing would be the same again. All through that winter she continued making her reports but whenever a disaster struck, be it natural or man made, she could see dark shadows in the background. Sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. By spring she knew it was time to make a change. She left the public eye. She sold her quayside flat and bought a cottage near Eyam. Downgraded her Range Rover to something smaller and greener. She visited her Mother a few times but never mentioned what she now knew. Midsummer’s eve came along, dry and warm. Sally had resigned from work a while before in anticipation. Walking the dozen or so miles to Arbor Low, she arrived when the sun was low. Her plan was made, her mind made up, but she more than a little apprehensive. Having read up on old folk-tales she now understood that some were for protection from other realms. So, following tradition, she walked three times round the ring before stepping in just as the sun touched the horizon. The mist arose instantly but no monsters from hell rose with it. A lone figure walked towards her and as she looked at Jack he asked, with a smile
“Did you call me?”
“I did,” she replied. “There’s something going rotten with the world. The things out there are influencing wars and polluting our world. I want to stop them but don’t know where to begin.”
“Oh, I think I can help,” said Jack, offering her his arm. “Shall we?”
Chitra Gopalakrishnan uses her ardor for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and tree-ism and capitalism. As a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communicator for 30 years, she enjoys this career of trying to figure out issues of social development and its impact – or the lack of it – on people. Her fiction has appeared in the Celestial Echo Press, Black Hare Press, Fantasia Divinity, Me First Magazine, Reedsy, Terror House Magazine, Unpublished Platform, Literary Yard, Truancy, eShe, Literati Magazine, Spillwords, Fleas on the Dog, Twist and Twain, Velvet Illusion, CafeLit, Breaking Rules Publishing, Sky Island Journal and Runcible Spoon. |
And my world changed yet again
- Memory one: all about good weather (581 words)
- Memory two: neither here nor there, knowing nothing of anything (514 words)
- Memory three: the mixed stink of rotting cauliflower and fart (506 words)
- Memory four: residents, strangers, buffaloes and the spaces between (401 words)
- Memory five: foibles, missteps and the small humiliations that hurt (557 words)
- Memory six: the many faults in our reality (493 words)
- Memory seven: colors that agreed only in the dark (719 words)
- Memory eight: braving the rain to get to the rainbow (853 words)
- Memory nine: all that is, is all that matters (931 words)
- Memory ten: quid pro quo (385 words)
- Memory eleven: on cartography and maps of the mind (414 words)
- Memory twelve: squaring the circle (298 words)
- Memory thirteen: I have the markings of joy (669 words)
· Memory fifteen: I am this, I am that and I know how to make bows out of knots (620 words)
Memory one: all about good weather
“Carry the good weather with you always.” is what my wily maternal grandmother would often tell me. With an unruly mass of coarse white hair and many, many curly tendrils with lives of their own, she had piercing eyes and an even more piercing tongue both of which she unreservedly used with knife-keen precision.
As a thirteen-year-old girl, I lacked the flair or the chutzpah to do what she asked.
Otherwise, I would have carried to New Delhi in the December of 1975 the summery joviality of Hyderabad, the fiery flavours of its mirapakayas, the tangy gongura sambhar trails along with the endless orange-gold stretches of sky all within the throbbing inner ducts of my still-forming being.
“I have found myself a new job in Sahibabad in Uttar Pradesh on the outskirts of the national capital as my company in Hyderabad is shutting down,” my dispassionate father announced without preamble one agreeable Sunday in the month of October. With his breath falling heavy and solid between my mother and me, he left the room soon after saying this. The disquieting finality of his exit was intended to escape our reactions I am sure. I did see something flash fleetingly beneath the surface of his face in this second but it vanished sooner than it appeared.
The moment of his announcement stretched endlessly like a sari on the clothesline for the two of us. My mother stood stunned, holding in her half-believing breath. She probably knew this was coming. I did not. For me, his words coursed like high-voltage electricity through barbed wire. The rest of the day was charred for me as were the following ones.
Like all fathers of those times, my father had a forbidding reserve, call it old-fashioned refinement if you will, and it was understood that we never argue with him or express our dismay about upheavals in our lives. For him life was a simple case of what was, was, what is, is. An acceptance of the way things were and are.
“If only money did not matter in our lives,” I sobbed inconsolably in my best friend’s outstretched arms that cradled me as we parted forever. Sheela Santanam and I had promised one another to “always to live our lives in the same city.” “It feels too terrible to leave behind the only place I know, my everyday realities, my home, our tight circle of friends, our petty mischiefs, our school and most of all you to move to another plane of reality. As a Tamilian in Hyderabad, I have never even wanted even to go to Madras and Delhi is just too far,” I rasped with regret in between sobs. I cried more hot tears when an afterthought struck me. “And, my widowed grandmother will have to manage alone.”
As an insider to the cruel insularities of teenagers I knew too well that the remembrances of the young were fickle, seeping away as fast as ink into blotting paper. The truth was I was terrified of being blanked out by my friends. I trembled at the thought of being out of their minds with my generally undistinguished academic record and more so at the idea of being hollowed inside out in my need of them. The leaves of the tamarind tree rustled outside our bungalow and as tears glassed my eyes they dimmed into a curtain of green hues behind my eyelids. A deep sense of emptiness set in as my spirits leaked out.
Memory two: neither here nor there, knowing nothing of anything
So there I was standing on the platform in New Delhi, in the leaden, sullen winter twilight, scrawny and suffering, bereft of my earlier, small, outlined life lived deeply, carrying inside of me a dry mouth, a dull, aching head, a fogged mind, a thrumming, anxiety-ridden heart, disconsolate spirit that mourned what could have been and a future that frowned.
The cold that merely feathered the air in the compartment turned into a calamitous raw frost, one that hit me at the first point of contact with the city. With no socks, shoes, sweater or scarf, my open, pink plastic sandals and my frock of synthetic fabric were no safeguards against the grate of the winter winds. They could not have warded off a light, spring breeze and I felt the rage of the winter spear through my long, pendulous arms and then as it crept upward through my soles and wicked away my body heat.
I throbbed all over with a sense of cold and a sore betrayal, my gregariousness solidly shook out of me. As the other passengers shuffled around us and the minutes progressed, the many and varied displeasures of hell that the wretched New Delhi winter brought set in. We as a family seemed to have arrived in New Delhi knowing nothing of anything here. We knew nothing of the cold so we came unprepared with woolens to our new city. Never having experienced the stinging iciness of cold or the gelid numbness that was creeping into my bones, we seemed to have no vocabulary for it. And as a shocking variety of unfamiliar sensory impressions besieged us, olfactory, visual, tactile and auditory, we demonstrated our tentativeness, our diffidence, towards our new environment with each passing moment. We were in a double prison of body and mind.
Yet at this point, rigid though I was with inexperience, I knew one thing for sure. Fitting into this city was not going to happen easily. Especially after a life cushioned with comfort. As if on cue, I heard my mother clad in a silk sari say in a voice that was audible only to me, “I feel a tingling and loss of feeling in my fingers, toes, nose, lips and ears”. Not surprising, I thought, as her silk sari that was more than adequate covering for Hyderabad seemed an absurdly ineffectual barrier here.
My father? He maintained a resolute silence through our whimpering, not willing to admit his lapse of not thinking beyond Hyderabad’s four seasons, the hot season, hotter season, the hotter, hotter season and then the hottest and humid season. If he was cold in his terylene shirt and pant he did not tell us at the station. Or as we clumsily staggered behind our licensed coolie, with his red shirt and shiny arm badge, as he precariously balanced our several pieces of our luggage and shot through the over bridges with the speed of summer lightning making our breaths rise in visible puffs. Or even when we sped past the city in a cavernous black and yellow Ambassador taxi.
Memory three: the mixed stink of rotting cauliflower and fart
Behind the wheel of our taxi was another dangerous and distracted individual who chortled wickedly at our cowering over his dizzy speed. His face was covered with fuzzy hair and we could not say where his mustache ended and beard began. As he swerved the wide roads with wild abandon and scant respect for traffic rules or lane driving, our muffled drowsiness came to an end in a final kind of way. Our chests lurched and our stomachs churned as we tried to cope with his speed on the one hand and the smells of his cheap liquor and the mixed stink of rotting cauliflower and fart within the enclosed interiors of the taxi. It was hard to say whether he was drunk at six in the evening or still drunk from the night before. Our eustachian tubes that were plugged with the cold came jinglingly alive to the full, orchestral mode Hindi film songs he played and we pretended not to hear a man make animal sounds in one of the numbers.
As we neared Ramesh Nagar by nightfall, in the western part of the city, twelve kilometers from the station, where my father had rented a flat, the barrel-chested taxi driver brought his taxi to an abrupt halt and began dramatically unloading our assorted luggage much to our consternation, his ripe belly and meaty buttocks bobbing up and down, ugly folds of flesh and fat. We were unsure of what to expect. Once our luggage was unloaded, he stomped his feet up and down, waved his arms in angry spirals and shook his head furiously. We figured that he would not take us into the narrow, haphazard, brick-paved lane with a smoky air, one that smelt of cinders and led to our first floor house.
Pointing towards his tires, he seemed to argue, “I will not get my tires punctured on these untarred roads and you will have to pay me extra for loading and fastening your luggage with ropes atop my taxi.” Despite our non-fluency in Hindi we understood that this was what he was saying just as we understood the malice and avarice that glinted in his beady eyes. Used to having many courtesies extended to us by respectful and careful drivers back in Hyderabad, we stared in horror at his rough, acerbic hostility.
“Bloody thieving man,” I heard my usually taciturn father say under his breath, huffed with outrage. My father used the word ‘bloody’ only when he pushed to the extreme. As his muffled rage frothed into full-blown anger, he began arguing with the driver in broken Hindi. I think his heavily accented intonations made no sense to the driver but his indignation did. The driver retaliated with some vile words, his tone histrionic and I suspect he talked of the unmentionable parts of mothers and sisters! My father finally deferred to him and paid up, scared maybe that he would brandish his furry fists and head-butt him with swift violence. The driver left with alacrity and without much ceremony.
Memory four: residents, strangers, buffaloes and the spaces between
The sight of boxy homes stuck one to the other in Ramesh Nagar and facing onto blackness, of un-cemented bricks on walls was brutal to us as was our glimpse of uneven brick pavements and open drains. Also coming into view, degree by unexpected degree, by the light of a half-moon, were some other lane truths. We came upon shadows that bloomed in the darkness which at first glance appeared to be large, black, moving apparitions that snorted. Points of light that gathered behind my lids began to flicker. As we dodged these shadows, new chilled fears gripped us and our unmoored minds scurried with frightful conjectures.
These monstrosities turned out to be buffaloes that swatted flies with their tails and shat copiously from under them. On hindsight, our situation that I recall with embarrassing clarity was without doubt comical, if not inelegant and one possibly full of improbable misfortunes, but to us imagining our obituaries at that point and later visioning being stampeded to death after we discovered the truth of these beings was singularly unnerving. “Imagine having to live with buffaloes,” was my mother’s panicked reaction. “I have never heard of such a thing.” This discovery I know almost sank her. And their grunts that floated out on the rush of cold winds were like taunts to her.
As we exerted ourselves in frazzled desperation through the narrow, dimly-lit, street hauling our lives in five bulky travelling aluminum trunks, crammed with memories of my lifetime and strung with brass locks, along with three unwieldly olive-green canvass bedrolls, two tiffin boxes made of stainless steel as we called it and a tall jug for water that I kept dropping, I sensed eyes survey us with uneasiness. Their restless, peering curiosity spoke to us from behind their windows, their whispers echoing through the black drafts of the night.
The unevenness of the brick pavements at first made me aware of every rotation of my hip, every turn of my foot and then suddenly I distinctly remember feeling a sharp sense of disengagement from my surroundings as the space began to stretch endlessly ahead of me and I wondered whether I was actually in my body. My face flushed with heat, the world seemed to drop away along with the cold and I suffered from an unfamiliar combination of physical sensations, thoughts and emotions that made me believe that I was sleepwalking.
Memory five: foibles, missteps and the small humiliations that hurt
The next morning brought a measure of normalcy and our ruddy, square-faced, thick-necked landlord Jaswant Rai Kapoor. He flapped into our home in his wide white pajamas and short kurta, with proprietorial authority, his rugged footwear making sounds like harsh sibilants. Our family was seated on the white marble floor having idlis for breakfast and we were discomfited by his presence as much as by the cold marble which was a new physical material to us. He comprehended none of our reserve or our rigid body language.
In South India, or at least in my home, we ate sitting on the floor and with our fingers and it was understood that non-family members were not to intrude into our dining spaces. Sandals were a strict no-no within our homes and bare-footedness the norm. But it looked like that this custom was unknown in these parts and our landlord’s two elder brothers clattered in, tiny particles of gravel flip-flopping beneath their sandals.
Gulbagh Rai Kapoor and Gulshan Rai Kapoor, his two other brothers, exceedingly fair skinned in our eyes, with cheeks the colour of ripe watermelon and polished jawbones, looked at us on the floor, this way and that, and surveyed our food with unabashed interest. From the rocky heights of their shoulders and without restraint, they asked in Hindi, “Why are you all eating rice balls early morning. Rice weakens the system and we will send you rotis with ghee and sabzi to infuse strength into your infirm Madrasi bodies.”
Between mouthful of idlis and coconut chutney, I wondered what they would have said if they knew idlis were made of fermented rice. Would we be branded as horrible subverts, as carriers of peculiar diseases? Even as our food and eating styles stood scorned in a few sentences and before we could reset our faces after our looks of quick hurt (they did not register that either), plates of rotis, subzi and tea made their way into our home. They were brought in by my landlord’s stout, gap-toothed wife Sharda, heavy in hip and thigh and with a hint of a beard and his daughter Sweety who looked roughly my age and had squeezed features like somebody had pinched them. The face had no hint of sweetness to it. Something, disappointment, maybe, flicked through the muscles of her face.
Meanwhile our landlord galloped with talk, not even pausing for breath-space. In an emphatic tempo, making small, hard sounds, he told us of his reasons for choosing us as his first tenants. He was unsettlingly honest. “Madrasis, I am told, are passive as people, pay their rent on time and can be easily scared into submission as they are outsiders and would not have the gumption to stand up against the might of an angry Punjabi.” And without a pause, but with an added mix of self-possessed practicality and sly wit, he continued in his metallic voice, “Most important for me is that you people read English newspapers and I can earn more money as a newspaper vendor.” He rushed off after soon after this candid admission, his brothers following, asking us to view the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shaka (meeting) from our balcony. “I am diehard RSS adherent. Our group provides awareness of India's glorious past and binds us in a religious communion,” he offered as explanation.
Memory six: the many faults in our reality
Staking out a position just beyond view of others but close enough to see, I peeked out to see what he was talking about. I realised that it was nothing like anything I had seen before. A sea of men in black forage caps, white shirts and khaki shorts vaulted from tame yoga postures to coercive paramilitary techniques using bamboo staves, swords, javelins and daggers and then ended their gambadoes with a robust nationalistic song followed by raucous laughter. It was what the shaka left unsaid that saturated my insides with a sense of menace. For the first time in my life, I felt the vibes of living precariously close to a hostile country, something that never figured in my consciousness earlier as boundaries and nationalism were not very relevant to my life. I felt a nearness to living history, to evil intent and I began to associate the colour of revolution with khaki.
My landlord’s image of an overbearing, angry Punjabi came fully alive in my mind and more so in the evening as my landlord clashed audibly with a full-mouth and rough gestures with his eldest brother Gulbagh Rai Kapoor, a Congress supporter. The Punjabi expletives used freely, none of which were fully comprehensible to us, sounded virulent and my landlord we made out was hugely critical of our then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. As the city was seething with political tension with the declaration of the Emergency in June that year, where everyone’s fundamental rights stood suspended, my landlord’s wild and stormy fury I concluded was about brute political power and the terror unleashed by the state on those who defied its will.
Our school in Hyderabad taught us to respect political leaders and never question the decisions of the government. So like my parents, who had an unstinting, unquestioning admiration for Indira Gandhi, I silently watched the violent exchange of words from above and threw in my support for the Congress in the battle between brothers.
Yet I realised that ours was an unstated conspiracy of silence. I say this, as even at this young age where my political understanding was tenuous, I was vaguely aware that my family and I were making unspoken accommodations and settling for peculiar political and moral equilibriums because many people around us were learning the differing meanings of repression. This I derived from my reading about arrests of political leaders and crackdowns on newspapers though I must admit that most of my teenage attention was drawn to reviews of popular Hindi films, blockbusters like Sholay and Deewar whose heroes were angry young men, like the men around me.
So on my first morning in the city, I figured that whatever one’s political persuasion or whatever one’s profession here violence and anger were part of that package. It also became blindingly obvious to me that my family needed a new brand of hardiness to survive not only the cold but the rough-necked life here.
Memory seven: colors that agreed only in the dark
In the cold light of the days that followed in my first month at this colony, it became clear to me that Ramesh Nagar’s people were from roughly comparable income groups and that their social aspirations and attitudes were not too dissimilar. In my outpourings to Sheela in a letter, I said, “Ours is a colony as earmarked for refugees from Pakistan, the majority who came here after the partition of the Indian subcontinent post 15 August 1947 from Lyallpur. In Delhi parlance, it is called a re-settlement colony, not a prestigious tag to begin life in this city. As I see it, our family are as much immigrants to this city as the residents of Ramesh Nagar are yet somehow we are looked upon with disfavor, as strangers in this land. In a socialist country like ours, we are still unequal. So much for our learning in civics and beliefs at school.”
I had no one else to tell but her.
Looking back, it is clear why we as a family were found wanting. We were markedly the ‘other’, our foreignness too much to overcome. We spoke Tamil which must have sounded guttural to them as their language sounded nasal to us. We wore different clothes, my father’s pristine white veshti was especially intriguing to them. We ate unknown food, raw bananas and tamarind to begin with and we conducted ourselves mildly and perhaps in an overwhelmingly orderly manner because of our middle class Brahmanical background. “There is no ronak or shor sharaba in your home,” our neighbours observed pityingly, our quiet, bland ways of communication a marvel to them.
Newly opened to many scalding emotions, I made a note in my diary that “as a middle class South Indian family our toothpaste is Colgate, our radio is Murphy, our music western and Indian classical, our oil groundnut and our detergent Det. They on the other hand use toothpowder and neem twigs, have transistors to hear Hindi and Urdu news and film music, cook in an unbearably nauseating mustard oil and use a locally made dull, dirty brown laundry soap that they buy by the kilo.”
If my own biases against ‘them’ were made clear so was my teenage pique. In another diary noting, I spluttered with spite. “I am looked down as I am dark, thin, have jet black hair that I part in oily waves and plait tightly and yet considered vain, westernized and upper class as I wear frocks, skirts and pants (called jean pant by them) and read and speak only in English that they consider elitist. I feel different from everyone else and am afraid of being seen as a proxy for my ethnic group. I don’t think I like them that much.”
I continued in a similar, red-hot rancor rant two days after. “The girls who wear only salwar kameez and speak only Punjabi (they call it theth meaning stout Punjabi) stifle their giggles and ridicule me for exposing my legs, thighs and breasts or really my lack of them. They probably see me as an unattractive slow developer with protruding shoulder bones. They are affectionately called Pinky, Sweetie (pronounced Seeti), Rozzy (short for Rosie, I presume) and Honey at home and wonder at the lack of a term of endearment for me. Is it because you are ungainly and unattractive, they ask puzzled. Inside I feel like little hooks pull at my flesh. And when they suggest a mix of chickpeas powder and milk for my dark skin and as an urgent, instant remedy they urge the use of grated potatoes. I smile tightly and quickly and laugh a mysterious laugh to drown feelings of being maligned and as a way to sneer their belief that my physical clumsiness could be settled in this way.”
Did I struggle with my skin colour? Did I think my family would love me better and young men would smile more often at me as the girls implied but did not say? I don’t think so. I was armed with enough science at this stage to laugh indulgently at the ways of these girls. Also, because perhaps even then I was not given to unreasonable hope. Not that I needed it because I rather liked my dark coloring and always considered it an unparalleled advantage.
Memory eight: braving the rain to get to the rainbow
But I often fell into deep despondency for other reasons. I yearned for the warm camphor-soothing melodies of my grandmother, the comfort of my friends, the scaffolding of my former school, the familiar foods, smells and sounds of my old world. I played back all my old memories in mind every day in the hope the terrible emptiness in the spaces around my heart would be filled. And I dreamt every night of waking up to my old life. When I did not a mix of anger, loss, confusion and despair filled me and I curled into a ball on days and wept till I could weep no more.
Having paced the rhythms of daily life by the second month, I built a bridge between my experience and intuition to figure that while my neighbours were not so accepting of us, their own common losses of home and fortunes and the injustices they suffered in their new surroundings bound them into an immeasurably strong kinship, an overwrought one even with extreme evocation to emotion. I saw how their spirited bonds, their outsized clamor, tided them over poor housing, where most of them were trying to build houses without really knowing how, over endemic power outages, over poor civic amenities where children felt free to defecate in the open nallas and over daily disorders that boiled into open confrontations.
In particular, the sanja chullah, the warm, collective, evening meal over a longitudinal coal-and-wood-heated clay tandoor, bridged their estrangements into benign fraternities with incredible ease. As the leavened dough rose within the warm embers of the tandoor, men packed in together, donning blankets and scarves and sweaters. The Kapoor brothers fizzled like sparklers as did the Sethi and Roshan brothers, all of whom had fought hot-bloodedly just a few days ago and threatened to bludgeon each other while their wives and children watched helplessly.
As women served the men and children in shiny copper plates first in a clearly established social hierarchy and then gathered in a circle to eat their meal amidst the clatter of their bronze plates, gossip and laughter, the sense of community came alive. It was this spectacle of their evening togetherness, their sturdy bonds warming up the chill of the night, one night after another, which dissolved my apprehensions about their coarseness, their otherness, their combatant-ness.
I decided to take a leap across the social chasm that separated us to be part of their responsive world and also perhaps address my longing to belong, one that came with another conflicting combination of wanting to be absorbed again by my old world. It was a muddied combination of wanting to have and yet not have that was confusing. Yet they reacted with spontaneity to my desire to taste the scents and textures of their food and perhaps to the charm of my artlessness. My initiation into their warm sense of community and my first feeling of safety at their centre came with my first taste of tandoori roti. They convinced me that fat in the body indicates progress and wealth. So I tucked in one more roti to keep them happy.
Swallowed by their warmth, in the following evenings I learnt how to relish the unaccustomed flavours of cottage cheese, radish, cauliflower, red beans, chickpeas and peas, all cooked in a gravy of onion, tomato, and ginger-garlic paste. These were vegetables dismissed by my community as English vegetables unsuitable for the Indian palate. They I know would have been appalled by this unholy gravy, purists as they were of food, believing that vegetables needed to be cooked in isolation to bring out their flavours. Of cottage cheese they often unkindly joked that paneer was a North Indian’s idea of a vegetable. I soon learnt to ignore the buffaloes as unprepossessing specimens, slurp their creamy milk and laugh with others over our white whiskers. I learnt to savour the saccharine sweetness and the aroma of the herbal roohafza drink and to tolerate the rather vulgar sight of chicken parts splayed on skewers with a glistening orange basting and even withstand the smell of mustard oil.
Being socially awkward and tightly bound to their traditional ways of eating within private spaces, my parents maneuvered around these outdoor eating escapades keeping a civil distance from them and as vegetarians the sight of dismembered chicken and goat parts agitated them. “We won’t come as we are wary of the men and women here. They say one thing and often do the other as a matter of habit. We don’t want to break bread with people who don’t see their dissembling as lapses but as creative additions to their lives. It is as if plain dealing, our small disciplines are boring and hugely dissatisfying to their minds,” my father explained to me with rare candour. “While I like their warm-heartedness, I cannot get over our landlord infinite artfulness in understating the rent received from us in receipts and his con-artistry to make making us pay for his household’s use of water and the mechanical malfunctions of our common water pump,” my mother said with sighed impatience.
Memory nine: all that is, is all that matters
But, I, on the contrary, took on the challenge to connect before the delicate human moments passed. I elbowed my way into the community able as I was to get my head around their incongruities, the incompatibility of these facets in my neighbours. My being a teenager, I guess, helped me handle this kind of ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency and things out of play. I saw it kindly and understood it to be their coping mechanism and hence their enduring core and began going down every afternoon. So I dared to trade beyond my experience to linger in the sunshine with women who lay on low cots threaded with jute called manjis, their limbs so intertwined that I could not tell which limb belonged to which woman. Through their lips of clotted-red and ultra-magenta, “uncommonly bright lipsticks”, in my mother’s words, they commanded me to consider them as family and address them as maasis. Their unnaturally loud voices and their adult female strength made me obey.
I munched on an odd combination of peanuts and oranges with curvaceous Manju maasi in the weak winter sun. I learnt to knit from the sag-chinned, silver-haired Puja massi, how to gather dough into a pliable and accepting consistency for rotis from Vimala maasi and from Roshan maasi I learnt to speak Hindi with the brusque efficiency of a Delhi-ite, earlier bent and reshaped to fit the needs of Hyderabad. I arced toward the voice of Roshan maasi and enunciated the words as she did while ignoring the undulating brown tartar waves on her teeth. I retain the tone of orality she taught me till date. The finesse of the Hindi from Uttar Pradesh was a superimposition on this. And, my landlady Sharada taught me how to layer myself cleverly to fight the cold, apply henna on my hair to soften it and to moisturise my body to a soothing creaminess with the top layer of milk but I drew the line when it came to using mustard oil no matter how she coaxed.
I even learned to holler for neighbors who had relatives call them on the one landline phone that existed in the locality and belonged to Mr Khattar, laugh gregariously at children who called their mothers mammals as they fed their young and listen in to gossip about the buxom, fourteen-year-old Gudiya whose pregnancy ended her reckless escapades into intimacy with a photographer who had a studio in the colony. I was fully aware these things would have considered complete crudities in my old upper middle class circles.
While I socialized with the ladies, girls of my age only took mildly to me. They never stepped beyond the line of acquaintanceship. I saw them struggle with their bodies that got away from them, against cultural restrictions, their inchoate anger with peer pressure at school and academic performance and forgave them for being un-bothered with my adjustment issues, my sense of un-tetheredness. I later made friends at school so I left these girls to their striving girlhoods, their modest educational ambitions, their awkward clichés of me in their mind as the strange Madrasi girl who was the furthest from fair and their brittle envy of my erudite asperity, of my speaking English so well.
Memory ten: quid pro quo
As quid pro quo to my camaraderie with the women, our modest drawing room became the epicenter for the colony’s avid television watchers. As the only family that owned a TV set, we had to accommodate watchers of different shows be it the half-an-hour of film songs called Chitrahaar, full length films on Sunday evening or the news. This much to consternation of my parents who were strict about my study hours. They had to put on a face of hospitality though they hated the crowding of their private spaces, the heat of collective breaths, the smell of bodies and the overhang of the smell of mustard oil. We even had viewers who seemed content to watch the government-sponsored Doordarshan montage where a disc rotated on screen endlessly to the accompaniment of the signature tune.
Between my mother and me, we taught the colony women how to make spicy sambhar, braid their hair in a way to lock wayward strands, read English magazines and some nature cures for their children’s bad stomachs and worms. We were now no longer strange or in disfavor. Our neighbors began to invite us to their raucous weddings to show us how we were missing out on life’s luxuries, the extravaganzas of dancing, light displays, groom-on-horse fun and dowry displays. All we did was gawp as our weddings were sedate affairs where serious rituals overrode any kind of jollity.
Yet it was not as if their comments stopped. They could not help but wonder at the sparseness of our décor, “our lack of the typical settings” as they called it. “How come you don’t match sofa sets, crockery, curtains and show pieces like us in your drawing room?, “Why don’t you arrange copper glasses in a pyramid like we do in our kitchen?”, “Why is your kitchen in a state of clutter always?” and “Why do you serve us tea in steel tumblers minus biscuits or savoury namkeens?” they asked us constantly and with extreme perplexity while giving each other smiles of solidarity. We could not seem to find the words to tell them that our lifestyles were dictated by practically rather than by exhibition or flamboyance or make them understand that it was only our newly developed feelings of immunity that saved us from complete mortification of their words.
Memory eleven: on cartography and maps of the mind
After my induction into our locality’s bonhomie, I began closely studying its topography. I discovered that our locality was designed in concentric circles and that even as we were settling in our colony, a new life getting invented around us. Each block of the colony had a park in the middle with paved outer perimeters surrounded by homes that were stuck to one another in an interdependent sort of way. The outer circle of the colony had dispensaries, libraries, stationery shops, restaurants, grocery shops, flour mills, a post-office, photo studios and telephone booths.
My walk to our affluent, neighbouring colony Kirti Nagar, a hub for furniture makers and their warehouses, showed that it had a separate ambience and its physical closeness to us in no way meant familiarity or closeness to us. Their social and emotional universe with semi-detached homes was different from ours. Oh, my naiveté! Before that I really thought maps had unnatural lines separating one area from another!
Yet I found that it was only in our locality that a man who sold handmade violins announced his presence by playing tunes of songs. The sarangi wala, as he was called, had a hoard of unruly children follow him whooping with delight. They listened with mesmerized wonder at the sonorous sounds the bulb fashioned out of a baked earthenware cup made. I saw their eyes brim with delight as the taut strings over the bamboo stick shivered at his touch.
It was only in our locality that a weathered, bald man sold large white and crisp rice papads in a huge wicker basket sprinkled with mango powder. He called out to us with his tuneful song ‘karare papad lo, karare papad, lo papad, karare papad’, his adenoidal voice timbre wobbling from low to high.
And it was only in our locality that I heard the twang of the heavy stringed dhunna of the cotton beater. He used his instrument to beat, re-fluff and stuff back cotton into the quilts. Within the first month of my stay I understood the luxuries of the razai, which I had never used before in my life. To me this was an inordinately flexible over-the-body-mattress that was far more comforting and thick than the mattress that I slept on. And I discovered it was only within our locality that people built a small, secret, low-roofed mezzanine room called miani to store these quilts.
So my mind was made up. I liked my locality better than Kirti Nagar.
Memory twelve: squaring the circle
Schools. No school in New Delhi would have me in class nine. They had all hastened to their last semester in the month of December and the students were to be tested in three months. Class nine exams were crucial, a build up to class ten, the do or die situation for all Indian students. So these exams were meant to be deliberately punishing so as the sit the fear deep into living fabric of students. What made my situation worse was the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education of which I was a student in the south were being phased out in New Delhi.
After many tests and many denials, the only school who was willing to take me in was the Saint Thomas School. The kindly principal seemed to take pity on the plight of our family and my obvious distress. There was a rider, of course. I was to take the exam in three months with the other students whether I was prepared or not. If the results showed up my unpreparedness I was to remain in class nine. An ignominy I think I would have borne poorly.
Left with little choice, I learned to wake up at five am and get to the bus stop by six am even as the mists, white shadows with teeth, swirled dangerously. I struggled with the newness of the surroundings, the students differing ways, the syllabus, the uniform and the wearing sweaters and blazers to school. The only thing I was pleased about was my cleverness as I sidestepped Hindi as a subject and chose Sanskrit instead.
My new teachers, friends and my parents helped the funneling of new knowledge and I managed to get past the exam finish line without disgrace. I somehow managed to square the circle.
Memory thirteen: I have the markings of joy
As I began to attend school, I fell into the rhythms of the school season as much I did of the seasons and festivals of the city. The first to come in January was Lohri, the Punjabi festival of harvest where sweetmeats made of white sesame and jaggey called rewri, popcorn and groundnuts got thrown into the bonfire only to be plucked out and eaten hot with relish.
Then came Basant Panchami, the preliminary arrival of spring, celebrated by women in our colony by wearing yellow saris. The women, normally in their traditional salwar kameez, covered their heads with a pallav of the sari but their belly buttons were on show. They served us
halwa made of saffron against a backdrop of provocative Hindi film songs suggestive of a variety of physical intimacies.
Right in front of our house was a large gulmohur tree that remained bald in winter but with the first signs of spring, it sprouted small, pale green leaves which grew in number till the whole tree acquired a happy green foliage. Then the buds showed up and burst into red flowers. I loved walking on the rich red carpet of petals.
It was around this time that the winter frost began to thaw faster than I could imagine. By the festival of Holi, it got reasonably warm and as we were a beat away from summer we were allowed to throw coloured water and balloons on one another in mad pleasure to celebrate the victory of the moral over the immoral. At this time, another fiery red, bulbous, flower the silk cotton or semul came to litter the street.
In April with the ripening of their winter crop came the New Year Baisaki, where days turned from dark to bright in a seemingly single sweep. The grey sky came to be shot with sharp sun streaks, the days came to be full of diamond-dust with the subtlety of the winter sun was gone completely. And the leaves of the gulmohur first grew dark and then yellow and fell in flakes as the wind whipped them
If winter was torturous, the summer months bruised by being long and uninhabitable. It was like our world was razed and remade with new kind of horrors in the offing. If I did not know extreme cold before I also had never experienced the furnace-heat that was to befall. Trees wilted and yearned for shade, the earth dried and cracked open around us and winds whipped the loose sand which whirled manically in swirling brown blurs for hours only to settle in our homes, our bodies and mostly on our eyelashes. And then there was just heat and more stifling dry heat as the sun glared down upon us day after day.
In this season, our landlady took to hand washing clothes with gusto, morning to night, in monstrously huge tubs using copious amount of a blue powder dissolved in water to whiten clothes and bedsheets. Our lane’s long standing tryst with open sewers meant we were subject to gut-wrenching smells as the result of her love for laundry.
As the temperature touched 45 degrees centigrade, our table and ceiling fans threw more hot air on us. Only the affluent owned desert coolers that functioned on a strange science of water, straw and a mechanical motor and made a dramatic change to the heat. We turned the banyan and peepal trees into shrines as we sought their shade during power outages. To cool our bodies down, we bought the black berried phalsa fruit from vendors who sang ‘kale, kale, phalsey, tande, mithe phalsey’ with an odd sort of pathos, drank gallons of aam panna made from roasted raw mango, sugar and a variety of spices and waited for the water supply to be switched on in the evenings to have long, cold showers. At nights I learned what it was to sleep on our terrace on white sheets under twinkling stars and the moon that turned from crescent to full.
Memory fourteen: Beauty is the flavor of rain and winter
Nothing snuffed the building blocks of routine more surely for me than the arrival of monsoons that flooded our entire lane in a breathtaking swampiness and gave me unplanned school holidays. I discovered the liquid pleasure of unhurriedly soaking myself in the first rainfall as I did the challenges of getting to school past our roadside cascades and muddy ponds with my white shirt dry so that my teen modesty remained intact. Eating from roadside vendors in this season was a no-no but I could never resist the temptation to slyly eat chaat, dawdling on my way back from school at his stall, which often ended in disastrous results.
The resurgence of the soil became evident in the following months as a variety of vegetables and fruits emerged in our market. At Dussehra in September, I was in thrall of huge effigies of Ravana, Meghnath, and Kumbhkaran, devils of the Indian epic Ramayana, all gaily decorated in colored paper and burnt in our park. It was the time for kheel (puffed paddy) and batashe (sugar drop candy), clay toys, and animal shapes moulded out of sugar. A local troupe performed shows of the epic Ramayana in the neighborhood and the homes hung out paper lanterns, called kandil, which had papers of different colours pasted on the sides and a lighted lamp which threw out a kaleidoscope of colours. I did not think of myself as too old to buy toys made of cardboard, colored paper and bamboo sticks as well as models of ancient weapons, such as bow and arrows, swords. I was enthralled by the bulbous stick meant to crack someone's skull and shamelessly played mock battles with small boys and girls.
In September came Karva Chauth where women fasted the whole day in their finery for their husbands. It held little lure for me as no special food was served and because I did not have a husband. I remember my mother was scolded for not being part of this but she bore the criticism with her usual stoicism.
Then came Diwali at the end of October, the festival of lights announcing the setting in of winter, which meant long, dark nights and getting up to go to school in the bitter cold mornings. We burst crackers through the night uncaring of the environment and for me it was a departure from celebrating the festival in the morning.
With Christmas, my life came a full circle after a whole year in Ramesh Nagar.
Memory fifteen: I am this, I am that and I know how to make bows out of knots
While I held on strongly to my memories of Hyderabad, my life in Ramesh Nagar plotted multi-dimensionally along the axes of geography, class, language, food and ethnicity had grown on me and spread its roots under my skin. There was a new ease to my life here. It became my passageway to understanding the greater city, the adventures it held, as much it allowed me to understand myself.
In that year, I learned that we really never leave things behind. That home was not where I lived but what lived inside of me, in the place that really counts. And that the only way I could be at peace was to accept that I belong equally to both places. While I could not let go of my desire of Hyderabad and all its possibilities and impossibilities, I now belonged to Delhi. So in a private reconciliation as I held both cities in my heart. I realised that at fourteen I was able to do what my grandmother wanted. Carry the good weather within. The satin sunshine of the heart. I also realised she was not talking of the weather.
So in the following four years in Ramesh Nagar, I learnt to balance my taste for English classics, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Shakespeare and my inclination towards western music and singers like Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Harry Belafonte and the Beatles with the life that was grounded in my everyday brick-lined realities of Ramesh Nagar. It was not easy to find myself amidst this balance and most often than not my lifestyle and my tastes collided. I found my life thrown off the rails without warning quite like our television set whose telecast would be abruptly suspended with a message announcing, ‘Rukawat ke liye khed hai' (‘Sorry for the interruption'). At such times, life’s certainties did not seem that certain. So while I learned to give in to fate’s meaning and its constant change, I also learnt to wrest my own meaning by taking chances with fate.
On hindsight at fifty five years of age, I see my five-year stay in Ramesh Nagar as a teenager as a sort of catalogue of my journey of conflicting emotions. Of the overlap of my unstable highs and terrible lows. Of my shedding old sensory impressions and faiths and acquiring new ones. Of my recognising of people’s similarities and differences. I also see it as a phase of my gaining abilities to make unlikely connections. Of my accepting of what life had to give me. And, of my taking risks and building on ideas that took advantage of the unexpected.
Over and above all these learnings, I think my life here helped me absorb new ways to live. Neighbours, strangers, the papad wallah, the chaat waala pulled, pushed and hand-held me into a familiarity with the city. Their small, intimate actions helped me get inured to the dangers of a new comer to the city and the peculiarities of the life here. They helped claim my life, my joys and a chance to return to happiness.
And my world changed yet again.
Today as I sit back, forty years hence in my city, my home, of New Delhi, I see the focus on identity is part of global anxiety. I know now that it is especially dangerous in a country like India where this concept is tenuous as a construct. This at it is still (as it was in the year 1947 when it became independent) a land frothing with so many identities, crisscrossed along the lines of caste, gender, class, religion, language and ethnicity.
The only way to make India work is to accept that everyone belongs equally to India.
EUSTACE WAKES IN THE DARK
What could this mean? It could mean one thing only: this was not his room. And if this was not his room it was somewhere he had been taken against his will. Someone in the night had crept into his room and seized him as he slept, taking him far away to this dark cellar with only a small, high window from which a little moonlight shone as he looked about him.
‘Help! Save me! I am being held against my will!’ Eustace cried. The walls mockingly echoed his pitiful anguish, and he knew there was no hope of immediate rescue. He might never see his home again. He might never sleep in his bed. He might never see Teddy again. The thought was too much. Eustace felt that the walls were creeping closer and that he was about to be crushed. Every plea for mercy resounded in the dark as an echo resembling a pitiless laugh. In all his twenty-seven years and two months Eustace had never known such misery. His life so far had not prepared him for this.
Nor what was to come next when the door in the corner opened and a beautiful woman with a lantern came in. ‘So there you are, my pretty fool,’ she said on seeing Eustace crouching in the corner fearfully. ‘I have you at last within my power.’
‘Who are you? Where am I? Why am I here?’ Eustace asked. ‘If, that is, you don’t mind my asking.’
‘Ask all you want,’ the beautiful woman said, tossing her long mane of golden hair contemptuously. ‘Ask all you want, but there’ll be no answers.’ And with that came a cruel laugh which the acoustics amplified until it seemed there was a chorus of wicked creatures entertaining themselves at poor Eustace’s expense.
‘I demand to be released at once. At once, you hear. Or, or, or I shall be very cross with you,’ Eustace said, somehow in his desperation summoning the courage to confront his cold-eyed captor. ‘You’ll never get away with this, you know. There’ll be people searching for me.’
‘They’ll never find you here,’ the woman said. ‘I can assure you of that. Once you are within my power there is no escape.’
Then the door closed and it was dark again but for the moonlight glimpsed through the small, high window. Eustace felt utterly alone because he was utterly alone. Or so he thought. In the dark no-one is ever alone for long. Think of all the strange beings hovering outside, hoping to get in. A door creaks. A curtain moves. And Eustace is frightened. Night after night. But this was no ordinary night.
‘If you’re lucky you’ll get a candle,’ said a voice. Eustace looked round to see a strange emerge from the darkness. ‘How do you do,’ said the creature who was large and reptilian with huge claws and wings. Eustace was alarmed to see that he was encountering a dragon. ‘My name is Augustus,’ said the dragon. ‘Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s afraid of me when they get to know me. I try to be fierce, but it just doesn’t work. I suppose it’s all to do with nature. If you’re born to be fierce, well, that’s what you what you are. And I’m not.’
‘How did you get in here?’ Eustace, not wholly assured that he was safe in the presence of a dragon.
‘Oh, the usual method,’ Augustus replied. ‘I simply made my way here. It’s all make-believe, you know, in Dreamland.’
‘Is that where I am?’
‘Of course. Didn’t they tell you? They really ought to have told you. I’ll have a word with them. People really need to know where they are. It isn’t fair otherwise, in my opinion. I’ve got quite strong views on that.’
‘So I’m not really here,’ Eustace replied. ‘Not if I’m in Dreamland.’
‘Of course you’re here. I can see you. I can hear you. So I may safely conclude that you are in fact here. I mean, it’s obvious. If you’re here you’re here. And if you’re not you’re not. And you are so you are.’
‘I see,’ Eustace replied, confused and downcast.
‘But it isn’t so bad. The first thousand years are the worst,’ Augustus explained. ‘After that it seems to get better somehow. Not sure why.’
‘A thousand years!’ Eustace cried in alarm. ‘A thousand years. I shan’t live so long, shall I?’
‘Oh, in Dreamland nobody ever dies unless they are very, very wicked. Every million years or so someone comes along who’s very wicked, just to provide a little variety in the routine, you know. We’re due another one in about fifty thousand years. It’s a wicked uncle this time. We had a run of wicked stepmothers, but there were complaints from the Equality and Diversity Department. Quite right, too, in my opinion.’
‘But,’ said Eustace, ‘what about the women who came in here? She looked cruel as well as beautiful.’
‘Don’t worry about Doris. She’s all heart really. It’s just her way. Once you get to know her she’ll be fine.’
‘So,’ Eustace asked, trying not to sound too dejected, ‘she’s not an evil seductress of innocent young men like me?’
‘Oh, goodness me, no. She sings in the chapel choir. Rather a fine contralto. I’m afraid my singing isn’t quite up to it. The problem is that when I hit a high note I tend to breathe out fire. I can’t help it. So embarrassing - and dangerous, of course. I’ve been to the doctor’s but they say they can do nothing about it.’
A long pause while Eustace took in all that that his new friend had told him. Then a thought occurred to him. With a hint of irritation Eustace said, ‘If Doris isn’t cruel, then why am I being kept in the dark?’
‘Because it’s night, of course,’ Augustus explained. ‘It’s Dreamland, remember. That’s why you’ll need a candle until daylight.’
‘And when’s that?’
‘Let me see,’ Augustus frowned while he puzzled over the necessary calculations. ‘Only another few thousand years. Not too long.’
‘It’s too long! I want this dream to end. I want to wake up with my beloved Teddy by my side in my own bed in my own room,’ Eustace protested, expecting to hear a response from the friendly dragon. But there was silence. He could neither see nor hear Augustus now. The dragon had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared in the way of dragons in Dreamland.
For a long time [Eustace was not sure how many centuries had passed] there seemed no hope. The door of the dungeon was locked. No-one came to his rescue. He was all alone. And, despite what Augustus had assured him, he was not entirely certain that Doris was quite the well-meaning person Augustus said she was beneath the veneer of spite and malice.
Sometimes Eustace could hear footsteps outside the dungeon door. There were whispers and giggles. Then there was more silence in the dark of this long night. They hadn’t even given him a candle. If only the friendly dragon would come back. He might be able to advise Eustace further, or, failing that, provide him with some company and conversation. It seemed that there was nothing to do in Dreamland but wait until morning.
The years passed as Eustace waited in the darkness. He past the time by playing I Spy. The options were limited, and he had to guess the answer to his own question, but it was fun. Actually it wasn’t. It was awful. Eustace, however, had been taught never to make a fuss, and always to remember there was someone worse off than him. Yes, there were poor souls languishing in dungeons at this very moment, whereas he….
The situation was hopeless. Was this how the rest of his life was going to be? And the rest of his life in Dreamland was going to last for ever. That’s quite a long time. Eustace tried to calculate how long ever was. After a million billion trillion zillion years he gave up counting. It was going rather a long time.
And so that’s how it might have been, forever waiting for Doris to open the door. But in a moment of inspiration Eustace remembered the words of Augustus, his dragon friend. What was it Augustus had said: ‘It’s all make-believe, you know, in Dreamland.’ Eustace recalled the exact words. He almost could hear the dragon’s voice out loud. The more Eustace thought about it, the more he was sure he could hear Augustus speaking to him.
And the more he listened, the more he understood. It was all make-believe in Dreamland. That was the important thing to know. If Eustace tried very, very hard he could make-believe something. Of course it would be better if he put his thinking cap on, but a pretend cap would do. Now, surely it was possible to make-believe this was all a dream from which he could awake and be safe at home again just before the alarm rang in the morning? Yes, he was certain that was possible if he closed his eyes, keeping them tightly shut while he imagined himself back home.
And when he opened his eyes what do you think he saw? There in the darkness was Doris and the dragon. ‘So, my pretty fool, you thought you could escape me,’ Doris said, her lips curving into a cold, cruel smile as her eyes penetrated Eustace as if to pierce his heart.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ Augustus the dragon added. ‘I did the best I could.’
‘You know what I’m going to do now?’ Doris asked. ‘I’m going to eat you up. That will teach you a lesson.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Eustace said, questioning the logic of her actions with a maturity worthy of his twenty-seven years.
Suddenly there was a rumble like thunder in the distance. Doris, no longer proud and haughty, looked aghast. There was panic in her eyes. ‘No!’ she screamed. ‘He doesn’t believe me!’
The rumble of thunder grew louder, the dungeon floor and walls began to shake. And Doris quivered until she spun so fast she turned into a cloud of vapour that soon trailed away into the air.
There was daylight from the window, and Eustace saw that there was some of the furniture and toys from his room. ‘I don’t understand,’ Eustace said ‘Where am I? What has happened?’
‘Well,’ Augustus the dragon explained, ‘you said you didn’t believe. If you don’t believe it destroys the make-believe, you see.’
‘But you’re here, Augustus.’
‘Ah yes. That’s because you believe in me. Not many people do. So I expect we’ll see each other from time to time, old chap,’ Augustus said as he opened a cupboard door and stepped inside. When Eustace dared open the door there was nobody there. One day it would open again.
‘Well, Teddy,’ Eustace said, ‘that was quite an adventure. But I’ve made a new friend and the story has a happy ending.’
As Eustace looked into the sky of the early morning he saw clouds drifting by. One of them, darker than the rest, twirled into a curious shape that seemed to resemble a face. It was only for a moment, and then it was gone as the sun shone again. It was nearly time for the alarm to ring and for Eustace to go down the mine to begin another day’s search for gold.
WACKOdemics!
From: “Wagner, Carl” <carwag85@vols.utk.edu>
Date: Sunday, December 8, 2019 at 4:16 pm
To: “Singer, Neil” <neil.singer@utk.edu>
Subject: Thank you for being a friend.
Dr. Singer,
Thank you for buying me lunch the other day. I think I have some idea of why you wanted to have lunch with me, and I want to assure you that I am fine, that I’m not going to show up at the university with an AR-15, or an Uzi, or a flamethrower.
In fact, I am in better spirits now – now that I am no longer in contact with certain people in the English department. I even deleted the “English Majors at the University of Tennessee” Facebook group, so I couldn’t troll the grad students and lecturers if I wanted to.
Not that I consider what I did trolling. I mean, I was just trying to make a good-faith argument about the gender pay gap, because I think it's important my fellow lecturers and I see everything, opposing views and so forth, since a lot of my fellow lecturers and I, as well as the grad students, do bring politics into the classroom, something we must do, really, if we’re going to teach Hermagoras’s stasis theory to our first-year composition students.
Anyway, the point is I’m fine, Dr. Singer. 😊 I’ve just been going through an anger phase, and yes when my Facebook post about the gender pay gap received its barrage of attacks from the grad students and part-time lecturers a few weeks ago, I went ballistic, calling one part-time lecturer, Jamie Teschendorf, a cunt. It was impulsive, and I regret it. You can rest assured that I will not kick the beehive again, that I will not verbally abuse the grad students and part-time lecturers anymore, Dr. Singer. I swear.
There is just one thing I’d like to mention, though, if I may: Jamie Teschendorf isn’t being totally aboveboard about the whole thing. She isn’t innocent in all of this! A few weeks ago, when she ran into your arms, saying, “Carl Wagner made a post about the pay gap on the ‘English Majors at the University of Tennessee’ Facebook group and then he called me a cunt to boot,” she was not being totally forthcoming, I will have you know. You don’t know the whole story, Dr. Singer. At least I don’t think you do. Jamie Teschensdorf and I used to date. We met a year ago, in the fall of 2018, and bonded over Bret Easton Ellis novels, which so many of the English majors – Shakespearians, Spenserians – consider pulp fiction, not “real fiction” – not Tommy Orange, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the almighty Toni Morrison. In Knoxville, Jamie and I strolled through World’s Fair Park, admiring the Rachmaninoff statue. We went to the top of the Sun Sphere. We went dancing. But the relationship went South one snowy night when Jamie and I were downtown bar hopping. We stopped at The Market for a pack of cigarettes, and we were waiting in line when we noticed the homeless man in front of us had a Swastika on the back of his neck. “That’s Knoxville for ya,” Jamie whispered, angrily, into my ear. The Swastikaed man completed his transaction – he, too, was buying cigarettes – and made for the exit, but as he was leaving, he dropped his mitten to the floor, and without thinking I dashed after him, scooping up the mitten and calling, “Sir! You dropped your mitten, Sir! You dropped your mitten, Sir!”
I have not seen Jamie since.
Jamie can call me a poor historian all she wants, but I’m telling you that’s what happened, that she abandoned me because I’d assisted a homeless man.
(In all fairness, I think Jamie might be Jewish. The dalliance was short-lived, and believe it or not, we never broached the subject of religion, but I’ve heard rumblings that Jamie is a Jew.)
Finding Jamie was a relief, Dr. Singer. I couldn’t believe my luck! I couldn’t believe a beautiful woman like Jamie would go with me! Did Jamie have a brain injury? Was she experiencing brain trauma? Between you and me, I hadn’t had a woman since the Obama Administration, and it was nice not being lonely for a change, and I’d worried I was going to spend the rest of my life alone (at this point, it is pretty much a certainty that I’ll spend my life alone), and some nights, Jamie would stay over, and she would sleep in my bed (her body so warm, a radiator), wearing nothing but her CPAP machine (a snorkeler, a marine archaeologist), but then everything ended the night I helped that homeless man, and it was very cold, and when I called Jamie a cunt on Facebook a few weeks ago, I was very emotional, because my father committed suicide a couple months after Jamie and I “parted ways,” and I could have used a friend in that time (undoubtedly the darkest period of my life, a period from which I’m not sure I’ve emerged), and anyway what did I do to her that was so horrible?
I understand you ordered me to stay off Facebook not because I made an argument about the gender pay gap but because I called Jamie a cunt, but I maintain there is a kind of intolerance in Academe, an intolerance for more conservative talking points. Once, at the Oliver Hotel, friends and I were having cocktails, and we were discussing Barbeque Becky. Do you remember Barbeque Becky? She made headlines in April of 2018 when she called the police on two black guys because they were illegally having a barbecue in a park in Oakland, California? At the Oliver, I had the nerve to say there was no evidence to suggest Becky was a racist. She may have been persnickety, but racist??? The “victims” (if we’re willing to call them that) said Becky had used the word nigger, but if you watch the YouTube video of the fight that ensued in the park, you’ll notice the “victims” (the men trying to have the barbeque) don’t say anything on the video about Becky having used the n-word, and wouldn’t the “victims” have been dying to tell the world that this white woman had just called them the n-word? Like, wouldn’t that information have found its way onto the YouTube video? Like, during the kerfuffle that was being recorded, wouldn’t someone have said, “This lady just called us the n-word!” Anyway, if there’s no evidence to substantiate the claim that Barbeque Becky is a racist (and there isn’t, Dr. Singer), why are we ruining this woman’s life, calling her “a racist” and “a piece of shit” and “subhuman” and all the rest of it? That was my stance at the Oliver. Of course, my interlocutors did not agree. They assured me Becky was racist, that if the black men insisted she called them a nigger, then she must have. Furthermore, they insisted I was a racist for defending Barbecue Becky. Can you believe that, Dr. Singer? I was a racist simply because I’d had the effrontery to suggest Barbecue Becky might not be a racist! I was a racist because I wanted to enforce a kind of presumption of innocence!
It was nice talking with you over lunch, Dr. Singer. I found our conversation medicinal. I must say, however, I was a little hurt when you told me you didn’t remember who I was at first. Um, my name is Carl Wagner??? I was a graduate student here at the University of Tennessee between 2016 and 2018? I was in the MFA program? I took classes here and taught freshman composition concurrently? I know, I know, there are many of us, lots of grad students and part-time lecturers here in the English Department, BUT YOU EVEN OBSERVED ONE OF MY CLASSES IN 2017 AND EVALUATED MY PERFORMANCE AND SAID I DID A FANTASTIC JOB!!! And then, after I graduated, I took a job here as a part-time lecturer because I can’t find a full-time teaching position. RING ANY BELLS, DR. SINGER??? 😊 I enjoyed talking with you over lunch, Dr. Singer. I find I can really talk to you. (You won’t call me a racist if I say I hate Jordan Peele. You won’t call me an anti-Semite because I read Mein Kampf.) I can’t talk with anyone my age, Dr. Singer. They are all so quick to call me a racist. Dr. Singer, what does one do when they’re at odds with their generation the way I am? When they’re a total anachronism? A time traveler? Do they simply adapt? Join or die? I want to have community (i.e. friends, a girlfriend), but I have sat in many a Knoxville bar, listening to my peers’ views, and I can’t bite my tongue.
Like, one night, at The French Market, I was listening to Hollingham Woerner talk about his Fulbright scholarship. Before coming to the University of Tennessee, Hollingham (an alumnus of Brown, a macrobiotic vegan) had lived in Mexico for several months on a Fulbright scholarship. He was supposed to continue on in Mexico but cut his trip short because he felt unsafe in Mexico, and at The French Market, a tad sauced, he said he was worried he was a racist for going home early; and, as a matter of fact, Jorge Martin – another Brown asshole – suggested Hollingham was racist.
“Like…I dunno…I just think maybe you need sensitivity training,” said Jorge.
I could not bite my tongue, Dr. Singer.
“Gee,” I said, looking at Jorge, from across the table. “‘Sensitivity training.’ Don’t you think that sounds a bit like ‘reeducation camp’? Like Maoist China?”
HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY, DR. SINGER??? HOLLINGHAM IS A RACIST BECAUSE HE FELT UNSAFE IN MEXICO??? BECAUSE HE WANTED TO GO HOME EARLY???
Hollingham hurled invectives at me on Facebook. You’d think Hollingham and I would be friends – he, too, was unfairly attacked, wasn’t he? At the French Market?
Hollingham and I should have started a group – Society for Men Embattled by Leftists (SMEL) – but, alas, when I made my argument about the gender pay gap on Facebook a few weeks ago, Hollingham attacked me, calling me a misogynist. He was among the mob that wanted my head on a pike all because I’d dared to poke holes in the gender pay gap argument and call Jamie a cunt to boot. He said I was “unwell” and I needed help.
Dr. Singer, I understand why you told me to stay off Facebook, but don’t you agree the Academy should be a Free Marketplace for Ideas? An Ideas Fair? A place where we share information, because we’re teachers, and every day we speak to impressionable young people, first-years, so it’s important we be informed, because, as kooky as it might sound, we can change the direction of the country? Like, if we inform students, we can change the way they vote? Like, we can help them vote responsibly? So we have an obligation to be informed ourselves? Because, to some extent, we’re “public-opinion sculptors”? Not unlike journalists? While I understand “The English Majors at the University of Tennessee” Facebook group is supposed to be a place where grad students can ask each other benign little questions about their upcoming comprehensive exams, I argue it ought to be a place where people can ask malignant questions, too (questions about the gender pay gap, for instance), and what does the word malignant even mean in this context? I’ll tell you what it means: A malignant question may hurt people’s feelings. A malignant question will challenge people. A malignant question may be violent, slaughtering sacred cows, demolishing ancient buildings, erecting new ones in their stead… For example, maybe all this atheism isn’t working for us, Dr. Singer. Did you know twenty-two percent of millennials say they’re lonely? And not just lonely, but…like…so goddamn lonely they can’t even cope with their loneliness. Maybe religion, real or not, is good for people. Like, maybe the messages are important. Not the homophobic stuff, but the aphorisms, the New Testament, Jesus Christ, King of Kings. Like, the idea that Christ was kind of like a samurai sword, folded one-thousand times, rid of impurities, purified, pure, perfect. Be good to people! Turn the other cheek! Judge not lest ye be judged! These are good things, Dr. Singer. Good messages. Not to be dispensed with. (Is “There but for the grace of God go I” from the bible, Dr. Singer?)
If nothing else, religion offers community, does it not?
Dr. Singer, did you know Jesus’s disciples were a mushroom cult? A bunch of guys tripping their dicks off on toadstools, amanita muscaria? Did you know Jesus wasn’t real, that he was a mushroom, that the word Jesus means “mushroom covered in God’s semen” in ancient Aramaic or whatever? (Now there’s a malignant question, Dr. Singer. And, yes, it ought to be allowed, as long as it’s made in the interest of truth.) I did a ton of drugs in high school, Dr. Singer. A pharmacopoeia of pills. A drugstore. My friend, Speedy, and I did them together. We did shrooms. We shroomed. We read psychonauts like Terrance McKenna, lending each other books. We were interested in drugs as intellectual catalysts. I once did ecstasy every night for three months. I once did methamphetamine and disassembled and reassembled a computer. I once did acid and “dreamt” I was an astronaut aboard a spacecraft called The Pequod – our mission was to rendezvous with an asteroid traveling 135,000 miles per hour, land on the asteroid, and then mine for conflict minerals, which we all use in our cell phones, of course. Dr. Singer, did you know NASA scientists are entertaining the idea of building a moon base out of mushrooms??? During another trip, I was working with cosmonauts and taikonauts to build a base near Mons Malapert, a mountain at the South Pole of the Moon. I once did toad venom and lived an entire life while I was on it. I had friends and girlfriends and a full-time job. I met a girl, got engaged, bought a house in the burbs, had kids, got old… Then I snapped out of it, and there I was, sitting on my friend’s sofa, fifteen years old again. Now I don’t even know what’s real. Are you real, Dr. Singer? Am I real? Is the University of Tennessee real? What about the English division? The grad students and part-time lecturers? Are they real? And if they’re not real, what would be the harm in killing them?
Swipe left on toad venom, Dr. Singer. 😊
Dr. Singer, I was sad to see Estabrook Hall torn down last year. I remember the construction on campus – the yellow tape, the men in hard hats, the cranes, the wrecking ball…
The Academy is not a Safe Space, Dr. Singer. It’s a war zone, a place where structures come tumbling down all around you. It’s a place where your ideas may be smashed, demolished…
But what do I know, Dr. Singer? I’m deranged. Surely, that’s what everyone in the department thinks. That I’m creepy, deranged… That I’m having a meltdown, a psychotic break. That I’m sitting in my lair, reading Malthus, writing my multivolume manifesto. That I’m engineering a virus to be unleashed at the international airport. That I’m a renegade chemist concocting the next carfentanyl (fentanyl’s big brother) to decimate the human population, so concerned am I with overpopulation. That I’m a biodefense researcher gone mad, sending anthrax in envelopes all over the country, terrorizing the nation. That I’m raising hundreds of jungle cats – panthers, and jaguars, and snow leopards, and guinea leopards, and ligers, and tigers, and lions – only to set them loose on the city one day, all of them starving, and laugh maniacally as hundreds of innocents, among them children, are ripped to shreds!!! That I’m spearheading a misinformation campaign, convincing thousands of parents not to vaccinate their children, resurrecting diseases we eradicated in the twentieth century like smallpox and measles and polio. That I’m writing a riddle, the answer to which will diffuse the bombs I’m hidden all over the city. Every day, I post one or two or three or four things on my Facebook page, news stories about false rape accusations, hate crime hoaxes, murderous migrants, and my Facebook friends think I should let it go, give it a rest, “lay off social media, dude,” because I’m making an ass out of myself, because people are worried about me, but for God’s sake, I’m interested in truth, Dr. Singer, and this is merely their attempt to silence me. THEY KNOW I’M ON TO SOMETHING!!! I MUST BE SILENCED!!! I’M GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING!!!
Wokeademics live in an echo chamber. Wokeademics are happy to go their whole careers, their whole lives, without thinking, even once, about opposing views. Dr. Singer, might I suggest a kind of Continuing Education Unit for the Woko Haram? One where they’re forced – if they want to receive tenure, anyway – to hear opposing views? One where they’re forced to hear healthy opposition? Here’s healthy opposition for ya: Is there such a thing as systemic racism, Dr. Singer? Is it possible that African American thinkers like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell are correct when they say blacks are stymied by their identity as victims? Are hate crimes really on the rise? Maybe they are, but did you know hate crime hoaxes are way more common than people realize? Is it true that women are paid less than men even when they do the same job, even when they work the same number of hours, even when they have the same education and experience, even when they too negotiated fiercely during the hiring process, even when they too moved across the country for the job? Are transgenders suffering a mental illness? Is transgenderism a type of apotemnophilia? Is fat shaming bad? Maybe yes, maybe no, but a rhetor ought to be free to question long-cherished beliefs. That’s the point, Dr. Singer!
The television talks to me, Dr. Singer. Right now, the news is on in the other room. There’s been a flood somewhere in the developing world. The T.V. says I created it. I’ve ruined all these people’s lives. It tells me over and over and over again that I ordered the flood. I want it to stop saying this. Because it’s not true. Can’t be true. I’m listening to the live coverage right now, as I write this, and the T.V. is laughing maniacally from the other room. It talks to me even after I turn it off. It tells me repeatedly that I’m a mass murderer, and of course if you repeat something over and over again, it becomes fact – or so says Hitler, in Mein Kampf. Have you ever read Mein Kampf? Hitler was like, “The most brilliant propagandist…[will be confined] to a few points and repeat them over and over again.” Have you heard about Sokal Squared? The publishing hoaxes? A group of gadflies transcribed passages from Mein Kampf, except they replaced the word Jew with Cisgender White Man or something like that, and the gender journals ate it up, calling it “brilliant work, important,” and the editors at these journals unwittingly published Mein Kampf!!!!! And now, not surprisingly, some folks are beginning to question the whole Gender Studies field as well as the goddamn quackademics that teach it, and I say it’s about time. Furthermore, I say Gender Studies students across the country ought to unite, come together and bring forward a class-action lawsuit, sue the universities!, sue them for selling snake oil, bunk. Ditto for the Post-Structuralists and Deconstructionists and Post-Colonialists. It’s all bullshit, bullshit baffles brains, obscurantism, or so said Sir Roger Scruton before he died of cancer, though some people think he was murdered, probably by a wackademic, because wackademics didn’t like Scruton’s views. It really does make me angry, Dr. Singer. If I were to get a full-time teaching position, I would teach Rousseau and Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, but of course I can’t get a full-time teaching appointment to save my life. Why, you might ask, can’t I get a full-time teaching appointment to save my life? Because the schools are busy hiring lunatics! They will almost certainly hire someone who’s published extensively in the field of Gender Studies before they hire me. (I write fiction, Dr. Singer. I told you that. Over lunch. You probably don’t remember that. I write about the incel. People make fun of incels, but these are guys who’ve never been touched, much less made love to, and make no mistake: We need to be touched, made love it, need it the way we need water, and when we’re not getting it, we’re flailing and gasping. But, of course, who gives a damn about the incel? The incel is not an important subject. It’s not like we would see fewer mass shootings if we had a conversation about the incel. Let me tell you something, Dr. Singer: When a society engages in an ongoing conversation about women, par example, women can see that their society cares about them – this is what I call the medicinal conversation. But what about young men, Dr. Singer??? Can we talk about men and boys for five minutes? How about one minute? How about thirty seconds? No, no, no, we must never stop talking about women. Not for a second. After all, it’s women who are living in an oppressive, sexist, misogynistic, dystopian patriarchy, a chimp enclosure, and they need to be promoted. All hands on deck, Dr. Singer! But did you know that men are more likely than women to commit suicide? [Men do it exceptionally well. My father is one of thousands, tens of thousands, who do it every year.] Did you know that men are more likely to be homeless? To suffer failure to launch? To be the victims of violent crime? To be incarcerated? To fight and die in a war? To be tortured in places like Hanoi? To die at work? To use illicit drugs? To be the victims of divorce laws that take away their kids? Did you know that men are less likely to be college educated? And yet the feminist’s voice, “Male privilege!” carries the day. Dr. Singer, are you familiar with the Cassandra Complex?)
YOU’RE A REAL FRAUD, DR. SINGER!!! I GIVE THE GRAD STUDENTS AND PART-TIME LECTURERS FOOD FOR THOUGHT, MAKING A GOOD-FAITH ARGUMENT ABOUT THE GENDER PAY GAP, AND TWO DAYS LATER (TWO FUCKING DAYS!!!), YOU, THE DIRECTOR OF FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, SUMMON ME TO YOUR OFFICE, WHERE YOU ORDER ME TO “STAY OFF FACEBOOK,” AND THEN, ONE WEEK LATER, YOU ASK ME TO MEET YOU FOR LUNCH, WHERE YOU GIVE ME ANOTHER EDICT, A PAPAL BULL, SAYING, “STAY OFF FACEBOOK, CARL. HAVE YOU BEEN STAYING OFF FACEBOOK?” WHERE DO YOU LIVE, DR. SINGER??? KINDLY REPLY TO THIS EMAIL WITH YOUR HOME ADDRESS, AND DON’T YOU DARE GIVE ME ANY FUGAZI HORSESHIT!!!
I SAY YOU’RE A FRAUD BECAUSE YOU DON’T VALUE THE FREE MARKETPLACE FOR IDEAS! I SAY YOU’RE A FRAUD BECAUSE YOU DON’T VALUE THE IDEAS FAIR! I SAY YOU’RE A FRAUD BECAUSE YOU DON’T VALUE HEALTHY OPPOSITION! YOU’RE A FRAUD, DR. SINGER! A FRAUD!!!
You know, sometimes I think my mother isn’t actually my mother but someone pretending to be my mother. I don’t know who she is or why she’s doing this, but the person I talked with over the phone last Sunday was not my mother.
[Sigh.] Alas: The Academy is no longer a place of truth, Dr. Singer. (Did you know Edward Snowden dropped out of college because he thought he could learn more on his own?) The Academy – no longer a place of Age of Enlightenment concepts like free inquiry, no longer a place of high-quality scientific research and scholarship that adds to our current wealth of knowledge, no longer a place where we bring students into the fold and teach them to participate in our search for truth, no longer a place where we teach students to think for themselves and make coherent evidence-based arguments, no longer a place where we teach students to question assumptions, question everything – is doing more harm than good, and it must be destroyed. Fun while it lasted, but the idea of the university must be vacated. Things have reached Peak Absurdity, Dr. Singer. PEAK ABSURDITY!!!
I have this dream where I’m in a padded cell. I have this dream where I can’t get in the house. I am cold, and I can’t get in the house. I try the front door, but it’s locked. I try the side door, but it’s locked. I try the back door, but it’s locked. Everything is locked, tight, and I can’t get in. I am months behind on my rent. I live in Maplehurst Park Apartments. Building 727. Apartment 9. (Drop by some time. If I’m not hanging from the ceiling, I’ll serve you tea.) Are you familiar with Maplehurst? Maplehurst is right on the Tennessee River, which, as you know, snakes through downtown Knoxville. You know the Henley Street Bridge? My building is right under it. I am buried in debt – ten-thousand dollars in credit card debt, another fifty in student loans. As you know, I graduated recently from the University of Tennessee, and for a lack of anything better to do, I took a job as a part-time lecturer (here, at the university), but I am the part of the totem pole that is underground, and I don’t make a lot of money, and I don’t see a full-time teaching appointment anywhere on the horizon. (I swear it’s easier to become a five-star general than it is to get a full-time teaching position at a university or even a community college. Too many pigs for the teats, Dr. Singer.)
I am tired, Dr. Singer. Utterly depleted. World-weary and not yet out of my twenties. I think tomorrow I’ll go to the leasing office, here at Maplehurst, and ask Management, “What’s the damage?” and if I owe all these late fees on top of the back rent, I’ll take that as a sign, that life just isn’t working out.
Some people’s lives are simply duds.
The bridge looms over my apartment. I can see it from my balcony. I see it all the time, like Hart Crane, though I’m not as brilliant as Hart Crane. For months now, I’ve been working on a novel called Big Amygdala, and as I sit at my desk, writing, I look through the window occasionally, and there’s the Henley Street Bridge, glaring back at me. (I have a rendezvous with the Henley Street Bridge.) My heart is broken, because my father died. (I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone, this feeling of rejection.) He died a year ago, shortly after Jamie ghosted me, but it still hurts. (Always will?) I mean, he wasn’t my real father. I’m adopted. But, still, when my father died, I went into a tailspin, SO EXCUSE ME IF I CALLED JAMIE TESCHENDORF A CUNT!!! I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS SPEAKING TO PRINCESS NEFERTITI!!! AND, REALLY, WHAT’S SO HORRIBLE ABOUT SAYING CUNT??? IF A WOMAN IS BEING MISERABLE TO ME – LIKE, JUST FUCKING AWFUL – WHY CAN’T I LOSE CONTROL OF MY EMOTIONS AND CALL HER A CUNT??? WANETTA GIBSON FALSELY ACCUSED BRAIN BANKS OF RAPE, SENDING HIM TO PRISON TO FIVE YEARS… CAN WE CALL HER A CUNT, DR. SINGER? WHAT ABOUT THOSE DRUG LAB CHEMISTS WHO TAMPERED WITH EVIDENCE, WHICH RESULTED IN THE WRONGFUL CONVICTION OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MEN WHO’D BEEN BROUGHT UP ON DRUG CHARGES? CAN WE CALL THEM CUNTS???
When Jamie enters a room, four semi-literate hulks bring her in on a divan.
EXCUSE ME FOR HELPING A HOMELESS MAN, JAMIE! OKAY, SO HE HAD A SWASTIKA ON HIS NECK! BIG FUCKING DEAL! LIKE, MAYBE HE GOT THE TATTOO DECADES AGO, WHEN HE WAS A KID, AND HE WAS REALLY ANGRY, AND HE WAS LOST AND CONFUSED AND HE REGRETS IT NOW, AND MAYBE NOW, IN 2019, HE WOULD GET THE TATTOO REMOVED IF HE COULD BUT HE DOESN’T HAVE THE MONEY, AND MAYBE HIS FATHER DIED, AND SIX MONTHS LATER HIS MOTHER DIED, AND THEN HE FELL OFF A LADDER AT WORK AND HE COULDN’T MAKE MONEY ANYMORE AND HIS WIFE LEFT HIM, TAKING THEIR LITTLE DAUGHTER (A HEARTBREAKING DEVASTATING BLOW), AND THEN HIS FRIENDS ABANDONED HIM, SAYING HE WAS GETTING TOO RADICAL, AND THEN HIS LANDLORD EVICTED HIM, SAYING HIS LATE-NIGHT RANTS ABOUT JUDEOBOLSHEVISM – THE JEWS, THE JEWS, THE JEWS – WERE KEEPING THE NEIGHBORS AWAKE (NOT TO MENTION SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF THEM), AND MAYBE HIS WHOLE LIFE CAME CRUSHING DOWN AROUND HIM, AND THEN ONE DAY HE SNAPPED. AREN’T WE ALL CAPABLE OF SNAPPING, JAMIE???I TAKE IT YOU DON’T BELIEVE IT BEHAVIORISM, THE WORK OF B.F. SKINNER. JAMIE, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT EARS?
I have an Uzi under my mattress, Dr. Singer. It’s black, high-gloss, like an eel. An ugly beautiful thing, like free speech. The Uzi fires sixty rounds per second. The Uzi is God. The TV tells me I’m a mass murderer, that I ordered the flood, so I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing the Uzi to campus and killing as many diversity officers as I can find. Might as well, since I’m a mass murderer already. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of administrators at American universities quadrupled, while the number of faculty members barely changed at all, and woke millennials wonder why tuition’s through the roof, why they’re saddled with debt. Someone’s gotta take a stand!
But I’m kidding about the Uzi, Dr. Singer. I mean, please. Where would I even get such a thing? I’ve been thinking of killing one diversity officer. With an axe. A single diversity officer with an axe. That, I think, would make a statement. Yes, that would make a statement. The media would get a hold of it. I would leave behind a manifesto. I would quote the Book of Matthew. (Matthew was like: “Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be cut down.”) I would start a conversation. About the Academy. I would question long-cherished beliefs.
Or maybe I’ll self-immolate in the quad – after all, I’m not interested in hurting anyone else. Au contraire, Dr. Singer, I want to treat everyone else with kindness. I really do! Even neo-Nazis. Even murderers and rapists. As counter intuitive as it might sound. There but for the grace of God go I. Alex Fields come to mind. Are you familiar with Alex Fields? He murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville when he drove his Challenger into a group of counter-protestors. His mother was in a wheelchair. His father died before he was born. What would I do in those circumstances? What would you do? If you were given that hand? If only people could have pardon, Dr. Singer. Hurt people hurt people, Dr. Singer, so we should have pardon, even for people like Alex Fields. If people could just remember that, this fundamental truth, that hurt people hurt people, that scars make monsters… If people could just hold onto that, difficult though it may be…
SAFE AND UNSOUND
It was a deaf date.
I’ve always had a problem telling people, not my pets, people, how I truly feel.
There was no getting anything off my chest unless my mouth was directed to my cat’s ears.
I was still going through a divorce in my head that had begun and ended a million years ago but seemed like only yesterday, today and tomorrow.
I wanted to hold onto it and never let go even though the other party moved on, I was still having my continuous afterparty cleaning up the dishes when there were no more dishes to clean.
I could not and did not want to cleanse myself.
Remaining in pain felt like it wasn’t over.
Like a cloud staying still over my head refusing the winds natural encouraging motions.
I was no bargain and my ex wife not one either. When you accuse someone of something and they say ,” Don’t be ridiculous,” they are lying.
I heard don’t be ridiculous so many times, it sounded like don’t be a piece of licorice.
I knew it was the end even before it had begun.
We finally told each other to take our, my way or the highways and shove them up our one-way streets.
I would like to blame my lack of communication skills on it all falling apart rather than just accept that the bottom line of any failure is and will always be that it just didn’t work out.
Eventually I got my body to continue believing my head never would follow.
I had a healthy body and like the best decisions in life that you make are the ones where you have no choice, my decision was when you have your health, you have everything.
Yeah, sure.
I thought I would never recover.
I was in a bookstore one day looking for something, anything, when a woman over to my left dropped a set of keys on the floor and when I did my hey lady she did not respond.
I picked them up and tried again, no reply.
I tapped on her shoulder and she turned around, looked at me, then the keys, took them and said, “Thank you so much”.
She sounded like a Dolphin.
She then handed me a card that said, “Hello, my name is Ann, I am deaf. Nice to meet you!”.
I later found out she had a few different cards for a few different occasions.
One even said, “Fuck you, leave me alone or I’ll call the cops”.
I never received that one.
I thought perhaps I had found someone I could talk to.
It also helped tremendously that she was, as they say, “Cute as a button”.
Plus, she wasn’t allergic to cats and didn’t seem allergic to me either.
We had what we later referred to as “Silent chemistry”.
I pointed to her, then pointed to me, and then made like I was throwing down a drink in my hopeful unfilled mouth.
She nodded yeah and off we went on our first and not last date.
We became an item and when we E mailed and texted each other to talk a bit I could hear her voice.
Her beautiful melodious non dolphin voice, but the one in her pretty head. She wrote she heard mine too.
I fell in love with love and I also fell in love with her and her with me.
Before we met, I was falling and could not get up.
After we met, I began to rise.
While I was not the best pupil for her sign language lessons, we compensated by not being able to keep our hands off each other.
We would “Speak”, to each other when we were together thru the magic of texting with our phones like a couple of kids.
We ”Talked” about everything under the sun and over the moon. When our phones went dead I would shoot my mouth off and she would seem to enjoy just watching.
It was those times I really let my life out as I had never before with anyone except my beloved attentive kitty cat.
I make a good and bad living as a writer.
That being said, and written, and as far as my new love was concerned, I saddened myself with the cold hard fact that she could never hear the greatest voices of our times or any other times.
Dylan, Jagger, Frank and a guy named Elvis.
Not to mention Mozart.
Anyway, to me, all that counted was that this piece of beauty was the first piece of beauty I could really talk to.
One night we got really drunk by candlelight. Without texting, I really shot my mouth off about everything in my life from cradle to not yet grave. “Told” her about my tremendous love for her and even told the name of my precious cat. “Iron”.
She just nodded as I rambled on.
In the morning while soaking in the sun, enjoying our romantic hangovers, she sent me a text saying that she loved me too and that Iron was an interesting name for a cat.
I guess she saw I could not figure out how she knew the name of my cat since it was without a text and just drunken babbling by candlelight.
Her next text made our future form of communication even more delicious, brighter and above all, clearer and louder.
It read “ I Love your lips and I can read them too’’.
Founder of TheBlueSpace Guides Co-operative, Nepal and a consultant to Child Space Foundation, Nepal. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Published Books : The World Peace Journals (Garuda Books 2013), No Place Like Home (Garuda Books 2013) and Mumbo Jumbo (Garuda Books 2015) In Journals: 1. Poached Hare Journal (2019: Identity Theme) –Like it or Lumpit 2. Scarlet Leaf Review (Nov 2019) - #National Sex Consensus Board 3. Fear of Monkeys (Dec 2019 - The Moor Macaque issue) – When the North Star Falls 4. Twisted Vine journal, Western New Mexico University (Dec 2019) – Crystal Night 5. Bookends Review (April 2020) – Crystal Night 6. Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (July 2020) – The Other Side of Midnight 7. Scarlet Leaf Review (April 2020 ) – The Dark Chapel 8. pacificREVIEW , a west coast arts review annual sdsu (2020, Synchronous Theme) – Crystal Night 9. Literary Veganism: an online journal (May 2020) – The Seven million Year Itch |
Ice Finger
1.
Stockholm Airport, 2nd January.
Detective Sergeant Ryan Reeves sits at a small table looking through huge glass panes into the murky light of a bitterly cold afternoon. Outside, well-insulated crew stand on mobile platforms spraying de-icer over a waiting plane’s wings. It’s a time consuming job and he notices the frustrated looks from passengers peering out of porthole windows.
If it’s cold here, what would it be like further north?
He had already had two shocks that day: the first was the call; the second, his sandwich, probably the most expensive sandwich in the world. For almost half the price he could be lounging in a ritzy London hotel, overhearing conversations from the rich and famous, smelling French perfume and admiring sun tans and designer suits, with exactly the same bread and ingredients sitting on a plate in front of him. But he’s not: he’s on a public concourse in a busy airport. The sandwich looks good. He takes a bite. It is good and he snickers: still not worth thirteen pounds.
Unable to raise a smile at the other shock, he ponders as he eats the sandwich. The call had come before dawn. It had never happened before, not to him, and not to anyone he had ever known. These calls were urban myths, until now.
Anxiety suddenly washes over him and he abruptly leaves his ivory crust to pace the long concourse, glancing into shops, feigning interest. In a few hours he too would be peering out a porthole window, waiting for the de-icers to do their job. The connecting flight would then fly north, to a job he knows nothing about in a country he’s never been to.
The call had been brief. His boss, the reticent Inspector Charlie Mace, had told him to pack a bag with warm clothes, bring his passport and immediately come down to the station. He protested. It was his day off and he needed to prepare for his promotion interview: he was days away from becoming a Deputy Inspector. He had earned it, done his time, and tried to reason with Charlie Mace, but his boss got angry and the phone went dead.
In less than an hour he was at the station. Charlie Mace was not there and the desk sergeant handed him a folder. There wasn’t much inside, just a ticket to Lulea, car hire details and destination along with a short note telling him the Swedes would pay for everything. His flight left in three hours. Asking for more information, the officer at the desk had just shrugged, meanly saying:
‘You got the call, now don’t mess it up.’
Was he jealous?
On the subway to Heathrow airport, the train had rushed out a noisy tunnel into the gloomy light of a winter dawn. His carriage was hushed and the few people sitting near him looked out from sleepy, empty faces. Maybe they were heading to work or, like him, to a flight to who knows where. He had to rush to catch his flight. It felt like exile.
He stops pacing the concourse as the penny drops. The promotion: they don’t want him to get the job. Charlie Mace knows how much it means to him. It was his, now it’s for someone more in favour. He had had the call that everyone wants: an international crime scene detective, glamorous, double time and an expense account. On return, he would be back to his old job, one he didn’t want anymore.
With his stomach rumbling and anxiety waning, he returns to find his half-eaten sandwich and coffee cup still there. He sits and gloomily watches the de-icers. He had only packed a jumper.
The raucous New Year Eve’s party, just two days ago, where he and friends danced vivaciously and drank too much, seems an age away.
Life feels bitter sweet.
2.
Ryan wakes from his doze as the plane lands bumpily on the runway. Although it’s pitch black outside, he sees white, and lots of it. By the time the plane taxis towards the terminal, the landscape is illuminated by flood lights. Snow and ice is everywhere and the wind gusting, blowing spindrift right and left. Battling the elements, ground crew are wearing large gauntlets and thick parkas, hoods up and fastened tight. Ryan hadn’t even bought a hat, let alone a pair of gloves. Maybe his shock of black hair would keep him warm. But as this was all new to him, he really has no clue.
Collecting the car keys from the desk, he nonchalantly exits the temperate terminal. The wind hits, driving cold into every part of him. He gasps at the shock, aware his temperature is dropping fast. By the time he reaches the car, his hand pulling the suitcase is numb and his thumbs are painful. It’s unbearable. Wasting no time, he starts the car. Turning the heater full up, he waits for warmth.
As he drives off, the GPS shows fifteen minutes to the hotel. There’s no tarmac to be seen, the car’s headlights illuminating white sheet ice.
Stay on the right he keeps telling himself as he turns into a roundabout, gingerly taking the turn. The car broadsides and comes to a halt, banked up against a wall of snow. The car hire note had told him he would have full winter tyres, this can’t be right. Are they trying to kill him? Nervously, he drives back to the airport, sliding into a parking spot just missing the adjacent car. He needs to change the tyres.
He tries to be calm but when the girl at the desk fobs him off by telling him he’s just not used to these winter conditions, he loses his cool:
‘I’m driving three hundred kilometres north tomorrow!’
That does the trick and he’s given the keys to another car with brand new tyres: type Ice 2 with studs, he’s told. Ryan feigns a confident nod.
Cautiously, he drives to the hotel, chilled to the bone.
Confused and exhausted, he crashes fully clothed on the bed, not waking until seven the next morning. Knowing his destination has good daylight from only 10.30.am until 12.45.pm, he starts his journey north. It’s dark and freezing cold. Not daring to call Charlie Mace until he arrives at Gallivare police station, he still has hope of his promotion.
The empty road cuts through tracts of snowy pine. It’s more than twenty minutes before he meets another vehicle: a logging lorry passing on the other side, sending up clouds of spindrift so thick it blocks his view. Unable to see the road ahead, he drifts into the path of another logging truck, its horn blaring horribly. Urgently he pulls the wheel, steering the car back, studs and tyres grinding in the ice. The girl was right, he’s not used to these conditions, good tyres or not.
Jittery, it’s with some relief that Ryan pulls into a siding with a lit-up neon sign. This must be a cafe, Ryan thinks as he hurries from the car to the front door. It’s still dark and freezing cold. Standing opposite a pretty woman, she looks him up and down. From his first hello, she knows he’s not a Swede and speaks in fluent English:
‘Are you trying to kill yourself with those clothes, it’s minus twenty six outside and dropping fast.’
Ryan feels a fool. Maybe the truth will help.
‘I came unprepared, they called me yesterday morning, it’s urgent I guess. I’m Ryan, a British Policeman, come to help out in Gallivare.’
‘Oh, the murder of that Englishman, never off the news.’
Murder? Ryan was a specialist in drugs and money laundering. What use would he be to the Swedes? He really has been exiled.
‘Sorry, I can’t talk about it.’ And he couldn’t, he knows nothing.
‘Well, buy some warm clothes, don’t want another dead Englishman.’
Ryan laughs. Is that his case? Maybe, maybe not and his hand reaches for the mobile in his jacket pocket to look at online news. Pulling out the mobile, he hears the woman asking for his order. Hungry, he leaves the phone and tells her he’ll take whatever she suggests.
The place is empty. Lifeless eyes of wild creatures bear down from shelves and perches. An ancient collection of taxidermy tells him he’s in an unfamiliar world.
Ignoring this display of hunting trophies, he helps himself to bread and coffee. Ryan drinks two mugs and tastes the unfamiliar black bread. Two steaming moose meatballs arrive with potatoes and overdone veg. Curiously, it’s delicious. The cafe starts filling up with customers, outside workers in what seems like full arctic attire. They smile, momentarily staring; in his jeans, trainers and leather jacket he must really look a fool.
Drinking a third cup of coffee, Ryan looks at his mobile: no message from Mace. He decides to leave the news, not wanting to fill his head with something that may be distracting and probably irrelevant, and hurries to the car.
Passing an ice clad sign telling him he’s now inside the Arctic Circle, the drive to Gallivare becomes increasingly stressful. Snow had started falling during breakfast and visibility is now dangerously low, even with full beam on. The road becomes soft and slushy as the car ploughs through the newly fallen snow. Ryan realises he can’t see the sides or middle of the carriageway. Everything is white. With nowhere to pull over, he carries on, dropping speed to less than thirty. As dawn breaks, things become easier but the stark facts frightening: he’s on a white road with white sides in a white landscape. A snow plough passes on the other side; no sign of any other vehicles.
Tense and knotted, he turns off to Gallivare. The GPS shows sixteen minutes to his destination. Bursting for pee, he curses as he passes a lay-by – it’s full of snow, he’d get stuck if he drives in there.
3.
Ryan had driven into the first large supermarket he saw, used the toilet and now sits in the Co-op cafe with yet another cup of coffee. The drive had shaken him badly. He’s a detective, meant to be level-headed, focused and professional, but feels a wreck. He had looked in the bathroom mirror and saw himself pale, unshaven and glassy eyed. They won’t be expecting this, he frets.
Ten minutes later he’s staring through the windscreen at a large, modern and very uninteresting building: Gallivare Police Station. He hurries through the snow and wind to the glass fronted entrance.
‘Detective Sergeant Ryan Reeves, British Police.’
Shivering from cold, he tries to smile
The woman at the desk just stares back; in fact, the entire office behind her stare. An uncomfortable moment is broken by a deep voice:
‘Happy New Year Ryan, come on through, we are glad you’re here. How was the drive up?’
‘Err, different...Happy New Year.’
The office breaks out in laughter. The man speaking to him from behind the desk laughs too:
‘Damned dangerous, you mean!’
Ryan manages a smile and goes through a door someone else is holding open.
The deep voice belongs to Chief Inspector Erik Olofsson, head of station; burly, fair headed with an impressive blonde beard. After jokes and concerns about his clothing, he’s introduced to a woman who would partner him while he’s in Sweden.
Special Investigator Captain Eva Strid is petite, slim with long black hair. A sallow complexion matches her shiny black obsidian eyes. She puts her hand out. Ryan shakes it.
‘Let’s try and work this out together. Did they brief you in London?’
‘Inspector Mace didn’t say...very much at all.’
Eva and Erik exchange glances. Erik speaks:
‘Not your boss, this is inter-government co-operation, the request was made at the highest level. We need a specialist...we don’t want to look like incompetent fools.’
Erik laughs but Ryan grimaces. He too will probably end up looking like a fool when they realise he’s not special, just a detective working on low level money laundering cases. He chooses bluff as a defence.
‘I am a specialist,’ Ryan says, unconvinced by his own words. After all, that’s what they’re expecting. He starts to feel on edge.
Before anxiety gets the better of him, he’s thankful when Eva takes him outside to collect his bag. He follows her down the street thick with snow to the hotel: The Quality Resort, right opposite the eloquent train station neatly painted in red and black. Eva studies Ryan and then tells him to get some rest; she’ll pick him up at six. Ryan checks his watch: 12.45.pm. It’s getting dark.
His spacious room overlooks the icy train station. Although pleased to be inside a warm hotel room, he just can’t shake the cold. Standing in wet trainers with numbing feet, he heads towards the shower.
4.
Meanwhile, down the road at the police station, Eva Strid worries about Ryan. He’s unprepared: has not been briefed and risks frostbite or hyperthermia in his urban clothing. She’d appealed for help and now she’s got it. Having been assigned to work closely with him, feels responsible. With Stockholm overwhelmed with increasing crime and terrorism, most Lulea detectives have flown south. At Gallivare, the station has a skeleton staff, most of whom are not experienced for a case like this. She needs to look after Ryan.
Erik, seeing a concerned look on Eva’s face, walks over to her desk.
‘Think he’s up to the job?’
Eva keeps her thoughts to herself. After all, Ryan is only here because she put in a request for help to Lulea, which went to Stockholm and then became political. She has no idea if Ryan is the man she needs.
‘He’s a specialist, said so himself...he needs clothes though, we might be in the backcountry. The forecast says minus thirty five tomorrow. It’s one of those winters.’
‘I think the budget will stretch to some warm clothing. Brief him tonight.’
At the hotel, Ryan sits on the bed staring at his mobile: still no message. He’s tired but with all the coffee he’s drunk, just can’t sleep. Clean, shaved and wearing new clothes, he feels respectable again. He dials London.
‘DC. Reeves here Sir, I’m in Gallivare.’
‘Anything to report Reeves?’
‘No, just arrived.’
‘Then why are you calling? You’ll be some time out there I think. Send a report by email every few days or so. Is there anything else?’
‘My promotion sir...’
‘DC Coogan is now Deputy Inspector Coogan. You volunteered for an important posting.’
Ryan hesitates and the phone goes dead, again.
Ryan looks across the road to the train station. That bastard, he fumes. He never volunteered, press-ganged into service more like. Charlie Mace and Jack Coogan play squash together, their wives go shopping together, yet he’s only been in the job for half a year. Is that why he’d been sent here, to remove him from the interview process? Add to that his lack of international experience and unsuitable clothing, he’s bound to make a hash of it. At a time like this, only the bar could give him solace.
Later, outside the hotel, Eva sits in her car mulling over the situation. It’s six o’clock but she hesitates. She needs to get this right, brief him properly so tomorrow they can work together. Hopefully he’s had some rest.
The murder of a British celebrity in a remote cabin without clues, motive or murder weapon has so far hit a dead end. His name was Fuzzy Smith, a famous British comedian. He and a Russian business partner were trying to develop pristine forest into a winter holiday resort. It had been met with fierce local opposition; however, it seemed likely the authorities would grant permission. She now needs to tell Ryan in a way that is clear to him. Eva leaves the car.
She sees Ryan in the bar. He’s lounging in an easy chair behind a table of empty glasses. He looks different, more relaxed, clean and shaven. But he’s still wearing inappropriate clothing.
Greeting her with a smile, he wobbles as he gets up out the chair, hand outstretched. Not shaking it, she momentarily stares. He’s obviously drunk.
‘Ryan, are you on duty?’
‘I don’t know, am I?’ He laughs.
‘I suppose not.’
There can be no briefing in his condition. But time is of the essence, more snow is due tonight; it’s already hard to get about. Eva knows she’s got to take control.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘This morning at some weird roadside cafe.’
‘You’re in no shape for briefing. You need to sober up and eat. I’ll cook something at mine. I’ll drive.’
This is hard work for Ryan, all he wants to do is drink himself into a stupor and forget about the lost promotion. Now he’s been summoned to her house for food and work. Don’t these Swedes relax, he’s been on the go all day?
She’s looking at him impatiently and he resigns himself to a sobering night out.
5.
They don’t speak during the drive. It takes about twenty minutes down a pitch black road without any obvious signs of housing. The road’s been recently been ploughed but is still thick with hard dense ice, reminding Ryan of his perilous trip north earlier that day. Considering the conditions, Eva drives fast.
Eva slows the car to a crawl, the headlights illuminating a small neat red house where the road becomes a dead end.
‘They plough this just for you?’
‘I’m resident,’ Eva states emphatically.
Ryan, struggling with the effects of alcohol and increasing weariness, steps out the car as soon as it comes to a halt. The biting wind burns his face. Eva opens the house front door.
Before she takes the key out of lock, she points to a chair in the middle of the room.
‘Take off your shoes and sit there, and Ryan...there’s no alcohol.’
‘Don’t you drink?’
‘I’m Muslim.’
Ryan does as he’s told. The chair is comfortable and the house warm. He soon finds himself battling sleep. For distraction, he looks around. The room is modern, almost minimalist, the polished wooden floor partially covered by a large oriental rug. In another room, he hears the movement of plates and pots, a cupboard being opened and closed and the noise of a kettle warming up. Through the window he gazes down the dark and empty road, mesmerised by the fall of heavy snow.
‘I’m vegetarian, so I hope this will do. I know it’s late for coffee but I need you alert.’
Ryan glances up as Eva puts down a tray on the table in front of him. He studies his plate of steaming food and large jug of coffee.
‘Ryan!’
He jumps as she shouts his name, instantly snapping out of his reverie. Embarrassed, he points towards the window.
‘Sorry, it’s snowing.’
Frowning, Eva looks through the window at the flakes.
They eat in silence. When finished, Eva produces a thick file, which heavily thuds down on the table between them. Disinterested, Ryan sighs softly. But instead of asking Ryan to take a look, she tells the story of Fuzzy Smith. He quickly perks up, taking interest in her every word.
Fuzzy Smith found on the 1st of January. No wonder Ryan hadn’t heard, he was busy nursing a savage New Year’s hangover; and then the call.
‘Was the Russian laundering money?’
Eva looks hard at Ryan. So he is a real detective, she surmises.
‘I don’t know, he was in Russia over New Year and the Russians aren’t co-operating. I’m sure we’ll never see him again.’
She pulls a photograph from the file and shows it to Ryan. It’s the murder scene with Smith on his back, eyes open pointing skywards, covered in ice and spats of frozen blood. His clothes are torn and bits scattered in the snow.
‘I doubt it was the Russians, far too messy. Looks more like a brawl to me.’
Ryan studies the photo.
‘Would you like to see more pictures?’
‘I’d like to see the crime scene,’ Ryan says, looking up at Eva.
She hesitates, looks out the window at the falling snow before looking back at Ryan.
‘There is no crime scene.’
She says it so quietly that Ryan’s sure he heard her wrong, but her look tells him differently. Perplexed, he just stares and listens to the story.
‘Two days after Christmas, Fuzzy Smith wasn’t missing but his hire car was two days overdue.’
Ryan learns that the hire company, not being able to get through to Smith, had tracked the car down to a remote cabin. It was an expensive car and they wanted it back. As so much snow had fallen, they had been forced to hire a snow plough to push through the last thirteen kilometres. It was dark by the time they reached the car. Not noticing the body, they simply drove the car away. In fact, it’s now suspected that the plough drove over Smith while doing a U-turn to drive back out again. The car hire company then spotlessly cleaned the vehicle and hired it out again. Only when he hadn’t returned on New Year’s Eve did a member of his family call the police.
‘But the photograph, it’s a crime scene, Eva.’
‘On New Year’s Day, two local policemen and their dog went to investigate. They found Smith lying face up in the snow just like photograph, but contaminated the entire scene, even treading on the body in an attempt to stop the dog urinating on Smith. They failed. By the time forensics arrived, heavy snowfall had started and the wind blowing so hard that the body was quickly covered in snow. A tent was erected but that soon flattened and blew away. Conditions were impossible and the men so cold, it was decided to remove the body and take it to Lulea. Only the cabin had any real forensics done. That photo was taken by the first policemen on the scene. The nearest neighbour is twenty kilometres away and then they are only summer residents.’
Eva shakes her head.
‘That’s when I became involved. Forensics should be in tomorrow for the body, car and cabin. Besides that, there’s nothing.’
Looking at the picture, Ryan feels somehow cheated out of an investigation and says, rather cattily:
‘So this messy crime scene isn’t a brawl, it’s just a big mess made by your colleagues and their well trained dog.’
He regrets his comment.
‘Sorry.’
She sits down opposite him and puts her head in her hands. Ryan hopes she doesn’t start to cry. He can’t cope with that.
She stares up at him with a worried, ashen look.
‘Please help me Ryan.’
Of course he’s going to help her, it’s his job. Out of habit, he laughs. But this isn’t England and his defence mechanisms don’t work. She’s still looking, nothing’s funny, nothing’s changed.
Ryan blurts out the last forty eight hours and his feelings of dejection at being shafted by his boss. Suddenly it’s him who has his head in hands, wondering if it’s he that’s going to cry. Feeling like a mess, he can’t quite believe what he’s just said.
He feels her hand on his shoulder. Tensing, he looks up and says:
‘Any of that coffee left?’
His voice sounds urgent and, as Eva heads towards the kitchen, Ryan feels ridiculous. Badly needing personal space, he yearns for the hotel.
She returns with tea.
‘You need warm clothing.’
Snow had started freezing to the windows and Eva walks over to peer through. Studying the road, she speaks quietly without looking back.
‘We’ll never get the car through that, will have to wait for the early morning plough.’
Unsure of what she means, he waits. It’s at least a minute before she turns around, and, as she can’t see him, Ryan doesn’t take his eyes off her. But his reflection in the glass tells her exactly what he’s doing.
‘There’s a spare room upstairs but I think it best you sleep down here, I’ll get some blankets. There’s a small bathroom out the back.’
6.
Glaring lights and loud noises startle him. Panicked, Ryan sits bolt upright. Through the window he sees a large modern tractor pushing snow, its large protruding bucket scraping the thick ice on the road as it clears the area around the front of the house.
The unfamiliar surroundings have him confused and Ryan pushes back the covers and stands up. Illuminated by bright white light, he retreats into the shadows. Minutes later he watches red taillights and flashes of a yellow hazard disappear up the road. It’s still snowing. He lies back down.
He awakes to the sound of a shower and footsteps overhead. Not wanting any more awkward moments, he dresses and tidies up the room. The outside thermometer fixed to the window ledge reads minus thirty seven. How cold is that? Ryan wonders.
The answer comes soon enough. Eva appears, dressed in warm clothing, woollen green slacks and a thick white patterned jumper. She looks like she’s going skiing.
‘Dressed for the weather?’ He says, making light of things
She looks at him oddly.
‘My husband is about the same size as you, you can use his things. Follow me.’
He follows her through the kitchen into the garage where she searches through a pile of boxes, handing him pieces of outdoor clothing. Not waiting for a response, she starts dressing herself until she looks like an arctic explorer in a padded parka with a fake fur-lined hood. Remembering the airport workers at Lulea, he laughs but she doesn’t, insisting he dresses the same. She hands him a pair of thick-lined winter boots.
Feeling absurdly overdressed, he follows Eva to the car. One step out the door has his ears aching so badly from the icy wind that he frantically pulls at the hood of his new jacket. Fumbling, as he had ignored Eva’s pleas to put on gloves, his fingers don’t work properly. Helping him, she straightens his hood and pulls the gloves up over his hands. A few minutes later they are sitting in her green police car. Ryan is breathing hard, almost in shock.
Now she laughs.
‘Welcome to Sweden.’
As the car warms up, Ryan unzips his jacket and removes his gloves.
‘I feel bad about using your husband’s things...’
She cuts him off.
‘He’s in Athens. Familiar food, nice weather...’
She pauses, takes a big breath and continues:
‘We were reporters in Iran but had to flee, run for our lives. He couldn’t stand the cold or the Swedish language, loathed it when I joined the police... he left me.’
She glances anxiously at Ryan.
‘At home we had terrible experiences with authority. I had to change my name, I’m Swedish now...’
Eva suddenly stops talking and Ryan, knowing how close he had come to crossing a red line last night, doesn’t ask questions. They stay silent until they reach the hotel. When they arrive, it’s still dark outside.
‘I’ll pick you up ten thirty, read the file.’
Ryan showers and then orders breakfast at the bar. The file tells him nothing, it’s full of dull paperwork. Only the photographs are of interest. He reads the online news and learns there’s nothing new.
For how long can he string-out this dead-end case: days, weeks, months? The last place he wants to be is home, working for that irascible Charlie Mace or worse, Deputy Inspector Jack Coogan.
7.
At the station, Eva studies the forensic report and, without speaking, hands it over to Erik. He reads it thoroughly and then seems lost in thought before putting the file down, asking:
‘How good do you think Ryan Reeves is?’
‘He’s very to the point...don’t think he’s used to sticking to the rules.’
Erik looks hard at Eva
‘Then let him loose, and if it goes badly wrong, we can blame him before we kick him out.’
‘Are we that desperate?’
‘You tell me Eva, he wasn’t at the hotel this morning when I stopped by.’
‘Oh...’
Eva knows the sombre light of dawn will never pass. It will be dark in a few hours. She enters the hotel to find Ryan waiting in the foyer, dressed in all the clothes she had given him. He seems irritated.
‘How can you bear living with no light, and when it comes, it’s like this?’
He indicates to the gloom.
‘That’s what my husband used to say.’
Ignoring that, he points to the car.
‘Where are we going?’
Not answering, she goes back to the car. Ryan follows. As she drives, she hands him the forensic report. He reads it twice.
That morning from the hotel, he’d asked the British police for more information on Fuzzy Smith, but they couldn’t give him anything useful.
He’s quiet for a while, mulling over what he’s just read.
No forensics of any use, certainly no strange prints, DNA or fibres. And as there’s no mobile phone signal at the murder scene, there are no phone records. Add to that no witness, murder weapon or obvious motive, Ryan feels Inspector Mace has sent him on a wild goose chase. There’s nothing he can do.
He looks at the report again. Smith hadn’t even been drinking before he died. A light blow to the head and death by freezing: at least that’s clear. So are the dog, fox, moose and reindeer tracks. The fox had even nibbled Smith’s frozen ear. And then there’s the snow plough whose huge heavy chained wheels had reversed over Smith, let alone all the messy police contamination.
‘Any other cock-ups I should know about?’
Blurting that out, it had sounded mean. Ryan instantly regrets his tone.
‘Eva, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re in a strange country with no light at minus thirty seven and a half with no clues for a case you’re expected to solve. And you lost your promotion.’
Eva pauses before saying quietly:
‘I know exactly how you feel.’
Out of awkwardness, Ryan laughs.
‘I’ll try and help you solve this case, but I just don’t think I can. By the way, where are we going?’
‘To a crime scene that isn’t there.’
Eva turns the car into a narrow single track road. At least it’s been kept ploughed, she notes. She doesn’t want ‘no snow plough’ added to Ryan’s list of Swedish police incompetencies. As Erik suggested, they’re desperate. In fact, she must be really desperate to be driving Ryan to this desolate place. She hopes he won’t get angry when he finds there’s only snow and nothing else to see. And what did Erik mean by “let him loose”? What kinds of pressure is Erik under to solve this case if he’s more than willing to throw Ryan to the dogs if it all goes wrong?
Ryan breaks her thoughts.
‘Is there any colour besides white around here?’
8.
After a long and slow drive, what light there is begins to fade. They have parked up where the snow plough stopped, about twenty metres from a large cabin on the edge of a dark forest. A piece of police tape, one end stapled to the front cabin wall, flaps in the wind.
‘We don’t have much time.’
Eva takes two pairs of snow shoes out the trunk and passes a pair to Ryan. He looks bewildered.
‘Put them on, you’ll get nowhere without them, in fact, you’ll sink up to your waist.’
Eva watches and then follows as Ryan does his own thing. He’s pulled the photos from the file and clasps them tightly, examining them and looking at what he assumes was once a crime scene. There’s police debris, the remains of the flattened tent, torn and shredded in the wind and stuff he can’t quite place. The cabin’s locked and he refrains from asking why. In the last of the light, he stands awkwardly, trying not to let the wind rip the photos from his hands. He studies the front of the cabin. It’s exactly the same as in the photograph. He makes a mental note of what he sees.
He can’t believe how cold he is and sits in the car with Eva, trying to warm up. She’s apprehensive.
‘Did you see anything?’
‘I don’t think so. What was he doing out here on his own at Christmas?’
‘We’ll probably never know. The land they wanted to develop starts right here and runs back for miles, right up into those hills and more.
Eva points. ‘It’s full of lakes and creeks.’
‘Environmental activists?’
‘We checked the data base, anyone like that is just a lefty student type and anyway, they were all away for Christmas.’
‘A wandering psycho, who took offence to his bad humour...?’
‘Ryan, be serious, please.’
In the last of the light, Ryan looks at a photo and back to the cabin one more time.
‘Have you found something?’
‘It’s not like that, I’m being thorough. Besides, I never found him funny. Let’s watch one of his shows later, you can get a measure of the man.’
He turns and faces her and she’s quick to answer:
‘At the hotel, not mine.’
As they start to drive away, a gust of wind howls, shuddering the car. A second later, a fair sized tree branch hits the bonnet with a loud scraping thud before being pulled away with the wind. Eva stops the car. They look at each other.
Ryan says it first:
‘What if it’s not murder but an accidental freak of nature? Hit on the head by a piece of flying debris...makes perfect sense.’
‘You’d have to return to England.’
Not liking that prospect, Ryan pushes it aside, gruffly remarking:
‘Let’s exhaust the murder enquiry first, there’s still a lot we can to do.’
In silence they drive, Eva wondering how a murder case could make her feel so optimistic.
9.
Eva drops Ryan at the hotel so he can mull things over, come up with a coherent plan to move the investigation on. But in their hearts, the flying wood tells a different story.
At the station, Erik is curious.
‘Nothing new, Ryan wondered about environmental activists. He’s thinking it through. I’m sure he saw something at the cabin besides the endless white of snow.’
In the hotel bar, Ryan sits with a cup of coffee and a rather good sandwich. At least he’s not paying for it, he muses. Having written a short report to Inspector Mace, detailing only the positive points of the investigation, he is now trying to get a grip of anything that might push the investigation forward. A dead-end would mean a flight back home.
Eva had told him that the proposed resort site lay in a buffer zone around a large National Park. Even with development there would be restrictions and limitations. To him, that ruled out environmental activists. Along with that, local hunting societies had long been banned from the area; so no recent grievance there. Nothing fitted, not even a piece of flying wood. Forensics had said nothing of wood in the shallow gash on Smith’s left temple.
Knowing that they must get a breakthrough in the next few days, Ryan leaves the hotel and hurries through the cold to the station. Snow ploughs are busy, their flashing yellow hazard lights illuminating the streets. It’s snowing again.
Having been buzzed through reception, he stands in the big open office looking at Eva from across the room. Sitting at her desk, busy with paperwork, she looks up and sees Ryan’s cold, tense face.
A minute later she’s in Erik’s office.
‘He wants what? We just don’t have the staff. There’s all the other regular police work to do. In these conditions there’s a car accident every few hours. A farm gate was stolen last night. We can’t even manage these things effectively.’
‘We’re desperate and it’s the only idea he has.’
‘We already look incompetent. Anymore mistakes and they’ll send in a hard-nosed team from Stockholm. No doubt we’ll be transferred, rural duties farther north...I’ll have no choice but to blame it all on Ryan.’
‘No, don’t do that, he’s doing his best, please Erik.’
‘His idea, he’ll get blamed. I don’t want to spend my days chasing missing reindeer, do you?’
Eva goes back to Ryan, who is now sitting in her chair.
‘Are you sure you want to do this, what if we find nothing?’
‘We’re at nothing now, can’t see that changing, can you?’
‘But every suspicious or unsolved case for the last twenty years...do you know how many files that is, some of them in other stations collecting dust.’
Ryan nods.
‘I suppose I could ask Olaf to come out of retirement for a week or so and then there’s that intern, what’s her name...you don’t read Swedish either, we’ll have to translate everything.’
‘No you won’t. Focus on isolated rural cases, especially in winter. Start there and make a short list.’
Eva is impatient.
‘What’s on your mind, I’m your partner.’
‘Something’s not right with this case, I just don’t know what. What did Erik say?’
‘I’ll be sent north to look for missing reindeer, and you, you’ll be blamed for wasting police time and for all our...cock-ups.’
10.
Managing to get a small private room next to the hotel reception to watch a Fuzzy Smith show, Ryan sits looking through the window at the continuing snowfall. He’s not in the mood to watch a crass comedian, but feels Eva needs to know something about the character found frozen outside a lonely cabin.
Mulling over the mystery of Smith’s demise, Ryan blurts out his concerns as soon as Eva walks into the room.
‘...if the snow plough had deliberately been sent to remove any traces on the road before they crushed Smith’s body, along with all the other missing evidence, it starts to look like high level conspiracy.’
‘Or it just might be a piece of flying wood,’ Eva says.
‘Think we’ll ever know?’
Not waiting for a response he turns on the screen. In silence they start to watch the show. Neither laughs nor makes a comment. Before a minute passes, Eva pushes the off-button on the remote control.
‘Graceless and tasteless, but bad humour isn’t cause for murder.’
Ryan laughs at Eva’s wit.
‘Maybe Smith was in the wrong place, wrong time, witnessed something, something secret that goes on round here?’
‘Is that why you want the files?’
Ryan, looking up to the ceiling, stretches his arms out wide and shrugs.
‘If we don’t spend time looking in the files Eva, I’ll be sent home.’
They stare at each other for a moment.
‘I know a good place to eat. They sell drink.’
11.
Sitting at a table by a window, they have been talking about the case.
‘I still prefer the flying stick theory,’ Eva says jovially.
How can she be so happy, she’s not even had a drink, Ryan wonders.
‘Besides, it’s normal procedure to requisition an expensive missing car.’
‘And the snow plough – thirteen kilometres, what did that cost?’
‘Insurance paid it.’
‘Flying sticks it is then.’
Ryan lifts his wine glass and downs the contents. He orders more.
‘Does it always snow like this?’ Ryan is looking out the window.
‘Not like this. The last time it snowed this hard, I was with my mother. She smuggled us to Baku in an old boat. That’s how we escaped. Holding my hand, she sung poetry, things I didn’t understand...she...’
Eva breaks mid sentence, and Ryan, feeling she’s about to say something personally revealing, deflects the conversation:
‘Poetry...is she still alive?’
Eva nods, knowing he’s not that interested.
‘In Baku...can you swim Ryan?’
‘Not in this weather.’
About to ask why she asked that question, his wine arrives. One more for the snow-ploughed road, he thinks, knowing he’ll sleep well tonight.
12.
Gallivare Police Station, 7th January.
Eva had managed to enlist Olaf, Ann the Intern and Sharky from the basement archives. Everything had been collected and for several days now they have been meticulously sifting through old files. An upstairs room is full of them. Eva’s compiled a list.
‘Missing, disappeared, unexplained, suspicious, some murdered, in remote places in the dead of winter. Not so short, this short list.’
‘Let’s start with the oldest.’
Each file requires one of the Swedes to read before verbally translating it to Ryan. Everyone is trying to find something that will link to Smith’s case, no matter how tenuous. Photographs are put upon the wall. More whiteboards are brought in and they try to put a jigsaw puzzle together. But it doesn’t work. The pieces are all wrong.
Ryan needs to narrow it down somehow. There are too many files, too many imaginary links. He looks at the heaps of files that are still unopened. They break for lunch.
Ryan suggests the hotel and he and Eva sit in the bar area eating expensive sandwiches.
‘They really make the best.’
‘Go to Norway, The Swedes call it Land of the Sandwich.’
‘Don’t you miss the food back home?’
‘Of course,’ she says, forlornly. Ryan changes subject.
‘Who’s the longest serving member of the police here?’
‘Olaf until he retired.’
Back in the station, he asks Eva to quiz Olaf about any old cases that had seemed unusual: missing people, accidents in remote places, perhaps with property or resort connections.
There’s a sudden exchange between Olaf and Sharky.
‘They both remember a case, more than twenty years ago, on the other side of the National Park. A property developer went missing, he was later found by rangers outside a small fishing cabin by a frozen lake, with no obvious cause of death.’
Sharky and Olaf stare at Ryan.
‘Which file,’ he asks, looking around at all the files. ‘And why the odd looks?’
‘It’s not here, last saw they saw of it was in a tiny police station, which closed down years ago...strange case, best forgot.’
A few minutes later, Eva is in Erik’s office. He’s unhappy.
‘My predecessor lost his job over that. These things run deep around here. It was one of only two cases that station ever had to deal with. The other was a case of missing reindeer. I suggest you familiarise yourself with that one, Eva.’
13.
The Quality Resort Breakfast Bar, 6.15.am 8th January.
Too early for breakfast, Ryan sips coffee and gazes through a nearby window. The night sky clearly shows the falling snow. His tranquil thoughts are interrupted by bright headlights and flashing hazards of a passing snow plough. Turning away from the glare, he looks across empty tables towards the hotel lobby and main entrance. Eva should be here by now; it’s not like her to be so late.
Meanwhile, down her lonely narrow road, Eva drives fast to make up time for her rendezvous with Ryan. Unusually, the snow plough had been late as all the unexpected snow made for lots of extra work. Her solitary house on an empty road is not municipal priority.
Her mind is on the case. Indulging Ryan’s far-fetched theories is risky and just might end her career. But what else can she do? Admit to failure? Erik had clearly warned her about his intentions if things went wrong, but the only way to hang on to Ryan is to let him loose, let him follow his nose.
Having been briefed by Olaf, she worries nothing good will come of opening up an old police post to pull a dusty file, if it’s still there, of yet another unsolved case. It had caused a lot of trouble in its day.
It was with apprehension that she had turned the starter key to pass the plough and drive the road to Ryan’s hotel.
Distracted by her thoughts, she fails to notice a large moose standing in the middle of the road, nostrils steaming in the cold night air. Frantically swerving to avoid collision, Eva rams the car into deep soft snow piled high along the edges of the road. Stopping with a shuddered thud, an airbag triggers, smothering her face in an expanding hissing cushion. On deflation, she peers through her side view window, glimpsing the dark shape of the moose disappearing down the road.
Stuck, Eva waits for the flashing hazards of the snow plough to come back up the road. Minutes later it starts to dig her out.
At 6.45.am Ryan drains his second cup of coffee. Picking up the heavy parka, he walks over to wait by the hotel reception. It’s pitch black and far too cold to wait outside. Last night Erik paid a visit, warning Ryan not to look too hard at the old unsolved case. It had caused much anger and resentment. Local Sami people claimed the casualty had raised the wrath of ancient forest spirits. The church was furious. There was uproar, with both sides defending faith and heritage. The provincial police, caught in the middle of this feud, along with a general lack of evidence, became embarrassed. Stockholm took control. As the cause of death was unknown and nothing obviously suspicious found, the case was quickly closed. Erik’s predecessor was up in arms. A day later, he lost his job.
A cover up, that would figure, Ryan mused, or maybe just incompetence. If the cases are somehow linked, he would be way out of his depth and politically his hands completely tied. But for now he has a theme: wild nature, property development and suspicious police incompetencies. At least it takes his mind off things at home.
Eva’s car pulls up with a buckled bonnet and a broken headlight. Putting on the parka, Ryan pulls the hood up tight. Instead of waiting in the car, Eva walks towards the hotel entrance. She’s slow, and Ryan pulls the door open. As freezing wind blasts him in the face, he sees that she is shaking.
She avoids eye contact and her fragile face tells Ryan not to be a dumbass and ask a stupid question. Concerned, he takes her arm and helps her to a nearby table. Unsure of what to do or say, he orders coffee and breakfast for them both.
Some minutes later after coffee has arrived, she tells him of the moose and being half buried in the snow. Badly shaken, she drove straight to the hotel. Ryan offers to take her to a hospital but she declines.
Picking at her breakfast, she imploringly looks him in the eye:
‘I don’t want to lose my job. I’m a refugee with no ties here in Sweden.’
Knowing that plea contains a warning aimed at him, Ryan’s gets the message loud and clear: if he messes up, he’ll be taken down. There can be no real investigation. It simply isn’t going to be allowed.
‘Can I at least stay and do my best? Nothing has to be official.’
Eva nods. Is that a smile Ryan sees, he’s not entirely sure.
14.
Reporting the damage to her car, they leave the hotel and hurry to the station.
Having lost time, Ryan starts his hire car as Eva picks up the key to the old police post from Erik in the office.
For his sake and for hers, Ryan drives slowly. These roads terrify him.
‘How’s Erik?’
‘Not happy.’
‘Is it a nice drive?’
‘It’s dark.’
What an idiot he must seem. Ryan doesn’t even laugh.
Soon after leaving Gallivare, Eva falls asleep and Ryan follows the sat-nav, cautiously looking out for moose.
On a small and empty icy road, the gloomy light of dawn begins to show. Ahead, surrounded by thick snow covered pine is the silhouette of the police post: a large black corrugated cabin half buried in the snow. No wonder it was closed down, Ryan surmises, there’s nothing out here.
Although the road has been recently ploughed, there’s only room for one car on the narrow carriageway. Ryan stops outside the post.
Eva had put the key on top of the dash and Ryan takes it. She’s still asleep. He softly clicks the car door shut. The snowy bank at the side of the road is more than three feet high and Ryan clambers up and over to sink thigh deep. As he pushes down with his hands to free his legs, his arms too sink down. He flounders, lies flat and tries to forge a path to the post’s front door. It takes a full five minutes and he half sits, half lies, panting, wondering if he’ll make the last ten feet. Turning, he looks back towards the car. Eva is staring at him. Embarrassed, he wonders for how long. The window of the car comes down and she tries to speak but starts to laugh instead, giggling at his predicament. Ryan doesn’t feel like laughing, everything so far has been a disaster, so much so that he feels he’ll end up covering up his own incompetence. But his seriousness doesn’t deter Eva. She gets out, shouting:
‘Every hire car has a shovel in the trunk.’
And she fetches it to start clearing a path to Ryan and the front door. On reaching him she hands over the shovel.
‘Team work, partner.’
In silence, he gets to it.
Clearing the steps and the area immediately in front of the door he looks at her. She’s smiling and he can’t help himself.
‘I love your smile.’
Looking down at the icy wooden veranda, he reaches in his pocket and hands over the key without catching her eye. Eva turns the lock. A dry musty air catches them by surprise.
‘We’ve opened a tomb.’
‘Then let’s not disturb the dead, as Erik said,’ Eva replies.
Ryan, taking a step inside, doesn’t know if that’s a joke or not. The lights don’t work and the shutters are all down. Entering the shadows, Eva turns on her torch.
The wind blows in cold air and Ryan pushes the door shut. In silence they stand still following the light of the torch. There’s not much left, most of the furniture has gone. Covered in dust and cobwebs, a large map of the area is on one wall. Below it is a simple metal filing cabinet. Eva goes straight to it, pulls open the draws and takes out just two files. Without saying a word, Eva closes the draws, walks over to the door, opens it and leaves. Ryan follows and Eva locks it and heads straight for the car.
Sitting in the car, Ryan warms up as Eva reads. It doesn’t take long and she turns to him.
‘There’s not much here, a photo of the cabin but not the victim, a poor sketch of a suspect that led nowhere, and a name of an unreliable witness who was later deemed mentally ill.’
‘And the other file?’
‘It’s an insurance policy.’ Eva throws that file on the back seat and hands the old case file over to Ryan. As he studies it, she turns her head, glancing at the back seat.
‘That’s it, no forensics?’
Eva shakes her head.
Ryan studies the old photo, and then looks at the sketch: a fierce looking unkempt man with long hair and a beard. He tries to remember something he had seen at the Smith site, but nothing comes.
Shaking his head:
‘Useless....who was this witness?’
Eva looks at the file again.
‘A name but no address, it seems.’
‘Someone really wanted this case shut down.’
‘Please Ryan, don’t...’
An open-back pickup truck brimming with cut logs stops in front of them. A bearded wild looking woodsman type stares at them through the windscreen.
‘Ask him about that name.’ Ryan points at the file. ‘Then I’ll back up.’
Eva gets out. The conversation is brief. As Ryan backs down the road, Eva speaks:
‘Past his wood yard is one house only. That’s where she lives.’
15.
As Ryan focuses on the dimly lit forest road, Eva eyes him. Had she heard him right outside the police post door?
They pass a roadside clearing full of ramshackle sheds and piled up logs. Fresh tyre tracks lead from a yard onto the road.
‘It must be soon,’ Ryan states, looking right and left.
But it’s another twenty minutes before the snow ploughed road ends in front of a crooked wooden house with a black metal chimney, smoke churning in the wind. Outside, on a cleared veranda sheltered from the wind, is a bench. Sitting on it is an old woman dressed in what looks like black rags, stroking a black cat. Her feet are bare.
‘She must be near frozen...mentally ill you say?’
Eva studies the file one more time.
‘Yes...and totally unreliable.’
Ryan switches off the engine. The woman is staring at them.
‘I have a bad feeling about this, Ryan.’
‘Let‘s make it quick then.’
Eva nods. From the car she had looked wizened; but now up close, she’s gnarly like the twisted bark of the old pines growing tall around the house.
Eva asks some questions. The woman and cat both stare at Ryan. The cat stands up in her lap, the dark fur raised on its back and neck. Ryan feels the need to leave but her deep gravelly voice keeps him rooted to the spot. She doesn’t take her eyes off him.
‘Her Swedish is poor, worse than mine.’
Eva shows the suspect sketch. The woman looks, speaks and points into the dark forest behind her house.
‘Twenty three years ago, she saw him following the victim to his fishing cabin...he had a large dog with him.’
Eva, struggling with the language, asks more questions.
‘He spoke to her.’
‘That’s not in the report. What’d he say?’
But the woman only laughs, her piecing shrill startling some birds that start squawking overhead.
Ryan and Eva exchange worried looks. Sensing some hysterical outburst, they turn and leave. The woman shouts, her words stabbing the harsh cold air. Ryan wastes no time and turns the car around. Neither of them dare look back.
Passing the wood yard, Ryan finally speaks.
‘She spooked the hell out of me,’ he jokes, letting out his nervous tension.
Turning to briefly glance at Eva, he sees her pensive face transfixed on the road in front.
‘What wrong? She’s just a batty old lady.’
‘She said...’
Eva turns and looks deadpan at Ryan.
‘...that he spoke to her, just one hour before we arrived.’
16.
At the station, Ryan studies the photos: Smith’s cabin and the twenty three year old black and white photo of the small fishing cabin by a frozen lake. Spotting something, he shows Eva, convincing her to call Lulea Forensics.
A while later, after Forensics has sent a new report, Eva and Ryan are in Erik’s office.
Erik doesn’t need convincing, it’s plain to see: both photographs show huge icicles hanging down the front of their respective cabins. But in each photo there’s an icicle missing, snapped off from where it left the roof. No one has doubt that both icicles had deliberately been broken off.
‘A big weapon, a meter I’d say and thicker than your arm, Eva.’
Eva agrees, passing over the forensic note. As Erik scan reads, he mumbles out the words:
‘Ice embedded in his wound, frozen cells before Smith’s actual death, etc, etc.’
He looks up, smiling.
‘Not proof of anything but at least we no longer look like imbeciles.’
Erik’s body language expresses ruffled excitement, making Eva wants to laugh but she still has more to say.
Hearing about the old lady irks Erik.
‘That mad Sami woman was nothing but trouble, we’ll all get fired. The old case is closed and stays closed. Do you hear me?’
Eva’s nod placates Erik and he states that Stockholm will be pleased; they’ll not be sending up a hard-nosed team.
Leaving the office, Eva whispers to Ryan:
‘You have something concrete now to tell your boss, hopefully this will last for months, and I...’
But she doesn’t finish, leaving Ryan wondering if she’s hoping for promotion. No chance of that for him. Suddenly, he wants a drink.
He invites her to the hotel; they could have a bite to eat and he a drink or two. She declines; there’s all the paperwork to do, she says. Ryan heads off alone, exiting through the big glass doors into darkness, bitter wind and snow. Eva watches him disappear across the road.
In his room, Ryan too has paperwork. Knowing Stockholm will send full reports to Inspector Mace’s superiors, he hurries through it: bullet points of his own excellence should keep that bastard off his back. He won’t bother with anymore phone calls; so long as Erik’s happy, there’s nothing Mace can do. Ryan heads downstairs to find a friend at the bottom of a glass and hatch a plan. He’s on his own agenda now.
Eva leaves the station at 8.pm. Having been given a new car, she sits with the engine running, studying herself in the rear view mirror. The long fraught day, starting with the car crash, shows in her drawn and tired face. Glassy eyed, she cautiously drives out the station car park towards home; but she’s unable to switch off her thoughts. Ryan had triumphed today, so much so that the office hadn’t stop talking about him. They had made a breakthrough: a probable murder weapon linking to another case. But that case is off limits, she had had her orders. What will Ryan do next? Intuitive and creative, he’s also unpredictable.
As the wipers take away the snow, Eva peers down the narrow icy road trying hard to get him out her head.
17.
The Quality Resort Breakfast Bar, 8.15.am 9th January.
Last night hadn’t gone to plan.
Instead of a solitary session of self medication, Ryan was spontaneously joined by Erik and a bunch of people from the station, most of whom he’d never seen before. They wanted to party. An absurdly premature party, Ryan thought: the case wasn’t anywhere near being solved and probably never would. However, it quickly transpired that he had unwittingly saved their jobs. As the Swedes hit the bottle, Ryan kept his drinking modest: no need to overdo it, he told himself, he was on full display.
With a clear head, Ryan now watches snow through the windows of the breakfast bar.
Things would start slow and late today. Erik and his drinking pals would be worse for wear, giving Ryan time and space to try and comprehend the secrets of this case.
He had missed Eva last night. But before thoughts of her start to blunt his focus, he leaves the hotel. He already has a plan of sorts.
Cold air jars him. Ryan gasps, hurrying to his hire car. In the police car park, he passes Eva’s damaged car. Seeing that the driver’s door is bent and misaligned, he stops. In the dark, Ryan tries the door. It squeaks open. Pulling the boot release catch, he moves to the rear of the car and removes a pair of snow shoes.
Minutes later on the edge of Gallivare, Ryan stops for gas. Filling up the car, he deliberates his plan. If he’s fast, he won’t be missed.
It’s not even a hunch, more a sense of curiosity that has him driving round the edges of the National Park. Although the old case is off limits, experience tells him the two cases are linked by something more than icicles, but if the Swedes find out he’s poking about, he’s sure to lose the job. They just won’t find out, he confidently thinks.
It’s light by the time he stops outside the old police post. Eva had forgotten to take the front door key back; it sits on his dashboard. Using the snow shoes, he’s soon at the door, turning the lock. The place still smells musty and feels oppressive. Wasting no time, Ryan uses the light from his mobile phone to illuminate the map. And there it is, an X that marks the cabin by a lake, somewhere behind the cackling Sami witch’s place. How far is that? The map’s hand drawn, nothing’s to scale, but it can’t be that far, he thinks. Who in their right mind would walk any distance in an arctic winter to go fishing?
Twenty minutes later he pulls up outside the Sami woman’s wooden house. She’s nowhere to be seen. Putting the snow shoes back on, he heads around the house. The wind is freezing and Ryan hopes that his journey will be quick. At the back of the house, she stands there, holding the cat. Still dressed in rags, she’s barefoot and her toes are grimy black. Ryan stops. Before he can frame a thought, her gaze and finger point to the forest. Not risking another skittish outburst, he follows her direction to the trees. According to the map, her direction seems right.
How can she be barefoot in the snow? But as she’s out of sight, she’s quickly out of mind.
Enveloped by tall trees, he moves as quickly as he can. Even with snow shoes it’s a slow and tiring plod; sinking and pulling up with every step. Ryan focuses on the task: if he pushes hard, he should be by the lake around midday. He hopes to find something useful there, and make a concrete link.
Stopping to catch his breath, he listens to the forest. Increasing gusts of wind disturb the silence and blow around the snow. Realising that snow’s been falling all day, he turns, looking back the way he came. His tracks are still there, but for how much longer? He forges on. Even with Eva’s husband’s gear, he feels cold; stopping is not an option now.
Tree trunks turn black and the bright snow underfoot begins to dull. Ryan looks at his watch: one thirty. Having lost track of time and fearful of losing light, he decides to turn back.
The forest suddenly feels menacing and Ryan feels the need to flee. His tracks are faint and filled with snow. In the fading light, they’re soon lost from view.
It must be this way, or is it over there? Lost, confused and, more urgently, in pain from cold, he desperately keeps on moving. Drawn to a steep bank, he scrambles up among the rocks and trees. There must be a view at the top, he thinks, but thinking’s getting hard. Everything’s becoming numb.
At the top of the bank, he stops, struggling for breath in the cold air. There is no view, only eerie silhouettes. He’s in a clearing and looks across to the other side. Is that a cabin or a shack? He’s not sure as the dark sky has given up the day. I need to be out of the wind, he mumbles to himself, and lurches forward, towards the other side. Soft snow gives way to hard ice. He’s on a lake and instinct tells him to skirt around the edge. Faster on ice than snow, he feels a surge of energy. Where the edge of the lake meets some trees, he pauses and looks hard at the dark shape: yes, it’s a small cabin, less than fifty meters away, he thinks. His mind’s going foggy and his hands seizing up, but the confirmed sight of shelter spurs him on. The hard ice beneath him turns mushy. Looking down, he sees dark swirling patches and hears a wretched crack. He’s on a running creek and the ice gives way.
Ryan’s down and under, surfacing with a gasping cry. Grasping at the icy crust he tries to pull himself up and out, but the ice breaks and he slips back down. Frozen, he hears the sound of bubbles and sees only black. Then the doom of silence comes.
18.
Gallivare, 10.40.am 9th January.
Driving to work gives space, time to think and ponder on events. Reflecting off the white road, the morning light is harsh. Eva puts on her sunglasses and listens to the radio. She smiles when she learns it’s minus forty one outside. Even her husband’s gear won’t cope with that temperature, especially as the wind now blows from the north east. That will keep Ryan indoors and out of trouble, although he’s probably still asleep, waking up to a thick head. Erik had texted her last night telling her to come in late: there was a party at the hotel, a celebration for the breakthrough in the case.
The endless excuses to celebrate the dark winter months, is something she had learned to accept. There was no breakthrough in the case, just a possibility that Smith was wacked over the head with an icicle. It could never be proved, she was sure of that.
The police station is near empty. Besides the Smith case, which is Eva’s only job in Gallivare, nothing much happens in the dead of winter: crime goes to sleep. She’s usually away, working in Kiruna or Lulea at this time of year. A drunk driver in an overturned car in a snow filled ditch or some high-spirited kids booting a football down an icy urban street scaring a bored pedestrian, is the extent of it round here.
Having completed all the necessary paperwork last night, she’s at a loss of what to do. There really is nothing to investigate, no leads to follow or questions to be asked. Smith’s finances are in order; even the Russian’s money seems to be legitimate. Maybe Ryan has a way forward, she’s sure he does: he seems desperate to string this out and not go home.
Ryan’s mobile doesn’t ring and Eva walks over to the hotel. On arriving she’s almost in shock from cold. Reception calls his room: no answer. Eva takes the lift to Ryan’s floor and door. She knocks three times before calling out his name.
Hurrying through the police car park, she notices her battered police car’s boot is half open. About to bang it shut, she sees an empty space: a pair of snow shoes is missing. And there she was, a little while ago imagining Gallivare as a winter crime free zone. They had been stolen. A present from her husband, the only useful thing he had ever given her, was gone. They were meant for Ryan; something hurts inside her.
Seething, she heads towards the main entrance, but stops. Ryan’s hire car is also gone. The tyre marks in the snow tells her it left not so long ago. She just knows Ryan took the shoes.
Erik arrives but takes no interest in Eva’s questions to where Ryan might have gone. She scowls: he’s always disinterested after a drinking session. But she does learn that Ryan left the party early, and sober; he must have had a morning plan, she thinks.
Wherever he is, there’s no mobile reception: the phone still won’t ring. And, if he wants daylight, he’d be there by now. Smith’s cabin or the old police post – where else does Ryan know? Smith’s has no mobile reception but the old post must have some. Eva opts for Smith’s cabin and drives to pick up gas. The cashier remembers Ryan, the only Englishman in town. She points to a newspaper on the counter. The headline reads: ‘The Icicle Murder’. That’s just plain wrong, there’s no proof and who leaked it to the press anyway? The cashier points towards the main road out of town. That’s not the way to Smith’s cabin. Eva ruffles through her pockets. Where’s the key? Had she left the key in Ryan’s car?
Heading for the old police post, she turns on the car’s blue lights. This has started to feel wrong.
Eva pulls up outside the old post. Although it’s been snowing most of the day, she sees the vague outline of snow shoe tracks leading from the road up to the front door. So he’s been here, she deduces. What for? Then it clicks: the map, the cabin by the lake. What’s he going to find there after twenty three frozen winters?
The road is full of snow and it takes more than half an hour to reach the house; the plough won’t be back ‘til the morning. She parks behind Ryan’s car. It’s one thirty: she’s almost lost the light.
Even in full winter attire, Eva feels the cold. She must find Ryan: he won’t last long out there. She sees his tracks disappearing around the house. Full of snow, they’re almost gone. Putting on her own snow shoes, she starts to follow what’s left to see. A small gust of wind blows spindrift in her eyes and nose. She stops, sneezes and wipes away the snow to see the old woman standing in her way speaking a language Eva doesn’t know. She’s pointing to the tracks. Inside each of Ryan’s large prints are others: a bare human footprint and what looks like a large dog. Eva suddenly feels terrified.
The woman then speaks in broken Swedish:
‘There’s nothing you can do, the Nightmare will choose.’
Before she faints, Eva sits down on the veranda bench. She feels the cat’s tail swish across her face.
When she wakes, it’s dark. Numb with cold, she drags herself off the bench. The front door is wide open. Stopping in the opening, she leans against the frame. Warmth from the wood burner draws her inside. The door slams shut behind her. The only light is from the wood burning stove. As Eva adjusts her eyes, the old lady commands her to sit. There are no chairs, just large cushions on the bare wood floor. Sitting down next to the old woman, Eva notices her black feet and smell like old milk mixed with fresh cut hay. Not speaking, Eva gazes through the burner glass, mesmerised by flames. She’s so cold that it takes some time before she can take off her gloves and coat. Her mobile falls out. The signal is strong and she calls Erik.
‘It’s two o’clock in the morning Eva.’
‘What, oh...’
Ryan would be dead by now.
Explaining the situation, she keeps any reference of the Sami woman to a minimum. Erik doesn’t have much hope as the temperature is near minus forty five in Gallivare. It must be lower in the forest. A search and rescue team would be there in the morning, but morning still means darkness. Ryan might have found an old cabin to take shelter, but Eva knows he’s only trying to be nice.
On the boat to Baku as they fled Iran, Eva’s mother had sung poetry: beautiful words that wove mysterious tales. Eva had laughed, enjoying the distraction, especially when told that she would meet a man in a foreign land who would later fall into the freezing waters of a winter nightmare. Then, listening to that melody helped take away bad thoughts. Now, it’s just plain frightening.
19.
The Wooden House, 10.15.am 10th January.
Cold, Eva wakes. The fire’s out and the room full of sombre shadows. It must be near ten o’clock, she thinks. Breathing in, a weight on her chest feels uncomfortable. The cat sits staring at her before stretching out and scratching at her woollen jumper. Standing, it arches, turns around and displays herself right in Eva’s face. Charming, Eva frowns, as the cat jumps down.
Arctic wind bites as she heads towards an outhouse she’d noticed by her car. Having left her coat and gloves, she’s tight and pained by the time she’s returning to the house. The old woman sits on the bench, still bare foot in rags. Eva hurries past and goes straight to the stove, opening the door to blow any embers that might be left. A glow of red and Eva stokes the fire.
The old woman is behind her offering a steaming bowl of food. In the other hand is a mug. Eva takes them and sits down by the fire. She can barely see in the gloomy light and doesn’t understand the food she eats: a stew made of things unknown and a drink that tastes resentful.
The woman just stands and stares. Eva stares back while eating and drinking alien cuisine. She looks like a fairy tale witch. Superstition is not something Eva wants or needs; back home it meant believing in things you couldn’t understand. She had her facts: Ryan had gone looking for a cabin by a lake to get some clues to connect to Smith’s murder case. The old woman just lives here with a cat and has remarkably tough feet. That’s all. Nightmares are just things that disturb your sleep, and she had slept very well last night.
Where’s Ryan? As Eva feels the rise of fear, the woman’s raspy voice says things Eva doesn’t understand. The moment is broken by a helicopter passing overhead, and then by someone knocking at the door.
‘Sorry we’re late, got stuck and had to call the snow plough. Only this woman and her grandson’s wood yard ever use this road.’
Erik explains that they had to break down the police post door. Olaf had confirmed that the lake Ryan had headed for was indeed the old murder site. But it’s a day’s walk without the snow; Ryan couldn’t have covered even a third of the distance. Police skiers would make their way from here while others would be dropped by helicopter at the lake.
‘Has she said anything?’
‘I can’t understand her.’
‘It’s a Sami language.’
Erik talks to the old woman who says a few words back.
‘Twenty three year old trouble...she’s barking mad.’
Erik and a dozen police officers ski into the shadows of the forest. A van with two officers sits outside the house co-ordinating the search. Eva spends her time between the van, her car to listen to the radio and the house where she warms up and drinks tea the colour of black tar.
It’s late by the time everyone returns. They had found no trace of Ryan. More men will come tomorrow to broaden the search area, Erik says, before he and everybody heads off home.
Feeling no need to ask permission, Eva stays.
It’s past midnight. Not having exchanged a word, the two women stare at the fire. Headlights illuminate the room, giving Eva hope that a rescue party has returned. On hearing noises, bangs and thumps, she heads outside with her coat and gloves.
There’s no police search and rescue team, just a white pickup truck being unloaded of cut logs. The old woman’s grandson walks past Eva without a glance. He’s carrying two shopping bags of food. Eva stands at the open door staring in. The two are in conversation. He must speak Swedish, Eva thinks, blurting out a question:
‘Where’s Ryan?’
‘At the bottom of the lake,’ he replies.
‘But there was no trace of him anywhere around the lake.’
Eva knows she sounds desperate.
They both stare at her. The sound of spitting wood from the fire fills up the room. She feels like screaming.
‘Wrong lake.’ Looking out the window, he points: ‘It’s dangerous, full of fast creeks and tiny lakes, that’s where he went down.’
Not saying another word, he leaves. Eva hears the pickup start, reverse and turn before driving away.
How can he know Ryan broke through the ice? That’s not possible. Back arched and fur on end, the cat is hissing at her. She turns and looks at the old woman who puts a finger to her lips. Woefully resigned and not wanting to hear things she doesn’t understand, Eva stays quiet.
20.
The Lake, 11.am 11th January.
The lake is completely covered in snow, except for one small area of thick translucent ice: a self-evident and recent hole. Through it, the ominous murk of deep water shows.
Eva had pointed the way to Erik and his team. It turned out to be only five hundred metres from the old woman’s house. She hadn’t dared tell what the grandson said; she kept things simple and told a lie, saying the old woman had seen Ryan heading off that way.
The team is large. At least twenty five people had skied ahead of Eva. She followed in her snow shoes. Arriving, she saw the team spread out along the lakeside, all focused on one spot: the hole.
No one speaks. In the hush, she hears the wind swishing through the swaying trees. Battling the cold and holding back tears, Eva can’t imagine a scene more solemn. It’s obvious what had happened.
No one really knows what’s next: divers in the lake perhaps? Eva alone knows what the grandson said, but all the others only guess. Is Ryan really at the bottom of the lake? Unsure of what to think or do, people start to look around. Someone points and shouts. Across the lake, leaning against the cabin door, is a huge icicle shaped like a bent finger. Some distance from the door, between two large hanging icicles, is a gaping space: an icicle is missing. The ice finger had been snapped off and deliberately placed against the door. Looking from the ice finger to the black hole in the lake, Eva spots a trail of disturbed snow. Something had been dragged from the lake to the cabin’s front door.
21.
The Lake, 3.15.pm 9th January.
Retching and disgorging water full of icy lumps, Ryan flounders in the snow. Foggy and disorientated, he recalls empty darkness before rough hands yanked him to the surface. Someone had then slung him to the ground where he now lies.
As cold spikes every fibre in his body, he starts to uncontrollably shake.
Cabin by the Lake, 6.am 10th January.
Orange shadows flicker, something cracks and fizzes. An oppressive presence fills his space.
It’s the growl that rekindles his senses. Ryan gulps for air, a huge inward gasp. Throwing off a blanket, he bolts upright in a state of panic. Breathing hard, he takes in his surroundings. Ignoring the wood burner and his clothes hanging on a lean-to branch, it’s the massive dog, bearing teeth, that has his attention. A huge man, strong and powerful, stands next to the dog holding a piece of ice. More than a metre long and bent like a crooked finger, it’s pointing straight at Ryan. In a dream like state, he tries to scream but nothing comes out. The man is speaking but Ryan can’t hear him. Nothing makes sense. Then the dog lurches forward and bites Ryan on the hand.
The pain is real, the blood feels warm, oozing and dripping on the blanket. Forced to listen, Ryan can’t understand a word. A rhythm and a rhyme keep turning round and round until he recognises the man’s face as the suspect from the old case. Seemingly satisfied, the man stops speaking and leaves the cabin with the dog. Intense cold blasting through the open door has Ryan down on the hard board bench, pulling the scratchy blanket over his head.
The cabin rocks as the door bangs shut and Ryan shivers into sleep.
22.
The Lake, 11.15.am 11th January.
There’s a dilemma. No one wants to cross the ice. Having seen the dreadful hole where the creek flows into the lake, the team don’t want to risk the hundred metre crossing. The ice could be one metre thick or a mere centimetre; no one knows. The team, apprehensive, opt to skirt around the lake’s long perimeter to get to the cabin.
They hit a snag: dropping out the lake into the forest is another creek, full of cracked and broken ice.
The Lake, 12.45.pm 11th January.
Eva stands shivering, her hood tied tight against the wind. It had seemed an age waiting for a chainsaw to be fetched from a vehicle parked by the old woman’s wooden house. She now feels irritable, watching as a makeshift bridge is cut from nearby trees and laid across the creek.
It’s tough keeping up with the skiers, but for some unknown reason Erik, at the lead, takes it slow. What’s wrong with him? Eva fumes. He’s wasting precious time.
Erik arrives at the cabin. Instead of forcing the door open, he starts taking photos with his phone. Furious, Eva barges past the police team and demands to know why he’s not pushing at the door.
‘I’ve never seen one this big,’ he says, pointing at the finger.
‘What..?’
How many has he seen? She eyes the grotesque weapon, its frozen crooked joint set in a ghastly smile. Erik can’t fool Eva. She sees that he’s scared stiff, delaying finding out what lies behind the door.
‘Ryan,’ she yells, before banging the wooden door with her clenched fists. The door swings open and the ice finger falls, breaking clean in two.
Cold air quickly fills the cabin. Half conscious, Ryan hears the yell, thump and cracking sound of ice. Under darkness of the covers, he curls into a ball. Not that dog and man again, he silently pleads.
The cabin’s dark and Eva hovers in the doorway adjusting to the light. Recognising her husband’s parka hanging on a branch, she says his name again, quietly this time.
He knows that word, it sounds familiar and the soft voice not foreboding. He tries to speak, to say that he is here, but nothing seems to work.
Eva pulls the blanket back. Facing her, eyes shut and curled up, she wonders if he’s dead: ashen skin, cold to touch and a hand crusted in dry blood. As she kneels to see if there is any life, Erik enters, blocking out the light.
Eva turns and looks back at Erik. He moves into the cabin. On seeing Ryan’s hand, the deep holes of the dog’s incisors clearly visible, proclaims:
‘He’d be better off dead at the bottom of the lake.’
Horrified and perplexed, Eva is transfixed.
‘I told you not to mess. You’ve no idea...’
Without hesitation, Eva picks up half the ice finger lying on the floor. In one fast ferocious move, she’s on her feet smashing it into Erik’s face. With a crack, the finger shatters into flying shards of ice. Erik groans and stumbles back.
Back home, she’d hurt a man like this before: he’d pushed his luck too far.
Confused and concerned, Olaf and some men rush in. Erik barks an order and then leaves the cabin, nursing a bloody wound across his cheek.
She hears Erik tell the team that Ryan must have pulled himself out the icy water, valiantly crawling fifty freezing metres to the cabin; a remarkable feat in these conditions. That doesn’t explain the ice finger or Erik’s strange behaviour, Eva rages. No evidence has been collected or other ideas explored. Would she ever get to the bottom of this?
A medic arrives. A few minutes later, Ryan is on a stretcher, being carefully carried back towards the wooden house.
Aware of movement and his throbbing hand, he opens his eyes. Squinting in the harsh light, he briefly sees the lake. Recalling the taste of its peaty water in his mouth and throat, he starts to gag and shuts his eyes to make it stop. He hears a language he doesn’t know and feels something softly touch his head. Then he feels a sharp pain in his arm.
The man and dog: this is all he remembers. Helpless, he falls back to oblivion.
When she knows he’s alive, she doesn’t show emotion. Stay strong, she tells herself, this is far from over: unprovoked, she had violently attacked her boss. She would have to deal with that later; for now, she needs to stick with Ryan. He’s not safe, she feels.
23.
The Wooden House, 2.45.pm 11th January.
In the deep gloom of arctic twilight, they enter the clearing by the house. An ambulance had been called from the cabin, and Eva now sees faint blue flashing lights on the dark horizon. The saline drip in Ryan’s arm had made the journey through the dusky forest slow and difficult. The team are packing up. It’s a large crowd, gear is everywhere and their vehicles, jammed together down the road, are making space for the ambulance to pass.
Eva spots Erik talking to the old woman and her grandson. He’s speaking Sami, she realises: of course he is – he is Sami! How could she be such a knucklehead? A large makeshift lint plaster covers one of his cheeks. Even in the dimness, she sees the dark spread of blood.
Although she knows she will probably lose her job, she won’t back down and plead forgiveness. Ryan would be better dead than found alive, he’d said. What’s wrong with that man and what’s he hiding? Still enraged, she marches over, confronting Erik.
‘What aren’t you telling me?’
Erik stares but doesn’t answer back. His frightened face tells Eva that he doesn’t know what’s going on. He might know facts, but not the truth. Realising this puzzle won’t be solved by asking questions, she turns away to watch the ambulance arrive. As the door opens and Ryan placed inside, his wounded hand clearly shows.
‘Nightmare,’ the old woman gasps.
‘What nightmare? Eva seethes.
The old woman lets out a deep raw cry, forcing Eva to hurry to the ambulance. Once inside, the closing door shuts the madness out.
24.
Kiruna Hospital, 11.00.am 15th January.
For three days now Eva’s been visiting Ryan in his room. Each morning and afternoon she tells him things about her life back home, and other things she wouldn’t dare if he were wide awake. Not regaining consciousness since briefly waking at the lake, she wonders if he ever will. Dehydrated and hypothermic, he’d been in a state of total shock. Considering the lethal low temperature, icy water of the lake and length of time spent inside a freezing cabin, it’s a miracle he’d survived, the doctor said.
For the first two days, Erik had phoned twice a day. Initially demanding her return to Gallivare, she’d refused. He hadn’t asked again and never mentioned the assault. Relieved, she’d then been foolish, asking awkward questions about the case. ‘Call me if he wakes,’ was all he said.
Eva had booked in at the Scandic Ferrum Hotel, a short walk from the hospital. She’d paid with Ryan’s Swedish expense account. Angry, with scant regard for protocol, she’d even bought some new clothes. Right now, there’s no chance of going back to Gallivare: it’s feels risky, something’s very wrong.
The doctor had told her that, although Ryan may not seem conscious, his hearing may still function: any words of comfort might help him wake up. Sitting across the room, she’s telling tales from Iran. Ryan stirs, a slight movement of his head. Watchful, Eva keeps on talking. Making soft noises, he breathes out with a sigh. Instead of calling for a nurse, she calls his name.
That word again, is that me? It is me, and who’s that voice. Ryan opens his eyes and stares blankly across the room.
‘Ryan, it’s Eva. I’m here.’
He knows that name. Almost inaudible, he answers back:
‘Eva?’
She leaves to fetch a nurse.
Barred from the room as two doctors and a nurse attend Ryan, she calls Erik. He’ll be there in two hours; he’ll meet her at the hotel. Peering through glass at the movement in the room, she could do without a fraught and potentially explosive meeting with her boss right now.
Allowed back, she’s self conscious. What if he heard all those things she’d said? He’s very much awake and she sits close to him. For a short while, they don’t speak.
The words the man had spoken in the cabin keep going round and round. As their vibration slowly starts to settle, Ryan tells his story. It’s brief, there’s not much he can remember.
‘He was the same man in the photo-fit, hadn’t aged a day.’
She stares out the window. Looking back at Ryan, hoping for a reasoned explanation, he’s fallen asleep. This case is now ineffable, she fears.
25.
Scandic Ferrum Hotel Lobby, 1.00.pm 14th January.
When Eva arrives, Erik’s sitting on a sofa near the fire. Finishing a large glass of beer, he doesn’t bother greeting her. He must have put his blue lights on to get here this fast, she derives. Not wanting to look him directly in the face, she stands watching the amber liquid drain from his glass. She listens to his gulps as a few drips of beer run down his chin, dropping onto the wooden table top. He no longer has a beard but she still doesn’t dare look him in the face.
‘Want to eat?’
Eva nods. Badly needing food, she sits down opposite and studies the menu.
‘I’ll put it on expenses along with everything else, won’t be questioned; be assured of that.’
She knows he’s looking directly at her but she still can’t meet his gaze.
That’s not like Erik, he’s a stickler for detail: he’s got something fishy up his sleeve, she’s sure of that. What the hell is coming next? As Erik orders food and another beer, she finds the courage to look directly at his face. The plaster’s new but still covers half his face. Without a beard, he looks formidable, young and strong and not the man she’s used to seeing at the office every day. Above his cheekbone near his temple, Eva uncomfortably views the knotted end of stitching protruding from the plaster.
Feeling less on edge, she starts to settle. Sensing that, Erik takes a file from his case.
Reading out a lengthy report, he doesn’t finish until the food arrives.
For the first time, Eva meets his gaze. Perplexed, she tries to comprehend what she’s just heard.
‘Ryan chased a suspect through the woods before falling through the ice?’
‘We have a suspect, although he’s now twenty three years older, and a possible murder weapon we think was used in both cases.’
‘The Ice Finger?’
‘Just like the one that broke off and whacked me in the face as I opened the cabin door.’
Now she knows he’s really lying.
‘I’ve recommended you for promotion and a medal. Ryan would have died without your vigilance.’
The bastard wanted Ryan dead and now he’s trying to buy me off. What will Ryan think?’
Eva tries to tell Ryan’s story but Erik shows no interest; in fact, he cuts in as she speaks, causing Eva to erupt:
‘God damn you, you wanted him dead and have a report full of fabrication and downright lies!’
Unfazed, Erik puts his hands up, palms out, and shrugs, as if to say: okay, I’ll listen if I must.
Eva knows he’s heard the words but couldn’t give a darn.
‘Hallucinations, quite common in these extreme survival cases...this is the report Eva, Ryan’s report. He can sign it later. ’
Unable to fathom the confounding mysteries of the case, she says no more.
26.
Kiruna Hospital, 3.00.pm 14th January.
Ryan is sitting up in bed looking at the two of them sitting across the room. There’s a frosty silence, Ryan notices. Erik reads the report aloud and then shows Ryan a sketch of an older man, not recognisable at all.
‘This is your photo-fit description.’
About to say he hadn’t done photo-fit and besides, the man he’d seen looked exactly the same as in the original sketch, Erik continues:
‘Inspector Mace is mighty pleased with you, spoke to him myself. There might be a promotion, rural Shropshire.’
Ryan almost laughs but he’s feeling too strange for that.
‘Chasing lost sheep, you mean.’
‘I’ve been speaking to my boss. A lot of foreign money laundering is buying up resorts, paying off corrupt local officials. It’s getting too much...a nightmare job. We could do with a man like you.’
Ryan doesn’t say a word. Eva knows he’s trying to buy Ryan off too.
‘We could put you on salary, paperwork will take some time, three months or so, you could both do with a holiday.’
‘He’ll take it.’
Eva is up out of her seat, energised, and then Erik has the report in front of Ryan, handing over a pen for him to sign.
He just signs, knowing he has no life at home and the pack of lies written in the report is how it’s got to be.
Ryan’s hand itches.
‘What happened to me?
But Erik’s already leaving the room. Pausing, he turns:
‘It’s all in the report, you said it yourself.’
The door clicks shut and Eva is immediately up and over Ryan.
‘I’m going to Baku, come with me.’
Her eyes are shining. He feels changed but a small part of him remains the same, the old Ryan. It’s that part which speaks:
‘Now you’ve got me spooked.’
C. C. Kimmel is a writer and musician living in Phoenix, AZ, USA with his wife and four kids. He has been published in fat cat magazine and hosts the Lightcatchers Podcast, a podcast where he reads his original children’s stories. He is currently revising a novel manuscript and trying to remember where he placed his keys. |
My Last Confession
Once you read this, I will no longer exist. The molecules that once formed my body will be dispersed through the vast expanse of space and the space ship that brought me to my death will be vaporized.
I do not expect you to understand, nor do I expect you to forgive me. I hoped that redemption would be possible for me, that I could take my worst moment and turn it into a life of good. But there is no redemption apart from confession, and I am, quite frankly, tired of paying for my own salvation.
There is no way you will understand, but I would at least like the opportunity to explain. I want to confess in my death what I never could in my life, and hope that somewhere in the depths of the nothingness of space, mercy can be found for my wandering soul.
What follow is a story many of you have heard and you will wonder why I’m revisiting this so many years later. It is a story told every year at this time in commemoration of the lost souls of Shuttle 327A. But, in truth, the story you hear every year is only a half truth, and it is for the missing half of this truth I have come to the conclusion that I have no option but to end my own life and search for forgiveness in the life beyond. I know I don’t deserve the forgiveness of this universe, but the universe is vast and I’ll spend eternity searching for it.
#
It was 32 years ago. Grand Central Station was busier than usual. I remember that. Maybe it was a holiday that I’d forgotten about. At that time, it seemed every week had some type of holiday, something to remember or anticipate, some commemoration of sorts. I, honestly, couldn’t keep track. Even now as I write this so many years later, I can’t remember, nor do I really care. There were a lot of parents putting commuter suits on their kids, checking the calibration tanks to make sure their re-entry into Martian atmosphere was smooth. More than usual. I do remember that.
I set my briefcase down on the smooth, browning tile and rested on the bench while I waited for my shuttle. I could see the blue cloudless sky through the upper windows and the hints of red and purple in the corner of the sky as the earth turned away from the sun. Despite all the work us developers did to make Mars feel the same as earth, there were just some things we couldn’t replicate.
The sun reached the point where the beams of light sprayed across the atrium and I checked my watch. When I looked up I noticed a husband and wife looking over at me, pointing me out to their five year old son. As they made their way to me, I practiced my smile.
“I’m sorry, sir, but are you Scott Enrick?”
“I am.”
“Son, this is the man who designed the Martian Community, this is the man who made Enricktown.”
The boy had dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes that widened as he heard his father tell him who I was.
“What’s your name?” I said to the boy.
“It’s Scott, just like you.” The boy said, giggling slightly as he retreated back to resting at the base of his mother’s dress, looking up at both of them and then back to me.
“Well, that’s an excellent name. Would you like a special badge made only for Scott’s like you and me?” The boy Scott shook his head up and down with his eyes widening even more. The rays of light coming through the windows back lit him and his family, giving him an angelic glow as I reached into my bag to grab the set of space shuttle badges I kept for just such occasions.
Scott’s mother bent down behind her son, placing her arms on his small shoulders and whispered, “What do you say, Scott?”
“Thank you!” The boy said as he became caught up in another world staring at his treasure, turning to ask his mother to pin it on his shirt.
“We really appreciate it Dr. Enrick. We moved to Enricktown after losing our home upstate. The water, you know? Well, anyway, we’re very thankful that you allocated so much space for people with, you know, different economics.”
“Well certainly, I’m glad you were able to find a home there and sorry for the loss of your home here. I was just in a meeting discussing the problem of water here and hopefully we’re nearing a solution.”
I looked at my watch again, trying to signal an end to our conversation, which he understood and thanked me and walked away, their son staring endlessly at the badge pinned on his shirt.
The family faded behind the light and I reached into my bag for my commuter suit, putting it on with pride, glad to be seen with all the other commuters. I tried to make it a habit back then to take the public commuter ship back to Mars as often as my schedule allowed. I was proud of it, proud of all of it. And, frankly, it was good to be seen like that for my upcoming congressional bid, the first of it’s kind from the Martian Colony.
Down the large corridor I could see people, all in the gray commuter suits, walking towards the shuttle, so I picked up my briefcase, grabbed my mask and helmet, checked my watch one more time and walked along with the crowd, smiling at the whispering crowds as I passed.
#
When I saw the red light in the corner of the shuttle switch to green, I reached to loosen my mask and helmet. The mask was hooked into the transitional pressurization of the shuttle that helped everyone pass through the shifts of pressure moving through the atmosphere, as well as provided healthy air levels as the cabin adjusted.
Out the window I could see the serene greens and blues and white of earth growing smaller behind me and I had the same thought I always had as I left earth, that it looked beautiful even in it’s dying. The glass like quality of my native planet looked eternal as we raced through space. Everything seems eternal in the void. That’s true even today. But the earth was dying. The water, infected like septic blood, began in the country and was slowly moving into the cities. The earth still had some time, and some of us were hopeful to find something to turn the tide, but, to me, it’s death was inevitable and the only way to not die with it was to expand beyond it.
I was the first astronaut and scientist to discover that the chemical makeup of the Martian atmosphere allowed us to make synthetic water. It was actually an accident, which I didn’t share with anyone afterwards, but it happened nonetheless, and at the time of this event, we were ten years into the Martian Colony.
Actually, of all the technical advancements that made it possible, I was most proud of the commuter ships. With the exception of the first two prototypes, they were indestructible and without incident. I knew they needed to be seen as overly safe to convince most people to step into them, so we over engineered them to be fool proof. Of course, we gave people the illusion of safety measures by placing seat belts on the seat, emergency exit lights along the ceiling, the usual illusion of safety things. We even placed an escape pod on the bottom of the ship’s hull, separated by a single hatch. The escape pod could only hold 4 of the 150 commuters on the shuttle, which surprisingly didn’t seem to bother people.
They just wanted to know it was there just in case, and, like the safety measures in airplanes, it helped to calm the nerves of those who entered into a device that would either leave you unharmed or completely dead, never just injured.
I took out my device and glanced down at the hatch, a few yards from my seat and smiled at the strangeness of the human psyche. Outside, the sky was vast and dark, but also brighter than any night sky seen on earth. In the distance I could see the moon, like a small island far off the coast, and knew we were only a few hours away from touching down on the Hellas Basin, so instead of following up on some of the comments made in the meeting back in New York, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
#
At first I thought I was dreaming, one of those dreams where the content is vague and forgettable, but the sensation it leaves you with is palpable. It was a rumble, a shake that moved through the shuttle, jarring everyone from their preoccupations. The kids crept slightly closer to their parents as the adults looked around, out the windows, and at each other to see if everyone felt the same shake.
I wasn’t dreaming. As we all later learned from the diagnostic transmissions from the shuttle, something did happen. A tiny hose connected to a thruster on the port side of the shuttle disconnected, causing a build up of pressure in the tertiary thruster, which caused a mini explosion and sent a rumble through the ship. None of us knew this at the time, nor what it would mean over the next hour. All we knew was that we felt something we’d never felt after ten years of commuting back and forth, and it awakened a deep fear in all of us, one that was only buried under the guise of hubris.
As I looked at the other passengers, I noticed the family I met in Grand Central Station a few rows down. The boy, Scott, clutched his mother’s hand and stared at the shuttle pin I gave him. I nodded at his father a reassuring nod.
Apart from the first shake that went through the shuttle, nothing else happened for a few minutes, but the fear remained. I saw this as a great opportunity to exercise some of my calm, cool leadership under pressure. So I stood up and addressed the rest of the ship.
“Hello, hello, everyone. My name is Scott Enrick.” I paused to let it sink in. “I know that you all might be a little uneasy after feeling a bit of ‘turbulence’.” I laughed a little at the absurd thought of turbulence in space. “I assure you, I oversaw the design of these ships and am fully confident that we just scraped by some space particles that caused a slight disruption and nothing more. These ships are over engineered to be indestructible and their autopilot and automation systems are works of perfection. We’ll be landing in Mars in no time.”
I could see people exhale and begin to smile. Some looked back out the window, while others returned to reading or sleeping or streaming whatever show they were watching before and I sat back down, satisfied. I glanced over at the boy Scott, his blue eyes glued on mine and I saluted him. He saluted back and went back to staring at his shuttle pin.
Just as I grabbed my strap to click it in, a second explosion happened, this time on the starboard side of the ship, which shot me out of my chair into the row across from me.
#
Up to this point, the story I am sharing now is the story that’s been known my whole life and is true. I’ve added a few more details in this account, but the basic story is the same. The rest of the story as known to the population is how, despite repeated attempts of refusal and even physical fighting, the ship decided my life was too valuable to lose and they hoisted me kicking and screaming through the hatch, into the escape pod, just in time before the whole ship blew up.
This is the story that became the foundational narrative for my bid for congress, my eventual bid for president, and the story that put me in the position I find myself now. It is the story I claimed drove my humanitarian ventures. I told everyone that my life was indebted to the belief and the sacrifice given to me by the brave men and women aboard Shuttle 327A.
But, unfortunately, the story I told after this point was a lie. And I need to now tell the truth.
#
After I was launched into the row across from me, a panic set in. I was panicked. In fact, I was more panicked than anyone. I knew that what was happening couldn’t be happening, that there’s no way a shuttle, this far into it’s existence could suddenly have a malfunction only seen in early prototypes. I was more panicked because I knew what space would do to us if it ever got us.
By this time, the lights dimmed and red flashing lights blinked along the ceiling of the shuttle and a robotic female voice came over the intercom telling everyone to remain calm, stay in their seat, and put their masks back on.
Most of the shuttle did just that and sat wide eyed as the ship began to veer downward, off course and hum. I knew the masks made no difference so instead I stood up and addressed the rest of the shuttle.
“I’m in disbelief and can’t believe I’m even saying this, but I believe we might be in a bit of trouble. Fortunately, there are a series of countermeasures that will take place before anything dire happens, and I am confident, despite the apparent problems that we will land in Mars and sleep soundly, and gratefully, in our own beds tonight.”
I paused to make sure I had their attention. There was an unusual quiet, a stillness that hung in the synthetic air as the shuttle continued to turn downward into the abyss beyond. I glanced down at the the hatch leading to the escape pod before continuing.
“We need to remain calm and stay in our seats with our masks on as much as we can and allow the shuttle to correct itself. I believe there have been a few issues with some of the thrusters, but fortunately the shuttle was built with more than it needed, so it will be easily fixed when we land on Mars.”
Another man, about twenty feet away from where I was standing, stood up. He was an older man whose grey hair had almost completely taken over his dark brown hair. “Excuse me, Dr. Enrick, I hate to be the one that asks this, but what if this ship doesn’t make it. Is there a way for us to escape?” The man’s eyes looked at the Hatch, followed by the eyes of the rest of the shuttle.
A woman, mid-thirties, stood up behind me. “Yeah, you made this thing, surely you know what to do if we had to escape.”
Everyone was looking to me again and I proceeded cautiously to explain the thinking behind the escape pod.
The old man spoke up again, “You mean to tell us that out of the hundred or so people aboard this shuttle, only four of us could possibly escape? You mean to tell us that for all the over engineering you claim, you didn’t over engineer the back up plan if this failed?”
I tried to smile. “I understand your concern. And yes, when put that way it does seem, um, negligent,” I regretted using that word then, “but if we put enough escape pods on the shuttle for everyone, it couldn’t have flown properly. And besides, these things won’t break. They may have an issue here and there, but there is no way that they would just break apart in space. So please, let’s all calm down, take a seat and just wait for the ship to correct itself.”
Another explosion occurred, making the ship drop suddenly, causing me to fly up to the ceiling, cut my head, and drop back to the floor.
I know it shouldn’t have been my first thought, but I was pleased with how real the artificial gravity worked on the shuttle. Through the window I could see that we were now spinning, and though the cabin pressure helped us feel stable, I could still feel my stomach tighten with every turn.
As I stood up, I caught the eye of the young boy with blue eyes, who was now sitting on his mother’s lap clutching her arm. His eyes looked like the glass earth we left behind and I felt my stomach tighten for a different reason. The blood dripped down the side of my face as I spoke again.
“Okay, I still believe that this shuttle, despite the three malfunctions we just experienced, will land safely on Mars. Whether its the ship itself or the ships they are sending right now to get us, since we’re not far from the Helas Basin and they surely would have seen the indicator lights go off on their monitors. I do not want you to be afraid.”
At this point, many were crying. If they were commuting with someone, they were holding each other. I’m sure even some strangers felt it necessary to huddle close to feel the humanity of touch in the midst of the overwhelming fear. The family of the boy was huddled together and I could see the fear in the eyes of the mother and father.
“One possibility, in the off chance that our communication transmissions were damaged in the, um, malfunction, is that I use the escape pod, with maybe a few others, to go and get help at the Martian station.”
The silence grew thicker.
The woman behind me, the one who had already stood up and asked about the escape pods yelled out. “Why should you be the one to escape? Why not me? Why not any of us?”
I could see the fear turn to anger in the eyes of many of the commuters and I tried to calm them, assure them. “Oh no, that is not my intention. I am not trying to escape and leave you behind.” It was what I was attempting, but I didn’t want them to know that. “I am merely suggesting that we send a rescue team to Mars to help them locate us and since I have the most knowledge of the shuttle and how space travel works, it only makes sense that I’m the one sent to get them.”
I looked again at the hatch. It was only ten yards away from me, a few steps, a strong twist and a leap. I could feel us spinning faster and noticed the cabin felt warmer than it should.
“Look, I understand how that came across, but I promise I only have the rescue of this shuttle in mind, not that I believe, in the end, that this shuttle will need to be rescued at all.”
Another stood up, “But why you? I have a wife and kids waiting for me at home. It’s my daughters fifth birthday next week and I promised a trip to the Martian Mountains. You don’t have anyone waiting for you at home, so why should you escape?”
I tried to control my disbelief but couldn’t. “Why should I escape? Do you not realize that none of this would be possible without me? I discovered how to make water on Mars. I oversaw the creation of the first Martian colony. I mean, I invented this ship. I invented this ship. I invented this ship and I will do so much more!” I was shouting at this point and breathing heavily. “How could you possibly believe that you deserve this more than me!?”
I was seething at this point. All the pretense I held to blend in with the ‘common folk’, as I called them, was gone. I couldn’t believe they couldn’t see how different I was from them.
“Look,” I tried to calm down, “I will bring some of you with me. We are all going to make it out of here, don’t worry.” I attempted to smile, but I could tell it was no use.
After a brief pause, the shuttle erupted with everyone shouting their case for why they deserved to be on the escape pod.
None of the reasons shouted came close to the contribution I gave to humanity. I began to slowly and nonchalantly move back towards the escape hatch.
Down at the end of the shuttle a fight broke out as a young man began to run towards the hatch. Another woman began leaping down the corridor, stopped violently by other commuters.
I held my hands out to try and calm them. Every step I took was a step closer to the hatch until I was a few feet from it.
“He’s trying to escape!” someone behind shouted and I felt a hand grab my shoulder and pull me down.
“Please! Please!” I shouted, attempting to shake off the arm when another grabbed my leg. I flung my fist at the arm grabbing my leg and grabbed the hand that pulled my shoulder and bit it.
“That son of a bitch is going to escape. He’s going to leave us behind!”
I could feel the shuttle warming more and now the smell of burning crept through the oxygen ducts of the cabin.
More commuters were rushing towards me and I knew I was out of time, so I pushed and fought and screamed and kicked and punched my way to the hatch and spun the circular release valve until it creaked open and I pushed and bit and punched some more until I could get my legs down through the hatch.
I felt an arm reach for my shirt as I began my descent and I reached back and pushed the body attached to it away. When I turned, I saw the blue eyes of the child, wide and still, his mouth wide and silent. My shove ripped the shuttle pin I gave him earlier and tore a hole through his cotton blend shirt with a dinosaur on it.
I paused briefly and stared at his eyes. It was as though the chaos of the last minute was calmed and I was just sitting on the ship after the storm ceased in amazement at the glory and the wonder.
Then I heard another explosion and saw the reflection of fire barrel down the corridor, so I shut the hatch quickly, pressed the launch button, and felt the pod drop into space.
#
One of the first things I learned in space travel is that nobody dies in space. They just stop existing. Cells and molecules that once formed organs and flesh and bone and blood separate and simply cease to be anything but nothings fragmenting into a voided nothingness. As the pod launched off the hull of Shuttle 327A, I watched the billions of molecules that once formed the commuters, the molecules holding blood and dreams and fears and anxiety, memories and visions of beyond, all cease to exist and become nothing.
There was no sound. There was no light, no moment to allow the length or brevity of the person’s life to flash before his or her eyes. No time for regrets. There was nothing but the split second transition from existence to non-existence, and I was a silent witness to the nothingness. In the distance I could see earth hovering like a blue eye and I looked at the three other empty seats in the escape pod. I would have gotten the family off if I could. I would have at least brought the boy. If they hadn’t started fighting with me, if the rest of the commuters could’ve just understood my rationale, if they understood my contribution, then at least I could have brought the family with me. I thought about the conversation we’d be having, the cool, comforting presence I could have been for the family. The bravery they would’ve witnessed.
But they weren’t with me and no longer existed.
I was alone. Alive and alone. Existing in the ocean of nothing, smaller than a molecule in the vastness of space.
It took a little over an hour before I saw the august haze of the Red Planet’s atmosphere. Faint lights peeked through the auburn sky as the plains of the Helis Basin came into sharper relief beneath me.
I couldn’t believe that hours before, I was watching the sunset burst through the atrium windows of Grand Central Station. I refused to believe it. I refused to believe that anything that happened up until the moment of re-entry was true, or me, and I decided that my re-entry into Mars would be my rebirth. Scott Enrick disintegrated in space with the rest of the shuttle and a different Scott Enrick, a better Scott Enrick was born, formed by the disparate molecules of the previous bodies and souls I abandoned.
When I landed, the station attendants rushed out, wrapping me in a blanket and bringing me inside. They had sent a rescue ship to try and retrieve Shuttle 327A, but hadn’t been able to find it. I told them it no longer existed.
Later that evening, I was asked to give a public statement, and in my new body and new soul, I shared the tale that’s been known through history; the tragic fate and heroic sacrifice of a ship that saw my life and contribution as more valuable that their own and fought tooth and nail so I could make a better world.
#
And I did make a better world. As governor of the Martian Colony I was able to develop the water creation and supply chain necessary to not only sustain the colony, but to sustain the remnant of life left on Earth, making the Martian colony incredibly wealthy over time. Millions of lives saved and made better.
As president, I was able to navigate a peaceful treaty with other world leaders that ended the water wars and brought about the collaborative innovation that led to the discovery of the antidote, the chemical solution to the poisoned water of earth.
I saved millions, and if you count the generations beyond me, billions, all the while telling myself that the good of my life outweighed the evil of the truth. I told myself I did what was necessary. I told myself that no great thing came without great cost. And for a long time I believed it.
Which is why it might surprise you that once this letter is found, I will have launched myself into space in a ship timed to explode five miles over the Martian atmosphere. I don’t know whether or not the good that I did outweighed the lie that I told. I don’t know if there is such thing as penance. I hope there is.
What I do know, is that every night as I fell asleep and every morning I awoke, every time I squinted my eyes at the sun or shut them in the brightness of the day, I saw a pair of longing blue eyes stare back at me. My life has been filled with ghosts of what I deemed undeserving and I feel I have no remedy but to join them in the nothingness and let my molecules and dreams separate and fragment into the eternal slumber of the void.
This is, as they used to say, my final confession and with it, I hope I may find a bit of peace, a bit of forgiveness. Or maybe I’ll find that mercy was just a comfort we gave ourselves to mitigate the cruelness of a universe trying to destroy us.
Either way, goodbye.
Dr. Scott Enrick
Surprise
“No. I don’t want to hold him. He’s so icky! His ears—he has black hairs growing out of his ears! They look like pig bristles. You’ll have to pull those out.”
“That would hurt him, Miss Selnick. And anyway they look so cute.”
“He’s my baby, nurse, not yours, unfortunately, and I say they’re ugly like the rest of him. But oh well, leave them alone. I’ll do it myself later. His dad has them, too, the pig. Why is his head misshapen? And he has a big lower lip. ”
“Miss Selnick, many new babies have misshapen heads because they are compressed during birth. In a few days he will be the handsome boy you expected. “
“Really? Well, I’ll have visitors in a few hours, not a few days. At least you can clean him up and give him some formula so he won’t keep squalling with company here.”
“So you aren’t going to breast feed him?”
“Are you kidding? I can’t even bear to look at him.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say! You’ll grow to love this little guy, I’m sure. What’s his name?”
“Daniel. He’s named after his father.”
“And will his father come to see the two of you?”
“There’s only one of me. And yes, My sister and her husband will be here in about an hour.
God’s Unlikely Hero
An expression Dan had heard in a Vietnam war film. Now very close, her eyes beckon, and she rasps “Wake up, Corporal Selnick, or I will have you thrown in the drunk tank.”
Startled awake, Dan picks up his mike and assures Sergeant Donald Yost: “I’m following a suspicious character into the Dairy Queen on 10th and Gordy, Sarge. I’ll keep you posted.”
Dan knows that Yost knows that Dan has been sleeping, that he will not keep Yost informed, that there is no suspicious character, that Dan has a sound and moving picture recording of Yost and Toch vigorously copulating on Yost’s desk, and that Yost will continue to pack Dan’s performance reviews with fulsome praise.
Dan also knows that his fellow cops despise him because he’s unapologetically useless. When he’s on station to catch speeders, they suddenly develop a reverence for speed limits; when he’s sent to investigate a possible burglary, the burglars always get away, and so on. Other cops (except Yost and Toch) wonder how Dan keeps his job, let alone how he earned his corporal’s stripe.
Dan yawns and leaves his squad car, which is conveniently located in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. “Lily promised roast beef tonight, so I won’t eat a lot,” he thinks, “so I’ll just have a Blizzard.” He approaches the door. “No, I’ll have a peanut butter milk shake.” He walks through the door. “Maybe I should order both. Wait, I think….”
“Oh, God, help us!” A high-pitched shriek.
Reluctantly, for he resents the interruption, Dan turns just in time to glimpse a man charging him—a large, round, hairy, naked man clutching a baseball bat over his head. So Dan turns toward the safety of the exit, and in so doing cork screws his left knee. The knee buckles in agony. Largeroundhairynaked’s momentum carries him over Dan’s left shoulder, and he (Largeroundhairnaked) bounces face first on the floor. Dan collapses with both knees on the back of Largeroundhairynaked.
“My God! Why does this shit happen to me?” Dan whimpers.
“You saved us,” responds a breathy, girlish voice. “That monster would’ve killed us all.”
Dan’s eyes climb up a Repunzelesque blond braid until they reach the braid’s resting place in the valley between two mountainous breasts. This topography causes Dan to to relive experiences he’d had when he was a small child, when he would stand in a shower while holding a soapy wash cloth and looking up at his mother’s massive breasts and an angry black cloud between her legs, and the black cloud would command him to “Take this wash cloth and wash your Mother everywhere.”
The PTSD episode ends in a flash, enabling Dan to identify the owner of the useful braid and threatening breasts as a young woman with adoring blue eyes whose many curves and bulges threaten to escape from her aqua blue—matching her eyes—slacks and a white sleeveless blouse. She is cocking her head to the right and her hips to the left. And she is thrusting out her chest, and running her tongue around her lips.
With a braid and clothes to match, a girl of about 10 years of age, with adoring blue eyes, stands next to this fertility symbol while sending the same signals: cocking hips, licking lips, etc.
Farther back are five other girls of about 10 years old. Dan takes no note of their appearance, but does notice that they are all using their phones to take pictures of him and his trophy.
He focuses on a boney girl with a crude, helmet-shaped hair cut and wearing a shapeless, too large dress. She’s standing apart from the rest of the girls and looking at her feet, but seems to sense he’s looking at her and looks up and smiles just long enough to reveal large, crooked teeth. She looks down again and chews her thumb nail. “She seems to be restraining herself from sucking her thumb,” Dan thinks. “Lily must’ve looked and acted like that when she was 10 years old.
Largeroundhairynaked bounces once, reminding Dan that he needs to deal with the pain in his knee. To be a cop, too. He handcuffs the perp (the first such use of handcuffs in his career) and assures Girl-Lily “This beast is SUB DUED,” and calls the dispatcher: This is Unit 48 located in the Dairy Queen at 10th and Gordy. 10-26.10-61. Situation 10-18, code 3. 10-3. 10-78. 10-52. 10-91.
“You gotta be kidding,” says the dispatcher.
“Officer down. Officer down. 10-40,” says Dan gleefully, for at this point he is feeling euphoric, and not just because he’s a hero and his heroism will be pictorially displayed on the front pages of the local newspaper, thanks to the picture taking witnesses. No. Infinitely more important is the realization that his knee is so badly bunged up that he will almost certainly retire at age 27 with half pay, adjusted for inflation, and fully paid health insurance for the rest of his life.
Lily will continue to work at the post office, of course.
Loving Parents
Patriot puts his hands on May The State Rule’s shoulders, saying, “You must stay by Mah Mah at all times today. Obey her without question.”
May The State Rule’s round, unmarked, innocent face—the face he inherited from his mother—looks shocked and close to tears by Patriot’s rough voice and demeanor as he replies, “Yes, Bah Bah.”
“You may bring your dog inside to play with her,” says Patriot. He regrets frightening the boy.
Patriot thinks, Woman With Beautiful Smile is teng, stronger, more Central Nation than I am. She grew up as a farmer. She has Central Nation’s soil in her blood. I spent my childhood on pavement and in barracks for factory workers. Not that I was coddled. My parents beat me worse than the bullies until I learned how to gouge their eyes and smash their balls. Still, it is good that Woman With Beautiful Smile is teng because if I fail, she is the one who will place a cyanide capsule between May The State Rule’s teeth and tell him to bite down.
**************
At 12:10 pm, during Patriot’s lunch break, he tells Director Wang Become Great that Chief Surgeon Zheng Autumn is selling organs and driving a Chevrolet. Patriot knows that Become Great rides a bike, and that by driving a car, Autumn is usurping Become Great’s status.
At 5:06 pm, the team (composed of the chief surgeon, two assistant surgeons, and two nurses) has just finished cleaning up after the last surgery when a soldier comes in. Patriot inserts a cyanide capsule in his mouth. The soldier orders Autumn to report to Director Wang Become Great.
The remaining members of the surgical team cover the floor with an unzipped bag made of thick plastic. Once finished, the team members sit around the room—each taking a position determined by status—to await orders. Patriot draws up his legs and locks his arms around them so that he cannot jump up and flee.
Patriot thinks, Autumn almost certainly sells organs for Become Great, who pays him. But Become Great will not accept losing face to Autumn. I am afraid for no reason. My plan will succeed.
A 5:32 pm, two soldiers carry Autumn into the room and position him on the plastic bag. As with all donors, his vocal cords have been cut and a thin rope has been tied around his neck and around his wrists, which are behind him. The team dons clean surgical uniforms. Patriot puts the capsule in a pocket of his smock before reading aloud the order pinned to Autumn’s chest: “Wu Patriot is now Chief Surgeon. Prisoner will donate his kidneys and eyes.” Patriot thinks, I will sell organs for Become Great and share the profits. I will be rich.. The assistant nurse firmly grips one of Autumn’s legs and steps on the rope, which causes it to cut into Autumn’s neck if he struggles. Using scissors, the head nurse cuts Autumn’s clothes from the middle of his sternum to the umbilicus. He swabs disinfectant twice over Autumn’s abdomen.
Patriot grips a scalpel and looks into Autumn’s pleading eyes (Patriot thinks, You should have accepted your place.) before cutting Autumn open from the umbilicus to just under the sternum. Autumn’s legs twitch. Blood and intestines gush out. Tonight we will prepare a feast. Patriot pushes the intestines aside to reveal the kidneys. I can save enough for bribes and tuition to send May The State Rule to People of the Han Police Academy. He removes the kidney from the right side while the assistant surgeon removes the kidney from the other side. They place the kidneys in an organ transporter.
The assistant surgeon grips Autumn’s head and holds his eyelids open with two fingers, revealing the terror in his eyes. Now I see how much my parents loved me! They wanted me to be teng, to crave terror in inferiors. He grips a pair of hemostatic forceps. But I have been weak and have allowed my son to lose his Central Nation and become lo sen. We cannot defeat westerners by becoming like them.
Become Great enters the room and nods to Patriot, who gouges the left eyeball out and hands it to the head nurse. I must teach my son as I was taught. He gouges out the right eyeball, hands it to the head nurse, and then stands aside and surrenders the scalpel to Becomes Great, who removes Autumn’s face.
“I have gained face and Autumn has lost his face,” he announces. The team members bow their heads to acknowledge Become Great’s renewed status. Become Great hurls the scalpel and Autumn’s face upon the intestines and leaves.
The assistant nurse takes her foot off the rope, zips up the bag, and knocks on the door. Two soldiers appear and carry the bag away. The team cleans the room and removes their bloody surgical uniforms.
**********
At 7:16 pm, Woman With Beautiful Smile says, “May The State Rule, it is time for you to become a man. You will bring honor to Central Nation, to your ancestors, to your parents, and to yourself. Find Kind Peace and bring her into the house.”
“Yes, Mah Mah.”
He leaves. Woman With Beautiful Smile goes into the kitchen and brings back a skinning knife, a thin rope, and a roll of tape.
Patriot says, “Let’s blindfold the dog. The boy loves Kind Peace. It might be too much for him to look into her eyes.”
“OK. After we beat him into submission, we will tape the knife to his hand. You choke the dog with the rope while I force May the State Rule’s hand to skin her,” she says.
“I wonder if he will ever love us again.”
“Our ancestors will be pleased,” she says.”
Alex Woolf is a UK-based author of over 150 books, mostly for children and young adults, which have sold in many countries. His fiction includes Chronosphere, a time-warping science fiction trilogy, recently translated into Mandarin, and a steampunk series, Iron Sky. He won a Fiction Express award for his story 'Mystery at Moon Base One’ and was shortlisted for the RED Book Award for his horror novel Soul Shadows. He is co-author of a crowd-funded 'novel-in-emails', Kitten on a Fatberg, due to be published by Unbound. |
When Tomorrow Comes
Eventually, however, the calendrically challenged campanologist wins our little battle of wills, and I struggle out of bed and splash some icy water on my face. My shirt passes the armpit-sniffing test and I put it on, together with yesterday's underpants – I've been struggling to stay on top of the laundry situation ever since I was expelled from home eleven months ago, and this ordeal has only made me appreciate Jane all the more. I'm down to my last pair of chinos, and they have a blood stain on them, but it's fine because today is the day when I will make everything better. I will pay my debt to Whistling Steve, and persuade Jane to forgive the Ponders End Incident and let me move back in with her and little Frederick.
I'm close to success on both fronts, and I can almost taste the Bollinger I'm going to treat myself to when this is all over. Chris Grigoryan said he'd have the loan money ready by midday, so I'll be able to pay off Whistling Steve by lunchtime and he won't need to break my legs. As for Jane, I feel that yesterday afternoon went rather well. She barely tensed when I kissed her on the cheek, and during our walk by the New River we even reminisced about the time when we went boating there after a few beers and I fell in. I could swear she was watching us and smiling while little Frederick was beating me up in the play area at the King and Tinker. I believe she's on the verge of taking me back, and when I meet up with them at 3 o'clock this afternoon for our planned shopping trip in Enfield Town, I'm going to be so punctual and well-behaved, not to mention charming in a rumpled sort of way (mainly due to my lack of ironing skills), she's almost bound to crumble, and I'll be back in the family home, sleeping in the marital bed with any luck, by tonight.
That is the plan anyway.
Epping Bassett is awash with spring sunshine as I step outside my rented cottage. In the driveway stands my pride and joy, a dark green Lotus Elan S3. I gave it a polish yesterday and it's catching the early rays beautifully, glittering in the morning dew with the same perfection as the daffodils and crocuses on the village green. It's one of those days that feels like a new chapter in the book of one's life – everything is so fresh the ink has barely dried on the page.
I expect to hear some amused laughter at our bellringer's clanger as I enter the Post Office, which doubles as the village's general store, but no one is so much as raising a smile in the small queue by the checkout, and Peggy behind the counter is her usual bustling, serious self. I pick up a newspaper from the rack by the door, and get a jolt when I see that it's not the Daily but the Sunday Mirror. I check the date, 28th March, and I blurt out the nonsensical words: 'But this is tomorrow's paper. What happened to today's?' I get a few stares from the queue, but no one says anything.
I look more closely at the newspaper. A photo takes up the whole page: the charred and burning wreckage of a passenger plane strewn across a runway. The headline reports a crash at London Britannia Airport yesterday evening in which all 157 people on board were killed, but this barely registers. All I'm thinking is, Damn! Can this really be Sunday? Did I just sleep through two nights and a day? It doesn't take long for the implications of my mega-kip to start hitting me, and they are calamitous: this means Whistling Steve never got his money yesterday, and I didn't meet Jane and little Frederick for the shopping trip. Double damn!
On the plus side, I was able to walk to the post office this morning, which means my legs are, as yet, unbroken. I check my phone and find it alive and crawling with messages from yesterday – mainly from Jane, but also from Whistling Steve and Chris Grigoryan. I buy the newspaper and a pack of Lambert & Butler Kingsize and go outside to sit on the bench next to the war memorial. Neither the cigarette nor the morning sun can halt the growing chill in my bones as I read through Jane's messages, all sixteen of them. They chart a heartbreaking course, starting with a mild 'Where are you?' at 3.28 pm, and ending some four hours later with a much lengthier and less grammatical missive, casting aspersions on my fundamental nature and warning me that I'll be hearing from her lawyers about visitation rights for little Frederick and that I should refrain from contacting her again. The thread from Steve, proprietor of easycash.com, is far more succinct and to the point, limited to just three short messages.
Steve, known in local circles as Whistling Steve owing to the peculiar speaking style he has adopted since getting shot in the mouth ten years ago, is an Edmonton-based banking entrepreneur who has managed to survive in a competitive industry despite the authorities closing down a number of his businesses for various regulatory infractions. Steve and I go way back, and I've been a loyal customer of several of his establishments over the years, including TurboBank, WeLendToAnyone, InstantLoans, Fast Finance, Sunny Money and Bad Credit Welcome Here. Due to my lack of conventional collateral, apart from the Lotus, which I refuse to offer as hostage to my undulating fortunes, I suppose it's only fair that Steve should wish to seek an alternative form of security, namely my legs. It's heartening, I suppose, that he's decided to spare them on this occasion, as it appears to indicate that he still has confidence in me, despite my recent catastrophic run of luck on the horses. He must know that I will always come through in the end.
Steve's first message is a simple enquiry as to my whereabouts, similar to Jane's opener but a little more profane. That one arrived at 1.54 pm. His second, which followed an hour and a half later, reads, i am coming to get you you fuck – I can tell he's stressed at this point, as it lacks any punctuation. Clearly he didn't follow through on that threat, even though he knows very well where I am currently living. Steve's final message came through at 5.16 pm and is a repeat of the first, followed by: dont think you can hide from me you bar stool. I don't believe Steve meant to call me a bar stool, as it's not his style to mince his oaths. But his spell checker may have made an assumption based on his habit of putting the 'r' of bastard after the first 'a', and not the second.
I can only imagine that Steve, despite his threats, had second thoughts about driving out to Epping Bassett yesterday, and has postponed his visit until today. In that case, it's possible I can forestall him by driving to Chris Grigoryan's house in Walthamstow to pick up the loan money, then heading to Edmonton to pay off Steve.
I've been forced to turn to Chris Grigoryan as an alternative source of liquidity because Steve has lost patience with me in recent months. Chris, a former bookmaker turned money lender, is more understanding of the inherent ups and downs of the gambling life and is prepared to work with me until I can get my finances on a more stable footing. But the message that arrived from Chris at 2.13 pm yesterday is concerning: Jerry, he writes, I'm sorry, I waited for you but you didn't come, and now I must leave for Britannia Airport as I'm flying to Yerevan this evening. I will be back in a week's time and we can rearrange. CG
Anxiety now seizes me as I recheck the main story in my newspaper. As I thought, the plane, which crashed due to a collision with a flock of Brent geese, was the 6.30 pm flight to Yerevan, the only one to that destination heading out from Britannia Airport that day. Every single person on board was killed.
With my last chance of paying off Steve now just charred bones floating down the Thames Estuary, I'm extremely scared about the prospects for my legs. Even so, my first impulse is to try to repair the situation with Jane. As I start back across the green towards the cottage, I call her up, and the conversation goes like this.
Me: Jane darling, I'm so completely devastated about missing you yesterday.
Jane: Where the hell were you? No, don't tell me. I know exactly where you were. You were with your whore in Ponders End...
I should at this point explain her reference to the whore in Ponders End, which dates back to an incident a year and a half ago when a young woman in that district was brutally assaulted by her boyfriend. The woman's flatmate, who was in the adjoining room, happened to be a part-time sex worker, and you can probably guess who was partaking of her services that night. Both of us were called as witnesses at the ensuing trial. Needless to say, this was a painful time for everyone concerned. I was shortly thereafter exiled to Hertfordshire.
Now back to Jane: You make me sick, Jerry, with all your promises. You'll never change.
Me: I will change, and I have.
This, by the way, is absolutely true. Since moving to Epping Bassett in Hertfordshire, I have forsworn prostitutes, gin, and several other former pleasures. I've joined the village gardening club and the church choir and generally endeavoured to pursue a quiet and abstemious existence with the aim of restoring Jane's faith in me. The only one of my hobbies that I can't seem to shake off is the horses.
Back to me: You might find this hard to believe, my darling, but I didn't stir from my bed the whole of yesterday.
Jane: Are you saying Ponders End came to Epping Bassett?
Me: Not at all. I think someone may have spiked my cocoa, because I swear on little Frederick's life that I was fast asleep from Friday night until I woke up this morning.
Jane: Codswallop! And don't you dare bring Freddy into this.
Me: I promise it's true!
Jane: It's a lie, because I went over to your cottage yesterday evening to check if you were okay as you hadn't answered any of my texts. Stupid me thought you might be injured or sick. You weren't there, Jerry. You weren't in your bed or anywhere else.
Me: Impossible. I don't believe you.
Jane: I don't lie, unlike some people. If you want proof we were there, Freddy did a drawing, which he left in your kitchen.
By this time, I'm back at the cottage, and on the kitchen counter, by the kettle, I find a drawing in colourful crayons done in little Frederick's inimitable style. It shows a small stick figure standing in between two larger stick figures, one with long hair and the other with short hair, and all three have big smiles on their round faces. The sun is shining in little Frederick's sky and the three of us are standing outside a house that doesn't look anything like our house, but maybe represents a house we could aspire to – a detached house with the front door in the middle and four big windows and a chimney emerging diagonally from the triangular roof.
Jane: Do you see it?
Me: I'm looking at it now. It's beautiful.
Jane: I won't stop you seeing Freddy, but I don't want you ever calling me again, do you understand? Wait for my lawyer to contact you.
Me: ...
There's nothing more from me at this point. Just silence, until I hear a voice in my ear saying, 'The other person has cleared.'
If I wasn't in my bed yesterday, then where was I? Because, as Spike Milligan once said, 'everybody's got to be somewhere'. Did someone slip me a sleeping drug on Friday night, kidnap me and then return me to my bed thirty-six hours later? Who would do that, and to what end? I have no enemies to speak of, nor friends who like to pull elaborate pranks. The only person I can think of who might wish to do something like this to me, perhaps as a warning, is Whistling Steve, yet he seemed as baffled as anyone about my absence yesterday. Nevertheless, I sense it's time I bite the bullet, much as Steve himself did ten years ago, and give him a call, not least to reassure him that I'm on the case vis a vis the whole debt repayment situation. My total debt to Whistling Steve currently stands at 80k, give or take, which I was repaying in regular monthly installments, but because of recent cashflow issues, I've missed a few of these and he's now insisting I make an immediate cash payment of 10k – or he'll take a baseball bat to my legs.
I call him up, and he replies, 'This is Steve, what can I do you for?' He pronounces the sibilants in the first three words in a breathy whistle, like a stuttering pressure cooker.
'Good morning Steve, Jerry here. How are you?'
'What do you mean how am I? What the fuck's that got to do with anything?'
Because of the mutilated shape of Steve's mouth following his accident, the voiceless labiodental fricative, namely the 'eff' sound, also emerges as a whistle, though at a lower pitch than the sibilant, much like the final dying note of an owl's call.
'Nothing, Steve. Nothing at all. I was merely being pleasant.'
'Where were you yesterday?' is the polite version of Steve's next enquiry. You should assume that every third or fourth word he utters is a curse, but these become tedious to transcribe. 'Where's my money?' he adds.
'On its way to you, Steve, have no fear. It would have been with you yesterday, only I somehow managed to sleep right through yesterday. Extraordinary, I know! You didn't by any chance drug me and kidnap me, did you, Steve?'
'What would I do that for, Jerry? How would that help me get my money back?'
It's a good question, and not one I have any immediate answer to.
'Your time is up,' Steve says. 'I'm coming to break your legs...'
'About this whole leg-breaking thing, Steve, can we just clarify what we're talking about here? I assume we're talking about a minor fracture to each tibia, is that right? The sort of injury one might pick up on, say, a black slope at St Moritz – one that might see me back on my feet in six to eight weeks? I only ask because I have a business to run, and the quicker I'm back on my feet running it again, the sooner I can pay you back the rest of your money.'
Steve's silence is punctuated by the mournful whistle of his breathing.
'I mean, how big is the baseball bat, Steve? Is it actually in fact a baseball bat, or more of a rounders bat? We are Englishmen, after all.'
'Just tell me where you are, Jerry?'
'You know where I am. I'm at the cottage, where I always am.'
'You weren't there yesterday. I came out there and you definitely weren't there.'
'You came out here?'
'Yeah. I even left you a message.'
'You left me a message? Where?'
'In your laundry basket. I planned on leaving it in your wardrobe, but all your trousers were in the laundry basket, so I left it there, on your trousers.'
'You left a message on my trousers?'
'Yeah. You'll get it when you take a look at them. See, Jerry, I'm getting tired of this little dance you and me have been doing these past six months, where you keep making and breaking promises to me and I keep forgiving you like I'm one of your bitches that you keep stringing along. It's no longer a baseball bat I'll be taking to your legs, Jer. Take a look at your trousers and you'll see what I mean.'
As he's saying this, I'm heading into my bedroom and tipping the contents of the laundry basket onto the floor, and I immediately see what he means. The message could not be clearer. He's taken a scissors to every pair of chinos in there and turned them into shorts.
'Do you see what I'm talking about now, Jerry? Do I need to spell it out for you?'
'No. No, I get it, Steve.'
'Good. Now I'm giving you one last chance. You bring me the 10k you owe me tonight, in cash, or I'll do to your legs what I did to your trousers. Or to put it another way, by the time I'm finished with you, you won't be needing trousers any more.'
'Yes, Steve, I get the message, really. I get it.'
'I'm glad. Oh, and one more thing, Jerry, if you don't show, I'll kill your family.'
'My family?'
'That's right.'
'You can't do that, Steve.'
'I can and I will. I'm not fucking around any more, Jerry. Our dancing days are over. You bring me the money, every last penny of it, by six o'clock this evening, or it's surgery time. And if you don't show, it'll be curtains for Jane and little Frederick.'
I end my conversation with Steve as quickly as I can, and get on the phone to Jane. I'm thinking that she can go and stay with her parents in Berkshire for a while until this situation with Steve blows over. But Jane doesn't answer. Her phone doesn't even ring. She must have blocked me.
I hurry out of the cottage and climb into the Lotus. If I leave now, I could be at our house in North Enfield by eleven o'clock, assuming no breakdowns – plenty of time to warn Jane to remove herself and little Frederick from harm's way. I'm about to switch on the engine when I pause and study my pride and joy – the walnut veneer dashboard, the leather trim, the racing-car steering wheel so warm and solid under my hands – and I ask myself, who am I kidding? I won't even be able to drive it if I don't have legs. I love this car in ways that are hard to express. I know it's not reliable, and it breaks down all the time, but it's beautiful, and it's all I have left in this world that's mine. I've lost or sold practically everything else, including my late parents' house, but I've clung onto the Lotus through thick and thin, and lately things have mostly been really thin. As soon as I saw it on the forecourt of SD Classic Cars in Buckhurst Hill nine years ago, I knew I had to have it. It has grace and simplicity and power. It is everything I want and says everything I wish to say, and the impression it makes on people is the impression I want to make, or wish I could make. I wipe a tear from my eye with my jacket sleeve, then take a moment to collect myself before turning on the engine. The deep resonance of its growl fills my bones. I drive the car slowly out of the village, holding my head high.
The owner of SD Classic Cars, Samuel Taylor Dixon, has maintained the car for me over the years, though not as regularly as he would like. I find him in the workshop underneath a Jaguar E-Type. 'Good day, Samuel,' I say.
He emerges, oil-stained and blinking, spanner in hand. 'Jezza? How's the Lotus?'
'I have to sell it. How much can you offer me?'
Samuel wipes his hands on a rag and follows me to where I've parked. He opens the bonnet and starts poking around in the car's innards for a disconcertingly long time. Finally, he raises his head and says, 'I'll give you 10k for it.'
I'm staggered and affronted. 'But I paid 15 nine years ago,' I point out. 'These classic cars are supposed to appreciate with age.'
'Yeah, but you haven't looked after it, have you?' He then proceeds to list all that is wrong with the car, most of which is far too technical for me to understand. 'You kept the outside in decent nick, Jezza, but you never paid enough attention to what's under the bonnet. It's going to cost me to put it right, thereby the disappointing price.'
'Therefore,' I correct him.
'What?'
'Or Hence would be even better. Hence the disappointing price.'
'What?'
'Never mind,' I tell him. '10k it is, but I'll need the money straight away. In cash.'
Samuel raises an eyebrow. 'I don't keep that sort of cash in the office. I can probably get you 8k by this afternoon. You can have the rest tomorrow.'
'That's no good Samuel. I need all of it today.'
He starts heading back towards the E-type. 'Sorry I can't help you then, Jez.'
I relent, and agree to return at 2.30 for the 8k. It's 2k short of what Whistling Steve is expecting, and I find myself wondering what that equates to on Steve's amputation scale: a couple of toes? A foot?
I take luncheon at a fried chicken and ribs establishment on the high street. It has plastic, wipe-clean surfaces and photos of the products on the menus, and a fat, grizzled proprietor with a lazy eye who stares at me until I finally leave and go and sit in a park, where I smoke cigarette after cigarette, waiting for my watch to drag itself to the appointed hour. I worry a great deal about Jane and little Frederick. I wish I had contact details for Jane's parents or her friends, and reflect on the fact that in the seven years of our marriage she has never shared much about her family or her social life. Her friends are work friends or gym friends, never our friends. As for her parents, they had their doubts about me from the start, and the Ponders End Incident merely confirmed them in all their worst assumptions about my character.
They were – they are – I think, right in these assumptions. I've failed everyone – my parents, my wife, and most of all my son. This past year I've tried very hard to be better. I always think I can be better. I've spent my whole life believing this. I am a fundamentally optimistic person about my own potential, and am always far more surprised than anyone else when I fail to achieve it. Yesterday was my golden opportunity. It would have been very easy to make everything right, but somehow I contrived to sleep through it – no, to entirely absent myself from it. I managed to pull calamity from the jaws of victory. This is something that only I could do.
At 2.15, I return to SD Classic Cars and I drink a cup of coffee from the machine in reception while I wait for Samuel Taylor Dixon to come back from the bank. I wonder whether his parents were aware of what the initials they had bestowed upon him also stood for, and if their love of the romantic poet and desire to commemorate him in their son's name outweighed this consideration. I also speculate on how such a literary-minded couple managed to produce a car dealer, and what their Christmases are like.
At 2.43, Samuel returns. We perform the necessary paperwork, and forty-five minutes later, I leave with the money, which I have secreted bulgingly around my various pockets. Feeling somewhat vulnerable and conspicuous, I strike out along the high street towards the bus stop that will convey me to Whistling Steve's headquarters, the nerve centre of his banking empire, in a back room of the Cock and Bull Tavern in Edmonton.
Near the bus stop, I spot a branch of a well-known bookmaker. I go inside, purely out of professional interest, to check out the afternoon's horse races. I run my eye down the racing form and one particular horse catches my eye: Last Chance, running in the 4.30 at Haydock Park and priced at 10/1. Last Chance is a filly I've had my eye on for some time. Like me, she's suffered a disappointing run of late, hence the long odds. Some of her bad form has been down to the amount of rain we've had these past few weeks – she's always run better on firmer ground. Also, her trainer is currently on the cold list, due to some infection or other in his yard. Her handicap is consequently 7 lb lower than the favourite, Katie Rose. Yet there are a few factors that lead me to conclude she is underpriced in this particular race. Haydock Park, at a mile and 5 furlongs, is her ideal distance, and the going, after a few dry days, is now good. Also, I've learned through a contact that her trainer is back in form. I'd say she's definitely worth a flutter, and it occurs to me that if I put £200 on her, I'd stand to make up my cash shortfall for Whistling Steve.
I take a roll of twenties from an inner pocket and start peeling off ten of them. As I'm doing so, I feel a sudden tingling sensation as if the goddess has just breathed softly on the back of my neck. It's the name, I suppose – Last Chance. I've always liked it, and it's never felt more appropriate than today. It's also the odds, 10/1, and the fact that 8k, the amount I'm carrying, when multiplied by 10 equals the total sum I owe to Whistling Steve. Lady Luck is telling me something here. She's telling me that in the next forty minutes, if I have the courage of my convictions, I could get that man out of my life forever – no more fear of leg breakages or amputations. I'd be free. I recall the feeling when I stepped out of my cottage this morning, before the disasters began piling up, the feeling that today was the first page of the next chapter in the book of my life. Perhaps it still could be. Last Chance is definitely underpriced. No one seems to have spotted this but me.
I fill out a betting slip and go to the cashier's window. The cashier goes to speak with her manager, and the manager asks me if I'm sure about this. I say I am, and before I can think better of it, I start handing over the full 8k. It takes me a while, fishing around in various pockets for the rolls of notes I've got stashed there. It takes the cashier several further minutes to count it, during which time I have ample opportunity to think again about what I'm doing and withdraw the bet. But I don't. I'm committed now. I've rolled the dice. There's no better or worse feeling in the world than this one.
For the next twenty minutes, I stand there in the betting shop waiting for the race to begin, knocking back the free coffee and veering between despair and elation. One minute, death is tapping me on the shoulder; the next, life is singing through my veins at a hundred miles an hour.
Finally, the race begins. I watch it on the flatscreen TV along with half a dozen fellow punters. The horses fly out of the starting gate and, as usual, it's hard to see what's going on at first as they all manoeuvre for position. I seek out Lucky Chance, looking for the yellow and purple of her jockey's silks, and I'm overjoyed to see her emerge from the mass of horses in second place, just half a length behind the leader, Katie Rose. Last Chance and Katie Rose are soon four or five lengths ahead of the chasing pack. On the back straight of the oval course, as they come into the bend, Katie Rose starts extending her lead, but Last Chance is still on the bridle, which means her jockey has more up his sleeve and I'm expecting him to challenge. Sure enough, on the home straight he does, and soon they're neck and neck. 'Come on!' I whisper. In the final couple of furlongs, Last Chance begins to open up a tiny lead, no more than half a head. I go very still, like a statue. Caffeine and adrenaline are pumping through my system and my heart is banging like a door in a hurricane, but on the outside, I'm rigid. Terrified. Electrified. Daring not to hope. Barely able to breathe. Last Chance. My last chance. The stars are aligning for me and my horse. We've had it tough, Last Chance and I, but we're fighters. We don't give up.
Back on the screen, Katie Rose isn't giving up either. The two horses are neck and neck again, with their jockeys giving it everything as they close on the finish line. There's nothing between them. It's looking like a photo finish.
And then something happens, and it happens so fast I struggle to process what I'm seeing. Katie Rose's jockey suddenly falls off his mount and tumbles to the turf. The riderless horse then bounds ahead, distracting Last Chance and causing her jockey to fall. Both horses cross the finish line without their riders and are therefore disqualified. The winner turns out to be an unfancied gelding called Tomorrow. This serial loser went into the race at odds of 100/1.
For a long moment I can only stand there, unable to move or think, as my fellow punters jabber around me, astonished at this bizarre turn of events, this complete up-ending of form and fortune. Finally, I leave the bookmaker and head down the street, smoking furiously and directing harsh, rhetorical questions at myself: what did I think I was doing? Was I insane? What am I going to do now? I seriously consider walking out in front of the next bus.
It takes me a while to emerge from this fog of suicidal despair and self-loathing and remember that I have a family, a wife and a little boy of five, and in an hour's time, when I don't show up at the Cock and Bull Tavern in Edmonton, Whistling Steve is going to make plans to kill them. I should go to their rescue. That is more important than anything else at this time. Once they're safe, I can think about killing myself, but right now I need to get to North Enfield as quickly as possible. The trouble is, I can't afford a taxi and I have no idea how to get there from Buckhurst Hill via public transport. An app on my phone suggests a route, but it's complex, involving a tube ride, a walk, and three different buses. The estimated journey time is an hour and forty minutes.
It's already ten to seven – 50 minutes after I was supposed to deliver the cash to Steve – when I alight from the bus at the bottom of our road. I haven't been back here since my ejection eleven months ago, and I get hit by a flood of memories. Across the street is the Co-op where I made countless trips with little Frederick. Whenever we ran out of his favourite mini yogurt drink, he'd say 'Go buy sops', and out he and I would go to the Co-op to purchase more. One block south of here is the canal, home of the scary swan, and to the east is the park where little Frederick would climb up the ladder and slide down the slide and then climb up the ladder and slide down the slide, again and again and again, and to the north is the pub where Daddy and Mummy drink their beer, and to the west is the cemetery where the dead people live. This was our world, and I'm so sad because I haven't been sharing it with him and his mother, and he probably doesn't remember much about when I did. I'm also terrified because it's supposed to be a safe world and it doesn't seem that way any more. Whistling Steve will be here soon. I have to get my family away.
As I start jogging up the road, past the terraced houses, I catch a smell of burning on the breeze, and I think to myself this isn't the season for bonfires. Then I see blue flashing lights up ahead and my heart catches and I feel this ice-cold shadow forming inside me. But I tell myself, there are hundreds of houses in this street and it probably isn't ours. Smoke is rising into the sky, and black fragments are drifting through the haze. I'm coughing, my eyes are streaming, but I don't stop running. I'm close now. It may be a neighbour. Mrs Bingham from next door was never too careful with her cooking. I remember the smell of burned rice sometimes drifting from her window. A big fire engine is parked in the road – little Frederick will be so excited.
A firefighter comes out of the smoke and shouts at me to get back. They're directing powerful jets of water at a house. I can see it now and can no longer keep telling myself it isn't ours. The brickwork is scorched, the little porch has collapsed, flames are gusting from the windows like a bright, all-consuming wind. I scream at the firefighter, 'That's my house. What happened to my wife? My child? Did you get them out?' I see his face change, observe his discomfort. He doesn't know where to put his eyes. 'What happened to them?' I ask, but I know from his face what happened. He doesn't have to say. I think about little Frederick's drawing of the three of us. I think about him and Jane in there. The shadow inside me, it's so cold, and it has no end.
When you go to sleep in an Enfield hotel and you wake up in your rented cottage in Epping Bassett, you know that something is wrong. Not that I care any more what's wrong or right or where I wake up or what happens to me. Jane is gone. Little Frederick is gone. It's my fault they're dead. I may as well have lit the match myself. I'm all cried out now. My eyes are dry as I stare at the ceiling and contemplate the empty, dark and bottomless pit that is the rest of my life.
After witnessing the fire, I was driven to a police station where I was asked lots of questions, very few of which I could answer. I didn't tell them about Whistling Steve. He'd deny any involvement anyway, so what was the point? I cried when they confirmed the deaths of my wife and son. I didn't stop crying until they gave me something to make me calm. Then they took me to a local hotel where they could keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't do anything stupid. They gave me some new clothes and some toiletries, and then the pills kicked in and I must have fallen asleep. And now I've woken up here, and that's strange, but also completely inconsequential. Whistling Steve still wants his money. He'll probably come here today and that's scary but also inconsequential, because I'm just flotsam now. Fate can do what it wills and dump me where it pleases and remove parts of my anatomy, and I am supremely untroubled about any of it.
There is something odd, though, about what I'm experiencing, beyond the fact that I've woken up in a bed 14 miles to the north of the one I went to sleep in. It takes me a little while to figure out what that is, preoccupied as I am with staring into the empty, dark and bottomless pit of my future. The thing that eventually penetrates my depressed and nihilistic state is auditory in nature. There are odd sounds coming through my window. It's Monday morning, but these are not Monday morning sounds. I can hear the hum of an electric lawnmower, the shouts of children who ought to be in school, and the voice of my next-door neighbour, Mr Hibbertson, who is normally in the city by now trading in futures, but is instead chatting with Frank the postie.
I reach for my phone, which I find placed on my bedside table. It tells me that the date is Saturday 27th March, the day before yesterday in other words, the day I slept through. I sit up very straight in bed, and a wave of giddiness overwhelms me. I blink several times and wait for it to pass. Then I look at my phone again. It's still Saturday 27th March. I leap out of bed and pull open the curtains. The sun is dazzling. I can see a young couple seated on the bench by the war memorial, and a mother and toddler feeding the ducks in the pond, and a group of teenagers heading into the Post Office, and Dr Willis in his shirtsleeves mowing his lawn. The cars in this commuter village are all in their driveways, including, quite astoundingly, my own Lotus – my pride and joy.
I shout down to Mr Hibbertson and Frank the postie. 'What's the day today?'
They squint up at me. 'Saturday of course,' says Frank.
I dash back to my bedside table and pick up my phone. My fingers are shaking almost too much to press the required buttons on the touch-sensitive screen. On the third ring, Jane's voice answers.
'Hi Jerry. Is everything okay?'
I can't speak.
'What's wrong?' she asks. 'Is it about this afternoon? I don't mind if you can't meet us.'
'No,' I say. 'I want to meet. It's just that I had a terrible dream. I thought you and little Frederick were...'
'Don't,' she interrupts. 'Don't think about it. We're both fine. Freddy's in the middle of his latest artistic masterpiece. He'll bring it to show you when we meet. He's still buzzing about yesterday, and he can't wait to see you. Is 3 o'clock still good? We can meet in the market square... Jerry, are you sure you're okay?'
'I'm fine,' I say. 'I love you both. And I'll see you later.'
I sit for a long time on the bed, trembling with happiness, but also confusion. Yesterday wasn't like any dream I'd ever had. It seemed so real, so like life. I rise from the bed and go and check the contents of my laundry basket. My chinos are all intact.
Fifteen minutes later, I'm sitting in the sun on a kitchen chair in my tiny front garden, cup of coffee in hand, and it's still Saturday 27th March. I find I must keep checking my phone to make sure of this. For the third time, I look to my right to check that my pride and joy is still sitting in the driveway. Time, the way it moves, suddenly feels so fragile and uncertain. And if this day vanishes, or turns out to be a dream, I will go mad.
I call Chris Grigoryan, and he reassures me that he'll have the 10k ready for me by midday. Before he hangs up, I say to him: 'Chris, are you planning to fly to Yerevan this evening by any chance?'
'Yes, how did you know?'
My coffee turns cold and bitter in my mouth.
'Are you booked on the 6.30 flight from London Britannia Airport?'
'I am.'
'Don't take it, Chris. Don't get on that plane.'
'Why?'
'If I tell you you'll think I'm crazy.'
'I'll see you at 12, Jerry.'
Everything goes like clockwork. I drive over to Walthamstow and pick up the money from Chris, who I'm pleased to see has torn up his plane ticket. Then I go to the Cock and Bull Tavern in Edmonton and pay off Whistling Steve. After that, I have a couple of hours to kill before I'm due to meet Jane and little Frederick. Normally I would kill this sort of time in a bookmaker, but after yesterday, or tomorrow, or whatever one should call that day, the idea of gambling sickens me. There is, however, one thing I can do with this time I have and it does involve a visit to a bookmaker, though you couldn't exactly call it gambling.
Two hours later, I'm standing in the market square in Enfield Town when my little boy comes running up to me and I sweep him into the air and give him a big hug. Jane is more circumspect in her greeting, but she doesn't tense up like she used to when I kiss her on the cheek.
'Where did you park?' she asks.
'I didn't,' I say. 'I came here by bus.'
'Did the Lotus break down again?'
'No. I sold it.'
She looks at me in surprise. 'But that car is your pride and joy!'
'That car is part of my past. I'm pinning all my hopes on Tomorrow.'
Postscript
I went to bed that Saturday night, and woke up on Monday morning a much richer man, and I mean that in every sense of that word. I was still in my cottage, but my afternoon with Jane and little Frederick had gone so well that less than a week later I was back in our family home. I paid off my debt to Whistling Steve and invested the rest of my winnings in a rental property. Then I went out and found myself a regular suit-and-tie job. Never again did I gamble, and never again did I experience a mis-ordering of my days as I did that weekend. My Monday was followed by Tuesday, and Tuesday was succeeded in the usual fashion by Wednesday, and so it has gone on ever since, and I can't say I'm sorry about that.
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A. E. WILLIAMS
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