Short Stories

2004-12-29T19:47:00.000+01:00

Contents

Small Blue Thing

The Case Against Wings

Reinventing the Beach

Wrapped Town

The Timelapse Photographer's Fear of Mortality

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The Timelapse Photographer's Fear of Mortality

2004-11-29T21:50:00.000+01:00

first published in Markings

The last 500,000,000 years: Continents suffer brake failure, crash and buckle. Scotland is a raft adrift on the equator, towing Greenland. It floats on a tide of rock, while the Iapetus Ocean between what will be them and what will be us shrinks to a small sea to a strait to a river to a burn to a trickle somewhere round by Hexham, and on dry days isn’t even there. Mountains and valleys rise, fall, crumple, like the folds of a heavy tweed cloth. We dock. Forests blanket the ground and turn to coal. The earth spins, and if you could hear the note it makes, you’d hear an E flat — the music of this sphere.
David: Is this the kind of thing? I’d suggest intercutting the animation with real footage — slo-mo crumpling cloth, puddles on moving black polythene etc, i.e. to show it’s a world we KNOW, if you just factor in (time-)scale.

The last 250,000,000 years: Eildon erupts, dribbles from its guts the stuff of hills. The hills grow, subside, grow, subside, with the bubble of mudbaths. The volcanoes sputter and snuff, die, are scoured flat by ice. The desert drowns in a tropical sea.
D: Slo-mo hot mudbath (close-up). Timelapse: Rocky pool freezing over (stock — I have this) and maybe a rock-polishing sequence for the erosion (? at a pinch, could do Blue-Peter style with different-stage samples. Or animate. NB Dinosaurs! Whack ‘em in! Any excuse! But not solid — ethereal. Like insects/ghosts).

The last 1,000,000 years: Icescape melts to reveal the tips of rocks, a glacier thunders down the Teviot Valley, bulldozing the land to make a thoroughfare for the river it will melt into. The earth inhales, its greyness suffusing with green.
D: Plenty glacial stock. Timelapse: Ice melting from rock (Bernese Oberland — mine, scale totally ambiguous; also have various bare-soil-to-crop sequences — could be tinted. Or locusts un-eating a field. Can get hold of quarry stuff)

The last 1,000 years: Settlements spread like melanoma, crawl across land, hoovering forest. Cathedrals bud, park and powder. Families take root in the land and fence it with wars, drop litters of children that fence it with green.
Not sure. Ant-hills? Termites? Or something colourful in a Petri dish? Mould? Fencing easy to arrange. And there’s a brilliant field patchwork taken somewhere in Kent — spring through autumn.

The last 100 years: Roads sprout, divide, and join. The land is veined with road. Rivers rise and fall, spread, shrink. Plugs are pulled from wetlands; they become fields. Valleys fill with water and become lochs. The air thickens and darkens above the towns, which blink orange at night.
Night above Rio — like an on-off switch. Police siren/light thing. No prob. Roads: Back to micro stuff, I think. Will inquire.

The last 10 years: Cities crawl east and westward, sucking up villages in their path. Fields flicker with changing crop colours. Yellow, bright, rape. Summer sneezing reaches epidemic proportions.
Mercury? You know how it stays in blobs and suddenly joins up? Eats the smaller blobs?
Me — I went to London, worked, shagged James/Carl/Steve, processed food and smoke and booze through my body, painted my front room white then peach then yellow, beetled up and down the roads, sometimes took off into the air for a short breath of elsewhere. Married Steve — whirlwind of white — divorced and found another room to paint yellow then green then eggshell.

The last year: Met Joe. Shagged, moved in, shagged, ordered pizza down the phone, drank small bottles of beer, shagged, worried when I missed a period and cried when I bled. So did Joe. Good, fine Joe. Painted the room ‘hint of yellow’ together. Getting more subtle in old age.
Koyaanisqatsi territory, almost.

The last week: Ate, drank, slept, and finished editing sequence for “The Twelve Seasons”. Found a lump and saw the doctor. He stuck a needle in and gouged out some tissue. Gouged. Bastard.

The last day: Doctor’s. Mammograph tomorrow. Sat in front of telly all day watching daytime stuff. Clarissa: I always think Sachertorte is ruined by that layer of apricot jam. Always? Sachertorte on my mind. A woman with dyed hair said her husband loved his ferrets more than her. Project: dyed hair growing back? C/U and head shot? Or shaved head? Sprouting hairs like grass shoots. ‘Black wires’. Or a person, young-to-old. Smooth-small to sagging. Need to start now. Train apprentice for the later years. Or thin to fat lady. Forcefeed like a goose, over months/years. Or film self? Too late. Sagging has set in already.

Jen. Where are you? Everyone’s worried sick. Give me a ring. Are you at work? Please. And good news about the film. David called. He wants a copy of the new treatment. Should I send him your notes? Just let me know where you are, eh? Love you.

Dear Joe:
OK, this is the score. Sorry to be difficult. Am fucked. Am calling it Dennis, in homage to Dennis Potter, who called his Rupert, in homage etc etc. They want to lop a bit off. Amazon. Maybe I can get a part in Xena Warrior Princess, lad’s wet dream, wear leather etc etc. Joke. Anyway. I need to be on my own for a bit (Garbo — drama queen). Want to finish snowdrops SO DON’T TOUCH THE CAMERAS. And tell David to go shag himself. As if he’ll ever get funding. I love you.

Jen xxx

OK Jen. Are you there? Are you listening to this? Don’t you just hate those shits who listen to their messages and don’t lift? Jen? OK then. Got your note. Don’t know what to say. Love you. That’s all. Love you. And come home. It’s cold without you. Crap. It’s shite without you. Come home this instant or the snowdrops get it. Love – you. Don’t do this.

Dear Joe,
Thanks. Feeling OK. Dennis fine too. Still not sure about lop-off. We’re attached. Or I’m attached. He’s a hanger-on. Parasite. Like mistletoe. You’d think you could take it off, shake it out like a cup. Dice. Wipe out gunge with a finger and replace. But no — it means more gouging. Need to think. Snowdrops growing fine — shoots about 1” now. Home — not yet. Will get back. You understand. At least, I hope you understand. Assumptions. Love you lots.

Jen xxxxx <---extra ones

Jen. Hi. What can I say? More to point — what can I do? People are asking for you. I don’t know what to tell them. Some cards here. Don’t want to open them. I want to talk. “It’s good to talk”, and all that. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Feeling a bit crap. In the sense of useless. And crap as in crap as well. Joe. That’s me. Remember me? Love you.

Dear Joe,
Ha bloody ha. Very funny. Next time you pass through, remember not to wear those fucking huge docs. Made a huge footprint — 10 or so frames until I caught it. AND IT SHOWS. To me, anyway. Don’t fuck it up for me, please. Skulking around like a spectre. I thought you were a cloud until I looked in freezeframe. It’s not video, you know. No sound. No point in speaking. Your mouth was all mushy. And your hair needs cut. And I’m still thinking about the lopfest cos apparently it won’t do much good and what’s the point of going titless into the good night? Sorry — no maudlin stuff. It’s fairly straightforward, actually. To lop or not to lop? Like snipping out a frame. Like you, matey-ghost — cutting room floor for you. Though of course there’s no cutting room floor, just a cutting room void where all the bad frames go to roost in pixel limbo. Don’t worry — I kept you somewhere. In my heart. In my hard drive. Easy to get confused. Love you.

Jen xxxx

Me again. You can’t hide forever, you know. I have friends in high places. David, actually. I sent him your outline. Any objections — tough. And any credit — mine. Cos you’re written off, right? Cos what’s the point of timelapse without time? Fair enough, Jen — spend it with your bloody snowdrops instead of me, cos they can comfort you and help you in ways I am obviously too crap and cackhanded to manage, and are no doubt far less boring to talk to. This is getting stupid.

Dear Joe,
I want to finish something. Can you understand that? Just another week. To feel finished. Don’t want to stop doing things. Then the Lop (sounds like a new dance). Yes, sirree. They’ve booked me in. Bye bye Dennis. It’s been whatever. And I’ve spoken to David. He wants a treatment, lists and costings for the archive stuff. And I’ve bought some paint. For the bedroom. Blue. Sort of deep Blue Blue as in Klein. Thought I could roll around in it and rub myself up against the walls. So you see I’ve got to come back. And cos I love you, incidentally. In fact, mainly that. But I didn’t want you to see me being crap. Cos I’m crap at this. Hugs (blue-smeared).

Jen

Jen. Fuck off. Joe.

David:
Here’s the next bit as discussed.

Now: A woman is sitting at a keyboard typing this. Symbiotic things — Dennis, bacteria, maybe viruses and fungi (who knows?) — lead small lives in the habitat of her body. Elsewhere, volcanoes are erupting and mountains growing imperceptibly as the continents collide. The noise of the creak of everything is E flat, if you had ears to hear it. Everything has a note.
(Stock) Snowdrops stretch upward toward the sun, unfurl. The snowdrops move, circle with the sunpath, dance the dance. A man looking like Joe appears suddenly and sits. He flickers. He’s there until the snowdrops wilt.

The next day: Wars — big, small, on scales we can’t imagine. Planes land and take off like bees. A One-Day Fly emerges, breeds, dies — all mayfly life is there, in the space between dawn and dusk. They live so fast, they’re dead by night. They live a long, slow brightening and a long, slow sundown — never the blink of days.
Slo-mo: We are so SLOW! Need to grind things nearly to a halt so that we can see them. To mayflies, we are lumbering monoliths. (Stock) Redwood forest, Canada, tree POV looking down, timelapse: people picnic around its ankles, play frisbee. Quick and insubstantial as flies.

The next week: More of same. Eat, drink, sleep. The rhythm of commuting is the rhythm of breathing. In-out.
Koyaanisqatsi territory, almost.

The next year: As above. Cities crawl. Roads join. Neon blinks: night-day-night-day-night-day. Sun blinks (in reverse): day-night-day-night-day-night. Trees grow another ring.

The next 100,000 years: Ice thunders down the Teviot Valley, etc etc (see above). Huge slump in world fridge market.
Glacial stock.

The next 10,000,000 years: (approximately). India crashes into Asia, the Himalayas shoot higher and higher. Crumpled cloth.
Slo-mo. Tweed? Polythene?

The next 4,000,000,000 years: Sea evaporates to desert as sun balloons and reddens. A small asteroid the size of a town hits home. A huge asteroid the size of a marble.

Wrapped Town

2004-11-29T20:37:00.000+01:00

first published in Eildon Tree

The first inkling that something was afoot was the appearance of a new couple in the town. He was small and skinny and spectacled – very much in the mould of Woody Allen. She was exotic, with hair so thick and long it stuck out behind her in the wind like an orange flag. They were bound to be noticed.
The word passed along the grapevine that the visitors had unusual, American-type accents but not quite, that they had just arrived in the area, and that they were artists. It then emerged that they were artists who specialised in wrapping things, including bridges, buildings and trees, and that they were looking for a town to wrap.
Why they came to Hawick at all became clear only much later on. They had never wrapped anything in Scotland before, and in the normal run of things they would probably have turned their attention to much better advertised places. The Scott Monument, say, or the isle of Muck, or the Forth Railway Bridge – places on the tourist trail which already had a large fan base, and where the civic leaders could be relied on to do a professional, cooperative job.
More locally, too, there were plenty far more obvious candidates. Leaderfoot Viaduct, the Eildon Hills or Jedburgh Abbey would have been just the job, and used up far less material. And there were a good few statues around that would have been quick and easy to wrap, including the chunky red sandstone William Wallace at Bemersyde, which would’ve been much improved with a bag over its head.
As it turned out, the supermarket manager’s young daughter Eileen had seen a picture of the Wrapped Reichstag in a book at school. She didn’t know what a Reichstag was, but to her, it looked like an impossibly large, exciting present.
Her imagination went wild savouring the nuances of receiving such a delicious surprise. She found herself dreaming about it - its rattle, its rustle, its squelch and smell, the mysterious points and edges that strained the wrapping into folds. Above all, she dreamt about opening it: feeling the hidden bulges, guessing the shapes, gnawing the knots with her teeth, lifting a corner for clues.
And in her dream she’d shut her eyes and stop, just at the cusp between desire and disappointment, a deep breath held inside her, her heart thumping in the moment. Then, with a shudder, she’d fall on the rustling stuff and rip it away - and wake up. Always. Just in time, before the surprise could turn into ordinariness.
The dream became something of an obsession. Eileen emailed the artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in the hope of finding out more. They emailed back to explain that the Reichstag was a building and something of a one-off. Far from daunted, Eileen said she loved it and that if they were wrapping anything in the area, be sure to let her know.
Her inquiry came at a good time. Christo had pretty well exhausted that line of inspiration, and was toying with the idea of random wrapping. What could be more random, he thought, than an out-of-the-blue something that offered itself on a plate? He decided that it was at least worth taking a look.
On their arrival in Hawick, the couple were immediately struck by the shape of the town. It flowed along a narrow valley. The houses crawled up each side, but not so far up that they spilled over the edges. Standing up on the surrounding hills, Christo and Jeanne-Claude saw that it would be perfectly feasible to wrap the lot. It would have to be a blanket wrap rather than a complete figure-hugging knotted job. The material would be laid across the valley, suspended on thick steel wires. It would come to a point at each end, just outside the 30-mile limits. The finished work would be best viewed from up on the hill, where it would look like a vast inundating river, or a bank of descended cloud.
Nothing more was heard till a year or so later, when the council received a planning application. It was accompanied by detailed sketches, full measurements and timescales. The pictures showed Hawick hidden by a shimmering veil of palest blue. The valley looked as though it was flooded by a lake – a still lake, flat enough to mirror a clear spring sky.
The whole thing was far too bizarre to contemplate. But, as the council had to admit, the accompanying CV was highly impressive. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had been wrapping for years, and were the acknowledged experts. They’d wrapped deserts in California, bridges in Paris, a parliament in Berlin, a complete park of trees in Switzerland and assorted islands and gorges all over the world.
The council divided into two camps on the issue – one very large, and one very small. The large camp said it was a piece of nonsense and they had more important things to be dealing with, such as the forthcoming by-election in Gordon and the site for the new drive-in burger bar.
The small camp consisted only of Councillor Brown, who was widely travelled and had a fondness for things that lightened up his day. He decided to make a stand just for the hell of it. He pointed out that the German Bundestag had held a similar debate on the wrapping of the Reichstag, and that Scottish Borders Council shouldn’t waste time reinventing the wheel. He emphasized that the wrapping was free, and what did you get for nothing nowadays? And for good measure, he underlined his killer point – that the Christos had never once considered offering to wrap Kelso, or Selkirk, and certainly not Galashiels, and that since Hawick was being singled out for special treatment, they’d be wise to take up the offer.
That swung it. A couple of weeks later, the town became host to the diverse crew of engineers, technicians, steeplejacks, seamstresses and art students that specialise in large-scale wrapping. The whole operation was overseen by the two artists, and it took just ten days to hoist the specially woven fabric onto the poles, joists and trusses erected across the town. Section by section, it went fluttering up into the sky, and was soon stretched tight across the frame until the whole valley was covered by a billowing tent of nearly blue.
It was an artistic sensation. Critics and connoisseurs and the plain curious travelled for miles to see it. The path up the hillside to the TV mast wore away from the constant tread of footsteps. The hilltop was crowded with sightseers camped out from morning till night, in all weathers, because it was impossible to appreciate the full impact of the work in a single short visit.
The changing light and clouds cast wonderful patterns across the ambiguous silver-blue. The long, low shadows of dawn shrivelled across it as the sun lifted off into the sky. By midday, the canvas bleached to the brilliant white of swans’ wings, yellowing through the afternoon into crisp vellum. By evening, it had darkened to inky blue shot through with phosphorus stars that shone faintly up from below.
Christo refused to be drawn on what the work actually meant. The critics had theories in abundance, and he was happy to let them thrash it out while he got on with enjoying the view.
It seemed the Wrapped Town, as it became known, meant different things to different people - and even to the same people at different times. To the fishermen it meant a river in full spate and the promise of hidden salmon. To the mill workers, it suggested a full-tilt production line. To the shopkeepers, it was a flow of traffic bringing opportunities their way. To the cynics, it was a bank of featureless fog that clouded everyone’s judgement but their own.
The practical thought about the practicalities, the dreamers about their dreams, the reactionaries were outraged and the revolutionaries inspired, the old pondered their childhoods and the young their futures, while those in between sat and wondered where they’d got to and where they were heading, depending on the light. The poets spouted metaphors and the critics coughed up bile, the poor pondered the cost and the rich how to cash in. The godly thought of salvation and the devilish of doom. The secretive saw mystery, the open saw revelation, the sick saw survival and the healthy saw joy.
The Wrapped Town could conceal, reveal, exclude, embrace, deny, confront and otherwise soak up just about any resonance anyone cared to transmit. That was why it was so widely loved.
Councillor Brown loved it because it lightened up his day.
The supermarket manager’s young daughter Eileen loved it because here, right in her own steep, grey valley, was the biggest, shiniest present she’d ever seen.
She sat all day on the hill and watched the pale sheet billow. At night, she shut her eyes and found she’d dreamt her way under the wrapping. It was dark. She could feel hard things, soft things, straight and squint and curved things that gave and shifted under her hands. She woke sticky with sweat and lay there, too troubled to sleep.
Meanwhile, in the town, life went on as usual. Traffic restrictions had been put in place to prevent the build-up of smog under the blue canopy. The weather was warm, so coal fires weren’t needed, and any rainy spells were diverted by the layer of industrial polyester a few yards above the highest rooftops.
The local paper tried to stir up a bit of reaction with its usual ploy: an anonymous letter penned by the senior reporter.
‘Outrageous!’ it fumed. ‘What a waste of money! It would be much better spent on clamping down on dog owners. These artists should be taken out and shot at dawn. Who do they think they are? They’re certainly not local. A Concerned Patriot.’
The reporter’s friends and relations rallied round as usual with supportive noises. But not one of them replied to the paper, even for the guaranteed pleasure of seeing their names in print. However much the reporter wheedled, the letter page remained staunchly in favour of the Wrapped Town. He was forced to write a reply of his own to redress the balance.
‘The Concerned Patriot is right,’ it said. ‘All that flammable material is only putting temptation in the vandals’ way. Who can blame them if they put a match to the entire lot? A Local Hero.’
But even the local vandals refused to be incited by this obvious bit of preemptive newsgathering. They were far too busy sitting out on the hillside, slashing the tyres of TV crews who dared to criticize the wrapping and, by implication, their town.
Down below the canopy, everything was fine. The clock chimed the hour as usual, its jaunty tune muffling high into the folds of the canvas. No one was troubled by the overcast days. They enjoyed the weather’s new predictability, and the freedom of walking without an umbrella.
Neither did the lack of direct sunlight bother them, since the sun now filtered down with a gauzy, flattering sheen. It was a strange light, but they got used to it. They liked the way it gave a mysterious silver glow to the High Street, and turned the sun into a luminous smear that floated above their heads.
What’s more, they found each other more interesting with a touch of alien blue about them. Even the same old faces they knew so well from their bathroom mirrors offered something new to see. There was a brightness to their eyes, an upturn to their mouths. A softer focus, maybe, thought Eileen, wondering at the transformation in her own face.
Every night, when the traffic thinned, she heard faint noises high above: the low, slow flap of the canvas, the jangle of clips on metal poles, and the wild harmonies of steel wires grating the wind.
It was a good time. A growing time.

The problems began when it came to unwrapping the town.
It was inevitable. It was a condition of the project that the whole woven edifice came down after four months in the air. Christo was adamant about this. It came down to aesthetic considerations. After that, the fabric would start to look tatty and fray at the edges. It would lose its baby blue sheen and accrue a stiffening layer of bird droppings. Its luminosity, its translucence, and all its resonances would be buried under overtones of opacity and filth. The meaning of the work would change.
There was a mutiny. The council held a meeting attended by pretty well the whole town. The town hall was stowed out. Everyone had become fond of the canopy, and felt it now belonged to them. And behind it all lay a desperate wish to defend the things the work had come to represent – their river, their clouds, their billowing fog, their hopes, their fears, their future.
A motion was unanimously carried that Hawick should stay wrapped, and that any attempt to unpeel it should be resisted. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived back at the 30-mile limit near the fire station with their army of engineers, technicians, steeplejacks and art students, ready to dismantle the work and dispose of the fabric, they found an electric sheep fence Behind it stood a crowd of well-drilled volunteers from all over town. At their head was Eileen, tall and straight, with a 12-bore shotgun in her hands and wild determination in her eyes.
The townsfolk camped in shifts. All night the braziers burned and threw extravagant shadows against the flapping sky. Like giants, they were, or demons, or big black restless bears against the gold. The smell of smoke hung heavy in everyone’s clothes.
It was a time for reflection, the burial of animosities, the renewal of old friendships that had died for want of nurture. The townsfolk were united in their stand. It was their artwork and they weren’t going to let anyone come along and destroy it, even the artists. Especially not the artists, who had subjected them to all the inconvenience in the first place and couldn’t just expect to walk away and pretend nothing had happened.
They hired a solicitor to scour the contract and found a loophole that suggested they had a case. The army, which was standing by with tear gas, withdrew. Christo shrugged and decided to move on to his next piece - a wrapped synchronised swimming team. As he climbed into his taxi, he turned and waved. Eileen stared, the shotgun tight under her arm, her heart hurting with a new excitement.
Hawick was left wrapped.
For a while, it was fine.
The stream of visitors continued. Each night, crowds camped out on the hill and watched the light dim slowly on the rippling sheet below. And each morning, the people below woke to the alien shine on their neighbours’ faces and were startled anew.
But in time, they got used to it. The blue canvas became less interesting as the days and months wore on. The joie de vivre the people had gained from its presence evaporated. It stopped surprising them. It became simply part of the landscape. They took it for granted and forgot about it entirely.
They even began to forget how things had been before. They forgot what the sky looked like, and eventually forgot that there even was one. They began to believe the canopy had been there for ever, and were furious when others suggested that was not the case.
The months turned into years. Plop. Plop. Plop. The overhead birds flung their thickening cast of droppings on the canvas. Missile by missile, it hardened into a black, sludgy crust. The canopy began to sag in the middle. The steel poles started to creak, the wires to stretch under the extra weight.
The people grew pale and stretched, like light-starved plants. Year by year, they woke to ever-darker days. Their faces grew dull and overcast, the ends of their mouths turned southward.
The numbers on the hillside fell away, died, forgot.
And now, only a solitary sitter remained, waiting and watching, her rusty gun heavy in her stiff old hands. Any day now. Any moment.
She shut her eyes. The dark shapes were spiking and bucking under their wrapping, like wild tethered horses. The darkness was lifting. She began to make out edges, shadows, bony outlines. She smiled, savouring the rising thud of her heartbeat.
Below, the tattering canvas drooped deeper onto the town. At its lowest sag, it scratched the jagged flag shaft wielded by the statue in the middle of the high street – a man on horseback marking some long past battle.
She heaved herself upright and laid down her shotgun, dusting the grass from her clothes.
Inch by inch, creak by groan, the canopy shifted under its load of stiffened sludge.
She sighed. It was a long way down. She toed the edge of the wrapping, and watched as a thin crack scuttled across the crust. She shuddered. Anticipation. The sweetest taste. The one she’d tasted all her life.
Below, the metal spear jabbed against the awning. Any moment, she thought. Any moment now.

Reinventing the Beach

2004-11-29T20:20:00.000+01:00

first published in Chapman

The Home Beach was invented by Croatian surgeon Aleksandar Stošić. It was designed for orthopaedic and therapeutic use in hospitals, fitness centres and the home.

Once upon a time there was a beach. It was a beach covered in stones, not sand. The stones were round and smoothed by the action of water and time. One day, after more water and more time, they would become sand, but not for the duration of this story.
A man walked across the beach. If it had been a beached covered in sand, not stones, he’d have been swinging his arms, curling his toes into the soft grit, enjoying the slight sinking and shifting below him.
It wasn’t. His trousers rolled up, he was hirpling across the stones in something close to agony. Though round and smooth, they were large stones. However, they were not large enough to accommodate a whole foot, nor even just its heel or ball. They were roughly the size of eggs, ranging from duck or swan size all the way down to bantam. He might as well have been walking on eggs, in fact, given his slow and painful progress.
Each stone ground deep into the soles and arches of his foot, until his weight was borne by the best match between skin and stone, stone and skin.
Finding the right spot to place his foot was a matter of care and bravado. At first, he tried to seek out suitable stones, test them for stability, rest his foot on top then gradually increase the pressure. It seemed the most sensible way to proceed. But as his balance shifted, and the proportion of the body borne on the back foot began to equal the proportion carried on the front, and arrive at the critical point where his weight would transfer from one to the other, the stones moved.
They were not fixed. They were rolling stones, and although there was no tilt or seismic upheaval below them to keep them in motion at this time, they were capable of rolling under pressure from above. Under the man’s foot, they slid against each other, grinding away a small surface each from the other, and found a new arrangement where friction kept them tight together, balanced point to point, with his weight above to keep them steady. Unfortunately, this had the effect of sending painful edges into places the man wasn’t expecting. These were usually the underside of his arches – the softest, most vulnerable part of his body, the oyster-soft smooth and ticklish parts of him, which were all the more surprising for being right next to the hard, horny leather of his heels.
Carefully picking his way across the stones was not the way to go. They weren’t cooperating. He decided just to give himself up to their random action. Since they were moving in any case, it didn’t make any difference where he landed. He would stare straight ahead, making no pretence at selectiveness. He would keep his eyes on the line where the sea met the sky, both now turning a tender shade of orange. The stones would do whatever they wanted down below, and he would keep his legs moving, one then the other, and let his feet find something to land on.
This seemed to work better. By walking faster, each foot had less time to dwell on the stone, and thus the pain. As quick as they landed, they lifted again, giving the pebbles less opportunity to grind into the parts that yielded most.
He was reminded of hot coals. It was a question of will and timing, he’d heard. First, you needed to be psyched up to the point where the entirely valid objections of your rational mind were overruled. That was achieved by talking to other people who’d already danced the coal-walk and lived. “It’s fun,” they’d lie. “It’s exhilarating” and “it’s like nothing else,” they’d add, more truthfully, followed by “speed is of the essence”.
For people didn’t walk across hot coals. They didn’t stroll or saunter. They ran. They sprinted. They hared as fast as their legs could carry them. Like hell, like the blazes, like all the fast, fiery similes rolled into one.
His face squeezed into a range of grimaces as he walked the stones. Sometimes his eyes shut tight, and his mouth along with it. Sometimes his eyes stretched wide open, and his mouth followed suit. Sometimes one did one and one the other, with no attempt at coordination.
He didn’t bother to hide these comic expressions. No one was watching, and he needed all his concentration for the job in hand.
His arches weren’t worthy of the name. They were flat as roads. They spanned nothing taller than a hair, and even a hair would have been crushed ovoid below them. They had fallen. If they had fallen any further, they would have dropped below the horizon.
There were advantages. For one thing, he had managed to avoid military service. For another – but there wasn’t another. There were only drawbacks. All sorts of careers were ruled out. Ballet, police, guardsman, of course. But others, too, less obvious: security guard, shop assistant, salesman, customs officer. Anything that involved the least amount of walking about, the least standing upright, whether at a counter, desk or entrance gate. He couldn’t be a dog-walker or an usherette. He’d be no good whatsoever as an athlete or burglar, with all the running involved.
It was getting easier to walk across the beach. The cycling of his legs seemed to have made him lighter on the stones, and the pain was no longer so great. He was able to devote less thought to his feet, and more to his face, which was aching, too, from the unaccustomed stretching and clenching.
He kept his gaze on the horizon, by now an angry orange, like the heart of a fire. He kept walking.
He was reminded of a story he’d once heard, of a mermaid who traded her tail for legs that felt like knives to walk on. It always seemed like an unfair transaction to him. He could fully understand the reaction of her merfellows, who put her over the equivalents of their knees and told her not to be so silly, that no love was worth distorting yourself for and that she could change herself to suit the prince as much as she liked, she’d still fall short of the mark. It was a consummate, modern lesson, just as applicable to breasts, weight and nose jobs as to tails.
Treading across the stones, he wondered nonetheless about her courage. How had she kept her mind off the knives? Were knives really that painful at all? He’d cut himself deeply, once. It hadn’t hurt in the slightest, as far as he could recall. Not for several minutes. His finger had bled profusely and needed several stitches. He hadn’t felt a thing until it started to heal, until the wound stopped being fresh and supple, and started being stiff and hardening at the cut edges. He remembered only the insistent throb of his slit finger, as if the muffled underground workings of his body were now exposed to the daylight. It had been like opening the bonnet of a car with its engine running. The blood had squirted into his handkerchief. He had found it interesting, not sore.
So maybe the knife-walking was something you got used to, like a permanent headache, and maybe your mind found ways to deal with it. Such as looking outside yourself and your bothers. Such as keeping your eye on the ball.
The sun was dissolving into the sea. It made a kind light. His hands looked golden. His fingertips were haloed with backlight. He could taste the brine on his lips. His hair was thick and strawy with salt.
He didn’t look at his feet. They were apart from him now, someone else’s feet. They felt very far away. He was vaguely aware of them taking steps, moving him forward mechanically. The ground was gently sloping away beneath him. He must be almost at the water.
The shock of the wet hit him. It was cold and delicious. He felt the foam massage his toes with the gentlest touch and fall away. Seafoam. What the mermaid had become when she’d given up on her impossible love and returned home, ghostly tail between her grafted legs. He wondered whether she’d had a memory of that tail when she walked. Did she have not only the knives to contend with, but also the phantom itches and swishes of her amputated fish-part? Had she missed the things she could no longer do? The feel of a powerful kick that surged her forward, hair rippling behind? The tickle of fish in her slipstream? Had she flexed her old ghost muscles against the disappointing emptiness of air?
He stood and let them bathe, the numb feet. They chilled into feeling. They were sore. His soft mollusc arches ached and burned. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hiss of steam rise from them. Deliberately, he’d tricked himself into walking all the way to the water’s edge, so that now, he’d have to walk all the way back. His shoes lay together next to the road, back where he’d parked the car. The socks were stuffed inside them. The only way back was across the pebbles. He’d forced himself to do twice as much walking as he really could.
He would rest. Sit down and watch the melt of the light. He’d earned it. Lowering himself onto the beach, he rested his hands behind him and winced as the stones stabbed his palms and then his backside. The hot-coal dance again. He had to shift, shift, shift from one point of pressure to the other. There was nowhere for respite. Even the startling chromatography of the sky couldn’t keep his mind off his predicament.
A dog appeared, a long, bony lurcher, bounding easily over the pebbles. Some way off walked a woman in boots, a length of lead dangling from her hand. A few feet away from the man, the dog stopped and sniffed its way forward. He wasn’t sure about dogs. There were good ones and mean ones. It nuzzled around behind him. It was interested in his pocket. He twisted out of its way, putting his hand out to push its wet nose from his jacket. As he did so, his weight ground harder into fewer stones and, trying to avoid the pain, he lost balance and toppled backwards.
His head just missed the stones. He curved his spine and felt the hard points dig into every bone of it. There was nothing for it but to give in, to fall right back onto the pebble bed and lie there. He felt surprisingly comfortable, spreadeagled across the beach in his thick coat. The dog’s muzzle poked into his face and slobbered his chin. He spluttered it away and started to laugh. To giggle, even. His belly let out all its hoarded tension and heaved in great, shaking gasps, each one jabbing him again and again into the stones. He crooked his knees up and splashed his flat feet in the rising water, one after the other, treading the stones as if they were grapes, giggling like a schoolchild.
There was still the long way back to the car. He looked up at the darkened sky. The first star was out. Venus, maybe. The one that appeared before the others, before the sun had even had time to drop out of sight.
He wanted to take the beach home with him. Plant it in his living room. Carpet the house with it. Paint the walls the colours of the sky.
It was good for him, the beach-walking. It was good for his feet. It was medicinal. Each step made his feet stronger, harder. The muscles tensed and toughened. The arches remembered what they might have been and strained at least in the right direction.
He would, then. He’d take the beach home. Learn to live with it. He’d lay it out on the floor and walk across it every day. Wake up to it in the morning and lower his feet onto basalt, not the thick, white rug that purred by his bedside. Stumble across it to the bathroom. Stand on it in front of the toilet, shifting his weight from left to right, heel to ball, as he waited for his bladder to empty. In the kitchen, in the living room, and up and down the corridor, walking and wearing the stones, feeling them shift under him as nothing ever did in the clean, concrete world he lived in. Or maybe just a corner of beach. A boxed beach. A square of it, a metre each side. He’d keep it in his bedroom, under the bed behind the white, purring rug, and he’d pull it out every morning and stand on it and tread the stones as though they were grapes, and remember the taste of salt and the colour of the sky, while his arches strained from the knives.

The Case Against Wings

2004-11-29T20:09:00.000+01:00

first published in Chapman

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Wings? I can’t see it catching on. Too dangerous, for a start. Imagine the chaos. You’d have everyone up there, flapping about, getting caught up in each other. Getting caught in telegraph wires as well, like as not.
You’d have to give everyone special training. Couldn’t have everyone just taking off, whizzing around with no training. They’d have to work out the steering. How to start, how to stop. Braking, that kind of thing. You’d have to have speed limits. How would they work that one out? You couldn’t have speed signs hanging around up there, all over the place. People would get caught up in them. And you’d need people to reinforce the speed limits. People with proper training. Police, maybe. Traffic police. They’d have to stay airborne, cruise around, just to make sure everyone toed the line.
And what about the dark? You’d need special lights fitted, around the edges, maybe, so that people didn’t run into each other. Or headlights. Maybe special waistcoats with headlights fitted, and backlights, and brakelights as well, to wear when you were up in the air. How would people see, though? They could fly straight into telegraph wires and slice their heads off. All the telegraph wires would have to be fitted with lights, maybe. That would take some doing.
It would certainly send the crime rate soaring. Imagine all these burglars flying around, almost completely silent, looking out for women who lived on their own or old people ill in bed, hovering outside their windows in the dark, or maybe landing on the roof and giving signals to their partners inside. You’d need to fit your windows with alarms, or netting, or bars. The higher floors would be no safer than the ground floor.
What would they do about moulting? Feathers moult. It’s a fact of life. I think it happens seasonally. You’d have to keep a close watch on them, check that they weren’t loose in their sockets, before you planned any trips. And even if you’re not in season, wingwise, you’d have to be pretty sure you hadn’t caught anything. Because there are all sorts of diseases that can attack feathers, make them drop out, shrivel up, lose their oils – that sort of thing. You’d have to quarantine people with diseases and make sure they didn’t spread. Maybe make them wear special badges, or cover themselves up, or make them stay indoors.
How would you check your wings for diseases if you couldn’t get a good look at them? It’s fair enough if you live with a partner. You’d just check each other once in a while. But what if you live on your own? A mirror, maybe. Can’t see that working. There are bound to be blind spots. You’d need regular checkups. That would put more pressure on the National Health Service, as if they weren’t already straining at the seams. Maybe they’d have to set up specialist wing clinics just for checkups. You could train nurses to do it. Just check the feathers and make sure they’re in good health and up to the job.
What about clothes? You’d have to get a whole new wardrobe. Or get bigger sizes that would fit. But that would look pretty awful. Like pregnancy tents. Probably, people being what they are, everyone would jump at the chance to splash out on a whole new wardrobe. It would be interesting for designers. A challenge. Give them something a bit more meaty to work on, not just the usual hems and collars, here-a-tweak, there-a-tweak. You’d need a lot of darts, I reckon. Have to finish all the edges properly. It would bump up the cost of clothes, I bet.
And you’d have to sort out the issue of whether to leave them uncovered, or to have a special pocket or bag or flap affair that you could cover them in, and still have them easy to get at when you needed them. Zips might be good, but you’d be in danger of getting your feathers caught.
You could leave them uncovered in the summer. Maybe have slits in the back where they stick out. They could be quite pretty, after all, on the right person. I could imagine them fluttering around. Quite flattering, I suppose, if you had the figure for it. But in the winter, and even in the spring and autumn, it would be too cold. In fact, it would be too cold most of the time, except in the very warmest t-shirt weather. So mostly, they’d have to be covered up. They’d have to design special bras, too, to go around them at the back. That would be a challenge, I bet.
Chairs would be a problem. Especially high-back chairs. It would be highly uncomfortable, leaning back against all those quills. Though I suppose the feathers would be soft, so it’s swings and roundabouts. Better to design low-back chairs, and then people could just let them hang behind over the chairback.
You’d have to sleep on your side. I can’t see any other way. Or on your front, but that’s not good for everyone. Bad for your back, too. It would make turning round a bit of a palaver. Maybe you’d need special nightstraps to keep them tied up, so that they didn’t get tangled or messy - like the way woman used to braid their hair at night.
It would be good for the economy, no doubt. There would probably be a boom. You’d get all sorts of new industries springing up. New products. Those nightstraps, for a start. New clothes. Grooming products. You’d certainly need plenty of those. Brushes, possibly? Would you need to brush them? Or would they keep their own shape? You’d need some kind of kit, I’m pretty sure of that. Especially if they had to be cooped up under clothes. They’d get crushed to death. And special shampoos that didn’t damage all the delicate oils. Because I’m sure those oils are a crucial part of the whole flying business. Keep the feathers airtight, I think. Certainly watertight. If you used an ordinary shampoo, it would probably strip the oils and you could end up with some terrible accidents. Because people take risks, don’t they? Unnecessary risks. And you can’t police them all the time – certainly not. That would be an infringement of their personal liberties.
Personal hygiene might be tricky. Feathers are notoriously smelly, after all. Especially when burnt. You’d have to be extremely careful near fires. And they’d probably need washing more often than hair, because they’d be cooped up most of the time. It would get pretty sweaty, especially under the back joints. Maybe you’d need special deoderants that didn’t damage the delicate oils. And sprays and gels to keep everything in place. Like hairspray. That would be another new industry, maybe – a feather salon. You could go to get everything styled and groomed. Wonder if there would be different styles, different cuts? Though presumably you couldn’t have more than a light trim or you wouldn’t be able to fly.
I really can’t see people going for it. It just seems like an awful lot of unnecessary hassle. All the things you’d need to think about. Imagine having teenage children, for starters – that would a nightmare. They could be out all over the place. Obviously they’d want to experiment. That’s the nature of things. You’d need eyes in the back of your head. And then they’d be wanting this, wanting that. Wanting their licence, wanting the latest outfits and gadgets, trying to outdo each other.
I suppose it might be fun, yes. I can see the attraction for some people. Flying around, off down to the shops, avoiding the traffic. Looking into people’s gardens, tapping at their bedroom windows. You’d certainly see some things. Oh yes. You certainly would. But on balance, no. I really can’t see it catching on.

Small Blue Thing

2004-11-29T19:56:00.000+01:00

first published in Story Cellar

Marbles were banned in our house.
“Can ye no take a telling?” said my mam,
peeling my fingers yet again from a small hot ball. She didn’t trust me as far as she could throw me. And maybe she was right enough. Marbles were the reason I first borrowed my sister’s eyes.
There was this marble craze on at the school at the time, with us wee ones hunched all playtime, clicking our secret patterns. Small glass wars raged in every tarmac corner. Gobs bulged with everlasting trophies. You had to be part of it. No marbles, no pals.
But we had a baby. One weekend there was a midnight abduction to gran’s across the way. Three days later, I came back to my room to a strange smell of soap and new knitting, and a glaikit new bear sat on my pillow.
It was four months and ten days till my birthday. I wasn’t daft.
“Look what the baby’s brought you,” said my mam. The parcel of pink wool in her arms twitched. And there she was - a skinny damp doll with fingers and gums and muckle great eyes on her. My sister, Rhona.
“Isn’t she bonny?” said my mam. “Look, Mandy - she’s got your eyes”. And that was only the start of the thieving.
I was prepared to be generous. A baby conferred a certain playground status, like being the first with a tricksy new toy. I had a shot at holding her, and made a few pence by promising turns to my pals. But it soon became clear that Rhona was just a tiny tearjerker that really ate and really shat and really gret and really got on my nerves.
She stole all my best toys.
“You’ll not be wanting this old thing,” said my mam, dancing my love-worn rabbit into Rhona’s cot and clutches.
She stole half my room.
“Stop humphing, Mandy,” said my mam. “Share and share alike.” She and Rhona exiled me to a rug island in the far corner.
She stole my attention. After sworddancing all week in the kitchen, I came into the living-room to entertain mam’s Thursday pals. As I stood on tiptoe poised for the best high cuts of my life, Margot and Daphne gave a unisono coo.
“Aaahhh! The wee lamb!” But they were focused somewhere over my left shoulder, at a bundle in white swaddle lace.
And Rhona was the reason my mam stole my best marble - a perfect blue one with a grand cloudy swirl that I won in a spitting match. This was no solo job - they were in it together, thick and thieving as they burbled secrets over gonks and mash and milk.
The Banana Splits were on, louping in that daft American way across the screen. It was a bit advanced for Rhona - she was far more taken with the bright coloured baubles I had lying about the floor. For peace I gave her my best one to hold, and she grabbed it happily in her fist and went quiet. I was sucking another one in my gob when - oh oh, chongo - my mother swooped.
There’s a danger in the trapped wisps of a marble. If you gaze too long inside it, your mouth will want to melt it on your tongue.
Rhona’s cheek had a big hard boil out the side, like a squirrel-wad of Campbell’s chicken soup.
“Open up!” said mam. “Open up!” with that desperate choochoo feeding-spoon voice on her - Rhona’s cue to clamp her mouth. So she was turned upside down and jemmied open and her gums coughed apart, and finally the marble went skiting out across the carpet. I sat braced in the corner ready for the clouting. And when it came, my sister’s honest blues stared in their bland baby way right at me.
All my marbles went in the bucket after that. Not the kitchen bucket, where you could find stuff if you still wanted it, but the outside bucket, where the scaffies came and took things off to wherever scaffies go.
Marbles are hard to hide. Keep them in your sock and you look like you’ve a goitre. Put them in your shoe and you hirple like your gran. And in your knickers they have you hotching like an ape. I tried all the obvious places.
My sister’s eyes were milky, like her diet, and watery, like her nose. And granted, they were bonny, with their pale sky shine and innocence.
“She’s your mam’s eyes,” said the street. “She’s your dad’s eyes,” said granny B, against the grain as ever. But I knew the truth.
“She’s your eyes.” And her no more right to them than to anything else she’d thieved. I took to searching them when she was awake. With my face up close to her butter breath I stared, and could sometimes see my face caught in the blue-spoked irises. I watered from the looking, but she never blinked. I grew to wanting them back.
Then came the day I lost five best pals. In the way of these things they’d gone into a huddle and replaced me with Sandra, who wasn’t a marble outcast. By the time I walked home from school, I’d finished howling, but in Rhona’s eyes I saw my ugly redness reflected in her untroubled blue. I’d had enough. It was time to take back what was rightfully mine.
Her eyes were smaller than I thought, and sat a bit loose in my sockets. I blinked, and through Rhona’s infant blur made out her hands dabbing the air. At first, she giggled at the novel darkness, but when no peekaboo came she started straining indecisively, and I found my own eyes and popped them in above her cheeks. She stared in surprise, and maybe bulged a bit more than usual, but on the whole she seemed content, in that way of warm milk-soaked babies.
There was a mirror in the bathroom, so I lifted her next door so that we could see our reflections. Mine was disappointing - I couldn’t see much beyond the pastel baby mist. But for my sister, it was a revelation. In place of the soft forgiving fudge she knew, there were now the harsh outlines of bony arms and a pudgy outsize head, all in unrelenting focus. She opened her mouth and bawled.
My mam came hurling through from the kitchen, and felt my sister’s backside. It was dry and unslipping under the fat squash of nappy.
“Shoosh now,” said my mam. Rhona’s hand paddled treacherously.
“Have you been at her?”
“No!” There’s no thinking about the rights and wrongs of lying in the moment before a clouting.
“Cos if you have...” Her finger said the rest.
I looked straight at her in the only form of confession I could manage. But it seemed my new eyes were the best liars out - mild, honest, innocent as an angel. Slowly her hand went down.
“Get your coat on. We’re going for the messages.”
Away from the threat of the mirror, Rhona was soothed into sleep, my eyes strapped safe behind the veined pink of her eyelids. She was girdled into the push chair and I walked alongside, holding onto the pram handle for balance.
Everything swam, as if through the wet blur of chlorine in the baths.
We came to a halt by Kerr the butcher’s, and I kept an eye on Rhona outside. The very smell of the butcher’s could make you bowk if you thought about what it meant. Rhona opened my eyes and found herself right up against a glazed, applemouthed pighead and a lengthwise half of dangling cow. She screamed.
By now my mam was fairly in one, and with two girny children in tow she speeded grimly through the maze of shopper’s legs, me flailing behind clutched onto the pram. In the end she lost her patience and wrenched me from the handle.
“That’ll do. You’re far too old to be hinging onto a pushchair.” For a moment I stood anchorless. Neither of us saw the passing Hillman Imp until it jarred to a halt inches from my nose.
“You don’t get that from my side,” huffed my mam as we wheeled the pushchair into Mr Bryden’s, the optician.
“Can you not wait outside?” I said.
“Don’t be daft,” said my mam. “If you’re getting your dad’s eyes, I want to know about it.”
Mr Bryden sat me into his leather chair and wedged my chin into his metal contraption.
“Don’t you worry, now,” he said. “We’ve some lovely glasses for bairns.” He peered at me close, through very unattractive bifocals.
As the light went off, I shrank back from Mr Bryden’s breath, jaw trapped in the cold steel and eyes shut tight.
“Look at the wee light, now”. I couldn’t. Rhona’s eyes were wet with tears.
“Do what the man says.” My mam pinched my arm, smiling the while at Mr Bryden in the dark. “It’s a stage she’s going through.”
I raised my lids and stared ahead through the face-cage. Mr Bryden and I and my sister were locked eye-to-eye in the glare of his pinpoint light.
Mr Bryden was the first to look away. He swallowed, wiped his bifocals and took another look.
“There’s something not quite...”
Then he stood up abruptly and put on the light. Rhona stirred fitfully in her pram.
“Her eyes. They’re not...”
Hers, I wanted to say.
“Focused?” said my mam. “I might have known. She’s her dad’s eyes.”
“She’d better see the specialist, Mrs Douglas.”
Mam bent over to peer at me. I peered back through the haze.
“It’s his mother’s side, you know.”
Then Rhona, her sleep now wearing off, started to wail. She wailed at the bright lights on the ceiling, she wailed at the sharp metal shapes, she wailed at the jagged letters on the walls, blind to the meaning but seeing all with my crystal 20:20 eyes.
“Next Tuesday!” shouted Mr Bryden, as Rhona was bundled out in the pram. “Nine-fifteen! Dr Armstrong! He’s very good with the bairns!”
He bent over Rhona’s pram and poked her belly, as she hunched for another ear-bursting roar. But not before she’d opened my eyes and looked him full in the face.
Mr Bryden snatched back his finger as if from a burning grate. There, trapped in the mirrors of her eyes, was all the living of my own six years. Something in her expression was too old to sit smooth in the cushion of her cheeks - a knowledge of school, of sandpits, of skirts, ties, tig and tantrums. But above all there were secrets - secrets no cream-fresh baby has the right or the time to know.
And Rhona saw his knowing and shut her face on him like a door. We went back home, I clinging miserably to the pram.
Later, while my mam was in the kitchen telling my dad about my eyes - and his, and his mother’s - I reclaimed them and washed them with tears of relief to see so sharp again. And my sister’s I returned quickly to their place. Too quickly, for I gave a her a slight squint which she has to this day.
And that would be all about marbles and their dangers, except for one night, much later, when I was old enough to be drunk enough to be a girl again. My husband and Rhona’s and she lay snoring dead by the fire, and I remembered a game I had once played. I looked down and from my husband’s sleeping face, took out his eyes for my own. And when I looked on Rhona, and when I looked on my own stretched body with those tired eyes of his, I learned too many secrets I’d not the right to know.