HER WORDS, NOT MINE
A collaboration with Allen Ashley



She kept me waiting only because winter daylight was so short. Her words, not mine.

She did apologise between her gritted teeth, and I was gentleman enough to accept her apology. However, I remained irritated, especially when she said that darkness gave her the willies. Again, not my words.

At the time, the shaky logic of her position escaped me. In fact, given her excuse, she should have been early, not late. In any event, we proceeded with the business of our appointment without further ado. She was not a lady with which to be messed. And I don’t mind saying that.

"I am interested in party-giving. There is a lot of mileage in parties especially during economic recessions."

I nodded, still bemused by her turns of phrase. What was more, her manner left a lot to be desired, bearing in mind that her aim was to sell an idea to me. I was representing a Venture Capital investment outfit, one to which small businesses appealed for funds when the more customary sources of finance had not proved viable. It was my job to identify worthwhile, if superficially precarious, businesses and, then, take back the necessary information to my Board for a decision. People who invested in Venture Capital wanted the best of both worlds—security and above average returns. A hard act to perform. And the Board would need every i crossed. The lady I discovered was indeed into parties. Running shindigs. Planning gigs. Providing the disco and the balloons and the Dracula masks and the strippergrams and so forth. Angela and Co., her firm was called.

"Have you brought details of your track record?"

Ignoring this question, she averted her face for a moment and, upon turning back towards me, she had apparently plugged into her mouth two gruesome vampire fangs.

I was flabbergasted. So much so, I lost all concern for syntax and style.

Hey, parties were essentially concerned with the art of frivolity. But here we were meant to be having a hard-nosed business meeting, with tough bargains to be forced. Instead of which, she was acting the goat. I couldn't believe it. How could I tell my board that it was a promising concern, simply on the evidence of her fancy dress? Most of the Directors, I knew, would stand no stuff and nonsense.

My thoughts were even more flabbergasted than the thinker of such thoughts.

Indeed, I tried to put myself in Declan Denton's shoes, particularly, when interviewing a Venture Capital prospect, because, after all, Declan was the chairman of my Board. And at that precise moment, Declan's shoes were pacing up and down in a disused and rather stinky shop-doorway.

The half-warm early streetlight cast little illumination upon his workaday clothes and scurrilously ordinary face. By contrast, he had a good view of what was once the spanking-bright offices of Shark, Lizard and Lizard, Loan Arrangers. How much longer would Angela be? If the building, as it seemed, had been decked to mimic a hotel, would Angela come out dressed like a chambermaid, with a crocodile of disturbed sleepers in tow? His thoughts, not mine.

He stubbed out his cigarette before he got down to the worm in the filter, kicked the butt out into the rain-swept road. There were so many things to worry about lately. Shoe polish in chocolate, weevils in the tap water and the Old Bill trashing all the West Side dens. On top of which the weather had gone completely haywire and Angela had been noticeably frosty whenever he dared lay a hand on her shoulder or display a set of yellowed teeth in her direction.

From about a mile away he heard the klaxon calling cockneys to the comparative safety of the dome of St Pauls and the upper floors of Centrepoint. The Thames had burst its banks again and already the street was an inch deep in flood tide. Angela had better hurry. She didn't like crossing water at the best of times. Denton reached for another cigarette but this time the worm had awoken from its pupa stage and chewed through the paper and impure tobacco. Denton tossed it carelessly into the street stream.

Through the drizzle he saw the 'hotel' door open and a darkly-clad figure emerge. It had better be Angela, he muttered as he stepped out into the rain. Forgetting to look both ways, he was several steps into the road when he heard a whoosing noise approaching from the right like a runaway steam engine.

With jaws. Like doors. Swing ones.

I sauntered self-consciously through those swing doors to escape from the hotel lobby. The cocktail I had shared with the lady from Angela & Co. had gone to my head. Declan Denton may have been my boss, but he had no right to use my own thoughts against me. I snatched the half-smoked cigarette from where I had it poked behind my ear and tried to light it in the newly sprung rainstorm. The darkness was thus touchable like ink. I moved into the temporary shelter of another doorway which, I hoped, did not interconnect with the hotel. The lady wouldn't follow me into a night as dirty as this one, especially in view of her phobia about the comparative lengths of black and white. Out here, it was not only monochrome, you couldn't even get a signal at all. Yet I managed to tune into Denton's footsteps again. I wasn't very far behind—I could even see vague imprints on the shiny pavement.

"Have you brought details of your track record?"

I repeated over and over again the question that had stirred up more ancient fears in my mind than if I'd been a young maiden tied to sleepers and a whole trainload of weird monsters on a night-trip to Clacton-on-Sea coming at her.

I now stumbled through Limehouse, hoping for a station with some semblance to one called Shadwell. I wanted back to basics. Then, belatedly, I saw I, too, was leaving glosspacks behind me, with groove-patterns off my shoe-bottoms. And other patterns—thought-patterns—were off away on their own version of soul-searching...

This was Declan Denton's theory: stuff Venture Capital for a while, he wouldn't go short of a few bob with his dosh. He had to solve his identity crisis by going back to his East End roots. Seek out the ghosts of Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. But things had broken down so much recently that all manner of crap had come out of Pandora's Box with the collapse of the Sterling currency and now seemed to have seeped back into my own corner of the universe.

There was a crowd of youths one window up from the video store. They seemed unbothered by the rain. Probably lager louts. But such bigotry was bad for business. He glanced at the new releases. Certificate 18 was a short short called "Angel or Demon". He liked gripping plots and happy endings. This one promised gripping thighs and a snappy ending.

There were two Shadwell stations, steps apart. One was the barely populated East London Lines, sort of sub-underground. Up on the bridge was the Docklands Light Railway, hand-driven by computers and as reliable as Arfur Daley's motors. The train was red, white and blue—all the colours you'd expect it to be. Denton sat next to a balding business-man sporting a walkman. There was so much leakage he could hear every whoop and scream of "O Bondage, Up Yours" by X Ray Spex. He moved to the other end of the carriage, waving his travelcard at the train captain. The system stalled just outside Cyclops Wharf. Apparently there was a young maiden tied to the tracks up ahead. Denton joined the other passengers peering through the front window but all he could see was building sites ... and tracks.

Track Records. That had been The Who's label. But they weren't East End lads, were they?

Eventually the doors swished open. It was like exiting a lift into a hotel lobby. Too late he saw two shapes in Halloween costumes with the vamp fangs and stuff. Always touching him for money, rain or shine. An Ark would be more useful than cash if the Thames burst its banks any wider.

Oops, they'd spotted him—but luckily the rain had turned heavier and icier and he was able to dodge behind a low-flying skyful of it. Indeed, each dotted slat of sleet stretched right back to God's tilted palm ... and then he thought: "Angela and Denton" must have been the title. A miscegenation of word and meaning. Also, why on earth was he being pursued by black and white holograms—and strippergrams, horrorgrams, X-ograms, all dressed up as real people?

I was one of those so-called people. After trekking for what seemed hours, I had Denton in my sights. Angela's trial sample of the type of virtual reality she marketed was certainly proving more than a mere nightmare to pass the dark time. She was sure proving that my company's investment in Angela & Co., were it made, would be more than mere zootropes: in fact, a lot more than feeding lizards or tugging mindless crocodiles through bouts of sleeping. I only needed to convince Denton. But who had heard of Board Meetings outside of Whitechapel? What was more, there was something tangibly evil in the air around Canary Wharf? Pixels of snow across the eyescreen. Blotting out Deptford, let alone New Cross. Still, think global! Seize the night! Denton stood alone, with a face like Roger Daltrey's (Who?), a face he had often sported during our company's Quality Control sessions. All I had to do was detrack my Angela body and lay its mind on him thick...

I was nearly home. I had lost Declan Denton in the murk. He was welcome to it. Along with his anti-smoking fags and his one-eyed monster in the tower, I just hoped someone would release the woman tied to the railway line so that my plan B escape route was clear.

I paused on the parapet, feeling the usual disorientation after a VR trip. The venue had been called Angela Arcades, the machine "One Track Mind". I spent half my waking hours there these days. Prosaic thought; the old story cliche went: "He woke up and yes it had all been a dream." Modern version: "It had all been a virtual reality experience." Denton would call that progress!

The waters already licked at the top of the wall, running over the chalked graffiti, "The Willies rule, so don't mess boys!" I had my boat ready, intending to take the Regents Canal through Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Camden Lock right up to the zoo. Two by two I'd save only those animals who had something to contribute to society. Locks of any description would not hinder my crest of the wave progress.

"Hello, dear, had a nice day at the office?"

Already in mode as a new neanderthal, I merely grunted in reply to my wife. I was just a tad nervous about explaining to her that I was ditching her into the ditch water, leaving her behind because I was in love with a construct.

She dished up a chiaroscuro tea. The darkness was the brown sauce and the burnt bacon; the light was an anemic egg and over-cooked mashed potatos. She'd made sure these last were not only dead but eradicated from history. Eradication awaited her, too. And awaited that serpent demon Denton. I pushed the plate away. I'd kill something later on the Ark.

I thought to myself: say nothing. Keep mum. No, forget mum, I didn't want any Freudian stuff in my new Eden. I would set my alarm for 2.31 am, high tide. Just scarper. Blimey, words escape me!

The flood waters were already seeping under the kitchen door. Most of London would be adrift by midday. I ignored the outdated goggle box pulsating steadily in the dampest corner of the living room.

I went fully dressed to bed, flabbergasted fangs and all. “London, after all, is the greatest Venture Capital in the world”, were the words I dozed-off with.

Yet no Hackneyed ending, this. Not a dream, not alien impregnation of his mental processes, not even a virtual reality device, but something far more astounding had invaded his mind: His own thoughts.

A SECRET ANCESTRY...
A collaboration with Gordon Lewis.



The town was silent as night slid across the sky like a stormcloud. Inside the houses, thousands — no — millions watched flickering T.V screens where an important football match played out its drama.

Sandy smirked at the other two people in the room — knowing that the way things were going in the dying minutes of a vital match he would win a whole pile of money from his two friends and a betting shop — if the football score stayed as it was.

Suddenly, an equalizer was unexpectedly poked in by a rather lugubrious forward — and the watching world was faced with a ‘golden-goal’ situation, or at worst, an unsatisfactory penalty shoot out to end a very important match.

Sandy’s glee was expunged and, disgusted; he abruptly slammed out of the house to wander into the back garden despite the onset of a dampening drizzle. More a dribble he thought ruefully. In the old days footballers used to dribble the ball didn’t they? Cleverly foot-juggling with the ball from boot to boot as they weaved round the players towards the opponent’s goalmouth.

It was then he saw it, a huge black swathe swoop across the sky (darker even than the brooding rain clouds) with lights spraying like sparks in its wake. As this huge black shape approached above the area he was standing, Sandy stood transfixed as the ‘thing’ stopped directly above his head, hovering like a low black cloud with just a beam of light emanating from it.

Having always been sceptical about unidentified flying objects, he had, in an off-hand manner, read reports on UFO spotting, ending with a shrug of disbelief, especially when some people claimed they had been ‘beamed-up’ to be examined and interrogated by alien beings.

Shaking himself out of his stupor he found the propulsion to turn and run back into the house, not trusting to providence, for he knew he had seen something odd. Still trembling from his experience he burst into the TV lounge to be greeted by his two friends, Stuart and John. Still breathless, and before he had gathered his wits to blurt out his story, Stuart was the first to speak.

“Where did you fly off to? You should have waited to see the kerfuffle over that last goal. One of the linesmen claimed there had been an infringement, a handled ball. After quite a long con-flab with the Ref and the protesting players, the goal was disallowed. The whistle for full-time came soon after, so the match ended up with a score of 2-1, just as you predicted. You’ll pick up a tidy old sum from the betting shop tomorrow, you lucky dog, you’ll not bother with the couple of quid off us... will you?”

Still breathless, Sandy managed to speak at last...

“Forget the bloody football for a minute, come outside quick, there is something very odd in the sky above the house. A huge black shaped thing, too triangular, too uniform in shape to be a cloud... Come hurry up, it may be still out there...”

“You’re having us on”, John was quick to reply, “you never believed in there being anything like extra-terrestial beings.”

“I tell you there was something and I want you to take a look, maybe it’s some kind of plane like the stealth bomber… it could be some natural phenomena, but I want you to at least come and have a look...”

As they went into the garden, they all saw something, but as they went further into the garden they were met by an invisible obstruction, something intangible… like a glass wall, with no glass, just an impenetrable barrier.

An ‘impenetrable barrier’, so called, was what Sandy’s wife erected when he had his pals around for drinks or a game of cards. Except, tonight, it had been football on the telly... along with millions of others. Even folk with a tepid interest had their heads turned by the World Cup...

Stuart’s earlier speech about ‘kerfuffles’ and ‘protesting players’ now seemed to Sandy as if it were UNREAL. The very words had sounded learnt parrot-fashion. Sandy’s own words, including “forget the bloody football” didn’t sound characteristic. He’d normally have replaced the ‘bloody’ with a much stronger word. He felt himself ‘dumbed down’, as modern parlance had it. He couldn’t fathom things.

And when the three men returned to the house — having given up the ‘impenetrable barrier’ for what it was (imagination? a psychic condition thrown over the country by some petty dictator? or, indeed, a real barrier of paranormal dimensions?) — there stood Sandy’s wife. She had hefted the last six-pack from the fridge for Sandy, Stuart and John into the television-room for the after-match chat by pundits. She was a good old sort, really. Her bark was often worse than her bite.

“Thanks, dear,” said Sandy, as he relieved her of the cans.

“What was the score?” she meekly asked, pretending to show a little interest.

Sandy shrugged. He felt decidedly ill at ease. His wife’s personality, too, was somewhat out of kilter. Nobody, tonight, was truly themselves.

The whole ambience seemed so sexist, so type-cast. In many households, it was the women who often shouted and cursed at the football, eager to let their feelings rip with cheers or jeers. The women, indeed, demonstrated a certain uncouth bravado when cat-calling the imputed prowess of the studs who kicked a leather bladder, performing their rivalries as if the world depended on it.

Sandy could hear rain belting down on the roof — and he imagined a decade’s drought had abruptly decided it was time to slake the dry earth. He cracked open his very last can of fizzy amber and prepared to watch the News.

With John and Stuart’s help to see off the lager which his wife Margaret had served up, the can in Sandy’s hand was one of his ‘specials’ he always kept tucked away in the corner of the fridge for such an occasion as this. Left alone, his mates departed... and Margaret in bed upstairs, probably propped up, reading a few pages before turning out the light. He knew she would be appear to be asleep — even if awake — when he finally decided to call it a day. It was an unwritten law… there would be nothing going on after Sandy had a session with his mates and a lot more than one six-pack of cans of lager.

The sound of ‘Big-Ben’ faded away and the newscaster began with the main headlines of the day.

Though there had been an earthquake of devastating proportion in Eastern Europe, floods in Pakistan... thousands of people in jeopardy, some starving to death in Africa, the first item was the dramatic end to the semi-final of the World Cup! Sandy wasn’t paying a lot of attention, it was just his ritual to listen to the late news just in case something cataclysmic had happened… or was about to happen; he wanted to be one of the first to know.

The events of the evening with his closest of friends and the excitement of the football combined with the lateness of the hour were having an effect on Sandy. His eyes were getting heavy and there was the likelihood of yet another night’s sleep on the settee with the T.V. continuing to play to no one in the Jackson household, but it wasn’t to be.

Sandy Jackson was suddenly wide awake, roused from his stupor by piercing screams from upstairs. Desperate, hysterical screams that went on and on. Screams he never expected to hear from his usually calm, stoical wife Margaret. Screaming shrieks sounding nothing like the woman he had been married to for almost twenty years.

Galvanised into sudden action, Sandy lurched off the settee to hurry up the stairs. What on earth could have been so fearful to make his wife shriek so loud? Bursting into their bedroom he was shocked to find Margaret crouched in a corner of the room, babbling like someone completely ‘off her trolley’...

Disjointed words, bits and pieces he picked out of her incoherent outpourings were not making any sense. There seemed to be nothing untoward about the room, except that the bed was in a muddle...

As he hurried to comfort his wife, Sandy picked out one or two words Margaret was repeating...

“They were there, on the bed… they were there… horrible...”

Out of kilter she may have been earlier — but this was something else. He had never seen his wife’s face so distorted, she was almost unrecognisable. Even the anguish on her face after she reacted so strongly to the shattering loss of twin babies whom she had carried within her for almost a full term pregnancy, to sadly lose them after a fall downstairs... According to the prognosis, she would never be able to have children. As the years passed, so did the pain and anguish of losing the little boy and girl, children who would now be in their seventeenth year. Of course neither Sandy or Margaret would forget those desperate times… but surely she hadn’t flipped over what happened so long ago. There was nothing to indicate why Margaret was now a crumpled heap of humanity, saying the weirdest things. She could have had some form of nightmare — but still she kept ranting on in a language he had never heard before, knew for certain she was incapable of speaking. Still lapsing into recognisable English words, laced with unprintable swear words the like of which Sandy had not heard in the army or his workplace.

“They were there… them things... Horrible, horrible...”

As Sandy bent to comfort his wife, she looked up with loathing, seeming not to know him, and, as he attempted to pick her up, she became violent, fighting off her husband with tooth and nail, as if he was one of them... One of the things she had seen… or thought she had seen… was still seeing...?

“They were there, on the bed...” she repeated.

And, then, Sandy saw them for himself — or imagined he did.

Two small shapes stretched — as if with chewing-gum for skin — from the tangled bed-cover… fingers splitting into existence as they pointed at the ceiling.

Sandy reached out and actually thought he touched one of them — before both shapes vanished.

He felt some of his fingers with his other fingers to find them feeling distinctly sticky.

He turned to Margaret.

“Sssh! she hissed, putting her finger to her pursed lips. She seemed calmer — as if the storm had passed.

“Why were you swearing?”

“I don’t know Sandy. I really don’t” After a pause, she continued:

“Did John and Stuart enjoy the match?”

“I think so, though I expect they would have wished the last goal had been a good ‘un. They hate losing a bet — especially when they have to pay up to me - I seem to be always on a winner, according to those two scallywags.”

Suddenly, Sandy felt decidedly under-the-weather. That last can of very strong lager could have been that one-over-the-eight. As he turned to the window he saw a series of bright lights that reminded him of that thing in the sky, trailing sparks like a gigantic firework.

“Imagination can play some funny tricks.”

Which of them — Margaret or Sandy — said this, neither of them would later remember. It had definitely been imagination after all — that was certain.

When Sandy went to work next day at the local factory, the shop floor was throbbing with post-match expertise. Everybody had their own theory on the game… especially John and Stuart who worked in the same section as Sandy — until one of them said, out of the blue, something at which a few of the other men pricked up their ears:

“The sight of that thing in your garden. Spooky, wasn’t it?”

Sandy shrugged. He didn’t want to be reminded of it. He merely said:

“Margaret was a bit off colour last night” — as if that could explain everything. Could someone’s physical condition affect Nature itself, just as Nature could affect that same someone? Was illness a two-way phenomenon? Sandy almost believed that his wife’s attack was a cause of an insidious glitch in the world’s clockwork. Or, more likely, had a shadow passed over the land, causing people to feel ill, Margaret’s strange behaviour being one such reflection, an effect not a cause?

There was no time to ponder further. Men of their ilk were not accustomed to deep thoughts — and midday dinner in the works canteen found them sitting side by side, tussling with small talk rather than any significant debates. Funny — men like Sandy, John and Stuart rarely sat opposite each other, face to face. They simply turned to their neighbour wherever (or if ever) they had anything to blurt out; an intermittent exchange, a fitful sadness at their apparent inability to maintain a smooth communication.



Margaret had recovered from the previous night. In fact, she recalled literally nothing of the events at all. Football was o.k. She preferred the proliferation of the soaps herself...

She picked up the phone, having a strong desire to have a prolonged chat with her life-long friend Jenny Richardson. Usually they took turns at the week-end cheap rate ‘friends’ option. But Sandy was usually around — fiddling and fussing — a proper fiddle-faddle was he, interrupting the phone link between his wife and the friend she could bare her soul to — without fear of anyone else finding out their innermost secrets.

Margaret had not even depressed the numbers that would link her to Jenny some miles away in the Midland’s town of Long Eaton, when a strange feeling overwhelmed her, a feeling that she was a very young woman again. She imagined she was a version of her own mother... In fact the older members of her family often remarked about the remarkable likeness between her and her mother. Especially Great Aunt Maude — who had stupidly said if Margaret and her Mother had been born at the same time they would be identical twins. How she possibly could have imagined such an occurence was beyond Margaret... Ah well, the old girl was in her dotage; Margaret would listen to her Auntie Maude with great patience, keeping on the right side of the octogenarian maiden lady was important, for she was an eccentric, would change her will without hesitation if ever she was slighted in any way. There was a number of antiques in Aunt Maude’s cottage Margaret coveted — not in a mercenary way — but intrinsic objects of beauty she would never consider turning into money.

Margaret’s reverie, if such it was, was interrupted by a voice from the phone ear-piece... a crisp clear voice said “Number please...?”

Number please? Was this some new thing, reverting back to pre-dialling times, some girnmicky nonsense of the telephone company.

Number PLEASE? said the voice again.

Margaret blurted out the ten digits of Jenny’s number, to be interrupted by the now irate operator

“Are you calling the Man-in-the-Moon, Madam? Kindly give me the number you need or replace your ear-piece.”

‘Replace your ear-piece’ sounded most odd, until Margaret caught a glimpse of herself in her Cheval-mirror, a proud possession left her by her great-grandmother. Her mirrored image was holding an old-fashioned phone, ear-piece in one hand and an upright mouthpiece thing in the other; what is more she thought she was looking at her own mother in a floral old fashioned frock which Margaret wouldn’t be seen dead in.

So shocked was she, she fell back on the settee in a crumbled heap again, mouthing obscenities and the strange language of the day before… then she lost consciousness… a complete black-out.



“If you can hear me Margaret, squeeze my hand.” A sentence repeated over and over again by a motor-cycling paramedic — evidently called to Margaret’s side by the friendly next-door neighbour, one who normally called in to see Margaret around morning coffee-time.

Eventually Margaret responded, despite still representing a case for the casualty department of the local hospital. She regained consciousness — still ranting and raving, becoming violent, to the dismay of Margaret’s neighbour and the mobile paramedic. Restraining the termagant Margaret was difficult but the ‘Medic’ managed to use his mobile phone — calling urgently for the assistance of an ambulance crew.

Margaret tried to establish her mind’s equilibrium. What the Hell is that small contraption the strangely uniformed man is pressing to his ear and talking into? No wires. Too small to be a walkie-talkie. Then, as full equilibrium kicked in, she concertinaed back — or was it forward? — into a more acceptable belief-system, where modernity seemed as natural as the breaths she could now take calmly without feeling as if she was on the brink of hyperventilating.

The ambulance dashed through the busy streets, sirens blaring towards the local casualty department of the hospital. Later, she felt a bit of a fraud, feeling almost back to normal — but by what measure could ‘normal’ be judged? Memory was the only determinant. She went through the hospital ritual programme… until she was released.

Sandy drove her back home in his old jalopy, hearing all these things...gathering information from between the incessant chatter she kept up. The story was still unfolding, in words neither of them could control, or even, understand.

Stuart and John were at their house as a welcoming party — to see what was so urgent about Sandy’s sudden summoning to the hospital from their place of work. Despite their tacitness and diffidence, they were both showing a determined concern for their pal’s wife, as they bustled around with cups of tea and words of comfort.

Incredibly, soon after John and Stuart had left beneath the gathering grumble of another storm, the doorbell rang and there stood Jenny Richardson — freshly travelled from her Long Eaton home. Apparently, her phone had rung — and then cut out before she was able to reach it. Ringing 1471, she discovered the call had come from Margaret’s number. She became concerned that there was no answer when she tried to ring back — kept getting the engaged noise, and sensing, via feminine intuition, something was wrong, she had taken the first available train south, telling her husband not to worry. She’d kill two birds with one stone. She’d ring her doctor in Harley Street (just up the tube line from Margaret and Sandy’s) the next day and insist on an appointment for herself. She’d been meaning to consult her doctor for some weeks, but not got around to it. Fate now pointed to the fact that it was important to do so.

“Hope everything is OK with both you and Margaret”, called out Mark Richardson as he watched Jenny leave the front hall to take a taxi to the local station. He could not see the driver as Jenny waved goodbye. Something in her sensed she would never see Mark again, but she put it out of her mind, even before she proceeded with the silly thought.

‘I put it out of my mind ,‘ Jenny thought as she stared into the distance and dwelled on the events of the day. She and Sandy had managed to get Margaret settled in her bed — forced her, in fact. To Jenny, Margaret appeared to be the same... yet different in some way.

Sandy flaked out next to Jenny on the settee. Too close for comfort.

“Want to watch the World Cup match?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before flicking on the telly with the tiny remote control.

Jenny nodded non-commitally. “I think I’ll go up and tuck Margaret in for the night,” she said, quickly standing up.

Don’t bother. She’s sound asleep, I peeped in on her a few minutes ago.

Reluctantly, Jenny lowered herself back on to the settee, subtly. increasing more elbow room between her and Sandy. She’d always considered Sandy to be a surly creature. Didn’t understand how a beautiful Margaret could possibly have married someone so decidedly fiddly and low-key, as she glanced at the man’s huge hands and hairy arms. Almost uncouth in her eyes.

There were goals in the match — but only one wonderfully exciting goal the ball shooting into the back of the net from a great distance and at the acutest of angles — as thunder rumbled growlingly above the house.

But Sandy had no one with whom to share the excitement of the outstanding goal that surely would be nominated as the goal of the tournament. Even his whoop of delight failed to waken the sleeping Jenny. Obviously bored out of her skull by the whole silly proceedings of World Cup Football. What a fuss about twenty men chasing a ball between two goalmouths, as exciting as watching paint dry, she thought. The finer points of the game were lost to her. Jenny and her husband were not of the plebian masses. Her friendship with Margaret went back a long way; the only reason she had condescended to be sitting on a settee next to Sandy the husband of the only friend she had from the old days. Her only friend outside of the Hunting, Golfing and Shooting fraternity to which she had elevated when she married wealthy Mark Richardson. Keeping friends with Margaret was only important because the two women shared a dark secret they had sworn on a bible never to divulge. A secret from their early teenage that would rock, or even wreck both their lifestyles, different though they were — and it would be Jenny that would suffer the most.

Sandy became aware that Jenny had fallen asleep, to dream of things other than football. He studied the sleeping Jenny’s profile and his eyes wandered down her body to the shapely silk clad legs and back again to her chest, to watch the shape of her breasts rise and fall as she slumbered on. She had obviously fitted well into the cream of society for her clothes and make up (from her elegantly coiffured hair to her stylish shoes) simply oozed wealth and good taste. As well as the pang of jealousy of the man she married, Sandy felt a stirring in his loins at the sight of a truly beautiful woman.

He had his fill of the usual strong lager, but in spite of his desire, he turned again to watch the football that still had twenty minutes to the final whistle. But the excitement had gone, the winning team was obvious, having three clear goals in front of their rivals. The result was a foregone conclusion and the winning team was just pussy-footing along with trick football, boring long passes and time wasting moves. The lager and boredom, had their effect on Sandy, and he too had dropped of to sleep.

Jenny slumped sideways and her head came to rest on Sandy’s shoulder.

He was unconscious in his alcohol induced sleep. The lighter sleeping Jenny became aware of the snorting, snoring drunk at her side and her eyes opened to see Margaret silhouetted against the light from the flickering TV screen, Garishly made up with lipstick, mascara and rouge — without a stitch of clothing on — but it was not her nakedness that her mesmerised eyes were fixed on — but the cleaver she held above her head with light glinting on the steel blade...



The next day — the vision forgotten — Jenny Richardson paid the visit to her posh doctors. There — amid much prevarication — they informed her that she needed to go under a real knife. Gallstones, Kidney stones. A leathery bladder… something worse… killed by two birds...

She shrugged. Whatever the nature of the illness, she simply knew that she would only be cured, if at all, by the skin of her teeth. Margaret’s sub-conscious beckoning from London to Long Eaton had a lot for which to be thanked.

She and Margaret somehow shared somebody in the past called Auntie Maude — a secret antecedence that neither had confessed to the other. A common shadow cast by ancestry. An indefinable celebration.

Meanwhile, Sandy and Mark (their two husbands) remained the mere men they had always been. They could be left to their own shallow devices — them and their beer and their petty thrusting ways. Women had a deeper instinct — like a bruised sky-wide shade that came and went with the rhythm of global warming — came and went in tune with even darker, direr archetypes... sipping from the cup of plenty, the world’s cup of eventual goodness...



John and Stuart sat side by side in the works canteen. Silent. Where was Sandy? But they did not think to ask the question.







The End.

Thoughts & Ribaldries
Published 'Fresh Blood' 1994


“It’s the thought that counts,” said Densil.

“Well, I thought of giving lots and lots of lovely presents but decided against it,” countered Basil, whose sense of humor was lost on Densil. The pair of them traveled together towards Elfclaw House for Christmas, where, apparently, Lord Elfclaw had arranged all kinds of Dickensian activities - including an artificially frozen lake for ice skating.

The tall chimneys rose like the Devil’s fingers pressed into an iron sky, as the car gasped its last exhaustfuls along the winding drive. They were heartily welcomed by Lord Elfclaw who was disguised as Santa Claus. The three Elfclaw daughters were particularly becoming as reindeers with mock antlers and shaplely bodies, tantilizingly decked with incomplete animal skins.

“I’m glad you could come. Let Donna see you to your rooms. And as soon as you’ve washed the road off, come and have a heart-easing scoop of punch in the lounge.” Lord Elfclaw sounded as if he were reciting a speech learned when he didn’t understand it.

Densil and Basil were soon ready but not before arguing the toss about who had priority in the shared bathroom. Densil ridiculed the fact that Basil’s room was chock-a-block with variously sized boxes neatly wrapped in a pink silky paper bearing a holly and robin motif. Basil must have sent them on earlier, with the intention of piling them under the Christmas tree for the other guests to “Ooh and aah” at. Basil countered by saying they were simply full of scrunched-up tracing paper. This was the best ploy since he knew Densil would not believe him if he claimed they were not his parcels at all.

Having returned downstairs, they discovered the lounge tenantless except for an angry coal fire sputtering in the huge hearth. The punch bowl stood on the sideboard with contents looking like lumps of fruit-peel in blood slopping from side to side - as if a servant had just placed it there and vanished (up the stairs).

Suddenly, there was the zithery sound of girlish laughter from the garden outside. The window was blocked by a large shaggy Christmas tree, as yet undecorated, so Densil and Basil looked at each other bewildred. And were they meant to help themselves to the punch?

Thinking that their host was more hospitable than most, they shoveled the punch into two of the glasses that hung on hooks around the bowl. They gulped it, whilst they tried to gain a better view through the window upon the back lake. There was a sleigh being drawn across it - a red figure waving and at least twenty tall reindeer lifting their legs high. The sleigh’s boot was overspilling with pink parcels. Whether it was the effect of the punch conjuring up solid burps like bodily innards, Densil and Basil no longer had a Christmas spirit, where thoughts no longer counted. Days were short around the winter solstice, and all went black like dead ice that cannot melt.

It is a pity dead bodies cannot really enjoy being undressed by others, as live ones do. That is perhaps a godsend, however, since they would not particularly relish being roasted afterwards.

Vampires’ testicles are a delicacy as are rare armfuls of stolen blood. Densil and Basil were the next best thing. Lord Elfclaw who was not quite the calibre of host they had originally thought (which proved something), raised his glass of punch, now so red it had become blacker than the Devil’s version of Christmas Eve. Surly servants dragged in the feather-light parcels and the giggling reindeer curled together before the roaring fire, playing brittle games of cats-cradle and pick-a-stix, amid the cozy yuletide cheer and fellow feeling. Tomorrow being Christmas Day, they could be opened.

The Wedge Question
First published '9th Issue' 1991

The couple were crouched around the roaring coals, counting the sparks that marched up the black chimney bust. The room, other than their faces, was in shadowy darkness.

"Have you noticed?"

"Noticed what?"

The two questions were images of each other in a buckled funfair mirror. The voices were of similar pitches, but their faces were from opposite ends of the sexual spectrum.

"...that most things you decide in life are trivial, but now and again something comes along that is all important."

"Yes, but you don't realise at the time which are trivial, which not."

"...unlike the wedge question."

One of the faces withdrew into the gloom while it pondered the imponderable.

It soon returned to the flame's blessing with a rejoinder:"When I was a kid, my father used to make me cottonreel tanks, with a rubber band, a matchstick and a wedge of candle. I thought that was all important then - but now I've almost forgotten him, let alone the tanks. They used to climb over things, because he carved treads into the reel rims. The candlegrease lubricated the torque of the rubber band upon the match traction. I don't suppose you played with them when you were a little girl?"

"No, I had too many dolls, to keep me busy. They cluttered up the bedroom, sitting around in their finery as if they owned the place. At night, their eyes opened and shut without me lifting them up at the optimum angle. One of them had dewy tears upon her petal cheeks come the light early summer mornings. Another doll was actually bigger than me..."

She broke off, having realised she was intoning an unlearnt speech which had once been prepared for an audience. Knowing no more, she retracted her head like a tortoise.

The man groaned from his chair by the fire, so as to take a poker to the coals. He churned them up as a way of avoiding an embarrassing silence.

As dawn broke, they decided independently to go for a walk along the sea wall. So, with a mixture of indifference and pleasure, they found themselves both strolling in the same direction, carried by salt wafts towards the bereft creeks - hardened mounds of belched quicksand beneath the mutant umbrella claws of the scrawny gulls. In the distance, the Essex marshes oscillated in the uncanny light of the reflected horizons - giving hope, if not ultimate belief, to the Flat-Earthers they were.

She had never thought of the planet as more than a clump of dried mud snapped off from the tussocky heel of reality. Whilst he, the man, had never been beyond these sodden parts and expected the ruptured lands to stretch forever...

It was more difficult to believe in endings.

The blackened curds of smoke billowed from the chimney fire into the matchless leaden grey of the sky. They had turned their backs on the diminishing doll's house.

A tractor crawled along the horizon, its sole sloping pinion guided by the straight furrows but spasmodically turning full circle as its trencher wheels slew sideways in the loose mud.

Hand in hand, the couple disappeared into the far distance.

Hauled From Hell
A collaboration with Kirk S King
(published 'Masque' 1993)




"I'm afraid because I've never been afraid before."

There was not a flicker upon her staring eyes - the coolest of customers.

"What exactly do you mean?"

I pitched my reply within the range of informality.

"You have not programmed me to be in a blue funk," she told me, her means of speech coarse yet with a lilt: perfectly in tune to that of my wife's voice.

I shook my head and sighed deeply, "Oh, Catie, when I designed you I didn't want to hinder your thoughts and actions with such an expendable human emotion."

The Cyborg Automated TechIntegrated Emboloid did not respond and I wondered why she, yes, she - should miss fear if she did not have the capacity to fear. Gender, too. But how could I refer to my first operational model as an 'it'? After all, simply look at her - how could that beautiful creature be an 'it', even at the furthest stretch of lateral thinking?

Catie had been in the Chair before, travelling to places inaccessible by foot or craft and, after those successful experiments, she had returned safely: ready to compute her sights and impressions unto the disc. Why then did Catie feel perturbed by her next trip? To her, it should be merely another destination. Surely, surely, I had not graced her with the concepts of Hell.

"There are places where people can't go without the accompaniment of fear," Catie continued, picking up on her earlier First Cause fear of lacking fear.

I nodded, as if she were proving the falsity of her complaint. I held back the smile which would have made me seem smug. I had known only subconsciously before but now fully realised that Catie's emotions were upon circles of different emotions, feeding off each other. This, to my mind, proved that souls could exist without souls.

"Imogen's soul's in Heaven."

If she understood my statement, she did not say. She simply stork-legged to the Chair and sat there without any suspicion of fear. I was thankful I hadn't told her the truth of Imogen's soul.

The violet sky belched a cloud, covering the moon, greying the Institute. The lights inside the building automatically brightened, but this, I felt, paradoxically imbued my laboratory with a sense of foreboding. My powers to feel such shades of life had indeed increased once I shook off the madness instilled by Catie's circularity - and once I dealt with my own aspirations vis a vis Imogen. A wife like Imogen was beyond simple bereavement: even if it had been suicide: her body hanging by the neck.

Chaired Catie gleamed, patiently waiting, patiently calculating her inability truly to function on the same parity as her creator. But whether she was subhuman or not, I still needed to fathom how fear could become a concept of an essentially fearless Emboloid. Yet maybe the answer was so simple. Was fear a separate entity? A seed of inquietude fertilised with knowledge? Or simply the result of lacking any sense of the unknown? But my pondering such imponderables was interrupted.

"Professor Cordell!"

The video screen on my desk flickered and, a second later, Trustman's face followed his voice. The CEO's eyes glanced around the laboratory, hoping to have caught me being furtive: committing the unloggable. His nose was squat against the screen in his own laboratory and his cheeks were puffed red. He was a boar. Even if the pun was worse than I imagined, it was nowhere near as boring as Trustman himself. Although we were in the same field of investigations, we wielded a mutual understanding: we shared the same hate. We were brothers in the strongest emotion possible. Cain and Cain, without the escape valve of Abel.

"Yes?"

I spoke with trepidation, having often wondered whether an image on a screen could talk to another image on a different screen. I was adrift in ontological doubt. Yet, when I originally met Trustman in the flesh - so long ago now, it seemed more like a dream than a memory - it was he who had enlightened me regarding embolisms. In fact, the meaning of 'embolism' was diverse, as any dictionary-freak would attest: in fact, so bizarrely wide-ranging, could the word exist at all in a sane universe?

1. Extra day or days prodded into a calendar system to correct a

previous error.

2. A prayer for delieverance from evil often recited after the Lord's

Prayer - as belt-and-braces.

3. An obstructing clot in the blood vessels.

4. ...

Reciting the various definitions was almost a prayer in itself. I switched on the screen's override before Trustman could reactivate the automatic surveillance system. There was no time for the likes of him, since Catie was gurgling louder than being Chairbound justified. Her eyes redder, too - bulging on the brink of blow-out. She had guessed, I guessed, that my Heaven was her Hell, or vice versa: it didn't matter which. She was now engorged not with simply a single fear but with a ricochet of several trip-switch terrors. I guessed, too, that Catie sensed the return of Imogen to the body-hanger, with little to be done to prevent it. As if a coat was returning to its hanger with a relentless ghost inside.

My own sense of the matter was that there might be a surplus of Imogen to fit, since she had predictably saddled someone else's soul to her own, rescued it, as it were, from Hell. Or something else's. Or a soul so foreign, even 'something' meant nothing.

"Professor Cordell!"

Trustman had left his screen for the first time in forty odd years and was banging on my laboratory door! What he had to say, therefore, was more important that I had assumed.

Abruptly, Catie became as limp as her body would allow and her face a frozen mask of contortion that would need neo-plastic surgery. Shadows sweated from her artificial pores and pooled at her feet.

"Cordell!" All formalities vanished as urgency prevailed. "You can't go there! You can't go to a place that doesn't exist!"

The CEO's screams finally opened the electronic door where his fists had merely created self-inflicted pain. He darted into the laboratory and came towards me. Came at me, rather, since where I moved he also followed. Like a shadow that could know no pooling. Grabbing me by my arms, he screeched in my face: "I told you not to do it. You're killing her, Cordell. Can't you see that?"

I glanced at Catie and knew that Trustman was wrong. I was not killing her; I was giving her life. I was giving her the fear that she was so frightened not to experience. In essence, I was giving her Imogen, together with the sublimest fear of all: Imogen's. It all began to make sense. The ensaddled soul would be consigned to the body-hanger in the Institute's cellar. Imogen's soul to Catie. Even mistakes had a purpose.

I grabbed Trustman, our arms and fingers locked like a giant jigsaw and I bellowed in his podgy face, "She is alive!"

Whether, at that precise moment, I meant the embolisms floating in Catie's body or Imogen's soul being hosted by her own body in the cellar, I was never certain. Surely both Trustman and myself were on the verge of a discovery, one that could possibly drive us insane. Or insanely drive us to oblivion.

We continued to struggle until derailed by a shriek from the Chair: a squawking wail that betokened the switch of souls.

Yet, for fear of madness, I relegated the unrefined fear to a different fear. It was a past fear, one I'd already half-noticed. I had coped by channelling it to areas of my mind that knew how to process fears for transmission in easy stages to the brain. The fear in question was twofold. One - CEO Trustman did not quite look like the man I'd seen on the screen for forty odd years. Two - the soul Imogen had saddled to her own soul in Hell had returned to Catie in preference to the rat-eaten body-hanger in the cellar. (Rats could climb literally anywhere - or even fly?) Indeed, the body-hanger had not stayed neat and long in its hamstrung state, in once studious preparation for becoming a restful berth for a soul after its heavy haul from Hell. All to the good, I'd thought. A tidy vessel would not have been fitting for the shrieking soul that had now accidentally found its way into Catie. I sobbed - as it suddenly dawned on me that Imogen was now back in the cellar eating the rat stew of her own erstwhile body. I sobbed again - for Catie.

But such thoughts had yet to become thoughts. Meanwhile, the fact that Catie had spurned one emotion (fear) for another (hatred) was neither here nor there. The searing squawk that would have startled even a plastic monster in a Ghost Train ride at an old-fashioned fair was as nothing to me. But Trustman's face was a mask of the most abject horror - making me feel at least half of it myself. Either this was a bogus CEO in the flesh or his previous screen image was the bogus one. Both could not be real. Both could not be bogus. Each assumption excluded the other, as each fear, upon being sensed, excluded all other fears. As if emotions had to queue up for the mind's attention, with no possibility of overlap - thankfully.

Suddenly, before I could stop him, Trustman had approached Catie's writhing shape and started fondling the breasts I'd built. These swollen glands had been formulated with meticulous care from the most life-like substance, skinned with a satiny finish. Thus, I empathised with the attraction Trustman must have for them. Surely, this was the bogus CEO. CEOs should not make a habit of being both real and sex mad. I clumped him on the head, with the sure conviction that I was justified in so doing. The real CEO would certainly thank me.

Eventually, the Emboloid's screeching and wailing had faded to the back of its throat. Not Catie's voice. Nor Imogen's. But one belonging to the thing I could not even call 'thing'.

Slowly, methodically, it chanted the Lord's Prayer, or, on second thoughts, a bastardised version. The pronoun 'it' didn't fit. But, no matter, I had so many thoughts and emotions in patient line, the wrestling with words was, at the most, insignificant: as were the twin balloons of blood into which Trustman's hands had already pummelled Catie's dead mammaries. Whilst down in the cellar, the body-hanger, I guessed, spun on its suicide cord, throwing off gobbets of centrifugal splatter.

But here I am: Trustman at my feet. Here not there. In the laboratory. Crawling from Catie's erstwhile mouth, squeezing, grinning, jawing, is the thing that looks like me, the me that looks like thing, grinning, jabbering, lisping with no 'S' to lisp, whispering in shrieks, stuttering without faltering: "I'm home, Cordell. Have no fear. I'm home."

And, indeed, home I am: Cordell at my feet.

Hide and Sleek

http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/5478.html?1327392256

Column of Bertin

 

(published 'Dark Star' 1991)

Tokkmaster Clerke was in fact almost a ghost. His winklepickers no longer fitted his shapeless feet. He could hardly grapple with the slide rule that was once all the rage before calculators. He rattled threepenny bits in his dressing-gown pocket, but they did not respond. And finally he tried to seek out haunting memories to underpin his present situation.

The parlour he knew very well, being his station of command in the old days when he ruled the roost on the Clockhouse Mount Estate. Despite following the relentless pendulum of the tall clock in the corner with his bleary eyes, he could no longer catch its sonorous ticking with ears which had been the first items to go ghost.

He withdrew his hands from the welcoming warmth of the deep dressing-gown pockets and saw the fan of veins were now clearly showing through the translucent flesh.

Only a matter of time.

He looked desperately for his file, the long heavy-duty hod-labourer's version with grooves as sharp and deep as steel could be cut. He often wore his fingers to the bone strumming it like a washboard in his own inimitable performance of 'Does your chewing-gum lose its flavour on the bed-post overnight?'. However, the file had always felt good, in the palm of his hand, on rampages against the lager louts. Being a weapon rather than a tool, it was hanging upon the blistered wallpaper as a trophy, with embalmed shreds of flesh-corrupted blood decorating its length. It once bore splinters of bone from a particularly virulent scraping of some yob's skull that Tokkmaster had undertaken whilst under duress. Rarely, but not unknown, the file itself showed signs of blunting from being ill-treated against hardnut cases who seemed to infest the Estate, their ears clogged with heavy rock-wax.

Tokkmaster recalled the several evenings he spent lovingly re-grooving the file with pure diamond chisels, a whole set of which he inherited from his father who had been a dustman with a hobby of jewel-facetting.

Today, the file slipped through his hands like butter. It crashed to the floorboards, momentarily stirring dim echoes of sound within Tokkmaster's still relatively substantial skull.

He seemed to stare at it lying there, tears weltering from the fraying holes either side of his bubbling nose. No more would he be able to tote this serrated rod of steel, no more swing its bitter crenellations around his wild head.

Then, he tried to stand up. He just managed it, his legs a couple of jellies. The dressing-gown slipped through his furcating bones and collapsed to the floorboards, audibly sighing with relief at leaving the anorexic ghost of a body.

Tokkmaster Clerke continued black-staring, as a column of pure white ectoplasm extruded from his wilting member and, whiplashing like an untamed tentacle, it grasped the hefty file from the wall and proceeded to scrape, scrub, gnaw, erode, grind at his own only just softening skull; gobs of pliable bone flying in all directions of the compass around the chintzy parlour - even stopping the pendulum with sickish coagulations.

Dreams of a Dreamer
The dreams promised me that they would go alphabetical by Christmas.

Each time I had them, they were in random order. No rhyme nor reason to them. Even the subject matters didn't follow on, but became the ultimate non-sequiturs to each other, going in all directions through various tangents, repetitions and, at best, deja-vu's. I lost patience with them and threatened not to go to sleep. They, in turn, threatened to introduce me to a monster far more fearful than I could possibly imagine when I eventually did go to sleep, as I must.

As indeed I must have done.

Still, they had promised to go alphabetical by Christmas, which would at least give me some handle on the recurring dreams that constitute a lifetime.

But what letter of the alphabet does a dreamer (somebody sufficiently monstrous to be utterly unrecognisable and indescribable and unmentionable and, even, undreamable) begin with?


(published 'Psychopoetica' 1993)

Rich Seam
He cleared his throat and began watching my reaction to his poem. The fact that I was there at all was unpoetic, making everything turn prosaic. His original intention was for nothing but condensed symbol, studied elision and semantic exegesis. Indeed, his well-meaning meaninglessless of hemming a vocal disenchantment (a disenchantment with my presence?s potentiality for small-talk dialogue which close-knitted verse usually eschewed) caused me to poke my finger down my gullet in an attempt to reach beyond the seventh type of ambiguity, indeed towards another sense that even the sixth failed to reach: the most unwieldy elision of all: death.

(published 'Night Songs' 1997)

Neighbours

 

 (Published 'Eleventh Issue' 1991)

‘The house next, door is partially occupied.'

I looked quizzically at the friend whom I was visiting for the first time since the war.

‘Yea, the old woman ... you remember her, Mrs Charles ... well, she died Just before Christmas.'

I nearly said that was better than dying on Christmas Day itself when I realised I would be playing into his conversational hands as It were.

He had always been a little bit of a joker and I could see nothing had changed.

‘It’s a good job she’s there...’

‘Why?’ I bit my tongue. I had fallen into his trap.

‘Because my water pipes come via her property and they’d freeze up If her heating wasn’t kept going.’

I looked through the window at the cascading snow. The lane had been like an Ice rink and it was lucky I’d arrived at all, let alone in one piece. He had lived here man and boy, a terrace of two-up-two-downs, miles from anywhere ... well, from anywhere except Tipoak.

For several years, most of our contact had been by means of the written word, so it was with some consternation that I noticed those same years had not been as kind to him as to me. In fact, if it wasn’t, for the hearty handshake and the ready twinkle in his one eye, I could have easily imagine-i it was not him at all. We might be both growing senile, but I, at least, was insufficiently senile to believe that.

Well, after a period of friendly small talk, whilst thick bacon rashers sizzled oveU the open fire, we trawled and dredged memories for what they were now worth. We ended up discussing his neighbours again and it turned out that the following prevailed:-

‘What happened to Miss Welch?’

“She left to go up north.’

‘I always thought you had a fancy for her. I was surprised you never finally tied the knot.’

‘We did really, but it all came undone with loose frayed ends. You know what it’s like.’

Only too well, I thought, remembering his lame sister.

‘Is anyone moving in next door?’

‘I don’t think so. Tipoak’s a little bit too far away for comfort these days.’

He rubbed his back.

Then, out of character, he abruptly lifted himself from the easy chair and knocked vigorously on one of the connecting walls. I couldn’t quite recall which side was which, as I had lost my bearings soon after stepping indoors. In any event, the result was surprising: a double knock reply.

‘It’s Ok. She’s still there... You know, I’m thinking as well as being plumbed in like we are, we could knock that wall down - seems a shame, otherwise - I’ll be too old enjoy it. The only reason she’s hanging about down here, really...’

He was interrupted by a telling rattle in the pipes as someone somewhere drew off a kettle-full of water, no doubt for a warming cuppa.



After a tasty breakfast, I decided to be on my way. Trains weren’t so regular through Tipoak these days.

My old friend was not too upset my sudden departure. I tried to memorlse his face, as I shook hands with him. Despite the changes the years had brought, it was still, on the whole, as kind as ever.

Mr and Mrs Urquart’s curtains were drawn I noticed as I passed on the way to the station. I hoped there hadn’t been a death in the family.