Winter Song

The time will come for everyone of us to say goodbye to all
We’ll meet again upon that distant shore
Where pain and misery will be
Just memories of what used to be
And happiness will reign for ever more

But it will not be as it should be
If I don’t have you standing next to me
Your love is all that I desire
It’s all I need, all I require
To make this happy day of life complete
To make this happy day of life complete

And as we come to the year’s end
With brothers, sisters, foes and friends
Both by our side and scattered round the Earth
The memories that we hold so dear
Of precious ones both far and near
The future starts now with our love’s re birth

But it will not be as it should be
If I don’t have you standing next to me
Your love is all that I desire
It’s all I need, all I require
To make this happy day of life complete
To make this happy day of life complete

And as we gather round the fire
The flames of hope reach ever higher
All come and join beside us in the feast
Holding hands and in the calm
Sharing in this safe and warm
I wish you all Love, Happiness and Peace
I wish you all Love, Happiness and Peace
I wish you all Love, Happiness and Peace
I wish you all Love, Happiness and Peace
I wish you all Love, Happiness and Peace

The Truth About Santa Claus

Christmas should be a magical holiday. But how can you believe in magic when Reality keeps getting in the way? Then again, sometimes, even Reality has a few tricks.

Kids have a right to believe certain things. Should we believe in fairies and elves? Is Christmas a special time? Should we believe in Santa Claus?

I’m not sure whether you should believe this story. But I promise you, it could be true. I had gone into what had once been called "The Traveller’s Rest" for a couple of drinks before the evening shift at work. It was around tea-time, the shops were shutting and it was a bitingly cold, wet evening. Christmas was not far away, and all the decorations and coloured lights and other trappings of the so-called festive season just served to throw my own despondency into stark relief. This Christmas did not look like it was going to be one of the best of times. I was in a job I didn't like, which didn't pay enough to cover the bills on my credit cards. And my girlfriend was leaving me, at the end of the week. It was going to be a great Christmas.

I was slightly surprised to see, that quiet December evening, one of the barmaids standing on the other side of the bar, evidently on her day off, making a social call. She was chatting to one of the barmaids on duty, and a chap, who answered to the name of Chris and who I gathered was the manager. The barmaid off duty had brought with her a young girl, of about eight or so, probably her daughter, to show off to the other staff.

Chris, the manager, was explaining with great gusto and in great detail, all his clever plans to make the most money out of the forthcoming holiday season, especially Christmas and New Year's Eves. On the one hand, his know-all clever-dickness was getting on my nerves, on the other he just sounded like a guy who knew his job very well.

It was at this point that Chris decided to share another snippet of his vast range of knowledge with the little girl. "And I'll tell you something, Sarah, about Santa Claus."

"What?" asked Sarah, agog with anticipation. She'd probably been looking forward to Christmas for weeks, and the merest mention of Santa Claus stirred her excitement.

"Santa Claus doesn't exist!" Chris announced.

"What?" she said.

"Santa Claus doesn't exist."

"Yes he does," she said, with determination, defying him. "Course he does!"

"Course he doesn't," he insisted. "How could he? How many chimneys are there in the world? Millions, right? - " I was wondering when we'd get round to statistics again - "And how long does it take you to see just ten of your friends in an evening?"

She tried to answer him, but she was clearly worried. Seeing he had an audience that could not escape either his logic or his voice, he continued, "Santa Claus can't exist. He couldn't get down all then chimneys in one evening. And some people don't even have chimneys. So he can't exist."

"Yes he can," she insisted, "He's magic!"

"He's not magic," said Chris, "Santa Claus is dead! So you can forget about Santa turning up on Christmas Day. It ain't gonna happen."

There was nothing more she could say to that, and she fell silent.

I drained my glass and prepared to go. Just at that moment, the little girl got up and walked past me to look at a pinball machine by the door. She was still very quiet.

As I got level with her, on my way out, I leaned over to her, and said, quietly, "Don't you take any notice. Santa Claus does exist, you know?"

She said nothing, staring at her feet. I'd said what I had wanted to say, and my hand was almost on the door. Then, I said, "You do believe, don't you?"

She looked at me briefly, then her gaze returned, silent, to the floor.

"Listen," I tried again, " I know he exists. Because I've seen him."

This got her attention, at last. Her eyes were so big and dark, you could fall into them. "When?" she said.

"Well," I said, "it was a long time ago." I had to stop and think what to say next. I had a feeling it might be important. "It was a long time ago," I continued, "well, not all that long, really, when I was just a little bit older than you are now. And I was growing up, and one or two people - one or two silly older people who didn't really know anything really - were telling me that as I was growing up I shouldn't believe in Santa Claus any more. They told me Santa Claus didn't exist.

"Then it came round to Christmas, and I started saying, 'I don't believe in Santa Claus any more, he doesn't exist'. Though I felt a bit funny about it really."

"Why?" she said.

"Well, I'd always believed in Santa Claus before and I had always got lots and lots of really nice presents every Christmas, and here I was saying he didn't exist. That wasn't a very nice way of saying 'thank you,' was it? Hm?"

"Suppose so."

"And then it got to Christmas Eve, and I went to bed early, saying, 'I don't believe in Santa Claus.' And I settled down just to go to sleep. But I couldn't sleep. So I got up, and I went downstairs to where we had this big Christmas Tree. And there were presents all around the bottom of the tree, presents for every one. Every one, that is, except me."

Sarah looked suitably impressed by this.

"Every one had been left a present, except me. And it was all because I stopped believing. Because I had said Santa Claus didn't exist. And I ran out of the house, thinking, 'Oh no, it's too late, Santa's gone and not left me any presents, all because I didn't believe in Santa Claus.' And I bet you'll never guess what happened next!"

Sarah's eyes were firmly fixed on mine by now. "What happened?"

"I looked up in the sky, and that's when I saw Santa Claus! He was up there, in his sleigh, being pulled across the sky by his reindeer, and all their bells were ringing, and he had a big sack of presents on the back of his sleigh, the biggest sack you've ever seen. I called to him, 'Santa, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I didn't believe in you! Come back!' But he was in a hurry. He had presents to deliver to all the other children, the ones that still believed in him. He didn't have time to waste on people who thought he didn't exist. But it was too late, now. Or so I thought." I gave her an inscrutable look.

"Why? What did you do?"

"Well, I went back in the house, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Because, there, all around the Christmas Tree where they had been presents for everyone else but me, there was an even bigger pile of presents!"

"An even bigger pile?"

"An even bigger pile! And all of them were for me. And there was a card, for me, too. Do you know who it was from?"

"Santa Claus!" she squealed.

"Yes, Santa Claus! And do you know what it said?"

"What?"

"It said 'Just Kidding'!"

"'Just kidding'?"

"That's right. Santa Claus was just kidding that he wasn't going to leave me any presents. He knew I still believed in him really. He just wanted to make sure I didn't forget!"

Sarah stared at me, her eyes twinkling. I watched her tiny bright face, and started to laugh. And she laughed too.

"So," I said, just glancing for a moment in the direction of Chris, "you'd better remember Santa Claus really does exist, because you've met someone who's actually seen him."

* * * * *

Well, I got in to my job and did a terrible night's work, and it got to the end of the week my girlfriend moved out, and then it was Christmas Eve. I was stuck in the house all alone, and no amount of trying to watch the banal pap that passed as festive entertainment on the TV was going to get me in the mood to celebrate anything. I had steadfastly turned down any offer from friends to go to any party or anyone's house, because I didn't want to turn up alone, and now I was regretting it. I decided to try the local pub, a dull pit of a place - at least the landlord would have restricted himself to a few paper streamers. It was a place I normally avoided, so there was no-one there that I knew, but I picked it tonight because it was in walking distance.

I thought briefly about all that cobblers I had told that little girl. Making her believe in fairy stories, when there was a real world to grow up into. What had I done? Poor little girl, I thought. "Stuff this," I said to myself, and I wandered off home.

When I got back to the house, I realised something was slightly different. I let myself in, and found the small reading light in the living room was on. I was certain that I had left it switched off when I had gone out. The house was quiet, but not in the deathly, isolated way it had seemed before, but peaceful and welcoming. In the little pool of light, on the coffee table, there were some packages. Someone had been in the house while I had been out.

There were various people who had a spare set of keys - my folks for instance, and my girlfriend, of course, and a set that were hidden under a plant pot outside the door, that several of our friends knew about. I figured that it could be any of them that had decided to call round, leaving whatever they had been doing that Christmas Eve in order to see me, and I'd been out. So they had left me some presents! I could hardly believe it. A feeling came over me that I could not describe. It was as if I had been standing for a tremendous time in a shadow, and now I had stepped out of it.

Suddenly, as daft as it sounds, I didn't feel lonely any more. I made up my mind that I would find out who the presents were from, and make sure that I went round and thanked whoever it was next day. And I wouldn't stay in on my own being a miserable git feeling sorry for myself, but I would get out and have a good time. After all , it was Christmas! A time to celebrate had to find who the presents were from, so that I could thank them, even if they were only pairs of socks, unbearable after-shave and a ghastly tie. They had really made my evening.

But the first thing I picked up was not a parcel, but a small envelope. I opened it, and a plain little card slid in to my hand. Inside, written in a wide, flowing handwriting - that I couldn't recognise and yet it looked familiar - was a two-word message.

It said, "Just kidding."

Then, at the bottom: "Thank you!"

It was the best Christmas I've ever had.

The end

Home From Home

A death in the family - a tragedy, good fortune, a coincidence? Or even more?

#

(This story was originally published in Chorley and District Writers' Circle magazine, Aware, issue 3, November 2007, on the theme Home and Away.)

I stepped into the familiar hallway over a dune of junk mail circulars and free-sheet newspapers. The air was at once familiar yet cloyingly strange – the house had been shut up for many weeks. It was tomb-like, yet I breathed the air I knew from childhood. So different from the boiled cabbage, urine and disinfectant soaked atmosphere I had had to tolerate recently.

I entered the living room. Brown wallpaper, some faded floral pattern whose colour scheme seemed to be based on recycled teabags. The fusty armchair, seat bellowed inwards. Dull books on the shelf, dull ornaments and pictures. All this would have to change. Not a problem now. This chair would be first to go. This was where my father died.

At least, that is to be assumed. That is where they had found him. It was a fair assumption. It’s where I had last seen him alive.

‘What am I going to do?’ he had asked. ‘Everything was going to come to you. And I’ve tried to keep going on my own, but it’s too much.’

‘You are very ill, father,’ I had agreed.

‘But I can’t look after myself anymore.’

‘I look after you, father.’

‘I know you do.’ He tried, painfully, to readjust himself in his chair, and grimaced. ‘Pass me one of my little friends, will you.’

I handed him the book-sized bag – it had been a sort of pencil case, I think. But, instead of pencils, it contained spliffs of cannabis, papers, lump of ‘substance’ wrapped in Clingfilm. He took one, lit it, and drew deeply on it. Hot tiny cinders fell from the end and burned pinprick holes in his old shirt – I was surprised the health visitor never picked up on this. ‘If I go into a care home, this is the one thing I will miss,’ he said at length, hoarsely. ‘You know, this is the only thing that gives me any relief from the pain?’

‘Yes, I know, father. You’ve told me many times. Many times. You forget, don’t you?’

‘Do I?’

I reached for his other medical kit, the one with the insulin, and, as I did so, I couldn’t help feeling how life could be so unfair, inflicting a man with two severe illnesses, diabetes and MS, either of which could, if left untreated, kill him. I checked his blood sugar tester and absent-mindedly looked up the dose – I already knew the table pretty much by heart.

‘The thing is, I can’t go into care unless I sell up the house. I will need the money to pay for the home.’

‘Not on medical grounds,’ I reminded him, patiently, for the umpteenth time.

‘But I will need the residential care – I need somewhere comfortable where I’ll be properly looked after.’

I passed him his syringe. ‘The Health Service will look after you.’

‘No they won’t,’ he insisted, as always. He equated National Health Service care as being in hospital, incarcerated, waiting out his days.

‘Here you are.’

He started to cough intermittently, the smoke irritating his lungs. God help us, I thought, if he also ended up getting cancer. However, I noticed that, apart from the shaking from each minor spasm, the tremor in his hands had eased. I wondered if he would make the injection himself. It would be easier.

‘You do it, son. My little friend is making me a bit woozy.’

‘You can do it, Dad,’ I reassured him. ‘Your hand’s much steadier now.’

I had left shortly after and that’s how they found him. When the post-mortem showed he had died from a pulmonary embolism, that there was air in the injection fluid and my fingerprints on the syringe, I was arrested and charged with murder. I had means, opportunity and, with the chance of being bequeathed an entire house, the motive. They made it sound like I had almost been sloppy. Some rising star was picked by the CPS to make the prosecution case just for the practice, so sure were they of winning, of sending me away for a long time. I should get used to my prison cell. It would be my home for many years to come.

I had my own hot-shot lawyer, however. While I was on remand, waiting interminably for the case to come to court, we went over my defence. Counsel is not allowed to coach a witness, even one speaking in his own defence. There is no law against doing things the other way around, however.

I merely suggested that my father had increasingly relied on illicit drugs for pain relief. It was perhaps no surprise that he had graduated from just cannabis to intravenous heroin. And the post-mortem also concluded that my father had enough of the stuff in his bloodstream to anaesthetise a horse. Certainly that would have been enough to kill him. I often gave him his insulin injections because of his hand tremor. Of course my fingerprints would be on the syringe. It would not be possible, with his prints and mine both present, to say who handled the little glass tube last.

Why, if I had wanted to kill my father, would I use two different methods to finish him off, especially one that was so easily detectable?

This was sufficient to sew doubt in the mind of the jury. Much more reasonable to assume the old man had been ham-fisted in preparing the injection for himself, before I even arrived for my daily visit. That I’d already left before took it. The simplest explanation is always thought the most likely.

And so, the case had collapsed. I was discharged, a free man, not put away to rot out the remainder of my life, any more than my father had needed to be put away to see out his own.

I stood in the house I had grown up in, and had now inherited, without a stain on my character, nor, for that matter, on my conscience.

The fact that I had prepared the fatal injection containing both heroin and the bubble of air that had formed a clot in my father’s lungs, swiftly and painlessly killing him, was irrelevant. I was in the clear, I was home free.

I was home.

The end

Season's Greetings

A rant, just in time for the 'Festive Season.'

Autumn is often regarded as the most emotive of seasons. The bright glory of lazy summer days or the high activity of holidays in the resplendent sunshine give way to the fading grandeur of woodland in a gaudy yet decaying plumage. It is with a feeling of being reconciled that the year is coming to an end. Yes, Autumn is a season of resigned calm. This is what autumn does to us writers and poets.

Not so, the season of Winter. Winter is an ugly beast that chillingly wants to suck on the marrow of our bones. But there is a most hideous evil at the heart of Winter! I speak openly of none other than the abomination that is called: "Christmas."

Everyone knows that Christmas is bad for you. Normally sensible people who diligently handle their financial affairs suddenly lose all sense of reason and blow every penny. People binge openly. Habitually-temperate individuals are to be seen as drunk as a lecturer with a pay rise, or a poet with any pay at all. Alcohol intake soars, tobacco, otherwise eschewed, is suddenly fashionable, as cigars light up like bonfires, food is gobbled in vast quantities as diets are cast aside, waistlines bulge, five a day comes to mean "meals," rather than "portions of vegetables." Promiscuity is encouraged, with sinister rituals dragged up from antiquity involving sprigs of plants such as mistletoe. Never mind how many children are conceived outside wedlock during this period, the number who start life outside any kind of enduring relationship must be staggering. All the more frightening is proportion where the act of conception has been captured for posterity on a photocopier at office parties.

And then there’s the lies to the children. How many children are dumb enough to believe a fat interloper in a conspicuous costume but with his hooded face covered can enter umpteen different properties all around the globe simultaneously though an antiquated and indeed often non-existent heating system? And then just give things away for nothing in return, no favours of any kind. The fat guy and the sleigh, all the supernatural creatures and the cloven-footed animals with illuminating body parts, it is revealed as the children get older, were invented, and used as a form of behavioural modification blackmail as the year’s end approached. Trust you parents after that? Why should you? They’ll say rubbing belly-buttons makes babies next!

Then there’s the extended family and the problems Christmastime entails. Families are extended for a reason – the reason is they can’t stand being near each other and want to put as much distance between who they share a blood line with. Blood is thicker than water and it usually ends up spilled on the carpet. Families getting together is the biggest cause of family breakdown in the world today. This is not rocket science – they couldn’t break down if they weren’t brought together in a supercritical mass in the first place, could they. It’s a sociological atom bomb waiting to go off.

While all that’s going on, there are questions about the damage inflicted on commerce and industrial activity. Whole industries close down while others, briefly, like fungus, spring up in their place. Just when they are needed most, in what should be their money-making peak of the year, plumbers and electricians disappear. And not only does God not exist, try finding a doctor or dentist at Christmas. Absenteeism is so rife, some companies can’t even tell whether they are actually still operating any longer or have gone into receivership. From the customers’ point of view, as far as public transport is concerned, it may as well have done so. "How was your journey then?" "How do you bloody think it was? No wonder Joseph and Mary had to stay in a stable – we nearly had to break our trip at a bloody Travelodge!"

Almost the ultimate indignity is yet to come. This is referred to as The Christmas Number One. For music-lovers everywhere, this alone is justification to stick a pencil into each ear and swirl it around until you stop moving. (A similar phenomenon with the eye is to be encountered when you are forced by some niece you have discovered makes you watch a DVD of Dude Where’s My Car? or Weekend at Bernie’s II. While on the TV, just to get you in the Christmas mood, there’s Saving Private Ryan followed by Schindler’s List.)

Christmas is as desperate as a famine inside a war inside a plague. Finally there is the social cost. This is best illustrated by the colossal, soul-crushing feeling of desperation when you find that you are actually left out of the festivities, that you have no cringe-inducing parties to attend, no visitors nor people to visit, no presents, no cards and only the wallpaper for company. As if to rub salt in the wound, the televisions companies have started to pick up on this and just as you are sitting through your umpteenth viewing of North By Northwest they spray across the screen a phone number you can call "if you’d like to talk to someone." How would you start such a conversation? "I’m such a Billy-No-Mates, I was going to slash my wrists but I can’t find the kitchen knife so I thought I would call you, you self-pious, do-gooding little bastard."

Christmas begins to blight us now from the beginning of September along with the anniversary of the start of World War II – a re-enactment of the Somme artillery barrage rumbles on from mid October till advent calendars come into use. Then New Year (why does the Year of Our Lord start seven days after the anniversary of His arrival – did someone forget to post the birth announcement? Had they been sniffing too much myrrh to remember till a week later? "Messiah arrived – must make a note." Then it’s back to work, just preceded by carting car-loads of wrapping paper, greetings cards, the odd dodgy present and possibly the odd clingy relative, to the recycling centre, staggering credit car bills or mind-numbing overdrafts until the final embarrassment of St Valentine’s Day. At last, you can remind yourself, Summer is now not far off, once you’ve got past Easter.

Then you’ve got about six months before the whole ghastly spectacle begins all over again. Let nothing you dismay, you merry gentlemen! God rest ye!

The End (-ish)

The Road To Perdition

What might happen if you let students - an intemperate bunch at best by all accounts - to throw a party behind the students union bar. Nostalgia about what might have happened afterwards

"Where does this road go?"

"It doesn’t go anywhere – it’s stationary."

"Stationery!" I said in mock surprise, at an attempt of surreal humour. "You mean it’s made of paper? It’ll collapse into the Bristol Channel!"

"It’s stood here for years," said Tariq. "Solid as a rock." All night he’d adopted this insouciant tone. At first it had seemed hilarious. Then funny. Then slightly amusing. Now, in the grey morning, it was getting just a tad irritating. This may have been in inverse proportion to how sober I was. "What’s to stop a big gust of wind blowing us off this bridge and into the water, dozens of feet –"

" – hundreds of feet – " He corrected.

" – hundreds of feet below?"

"Well, there’s that railing there."

"Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Would the authorities come and rescue us?" I pressed the point.

"God, no."

"Why not?"

"Well… if they’d seen us here at all, they’d have come and arrested us for trespass."

"But that’s still no reason not to rescue us."

"It is, if you think about it," Tariq reasoned, reasonably. "You see, if they’d not seen us to arrest us, they’d can’t have seen us to rescue us, can they? Besides…"

"Besides – what?"

"Besides, the fall would kill you, and even if it didn’t, you would drown in the current. If the hypothermia didn’t get you first. So it’d hardly be worth their bother."

I digested this. We’d been walking for about half an hour on the path-and-cycle-way that ran alongside the elevated approach to the Severn Bridge. This, Tariq had informed me, was a cantilevered path. I looked up ‘cantilever’ much later, and it said: "A cantilever is a beam anchored at one end and projecting into space." I could aver that this was true. The path was "temporarily closed for safety reasons" with a small barrier but we’d scrambled over that. We were now barely out over the water and hadn’t even reached the huge concrete structure, the size of a large block of flats, into which the suspension cables were anchored. There was absolutely no cover of any kind and we would have been clearly visible for miles to anyone who’d cared to look.

"Well I’d hate to put them out, if they’re so busy not seeing trespassers and all. I mean we’re hardly hidden from view." Even to myself I was beginning to sound a little grumpy.

"No, but we are a long way off. That’s probably why they haven’t seen us." Tariq still seemed as chipper as ever. "That and the fact that no-one in his right mind normally crosses on foot."

"Tariq, exactly why are we crossing the Bristol Channel by suspension bridge on foot at nine o’clock in the morning."

"Ah. You do you remember last night?"

"Which bits?"

"The later bits."

"The bar-staff party."

"And afterwards?"

"Nope." I strained to recall something. Something that might have been important, the sort of thing that explained why I was here now doing this thing. "Not really. Little bits. The bar closed. We tidied up in twenty minutes and that left us forty minutes in which to cram an entire party evening’s drinking, before the Students’ Union building shut and we all got slung out. We started drinking and… I don’t think I remember anything after that."

"The people all lying around on the grass?"

"Not really. Were they drunk?"

"It was hard to tell. They were all unconscious." Tariq seemed remarkably unconcerned about this, much as he was about everything else.

"Don’t you think they might have been drunk before they became unconscious?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Let’s face it, everyone was drunk. In fact, every thing was drunk by the time we were thrown out."

"Why weren’t we unconscious?"

"Must have been down to our robust constitutions," Tariq grinned. "Anyway, that’s when I suggested that we go down to Keele motorway services and hitch a ride with the first truck-driver who’d give us a lift."

"You did what?" I’m not sure how much I was surprised, feigning outrage, or genuinely outraged. "Why couldn’t I have just been unconscious like everybody else?

"You said you thought it was a good idea."

"I said that? Why didn’t you disagree with me?"

"I thought it was a good idea, too. After all, it had been my idea. So that’s what we did. You insisted on going back to your room first for some reason, then we set off."

"You can’t just hitch-hike away from a hangover."

"Oh no? Look at you now? Up, fresh as a daisy, out in the bracing open air. Imagine all those others – just waking up with their heads throbbing. Have you got a hangover?"

He had a point. But so did I. "No – but I’m nearly getting my tits blown off in this ‘bracing air’!"

"So it wasn’t such a bad idea."

"But… but how? What happened?"

"We got a lift to Aust Services back there and the driver said he was having a stop-over, so we said we’d walk."

"But why are we crossing the River Severn bridge on a pathway closed to the public?" I persisted.

"Because it’s there!"

"But we don’t have to be!"

"And to get to the other side, of course."

"Of course. How silly of me."

"Because, on the other side is where my uncle lives. He owns a pub in Caerleon. The Red Lion. Or the White Lion, I’m not sure which. But I’m sure we’ll find it. And he can give us a lift back to Keele."

I was starting to worry that this was actually making some kind of sense, when it shouldn’t. "Tariq, don’t take this personally, but you’re, sort of, of a dusky Asian hue and you’re from Bolton. How come you’ve got an uncle who owns a pub in south Wales?"

"What’s wrong with that? I’m a good barman back at the Students’ Union, aren’t I? Serving booze to white folks runs in our family."

"I suppose you’ve got a point. How far is it to Caerleon?"

"Oo… only a few minutes’ walk. We’ll soon be there."

"Tariq, we’ve been walking for hours and we’re not even half way across and I can barely see land in either direction."

"It’s just a trick of perspective. The bridge is only a couple of miles long – at most – including the approach sections.

"Then – how far to Caerleon?"

"Not far. Only about 15 miles."

"Only!…"

"There’s two things to keep in mind. Firstly, don’t look down."

I looked down. We appeared to be walking on thin steel plate. Well, it looked like steel plate. Its apparent thinness was revealed because at frequent if irregular intervals there were holes right through the metal, for no readily apparent reason, about the diameter of a ten pence piece, revealing the steel to about the thickness of a ten pence piece. Clearly visible below that, about as far down as a ten storey building, curling, twisting brown waves, like a pit of vipers, wriggled, waiting with waning patience for their prey to fall amongst them.

"What was the second thing?" I croaked.

"We’ll be alright, just so long as we don’t hit a spot of bad weather."



We reached about half-way across the bridge, and became the centre of a sphere of air, sky and water, with just a puny piece of engineering to indicate Man’s existence. At that point, some weather – a spot, bad – blew in from the general direction of America, and it seemed to be in a hurry. The metal at our feet was matched by the metal sky overhead, and the metal water below disappeared from view as we became entombed in a racing ball of cloud. Every step we took seemed to turn us sideways. To have jumped up, losing contact with the armour-like decking, would have been suicidal.

Then the rain came in. To call it rain was a bit of a liberty, insofar as the only resemblance this phenomenon had to rain was that it was wet. Horizontal spears of water daggered into us, making us yelp. But this was just the beginning. We started to realise we might be in serious trouble when it became unwise even to lift one foot off the slicked surface, and we attempted a cross-country skiing movement. Progress went from slow to slower. Then, as the bullet rods and hydro-tracer puckered and cratered my denim jacket, making it dark as though stained with blood, we fell to our knees. As an afterthought, we decided to lie down altogether and time froze – as, indeed, did we – until the venom of the elements subsided once more. Eventually, the wind lessened, we got to our feet and we plodded on in what was to me a bubble of misery.

Long after we were no longer over the waters of the Bristol Channel, the road continued in an elevated arc round to the west parallel to the bum of Wales. Hours seemed to drag past. Eventually road met land, and we were able to get off the motorway and walk on the grass embankment alongside. Caerleon, whatever it was like, still did not hove into view. I was not sure how it would appear but I was imagining something like Valhalla. The morning grew old and tired.

At long last, we crossed under the motorway to get on its northern side and approached a motley collection of buildings. This was Caerleon. This was Caerleon? It was, probably, quite a pleasant village – it even had some Roman remains somewhere, to which some human remains were in danger of being added – mine – but it was hard to appreciate under the circumstances. Its one merit was that it contained a public house where we could find shelter, rest, food and, most importantly, transport to take us back to the home whence we’d so pointlessly come.

It took some time for Tariq to identify the correct pub. It turned out that Caerleon, with a population of just two thousand souls, had twelve of the establishments. The one we wanted was in fact called The Black Bull – Tariq had been close, apart from an appalling lack of awareness of colour and zoology.

The only thing was, we were too early and the place was still shut.

We had nowhere left to go.

All we could do was wait for his relatives to wake, open up, let us in and take us back to the little student residence blocks we called home.

"Drink has driven me to this," I exhaled, and, exhausted, slid to the ground, where fatigue enveloped me like a foggy pall, and I sank from the conscious world.



When I finally saw my room again, many, many hours later, several things argued for my attention. Firstly, not only was the door unlocked, but it was slightly open. Secondly, the light was left on. Thirdly, an empty vodka bottle was embedded, neck first, into the wall plaster. It came back to me. I had taken this bottle back to my room "for later," but having got there, I had drained the last of its contents then flamboyantly thrown it at the wall, as if completing some dramatic toast. To my befuddled amazement, it hadn’t shattered and I hadn’t the heart to attempt to heap further injury upon it.

And that was how, for me, the one and only Keele University Students’ Union bar-staff party ended.

The End

The Twins Paradox

Non-fiction about one aspect of Special Relativity

The other day somebody sent me a recording of the play, Insignificance, by Terry Johnson, made into a radio production. In it, at one point, a character – who happens to resemble Marilyn Monroe – explains – to a character resembling Albert Einstein – parts both of Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity and General Relativity. In particular, she refers to something known as The Twins Paradox and adds that Special Relativity is inadequate to explain how it works, and that the General Theory is required.

I will not digress to comment here on a play where characters resembling Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein discuss Relativity (not to mention that characters resembling Joe DiMaggio and Senator MacCarthy show up) nor ponder why the play is called Insignificance. However, I will state here and now quite categorically that you do not need General Relativity to explain The Twins Paradox and that the Special Theory is perfectly adequate. Indeed, using the General Theory would probably mess up your answer while the Special Theory gives you the right answer. What’s more, I’ll show what that answer is and prove it is right!

And no maths.

(Just a tiny bit of arithmetic, and you can even skip that.)

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, it gives an opportunity to look into what Relativity really means and hopefully make it a bit more easy to understand for more people. I’ll show you don’t have to be a maths genius to understand it too.

Why Two Theories?

Just to explain, for the moment, why there are two theories of Relativity – or, more accurately, two parts – Relativity is all about things moving. It concerns the speeds of things. The word "velocity" is sometimes used in place of speed (in physics, "velocity" has a more precise meaning.) But, for simplicity, I have used the word "speed" most of the time to help keep things clear and used the words physicists prefer when it matters. For the moment, what you need to know is that Special Relativity deals with constant speed while General Relativity is about changing speed, going faster or slower. This is not just playing with words – if you were moving at constant speed smoothly enough – on a train or a plane, for example – you might feel as if you were standing still. If you were on a train, plane or anything else that was speeding up or slowing down, you would always know that you were moving. This difference is vitally important. There will be more about this later.

I have used the word "mass," as preferred by physicists, in place of "weight," just to keep the physicists happy. But they mean almost the same thing.

Einstein was probably the most famous physicist – indeed the most famous scientist – of the 20th century. His face is instantly recognisable in any picture even today, and, as most people are aware, his work led to the development of atomic energy and the atomic bomb (though he emphatically did not work on the atomic bomb himself, as he was a pacifist.) His work also explains how stars burn (though I won’t be going into that here.)

Not surprisingly, Einstein won a Nobel prize for physics. More surprisingly (and quite unfairly, in my view) he did not win it for either versions of his theory of Relativity, but for a piece of work that led to an area of physics called Quantum Mechanics, which a lot of people have never even heard of (although I talk about some bits of it in other articles on this website.)

(His work could also have saved someone from committing suicide, but alas this tragedy was not averted – the news of yet another discovery by Einstein that proved the existence of atoms did not reach, as far as we know, the ears of Ludwig Boltzmann, also a brilliant physicist who worked on a theory of atoms. Boltzmann suffered from manic-depression, it is believed, and was sometimes ridiculed by other physicists. With no proof that he was in fact right, he killed himself a year after Einstein’s proof might have lifted his mood and saved him.)

So what is all this theory of Relativity about then? I’ll try to keep this brief, but if you’ve already had an introduction to this subject, concerning the speed of light, you may want to skip this altogether and get straight to The Twins Paradox.

Light Speed

It had been known for some time that light had a finite speed, although a very great one. Sir Isaac Newton did some work on light (also discussed elsewhere on this website) but he did not, as far as I am aware, investigate what the speed of light might be. He may have been hampered by the absence of telescopes and very accurate clocks during his lifetime, though Newton was such a clever-clogs he probably could have got round this, if he’d set his mind to it.

By the nineteenth century, all the necessary equipment was available. It was still no mean feat to measure something so fast. A man named Albert Michelson came up with a clever method which I will sketch out here. Imagine light from a lamp focussed to shine off a flat mirror to another mirror some distance away – a distance we have measured with extreme precision. The light reflects back to the first mirror and then back to the experimenter with his face just above the lamp. You can see that a bright lamp and a telescope would be quite handy for doing all this. Now, if the first mirror is in fact mounted on the edge of a wheel that is made to turn after a flash from the lamp has reflected off it, the returning flash will no longer be visible to the experimenter – the mirror will now be turned to the wrong angle.

To get round this (literally) how about covering the rim of the wheel with a series of mirrors all placed at precise angles, and spinning the wheel? If the wheel is going fast enough, by the time the flash of light gets back from the second mirror in the distance, another mirror on the wheel will have moved into just the right position for reflecting the light back to the experimenter – he will see the reflected lamp again!

All you need to do is have enough mirrors on the wheel, and spin the wheel fast enough to make this work. And if you know how fast the wheel is spinning (and, as I said before, the exact distance to the far mirror) you can get an exact measure for the speed of light, because you know how long it takes the wheel to turn one mirror’s-worth and therefore how long it takes the light to cover the distance. Nice and simple (and I’ve not used any maths to explain this, notice.)

For a moment we need to consider what speed is. Well, obviously, it’s distance covered in a certain amount of time. If only things would stay that simple.

Let’s think about two cars colliding – fun, I know, providing no-one gets hurt, but who said this couldn’t be fun? If a car runs into a brick wall at 60 miles an hour it hits the wall with a speed of – d’ur! – 60 miles an hour. If it runs into a car driving towards it at 59 miles an hour, the speed of the collision is 119 miles an hour. This seems obvious – we just add up the two speeds. (This is about as hard as the maths gets in this writing so I hope you are keeping up.)

However, if the second car was driving away at 59 miles an hour, the collision would be just 1 mile an hour. Simple.

(Only – it isn’t. For reasons I’m not going to go into here, combination of velocities is not determined by addition of velocities, but don’t worry about it – addition is good enough for speeds much slower than the speed of light, and we will not be looking at faster collisions.)

Another, less obvious thing is that there is no such thing as the speed of something on its own. The speed has to be relative to something else. For cars, this is usually the ground. The important thing is that you have to have two things moving relative to one another to have a value for speed. It’s more obvious if you talk about rate of change of distance between two things, if a bit clumsy. You simply cannot have rate of change of distance between something and nothing else. (It’s a bit like the sound of one hand clapping… but we won’t go into that!)

Now back to the speed of light. From what I’ve just said, if we are moving towards or away from a lamp flashing at us, we ought to get different answers for the speed of light. Also, there are other ways in which we should be able to alter the answer, by shifting the whole experiment about. The thing is, when Michelson tried doing tricks like this, he didn’t get any variation in the value for the speed of light. He always got exactly the same answer! This should be impossible. But what turns out to be impossible is to get the speed of light ever to change!

Various means were used to attempt to explain this. One by one, however, they didn’t work.

Speed Invariance, and Special Relativity

Meanwhile, along comes Einstein. He didn’t worry about how or why the speed of light was fixed. He simply accepted that it never changes, and that was that. He never liked the name ‘theory of Relativity’ for his theory – he wanted to call it the ‘theory of invariance.’

The thing is, if light never changes its speed, you’ve got to fiddle around with other mathematics in order to get the sums to add up. In fact, the maths is not difficult, it’s just that what the answers mean sounds a bit weird. But here we go.

Imagine you are sat still in a room, wearing a watch. On the mantle-shelf stands a clock. As your watch ticks, so does the clock. Time seems to go at the same rate everywhere.

Now we will need a bit more arithmetic here. To make things easier, let’s imagine that light-speed is 10 centimetres per second. (It’s a lot faster, but using made-up figures makes it easier to see what’s going on and, apart from the values, doesn’t have any effect on reality.)

Suppose the clock now began to slide smoothly across the mantle-shelf towards you at one centimetre per second (never mind what’s making it move.) A flash of light comes from behind the clock, passes it and on to you. In one second the light would go 10 centimetres. But if you measured how far the light had gone past the clock, using the clock’s time-keeping and measure of distance, it would only have gone 9 centimetres. If you used the moving clock to measure the speed of light, you would get only 9 centimetres per second – which is the wrong answer!

It’s easy to get back to the right answer (though you have to ignore how weird the answer seems to be.) All you have to do is have the moving clock run more slowly. By stretching out a second on the moving clock, light again travels 10 centimetres in one clock-second.

A similar correction works for any other speed.

This is the first bit of Special Relativity – time goes more slowly, relative to someone watching, for moving objects. It has to, in order to get the speed of light to be constant.

However, if you were moving with the object, you’d notice no difference.

How about – instead of using the clock’s timing, we used the thickness of the clock to measure the distance light travels in one second? If the clock was itself 10 centimetres thick and it was moving at 1 centimetre per second, in one second the light would appear to move 9 centimetres past the clock in travelling from the back to the front. Again, the wrong answer. Again, it is easily fixed, mathematically. We just say that the clock gets thinner in its direction of travel when it is moving. Once again, we get that light takes one second to move from the back to the front of the clock because the clock, while moving at one centimetre per second, is only 9 centimetres thick, from our point of view, giving a light-speed of 10 clock-centimetres per second.

Again, a similar correction works for any other speed.

This may sound very peculiar and not at all true, but it is, in fact, exactly how the Universe works, and that is that. The only ‘fiddling’ I’ve done is to make the numbers easier to work with.

This is the second bit of Special Relativity – things get shorter, relative to someone watching, when they are moving, in their direction of travel.

However, if you were moving with the object, you’d notice no difference.

Using our imaginary light-speed of 10 centimetres per second, it’s easy to see that, if the clock itself were sliding towards you at 10 centimetres per second, it would have stopped ticking altogether, and it would have no thickness at all! This still gives the right answers for the speed of light, as measured by the moving clock. It also shows that to travel at or faster than the speed of light is impossible for a physical object – time can’t go backwards and you can’t have negative thickness or length.

A third problem arises. When a thing with a certain mass is moving at a certain velocity, it has momentum which is calculated by multiplying its mass and velocity together. If it collides with something else – which may also have its own momentum, it’s a law of the Universe that the total amount of momentum after the crash must be the same as the total momentum before. It doesn’t matter if the things get smashed up and the parts scatter in all directions – do the arithmetic properly and you will see that no momentum has been gained or lost. This is known as The Law of Conservation of Momentum, and it’s been known about and proved to be absolutely true for ages.

The thing is this. If you stuck clocks on all the moving objects involved in the crash, those clocks start running slow, depending on how fast the things are moving. As velocity is distance covered in a given time, you start getting speeds that are too slow and the momentum doesn’t add up properly any more. The Law of Momentum seems to be broken – which it can’t be – so something again has to altered to allow for this. The only thing is left is the mass, so the Universe needs to increase that to make up for the loss of apparent velocity.

This is the third bit of Special Relativity – things get more mass, relative to someone watching, when they are moving compared with when they are still. (We’ll see where they get the extra mass from in a moment – you don’t get anything for nothing!)

However, if you were moving with the object, you’d notice no difference.

In fact, if you had something moving at very nearly the speed of light, its mass would become very nearly infinite. You would therefore need a very nearly infinite amount of energy to push it that little bit faster – and even then this energy would be turned into mass – the fat thing you were pushing would get fatter rather than faster. It was from this that Einstein realised that energy would turn into mass, and could be turned back again, in certain circumstances, giving us atomic power, the atomic bomb, radioactivity, why the core of the Earth is still hot after so many years of trying to cool down, and how stars burn. But we’re not going to go into that.

So, in a nutshell, in Special Relativity, when things are going at constant speed, things get shorter, more massive and their clocks runs more slowly.

Now, in practice, light goes an awful lot faster than this. But it is absolutely true to say that, every time you move, relative to your surroundings, all the things around you get more massive, shorter, and have time going slower. It’s just that at ordinary everyday speeds, you never notice it and can ignore it. (Global Positioning System satellites works to such high precision, their movement and altitude do have to be taken into account, however.)

But, just for a moment, let’s go back to the clock sliding towards you at constant speed. From its point of view, the clock feels as if it isn’t moving, and that you are. So the clock sees you get heavier, thinner and your watch running more slowly. How can they both be running slow, and which one is right? What time will each show after you’ve been moving for a while? This is where The Twins Paradox comes from.

First of all, let’s look at the clock and the watch both looking as if they are going slow from the point of view of the other, while each ‘feels’ as if it is running normally. This is a bit like watching a ship sail over the horizon (possibly through a telescope, for a clearer view.) From someone watching on land, the ship appears to sink into the sea (and, if we could look very carefully, the mast of the ship would appear to tip away from us.) But, from the point of view of someone on the ship, you and the land would appear sink into the sea (and tip slightly backwards) while the ship stayed afloat and its mast vertical. What we have is two different horizons caused by being in two different positions. In a similar way, we have two different ‘time horizons’ for things moving. Neither clock is ‘right’ while the other is ‘wrong.’ If you brought the two clocks to the same speed – that is, stationary relative to each other – the two clocks would show time going at the same rate, much as bringing the ship back to the same place, at shore, shows neither of them sinking and that vertical things point straight up.

The maths of all this, when things are moving at constant speed, is really quite simple and any teenage maths pupil at school should be able to do it (though I have deliberately left as much maths out as I possibly could.) Things get tricky when you start looking at things speeding up and slowing down, accelerating or decelerating. The maths for this probably needs you to be a graduate maths student. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is so called because it deals with the special case of constant speed. When he wanted to work out what was happening generally, when things are changing speed, he had to resort to much more complicated maths. Surprisingly, some of the maths had been done already by a man called Berhard Riemann, about thirty years earlier, but Einstein was such an appalling student (from the point of view of his lecturers) that he skipped the lectures where he would have learned about it so, sadly in some ways and impressively in others, it took him longer to come up with the General Theory as he had to work out the maths for himself. Notice that, in the General Theory, if you have a velocity change of zero, that is a special case – the same as the Special Theory and why the Special Theory is so called.

However, we want to avoid the maths of the General Theory as much as we can, and this is why The Twins Paradox is interesting. Many people think you can only explain The Twins Paradox with the General Theory. But they are wrong!

But what is The Twins Paradox? Well, I’ve hinted at it already, but here it is in full.

The Twins Paradox

Take a pair of twins – who are, naturally, the same age. To distinguish them, we’ll have fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. The girl becomes an astronaut. She gets on a rocket, cruising steadily at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light (which is not forbidden, but would require a pretty powerful rocket) and she flies to the star nearest to Earth, which is Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. It is not a time, it is a distance.) She turns round and comes back to her stay-at-home brother, still on Earth. OK so far?

Looking over the theory of Relativity as explained above, because she’s been a gal on the move, her clock has been running slower than her brother’s on Earth, so she is now younger than her twin brother!

As odd as this is, things get worse. Also according to what I’ve said earlier, the brother has seen her fly away and come back, so it’s from his point of view that her clock looks slow. But it also depends on whose point of view you are looking from. From her point of view, he has moved away (along with the Earth) then come back, so, as she sees it, his clock has run slow and he’s younger.

They can’t both be right. Are they the same age? No – as we shall see. Which one is younger? Well, it depends – in some way something that has happened to one of them is different from something that has happened to the other. The questions are: what? To which? And with what result?

The usual explanation – and the one referred to in the play Insignificance, is that she has had to undergo an acceleration in order to fly away from Earth. She also had to slow down when she got to Alpha Centauri, turn round and speed up again to fly back. She probably had to put the brakes on as well when she got back to Earth so that she could have a chat with her ageing, Earthbound brother. This involves changes of speed, so we have to use General Relativity with all its horribly difficult maths to explain why – as it turns out – she is younger than her twin.

This is true. The astronaut twin ages less. She is younger. So that’s the answer to that one. But it’s nothing to do with General Relativity.

That’s because we can cut out the bit about speeding up and slowing down. It’s not so important that the two people are twins now – any two people will do – we just want to see which one ages less – who has the slower clock, and why.

Suppose that we use stopwatches to time everything and our lady astronaut sets off in the opposite direction from Earth, away from Alpha Centauri, to start with. She turns round, has a good run-up and gets to her steady cruising speed just as she passes her brother on Earth, and both of them start their watches. Onwards she travels. As she gets level with Alpha Centauri, she stops her watch and applies the brakes; back on Earth he stops his watch at the same time. There is a problem with this – she is 4 light years away so can’t actually see her pass Alpha Centauri for another 4 years (and with a very good telescope.) But he knows, for a given cruising speed, how long it should have taken her, from his point of view, so he trusts nothing has gone wrong and stops his watch by dead reckoning. (This might not sound very convincing, but it is not a fiddle – read on.)

Sister now turns her spaceship round, accelerates to steady cruise speed just as she gets level with Alpha Centauri, and, as she does so, she and her brother both start their stopwatches once more. (To do this, they will have had to plan the mission out very carefully and stick to the plan, but as long as they do so, everything will be fine.)

Now, she gets level with Earth and, as she does so, both brother and sister stop their watches a final time. (She can now get on with braking and coming back to Earth for a soft landing.) The important thing is – both watches have only been timing the part of the journey when the rocket was flying at a steady, unchanging, Special Relativity-friendly speed. So what do the watches show?

They show her watch is slow compared with his! She has aged less! How is this possible, when, from the point of view of each of them, it’s the other that has been moving?! Surely, now that we’ve cut out the speeding up and slowing down bit, they have experienced exactly the same things!

Not so. It’s a bit like a magician’s trick. We’ve been looking at the wrong thing about the experiment.

The thing is – she has flown to Alpha Centauri and back, a distance of four light years as seen by the brother on Earth. Earth and Alpha Centauri have not been moving, as far as the brother is concerned. But she has been moving, and quite quickly too. And from her point of view, Earth has moved away and Alpha Centauri has moved towards her. Or, thinking of it another way, the Earth-Alpha Centauri route are two ends of something moving past her, like light going past our old clock on the mantle-shelf.

Anything that moves, shrinks in length of the direction of travel. Remember?

From her point of view, the journey to Alpha Centauri, and back, has been shorter than it looks to the brother on Earth. Because the journey is shorter, as she sees it, her watch hasn’t had enough time to run for as long as her brother’s, nor has she aged as much. The two siblings have not had the same experience and that’s why they’ve not had the same number of birthdays by the moment she gets back. Speeding up and slowing down have nothing to do with it – at least as far as our stopwatches are concerned, because they weren’t running for that part of the experiment.

So that is the answer and explanation to The Twins Paradox. The travelling twin ages less and is no longer as old as her brother, but you only need Special Relativity to explain it. General Relativity can be kept out of it.

That’s about it, really.

The End

(Much of the information for this article was drawn from lecture notes made available on line by Michael Fowler at http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/ - however, all errors, faults and general confusion are my fault. For much more – puzzling, interesting and accurate information on Relativity and other stuff - see this site.)

Addendum - For all you Doubting Thomases out there
(Gary, this means you!)
Some people have doubted that the difference in ages can be a Special-Relativity-only effect. Here is a worked example using actual maths and figures to demonstrate that the twins will age by different amounts even without considering acceleration and deceleration – that is, constant speed.

The situation.
One twin – the female – is going to fly to Alpha Centauri, a distance of 4 light years, and back, 60% of the speed of light (v = 0.6c) while the male twin stays at home.

During the trip, each will send off a flash of light from a beacon, once a month. In other words, each will have aged one month between emitting each flash.

It is vital to realise that each flash from its sender means that one month has passed for that person. In other words, counting up the flashes sent by either person shows how much they have aged.

As she sets off at 0.6c, she sees flashes arriving from him just once every two months, just as he does from her. This is partly owing to the ever-increasing distance, (an ‘optical’ effect) and time dilation (a relativistic effect.)

Not convinced? And I think I can hear you say - Hang on - after 1 month travelling at .6c, the next flash ought to be after 1 + 0.6 = 1.6 of a month! But you are forgetting that time dilation is slowing her clock. The amount by which it is slowed down is worked out using the following formula: Time observed = Time at rest / square root (1 – v^2 / c^2 ) where v is her speed and c is the speed of light. Her speed is 0.6 so v^2 = .36. So v^2 / c^2 = 0.36. 1 – 0.36 = 0.64. The square root of 0.64 is 0.8. So her time is dilated 1/0.8 which is 1.25. In other words it takes her 1.25 months between signals, owing to time dilation. But in that time, she has travelled 0.6 * 1.25 light-months which is 0.75 light-months. Therefore her next light signal takes 1.25 + 0.75 = 2 months to reach Earth. (And, of course, swapping things around to her point of views, his signals reach her only once every two months as well.)

On the way back, the situation is reversed as far as the change in distance is concerned. Each signal is sent out, as seen by the other, with time dilated to 1.25 months. But in that time, the distance has closed by 0.6 * 1.25 = 0.75 light-months. So the signal arrives at the other end of its journey 1.25 – 0.75 = 0.5 of a month, in other words, two signals a month.

From the Earth, the total journey time (excluding speeding up slowing down and turning around) is 8 light years at 60% the speed of light = 13 years 4 months, or 160 months.

What does she see?
The distance of the trip to Alpha Centauri, where she sees the star rushing towards her, is shrunk by length contraction. The formula for this is the original distance multiplied by the square root of 1-v^2/c^2. This equals 80% of 4 light-years, which is 3.2 light years. (The square root of 1-0.36, which equals square root of .64, which is 0.8.) It therefore takes her 64 months to get there (3.2 light-years/0.6 = 5 years 4 months.) Therefore she sees 32 flashes from her brother.

She turns round and heads back, and immediately sees the frequency of flashes from her brother increase. This is despite time dilation as she is shortening the distance to her brother. She now sees flashes twice a month. It takes her another 64 months to get home, and she sees 128 flashes. By the time she reaches Earth her brother has flashed, and aged, 32 + 128 = 160 months. This is just what we would expect (see above.)

What does he see?
From his point of view, the distance to Alpha Centauri remains 4 light years, so he expects her to take 4 light years / 0.6c = 6 years 8 months = 80 months to get there. But, because Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away, he doesn’t see her turn round for another 4 years = 48 months. (This is a key difference in their experiences – she sees the flashes from her brother change immediately she turns round. He doesn’t see her turn round till 4 years later.) So it is 80 + 48 = 128 months into the mission before he sees her turn round, during which she has flashed 64 times and aged 64 months.

There is now only 160 – 128 = 32 months left before she gets back Earth. Because the distance is closing and despite time dilation, he too sees flashes from her at twice a month, 64 flashes in total.

By the time she arrives back, he has seen 64 + 64 = 128 flashes from his sister who has therefore aged only 128 months to his 160. So his twin sister is now 32 months younger than he.

Note that this difference is regardless of accelerations and is a constant velocity, Special-Relativity-only effect.

Don’t take my word for it, doubt all you want to – but do the maths

(I apologise for breaking my word about there being no maths in this article, but sometimes sums speak louder than words!)

P.S. Notes
Equations of Special Relativity
Length observed = Length at rest * square root (1 – v^2 / c^2 )
Time observed = Time at rest / square root (1 – v^2 / c^2 )
Mass observed = Mass at rest / square root (1 – v^2 / c^2 )

Extra, Extra - Read All About It

Non-fiction article about what it’s like to be in a TV drama – stood at the back

The call came through just before eight o’clock in the evening on my mobile. I had switched it to silent so as not to disturb the others attending the meeting I was in. The buzz of the little phone going off in my pocket almost made me jump. You think I’d be used to it by now. I excused myself and went outside to take the call in the corridor.

"We’ve got a job for you to do."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

"I had things planned."

"They need you in C.I.D." said my agent.

"What’s the call time?"

"It’s good, twelve noon."

I sighed. "I’ll reschedule what I had planned. I’ll be there."

"Wear the dark suit."

The industrialised hinterland of Merseyside north of Speke Boulevard, not far from the Liverpool John Lennon Airport, is a drab and dreary place that no-one in his right mind would visit on a sight-seeing trip. I turned in to one of the innumerable business parks and pulled up at the barrier.

"BBC," I said.

"Do you know where you are going?"

I knew where I was going. Formerly the offices of a potato crisp factory, this is where the BBC filmed the TV series, Merseybeat, and I where I was going to be an extra.

Not so long ago, filming on location was rare. When it did take place, there would be a fleet of large vans in green BBC livery. That doesn’t happen anymore. Reality in TV has become the order of the day as technology has improved to the point where cameras are small and portable, and much less demanding on studio level lighting. Real locations are used, even for interior scenes, and independent production companies make TV programmes. Hire vans are more common – only a few have legends on them indicating a film crew is about.

Spotting crew is much easier, principally because of their dress-sense. Difficult to describe, but impossible to miss, you head for the bunch of people meandering around that most look like refugees, in very casual clothes. Jeans, sneakers or boots, fleeces and sleeveless puffa jackets are common. On colder days this would be topped off with massive hooded waterproof jackets, and often waterproof leggings as well.

Crew roughly divide into two subtypes – one lot, basically technicians, always wear belts from which dangle every hand tool known to Man, along with bum-bags, reels of gaffer tape, clips and cables, making them look like a DIY-er’s convention, and others such as costume, hair and make-up. The other type are assistant directors and always have walkie-talkies that crackle and squawk from time to time if anything is actually happening. The technical people tend to be male and of any age, the others female, and the A.D.s young but sometimes looking half-way to being burnt out by their work.

One good thing about getting a call-time of noon was that I couldn’t possibly be here all day – unless a night shoot was planned as well, in which case we could be here till ten in the evening. The other good thing was lunch would be included. Today it was steak. But first, there was work to be done. And, first of all, that meant going to wardrobe. Mary, the wardrobe mistress, had a shooting script, a shooting schedule, Polaroids of me from my last appearance, and the tie I had to wear, plus a change of shirt. Other clothes were my own.

Being an extra is in some ways a job like any other, and in others, a job like no other. You find yourself rubbing shoulders with people who you’ve seen loads of times on TV and are famous – that is to say they are recognised by literally millions of viewers. Your face too will appear on a million TV screens – but in the background, and no-one will recognise you. They’ll probably not even notice you. All the viewer perceives is that the action of the drama they are watching occurs in " a busy place," – one with other people moving around, but in no way part of the story, and with no identity.

Nevertheless you are going to be on the Tele, and that puts some people in awe of you and they think you are famous in some way and wonder how you ever got the job. It’s not a secret. You subscribe to an agency and they get you the work. (In a few instances, some extras get work directly, but this is not so common.) To find an agency, you get a weekly newspaper called The Stage, and look in the ads at the back. There – none of that was rocket science, was it? Some agencies charge, and some just take a commission.

The next question might be "Why?" In my case, that’s simple – I needed the money! However, that’s not the only reason. I have done some amateur dramatics and I was always curious as to what it would be like to act on camera compared with acting on stage. Remarkably, very few people doing work as extras are or have ever aspired to be actors. For me, however, this often leads to the question, "What is the difference between acting on stage and acting on camera?" and for me the most obvious, if not entirely serious answer is that on camera you don’t need a prompt! Mess up, and you just do it again. And people don’t throw stuff. Apart from the crew, that is. I find it a lot less nerve-racking.

As for the money – it’s not bad but it’s not brilliant. Worst of all it’s unpredictable. You might get only one day’s work in several weeks, which is definitely not going to keep body and soul together. However, some people work at it to get a multitude of jobs so they keep busy. Nice little earners include being some sort of regular in the Rover’s Return or The Woolpack. Unfortunately, some productions don’t like to have the same anonymous faces over and over.

There are three inventions that make modern movie-making possible. One I’ve mentioned is the Polaroid, one is the walkie-talkie and the last is the mobile phone. Everybody has one. It never ceases to amaze me how rare it is for a take to be ruined by one going off – there’s discipline for you – everyone remembers to switch them off. But, between takes, the extras are whipping them out left, right and centre, phoning friends, colleagues and, of course, agents. One girl I was sat opposite to during a break had two – one for personal calls and one for business – and during the interval she was setting up work for up to six months in advance.

Another way in which the job is unusual is the variety and precocity of the start times. Seven-thirty in the morning is not uncommon and that’s just the extras. The actual actors, or principles, can be in as early as six, for costume and make-up. What a life! And shooting can go on all day, into the evening. A plus point about the early call is you get a full (and I mean full) breakfast thrown in. And, by the way, the stars all eat the same food as everyone else, either in the canteen or, when on location, the catering bus.

Besides the principles, there’s us – the extras. You’re almost never called that. Technically, on the shooting schedule you are referred to as NS – non-speaking, which is fairly self-explanatory – or SA, which rather more grandly stands for "supporting artistes." However, the ubiquitous word used by all the assistant directors is the depersonalising term "background," which is really all you are – just walking scenery.

Being background means you are herded about by A.D.s taking instructions from the first A.D via radio, and sometimes it does feel a bit degrading. But you are still an important part of the creative process (which translates as: you mess up, and everything’s messed up.) To me, the A.D.s seem to be the hardest working people on the set (which is probably why they sometimes look so weary), but that’s probably only true when there are background to deal with. They will give you simple instructions, like "Walk over there," or "Look through this pile of papers." It’s seldom complicated and, in case you were thinking of getting nervous, it’s not worth the bother. I have learned not to question any orders, or ask the A.D. anything unless it is absolutely necessary, such as, "Which side of that light/sound technician/mobile crane should I go?" I never listen to any instructions that are meant for someone else, and I never, ever ask, "How was I?" If there was anything wrong, they’d tell you (and it would probably have been their fault in the first place, unless you are a complete dummy.) It’s a bit like being in the army – you obey orders and you don’t ask questions, and I suspect the A.D.s like it that way.

There are a couple of run-throughs, rather fulsomely called "rehearsals" with everything except the camera running, just to see if it works. Then you’re ready to make picture.

Other things some people like to know include, "Is there really a clapper board? Does the director really shout ‘action’?" Some of the clichés are true. There is a clapper board, but it is now plastic with a whiteboard marker, but it’s used in exactly the same way as they always have been throughout the history of movies. Someone does shout "action," but the process is a tad more complicated. There is a sequence of events which include a call for silence, then "ready," then "turning," then "camera set," (I’ve no idea what that means) and finally, often after a long pause, the A.D. will shout "and action." No-one thinks to tell you these things the first time you are ever on set, but it is vitally important that you do absolutely nothing until that shout of "action."

The long pauses between instructions – not to mention sometimes between takes – can be baffling, but is almost invariably because some technical flaw has been spotted. Quite often, the camera is left running, without compunction, while the problem is fixed. No-one cares about wasting film – in any case it’s not film or video tape, turning on reels, as the shout of "turning" would suggest. This must be just an old convention that’s stuck. Everything is direct to digital, and fed straight into a computer in the editing suite, where the bits are assembled into a show. Nor should "turning" be confused with "turning round," which means we are all going to do exactly the same scene again, only photographed from the opposite direction so that we see the other principle’s face during a conversation. And I do mean, "exactly the same." Never do anything in a take that is so complicated that you can’t remember what it was afterwards, like scratch your head or bite a thumbnail.

Sometimes the pauses and breaks can seem interminable. Often the job is mildly boring, occasionally tedious, and sometimes excruciating. But in movies more than most jobs – labour intensive as it is – time is money, and during every delay, with actors and even seasoned crew looking wearily at the edge of their patience, someone, somewhere is hurrying – probably desperately – to fix something. No – I take that back; I’ve never seen anyone panicking to sort something out – there is just an air of quiet professional efficiency that problems are promptly dealt with.

Then comes the retakes. Even if the first take was perfect, the director will always want a "safety." Typically, however, something will not be quite right. Quite often you were still not 100% sure of what you were going to do, even despite the "rehearsal." The A.D will shout "reset," or "First positions," and you do it all again. The usual number of takes is about four. There is a high level of attention to detail, to getting it just right, but it doesn’t stretch to needless perfectionism.

After that, given the director’s nod, lights and camera, on its little trolley, and anything else that needs to be set are moved around by the ant-like army of technicians, while the actors – their one-trick-pony piece done, look on. Or, if that’s them done for the day, buzz off as speedily as anyone getting out of work early. The shooting schedule, which indicates scene lengths in eighths of a page of script, tells them when they can go home. Incidentally, despite what you may have heard about formats for screenplays, the actual script sheets are simply typed on a word processor, with very little formatting.

And, eventually, as you get to the last eighth on the shooting schedule, your feet are aching from standing around, and you’re beginning to wonder if becoming an extra was such a good idea, the final scene of the day is shot, the work is done, and you all wait for the assistant director to call out the words you are now longing to hear.

"And that’s a wrap."

THE END

The Valletta Deal

What not to do on your holidays - short story with a mystery-thriller tinge

The taxi that dropped me off in the late afternoon sunlight at Malta International Airport at Luqa took just about the last of my Maltese money. Some places would still accept Sterling, after all these years, but with no greater preference than other European currencies. It was all a bit academic, seeing as I had no money in other currencies either, and, in any case I was leaving. The job that I’d flown out to Malta for had fallen through, I was broke, and all I wanted to do was get home. At least I had my return ticket. Resigned to being processed like a piece of cargo, I shuffled up to the departure desk and dropped my ticket on the counter. The flight attendant, in her prim, Air Malta uniform, flicked through it.

"Mr Bishop?" said the slightly accented voice.

"Yes?"

"This ticket is for the six o’clock flight to London Gatwick."

"Yes. That’s right."

"Oh-six-hundred hours. The flight was at 6 a.m. this morning."

I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t believe it. All the years I’d been travelling to various corners of the world, some of them loosely describable as flesh-pots, some of them not even loosely describable, and never once had I confused the 24 hour clock for normal, "What time do you make it?" and glance-at-your-watch time. I understood perfectly the difference between a.m. and p.m. and zero hours through to 23 hundred and fifty-nine hours and I had never got them mixed up. Until now. I had arrived expecting to catch a flight at 6 p.m. that had left twelve hours earlier at 6 a.m.

I could only put it down to exhaustion. Exhaustion and frustration. Frustration at having come all this way for a job, when I so desperately needed money, and the job had fallen through – if it had ever existed, and I had felt utterly at a loose end. Exhaustion, frustration, and bonehead stupidity.

The flight attendant evidently could read my thoughts from the expression on my face. "Don’t worry, Mr Bishop. Providing there is room, we can move your ticket to tomorrow morning. All you need to do is to find a place to stay for the night."

She consulted some kind of computer terminal, and, after some tapping of keys and fiddling with bits of paper, she printed me a fresh ticket. As she handed it to me, she said, with an encouraging smile, "Don’t forget – tomorrow morning."

I tried to smile back, but I felt like I’d just stepped out of a dentist’s with a face full of Novocaine. Where could I spend the night? I could not go back to my hotel in Valletta, the capital, as I had no money left, and the rows of airport bench seats looked like instruments of torture. I had just about enough money for one bottle of Hopleaf and that was it.

"Your name is Bishop, yes?" said a voice by my shoulder. A small, middle-aged man, with receding black greasy hair, was talking to me. "You are English?"

"That’s right."

"Good. I like English very much. I hear what happened. You go to England in the morning."

"Yes."

"You have no place to stay?"

"No."

"It will be my pleasure to offer you a place for the night. If you wish. I like English."

"I’m afraid," I could hardly talk, I was so embarrassed, "I’m afraid I have no money."

"It does not matter. I like English. My name is Camilleri. Come. You stay the night. Perhaps you can do some time something for me."

I wondered what he had in mind.

Mr Camilleri was a perfect host. He drove me in a blue Vauxhall Cavalier that seemed to have dusted embedded into its paintwork. We headed past Valletta to his flat in Sliema, on the northern side of the Grand Harbour opposite the city, where he got me a light meal of salad and fish, mercifully finished off with a bottle of Asbach Uralt brandy. He showed me to a small, clean room that had a bed made up ready and waiting as if he had been expecting me. Next morning, he woke me very early with some incredibly strong coffee, and some toast and marmalade. Then we set off back to the airport.

In some countries they drive on the left, in some on the right. In Malta, they drive in the shade. It was not yet five in the morning and a Mediterranean dawn was just preparing to launch itself into a riot of colour. With some light and little traffic, Mr Camilleri, with typical Maltese zeal, drove like a man possessed, even though there was plenty of time to spare.

He waited while I checked in, this time with no problems. I was so relieved to be going home, yet I had enjoyed my evening with this stranger. I was grateful but didn’t know how to thank him, and I said so.

Again, it was almost as if he had been ready for this moment. "You will be passing through London?"

"Of course?"

"Then I was wondering if you would be so kind as to drop off this postcard?" He pulled a small picture postcard from his inside pocket.

"Don’t you have a stamp?"

"The post!" he turned up his hands in a mild gesture of dismissal. "So slow. A small detour? You can do this for me? There is some money to cover your fares." He also handed me an envelope. Inside was a small collection of £20 notes.

I took the card. It was a picture of Valletta harbour. On the reverse was an address in Belgravia, in slightly shaky capitals. I could not read what was written on the correspondence side of the card, which appeared to be in Greek. It would mean a couple of Tube journeys, nothing more, a lot less than the cash. How could I refuse?

My flight was called and I said goodbye to Mr Camilleri. On the other side of the boarding pass gate were some shops. I bought some overhead projector marker pens. My only souvenir.

At Gatwick, I was diverted, as if by random, by a customs official as I went through Nothing To Declare. He went through my one bag nonchalantly yet thoroughly, as if following a practised routine. He found nothing – there was nothing to find – but he noticed the picture postcard of Valletta harbour. He studied both sides of it with more interest than I felt it warranted. "Forget to post this?" he said.

"I ran out of stamps. Guess I’ll just have to hand it over in person."

He seemed to read the back of the card. Then he lost interest and let me go.

In the toilets, with a damp tissue, I wiped off the English I had written in large print, with the water-soluble overhead marker that I had used to cover the original message. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t like the idea of carrying a message in a language I couldn’t understand. I took the card to the Belgravia address, handed it personally to a man who could have been Mr Camilleri’s younger cousin, and went home.



Mehmet Ertegun – known as "the banker" by those who had dealings with him – was delighted with the picture postcard. It told him just what he wanted to know, and that was the number of a safety deposit box that contained $500,000 in Kruger rands. He used his own method of communicating with his colleague that payment had been received and delivery of the merchandise could go ahead. Duly, thirty-four Kalashnikov AN-94 "Abakan" assault rifles, with a maximum fire rate of 1,800 rounds per minute, and 22,000 rounds of 5.45 calibre ammunition left Piraeus in Greece by ship for Marseilles. They had been moved from Russia, through Chechnya to Albania and on to Greece, and this was probably not the end of their travels.

No banking system in the world had handled any part of the financial transaction. No radio, telephone call, email, or telex had been transmitted that could be picked up at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. No mail intercept had taken place. The deal might never had existed.

Face-recognition software attached to the surveillance cameras at Malta International Airport had spotted Mr Camilleri, and soon had a host of other names for him. Mr Bishop’s face the software did not know. Still, MI6 put Bishop’s name and description on a watch-list at airports around the world.

The next time Mr Bishop showed up late for a flight on which he was booked, he would have a lot of explaining to do.

THE END.

Astronomy – The Greatest Show On Earth

Non-fiction popular science article about how literally pin-pricks of evidence have led us to learn about the entire Universe.

Every single night, over your head, over my head, over every single person’s head in the entire world, something utterly remarkable takes place. It will happen tonight, tomorrow night and every night for as far as we can imagine into the future, as it has done for as far as we can imagine into the past. Every night, it goes dark.

Now at first you may not think that this very much to get excited about. After all, nightfall is about as predictable as anything can get – as predictable as the dawn that will follow. And yet, it is in the minutiae of things, the details, the tiny, that, at first glance, seem so trivial, that so often lie the greatest wonder, the most amazing discovery and the most challenging concepts to face the human mind. In this particular instance, all I should need to do is ask you a simple question for you to see why. That question is, "Why does it go dark?" In attempting to answer that question, we are taken, in almost a single bound, from the mundane, the trivial, to the heart of some of the greatest of mysteries.

Let us add to this mystery, before even attempting to answer our simple question. If you are lucky – and it happens to everybody sooner or later – I ask you to trust me on this – the weather at night will be fine, and the sky, we say, is clear. But it is when the sky is what we call "clear" that it is anything but! The merest glance at a cloudless night sky reveals even to someone with eyesight as limited as mine, thousands of tiny pin-pricks of light. Tiny, twinkling and terrifically important. For they are the stars, the populace of the vast "everything-ness" we call The Universe. It’s the greatest show on Earth.

It is because of the fact that we live on a planet that is round, held to its surface by a force called gravity and that once in every twenty-four hours this planet turns its back on the closest star, the Sun, that it goes dark at night. But there is still more to this mystery. A lot more. For example, if the Universe is infinite, there should be a star in every direction that we look. But there is not. The gaps between the stars are dark. This leads, though a chain of reasoning, to the astonishing, astounding conclusion that the Universe had a beginning. It has had an evolution. We have yet to determine whether it will have an end. And as for what might come after that, well, your guess is quite literally as good as mine or anybody else’s.

For thousands of years – more probably, tens of thousands, our ancestors looked up at the night sky, and wondered – surely one of the most striking of human characteristics. That wonder hungered for explanation. What were the stars? How did they work? What held them together? Various mythologies were created to feed this hunger. Gods and familiars, creatures and creations, the scintillating ciphers that would seal our fates. Poetic, strange, beautiful and believable, but, sadly, fictional artefacts of man’s mind – not a verifiable explanation. For a hundred thousand generations perhaps, this was all we could tell of the stars. Now, suddenly, within a single generation, we have worked out most of it.

Most stars are vast aggregations of hydrogen gas – the stuff you put in party balloons to make them roll around the ceiling, instead of rolling around the floor. The tiny points are in fact staggeringly huge balls of fire – the average star would encircle both the Earth and the Moon that orbits it. Indeed, three quarters of The Universe is just hydrogen, most of the rest is called helium, which we will meet again in a moment, and everything else makes up just 2%. But it’s that 2% that makes us, amongst other things, and in turn makes the 2% so interesting. Again, it’s the little things that count.

The hydrogen gas is brought and held together by gravity – not the mightiest force in The Universe, but its feeblest – having one distinction from other forces such as magnetism – it is always only one way. To gravity, everything is down. It makes no exceptions. Unopposed, gravity’s effect accumulates from seemingly trivial to tremendous, until it has dominion over all. Gravity takes the lightest of gases, and crushes it till it glows with incandescence. And it doesn’t stop there. Once greedy gravity has squeezed every iota of energy from its prisoner, the very heart of the particles begin to fuse together to produce newer, heavier elements. It is only fitting that the first of these was found in, and named after, the Sun, the element helium, from the Greek word for the Sun, Helios.

Gravity knows no mercy. It continues to crush the elements together, releasing yet more energy. In doing so, each one gives out a characteristic signature of light. Those tiny pin-pricks in the sky - still pin-points even through the most powerful telescope, can have their light dissected, like a specimen on a slide, to reveal that signature and thus give away the star’s components, its age, its true brightness, hence its distance and a fair few other facts besides. Not bad for a pin-prick. Forensic science, hunting for the fingerprints of creation.

And so many of the chemical elements with which we are familiar on Earth were and are created – carbon – essential for all living chemistry, oxygen, phosphorus – a key part of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Not to mention water – the key to life, and alcohol, the key to a good night out. If you want to wake up with stars in your head, that is!

But then comes a twist in the story. Once a star is so crushed that it starts to create the humble element, iron, one of the first and most useful metals humans ever extracted from rocks, the process hits a brick wall and halts. Creating still heavier elements uses energy rather than releasing it. The alchemist’s dream, of turning base metal into gold, remains, for the moment, beyond reach. But not for long. Gravity knows no mercy. If a star can’t burn, it is crushed still further, like the stubbing out of a cigarette. The star abruptly collapses in on itself. Like anything crashing to the ground, this releases more energy – enough to convert iron to lead, lead into silver, platinum and gold, and gold into uranium and beyond. Then the star explodes, like a cross between a smelting factory and a junk yard, scattering its trash and treasures through the heavens.

Then, gravity, tireless gravity, slowly, irredeemably, irresistibly, begins to haul the stuff back together again. This insistence of harvesting matter creates new stars, and metallic-cored planets such as the Earth are formed. Planets with carbon dioxide and water, ammonia and methane, phosphates and sugars, the ingredients for life. And what does life lead to? Wonder.

The study of the stars – astronomy, as it is known – is, in a way, the study of everything. It is wonder put into practice. Where we came from, where we are going and above all where we are. We live in a Universe that may have had a divine creator, or it may be that it is the way it is because it could not be any other way. What you believe about who you are and why is really up to you. But the "how" and the "what" that makes us, our planet and our star, along with all the other stars, comes from our looking at the skies and making the logical deductions from our observations, from a forensic examination of the dark sky that makes CSI Miami look like bumbling guesswork!

This is wonder at work. And it all starts with looking at those little spots of light on a clear night.

It’s something to think about when it goes dark this evening. It’s the greatest show on Earth.

The End

A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare

Mysterious tales are, for some reason, usually set in the depths of winter. This one is different.

"What’s that star?" asked Lamienne.

"That’s not a star!" sneered Reece.

The Volvo estate negotiated a tight bend in the winding country road as it climbed the rugged hill, taking the bright point of light out of view of the two children in the back seat, for the moment. Several seconds passed before another bend revealed it again.

"Look," said Lamienne, "that’s a star!"

"It’s not a star," insisted Reece.

"What is it then?"

"It’s a planet," explained Reece triumphantly. "Girls know nothing."

Lamienne digested this information, or, rather, tried to. "Daddy?" she said at length, "what’s a planet?"

Donald looked through the window into the depthless bowl of the midsummer night. "That star’s called Venus." Lamienne’s father considered carefully before continuing. "A planet is a special kind of star."

"See," said Lamienne, "it is a star."

"It’s not a star, it’s a planet," insisted Reece.

Mary, in the passenger seat, turned to her husband at the wheel of the Volvo and said, quietly, "Nice try, Donald."

Their two children, Reece and Lamienne, continued to argue in the back. Reece was nearly two years older than his sister and this undoubtedly gave him an unfair advantage. However, Lamienne had enough determination to hold her ground, nevertheless. Donald decided to try again. "Not all stars are planets, but all planets are like stars."

There was silence from the back seat while each of the youngsters tried to determine who had won.

"So you’re both right," added Mary.

Before the children could dispute this, Donald continued, "That planet is called Venus, which is sometimes called the Evening Star."

"Because you only see it in the evening," said Mary.

"Except for when you see it in the morning," whispered Donald, for Mary’s benefit only.

Venus hung like a brilliant jewel in the blue-black sky of late evening. It was approaching the final week of June in what had been a glorious summer. The embers of the day still gave colour to the mantle of darkness overhead, though midnight was approaching. It looked like it might never go completely dark that night, as the Remington family’s car climbed the West Pennine moors towards their farmhouse home.

They had spent the day with family friends, the Caufields. The Caufields had just returned from a holiday in the Caribbean, to their home in Cannock, Staffordshire, while the Remington family were themselves returning from a vacation in Cornwall, all steep-cliffed harbours, fishing boats and all. Donald and Mary had known Susan and Geoff since before either couple had married, though the Caufields had had no children – at least not so far. In a way, in the meantime, it was as if the Caufields had almost adopted their friends’ children as their own. Reece and Lamienne enjoyed the trips to the Caufield household despite the long drive south. This particular visit – as was customary, and the first for some months – had been a relaxed and happy affair.

In fact, the four adults and two children had especially enjoyed themselves together, perhaps more than usual. So it was that a tired but cheerful family were approaching home and a welcome bed, feeling content and peaceful, after day full of pleasant memories.

How much that was about to change.

The family tumbled into the farmhouse, which seemed awoken by their sudden presence. Lights came on, decimating the shadows. Mary went into the kitchen, closely dogged by the children. The chance to move around again after the confines of the car had galvanised them, and Mary knew from long experience that the best way to get them to settle was to feed them. She took out a packet of Cheerios from a cupboard and filled two bowls, adding fresh milk that she had, planning strategically ahead, bought at the last convenience store they had passed. Then she went back to the hallway. Donald had taken all the cases out of the hatchback of the car and placed them on the paved flags before the front step. She picked two of the lighter bags – an overnight bag and her small valise – and took them upstairs. Along the banistered landing, past the bathroom and into the adults’ bedroom. She snapped on the light, and then stopped.

She looked round the room, as if expecting to see something out of place. But everything was just as it had been left a week earlier. Yet something was amiss. What was it? She took a step into the room, shrugging off the feeling, but stopped once more. What was it? The room seemed exactly as it should be, yet the feeling would not leave her.

She walked over to the bed, placing the bags upon it. Should she unpack now? It was late, but the journey had made her restless, and she knew it would be little while before she would be able to get her head down. And then there was… She listened carefully. Downstairs, sounding miles away, she could hear the children in the kitchen. At least they were not arguing. Through the open front door, she could also hear Donald, still attending to the car. She opened a bag, and debated with herself whether to put anything away in drawers or just tip everything into the laundry basket.

Something checked her again. This time, she noticed that there was a faint odour in the air, that reminded her of the sea. She sniffed the contents of the bag. "I bet there’ll be sand in everything," she said to herself, and took both bags over to the lidded laundry basket. She picked out a few items not for washing – bath bag, hair brush, shoes – and tipped the rest into the basket. She did not see whether there was anything else in the basket. As she turned, she suddenly realised what had held her before. The room was frigidly cold.

Automatically, she touched the radiator, although she knew it would not be on. "Donald, could you turn on the central heating?" She called. "Righto," she heard him answer, from far away. She picked up the two empty bags and went to place them in the top of a set of fitted cupboards. In order to open the cupboard, she had to close the bedroom door first. Reaching up, she pulled upwards on the handle. Normally it opened with a swish of the sliding support struts. It didn’t give. She pulled harder. Nothing happened. She gave the handle a firm twist and tug, and, at last, the cupboard door swung upwards, reluctantly.

She wondered what the matter had been with the door. She’d mention it to Donald in the morning. She gathered up the two bags, reached up, and slid them in to the cupboard. She felt very cold. She turned her back to the cupboards and wondered if there was something warm she could slip into while the heating came on.

The shock of one of the bags falling on her head was more sudden than painful. She tried to turn to catch the wretched thing as it tumbled onto her shoulders. The second bag caught her full in the face, making her cry out. The first bag, slipped though her hands to the floor. Another bag, not one she had just put away, then struck her on top of the head. This was heavy and hard, as if fully laden, and a corner seemed to catch her viciously. She stumbled under its weight.

It was then as if bag after bag was raining down on her. She heard the clink of glass, like bottles, and felt pain as something else hit her from above, and knocked her to the ground. She found herself shouting Donald’s name over and over, until one more impact was so severe she let out a scream.

"What is it?"

Donald was standing over her. She was slouched against the wall cupboards. "I’m sorry I took so long, but I couldn’t get the bedroom door open – I thought you’d locked it at first."

"I don’t know – all these – " she gestured around her. The valise and the overnight bag were all that lay on the floor by her side.

"Something… fell on me. From up there." She indicated the high cupboard that she still yawned open. Donald, somewhat taller than his wife, looked inside. "There’s nothing in there," he said.

He helped her to her feet. For a moment, she looked confused, trying to recollect what had just happened. The two empty bags still lay on the floor. There was little weight in either of them.

"I must be getting clumsy," she said. "Maybe I’m more tired than I realised."

Donald was still holding her arm. "Come downstairs and I’ll fix you something to drink. You’re trembling. Are you cold?" She didn’t answer as he led her out of the room on to the landing. Neither of them noticed the laundry basket.

It was on its side, the clothes spilled out over the floor, with a blackened pool of water spreading out slowly across the floorboards and soaking into the carpet.



"What happened, dear?" Donald asked as he led Mary down the stairs. He was beginning to appreciate that there was more that just tiredness from the journey, or a clumsy slip in the bedroom, when she didn’t answer him. "I tell you what," he joked, trying to raise her spirits and get a response from her, "we’d better get that washing machine going – those bags were smelling really high!."

Mary suddenly looked up into his face, but, for a moment, didn’t speak.

"I could really do with a hot drink," she said.

"Could you eat something too? It’s been a long journey."

"Very long."

Donald realised he was supporting most of her weight on his arm.

When they got to the kitchen, the children were still seated at the table, finishing the Cheerios. "You’d better not have had extra helpings," said Donald, as he helped Mary into a chair. He went over to the gas cooker, lit the grill. He looked inside the fridge for something he could cook quickly, such as bacon or sausages. There would probably be hamburgers in the freezer. He stuck his head in, and thought he heard a faint chiming noise. He looked round to see what it was, but couldn’t see anything. He was about to ask Mary had she heard anything, but, he could judge from her vaguely distracted air, she had not, and didn't speak, except to ask, "What do you fancy?" She didn’t answer. He closed the fridge, and walked over to her, putting his hands on each arm of the chair.

"Would you like a good, old-fashioned bacon sandwich? Mustard and ketchup, all the trimmings?"

She wasn’t looking at him. "Why did you open the kitchen window? It’s so cold in here."

"I didn’t." He looked round. The kitchen window wide open, latched on its fastener. Outside, the blue-black mid-summer night was turned to complete darkness by the contrast of the house lights. Donald looked at the children, but chose not to say anything. They had probably been looking for stars again.

He picked up the electric kettle and crossed to the sink below the window, and filled it. He returned to the power cable, plugged it in, switched it on, confirmed by the glow of a small red light on the top of the handle. He crossed back to window. For a fleeting moment, he thought he saw movement outside. Could be a fox, he thought, though they seldom came this far up the hillside away from the cover of the trees. He reached over the sink to the window latch.

There was a rush of air and a deep, baffled flapping sound, that made him jump back. A large, black bird, like a crow or raven, had settled on the window ledge. The creatures feathers seemed dark, even against the night background, its feathers shone with an iridescent oily sheen, blocking his way to the window latch. It’s beak was a pale yellow, as long as and thicker than his thumb, curving down like a scimitar to vicious-looking point. The one eye turned towards him, looking him up and down, as if giving a silent message of warning.

Donald laughed at himself for being so startled. He recovered the involuntary step back he had made, and shooed the bird away from the window. It shuffled from side to side but did not fly away. Donald looked round at Mary, and gave an embarrassed smile. "It’s quite beautiful," he said. "Don’t you think?"

"Get rid of it," said Mary.

He waved his arms at the bird, It did not react, but continued to stare at him.

"Beautiful plumage. That black sheen. You can almost see rainbows in it. Like oil on water."

At the word, "Water," the bird gave a cry and hopped, in an ungainly fashion, on to the draining board, narrowly missing sliding on the on the grip-less stainless steel into the sink. It’s wing stuck out awkwardly, like it was broken. The bird cried out again, as if in pain, and attempted to negotiated its way across the draining board to the adjoining work surface.

"Don’t let it in here!," said Mary.

Donald tried first of all to block the bird’s progress, then to gather it up in its arms. But it seemed in pain and avoided his grasp. It let out another cry.

"I – I can’t get hold of it, " said David.

"Get rid of it!"

"Daddy, make it go away, said Lamienne. The two children bracketed Mary.

Donald turned to face them, and as he was distracted, the bird leapt into the air landed awkwardly on the table, scattering cutlery and knocking over the milk jug, the liquid, blue-white, dripping on the stone floor. The creature sprawled in a disarray of black, like a dishevelled shroud, in the centre of the table, and struggled to stand upright. It took a sudden lurch towards the mother and her two children.

Lamienne screamed.

Donald rushed around the table to put himself between the children and the bird. He had his arms outstretched as if to guard them.

Behind him, the bird suddenly took off from the table and flew smoothly out of the window into the night.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Them Mary said, "It must have been shamming."

"I’ve never known a crow – or any member of the crow family – do something like that, Donald said. "I thought it was just skylarks or something, to lead you away from their nests."

"Shut the window."

"Let’s go to bed. We can clean this up in the morning."

"No," insisted Mary, "do it now. Children, go up to bed."

Donald gathered the pieces of broken crockery and Mary tidied away the other remnants of supper. On the table he found a black feather. He picked it up and looked at it, unsure what to do with it, and failing to notice the speck of blood where it had lain on the table cloth. Just as he was trying to decide what to do with it, he heard both the children, upstairs, scream.

Mary and Donald were out of the kitchen in a s hot. Sprinting up the stairs, Donald able to move faster but Mary blocking his way. Across the landing. To the children’s’ room that they shared. They burst in.

The two children had clearly barely entered the room themselves. The room was brightly lit, almost dazzling against the midsummer night beyond the window. Buzzing dully, drifting lazily as if stupefied by the heat of the just-gone day, crawling over every surface and hanging in slowly swirling clouds, were flies. Huge great bluebottles. Everywhere.

Donald slowly crossed the room. The very air was full of the low, erratic buzzing of the black, docile blobs. It was as if they had all gathered for something that the humans’ arrival had interrupted.

He got to the window and opened it. He tried sweeping the flies towards it with his arms, to no effect. He retrieved a towel, and attempted to waft the fizzing clouds. But the flies had no idea what he was trying to do, they settled on the walls and basked as if in the warmth of evening sunshine.

"Well, there’s no way your sleeping in here tonight," said Donald in his good news tone of voice. "You can come and sleep with us."

"Oh, can we?" said Reece.

"What about the flies?" said Lamienne, cross.

"We’ll get rid of them in the morning," said Mary. "Now, come along. I think it’s time for bed. For all of us."

Donald put out the light and closed the children’s bedroom door.



Donald led the way to their room while Mary, her hands around the shoulders, shepherded them up the landing. Donald open the bedroom door and switched on the light.

"Poo!" said Reece, "what’s that smell?"

It might have been more correctly described as several, pungent, unpleasant smells mixed together. There was a recognisable smell they had met on their holiday in Cornwall, before their trip had taken them to their friends in the Midlands. It was the kind of tide-gone-out, rotting seaweed, with dead fish and a hint of sewage smell, which had been their least endearing memory of an otherwise enchanting holiday. The dead fish smell was amplified by a more gruesome, distressing stench of putrefaction, as if something larger had somehow crawled into the room and died. Incongruously, with all that, was something that had a kind of solvent base to it, artificial, oily, but equally stomach-turning – especially if one were prone to travel-sickness.

"It’s like Daddy when he spilt petrol at the petrol station," said Lamienne.

Donald walked slowly into the room. "No, it’s not petrol, it’s more like – " but at this point his voice trailed off, as he could not think quite what it was like. He noticed something else. As he moved across the room, the mixture of stink seemed to move through its own kind of spectrum of vileness, first this odour was predominant, then that. His first reaction was to look towards the bedroom window, in case the stench was drifting in from outside. But all the windows were firmly closed.

Mary had squeezed gently past the children, and was moving slowly around the bed. "Donald," she said, "You said, something like petrol?"

"Yes,"

"Well, I can smell something more like burning."

He rushed over to her, putting his hands on her arms, and sniffed. "Are you sure? Is something burning?"

Mary concentrated, then clamped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, Donald," she cried through her fingers, "it’s like burning hair!"

Donald moved round the room. As vile as the smell was, it was elusive, stronger here, almost absent there, and ever-changing. Mary moved also. Suddenly, she let out a stifled scream, staring at her feet.

"What is it?" Donald was at her side in a second. He looked down. There was the upended laundry basket, the ghastly stain on the carpet. He pressed down tentatively with a toe. Moisture oozed out.

Donald felt a slow anger build within him. It fed on an inconsequential train of thoughts. They had just been on a lovely holiday. They had just spent a wonderfully happy day with their best friends. Now they had returned to their home, his wife and children and himself, a place they had once longed for, planned for, finally achieving – Mary and Donald had even joked about it as their dream house – where they had raised their children and always been so content together. Now, they had returned to the place, and it was as if they were under some kind of attack, something which wanted to undermine them, threaten them, destroy their piece of mind forever, such that, wherever they might go afterwards, they would seek for it, in vain.

Donald snatched up the laundry basket and its foul contents, and stormed over to the window. Wrestling with the catch with fumbling fingers, he finally threw open the window and hurled the offensive bundle into the night. He stopped, and sniffed.

Cool fresh air from the midsummer night gently flooded into the room. It dispersed the foetid atmosphere of the enclosed space, like a subtle fragrant scent. Stepping closer to the window, Donald looked out to the northern horizon. The day just gone, June 21st, the day just about to come, June 22nd, with the shortest night in between, had seemed overrun with disturbing – distressing – events like a multiple pile-up on a motorway. On a clear night such as this, in midsummer, it never went completely dark. The sky due north was the deepest indigo, but it was not the impenetrable blackness of a winter’s evening. The sun lay tantalisingly close below the northern horizon – 900 miles further north it would not have set at all. In just a couple of hours the sky to the north-east would begin to brighten, heralding the onset of the new day, the dawn at last on its way. Donald longed for the daylight, where nothing more could clothe itself in shadow.

The air in the room improved steadily with the little eddies and drafts from the outside. Mary told the children to take off their shoes and outer clothes and get into their parents’ bed, while she and Donald did the same, lying down beneath the quilt with the children between them. Mary put out the bedside light, sinking the room into blackness. Darkness in the countryside is a shock to people used to town night-time. There is not street-lamp, no headlight, no reflected glare from another window – just no light at all. At first, they could see nothing, but as their eyes accommodated, the slight iridescence from outside silhouetted the window. But that was all. Soon, however, dawn would start to steal its way across the hills behind the farmhouse, like an ill-behaved youngster hoping to sneak back home late from a first date without being detected.

It was cool but not unpleasant with the window open, and they gained warmth from each other. The discomfort of clothing in bed receded, and they began to doze.

"Lamienne?" The whispered voice was close to her ear.

"Yes, Daddy?"

"Speak very quietly. Is your brother asleep?"

"No, Daddy." His hoarse reply suggested he was just about to drop off.

"Listen to Mummy and Daddy."

"Yes, Mummy."

"Mummy and Daddy are going to get up now."

"Where are you going?"

"Lamienne, you know that Daddy loves you very much, don’t you?"

"And, Reece, you know Mummy loves you very much also?"

"Yes."

"And you love us don’t you?"

"Yes, Mummy," said Reece.

"And we’re always going to be very happy together."

"But where are you going?"

"We’ve got to get up and go, and you’re to come with us."

"OK, Mummy."

"Where are we going?" asked Lamienne.

"We’ve just got to go down stairs. Alright? But we can’t put on the light. OK?"

"OK. But how are we going to know where we are going if we can’t see?"

"Sh! Quietly! Just hold hands, then hold on to Mummy-and-Daddy’s hands. OK?"

"OK"

"Lamienne, give me your hand."

"I can’t find it."

"Here it is."

"And, Reece, you give Mummy your hand."

"Yes, Mummy."

"Are you holding each other’s hands?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"Now, we want you to push back the quilt, and stand up. And you must be as quiet as little mice. OK?"

"Yes, Mummy."

"Then stand up, and we’ll lead you to the door."

"How can you see the way to the door?"

There was a pause. "Just hold Daddy’s hand tightly. I can see clearly."

"But how can you see?" insisted Reece.

"Just hold Mummy-and-Daddy’s hands very tightly."

"Daddy, you’re –" Lamienne began.

"Quiet!"

"Daddy, you’re hurting my hand."

"Mummy! Mine too!" Reece’s voice rose to more than a whisper. "Mummy!"

"What is it? What’s the matter?, said Mary, snapping on the bedside light. She was heaving herself upright in the bed, looking drowsy. Donald, next to her on his side, opened an eye.

The two children were beneath the quilt. They, and it, were on the floor, leaning against the wall, a few inches from the open doorway, – far from the two adults who lay, uncovered, in the bed, on the other side of the room about twelve feet away.

The children sat frozen together clutching each other’s hand. "What’s the matter?" said Mary. "What an Earth are you doing over there?"

An Earth-shattering thump shook the house.

The children screamed and fled across the bed to their parents. Donald and Mary grabbed them, uncomprehending, as another thump shook the house as if a giant footfall had landed on the ground outside. The window was still open, outside still dark. The impact had not come from beyond the window. It was inside the house.

"What the Devil’s that?" said Donald, hugging Lamienne to his chest. He realised his own heart was pounding in his ears, confusing him. Lamienne was speechless, terrified. Mary, too, could not speak. She was staring out through the open bedroom door to the darkness of the rest of the house. Reece clung to her, his arms coiled around her shoulders.

"Could it be… could it be an earthquake?" said Mary at length.

As if to answer her, another terrific impact shook the house. The door swung slightly on its hinges. Floorboards in the landing gave a creak. A little inverse fountain of dust strayed from the ceiling.

"That was like something…" Mary trailed off, not wishing to complete the sentence. "Something downstairs."

"I know," said Donald. "Reece, Lamienne, what were you doing out of bed?"

"Somebody was talking with us," said Reece.

"Talking with you? Who?"

"I don’t know," said Reece, close to tears.

"We thought it was you," said Lamienne.

Donald listened for a moment. There was nothing about the sound he could recognise. Except for the certainty that it was from within the house itself. "What did the person talking to you say?"

"It was both of you," said Reece.

"You were asking us to go downstairs."

There was a shattering impact, greater than the others, that made the bed shake. The terrified occupants hung on closer to each other. A wardrobe door swung slowly open.

"Downstairs?" There was another large "wump," as if in answer. "There’s something downstairs?"

Wump.

"I’m going to have a look," said Donald. He sprang out of bed.

"You can’t leave us here," said Mary.

"No," Donald considered. "Follow me. Stay close, but keep behind me."

Mary kept the children in front of her with guarding hands. Donald went first, and put on the landing light. He looked down the stairwell but saw only the hallway furniture. "Come on."

He crept down the stairs and turned on the hallway light. Nothing was out of place. Ahead of him, in the direction of the kitchen, he could make out dull, thumping sounds, almost like a boat banging along a jetty. He moved towards the closed kitchen door. When he was close enough, he flung open the door and snatched at the light switch.

The kitchen, too, seemed perfectly in order. The cereal bowls were still on the table where the children had left them.

There was another thump.

Donald’s eyes scanned the kitchen. The sound had come in the direction of the door, beneath the stairs, that lead to the cellar. There were more nondescript bumps and bangs, nothing compared to the great impact of a few moments earlier. Donald was certain the noise was coming from behind the cellar door.

"Follow me."

Donald moved across the kitchen and collected off a hook a large brass poker they sometimes used with the Aga stove. Then he moved over to the cellar door. There were creaking and scraping sounds coming from the other side, but nothing more. He reached out for the handle. "Are you ready?" Mary looked as if she would rather have done anything than find out what was beyond the door, but at the same time she knew she must. She nodded, holding the children more tightly to her.

In a swift grab, Donald threw open the door and reached for the light switch. The light came on, nothing happened, and he felt foolish with the poker held in mid-air. He threw it on the kitchen floor.

Only it was not quite nothing. The sounds had stopped. Donald looked down the stone steps into the cellar. They used it as a utility room, a chest-freezer and tumble-drier were down there. Toys that had fallen from favour. Tools, paints, an assortment of home-made pickles – even some better wines they had bought – usually abroad. The single, naked light-bulb seemed to struggle to drive away the shadows. Donald scanned the expanse of the cellar as far as he could see it from the top of the steps. Corners were elusive in gloom. Nothing, again, seemed out of place in the cellar. Donald stared. There was something wrong. What was it?

"Mary?"

Mary was just inside the doorway, with the children still close in front of her. "What is it?"

"Nothing – I just – … Pass me the torch, will you?"

There was a large, durable, rubber-coated torch hung from a hook by the back door. She would have to cross the kitchen to fetch it. "What is it?"

"Just get the torch."

She didn’t like to leave the children, but they were stood at the top of the steps, close to Donald. She fetched the torch, reached forward and gave it to him.

"What’s the matter?"

"I can’t see… I can’t see the floor of the cellar." He took the torch from her, flicked on its heavy duty beam, and aimed it downwards. "That’s funny. I still can’t see – "

He was cut off by the abrupt failure of both the kitchen and cellar lights, and by the cellar door slamming shut. In doing so, it knocked Mary sideways and sprawling across the dark floor of the kitchen, and trapped Reece and Lamienne on the top of the cellar steps with their father. Startled, he attempted to turn, but lost his footing. The torch careered crazily from his grasp, stabbing light into their eyes before falling through the air. Donald found himself grabbing for the torch and plunging headlong from the steps and falling into empty space.

Instead of the bone-shattering crunch of hitting the cellar floor, he was plunged into icy cold water.

Choking and spluttering, he surfaced to the sound of both Reece and Lamienne screaming in the stygian dark. He could feel no ground beneath his feet, and the water was salt. He thrashed to steady himself. The screams of the children were above him and away to his right. The nerve-tingling thrill of shock echoed through him.

"Don’t worry. Daddy coming."

He struck out in a crude dog-paddle towards where he imagined the steps should be. But where was all this water from? The children’s screaming was joined by another noise. It was Mary, calling desperately through the closed door, scrabbling to get it to open. But she could not.

Another stroke, and he barked his knuckles on stone. The steps. He kicked and got both hands on to a step, and started to heave himself out of the water.

He felt arms reach out to him.

"Lamienne, Reece, stay back. You may fall in."

But it was not a child’s hand that now grabbed his face.

"Give us the children," a voice hissed. It was not Lamienne or Reece. "Give us the children."

"No!" he yelled. The hand’s grip was brutal, as it pushed his face beneath the water and held him there. Water flooded into his gagging throat and on into his lungs. He kicked and struggled, but the vice-like grip was unyielding. Suddenly, the hand in the darkness plucked him by his face above the water.

"Give us the children!" The voice was more insistent now.

"Give us the children," said another voice. Inconsequentially, there was something familiar about the voices.

Donald spluttered and choked for a moment before he could answer. "No!"

The hand pressed him down beneath the icy water once more. This time he had just managed to grab a breath before the liquid poured into his nostrils. He almost waited for the hand to let him up. But it did not. Held in total darkness, beneath water, he felt resistance ebbing from him. The desire to suck in a breath was becoming overwhelming. He knew that if he attempted that breath, it would be his last as his lungs filled with water. Just when he thought he could endure no more, the hand, gouging its fingers into his cheeks, pulled his face from the water.

"Give us the children, and we will let you live!"

It was several seconds before he could muster the breath for a response. He could hear the children sobbing, sounds from the door, all amplified in the darkness.

"You can," he gasped, "never have the children. They’re our life! Take me, if you want a life."

The hand opened and let him drop back into the water. He heard, or thought he heard, one of the voices saying, "We wanted a life, a life with children."

He felt the last of his strength had gone as he slipped beneath the water for the final time.

Suddenly, the door above him opened. Mary stood at the top of the steps. She was holding the big Maglite, that they carried in the Volvo for emergencies, in one hand, and the poker, which she’d used to prise open the cellar door, in the other. The children were on the steps, distressed and tearful. Donald lay, spread-eagled, on the bone-dry cellar floor.

Scrambling, stumbling, toes stubbing, elbows banging into unseen walls, the family, grabbing handfuls of each other’s clothing, fled up the stairs and along the darkened landing to the main bedroom. Donald pushed past Mary, halting their path, and scanned the bedroom with the Maglite. There were no flies, no odours, no voices, just the bedroom with the large bed against the far wall and the quilt on the floor at its foot. He shoved the group into the room, wedged a chair behind the door – the old-fashioned lock no longer had a key – and they flung themselves on the bed. Donald threw the quilt over them. The bedside digital lamp had failed in the loss of power, but the luminous dial on his watch showed 1:38. He went over to the window and looked desperately to the north-eastern hills. Sunrise would not be till 4:35 and then there was the height of the hills to climb above, but there should be pre-dawn twilight at least an hour before that. He estimated that the sky would start to lighten by three. God grant that it were sooner.

He climbed quickly into bed and drew the quilt around them, with the Maglite, still on, resting on the quilt, between his knees.

"Everyone hold tightly to each other. We mustn’t go to sleep. Everyone understand?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"Yes, Daddy."

"We will stay awake till morning. We’ll tell each other stories to keep awake."

"Yes, Daddy."

"Right. Well," Donald managed to suppress the urgency that had built in his voice. "What shall we talk about?"

"I don’t know," said Mary. "What we did on our holidays?"

"Good idea. What did we do, children?"

"I don’t remember, Daddy," said Lamienne.

"Well – what about what we did today?"

"What day is it today?" said Mary.

"It’s going to be Friday. Friday the 22nd. When the sun comes up. Technically, it’s Friday now. Remember, we said we would come back from Cornwall a day early so that we could see the Caufields? They were flying back from the Caribbean the previous night."

"That’s right," said Mary. "So by today, you really mean ‘yesterday.’ Thursday."

"Yes," said Donald. "What did we do all day, children?"

"We spent the day with Auntie Susan and Uncle Geoff."

"They’d just got back from their holidays too," said Reece.

"They had been to – what’s that word?" said Lamienne.

"The Caribbean. They had just flown back from the Caribbean."

Donald thought about the night flight the Caufields had been on. Flying eastward, towards the heart of the sunrise, the night was very brief. He had experienced a similar thing himself.

"Can we go to the Caribbean for a holiday?"

"Maybe next year."

"Maybe we could live there."

Mary looked at Donald in the darkness. "Perhaps moving wouldn’t be such a bad idea," she said.

The children chatted on, hesitantly at first, with only the reflected glow of the Maglite showing their faces. Eventually, they talked more freely, as Donald and Mary kept reminding them of events through the day in Staffordshire. Inevitably, though, they begin to tire as the minutes dawdled past. The Maglite appeared to be dimming. Donald wondered how much battery power was left in the lamp. Then he began to realise that it was not just the lamp growing weaker, but that the hue of the sky outside the window was changing. An uncountable number of indescribable shades of blue quietly displayed themselves at the window, before yielding to lilacs and pinks.

"Daybreak," he said, as if planting a flag on a hard-won battle-ground. Mary and the children were silent. Without realising it, he too drifted off into sleep.

He was awoken by the sound of someone whistling. Brilliant sunlight dazzled through the window, and the hillsides glowed with a day in full glory. The digital clock was back on, flashing. This meant that the power-cut was over, but that clock would need resetting with the time and the date. Without power, its electronic memory wouldn’t work. It was a nuisance resetting it, Donald thought to himself. Outside, the whistling approached. The paperboy, who had a long climb on his bike to deliver to the farmhouse, often announced his triumphal ascent with a whistle.

Donald got up, leaving the family undisturbed, and went downstairs. Opening the door, the day burst in, hurting his eyes. He was just in time great the paperboy.

"Hello, Tom."

"Morning, Mr Remington. Am I glad you’re here. We couldn’t remember at the shop if you were due back today or tomorrow. I’d’ve been mad if I’d had to cycle all this way for nothing. Here’s your paper."

Donald took the paper and looked at it, only half-noticing its headlines at first. "Just a minute, Tom."

"What’s the matter?"

"This is yesterday’s paper."

"You sure?"

"There it is, look. Thursday June 21st."

"But it is Thursday. That’s why we were unsure. We thought Thursday was an odd day to be coming back. Then I remembered Mrs Remington saying you’d be back a day early for something."

"Yes, but that was in order for us – " he broke off, distracted by a story on the front page of the paper. The headline told of a plane crash. The plane had ditched in the Irish Sea.

"Something wrong?"

The plane had developed severe engine trouble and the pilot had decided to ditch rather than risk coming down over land. Emergency services had reached the aircraft within minutes. The overnight flight had been from the Caribbean.

"No. I – I don’t think…"

It had been a miracle that so many of the passengers and crew had been rescued, the story went on. The only fatalities had been a couple, trapped inside the aircraft when it sank, who were believed to have come from Cannock, Staffordshire.

They were named as a Mr and Mrs G Caufield.

"Well, whatever it was, I don’t get paid till Friday, so today is definitely Thursday," said Tom, and rode off.

The End