Nicky J Poole

For Cats' Sake

2010-11-11T17:44:00.002Z

FREE CAT CALENDAR 2011 TO DOWNLOAD! PDF OR WORD DOC:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4692947/2011%20A%20Calendar.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4692947/2011%20A%20Calendar.doc

Happy New Year everybody!

Info on GSOH and The Moon Can't Wait

2010-03-21T12:08:00.002Z

The Moon Can't Wait ISBN 978-1-4452-4557-7 (Nicky J Poole)
GSOH ISBN 978-1-4092-0671-2 (Nicky J Poole)
Both available from Lulu.Com

Bilder an einer Ausstellung

2010-02-19T22:30:00.000Z

“Oh, I like to look at your picture, it reminds me of when I had a chance.”

The words of the song run through my head every night as I settle down to sleep. And I stare at your photo on the night-stand. Perhaps not the best time to have an image of you in my mind. It’s not as if I’m likely to forget your face.

I’m certainly not likely to forget the day you told me about Ronald. Your Ron. You and I had been dating just a little while, just long enough for me to feel we were getting into a routine, that this was something that was long-term, that we were “an item.” I remember all of it, the first meeting, the first date, the first cheliceral kiss. Just as I was getting used to you, you told me that you needed to see “other people.” Other people turned out to be just one person in particular, this Ron character. It took you a little time to come out with the truth. That you were seeing someone else. You’d been “a keeper,” yet somehow I had not kept you. Another lyric comes to mind: “All I’ve got is a photograph of you.”

Did you mean to be so cruel?

I try to distract myself. I know I’ve got to move on. So I put on headphones and flick through my laptop’s collection of music. Best to avoid pop songs, they so often tend to have lyrics about losing someone, wanting them back, remembering. I play safe by going for classical music. No lyrics there. By chance, I select Modest Mussorgsky – Bilder an einer Ausstellung. “Pictures at an Exhibition,” with its lopsided meter and varying time. I’m asleep before I realise the irony.

But what a charmed sleep I have. We’re back together again. We’re laughing and joking, enjoying each other and there’s no Ronald. He’s written out of the pages of my fantasy. It’s just you and me. For a while at least.

Then, as night-time hours pass, a cloud creeps into my imagination. There he is, there’s Ronald.

It’s like a piece of cinema film being run in a loop through the projector. Frame by frame, I see our time together replayed – the happy part then the sadness, the coming of the depressive epoch of Ronald. But I don’t have to sit through this. I can walk out, like walking out of a movie theatre.

“I’ve had enough of this,” I say. “This is my dream and I am leaving.”

You look hurt, shocked. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, your dream?”

“This is my dream and I am going to wake up.” I rouse and I am gone from the dream-gone-bad and I’m lying awake shaking and sweating and feeling pallid in the dark as I snap on the bedside lamp and see the accusing witness of the alarm clock declaring the smallness of the hour. And, of course, your picture.

Why have I not the wit to remove it? I doze restlessly till morning and it – you – are still there.

The next night is the same. I slip into slumber as a submarine would slip beneath the surface of the ocean, into unconsciousness. The song words, “Dreams of you all through my head,” by Led Zeppelin play over and over like a mantra as theta rhythms take over my brain.

Then it is as if I have come through a tunnel and I am awake once more in the dream of being with you, as we first were. All is happiness, all is fine until, again, suddenly the idyll twists out of shape and Ronald looms.
“This is only a dream,” I tell you, “and I am waking up.”

“What dream, darling? What do you mean?” you ask, dismayed. But I have made my escape and lie awake in the darkness once more. Another night disturbed, reliving pleasure followed by heartache. Morning finds me weary, un-refreshed. Still not able to move on.

And still I do not remove your picture from my bedside. A third night draws on. I will take control, I will dream of us together and that’s how it will be, and Ronald will not appear to corrode the reliving of the dead relationship.

And it all seems to work. At first. We are happier together than ever. All my life should be like this. All my life a dream with you, captured like a postcard, freeze-frame.

Then Ronald appears. I cannot believe it. Surely you can command the imaginings in your own head. I turn on you angrily and swear. “I am going to wake up now, and destroy your photo that has haunted me from my bedside, and I will leave this lost dream and I will move on!”

“Oh no,” you contradict. “You are not going to move on. You are not going to wake up from your dream, because this is not your dream. This is my dream that you are in.”

Did you mean to be so cruel?

“You are in my dream,” you say, “where I am happy and you are not. And you are trapped in it forever.”

THE END

How My Father Saved The World

2009-09-03T20:46:00.002+01:00

Today, as we remember the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, I can exclusively reveal a little-known fact. Not only did my father fight in the World War, he started it. And I can prove it. Well, almost.

Arthur was raised by Methodist parents in the rural fens of East Anglia. Many of his other relatives worked the land. I’d say they were farmers, but I’m not sure any of them actually owned any farms – in fact I’m not sure they owned anything, they were so poor – but they did do some farming. He left school at the age of fourteen to deliver milk, 14 hours a day from a ten gallon churn, something I would blanche at even now. Not surprisingly, he must have wondered whether there was a better life. He had one abiding interest – football. His parents’ best offer was that he become a Methodist minister.

He was talent-scouted and offered a contract with Peterborough United, then, as now, known as The Posh. The scout duly went to Arthur’s house to obtain his parents’ agreement. My grandfather literally chased him off the premises. Not only did he regard alcohol as a sin, along with sex, stealing and murder, he evidently thought football was the Devil’s handiwork too. My father was denied the opportunity of playing the game he loved, and for money too. Imagine that, today. Some parents probably would sell their children to a football club.

A few weeks later, World War II broke out. Coincidence? I think not. Two days after that, he enlisted.

That this son of the soil, when answering the call to arms, chose the Royal Navy, bearing in mind few duties took battleships into the heart of East Anglia, surely confirms it – he had planned all this to get as far away from his kin as possible.

He was assigned to HMS Dainty and ended up in the Med. The ship’s company, officers excepted, were designated "HX," which meant service, "for the duration of hostilities plus six months." My father later found out that the crew were almost entirely orphans – no family of any kind. They never received letters from home, they never sent letters – indeed some of them could barely read or write. Even at Christmas, they had no parcels or gifts. I bet my father felt he fitted right in. They must have been a tight-knit group.

Less than two years in, the Dainty was hit by a 1,000 pound bomb and sunk in Tobruk harbour.
Earlier on, they called in at Malta, where, to my father’s amazement, left-overs from the ship’s mess were sold as food to the locals. It’s not they were inescapably poor, it’s just that they gave all their money to the Church, who in turn used it buy gold statues for the places of worship. I think my father’s view of religion must have become even more jaundiced at that point.
I once asked him if he was terrified at the state the world was in at the time and what the future threatened. He said, "No, no. It was all great fun, really exciting. I was in charge of the ship’s launch, taking things ship-to-shore and back. I was seeing parts of the world I barely knew existed." It can’t all have been fun though. Not all of his friends came back. But I can see how a lot of it was.

The highlight of every day was the rum ration, served at seven bells, or eleven in the morning to you and me. This was 50% alcohol watered down two to one, which still makes it a heck of sight stronger than a Bacardi Breezer. Perhaps this is where the expression, "to knock seven bells out of someone," comes from. His poor dad must have been spinning in his pulpit. As if this was not enough, there was shore leave and, on one particular occasion, the following occurred. A rating, climbing back on board from a night ashore, inexplicably slipped and cut his head open. The ship’s surgeon was summoned, a new man, unversed in the ways of sailors, who brought his medical kit with all its contingency items to put a bandage around the skull of the injured crewman. When the medical officer went to retrieve his bag, a large bottle of surgical spirit had vanished. He daren’t say anything as he would have been in as much trouble as whoever had appropriated it.

What does surprise me is that not only were this semi-soused lot allowed near guns, and by that I mean artillery, they were actually got to fire them at things from time to time. And on one occasion, they managed to hit a submarine, which had unwisely taken a sojourn on the surface. Fortunately, the Uebi Scebelli was Italian, and on the other team. This was the 29th June, 1940, and is where my father’s world-saving activities really began.

As my dad watched the damaged submarine before it was scuttled, he noticed that something in a small case, about the size of a portable typewriter, was concealed in a kit-bag and brought on board the Dainty in some secrecy. It later transpired that this was a copy of Enigma, the Nazi coding machine used by all the Axis forces. Being able to break secret messages so that you always know what your enemy is about to do is a tremendous advantage to you and is one very significant reason The Allies eventually won the war.

My father therefore feels, with some pride, that he played a pivotal part in this victory over the evil of fascism. I haven’t the heart to tell him that the British already had copies of the Enigma machine from even before the war. The Polish Cipher Bureau, which for years had been monitoring German radio traffic, had deduced from scratch how the Enigma was built and had made their own copies. It was capturing copies of the code-books which gave the daily settings for all Enigmas that mattered most after that. When Poland was threatened with invasion, in August 1939, they sent a copy of the machine to London for the British to use. Code-breaking was carried out at Bletchley Park throughout the war and was indeed instrumental in assuring victory, especially during Operation Overlord, the liberation of western Europe.

But my father was not to know that. He played his part on the chessboard of history as much as anybody. What he did was important and, under slightly different circumstances, could have been monumental.

So when you see all around you as in a mess, don’t think there is nothing you can do. Some action of yours might just help save the world.

After all, my dad did.

The End

Going Back (The Moon Can’t Wait)

2009-07-20T13:46:00.004+01:00

Friday 1200 Zulu

“We’ve lost contact with South Pole Base.”

This was big news. I could only speculate why Mission Director Lavrov was telling me first – if I was the first.
“Who’s this ‘we’?”

“Both us and Mission Control on Earth. All radio and data contact, telemetry, complete works became silent at 0900 Zulu, Friday.”

“The Sat links?”

“Both Sat links to us and direct feeds to Earth. Whole show went off at once. No warning, no prior emergency, nothing. Just like somebody pulled plug on entire base.”

“What does Mission Control say?”

“Somebody’s got to get ass down there and find out what’s happened.” I don’t know why, but I always find it amusing when Russians try to use American slang. Especially when agitated. “Assuming worst, till we know better.”

“When do we go?”

“We can’t prep a sub-orbital flight in under four weeks – ”

“Four weeks?” I was surprised. “Why the delay?”

“The Selena is undergoing routine overhaul and maintenance. Right now she’s lying around in Engineering Bay in about three thousand pieces.”

“Why is the car always in the shop just when you need it?” I said. Perhaps my levity was out of place. Certainly, Lavrov scowled at me.

“So we are sending team in one of the Marathons,” he added, somehow coping with his bad mood – at least he was regaining his fluency in English – “along with trailer carrying supplies for every kind of eventuality. That’s another reason for going by lunar surface route – bigger load.”

“But the surface trip from here to South Base is over five thousand kilometres – and that’s not counting the detours around craters. Especially as you get nearer – it’s, what? –– like a thousand kilometres of Himalayas.”

“It’s been done before – and that was before rougher sections were bulldozed to make causeways and cuttings,” said Lavrov. “About the same as crossing the Sahara, end to end.” His expression had not improved any, so it still didn’t sound like some kind of picnic he was suggesting. “You can average 40 kilometres an hour which means 140 hours to get there – about six Earth days. Which is just as well as it’s only seven Earth days till Lunar night on the Earth side.”

“So who’s going on this jolly jaunt?” I asked. It was a safe bet I already knew one person who would be going. John Patterson. Me.

“Jim Sellars, Dr Li, Françoise Lagrange from medical and Ajali Ndege. Then there are two newcomers. Dr Ahmed Zubaydi and his assistant, Ibrahim Rashid.”

Newcomers indeed – I recognised their names from a recent passenger manifest, but knew nothing else.

“Who are they?”

“They came in on the last trip from South Base before the Selena went for her overhaul.”

“What are their specialities?”

“Apart from having visited South Base and seen how it was just days ago?” Lavrov picked up and glanced at a slim folder for several seconds like he had never read it before. “Dr Zubaydi was expert in geological survey – oil prospecting, I gather – before he joined our team.” A pause. “Rashid is – ah – his right-hand man… been with him for years. Deputy-Directory Kennedy at South will have done a more thorough debriefing, seeing as they were joining his staff. They are visiting North just to get to know whole operation.”

“And who else?”

“And your good self, of course.” He still didn’t stop scowling.

“Why just seven of us?”

His scowl worsened, if that were possible. “If nothing serious has happened, there will be plenty of people there who can take care of themselves.”

“And if it is serious?”

“You won’t need more than seven of you.”

He filled me in on a few other details for my own speciality. “One last thing,” Lavrov added. “Keep in touch with us here at North Pole Base, every six hours. You know the protocol.”

I nodded. I knew the protocol. “Anything else?”

“Get back in one piece.”

I’d kind of planned that already.

Friday 1600 Zulu

Let me introduce you to a Marathon. It’s one hell of a bit of kit. It has twelve wheels, six in the forward tractor unit and six in the so-called trailer which was attached to the tractor by a fully sealed gimballed mid-section, like a flexible bus, although it could be jettisoned in an emergency, such as sliding down a crater wall and the like. It was unfair to call it a trailer, as drive went to all of its six wheels, just like the forward unit, which in turn wasn’t really a tractor in that it didn’t pull anything. In fact, each wheel has its own drive motor which could be cross-linked to any other wheel in case any motor failed. It could carry up to sixteen people, suitably equipped, though, on this occasion the rear unit would be full of stores with no passenger space. The whole thing weighed twelve thousand kilos on Earth, or just two thousand on the Moon. All of them were nick-named the “recreational vehicle” or “RV” by everyone that used them, both at North Pole Base where I normally spent my time, and at South Pole Base. There were five on the Moon in all with at least two stationed at each base and the fifth as a kind of spare. Each one cost one point eight billion dollars. Some RV.

The reason for always having at least two at each base was for contingency. Contingency and redundancy. When you live on the Moon you never adopt the mode of thought, “What if something goes wrong?” It’s always: “When things go wrong, I can do so-and-so.” There’s always a back-up, a spare, of everything from a spanner to a spacesuit. The only exceptions at all were the Selenas – the sub-orbital spacecraft – and the Atlases, the Earth-Moon shuttle/cargo craft – it simply wasn’t feasible to have duplicates of these hugely expensive transporters at both bases – we shared one a piece at each base with at least one either on Earth and one en route – four in all – and this was thought sufficient. That had worked out well, I couldn’t help thinking, considering the current circumstances, but then no-one had anticipated a whole base simply shutting down like a blown-out candle. As for our Selena, giving it regular and thorough maintenance was our way of covering our asses. That had worked out well, too, again given the same considerations. I can be quite cynical when I put my mind to it.

Considering what was about to happen, I was probably justified.

This is the opening of my new novella which came out today, available from Lulu.com

Black and White

2009-04-04T14:00:00.003+01:00

(Somebody at risk of harm - but to themselves or somebody else?)

It’s black and everywhere is white.

Or is it white and everywhere is black?

I can’t figure it out. It’s black everywhere and it’s white everywhere.

I look up and it’s black. I look in the distance and it’s dark, nothing is clear, but white specks are floating into my vision. They scurry, form shapes, re-form and disappear, only to be replaced by more phantom figures. I look down and it’s white everywhere. My feet stumble in the white.

The white around my feet crumbles and swallows my feet as I try to move. I breathe out and my breath clouds, mixing with the swirling phantoms. It is snowing and it’s very late at night and I don’t know where I am going. What am I doing? What am I about to do?

What have I just done?

Was it right? These things are never black and white.

This is one of my clearest memories of being at North Riding University. The winters were always severe. Snowfalls would sometimes cut off the new campus from the rest of the country, especially, it seemed, at week-ends. Menial staff like cleaners and porters would be trapped, and have to sleep in the main refectory or the chapel till Monday. On this winter evening the snow is more hideous than ever. It is so cold and ice-sharp, it is dry and doesn’t even have the decency to melt on your exposed flesh of your face, till your skin burns and you cannot feel the cold anymore. It dances around me furiously, piling into my eyes as it gathers, onslaught upon onslaught from an unseen black canopy over head.

The centre of campus, the piazza, is totally deserted. Lamps burn pointlessly overhead, illuminating a dazzling, deserted tableau.

I stumble on.

Almost miraculously a figure appears in the distance. Small in stature yet definitely male, he makes his way directly towards me through the driving snow. His hands are thrust deep into the pockets of a duffel coat, though the hood is down and his head is bare in the outrageous blizzard. I can see his close-cropped red hair – coupé en brosse as the French would say, and red stubble of beard – it is the only colour in this monochrome scene.

"Are you Malcolm?" he says, almost conversationally.

"Malc," I nod, correcting. "Call me Malc."

"My name’s Chris. We spoke earlier. Have you taken any pills?" He has the politeness to grin slightly as he asks.

"I can’t remember," I mumble. "I’ve been out in this – " I shrug, indicating the whirling ice-flakes. "It’s been so long," I add after a pause. "Yet, I feel so… hot."
"Are you feeling dizzy?"

"Dizzy? No… no, I don’t think so," I lie. I’ve taken some tranqs, but that’s understandable.
"It’s been five minutes since you called the Nightline office. You said you hadn’t taken anything then. Just that you thought you were going to. That’s why I came out to meet you." He almost laughed. "Lovely night for a walk, eh?"

"No, not dizzy. Just hot. Here," I tugged at the clothing at my neck, "let me take my scarf off."

Nightline was a little organisation run by the Students’ Union. It was there to help member students through the night when ever they had problems, like an essay they couldn’t finish for a nine o’clock deadline, or an impossible finals exam coming up – that would be usually in the summer term, of course, though some schools had mid-year class tests. Also, other problems, like money worries, late grant checks back then, difficulties with parents, fear you were on the wrong course, love affairs running less than smoothly – in fact anything that could disturb the student psyche, a student-based version of The Samaritans. They were said to be particularly keen on helping undergraduates talk through their sexual orientation – nothing like becoming queer to excite the would-be psychotherapeutic volunteers that would stay up all night once or twice a term to run the Nightline service, from the VP-Internal’s office in the Union. Their busiest time, and type of call, though, was always during exams, or the suicide season, as it was known.

I flapped inanely at my coat, trying to find a pocket. "Could you take this?" I said at last, handing him the scarf. I am a personification of confusion.

"Sure."

Despite his casual, amiable manner, I knew he was studying me closely.

"There is something else," I said. "My girlfriend."

"What about her?"

"I think I may have… harmed her."

"Harmed? In what way?" said Chris.

"A bad way."

He remained calm, but it was with a hint of effort, of self-control. "Where is she?"

I told him the room address in the hall of residence at the east end of the campus. Sure enough, his demeanour descended from controlled calm to the edge of agitation. The snow dramatically raised its dervish dance around us as we headed out into the frigid night.

We get to Marion Harding’s room and the door is ajar. We step inside and Marion is sprawled in an ugly fashion on the floor of the cramped bed-sit room. I am all confusion and unable to explain what might have happened. Chris is bent over the body as police from the North Yorkshire Constabulary arrive. I am suddenly the model of clarity and perception. "He did it!" I exclaim. "I saw him strangling her. He’s the one I called you about. Look – her scarf is hanging from his pocket!"

There, on the nightstand, is a sad little epitaph to the recently deceased. Marion’s diary, open at today’s page and, in her handwriting, the note: "Meet Chris tonight." It is there, in black and white.

When I graduated from NRU in Business Studies, it was an easy step to take a job in London, just after the Big Bang of deregulation on the stock market and financial institutions. It was easy to make a killing here too. I dutifully became obscenely wealthy and, as the Eighties segued into the Nineties and the bubble subsided, I quietly stepped back from coke-fuelled trading in the City to semi-retirement in my Docklands flat. The only thing I really lacked was a partner, a girl by my side. But the only woman I had ever loved had turned me down back in my college days because she was already seeing a sociology major called Chris, who, amongst his many good works, volunteered for the Nightline service at NRU. The only woman I ever loved was Marion Harding. I found out, one winter’s evening when my heart could bare the pain of rejection no more, when Chris was on duty at Nightline. I gave her one final chance to reject him in favour of me. She failed to do so and I took the only course of action I could see open to me. If I could not have her, then nobody would. It was a choice as clear as between night and day. Framing Chris was an exquisite bonus. He had the means, opportunity and possible motive – an arranged meeting to break up with him and go out with me, perhaps. He was sentenced to life. Or as good as, in this penal system.

Now I sit in my apartment, staring at the ancient brick architecture and genuine maple floor and gaze blankly across the river, and I wonder what it has all been about. Light floods the open plan room but not my dark secret. How life would have been different with Marion at my side, when there is a knock at the door. Callers are unusual, but I answer just the same without hesitation.

A figure stands there, bent and with lined face. "Remember me?" he says.

No, I do not, and say so. I expect an explanation. There is something vaguely familiar about the close-cropped red hair. He hits me suddenly with something so hard, all I see is a flash of light. Though I know I must be falling, it is as if the floor pivots up to meet me in the back. I am dazed and confused and can find no breath.

"Perhaps you remember this," says the red-haired figure now kneeling on my chest. "This scarf is just like Marion’s. The one you planted on me all those years ago. The one you strangled her with and used to send me to prison for life!"

He is looping the scarf around my neck. I can hardly breathe as it is with his full weight upon my chest, and the blow to the face moments earlier – what did he hit me with? There is blood in my mouth and I feel terribly hot.

"They say life should mean life," he says – I’ve not a clue what he’s on about – "in your case, it will do!"

The scarf slithers around my throat and he tugs it tighter still. I can get no air and my lungs are exploding. At last, I suddenly realise who he is and why is here and what he wants.

Just as everything begins to go black.

Maybe it is what I want too.

The end.

Vacuum

2009-03-07T09:55:00.009Z

(Space colonists fear only one thing)

The stars jabbed out of the blackness of infinity from every direction. They were above and, as above, so below. They were to port as to starboard and ahead as aft. They freckled the face of the endless night and tried to pierce the eyes of the lovers, but the lovers only had eyes for each other.

Albion was looking into Roxette’s eyes with keen adoration as she was telling him the news of the forthcoming grand festival.

"So we are all to congregate in the hanger decks and try to make it as much of a celebration as possible."

"What? Isn’t that a bit… well, tacky, under the circumstances?"

"Don’t you see what my father is trying to do?" said Roxette. "It’s to boost morale after everything that’s happened."

The stars swam dizzyingly all around them outside the Observer Dome as the great craft rotated. It was the only sky that Albion and Roxette had ever seen throughout their lives.

"This was your father’s idea?" said Albion.

"Well – now that the crew of the Argo are joining us on the Prospero for the rest of the mission, he felt as captain that he had to make their arrival into some of occasion. Don’t worry – he’s going to say something about the other crews that… were lost. But he thought if that was all he did everyone would be miserable for another couple of light-years and he didn’t want that. So – we’re having a big bash."

"I should hope he does say something," said Albion. "What happened was tragic."

"I know," said Roxette. "But at least we know we are safe on the Prospero. Our cargo hold door has been double-tested and there’s no flaw. And we found out that the Argo’s door was faulty before it blew, so we do have something to celebrate."

Albion was coming round to Roxette’s view, but he still remained to be completely convinced. "A pity no-one found out before we lost the other two ships," he murmured.

"It’s a pity there was a design fault at all! Just think how lucky we are that, as flagship, the Prospero is built differently."

"That’s true," he shrugged, "otherwise we would have had it. We’re only just reaching half-way."

"My grandfather told me of the festivities they had on Earth when the fleet was launched. I don’t know how they could they have made such a huge mistake."

"We don’t know what Earth was like, come to that. Neither of us have ever been there."

"I wonder what the new world will be like," said Roxette. "That will be something to celebrate for sure."

"Just so long as we get there," said Albion.

"Oh, stop being such a junk-dump!" she said.

The small fleet of four huge spacecraft had set off from the closeting comfort of Earth orbit for their exoplanetary destination two generations ago, the fusion-powered ion drive engines thrusting the ships at a steady acceleration, such that inside the craft, the feeling was exactly like the gravitational pull on the surface of their home planet. Within a year, they were close to the speed of light, though the convoluted warping of space and time, as described by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, meant that this velocity was only approached but never reached. The one thing that was simple to understand: they would never be going back. Families set out on that stupendous journey, of such stupendous duration, that the parents would age and die, while children would be born and grow to take their place. At least, that had been the mission plan. Half way through their transit to their new home, a second Earth orbiting around the star Tau Ceti, the ships were to turn about face – no problem in the lifeless vacuum of space – and fire their engines forward as brakes, to bring them to a timely halt at their destination.

But not all had gone to plan. Sealed inside the enormous containers, ever to be held with means neither of ingress or egress to the airless void save for inside a full, hard-pressured spacesuit, the fecundity of the travellers had fallen well below expectation. A full complement of passengers was 500, expected to be reached as journey’s end approached. However, not one ship held even a hundred as mid-point neared. Then disaster struck.

The first ship to fall victim was the Mexico. The demise was as sudden as unexpected. A catastrophic failure of the hull, and the one thing feared by any who ever ventured into the void of space befell all on board, the loss of life-giving air to the unfillable vacuum of space. With no time to don pressure suits, death was swift. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim as the nitrogen in the tissues boiled through the skin, shutting him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the process, were the incidents of half a minute.

At first the survivors on the other three ships, the Prospero, the Argo and the Calypso, thought that the Mexico had been prey to the most extravagant bad luck, a one-in-a-million chance encounter with a primordial chunk of space débris. Then barely had the shock and the grief at the loss begun to subside when the Calypso’s automatic monitoring systems detected that its hull too had been compromised, only this time without the explosive, balloon-like bursting that had laid waste to the Mexico. This time the true fault was identified – the massive hatch to the cargo bay, that would have been opened to unload the myriad items required to colonise and populate a new world, was found to be terminally compromised about its edge, its seal ruptured. Too late – the loss of air so rapid, that all had perished before they could evacuate in shuttle craft or in emergency pressure suits to the two vessels gliding alongside.

Now forewarned, the crew of the Argo, identical in every way to its two sister ships, checked and eventually yet with haste identified a profound error in the construction of its own cargo bay door. Only the Prospero, with a slightly more elaborate and different design, offered refuge. The Argo was abandoned, and all of the remaining colonists joined together on the one sound craft for the final years of their fated journey.

"I presume you will be accompanied by Albion at tonight’s festival?" said Captain Prospero. The ship he commanded was named after his family.

Roxette fidgeted uncomfortably. "Are you sure this festival is the right thing to do, dad? I mean, some people might think it’s a bit in bad taste. Do we all have to go?"

The Captain faced his daughter and studied her gravely. "Yes, everyone. In all the time since I took over as commander of this mission from my father, I have never instructed passengers of this vessel in a more important duty."

"But it seems disrespectful to the dead," said Roxette.

"It is in honour of the dead that we celebrate. In that, and a restatement of the mission. You do understand?"

Roxette Prospero looked levelly at her father. "I suppose so. It’s not as if we have any option."

Captain Prospero frowned. "What do you mean? I’m not going to force you to attend if you would really prefer not to. But it would seem strange to the rest of the crew if my daughter were not there."

"No, dad. I meant: it’s not like we can turn round and get back to Earth. We have to go on."

"Life has to go on. Our life and our future lie ahead of us – something which is true for anyone. I was wondering – have you and Albion ever considered the idea of getting married?"

"Dad!"

"One day you may take over this command. One day when I am too old. It would be beneficent to yourself if you had someone, such as I have your mother, by your side to share in the burden of command, Roxette. Someone such as Albion, for example."

"Oh, dad! Is our whole future planned out for us?"

"The future of all of us," said Captain Prospero, "is in the stars. It has always been so."

"But it is not set, is it, dad? We still do not know what the future is."

Prospero knelt down at his daughter’s side. "My darling daughter, I am determined to make the festival as exciting an occasion as possible. There will be no shortage of stores from which to prepare a banquet. There will be actors playing skits, dancers, comedians, musicians. All these and security inside our spaceship home. Only outside will be the limitless vacuum. But perhaps you can help me."

"In what way?"

"The hangars, where the shuttle craft for planet-fall lie sleeping, offer plenty of room for revelry but are joyless in their appearance. I am thinking of decorating them, each with its own colour-scheme. One is to be blue, lit with blue lights, to suggest the oceans we long to see, the next exotically in purple, the next green, with green illumination to look like inside a jungle, the fourth orange, the fifth white and the sixth violet."

"It sounds a bit gaudy," said Roxette. " Are you sure you’ve an eye for this sort of thing?"

"Well, exactly," he allowed a modest grin. "And I’m sure it’s something that runs in the family. So I was wondering – maybe you could suggest the colour scheme for the last hangar."

Roxette reflected. "How about… black?"

"Black?"

"Yes. Black velvet, like a dreamless sleep."

"That sounds a little… moody."

"No – it will be romantic. Black with red lights, a passionate scarlet, a deep blood colour. So that people who want to get close can do so in an intimate setting, not in a bright glare. That is what you want, isn’t it?"

Captain Prospero was dubious. "Perhaps we could have a big digital clock at one end, with a red display, counting off the time to our arrival at our new home."

"Yes," said Roxette. "After all, you do want us to look forward to raising our children there."

"Perhaps – who knows? – tonight would be good time to announce a forthcoming marriage?"

Roxette regarded her father strangely. "Perhaps."

Everyone was to wear fancy-dress, costumes of their own making. The anticipation that would build in such preparation would heighten the excitement, Prospero thought. No-one was to remain at duties. Prospero alone would man the bridge, watching the festivities from the cameras mounted on the decks.

"All seems to be going well," Albion said to Roxette.

"Things have livened up since the music and dancing began," she replied.

"And since your father suspended restrictions on alcohol. I’ve never seen so much booze. Amazing how quickly people forget."

"Don’t be harsh," said Roxette. "It helps melt their hearts."

He turned to her. "Lucky we don’t need it."

From the bridge, Prospero watched, content that his instructions for a joyful occasion were going to plan. There were to be generous prizes for the most inventive costumes awarded at the height of the evening. It was then that he spotted something on the blue hangar’s monitor that appalled him. Some idiot had thought it would be amusing to come dressed in a pressure suit, the sort that would be worn in an emergency evacuation of a stricken craft. The very suit the kind of which the poor souls of the Mexico and the Calypso had been so grievously unable to don before they were overcome.

Furiously, Prospero hurried down to the blue hangar, but the callous fool in the suit had already left for the orange hangar.

"Master-At-Arms?" Prospero addressed a man dressed as a cowboy.

"Sir?"

"I know you’re not on duty but – somebody has come in a really offensive costume. We need to remove him before he upsets everyone."

"Where is he?"

"There he goes – into the next hangar!"

Prospero called his master-at-arms, though not dressed for duty, to come with him to catch the offensive culprit. The figure passed between other party-goers, all of them falling silent. Captain Prospero and the Master-At-Arms followed but could not catch him as he slipped between the crowds from one hangar to the next. At last, he arrived at the final hangar, with its black fabrics and scarlet illumination. Albion and Roxette were there, hand in hand, watching on.

Prospero strode to the middle of the deck. "Who is that idiot who has come here dressed so distastefully?"

The figure turned slowly to face Prospero. The gold-tinted visor was drawn down on the face-plate of the helmet, the thin film of metal hiding the visage within.

"Master-At-Arms, grab that man."

The Master-At-Arms however, hesitated.

Prospero turned on him. "Unmask that vile interloper!"

"Sir, I…" the master stammered and fell silent.

"Very well," said Prospero, "I shall do it myself!"

He reached forward and snapped back the all-concealing visor.

Instead of someone he recognised, he saw a face, contorted and twisted in a rhesus of agony, fluids bubbling from the bulging eyes, blood sweating from skin and oozing from the nose and mouth, as one dying in the final stage of catastrophic decompression in the vacuum of space.

Prospero fell back, a vaporous shriek wretched out of him as all air was torn from his lungs. He collapsed to the black-clothed deck, dead. Roxette screamed, and threw her arms round Albion, his name dying on her lips. He grabbed at her before he too succumbed. Within scarce a beat, those nearest likewise crumpled as the atmosphere ceased to exist, throats ripping, eyes exploding. On it went like a wave through the whole flux of people inside the spacecraft, and the digital clock stopped and its glowing ember lights went out. And now was acknowledged the presence of the vacuum. It had come like a thief in the night. And darkness and decay and the vacuum held illimitable dominion over all.

The end.

Changing Channels

2009-01-25T12:44:00.003Z

So? – what have you changed for the New Year?
(Doing some more writing for a start! – specially for Lynne)

"Hello!? Anybody about?"

Mike stepped inside the apartment, and listened. He could have sworn he’d heard a faint noise, muffled, distant, but now it appeared to have stopped. "That fridge’s getting noisy. I suppose we’ll need a new one soon."

He immediately started hunting for the remote for the TV. As usual, like all remote controls, it had attempted to secrete itself under a cushion. He was wise to its ways, however, retrieved it, aimed the priceless gadget at the set and pressed ‘On.’

He was waiting patiently for signs of life when the hallway door opened. "Good grief! Spencie! I didn’t know were home. Why didn’t you answer when I called out?"

"Called out?" Spencie looked startled, and her eyes darted round the room. "I didn’t… didn’t hear you."

"How come you’re not at the office?"

"Took the afternoon off. Things to do. Anyway, how come you’re home so early?"

"The international’s on live. England against Belarus. The kick-off’s four o’clock, so I thought I’d sneak out of work and catch it. I didn’t expect you’d be in for dinner till it was nearly over. Are you alright?"

"Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?"

"You seem a bit feverish."

"Do I?" She put a hand to her cheek, her fingers fidgeting upwards to cover her eyes. "I’ve just been doing a spot of gardening. Potting some flowers. In the bedroom. Why don’t you come and see?"

"That’s alright," Mike laughed, in the way that she had once found so appealing. "I wondered if you had a secret lover in there!" He moved closer to her and put his forehead against hers. "Hey, toots," he said, mock-Bogart, "I thought I was all the man you could handle."

She seemed to relax into his arms. "Why don’t you come into the bedroom anyway, and let me…" she brushed his cheek with her mouth, "… check?"

"Well, swee’heart… – what is wrong with this damn remote?" He suddenly snapped his attention to the still-silent television. "The game will have started! I think we’re going to have to get a new TV. And a new fridge too. I’m sure I could hear the thing buzzing when I came in."

She stared at him coldly. "The batteries have probably gone."

"Again?" he said, exasperated. "They’re always packing up. I can’t change channels on this stupid TV without the zapper." He snapped the cover off the back of the control and again he looked puzzled. "The batteries really have gone! There aren’t even any in here."

Spencie licked her lip and took his hand. "Maybe you don’t need to watch football after all."

Mike looked back at her, adoringly. "Spencie. Darling… It’s a qualifier – I’ve got to watch it. Have we any spare batteries?"

She pivoted on her heel and stamped off up the hallway to the bedroom. She returned, jackboot, and threw a pair of Energizer Extra Power at him. "I shall get a bunch of spares tomorrow," she announced, as if making a manifesto commitment, then retreated back to the bedroom, closing the door sharply.

It wasn’t until half time, with the score still nil-nil, that he wondered what she was doing in there.

There was an atmosphere in the apartment after that. Christmas was coming. To Spencie, this meant: presents, wrapping paper and decorations. To Mike, it meant a crowded fixture list in the Premier League. Negotiations were entered into, and a rapprochement was achieved – Mike would go shopping anywhere Spencie wished as long as this didn’t coincide with Manchester United playing at home. He would not attend away matches as long as highlights were shown.

It came to the Saturday before Christmas. Both had had a good day – a pile of purchases lay on the throw-rug before the couch, and Mike was secretly relieved to have an excuse not to travel to all the way to Fratton Park.

And so they ended up on the couch, Match of the Day seemingly sinking into the background as the two of them demolished a bottle of Pinot grigio. Even the highlights had lost relevance as Mike had already accidentally seen the results in a branch of Currys.

"I was wondering," said Spencie in her curiously circuitous way, "whether we might be thinking of an early night."

Mike looked at her and seemed on the edge of a decision. "And Carrick keeps feeding Ronaldo down the channels," the commentator was saying, "but the Portsmouth defence is holding firm."

"Well, change it," Mike yelled at the TV, "cross to the other wing!"

Mike wondered later at what point in the evening Spencie had gone to bed.

It was already dark on New Year’s Eve when Mike let himself into the apartment, with his now customary sheepishness. Spencie had become so volatile these days, so unpredictable, he had to be ready for anything. And, on this occasion, he felt pretty sure that he was.

Spencie confronted him in the lounge. "I was wondering when – or if – you’d turn up. Thought perhaps you had gone to see your precious United."

"Don’t be daft, pet – they don’t play on New Year’s Eve."

"I sometimes think you love Man United more than you love me."

Under his breath, he muttered, "I sometimes think I love Man City more than I love you."

"What!?" she bellowed.

"I said Man United aren’t as pretty as you."

"How can I be compared with a football team on the basis of who’s prettier!?

"Come on, Aspen," – he knew she hated it when he used her formal name – "change the record: ‘you’d rather watch a game than make love.’ When have I ever said that?"

Spencie seemed to coil like a serpent and hissed, "Do you know what is the one time each year we don’t make love?"

"When your mother visits?"

"No," she retorted, triumphant, "when it’s the football season. Well, not any more!" She strode out of the room and returned a moment later with a stranger, another woman, rather plain and shapeless in Mike’s view, with a blunt bob haircut. "Meet Geraldine – my new lesbian lover! So whatever plans you had for this New Year, I think you might have to change them!"

Spencie had imagined her announcement would have the lurid impact of a bomb in a paint factory. But it somehow landed curiously flat.

"I’m not so sure about that," he said, and fetched a male stranger from the entrance. "Meet Gerald, my new best mate. I just came back to tell you – we’re going down Canal Street for the evening to discuss a flat back four and two holding players over a few glasses of Bailey’s."

The End

Author’s note: several people were kind enough to offer constructive criticism of this piece and, particularly, whether the use of the word ‘Lesbian’ was necessary near the end. I myself agonised over this as I am all in favour of letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions and at no other point is gender orientation mentioned explicitly (why should it be?) I came very close to removing the word, but changed my mind, for the following reasons. Firstly, she is not just adopting a new partner, but making (apparently) a major life-style choice - the main interpretation of the piece's title, Changing Channels - as a consequence of her recent relationship. Secondly, she wants to emphasise this point specifically to annoy and prick the conscience of her former partner. Finally, and more trivially, she is probably lying! – she has in all likelihood, neither got a new partner nor adopted a new lifestyle – her outburst is motivated as an attack on her old partner. His response, however, is somewhat different…

Small Sacrifices

2009-01-19T15:54:00.003Z

This story orignally appeared in Chorley and District Writing Circle's magazine Aware (issue 4, December 2008) where it was a prize-winning entrant in Aware's competition, themed around, "Flight." A jolly good reason to go a buy a copy too!

Otto stood at the edge of the high ground, the point at which it fell away most steeply, and felt the stiff breeze tug at his neatly cropped hair and beard.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Charles asked, in his head.

"Please don’t," said Miyoko, her voice catching in her throat.

"I have to," Otto murmured. "There is no other way."

"You realise how this is likely gonna end up?" said Wilbur, concerned.

"I promise you," said Otto, "I have keine sorge – no fear."

"Well…" said Wilbur, "it’s your neck."

"Not just yours," Charles murmured.

"It has been a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen, madam. But now, I must fly."

With that, Otto turned, broke into a run, hurled himself off the edge of the mound and into space.

The crowd below, men in frock-coats, ladies in their Sunday-best dresses, gasped.

The bat-winged-like structure of wires and fabric around Otto stretched and groaned as the updraft of air lifted him high over the heads of the people watching. His control of the craft was now well-practised; he could, if the wind was right, hover in the air. Adjusting himself against the triangular control frame, he called down to a figure amongst the spectators beneath him. "Make one of your pictures, Herr Anschütz!"

"I will! I do!" cried out Anschütz, from behind his apparatus, mounted on a tripod.

As Otto alighted on the ground, Wilbur and Orville ran to join him. "That was mighty swell. Whaddya call this thing?" Otto Lilienthal did not speak English, but his brother, Gustav, helping Otto out of the glider, answered in English tinged with both a German and Australian accent, "We call it the ‘Derwitzer.’ Derwitz is where first we made it."

"We read translations of your articles, back in Ohio. But to see it in action – well… that’s something else!"

Otto beamed with pleasure. He may not have understood what the two Americans had said, but their excitement was obvious. "It is a delightful distraction, to fly like a bird." Gustav translated.

"Hey, more than a distraction," said Orville. "It’s been man’s dream to fly like a bird down through the ages! We’ve been trying to solve the flying problem for years now."

"Yeah, we’ve made lotsa machines to test ideas," said Wilbur.

Otto listened to the translation before replying. "To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything."

"Maybe not the best thing," said Charles’ voice.

"What harm could there possibly be to fly like a bird?" Otto thought to himself.

"You have no idea," Charles Sweeney answered.

"No idea at all," Miyoko sobbed. "Not unless you become a hibakusha."

"So," said Orville, "how do you control the – whaddya call it? – the Derwitzer?"

"Ah, yes, gentlemen," Gustav answered. "My brother simply changes the centre of gravity by the slightest shift in his weight. That controls the direction in which the glider travels."

"The slightest shift?" said Wilbur. "Can just a slight alteration make such a big difference?"

"Believe me," Miyoko fought to bring her voice under control. "The tiniest things can have the biggest consequences."

"Ain’t that the truth," said Charles Sweeney. But only Otto, in his head, heard them. Gustav translated what Orville and Wilbur had said for his brother. Otto replied, "It is sufficient. I have made almost two thousand flights now, some as far as fifty metres."

"But what if you had an engine?" Wouldn’t you need some kinda control surfaces? And what about going further? And picking when and how you land?"

"It is true, the glider does not manoeuvre as would a bird. There is a tendency to pitch down, from which it is difficult to recover."

"But we are working on it," Gustav added, "and also are we working on an engine."

"Then we will be able to fly wherever we may wish, whenever we wish, for whatever purpose we wish. We will be as free as the birds."

"Not all of us will be free," Miyoko whispered.

"Come and see me fly again tomorrow," said Otto.

"Gee, I dunno," said Orville Wright. "Me and my brother have found you a great inspiration, Herr Lilienthal."

"But I think we wanna look at some other ways of doing things. We wanna powered machine," Wilbur added.

The next day, August 9th, 1896, as Otto Lilienthal took off in his glider from the great artificial hill he and his bother had constructed outside Berlin, he imagined the two American brothers were still there with him. Suddenly, the glider pitched forward. Otto struggled in vain to regain control, but smashed into the ground. His spine was broken. In his final hours, the voices he had been hearing in his head returned. With one final effort, he said to the Americans, "Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden."

"What?" said Wilbur. "What did he say?"

"‘Small sacrifices must be made.’"

Otto Lilienthal died next day aged 48.

Exactly 49 years later, the span of a man’s lifetime, on August 9th 1945, Major Charles W. Sweeney banked the B29 Superfortress as sharply as he could and at full throttle to get away from the bomb his airplane had just released over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Forty-three seconds later it exploded, killing seventy thousand people.

One of the survivors, one of the "explosion-affected people," or Hibakusha, as they were known, Miyoko Matsubara, imagined herself talking with Otto Lilienthal. Talking, asking, pleading with him not to develop a flying machine. But all she could hear him say were his final words.

Small sacrifices must be made.

The End

"Brother, Can You Take Me Back?"

2008-11-02T21:57:00.008Z

Remember what is was like being a teenager? - You will!

-1-

"What is the logical value of this q-bit here?" Ms Trisconi demanded, pointing at the magiscreen. She seemed to be getting quite worked up over the matter. It sounded to Daniel like he ought to know – that it was obvious – from something Ms Trisconi had said in the last five minutes. The trouble was – Daniel had not been listening for the last five minutes.

"Erm… True?" he hazarded.

Ms Trisconi glared at him. "Daniel, do you want me to refer you for Realignment Programming?"

"No, miss."

"So – I ask again, if the input q-bits to a ZOR gate are a True and a False, what is the logical value of the output q-bit?" She really meant it this time.

"I don’t know," he answered, honestly. He really meant that too.

"Anyone?" she addressed the rest of the class, mock-weary.

"True-and-false," the class all chorused, like reciting a mantra.

"Now, Daniel, why didn’t you know that?" Ms Trisconi said.

Daniel searched the air itself around him. He glanced at his transputer screen, looked across his desktop and searched, wide-eyed with growing despair, the faces all staring at him. Perhaps he had a chance to redeem himself with one last throw of the dice. "Because it’s all bollocks, miss?"

-2-

Daniel was wandering disconsolately down the blue atrium, with no particular place to go, when he spotted Claire. Claire was just about his best friend. Indeed, she was about his only friend – for some reason he just couldn’t seem to get on with the other kids. Claire, however, seemed to understand him. A little. At least, she was prepared to listen to him. Usually. He approached her. She spoke first, before he had time to say hello.

"You idiot! Do you really want to go to Alignment classes?" she snapped. Perhaps she was not so understanding after all.

"I suppose not."

"Then why do you say such daft things in lessons? Trisconi’s bound to report you now!"

"What did I say that was daft?"

"Everyone knows the output of a ZOR gate is true-and-false. It’s like, d’ur, the most basic thing in quantum transputing. And using language like that too. You’ll get an F for respect in Civics as well now."

"But it is bollocks," Daniel insisted. "How can anything be true and false at the same time?"

"That’s the whole point of quantum transputing – it’s all based on a superposition of entangled possibilities before the collapse of the probability density function! Like Shrödinger’s Cat."

"Claire," Daniel spoke cautiously, "where did you learn to speak English?"

She glowered at him. "Do you know, at this rate, by the time you graduate from school, you’ll be a hundred years old?"

Daniel hesitated. Claire was his best friend. Perhaps now it was time to tell her his biggest secret. No matter what the consequences.

"Claire – listen. I’ve got something very important to tell you."

She shrugged, turning partly away from him, and didn’t speak.

"Claire… I already am over a hundred years old."

For a moment, she still said nothing. Then she spun back on him. "Daniel," she yelled, "you’re impossible!" and stormed off.

-3-

It was after Environics that he caught up with her again. She was in the panodome but, unusually for her, she didn’t have her head in a screen, but was staring out through the thermoglass into the distance, arms folded.

He walked up behind her and said, quietly, "I accept you for what you are ."

"What do you mean, ‘accept me’? For what?"

"Well… for having purple hair for a start."

"What’s wrong with purple hair? It’s not dyed – it’s natural, you know."

"That’s what so scary," he murmured.

"What?"

"And you’re a girl."

"Of course I’m a girl, you – " she ran out of words. "Is this about us having sex again?"

"We didn’t have sex before," he quibbled.

"We talked about having sex before. We decided it would be a bad idea at our age. And with wrist-pods," she raised her hand to show the electronic device strapped to her arm, "we’d soon be spotted together and get in trouble, and we’d both fail our Responsibility exam."

"That’s what I meant," he winked. "We talked about it before, but we haven’t had it before."

Despite herself, Claire couldn’t keep a grin playing around the corners of her mouth. Of all the people she knew, he was the only one who could make fun of serious matters like this. And he was the only one who made her laugh about them.

"What’s wrong with being a girl, anyway?" she pouted.

"Nothing. It’s very nice, in fact. It’s just that – when I first went to school, it was a boys-only school."

"When was that?" she mocked. "In the middle of the twentieth century?"

"Exactly!" he hissed. "I first went to secondary school in 1966."

The smile faded from Claire’s face, replaced by a look of concern. "Why don’t you speak to Ms Grubczak, in S.E? Maybe she could help you."

"I don’t need advice from Ms Grubczak or Spiritual Enlightenment or anything else. I just need to confide in a friend. My best friend. Even if my best friend does have tits."

"Daniel!" Claire could snarl like a rottweiler when she chose to.

"I’m sorry. It’s just that when I was a teenager, I never knew any girls."

"Daniel, you’re a teenager now."

"Alright – when’s my birthday?"

"I dunno – sometime around the summer solstice."

"What year?"

"2055 – same as mine. We’re both fifteen years old."

"Claire – I was born in 1955."

She studied his face. "Maybe you should get your hormones checked at MedLab."

"I’m absolutely serious, Claire. This is the second time I’ve been through adolescence in my life. And I’m absolutely hating it."

-4-

He caught up with her again outside, behind the bicycle sheds – it was funny how some things didn’t change about school even over a century. Even if, now, the bikes all had hydrogen cells. They both were wearing shades, to protect their eyes from the UV, but it looked like a fashion statement. Claire was listening to pipe groove on her wrist pod. She was moving in time with the music, as if in a miniature dance, and the volume was so loud he could hear it coming out of her nose. He tapped her on the shoulder.

"That stuff will rot your brain."

She removed her earplugs. "It’s top – don’t tell me you don’t like pipe."

"It’s sodding bag-pipe and drums like they used to play at the Edinburgh Tattoo, speeded up and played on synthesisers!" he snorted.

"What’s a bag-pipe?"

"What you were – almost – listening to now. They were played by Scots men in kilts and annoyed everybody because it sounds like someone strangling a cat!"

"Get up to date, will you? You’re beginning to sound like my parents."

"I’m old enough to be your great, great grand parent."

"And where do you get off on that rubbish? ‘I’ve been here before’ and all that crap?"

"It’s not crap. It’s the truth. I went to a school with no girls in a building that was made of brick with windows so high up the wall you couldn’t see out, not this – " he gestured to the gleaming building behind him " – thing that looks like someone threw up a pile of goldfish bowls. And we had uniforms and we had proper subjects like chemistry and history and maths – not Personal Development and Civic Responsibility and Quantum Transputing and – what’s that other thing? – Spiritual Enlightenment, whatever that is."

"And I suppose you didn’t wear sun-screen and drove around in petrol cars too!" she snapped.

"No," he shook his head slowly. "Not the cars. You couldn’t learn to drive till you were eighteen."

"So how did you end up here in year ten of Ganesh College?"

He sat down on a low wall and waited patiently for her to join him. Eventually, she gave in and took her place by his side. "You didn’t meet me to the beginning of this academic year?"

"No."

"That’s because they didn’t let me loose till this summer."

"Who? Who didn’t?"

"I had a whole life before this one. In the middle of my nineties in 2050, I fell ill. The doctors told me that they were developing a treatment for what I had, but it wasn’t quite ready. They offered to put me in suspended animation and when the treatment was perfect they would fix me and bring me round. I mean, I didn’t know what they had in mind – I was an old get who’d long since lost interest in scientific developments in the world, and, to tell the truth, the world in general. I was what some call, ‘waiting for God.’ My life seemed almost over. However, have you heard the saying, ‘Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die?"

"I – I’m not sure. I might have in S.E."

"Well, I thought, ‘What the hell,’ and said, ‘OK.’ It was stupid really – all my friends had gone, all my close relatives had died and I didn’t see even my kids or grand-kids any more. To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. I’d just quietly go to sleep in comfort and that would be that."

"What was the treatment?"

"It was called stem-cell technology or something at the time. I suppose it’s what you call bio-regenics today."

Claire was taking this seriously. She tugged absent-mindedly on her wrist-pod. "What happened?"

"Well – apparently – they eventually got it to work. They brought me round, finally. But it was ten years later. And they’d not simply cured my illness, they had re-grown my muscle, skin and bone. I was a centenarian in an infant’s body."

"Ozone holes!" said Claire. Beyond that, she had no other comment.

"So after that I went through a period of rehabilitation and readjustment – there was no need for me to got to school to learn to read and write and I didn’t have to be potty trained. Walking was a bit odd at first. Ultimately, they got me to a state where they felt I could be reintegrated back into society. I was a teenager by then. So here I am at school. I’m learning all these stupid subjects that didn’t exist when I really was a teenager all those years ago, I don’t understand any of it, I’m not interested in any of it and everybody is giving me a hard time, especially that Trisconi woman. She just keeps getting on my back every day and I’m sick of it. All the stuff I know is useless and all the stuff they’re trying to cram in my head just gets on my bloody nerves."

Claire absorbed this. "What was it like, life back then? In the nineteen hundreds?"

"Nothing special. Or, that’s how I felt at the time. By comparison, it seemed a lot more sensible than life today."

"I’ve often wondered about back then. I mean I’ve read about it and see it in videos. I sometimes think I might have liked it."

Daniel was dubious, then something occurred to him. "Maybe that’s why you and I sort of get on together."

"What did you do for a living?"

"I was a computer programmer until I retired. Then I took up growing roses in my back garden."

"But you don’t programme transputers. You just specify the problem in assertive terminology and the solution-algorithm is self-generating."

"Well-remembered! It’s almost like you’re brainwashed. Meanwhile, the one thing I was good at and earned a comfortable living from isn’t even a job anymore and I’m supposed to learn a new career. As if I could care less. And I’m supposed to like bloody bag-pipe music too!" Daniel was clenching his fists in rage by now.

"Daniel," said Claire at length. "What’s a rose?"

-5-

They were walking along beneath the overpass near the Interchange, the quiet hum of vehicles above filling the gaps in their conversation. At length Daniel asked, "Won’t they notice we’re missing Recreational Studies?"

Claire thumbed at her wrist-pod. "With a bit of luck, the overpass will mess up our pod signals and we’ll just tell them we missed the Shuttle back from the Mall."

"That’s just what I used to say when I used to bunk off Latin. Sort of." He looked at her. "Before you ask, Latin was the language everybody spoke before English took over, but about two thousand years earlier. Alright?"

Claire mouthed the word, "Oh," in ill-feigned interest.

"But you do really know what a rose is, don’t you?"

"Of course I do," she said. "I was just testing you to see if you did."

"Ah. I see."

"I’ve seen one in the museum. I’m still not sure what a kilt is, though."

They were running short of anywhere interesting to walk. There was a service gantry with a metal stairway that rose to a dizzying height. Few people passed by here. Opening a gate, they climbed to a platform, sat and looked out on a deserted urban tableau.

"Why are you testing me?" Daniel said. "Don’t you believe me?"

"That you’re a hundred and fifteen years old. Of course I believe you."

"Thank you," he said.

"It’s just that you don’t look a day over a hundred and ten."

"Look!" he said, seriously, on the edge of losing his temper. "I’m like that Shrödinger’s Cat. I’m in a superposition of states – I’m fifteen and I’m one hundred and fifteen!"

Claire looked suitably chastened. "What about your parents – the people you live with?"

"The foster parents, you mean?"

"You’re a hundred and fifteen and have foster parents?"

"No – the parents I live with are called Mr and Mrs Foster – they have other children… What do you think I mean! I have to appear to be an ordinary teenager. And that’s just how they treat me – always on at me to work hard at college, grounding me if I stay out late and being a real pain in the backside."

"Why?"

"So that I won’t stand out and because I’m supposed to need looking after – this is an entirely different world from the one I knew. What’s more – " he broke off.

"What?"

"I’m not supposed to tell anyone. The treatment I had is still experimental. You don’t even qualify for it unless you reach a hundred."

"What – like a prize?"

"Some prize! Anyway, if anyone finds out, it could be… rescinded."

"Rescinded?"

"Revoked." He could see her staring at him, uncomprehending. "I think it means they’d take me and chuck me back in the freezer if I blab. What’s more, you could be in danger too."

"Why would I be in danger?"

"Because if you told some old folk they could have a second life, they’d all want one!" Daniel was exasperated. "I don’t know – all I know is it’s supposed to be a secret and I’m sworn to silence. The old folk wouldn’t be so keen if they remembered what it was like to be a teenager, having grown-ups always telling you what to do and asking you ‘what about your future?’ and crap like that. And now I’ve gone and told you because you’re the only person I really trust. And you’re probably the one person I shouldn’t have told because you could get into trouble!"

"I can take care of myself."

"Oh, yeah, tough-girl. And what if they turn you into a Popsicle too?"

"Let them try," she said, defiantly. "Creeps."

He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Look, I don’t want anything happening to you, because I care about you."

"I know. I care about you," she shrugged.

"No – I mean, really care. Y’know?…"

"You mean?…."

He nodded, slowly. "Yeah," he said, at last. "I have strong feelings for a fifteen year old school girl and I’m over one hundred years old."

She looked at him, surprised at first, then, coyly. "You dirty old man," she said, with a wink.

-6-

The Educhief’s private lounge, Ms Trisconi and Ms Grubczak faced Ms Ohuruogu, the chef du mission of Ganesh College.

"He’s rude, ignorant, and… dare I say?… discourteous even," Ms Trisconi was going on. "I’ve never met a student like him. He shows no interest in learning anything. He behaves like somebody from the Middle Ages!"

Ms Ohuruogu looked askance at Ms Trisconi. This was a day she had secretly been dreading. Before she could respond, Ms Grubczak interceded. "I think Daniel may have some deep spiritual issue he is struggling with. I have noticed him showing signs of distraction, as if something is preying on his mind. I have attempted to show empathy in compassion-sessions with him to seek out his inner conflicts…"

"Oh, shut up!" said Ms Trisconi, her voice, soggy with derision, betraying a slightly less enlightened attitude than was conventional.

"Colleagues, colleagues," said Ms Grubczak, "we need to try and find a way to move forward with Daniel. This groupthink has done nothing but focus on the past so far!"

"If we allow a student to realign his learning posture, it could spread to the other students."

"I think you’re overstating the situation," said Ms Ohuruogu, though she sounded less than convincing.

"Am I? Things like this have a contagion. And once it gets a hold, we could lose our educredit rating!"

"It is true," Grubczak nodded. "Disrupting the harmony of one insight period could spread to – "

"Will you stop talking like some reincarnated hippy!" Trisconi snapped.

"You’ve no idea what hippies were like, you post-post-post-modernist!" Grubczak retorted, with unusual venom.

"Colleagues, you are becoming heated!" said Ms Ohuruogu, heatedly. "There is more to this situation than meets the eye." She sighed heavily. "I didn’t want to have to tell you this. You are sworn to secrecy. Understand?"

The two education engineers exchanged glances, then nodded. "What is it?" said Grubczak.

"Is it something we really want to know?" said Trisconi.

"I’m afraid… it has become so." Ohuruogu pressed her thumb against the identity window of a filing carousel and extracted a piece of gutenberg. The sheet glowed with Daniel’s college report. She invited the two education engineers to see.

"There’s nothing odd there," said Trisconi, still reading Daniel’s record details. "He turned up here last solstice, seemed to settle in, then he’s gradually become more…"

"Discordant," Grubczak prompted.

"Where was he before?" said Trisconi. "I can’t see any previous college record."

"It’s confidential," said Ohuruogu. "Here’s why." She pressed her thumb against an ident patch on the gutenberg, and the image changed. "See?" she said, heavily.

Grubczak craned her head and read aloud. "‘Daniel… educated to tertiary level… Hertford College… King George V grammar school…’ Where on Earth’s that?"

"And ‘The Lazarus Institute’?" said Trisconi. "That’s not a college… Isn’t it a?…" She broke off.

"A hospital?" Grubczak broke in.

"‘Daniel was admitted, after attempts to treat him for…’" This time Trisconi’s voice trailed off into silence. Grubczak, still reading, remained speechless.

"So you see," said Ohuruogu, "if anyone’s ‘reincarnated’…"

"So that’s why Claire gets on with him so well," said Grubczak, with sudden realisation, "She’s always been a bit of a romantic when it comes to Antiquity Studies."

"Claire? Who’s Claire?"

"The girl he spends most of his personal study sessions with," Grubczak and Trisconi answered in unison. "They’re inseparable," Trisconi added.

"Possibly in more ways than one," Grubczak continued. Was that a twinkle in her eye?

"Where are they now?" said Ohuruogu. The two education engineers shook their heads. Ohuruogu flicked at the gutenberg. It was hyperlinked to the Omnipres that tracked the students’ wrist-pods. "Something’s interfering with the signal. They were last detected heading under the Interchange"

"You don’t think they might…" said Trisconi.

"Oh no," said Grubczak. Though she might have been struggling to hide a wry smile. She was a bit of a romantic at heart, too.

-7-

"That was nice," Claire said.

"Really?" said Daniel.

"Really."

"Would you like to do it again?"

"Already?"

"We’ve waited a long time till now."

"And people our age used to do it all the time?"

"Not all the time. They needed to rest occasionally," Daniel winked. "And, usually, when a little older, to be honest. At least, you ought to have been older. And," he waved his hand in act of dismissal, "without quite the age gap."

"What’s it called again?"

"Kissing."

"‘Kissing’," she mused. "It’s a nice word. I often wondered what it would have been like, to have lived a hundred years ago. It always sounds, well, so much nicer than now. So much more alive."

Daniel grinned. "Believe me, if you liked that, you’ll love what comes next."

"You mean ‘sex,’" said she.

"I mean ‘making love’." His face suddenly clouded over. "I’m… I’ve just realised… I’m sorry."

"What? What’s the matter?"

"Well, you really aren’t old enough."

She sighed. "C’m’ere." She kissed him again. "Of course I’m old enough." He was aware that she was breathing slowly but heavily. "After all, I know all the theory. Time for the practical."

He kissed her back, slowly and longingly. "I’m sorry," he said again, hoarsely.

"There’s no need to be," she spoke, hoarsely back.

"No – I mean ‘I’m sorry we’re doing this under an overpass.’"

"Don’t be," she whispered in his ear. "It’s just like in those 20th Century novels. It’s so book."

They kissed again. "I don’t know" he murmured, "the 21st Century has some good points too."

Suddenly, an amplified voice boomed out. "You are surrounded. Come out with your clothes on!"

"They’ve found us!" Claire gasped.

Daniel leapt up. "How did they manage to track us down so quickly?"

"You really aren’t used to this century, are you?"

"Daniel!" a voice boomed, "we know you are having some… problems. Please come and talk to us."

"What are they up to?" hissed Claire. "Are they planning something?"

"In this day and age – what do you think?"

"Daniel!" The voice again. "We’ve got someone here from The Institute. They just want to talk to you."

"Like fun they just want to talk," said Daniel. ‘Like fun,’ – an expression he remembered from The Catcher In The Rye.

"What will they do to you?" Claire demanded.

"More to the point, what will they do to you."

"But I’ve not done anything." Then, realising what she had said: "Neither have you."

"It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you know."

Again the booming voice: "If you don’t come out, we’ll have to come in and get you!"

Daniel stood at the railing of the gantry platform. "It seems," he said heavily, "I’ve got no choice."

"There’s always a choice!" said Claire. "I don’t want Realignment Programming, or any of their other techno-crap. I want to be me."

Daniel turned and looked at her, then kissed her gently on the forehead. "That’s all I ever wanted. That and being with you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me in both my lives."

He was turning away once more as she grabbed his arm. "That’s the one thing they can’t have. Who we really are. Our lives."

He stared hard at her face. "Do you mean…? Do you really mean…"

She suddenly seem to relax, become calm almost. "It’s the only thing we’ve got to lose. And what have they got to offer us in return?"

"Claire, I –"

"Do you really want to go back?"

"Do you really not?"

"Not without you."

Way below the gantry and some distance back from the overpass, Dr Stinger stood with two nursing attendants and the Community Custodians. Ms Ohuruogu and her education engineers watched in horror as two figures flung themselves from the platform and crashed sickeningly to the ground.

Ms Grubczak screamed. The nursing attendants dashed to the prone stricken forms, motionless on the asphalt.

"Why did they do that?" Ms Grubczak began to sob.

Ms Trisconi shook her head, more puzzled than distressed like her colleague. "They had no cause to rebel."

"Who knows?" said Dr Stinger. "Perhaps we will find out, eventually."

"What do you mean?" said Ms Ohuruogu. "You think you will be able to save them?"

"But of course," said Dr Stinger. "It may take us a little time, a year or two even. But we have the technology. Of course, I must insist that you do not tell anyone – it is still," – he paused – "a sensitive subject. Nevertheless, I promise you we will be able to treat them. Perhaps a little realigning also. Then they will be back with you, bright young students. Their whole lives ahead of them."

The End

Mental Lottery Chinese Chicken

2008-09-27T00:06:00.003+01:00

(Lyrics from the album)

All The News Of The World

The day is reaching an end now
Time to spend some time
What a message to send now
Driving me out of my mind
It’s OK to say you’re doing fine now that it’s over
You’re glad you once were mine but now you’ve another
On the line
And all the news of the world doesn’t match the way I am feeling
All the news of the world forgets the story you are leaving me
Behind

Fold the papers away now
There’s nothing left to say
Send the letters away
There’s no-one else to pay
It’s OK to say the business is all done, now that it’s over
Turn the final page and close the cover
And sign
And all the news of the world has missed the deadline
All the news of the world doesn’t equal the headline
You’re not mine, any more. You’re not mine, any more. You’re not mine any more
It’s the news of the world.
It’s the news of the world.
All the news of the world.
It’s all the news of the world.

Bad For Business

High heels and hot wheals
Stiletto shoes and razor steels
Diamond rings with a shoulder cut
Keep your eyes wide open and your mouth tight shut
We've just gone several rounds of passion
But I can't tell you in the usual fashion
Cos a lover like you might just be bad for business

Heaven sent and heady scent
No-one knows where evening went
Little kisses leave a trail of fire
Burning up I got just one desire
I've a head full of crazy visions
But I'd better wait for someone’s permission
Cos a lover like you might just be bad for business

You tell me sweet nothings are nothing at all
You look swell and I fell when you gave me the call
But when you leave it's a greed it's a long way to fall
So long, so hard, check me out on my calling card

I've heard the odd word
It could be love but it's so absurd
So quick and so slow
Hot wax as the candles glow
You could become a personal obsession
I pick up fast and I've learnt my lesson
A lover like you might just be bad for business

Same Old Story

I remember, I caught you in a show
Your eyes were bright, with the tale you told
Love is new, but the story is old

Time together, time we had to spend
You turned to me, turning from a friend
Like you needed someone when love is at an end

Late at night your keepsake still reminds me
How I let my own compassion blind me

It’s an elaborate game
When your turn comes, you will do the same
Love is old, but the story is the same

Late at night your keepsake still reminds me
How I let my own compassion blind me

I remember, I caught you in a show
Your eyes were bright, with the tale you told
Love is new, but the story is old
Love is new, but the story is old
Love was new, but the story is old

Room For The Day

After so many hours it’s hard to believe the time is almost here
So many miles, so many sighs, so many times I’ve wished that you were near
Now at last you stand before me, real and clear and solid to my touch
If this is all we ever have nothing we could give would be too much

We
Have the room
For the day

Time is frozen for the moment, it and everything and we are one
Only space between us ever, in this place today the space is gone
All our waiting, meditating, contemplate mistakes we may have made
Should we love, expect so much, should we part and go our separate ways?

We
Have the room
For the day

Hardly chance to pause for breath before I’m up and running from your side
So many words are left unsaid, so little time we had in which to hide
Did it really happen that way that we were for a while as free as air?
No evidence, nothing left except the haunting feeling we were there.

We
Had the room
For the day.

Snowfall

Lonely feeling as dead as ground
The high days of summer, the colours and sound
An evening’s dream of love to be found
Lost under snowfall

Heavy the leaves, flowers in bloom
A scent of passion, the heart’s distant boom
Desire woven in hammering loom
Lost under snowfall

No fear of ageing, preserved in winter’s chill
Ambition fading, the empty page unfilled

Passion that flamed, fire in the air
A love that was hope, turned to despair
Frozen to nothing as if never there
Lost under snowfall

No fear of ageing, preserved in winter’s chill
Ambition fading, the empty page unfilled

Colder than ice, colder than stars
The blanketing white hides all the scars
A change of season from Venus to Mars
Lost under snowfall.

When The Morning Comes

You breathe out
I breathe in
Contact
Skin to skin
And when the contact’s broken
There still remains a line
Words remain unspoken
And end in just a sigh

I breathe out
You breathe in
You count
My rhythm
The clock is going slower
As time is winding down
You hold on to my hand
But you can’t hold a sound

So when the morning comes
I’ll be on my way
When the morning comes
You know I cannot stay
When the morning comes
I’ll be gone.

I draw breath
I draw the line
You hold breath
You hold on to time
Fingers of light begin
To grasp the coming day
Tomorrow can never be
There’s nothing left to say

So when the morning comes
I’ll be on my way
When the morning comes
You know I cannot stay
When the morning comes
I’ll be gone.

So when the morning comes
I’ll be on my way
When the morning comes
You know I cannot stay
When the morning comes
I’ll be gone.

At The Health Club

Welcome to the health club
Now the time has come to turn your life around
Welcome to the health club
Now you choose to lose your body by the pound
Step up the machine, we know where you have been
So wave bye-bye
Welcome to the health club
Now it’s time to change our fate with just a sigh

Welcome to the health club
Now the time has come to give it all away
Welcome to the health club
That you have said all there is you have to say
Your therapist is here to take care of your needs
And make things clear
Welcome to the health club
Here is your last chance to hold on to what’s dear

Welcome to the health club
Now the time has come to be going down
Welcome to the health club,
Feel the rhythm, see your heart race and pound
Connect up to the machine, you know what we have seen
And now you’re on your way

No Reprieve

Late in the afternoon
[Sunlight shining fair
Fluorescent Striplights
Starve the very air

The trees outside the window
You see them in the breeze
Hanging flags at half-mast
Reaching for some ease

As you come to realise
There’s no way out, no way out
Trying hard to believe
There’s no reprieve, no reprieve.

Limp and plastic curtains
Close around your bed
Cutting you off from view
Deep inside your head

You remember a sunny day
Running as a child
Things you will look back on
Memories stockpiled

Time is running thinner now
This is how we leave
Hanging on to the air
There’s no reprieve, no reprieve

There’s an open window
You can feel the breeze
You look forward to the light
But you know longer see the trees

Limp and plastic people
Turn and walk away
Cutting you off from view
You were here today

You remember another world
Running as a child
The past another country
From which you’re now exiled

Time is over, has run out
Time has come to leave
Time has gone, like the air
There’s no reprieve

There’s no reprieve
There’s no reprieve
There’s no reprieve
There’s no reprieve

Domestic Bliss

2008-08-19T13:14:00.002+01:00

(Short story with a new twist on an infamous old problem)

Fluorescent jackets, two, bright yellow, Day-Glo strips, belts heavy with equipment – night-stick, radio, spray, cuffs – below stab-vests. Fluorescent strip lights, dirty grey, flooded the shadow-less pallor of late-night casualty. The police officers approached the reception desk. The triage nurse nodded in dull acquiescence towards the far corridor, opposite the entrance, leading out of the waiting area to the treatment section. The officers walked through.

"Mrs Beryl Rimmer?" said the first officer. The second stood holding back the plastic curtain of the assessment cubicle. The nurse, a plump-ish woman in her forties, finished attending to a dressing on Mrs Rimmer’s face. She’d seen this all before. She stepped round the trolley and squeezed past the second officer, out into the corridor.

"How did it happen?" said the officer.

Bob was late. Beryl hated it when he didn’t come home in time for tea. She was always fearful there would be a scene. She would try to avoid it, try not to say anything that might upset him, provoke him into one of his moods. But it wasn’t fair. He would be out enjoying himself, spending their money, having too much to drink. He always seemed to drink too much these days. How was she supposed to get on with her life, let alone enjoy herself, when she didn’t know what time he’d be back? Or in what state?

It hadn’t always been like this. There were the good times. The old times. Back when they were first courting. They couldn’t get enough of each other then. There was no where else either of them wanted to be. Now, it was difficult to be in the same room together, without there being an atmosphere. A tension.

She flipped the shirt over on the ironing-board. She’d done the sleeves, now the shoulders, about to do the back. Her mother had always said, "Be a good housewife, and your man won’t wander." That, and "A happy marriage is one where both of you know your place." All sounded a bit old-fashioned now. The iron was too hot, but she didn’t think to turn it down. As long as she didn’t linger, it would be alright. Get the creases out faster.

She thought she heard his key in the lock.

"Had your husband been drinking, Mrs Rimmer?" said the officer. The other took notes.

"Why do you ask that?"

"You said he was late home. Why was that?"

"He can come and go as he pleases. I don’t mind him spending a bit of time with his friends. There’s nothing wrong with our marriage."

"Of course not," said the officer. "Was he drinking with his friends?"

"He might have been."

"Is that why he stayed out?"

"He doesn’t stay out," she said, defensively. "He’s always back at a proper time."

Bob let himself in. Beryl was ironing. That was good. He was pleased to see her doing some housework. Perhaps she had learnt her lesson. It wasn’t just for him. There were the children to think of. They needed a good family environment to grow up in. Perhaps she had sent them off to bed early. He didn’t like them to see when he and Beryl had words. "Any tea?"

"Don’t you go expecting to be fed at this time of night," she said. He thought he saw her bite her lip. "I threw your dinner in the bin."

He was angry and disappointed. "I told you I was going to be a little late." He was hungry, and he had told her he wasn’t sure when he’d be home. He had had nothing to eat and here she was, being difficult. Why for once couldn’t she just do the right thing – get him a meal that would keep till he got back. "It was a leaving do. I couldn’t come home any earlier."

"Oh no, of course you couldn’t. Always putting someone else before me."

"How dare you say that," he retorted. "I’ve always put you first."

She seemed unable to contain herself. "You go out, spending our money on yourself and your mates. What about me?"

Bob was surprised. It wasn’t like her to refer to his friends like this. She usually didn’t even mention them, as if she preferred to pretend they didn’t exist. Why couldn’t she be more reasonable? Why couldn’t she be friends with them too? He felt his anger rising. "They could be your friends too if you’d make an effort. "And as for ‘our money’? This is my money. I earned it. And I haven’t spent all of it. Trouble is, my sweet angel, if I bring it home you go through my pockets and steal it and spend it on clothes that make you look like a tart. Most men would give you a clip round the ear for carrying on the way you do!"

The police officers pushed into Bob’s cubicle.

"You Bernard Rimmer?" said the first officer.

"Bob," said Bernard. "My friends call me Bob."

"Well, Bernard," said the second officer, "would you mind telling us how you come to be here?"

"It all started when I was a little late getting home from work," he said. "It was somebody’s leaving do. A colleague who’d been with the company for ages. We were giving him a good send-off. Drinks, food, everything. Or, rather, everyone else was. I could only stop for a couple of drinks. My wife, Beryl, doesn’t like me staying late after work. No matter what the reason. Then my colleague – the one who was leaving – bought everybody a round of double brandies. That was very nice of him, that. I bought him one back, knocked one back myself. Then I had to dash off. I had to catch a bus – I couldn’t drive after all that alcohol. That made me even later."

"What happened when you got home?"

"Well, I’d all this to drink on an empty stomach. I’d not had any time for anything to eat. So when I got home I was starving. Beryl – that’s my wife – said she had cooked me some dinner but thrown it away. I’d told her I was going to be late home. There was no need to do that. It’s not right."

"So you hit her," said the first officer.

"It wasn’t like that," Bob protested.

"Let me just go and check with the doctor," said the second officer. "I think he’ll confirm somebody hit her."

"Yes – no," Bob struggled for words. "I did hit her. But it wasn’t like that!"

The two officers stood, heads together, in the corridor as the doctor approached them. One turned to the other and said, "I hate domestics."

"Waste of time, if you ask me," said the other. "She should just walk out and leave him and take the kids with her. Divorce him, have the house, all of his money, and be done with it. Get rid of the bullying little creep for ever."

"Just got the results of the x-ray," said the doctor. "Mrs Rimmer has a broken cheek-bone. She’s been struck a very heavy blow, possibly with a blunt object."

"Good enough for me," said the first officer, "let’s go and arrest the sod."

The two officers pushed their way into Bob’s cubicle once more. "Bernard Rimmer, you are under arrest for assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Anything you say will be used as an excuse to beat the crap out of you."

The police officer hadn’t realised the doctor had followed him in to the cubicle and was standing right behind him. "I think there is something you should see first," said the doctor.

"I was trying to tell you before," Bob protested. "When I got home, my wife was ironing. I offered to give her the money I still had from the leaving do when I came in. As I put it down on the ironing board, she trapped my hand with the iron. She burned me! The only way I could get free was to pull the iron off. It broke free and hit her in the face. I was only trying to protect myself."

The doctor pushed between the two police officers and showed them both Bob’s hand.

There, right across the palm from fingertips to wrist, was a livid purple burn, triangular, curved edges, in the shape of an iron.

"His hand must have been in contact with something very hot for quite some time to inflict such a severe wound," said the doctor. "If it had been me, I don’t think I could have stuck it for so long."

The end

Epilogue – Ignorance Isn’t Bliss
"In January 1999 the UK Government’s Home Office published the results of a survey into domestic violence. It was the biggest ever carried out anywhere in the world and involved more than 10,000 men and women.

"It was called Study 191 and it stated, quite categorically, that 4.2% of men and 4.2% of women perpetrate the crime of domestic violence. In other words they had discovered that men and women are equally violent."

For any who wants information about men being victims of domestic abuse, contact www.mensaid.com, help@mensaid.com or call 087 1223 9986.

Hitler – The Comeback

2008-06-03T00:20:00.004+01:00

It has been announced today that there is to be a remake of World War Two. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, World War Two – The Original, proved to be very popular with large numbers of people everywhere. This was more so than a proposed sequel, World War Three – What are You Doing After The Apocalypse? shown to a test audience, which was rated badly for a lack of, well, anything, really, after the opening minutes. Secondly, it has widely been suggested that World War Two brought out a lot of stirling qualities in people, such as selflessness, forbearance, camaraderie and communal singing.

However it was felt nevertheless that the original World War Two had a number of shortcomings. First of all it was in black and white. Secondly, it was not in stereo. Nor was it available in a universally accepted format. The remake will have a broadly similar plot to the original. However, the Director’s Cut Special Edition DVD will feature a number of alternative endings for those who like a surprise. Look out for the one where, as the hostilities cease, Josef Stalin joins Cambridge Footlights with a song on ukulele called Lenin On A Lamp-post!

Rumours of a prequel to the series, The Franco-Prussian War – Who Are You Calling ‘Sausage-breath?’, are unfounded.

Anyone who wants to participate in any capacity whatsoever, from cast to crew, are welcome to get involved. And if should one of you feel that you can contribute some saucepans and kitchen utensils to make fighter aircraft, please hand yourself in to your local mental hospital or throw yourself into the nearest quarry immediately, whichever is more convenient.

(A remake of The Yom Kippur War, Your Land Is Mined Land – This Time It’s Anti-personnel, is still in its planning stages. More wars are definitely in the pipeline. Speaking of pipelines...)

Extract from GSOH – hiding at Crispin’s

2008-02-26T23:43:00.002Z

(The scene: Roger, on the run from the police, suspected of a series of murders of women he has met through a dating agency and trying to prove his innocence, has recruited one of his dates, a TV journalist called Candice, and her colleague, Crispin, to help him. Roger and Candice have tried to get his remaining former dates to go into hiding with him, but, having initially drawn a blank, are forced to stay the night at Crispin’s house.)

As they drew up back at Crispin’s house, it was already growing dark, which suited both of them fine. Roger didn’t want to be seen. Candice certainly didn’t want to be seen with Roger.

"How’s the exclusive going?" was Crispin’s only greeting.

"Have you any food?" was Candice’s only reply.

"Try the freezer."

Candice grilled some pork chops without ceremony and without vegetables. Crispin added some canned peas, microwave chips and instant gravy as an afterthought. Bachelor cuisine. Candice sat, studying the meal, Roger toyed with his food, and only Crispin made any attempt to eat anything.

"You should get stuck in, mate," said Crispin to Roger. "It’s probably better than prison food."

"I wouldn’t be so sure about that," said Roger.

"I’m going to make some calls," Candice announced, abandoning her plate. She pulled out Crispin’s mobile. "I’ve got to have another shot at talking the women round."

"You won’t be needing this, then" said Crispin, stabbing her chop with his fork, along with a generous scoop of chips.

"You can have this too," said Roger, scraping his food on to Crispin’s plate before Crispin could stop him.

Crispin had just loaded his face with a huge mouthful, when the doorbell rang.

"You expecting anyone?" said Candice.

"Don’t!" said Roger. "Remember what happened when I said that?"

Unable to talk, Crispin stole a sidelong glimpse out of the front window.

"Fffck!" he cursed, spitting potato down the curtains. "Iff Frnnk Knn’nnduh!"

"It’s what?" said Roger.

Candice suddenly caught on. "Frank Kennedy! He’s a friend of Crispin’s. A detective friend."

"Oh, God! Not again!"

Crispin emptied his mouth on to his own plate in a disgusting spray of food, and slipped the other two plates underneath. "Quick – get in the kitchen! I’ll find out what he wants and try and get rid of him. If I can’t, make a dash for it."

"Don’t worry – we know how to do this."The two scuttled out of sight while Crispin gave himself a quick preen, tried to remember what normal looked like, and nonchalantly opened the door. He made sure he had a tight grip on it, just in case he needed to shut it again quickly.

"Frank!" he said, a trifle too cheerfully. "What can I do for you?"

"Let me in for a start. I’ve not come all this way to admire your bloody doorstep."

"I’m just having my…" But Frank had already pushed past him. So much for holding the door.

"You in here?" Frank made his way into the front lounge where the dinner table was set. "Good. It’s turning miserable out there tonight."

"What do you want?" said Crispin, following him into the room. It didn’t look like he’d brought the rest of the police force with him, but Crispin didn’t think this was a social call either.

"I got to thinking, perhaps we can do each other a favour on this dating agency killer thing." He noticed the huge pile of food on the stack of plates. "Flippin’ ‘eck. You eat well, for a thin ‘un."

"Er, that’s because I work hard. Got to keep my strength up."

"Why the three plates?"

"I’ve no place mats."

"Just as well – you might eat them an’ all. You don’t mind me coming in, do you? I’m not interrupting anything?"

"No, not at all. Well… yes. Only my dinner."

"There’s nobody else here is there?"

"No, of course not."

"Only I don’t want to get in the way."

"No, Frank. Stay as long you want. As long as it’s only a few minutes."

Out in the kitchen, and easily within earshot, Candice and Roger craned to catch every word of this performance. The number of times Candice had told Crispin not to contradict himself when writing copy.

Crispin attempted to back-track. "So, what is it you want, exactly?"

"Well, I was thinking – I’m giving you the nod and wink on any developments from the police end, when it occurred to me that you are in a privileged position with the public."

"I’m… I’m sorry, Frank, I’m not following you."

"Get rid of the little blighter," Candice hissed to herself behind her hand.

"I’ll second that," whispered Roger.

"What we could do with," said Kennedy expansively, settling into an armchair, "is some background on dating agencies in general, y’know what I mean? What kind of people use ‘em, what the service is like and so on. Build up a picture of the clients or whatever they call themselves. Sad bastards, I call ‘em."

"Know what you mean, Frank," Crispin nodded.

"So how about you run a piece on Northwest News and see if you can get members of the public to phone in with their stories? See if you can paint a picture of these nutters. Any gory details, so much the better. Especially off-the-record confessions."

"Frank – you know, nothing is ever off the record."

"Exactly. Find out as much as you can about these wierdos and losers."

The sound of Candice’s teeth grinding was abruptly drowned out by Crispin’s mobile phone going off in her hand.

"Excuse me, Frank." Crispin was the height of casual urbanity. The only thing was, he thought he was going to wet himself. "Duty calls. That’s my phone, in the kitchen."

"Wish I could cook," said Kennedy and, as Crispin left the room, stole a mouthful of pork from Crispin’s plate.

"I can’t get rid of him!" Crispin whispered to Roger. "He’s going to reinvent Crimewatch, Police Five and Dragnet at this rate!" He suddenly realised that Candice was taking no notice of him, and listening with rapt concentration to the phone call she had just received.

"Candice," said Crispin, "if it’s another date, tell him he’ll have to wait!"

Candice hung up. "It’s Elizabeth! She’s in trouble. She thinks she’s got a prowler."

"Well? So have we!" said Roger. "Does she want to swap?"

"We’ve got to go," said Candice.

"I’ll not argue with that!" Crispin leapt to the back door, unlocked it and shoved the pair of them out into the night. Trying to recollect a Tai Chi exercise, he then slowly swaggered back into the lounge to rejoin the detective.

"Just one of my sources with a tip," said Crispin.

"That mobile phone of yours must be bloody loud," said Kennedy, swallowing hurriedly. "I could almost hear what the other person was saying."

"Well… er, they do say good policemen have big ears."

"Do they bollocks. You’re thinking of Noddy."

Outside, in the pitch dark of a damp Manchester evening, Candice and Roger encountered another obstacle. The gate on the side path of Crispin’s house was locked.

"Hang on," said Roger. "I’ll give you a bunk up."

"You will not!"

"Then you give me a bunk up."

"Piss off."

"Which finishing school did you go to?"

"Roger! Climb on top and pull me!"

"Whoa! Honeymoon night flashback."

A patent leather toe-cap caught a shin.

"What was that noise?" said Kennedy. "Y’know, these chips are a bit soggy. You should give ‘em another couple of minutes… There it is again. Can y’hear?"

"It’s… it’s…" Crispin shook his head, utterly bereft of a cover story. "It’s burglars. Probably."

"Oh, that’s alright then."

"Excuse me? You’re a police officer. Aren’t you supposed to catch burglars?"

"Jesus Christ!" said Kennedy, giving up on the chips. "If I went after every bloody burglar in Manchester, I’d never get any work done."

Outside, Roger and Candice had somehow managed to scale the gate. Candice thought she might have laddered something. Roger though he might have ruptured something. They tiptoed over to the Galaxy and quietly let themselves in.

As Crispin heard the familiar sound of his own car starting up and driving away, Kennedy took out a Regal and lit it. "Now, about this TV piece…"

Crispin looked in stern disapproval at Kennedy’s cigarette. "Do you mind?" he said.

"What?" said Kennedy, puzzled for a moment. "Oh! Sorry." He took out the packet and offered it to Crispin. "Help yourself."

End of Extract

Not Dead Yet

2008-02-18T23:21:00.003Z

I wrote this originally as a song for a friend who had just recovered from a serious illness - now it feels more and more like tempting Fate every time I sing it! On the other hand, if I don't post it soon... well, I might not get the chance!

Some friends say I’m on the way out
Won’t give them satisfaction by checking out
I am staying here a while have no doubt
And if you say it one more time, I’ll give you a clout

I’m not dead yet, not dead yet
Going to live another day, you can bet
Go down to the bookie’s, see what odds you can get
I’m older but I’m not dead yet.

I maybe flaky, shaky like a share price going down
I’m as good as a gold standard and as sound as a pound
I’m feeling kind of dried up but don’t put me in the ground
Get you wallet open and buy me another round

I’m eating at life’s buffet, the crackers and the dips
Spin the roulette wheel, I’m not cashing in my chips
I’ll take what life throws at me, chew on it and suck it
The last thing that I plan to do is go and kick the bucket

I might look run down like I’m going to the dogs
But I’m going to chase the hare, I’m not going to pop my clogs
If you think I’m packing in, well, you can go and stuff it
I’ve got housework left to do before I’ve time to snuff it.

You can forget the lilies and you can lose the blossom
I may be lying still but I’m only playing possum
Some think that I’ve departed but I’ve not gone for good
Put me in a box and I’ll play "knock on wood"

I’ve met some care professionals all so earnest
A funeral director and a taxidermist
My doctor says I’m at death’s door, he’s going to pull me through
I turned around and told him just what he could go and do

Some friends say I’m on the way out
Won’t give them satisfaction by checking out
I am staying here a while have no doubt
And if you say it one more time I’ll give you a clout

I’m not dead yet, not dead yet
Going to live another day, you can bet
Go down to the bookie’s, see what odds you can get
I’m older but I’m not dead yet.

I’m still warm and walking, still dancing and a-talking,
shouting, crying, skipping, jumping, laughing and a-squawking
So think about it, sort it out, get it through your head

I AM STILL NOT DEAD!

29

2008-02-07T16:05:00.000Z

How far would you go for justice? When is justice just revenge, and when does revenge become evil?

(Beginning piece of a longer story)

"The highest achievement of human ingenuity is justice."

Dr Hall looked round the lecture theatre to gauge the reaction to this assertion, so lacking in equivocation. This was the third lecture in the module, The Psychology of Morality, and so far it had been pretty regular stuff. Pretty regular reaction – note-taking, yawning, wandering gaze. Which were paying attention, which were thinking, which might want to debate with him in tutorial later in the week? Which might anticipate what he was going to say next?

"And the ingenuity of the achievement lies in the way we humans deceive ourselves that it exists."

Did he detect a faint murmur in the ranked tiers of his audience? He held up his pen, a plain, ordinary ballpoint. "Supposing this was yours, and I stole it – what would be justice? Suppose, on the way out of this lecture someone picks the loose change out of your pocket? Not very serious. But suppose that was the only money you had for your bus fare to get home this evening, or to buy food for the weekend. What would be justice then?

"Suppose your change included your keys. Someone gets into your bed-sit and steals your hi-fi? Or you live at home with your parents – someone breaks in, rapes your mother, kicks your father to death. How would you feel if a court said, ‘But the attacker didn’t mean to kill the man – he was sick and the illness, aggravated by the assault, was the cause of death.’ Your mother suffers trauma for the rest of he life, can’t go outdoors. What would be a suitable sentence from a court in this country?

"Would you take justice into your own hands, perhaps? It’s against the law in this country, but if the victims were your own flesh and blood, would you feel entitled? Obligated? Forced to take action? Justified?

"We equate justice with punishment. But how do you make punishment as great as evil and are we in the right even to try? And wouldn’t we be committing evil ourselves?

"This pen I am holding up was sent to me through the mail. It was from Amnesty International, a well-know, world-wide charity that campaigns for fair trials and just treatment of prisoners, and the stopping of torture. They were asking for funds for their cause. They pointed out in their leaflet that a pen such as this, in the hands of a secret policeman, could be used as an instrument of torture. To blind somebody. I will leave you to imagine the fundamental details.

"It is often said that the best person to define what is just response to a wrong-doer’s act is the victim. Let the victim decide what is just. If you’ve just had your eye gouged out, what do you think you might say?"

Terry felt distinctly uncomfortable in his seat. He was a mature student, which meant that he was a good fifteen to twenty years older than most of the other students on this course. He had chosen psychology because he wanted to know more about people, and, being a social science, he had been led to believe there would be lots of women on the course. He thought it might be a positive thing, to start looking around for someone to start a relationship with, since his wife had died. And, since he had also been made redundant with a fair settlement, and had no other responsibilities, he felt he should do what he liked. There was some doubt he’d get another job at his age anyway. He could re-skill… or he could just go and be a carefree student doing what he wished. He looked round at the other students and wondered what they were thinking. When he’d picked this particular module, "The Psychology of Morality," he hadn’t known what to expect. Maybe dry and dull. This was turning out to be neither.

Dr Hall, the lecturer, was continuing. "You see, it’s not just a question of ‘who is qualified to make decisions about justice?’ It’s also about what would satisfy the unjustly treated." He paused. "There was some work done at the Psychology Department of Freedom University in The States back in the Sixties. It was very controversial, and could never be repeated now, certainly not in this country, in this university. The usual guinea pigs were students, and they were locked in cells for long periods, then shown films of people undergoing torture, and told they would have similar things done to them unless they confessed to some crime none of them had committed. To make up for the fact that this was not a real prison – and to spice things up a bit, because – after all, experimenters love to push the parameters – the subjects were given adrenaline beforehand, so they would have a fear-reaction guaranteed. Then – when they had identified with and empathised with the victims – they were asked what sort of punishment the torturers should get. The results were surprising.

"A lot of the students actually came up with suggestions that were even worse than the things they had been shown – and believe me, they were bad enough. But in some instances, the pseudo-victims couldn’t say anything. They became hysterical. They started to scream. Some carried on screaming for several hours, until the adrenaline wore off or they were given barbiturates to calm them down.

"And that is my point. The only justice some victims get is to scream. All they can do is scream. They get nothing else. When you are hurt, you can scream intermittently for hours. But how long can you make a single scream? How long could you scream for, if you were in pain and believed you were about to die?

"I’m going to tell you a number. It’s a number that I promise you that you will never forget. Not when you leave this lecture theatre, not when you go home, not when you finish the term, nor the course. Not ever. The only justice these people got was to scream. And the longest single scream any of them made was for just 29 seconds."

(To be continued, possibly...)

The House With The Room With The Hi-Fi

2008-02-02T17:37:00.000Z

After Creative Writing classes, I swore I would never write another poem. This is it.

I was reminded of this piece by meeting a fellow writer who actually owns a Bang & Olufsen. Sigh....

In sixth-form there was a lad called Tony Ormerod
Quiet, curly hair, glasses.
Looked a bit like Buddy Holly
but no-one bullied, abused, threatened or touched him
For he was armed with the most venomous grolly

Could spit, split a reed at thirty feet
If it was an inch.
Knock a wayward schoolmaster off his bike
At a pinch

Didn’t really know him.
Was a friend of friends
but already I knew better than to cross him,
Then try to make amends

for vile sputum, rotten, rancid and mephitic
would have winged my way, asteroid-like
There was some irony to hear A-levels
Were his passport into medical school
to learn the art of physic.

Fermented his own wine,
Supercharged alcoholic
He drank as if in training
for his bedside manner
As, for days after, he was sick.

In Assembly the headmaster read
religious bromides from behind a lectern
while Tony loaded his mouth like a breach
and practised yokking from the balcony
during lunchtimes to see if one day
his range might reach the teach,
mid-preach.

One evening my friends of Tony
were invited to his house down
the posh end of town.
Well-heeled hardly came into it

The house was massive and plush
But, what took my breath away
Was a room that had one purpose only.
It was furnished solely with a hi-fi (and a sofa)

Oh what a hi-fi, mounted on a simple table
Speakers like wardrobes and a single Paschal light
Phonograph, plinth, elliptic diamond stylus
and the amp! A temple and its altar in its church
The house with the room with the hi-fi.
How I prayed. How I craved.

From that day on the thing I wanted most of all
(Apart from, with hormones coming to a head,
a girlfriend) was a house with a room
with a hi-fi, to listen to Ummagumma
And see Pink Floyd’s instruments where they lay
In the dark – See Emily Play
In the house with the room with the hi-fi.

I was at an impressionable age.
At 16, like putty used to duplicate keys
to unlock other people’s pleasures.
Now, in this age and of age, with CDs, DVDs MP3s,
music’s
in reach with ease.
And I no longer wish for
A house with a room with a hi-fi

but I wouldn’t mind having the girlfriend.

Touch of Creation

2008-01-26T01:31:00.000Z

Rock and Roll!

Steam lifted the nearly-triangular and flat cardboard box out of the back of his SUV and took it up the back stairs to the rehearsal rooms over the studio.

"Let’s see what we’ve got here."

There were plastic securing tapes around the box – not unlike Plasticuffs, Steam thought to himself – perhaps he could find another use for them later – before he took out his penknife and slit them apart. He lifted the lid off the box.

Inside was a swathe of bubble wrap and polystyrene balls. The bubble wrap contained an object, like eggs in a spider’s nest. He lifted the bundle out and began to tear away the wrap. The roadies would probably have great fund popping the little air cells later, between duties. Or instead of them. "Show me a conscientious roadie," Steam had been known to say, "and I’ll show you a wannabe groupie who couldn’t even make it as a bank clerk." The wrap protested and he tugged hard, shredding it away. Then, revealed at last, like Tutankhamun’s tomb to Howard Carter, there lay before him a treasure beyond price, the shining lacquered wood, ivory-coloured scratch board and gleaming brass-gold frets of a Fender Stratocaster guitar.

It was not the first time in his life he’d uncovered a Strat to the light of day. But the thrill of that first time, that magical moment when he saw the strings, the humbucker pickups and the fret-board, its pale, flesh-maple perfection under its slick patina of varnish, was always the same. It was like the first time he’d had sex, the first time he had stripped a woman and seen her naked, curved body. The moment when time itself held its breath, and he shivered with delight.

"Wonder how you’ll play," he murmured. He gathered the guitar up into his arms and held her comfortably close, like a familiar lover. Or a child, in need of comfort. Suddenly, he was gentle, cradling her, stroking the long sleek neck in an act of tenderness.

Now he was holding the wooden body up to the light, sighting along the length of the guitar like a marksman, armed with a weapon, checking for flaws. The barrel of the neck was dead straight, her aim would be true, he could go into battle safe in knowing she would not jam, or misfire or let him down at the crucial moment. When the notes would cascade like bullets, or shower like communion wine over the supplicants of the crowd. Tonight, during the show, the baptism.

Steam looked at the strings. They were Fender’s own brand and they were fine strings. But they would have been on the instrument some time at the showroom and would they would need replacing, and he preferred his own choice. This were Ernie Ball Super Slinkies with the 9 top E – he’d tried the Extra Slinkies which were an 8, but this was just too light. 9 was just right. He would put them on later, fresh like dew on grass for tonight’s show. But first he just wanted to check the electrics. He reached down for a TEAC cable – alleged to be so tough they were roadie-proof, connected one end to the angled cable slot rudely on view on the front of the body, next to the control knobs, the other into a small Marshall practice amp, and snapped on the chunky red switch.

The guitar became alive.

He caressed the strings, held down a G major . Amazingly, the instrument was almost in tune. Considering the rough ride it must have had from manufacturer to showroom to him. Steam tried a few more chords – the D was out – a riff, and a couple of runs – everything was fine. He just needed to get the Slinkies on and give them the chance to settle down – new strings always took a while to bed in and would slip for some time on the machine heads. Get the in-transit strings taken off and play in the new strings ready for tonight, when they and their blood-red and sunburst new home would start earning their keep before a live audience.

Hard-egg came in the room. "You got it?"

Steam nodded. "I don’t like changing guitar in the middle of a tour – it’s like changing ladies in the middle of the night. I wanna stay with the old one."

"Romantic bugger," said Hard-egg. "You should have thought of that before you trod on the old one."

Steam looked at his old sunburst Fender standing in the corner of the room. Already battered before the ‘mishap,’ gouges and scrapes in her skin, varnish worn right down to the wood on a fretboard that had had an army of fingers march across it, the scratch plate was cracked and the pickups depressed inwards. Steam felt contrite. "Yeah, well – I dunno, I was really drunk at the time. I didn’t know she’d fallen over. What’s that melon-head technician say about getting her fixed?"

"Solder-iron Boy? He’s out now getting new parts. I don’t think he’ll have her fixed for tonight. It’s almost tea. You’d better get prepped."

Steam picked up the psychedelic pink packet of Super Slinkies. "Already on it," he said.

The concert was a sell-out, the tour indeed was sold out, the album climbing high in the charts. The new Stratocaster had a lot to do and it didn’t let Steam down. When it came to the big solo, screaming and aching to touch a level of meaning that no words could match, it was like the guitar was playing him. His back arched, his fingers bled to please, the feverish desire of every note soared over the heads of the enraptured crowd.

A young man in the audience, at his first ever gig in his life, felt the pleading urgency and spirit of the guitar seeking him, stretching out to him. His skin rose in goosebumps, the hair on the back of his neck bristled.

Just then, as Steam tipped himself back to the peak of the final squealing crescendo, a solitary bright spotlight held him in its aura, the dazzling beam bounced off the diamond-shine of the Stratocaster’s smooth slab body and shot into the fan-mass to the young man, sanctifying him, in a blazing spark of brilliance. It was like God reaching out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The young man now knew what he must do – with himself, with his world, his life.

He must play guitar. A new guitarist was born.

The End

Shank

2008-01-17T10:15:00.000Z

Monologue by person dressed in an overall

Don’t ever be taken in by appearances. Don’t! It’s a big mistake. It could cost you.

Take a look at me, for instance. At first, you might think that I’m a labourer. A hard-working man, grafting with his hands. I’m not a labourer. Though I do keep my hands occupied. But I don’t have a job. Still less, would I ever have tools. They’re not allowed.

I’m not allowed any other clothes besides these overalls, either. Except for flip-flops. A ridiculous combination. Don’t blame me. I didn’t choose it.

If you look closer at these overalls, you may notice there is something not quite right about them. That’s partly what I mean about appearances. You need to look closer than your first impression.

Can you see what it is? This kind of overalls is sometimes called a "bib and brace" overall. Well, no sleeves, and they’ve got the bib. But have a look at the braces. See? Denim overalls, but no denim brace. That would be too strong. So we have these stupid elastic straps instead.

You can’t strangle yourself with a piece of elastic. At least, not easily. You can’t strangle anyone else either. They’d just struggle and get away. It would be hard to pull the elastic really tight and, anyway, this stuff’s so thin it would easily snap.

We’re not allowed anything like that in here. I’ve been here quite a long time. Never mind why. To be honest, I don’t understand why. I didn’t do anything wrong. At least, anything I see as wrong. Sometimes people just judge you with their opinions. Their opinions, your appearances – it’s all dodgy. Don’t.

They think I’m safe here now. Or rather, that they’re safe. I can’t get out, that I can’t hurt anyone. I’d never hurt anyone, honest. Not unless I had to. Sometimes you don’t have a choice in these things.

They don’t let you have anything you could tie something with, so no braces and no sleeves. Nothing you could hit with, so no shoes. Nothing you could cut or stab or lever with. They don’t let you have anything you could do anything with. Nothing. So you have to take, or, if you are lucky, find something.

I found a coin. It wasn’t… I don’t know how much it was for, but that didn’t matter to me. It had a far greater value than currency. There’s a stone step in the entrance way to the compound – they let us out there to exercise and leave the doors open on fine days so we get some fresh air and a bit of movement. There’s no way out of that compound, though. They’ve built it too well. As far as I can tell yet at any rate. Maybe I’m missing something. I don’t usually miss much. I’ve a lot of time to look at things. Anyway, the step. When nobody was watching, I’d rub the coin on the stone. I had to get it sharp. And to change its shape. Round was no good. I needed a sharp thing with a flat edge. One of the other inmates told me about that. Took me ages, to get the shape.

That inmate taught me something else. There’s an office attached to the ward. The door’s open in the day, so the orderly can see out from his desk. Come out and intervene if anyone kicks off. That happens quite a bit in a place like this. When the staff were busy, I used my coin to start undoing the screws in the hinges of the door. It was finger-breaking work at first. Took a lot of time to loosen those screws. But that’s OK – I’ve got a lot of time.

There’s another door out of the office to an adjoining office connecting to another ward. But it’s not used, ever. They’ve put filing cabinets in front of it. That was another mistake of theirs.

We go to our beds at night and the lights are put out and there’s no orderly at night. The office door is locked. But I got most of the screws out of the hinges. One night, it was really quiet, I just pushed the door hard on its hinge side, wiggled it, moved it around, and the door suddenly fell inwards, off its hinges. It didn’t take me by surprise. I’d been ready, and caught it before it fell. Got in the office. Moved the filing cabinets out of the way. The other door wasn’t even locked. Another mistake. Not that getting into the other office was really what I was after. Searched this office, trying to find stationery supplies that might be useful, but even they weren’t quite that stupid. Apart from the adhesive tape and some pencils. But the other door was interesting. There was a kind of carpet tack strip in the threshold of the door. There wasn’t any carpet, of course – the floor is covered in lino-like tiles. But the strip was there, held down with more screws.

Had to keep going back, night after night. Forcing the door back into place before lights on. But I got that metal strip, eventually. And, as the door was never used, no-one knew. I broke off what I needed, hid the rest. Not that it matters if they find it. I’ve got what I need.

Did the same thing with the strip as I did with the coin. Rubbed it on the stone. Always made it look casual, like the boredom of the place was driving me into delirium. Like you sometimes see with animals in zoos. I remember once seeing a tiger in a cage, just pacing, back and forth, back and forth. So I was just messing around, moving my hand, back and forth. Appearances. They didn’t know, under my palm, was the metal strip.

That metal strip is now sharp, a blade. Bound it with the tape into a bundle of the pencils, to make a handle. Now I’ve got my own shank, my own knife. I can prise things open, lift snecks, undo screws, force windows. And cut. Slice, hack, puncture, stab. I’m sure the tiger would approve.

They think they’re safe. They think I’m safe.

We're getting out tonight. Me and my knife.

So much for appearances.

The end.

Letter to Connor

2008-01-13T16:52:00.000Z

This is a real letter

Dear Connor,

SOME INFORMATION ABOUT EARTH

(A Passing Traveller's Guide)

Thank you for visiting our planet. We are sorry that you were unable to stay longer, but we know there are much better, brighter and more enjoyable places for you to see and we look forward to joining you some time. But, for now, our paths have to part. In the meantime, if I can, let me tell you a little about the place where we have to stay before catching up with you.

1. Jokes. Jokes are our way of coping with Earth. Some jokes are quite funny while others aren’t so good. Sometimes they have to be very good indeed, because being on Earth can be not much fun at all. Earth can be nasty, and this is our way of getting our own back, by making jokes about it.

2. Laughter. A lot of the laughter occurs just out of nowhere, like grass or an irritating itch between the toes. And then some the laughter comes from the jokes I mentioned before. If it wasn’t for the laughter, we’d just have to cry all the time.

3. Friends. Friends are great to share jokes and laughter with. We also share crying with friends. We were looking forward to sharing things with you as our friend, but we know you had more important things to do elsewhere. That doesn’t matter too much because we’ll still be friends anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about.

4. Time. Time is strange because it goes on forever, yet there never seems to be enough of it. Except when you’re waiting to see a friend. That’s one of the times we need the jokes and stuff, just to pass the time.

5. Pain. You won’t need to know anything about pain. It’s something only we have to put up with.

6. Loss. Sometimes we lose things and we cry, or we say, "where on Earth did I put it?" but then we just have to laugh because nothing’s every really lost, it’s just moved away from us for a short while.

So that’s Earth. Not very exciting really. OK for a visit but not a place you’d want to stay forever. I bet you’ve found somewhere better already.

Please wait for us and get things ready.

Away Day

2008-01-08T11:52:00.000Z

Many people have to travel for business. Best advice is: don't leave home... unless you have a good reason to go back.

(First published in Runshaw Writers' Write Lines magazine)

Just another commuter, Lizzy thought, as she stood at the barrier, collecting tickets. Everyone in London always in a hurry. Never time to stop and exchange pleasantries. Pity – he had a certain look about him she liked.

" ‘Morning," he said, courteously. "This is Farringdon Underground station, isn’t it?"

Ah, she thought, not local. "Big city, isn’t it?"

"Vast," he replied, struggling with briefcase and unnecessary raincoat as he passed her his ticket.

That settled it – definitely a Lanky accent. Like her Dad’s. "This is the wrong ticket," she said, patiently.

"How much more is it? I’ve got a job interview at half past. I’ve only come from Euston."

It flashed through her mind how her Dad had "got on his bike" and come down to London from the Northwest looking for work in the Eighties, and had never gone back. "You’ve given me given me your Virgin Day Return ticket – you’ll be wanting this back. It’s your Underground ticket I need to see."

He swapped the ticket for the Virgin Return to Wigan North Western. "You see, this job means a lot to me if I get it and I’m running late. I’ll have to be fast."

"This is the right ticket," she said.

He thanked her then sprinted for the station exit.

He sprinted back a moment later. "You couldn’t tell me where Saffron Hill is, could you?"

She told him.

"Thank you – must dash."

He was back within the hour. His pace was rather more measured but he seemed no less agitated. "Excuse me."

"Yes?"

"I – I’m awfully sorry, I don’t even know your name."

"Lizzy."

"Nice to meet you. I’m Arnold. Lizzy, I was wondering if I could ask you a favour."

"Well… I get off in half an hour so you might be lucky," she grinned. She was kidding with him, but wasn’t quite sure he realised.

"Oh. Ah. That’s jolly kind of you. Thank you. You have a nice laugh. But what I really wanted to say was – I don’t suppose by any chance anyone has handed in a Virgin Day Return ticket, have they?"

"You mean this one?" She held up the little card. "You must have dropped it before. I didn’t notice it till you’d gone."

"Yes, that’s it…"

Lizzy noticed that her customer had suddenly gone rather quiet, as if a final burden of anxiety had been taken from him. But not in a good way. "I expect you’ll be down South here again before long."

He hesitated. "I wouldn’t bet on it."

"Oh? Why’s that?"

"I don’t think the interview went that well. In fact, not awfully well at all."

"You can always hope," she said.

"I think when they say, ‘We don’t want you, you’re not adequately qualified and you don’t have the necessary experience,’ it’s hard to take it as a good sign."

"Oh," she said. She looked him up and down. He was about her age, clean-cut – smartly dressed, if a little crumpled. Did he really want to come and live down here? If her father hadn’t come South, would she herself have moved anyway? She could imagine Arnold, setting out that morning neat and tidy and eager, hopeful and optimistic. Now all he had was a return ticket and a long journey home. "You’ll be going back to Euston then?"

"With these Away-Day tickets or whatever they’re called, you can only travel on certain trains. The return is not till early this evening. I was expecting the interview to last a little longer. I suppose I’ll just have to find a way to pass a few hours."

She studied him again. "You know," she said, "I wasn’t joking when I said I was getting off-duty. Perhaps I could join you. How does Kew Gardens take your fancy?"

"I was hoping you’d suggest something, I didn’t like to ask."

They had explored the hot-houses of white-painted wrought iron and glass with their exotic foliage, climbed the spiral stair cases up to the walkways just below the roof, and looked down on the succulent fronds, while exchanging idle chit-chat that had been about nothing, yet told each everything that needed to be known by the other. Now, sated and not a little tired, they went outside.

"You’re a Lancashire lad, aren’t you?"

"How d’you mean?" Arnold said.

"‘Vast, pass, dash, laugh,’" she recited.

"What on Earth are you talking about?" Arnold was puzzled.

She burst into giggles. "No Southerner would pronounced them the way you do!"

"Really?"

"No – it’d be all ‘Varst, parss, darsh and larf!’ You say them proper, like me Dad.

"In that case, he grinned, "let’s sit on the grass."

"I like coming here," Lizzy announced, gazing at the parkland as if it were her own private garden. "Me Dad grew up in the country, so he said."

"I like countryside. Do you?"

"When I can get to it. Either here or Richmond Park. That’s almost real countryside."

He rolled on his side to look at her. "I suppose so. I’ve never been. But isn’t it still inside London?"

"It feels like countryside. I once saw a deer. Don’t tell me Wigan is countryside."

"I don’t live in Wigan."

"Where do you live, then?"

"It’s a village, outside. Called Appley Bridge."

"What’s that like? Is that countryside?"

"Oh yes," said, turning away. "It’s in a beautiful river valley, full of fields and trees. I live in a small old house near the Leeds and Liverpool canal. I bet you’d love it."

She looked round at the park, with its strolling visitors and pathways and its feeling of being ersatz – familiar, totally explored and well-trodden by countless feet. Not wild and strange and fresh. "Why do you want to move down here then?"

"Job, career, prospects… Don’t know really."

"You mean – it’s someone else’s idea of what’d make you happy."

He considered her remark. "You’re probably right, Lizzy. In fact, now you mention it, I’m sure you’re right!" It was as if an epiphany had befallen him. "I don’t want to move down to London at all! It’s just a big sprawling city that some people think is important. There are other important things." He stopped, as if another thought had struck him. "But you live down here."

"Why should that matter?"

"Well…"

"Yes?" she teezed.

"I wouldn’t like the thought of not seeing you again. Meeting you has been the nicest thing that’s happened to me today. The nicest thing in a long time."

"What a sweet thing to say," she said, making fun of his grave tone. Then, herself, more serious: "In fact – actually – Arnold, this has been the nicest day I’ve had for a long time, too."

He plucked a green stem from the lawn. "Oh, Lizzy," he said, mock-serious. "What are we going to do?"

Euston Concourse, early evening. People bustling over the black rubber tiles, heaving luggage, dragging reluctant children, staring nervously at the annunciator board, checking arrivals and departures.

"Tickets, sir?" said the inspector at the gate.

"Here," said Arnold. "One return…" he turned and took Lizzy’s hand. "And one single."

The End

Real Christmas

2008-01-03T23:38:00.002Z

Real Christmas should be magical. Sometimes it really is.

It was hard. Really hard. Darryl had lost his job in the summer. The redundancy had come out of nowhere, like a summer storm.

"We’ll be alright," he said to Stacy. "Don’t worry. I’ll soon get something else."

The summer ended and the new school year approached. Stacy said: "Can we get the kids new uniforms for this year? They’re growing up, Jason and Beatrice."

"Can’t they get a bit wear out of the clothes they’ve got?"

"It’s not fair, Dad. The other kids will make fun of us," said Jason.

"And I don’t fit this any more," said Beatrice. Darryl could not help but feel a tiny wave of pride wash over him has he saw his little girl was already on the threshold of becoming a young woman. That he could not dress her in the finest of fine clothes bit into him like a whip.

"It’s true," said Stacy, "it’s not a case of wear – their things just don’t fit – they’re growing kids."

It ate into the few savings Darryl had left to see the two youngsters properly kitted out for the forthcoming term. Maybe somewhere would have vacancies as the winter came on. He had worked for five years in the same company in the strategic planning department. He had to look forward, and have faith in the future.

Christmas approached, and what little cash he had left dwindled almost to nothing on essentials. It looked like Christmas was going to be bleak indeed. No fancy food, no decorations, not even any presents. Stacy knew the situation they were in all too well. What were they going to do? She and Darryl could get by, they’d had many a happy Christmas in the past, before this famine of lean times had befallen them. But, for the children, the thought of the disappointment on their faces was almost too much to bear.

Darryl led Stacy, Jason and Beatrice into the living room. "Keep your eyes closed!" he commanded, as he directed each one of them into position. "Tight closed… right – open them… now!"

Jason and Beatrice and Stacy all looked, and blinked in amazement. There was a tree, decorations, lights, cards… Selection boxes of chocolates and great big packages underneath – a great Lego ‘Dinosaur’ construction kit for Jason, a new hi-fi for Beatrice and a collection of CDs. Other, little parcels, small objects of desire. On the table, the food was stacked high, cakes and biscuits, liqueur chocolates, cooked meats and paté, a cheese board complete with a ripe Stilton, nibbles of every description. There were stacks of Christmas crackers, and not cheap ones either. Nuts, fruit, bottles of red wine, cans of beer, even a bottle of champagne. And, in the centre of the display, a huge turkey. On side plates, trimmings like roast potatoes in goose-fat, honey-glazed parsnips, pork and apricot stuffing. In fact, everything for a perfect family Christmas.

Stacy was open-mouthed. "How could you possibly have afforded all this?" she gasped, her voice choked with joy.

"I was in strategic planning," he said. "And I was good at my job. And I mean, good!"

"But where did you get all the money? It must be a miracle."

"It cost next to nothing – they were virtually giving it away down the shops. Happy Christmas!"

It didn’t matter that it was January 3^rd, that it was past New Year. All the shops were selling off their excess Christmas stock as fast as they could unload it, at rock-bottom prices. Darryl had banked on this. He had planned ahead. It was a miracle that he knew would happen, as it did, every year.

As the children set about tearing the wrapping off presents and pulling crackers to gales of laughter, Darryl said, "And I got you this – that cashmere sweater you wanted. Even that was half price!"

Stacy found it more difficult than ever to speak. "But I’ve got nothing to give you!" she said, caught out by Darryl’s surprise master plan.

"Yes, you have," said Darryl, quietly. "I’ve got you."

It was their miracle, even if some of it was cut-price. It was their very own, special, January 3rd Christmas.

And, with it, hope for the future.

The end.

The Meeting Place

2008-01-01T15:14:00.001Z

To commerate the re-opening St Pancras railway station and inspired by its Paul Day statue, The Meeting Place

The Friday evening Eurostar glided into St Pancras like an ice dancer, three minutes ahead of time, having left Paris just over two hours earlier. Jocelyn felt her stomach flip and her heart jump at the sight of the white, blue and gold train. It slid into place along the platform and sighed to a halt. This, she realised, could be the most important moment of her life. The most wonderful, or the most horrible.

Either way, she would never forget what was about to happen next.

Don’t go

Wait for me

She made her way from where she had been standing beneath the Paul Day statue to watch the crowds coming up to the ticket barrier. Dozens upon dozens of people, like a ragged, growing tide, began to drag round her. The business man in his smart suit, shoulder bag and lap-top, the family group perhaps back from a holiday, the young woman with a child, the middle-aged woman steering a trolley of luggage, the couples and the singles, like a billowing cloud around her, blocking her view. And still she could not see the one face she sought. Was Dominic going to be there, amongst them?

She was distracted by a cry from her right, as two people fled into each others outstretched arms, reunited at last.

"I expect you’ll forget me," she had said.

That day, she had just been to order a new tumble dryer for her flat. On the way back from the store, the heavens opened, great fat gobs of water splattering. As she dived for the cover of a taxi, they met.

"Share?" he suggested.

The rest of the hours of the day they passed together. As the light faded, Jocelyn realised a feeling of contentment, like she had never known before. She was thinking of the many days to come when Dominic broke his news.

"I have to go away – a long trip. Europe, then the Middle East, India, China and Polynesia. It’s all to do with work, liaising with local offices."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

"That – " she shifted her gaze from his, "… not what I wanted to hear."

"I know. I’m sorry. It’s my job. It will be the big trip for the company. Once it’s done, someone else can worry about the day-to-day details. I was quite looking forward to it. I never took a gap year from college. Now I’m not so sure I want to go."

"It’s part of your work. The thing that keeps you going," she said. Where was that from? "Where is Polynesia?" she tried to sound intellectually curious, detached.

"What is Polynesia? – That’s what I said," he told her, trying to joke. "I thought it was the ability to forget a parrot, when they first told me. Either that or being able to forget about several things at once."

"Are you likely to forget things?"

"Oh, lots of things. I forget almost everything given half a chance."

"Does that included strangers you’ve met?"

"Strangers, yes."

"So you could forget me?"

"You’re not a stranger," he said, "I feel I’ve already known you for ages."

"But you haven’t."

"Don’t misunderstand – I’m sure it will take ages more to get to know even a tiny bit about you."

"How long will you be gone?"

"About two months. Not sure exactly. Perhaps you won’t want to know me then. I mean, if I can’t wash my clothes while I’m away." He offered a remorseful smile.

"You’ll need a tumble dryer," she said.

Thoughts passed between them.

Don’t leave

Don’t forget

His postcard had a picture of a parrot – a scarlet Macaw. It said when he would be back. After that were the words, "Wish I wasn’t here."

Perhaps she had got the wrong date or time. She had washed the sweatshirt she jogged in, not realising she’d pushed the postcard into the pocket, until she found it mangled and shredded in the very same tumble dryer she’d bought that day. Somehow she had forgotten to check before she threw the shirt in the wash after her morning run. The date and time of his return had been on the card and she was sure she remembered them anyway. But what if she were wrong?

What if he didn’t want to come back and see her after all. They had barely had time to get to know each other. Time – something you always have too much or too little of.

The stragglers from the train were clearing the platform. If he had been amongst the passengers she had missed him. More probably, he just wasn’t there. He’d said he forgot things. Perhaps she was one of them. She was positive she had seen everybody who had got off the train. Even when she’d glanced away at the affectionate couple greeting. Hurt and disappointment pricked and stabbed at the back of her eyes. She turned and, slowly at first, but with gathering pace, she began to walk away.

Just as she hurried beneath the statue, her gaze fixed resolutely on the ground, someone got in her way. Before she could side-step, she had collided with the stranger. Why couldn’t the fool look where he was going? She stared up angrily into the eyes of the irritating person blocking her path.

"Hullo," said Dominic.

"Dominic!" She thought her eyes were lying to her. "Did you just come in on the train?"

"Why else would I be at the station?" he smiled.

"But I didn’t see you coming off the platform." She almost stamped her foot.

"You must have missed me."

"Missed you? Missed you? I was waiting at the barrier!"

"I did say, ‘beneath the statue.’ If you’d stayed at the barrier I might have missed you."

I remembered

I’m here now

He put his arms around her waist. She reached up to touch him on the cheek. She didn’t speak, just looked into his eyes.

"I told you I’d come back," Dominic said.

"I never doubted it," she answered in a whisper. It may have been a lie, but it didn’t matter.

She was right. She would remember this moment for the rest of her life.

The end.

Winter Song

2007-12-28T01:13:00.000Z

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

2007-12-21T20:37:00.000Z

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

2007-12-11T14:21:00.000Z

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

2007-10-31T13:02:00.000Z

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

2007-10-24T22:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-10-19T18:43:00.027+01:00

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

2007-10-11T00:32:00.000+01:00

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

2007-09-19T15:18:00.000+01:00

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

2007-09-07T13:03:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-29T00:17:00.000+01:00

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

The Hobbyist

2007-08-22T00:23:00.000+01:00

Short story of a young man brought up in a repressive household, by straight-laced father with a sinister, obsessive secret after meeting a curious visitor.

I’ll never forget the time I first saw him. It was a fine summer day in early May and Father was almost finished getting dressed for church, when there came a knock at the front door.

"Who on Earth can that be calling on a Sunday?" said Mother. Father glowered but didn’t speak, as he was still struggling to fasten his tie over his stiff collar. "Should I answer it?" said Mother, reading something in Father’s silence.

"Whoever it is, send him packing. It’s not Christian to call unplanned on a Sunday."

My Mother went down the dark hallway to the door and opened it, letting a torrent of sunlight in from the chasm of the terraced Aigburth street. For the moment I was blinded, nor could I hear the muted conversation from the door. The uninvited stranger was not in retreat, it seemed. Father, having mastered the knot in his tie, strode up the hallway, shouldering my mother aside. Perhaps I followed a step or two in his wake. There I could see a man, dapper, in his late fifties, grey hair at the temples. On seeing my father he raised his trilby hat.

"Er-oh, hello," he said politely, in a gentile, public-school accent. "My name is Tibbets. Have I the pleasure of addressing the man of the household?"

"And what might your business be?" said Father, his tone none too friendly.

"Business, ah, business. Yes, it is a business. But not in the conventional sense. Not an enterprise, not that kind of business at all, my dear fellow."

I could see Father stiffen at this trite pleasantry. "Tell me what you want and be quick about it, so the sooner you can be on your way."

"Yes, of course, of course. But perhaps not here on the doorstep. It is a matter of some discretion."

"It’ll be on the doorstep or nowhere at all."

The stranger, replacing his hat, gave the merest flicker of a glance in my Mother’s direction. "Very well," he said, a faint hint of regret in his voice, "but it is something only you and I should discuss. A lady," he flashed the briefest of smiles at my Mother, "might be, how shall I say? – disquieted."

Father bristled, caught in indecision. Mother intervened. "I’ve the Sunday tea to be getting on with," she said, diplomatically. "Excuse me." With that, she retreated down the hallway to the kitchen that lay at the back of the house. I, still in the doorway of the front parlour, continued to listen astutely.

"What is it then?" Father demanded.

"Sir," said the stranger, in his cultured, well-educated voice, "I have a certain – adeptness – a skill, if you will, granted me by a Higher Power. Or at least, I assume it is from a Higher Power, for I have certainly made no effort to cultivate it myself. This – adeptness – gives me a sensitivity to things."

I was wondering how much of this circumlocution my Father would tolerate before he slammed the door in the stranger’s face so that he could return to his Sunday habits. But the slam I anticipated did not come. The stranger appeared to have captivated my Father’s normally impatient attention.

"Things?"

"Things," continued the stranger. "Things that are not of this corporeal world."

Whatever I had expected my Father to say, what he did say surprised me.

"What’s that got to do with this household?"

"As I say, I have a sensitivity. I happened to be walking past your home on this glorious afternoon," – he paused to indicate the sunlight hammering off the brickwork of the terraced houses – why anyone should just happen to wander down our street, or any of the dozens like it in this part of Liverpool, was itself a mystery – "when I sensed that all was not well with this house." Suddenly, the polite flippancy of his earlier speech was gone. His tone became grave. "Not well at all."

I was certain my Father would have no more of this conversation. But I was mistaken. Still he held open the door to the stranger.

"What’s wrong with it?" he said.

The stranger looked almost uncomfortable. He lowered his voice a note and I had to strain to hear. "Sir, I must speak plainly. Your house is in habited with spirits. Many spirits. And these spirits are in torment."

I saw my Father's shoulders raise – surely now the door-slam would come. But then they sagged, as if he had been caught out with some accusation he could not deny.

"What is that to you?" he said, lamely.

"I have come to take these spirits away, and let them move on to a happier place."

"An exorcist?" I could not tell whether my Father spoke in surprise, derision, or merely resignation. Or possibly even fear. His tone was so ambivalent, so unlike him. His usual religious leanings were strictly conventional, the Bible, fire and brimstone, and that was about it. It was almost as if he had become a stranger to me. As strange as the caller standing in our doorway.

"A guide," corrected the stranger. "A messenger, a healer, no more." His voice recovered some of its earlier levity.

"And what’s your fee?" my Father demanded, more like his brusque, usual self.

"My dear fellow, there is no fee. It is a service, the use of a talent that I never aspired to. Regard it as a hobby, if you wish. What I can promise you is that you will not be sorry by the time I am finished."

To my astonishment, my Father said, "You’d better come in." I nipped out of the parlour doorway sharply and pretended to be busying myself before the mirror. My Father ignored me as if I were not even there and guided the stranger into the parlour, closing the door firmly behind him. It was more than I dare risk to listen at the door, so I have no idea of the conversation between the two men, but it was more than an hour later before the stranger and Father reappeared. The stranger seemed to be in the same, chipper mood with which he had arrived, though my Father was quiet, ashen in appearance.

"Good day to you, sir," said the stranger, tipping his hat once more. "I shall see you again within the week." With that, he was gone. My Father, without speaking, retreated to the bedroom. I did not see him again that day, and he did not attend church, as was his custom.

True to his word, Mr Tibbets returned one evening later in the week. This was to be the first of many such visits. My Mother, myself and my Mother’s sister, Minnie, who lived with us, were all banished from the front parlour during his visits, which we had to sit out in the breakfast room with no consoling explanation until Mr Tibbets left. We could hear the faint murmur of conversation between the two men, but of what they spoke we had no clue. On the third or maybe fourth visit, I heard my father come out of the parlour and climb the stairs to the bedroom then descend. Evidently, he had returned with the key to the cellar, the access to which was by a door below the stairs that was always kept locked. From time to time in the past, my father would disappear down there, in the darkness, maybe for an evening, or early in the morning before the rest of the household rose, but would never give any explanation of his actions. Indeed, even to ask of one was to invite at best a brusque and at worst a harsh rebuttal from my father. On more than one occasion – not a frequent event but one that would come around from time to time, I had found myself alone in the house – my mother, father and aunt would all be occupied elsewhere – and I had searched my father’s room for the key to the cellar, without success. I had absolutely no idea in what activities he was engaged whilst down there. Evidently, however, he had no reservation in letting Mr Tibbets enter this private domain.

After this first time, my Father took Mr Tibbets down to the cellar on a number of occasions. Always, after they had entered, I would hear the key turned in the lock from the inside and some time would pass before its sound was to be heard again. No-one ever asked my Father why he and Mr Tibbets descended to the cellar as there would have been no point – he never would have answered.

It was hard to gauge my father’s mood before and after Mr Tibbets’ visits. Subdued, mollified would be about it, and a contrast to Mr Tibbets’ own, which was on a borderline between conviviality and deference. Polite, cheerful but earnest, as if he were about some purpose of servitude. But what this purpose might be, my father never explained. And when he had nothing to say on one matter, he was wont not to speak at all.

This changed in an unexpected manner. On one of his visits, for some reason – maybe he was early – the door was opened to him by my Aunt Minnie. Minnie was, I realise now, looking back, a bit of a dotty creature who had never married nor worked. Aside from seeming a little simple, she was pleasant enough, sharing my mother’s good looks with an added note of facile charm, a kind of innocence. On seeing her, as I observed slyly from the entrance to the breakfast room, he seemed delighted. A smile of genuine pleasure, rather than the polite demeanour he normally adopted, lit up his countenance. My father, hearing Mr Tibbets’ arrival, virtually bundled him away from Minnie and into the parlour, where the door was closed with a bang.

After that, Mr Tibbets’ calls became more frequent, and he would consistently appear to arrive ahead of expectation. If ever Aunt Minnie opened the door to him, he always beamed with delight, exchanging pleasantries or something more – I wasn’t on every occasion able to hear. That this was not to my father’s approval was easy enough to infer, but was confirmed beyond all doubt, when, on one evening, conversation from the front parlour increased in volume and became more heated, climaxing with my father clearly exclaiming, "You are in my house to do your business, Tibbets, but on no account are you to have dealings with my family, especially my sister-in-law!"

Tibbets could be heard protesting his case, but to no avail, it seemed. Father effectively threw Mr Tibbets out, their business, whatever it had been, concluded. Mr Tibbets barely had chance to retrieve his trilby from the coat-rack. I never saw him again.

I never saw my Aunt Minnie again either. She simply did not return to the house next day, having apparently gone on some errand or other. The police were eventually informed, but no trace of her was ever found. There was nothing of hers missing from the house. But after a period of searching, the police merely concluded that people went missing all the time and there was nothing further of any practical value they could do. There was simply no reason to suspect foul play and that was that.

Time passed, and nothing was heard of Mr Tibbets, nor my Aunt Minnie again. It seemed indelicate even to discuss the matter, let alone suggest the two disappearances might have been connected. When my school exams came up and I got good grades that enabled me to read English literature at university in London, it was, I later realised, with some relief that I was able to leave that claustrophobic household. My only regret, which I realised too late, was that I had turned my back on my Mother, and her death from a sudden stroke, while I was still away, hurt me grievously. I should have kept in touch and I felt guilty. I had no such inclinations towards my Father. At her funeral, all he said was, "Brutal, but mercifully quick." There was some speculation that Aunt Minnie would suddenly appear at the burial of her sister but to no avail. I went back to London, without concern for my Father now living alone in the empty, draughty household and I did not make any attempt to keep in touch with him.

I lacked any idea of a career. I started writing little pieces and submitting them to the quality newspapers and certain magazines and, to my mild surprise, they were accepted and I received payment. After graduating, it was an easy way of making money. It’s funny how you can do something once, then repeat it until it becomes a habit and before long it is taking up all of your free time. Without any formulated plan I realised that become a freelance journalist. Yet it didn’t feel like an occupation and the money, though adequate and pleasant, was almost irrelevant. It was more like a pastime. I had settled into my new life comfortably, when, one day in early summer, I received a phone call out of the blue.

It was the police. My father, with whom I had had no contact since my mother’s funeral, had died suddenly, a fact that had been detected by the milkman who noticed that his deliveries were not being collected off the doorstep. The police explained that the coroner’s office had been notified, which was standard procedure in the case of a sudden death, but would I travel back home as soon as possible? They needed somebody to identify the body.

When I got off the train at Lime Street I was met by two CID officers who said they had some questions. I tried to determine whether I was under arrest for something. They remained vague on the point, saying that I would merely be helping with enquiries, but the supposition was that, had I refused, they would indeed have arrested me.

"Enquiries into what?" I asked, and repeated the question when we reached the police station.

"Enquiries into how fourteen bodies come to be buried in the cellar of you family home."

Shock is such a short word for the conflicting tumult of emotions that struck me now. A whole series of questions sprang to mind at once with the effective result that I was unable to speak at all for several seconds. When I did, it was to ask what, in retrospect, may have seemed an odd question: "How long of they been there?"

"None of them is recent," said a quietly spoken senior officer whom I suspected of being rather sharper than he looked. "In fact, some form of embalming or preservative process seems to have been carried out on them."

Then he added, in a tone I did not like at all, "You were probably still a child when the last of them was, what shall we say? – laid to rest."

"Who are they?"

"We were hoping that you might be able to shed some light on that matter."

This detective took some considerable convincing that I could not, that I did not know anything at all of their existence and had no idea how they had ended up as they had. But there came a point at which the officer suddenly seemed to become satisfied. "The bodies are all male, men in late middle age."

A thought struck me. "Are you sure none of them is female?"

"A forensic pathologist has been over every corpse. Why, were you expecting someone in particular?"

"Of course not." I don’t think I sounded too convincing, even to me. But the officer continued.

"We were doing only a routine search of the house when we became suspicious. The floor of the cellar was bricked, but it was way too uneven and the bricks came up too easily. Much later on, we were going through your father’s possessions and we came across this." He produced a hard-backed note book, the sort that had that curious cobweb-like pattern in dark blue bands across the cover. Not unlike my old school exercise books.

"What is it?"

"It’s a kind of diary. Meticulously kept. The first entry relates to an incident that occurred while you, your Mother and your Aunt were all out. He stresses this point several times. A gentleman came to the door in some distress, asking your father for help. He was having some kind of attack it seems. Your father went to make him a cup of tea and by the time he returned from the kitchen, the gentleman was deceased. Your father found some medication on him, digitalis – it used to be prescribed for heart conditions. Your father records here," he rested his hand on the page, "that he felt guilty for not having checked with the gentleman first about his health before leaving him on his own.

"He goes on to say – I won’t go into detail – that your father decided to attempt to lay him to rest in your cellar – some kind of act of contrition - he says here – ‘a kindness.’"

"That’s odd," I said, dumbly, "my father wasn’t noted for his kindness."

"That’s the only thing you find odd?" said the detective with a curious stare.

"I mean, I – " I stumbled for words. "No," I managed at last.

"Well, it seems his kindness didn’t end there," the detective sniffed. "After that, your father committed a number of ‘kindnesses’ on various old fellahs that he came across, usually at the church mission. Chaps he identified as lonely old blokes who’d no family, no friends, generally fallen on hard times – and, of course, wouldn’t easily be missed. He used the digitalis on the first few – it’s related to deadly nightshade, of course – and when that ran out he employed other means. Then he wrote it all up in his log book," he raised the note book to my face, "names, dates, any other details…" he closed the book, steepled his big bony hands underneath his chin, "then stuck ‘em in the ground below where you were living." There was that stare again, as if he could see right to the very back of my mind.

"I – honestly – I swear – I knew nothing about this."

The detective leaned towards me conspiratorially. "And I believe you. Your father makes it perfectly clear he kept his private activities to himself. But, of course, I had to check. I think if you’d known anything I’d have got it out of you by now."

I felt as if I ought to thank him; then again, he had suspected me of conspiracy to murder, and, while I thought this over, the moment passed. Then something else occurred to me. "You say all the victims’ names are recorded – written down – in – in that book."

"Yes. Of course, we’re still checking them, but there were various personal effects that you father had also kept and so far they all tally with the bodies."

"There was no mention of a Mr Tibbets in there, by any chance?"

"Who’s Mr Tibbets?"

"He is – was – is – a stranger who came to the house while I was still at school. He and Father seemed to have some kind of business, then my Father had a sort of falling-out with him and threw him out of the house. I never saw him again."

"When was that?"

I gave a date accurate to the best of my recollection.

The detective shook his head. "There’s no Mr Tibbets mentioned in here. And the last body your Father laid to rest was some months earlier."

"There were no more deaths after that?"

"Not according to this, and the pathologist agrees."

When I got back to the house, it was after sunset, but there was still an afterglow out over the Mersey. Under the circumstances, it was rather eerie. Despite my long absence, I still had a key and let myself in to dark, silent house. The interior was, as ever, cool, the heat of the day had never penetrated those sullen bricks. I snapped on a light, a bare bulb, in the front parlour. What should I do now? It was too late to get back to London tonight. It was a grim prospect, the thought of spending the night trying to sleep over a graveyard. Yet I’d done it, apparently, for years.

Suddenly I had an idea. I realised what an astonishing story this was. I could sell it for a big fee, and live high in the hog for months. I found some paper in the old bureau, laid it and my pen on the parlour table, and sat down to write.

It was then that I noticed the trilby hat, hooked over the back of the chair opposite me.

THE END

Echo of the Mind

2007-08-15T19:42:00.000+01:00

Short story about a young man who has everything - it seems - except the girl of his dreams - a girl whose biggest thrill is deadly.

A cool breeze was just starting to lift off the Atlantic to give some relief at the end of a hot New Jersey afternoon. This was invitation enough to bring out the early evening drinkers to the Ocean Club down the avenue from Point Pleasant. Guy loved this time of day. He knew, as he rolled his Ferrari F430 Spider into the parking lot, that the women’s heads would turn. He would leap out over the door without opening it, and the gentle wind would just catch his expensively-coiffured shock of straw-coloured hair, ruffling it and making him look even more interesting. If that was possible, with his tan good looks, Versace jeans and the fact that he’d arrived in a diamond-graphite coloured car that cost more than some people paid for an apartment.

Dino had his Long Island Iced Tea, mixed just the way he liked it, with extra Sour, by the time he reached the bar. He raised the glass, already steamed with condensation, and took a long, satisfying drink before he spoke.

"How’s it hanging, Dino?"

"Just fine, Mr Richards, just fine. How’s things with you?"

"You beat me to it, Dino." He put his glass down carefully on the bar and pushed his Ralph Lauren shades up into his hair. "Just fine." He cast his gaze round the bar. "Usual crowd in here this evening?"

"One bit of class out there on the veranda. I thought you’d have already noticed her."

"I certainly did, my man," he said, with a twisted grin. "Just wanted to check I wasn’t dreaming. I didn’t want to ask you to pinch me." He collected his drink and set off towards the striking woman standing out on the veranda, sipping a cocktail and staring out over the breakers.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself."

Guy hesitated, as if tangling with a problem. "I know you must get this all the time, but – has anyone ever told you that your God’s own spitting image of Julia Roberts?"

"Happens all the time," she said, over the rim of her glass. She was weighing him up, he sensed.

"You’re not Julia Roberts, are you?"

"Ssh!" she grinned. "No-one’s supposed to know. I’m incognito."

He held out his hand. "Guy Richards."

Her long eyelashes fell and rose slowly before she placed a delicate hand in his. "Evelyn Turner."

"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Evelyn."

"Nice car you got there."

"I like to think so." Guy realised the parking lot was not visible from this side of the club-house. "You noticed when I drove up?"

"Yeah." There was a tiniest flash of her tongue as she took another sip of her drink. "I like fast cars."

"Maybe you’d like to get better acquainted with it?"

"Maybe I would."

That was the trouble with Ocean Avenue. It ran along the New Jersey coast which, at that point, was dead straight. So the road was dead straight. No reason to slow down, hold the car back.

"Faster," Evelyn breathed.

Guy liked to open up the Spider whenever he could – he loved the thrill of the wind dragging at his hair as much as anyone could. But there was a time and a place. Now late at night was one thing. But Ocean Avenue was not the place, with the local townships nearby and all, and after a long evening drinking. If a blue-and-white caught them, he’d get more that a ticket for speeding. DUI and he’d be in jail.

He nudged the accelerator downwards then eased back a little.

"Faster!" Evelyn demanded.

"We’re doing one hundred and ten now," he grimaced, trying to still sound calm.

Evelyn was laughing now. "Is that all? Surely this thing can go faster?" It was like a lover’s request.

Guy pounded down on the accelerator and the Italian engineering roared with delight. "There’s a red light!" Guy yelled into the slipstream.

"Jump it!"

There was no traffic, either approaching or crossing. Guy decided to go for it.

Just as they reached the point of no return, a car pulled out in front of them.

Guy would have hit the horn if hadn’t been wrestling with the wheel. He also toe-poked at the brake. The anti-lock would not have given up traction easily but he wanted all the control he could hang on to, and not to turn the vehicle into a sliding one-fifty mile an hour coffin. Rubber screamed. The car slammed into the sidewalk and tipped at a crazy angle, tires off the tarmac, before crashing back down. It careered on, snaking this way and that as Guy strangled the speed out of his mechanical pet, lest it turn and roll and bite him, and it finally slued to a halt almost half a mile beyond the intersection.

He was dazed, exhausted, soaked in icy sweat, when he realised the beautiful woman next to him was laughing.

"You enjoyed that." He wasn’t sure whether he intended it as statement or a question.

She was panting like a race horse, just coming down, her own spittle on her cheek. "That was magnificent," she gasped, and huddled against his shoulder, closed her eyes.

"I used to come here when I was a boy," he told her. It was the latest of a number of dates they’d been on in quick succession after that first night and slept together. Always she wanted him to push the Spider to the edge of its capabilities. Artfully, for a change, after picking her up from the Ocean Club, he’d headed inland east of New Brunswick to some woods. He thought if he could get her out of the car and maybe just walk, she would calm down a little. Not that her excitement wasn’t infectious. On the contrary, it seemed to seep from her into him. Just that, sometimes, a little quiet was also nice. The woodland was a favourite place from his childhood. At the end of a path there was a clearing with a high, rocky point, from which it was easy to see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, clustered like blue-grey shapes, more than twenty miles away. He took her there now, and showed her the view.

"D’you ever go to the Big Apple?"

"I used to," she said. "I used to love going up the WTC, to the observation deck, and tell myself, ‘Hey – I’m a quarter of a mile off the ground.’ It was such a thrill. I always thought it was a shame you couldn’t lean right out over the edge, because of all the fences and everything. To stop the jumpers."

"Well, you don’t want to go too crazy jumping round here. The cliffs here are only about fifty feet but you’d do bad things to yourself if you stepped off one."

"Really?" She seemed to find the place more interesting.

"I used to come here with my Dad," he said. "He was more like a big brother to me than a father. We used to play a game in the Fall. Just a silly game. We’d try and catch the leaves as they were falling. One at a time. It was crazy. Such a simple game. But we’d have hours of fun playing it."

"What happened to him?"

"He died when I was a kid." Suddenly, he couldn’t say anymore. He wanted to say that his Dad was his best friend. He wanted to say after he’d gone, he was all on his own and nothing made much sense for a while. He even remembered how lonely he he’d felt back then. In his mind’s eye, he saw a solitary kid, quiet and abandoned with no toys and no friends and nowhere he belonged. But it just sounded corny so he kept silent, pushed it all back down inside.

"I can think of a game," she said, suddenly animated. She pulled her silk scarf from around her neck and abruptly tore it in half, giving two long strips, "Come here."

He was standing right next to her anyway but he moved closer. She took one of the strips, folded it over then placed it across his eyes, and tied it behind his head.

"What are you doing?" he said. "Hey!" She suddenly spun him round, several times, then let go. "What gives?"

"Hold on," she said. "I’m just putting my blindfold on too… There. Neither of us can see!" She took his hand and started dancing him around. "Don’t take it off," she sang out, "don’t take it off."

"What are you playing at?"

"Know which way your facing?"

"Not a clue!"

"Run!" She screamed, "Run!" She grabbed his hand again and dragged him into a stumbling trot. "Come on, come on, come on, faster, faster!" she kept yelling at him.

He staggered trying to keep up with her. "It’s dangerous!"

"I know. But it makes you feel alive! Run!"

He plunged headlong in total blindness, the ground constantly leaping up to hook at his feet. He could feel she was tripping and bumping into him but still upping the pace, laughing wildly. Something snagged his foot and he fell full length, she landed on top of him. Winded, he tugged off the silk blindfold, just in time to see her do the same.

They had fallen at the very edge of the cliff.

After that, Guy didn’t know where to go out with Evelyn. He had been really scared after the woods episode. He called in at the Ocean Club without making a prior arrangement to meet her. He was just beginning to relax, thinking he would have his evening to himself, when she arrived, carrying a purse, ordered a drink. "Come walk with me on the beach," she said. He followed her down the wooden steps from the veranda onto the sand. There was nothing much of any threat down there. Unless she planned taking a swim, in which case he’d certainly not join in.

It had been a blast knowing her though. He wanted to please her. By the time they had walked fifty yards and she’d said nothing, he found himself wishing she’d suggest something. Eventually, he spoke.

"You like danger, don’t you?"

"It’s a turn-on, isn’t it?"

He surprised himself by laughing. "Yeah. Yeah it is."

"I knew you did. That’s why I do it."

"Do what?"

"All of it. For you. To give you a thrill. You like a thrill, don’t you?"

"But somebody could get hurt."

"Of course they could. It wouldn’t be a game without all the parts."

"What game?"

"Like playing with your Dad. But it’s not a game unless there’s danger. Didn’t your Dad like danger?"

He saw a shy little kid in his head, without a Dad. "You didn’t know my Dad. Nobody did."

"Wouldn’t you like to play another game right now?"

"What sort of game?"

"With two friends of mine." She reached into her purse and pulled out a gun. "With my two friends, Mr Smith and Mr Wesson." He stopped in his tracks. She handed him the revolver and paced out ten steps. "How good a shot are you?"

"What?"

"How good a shot? You could hit me at this distance, right? Then I’ll go a little further." She took another ten paces.

"I haven’t fired a gun since I was a kid."

"Don’t worry. I don’t want you to hit me! I want you to miss. But you got to see how close you can get."

He held the dull metal object in his hand.

"I can’t."

"Go on," she begged. "Think of the thrill. You don’t have to aim all that near to me."

"I can’t," he said again.

"But I want you to. It excites me. And I know it excites you. Look how we make love afterwards. Isn’t it always great? Because you feel so alive?"

He hesitated, lifted the weapon, then lowered it again. "But not like this, Evelyn. I can’t do something like this. This is too much."

She stood a second, as if waiting to see if he might still take the challenge. Then she came over to him. "If you can’t give me a thrill, then how can you expect me to do anything for you?"

Something stirred in the far reaches of his mind but he pushed it deep back down. "I can’t," he said, as much to himself as to her.

"Maybe you and I should call it a day," she said. "It was fun for a while. But you’re not alive anymore." She reached out for the gun. It was as if she had already made up her mind. He didn’t want to lose her. Suddenly, another idea seemed to occur to her. "I tell you what. I’ll give you one more chance. If you’re too scared to shoot at me, shoot at them!" She indicated the gathering of people on the veranda at the Ocean Club. "Do you think you could hit anybody at this distance?"

Before he could stop it, an image leapt up like vomit from his inner being. A young man, standing outside a sleazy dive, his clothes worn to rubbish, knees through on old jeans stiff with dirt, his yellow hair greasy and matted with neglect. Inside the bar it was noisy and bright with neon, people having fun, friends enjoying each other’s company. Outside, the scruffy young man, alone, in the dark, and shivering with cold, his skin pale and ingrained with dirt. How he longed to have someone to talk to, how he longed to have enough money to share a beer with someone – anyone – and if he could make contact with female company, that would be wonderful. He’d feel alive. All he had, in the pocket of his rough jacket, was the Smith and Wesson.

"Go on," she said. "You can’t hurt them. They can’t even feel you. Go on."

The yellow-haired man raised the gun and took aim at the crowd.

He could feel himself squeeze the trigger.

The End

Sucks In The City

2007-08-10T14:26:00.000+01:00

(Short story that, for reasons explained elsewhere, has to include the following random word pairs and expression, namely: "axe lips, war stick, city hair, basket vampire, zip book, door vomit, pan party, banana lace, shelf buttock, nest beauty, specially for Carol.")

Karl was late.

Ironic, considering what they about to, and its emphasis on speed. Speed implied promptness. And Karl couldn’t even get here on time. Just to mock him, it seemed were all the stainless steel and glass clocks on posts down the surreal pathway he’d just walked along, like a deleted scene from Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Darren Taylor adjusted his suit and checked he wasn’t getting pits under his arms in the warm summer evening. He had spent his day in shirt-sleeves in the air-conditioned offices of 1 Canada Square and now he would rather be relaxing in front of the TV, his shoes and tie off, with a can of beer and take-away. Instead, he was standing around outside the huge arched glass canopy of Canary Wharf DLR and Tube station, looking along the waters of Heron Quays and wishing he could go home.

Not that it was much of a home now. Not since Carol had left. But he’d sooner skip on the DLR and take the five short stops to the small flat he occupied in Mudchute, rather than carry out the frankly stressful undertaking Karl had suggested. Or insisted on, to be more accurate. "You’ll love it, man," he’d said. "I never miss it." Where the Devil was he?

Darren was within seconds of chucking the whole idea, when he heard Karl’s inimitable and somewhat irritating greeting. "DT! Sorry I’m late, buddy, but just had to clinch a final deal for the week-end. Nothing like making a small fortune to set you up for an evening out. How about yourself – close on anything good today?"

"I may I lost the company millions again – I don’t think I understand any of this business." Darren realised he was talking to himself – Karl was already setting off across the concourse towards their destination for the evening, The Merchant Banker on Grime Street, south of the Quays. That was the official name of the bar, but everyone who worked in Canary Wharf knew it as The Muck and Brass or simply Grimy’s. This was probably after someone had pointed out that "merchant banker" was rhyming slang for something else in the rest of London, especially to the indigenous residents of the East End, where the two city slickers worked.

Darren hurried to keep pace with Karl. "I’d rather have had a shower and changed before coming out," he said, struggling to keep up.

"Nonsense!" said Karl. "You want to catch everyone while there’ll still on a high from doing business."

"I don’t feel on much of a high."

Again Karl wasn’t listening. "Striking fast is the whole point of the battle, buddy. Knock ‘em off their feet before they’ve had time to have second thoughts."

"Battle?"

"Got your war stick ready?"

"What?" Darren was perplexed.

"Your killer chat-up line. Speed-dating is like going to war. You’ve got to make split-second decisions. It’s hard, it’s aggressive and you’ve got strike fast. Your war stick is a killer chat-up line in the dating battle – sticks the prey like a butterfly in a display case for you to enjoy at leisure."

"I thought we were going out to meet some girls, not to kill them."

"Of course not," said Karl. "Take a few prisoners perhaps. That’s why you need a good chat up line. You’ll learn, buddy. Might take you a bit of practice before you hit on one that suits you. Just don’t use the one I tried when I first started."

"What was that?"

"You won’t believe this." Karl suddenly halted and turned to face him, as if confessing to a long-redeemed misdemeanour. "I used to say, ‘Your eyes match my duvet.’ Nearly got me slung out of the place."

"It isn’t very subtle," said Darren.

Karl still appeared not to hear him. "No use at all," he nudged shoulders with Darren. "It’s speed-dating. You’ve got to be much more direct than that! Here we are." Karl took another step, then halted again, just outside the entrance of Grimy’s. "One last thing – door vomit."

"I beg your pardon?"

"If you’ve got any emotional baggage in your guts, buddy, chuck it up now and leave it at door."

"So best not to think about Carol."

"This is specially for Carol. After all, DT, she walked out on you. This is where you get your own back. You go in there with ‘rebound’ written all over your face like that, the lassies will spot it a mile away and never come near. Come on."

They plunged into the bar of gleaming glass and chrome, and vicious Budweiser neon. Darren sometimes wondered if the architects of Canary Wharf had simply forgotten the existence of dark timber and its calming grandeur. Perhaps he wasn’t a city slicker at all. Maybe he should be a labourer on a farm or something. Before he could speak, Karl had thrust a bottle American beer in his hand when he’d far rather had had a pint of bitter. "I’ve already paid for our tickets. We’ve got about 15 minutes before the off, let the latecomers straggle in. Gives you time to loosen up and absorb the atmosphere."

"What atmosphere?"

"Just take a few deep breaths," said Karl – all too literal and missing the point. Just about to meet someone – several someones in fact – that could be that special person – "

" – or persons – "

" or persons," Karl agreed, "in the rest of your life. Which is about to start now. Prepare to get cooking!"

"Cooking?"

"Cooking in Life’s Take-Away. The wok of human relationships – it’s stir-fry time in the pan party of pulling. Time to get sizzling. And, if you feel yourself losing your bottle – well, just buy another bottle, one for you and one for her, some tart-fuel or one of those huge great goblets of wine the size of a bucket. Of course, you may end up with a six-pinter at the end of the evening if you can’t see straight, but that’s all part of the game.

"You’re such a romantic."

"That’s my man. It’s a good idea to have some kind of game-plan – think of the sort of woman you want to go for. Don’t waste your time with anyone who’s not your sort."

"How do you tell which is which?"

"I’ll give you a run-down of the different species and how to spot them. City hair means a Power Girl working in the Square Mile or Canary Wharf – probably worth a few quid but she will expect you to be the same. Basket vampire – looks cute as a kitten but get her home and she’ll expect you as her new S.O. – that’s Significant Other – to be a meal ticket on the gravy train for life. When they’ve got something frilly and colourful showing above their business suit, that’s a spot of banana lace – one bit of female decoration on androgynous City clothing to suggest ‘I am a girlie, really.’ Though for goodness’ sake, don’t call her that or she’ll freeze your assets off in a flash. Beware axe lips also. Not to be confused with ‘wax lips.’ They look DDG – "

"Drop dead gorgeous?"

"You’re getting the hang of it – and as kissable as they come, but you disappoint one of them…

"And they’ll chop you down with a sentence."

"With a word, buddy, with a word. Lastly, beware the nest beauty. Pretty as a picture, but all they want to do is set up home somewhere – have you picking out fabrics and deciding on colour schemes before you can say ‘Where’s my slippers?’ Unless that’s your type, of course…" Karl let the statement hang in the air like a question. However, Darren refused to speak. "Sometimes wondered if that’s what you thought Carol might become."

"Really?" Darren was surprised.

"Never would have happened with Carol, though, DT."

"Why not?"

"She was a Power Girl, if I’m any judge. If you thought she was the settling-down-and-having-a-quiet-life-type then you were pretty much mistake."

"I never really thought about…" Darren trailed off. Maybe he had got Carol wrong. After all, she had left him, for some reason. But, on the other hand, if Karl was right, maybe he would have one day wanted to leave her. The high life didn’t really seem to be his thing.

"Ready for the off?" said Karl.

"Ready as I’ll ever be."

"OK, here’s the rules. Here’s your ticket. This let’s you into the Enterprise Lounge. When the hooter goes, you’ve got five minutes. Go and talk to the nearest available female and see how you go. It’s alright to take notes, because by the end of the evening, the faces may have become a bit of a blur. She’ll be doing the same, probably, or putting you in her zip book – that’s her PDA –"

"Personal Digital Assistant?"

"That’s right. Probably a Blackberry or something similar. Replaces the old ‘little black book.’ You want to get your mobile number and email address in there as fast as you can. Likewise, you want to get her contact details – assuming you’re interested – and mark how attractive she is as you go."

"Why don’t I just give her marks out of ten?" Darren remarked, dryly.

"Excellent! That’s what I do. Then at the end of five minutes, the hooter goes and you move on to the next filly, and so on. By the end of the evening, you see how many you’ve got, rank them in order and start giving ‘em calls over the week-end."

"Wonderful."

"If we cross paths as we circulate, we can have a quick check on numbers." Karl nudged Darren’s shoulder. "Just hope we don’t go for the same ones, eh?" At that moment the hooter sounded. "Here we go! Catch you on the other side."

Darren had to tackle his demons. The demons of shyness, self-doubt and simply not knowing what he was doing. What was the killer line he was supposed to come out with? A lady with city hair approached him. Therefore he had to speak.

"Hello."

"Hello"

(Going well.)

"Your eyes match…" He broke off. This was not going well.

"Of course they match, you rude little sod! How dare you!"

The blonde goose-stepped off. No wonder they called it speed-dating. From his first seeing her to her disappearing forever had taken eleven seconds. He needed another drink. At the bar, a raven-headed woman was ordering "a JD straight up, large."

"I’ll have the same," he called over her shoulder. She turned to see who had attached himself to her order, with a slight pout. "I see you like a stiff one," he said. Her expression withered to disgust. Four seconds.

Darren stood, pulling on his drink, feeling like a spare groom at a wedding, trying to spot any other female singleton he could approach, while waiting for the hooter that would toss the ingredients of the people-wok into the air again. Karl cantered past, pursing some brunette who, to Darren, appeared to be trying to put as much distance between herself and Karl as possible. "Isn’t this great fun, DT?" he yapped. "I’ve got two numbers already!"

"Bully for you," thought Darren.

By the half-hour mark, he had interlaced eight meetings with eight drinks orders. Things had only got worse as he tried to remember Karl’s patois of the dating scene. At one point, Karl hove into view, and Darren would have asked him for a little more advice. Instead, he got an idiot grin from Karl as he held up his outstretched hand to indicate the number, five, as he scuttled off in pursuit of some other lady. Darren had tried opening with compliments, which had been OK if a little predictable at first, but as the alcohol took its effect, he had started to come out with comments such as "you have banana lips," "I like your hair nest," had invited one to an axe party, called another girl a zip vampire and described yet another to herself as a war beauty with a face like a pan.

"I’m no good at this, am I?" He slurred wearily to a rather shapeless female, one of the few still left, and for whom the choice of a jacket in houndstooth check had not been well-considered.

"Talking or standing?" she remarked. "You seem to be having trouble with both."

"What’s the secret of chatting someone up?"

"If I told you, one of us would have to die." This was her valedictory remark.

At last, the final hooter-blast of the evening sounded, a voice over the PA announced the speed-date session was ended, and invited to people to relax. To help with relaxation, I Predict A Riot started blasting out from speakers in every corner. Darren screamed an order of another JD from the barman and slumped disconsolately on a bench. He had just about finished feeling totally sorry for himself when Karl showed up, Budweiser in one hand, and pen and notepad in the other. "What great evening, eh?" he bellowed, so close to the side of Darren’s head that his voice made Darren’s ears ring. It was necessary as Karl was in competition with Hard Fi wailing out Cash Machine. "You stay sat on the sidelines much longer you’re going to suffer from shelf buttock!"

"So you got lots of dates," Darren yelled.

"Loads!" Karl yelled back. "A great evening!"

"So you keep saying."

"What?!"

"I said, I’m very pleased for you. I didn’t get any!"

Karl took this in. "What, none at all?"

"None at all."

Karl abruptly slumped in an echo of Darren’s posture. "I’ve got a confession to make."

"Yes?" Darren wasn’t really interested.

"I’ve had a rotten night."

"What?"

"Rotten. I got none, too. Not a one."

"None at all?"

"None. Nix. Niente, nada, null points. Zero, zilch, the leather medal, the wooden spoon – "

"I understood you at ‘none.’"

"This was supposed to be a brilliant evening for both of us. A brilliant end to a brilliant week. Do you want to know something else? I didn’t close a big deal this afternoon. I haven’t closed a brilliant deal all week. In fact, not for a number of weeks…"

Darren hated to see a grown man cry. Even if it was Karl. And he was just about a grown man. "Never mind, Karl," he said. "I’ve got a great idea where we can go and have a good evening."

They slumped down in front of Darren’s TV to watch a Cheers marathon on UK Gold, battered cod, chips and curry sauce steaming in their laps. Darren yawned and rubbed his face with both his hands trying to clear away the images of the evening. "That was the worst best time I ever had."

"I can’t argue with that, buddy."

"You know," said Darren, surprised that Karl had heard him through his fingers, "I think I’ve decided. I’m going to pack in my job, first thing Monday, sell this place and move to the country. Maybe live on a farm in south Wales. Property’s cheap there."

"Now that is speedy decision-making," said Karl. Darren waited for Karl to give some half-wit reason why he couldn’t leave the city and become a country boy. But he didn’t. "Darren?…" Karl said slowly.

"Yes, Karl?"

Karl propped his head up on one hand, unwittingly plonking his elbow in his curry sauce.

"Do you think I could come too?"

The End.

(This story originally appeared on http://cadwc.blogspot.com/)

If You Think Your Tough – Try Saying "Cancer."

2007-08-10T14:06:00.000+01:00

Non-fiction article explaining a widespread but often not widely-understood disease.

It’s a disease that strikes fear and dread into the bravest hearts. It’s a word, even today, said usually in little more than a whisper, or not said at all – when John Wayne got it, he told a friend that he had "Big C." His friend thought that the Duke was admitting to having caught "the clap." It affects all age groups, from babies to octogenarians, both genders, all races. It attacks all parts of the body. It is sometimes resistant to treatment and, untreated, can kill. The word is cancer.

Even reading it makes you feel someone has just walked across your grave. More than one in four people will have cancer during their lifetime, and after heart disease cancer is now the most common cause of death in western countries. But "cancer" needn’t mean "curtains," and there is plenty of good news about this so-called silent killer. So, what exactly is cancer?

Is that a hand up at the back there? I thought not. Most people have only a vague idea what the disease is. Hardly any wonder – it’s not one disease, but a whole family of them, brothers sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and all. In a nutshell, most of your body is made up of many different tissues, and there are as many cancers as there are types of tissue. The tissues are made of cells which grow by dividing like amoeba (hence the old amoeba joke – Frank and Mabel Amoeba have split up.) Each pair of daughter cells is supposed to be identical to the parent. But sometimes this duplication goes wrong (just think about your average photo-copier) and abnormal out-of-control cells, that sometimes grow very rapidly, are the result. This is known as a tumour, which may or may not be harmful. But if is, it means trouble. There are also cancers of the blood.

Despite all the scare stories you hear, in the press and on TV, the precise causes of most types of cancer are not known – at least, not officially, by researchers in the field (who demand a very high burden of proof.) But the usual suspects have a lot of evidence stacked against them. Carcinogens – poisonous chemicals that are linked to many cancers – environmental factors, such as radiation – including sunlight – are all up there. And, of course, top of the list is cigarettes. Along with certain foods, drink, not exercising, not eating other foods such as fruit and veg, and others of life’s pleasures. Annoying, isn’t it? Some cancers can be caused by viral infections and some are even hereditary.

Which brings us to good old DNA. Back in the 1950s, no-one knew what it was. Then Crick and Watson discovered the now-familiar double-helix, the Secret of Life. Today, we can’t get away from the stuff, with stories about gene therapy and genetically modified food in the news every day. What’s the connection? Basically, DNA carries the genetic instructions for making cells. If these instructions get damaged in any way, cells go wrong. The amazing thing is not that errors occur, but that they are, relatively speaking, so rare. If the instructions to make you were copied from generation to generation by the world’s best copy typists, you’d have mutated back into jelly millions of years ago.

What causes DNA to copy itself incorrectly? One or more ‘insults’ – which is the technical term for exposure to carcinogens – may result in damage or modifications to a cell’s DNA. ‘Oncogenes’ are genes present in the DNA of every cell and carry out normal functions but have the potential to make a normal cell turn cancerous. These genes help regulate normal growth and development, but an abnormal change may cause them to produce irregular or excessive amounts of chemical signals. These may stimulate extreme or abnormal cell growth. On the other hand some genes are thought to be protective against cancer and viruses causing badly damaged cells to self-destruct. So don’t go insulting your DNA, if you can help it. In particular, avoid tobacco. Tobacco is a killer. If it were discovered today, it would be banned.

Treatments for cancer are improving all the time. Surgery can be used to remove isolated tumours but is sometimes not suitable for deep-seated problems. Radiation, which is a possible cause, can also be a cure. By focussing the radiation from a number of different angles, the tumour gets burnt to a crisp, while healthy cells all around receive just a mild toasting. Chemotherapy uses a near-toxic cocktail of drugs, intended to kill bad cells while leaving the rest of you alive – just. It tends to kill the hair cells in your scalp, which is why patients go bald.

Prostate cancer is on the rise so rapridly that it is likely overtake lung cancer as a cause of premature male death. There are several reasons for this, not all of them as depressing as this might sound. For one thing, lung cancer is falling as people cut back on smoking. Prostate cancer is more common in older men and we’re living longer. What is needed is research to develop a quick and accurate screening method, but here again self-knowledge is key. Classic symptoms include wanting to go but not being able to pee. So if you can’t go, go see your doctor instead. He or she will give a penny for your thoughts about you not being able to spend a penny.

Other drugs, such as tamoxifen, have been around for years and have a very good track record for stopping the return of breast cancer, so much so that it is being trialed as a preventive treatment for people at risk. Newer relatives of tamoxifen that work even better are coming along, but some are hellish expensive. No-one wants to be in the position of having to decide between extending the life of one adult or, say, saving one hundred children, but at the end of the day there is only so much treatment money can buy. One drug, Arimidex, has had extremely successful trials in the United States and is likely to be introduced shortly over here.

Some cancers are difficult to treat while some respond readily – especially if caught early, but by this we do mean early. So early, in fact, that you probably don’t yet know that there is anything wrong with you. The only way to detect cancers this soon is by screening – that is, people going for check-ups anyway, as a matter of routine. This is why there is such a fuss about extending screening programmes for a variety of common cancers. Despite the occasional stories about mistakes with tragic consequences which make the news, screening has saved thousands of lives, which doesn’t make the news. Some people are reluctant about going for screening. Don’t be. Think of it as an MOT for your body – it’s meant to last a life-time, but you can’t trade it in for a newer model.

That’s another thing about cancer – it does seem to have a fondness for bits of the body you’d rather not talk about. If you are in a sexual relationship, a partner can be very good at spotting changes in you that you might not notice. Oh, and it’s not just women who get breast cancer – men can get it too. They’ve got the same sorts of cells in their chest, just not so much of them. Men obviously tend to corner the market in prostate and testicular cancer, while women are at risk to cervical and other genealogical cancers. We don’t want you to ruin a romantic moment, but while you’re at it, you can give your partner’s gorgeous tits or balls a critical once-over. It’s all part of a healthy relationship.

So, if cancer scares you, avoid insulting your DNA, don’t smoke, don’t allow people near you to smoke, don’t go where people smoke, exercise a bit, don’t sunbathe too much and eat your greens. If you get the invited to a screening, for goodness’ sake go, and if you are ever worried about any part of your body that shows unexpected changes, tell your doctor like now. Don’t be afraid of mentioning bits south of your waist-line – he or she will know they are there from medical school – and it would be silly to die of shame. He’d be happier to put your mind to rest than for an undertaker to put you to rest.

Saying the word "cancer" might just save your life.

Postscript: There’s masses of information about cancer on the Web. Some of the information in this article is from http://www.cancerindex.org/. Another good site for much more detailed information is http://www.cancerbacup.org.uk/. Just type "cancer" into your search engine for more.

Cancer – some facts
Data from the World Health Organisation

In 1997, a world-wide total of 6.2 million deaths were due to cancer (out of a total of 52.2 million deaths). Leading causes of death from cancers were those of the lung (1.1 million), stomach (765 000), colon and rectum (525 000) liver, (505 000), and breast (385 000).
Cancer and cardiovascular (heart) disease are the leading causes of death in industrialised countries, in developing countries infectious diseases are the most frequent cause of death.
By 2025 the risk of cancer will continue to increase in developing countries, with stable and possibly declining rates in industrialised countries (partly due to screening).
World-wide cases and deaths of lung cancer and colorectal cancer will increase, largely due to smoking and unhealthy diet respectively. Lung cancer deaths among women will rise in virtually all industrialised countries, but stomach cancer will become less common generally, mainly because of improved food conservation, dietary changes and declining related infection.
Cervical cancer is expected to decrease further in industrialised countries due to screening. The incidence is almost four times greater in the developing world. The possible advent of a vaccine would greatly benefit both the developed and developing countries. Nuns don’t get cervical cancer.
Liver cancer will decrease because of the results of current and future immunisation against the hepatitis B virus in many countries

The End.

What is Quantum Mechanics – Reality or Magic?

2007-08-10T10:57:00.000+01:00

Non-fiction article about the unreality of some real science

Ordinary Mechanics

Somehow, the phrase Quantum Mechanics crept into a conversation I was having with a mate down the pub the other day. "I’ve no idea what it is," he said. I said that it was the most important, most successful, most far-reaching scientific theory ever devised by the human race, and that it affects everything around us.

"But what exactly is it?" he asked.

That is a hard one. Never one to resist a challenge – unless I’ve got something better to do – I shall try to explain the underlying principles on which the entire Universe works, in as few words as possible. To save time, I’ll chuck in a few diagrams. And no maths.

First of all, we need to back-track. What’s classical mechanics? A little bit to do with cars, it’s just how ordinary matter interacts – what happens when you push something, what happens when things collide. By "ordinary" I mean everyday-sized objects. A pool table gives loads of examples of mechanics in action.

Figure 1. The moving red ball collides with the stationary blue ball.

When the moving red ball has a sidelong collision with the blue ball, the blue ball moves off, forwards, in the opposite direction from the collision. The red ball moves the other way (bouncing off the side cushion, giving a very tiny amount of movement to the table and the Earth on which it rests.

There are all sorts of rules you can work out about these collisions. One obvious one is that the blue ball can never move backwards. Lots of tests would show that the balls always come to a halt eventually – what would happen if the table was frictionless? Other rules can be worked out about speed and direction, especially what happens when balls of different sizes are used.

So what’s Quantum Mechanics? It’s the mechanics of the very, very small. Is it different from classical mechanics? Very, very much so.

Enter the Atom

How small are we talking here? We’re looking into the world of the atom. The idea of the atom comes originally from ancient Greek philosophers, some of whom believed that there was a lower limit to how much you could grind up a piece of matter (others thought you could grind it up endlessly.) Those who thought there was a limit called the smallest pieces atoms, which means ‘can’t be split.’ There were more nearly right than the other lot, but not spot on. A typical pool ball is about four centimetres across. If you expanded the ball so that an atom was a few centimetres across, the whole ball would stretch about one tenth of the way across the entire Universe! So, you must remember, we’re talking about really small things here. This will be important later on.

It took a long time for modern day scientists (that is, going back just a hundred years) to discover that atoms really did exist, and it was less than a hundred years ago to learn that, despite their tiny-ness, they had an internal structure – they are not the same all the way through. You may well have been taught this sort of structure at school in basic chemistry.

Figure 2. Model of the Atom - a bit too simplified.

Looking a bit like the Solar System with a central sun and orbiting planets, even this model took some time to come up with. The core is known as the nucleus and is itself made up of still smaller particles, called protons and neutrons, while other, very light particles, called electrons whiz round the outside. For many explanations this model works quite well, like a model aeroplane. But it is only a model and a very simplified one at that. (Incidentally it’s not to scale – the nucleus takes up only 100,000th the diameter of the atom – it is mostly completely empty space – whatever that is.)

The first problem is that the protons in the nucleus are electrically charged and, like magnets of the same pole, repel each other with enormous force, so something has to glue them together. We won’t be going into how this glue works, but we will need to consider how we can get things unstuck at some point.

The second is the electrons are negatively charged and should be strongly attracted by the nucleus. Just whizzing about isn’t enough to stop them spiralling into the nucleus, giving off energy, and all the matter in the Universe should just collapse in an instant and a loud bang. But it doesn’t, so something must be stopping it.

Light – Particle or Wave?

But let’s talk about something else here. Light is energy that flies across space from any glowing object. Some folk speculated that it must travel instantly from place to place, but that wouldn’t explain why my hand casts a shadow on the wall when I shine a light at it – the light must hit my hand before the wall so light’s speed must be finite (though still very fast.) Sir Isaac Newton thought light, too, might be little particles, though he doesn’t seem to have tested this; perhaps he was too busy working out how gravity works. Other people did experiments later that proved light was a wave. How do you do this? Imagine waves on a pond striking a barrier that has two narrow gaps in it. Waves pass through the gaps in an orderly fashion spreading out till they hit the shore of our pond.

Figure 3. Two lots of waves interfere with each other.

Where two crests, from the two lots of waves, hit the shore together, we get an even higher crest. Similarly, where two troughs meet, we get a deeper trough. We can show the places on the shore with the biggest waves as white bars. Where a wave and a trough meet, they cancel each other out and we get little wave activity, which we show as dark bars. Overall we get an alternating pattern of great activity and quietness which is called an interference pattern. It is a characteristic of anything than travels in waves.

Experiments carried out projecting light though a blind with slits, then on to a screen, reveal interference patterns. This simply cannot happen with particles so light must be a wave. In fact light waves, radio waves, microwaves, x-rays and gamma rays are the same sort of thing, just with different wave lengths. But they are definitely waves, not particles. (You try dropping blobs of putty – particles – through two different holes in the floor and you will not get an interference pattern, just two piles of putty.)

There was just one problem with this. Some experiments with light only work if you assume light is made of particles. When talking about light as particles it is usual to call them photons. One example is the way things glow; classical physics expects hot things to glow with as much energy as possible in one go – this means every hot thing should look violet. But we all know things glow red, then yellow as they get hotter. (This is known as black-body radiation, and the classical, wrong answer as the ultraviolet catastrophe.) Another example is that you can knock electrons – particles – out of atoms. This is why some metals give off electricity when light is shone on them. It’s called the photoelectric effect and is used in light meters in photography, amongst other uses. You simply cannot explain the photoelectric effect (or any of the other experiments) if light is a wave. So it must be a particle. But it also must be a wave to explain interference patterns. What the devil is going on?

It gets worse. Once you can get electrons – particles – flying through space you can project them through slits and on to screens. And you get interference patterns.

This turns out to be true for other particles – whole atoms even – that can behave like waves when we perform experiments to find waves but perform like particles we look for particles. The only way round this is to talk about wave-particle duality and say that tiny bits of matter and energy behave like wave-particles. But, I stress, this happens only at the scale of the ultra-small. Nothing we have on a pool table or on a pool for paddling in – the ordinary scale of things – behaves like this. In fact, we cannot even make an ordinary everyday-sized object that has wave-particle duality – we can’t even imagine what it looks like. But it’s how the ultra-small world works. And it has to work like this, otherwise the Universe wouldn’t work at all. Things get even weirder, as we shall see.

Quantum Leaps

Just before we do this, I need to explain just a little more of the photoelectric effect. Photons can have any amount of energy, from the absolutely feeble to enough to crack a nucleus. It was noticed though, that only a photon of a certain energy, or size, would dislodge an electron from any given type of atom. Too little and it didn’t work. Too much and it didn’t work either. In a similar way, and electron can be moved from a lower orbit to a higher orbit – that is, not knocked off altogether, just shifted, by supplying a photon with exactly the right energy. If waves had been able to do this, there wouldn’t have been a need for this preciseness. A chap called Max Planck suggested that it was a certain-sized packet of energy that did the trick. Only he didn’t like the word ‘packet’ so he coined the word ‘quantum’ – meaning a precise quantity, instead ("So that’s where the word comes from!")

As a footnote to this, the electron in the higher orbit has absorbed this quantum of energy, and is in what is called an excited state. After a while, the electron prefers to go to the lower energy state (a bit like things cooling off) into what is called its ground state. When it does so, it gives off a photon of light energy. (Emission spectra are explained in the article, Somewhere Seen Through The Rainbow, elsewhere.) This photon has exactly the same amount or packet of energy as the photon that excited the electron in the first place. No more, no less.

We’re are close to an explanation (admittedly not a full one) of why electrons cannot spiral down into the nucleus, or, indeed, give off (or absorb) other amounts of energy. Each atom’s electron orbits correspond to whole quanta (the plural of quantum.) you could think of two orbits being like railway tracks – your carriage can be on one track or the other, but not half way in between.

Figure 4. Quantum orbital tracks: an electron can leap from one track to another, but it can't run along in the gap in between.

Half a quantum (or, indeed, any fraction) is not allowed. So electrons can only be in certain orbits and can’t go up or down just as they feel like it. A quantum leap is the smallest leap an electron can make, and no smaller. People who talk about "quantum leaps" as if they are giant leaps (usually of progress) are therefore making a big mistake and look rather silly (to those of us who know what a quantum leap really is. Chuckle.)

By the way, the movement of large numbers of excited electrons is what makes lasers possible, from laser-guided missiles to laser bar-code readers in shops.

But can’t a quantum be of any size? I hear you ask. Well, yes. So there must be something about which orbits are ‘allowable’ and which aren’t. Yes. One explanation is that the electron particles have a wavelength as they go round the orbit. When an electron sets off it is some point in its wave. If it is to be in the same part of the wave when it completes an orbit, then the length of the orbit must be a whole number of electron wavelengths. If the orbital length was not a whole number of wavelengths, then the electron wave would interfere with itself and wipe itself out. Therefore only certain orbits are possible.

Figure 5. If the length of the orbit is not exactly a whole number of electron wavelengths, the electron interferes with itself and wipes itself out.

This might not be easy to visualise (and my diagrams, drawn free-hand, aren’t as good as they might be) but it shows again that, at the size of the ultra-small, things are both particles and waves.

Quantum Mechanics has a lot more to say about how electrons populate orbits – henceforth known as orbitals – in what are known as shells and sub-shells. This is too complicated to go into here, but in a nutshell, only so many electrons can fit in a shell and once it is full, no more are permitted (this is an example of something known as the exclusion principle.) This is why every chemical element has a different arrangement of electrons and these determine its chemical properties, what chemical compounds they can form and also why matter is solid (even if atoms aren’t.)

Another question you might ask is, "Where is the electron as it moves between orbits, making its quantum jump?" That’s a good question (which means I don’t know the answer.) But things are going to get so much weirder it doesn’t really matter. It turns out, in the quantum world, we can’t really tell where anything is.

Uncertainty

Obviously, finding out anything about things so small must be difficult – where they are, how fast they are going, for example. It turns out, however, that it is not difficult, it is absolutely impossible. In the normal, pool-table world, we might be able to say exactly where a ball is; we might also be able to say how fast it is moving. With quantum objects, these properties simply do not exist. Many physics books describe this problem incorrectly; they suggest something like this: if you have a glass of hot water that you want to measure the temperature of and you put a cold thermometer into it, then the result you get (after waiting a while) is the temperature of the water after the thermometer has cooled it down and that therefore the measurement is inaccurate. But we could allow for this – either by estimating what effect the thermometer’s glass has on the water or by using such a tiny thermometer it would make very little difference. This implies that, if only we could develop measuring instruments delicate and sensitive enough, we could measure and electron’s position, or speed. This is absolutely not so, because these things do not exist. Not even the electron ‘knows’ where it is or how fast it is going.

If this sounds bizarre, then that’s because it is. An electron doesn’t have a position we can measure any more than a field has an area you can get just by measuring the length of one side. Length is measured in metres, area in square-metres – two similar sounding, but completely different units. You may as well try to weigh something in degrees Celsius.

What the electron ‘knows’ – and then only approximately – is it’s position-momentum. Momentum is just speed times weight; if you want twice the momentum, you either go twice as fast, or get twice as heavy. This is one of the few examples where ordinary mechanics is exactly like quantum mechanics. However, to simplify things: if we are talking about electrons, they all weigh the same so we can just think about the speed. Even so, an electron has position-speed and you can only measure the two things together as if they were one. And, even then, you can’t know what this is, exactly.

Imagine, for a moment, taking a photograph of a rapidly moving racing car. When you look at the picture, all you see is a long, streaky blur. If you know the length of the exposure at which you took the photo, you could estimate, from the length of the blur, how fast the car was moving. But you can’t say exactly where the car is because it isn’t at any one fixed point in the photo. So you try again, this time with a much shorter exposure. Now, you may get a much sharper picture – one with only a tiny amount of blur, and with the car at apparently, more or less, one position.

But you can no longer say how fast the car is moving.

The more you pin down position, the less you know about speed. The more you know about speed, the less you know about position. But this is still not the end of it. In the quantum world, no matter which way you do it, you cannot get an exact measure of position-momentum. This is not because of the limits of your instruments but because there is a limit to how exact this double property is. It’s like an exactness speed limit. The man who discovered this, Werner Heisenberg, called it Unbestimmtheit. This is always translated into English as Uncertainty, but an alternative might be Inexactitude. Don’t ask why the Universe is like this in the ultra small, it just is. If you imagine the Universe to be like a map with grid lines, then there is just a bottom limit to how close the grid lines are drawn together. (It sounds a bit like the Greeks who thought there was a limit below which it is impossible to split matter.)

I said position-momentum is a double-barrelled property. This means that you are entitled to try to measure the position of something as accurately as you like. But, like car in the photo, you will know less about its speed. Measure its speed with great accuracy, and you lose the position. The position and the momentum multiplied together can never be more accurate than the quantum limit. This limit is a number that even has a name – it is known as Planck’s Constant (remember him?) It’s an exceedingly small number which is why it only is noticeable with ultra tiny things. Pool balls and cars don’t count, so we don’t notice what a crazy, fuzzy place the Universe is.

So who cares? If it’s only a problem with the ultra-tiny, how can it affect us? Well, it does, when we start using quantum mechanics to work out how the world works, chemicals, light-bulbs, people and so on. As we shall see.

There is another double-barrelled property that involves the Uncertainly Principle. This is energy-time. In a system, as scientists like to call it, there can be a certain amount of energy and the rules state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so this amount is fixed. But what the Uncertainty Principle says is that a system can have more energy, providing it is only for a very short time, because of the limit on certainty. The more extra energy you want, the shorter the time. Again, the ‘system’ doesn’t ‘know’ how much energy its got for a very brief interval. Or it can have just a tiny bit more energy for a longer interval and still not know.

This is a bit like having an account at a bank which checks your balance at the end of the day. If you withdraw more money than you have actually got in the morning, so long as you get it back by afternoon, the bank never knows. For argument’s sake, imagine the bank is a little more cautious with large withdrawals. If you take out a very large sum, then the bank double checks your account, at the end of the day and also at lunchtime. But if you get the money back before then, the bank is none the wiser.

Does the Universe really act in this balmy, irresponsible way? Oh, yes! Can we tell? Sure we can. The Sun wouldn’t burn and atom bombs wouldn’t explode without it.

However, this is still not the end of the weirdness. Because, it turns out, that, in a sense, nothing really exists at all! That is, nothing exists, until we decide to take a look at it. Then, depending on what we are looking for, things spring into existence. For more surprises, read on.

Quantum Unreality

Remember when I said we find waves when we look for waves and particles when we look for particles? What happens if we cheat?

The double slit experiment is looking for waves (that form interference patterns) and, hey presto – we get ‘em. What happens if we put some sort of particle detector at one of the slits?

Figure 6. Looking for waves and particles. What happens?

The answer is more incredible than you can possible imagine.

Remember, a wave can spread out and go through both slits. But a particle can go through only one slit – what’s more it can’t make an interference pattern. Suppose we do this experiment with a source of electrons (an electron microscope would do fine.) It’s very easy to sneak an electron particle detector up to one slit, sit back, then just switch it on. And detect particles.

And the interference pattern vanishes.

You have to think hard about this. We had an experiment that was looking for wave evidence and we got waves. But the moment we switch to looking for particles, we find particles and the wave evidence disappears. We see a particle go through one slit. And, as a particle can’t go through two slits simultaneously, nothing, goes through the other slit. The really weird thing is a particle can go through the other slit, but, because we’re looking for particles at the first slit, it’s like the ‘particle’ knows we’re looking and so it behaves like a particle. How does it know, at one slit, what is going on at the other? We don’t know. But we’re sure it happens. Experiments prove it.

To get a feeling for this, see how it might look if the every day world behaved like this: imagine I am in Manhattan, standing on the corner of 34th Street and 5th Avenue – not far from the Empire State Building – and an event has just occurred at the junction on the opposite corner of the city block, at 33rd and 4th. I don’t know what it is yet, but I do know it can be one of only two possible events, and I will find out in a few moments which it was.
The event at 33rd and 4th is one of the following: either a fire hydrant has burst and sent a torrent of water (it’s a really big fire hydrant, you must understand) in all directions; or a taxi has just set off on its way to 34th and 5th. It can go along 33rd Street from 4th to 5th Avenue then from 33rd to 34th Street, or it can go up 4th Avenue to 34th Street, then along to 5th Avenue. In other words, it can take one of two routes to me, but – because taxis can’t split in two, not both routes. Just one or the other. A torrent of water can of course split in two and go two routes at once.
Now here is a funny thing on this day in Manhattan. Somehow, if I shut my eyes and don’t look to see what is coming towards me, I will be soaked! But, if I look up, then a taxi will arrive and no water will appear. Think very carefully about this. If I have my eyes shut and the fire hydrant bursts, water will set off down the streets. But if I open my eyes, the water will disappear on both streets and be replaced by a taxi, on just one street. Magic!

It gets stranger still. Suppose I have closed-circuit television cameras on both routes. If I switch them on, or even just one of the cameras on, all I will see is a taxi, or an empty street (which will mean there is a taxi going by the alternate route. But if I leave them switched off, then a wave of water will inundate me from both directions. Even if water had set off originally, switching even one camera on makes the water disappear as if it never existed and the taxi (which until now had effectively never existed) suddenly appears as if it existed all the time.

This one-slit-affects-the-other is known as non-locality. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance." I think this sums it up nicely, not least because the distance between the slits makes no difference – switch on the particle detector at one and the other one knows, instantly.

We can try another experiment; get rid of the particle detector at the slit and send one ‘particle’ at a time at the two slits, one after another, like someone throwing balls randomly at two holes in a wall. At first, it seems that each particle goes through one slit or another, but without the detector, we can’t be sure. What happens at the screen? At first, no obvious pattern is recognisable. Amazingly however, after we’ve sent thousands of particles through the whole experiment, we get an interference pattern once more. It’s like the experiment knows we’re no longer looking for particles; what’s more, each wave-particle also knows where on the screen to land – it’s even like it knows the past and the future of the experiment – in order to give a wave result.

What happens if we have the particle detector switched on? You’ve guessed it – we get particles – the interference pattern disappears.

A good question to ask now is – what happens in other areas of the experiment? The short answer is simple – we don’t know! Until we look, we can’t be sure, and when we look, we find what we are looking for. Again, it is like the experiment knows what we are doing. Our observation becomes part of the experiment! Our decision affects the result! Science isn’t supposed to work like that! Meanwhile, the whole of empty space is boiling with virtual bits of matter that come into existence then disappear again before they are detected by virtue of the Uncertainty Principle not knowing they ever existed.

The first work on the theory of Quantum Mechanics started at the beginning of the 20th Century. By 1930, scientists had done enough experiments to want to sit down and summarise what was going on. The result of this is known as The Copenhagen Interpretation. It’s not the only one but it works as well as any of the others. It was concluded that, in the gaps in the experiment where we are not looking, the electrons or photons or whatever are not really in existence at all! More accurately, they are in a superposition of possible states, each having its own probability, like odds in a race. When the wave-particles reach the screen, they have to decide, depending on these odds, where they are going to appear. Some places are more likely than others which is why you get the fringes of the interference pattern. But until they hit the screen they could be anywhere.

This is a bit like tuning into the radio at tea-time to get the horse racing results. The horses have different odds of winning, but once the winner has past the post, its ‘odds’ of winning become certainty and all the other ‘odds’ become zero. You would like to think that, even before you’ve switched on the radio, the results of the races already exist. But, in the Quantum World, the results don’t exist until you listen to them! What’s more, once you stop listening, the uncertainty starts creeping back in as if the race was still being run.

This is described like this in The Copenhagen Interpretation. The object travelling through space might set off as a particle but it travels as a wave of probability. When it encounters a detector at some point, this collapses the wave function so that one result becomes definite and all the others impossible – a particle at one place. To give a different example to get the feel of this, imagine a crowd coming out of a theatre. Some people may drive home, some may get a bus and some a taxi, while some may just walk. We can work out the relative odds of each outcome, saying, for instance, 30% will get a taxi. But, take any one individual, and we have no idea what he or she will do, just that the odds are 30 in a hundred they will get a taxi. Until he gets a taxi we don’t know what he is going to do. This doesn’t sound like the sort of physics Newton would have liked. Einstein didn’t like it either – he was prompted to say, "I cannot believe God plays dice with the Universe!"

No-one seems to have told God this.

We are all made up of matter that could exist in a superposition of states. And yet, we seem real enough. In which case, who has collapsed our wave functions. Who is looking at us? What makes us exist in reality? Tricky.

Is Quantum Mechanics Real?
One scientist once said, "It’s like our everyday-scale Universe is real, but the things it is made up of are not." Whatever happened to reality? Is everything all magic? Those are questions for another day (and another article.) Does all this peculiar goings-on – wave-particle duality, collapsing probabilities, and uncertainty about position-momentum and energy-time – have anything to do with us in the ‘real’ world? Well, yes, fortunately.

For one thing, it accounts for how anything glows (this includes radio transmitters, microwave ovens and x-ray machines too.) It also accounts for how the eye works, how photographic film works and enabled us to make TV cameras and digital cameras too, and makes astronomy possible, as well as movies and why we don’t have to grope around in darkness.

It also explains why we could grope around in darkness if we had to because it explains why you can’t put your hand through solid matter, or just melt into it.

It explains how all chemical elements bond together, so it accounts for all chemical compounds. This was particularly important in understanding the structure and shape of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, because without knowing its structure we wouldn’t know how it works. This applies to the rest of molecular biology as well.

It also accounts for how, in stars nuclear burning of elements like hydrogen and helium and so on can take place to create, ultimately, all chemical elements. And how stars work generally up to where some of them collapse to become Black Holes (though it doesn’t seem to be able to say what happens next.)

Again, Quantum Mechanics explains radioactivity. Remember when I said the nucleus is held together by very strong glue. It is, but it works over a very short distance – the size of a nucleus. Because the exact position of the parts of the nucleus is not determined, occasionally bits can be outside the nucleus – where they take the opportunity to fly off. In reverse, inside stars, the inexact position of nuclear particles allows these particles to sneak into the nucleus, making nuclear fusion possible and for stars to burn. Alternatively, you can think of the radioactive particle gaining extra energy by the Uncertainty Principle; either way, it’s known as quantum tunnelling and it explains the fission and fusion of nuclei.

It explains how electricity flows through conductors such as wire and not through insulators such as plastic (imagine where we would be otherwise in the modern world.) It explains what happens to super-cold materials that make super-fluids and super-conductors possible. These might seem a little exotic – take, for example, a super conductor – something that allows an electric current to flow with no resistance. If you put such a current in a ring it will flow forever and I mean forever. This makes superconducting magnets possible – really high powered magnets that are used in magnetic resonance imaging which is used in medicine to investigate the inside of the body and to detect tumours, for example.

It also explains how to use materials called semiconductors to make transistors – one of the most universal practical applications in the world. Transistors were originally seen as a replacement for vacuum tubes, also known as valves, in early radios and amplifiers. But they can also be used as switches and as such made ultra powerful computers that were also very much smaller and cheaper (not to mention more reliable.) Again, computers were invented first, but it was the application of Quantum Mechanics to materials science that made the microchips we have today.

Quantum Mechanics also accounts for lasers, both how to make them, and how they are used. When you look at the colours reflected off a Compact Disk, that is a quantum mechanical effect. In fact, when you think of the disks, the amplifier, the computer control circuitry and the laser in a CD player, you have a superb example of a device that relies on the application of Quantum Mechanics to make it possible.

But, then again, that goes for just about everything, if you look at it close enough. However you look at it, Quantum Mechanics is the most successful scientific theory ever and it’s here to stay.

The End.

Humans Make Rubbish Pets

2007-08-06T01:00:00.000+01:00

(A bit of doggerel about how bad Humans are for Planet Earth)

I brought me home a human being
They said it’s all the rage
They said that I could let it roam
It wouldn’t need a cage

Things started well, it must be said
Sitting by the fire
It claimed it had invented
Besides the rubber tire

After dabbling with steam
To drive things to a station
It then went on to invent
Internal combustation

Then it learnt how it could fly
And how to sail on wave
Now it conquered sea and sky
And how it misbehaved!

Having mastered half the world
Beneath its tiny feet
It started trampling everywhere
In search of things to eat

Soon the world was all used up
I felt such deep despair
What it had it couldn’t use
It pumped into the air

The world it started heating up
The other creatures suffered
The seas they started rising up
And woods and jungles withered

It gobbled up the fill of fields
Dug metals from the ground
And then it cast its eye to sky
To see what could be found

I feared it might escape the Earth
And tread among the stars
Leaving dirty footprints
Leaving dirty scars

There was one solution left
I could choose with a frown
To take the human to the vet
And have the sod put down!

It all could be so different if
Humans could be taught
The planet’s not for its amusement
A new one can’t be bought

If human being would just behave
Its brain says that it can
To use with care what’s free as air
Man sharing thing with man

So beware what you unleash
A pet’s for idle pleasure
If you release a greedy beast
You will repent at leisure

But in the end I’ve got to say
They don’t make too good pets
You can’t train ‘em – who can blame ‘em?
Just leave them at the vet’s!

The End