Jason / attracts the attention / of one of the hospital pathology lab technicians / by jabbing her with the point of his spear / Over here! / he snaps / process these before I collapse / and saying thus he deposits / a bunch of specimens from his toga pockets / CRP and FBC / from the bronze giant Thalos on Crete / U’s and E’s / please / for King Aetees / LFT, TFT and Bone Profile / for the hideous and horribly motile / skeleton army / I fought and diced like calamari / and… and culture & sensitivity for the swab / I took from the gaping, golden gob / of the ram’s skull yet appending / the Golden Fleece at my journey’s ending /… but just at that moment the door blows wide / and a helmeted Hercules thunders inside / his leather trousered legs spread wide / transfusion panniers swinging at his side / Zeus and Hera! The day I’ve had! / Take these offerings before I go mad!
The District Medusa’s / confused / but used to it / curses as she struggles to tie on a mask / past the rattlers, vipers and asps / ignoring the patient’s frantic objections / that he really doesn’t want an injection / flailing and wailing with his eyes squeezed shut / but / when the DM cracks her dusty knuckles / he opens his eyes so she smiles and chuckles / advances the needle but the needle buckles / okay stony / you great big phony / she roars / tossing the broken needle on the floor / grabbing her bags and kicking through the door / I’ve got a busy day and I just can’t plan it / when every patient turns to granite
Ray has the kind of face Disney would draw if he were animating an oak tree. A knotted, gnarly, weathered kind of face, smiling the width of his trunk, a songbird nesting in his hair. ‘Thanks for coming,’ says Ray, then turning stiffly on his roots, leads me into the sitting room.
And if Ray is a tree, Daisy is a deer – an ancient, other-worldly kind of deer, with sad pale eyes, uncertain footsteps and a wistful manner.
‘So!’ I say to her, dropping my bags and sitting at the other end of the sofa. ‘How are you feeling today, Daisy?’ She laughs – an unexpectedly girlish trill – as if I’ve asked the most ridiculous and scandalous thing possible. ‘How am I feeling? What a question! How do you think I’m feeling?’ ‘Me? I don’t know. You look well, I have to say.’ ‘Tell the gentleman about the fall, Daisy.’ ‘The fall? Where?’ ‘Not so much a fall as a slip out of bed. Onto your bum.’ Daisy looks at him blankly. But in the time it takes for her to turn and look at me, the moment has completely gone. She frowns a little, then fiddles with the cuff of her cardigan, muttering something I don’t quite catch. ‘You know about the dementia?’ says Ray, mouthing the words more than speaking them. I nod. ‘Is it any worse?’ He shakes his head. ‘This was a little setback. I think we’re okay, though. Aren’t we Daisy? Eh? We’re okay?’ ‘What are you talking about!’ she says, then turns to stare at me again. ‘Seventy-five years we’ve been married,’ says Ray. ‘Imagine that.’ ‘Congratulations! That’s quite an achievement.’ ‘That’s one word for it.’ ‘How did you meet?’ Ray leans forwards in the armchair. ‘I was eighteen, just about to join the navy. There was a fair on the common, so I went there with my mate Harry to see what’s what. Daisy was there with her identical twin Maisy, so we hung out with them for a bit. Which one do you want? Harry said. I said does it matter? I can’t tell ‘em apart! So we took up with each other, and there you are. Harry got chucked after two days, and here I am, seventy-five years later, still wondering if I married the right one.’ ‘How come she chucked Harry?’ ‘He was too cocky. Me? I was just the right amount.’ He laughs and leans back in the chair. He has a twitch in his right eye, which he tries to ease by kneading it vigorously with a knuckle. ‘Nah!’ he says, dropping his hand after a while. ‘I definitely married the right one. Didn’t I Daisy? Eh? I say I married the right one!’ ‘My husband should be back soon,’ she says, blanking him, folding her hands neatly in her lap. ‘Shall I fetch you some tea?’
now – I know many of you are wondering / how a PM so blatantly bent and blundering / could still be up here thundering / about public duty / civil responsibility / new possibility / gesturing energetically / his hair photogenically / awry / flexing his fingers into the sky / like Lear having a good old crazy-cry / there, on the… on Haywards Heath / flailing and wailing, furious beyond belief / that the job of Prime Minister / could’ve been so damned difficult to administer / with nothing like the levels of Churchillian adulation / he wanked about in the Gladstone bar at graduation
no, my people – that’s all in the past / consigned to the social history bin at last / and thus the reason for this televisual broadcast / this rich and nationally nutritious repast / whose viewing figures will never be surpassed / (you see how well I work it? / I’ll be even better on the after dinner circuit) / now is the time for a serious reset / like having the soup instead of the baguette
so at the risk of losing my public speaking permit / and to paraphrase the immortal words of that Most Muppetous of Muppets, Kermit / To introduce our policy – That’s what I’m here to do – It really makes me happy – To introduce to you… / The Three Tier System!
(To simplify the thing so it’s easy to remember / we’ve linked it to the class of which you are a member)
Thusly
Tier Three – is the NHS junkies / state school flunkies / wrench wielding monkeys / and anyone else without the moolah / to live anywhere south of Peterboorah
Tier Two – is the doubting Derby & Joaners / the middle-class, pain in the arse Red Remoaners / the lefty lawyers and artsy groaners / the Guardian reading eco-homers / the food bank donors / and sundry other disposable personas
Tier One – is the Oxbridge Eliters / the gentlemen’s club and country retreaters / the tax and grouse beaters / the market makers / slush fund rakers / contract breakers / working class haters / and anyone who’s ever worked at the Telegraph or Spectator
I do hope that clears up any confusion and in conclusion
always, always remember…
Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the Waves! Britons ever ever ever shall be slaves!
Porky Pig knows what he did / how he spun the chamber and flipped his lid / hit the throttle, the bottle, the skids / went off grid / lay low in Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid / had a kid / all his careful work undid / heaven forbid
The Big Bad Wolf’s done playing around / waives the 5th in Chinatown / huffs and puffs on the smokes the pigs pass round / sure – yeah – it’s true, I blew the house down / on them preternatural porcine clowns / buried their bacon beneath the ground
Humpty Dumpty gets sick of the fence / the painted smiles, the thin pretence / the heightened suspense / so he rolls up in court & self-represents / blows his eggy vents / makes no friends, no case, no sense / gets dragged away by the civil defence / it’s eggstremely ugly and intense
Georgie Porgie bends the rules / servicing high-end swimming pools / extending his pole and other tools / for the benefit of all the five-star fools / who post online he’s slow but cool / hopeless & hapless, hung like a mule
Little Miss Muffet finds peace at last / smiling at the nurses through the plexiglas / for once in her life she feels first class / off the tuffet, off the grass / she’d been way out of character, man – totally miscast / her curds absurd and her whey too fast / but at least now whatever comes to pass / them mother fuckin’ spiders can kiss her ass
Cometh the hour, cometh the man / in bulletproof teeth and orange tan / advisers fanned / applause canned / as he stares & stands / one handmade Italian shoe on Maine, the other on Portland / his rinky-dink cock catastrophically in hand / cranking out poison across the land
Cometh the man, cometh the hour / a name writ big on a tall glass tower / T for the Trust in the Truth he sours / R for the Riches he devours / U for the Underlings garlanding him with flowers / M for the Mouth, P for the power / to Trump his Tremendousness louder & louder…
You couldn’t stand me the price of a drink, could ya…?
When I walk into the front garden, a young collie rushes up from the back garden to the rusting, curlicue iron gate that pens it in, pushes its muzzle through the gaps, and barks crazily. I say hello, which only makes it worse, of course. It’s a funny-looking dog. The eyes are different colours – one brown, one blue – which, along with the patchwork black and white fur, mismatched paws, one ear up, one ear down, reminds me of an oil painting my auntie Ollie did of a collie dog, staring up from a hectic, pea-green background. ‘Whose dog is that?’ I said. ‘No-one’s,’ she said. ‘I did it off the calendar.’
All that remains of the keysafe at the front door is the base, though, and I realise that I’m expected to go to the side door, beyond the gate guarded by the mad dog. It gets so excited when it sees me coming back to the gate, it does an insane war dance on its back legs, spinning round on the spot, stopping itself by slamming its paws against the gate, then spinning round in the other direction. It looks pretty crazy, but I think what the hell, and reach in to flip the latch. The dog runs off into the garden, then sprints back with an empty plastic Coke bottle. ‘Thanks!’ I say. It drops it at my feet. I toss it away into the garden again, then seize my chance to go through the kitchen door standing open on my right. ‘Hell-oooo…’
Maisie is lying on her bed in the gloom. There’s a substantial electric mobility scooter in the bedroom doorway – more like one of those big, sit-on mowers – with a seamy jacket slung over the seat and a basket filled with crap strapped to the bumper. ‘Over here,’ says Maisie. The dog rushes in behind me and prostrates itself on the floor with the Coke bottle in its mouth, biting it with loud crackles. ‘Flash! Leave him alone!’ says Maisie. Flash drops the bottle and smile-pants up at me. I stroke Flash’s head, then straighten up, breathe in, and squeeze past the scooter into the bedroom. ‘The diet starts tomorrow,’ I say.
I’m guessing there’s been a partial deep clean at some point. There are lots of yellow bags zip-locked, piled up around the place. Maisie’s bed seems enormous, Maisie spread-eagled on it, like a depressed housewife cast adrift in a yellow ocean on a giant orange sponge. ‘’Scuse the mess,’ she says.
The phone rings. She grunts and rolls towards the side table. Before I have a chance to pass the phone to her, she knocks it off its base and the two things fall down the back of the bed. To be fair, it would be difficult NOT to knock anything off Maisie’s side table. It’s a cheap, warped affair, made worse by the fact it’s littered with stuff – bottles of spray, a glass of water, a mobile phone, an alarm clock. When I retrieve the phone and the base, hand Maisie the phone, and put the base back on the stand, I knock the alarm clock off. When I retrieve the alarm clock and set it down again, I knock the phone base back onto the floor. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I say. ‘Whoopsie!’ says Maisie. She holds the phone to her nose and prods the buttons myopically. ‘Dunno who that was,’ she says after a while. She hands me the phone. ‘Don’t drop it,’ she says. I rearrange the side table as best I can, then start in on the examination.
*
Turns out, the phone call was from the pharmacist. She rings again and this time Maisie manages to answer it without anything else happening. There’s a long conversation, Maisie saying yes or no or yes or no or sometimes, all in a bored, non-committal way – then hands the phone to me. ‘She wants to talk to you,’ she says. The pharmacist is someone I know well. She has the kind of incisive questioning that’s light and pleasant but still makes you sit up a little straighter. ‘Maisie says she hasn’t got her medication. It should be in a green bag somewhere. Could you check for me?’ I don’t have to check very hard; the bag is right there in front of me, beside the table. Not only that, the drug chart in the folder at the foot of the bed shows that the carers gave the morning dose as prescribed. ‘Good!’ says the pharmacist. ‘That’s a relief! Although why she told me she didn’t have it….is she confused this morning?’ ‘No, she seems pretty orientated and okay. All her obs are fine…’ Flash has climbed on the bed by this point. He’s lying on his back with his legs in the air as Maisie tickles his tummy. Who’s a silly boy? Who’s a silly boy? Flash stares at me with his tongue hanging out, his mismatched eyes spinning with ecstasy. ‘No. She seems fine,’ I say.
*
The pharmacist has arranged to visit later to check up on things. I say goodbye to Maisie, and with the dog leaping around me like a species of giant flea, I see myself out, closing the gate as quietly as I can behind me.
I open my laptop and write my notes in the car. There are a few things to sort out, so I’m there fifteen minutes or so. I’m just about to finish up and move on when I hear a clatter from the gate. Maisie is coming out on the electric scooter, Flash trotting by her side. Maisie pauses at the front of the garden. She pulls out a packet of fags, nips one out with her lips, lights the fag with a flip of her Zippo, puts the packet back in her pocket, all in one smooth, practised motion. Then she sits there smoking a minute or two, looking right and left along the street, blowing smoke from her nose in a business-like way. Then she twists the key on the scooter again and heads right, at speed, to the park, I’d guess, with Flash high-stepping alongside her, trying to avoid the wheels. On the top of the basket, I can see an empty plastic Coke bottle rattling from side to side.
Perched on the edge of her bed, her crochet cap looped over her ears, her smock rucked up, her square face a little wax-yellow in the light from the basement kitchen window, Wendy looks like a character in a painting by Brueghel, the village wise-woman, taking a breather half-way through making the latest batch of crab-apple gin.
‘I don’t drink the stuff,’ she says, wiping her hands down the front of her smock. ‘I just like giving it away as presents.’
She gestures to a row of elegant and antique bottles on a shelf behind her. ‘There’s more in the cellar,’ she says. ‘Have a look if you like.’
There’s nothing I’d like better. I could very happily spend the day exploring this extraordinary house, filled with Wendy’s charcoal sketches and stone sculptures and black and white photos and shelf upon shelf of tatty books – the beautiful strata of a long and colourful life lived in many parts of the world. I haven’t the time, though. Apart from checking Wendy over and making sure she’s okay, I’ve come to see what we can do to help. We’ve had a good long chat about the things she could do to improve things environmentally. I’ve offered to find help with some ‘rationalisation’ so we can accommodate the hospital bed she desperately needs. Nothing I’ve said impresses her over much, it has to be said, although she’s happy to think about it.
‘I like to be in the action,’ she says. ‘The kitchen is the heart of the house. I don’t want to lose that.’ ‘You wouldn’t have to.’ ‘Hmm,’ she says.
She shifts her position, and a batik-print cloth bag rattles out from a pocket onto the cot bed. ‘My bones,’ she says. ‘Your bones? What are you – a necromancer?’ She laughs. ‘My phones! My phones! Although – talking about divination – I did see things. In the past. Not so much these days, unfortunately.’ ‘What kind of things?’ ‘Oh – I knew they weren’t real. I didn’t let myself get frightened by them. And I certainly didn’t tell anyone else, or they’d have locked me up! My sister was the same. I think in retrospect it was a form of epilepsy. Only with us it was more hallucinations. When we were little we both got sent to a convent. Not that anyone had ever told us we were Catholic. What’s a Catholic? my sister said to me when we were lined up outside the classroom. I told her to watch out, keep her mouth shut and follow me. Anyway, there was this nun who took us for something or other. She’d slowly write a word on the blackboard, then underline it slowly with two wiggly lines, and finish off by screwing in the chalk to make a dot. And it was that particular sequence, you see, the two wiggly lines, the dot at the end, that would send us off. Animals would burst out of the blackboard. Foxes, eagles, herds of reindeer. We learned to control our surprise or we’d have been for it.’ ‘Maybe they’d have thought you were visionaries. Is that what they call them?’ ‘I think if you see the Virgin Mary you’re a visionary. Foxes and eagles they burn you at the stake. We didn’t tell anyone, needless to say.’ ‘Do you still have visions?’ ‘Sometimes. Odd times. The last one I was standing at the sink doing some washing up – which dates it! I haven’t done that in a while. Anyway, I was standing there with my hands in the sudsy water, and – maybe it was the pattern of light through the window, or something else, I don’t know – but suddenly I was standing on the edge of a vast, desert plain. And off in the distance I could see a dummy.’ ‘A dummy?’ ‘Like a tailor’s mannequin. You know? On a stand. And I moved closer, and I saw that the dummy was wearing a jacket – a nice, neat, green brocade affair, with pearl buttons down the front and at the cuff. A little closer and I could see some other details, a beetle brooch, a pair of calfskin gloves. And it was then I realised what I was looking at. It’s you, you dozy old cow! I said to myself. The vision vanished. I carried on washing up.’
Photoshop for Beginners – Into the Woods & Into the Zone – Guard Duty – Jenny & Cecil – Rain & How Animals React to it – An Alarming Picture of One Man & His Labrador – Fake Horses – Crows & Cameras
If Lola seems to have disappeared from this journal for a while, it’s because we’ve been tending to walk her separately. The thing is, before Stanley (B.C.E, or Before Considering Extra-lurcher) she’d been used to long walks over the woods. Off the lead, free to follow her nose from the moment we push through the kissing gate back of the rec. Lola’s completely reliable – dogs, people, cows, dinosaurs (no doubt, if there were any). So all in all, it’s an easy time. The kind of idyllic, carefree country walk you see in adverts for dog food or laxatives. Not only does it mean she gets plenty of exercise, it gives me time to wander off in my own head, a meditative, semi-vegetative state, like a dozy shaolin monk, but in a kagool, not a robe, an iPhone instead of a flute, squinting up at the dazzling patterns of the leaves against the sun, whilst Lola looks back at me from way along the path, wondering what the hell’s holding me up.
It’s a different kind of walk with Stanley, I’m afraid. More like walking a maximum-security criminal round an exercise yard, Stanley in an orange boiler suit, grinning up at the watchtower guards, chewing grass, gauging distances / response times.
I’m over-selling it, of course. He’s not that bad. And if he is, he has good reason. He had nine years of not being walked before we adopted him, so it’s not surprising he has a few issues. The only thing is, you do have to watch him, and it’s not what you might call relaxing. I seem to spend my time continually passing Stanley treats, or scanning the horizon with field binoculars. With Lola, if we see another dog walker, and our paths happen to cross – great! We chat, we talk about this and that. I miss catching up with the people I’ve come to know over the last few years.
Take Jenny, for example.
Jenny’s a middle-aged woman with – from top to bottom – wild white hair, Onassis sunglasses, Barbour jacket, tight blue jeans, hacking boots, and a pug called Cecil. Except for a couple of days midsummer, Cecil is always in a fleecy wraparound, much like a babygro except tighter and with a hole for his stubby tail (although, thinking about it, you have poppered holes for nappy access, so maybe it would make a cheaper alternative, and you could buy them in packs of three). Cecil’s fleece always looks a bit too tight, because he walks with the kind of stiff-legged roll you’d imagine an occasional table would walk with if it could, and his eyes bug-out alarmingly. But that’s a feature of the breed, I suppose, and something you might go for if you had a kink about dyspeptic bank managers. They have a fraught relationship, Jenny and Cecil. You can hear them coming from a long way off, Jenny snapping out his name constantly, driven mad by his latest infraction, like Cecil stopping to sniff a flower, or snacking on rabbit droppings. ‘At least it’s organic,’ I say. ‘Highly toxic!’ says Jenny, clapping him away. ‘We’ll suffer for that later.’
Jenny is worried about everything. Her anxiety is a force of nature, all-encompassing, a low-lying cloud of generalised concern, covering everything from Brexit and the pandemic to the kids who hang around the recreation ground. Trying to stay positive when you’re talking to Jenny is a bit like when you mix all the colours in your paintbox: you start off with yellows and reds but despite your best efforts you end up with puce. It’s exhausting talking to her, like blundering into quicksand and trying to whistle for help. But she often says such strange things I like it. And Cecil is always good value. ‘I was thinking of helping them out over Brexit,’ she says, frowning at Cecil by way of illustration. ‘Oh? In what way?’ ‘Fruit picking. I hear they’re a bit short. I think I’d quite like a bit of fruit picking, in East Anglia or wherever it is they do that kind of thing. Lincolnshire, is it? Somewhere flat. But then again, you see, I don’t want to end up in a dormitory. If they give me one of those sweet little painted caravans, well, then – fine – I can cope with that. But a dormitory… Cecil! Don’t eat that! You’ll blow up and die!’
She has bracing views on most things. The pandemic gives her plenty of scope to sound off about the state of the health service, the government and so on. I offer the usual line, which is that they want to dampen the spread of the infection so the health service doesn’t get overwhelmed. ‘We just need a vaccine,’ I say. ‘Once we’ve got that we can start getting back to normal.’ ‘Well you know what I think about that,’ she says. ‘What?’ ‘Well it’s obvious!’ she says. ‘What did we do before all this medicine? We built up immunity! That’s what we did! Some people would die, of course, but they would have anyway…Cecil! Put that down, darling!’ I mention diphtheria and smallpox, the fact that vaccines had eradicated them in the community. Without vaccination we’d still have a ton of young people dying before they reached adulthood. ‘Maybe,’ she says, unconvinced that’s such a bad idea. ‘I’m not a scientist. All I can say is how I see it.’ She suddenly seems sad. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, with a sigh. ‘Everything’s changing and not for the better. You know – I completed on my mother’s house the other day.’ I’m not sure whether to congratulate her or offer my condolences, so in the end I just raise my eyebrows and nod. ‘I celebrated with champagne and strawberries, but they gave me indigestion. I thought I was having a heart attack. And then I couldn’t sleep, because I kept on having the same thought. If I died here now, who would find me? And what would they think?’ She looks at Cecil again, as if to imagine what he’d have done. But shockingly, Cecil has blundered down onto the shallow bed of a nearby stream, where he snuffles happily and noisily amongst the rocks. ‘Cecil! Cecil!’ she cries, sliding down to grab hold of his collar, then dragging him back up again. ‘I’ve already had to take him to the vets with a chest infection,’ she says. ‘Last time he went after a ball and got water on the lung. He thinks he can get away with these things but he can’t, you see. He can’t. Just because your face is flat, doesn’t mean you can breathe underwater.’ ‘No. I suppose not.’
*
Today, though, I decide to take Lola out with Stanley. It’s pouring with rain, and forecast to stay that way, so I figure it’s better they go together for a short walk over the fields and get the thing over and done with. Neither dog is enthusiastic. Stanley pushes his head out of the dog flap, holds it there a second, then slowly withdraws and looks up at me with the kind of expression you might see on a stunt man who’s just been asked to throw himself off Niagara Falls. ‘You’ll like it when you’re out,’ I tell him, pulling on a hat and a waterproof (and feeling a little guilty about that).
The walk doesn’t start well.
As soon as we’re through the back gate, Stan sees a man and a Labrador trudging past the front of the house, so he lets out one of his horrendous, howitzer-grade barks. And although I know I’m prone to exaggeration now and again, and won’t stand up in court about this particular detail, I think I’m right in saying that the dog did the splits in mid-air and the man’s hat blew off. I wave an apology as they hurry on. Lola looks up at me, already drenched, with a tragic look on her face, as if to say: You see? You see what happens?
We carry on with the walk.
And actually, it’s okay. Bad weather always looks worse when you’re snug and warm indoors. The rain takes pity on us and eases a little. The dogs give a couple of shakes, magically transforming their fur into primitive anoraks, and they trot along happily enough. One benefit of the bad weather is that there aren’t too many other people out, so it’s a clear run through the housing estate to the fields out back. All the horses of The Hole in the Hedge gang are out, standing as motionless and menacing and dripping as life-size model horses in the rain, so it’s easy to pick a route that’s equidistant from each and make it through to the fenced field the far side. I let the dogs off, and they tear around after each other through the saturated grass. I even have time to take a photograph – or try to. There are two crows perched on the top branch of a tall, dead tree. I figure it’ll be a moody shot to catch them as they fly off, so I wait at the bottom of the tree with my phone held up over my head. And wait. And wait.
And I might be wrong – and I definitely can’t promise to stand up in court and testify about this – but I think I’m right in saying, one of them slips a little black phone out from under its wing, and takes a photo of me.
it happened immediately after the debate / Trump was terrible, Biden wasn’t great / the whole thing a shovel of shit on a plate / with a generous side-order of humiliation / for the tortured, television watching population / so they thought about what they could put in its place / something to galvanise the electoral race
someone at Fox / was first outta the box / she said why not dress them as comedy mascots? / Republican elephant, Democrat donkey? / with an umpire dressed like Walter Cronkey / with his hair standing up and his moustache on wonky / timing them out with a horn he can honky? / the costumes could be padded with plenty of cushions / to protect them from all the kickin’ and pushin’ / three rounds of trunk to hoof combat outta do it / here’s a rough drawing – let’s get to it
so that’s what they scheduled for 2024 – if only Trump hadn’t started the third world war
jim clayton 