I’m sorry, STORM, but the name doesn’t suit’cha
it doesn’t seem right for a scruffy lurcher
I mean – if there’d been bigger dogs in the pound
like a Munsterlander or a Newfoundland
a Pyrenean sheepdog or an Aghan hound
well – maybe
the name would fit the breed
and STORM would do you very well indeed
but a lurcher? who, for all his graces,
just has one of those mad faces
crazy wise and clever
more wild blue day and less bad weather
but anyway
what I meant to say
who you really remind me of today
– Johnny Rotten circa 1978
Author: jim clayton
soap
Mr Gates is dying in the living room.
Despite the name, it’s the most appropriate place. As well as being the only room big enough to accommodate the bulky hospital bed and dynamic pressure mattress, it’s also the most pleasant, with wide, sunny windows overlooking the garden, warm and well-lit by the sun for most of the day. It has a TV in the corner, too, specially raised up on a wall-mounting so Mr Gates can watch it from his bed. Unfortunately he’s deteriorated so much now that the Emmerdale repeats aren’t really anything more than comforting background noise. He lies semi-conscious, mouth gaping open, breathing in fitful gasps, hugging a pillow, his wasted legs crooked up. He doesn’t look as if he’d last till the advert break, but apparently he’s been like this for weeks. He doesn’t seem distressed, though, and his son, Frank, who’s temporarily moved back to help look after his father, is bearing up surprisingly well considering.
Everything’s in place. There are District Nurses visiting regularly, the GP has supplied the anticipatory meds, there are carers coming in four times a day to freshen him up. The only hitch is that the bed is jammed in the down position.
‘You couldn’t do it again if you tried,’ says Frank. ‘The carers threw a covered cushion on the floor when they were turning him, forgot about it, and when they lowered the bed it dragged the vinyl cover into the mechanism.’ He bends down to tug at the mess sticking out from one of the hydraulic legs. ‘See what I mean? We’ve tried everything to free it, but nothing’s worked.’
The carers can’t give bed care safely or effectively at this height, so the only option is to install a second bed alongside the first, slide Mr Gates over whilst still on the mattress, dismantle the broken bed, then push him back into position.
Four of us have agreed to rendezvous with Zac, the equipment supplies guy. Zac isn’t thrilled with any of this, not the timing, the circumstances, the interruption to his schedule, and certainly not with the number of people milling around, spoiling his routine.
Zac is covered with tattoos, even into those dangerous and anti-social areas, up the neck and the side of his face. He looks like a Maori warrior – so much so that with the stress of all this I wouldn’t be surprised if he did a war dance, flashing his eyes and poking out his tongue. As it is he gives a series of alarming sighs and grunts, and then hurries back outside to the truck to start off-loading. We follow after him in a line like so many ducklings, and immediately start getting in the way. But I suppose theoretically at least we’re some kind of help; in no time at all we’ve got the parts of the new bed carried inside and placed either foot or head end ready to assemble. Zac declines any help with this.
‘I’ve got a system, okay?’ he says, which mostly seems to be a lot of muttering and kicking.
We want to be on hand to pass things over, though, and ultimately to slide Mr Gates across. So instead of all going out into the hallway, we stand around watching Emmerdale.
I’d guess from some of the clothes and hairstyles it’s from the Eighties. The whole thing seems oddly amateurish, like a skit in a local church hall production. There’s a sad looking woman sitting on a swing, and a huge, red-faced guy in a white shirt and golden bow tie telling her how disappointed he is with her and how could she and so on. At one point she turns her eyes up to him in a pathetically pleading way, kicking herself back a little on the swing.
‘It’s no good, Janet,’ says the man. ‘Spare me the sob story. You’ve played your games for the very last time. We’re finished. Do you understand? Finished!’
He walks off.
The theme music plays, and the TV cuts to an advert – insurance for funeral costs.
We all grimace.
‘Can one of you pass me that?’ says Zac, pointing to a strange looking multi-tool on the floor.
We all go to get it at the same time, then all pull back again.
‘Jesus Christ!’ says Zac.
st patrick
I met this woman
a wiccan witch
she saw a beautiful angel
standing behind me
stretching his wings
It’s true
I’m telling you
The witch had a stone
heavy and black
she gave it to me
to soak up my negativity
I carried it around all day
but it got too hot in my pocket
and I had to get rid of it
what could I do?
I mean fuck it
I couldn’t just chuck it
I chose my moment
buried it under a tree
on the edge of a cemetery
it felt right to me
putting it in the ground
to cleanse it
I’ll never forget it
These are the end times
the bad, sad times
I mean – read the signs
it’s all been foretold
the war between young and old
good and evil
Saint Michael the Archangel
The Seventh Trumpet
The False Prophet
The Red Dragon
The Whore of Babylon
I could go on
Satan’s to blame
everything was good
with God
till Satan
grew sick of waiting
said he would not bow
could not
not anyhow
but that’s just pride I guess
what’s a few angels more or less
God cast them out into the wilderness
There’s so much in this world we don’t understand
I mean, why d’you think there are no snakes in Ireland?
losing centre
There’s something so vague about Mrs Graham, something so detached, the view out of her living room window, across all the trees and rooftops of town, feels strangely appropriate, like she’s a balloon and someone let go of her string.
‘Wow!’ I say, putting my bags down. ‘That’s quite a view!’
‘Is it?’ she says. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
She sits neatly in her armchair and waits for me to begin.
She’s watching gymnastics on the television with the sound on mute. A female gymnast flic flacs across the mat in the floor exercise, lands, arches her spine, throws her arms high and wide in showy gestures, then takes a couple of sprung skips and hurls herself back in the other direction.
I explain to Mrs Graham who I am and what the visit is for. She listens to me carefully, but she obviously has no idea, no recollection of having been in the hospital, let alone being brought home by the Red Cross just about an hour ago.
Quite how she’s able to live alone like this I’m not sure. She has carers four times a day, and her daughters live at various points around the city, but hour to hour? It’s a mystery. Environmentally the flat is as safe and hazard free as it’s possible to be. There are no immediate trip hazards, things are neatly squared away, the medication in a locked box. My notes say that the cooker is disconnected, there’s a stairgate to discourage her from going downstairs, there are notes taped to various doors with simple instructions – but with such a poor level of recall or understanding, I can’t imagine how she gets by. She was admitted to hospital with a chest infection and not a fall, though, so that’s some reassurance I suppose.
The gymnasts have moved on to the asymmetric bars. A different competitor has just smacked chalk on her hands, acknowledged the start with a hyperflexed gesture, then thrown herself with a half twist through the air to skip across the bars and begin spinning and curling and doubling back.
I ask Mrs Graham what she used to do before she retired.
‘A biochemist. I’m Dutch, originally. I met my husband just after the war and came to England to work. It was a long time ago,’ she says, staring back at the TV. ‘I was a dancer, too,’ she says, without breaking her gaze. ‘There’s a picture of me over there…’
She gestures behind her without looking. I go over to see – and there she is, a young woman en pointe, arms arched delicately above her head, a headdress of white flowers, a tutu. She’s looking wistfully off into the distance stage left, which – given where the picture is hanging – is pretty much directly at where she’s sitting now.
‘Lovely’ I say.
‘Thank you,’ she says, then gives a little flinch as the gymnast tumbles through the air at the end of her routine, lands a little off-balance, puts a foot out to recover, draws it back when she’s found centre again, straightens, acknowledges the crowd, then strides off.
phlebotomagic
Craig is a heavy-set young guy with even heavier-set eyes. He’s sitting in an armchair almost completely walled-in with books, some open, some being used as improvised tables for his bottles of Dr Pepper and No Sugar Sprite. Books on the occult, alien conspiracy theories, tarot. Books on the history of the horror film, on special effects, Warcraft, sorcery, sex magic. Books on PHP, C#, Javascript. And weirdly, a book on rabbits.
‘I’ve come to take your blood,’ I say.
‘Whatever,’ he says.
He’s extraordinary. A long, black pencil moustache trailing down either side of an equally long goatee, giving him the look of a sleepy catfish – except a catfish that had spent as much time in the piercing and tattoo parlours as the mud at the bottom of the lake. His tattoos are amazing. Full sleeve canvases of skulls and roses and ivy leaves, swords, flames, goblins, and here and there a portentous Latin phrase in gothic print.
‘Good luck finding a vein,’ he says, extending his right arm and resting it on the top of a book.
He’s right. It’s going to be tricky. Normally if a patient is large and you can’t see the veins, you can work by feel. In Craig’s case, the intricate lines of ink have raised the skin, so what feels like a vein is actually the stem of a rose or the ribbed hilt of a dagger. I’m prodding around for quite a while. To pass the time we talk about tattoos. I show him mine, the Tree of Life I had done on the top of my left arm. He’s polite about it but doesn’t seem that impressed.
‘There’s a lot of people doing it,’ he says. ‘Most studios can sort you out with that kind of thing.’
‘I went for hand-poked,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t know why particularly. I suppose I liked the idea that’s how people tattooed themselves before electricity.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘The whole primitive thing.’
‘I want to get another one, a bit lower down. It’s quite addictive.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he says.
‘There! What about there? That feels like something.’
He shrugs. ‘If you think. I’m okay with it.’
Amazingly, the blood flows immediately.
‘I can’t believe it!’ I tell him when I’m done, withdrawing the needle and taping on some gauze. ‘I wasn’t at all confident with that one.’
‘It’s the book I was leaning on,’ he says, holding it up so I can read the cover.
Divination for Beginners.
Then slowly strokes his feelers, like that was his plan all along.
naked maria
The cautionary note on Maria’s record was plain enough.
Naturist.
No exclamation point or any other modifier.
Naturist.
Just that. A succinct alert, short but informative.
I think about those signs you see on beaches sometimes: Clothes may not be worn beyond this point. It doesn’t worry me, though. And I suppose it’s good to get the heads up.
What it doesn’t say – and which, in the end, is vastly more relevant – is that Maria likes to live in the dark.
‘Mind yourself,’ says her husband, John, a large, wild-haired man who holds the flat door open and makes an arch with his arm for me to duck under. Leaving the well-lit shared hallway to enter their grotto of inky black is something of an act of faith, only made possible by the thought that John surely HAS to be standing on the floor and not hovering like a malevolent angel over a chasm.
I feel my eyes widen as I struggle to adjust. The absence of light wouldn’t be so bad if the place was clear. As it is, I bark my shins a few times and stumble over – what I take to be – a mobility scooter, a box of junk and either a grandfather clock or a coffin.
‘Careful,’ says John. ‘D’you need a little light there?’
‘Would be good.’
‘Okay then.’ He snaps a switch, and a few, long seconds later a tentative orange glow emanates from a silk covered lamp.
‘Energy saving,’ he says.
‘Thanks.’
Still, it’s better than nothing, just enough to illuminate the room in front of me where Maria is waiting on the sofa. At least naked she’s easier to make out, the mass of her large pale body accentuated by the square of white muslin she’s draped over her middle. She’s like the Venus of Willendorf, on the sofa, with a remote.
‘Sorry, pet,’ she says, putting it to one side. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep moving if that’s okay.’
I think about the torch I’ve got in my bag, and wonder about getting it out.
She shrugs, adjusts her square, then stares past me into the vast plasma TV screen opposite. I’m guessing the TV was on until recently, the images now fallen back into the magical place from whence they came. I look into it, too. It holds the faint image of her naked body, a phantom, caught in the depths of a scrying mirror.
the IFS FFS
There’s a funky little place I know / where all the thrusting economists go / to dine like fine dinosaurs / on the Wall Street whys & wheretofores / simplifying the industrial complexes / the Wall Street Journals and Han Seng indexes / the open and shuts / the quantitative easings & budgetary cuts / the investment wrecks & spending checks / dealing with more zeros than all the heroes at the cineplex / speaking truth to power / for a coupla hundred dollars an hour
where?
the institute for fiscal studies
where forecasts blow and dollar streams muddy
and thinkers range
theoretically strange
scattering opinion like so much change
it’s a who-knows-what-the-hell-it’s-for / top drawer / less is definitely more / happening kind of club / a cross between a wishing well and a magic money shrub / a dreamy Disney depot / where punchy academics can go / to work their monetary mojo / it’s a dealer’s dream, a holy preserve / it’s a lot more fun than the Federal Reserve / it’s a safe deposit space / where no idea is too unclear or goes to waste / where even the receptionist / is a theoretical economist / waving you gently through the mist / and the canteen / is expensively inviting / and the meet & greet / is The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street / bending over to touch her feet / athletically / smiling coquettishly / pointing to her arse / because she’s very well oiled & her assets are vast
welcome
to the institute for fiscal studies
where CEOs & hedge fund buddies
can sit to lunch
on credit crunch
and watch Midas give a TedX on his golden touch
like a stake through the heart
My dearest Dracula,
I admit – for a while it was quite spectacular
but did you REALLY have to go sneaking around like that
flipping through the window like a brilliantined bat
howling like a wolf
on the roof
or a dog
in the fog
and – the real bust –
elemental dust
ELEMENTAL DUST!
I’m completely nonplussed!
So yes – okay – you’re a transmutational sensation
and yes – yawn – you’re a master of protean creation
a victory of hope over cremation
but – my honest opinion?
save the capey capers for your bloodless minions
THEY might be impressed with all that flapping about
ME? I’ve fallen out of love with your pointy pout
I want a
monster
with a little more bite
not some creep who keeps out of the light
and only come out of his coffin at night
sure – you’re handsome and muscular
but just a tiny bit dead and way too crepuscular
hope you’re well
yours in Christ
Jonathan
new year’s thimble
Coming back from a dog walk the other day we saw a guy kneeling in the field securing the legs of a tripod. It looked like he was setting up for a long-distance camera shot – maybe of the crows that squabble in the oaks around there – but when we got closer we saw that the tripod was actually a long, thin spade stuck in the earth, and propped up against it, a metal detector.
The guy straightened, waved, and walked over. Despite his headphones, combat trousers and Caterpillar boots, he had a strangely out-of-time look about him, like a Viking who’d come back in disguise to find the treasure he buried.
His name was Janusz. We chatted about the area, what we knew about it, the places it might be good to look. I told him about all the fragments of old glass and pottery that get washed out in the far corner. Maybe there was a midden there or something. I told him about a field I thought was the remains of a medieval village over the back behind the church.
‘It had all these strange bumps in it I thought were the huts. But then I found out it was a golf course in the 1920s.’
Janusz laughed.
‘There is an old pond over there, though. It was dug in the middle ages, one of the hammer ponds they used when they smelted iron for cannon balls.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Hmm. Well – last year I found a beaten coin that way. About 1520. That was nice. Not much today though. I dug this up…’
He put a tiny brass thimble in my palm. It was fragile, dull, squashed out of true, filled with earth.
Have it,’ he said. ‘No idea how old it is.’
I felt the weight of it, held it up to the light.
‘Thanks, Janusz’ I said. ‘Thanks very much.’
I wanted to tell him how much it meant to me. How it was my birthday, and my Dad’s the day before that. How this time of year always felt freighted with meaning. I wanted to tell him about how Dad bought a metal detector once, back in the seventies, from the back of a Hobbies magazine. It was a clumsy, boxy thing, bakelite dials, wires sticking out of it. A horrible piece of crap someone might solder together from an old twin-tub and a radio. I used to go with Dad out on the Fen sometimes, looking for coins. I wonder what people must have thought if they saw us from the road: a man and his son, slogging through the peaty soil, stopping every now and again to chop frantically at the earth with trowels. A hopeless, fruitless quest. Half the time I think the buzz it gave off was a con, something random they built into it, just enough to keep the suckers moving. We’d have had more chance finding King John’s treasure with a hazel twig. Still – it meant something, out there on the Fen with my Dad, searching.
‘Thanks for the thimble!’ I said.
‘Hey! You’re welcome!’ said Janusz. ‘Happy New Year!’
birthday poem
mum went into labour
on the 28th december
dad’s birthday
but I wasn’t born until
three minutes past midnight
on the 29th
he wanted the day to himself
the midwife said
three minutes past midnight?
that’s suspiciously precise
what? was the midwife
cheering on the crowning head
from the side of the bed?
and what counts as born?
when you back-heel
the mothership?
when the cord
gets snipped?
whatever
fact is
the certificate says
the 29th
not the 28th
and anyway
what’s a few hours
in this great daisy chain
of life on earth?
dad was begat
then beget
some things you hold on to
some you forget
and now dad’s dead
head or feet first
into the abyss
I must confess
I’m not entirely sure
all that is clear
is that I’m still here
looking around
wondering where the rhyme is
checking what the time is
