Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

  They parked at a fast food restaurant. They ordered burgers and fries, Cokes and milkshakes. Whitey paid. When they had eaten they ordered more burgers and more fries. More drinks. When they finished those they ordered the same again. Apple pies and doughnuts too. Ice cream. Teas and coffees. Then they sat back and yawned and belched and lit cigarettes and sat smoking until the night manager nervously asked the men to leave. Whitey Moody pushed a ten-pound note into the manager’s breast pocket and gently slapped his face. The men roared with laughter at this, and spilled out into the night in their own time, a million stars above them, their bellies full to swelling, and their heads reeling with possibility.

  This strange alliance walked to the nearest pub, where they drank beer and whiskey. They played pool and commandeered the jukebox. They smoked cigarettes, and cigars too, and Whitey and Joss Moody joined in with the jokes and singing. Then they moved to another pub, and then another.

  They found themselves in a nightclub. Here they got each other in friendly headlocks and they tried to talk to women, and they staggered around a dance floor beneath a flickering strobe light. They spilled drinks and then when the house lights came up one or two of the younger men had passed out on tables, and the others lifted them up and carried them out, singing and laughing into the sub-zero night.

  Hungover but reinvigorated, the next morning the men gave a galvanised push on the third stone to be laid in testament to Walter Moody. They worked until lunchtime, Whitey barking orders and conducting the operation.

  When they returned to camp, The Pole had slaughtered the lamb that had been fattening for weeks, and mounted it on a stick. It spat globs of fat on to the glowing ash below. They dined on great hunks of it then returned to the slopes.

  It was dusk and the stone just fifteen feet from the top of the hill when the securing cable snapped and its tangle of moorings came whipping through the air like a lightning bolt of steel. The generator upended and there was an almighty rumble.

  ‘Run.’

  The men scattered as the piece of granite bore down on them, a growing blot against the fading sun.

  Whitey slipped in the morass. He flailed, then fell.

  The stone bounced once and then twice and then it rolled right over him. It crushed him in an instant, then carried on down the hill, where it butted up against a craggy outcrop with a loud crack that resonated across the valley.

  Joss Moody scrambled through the snow and mud and stooped to where his brother lay prone, his body broken but the strong features of his face somehow untouched by the tumbling granite.

  The men hurried to join him.

  Joss hesitated, uncertain, his face wracked with grief and horror. His chest rising and falling.

  Silence reigned.

  Then Joss slowly straightened. He gathered his breath. Composed himself.

  ‘Hear this now,’ he said. ‘A great man has passed today. My brother Whitey Moody is dead. And I will honour him.’

  There was another long silence before a voice spoke.

  ‘How, Joss?’

  ‘I will erect a monument to him,’ he replied. ‘One to stand tall on the skyline here in these woods right next to that of his father, Walt Moody. And you will all help me.’

  The Last Apple Picker

  He first arrived at the orchard uninvited. Early September. Here in a field of cowslip he pitched his tent and helped with the apple picking.

  The man said little, asked for nothing. He dined on bread and windfall, bathed in the top pond. Sometimes he tended to the trees too, cutting away the parasitic creepers that slowly strangled everything living.

  Then, when the branches were stripped of their perennial bounty and the barrels brimming, and the wind blew in on a westerly, without a word he left, a yellowing patch of grass where once he slept.

  The next year he returned, and kept returning, each time a little older, a little thinner, to slowly toss the ancient gleaming apples down to the soft carpet of the orchard and swat away wasps that feasted on those decaying fruit too sour to keep.

  After a decade or so the farmer’s wife offered him the barn and a bath, but he politely refused. He preferred the tent, the pond. The field of cowslip.

  Another decade passed this way until one autumn he did not appear.

  The harvest was particularly poor that year; the trees were covered in ivy and the crop infested with worms. It was as if the orchard were in mourning for its quiet custodian.

  That winter three trees were felled in a storm and the farmer suffered first financial difficulty and then a tragedy too great to allow him to think about things as small as apples.

  In time the orchard itself was gone.

  But deep in the soil the seeds of fallen apples sat silently awaiting sunlight.

  Saxophone Solos

  The transition from reader-cum-fan to the world’s leading authority on Bill Katz and organiser of an international academic symposium devoted to his eleven novels and three collections of essays and journalism, to then latterly becoming his lover, was as steady a trajectory as it was predictable, the type of narrative arc that Dr Elizabeth Brownlee herself would be the first to dismiss as the redundant remains of that precious strand of fiction that used to sell rather well up until ten or fifteen years ago.

  If she had read it as an abstract for a conference or a submission to the literary anthology she co-edited, she would surely have rejected it without hesitation.

  What had once been an illicit liaison that buckled under the pressure of its own inevitability had now hardened into a hollow relationship that echoed with the tinny callbacks of centuries of literary cliché, yet still she allowed herself to become the chief antagonist in the drama of this publicly recognisable writer’s well-documented private life, the person some deemed responsible (though, of course, the responsibility was all his) for finally ending his marriage to the television producer and mother of his two children, Anne Allan.

  The whole thing was sordid and embarrassing for all concerned, except, perhaps, for Katz himself. Led by his waning libido and pathetically grateful for the attention from a bright woman on the right side of not-too-young, he saw this development as the unexpected opening of the penultimate act of a career that had seen him slip from the eloquent bad boy of digestible liberal intellectualism in the 1990s to the midlist novelist of the late 2010s.

  A thin layer of scandal in an era in which the old, deeply rooted totems of patriarchy were falling hard and fast around him was, he reasoned, a minor act of rebellion, perhaps his very last. It was one final stab at the type of mischief that kept him in the gossip columns even when his paperback sales were beginning to scrape mid-to-low four figures.

  He had done little to hide the affair, from either his wife or the hacks and bloggers who still begrudgingly devoted an inch or two to a writer of satire who’d once boasted of having taken acid with the current home secretary while they were postgraduates. Katz clung to this reputation of self-elected bon viveur for the middle-brow masses, quite unaware that his readership had grown up and moved out of the city that he still eulogised, and now lived in tall houses in Hastings, Totnes or Hebden Bridge that were full of retro turntables, spiralisers and cynical children, while he festered in a damp house south of the river.

  He still smoked cigarettes, even though no one old smoked cigarettes any more. Yet there he was at prize-giving ceremonies, book launches (his, mainly) or out on the lecture circuit, standing on town hall balconies or huddled on rainy campus forecourts, puffing away with the young vapers, sporting ash smudges on his lapels with a misdirected sense of pride, like badges of honour that said: I’ve still got it.

  Anne had left him several times before. On the last occasion she had cited, only half-jokingly to anyone who asked, that it was his love of music featuring saxophone solos that had killed it for her. ‘When a man is tired of sax solos, he is tired of life,’ he took to saying far too frequently, often to the same few people.

  She had never quite worked
out whether this particular penchant for seventies yacht rock and mainstream eighties power ballads that was defined by the incessant wailing of this tragically phallic instrument was genuine, or instead a commitment to a wider plan to grind her down. Either way, in Bill Katz’s hands and on his stereo, the saxophone had been weaponised and turned into a tool of torture deployed in a kind of aural long game to provoke first irritation, then resentment, before segueing nicely into a divorce that, all being well, wouldn’t wipe him out entirely.

  It had worked, and Anne despised him for it just enough for her husband to feel validated and vindicated in pursuing this relationship with Dr Elizabeth Brownlee, though of the myriad real reasons for his ill-behaviour towards his wife it was perhaps the simple prevailing fact that she had recently been enjoying a more financially and critically successful career in film production, while his own was clearly faltering.

  His last work, a thin novella that ostensibly appeared to be about a man who falls out of a tree, had barely made an impact, despite his genius agent somehow leveraging a commendable advance. Even Katz himself knew that this was unsustainable, especially as the many film and TV options that had been bubbling away on the back burner for the past decade had all but run dry, and he was now facing a fate worse than death: a possible return to a type of journalism that he no longer recognised, that of listicles and clickbait opinion pieces.

  He shuddered at the prospect of dogged 10p-per-word provocation, when once his colourful behaviour had been the very source of the manufactured outrage.

  He exhaled smoke across the restaurant table into the face of Dr Elizabeth Brownlee, who, after writing a thesis and several papers on the man and his work, and having organised the aforementioned three-day symposium at which Katz had made a surprise and somewhat smug appearance that featured an entrance choreographed with all the pomp of Liberace rising from his glittery grave to play one more encore on the Strip, suddenly realised that she was already sick of him. This epiphany finally came eight or nine months after he’d first put his hand on the back of her neck and gently caressed her there with two fingers that she thought felt cold, clammy and intrusive, as ‘Born to Run’ played through the cheap laptop speakers that he had set up beside some tea-light candles in his Novotel room.

  What good fortune, he thought, gazing at her.

  What disappointment, she thought back.

  Vienna (The Hunters in the Snow)

  I feel a fire inside, warming. Warming and burning.

  Burning and blazing.

  It comes on soon after we unfold our stiff, sleeping bodies and set out into the frozen blackness. A hundred crunching steps or less and the flames are licking at our chests, our throats gasping from the challenge of the snow-covered inclines steepening towards a sullen half-moon, the smoke of us pluming from our slack wet mouths. The wind means no candle lamp can light the way.

  We chase the day.

  Pray for prey.

  Perhaps our prayers will be answered as thin limbs of light start to streak the dark and we walk and walk, searching for signs, and in the soft wakening sun the ashen sky feels as heavy as a laden sow. A net of snow suspended. There is surely more of it to fall. Deeper, thicker.

  We walk into it.

  Our hotel room was illuminated by lights that dangled from the high ceiling and had black bowler hats for lampshades that made me think of Magritte.

  Plastic candles dripping simulacrum wax lined the stairs that led to the hushed corridor when we arrived late, tired from the flight and still carrying the faint scent of airline meals and stale pressurised cabin air. Though the corner room overlooked a busy junction, the windows were so well insulated against the cold that the horns of the passing trams and general traffic of Vienna were kept silent beneath layers of glass and a beautiful old set of heavy wooden shutters.

  The hotel occupied one floor of a townhouse, and was discreetly run so as to give a homely feel to its visitors that my wife and I welcomed; there were no corporate-chain intrusions here, no unwanted muzak or unexpected add-ons to bills shoved beneath our door at ungodly hours, only a quiet lobby area overseen by a smiling young Austrian lady, with tea- and coffee-making facilities, and a generous supply of alcohol to be paid for via an honesty box when no member of staff was available.

  Such an example of trust is rarely seen back home.

  After an unexpectedly sound sleep and a quick breakfast in a neighbourhood bakery, we spent the first day wandering the broad Straßen, each one seemingly deeper and wider than the last, the clean light stone of the ornate apartment blocks standing stoic against a sky pregnant with tomorrow’s snow creating the impression of canyons carved from grey granite, syenite and marble. Our necks ached from looking up at buildings as our feet crunched over pavement frost that glimmered like quartz dust and the grit salt granules that seared holes in the surface patina of glimmering white.

  Ice droplets decorated the lamp posts and the sun was a monochrome watercolour painting hung on the wall of the sky.

  ‘Everything is so crisp,’ I murmured so quietly that no one could possibly have heard it. ‘Everything is so clean.’

  As we wandered the streets, I breathed in the city’s many scents. When I exhaled I imagined a thick plume of black smoke that represented the anxiety I had been carrying around within me. Up and away it went, dissipating in the stiff air. I was attempting to let negative feelings go and banish the tensions and occasional flashes of terror that had underpinned an exhausting year.

  I had recently submitted a novel, the first to my new publisher, and now I was a spent husk, a walking cadaver with pieces of coal for eyes, the last reserves of my psychic energies having been poured into a final edit. I had been in one of my ‘states’ and, as is so often the case, it had taken all my willpower to get myself vertical and dressed, and to leave the house in order to get to the airport in time. The novel was just one of the reasons for the tension and terrors; the others were more nebulous and not as easily identifiable.

  As has happened before, the airport had represented, to my frazzled mind at least, a kind of slaughterhouse of the near future, an existential cattle shed from which my natural inclination was to turn and flee. It was the people everywhere that did it for me, all of them in a hyperstate of pre-flight excitement that changed the energy of the place and singed the edges of my already fragile senses. I had spent so much time alone of late that the sight of all those people flowing around me, their bodies occasionally brushing mine, their voices too loud and their breath sometimes smelling of scented vape smoke and morning lager, did not help my mental state. Everything seemed too loud, too bright.

  I vomited in the toilets.

  But we were here now and I could smell the warm salty hum of blinkered horses, their tails plaited, fetlocks decorated and steam rising from their flanks. Their drivers idled in the carriages behind them, awaiting the next wave of tourists to take around the city.

  Other scents intermingled to form a collective perfume of old Europe. In the Christmas market the hiss and sizzle of bratwursts on street vendors’ griddles overlapped with the cinnamon of warm strudel and the spices of mulled wine, while simmering pots of goulash, deep-fried doughnuts and strong coffee stirred the appetite.

  Across broad Plätze and down other Straßen, other smells: vanilla pods, waffle sugar, roast chestnuts, dark chocolate, cigarette smoke – even the most ardently committed reformed smoker still occasionally feels the lure of tobacco on a sub-zero day – schnitzel, car fumes, hot oil. More pretzels.

  We wore clothing that was too warm even for northern England in December: our most expensive coats, plus scarves, gloves and hats, and our best leather shoes.

  There is something about European capital cities in winter that makes one want to parade. Perhaps the need to move and look and observe and breathe is a form of time travel. This was certainly recognised and enjoyed by the French flâneurs of the nineteenth century, whose constant strolling and deliberate act of looking was considered an
art form in itself. That we pompously opted to do something similar while wearing our best coats and shoes only seemed to draw us closer to those wanderers who had gone before, and in those moments – at the turn of a new corner, peeking down an obscure alley – the decades and centuries (and language barriers) slipped away as we fell into step with our European ancestors, the soles of the centuries tapping the hard pavements in unison.

  We are three. Bernt, Elrick and me.

  A devil’s dozen hounds we have with us; two are out on their maiden pursuit, their first winter.

  Now and again we have to cleave away the snow that becomes impacted in the paws of these two with a branch or twig so that it does not freeze and make them lame. When that is done they bound back to the pack, pink tongues unfurled and dangling like cut hide strips hanging at the tannery. Often along the trail they disappear from sight, sinking deep in the drifts, but we do not stop to dig them out. This they must learn themselves, lest they become lazy or are turned out into the woods forever and must survive the season alone.

  Mainly we move as one, the pack a shifting shape with the same two elder dogs heading the chase. Vop, usually, or Yeff. Both are still lean and strong, long-rested and ready after a hot slothful summer and mild autumn past.

  The others follow their lead, and we follow them. Bernt to the left side, Elrick to the right, and me minding the rear for laggers, or the sight of any cunning hart, boar, wolf or fox that dares to think he is smart enough to circle back on us for a second look.

  That evening we went to the Secession gallery, where Ed Ruscha was exhibiting a collection of paintings of American flags and drum skins on which were written phrases from Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. The works were shown in a white concrete box of a room that echoed with the staccato chatter of German students. We didn’t stay long.