Snap Shots

by Alan Blackwood

  About the Author

  Alan Blackwood was in the book publishing business for most of his working life. He is also the author of many books and features on music, including a biography of the famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. More recently he has turned to fiction, with a novel, Writer’s Cramp and Pot Shots, a collection of short stories. Snap Shots is his second essay in this medium.

  Alan Blackwood

  Snap Shots

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © Alan Blackwood (2019)

  The right of Alan Blackwood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781528920346 (Paperback)

  ISBN 9781528968560 (ePub e-book)

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2019)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LQ

  Two’s Company

  ‘May I?’ She sat down across the table with a silken kiss of her legs and raised her glass. ‘Cheers!’

  The ship began to roll with the open sea. ‘I love going places, don’t you?’

  ‘Not at night,’ I said. Water and darkness. Like crossing the river Lethe.

  The mascara, the false eyelashes, gave her the wide-eyed gaze of a doll. ‘Are you a writer, or something?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to write.’ She watched the lights of the ferry going the other way. ‘Ships that pass in the night,’ she added dreamily.

  A distant beam of light swung in a lazy arc. The French coast. ‘Hasn’t the time gone quickly!?’ She smiled over my shoulder. ‘Alright, darling?’ Bill had to take his seasick pill and lie down.

  On the car deck the names Bill and Sandra were stuck over the top of their windscreen. Then we were off in a blue haze of exhaust.

  Ships that pass in the night.

  Cat Flap

  Like waiting for a pot to boil, the phone will never ring as long as you wait. The front door answerphone buzzed instead.

  A woman asked if she could leave a notice with us about a missing cat. She waited downstairs, wrapped up against the wind under a sky as hard and grey as pumice. Lost, said her sad notice, above a colour photograph of a furry little face, startled perhaps by the flash of the camera. Her name was Biscuit.

  ‘Poor little Biscuit,’ I said. But the woman had already gone, too cold to hang about.

  A change in the weather brought clouds and rain, or tears to trickle down all those other pictures of the same furry little face, stuck on fences and around lampposts.

  ‘Any luck?’ On the way to the shops I’m sure it was the same woman, looking a lot better in plastic mac and wellies. ‘Biscuit,’ I reminded her. She frowned and hurried on.

  Too wet to hang about.

  Sea Fever

  On Ocean Beach, fugitive rainbows danced about the tumbling surf, legions of tiny birds ran comically up and down the gleaming wet apron of the sea with each wave, and something on the sand had attracted a small crowd.

  The downward slit of the mouth, the tail fin shaped like a cutlass, they’d found a young shark stranded on the beach which they were daring to touch and prod.

  ‘Amazing creatures,’ I said, ‘no real bone just muscle to give them more strength, skin not scales for extra speed through the water, and fins that could turn them on a dime.’

  So saying I boldly picked up the shark in both hands, strode into the waves, never mind my trousers, and cast him back into the sea. My good turn for the day, for as long as it lasted. Returning on my walk he was washed up again, too weak or too sick to swim against the tide.

  Voracious predator he’d never grow up to be. Amen.

  Still Life

  ‘I dreamt of those sparrows,’ Carol said, the flush of last night’s wine still on her. She’d had a tough time of late and this was her first holiday in years.

  They’d be the ones flitting about the nave at Vezelay. We didn’t expect to find birds in a church in our squeaky clean age, but what could be more natural, the commonplace and the numinous, made one. Like the pilgrims who gathered there a thousand years ago, a scruffy noisy crowd one moment, awestruck, the next. By the bells and by the image of the Risen Christ at the entrance to that wonderful nave.

  ‘We’ve lost our sense of wonder,’ I said, just as the line of grey-blue hills parted to reveal our first vineyard, the young shoots of vines calling down the sun.

  Carol sat up. We turned a corner and sprawled across the road was the mangled body of a fox or hare. ‘Oh God!’ She buried her face in her hands.

  Sometimes you just can’t win.

  Chilled Out

  With a gust of steam and Brussels sprouts, Adam burst out of the kitchen and out of the house, slamming the front door behind him.

  Christmas made no difference. Roberta and Adam, mother and son, didn’t get on, and that was that. I gave it another couple of minutes, drained my sherry glass, wished Roberta a happy one, and departed with a little less fuss.

  The deepening murk of afternoon threw into relief other brightly lit rooms and scenes of seasonal fun and games. And one that was more like a tableau. A large dining table was abandoned to the detritus of a festive meal, spent crackers, paper streamers, orange peel, nut shells, and old Granddad, fallen forward in his chair with his paper hat still on, fast asleep face down in his plum pudding and custard.

  Someone else, hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets for warmth, had just joined me.

  I turned to Adam. ‘Says it all, really.’

  Punch Drunk

  Rita sat Mr Punch in a chair, red pugnacious face and hump at one end, spindly legs at the other, and not much in between till someone shoved a hand up his backside.

  Sam’s, that is. With his pitch in Covent Garden he’d been a big help with the book I was writing about Punch and Judy, letting me in on the secret of his swazzle, the item he stuck in his mouth to get the funny voice (‘That’s the way to do it!’). A shame he had to leave town in such a rush, asking me to let Rita have his puppets.

  She next picked up the Hangman holding his little wooden gibbet, and with a practised twist and a tug, pulled off his head. Stuffed into the neck was a wad of banknotes. She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to old Sam!’

  ‘Sam,’ I echoed, spilling gin on the sofa.

  At her front door she tucked a banknote inside my shirt. ‘For services rendered,’ she whispered, daylight exposing the grey roots of her hair.

  Killing Time

  Whoever said it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive, was bang on. After six hours on the road, across blistering desert and down eight-lane highways, we pulled up by a grubby fringe of sand and a trash can.

  First things first. Emily rushed off to find a loo while I cooled my feet in the sea and let nature take its course that way.

  An aircraft caught the declining sun as it climbed over the ocean, turned and headed back towards the land. Others had done the same, but there was something about that one.

  Em
ily thought so too. ‘I knew we should have checked straight in.’ She stepped back as the next little wave licked a few more inches up the sand. ‘“Time to kill,” you said. Well, I reckon we’ve got about twenty-four hours of it now.’

  Lights began to twinkle up the hill towards Sunset Boulevard. ‘Are you going to stay out there all night?’

  Just now, we had all this time to kill.

  Solo Turn

  September in the Rain sounded so much better on the Bechstein grand that stood in a corner of the hospital reception area. They let me have a go on it whenever I showed up.

  ‘You play beautifully.’ I turned around and nearly fell off the piano stool. It was the miserable old girl who’d shouted me down in Sainsbury’s. I wonder what she was in for. A new face perhaps. At any rate, with those pebble glasses and that myopia I don’t suppose she recognised me. ‘Are you a concert pianist?’ she asked.

  ‘Not quite,’ I smiled modestly, ‘but I might have a go at the opening Prelude in C major from Bach’s Forty-Eight, with its gentle progression of arpeggios or broken chords.’

  I’d never played it better. The usual hospital commotion, the rattle of trolleys, PA announcements, the noise of the coffee dispenser, faded right away.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly at the end of it and tried a smile of her own.

  High Noon

  The large bell resting in the basement of the old Courthouse commemorated the time when there was a bell foundry down there. A small hammer on a chain invited you to strike it. ‘Don’t,’ Judy said. ‘Someone might hear you.’

  Upstairs was the rest of the story. There, under glass, was Wyatt Earp’s very own six-shooter, a faded sepia photograph of dentist, gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday, pictured with his girlfriend Big Nose Kate, and a contemporary newspaper account of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, apparently all done and dusted in under thirty seconds. ‘Come on,’ Judy said.

  Upstairs again was the old courtroom itself, preserved just as it must have been in those riotous days and how you saw it in some of those Western movies, while down below in the sun-baked courtyard was the four-poster gallows. They didn’t hang about back then.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Judy said, not in the mood for jokes.

  Paper Tiger

  Tippoo’s Tiger, a prize exhibit in the Victoria and Albert museum, had inspired Richard to write his book.

  This mechanical wonder, that growled as it dug its claws into a red-coated soldier, had once belonged to the Sultan Tippoo of Mysore, who was killed fighting the army of the British East India Company. I’d watched Richard go bald and myopic as he wrestled with his account of the gallant Sultan’s life and times, filling every inch of space in his tiny flat with books and photocopies, maps and pictures, piles of correspondence and stacks of typescript.

  That still left, up on his wall, the old poster for a production of King Lear, with his name proudly included in the cast. Someone else in that cast list was now a star of stage and screen. It hadn’t happened for him.

  Richard reached for my bottle on the floor, where the lino curled up at the edges. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘what have I got to lose?’

  Not his hair, I guess.

  Monkey Nuts

  The wind, the towering granite cliffs, the sea. It might almost be Cornwall or Brittany, with the mortally wounded Tristan waiting among those ruins for a sign of Isolde’s ship.

  Hang on. Not at eight degrees south of the equator, and Australia somewhere over those shark-ridden waters. We’d come to see the ruined temple with the sacred monkeys, and already feeding them was the woman from the bus who kept tossing back her hair to sneak another glance at the mystery man behind his silver-tinted glasses. Swedish perhaps with such soft pale hair.

  I took off the glasses to treat her to a smile. A simian hand snatched them from my grasp. A sacred sphincter disappeared behind a heap of rocks.

  ‘Talk about cheeky monkey!’ she bawled, and everyone else from the bus turned around. I hid behind another pair of dark glasses, and one of the plastic eyepieces fell straight out.

  ‘Be seein’ yer, Lord Nelson!’

  Fag End

  Cyril was like a headhunter’s trophy; the grey shrunken face with the rictus of a grin and a few tufts of hair.

  That’s what forty fags a day for forty years had done for him. They’d also kippered and cured him against all infection. He was as indestructible as a flea and as difficult to brush off.

  ‘Hi there!’ I tucked myself in next to Anthea over by the door. ‘Good party!’ Her face was no oil painting but the rest of her I fancied something rotten.

  Toying with his next cigarette, Cyril bobbed up between us. Christ, was there no escape. And where had Anthea gone?

  Outside in the bleak courtyard I could at least breathe again and at the corner of the road jumped thankfully aboard a bus.

  Cyril hopped on behind me. He flashed his freedom pass, sat down by my side and fiddled with his hearing aid. ‘How far are you going?’ he asked.

  All the way with Anthea, given half a bleedin’ chance.

  Southern Belle

  The Mardi Gras was over. A few shrivelled balloons still lolled from balconies, and in Jackson Square a solitary black man blew a few tuneless notes on a saxophone, a chilly requiem for the soul of jazz.

  It was warmer on the bus. ‘It’s hot in here!’ The driver glanced nervously at the old girl on the back seats as we pulled out of the station. Nutty but harmless, her crackling voice soon became a counterpoint to the whack of vulcanised rubber on road.

  Biloxi, Pascagoula, Montgomery, Alabama, for coffee and donuts at some ungodly hour of the night, then on towards an unforgiving dawn. In so far as any of us slept, I don’t think she did.

  ‘Where are we now?’ The Lincoln Memorial, after thirty-one hours.

  At the depot she squatted by the empty baggage hold, snowflakes melting in her iron-grey hair. ‘Where’s my valise?’

  Try A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Blue Eyes

  With his lovely thick coat of grey hair Mr Smoky rolled over when he saw me, a sure sign of trust.

  Not like Blue Eyes, diving for cover beneath the nearest parked car or disappearing back into the garden of that empty house round the corner.

  Jungle was more like it, where Blue Eyes, like one of the artist Henri Rousseau’s fabulous tigers, might suddenly stare out at you with eyes that were almost the biggest things about her.

  So where was she when they started clearing the place? Why, sitting by the front door preening herself in the sun and waiting for someone to return.

  It’s flowers again in the garden and curtains in the windows. But that’s not Blue Eyes dozing in the same sunny spot. A bit like her, but much too well groomed.

  Still, she was happy for a week or two. Which is as good as it gets for most of us.

  Curtain Call

  Another first night, and Tony as Canon Chasuble elbowed his way back to the bar with a painful dig in the ribs for Peter, who made an exquisite Algernon. Jeremy, the director, and Peter’s good friend, gripped his glass. He played rugby too.

  Julia fiddled with Lady Bracknell’s wig and pressed my hand. ‘See you round the car park in ten minutes.’

  So why, I wondered, all the bitchiness behind the smiling curtain calls? And was it worse among amateurs who felt they’d missed their true vocation?

  Coming up the path to the car park, someone still in dog collar and gaiters tripped and fell in a puddle. Someone else giggled. Jeremy emerged from the shadows.

  Julie tugged at her safety belt. ‘Let’s go.’ We drove into a cosy world of large detached houses, gentrified pubs, and a church that flew the flag of St. George.

  St. George for England! St. Pancras for Scotland! A good old chestnut for Tony in the Tudor Players’ Christmas pantomime.

  If he still had his teeth.
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  Via Crucis

  The cypresses in the cemetery, grown old and ample on the compost of death, swayed and groaned before the mistral, the fierce, bone-dry wind that sometimes blew in those parts.

  Never mind, it was the chapel we’d come to see. As a man of the cloth I thought David might be interested, and Jessica, of course.

  The heavy oak door slammed shut behind us, and the sudden silence was awesome. A faint bluish light from one small east window fell like a tear upon the flagstones and a few benches were drawn up before the bare white altar. We breathed in the smell of cold stone. Jessica said, ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  So what about the large iron crucifix hanging from my wall that I’d rescued from the cemetery dump. It must have belonged to some lost soul. ‘David,’ Jessica said, ‘it’s time we made a move.’

  From their car window she shouted, ‘We’ll pray for you,’ as the mistral carried them off in a cloud of dust.

  Eye Witness

  Edward’s dark glasses, romantic and mysterious, were aimed at the Polish waitress.

  She was his type, he said, as we sat down to our working lunch and turned to The Great Composers, his latest mail order project. ‘There’ll be more work than you can shake a fist at!’ Edward (don’t ever call him Ted) spoke fast but softly with the hint of a transatlantic accent that could be very persuasive. ‘Tchaikovsky was queer, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and his marriage was a disaster.’ The dark glasses gave nothing away, but Edward had been through more marriages than I could shake a fist at. ‘It was always some little thing,’ he confessed.