Thumbnails

by Gregory Norminton

  Thumbnails

  Gregory Norminton

  To Claire and Sebastiaan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Bad folks

  Late flowers

  Waxwings

  Houghton triads

  The return from exile of P. Ovidius Naso

  Horse burial

  Unforgetting

  Goody goody

  The carpenter’s tale

  The panic room in Eden

  Gifts

  The monumental achievement of Jose Rodrigues do Cabo

  Pileup

  The acid reef

  From a dictionary of slang, circa 2050

  The panic room in Eden

  Stills from the Anthropocene Era

  Visitors Book

  All my little ones

  Tete de veau

  Singer

  The kingdom upstairs

  Intervention

  The overnighters

  Dormeue

  Wild things

  Bog man

  Orpheus’s lot

  Orpheus’s lot

  Gorgon

  Narcissus & the pool of mirrors

  Preliminary report on the economics of unicorns

  Cut is the branch

  Glass slippers are a health hazard

  The siren of May

  Pearly Gates tick box survey

  What gets lost

  Bunking off

  Cryptozoology

  Sepiatone

  One finger exercise

  The runner

  Time & the janitor

  The Dirty Realist Choose Your Own Adventure Book

  What gets lost

  Bookends

  Bibliophagy

  Essential words of the Empress Shōtoku

  A pillow book

  The bard’s last words

  The translation of Archie Gloag

  Flow

  At prayer in the madhouse with Kit Smart

  Endnotes

  Copyright

  Bad folks

  Late flowers

  You should watch that one; she has ears like a hawk.

  Arthur had come in to see me. She was in her armchair by the television. A man was on, showing things to do with parsley. Arthur parked his frame. His trusty steed, he calls it. Never mind her, I said. She’s daft, there’s nothing going on upstairs. Arthur’s a gentleman. I noticed it the day we met. He likes to be proper. But I was sure we were safe and so we carried on.

  Of course things would have been easier if we had rooms to ourselves. We do our best, screening our beds with photographs and rows of familiar trinkets, but it’s not the same. Arthur had it worse than me. He shared with the Major. Poor circulation, bound to the settee. Made elephant noises in his sleep. I couldn’t abide those unequal eyes, one shrivelled and one huge, like Ralph Richardson.

  For a few weeks we were happy in mine. Always with Flora plumped in front of the box. Arthur got used to it and we came to forget all about her. When the Major died it took them a fortnight to replace him and then it was Mr Gads, who was quick on his feet. Arthur bribed him with whisky to make himself scarce.

  So we left Flora to her cookery shows. And suddenly the game was up.

  We were allowed special friendships. They were encouraged. But there have to be boundaries. Arthur’s kids and mine heard about us from the Gorgon and had to interfere. They didn’t want us tampering with our wills at this late stage.

  What a fuss they made! I half expected the gentlemen from the press to appear with their flashbulbs. Barbara took me out to the garden. The camellias were in bloom. I said to her, look, they’re lovely. Never mind about them, she said. It’s not decent at your age. Not decent? I said. Just you wait, you’ll be glad of the attention. The things she said. You don’t like to think of your child’s mind sprawling in the gutter.

  From that point on we were under guard. Mr Gads was discouraged from going walkabout after lunch. He used to so enjoy his tour of the flowerbeds.

  Our intimacy came to an end. They had tired Arthur out. We only hold hands now.

  I wondered who it was gave the game away. There weren’t many suspects. I had words with Flora about it. She smiled and patted my hand. I could have sworn I detected a glint in her eye.

  It just goes to show about appearances. Who would have thought the old girl still had it in her?

  Waxwings

  The boy rubbed his cheek where it still throbbed. From the pinewoods he could hear the farting engines of dirt bikes.

  After a time he found himself at the rear of the supermarket. There was a tree beside the bins. The boy heard the twittering but thought nothing of it until he saw the man.

  “Hallo,” the man said. He held binoculars. The boy did not run away because he wondered what the man was doing and the man said to him, “You are a lucky boy.

  “Do you see those birds? It’s a treat, you know; they hardly ever come to England.” The man said they were waxwings on account of the red feathers like drops of sealing wax on the wings. Great flocks this winter had come across the North Sea. They came here for the berries: cotoneaster and rosehip and sloe. The tree pulsed with the birds and their chatter.

  The boy felt the man’s fingers when he showed him how to adjust the binoculars. Sorting through branches, the boy saw the little sharp birds and their raised crests but not their waxy feathers. The lens misted over and he handed the binoculars back. The bird man was smiling at the tree with the chattering birds in it.

  The bikers came roaring, shitting mud, from the woods. They circled the tree with the birds and the bird man and the boy. In the diesel stink they left behind the man said, “People don’t know the things they’re given.”

  The boy took the knowledge home as a secret. It was something only he owned.

  The next day he found the bird man and they went in search of the waxwings. The man pointed out other birds. The boy didn’t know that the flickering ones are pied wagtails or that starlings do impressions like comedians off the telly.

  Children surrounded him later with their bikes. Who was that man, they asked, but the boy kept his secret.

  Someone must have spoken to mum. “Has he tried to touch you,” she asked, “down there?” The boy felt his face burn. He set her straight but kept his secret.

  The next day after school it wasn’t mum stroking his hair but his stepdad who spoke to him. The boy’s face burned for a different reason.

  “You don’t know anything. I like him better than you.” Mum came in at the screaming. “Better than mum,” he added.

  Gossip spread among the houses. The man was divorced, he had recently moved to the estate. Nobody knew his business.

  His step-dad came to fetch him from school but the boy got away.

  The bird man wasn’t home so the boy went birdwatching on his own.

  He wandered far from the estate, along the main road, until Craig found him and drove him home.

  After the assault the bird man was relocated by the council. For his own safety, the paper said.

  Mum ironed the newspaper with her hand. “Well,” she said, “if they took him away, there must have been something in it.”

  Houghton triads

  Three desirable qualities in a Houghton male: a genial manner, a trustworthy face, stock options.

  Three accomplishments acquired over time by Houghton women: social grace, an implacable smile, strategic incuriosity.

  Three games played by Houghton children: I-spy, It, For God’s Sake Go Outside.

  Three hiding places: Mummy’s walk-in wardrobe, the utility room, euphemism.

  Three physical qualities to be desired of Houghton nannies: plainness, adaptability, a blind
eye.

  Three places of commerce: the organic farm shop, Harrods, Dubai.

  Three places of leisure: Glyndebourne, Guards Polo Club, wherever she wants to go this week.

  Three charities worth supporting: Shooting and Conservation, the Royal Lifeboats, the boys’ future school.

  Three places of business: the boardroom, the country house hotel, the strip club.

  Three golfing skills required of a Houghton male: a carrying drive, a nifty pitch, the readiness to fluff a putt when politic.

  Three avenues of escape from the Houghton lifestyle: retiring on the mother of all deals, downsizing to the country, a heart-attack at fifty.

  Three elements of a sales pitch: technical language, flattery, acronyms. Three words never to be used in a professional negotiation: bribe, minister, casualties.

  Three items to bring home from a business trip: toys for the children, perfume for the wife, a plausible narrative.

  Three indispensable brand names: Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, Botox.

  Three preconditions for seduction: sleeping kids, a fine meal, demarcated exclusion zones in the conversation.

  Three reasons to lie awake in the early hours: indigestion, fear of death, yesterday’s news story.

  Three items in the Houghton arsenal for dealing with journalists: assurance, silence, an aggressive lawyer.

  Three stock words with which to dismiss the allegations: bosh, froth, piffle.

  Three distractions from bosh, froth, piffle: a week in Klosters, a month in the Cotswolds, a night with an escort.

  Three places of refuge for a Houghton wife: the club, the spa, the masseur.

  Three consolations to offer Houghton children: Mummy loves you, teddy loves you, the pony.

  Three best friends at a time of crisis: the Attorney General, the sheik, political expediency.

  Three professional fallback options: a consultancy in Zurich, a thinktank in Washington, those contacts in Lagos.

  Three expressions that brighten one’s day: a surreptitious glance from a fitness instructor, smiles of reassurance from the legal team, the open mouths of protestors seen from a speeding car.

  Three government assurances: the Saudis are unhappy, explanations are accepted, there is no need to prolong investigations.

  Three lessons learned from the Houghton year: no lessons were learned from the Houghton year.

  The return from exile of P. Ovidius Naso

  To P.O. Naso – Rome

  I hope this letter finds you safely returned from the working end of the empire which you once derided, and that you are renewing acquaintance with the fruits of that season for which you pined in a province where, in winter, the whole of nature displays but a single face. You see, I have read you well. It is as a reader that I permit myself to address you. I am, moreover, not unrelated to the source of your misfortune and its seeming correction, being close, exceedingly so, to the bookish runt of Drusus, mighty Livia’s hobbling grandson.

  He it is who instructed me to compose this letter, that you might better understand the intentions of his step-uncle in returning you to Rome.

  Many times, in the years following Augustus’s judgement, I pictured you by the Euxine, writing in hope of reprieve or at least permission to transfer to a province where the sea cannot be walked upon in winter. Unlike some in this city, I trusted your accounts of the harsh steppe and barbarians as versed in our tongue as fish or bullocks. Deprived of wife and companions, with nothing to cheer you save bartered chunks of frozen wine, you listened out for the pounding of enemy hooves. I, that have never been fit to wear shield and armour, could only imagine you shivering on the battlements, waiting with your fellow settlers to defend the town that you hated less than the prospect of its capture. After such hardships, you must have wept with joy to be welcomed by our new Caesar back to the home which you had thought lost for ever.

  Alas, your homecoming cannot prove a joyful one. Though you regain your villa and your house near the Capitol, you will find a cold welcome in the places of your triumphs and few traces of that eager audience which once acclaimed you. For Tiberius is a man who makes his deeper wishes plain and, though on the surface your faults are forgiven, yet all of Rome knows to keep out of your way.

  It shall not be a challenge for citizens enamoured of novelty to overlook a white-haired, palsied old man. Suffering, they say, has left you ripped away from yourself, scarcely recognisable; and even your verses have not been spared. My appeals to the public libraries of Rome to reinstate your Art of Love have fallen on deaf ears. The one thing that kept your name fresh in the public’s mind was your fate; and now that it has been revoked, I have heard men say: “He should have stayed in Tomis. We would have remembered him then.”

  Yet these gossips are deceived if they think your circumstances have changed; for it is not geography alone that can serve to exile a man. The farmer whose hills and crops have burned in a summer conflagration has not left home, yet home is ashes underfoot. In like fashion, Tiberius has decreed that your return to Rome be desolate; for the city where you triumphed will ignore you; it will be yours and not yours, the contrast between your former renown and your present oblivion more terrible to contemplate than any Sarmatian horde.

  Ought you to regret the past that has brought you to this present? It is my belief that you could not have obeyed your Muse without incurring the wrath of those in authority. When Caesar Augustus, wanting a new Golden Age, tried to legislate against adultery, which is to say human nature, you would not pander to the idea and bruited it about that his own grand-daughter had a Vesuvius between her legs that no amount of offerings could propitiate. That tactless talent of yours spared nothing. You mocked the gods and maddened the Emperor, who is become a god; for none can read you and doubt that power fades, greatness corrupts and every accomplishment dissolves in time. Poets who seek an easy life know how to polish with words the rough timbers of power. This you did not do, and though a decade had passed since the publication of your erotic verses, I could have foretold that they would be used against you. The exposer of vice can easily be made to seem vicious by those who, wearing the mask of virtue, fear the revelation of the face beneath.

  It affords me no pleasure to imagine the effect on you of this letter. I send it in order that you be forewarned and keep away from those humiliations that await you in Rome. Attempt, if you can, to reconcile yourself to fate, as must those of us that are born ill-made. Write, as I do, for your own pleasure, tend to your garden where your work is wanted, and take comfort in the knowledge that you will not be buried by the shores of that distant sea. Though you live in obscurity, entertain the hope that your verses may outlast us all. I remain, dear Ovid, that most elusive of creatures:

  An admirer

  Horse burial

  The men came for us in the dead of night. A wind was blowing in from the Sea of Azov and our tents must have looked like great beasts huddled together against the cold. By then we were living beside the burial pit, where we expected to spend the next day brushing dust from the bones of horses. Semyon was pissing into the grass when he saw the guns. He made no sound. Nothing could have saved us.

  Sometimes I wonder what it was like for the men who arrested us. They were drunk: you could smell it on their breaths. A few storm lanterns burned between our tents, giving just enough light for them to see the exhumed drinking cups cut from human skulls. Perhaps they viewed us with fear as the avatars of ancient shamans stooped over the remains of a sacrifice. But they were too habituated to relent. Even before their leader spoke, I felt myself age a thousand years.

  One of my staff died in the prison where they crammed us forty to a cell designed for twelve. Anton Maximovich – who had come top of his year at the institute, who could recite Pushkin and Goethe and Shakespeare – was crushed against the bars. Semyon made it through to the cattle-trucks and we looked out for each other, for prisoners could be as savage as the guards and the urkas slept with murder in their fists.

  “
I can’t understand it,” Semyon said when our train had stalled for a week in the taiga. “We were doing good work – the institute’s work. What changed while we were away?”

  I have long ceased asking myself why. The man who seeks an answer to that question – an answer that makes any sense – soon finds himself eating shit with the goners. Best to accept it as you must the weather. In the early days, however, I still believed in reasons. What we had unearthed confirmed Herodotus on the Scythians: they did, indeed, make human sacrifices, which they buried among concentric rings of slaughtered horses. Civilised Russia, this seemed to confirm, had emerged from the barbarism and class inertia of nomads. I did not tell Semyon that he had made the mistake which doomed us. For in that same excavation we found shards of Greek pottery and Persian jewels: confounding evidence of a cultural sophistication that could not please the Party. Semyon had written to the institute about it; he had even sent an article to the newspapers.

  In our second year among the goldmines of Kolyma, Semyon must have understood all this, or else he did not mean to insult the man who tore out his throat.

  Every one of my colleagues is dead and I remain – the ruin of our fellowship. Nor will I last long, for every day the blood tide rises in my chest, displacing all hope of breath.

  I think about the Crimea. I am a city boy from the forested north: when I first went to the Black Sea, the steppe disturbed me. I long for it now, as I meditate on that burial pit.

  We had no doubt that it marked an atrocity. We could not read the bones, only conjecture what suffering they attested to. Lying here, toothless, I wonder what archaeologists will make of these posts, these shacks and mine shafts, when in the future they come to exhume us.

  Unforgetting

  Hold yourself WELLCOME to the Monument of our Citizen Martyr! Show yourself respectful in the memory of 5000 killed on account of their ethnic being. Fifteen years after see live size models and dead photographs. Remember unforgettingly the victims of H— and leave generous givings for their monumental upkeep.