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by Gregory Norminton

  Sell exclusive rights to Hello!

  Have them augmented

  Use the panic room

  Visit your vault

  Experience Zero-g weightlessness

  Help to save Africa

  View the Earth from space

  Feel humbled by your success

  Make your child a movie star

  Endanger you septum

  Compliment your private chef

  Punch your anger management coach

  Read the books in your library

  Establish a think tank

  Prove litigious

  Look at the art you own

  Trade up for a younger model

  Know Jesus loves you

  Experience opulent solitude

  Taste gold

  Make the cover of Forbes

  Sue for defamation

  Find a complaisant guru

  Have sex with a lookalike

  Endow your alma mater

  Invest in tar sands

  Own a football club

  Intervene editorially

  Fail to visit every room in your house

  Silence a critic

  Find a warm welcome on your island

  Deny a conflict of interests

  Shoot an elephant between the eyes

  Purchase a live organ

  Achieve a monopoly

  Pay for your own facts

  Quash disruptive technology

  Disinherit your children

  Hire a food taster

  Watch a pool boy make love to your wife

  Alter government policy

  Issue explicit instructions not to be looked at

  Keep tigers in your garden

  Finance a coup

  Establish plausible denial

  Bury the facts

  Bury the fact-finders

  Establish a religious cult

  Install a missile-defence system

  Build a hypoallergenic bomb shelter

  Invest all your hopes in cloning

  Consider cryogenic burial

  Keep your hands clean

  Try forbidden flesh

  Work out what was in it for you

  Think you got away with it

  What gets lost

  Bunking off

  The first thing Graham did upon waking was to check his teeth. He pressed them gingerly with his thumb before giving the incisors a tug. They seemed firm. In his dream, a recurring one, they had come loose, crumbling from his mouth.

  His wife slept on. The alarm clock stared. NO POINT NOT GETTING UP, it said.

  Looking in the fridge, Graham found the marmalade gunged up and cold. She had left it in overnight. He couldn’t hope to spread it now. He settled for plain toast but the margarine she’d bought was too salty and he scraped the excess into the bin.

  His wife moaned. With Billy gone there was no point getting up. She paid no attention to the grapefruit juice he brought her with its swirling cloud of pulp. Graham made deliberate noise with the foil. He arranged the pills as usual beside her glass.

  On the train there was the usual overcrowding. Many fragrances, pleasant on their own, blended into a miasma. Graham turned his face towards the Perspex screen. He imagined he had a pocket of air just for him and breathed it as though secretly. The screen was smudged with grease from people’s bodies.

  Clouds all the colours of a bruise churned above the City. A storm coming, Graham hoped, but he had forgotten about it by the time he was sitting at his desk, the first coffee of the day giving up its puny ghost beside him. The desk had been swept clean of personal effects. It could have been anybody’s.

  All morning familiar heads swayed behind the partition. Graham went out for lunch; it had rained in the world. He wiped with his sleeve the fat drops from his habitual bench in Bunhill Fields and ate a sandwich, wondering all the time how in God’s name he was supposed to break it to her.

  Later, in the glib sheen of the toilet mirror, he checked his gums where he’d felt the pressure. He could see nothing more unpleasant than usual.

  Graham worked until five. “Bunking off,” he said to the post room girl, the sight of whose padded breasts he thought he might miss.

  Nick Burke caught up with him in the atrium. He pretended to have been running. Calling it “voluntary”, Graham reflected as they shook hands, only made it easier for those who were staying.

  His wife had gone to her sister’s. She had put the marmalade back in the fridge. Graham decided not to mind, remembering the dream about his teeth.

  Cryptozoology

  People in town had got the measure of him. They knew his sort: the wild-eyed fanatic, the desert guru, driven by God knows what distress to the crucible of flies. What was he searching for? Some ruddy goanna: extinct, dead as a rock; but not for him.

  The man was no scientist but he declared that an advantage. He had, he said, seen enough of them to know the smallness of their minds, the meanness of their superior smiles. For a month he had been going on his expeditions: heading out in his Japanese car into the Wilcolo Valley, or patrolling Wilpena Creek among the red gums and native pines.

  Nobody knew much about him. He was polite and he paid: there’s saner men you can’t say the same about. Once he left his wallet in the pub. Before handing it back, Phil Tucker checked inside. There was a photo of a little girl, maybe three, standing in striped socks and a cutesy white dress on a paving slab. There was another photo, more recent by the look of it, of a teenage brunette – good-looking – all dressed up for a ball.

  There was something about the owner put Phil Tucker off asking questions.

  In March, when the heat lessened, the city came up to the Ranges. It mistook the man for local colour. The bush had dried him up, like an apple core. His eyes were raw with looking. He turned them on the student who challenged him in the pub.

  “I’ve seen them as fossils,” the young man said. “I think you’ll find they died out in the Ice Age.”

  The man had known this before: people tramping all over his theories. There’s always a chance, he said. A herpetologist had startled one in the Wattagan Mountains. A French priest had seen one in Papua New Guinea.

  Witnesses are fallible, the student replied. The ape turns out to be a hoax, the lizard is a log, the sea serpent is the erect penis of a Grey whale. Why not focus on the marvels that live and which by our actions we are losing?

  Nobody had seen the goanna man angry before. The blood drained from his face. He gripped the counter, his knuckles bleached with rage. What about the coelacanth, he said, dredged up alive from prehistory? What about the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Wollemi Pine, shade once to dinosaurs, secretly ramifying in the Blue Mountains? Sometimes the world gives second chances.

  The whole pub had gone quiet. The challenger backed off, showing his palms. He knew better than to puncture the illusion: that it’s possible, if you search hard enough, to find something living that is thought lost forever.

  Sepiatone

  At the age of seventy-eight, my grandfather became invisible. One moment he was seated in his easy chair, sullen as ever, a drop of fluid balanced on the tip of his nose; the next, his skin grew transparent, his hair thinned to gossamer. Grandma threw her knitting pattern into the air and screamed. She begged him to come back but Grandpa looked at her blankly, and his eyes too became transparent, so that I could see through them to the antimacassar.

  Grandma gripped me by the sleeve. “Do something,” she cried. My grandfather was in no pain; indeed, he seemed unaware of his predicament until he looked at his hands and saw blood, clear as water, pumping through the veins.

  At that moment, something astonishing happened. Grandpa smiled. It wasn’t a particularly kindly smile, more embarrassed really, but it was quite definitely a smile. In all my childhood, throughout my unspeakable adolescence, never had such a thing occurred. I could just make out the white of his teeth in the mist of his face; the two gold molars had turned a sepia colour.


  “Don’t just sit there,” said Grandma. “Fetch someone or we’ll lose him for ever.”

  But it was already too late. My grandfather had become no more substantial than steam in a breeze. By the time Grandma’s hands left her horrified face, there remained nothing of him, not even a faint outline. I put out my hand and reached for the space that I supposed my grandfather to occupy. It was empty.

  Over the next few days, to be a comfort, I fell back on old cliches. Just because we couldn’t see him didn’t mean he wasn’t there; invisibility was a disability like any other; medical science was advancing in leaps and bounds. Above all, it was vital for us to continue as normal. We didn’t want to alienate Grandpa in his time of need. So we made food for him, which we placed at the table next to our own. When enough of these dishes had gone untouched, I tried to convince Grandma that his behaviour was quite normal, all part of the adjustment process. When Grandpa stopped raiding the fridge, however, we changed tactics.

  It was clear that he had taken to his potting shed: I could see the kerosene lamp burning at night. So his meals waited outside while we chewed ours indoors, and at nightfall I would return half empty plates from the garden. Faintly encouraged, Grandma took to preparing elaborate dishes to tempt him back, finding new purpose in her culinary mission. Day after day I was sent out to buy chillies and peppers, saffron and ginger, rice wine and naan bread. When these failed to get results, Grandma changed strategy and, for the first time in fifty years of marriage, she treated him to ketchup and chips, cod in batter, sausage and beans. For a while this new tactic paid off and, in return, my grandfather etched complex patterns into the grease with his cutlery, which my Grandma studied avidly, holding the plates up to the light. It seemed like the situation might last, but in her mounting hopefulness my grandmother made a mistake. She took to slipping notes beneath the plates, perfume-dabbed love letters like the ones she hid in the box beneath the stairs.

  My grandfather’s final disappearance happened more slowly than the first (though, looking back on it now, I should have foreseen that too) and it began with the returning of his dishes untouched. Night after night, I walked back to the house with the loaded tray, my heart heavy, trying to persuade myself that he was only out of sorts, not himself for the moment.

  “Not himself?” Grandma said. “What is he now? You tell me!”

  Tired of waiting, we broke into the potting shed. The smell was terrible, like burnt molasses. Empty crisp packets and chocolate wrappers lay strewn about the floor. And there, pinned to the wall with a Stanley-knife, were my grandmother’s late letters of love. I watched as Grandma took the knife and picked up the stained pieces of paper. She looked at them blankly for a moment. Her head jerked as though she were about to retch, and she cast the letters to the ground. “The bugger. The bloody – buggering – bugger. Oh, he was always a cold one. He never cared for us, never. I’ll bet he’s waited for this to happen all his life.”

  She hid her face in her hands and sobbed. Her crying sounded to me unpleasantly girlish. I bent down and picked up one of the love letters. Despite the sickly sweetness in the air, I could just make out the smell of perfume from the paper. I held the letter to the light. Her signature had been carefully scored out with a blade.

  One finger exercise

  On the last day of his despair, Alasdair remembered his father’s pistol, stored ever since the end of the war in the cherry wood cabinet across the hall. He located the tiny key that would unlock it behind a wall of sheet music in one of the leather-bound ashtrays his father used to collect.

  Alasdair held the key teeth-side up under the trap of his fingers. It was nine months to the day since his diagnosis. “Nothing fatal,” the doctor had assured him. Dupuytren’s Contracture: it sounded like an exercise for spanning the keys.

  Refusing at first to believe it, he had gone home to resume his assimilation of Bach’s Partitas and Fugues. But having a name for his condition made it worsen rapidly. Trying to find a simple chord, his fingers flinched and curled up like wounded animals. The contracture was vicelike; the more he exercised, the harder it bit, until his hands were agonised paddles floundering on the keys. Occasionally he would have days of remission but they were grace notes in his life and soon ceased altogether.

  His hands had warped, his life also, for he had driven away his friends and sympathetic colleagues. The Bach sheet music was locked away in the piano stool; he spent entire days in the sunlight of a disregarded summer, watching his fingers furl up like scorched leaves.

  On the day, early in the Festival, when he had been scheduled to play the Partitas and Fugues, Alasdair had received a visit from the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund which had put him in a rage and made him weep as soon as the woman was gone.

  Thus he came to stand beside the cabinet.

  When he was little, his father used to show him the pistol. It was always loaded, he said, in case of burglars. Or for naughty boys who don’t practise their scales. Alasdair had no idea if the pistol still worked. While the father had fought in a war and killed men, his son had little experience outside music.

  It was a cool afternoon of scudding cloud when he entered the gardens. Jugglers were spinning sticks on the grass. A group of students was handing out fliers. He passed them all on his way up the hill. His father used to bring him here, under the dark volcanic crags, to speak of God and music, of the purpose he was born for. His father had not approved of the festival. He frowned on dramatics and all pretending.

  Alasdair found a suitable spot, extracted the heavy object from his pocket and lifted its cold snout to his temple. For perhaps no more than a fraction of a second, he would have been able to smell unseen flowers.

  The group of students found him unconscious but uninjured, a replica pistol in his clenched and ruined fist. Somebody wondered if he wasn’t famous.

  The runner

  Night bombardment, and the telephone wires cut to shreds, the observation officer had an urgent message to send down the line. Reclus was summoned from his vigil on the fire-step.

  The officer was hoarse from shouting. Men said he had an uncle in the top brass. “See that he gets it in person,” he said to Reclus. “I want you to put it in his hand.”

  There were no pilots to chart him through the wasteland, and little light save for the field-battery that revealed in flashes stripped trees, an eviscerated horse, stretches of churned mud powdered with chloride of lime. Reclus could not run for the rottenness of the boards. The going was cold slime, then hard and firm again underfoot. He ducked where he remembered the slack wires. The annunciation of each incoming shell made him stoop and grimace.

  In a bombed-out part of the trench, the water was more like slobber than anything. Men were dredging the broken section, turning up unspeakable things. Reclus gulped air through his mouth and waded into the ditch.

  A solitary star-shell rose from the Bosches. Reclus’ long shadow contracted as the shell reached its apex, then lengthened again, so that he saw a jerking puppet. Something exploded metres short and he stumbled against the hastily thrown-up earth. Loose dirt tumbled from the split hessian of sandbags and spilled cold on his nape. Highpitched screaming broke the caul of his deafness. Stretcher-bearers passed, smelling of iodine and cordite and piss.

  He moved faster as he left the hottest trenches. Artillerymen, evenly spaced, sent their nightlines twinkling in the damp and stunted blackness. Reclus knew the places in this sector that were enfiladed: his lover had collapsed in blood and shit a week ago at one of them. His tongue was foul in his mouth as he leapt through these unhealthy points. He held his breath as if that might save him from a sniper’s bullet.

  In the first glimmer of dawn, Reclus bolted down a transport line towards the transport wagons and the field kitchens. The walking wounded moaned and huddled. Reclus gave one water, another a damp cigarette. He scurried close to the wagon lines, in memory perhaps of his childhood and the hot breath of horses. Others, without urgent errands, moved li
ke elderly workmen and cast the broken nets of their gaze upon him.

  It was strange, as ever, penetrating the grounds of the chateau. Reclus felt like a visitor from another planet. Waved through by sentries, he made his way to the great hall where the general sat nursing his morning bowl of coffee.

  Reclus stepped up to the desk with its maps and ashtrays and handsome chessboard. He shivered with cold after the heat of his run and there was a log fire burning but he was not invited to approach it. Standing to attention, he tried to stretch out the ache in his back.

  The general received the sweat-stained paper. Responsibility so weighed on his brow that he barely raised his eyes. He read the message, frowned and dismissed its bearer. Closing the door on his way out, Reclus saw the general read the message again, sigh, and move his opponent’s queen to take his bishop.

  Time & the janitor

  In about twenty seconds you’re going to throw up. Please do it into that funnel.

  There – feeling better? Take a glucose tablet. Time plays havoc with the old blood sugar.

  I shouldn’t bother – that’s twenty inches of fibre-reinforced plastic. We don’t know where you’re from. We don’t know what you’re carrying. Believe me, it’s as much in your interest as it is in ours.

  What were you expecting – dignitaries? Those days are long gone. You’re the trickle after the flood. You’re the drop of piss in the underpants of time.

  Sorry. I forget my manners. It’s just we’ve had all sorts pass through the portal. Maniacs, most of them. Crooks and gamblers.

  I say “we” but in fact I’m pretty much the last one here. I used to have a life outside. I used to see the world. Now I wait for the future to turn up – or those bits that get through before they cancel each other out.

  Good idea, take the weight off. That’s what the chair’s for. You might as well make your stay a comfortable one.

  I’m afraid there is no one else you can talk to. I’m as high as these things go. I have authorisation.