by Robert Power
The group took a step back, for this was an outsider and one with a very big and strange dog.
‘He dug up all my tomatoes,’ he said, slapping the huge head of the dog. ‘My Mexican tomatoes,’ he said, looking around for recognition. No one responded. ‘Marry … jew … anna.’ He emphasised each syllable.
One by one the others sauntered off. But I stayed back. I liked this man with the wild black dog. He told me how the ridgebacks were bred to look like lionesses. How they scared off the male lions and guarded the African kings. And then, when I told him my name, an unusual one at that, he said it was the same name as the teacher at school who for years got away with abusing the boys. As he drew on his cigarette he described how he and his friend went to the headmaster, who said in a very serious tone: ‘This had better be the truth.’ But they stood by their story and many other boys came forward, eventually even some from decades gone by. The teacher concerned was suspended on full pay and then disappeared from the area.
‘We were wogs,’ he said to me, his dog nuzzling against his thigh, ‘and no one cared about us or what we had to say.’
He was looking across the park into the past and then he turned and smiled, his cigarette stub hanging from his mouth.
‘Once my mum said to me, when I was a kid: “What’s with those Mexican tomatoes you keep growing? They’re all leaf. No tomato.” So next day I went out to Tesco’s and bought some really ripe vine tomatoes. I tied them onto the stakes and said to Mum, “Come on out and see.” She was a bit blind, but was amazed at my crop.’
The dog barked as his master laughed. We chatted a bit longer about this and that. Then my new friend said goodbye and I watched them as they walked across the park towards his truck: the lioness and the African King.
LUCIFER’S ELIXIR
Never judge a suburb by its lawns. Skokie, Illinois: picket fences, polished chrome on four-wheel drives, blond hair and pigtails, sports pages and pipes, all tucked up in bed by ten. But in the basement of number 66 Dawson Drive, there’s no sleeping to be had. The walls are lined with photos of the spirits of long-dead First Nation Americans in war paint and headdress. A shrunken head sits in one corner, its lips stitched in silence, next to a brightly coloured glass bubblegum machine. Don, the Satanist, with the bust of his master above his head (mocking The Last Supper on the wall opposite) produces the bottle from the cupboard and places it in the middle of the table.
‘Lucifer’s elixir,’ he announces, the amber liquid shimmering in the half-light.
The motley crew of vampires and junkies, serial killers and psychopaths recoil in horror. Don smiles on, his pinprick eyes moving from one face to the other. He looks at me, the stranger in the room, the one whose motto is ‘out crazy the crazies’. So I return his smile, with one more twisted, one more unfathomable. I reach out across the table and lift the bottle to my lips and drink deeply of the mysterious liquid. Let me swallow it up, let me be changed, even though I know my heart will turn black, and it will all, once again, be a long time mending.
PORTRAITS
Sleeping in the lodge in Ranthambore National Park, deep into tiger territory, tiger images and artefacts all around me, my dreaming turns to visions as my sleeping mind becomes alert and aware. The sense is of an art gallery with gilt-edged pictures being held before me. One by one the faces appear. Men and women of different races and creeds, ages and demeanours, from far-off times, dressed in robes and headscarves, tunics and top hats. Each pauses, a portrait in a frame, so I can look them in the eye and be reminded of lives gone by. And all around me, all the while, inside the room, inside the lodge, and within the trees and fabric of the forest, the ageless spirit of the tiger roams, stirring remembrance, confirming the mystery, the flow, the inexorable course.
IN A HOUSE OF ADULTS
What do they see? The birds hanging in the sky. On the hillside, the crucifixion. The sawing of wood and hammering. The ship tossed between waves, cresting the mountainous ledges, then thrown into bubbling canyons. The shrieks of the woebegone sailors matched by the gulls and the albatross. The tidal wave. Am I this old? Here now. Or the small boy I have always been. I could tell you stories to make your fur curl. Stories of the human kind. Alien stories from another world. I once lived in a house of adults who never told the truth.
TIGER TATTOO
The first cut is a kiss, marking the beginning of a lifelong partnership.
Time passes, hazily, as D goes about his work with beautiful precision. A true artist. He told me it would be eight hours from beginning to end. That I might find the pain too much to endure. That I might prefer shorter sessions.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it has to be now. At once, like a dream, like a dance.’
Seven hours into the project. Sweat running down my brow, a nauseous, drowsy sensation wafting over me, hot and cold, cold and hot. Needles slicing my skin. The pigment seeping into the wounds. A mild delirium takes over, a dreamy altered state. D continues, bent over me in concentration, shaping, colouring, bringing life to form. I see his hair, his eyes, his shoulder, his elbow. His fingers fast at work. I sense the tear and pull of skin opening, the absorption of the pigment. I feel my body, in shock, resisting each cut. But my spirit is welcoming.
It is some time later: I feel a tapping on my shoulder. D raises his upturned hands in a gesture that tells me it is done. He guides me up from the table and over to a mirror on the wall. There in the reflection … I can hardly believe it … is my blue tiger. His expression is of power, confidence, majesty, as he walks proudly out of a forest of curves and swirls that D has crafted as decoration. D rubs oil into the image, bringing it even more vitally alive.
I lie back on the bed, exhausted and complete.
PIE-MAKER
I had a friend who was a hopeless heroin addict. When I say hopeless I mean in the literal sense, as Paul was very good at taking heroin. The hopelessness extended to his keeping the rest of his life together. The last time I saw him was in Liverpool in the late 1980s. Skunk was doing the rounds and playing havoc with all our heads. We’d been together with a few others at the Adelphi Hotel where our American friend was holed up. When the night came to an end Paul put me in a cab to get back to my bed and breakfast. I got paranoid and jumped out of the cab at a roundabout, convinced the driver was going to kill me. The night got much worse. Then we lost touch, meandering through life and ending up on opposite sides of the world to each other. Thirty years later he started posting pictures on Facebook of the pies he was baking. Cherry pies, steak and kidney pies, apple pies. He baked bread and baguettes, croissants and cakes. Every day a new photo would appear along with minute detail of the process and critical analysis of the outcome. I sent him a photo of my apple and blackberry crumble. I had a pair of oven gloves depicting shark jaws that I placed on either side of the dish. He wrote back commenting on the fact that the crumble seemed to have sunk and did not fill the dish to the top. As I was reading the message I got an email asking me to teach on a Master of Addictive Behaviour course. I scanned the topic areas: treatment, prevention, drug and alcohol, research, epidemiology, legislation. But nothing on pies.
TREES
There was a time when he looked at a tree to gauge how strong were its lower branches, to assess if they could take his weight. In those days things were not going too well. He even learnt the hangman’s knot, felt the thickness of ropes in the hardware store. He had a notion to fashion a purple velvet hood so as not to frighten any children who might stumble across him: bulging eyes, death-blue tongue.
But he got over it. His life got better bit by bit and he avoided taking himself too seriously. Nowadays he likes trees for their shape against a clear blue sky and the sound of leaves in the breeze. He likes walking his little dog in the woods. He touches the bark of the elders and plane trees and likes the tingle of energy he feels from the sap. His youngest calls him a hippie and a tree hugger. It makes him smile to hear him say that, figuring that there are a lot worse things he could have en
ded up being called.
AT PEACE
It was close to the end for you. Too short a life. Still too early, even though the six months predicted by the doctors had stretched to twenty. The last words we share will be of Egypt, echoing those first unspoken by mother to babe.
As you lay in the bed the photos of our trip surrounded you. The pyramids, the Sphinx, the Nile, all looked down to where you lay. You were resting or sleeping. Mother of Mothers. And the words of Egypt came to my mind without my bidding. And I asked you, was that where you wished to be laid to rest? To find peace. And you awakened. And you said yes. Was it in words? Or in a glance? A gesture?
In due time it comes to pass. I sail the Nile and take your ashes by horse and cart into the Valley of the Kings. I stop in my tracks, pondering the spot, and you guide me to the allotted place. Where else could it be but atop the Tomb of Tutankhamun? I spread your ashes in an arc in the sand. Open to the bluest of skies, among the pharaohs. Home. Where you’ve always belonged.
HAPPY DAYS
Put on the washing. Turn on the radio. Clear the table. Wash my hair. Brush my teeth. Dry my hair. Look in the mirror. Dress. Fry the eggs. Toast the bread. Boil the kettle. Eat. Drink tea. Feed the fish. Look out the window. Check the sky. Frown. Put out the rubbish. Check the sky. Check the clock. Listen to the news. Wait for the ping. Peg out the washing. Check the sky. Frown. Look for keys. Find the keys. Open the front door. Close the front door. Walk down the road. Turn the corner. Hear the train. Check the sky. Watch the clouds. Face to the sky. Feel the rain. Check the sky. Smile.
FIVE
Choose a job you love, and you will never
have to work a day in your life.
—Confucius
FRUIT PATCH
The old woman and the young man had worked together all year to rejuvenate the fruit patch. There were strawberries, loganberries, raspberries and blackcurrants. It had been a glorious summer and the harvest in the small garden was beyond both their expectations. To celebrate she had made summer pudding from her mother’s pre-war recipe. Ladling the sumptuous fruit mix into his bowl, she said she wanted to give him a retainer to keep him through the winter months, when there would be less work to be done. He was going to college, but was happy to keep a few gardening jobs on the go to help with expenses. So they agreed on the plan as they ate the fruits of their labour. Sweet, delicious, succulent.
As things turned out she died before the following spring. No one told him (why would they?), so he arrived at the house, as agreed, on the first Monday in March. The new owner opened the door. Not surprisingly, the young woman was startled to see this man on her doorstep, wielding a hoe and a spade.
‘Miss Galley?’ he said.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘She lives here,’ he said. ‘I’m the gardener.’
‘Ah, no,’ said the young woman. ‘I don’t know about her. We bought the house last month. It was empty.’
They talked a bit longer, but the young woman had no knowledge of the previous owner or her whereabouts. When he left he walked down the alleyway behind the house. Peering through the slats of the fence he saw that the fruit patch had been cleared, covered over by slabs of paving stone, neat, tidy and square.
REMEMBERING BOBBY SANDS
It shouldn’t have surprised me. On the first day of term, my very first day as a schoolteacher, I watched Mrs Cattal, head of Year Nine, as she looked out of the window at the kids lining up in the playground. Pretending she had a machine gun in her hands, she mimicked mowing them down. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat.’ She turned inwards to the staffroom, laughing crazily, blowing the imaginary smoke from her imaginary weapon.
It was sometime later that Bobby Sands of the IRA succumbed to his hunger strike, holding out for political status for the Republican prisoners. It was at morning recess, between period two and three. Mrs Cattal had uncorked the bottle of champagne and was filling the glasses.
‘Who wants to toast the death of Bobby Sands?’ she said.
‘Not me!’ I shouted from the back of the room, raising the machine gun to chest level. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat.’
No mimicry required.
BAD LUCK HAT
All the teachers know about Gary and his hat.
‘In a trap, Josiah,’ he says to me. ‘In a rat-trap, Josiah.’
We are in the huge sports hall, just him and me. It’s been a bad day for Gary. His hat has gone missing (maybe one of the other kids hid it somewhere, but it is nowhere to be found). They can be mean to each other, well, at the drop of a hat, you might say. But then these are the meanest kids in town, the ones all the other schools have long given up on. I said I’d take him for a game of badminton to take his mind off his loss, but I can see he is not to be distracted.
‘No hat bad luck, Josiah, in a rat-trap, Josiah.’
He is building himself to frenzy.
‘Poor serve,’ I say, as he hits the shuttlecock directly, deliberately, into the net.
He stares at me long and hard.
‘In a rat-trap, Josiah, no hat bad luck, no hat bad luck.’
Then he smashes his racquet on the wooden floor, splintering the frame.
‘No hat, bad luck, rat-trap, Josiah, rat-trap.’
Repeating, repeating, staring … staring at my bunch of keys with the penknife by the net.
We both lunge forward together.
‘Gary!’ I shout.
HINCKLEY
There was no agreement as to quite why, but in the late 1980s Hinckley had an unusually high proportion of demented people among its townsfolk. Genetics? Metal in the water? Inbreeding? It was the hosiery capital of Britain and generation after generation had worked in the industry.
Walking down the high road to his appointment, the visiting doctor had a strange feeling about the town. Aside from the eerie atmosphere, every other shop window displayed stockings and women’s tights. Identical severed plastic legs dressed in nylon. A motionless cancan dance. And the people themselves, going about their everyday business, did look curiously alike.
When he arrived at Martha Davis’s house, the doctor was greeted by her daughter. She looked exhausted, frazzled at the edges, with dark rings under her eyes. If ever a model was needed for the ‘Respite break for carers of the demented elderly’ campaign, then here she stood.
Martha Davis, eighty-nine years old, sat by the single-bar electric fire, clutching her handbag to her chest. She pointed to her daughter, who sat down on the other side of the fire.
‘That woman,’ she said, without a word of greeting or introduction to the doctor, ‘is trying to poison me. And she wants to steal my things.’
She held her bag ever more tightly.
‘But it’s okay. He’ll be here soon. We’ll walk along the sweep of the bay and eat ice-cream and then he’ll take me away somewhere. We’re going to elope to Gretna Green.’
‘Cardiff,’ said her daughter, with a sigh. ‘She thinks she’s in Cardiff eighty years ago and her first boyfriend, not my dad, is coming to take her out on a date. She’s like this every afternoon. Just waiting for him. She’ll cry soon, because he’s never coming.’
The doctor looked at the younger woman, an old woman herself. Slumped in a battered and threadbare armchair, the strain of the daily round etched upon her face. Her clothes were shabby and worn. And, as she shuffled her feet further into her oversized carpet slippers, the doctor noticed the holes in her stockings.
HUNGERFORD
We were all sitting around the electric fire on the first floor of the Hungerford Drug Project down near the River Thames, just off Charing Cross Road. It was the early 1980s and to most people drug use was simply a crime. This cramped dingy room was an oasis from the madness of the streets. Somewhere to get warm, have a bowl of soup, feel safe. Molly, the volunteer, was making a pot of tea in the small kitchen off to the side. Lennon (so-called on account of his Beatle haircut) was recounting the days of the heroin trial at the National Temperance Hospital.
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��Pure pharmaceutical dope, that doctor gave us. So I didn’t have to steal or hang out with all the scumbag thieving dealers on Old Compton Street.’
The younger users licked their lips at the thought of such a paradise.
‘But we knew it wouldn’t last. There’s no way any politician was going to support that.’
‘Yesterday,’ said Warren, always looking for the chance, ‘all your troubles seemed so far away.’
The older junkies laughed; the younger ones looked lost in the joke.
Then Lennon jumped up and jigged around the room, singing loudly.
‘I am the walrus, you are the eggman … Here comes the sun, do do do do … All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’
‘Eggmen? Scum-men.’ Everyone listened to Warren. He was in his fifties and had been on a methadone script forever. ‘The police are pushing us out of Soho, cleaning up the clubs so that they can bring in fancy shops and loft apartments.’
‘What’ll it mean?’ asked Russ, a young Liverpudlian who had come to London to get away from the deadly Diconal that all his mates were pumping into their arms.
‘We’ll just be shifted somewhere else. Kings Cross. Euston. Paddington.’
‘Mornington Crescent!’ chimed in Lennon, with another joke for the older guys.
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Warren shifted in his chair to get nearer to the single-bar fire.
The winter was biting and the crack in the window let in a shaft of freezing air. There was silence for a while. We all stared at the orange glow of the element of the fire.
Russ looked up.
‘You know this queer disease in America? HTL-something, I think it’s called. Well, I heard a Yank on the streets, a really strung-out guy, saying that junkies were getting it. That it gets spread by injecting.’
‘Molly,’ shouted Warren. ‘You heard about this? This HTL thing? You’re at college, ain’t you?’
Molly was tipping the boiling water from the urn into the big teapot.