Twelve Stories

by Paul Magrs

  Roger had something special. I don’t know what it was, exactly. A little glow around him. A furry little halo. An extra spring in his step. It made my heart jump up inside me, whenever he came bounding along. Is that daft? Does that sound sentimental?

  Everyone had warned Roger about his fraternizing. We all knew that he was bound to come a cropper, the way he was mixing with the humans, and the company he was keeping. Time and again his friends would tell him: Don’t get involved in their strange human ways. But Roger was fascinated, compelled, endlessly drawn to them.

  We watched Roger show off for the humans. He turned cartwheels and somersaults across their scrubby back lawn. He scampered along their rickety fences and the tangle of conifers that hemmed the houses beside the railway lines. He capered and twirled and did gymnastics all over the place in order to grab their attention. But what for, Roger? The extended membership of the clan known as the Longsight Branch all wanted to know what old Roger was playing at. You don’t have to go impressing humans. What do you want from them?

  Roger couldn’t say. He wouldn’t explain it. But I somehow knew. I who’d been his first girlfriend, ohh, all those many years ago. I knew more about him than he knew himself. Let’s face it Human beings are the ones with all the power. They’re big and they’ve got chainsaws and axes and pop guns and everything. They tolerate us living beside them, by their tall houses and higgledy-piggledy gardens.

  Greasing in, is what some would call it. He would dance on that particular unkempt lawn, when he knew they’d be watching. What was so great about them, that he wanted to amuse the likes of them on cold mornings? He would waltz about all over the joint, carrying armfuls of nuts.

  ‘They’re a shifty-looking, vagrant lot,’ I warned him. ‘They don’t even belong in that house. They go sneaking in after dark, making sure that no one sees.’

  He just puffed out his cheeks and laughed at me. He had hold of a fat conker, past its best, its snug coat gingery with rot. He was banging it against the concrete of Number Eight’s patio.

  ‘I don’t care who they are,’ he said. ‘They feed me stuff. They let me indoors—imagine! Right inside the house! I’ve been inside, Elsa. I’ve seen what it’s like inside their homes. How many of us have seen that, eh?’ He grinned, all lop-sidedly, with his eyes shining bright. He was still bashing away at the skin of that conker. ‘I’m an explorer, I am,’ he said. ‘I have been to the Interior.’

  ‘So what’s it like?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s hard to describe,’ he said. ‘Quite messy and dirty. Dark, too. I was surprised at them. I thought human beings liked their luxury.’

  I stared at the dark-eyed house, all gloomy and cold. It radiated this feeling of not-rightness: of awful things having gone on in the past. As if the stones and plaster still held an echoing record of ill feeling, trapped in the dark and damp within. Human beings live inside dead matter: stones and cement. It tells on them, I think.

  They were squatters, living in that derelict house on Middlebank Avenue. They were drug addicts and criminals, surely. Ah the members of the Longsight Branch were very disapproving of the way these shady human beings didn’t appear to do very much at all with their lives. They sat about the place, or shambled about in the messy garden. It was the very antithesis of the busy-busy- busy mentality of the Longsight Branch.

  We squirrels live cheek by jowl with human beings. But that doesn’t mean we have to be best friends. We are in a wary, uneasy relationship with the human beings. Some of them hate us, don’t they? And so we have to be careful…

  And that is why we’ve evolved for ourselves a fantastically complicated means of communication over distance. It’s very sophisticated, when I think about it, but we never really have to think about it. Our network is just there.

  So long as there are horse chestnuts and beeches around us, between houses, in gardens, down the sides of the railway tracks, then we’re sorted. They are our homes, our highways and byways, our food source and our means of communication.

  We go tap-tap-tapping on the interlinked branches. We set off the tiniest trembles and they communicate from tree to tree with the slightest pressure. We can say anything to our friends and neighbours through the medium of the clattering twigs, the rustling leaves. We can set off alarms when something is wrong.

  Tap tap tap

  Thump thump thumppetty thump

  Scrit scrat tap tap tap

  That’s the sound of the Longsight Branch: all the many twigs and boughs of the horse chestnuts wagging and clacking and rattling against each other. Miles away people can hear the palaver. To any other ears, the birds and the rats and the foxes, it sounds like nothing. Just the wind soughing and riffling through the greenish branches. But to us it is our lifeline.

  Tappety tap thump thump clatter.

  Some of it’s just chatter. Some of it is news. You lot think you’re the only ones with your aerials and satellite dishes and all that rubbish hanging off your houses. Your airwaves alive with bristling information. Broadcasting everywhere and buzzing like mad. Well, we are the same. I’ll have you know.

  We learn to recognise the distinct timbre of each other. Each individual’s call. And that was how Wayne knew, and then I knew, some three days later, that—incredibly—Roger had come back to life.

  By then the derelict house was a black, still-smouldering ruin. The trees around it were dying slowly. You could hear them, if you listened, creaking and weeping and fading away. But there was another noise that morning. A thumping, a padding, a tapping that was all too familiar to us, those of us who had known him all our lives.

  ‘Roger? Roger?’ We tapped his name back and let it carry through the interlinked web of branches and twigs. Where was he? How far? And where had he been?

  Tap tap tap. Thumpetty-thump.

  The humans had absconded to safety, those awful squatters. They had left and they themselves had torched their stolen house, leaving only Roger to face the flames and perish. But maybe we were wrong? Maybe he was still here, amongst us? Somehow alive? He was the gymnast, the tumbler. The most nimble of us all.

  And so we listened hard, Wayne and me, and the others as they caught a glimpse of him on the breeze and heard his subtle patter.

  Maybe—just maybe—he hadn’t left us yet. Maybe Roger hadn’t yet tumbled off the Longsight Branch?

  The Girl from Victim Support

  The girl who was sent round a week after the break-in was called So-Sue-Me. That’s what it sounded like to Mrs Booth. She was Chinese, with a fluting accent, tinged with Bolton. Having recently started her criminology degree, So-Sue-Me volunteered for Victim Support because she liked to find out what ‘pushes people into it. Some people have same background, same chances, but some will do crime. It interesting.’

  Mr and Mrs Booth sat either end of the kitchen table and the girl sat halfway along, flipping dreamily through her diary. Mrs Booth made tea. As she fetched out the dainty biscuits Mrs Booth was already starting to find it embarrassing. Rather than our feelings, I bet we end up talking about house prices, or gardening instead, she thought. So-Sue-Me wasn’t giving many prompts.

  But Mrs Booth found that she herself had quite a lot to say. She had a burglary to describe.

  Mr and Mrs Booth hadn’t been long in their house by the railway lines. They loved the quiet of the long garden and the shadows under the magnolia trees and their blossom like white cups and saucers. They loved their real fires and their tall back windows. They loved how weird it was that, just across the tracks, there was all the noise and confusion of the main street with its dingy kebab shops and rowdy pubs.

  They were settling down here, and the cellars and attic were crammed with the things they could never bear to part with. They weren’t a young couple, in the first flush. Theirs was a hard-won solitary life together and they were nesting for the first time. Mr and Mrs Booth were happily encumbered by it all.

  And when the break-in came, a week ago, it was Mrs Booth —the light slee
per—who found herself on the middle landing, shaking in her nightie and trying to make sense of the noises downstairs. The lights were blazing. Mr Booth sometimes left them on. He often left the house in vulnerable disarray. Had he let a cat come in? He had a soft spot for cats, but cats didn’t open and close drawers, or empty out the contents on the kitchen floorboards.

  Mrs Booth very sensibly made lots of noise. She bellowed and thudded down the stairs. She wanted to warn them—whoever they were—and give them time to realise they had been discovered. Let them make their escape.

  A horrid kind of gravity pulled her down to ground level; to the kitchen door. She couldn’t stop herself. She took a deep breath and screeched: ‘Our house! You’ve ruined our wonderful house!’ The words weren’t premeditated. They ripped out of her.

  When she flung open the door she saw the back was open to the blackness of 5am outside. She could hear rapid feet on gravel and laughter—which made her furious—and the shattering of (what turned out to be) the terracotta pot of rosemary.

  They were gone.

  Mr Booth clattered downstairs moments later, shouting in confusion. He was a much deeper sleeper than his wife. She was already on the phone to the police, telling them of the things that had been obviously, annoyingly nabbed. Wallets, cards, driving licences. Then they were drinking sweet milky tea and waiting to start up the whole business of putting everything back together again.

  Mrs Booth paused in her story. She and Mr Booth waited for So-Sue-Me to say something.

  She had been trained to say things which would address a number of their key issues.

  So-Sue-Me coughed and said:

  ‘That feeling of insecurity and guilt, that not your fault. Them feeling of anger and guilt? They natural.’

  Mr and Mrs Booth leaned forward, listening carefully to the girl’s comments. They nodded at them all.

  ‘You do all the form you must do, for insurance and security, and you feel better, I guarantee. And now you secure with window lock and kick-bar, you better off.’

  Then, as if So-Sue-Me had turned a lock inside them, Mr and Mrs Booth found themselves talking even more. Even Mr Booth. They did it to fill the gaps between So-Sue-Me’s pronouncements. But soon they found they were quite carried away. They talked about their feelings of security and fear and anger and guilt and fury and blame. They surprised themselves.

  So-Sue-Me nodded. ‘All them feelings? They not your fault.’

  After an hour she announced she was off into town, for shopping. She was doing up the many buckles on her chic black jacket and she said: ‘I have too many fastenings.’

  ‘Like our windows and front door,’ Mrs Booth said, and they all laughed. She wanted to ask one last thing. She wanted it to be like lightning and not being struck twice, and all the odds against it. Perhaps the girl had learned some nice statistics as part of her training. ‘Now that we’ve been burgled, is there less chance of it happening again?’

  So-Sue-Me looked at the couple and smiled. ‘It not like that at all. Now you stand more chance. They been here. They say, these people have nice things. They tell friends. Will rob again.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Booth weakly. Then she glanced at her husband as they went down the hall in order to show the girl out. Unaccountably, they started to laugh.

  ‘But it not your fault,’ So-Sue-Me said. ‘Now you have security features. But you must be wary. It natural.’

  As Mr and Mrs Booth waved the girl off down the garden path, Mrs Booth was starting to think of their house and their life together as a space craft. It was a rocket, fragile in the hostile void of five in the morning. Its metal skin had been punctured, the air lock forced open, and all the oxygen and the precious stuff of fife had flooded out.

  Now they were in space, Mr and Mrs Booth. They were bobbing about together in no gravity, and even laughing about it.

  The Great Big Book Exchange

  There was once a woman who loved to read.

  There was once a woman whose daughter went and left home and died. Now the old woman had a house filled with paperback books, one cantankerous old man, and one orphaned grandson.

  There was once a woman who lived in a small town at the top of a hill. There was a market place, two pubs, an Italian cafe… there were low, flat fields criss-crossed by railway tracks and country roads, a sandstone quarry, the old pit nearby… This was her landscape.

  There was once a woman who had read so many paperbacks that she couldn’t possibly remember all that she had read. So much of it leaked out of her head, under the gap at the bottom of her bedroom door, across the top landing, down the staircase…

  There was once a woman who was a dinner lady in the school her grandson had to go to now. Where he didn’t fit in, because he’d slipped back a whole generation into the past. His parents had been killed in a plane crash. A holiday in Florida they’d won on a quiz show. Everyone dreams of going to America. Tickets and new luggage and kisses at Teesside airport and they were never seen again. The tape of their quiz show triumph sat by the video recorder on the stone-effect fire place. No one had ever watched it.

  There was a woman who loved to sit up all night reading. She would ward off the present she was in with reading.

  There was a woman who didn’t remember the names of people, the order that events came in, the twists of plots. She could never remember the outcomes of who was in love and who was dead and buried or married; or who was saved and who deserved or didn’t deserve their comeuppance.

  There was once a woman called Winnie who knew that, even if she forgot the adventures she’d been on, or the lives she’d lived, the paperbacks were still there to prove it. This woman was measuring her life’s duration in inch-thick spines.

  There was a woman who believed that books, old books, had a life of their own. She believed they were independent of their owners and they floated from home to home. They rested, like pigeons taking a breather, in book shops and market stalls. She believed they sought out their rightful owners and ultimately found them.

  She believed they come to us at just the right point in our lives. They wait and wait and then they ambush us. Tell us all they know.

  There was a woman called Winnie who was seduced by Paperbacks, one after the next.

  There was a woman who went each week to breathe in the dust of the Great Big Book Exchange. She went to the shop owned by the man with two plastic arms. She went to him, even though he expected customers to eventually return the books they bought from him. He expected them to adopt his credit system and to take part in the Great Big Book Exchange. Everything swirling in a great big current, swapped hand to hand, always moving, always flowing. But she was a woman who liked to keep her own books. To keep beside her every book she ever read.

  There was a woman who browsed those shelves, and couldn’t help but wonder over the man in charge. She couldn’t help wondering about him with his two plastic arms. As she worked her way round his shop she darted the odd look at him and, every glimpse she got of those arms, it made her flinch. And Winnnie wondered what he could do and what he could accomplish with those two smooth arms. She wondered if it was only from the elbows down that he was artificial. It was hard to tell with the sleeves of the checked shirts he favoured rolled up just so.

  Pride and Prejudice. The Silence of the Lambs. Flowers in the Attic. Jaws.

  She watched carefully at how he managed when he had to count out change on his counter and when he had to operate the clunky old till. Winnie stood in shame with her pile of books, her heart turning over in her chest, when he was forced to take them from her to check the scribbled prices on the inside covers. She held her shopping bag open for him, so he could drop them in. She blushed every time she came here, but she still came back.

  Rich Man, Poor Man. Sophie's Choice. The Exorcist. Jane Eyre. The World is Full of Married Men.

  There was a woman who couldn’t help coming back again and again to the Great Big Book Exchange.

  Gone with t
he Wind. Peyton Place. Great Expectations.

  There was a woman who went out on a Saturday with her grandson, now a teenager. He was a bit old-fashioned. He didn’t understand the kids in his class at school. He didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Brideshead. Dead Zone. Tin Drum. Dallas. Dune.

  There was a woman who bemoaned her grandson’s fate, but only to herself, inside her head. Poor lad. His parents dead, his grandma quiet, her head in a book, his granddad pissed and crazy. In a little town like this. Like he’s too old for his generation. They like—what do they like?—burgers in buns and french fries and rap music and punk music and hanging around on the street of a night. Even in this small town. They cluster around the phone box in the market square. She’s seen them. Her grandson would never dream of knocking about with them.

  What does he like? He likes the suety puddings and the mashed swede and the roast potatoes and jam rolly-poly she makes for him. He’s heftier, more careful, slower than his peers. He’s sedentary. He reads.

  A Clockwork Orange. Stig of the Dump. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Lolita.

  He doesn’t want a girlfriend. You don’t want a girlfriend, do you? They take all your money off you. Girls your age are older than you. More mature. They’ll be after all your money you’ve saved. Your inheritance. They’ll take a lend of you. Leave you with nowt.

  A Confederacy of Dunces. On the Road. The Naked Lunch. Battlestar Galactica.

  There was a woman who was pleased her grandson had caught this reading bug of hers. She was glad he would come to choose books with her at the Great Big Book Exchange. Often they were the only customers in there on Saturday afternoons, making their way along their separate shelves.