by James Newman
She read it, and then read it again. She took off her glasses and put a handkerchief to her eyes. “You poor, poor boy,” she said. “You are gifted.”
Whatever happened that day I never saw the inside of a special class again in my life.
You see?
I was so special I wasn’t special anymore.
THE POISON
Green Street Green
then
RECIPE FOR HEADGEHOG PIE
1) One Hedgehog, plumper the better. Avoid road-kill.
2) Encase the entire animal (alive or dead) in a ball of mud or clay
3) Place under an open fire for about an hour.
4) Wait until the clay ball is broken by the heat taking with it the spines.
5) Serve remembering the Lord invented fingers before forks.
Fun City
RECIPE FOR MIND-ALTERING BENDER.
now
Medical insurance – comprehensive policy.
Local Rum – one small bottle
Local beer – five large bottles
Cocaine – one gram
Cigarettes – two boxes (40)
Heroin – two liberal shots
Ya Ba – one tablet
Valium – 20 milligrams – 2 ten milligram tablets
Vitamin C – 2000 milligrams
Vitamin B7
Water – three liters
Atarax / antihistamine – 50 milligrams
Gatorade / rehydration salts
MacDonalds – One set meal
ROXANNE
now
SERGEANT SWIFT had just finished a TV dinner that did little to fill the gap left by the disappearance of his wife and kids. The divorce papers sat on the telephone table as an angry reminder. The news was always hard to take. Another geezer screwing the woman you chose to be the mother of your child. The woman you had taken to garden centers and chose the plants withering in the lounge. Another geezer from the station. A geezer you used to drink pints with on a Friday night. Some geezer that you used to think was alright. He guessed he was more than just an alright geezer. He was better than you and all the evidence was there to prove it. They avoided each other in that cold professional way one does when one knows that one’s colleague had achieved what one could never achieve – make her happy. Swift forked the last of the microwaved Shepard’s Pie out from the piping plastic tray and onto the dirty plate. He’d heard about the latest scare about horse meat being used in his choice meals, but what was the difference between a horse and a cow and a sheep anyway? Nothing, ney. They were all dumb herbivores. Swift took the TV dinner into the lounge, ate without emotion, like filling a car with gas and climbed up and made it to the kitchen, placing the plate in the dishwasher. He opened a cupboard and took out the bottle of Bells. Poured some into a glass and hit it back in one before refilling a good four fingers, no ice. Outside the wind blew the large willow where a flock of starlings roosted nosily. He watched the sun go down over the church and listened to the birds chattering in the trees. The whiskey began to do the job. Warmth filled his stomach and eventually his head. He had heard about the exchange. The boy Jimmy was involved and probably Edward Case was involved too. Criminals robbing from each other would not have a big deal unless there were some financial interest. He had taken out a loan to secure the investment. Was told it was a sure thing. Mistakes were always possible. He slammed down the rest of the Whiskey and reached for the telephone. Byron picked up after two rings. “I thought this investment was solid,” Swift said. “You and I both know that this puts me in a tight position.”
“We’re working on a plan to retrieve the merchandise. Keep fackin calm,” Byron said over the crackling line. “We just need to find the kid and get him to find the cash. I’ll give you a tinkle when it all blows over, like.”
The line died and Swift put down the receiver and grabbed his coat. He drove the panda car across London Bridge and headed West through Blackfriars towards the entertainment side of town.
A sign above a door.
THE MILK BAR
Swift rang the bell.
“Hello, who is it?” The voice supposed to sound seductive translated as sedated.
“Swift. Open up.”
She buzzed him in.
Swift walked up the stairs and opened another door. Inside was a bar stocked with Grey Goose vodka and mixers. The voice from the intercom walked over wearing a pastel blue blouse, transparent, over a black lace bra. About forty-six, but looking good fo it, she touched his arm. “Sergeant, we have a new girl, Polish, I think I can say she will be right up your alley?”
“Forget the Pole,” Swift said, “Is that posh totty still working here? Byron’s daughter?”
“Well of course, but isn’t it, well, dangerous?”
“More so for you than me, Roxy. You’re the one pimping the big man’s daughter.”
“Well, the clients, they pay, I mean they really pay,”
she smiled nervously “I am first and foremost a business woman. You’d be surprised who I see come through these doors, sergeant.”
“You should write a book.”
“The thought has crossed my mind. So it’ll be Rose your wanting, sergeant?”
“That’s her name. And give a vodka tonic and one of daddy’s little helpers.”
“Do you want Viagra or the generic brand?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Price, sergeant.”
“Of course it is, give me the real thing.”
“As you like,” Roxy repeated the order to a woman about thirty, defeated, behind the bar. “I’ll just make sure Rose is freshened up.
PANTOMIME HORSE
now
MISS JONES, or as she was known by her few close friends, Amanda, sat in the easy chair by the window in her cottage a long stone’s throw from the tracks of Chelsfield station. The train tracks where a former student was found some months back having stumbled and fell one afternoon. She felt a stab of personal responsibility for the ill fortune that befell all of the students that studied under her tutorage.
Amanda was past her best, Welsh, the wrong side of fifty with a shock of red hair and pronounced teeth, that the students often joked about acting out cruel equestrian pantomimes. The red brick cottage was constructed by British Rail and left to her by her father who died suddenly (wet roads, alcohol) shortly after she had graduated from university. Ivy climbed up the outside wall and drank from the raindrops collected in the guttering. Outside the window rain continued to fall in droplets, some of which raced one another down the glass settling between the cracked painted that once covered the entire window frame. On the table in front of her sat a notebook that she used sometimes as a diary and sometimes as a record of her students. She wrote in longhand with a precise script, slanted ever so slightly to the left, a hand typical of her generation:
...Then there is Jimmy; an oddity. Growing up in the gypsy site I first expected brute ignorance and a determination to graduate to a life of crime and immoral congress. While I do believe there lies within him the potential to underachieve he does however appear to harbor abilities with the written word that I have never experienced before in a child of his age or older; never in my twenty-five long years of teaching English to primary school children has a student so effortlessly warmed to English. Words, in a sentence, use of paragraphs, where should one stop? Nuances of language, playfulness with words; words that an adult, a graduate; degree in creative writing, rich well-meaning parents would struggle, and struggle and tie oneself in knots to manufacture. Such imagery is a rarity in a student of his age. Perhaps one should consider the possibility that he is simply older than my other students. Perhaps the gypsies lied about his age to get him into school, they have not, after all, furnished the school with a birth certificate. But then again why would they? Their only interest seems to be in having their clan progress through the legality of schooling as soon as possible so that they are free to work or commit crimes or whatever it is
that they do with their time. I am at odds with it all. Perhaps his outdoor lifestyle may have had a part to play. Children who spend time playing video games and watching movies and television have little time to create adventures and explore such real life flights of escapism. Compared to a neglected child, such as Jimmy, alone in the woods, notebook in hand, these mollycoddled modern children are perhaps missing out on the true experience. Surely children can do well in education despite their upbringings and even achieve good grades to spite their parents or primary guardians? In fact evidence may suggest that the true geniuses were raised from ignorant stock. And what was genius if not a strand of autism? It is the want to succeed above their status that propels entrepreneurs and millionaires and football players. Artists, authors, acrobats, autistics and actors. Perhaps all they needed was the want to succeed? Directors, Dictators, Dentists and Dieticians had only the qualifications. Consider the star of the silent cinema Valentino, a poor Italian immigrant who had a gift for dance. He worked as a male prostitute before breaking into Hollywood, some said. Failed marriages, impotence and then an early death. Upon his death hundreds of women committed the unholy act of suicide. Perhaps Jimmy, like a young Valentino, and certainly not without a talent would one day be realized - unless...
The site...
How can one be politically correct when they are quite simply beastly, brutal, thieving barbarians. Not one of their children had once taken to reading a single word of English until now. They have their own language I understand from the brief snatches and by the body language they display whilst conveying themselves with ugly repulsive gestures. I cannot fool myself into thinking their strange tongue does not bristle with malice and ill intent.
What more is curious is the boy’s features. Jimmy is the somewhat dubious owner of a pronounced nose and also wears the olive complexion and the dark eyes that the other gypsy children exhibit. He is, however, just simply different.
She thought about this as she drank her tea (English breakfast, one sugar, milk) and looked over her notes. It was a Friday night and tomorrow there would be no class to contend with. The continual chattering of the little voices and the rude remarks (pantomime horse) and insults that the children would hurl around like paper airplanes would be replaced by a visit to the library, a cozy mystery, afternoon tea and an early night. All those hours spent with undeveloped feeble minds promised that at some point, maybe not tomorrow, but at some juncture her own mind would begin to slowly lose grip of reality. Of this she was acutely aware but as the lion tamer put his head into the beasts mouth for the one thousandth time the teacher must return to the classroom as to not was to starve or worse still; to enter the real world.
The wood fire crackled as she poured another tea, neglecting a visit to the fridge to add any more milk. She would be up for a while and milk made her drowsy. The weather outside was blowing a gale and the tea and the fire and the rose-papered wall paper were the perfect sanctuary from the storm.
The lack of birth certificate that should have been furnished to the school was one indication that Jimmy was not from the site. But none of the other gypsy children were registered.
Yet, something had to be done. She walked over to her desk and took out a pad of self-addressed writing paper. She wrote a letter:
To The Social Services
Child Protection Department.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing as a teacher at a primary school at Green St Green school. It has come to my attention that one of our students, a particularly gifted student, in my opinion is living with the travelling community. I have reason to believe he is not one of their clan and the fact that the ‘family’ who consists of one elderly male, who at first impression appears to be constantly intoxicated with alcohol, has not furnished the school with a birth certificate leads me to further doubt the parentage. In any case the boy, James Taylor, seven years old, is in a high risk situation and it would therefore calm my concerns if you and your team could look into this matter as a matter of urgent importance.
Yours Sincerely,
Amanda Jones.
Green Street Green Primary School.
GOING BLANK AGAIN
now
SO THERE I am.
Casualty.
Hospital.
The nurse is some sweet little thing from Thailand or the Philippines or somewhere with tropical palm trees and warm sunny beaches where the women treat the men with respect before they steal all their money and leave them with a dose of the dripping cock – that’s if she hasn’t chopped it off with a carving knife - dabs the alcohol on my knee – stings, I mean it stings and it feels good at the same time like a shot of brandy on a Sunday morning. She smiles like the Cheshire who got the cream. We could be good together, her working the night shift while I do the rounds. Come back in the morning whilst she’s zipping up her nurses outfit, come up from behind and unzip it, bend it over the sink and give it a good seeing to. I’ll get over there one day, the Far East that is, and see what these Orientals can do to a man’s luck.
Apparently that’s where my father went, the real one that is, went to a place called Fun City and wrote a novel, leaving me mother drowned by the canal and me as well, by his reckoning.
The problem was I wasn’t.
Dead that is.
Well, not yet.
The nurse gave me a shot of something and the room swallowed me into the most peaceful of places.
The bird’s eye view of a neon city....alleyways and arcades, plazas and dancing girls. A beach, a harbor, a fan rotates in a lonely room, a man crashed out in the zone, the camera closes in on the beating of a mosquito’s wings in slow motion as the creature hovers above a thigh, lands, and sucks the blood, slowly, carefully...
SUNDAY MORNING
now
JOE DYLAN’S hand slapped his thigh and took the bloodsucker into the next one. Crashed out on a mattress on the floor of a ground level hotel that called itself the New Hotel. Well, it may have been true thirty years ago... Moved down in life since The Flamingo case. Down hard. Head a nest of snakes. He didn’t need an aspirin. He didn’t need a shot of Tiger Sweat or even a codeine pill. He didn’t need God.
He needed an exorcist.
Crucifix.
Holy water.
Pea-soup.
That or a shot.
The demons inside were eating him from within. Last night there was a woman and a bar. There was usually a bar and often a woman. Some women took crystal meth and humped furniture. Enjoyed it. Joe once saw a bargirl bite a lump of wood from a two-ply door in half. The world was crazy. As were women. Some finger-painted. Some took off their clothes to protest about the exploitation of naked women. Some thought about the wisdom of magic and the beginning of it all. Some read books. Most did. Some wrote poetry. Dripped candle wax on their naked bodies performing ancient translucent rituals. Some shouldn’t even think about it. Some should. Men were equally insane spouting political nonsense to blinkered herds. Body-building in their lunch hours while destroying empires in their feeble minds. The trick was to not slip, not be tricked by the simple solution. The most simple solution was so simple that the simple couldn’t understand it. Without each of these slips his life would be much simpler and much, much, much more colorless. A slip. He just wanted someone to hold on to, one to fill a hole with artificial love.
He paid her.
The moment he awoke at 1am she had left. The first time he had been abandoned by a lounge singer. Normally they were like cats.
Getting old, man. Getting old and ugly.
Next door in the apartment he heard the sounds of a man and woman having intercourse and after the grunting and thumping had stopped he wondered if it was her. Had she simply gone next door. Good lord I’m not even a good customer. A fucking cash hungry nymphomaniac.
Anything was better than this.
The sound of laughter.
She kept laughing.
Everybody laughed. They laughed but they
never meant it.
Lady Death laughed while she probed your prostate cancer. Milkmen laughed, policeman whistled. Bricklayers read tabloids and laughed at the stupidity of politicians. Life was simple. Never trust a man nor a woman unless they were drunk, dead, laughing or dying.
The woman kept screaming.
Screams of pleasure were scarcely different from the screams of pain. She was in heaven and Joe was in hell.
Soon it would be Christmas Day, a day like any other.
There was only one answer.
Celebration.
The celebration would be an ounce of smack that he bought wholesale rate from a Russian who owned a certain section of Fun City. He had been clean for ninety days and had attended the meetings. That was two days ago. A different place. A different world. The message was always the same.
Don’t pick up.
Whatever you do don’t pick up.
Right.
Dylan picked up spoon and heated up some powder with the water.
Like switching cabins on the Titanic.
Used the syringe to suck up the solution and hit a vein in the forearm. He fell back onto the mattress and slumped into a deep dream: he was back in England, London, the sound of church-bells and the smell of bacon frying from an Italian cafe, pretending to be British, why pretend? the punch-ups after a Friday night, the gang, Millwall, the firm, the financial brokers, , the hung drawn and quartered, Crutched Friars, London Bridge, pie and mash, double, and yes, and yes, and yes the drunken lawyers, drunken brokers, strong women, Hamleys on LSD, ducks on the pond swam, swam, swam inside a pool of nostalgic mush. His head hit the pillow.
Fell into it all.
All of it.
The whore was history.
Weren’t they all?
Somewhere in the distance a baby cried.
Then stopped crying.