Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  As the classes filed into lines in the playground, little Mousey threw back his head and looked upwards into Matthew’s face with great suspicion. ‘Matt, you’re not doin’ drugs are you?’

  ‘What?’ Matthew broke out of his reverie and looked down at the pesky classmate.

  ‘You look all weird, like a zombie,’ Mousey said, all concerned for his friend.

  ‘Oh I feel fine Mousey,’ Matthew said, picturing those hazelesque eyes.

  ‘Drugs aren’t the answer Matt, get high on life. Play footy,’ was Mousey’s earnestly-spoken words of wisdom.

  ‘Oh shut up Mousey, I’m not on drugs,’ Matt shoved his diminutive associate into the line as Mr Gittens surveyed the classes.

  Mousey stood in front of him, shoulders thrown back, chest proudly thrown out.

  ‘I think I’m in love though,’ Matthew told him in a low, despondent voice.

  Mousey’s head turned slowly, his mouth a lopsided smile of scathing sarcasm. ‘Love? You?’

  Matthew gazed at his own hands and fidgeted with his thumb. The shame of it.

  ‘That’s sick,’ Mousey told him, and warned him not to let anyone else in the school find out.

  Quick as a velociraptor, the lizard face of headmaster Gittens appeared between Matthew and Mousey, and little Timmy Thompson was marched to a spot where he had to stand in full view of all the classes.

  ‘Only for the Court of Human Rights and all those other pathetic, interfering do-gooders, I’d step on you Thompson, ‘said Gittens, ‘because you’re continually talking when you should be listening! Got to my office at noon!’

  ‘Ooooh!’ the classes chanted, followed by a wave of sniggering.

  'Shut up!' Mr Gittens ranted at the cheeky pupils, and he blew his beloved brass whistle before waving each column towards the school gates.

  Julian Cruxtable drew the attention of his cronies to the boy and girl walking ahead of them as they left the school. 'Ooh, look - Matthew Brindley's walking with Christina,' he said.

  Christina stopped in her tracks, and Matthew walked on for a few moments, then turned and looked back.

  Christina turned around to face Cruxtable. 'So what's it got to do with you?' she said with a grim look.

  'Nothing,' said Cruxtable meekly, and as he walked around the Goth, one of his diminutive followers blundered into his satchel. Cruxtable and his little gang had seen Christina fight. She could kick up her leg almost vertical in the gym and her choking headlocks were to be avoided at all cost.

  Matthew looked Cruxtable up and down with a sneer as he passed by, then he was rejoined by Christina. They decided to take the long route - down Jesmond Lane - to reach their homes, just so they could have time to talk and maybe hold hands while out of sight of the cynics. The autumnal sun silhouetting the gasometer on Jesmond Lane was not the most romantic backdrop to a landmark love affair, but to Christina and Matthew it was magical scenery because they were looking at the world through love-tinted eyes. At some point down the secluded lane, she took hold of his hand, and they talked non-stop. Somewhere in the rambling conversation, Matthew told Christina about the Talking Picture, and she just smiled, but with puzzled eyes.

  'I'm serious,' he told her.

  'A talking picture?' Christina began to wonder if her new boyfriend was a kook.

  'Yes,' Matthew said, then looked at the bronze sky for a moment. 'Oh I'm not supposed to be telling you about her, I've been keeping it all secret. I don't think she wants anyone knowing about her see.'

  'I don't understand -' Christina was saying.

  'Look I'll show you the picture to prove it,' Matthew decided.

  And they walked on down Jesmond Lane, where Matthew received his very first electrifying kiss - in the long shadow of the gasometer.

  'Mum, Dad, this is Christina,' Matthew presented his girlfriend to his parents from the hallway. Mr and Mrs Brindley were sat in the lounge in front of the television. Maureen Brindley was overjoyed and a little sad deep down. Her little boy was growing up fast. Frank was amazed and a little embarrassed. He had imagined his son was not into girls yet. Frank himself had not started going steady with Maureen until he was twenty-three. He was a late starter, and Maureen was the only real girlfriend he'd ever had, although he often insinuated he had been a dead-ringer for Johnny Depp in his youth and always maintained his family where distant relatives of the Depps. Frank turned down the television volume.

  'Come in Christina; come and sit down,' Maureen got up off the sofa and made the girl most welcome.

  'Pleased to meet you,' Frank Brindley said to Christina.

  'Do you take sugar Christina,' Maureen asked from the kitchen.

  'Umm -' Christina didn't drink tea. She gazed at Matthew as if he was her interpreter.

  'No mum, don't put a brew on, we're going upstairs to do a bit of homework,' said Matthew, confidently.

  'Oh,' Mrs Brindley said, and she watched the two smiling kids climb the stairs.

  'He better not be up to any funny stuff,' Frank told Maureen, adding, 'Keep an eye on them.'

  Maureen had a tear welling in her eye. 'Aww, they're in love. Isn't she lovely Frank? She had a widow's peak as well -'

  'Keep and eye on them,' Frank reiterated, 'He's at a dangerous age now.' He sat in front of the television, scratching his pot-belly under his old teeshirt while checking the horse-racing results.

  'This is the picture,' Matthew said, looking at the oval portrait.

  'Coolness,' said Christina. She was so in love with Matthew now, she was prepared to believe anything he said.

  'Rhiannon?' Matthew said to the framed painting, but the image remained flat and lifeless.

  The two children waited, and waited - and waited.

  Doubt crept in ever so slightly. Christina conjectured that Matthew simply had an over-active imagination. Well, if that was the case, she could certainly live with that.

  'I give you my word Christina - this picture talks. The woman in the painting is a witch named Rhiannon, and she's trapped in there.' Matthew felt as if he was betraying the secret of the Talking Picture, yet he wanted to share the wonder of it with Christina, for she was now an inseparable part of him somehow.

  'Whatever,' Christina said, and she looked so serious when she noticed the blu-tacked pictures of Matthew's Internet friends on the wall above his computer. They were all females.

  'They're my cousins in America and Australia,' Matthew lied, and blushed so much he had to turn away until his face returned to room temperature.

  'Oh,' Christina said, a little relieved.

  Matthew turned back towards the painting on the wall. 'Rhiannon come on, please speak. This is my girlfriend Christina, she won't tell anyone about you,' he whispered.

  'Look Matthew it's okay, forget it,' Christina sat on his bed and looked at him with a blissful expression. Matthew sat next to her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulder.

  'Am I too old for you?' she asked him with genuine concern.

  'No, it's just right, ' Matthew found himself saying blindly, 'because I mean, it's like my Uncle Jimmy; he's ten years older than his wife.'

  Christina looked baffled.

  'So, like when he was twenty, she was half his age, and then when she was twenty, she was um, a third of Uncle Jimmy's age, and she's caught up over the years. With us, a year is nothing. I'll be thirteen in five months anyway.' Matthew was making things worse.

  'Oh, I feel old now; why couldn't you have been born a bit earlier?' she leaned forward and kissed him.

  After the kiss, she hugged Matthew and looked over his shoulder. For some strange reason, her first serious love - Hayden Moorcroft - popped into her mind. They had split about six month's back because of Christina's possessiveness. The suave Hayden was fourteen, and could already drive. Everyone in Christina's family liked him, from her 9-year-old brother Calum to her grandmother Margaret, who compared Hayden to a young Richard Gere, whoever that was.

  Matthew, meanwhile, felt so manly, holding
his girl. He had never dreamt she had any feelings for him. He squeezed her in his arms, and she yelped.

  'Sorry! I'm sorry,' he apologised - then saw her face. Her big hazel eyes were gazing at something behind him, and they were full of shock and terror. Matthew swung around, and saw that Rhiannon had come to life in her frame. She looked at the two of them with a serious expression.

  Christina let out a scream and dashed for the door.

  'No wait! Christina don't be afraid!' Matthew hurled himself after her, and tripped, falling at her feet. He held her hand tight, and knelt before her so she was unable to open the door.

  'Please don't be scared,' said the faint voice from the other end of the bedroom. Rhiannon smiled at the frightened girl.

  Matthew got to his feet and hugged Christina, but she stood there trembling with her hand over her mouth, regarding the witch with natural consternation.

  'It's alright, she's a good witch, she's very kind,' Matthew reassured his fearful girlfriend

  Downstairs, Frank Brindley muted the wrestling programme and hauled himself off the sofa. 'What's going on up there?' he said to the ceiling.

  'Nothing, Frank, calm down,' Maureen said, tackling the crossword of a tabloid.

  Mr Brindley walked into the hall. 'Give them an inch and they take a yard,' he complained.

  'Frank come back!' said Mrs Brindley sternly.

  Frank stood at the foot of the stairs and listened. Things had quietened down now. He walked back into the lounge, moaning, 'Just want a little bit of peace. The only bit of pleasure I have, the wrestling.'

  'Yes,' said Maureen, 'along with the golf and horse-racing and cricket and football and boxing and the boring snooker…'

  Frank scowled at her as he sat in his rightful place again in front of the telly.

  '…and the motor racing and rugby and darts…' Maureen went on.

  'Okay, let it go Mo, let it go,' Frank squeezed his eyes shut at the painful nagging, 'we all know you're anti-sport, but you see, we don't all want to watch depressing soaps morning noon and night.'

  There was a long pause, during which the couple avoided eye-contact with one another. Then Maureen was forced to ask Frank for help. One of the clues in the crossword referred to 'a boxer famous for his grill', and Maureen had realised she couldn't make 'Frank Bruno' fit the squares. She reluctantly asked the sulking Frank what the answer was, and without taking his eyes off the TV, he said, 'George Foreman,' in a monotone voice, yet you could tell by a faint trace of a smile that he felt inwardly pleased because his sporting knowledge had come in useful.

  Larry the Alsatian came over to Frank and dropped a tennis ball in his lap. Frank stared beyond his wide-eyed panting face to the wrestling. The dog faintly wined. He wanted Frank to play.

  'Is he another person you're not talking to now?' Maureen joked sarcastically from behind the newspaper.

  'He's not a person, he's a dog,' Frank said in a huff, eyes fixed on the TV screen.

  Larry leaned forward to lick Frank's sour face - but burped loudly instead.

  'Oh my god -' Frank recoiled in disgust at the rancid canine breath.

  Upstairs, before the Talking Picture, Matthew and Christina stood side by side, his right arm curled around her. The face of the witch was within reach of both of them, and Christina was still a bit unnerved by the strange spectacle. There was nothing evil in Rhiannon’s face, and gradually, Christina felt at ease. The girl asked Rhiannon an interesting question: ‘If you’re a witch, then can’t you think of any spells to get you out of that picture?’

  Rhiannon shook her head ever so sadly and said, ‘I’ve tried, but I can’t reverse Ursula’s hex.’

  ‘Perhaps there is some witch, or maybe some magician or whatever, out there who can get you out of there,’ Matthew suggested, and he leaned forward to gaze sideways into the strange depths of the background within that framed world.

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever get out of this portrait,’ Rhiannon said, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. She couldn’t remember what it was like to feel the wind and rain on her face, and the touch of a living person.

  ‘Hey, don’t say that,’ Christina said positively, ‘there’s got to be a way to reverse that spell. Maybe someone on the Internet will know,’ she suggested, her big hazel eyes filled with manic hope.

  ‘I doubt it, Christina, High Magic is a closely guarded secret known only to a few people,’ Rhiannon sighed, and then smiled bravely. ‘Now, Matthew, you may recall that I promised to tell you some tales,’ she said.

  Matthew and Christina sat on the bed, huddled together, gazing up at the witch

  ‘Pleased to meeeeeeet you!’ said a dull voice under Christina’s skirt.

  The schoolgirl let out a yelp, swore, and jumped to her feet. Something had buzzed against her bottom as it spoke in a metallic voice.

  ‘It’s ok,’ Matthew said, picking up the toy robot from the duvet, ‘you just sat on Mechanizmo that’s all.

  'Dickhead robot!' shouted Christina.

  'Hello, dickhead robot, pleased to meet you!' intoned Mechanizmo.

  All three saw the funny side and settled down, ready for Rhiannon to relate a tale.

  The witch’s eyes lit up with a faint sapphire blue, as she gazed into time and space itself. ‘Matthew, there is a boy in your class named Harry Roach…’ she said in an eerie voice. An aura of phosphorescent green glowed around the oval frame and formed a halo.

  ‘Yes, he lives in the next street,’ Matthew told her and Christina, and with a frown, he added: ‘He stole my mountain bike last summer.’

  ‘He’s a thief now, and twenty-five years from now he’ll be a criminal mastermind, ‘ Rhiannon said, ‘with an accomplice called Jim Doggerty…’

  ‘I know him, too,’ said Matthew, but the words were barely audible. He felt so strange. His consciousness was drifting away down a tunnel of multicoloured light which swallowed the whole room. His hand gripped Christina’s, as the two of them shared the same sensations of travelling at a phenomenal speed down the tunnel of rainbow light. Matthew and Christina got ready to yell as they were catapulted in a heartbeat along the fourth dimension of time, into the future. The children expected to be pulverised against some invisible barrier as they slowed down, but a hole opened before them, and through the opening they beheld a rainy street. Matthew became Harry Roach, and Christina found herself in the body of a small man named Jim Doggerty. The children didn’t fight to resist becoming these other people; they went with the flow…

  The Robot Job

  ‘Eww! Taste that rain!’ Harry Roach grimaced. Beneath his midnight blue trilby, Roach’s diminutive side-kick Jim Doggerty didn’t notice the greasy mustard-drizzle, because he was busy watching 3-dimensional pop videos on his virtual reality TV specs. He was faintly singing along with Ezzy Esperanto’s catchy Univision song, even though he didn’t know the words: ‘La la dum dee doo, baby it’s you, ooh ooh ohh!’

  Roach halted at a hole-in-the-wall tabloid dispenser, inserted a forged credit card, and keyed in a PIN number. Amidst the crop of illegal pop-ups, there appeared the mastheads of over forty national, international and local newspapers and magazines on the dispenser’s screen. Roach made his choice - Update - a right-of-centre national newspaper which did not have a tendency to bend it’s ear to the scandals of the hour, unlike Vile Gossip magazine, which was pickpocket Doggerty’s favourite ‘read’ although it contained few words, but many risqué photo-exposés on Hollywood stars, soap personalities, and even reality TV celebs like the sexy singing cyborg Ezzy Esperanto.

  Out of the dispenser’s fractal-definition instantaneous nanoprinter shot the very latest 10.35 a.m. edition of Update. Two hundred and eighty-eight editions of the newspaper were transmitted across the net by the World News Agency every five minutes of the day, with each edition continually revised to bring all the up-to-the-minute developments, locally and globally. Roach’s shrewd brown eyes glanced at the headlines of Update

  LAST MONTH OF CASHr />
  Chancellor’s go-ahead for

  Cashless Society

  Strange lightning, which travelled sideways through the slate-coloured clouds in blinding ribbons of charged plasma, triggered a heavy downpour. Something had happened to Britain‘s weather, and the EuroPresident in Brussels wouldn’t admit that global warming was to blame. There were even rumours that a high-tech top-secret weather-control programme coordinated by British and American climatologists had gone disastrously wrong. Scorpions had invaded the country, and strange striped snakes with lethal bites had been encountered across the UK, from Cornwall to the Lake District. Twisters menaced air traffic and sucked juggernauts off the TransPennine Superway. The Thames Gateway area of the capital was now under water, and many coastal towns resembled Venice because of the dramatic rise in the levels of the seas around the British coast. On top of all that the net conspiritards were claiming that the Britain was sinking.

  Harry and Jim hurried out of the jade rain into the Bon Appetit Automated Café and joined a line of people queuing in front of the only functioning food and drink dispenser. Roach unfolded Update and read about the shocking phase-out of cash from society. After a quick perusal of the story, he turned to Doggerty. ‘We’ll have to abandon the job,’ Roach said in a low careful voice.

  Doggerty touched his four-D TV specs and screwed up his eyes. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Oh, back in the real world now, are we?’ Roach sometimes wondered why he couldn’t have a taller, sharper accomplice.

  ‘Why? Whassup?’ Doggerty asked.

  ‘Guess what little fellah?’ Roach said. He took off his trilby and shook the polluted rain from it.

  ‘What Harry?’

  ‘Well, Jimmykins, we are going to have to forget all about the you-know-what we had planned for next month, because something’s happened.’