Ideas Above Our Station

by M Y Alam

  Before sending the letter, she set it down on the kitchen counter, next to the aubergine that she would eat later that evening, poured herself yet another drink, this time without ice, and contemplated the impact that her work might have. She was seeking no glory, no fame or fortune, no international recognition like that bestowed upon her predecessor, Sir Thomas Hancock. She wanted only to inform the people of all that the aubergine was capable of, all that lay within its deep and mysterious skin. Sipping her drink, her satisfaction and anticipation grew. She was sure that the museum would accept, sure that they would see the importance of the project.

  After finishing her drink she stood, placed the letter into her bag and walked to the post office.

  ***

  ‘Courtney? Hi, is this Courtney? Oh, hi, I’m trying to get in touch with Courtney Schroeder. Right, Courtney S-C-H-R-O… Okay, sure. Hello. Yes I wanted to speak to Courtney. I’m an old friend of hers, from school. Not since freshman year of college. No. No, I didn’t know that. Really? Missing from home or missing from the country? Just missing. Right. No, I didn’t know that. That’s too bad. Right. Well, I will. Okay. Well, if you find her, I’d love to speak to her, to see what’s been happening in her life, how she’s changed. Right. Right. Okay. Bye.’

  ***

  The museum took four and a half months to get back to Aubrey, a period of great anxiety for her, during which her only solace was the new aubergine soufflé that she was developing. It took them a further nine months and three quarters to actually build the display case, having hired the work out to a museum display case manufacturer in Sweden, to Aubrey’s great dismay. In the months leading up to the acceptance of her idea Aubrey had spent many an evening diagramming how she thought that case should be filled, collecting swatches of fabric for the backdrop, choosing manuscript pages featuring elaborate aubergine illustrations, along with all manner of aubergine ephemera, such as the teapot in the shape of her beloved vegetable, which she found at an estate sale one Saturday morning. The best part of her design, she thought, the crowning glory, was the small garden patch which she hoped to fit inside of the case, with actual aubergines growing under specially timed lamps and padded with just the right kinds of fertilizers and nutrients. But it was all to no avail. Eventually the manufactured case was put into the museum, replacing the much older display case on states of matter.

  Aubrey called everyone that she knew to come to the museum and see her beloved project realized at long last, roughly three hundred and twelve people. But most of them lived far away or had more important things to do.

  ***

  ‘Your show starts at noon, which gives you just enough time to do a little bit of exploring before you have to be at the planetarium. There are some excellent displays throughout the museum, but just recently we unveiled a new display on the aubergine which is a truly fascinating look at that uncommon vegetable.’

  The woman furrowed her brow. ‘Aubergine?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. The aubergine is a multifaceted vegetable, not like any other, a real innovation in the world of cultivated foods, a subtle but captivating example of what nature and mankind are capable of achieving with much hard work and careful attention.’

  ‘Don’t you have displays on other things, like space and dinosaurs and stuff like that?’

  ‘Certainly we have other displays, but this one is unique and quite special, I think. You’ll learn something that you never knew before.’

  ‘Why should I want to learn about aubergines?’ Aubrey didn’t get a chance to respond to the enormity of the question. The woman held out her hand impatiently. ‘Have you got my tickets?’

  ‘They’re right here ma’am.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Enjoy your visit and come again.’

  ***

  The director of the museum never sent her any kind of recognition for her work, no raise or plaque or congratulatory letter, but she was happy just to have people who visited the museum stop by and find out something new about the aubergine. She felt like it was a point of light in her life, a vital moment.

  She heard from one of the museum’s tour guides that a few complaint letters had been sent to the director’s office regarding the fact that the states of matter display had been replaced. No one had sent any letters complimenting the new case. Aubrey liked to imagine that the people who liked the case, those who loved it as she did, were too busy cooking new aubergine recipes or trying to locate a specific variety in a grocery store in Egypt to bother writing congratulatory letters.

  One man that bought tickets from Aubrey on the day of the aubergine case’s unveiling said that he had been coming to the museum for years and never remembered a time when there had been a new exhibit added. He said that he liked to see the same things every time and that he wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything about the aubergine. Aubrey wasn’t sure how to reply to this, so she just handed him his tickets and hoped that he would come again.

  It’s A Hard Rain

  Penny Aldred

  Her husband was having an affair, sleeping with someone else, fucking another woman; it hardly mattered how she thought of it. There was betrayal.

  Yet compared with the dishonesty, deceit and collusion that kept the West running the show and sod the rest, it wasn’t that important. Compared with the lies being told about the bitter occupation of another country and the detention of hundreds of prisoners, it was hard to see that it mattered. At home there was misinformation about meetings running late, working weekends away to thrash out new directions in the firm, dinners with clients stretching into the early hours. So what? Compared with the way that the worth of life was measured in pounds and dollars rather than love and service, compared with this, the betrayal at home seemed trivial.

  Maybe not trivial, but insignificant.

  She held the evidence of his betrayal: two theatre tickets for a play she’d not seen. Crumpled in the bottom of the waste bin. Casually disposed of, he’d been careless of her seeing them. In the corner of the room, the television news announcer downloaded information into her brain.

  She stared at the screen. Hand-held camera, lit by infrared giving hazy green night-time pictures, bombs screaming, people running, screaming. The reporter’s voice as shaky as the camera. An ambush, men dragged out of a car and shot. Their wives following in a second car, gathered over their men’s bodies, still and dead. The wives reached out, their hands touching skin still warm, stroking arms, faces. Wives saying goodbye to husbands.

  She watched, perched on the arm of the settee. She smoothed out the tickets, tickets for two nights ago when he’d phoned and said he’d a report to write for the next day, he’d be late, to eat without him, not to wait up and he loved her.

  She remembered him coming home, getting undressed in the dark. She clutched the duvet close to her to avoid his cold body touching hers, but still she felt the icy air striking her shoulder as he got into bed. She’d turned over, as though in her sleep.

  The morning after she found the tickets as she made him coffee and toast. She stood in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, watching him eat and drink. Turned her cheek towards him for a kiss as he left, as always. Wished him a good day, closed the door. She heard the car start up, drive off, slow down at the junction, then finally speed off. She switched on breakfast television. Saw those women again. Hearing them wailing she thought, yes, maybe she could take it, this betrayal, smile at him and be thankful she still had a living husband; be glad that there weren’t curfews and foreign soldiers in England, that the shops were full of food and clothes, that she had money to buy them, that her house had electricity and clean water.

  There were rules, the country ran on rules. But people broke them all the time. She could survive a little transgression on her husband’s part. She didn’t deserve peace any more than the women on the television who had husbands brutally killed, who’d struggle to bury them where they wanted. She didn’t deserve any more but she had much more. So she’d sm
ile at her husband when he worked late, or had to go on business trips that meant staying overnight. She kept her breathing shallow so it didn’t reach down to the agony. She stared at the women on the television, touched their pain instead.

  They’d met, Anna and her husband, many years earlier. It might have been on a long march to Aldermaston, sleeping over in church halls, community centres. Hopeful breakfasts of coffee and toast, exchanging smiles but no words. So maybe the first time they met properly, spoke to each other, was when sitting in Trafalgar Square, each with friends but ending up squashed against each other, singing and chanting to end a war in Vietnam, arms linked to hold onto each other as the police tried to haul them away. Later, when Anna’s flatmate was one of those arrested he’d gone with her to stand outside the police station in the small hours. It was a smaller crowd, the chanting and singing a bit thin. Then they’d talked.

  For a while that was their lives, tearing from London to Manchester or Birmingham, protesting about a war, about the bomb, nuclear energy. ‘Nuclear energie? Nein danke’ asked the sticker on the back of the blue Beetle they’d bought for their first car, their first significant joint purchase. They’d fit work in between marches, meetings, producing newsletters. Work was to get money to pay the bills, but the real thing, real life, was the struggle.

  That’s what he said when he suggested they live together. (Not marriage, not then, that came later.) He told her how he wanted to wake up next to her each morning, come home to her in the evening. He said, ‘together we can fight the good fight’. It was a statement of belief, a catechism. (What will we do? Strive to rid the world of injustice. What will help us? Our faith in truth and equality, with help from each other.) It’s what she’d felt on her own, saving the world from its own excesses and greed was what her life was for and doing it with him, together, it made her stand straighter, her arm extend higher, her fist clench tighter.

  They each left their houses shared with comrades, found a flat for two. Anna loved the novelty of keeping house just for them, planning meals for two, putting food in the cupboards and knowing it would be there when she returned to cook, loved the notes that he left her around the house. Between work and politics she made curtains from material from the market, she stripped furniture bought in second-hand shops. She poured rice and lentils into sweet jars, arranged them on the work surfaces in the kitchen, she made mobiles from feathers and shells and hung them in the windows. She put posters (Che Guevara and his beret, words from Gandhi, an anti-apartheid rally in London) in clip-frames and hung them in the living room. Let no one who came into their home doubt what they were about, Anna and her man.

  At weekends, after meetings, marches, conferences their flat would be crowded, people sitting on the arms of chairs, on the floor, perched on tea chests. There were discussions and arguments: squatting and the housing crisis, was feminism a bourgeois deviation from the real struggle? Palestine, Rhodesia, the Soviet Union. As the words meandered through the evening into the night Anna would pull the curtains to, light candles, bring in blankets for anyone, child or adult who was sleeping. All quietly, not to disturb the debate. She’d bring in mugs of tea, home-made beer, plates stacked with toast, and then fold herself in his arms.

  Birthdays came and came again. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. He wanted to move to the suburbs, have more space, a garden. So they bought a house; three beds and a garage. In the living room he hung copies of famous paintings by famous artists. The posters were stacked in the attic. More birthdays, thirty-nine, forty. He was distracted by pensions and getting the stripes on the lawn right. He got promotion and wanted Mediterranean holidays in hotels with swimming pools and air conditioning. He didn’t want to go to meetings to stop the war, fight the BNP, keep the local hospital open. He didn’t want weekends roaming the country, sleeping in trees or tunnels, camping out to stop bypasses and runways. Forty-nine, fifty. Inside Anna didn’t change; she still felt that those things were real life, those times from their youth were what counted, made them who they were, that their battling was the price they paid for their privileges. But as well as the aches in her heart over injustice and poverty, there were aches in her knees and a desire for small comforts. She conceded and they took their holidays in smart hotels, ate in fancy restaurants.

  He often worked late, it was that kind of job. Until she held the tickets in her hands there’d never been suspicion of any betrayal.

  The first two mornings after discovering the tickets she found herself going through his pockets, his desk. It made her miserable, sliding open drawers, taking out cheque books, bank statements, returning them just so. On the second morning she found a cheque stub made out to a dress shop in town, for one hundred and eighty pounds. She put it back, slid her arms into her woollen coat and walked through the park to the shop where she worked.

  In the afternoons Anna worked in a craft shop. She sold cards, candleholders, cushion covers, embroidered pictures. She packed up orders and sent out brochures. Goods imported from India, Ethiopia, South Africa. Bought from co-operatives, fair traded.

  After that she didn’t want to be in the house alone, to be tempted to sneak around his things and so this became her new routine: leave early, walk through the park, sit in a café. Here she’d drink one or two lattés and read the newspaper.

  In the paper she read of wars. She read of poverty, of famine, of environmental devastation. She kept her mind and her heart turned away from her husband’s infidelity. She didn’t wonder who the other woman was. Or when she did start to wonder, she concentrated on the women nursing their babies, walking two hours to collect contaminated water to make milk to feed their babies.

  If she’d challenged him in anger, or asked him quietly, she knew he’d have rounded on her. What did it matter what he did with his time when they weren’t together, what he did with his body? Is that what it boiled down to, she wondered. What he put where, whose body he touched. He’d be much cruder, more specific. Then, reducing it to that he’d recall some notion from long ago, of free love, not owning each other, certainly not each other’s bodies, what they did with their bodies. She would be the unreasonable one.

  He told her lies and she returned them with smiles. She spent the evenings watching the news, current affairs programmes, flicking from station to station to find the saddest stories, the cruellest injustice. Later, in bed, she lay awake, her mind racing through the evening’s viewing. Her inactivity in the face of the world’s disintegration appalled her. When did she stop caring? And when did the world start to fall apart? And a tiny voice asked if the two were linked.

  Beside her, her husband slept. His betrayal was a blip on the surface of the world’s inhumanity.

  She picked up leaflets in the craftshop, read posters on the noticeboard and started going to meetings, sitting at the back, leaving before the end. She was out more. There were fewer lies at home; he didn’t need to say where he was. It was distracting, seeing what was going on. One meeting, about a windfarm, or maybe about an oil spillage washing up against a vulnerable coast, someone recognised her, someone from many years ago. Anna was drawn in, started volunteering her help. She took some photocopying to the shop, did some typing at home, organised a coach, booked a meeting room, met a speaker off a train. She started to feel more at home, that she was back inside her skin, and that she had something to keep her thoughts from wandering.

  That she could watch the despair of other lives and her small actions made the despair more bearable to her.

  She still went to the café, read the paper. But then there’d be letters to write, to newspapers, MPs, posters to design, fundraising to organise. One day in the café, as Anna was writing to a prisoner in Zimbabwe, sending a message of solidarity, a shadow fell across the paper. She looked up; a woman was standing there.

  ‘Can I sit here?’

  ‘Oh?’

  Anna glanced round the café at the tables, three quarters of them empty.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?
’

  ‘What?’ Anna looked up, took her glasses off. ‘Sorry, I missed what you said.’

  ‘Anna Jenkins, isn’t it? You don’t remember me do you? We were at school together. Don’t you recognise me?’

  Anna looked at the woman. No she didn’t recognise her.

  ‘Pauline Reynolds. As was. Pauline Johnson now.’

  Hazy memory. ‘Oh yes.’

  Pauline Johnson sat down. She talked, going through a list of girls they were at school with. She seemed to have kept in touch with half their year and know about another quarter.

  ‘So, tell me about yourself. What you doing? Husband? Children.’

  ‘What? Yes, a husband. No children.’

  ‘Best way that, I say. Not that I’d be without any of mine. But if I had my chance again, you know.’

  Anna smiled.

  ‘I’ve three. One to each husband. Plus a couple of step ones. My sister calls me Elizabeth Taylor. On account of the husbands. Not my looks, or my money. You like another drink?’ She caught the eye of the girl behind the counter. ‘Two more coffees, please.’ She turned back to Anna. ‘And not that I’d marry any of them again. No, I’m sticking with number three. I’m the sort that makes up her mind and does it. No messing.’

  ‘No, it makes you wonder doesn’t it, the ones who stay when it’s not right. Oh yes, I was talking to that Jacky Armitage. She’s not happy and she puts up with I don’t know what. Might have been clever at school, but she ain’t clever now, I’m tellin’ you. I’m going on aren’t I? Hubby number three, he says I’ve a gob on me. Not that he minds. Sorry I’m interrupting.’