Dusk

by Cherry Potts

  The rest of her was in the kennel, thin, dead. They hanged him in the autumn.

  Words on Paper

  Rob Walton

  I know some things.

  I know about Fibonacci and nature. I know if I pick the petals from the sunflowers I grow in my garden I will count 34. I know, therefore, if I chant ‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…’ it will end in disappointment. I know sunflowers can have 55 or 89 petals. I know I can engineer the answers. I know if I stare at the last of the sunflowers at dusk I bring more light into my day.

  I know there’s a difference between 800g lining paper and 1200g lining paper, especially when you’re writing poems on it. Poems about a person you may or may not love, about a person you want to love, about a person who may or may not love you, poems as advertisements. The grade and weight matter when you’re pasting these poems on paper to the windows of your local shop.

  I know a row of shops with a butcher, a baker and a mischief-maker. Mrs Mehra has always been up for anything, especially mischief. It perhaps wasn’t what you’d expect of her when you saw her but, as Denzil says, never judge a book by its cover. Alice, who was staying with me, says Never judge an app by its logo. This annoys me more than it should. It makes me want to pour her Ricard in her bag or smash the bottle against her bedroom wall, until I remember that it’s my bedroom wall. Every night out she takes a bottle of Ricard in her bag. She’s too poor for some things, but she’s never too poor for Ricard. That could be her epitaph: Let no-one doubt that she was ne’er too poor for Ricard. (I could write it in that red Sharpie she’s always carrying with her. When you ask her why she’s got it, she taps her nose and winks.) Alice is too poor to fix her iPad that is still covered in an eating and drinking accident from last Christmas. I’m told that’s really bad for them. She’d been ill as she was getting into bed, and wiped it with her Secret Santa Minnie Mouse slipper. She came back to my place at New Year and said she was going to get it sorted on her credit card. Her new credit card where her name was spelt differently: Mr R. Ellis. I thought she probably had the card for effect. I never saw her use it. Alice was kind of flaky and kind of alluring. Sometimes me and Denzil argued about which it was, but we kept switching sides.

  I know I’m jumpy. Forgive me.

  Our mischief-maker wears a black suit, and she sells pretty much everything. She even has a bucket to mix the wallpaper paste, and she has the paste. Who buys this stuff with their groceries? The bucket and the paste are the things I had forgotten. I didn’t have that much to remember, it wasn’t an overly complex procedure. Once I’d made the decision to go for the 800g grade, for what Denzil kept referring to as ease of application and adhesion, it should have been straightforward.

  I was listening to Frankie and the Heartstrings’ Hunger on a huge black CD player Mrs Mehra dragged out front, which wasn’t perhaps my brightest idea. It’s music that’s great for lots of things – hearing live, in the car sometimes, in the house, in clubs, especially at festivals – but as a sensible accompaniment to putting up wallpaper it’s down there with drinking super strength lager through a straw. Fun? Yes. Helpful? No. There’d be some steady bits where I’d get a real rhythm with the paste brush but there’s that bit at the end of It’s Obvious which led to a few rips and Don’t Look Surprised made me break the pasting table. I had to improvise on the pavement, which led to words being smudged, erased, and somehow scratched. Words being scratched or smudged I quite liked. I wasn’t so keen on them being erased.

  This verse stuff had taken a lot of time. I don’t sleep so well when the clocks change. There’d been lots of disturbed nights reaching for the phone to record ideas, or getting a cheap biro to make a note on a music magazine from last year that now lived next to my bed. On the tissue box there was an almost-brilliant rhyme that I was about to forget about. It would soon be remembered and light up one of my evenings.

  I covered the shop windows with the words on paper. All of them. Mrs Mehra went along and told me if I’d missed a bit. I don’t know what she was getting out of this, but I knew I’d never buy my buckets anywhere else. If things went well I might even buy one for Alice’s bedside.

  When there was no glass to be seen, I waited for the reaction. Mixed is the word people use in such circumstances. Some people were slightly afraid and some were unhappy. Mr Crump, grubby and grumpy butcher, turned round and went back to his shop without speaking or showing any emotion. Denzil’s brother said,

  ‘I don’t want to see poetry. I want to see Mrs Mehra’s special offers. I want to look through the window and see that tray with no samosas. Now look. It’s like something out of a black and white European film you’ve recommended. One I won’t watch until the end.’

  At lunchtime there was more interest. People were taking photos. There was a spate of selfies. I couldn’t work out if this was a good thing. I was hoping someone would come with a Box Brownie, or a sketch pad or a notebook. I wanted it to be this event thing. I wanted slow art. It wasn’t going to happen.

  At quarter past one it all changed. This boy came and he looked good. He looked really good. I – let’s be clear about this – I liked the look of this boy. It was becoming.

  Then I thought I recognised him. Was he a friend of Alice’s? I’d seen him – or I thought I had, I’m not sure how reliable a narrator I am, I’m jumpy, remember – but, yes, I thought I might have seen him in the old independent cinema at the top of the bank. The Bicycle Thieves was on – which, I suppose, in a way is where the idea for this came from. Or at least it was a thought or an image which met something else floating around my head and then moved on to the idea to do this – what to call it? Flyposting? Poemposting? So, The Bicycle Thieves – you really must see it. Don’t listen to Denzil’s brother. I’m not usually a recommender, or if I am I’ll be very inarticulate – but it’s a film to see. The man, the protagonist, goes out on his bicycle to paste posters on billboards and his bike is stolen. The pasting struck me – and at the same time I had this idea for a killer poem – I can, sometimes, stand outside all this and be objective – and realised I had to take things in my own hands.

  I read this review of the film which spoke of a man riding high in the morning and being brought down by night-time. Only he’s not. It ends at dusk and he’s holding his little boy’s hand, looking ahead at the big city. There’s a tiny bit of light between their palms, and sometimes that’s enough.

  It was like the poem as an advertisement had worked. The good-looking boy could be my ally in all this. Maybe he already was. He was there at the genesis, and so I told him about the next stage and he didn’t run away.

  I’d been thinking of it as Speakers’ Corner, but it was just me at the top of the bank reading the poem out loud. He sat near my feet, looked at me and listened. Mrs Mehra and Denzil looked up, shielding their eyes from something. I thought I saw Alice (who spoke of Ladri di biciclette) coming out of the shop with a bottle of Ricard. She was with Denzil’s brother. They were raising a toast to lingering light and developing love.

  So my poems stayed on lining paper on Mrs. Mehra’s shop windows for the rest of the week and I was happy. A local arts magazine got a photographer there, and I got the boy and the others to stand near me and we all put our arms round each other. I think that was one of the things I wanted.

  Things moved on. Alice moved away. I bought her a bucket and we kissed and hugged. The lovely boy eventually departed. He actually rode a bicycle into the sunset – but not before he moved in to my flat, taking Alice’s place. He always arrived at dusk, after work or college or whatever he did. I never asked. We spent evening after evening dancing and kissing as we shared our Frankie and the Heartstrings young love soundtrack.

  We papered the windows in the flat and wrote stuff down, our story. Eventually we blocked out too much of the light, so we could only see ourselves and it stopped being enough.

  I sometimes use the red Sharpie I stole from Alice to add bits to the story, and then I dance a bit
more. It’s all I know.

  One Two Three, One Two Three

  Rosalind Stopps

  This is how I know that timing is important.

  My mother was a formation dancer.

  ‘Timing is everything,’ she said. ‘Count it out and you can make order out of chaos, keep the dark at bay. If you keep counting your life will be a dance. Mess up the steps a little? You can get the order back, just as long as you never miss a beat. Remember that.’

  I saw the chaos around me and I started to count. My mother knew that if her timing had been more accurate I would never have been conceived.

  ‘We were backstage at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool,’ she said, ‘and I thought we wouldn’t have time to go all the way, but the team from Hong Kong had a mishap. The call was ten minutes late and by then you were on the way.’

  ‘I kept dancing when I was pregnant,’ she used to tell me, ‘right up to the end and then again six weeks after. I was better on the slow ones but I never sat out a quickstep even though they asked me to.’

  Hearing this story when I was a little boy I used to think that they had asked her to sit it out because of concern for her and even for me, jigging around in her belly like a kitten in a washing machine.

  ‘I loved the Paso Doble,’ she said, ‘my favourite.’

  She would fling anything round her shoulders when she said this, a coat, a dishcloth, once a sheet of newspaper. This was the part I liked. The sun was bright.

  ‘Ole!’ she shouted and I had to circle her, slowly at first and then more quickly while she turned on her knees following my movements and with her eyes on mine, all the way. I got the slow part, the bullfighter, and as long as I counted and stamped my foot we were dancing, all else forgotten.

  This is how I know that there is a down side to timing.

  Even at school I counted my steps, one two three, one two three, making sure I paid particularly close attention to detail when chaos loomed. I knew how many steps from the playing field to the hut and I knew how long it would take to get changed and get home. I thought I might be one of the people who are happier when they are older.

  ‘You, boy, is football a joke?’ the teacher shouted. I had taken my eye off the ball and I had got to two thousand and thirty six, with home time not far away.

  ‘No sir,’ I said.

  ‘No sir?’ he bellowed as if it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. ‘No sir? It’s not a joke then?’

  ‘No sir,’ I said again. I didn’t know where this was going but it wasn’t going well and I was worried about losing my place in the numbers that determined my life.

  ‘Then why the hell are you smiling?’

  ‘There are three hundred and six steps to the changing room,’ I said.

  It was the first thing that came into my head but the response was not good. The light dimmed a little. The rest of my school career was spoilt by whispered counting and sniggering from all sides.

  This is how I know that timing is a random bastard.

  Take falling in love, and choosing a life partner. Picture life as a shooting gallery. At the beginning millions of faces are lined up, but some of them fall down straight away. They are the people you would have met if you had been born in Finland or Rwanda, or too early or too late. Everywhere you go after that, some faces pop up and some fall down and every time you make a choice like, studying chemistry, more faces fall flat, thousands of them. They are the people you might have met if you had learned Spanish or left school to live in Nepal. The rows shuffle every time you walk down a street or eat a bagel and miss your train until finally you’re at a party and you’ve drunk too much to drive home and there she is. The only face that came up in the shooting gallery shuffle for that time and that place and you think, maybe I’ll marry her. And in another gallery, millions of faces shuffle forward and back, the millions of children you could have had. It’s all part of the dance, and all you can do is to keep on counting and pray to Whoever Keeps the Score that you don’t trip up.

  ‘If you trip,’ my mother used to say, ‘just adjust the count until you’re where you should be again, then count on from where you are.’

  ‘How can you know where you should be in the dark?’ I want to ask her now, ‘and who the hell is keeping the score?’

  This is how I know that time is running out.

  We met under the clock at Carnforth station. She asked if I could dance and I told her, ‘I can dance to your tune if you’ll let me’.

  ‘A funny man’, she said. ‘I like a funny man. Let me tell you this then, funny man, I’m a whore.’

  Only after five minutes did I understand that it was a joke. Only after five minutes did she explain that the study of timekeeping is called horology and that was her hobby.

  I was hooked.

  ‘That’s my kind of joke,’ I said and I stopped thinking about all the people I wasn’t meeting and all the streets I wasn’t going to walk down. There was order again. I forgot the woman I had married when I couldn’t count my steps correctly and the children we hadn’t had because my sperm had been timed out on their egg hunt. Instead I watched that one face as she bent over her beloved clocks, sorting through parts so tiny and intricate it seemed terrible to hide them away again when the clock was mended. She laughed when I told her that, and made me a clock with every little spring on show. I keep it by the bed and I watch it when she is sleeping. The tick keeps coming while I try not to think of how much longer we could have had.

  One – two – three, one – two – three. Never miss a beat.

  ‘It’s not the amount of time we have that’s important,’ she said, ‘it’s what we do with it.’

  So we’ve seen the northern lights together and we’ve travelled on trains across time zones and fields of snow. We’ve looked down from the Shard and up to the stars and we’ve eaten on the beach while the water lapped at our feet.

  I have been too happy to keep time and still I don’t think that I ever missed a step but what I know now is this – time keeps itself. Even if you stop counting.

  ‘Not long now, darling,’ she says, as if she is keeping me from some important engagement.

  ‘The longer the better,’ I say but she looks at me in that way she has that means, come on, no need to say anything.

  ‘It’s dusk,’ she says, ‘the light is going.’

  It’s early in the day but she’s right, the light is going.

  ‘Do that bull fighting dance,’ she says.

  ‘My timing is not good today,’ I tell her and she laughs although it is not funny. And because she laughs and because I am grateful to her for laughing I put the red towel from the bathroom round my shoulders and I hum along to ‘Thriller’ while I step out to the count and she moves a little, from side to side and I feel the chaos approaching with the dusk and I think

  this is how I know that timing cannot always keep the chaos away.

  Daylight Savings

  David Hartley

  Sam: It’s your Dad.

  Jenny: Hold on a sec.

  Sam: He says are you turning the clocks back?

  Jenny: Just doing it!

  Sam: She’s just doing it John. Yeah. Say that again?

  Jenny: I’m doing it now Dad! What’s the time?

  Sam: He says to keep turning it. I don’t know what he’s on about, here.

  Jenny: Hiya Dad.

  John: Hello pet. Are you turning the clock back?

  Jenny: Just doing it now.

  John: Right well don’t stop. Keep turning it.

  Jenny: You what?

  John: Don’t stop at one hour, keep going! Turn it slowly though, take it slow.

  Jenny: What you on about? Sam, what’s the time?

  John: Keep turning, keep going!

  Sam: 10:04. No, 10:05. It’s dark out. Streetlights are still on. Is that right?

  Jenny: 10:05.

  John: Keep turning Jenny! Trust me pet. Keep going back. Slowly; an hour every thirty seconds. />
  Jenny: Dad what are you on about? It only goes back one hour.

  Sam: Is he alright?

  Jenny: Dunno.

  John: We’re doing it, we’re all doing it!

  Jenny: Are you outside somewhere Dad? You sound like you’re outside. Where are you?

  John: Are you still turning it?

  Jenny: No.

  John: Turn it Jenny!

  Jenny: Ok, alright, I’m turning it.

  Sam: What’s going on?

  John: Take it slow. One hour every thirty seconds or so.

  Jenny: He says to keep turning it.

  John: Put me on speaker, love.

  Jenny: Put it on speaker.

  Sam: What’s all this, John?

  John: Hello again, Sam. Just trust me. Tell our Jenny to keep turning the clock.

  Jenny: I am Dad.

  Sam: She is.

  Jenny: How long for?

  John: Just keep going!

  Jenny: Where are you Dad? Are you outside? You’ll catch your death. Is it raining?

  John: Don’t worry about me, pet. Just make sure you keep turning the clock. One hour every thirty –

  Jenny: Yeah, yeah every thirty seconds, I’ve got it.

  John: Is little Sarah there? You there Sarah?

  Jenny: No, she’s downstairs.

  John: Fetch her up; she’s got to see this. This is wonderful, magical.

  Jenny: Dad, I don’t understand…

  John: What you on now? What time?

  Jenny: Just coming up to two.

  John: Great, that’s great, keep that pace going.

  Jenny: How long for though?

  John: Is Sarah there? Fetch Sarah.

  Sam: John, are you alright mate?

  John: Fetch Sarah, Sam!

  Sam: Alright, alright. Sarah, love! You wanna just come up here a minute, say hello to Granddad? What’s this about John?

  John: Nothing short of a miracle Sam, nothing short of a miracle. Can you see outside?