by Cherry Potts
Sam: Yeah. We’re in the bedroom. It’s dark outside. Like middle-of-the-night dark.
John: Good, good. Just watch it though. Keep watching it.
Sarah: Hiya Granddad.
John: Sarah love! Hello my sweetheart, how are you?
Sarah: I’m good thank you. Are you still sad?
Jenny: Sarah…
John: No, no thank you Sarah, but no. I’m as happy as can be! Sarah, listen very carefully – do you have any fruit in the house? Apples or something?
Jenny: We got those bananas didn’t we love?
Sarah: Bananas.
John: Perfect! You think you can run and fetch one of those bananas for me?
Sarah: For here? Like, bring it here?
John: Yes, yes! Quick as you can.
Sarah: Ok.
Jenny: Careful on the stairs Sarah, don’t run. Why is it dark, Dad?
John: You’ll see, you’ll see. Oh! My, my, it’s working, it’s really…oh God!
Jenny: Dad? Dad what is it? What’s working?
John: Sorry, pet…it’s just…it’s really happening…
Jenny: What is? Where are you?
Sam: Come on John, you’ve got to clue us in here.
John: Ok, sorry. Listen. We’ve been going at it, a team of us, since one in the morning. Last night. Well, tomorrow, next week, whenever it is!
Jenny: What do you mean Dad? Have you been out all night? Up all night?
Sam: Have you been drinking, John?
John: No, no; clean as a whistle, Sam, don’t you worry! I’m fine – I’m more than fine, I’m spectacular. We’re all here, the whole group.
Jenny: Who are? What group?
John: Never mind about that, it’s a sort of club. A society. It doesn’t matter. We’ve been at this all night, all together – and around the world too. All synchronised.
Sarah: Banana.
John: Sarah! Great, you’ve got it?
Sarah: Yep. One banana.
John: Ok, put it down on the bed. What colour is it?
Sarah: Yellow.
John: Is all of it yellow?
Sarah: The top bit is a bit green.
Jenny: Sarah, is this from the fruit bowl?
Sarah: Yep.
Jenny: From the ones we bought yesterday in the shop?
Sarah: Yeah, Mummy. What?
Jenny: I bought those bananas cheap. Past their best.
John: Keep watching the banana! Are you still turning Jenny?
Jenny: Yes, I’m turning, I’m turning.
Sam: It’s getting light out.
John: Yes, Sam! And it looks like…
Sam: Evening.
John: Bingo! What colour is the banana Sarah?
Sarah: It’s going green!
John: Green!
Jenny: Dad what is this? What’s going on? I don’t like it!
John: Turning back time Jenny, turning back time! We’ve been at it since one in the morning so we’re actually a bit further back than you might think –
Sam: What the hell do you mean John?
John: You can see it! The banana, look. It’s back to – maybe four days ago? It’ll get faster as you catch up with us.
Jenny: What do you mean catch up, Dad? How far back are you?
John: If the synch has gone right… we’ll be coming up to twelve days back now.
Sam: Twelve days?!
Sarah: Are we time-travelling?
John: That’s right Sarah! Time-travel, like Doctor Who! Just for a bit though, not forever.
Sam: This is stupid. This is impossible. Jen, put the clock down.
John: Keep turning Jenny.
Jenny: I am Dad. Just tell me when.
Sam: Jen, what the fuck?
Sarah: Daddy!
Sam: Jen, put the bloody clock down.
Sarah: No mummy, keep going!
John: That’s right pet, keep going. Keep on…oh God, that’s it… keep on turning!
Sam: No. No way. This isn’t right.
Jenny: Shut up Sam. Just tell me when Dad.
John: I will pet, I will.
Sam: No fucking way.
Jenny: Stop swearing Sam.
Sarah: Stop swearing Daddy!
Sam: Twelve days? Are you at the cemetery John?
Sarah: The banana is tiny now Granddad. Just a little green stick.
Sam: Answer me John.
John: Yes, Sam, yes. It’s working.
Jenny: Is it working, Dad?
John: It’s working pet.
Sam: I can’t… I can’t be a part of this.
John: What’s it looking like outside Sam?
Sam: Dark, light. Dark again. Light.
John: You’re catching up. It’ll slow down soon. Oh my, here we go…
Sarah: Is Granddad at the cemetery Mummy?
Jenny: Yes love. Yes, he is. Dad?
John: …
Sarah: Granddad?
John: …
Jenny: Dad, answer me. Has it worked?
John: …
Jenny: Dad?
John: I’m here, I’m here. Are you ready for this?
Sam: No way in hell, Jen, no way.
Jenny: Shut up, Sam. I’m ready Dad. We’re ready.
John: Gladys? Gladys? I’ve got Jen on the phone. With Sarah
They’d like to say hello.
Four Beaches
Rob Schofield
For six months, Hassan worked as a night porter at the Grand Palace Hotel in Tartus, signing in as the sun set and escaping to his room when it rose the following day. Even in this country, where you could rely upon nothing and nobody – betrayal and bombs, death and suffering aside – you could rely upon the sun to rise.
For six months, Hassan took off his suit every morning and headed to the water. A section of the beach had been partitioned for the foreign tourists – mostly government contractors and journalists – and visiting dignitaries from friendly countries. More often than not, this prime spot was empty. Armed guards from the Ministry of Tourism were always on hand, in shirt sleeves and sunglasses, whispering into walkie-talkies and polishing their automatic rifles. As he swam back and forth in parallel to the beach, beyond the floating boundary, Hassan got to know each one of the guards by their facial tics and moustaches. A couple of them also worked as close protection for some of the visiting Americans. They might have been moonlighting. There was never any nod or word of recognition.
Swimming was a chore. It was boring after ten, twenty minutes. After three hours, it was agonising. After four, it was dangerous. As much as the water itself, Hassan’s enemy was cramp and fatigue. But as the proverb says, patience is the key to relief. And relief, when it was finally in sight, would be around six kilometres away. Hassan did not know anyone who had ever swum that far. Early one morning, before the guards arrived, he paced out his swim at around two hundred metres. Five lengths, which took him approximately thirty minutes, equalled one kilometre. Six kilometres equalled one hundred and eighty minutes: three hours. After six months he was able to manage four hours in the water, by alternating strokes, occasionally swimming on his back, and sometimes treading water. Four hours would be enough.
After another six months he arrived in Bodrum. He journeyed north, avoiding Aleppo, then onwards to the Oncupinar border crossing, where a returning refugee sold him – at great expense – his Turkish papers. With the help of other Syrians, in particular the brothers who took him in when he fell sick, he walked, hitched and stowed his way to the Turkish Aegean. He had lost too much weight, and he had no money to pay for a boat. He borrowed a few coins to buy a notebook and some pencils, to earn a little money selling sketches and portraits. He built sandcastles and sculptures and offered an upturned baseball cap to the English and German tourists who stopped to admire his work. But there was only ever enough to buy food. There would never be enough for the traffickers.
He left at dawn on his first attempt. He stowed his toiletries, shoes, clothes and notebooks in a plastic bag, wrapped in anothe
r plastic bag, inside his backpack. He pulled the pack over his shoulders, clipped the straps around his chest and stomach and walked into the sea. He heard laughter and shouting from the others who were camped along the beach. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ someone said. ‘You’ll never make it. It can’t be done.’ A child cried out ‘Look Mama, he’s wearing his underpants.’ But he made good progress. He could see the tip of Kos when he looked up. If those grinning Italians – if they had been English he might have been able to explain – hadn’t dragged him out of the water and taken him back to the beach, he could have made it. The next time it was the Coast Guard or the Navy – some kind of uniform – and he would have been in trouble if he hadn’t run off when they landed at the harbour, sprinting like a fool along the jetty, a crazy man in pants waking the tourists from their slumber below decks. The third time, he was buzzed by idiots on jet skis. No. Daytime was no good.
It took another three weeks of sketches, portraits and sculptures before he could buy the right head torch and compass. The shopkeeper assured him they were both waterproof. He did not ask if they could withstand the ocean. If and when the light went out, his strength would be the measure of his desire. As the day began to fade, he sat down on the beach to eat the few scraps of food he had left. He took off his clothes and packed his bag. Fixing the torch as tight as he could stand, he took a bearing with the compass and tied it around his neck. As he mumbled one final prayer, a voice behind him shouted ‘Hey, underpant man!’ A woman, with a toddler on her hip, walked towards him. She was pulling a small inflatable dinghy behind her. ‘If you must try again, take this.’ The dinghy landed at his feet. ‘Tie it to your pack. It will help you float.’ How could he turn down her gift? So there he was, a skinny man breaststroking towards a bloody horizon, the sun setting below the mountains to one side. The inflatable followed, like a taunt that would not be shaken off.
*
The single bed was pushed against a wall so thin he knew how much his neighbour missed his mother. There was a small wooden table and foldaway chair under the window and a slim wardrobe in one corner behind the door. There was no key for the door. Before he went to sleep he jammed a rubber wedge under the bottom, and moved the table in front of it. His pencils went missing shortly after he moved in, so he carried as much as he could in his backpack whenever he braved the streets. He ferried boxes and crates from stall to stall at a nearby market: fish, meat, vegetables and fruit. The stallholders palmed him coins or filled bags with the produce customers would not buy. He had learned very early on that thirty six pounds and ninety five pence was not enough to live on. He was not allowed to work while he awaited the decision on his claim; and when the middle men laughed at the amounts he tried to send home, he tightened his fists and held his tongue. But there was at least a familiar energy to the market. And the men behind the stalls shouted, laughed and sang all day, teasing old women and chatting up the young ones. What was Oi! Oi!? It certainly wasn’t covered in the classes at University.
He was planning what to do with the aubergines and courgettes in his carrier bag when he was yanked between two stalls and shoved against a wall. A red haired man with yellow teeth pressed all his weight through his palm against Hassan’s chest. A young man with brownish fluff sprouting from his chin stood five paces back, looking at his shoes. This young man would be carrying the boxes from now on. Yet again, Hassan was told to ‘Fuck off back to where you came from’. Instead, he took to walking by the river, where one day he leaned over the railings to admire a strip of sand on the otherwise muddy beach that had been unveiled by the ebbing tide.
In Poundland in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, he bought a child’s bucket and spade and some Union Jack bunting. He consulted the tide tables at the local library and arrived at the river late morning. He tied the bucket to the railing and climbed down the ladder to the river beach, where he planted a length of driftwood like a flag on the moon. He fixed one end of the bunting to the railing, looped it around the driftwood and knotted the other end further along. Inside this triangle, he knelt and started to dig. He checked his watch and began to shape the first of two piles of sand. Coins were dropped into the plastic bucket long before he had finished, three hours later. ‘Thank you! Thank you,’ he shouted over his shoulder, smoothing the sand with a wet hand and allowing himself a smile. He found a stone heavy enough to stop his deflated dinghy afrom blowing away. He walked backwards to the ladder, turned, and climbed up over the railings.
The Chinese tourists looked down, said nothing, and walked away. The Russians, dripping with confidence and money, shouted insults. The Spanish schoolchildren shook his hand, and offered him sweets and cigarettes. As the crumbling parliament building and the city’s glass towers faded with the light, the young students urged him down to the beach to take his photograph alongside his sculptures: a man, naked except for his undershorts, clinging to an airless dinghy; and the body of a toddler, face down in the mud, oblivious to the encroaching tide.
On the Evening Train
Fiona Salter
‘Your role has been made redundant.’ The office reeled back beneath me. I was vaguely aware of muffled sobbing in corners, urgent whispering and, most irritating, the affected concern. What more could you expect from the not-quite friends?
‘Will you be ok?’ I mumbled something reassuring, but a phrase repeated itself in my stunned brain.
What now?
Change. I abhor it. For twenty years this had been my life – working hard to avoid promotion, neither ambitious nor demanding, just happy to be part of something, which consisted of my special mug, the cakes on Friday, and the wedding, new baby, good luck cards which I signed, but did not receive. My surrogate family, if you were playing the amateur psychology card.
Until now. Ask not for whom the leaving collection tolls.
After the final day, the perfunctory speech – ‘like being at your own funeral’ whispered a colleague – my manager struggling and failing to find hilarious anecdotes from my 20 years, and so falling back on my ‘sterling service’. I accepted the vouchers (M&S, nice and safe) and went home, my bag bulging with files. For what? Filing? I might as well have filed myself while I was at it.
That first week was a drowning. The weather concurred and day turned to dusk.
It was a Victorian rain, cloaking everything, trees, buildings, the throats of commuters – leaving us groping and floundering through familiar streets. Fanciful commentators said it echoed our national malaise, the aftermath of a bruising political storm which had brought in its wake stagnation and blotted out the future.
The Today programme continued to wake me up every morning. I got out of bed, stood at the window and thought: what now?
The absence of work gnawed at me like a fox at a carcass. I found myself making a packed lunch for a day that had no need of one. So I looked for comfort in the only place I knew.
The station.
As I neared it I felt a little flutter of familiarity at the bouquet of diesel, sweat, perfume, makeup and newsprint – the smell of the working world. From the footbridge I watched commuters drizzling onto the London-bound platform, standing in little clots at their appointed position. Dead-eyed, unspeaking. Oh, how I longed to join them.
There was a strike in force when I started travelling again. I had nowhere to be, so the strike made no odds. I just slid through the barrier and took my place among them and looked out of sluiced windows.
At my leaving ‘do’, our IT guy, a bit of a wag, asked about my love life – I noticed my colleagues hold their breath. With a cheerful lack of social awareness, he ignored my glacial stare and insisted ‘all I needed’ was this app. Sure enough, as the train carried me home I saw it winking at me from my screen. He had installed it on my phone anyway.
I’ll give him credit. He knew me well enough to know that I liked the patterns and the beautiful logic of the network. Perfect voyeurism for commuters. The algorithm works out when your paths cross, and presents you wi
th a profile. It felt like stalking. ‘Tom is now 1 km away from you’, ‘now 20 km’ as the train carried the smiling Tom back – presumably to his blissfully unaware wife and kids.
‘You’ve crossed paths 11 times’ Why not send him a wink, asked the app.
A profile flickered up, and before I swiped, I was arrested by shark eyes. He was balding, with dark wispy tonsure of hair and patchy grey beard. Black frockcoat, rumpled and rolled-up sleeves. No shirt visible under it. What does he think he looks like?
He liked being in the mountains. Not conquering them or abseiling down them like prat, just being in them. I liked that.
The ‘I’m looking for’ section read simply: ‘A fellow traveller’.
I sent him a ‘wink’ – though in real world I have never winked at anyone or thing, and a question. Hi, what do you do?
Let us not dwell on such things, he replied.
Something about his archaic phrasing and his Transylvanian roadie get-up made my flesh creep, a mixture of revulsion and affinity.
That was not altogether a bad thing.
Have you never woken up next to someone and wondered: why? An intersection of pleasure, puzzlement and pain.
One might describe my commuting similarly. I caught the evening train from my non-job and folded myself into Southern Rail’s fickle embrace.
Where did I go? Without an income I sought out free sanctuaries, so I haunted galleries, cloisters and parks.
And all the while the sky thickened and clotted, it was like being trapped in Tupperware.
The black rain smelt of soot and vinegar in those dusk days of summer, and seemed to manifest a meteorological PMT, culminating in window-rattling storms that did nothing to release the tension. Even the annoyingly cheerful TV weather woman called it ‘apocalyptic’.
On those twilight jobless journeys my laptop sat unopened in front of me, applications waiting to be filled. It all seemed so futile, compared to the intoxicating thrill of swiping profiles.
A woman’s face popped up. I could have sworn I had specified I was looking for a man. Yet here was a young black woman with the same direct gaze as the frockcoated man. Oddly, for a dating profile, she held a swaddled baby in her arms, its face turned away from the camera.