In 2006, The Friday Project asked me to curate The Blog Digest 2007 which collected what I thought was some of the best writing by bloggers at the time. Not many people bought it but I was proud of it and glad to be able to showcase writers I admired. You can still get it on Amazon for a couple of quid.
Currently, I write for Greenpeace International on nuclear issues on their Nuclear Reaction blog. I also tweet at @nukereaction.
Want to know anything else? I live with my wife, two daughters, a dog and a hangover. I like beer, Star Wars, Etnies trainers, le cinéma de Jason Statham, and several other signifiers of a desperately deferred adulthood.
You can visit my website at justmckeating.wordpress.com or find me on Twitter at @JustinMcKeating.
Read the first chapter of my short story Liability Limited which you can also find on Smashwords.
One
The office was tidy but musty. The smell in the air was of tobacco and, I’m sure, cats. Sharp light from the naked light bulb in the centre of the ceiling pushed splinters into my eyes. The uneven colour of the walls could have been white stained with nicotine. Or maybe magnolia stained with age and water damage. The man on the rickety kitchen chair behind the pasting table was one of those irritatingly well-preserved types who could have been anywhere between 50 and 70. His close-cropped silver hair gave view to the muscles in his temples which were defined as if through too much clenching of his teeth. His dark suit was as creased as his shirt and his tie was poorly tied and off centre. Without speaking or looking up from the cheap laptop he was fixated on, he gestured towards the ancient armchair in front of the table and I sank into it. Dust rose from the arms as I sat and I could feel springs through the seat of my trousers. Sharp-toothed steel snake hatchlings were trying to burst free from their rotting nest. It was another few minutes before he spoke. I looked around to find something interesting to distract me from my anxiety. The carpet at my feet was old and worn and I couldn’t have sworn to what its original pattern or colour might have been. All the walls were bare of decoration. The ceiling was an unimaginative abstract impressionist’s herd of patches of damp, none of which formed interesting or diverting shapes. The view through the single dirty and rain-spattered sash window over the man’s shoulder was of only slate roofs and chimney pots.
He closed the laptop and spoke. There was the attractive croak in his voice that you get from smoking too many cigarettes in quick succession or shouting too hard in a similar space of time. The smell of the room and the (possible) colour of the walls marked him as a smoker. His unattractive, downmarket circumstances marked him as a shouter. One or the other or both. Nicotine withdrawal made me a shouter so maybe he supplemented his smoker’s croak with rage when he ran out of cigarettes.
Within a few seconds of him speaking though, the precision of his voice made me dismiss the idea that he was a man who raised it. It made me think he was more a man who loved the sound of it.
'Forgive me, Mr Royle,' he said without performing introductions. 'The indulgence of my curiosity is a perk of my job. It’s not important for our dealings together but I’d be fascinated to know how you found us.'
I took the bloodstained business card from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed to him.
'I found this in… in an acquaintance’s wallet,' I said.
Read the first chapter of my short story Jasper and Ruby which you can also find on Smashwords…
One
Hide not your talents, they for use were made,
What's a sundial in the shade?
Benjamin Franklin
'Not again,' He said as He knelt to retrieve the two fingers from the pile of sawdust at his feet. They were still twitching and flexing like caterpillars.
The ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG-Ang-ang-ang-ang-ang of the circular saw as it slowed and then stopped spinning was replaced by the rumble of thunder from somewhere overhead. Outside, the starlings that had been listlessly and fruitlessly combing the parched late-summer grass pink and wriggling things of their own, scattered into the still, baked air. He straightened and blew the sawdust from the still writhing creatures.
'Two,' He said, checking that the number of fingers in the palm of his left hand corresponded to the number missing from his right. There wasn’t as much blood as last time. Or the time before that. Not as much pain either. Above the smell of the motor oil that lubricated the shed’s machines, above the scent of pine resin from the wood He'd been cutting, He could sense the tang of the iron in his blood as it dripped and splashed onto the shiny, greasy concrete at his feet.
The caterpillars stopped inching. For the moment. They might not have finished. His left index finger still held the record, having covered six and a half feet into the garden unaided a few weeks earlier.
He turned to peer through the shed’s single window, which was almost opaque with bird shit and dust, and then to the open door, to make sure none of the neighbours who sometimes dropped by for a chat were nearby. He closed his eyes and as He squeezed the fingers back onto where they had been severed, He felt the warm familiar tingle spread through his hand.
He decided that was that for the day. He threw a cloth over the circular saw and turned out the less than illuminating light. He took one last look at the now dimly-lit chisels, saws, planes and hammers hanging neatly on one wall. His eyes turned to the fruits of his labours of long years arranged on shelves along one entire side of the shed. The cobwebs that blanketed the older pieces made him think the spiders with who He shared the shed had covered them up in an attempt at sympathy. Or artistic criticism. He closed the door.
It was only when He got back to the house and tried to open the envelope He'd scooped from the doormat that He realised He'd reattached his fingers the wrong way round and back to front. He spent a minute or two trying decide whether this was an improvement. It made opening the envelope more difficult and didn’t make picking his nose or cleaning his ears any easier. Scratching himself was less satisfying. 'Give it a chance,' He said to himself. He would have to wait until He was back in the shed with the saw running before He could fix things anyway.
He slouched into the kitchen, looking at the envelope. 'Not again,' He said. The naive, childlike handwriting that had addressed it was all too familiar. He took out the letter inside and unfolded it. A small square of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Ignoring it, He scanned the letter, already knowing what it would say. At the top, the childish writing read RED HOT ACSHUN LIMMITED, followed by a Post Office box number, a registered charity number, a mobile telephone number, and an email address. The letter said:
To hoo it mae consern
I am the Devil.
I hav sent you a prezent
It is a lotteree tikkit it will win you lots of munee on saterdae
lots of love from
The Devil
xxxxxxxxxxxx
He stooped with a groan of bone-deep exhaustion and weary recognition to retrieve the lottery ticket from the kitchen floor. It was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t under the kitchen table. He scratched the floor tiles badly while pulling the cooker away from the wall to see if it had slipped under there. It hadn’t. He did the same when it came to the washing machine. He spent a quarter of an hour poking under the fridge with the bread knife before deciding it too would have to come away from the wall. He walked and rocked it awkwardly on its feet from its tight fit between the cupboards, mashing his fingers more than once. Back to front fingers didn’t help here either. When the fridge was free from the cupboards He had more space to rock the fridge to move it. Rocked too vigorously and hurriedly, and too heavy for Him to support, it toppled.
He could hear glass bottles and jars shattering inside the fridge and the hiss of gas escaping from its broken condenser. Bending once more, He balled the lottery ticket in his hand as He collected it up from the space on the floor where the fridge had been.
He slid down against a cupboard onto the floor, sweating and breathing hard, his jeans absorbi
ng the mixture of milk, orange juice and olive brine leaking from the dying fridge. He opened his hand and looked at the scrunched ticket. He reached up and pulled the cupboard drawer just above his head right out, clean off its runners, upending it, spilling the contents into his lap. Lottery tickets. Hundreds of lottery tickets. A confetti - an early autumn - of lottery tickets. All winners. All unclaimed. All presents from the Devil.
Enough. He would have to go and see her.
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