RAKING THE ASHES

There was a sealed window two feet square set in the wall. You rapped upon it. The metal plate slid back. You gave your name, stated your business. The metal plate closed. They checked the details. At five to six in the evening the huge door swung ajar. A warden admitted you, unsmiling. You walked twenty yards to the next wall, gave your name to a warden, stated your business. A man in mufti, the education officer, also carrying a bunch of large keys, escorted you across to the Nissen block of classrooms. You passed by the prisoners on parade. ‘Stand easy! That doesn’t give you permission to talk! If I so much as see anyone’s lips moving, they’ll be up on a charge!’ The education officer unlocked the door of the classroom block. You follow him down the corridor, stopping at each classroom door. He lowers his head to study his ring of keys, fingering three or four in turn before unlocking the door. You stop at the last door. That’s your room. The officer unlocks your door, opens it and signals you inside with a nod. Single desks, chairs, blackboard, chalk. Then you hear some banter and laughter and heavy grating of boots scraping down the corridor. A dozen men in blue serge file in, some with a menacing swagger, others with a loose-limbed, friendly gait, others trailing in mute and pinched at the eyes. It is their eyes that unsettle you: dark, skittery eyes, sullen eyes, fiery eyes, all very watchful eyes, even the eyes that stare down at the desks. A warden stands at the threshold and casts searching eyes about the room. Then locks the door and disappears.


Rummaging amongst the memorabilia that was Margarita now Nicola but once Princess, Terry was brought up short by one of her ‘Save me, save me!’ letters from Bad Herralb, the valley in the Black Forest where she had acted out her nightmares:

I have been going through changes here – you know I’m in the clinic, don’t you? My first few weeks were light-hearted & frolicsome – therapy can be fun; but as the time goes by I reach my ‘normal’ level – my depressions come back & I seem to use up all my energy scrambling from one pit to the other. Deep down inside I believe I’m mad, & it’s driving me crazy being confronted with the fear of the fear. The last four weeks I have been heading slowly downhill – the emotional work in the groups stirs old ghosts. I dream macabre and bloody dreams of past lovers & death, & my parents are still fighting in the living room of my head just like they did all those years ago at home.


Finally, last week I felt ‘possessed’. I just had to share this scary knowledge. I was very quickly prescribed medicine as a ‘helping step’ through the crisis – I don’t know what good it will do but my possessor was getting ready to kill me. Can you understand all this? – I seem to have an incredible amount of trust confiding in you, someone I care for yet haven’t seen in years. Maybe I’m testing your tolerance level; maybe I don’t run the risk of being rejected. After all, you’re miles away. Maybe you’re still the fantasy man in my head. In any case I’m starting to feel the need to share with you right now. I thought of you yesterday, & had the urge to see you soon. As my dreams by night take me through a past of lovers and friends, so eventually will I meet you on the way . . . ?


‘’Ere, ‘ow much more of this bleedin’ story is there?’ asks the Cockney. ‘This geezer’s more borin’ than the last one.’

‘It’s only a short short story.’

‘Fought you said it was funny, man,’ says the Jamaican, arms crossed, slouched back, rocking.

‘I thought it was,’ replies Terry. ‘Thurber’s meant to be a humorist.’

‘Not ‘ere he ain’t,’ says Spider, who’s already sorting through his folder. ‘Give ‘em somethin’ contemporary that they can relate to, like Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Me, I find this fuddy-duddy stuff about as funny as getting nicked by the rozzas for speeding.’

‘Yeah, just when you’re scarperin’ from Tom Foolery,’ adds the Cockney.

‘So how can I help you?’ asks Terry, laying Thurber to rest.

‘Give us a toss,’ mutters a voice.

‘Give over,’ says Spider. ‘This man’s all right. He listens to yer. What’s more, he don’t carry no keys.’

‘Could you do us a favour, guv?’ says a burly man in his early twenties.

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘I’m due out Friday afternoon. Order me a taxi, there’s a good bloke.’

‘Sorry,’ says Terry, ‘it’s against regulations.’

‘Who needs to know?’

‘Leave it out,’ says Spider. I wanna finish me novel, not have this class shut down.’

Terry senses shadow: the peak of the warden’s hat against the window of the door.

‘What would you like me to teach you?’

‘Why don’t we teach you a few tricks, mate?’

Al holds forth his hand. ‘There, I’ve gone and broken the point of my bloomin’ pencil. You wouldn’t have anything on you to sharpen it, would you?’

Terry is surprised at the outburst of guffaws and knowing nods.

‘C-c-can you wr-wr-write-ta-a-a l-l-let-letter t-t-ter m-my g-g-girl?’

‘I can check it out for you, of course,’ says Terry.

‘No, write it, mate,’ persists Al. ‘He means, write it. The lag’s illiterate.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘He wants a loan of your imagination. Just write the sexiest letter you’ve ever written. To Jodie. That’s right, ain’t it, Foxy? Jodie?’


We dance a beautiful distance between us and we spin our fantasies across continents. My hair is no longer long and I’m more filled out – that’s a nice way of saying fatter. My eyes bear the wrinkles of a 30 year old – so I am told (much to the disgust of my therapists who are waiting for the day I decide to become a fully fledged swan, that is WOMAN). I have beautiful breasts, thick & shiny hair & a big, soft tummy but not the slightest desire to fill it with another. I can’t imagine the stork bringing me what I don’t want to have & have little feeling for. But my desire for lovers doesn’t stop; in the clinic, where loving and bonding are encouraged, I realize I fall in love usually five minutes at a time & that fills me up. I love five men and two women, no three, currently – but who knows what will happen when I split from here?


Alasdair Robson; 643297: Original petrol head; petrol sniffer; siphoned petrol from fuel tanks parked in driveways at dead of night; graduated to stealing items left on back seats and inside glove-boxes; then to joy-riding sports cars to Brighton; specialized in stealing MGs and Jaguar coupes for a dealer in Leytonstone. Detained in Her Majesty’s Prison for two years.


                                                       But what should it be


                                                         If I meet you later


                                                      And meet a stranger?


It is a cold December evening. There is a light dusting of snow. After class the inmates are mustering outside the classroom block for another roll call. As Terry walks towards the interior wall, he hears the rise and fall of deep voices in the distance. There is a carol service in the chapel. The men are singing Silent Night. They sound in good heart. Beyond the clanging of the first door and the looming of the outside wall, Terry continues to hear the bass swell of distant carolling ringing in his ears. As the outside door squeals and slams behind him, he feels more than customary relief. A sob mounts in his throat that he chokes on. He has never sung Silent Night. Never really sung it, body and soul.


Another night, late: she was lying on her side on the floor, in black mini-skirt and neck-band, silky, mauve blouse, listening to . . . Just like a woman . . . A whiter shade of pale . . . Reach out, I’ll be there . . . when she brazenly murmured – she had a thickish swell of a lower lip like Bardot – ‘How can you resist caressing a girl when she’s revealing so much thigh?’ Which sucked his breath away. ‘Did you bring the you-know-what?’

‘What?’

‘You know. A Johnny rubber.’

It was her carnal knowledge that might have crushed him, except that he felt some relief at not having to penetrate her.

‘No.’

He was content to moan in ecstasy just to pet. Pet! Whoever heard of anyone petting nowadays?


They all believed, those Minor Offenders, that they were hard done by, framed by the Police, convicted by a bent judge, betrayed by the real crims, ‘the big boys’, blackmailed by the screws. They all believed that a life of crime did pay, that they’d stashed away enough bread to offset the inconvenience of being put behind bars for three or four years. They joshed him about how to do a break-in. But he had enough to do considering the list of his own crimes.


He turned off the ring road for the centre of Norwich, crawling with Friday-night shoppers under umbrellas. Huddling beyond the glare of neon, poky terraces stuck up out of the murk, grimy-grey and sullen as charnel houses.

It was while he rang the bell that he realized how extraordinary flat he felt, but put it down to the tiredness of the drive. Should he try for a hearty embrace? No, his mood was strangely diffident. Then there she was, dwarfed in the rectangle of yellow light broadening, with high-pitched but false disbelief: ‘Terry! After all this time!’

‘Nicola!’ Which was as much as he could get out, for her face seemed pinched smaller, eagerly birdlike like Edith Piaf, while her tracksuit trousers made a sloppy housewife of her.

‘You must meet Richard.’ Because a duffle-coated, trouser-clipped man was trundling out his standard black 1940s rattler along the hall. ‘This is Terry I’ve been telling you about. From Australia.’

‘Hello. Make yourself at home,’ he stuttered airily from behind a thick, black beard. ‘I don’t care who lives here. Even Awstralians.’

‘Very kind of you, I’m sure.’

‘Do come through,’ piped Nicola. I’ll show you over the house. Richard’s a professor at the university. Lectures in German Expressionism and Dada, so he’s off the wall. Actually, he’s in another of his stinking black dogs. His wife walked out on him after eleven years. Took their little boy. All the academics I know are separating. They’re married to their work. Did you find the house all right?’

She ushered him upstairs, past insets above the banister for billhooks, dibblers, planes, leg crooks and brasses where he might have expected swallows ascending. He stumbled into a curtain of incense. Silk scarves hung down from the bedposts like pennants. Or scalps, he wondered. Several letter-cards decorated the mantel-piece and book-shelf. A sink occupied the corner next to the sofa.

‘Very spacious,’ he acknowledged. ‘Hope I’m not driving you out.’

‘Not at all. I’ve moved into the penthouse upstairs.’ Which turned out to be a lilo on the attic floorboards.

‘Do you remember this?’ From his bag he flourished a faded baize green scarf with gold squares and red tendrils. ‘I used to sleep with it under my pillow.’ His grin was more foolish than apologetic. ‘I never washed it. Gave off a scent of eau de Cologne for years.’

‘Not surprised. That’s why I never used the stuff.’

‘I’d brought you back a bottle from Paris.’ He sounded more disappointed, hurt even, than incredulous. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Was it you who had that Ricky Nelson EP with the centre hole missing?’

Probably. Bloomin’ French EPs. Had no hole small enough for the spindle, so boiled them down into vases, ugly ones. Now Hardy . . . Thomas, get lost! . . . Hardy . . . Francoise, Francoise Hardy . . . J’ai jete . . . J’ai jete mon coeur. . . There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Odd, though, how yesteryear’s frustrations become the endearments of today.

After a piping liver soup and Greek salad, Nicola lit a fire from timber that Richard had lifted from building sites under the cover of dark. ‘How long is it actually?’

‘Must be all of sixteen years. Then you paid a flying visit back to Cowes one bitterly cold weekend and we slept together in our overcoats.’

‘Can’t be,’ she shuddered. ‘Almost half my life-time. I was going with Alasdair then. The most meaningful relationship in my life. I’d always wanted an open relationship, and at first it was so exciting doing our own thing. Quite the opposite of how you were, you old meanie, with your possessiveness. Al never used to ask me what I got up to when he was doing time inside. After a while, though, I grew desperate for him to ask and wondered why he didn’t. So the insecurity began to gnaw away.


He remembered the motor-cycle cop taking his name and address when he and the Myrtle Road gang were bashing down conkers from defoliated chestnut trees near the Bethlehem Hospital, the fear of being reported to his parents, of being called out at assembly to stand on the stage of his primary school utterly disgraced; the German New Guinea stamps he stole from the album of his best friend’s grandfather; the extra penny he’d nicked from his mother’s purse to buy liquorice wood during the rationing, then being beaten by his mother on his bare buttocks; the bits of planking and branches he’d thieve on foggy nights from the pile guarded by the night watchman, a ghostly terror muffled up in layers of overcoat hovering over a glowing brazier, when his own despondent dad had shuffled along the queue at the Labour Exchange with no luck; swigging from other boys’ bottles of Tizer secreted in desks; stuffing books from bookshops down inside his shirt; tying sweaters round his waist beneath his overcoat to fool in-store detectives at the staff exit . . .  Was there no end to all that petty pilfering? Then when he did finally land in prison, he presented as teacher, an upright pillar of the community.


‘I resented the structures of the outside world and craved to escape to the free, unstructured world of feeling and knowledge. But when Al left me I had a breakdown. I couldn’t get over that sense of absolute loss for almost three years. So had myself committed to the clinic. We were encouraged to have as many relationships as we could handle. Have you ever just been held for an hour? Some of the inmates couldn’t cope with that. Gradually, I found myself being different people, giving so much love and caring that I didn’t need a relationship with simply one person. Which was contrary to everything I had held out for.

‘Then my mother died. It was like an enormous burden being lifted out of my head. I changed my name. ‘Margarita’ always reminded me of my crazy mother manipulating me, bullying me, dismissing me. I decided to make peace with my father, who had allowed himself to be so humiliated by that vile woman that I’d lost respect for him too.’

‘Yes, they do say you can’t have a fulfilling relationship till you’ve resolved matters with your parents.’

‘Thanks a lot, Terry. Sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Anyhow, I was ready to start afresh. About time: I had turned thirty! It took four rather insecure years for the BA, but in another couple I’ll have my master’s. And just as I walk on to the rostrum to collect my scroll to prove that at the grand old age of thirty-eight I have finally qualified for a profession, tra-la, there will be bugger-all posts to apply for. Now tell me everything about you.’


‘Mr Sullivan, we wish to terminate your employment with us.’

The Governor was a man of military bluntness, military bearing and military moustache. But his features belied this stern impression. He was strikingly blonde, even effeminate in his shooting of starched white cuffs, with an eloquent conviction in his voice.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir. I thought my work was useful.’

‘It’s not a question of your work. I heard that your classes were very popular. With a small core of the men. In two or three cases they were positively therapeutic.’

‘I admit that I allowed the men to discuss some of their problems in class.’

The Governor raised his blonde eyebrows. ‘You realize, I take it, that I should charge you with an offence committed under the Official Secrets Act.’

‘But I couldn’t stop them talking. That’s what they really wanted to do. Not discuss how many children had Lady Macbeth. My classroom was the only place in the prison where they could do so. Legally, that is.’

‘One of my officers informed me that you smuggled in a tape-recorder.’

‘”Smuggled” is hardly the right word, sir. Two different wardens checked me in. Besides, where’s the harm in using a tape-recorder?’

‘That depends on what it’s used for.’

‘I was merely taping a discussion. To generate some ideas for writing a story. One of the men, Spider Williams, wants to write a novel.’

The Governor gave the slightest of smiles and a knowing nod. ‘The offenders are invariably megalomaniacs. They all have a false, often inflated idea of themselves.’

‘With respect, sir, I was trying to help them realize their ambitions . . . needs . . . in a socially acceptable way.’

‘Yes, yes, I apologize. And you did more than a passable job. But you were bringing into this prison tapes from outside, recording the men’s voices and taking away those same tapes.’

‘But there was no sinister intent there, sir.’

‘To come straight to the point, Mr Sullivan. You could be acting as a go-between.’

‘Do what?’

‘You could be carrying messages between the inmates and persons unknown on the outside.’

‘Christ!’


Why did you vanish so abruptly? To Australia, of all god-forsaken countries! If you had stayed, we could still have been lovers. Your note of explanation speaks of hollow fears. Al asked you to take care of me; and you did. He need never know how ardently you carried out his assignment! Oh yes, I appreciate he’s impetuous at times and stubborn, but you misjudge him. He possesses an inner strength, a certitude of destiny that lends him a noble dignity. Al would never wilfully harm a fly. Besides, it was no one’s fault the fuzz found out about our little scheme.

‘I bought some brandy in your honour,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have.’ Though he should have brought some flowers or an art book or something.

She was knitting the front of a sweater for an oversized friend. ‘I’m making a conscious effort to do things for other people. Being a student makes you more wrapped up in yourself, if you’re not careful.’

‘Whatever happened to the 1910 Fruit Gum Machine?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you remember that group in, let me see, sixty-eight? They really knocked you out. American.’

‘You’re confusing me with someone else.’

‘Of course not.’ But he certainly looked confused. Well, you can’t deny that you reckoned the Doors would become the Beethoven of the late twentieth century.’

‘Didn’t their lead singer die many moons ago?’

‘Jim Morrison, yes.’ He had looked up the name for her benefit. ‘So did a thirteen year old girl, who used to listen repeatedly to one of their hits, The End, and was inspired to kill herself.’

‘Have I changed much?’ she asked urgently.

‘Not really.’ Though in a thousand ways she probably had, but he realized now that he had no clear idea. ‘Your face is just the same.’ Which in a kinder light and heavier make-up it almost was, but the outlines were cut harder. ‘Your hair is shorter and thinner from the ears down, but that’s just the styling. I used to love the way it tumbled down to your waist.’

‘You didn’t have to wash it.’

‘True. And your legs are a little bit thinner.’ A lot thinner. Which saddened him. Her legs had been made for the mini-skirt era, beautifully proportioned to the thigh. In his mind, she would always be wearing black patent leather shoes with buckles.

‘Yes, I had an operation on my feet last year. Was in a wheelchair, then on crutches for three months. God, I was screaming with frustration!’

‘Yeah, I bet. But you strike me as being less intense, less moody, more purposeful.’

‘It’s difficult to measure your own changes. You need ghosts from your past to point them out. Yes, I feel I’m ravelling through. Slowly.’

Suddenly, she said, ‘What did our relationship give you?’


On the razzle. Shepherd’s Bush Studios, ’66 or ’67. One pound entrance fee. The lots ranging barn-like through which dream-coated hipsters and swingers and gays from Carnaby Street, some of whom were drop-outs from the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army circa 1900, strayed like the bubbles of soap they blew through copper monocles, lying like sacks of crumpled cord in dark, warm caverns, breathing in the incense, watching an attractive blonde enter the spotlight on stage dressed in aluminium foil, the spruiker calling for volunteers from the floor to snip at the shimmering sheet of foil with electric scissors: ‘Cut anywhere you like, folks. Step right up! Anywhere you like. We’re broad-minded, if you are.’ The sound of tearing amplified into hacking by the microphone, a father turned his back for his little girl papoose to cut away the last fragment of silver from the blonde’s breasts as the lights fell and an overcoat bundled over the silver spikes girdling the model. We curled up in the trash and scuffed flower-heads and splayed sheets of the International Times, me on my Jimmy Hendrix poster, you on Che Guevara, bomb bomb bombarded by the lunatic luffing of the Pink Floyd and shafts of freaky strobe light, as we sniffed by turns from a small bottle. Amyl. Amyl nitrate. Pulse, pump, pump-pump, thump-thump-thump. Catching for breath, thumpity-thumpity. Gulping for breath, thumpity-thumpity faster and faster. My kick-started heart now pumping, now thumping, faster and faster, sky-jump, sky-jumping, sky-jump-jump-jump-jumping! I AM I AM I AM A L I V E!


‘I suppose you gave me an appreciation of small things: the way you got rapt over a shell on Gurnard beach or a dog-rose in a hedge. Do you remember how we rolled over and over in the snow one Halloween?’

‘You were my big, black bear in that shaggy overcoat.’

‘And you were my soaring Margie magpie.’

‘And you’d leave notes for me in the library among the French Impressionists.’

‘God, we were crazy to take such risks!’

‘Please don’t have any regrets, Terry. Ours was a beautiful relationship.’

‘I used to huddle into that crummy old armchair in that flat waiting for you to come round, pleading for the phone to ring.’ And hating you, hating you!


That grey Saturday morning in Norwich. The relentless rain could not scrub the grime from what was once yellow-brick, yet he was more saddened by the way Victorian architraves and doors and bay windows had been ripped out to be replaced by double glazing. Corrugated aluminium had replaced the vernacular architecture. After the war you could get grants for modernization, not for restoration.

Nicola cycled back from a yoga-teaching class. Afterwards they strolled to the Market Place by way of the cobbles of Elm Hill to admire the steep-gabled houses of medieval weavers. He had never accompanied Nicola in shopping for food, so he was amused at her critical eye surveying fruit and vegetables under the gay awnings. It was cosy and partner-like.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she smiled. ‘We shared painting and poesie, not mortgages and nappies.’

Away from the pre-Christmassy bustle, Cathedral Close tendered a sense of peace with its generous lawns and Georgian brick and flint houses and jackdaws passing comment amid the Japanese cherries. They entered the portals of the cathedral. Massive Norman arcades closed down the light. Candles flickering before the faces of choristers, other-worldly cherubs, whose pristine treble voices soared like the clerestories and columns, leading one’s eye to the hundreds of coloured and gilded bosses that hung from the lierne vaulting like enormous fruit, as if an avenue of majestic trees interwove a canopy above them. So that in the ambulatory Terry was tempted to slip his arm round her waist, in spite of the illumination of the Last Judgment.

The purity of celestial sound echoing, the simple stolid dignity of Caen stone, the proximity of the bishops’ tombs, he was floated into the time-spans of others now long dead, where faith and fealty uplifted the spirit, where invasions, plagues, riots gave you something horribly tangible to resist. Standing behind the Saxon Bishop’s Throne, he was touched by the vibrations of past millennia, the humble tread of countless generations, the lapping of time against the so solid piers, that this tenuous relationship with Nicola seemed at the same time ridiculously insignificant and yet something to hold fast to during every second of her presence.


The intermittences of our written communication are no indication of the levels at which we touch base. Life’s meaning I cannot speak of, but the form centres on relationships. The creative energy that flows between people and oneself and higher consciousness. I have no art, but to be. That is not enough, yet too much already.


‘All you want is love,’ she was saying, ‘but it’s so much easier to seek than recognition.’ Terry placed the sausage-dog at the door. An icy draught was rattling through from the hall-way. ‘And it’s more controllable when the world is at bay, feeding off your words than when the loved one is in your arms.’

‘I could only live with someone now if it was impossible to live without her.’

‘So you still need the fireworks?’ She removed her granny sweater and lay on her stomach, relaxed about her body, in spite of the protuberant curve of lower vertebrae that brought discomfort. But this revisiting of fleshly contours that once he had travelled so avidly he did not at all cherish, failing to find the rhythm of her flesh, a thickened, white flesh that refused to yield. ‘Sorry, but I get more out of psychic massage,’ she yawned. ‘Time for bed.’


This fantasy stuff is so much candy floss that dissolves in pink air when I bite into it.


The car shuddered off in a north-easterly direction towards the flatter country. ‘What’s a broad?’ he asked,

‘It’s where you’re at,’ she giggled. ‘No, seriously, it’s a pregnant cow.’

‘I appreciate that you’re a linguist concerned with sexist semantics, but just teach me some geography.’

‘Look, there’s a broad!’ she gasped, with exaggerated excitement.

‘What, that little black puddle?’

‘Yes, they’re as common as medieval churches in Norfolk. I’ll show you a proper one.’

They parked at Ranworth. The water was black, strands of petrol skirling on its flat surface. The peaty broadlands lay at peace, for there was nary a flick of white sail. Nicola perched at the muddy edge, gazing beyond the sedge across the slicked water into the intricacies of channels half-hidden by sallows and alders. The coppery leaves and the stillness, together with her frailness and remoteness – she seemed lost in that black cape – stirred in him the desire to draw her into his arms. But not yet, not so hastily, not so conscionably romantic.

Do the moods of nature still bring messages to you?

The west tower of Haydon Church was looming upon them. ‘So they filmed The Go-Between here?’ he said, sweeping round the eighteenth-century green with its brick pump-house, as if he were Sir Michael Redgrave/Leo returning to the Hall after more than half a century. ‘Gee, I loved that film.’

‘Do you still fall for inaccessible love?’ There was a strain of irritation in her voice, but Terry was lost in thought. ‘So you haven’t overcome that fear.’

They strolled through the gatehouse of Melton Constable into the park of beeches, oaks and limes. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ he said, distracted. ‘They do things differently there.’

‘We all have our own prisons. Why did you really come back?’

‘Tell me, what became of Alasdair?’

‘What is he to you? Why can’t you leave him alone?’

‘I need to know.’

‘Why? You were always running away from the fear of discovery. From people who could see through you.’

‘Did he go back inside?’

‘Yes, he went back inside.’

‘For how long?’

‘Another two years. They believed your story, not his.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Huh, after twenty years, I bet you are.’

‘No, really.’

‘Sunning yourself on those distant beaches.’

‘I couldn’t bear him to touch you again.’

‘That’s tough. He fucked the life out of me. Cigarette?’

‘I’ll drag on yours.’

‘You always were a drag, Terry. You always wanted to live life backwards. Drifting away like soap bubbles you blew into the wind, a bemused five year old mummy’s boy. Mooching around like Jimmy Dean, hands in pockets, head bowed into your turned-up collar. You know when I lost respect for you? Why I chucked you for Al?’

‘My memory’s fogging up these days.’

‘When you begged me to stub my fag out on your butt.’

‘I never did so. That was someone else. You enjoyed many lovers, remember. Many lovers have lain between us.’

‘Enjoyed?’ she howled. ‘Enjoyed?’ That’s just the point, you goose! I hated them all!’ Her screams broke into shuddering sobs. ‘Al was the only one I loved, deep down.’

‘But I remember clearly. I was going to take you away.’

‘On bubbles of hot air? All I remember is the waiting. Waiting for Al. Waiting for word of him. Any word. Waiting for you to get back from prison. With his words. Those pitch-black nights with a smell of coal dust in the air. I remember that lurid orange aura hanging over the prison. Staining the sky from miles away. All through the night. You could even see the barbed wire above the wall. Sometimes in the beam from the searchlight I would see Al strung up on that barbed wire, trying to make a break for it. When you came in from the prison, you were always bleached with cold. I smelt the death on you. But I was desperate to touch you because you might have brushed shoulders with Al, exchanged a few precious words with him, breathed the same dry, chalky air of that classroom. I wanted to give my body to you out of gratitude.’

‘Yet I can remember . . . ‘

But as the south-west prospect of the Georgian mansion rose into view between a spread of over-arching boughs, he realised that he no longer could.


Michael Small

October, 1984-1985

published  Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo Publishing, 1989