Phases

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New Moon

Sam woke, heart pounding, at exactly 3am. She didn’t set an alarm anymore, the electronic clock by her bed replaced lately by the nightly rise of panic inside herself, always culminating in the violent shock of jolting from sleep, gulping air, thoughts recirculating in her mind like contaminate trapped in a broken air conditioning unit. There was half a mug of cold peppermint tea on her bedside table which she sipped, willing it to calm her better than it evidently had a few hours ago when it had still been warm. A specific thought chased itself. If the project deadline was in ten days then you still have to run all the revised figures, still have to get them signed off, still have to draft the paper that nobody will read, still have to attend the daily stand up, still have to fit it in around year end. You are behind and ten days isn’t enough. And you wasted yesterday when eleven days wasn’t enough. The thought looped back for a repeat visit. Closing her eyes just gave it momentum. She opened them and started her exercises, named five things she could see. Clock. Mug. Mirror. Dressing gown slung over a wardrobe door. Empty space where you used to lie next to me. Then name them with description. Really see them. Grey cube with dull black numbers radiating from its front reading 3.04. White mug with a capital L printed on one of its sides, faded now but once a bold red. The mirror is propped up on a dressing table opposite the bed, silver framed, flaking at one corner, a smudge on the glass. My dressing gown is a pale blue, three quarters length, pocket bulging with tissues. The empty space is just that: empty. The last part of the exercise now. Her heart rate was slowing. Don’t just see them. Remind yourself about them, about the memories attached to the objects. Connect them. I bought the clock a few weeks ago after resolving to keep my phone out of reach in the bedroom, part of a new set of rituals to sleep. It had been cheap and its alarm wasn’t particularly cheerful: a brash single electronic note that seemed to operate at the same abrasive volume irrespective of how it was set. The only upside of waking at 3 was that I never heard it. The mug had been part of a set we’d bought together. Four in total that spelled out L O V E or, as you never tired of finding funny, V O L E. The other three were all broken, two by accident, the O on purpose after you left. I smashed it one night after trying to make a coffee to sober up a little, in the solo drinking phase that kicked in for a few weeks. It had fallen apart easily. I appreciated the metaphor. I’d kept the L. but I don’t know why. The mirror is smudged from yesterday’s hairspray. Another morning rushing to be ready after another disturbed night. I rubbed it with a make up remover pad but not before staring through it at my now distorted, disguised face, at my indistinct fuzzy edges. The pad just smeared the residue across the glass. Blue is not your colour was one of the things you used to say. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell you to fuck off but I didn’t. I used to avoid it and dressed in polite pastels and muted beige. Black. Grey. The dressing gown was the first piece of clothing I bought afterwards. In truth I didn’t really even like it but it was the first blue one that I saw. And there’s too many memories about the empty space. Too much connection. She closed her eyes, felt her breathing settle.

She knew, despite the reprieve from her anxiety, that she wouldn’t sleep again now. The panic was gone but replaced with a numbing sense of loss that she felt like a weight, pinning her to the bed. If she didn’t rise now then she feared she might not muster the energy to rise again. The thoughts about work were still there but in the background now, submerged under the memories of him, of them, and the project and the deadline felt distant now, remote, rather than urgent and real. Somewhere in her mind she registered that this was the pattern from last night, the night before, the night before that, and that her ten remaining days would soon be nine, but she felt too exhausted to do anything other than file that information for later. She was fairly sure it’d surface at 3am the following night. She resolved, at least, to put some different objects within sight of the bed so that she could change up her exercise.

She lifted the duvet. It was cool in the room and she lay for a moment, feeling the slight chill on her bare arms, letting it take her attention. Feet on the wooden floor now, reassurance in its solidity, pressing her weight through her toes. Grounding was another one of the exercises. She stood and pulled back one of the curtains, the night sky had become part of her new routine but tonight it had little to show. The moon was absent and other than Venus she couldn’t pick anything out; she had an app on her phone to track constellations but if she retrieved it then she wouldn’t be able to resist checking her email, checking her Teams messages, doom scrolling the news, and watching the social algorithms unwittingly mock her existence: five tips for banishing anxiety, why men leave, blue dresses for this Spring, why you procrastinate, living your best life alone, defence against panic attacks, sleep like a baby. The app could wait.

Sam ran through the list of things her counsellor had suggested for switching back off, finding sleep again. Light yoga. She could see her mat buried underneath a pile of clothes and the idea of picking through that many hastily bought blue sets of matching underwear held no appeal. Deep breathing. This felt more achievable but she knew you couldn’t maintain focus on ‘the golden thread’ or whatever she was supposed to call it, not whilst the work thought was still lapping the inside of her brain. It was on the far side of her mental track right now but only whilst she kept distracted. Breathing would give it time to return. Listen to calming story on mindfulness app. This never worked. For starters there was still the problem of resisting the pull of every other dopamine driven distraction on her phone to consciously pick the one that was supposed to switch all that off. And the stories were shit. There was one about a train ride through the Canadian Rockies, slowly intoned by a very deep voiced man, in which literally nothing happened. She got that there was supposed to be something soporific in his tone, in the repetition, in the idea of the movement on rails, forwards but a barely perceptible rocking, but she would get bored and invent events on the train. A discarded briefcase carrying twenty grams of cocaine and a loaded gun. The driver suffering a heart attack as they sped through a red signal. A woman waking up, confused, believing that she is in hell and all the other passengers were demons. Maybe that last one was too close to home. None of it worked. None of the active attempts at relaxation: moving, breathing, listening. She pulled her dressing gown from the back of the wardrobe and went downstairs.

She made a coffee and sat in her conservatory under a blanket she’d left there as a practical acknowledgement that she was routinely waking up before the heating came on each morning. Resetting the thermostat clock seemed like admitting defeat entirely. She checked her phone, its pale LED the only light in the room. There were a string of messages from Penny who texted in a very particular format, one sentence at a time or sometimes just a handful of words. Missed you today. Don’t WFH tomorrow. I swear. Barbs. I can not do the risk workshop without you. Promise. Me. Come in. Sam smiled at “Barbs”, she thought Penny would have let go of that by now but it seemed to have stuck, a hangover from the time they’d driven to Bristol for the department’s annual community day and she’d surprised both of them with a word perfect run through of No More Tears (Enough Is Enough). Mainly the Streisand parts. Hence, Barbs. It had been a few months after he left which may have explained the force of her delivery and also the floods of tears at the end. Penny tried to keep skipping to something that might cheer her up but all Barbra was channeling on that playlist was heartbreak: Memory, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, The Way We Were. Eventually she hit Don’t Rain On My Parade and finally succeeded in making Sam laugh by singing it in the broadest Brooklyn accent she could muster and repeatedly asking her if she wanted to stop for “cwoffee” at the next services.

Scanning back across the staccato messages she settled on ‘risk workshop’ and she felt the tempo of her heartbeat rise slightly. Closing her eyes she could visualise the to-do list in her OneNote, the slightly different one in her notebook, the version she’d painstakingly put into Planner (the one that auto populated her calendar with tasks which she’d had to turn off as it served up daily, angry notifications of shame at her unfulfilled aspirations), and the shortened, priority list she had condensed to a post-it. That last one had been stuck to the bottom of her monitor but kept falling off. She wondered if it would be acceptable to list the following risks as matters of critical concern in the workshop: hitting 38 alone, drinking brandy midweek as she had promised herself she wouldn’t drink wine every night, having a panic attack in the car park at work if someone had taken her usual place, crying to Knowing Me, Knowing You by Abba when it came on in Tesco’s, having an old man take her elbow and assure her that it would be okay, that a lovely young lady like her shouldn’t cry, and that he was sure any man would be lucky to have her, in Tesco’s shortly after crying to Abba. The main risk she needed to flag was the risk of having done none of the preparation for the meeting, completed none of her actions, and her failure to respond to any of the increasingly urgent emails from audit requesting immediate acknowledgement and evidence of remedial actions. The time was now 4am. Maybe two solid hours on Chat-GPT would sort it all out. Give her enough, at least, to busk it through another day.

She let the phone screen dim and stared out of the glass doors overlooking her garden. When the moon was fuller she would sometimes find calm in watching tree branches turn a shadow play across its surface. Or she would try to imagine being up there, listening to her own breathing inside a space helmet, staring back down at the blue globe orbiting the sun. Blue was not her colour. Maybe this was not her home. It was dark tonight though. No moon.

She prodded the phone back to life. Texted Penny back. I’ll be in. As it’s you. Buy me a cwoffee.

Riffs and variations on pilates, rage bait, chicken hacks, and the C bomb

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“Are you looking after yourself?”

“How do you mean?”

“Physically, I mean. Exercise, moving. I don’t see you these days and just have these conversations to gauge your… your wellbeing.”

“I was really hoping you weren’t going to say ‘wellbeing”, said Pete. “Now I can’t decide if you’re channeling my mum or a well intentioned but useless mental health first aider at work.”

“Tell me about your mother…,” laughed Jen.

“I would run out of minutes.”

“Aren’t you on an unlimited minutes package?”

“Precisely. And I would still run out. Would probably burn through the unlimited texts too.”

“Okay, I wasn’t on a trauma trawl. Answer the original question and stop deflecting. Are you looking after yourself or do I need to send round a crew with a crane to lift you off the sofa?”

“Are you fat shaming me in your imagination, Jen?” said Pete. “Even my mother wouldn’t do that and, as we’ve established, I’m definitely not getting into that.”

“Stop. Your. Deflecting. I don’t care if your BMI is 20 or 40 or whatever a normal number is but I just want to know that your pulse is hitting 100bpm for better reasons than you woke up in a cold sweat after a recurring nightmare about your childhood.”

“Pilates,” said Pete.

“You have a recurring nightmare about pilates?”

“Yeah, mainly how much it costs. I was looking at that reform pilates and it’s ridiculous.”

“It’s ridiculous that you don’t even know what it’s called. It’s reformer pilates, not reform,” said Jen.

“I thought it was going to be a group of us contorting ourselves into positions where we convinced each other that we weren’t racist,” said Pete. “Even though the positions we were actually in were quite obviously problematic.”

“How long have you been working on that one?” asked Jen.

“It came to me during an actual pilates class,” said Pete. “You don’t have to worry, I have returned to the world of stretching and strengthening. I figured I might need to get back in shape in case someone needs me to put some flags up or take them down.”

“I don’t have you pegged as someone that feels the need to advertise your patriotism by hanging a St George’s Cross from the nearest lamp-post.”

“I’ll ignore the pegging…,” started Pete.

“Probably quite a hard thing to ignore,” said Jen.

“I’m rising above. I’m ignoring the pegging and being pegged and hard things and I’m just answering your point. I am not a fan of the flags. In fact I got called a pdf after I argued with someone about it on Facebook.”

“A pdf? Like the file extension?”

“Yeah. There must be some filter on certain words, I guess to stop people abusing each other, so the short-hand for paedo seems to be ‘pdf file’. Obviously doesn’t get automatically redacted. Maybe it’s libellous to call someone that, I don’t know. Credit where it’s due, I was surprised the far right had such a good grasp of phonics.”

“Can’t imagine that’s quite the brand extension Adobe were hoping for,” said Jen.

“No. And I don’t really understand why Facebook stops them writing that word but doesn’t stop people calling me the c-bomb.”

“Well that one is more factually accurate,” laughed Jen.

“I think you mean it more affectionally than they did,” said Pete.

“Of course,” said Jen. “The Scottish version. It’s practically like ‘mate’. Put daft in front of it and it probably means you’re best friends.”

“Well, I’ve learned my lesson. No more rage baiting on Facebook for me.”

“Very wise. Bad for the blood pressure. Will undo all that good work on your wellbeing.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got the pilates and I’ve also got a protein hack. You know? For the gains.”

“A protein hack? Is this going to be like when you said you’d hacked swimming by wearing your shorts to the pool, forgot your pants, and had to go commando to work?”

“That was an uncomfortable but strangely liberating day,” said Pete. “No, this is like a proper hack. I could probably put it on Tik Tok and go viral.”

“Against my better judgement then… what is it?” asked Jen.

“At work now they’ve got a really good salad bar and you can cram a large portion into a small box and get charged less if you’re strategic about sequencing…”

“Strategic salad sequencing?”

“…yes, if you lead with the bulky stuff – potato salad, beetroot, cucumber, tomatoes – then you can pack the lettuce and more malleable pieces in around it. Coleslaw will slot in anywhere.”

“And this is the hack?”

“No, no, no. That’s just common sense. The hack is that I add a chicken skewer to the salad so that I get some protein. Sometimes two.”

“Isn’t that just having some chicken with your salad? It’s not the hackiest hack I’ve ever heard if I’m really honest,” said Jen.

“But the salad doesn’t come with the chicken…”

“If you were choosing an egg that was way cheaper than the chicken, and that egg then hatched into a chicken, and you then ate the chicken having only been charged for the egg, then I’d call it a hack. Just choosing some chicken isn’t a hack.”

“What if I hide the chicken under the salad so I don’t get charged for it?”

“That’s just dishonest. Hack adjacent. Not an actual hack.”

“Diet, exercise, sleep. I’m practically a new man.”

“Is that a hint?” asked Jen.

“I’m pretty tired,” said Pete. “Much as I would love to continue this chicken related chat, I think it’s time they came home to roost.”

“Cluckin’ hell.”

“It’s funny. Georgie went vegetarian and the only thing she used to miss was a roast chicken. She used to say ‘cluckin’ hell’ when we were out somewhere and she caught sight of it or, more usually, its aroma.”

“I know, Pete. It’s why it came back into my mind.”

“She was my real hack, you know? My hack for life. Like a cheat code to make everything else seem okay, to help me cope with whatever else was going on.”

“You should sleep. Honestly, it’s great to see you trying to get healthy. It’s what she’d…”

“I know it’s what she’d have wanted, Jen. But let’s leave that unsaid if it’s alright? I’m still figuring this all out and I need to trick myself into getting better. I need to hack it.”

“You alright, Pete?” The same question, always the same question.

“Not yet. But I will be.”

“Okay. Sleep well you daft cunt.”

It appears that I haven’t written anything for nearly three years. As ever, the route back is easiest via letting Pete and Jen talk to each other.

The truth of who we are

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The truth of who we are is more than the lies we tell ourselves. I think that is what I used to believe. A conviction that there was something intrinsically true at the core, buried under the tangle of half-truths, fables, lies, and stories we accumulate day to day. As if divers could explore the inky blackness of my ship-wrecked consciousness, sift the flotsam and jetsam, and eventually find a half buried treasure chest that would contain the actual essence of who I was. Even in metaphor I am submerged, hard to reach, broken apart, and believe that everything this is important, or true, is in the depths and not on the surface. I am not a reliable narrator of my own truth. I am not to be trusted.

There are things that I have believed to be true for a long time now, things that I thought served me well, maintained my self sufficient self. That is the first one. That there is value in self sufficiency and strength, whatever that actually means, and a wariness of others; an unwillingness to seek help that stems not from stubbornness but from not understanding how to ask, how to accept. I think that it can all be thought out. That all of the impulses and thoughts, emotions and reactions, hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, can be rationalised. Considered, labelled, stitched together in systematic sequences, boxed off, and dealt with. An intellectual exercise to complete. I am already thinking ahead to the next paragraph to figure out how to make it appear clever as if that was ever the point of the endeavour. I am tired of thinking.

I think, on some level, that I thought I wasn’t really worth very much. Wasted a lot of energy in worrying about being found out, some kind of ritual unmasking that exposed a sensitivity to the world that I had cloaked in smarts and sarcasm, front and funny. People seem to like that projection and it’s not like it’s a complete deception; some of that stuff is true, it’s just that sometimes it isn’t and sometimes it’s exhausting on the days you’d rather listen to Bon Iver sing Re:Stacks and cry. There’s probably a whole shelf of self-help books that start from the you are enough premise and insist on being kind to yourself but reading the words and believing the words aren’t the same thing. Even writing the words and believing the words isn’t the same thing. In writing words I can be anything and, perhaps, that’s why I write them.

If the fundamental truths that I believed in turned out to be lies then what does that leave? They are hard wired now; brain chemistry isn’t fixed but it seeks the familiar patterns, the paths of least resistance, the worn-in grooves. Or worn-out grooves, like a record stuck on repeat, stuck on a scratch in the vinyl that you have to force the needle past or you’re just going to listen to the same refrain over and over again. Perhaps what should be left is to start with some new fundamentals, the ones that seem to bypass the exhausting over-thinking, second guessing, and the relentless, pointless, picky, destructive inner monologue. It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me (Taylor’s version).

That leaves things that feel true. And maybe the point is that I can’t really explain them very well except to say that there’s an evocation, a revealing of something that I can’t otherwise articulate. It’s there in music most obviously, whether it’s Kurt’s howling catharsis or Margo Timmins’ hushed whisper, Neil Young’s raggedly glorious guitar tone or the weary resignation of Fake Plastic Trees, the joy in Move On Up and the despair in Skeleton Tree. It’s there in laughter and connection; there’s a particular kind of kindness, I think, in trying to bring laughter to bear in a way that let’s people know that it’s okay to smile, okay to let their guard down. I overplay that kindness in my work but it feels true and I am unlikely to stop now for the sake of another rung on the ladder. It’s there every Autumn when the leaves are polished gold, suspended before the fall into winter. It’s there on the nights when the light pollution from the city can’t disguise the scatter of stars across the infinite, ineffable blackness above. It’s there in Withnail delivering Hamlet’s soliloquy or Han bailing out Luke to take down the Death Star or in every la-di-da to pass Diane Keaton’s lips. It’s there in a myriad of things seen and heard and felt. Always felt. I can deconstruct all of these things but all the value is in the feeling.

And love feels true. Possibly unfashionable and possibly sentimental but true nonetheless. 

So the crux of the dilemma might be that all of the rational, intellectual, clever modes of thought in which I dwell are lies, or at least not the whole truth, and all of things I hold to be true are beyond my comprehension and expression. Love, art, beauty, laughter, sadness, joy. Quite the shopping list. If Amazon start dealing in truth then hopefully all available via one-click soon. Free to Prime members. I guess the commoditisation of those things is actually the underpin to the entire entertainment industry but that feels like a distraction for another day, a diversionary tactic deployed as we were sniffing around something more fragile. 

And it is fragile. Age was supposed to bring certainty and, on a good day, with a fair wind, some wisdom. It has, instead, yielded less certainty, more fear, and more anxiety. Where’s the belligerent sense of being right about everything that I was promised? Where’s that intrinsic sense of something true at my core that I believed in? I’ve been mining my own seams for so long now that I surely must have found it if it was there. Again, we are back believing in hidden depths of value. Like I said, I am not a reliable narrator and I am not to be trusted.

The truth of who we are is more than the lies we tell ourselves. I think that is probably right. As for the rest of it? I don’t know. I might need to learn how to ask for help.

I don’t know what this was in the end. I wanted to wrap back to the start of July’s writing (the lies we tell ourselves piece) but I’m not sure if this one survived the contrivance. Maybe some of it is salvageable from the shipwreck.

Anyway, that concludes 26,000 word for Great Ormond Street Hospital in July ’23. With a day to spare. I’m over the 26K and over my fundraising target but any donations welcome here. Hope you enjoyed it.

A disagreement about The Cure

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We had disagreed about The Cure. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me but you were pretty militant about it. My position was that they had done so much poppier stuff in later years that you couldn’t credibly call them a goth band anymore and this was clearly a problem for you. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is not a goth record and that was 1987 so it’s not like it’s even a recent thing. It’s got trumpets. Surely the least goth instrument unless it’s in a Wagner symphony or something. I’m a bit sketchy on classical music. Would Bauhaus have been improved with a parping trumpet solo in the middle of Bela Lugosi’s Dead? Well, okay, maybe but that’s not my point. You countered that it wasn’t just about the music, it was about the aesthetic and the attitude. I think you said something about how it was like when you saw goths at the beach: they might be in their swimming gear, probably getting sunburnt, but they didn’t stop being goths just because they happened to be playing frisbee. Robert Smith didn’t look like a frisbee guy to me, I reckon he’d want to be buried in sand, just his mop of frizzed black hair left sticking out of the beach like a mass of gnarly seaweed. 

If I’m honest the conversation hadn’t gone to plan. I’d spotted you pretty quickly after arriving at the bar and clocked the dark hair, dyed a deep (dare I say blood) red at the tips, framing slightly sharp features, high cheek bones, slightly pronounced, pointed nose. A cascading array of ear rings, a series of studs and loops around, seemingly, the entirety of the outside of your lobes. Looked pretty cool. You had large, hazel eyes. They made me think of the Well Of Souls but I decided that this would be a terrible first line, even my own inner monologue was telling me that it was dreadful, and figured that the Cure tee-shirt (Boys Don’t Cry) you were wearing was a safer place to start than a cave where the spirits of the dead await Judgement Day. How wrong I was.

I didn’t actually get to start with a line. You watched me walking towards the bar and, evidently, clocked that I was wearing a Nirvana tee-shirt and stole my conversational opener. Do you actually like them or is this a zeitgeist bandwagon thing? It wasn’t exactly that but you said something like that and the inference was very much that I was a zeitgeist bandwagon rider rather than a genuine fan. I didn’t mind. Other than the tee-shirt I wasn’t really looking like an archetypal grunge head at that point, just jeans and a pair of trainers. I’d had my hair cut a couple of weeks ago and had gone very respectable in anticipation of the end of term and trying to find some work over the summer. So I was looking less Kurt Cobain and more trainee-accountant-on-the- weekend. Your scepticism was justified I guess. I hated people that wore band tee-shirts for bands they didn’t even like or know so I actually thought this was a good sign that the conversation had started like this. How wrong I was.

I told you that I had liked them from the start, which, in my head, was Bleach, but you seemed to know some obscure stuff that pre-dated that and had, apparently, seen them on the tour they did with Tad and Mudhoney, I felt less sure of my fandom. Obviously I knew who Mudhoney were but who the hell were Tad? You seemed to sense my sudden hesitancy and declared that you’d lost interest in Nirvana after Nevermind came out; production was too polished and poppy, you couldn’t get on board with the whole poster boy for an alienated generation stuff. I wasn’t ready to completely give way on this point and suggested that maybe it was a good thing that more people would get into some great music. You started to sing the chorus to In Bloom by way of response. He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along. At this point perhaps I should have called it quits and slunk off to see if my friends had showed up yet but it was going so far off plan that I thought it probably couldn’t get any worse. How wrong I was.

I needed to get the conversation away from me and onto her and the obvious pivot was the one that I’d planned to start with. Talk about The Cure. You obviously like The Cure. This will be a failsafe route into a chat in which you hopefully discover that I am a good guy, not likely to hit you with a line about the deep abyss of sorrow in your eyes, and we exchange numbers, say that we’ll hook up in future. In retrospect it was a mistake to pivot to The Cure by suggesting that they were, just like Nirvana, equally as guilty of softening up their sound, playing to the pop crowd, and that, maybe, just maybe, they weren’t a goth band anymore. You watched me make my series of statements with a bemused, slightly detached air. I felt like a fly flitting around one of those plants that seems benign and then eats them, jaw like leaves sliding shut efficiently, smoothly, dispatching their prey. Something to do with Venus but I didn’t really pay much attention in biology. Or mythology. You stayed silent, waiting for me to finish and so I prattled on a bit longer about how Friday In Love could practically have been the Friends theme song such was its sunny peppiness. I don’t think I actually said sunny peppiness but I was babbling by this point so all bets are off. I finally stopped talking. You raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was a considered reappraisal, an eyebrow that spoke of seeing something familiar from a fresh perspective, a perspective from someone that you were now thinking was pretty okay. How wrong I was.

I went to a lot of lectures that year. I was a good student and even stuck around for the optional stuff on tax law that was like listening to an atonal dirge of noise for an hour. Quite a lot like how I felt about The Cure before they went poppy if I was honest but I felt this wouldn’t help to say out loud. All of those lectures were as nothing compared to the exceptionally detailed dissection of The Cure’s career, songs, principles, importance, and place in alternative culture, that you gave me over the next ten minutes or so. It was impassioned, frequently sweary, oddly sexually charged when you talked about Robert Smith and men wearing make-up, and pretty unambiguous in whether I was right or wrong about the whole pop sell-out thing. It was magnificent. The only trouble now was that I had started out mildly curious, attracted by those well-of-souls eyes, and now I was in deep. You were glorious and I had blown it because I didn’t know who supported Nirvana in the UK in 1989 and I thought The Cure had some tunes that milkmen would cheerily whistle. Not even goth milkmen either. You were fierce and intelligent and absolutely gorgeous and I had no chance. How wrong I was.

We had disagreed about The Cure. You said later that you were just messing with me and wanted to see if I’d stick it out whilst you unloaded all that stuff about dark majesty and direct lineage from punk that was more legitimate than Nirvana’s Beatles meets Pixies marriage of convenience. I don’t think you were entirely messing with me. You do have an inordinate amount of Cure records and that enormous poster of Robert Smith over your bed still kinda freaks me out a bit when I wake up in the morning. I told you the eyes thing after a couple of weeks. You rolled them in response so at least my instinct to keep that one to myself early on was correct. You’d be a decent point of judgement for the dead though. As long as they liked The Cure they’d be fine. I grew my hair back out but you shaved yours off. It suited you. I said it made you look like Ripley in Aliens. Alien, you said back. Well, I think Aliens is the better film, I replied. 

How wrong I was.

Almost at the end of July and almost at the end of my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital (fundraising page here).

This one was just a bit of fun but has its roots in an incident, a very long time ago, when I argued the merits of Lenny Kravitz with a woman at University who had a large poster of him on her wall. I still think I was right but it was probably a situation where it was better to be wrong…

Dirt Dawg & The Highway Hound (Marv’s Song)

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When he got to drinking Marv liked to think about the old days, back when he and Hal had more hair than sense and they had no worries beyond whether their tyres would last until the next race meet. Dirt Dawg and the Highway Hound. First time they’d each showed up at track with their new names emblazoned across the top of their windshields they’d been laughed at by the old hands, the guys that had been on the circuit for a few years. They stopped laughing soon enough when they stopped seeing that windshield and only saw their taillights pulling away from them, left to pointlessly chase the newcomers through clouds of kicked up dust. It was all unofficial. You heard from somebody that knew somebody when the next meet would happen, either on some marked out piece of scrub land or, sometimes, late at night on streets that would probably be quiet enough to be safe or where a local sheriff had been paid off to close the place down. Marv liked the off-road tracks, Hal the streets. Hence the names.

They were good. It wasn’t just the drink talking, they were really good. Some of it was won in the garage, both of them spending hours tinkering with their cars until they were set just right, tuning the engine, tweaking the suspension, stripping out anything not bolted down that was just excess weight. Hal was the first to strap a nitrous oxide booster to his engine and he’d blow everyone away in drag races on the long stretches that they sometimes ran north of Culbertson, up by the cemeteries. Then they’d sit around laughing, inhaling the remnants of a leftover canister of the stuff; too young to buy beer but buzzing on the same fuel that had injected their victory. Not all of it was technical though. Even without the gizmos and gadgets they were the best drivers. Marv liked to say that they were too stupid to be afraid of dying and that gave them an edge. He’d throw his head back and howl and Hal would match him, their signature announcement before the start of each race, steadily matching their howls with the revs from their engines until they’d whipped up a furious frenzy of noise, men and their machines in harmony.

It had changed when Marv met Anne-Marie. She had loved the racing, it wasn’t that, it was that he suddenly felt a little less stupid and, as a consequence, a little more afraid of dying. There were corners he braked for a little earlier, racing lines he ceded to others that he would never have ceded, gaps between cars that now looked too narrow that, before, he would’ve forced his way through. He lost his edge. The Dirt Dawg got a little less dirty, less feral. She’s tamed him. He knew that was the whisper round the circuit but truth was that he’d tamed himself. He could see more in their future than stripped-down, souped-up Chevy’s, wanted more than the accolade of being the fastest thing on four wheels in Hitchcock County. Maybe the whole of Nebraska. Whatever, his horizons were a little broader now and stretched beyond the State line.

They’d married with a small ceremony at the local church. They didn’t have any money but Marv had persuaded Frank to let them take over the bar for the afternoon and into the evening. It started respectable with some speeches and a buffet spread that was all they could stretch to and it ended less respectable with tequila shots and a slurred singalong to ‘Jack And Diane’. Hal was best man and had insisted on driving them from the chapel to the bar. One last drag race, for old time’s sake. The Dawg and the Hound. He’d gunned the throttle, held the car on its parking brake until the tyres started to smoke, and then released it, hurtling them forwards. The ride of your life. Hal had shouted it halfway down the street, eyes locked on the road in front of him. In the back Anne-Marie had nestled her head into Marv’s shoulder and whispered this ain’t the ride of your life, honey, you wait until later.

That was the last time him and the Hound rode together. Hal couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the race circuit alone and didn’t seem to notice that younger guys coming through were getting quicker whilst he was slowing down. He used to feel like he was the still point as the world moved around him, perfectly calm in the eye of a storm. Only now he didn’t feel quite so fixed, was getting buffeted by the storm whilst he was trying to navigate it. Before everything happened in slow motion, the road out front a series of photographs he could hold in his mind, place himself and his car in, but slowly everything started to blur, like a faulty VHS machine that was stuck on fast forwards, dancing lines of static obscuring the picture. Marv had told him to stop. Nobody else, maybe, could tell but Marv saw him miss racing lines, watched him half a second off the start line, fishtailing because he’d left his braking too late, misjudged another bend. They’d argued about it and drifted apart. Last time Marv had seen him had been at Frank’s. He’d walked in and Hal was drunk at the bar, picking the label off his beer bottle, railing to nobody in particular about how Clinton was a phoney. He’d got up when he saw Marv, pushed past him to the exit. Another phoney. Whole damn country’s full of them.

Marv heard about the accident from some of the old crew still on the racing scene. There was a cross country run they still did sometimes that he knew from back when he was the king of off-road. Some fields east of Trenton, couple of circuits and then a sprint finish in to Massacre Canyon, barrelling under the railroad bridge marking the finish line. It was a challenging run, especially when it had been dry for weeks, the tracks hardening into a series of uneven jolting bumps, the cars jumping, drivers fighting to keep tyres on the floor. Back in the day it was the kind of run that the Dirt Dawg owned, the kind of run that made his name. Hal had never liked those races, he’d always preferred the surety of tarmac and the straight line speed down an empty stretch of freeway. Maybe he was trying to prove something that day, Marv didn’t know. All he heard was he pushed too hard in the final sprint, opened up his nitro way too early, way too far, hit a rise and lost control, stacked his Mustang into the side of the bridge. If he’d been wearing a helmet they said he might have survived but the Dawg and the Hound never wore helmets.

If it was one of those afternoons that started with a beer and then stretched into the evening, time marked out in a growing stack of bottle caps on the bar, then Marv might get to thinking that his whole life had been one long drift, too much power early on and then just trying to find some balance to stop the whole thing spinning out of control. Anne-Marie died about ten years after Hal, summer of ’94. She was no age and he didn’t really understand what they told him in the hospital in the short time between diagnosis and her passing. He understood the bills. For all Clinton’s promises it didn’t seem to make much difference to people like them and none of his driving gigs came with medical insurance. It took him ten years to pay it all off, taking a long-haul truck job, spending his days and nights traversing the country, hoping the noise from his twin twelve cylinders would drown out his grief. He made some kind of peace with it and settled back in Trenton because he didn’t know where else to go.

The truck wash had been an idea he’d been turning over in his mind in the last couple of years of driving. There was pride in the community of truckers ploughing the highways, they might not come right out and say it but he’d watch them take a rag to polish up a bumper or vacuum out their tractor. Sure, they were all a little rough around the edges but they liked their rig to be smooth. He’d opened Dirt Dawg’s Truck & Car Wash in the Fall of ’05, figuring that he had enough money to make it through that first winter and then demand would pick up into the summer, no rain to rinse away the dust and grime from the road. The name had seemed obvious and, maybe, he hoped there were still some around who remembered the original young buck that had worn that title, remembered when nobody could touch him across the county dirt tracks, remembered when nobody could touch his partner on the streets. Just glory days. No-one seemed to remember except him and Frank. You’re like that song, Marv. Holding to glory days. Frank would put it on in the bar sometimes to amuse himself, usually on those nights where either the stack of bottle caps or Marv would topple over.

He was tired. He knew he was slowing down and he wasn’t resisting it, he wasn’t interested so much in raging against the dying of the light as fading down the dimmer switch himself. His days of being on full beam were done. He took on that kid, Johnny, to run more and more shifts and he saw something of himself in the boy, something of who he used to be. A certain restlessness, a certain attitude. They never spoke about the future but Marv thought that perhaps he could pass the business on, let himself be bought out by this pup, let the old dog finally rest, finally stop drifting. Johnny had other ideas.

The night Johnny and Diane pulled their Bonnie and Clyde stunt, jumped town with the pick-up, Marv was drinking at Frank’s. He’d only had a couple. Frank was regaling the bar with his story about travelling up State to see the Trump rally and how he was going to bail out the little guys, the forgotten guys, the American guys. Marv didn’t want to hear it all over again. He’d stopped wearing the MAGA hat that Frank had got him after a while; the more he saw of this guy the more he just thought he was the same as all the rest of them. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. None of them had done anything for him or for Anne-Marie. Hal would have called him a phoney and he reckoned he probably had it about right. He left the bar and decided to check that Johnny had locked up as he had to pass the truck wash on his way home anyway.

He noticed the girl first. She was sat on the sidewalk, hugging her legs up to her chest. Something about it reminded him of Anne-Marie, how she used to sit up on the hood of his car in the same kind of pose. It used to drive him mad and he’d yell at her to get down, shout about the rivets on her jeans scratching his paint work, but she’d just laugh at him and chide him for loving his car more than her loved her. And she knew that wasn’t true. He thought he recognised this girl, she looked like the one that had been helping up at Cindy’s, had moved in there for a while after that nasty business between Cindy and Randall. Cindy said she was a nice kid. Marv never thought of himself as the smartest guy but he saw the make-up, saw the cropped top and the too-tight jeans, saw the girl trying to front up as a woman, hanging around beside a known stop off for groups of men. He saw what this was. Saw someone else drifting and about to spin out of control.

You steer into it when you’re about to spin. So he gave her something to steer into.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

He thought about Johnny, out there running the highway, and decided to let him go. He could understand why a young man might want to get of Trenton. He figured he’d abandon the pick-up along the way and there couldn’t be many Dodge Rams on the road decorated with Dirt Dawg decals and a horn that blasted a whistling howl. He’d get his truck back but, even if he didn’t, some things were more important. He’d lost the Hound and he’d lost Anne-Marie, damn near lost himself, but he wasn’t going to let this girl get lost too.

This concludes the loosely entwined trilogy about Trenton, Nebraska. I guess it’s mainly Marv’s back story. You can decide if Jennifer sticks it out and eventually takes over Frank’s bar or not. I like to think she maybe does.

This is another story in my 26,000 word commitment for Great Ormond Street Hospital in July ’23. Fundraising page here

Grace notes

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Definition: a grace note is a brief note that functions as ornamentation for the note that follows it, which is known as the main note or principal note. It is non-essential to the melody but enhances the overall piece.

It never leaves you. There’s no balance to the loss equation; just loss and the continued absence of the person lost. There’s an acceptance over time, a slow fade, but the absence never disappears completely and you never want it to. If the absence of someone is all you have left of that someone then you hold fast to it. These are not losses to be cut.

In those final weeks it’s the kindness that I remember now. I have shut away the endless days of waiting without hope, have numbed and blunted the memory of them or they would be too sharp, too raw. The kindness lingers. The pharmacist who would pause and maintain eye contact, acknowledge the implications of the prescription, deal with it without fuss or fluster. The subtlest shift in the interaction signalling that they understood; sympathy and empathy extended in body language and manner where words would be inappropriate. The district nurse extended over a constituency of the suffering that is too large, she is too stretched, but she persists anyway and persists with smiles and good humour when she could be forgiven for giving neither. The astonishing palliative care nurses who attend to you, to us, with grace and gravitas; talking quietly to you long after you can acknowledge them, giving you the dignity you deserve. We called you angels but you were more than that because you were real, not just the idea of unconditional love on earth but the manifestation of it. The Chaplain whose faith I didn’t share but who brought gentle wisdom, never promising or providing answers when it was evident that there were none, but offering solace, comfort, and something as simple as companionship. He offered his faith to you and I know that you did share it. The very definition of a good man.

Later, when the skies opened, rain in a deluge as if to match our tears, I remember the man, soaked to the skin, that took you to a final place of rest. I remembered that today, caught in a brief downpour walking home, cursing at the weather and then reflecting that he, stoical, sure, gracious, made no comment and carried out his unhappy work.

Memory is unreliable and perhaps I have it all wrong but I don’t want a perfect recollection of the most imperfect time. I am comforted to choose to remember the ornamentations consciously and not the pain and terror buried in my unconscious. It is never far from reach, it never leaves you. 

The melody we sang was one of terrible sadness, anger, regret, guilt, and trauma. The kind sang that melody with us, stepped us through a song we had never sung before but which they knew too well. They understood where we would falter in our singing and they offered their guidance through the song, offering notes to step us through the melody. 

When cancer patients’ treatment is successful they sometimes leave their hospital ward and ring a bell to signal a great accomplishment, borrowed from a Naval tradition. A moment to reflect on hard won battles, emotional and physical, and celebrate a milestone. A ringing cacophony of hopeful notes to replace the silence of despair. 

Those weren’t to be the notes of our song, of your song, and that’s the continued and tragic reality of cancer. Arbitrary, brutal, merciless. For those weeks our song was a requiem but one that was lifted and given meaning by the kindness of those around us; kindness that reflected the way that you had always sung the song of your life. 

I am writing in July to raise money for a new cancer treatment centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital. They deliver grace notes day in, day out. Fundraising page is here

Jennifer Harlow

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It’ll pick up. That’s all that Cindy would say as she sent Jennifer home again, another busted shift because there weren’t enough bookings. It’ll pick up. They’d been busy, too busy really, in ’20 and ’21 when it seemed like the whole town bought a dog and competed with each other to see whose could be the best turned out. Trenton hadn’t suffered much with Covid but they’d shut down the places people could meet just the same, Frank’s Bar, the Community Room, the library, everything except church and even that was emptier than usual. Everyone seemed to decide that dogs were the answer. Jennifer thought they were just scared of having to spend any time alone confronting their reality in this town, facing in to all their little insecurities that they usually drowned out by speaking to each other. She didn’t speak much to anyone.

They shouldn’t really have been open in ’20 but they figured out a system, dogs dropped off in a small holding pen that Cindy had put up on the side of house and then they’d wait for the owner to push their horn when they were back in their car so they knew they could go out and get their pet. Cindy was on her own by that point, Randall had upped sticks on her and moved to Enders with Sandy Michaels just as she graduated. Nobody could ever prove anything but the word in town was that he must have been seeing her before she turned sixteen. People said they saw them down at Swanson Lake that summer, her in cut off denim shorts and a tiny bikini top, him in jeans, white shirt unbuttoned all the way down, holding hands, kissing, but nobody saw anything more. Randy and Sandy. That used to make Jennifer smile. Jesus, this town, man. 

Jennifer had known Sandy at school, she’d been the year above but had still been one of the girls that had made her life a misery after the hair incident. She’d been into Nirvana but thought all the conspiracy stuff about Courtney Love was crap and wanted to do something to look like her, she thought Courtney was pretty cool but mostly she thought that she didn’t take any shit from anyone and she could use a bit of that. She should have gone to Beauty Marks and talked to Stacey about it but when she was hovering around outside, deciding whether to go in, she’d seen a friend of he mom’s in there and it would all get too complicated trying to explain. So she’d done it all herself, full on peroxide treatment to banish the boring brunette and emerge as a bottle-blonde bombshell. Don’t try for more than two shades. She knew that now. As it turned out the number of shades was the least of her problems as she had some kind of reaction to the peroxide; her hair turned orange and then, a couple of days later, which she’d spent trying to style the whole thing out like she’d always wanted orange hair, it all started to fall out. The best she could salvage was a fairly dramatic buzz cut which left her the laughing stock of the school for weeks. Everyone pivoted over night from picking apart Diane Flint’s apparent Disney princess obsession to picking apart her new look. All graceless stuff about lesbians or cancer mostly. This town, man.

She didn’t regret dropping out. Mostly didn’t regret it. Courtney got expelled when she was growing up and things worked out okay for her. Why stay somewhere you don’t want to be and where nobody else wants you there? Just for a piece of paper saying you can do math and knew who George Washington was. Maybe she could have stayed, sometimes she thinks that Diane was open to being friends and maybe that would have been enough. But she was always hanging out with that Johnny guy, the older one who stayed down a year, and he seemed kinda intimidating, like he didn’t want anyone intruding, so she’d kept her distance. Besides, everyone said they were screwing and she didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Dropping out had been easy, as simple as not showing up anymore. The aftermath had been harder as her mom kicked her out and she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the Community Room, hiding in the toilets until they locked up and then creeping back out to lie down on the floor until morning. Cindy had taken pity on her, maybe she just wanted company after Randy left her, but she let her stay at hers for a while, gave her some shift work grooming the dogs, and, slowly, Jennifer had put enough money down to rent a room in a pre-fab up near the 34. It was cheap because there was highway noise through the night, it wasn’t so bad except when the eighteen wheelers whipped past  and the room would shake, the loose piece of glass in one of the widows would rattle against the frame, and the screen door would swing open if she hadn’t remembered to jam it shut.  They had a steady stream of Big Rigs passing through the town. Sometimes she thought about thumbing a ride and taking off but she had nowhere to go.

It was getting harder when it should have been getting easier. In her head she’d thought that if she could keep the shifts at Cindy’s until she turned twenty one then things would open up a bit, she could take a bar job, worm her way in at Frank’s. He wasn’t getting any younger and she knew he had no family. It wasn’t much of a plan but it gave her something to hold on to, an imagined future where she owned the local bar and all those losers from school would have to pay her to drink in the only place in town to hang out. She figured she’d change the name, maybe to “Jennifer’s” or maybe to “Love’s” in a little nod to Courtney, and she’d put a proper jukebox in, get rid of all that bro-country that Frank had on all the time, put in the pool table everyone wanted but Frank said he couldn’t afford, stop watering down the beer, have open mic nights for singers and comedians. It was when she got to the open mic nights part of her fantasy that reality usually crashed in. This town, man. Nobody in Trenton’s coming out for slam poetry at Love’s on a Tuesday night. She was two years off twenty one and the dog boom was over, Cindy was barely making enough to make her mortgage, let alone enough to give up any shifts and pay someone else. It’ll pick up. Will it, Cindy, will it?

In her darker moments she wondered if her only option was to screw her way out of Trenton. There were a lot of truckers passing through, probably lonely, criss-crossing the country, no ties, no need for alibis. What would even be the going rate for something like that? There wasn’t anyone she could ask. What was it worth, half an hour of fucking? What was she worth? She’d never really been with a man before so it felt like a desperate leap. There was that time with Bobby Davids when they were both fifteen, he’d tried to take things further than she wanted to and she’d spent most of the evening moving his hands away or refusing to join in as he’d pulled himself off. An entirely different version of events went round the school the next day and she’d stayed away from boys after that, wrote them all off as assholes. Not much dissuaded her of that view before she dropped out.

One evening she’d fixed her hair up, pulled it away from her neck, and dressed in a tight, low cut top, spaghetti straps and cropped at the stomach. She’d squeezed herself into year old jeans, slightly too small for her now but they accentuated her hips, and stopped to check herself in the small mirror above the sink in her room. She practiced what she thought was a confident, sexy smile, pushed her lips into a pout, tried to look casual. Her eyes betrayed her, blinking slightly too often, unable to maintain eye contact with herself, she would look away, around the room. It was okay if she caught a glimpse of this girl in the mirror, this stranger, familiar but different, but it wasn’t okay if she stared her down, realised that she was looking back at herself. She thickened up her mascara and applied some more eye shadow, like she was building defences around the source of her betrayal, and took the edge off her lipstick, blotting her lips against a tissue, leaving the imprint of her mouth in scarlet. The suggestion of a kiss.

She’d walked into town and made her way towards the truck and car wash. Some of the freight from the 34 stopped off in town, they could get their wagon freshened up at Dirt Dawg, chat to Marv, or, more likely, go join him at Frank’s for a beer. She didn’t really know what she was going to do, thought she would just walk around for while and see what happened. Maybe they would know what to do and things would happen naturally and she could pretend that this was all just a regular night for her. Fifty bucks. That was what she’d settled on in her head. That was her worth. Fifty bucks for everything, maybe thirty bucks for hand or mouth, and she absolutely wasn’t doing anything other than those things. Fifty was a week’s rent. Twice a week, maybe she could get by doing this twice a week, maybe things would pick up a bit at Cindy’s, and that would get her through.

There was a light on in Dirt Dawg but it was closed, the main shutters to the garage were down. As she came closer the shutters screeched into life and began to rise, on the other side was Marv’s pick-up, headlights blinding her as the barrier rose higher and higher. She shielded her eyes and moved to one side.

“That you, Jennifer” came a voice from the pick-up. She blinked, squinting, eyes adjusting to the flood of light from front of the truck. Was that Diane Flint?

“Hey, yes. It’s me. Diane?” 

Someone else had walked over to stand next to her and she noticed that the driver door on the truck was open, presumably whilst someone had been opening the garage shutters. She recognised him as Johnny.

“You won’t tell anyone,” he said. Jennifer wasn’t sure if it was a question or a demand.

“Tell anyone what?”

“Johnny, she’s cool,” shouted Diane. “Let’s get going. We should put some miles on before it gets too late.”

Jennifer pieced it together. “You’re leaving town, right? You’re taking off?”

“It’s not your business whether we are,” said Johnny. “You sure she’s cool?” This was directed back at the pick-up.

Before Diane could respond Jennifer interrupted. “You don’t need to worry about me. I won’t tell no-one. I haven’t really got anyone to tell anyway. But even if I did, I wouldn’t. Go on, get going.”

Johnny nodded to her, the briefest acknowledgement, and jumped back into the pick-up. He and Diane spoke quietly, Jennifer couldn’t hear them over the sound of the engine. He was shaking his head, Diane was gesturing and doing most of the talking, both of them seemed to be getting frustrated. Jennifer broke the stalemate. “If you’re arguing about whether to ask me along then quit it and get going. Three’s a crowd and I’ve got plans in this town.” Jesus, this town, man. Diane raised her hand, a small, sad wave that she barely had time to give as Johnny gunned the accelerator and left Jennifer standing there.

She didn’t really know why she waited. There was something about the truck wash being left open, unattended, that bothered her so she sat on the kerbside, stared up at the street light, and just waited. That was where Marv found her, about an hour later, when he came back from Frank’s. It had been a quiet night, Frank was in a bad mood, so he’d only stayed for a couple before deciding he should check on how much Johnny had taken in the afternoon. He was a decent kid but Marv knew his heart wasn’t really in it. Marv’s heart wasn’t really in it these days either.

He took in the scene quietly, mentally putting it together. The shutters were open and his pick-up wasn’t there. There was a girl – and she was definitely a girl much as she’d tried to dress up like a woman – on the sidewalk. He thought he’d seen her around town. She might be the one that helped Cindy out from time to time, Cindy always said she was a good worker. He went inside and checked that nothing else was missing. It looked like Johnny had left the safe, the day’s takings still inside, he’d just taken the truck. No note. Had he just borrowed it for the night? Taken someone up to the lake, maybe? That didn’t seem right, he’d have asked if it was just that. Marv figured he’d split town. He was about to pick up the phone, call the sheriff, when he heard a voice behind him.

“Everything okay, now? I… I waited ‘cos I noticed the place had been left open and it didn’t seem right.”

Marv turned round. “You see what happened?” He didn’t expect her to tell him the truth. She didn’t.

“No, I didn’t. I was just coming in to town to… well, to have a drink, but I saw it all open like this.”

“You seem a little young to be coming to town to have a drink,” said Marv. He slowed on the word drink, raised an eyebrow. “If you want my advice then I’d stay away from drink.” Again, he was deliberate on the word. More gently he said, “You don’t want to be messing around with that.”

Jennifer suddenly felt exposed. The night air had cooled and she was aware of the chill on her uncovered arms, her shoulders, her stomach, her neck. The change in his tone, its softening, had pulled away any last remnants of forced confidence, of fake front, that she had left. Fifty bucks? Was that really what she thought she was worth? She felt tears pricking at the edges of her eyes, sensed that the mountain of mascara she’d applied before was about to dislodge in a black avalanche down her cheeks. She wanted to run away, back to her room, sit and sob listening to the sounds of the rigs rattling past, all those truckers she thought she was prepared to give herself up to disappearing into the night. She turned away.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

Jennifer didn’t turn around again. She didn’t really want him to see her like this anymore. It wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t completely sure she knew who she was but she knew it wasn’t this.

“Thank you,” she said, back to him. “I think I’d like that. I’ll be back in the morning. Some honest work.”

She left and Marv watched her walk back up the street before he closed the place back up for the night. He thought about calling the sheriff but decided it could wait until tomorrow; get to wherever you think you’re going, Johnny. He flicked off the lights.

I decided I had unfinished business in Trenton after my earlier story: here. I may round out a loose “Trenton Trilogy” and tell Marv’s story at some point. Anyway, Jennifer deserved more than the couple of lines she got first time out, hopefully things work out for her from here. I think I may have switched tenses towards the end but that’s the sort of thing an editor is for, right?

This is another in the series of stories for my Great Ormond Street Hospital (UK children’s hospital for my non-UK readership, yes, both of you). Donations welcome here.

A secret never told

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“Rain later, apparently.”

He didn’t turn as I approached. The two of us leant against the gate, looking out over the meadow. A solitary magpie landed on a scrubby patch of grass in front of us and began to peck at the earth.

“Good. Field needs it. It’s been a hard summer.”

“It’s still uneven.” I gestured at the patch where the magpie continued its restless scouring of the ground. Two others broke from their circling overhead and joined their companion who greeted them with an angry, rattling, staccato cry. 

“People don’t see it like you do. It’ll grow over again given another year.”

“I guess. You sure it’s being left as pasture?” 

He nodded without averting his gaze from the field. “Won’t be ploughing this for three or four years. Needs to lie fallow for a good long time. They might put some sheep in there next year I reckon once the grass takes hold properly.”

“As long as you’re sure?”

“I was always sure.” 

I pushed myself away from the gate, feeling my weight through my arms, and looked up at the darkening sky. John was sure. If he’d been trying to reassure me it hadn’t worked. Hearing footsteps behind me I turned my head to see someone from the village approaching. She was followed by a dog, sniffing eagerly at the hedgerow. Jet black. Perhaps a labrador cross. I’d never really known about things like that. Another part of country life that I’d need to learn. I acknowledged her as she passed and bent to pat the dog as it barked in greeting. Over the fence the magpies scattered at the noise.

“Looks like it’s going to rain,” called the dog walker. “Come on Rosie. Here girl.”
Rosie ignored her owner and scrabbled under the gate and went bounding into the open field, tail flapping in the rising wind. She paused where the magpies had previously settled and pressed her nose to the ground. She began to bark.

“Daft dog. Must have caught the scent of something,” said the walker coming up to the gate. “Here Rosie. Come on. Good girl.”

“There were some birds in the field earlier,” I said. “Magpies.” 

“How many?” asked the walker in between continuing to call back Rosie. I started to join in. John briefly touched my arm, his hand firm. I stopped calling for the dog.

“Anne’s new to the area. She won’t know what you mean,” he said. “Doubt she’ll know about our little country superstitions.” 

She didn’t seem to hear, wrapped up in shouting at her disobedient companion. The dog had barely moved, still sniffing the earth. I gripped the gate, knuckles whitening.

“What am I going to do with that creature?” she muttered. Reaching in to her coat she pulled out a biscuit but Rosie didn’t appear to notice until it was thrown towards her, into the field. Then she trotted back towards us and snapped up the biscuit, crumbs scattering around her as she chewed. Another proffered biscuit was enough now to tempt her back and I watched as Rosie and owner disappeared up the path again. I relaxed my grip on the gate and turned to look back at the field. 

One, then three, then, finally, seven magpies alighted back in the meadow, squabbling over the remnants of dog biscuit. John was staring straight ahead again and something in the set of his jaw told me not to ask him what it meant.

Embers

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Marylebone Platform Six: Arrival

Is it too late at forty one? It was the first question that Jane wanted to ask, impatiently thumbing a magazine in the waiting room. She had read the literature, seen the changes in risk profiles past certain ages, heard the opinions of friends, family, strangers in forums on the internet, and the consensus was that it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t, perhaps, ideal but it wasn’t too late. She wanted to hear it out loud from a professional. She wanted somebody with a medical certificate on their wall, preferably wearing a white coat, to spell it out to her.

The waiting room was the same as she remembered it from the only time she’d persuaded Paul to come. Curved, vertically slatted, wood panelled walls framed the space, a light wood that softened the room and retained the light. They’d talked about it when they’d sat here together, a distraction from the real reason they were there. He thought it looked like somebody’s idea of the future from the 1970s, she thought it was Scandinavian and designed to evoke a sense of calm. Now she wasn’t so sure, sat there alone. It wasn’t helping the knottiness in her stomach or her quick glances around the room each time a door opened or the receptionist shuffled a set of papers or the printer on her desk hummed to life or the telephone rang. She didn’t think Paul had been right either. If this was an imagined future then it was not one she would ever have imagined for herself.

There were six other people in the waiting area with her, all couples, all sat quietly, two of them holding hands, the other sat side by side, her with her head leant across his shoulder. Everyone had acknowledged each other every time somebody new arrived, usually a silent nod or smile, a tacit sign that whilst nobody knew the details of everyone’s story they did understand the gist of it, understood that they had all reached an inflection point where they were all looking for the same happy ending. Jane had found that smallest moment of connection oddly moving and had immediately bent over to rummage in her bag, pretending to look for something important, so that she could compose herself, hold back the tears that were threatening to run down her face.

Jane watched two of the couples, in turn, be called to another room ahead of her. In their absence she imagined the myriad of chance events that could have played out that led them here, the arbitrary sequences where biological collisions were missed or cellular reactions spluttered and faded or genetics were just wired, unknowingly, against the hopeful protagonists from the start. She tried to read their faces as they came back into the waiting area but everyone carried the same pensive, considered look that they had as they entered. Maybe they didn’t know anymore than they did before. Maybe everyone realised, out of respect, that this wasn’t the place to show more than cautious optimism. Not everyone would leave with the news they wanted. Jane had read enough of the statistics to understand that.

Her name was called and she was directed down a corridor towards the back of the waiting area, and then into a room, marked simply with the name of her fertility consultant and the assorted set of letters after his name. MBBS BSc MD DFFP MRCOG. She didn’t understand any of it beyond the BSc but was reassured in its impenetrability, in its length, in its blank capitalisation. She hesitated and then tentatively knocked. If Paul had been her she knew he’d have hung back, waited for her to make things happen. The thought galvanised her and she didn’t wait for a response, just pushed the door open and stepped through.

Doctor Jacobs – Andrew, please, call me Andrew – was the owner of the various initials on the door and Jane listened as he talked through the potential IVF pathways open to her, detailed the risk profile information that she had already exhaustively googled, and gave her an honest appraisal of her chances. It’s a physical and emotional commitment, Mrs Roberts, and there’s no guarantees but you’re healthy, all your indicators are as good as they can be, so it’s certainly not a situation where I’d be looking to dissuade you.

“I prefer Jane,” said Jane suddenly. “I’m just finalising some paper work but I don’t think of myself as Mrs Roberts anymore.”

Andrew tilted his head slightly to the side. “Your ex-husband. Of course. I am so sorry about his death, Jane.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We were actually divorced but there was some admin to finalise and then he died. It was all very unexpected.”

“He explained it to me,” said Andrew. “I really am so sorry, I was so caught up in explaining the processes and the details that I usually cover. I really should have started with that.”

“He explained it?”

Andrew opened a file on his desk and picked through the sheets of paper inside it, eventually finding what he was looking for, pulling it out and placing it in front of her. “He wanted you to have this. He wanted me to give you this.”

Jane stared at it for a few moments, caught between curiosity and a sense of deep apprehension. She’d sat on the train on her way in mentally preparing for what she thought was every possible permutation, every way in which this conversation might go, every choice she might be offered, but none of that preparation had included a letter from Paul. She’d consciously walked rapidly down the platform at Marylebone, fixated on nothing but the exit barriers and the passage way to the street, deliberating screening out all of the small reminders, all of the tiny emotional cues that the place prompted in her. She’d deliberately avoided the station since the disposal of his ashes and had wanted that to close it all off, to end their story in the same place it began.

Curiosity won. Jane read Paul’s letter.

Dear Jane,

I am not foolish enough to seek your forgiveness. I know you too well and, more importantly, have come to realise that what I did doesn’t deserve that you forgive me. I regret it all deeply and that is something that I have to carry.

Perhaps somewhere you can appreciate the irony in the formality of this letter, now that we’ve parted and will lead separate lives. Do you remember that we started with Pride & Prejudice and I misquoted Mr Darcy, a vain hope that I would not lose your good opinion lest it be lost forever. Clearly I have lost it forever and I have only myself to blame for that. Know that I am sorry. I know that will probably not mean much, after everything, but know that’s it true all the same.

When you left me in 31 Below, that last time I saw you, you said that I owed you. I’ve thought a lot about that since and I think you’re right, I know you’re right. I’m due for my surgery in a couple of weeks and, after that, I will disappear. I don’t want to bounce around London anymore, bumping into the places that were ours, regretting what I let get away from me. I don’t know exactly what I will do but I’m going to move away, going to start again somewhere else, see if I can find a small village cricket team that will have me. But that’s all about me and not about you. And you were right, I do owe you.

The surgery will stop me ejaculating. I tried to think of a more poetic way to say it but drew a blank. No puns intended. Perhaps you realise how difficult this is for me and remember that we used to laugh at things like this? Used to laugh at so much. I’m sorry if it’s too late for that. How would Mr Darcy have put it? I guess Austen painted him as a study in quiet, simmering virility so I suppose it’s not a line she would ever need to have grappled with. What I’m trying to say is that after the surgery the one last thing that I might be able to do for you will be denied me.

I’ve donated my sperm to this clinic and arranged for it to be frozen. I finally made good on those conversations we had, those things I owed you. All the paperwork is taken care of. If you want to use them as a donor then they are yours – and only yours, this is something I should have helped us do together and it’s something I only want to help you do alone. If you choose to. I would completely understand if I am the last donor on earth that you would want to entertain.

This is no recompense for the damage I’ve done, Jane, but I hope it is, at least, something. I loved you. I didn’t honour that and, for that, I’m sorry but I did love you.

Yours, Paul.

Jane read Paul’s letter and stared at the paper, in silence, for several minutes. Andrew sat watching her, fingers pressed to lips, mindful to give her space. She looked up at him.

“This is not how I imagined this would all work, you know? I was so sure about everything, so certain in what I wanted, what I went after, what I got. Life was a series of things to achieve, things in my control that I could… I don’t know, that I could bend to my will. And I had a lot of will. And this… this is something that I can’t.”

“I wish that it were different,” replied Andrew.

She asked her question. “Is it too late at forty one, doctor? Sorry, Andrew. Is it too late?”

“There’s no guarantees but it’s not too late,” he said. 

“Am I crazy to do it alone?” It was the other question she had played over in her mind; the one for herself but which she asked quietly now, almost as if he wasn’t there.

“You can’t bend fertility to your will,” he said. “But if we succeed then I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that you can bend parenthood to it. It’s not crazy at all. It maybe takes a special kind of stubborn but it’s not crazy.”

Jane held his gaze. “Stubborn I can do. When can we start?”

Part six and the conclusion of the Marylebone stories. I am aware that the ending, technically, remains ambiguous so I may write a coda/epilogue for it at a later point. I know what I think happens to Jane but you are free to imprint your own version…

This continues my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street in July ’23. Any and all donations to fundraiser very welcome on this link.

Cinders

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Marylebone Platform 5: Departure

It was Jane that they called. He had listed her as the emergency contact; she wasn’t sure whether it was out of habit, some muscle memory from when they were married, or because there wasn’t anyone else. Nobody that had stuck around at least. 

She’d known that he was having the surgery. He’d asked to meet up and she’d agreed to a coffee at 31 Below, listened as he’d talked about things she didn’t really understand; enlarged prostate, strictures, bladder neck incisions. He’d made light of it at first – pretty sexy, right? – but she knew him well enough, behind the bullish bluster and bravado, to see that he was scared. And alone. That part was also unsaid but she sensed it and realised that he was trying to draw her into this, trying to lean on what they were before to help him get through it. 

They had argued. Paul had told her that the surgery meant that he wouldn’t be able to have children. Some more medial jargon she didn’t understand. At first she thought that he was expressing some remorse about the thing he’d always denied her – or, at the very least, the thing they’d never been able to agree on. It’s not the right time. I’m not sure if I’m ready. It’ll change our lives so much. Then he said it. I always thought I’d be a dad and now I won’t. It wasn’t remorse for what they might have lost, just regret for something denied to him alone, something he could have had with her but had always pushed away. 

She had wanted to scream at him. She sat stirring a spoon in her coffee, watching frothed milk spin around the cup until the urge to yell incoherently at him subsided, her anger dissipating in the swirling foam. “Why are you telling me this, Paul?”, she said finally.

“I thought you should know. I thought I owed you that,” he said.

“You owed me that?” Jane was incredulous. “Of all the things you might owe me, Paul, this is really the least of them.” He started to try to speak but Jane continued, cutting across him. “You owed me not fucking some old college friend at The Landmark on a regular basis. The fucking Landmark. Was she really that classy? Couldn’t you have taken her to the King’s Cross Premier Inn and saved some money on your infidelity? It might have been better for her. They have a good night guarantee and I can’t believe you would be as reliable as them in that promise.” Her voice was raised slightly now but controlled. A couple on the next table had paused their conversation, listening but pretending not to listen.

“Jane, just let me…”

“No, Paul, I won’t just let you. You owed me ten years of marriage and a series of broken promises about having a child. You owed me missed appointments at the IVF clinic. You owed me not being too proud to wank into a pot so they could test whether it was you or me that was ‘the problem’. So you don’t get to call me out of the blue and start acting all ‘poor me’ because you’ve got to have an op that’s going to stop your juices flowing.”

“It’s retrograde…”

“You’re not listening. I don’t care what it is. I’m sorry you have to have whatever it is that you have to have but I don’t really care. I’m done caring about you – for you – Paul and I want no part of this, whatever this is supposed to be.” Jane had left him sitting there, leaving the cafe in a rush, seat scraped back across the floor, coat flung on as she walked out. The chill of the outside air had felt like a slap around her face as she pulled open the door and her anger cooled as quickly as it had risen, leaving her feeling numb, suddenly exposed. She paused in the doorway. What did he want from her? She left without looking back.

The hospital was off Wellbeck Street. Jane thought about hailing a cab but it would be jammed at this time of day and she wasn’t far from Picadilly Circus so she jostled her way through the tourist throng to the tube station. As she came up the escalators at Marylebone she was briefly overwhelmed with a flood of memories, a sudden sense of anxiety which surprised her. She passed the flower stall which had been their meeting place in the early days, when everything was blooming, and slowed slightly, thought about stopping to pick up some tulips. Those were the ones he’d always picked out for her. It’s urgent, Mrs Roberts, your husband is in the high dependancy unit and we’d strongly advise you to come. She quickened her pace and left the station.

The hospital reception was calm and quiet, a smiling woman, glassed pushed back onto her forehead, looked up from a computer as Jane approached. She listened as Jane explained why she was there, gradually allowing the smile to soften on her face to something more neutral. She picked up a phone and spoke quickly, reassured Jane that someone would be right down to take care of her. After a few minutes a nurse arrived and took Jane up to a different floor, briskly escorting her down a corridor until they reached a set of signs for high dependency and intensive care.She ushered Jane into a small waiting room, pale pastel shades, a box of tissues discretely placed on a side table, and said that someone would come soon. They would keep her updated. Please wait.

Jane closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing, forced her focus to the steady rise and fall of her chest and the sensation of air entering and leaving her body. She curled her toes in her shoes as if she was forcing them into the floor, felt the shape of the chair support her body, tried to notice all the places where it came into contact with her. Each time she took her attention away from the simple physicality of the chair her mind raced away.

It raced back through a series of memories of their time together; a slide show of moments set on fast forward, images tripping over themselves, just snap shots suggesting the essence of them. Running for the last train, him bounding on to it and wedging the door open so she could duck under his arm. Drinking cocktails in Soho, watching a hen party dance on the tables, Paul eventually joining them, laughing as they draped a feather boa around his neck. Walking through Regent’s Park in the Spring, late afternoon, arm in arm, listening to him talk about cricket. Walking the steps at the Town Hall on their wedding day, pretending not to notice a group of her friends scuttling in just before her having misjudged how long they’d stayed in the pub. Walking the aisle, the ridiculous wicket themed aisle, and seeing him standing at the other end, his eyes never leaving her as she walked down towards him. The flat in Willesden. Later, the house in a village, the one with the good schools they’d never need.

She gripped the arms of the chair, dug her nails into the fabric, stilled her thoughts again. If her mind raced she tried to keep it on the good stuff but each thread, when pulled, unravelled just as they had unravelled in the end. The thread she pulled the most ran back to the night she had realised, the night her stupidity had been revealed. He’d been away and, unusually, had picked up when she’d called him. They’d been rowing a lot recently so maybe he felt bad or maybe he was worried that she’d start to suspect. She could hear a noise in the background on the call, almost like static. I’m just running a shower. Just freshening up before meal with the team. When she thought about it later she figured that maybe he’d answered because he’d assumed that he was safe, his secret stashed in the shower, out of danger. But his secret, unknowingly, disclosed herself. Are you coming in to join me? Female voice. Flirtatious. Some laughter. Called loud enough to be heard over the falling water and called loud enough to be heard down the receiver of a phone.  

It was the consultant that came, flanked by the nurse that had brought her up before, holding a glass of water. He was in pale blue scrubs but had pulled the cap off his head and was holding it in one hand, playing it between his fingers and thumb. He introduced himself but Jane didn’t register the name, she was fixated on the glass of water and the restless motion of his fingers. Why would they bring a glass of water? He was speaking quietly but firmly, precisely. She caught him say “as his wife” and only then looked up.

“We split up,” she said, sadly. “We’re separated. Paul’s not my husband anymore, doctor. I don’t know… I don’t really understand why I’m here.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs Roberts,” he said. “He has listed you as his wife in all his documentation. Including,” he paused. “Including as his next of kin.”

Jane looked at him again. “What are you saying?”

“I’m sorry but there was a complication in the surgery. Your husband, your ex-husband, is dead.”

Part five of the Marylebone set of stories. One to go. Obviously no happy ending for Paul but let’s see what awaits Jane.

This was another piece in my 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital (not the hospital referenced in this story) during July ’23. Fundraising details here.