Autumn Issue 2009

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Editorial
As I write, a wan sun is dissolving in a watery blue sky and the fells are hot and spicy with autumn.  It’s the end of an October which has been brighter and warmer than the whole of the summer.  Here in the Dales, summer came and went behind closed doors and dripping windows, beneath a slab of dirty sky. Not weather, you would think, to provide much poetry inspiration, but you’d be wrong.  The poems have been coming thick and fast – bit like the rain really, although I’d rather have a poetry deluge any day.  We’ve also had some short stories submitted; these are rare creatures which we only see occasionally. We’ve included one by Irish writer Steve Wade, whose writing is compelling and unflinching – not for the fainthearted – but a striking piece of work nonetheless. So, big thanks to all our contributors and to Richard Quayle for doing the hard techy stuff and the cover photo of autumn in Burnsall. We hope you will enjoy this latest issue.
On a more mundane note, we have been receiving a number of e-mails with attachments.  We do state in our submission guidelines that we won’t open attachments and require all work to be included in the body of the e-mail.  We’d be very grateful if all contributors would take note of this.  Also, it would be helpful if, when sending poems, contributors could adhere to the format in the online magazine i.e. Font – Arial, font size 10, title in bold and name at the bottom of each poem in bold.  It’s not a huge deal, but it does save time when we’re getting it ready for putting up on the website.  Thanks.
Finally, my recent chapbook ‘Songs For Lesser Gods’ (erbacce press - £3.99) has been voted number 12 in the top twenty Best Individual Collections of the Year by Purple Patch Small Press Best of 2009 List.  So many thanks to them for that.  Copies are available from erbacce press direct – see the link to their website.  See also review by Martin Holroyd at Poetry Monthly - www.poetrymonthly.com

Lesley Quayle

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Words of wisdom

Freud would say
you forgot something
at my place
because you
subconsciously
wanted to return

Jung would say
there is a mystic reason
why it has rained for three days
straight since you
walked out

but my mother
would only say
I should drop
you like a hot
potato

Ivan Jenson.

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Breaking the Mould.

I’m tired of strawberry jelly,
I’m tired of the same old mould:
I’m going to try a different flavour
Before I get too old.

Sharon Lansbury.

.
.
Miss Havisham Car.

Forty years publicly decomposing in the lean to.
Covered now in a pelt of moss, rust nibbles at its body work.
A ‘Not for sale ‘sign scrawled on torn cardboard is stuck
to the rear window, evidence of failed attempts to rescue
the 1960s racing green mini. Beside it stands another car
renewed every two years, well cared for, like a favourite child.
A friend boldly petitions the elderly man at work in the garden.
His son simply refuses to part with his possession.
Dog in the garage behaviour even his father find inscrutable,
but recalls another car with a totemic hold upon its owner.

The first was no sooner spotted in the Sunday Express
by a profligate father, than it bowled up outside the house
to become the envy of the village. A showy little white
sports car with the charisma of its dog fighting namesake.
But whose curvaceous body, skimming the ground
like a stalking lioness meant that it was always mother’s car.
In summer, the saucy 60s glamour of taking the top off,
her headscarf tied a la Audrey Hepburn,
as she sped along country roads in search of the Rivera.

After his death she traded white for scarlet.
Eventually, the repair bills became too costly and the car
was incarcerated in its garage like a shabby old lion in a lock up.
For years its disposal was as unthinkable as selling a child.
Instead she side stepped the clutch of bills and walked everywhere.
Refusing to enter the garage herself, the sliding door was
raised only for crooked back access to the dustbins.
Sometimes in dreams, she drove it again like a loved one
miraculously cured. Occasionally lads from the neighbourhood
came sniffing around it like a local pretty girl and were sent packing.

She stayed in her bedroom when the men arrived and in
an already proprietorial manner, explored the car’s bodywork
with their hands; groped about under her bonnet; thrust
themselves beneath her and overwhelmed her interior.
Veiled behind net curtains, she witnessed the young man
and his mates, in public view, push the disabled vehicle
down the drive. The locked handbrake making them laugh
breathlessly as if the car were digging in its heels.
She had kept her looks, despite her failing organs.
An age to load her onto the trailer as they trussed her like a
tranquillised lioness. ‘Why don’t they get on with it?’ she groaned.
Finally, she watched as they slowly drove her body away.

Fiona Sinclair

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 The bungalow’s secret past.

Mother shared a cup of tea with a lecherous councillor
and picked up the house keys with her finger tips.

Driving away from home they saw the land empty, waiting
for the town to breed on it. The housing estate grew tough

and spiteful as a nettle bed. Neighbours stared brazenly
from windows and gardens as the alien family’s fine furniture

was paraded into the building. Then the insoluble equation
of trying to fit their home into the mean little bungalow.

Furniture familiar as family was sacrificed. No place for oak
chests and regency dinning room chairs, here. Attempts at

positioning a bookcase and kidney shaped side board ended
in stalemate. They were left to bully the sitting room.

Mother and daughter strained like Alice in the lizard’s
green house. She was demoted to a single bed with double

wardrobes either side that hemmed her in like bouncers.
Her underwear kept in a packing case squeezed under

an early Victorian sofa. Then the lodger muscled in and
watched the bathroom and bedrooms with his x-ray eyes.

Conversation in the kitchen polluted the other rooms. And
beyond the dividing wall, the sound of the neighbours peeing.

For twenty years, a contemptuous sweep of the duster over
surfaces and the vacuum cleaner skimming the ‘bits that showed’

meant that a rising tide of filth crept across the magnolia walls;
cobwebs blackened corners like dirty secrets; stains gradually

flooded the Wilton carpet; and every curtain inhaled the
lodger’s cigarette smoke and turned ginger. 

Sometimes, mother and daughter would walk the length
of an invisible leash, eyes straining beyond the industrial

bulk with its green and red alien lights and permanent
stain of black smoke, looking for their lost country side.

Today, a retired man lovingly mows the lawn in front of the
innocent looking bungalow with its murder scene’s secret past.

Often the daughter is sent back and strives to clean up the mess.

Fiona Sinclair

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Battered.

He was more than six sheets to the wind.
He was battered and bruised.
Dark blood dried beneath his nose
and he had a large lump under his eye.
He, no doubt, had been in a fight over a
cheap bottle of wine.

He whined as I wiped the blood from his face.
He reeked of cigarette smoke and wine.
I scrubbed at the blood but it didn't come easy.
One deep cut will leave a scar joining the
ranks of a dozen others.

He shook as he tried to drink a cup of coffee.
He spilled most of it. I asked him what had
happened. He frowned and gave me a blank
stare. He slowly shook his head. He pursed
his lips and replied, "I don't remember a
thing, but I wish I were dead..

Mike Berger, Utah.

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Paranoia built the walls
 
Why’s he feel so precarious?
out there in here all the jack on the
line all the hooch and the pooch
phones tapped, wires in the walls.
Who’s the plant? who’s the snoop?
driving him round the loop
living on the card edge of  credit
card lopping lines for all these
vultures, jackals, hyenas behind
veils of blue reeking smoke
but in his guts feels like snakes,
constricting, sirens,
wire in the teeth, satellite picks
up chips in the head, tiny deposits
secreted while he slept,
watching the whole damned show
on tiny cameras, detailing stoned
conversations in the backs of windowless
vans, clicking shots of his clients,
building files, resumes, folios.

Dave Migman, Edinburgh.

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Pigs in Transit.

The truck is a metal box.
One of the slits in the side
Frames a jumbled collage
Of medieval darkness and bits of face -
A twisted mouth grafted
Over three bulging eyes,
Nostrils, tusks and bristles growing
From an ear.

Their screams
Are racked from our own atrocities,
Their teeth clenching
On our wordless tongues.

Gone -
They leave the stench of their fear
Trailing behind them
And their panting in our lungs.

Roy Cockcroft

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Wasp

There was a boy in my primary school
who, one lunchtime, walked up to everyone
in the playground, us all standing around
eating ham sandwiches we didn’t want to eat
and drinking foul cartons of flavoured milk
we each hated, showing at the tip of his index
the hanging carcass of a lifeless wasp, stuck
with its shell to the groove of his skin,
spent of its sting and given of its life
to the cause of its unknown natural desire:
we marvelled and thought it asleep.

Kevin Graham

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"Spy Prototype Robot Girl, Number 5"

Her mental contents,
And delivery-

She's usually
As nice as she can be-

And her beauty
Makes me think of
All these various activities...

She's spy prototype robot girl, number 5.

She's got lasers in her eyes.

She's very specialized.

Don't know
How many more
They'll make of her-

But on all missions
She's assigned
To come along with me on-

She's always quite a surprise:

She's the latest in advanced-
Espionage technology,
In this year of 2175.

She's spy prototype robot girl, number 5.

And she's much improved
Over numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4-

It's almost as if she's actually alive-

She has a learning program,
As well as a total range of
Downloaded emotions-

Even going as far as telling you-
She'll kill you, if you ever make her cry:

Giving you fair warning,
I suppose-

That she is after all:

Spy prototype robot girl, number 5.

Rex Cox.

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"The Last Stop ( 1:58 A.M. in the Morning )"

A tip for the waitress-
Because she doesn't look the kind
To allow a slap upon her behind!

Well, you know,
Some of these truckstop mamas,
Just don't wanna let it shine!

So I'm outside climbing aboard my old rig-
And heading off down the road-

Doing what I always do-

Hauling another load:

Turning on the radio...

And immediately
Picking up the start
Of Red Sovine...

"Phantom 309"

While I'm already
Lead-footing it,
Rushing through the gears-

Pushing this old rig up to speed:

Just trying to make some time!

But suddenly there's lights up ahead,
All over the road-

And I'm....

( Time of death upon the police report- 2:48 A.M. in the morning ).

Rex Cox.

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 Query for John Milton

    Can we believe
    that Eve
    ate that confounded apple to the core ? -
    or maybe spat out the pips
    through her lovely lips
    on Eden's floor ?

Ian Emberson, Todmorden.

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Ham

I huckstered for these thigh-boots
in Paris.

Watch dispiriting tatters of this role.
Applaud, swank puffs me up.
You perspiring Dog Rose water.

A stage-hand,
you're behind the scenes.
A ripcord will curtain-raise
this bow and flourish.

Christopher Barnes, Jesmond.

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Flitting

Nothing’s more important, the picture asks
you to believe, than what tugs your heart-strings:
two sad-eyed, straggle-haired little girls,
arms round each other’s shoulders for comfort.

Wearing grubby, washed-to-death pinafores
over hand-me-down skirts and clompy shoes,
their unsmiling gaze says it all, the rest’s
only out-of-focus background, a blur

of tea chests, bits and bobs, bed-frames propped
by the door, a paraffin stove, four chairs,
a washstand, things you’d hope might keep the wolf
from the door, two men loading a handcart.

Ken Head

.

Twenty lines of despair and a word of love*

Some trains are identified only by their numbers.

While arriving at the Bangalore station,
They always prefer the painful language of time,
The estranged body of an old girlfriend,
The disguise of an ignorant witness

They resist revealing much more or more less,
Like the new magazine cover at Higginbotham’s**.

Precise in their vague, smoky appearance,
They remind often about her,

About
how she does so perfectly,
while reducing memory into
a strand  of long hair in the bathroom,
a wrinkled bedspread,
a careless line ‘I will be back’.

This may or may not be the hour of departure.
But,
The saddest line can never be written about
a total stranger.

(Note:
* - Dedicated to Pablo Neruda
** - A book store chain seen across Indian Railway Stations)

Aditya Shankar, India

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Travelogues

1.
On the road from Gundalpet to Bandipur,
Time is a confused choice between heights.

Like an old village way,
everyone has a friend to wish,
the name of a relative to remember,
the warm smile of a lover to feel:
everyone imagines, a peak of memory.

There happens to be a question above all questions,
A silence thicker than all strangeness,  
a moment longer than all eternity.
 
On the road from Gundalpet to Bandipur,
Our car imagines itself to be a wild, migrating bird
that returns to its nest only once a year.

3.
While seeing the giant system of lamps and lenses
Atop the light house at Kavaratti with coast guard Anand,
Memory passed like a fading signal from the distance.

About father and grandfather
About old Kollam and its haunted beaches
The older light house at Thankassery
where silence hides a sting with vengeance in its secret hives
About the oldest of the oldest lighthouses
that set fire in its own head like mothers
to reach distant vision of its lost sons

Aditya Shankar, India

.

To A Literary Suicide.

You go over the railing,
following the black thread

embedded in the map
you were given

back at the start,
the wings of bat-faced angels

slashing the clouds
now that you're falling

and such light
as you can make out

suddenly like the first few
yellow leaves on a tree.

Howie Good, New York.

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Paths

slippery patch of ice
she walks over it
he walks round it.

Tristan Moss, Sheffield.

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Writing

Sorry, this poem isn't in to take your call at present.
But if you'd like to leave a few words
or even some sort of a message,
it might get back to you later.

Tristan Moss, Sheffield.

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Corner Office

Unlike his peers
his office holds
no photo of a wife
no indication that he has
fathered five
and probably
will father more.
There’s a silver ashtray, though,
and a tinkling chandelier 
and carpeting
his wife would like
soars across the floor.

Donal Mahoney, St Louis.

.

Aura and Essence

Thumping off my eye
I find the fist to be
less important
than the blur
the fist arrives in.
Coming toward me now
that man, his girl.
But more important is
the golden halo of the sun
falling now around them.

Donal Mahoney, St Louis.

Kaleidoscope

It was dope
that made him look through
a telescope
and see the stars in the sky
as coloured shapes
inside a kaleidoscope.

And he shook the
telescope, and the universe
shook about
becoming a mass of changing
patterns,
and the old order fizzled out.

And aliens fell from the sky
like locusts
and the Earth jumped away
from the Sun
and spun and spun
shaking off… everyone.

But, in all that swirling chaos,
there was least hope
for the man with the telescope
who smoked dope.

Linda Marshall, Leeds.

The Chelonian* Expert.

They inhabit his rooms, primeval
relics, regard him with black eyes
seeded in skull pods.

Sometimes he caresses their shells,
able to distinguish minutiae,
seeking symmetry

in hard curves, convex squabs
of brown and black and gold,
exquisite sanctuary.

His wife describes indifference,
though secretly despises cold chelonian
scrutiny.   

Warm bloods induce panic,
their hot, soft brilliance, twitch
of blood under skin

and sump of flesh, jellyfished
over clean and linear bone,
sour mat of hair.

Naked by the mirror, he traces
clavicle and sternum with
a curious finger,

the bump of floating ribs,
his pleading heart, tick-tockative
in its cage.

She finds him, on his back,
helpless to right himself, rocking,
slowly            slowly. 
 
Lesley Quayle, North Yorkshire.
*(Chelonian – belonging to the order of Chelonia, comprising turtles and tortoises)

We have been left a cuckoo child,
hungry and damaged, bisected by anger.

He litters our view of a cosier world,
smears his dirty protest like a sick pup;

having only ever seen the view from the cheap seats,
he has decided to shit on us now from the gods.

His quadrophonic rage is deafening,
us and them, his mother and himself,

there’s no room for simple affection,
his borderless emotions roam unchecked

and his inconsolable lust can’t help but defy –
his days are clandestine journeys along perilous edges.

All the safe houses have fallen down,
scrapped under the hammer of his gaze.

We have been left a cuckoo child,
lost in his tunnel, waving a lamp at the last, late train.

Lesley Quayle, North Yorkshire.

(from Songs For Lesser Gods)

Of Punks and Men

   The racket from the little scumbags kicking a ball around outside tore away the refuge of sleep. Doc’s head felt like it was clogged with gunk or some crap. But the gunk was no cushion against the bouncing ball and scumbag shouts and bellows. Felt like they were playing a match inside his head, the little bastards.

   Straight out he knew he’d have to take something. Or he’d be really sick. But there was nothing in the gaff. He’d have to buzz up into town. Sharp, like. Luckily, it shouldn’t take too long. That’s why he liked living in the city centre.
   Lifting the dirty, off-white duvet away from over his covered head, he sat up, kept his eyes closed against the daylight blazing through the curtainless window, leaned forward and worked his hand around the floor to locate by touch his socks, which he pressed to his nose – they passed the sniff-test.
   Gradually, he allowed the day to enter his eyes, firstly by opening his eyelids the width of a splinter, and then fully when he put on his fake Ray bans. Next he pulled on his white tracksuit.
   Now he was ready. Before thumbing the re-dial key on his mobile, he worked his fingers under his sunglasses and scraped the sleep from his eyes with his blackened fingernails.

   The voice on the end of the line was gruff and sounded pissed-off.
   “I know,” Doc said. “I know. I have you. But, it’s an emergency, man. I don’t have nothing, like.”

   Without mentioning names or locations, they agreed to hook up in the usual place at eleven bells. Doc then snapped his phone shut and left the flat.
   “Morning, Doc,” one of the two women said as he passed them at the bottom of the stairwell that led up to his and their flats.
   “Ah, hello, Misses,” he said. “How are we doing?” He could never get their names anymore.
   “That’s a grand day for you now,” the second one said. “Nice and sunny for you now. Look it!” And she waved her arm in a sweeping arc at the sky behind her.

   “Thanks,” Doc said. “Thanks Misses.”
   They always managed to make themselves sound better than him. ‘…a grand day for you now’. Like they were the ones giving him the day. A pair of old wagons.

*          *          *

   The advancing bus, the shrinking figure and the hurrying pedestrians couldn’t deny it: the man, now partially concealed in the crowd, had the same stooped posture, the identical checked sports-jacket; and the way he paused to rest against a shop-front, the walking stick tucked under his arm - even the same shuffling steps. It had to be. It was. Couldn’t be anybody else: Colm’s dead father.
   But, how could it be him? Colm had kissed his old man’s forehead, as cold as marble, the day of the funeral; the first and last time he’d pressed his lips to his father’s face. He’d brushed back the soggy hair from his own forehead and watched the torrential rain drum-roll off the small, mucky puddles that had formed round the gaping black hole at the graveside, the water flowing in thin channels into the unwelcoming wound in the earth.

   And yet, maybe, just maybe. But maybe what?
   Colm didn’t know what to think or consider.
   He twisted round in the bus seat to look after the elderly man in the street. The man’s face had been the face Colm’s father had worn in his final years. “Sorry. Excuse me,” Colm said to the young woman who smelled of Jasmine sitting next to him, as he felt himself rising to get off at the next stop, three or four stops before his.

*          *          *

   Since his retirement, Alfie and his wife Mags enjoyed Tuesday as their special day out together. Up early and into town on the Luas, a full Irish breakfast in the Kylemore, a stroll around the shops, under no time-pressures to be anywhere else, and up as far as the Green to feed the ducks if the weather was fine, a light lunch in Bewley’s cafe, and home before four. Lovely!
   This ritual Alfie continued after Mags had gone in to hospital. Her lovely, chubby face swelled with interest and excitement those Tuesday afternoon visits when he described to her what some chap, a gas character, known well to he and Mags had done or said in Henry Street.
   “And did you have the Full Irish?” she’d ask him, or “What’s going into the ground this weather, love, up in the Green?”
   But those Tuesday visits were few. Mags went in to hospital at the end of February and had passed on by early April.
   For over a year since Mags’ passing, Alfie kept up the Tuesday morning trips into the city. At first he talked to Mags in his head. He heard her voice comment on what a beautiful day it was.

   Sure isn’t everyday a beautiful day so long as you’re in it, he’d say. And he’d hear her big happy laugh crowding the morning, as honest and pure as the hidden blackbirds singing in the trees and bushes.
   A few months after Mags’ death, Alfie graduated to talking to his dead wife aloud, left a pause for her response, and laughed with her, nodding his head in casual greeting at the people in the street who smiled at him. He accepted the smiles for the two of them, he and Mags, the way they used to be: an aging couple, still happy together and there for each other at a time in life when they depended so much upon the other’s support.

*          *          *

   “Doc! Doc! One of the lads called to him from a third floor balcony.
   Jaysus, he couldn’t even get out of the bleeding complex.
   Doc stopped, turned round and squinted up and through the sizzling daylight. He chucked his chin up at the youth. “Alright,” he said.
   “Hold up, Doc,” the other said. “I’m coming down.”
   “What’s the story?” Doc said to the other’s retreating back. You had to look after your customers, no matter what.

   The youth disappeared into his flat and emerged quickly through the door at the bottom of the stairwell.
   Doc knew exactly what the other wanted. He had to stop him before he got going.
   “Haven’t got nothing,” Doc said, before the youth reached him. He held out his arms like the statue of your man in O’Connell Street. “I don’t have nothing. I’ve got to blast off to see a man, like. Alright?”
   “I know how you mean,” the youth said. “Game ball. I’ll catch you later then, Doc.”
   “Sound,” Doc said.
   Doc pulled his tracksuit hood up over his head before he reached the young fellows taking penalties in the vandalised basketball court, their goalposts constructed from a bent and flattened traffic cone and a burnt, blackened and melted car seat.
   “Nay, what’s up, Doc?” the bigger of them shouted at him, in his usual, nasally impression of Bugs Bunny. The rest of them exploded into laughter, like they always did.
   “Fuck off, you little pox-bottles,” Doc said. Just wait another few years and they were old enough. He’d fucking show them who they were messing with. Fucking pox-bottles!

*          *          *

   Catching up to the old man was easier than Colm had expected. He hadn’t got far. The elderly man, the man he had yet to be convinced wasn’t his dead father, might have been waiting for him. Colm slowed his pace before he drew near, glancing at his watch as some kind of diversion.
   Another half hour and they’d be arriving in the office. Colm would phone in and tell them he’d be late, he considered, but, really, his decision was already made. He wouldn’t be going in at all today.

*          *          *

   Alfie’s walking stick clattering to the pavement was what did it.
   No break came in the parade of legs. And when he stooped in an attempt to retrieve the stick, the shooting pain caught him as though someone had rammed a blade into his lower spine. Despite the pain, he forced himself to twist round and face the shop-front window, lest the passersby see him whinging and blubbering like an old fool.
   “Christ, the pain, love,” he said aloud, as though Mags were next to him. “Me back is gone again.”
   “Don’t you worry none,” he heard Mags say. “We’ll get a nice cup of tea and a scone in the Kylemore. Again we get back home, the pain’ll  have eased off. Like before.”
   Mags was right. She was always right.
   “Are you alright, Mister?” a young man’s voice asked.
   Startled at being rumbled in such a pitiful state, and, at the same time, feeling the goodness in the young man’s selfless compassion, Alfie could feel himself coming completely undone. He kept his head down, his hand covering his face.
   Into his other hand was placed the familiar wooden walking stick, a gift from Mags.
   “There you go,” the young man said. “Nothing to worry about. Now are you okay?”
 Alfie tucked his head further into his chest, sucking up the increased pain. He nodded that he was fine, but felt his entire body racking as the tears he could no longer control burned his eyes. And then it hit him, like being clobbered from behind, it was.
   What was he doing? Why was he here? What reason was there to come into town on Tuesdays anymore? Mags was gone. He’d sat with her in the hospital ward that last day, gripping her limp hand until it felt like a piece of unwrapped chicken taken from the fridge. She ended. A fact he had known but rejected. He was left on his own. Alone. A temporary error that would be corrected once he too ended.
   The unexpected touch and warmth of a human hand pressed against his upper back made Alfie look up and squint at the reflection in the shop-front window. The young man, his saviour, a bit rough looking, wore a hood that made it difficult to see his face.

*          *          *

   Doc said that was game-ball with him. He’d love to join the old boy for some grub. In fact, he hadn’t had any breakfast and could really go for some toast and a cuppa’. Except, and he told the old man he was sorry for saying it and the whole lot. But he’d left his wallet back in his gaff. He was stony he was.
   “Never you mind, son,” the old man said. “It’s on me. Sure what would an auld fellah like me be doing with me money anyway?”
   The laugh Doc shared with the old man made his head feel as if the backs of his eyeballs was the wall the little scumbags used as the net they measured out between their makeshift goalposts, and at which they were pounding quick-fire penalties.
   “What ails you, son?” the old man asked. “Is it sick you are or what?”
   “No, no,” Doc said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s just headaches. Me head is bursting.”
   The old man said he might have a few Aspro in his pocket, only his back was hurting too much for the moment to go hunting for them. He told Doc to dip right in and dig them out. The tablets were in a little blue box he told him.
   “Are you sure?” Doc said. “I mean I don’t want to be rooting around your stuff and the whole lot.”
   “Go right ahead, son,” the old man said. “Please.”
   Fumbling in the old man’s pocket, the old man’s smell was stronger: A sour smell that reminded Doc of his ma’s aunt - a comforting smell.

*          *          *

   It should have been him. The guy in the tracksuit got to him first. But who was this guy? What did he want with the old man? Broken images of the time Colm’s father came home the evening he’d been jumped by a gang of drunken teenagers, his swollen eye, eggplant purple, and the dark red blood already congealing under his father’s nose formed and faded in Colm’s head.
   If this guy so much as touched the old man …
   Colm took out his mobile and affected taking a call.
   With the phone pressed to his ear, he mumbled and nodded, moving slowly after the pair, each looking sicker than the other, as they threaded through the crowd in the direction of the Green. The way the younger man supported the old man, his arm around his waist and the old man’s arm draped round the younger’s shoulder had Colm guessing they were father and son. They were even laughing together, the type of laughter that belonged to the street, laughter loud and spontaneous, like the combined wing-beats of a startled flock of pigeons.
   What an idiot he’d been. Impulsively getting off the bus and missing work to stalk an old man who just might have been his dead father. He laughed aloud and spoke into the phone.
   “What an asshole!” he said to nobody on the other end of the line.
   Now he’d have to lay low and hang about town till after five. There were always too many officials connected to the office, on supposed business, moving about town; he’d bumped into them often on his days off. They were a bunch of big mouths.
   But hang on. Did he see what he thought he just saw? The guy in the hoodie had stopped, manoeuvred himself so that he and the old man were facing each other and, with his fingers pressing the bridge of his nose, as though he was supposed to be dizzy or something, had dipped his hand into the old man’s coat pocket.
   Colm slipped his mobile into its leather cover, shoved it into his trousers’ pocket, and took off after the pair like a lioness locked onto a potential kill.
   “Watch where you’re going, you gobshite, you!” a guy Colm accidently collided with said.
   “Sorry,” Colm said over his shoulder, offering an apologetic wave.
   “You moron, you!” the guy added behind him.
   Resisting the impulse to spin round and shout after the prick that he’d said ‘Sorry’, Colm pushed on, an urge to slam his hands into the shoulders of the next prick that got in his way tearing at the inside of his stomach. There was nothing that pissed him off more than when you apologised to some prick and he acted as though you hadn’t said ‘Sorry’.

*          *          *

   Already Alfie’s back-pain was easing off. Once he got himself sitting down, he’d be grand. Especially if there was one of the longer seats free in the Kylemore, he could kind of lean sideways and rest on his elbow.
   “Banjaxed!” he said to the young man. “The pair of us is banjaxed, what?”
    The two laughed.
   “We’ll be right as rain soon as we take a load off and grab a bit of brekkie,” the young man said.
   Alfie rubbed his hands together, and then raised up his arms. He flinched with the pain.
   “In me inside pocket there’s me wallet. Reach in and dig it out, son, will you?”
   “You sure,” the young man said.
   Alfie nodded hard to convince the young man of his trust, the sudden movement of his head causing the invisible dagger to catch his lower back with another thrust. He drew in a sharp breath and consciously tried to turn the spreading fire in his spine into a joke.  
   “The tea and scones isn’t going to pay for themselves, is it?” he said, his own attempt at laughter sounding more like a whine. Jesus he had to sit down quick. He felt himself stumbling and, if not for the young man, he would have … well, he wasn’t sure what he would have; his head wasn’t working too good.

*          *          *

   Doc’s eyes refused to focus and he needed to open his belt. He fumbled in the old man’s wallet, failing to push through the sudden, sickening dizziness that almost made him trip at the top of the escalator.
   “I have you,” the old man said. “Take it handy, son. We’re nearly there.”
   “Thanks,” Doc said. “It’s me head. I just need to get a load off, you know?” He allowed the old man to take his weight as they struggled through the café entrance and towards their seats. Black and red shutters wavered before him, clouding his vision.

*          *          *

   Colm followed the pair into the shopping centre. Suddenly the roles seemed to have been reversed. The hoodie somehow looked as if he were now the one being supported by the old man. They took the escalator, the older man helping the younger on to the first step in a practised manner. Colm stayed eight or nine steps behind them.
   There, he was right. The hoodie now had his hand stuck into the old man’s inside pocket, the older man’s pained though laughing face nodding like a horse.
   Threatening him. That’s what he was at.
   Although too far from them to hear the hoodie’s whispered threats, Colm had him sussed. He knew his type. Looked like he was even getting the old man to laugh, as if everything was normal.
   A believer in destiny, Colm experienced an instantaneous sense of who he was and what he was for. Of all the thousands of early morning shoppers and people on their way to work, Colm alone saw what others could not see.

*          *          *

   Soon as they sat down in the roundy central seat, the lad conked out. Poor chap. Sleeping. He was kind of half-lying against the imitation-leather backrest and half-propped up against Alfie. Through the closeness and warmth of the lad’s body, Alfie felt the quickened breathing of the sleeping young man the way he used to feel Mags’s breathing when she slept next to him those cold winter nights in the bed they’d shared for over forty years.
   Not wanting to disturb the young man, Alfie remained as he was until his left arm, wedged between them, grew so numb it felt like it had disappeared and been replaced by the young man pressed to his side.
   Carefully, Alfie supported the other by the shoulder using his free hand, leaned slightly away from him, and worked his trapped arm free. Used to the kind of deadness in his limbs and how to deal with it, he needed to smack his arm against his thigh to get some blood flowing through it. That could wait. Instead he left it draped round the young man’s shoulders, closed his eyes and did what he always did: walked arm in arm in his head with Mags through Dublin’s thronging streets in early spring and on into summertime, or when the Christmas lights, sparkling overhead, crowded the day with holiness and filled the vendors’ voices with a kind of godliness that made Mags wipe the corners of her eyes with her linen handkerchief and laugh at her own foolishness.
   “That’s my girl,” Alfie would say, stopping in the street and pulling her to him in an effort to hide the emotion he felt suffusing his own face. “You’re the best girl ever was.”

*          *          *

   Doc felt the buzzing in his tracksuit bottoms’ pocket before he was fully conscious. Into his nostrils came a stale urinary hum that played through the buzzing and wove its way into the familiar thudding beat of Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. His phone, his bleeding phone was ringing. But he couldn’t move. And his eyes wouldn’t open. He was fucking paralysed. Jesus fucking Christ, he was bollixed. And where the fuck was he? And who the fuck had his arm around his neck and the other in his lap? Whoever it was smelled like a piss-alley. Fuck!

*          *          *

   By the time Colm had got his coffee, paid for it and sat himself at a table near them, the pair seemed to be asleep in each other’s arms. This was getting weirder.
   Colm scanned the other customers. Apart from a middle-aged suit eating a bowl of something while devouring The Irish Times, and a young woman with yellow hair touching up her make-up in a hand-held mirror, the place was quite empty.
   Working his way out from the chair at his table by the window and approaching the two seemingly sleeping men, Colm experienced the strange sensation of watching the scene as though from the eyes of someone else’s dream.
   Asleep, his mouth open exposing off-white, gangly teeth, the old man looked even more like Colm’s father.  With no idea what he was going to do or say, he leaned forward and tapped the old man on the shoulder.
   “Excuse me, sir!” he said.
   A funny sound bubbled in the old man’s throat, but his eyes remained closed and he kind of pulled the hoodie closer to him, as if he was protecting him.
   Colm straightened up, scratched his head and kind of twisted his torso sideways to glance at the suit and the yellow-haired woman. Neither of them was paying him any attention. “Dad! Dad!” he heard himself whisper next to the old man’s ear. The man breathed heavily but stayed asleep.
   Colm then sidled around the small square table, fighting the shaky feeling in his legs, clenched his teeth and prodded the hoodie once in the shoulder.
   “Hey!” he said. “Excuse me!” No reaction. He looked harder at him. The hoodie didn’t even seem to be breathing. He prodded him again, this time with three fingers, using greater conviction. “Hey you, Muppet,” he said. “What are you up to, motherfucker?” Calling him ‘motherfucker’ emboldened Colm, made him feel like Pacino or De Nero dealing with some dirt-bag in a movie. He scrutinised the hoodie’s face: sunken cheeks, eyes too close, a long nose and a lipless gash for a mouth - features all squashed together to present the type of face that always soured the contents of Colm’s stomach when he passed them on the street.
   Scattered images of Colm’s father’s terrifying and terrified countenance staring out from behind a mask of swellings, bruises and blackened blood flickered about in his head.
   One punch. Colm knew the system. As a civil servant he was part of it. By the time a Garda arrived he’d be long gone. One swift punch to the jugular would do it: These Muppets targeting old men like his father. No respect for nobody. Let them claw at their own throats as their filthy lungs gasped for life.

*          *          *

   He was going down the fucking tubes. That was the bad shit. He had to have taken some bad shit. Doc felt fully alert now, sort of. But his body was frozen and his eyes were stitched closed. He remembered coming into the Kylemore with the old boy. But why in the name of fuck was the old man wrapped around him like a fucking rollie?
   “Excuse me, sir!” someone said.
   What the …?  Who was that? The manager or somebody.
“Dad! Dad!” the voice went in a whisper. The aul fellah’s son.
 Doc heard the old man’s son moving about. He could feel the vibrations on the floor through his feet.
   Shite! The pox-bottle just prodded him. “Hey!” the voice went. “Excuse me!” Doc felt himself being jabbed again, only now it felt like the pox-bottle meant business. “Hey you, Muppet! What are you up to, motherfucker?”
   Doc didn’t like fucking nobody laying a finger on him; didn’t matter who the fuck he was.
   His blade. He had to get his blade out, but his Jaysus hands just wouldn’t fucking work. And behind his eyes the balls were now slamming like they were being fired from a bleeding cannon … but wait. His eyes were coming unstuck - and his fingers - he could wiggle his fingers.
   Straight out he knew how to handle things. His stomach. His stomach told him exactly what he had to do. He’d play unconscious. Let the pox-bottle think he had the upper hand, and then let him have it. Bam! 

*          *          *

   Colm was startled by the appearance from nowhere of the uniformed guy who sidled up beside him.
   He held up his hands as though he were a bank-teller with a gun pointed at his face from behind protective glass. “No,” he said, shaking his head and before the security guy, a little ape without a neck, spoke. “It’s this guy,” he indicated the hoodie. “He’s up to something. Trying to rob my … I mean, look at him! He’s up to no good  … Hey, what are you …?”
   The ape had locked his huge paw onto Colm’s collar and was shaking his head. “I’ve been watching you,” he said.
   “Don’t touch me, you prick!” Colm heard himself saying in a voice that sounded like someone else’s voice. And he felt himself slamming the ape hard in the shoulders with his palms. A mistake. He might as well have slammed his hands into an oak. Except the oak tree wouldn’t have been able to grab Colm by the arm, flip him round the way you might a naughty child, and twist his arm up his back until the pain felt so great he fell to the floor.
   “Get off me!” Colm roared. “Jesus, my arm. Please, get off me!”
   “Take it easy, scobbie,” the ape said. “Okay? Just take it easy!”
   Colm felt the burning in his shoulder easing, but being replaced by a fire in the crooks of his knees, across which the ape was now half-kneeling.

*          *          *

   “Mags!” Alfie whispered through the threatening shouts, loaded with violence. Violence had always terrified her. “Don’t worry, love. It’ll pass.” And he pulled her closer to him. But the shouting grew louder. And there was music, the type of music from one of those disturbing movies. And her smell; Mags suddenly didn’t smell like Mags. And she felt wrong.
   The shouting voices dragged Alfie back into a world where Mags no longer moved.
   “Mags!” he shouted, pushing the sickly-smelling young fellow from him. “Help me, Mags! Help”

*          *          *

   Through half-lidded eyes, Doc watched the pox-bottle being throttled, and a toasty feeling came into his stomach, which worked its way upward and made his head buzz. Like the feeling you got with good gear. The sound of Coolio’s ‘Gansta’s Paradise’ starting up again in his pocket came in as though on cue, the way it did in those flicks when the guy everyone treated like a punk showed him he was ‘The Man’. Deadly!

Steve Wade, Dublin

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