You can’t tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.

He wasn’t even sixteen, but his coffin’s the same size as a man’s would be.

It’s not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did: that’s what the faces here say.

I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can’t bear the thought of him being cold.

And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb:

Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?

One

It was three months after Mum left that the gypsies moved in. They set up camp in the paddock one Sunday night while we were asleep. My brother Sam was excited when he saw them.

‘Gypos!’ he shouted.

Sam used to have a gypsy in his class: Grace Fitzpatrick. She’d been famous at school because she could do as many things with her feet as with her hands. She could even write her name with them, which was funny because she couldn’t read. Sam, who’d sat next to her in assembly, said she smelt like cat piss and fire smoke.

‘They live off barbecues,’ he told me as we watched from Dad’s bedroom window.

I thought it sounded brilliant.

There was a caravan, and a clapped-out car and, a few metres away, a fire with a pot hanging over it.

‘Be bloody hundreds of ’em by the end of the day,’ Dad said, emptying sawdust from his overall pockets onto the floor.

‘They’ll probably tarmac the field while we’re asleep,” Sam said. “Try and make you pay for it.’

Dad made a growling noise. ‘Be a nightmare getting rid of them, that’s for bloody sure.’

He left us leaning on the windowsill.

Sam made dents in the wood with his fingers while I wondered what Dad was going to do. This was exactly the sort of thing Mum would have sorted. She’d have been best friends with the gypsies by breakfast, had them falling over themselves to make her happy, even if that left them without a home.

‘Look at all those dogs,’ Sam said. ‘Bet they fight them. Tie blades to their paws.’

I shook my head.

‘Seen it on the telly,’ he said.

‘What, on kids’ telly?’

He dug his elbow into me until I squirmed.

Two greyhounds bounded round the paddock and I tried to imagine them snarling at each other, blades flying, but it was ridiculous, and then the caravan door swung open, and a tiny black dog scurried out.

A woman appeared in the doorway. Tall and thin, with red hair falling over one shoulder, she looked beautiful. She lifted her arms above her head and stretched, revealing a stripe of tanned belly beneath her green vest. Behind her the white caravan seemed to sparkle.

‘Prozzie,’ Sam said.

The woman spun around suddenly, and a teenage boy in rolled-up jeans leapt from the caravan, laughing. He’d obviously startled her. The three dogs ran over to him, the tiny black one lagging behind, and he bent down to tussle with them. They licked at his bare chest.

Sam didn’t have anything to say for a second. The boy looked about the same age as him. He was clearly the woman’s son, tall and thin like her, but with lighter, ginger-blond hair that flicked out above his ears and curled on the back of his neck.

‘Bet he don’t go to school,’ Sam said.

‘Come on, Iris,’ Dad called up the stairs. ‘You’re going to be late.’

‘Aw, shame’ Sam said, because he was on study leave.

Still, I couldn’t help staying a minute longer, watching as the red-haired woman filled a bucket with water from the pot above the fire and began scrubbing her steps.

Dad left the house at the same time as I did. With fists clenched, he headed towards the paddock.

I couldn’t wait till the summer holidays. Everyone at school was getting on my nerves. Especially Matty. At registration, when I told her about the gypsies, she told me this story about her second cousin’s boyfriend’s brother: he was on his way to the newsagent’s to buy a magazine when a gypsy girl burst out and cracked him over the head with a golf ball in a sock. For no reason. I told her we didn’t have any girls, only a boy, and described the way his hair flicked out, but she curled her nostrils at me.

‘Pikeys are gross, Iris,’ she said. ‘You’d get gonorrhoea.’

Matty was always name-checking STDs. She thought it made her look sophisticated.

At dinner time, we watched the boys play football.

‘Your socks are odd,’ Matty told me. ‘Don’t you care?’

‘Not really.’

‘Maybe you should.’

I took my shoes off and folded my socks down so their oddness was less obvious.

‘That’s your problem, Iris,’ she sighed. ‘You think that makes a difference.’

Before maths, next lesson, I nipped into the toilets and took them off.

Matty had moved to Derby from Guildford four years ago with frizzy black hair and too-big glasses which left red dents on her nose, but every new term she got prettier. Today her black frizz was tamed into long waves that she twisted round her little finger. Her glasses had shrivelled to contacts, and to make matters worse, her boobs had gone from a size nothing to a 32B in the last six months. As far as Matty was concerned, she was a fully mature woman.

‘Remember, Iris,’ she’d taken to saying to me, ‘my birthday’s in September. Really, I’m in the year above you. Really, I’m a Year Ten.’

Every day, after school, I watched the gypsies. They hadn’t listened when Dad told them they weren’t welcome, and much to his annoyance were getting on with their lives. As well as the teenage boy, the dogs and the red-haired woman, there was a man, a baby, and four little girls.

The boy spent a lot of time with his mum. He got in her way while she was cleaning, and made her laugh. Sometimes she grabbed him and ruffled his hair. They reminded me of how Mum and Sam used to be.

The gypsy boy was good to his sisters. They were all loads younger than him, but he still played hide and seek with them, and picked them up when they cried. I couldn’t imagine him getting mad at them for something as silly as borrowing his socks.

In the evenings, they all sat around the fire, or on the grass nearby, until it was time to eat whatever their mum cooked in the pot, or their dad brought home in the car. Later on, when the mum had put the little ones to bed, the gypsy boy went to lie underneath the caravan by himself, and I felt as though I understood him completely.

Dad shouted if he caught me watching from his bedroom window.

‘It’s not a game, Iris,’ he said, and so I kept my spying to when he was out.

One night, I left my curtains open so the sun could wake me. I wanted to see what the gypsies did first thing. It was well before six when I crept upstairs, past Dad sleeping with his head half under the pillow, to my usual perch on his armchair by the window. He didn’t notice. Mum was the light sleeper – the snorer too. She used to make herself jump in the night.

Underneath the early white sky, the paddock was dotted with poppies, and fat wood pigeons in the tall poplars surrounding the yard called to each other. The boy got up first. He jumped down the caravan steps and did a lap of the field with the dogs. Occasionally, he stooped to pick up sticks, or tugged dead branches from the hedgerows.

By the entrance to the paddock was a huge pile of logs that Dad and Austin, his apprentice, had cut down over the months – a year’s supply at least. Reaching it, the boy stopped. He glanced towards our house, and I ducked behind Mum’s rose pincushion cactus. I peered round its spiky dome, which was flowering purple, and watched as he added a couple of long, slim branches to his pile.

Back at the camp, he knelt to build a fire. By the time the door to the caravan next opened, he was fanning the flames with a sheet of cardboard. His mum emerged carrying a stack of bowls, the baby wrapped to her back, and the boy changed position to direct the smoke away from them.

‘Eye?’ Dad lifted his head. ‘That you?’

Dad called me Eye, as in ball. Sam had started it. Mum used to tell Dad off for joining in, back when they still talked to each other. ‘She’s named after the flower,’ she’d say, but she didn’t mind really. It was just something they did.

‘What you doing?’

‘Need some socks,’ I said, pretending to rummage in the unsorted pile I’d been sitting on.

The plastic of Dad’s alarm clock creaked as he looked at it. ‘S’not even seven,’ he groaned. ‘Go back to bed.’

I watched the boy put on a rucksack, pat the baby’s head, and walk to the far end of the field where the paddock dropped into the brook. He reappeared on the other side of the water, and then disappeared into the cornfields, and I wondered where he could be going.

I was sad to be leaving science for the summer. Biology was the best, not only because I got a break from Matty. I was in the top set, and she was in the bottom, and I paid extra special attention when Mrs Beever talked about the parenting traits of various birds. Apparently both male and female swans help build the nest, and if the mother dies (or drives off in a van to Tunisia) there’s no need to spaz out and call the RSPB. The male swan is completely capable of raising his cygnets alone. I almost wished Matty was sitting next to me when I heard that.

All afternoon we bickered, but choosing sweets in the shop after school she still invited me to sleep over at hers that night. ‘We can do a fashion show with my new clothes,’ she said. ‘Mum’s making spag bol.’

‘Doubt my dad’ll let me,’ I lied, putting ten fizzy cola bottles in a paper bag.

‘He still being unusual?’ she said, and I nodded, but the truth was I couldn’t bear it round hers any more.

Her mum, Donna, asked questions with her best talk-to-me expression: are you okay? And is your dad okay? And is everything OKAY at Silverweed Farm? The worst thing was that Matty didn’t stop her. She just stood there expectantly, as if the two of them had become some kind of talk show mother/daughter duo, and I their favourite guest.

– Infinite Sky is published in hardback by Simon and Schuster Childrens Books

every trouble imaginable

The environment alongside the river is hardly a healthy one, and the people do suffer a great many ailments, for they are most of them poor and eat badly and drink to excess and live – to the pharmacist’s mind – insanitary, incontinent lives.  They procreate without thought, without sense or restraint, and condemn their unwelcome and unfortunate offspring to years of malnourishment, and sometimes mistreatment, dressed often in rags and prone to coughs and colds in every season – their noses invariably crusted, their sleeves used as handkerchiefs – and not only colds but any number of other afflictions, for they are prone, in fact, to every trouble imaginable.

They come to him with ringworm and head lice, laryngitis, bronchitis, eczema and asthma, diarrhoea, constipation, biliousness and jaundice, carbuncles and boils, broken bones; all of these, but also much graver conditions, including measles, meningitis, whooping cough, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, the rest.

He has nostrums for most of these things; he does what he can for them, and does what he can for the mothers, whose notion of their own good health is so often no more than the gap between illnesses, or merely the illness that is supportable – that doesn’t obstruct them from getting through the chores that must be got through in a day – and among his particular skills, he believes, is never to allow a female customer to feel she is making a fuss about nothing, and if she appears shy of referring to certain parts of her body, then he is able to supply the words for her, often euphemistically, often going some way around the houses, but in the end arriving at an understanding.

He is most adept at disguising his impatience – and sometimes distaste, even disgust – and has as a consequence become especially well known for his sympathetic understanding (or so he hopes it must appear to them) of female infirmities, the list of which is unending: the discharges and vague, unspecified discomforts, the backaches and headaches so frequent they are accepted almost as normal, the constipation and haemorrhoids, flatulence and heartburn, the missed, heavy or irregular menses, the kidney and bladder infections, cystitis, nephritis, rheumatism, arthritis, weight gain and weight loss, gallstones and gout, mastitis, tonsillitis, eyestrain and toothache, palpitations, phlebitis, ulcerative legs, hot flushes, water retention, and the general weariness and depression of the spirits that are so common among them (and no wonder).

In pregnancy especially the women will come to him, anaemic and listless, undernourished and unable to discharge their bowels, plagued by aches and pains of every description, their legs ropey with varicose veins, ankles puffy with fluid, and some of them so poor – or so self-neglectful, or so lacking in the maternal instinct, or so bone-tired of maternity – that they will suffer a diet of bread and tea throughout their pregnancies and thus give birth to weak and underweight babies with no chance in life but to die young (or to live, which is worse, as burdensome invalids).

After which many of the mothers will present the ailments that are consequent upon childbirth, the prolapses and tears and persisting anaemia, the constipation that can’t be remedied as long as they haven’t the time to establish the habit, and above all the insomnia and related physical and nervous exhaustion, their beds being shared not merely with husbands (who are frequently drunk, if they haven’t yet enlisted or been conscripted) but with various of their other children, including the nursing, colicky infants who were so recently born there, all of them huddled beneath inadequate coverings in damp, unaired rooms that are rarely quiet, the walls being so thin and the neighbourhoods so very noisy.

No wonder, then, that the women (and sometimes their husbands) should also come to him in the hope of relief from the burden of childbearing, whether before or after the fact of conception.

bone-headed and dangerous

Elsewhere in the county, no doubt, there will be pharmacists as obliging as Dobson in the matter of contra-conceptives, and possibly some among them will be guided by their intellectual convictions, but most to his certain knowledge are reluctant to stock such devices, or else place so many conditions upon their availability that few will have the courage to submit to the interrogation that must accompany their sale (or will be forced to approach the subject so tangentially that the pharmacist will have the excuse he requires to misunderstand them), while others among his rivals are steadfastly opposed to their provision whatever the circumstance, refusing to countenance the supply of any aid to the avoidance of unwanted children – or, indeed, of venereal disease – on the grounds that availability can serve only to encourage immorality and sexual incontinence; in other words, there remain those who believe that restraint is not only laudable but possible, even now, in 1916, and Britain in the midst of a war, and even here, among the poor, in a neighbourhood such as Riverside Road.

Which is a view that Dobson considers quite whimsical, or worse: bone-headed and dangerous.

At one time he thought differently, when he was not so wise as to the nature of his neighbours, when it was also his policy to ration the provision of contra-conceptives, confining their sale to married women above a certain age who had already borne children, in the belief that women lacked a sexual appetite and possessed a greater natural modesty than men, and so would never come to him out of any low motive but only because they were subject to the dominating desires of their husbands and required some protection from the perpetual burden of carrying and caring for babies.

But his years of proximity to the poor of Riverside Road have persuaded him that most are the product of a genetic inheritance that guarantees their moral debility – their susceptibility not only to idleness and criminality but to promiscuity – and while he accepts that there may be some possibility of probity and decency among the best of them, the fact is that most have been raised in an atmosphere lacking moral oxygen, the offspring of successive generations of intemperate parents, and there is no hope for them.

There is nothing to work on, and if their kind is not to be promulgated then the only strategy is to concede to the urgency and inevitability of their appetites, to allow them to satisfy their hungers, but meanwhile to prevent there being any addition to their numbers through the ready supply of prophylactics.

Certainly, it now appears to him, the old ideals of sexual chastity and self-control cannot possibly hold when there are so many more opportunities for fraternisation between the sexes, and such a fever among young women in particular for the passions of the moment – life seeming so cheap and the lives of soldiers so readily wasted – and all of this allied to such a persistence of ignorance as to the mechanics of the thing, for despite their upbringing in overpopulated homes, surrounded by babies and mothers about to give birth, it seems that most young people still know little or nothing of how these babies are made, or of how they are got out (the belly-button being the commonest surmise), let alone of how to prevent their conception.

The situation is a sorry one.  And while the absence of so many men has resulted in there being less drunkenness on the streets, and fewer assaults, fewer accidents, and has meant that their children are better fed, better clothed, and in better health as a consequence of their mothers’ additional earnings and the curtailment of their fathers’ profligacy, the lifting of the controlling hand of the father has allowed the children an excess of liberty, the younger ones running to mischief, and even to hooliganism, while the older ones seek opportunities to answer the appeals of their appetites, and Dobson fears for them; he fears for the daughters especially.

Worthless Men is published by Sceptre on February 14 at £17.99.

THE SUPPLIANT

13 February 1998

Friday

‘Henry Bane is dead.’

I looked up as he said this.

Vic rocked on his heels like a bobby, cleared his throat, lifted his chin, blinked a few times – eyes red and boozy. ‘But that dunt mean ee int wiv us. Keepin eye on rest o you lot till we give it up n av the good sense t’croak n all. All o yer knew ee were a good man, our Henry. Ah knew im near nuff twenny years. But ee sodded off fer the las few. Ah were glad when ee come back, though. A sound bloke, ee was. A right jammy bugger. We loved im. Dint we?’ Vic cleared his throat again. ‘Dint we?’

His front room said yeah.

Vic had been best mates with my old man and I was best mates with Vic’s son, Gordon. I was glad to have the do at his place.

So then Vic asked us all to have one on Henry Bane.

‘Ee-ah, enry.’ Some bloke on the other end of the couch passed me a drop of rum in a short glass. ‘Jus one. Do yer good, lad. Elp yer get right in yerself.’ I said no, took it off him anyway, held it up to the light. Hard black stuff. The glass didn’t glow. I slipped it under the coffee table, untouched, spilling some next to the sausage roll flakes and dead drinks.

Drip stains swelled and ate the rug.

Everyone was gabbing again.

My old man had been a market trader for most of his years.  Henry’s Records down Arndale Market: 7-inch soul and rhythm and blues classics. Two-for-one every Saturday before twelve.

‘Out of Sight’ was playing quietly on Vic’s dusty stereo in the corner. A James Brown tune – sampled by every rapper since the microphone met the turntable and fell in love.

Out of Sight.

The old man’s favourite.

Henry’s Records: 1981-1990. RIP.

Henry Bane: 1931-1998. RIP.

It was a mega heart attack outside Ladbrokes – just like that – small winnings still to collect. My mam wasn’t too dead to be smug.

Lola Bane: 1949-1990. RIP.

‘Out of Sight’ faded. We had ‘Soul Power (Parts One and Two)’ on next but somebody got up and turned the sound down to zero. ‘Coon shite,’ they muttered.

I shut my eyes. Soft hands pushed a brew into mine, making sure I had hold of it before letting go. Her fingers stroked my cheek, touched my lips. I could smell her hand cream, her perfume, her B&Hs.

Eyes open: chipped red nail polish.

‘Careful, lovey. Hot.’

‘Ta,’ I said.

‘Enry?’

I gulped the brew, put it down on the table between the lager cans and looked up at our Jan.

‘Ow we doin?’ she said.

‘He’s not here yet,’ I said. ‘Gordon.’

Jan rubbed my head, bent over and kissed me. ‘No, lovey.’

‘Where’s Trenton?’ I said.

‘Ee’s in kitchen. Pickin at buffet. Want us ter get yer summat? Yuv not ad owt, av yer?’

‘I’m alright, love.’

‘Gotta av summat.’

‘I will do.’

Jan smiled. Jan worried.

‘When yer wanna go ome, we’ll go ome,’ she said. ‘Right?’

‘Right.’

She walked out, new heels knifing the bald carpet, dodging the sea of booze.

It was roasting in Vic’s with everybody sardined into the front room, the gas fire going. Above the flames – the brass clock on the mantle said 7 p.m.

On top of the funeral, Gordon was getting out this weekend. I thought he was due back today, but it was a bit late now. Maybe it was tomorrow. His picture by the clock showed him stood with his dad on Blackpool promenade – two scruffy gits, holding up their double 99s. Granite Gordon – 6’6, roid gut, squinting at the camera, a jolly grin, the same grin he gave the world when he was kicking some sorry bugger’s head in. He’d served ten months of a two-year sentence and I hadn’t rung him in four or visited in six. I was bricking it. Maybe he’d be back tonight. Vic would know the ins and outs of it but I hadn’t had a proper word since the crematorium this afternoon.

Our Gordon wasn’t in my school year – he was a couple of years older. I kept well clear until the summer of ‘88, when we got friendly through our dads: Victor Payne the bent, sage cabbie and Henry Bane the music man. They were the Cock o’ the North pub quiz dream team. I must’ve been eighteen, just. Gordon wasn’t the brightest bulb but he was hard – a bad lad, a right rum sort, his dad said.

But so was I.

My old man had liked reminding me and all.

I got up with my brew, made it to the hallway, then the kitchen. There was a decent-sized spread on the little breakfast table, some of it still cling-filmed.

Trenton was sat up on the surfaces, still in his scarf, gloves, Adidas jacket, the back of his trainers thumping Vic’s draining cupboard door. He’d turned thirteen last September. Jan’s kid. He was mither. But I took care of him and he let me.

‘Pack it in.’

Trenton stopped thumping the cupboard and started flicking a Zippo in his hands to remind me he was bored. It sparked but there was no flame.

‘These any good?’ I said, pointing to a tray of party scran.

‘Yeh.’

‘Barely been touched. Could be a warnin. Mini sausage rolls? Firm favourite – only two left. You havin one?’

Trenton nodded.

I passed him one and ate the other. He was still pissing about with the lighter.

‘Give us that.’ I took it off him.

‘Oi.’

I put it in my pocket.

‘Oi nothin,’ I said. ‘Y’mam won’t want you messin with that.’

‘It’s ers.’

My dad had never smoked in his life.

We heard the doorbell go. I started on the breadsticks, dunked one in my brew and regretted it.

An old uncle I hadn’t seen since I still believed in Father Christmas popped his head into the kitchen.

‘Enry, think someone’s at door fer yer, lad.’

‘I don’t live here,’ I said.

‘Ah said it were yer dad’s funeral do n then she said she were after you, lad.’

‘She?’

‘Aye.’

I walked back through to the hall and saw the front door was open. It was dark out and I could feel the draught from there. Somebody was stood on the step but fellers my old man had known
were coming in and out of Vic’s front room, blocking my line of sight.

‘Someone want us?’ I said, getting through the traffic.

She’d let her hair grow out.

She’d got thinner.

‘Henry.’ Her voice still had that soft croak.

The cold bit my shaving nicks. My face cracked when I said her name.

She was bug-eyed in the dark. I shut the front door to and we looked at each other, teeth chattering, brains burning. Time passed. I heard her swallow.

‘Henry-’

‘It’s just Bane now, love.’ I folded my lapels up and the frost walked my spine.

‘Well, it’s still Roisin,’ she said.

When I came closer, she stepped back and made up the distance again.

She said: ‘Listen. I’ll need your help to get him inside.’

She was still gorgeous.

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Follow me.’

Roisin took me out of the front plot and over the road.

There was a battered Fiesta humming on neutral – lights on, exhaust smoking. A bin bag was taped over the back passenger window.

She opened the car door and stuck her head inside, pulled the front seat back and showed me a feller, breathing hard, wincing royal, blood down his jacket.

‘Help me then,’ Roisin said.

I helped her lift him out the car.

‘Who’s this?’ I said, taking most of the weight.

‘This is Dan.’ We got him standing. He’d hurt his foot or ankle. He was trying to hop and hold onto us at the same time.

Roisin gripped my arm as well – nails – short but sharp.

Dan said hello.

When he was steady, I had a quick look inside the car. There were tiny crystal squares on the backseat where some of the glass had come in. The door panel fabric opposite had three small holes in it.

‘What happened to the window?’ I said.

‘Kids,’ Dan went.

‘Bollocks.’

‘Henry,’ she said.

‘Where’ve you come from?’ I said.

‘London.’

‘Lundon?’

‘Freezing,’ he said.

‘Just help me get him in.’

We got Dan over the road and took him inside – the wave of gas heating making us choke.

Jan came out of the hall loo as we were getting him up the stairs. ‘What’s goin on?’

‘Nothin,’ I said. ‘Keep everyone downstairs. Be down in a minute.’

She stood there, watching us go up.

‘Get him in Gordon’s room,’ I said to Roisin, Dan’s arm over my shoulders.

‘Gordon not in?’

‘Not yet.’

The three of us reached the landing.

‘Oo’s that feller?’ We heard somebody say from downstairs.

‘N oo’s she?’ Jan’s voice.

Roisin was four summers after Alice, and my first proper bird after leaving school. We were mad for it from word go. She was nothing like Gordon, her big little brother. She was the clever one: book worm – fancy ideas – studying all sorts at the polytechnic. Gordon didn’t seem to mind me shagging his sister and, for a bit, we all got on dandy. Then it got fucked right up. And she left Wythie. Left Manchester. Left the North. This was all a good eight years ago. I hadn’t heard from her since that day she checked herself out of the Royal Infirmary.

At least Gordon and I had stayed mates.

I shut the bedroom door and we got Dan onto the bed.

‘How long’s it been for you two?’ he said.

‘Eight years.’ We both said it together.

Roisin touched my arm again. ‘Sorry to hear about your dad.’ The crackle in her voice: tyres on gravel, a fucking frog inside the princess. I remembered more and more.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

Gordon’s room hadn’t changed since he was a young lad. He was thirty years old and still stopping at his dad’s when he wasn’t bunking in Her Majesty’s cell. There were old boxing gloves hanging from the wardrobe knob. Newspaper cut-outs stuck all over the show – we had Nigel Benn the Dark Destroyer and some heavyweights like Herbie Hide. He’d got all creative with it. I tried to imagine our Gordon, sat there with a pair of scissors, Blu-tacking Lennox Lewis and Iron Mike Tyson on his wall – and I fucking well couldn’t.

Dan had a go at the zip on his jacket but Roisin had to help him out of it. She kissed the dried blood on his cheek, stopped him flinching. He told her he loved her.

In the light I could see his foot was the real mess and knew that someone had shot him. The top of his trainer was torn but there wasn’t any blood pumping out. He was pale as death though, he could’ve already lost a pint on the way up the M1.

‘So what happened?’ I said.

Roisin was still sat on the bed, mothering him, his head against her chest, her hands in his hair. She said: ‘You’re going to have to help us.’

A knock on the bedroom door made her jump.

‘Right – clear off, all o yer,’ Vic yelled through the door. ‘Pub’s open.’

We heard his footsteps creak on the landing, voice fading as he went back down the stairs to roll off goodbyes: ‘Mind ow yer go. Ta fer comin. All the bloody best.’

‘He’ll be chuffed when he sees you. Both kids back on the same weekend,’ I said.

‘Where’s Gordon been?’ she said.

‘Strangeways.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Again.’

‘Again?’

Roisin stood up and came closer. My eyes went to young Tyson on the wall – slugging Alex Stewart, mid-annihilation. Roisin tried to touch my arm but I moved away.

‘What did he do?’ she said. ‘Gordon.’

I looked at Dan – hugging his own ribs. ‘What did you do?’

There was another knock on the door. Jan opened it, she glared at Roisin then me then Dan then back to me.

‘We goin?’ she said. ‘Vic’s pissed. Wants everyone out.’

‘I know,’ I said.

Jan coughed. ‘K, well – me n Trenton’ll be in the car.’ She shut the door again carefully and we watched the handle turn.

‘Who’s she?’ Roisin said.

–Chamber Music (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) is out now.

During the occupation of Singapore, the Chinese and British suffered greatly. For us Indians, however, the Japanese had somewhat of a soft corner. This was partly due to the pro-Japanese attitude of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who arrived in Singapore by submarine from Japan. He roused some segments of the Indian population to join the Indian National Army under his leadership and fight alongside the Japanese for the liberation of India from the British.

My father, having some experience with printing and no inclination for combat, was attached to the Indian National Army Press, which was known as Indo-Shimbunsha. This name had a connection to an old and venerated Japanese newspaper. I believe it was designed by the Japanese to confer some honor or respect to the Indian National Army Press.

Once they had secured the island, the Japanese begin to grab young men, forcing them onto trucks and sending them to places of no return. Nobody knows where they have gone. It is common for trucks to pull up at large gatherings, like weddings or birthday parties. Consequently, no one wants to have a wedding party or a birthday party or a peopled celebration of any kind whatsoever because your guests might be taken away. So all these events are reduced to the minimal number of persons, the immediate family only, and everything happens indoors.

Although I was ten at the time, I was even then rather tall for my age, and my height would have theoretically been enough for them to pull me onto one of these trucks. My father got me employed—I don’t know if you could use the word “employed,” for I was quite useless—but officially, I was employed by the Indo-Shimbunsha. What I would do there is climb up large, stacked bolts of newsprint and go to sleep. In the evening, I would return home. That was my first official “job.”

It was not the monetary benefit which was the primary concern. After all, I made only a few cents a week, and this “banana” money, as we called it, issued by the Japanese during the war, was almost worthless. The real value in my job was the badge. At the time, all employees were issued metal badges to identify that you were working for this or that company. For the Indo-Shimbunsha, it was a smart-looking Indian tricolor flag with the spinning wheel, for you see, well before Independence, the Swaraj flag was a symbol of the Indian desire to be free of the British. Now, the badge was of the utmost importance because only it could save your life. The badge and your skin. If you had dark skin, you were like a V.I.P., which was something of a reversal from normal life in Singapore. Still, there were many Indian prisoners of war who had fought alongside the British and refused the opportunity to join the I.N.A. Indians were safer than the Chinese, but no one was safe.

Our immediate neighbor was a gentleman from the postal service. The postmaster, in fact. He was a typical Chinese man in his forties. I remember him being very proud of his English, and not without cause. His vocabulary, grammar, and accent were all quite flawless. Every day, he would go to work with his postal hat cocked to the side, a very clean and sharp suit, and his moustache always neatly trimmed. He looked quite handsome. He had four children, two sons and two daughters. The boys were Chen Tseng Qi and Chen Tseng Yong. Tseng Yong was around my age. The girls, I don’t remember their names. We always called them Ji-Ji and Mei-Mei, which mean “big sister” and “little sister.” They were beautiful. I found myself constantly falling in and out of love with them, sometimes fantasizing about running away with Ji-Ji and other times fantasizing about running away with Mei-Mei. Always the common denominator in these daydreams was the running away.

After dinner, we would all sit out on the verandah and on occasion head down the street to a spot where hawkers sold salted fruits. There was a concoction that was quite delicious, and we would sometimes collect our money together and buy one plate of pineapple doused in Chinese black sauce and sprinkled with rock salt, to be split equally amongst ourselves. My goodness, it was wonderful. Of course, all this was before the occupation. After the Japanese arrived, no one dared to go out or let their children run around outside because they might not return home. Just like that, childhood was no more.

Now, the Japanese are going through the neighborhoods and, as I said, taking away able-bodied Chinese men. And pretty soon, we see them on our road, Towner Road, and Mai Street, which is behind us. Well, the postmaster, he somehow gets advance notice that the Japanese are coming for him. He is not sure when, but he knows that his name is on some list. It is simply a matter of time before they knock on his door. Before this happens, he and his wife want to take care of their young and beautiful daughters so that Ji-Ji and Mei-Mei do not fall into the hands of these Japanese fellows, who are real rogues. The family approaches my mother, and she consents to hiding the girls in our house.

We lived in a two-floor house, and we had a staircase of approximately three feet in width that went up to the first floor. Below the staircase was our storage area, where we kept our cooking coal and firewood. Ji-Ji and Mei-Mei were kept there as well, behind the gunnysacks of coal. Filthy black coal dust permeated every corner of the storage area, and rats and lizards could sometimes be heard scuttling around, but it was the only spot in the house that was a feasible hiding place. Being extremely fair, the girls needed assistance to camouflage them in this environment, so Mother crushed a little bit of the charcoal into dust and mixed it with water to make a paste, and then she applied the paste to the girls’ faces and necks, any parts of the body that were visible. Even then, anything more than a cursory search would have quickly uncovered the subterfuge.

Badge or no badge, to hide Chinese people in your house, this is a criminal offense, and the soldiers will definitely shoot you for it. Probably right there on the spot, not even bother to take you outside. I don’t know how my mother and father got the guts to do this. I was too young to understand exactly what was at stake, but they certainly knew that their lives hung in the balance.

Well, the girls found safety in our home, but their father, mother, and brothers were taken to a football stadium, where the Japanese collected all the Chinese from our area. It was there at the stadium that the secret police, the Kempeitai, staged their interrogations. These guys knew who was who, so they would ask their questions, and anyone they deemed suspicious would be put on a bus or a truck and driven to various locations, usually by a river, taken out, lined up, and shot. Some would die on the spot, others would be half dead. All were thrown into trenches, dead or alive, and covered with dirt by bulldozers.

Fortunately, the postmaster and his family returned from the football field. I don’t know how the Kempeitai made their calculations, since from our perspective, there was no discernable pattern between those who were returned and those who were put on the buses. Still, the girls stayed with us. There were immediate dangers to overcome and long-term dangers, and you could not allow your vigilance to drop, even for a moment, because that was when they would come for you.

Silence on a tropical island is the relentless sound of water. The sound of the waves, like the sound of one’s breathing, never leaves you. For a fortnight though, it has been drowned out by the simmering clouds and whips of thunder; raindrops drumming on rooftops and slipping off to shatter into countless splashes. The newly married Girija Prasad and Chanda Devi have resigned to their fate. The rains refuse to leave them alone; strangers in a bedroom with dampened desires and half-dreamt dreams.

Girija Prasad dreams a lot these days, for the rains are conducive to such things. One night, the downpour suddenly stops sometime before sunrise. In the middle of a wet dream, it wakes him up. His ears had adjusted to the tropical cacophony like a spouse to a snoring partner. He wonders what happened. Who left the room?

He peeps from his queen-sized bed down to Chanda Devi’s rustic bed on the floor, facing the open window instead of him. Aroused, he traces her curvaceous silhouette in the darkness. When the two were united for several births by walking around the sacred fire seven times, she followed his footsteps meekly; firm in her conviction that destiny had brought them together in a new avatar. But in this avatar, he would have to find space in her heart once again. Till then, she informed the groom on the first night, “I will make my bed down”.

She’s wide-awake, distraught by accusatory cries coming from the other side. It’s the ghost of a goat. The ghost’s feet wander on the roof, and have now descended to stand under the open window, filling the room and her conscience with guilt.

“Can you hear it?” she asks, “the bleating.” She knows he’s awake, she can feel his gaze on her back.

“Hear what?”

“The goat outside”.

The forlorn erection dies a certain death. He’s wide-awake now to Chanda Devi and the predicament she poses.

“No goat roams in our house,” he replies in exasperation.

She sits up. The goat’s cries turn shriller, as if to tell her to convey to her dreamy husband, “you denied me my life, but you can’t deny me an after-life, you sinful beef-eater!”

“It’s just outside our window!”  She tells him.

“Only you hear it. If it doesn’t scare or threaten you, then perhaps you could ignore it and go back to sleep.” He meant to say ‘should’, not ‘could’. But he doesn’t have the courage to be stern. His wife, he has realized, doesn’t respond well to dialectics or coercion. In fact, she doesn’t respond well to most things. If only she was less attractive, he could have ignored her and gone to sleep.

“How can you sleep?” she exclaims. “You hacked the innocent creature, minced its flesh, deep-fried it with onions and ate it with guests. You left the restless soul to haunt our house!”

If the souls of all the various kinds of meat he had consumed returned to haunt him, his home would be a zoo and barn combined, leaving no space to move, let alone sleep. But mild-mannered Girija cannot say that. Two months into his marriage, and he’s resigned to his wife’s virile imagination. It is a wilful act of hope, attributing her behaviour to her imagination, and not some mental illness. For the sake of his unborn children and the decades they would have to endure together, he announces, “If it makes you sleep, I will stop meat”.

That’s how carnivorous Girija turns vegetarian, much to his wife’s and his own surprise.  For the sake of few hours of rest, he says goodbye to scrambled eggs, mutton biryani and beefsteaks forever.

At the hint of sunrise, she leaves her bed. She enters the kitchen to prepare an elaborate breakfast. There is new life in her movements and a smile lurking in her silence. Now that the killings have stopped, its time to stretch out a white flag in the form of ‘aloo parathas’. Two hours later, she serves them to him and asks, “How were they?”

Girija can’t help but feel unsettled, that too for all the wrong reasons. The sun is finally out. His wife, who cooked him breakfast for the first time, is bold enough to place a napkin on his lap; brushing past his shoulders, spilling her warm breath on his skin. While he craves the comfort of grease mixed with flesh, he can’t find it on his plate. He turned vegetarian in his sleep.

“How were they?” she asks him again.

“Who?” he replies, disoriented.

“The parathas.”

“Perfect.”

She smiles and pours him a second cup of tea.

Chanda Devi, the clairvoyant one. She gazes at ghosts and prefers the laconic company of trees.

She feels for him- his unexpressed cravings. Yet she knows he is better off giving up on flesh. The kingdom of flesh is as ephemeral as it’s unreliable, especially when compared to the kingdom of plants.  Chanda Devi has seen it all; even the rivers of blood that will drain out of her body one day, consuming her flesh but not the soul. It makes her obstinate, this knowledge. It makes her a demanding wife.

*

When Girija went to Oxford, it was the first time he his left home in Allahabad. After a four-day journey in horse carriages, ferries and a train, when he finally sat on the ship that would carry him to England, he left behind the jars of pickle, ghee parathas that could outlive human beings, and images of various gods and pictures of his family–including a portrait of his mother that he had painted.

While he was relieved to leave the gods behind (especially Ram the dutiful son who left his wife for no good reason and the riverbank Baba who was no God, just a senile starving man) discarding his mother’s portrait was impossible without breaking down. But so would’ve been staring at her face, separated by the oceans. Unable to accept the separation, he decided to start a new life. A violently different one, the thought of which gave him piles. Lost in an unending ocean, he spiralled into a shell of silence. Stillborn tears expressed themselves as stubborn constipation. A diligent documenter of the plant kingdom, Girija had carried kilos of isabgol husk for the very purpose. He also carried dried tulsi, neem, ginger, powdered haldi, cinnamon bark and ground pepper to counter other physical ailments. When he arrived at Dover, the customs officials mistook him for an illegal trader of spices.

Within a day of his arrival at Blimey College, Oxford, Girija Prasad Varma became Mr. Vama, christened by tutors untrained in Devnagiri names. On the first evening, he tasted alcohol for the first time and also broke the generations-old taboo of consuming things ‘jhootha’, contaminated by the mouth of another. When the colossal mug of beer was passed among the freshers to take a sip from, he was presented with an option:  embrace another culture whole-heartedly, or languish forever at the crossroads. There were no portraits or deities on his desk to admonish him. The next morning, he would eat fried eggs for breakfast.

*

Girija Vama, India’s first commonwealth scholar had returned to India after five years with a doctorate thesis that he ended with two native words, ‘Jai Hind’. At the behest of the young Prime Minister, he was to set up the national forestry service. Most evening conversations of the tea drinkers in Allahabad involved far-fetched connections linking them to the illustrious bachelor. But why would he choose to get posted in the Andamans, the aunties wondered. A place only known for exiled freedom fighters and naked tribals. It was rumoured that there wasn’t a single cow on the island, and people had to resort to black tea.

One of the tea drinkers, Chanda Devi was relieved. Finally, Allahabad would have a man more qualified than her, a gold medallist in mathematics and Sanskrit herself. Her gold medals had clasped her like a chastity belt. Only a man more qualified could dare marry an intelligent woman.

Could she have it her way, she would’ve married a tree. She disliked men and women equally; meat-eaters even more, beef-eaters the most. But in 1948, even misanthropes got married, if only to increase their tribe.

The task of bringing them together was left to the starving, stooping baba who sat on the banks of the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. The Sangam’s sandy banks were forever crowded by devotees wailing, singing and praying loudly, leading local frogs to believe that it was mating season the whole year round.

Girija’s head-covering mother visited the baba and offered him bananas and a garland of sunshine marigolds. She touched his feet, and her worries came tumbling out.

Her son was exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally qualified with an exceptionally bright future. He was exceptionally handsome too. He retained his mother’s features and borrowed only his father’s chin. A prying devotee asked, “Then what is the problem with your son, behenji?”

“I can’t find him a worthy wife!”

“But what is the problem?” the baba asked with a smile.

Girija’s mother was about to repeat herself. When she saw the baba smile, she stopped. Holy men were in the habit of speaking in riddles and half-uttered sentences. He ate half a banana in silence, took the marigold garland and flung it in the air. It swirled several times and landed around the shoulders of a perplexed Chanda Devi, lost in hymns. And that is how the marriage between the man who studied trees and woman who spoke to trees was fixed.

“But baba,” it was Chanda Devi’s father’s turn to complain now, “My daughter doesn’t speak English, she is a strict vegetarian. And this man you selected, he has done a Ph.D in the English of plant names, and.. and.. I hear that he has tasted beef!”

The baba peeled a banana. “Child, you only see the present,” he said, and gave the father a banana peel to confront metaphysical truths with.

The truth is, it’s the islands that brought them together. Chanda Devi dreamt of her escape from a stifling household into the company of trees. For Mr. Vama, it was a little more complicated. A simple academic creature, he addressed every Indian woman as sister, sister-in-law or aunt.

Although the islands gave their name to the surrounding sea, the Andaman Sea, it was as compliant as they got. In the Andamans, species lacked names. Hens behaved like pigeons. They slept on trees and laid eggs from the branches of mango trees, giving gardens the rotten stench of smashed eggs. Airborne butterflies drifted themselves into sleep, floating down like autumn leaves. Ascetic crocodiles meditated on the banks of mangroves. For the longest time, no one could colonize the islands, for the impenetrable thicket hid more than just natural history.

It also hid tribes left behind by the original littoral migration across the Indian Ocean. People who preferred to read minds over language, who clothed themselves in nothing but primitive wrath, equipped with only bows and arrows to fend off syphilis of civilization. Their world, a giant island held together by mammoth creepers, not gravity.

On this knotted thread of islands, Mr. Vama hoped to live the life he dreamt of: a life of solitude. An intrepid bachelor, he failed to see that the allure of the virgin forests wasn’t a simple one of the unexplored. It was also the allure of consummation. Here, his world experienced an earthquake.  Tremors ran through his body on a forest excursion, when he saw a tree that was actually two trees entwined. A peepal tree had coiled itself around the trunk of an Andaman Padouk, sixty feet high. For the first time, he saw two full-fledged trees growing in a coital position, blocking the sky with their embrace. Parasitic orchids found footing in the entanglement. A cancerous growth high up on the trunk obtruded his thoughts, with its face-like features. It felt like the trees were looking back at him. Exposed claw-like roots leapt on to the ground and sought Vama like a pale python. As he stood there, he could feel the roots inch towards him and halt at his toes. Standing at the bottom, Girija felt like an ant shuffling around, tempted by the impossible.

Months later when his mother began searching for a bride, he didn’t object. Science taught him that all creation demanded a male and female investment. And the islands seduced him by the beauty of it all.

*

A month into the monsoons, the four walls and roof that shelter the couple are reduced to a symbol for keeping them dry, a warm thought left behind by the British. For the rains have flooded deeper into their beings. An invisible wall has caved in, filling them with curiosities and preoccupations of another time.

When Girija stepped on to the island, he arrived believing in half-truths like no man is an island. It took him a year to realise that no island is an island either. It is part of a greater geological pattern that connects all the lands and oceans of the world. Half a mile away from his home, he found a living plant that was previously found only as a fossil in Madagascar and Central Africa.

On the day that would mark the end of the downpour and his tryst with beefsteak, Girija spent his office hours researching the ancestor of all continents: Pangaea. A supercontinent, a single entity that broke into all the pieces of land that exist; a possible explanation for the plant near his house as the Indian subcontinent broke off from Africa and banged into Asia. He studied the world map sprawled in front. “An impossible jigsaw,” he spoke aloud.

All the day’s efforts were rewarded in his dreams that night. The belly of Latin America slept comfortably in the groove of West Africa. The jigsaw fit so perfectly, Pangaea looked alive. What seemed like bits and bobs breaking off and floating in the daytime, now felt like a living being blooming in slow motion. He was ecstatic to see her stretch her arms as wide apart as Alaska and the Russian Far East, lift her head and stand on her toes, poles apart. Pangaea, blooming with the grace of a ballerina. He was aroused.

But when the downpour suddenly ended, it woke him up. Left to ruminate on half a dream, he wondered why the continents drifted apart in the first place.

Water swept into the cracks, a trickle turned into a stream. Streams turned into rivers. And then there was no turning back. Overnight, the rivers revealed cracks only oceans could fill in. It is in water’s nature to absorb the void, with all its crevices and peaks and other irregular symmetries, covering it with an unbroken, unending line. Only a fool would consider the shores of continents, sandbanks and parched patches as the full-stops to the line. They are pauses, at best. Or mindless chatter. Islands are mindless chatter in a meditative ocean.

He peeped from his queen-sized bed and traced his wife’s silhouette. He wondered what they were thinking.

Perhaps Pangaea the supercontinent dreamt of being a million islands. Perhaps now, the million islands dream of being one. Like the oddly dressed sailors who crossed oceans on a whim, the lands too realised that the end of our world is another’s beginning.

How does it matter? He concluded. Even if we had the answers, we’d still need God, and we’d still be lonely. Like the island he lived on, he was far too mid-ocean to change paths. Only God could help him endure the loneliness created by the couple’s separate beds. For a brief moment, the atheist believed in God.

Brought up as a devout Hindu, his atheism wasn’t an act of rebellion. Girija was just stretching his belief system, like Pangaea stretched her arms. All the languorous ship journeys that he made between England and India, India and the Andamans, they changed him. “When you stand on a ship deck and meditate on the blue-green, it’s the closest you come to staring into infinity,” he once wrote to his brother. “Standing alone in the face of infinity, it’s not your beliefs that bother you, but what you rejected or chose not to believe in that tugs at you.”

It is the closest they would get that night. Continents apart in their beliefs, God was the precarious bridge created when ridges met.

At that moment, the devil was a goat. “Can you hear it?” she asked, “the bleating.” And Girija lost his erection, the 27^th one in the first two months of his marriage.

*

After Raisin

EC Edition, Denmark 2010

Translated by Louise Øhrstrøm and Philip Langeskov

1.

                                                            * CAT *

That summer, when I decided to write about the fox, Klaus had already left Maribo. His excuse was that, because we lived on Lolland, he was missing out on professional challenges, but I was convinced that he left for other reasons. For one thing, I recognised the expression on his face when he came to pick up his last things. His lips were tightly pressed together, and a rhythmical expansion of his nostrils revealed how he was working to control his breathing. It was just like when he arrived at the hospital, after I had given birth to Raisin.

After he had gone, I wanted to let him know that I had seen through him. I wanted to write him a letter, saying that Maribo wasn’t the same without him. That it was as if one of the bright stars from Van Gogh’s Starry Night was missing from the painting. Most of the time, however, I was less poetic and just wished that I could cling to him, or attack him with questions, like how he could have the nerve to leave our Raisin, or where he thought he was going, without me. I was convinced that he had been beside himself when he decided to leave, and that he would return sooner or later. It was so obvious that we were still in a state of emergency.

I spent days trying to write letters to Klaus. “Dear Klaus. I know why you left Maribo. I feel…” Most letters ended here. Then I started to see spots before my eyes. They seemed to dance in front of the computer screen, before joining in clots and then scattering again. I felt sick and had to lie down on my couch. The nights were just as unforgiving. Some nights, I would fall asleep, only to wake with a start because of a nightmare, or a sudden clear thought that ran through my whole body and made me gasp. Other nights, I would find myself awake and alert, pursued by painful images, such as Klaus’s grave face or Raisin’s small fingers. I had visions of women surrounding my bed, holding pale babies in their arms. Their faces were without expression, their shoulders fallen and their arms hung either loosely at their sides, or, worse, pointed accusingly at me. Sometimes, I would hear someone scream somewhere and look around me, bewildered, my heart racing. Thoughts replaced one another at such a high speed that I couldn’t discern one from the other. When I tried to make sense of what had happened, I could only express myself in fragmented sentences. “In a moment, the light…”, “then I’ll go”, “with his arms, yes”.

I kept the blinds down day and night. When I didn’t lie on my bed or on the sofa under a blanket, I ate noodles or drank tea in my armchair. My mum and Sofia called me constantly. How was I doing? What did I eat? Did I get any sleep? Maybe they should drop by? I replied that I had to postpone everything. That I needed peace to deal with my writer’s block. That I needed to write again. “Articles”, I lied. I knew that this was what they wanted to hear. My head felt heavy whenever my mum started to talk about her work at the old peoples’ home, Birkely, or when Sofia told me about her friends, about nights out, about her colleague, Bente, or about her boyfriend, Laust. Their pretense disgusted me. It tormented my conscience so much that the very sight of them made me feel sick. I just wanted them to leave me alone and stop coming up with questions and advice all the time.

So, my first reaction was obviously to be irritated when Sofia, in a flow of talk, announced that she had found the solution to my writer’s block: I should write a fable. She said this having seen a man with an incipient tail at a swimming pool, It had reminded her how bestial we all are. How much easier it would be if we all just followed our instincts (it was not hard to tell that she was in love).

It was quite typical of Sofia to come up with something like this. “Spontaneous,” my mum called her. “Bubbly”. I often felt grey and overly serious next to her. After Raisin that feeling had increased. She probably looked at me as one of her projects. Something that could be fixed. I would not be surprised if she had discussed her brilliant fable idea with her one and only Laust. Like my mum, he loved Sofia’s ‘naturalness’.

I looked around me. It was almost impossible to distinguish the floor from the piles of clothes, books and empty noodle pots. I picked my way through the mess and took all the empty pots to the kitchen. Tears came to my eyes. I clenched my teeth. How could Sofia think that something so trivial as a fable could save anyone? How could she even suggest it? She had stayed with me for several days after Klaus left. She knew how I had felt. Maybe she just wanted to get rid of her weird sister. Maybe I had become one of those people you prefer not to talk about. I picked up the noodle pot. There was a picture of a dragon on it with the slogan “Blue Dragon – for whatever you desire, release the dragon”. For a second, it was as if the fire-breathing dragon moved, as if a flame blinded me. I tried to crush the pot, but it dropped out of my hands. What a ridiculous slogan! My fingers were smeared with noodle sauce. When I scratched my head, I could feel that my hair was sticky. It was more than a week since I had washed. I didn’t like to take showers anymore. My skin prickled painfully each time the jets of water hit my naked skin. It was tiresome to find a clean towel; exhausting to dry myself and get in my clothes again. And I hated the sight of my stomach.

In fact, I hated my whole body. When I looked in the mirror, I could hardly recognize myself. All I could see was a poor skinny creature in an oversized T-shirt and bare legs. It was as if something had ceased to work in my brain. I had no filters anymore. Everything I saw went right into my bones. It was impossible for me to see the news or read a newspaper. Each and every story gave me a feeling of guilt I couldn’t bear. Images of tortured bodies and war torn houses haunted me. Eyes of foxes followed me everywhere in my apartment.

As a child, I had seen a fox savage our neighbour’s hens. There was a moment I would never forget. In the instant right before the fox attacked the hens, it turned its head towards the fence that I was hiding behind. There was a hole in the fence through which I could see the fox. The fox looked directly at me. My throat felt dry, my body was trembling. I wanted to shout. I should have shouted.

My cheeks were cold and wet when I woke up the next day. I was on the sofa. It was the light that had woken me, glaring in my eyes.The blinds had been lifted, and there was a fox at my desk. I squinted and sat up, expecting the vision to disappear, but the fox was still there. It was sitting on my office chair, solemnly observing its own reflection in the oval-shaped mirror above my desk. All of my unfinished letters for Klaus were pushed to the side. The fox had placed its paws on the table next to a packet of sausages it must have brought with it. A tail peeped out of the hole at the back of the chair, slowly swaying from one side to the other. The fur along its spine was smeared with sticky brownish stuff, and the hairs on the tip of its tail were black and short, as if they had been burned. Each time the fox swayed its tail, a foul stench of dunghill, cheroots and cognac wafted across the room.

I could see its face in the mirror. Its yellow eyes were close together. Had its gaze not been so blunt and militant, I would have thought it was cross-eyed. When I looked to the side, I saw that the left hind leg of the fox was resting on a pile of books Sister Helen had given me. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Opening my eyes again, I found that the fox had started to write on my computer. Its paws hit the keyboard at breakneck speed, only interrupted by moments of self-satisfied chomping and appreciative nods towards the computer screen. I watched carefully. It was difficult to discern what was fox and what was dirt. The sun reflected on a part of the fur that had a greenish gleam. Only right above the tail did the fur have that golden, reddish colour you would expect of a fox. Behind one of its ears of the fox was a sticky lump, with a pencil and a couple of feathers attached to it.

The fox swayed its tail rhythmically from tone side to the other while it wrote. The stench was sickening. I was about to open a window when the fox started to shake. Its whole body trembled, the shoulders jumping up and down. The pencil fell to the floor, and the feathers dangled unsteadily. I assumed this would be the first phase of the disappearance of the fox. In a moment it would shake more and then dissolve in the room, just like the women who surrounded my bed at night. I moved closer to the desk, watching the fox intently.

But the fox did not disappear. Instead, it insisted on its presence by coughing loudly. Apparently, it had choked on something. In order to get rid of it, it swayed its tail so high up into the air that it touched my face. A hair got stuck in my nose. I felt sick. The fox started to roar as if it was a lion. A piece of sausage skin flew from its mouth and hit the computer screen. The fox cleared its throat and sat back in the chair again with an expression of triumph. It bent down and licked the computer screen to get the sausage skin back in its jaws.

- What are you writing?  I heard myself ask.

The fox pricked up its ears and moved its whole body closer to the back of the chair with a start, glancing at the computer screen.

- My memoirs, it said promptly, followed by more chomping

The fox reached out for a sausage, pulled its head back, tossed the sausage into its mouth and chomped even louder than before. The sound annoyed me.

- And where are you from? I said.

Everything went silent. I was convinced that the fox would disappear now. It would have to let me know that it came from my imagination and nowhere else. Then it would explode like a balloon or silently dissolve like the embers of a fire. I had experienced this before. A door slammed, Klaus was gone. Raisin dissolved into cold air in my arms.

I felt heavy and weak. I saw spots before my eyes. All I wanted was for the fox to disappear so that I could pull down the blinds and go to sleep again. But the fox was still sitting, alive and kicking, on my office chair. It slowly turned its head towards me, exposed its teeth and hissed angrily.

- I need peace to work for Christ’s sake. You can read my book when it’s published!

I looked at the back of the fox again and carefully touched its tail. It continued to pound the keyboard, unaffected by my touch. The hair and the stench on my hand was incontrovertible. The fox was real. In the end it seemed useless to sit on the sofa and wait for the fox to disappear.

I looked out of the window. The sun was low in the sky. It had to be afternoon. For some reason I thought it was morning. After Raisin I had completely lost any sense of time. I spent most of my time lying in bed or on the sofa, feeling constantly exhausted. When I got up and walked from one place to another in my apartment, I felt as if I was being forced to wade across a river. I preferred people not to touch me. Any smell or ray of light felt painful. It seemed impossible that I had ever spent long afternoons playing football in the sunlight, or that I had once enjoyed having Klaus inside me. Now, any touch was connected with pain. If I went out in the daylight at all, it was to buy more noodles, to visit Raisin’s grave or to sit in silence at the chapel of the Sct. Bridget Sisters by Søndersø. I preferred to go out at dusk, or just before dusk, when the light was not too bright.

The fox sneezed and rubbed its nose with its left paw. A drop of slime fell down on the keyboard, which the fox licked immediately. The stench was unbearable, and the sight of the shiny keyboard made me feel more and more sick. I had to get some air.

- They have cut down the chestnut tree. It was more than 200 years old, said Sister Helen.

She looked towards the group of workmen as if she blamed them. I stared at the red pieces of felt that were attached to her wimple. They formed the Sct. Bridget crown. She had once explained it to me. The red pieces of felt represented each of Christ’s wounds, the passion united with endless love.

The workmen were about to leave. It was closing time. Blocks of grey concrete formed a square next to the white monastery. There was an excavator with the logo “CAT” in front of a pile of soil. Behind the excavator a workman was locking a portable cabin. Next to the portable cabin, I could see a big pile of branches and roots.

- Is that the chestnut tree?

- Yes, Sister Helen sighed.

Then she smiled and laid the garden spade on the wheelbarrow in front of her. She had been digging up weeds by the entrance to the monastery when I arrived. She still had her gloves on.

- But I look forward to living in the new monastery. It will be exciting.

She looked into my eyes.

- You are not well today?

Her Indian accent made her say ‘today’ with a very hard ‘d’. I looked down at the gravel and then up to Sister Helen’s hands. She took her gloves off. Her hands were brown and coarse. Whenever Sister Helen wasn’t praying in the chapel, she worked in the kitchen or in the garden. She placed one of her hands on my shoulder. My throat felt dry. I stepped away from Sister Helen, but she didn’t let me go.

- Come. Let’s go to Vespers.

The chapel of the Sct. Bridget Sisters was a sanctuary for me. No one analyzed my movements or my facial expressions there. No one touched me. When the sisters prayed, there was a certain sense of peace that made me feel at home. I never felt lonely when I was in the chapel, and, although I wasn’t a nun, I never felt like I stood out. While saying Sct. Bridget’s prayer with the nuns, “Lord, come and light up the darkness…”, I looked at the statue of Bridget on the window sill. Bridget had a pen in her hand. The expression on her face was grave. She was looking down on the book of her visions. I always let my eyes rest on her while the sisters prayed or sang.

The first time I had been to Vespers, I had watched the sisters pray. It had seemed intimidating. It was only after Raisin’s death that sporadic prayers of thanks to a God somewhere had developed into a more conscious faith, but there were still many things I found alienating in Christianity. Even so, I couldn’t help clinging to the hope that Raisin was somewhere up there, in heaven. “I come to you, like the wounded comes to the doctor. Give, Lord, my heart peace. Amen.” The sisters kneeled in pairs in front of the cross, put out the candles and left the chapel. For a moment I thought Raisin’s little body rested on my breast.

The window shook. It was a warm but windy summer. I pulled my hood up, went down the stairs and left the monastery.

Deep sleep. That was all I hoped for when I opened my apartment. I wanted nothing more than to throw myself on my bed and forget about everything. The sight that met me was for that reason even more unbearable. Creased pieces of paper and half-eaten sausages were strewn over the floor. The walls in my bedroom had been scrawled on in a mysterious script that I couldn’t make out, my bedside table had been overturned, and the waste bag torn to shreds. . My duvet was piled up like a mountain in the middle of my bed, and there were two red pointed ears to one side and a long bushy tail to the other. The tail was swishing up and down in time with the fox’s grotesque snores. In my bathroom, the walls were also covered in scrawls and a foul-smelling yellow fluid ran down the washbasin and the toilet. I couldn’t believe it: Fox piss!

It’s a mystery how, once in a while, when you feel the most exhausted, you somehow find the energy for the most explosive bursts of anger. I grabbed the nearest weapon (an umbrella from the hallway), jumped up on the bed and attacked the sleeping fox, hitting it as hard as I could and pouring all the invectives I could think of down upon the creature. When I lived with Klaus, it had often been a problem for me to find suitable words to express my anger. Like a child, I ended up calling him “stupid” and kicking his bag or throwing his real estate catalogues to the floor. Now, I found myself making up all kinds of curses. “You filthy fucking snake! You sly, selfish dog. That’s what you are. A damn jerk! Get off my bed immediately and stay away forever! No, die! Die! Yes, I want you to die in your smug spit and be eaten up by reeking mites!”

Much to my annoyance, none of this seemed to bother the fox. No matter how hard I beat it, or whatever I screamed in its ears, it kept on snoring. Its eyelids didn’t even flicker. The only one exhausted by my burst of anger was myself, and after a while I gave up and fell down into the armchair. Here I sat for a long time, defeated, looking at the mess in front of me. Then I noticed a sound that was different from the snoring of the fox, a mechanical, monotonous sound. It came from the printer under my desk.

The Travels of a Pilgrim Fox

Preface

This is the remarkable story of the life of one of God’s most supreme creatures. It depicts with grace how a noble animal has lived out his dreams in the most elegant way one can imagine. Let us call it a truthful pilgrim’s account of his life on the highway. It will stand forever, steady as a rock, as a tremendous miracle, an oasis in a barren literary landscape. I am aware that certain so-called poets – one thinks, for instance, of Nivardus’ writings about the repulsive wolf Isegrim, or the clerk Willem’s poem Van den vos Regnaerde in 1250 – have participated in a smear campaign against my species. These people have used us as bugaboos in an absurd moral crusade, which has reduced our wonderful capacity for slyness to the status of an indulgence, a frippery. For this reason, it is my dream that this story will be recognized not only for its marvellous literary qualities, but that it will also rescue the reputation of our much – and unfairly- criticized species. Turgenev will regret that he said Gogol looked like a fox. His statement will never again provoke laughter. It will be considered a compliment.

INEVITABLE NOTE: It should emphatically be pointed out that a snout should always be preferred to one of those gigantic mountains that are raised in the landscape of the human face. The best writers let their noses wander – just like Gogol did. Only pathetic poets keep their noses in the sky. See also my pamphlet, Criticism of the detestable Nose’s Popularity.

I hope that the Church of Rome will acknowledge my masterpiece and not place it on Index Librorim Prohibitorum (the list of illegal literary works which holds most other fox literature). I am standing on firm ground, on the promise of a king to a relative of mine: “Whatever you write, will be the truth”. As a humble pilgrim, I have always tried to give my blessings to the places I have visited, and I have given freely of my wisdom, to anyone in need.

Subsequently, the fox gave an account of all of the places he had been and the people he had met. According to the fox, in Kansas City he had been a part of a famous family of prairie foxes, who mastered the art of robbing stagecoaches and naive colonists. In the Himalayas, he had rescued a Russian czar and his family, when their luxurious caravan was about to fall off a cliff. In Lapland, he claimed to have bitten both ears off the famous lynx, Arthur, in an unforgettable local tournament. It seemed there would be no end to the stories the fox intended to unfold in his memoirs, which for now consisted of a 10 page preface and an appendix in three parts. The first part held solely literary references, mainly to Lord Byron, whose Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the fox claimed as the main inspiration for his work. The fox wrote that he felt spiritually related to Lord Byron, being both a revolutionary and a well-travelled pilgrim himself, and he advanced the following quote from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as his slogan:

“He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find

the loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;

He who surpasses or subdues mankind

must look down on the hate of those below.”

Not only did the fox think himself related to Byron, but he also felt a connection to the hero of Byron’s poetry: a restless, melancholic and solitary figure who defied the standards of his time. At the same time, the fox could not relate to the sense of guilt Byron’s hero had. He found the guilt felt by most pilgrims to be completely useless and considered himself a gift to the highway, not the other way around.

My head felt heavy while I looked through the manuscript. I decided to skip the second part of the appendix which looked like sketches of possible chapters of the final memoirs. The third part of the appendix consisted of small poems that the fox had written throughout his life as a pilgrim. They were not structured around the dates they were written but around what the fox had eaten immediately before writing the poems. The fox was of the opinion that this would provide a better understanding of his works of art. Under FISH it said:

PERCH

Spare me

from flies and cats

begging for bits

I give in

I give up

Give me warm-blooded creatures

I snarl of

poor chips

FILET OF PLAICE

Fat falls

in lumps

turns around a non-existing corner

small jumpy feelings

in my belly

tom-bom-tom-boom

boom-boom

DEEP FRIED SCRIMPS

Spinning crispy rascals

crackling

crunching

lively playing

in my

hurling

intestinal

system

In the grounds of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the contemporary artist Michael Heizer, sitting in the cabin of a bulldozer, waves his cowboy hat and lassoes the air whilst dragging a twenty-four tonne granite slab over the manicured lawn.

This is ‘Dragged Mass’.

The commission is a breakthrough – a way to get things moving here, break apart the marbled hallways and the monotony of ancient art. The torn gully which scars the lawn and the heavy weight of mass symbolise the necessary destruction of old order.

Sam Wagstaff welcomes it with a loving embrace.

The mass sits there for days. Rain falls. The buckled gully becomes a muddy trench. The mass, which is supposed to sink majestically into the lawn, does not sink. Eventually, it is hauled away, blown up with dynamite and removed piece by piece.

In New York City Sam tours the downtown galleries. At night he tours the bars and clubs. This is a contrast from the world he’s left behind, the perfect green lawn (restored at great expense), the empty hallways and reverent air – stuffy and formulated, questions never asked. There, his body was just an empty, ancient vessel. Here, he can touch things, feel their weight.

Sam first sees Robert Mapplethorpe’s picture on the mantelpiece of a mutual friend. In the picture, Robert, dressed in a French sailor hat, smiles coyly at the camera.

Who is this? says Sam.

Robert Mapplethorpe.

This feeling is the same as art.

Sam gives Robert a camera and he tells him to take more pictures. They go away together to Fire Island, to European cities, and Robert takes photographs of Sam as he used to take photographs of other people. Sam doesn’t mind – it is the way Robert takes the photographs.

Sam becomes the subject of art. In Robert’s photographs, Sam is dressed up or not dressed at all. Sam in the bath, pulling faces in repose, a man about his toilette; or at the beach, dressed in nothing but a pair of white underpants and white sports socks; dressed in a disco shot, wearing black leather boots and hot-pants; the couple shots – artist and patron – they share the same birthday – Sam squatting in the corner of a white room and Robert standing over him, one arm leaning over his head, Robert, the skinny kid in loose denim jeans; the wedding picture, Robert behind, but it is always Robert’s face you’re drawn towards; the images spread across four eight-panel pages – cock bound and trussed in black leather cord – his or Robert’s – it’s not entirely clear – tied between the buttocks, twisted and fastened to the wrists, the front view, back view, side view.

At first, Sam doesn’t consider photographs to be works of art. They are more like historical documentation or reportage to him. It is Robert who changes his mind. Sam sees Edward Steichen’s ‘Flatiron Building’, the prow of the ship emerging through the mist, the dagger-sharp blackness of the tree branch cutting through the rain-drenched air. It looks like a painting, he thinks. There is that feeling again.

Sam collects all the photographs he can find. He goes to auctions with Robert – they rifle through the photographs. He chooses all the pictures no one else has considered, photographs of medical experiments and industrial scenes by anonymous photographers – he is not just looking for the name of a photographer but for the image itself. He drags home brown paper bags filled with photographs.

At the exhibition, Sam Wagstaff struggles with his bowtie. Get a grip on yourself, Sam.

He reads his own words in the exhibition catalogue: This exhibition is about pleasure, the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of seeing, like watching people dancing through an open window. They seem a little mad at first, until you realize they hear the song that you are watching.

Sam’s favourite photograph in the exhibition is Thomas Eakins’ ‘Male Nudes: Students at a Swimming Hole, 1883’. The picture shows a group of boys swimming in a lake. Each looks up at a young, fit boy who is cocked and ready, balanced on the edge of a rock, about to dive. Sam feels as though he comes to the scene by accident, strolling through a wood, the last days of summer, when the season has cooled, when the air has changed, when the day seems shorter than it should. The diver holds his position. His friends look on in admiration, frozen in time. A breeze blows in, not one of them moves. Water laps their skin. A beetle crawls across the diver’s toe. The sun shimmers on the water, catches the surface, catches the eye.

When Sam looks at the photograph he feels just the simple joy of witnessing something beautiful. These boys remain fixed – they won’t swim away, they will never grow old.

The other photographs depict the American wilderness – Niagara Falls, the Nevada desert, the beginnings of a Western railroad, working class portraits, medical experiments, industrial scenes. The spectacle of a Hippopotamus stuck behind bars with children looking on, geese flying low over an ocean, Lewis Carol’s ‘Little Girl’ lounging on a sofa, coy and perverse in the way she bends her knee and looks at the camera, knowing much more than she should. The madness of Boulogne’s  ‘Fright Mixed with Pain, Torture’ – the woman’s face seized with electrical pulses.

And here are Robert’s photographs:

‘Jim and Tom, Sausalito, 1977’, the leather-clad gimp pissing into another man’s mouth, the arch of piss, suspended in mid-air, the warm, fleshy mouth, which eternally holds the piss, black shadows, sharp against sun-bleached walls, the glint of sun reflecting off leather, the men stand and squat, suspended. And Robert’s ‘Tulips, New York, 1977’, freshly-cut, positioned in a vase, straight and true, except one, drooping off to the side.

The first time Sam saw Robert, Robert was in a photograph, dressed in a sailor suit.

The first time Sam met Robert, Sam said, I’m looking for someone to spoil, and Robert said, You’ve found him.

The first time Sam visited Robert’s studio, he saw a dressing gown pegged to the wall with a baguette protruding from the crotch.

The first time Sam saw Robert’s slides, their cosy scene was interrupted by Patti Smith’s screams coming from behind a partition wall.

The first time Sam met Patti, she was barely dressed, her hair a mess, she spoke in sweet profanities.

The first painting Patti made Sam think about was Munch’s ‘Scream’, how the painting attempts to depict the very thing it cannot, yet shows it perfectly.

The first thing Sam bought Robert was a camera. The second thing Sam bought Robert was an apartment far away from Patti.

Sam doesn’t know why he collects the way he does. He says that obsession, like any kind of love, is blinding.

Walter Benjamin says that the collector is the true resident of the interior. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one.

The camera observes and records passively, without intrusion, and yet it makes an argument by organising subjects into a two-dimensional plane within which Sam is made to understand.

Robert says that when he takes a photograph or when he has sex he disappears. Like when you are the artist or when you are the art itself, the focal point of everything, you cease to exist.

Robert isn’t here.

Sam looks for Robert in the tulip heads, the hard erect stalks, the black background, but there is only his own reflection in the glass.

When Sam’s mother dies, Robert is away in London. Sam sits beside her bed and takes her photograph. He photographs her face and her hands. He photographs the bed frame and the bedspread; he photographs the bedside table, her reading glasses, water glass, a vase containing roses. He photographs the view from her window and the way the curtains are tied. He photographs the paintings on the wall, the dressing gown hanging on the door, her slippers under the bed. The pictures will preserve a silence that doesn’t exist in reality, for there is noise coming in through the open window – traffic, glass bottles being dumped upon the sidewalk. He can hear his own heart beating and he can feel a nervous twitch in his knee, which pauses only when he stops to take a photograph. He takes more pictures. He thinks, If I can’t understand this thing for what it is, I’ll understand it in pieces. Then he thinks, Now that she is dead, Robert will have to come home for the funeral.

Sam sets up the studio – white walls, bright lights – these photographs will be in colour. Patti, in a good mood, sits on the floor, tosses the feather boa over her shoulder and picks up the kitten. She laughs at Sam who is watching her. She repositions her hat and holds up the kitten. She looks at the camera and smiles. Sam takes her picture.

When Robert finds out he is very, very angry. He yells at Sam, Don’t you know who we are? Iamtheartistandyouarethecollector! Sam and Patti feel very guilty. All the pictures belong to Robert, the master of their universe.

Robert’s studio on Bond Street has a high ceiling. It is a place where he can work. Robert sets up the place how he likes, creates a giant cage out of chicken wire, places his bed in the centre of the cage and lines it with black rubber sheets. He works how he lives. These factories are filled with artists. It is all about money, art, love and rent, all things are up for exchange – this is something Sam always says to Robert – remember who pays your rent.

Robert doesn’t always remember. He telephones Sam and lists all of the men he has been with and all of the places he has gone. He lists his collection of physical symptoms – tiredness, back pain, groin strain, lice, rashes, swellings. As he speaks, Sam imagines him twirling the phone cord around his fingers like a debutante and thinks, That’s me being wrapped around his little finger.

Jim Nelson arrives in the overnight delivery, a gift from Robert who is in San Francisco. He is slim, attractive and new to New York. Sam buys them a home on Long Island, a beautiful grand mansion called Oakleyville, which has its own woodland and a private beach. At weekends and in between shows Sam and Jim rest up here and feel very grand. One thing Jim wants to do is grow wild roses. Perhaps this is because Sam possesses lots of beautiful things and Jim does not. Sam doesn’t mind, except, when he thinks about the roses, he thinks about Robert’s flowers. Wherever Jim decides to try to plant the roses they just don’t grow. He tries them in a sunny spot and then a shady spot. He tries them by the perimeter wall and by the exterior wall of the house. He plants them too close to woodland and wild deer eat the bushes before anything can grow. All the time while they are in Manhattan, Jim can only think of the roses. He talks about them all the time to Sam. Jim is a hairdresser by trade. He has spent his adult life cutting things back but now the roses won’t grow.

When Sam’s photography collection is complete, he sells it to the Getty Museum for five million dollars. His critics say that this is self-sabotage. They say it is the action of a man who wants to build something up until he loves it so much he cannot help but despise it. They say the collection represents himself and it is himself he has come to despise.

Sam starts to collect American silver. He searches the auction rooms for silver, and he drags it back to his place in black plastic sacks. Sam raids the salerooms. He also stands on the Oakleyville beach and scours the sand for remains of ancient shipwrecks, collects the shards of silver that he finds and adds them to his collection. In the end he acquires a massive fortune – this is the best American silver collection this country has ever seen.

His critics say his collecting is a sign of early dementia – a Polish émigré wanting to possess more silverware than the Boston museum. Others say this is just an example of his capacity to love.

Sam lies dying in hospital. Robert comes to visit him but he cannot look at Sam. Sam is no longer beautiful. This thing has stolen his looks. He has become an ancient, empty vessel. Jim’s roses never grew. Sam finds it hard to speak. He manages to say to Patti – IfyouwantanyofmymoneybenicetoRobertbecauseI’mgivinghimeverything.

After Sam dies, he is placed in the Wagstaff family vault. He was a collector of art for so long and then he was the subject of art, and then he was the subject of history. He is reliant on the passionate whims of researchers who are always trying to solve the riddle of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Robert chose one of his own photographs for Sam’s memorial service. The photograph shows Sam staring defiantly into the distance. His neck muscles are taut. The area around his head is illuminated with light, like a halo. This Christ-like illumination makes the rest of his outline seem more defiant. He is very beautiful. He has a strong jaw and forehead. He is solid and weighty, like a statue or a monument.

REAL GONE

It’s like a movie, she said.

There was that defining moment.

What defining moment?

When I realised how small I was, how small and boring. Just a talking head, spewing nonsense.

I looked at her. In a book, it would have said, “you regarded her oddly”. It’s true. I regarded her oddly.

Just a talking head.

It was the tenth day that we had been traveling together in city X and we were getting sick of each other. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, it was just that we were always walking around and being stubborn and getting lost and refusing to back down. In the first place, we’d chosen the wrong time of the year. In summer, it would have been glorious. In this sort of soggy not winter almost spring, it was a city gray and mean and shuttered.

Now it was daytime. We were in some shitty cafe, having sickly sweet coffees, waiting for the rain to pass. I liked to look at all of these foreign people leading their intractably alien lives in this intractably alien place, they were so used to it, maybe they visited it daily, this random cafe I would probably never visit again, would probably never have heard of. There was an impossibly blonde woman reading a newspaper, two women having a boring-looking conversation (like us, perhaps?), a man waiting for his cake, all of them minding their own business, all of them unintelligible. It made me think of all the small, unremarkable cafes all over the world I had never heard of, would never visit. At this moment in time maybe all over the world grumpy girls with shitty flat hair were stirring their sickly-sweet coffee and thinking in the exact same way, and listening to their friend talk about herself.

A couple of nights we went to dingy basement clubs and got painfully drunk. Not the fun-sort of drunk, the uncomfortable sort of inebriation where you knew full well that you were losing control of yourself, would invariably say something stupid or do something spectacularly embarrassing. In my case, I lost my wallet and I stumbled about and eventually found it deep in my pocket. And then I spent the rest of the night waiting around, trying not to look hurt or expectant or desperate or even like I was waiting but I was, because Men were always approaching her. Not the soft, seal-like, vaguely gooey boys we met at school, but Men who looked like they belonged in a low-budget Russian gangster movie. Men, who knew what they were talking about, who leaned toward her and did not clumsily appropriate subtext- they wrapped their words around its waist. In that sense, they were all knowing and formidable. There were about three or four of them who spoke to her on an average night. Most of them were from Spain or America or Greece.

What’s your name, these men would eventually get around to asking me, when they noticed that we were together. They would blink like alligators at mid-day.

I always said my name was Marsha. Even though it was commonly spelt Marcia, in my head I thought, Marsh-a, Marsh-a, I was mired in the miserable marshland of my unattractiveness. My unattractiveness versus her prettiness, the unfair disadvantage, it hung like wafer-thin gauze between us.

She never did anything with any of the Men; that was part of her charm. She just let them talk to her and whisper things and buy us some drinks. And then we always left. One night one of them tried to follow us back to the hostel, but it was okay in the end. That isn’t even a story worth telling.

And every morning when we got up, before I put on my face and I was an erased, androgynous mess, there she was across the room disheveled but infuriatingly beautiful. She always wanted to sleep a little more. A week and a half and it seemed like we had been smudged in this routine forever. We were meant to have seen so much and felt so much and been the best of friends- but I kept on getting subsumed by disappointment, fatigue, envy and the nit-pickiness borne from being so inescapably proximate.

Let’s travel somewhere, she’d said, five months ago.

I don’t know if I can afford it.

Of course you can. We’ll travel cheap. We’ll be like real back-packers.

It will be an adventure.

I’d been excited. I thought of the pair of us lit by X sunshine, all linen dresses and retro shades, beautiful and effervescent. Of course it wasn’t like that. It was getting lost and finding our maps illegible, folding and re-folding them until the creases spread over the coordinates and we couldn’t tell a transport museum from a monument.

It stopped raining and we had to get up from our chairs. The chairs scraped on the floor but nobody in the cafe looked up. We got our things and headed for the door. I looked down at my sneakers. They were dirty. They looked sad and lost: sad for city X, lost because I was no fun.

Where will we go now, she asked. I could sense that she was getting frustrated with me; I was acting too downbeat, too laconic. I was getting sour like a child cooped up in the back of a car. She was driving the car but she had no license.

Do you have a preference, she prompted?

I felt bad for her, or I didn’t. She was trying. She was just herself. I was just myself. The pavement was wet and her shoes looked dirty as well. It was odd, but at that moment, she felt much younger; a sudden, condescending thought. She was looking at me. So I said,

No, anywhere is fine.

Anywhere at all.

Summer and the sun-kissed gazelle-girls unfurl themselves splendidly from caves made out of winter coats. All this skin on display makes me want to starve myself. I think this on the bus home. Gazelle girls board and alight the bus, stroll the bright-flood pavement. Skirts and linen dresses swish and float.

It’s a crazy kind of year, I’ll tell you that.  January and the earliest strains of Lilliputitis are rife in the fields of New Zealand. Before long it spreads all across the world, Lilliputitis-infected sheep and cattle. You can’t really say they are sick, these cows and sheep are fit as fiddles, the only thing is once infected they shrink to roughly an eighth of their original size, perfectly to scale. I’ve never seen a Shrunk One in real life but from the news footage they look adorable. A herd of sheep in a field is really now just a herd of sheep in a small section of a field. Barely audible mooing and bleating. Shrunks can reproduce and everything but their babies come out similarly, maddeningly small. Lots of people are getting jobs. The vegetarians and vegans and animal lovers love it. PETA launches the Small To Love! campaign. A dumb actress with Chiclet-blinding-teeth poses naked on a cow-print throw. The World Health Organisation says it is all relatively dandy and Lilliputitis can’t spread to humans but I bet every important person is shuddering behind their lectern.

I think to myself, with all this Lilliputitis I guess it’s easier to starve yourself, and then I think of the tiny cows, their sad mini corpses strung up in an abattoir, and I get this massive craving for steak. I haven’t had a good steak all year, because it’s so expensive. And woollen clothing is now exclusively couture: Givenchy S/S 2015 features a herd of spray-painted Shrunks hurtling and bleating softly down the runway, followed by models in yak-helmets and wool bras pinching their noses. I could go on, but I won’t.

It is precisely because the food chain is fucked and everyone is swigging goat’s milk and the dairy industry is tottering, that I withdraw from school two weeks after the story breaks that a farmer in Northumberland woke up one morning to find seven very small pigs drowned in a ditch. Now any big pig would have flopped around that mud-puddle and had a grand time but their little snouts couldn’t take it. This time they are measured to be a tenth of their original size and the picture in the papers is grainy and sad, this turgid porky thing trotters-up on an autopsy table.

The fridge in my flat is stockpiled with streaky bacon. I wish there was a way to make it last longer. Norman comes over, peers in the fridge and disapproves. He used to be my thesis advisor before I withdrew. He has an ugly wife, a suspicious child, and a large nose. “He inhales life,” I told my cousin two years ago, and she guffawed. I did not tell her about the wife or the six year old.

“Don’t starve yourself. It doesn’t work, you don’t need to. You are my best beautiful best beautiful most” says Norman, lying across the sofa, chewing on a raw strip of streaky bacon. Sometimes, for someone paid to be intelligent after work his brain seems to switch off and he delights in vegetating. I suppose it is a natural thing. My brain switched off ten years ago, I once joked to Norman. “Of course not,” he replied in a tone that said “Maybe”.

“Starving’s my new thing,”

“Get another new thing. By the way they’re saying the Northern pigs were a hoax.”

I look in the fridge and feel betrayed by those layers of bacon. I think of the summer gazelle golden-shouldered girls. They are miles younger than me. I wonder about their nutritional requirements; if any of them miss hamburgers that cost less than fifty pounds.  Fifty gold smackers; fifty big ones. Oh temporary inflation, I look at my fat thumbs as I think this, temporary inflation. I wonder if these summer dreams ever stand in front of a humming fridge on a quiet Friday evening as their forty-eight year old lover chews and dozes. I wonder if they ever keep quitting and finding it too hackneyed and embarrassing to admit it means much of anything. My imaginary gazelle girls toss their perfect hair contemptuously. In my imagination they are also all naked. All the better to sport your lissome bodies. I close the fridge door. I feel pale, and flabby, and insignificant.

Maybe I should go into hiding, emerge in winter. Palatial snow and sheathed in layers. I like to propose these radical things to myself. Radical things; either pertaining to starvation with a view to neatness, or indulgent hermitage. Considering it I wish maybe that I contracted Lilliputitis. It would combine neatness with a hermitage of necessity. I’d be this tiny, perfect self and I might drown washing dishes. Goodbye Norman, goodbye the fear of getting knifed walking home at night. Getting squished seems better than getting knifed.

“Come here, you little kidney bean” says Norman. I cringe a little and come up to him on the sofa. He pulls me against his narrow chest and my face is against his face and I am conscious of our faces wrinkling. I imagine facial lines folding and forming like glaciers. If the world ended and we got melted together like this forever, I think it would be uncomfortable and unfortunate. I hold on to Norman and feel so tender but also so sad.

“If you get any thinner you’ll disappear,” says Norman. I try not to ever think of it but I try to imagine what his wife is doing. Florence.  Florence Nightingale, she looks funny in my brain, in a nurse’s bonnet. Of course she’ll be doing something domesticated. Or maybe she’s on the Internet, buying the dress I’m wearing.

I think of the one time, as well, that I met Sarah. I often try to forget her entirely. She was seven then, and she kept glaring at me. I doubt she even fully knows. “Sulky children,” laughed Norman’s colleague. I wanted to shrink right then. I remember the scuffed straps of her sneakers. Maybe I’m getting too old for guilt. It’s so stuffy in my living room it would choke a vacuum cleaner.

Somewhere, maybe in Lisbon, the wind beats against a wooden coop of terribly tiny chickens. They huddle and cluck nothings in the breeze. Maybe I just want to lean into Norman forever, until he died earlier than I did, or until he had to go home.

BACK OF BEYOND

I should never have started crawling around in ditches, kicking up people’s secrets. I used to be afraid that if I tripped and fell, I’d crack my head open and they’d spill out everywhere. The stuff I knew, the secrets. That they’d lie on the road in shock for a moment, trying to get their bearings, until some got caught up in a gust of wind while others went crawling off under hedges, into ditches to wash up in people’s back gardens, or in the gutter outside the village shop for all to see.

‘Dolly, you’ll never guess what I’ve just heard,’ Sadie Borrett would say over the fence, looking over her shoulder towards the back garden where a secret has just landed on her buddleia like a Peacock butterfly. ‘That Pam White has been carrying on with Bernie from the garage. Been at it for years, apparently. They were seen in the back of a van which was brought in for repairs from out Bedfield way.’

Or further up the road by the council houses a gang of kids would be skipping and chanting, ‘We know who went with the Peaman.’

I got too good at being able to disappear, that was the problem. It took years of practice, this trick of the breath. I breathe in deep, hold it, then let it out, slow, flat and even. I breathe out through my skin, all over. That’s the way animals do it. Rabbits, hares, rats. They breathe out and flatten into the sides of verges, become part of the field. It’s like the edges of me begin to fade away and the colour behind leaks through. I can take on the pattern of cowslips in a ditch, or a shelf of tins in the shop, all the time feeling safe down there, tucked away behind my ribs.

That’s how I found out about Pam and Bernie long before anyone else. I’d seen them a couple of miles out of Worlingworth parked up in a layby one evening. You couldn’t see them from the road.  The Ford van was on the concrete next to the ditch, hidden behind a ten-foot-high pile of sugar beet, its lights turned off except for a small one inside above the windscreen. I was on my way home, walking the ditches between two fields with the faraway names Malaga Slade and the Back of Beyond, remembering where to avoid the drainage pipes and the small fridge that somebody had tipped down there months ago, now invisible in the dark. I was on a level with the van’s tyres, the suspension. The near right looked a bit soft as the van rocked around, its chassis creaking, the springs pinging up and down. I wanted that clamp to give way and a ton of sugar beet to come crashing down on to the pair of them. He didn’t do that to me. Bernie Capon didn’t make the car rock and roll for me. He’d never even given me a lift home after pushing into me against rubbish bins out the back of the village hall.

There’s a stack of them in my head, other people’s secrets, solid up to the roof like hundreds of straw bales wedged in tight. Take one or two out from the bottom and they’ll all come tumbling down, bales exploding all over the place. Like when you cut the bailer twine if they’ve been baled too tight and the straw busts out the middle, becomes twice, three times the size, dust flying up everywhere.

TANNINGTON STRAIGHT

Our house stood out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields that stretched for miles. A Suffolk prairie, some people called it. There were no trees or hedges left. They were grubbed up when the smaller fields disappeared, so that even the spindliest elder stood out like an oak tree.

Every time I slid down a bank, it felt like I was slipping into a crack in the earth, a place where I could hear and see things properly. Where everything above ground grew to three, four times the normal size. Boxing hares could look like two grown men having a stand-up fist fight in the middle of a field, and the underbellies of vans could look as big as juggernauts seen from a ditch. It was the only place where thoughts slowly trickled back into me, where I could hear real sounds – like that noise the clay makes after it’s been raining, a soft sucking noise, a bubbling from underneath as if the field is smacking its lips.

The best ditches were the ones over at World’s End on the edge of Worlingworth. Three brothers and a sister worked the farm: Walter, Edgar, Hubert and their sister Ivy. They’d always kept cows and pigs, a few red hens. The water ran clear into their ditches and was thick with pondweed and frogspawn by the start of spring. Ducks came over from the drinking pond to feed there sometimes, wading down banks full of primroses and oxlips.

But then there were ditches like the ones either side of Tannington Straight, deep lifeless ditches full of rubbish. I never went in them if I could help it, tried to avoid going down the road altogether.

I’d found some bad things in those ditches. Porno mags with their pages all stuck together. Used johnnies. Stained mattresses that were tipped straight in, some left to stand there on end. With hundreds of acres of flat field either side, people knew they wouldn’t be caught out, surprised by cars swooping round a bend or people out for a stroll, because nobody ever walked down the Straight, not even with the dog for a stretch of the legs.  People only walked down it for a purpose, like me or Walker. Car drivers had a clear view in every direction and if they couldn’t see anybody, then nobody could see them. An open road, a clear throw, so they wound the windows down, or stopped to open the boot, just long enough to lob something into the ditch. Like a baby.

Everybody was talking about it. I could hear them wherever I went.

‘Have you heard? There’s been a baby found. Up by Tannington Straight.’ On the streets, in the village shop, over garden fences. It reached as far as Fram where people whispered about it in Carley & Webbs.

‘A newborn baby, dumped right out there in the middle of nowhere. Who would ever do such a thing?’

‘Nobody’s been carrying round here, not that we know of. It must have been someone from outside. Poor little mite.’

On and on they went. What was its mother thinking of? How a poor little defenceless creature didn’t deserve an end like that. I knew what they were on about. It was me who found the baby down there in the ditch that day.

‘It was lucky you happened to be passing on foot,’ people said. ‘That baby could have been down there for days. Deep ditch out the way like that.’ Then with a shudder, ‘Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Such a terrible thing. Was it a boy or a girl, I wonder?’ All eyes turned on me.

It was a still morning in early-March when I found the baby, the first day of the year that the sunshine felt strong enough to start taking the chill out of the ground. The wind had been in the east for the past week, sheeting across the fields and in through the gaps round the window frames. But overnight it had disappeared, and the morning was so quiet, you could hear voices from miles away: the noise of children playing outside the farm cottages in Brundish, the ducks on Fram Mere. It felt like everyone was coming out of their houses into the sun for the first time that year. Blue sky, no wind, a perfect spring morning. It wasn’t long before the crop sprayers arrived.

By mid-morning the spray was hanging heavy in the air. It soaked into the fields, sank into the ditches to settle on the water.

‘First fine day,’ my dad sighed. The spray booms swung close up to the edge of our garden, a fine wash of pesticide landing on our fence, the edge of the goat shed.

‘I do wish they wouldn’t come so close,’ Mum said, as she made sure all the windows were closed. But still those fumes found their way in. A thick smell like burning plastic crept through every hole and crack till the pesticides seemed to fill the whole house and caught against the back of our throats.

I had to get out of the house, find fresh air somewhere away from all the spraying. In the end I decided to take a bag of feed to the two chickens who were living wild by the side of a field towards Horham. They’d fallen off a lorry some time ago when the driver skidded on ice on a back lane, and ended up in the ditch. Me and Dad came across the crash minutes after it happened, saw broken crates and a mess of chickens spilled all over the road. A few days afterwards, when the road had been cleaned up, we saw the two birds that had got away, sheltering under a nearby hedge.

‘Winter nights will finish them off,’ Dad said. ‘They’ll be dead by Christmas.’ But they did survive. They’d got through the winter, and had plumped up with thick feathers from living in that strip of hedge.

It took me over an hour and a half to walk the few miles. I took the longer route so I could get off the roads and go down the bridleways and footpaths across the fields.  The chicken boys were scratching around on the verge when I got there, but scuttled off into the field when they saw me. They were still wary after all this time, but as soon as I threw the feed and moved off  a little way, they came over to peck at the corn. They were like an old married couple, sticking close together when they weren’t sure what to do, whether to run and which way, or whether to come and feed. It was the smaller bird who usually took the lead, the other following close on his stumpy tail feathers.

It was late afternoon by the time I started heading home, not thinking clearly about the route I was taking. Before I knew it, I’d rounded the bend and the endless grey stretch of Tannington Straight lay ahead of me.

They were growing rape in the fields either side that year.  It was already knee-high, like dull grass. The sky had clouded over and the feel of spring was long gone. I put my head down and started walking as fast as I could.

I was halfway along when I saw Bella Creasy, the last person I wanted to meet out there on my own in the middle of nowhere. She was wheeling her bike in the distance, just approaching the top junction. I slid into the ditch without a second thought and landed by a huge pile of bottles. There were always a few empty cans and bottles in there, Tolly Cobbold, Watneys Pale Ale, but this must have been a pile of at least twenty London Gin bottles. The smell of gin was so strong it could have been running off the field that day, getting mixed in with the ditchwater and the pesticides.  It wasn’t long before I started to feel queasy. I took a quick look over the bank and saw Bella Creasey hadn’t turned down the Straight after all and had disappeared from sight.

That’s when I saw it just in front of me. Half in, half out of the water. It was a package, wrapped in pages from a News of the World, lying underneath the land drain pipe. It looked like a bag of fish and chips but for some blood showing through. I was wondering if it might be kittens as I prised the paper open with a stick. A photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Di in her blue engagement suit had been covering the body. The face was blackened in places, blotchy, and some newsprint had rubbed off on to the belly, a faint tattoo of Lady Di’s face on the chest. But she had a lovely sticky-out mouth with perfect lips as if she was about to reach up and kiss someone, and a tuft of dark hair with a slight curl at the end. She had no arms.

‘Nobody’s been expecting round here.’ People were going on and on about it. Suddenly they were noticing me, that quiet White girl, stopping me for a chat, asking me how I was. But underneath all their questions about me, my mother, how Dad was getting on in his new job, I could tell what they really wanted to ask me. What did it look like? What colour was it? Was it black, white, yellow? What about its hair, its eyes? Did it look like anyone round here?

I was a walking lump of clay for weeks afterwards, people pressing questions into me, trying to push their fingers into my head and have a good delve around inside to see what they could find. But I never answered people’s questions.

‘Baby was dead, that’s all,’ I mumbled. I didn’t tell them that some of her was missing. I wanted to bury her deep, keep her down there safe and quiet, where nobody needed to know anything, safe as long as she was down there behind my ribs.

If it hadn’t been for the ditch baby, I often wonder how different life would be now. That maybe none of those terrible things would have happened that summer, or everything that’s happened since. From the day I found her, it’s as if that baby climbed aboard a runaway train and sat astride the engine as it hurtled in all crazy directions, mowing down people and houses in its path, and leaving tracks scorched into the ground behind it. I might not be fourteen any more, but it worries me, the way that train is still going strong after all these years with no way of knowing where it’s headed next.