short stories

Bad elevator

2012-02-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

Jack noticed that Buck's elevator wasn't working properly, stuttering and catching where it should instantly shift, and this confused him, really, made him wonder if he should radio over to warn him, warn Buck, who was talking a whole lot, though this wasn't for definite, because Jack wasn't sure what the sound coming through the radio was, whether it was static, or whether it was even human. And so he tried to stifle a laugh.

And then it surprised him when Buck's engine exploded, after very little effort. The next thing Jack knew was Buck going up in flames. He watched with interest as Buck pulled his ejector cord and shot up, but Jack didn't copy, he waited. He fluttered up above, in the clouds above Buck's rudderless plane, now curving down.

Then he pulled the cord and he shot up and sunk and took some time to compute, to watch, and he looked down at the fields which surrounded him. The sun hung low, filled the canopy's under-side with orange, and his body was orange too, lit by that sinking sun, which struck him as beautiful, not just to consider, or extract from, or to memorise, or to refer to in the future, but for what it was. Unfathomable. As vivid as it was unexplained.

To one side the smoking aircraft descended in a long minute, and it felt strange there was no sound, like there should be, but it slid silently to earth and cruised along its surface, like it could keep going forever without halt, dragging stuff with it until the end. Jack felt unceasing too: like he could hang here, in the air, and never descend. But he sank anyway. He sank like the end of a sigh.

Moments later, when he stood over the aeroplane's smoking carcass, drag following drag, the light from the cigarette converting energy at twice the speed it would have at altitude, he didn't know much: like why this burned. And why he wanted to see it all again.

But he realised there was a lot he didn't know, like why this family was weeping, here, and why a crew of paramedics looked on in horror, or why he had steered into Buck, or why he couldn't remember Buck's wife's name.

He picked up his cell phone. He scrolled down to his home number, and pressed the red button.

"Hi," he said, slowly. "I'm coming home."

Summer equaliser

2011-12-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

From a distance, the eastern city was traced in orange as the day began. The crowds loped unconvincingly through Pamplona’s many streets and squares, and up close, the dawn scrubbed their skin into amber. The pace was slow: the everyday boredom of waiting for an event to happen showed itself in people’s cameras and cigarettes and half conversations. A nod, a smile, a mindless gesture.
As the day progressed, the shadows darkened, and the city filled, the atmosphere becoming more intense. The fiesta, fans of Hemingway already know, was the city’s busiest time, and while the bulls would not be released without security being tight, and tourists’ composure being straitened, the babble was rising. People were seeking out places to scrabble, nooks in which to hide for when the animals ran past.
Lex and Luke were rushing to their mark. Luke, a security officer of the highest rank, knew the streets well, and begrudged the ineptitude of his female charge. Within minutes they became separated, and as he slalomed around a corner, avoiding stray limbs, he glanced back over his shoulder and tried to pick out three or four of Lex’s distinguishing features. He’d already forgotten what she looked like, and this surprised as much as disappointed him.
An overweight man ran up to him.
“Hacer sitio” he said, as a greeting, though he was wheezing loudly.
“Lo siento,” Luke said back, shrugging, explaining he didn’t know where to go, and would much less share the information.
His radio crackled at his side.

MESSAGE STARTS “I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have TIME. I had to make a snap decision, in difficult circumstances. Luckily, SOULJA’s 24-hour support network were on hand to give me...STATE OF THE ART TECHNOLOGY.” MESSAGE ENDS

The radio fizzed again.
“Who’s the fat guy?”
“Jesus, no one, he just wants info.”
“Get rid. To your mark. If anything happens to Lex, you’ll be fucked.”
Luke scowled, then stowed the walkie-talkie. Like its holster, his trousers and shirt and sunglasses were all standard issue black, suitably impassive if impractical for the summer heat. He was an obvious target, though should anyone take a shot and miss, he would reach to his pistol and blast them into the future before they could rattle off a second salvo.
Lex rounded a corner. They were now both stood in a busy street, around 500 yards from where the bulls would be released with the bang of a rocket in around 15 minutes’ time. It was getting hard to move as people edged towards the peripheries of what was a central artery between the horns and hooves in an initial holding pen and the stadium, which marked a 20-minute journey downtown. Luke sized Lex up. She was his age, in her mid-30s, and she had her hair tightened behind her head. She was in good shape, unsurprising for someone with such an aristocratic background, the kind of cabal which could hire five elite security guards to watch over their daughter run through Pamplona. Of course, thought Luke, who should begrudge her this privilege. But he still did. He despised her slowness, her inability to get anything done for herself without additional protection. It was a predictable and banal irony that a festival which attracted so many for its anarchic freedom would see a member of the upper class chaperoned through it, so that the experience was unrecognisable as something liberating, interesting or impulsive.
Up the street, the bulls were snorting in their pens. Their nostrils issued gusts of warm air, and Luke embraced Lex on the cheek, inhaling her smell then exhaling hot breath across her neck. He kissed her on the mouth, and she looked up at him, for a moment wan, but then suppressing her emotion beneath a thick foundation of hauteur to match her impeccably made-up face.
Luke grabbed her hand, and they jumped over runners into the middle of the street, sidling between walkers who thought they were sprinters, who jostled and jittered their limbs in anticipation of the melee shortly to begin. He saw the sweat adhering hair to her forehead.
“You OK?”
She nodded, her face blossoming red. He pinched his lips together and pulled her urgently to his side. For the next five minutes, they kept going, meandering in and out, and again she threatened to fall behind. Why did she do this? Why did she need to be so slow?
In the distance, the rocket calling for the bulls’ release whooshed into the air, and segued into a loud human roar, which then settled into a constant ruffle. People cheered, bodies rushed towards them, and flesh scattered in all directions apart from that which stood hard and firm, like rock poking proudly above a river’s channel, in defiance of all to come. The crowd’s flow thickened. Someone stamped on the back of Luke’s calf, causing him to cry out, and he turned his face up to gnash the light which speared the ground in bars around him.

MESSAGE STARTS “SOULJA. BZZZZZ. SOULJA....can’t you understand....YOU’RE but a grain of sand....do YOU need a GUIDE....to make YOU satisfied.....” Collages of faces. Smiling. Skulls with pristine, recent teeth. “In 20 out of 25 cases, SOULJA delivers results....human deliverance to the Almighty.....you decide how and when.....” MESSAGE ENDS

A bare-chested Catalan pushed past them and shrank to a pin-point on the horizon. Luke pulled Lex’s arm a little harder, and they swung into a narrow side-street off the main thoroughfare. On one side, balconies full of midday drinkers hung above clothes shops. Just opposite dozens of locals, singing loudly, perched upon a slatted white fence. Those seated could hear the bulls now, and jumped down to try to see them, colliding with the couple who rushed up into their path. They were pushed back, but they ducked, and managed to squeeze through. Luke hauled himself up on to the fence as the imagined hammering of a hundred hooves joined the noise of a thousand veins filling with adrenaline. But he had lost her. He turned around, and she was out of sight, and then the crowd washed past to fill his frame of vision. He caught a glimpse of Lex pressed up against a wall, and for some reason, she was now wearing a black baseball cap. After several minutes, the flood began to abate, and Luke started walking towards her. He made it around halfway before the snap of gunfire caused her body to crumple, and he hit the deck immediately, like some gruesome imitation of what he desperately hoped was not her final dance.

Decades later, time had fallen off a cliff, churned into a ball, and settled down-river so that it seemed no longer to be moving. The orange of the dawn appeared once again, but this time slowly, warming the cheeks of those waking in the city. But where a woman and a man lay side by side in the bedroom of a second-floor flat, his legs a question mark punctuating her body beneath the bedclothes, the light seemed to stop, disgusted as it was by the old lines and creases of those who has suddenly become middle aged.
Lex’s head warmed Luke’s chest. He lay deep in thought. For what felt like good reasons, he didn’t want to kiss her wrinkled, unblinking face. She was still asleep, and leaned gracefully towards him, bending her body to marry his legs and chest.
She stirred, as if in a bad dream, moving her arm up in a start and accidentally waking herself. She blinked, then brought her hand up to his cheek, before tracing the contours of her own misshapen face.
“Always watching over me?”
“I have to”.
Her smile evaporated. He shook his left leg nervously. She was irritating him.
She took breakfast in the dining room; he put on his uniform in front of the television, as he had done for the previous 20 years. She shut things with a bang, and his aggression emerged worse than he intended. He couldn’t flatter her with his whole-hearted attention any more. His flattery was hiding, somewhere else, cocooned inside something selfish inside of him.
“Your fucking mind is going,” he shouted, half hoping she wouldn’t hear.
She stood back, silently.
“Where did you put the....?”
“Above the refrigerator”.
“Why have you moved it?”
“I never eat it”.
Again, louder than he should have. She looked vacant, as normal, confused, lacking that elegant, manicured look which had attracted him in his youth. She ran out of the kitchen, into the hall, and into the empty street. The front door banged shut and he sat down, picked up the remote control, and switched the channel onto a familiar, comforting, flashing screen.

MESSAGE STARTS “After the AWAKENING, the places we can go, the people we can see, are so large they are practically INFINITE....When you’re 70, you don’t feel like walking under a bus. You want something easier than that.....The decision is yours! For a quote and access to SOULJA’s free pricing plan, ring 1-800-FREE-LIFE......” MESSAGE ENDS

After the bulls had been rounded up, and several had been shot by an angry Luke, and the unconscious Lex had been bundled into the back of an ambulance, the other agents, Luke’s colleagues, ran into the streets, scattering the crowds, in a misplaced attempt to clean up the exploding mess. While Lex was taken off into the comforting bosom of medical care, he was swaddled in itchy sack-cloth and shoved into the back of a van. From there, he had come here, what he could only assume was the basement of a safe house on the city’s outskirts, and it was grey, and it was cold. He’d been stripped of his uniform, and stood there, rather ridiculously, in his underwear, the cool kiss of concrete slobbering across the back of his legs and neck. There was a single table and chair, and what he could only assume was a two-way mirror.
He felt his spine crack as his sergeant disdainfully flung him against the wall. He winced from the impact. Initially, he’d been angry, but now he split his fear between Lex and himself. The healthier helping was dispensed in favour of himself.
“You’re supposed to be her fucking bodyguard! Of all the people...how come she gets done in on your watch?”
“I didn’t see it coming chief. It happens”.
“It happens? What about the drill? Act as a shield? You were running off, we saw, you were impatient, I never...”
Resignation dripped into Luke’s fear, floating like oil across his endlessly shifting surfaces. Then the resentment returned. He wished his initial sense of shock had lasted longer.
The sergeant skulked off in disgust to smoke a cigarette, and in a split-second was replaced by another figure, thirty years’ Luke’s senior. He was smartly dressed in a camel-coloured suit, brown shoes, and dark glasses. He had Lex’s nose and lips.
He was quiet at first. He stared at the floor, motionless. Luke’s neck bristled, his stomach gurgled, and he suddenly thought he needed a drink. He had the overwhelming urge to cry out with laughter. Like most high-fliers he had no real experience of punishment, and didn’t really know what to do.
“What do you think of my daughter?”
He thought this was a trick question.
“We’re close, yeah.”
“Close?”
The man spun towards Luke, eyes wide with a manic glare.
“Everyone knows you’ve been fucking her. I should get you killed, but I need time to think, to consider...why I let you do this. I let you get close to her, for her sake. She begged me to let you protect her at Pamplona. And you’ve gone and fucked it up.”
He took off his glasses and flung them into the corner of the room. Large bags sagged beneath his eyes. He would occasionally glance at Luke, then would look quickly away in disgust.
Luke knew he could not break. Not for this. He knew they could not touch him, because she would try to protect him. Because she knew the balance of power was so strongly weighted in his favour. And on top of all this he knew, deep down, that something inside him was growing for her. It pulsed. He couldn’t define it as love, not yet, but now it galvanised his fear. He was sure this would be fatal for his career, and it was that thought, and not Lex, that prompted a strong tide of misery to sweep across him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For all I know you did this on purpose.”
Luke snorted. There was nothing he could say.
Lex’s father grabbed Luke by the lapels, and repeated what was now a familiar process. He pushed him into the concrete, and his back relaxed into the pain.
“The question is,” said the man, shoving him slowly, grinding his teeth, then looking down, as if he scarcely believed what was happening, “how are we are going to punish you? Actually, it’s coming to me now. Because at some stage, my girl is going to wake up in that hospital. And when she does - and this we can say for sure - she is going to see your face. I’ll tell you what might be quite nice. From now on she is going to see your face every day for the rest of her life. I’ll arrange for the two of you to move in together, see. You will marry, and stay married, for the rest of your life.”
Luke’s throat tightened. He could feel his arms, pressed tightly against his sides, begin to shake.
“I see, sir”.
“That will be your punishment. To take her off my hands”.

So he did. For two decades after that cold interrogation, until not long after a burned saffron day where a pair of confused middle-aged lovers slept peacefully before repelling each other with vigour due to an argument in a kitchen, a doctor saluted a 50-year-old Luke. They were in a hospital ward just outside the Spanish capital. While Luke’s black uniform was now decorated with the insignia and finely pressed epaulettes of a general with rank - for along with his marriage, he had been able to keep his job, and had been guaranteed a substantial income by his father-in-law - his features were sagging due to accumulated stress and age. Lex sat to one side of him. She was now confined to a wheelchair, and was increasingly desensitised to life, her head lolling to one side, her mouth drawn into a permanent rictus, her eyes unfocused and lungs that pulled in and out with all the humour of a metronome.
It was in these circumstances, throughout which Luke stared at the ground while hunched on a chair, that the doctor told Luke his diagnosis of Lex’s condition. He told him again. He relayed the information a third time, just sticking to the facts, and Luke would have appreciated his brevity, if he had been able to fully digest the full horror of his circumstances.
“The early brain damage from the shot took its toll,” the doctor said. “The bullet which was removed from her head has caused a trauma to develop over the last few years. Her blood supply can no longer drain it.”
“So?”
“So I’d give her four weeks”.
Luke nodded.
“I get it. Lex?”
She didn’t understand. She couldn’t speak. And if she could, would she thank him for what he had done? Or what he hadn’t done? Or what he had never said to her?
“Lex, you understand what the doctor says?”
A vacant smile. Luked looked again to his feet.
“Legally you need to take some recourse. I strongly think you should consider this”.
The doctor handed Luke a leaflet.
“That’s pretty inhumane.”
“Sir, in this situation, it’s the best course...”
After two more minutes of fruitless conversation, the doctor left, slamming the door behind him and shaking its glass. Lex played absent-mindedly with the hem of her dress. She bit her bottom lip. If you could say that having wide-eyes, a faint smile, and shaking hands looked anything, she also looked somewhat scared.
Luke wanted a drip to bleed him dry.
“It’s all OK”. He smoothed down her hair.
Chastising himself for his skipping mind, he found his thoughts, as ever, going back to business matters. He looked at the leaflet in his hand. It was headed with a single word.
“SOULJA”.
He screwed up the piece of paper, and threw it up. It paused for a minute in mid-flight, suspended above his head at the apex of its arc, before spinning a slow descent back towards him.

It was two weeks later that Luke found himself strapped by the same doctor into an apparatus arranged around a central, white, oval seat. The premise of this contraption, and its associated devices was simple: a baggy but incredibly thin plastic skin was suspended from a glass frame around whoever was sitting in the chair. At first, the skin would hang open, away from the frame, to make the chair accessible via narrow strips cut into the plastic’s surface, through which Luke could climb inside and sit down. But at the touch of a button - and there were many to choose from, for the laboratory which housed them was covered with screens and complex mechanisms - the frame would contract into itself telescopically, and the skin would shrink to fit Luke’s own. He was told it was a protective device to ease his travel back into the past, though Luke thought, at this stage, he would probably have believed anything. On the opposite side of the laboratory was a man-sized oblong hole, which Luke peered at suspiciously from inside his non-retracted square frame. He played with a sniper’s rifle on his lap, fingering its delicate guard, and locked and unlocked it nervously. He clutched it close to him.
Through a slit, the doctor handed Luke two maps of Pamplona.
“There will be side-effects when you get back there. Here’s a crib sheet. Run through it”.
Luke nodded. The doctor sat down in another chair opposite him and lit a cigarette. He took a long drag.
“It will be 2020. You can only change some things. So, you can go back and kill her, with that gun you’re playing with there, instead of just seeing her injured as a spectator, as you did as a younger man. We’ll tie up all the loose ends here.”
The doctor picked up a tablet computer, and punched in six digits. A computer console in front of him lit into life. It showed a timeline of Lex’s life, with several different branches stemming off a central trunk. The SOULJA logo - a heart, slipping in and out of focus - hovered in the screen’s upper-right corner.
“We’ve gone through all the contemporaneous documentation. I guess you’ll agree that you were blamed for not saving her from the assassination attempt. Right?”
Luke grunted.
“OK. So when you get there, get to your vantage point and shoot your younger self in the leg. Then kill your younger wife. You can use a rubber bullet for your own shot, but switch back to live for her.”
“I think I can handle it”.
“Whatever, it’s got to be convincing. If you’re shot, even just injured, you can’t be blamed for her death. Our stats experts say you’ll have a 90 per cent change of being let off. She will die, sparing her from the painful degenerative condition she is experiencing now. Then - lucky you - your younger self can marry who he pleases.”
“How do I get back here?”
“That timer in your pocket. When it reaches an hour, you’ll be brought back automatically. When you get here, things will already have changed.”
Luke fished into his inside pocket and pulled out a silver stopwatch. He pressed it into his palm before replacing it, then asked the medic for a smoke. The doctor refused. A quizzical look, then anger, sprung from behind Luke’s eyes.
“OK, but I still remember what happened. It was the biggest day of my life. I assume that it must have been me in the future trying to kill her the first time around. Right? So why didn’t I hit the target the first time?”
“It’s anomalous, yeah. But SOULJA doesn’t properly understand how time travel works, and I suspect - and I’m talking way above my pay grade here - they wouldn’t tell us even if they did. But rest assured,” and at this point, the doctor gestured again to Luke’s rifle, which hung limply at his side, “You won’t be missing this time”.
Luke nodded, and picked up the gun. He broke open its barrel, pretended to inspect the interior of its shaft, then swung it quickly towards the doctor through the slit in the plastic, causing the medic to shift awkwardly in his seat. Luke smiled. He stored the firearm beneath his chair and sat bolt upright. The air conditioning fanned the material out around him, like strips of flesh falling from an open wound. Luke’s face fell in and out of view.
“I’ll be the judge of that”.

So documents were signed in triplicate, gym sessions endured, medical exams ratified, and all of it was accompanied by the same, ennui-laden trip to the medical building, the same swift commute from Luke’s opulent apartment in the city’s suburbs, where he lived with an increasingly catatonic Lex. He would leave her with a cursory, non-committal goodbye, before slipping into a taxi, staring vacantly at the buildings laughing back at him, and passing the bored security guard on reception at SOULJA HQ, sloping up the stairs, and entering the lab to meet the doctor. At this point there was often a requisite two-hour wait, but this time he was prepared for it, and the frame of plastic skin, which he was beginning to feel vaguely more comfortable with, was waiting for him obediently like a malformed pet. The doctor appeared, slightly less late this time, but the routine had already changed, and Luke, despite himself, was surprised the medic did not even attempt to make polite conversation for their final interaction. He just nodded. An application form rested on the desk, the doctor quickly checked it, and then with a deep sigh wheeled Luke over to the hole on the opposite wall of the room, jacked him up, and slid him and the surrounding apparatus with little effort inside the open dumb-waiter which yawned black back at him. Luke stared ahead. He knew there was just going to be a short wait before it all happened. The lights in the room changed colour, first to purple, then green, and for the first time a small spring of anticipation welled up through Luke’s antipathy. He easily endured the skin suddenly shrinking to fit around his arms, chest and torso. It felt sticky against his flesh, and while in some areas it clung directly to his body, tight like a wetsuit, in others, such as around his head, it was baggier, leaving him pockets of air. As his training kicked in, his pulse, previously ringing in his ears, subsided to a distant beat. He had more than enough room to manoeuvre, and heard the doctor pressing another button. A black liquid was slowly pumped into the skin, now sealed to air-tightness, and over several minutes the fluid coagulated around his legs, then rose up to the middle of his torso, where it hung like an effervescent mirror. He looked down to its surface, which popped and bubbled into his face, then up at a computer screen which had been illuminated in front of him on the interior wall, just visible through the plastic carapace. He made out a map of Pamplona, which showed where he would subsequently need to be and when, and then - rather incongruently, he would later remark - a vague memory of his wedding day jerked into his mind: of grins, of clouded remembrances of smiles, that had stayed with him, like a perennial haunt, flipping and morphing as his days progressed with the hundred different faces of a single ghost.
A countdown commenced. A buzzing broke out around him, and his memory staggered, then crawled. The liquid started to rise up again, and soon was creeping up to his neck. He knew he couldn’t resist the pull of time, and was glad that the doctor had now moved away, because he could no longer identify the cascade of tears which ran down Luke’s face, falling to greet the dark meniscus that raced with renewed purpose up towards Luke’s ever-increasing grimace.

And so, morning returned yet again. Luke ran around the first of many corners in Pamplona for the second time, but now, in the evening of his life, he was breathless. He found it hard to keep up with those around him, and difficult to get out of their way with any kind of pace. The back streets were already full, and Luke pulled out his stopwatch. He had 52 minutes.
He felt his collapsible rifle bang against his side through the sports bag slung over his shoulder. He produced his map. Someone tapped him on his shoulder.
“Perdido?”
It was an overweight man. Luke seemed to recognise him. He was sweating profusely, and wiped his forehead with a red handkerchief. Luke greeted him with strange warmth, and his Spanish flooded back to him more easily than he could have hoped for. He told him he needed to get to an apartment building two blocks away. The man nodded as though he recognised the place and gave Luke directions. Luke thanked him with a smile.
Soon, he was walking slowly, his focus tightening around him as he fully comprehended what was upon him. He got out a bunch of keys from his bag and let himself into a run-down apartment block at the bottom of a nearby street. It was dimly lit inside, crowned by broken fans and hobbled by worn wooden floors. He sidled past half smashed interior windows advertising the services of now long-retired dentists, and walked through halls and corridors reeking of bleach, to the top floor, where he let himself into room 65. There was a telescopic gun sight already lying on the bed, which Luke noted, with some disdain, was unmade. A tap dripped into a sink in the corner. Some fruit lit up a table by a set of French doors leading out to a balcony, which basked in the heat of the approaching afternoon. He had 25 minutes left.
He threw the bag on to the bed and splashed water on his face, then opened the doors to breathe in the pre-heated air which he somehow hoped, with uncharacteristic anxiety, would blemish the steel of his heart and stop it from operating when it needed to.
The slats of the doors caught the sunlight and cast corrugations across the floor. He peered outside, down at the old square beneath him, where klaxons sounded, then drunken cheers rose, and he winced at the thought of so many competing bodies. He leaned out, and could see the street where Lex had been shot. He toyed with the unreality of the moment, tracing his eyes along the pavements’ miniature dust storms as he mentally flicked through long-lost photographs, some of which he had never seen.
He took a sheaf of papers, including his crib-sheet, from his rucksack. Mysteriously, for he did not remember packing it, there was a hard copy of his wedding photograph. Its corners were now curling, in a perverse mockery of the happy expressions contained within it, and he cast it on to the bed. With renewed energy, he quickly fixed the telescopic sight to the top of the gun, and scoured the roads beneath him.
Of course, he now could remember it as it happened, like old photographs being handed to him one by one. There was the pop of the starter rocket, though this time Luke could take his time to enjoy seeing the bulls rattle towards his mark from a distance. They came like thunder, falling out of the cracks that contained them, shooting forward and lurching to either side, sending smiling people on to their backs. Occasionally, Luke observed a man taunting an animal with a stick, attempting to get it to rejoin its friends, or leave a frightened tourist alone.
Chatter and excitement pulsed towards him in unrelenting waves. As he locked in again, he saw his younger self in the streets below. Young Luke was instantly recognisable by his running style; he sped up, slowed down, then sped up again with surprising forgetfulness regarding his physical limitations. From what Luke could tell, his younger self was taking the race much more seriously than those around him, and for a moment, the faces of both Lukes were thrown into coarse frowns, for very different reasons, but both directing anger towards the same person. He saw himself halt, and then Lex appeared, more beautiful than he could ever have hoped to recall, and her face lit up when she saw his younger self. She was immediately, obviously, indefatigably in love with him. Luke felt something flicker to life, a tumour which had grown inside him for many decades. He was witnessing a betrayal. He lit a cigarette and attempted to enjoy the show, but there was too much in it - too many memories he now had a burning desire to study, to replay, to accommodate and understand before they evaporated.
Young Luke abandoned Lex. He wandered over to a fence. Lex seemed to cry out, like she was lost, and her face contorted into a bizarre caricature of grief. An old lady stopped alongside her to check if she was OK. Lex nodded, and the old woman put her arm around her. She led her to a shop on the other side of the street, and gave her a flask, which Luke presumed was full of water. She gratefully accepted it. A man resting on the other side of her handed her a black baseball cap which she then put on, pulling it over her eyes, in a seeming attempt to shield her reddening face from the unrelenting glare above her.
Luke played with his gun, again caressing its guard. He saw his younger self with renewed anger. One of them, he or himself, shouted Lex’s name. He loaded the gun. He looked at the stopwatch. It began to beep. He saw himself run towards Lex. Time had melted away.
He traced himself with his sight. He saw the young man pause in the middle of the street. He focused the gun on a patch of wall above Lex’s head. He squeezed the trigger, gratefully. He saw himself pause, and fall to his knees in the street beneath him. And then the bull run melted into the myriad surprises of a distant, long-forgotten controversy. With that, Luke leaned back into the light.

MESSAGE STARTS “ZZZZZ. Are you satisfied with your service? SOULJA is one of the only AWAKENING commpanies offering a 100% money-back guarantee come lack of satisfaction. Call 1-800-MONEY-BACK to claim your.....” MESSAGE ENDS

Morning

2011-01-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

The weather blasted into the glass and threatened to spill the paper on the desk across the room. It was grey, inside, but it had no reason to be, because the lamplight ran everywhere, collided with the day, which fell across the carpet, across the bed, and into her.

She faced me with eyes closed. Her underwear was just visible above the covers and her pale skin neatly dissolved into the sheets. She was definitely getting better sleep than me. I'd awoken in fits since five, and now I'm guessing it was nearer eleven. I still had a drunk on, but it was fading, and the rain made enough noise to stop my slumber. So it was me. But she was there too. So it was mainly her.

The remnants of last night were strewn across the room. The ashtray was spilling over with dog-ends that made me sick to look at. There were cups everywhere, receipts, dirty underwear and socks, the suitcase with red wine spilled on the corner, lying on its side next to my guilt, which was curled up and looking like it didn't want to move.

Carver Beats the Devil

2010-08-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

Reverend White blinked.
"What did you say?"
"I said the woman smiled widely then moved quickly--"
"What---excuse me---what in his name are we all doing here?

Am I wasting my time?"
He stood up. The class shuffled around to look at me.
"I ANGRILY SAID AM I WASTING MY COCKAMAIMY TIME."
"No, sir, no--"
I looked down at my page. I was scanning through it to see what I'd done wrong. Bill, the 42-year-old geography teacher from Maine, smirked. I glanced at Janey. She looked shocked.
"READ IT AGAIN."
My pulse was racing. I couldn't focus on the page. I used my finger like a ruler beneath the line.
"The woman smiled and moved down the hall. She was beautiful. She had auburn hair. She grabbed the handle of the car door. She felt tired. She---"
I heard a loud sigh. I heard Reverend White cough. He looked at me. Some members of the class started sniggering.
"Mdmfmdmff."
I couldn't hear what he'd said. I was in two minds about getting him to repeat himself. He shook his head. He seemed to be spitting his words.
"Submersion?"
I said I didn't know what that meant. Everyone was laughing. I tried to detach myself from it. Like I was in a different room. Janey was staring. She shook her head and then looked back down at her notepad. I kept reading.

I guess I was surprised when she didn't wait for me after class. I wondered what I'd done to upset her. As I moved through the campus I could see her talking to Bill near the parking lot. They were exchanging pleasantries. Bill looked over at me and smiled. I didn't know why they were talking. She'd told me she hated him. She said he looked like a basking lizard in a safari suit. I ran over just as she was about to get in her car.
"Hey, Janey---"
"I don't want to talk to you."
"What? What have I done?"
"You always do this. You insult his name and you pretend nothing's happened. Well I've had enough. You're acting like you've never even heard of 'Elements of Style'. Have you even read it?"
"I have..."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What do they say about adverbs".
"They say you should use them sparingly---"
"You don't fucking learn, do you? You just don't fucking learn."
I didn't know what I'd done wrong. I tried to apologise but she slammed the car door shut. She reached over to the passenger seat, picked up a book and wound down her window to shove it into my chest.
"Read it and then maybe we can talk."

I don't know how long I was in the parking lot. I leafed through the book. I didn't know whether it would give me the answers. I watched the last of the students drive off. That's when I saw him. That's when I saw Reverend White.
To this day, I don't know why I acted like a man possessed. It was something about the way he moved. I waited for him to pass, then began walking behind him. Even then, I could have left it. But I held the book tightly and I pushed it out towards him. Like I said, I wasn't being myself. I could hear him mumbling to himself.
".....they listened....they ate what they could...."
For some reason these words pushed me over the edge. It was like they signified something I could never have. I pushed him in the back with the book. He stumbled foreward and tried to stand up but I kicked him down to the floor with my boot. He swiveled round on to his ass and sat there, stunned, his eyes almost popping out of his head like a cartoon character.
"You?"
He went to get up.
"Don't fucking move!"
My neck muscles were taut, my mouth was dry. My hands were shaking.
"What's come over you?"
"Can't you remember? How you just humiliated me in class? My girlfriend doesn't
even want to talk to me any more."
"I don't know anything about that."
He moved to get up again.
"Don't fucking move!"
I was shouting. I kept shouting. I wanted him to know how angry I felt.
"What the jeepers is wrong with you?"
I pushed him back to the floor with my hand. He tried to struggle. I battered him around the head with the book. He squirmed slightly. He seemed to think about getting up again and then changed his mind.
"What's the issue here?"
"The problem is you fucking humiliated me in front of my girlfriend."
He sighed. He paused and slowly rubbed his head where I had hit him. He looked me over.
"I'm sorry. Some students take to it, some don't. I just find a lot of your words---"
He was unexpectedly silent. He was choosing his words carefully.
"I find a lot of your prose---"
"What are you going to say?"
"I can't say it. I can tell, with you in this kind of mood, that it's not a good idea for me to say it."
"Tell me."
"I find your use of adverbs......just....so.....Swiftian."
A pause. I heard a church bell chime in the distance.
"I can't believe this. I can't believe you're telling me this."
I looked down at my feet. They seemed like they were a mile away. I peered out across the car park. No help anywhere. All these conflicting emotions swelled up inside of me. I ended up dropping to my knees. I'd lost all my strength and I leaned in towards him.
"I'm sorry."
I can't work out whether he'd really forgiven me. Truly. I started weeping. I sat there for half a minute and I was crying with my chin pressed against my chest. Suddenly I felt his arm around me. I was warm. I began weeping into his chest. I was a child. I could feel his breath like a lover's kiss. And he said the following words. I'll never forget them.
"Carver will show you the way."
Undoubtedly the best advice I've ever had.

Bobby Rodriguez

2010-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

"I emigrated to America in a Lincoln," I said. Everywhere around me, people started laughing. Antonio, Gill, Carl, all were laughing. The smoke from the barbecue was getting in my eyes.
"Only you Bobby," said Gill, his stomach hanging over his belt. He tried to turn away to talk to Carl about his pick-up last night - something about a 50-year-old hooker - but I butted in.
"F--f--f--for sure did," I said. "It belonged to my grandpa. He'd bought it off a retired army officer who'd worked the suburbs. Higher class of clientele. When he died, I got it. I got in it, and I drove to New York."
It was beautiful. The ocean. The endless highways. The never-ending sky. Possibilities. Not like now. Standing in someone's back yard, trying to fit in, trying to get noticed. I was short, which didn't help. I tend to stutter my words when I'm nervous. Often people turn away before I've finished.
Following day, I'm driving down second. The traffic is bad. I'm thinking about getting home, my meal for one, maybe some music TV, the radio. I see a hole and I spin off hoping to get to the bridge before nine and floor it towards the water. There's a screech of tires. The boom of impact, of a body hitting someone's windshield. It's my windshield. There's a man lying on the bonnet. I look behind me. There's a woman screaming in the back-seat. I forgot I had a fare.
I run out. I panic. I don't know what to do. The woman has got out, she walks to the other side of the street, says she's going to call for help. I check the man's pulse. Nothing. I pull him off the bonnet and leave him lying on the street. I look over at the woman and she's got her back to me. I know my papers wouldn't bear up under close scrutiny. I jump into the taxi, and I floor it.
I curse to myself as I speed away, shaking my head from side to side. All night I'm worried. I don't get a second's sleep. I almost don't go into work the next day. But when I get there, all the guys are smiling at me.
"You're supposed to drive 'em, not kill 'em," says Gill. Turns out they'd had a call from the woman. She'd noted the registration plate. I swore again, before Gill gestured for me to sit down in his office. "Relax, we covered for you," he said.
"Covered for me?" I guess I'm still in shock.
"Fobbed her off. Said it was unregistered. Sometimes they sell our cars on once we're done; sometimes they forget to update the plates. Said it was city's fault. Said no-one with your name worked here."
"Why didn't she go to the cops?"
"I guess you've got a guardian angel."
He lit a cigarette, began looking through some registration documents.
"Anyone asks, we have a couple of former drivers in the force we can ask for favours."
"Th-th-th-thank you. How can---"
"Here's how. Tomorrow, our boys are going to do an unusual pick-up in the suburbs." He leaned over the desk. Had a twisted smile on his face.
"Sure. What kind of---"
"I'll refer any of your questions to the police authority, if you ain't happy?"
I tell him I'll take the job.
As I walk out, I'm flavour of the month. I get slaps on the back like I've saved someone's life, not taken it away. I'm invited to the next barbecue, out for drinks. People give me cigarettes. Carl gestures me over to the corner.
"You OK for tomorrow?" He's whispering.
I say sure, I don't know what it's all about. I'm so happy I got away with the hit and run I feel like cheering.
"Don't be fucking late." He hands me the address. It's a poor part of town. I'm told to hang out at a cross-roads until the boys turn up.
First time in ages, I relax. I go to a bar that evening. I get drunk. I get chatting to a lady. I get her number. A few whiskies down I climb into the cab. I sleep soundly for the first time in months.
I get to the pick-up half an hour early. I get busy eating a pastrami sandwich. There's an old deli half a block away from where I'm parked. The street's pretty empty. I see three or four people climb out of a pick-up and walk into a building by the deli. The top windows are open. I can hear arguing. Suddenly, a gun-shot rings out. I drop my sandwich into my lap. I try to brush it off and when I look up I see Carl running towards me with a tattered sports bag. He's screaming at me to take off.
"What about the others?"
"Fuck 'em."
I'm pulling away and two of the men I had seen earlier run out of the building. One of them has a shotgun. He begins shooting at the car. I feel the impact in the steering wheel. I duck, instinctively. I look to my right. Carl's head is splattered against the seat. For some reason I remain calm. I should go to the cops. I should go to see Gill. But I have nowhere else to go. I decide to head for the highway. I enjoy the thrum of the engine as I push the stick into fourth and barrel down the street.

Sky Island

2010-05-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

"When you're 21," he said, "that's when you'll officially become an adult. No more messing around, no more time off, a job, maybe a nice boy, some responsibility. You can't run away from reality for the rest of your life. Some time it will eventually catch up with you".

I feel like I am underwater. I am standing on the platform and I can feel the wind, I know it's making a lot of sound, I know I am wearing sunglasses and can see that there is a white plain ahead of me, as striking as an aeroplane wing, reflecting the sun's rays. It makes me feel scared, I guess it's the technology. The fact that one small rivet could come loose and we could all hurtle towards the ground.

I can also see that the girls are arguing. Brown is crying, she's banging her sides like a baby having a tantrum, and then Blond is screaming at her, telling her to calm down, that this isn't going to get us anywhere. The body is there, at my feet, swaddled in a blanket, and it looks unreal somehow, like as soon as I covered it I forgot what it was. I can see that the girls are crying, and I can see Jared, Blond's father's "go-to guy" at the door to the entry tower behind me. He looks unhappy to be there, the wind is blowing his long hair across his face and his sneer throws his features into bold asymmetry. When will I surface. Where will I surface. Maybe I don't want to.

I ignore the girls and use one foot to roughly kick the body towards the edge of the platform. The clouds look unreal, they're at so many different distances it's screwing with my concept of perspective. One minute it reminds me of looking down on Central Park, the trees replaced with rainmakers, the next someone's come along with an eraser and smudged all the edges, taken the tip of their pencil to my concept of reality. There's only one way this is going to end. I want to go home and I want to get this out of the way. I stand there, poised, with my foot upon the body and ready myself for sending the corpse off on the last journey it's ever going to make.

It's not every day you get invited to the 21st birthday party of the youngest daughter of Dan Miller, billionaire Canadian steel magnate, playboy and entrepreneur, just because you happen to be friends with aforementioned daughter, friends of friends even, you just happen to have gone to a couple of the same parties at college and you wind up on the invite list. Miller is one of those guys you grow up reading about, a slightly unreal character who's become so rich he doesn't need to spend money for a purpose any more. He just does it because it's there.

And so he comes up with this scheme, you remember, having flicked through a 5,000 word feature about it in the New York Times, this idea to create a floating bolt-hole in the sky, this insane proposition that involves elevating an oblong of metal the size of a city block above the cloud line for one week every year. He buys an area of the Nevada desert the size of the West Village and he spends 10 years making this God-damn thing, an architectural monstrosity which Miller calls Sky Island but wags have dubbed the Sky Turd, a jet-propelled miniature city that can avoid the weather. It's a platform powered by jet fuel and stabilised by 85 different hydrogen-filled blimps that have embroiled him in a suite of litigation with the state's health and safety authority that is in no danger of being wrapped up before he kicks the can.

So this is it, I read, checking out the schematic pull-out double-page side elevation in my magazine at my dormitory breakfast table. A platform the size of two football pitches which rises above the cloud level for one week a year. It's bounded by two towers, one which he uses for business, the other for pleasure. In the middle is the Water Spoke, a huge spike served by a single elevator from which 15 different water slides swirl around and connect it to various other parts of the platform, which has raised areas and different zones for chill-out, a club area, a huge infinity pool, three bars, a casino, a spa, a see-through platform from which you can bungee down and watch your friends as they reach the rope's limit and try not to hurl up their lunch. Fuck me, man. The whole thing is encased in this UV-protective glass-composite dome or some shit. Like I said, it's totally insane. In a week it uses up the same amount of jet fuel as Belgium does in five years. Miller, however, is a man on a mission. He wants to waste some serious money, and who am I to argue. I'm way off meeting my lifetime Mai Tai quota.

As you'd expect, Blond, I think her name is Scheherazade, though I don't know how to pronounce that so I just call her Blond, is a loose cannon, a misfit, two Pritzker Prizes short of a condo in the Hamptons. Whenever I meet her she's so off her face on whatever she can get her hands on I'm not surprised I've landed up on her invite list. Sure, she can hold a party, but an Ivy League night-time of shots and cocktails is one thing. Miller wants to take it to a whole new level.

Needless to say there are limos to JFK then the chartered jet down to Nevada. I start drinking at 10am and by the time the cars take us to ground zero, the research base in the middle of nowhere where the press corps is assembled along with the protesters and locals who for some reason think Miller is going to run for governor, what with being such a boost to the local economy and all, I'm pretty wasted. I pick out faces I recognise in the assembly hall for the safety briefing and before long it's lift off. I remember lolling into my harness, while Brown, she's my girlfriend, so-called not because of her hair colour but because her surname is conveniently actually just Brown, has gone off to speak to some other guy. I'm in trouble. But this night is too important to be corrupted by things like relationships. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the best party I am ever likely to attend.

So I take some time out, I stick to the waters for an hour or two as the warm-up acts begin. The whole Island's been divided up for the party, there are speeches, a firework display, some aqua aerobics in the pool and Miller's having a quiet evening in some corner apparently for the VVIPs before getting a helicopter back to the ground for some business meeting the following day. So Blond is in charge, God help us.

I wander from room to room, there is cocaine in finger bowls in the corners of every area so I help myself to a couple of lines to try to pep myself up. My nose gets numb but I resist the temptation to keep sniffing as I know chicks don't like it when you take too much and I don't want to have a fight with Brown who thinks my whole life is swirling down the drain. The music's a blast, there's some British band I've never heard of in the first room I go to but I know the emcee in the next one so I stick around. Me and my buddies are joining in with that song where the chorus is that barking sound. Man it's a blast. It cracks me up just thinking about it.

Still no sign of Brown so me and the guys dance in a circle in this incredible dancefloor at the side of the dome. There are these huge, 12-foot sculptures made out of fruit, like big dresses, and models walking around, and exotic canapes and you can't see shit outside because it's so dark so all the lights just reflect off the dome's surface and kind of make you feel dizzy, you kind of think coming all the way up here is a waste of time if you can't see outside but apparently it'll look good in the morning. We start doing shots, one of those ones where you have coffee and sugar and mephedrone on your hand and after that we just hit the lines, whatever is floating around, after a while I'm so gone its just drugs, more and more, up my nose and the guys tell me to slow down a bit and I tell them to go fuck themselves and wander off.

And there's this girl in the corner. She' d been looking at me earlier in the night when I was less wasted but seemed to stop when I lost control. I wander over and say hi and I can't really speak and she makes some excuse about meeting her friends, says she wants to go on the slides. She just smiles sweetly and I lose her in the crowd. Now it's just snapshots. Flashes of dancefloor. Snippets of conversation. I remember a band playing at the end of the evening, though maybe I'm just remembering the same one who were warming up.

I wake up and I stink of vomit. I'm behind a sofa in the main dancehall at the base of the living tower. It's an oblong room and obviously as soon as the party finished at around 11am the staff all wheeled out large sofas for people to crash on. I seem to have avoided any of those. I look around at the debris and see a few familiar faces on their backs, dribbling into the crooks of their arms. The floor is disgusting, the equipment from the DJ long since packed up. At the edge of the room a man in his forties wearing a tuxedo eyes up the carnage like he can't wait to get started on the clean up operation. Presumably he's so afraid of waking anyone up because he needs this job and knows what a bunch of assholes he's dealing with. He checks his watch.

I stretch and my head is gripped by acute pain. I rest it back on the floor. What happened last night? I'm still smiling to myself, though, because I must still be high. I move over to the member of staff and ask him for a Vicodin. He signals to me to wait and disappears for five minutes and then returns with a small packet of medicine. I thank him and go sit on the edge of one of the circular beds, which are rising and falling with the collective breathing of 12 young, rich, toned-looking torsos.

I kick aside some debris and go in search of some food. In a hall area outside the main dancefloor a group of waiters are serving up those silver breakfast tray things with cooked English breakfast sausages and eggs, though the room is still empty apart from a collection of hastily-assembled circular dining tables with expensive-looking tablecloths. I take a seat at one and ask for some coffee. I sit there, staring out of the dome, which despite the thick layer of UV-protective coating, the kind of thing you find on sunglasses, is still pretty damn bright. There are some sunglasses on the table, I'm not whose they are, but I slip them on and nurse my coffee.

The first stabs of paranoia pierce through my drunkenness. The hangover is on its way. I remember cornering the girl at the side of the room and her looking angry, I'm not sure why, and she's pointing at her drink. She's saying it's been spiked with a load of shit. I laugh and tell her it's ridiculous, goes the memory, but now I'm not laughing. I hurl my head into my hands with shame and despite the Vicodin manage to install an unpleasant crick in the back of my neck. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing I would do, when I'm drunk, but I was out of control last night. It scares me the way a stranger adopting your body for an evening would. What am I capable of?

There's a rustling and the beginning of some kind of commotion at the edge of the room. Some of the staff, who are all dressed in black, are talking into their walkie-talkies. There' s a girl I've not seen before and she's collapsed on the floor, she's crying, her mascara is running down her face and from the way they're talking it looks like they want to find Blond. As one of these rushed-looking guys runs past I ask if I can bum a cigarette and the guy gives me the whole pack, puts his hand on my shoulder, tells me it's going to be a long day and I say "tell me about it, buddy" this hangover's a doozy, one of the worst I've ever had.

Blond arrives in the room shortly afterwards, she's pissed at being woken up, she's only had an hour's sleep and she's swaying from side to side, she's clearly still wasted. Two of the staff are talking in hushed tones and I can hear from where I'm sitting that she's slurring her words. Occasionally her voice breaks into a shout and the people she's talking to are having to earn their pay cheques. Jared, this enforcer guy, comes in to calm her down, he's the only guy she'll listen to and she stamps her foot, sinks to her haunches and tries to light a cigarette. The lighter isn't working and she hurls it across the room.

I finish the coffee and the caffeine hits me like a car; I remember the speech her father gave the previous evening, in my shortlived period of clarity when I wasn't ramming crap up my nose, how he was saying that he was proud of her, how one day everything would be hers. I remember the look on her face, that smug look of overprivilege tempered with insane levels of beauty. Even then she was wiping white powder off her nose and squirming her shoulder into Petey, her model boyfriend who in my eyes is around seven feet tall with disproportionately few brain cells.

Suddenly the girl who's crying on the floor takes her protestations up a notch. I light another cigarette and it isn't until I've taken two drags that I realise she's pointing at me. She's crying "that's the guy, that's him" and before I know it she's slapping me in the face. She tries to knee me in the crotch but I'm on my feet and I'm holding her forearms and she spits at me, the crazy bitch. She's being held back by the staff and then Jared grabs me my the collar, knocking the cigarette out of my hand in a trail of sparks and I'm frog-marched out the hall, across the landing and into a private suite at the base of the business tower. I guess this is where the VVIPs stay. I can hear Blond on her cell phone behind me, she's trying to change some flight tickets and it takes me all this time to come to terms with the fact that some son of a bitch is actually manhandling me, the fucker is really hurting my arms. I'm just about to tell Jared that he's got a lawsuit on his hands if he doesn't get his fucking ugly fingers off me when I see the body of the girl I was talking to last night on the floor. It's definitely her. I remember the dress. There's a pool of blood emerging from her mouth.

The shock of that's enough to deal with but Jared punches me hard in the ear and I'm thrown on to my knees. The impact makes my head sting, my ears ring and I vomit on to the ground and it's mainly alcohol. He grabs me and forces me on to my feet but my legs give way and he's shouting at me, calling me a punk.

"You fucking rich kid, don't like it when someone says no, do you. You fucking punk".

I'm dribbling now down my shirt and as the excuses leave my mouth I know he has a point. It wasn't the dead body that made my heart sink. It was the sight of her, those isolated memories coming back, the argument in the hall, the distinct feeling that I've been in this room with her before. I've never been so wasted. I lose myself in the memory for a while and smile to myself at the adventure of it all. Jared spots the smirk and punches me in the belly and I buckle to my knees, I'm coughing and heaving but there's nothing left to throw up. The taste of vodka plays across my lips. And white rum. Too much white rum.

Brown's in there now, with Blond, she's not amused, the two of them are buddies and I can tell Brown's taking the heat for bringing me to the party. I hear the words "attorney" and "father" and I kind of blot out the rest. Everyone is on a cell phone now, Brown cuts me an evil look and does the throat-slitting gesture and I go to the bathroom which adjoins the room. Jared throws me a warning look and I tell him I'm just going to take a leak. I go in there, sit on the bowl with my head in my hands for a while. I find the remnants of a wrap of coke in my pocket and take a bump, then look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are bloodshot, there are bags the size of saucers beneath my eyes and my skin looks like paper. I can't stop grinding my teeth. There's dried blood on my ear so I take a towel and use it to clean myself off and then I throw it into the corner of the room.

I go back in to the bedroom. Miller is on the videophone in the corner of the room. It's been hooked up to a widescreen television. He's in a limo in a city somewhere, knowing where his businesses are, downtown Boston I'm guessing, or New York, and he occasionally breaks off what he's saying to speak into another cell phone which he has in his left hand. He's also shouting directions to the driver and every so often he breaks off in loud barks of frustration when it is clear the guy driving him doesn't know where the fuck he's going. It is obvious that this is not the genially proud father who gave a speech the previous evening.

"This room's chintzy," I say out loud as I enter and all eyes are on me. By now Miller has terminated the conversation and Jared seems to have received instructions. He tells me I created the problem, I have to fix it, and the girls' eyes bear down on me. Blond looks totally sober now, she's got one arm across her stomach holding her cell phone and the other hand is holding up a cigarette. Brown looks upset, she barges past me into the bathroom, and I can hear her being sick. I begin to make conversation to make things less embarrassing and Jared tells me to shut the fuck up.

"Hey maybe you should grow up a little." Turns out we have orders.

The deal is, apparently, that the four of us and two other members of cleaning staff are the only ones who have seen the body. Most people aren't awake yet. There is a service entrance at the back of the island which leads out to a clear white space where we're to take the body and throw it off the edge. It's a bit of a head fuck but I'm guessing I'm guilty here, I certainly feel guilty and I don't just think it's the standard drug-induced paranoia which admittedly I suffer from more than most. I sigh audibly and sink to the bed and Jared tells me to stand up, this guy is really beginning to bug me and he says "we're doing it now". So I gather up the blanket on the bed and make it into a makeshift sling. I roll the body on to the blanket and try and thrown the girl over my shoulder but she's too heavy.

At that point Jared reaches into his jacket and pulls a gun. I've got the jitters now, I'm nervous, I'm sweating, I feel like I'm going to be sick and I don't trust anything that comes out of my mouth. I drop the body a couple of times and Jared loses his patience and helps me gather it up in the blanket. He cocks the gun at the door, tells me to get a move on and so I end up kind of doing this bear hug on the body and dragging it out to the hall. We quickly bundle it into a cleaning trolley that those two staff members have gone to get and it takes us about 10 minutes to get to the edge of the platform, through the service door and out on to the ledge, Jared gesturing for me to go first and the girls following.

So that's how I find myself here. The hangover's really biting. I've left the body at the edge. Blond seems fine, she's chatting into her cell, Brown is crying some more. She crouches down to put her head in her hands and Jared is still looking pretty unhappy to be here. He tells us to hurry up. I look at Blond and she sort of grimaces, and frowns, she looks like a naughty schoolgirl again. She calls me a fucking asshole and struts off, her high heels making a loud clattering sound as she walks across the platform, squeezing her breasts against Jared who squirms uncomfortably to let her past.

Brown stands up then looks at me, says she's sorry and she kisses me on the cheek. I suddenly realise why she's so upset. She backs away from me, hugging herself against the cold and I begin to hear the roar of the jet engines, the brightness of the light as I pull off the sunglasses and throw them up and over the edge, not wanting to get too close. I notice them tumble through the air, they glance off the edge of the platform which feathers to a fine point, all smooth metal, painted, varnished perfection.

The platform wobbles. I look around and Jared cocks his head up to tell me to push the body away. He reaches into his inside pocket for the gun and I know that this is it. What a party. What a way to end it all. With this. I don't even think I got laid.

I get to my knees and I kiss the girl's forehead after pulling back the blanket. Her face is warm, she's heated up because we're so high up above the cloud cover, where it's hard to stand still because you think you're going to be blown off. Jared is hanging on for dear life. I pace backwards away from her and work out my run up, my old man's words telling me than in football it's all about the curved run up. If you're going to kick something it's always best to approach it from an angle. I crouch there and my hangover clears, the adrenaline makes me more awake than I've felt in quite a while.

"It's the perfect age, a crossroads, time to make right on the lessons of your youth," he said. "To go out in the world and act as you intend to go on".

I sniff loudly and rise to my feet. I spit on to the floor, then rock back on to my heels. Squinting against the sunlight, with the wind roaring in my ears, I begin to run.

Lost Cosmonaut

2010-05-09T07:35:00.002-07:00

He stretches down the skin beneath his eye. He looks at the pink flesh. He enjoys staring at the arc, seeing the moistness of this secret space. He imagines shrinking and lying in there; drawing the eyelid back over himself like a shroud.

Volodya pulls himself away from the chrome's reflection and looks out of the window. He is travelling at 18,000 miles per hour, he estimates, the perfect speed to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. Not too fast, not too slow.

As he leans back, he presses one hand into the metal and pushes himself further into the bucket seat. The super-cooled surface feels freezing on his palm. He snatches his hand quickly away and looks at the islands of condensation slowly disintegrate.

The Soyuz 1 rolls on its axis. It is over the Black Sea, and it turns its two solar panels perpendicular to the water, which is uninterrupted by cloud cover when seen from the night sky. The sea is expansive, unfeeling, immortal, and unkind, though Volodya cannot see it. Instead he feels his face, and glances up at the controls, wonders whether this will become a tomb, or an angel delivering him home.

A young boy sits on the pavement. It is St Petersburg. He plays with a toy aeroplane. He looks up at the aeroplanes flying above him, and he knows which is which from the sounds of their engines before they come. His mother thinks he is strange and the other boys tease him because of his obsession with flying. When he plays football he is flying. When he is walking to the shops he is flying. When he is sleeping, above all, he is flying.

He cannot see the other boys approach. He can feel the pit of his stomach fall away. He doesn´t want to show he is scared, but he is scared, and he focuses on swinging the plane around more clinically than before. But he can´t launch it into flight again. He grounds it, pretends it is taxiing across the runway, the paving slabs, the weeds, the dirt and the grit on his fingers transferred to his face but not to the clean aluminium of the plane's fuselage or wings.

They come over and the biggest boy stands above him. He doesn't say anything. Volodya is on his own, his mother is too far away to help so he takes what they give him. The punches rain down on his head, on his ribs, on his face and he takes it because he knows what they do not. He knows that one day he will fly among the stars and their blows will be as insignificant as the dying movements of a small insect, though probably not one that flies.

They leave him, prostrate and bleeding on the pavement. The blood mixes with stone, the grit is in between his teeth, his head feels boiling hot and it is not from the sun that beats down from a clear blue sky across which a Tupolev Tu-154 is slowly charting its course. He cries, but no water escapes. His body heaves. He runs inside and up the stairs, up another flight of stairs and into the attic. There is a wardrobe. There are a line of tin cans. He takes a knife and carves out a section from one of them, a rudimentary propeller, and he bends it into shape then leans out the window and releases it. He watches it spiral to the ground. As it lands a woman with another small child walking past stops in her tracks and they look up at the window.

Voldya tries to message mission control. One of the solar panels has not properly unfolded. He is without feeling, though, he is not fearful. He lets the training take over. Any anxiety he may be experiencing is perfectly normal for a cosmonaut in the final stages of landing a spacecraft and should be expected. The relaying procedure with the Soyuz-2 will take place another time, now. They were due to dock with him, were due to rescue him, in fact, but since that promise 10 hours previously the plan has been mysteriously scrapped. He will be sent back into space at a later date to complete the procedure.

He runs through a checklist of actions and fires the retro-rockets. A loud banging escapes from one side of the spacecraft and Volodya jolts forward in his seat. He keeps his hands firmly on the controls and focuses intensely upon them. It goes to plan. The spacecraft slows. As it does so its weight causes it to shift on its axis once again. The window turns towards the Earth. Volodya takes a moment to congratulate himself but does not see the Black Sea. Instead he sees a lightning storm above South America. For the first time he feels afraid, as gravity takes hold of his shoulders and drags him towards the Earth.

A boardroom, Moscow, Gagarin and the administrator are there. They are arguing. The administrator is saying that time is of the essence, that further testing is not necessary, that their track record so far is enough to build confidence that all will go well. Gagarin, chisel-jawed and as good looking as the photographs, disagrees, he bangs his fist down on the table but even he isn't strong enough to resist the administrator's will. The administrator reminds Gagarin that he would be nothing without him, that he should not fight battles that are not his, that his own life will be in the administrator's hands again and he would be wise not to interfere.

Gagarin asks Volodya whether he should lobby to take his place. That Gagarin is an asset that their fine country could not afford to lose. But Volodya tells him his training was not just the parabolic flights, the exercise regimes and diets, it was his entire life. Once in space is not enough. Once you have been up there you cannot come back. No one really ever comes back. Gagarin understands. He tells him he is a fine man but Volodya disagrees. He says he had no choice, that it was written from the beginning. That some men fly and some men walk, and the one man´s path will never be understood properly by the other. They go back and tell the administrator their decision. He seems happy.

The spacecraft shudders. The sound is deafening. The heat has hugely increased, it feels as though the seats may derail from the fuselage and food, sleeping bags and tools are falling from their positions, stowed away, and fly across the interior. Volodya closes his eyes. He is in God's hands now. There is nothing left for him to do. The Soyuz is designed to drop to Earth with no further intervention. There is nothing anyone can do any more.

He is over Russia. The spacecraft spins through the upper atmosphere. Gas rushes past its surface, whistling with confusion. How could anyone anticipate this heat, this harshness, the unfeeling, unfathomable nature of the universe? The sky plots its revenge.

He reaches for the radio. He has lost radio contact. He imagines that mission control must be happy with the way things have progressed. He does not feel afraid any more. He is one of the greatest Russians ever to have lived. There will be statues erected in his honour. His wife will proudly tell their children about how great their father was, and one day they will try to imagine what he sees now, what he feels now, what he hears now, though they will not probably be able to. He is lost. He wonders whether the president is aware of what is happening, how he will one day be reunited with him and there will be a ticker tape parade to rival anything the Americans ever managed.

He is in the middle of a lake. He is with her. She smiles at him, she is standing, they embrace, they are naked, they are in an island surrounded by mist, there are rings of smoke around them, blinking lights, but all they see is each other. They are perfectly in love. There is nothing above them and nothing beneath them. They are naked. Their bodies are intertwined. They kiss once more and he is a child, he is a cosmonaut, he is alive, more alive than anyone has been before or will be again. He has seen the world from above and he holds it in his palm.

The pair look up. The starry night is close, it is a blanket within which they swaddle themselves. A lone shooting star spins across the sky, leaving a trail of priceless dust in its wake. The man blows kisses, the lady laughs.

Volodya is thirty seconds from impact. He smiles to himself, happy at the thought of the future. The parachute is released. The Soyuz lurches to one side, and then pirouettes into a spin. Thrown across the cabin, he does not know why this has happened. The parachutes underwent many tests. Crying out at the pain now grabbing his side he feels metal in his mouth and his eyes are full of tears which stream down his face. The shuddering is too intense for him to cope with; he lets out one last, immortal gasp which echoes out of the spacecraft, into the night sky, drowns out the engines and wakes up his wife many hundreds of miles across Russia. She cries his name. The president pauses for a second then resumes signing documents. The administrator puts his head in his hands as the reserve chute entangles with the primary and the spacecraft's spin intensifies.

A snapshot. Two seconds until impact. An empty field soon to be ignited. A dead fly, its wings torn, shedding limbs as it falls. A man holding the sides of a bucket seat, his face distorted with pain, though deep inside an everlasting core shines brightly. The night sky. The ground. The clouds. The stars. An Antonov An-24 flying by, taking passengers back to Moscow. The moon laughs down, the memory of a distant heart-break pasted across its pock-marked face.

Silver Tree

2010-05-09T07:35:00.001-07:00

Mrs Miggins wasn´t helping herself. I said: "You´re not helping yourself". I hollered at her but she wouldn´t budge. She was wrapped around the lower bough of the tree and was holding tight, was totally immovable, she looked almost inanimate though if you looked closely you could see that her breathing was causing the branch to rise and fall with the movement of her lungs.

Then again, it wasn´t just that which wasn´t helping. The news helicopter didn´t help, neither did the group of 20 or so reporters hurling questions at her, or the photographers, mind, or the police, or the members of the fire brigade sprawled across the grass or the man from the police´s special terrorist negotiation squad who was gently trying to coax Mrs Miggins down. But she wasn´t having it. The most we got was a defiant stare over her shoulder which seemed to say, "come and get me if you dare," and dared they did.

Silver trees in the middle of the cricket pitch weren´t in the job description. Trimming verges, yes, making sure the graffiti didn´t scare the infants in the playground or carry obscene messages, making sure the paddling pool didn´t get too clogged up with leaves, these were all fair uses of your time. But when a tree sprouts up in the middle of the cricket pitch, what do you do? What do you do if it appears as a sapling, and your boss tells you to get rid of it, and you try pulling it out, and it won´t move? What happens when as its growth seems to accelerate, you manage to dig it out and then two days later another silver tree appears in its place? Or if you put down a metal plate to stop anything at all from growing there and the same tree grows again just a few metres to the left? I´ll tell you what it means, my son. It means problematic times. Problematic times for all.

And then it gets under your skin. There´s no doubt it´s a majestic tree. It´s so thick with leaves you can´t see the top if you stand next to its trunk which seems to ooze this thick, silver resin, which if you rub hard enough stains your hands and won´t come out. It´s handy that there are these low-level branches which allow you to climb up around the trunk, if you´re careful. You then work your way up through the branches, it´s easy. "Here, there´s a handy place to stand," you think to yourself, then you look up, and it´s strange how the light filters through the upper leaves, a million reflections, it´s almost too bright to look at. But somehow you want to drown yourself in it. Climbing up, through these silvery leaves, you want to join with the brightness, it´s weird, you want it to penetrate you, clean you, show you where it´s from.

I suppose that´s why I got into trouble. It had appeared, you know, fully-grown overnight, and I´d started my shift early the following day. I guess I wanted to be the first to climb it. I mean, why not? I´d gone to all the effort to try to get rid of the damned thing. Now it was here to stay, it owed me. The park owed me. So I ditched the shovel, placed my hands against its silver trunk which was sticky yet shiny, and held it close. I didn´t want to lose my balance. And I gripped it and swivelled my way around, stepping upon one small branch at a time, pressing my head close and breathing it in. It smelled rich, acrid, almost intoxicating, I got a high off it, I'm not going to lie to you, and my legs went to jelly. But I kept going. I wanted to reach the top, stick my head out of the canopy, break through these thick, metallic, brittle leaves, which when you touched them fell off immediately, like they were disgusted by you. Once they were sullied by human touch they lost all interest.

So I went for it, leaves shelling out behind me, falling all over the place, making a thick carpet on the ground, I noticed, though looking down made my head worse and my legs quiver. What I didn´t expect was getting to the canopy and taking so long to push myself through. I don´t want to do down my climbing skills which are very proficient, I´ll have you know, but when I got up there it felt slightly like those leaves were suffocating me, pushing their way into my mouth, tickling my neck. It was horrible. I had to give up, I began to panic, couldn´t see my feet, and I knew I couldn´t have got down if I tried. So I jumped.

Anyway, I got lots of cards, from the warden, the missus was worried sick and the kids weren´t too happy either. They cordoned off the tree and they said they were going to bring the bulldozers in after that, seemed like an overreaction, but I wasn´t bothered, I got some time off work, the leg was in a plaster cast for a few weeks, and I wanted to get back to doing what I do best. Leaves, verges, clearing out the swimming pool. The kids all had a go on the plaster cast, signing their names and the like, and apart from a few abusive messages on the leg - boys will be boys - everyone was very nice about the whole affair.

It was the night before I was due to return to work that it all kicked off again. A couple more people had decided to climb up the tree, don´t know what they were thinking, and they only went and fell out of it, it´s typical. Said that the branches gave way underneath them, that they had wanted to climb it, see what it was like, wanted to be a part of this beauty, make it belong to them and the best way of doing it was to conquer it, like, to climb up it and see how far they could look out the top, I guess, somewhere high enough so they could see what else they could make theirs. We had a broken collar bone, another broken arm and a broken leg, it was getting stupid. I got on the phone to the council and said "you´ve got to bring this thing down". The kids were using the tree as a wicket and the batsmen kept on running into it. We were getting more concussions by the hour. What was it about this tree that made people what to hurt themselves? "This is getting ridiculous," I said, and I meant it.

So that´s what brings us all down here at the break of dawn. We thought we´d cleared the area the night before and no one knows how Mrs Miggins got on to that branch, or who tipped off the press. Most people thought the old dear had trouble getting up and down the stairs at the best of times and here she is, holding off the bulldozers. The drivers are getting impatient. I can see the guys smoking, fidgeting, wanting to get going and they don´t want some sort of time-waster doing all this nonsense. They´re muttering that if they rev up their engines and drive at full pelt towards her they´ll get her to move. Every time the negotiator goes near her she starts shouting "murder" at the top of her voice.

Anyway there they go, the bulldozers, churning out smoke into the atmosphere, Gary´s squinting into the sun behind the wheel of the first one and he´s got a fag hanging out of his mouth and his moustache is bristling with the irritation of the whole thing. Mrs Miggins´ body seems to be shaking, she knows something's up. She´s craning her head, it´s obviously a lot of effort all that strain, looking over her shoulder, and when she sees these metal machines bearing down on her she lets one arm go and the whole crowd gasps. The bulldozers stop. "Come on love," shouts Gary, who wants to get home and have his lunch. But Mrs Miggins hugs the branch even tighter. She mouths something, but no noise is escaping so she´s licking her lips to shout something else and the reporters have got their pens poised over their notepads.

"Over my dead body", she screams.

Over my dead body. Some people.

We All Need Space

2010-05-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Alf sat at his chair at his desk in the shed at the bottom of the garden. It was quiet. He liked it down here, more than up in the house where his wife created battle noises with her mouth and the dishes. Here was OK. It would do. You could work here, you could think, you could take control of little things and not have a shapeless feeling of guilt hang over you like a death threat.

You take pains to make places like this your own. You pick and choose what's near and what's important: the pictures of things you like, the places that maybe you might like to be if it was in any way financially realistic, the tools, like pens, and spanners and soldering irons which can turn minutes into hours and hours into days. When you knew you had everything to hand, that's when you knew you were happy. Time to do something with all that time.

The radio transceiver sat there, impassive, daring Alf to switch it on and do something with it, make it happy, give it the things it needed to be complete. Some attention would do. It wasn't a difficult battle. Alf switched on the transceiver, looked over the rest of the radio equipment and began flicking through some articles in magazines, part of the stack which he kept by his desk but never really read. He tore through them, looking at the pictures. Each page turned like a hand-clap, a palpable achievement.

After an hour, Alf turned his attention back to the radio. He heard French voices, he guessed, then German, then other languages which he didn't know. Some sounded professional, others were clearly amateurs, people like him, people with lots of time on their hands, a microphone, a transceiver and amplifier, a shed at the bottom of the garden, a place where things were perfectly to hand. Even then, though, they didn´t have much to say. He switched on the microphone, cleared his throat, and began to speak a series of short, stuttering sentences. "This is Alfred Trumpet, of long---" he referred to a series of coordinates that he'd written down on a pad, "----of London and I am extending a peaceful greeting to anyone who may be listening. I mean you know harm."

He would stay there silently for a while, but maybe because the settings on the radio were faulty, he didn't know, people never really seemed to get back to him. It was like spending time with his wife. A lot of effort and not much back. He reflected that this was not an ideal state of affairs for leisure time.

Later that evening he was ready to pack up and head back at the house. He felt a sense of foreboding, the feeling he always got when it was about time to head up and kiss Elsie on the cheek and get no response and then settle into a shallow groove beside her until morning. He came to the end of the notes he was making in the margins of an old newspaper when something caught his attention. He didn´t know what it was, or where it was coming from. It seemed to be an outside noise.

He got up from his chair and approached the door to poke his head around it. Maybe it was a fox, something had made a sound, he didn´t know what it was, and it was troubling him. He stood in the open air for a minute, caught off-guard by the brightness of the stars and the cool, compelling nature of the breeze, then returned to turn off the radio. And then he heard it for the first time. He heard it properly. It was like someone was holding up a picture in front of him and pointing at it, smiling, gesturing, explaining, making him look at it and appreciate it like a work of art that he´d not previously understood. It was subtle, but uplifting. It gave him hope. It was just two syllables. But that was almost enough.

"Boom boom"

Just that.

"Boom boom"

It was coming from the radio. Alf leaned in and turned up the volume.

"BOOM BOOM"

Alf didn't know what it was, but he could probably guess. He made a note of the broadcast frequency, turned off the transceiver, walked towards the house, looking up at the stars one last time before retiring for the evening. For the first time in months he pulled the covers up over a smiling face when he kissed Elsie goodnight and started to dream.

****

The following morning Alf was at the shops. He was getting milk, he was saying hello to the very nice shopkeeper and he was picking out some food. He heard it again.

"Boom boom"

It was coming from the cheese counter. Alf walked over and there was a pleasant-looking lady there who asked him what cheese he would like and he couldn't answer because he was too busy working out where this sound was coming from. It was loud. It must be there. He asked her whether she had a radio out the back and she said "son, you aren't one of those Jimi Hendrix fans are you" and they laughed although Alf could only manage a half laugh. It was a half laugh because he thought he might be going mad.

"Boom boom"

"Boom, boom," said Alf, repeating it to himself, as he got home and saw that Elsie was taking a piano lesson. He rushed upstairs and pulled on his pyjamas, climbed into bed, to shelter beneath the covers.

"Boom boom"

He put his hands over his ears but the sound wouldn´t go. It just stayed. It kept getting louder and Alf didn't know what to do so he got out of bed, ran down the stairs, past the plonk plonk of the piano lesson, out the door and ran down to the shed. He turned on the radio again. It just produced static sounds. He turned it up to full volume and held the speaker up to his ear but could still hear the sound. The boom boom. Always with the boom boom.

He ran outside to the opposite end of the garden. He pushed the lawnmower out of the way and picked up his toolkit. He stood there, holding it for several seconds while deciding whether this was the right thing to do. He grabbed a hammer. He rushed back into the shed. He placed the radio on the floor and then smashed it with the hammer. The impact hurt his wrist. Up in the house he could hear the sound of piano scales but the radio cracked and its pieces splintered across the room, an extensive clean-up job and not one that he fancied. And then the noises stopped.

Elsie corned him that evening. She was complaining that since they'd both retired she was the only one bringing in any money, that he spent all his time in the shed, and she didn't know why, it was becoming frustrating for her and all her friends were asking questions. It wasn't healthy for a grown man to spend so much time on his own. He said he agreed, but it was important, and she said "you know what' s important" and she reminded him that his grandson was doing a journalism degree and it was important that Alf helped him out once in a while. He asked how he could do that and she said "maybe show an interest". And he said "how" and she said "well take him down there one evening and show him what you do, he's back in town next week".

And so he did. He opened the door wearing brown slacks and a miserable expression. The lad had an earring, he didn´t know how long he´d had it, and it was obvious he didn't want to be there, that his grandmother had made him. None of this was said explicitly, of course. It was just something the two men knew. So they had a cup of tea in silence while the boy looked out the window and then they made their way down to the shed.

The boy took out a pad and asked him about the history of being a radio ham, he said it was for the university paper. Alf tried to sound enthusiastic but he knew his grandson wasn't interested and he wasn't interested either. He'd not got a new radio anyway. He thought he´d do something different. He wrote down a question on a piece of paper. It said: "What if I told you I´d found an astronaut?"

The kid laughed, a low, hoarse laugh, and then looked at him as if he was mad. "You can't be serious," he said. Alf said yes, he was deadly serious, he'd found evidence of an astronaut in space that no one knew about, not even the government and that he probably shouldn't write it in his article because it would get them both into trouble. At this point the boy became interested, asked Alf all sorts of questions, like where was the astronaut now and how fast was he travelling and how did he manage to find him and Alf said it was very rare but that it was one of the proudest moments of his amateur radio career. One day, he said, smiling and pressing his hand into the boy's shoulder, "you might be a ham like me too". The boy smiled. He put away his pad, said he'd seen enough, said he was grateful that his granddad had spent so much time explaining how things were to him but that he had to get the last train back and would he mind if he left. Alf said "no of course not" and said goodbye with a proud slap on the boy's back.

The following day Elsie told Alf they were having a dinner party that evening. Alf wasn't sure he remembered her telling him this but Elsie said she had explicitly told him "seven or eight" times and why couldn't he remember his memory was appalling and there were too many noises rushing around his head maybe he should get it checked out and he said no, it wasn't appalling it was just her instructions were confusing and they had an argument. It ended with Elsie saying he shouldn't say anything, least of all about the radio because people found it boring, they were only humouring him and he said he disagreed but if that's what it took to get her off his back he'd go along with it.

So when the doorbell rang Alf was down in the shed. He was reading magazines, flicking through them page after page after page, quicker than before, not reading the articles but looking at the pictures, sometimes for half a second so that when he went to the next page he couldn't remember what he'd been looking at before. He heard the doorbell ring and ring and ring and the house was filling up and he went back and stood in the hall with a fixed expression on his face, a kind of half smile that was saying nothing and everyone remarked on how nice the house was, how beautiful it was and Alf could tell Elsie was very happy.

They had drinks, then chat, then dinner, then more drinks. Alf said many things and people laughed, said he was funny, said he was eccentric and how Elsie do you cope and she rolled her eyes as if to say "with difficulty" though Alf knew she hated it when he was eccentric and he would be in for it when they all left. He kept drinking though, and spurred on by how happy he was making everyone he began talking about the astronaut.

A hush suddenly fell across the room. People tittered at their spouses, some looked down at their plates and one feigned interested, said that was fantastic that he'd found an astronaut and Alf, slightly confused about the reaction he was getting said, well, yes, it was quite an important find and not one that he took lightly and he knew there was a lot of responsibility that came with it. He just needed to knuckle down and work out what he could do.

Elsie excused herself at this point, she'd been having trouble with her digestion and she walked away from the table and into the kitchen. The guests seemed to start enjoying themselves again and they were just tucking into the cheeseboard when the doorbell rang. Elsie came back, said she was confused, she said all the guests were there and everyone laughed politely and said it was no surprise people wanted to come, this was after all the place to be and she turned around and she went to the doorbell and then made a loud gasping sound. She shouted for Alf to come to the door.

There was a lot of light at first so Alf couldn't quite make anything out. He could just see the blurry, black outline of his wife and she seemed to be moving in slow-motion, or at least her edges were being pulled away from her centre and there was lots and of lots of heat. Alf moved to the door but felt like he was being sucked through time like his legs were not working like he was underwater or in a dream or somewhere else. He got to the door and a strong wind started blowing through the house, it swept through everything, one of the pictures on the wall fell down and the door to the dinner party blew shut behind them. Alf heard a voice, "it is me," it said, but Alf wasn't sure whether it was really there or not so he asked Elsie and she said she could hear it too but she was shouting because the wind was so strong and she couldn't really do anything about it. And then the light went away. There was nothing there, except their grandson, he was walking towards them, he explained that he couldn't catch his train and had been staying in town but asked if he could stay there, he knew they had guests but Elsie and Alf looked at him and then at each other and then they laughed. They embraced each other and for the first time in years Alf felt happy.

They are lying in bed. Alf is reading an amateur photography magazine. Elsie rests her head on Alf´s chest. "What was that thing," she says to him. "I don't know," he replies. "But I do know we shouldn´t tell anyone about it and I'm certainly going to be getting a different hobby".

The Bridge

2009-11-07T16:31:00.000-08:00

"Hurry," shouted granddad. He turned halfway around, eyes facing the floor, using his peripheral vision to catch Billy and I punching each other in the ribs.
"And cut it out."
I smirked. We kept quiet. I threw a sideways look at Billy and pushed out my lower lip, staring ahead, like I was following the old man's orders. Billy laughed, wiped his nose, started kicking grit.
The sun was low. As we moved, barrels of light shot out from the houses' edges, then spread down their flanks. I let the lights blind me, then disappear. They left streaks across my eyes. I threw my face up into the cold. The wind buzzed into my forearms and made them burn.
We were headed to the salt-marsh. The old man often read about nature, though he'd not shown much interest in it until last Christmas. That was when I'd bought him the Usborne Encyclopaedia of Nature, as a joke. For lack of anything else, it had become one of his favourite books. That and some book about birds he had stolen from the local library. He mostly read those two, knocked back scotch with ice, and sat in his armchair, the one which molted fabric like flesh. I didn't want to be here, I didn't want to be walking with Billy, but at least I could avoid being there.
He toppled forward into steps. A hundred metres down the road he would buckle. He usually wore this forlorn expression. Every time he made a clean step you felt like cheering. I kept one eye on him, the other was on Billy, behind whose back I was doing the international sign of the wanker.
The path widened. Whitewashed cottages gave way to low stone walls hemming tiny yards, then rushes blanketing the hillside down to the marsh. The wind blew harder. We took a rest by a small, burned out car and granddad handed Billy and I carrier bags. We changed into our Wellies in silence. Granddad made a couple of grunting sounds.
"Where are we going?", I asked, trying to suppress the annoyance levels in my voice.
He looked back. He pressed his finger against his lips.
"Patience."
The hillside ended. Rushes covered our legs in a fine layer of dew. The soft earth crumpled underfoot. As we walked, Billy lit a cigarette from a pack he'd stolen out of his dad's pockets. He helpfully exhaled his first drag into the wind. The breeze scooped up the smoke and delivered it into my face. Codger turned around. He asked Billy to put it out.
Billy complained. He looked at me for support, but I just shrugged, so he took a final tug and pressed it into the sole of his shoe. He waited for granddad to move on before flicking the butt into the undergrowth. We ran to catch up.
"What's that pops?"
"I hope we're not too late." He took a swig from a hip flask and pulled his woolen scarf up around his mouth.
We approached a wide creek. There was a drop of around five metres from the marsh to a thick layer of mud which extended to a shallow shore. The creek water nervously lapped against it. The surface didn't look solid.
Granddad asked us to help. We stood either side of him and put out our arms. The old man grabbed my right and Billy's left and slowly lowered himself down. Immediately after placing one foot on the unstable surface beneath him, he swiveled round and toppled gracelessly into a sitting position. His cheeks blossomed with anger. Billy raised his eyebrows. Granddad took a moment to compose himself before wearily pulling himself to his feet, one soggy knee at a time. He walked over to the lip of water and peered down. I punched Billy on the arm and we both jumped down to join him. I went to stand by granddad. Billy stood staring at the sludge further back, before walking up the waterfront, biting his nails.
"It's too dark." granddad cursed. I squinted into the rapidly-approaching night. The creek was maybe 40 metres wide, a dark, deep, green scar that cut past our home town to the left, then out to sea. Granddad peered at the opposite side of the water, where grass scored with the faint chalk line of a road ran over a hill.
The old man fired up his torch. He looked down at the water. Billy had found a traffic cone some way off along the mud layer. He picked it up and muttered into its apex, converting his voice into a low boom. "This is reality calling," he mumbled. "Your old man has lost it." Making sure granddad couldn't see, I gave him the finger.
"Ah," granddad gasped. He pulled me in toward him and he gestured at the water. There was a strong smell of alcohol, and I recoiled slightly, but he put his arm around me and switched off his torch.
It took a moment. There was something happening in the water. Small patches of phosphorescent light were glowing blue. Granddad picked up a stick and passed it through the liquid. As he moved the branch, it left a bright, luminous trail in its wake, a wiggling tadpole's tail, flickering light blue patches giving way to darker blue giving way to black.
Billy walked over. "Wow," he said, sarcastically. He asked granddad whether he could have the stick. With some reluctance, the old man handed it to him and I dreaded what would follow. "Thanks," Billy said, before immediately throwing it aside, grabbing a rock the size of a tennis ball, and hurling into the air. I grimaced as it landed with a huge splosh. A purple flower briefly blossomed from the stone's entry point. Phosphorescent needles surfaced, then dived.
Billy crouched and grabbed another piece of wood, maniacally slapping the surface of the water, turning around to us with a crazed look of gritted teeth and wide eyes. Granddad turned towards me, exasperated, and turned his torch back on. He suddenly seemed to notice something over my shoulder. He took another swig from his hip flask. "There it is." Around five metres away were two metal trusses, reinforced with crumbling concrete at their base, emerging vertically from the mud layer. We hadn't noticed them when we'd descended. Reeds grew around them like unkempt whiskers, but the passing torchlight made them glisten.
"What do you know about bridges?" granddad asked. I looked at Billy. He let his mouth drop half-way open in mock-disinterest.
"They tried to span this river, 25 years ago," granddad said. "It took a huge team of engineers." He held his hands a metre apart to try to demonstrate, then pressed his lips together, straightened his back and dusted the right arm of his jacket. Billy lit another cigarette by cupping his lighter against the remaining wind. Granddad shook his head. Billy put out the palm of his hand in anticipation, twisting his head before expelling smoke, which fluttered in the torchlight.
Recognising our disinterest, the old man shook his head, looked down, placed his rucksack on the surface of the mud and removed his Thermos and two cups. He poured coffee for me then him, which he topped up with a tot of whiskey from his hip flask.
I looked at Billy and shook my head, almost imperceptibly. Billy ignored me. He put his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and it hung there. He cocked up his chin, and ash fell from the end of the cigarette on to the front of his jumper. He rubbed it in with his forefinger. He hacked up some phlegm, moved to the edge of the water, and gobbed into the creek.
Granddad got up, downed his drink in one and moved back to the water's edge. He bent down and picked up a handful of small pebbles which he lobbed up into the air. He seemed fixated by making little purple ripples. He waited for the water's surface to settle before setting another rock into motion. From several feet away you could hear him wheezing, loudly. He swayed from side to side. I quickly finished my coffee, burning the end of my tongue. Granddad coughed occasionally, breaking the rhythm created by the sound of stone hitting water.
Billy looked at me. He smiled. I was bored, and the old man looked like he wanted to be left alone, so I cocked my head at Billy and scowled. We didn't say much and started to walk back towards town along the mud. After we'd travelled around fifty yards we started fooling around, breaking off reeds and whipping each other in the head. Suddenly remembering granddad I looked back and saw what appeared to be the rough outline of a figure lying in the reeds next to the marsh layer. I started to move back but Billy caught my arm. He handed me a cigarette and we shared it, sitting on the mud, watching the last remnants of day descend.
After half an hour Billy said he needed to get back. We got up and started back to see what had happened to granddad. My feet felt heavy along the way as they stuck and de-stuck from the mud and when we found granddad I swore under my breath. He was half asleep in the mud. He'd rolled over on to his back, covering his jacket in dirt, and I could see his shirt was drenched in booze. He mumbled, fitfully, like he was dreaming things. I don't know what. I leaned down and shook him roughly by the shoulder.
It wasn't getting any earlier so Billy and I pulled the old man to his feet. I cursed again under my breath, thankful that he couldn't hear me, but in all truth this had turned into a nightmare. Billy told me I had to carry him, that he was my responsibility.
"I can't get him back up there," I said, gesturing to the higher marsh layer, half my body sagging down with the old man, who was kneeling next to me. It was Billy's turn to swear.
The the end, getting granddad back up there required both our strength. Each time we thought we'd wrested him up - Billy pulling from above, me pushing from below - he stumbled back into my arms, laughing into his shirt. We eventually had to drag him up, Billy pulling him by his arms and sliding him on to his belly.
I managed to get pops to his feet and he vaguely managed to stumble alongside me. Each time he fell down I hoisted his arm back around my shoulder. A couple of times the pensioner dropped to his knees. Once he almost slipped into a salt pan, his leg falling into some random, dark hole beneath us, but I shouted to Billy and he helped me pull him out. "You'll be back in your chair soon, Pops," I told him.
We worked our way up the path towards town, where a street lamp illuminated our path every 100 yards. When we passed beneath a pool of light, granddad's head glistened with sweat. We passed a bench and set him down. He collapsed his head into his chest. His head lolled to one side. Billy shifted in his seat uneasily and we took in the view. Aylesfords' lights twinkled from the other side of the creek.
Billy told me his dad used to work at a construction company outside town. He was made redundant seven years ago. He said he knew a lot about it because he'd wanted a new bike and his family couldn't afford one. He'd thrown a tantrum and Billy's dad had come up to his room one evening to explain. He said his dad was glad he'd left the mill because the construction industry was dead around town. He needed to re-train.
"I told him your granddad used to work in building," explained Billy. "He said not many people talked about that any more, that there'd been an accident, and that he'd never been the same since. He was annoyed. He said the compensation claims had ruined it for everyone else." Granddad's snoring rasped. He dribbled on to his shirt.
I looked down at the floor. The tarmac was flaking away. Black pebbles of tar spilled across the pavement. They looked like tiny ants marching towards me.
I didn't look at Billy. We sat there for 10 more minutes, talking about school, about our families, but I found it hard. Every so often we would stop speaking when we heard the sound of a distant engine. There were broken conversations which drifted to us upon the wind.
Billy helped me carry granddad back up to the house. He said goodbye. He punched me playfully on the arm, said he'd see me at school. Then I was alone, an old man dancing at my side.
"Why's the bridge no longer there granddad," I asked.
I didn't think he could hear me. He seemed as though he was going to stumble to his knees, and I tightened my grasp around his waist. He stared at me, drew back, and stepped away, hesitantly pulling himself to his full height. He looked blank. He drew his eyes much wider, so that I could see clumps of blood vessels clustered into constellations around his irises. He swayed from side to side. He eked out a wonky smile, raising one index aloft. His hands were shaking. "God," he said.
"It was God."
I snorted through my tears.
"That's why the water shines."
The front door slammed. Dan, my brother, wrestled his mountain bike on to its back and began adjusting its gears with a spanner. He hadn't seemed to notice we'd returned. After tinkering for a bit he glanced over his shoulder at us before getting back to work.
"Nice one, granddad," he laughed. "You show him the bridge?"
Granddad ignored him, and silently moved towards our front door. I stood still, for a moment, looking back along the road. The light of the street lamps ended abruptly several metres away. From the height of our house you could see the lights on the other side of the creek winking in the black.
I turned towards the house. Illuminated through the lounge window was the hunched silhouette of an old man, silently shuffling into his armchair. He nodded forward, as if falling asleep, before removing a dirty handkerchief from his top pocket and wiping his nose. He picked up the Usborne Encyclopaedia of Nature and began to read.

The Fate of Modern Man

2009-11-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

"Hello James."
"Hi."
"You know why I've brought you in here, don't you."
"No..."
"Well. Let me put it like this. You know the organisation has been going through a number of streamlining processes, recently, don't you."
"You're firing me aren't you."
"Not necessarily. You know I've always been a big fan of your work and I like your style. You are a great asset to this organisation. But as you know, we have been going through a great amount of economic turmoil, and everyone - and I mean that literally - has had to bite quite a few bullets."
"Right."
"James, I have to tell you, I'm going to have to bite one such bullet now. It's a big bullet. Are you ready?"
"Yes?"
"We've decided to let you go."
"I thought you said you weren't necessarily going to have to fire me."
"And it's been a really hard decision. But we had to make it. We can't keep going along with our heads in the sand. We need to make sure that we are prepared to weather the storms to come."
"OK. Can I just say..."
"And you know you have always been a valuable asset to this company. Do you have any questions?"
"Is there no way you could keep me?"
"Well, no. You see, this all places me in a very difficult position, James. Because, as well as being pushed into these extraordinarily hard circumstances, I need to let you have some graver, more personal news."
"Yes?"
"James, I slept with your mother?"
God!"
"Yes. I'm afraid so. But nothing is happening any more?"
"How did it happen?"
"Well, I say nothing is happening any more but we had sex last night, James. But I absolutely promise you that it's not going to happen again."
"OK, OK. This is all a massive shock to me, that's all."
"Would you like a glass of water?"
"Yes please."
"Well, you can't have one, James."
James looks blank.
"What's wrong with you James. Why so sad? Are you going to cry home to mommy, like a little baby? Well you can't. She's in my apartment."
James is escorted from the building.