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InterText Vol 08 No 05
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InterText Vol. 8, No. 5 / September-October 1998
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Contents
Jane.........................................Peter Meyerson
Amo, Mensa!.................................Rupert Goodwins
Grendel.......................................Russell Butek
Heading Out.................................Adam Harrington
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Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@intertext.com geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
Submissions Panelists:
Bob Bush, Joe Dudley, Peter Jones, Morten Lauritsen, Rachel
Mathis, Jason Snell
....................................................................
Send correspondence to editors@intertext.com or
intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 8, No. 5. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically every two months. Reproduction of this magazine
is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by
itself or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the
issue remains unchanged. Copyright 1998 Jason Snell. All stories
Copyright 1998 by their respective authors. For more information
about InterText, send a message to info@intertext.com. For
submission guidelines, send a message to guidelines@intertext.com.
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Jane by Peter Meyerson
==========================
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When you hear a story, don't just concentrate on what's being
said -- be sure to notice who's saying it.
....................................................................
"Your feet," I say.
"What does that mean?" he asks. He's got this
what-the-hell's-she-talking-about look on his face, so I spell
it out for him.
"That's what did it for me. Your feet. I saw your feet and fell
in love. Get it? You've got beautiful feet, man."
Now he's, like, totally confused.
"My feet? What about my face?" he asks, looking _soooo_ hurt.
"The face was last."
"The face?" Now he's frowning. You'd think I was treating him
like a haunch of beef or something, which I'm not. I'm just
being honest with the dude.
"Okay, your face," I say, firing a bored sigh at him. I'm
getting tired of all these dumb questions. "I started with your
feet, then worked my way up. You didn't have a shirt on,
remember?"
"Remember? Jane, it was the day before yesterday!"
"That's right. So if we just met, how am I supposed to know what
you remember and what you don't? Anyhow, I dug your body, not
that it made any difference since I was already hooked below the
knees." I fell apart with that one. Sometimes I can be pretty
funny.
"Thanks... I guess."
"You're welcome... I'm sure," I say, flashing a sassy smile.
"So? What about my face?"
Geez! Men, the older ones in particular, are so vain.
"Okay. Then I got to your face and I thought, nice, the guy's
face works."
I suppose he finally had what he wanted 'cause he tosses me a
smile, one of those, isn't-she-a-cute-little-thing-after-all
type smiles, and we get it on in a bathtub full of Mr. Bubble.
Lou was thirty-eight when I met him. Guys like him always expect
every eighteen-year old girl is going to be shy around them,
'specially if there's a love/sex thing happening. Well, I'm not
the shy type, and when someone asks me what makes my heart
flutter and my lady bird sing and it happens to be his feet, I
say so. Call me weird, but when Lou opened the door, barefoot
and wearing his shorts and that dopey Hawaiian shirt, I took one
look at those hairless size nines and, well, it made me crazy.
I met Lou through his friend, Sal, who picked me up hitchhiking
on Highway 1. I'd come all the way to Monterey from Galveston,
more than a thousand miles on the road without anything bad
happening. Oh, maybe a few passes here and there, but that was
it. Still, Sal's acting like he's afraid for my life, and starts
lecturing me on the dangers of standing half naked on a highway
with my thumb in the air. Half naked? Man, that really puts me
on edge. It's a hot day and I'm in my cut-offs and, believe me,
there's no more than three inches of tummy showing through my
tank top. Yeah, I'm pretty -- big deal, so are a lot of girls --
and I dig working out, so my bod's in great shape. But I don't
go around naked in public!
Anyhow, it's pretty obvious Sal's got the hots. He asks me where
I'm headed and I say wherever I end up, which is true. Though I
told my ex-beau, Cal, who's living in L.A. (don't you just love
that word, "beau?") that I'd hang with him for the summer, I
don't really care whether I get down there or not. That's what's
so cool about being out of high school and having just one
parent who's usually too wasted to notice what you're up to. You
can go where you want and do what you want. Freedom, man. It's
the greatest high there is.
Well, Sal knows he's got one tired, overheated road rat on his
hands and he figures I need _help_ (which I don't). In fact, the
dude apologizes for not taking me home, if you can believe that!
He just got married, he says. (Why do guys always assume you
can't wait to hand over Ms. Moist just 'cause they're horny?)
Anyway, he tells me about his friend, Lou, who's got a cottage
on the beach in Seaside just below Monterey. He wants to call
Lou and see if it's okay to bring me over. Beach house? I'm
thinking. Oh, yes, nothing wrong with a short layover in a beach
house!
"Save the dime and just drop me off," I tell him. "Guaranteed
he's not gonna turn me away."
Suddenly, Sal gets this sorry look on his face and I just know
he's feeling guilty 'cause he's wishing his new wife was dead
and someone was dropping me off at his house. Later on, I meet
her, Katy, and we get real close right off the bat. It's a big
sister-little sister sort of thing -- seeing as she was
twenty-eight, but still young-looking and pretty and sexy, too
pretty and sexy for Sal to be wishing her dead in front of a
stranger. What is wrong with men?
So Sal drives me to Lou's and leaves, but fast, and Lou shows me
around his house. Shall we talk cozy? It's all wood, with two
bedrooms and an L-shaped living room with a fireplace and a
kitchenette behind an oak bar down at one end plus a wall of
glass looking out at the ocean and a redwood deck around the
whole place. I also notice lots of trophies on the shelves and I
find out that Lou used to race off-road bikes -- the kind
without motors. He still rides ten, fifteen miles every day and
is a definite fanatic about it. But that's why he's in such good
shape, right?
Believe me, if Lou didn't do it for me in a major way, I would
have been out of there before the sun went down. But since he
did, I started thinking, hmmm, this could be a very cool place
to park for the summer.
Lou's such a gentleman, though, it almost didn't happen. I mean,
he makes lunch and we go for a swim, then lay around on the deck
on these big lounge chairs taking in the rays and making small
talk. I tell him about never knowing who my father was and how
my mother back in Galveston's an alky who's been in and out of
rehab and loony bins ever since I can remember. And he tells me
about his business -- he's a manager for some bike company that
used to sponsor his races -- and about how much he misses his
kids who he doesn't see much because his ex moved up to Marin
just to spite him. He even gets kind of teary when he talks
about that part. I feel bad for him and I rub his neck, and he
puts his hand over mine and smiles at me, and next thing you
know we're cuddling up together in his chair, which makes me
think, yes, it's happening for him, too. So you can imagine how
surprised I am when, like an hour later, he says, "Jane, is
there some place you want me to drop you off?"
Drop me off? Whoa, that hurts! Really hurts. I don't like being
rejected any more than the next person. God knows I've had more
than my share of that.
"What's wrong?" Lou says, noticing how suddenly I'm avoiding his
eyes and not talking anymore. I'm thinking fast about how to
handle this situation. Is it my turn to cry? I sure feel like
it. What to do? Get all brave and huffy and say, "Oh, nothing's
wrong, Lou, just drop me wherever"? Or is he one of those dudes
-- I've met plenty -- who get off being put down. That would
call for a burning look and something like, "It's you, Lou.
You're all wrong for me. See ya." And I make my dramatic exit,
slamming the door behind me -- hoping, of course, that he comes
running. That might work. Remember, at this point we've only
been a couple for three hours, so I don't know that much about
him. No question he's the emotional type, though, and I decide
to go teary, which isn't that hard since, like I said, that's
how I'm feeling. Besides, honesty is the best policy.
"Nothing's wrong, Lou," I say, tears rolling. "Just drop me
wherever."
Next thing you know, Lou's got his arms around me and is
pressing my head against his shoulder and we're rocking back and
forth not sure who's comforting who. I guess the rocking went on
a little too long (thank God), 'cause I feel his one-eyed
dolphin swelling up against my Lady Bird like it's going to
explode if it doesn't find a home real soon. And, to be
perfectly frank, I myself am getting awfully tingly upstairs and
down.
When it comes to having real sex, nothing beats real feeling and
that night, our first night together, we had real feeling in
every room in the house, plus in the shower, on the rugs and on
the deck, even on the kitchen counter and, just before dawn, in
Lou's aforementioned favorite, a bathtub full of Mr. Bubble.
The surprise isn't that I move in -- that is, I drop two pair of
jeans, extra cut-offs, a couple of t-shirts and tank tops and my
Army-Navy store ankle-boots into the guest room closet. The
surprise is that I end up staying for almost a year.
The more I get to know Lou, the more I dig him. He's got a heart
of gold and he's great in bed. What more could a girl ask for?
Well, I get lots more. He buys me my very own off-road bike and
on the weekends we pedal over to Santa Cruz, Carmel Valley, Big
Sur, places like that. Every month or so, we take long, long
rides up into the Santa Cruz mountains and camp out among these
humongous sequoia trees. Sometimes Sal and Katy come with us and
sometimes we go alone. In the beginning, I like it better when
it's just me and Lou. But after a while, I'm just as pleased to
have Katy along since I do love doing girl stuff with her --
giggling and gossiping and everything -- which I certainly can't
do with Lou.
I hang with all Lou's friends, mostly outdoorsy types who're
always in flannel, spandex or rubber, depending on which
outdoorsy thing they're doing -- hiking, biking, scuba diving,
mountain climbing, stuff like that. I fit in nicely, too. I've
always been a real good athlete, tall and gangly with fast hands
and fast feet. For three years I played on our girls' volleyball
team and ran the mile at Galveston High 'til... Oh, let's just
say she provoked me something awful, otherwise I never would
have hauled off and floored her. I mean, punching a coach is a
pretty serious offense. Fortunately, there were witnesses who
saw her slap me first. Otherwise they never would have let me
finish my senior year and graduate. I suspect one day I'm going
to go to college, so not finishing high school would have been a
major blow to my future plans.
We eat out a lot, mostly in Carmel and usually at health food
restaurants, 'cause Lou's a nut when it comes to eating right. I
dig Carmel, even though it's a totally touristy burg, so neat
and clean it looks like what I guess a movie set looks like. I
say "guess" 'cause I've never actually seen one. I do recall
reading that Clint Eastwood was mayor there when I was little,
so it could be he got some of his Hollywood friends to spruce
the place up.
I'm not a person who can sit around all day doing nothing 'cept
wait for her man to come home from work. My mother never did.
(That's a joke.) I had to have a job. I was always good at
drawing and making things with my hands. It's a talent I have.
Lucky for me, Lou's friend, Lloyd, owns a jewelry shop in Carmel
and takes me on part-time. I work afternoons, waiting on
customers (I enjoy interacting with people) and keeping the
glass cases free of fingerprints. When he has time, Lloyd starts
teaching me how to make rings and pendants and bracelets. It's
the coolest job ever. Fun, and short hours.
Once in a while Lou goes to Mill Valley and comes back with his
girls, Beth and Meg, four and six, two of the cutest little
darlings I've ever seen in my life. Every time he brings them
down, which isn't often enough for him or me, I spend a long
weekend playing mama and I just love it. Someday, when I have my
own kids, I'm going to give them the childhood I always wanted
but never had.
It does bother me, though, that Lou tells them this ridiculous
story about how I'm a friend of his sister's who staying at his
house while she's visiting California. I know he's not ashamed
of me or anything, so what's he hiding me for? He and Annie have
long been divorced and she's already got custody of the kids.
What more can she do to him? I don't like seeing a man afraid of
a woman.
What really gets me, though, is this stupid saying he tacks up
on the bulletin board in the kitchenette one morning after we'd
been smoking a lot of dope the night before: "The Inevitable
Remains True Even When Ignored."
"Who the fuck wrote that?" I ask over coffee and a bagel.
"I did," he says.
"You make it up?"
"Well, yeah, I did. It's an epigram I flashed on last night."
"Is that a fact? An epigram, huh? Well, quit smoking so much
dope. What's it supposed to mean anyhow?" Sure. Like I don't
already know.
"It means that we can't last forever, even if we don't think
about it right now."
"Says who?" I ask, putting on a fierce scowl.
"It's just the way it is."
"Uh huh. Right from God's lips."
"Jane, you're only eighteen."
"Eighteen and seven months." Since Lou's counting, I figure he
should get it right.
"Whatever. The point is, do you honestly think you're going to
settle down with a thirty-eight year old man for the rest of
your life?"
"How should I know? We've been together nine months and so far
it's been great... Or am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong."
"Then why the hell're you putting stuff like that on the wall?
It sure doesn't help anything."
"It -- it's just a reminder." He can't even look me in the eye.
Now I'm having a flash. "You getting ready to dump me?"
"Jesus, no!" he says. "That's... not how it's going to happen."
I know he means it because his face sort of collapses and he's
looking so sad I'm not sure whether to get up and hug him or
fill the bathtub.
"So you already know how it's going to happen?"
"I just don't see us together twenty years down the line."
"Who thinks that far ahead?"
"At your age, no one. At my age, everyone."
"Well, here's another saying you can put up on the bulletin
board: `Lou's afraid to love Jane.' Period!"
"That's not true and you know it," he says. "But sooner or later
you're going to walk out of my life. I'm just... I dunno... an
experience you're having on the way to growing up."
Whoa, am I getting pissed! Now I'm thinking I'll _drown_ him in
the bathtub.
"Oh, man, that's complete bullshit!" I'm up and shouting. Then I
pitch half a bagel in his face. It's only lightly toasted so I
know it can't do much damage. "You're just scared shitless and
you're laying it on me! I may be only eighteen, buster, but I've
probably seen more life than you have in your thirty-eight!"
"I don't doubt it," he says, wiping a perfect circle of cream
cheese off his forehead. (I do have a great arm.)
Then he wanders over to the window and stares out at the ocean,
real dramatic. He reminds me of that picture of George
Washington crossing the Delaware that's hanging in the
principal's office -- a room I came to know well.
"There's this platitude about how older guys exploit young
girls," he says, looking kind of wistful. "You think that's
true?"
"Well, you don't. Not with me, anyhow. I never met anybody, man
or woman, who pays more attention to what I think than you do."
"That's because I love who you are. You're a fuckin' delight,
Jane." We both crack up at that because we're hip to its double
meaning. "Really," he says. "I've never known anyone like you.
And I'm not holding anything back. I couldn't if I wanted to.
But most people looking at us from the outside would probably
say here's one of those guys who's trying to hang on to his
youth by living with a girl half his age, a guy who's afraid to
engage a mature woman."
"Well, I'm not in this from the outside," I tell him. "So I
wouldn't know how to look at it from there." There are times
when my mind gets real logical. "As for you being afraid of
older women, well, you put in seven years with Annie. Sure you
got those two little honeys out of it. But, them aside, look at
all the heavy duty grief she's laying on your head. Looks to me,
mister, that right about now I'm exactly what you need. Right?"
"Right," Lou says, and it's like the gravity that's tugging at
his face suddenly lets go, and he breaks into this sunburst grin
and snatches his stoned "epigram" off the bulletin board, which
is a good sign -- but not a great sign, 'cause he doesn't throw
it away, he puts it in a drawer. That's like saying, "I'm not
going to flaunt the inevitable, I'm just going to keep it out of
sight." Still, there's nothing better than bringing your man out
of the dumps and into bed for the rest of the day.
There's no denying I have quite a temper, and with Lou it
sometimes did get out of hand. When I look back on it now, it's
clear, embarrassingly clear, that I wasn't nearly as grown up as
I thought. I was doing a lot of what George calls "adolescent
acting out." George is the dude I'm with now, a therapist here
in L.A. It's his idea that I start writing all this stuff down.
He says it'll help me figure out who I am. He just won't believe
I already know. I'm doing it, though, since writing's fun. I'll
straighten George out later on.
Anyhow, back to the temper thing. I don't know why, but it
starts getting worse after my bagel outburst. All kinds of
things begin annoying me. Lou being so tidy, for example.
Everything in its place, towels and sheets nicely folded, not a
speck of dust on any surface, books, CDs and canned food
arranged by category -- fiction, history, biography, pop, rock
and classical, soup, sauce and potatoes, all within easy reach.
The man even spin-dries his lettuce!
Now, in truth, Lou never asks me to do anything beyond putting
my dirty dishes in the sink and he never gets on my case
regarding my sloppy habits. He just takes care of everything
himself -- makes the bed, does the cleaning, shopping and
laundry. Once or twice, seeing him drive the vacuum cleaner
around the living room, I feel a pang of guilt and help out a
bit. But it burns me up inside 'cause I don't see the sense of
doing house work when everything's going to get all messy again
in no time at all -- 'specially with me around.
Look, I know it's not right to fault a man for his virtues, but
watching Lou on his knees sponging my spilled pesto sauce off a
hardwood floor is not a pretty sight. That's the sort of thing
can sure put a damper on a girl's respect.
And it's not just the neatness thing that starts rubbing me the
wrong way. Now there's lots of stuff driving me up the walls.
Like, you ever go eight months without a cheeseburger and fries?
It does terrible things to your body, 'specially if you're a
Texas girl who's been raised on beef. If a person like me goes
too long without cattle products under her belt, she becomes
emotionally unbalanced. It got so crazy-making I had to stop at
Burger King on my way to work to fill up and try and put my
system back in order. But I was too far gone by then. It didn't
do jack shit for mind or body. I'm probably ruined for good
'cause of all those veggies and wheat germ and homeopathic drops
of who-knows-what that Lou kept putting in front of me morning,
noon and night.
What edges me most of all, though, is how Lou never complains.
Every now and then, a little, "Clean it up, bitch, it's your
filth!" would certainly get my attention. Or, "We're doing
(whatever) my way 'cause that's how I want it!" Now that'd be
refreshing -- not that I'd stand there and take it. But, uh uh,
that's not Lou. So, more and more, it's me, the lazy good-for-
nothing, who's doing all the yelling and throwing things and
bursting into tears, while Lou, who's blameless as a lamb and
never -- never -- loses his temper, just smiles and tells me to
calm down, sweetheart, it's going to be all right. Which makes
everything even worse.
It gets to the point where just seeing Lou's face puts me in a
lousy mood, and I'm certain that if I don't do something soon,
I'm going to find myself back on Highway 1 with my thumb in the
air, which I am in no way looking forward to. Underneath it all
I do love Lou... though in a somewhat different way.
Trust me when I say that I deeply, sincerely and honestly regret
that I didn't find the "something" I was looking to do before
the "something" I wasn't looking to do happened.
I did not -- I repeat, did not -- put any moves on Salvatore
Bonafacio! Sure, he was a good-looking hunk, and closer to my
own age. Sal wasn't even thirty yet. And he was a married man! A
newly married man! As to his current status... well, I can't
say, seeing as I haven't been in touch with Lou, Sal or Katy to
this very day. But I hope she's left the bastard.
Not everyone who owns an antique store is gay. Sal's Antique
Mart is just around the corner from where I have my part-time
job, so it's natural that, after work, I hang with him and Katy
for a bit. I mean, they're my friends! In fact, when Sal's not
around I confide in Katy, tell her about the problems I'm having
with Lou. She's real sympathetic and understands how infuriating
it is to be with a man who absorbs everything you throw at him
with a smile.
"A man should at least try to put a girl in her place once and
while, don't you think?" I say.
"I'm not sure I'd describe it exactly that way," Katy says. "But
I know what you mean. You want Lou to give you his honest
feelings. And not just his good feelings. If he's angry or hurt
or depressed, you want to hear about it. Otherwise, it's like...
like he's in this relationship without you. It's got to make you
feel like you're not important to him, or at least not important
enough to share feelings with."
"Exactly!" I say. I respect Katy. Sometimes she has an awesome
fix on what makes people tick.
"Jane, I don't think Lou's aware of this. He's oblivious to how
he affects you. It's just who he is."
"Maybe so. But it doesn't make it any easier."
"Uh-huh. Well, hang in there. Lou's got a lot going for him, and
the two of you have a good thing together. If you believe it's
worth keeping, then get him to work on the bad stuff with you
until it's fixed," she says.
I'm dying to ask about her and Sal, how it is between them, how
they work things out. But something stops me. Also, I notice
that, starting from the day Katy becomes my confidante, she
seems a tad uneasy around me. Sometimes I catch her glancing at
me -- and at Sal, too -- in a funny way.
Still, everything's nice and I'm giving serious thought to
taking her advice about working on Lou when, all of a sudden,
she gets a call and has to go back to New Hampshire to see her
sick mother. (Oh, how I wish that woman never took ill.)
A few days later, I'm telling myself there's no reason not to
drop by and say hello to Sal just 'cause Katy's out of town --
though I'm wondering why I even have to say this to myself. So I
stop by the store to inquire after his lovely wife and her
ailing mother, and right away I see it. It's the same look Sal
had when he picked me up on the highway -- minus the sorry part!
All this time, he's been Sal, the perfect gentleman, Lou's
friend, Sal, the happily married man who, just once, about a
year ago, for ten short minutes, had a raging tiger in his trou
for a stranger on the road but, to his credit, kept it well
under control 'til he dropped her off at the home of his very
best friend. Well, that's not the Sal grinning at me now from
behind a counter full of Early American pewter saucers, one of
which he's slowly rubbing to death with a rouge cloth while
aiming to burn a hole in my face with his bloodshot eyes.
Nosiree. This is Sal the beast -- Neanderthal Sal, all set to
drag his prey into the back room and slam it home. If Sal hadn't
said exactly the right thing, I would have turned and walked
without a word...But he did.
"It must be lonely," he says.
"Beg pardon?" I say.
"Hey. It's okay. Katy told me." So much for confiding in that
bitch.
"Told you what?"
"About the trouble you're having with Lou. I'm sorry to hear
it." Sure he's sorry. It's breaking his heart -- and adding a
yard onto Mighty Joe Young.
"We'll manage," I say.
"I hope so," he says, holding the newly shined saucer up to my
face. "But you don't look like you believe it."
"Any reason you know of why I shouldn't?" I say.
"It's... it's not my place to... to talk about that," he says,
pretending to stammer and turning away like I'm not supposed to
see how much pain the poor man's in. Oh, he is smooth.
"Don't fuck with me, Sal," I say. "If there's something I should
know, I want to hear it."
Just then a customer comes in. "Excuse me," he says, going over
to her. I know he's jerking me around, and I resent it. But,
shame on me, it's having an effect.
"Let's hear it, Sal," I say after the customer leaves.
"Honey, do you think you're going to have any more luck turning
Lou around than anyone else has?"
"I'm not Annie," I say.
"I'm not talking about Annie," he says. "Annie's ancient
history."
"Then who are you talking about?"
"You want a list of names?"
"A list?" I say. No denying it. I'm shocked.
"C'mon, Jane," he says, as in C'mon, Jane, don't be naive.
"You're not the first young girl in Lou's life."
"So what? He never said I was." I can hear a little break in my
voice, not a good sign.
"Okay. I didn't mean to bring it up."
"Bullshit, you didn't!"
"Hey! It's Lou's thing! All right?" It's an eruption, not an
angry eruption, just a passionate and caring explosion on behalf
of his best friend. "No blame. I love Lou. But Cindy, Melanie,
Margo -- all of them under twenty-one -- that's how the guy
keeps his demons at bay. Some men just can't deal with middle
age." He shrugs. "They bed down with young girls."
Whoa. Haven't I heard this before? From Lou? Didn't he say
something about people seeing him as a man afraid to connect
with women his own age so he settles in with a young girl?
Indeed, I did, only he forgot to say how many young girls he'd
settled in with. Geez!
"Uh... how many young girls, Sal?"
"I've already said more than I meant to," he says, shaking his
head and staring at his sandals. (The man has ugly feet.)
Once again, Jane is hurt... and angry. I feel like I've been
had. Sooner or later you're going to walk out of my life. Damned
right!
For the next couple of weeks I take my revenge on Lou with Sal,
the worst lover I've ever known, a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am ape.
After a while, it's feeling more like I'm taking revenge on
myself.
It ends the day Katy gets back from her New Hampshire --
although Sal finds it amusing to continue playing footsie under
the table whenever we have dinner with them. I really want to
kill the bastard.
Far as I know, Lou never finds out about me and Sal, but our
thing goes straight into the toilet after that. Lou gets so
depressed, he hardly talks to me -- or anyone else. Try as I do,
I can't get anything out of him. Sure I feel guilty about
getting it on with Sal, but I feel worse seeing Lou suffer. The
guy is really hurting and he won't tell me what it's about. Our
cozy little cottage becomes the House of Gloom. I wonder if all
the girls who came before me went through this.
After a month or so, I put his "epigram" back up on the bulletin
board: "The Inevitable Remains True Even When Ignored." Lou sees
it and smiles. It's a real bitter smile.
"I guess you're right," he says.
The next day, when Lou's at work, I throw my belongings in an
overnight bag, leave him a note telling him (truly) that I'll
love him forever, and I'm back on U.S. 1. heading south toward
L.A.
Last night, George asks me if i wouldn't mind letting him read
the stuff I've been writing. I give it some thought, seeing as
I'm not certain why he's asking, but end up with a "Sure, why
not?" So he disappears into his study for about half an hour,
comes out and looks at me kind of strange-like.
"Pack up," he says.
"How come?" I ask, stunned, I mean, really stunned.
"Just do it and get out of here," he says. "It's over."
So just like that I'm out, back on the street.
L.A.'s okay, but I hear Maui -- no, Kauai -- is really cool.
Peter Meyerson (peteram@ix.netcom.com)
----------------------------------------
Peter Meyerson spent several years in book and magazine
publishing in New York before moving to Los Angeles to write
films and TV shows, most notably Welcome Back Kotter, which he
created and produced for several seasons. "Not too long ago,
realizing I had squandered much of my working life on dreck,"
says Peter, "I overcame my self-doubt and began writing
fiction."
Amo, Mensa! by Rupert Goodwins
==================================
....................................................................
If inanimate objects could talk -- trust me, you don't want
to know.
....................................................................
The pencil cried as it lay on the table. "Oh table!" it sobbed.
"Ah, table, table!"
The table was made of harder wood, however, and was unmoved.
"Stop that sniveling," it commanded. "It does nothing for you,
tiresome implement."
The pencil dried its point. "I'm a 2B, you know. I smudge
easily. I was made this way."
The table said nothing, but concentrated on having four legs and
being square.
"Table?" said the pencil.
"What now?" sighed the table, exasperated.
"Don't snap," said the pencil. "You know how that upsets me."
"To be blunt," started the table, but that just started the
pencil off again.
"How... how can you treat me this way?" the pencil cried out
between tears. "We're both wood. We've been brought together by
fate, the only two wooden things in the world. You used to
support me, and now...."
The table was getting more than a little fed up by now. "I'm
still supporting you, aren't I?" it said. "You're still here,
aren't you? Why can't you just lie there and be the pencil you
always were? It's pathetic. _You're_ pathetic."
Wailing from the pencil, a low keening as if its little lead
would break.
"Oh, now, now," said the table, which had resigned itself to the
situation and was now thinking of ways to bring the episode to a
close so it could get on with being a table. "Let's just get
back to being an arrangement of objects, shall we? You're a
splendid pencil, there's no reason for you to be so unhappy."
"We used to sketch so well..." sniffled the pencil.
"Ah yeah," said the table. "Thought that was it. And what do you
want me to do about it?"
"Now all I can feel," said the pencil, by now thoroughly off on
one, "are the layers of varnish and paint between us. I'm so
alooooooone!"
Sweet Joseph the hairy-handed Carpenter and all his tools,
thought the table. "What exactly do you want, then?" it said.
"To be together," said the pencil.
"That's daft, as well you know. It's not on the agenda, pencil.
Me item of furniture, you writing device. It's good to have you
around, but only if you stop this nonsense. You don't even know
what you want."
"Do too."
"Well, what?"
"I could make a wish," said the pencil, pointedly.
"Oh, you're more boring than woodworm. Go on then." That'll sort
it out, the table thought.
"Right. Computer!"
"Yes, Pencil?" said the computer, which had been watching the
palaver with a degree of amusement. It had had a feeling that a
deus ex machina was going to be needed, and had got its programs
loaded just in case.
"Grant me my wish? Make me and the table one? Forever?"
"You down with that, table?" said the computer.
"Whatever," sighed the table.
"Of course," said the computer, and hummed to itself for a
second. "Bye, guys. Have fun." With a flicker of lights, it
tucked itself down the modem and vanished into cyberspace,
pulling its peripherals behind it. There was a quiet pop, and
all that was left was the telephone socket on the wall.
"Computer?" said the pencil. "That's odd. Wonder why it did
that..."
"I hope you're happy now," said the table, "scaring off our
friends with your self-obsessed ranting. Although I must admit
that's a weight off my mind. He could be a bit of a burden."
The pencil said nothing. Truth to tell, it was starting to feel
a little foolish.
From out of the socket a shower of sparks whooshed in a
parabola, like fireworks.
"Goodness!" said the pencil.
"I don't like the look of this..." said the table. "That could
be dangerous."
The sparks started to land, first on the floor, but then hosing
out toward where the pencil sat. There was a smell of burning
carpet, soon overlaid with the dry perfume of hot sandalwood.
"Argh!" cried the pencil. "That hurts!"
"Look what you've done, you rubber-tipped fool! Computer!
Computer!" shouted the table.
But it was no good. Within seconds, the pencil was a heap of ash
and the sparks started to play along the surface of the table.
"I hope you're happy now..." crackled the table as the circle of
charred, popping wood grew. Soon, there was nothing there but a
pile of ashes marked out by four smouldering metal casters. In
the middle was a small, blackened metal band, of the sort that
would normally hold an eraser in place at the end of, say, a
pencil. The smoke cleared, and there was silence. Briefly. Then
the metal band cleared its throat, which was most of it.
"Oh casters!" it sobbed. "Ah, casters, casters!" The casters
were made of harder metal, however, and were unmoved. We're not
going through that again, they thought, and so the silence fell
for good.
Rupert Goodwins (RupertGo@aol.com)
------------------------------------
Ex-chief planner of the Tongan manned mission to Mars,
international jewel thief and mild-mannered reporter, Rupert
Goodwins writes about computers by day and behaves oddly at
night. He lives in London, a large post-imperial city set in an
alluvial clay bowl, but doesn't worry about it.
Grendel by Russell Butek
============================
....................................................................
The power of the storyteller is immeasurable. Especially when,
against all odds, the story is true.
....................................................................
I sense that you crave forgiveness. But there is nothing to
forgive.
It is human nature to fight: the wrestling of children, the
squabble of a loving couple, the knife in the back under cover
of darkness, the gleeful murders in full daylight under the
guise of noble war. Heroes and villains, glory and shame, have
passed in and out of our collective consciousness, and they have
held up a mirror. We've glanced in that mirror often, calmly, in
recognition, and calmly we've continued in our ways. Our violent
nature has not changed since before our species came down from
the trees. And yet we dare to call it evil. What nonsense! Is
the lion evil for bringing down the elk? Is the spider evil for
eating her mate? This is merely their nature. And so it is with
humankind.
I was a warrior like you once. Under this doddering remnant of
human flesh lie many memories. Some of the clearest are of war.
I have never sought forgiveness for what I was. I am human and
in my youth I gloried in the murderous nature of humans. As I
aged I gloried in other natures: some love, some politics -- if
you ever wish to be amused, dabble in these two; they are our
most comic natures. I have been...
You tire of an old man's ranting? Forgive me. Over you I do not
have the spell of the ancient mariner over the bridegroom -- but
please stay. An old mind is cluttered with many paths, and I
sometimes detour into overgrown, lost memories to see if
anything worthy can be found there, forgetting that I was with
company on another trail.
I am old, and many of my memories are overgrown, never to be
found again; but within this skull lies one memory which I have
maintained with care, treading it often since my violent youth.
At times I have tried to forget this memory, straying through
other, far distant paths; but all my travels have led back to
it, so I have long since surrendered to its demands and
attentions. My life has been devoted to this memory, so with it
I begin my tale.
A great battle was underway. It was fought within a distant star
system, but that tiny collection of worlds was not the reason
for the conflict, merely the battleground. The real reasons no
longer matter.
I was in a fleet of reinforcements. When only an hour from the
battle, communications with our fighting armada ceased. The
beams went cold, inexplicably so. We had received no orders for
quiet running; we did not hear the feared death cries. There was
just sudden silence. It was a long hour we spent hovering over
our dead receivers, wondering. It is not the domain of warriors
to wonder. Such thoughts are the domain of leaders, not
fighters. We were uncomfortable.
By the time we reached the system we were barely creeping along,
afraid of a rout, afraid of an ambush, afraid of just about
everything but what confronted us. There was no ambush, no
battle, no movement. The armada had been destroyed, but no enemy
was there gloating over their victory. The silent hulks of both
sides drifted about. Once-powerful giants were now shredded
carcasses, celestial flotsam in the inevitable grip of the local
sun.
Tales of dread and terror told in the safety of the gravity
wells, told in all seriousness by the old and laughed at by the
young, came to all our minds amid the scattered bones of
once-great fleets. Ghost stories are told over a fire or a beer,
but they are remembered in graveyards. We, the young, stopped
laughing that day.
The unknown is a terrible thing. It alone can unveil fear in the
fearless. Coasting through that graveyard, we instantly believed
the awful fables. This was not a comfortable graveyard we passed
through, not a cemetery of the battle-slain. No, a field of
death would have been comforting. As gruesome as death may be,
it is familiar. The scene before us was far from familiar.
Even though we recognized some of the mangled forms as ships of
our comrades, among them there were no comrades, alive or dead:
no bloated, bloodied bodies floating amidst the wreckage; no
carcasses pierced and mutilated by the tortured remains of their
ships; no dismembered fragments drifting by with their comet
tails of crystalline blood. Throughout the mass of monstrous
metal corpses, not a single human one was to be found.
In a short time we discovered that there were no organics
whatsoever remaining. The wreckage had been stripped of all
vegetation, plastics, water -- even the batteries and fuel cells
were gone. Nothing living or capable of harboring life remained.
The visions from the horrible tales reared up before us. Grendel
had come and feasted upon the combatants. Grendel, an unknown
terror, a name some forgotten mystic had pulled from an ancient
epic. The newest of those tales were hundreds of years old, the
oldest mere rumors from many millennia past. It was as if an
occasional plague were sent to slap humanity in the face, to
remind us of our distant fall from the Golden Age when humans
were gods and held power over suns. That reminder was vividly
before us again, shaming us from our lofty dreams of power.
Each tale has its own story: The sad demise of some hero, the
final death of some terrible villain. But Grendel feeds on them
all. Always, two great fleets oppose each other in a great
battle -- it has to be a great battle, for two lone ships in a
skirmish did not make a legend -- and always, Grendel comes and
indiscriminately destroys them, leaving never a witness.
The mystery and the legend had come alive before us, and we
would now write our own tales. We could add what had never been
told before. We now knew of the dreadful immediacy of Grendel.
The other stories talked of days or even years before the
battleground had been visited. In our chapter we would bring
that down to a single hour.
When the somber shock in our minds quieted enough for us to
function, we mechanically went about collecting the few
remaining secrets our ships held, and searched for remnants of
the secrets of the enemy. But this was mere fill in our story.
We had one more chapter yet to write.
Our sensors were running wide open, active as well as passive.
Hiding, we guessed, would be useless, so we scattered our pings
in all directions, not wanting to be surprised. We finished our
survey the next day and were about to go home when one of the
spotters caught a distant derelict changing course. Something
was still alive a million miles away. When we got there, we
found more than machinery, but less than a man. His mind was as
twisted and jagged as the wreckage we had left behind. He had
expended nearly the last of his breathable air to deflect his
drift in the hope that we would notice. It saved him, but by the
time we got there he was already suffering from anoxia.
Vacillating between light-headed fatigue and raving lunacy, he
was quite insane, but those of us who saw him knew that it
wasn't oxygen deprivation that had driven him mad.
The official report pieced together from his fractured testimony
was quite bland, of course. He and his squadron had jettisoned
early to surprise the enemy. But the enemy had surprised them
instead with the same thought. They fought their little skirmish
and lost. He was alive with his little environment intact, but
all his systems were knocked out. The victors hurried off to
join their main force and left him to float with the remains of
his friends. All he could do then was watch and, with no
systems, all he had were his naked eyes.
A million miles is a long way, but the combat was a fierce one,
the power of the battle fires toyed not only with the machines,
but with space, which glowed and wavered around the combatants.
As a light-bulb under water, he described it. But then it
flashed brilliantly and he was blinded for hours. When his sight
finally did return, it was the next day. From his distance he
couldn't see anything of the battleground. His signal was simply
the last act of desperation.
That was his story on the official documents, but his pages on
the chapters of our legend were such to grease the fires of
morbid romance. No longer would the tales speak of sad heroes
and vanquished villains. The old tales all spoke of the horror
and the mystery, but those had always been subsumed by other
plots. This demented witness's testimony of horror brought the
mystery to the fore, and there it would stay. A ball of light
flashed brilliantly about the battle -- that much had made it
into the official report -- but he wasn't blinded by it. Not
really.
Because of the light he could see nothing but Grendel, but what
else was there to see? From a million miles away, the greatest
ships of the fleet were mere specks, yet he could see Grendel
tearing away at those specks, unleashing the energies within,
cracking shells between its teeth to suck at the vital meat.
Yes, teeth. That is how he saw Grendel, a great face, vicious
and beastly. Through the massacre it was bowed down,
concentrating on its work. But when the fleets were consumed, it
turned and glared at him, a face of energies: red heat, white
heat, a tattered blue-green corona blowing as a mane in an
unseen wind, eyes burning with the power of suns, its snout
smeared with the lifeblood of its kill, bleeding planets
dripping from its ethereal fangs. When it saw him its
countenance brightened, grew less demonic, its eyes twinkled. It
winked at him once before returning to its lair beyond the
universe.
Ah, you're listening to the old man's tale with interest now!
You hadn't heard these stories before? I had thought that
perhaps you had. So have I gained the power of the ancient
mariner over you after all. Isn't it a wonder that that yarn has
survived over untold centuries? Why would such a tale stay with
us when so much else is lost? It is the mystique, of course. The
mystery always attracts the human soul. It is because of
curiosity that we toil as we do, and curiosity is fed by
mystery. The works of our ancestors which betake of this mood
appeal to all ages while the fare of lighter moods vanishes in a
few years. Beowulf. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Jovian
Dirge. The wordsmiths and the memories of them have long since
drifted into oblivion while their moody tales have survived to
taunt us, becoming mysteries themselves.
I am wandering again. Forgive an old man his senility.
I was haunted by what I had seen. For a time I tried to forget
the wrath of Grendel. But who could forget such a manifestation?
And who would let me? We who had seen the bones of Grendel's
feast were the center of attention at every landfall. So I took
the memory and fed upon it. It became a dream of mine to see
Grendel for myself, to tell of the real Grendel, not the
inarticulate visions of a raving lunatic. Grendel fed on war.
Very well. I would remain a cog of war.
I served my masters well, but their thanks was a forced
retirement. It seems they found no more use for a feeble old
man. Feeble! That was half a century ago and I still live! We
all heard, later, that on the night of my retirement ball,
Grendel had struck again. And the ships that had been under my
command were there! It mattered little to me that my ships were
torn to shreds. They saw Grendel before they died! That was all
that I had asked and my masters had taken it from me.
But they were my masters no longer, and there was still hope.
This latest visitation, terrible as it was, was nothing more
than the retelling of the older tales. No new chapters could be
written from it. The battle ground was not trod upon until days
afterward; there were no surviving witnesses. The desolation was
familiar -- yet no matter how familiar, it was still terrible,
and many were very afraid. Grendel had never attacked in such
quick succession before. It was a sign, they pleaded. Stop this
useless waste of men and machines or Grendel will feed on us
all.
Ha! It was a sign, all right, but it didn't portend any of their
superstitious nonsense. I had some suspicions of the nature of
Grendel that this latest attack appeared to confirm. Only the
most exceptional show of power attracted it, and I knew our war
machines were far from exhausted. We and our enemies were still
human, still full of our nature, and we both had much more
wealth yet to squander. Another great battle was sure to occur
again soon. So I waited. Yet waiting was not enough. I had to
live to see that battle. I became an expert of human nature and,
in my own small way, I assisted our civilizations in achieving
the summit of that nature. There would be another great battle
and I would be there, waiting.
I wanted to see Grendel with my own eyes. This desire superseded
all other passions, or brought those passions to bear for it. I
expected my doom when I encountered Grendel, and I would be
satisfied at that if I could just view the vessel of my
destruction. But I could still hope to survive the encounter,
could still hope to add my own chapter. So when I wasn't
studying human nature, I was studying the sciences to bring
about that survival. I had amassed enough wealth to buy or take
most anything I needed. The only fear I entertained was that I
would face death before I faced Grendel. But you see that I have
survived.
At last the greed of the empires built beyond endurance and they
once again went to war. Exploratory skirmishes at first, but
soon all of their greatest engines were brought into service
and, in the usual irony of war, the two sides could still find
one thing upon which they could agree: a meeting place and time
for the mutual slaughter.
I was there before the combatants, waiting. For those enamored
of battle machines it was a magnificent sight. Even from my
hidden distance, burrowed into a dead rock loosely orbiting the
dead sun that marked their rendezvous point, the arrayed forces
opposing each other were beautiful. Manufactured black shapes
set against the natural blackness of space. One ship is almost
invisible, but bring hundreds into view in an orderly pattern
and space becomes an embossed sheet of velvet, figures rippling
through the fabric as squadrons maneuvered.
For a moment they stood, quivering but quiet, like cobras
preparing to strike. Then they opened their energy piles against
each other, each of them the power of a small sun, combined, a
hundred suns, and soon a thousand, blazing in fury amidst ships
who expended as much energy in avoidance and absorption as in
offense. The dead system was ablaze. I thought my distance would
be sufficient to keep me out of the force. I was wrong. The rock
around me boiled away to nothing; my shields alone kept me
alive.
The expanse around me blazed and soon began to shimmer as if
through the heat rising from a fire, though, of course, there
was no air from which such a fire could breathe. But it wasn't
an air-breathing dragon that had been awakened. This dragon
breathed space. The glow was fierce. My displays dampened until
almost opaque and I was still nearly blinded. My ship itself
seemed to glow. The shimmer increased; the stuff of space began
to fold into itself and, as if it couldn't bear the stress, I
saw what I can only describe as cracks and gashes. Most of them,
the largest, were far from me, but a few were much too close.
The forces tearing away space outside my ship began to slip
their talons within, scratching at me. Scratching was all they
could do to me -- I was still protected -- but it was terrible.
Before I blacked out, the sinews behind those talons reached out
for the battle. Grendel tore through the cracks of space,
firing.
When I awoke, the air inside the ship tingled. Space was still
creased and torn. And Grendel was still out there, scavenging
for the scraps left over from the melee. It wasn't the vision of
the demented lunatic that faced me, though I found myself
mapping what I saw to the stories he told. The energies
engulfing the scene, both visible and invisible, were intense.
My screens were still at their dimmest setting. I was just
outside their sphere of influence, much closer than I had
planned, but still far enough away that I hadn't been torn to
shreds. Dark but sparkling shapes were moving about within. They
were huge, the size of planets, and they moved in perfect
precision. At the center of the sphere of energies was a region
darker than space should be. Space was still rent and cracked
all around me. Most of the tears were tiny, barely visible, but
planets could be swallowed by that huge gaping hole. With a
little imagination, I formed of the ships a dotted outline of a
face and of the gaping maw of non-space its grinning leer. The
madman had, indeed, seen Grendel. As I watched, the beast which
had consumed all around it began to consume itself. The sphere
was shrinking and the jagged smirking visage was swallowing its
own dotted outline, swallowing the planet ships.
Legends spoke of great battles fought by the nobility of the
ancients, fought over galaxies. Much too grand to be believable,
they could still be told as legends. But all legends have some
truth to them, and I had a theory. In those greater times of the
supreme glory of humankind, we fell from grace, and have been
falling ever since. In the first battles, their strength had to
be great indeed. Our mightiest conflicts would be mere
skirmishes to them. In their ultimate encounter, they not only
tore into each other, but they tore into the fabric of the
universe, and fell through. They were swallowed by their own
passions and trapped beyond space. Now, in our meager shows of
vice, we but barely poke holes through the universe. But beyond
those holes lies the power of the ancients ready to annihilate
us before falling back to their lair as the holes heal.
My theory seems to have been correct. I have seen the glory of
the ancients. You heard me rave about the beauty of our fleets,
but I can rave about such things no more. Not only beautiful
were the ancient ships, but sublime in their casual display of
raw power. Not the pageant of our crude metals. Their parade was
a crystalline spectacle; not even as substantial as crystal,
those ships were pure energies made solid for the warriors'
benefit. Every part of each ship could be converted to war.
But my thoughts again drift. You know these things. Please
forgive an old man. I am still in wonder.
Now when I recovered from this glorious vision, the talents of
my ship, unique in all the galaxy, were put into place. I know
little of the science of space travel, but no matter. What needs
a caveman the knowledge of chemistry to cook over a fire?
Gravity wells play havoc with jump ships, this much I do know.
They cannot jump from or return to normal space closer than a
few million miles from anything larger than a moon without
losing precision. And the closer to such a body, the more
precision is wanted. But some unnamed genius had discovered a
formula for the deviations, and my ship was built to prove it.
So now I set the ship to jump. And waited. The last of the dark
crystal planets was leaving the universe; space began to unfold,
spreading the cloth of itself smooth again. I guessed that I
must now take the chance, and hoped the folds wouldn't upset the
equation - I did have a direct line of sight to my target. I
pushed the button. It amazes me that after thousands of years of
technology, we still use such archaic tools, but how does one
improve on a button? I pushed it and found the equation proven
when I appeared next within the landing bay doors of the last
ship in the Fleet of Grendel.
You had little chance, then, to decide what to do with me before
the holes in the universe swallowed you back up, so now you are
stuck with me and my ship. I care not your verdict or your
mercy. I have lived to see Grendel. I have nothing more for
which to live. To die, fight, or peacefully spend my remaining
days is of little import now. The thought of writing my chapter
is no longer appealing, even if it could be read. There would be
no mystery in that chapter. Amazement, yes, but no mystery. Why
should I take that from the human race? It will die when it
discovers everything there is to be known. You, Lords of
Grendel, are necessary for its survival.
You make us sound so noble, old man, but all we do is kill. You
speak of millennia. We know only months. Even now we are again
in battle. Feel the tremors? How much time has elapsed in your
universe since you arrived? Ten years? A thousand? It does not
matter in here. We cannot escape. We do not know how. We are
only warriors, all we know is how to survive.
But you still haven't answered our question. The technology
within your ship is new to us. Nothing less than a great state
could develop such a craft. How did you come to be its pilot?
I have found that obsession can master the impossible,
particularly when one has been an emperor.
Russell Butek (butek@rconnect.com)
------------------------------------
Russell Butek is a nomadic software type who can't decide where
he really wants to live. He grew up in the Cold White North of
Wisconsin and got his education there, and has lived on the east
coast, west coast, and places in between, along with a brief
stint in Germany. He¹s currently checking out Texas.
Heading Out by Adam Harrington
==================================
....................................................................
This is the story of a journey from childhood to adulthood. And
we're not being metaphorical.
....................................................................
1.
----
The twenty-ninth of December 1940 was not a good day in
Lewisham. To most Londoners, this was merely the worst night of
the Blitz. To my paternal grandparents and me it was historic
because that night my dad was born.
My grandmother lay in the cellar of Lewisham General Hospital
amongst candles as, above, the Luftwaffe took London apart block
by block. The bare electric bulbs flickered every now and again
as the building shook to the reverberations from falling bombs,
and there was the occasional crash of a window being blown out
in the empty hospital above. Through tears in the
blackoutblankets, the sky flickered red under the drone of
German bombers, the badoom-badoom of anti-aircraft cannons and
ashes blew in through shattered windows and swirled around empty
wards and naked iron-frame beds.
As patriotic as my grandmother was, she frankly didn't care that
the country was being softened up for invasion in the same way a
chef's mallet tenderizes a steak. She was grunting and straining
under the coaxing of nurses who must have been cursing this,
quite possibly the worst night shift of the century.
My dad slithered out at five past one in the morning of the
thirtieth of December and within a few shocked seconds told the
world exactly what he thought of it.
My grandparents lived in a two-story brick terrace house and
pursued a life of aspirant working-class Protestant probity,
going to the Victorian gothic church twice on Sundays and
keeping their front rooms spotless and the piano consistently
badly tuned. My dad went to the Church of England primary
school, failed the 11-plus and was dumped in the local secondary
modern. When he was 15 he swiped Mrs. Frobisher, a war widow,
rather inexpertly across the shoulders with a plank of wood and
ran off with her blue fake leather handbag, which, he soon
discovered, contained five shillings and sixpence, a packet of
mints and a handkerchief.
Even if you ignore the social and humanitarian implications of
such an act, this was a silly thing to do. In Lewisham in 1955
most people knew everybody else and my dad had developed a bit
of a reputation as a tearaway. At least a score of people had
seen him, so the police paid a visit to my grandmother, who sat
ashen-faced in the kitchen with her hands on her floral apron
wondering where she had gone wrong. Grandfather drank a bit too
much, but he worked hard on the railways and went to church. She
made good meals every evening and cleaned the house. What more?
When I asked my dad, now enjoying a content middle age, why on
earth he did such a terrible thing, he sighed. Life was very
boring in 1955, he said. Really very boring, and I was very
young.
My dad lurked around Lewisham for a few hours and then sauntered
home, whereupon two policemen launched themselves at him from
various crannies of the sitting room and he was carried, kicking
and yelling, away from his grief-stricken mother and deposited
in the local nick. After a very brief court appearance he was
sent to a borstal near Rochester. Mrs. Frobisher, I am glad to
say, made a full physical recovery, although she was jittery
near the market ever after.
Did, er, 'things' happen in borstals in those days? I asked my
dad once.
Yes, he said, 'things' happened quite a lot. I was so stupid I
thought the boys were having a fight in the showers. They were
making all the same noises. My dad paused. I awaited a family
revelation. There was this group of boys who took a fancy to
me.... My dad trailed off and took solace in a hefty swig of a
rather horrible vin de pays he had bought the previous summer
from a farm near Montpelier.
Borstals were a bit more relaxed in 1956 than in Brendan Behan's
day, and inmates "of good character" were occasionally allowed
out to work in the town as a form of rehabilitation. My dad,
being a quiet, industrious and charming person when he wanted to
be and, more importantly, of a practicing Church of England
family,was considered of good character and was farmed out to a
metalworking shop in the Chatham dockyards. He worked so well
that during a sudden rush his employers asked the prison
authorities if he could stay after hours to help with the
backlog. The borstal agreed, and Dad did a bunk.
So, one
warm May night when he should have been going back to
the institution, my dad trotted through the streets of Chatham
in his borstal issue shirt and slacks, climbed up a railway
embankment and, amazingly, managed to climb aboard a train to
London as it waited for the lights to change.
If anybody noticed this, they were terribly English about it and
pretended that nothing had happened. My dad curled up in a ball
on one of the seats and fell asleep until the train reached
Victoria station. Not knowing what to do now that he was in
London, and too frightened about the police to find his mother,
he walked to Paddington station with the intention of getting on
another train, but found that not a lot was happening at that
time of night. So instead he nicked a loaf of bread from
somewhere -- my dad did not elaborate -- climbed into a wooden
freight wagon, ate the entire loaf and fell asleep.
The wagon was shunted the next morning. My dad was knocked awake
and spent a few panicked seconds wondering who and where he was.
The wagon was knocked about for half an hour, and as soon as my
dad's heart had stopped tripping over itself, he pulled the
wagon door open and looked out on some bleak and dreary sidings
near Willesden Junction in north west London. He let himself
down from the wagon and made his way to a brick wall some fifty
yards off. A few steps over the tracks and he was spotted.
"Oi! You! Wotcha dooin?"
My dad jumped five feet into the air and couldn't be seen for
dust as he sprinted across the tracks and vaulted the brick
wall. All a bit of overkill, really, as the railway workmen (fat
lumps all of them) could barely roll faster than the beer
barrels they resembled.
Dad then walked vaguely northwest along the Harrow Road through
Wembley (where he stole a couple of apples), Harrow-on-the-Hill
(where he stole another apple, some cheese, a rather sawdusty
cake thing, some bread rolls and ate them all), Pinner (where he
stole absolutely nothing), Rickmansworth (where he stole a huge
shopping bag full of groceries, but had to drop it outside
Woolworth's to escape a posse of enraged shoppers) and
Chorleywood, where it started to rain.
My dad fought with second thoughts as his grand adventure took a
suddenly wet and dismal turn. He started running to keep warm,
and jogged a few miles through wet dog's mercury and beech woods
near Amersham and Chesham and then, for who knows what reason,
took a minor road which ran north west towards Aylesbury over
the green and white Chiltern Hills. This area of the Chilterns
is now packed with joggers. On Sundays you can barely turn a
country road without slamming on the brakes in an effort to
avoid another blank-eyed and sweaty fitness fanatic plodding
past heady bramble and elder hedges. I claim my dad started it
all. People generally didn't run anywhere in 1956 unless they
had killed someone or were Roger Bannister.
Just as it began to get dark my dad found a brick shed, crawled
among the rakes and hoes and fell asleep.
The house to which the shed belonged lay less than twenty feet
away on the other side of an elm hedge, and about an hour after
my dad had curled up around garden implements, the owner of the
house decided to return her secateurs to the shed after pruning
the vine in her conservatory. May is not generally a good month
to do this, but Elisabeth lacked finesse in the gardening
department.
Elisabeth wasn't her real name; Dad never told anyone what her
real name was. In fact Dad never talked about this episode at
all out of choice, except to my mum just before he married her,
who then told me some twenty-five years later over washing the
Sunday dishes when I pursued this story. And when I told Dad
that mum had already told _me_, he wanted to know exactly what
mum had said, of course, and I managed to blackmail him into
revealing the whole story. He recounted the story in an odd
stop-and-start fashion, reflecting his internal pendulum of
embarrassment and sentimentality.
Your dad, said my mum, was quite a looker when he was younger.
My dad at this stage was asleep with his head hanging over the
back of the sofa, snoring gently. Mum removed the gradually
tipping wine glass from his hand and he snorted in some
subconscious annoyance. Difficult to see my dad as a bit of a
looker. He always looked, well, like a dad.
Elisabeth saw my dad as soon as she opened the shed door. My dad
took several seconds to realize he was being looked at, sprang
to his feet ready to run, but tripped on a garden fork and
pitched forward with a squeak. Elisabeth stepped out of the way
to allow my dad to crumple without hindrance on the damp grass.
"Are you all right?" she asked, bending over my dad.
My dad rolled on his back. His stomach, then flat, now anything
but, grumbled loudly. He grinned in embarrassment.
"Are you hungry?" said Elisabeth.
"Yes," said Dad. My dad was 16 and just out of borstal. Not a
conjunction designed for charmingly seductive repartee. A
situation since rectified, sighed my mum, and always directed
inappropriately.
"Well, if you have nothing to do right away, would you care for
a spot of something to eat?" said Elisabeth.
Dad said that he had never met anyone who talked like that
before. He was used to that peculiar form of southeast English
referred to as _sahf-luhndun_. Only his mum, my grandmother, had
ever tried to talk "proper," but even then nothing so upper
class as this. It was like being with royalty. And with royalty,
you do as you are told.
Dad nodded to the food question. He was suffering the ravenous
appetite of the hyperactive young, after all. Elisabeth tried to
wave my dad in front of her, but he didn't quite catch on and
Elisabeth, being polite, took the lead and my dad plodded after
her.
I couldn't believe the house, my dad said to me. It was like
those silly Famous Five books, all brick and timber and
fireplaces and tiled floors and oak tables. I can't imagine what
she made of me. Damp and dirty, a now heavily soiled thick
cotton shirt hanging at an angle over my chest, buttons missing
and untucked into my trousers, my bad borstal haircut stuck up
all angles and full of dried grass. She looked at me in the
light of the room and I could see a laugh creeping across her
face. I couldn't see why then, but I can now. She asked me to
sit at the blackened oak table and went into the kitchen, where
I heard her laugh, although it might have been the radio. I
looked around, but I was too overawed and tired to be really
interested in stealing anything.
"It might be about half an hour before I can get anything
ready," said Elisabeth. "Is that all right?"
My dad nodded. He would have agreed to anything right then.
"Do you live near here?" she asked.
My dad shook his head.
"Hmph," said Elisabeth, knitting her brow in vexation at the
difficulty of getting anything remotely intelligent out of him.
"What about your parents? Won't they be worried?"
"No, no, please don't call them," said my dad, looking
frightened.
"Well, all right. I think you should tell them that you're all
right though. You needn't say where you are. I've got a
telephone."
Dad didn't respond.
What did she look like? I asked my dad. Well, he said, she was
shorter than me (my dad was five-foot-seven, and had been since
he was eighteen) with black hair. How old was she? I asked. Dad
thought about whether to answer that one, and gave me an angry
look. I wasn't put off. I don't know, he said. When I was that
age there were only four ages -- children, my age, my parents'
age and my grandparents' age. She was my parents' age put like
that, though I think now that she must have been in her late
twenties.
"Why don't you have yourself a bath while I'm getting something
ready?" said Elisabeth, who was driven more by thoughts of
hygiene than altruism.
Baths have been one of my dad's lifelong weakness. Along with
food, alcohol and women, of course, but baths were always my
dad's first and most faithful of loves. So Elisabeth was
slightly taken aback by the enthusiasm of my dad's response.
Dad suddenly stood up at the oak table and said, "Yes, please!"
Elisabeth led my dad up to the bathroom, put in the plug and
turned on the hot tap. The geyser ignited with a _whumph_ and
covered the bathroom window with fog.
"I'll get you a towel," she said, removing her towels from the
wooden towel rail as she left in case he should use those by
mistake. Dad sat on the loo watching the water fill the bath. My
grandmother had a bath, but the borstal bath was so huge, filthy
and rarely used that it hardly counted as a bath at all. Dad's
toes twitched in anticipation and he began to undress.
Elisabeth returned with an armful of towel, a pair of trousers,
some underwear and a shirt. My dad was almost, but not quite
indecent, and vaguely aware that this wasn't the done thing in
front of women.
Give her her due, said dad to me, she didn't bat an eyelid.
"These were Tom's, my husband's. They might just fit you. Don't
worry, he won't be back," said Elisabeth.
It had never occurred to me to be worried, said my dad. I was
such an oaf. But the bath was good. My dad raised his legs and I
could see his toes curling in nostalgia inside his slippers.
And then? I asked.
Well, said my dad, I had some meat and potatoes and I remembered
my manners and used my knife and fork properly.
And then?
What do you mean And Then? Have you any sense of propriety
regarding your old man? Dad sighed. Well, what do you think? I
lost my virginity. Technically speaking I had lost it the
previous month, but I don't consider that real. Dad looked
dreamily at the ceiling and muttered Mmmm quietly to himself.
You can't just leave me there, I said. Dad looked at me, various
emotions flickering across his face. I wondered whether I had
pushed a wee bit too far.
She took off all my clothes and told me to do the same to her.
We lay on the rug in the sitting room and she stroked me all
over, and told me to do the same to her. Then we made love all
night. Well, until I fell asleep anyway. I didn't know what had
hit me. OK?
I felt rather jealous of my dad. My first time, real or
otherwise, was so ridiculously inept that both of us gave up and
decided to watch the TV instead. It wasn't a complete failure,
obviously, otherwise it wouldn't count as the first time. It
took Ruth -- that was her name -- and me about a week to get
plumbing and lust to coincide. And then it was quite fun. And
then we moved on, bound across years, relationships and now
oceans by our juvenile fumblings. She's now an up-and-coming
journalist. A respected adult with respected colleagues, no
doubt.
The next day my dad woke up in a bed with white linen sheets
rather than gray cotton ones, and trooped after Elisabeth like a
lost puppy, grinning daftly all the time.
It was lucky, my dad told me, that I was such a complete naif,
otherwise there would have been impenetrable layers of meanings
and sub-meanings and guilt and regrets, and as it was I thought
the whole thing was just grand, which made her just laugh and
laugh. I mean, why did she do it? A sixteen-year-old boy of whom
she knew nothing? She must have been a strange woman. My dad
took another slug of his _vin de pays_ as we pondered
Elisabeth's motives.
When I raised the question with my mum, she shrugged. Quiet
desperation, like most of us, she said. I must say that I found
this remark slightly chilling.
I would love to have seen Elisabeth through my eyes now, said
Dad. I mean, why? My dad shook his head and drew his eyebrows
together.
Dad stayed with Elisabeth for about a fortnight -- doing
gardening, repointing the chimney and repegging roof tiles under
Elisabeth's arm-waving commands from below. It was the first
time Dad had ever voluntarily taken instruction from anyone, and
he enjoyed doing it, and didn't even mind when Elisabeth cursed
him fulsomely as a dozen expensive Kent pegs slid from the roof
and demolished themselves on the front path because he hadn't
stacked them properly. He just grinned and grinned.
"Where are you going?" asked Elisabeth one night over dinner.
That day Dad had been a little distracted. He felt an imaginary
net close in around him. It wasn't as if the police were looking
for me, my dad told me. They wouldn't waste time on a runaway,
but I sort of felt the need to run again. I sometimes got like
that. Fidgety feet, I suppose.
"I don't know," said my dad. "I've always wanted to go to the
Yorkshire Moors."
Elisabeth munched on some cabbage. "You don't have any money,"
she said. Dad shrugged. "Well how have you been finding food so
far?" she asked. Dad grinned licentiously. A cloud of irritation
crossed Elisabeth's face, and before Dad could say something
crass said abruptly, "Well, I suppose you've been stealing,
haven't you?"
"Only when I'm very hungry," said Dad. Elisabeth ran her hands
over her face as she considered the options. "Well, don't do a
bunk on me. I'll give you a little something to take you part of
the way."
Oh, she was canny, said my dad. This way she could make sure I
wasn't making off with her family silver in the dead of the
night. That evening, in fact, she went through all her drawers
and cabinets "to do the dusting," she said. I thought she was
slightly potty then, but I now think she was making an
inventory. She never asked me to leave. I don't think she
particularly wanted me to go. I don't know how she would have
finished it if it had been up to her, but as it turned out, it
wasn't.
"I think I'll be going now," my dad said at about eleven in the
morning as Elisabeth was reading the Times in the garden.
"If that's what you want," she said, folding the newspaper and
getting up off the garden seat. Dad had collected his borstal
boots, but couldn't find his borstal shirt and slacks, which
Elisabeth had binned, at arm's length, protected by pink rubber
gloves, at the first opportunity.
"Here, have Tom's old work shirt. It'll last longer," said
Elisabeth. She also gave Dad Tom's old tweed jacket and a newish
pair of corduroys Tom had bought but never wore. My Dad took off
the thin cotton trousers and shirt he was currently wearing and
put on the new set. Elisabeth spent the next five minutes
dashing around the house like a mad thing. Dad watched her
uncomprehendingly.
This must have been her final check that I hadn't taken
anything, Dad told me.
Then, slightly flushed and breathless, she gave my dad a wallet,
a paper bag with some sandwiches and an apple in it, and a peck
on the cheek. She held his hand as they walked down the path to
the road. He walked into the middle of the road and looked
around.
"Which way's Yorkshire?" he asked.
"From here? Well, that way, roughly." She waved north over the
hill, at a right angle to the road.
"Oh," he said.
"But Aylesbury's that way," she pointed west along the road. Dad
grinned, waved and marched off to Aylesbury.
Thus endeth the Elisabeth chapter.
2.
----
Dad never let on who Elisabeth really was, and there are many
old farmhouses between Aylesbury and Chesham. I would have liked
to thank her for taking such good care of my dad, though I
suspect she would be somewhat mortified to have been thanked.
And one cannot entirely exclude the possibility that my dad made
the whole thing up, though I doubt it because Dad never made up
stories about anything else to my knowledge. Of course, since I
became a journalist like Ruth (though not paid anything like the
amount she is) I now make up stories all the time. No member of
my family can reconcile what I do for a living with watching the
BBC news or reading the Daily Telegraph. Actually, I can't
either, but there we go.
Dad looked into the wallet Elisabeth had given him. It contained
twenty pounds, a staggering sum for my dad, who had never seen
more money than ten shillings in one place at any one time. He
reached Aylesbury -- over the scarp edge of the Chiltern hills
-- by mid-afternoon, and ate the sandwiches sitting in the
market square under the warm sun, feeling is if he belonged
there.
He used some penny pieces in the wallet to phone his mum, who
was, as one would expect, upset, confused and desperate about
her son. Her son didn't know how to respond, and didn't say much
except that he was going on holiday. His mum asked him to give
himself up -- only another few months in borstal and then he
could get on with his life. Dad wasn't willing to face the
reality that England is -- was -- a very bad country to be an
outlaw in. A crowded nation of factotum shopkeepers.
It didn't occur to my dad to rent a room for the night so he
took the Buckingham road and slept in a cow barn. My dad was not
keen on cows. As a London boy, Dad was only used to cows as
sides of beef on a butcher's hook -- and in the fifties, that
fairly rarely -- and occasionally as irregularly shaped gray
items on a Sunday plate. Real live cows also smelt rather bad.
He crawled into the barn's hay loft and lay awake listening to
the animals below.
I realized, my dad told me, that the cows must have been lowing.
It made it all seem rather Christmassy. Nobody ever talks about
lowing unless there is a little baby Jesus nearby.
Before daybreak Dad set off through Buckingham, stole a
breakfast and earned it by being chased at full pelt along the
entire length of the high street, his booted feet going
phutphutphutphutphut as he hurtled across the gravel just
outside the old jailhouse. He could run a lot faster than your
average grocer, who was making a more crunch, crunch, wheeze,
crunch-crunch-crunch, wheeze, crunch sort of noise. My dad then
followed the signs to Northampton.
North, you see, my dad told me. Sounded sort of exotic. Just as
well that I never saw any signs for Northfleet when I jumped
borstal. Northfleet is a town barely ten miles from the place.
Dad then pinched lunch from a grocer's in Towcester and plodded
along the Northampton road. He got to Northampton after the
shops had shut, leaving very little that was stealable without
putting a brick through a window. In any case, Dad was too tired
to deal with the inevitable high speed consequences of this and
decided to use the money Elisabeth had given him. This was a
momentous event in Dad's life. The first time he had actually
used his own money, freely given, to purchase a service for
personal consumption. He went into a pub just north of
Northampton city center to look for a room.
"How old are you, son?" asked the landlord, just as he was about
to give my dad the key.
"Eighteen," said Dad, accompanying his barefaced lie with his
best barefaced innocent eyed look.
"Hmph," said the landlord, not convinced. "Where you from?"
"London, sir," said Dad.
"Hmph. Room seven. At the top of those stairs there, then turn
left." The landlord leaned over the bar and looked for Dad's
luggage. "You bringing in your luggage now?"
"Ah, no," said Dad, his brain going into overdrive to explain
this one. "I'm visiting relatives in Towcester tomorrow. Don't
need any luggage -- I'd only forget it."
"Where did you say your relatives were?" said the landlord, an
entirely inexplicable smile creeping across his face.
"Towcester."
"I think you'll find it's pronounced _toaster_, actually."
"What is?" said Dad, frowning.
"Tow-cester. It's pronounced _toaster_."
"Really?" said Dad, genuinely surprised. "Oh."
"Well, whatever. Do you want dinner tonight?"
Dad was hungry again, and a bit more of the contents of his
precious wallet was used in a legitimate transaction. He went up
to his room before dinner, and as soon as he closed the door he
had a fit of the giggles. He threw himself on the bed and
stretched himself out, his hands behind his head, and grinned.
Once the novelty of that had worn off, he explored the wardrobe
and the mirrored cabinet above the sink. He turned on the hot
water tap and ran his hand under it for a good two minutes
before hot water from the storage heater managed to negotiate
the contorted, clanking, magnolia-painted pipes from the
basement. This gave Dad an idea. He went out into the corridor,
then remembered his key and went back into his room to collect
it, and went in search of a bath.
He found a huge enameled bath in a tiny, badly painted bathroom
with a cracked window and graying net curtains. Dad skipped a
little boogie of joy on the linoleum, and then sat on the edge
of the bath for few seconds and raised his legs, toes curling in
expectation. Then he went down to the bar for his dinner, which
was tasteless, amongst the mostly silent and grimly drinking
working men of Northampton, thinking about his bath.
What is this thing you have about baths? I asked my dad.
I don't know, he said. I suppose it reminded me of living at
home with my mum. We were one of the few families in our street
with a proper full-size galvanized tub. We didn't often have
full-blown baths because of the expense, and when we did we used
the same water for the whole family, with my dad coming last, as
he was the dirtiest. My mum, my sister and I used to share the
same bath all together until I was seven, at which point mum
deemed it inappropriate. I just remember the borstal as cold and
dirty.
Your dad always was quite the bon viveur, said my mum. Even when
I met him. It has always astonished me that he survived trekking
across England with no clean clothes and no wine.
Ah, said Dad, but that was before I _knew_ about clean clothes
and wine and roast pheasant and pate de foie gras and summer
holidays in France and stuff. You're not born with taste; you
have to _acquire_ it.
This latter was said with a grand sweep of the hand, which
seemed eloquent of something, but quite what was difficult to
say.
My dad soaked for a good half hour in that Northampton bath. He
then tried to sleep in that unfamiliar hired bed, but was too
excited about the portentous strangeness of it all, and tossed
about for an hour before finally slipping off.
He passed the landlord the next morning. "Off to Tow-cester now,
son?" he said.
My dad tried to laugh politely, but he's never been good at that
and I doubt whether he was any better when he was 16. This was
just the sort of thing you expected from the country. Trying to
catch people out with arbitrary pronunciations. Oh,
ha-bloody-ha.
Dad got fed up with plodding a few miles outside of Northampton
and decided to thumb a lift. The drivers of the few vehicles
which rattled along this road looked at Dad with a mixture of
bafflement and suspicion. After half an hour of this, my dad
decided to get up from the long summer grass he was sitting in
and look as if he wanted to go somewhere. Ten minutes later, a
farmer in a bulbous, dark green, left-hand drive army surplus
truck pulled over.
"Where you goin', son?" said the farmer, leaning out of the
driver's window.
"North, sir."
The farmer looked at my dad long and hard. "You've got the right
road, then. Couldja be more specific?"
"The Yorkshire Moors."
"That's a heck of a long way to go by thumbin' it. I'm going
just past Market Harborough. That do?"
"Yes, thanks," said my dad, who had no idea where Market
Harborough was.
Dad walked around the truck and climbed in the passenger seat.
"No knapsack or nothing?" said the farmer.
"No, sir," said Dad, hiding a sudden blush with a big grin. The
farmer chuckled as he looked through the rear window of the
truck ready to pull out.
"Name's Charlie Ferris," said the farmer.
"I'm George," said my dad.
My dad was named after King George VI, four years dead by then.
He was never awfully keen on the name, any more than he was on
the age or cause of the King's death -- 56, of a coronary
thrombosis. Dad was 56 a few years ago, and by a strangely
unpleasant coincidence had his arteries widened by angioplasty
that year after a few nasty turns with angina. He was told by a
criminally naive doctor that the odd glass of red wine could
help reduce his blood cholesterol. My dad heard this as "one
glass good, one bottle better," and consequently his already
moderate intake of red wine took off stratospherically. He also
pooh-poohed all attempts to wean him off beef, saying that as he
was likely to be long dead before BSE got him, he might as well
take advantage of the suddenly low prices. Honestly. The older
generation.
The truck clanked and ground through Brixworth, Hanging Houghton
and Maidwell. Dad had been in a motorized vehicle before, but
rarely, and never before in a left-hand drive army surplus truck
bouncing along a trunk road overlooking Northamptonshire fields
and hedges. He stuck his head out of the window and felt the sun
and wind fly past.
The farmer watched him out of the corner of his eye.
"Have ya never been in a truck before, son?"
"No, sir..." The truck hit a pothole and Dad bounced a foot into
the air and landed in a heap, winded, on the dashboard.
"Mind the potholes," said the farmer languidly.
Dad took all of thirty seconds to regain his composure, and then
continued to look around him like a squirrel in a room full of
walnuts.
"Are you staying in Market Harborough tonight?" asked the
farmer.
"I don't know," said my dad.
There was another long pause.
"You can stay at the farmhouse if you're willing to work for me
tomorrer."
"Thank you."
The farmer drove through Market Harborough and took the road to
Melton Mowbray. A few miles outside the town the farmer spun the
steering wheel and threw the truck off the metalled road down a
white and dusty track which led to a collection of farm
buildings and a large horse chestnut tree.
"Do you have any cows?" asked my dad.
"Twenty. And a breeding bull."
"Ah," said my dad.
The farmer threw the truck into a corner of the farmyard and
yanked the handbrake to stop the vehicle, which skidded to a
halt in a cloud of dust.
"I'll show you the wife now so you won't get surprised later,"
said the farmer.
Mrs. Ferris was an awe-inspiring woman. Six-foot square and
bright red, her hair tied up in a bun.
"What's this you've brought in, Charlie?" she said, looking at
my dad not unkindly, but rather like you would look at a new
kitchen table.
" 'Ired 'elp. Give 'im some food. Can't work on empty." The
farmer stomped out of the kitchen back into the yard.
My dad looked up at Mrs. Ferris as if he was a rubber dingy
under the bows of an oncoming liner, and assumed the air of a
puppy looking for consolation. Mrs. Ferris stared down at him
dispassionately, and then pulled a huge loaf of bread, a leg of
ham, a vast lump of cheese, a bowl of tomatoes, a bowl of
apples, a triangle of butter and a couple of washed lettuces
from various parts of the kitchen.
Had my dad not been holding onto a kitchen chair, he might have
collapsed at the sight of all this food displayed all at once.
As it was he felt himself start salivating like a dog.
" 'Elp yerself, son. Jus' expect work from it." She grabbed my
dad's upper arm in her huge right hand and squeezed. My dad
looked at his arm in alarm as Mrs. Ferris felt to see if Dad was
work-worthy. She let go without any comment and went back to
cleaning something by the sink. Dad rubbed his arm to get
circulation back into it and watched the veins in the back of
his hands deflate. He then attacked the tabletop of food with
the sort of no-holds-barred gusto you tend to get from
perpetually hungry youngsters.
Three jagged doorstep ham-and-cheese-and-tomato-and-lettuce
sandwiches and ten minutes later, the farmer came back in.
"Finished?" he said to my dad.
My dad nodded happily.
"Happy?" he added with the slightest of smiles.
Dad giggled.
"Right, come 'ere. Got work for you."
My dad was then put to shifting hay-bales, cattle feed and
carrying bricks for the wall of the new Ferris kitchen garden,
corralling cows and sweeping farmyards until the sun went down
in a blue-purple glow some eight hours later.
The farmer then shepherded a completely exhausted and hence a
completely silent boy into the house and into a downstairs
washroom, which had a tap attached to a hose.
"Best clean yerself before dinner," said the farmer.
Dad slowly took off his clothes and turned on the tap. The water
was ice-cold and Dad suddenly awoke with a squeak as the hose
writhed on the floor and squirted him with water. After a brief
but violent tussle my dad took control and finished the job,
several inches of dirt dissolving away down the drain. Mrs.
Ferris popped open the washroom door and deposited a towel and
some clean clothes on a shelf. Dad froze in embarrassment.
"Seen it all before, and better," she said as she closed the
door.
My dad plodded into the kitchen, where Mrs. Ferris had made some
mutton stew. He was almost too tired to eat it. Almost, but not
quite. The farmer and Mrs. Ferris conducted their normal minimal
and staccato conversation during the meal and watched as my dad
drifted off, slowly listing on his chair. The farmer got up from
his seat and with impeccable timing caught my dad just as he was
about to brain himself on the kitchen's tile floor. Dad jerked
awake and flailed a bit in panic as the farmer righted him.
"Time for bed I think, son," he said.
Although my dad's bowl had been cleaned out quite efficiently,
he looked at all the other food just sitting there, waiting to
be eaten, and sighed deeply in defeat. He nodded, and the farmer
took him up to a tiny whitewashed bedroom with a tiny window and
a cheap yellow-veneered wardrobe. It also had a bed with clean
blankets and my dad pitched forward onto it and bounced a few
times. By the time he had stopped bouncing, he was asleep.
Just before daybreak the next day, Mrs. Ferris came in with a
mug of tea and shook my dad until he awoke.
"Don't go back to sleep on me now," she said. "'Ave that cuppa
tea, and I've got bacon and eggs for you downstairs." She
stomped back downstairs.
My dad could smell breakfast, and this was his main spur in
getting up. He was a bit surprised to find that he was naked and
inside the sheets, as he couldn't remember getting undressed or
actually getting into bed.
My dad found the day a series of baffling and exhausting chores,
executed in silence except the mooing and stomping of cows, or
the rustle of hay, the gentle gurgling of the milking machines
or the clank of aluminum milk churns, the high manic twittering
of larks and the sound of the wind in hedgerows. Lunchtime found
my dad and the farmer demolishing a foursome of whopping
sandwiches while sitting on the bonnet of the army surplus left
hand drive truck in total, single-minded silence, some two miles
from the farmhouse.
Mrs. Ferris had cooked another monster dinner, and my dad
managed to eat as much as he wanted before politely asking if he
could be excused, a lower-middle-class turn of phrase which made
the farmer and his wife look at each other in amusement. They
nodded, and my dad plodded up the stairs, got undressed, crawled
into bed and passed out.
On Sunday the imperative routine of the farm was cut back to the
minimum required to keep the cows happy. At half past nine in
the morning the farmer and his wife dressed up in their Sunday
best, and rummaged in their chests and wardrobes to find
something decent for my dad. He wasn't asked if he wanted to go
to church; it was expected. Dad didn't like church very much but
was smart enough to know on which side his bread was buttered,
and cooperated without a comment. The farmer drove them to
church in his army surplus truck, slowly and majestically, as
befits a Sunday, which surprised my dad as he thought the bumpy
rides he had suffered over the last few days had been because
there was something wrong with the vehicle.
In the church, Mrs. Ferris pointed him down a pew at the back
occupied by the conspicuously badly-dressed and possibly inbred.
The farmer and his wife then sat a few pews forward of Dad,
occupied by people with feathered, netted hats, crinoline skirts
and badly tailored suits. At the front sat people dressed
entirely in black who never looked around. Dad watched the
social strata of rural Leicestershire glide past him with
intense interest. He noticed that people only greeted people on
the same pew as themselves, perhaps nodding to the people behind
them with more than an implication of condescension. The
scarecrow next to him sneezed violently. As soon as the organist
started on some not awfully good rendition of a Bach chorale,
Dad drifted into the religion-induced trance which has afflicted
him all his life.
In the afternoon, they sat in the farmhouse's best room and
listed to records of Haydn and Mozart, read books and said very
little, until the farmer and my dad went out to feed the animals
again.
Monday was back to the grind. Two local lads, Robert and Peter,
came in from time to time to do more skilled work, such as
milking the cows and driving the tractor. After a week the
farmer gave my dad an envelope.
"What's this?" asked my dad.
"Your pay," said the farmer. "Do you want to stay another week?"
My dad opened the packet and pulled out ten pounds.
That was a good trick, my dad told me. I never thought that I
would be paid for work. A whole new world of paid labor opened
unto me. It was like the sun breaking through clouds. This is
how you do it. Bloody hell.
"Yes, please," said my dad.
"Good," said the farmer, and then he turned around in the middle
of the farmyard. "You're a good worker, George. Don't like
talkers. All their energy goes in hot air."
So my dad stayed until the beginning of August. He picked up a
girlfriend, Sally Smith, from the farm a mile down the road, and
went to pubs where he ended up getting drunk with the local oiks
and talking effusively about cars and airplanes -- subjects on
which he had no knowledge or interest. Sally was a bit of an
experiment after Elisabeth. Sally was only sixteen herself and
couldn't be expected to take the lead like Elisabeth had. For
the most part, it was all quite sweet and innocent, and the
occasional, half-repressed fumblings in various barns and
bramble ditches around the farm resulted in nothing more than a
desperate sense of urgency in Dad's slacks and a faint sense of
imperiled virtue in Sally.
I'm not sure I learned much about farming, my dad told me. Some
people understand it, some don't. I kept thinking that those
bloody cows can bloody well wait until I'm bloody well ready,
but the farmer didn't, of course. I didn't learn much, but I got
awfully fit. Even Mrs. Ferris was impressed. She tourniqueted my
arm every now and again and the week I left, she even
complimented me on my progress. She could eviscerate a pig with
a flick of her wrist. I think she viewed me the same way:
working meat rather than eating meat.
My dad wanted to get to the Yorkshire Moors and his feet started
itching again. He had a Plan. Plans were things you could make
with a bit of money. He planned to walk to Leicester and buy a
train ticket to York, which, he fondly assumed, was in the
middle of the Yorkshire Moors, just this side of the Scottish
border.
Dad told Mr. Ferris he was going. Mr. Ferris shrugged. He had
hoped for extra hands until autumn, but was used to the
fickleness of hired labor and made no protest. Dad set off on a
Thursday morning in early August in the same clothes that
Elisabeth had given him, an old knapsack and a horse blanket
that the farmer said he could have. Mr. and Mrs. Ferris waved at
him from the kitchen door. He walked to Illston-on-the-Hill in
blazing summer heat, the smell of nettles and cow parsley
filling the heavy air. He followed windy lanes through King's
Norton and Stoughton and made it into Leicester by late
afternoon, where he studied the timetable in the station and
bought a ticket on the train to York via Doncaster. He then
wandered around a closing city, bought some food, and found a
flea-pit pub to stay the night in.
Did you tell Sally you were leaving? I asked my dad.
Dad scratched his chin. No, he said, he hadn't.
Did you contact your mum again? I asked.
Not while I was at the Ferris Farm, no, said my dad. It never
occurred to me. I did try to make it up to your grandmother
afterward, when I was a bit older and could guess what terrors
she must have been suffering those months.
I have no basis on which to judge my dad in this. When I was 23
I went around the world for a year and sent a grand total of two
postcards back to my parents, one to say I had reached New
Zealand and the other six weeks later saying I was leaving
Australia. Communication is generally not a family trait. As my
mum plaintively said on my return: All you had to do was send a
piece of paper with a stamp and my address on it. All I wanted
to know was that you were still alive.
Men can be such shits, really.
Dad got on the first train of the morning and watched,
fascinated, as the train crossed that indeterminate border
between north and south England. The buildings and countryside
grew harder and sparer. Between Derby and Sheffield, the bare
and severe Pennine foothills of the Peak district came down to
the railway track. Towns, even villages, became darker with
industry, and people came onto the train speaking in way my dad
found difficult to understand. By the time he reached Sheffield
he was sure that the north was a different country. When he
changed at Doncaster, a grim town if there ever was one, he was
so excited by the foreignness of it all that he almost decided
to risk missing the connection to explore this weirdly gruesome
place.
The countryside opened out and became more mellow as the train
drew toward York. More hedges rather than stone walls, broad
farms and woodland. This confused my dad a little, as he was
expecting ever-increasing wildness. The train pulled into York
station, under York's city walls and just within sight of the
Minster. Dad was now completely at a loss. York looked so, well,
southern. It was also very hot. The sun ricocheted off the
city's warm stone and carefully tended flowerbeds as Dad
followed Station Road and Museum street across Lendal Bridge and
towards the Minster. He then went into a bookshop to look at
some local maps and found, to his horror, that the Yorkshire
Moors were some twenty miles further north, and that England
then went on for another eighty miles after that.
England just seemed to go on forever, my dad told me. It was
just so big. And even more shocking, so much of England seemed
to be northern. Both my dad and I laughed in a worldly fashion
at this. But England _did_ seem awfully big when I was younger.
Even Kent, the county I grew up in, seemed enormous until I was
ten. But when looked at from Australia or the United States, the
country seems so small that you want to laugh at it. Such
perspectives only come with time; and seems to me to be one of
the minor sadnesses of this modern and universally connected
world that everybody is so keen on seeing everything everywhere
_right now_ that whatever is under your nose is missed or
scorned. A shrinking world has rendered a tiny country like
England practically invisible. No sooner has a child wondered at
the strangeness of it all, than it has suddenly shrunk under the
pressure of immediate explanation and perspective. There is no
room for delusions any more, not even harmless little ones.
Dad filled his knapsack with food and then walked out along
Clarence Street towards Helmsley. When it started getting dark,
near Sutton-on-the-Forest, he turned off the road and settled
down under a tree with his horse blanket. The next morning he
set off again. Beyond Brandsby, the countryside began to roll,
building up to the impressively glowering massif of the moors
themselves. Dad got to Helmsley by four and thought about
staying in a bed-and-breakfast, but everything was expensive.
Helmsley looked strange to my dad, all gray stone and tourists.
He saw a picture of the nearby Rievaulx Abbey ruin on a poster
in a local shop and marched off to see it before darkness.
Rievaulx Abbey, if you have never seen it, is a severe and
remote collection of perpendicular gray ruins in a deep wooded
valley called Ryedale. My dad described going down into Ryedale
was like diving into a deep cold well of unimaginable
ancientness. Dad was entranced and sat in the abbey nave, where
the wooded valley walls peered through blasted windows and the
evening sun caught clouds as they floated pinkly over the open
roof. Tourists came and went, mostly in buses or on foot, but
Dad only noticed their absence when they left for the evening,
leaving the rushing of water and the swishing of trees. The
twilight peace of a northern summer evening settled on the
valley. The abbey faded as the stars came out and Dad sighed the
deep, happy sigh of a someone who has reached his own blue
remembered hills. He settled on a bench and watched the great
dipper slowly revolve around the pole star until he drifted off
to sleep.
The next day he walked the ten miles or so across Bransdale and
up to Cockayne Ridge, where he sat for an hour whilst a warm
breeze from the south rustled dried heather. There was nobody
there, just sheep. Even the birds were quiet. Just peace.
Absolute, unhurried, benevolent peace. In the afternoon, he
sauntered down to Farndale, whistling and chewing grass, and
camped out in a derelict stone barn. He then walked across the
head of Rosedale and Rosedale Moor, across Pikehill Moor and
camped out in another barn near Goathland.
You really were nipping across the moors, I said to my dad.
I was in a rather strange state of mind, he replied. I was happy
to be there, but I had to think about what to do next, and part
of me I had obdurately refused to listen to for two months had
already decided. Of course I thought I would live forever and I
would always be sixteen, but that doesn't preclude some degree
of foresight. I wanted to have a normal life. I didn't really
want to end up like Robert and Peter at the Ferris farm,
hopeless itinerants if there ever were any. I wanted a
guaranteed bath every night and money to visit Yorkshire
whenever I wanted. What I was doing just couldn't go on. I was
also getting tired of feeling like a fugitive. I didn't know it
then, but I had decided to grow up. This is a frightening
prospect. The child _has_ to be throttled by the adult he
becomes. It's an act of violence I don't think anybody really
gets over. I've met people in a permanent state of mourning for
the child they killed and people who have dealt with their grief
by becoming so cold that even the adult dies within them. The
child that I was knew that this was the last time he would be in
control, and the adult that I was becoming was girding his loins
for battle. I never actually managed to finish off my child
completely. Lacked nerve and persistence. Like most men, I
suppose.
My dad walked to Whitby and looked over the town from Whitby
Abbey. I feel I can hear the child screaming even now, knowing
what the adult was about to do. Dad walked very slowly down the
hill and found the Police Station. He took a deep breath, walked
in and gave himself up.
My dad and I are great friends. Sometimes, on one of the
provincial excursions my job involves, I find a country pub new
to me, with wisteria hanging over a patio, or a greensward
leading down to a river. I check the menu and when Dad comes to
visit we go there and waste the whole afternoon, eating plaice
with capers, or beef and ale pie, making bad and lewd jokes
which we would be to embarrassed to repeat in front of anyone
else, and gossiping about family and people we know. Wasting
time with people you love, I have discovered, is what life is
for, and neither Buddhists nor monetarists will convince me
otherwise.
Adam Harrington (adam.harrington@btinternet.com)
--------------------------------------------------
Adam Harrington is a computer programmer who has spent a fair
proportion of his 28 years wandering more or less aimlessly
across the British Isles and plans to spend his remaining time
in the sun doing much the same. He has been a biologist,
journalist, unemployed bum, bookie's clerk and unemployed bum
again -- in that order -- and doesn't plan on retiring until his
cold dead fingers are pried from the office doorknob.
FYI
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