Magpie Tales#89

Tess Kincaid's picture prompt this week is from a bygone age -

     It's Halloween.
   Zack is working late most nights, finishing his doctorate thesis on African tribal masks. He works in the room we call the lounge, hunched over his PC, and if the bedroom door is open I can hear the keyboard pattering, but mostly I hear Zack cursing - Windows, the printer, the memory stick he left in the Department, or himself for leaving it, or "How the hell do you spell 'tautological' anyway?"   He's onto the section "Death Masks." He reckons he'll finish a draft to show his supervisor by mid-November.  It's been slow going; one reason is he has to be careful to avoid taboos. Someone might read it. Unlikely, but you never know.

  "Go to bed, Pumpkin," he says. "I won't be long."  He makes us both malted milk and sits on the edge of the bed to chat for a bit, then decamps to his desk . . big old cupboard door on two saw-horses, we haven't much money, just each other. He leaves the door ajar.

* * * * 

   I woke suddenly and my first thought was, it was raining. Then I clocked that Zack had come to bed, that he had left the desk light on where he'd been working and that it wasn't rain on the window I could hear. Too regular. Too mechanical. Too loud.  I sat up and shook him. He stirred. He sleeps like a hippopotamus, I mean he wallows in sleep and the duvet.

    "Zack!  I can hear a typewriter." I shivered.

    "Billy" he said, coming to. "I mean don't be silly, Luce."

    "No, Zack. Listen." It's not a sound you can easily mistake. 

    "That's an electric," he said, listening now, sitting up alongside.

   "Zack, there's no typewriter in the flat, electric, clockwork, whatever. We have never had - "

    We heard a carriage return. Then the keystrokes sounded again, with pauses, the way you pause when you're thinking what to put next.  Then I knew he was scared and he knew I was scared and we hunched closer to each other.  "I don't like this."

    It got scarier. We heard chairlegs scrape, and the light coming through the part open door dimmed as if someone walked in front of it - once, twice before the typing started over. Only this time just five keystrokes, pause, five keystrokes, pause. And again, always five, typed slowly, as with one finger.

    He swung his legs from under the duvet, pulled on boxers. "Must sort this," he said, but I could feel him trembling.

  "Zack, I'm frightened."  In a whisper.  He patted my shoulder as if seeking as well as giving reassurance.  "Some pillock undergraduate got in scare the crap out of us. Trick or treat us."

    "What," I said, still sotto voce, "Bring your own typewriter?"

    But as he went to the door the light went out and the lounge was as quiet as it should be at . . . one minute past midnight, our little clock showed.  I clicked the bedside light on and said "Be careful, love."

    More light as he switched on the lounge overhead. He was back in only a few seconds, holding a single sheet of A4, shaking his head. He said, "Where do you begin when there's nowhere to begin from?  There's no one there. And no typewriter. Did we really think there would be? But look at this."  He gave me the A4 paper.  In a column of centered text, about 24 point Helvetica, bigger than any typewriter could print it read:

Wrong  Write  Books  Masks  Blood  Bones  Warns  Death

  "The computer's still switched on" he said, as if that explained everything, anything. "And there was this. Left beside it." He dropped something in my palm.
   Slender, white, hard. A finger bone.
   We looked at each other a long time.

Fearless Challenge

Kellie Elmore at "Magic in the Backyard" exhorts writers to be less fearful, to tackle 'taboo' subjects head on . . 


Breathe On Me

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to this -

Your lips, your fingertips be my awaking.

Breathe on my waiting eyes and take your kiss

to the twinned roses where my need is aching.

Breathe where beneath your breath my self is yearning,

where flesh engorges. Breath till your breath like fire

blown into flame, set by the wind's breath burning

fans into life my embers of desire.

Breathe on my limbs, my slopes, my globes, my curves 

Breathe on my secret sheaves, my readied portal -

Now, now, now, now the last shreds of reserve

are cast away, and this joy makes us mortal.

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to sleep.
Let lips, let fingertips be lullabies

sung as the slow moon past our window creeps,

let the spent dregs of passion close our eyes.

Magpie Tales#82

Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor uses another picture (below) for our starting point this week - Andrew Wyeth's "The Revenant" (1949)

Aftermath

   Time was they were called 'push-chairs'; modern marketing has them as 'strollers.' My sister's had been mine, handed on after years stowed in Dad's garage. I was eight years older than Julia and I earned pocket money cleaning it and then I was the one who insisted on pushing her on family walks or to Gran's or the shops with Mum when I wasn't at school and I wanted to tell everyone we saw that this was my little sister. When she grew out of it I think it went to charity. 

   This before the bad time, when Julia lost her pregnancy at three months and Zack and I separated, since when the stroller has haunted me, though it hasn't been so bad since Julia and I were reconciled. I mean, the dreams are not as frequent, and mostly only when I'm under the weather or it's my period.

   They begin with my bedroom door opening. I'll be awake enough to want not to dream, but I know the dream will happen anyway, and I hear myself or some disembodied voice saying "Who? Who?" I see the stroller coming in. First the single front wheel, then the seat part, the rear wheels, the push handle. The rain canopy is up, the occupant screened. My dreaming mind always hopes someone will be pushing it. No one ever is. The stroller trundles to the end of my bed and turns itself to me.  The duvet is unyielding. I cannot pull it up to screen myself. The dream will not let me not see.

   If it's Julia it's not so bad and I feel the relief even though she is tiny, like a two year old. She says nothing but holds out her adult baby hands as though imploring me not to hit her and doesn't hear me cry out that I won't ever again, hit you, hit you, ever again love, only come home. Come home, Joo.

   If it's Zack he glowers and hauls himself out of the seat and stands at the end of my bed and it would be funny if I wasn't dreaming to see a three foot tall husband carrying a toy panda called Sydney shouting how I'd enjoy having my lezza sister tucked up in there with me, wouldn't I; funny until he gets up onto the bed in his yellow babygro and tries to hold and kiss me.

   But mostly its the foetus, the homunculus that Julia conceived with Zack, that her womb shed too soon for him to live. My sister's blood stains the shawl the dream has dressed him in and his small skull lolls and his perfect hands flex and curl and the half formed lips form something that looks like Lu-cy, and then my own tears save me and I wake. Except sometimes I only dream I've woken, and the stroller is still there, empty and accusing and I shriek.

   Is all this because I blame myself? When I saw that I had married a child - oh yes, what Zack really wanted was a Mother he could get to sleep with - was it my aloofness that drove him to Julia? Was it her generous nature, nurtured by the loving Big Sister who pushed her stroller, that accepted him?

   Or that I might have become aunt to my sister's child by my husband, had not horror intervened? And now - is it that my ghosts are unquiet and will ever haunt the tormented part of me that was glad her baby died?

   

  

Magpie Tales#81

A Stranding

 "Look, Willow - dolphins!" Miss Warburton held the tabby cat to the car window, supporting the little head, rubbing her forefinger behind its tattered ear. "They won't mind the rain."  It streamed down the windscreen where the wipers had stopped.

  The dolphins - she reckoned seven maybe eight - wove around the car nudging it as if it were one of them, and, rising above the surface on their tailfins, knocked against the glass and looked in at her and the cat. The water had risen to the level of her seat, and now her feet, under the water, still on the pedals, were cold.

  "Nothing to be scared of, Willow," she said. "Dolphins are friendly to people. They help. They'll wonder what we're doing here. Shall we . . " She laid the cat in its basket on her lap and tucked in its blanket. "Shall we let them in?" She pressed the switch to open the driver's side window but nothing happened.  "Water in the wiring I suppose", and yes, the water was now rising toward the dash, covering her knees, soaking her heavy tweed skirt. But she could twist round  and just . . just reach the handle that wound down the rear window. "Let's finish it," she said, and turned the handle.

  In a few minutes more the rising tide sent water spilling through the open window. Miss Warburton stroked the cat and put the basket on the dash, against the windscreen, and closed her eyes and felt the cold seeping up to her waist. She waited.  The car rocked, rocked and she thought this must be the tide-rip moving it, floating it out to sea, and she opened her eyes again and saw the dolphins had gone, all but one, whose dorsal fin cut through the water ahead of the car, heading toward the rain-shrouded shore. But somehow the car was following it, and was now higher in the water, and the rocking was because it was surely floating, surely it was floating. And then she knew! The dolphins were underneath it, lifting and guiding it on their lifeboat backs and she made a low moan  and said "No, friends, no. Please no! You don't see. You don't understand." Her eyes closed again. She tasted seawater. Her greying hair floated up behind her. For a while the wickerwork cat-basket floated too, but was soon submerged. The car settled.

 * * * *

  Next morning at low tide a police vehicle drove down the shingle beach and across the sandbars to check out an abandoned car, about four hundred metres off shore.  Two policemen got out, looked into the car, opened the driver's door, shook their heads. Seawater dribbled.

  "This motor wasn't dumped," said one."And too late for an ambulance. Poor old soul. Got bogged down . . "

 "No, she didn't. Sand's quite firm." The second policeman's heelkick barely marked the surface "No sign of  trenching where she would've revved to get free. This motor was never bogged down. Some puzzle this. What was she doing here, for any's sake?" Then they noticed a cat in a sodden basket in the floor well still full of water, and one of them said, "God Almighty."

  The coroner's inquest found that Miss Warburton, a elderly lady who lived locally by herself and kept herself to herself, driving alone and in fading twilight, had drowned when her car became immobilised, although no cause of breakdown was found.
  The tabby cat, it was noted, had not drowned and had been dead at least four days.

(The picture-prompt below from Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor, and ideas from other Magpie posts were the starting point for this one. Many more entries can be found by clicking the link.)

   

  

Magpie Tales#80

Thanks to Tess Kincaid whose photo by Christopher Shay suggested this week's Magpie, and many more. 

"Hale Watter" 

  I logged out and turned the monitor off, left the Computing Suite and went down to the atrium. And stopped.  Outside you could barely see through the rain. Inside, folk were gathered, waiting for it to stop, and it looked like any day now it would oblige.

  My Gran had an expression for rain like this. "It's dingin' doon hale watter, Lucy," she'd say, her Scottish roots peeping. Too right! Gusts of wind sent hale watter lashing against the atrium's block-glass walls and running down in curtains. The deluge bounced off the forecourt paving. Vehicles on the driveway leading to the Main Gate threw up bow-waves like boats.

  Problem. It was very sincerely and determinedly pissing down. I had my little umbrella, more a fashion accessory than a piece of wet weather kit. Forget it, Luce. It's no contest. This rain would kill my umbrella in seconds. Instead, I went to the cafeteria and threaded through the yellow "Caution. Wet floor" cones, joined the queue, sat down with a latté and a danish pastry and texted Zack at the flat to say I was marooned at the Uni until Mr. Sunshine put his hat on again.  "Where?" he replied. "Computing Suite snack bar. For the duration by the look of it." "Don't move, Luce. You could drown! I'll send help." "Bless you, Z."  The sort of texts that new lovers do when both have mobes and 200 free texts if we top-up before sometime-next-month.

  I'd finished the pastry and was wondering about another latté and what form his help would take. A teleport back to the flat would be nice, even though it was two streets, seven minutes walk max., but seven minutes in this would turn my umbrella inside out and soak me to the skin. A teleport and a bath and Zack.

  My phone pinged again. "Those guys in your Product Design and Development should work on this!"

  Zack gets to the point like water gets down the plughole - tangentially.

  I knew I was going to regret my . .  "Work on what, Z?" but this is the way young love humours itself, yes?

 I sent the text. I waited. My phone sounded again. It's one of those smartphones. Sends and receives pictures, videos, sound files. It will Twitter and Facebook and do searches, and if you want, you can squint your way through whole books on its little screen.  I selected "Show Message."

   Just "HOHOHO!" and a picture . . .

but before the first "Grrrr!" had died on my lips and my fingers begun "Very Funny" onto the keys, the tannoy ding-donged and announced "Taxi for Ms. Westenra.  Lucy Westenra to the atrium, please." - the way young love . . er . . loves, yes?

Magpie Tales#78

The Writing's on the Wall

   When I moved into Zack's rented flat Mum said "You mean you and Zack are engaged?"  "No, Mum, it doesn't work like that anymore." Seeing her doubtful look, I said "We'll probably get married eventually. But not straightaway or anything. We've our Ph.D theses to finish."  

   The flat wasn't too bad except for the bedroom, which was done out in a 1960's wallpaper with huge yellow, orange and white flowers, so loud you could almost hear them. Certainly loud enough to give us insomnia. I guessed the paper had been up for forty years, but Zack said no, he'd found five rolls of the stuff in a cupboard when he moved in. With his then girl friend he'd scraped off earlier layers, one of which was Victorian, dark green and varnished. "Hell of a job," he said, "took absolute ages." Then they pasted up the Garden of Delights. "Kind of retro. We liked it. At first."

   So we got busy. Day One, we bought stripping knives, scrapers and a stepladder. We hired a steam stripper, a magic piece of kit. On Day Two I was up the ladder peeling off flowery grot I'd previously steamed.  Sometimes a whole width just about fell off the wall, a satisfying feeling, denuding several square metres in no time leaving bare plaster ready for white emulsion.  The piece in the corner next to the door was coming away nicely when I stopped, glanced at Zack who, gallant as ever was attacking some remaining bits of the green varnished stuff at skirting board level. So he didn't see me roughly manhandle the falling flowers back onto the wall and hold them there one-handed.

  "Zack love, what happened to the friend who helped you strip?'

  He dropped his scraper.

  "The paper, Zack. Strip the old paper. When you stuck up this ghastly stuff."

  "For a minute I thought you meant - We didn't really get on. Didn't last long after we finished the room."

  "Why?" I wanted to know, looking down on him from my perch, pressing my lips together not to laugh.

  "We were, like, incompatible."

  "In what way?"

  "Truth to tell,"he said, "she was about as much fun as a dead sheep. Why the sudden interest?"

  "Just that I imagined her up here where I am, erm . . helping you." I said, then, "Right! Nearly finished this lot. Time for a coffee."

   I took one last look. Right at the top of the wall where I had just dislodged another bunch of the horrible flowers, someone had written in pencil, in very small caps that I scratched out with my scraper in case he should see  -

  'MOST WALLPAPERS ARE BETTER HUNG THAN YOU, ZACKO!'  

  Nice one from a dead sheep!


(This is just one of many responses to Tess Kincaid's wonderful picture prompt this week.  You can find the others HERE)

Magpie Tales, 18th July

Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening!

  I was invited for drinks and canapes in the Principal's Residence along with other post-graduate students from the Departments of Mathematics, Computing, and Anthropology. Must have added up to fifty or sixty of us. The Residence is in the South Quadrangle in the mock-Gothic part of the University. It's Grace-and-Favour, of course, but the Principal was forever quipping that "Margaret and I have to put up with living in a tied cottage!" Some stonework renovations were in progress and right in front of the windows facing onto the quadrangle, a tastefully placed rubbish skip with a wide plastic chute from an upper floor of the cottage, for conveying debris.
   The Principal - a really nice man, it must be said - and his tiny wife, so welcoming, so friendly, from time to time hosted gatherings for all the post-grads in the University, and - fair do's - they didn't tap some slush fund to pay for them, but bought in the stuff themselves.  I used to see them on a Saturday mornings in Tesco, a trolley each, groaning with liquor and frozen sausage rolls, in their padded anoraks. They sort of knew me and nodded and they were, yes, really nice, friendly guys.

   "Come away in, dear," said Mrs. Principal, very Scottish, when I pressed the door-chime. "Montgomery tells me you're Computing?  Lauren . .  ?"
   I had to decide whether to be Lauren for the evening, and compromised. "But everyone calls me Lucy."

   "I see you in your pixie, don't I?"
   I guessed she meant my Peter Storm kagoul with the hood up against an East Anglian blizzard. There's really nothing between here and the Urals and we got some rare blows. I decided she was sweet.

   She led me into their big ground floor lounge. The rubbish chute was right outside the window. The Principal in shirt sleeves, chinos and loafers was pouring out and handing drinks.  A tall guy took one and passed it in to me.
   "Thanks!"
    "Zack Chesters," he said. "Anthropology. Masks."
    "Lucy. But Mr. and Mrs. seem to think I'm Lauren.  Masks what?"
    "Say again?"  He had a nice beard and a pleasant grin and seemed an O.K. guy.
    "You said anthropology masks. But not what."
    "Let's start again, Lauren or Lucy. . . "
   So we got him sorted out. Zack Chesters. Researching African war masks in the Anthropology Department.  He made a mock-leery face and said how he had lots of masks scanned into his PC and I must come up and see them some time.  We talked about war masks and wars and argued whether the International Space Station was a waste of money. He said you shouldn't put a price on human curiosity and so on, the usual earnest discussions that students have before life and writing their dissertations start beating them up. And we had a few glasses of wine, or a few too many, Tesco's finest, until the Principal tapped a glass with a spoon to call for silence. I leaned against this interesting Zack and he said "Sshhh!" rather too loud, drawing glances, and I had to stifle giggles.
   The Principal made us welcome and then turned to face the window and apologised for the rubbish chute spoiling the view.
     Years on, and I still go hot and cold when I think about it.
     I said, "You can chute the drunks straight into the skip."
     Oh, the horror! The horror!
    The silence stretched. I staggered slightly. Zack said in a TV sort of voice "I'll get her coat!" and at last everyone laughed and Mrs. Principal fetched me a chair and the evening went on its cheery way.
    Later, Zack said "I'll see you again, Lauren or Lucy?"
   I had a post-it in my bag. I scrawled my extension in the Computing Department. He put a hand on my shoulder. "It's O.K, Lucy. Everyone was a bit . .  they won't remember in the morning."
   Maybe not. But I will never, ever, ever forget.

(My response to Tess Kincaid's prompt which you'll find with many others HERE)