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First Short Story Anthology

Published by **firstwriter.com** in 2012

Smashwords Edition

Copyright **firstwriter.com** and contributors

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Foreword

Every year, **firstwriter.** com runs an international short story contest. This chapbook contains the winner and ten special commendations from the **firstwriter.com First International Short Story Contest** , which ran from 2004 to 2005. The winner, Alexandra Fox, was awarded £200 for her moving story "Cradle Song for Isobel".

These stories were first published together in 2006, in **firstwriter.magazine** issue 8: _Turning Leaves_ , where they continue to be accessible via <http://www.firstwriter.com/Magazine/>

If you would like to enter a story in this year's competition, please go to <http://www.firstwriter.com/competitions/short_story_contest/>

Table of Contents

Cradle Song for Isobel

By Alexandra Fox

Gray's Anatomy

By John Ravenscroft

The Teenager

By Bridget Livermore

One Small Step

By Toby Allen

The Death of James Chambers

By Tom Campbell

Partly Living

By Gervase O'Donohoe

As the Lean Tree Burst into Grief

By Susan Johnson

Boogie

By Heather Casey

Post Christmas Blues

By Brian Gray

Another Country

By Susan Watts

Album: A Story in Photographs

By Jane Greenwood

Cradle Song for Isobel

By Alexandra Fox  
United Kingdom

I will not think of Isobel.

I'll think of Jamie and his football match this afternoon, and how he's missed so many training sessions that he doesn't know if he'll be in the team. I'll think of keys left under doormats, peanut butter sandwiches with the jar open on the side, two-day shirts with grey lined collars, hair that needs a trim. I'll think of his round questioning face that doesn't dare to question.

But I'll not think of Isobel.

I'll think of Amy and the doors she needs to slam, the stamping up the stairs that starts, then stops half-way, the shouting swallowed into tight throat and twisted gut. I'll think of the parents' evening I missed this term, absence notes unwritten, homework unhelped, and all those lifts from other mums that I'll never be able to return. I'll think of how to pay for the ski trip in January and whether to mention that her blazer smells of cigarette smoke, and maybe I'll even try to talk to her some time.

So I will not think of Isobel.

I'll think of getting someone in to fix the hoover, buying bleach and new yellow dusters. I'll consider having a good spring-clean, wearing myself out with the work of it, mindlessly scrubbing baths, and polishing and brushing those cobwebs from the cornices.

And I won't think of her.

I'll think of other people all the time. I'll be fat and cheerful, coping oh-so-well. I'll talk to the mum over there and say isn't it wonderful that her little boy's well enough to go back to the normal baby ward, and it's a shame that he's blind but he'll still have a wonderful life, after all, he's so _loved_. And I'll put a quiet arm around the girl on the window-seat, lost in the bright-light confusion of bags and dials and beepings. We'll look together at her scrap of a baby in the goldfish tank and I'll explain in soft sounds because the long words of the nurses have passed over her head like a cloud in the wind and she's so frightened. And I'm frightened too, but I will not think of mine.

I'll think of the efficiencies of nurses, and the astuteness of doctors, and the acumen of consultants, but not of Isobel.

And I'll think of buying some chocolates for the staff and bringing them in tomorrow when it's over.

I won't think of her.

And I won't think of the tall shadowy man beside me, because if I think of his grief I might rip a tear through the strong sheet that hangs between us. If his sorrow spills into mine I'll melt, overflow, dissolve and my whole self will turn into a salty liquid, slightly acid, and seep, seep across this scuff-marked lino and evaporate, till all that's left is a dry white powder lifted by the breeze from the window.

I'm so lucky. I've got the two already. What's this point-four but a statistician's glitch? One-point-four ounces, lung function point-four of what's needed, half a brain working, half-sighted, part-deaf, (wholly mine), fully, excruciatingly finger-tip aware of pain. That's why I can't think of her.

I'll think about the priest, dear bumbling Father John in his creased stole with the fringing missing from the edge. I'll see the fatness of his finger as he tried to mark a cross on a forehead that had no room for it, and I'll try not to remember that he said, "Isobel ... why not call her Mary? Save Isobel for the next baby. I'll pray for you. There's always hope."

But I looked at her and I could only think of Isobel.

I'm almost thinking of her now, as the clever fingers of the soft-eyed nurse unclip the wires, and I'll breathe with her as the tube is pulled from the clinging of her throat, and she mews faint with the tearing of it. I'll press my nails into my palms, and watch them take the needles from her neck, her scalp and listen to the suck of the electrode pads peeled from skin as thin as tracing paper.

And then I'll think of Isobel.

As she is put into my hands, and I stroke her with my fingertips, so softly, round and round, painting my love on her. And I see that great black-haired hand come down over mine infinite in its gentleness, and cup her head. With my thumb I'll feel her heartbeat slow, and the racking of her lungs as they try to pull the hard air into them. I'll breathe soft, warm into her mouth and let her take her fill of me one first-last time.

I'll wait, wait. Then I'll put the empty body in the empty box, small, so very small, not half a baby, but taking with her more than half my heart. And in the years to come, through all the busy-ness of life, I cannot ever see myself forgetting her.

Table of Contents

Gray's Anatomy

By John Ravenscroft  
United Kingdom

On a cold Shrove Tuesday morning three weeks after Henry Gray had been admitted to the hospice, God paid him a visit. He sat on the edge of Henry's bed and they talked for about fifteen minutes. They talked about life and death, about magic, about responsibility. They talked about Doreen. Eventually, God told Henry what he had in mind.

Afterwards, Henry listened politely as God tried to crack a joke. It involved hospital pancakes, suspender-belts, and a nurse called Edna. It could have been funny, but God's delivery wasn't up to much. Henry hoped he wasn't planning on touring the stand-up comedy circuit, because if he was his routine was likely to be embarrassing. Now if God were to try his hand at a magic act, like the one Henry and Doreen used to do in the old days – well, he had natural advantages, didn't he? The punters would come flocking. But comedy? No. Forget it.

Henry smiled in the right places, but he was thinking how much better Doreen would have told the joke. She'd been a natural, able to leave you weeping with laughter almost without trying, and he wished now that he'd made more of her talent for comedy in the magic act. As usual his ego had got in the way. One of many regrets.

God laughed at his own punchline, then stood up.

"Well, Henry," he said. "I really must be going."

"Things to do?" said Henry.

God sighed. "You could say that." He sounded tired. "It's not easy, you know. Which is why I'm hoping you'll be able to help me out. Take a bit of the strain, so to speak."

He loomed over Henry's bed and touched him on the eyes, nose and lips.

"Now don't let me down, Henry Gray," he said.

"I won't," said Henry. "But remember your half of the deal. Remember Doreen."

God smiled, turned away, and walked briskly through the ward, heading for the exit.

None of the other patients paid him any attention. There was no reason to – God didn't look like anybody special. He looked like an accountant. Ten minutes after you'd met him, you wouldn't be able to pick him out of an identity parade. At the door he turned and gave a parting wave. Now the wave was good, thought Henry. Very royal, very House of Windsor. Breeding will out, his mother would have said.

He managed a slight nod of the head in return, little more than a twitch really, but God saw it and smiled. Even the tiny sparrows, Henry thought. Even the tiny sparrows.

A nurse came through the door and God stepped to one side. The Lord and Father of Mankind stepping aside for a nurse pushing a medical trolley. Then he moved through the doorway, and vanished into the dismal NHS corridor. Henry wondered what he thought of the puke-green paint on the walls. Quite a contrast to what he must have been used to.

He lay back in bed, thinking, mulling over what he'd been told he must do. Listen to your body, God had said. All well and good, but it wasn't quite as easy as that. He'd spent the last few weeks trying not to listen to his body, trying to block out the unwelcome messages it kept sending him. Before he could start listening to it again, he had a few mental barriers to dismantle. Still, like Doreen used to say, you don't argue with the Creator, do you? And if God kept his word... well, it would be worth a little pain.

Cautiously, Henry began taking down his defences. He braced himself for the expected flood of agony and nausea. It didn't come. He dismantled a few more struts, removed a few more sandbags. He waited, but still it didn't come. In fact, for a sixty-three-year-old who was supposed to be knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door, he didn't feel too bad. Not too bad at all. A damn sight better than he'd been feeling before God's visit, that was for sure. And soon, it seemed, he was going to be feeling a whole lot better.

"Three days, Henry," God had said. "Maybe less, certainly no more. I want you out of here. You have work to do."

Henry was so deep in thought, so busy thinking about his new job and about Doreen, that he didn't notice the nurse standing by his bed until she began straightening his pillows.

"You're looking perky this morning," she said.

Henry grunted. He didn't like many of the nurses, but he liked this one. Red, that was how he thought of her. Red, on account of her hair. It was a lot like Doreen's. Beautiful breasts, too, from what he could see. A pair of beautiful breasts, just like Doreen used to have, but packed away, out of bounds, strapped and tucked into her tight blue uniform.

"I'm too old to be perky," he said. "But I'm surely feeling better."

And yes, he really was. Better with every passing second. Three days? No, Henry didn't think so.

Red lifted his hand to take his pulse, her fingers leaking warmth into the thin skin of his wrist. Maybe the watch pinned to her uniform told her what Henry already knew. He saw her eyebrows lift a little.

"Hmmm..." she said, laying his hand down on the sheet again.

He remembered another bed, another hospital. He remembered laying down Doreen's hand, laying it down for the last time. Tucking it beneath a white sheet. Never picking it up again.

He swallowed.

Red started to fiddle with the bag hanging from a stand by the side of his bed. She checked the plastic tail of tubing that looped directly from its base, ending in a catheter plugged into Henry's left arm. Morphine. Henry and Mr Morphine had become very good friends recently. Much too good. It was time to say goodbye. He turned his head, aware that it moved more easily on his neck now.

"It's not the morphine," he said. "I had a visitor, see."

Red was straightening his sheets. "Is that so, Henry?" she said. "The Invisible Man, was it? I've had my eye on you, and I've not seen a soul."

He paused for a moment, wondering if he should tell her. What the hell, he thought. It wasn't as if he'd been sworn to secrecy or anything. And anyway, the situation was going to become obvious enough to everyone pretty soon.

He sat up and yanked the catheter out of his arm. Red looked alarmed.

"Henry! What are you doing?"

"God came to visit me this morning," he said. "We had quite a chat, me and God."

"God?" Red had taken the catheter from him and was trying to reinsert it. Henry grabbed her hand.

"God," he said. "And I don't need that thing. I'm cured, see. I'm not going to die, I'm going to get better. I'll be going home. Back to my wife."

"Henry, this is your medication talking. Let me just..."

"No." He kept hold of her hand. "I've got a bit of a job to do. Just fancy that, nurse. God hasn't finished with me yet. Not with old Henry Gray. He's given me a bit of a job to do. And he's promised me something in return. Promised, he has."

"Henry..."

Doreen, thought Henry, remembering her wink. Such a wonderful, sexy wink.

He reached out and found Red's left breast. He gave it a gentle squeeze. It felt delicious.

Red stared at him, her eyes and mouth a triple triangle of zeros.

"Sorry," he said, "but I've been dying to do that for weeks. Now, is there anywhere around here I can get hold of a decent atlas?"

Five days later he stood naked in front of his bathroom mirror, shaving the hair off his legs, arms and chest. Joe Sanderson, the barber he'd been going to for the past twenty years, had already shaved his head, but Henry felt happier doing the more intimate parts of his body himself. He'd put newspaper down to save making a mess of the bathroom carpet, but there was still hair and shaving foam all over the place.

"God, you move in mysterious ways," he sighed.

Joe had been pleased to find Henry looking so well.

"You old bugger," he'd said. "I didn't think we'd be seeing you here again. Not after, well... you know."

"I got better," said Henry.

While still in the hospice, he'd learned that it was wiser to shut up about his visit from God. Everyone he'd mentioned it to had suddenly become very uncomfortable. Joe didn't push it, though. He wasn't the type. He just nodded and got on with his job.

"So what can I do for you today? Same as usual?"

"No," said Henry. "Shave it all off."

Joe had looked at him in the big wall-mirror. "All of it?"

"All of it."

With a shrug, he'd reached for his electric clippers.

They'd done tests on him, of course. The doctors had done all kinds of tests. Most of them had refused to believe the results, and they'd wanted to do further tests, but Henry had said no. He was well, he had a job to do, and he was going home to do it. End of story. Against their advice, he'd discharged himself.

It was nice to be back in his own place again, to be amongst his memories. Doreen had been gone over four years, but the feel of her was still there. For now, though, he was alone, and that was good. He was free to begin work, to start conducting what God had called their "little experiment".

After Joe had finished with his head, Henry had gone shopping. There were several things God had told him he was going to need: new razor-blades, shaving foam, some fine-tipped magic markers, and the best world atlas he could find. At the big chemist in town he'd bought a top-quality first aid kit. Then, back home, he stripped off and got down to business.

He stood looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd shaved off all of his body hair except the pubic bush above and around his penis. He'd left that until last for sentimental reasons. He remembered how proud he'd been when his first pubic hair arrived. It had been like a present from God, a sign that his manhood was just around the corner. He remembered Doreen on their first date, forty years ago, grinning up at him on the back seat of his car. He shivered at the memory.

But now the tiny island of grey curls in the middle of an otherwise unbroken sea of pink flesh looked ridiculous. With a heavy sigh he covered it with shaving foam and reached for his razor.

When he'd finished he dried himself carefully and, still naked, went into the living room, where his new marker pens were waiting for him on the coffee table. The atlas was already open at a map of the world, showing the various lines of latitude and longitude that God said he would need to transfer. This next stage was going to be tricky. He picked up one of the pens and began.

An hour later he walked back into the bathroom and took a good look at himself in the mirror. His body was covered in a grid of fine black lines that corresponded fairly accurately to the lines of latitude and longitude on the map. The Greenwich meridian ran straight down his front, splitting his nose, lips, navel and penis into two halves. His penis tended to flop to the left, which spoilt the symmetry. That was annoying. It was an important reference point – the equator also ran through it, slicing it from top to bottom as well as from side to side. Still, he thought he could probably work around the problem.

Using his Greenwich meridian and his equator as starting points, he'd drawn other lines at fifteen degree intervals, north, south, east and west. He'd made a good job of his front, but it had been tricky getting an accurate grid on his back. Fortunately, his back was mostly Pacific Ocean, so accuracy hadn't been so critical there.

He'd also pinpointed several key locations and transferred them to his body. At 51 degrees north, London was in the middle of his chin - much higher up than he'd thought it would be: New York, at 40 degrees, was lower down, back near his right shoulder-blade.

"Okay, God," he said. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Let me have it."

He grabbed a beer, returned to the living room, switched on his TV set, and settled down to wait.

It was several hours before anything happened. In fact, Henry was on the point of dropping off when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his right calf. He looked down and saw a small yellow bump forming, exactly where he'd estimated New Zealand should be. When events occur, act quickly, God had said. And this was it. His first job. His very first event.

Henry took a pin from his first aid kit, burst the bump, and mopped up all the gunk that pumped out of it. When it was empty, he applied TCP, stuck a plaster over the wound, and waited.

The TV news came on. The second item was a rushed report of a volcanic eruption in New Zealand. There was confusion amongst the experts. The initial stages had been very violent, but activity had almost instantly subsided. A baffled-looking professor of geophysics came on the screen, his hair an Einstein halo. He seemed almost angry. "I don't understand what's going on here," he kept saying. "It doesn't make any sense. This thing should have been another Mount St. Helens, but somehow it's just... stopped!"

Henry looked down at the plaster on his leg. He patted it gently.

"Well what do you know?" he said. "It works. It really works."

He sat up in his chair and looked around the room.

"Okay, God," he said. "Where is she?"

There was a noise behind him. He turned. Doreen was standing in the doorway, her head cocked to one side, a huge grin on her face. His chest got tight.

"Henry Gray," she said. "Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look? What's with all the lines? You look like Spiderman on bath-night."

He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Doreen shook her head and came walking towards him. She wasn't fully materialised yet, and as she crossed the room he realised he could see through her. Still, a semi-transparent Doreen was better by far than no Doreen at all. She stopped in front of his chair, bent at the waist, and planted a kiss on the top of his bald head. It was like being touched by the frozen shadow of a feather.

"Cat got your tongue?" she said. "What on earth do you think you're doing?"

He reached out a hand and moved it through her.

"I... I'm saving it," he said.

"Saving what?"

"The Earth," said Henry. "I just stopped a volcano in New Zealand. It's a kind of magic."

The air inside Doreen's outline felt cold and a little thicker than the air outside, but that was about it. Still, he loved the feel of her, however slight.

"Oh my," said Doreen. "How long have I been away, Henry? It doesn't seem long enough for you to go senile on me."

"You've been dead four years, Doreen."

"Dead?"

Henry nodded. "Dead. And I've missed you. I've been ill and I've missed you – I can't tell you how much. But I'm better now, and you're back."

Doreen looked down at him. Something dawned in her eyes.

"Yes," she said, frowning, her head cocked as if she was listening to something. "Yes, I understand. A kind of magic. We're back on stage again, aren't we?"

"Yes," said Henry. "A bigger act this time around. Bigger part for you, too, my love."

He felt a sudden burning sensation on the inside of his left thigh.

"Henry," said Doreen, "your leg's on fire."

He looked down and checked his map. "It's that drought in Namibia," he said. "The little they've got left is going up in flames. Quick, put your hand on my leg."

Doreen raised her eyebrows.

"Hurry up," said Henry. "People are dying."

Doreen reached out and rested her cool hand on his thigh. The fire went out. The pain in his leg vanished.

"Well done," he said. "You're a natural."

"You know, if we pour a glass of water over your leg, I think we can put an end to the drought."

"Good idea," said Henry. "Worth a try, anyway."

Doreen patted his thigh and moved her hand up and down. She was rather more solid now, and Henry felt things stirring.

Doreen coughed. "Aren't we a little old for that kind of thing, Henry Gray?" she said.

Henry grinned at her. "You're as old as you feel," he said.

"Well, I don't feel dead," said Doreen. "That's for sure."

Henry grinned wider. "Oh, I think we can forget about death, you and I."

"Can we?"

"Yes," said Henry. "God's little helpers on earth, that's us. God's little trouble-shooters."

Doreen laughed, low and breathy.

"Henry?"

"Yes?"

"You know what God wants to fill the world with, don't you?"

"No, what?"

"With love, Henry. With love. He's always going on about it."

"You're right," said Henry. "He is."

Doreen nodded and moved her hand a little higher up his thigh. Henry felt his eyes growing wide. Doreen winked her old, sexy wink and kissed him.

"So... it's been a while," she said. "What do you say we make a start?"

Table of Contents

The Teenager

By Bridget Livermore  
United Kingdom

Who is he?

Head down, shoulders hunched, eyes warily scanning the bustling crowd from beneath the carefully sculpted fringe, gelled to within an inch of its life. Occasionally pausing, silently, sullenly scanning the shop windows. She follows at the obligatory distance, ready with her purse and accepting that no interaction is possible.

The teenager is out shopping with his mother.

Testosterone coursing through his gangly body his head automatically turns to steal a glance at the pretty young girls giggling and whispering in their mini skirts. Sensing his mother's private smile, he turns scowling at her, disgust oozing from every pore.

She brightens again seeing the bold "Sale" sign pasted across the window of Primark. Her hand feels for her purse as she prepares to go in. The teenager slouches right on by towards the neon sign flashing above Groovy Teens. The rhythmic thumping beat of sound, reminiscent of his CD collection at home emanates from the open doorway.

With a sigh she follows, her expression carefully neutral.

Suddenly she glimpses the son she once knew as he meets up with his own species. Identically dressed, desperately pursuing their own individuality they communicate together, laughing and jostling amicably. She instinctively hangs back, she knows that no sign of her existence must be evident, now more than ever.

Time passes and he appears from the bowels of the shop. A series of grunts, intelligible to only the experienced ear, informs her that the time has come for her to execute her duty, her reason for being there. A pair of trousers, several sizes bigger than ones worn by his father is thrust into her arms.

"Have you tried these on love? You'll need a belt with these won't you?"

Another look of disgust mixed with something that could be interpreted as pity is flashed at her from beneath that ridiculous fringe. Resignedly she takes the trousers over to the cash desk and pays someone dyed, pierced and painted beyond human recognition.

The teenager waits outside, slouched carefully against the window until his bagged and paid for purchase emerges, attached to his mother. They make their way back up the busy high street and into "Pete's Piercings". Having been made aware for many long months that she is the only mother in the history of existence who has made her offspring wait until his fifteenth birthday to have an ear pierced, the day of reckoning has finally arrived.

She watches as he chats lucidly and comprehensibly to Piercing Pete and, only she notices the carefully masked, fleeting nervousness that crosses his face, before the gun does its work.

Piercing complete, she notices the new saunter as they walk to the car and the stealing glances at the glinting reflection of his new earring in the shop windows.

Safe within the private confines of the car, she tells him he looks smart. He tuts, eyes rolling, visibly flinching at her choice of words.

Later, as she puts his old trousers into the washing machine, a week's worth of "treasure" falls from the pockets. A piece of Blu Tac, a rubber band, three Polo Mints, a straightened out paper clip, a shred of copper from the Science lab at school, a length of pipe cleaner and a half chewed, no doubt hastily extracted piece of gum.

Who is this person, half child, half man?

Still my boy.

Table of Contents

One Small Step

By Toby Allen  
United Kingdom

Imagineer this.

The suspension bridge, late at night, floodlit. In the harsh light the structure shows its age. It looks frail and old, the girders criss-crossing the light like rusted knitting. As one, the lights trained on the bridge swoop down, illuminating the rectangle of air between the bridge, the walls of the gorge, and the valley floor. The swathe of floodlight falls the 250 feet from the bridge to the river in 4.0 seconds and stops dead on the landing zone. The floodlight disappears. Darkness.

Then the lights burn back onto the bridge, scything through the ironwork. From the bottom of the gorge you can just make out six small silhouettes on the near side of the bridge. They begin to edge out into the light, and we see that they are made up of three pairs, each pair made up of one man in black, the other in a primary coloured jump-suit. Black and yellow, black and red, black and blue.

The crowd at the bottom of the gorge go wild. There are probably 10,000 of them along the valley floor, all yellows, reds and blues; t-shirts, caps and slogans: "Any Colour As Long As It's Blue", "Red Alert", "You Say Yellow, I Say Goodbye".

The blacks walk along the bridge, the colours shuffle. Each pair is followed by their own spotlight tinted yellow, red and blue (like the kind you used to get in discos, only harsher). Yellow has further to go to his station on the far side of the bridge than Red in the middle and Blue on the near side, but their walks are timed so that the three pairs arrive at their stations at exactly the same time.

It is 250 feet from the bridge to the river. Or 4.0 seconds.

The whole thing is perfectly choreographed.

Commercial break.

Ariel taps me on the shoulder.

\- My money's on Yellow. Who you going for?

\- I'm not playing.

\- Sure you're not.

\- Rules are rules.

\- What does it matter? It's not like we have inside information or anything.

\- You know the score: those involved in the program can't play.

\- Okay, but in your head, who'd you go for?

\- I don't know.

\- Oh come on. All this work, weeks of preparation, you must have given it some thought?

\- Don't be shy. Who? In your head?

We got Maria interested now. Oh great. She's leaning forward from the seat behind.

\- I haven't thought about it.

\- Oh come on, don't tell me there's been nothing going on in that dark little broom cupboard you call a mind?

\- I don't know, maybe Blue.

\- Because?

\- Don't know. Something about him.

\- Like what?

\- Large forehead. Brains. Probably been planning it for weeks.

\- How can you tell?

\- Way the hood fills out around his temples.

\- You picked him because of the shape of his head? That's how they used to hunt witches for fuck's sake.

Ariel leans over to her, puts his hand on her arm.

\- Personal experience, Maria?

She looks at him like she wants to pluck him from her nipple and dash his brains out.

The atmosphere has not been good between them for a while. Not since they started fucking at any rate.

The three men in black kneel in unison behind their primary-coloured partners and begin the complex preparations. They remove the ankle shackles and in their place wind round soft padded fabric. Around this they fasten and tighten the elasticated harnesses and attach them by a metal hoop to a thick cord. We see close-ups of the three metal hoops snapping together in quick succession: first yellow, then red, then blue. Always the same order, the same ritual.

Once this is done, on a signal from the director, the men in black stand up behind their coloured partners. They take care that their faces are shielded from the cameras by the wide hoods worn by the colours in front of them (they do not want to be typecast; one of them has an audition with Disney next week). In the tinted spotlights, it is difficult to tell apart the three blacks from the coloured's shadows. Then they guide the men in their charge forward, shuffling, to the edge of their stations.

The crowd goes quiet. One man in a yellow bandana shouts "Go Yellow" but he tails off before he finishes, silenced by hostile glances, and the penetrating stare of a five-year-old girl with banana-blonde hair sat on her father's shoulders next to him, in an oversized t-shirt bearing the words "Red Sky At Night". At this point the only sound is the helicopter hovering overhead, a camera out of each side trained on the bridge, preying.

In unison, Yellow, Red and Blue raise their arms to the horizontal. Legs together, arms outstretched, haloed in coloured spotlights, they are three florescent cruciforms on the crumbling iron.

The Christian fundamentalists won't like the imagery, but the whole thing is synchronised to perfection.

Commercial Break.

Maria taps me on the shoulder.

\- Taking their time aren't they?

My mistake. It's Ariel, not Maria.

\- It's part of the ceremony.

\- Yeah but we might be losing viewers. Concentration spans and all that.

\- They've got to do the checks, make sure there are no fuck-ups. This is going out to a global audience. And it's live TV. So no-one dies that isn't meant to.

Maria gets up, smiling to herself.

\- Real-time.

\- Sorry?

\- We're not supposed to call it "live" anymore. Felt to be a little, you know, inappropriate?

\- OK. It's real-time TV. So no fuck-ups.

Ariel leans forward.

\- Talking of fuck-ups, I heard this story about a jump organised as a birthday treat for a Japanese worker. His office building had thirty floors. So they multiplied the height of each floor by the number of stories, factored in the length of stretch a body his weight would cause on the bungee, and worked out how long the cord would have to be.

\- And? What went wrong?

\- He died. Hit the ground. Intestines came out through his arse.

Maria comes back with three white ribbed plastic beakers.

\- So, what went wrong?

\- They miscalculated.

\- Too heavy?

\- No.

\- Too tall?

\- In a way. The building was twenty-nine stories high, not thirty.

\- How come?

\- Japanese buildings don't have a thirteenth floor. Unlucky for some.

\- I'll say.

Maria hands me a beaker. It is champagne, not water.

On the bridge Blue's arms are beginning to sag. In the five minutes of commercials his shoulders must have tired. It's a sign of weakness and it could be crucial. The public pick up on things like that.

Maybe the crowd are thinking about Blue's posture when a shapeless mass of yellow explodes onto the far gorge wall. It takes them a fraction of a second to realise that what they are looking at is the hooded head and shoulders of the first man, filmed from the helicopter overhead, magnified hundreds of times and projected across the valley. Slowly their eyes decipher beneath the yellow hood the profile of a nose pushing through the fabric, and the pulse of cloth in and out to the man's quickened breathing.

This is the first time they have seen a close-up of any of the three, and the scale of the image forces them to consider the enormity of what they are witnessing (at least that is what it says in the program notes).

The rock-face darkens, and a neon-yellow word bursts onto it.

RAPIST.

Six huge letters full-stopped by a dark outcrop of rock.

The crowd is silent. They look around through the chinks of their eyes, gauging each other's reaction, trading glances and complicity. A woman with bad mascara takes off her "Going to Kill the Yellow Man" baseball cap and holds it to her chest.

Next, a huge red hood is blasted onto the gorge wall. It is a little misshapen from the contours of the rock-face, and its point is off-centre, almost jaunty. It is shaking noticeably. The rocks darken.

PAEDOPHILE.

The man with the little girl on his shoulders in the "Red Sky at Night" t-shirt turns to look at the rock-face. He is wearing a matching red t-shirt with the words "Parent's Delight". He holds his daughter's hands in his own to steady her, but he still manages to raise his middle finger at the faceless image on the far side of the valley. His daughter (please tell me it is his daughter?) copies the gesture. Four rows back and to the left a group of women hold up candles and black and white photos of children. They set their jaws under a "Better Dead if Red" banner.

Finally, the image of the blue hood, swaying on its shoulders, the head inside tilted up to the sky in defiance. Or perhaps in prayer. Then, as before, the felon's title. A huge blue

MURDERR.

Something is wrong. The blues in the crowd squint and frown, checking they read it right. In less than two seconds the projection is adjusted, moved a little to the right, and the missing E emerges from the fold in the rock that had swallowed it.

The blue MURDERER remains on screen for another eight seconds before we cut back to a wideshot of the bridge, the three dots of colour evenly spaced along its dark span.

Bar the minor technical hitch with the missing E, the whole thing is realised flawlessly.

Commercial Break.

Ariel (or is it Maria?) taps me on the shoulder.

\- Did you hear that?

It is Ariel.

\- This is something.

\- What?

\- Nothing. Not a whisper. You could have heard a pin drop out there.

Maria smirks.

\- Or a paedophile.

She gives a little bull-snort out through her nose as she says it. It's the closest she comes to laughing. And it's at her own joke.

But Ariel is right. This one is special. The monitor in the screening room showed 645 million votes already, and still 70 seconds to go. In the history of Justice TV, this was the highest ratings ever.

A tap on the shoulder. Ariel, Maria?

\- Why Blue?

Maria.

\- Looks the most guilty.

\- What about him, apart from the shape of the head?

\- Poor posture. Tell-tale sign.

Ariel leans forward.

\- Most guilty? Is it relative?

\- And sign of what? A bad back?

\- Anyway, aren't they all supposed to be guilty?

Maria turns to Ariel.

\- So if they're all guilty what does it matter?

\- Course it matters. You're deciding who dies, you need some valid reason.

Maria nearly spits out her water.

\- You're deciding? Please. You've got one vote in a billion. You don't get anywhere near deciding.

By now it's between Ariel and Maria, except they're not talking to each other, they're arguing through me. A voice in either ear. Not a voice of conscience, or a dialogue of the soul. No angel and devil on either shoulder – it is not a cartoon. Just two mouths on two colleagues winding each other up so their sex after the show could have that edge; that grudge that great desk-top sex should have. Their courting, like their fucking, derives its heat from friction.

\- So what if it's just one vote. That's democracy. Got to be in it to win it.

\- Democracy? You serious? It's just decent old-fashioned entertainment.

\- Decent?

\- Okay, old-fashioned then. Except with new technology.

\- But we get to choose. We're exercising our right to vote.

\- Three coloured buttons on your handset, darling. Interactive television, that's all, hardly democracy.

\- So what coloured button did you go for?

\- Yellow.

\- Really?

\- You?

\- Same.

\- Well there you go. Why Yellow?

\- My sister was raped.

\- Oh.

\- Yours?

\- What?

\- Your reason?

\- My ex used to like butter.

\- You don't like butter. Butter's yellow. That's a valid reason?

\- As in Marlin Brando _Last Tango In Paris_ kind of butter. Without consent.

\- Oh.

I saw them two nights ago in the car park, grinding away between cars, their breath turning to steam in the night air, tumbling out like exhaust fumes, like smoke from rubbed sticks.

Blue's arms are back to the horizontal (one of the directors must have had a word during the break; something like if he didn't get his act together he'd be up here again, if he was lucky). Red's trousers have darkened round the crotch but it's too late to count against him. Voting's closed, the audience have had their chance. Millions of yellow, red and blue buttons have been pressed on handsets across the world. Elimination's over.

The helicopter has disappeared. The gorge wall is black. There is no noise, no light. The valley is in darkness. A flare is shot up from the river bed, high above the bridge. It burns for a second before anything happens. Then as one, always as one, Yellow, Red and Blue flex their knees and launch off the bridge, backs arched, arms out.

We see them dive through the night air, through the light of the flare, their cords looping out behind them. Red and Blue maintain their shape but Yellow's arms are now flailing. They reach the dying edges of the flare's light, and disappear. For a split second we see three perfectly vertical cords, yellow, red and blue. It is (according to the program) a moment of pure geometric suspense.

Then the pattern changes. The yellow cord and the blue cord begin to jangle and arc a little, while between them the red cord stays straight. The bodies of Blue and Yellow soar back into the flare's shrinking light, their hoods ripped off by the force of the recoil. The flare is weakening now and the crowd do not want to miss a thing (Justice TV is 100% real-time, no replays). This is supposed to be a positive show, a celebration: the idea is that they look at the faces of Blue and Yellow, murderer and rapist, stunned to be alive still, and now free. But in reality, most are watching the untethered end of the red cord, snaking its way down behind its body, a useless umbilical in the fading light.

The whole thing is immaculately executed. Apart from the minor blemish with Yellow's flailing arms, but I think we can be forgiven for that.

Commercial Break.

It is 4.0 seconds from the bridge to the river. Or 250 feet.

I breathe out so deeply it feels like I have been holding my breath for minutes and perhaps I have. It is still dark here, and all I can hear is the throb of blood in my ears, and all around me a shockwave of silence.

I feel nothing, and then, a tap on my shoulder.

Table of Contents

The Death of James Chambers

By Tom Campbell  
United Kingdom

Chateau de Bois, Bergerac, November 11, 2.30pm

It was, typically, Mark who realised the mistake. Up until then, the last days of Sir James Chamber's life had been spent in peace, calm and comfort. One would almost say good health, if it weren't for the cancer.

He hadn't experienced any intolerable pain for weeks now. Once he had stopped trying to fight it, the tumour had proved to be a very gracious victor, and had quietly got on with the business of killing him, steadily growing and squeezing, and thinning and draining him. Meanwhile, well regulated doses of unlicensed painkillers, procured quasi-legally from the Houston Institute of Medicine, were making the process as dignified as possible. They were highly effective and precisely targeted, and each pill had cost four hundred dollars. They were also still experimental and untested, but, as his doctor had said, it was a bit late to be worrying about side-effects now.

Emotionally, James had remained on an even keel. He had always prided himself on his capacity for rationalism, and once he had been given the terminal prognosis, he had quickly passed through the stages of shock-denial-grief-anger-acceptance, and spent his last few months as profitably as possible. And, really, how could he resent his tumour? That libertarian masterpiece, growing freely and efficiently across his chest, unencumbered by the tyrannical regulations that all his other cells feebly subjected themselves to. No, the tumour was part of him – in fact, it was the most ambitious and enterprising part – and it would die with him. In fleeting moments, he had even found himself wondering if anything could be done to save it.

In this reflective mood, he was able to spend his last few days going over the balance sheet of his seventy years unsentimentally, in a disciplined, well-organised manner, making careful note of all that had happened. From his earliest memories of wartime summers on the Sussex coast, through to prep school, boarding school, Oxford, the bank and all else that followed, he scrutinised the decisions he had made, the paths he had taken and, never allowing himself more than a morsel of regret, those he had not.

And, at the end, the inventory really wasn't too bad at all. There were, he estimated, no more than 150 people in the United Kingdom who were richer than he was. True, he hadn't exactly started out with nothing, but he had played his hand with verve and skill. Most of the big risks had come off, all of the losses had been manageable, and he had properties, businesses, investments, partners, holding companies, creditors, debtors, enemies, mistresses, victims, competitors and litigations handsomely spread across four continents.

Fortunately, he had avoided the great follies that had engulfed his contemporaries – politics, sports, philanthropy, the arts, newspapers. There was no Chambers school of music, no ruinously expensive football club to worry about, and he was of little interest to journalists. He had always regarded his political donations as no more than an unavoidable business cost, and his knighthood had been awarded for no other reason than that he had a lot of money.

Nor had he been lonely. His first marriage lasted thirty years, produced four children and ended amicably and surprisingly cost effectively, while his second wife, although now hugely irritating, had provided him with four years of glamour and sexual excitement, without ever being completely vulgar. He had two economically dysfunctional daughters, who had inherited at least some of their mother's good sense, and thankfully made only semi-poor choices of husband. There were five indistinguishable grandchildren, many of whom were now bouncing around the grounds of the Chateau. Touchingly, for the last week of his life, most of his family seemed to want to be, if not with him, then at least somewhere on the same property.

It was Anthony who was the only out-and-out disaster. The eldest, who had behaved so much more like a youngest son, a foolish forty-five year old adolescent who dedicated his life to getting high and plotting schemes to bring down capitalism. It was very disappointing. Almost a million pounds spent on bringing him up, and all cancelled out by £10 worth of hallucinogenic drugs that transformed his son from Balliol scholar into gibbering idiot. Not that it got any cheaper afterwards. For five years, James had invested heavily in his son's mental health. The world's most expensive pharmaceuticals, the alpine sanatorium, controversial shock therapies, Chinese meditation, and, finally, fatally, the Californian psychoanalyst who provided Anthony with not only a theoretical justification for his lunacy, but a patriarchal culprit.

At the end, Anthony was no longer mad, but he was no longer Anthony either. The earnest young classics student went on to become many other improbable things instead: revolutionary Leninist, anarcho-libertarian, pantheist, surfer, Buddhist, environmental activist, cannabis dealer, skateboarder. Finally, he settled on unspecialised beach bum. If he lived in England he would be what James would have called a tramp, but on the West Coast of America he was considered a citizen, even a community leader, among the whackos with whom he took drugs and shared the funds his mother sent him.

But with Mark there had been no such accidents. From the earliest age, his youngest son had instinctively understood the contractual underpinnings of family relations. Mark knew what was due to him and what was expected of him, and had quietly got on with the family business of making money. He had a pathological work ethic, spoke in a flat trans-Atlantic accent and was impressively, brutally right wing. Emotionally uncomplicated, he still managed to be permanently on the point of losing his temper. His tall, blonde and barren Connecticut wife was both one of the most attractive and boring women that James had ever met.

And it was Mark who was now coming to him at the end. Broken from his stocktaking by the sound of footsteps, James raised his head to see his youngest son. He was striding purposefully down the hall, briefcase in hand, looking strikingly like James himself had done three decades ago, if somewhat shorter, and he started speaking to his father even as he approached.

"Jesus, dad. Do you know what _tax regime_ you're about to die in?"

Mark wasn't alone. Scampering behind him was Lewton, frenetically nodding his bald head. "Sorry Jimmy, _mea culpa_ , I'm afraid. Eye off the ball on this one. It was Mark who spotted it, and immediately I knew he was right. France is no country to die in. Not unless you want to be making a generous contribution to the state this year."

"To all intents and purposes, we are in a communist country," said Mark.

Although he understood what he had just heard, it was some moments before James was able to reply. He hadn't spoken a fully-formed sentence for many hours, and seemed to take a while to formulate a cogent response. "Okay, I understand. I should have thought of this myself. Take me to London. Valerie, let's do this as soon as possible."

The nurse, who had been sitting in the corner of the room, was on her feet. Anything she was about to say was silenced by a curt shake of the head. Mark and Lewton looked at each other for a moment. Mark said: "Okay, let's not push it now. Let's just get back to London. Will you get Frye to sort this out?"

Mark turned to Valerie. "We need to get back to London straight away. I guess you'll need to give dad a sedative for the journey, but for Christ's sakes, be careful – if he dies on the flight, I don't even know what the tax implications are."

Eaton Square, London November 12, 3pm

As if by teleport, Sir James awoke in London. The weather was beastly, as he had known it would be. He looked out of his window at a grey wall. He had never expected to see a winter's afternoon in England again, and the sight did not cheer him. Already it was perceptibly darkening, or was it his vision that was fading? He knew that that was to be expected soon.

For some reason, they had made a bed for him downstairs, rather than use the master bedroom. In the room next door, his study, he could dimly hear voices. Lewton, Mark and Jarmir Chahal, the lawyer, were talking. They weren't arguing, but he recognised Mark's purposeful and business-like tone dominating the conversation, asking questions, overruling objections, making collective decisions.

He couldn't say how long he had been awake, and how long this had been going on for. He felt groggy from the sedative, and he wanted to go back to sleep. Perhaps he did, because when he looked up next, the curtains had been drawn and the room was full.

"How are you, Jimmy old boy?" said Lewton, with laboured chumminess.

"Tired and very ill. Now what's going on?" said James.

Lewton didn't reply. He turned to Mark, who said: "Dad, we were thinking you should go to Mexico."

"You know you've got residency rights there," said Lewton.

James nodded, and said slowly: "Mexico... yes, that's right, I do, of course. Though I haven't been there for years. It's rather a long way from here."

Lewton nodded unhelpfully. "Yes, it is rather," he said. "But the tax savings are considerable."

"We're talking a difference of almost twenty million dollars," said Mark.

Sir James did not reply, but looked at his lawyer.

"Not immediately, of course," said Jarmir. "It will take us a few months to sort the paperwork out, and it will have to be routed through the States. But it's a perfectly standard procedure. No risk, and yes, I'm confident you will make tax efficiencies in approximately that region."

Sir James's father had given him little advice in life, but had told him always to have an English accountant and a Jewish lawyer. Well, times had changed, and he had a Jewish accountant and an Indian lawyer. He also had a French nurse, Valerie, who up until now had been listening by the door in silence.

Suddenly, she said: "We cannot go to Mexico. I don't give my permission. It's not safe. The doctor will not give his permission."

"The doctor will give his permission to whatever dad says," said Mark.

Sir James looked up, away from the others, to the ceiling. God, he didn't feel like going to Mexico. All he really felt like doing was dying, but it clearly wasn't going to be as straightforward as that. People said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes, but which people – nobody that James knew. Death was one thing, but there had never been anything certain about his taxes. Twenty million dollars was hardly the kind of money to throw away, and besides, there was the principle of the thing. No bureaucrat, French or English, was going to rob his grave. Not if he could do anything about it.

"Okay. Call Frye. Tell him to get hold of the plane and make all the necessary arrangements. Prepare the house. Make sure all the paperwork is tight and that you've got everything worked out. I don't want to have to come back. And get the doctor – he'll need persuading, but tell him I've made up my mind. I don't want to discuss this any further with him or anyone else. I don't know how long I've got, and we need to leave by tomorrow at the latest."

Although it wasn't clear who exactly he had been addressing, there was an immediate flurry of activity. Lewton bustled out of the room, Chahal started rummaging for papers in his case. Valerie shook her head, but stomped out of the room, to go and do as she was told. She was, she knew, being paid more than any nurse she had ever met. Only Mark stayed where he was.

"Dad," he said. "I'm not going to be able to go with you on this one."

James looked up at his son, but before he could say anything, Mark continued: "I've got a hellish week, and I need to get back to New York. There's a heap of things going down. One's big, really big, and all of them need my attention. If I don't steer it myself, I'll have a shit storm to deal with. You understand how it is."

Sir James nodded slowly. "I understand," he said.

"And don't worry," said Mark. "I'll definitely make the funeral."

San Teodoro, Yucatan, November 15, 11am

It was funny, he thought, how the present circumstances impact so strongly on one's perceptions of the past, even in the most rational of men. As James looked out over the farm, he couldn't help but wonder if his previous assessment of the last seventy years, made just a few days ago, hadn't been unreasonably upbeat.

There was no doubt that things were a lot less comfortable than they had been. Most of his medical supplies had been either confiscated or stolen at the airport and he was now solely dependent on imprecisely measured doses of morphine. Since waking he had veered erratically from vast pain to blissed out idiocy. Even now, on what was his very best form, he felt groggy and unclear. With some effort, the most distinct emotion he could muster was a state of extreme grumpiness.

He wasn't the only one. Clearly furious to be in rural Mexico, Valerie had disappeared into the house, only appearing every so often to perform the most perfunctory of tests and clumsily administer some medication. The doctor had only seen him twice, and both times had seemed strikingly disappointed. They obviously wanted him to die as soon as possible.

Not that he could really blame them. There didn't seem to be much for them to do out here. He had bought the farm in 1978 for, inevitably, tax reasons and had only been twice since then. James wasn't sure how much farming had gone on in the last twenty years, unless he was a cactus grower. He had always vaguely assumed that it was a cattle farm, but he seemed to be surrounded by 10,000 acres of empty scrubland. Maybe they were in barns or something, or maybe it was a tax thing and they didn't exist. He wondered who was meant to be in charge – there didn't seem to be anyone who actually worked here. The house itself was huge and rambling, far too big for any practical purpose. He had only experienced an over-sized bedroom, a depressingly old-fashioned bathroom and a poorly-lit kitchen, though he had peered down gloomy corridors and had glimpses of sad empty rooms, with their shutters closed and furniture covered in sheets, like misshapen ghosts.

His wife had rung from Paris to say that she was trying to join him, but, as alone as he was, he didn't know if he could face that. Even worse, there was a message that Anthony was trying to get in touch – perhaps, now at the end, he wanted to do some kind of Californian father-son thing. Well, he'd be damned if he was going to let his death make Anthony feel any better about himself.

He found himself wishing that he hadn't divorced Sarah, and for the life of him couldn't remember why he ever had. A divorce, followed by an embarrassing second marriage to a silly woman half his age. That made two failed marriages, and when he considered the rest of his family, the score card was scarcely any more impressive. His eldest son was a deranged terrorist, his daughters were imbeciles and Mark an atrocious wanker. He wasn't even sure if he liked his grandchildren very much.

Of course, and he had to keep reminding himself, there was still all the money. He was probably one of the fifty wealthiest people in Mexico. That was something. One should never overlook the importance of having a lot of money. It was just a shame that, at the end, there didn't seem anything to spend it on. But, as he looked out over the empty landscape, he realised that having nothing to do with his money was actually the least of his problems. He was lonely, he was in pain, and worst of all, in just a few days time, he was going to die, and he suddenly, horribly, didn't want to.

Table of Contents

Partly Living

By Gervase O'Donohoe  
United Kingdom

"Did you like our story, children?" she said, over her shoulder.

"Does Mr Rabbit get home safely?" asked the little girl, anticipating tomorrow's episode.

"Ah, you'll have to wait and see."

The blonde, curly-haired Tom, and his older, darker sister, Margaret, were still collecting their pencils, and she was wiping the board clean of the day's lessons. The young teacher was glad that the two children were delaying their departure, giving her a short reprieve from her sentence, for this was the time of day when it settled on her like a physical weight. Little Tom was trying to re-tie his shoelace before starting his walk home, and Emily Matthews went down on one knee to help him with it. As she did so, she was conscious that, in truth, it was she who was holding onto them, for the generous midsummer evening stretching ahead would be longer for her than for them.

Suddenly they skipped out of the schoolroom into the arms of their waiting mother. "Say thank you to Mrs Matthews," she encouraged them as she headed down the hill toward home with the children circling around her.

Emily turned the heavy key in the schoolhouse door and put it with the exercise books into the basket on her bicycle. She began to push it uphill, for it was much too steep at this point to ride. There was still plenty of heat in the afternoon sun and Emily took the hill towards the village slowly, for there was no hurry to be home. This was the most suffocating stretch of the day, when the heat intensified the suppression of life within her. The noise, the squabbling, the singing of her little pupils were over for another day, and yet the sun was still high. Back at the beginning of the year the night had almost blessedly fallen by the time she returned to her cottage, but now there would be hours of daylight in which to live, or partly live. Winter was more merciful when you were waiting.

She stopped and half-turned to look across the vale to the line of the Malvern Hills indistinct in the haze of the heat. Soon that line would be prematurely sharp and black as the sun sank to the west leaving the eastern side in an early dusk. Emily envied the people who lived on those slopes, whose day would be shorter than hers.

She was up the hill and abreast of the church now, and could think about mounting her bicycle, but that would hasten her arrival at home. She paused again, and from the churchyard the headstones of the village's ancestors stared blankly at her, past waiting themselves, and knowing nothing of her fearful longing.

She decided to delay the moment no longer. Climbing onto her bicycle she was home in a couple of minutes. She let herself in and revived the stove to make a pot of tea. She would spend some time with him. She brought her cup to the table at the window which looked out across the valley, and sat holding it in both hands, using the framed view as a stage on which to play out the scenes of her life with him.

The same sun, she thought, would be lighting his day in his trench in France. It seemed unfair to Emily that the sun should be able to be in all places at once whilst she and her Frank were so far apart. His face came back to her readily enough, and the charm of his half-smile, and the tenor of his voice as he spoke to her intensely with one hand on her waist. She had first heard him reading the lesson in church, and it was his voice which had attracted her. She concentrated... and suddenly a rush of images crowded her stage: cycling around the lanes with him, her hair blowing in her face and he, up ahead, shouting back to her; going to Oxford with him to see his college two Easters ago; slipping into the Severn in the valley at Upton and Frank's strength pulling her from the water. And then... then – she slowed her memories down, as people read slowly lest they finish a book they love – hearing about the war at the beginning of that August, and knowing that he was going to volunteer. One late August day, looking at the very same Malverns, Frank asked her to marry him and she said "of course", and they shouted their joy into the valley as they stumbled together down the hillside.

It was only a month after their hastily arranged wedding that he received his orders to report to a camp in Surrey. She hardly had time to adjust to their new closeness, but she felt every detail of it. She could see him asleep in the morning and recapture the smile that spread across his face when he woke and became aware of her next to him. She could smell his body, and feel the weight if it on hers. She briefly allowed herself the initial hesitancy and then the joy of their lovemaking, but the dreamy peace that followed it she could not experience because a lump of anxiety filled her stomach.

The sun was dropping into Wales by now, and the dark line of the Malverns was clear. The people on the eastern slopes were in dusk. Lucky them. She glanced at her photograph of him in his infantry uniform – just as he was in her heart. She heard the rattle of a bicycle against her iron gate, and leaving her stage she crossed to the other window, but the visitor had already covered the short path and was knocking on the door which opened directly into the front room. She reached for the latch and the door opened on a lad in a uniform. Her heart stopped. He held out a buff envelope.

"It's for you, Missus," he apologised, in a voice scarcely broken, and almost ran back to his bicycle.

She took it and sat down, omitting to shut the door. She knew what it was. Her fingers fumbled the gummed seam on the back. She had ceased to breathe. A noiseless sob exploded inside and her body jerked involuntarily. The telegraph was open and partially torn. She let it fall and threw herself next to it on the floor, smoothing it out, tears beginning to drop directly onto the fragile page, as she struggled to read it without smudging the text.

Even with her blurred vision, the words stood out in their precise military grid, each one separate as if afraid to admit any feeling. She made out "...Deeply regret... Matthews... killed in action... 10th July... Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy." She stared at the news, and a cry rose up from her body which she feared to let out lest she should lose herself. Emily half rose from the floor and, treading on her own skirt, stumbled backwards into a low nursing chair. She curled herself up and rocked the cry out of her little by little. "Oh Frank, my Frank." She took the telegraph to the table, and the movement released her tears again. She placed it carefully and began to dab it dry with her sleeve, protecting it as the last vestige of her beloved, a sacred memento. She dared not look at the photo of him who was no more. She caught the sun disappearing behind the hills and reproached it for lying to her for the days it had been shining on her and not on her dead Frank.

Emily sat motionless as the dusk gathered around her. The scenes she had relived went dead. They became memories, bitter, bringing pain not joy, beating her not comforting, hurting her not soothing, their very freshness the cause of physical suffering. The time she had spent with him had been the last time. How could she have known that? The telegraph was a relic. She lifted it, cradling the tear-stained paper in both hands, offering it up. The black of the hills edged her page. She braced herself to read about him once more. The light was poor now, her vision blurred. She held her breath and looked again. She could not be sure – did it say "F.R. Matthews" or "E.R."? Frantically she found a candle and lit it from the stove. She held it to the page. "E.R." – not Frank. She checked again. She dared not believe it. She sank into the chair. "E.R.", the vicar's son, Edward. She did not know what to feel. The photograph, the images took flesh again; loss relented into longing. She dared not admit any elation into her heart. To feel anything seemed improper. She refolded the telegraph, found her coat and went to the back of the cottage for her bicycle.

The church and its yard were in deep gloom as she arrived, and the Georgian vicarage appeared to be almost in darkness. Emily took the path between the graves. The headstones now seemed no more uncomprehending than she was of the bizarre scene they were witnessing. She was the messenger of death. Reaching the door quickly, she hesitated to knock, quite unsure of what she might say. As she faltered it opened and the vicar's wife, Sarah, stood silently waiting for her. Emily could not utter a word. She threw out her arms to encircle the neck of the older woman, the torn telegraph held tight between her fingers. Sobs shook the stolid frame which her arms enclosed.

Finding a voice, at length, she said "Mrs Matthews, I have a telegraph which... I'm sorry is for you and your husband."

"I know, my dear." In her turn she held Emily very close. Emily wanted to be gone, but hated herself for her cowardice. The vicar's wife held onto her still, and her husband appeared from the study, whose windows looked out across the churchyard to the gate. In his hand he carried an open telegraph which he held out towards her. Over the wife's shoulder Emily saw him coming and, realising instinctively what it all meant, slipped unconscious through the arms of the older woman into a heap on the doorstep.

Table of Contents

As the Lean Tree Burst into Grief

By Susan Johnson  
United States

Okay, first I'll tell you about how I got back with my husband and then I'll ask the question.

Well, it was last year, the year I turned 30. I was going through that stage women go through at that age – you know, getting in tune with life. First I quit my job. Then I redid my kitchen in an apples and roosters motif; I hand stencilled my floor in checkerboard and distressed it myself using Glid-strip and steel wool. I fenced in the area under the apartment that juts out over our garage with chicken wire, and I planted wisteria and trained it to grow up the posts so that it billowed out in big thick blooms. Then I bought a rooster and six Rhode Island red hens. Every morning I'd go out and toss chicken feed to them from my apron and breathe in the blossoms and say a line from a poem I'd forgotten: "One topmost mordent of wisteria." I ate fertile eggs, which I poached so that the tiny dot of blood cooked away. Invisible.

My husband James was a high school drama teacher. Our garage was crammed with canvas flats painted in gaudy faux wallpaper, papier mache masks of Oedipus and Antigone, two ten foot step ladders that were only used once in a production of _Our Town_ – stuff like that. No weed-eaters or jumper cables or things normal people have. James could make a high school auditorium look like Camelot, but he wouldn't fix anything around the house. The whole faculty thought he was gay but he wasn't. Underline that, would you. He wasn't.

We had a few friends. Mainly we hung out with our neighbours, Irene and Everett Varney. Irene was a nurse midwife and Everett was a Presbyterian minister who loved beer. He came over and drank it at our house with impunity because we weren't Presbyterians. Anyway, Everett would stretch out in my dad's old wooden Adirondack chair and drink Red Stripe beer all the livelong day while James would build flats or paint scenery. They would argue theology. James would say he highly doubted that God was involved in the minutiae of our everyday lives, and Everett would say "he knew you were going to say that."

Irene and I hung out in the kitchen making pepper jelly or canning vegetables. Irene said I was ready to get pregnant was why I was so domestic all of a sudden. When she said that I felt a sort of thump in my pubic area. Is that normal?

Let's see, I was telling you about when I decided to try and get pregnant. Anyway I went off the pill and bought a bunch of books and I have to tell you that trying-to-make-a-baby sex was just incredible. Well, it was just the opposite for James. He hated having to perform according to the demands of my body. He started acting weird. He'd stay at school till 10 or 11. He got a string of strange ailments: first it was migraines; then it was kidney stones. Irene said I should cool it for a while, but it was hard. I was raging with creative hormones that I had no outlet for. Irene and I ploughed them into herb gardening.

That's about when then chickens all got killed.

We were keeping Everett and Irene's chocolate Lab Dixie while they visited their daughter (who's a med student and the University of Tennessee). Anyway, we tied Dixie to the water spigot on the side of our garage, and in the night I guess that rooster drove her crazy and she pulled the tap completely out of it and dug under the chicken wire and just chewed that rooster and all six chickens to bits. When we woke up the whole back yard was flooded and the chicken coop was a nasty mud hole of chicken feed and chicken shit and feathers. Dixie was wallowing in it. I just stood in the middle of the yard with my hands on my head and James said "look at your pyjamas." I was bleeding all over them.

That same day, James's cousin (who his mother and dad raised) and his wife were killed in a car wreck. Right away we had to clean up all that mess and find someone to take care of that damn dog and take off for Louisville because James was the executor of the estate _and_ guardian of their daughter Sara Beth. We drove back ten days later towing a U-Haul trailer filled with the bedroom furniture, stereo, computer, curling iron, etc. etc. of a seventeen-year-old girl who lay curled up, foetal, on our back seat.

I was still bleeding.

Well, James just obsessed over Sara Beth. He enrolled her in his high school and put her in his drama class and even cast her in the role of Abigail Williams in _The Crucible_. Every night they would rehearse lines at the dinner table and practically ignore me except to ask for more lasagne or something. I washed her jeans and blood-stained underwear and ironed her shirts and cleaned her room. One day I found a joint in an ashtray under her bed. Irene said God made teenagers insufferable so we wouldn't be so sad when they left. Let's see, that was the week before Christmas. I threw away all my fertility books and went back on the pill.

In January James invites the entire cast of _The Crucible_ to our house for a cast party. Irene and I worked all day making almond cookies with little hangman's nooses on them and a huge black cake shaped like a Pilgrim hat. I ladled out "blood" punch to thin, zitty kids in Metallica t-shirts and their stage makeup still on. They sat around cross-legged in circles saying things like "did I play Elizabeth too bitchy?" and "I'm going to get a minor in art therapy."

Sara Beth clung to James all night. Irene looked over at them and arched her eyebrows, but I said "she just lost her father." Irene said that she guessed everyone grieved in their own way.

James was telling a circle of kids how he had met Keanu Reeves at a college drama competition, and I watched as Sara Beth slipped his wallet from his hip pocket and started studying his credit cards and photographs. He was casually aware that she was doing it, and that's when I knew they were sleeping together.

Sara Beth told all her friends she was pregnant before we found out so of course we couldn't "do anything" about it. Not that we would have. Irene was militantly pro-life. Not in a Jerry Falwell kind of way, but in a miracle-of-life kind of way. Everett found Sara Beth a Presbyterian home for teen mothers where she could stay in high school and where they would find a family for her baby if she decided not to keep it.

I let James move into the apartment over the garage until he found a new job, which was kind of difficult for a man with a theatre degree who'd been fired for knocking up a student, who also happened to be his cousin. I got my old job back as a copy editor on a daily newspaper. It was an hour's drive to and from, but I was glad for anything that ate up time. The office atmosphere – file cabinets, water fountains, Styrofoam coffee cups – was very comforting. I got home every night at around 2:00am and James had usually come in and cleaned the house and done my laundry and left me something to eat. It really ticked me off at first, but I was too emotionally exhausted to protest. As long as he stayed out of my sight.

After a while he began fixing things around the house while I was at work. He installed a new storm door and put a new vent hose on the dryer. He put my apple drawer pulls on my kitchen cabinets, which I'd asked him to do months before. He hauled away all the drama junk in the garage and he even planted shrubs.

Everett still came over to see him from time to time. Irene said it was more ministry than friendship. Of course, Irene still came to visit me. One day we were sitting at my kitchen counter colouring eggs for her Sunday School picnic and I looked out and saw Everett sprawled out in the Adirondack chair sipping a beer, watching James trying to fix a weed-eater.

Irene looked at them and touched my hand.

Let's see. That was April. In June the Presbyterian home kicked Sara Beth out for smoking dope. Everett and Irene took her in. I was so mad I wouldn't even speak to them. I started seeing a sports writer on the Gazette staff named Bryan. A couple of nights I even stayed at his place, mainly because I dreaded going back to that house. This apparently drove James crazy because when I came home, every light, every alarm, every radio, the TV – everything would be on full blast. I brought Bryan home with me one night and James called the police, who knocked on my door and asked me if I was being raped.

Irene wouldn't leave me alone either. She left baskets of muffins and loaves of homemade bread on my back porch when I was at work. I never touched them. They moulded and rotted.

On my birthday, (believe it or not) August 15, Irene delivered Sara Beth's baby, a 6 pound, 4 ounce girl. James was there. He cut the cord.

Everett baptised the baby because she was blue and so full of mucus she almost choked to death. They christened her Agnes Maude after Sara Beth's mother. James came to my back door with the baby all bundled up. We hadn't spoken a word in seven months.

"Do you want to see her?" he asked. His eyes were puffy and I almost gasped at how thin he was.

I shut the door in his face.

"Happy birthday," I heard him say.

Sara Beth ran off when the baby was only eight days old. James took her. I stood in the kitchen and watched him and Irene and Everett carry a bassinet, diaper pails, and so on up the steps to the apartment. Bryan called and said he was bringing over pizza and beer. I told him I had a virus.

About, oh, two weeks later I was at work and I had to do some research on an article about wisteria in the gardening section. I typed in the word on a search engine and there it was: "One topmost mordent of wisteria." It was the line from that poem I'd forgotten. I clicked on it. The poem was called "The Mad Scene" by James Merrill. He was a poet, you know. His family started Merrill Lynch. Anyway, there was that line that had sort of haunted me all these years. I have it. Do you mind if I read it to you?

The Mad Scene

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.  
In it, the sheets and towels of life we were going to share,  
The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever  
Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly,  
Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper  
Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched  
From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes  
Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never  
Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers  
And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna,  
Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust,  
Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen.  
Fingers were running in panic over the flute's nine gates.  
Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed  
To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one  
Topmost mordent of wisteria,  
As the lean tree burst into grief.

~James Merrill

Well, anyway, I just got up and walked out of the newsroom. I had my keys in my blazer pocket so I didn't even get my purse. I drove home squinting back hot tears and chanting over and over, "as the lean tree burst into grief." When I got home, James was in the living room. The baby was asleep in an infant seat in front of the TV and James was folding laundry – little t-shirts and little gowns and little square flannel blankets. All my laundry was clean and folded in a willow hamper. Do you hear me, a willow hamper. I didn't even realise we owned a willow hamper.

My question is, and I'm so, so sorry it took me so long to get to my question – do you think I ought to get some new chickens?

Table of Contents

Boogie

By Heather Casey  
United States

Sarah leaned against the door jam of Jonathan's vacant room, her head against the cool wood. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, sure, if she let go she would shatter into a thousand pieces. The cocoon of silence was almost tangible, as if a blanket had been placed over his room, smothering the life.

Sighing, Sarah pushed away from the door and crossed the threshold into the room. The air was heavy; she could feel it move across her skin, like walking through a heavy fog. She surveyed the bedroom; toys scattered across the floor, in suspended animation, waiting to finish the game. A grass-stained blue and white t-ball uniform lay in a heap beside the clothes hamper. As she walked around his room, her toe bumped the half-hidden baseball bat he just had to have. She smiled as she remembered how he sweetly begged for it: "Please Mommy, can I have it?"

She walked to the dresser where model cars lined up, ready for the flag to drop. She ran her fingers across the posters, double-checking the tape, of super heroes in various acts of heroism. There were no heroes anymore.

Her gaze came to Boogie, Jonathan's teddy bear, his most treasured possession. Boogie sat propped against the pillows, on Jonathan's bed. His big brown eyes, shone bright as if filled with unshed tears, stared back at Sarah. Questioning, when will Jonathan return for another adventure?

Jonathan would not be returning. Not ever, Boogie, Sarah silently answering his unspoken question.

She picked up Boogie and sat on the bed, cradling him in her arms and inhaled. She could still smell Jonathan; snips and snails and puppy dog tails, smiling as she remembered the poem she would recite for him.

"I cannot do this. I cannot go about my day as if he never existed." She cried.

"Oh Boogie, what are we going to do without him?" she asked the bear. He had no answer.

Fat tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks. The only sounds were her sobs; her chest tightened with memories. Her anguish was physically painful, her breathing came in gasps, and she was suffocating with despair.

Sarah lay down upon his bed, curling into herself and holding onto Boogie. She finally fell asleep, from exhaustion, from frustration, from heartache.

Images from their life played through her mind. Like a home movie, she can fast-forward, rewind or even pause, but they bring hollow comfort. When the movie is over, reality slams home and she again is alone. Knowing this she still replays them, because it is all she has left, a glimpse of him is worth any pain she may endure.

The trip to the zoo last spring plays through Sarah's mind. It was cool that day. Jonathan was so excited, the baby animals were beginning to make their appearances, and he would run from exhibit to exhibit hoping to see one. Jonathan stood in front of the orang-utan cage, making monkey faces, scratching his head and hopping back and forth, grunting and grinning for the camera. Sarah fast-forwards past the elephants, the rhinos and camels until she gets to the giraffes. They walked over the bridge of the exhibit, eye level with the long necked animals. Jonathan held his hand out for the giraffe to take the offered treat. He squealed when it's long black tongue wrapped around his hand in an attempt to get every morsel. While Jonathan was trying to untangle his hand from that giraffe, another one had snuck up and was eating the rest of the treats from the cup he held in his other hand. They laughed so hard at the giraffes' antics that their sides hurt. Sarah fast-forwards; they are walking hand in hand on their way home when Jonathan looks up at her, "That was a great day. I love you Mommy."

She tossed fitfully in her sleep as more images began to emerge. A postcard-perfect summer day. Large billowy clouds suspended in an azure blue sky. In her dream, Sarah watched as they walked to the park a few blocks away. She was carrying a picnic basket filled with sandwiches, fruit and a tin of chocolate-chip cookies, which they had baked the night before. Jonathan, wanting to do his part, carried the blanket.

She began to whimper, as the images grew darker. Like a child's etch-a-sketch, her head thrashed back and forth across the pillows, as if trying to erase the images. Regardless of her efforts, she was powerless to stop the nightmare from continuing along its devastating path.

Stopped at the corner of Fifth and Atlantic Avenue, they waited for the "Walk" indicator to light up.

"No! Go back! Go back!" Sarah's cry rang through the silence of the empty room.

But he continued, when the sign on the pole gave the all clear, across the street, oblivious to her warning

"Look out!" she heard someone scream out in warning, but it came too late. Sarah, powerless to wake from the nightmare, watched as the van, seemingly from nowhere, barrelled toward all she held dear. She watched herself turn to push Jonathan out of harm's way. Tires squealing, metal crunching, and Jonathan's scream echoed through her mind. She saw the blood red blanket, stark against the black of the asphalt, then only darkness and pain.

Bleep....Bleep....Bleep... Somewhere in the distance, she heard drawing her from the nightmare. She woke to find herself tangled in the blankets, soaked with sweat and crying uncontrollably. Her whole being ached. She was grateful she woke before the final vision of her baby lying on the pavement, broken.

She sat up, reached behind her feeling for Boogie. He was not there. Sarah turned to look, saw the bed was empty.

"Where is he? He was right here! I cannot lose him too!" She was in a full panic now. Boogie was all she had left, her physical connection to Jonathan. Frantically she tore the blankets and pillows from the bed.

Nothing. No bear.

Sarah dropped to her hands and knees onto the floor; she began flinging toys, socks, and muddy cleats out from under the bed, but no Boogie.

Crazed and half blinded by the tears, Sarah began searching the rest of the bedroom. Then she saw him, casually propped against the toy box with a handful of matchbox cars at his feet, as if he had been in the middle of playing when she woke.

She stood staring at him. "How did he get there? Am I losing my mind?" She thought, but it hurt her head to think about how he got there. Lately, to concentrate on anything but her memories, caused her physical pain.

She threw the blankets back on the bed before picking up Boogie. She stroked his soft brown fur as she tenderly laid him back on Jonathan's bed. He had once been Jonathan's most treasured possession, now he was hers.

As Sarah turned to leave to the room, she heard a whisper: "I love you Mommy." A sharp pain in her chest, like a vice squeezing the breath from her body. Choking back the tears, she shut the door.

Sarah could not remember the last time she went to work, or even left the apartment. She was not sure if she still had a job, not that she cared much anymore. Jonathan may not be in the apartment, but he certainly was not at McVain and Dewitt, where until the accident she had been a successful architect. Time held no reality for her anymore.

Sarah stood in front of the fireplace in their darkened living room and stared at the photographs displayed across the mantle. She picked up her favourite, the one of Jonathan the day he caught his first fish. She traced her fingertip across his face, his dimples, down along the curve of his chin, down to the fish he held, the tiniest little fish. He was so proud that day, his first fish. She took a picture of him holding his pole with his catch in one hand, while flexing his muscle of the other. "A big fish needs big muscles to reel it in", he had explained, his big blue eyes twinkling.

Sarah kept the curtains closed, shutting out the world as it went about its day wonderfully oblivious to her tragedy. The apartment was quiet, no Saturday morning cartoons, no racecars zipped down the hallway; even the phone had gone silent. Time passed in moments of awareness separated by periods of darkness. In the darkness, she felt nothing, she did not dream.

She could not remember much anymore, only her memories. Sarah no longer cared about the day-to-day things, she did not know when or what she ate last. It appeared as though she was still wearing the same clothes she had been wearing that day. "That can't be right," she thought, but the sharp stabbing pain pealed through her head, distracting her from that thought.

The only comfort Sarah seemed to find was in Jonathan's room. At least there, she felt close to him, as if he was still there somehow. It was a small consolation, but small was better than none.

The need to be near him drew Sarah back to Jonathan's door. She could not remember how much time had passed since the last time she stood here or even what she had been doing in the meantime. However, it did not matter to her; all that mattered was she felt he was near, if only in her mind.

As she stood in front of his door, for a brief moment, she thought she heard whispering from the other side. It was impossible she knew. Nevertheless, she did not care. If insanity meant she could have Jonathan, then insane she would be. Sarah carefully pushed open the door, hoping against hope she would see him playing.

The room was empty, the vacant bed, perfectly made, dominated the room.

"Did I straighten the bed?" she wondered, although she could not remember. The emptiness of the bed then registered in her mind.

"Where is Boogie?" she thought

She immediately sought out the toy box, where she had found him once, but he was not there. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of movement, startled she snapped her head around. In the corner, sitting in the rocking chair she bought for Jonathan before he was born, was Boogie. It had to be her imagination, this was a stuffed bear, but he appeared to have the same impish "I'm not doing anything" expression Jonathan wore whenever caught up past bedtime.

"How did he get there? I did not put him there. Did I?" sharp pains shoot through her mind, discouraging any further thought on the subject.

Sarah sat in the rocking chair with Boogie on her lap. She leaned over and picked up the book she had been reading before it happened. As she read aloud, she felt as though Jonathan was there on her lap, his small hand resting upon her arm, his head against her shoulder growing heavier and heavier as he fell asleep.

It was getting harder to read, the tears that flowed freely unto the pages of the book blurred the words. "I must finish the story, it was his favourite." She willed herself. As she finished, she noticed Boogie had begun to feel heavy upon her lap, so much so that her right leg had fallen asleep, just like it did with Jonathan.

As Sarah stood up the blood rushed sending familiar pricks of pain exploding through her calf. She took a moment to allow the sensation to subside and then carefully as if Boogie was indeed asleep, placed him on the bed.

She turned to leave, "Good night Mommy." A whisper drifted through the silence, squeezing her heart painfully.

She was sure the shrinks would have a field day with this. "Transference, I believe it is called" she thought. Sighing, she turned off the light and shut the door.

"No one comes to see me anymore." Sarah said aloud.

She thinks, "They all know. Even my sister. Jonathan would still be here if I had been faster, more careful, or paid closer attention. I do not blame them for not coming, and I would rather be alone with my memories. No-one to tell me that time will heal or he is in a better place."

"I do not want to hear that! How can he be in better place? He was only seven years old," she screamed. "It was not his time. It should have been me. No! We should be on our way to the park, or to the movies. We should be planning his prom, his graduation, his wedding, his life!" She was sobbing uncontrollably now, her entire body shaking, threatening to come apart at any moment.

She began to wander about the apartment, unable to sit; she used to complain it was so small, but now without him here it seemed so large. He filled the apartment with laughter and fun.

Sarah remembered a day in which they played hide and go seek; it had been his turn to hide. After he made her swear she would not peek, he took off to hide, giggling the whole time. She counted to 100, without peeking, and went in search of him. Calling out "I wonder where Jonathan is?" to which he would respond with a muffled giggle. After searching the hall closet, under the beds and behind the shower curtain, she stopped in front of the slightly ajar door of the linen closet. "Hmmm, I wonder if he's disappeared" she had said in an overly loud voice. Giggles erupted from the closet. She jerked the door open and Jonathan leaped from the third shelf, where he had been scrunched behind the towels, into her arms. "You found me!" he cried. They both fell to floor laughing. He loved that game.

Whoosh....Whoosh....Whoosh... from Jonathan's room, pulled Sarah from her memories.

A toy must have fallen over in the toy box. Most of his toys made some kind of sound. His favourite was the light sabre. "I'm gonna be a Jedi one day, Mommy", he used to tell her, as he waved it this way and that, creating the sound every Jedi hears while he battles evil.

Even though she knew no-one was there playing, she cautiously opened the door, and peered into his room. Silence greeted her once again. The sounds had stopped, just as the whispers had the time before. She looked at the familiar objects, and felt no comfort. These toys would never be played with again. Never would there be another battle with the Force overcoming the Dark Side. No more buildings of multi-coloured blocks would be built. No damsels would be saved.

There was Boogie, just where she left him on the bed, only now he had Jonathan's flashlight. She crossed the floor and sat on the bed. Sarah scooped up Boogie, hugged him tightly and wept.

She wept for Jonathan, she wept for herself.

A soft paw brushed against her cheek, and she felt Boogie hug back. Startled she tried to pull away, but he hugged her tighter and whispered... "Mommy, I miss you. Come back, just follow Boogie, he'll show you the way."

Sarah lay down upon the bed, closed her eyes and followed Boogie.

Bleep...Bleep....Bleep...Bleep... incessantly pulled her from sleep.

"Sarah. Sarah can you hear me?" a familiar voice washes over her.

Sarah slowly opened her eyes, her vision dark and slightly blurred at first, as if she was looking through smudged sunglasses, began to clear. She could hear the monitor beeping the rhythm of her heartbeat. She saw wires and tubes coming from various apparatus, and her right leg suspended over the bed in some sort of a sling. She looked toward the source of the voice, confused and questioning.

Karen stood next to the bed. She was smiling, even as tears rolled down her face.

"Welcome home baby sister." She said as she clasped Sarah's hand tightly.

Sarah stared at her in disbelief, not sure if Karen was real or just another memory.

"What...?" Then images began flashing through Sarah's mind. The "Walk" sign. The screamed warning. Pushing Jonathan out of the way. The agonizing pain as the van struck her and sent her flying over its roof. Most of all Jonathan's scream: "Mommy!"

"Jonathan?" Sarah's eyes plead with her sister.

She smiled. "Look" she says gently, pointing to the other side of the bed.

Daring to hope she turned and there Jonathan stood, his little blonde head barely high enough to see over the bed. Clutched in his arms was Boogie and they were both smiling.

"Jonathan!" overwhelming joy came rushing through her, filling every hole that his absence had created. Sarah devoured him with her eyes; taking in every detail she could, praying this was not a dream. She lifted her hand to touch his face dragging the IVs along. She caressed his face. He was real. He was alive.

"Mommy!" Jonathan's excited voice was the sweetest sound she had ever heard. "Aunt Karen said you needed our help. She said I should talk to you; tell you stories, like you do when I'm sick. That's why I sent Boogie to help you, 'cause he helps me when I'm sick." He was smiling, so proud of himself.

His face then clouded with confusion, "Mommy? What took you so long?" He asked.

Sarah placed her hand on Boogie's soft head. "Boogie and me," she said quite seriously, "we were fighting the Dark Side."

"Cool!" Jonathan exclaimed, his face lit up as he carefully climbed on the bed and threw his arms around her.

She tearfully breathed in his scent...snips and snails and puppy dog tails...

Table of Contents

Post Christmas Blues

By Brian Gray  
United Kingdom

Jan –u -ary. The precursor of the black abyss of winter, of harrowing sad grey days and bone chilling circulation, freezing under the blanket as the downers feverishly try to kick in.

Warmth. I need warmth, but the heating does not fire up for another hour and it's more than my life's worth to tamper with the timers: and the hot drink Nicki reluctantly left me before stomping off to work, has gone claggy-skin cold, not unlike the looks she now constantly reserves for me.

If January is the harbinger of winter, then it was almost certainly the death knell of Christmas. My fault as usual: totally out of my face the whole season to be jolly tral la lal la la, laa la la la laa. And who paid for this mind bending binge that I had promised so faithfully not to perform? Becky, our one and only offspring and future "Social Service" report subject matter. Food and present money blown away in a cocktail of gold, frankincense and mirth. Still she forgave me for it, gave me a kiss on Boxing Day and asked if I was alright. Now there's a kid who understands addiction, and that cuts me up. I promised I would make it up to her somehow. No forgiveness from Nicki though, it would need a deep thaw to surface her spring.

The slam of the brass plate on the letterbox tells me that the postie has been. Not my concern, I leave all that agitation junk to Nicki, but at least I know that the heating will come on within fifteen minutes, provided he was on time, and that will at least give me an hour's worth of much needed warmth. Creature of habit you see. Count the days, count the weeks, the months and the years, but count them with what – apathy, trepidation? Take a day at a time young man, a day at a time.

I shuffle from the bed, the coarse blanket still clung tightly around me, and pad down the stairs. Ignoring the brown and white envelopes on the cold bare hall floor, I make my way into the kitchen, switch on the kettle, and then into the lounge, plonking myself before the giant silver grey monster that is my only window on the world. Threadbare carpets, sparse seventies furniture, my old mum's rocking chair – a true sign of borderline poverty, but we are not down to the floorboards yet. But here it is, the token widescreen telly with DVD and surround sound system, compliments of Nicki's mate at the social and the wangled emergency loan – for Becky's educational needs, apparently. Now that's a scam.

I watch the cartoon network for a while, and then remember that I was making a drink and so shuffle off into the kitchen again. And then it hits me, jolting my senses, snapping me into real world reality.

Nicki's handbag.

In her rush to get out the door she has left her world behind, all contained within a small black leather pouch that never leaves her side. It contains every item that helps her through life and sustains the existence of her and Becky's well-being, sometimes me included. If I touch this then I am truly dead, but the temptation, the sheer possibility of power is too much for me and the steady slide of the downer takes a back seat as I flush with a surge equal to any "e" on a techno binge. Whatever is in the bag is not for me, but whatever is in the bag, however small or trivial will, I know, change my day, give me some powerful relief against its tedium. It may be a fiver to wile away a couple of rounds in the pub: it may only be a couple of quid for a bacon sandwich and a paper. It will certainly be trouble from Nicki, but what's new.

I put out my hand and feel the worn leather sides, a warm glow of euphoria bursting through me. Nicki never leaves her bag, and it has been too late for her to realise and come back for it. But she might ring me as soon as she gets to work, in fact she will ring me with dire warnings to life and limb. I rush to the phone in the lounge intending to disconnect it, the sudden exercise of brain co-ordination and physical effort draining me. But it rings before I get there. I don't want to answer, I want that drink, and I want that bacon sandwich. I drop to my knees shivering involuntarily, the shrill tones cutting into me.

_Aren't you going to answer it?_ A voice. A familiar voice wiping through the avenues of my brain seeking recognition, a home to latch onto. The downer is confusing me and the euphoria of discovering the bag is charging up my system, so I am suffering the effects of highs and lows simultaneously. The phone rings incessantly and I can sense Nicki at the other end pleading with me to pick it up.

_Aren't you going to answer it?_ That wretched voice again, echoing around the room. The room that is now freezing cold. My vision blurred, my vision, the spinning room, my vision, my mother in the rocking chair, looking at me in that way she always did when I had done something particularly wrong. I want to be sick.

I am sick.

The feelings pass. The phone has stopped. My mother's apparition has gone. I collect my thoughts together. Must be the downers. Kex has cut them with something and I am dropping like a stone and soaring like a bird and hallucinating all at the same time. I reason with the fact that I could not possibly have seen my mother and I now reason with myself that perhaps the bag did not exist either. All one long guilt trip.

Crawling carefully into the kitchen, for I am still a little weak, I look up onto the work surface were I first saw the bag. But it is still there and so I have to begin a new set of thought processes all over again. This is slow, this is so agonisingly slow.

But it does get easier. With renewed strength I eventually stand up, take the bag and begin to examine the contents. The phone in the lounge begins to ring again, but its urgency no longer grates upon my nerves. I find Nicki's mobile and check the credit: some left. Then I find her purse, the credit card slots stuffed with saver coupons, and one pound seventy in coins in the compartments. Bacon sandwich then.

Then that same cold chill engulfs me again as I dig deeper into the bag. I find a letter, an official letter all folded neat, a letter from the Benefits Office informing Nicki that her claim for special needs for Becky has been successful and a cheque for three hundred pounds will be sent under separate cover in relation to the back payments. I glance down the hallway and focus upon the mail on the floor. It has to be there. It has to be, and if it is, it will not be bacon sandwich time, it will be Christmas all over again. It would be my chance to keep my promise and make it up to Becky. Slowly I walk towards the pile of mail but my path is blocked.

My mother.

It's okay. It's okay, I have learnt to deal with these symptoms of hallucination at therapy. I tell myself she's not really there and ignore the apparition as I hesitantly walk straight through it.

A sudden clammy shiver ignites every nerve in my body and for a brief moment I am a child again and my mothers voice is admonishing me, _don't you do it, son, don't you do it_.

But then as a child, and now as an adult – I take no notice and I do.

Picking up the mail I discard the junk and the obvious bills and yes there it is the one that will contain the giro-cheque.

Three hundred pounds.

Ignoring the after effects of the cold clamminess prickling my skin I generate positive warmth and begin to formulate my plans to make amends for spoiling Becky's Christmas. No drugs. No alcohol, just presents for Becky and Nicki and a Christmas tree and trimmings and real food on the table. See if I don't.

It was easy getting Becky out of the nursery. A young nursery assistant wasn't going to argue with me and the supervisor was out at the time so the girl did not check the records. She knew I was Becky's dad alright, she did not know that I was not allowed to pick her up. I wish I had remembered to bring Becky's coat though, it was freezing and her flash of childlike excitement at going home soon passed. She began to whine.

Still, once I got this giro cashed then we could both go to the supermarket and buy everything under one roof and have some dinner in the café. Also Kex worked there in the café and I needed to have a word in his ear about what he was cutting me in those downers.

A bit of a comedienne was Kex, sussed out the café's clientele a long time ago and as he was cutting in on drugs anyway he decided to experiment with some of the old codgers that got their breakfasts there in the mornings. A bit of weed mixed in with their bacon and eggs worked a treat, better than any fix the NHS was giving them. It was quite funny watching some of those miserable old gits suddenly lighten up and start springing around the supermarket all jolly and spaced out. One even got done for shoplifting a dozen boxes of condoms. But Kex was not gonna be a comedienne with me and that's for sure, downers are downers and are supposed to bring you to rights, but those he sold me must have been aborted with some hallucigen.

With three hundred quid in my back pocket I'm at the supermarket café. I get Becky a drink and a doughnut to warm her up and stop her whining. She sits sullen for a while, but perks up a bit when I tell her all the exciting things we are going to buy and that we are going to have Christmas all over again. Kex is not in; he had to go to the dentist or something, but would be in later. I wait for a while savouring my mug of coffee, but then decide to give up the ghost. I need to start the shopping. Whilst I have been musing, Becky has wandered off to some of the other square laminate tables. She is sat at one in the corner laughing. I set off to pick her up, but she kicks up a fuss screaming in my ear that she wants to play with the funny lady, the lady sat in the corner. I tell her not to be daft and that no-one's there. " _Yes there is_ ," she says defiantly, still kicking up a fuss with everyone looking, " _I want to play with Madge_."

I almost drop Becky to the floor. Madge was my mother's name. It's hard to concentrate, my head is pounding. I get down to Becky's level, she looks a little apprehensive. " _Listen_ ," I says, " _there was no one there, right?_ " Becky nods and her bottom lip quivers slightly. I take her tiny hand and head into the supermarket. Becky mutters something under her breath, it sounds like – " _she's disap-poin-ted with you daddy_."

Still shaken I grab two trolleys, one for toys and one for food. I tell you that Kex is really in for it.

This is more difficult than I thought, where's the logic in these places? I can't find anything I want and it's not helped with Becky's constant whining, and her constant whining is not helped by the looks and stares of the other shoppers and some of the staff. At one point Becky disappears altogether and I totally freak out tearing down the aisles searching for her, knocking some old codgers shopping basket out of their hands. Then the manager appears. A weedy nasal little shit powerful in his retail domain. He has Becky with him and is not at all polite to me, his customer, acting like I was some sort of shoplifter or something. I was going to politely tell him to f off, we knew each other from past exchanges, but all I did was nod dumbly and shirk out an apology and take Becky back from him. He could hardly believe his eyes, but to tell the truth neither could I, because as he laid down his retail law, I was not even focussed on him, I was focussed on the figure over his shoulder, her accusing eyes boring into me, just like I was six years old again.

Keeping Becky on a tight rein I try to focus on the shopping, but end up buying anything and everything, trying to avoid the store managers' beady eyes and half a dreaded eye open for my persistent hallucination. Becky was a virtual prisoner in my ever tightening grasp, poor kid she would have been better of in nursery and for a moment I begin to wonder at the logic of what I was doing, and maybe the apparition of my mother was some sort of warning. But that's drugs for you, make you paranoid.

Then at last logic bounces back and there was a saving grace. A young couple approach me out of the blue, professional looking types with some sort of posh uniforms, asking if I knew that the store had a crèche and would I like them to take Becky and place her in there whilst I finished my shopping, all part of the service and all that. Well it struck me that the manager must have sent them, maybe he did have some sort of decent streak to him after all.

I bend down to Becky. " _Do you want to go and play in the crèche whilst daddy finishes off the shopping?_ "

" _Will Madge be there?_ " was all she said. I nod absently. So these really nice people start to walk off with Becky. At the top of the aisle I spot the store manager and give him the thumbs up to indicate he was not such a bad guy after all. He just looks at me as if I am mad. I wish he had not done that, it made me all paranoid again. For one brief moment I thought of going and getting Becky back and getting out of there, there was some nagging doubt swimming around in my chemical mind, something to do with Becky, something she said, but no, I was nearly done, I wouldn't be much longer.

A few more items and I was hitting a real low now. I was slowly loosing the will to go through with this. Slowly losing track of time. And that stupid suicide song by REM kept winding through my head or was it on the stores PA system? Hardly techno. And then I remembered that it was the song I chose at my Mother's funeral, just me there, the undertakers and the vicar. And I remembered that a week before how she told me that although she loved me, I would always be a disappointment to her and she could not understand where she had gone wrong. You have a chance she said, you have a good woman and a beautiful child – don't throw that chance away.

Well I wouldn't would I? I had ballsed up at Christmas I admit that, but this was my way of making amends and perhaps I was subconsciously tuning into my past and my relationship with my mother and that was why she kept appearing to me like this, maybe it was a sort of endorsement.

But then I realised what that nagging doubt was. I was the one hallucinating. I was the junkie – so how could Becky see Madge?

Oh shit, Becky!

It wasn't an endorsement. Two police officers stand before me, time had somehow moved on. A third woman officer was restraining Nicki who was shouting something at me. The store manager stood behind them looking concerned.

" _Can you hear me Michael_?" Asked the young copper, " _I am asking you a question. It's important that you tell us where your daughter is_."

" _Crèche_ " I mumbled through my fog, not taking in the scene of sheer confusion and terror around me.

The young copper looked at the store manager, who shrugged his shoulders and shook his head from side to side.

He tries again. " _Michael, where is Becky?_ "

I looked at him for a moment not knowing why he was there, and then beyond to the now distraught Nicki, and then past the store manager and a sea of crowded faces and there in an unnatural distance was my mother holding Becky's hand, and they looked so happy as they turned and walked away.

" _She... she is with Madge_ ," I said, and dropped the half price Christmas cake into my trolley. Becky used to love Christmas cake.

Table of Contents

Another Country

By Susan Watts  
United Kingdom

I was six years old when my grandmother died. She was fifty-three. I remember that I thought of her then as ancient and that the first news of her death did not much disturb me. She had gone to bed with my grandfather after a quiet evening spent in front of the television. Nothing was unusual. This was the way they spent their evenings. They lived their lives according to routines and habits. By the morning she was dead. Sometime during the night the life had drifted out of her, or maybe it was she who drifted out of life. In any event when my grandfather woke for work at his usual time of six o'clock she was gone.

I remember wondering why everybody was so exercised by the event. After all, to me my grandmother was old and surely expecting to die at any minute. I was aware by then of the fragility of life, its brevity, if not its importance.

My budgie had recently died, lying at the bottom of its cage stiff and unmoving one morning. I had held him in my hand to try and see where his life had gone. He seemed as real to me dead as he had alive. The lack of movement the stiffness and the chill of his thin flesh were different certainly, but he was still there in my hand.

After the funeral which I was not allowed to attend, a dead budgie may be an acceptable lesson in death for a six year old but a real funeral was judged too emotional an experience for such a young child, I remember watching my grandfather who seemed subtly altered. He was tearless and stoic as he munched his salmon sandwich, his eyelids so dry they seemed to grate on his eyeballs. Each time he was spoken to he blinked. A quick explosion of blinks then he would take out his handkerchief and wipe his agitated eyes and blow his nose hard like a trumpet. When he did this everyone in the room fell silent and turned to watch him as if he was about to make a speech. When he talked he was terse, his large square hands laying still in his lap like two sick animals. I imagined those hands in bed on the fateful morning creeping across the wrinkled sheet towards my grandmother expecting a warm and comforting presence to cuddle and instead finding a cold dead arm. In my imagination the arm, its flesh stiff and hard, was unaccountably covered in blue feathers.

I went to my granfather and tried to climb onto his knee. My auntie Dorothy took me by the shoulders and tried to push me down. My grandfather held onto my arm and shook his head.

"It's all right Dot. She's fine."

Dot tut-tutted and looked towards my mother for support that my mother wisely pretended not to see. Grandfater's lap was not usually uncomfortable but he was wearing an old and shiny brown suit that smelt of mothballs, a smell I have always since detested, and the front was buttoned up tight. He had on a stiff white collar that pushed his neck into soft wrinkles and a brand new black tie in that lumpy weave that was cheap and popular in the sixties. I tried to undo his buttons to creep inside the jacket to where my grandfather really was, but he stopped me and said "not today chicken, not today."

I suppose it was at that moment that a suspicion began to form in my thoughts that my grandmother may not be coming back. Something in my grandfather's manner, his extra care as he held me in the circle of his arms, or the minute quiver I could feel in his stiff chest and knees alerted me and scared me at the same time. I put my hands one on each side of his face and made him look at me searching for I don't know what, a denial perhaps? My own face must have communicated my question because as I watched his pink rimmed eyes filled with tears that hung on his lower lids and I waited tense and fascinated to see if they would fall.

They did not fall of course, he whipped out his handkerchief and performed his routine. Wipe eyes and blow nose hard then he lifted me down onto the floor and took hold of my hand in his large cold one.

"Come for a little walk, Carol."

It was difficult for me to understand that my grandmother was really gone. So far it had felt to me that she was just outside putting on more tea or prepearing sandwiches in the kitchen as she always did at family gatherings. Someone so solid in my life, so real, could not just disappear overnight. I had spent the day with her only a week ago and she had walked with me to the post office in the village some two miles away. How could a person, even an old person, walk two miles laughing and talking without any sign of tiredness on one day and then just not be there on the next. Dead did not convey to me the meaning gone. My budgie had stayed in his cage for a day or two until my mother discovered him and then he was removed and a few days later a new budgie appeared. I called him Tom the same as the old one without any sense of incongruity and the two seemed to merge in my mind. I did not feel any loss, just a short interruption in the presence of my budgie.

I went into the garden holding my grandfather's hand. He appeared much taller in his horrible suit and farther away than when he was dressed in his normal clothes of old trousers and a loose collarless shirt. I thought we would go to his shed where he repaired shoes and made small pieces of furniture in his spare time but he walked down to the end of the garden where there was a wooden seat set under the only tree. This was where my grandmother sat in the summer when she had to peel potatoes or shell peas.

"Why sit indoors. The job still gets done if I am enjoying the sun as well, doesn't it, chicken?"

I would sit beside her and watch as she split the green pods with a sharp "pop" that made her smile. Her neat thumb chased the peas tumbling them into the colander. One or two would always fall and she would shout "escapees" and that was my signal to scramble after them as they sped down the slope of her skirt to the ground. I was allowed to eat the runaways and the hard sweet taste of fresh raw peas in my mouth remains.

This was grandmother's place and I felt disjointed sitting here with my grandfather and at the wrong time of the year. I fidgeted on the wooden seat unused to wearing a skirt, my best dress of satin with a net underskirt, wishing that I was wearing shorts and my plimsolls and that it was a summer afternoon and the sun was shining. My grandfather sat very still gazing at the end of his shed where it stuck out into the garden covering half the end wall of the house. The muted sound of the crowd filtered down to us but they all seemed a long way away. He sighed and ran his large hand over his face.

"Why don't they all go home. They've done their bit. They could all go and leave me alone now."

Then he turned and smiled at me, but it was one of those smiles that adults sometimes gave me, a smile that did not mean they were happy, there was another reason they smiled and I could never fathom what it was. It upset me not to understand and I squeezed his hand and did not smile back.

"You always were a young head on old shoulders."

He nodded and smiled his baffled smile and rubbed my shoulder and the calluses on his hand snagged on the fine fabric of my dress and set my teeth on edge.

I had noticed before that to stay silent and look serious in certain situations made adults approve of me, but I had no idea why that worked. It felt like a betrayal to use this trick on my grandfather now but as usual it was successful. Unfortunately I had discovered nothing and my question remained unanswered.

My grandmother was my mother's mother and as time wennt by and she did not return I began to watch my mother closely. So far as I could see she was unchanged. She rose each morning and cooked breakfast before my father left for work. She made my porridge and told me off for not cleaning my teeth the same as before. Every morning she hugged me and told me she loved me before I went to into school. This was a habit, maybe an obsession, of hers that these words had to be said each time we parted so that they were the words remembered if for any reason we did not meet again. For all my observation I could discern no change in my mother after my grandmother died.

I went to visit my grandfather soon after and he seemed to be much the same as always. It was odd to see him puting on the kettle and he left the biscuits in the packet instead of using the blue flowery plate that grandmother always used, but he seemed to have resumed his usual demeanour. Nobody mentioned my grandmother.

We went to his shed and he let me turn on the polishing machine where he buffed the repaired shoes before his customers called to collect them. The smell of polish and machine oil was comforting and I tried not to think that before we would have been banished to the shed in order to get us out from under grandmother's feet while she finished preparing dinner.

It was not until three or four years after her death that I found the courage to ask my grandfather where my grandmother had gone. It was a question that I had held over from my younger self, by now I was nearly eleven and knew that she was not going to return so my question may have been a little cruel. I asked primarily to see what he would say.

He was sitting in his usual chair in the little room where they used to watch television together. Grandfather did not watch television any more and it stood in the corner with a lace edged cloth covering its dead face. He kept his toolbox on it, a thing that would never have been allowed in the house when my grandmother was alive.

"Grandad,..."

He looked up from his paper and grunted, his shaggy eyebrows raised.

"You know before, when grandma, you know when she..."

My voice trailed off even now I did not seem able to speak the dread word.

"When your grandmother died?"

He helped me out but his face was closed as if I had asked him a question about his sex life. He regarded me steadily his eyes fixed on mine daring me to go on. I quailed before what I divined as his anger. I knew I was treading on ground that bore no footprint but his.

I took a breath.

"When grandma died..."

But I could not go on. His face was rigid and closed. I realised then that he would never speak of it to me. The understanding propelled me to my feet. I felt rejected, expelled.

"Oh nothing. It doesn't matter."

I tried to look as casual as I could and fled the room. Outside in the hall I stared hard at the faded linoleum feeling like I had been sent out of the classroom at school for being stupid and rude. I would never ask again. The raw pain on his face had shocked me. I began to see that there was a country where adults existed for which I had no bearings, no maps and no language. It amazed me that so long after the event he could feel this way. I searched inside myself for any hint of grief as real as his and could find none. This made me feel somehow unworthy as if only those who had special knowledge and sensitivity were able to mourn my grandmother and that I was not one of those chosen few and would forever be outside that charmed and privileged circle.

Sometimes if the season is right I will buy a few peas still in their pods and sit in the sun to eat them. And even now, years later, a corridor opens and I am a child again and I can see her odd sideways smile and feel the gently solidity of her thigh through the thin cotton of her summer dress. Even now that I have myself passed the age at which she died and even though I have grown into that other country and should understand, I am as baffled as I was then and still so sad.

Table of Contents

Album: A Story in Photographs

By Jane Greenwood  
Australia

An image in the not-too-distant past: After the funeral

This might make a good photo: a woman in dark clothes sits curled up in an armchair near a window, leafing through a book open on her lap. Afternoon light falls in a shaft across the room, illuminating the book and picking up the faint pattern of roses on the chair. Her face is in shadow but you can see that she is lost in concentration. The book's covers feel a bit like leather and the texture is rather grainy and lined — like the palm of your hand if you could see it under a microscope, magnified many times.

The pages are brown and the photographs stuck to them with corners are grey and sepia. The images, pale and ghostly, are like little ships that take her on a voyage in the sea of her memory where she occasionally wanders. Despite her own family, her children who are upstairs, today she feels like Robinson Crusoe, marooned on an island that only she knows about. She looks for familiar faces from the past.

A man

This is a tiny sepia photo. A fair, wavy-haired man stands behind a surfboard, a towel slung around his neck. He is tall; the surfboard he is leaning on is one of those old-style, polished wood ones with chisel-shaped ends, one of which rests in the sand. His large forearms are crossed over the other. It looks as if he has just come in from having a swim. He seems pleased with himself and the world. Behind him you can see the water, lacy edges of surf scalloping the beach.

This is the woman's father.

A woman

A woman in her twenties, looking rather self-conscious, stands squinting into the sun. Her clothes are formal; she carries gloves and a bag, and is wearing high-heeled shoes and a hat, in the manner of the time. Behind her is a building with a chimney, a sugar mill. She has come a long way to marry the surfboard man and live in this tropical place where oaks and beeches and Luna Park are only a memory, but where the bamboo grows palpably overnight and the fields of sugar cane line the roads and their mauve flower spikes wave in the breeze.

This is the woman's mother.

A little boy

This child is about a year old. He has startlingly fair hair and he sits on the grass in the sun, dressed in a white romper suit. The child is laughing and the click of the shutter has caught him just as he begins to crawl towards the person taking the photo, one little arm outstretched as he leans forward, as if he is eager to take off into his life.

In the background you can just make out a rocker made of plywood cut into the shape of Pinnochio. This was handed down to the next child and the woman thinks that if this photo were on a computer disk you could colour the rocker that peculiar, hard shade of aqua she suddenly remembers. She can recall the springy feel of the buffalo grass, too, the deep shade under the mango trees in the background and their tender red new growth, and the noise of the flying foxes as they shrieked with gluttony each night as they fed on the ripe, rich mangoes.

The little boy's name is Johnno; he was the woman's brother. He looks very healthy but photographs only show you the outside, she thinks.

A little girl and her father

This is a close up of the child in her father' arms. She is three or so. He has her in the crook of his left arm and with his large right hand he supports her chubby legs. She has been crying. You can see the tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. A rather battered doll with painted hair dangles from the child's right hand; her left arm is curled about the father's neck. She is trying to smile. Her fair hair is caught back from her forehead with a bow and her flowered dress has a frilly collar and smocking. This is Margaret, Margie for short.

If she closes her eyes in later years the woman can remember how far it seemed to the ground from this perch in her father's tanned arms and how the starch in his shirt smelled clean and made the fabric feel both crisp and smooth.

She cannot remember quite why she was crying; had she been in trouble? Perhaps this was the day she ventured into the storm water ditch that held innocent, sweet-smelling mown grass in which black snakes liked to hide, or perhaps it was the time, copying her brother, she turned and called cheerfully to her father, "Come and look at this, you bloody drongo!" She cannot say for sure, now, and there is no one left who could tell her.

Perhaps she had been terrified of the burner, an ugly black steam train that spewed fire out through its iron cow-catcher and burned the weeds that threatened to engulf the train line. Normally, the line carried the big green locos that pulled the sugar cane trucks, driven by cheerful men with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, who leaned out of the side of the cabins and waved to the kids playing in their yards on either side of the train line. They would run to see the train and yell, "Blow your whistle! Let the steam out!" The drivers would always slow down and with a huge hiss, reduce the pressure in the boiler in a billowing of white steam and then blow the train's whistle till the kids put their hands over their ears and fell to the ground shrieking with laughter.

But the burner came with a noise like all the dragons in the world and it breathed fire and left a swathe of charred devastation behind it. At the mere sound of it, the little girl would run into the house screaming. When she and her mother went to the tennis courts the shortest way led in front of the cavernous loco sheds but she refused to go there and they always took the long way round, by the stands of bamboo that creaked in the wind.

Despite the tears on her face the child is smiling. She is being held by her father; her brother, home from boarding school, and her mother, are just out of the photo, but always there.

Certainly, she cannot know that only five or so years on, her father's laugh will be stilled forever. Or that her own children will enter a world where her mother's face will have to be learned from a fading image in an album.

The girl and her playmates

Three children sit together at the foot of a flight of white stairs that lead up to the verandah of Margie's house. They have been to the Show. Margie is holding a kewpie doll on a stick that she got from one of the stalls. Like all kewpie dolls this one, for some reason, has its thumb in its mouth. When its pink tulle dress becomes tatty the doll will be untied from the stick and used as the baby Jesus in Margie's Christmas crèche, alongside Mary and Joseph, made out of dolly pegs and clothed with scraps purloined from the sewing basket. Margie will ignore her mother's pleas to take her thumb out of her mouth. "Jesus sucks his thumb," she will say triumphantly.

The other children are brothers from a few doors up and they are not always good playmates, forever running home in the middle of a game. Their mother has threatened that if they do not behave she will give them to the old black man they sometimes see from the verandah, walking like a shadow in among the trees across the river, his swag on his back. The brothers run home regularly to check that they have been good enough to escape being given away. Their fear is infectious.

The woman is ashamed now of the terror that was not learned in her own home and about which she never spoke. Not until the day she was swinging on her rocking horse and the man came to the verandah door with a papaw for her brother, who had been sick again lately. She had been singing, crooning away in that almost tuneless, soothing way that children have, and she looked up and saw the gnarled old face framed in the mosquito-netted top of the screen door. She had shrieked so loudly her mother came running out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as she ran. Margie's loud cries were a family joke; she had been lost in a shop in town once and had just stood and wailed until her parents came and found her, joking that she wouldn't have been lost for long at that rate. This was different and her mother was plainly embarrassed by her noise. But the man had a gentle face under the shapeless khaki hat he wore, and a soft voice, and he said kindly, "It's alright, Missus. I just startled the little missy."

The woman pauses at the sudden memory, prompted by the photograph. Who was he, that softly-spoken old black man? Where did he come from? How did he know that Johnno had been sick again? There is no one now who can say.

The children and Minnie

This is one of those sharply-contrasted images that tell you something about the light in that part of the country. The mango trees in the background are uncompromisingly black and two of the figures in the photo have pale clothes on that come up as startlingly white. There are no shadows; it must be noon. Margie sits on the ground, her feet stuck straight out in front of her, her fair hair silvery in the glare, her eyes screwed up against the light. On either side are her dolls: one is the painted wooden doll in the earlier photo; the other, a black doll named Patsy. Next to her, Johnno, twelve now, stands up straight in his school uniform. Behind them, Minnie is standing, her hand on Johnno's shoulder. Minnie, her black hair standing out in a halo around her head, was one of the family; she looked after them sometimes and helped her mother in the house. They shared cups of tea on the verandah and in later years wrote letters to each other at Christmas on air mail paper, crinkled at the edges.

A few hours later, when the boy returns to boarding school, he will sit grim-faced in the front seat of the car being driven to the airport by his father and Margie will cry bitterly and have to be restrained by kind hands from running down the stairs and into the car. They have all gone, now, the woman thinks. It's as if they'd all got into the green Pontiac and she was left alone on the verandah, the mosquito gauze blurring her vision.

The Daily Advocate, September 9, 2003

This photo is grainy. There are three people in it, the local president of the professional association that is hosting a conference in this northern sugar town, and two women from the capital city. One of the women has fair wavy hair. Those who knew her as a child in this same town would recognise the likeness she bears in colouring to the tall man who was her father. Others would say that the face is more like that of her mother, who died — oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago now. This woman, whose name is Margie, is here to lay some ghosts.

In her suitcase the woman has brought with her an album of photos: the ones she has been looking at so recently. She has taken a taxi out to the place where she was born, astonished that it is so close to the town when in her memory the car trip home took an age with the red ball of the sun pulsating in her eyes all the way. The iron loco sheds are smaller and she is amazed at the idea that she was ever afraid of them. But the people she once knew have all gone and the house that she lived in as a child has been pulled down.

One by one the ropes that tied the woman to her childhood have been cut and now she feels like a boat that has been cut adrift. People are puzzled and say, "But you have your own family now," and of course that is true. But it is separate. Her children cannot remind her about being dinked on the handlebars of her brother's bike and the shrieks that could be heard a mile off when she fell. No one else can recall the terror when Johnno split his head open diving in the river and had to be raced to hospital cradled in his mother's arms, his head wrapped in a blue towel and his blood spreading in a dark stain above his small white face. Or the memories of cyclones which darkened the sky and shook the house and made the trees bend in the wind. Only she now remembers her father looking out at the brown flood that was the river in front of their house, saying, "It's still rising," and the fear that curled in her mind like the black snake they found one night round the verandah post.

All gone. It seems to her that life has been measured out by the deaths of almost all who once knew her best. It is only a few months since the last of these deaths, Johnno's, and a great dislocation has wearied her spirit. She stands under the mango tree, near the place where she and Johnno once had their photo taken with - ah, yes. With Minnie, who sent her a card, with sympathy for her loss.

A photo that was never taken

Two women stand side by side, waiting for a taxi to arrive; arms round each other's waists. They squint into the last of the afternoon sun which is still so bright it makes their eyes water. Behind them is a neat garden with pink gerberas in it and the open door of the house that Margie is leaving now.

All afternoon, while Margie has taken secret leave of absence from her conference, these two have been sitting inside the older woman's house. Margie has brought with her the photos from her suitcase but there has been no need of them. The old woman has those images in her head, and she brings them out and shows them to Margie, one by one.

"Your dad, now," says the old woman, "he was such a big fellow with a big laugh, always a cheerful bloke. And those gardens at the mill" — Margie thought of the mango trees and the bamboo grove, the loud crotons and acalyphas and the palms that lined the drive like soldiers — "he made those, and that place was a showpiece, in its time. Now the conglomerate's got it, it's not the same. Sad that they pulled your place down, though." They talk on, and the sun makes shadow lines on the old woman's walls.

"And your mum," says the old woman, "I remember when she first came up here to the mill. She loved to wear blue... We kept in touch for a long time, you know." The breeze blows cool through the kitchen annexe and the shadows lengthen on the wall.

"The old man? Well, he was an Aboriginal fellow who lived over the way," she says, smiling at Margie's memory of the mother who had threatened her kids. "Yeah, well, we had to put up with a lot of that ignorant talk from some people, the Aborigines and us South Sea Islanders, you know. That man used to cut cane and work at the mill. Your dad gave him a job during the war. He liked your dad; we all did; and he was fond of Johhno, too. Ah, Johnno," the old woman says, touching the fresh scar gently, "he was often that sick, but such a brave little boy. Your mum would be so pleased to think he'd grown up and had kids of his own. I remember him so well. He used to say to me, 'I've had a good day today, Minnie,' and I'd say, 'Course you have, you've been a little angel'."

Minnie pauses and looks at the younger woman. "And you!" she says, "I can't get over how you've grown like your mother. A proper little Shirley Temple, you were, all that fair curly hair! Always such a little actress — I remember when you put on such a turn because you had to have a needle at the doctor's. They had to hold you down, you know, there on that floor... you must have been four then, I suppose... You sucked your thumb a treat, in those days...." They both laugh to think of it.

If this photo had been taken, the taxi driver would have had to take it; he was the only other person around that afternoon. He would have seen through the lens a fair-haired woman with her arm around a small, darker-skinned older one. He would have been able to see, too, that the afternoon sun made them look as if they were crying, and that the light burnished the coppery glow along the old woman's cheekbones. He would have said that they looked as if they'd been sharing a present or as if one of them had just got back something she'd been missing for a long time.

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