Monday 29 July 2019

Passport - Part Two by Virginia Hainsworth


June 1987. The Grand Hotel, Margitsziget, Budapest.

  James Fincham strode into the lobby and walked straight to the reception desk, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. He set his brown leather holdall on the floor beside him.
  The desk clerk looked up.
  “Szervusz, Mr Leadbetter. Good to see you. How can I help you?”
  James replied in flawless Hungarian.
  “Good morning, Ambrus. Please can you tell me if Miss Fodor is in her room.”
  “No, I believe she is in the lounge, sir.”
  “Thank you, Ambrus.”
  James ran his hand through his hair and walked over to the lounge area, towards a woman seated on an oversized sofa.
  As soon as she saw him walking towards her, she leapt up and moved towards him.
  “Henry, you’re late, darling. I feel as though I’ve been waiting for hours.”
  “I’m only five minutes late, Martuska. Come here.”
  He bent down to kiss her.
  “Not here, Henry. Everyone will see.”
  “I don’t care.”
  They sat down on the sofa and she grasped his hand.
  “Have you heard the news?” she said excitedly. “Grosz has taken over as premier. Kadar is sure to be booted out of the party before long.”
  “It’s about time. Things will happen quickly now. However, our celebrations will have to wait. I’m on my way to the airport. I’m sorry.”
  She opened her mouth to speak and he put a finger to her lips.
  “I know. I really am sorry, but I have no choice. And I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
  “I wondered what the holdall was for. Where is it this time?”
  Her exaggerated pout brought a smile to his lips.
  “You know I can’t tell you anything. Just that it’s important. I do have about half an hour, though, before I need to leave.”
  He put his hand on the outside of her thigh.
  “Let’s go to your room.”
  She shrugged her shoulders.
  “We can’t. I have just checked out. You’re not the only one who has secrets, darling.  Jozsef wants me to go to Martonvásár for a few days.To pick up a package.”
  “Be careful, Martuska. I don’t trust Jozsef.”
  Martuska’s gaze left James’ face and looked over his shoulder towards the hotel entrance.
  “Henry. Don’t look now but there’s a man over there. He followed you in just now and has been glancing over at us. I’m sure I saw him yesterday, too. When we were on Castle Hill. I think he might be following you.”
 “Impossible. I would have noticed. Describe him to me. I don’t want to look round.”
  “He’s about 5 Feet 10 inches. Medium build. Bit of a paunch. Moustache and beard.  Slightly greying hair. About 50-ish. Camel-coloured suit.”
  “I think you’re wrong, darling. Let’s not worry about him. Tell me more about Jozsef and this package he wants you to pick up, but just give me a couple of minutes. I need a pee.”
James stood up and walked towards the men’s room.
  When she was sure James was out of sight, Martuska leant over, unzipped his holdall and peered inside.
  She was so preoccupied with the small brown paper bag which lay on top of James’ clothes that she didn’t notice the camel-suited man follow James into the men’s room.
James was facing the urinal and didn’t turn around when the camel-suited man stood alongside him, but he muttered,
  “Don’t make it so fucking obvious, Stan. She’s onto you. Fortunately, she thinks you’re following me and not her. You’re losing your touch.”
  “Don’t be so sure about that, my friend.”
  Back in the lounge, Martuska had opened the brown paper bag and looked inside. Her brow furrowed. Blue woollen baby bootees? Henry had never mentioned knowing anyone with a baby.

Monday 22 July 2019

Passport - Part One by Dave Rigby

His death had come so suddenly. Not an old man at all.
  She’d ended up with the job of clearing her father’s house. None of her three brothers was ever to be seen if there was practical work to be done.
  Sorry sis, just about to fly to LA. Business you know.
  Not that they were all in the States, but they were all busy, busy men.
  It was partly guilt though. She’d seen little of her father over recent months. They’d frequently not seen eye to eye. Was she trying to make up in some way for that lack of contact?
  Order had always been her thing. Even as a girl, her bedroom had been so neat and tidy, everything in its place. The contents of her father’s house had succumbed to the same order, felt-tip ticks in relevant columns on her checklist, a testimony to her skills.
  Category one. The rubbish – junk as her mother would have called it. A cluster of king-size supermarket bags were lined up in the back porch, waiting patiently to be carted away by a man with a van.
  Next up the hierarchy were the bags destined for the charity shops. Her friend Melissa would love the job of stacking them neatly in her estate car and ferrying them to a range of deserving outlets.
  Which left the good stuff. We have some particularly fine pieces her mother used to tell visitors.
  Mr Gregory was perfectly on time, looking just as she’d imagined. Over-fussy, three-piece suit in a too-large check, pince-nez, the tip of a handkerchief just visible in the breast pocket of his jacket. Ever since a child, she’d always had to think twice about the different three-pieces – suit or suite?
  A quiet confidence, the occasional comment demonstrating an immediate depth of knowledge, as he moved slowly from room to room making notes on his phone and taking photographs of the more valuable items.
  Standing in front of the bureau, his demeanour changed, eyes suddenly sharper a noticeable exhalation.
  “Now this really is something, Miss Fincham. Late seventeenth I’d say and a particularly fine example.”
  “Please – call me Jack. Yes, my father always loved it, prepared his handwritten lectures sitting just here. We haven’t decided whether to offer it for sale yet, but we would like it valued.”
  There’d been an argument. All four of them wanted the bureau. Getting a valuation would be just the start of a long and no doubt acrimonious process.
  “Some of the older examples have secret compartments.” So, engrossed in thoughts about who would inherit, she almost missed Mr Gregory’s comment.
  “Secret! Gosh, how intriguing. Would it be possible for you to check somehow whether this one is holding something back?”
  “Indeed.”
  His hands moved expertly around small wooden drawers, cubby holes, ink well and pen holder. Just as she was preparing herself for disappointment, his eyes lit up.
  “Voila! A Hopton spring as they’re known. A section of wood in one of the drawer spaces slid back to reveal a void. A delicate search of the small space.
  A passport.
  “Goodness gracious,” she said.
  He passed the document to her.
  Date of expiry 10th November 1988. An old photograph of her father stared out from one dog-eared page, with others displaying stamp after stamp, almost all, she realised slowly, Eastern European destinations.
  But he’d never been to that part of the world! Had he?
  Only when she turned back to the page of personal details did she notice that the passport wasn’t actually in her father’s name.




Monday 15 July 2019

The Window by Gareth Clegg


It looked incredible. Black oak aged for three centuries, originally used on an ocean-going vessel from the heart of the age of sail. The price had been incredible too—over two thousand pounds. But, how many people could boast a window frame dating back to the early seventeen hundreds?

We’d seen an advert about the wood beam, reclaimed from a Whitby shipyard as they wrapped up their business because of the current economy, and just couldn’t resist.

We made a real feature of it in the bedroom, decking the room out in an opulent array of pirate maritime chic. When it was complete, the room was the spitting image of something you’d expect to see in Pirates of the Caribbean. My wife and I laughed at the imagined view of Johnny Depp flouncing around from the table filled with map charts to lean into the soft oval curve of the frame and the beautiful window seat it edged in its ancient dark timber.

We both loved it, and it wasn’t until the third night that I awoke dripping with sweat and feeling as sick as a dog. The entire room seemed to be shifting and rocking. The nausea was unbearable.

It was pitch black. Rain lashed at the glass panes, thunder roared amidst the brief flashes of light that illuminated the room through the heavy velvet curtains.

In an attempt to settle my roiling stomach, I rolled up to sit on the edge of the bed. My feet almost recoiled from the wooden flooring. It was so cold that it felt wet.

Another flash and the bellow of thunder that followed almost made me leap out of my skin. In the pitch blackness, I reached for the bedside table hoping a sip of water would calm my grumbling belly. I couldn’t feel anything there. I must have rolled too far along the edge of the bed.

My hand crept out for the lush crimson fabric that covered our gorgeous window. As I pulled the curtains to allow some light in, my stomach lurched as I took in the scene outside.

It was a full-blown storm. Rain lashed across a dark moonlit sky into the crashing waves, throwing great plumes of snowy white spray and foam thirty feet into the night air.

I blinked back my shock, this must be a dream. I pinched myself, but instead of waking, my body protested with a sharp stab of pain in my forearm. Then I saw it.

The cold floorboards were black with moisture from a stream that seeped from the frame. Blood welled on the sill and soaked the window seat cushions before oozing out and dribbling over the lip, falling to the floor in a grisly waterfall. Salt spray and the iron tang of blood filled my nostrils.

My scream woke me.

It was pitch black. Rain lashed at the glass panes, thunder roared amidst the brief flashes of light that illuminated the room through the heavy velvet curtains.


***

I sat staring from the window in my room, white uPVC, cold and clinical. In fact, there’s no wood in the room, it’s all plastic of some sort. Nothing to remind me of dark wooden timbers. The view between the white-painted metal bars is pleasant enough, trees and a well-mown grassy lawn that mirrors the calming green walls.

They said I didn’t stop screaming until they sedated me, that I’d rubbed my hands raw trying to scrub away whatever I thought was on them, but I’m better now. I’ve told them what they needed to hear—that it wasn’t real.

Now I sit silently in contemplation in my pleasant surroundings, rocking gently to an unseen rolling sea. But even with the plastic blinds instead of curtains, I can sense the storm growling, a bass rumble that I can feel within my body as the darkness gathers in the distance.

It will arrive tonight, as it has every night for the past five years.

How do I know it’s been five years?

I reached up and my bleeding and splintered fingernails scratched another line into the dark bloodstained timbers of my cell.

Monday 8 July 2019

Earth 2.0 by Andrew Shephard



The solar system of Star 95
closely matches project requirements.

Give me a percentage.

Percentage of what?

Of finding a planet as neat as Earth.

Could be as much as sixty, sir,
according to our best scientists.

The reactor lasts fifty generations?
Seems hard to believe.

We are at the limit, Mr President.
One hitch in the first thousand years
and we could run out of gas.
 
The volunteers – I’m concerned.
Will they survive the radiation?

Models show some damage to the genes.
Whoever lands on two point zero
may look… different.

How different? Better or worse?
No, don’t tell me.
Prepare the launch.




I wrote this poem in Loutro, Crete, after a boat trip at night. Riding the waves, there was a clear sky above (before the moon rose). With the roar of the boat's engine it felt like we were flying through the universe towards the stars.

Monday 1 July 2019

Pole Dancing by Vivien Teasdale

Well, when you’re sitting in a caravan with the rain rattling down on the roof, you have to have something to do, don’t you? So, stuck inside, we put the bird pole outside the window and sat back to watch.

First came the blue and great tits, squabbling and fluttering from the peanuts to the fat balls. Their young ones came too, happily helping themselves until mum or dad came near, then there was a sudden flurry of wings, a gaping maw and the parent bird obligingly stuffed food down the nearest mouth. I’ve always had the feeling that it’s children who train their parents, and now I know.

That lot were soon shifted off by the woodpeckers – greater spotted ones, and we spotted them again and again as they wolfed down the contents of the feeders. For a while we were quite excited at the thought that we were watching a different variety – middle spotted woodpeckers, never before recorded in Britain. Then we read the book again and realised that the one with the red topknot was actually a juvenile. They don’t get the red patch on the back of the head until later. Oh, well, at least we hadn’t announced our discovery to the world before checking.

In turn the woodpeckers were chased off by a jay. If you’ve never seen one close up, they are beautiful birds, much bigger than you think and with a large, vicious beak. No wonder all other birds gave way to this visitor. He simply went for the peanuts and ignored the fat balls completely. Almost always when he left, he carried off a couple of peanuts, presumably for a later snack.

He was not the only one who wanted the peanuts. Cyril the squirrel sat on the grass and coveted them. Then he tried climbing the pole. It’s obviously quite difficult to do so with little paws that won’t quite go round the circumference. Even with four-paw drive, he only managed two steps up and one step back. Then he fell off.

They’re very persistent … things. He tried again and again until he got the hang of it and reached the top. Then he had to get across to the nut holder. He reached out. He fell off. He tried again. And again until he was finally swinging on the holder and, eventually, able to attack the wire mesh.

At this point, I rapped on the window. He leapt off and ran into the hedge. Five minutes later he was back. I rapped again. He looked at me. “You didn’t do anything before,” he seemed to say and ignored me. I went out and chased him off. The next time, I took the dog with me, so he did run a bit further away, but still returned within minutes. Battle lines drawn, I took drastic action. I greased the pole!

He sniffed at the pole. Decided the funny smell was harmless and leapt up. He slid smoothly and quickly down to the bottom. He sat on his bottom, still clutching the pole and thinking, “there’s something wrong here”. He tried again. Same result. He moved away, took a running jump to land three quarters of the way up the pole. He slid down again. He went away.

He brought a friend with him next time. They both contemplated the peanuts and the pole. They circled round and looked from a different direction. They retreated to the trees across the path, urged on by the dog who was trembling in excitement at seeing them so close.
Every morning after that, the squirrel would come, examine the pole and go away.

But a strange thing happened. One morning I looked out of the window. The peanut holder, which had been on the left, was now on the right. The fat balls were now on the left. I asked my husband why he’d changed them round. He thought I’d move them. Our nearest neighbours were more staid, more senior than us, so I can’t imagine they crept out of their caravan at midnight just to swap the feeders round. Anyway, the dog would have let us know if anyone had been sneaking about.

Possibly a pair of pigeons might have sat on the top, dancing in the moonlight, until they twirled the whole lot round. But I have a feeling that Cyril and his friend wrapped leaves around their paws so they could grip the pole sufficiently to turn it around, probably while muttering, “Ya boo, that’ll fox you.”

They were right, too.