Daily Archives: 7th February 2020

THE BLACKSMITH AND HIS WIFE

CHILDRENS FICTION

©1980 by Michael Clifford

Near the village of Balar Beimann, in a small cottage, lived a skilled blacksmith and his wife. On the first day of autumn the smith returned home from his forge to find his wife sitting at her loom with tears running like a stream down her face.

“What is wrong, my love?” he asked.

“We have waited for seven years to have a child and no fruit have I born. I have much around me to make me happy but I am barren and the love for own child burns within and will soon be extinguished.”

Hearing this made the smith downcast for, like his wife, he dearly longed for a son, or a daughter. He went to the village and sought council of the wise old man of Balar Beimann who, in turn, advised him to travel to Gascony to find the revered magician of the mountains.

The blacksmith travelled for seven days and seven nights. At last, on the eighth morning he emerged from a thick forest of dark oak to find the magician’s castle before him. He sought out the magician and spoke to him of his desire. The magician at last spoke: “It is not wise for you to have a child, some fields need to be barren to enrich the earth. Be proud of your fruitfulness in all else. Tell this to your wife: love other’s children. You need no child. You have everything you want. Heed this well.”

The blacksmith was vexed and upset by this advice and ranted and pleaded for his need to be fulfilled, but the magician would only repeat the same words.

When the blacksmith arrived back at his cottage footsore and weary, he found his wife sitting at her loom with tears like a river running down her cheeks.

“What is wrong my love?”

“We have waited for seven years and seven months to have a child and no fruit have I born. I have much around me to make me happy, but I am barren and the love for my own child burns within and will soon be extinguished.”

“he told her the purpose of his travels and of his meeting with the magician. He spoke the magician’s words. “Some fields need to be barren to enrich the earth. Be proud of your fruitfulness in all else. Love other’s children. You need no child. You have everything you want. Heed this well.” At these utterances the blacksmith’s wife fell to weeping on the kitchen tiles and her river of tears became an ocean.

Now the blacksmith dearly loved his wife more than he loved himself and was much grieved to see her in such melancholy. After the magician’s words he resolved to live without a child, but he knew his wife would die or wane with the moon unless she conceived, and used her burning love.

He had a plan, but it lay on him with much fear. He had heard from one of the forge apprentices who lived in the nearby town of Cruahawn the tales of a wicked but powerful witch, evil beyond measure, who was reputed to live in the country by. Without telling his wife the purpose of his journey he bade farewell and he travelled ever in the neighbouring county to find the witch. At last in a wood of braying wolves and with the leaves adance in the moonlight above, she appeared to him.

She was dressed in red scarlet gossamer which floated down from her slim body and her outstretched arms. To either side of her were tiny women, of whom each only had one eye. The floated above her, wearing the same loose red swathes of silk crepe. The blacksmith was transfixed with fear.

The beautiful witch began to speak. “I understand, blacksmith, why you are here. Now listen hard: I shall agree to your request upon this one condition: When you hear a clock strike the hour you will say aloud, ‘Oh ‘tis true, ‘tis true like my heart!’ After every stroke. If you do not do this your wife will surely turn to stone. Do you accept this condition?”

“If I agree to it, you will make my wife with child?”

“Surely.”

“I agree.”

“Then it is done.”

As soon as the apparition had vanished the blacksmith became so fearful of what he had seen he sped home as fast as his legs would carry him and resolved to tell no one, not even his wife, of his meeting.

One year later the blacksmith’s wife gave birth to a red-eyed daughter, which they called Rapoza. She was a sickly child and often in bad spirits, but apart from her humours her mother and father were happy.

Now the blacksmith had not told his wife of his bargain with the witch in case it should frighten her, but as a caution against the witch’s trickery he had removed all the clocks from the house and buried them. To replace them he erected a sundial in the yard. His wife found this new arrangement irksome and very impractical.

Seven years had gone by without event when one afternoon the wife heard the knocking of a hand on the outside door. It was a tradesman whose horse had lost a shoe on his way to Cruahawn. While the blacksmith led the horse away to be shod, the wife eyed with glee the trader’s furniture on his cart. Rapoza took a fancy to a large brown clock and also her mother too. She wound it, set it and placed it on the mantel, and all three stood back to admire it. At that moment the smith returned and when he saw the clock he became sick with fear and insisted the trader remove it hastily and go.

“I like the clock,” said his wife. “I wish to keep it. I have paid silver gilder for it.”

“It is of no matter, the clock must go!”

“You may be the master of this house, but I wish to keep the clock. Do I have no say? Am I just a provider of meals?”

At he began to reply the clock struck loudly.

“Oh ‘tis true, ‘tis true like my heart.”

“You don’t consider me or your daughter at all!” she cried. The clock struck the second time.

“Oh ‘tis true, ‘tis true like my heart.”

“So now, I know you have never care for me at all. Is that so? I darest though to say it.”

The clock struck again.

“Oh ‘tis true, ‘tis true like my heart.”

“And when the man’s gone you are going to set about chastising mummy with blows, aren’t you,” said Rapoza

The clock struck its forth stroke.

“Oh ‘tis true, ‘tis true like my heart.”

This was too much to bear for the blacksmith’s wife and she implored the tradesman to take her and Rapoza to Cruahawn, to her mother’s cottage. Upset by what he had witnessed he agreed in spite of the pleas of the blacksmith. The blacksmith cried out in anguish as his wife and daughter, sitting in the trader’s cart, rode off down the hill.

The afternoon following the blacksmith’s head was laid heavy as lead upon the table when he heard a hand knock at the outside door.

“They are but returned,” he said with joy. He rose quickly, but his brightness left him when he found two men in King’s colours with frozen faces appear before him.

“You are to come with us. You are summoned to appear before the county courts.”

Disbelieving his ill-fortune he prepared himself quickly to be accompanied to Cruahawn.

On the way he began to ask questions, but neither of the men’s faces thawed and less so did their tongues. He was much troubled in his heart that his wife, whom he loved so dearly, could put him to this.

He stood in the dock with the judge hovering before him.

“How does the defendant plead?”

The blacksmith espied his wife and daughter in the court and waved to them.

“How does the defendant plead?”

“Excuse me, my lord, but I have no knowledge of what I be accused of.. apart from the sad affair of a disagreement. A small misunderstanding between me and my wife.” He waved at them again.

A man in a wig stood up and spoke. “M’lud, the defendant is obviously pretending to be unaware of the simple argument behind the prosecution case. Permit me to ask him a few questions before he answers.”

“Objection,” said another wigged man standing quickly. “The defendant should not be cross examined at this stage M’lud.”

“I see no harm in a few questions,” said the judge. “Objection overruled.”

The first man was back on his feet again and asked these questions of the blacksmith.

“Yesterday afternoon your wife and daughter left your house with a furniture trader after an argument. Is that so?”

“It is.”

“You tried to stop them leaving?”

“It was so. I love my wife and daughter.”

“And you hated the tradesman?”

“Aye. I did so, sir, yesterday.”

“Why was that?”

“Because he, unknowing to himself, started the argument.”

“Surely it was because he ran off with your wife.”

“Well.. not exactly.. Only in a manner of speaking.”

“Let me put the truth to you like this. He rode off with your wife and daughter much against your wishes. You hated him, as you’ve already spoken on oath, and so you mounted a horse, overtook the cart by some circuitous route and then attacked it from behind. You shot him dead with a gun and rode back home.”

The blacksmith was overcome with such shock he had to hold himself steady against the dock.

“You realise that we have one witness who says she recognised you attacking the cart.”

The blacksmith looked round the court as if he was deep in a dream. Then his gaze settled on his daughter with her hard red eyes staring straight back at him. His wife was sitting next to her with her head drooped, with tears running like a river down her face. He felt so much in his heart for his wife and knew she loved him. When he looked back to the benches he saw the judge was about to speak.

“Let me ask again. How does the defendant plead?”

The blacksmith was so mortified by what he had heard and he heart was so full that his voice did not stir.

“Let me put it plain to you,” the judge said, near to losing his moderate humour. “Did you murder the tradesman who rode off with your wife? Are you guilty?”

Just at that moment a clock – at the back of the court – struck the hour.

 

 

 

ENDS 1805

THE BLUES SINGER

SHORT STORIES

© 1999 by Michael Clifford

Pentatonic, pentatonic, pentatonic, the rail sleepers sang to Millie in swing time, as the train entered urban sprawl. She was beginning to feel a bit edgy.

“Hey babe, you’ll love me tonight, heh?” suggested Ronny the sax man.

“It’ll cost you. You couldn’t afford it.”

“Whadya want, a wedding ring?”

“Nothing as pricey as that.”

They were only getting expenses tonight: it was a big publicity gig for a government-based charity and the boys moaned about it as they rattled towards Birmingham New Street. “I hate playing without our own gear,” scowled Mike.

“The back-line that they provide will be exactly as we specified,” said Millie, hoping she was right.

Coloured neon reflected in wet puddles. Drip. Millie dawdled along the shining city concourse. Chain store doorways sheltered captive window- shoppers. Traffic splashed gutter-drizzle over late night fashion victims. Drip. The boys had remained in the bar. The kit – which was fine – was in in-house and the sound check was over. As she wouldn’t be changing into a glittering stage-fairy until 11.30 – and as the flu of pre gig tension was ailing her – she had needed to get out. It should be ‘Singing In The Rain’ not ‘Crying In The Rain’, but she was a blues singer. I stand at the Crossroads with a vodka in my hand.

In this business you get addicted to everything.

If the claps of one performance could be added to the claps of the next, and so on, then this job would be heaven. But it’s not, she thought, unless you become a star. You have to go out and fill yourself up everyday. The trouble is you always want more, more….

She had woken up that morning to be phoned by agent Charlie Curtis to see if she wanted to front a Gladys’s Night tribute band. He listed the personnel involved. 

“Unlikely,” she said, “but I’ll have a think about it and ring you back. 

With her Modigliani portraits looking down on her, she lay on her ruby-red carpet and discussed the idea with her spider plant. She turned over her press clippings kept carefully in a white wedding album. She sighed when she came to the photos of her time on backing vocals with John May all. Everyone had said big things were in store for her, but only little packages arrived. Her heart warmed at the snapshots of the Ghetto Blues Band recording sessions in the early 80s. They had been fun days. The book closed and she poured herself a small vodka.

After those sessions the hotter opportunities cooled – it was just one jazz and blues club or function after another. Her ambition seemed to desert her when her father died and left her.

She gossiped the afternoon hours away bagging cardigans with the girls at Fenwick’s Knitwear. This deflated ‘Prima Donna’ tendencies, and kept her down to earth for which she was grateful. In the early evening she rang Charlie back. Thanks for the offer, Charlie, but no. She couldn’t let her own boys down. The type casting would restrict her own style. And, anyway, how long could she keep going. She was over 40 and was getting a bit long in the tooth for this wailing business.

In the dressing room she sobered her anxiety with another drink. She didn’t feel up to it tonight. She couldn’t do it. She was tired; she had a sore throat. She felt it coming on during the journey over.

Her body shrunk in anticipation. Desirous of intoxication but fearful of the needle of the audience.

At last. With five minutes to go, she could hear her band on the stage whipping up the audience: the raw jangling rhythm, the open tuned slide guitars, the kick bass comes in, the snare, the brass stabs, the whole grove, and then eventually she could hear herself being introduced by the DJ.

“People. You’ve been waiting. Well… here she is at last! Give a big reception to the Midland’s Queen of Blues, Millie Delton, and her renowned backing band, The Bluenoses!”

She placidly thought of the legendary Billie Holiday. She must have faced this joyful dread every night. Standing up to be shot down; an emotional clown, winding everyone up to the peak of emotion but at the same time exposing everything she had, making herself naked, vulnerable, leaving nothing for herself, somehow leaving herself empty, empty, empty…

Crazy. She was singing such emotionally wild lyrics – yet her own emotional life was simplified.

After three deep breaths she moved to the wings, then as she came on stage, she steadied herself with the microphone stand and felt the vodka slosh around in her legs. Her entire body surged with electricity. Lights came on in her head. Home! The place she knew in myopic sensual detail: the hum of the crowd; the buzz of the amplification; the taste of smoke; the chink of glasses; the low burble of intimate conversation. 

For a micro second she stood there – a woman in a red satin dress, white pearls, red nails and transparent crystal earrings – radiant; beaming to the audience. Behind her where her boys; a tidy crew of black suits, white shirts and metallic green bow ties and glittering golden brass.

Without another second the band dropped their funk groove and fused into a raucous 12 bar blues run down complete with wild crying of electric guitar. Down it came, down, down, down and then the whole band stopped dead.

Smack on time, she hit it, giving it everything she had.

I can wash out 44 pairs of socks and have them hanging out on the line
I can starch and iron 2 dozen shirts ‘fore you can count from one to nine
I can skip up a big dipper full of lard from the drippin’s can
Go out do my shoppin’ be back before it melts in the pan
Cause I’m a woman W-O-M-A-N, I’ll say it again….

The old Peggy Lee classic had the crowd instantly.

Despite her earlier doubts, musical emotion poured from every inch of her skin. She was it: passionate, raunchy. compulsive, raw. edgy, wild, pulsating, hypnotic and utterly dynamic as she worked the stage. She didn’t sing a song, she wore it. Everyone’s eyes were on her. Every man in the audience was transfixed by her passion and sensuality. They wanted her. But she knew they would not approach her. They rarely did – apart from the odd arrogant jerk. Her intensity frightened them. She was the stuff dreams were made of, but not of real life. She was as passionate as a panther in love, with a panther’s bite. Never put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington. Actresses are trouble.

“Watermelon man everywhere but not one to buy me a drink,” she said to the audience between numbers by Bessie Smith and Willie Dixon. Not long after she was surprised to receive a couple of vodkas in the wings.

There was a fair wind, the sky was blue, rhythm, melody and harmony were in synchronicity. It was a slipstream night. Songs followed from Sam Cooke, Clara Smith, Cole Porter, Howlin’ Wolf, Gershwin, Etta James and Smokey Robinson amongst others. Songs that would move a lot of people’s hearts – and a lot of alcohol from behind the bar.

“…get out of here and get me some money too!” she concluded after her third encore. The house came down again. More! More! More! But she had gone. ‘Always leave the crowd asking’ was something she had learned a long time ago.

She felt great! Adrenaline! The deeper the anxiety before a gig, the greater the release afterwards. She felt clean, guilt free; even sanctified: she had performed her penance.

“We got some good gigs out of tonight,” said Mike. “I’ve had loads of business cards and three definites and two agents. Top dosh.” said drummer Dave in the dressing room.

“Tell me Millie, in ‘Gold Bless The Child That’s Got His Own Bed’ how come no one ever sings ‘bed’?”

“The songwriter couldn’t get the words to fit the music,” said Millie giggling.

“Millie, your tingle factor got up to concert E,” said Ronnie, blowing the note on his alto sax, his eyes widening comically.

Like a cat before a roaring fire, she purred with a cosy vodka in hand. She had learnt something. The whole of her past life had been a rehearsal for tonight. As it would be for tomorrow’s performance, and the next night’s. It felt so good. It was her life. She couldn’t give it up. It was more than a job, or a craft, or an art. Blues was her prayer and expression. It made her completely whole – at least for a short while. Whatever the words, the singing was more than a song. It was a ritual; a catharsis of disappointment in deep love and attachment.

But the most important thing was:- that the catharsis was shared.

ENDS

1507

BORIS’S TALE

CHILDRENS FICTION

©1987 by Michael Clifford

A short story competition in the Writer magazine. Write a story – within stipulated word limit – ending with the last paragraph.

Boris, an overweight and out of condition grey mouse, fled down the hallway, nervously shooting rapid glances behind him as he went: first this way, then that, then back again. With his ears held sharply back and his tail swishing the floor, he scurried over the patterned tiles feeling terror, guilt and anxiety all at the same time. He blamed himself bitterly. Squeaker, his youngest son, had gone missing and it was all his own fault.

As Boris raced along he rued the evening he had told Squeaker of those wild adventures of the Great Grandpa Rigby, those adventures in which Rigby had always won the upper hand over the humans. If he hadn’t have told the tales so well Squeaker would be safe at home. But it was too late to think about that now. He had and Squeaker had silently slipped off to seek his own adventures in the world of humans and had not been seen for two days. The little fool had no idea of the danger he was putting himself in! He was so young and inexperienced he would surely get eaten!

Confound Grandpa Rigby and his adventurous lifestyle! For all his storytelling that sort of lifestyle had never appealed to Boris at all. It had been years since he had dared to move about inside the house during the day. He was quite happy, thank you, keeping to the safety of the wainscoting. Whoever was it who said that fiction didn’t influence young minds. Woodshavings! Whoever said it should be fed to a cat.

Boris slithered through the ajar door into the room at the front of the house. Squeaker must be in here! This was the only room he hadn’t thoroughly searched.

The door bell rang.

He stood on the carpet in the centre of the room. It seemed safe enough.

Above him blinding daylight flooded through a bay window making him squint as he looked around. A big sideboard was covered with ornaments and vases of flowers. The room was full of materials of all kinds hanging from walls, hanging by the sides of windows, and covering the floor. Humans liked material. He wondered if they ate it.

He carefully sniffed the carpet. His heart raced for a moment when he thought he could whiff his son, but then when his nose quickly raced back to the same spot he couldn’t find it. The carpet smelled pungent: of cat and human smells – particularly that plant stuff that humans smoke out of their mouths. After a while he had to stop sniffing because it made his nostrils sore.

His heart leapt; his body froze. Danger! Earlier he had heard someone come in the front door. Then he had heard voices in the hall. Now someone was entering the room. No four feet. That meant two people. He darted under the settee, but he could see them. There was a woman who wore some red dangling berries around her ears. (How strange – how did humans grow berries on their ears?). A man with a brief case. He wore black shoes. Boris’s twisty reflection dazzled back at him from their shiny surface. (Why did humans wear mirrors on their feet?) The door was closed.

Eek! How was he going to get out?

“Well! What a surprise! My, oh, my, oh, my,” said the man.

“It’s simply ages since I’ve seen you, Harold” replied the woman enthusiastically. “How long is it? It must be at least ten years since. Do you know I can’t bear to listen to Victor Sylvester’s records anymore because they remind me too much of those wonderful times we used to have. What a tremendous surprise. I didn’t know you lived around here. And to think – all this time you’ve been working down at the old council.”

“Well yes… I must say you are looking very well. You look quite ravishing.”

“If I’d have known there was a fiery old flame like you down in the old rat catcher’s department I’d have planted a few rats myself to get you up here, Harold.”

“Ha! Actually I’m not a rat catcher, Marjorie, I’m a Public Health Inspector. Anyway I thought it was mice?”

“Yes. Yes it is. Do you know what happened, Harold? Listen. Can I call you Harry, like the old times? It’s not as though we don’t know each other extremely well is it? You don’t mind?”

“Not at all, Marjorie. You were saying?”

“Oh yes… those creatures are.. despicable! I’ve never been so scared in my life. I was in here yesterday minding my own business, heightening the hem of one of my miniskirts – I can see by the smile you haven’t forgotten my old miniskirts, you rogue! Oh where was I, oh yes. Anyway, would you believe it, this damn little brown mouse started trying to climb my leg. Scream? You’ve never heard anything like it. I kicked it off and ran out of the room and shut the door. I tried to find Tiddles in the garden but he was nowhere to be seen. He’s never been much of a mouser at the best of times anyway. He seems to lack the killer instinct.”

Boris’s whiskers bristled with rage. How dare she kick her son off her leg! He was only trying to be friendly. There was no telling what these fiendish monsters would do next.

“Ah, so it is mice?” said the man. “If you’ve seen one of the little blighters, it’s likely you’ll have them all over the house.” The man pointed to his brief case. “There’s a form you need to fill in about the poison. While you are doing that I’ll just check the place over for you to see where they are coming from Marjorie.”

Boris was thinking hard. Perhaps Squeaker was no longer in the room. Earlier when the lounge door had been open Squeaker might have escaped. Maybe he was hiding somewhere in the room? He’d better have a quick look round anyway if only to find himself somewhere to hide.

“Don’t do everything in a hurry, Harry,” said the woman, purring louder than any cat. “Sit yourself down on the settee and I’ll get you a brandy. I need someone reliable and strong like you to help me fill in this form. There you are. There’s nothing wrong with getting nice and comfy is there? Is that better? Remember?”

“Yes Marjorie, it’s very nice. I say… I wouldn’t say no to a brandy. That is… hey steady on there, you’re tickling me.”

“Let’s save that for a moment, shall we? A brandy for the gentleman. Of course. I’ll also go and see if Tiddles has come in yet. He might make your work extremely easy if he’s in the mood. If he is in the mood, Harry, he certainly isn’t the only one. And it’s such a warm afternoon, Harry, I might just slip into something more comfortable.”

“Could you make that a double brandy, Marjorie?”

Boris’s whiskers were now snuffling around the carpet, but he could still find no new fresh trail. He wished he’d known where she’d been sitting when she had kicked his son off. He wasn’t sure what to do.

Minutes later the woman returned. The woman’s re-entrance into the room further convinced Boris of the peculiarity of humans. She had said she was going to slip into something more comfortable and yet it seemed that all she had done was slip out of most of what she had been wearing. He watched her put a tray down on the coffee table and then go out again, calling behind her, “Tiddles is here. I’ll just go and get him.” She shut the door behind her.

Tiddles was not a particularly dangerous cat, but even the most lethargic cat was given considerable respect by Boris. He had to hide. He didn’t have to look far. The underside of the settee had many holes; the widest of which his teeth rapidly enlarged until the hole allowed him to pass quickly inside the foam webbing.

Sanctuary came none too quickly. He caught the woman’s voice and the waft of cat simultaneously.

“Now Harold, here’s your brandy. And I’ve brought the bottle in as well to keep us company. Tiddles here..” Boris felt a nearby thump on the floor and vile cat-stench, “Tiddles here can go and find the mouse while you… while you … smother me in kisses.”

“Oh Marjorie.”

“Oh Harry I can’t believe it’s you.”

Boris didn’t understand human conversation at all. He thought they had already introduced themselves to each other.

“Dad, dad…”

“Squeaker. Is that you I can hear?”

“Yes. I’m down here. Can you see my tail? I’m down here in the lining.

And there he was. Squeaker, with moist red eyes and wilted ears. He looked all in.

“Are you hurt, my darling? Oh praise the Lord of the Long Tail! Oh you’ve been so naughty. You’re mother is furious and you can’t imagine how much you’ve upset your brothers and sisters and me.”

“I’m sorry dad. Soz. I won’t do it again. No, I’m not hurt. I thought I’d twisted my ankle but I’m alright. I want to go home. What’s all that noise going on, and why is the settee shaking so much, dad?”

“I don’t know Squeaker, just hold on.”

They kept completely quiet, swaying around in the foam as the settee seemed to pulsate this way and that. Suddenly they heard a loud cry of anger. It was the woman.

“Damn it, Harold! Every time we start to show each other what we feel for each other that cat jumps on your blasted lap and you start to stroke it. How am I expected to feel!”

“I’m terribly sorry, Marjorie. It’s just that I can’t stop it. Every time I put it down it simply jumps back up.”

“Well, you don’t have to stroke the cat. It supposed to me you’re stroking. It supposed to be mousing. You’re encouraging it.”

“No, I’m not. To be quite honest it seems to be more interested in my brandy than me, Marjorie.”

“Well I’m not playing second fiddle to that thing. It can go back into the garden. And as for being more interested in the brandy than me I know what you mean!”

Boris and Squeaker felt the settee spring higher as someone got off it, and heard the whelp of the cat. “I’m putting him out the back door and then Harold I’m coming back and I’m putting you out the front door. Understand?.”

“I’m going immediately,” said Harold tersely

“Come on son. It’s time to go. Let’s hope they don’t close the door before it’s too late.”

Boris had no need to fear, when they emerged from the settee the room was empty and the door was open. A mad dash down the hall, across the passageway and they both arrived at home safe and sound.

That evening Boris described to his wife and children how exciting and dangerous the whole day had been. Boris felt quite grand over dinner, like a returned conqueror. He would add his own adventures to those of his great grandpas.

It had been pretty terrifying but it had made him feel young and adventurous again and he had found out many new things about humans. They grow berries on their ears, have to continually drink stuff called brandy, and they like to introduce themselves to each other lots of times.

In the end it had all been worth it. Somehow he felt the experience had deepened his understanding of this strange world. Nonetheless he knew he would never attempt such a thing again.

1952 words
I won third prize and £30

WOMAN

SHORT STORIES

©1982 by Michael Skywood Clifford

He had felt it before. Not that long ago. An electricity; a convulsion; a quake of fear; a beautiful nausea – an unbearable tension. A need to impress and a need not to at all. A need to be kind and gentle, yet a desire to kick out and show his wants, to retain his personality – to curb the witchcraft.

He had been alone for a week or two, getting on with things quite happily when she returned from holiday. Work became unbearable again. He felt dominated, dwarfed by her; going out of his way to avoid her. She made him feel so nervous, so incapable, so transparent and inferior somehow. Not at all he imagined how she would want him to feel. She would just want him to be friendly but that he found a strangling but necessary ordeal.

He didn’t want her for sex. Well he did, but it wasn’t just lust. In many ways he didn’t find her pretty at all but she was electric somehow. Yes, it was sexual, but only square one on the snakes and ladders board with a the future of a terrifying snake to slide down from square ninety nine. So he’d keep away, let it die. Her proximity, the thought of her made his breathing quicken; she knotted his mind with delightful anxiety.

What bothered him was that he didn’t want to worry about what she thought of him. He couldn’t afford to speculate it was too dangerous to dwell on such matters.

How much was she a games player? How much did she realise her female chemicals had activated his psyche? Women are never stupid in such matters.

Then later that day – and he had seen nothing of this woman that day – he went into a bookshop. He picked up a book called ‘The Affect of Intelligence’, or similar by Krishna Mirti. It said (wrongly quoted) ‘We all need stimulating things and they are all escape’. Then it said, ‘Relationships are the most important things in life’. Isn’t that contradictory, he wondered. Surely he is saying escape is what we are after then? But Evidently not. Krishna Mirti made it clear on the next page once again that escape was to be avoided.

Our hero left the bookshop most confused, relieved that Indian and metaphysical philosophy didn’t affect him as it used to. However some things he had read stayed with him all day. ‘We all create images of others and ourselves which are wrong and damaging to ourselves and others’. (Actually he agreed with this).

‘… And then we end up becoming isolated and neurotic’.

He didn’t like that. But the book also said ‘seeking relationships, and games with people, clubs, societies and the safety of similar thinking is escape’.

‘What a nutcase!’ thought our hero defensively. ‘You can’t win with him. He is no leader. That’s probably what he’s trying to say through being a leader.’

He met Mike later and told him about it. Mike said, ‘You don’t want to read all that pseudo bull-shit.’

‘You might be right,’ said our hero.

Anyway, who is our hero?

Our hero is the human race who have a compulsion to eat, drink, copulate, smoke, indulge, etc.

…to fast, to restrain, to atone, pay penance, to deify, etc.

Our hero is the middle mast sailing in the eddy between two currents.

Our hero likes to have the permanent pain of stark consciousness blotted out by drink or drugs or distraction, he needs a woman (self evident) – or not – and needs some bond however fragile.

Our hero wants:
To be loved
To feel alive
To be an executive
To own stocks and shares
To fulfill romantic images, stereotypes and roles that all fiction has passed onto him
To talk it out
To be everyone’s friend
To be THE FÜHRER

But our hero may have some trifling problems:
Self disgust
Doubt of self worth
Fear of people
A growing ego of colossal scale in proportion with his rejections
Falling into the armchair and enjoying being dumbed down
Loneliness

‘But I’m afraid I’m lonely,’ said our hero. ‘Meeting people, even superficially, even nice people, doesn’t kill that loneliness – in some ways it makes it worse. The more I go chasing people the lonelier I feel.”  Well not really. I’ve never actually tried it, but I sense that to be true. Going out to talks, films and shows, I’ve always felt quite stimulating.

“Can you stand to be with people and not become leader, stimulator, organiser?’ he asked me. ‘Can you be merely a quiet but a well considered member?’ I didn’t answer. This all smells of weakness. Whose weakness?

‘Is it surprising I don’t know what I want? One’s ideology can only be an extension of one’s personality

or obviously it will be an ill fitting glove.’

Where are my good manners?

Relationships need development like a melody

With this beautiful thought he left the room.

***

An hour later he sat next to the woman. It took him by surprise. Everyone sat around. He chatted to her. Funny silences. Then she got up, left the room, returned and sat next to him. Then she got up and left the room again, and someone else – another woman – almost took her seat. Our hero somehow managed to stop this happening. While she was talking to this other woman, the woman returned and he felt she was going to sit elsewhere – but she didn’t. She sat next to him.

The electricity was terrible. Body language; legs pointing this way and that. Then as she kept playing with her plaits, she kept touching him with her arm.

Electricity!

But it wasn’t as obvious as that and sadly our hero probably misconstrued it, and it meant nothing.

He always overestimated women’s evaluation of touching.

But he felt something – it must be true. No. Yes. No. Yes. Sadly our feelings are often wrong.

No, not totally. There’s something there.

***

Then later as they were driving along in his car towards Reading, she started talking about her husband. She couldn’t drive with his hand on her knee, she said, and our hero said, ‘I wouldn’t object if you were my passenger’. She laughed, embarrassed, but he was pleased with the comment and the inevitable rejection it invoked. It killed some of her power over him, as did all innuendo comments.

Then later she talked to him over a cup of coffee about what it was like to be female.
She said she had a violent relationship with a boy. She hadn’t exactly consented to making love on this occasion and had become pregnant. Bitterness, resentment, a refusal of marriage on her part, then off to abort. The lover sped after her in a stolen Rover with a crow bar to stop it, but he was unsuccessful. A mess; a pain; who and where is Heathcliffe? I presume he is yet to arrive.

Our hero spent five days in her company, driving her to and from a course. She was a captive in his car; she was inside him, inside his car. He couldn’t put his arms around her but he could softly immure her into his metal world.

One day they had a conversation about literature and visual art. He was staggered by it. That night he lay in bed and made up a picture in his mind and she was in them all. He considered her physical insubstantiability; a ghost with blonde ringlets. She was particularly light on touch, and sometimes light on sincerity. On heavier matters her sincerity wasn’t in question. She was a sad person, or she projected herself to our hero from such a stance. Perhaps it was personality marketing techniques – perhaps she was delivering what she thought he wanted. No, a sad person.

One day she told our hero she was leaving, she had got a better job. He was surprised and happy/sad about it. He liked her very much, respected her, he told himself. Then he had a few days off with the flu and she’d gone by the time he returned to work.

Three weeks later he left as well and returned back to the home counties.

ENDS

1309

THE SEASON

SHORT STORIES

© 1998 by Michael Clifford

An entry to a competition in Foreward, a writer’s magazine. Write a story called ‘The Season’ using no more than 1450  words.

Gradually, May rambled into June, and rambling was how Lana and Jerry met.

The late snowfall had melted and the bleating of newly born lambs had faded. Diehard bluebells sapphired the woodlands as buttercups gilded the meadows. In the village gardens, daffodils had given way to pansies, forget me knots, blazing baskets of fuchsia, all parading within the dreamy spray of rosebud scent. Turned-on clocks created an English scenery of light nights and vowed days without end.

Lana, an English art teacher had read ‘A Brief History Of Time’. Jerry, an American physicist, had a daughter who wanted to be a sculptor. So they found – as they made footprints together around the common – they already had something in common.

She liked him. She wrote that evening in her diary: ‘It is a time to reveal and a time to withhold, a time to reach out and a time to hold back’. In the next week, struggling with these paradoxes, she joined him on a canal walk and a museum visit.

Then came blistering July: blue sky, white clouds, blue lake, white swans. Feeding white crumbs to orange beaks, Jerry and Lana told each other of their lives. “All was devoured,” Lana later wrote in her diary. “The ripeness of our own understanding of who we are, now shared.” The March-wind loneliness of each other’s divorce became touchable to the other, as the long shadows of a Constable painting cocooned them in the warm yellow evening of the solstice.

All over the community, as the heat-wave defied local radio statistics, pullovers, cardigans, boots, electric blankets, hot water bottles and heavy clothing were buried out of sight. Winter had been abolished, the word was stuck out of the dictionary. It had never existed.

Balancing on the edge of things, between worlds, Lana sketched by the water side, with ladybirds, midges, thunder-bugs and the lilt of the lapping reservoir for company. It’s rippled surface mirrored the reeds, the grassy banks and the oak trees. “Perhaps a lover is like a mirror,” she mused aloud, “throwing back to me my own reflection.”

Caterpillars had shed their unwanted parts and the mad dance of butterflies exploding from hedgerows had begun. The summer hummed as metallic dragon flies glinted in the sunlight. Lana watched ‘water-boatmen’ insects skate on the surface of the village pond as Jerry reminded her of the miracle of surface tension.

Sunday cricket, village fetes, gymkhanas, agricultural shows, stately homes and garden barbecues. Jerry and Lana became the tourists of their own lives. At other times, they would banter in the garden of the Bull’s Head, a stone’s throw from his rented cottage. Here, much of the entertainment was in the form of observing Ibiza-hopping, chocolate-skinned locals in their white fineries and brand ostentatious sunglasses – always with glass in hand – boasting of something they had acquired, or of somewhere they had been.

Lana and Jerry ventured south to the hot urban capital. She stepped over the cracks of London paving stones, noticing the weeds maturing between. He fed her strawberries and cream at Court number two. At Henley Regatta they couldn’t stop touching each other.

Later, back at home, she read him ‘Wind in the Willows’ and he once again tried to explain the importance of The Big Bang.

“But what came before the Big Bang?” she queried, “The Big Foreplay?”

While the bees buzzed from flower to flower, unwittingly executing nature’s design, two cold showers a day became a necessity for Jerry in the heat.

The interior upholstery burned through his shirt. His sweaty hands slid over the slippery steering wheel, as his four wheel drive cut through the moorland, taking Lana home in the afternoon. The radiator gasped of thirst. Tyres bulged near to bursting with expanding air. The asphyxiating stench of petrol. He stopped and opened the sun roof.

He laid her down in a field of golden corn and kissed her passionately. Soft breezes touched him, rustling wind spoke to him.

Later, with windows open, the smell of neighbours new cut grass, insects adrift, the duvet on the floor, under the whirling fan, their thirst was quenched again. “This summer you will need to keep on top of my garden,” she said.

“You are an English Rose in bloom,” he said to her, in August, in a country lane, placing a wild raspberry in her mouth.

“Whatever you do, don’t quote me a Shakespeare sonnet about being as fair as a summer’s day,” she said, pointing to the bags under her eyes.

“I love you,” he drawled.

“But, as the English roads wind and as the English hills roll, English love rarely runs straight.” she laughed. “One out of three roads end up in court.”

One Sunday, he played her Gerswin and she introduced him to Vaughn Williams. Next day, as a lark ascended in a meadow, she could hear the passionate voices of Summertime moving with the breeze.

Another fine day, he e-mailed her, from the University research lab, in the form of a telegram :I SEND YOU MY LOVE STOP.

She replied by telephone in a metallic computer voice: “But when you send me your love do you send it in particles or in waves?”

Brown slippery skin on white sand. In the dog days of summer, in the noon of the year, in Terracina, he applied Amber Solitaire to her back and poured Italian Secco Bianco Vino down her throat.

‘I’m dancing on sunshine’, she sang. “Thank god for summer holidays from school.”

One evening, in the Bull’s Head garden, his joke about one of the local poseurs made her literally cry with laughter. By the light of the harvest moon, they could both see within each other a core that ached with desire – and they both enjoyed the suspension and anticipation of that desire.

One afternoon, returning home from the library, she found a flock of squawking crows in her front garden. Having fought her way to her front door, her attention became focused on colonies of arts forming around the entrance paving slabs. In the kitchen she noticed an over-ripe banana and a mouldy tomato rotting in the vegetable rack. She felt vexed for the first time in months. It had been a day of irritations, negative appraisals, insect bites and itchy heat bumps; even her period was late.

And leaves gradually begin to discolour.

One weekend, they laughed all the way on a rail ‘Saver Ticket’ to Skegness. Families, beach balls and over large grandmas. A storm battled with the sun, as a torrential downpour welcomed them. Looking at the rainbow after the warm rain Lana remembered a quote, “No one cares what the weather is like if they are happy.”

In these Indian summer days, when they were not at Jerry’s cottage, they spent much time in the garden of the Bull’s Head. Tonight, both had been uncharacteristically quiet.“Building up courage has a restraining effect upon verbosity,” a ‘Wildeism’ she wrote later. She knew she had to tell him, she couldn’t put it off any longer. She flicked away the wasp from a spilt pool of lager and turned to him.

“September has blown in and I’m with child.”

The wasp began on a flight path that would inevitably end up at her face; she knocked it away. Then, watching it fly off to another table, she added calmly, “I’m 36 and I’m having my first baby – yours.”

He was looking down into his whiskey sour. She noticed how sweat had claimed areas of his white cotton shirt, turning their colour to a disgusting shade of peach.

He said, “Well….there’s something I haven’t told you. I’ve been meaning to…. I have to leave Britain soon. I have to return to the States. My company wants me back – and so does my daughter – ”

“ – So your physics is taking you away from my biology,” she interrupted. Her delivery was deadpan, emotionless, calm, reasonable.

“No….I’ve been meaning to ask you to come with me, but I’ve been frightened….

“How can I expect you to give up your roots, and your career – and these English summers? I want you to come with me. You and…. You will? You must.”

And the only summer they spent together in England ended. All others were in Syracuse, New York State USA as a threesome.

1403