Without The Booze and Fags (in homage to Beryl Bainbridge)

She was old. Nothing else to be said; Gran was old.

Lying there on the floor of the book shop, her limbs bent under her, her frail bones covered by papery skin, she looked old.

“It’s not the booze, darling,” she said, looking up at me with her chocolate button eyes.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Nobody came to help her up. The people who had come to see her tonight, on this book tour for which she was too old, just stood and stared at the drunken old woman who had lost her footing on the slippery laminate floor.

I bent down and gripped an arm. I tried to manoeuvre her, to find her other arm, but she lay there, helpless.

“Have you broken anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, darling. I landed quite softly. I slipped, you know. It isn’t the booze.”

Her best friend had died the night before. Another author, someone the reading world had already forgotten, long before she even hit her 60s.

“Don’t let me go the way she went,” she had begged me, earlier that evening. “It’s disgusting to die that way,” she said.

I had promised to smother her with a pillow if she ever fell victim to a stroke.

“I wouldn’t want to go on, darling,” she told me.

“I know, Gran,” I said. “I know.”

She was small and frail on the floor beneath me, and I couldn’t find a way to lift her up.

I straightened, looked round for someone to help, caught the eye of one of the shop assistants. She might have been a manager.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “She’s fallen.”

“Of course,” she said, coming out of her gallows curiosity.

Together we lifted my grandmother from the floor.

“I’m fine, darling, I’m fine,” she assured us both. “So kind of you to help,” she said to the shop assistant.

The woman blushed. “It’s not a problem,” she said.

I hoped that the blush was one of embarrassment for having left my grandmother so long in her indignity.

“Come on, Gran,” I said, tucking a hand under her elbow. “I’ll get us a cab.”

“It wasn’t the drink, Charlie,” she told me again.

“I know,” I replied. “Walk carefully on the stairs here.”

Slowly we made our way down the stairs to the shop entrance. The London evening was sticky with heat. I saw a cab pull around the corner, a hundred yards away. Still holding onto Gran beneath her elbow, I raised my other hand. The cab drove towards us.

I helped her in and settled her back into a seat. She pulled the seatbelt across her shoulder and buckled herself in. Not many people do that in a cab. Not many people have had an accident in a cab that catapulted them through a window, either. Cautious to the last, apart from when drunk, that was my grandmother.

“You see, dear, Sofia was my oldest friend. I had to have a little drink.”

“Where to?” the cab driver asked. I gave him directions.

I sat alongside my grandmother and held her hand and she rambled on about her friend. She was one of the few survivors. All three of her husbands had predeceased her. She still lived in the same ramshackle house, peopled and littered with skeletons and carnival masks. She still climbed the three flights of stairs to the room that housed her ancient computer.

“I couldn’t live anywhere else, darling,” she said, to anyone who asked or dared to suggest that she move to live with one of her daughters.

My mother would heave a sigh of relief when she heard her say it.

“The house is a death trap,” I would say.

“Then let her live with you, Charlie,” was her reply.

The cab stopped outside her house. She had pointed out to me the place on the corner where the van had run into the cab she was in, that night she went through the window.

“I still have the glass in my lip, darling,” she told me. “The next book I write,” she said, “there will be an accident in a taxi cab.”

She had given up smoking, though, and writing was suffering. There would be no next book. Like any writer, she needed the thing that was killing her to spur on the creative flow. Without the suck and drag, without the flick of ash, she was nothing.

We were out of the cab and I was helping her up the steps to her front door when she gripped my arm.

“You won’t tell your mother, Charlie?” she said, her face close to mine, looking up at me.

“Won’t tell her what?” I asked, playing along.

She frowned. She didn’t get it.

“You won’t tell her that I fell,” she said.

“Oh, that?” I said, feigning surprise. “No, of course not.”

She seemed to start breathing again, as though she had been holding her breath while waiting for my answer. She said nothing, just turned from me and pushed her key into the lock.

I saw her in.

“Do you want tea, darling?” she asked me, filling the ancient aluminium kettle at the tap; a tap that was connected to an ancient lead pipe. It was a wonder that she wasn’t dead a long time ago. Or pensioned off in a nursing home for the senile.

“No thanks, Gran,” I said.

“Something stronger, then?” she asked.

“No. Nothing for me, thanks.”

It was late and, although I knew that she never went to bed before midnight, I wanted to see her settled. I wanted to know that she wouldn’t sit at the table, drinking more, trying to piece together the book that would never come.

I wanted her to be a grandmother like anyone else’s; not this driven creative force that had lost its way and was drifting through its last days. I wanted her to stop being Beryl, but I knew it would never happen, and that I would hate her if it did.

She made tea in an equally ancient aluminium teapot.

“You should get rid of that, Gran,” I said. “The kettle too.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Charlie. I’ve been using these for years. All that nonsense. Do I have Alzheimer’s? Am I senile?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then.”

She sat at the table and removed her watch, scratching her wrist.

“I think I need a new strap, Charlie, darling,” she said, inspecting the grooves and redness where the strap had been resting against her too warm skin.

“I’ll call for you in the morning,” I said. “We’ll get you one tomorrow.”

I was spending a couple of months with her. I was between projects and she had got it into her head that she might not be much longer in this world, so she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.

The other grandchildren came along later than me, but she treated us all the same, answering Jo and Beth’s 3 and 5-year old questions with the same abstract clarity as she used when speaking to me about the past or about her writing. With Simon she explained the principles of making arrows and the importance of a well trimmed flight to encourage speed and distance when released from the bow. It was a moot point whether Simon wanted to know this information, but Gran persisted nonetheless.

My mother said she had been the same when she and her sisters were growing up. She was this force who thought that everyone, no matter what their age, was on the same plane as her.

She was right to think that way, as well. There was something childlike in her approach to the world that sat well with adults and children alike. Some might view it as an eccentricity, but to us it was just Beryl.

“Where does one get a watchstrap these days?” she asked. She was looking at the offending item in question. “I must have had this one for twenty years. I can’t remember where I got it from.”

“From a jeweller's,” I said. “Or a watch repair shop.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “You are clever, Charlie, dear.”

The tea was still stewing in the pot, no doubt filled with aluminium that had leached into the water.

“Are you having tea?” I asked.

She sighed.

“I don’t think so, Charlie, no.”

“Well, I think I’ll be off then,” I said, rising from the table. “Don’t be up too late. I’m coming round for you at nine.”

“Oh, I only need six hours these days, darling,” she replied, breezily. “It’s one of the advantages of getting old.”

She saw me to the door.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?” she said, as I stood on the doorstep, bending down to kiss her soft, dry cheek.

“This is London,” I said. “I’ll pick one up on the main road. Besides, the tube will still be running at this time.”

“You’re such a good boy, Charlie,” she said, pulling me into an embrace. There was untold strength in those arms. I would have bet my life that she would live until she was a hundred.

At 3 a.m., tucked safely into a deep sleep, I was woken by the phone ringing.

“Charlie?”

It was mum.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice still sludgy with the sediment of sleep.

“It’s your Gran. She’s been taken ill. We need to get her to A&E.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” I was awake now, standing at the window to my flat, stark naked and not caring if anyone could see me.

“She says she has pains in her legs that won’t go away.”

“Well, she did fall after the reading tonight,” I admitted, feeling like a traitor for having broken my earlier promise.

“I know. She told me.” My mother’s tone was flat with suppressed exasperation. “Are you fit to drive?”

“I don’t have a car,” I said.

“Oh. I forgot.”

”I’ll call a cab. I can be at Gran’s in ten minutes.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

At the house, my grandmother was sanguine.

“It’s nothing, really, darling. I feel fine. It’s just when I walk up and down those stairs, or if I spend too much time on my feet.”

We took her to A&E. My mother unashamedly told them who my grandmother was, told them how old she was, explained that she couldn’t really be expected to sit in a waiting room full of drunks with cut heads until a doctor was free.

The triage nurse asked Gran some questions. In the end, it wasn’t who she was or her age that helped her to jump the queue; it was the severity of her condition.

“I told you I wasn’t long for this world, Charlie,” she told me triumphantly as she was wheeled into a cubicle to be seen by a doctor.

There were tests. There were hushed conversations. There was a period of waiting. Then my grandmother was returned to us.

“Are you her daughter?” the doctor asked my mother.

“One of them,” my mother replied.

“Then please tell her to stop smoking completely and to cut down on the alcohol she consumes.”

“They told me if I don’t stop, I’ll have to lose a leg, darling,” she told me cheerfully as I helped her into another cab, one that would take her home.

“Well, then, perhaps you better had,” I said.

“I will stop,” she replied, “but I suppose this is the end of my career.”

Neither mum nor I knew what to say.

“It’s not such a bad thing,” she said, looking at us with her chocolate button eyes. “I’ve had a good run, after all.”

“You never know,” my mother said. “You might still be able to write.”

“Without the booze and fags?” my grandmother exclaimed. “Not likely!”

We stayed the night, both worried that she might not make it through.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

In the morning, I took her for her watch strap. She chose one made of fake snakeskin.

“It has a certain shabby chic to it, darling,” she said, admiring it against her wrist. “Don’t you think?”

She held it up to me, so that I could admire it.

“Do you know,” I said, “I think you’re right.”

She grinned at me like a girl still in the first flush of youth.

In the afternoon, she sat at her computer, waiting for inspiration to strike.

“I don’t know if I can do this, darling,” she told me, when I took her up a cup of tea.

She sipped at the tea.

“Is this made with a tea bag, dear?” she asked.

“Yes, Gran,” I said.

She set it down gently on a coaster at the side of the keyboard, alongside a now empty ashtray.

“I need a ciggie in my hand!” she cried, and thumped her hands down onto the keyboard.

“It will come, Gran,” I said, knowing instantly that it was the wrong thing.

“Oh, you. You know nothing!”

She was up and pacing from the room. I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen and watched her pour herself a glass of wine.

“The sun’s over the yard arm, darling,” she said as she saw me looking at her.

“The doctor said you should cut down.”

“I am cutting down, Charlie. I’d have had three by now if I wasn’t.”

She held the bottle out to me and I took it from her. I poured myself a glass and we drank together like naughty children.

“You’ve got to have some fun, Charlie,” she said to me with a wink from her button eyes.

I laughed.

“Gran,” I said, “you’re not wrong.”

© J R Hargreaves June 2007

Salvaging History

It’s like a dream; or, no – not like a dream; it is a dream. I wake up in the middle of it and I am still dreaming. My desk is cluttered with papers; reminders for unpaid bills; the fruits of the research I am carrying out; books and pens and chocolate wrappers are mixed in there, as well. This part isn’t the dream, I’m sure; but then, when I’m in the dream, I’m sure that isn’t the dream as well.

It starts: I enter a large room, its walls clad with wooden shelves, its rafters exposed and supporting yet more shelves. This is someone’s office in a building we have been sent to clear. My colleagues are already hard at work, taking things from the shelves without looking at them; there is no time for assessment, we must clear the room and take everything away with us or it will be destroyed. They are taking things from the shelves and putting them into black plastic bin liners. They work as though this is a novelty to them; from the expressions on their faces, they seem not to realise that they have been here before, carried out this task before.

I take up a black sack myself and set to work. I look at the pieces of paper I remove from the shelves and I recognise each one. Something tells me that I am in this dream but not part of it. Thinking these thoughts, I continue to work as robotically and mindlessly as my colleagues, but all the time I am plotting. The pieces of paper include paper serviettes, ticket stubs for cloakrooms; all meaningless ephemera. Still we work to salvage them, placing everything into the large black sacks ready for removal to our storage unit at work.

Salvaging history, we call it.

None of us speaks to anyone else. We have a task to do and a limited amount of time in which to do it. Knowing that I am in the same dream as always, I wonder if I am the only one dreaming it or whether it is a communal dream with each of us contributing our individual effort to it.

If I control the dream, then I can break it. I prepare myself. It is too late now to do anything; the recovery process has already begun and, even if I do control the dream, there is nothing I can do to send it back to the start. I know that waking up will only place me back inside the dream. My dreams are still analogue; I have a way to go before they can be digital. Stopping the dream is like stopping a video tape: you start right back where you stopped it.

Outside of the dream, in what I call my real life, a place which is far less rich than the one I live internally, I do not mention it to anyone else. Each one of my colleagues is in the dream, as real or as surreal as I am, and I still dare not make the assumption that it isn’t something communal.

I sit at my cluttered desk, answering the letters of people who haven’t the time to sift through the detritus of history for themselves and yet who believe that the same detritus carries something of significance to their lives.

We salvage the rotting humus of the past in order to fertilise the bastard hopes of the displaced. I filter it through my fingers, seeking out the pieces that will decorate a distant past for some poor sod who thinks that it matters. My desk is covered with the written evidence of their homogenous beliefs that they are unique in this world.

We are none of us unique. If we were, then we wouldn’t understand each other so easily.

Across the room from me is a door; beyond that door is another room; within that room are shelves that glide on tracks set into the floor, and each shelf is full of boxes that are in turn full of the documented evidence of the past. It is a past that is sterile, that is open to interpretation and, as guardians of that past, who are we to say when someone’s interpretation is wrong?

We are none of us unique.

This is how I spend my days. It is little wonder, then, that it is also how I spend my nights; dreaming about the job of salvaging the evidence.

I climb into my bed; a soft place, warm and deep and musty with sleeps from the past. Closing my eyes, I fall down into the place where dreams await me.

I walk down a corridor in an ill-lit and silent building. It seems to be morning, but the part of the morning that hasn’t yet shaken off its sleep. The sky has the harsh first touches of the sun and everything is still illuminated in the uneasy monochrome of dawn.

I reach the end of the corridor and stand before a large panelled wooden door. For a moment, I pause to listen; there is no sound coming from within the room. I glance up at the high window to the left of me and see the pearlised sky like a daguerreotype photograph in the window frame.

Opening the door, I enter the silent room. It is the same as it ever is, save the absence of my colleagues. I work quickly, beginning the process of disposing of the evidence. We have cleared this room a thousand times; we have all the detritus that we will ever need. This time, I am determined: there will be nothing taken from this room. I am in control.

I work until the sun has filled the sky with pre-noon light. I push papers into bags and push bags into cupboards, under floorboards, into the rafters: wherever they will go and stay hidden.

My colleagues appear, one by one; one by one, I explain to them that there is little left here now. I say that we must have cleared the bulk of it already. They seem confused, and I realise that in the dream they haven’t been here before. None of them speaks, however; in this dream, we never speak to each other, we simply carry out the task like automatons. Instead, they take up the black sacks and copy what I am doing.

In arriving first and taking the lead, I have determined what happens in the final outcome.

I feel relief. I have somehow broken the dream. I allow myself to smile, until the realisation comes to me that I haven’t broken the dream until the dream ceases to return. All that I have done is change the direction of the dream. My heart sinks as I realise the burden I have placed on myself. Now, instead of arriving after my colleagues and carrying out the work as their actions have dictated, I must ensure that each time I fall into sleep, I must be here first. I must repeat this dream in the same way all the other dreams have been repeated.

The thought fatigues me. It doesn’t matter that I have hidden the things on different shelves and in different cupboards. They will still be here in the next dream.

I wake, sweating. The numbers on the clock beside my bed tell me that it is too early to get up, but I don’t want to go back to sleep. I lie in the dark, willing myself to stay awake, but I suppose I drift off again, eventually. The next thing I know is my alarm going off, rousing me from the dreamless dark I have allowed myself to fall into.

I arrive at work to find everything strangely still. My colleagues sit at their desks, but do no work. I go to my own desk and take up the first letter in the pile that is newly arrived today.

“Dear Sir or Madam,

My great great grandfather, Josiah Matthews, owned an umbrella shop in Shudehill in the early 1800s. I wonder if you have anything among your archives that will tell me more about him.”

I go to the index cards and open the drawer marked M. I flick through the cards to where my practiced fingers instinctively know Matthews will lie. I look down at the point where my fingers have paused. The card is blank. I flick through the cards behind and the cards in front. All of them are blank.

I look at my colleagues who are motionless at their desks. I walk past them and into the store room. The shelves are still there, ready to glide on their tracks. The boxes are still on the shelves. I walk to a shelf at random and pull down a box. It feels heavy, so there must be something in it. I open it to find pages and pages of blank paper. All information recorded on the documents and sheets that we have spent so many years of our lives salvaging from redundant buildings has been wiped clean.

I stand looking at the box full of blank paper; I have no idea how long I stand there, but I only lift my head when someone touches me on the arm. I look up to see one of my colleagues standing in front of me, holding a sheet of paper in her hand.

“What about this one?” she asks.

I look to see a sheet bearing an advertisement from the 1930s. I look at my colleague’s face and, in doing so, see the room behind her. It is the same room lined with shelves. I look up and see the same rafters, supporting more shelves.

“Yes,” I say, still staring up at the rafters. “That one as well.”

I am back where I started. More likely that I never left.

I wonder who I am when awake, because it seems to me as though my whole life is this dream. I wonder who I am at all; this dream life is anonymous, rolling on forever, and I have no means of stopping it. It seems that way to me, anyway, as I stand in the same room, staring up at the same rafters, as my colleagues work on around me.

I wonder what place it is that I work at, that has the power to send me here when I am asleep, and the power to keep me here forever.

Wondering does no good, though. I take up my black plastic bin liner and continue to fill it with pieces of nothing that will feed the emptiness of those who want to be unique.

Back where I started, and with no means of escape.

© J R Hargreaves May 2007

Fitzhenry

“Nah, you’re just a greedy old bugger, Fitzhenry,” his companion at the bar said. “Sure, I don’t believe you paid fifty two old pounds for that thing fifty years ago.”

“Sure and I did,” Fitzhenry said indignantly. “And that there ‘expert’ said it was worth no more than £400 today.” He grumbled into his pint of stout for a moment before raising his head again. “£400! That’s terrible.” He shook his head at his pint glass.

“It serves you right for thinking it would be worth more,” his companion said equably.

“Tell us some more about your day, Fitzhenry,” a voice said from a bench near the window.

Fitzhenry turned around to address his audience of men from the village. Mary Smith tutted as she walked past him with a clutch of dirty glasses at her bosom.

“I went up to the old house,” Fitzhenry began in his sonorous story-telling voice.

His companion clapped him on the back, tears of laughter beginning to appear in his eyes.

“Sure, Fitzhenry, he didn’t ask you to start from the beginning again.”

The old man gave his companion a look. It was intended to wither the man in his seat, but he wasn’t looking at Fitzhenry. He was absorbed in his fifth whiskey of the day.

“I went,” Fitzhenry began again, slowly and self-importantly, with his gaze cast from the corner of his eye at his disrespectful companion, “up to the old house.”

His companion snorted and raised his whiskey to his lips. He drained the glass and nodded at the bar man for another.

“I’d packed the thing carefully into my brother’s car, God rest his soul, and driven there as early as I knew how. When I got to the big house, there was already a queue at the gate. People of all sorts, carrying objects in their arms, standing as though they had nothing on them but a smile for the morning. I parked in the field around the back of the house and a young chap in a violent orange jerkin told me to join that there queue and wait until there was someone to tell what it was I’d brought with me.”

He paused to take a mouthful of stout, wetting his whistle so that he might continue. The room was silent and all eyes but those of his companion were on him. The old man was enjoying being a minor celebrity, even though he didn’t realise it was for the wrong sort of reason.

He was old enough to be dead by now, but he refused to allow death a look in. He drove his late brother’s unlicensed car, ignored by the local constable. He lived in relative squalor, in a house filled with knick-knacks that was no more than two rooms downstairs and two rooms up. His brother and his brother’s wife had given in to death more than twenty years ago, as was the given way according to both nature and the Bible, and since that time he had rented out the house next door to his whiskey-soaked companion at the bar. Fitzhenry didn’t know much about the man, but he seemed to be a Dubliner, which would explain the whiskey.

Fitzhenry had joined the queue as instructed, which had grown in the time it had taken him to park the car and walk back to the main gate.

When he reached the head of the queue and was called forward to a table, it reminded him of the Troubles, when the army would regularly bring them all in and ask if they had any weapons they wished to declare.

“Have you a photograph of the object?” the youth sitting at the table asked him.

“I haven’t,” Fitzhenry had replied.

“Can you describe it for me, then?”

“I can. It’s a mahogany chest for use on a ship. It’s for a gentleman to perform his ablutions,” he said grandly and with pride, as though he were the sort of gentleman to take regular trips on a ship with his own portable wash-stand.

The youth made some comments on the sheet of paper in front of him. He had not once looked at Fitzhenry. If he had, he might have noted the slight glint of madness in the old man’s eye and changed his mind about passing on the information to the expert.

“Here,” said the youth, still not looking at Fitzhenry as he handed him a slip of paper. “Give this to a porter and accompany him to your vehicle. He’ll arrange for your object to be brought to the grounds and show you where to wait.”

Fitzhenry took the slip of paper. The youth pushed a clipboard towards him.

“Sign this, please.”

Fitzhenry hadn’t brought his glasses. “What is it?” he asked, peering at the sheet of paper on the clipboard.

“It’s a form you need to sign to give us permission to film your conversation with the expert and broadcast it in the programme.”

Fitzhenry took the pen that the youth was holding out to him and signed without reading.

“If I had only read it,” he told his audience in the pub, “I would not have signed it.”

“Why’s that, Fitzhenry?” one of the gathered crowd asked, trying not to laugh.

“Well, if you’ll understand, it was a contract.” The old man paused to allow the legality of this important word to sink into the brains of his listeners. “As I discovered later in the day, it was a binding contract from which I could not freed.”

He left the significance of the contract at that, partly because he believed it lent more gravitas to his tale, partly because he did not understand what it was he had signed well enough to explain it in public.

The contract, as the BBC assistant producer had explained to him when he continued to grumble at the expert long after his shameful valuation had been given and long, long after the cameras had stopped rolling, meant that he had no right to tell the BBC that he did not want the clip to be televised.

“You signed the contract,” she kept saying. “It’s a binding agreement.”

Fitzhenry was doubly insulted. First the expert from the programme had told him that the object he had bought was worth nothing more, and probably slightly less in today’s super inflated money, than what he had paid for it fifty years ago, and now this woman was telling him that he had no right to say that they could not broadcast his shame to the nation.

Someone in the bar failed to stifle a laugh.

“You may laugh,” Fitzhenry said, holding a finger aloft and pointing it around the room, “but if you’ll understand, as I told the expert from the television, I bought that wash-stand from Dalgeity & Son, which is an auction house, and so it was not cheap.”

When the expert had told him, in front of a crowd of people and on camera, that the wash-stand, as lovely a thing as it was, would only fetch no more than £400 in a specialist auction, Fitzhenry had almost spat out his teeth.

The entire village had of course watched the programme when it was on many weeks later. Fitzhenry had been strangely silent on the subject of his adventures at the old house on his return, but rumours crept their way down to the village, building up the expectations of Fitzhenry’s neighbours, and when they watched the programme it was said that the concentrated whoop of laughter at Fitzhenry’s response could be heard as far away as Newtownards, or even McCulley’s Rock.

“Sure, and it’s something I’ve kept for more than fifty years,” Fitzhenry said indignantly as his audience relived their joy at seeing the old fool’s response on the tv. “I shan’t be doing that again.”

His companion at the bar turned around on his stool, his eyes filled with laughter and tears, and clapped Fitzhenry on the back.

“Take a drink, man. Sure you won’t live out another fifty years. Not unless you have a secret we’d all like to know about.” He handed his ancient landlord his pint of stout and placed a hand on his shoulder. The weight of his hand encouraged Fitzhenry to sit back onto his own bar stool.

“No more than £400,” Fitzhenry sighed into his stout. “It’s enough to make a man want to die.”

“But you won’t, Fitzhenry. Not just yet, you greedy old bugger,” his companion said. “You’ll keep on living just long enough to prove that expert wrong, eh?”

His voice was gentle. In spite of the amusement he gained from Fitzhenry’s very public ridicule, along with the rest of the village he was sorry that it had happened.

“That’s right, Fitzhenry,” someone else said from the crowd by the door. “You’ll get your chance to prove that toffee nosed fop was wrong!”

Fitzhenry smiled weakly at his audience.

“Aye,” he said. “Maybe you’re right about that.”

The room was silent for a while, then gradually everyone fell back to murmuring conversation about this and about that, but not about Fitzhenry.

The old man turned himself round on his stool so that he was facing the bar. He and his companion were hunched over the counter, Fitzhenry with his pint glass, his companion with his short glass.

“And will you stop in for a spot of supper later?” he asked the younger man.

His companion did not answer for a moment. He was lost in thought, sorting through words inside his head, making them into sentences. The wealth of words that surrounded him in this place was dizzying at times, and he knew it was likely that he would never leave. Not while there were people like his landlord to keep him fed with inspiration.

“What’s that, Fitzhenry?” he asked when he realised that the old man was waiting for some sort of response from him.

“I asked if you’d like to stop by for something to eat when we get back,” said Fitzhenry.

“Yes,” said the writer, placing his huge hand gently on the old man’s frail back. “I’d like that very much indeed.”

© J R Hargreaves May 2007

Vodka

Alexei Andreyevich sat at his desk. It wasn’t a desk at all. It was a table. A table in a kitchen. He sat at the table, alone and unwilling. To his left sat a glass of vodka. Before him was a plate of bread and cheese. He sat at the table and remembered her.

He remembered the way he had held his hand across her eyes, like a blindfold. The notches of her spine had pressed into the knots of the carpet. He lay over her, his dick now hard, now soft as he battled his conscience and tried to convince himself that she was nothing more than a whore. Another prostitute in a long line.

Her hips were narrow; her hair was blonde and long. He had taken hold of it, moving his hand from where it blindfolded her eyes so that it stroked back the luxurious length of it, gripping it firmly at the nape of her neck. He had snapped her head back so that her throat was too taut to make a sound. He had held himself above her, his dick now hard, now soft.

“If I carry on drinking,” he said to his wife, now present in the room, “it will be the end.”

The glass of vodka sat just to his left.

“And if you stop?” she asked.

“I will remember her,” he thought but did not say.

He picked up the glass and threw the contents down his throat.

“Vodka,” he said, staring at the glass in his hand, but his wife was gone from the room again, as suddenly as she had appeared.

The bottle sat to his right, and he poured himself another glass, setting it down to his left. The table returned to its original pose. A still life, with a man in the middle, breathing alone.

He remembered his fingers, hard up within her. He remembered with determination the way in which he had bitten her nipples, trying to draw blood.

She had been angry. It spat from her, even when she did not speak. It was the thing which attracted him to her. The physicality of her anger, the way she seethed in public, the coldness of her indifference and the white heat of her fury. His pursuit had been inevitable.

He drank down the vodka. Its flame as it passed through his gullet reminded him of the searing heat of her ire.

Transgression is more appealing when desire has a purer goal. His lust for her wayward anger was as pure as refined gold. He had known her before he met her. Rumour and reportage were enough to seal his desire.

He had not stopped drinking; nor had he stopped remembering.

The room had been hot and stuffy. The crowds of people there to see the playwright had crammed themselves into the salon. His wife had been one of the throng, but he was there to see her.

The gold of her hair was like a beacon for him. It illuminated the room. He had taken two small glasses of vodka from a tray being carried through the room by a servant and crossed the salon to where she stood.

Rumours abounded that she was the playwright’s muse. He barely left her side at soirees such as this one, even though he was the one who was there to be celebrated. She stood, cool and aloof, letting the circus pass her by.

Every so often, she was known to speak her mind; anger and vitriol poured from her; scorn for her lover’s work, disgust with the establishment, hatred for the men and women crowded into salons across the land simply to fawn over the words of the man who called her Muse.

She was, he had decided, exactly like him. She drank vodka neat from a tumbler. She did not bind herself in the corsets and girdles that fashion dictated. She went her own way.

These were the ideas about her with which he comforted himself as he crossed the salon to deliver up the glass of vodka he carried in his left hand. He did not acknowledge the playwright, but instead handed the vodka to her, his eyes fixed upon her face.

She met his gaze and accepted the glass, then turned her face away from him. The boredom in her posture deepened the thrill that had already begun to build in him.

They did not speak. He kept his gazed fixed on her face as he sipped at his vodka; she kept her face turned away as she sipped on hers. It was enough.

The playwright moved away, the swell of the crowd carrying him to another part of the salon, leaving her behind, still in that awful pose of bored indifference. He did not change position either, but he could sense the playwright’s panic as the tide of people carried him further out to sea, his anchor and his shoreline receding into the distance.

“You should not have come tonight,” she said, her face still turned away.

“I had to,” he replied. “There was nothing else for it.”

“You have spoiled everything,” she said.

He sipped his vodka and did not reply.

Suddenly, she lifted the glass to her lips and tilted it; she tilted her head to the same angle. She swallowed the vodka in one fiery whole and threw the glass to the floor before stalking away from him.

He was left in the vacuum her absence created, soaking in the anger that negated all other matter. It was at that moment that he decided; he had to have her.

He threw back his own glass of vodka and left the room.

Sitting at his kitchen table, listening to the sounds his wife made in the rooms upstairs as she readied herself for sleep, he took up a different glass of vodka and tossed that one back as well. He took up a lump of cheese and broke it into smaller pieces. He ate one of the pieces. He left the bread on the plate. It was hard and grey and needed softening in milk or tea or something.

He chewed on the cheese and remembered not to chew hard on the left side of his mouth. His teeth were bad on that side. They were beginning to crumble and fragment; if he pressed one in particular too hard with his tongue, it released a foul taste and odour into his mouth.

He sat, as on most nights now, alone and unwilling at his kitchen table, trying not to remember as his wife settled into sleep in a room somewhere above his head.

He poured more vodka into the glass. The night was growing darker. It was ink-like in its blackness. Not even the stars peeped out in the velvet sky that showed itself in the window. As night drew on, the shadowy trees that closed in around the house from twilight until dawn took on the same hue as the sky, until it was impossible to tell sky from trees or any other part of the garden.

On the only chair in the kitchen that was cushioned, positioned by the damped down range, a cat lay grumbling in its sleep. Its paws and muzzle, ears and eyes, even the skin along its spine, twitched as it dreamed, tiny electrical currents running through its body, forcing the muscles to spasm.

He thought of the ripple of the muscles around her abdomen when he ran his fingers gently over her flesh. He thought of her naked form, there on the carpet in the drawing room, and him above her, bearing down, his dick now hard, now soft. He thought of his fingers buried inside her, warm and moist and sticky. He thought of the way her head was turned away, so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, of his other hand holding on to her hair and pulling it back so that she couldn’t move her head if she wanted to.

He thought of her complicity, her submissiveness, her absence from the physicality of the present.

She had not turned out to be the woman he had thought she was.

He tried to cut the bread, but it was too hard. It needed to be soaked. He would not waste the vodka on it. He drank down the glass he had poured himself and then topped it up again. This could, and probably would, go on all night.

If he carried on, it would be the end. If he stopped, the memories would overwhelm him.

He had sent a card to her apartments, a few days after the soiree, inviting her to drinks with himself and a few of his acquaintances. The intimation was that his wife would also attend.

To his surprise, she had agreed. A card had been sent by return to his office in town bearing the name of a drinking hall, a time and a date. He made no arrangements with anyone else; that had never been his intention. He told his wife he was meeting friends for dinner at his club. There were no questions asked.

She sat with him in that drinking hall as the bar man brought over a carafe of vodka and some water in a jug. She was the one who poured the drinks.

“You don’t want water, do you?” she said, the question filled with derision.

He presented her with a book. “This is my favourite author,” he said.

She looked at it, then looked away.

“I’ve read it,” she said.

He withdrew it from the table and took up his glass of vodka. He sipped it at first, watching the elegant line of her neck and throat as she tilted her head back and swallowed the contents of her own glass in one. She refilled her glass and looked at him.

“Why are you with him?” he asked; blurted like a schoolboy ejaculating with excitement at the proximity of his first woman.

“Drink,” was her answer; a command delivered with a glance at his glass.

He obeyed.

“That isn’t the question,” she said.

“Then what is?” he asked her, trying to appear suave and knowing.

She laughed. It was a short laugh, brittle and full of scorn. She looked away from him again and an uncomfortable silence descended. He felt ashamed and searched his mind for the question he should have asked.

She drank more vodka and refilled both their glasses.

“You need to keep up,” she said.

“I don’t understand why it is that you are with him,” he replied, trying to work the question another way.

“You don’t understand anything,” she said, looking at him again briefly before finishing off her third glass. “Come on,” she laughed, tapping her glass against his. “You must keep up.”

He drank and felt afraid. It was as though she was possessed. It thrilled and scared him.

“The question,” she said, leaning towards him across the table, “is what he is doing with me?”

She filled their glasses.

“And what is the answer?” he asked.

She paused, smiling innocently. The innocence of her lips lent a new aspect to her face. Even her eyes had lost their cloud of anger, and she appeared almost bashful.

“He is not the playwright,” she said. “I am.”

He drank, she drank, and this time he was the one to refill the glasses. He did not comment on her revelation. He did not know how to.

“You don’t believe me,” she said, the smile changing from innocence to gently mockery. He saw the subtle alteration in the way her lips curved happen.

“Why should you?” she sighed, looking away from him again, one hand resting lightly on the glass that sat on the table in front of her, her opposite arm thrown behind her, over the chair back. Her posture was open. He drank while she disappeared, who knows where, into the hidden avenues of her mind.

Silent moments passed before she turned her attention back to him.

“Are we equal now?” she asked, indicating his empty vodka glass. He silently refilled it.

They drank again.

“I am the writer,” she said. “But who in this society would accept the words of a woman in the printed press? He was a struggling playwright whom my father thought it would be amusing to introduce to his ambitious daughter.” She paused and sipped from her glass. “I think he wanted to make the point that there were plenty of average writers, male writers, in the world, and that a woman had no place trying to compete with them.”

She sat silently for a moment, not talking, not drinking, not looking anywhere but straight ahead, studying the grain of the wood that made up the table’s form. As he was not about to break that silence, she raised her eyes to the ceiling and continued, her voice low and lovely, sending thrills through him.

“The playwright read my work and was astounded. He literally threw himself at my feet.” She looked down at her lap with a cruel expression on her face. “It was pathetic.” Another pause and then she looked up at her companion again. “You’re not drinking,” she said.

He spoke, at last. “I’m listening,” he said.

“Do you believe me?” she asked him, her eyes burning like coals, her anger with the injustice of the world rising again.

“Yes,” he said.

She dampened the coals slightly. “Good,” she said. “It’s important that you believe me.”

She did not need to continue with her story. He was able to work it out for himself; the plot hatched that her writing would be presented under his name; the success that followed; the reason he was so lost in public without her by his side; the reason she was so disdainful of the people who fawned over him.

She kept him out until three in the morning. He was too drunk to walk straight, while she somehow retained her composure. She hailed a cab and took him to his house. He tried to give her money, but she refused.

“Go home,” she said. “Sleep it off.”

He stood on the street and watched the cab carry her away, wishing he had had the courage to go with her.

He had lost track of the number of glasses of vodka he had drunk while remembering that first meeting. The bottle was almost empty, and he rose from the table to find another. The cat stirred in its sleep.

His wife was sleeping upstairs, just as she had been on that night, when he had returned at three in the morning. He wondered what the time was now, but did not check his pocket watch.

“Alexei Andreyevich, you are an old fool,” he said to himself. The cat opened one eye at the sound of his voice, then, seeing that it was only him, quickly settled back into sleep.

He found more vodka in one of the cupboards and took it back to the table. He poured himself another glass but did not drink it.

He was remembering again the night she had lain naked on his drawing room floor, the harsh weave of the carpet biting into the flesh of her back, rubbing raw the skin that barely covered the notches of her spine. His hand over her eyes like blindfold so that he would not have to witness their emptiness. The stillness of her body. Her absence from the physical moment.

He had taken her to dinner with some friends. His wife was away, visiting some cousin or aunt or friend in the country. These were the times when he socialised with the people she did not approve, or did not understand his liking for. Intellectuals, musicians, poets and performers.

He had announced, as they were eating, although he had noticed that she did not eat very much, preferring to drink instead, that he knew a secret about one of the company around the table.

She had flashed him a warning glance, full of ice and fire and steel and sapphires. He had disregarded this warning, choosing to believe that she would forgive him once her secret had been accepted by this enlightened group of bohemians.

“One of us here is the secret power behind our celebrated playwright Sergey Mikhailovitch Drozny!” he proclaimed, his cheeks red with food and wine and the excitement of knowing this fact and revealing it to the others.

She downed a glass of vodka and pushed her food around the plate.

The other diners looked at each other with amusement.

“Well, I know that it isn’t me,” said a poet. “I would keep those words for myself, damn his talent!”

“No, no!” Alexei Andreyevich said. “It isn’t you.”

“Then who?” asked one of the dancers from the vaudeville theatre.

“It is our silent and mysterious friend who does not eat, just silently and angrily drinks vodka in our midst!” he exclaimed.

The others were silent and turned as one to stare at her.

“His muse?” said the poet. “His muse writes his plays for him?”

His tone was one of incredulity. She sat rigidly in her seat, eyes blazing, looking straight ahead of her as the poet led the laughter that could be their only response to something they did not understand.

“No, don’t laugh,” Alexei Andreyevich said. “It’s the truth. Don’t laugh, I tell you.”

It was too late. Laughter had taken hold of the gathering to the extent that tears were falling from their eyes.

She, meanwhile, with an angry grace, had risen from the table and left the room.

He pulled some roubles from his pocket and flung them onto the table. He followed her hurriedly from the room, almost colliding with a waiter as he tried to catch her up.

He caught her in the vestibule, fastening her wrap.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Her answer was to slap him. Twice.

He fell upon her then, taking her into his arms and kissing her passionately. She struggled in his arms for a moment and then went dead.

He released her.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

“What?” he answered, drunk and confused.

“To have your friends mock me and then to fuck me? Is that how you mean to subjugate me?”

He tried to kiss her again, but she pushed him away.

“You’re drunk and you stink,” she said, and stepped out into the street.

He followed her and got into the cab with her. He gave the driver directions to his own home, not hers.

Within the darkened confines of the cab, she could not escape from his amorous attentions. He took her in his arms and kissed her, again with passion. Again, she did not respond; nor did she struggle. He stopped.

She turned to him, her face full of hate and mockery.

“So this really is what you want,” she said, her lips curling into a sneer that bruised the prettiness of her face.

“Yes,” he said. “This is what I want.”

The cab drew up alongside his house.

“Well, then,” she said.

Exiting the cab, she led the way to his front door. They were barely inside and he had just closed the door against the prying eyes of the cab driver and any people who were passing on the street, when she fell upon him, wrenching his coat from his body, pulling her own clothing awry so that her breasts were exposed, pulling his head down towards her so that he could take one breast with its rosy pink nipple into his mouth like a suckling child.

As he sucked on her breast, she continued to remove as much of his clothing as she could manage. At the back of his drink addled mind he was aware that she was being too clinical in the way she was masterminding this encounter, but her breasts were warm and soft and distracting.

She slipped the loose gown from her body, stepping out of it. He saw that she wore no undergarments at all. Her body was lithe like that of a young girl and the sight of it made his passions rise even further.

“Where?” she asked him.

He began to walk her into the drawing room, removing more of his own clothing as they went.

This, to him, was more exciting than being with a prostitute. This had the edge of spontaneity to it and, for all that she was the muse of a famous playwright, she was a respectable woman.

He grew stiff and when they had finally conspired, sitting on the floor of the drawing room, to remove his boots and trousers, she had taken his hardness into her mouth. He closed his eyes the better to enjoy the sensation of her tongue against his shaft. She rolled her tongue around it like an expert, or like a child sucking on an ice. Her tongue flattened over the head of his penis, then the tip pushed into it, and he groaned with the painful ecstasy of it. He pushed her away, not wanting to come too soon, and he laid her back on the floor. He entered her, hard, and she bucked against the floor. He held her around her back, his fingers stroking the exposed notches of her spine.

He looked at her and saw that her face was turned away from him. He realised that it was only her body that was reacting to his presence; her mind was far away.

He stopped, his penis softening. He told himself it was his conscience reminding him that he was married and that this was a betrayal. He knew that it was wounded pride, that she could not bring herself to pretend; that he was nothing to her but another man who wanted to reduce her to an object of lust.

To punish her, he bent his head to her breast and took the nipple between his teeth. He bit down. She did not even wince. Not a flicker of reaction came. Her face was still turned away from him. He held himself above her, his dick now hard, now soft, and placed one hand over her eyes, blindfolding her; although he knew that whatever she was looking at was not in the room with them, he needed to try to prevent her from seeing it. He pulled her head so that she was looking up at him, her eyes still hidden behind his hand. Her hair had fallen loose as they had struggled together in the hallway of the house, and now lay like cloth of gold on the carpet. He moved his hand up from her eyes, across the crown of her head and down to the nape of her neck, where he gripped the length of her hair and used it to snap her neck back.

He was hard again, and she was silent and remote. He did not enter her again, however. He rolled onto his side, next to her on the floor, and entered her with his fingers instead. He placed them inside her like the bud of a flower, then unfurled them like petals, pulling against her flesh, expanding the entrance to her fecundity, wanting to hurt her, wanting to draw blood. He continued to pull back her head so that her throat was too taut to make a sound, so that her face was forced to look straight ahead.

There was no reaction in her eyes. She had withdrawn deep inside herself, to a place where he could not touch her.

He bent forward and kissed her. He tasted vodka on her lips.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” he whispered into her ear.

Somehow, her lack of response to his brutality had helped to keep him stiff. He changed position again, releasing her hair, removing his fingers, so warm and sticky and moist with her. He entered her and they fucked for a while, all physical checks and balances correct.

He felt himself about to come. He placed his hands around her neck. His thumbs pressed against her throat, against the hardness of her trachea, protruding as it did. As he came his grip around her neck tightened. She did not fight it, she did not claw at his hands, trying to remove them.

The light in her eyes was snuffed out like a candle. Her emotional deadness was married to her physical death.

He dressed and bundled up her clothes, throwing them over her body. He rang for his valet and explained the situation.

Alexei Andreyevich was a powerful man in the city. When the strangled body of the playwright’s muse was found in the drawing room of the playwright’s house, there was no suspicion that Alexei Andreyevich had had a hand in her death.

And now, months later, he sat at his kitchen table, his desk, the place he did his thinking and his work, with a bottle of vodka to his right and a glass to his left. He sat like this every night, with his wife sleeping in a room above his head, and he knew that if he continued drinking, it would be the end.

But to stop would bring disaster.

© J R Hargreaves May 2007