The Way Things Go

He is a small man. A small fat man who operates a forklift. And he is gay. He wears it upon him like he wears his little frieze of white hair: naturally. And his name is Derek. Funny, isn’t it?

            I’d gone out onto the shop floor, finding staff and giving out their payslips. When I got to Diane, the sty red under her left eye like some little object of affection she tried to hide beneath the frame of her glasses, I’d said, ‘D. Underhill. Diane? Have you collected your payslip?’

            ‘No,’ she said.

            ‘No? Not Diane Underhill?’

            ‘No, I have collected it,’ she said, ‘but I think you’ll find that that’s a Mr Underhill – and I am not a man.’ She paused, now standing up to either scorn me or address me further. ‘And there is no Mrs Underhill.’

            Before I could understand what she was saying, she continued, nuance clearly not her want – inference to her clearly a thing for that other sort.

            ‘He swings the other way. I don’t know who’s the man and who’s the woman. His other half’s quite fit apparently, though.’

            As I made to get away, not uncomfortable, but not entirely agreeing with the direction of this exchange, she continued. ‘He works in the stockroom – he’s the small, fat feller with the white hair.’

            ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ I recognised him: I'd seen him in the store that morning, although I hadn't seen his face.

            I continued giving out the payslips, eventually making my way to the stockroom. When I got there, two little faces peered out of the double windows and hands waved. I stopped and waited.

            ‘You can come in now.’

            I entered, and there he was – the small fat man – driving the forklift. It weaved around the stockroom intricately like a wannabe ballerina, like some portly Russian girl with all the grace and the poise, but with too much flesh on her bones. And as she moved, one could tell that she dreamed of being on some Moscow stage or at the London Opera Theatre, but, for now, she was happy with a stockroom for a stage, and two ladies on the sour end of middle-age, chatting away whilst Derek drove her, for an audience.

            I approached Derek once he’d docked the forklift. ‘Hi, Derek. I’ve a payslip for you, if you’d like to sign for it.’ I handed him the payslip and then the folder. ‘I’m Robert – new starter.’ I looked at his face. It seemed featureless in the light – pink with a white crown of hair. But for some reason I could imagine it being a friendly face.

            When I’d finished work and got home, I thought about all this. I had a good mind to report what had gone on to my manager. But then my strands of thought caught me insect-like in their web: no, I could not. This is how the world works. New boys on the job might want to seem to be caring, stalwart, moral people, but fifty years of life can do that to a person – make them bitter. It can make them do that: vent their hate, whilst they save their affection for some other person or some other forum, saving it if only to remain sane. You meet them every day: they smile, they chat, they laugh, but life for some people is a sentence, a burden to be carried. You try living the life I’ve lived, see the things I’ve seen, she’d say, and then you come back to me with your high-fucking-morals!

            The truth is, you can’t argue with some people. Sometimes, your sight wide, you can see a little farther – you take in much of the picture. And sometimes what you see can be ugly, displeasing. But you can’t go around cavalier, superior, trying to cleanse the world as you ride from place to place on your brilliant-white stead.

            But what you can do is try hard to be a good person. Understand why people do the things they do, and make your own actions just. Because, the truth is that not all of us eat from the same pie – and some slices can taste that little bit sweeter.

I Shall Stand, Waiting

He looks out to the crowd nervously and my head is one amongst many. He looks more nervous than usual and I am worried – he’s been acting different of late: he’s taking less water with his whiskey; he often doesn’t return my calls. God, I hope he sees me – I hope he’s looking for me.

            I remember when I was seventeen. After our first date, a few days after, he’d invited me to one of his gigs. He was twenty-one, and I was just about to turn eighteen. He looked out nervously at the thin crowd and then smiled wryly, his coy smile with its strange confidence. And then he started playing his guitar, playing for himself; merely for himself, that his earnestness would manifest itself in the hearts of others. I knew that then, and I suspected he knew I did.

            By the time I was nineteen, we were married and I was three months pregnant with our first child. He’d formed a small experimental folk band, Goldacre; they played whatever they wanted, and those listening seemed to understand where they were coming from, and were having moderate success. On this cold January evening, the snow riffling outside and caking the sidewalk in miniature white cliffs, I’d just walked into the small bar and found myself immediately absorbed in a small crowd of hipsters, beatniks, jazz freaks, and gin drinkers. The place had a palpable buzz. I turned a corner and I could see them setting up. I stood there, leaning on a wooden post, stroking my ever-swelling stomach, and he looked up. When he knew it was me he gave a warm smile – he could transmit across a room of hundreds only to me. All that night, he threw those coy, mysterious smiles and I could imagine his fingers caressing my earlobes, his soft hands stroking the small of my back as I lay looking out upon the bare moon that pours itself through the window.

            By the time I was thirty, we had four children – twelve, eleven, seven, and three – and his band (he was now in an experimental folk rock band), Path Less Travelled, was having bigger and bigger success. They would tour three to four months of the year, hitting Seattle, Portland, Frisco, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Austin, Atlantic City, New York, Chicago, Jacksonville, Detroit, Cleveland... I’d occasionally go to his gigs, and he’d always await my arrival with trepidation, scanning the room, the unease clearly writ across his brow, until his eyes met mine. He sang with that same true voice, never wrote a song he thought others would like to hear, and he’d always underplay his talent, believing it to be a matter more of heart than head. Our love had grown so strong through the years, and he’d still smile at me, his darling, his virgin love, his first date – his only. Although he never mentioned me by name, I knew that each song he wrote was written with me in mind.

            And now I am fifty-one. All of our children have graduated college, our eldest has a two-year-old son of his own, and only my youngest, most sensitive, son still lives at home. As I stand in this huge hall, its walls resplendent in oak panelling and burgundy-red paint, tasteful bronze chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, the varnish now gone, leaving the tarnish of age, amongst hundreds of people, I can see him looking out nervously at the crowd. I follow his eyes as they wander, as technicians come and go, expecting them to fix on some elegant young thing in a black slip and heels, but he continues looking around the huge space, seeming quietly frantic. I think of the scotch, the phone calls, the strange aloofness, his implacability like one stranded in some transparent capsule, but then the haze of creeping pain lifts, and the sharp blue steel steadily increasing its pinch is shattered into a fine calm shroud that descends slowly and silently onto me: his eyes have found mine, and he is smiling. He turns to acknowledge a passing technician and then turns back and finds me again. The smile above his greying tuft of beard is as coy as ever, a bright curl of lip that seems to soothe and quiet  my heart, and his eyes are like two soft notes that ring up my spine, and, as he begins to play his guitar, I know that everything is gonna be okay.

Virgin Territory

I was sitting there beside her thrumming the deep keys of the piano, creating the rhythm, the anchor, that tried to tether her graceful, life-filled fingers, when before I knew it I’d kissed her on the cheek. She was two years older than I and had been tutoring me for the last five weeks.

            She looked at me, spryly, and the spot where I’d kissed her seemed to glow alive, her face giving life to my lips as if a seed were planted on her cheek and allowed light. Sanguine was the colour, and sanguine is how I remember her. She edged in towards me, and I to her, slowly, making sure to align ourselves in the perspective of our lips. We met, we kissed each other softly, our spittled lips like sponges whose fibres seemed to burst with sensation.

            We poured ourselves more deeply into that font, our rivulets wandering to an unknown and exciting confluence, and as we closed our eyes in kiss, our hearts seemed to rise, meeting something unknown that seemed to fall down into the dark cages of our bodies.

            We knew where it was going. I held her and she started removing her blouse, her small breasts cupped by her white bra. I wasn’t familiar with this rite of passage, but I worked it off easily. I was soon down to my briefs; her painted toes and small nipples were the same colour as blush. I held her and she begged me to touch her. ‘Touch me,’ she said, where she’d been touched before, but never with fingers that had only the urge to touch upon them.

            As my hand wandered down the inside of her leg, flicking the trim of her panties, I stopped. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘This is virgin territory.’

            ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘don’t be nervous – you shouldn’t worry so much; I know you’re a big boy.’

            And as she lay back, my fingers doing the talking, she bit her lip and let a small sigh escape as her head recessed the pillow, but there was more in those words than she’d ever know.

Clock

‘Ssh, can you hear that?’

            ‘Hear what?’

            ‘Ssh!’ He paused, eyes squinted, lips pursed, right hand raised, the dusty bowler hat resting on his head. ‘That. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Ever so faint. Hear it?’

            ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘No.’

            After a few minutes of rummaging he’d come upon it – a small, black clock with a cracked face. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ he asked.

            ‘Yes. Yes, ’tis.’

            ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve a feeling in a past life I might have been an excavator.’

            The other thought about this: ‘Really?’

            ‘No,’ he wheezed, ‘I can’t remember.’

            He crouched, turning over the clock in his hand. ‘You know, it’s funny,’ he said, ‘...ssh! No? No.’ He scratched his head. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes!' He cleared his throat. 'You know, it’s funny,’ he went on, ‘how time ebbs away at the same time – ha! Er, pace, shall we say? – all over the surface of the Earth.’

            ‘Is it?’ asked the other.

            ‘Yes! Yes!’

            ‘Astounding,’ said the other, half-heartedly.

            ‘Yes, awful gay, wouldn’t you agree?’

            His companion looked puzzled, stern. ‘Queer,’ he said.

            ‘Hmm?’

            ‘Queer. It’s awful queer.’

            ‘Yes, yes – ‘tis, ‘tis.’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘Confounding!’

            ‘Yes.’ He looked around. ‘And what about the universe?’ he offered.

            ‘The what?’ he said, distractedly.

            ‘The universe.’

            ‘The uni― Oh!' His tone lowered. 'Oh, don’t be silly – it’s much too dark. But you know what,’ he began, ‘I bet you that time seemed to run much slower for them.’

            The other paused, looked up into the stands of crumbling grey buildings, almost party to the sky in the depth of their greyness, then looked down at his companion. ‘Not the opposite?’

            He mused. ‘No, no, I doubt it.’

            ‘Hmm,’ offered the other.

            The first was still turning over the clock when he began to recite:

Time, time, it ticks away,

Runs down to deeper grey,

It shakes the material cave;

Thrums in the deep.

And even if I cup my hands

Around this vessel’s loud commands,

Still hidden shall it cull the stands

And make the angels weep.

            ‘That was beautiful,’ said the other.

            ‘Thank you.’

            ‘Where did it come from?’

            ‘Nowhere. The primordial deep. Five miles south of Stoke on a greetings card. It doesn’t matter.’

            ‘Oh,’ said the other. He looked towards him. He seemed to want to say something, but he was struggling with the words. And then finally, 'W-what’s your name?’

            He paused in self-reflection. ‘My name?’ he asked himself. ‘My name – what is my name?’ Pain seemed to float up into the expanse of his mind, like a cork in water: he looked unsettled, jittery; sweat started to show on his brow, streaking his ashen face, their small theatre becoming the more repugnant, until: ‘Ha!’ he said abruptly. ‘Ha!’ he repeated, menacingly. ‘Don’t worry about formalities!’ His erratic grin emptied itself out, until finally his expression once again said nothing.

            The other felt strangely relieved. ‘Well, if you insist.’ He paused. ‘And, er, what’s the – er – what’s the – er – time?’

            ‘The time?’ He looked down at the clock which he held in his right hand. ‘I don’t think that matters now.’ He let the clock slip through his fingers as if it were a fine powder. It settled on the small pile of fractured history and ash.

            They stood there in their fading suits, the two of them, and for some reason the light felt different, strange; the wind blew steadily its empty tone – both seemed to come from nowhere.

Afterword:

I wanted this to be a marriage between the content of The Road, the style of Godot, and the humour of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - but forget that. Tell me your thoughts.

Marmite

I'd been going steady with this girl for two months. This night, she’d been ‘round, we’d kissed on the sofa, then she popped up to the toilet.

        I seized the moment. I went into the kitchen, grabbed the jar, and smeared it on, sitting there, legs apart, waiting.

        She came in, saw the black sticky thing standing at attention: ‘oh, my! Samuel, what are you doing?’

        ‘What? But I thought you liked Marmite-'

        ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but you know I’m Catholic.’

Police Line-Up

The sun shone oppressive on the filthy gilt streets, gold specked with dirt and spit. The thick smog scrawled into the basin from Hollywood Hill, and all was a white noise of engines purring over, horns rumbling, and sirens wailing like disembodied voices amongst a sea of black and Latino faces.

He approached the building, its thousand glass eyes staring out; its brilliant exterior hiding a deep and shady belly full of frosted glass, beaten brows, and blackguardly exchanges. He entered, signed in, and was taken up.

He limped into the room, his legs pained and bruised, and was met by the officer, whose black uniform seemed starched onto his body. The cop looked him over sneeringly, but the man did not acknowledge the hateful face - stuck on his neck like a flabby stony totem glaring out at him.

Another came in and stood by the door, taking off his peaked cap to fan himself. ‘You ready, son?’ asked the first officer, peering out from the emptiness behind his hard face.

‘Yeah,’ he murmured.

‘Sorry, son?’ the cop repeated.

‘Yes, Sir,' said the man, then he looked down in pity.  

He saw the sound recorder’s red light in the darkness, blinking steadily. He felt weak, felt an aching in his ribs – so sensitive since that night.

            ‘Right, send ‘em in,’ said the first officer, and in they came - all five of them. They stopped in their appropriate positions, faced the glass, and one of them – the one who’d beat him - stared knowingly at the window, seeming to pierce through into his being, two blue shards shining from his face.

‘Right, when you’re ready,’ the second cop said. He put his hand on the man's shoulder: ‘I trust you’ll do the right thing.’

The man went to speak, but the words were stuck in his throat. ‘Which one?’ he asked. ‘Which one did it, goddammit!’ He smiled at him, crushing him with the weight of his knowing. The man could see the word nigger curled up in the corner of his mouth, unspoken. They had him in their palm; they offered their fists.

Note: my thanks to Thomas Jordan for his insight and suggestions.

And He Resigned Himself

This is the story of Harry Webber. Did you ever hear the story about the deaf chicken that crossed the road and was sent up in a flurry of blood and feathers? Poor little thing. Well, Harry was that chicken.

            And the operative word here is was. I knew him a fair few years, and I’m surprised he lasted ‘til thirty-two, to be honest. You see, Harry was a man of impeccable moral uprightness – but also of impeccable logic.

            Harry was a vegetarian from the age of twenty onwards. He’d make soups, vegetarian paella, seafood salads, baked salmon, Spanish omelettes – but every now and again, he’d go home and his old mum would give him a big bag of goodies, and in this bag of goodies he’d find sausages, bacon... you see, if he were given animal flesh he wouldn’t let it go to waste; waste was a bigger evil than carnivorous extravagance, he thought. So, when he’d go to dinner parties, if he hadn’t asked for a vegetarian option, he’d eat what was given him on the plate.

            Harry also loved hemp – what an amazingly productive material! Strong, it could be made into clothing, furniture, recyclable plastics – it was crucial in 16^th century ship-building. Only, he didn’t own any hemp clothing – his family would always buy him clothing from Debenhams, Next, George: all clothing made mostly from nylon, all clothing that used fossil fuels in their production. But never mind – maybe one day he’d meet some vegetarian friends, people who, unlike his family, cared enough to buy him such things as hemp. And he could return the favour – oh, what glorious days! The salad days, the salad days would finally come – and after the meat days!

            But no; he waited, and waited, and waited, but no one came; maybe they were all at dinner parties or at home, resigned to the fact that unfaulting logic would always get in the way of their aspirations.

            Harry was a keen supporter of renewable energy – energy for the here and now: tidal, wind, geothermal; he’d even heard of gyms in which the equipment powered everything or clubs in which the kinetic energy of dancing would be transferred to electrical energy and power the lights and equipment – and just wait for fusion! Give it ten or twenty years... but that was too far ahead and the technology was too uncertain. He’d learnt all of this in an evening class.

            Despite this, however, Harry resigned himself to nuclear and coal-fired energy: nuclear was good enough, wasn’t it? And it was safe – enough. And coal? Well, the public didn’t care – stations were running down in England, anyway – but China, on the other hand.... What could be done? It was out of his hands. So he’d champion tidal and other innovative forms of renewable energy, but his heart lacked the passion of resistance.

            At the age of thirty-two, Harry killed himself – but it was quite accidental. You see, after one dinner party talking about the sanctity of life, how no life form is qualitatively better than any other, he cooked some underprepared chicken and contracted E. coli. Despite all he knew about microbial biology and the dangers of certain bacteria, he never consulted a doctor. His case became serious, and by the time his family got him admitted it was too late – he was dead within two weeks. I heard through the grapevine they comforted him, brought him grapes, fruit juice, fresh carnations, and his mother brought him a plate of sausage rolls – which he ate.

            And so, on March 23^rd 2011, at the cage of thirty-two, Harry Connick Samuel Webber died from immune-deficiency complications. And who are you? I hear you ask. Well, it doesn’t matter who I am. This is Harry’s story, and I am just an old friend. But there is one final twist to the story: I found a diary the day after his death when clearing out his apartment, and I started reading it. The things I’ve relayed are based on his thoughts and musings. Halfway through the diary, I read of his wishes to be buried in a wicker casket when he toddled off life’s short plank, and I saw to it that his family was informed.

            I read all of this in his diary – in his leather diary that his mother bought him for his twenty-fifth birthday. Harry was too young to go, and the world was far too much for him to fathom. Like two diametrically opposed dishes piled onto the same plate, steak and kidney pie served with a mozzarella and basil salad, he came into the world, and in the same fashion he left, resigning himself to the obscurity of life’s palette, and the deafening logic of propriety.