While the cat's away...

My wife has been away with our daughter for a week, which has been pretty tough, but has at least given me time to write! Lots of new ideas, and two poems to be published in Every Day Poets, which is great. AND my first short story in an absolute age, one I am actually pleased with. It's in response to this week's flash fiction challenge on Writewords. Here it is, below:


The Proposal

Alice took the bus into town for the third time that week. There was little reason for her to do so; she needed nothing from the shops, had reached the limit on her credit card months ago, and found crowds rather unappealing. Yet something about the week – the weather perhaps, or the way Charles had left things when she saw him last – gave her enough of an excuse to do so.

She was still unsure about what Charles had proposed, standing in her front porch the weekend before, his hands in his pockets, the rain blurring the garden behind. It involved the following weekend, something about a hotel. But he had been vague, as usual, and she had been left wondering whether he was being serious about asking her to go away with him.

She found herself, as she often did, in the small antiquarian booksellers opposite Magdalen. She walked to the back of the shop, to the rows of leatherbound books. She picked one from the shelf and opened it, releasing its soft, dusty odour, so redolent of her childhood, of her grandfather’s library. But she couldn’t concentrate on the words; they seemed jumbled, lacking in focus. She replaced the book.

As she was leaving the shop she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned. It was Charles. ‘I saw you, from the window up there,’ he said, pointing to his small leaded window above the gateway into Magdalen. ‘I thought maybe you might want to come in and have coffee. Or not. If you are busy.’ Charles pushed his glasses up his nose. Alice had bought him a small screwdriver, to tighten his glasses, but he had lost it.

She followed Charles back through the wooden gates and up the tight spiral staircase to his room. She loved this room; the papers lying everywhere, the books in piles on the floor, the single bed in the corner with its carelessly arranged eiderdown. It reminded her of what she would have liked to have had if her mother had not taken ill. The books, the notes, the knowledge. She saw another side to Charles when she spent time in his room. The depth of his intelligence. Alice found it exciting and intimidating. Yet he was so different outside this room. So without confidence. That was another element of him that Alice liked, loved perhaps. They had been seeing one another for six months and Alice was still unsure. But the mention of a hotel at the weekend had changed things. This was all new to her.

The room was small, yet Alice had always surprised herself at how much she enjoyed the feeling of claustrophobia. Sometimes she would sit on the bed and watch him work, his eyes only inches from the notes he was scribbling, his breathing rhythmical, as if he were asleep. She would often peer around to see if his eyes were open. He would see her in his periphery and pretend to snore in an exaggerated fashion. It always made her laugh.

But this time, in the room with him, it felt different. The floor, the walls, the bed; all of them were suggestive to Alice, were places where Charles might want to make love to her. She hardly knew where to look, and felt foolish in even thinking of such absurdities. It was Charles; the same Charles she knew before he had mentioned the hotel. And yet he was not the same.

She sat on the hard wooden desk chair and he boiled water in a small chipped saucepan on the little hob unit. He splashed water onto the floor as he was pouring it into the two mugs. He cursed under his breath, but loud enough for Alice to hear. She was not used to hearing Charles speak in this way, and she looked away, through the little window overlooking the bookshop. He brought the coffee across to her and placed in on top of a copy of Paradise Lost. A few grains of coffee had not dissolved. Alice would usually have chastised Charles for not allowing the water to fully boil. But it seemed inappropriate, after hearing him curse.

They sat for a few moments in silence; Alice on the chair, Charles on the bed. She leaned forward. He rested back on one elbow, his right leg splayed onto the bed, his other foot on the floor. ‘So have you thought about this weekend?’ he said. ‘Had time to think about it?’

Alice looked into her coffee. The grains had still not dissolved. She wanted a spoon: why hadn’t Charles offered her a spoon? ‘I’m not sure⎯’ she began.

‘I mean, only if you weren’t busy or anything, which I know you are, most of the time…’ His voice trailed off. He sat up and picked a sheaf of papers from the floor. ‘I really must…’ he muttered to himself, to the papers.

Alice got up and walked across to the hob. She took a teaspoon from the small, stained enamel sink beside it, and stirred the coffee. Charles began to rise but she gestured for him to remain sitting.

‘I’d love to go,’ she said unexpectedly. She was surprised at the clarity of her own voice. She couldn’t remember the last time she sounded so definite. Probably when making decisions about her mother’s next course of treatment, or the funeral. Charles had made a proposal. There was nothing wrong in what he had suggested. It was finally time to act.

Charles stood, the sheaf of papers still in his hand. ‘Are you sure? Because there’s a lovely hotel, not far at all, and I think you’ll—’

‘I don’t want to know the details.’ Alice sat on the bed beside him. Charles sat back down and put his arm around her. She stirred her coffee, then his.

The Sirens

Inspired (at least in title) by a poem of the same name by Laurence Durrell. Not a big fan of his, but I liked the title, and wanted to give the idea a more modern twist.

The Sirens

They follow me again, the same three faceless
girls, calling their names over and over,

the night sweet with their warning. I long to
ignore them this time, have no patience

with women who do not need to be clear
in their purpose or motivation. I turn:

they wait in the shadow of where I’ve been.
I want to ask them, why me? What do they

hope to achieve in this act of stalking,
where do I fit with their idea of what

decent prey should be? Their song says nothing;
it is beautiful, yes, but missing a beat

somewhere, a cadence which should draw me close
to death, wreck me, make me run in front of a car

or something. But all I sense is the breath of things past;
of a time when their cool chant would lift a man

from himself and drop him at their feet. When
they meant something. And knew it, completely.

Sestina: Who Speaks for the Bones?

This is my first go at a sestina, a tricky form which uses the same six words at the end of each stanza, but reorganised. I've broken each sestet into triolets, as I prefer the more broken up look of it.



In the corner of a field, where the dogs play,
they find a body, deep in peat, beneath
the bracken and bits of car and Tesco bags;

how long it has waited to be found, how far
its body has become the earth’s, how tender
its last touch, we need to know. We follow

the men with trowels and frowns, follow
them and stand around while they play
earth over their tools, admire how tender

is this caress of soil on skin, as they reach beneath,
around, behind, release the man (they’ve gone so far
as to call him ‘he’), line up the bags

they need to take his parts away. These bags
contain a past. Collective, distinct, but to follow
this to a conclusion is to show how far

an argument can go. Is this just play,
this claiming of an age-worn body, is it beneath
contempt to ask for more? Many tender

their interest in the man and in their tender
moments claim him as their own; these bags
of bones begin to touch a thing beneath

the ordinary, and when we follow
a line back, take time to see how we can play
with time, then science and pagans are far

away. For this man, for one whose life was far
behind, who’d lain in peat for how long? this tender
part of then has no interest in now, he cannot play

our games, will have no say in where the bags
will go, has no desire to follow
us to our conclusions. He is dead; better beneath

the earth where he belongs than have to follow
our urge to fill his past, to be beneath
the place he ended, which was his ending, with the play

of dogs and scrub on top, far far
away from all this crap, with the tender
breath of air through car parts and Tesco bags.

It's been a while since I posted anything onto this site. This is something I have been working on for a while now. It's a reminiscence of my grandfather, who was, looking back, a pretty amazing man.

He worked their land, grew things not his own,
plotted the elegant rise of tomato plants
on greaseproof paper culled from their kitchen,

rested in the damp warmth of the greenhouse
until it was time to go home, to his cold frame
choked with passion flower bursting the glass

and the ranks of broken plastic pots
half filled with years old peat, stacked
like hats whose heads have long since left.

He was proud of his borrowed place, of the
things he did there. How clean it was, with
its order and its hospital smell of Jeyes

and him the surgeon, with canvas gloves
and the shears gripped, ready to operate,
ready to bring shape to the jumble of growth.

But then at home the random scatter of
his outside space, as if all his decisions were made
elsewhere, inside the safe glass house not his own,

as if things only grew the way they should
at work. I came, twice, saw him at his best,
at what he did for those who called him Snook;

his first name buried in the cooling peat,
or left hanging on the peg with his indoor coat.

The Fisherman

Nothing but thick rain. The fisherman
pushed off from steady land and his one small room,

near the park, where he listened sometimes
to the play of children’s voices on the swings.

His mother gave him little to begin.
He gave her what she wanted, grew into the oilskin

without praise, and he swept his sight over the sea.
The mornings drew fish and the evenings slept at the lee

of his tiredness. He fished his father’s waters
and all the while the murmur of the daughter

brushed against his thoughts. “Why now,”
his mother asked when she found

him silent, “why fish these places dry again?”
As the bland sky turned towards the rain,

dropped a tempest stopping him from work,
he contemplated forty days with just his thoughts,

enough to make him him again. The man
considered, and somewhere in the plan

he saw no ending. Nothing but rain
squalling, nothing but the sea and him.

Faith, her name, lapping at the boat
he named for her, even though

she never swam outside her water,
couldn’t slip from the hook that caught her.

Her cows

are lined along the mantelshelf.
They’re her babies. She’s had them years.
Above, in clip frame on the wall,
is a signed photo of Cliff.
His songs often drift from her.

I’ve been visiting for weeks,
walking her dog, listening to the drain
of her boredom, trying not to notice
the acid smell of piss. She sits in a one-
armed armchair, the other arm long
broken. She pats the arm like an old friend.
I lean this way now, she says.

She asks me to hand her a cow –
a different one each time I come.
She puts them on her knee and
strokes them as she talks.
She calls them all her favourites.
Is it indecision, this constant
preference, or something else?
The space that choice once rested in
now missing everything but cows?

I buy her one, on impulse. It’s made of wood
and is rather grand. I put it with the others.
The next time I come it’s not there.
She clasps another in brittle hands.
I realise I am not there to add to her.

Shit boy

This lad waits back at the end
of class, says he has things to say,
things for my ears only.

They call him ‘only half there’,
whisper about the other half
behind his back, about him shitting

himself last year, in maths. About
how he stinks, which is true,
only I’m not allowed to say so.

He sits on the edge of the desk.
‘Can you keep a secret,’ he says.
I tell him I can guarantee

nothing, which is always a good
way out. He nods. He’ll tell me
anyway, whether I like it or not.

It’s about a girl, he says, about
a girl he’s been seeing (no longer
do they ‘go out’ as we used to) –

about the things she’s been saying
about him, to her friends, calling him
‘shit-boy’ and making noises.

You know the sort of noises, he says.
Not very nice noises. They make me feel funny.
I shake my head and tell him I’m sorry.

He looks at me as if there is nothing
more than this moment, these
girls and their insults. I tell him

I’ll see what I can do. (Know it will be
forgotten by the time I’ve had coffee
and been to the loo.)

I leave him sat on the edge of
the desk, looking at his feet, like a
lemming contemplating freefall.