Southcart Book Club May 2016

Let’s just imagine that a couple of weekends ago, hang on, it might have been last week. No, it was definitely… Oh, I don’t know, I’m not Doctor bloody Who (Although I would no doubt, make a bloody brilliant Doctor Who. Admittedly, there’d be a lot less reversing the polarity of the neutron flow and a lot more ‘Hold my beer and watch this’ before all the running and yelling started)

Anywho, 3... 2... 1... back in the room… Where was I? Oh yes, one weekend in the recent past, I was invited down to Southcart Books, the only independent book shop in the Black Country (Where Lenny Henry comes from) to talk about all my books – Past, present and *Whisper* future. You’ve heard me talk about Southcart before – I bang on about it like it’s going out of fashion, you should really go there and spend lots of money. Also, say it was my idea that you go there, I might get a free coffee out of it or maybe some vodka at Christmas – Because everyone knows that that’s what authors live on, coffee and vodka.

It wasn’t just me that got invited. Well, it was that time, but… Well, what happens is that every month, on the lunchtime of the last Saturday, they hold a book club in the shop. It’s where they get a local author, or other person of note, to pop down for a couple of hours and chat about stuff and things, maybe do a reading, maybe recount some funny story from their past and generally hold sway with their feet on the table like a cut-price Tyrion Lannister until it’s time for them all to leave so that they can pick their kids up from ballet, or football, or organic weasel plaiting or whatever it is that passes for children’s weekend entertainment in the West Midlands nowadays. The punters also get the chance to buy copies of whatever book the author’s hawking at the moment. It’s like the thing that Waterstones do with authors you’ve actually heard of, but without all the nasty queueing out of the door and not being able to eat an ice-cream while you’re looking around the shop.

I got there early, spread out some signed copies of ‘The Pangolin Yodels’ and sat on one of the shop’s comfy sofas to await my audience. Before long, Lucy, the organiser of the whole book club thing arrived – Calling her an organiser is selling her short really, she’s a successful author too, and a musical photographer (in that she specializes in taking photos of bands, she doesn’t spin around whilst whistling the Sugar-Plum Fairy as she works – Although who am I to judge? She may well do that too.) and she’s the lead singer of a massively popular soul band – I hate her actually, she’s so bloody talented that it makes my teeth itch.  She let me know how these things usually played out, and confided that usually it followed a pretty strict timetable of five minutes of the author bigging up their book, then a break for cake, then the remaining hour was reserved for random knob jokes and comparing favourite flavours of crisps, then a couple of people would buy a copy of your book and we could all go home (via the Organic Weasel Plaiting Foundry Est. in Walsall December 1749, obviously)  

So then the fine upstanding members of the book club started to arrive and some of them talked for a while about the damage caused to their boobs by rabbits, (Plus other famous local author James Josiah whom I may have mentioned in passing before - Wait, no, I don't mean that James Josiah caused them some boob damage too... Oh Christ I can see the litigation now!) I sat at the head of the oversized oak table, with a line of completely normal people down each side, some with more damaged boobs than others. They looked at me like jackals in a kebab shop, ‘Go on,’ I could tell that they were thinking, ‘do something literary, I dare you.’ I started off with telling them who I was, just to let them know that they were in the right place. And gave them a quick five minutes of why I do what I do, and where I stared and stuff like that. Then I was asked for a reading… I’d prepared some stuff, but I was requested to read the Gullible Steve story ‘The Concussion Chilli with Rottweiler Sauce’ – I read it, stopping every few minutes to wait for people to stop laughing, and told them that this story wasn’t actually in the book that was available for sale, it was in my previous one (Luckily, I’d bought a copy of it with me for advertising purposes). I got through ‘Thermodynamics,it’s the law’ about my Dad and a pigeon from the 60’s and I think that there might have been one other, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.

Then I read ‘Bek’ – Now, I can’t tell you what ‘Bek’s about, because it’s a story from my next book, which includes both some extended versions of existing (fiction) stories and some completely new stuff – I’m trying to get it out for Christmas (2016 before you ask) – I’ll keep you in the loop.  This is the cover:

Yes, that's my daughter there, well spotted

It promoted some interesting reactions, there were yelps, there were covered faces and various cries of ‘No!’ from people.  At the end there was a stunned silence for a few seconds, and one person asked, “How can that story have been written by someone who writes things like that.” (Pointing at ‘The Pangolin Yodels’) another remarked that it felt somehow comfortable and horrific at the same time (I’m paraphrasing as I can't remember exactly what words he used, but I know that I was quite pleased)

I looked up at the clock and we’d over-run by about half an hour. I inscribed some books for people, and every single person who was there bought a copy (apart from the people who already owned it, obvs) – We even had a Viking film director come in off the street to buy a copy (And by Viking film director, I don’t mean someone who directs Viking films, I mean he directs films, and is also a Viking)

(Don't tell anyone, but there has even been talk about the possibility of one of the stories from 'Forever Girl' being made into a film - Remember, Mum's the word. Shh...)

Another funny thing happened, all the people who were there, every man-jack of them, are now my friends on Facebook – I’m very social you know – And one of them has given me permission to screen-grab something she posted so that you can see that, despite your better judgement, it’s not just me that enjoys my books. (I also enclose a picture of her preparing to read the book, for science reasons *cough*) I’m going to be there again probably on Saturday the 25^th June, so that people can ask me questions about the book – You could come too, it’ll be fun. There might be a bouncy castle*

Not gratuitous in the slightest...

Frankly written and beautiful? Open? Me? Surely some mistake... Anywho, Southcart might have some signed copies left, or if you get a copy of whichever book/s you want and get in contact, I'll scribble something unintelligible in them and send them back to you, free of charge (inc postage within reason) when I remember.

And what do you get for nothing nowadays?

*There almost certainly won't be a bouncy castle.

Insomnia

A story based on a sleepless night I had a few months ago. In actuality, it went on for about another five minutes or so, but... Well... Some things are best left undescribed.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781

-oOo-

My bladder woke me at 03:30 – and I briefly tried to convince myself that I could hold it until the alarm went off; but the bastard part of my brain, the piece that visualizes dripping taps and waterfalls and gurgling drains, had more immediate ideas. Pulling back the covers as quietly as I could, I padded through the cold darkness to the bathroom, careful not to stub my toe on the laundry basket, or tread on the cat as I so often do.

I fumbled for the light, which only had two settings, ‘Off’ and ‘The heart of a supernova’, or so it felt in the early hours of the morning when the house was quiet and peaceful but for the hushed snores of my wife and slightly louder ones from the dog in the next room. I screwed my eyes closed and tried to flip the switch slowly, willing the light to fade into life, rather than springing upon me like a startled leopard. I saw details of the bathroom furniture through my tightly closed lids and could almost hear the sizzling noise as my retinas shrank.

Immediate business completed, I washed up and tried to put the hand-towel back on the radiator through pupils the size of pinpricks. Turning the light out as I left plunged me into the darkness usually reserved for particularly deep dwelling badgers and professional kidnapees. I stumbled back into bed, offering thanks to whoever had initially thought of en-suite bathrooms for making it so that I didn’t need to go out onto the landing and enter the domain of the inquisitive, but vision impaired, dog that sometimes haunted the corridors.

Pulling the covers up to my neck, I chanced a look at the clock. The bright green LED numbers displayed 03:37. I closed my eyes, planted my feet flat on my wife’s previously warm thighs, smiling at her grunt of mild discomfort as she turned over, and tried to go back to sleep.  The clock showed 03:51 and my attention was drawn to the light shining from the gap above the curtains. Was it getting lighter? The sun doesn’t usually rise until 06:30, until after I had fought my way out of bed, which meant that the sun was lazier than I was, or significantly more clever. But what if it was Saturday? Is it Saturday today? I looked at the clock and saw the single LED in the corner that showed me that the alarm had been intentionally set; so no, it wasn’t Saturday. Perhaps it was a Bank Holiday and I had set the alarm in error – There’s always that hope. I thought about setting the alarm on a Friday night, just so that the alarm would sound at ‘Stupid O’clock’ on the Saturday morning and I could just turn it off, roll over, and go back to sleep, with all the feelings of empowerment that came with it. I thought of my own confusion, I thought of the dead-arm that would unquestionably result when my wife discovered what I’d done, I hastily thought better of my plan. It was 04:07, less than two hours until the alarm went off and the repetitive electronic screaming presided over the birth of another dull, soul-less day.

I stared at the wall between the wardrobe and the door to the hallway.  It seemed darker than the rest of the wall. It wasn’t a shadow, the dim light from the curtains bathed that entire wall, but the specific area I looked at was darker, and the longer I looked at it, the darker it became.  I scanned along the wall, until I was looking at one of the small pictures that my Wife had bought in a desperate bid to give the room some ‘character’. I remembered that old writing exercise where lazy English teachers ask you to write a story about a generic picture that had far too many elements for you to adequately cover in your allotted time. Mine invariably featured devious Lovecraftian experiments, or an underground butchery ring, or a trusted upstanding member of the community being unveiled as a cannibal. Jesus Christ, was it any wonder that none of my writing ever sold? If you look up the words ‘Formulaic’ or ‘Derivative’ in the dictionary, there was a picture of me, looking self-satisfied. In later editions, I often had a revolver pressed to my temple. In the Children’s editions, it had a flag, with ‘BANG!’ written on it sticking out of the barrel.

My eyes lowered to a point on the wall directly below the picture; almost immediately, the wall began to darken in a clearly delineated circle around the point I was staring at. Sweet Baby Jesus, I was going blind! At the very least it was cataracts, I’m not even 50, a failed, derivative writer, trying to make enough money to keep himself and his family fed on a diet of watery soup and second-hand crackers.  My children would point and laugh at my crumpled Dickensian form, panhandling for sixpence pieces by the side of the road. My wife would leave me for her tennis coach and she doesn’t even have a tennis coach. She would take the last of our money, hire a tennis coach, and leave me for him. I would change my name to Michael de Santa.

04:21. Should I just get up? I could see if I’d had any more life-affirming ‘likes’ on Facebook. I could go through my backlog of unopened emails to see if my Agent had received any life-changing acceptance letters. I could see if those pictures from my tequila party were ‘Trending’ on Twitter. Who am I kidding? I’d either be playing an on-line game until I made myself late for work, or opening an ‘Incognito Window’ on Chrome and hoping the floorboards didn’t creak too rhythmically and wake someone up before I had experienced a personal ‘petit-mort’.

I’ll make a cup of tea. Can I be bothered to make myself a cup of tea? Maybe coffee? Maybe I could make a pot of coffee and score some brownie points with the wife when she woke up. Would it stay warm long enough? It was 04:45, it’d be close. I’ll do that, I’ll make a pot of decent coffee.

I woke up to hands on my chest, warm hands, a palm resting gently on each of what I laughingly call my pecs, but everyone else calls ‘moobs’. I slowly open my eyes to the yellowish light streaming through the kitchen window, a bright day, a warm day. I’m lying on the coffee table, maybe eighteen inches off the ground. The smell of fresh coffee permeating the air. I look up, along the bare arms of my masseuse, to the shoulder of the fitted mini-dress, rising to a thin, pale, neck, sporting a golden necklace finer than a human hair, from which hung a gold and diamond crucifix nestling in the valley where her translucent skin was barely covered by the sheer material. I blinked, trying to clear the slight blurring of my vision, “Aren’t you…”

She smiled, “Just call me Madeline.” She took a step forward, her manicured nails moving through the hairs on my chest, down to my stomach; her parted thighs gently brushing the tops of my ears.

“Madeline… Smith? I saw a film with you in it… Last night… You were…” It was then that the alarm chose, in its infinite wisdom, to go off.

Probably a Mutoscope

Well, it's Halloween, or Samhain, whichever you prefer; which makes it the perfect time for a short story.

Hope you like it.

-oOo-

When it came, the blow was brutal. It cut across the side of her head and the world just seemed to stop. Well, no, that's not quite right, it didn’t exactly stop; she could see the pearls of blood… Her blood, hit his sneering face, exploding in slow motion into delicate scarlet flowers that spread in a line across his cheek.  She didn’t feel any pain, there was just a burning sensation, but more like the feeling you get from touching a block of ice.  No pain, not really.  The strength faded from her legs and she started to topple backward, she felt the numb ‘pins and needles’ spreading down from the small of her back to her knees and smiled.

Richard had always thought she was odd, for enjoying the tingling feeling that restriction of the blood-flow sometimes brought.  In fact that’s why he left; he came into the shop one lunchtime to find her in the stockroom with the wire bound tightly around her wrist. Her fingers were swollen and purple, the veins standing out on the back of her hand like vines on some great jungle tree.  She hadn’t realised he was there until he spat the word, ‘Pervert!’ at her and slammed the door behind him.  By the time she’d composed herself and got back to the flat, he’d gone.  By the look of things he’d just shovelled his few belongings into a bag and left his key on the bedside table never to be seen again. It was no great loss.

      

She was still falling.  Her head snapped forward as she clipped the cabinet behind her and sent the credit card machine flying through the air. ‘Damn!’ She thought absently to herself, as it spun towards the floor, ‘That’s rented; it’ll cost a fortune to replace if it smashes.’ She saw the man that had hit her, his eyes wide and shining wetly, his cruel mouth lolling open like a panting dog’s.  He had dropped the baseball bat, but it had not yet landed on the counter, along its length, as it twisted in the air, she could see the glitter of metal sunk into the wood.  ‘Razor blades? No, can you even buy razor blades anymore? Stanley knife? Yes, they’re probably Stanley knife blades.  You’d have thought the bat would be enough, but then what do I know about current weapon fashions in the smash and grab industry?’ 

In time with her weakening pulse, her vision began to fade, the colours went first to make it look as if she were trapped in some terrible black and white film. Then the details started to blur, and the darkness began to seep in from the edges, constricting her field of view even more. It looked like an old-time silent picture now, the type where someone would be playing a piano in the theatre and every few seconds a card would appear explaining what was happening on the screen.

Her father had shown her a machine once whilst they were on holiday, where you put an old penny into a slot in the side and then wound the handle whilst looking through a lens.  Its real name was something odd, she remembered, but she couldn’t remember exactly what it was.  He called it a ‘What the Butler saw.’ But she didn’t really understand why, unless the butlers of the time often saw a set of dusty old postcards clicking past one after another.  Ornate white letters swam in front of her eyes, ‘Kally has been hit by a bat and is probably going to die!!!’ Her heart sank, from what little she remembered, three exclamation marks was never a good sign.

The man was grabbing jewellery from the case now; he used both hands as if he was starving and the diamonds were plates of gravy and potatoes.  Christ, she was hungry – She should have grabbed a sandwich from that shop next to the Tube station, but they’d only had egg, she didn’t really feel like egg, she was in a tuna mood.  She was going to die on an empty stomach, could this get any worse?

Her head continued to slide down the front of the cupboard, the muscles in the back of her neck getting tighter and tighter until she felt something tear and she heard a crack, ‘Owww! That hurt!’ She yelled, the words echoing around her head but somehow unable to escape through her lips.

Then it suddenly didn’t hurt any more.

And there was nothing to see.

And there was nothing to hear.

And as her last breath left her body, her nose was filled with the scent of her father’s aftershave. She’d not smelled it for years, not since she’d taken over the shop after he’d died.

A Halloween Children Story.

She'd been looking out of the window for a long time, not exactly at anything as such, just looking, watching the wind in the trees and the birds making their way home to roost for the night.  She sometimes envied their simple lives, their deeply feathered nests, their lack of complications.

As the light started to fade, she took one last glance at the landscape, wiped away the fog where her hot breath had clouded the rapidly cooling glass and left the room.  The children's voices echoed through the corridors as she walked towards their nursery, well, it was still called the nursery according at least to the brass plaque screwed to the door, they called it their playroom of course - They were both of that age when they considered themselves to be approaching adulthood, and this showed in the sometimes raucous style of their play.  Despite the fact that the room was decorated with jolly, but ultimately empty eyed, jungle animals rendered in a selection of pastel colours and still contained a wooden rocking horse and a selection of rag-dolls that had once kept Emily so enthralled.  Scattered around the room were a platoon of carefully painted wooden soldiers that had joined Richard on numerous adventures in the past, but were now relegated to duty as bowling pins or impromptu missiles.

She paused as she stood outside the door and waited for the noise to settle slightly to the point where they would be a chance that they would be able to hear her gentle knocking.  A sudden silence from the room indicated that they had, she opened the door slowly and walked into the room.

'It's supper time children, Cook says that there are sardines, or the leftovers of yesterday's boiled ham and potatoes.  Which would you prefer?'

They both looked at her with gentle, easy faces, then Emily cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered into her brother's ear, he nodded solemnly and looked up again.

'Both my sister and I would like the sardines please, with some bread and butter if there is enough?'

She curtsied and left the room, closing the door carefully behind her. Almost immediately the sounds of play resumed and she allowed herself half a smile, the laughter of happy children was one of the reasons that she took the job. They were always laughing, always happy, although oddly, in the short time that she'd been working at the Manor she had never heard Emily's voice, she always talked though her brother, the poor girl was painfully shy.

The driving wind and rain started when she was halfway down the servant's spiral stairway.  Huge, round drops falling heavily against the leaded lights of the frosted windows gave the enclosed stairwell a morose chill and created a draught that threatened to blow out her already stuttering candle. She quickened her downward pace and before long she had reached the warmth and relative safety of the Manor's large kitchen.

The only light in the room came from the open oven door of the huge range itself, the dimly lit surfaces surrounding her were adorned with the skittering shadows of carving knives and other devices whose uses were a complete mystery to her.  She was only nineteen herself and had gone 'into service' as a child, she had never really learned to cook, all of her meals had been prepared by her mother, or by the cook in whatever house she had been working in at the time.

'Have they decided?'

She let out a small scream as the Cook seamed to coalesce out of the very darkness behind her.

'Calm yourself girl, there's enough to worry about on a night like this without adding me to your troubles.  Did they want the fish?'  She watched as the pale girl nodded her head.' Aye, they usually want the fish when we've got it.'

'They asked for bread and butter too, if we have enough.'

'If we have enough?  I bake fresh bread every day! and the buttter's from Jed's cows on the bottom field, there's always butter!  How do you think I keep my youthful figure?' The Cook pirouetted slowly, in the style of a ballet dancer, despite having the bearing of a woman who would have no trouble sheltering an entire brass band beneath her voluminous skirts.  She disappeared back into the darkness towards the pantry and came back with four plump sardines which she expertly gutted, seasoned, and placed into one of the smaller ovens.  She then cut four slices of bread, each over an inch thick, and spread them with a deep layer of fresh golden butter.

'Isn't that rather a lot for them? Won't it give them indigestion at this time of night? Especially with their condition?'

'Their condition?  Oh, I see,' The Cook laughed, and sat down on a rough wooden stool to wait for them to cook. 'No, over the years we've found that it's best to keep them well fed when the weather's poor.  They don't like the lightning you see, it can set them off.  Talking of setting them off,' She patted the pockets of her apron and brought out a piece of weathered, folder paper, sealed with a large blob of red wax, 'The housekeeper gave me this for you to give to them, it's a letter from their Father, he's out in Africa you know.  You might want to give it to them when you collect the empty plates.  It can sometimes...'

'Set them off?'

The Cook nodded slowly and stared into the flames of the open oven, 'He tells them stories of what he's doing,' She turned and looked towards the young nurse, 'Did you know that he's never seen them? He left the day after they were born, on the day his wife died.  Terrible business.'

'I'd heard that she's died in childbirth, I understand that there were complications, with the twins being joined, two bodies sharing the one pair of legs and so on.  I supposed that they had to cut her open to get them out.'

'That's what the Doctor will tell you if you ask him, and that's the story that they told the papers.' She pulled her stool closer, 'But one of the maids, she's left now though, used to tell a different story.  She was there at the birth and when the poor mites appeared there was panic, no one knew if her ladyship would take to them or whatnot.  But give her her due, she did and once the doctor had tidied her up and settled her down she did her best to feed them herself.  They both tried to drink at the same time but it just wouldn't work and she was in some real discomfort with the stitches and everything, and the babies were starving hungry.' A cloud of doubt passed across her face as if she was trying to decide whether to go on. 'The next morning the house was in uproar, His Lordship had gone to see them and found the babies happily feeding themselves... Her Ladyship was cold and gone by this point.'

The Nurse felt a lump rise in her throat, 'But surely her milk wouldn't flow if she had...'

The Cook continued to stare into the flames, 'They weren't drinking, they were eating.' She groaned as she stood up and wandered to the oven and took out the pan of fish. 'These look about done, I'll put them all on one plate, be easier for you to carry it with your candle.'

She loaded a tray with the food, the candle and the letter, then started to climb the stairs towards the playroom.  She couldn't believe the tale that the Cook had told her, it was all some silly story that they probably told in the village pub to add a bit of history.  Something that tourists might find out about and pay a penny to hear the gory details of.

Knowing all this didn't stop the discomfort shooting through her when she got to the door, and the sudden cessation of noise when she knocked was more chilling than it was charming.  The children were sat in the middle of the floor, in their nightclothes, with a small table that they had prepared themselves in front of them.

'Here are your sardines, there was ample bread and butter.' She put down the tray and backed towards the door.  Emily breathed in deeply as if the baked sardines had the most delicious scent that she had ever encountered.  Richard's eyes were glittering in anticipation and she could swear that there were small beads of saliva escaping his smiling lips.

She curtsied once more and left the room.  As soon as the door clicked closed, she remembered the letter, she had forgotten to remove it from the tray.  If anything that the Cook had said was true, she could be sure that it would be the part about a letter from their Father setting them off.  Without a second thought she opened the door and went to rescue the errant piece of paper.

She froze when she saw the children,  They had both forgone the normal eating utensils and were rapidly stuffing fish and bread into their mouths by the handful.  When they heard her gasp they looked straight at her with cold black eyes like sharks, there was no white, none of the beautiful cornflower blue that they both shared, only black.  Half chewed food fell from Richard's open mouth as he started to scream, but the almost whole sardine that Emily was trying to swallow was held back by her mouthful of cruelly spiked teeth, plucked straight from some nightmarish deep-sea fish.

The last thing that she thought as the twins vaulted the table towards her was 'Ah, that's why she doesn't talk.'