A short story or two

The Silent Sky

This is the one thing I really, properly, remember from when I was a child. It’s not very interesting, it’s not even really a single memory — more likely it is a set of memories, overlaid on top of each other like the layers of paint built up over the years on our living room walls, on the window frames through which I so often used to look outside — but it’s so clear and total, a visceral genuine thing, in which I can see and feel everything in an incredibly solid way, rather than just in the abstract, rather than just as a story I’ve told over and over again until all I have left are the words of it.

Because of this I often wonder whether it is genuine at all.

When I was about five my bed was put in the living room for a while, at the front of the house where it loomed up near the pavement and looked out over the road. I’d broken my ankle falling off a wall, and my mother didn’t want me to have to hobble up and down the stairs.

Because of the injury I didn’t have to go to school, although as I’d only just started I didn’t really appreciate this fact in the way I would have done had I been older. In the mornings I’d be left in bed while my brothers and sisters would get ready for school (although my mother would still come in and open the curtains like she always did in her sweep of the house), and I’d lay there listening to them all getting ready, listen to the bickering, the radios and tape-players going on and off in their rooms, listen to them leaving, listen to them and all the other kids on the street talking to each other as they walked past my window.

It was sunny. It was always sunny.

(It was – it must have been – October. It was not always sunny.)

It was sunny. My bed was shoved up tight against the radiator by the window, and I’d lay there, bathed in heat from the sun shining in through the window and from the radiator heating its way through the quilt and the sheets. I’d lay there on my back, below the level of the window, looking up at this odd angle at the sky and the birds and the branches of next door’s tree, listening to the disembodied voices of all the other children fading away as they passed through our street, their dying laughter, their ever more distant shouts.

And then the silence. Inside the house and out.

Every day, I had this fifteen or twenty minute gap, this space of my own, before my mother got back from walking my brother to school, before she got me up and got me cleaned and dressed and fed.

These fifteen minutes where I’d be left all alone. Completely alone. Listening to the silence of the house, the silence of the street. Looking up at nothing, at the pale and silent sky.

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Notes:

1. Written on 27th April, 2015

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London

I went to London once.

I’d never been before and everyone always used to say to me, “Oh, have you been to London?” and “You should go to London, it’s brilliant,” and “I can’t believe you’ve never been to London.”

“London,” they’d say. “It’s fucking amazing.” And then they’d tell me all the ways it was amazing.

There were a lot of ways it was amazing.

Once I admitted that I’d never even heard of London and they looked at me as if I was mad. “What?! How? That’s impossible!” and “You must at least have seen it on the telly?” and “What about that film that came out last year? You must have seen that!” and I said what film and they said, “That one about London,” and so in the end I said “Oh that one! Of course I’ve seen that!” but of course I hadn’t seen it at all.

So I went to London.

And it really was incredible and I’m glad I went.

They had all these buildings and there were so many of them and so close together and they were huge and weird and all sort of knotted and woven together so you couldn’t see where one finished and the others started and they all glittered like jewels in the sun so the longer you looked at them the longer they stayed with you when you looked away.

And there were hundreds of people everywhere, thousands maybe, all going all over the place like they knew where they were and where they needed to be but they all looked kind of dry somehow, all brittle and faded like old newspapers, and when you spoke to them they’d shift and shimmer and get all scared and fly away into the sky in great directionless flocks.

I bought some food in one of their shops but instead of money they had a system based around physical punishment so after that I didn’t buy anything else although I was too polite to put the sandwich back and too cowardly to show them how cowardly I was and so I stuck out my hand and accepted the sharp cuts across the knuckles that it cost me.

In the evening I found this town square and there was a huge unlit pyre of bodies at the centre and more and more people kept stumbling out of the restaurants and the bars and the theatres all around and collapsing against the mass of it and in this way it grew and grew. I danced beside it for a while with a three-armed girl and we danced and danced and kissed and more and at the end I held out my hand so she could inflict her price but she just laughed and said “It’s not there you pay it’s here” and she tapped me on my belly and cavorted away.

I wondered what she meant at first but then I began to feel queasy and dizzy and unwell and eventually I fell to my knees by the empty horse’s trough at the entranceway to the square and began to vomit up my lunch into it, and then my breakfast and then everything else that came before and after that some blood and then more blood and organs and old tin cans and some pieces of string and misshapen lumps of glass that looked like malformed bones and one that looked somehow like a skull and then a few more drops of blood and then it stopped and I spat and spat out all the saliva I had left into that trough of filth and I wiped the tears away from my eyes and I thought I was going to be okay I thought that wasn’t so bad was it and I looked at the blood in the trough and I thought I saw it ripple and I thought I saw it move and then two hands came out and grabbed me round my neck and pulled me down towards whatever it was they belonged to down towards the blood and into the blood and the rubbish and the half-digested food down and down endlessly into the dark.

I think it was London.

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Notes:

1. Written on March 17th, 2016

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“Why do the dead float?”

The swollen birds heaved themselves from the river and waddled awkwardly across the mud banks. The water they left behind was the same pale orange as the sky, and as silent and still.

“Tell me a story from before I can remember.”
“From before you were born?”
“No. After I was born but before I can remember.”
“Okay. Let me think.”

The sun was almost down. We lit the fire. I stared into it and offered up my nightly prayer.

“I could tell you about the snow.”
“No. I remember that.”
“But you were only one.”
“You’ve told me before. So I can remember that.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I want to hear something new.”
“I could tell you something about before you were born. That’d make it easier.”
“No, I have to be in it. That’s what makes it real.”
“Do you remember the boat?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you about the boat.”

*

This was after mum and dad had gone, ages after it seemed, although it couldn’t really have been long, and it was much closer to them going than it was to where we are now. Time can move at different rates, and those first few months lasted forever. You were about three. It was still summer. I would have been nine.

It wasn’t this river. It was a different river. Wider and longer and somehow calmer, almost like a lake at times. The other bank was a world beyond our reach. We found the boat tethered to a collapsed old tree. Or rather you found the boat and I found you in it, your bare feet stamping up and down in the mucky water that puddled in there at one end, where the boat leaned down the shallow bank towards the water.

It was an old rowing boat, wooden, painted a peeling blue on the outside and white inside, about six feet long. All the paint was peeling off and you could see glimpses of the wood beneath it.

I’d seen a lot of boats before, when I was younger. I haven’t seen any since. There were two benches, one at the back and one across the middle, and a single oar tucked under them. A dead frog lay bloated and white in the puddle by your feet. I scooped it out with oar rather than touch it with my hands.

It didn’t take much for me to push the boat into the river. I clambered in and used the oar to push us out, away from the shallows and into the river proper, and we floated away.

What I remember most about the water were the jellyfish. Some just hung there, completely still, suspended motionless in it as if the water was a slab of glass. Others gently pushed their way onwards to wherever it was they were going. The perpetual rippling of their bodies – from the outside edge all the way in towards the centre – was hypnotic and serene. That movement is the way I’ve always dreamed our hearts beat inside us, if only we could ever see them. If somehow we could turn our skin to glass and look down into the dark depths of that sea of blood that fills us up and keeps us alive in some way.

The sun shone that day and there was hardly even a breeze. We left the hum of insects and the cries of birds behind us on the shoreline and drifted out into silence. I let my hand fall into the river and watched the water bubble up and break around it, felt the steady constant push of the current against my palm. You pointed at everything – at the boat, the water, the oar, at the sky and the clouds and at the jellyfish and at me.

The boat crashed heavily and we both fell off our seats. You looked at me for a moment and then burst into tears. I picked you up and held you and comforted you while trying to turn and see what it was that we had hit. It was huge, dead, floating there in the middle of the river. I pushed at it with the oar. It didn’t move, and instead we did, driven slightly back from it for a second, before the current pulled us back toward its mass. I pushed again with the oar and slowly manoeuvred us around it, and once we were past we floated off away and left it behind.

*

“And then what happened?”
“I don’t know. Nothing much.”
“How did we get back?”
“Get back where?”
“Where we started.”
“We didn’t.”
“But what about our things.”
“We had them with us.”
“In the boat?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“I forgot to. It wasn’t important.”
“What else did you forget to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Where did we end up? Did we float out into the sea?”
“We got out further up the river. On the other side.”
“What was there?”
“Nothing much. It was like the other bank. It was like this one. Like all of them. Like everywhere.”
“Did we see any people?”
“Not that day.”
“Why do the dead float?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the living sink?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Do you remember mum and dad?”
“A bit. Less and less.”
“I do.”
“You can’t. You were tiny then.”
“I do. Although sometimes I think I made them up. Or you made them up.”
“Maybe we both did.”
“What do you think that thing was in the water?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think you made that up?”
“I don’t know. How would I know? How could I tell?”

The fire crackled as it burned. Smoke drifted up towards the stars. The thin sliver of the moon fell down below the horizon and the last of the light left the night sky.

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Notes:

1. Written in June and July, 2012

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My Aunt

My aunt lived in one of those wooden sorts of houses you see in American films but never usually see here, where you step up onto an outdoor porch before you go in, and the whole house is raised up slightly above the ground. It never seemed natural to me having a gap beneath your own house. I used to wonder how she could sleep at night, imagining the insects down there, spiders and worms and lizards and worse, crawling around just beneath your feet, and not even the cold comfort of several feet of concrete for protection between you and them.

But I loved going there to see her whenever we could. And I always wanted to crawl under there, to find a gap into which I could squeeze and slither along and hide there away from everyone, to roll onto my back and look up through the floorboards and watch everyone from below and see somehow their true selves, the selves they hid from me because I was a child, because I was alone. But I never did find a gap, and I’d never have been allowed to crawl under there even if I did. Nor would I have dared to, in any case.

She was huge, my aunt. Huge, loud, exuberant, exciting and offhandedly kind. Every time we went she seemed to me to have grown, not only wider but taller too, deeper, more solid. Louder, lovelier.

I can still hear her laugh.

My dad was always subdued when we went round, his sternness lessened, his sureness rendered slightly stumbling. Probably in retrospect this was because she reminded him of my mother, brought out the sadness in him. But to me then it just seemed inevitable in a way. Everyone would have seemed reduced slightly by the overwhelming immensity of her presence, her brightness rendering everything else slightly dull, making us all seem slightly washed out, like a faded monochrome photo in comparison to her vibrant unreal technicolor splendour.

And maybe her brightness and sparkle was her response to that sadness, too, a protection for her heart and for my father’s too. And for mine, without me knowing. Without me even realising the possibility of it until just now.

I remember one christmas when we went there, on boxing day probably, or perhaps the day after. Her house was filled with elaborate hand-made paper decorations. Her tree looked as if it had always been there, always would be (and not even a single pine needle on the floor).

I worried about the candles in its branches, imagined everything going up in smoke, the tree, the decorations, the whole wooden house. But she just laughed and swept me off my feet, and we danced round the room, me in the dress she had given me for christmas and her in her in her jewels and her bracelets and her layers and layers of wool and fur, while my father played song after song for us on his violin, each one slowly seeping away into melancholy before a cough from my aunt would cause him to look up from his reverie and see us both there as if for the first time. Then an apology in the face of her ironic stern look, and a return to something jauntier, for a time.

Later, at the kitchen table, me and my aunt, separated by an endless array of cakes and chocolates, a rainbow of jellies and jam tarts, bowls of sweets and trays of enticingly dusted cubes of turkish delight.

“How old are you, now?” she said.

“Sixteen.”

“And how tall?”

“Five foot,” I said, and then quickly: “Four foot eleven, actually. And three quarters!”

We both laughed, although my aunt only quietly.

“You never did grow,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “She never did, either… You’re so like her, sometimes, you know? Like your mother…”

And she looked away and I caught a glimpse of tears at the corners of her eyes.

Then she stood up and walked away and when she came back holding a new bottle of wine she was as bright and as happy as always. She popped out the cork with a sly grin and poured me a glass to go with hers, and we went back to the living room and danced along to my father’s playing some more.

I’m sure that wasn’t the last time I saw her, but it feels like it. That winter or maybe the next my father got sick, and stayed sick, and with both the demands of work and of looking after of him, we travelled to see her less and less until eventually we stopped completely. After that we spoke through postcards and christmas cards and birthday presents and the occasional unoccasioned gifts.

And I thought of her every time my father played his violin, though that too was less and less each year.

Now, in the silence, I think of them both. I think of them always.

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Notes:

1. Written on September 8th, 2016

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this is as small as i can write

When we were little, my mother invented a game for us to play. She’d write a sentence at the top of a piece of paper and say “This is as small as I can write” and then the next player would write a sentence in slightly smaller handwriting and say “This is as small as I can write” and you’d pass the page to the next player and if they couldn’t read your writing you’d be out. And you’d continue round and round the table until either everyone was out or you reached the bottom of the page and it was so filled up with tiny writing there was no where else for your writing to go.

None of my brothers or sisters remember this game at all when I mention it. And none of them ever really liked it back then anyway. But I always loved it and I never stopped playing, even if for most of my life the only person I’ve been competing against is myself.

I bought magnifying glasses and microscopes and ultrahard ultrasharp pencils and even thinner pens, and etching equipment and even a cutting laser at one point, always trying to better my last sentence, to beat my last score.

Now I’m down to atoms there’s nowhere else to go.

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Notes:

1. Written on September 23rd, 2016

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

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Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.

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Thank you!