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Notes:
1. The script for this was written on August 6th, 2020
2. And then the comic was made in September sometime
3. This was longlisted for the 2020 Observer/Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story Prize
4. But got no further than that
5. The Baron was an attempt at seeing if I could actually draw Nietzsche
6. And though that experiment was a failure
7. It didn’t stop me trying again
I was digging a hole. I was about five. I’d gotten bored of digging a hole in the sandpit, and wanted more of a challenge.
After I had been digging for a while, my mother came out of the house to see what I was doing or at least to make sure I hadn’t drowned in the pond.
“What are you doing?” she said, even though she could see what I was doing.
“I’m digging,” I said, making a digging motion with my spade in the air and then following it up with a digging motion in the earth that wasn’t so much a digging motion as actual digging, so that she could see that I was digging and that I could see that she could see that I was digging.
“I can see that,” she said, which she could.
I did another little dig and she didn’t like it and said, “Can you stop that?!”
I looked up at her. She was about twenty feet away at the lip of the shaft I’d dug and she looked quite small up there, and because of the way she was silhouetted against the sky I couldn’t even really make out her face and certainly not the ferocity of her scowl.
Disobeying a tiny faceless mother who was twenty feet or more away was easier than disobeying a huge red-faced mother who was right next to you with her hand poised in the air to administer some sort of smack. So I pretended I couldn’t hear her and carried on digging and hoped soon I’d be deep enough that I really couldn’t hear her and therefore I wouldn’t be doing anything bad like pretending I couldn’t hear her when I could.
It turns out that, due to the acoustics of tunnels and shafts and wells and, presumably, all the other possible types of tubes, I would always be able to hear her. And I always have.
I’m 39 years old now and she’s as loud as ever, even though I’m seven miles down and can no longer see the sky, let alone her faceless face peering down at me, shouting out admonishments into the hole that I dug in her beautiful garden, never letting me forget that I’ve ruined her lawn forever.
She probably wishes I really had drowned in the fish pond by now.
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Notes:
1. Written on September 25th, 2017
2. This is at least the third story on here called “The Hole”
3. And probably the worst
Jason put his finger in the hole first, then me, then our mum. Alice refused, but she was only three and the instructions said not suitable for children aged under 48 months so it was just as well.
Jason’s finger came out covered in sherbet. Mine came out covered in jam. Our mum’s finger came out covered in marmite and she laughed in delight as she licked it off and then she put it in the hole again and again.
Our Dad came home later and bent down and looked into the hole for a while, first with one eye and then with the other.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s the future,” said our mum, and showed him how it worked.
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Notes:
1. Written on August 30th, 2016
__________The circus was in town. You could tell this by all the posters round town telling you the circus was in town.
And also there was a clown scrabbling at my front door.
I’m not sure why clowns were attracted to my house but they always were, whenever they were in town. My sister reckoned it might be due to the way our house was in the same field as the circus, but I’m not sure it had anything to do with that.
I reckoned it was because they knew about the hole.
I’m not going to tell you about the hole.
It’s not safe.
I hadn’t even told my sister.
I hadn’t told the clowns either but I’m pretty sure they knew.
I made sure the front door was locked tight and left the clown there, scrabbling, always scrabbling. I’d have to re-do the paint once the circus had gone, but that’s a small price to pay for maintaining a clownless house.
There was another clown scrabbling at the bathroom window, but I climbed into the bath anyway. It’s not like it was going to see much through the frosted glass anyway.
I fell asleep and dreamt of many things.
Later on, in my bathrobe, I absentmindedly opened the back door and went outside for a fag and the whole bleeding lot of them swarmed in and made straight for the hole.
I sighed and smoked my cigarette and wandered over to the circus in my slippers to tell them about their loss.
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Notes:
1. Written on 18th July, 2016
__________There was a hole in the tree at the end of our nan’s garden. We used to love shoving our arms into it, me and my sister, pretending we were Flash Gordon, pretending we might get bitten and die.
No matter how old we got, no matter how long our arms grew, we never could reach the end of it. We stuck the garden hose into it once, lowered it down slowly into the depths as if we were dropping a bucket down into a well, or a bathysphere into the sea. And even when we’d unspooled it all we still could have gone deeper.
My sister said it must be coiling around in there like a snake, or like the tape inside a cassette, tightly wound round some tree-ish spindle deep down there in the dark.
All I could imagine it as was guts. But then at the time all I could imagine at any time was guts, stomachs slashed open, intestines bulging out from the gaping wound like a colony of bloated worms, all this the consequence of some surreptitiously watched forbidden video, rented out on our behalf from the shop by a friend’s older brother or an unconcerned uncle.
And every day since, these visions of mutilation and evisceration. I’d sit in the bathtub and stare at my ever largening belly, horrified and fascinated about was was within, what was straining to get out.
We turned the hose on, in the end, while it was in the hole, and counted out the seconds until it overflowed, so that we could work out an approximate volume of the expanse within the tree. But it never overflowed. The hollow was obviously infinite, a void unexplainable by science. (My sister had more prosaic explanations).
Our nan asked us what we were doing out there, when we’d gone back inside in the afternoon for a glass of watery orange squash and a biscuit, most likely a rich tea but, if we were lucky, perhaps one of those with the cow on them, whatever they were called.
“We were putting our arms in the hole in the tree,” said my sister, rather guilelessly.
“You shouldn’t put things in holes, dear,” said our nan. “You might not get them out again.”
And she chuckled to herself as if it was funny, both what she’d said and what we were doing. But after that she never let us play in the garden much again, or at least not on our own.
That summer extended on forever and we forgot about the hole. Moved on to other mysteries. Then there was school, again, eventually, autumn, winter, christmas, snow.
In the half term we stayed there, and we got snowed in. It was quite exciting. The roofs of cars protruding out from the drifts like polyps. Icicles growing down from the gutter so far when you looked out of the window it felt like you were behind bars.
I woke up one night, a gap in the curtains letting the moonlight through. The house was silent. Outside the snow glowed as if lit from below.
I heard the screams of foxes, far away, nearer, near. Then out into the garden one ran, each footstep an echo of its passage through the snow.
My nan burst out from beneath the picnic bench, galloping across the snow on all fours towards her prey. A silent leap, up, up, down onto the back of the transfixed fox. Then an explosion of noise and movement and screaming.
My nan rose from the snow, up on to her hind legs, the dead animal hanging from her mouth, blood dripping from the holes where her teeth were submerged in the poor thing’s belly, splashes of red on the white of her nightgown, and more behind her in the hollow in the snow where her footstepped path and the fox’s converged.
She walked across to the tree, bent down towards the hole, and pushed herself into it, fox first, then face, her shoulders dislocating behind her as the rest of her slithered inside.
Silence, then, and stillness, for a moment. Then clouds obscured the moon. Snow fell in darkness. Sleep eventually took me back to bed. And in the morning no trace of footsteps in the snow, no stains of blood on the ground, nor on the tree. Even in my mind, the memory was softened out by the possibility of it being a dream.
For breakfast there was toast and jam, thick and red and spread too strong. Everyone eating it, except for me and my nan. No one believed me about the hole and what I’d seen go in it, and later when we went outside to look it was frozen full of ice, so thick and clear you couldn’t see it, you had to touch it to know it was there, to know it existed in more than just your mind.
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Notes:
1. Written on July 3rd, 2018
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