The thing about Iffy is that he’s all about conspiracy theories. Not proper conspiracies like you see on the socials, these are more personal tales of his regrets and ‘if only’ flights of fancy. That’s where his nickname comes from ‘if only I’d done this or that or the other’.
Take last Thursday as an example. A few mates met up in the pub and were mentioning the imminent implosion of the marriage of two of our friends. Off goes Iffy:
‘If only I’d asked Gwenda to marry me before she met Bob. We could have been happy. Maybe we’d have moved to the country. It’s my fault they’re not happy’.
I have lived in the cathedral rafters for an endless number of bell chimes. At first I thought I’d count them to track the passage of time. It’s an enormous hunk of bronze, the bell, and every time it rings, it roars so loudly I’m amazed I haven’t lost my hearing yet. In fact, though, most of the time I don’t hear it at all; after so long living here I must’ve learnt to ignore it, and only when I was much younger did it used to wake me up on a Sunday.
Sometimes the chime of the bell is so incessant it’s impossible to ignore. When it rings to announce special occasions, so do my ears. I remember, as a child, church bells singing wedding melodies while beautiful women floated like clouds along the aisle. From this close there is nothing melodious about this bell. It only clangs.
Liz sat drinking her oat milk latte, and seeing her reflection in the cafe window sighed. This is not how I imagined my retirement, my face all puffy and pale from the medications I had been prescribed. After an active job I had felt prepared for the future, but my body had other ideas it had decided. Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol had suddenly appeared, although I was told they had been on their radar for years!!
Having lost the ability to wear stilettos, I reluctantly admitted defeat and replaced them with sensible shoes. I loved my old shoes even kept my favourites, just in case, trying them on now and again but usually ended up going ass over tit .
The ambulance outside alerted two of the neighbours.
‘Is Janice OK? Mrs Hughes asked. ‘She’s been looking very drawn.’
‘I saw her come to the door. I think it’s…’
‘Alex?’
‘Janice told me he’s been worse lately,’ Mrs Phillips said.
‘That overdose. Last summer, wasn’t it? Do you think he…?
Mrs Phillips clamped her lips together. This isn’t suitable conversation her stiffly proper expression seemed to say.
/
Eirlys was everything to him. He watched her grow as a baby, kept an eye on her schooling. On her reaching puberty he became over-interested, you might say. When she had boyfriends, well he had jealousy like a bridge has rivets. Eirlys’ marriage left him grey somehow, his spirit seemed to have drained from him. But he had the blues in him right from when we first dated, just kids. He was prone to them. Having a daughter gave him some relief, I suppose; her leaving home extinguished that. I tried to help him but his empty heart wouldn’t let me in. I’ve been expecting this ever since last summer. Longer, really, if I’m honest.
Alyria stood, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
All the sacrifices she’d made to get to this point, all the favours traded, the coin expended, the hard graft… it was all for nothing. Before her, the ruins of the gateway taunted, its rubble strewn over twenty square metres. With a wordless, throat-ripping howl, she sank to her knees.
Even the breeze through the dusty ravine seemed to mock her, whispering “too late, too late, too late” over and over until it became almost torturous.
Three long Earth years she’d travelled to get here, following rumours and sotto voce conversations in bars she thought she’d never get out of. The laser pistol at her hip had seen more use than she’d hoped – slavers, kidnappers, and perverts had all stared down the barrel, and more than once she’d barely escaped with her life.
‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’
‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’
‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’
‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’
‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’
‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’
‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’
‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’
/
In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.
His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.
It had been very kind of him to take us in during a raging snowstorm on Christmas Eve, but I wish Joel would shut up about it. We’d been travelling along the edges of Białowieża Forest, trying desperately to get home to see family, when the car had broken down.
There was no mobile signal, of course, so we’d sat in the car, after the inevitable argument, shivering. Then, like the light of the Angel Gabriel, twin beams of a 4×4 had sliced through the blizzard, and Joel had been out in the road, waving his arms, trying to get a lift. Fortunately, the driver had stopped.
Dimitri walked the beaten path from his small town in Hostre, to the familiar fields of grain that he’d admired since childhood. The fresh dew sat lackadaisically on a blade of grass; its slumber abruptly disturbed by the compression of Dimitri’s leather bound foot. His impact paled in comparison to the indelible impression bestowed upon the wider area. During the previous season, the land had been disturbed by heavy machinery, the earth turned over and upon itself, revealing the darker soil below.
“Big machines, operated by large men, led by those with gargantuan egos.” He pondered aloud.
His fixation upon his outer surroundings caused a momentary lapse in perception. Dimitri’s foot discovered a deep puddle, which had been considerately filled with fresh rainwater. His right foot and shin now completely submerged and subsequently sodden.
There was a dame sitting at the bar. She was attractive and alone. I decided to take a chance. I slid onto the stool next to her and asked if she wanted a drink.
‘My name is Alice’ she said, ‘Alice Fortune. Miss Alice Fortune.’ I noticed her beautiful smile as she shook my hand.
As our fingers met, I felt something pass between us. My sixth sense was screaming at me but I took no notice, I was hooked.
Red and gold, green and yellow. Riotous explosions of colour, searing through the night skies against a backdrop of the universe.
“They’re beautiful, Momma,” she whispers, bundled up in her best winter coat, with mittens keeping her fingers warm, holding hands and staring in wonder.
“I know, baby,” I say, checking my comm bracelet, anxiety spiking. It’s linked to his.
As the bell rang young Billy Thomas barged his way out. Racing off he headed into the woods above the school Megan’s words echoing in his head: ”I’m sorry Billy we can’t be friends anymore.”
She had just walked away from him.
Gasping for breath he threw himself onto the floor. What had he done? He and Megan had been like brother and sister. They had played together for as long as Billy could remember.
The postmistress had a bad reputation and specialised in being irritable with everybody. She was perhaps in her fifties, but almost of a geological age. You were put in mind of a slab of granite behind the serving hatch in the corner of the mini-supermarket. Her face was stony, her resentment hard.
‘NEXT!’ she barked from behind her counter. ‘First or second? Put it on the scales. ON them, not under them. Where’s it going? WHAT? Gib-raltar?’ She pronounced the word as though it were the most awful place on the planet. Then she forked the parcel off the scales with a plump paw, eyeing her customer in the manner of a prison guard with a felon.
Brian knew a good deal about Eric’s life story from the first research interview. What he didn’t know was that Eric’s life (but definitely not his story) was going to reach its final destination in one hour and thirty minutes. Nor did Brian know that Eric’s account of his past in the next forty-five minutes would contain (if anyone cared to listen and adequately interpret) the answer to why he died. This, the second interview, began at 2:30 pm Eastern Time in a small room in Krill Bay’s large central library.
Lorenzo had booked the local pub, boasting to a few hopefuls that they’d win “oh fifty quid” and have the attention of a hundred people when they performed.
The worst thing that could happen was that they’d be laughed at, although this crowd tended to look away in embarrassment when a no-talent embarrassed themselves.
A thin ribbon of green viscosity slithers under a flautist’s door. It slides along walls and meets other slender ribbons – deep, glistening chestnut from the folk club, vivid scarlet from a classical concert in the town hall and vibrant, earthy umber from the mellow notes of Miles on a stereo. Together they dance solemnly, rising up, coiled together in a strange braid of colour and light, and then part to pursue their solitary tasks. They are creatures of great beauty and ingenuity.
Hubert approached the freezer door gingerly. The seals were failing and he was fearful of triggering an ejection of its replenished contents. DIY maintenance was not his forté. Opinion on this had been unanimous since the incident involving pergola components, a hammer drill and his newly numbed left hand and truncated thumb. Lifting the door handle and easing outwards whilst bracing with his knee usually worked.
He had been re-examining the previous evening’s chronology – the pier’s shadow in the fading light, the incoming tide and Jenny paddling at the water’s edge. They were discussing wedding pros and cons – woodland versus church – when interrupted by a commotion out in the bay. A boiling murkiness was expanding as it rose from the ocean’s depths. Bubbling and spitting it ran towards the shore; the coral-pink darts of the drowning sun were unable to disperse it. Overhead competing clouds of gannets and seagulls quarrelled in a screaming circular tornado. And at their feet, tickling their toes, the advancing flume line turned silver with thousands of doomed sprats. Fleeing the mackerel’s strike they wriggled and squirmed on the reducing ribbon of sand.
There’d been an atmosphere of suppressed excitement in the village that morning. The boy was glad to go into the solitude of the woods to search for the fox. It wouldn’t take long. Foxes didn’t hide their tracks, unlike people. He stopped to hoist the shotgun onto his shoulder, then moved stealthily forward. Most of his friends knew nothing about foxes, but the boy knew where they made their dens and when they were most active. He could even tell if they were a dog or a vixen from the muskiness of their scent. The fox couldn’t escape him.
Aysha had been running and hiding for two days, and still they followed her relentlessly. Now laying under a thorn bush, she was quivering. Her once sleek body was emaciated, a pale grey colour, her eyes seemed to take up her whole face, a beaten look in them.
The hunters found her the next morning, dragging her out and they set off for the krall. She had to be returned. They placed her in the care of the wise woman who set about treating her wounds, purging her of the parasites that she had swallowed in the river water, feeding her honey water and thin gruel. She slowly recovered .
I was on my way home at last, I’d been counting down the days to my return flight since I arrived. The ‘Call of the Wild’ was overexaggerated as far as I was concerned. I just could not wait for that blissful moment of sleeping in my own bed. As it turned out, Africa had different plans for me.
The airport tannoy crackled into life.
“The flight to Nairobi has been delayed.”
There was a groan from all the passengers.
“More information will follow.”
I looked down at my dust-encrusted attire, I really needed a shower; even I could smell how disgusting I was. I just hoped that we would be aboard the turbo prop soon.
I stand, confused, as she presses an activation key into my right hand, then runs along the corridor towards my father and the mob pressing against the hangar’s blast doors.
*
We’ve been spacers all our lives, living on the margins of existence. Trading goods wherever we can make credits, salvaging wreckage, fighting off pirates and raiders. The Federal Planetary Government doesn’t hold much sway out in the void, even though they’re becoming more authoritarian and imperialistic on the inhabited worlds. Rebellious types from beat poets to guerrilla militias had been crushed mercilessly according to rumour, but Father had dismissed the hearsay with a wave of his hand.
“No matter to us, girlie,” he’d said. “Go help your mother with the hull repairs.”
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