He looked at her round red face that had once suggested an arse. Then he had fallen in love with it, and all he could think of were apples, strawberries, ripe fruit, things sensuous to the tongue. Lately though a falling off, and rotting and withering slithered about his brain.
‘There was a man who considered his life was like a jigsaw.’
‘That it?’ she said.
‘You want more, Rebecca?’
‘Have you got more in you?’
‘A couple lunched out on a death anniversary. He, Bren, was thinking of a childhood conversation with his late mother. “That’s Nanny in Ireland,” she’d said as a sound like a distant earthquake rumbled in her belly.
Celebrity biopics sell movie tickets, although it’s never a guarantee that any particular superstar has led an interesting life. So, if you’re a Hollywood scribe, you can squeeze your subject into a readymade template. Celebrity had a career decline? That calls for a Citizen Kane style rise and fall. Your famous figure OD’d? Great! Turn it into a tragedy, driving home some point or other about addiction. What if their life involves an unsolved mystery on par with the Mary Celeste? Dream up a solution.
Norma Rankin, twice grammy nominated singer-songwriter from Chicago, comfortably slotted herself into category three by vanishing off the face of the earth in 1992. Thus, esteemed director Ivan Shanks, auteur of such classics as “Your Mother and a Cow” (1985) and “Die Slowly and Painfully” (1988) made the acclaimed, highly speculative “Rankin Vanishes” (2000), which nabbed three Oscars, and a golden globe.
She heard a low rumbling as she walked along the cliff top. It sounded like thunder, but came from deep below, a guttural sound, almost like the Earth was groaning. There was a shudder and a loud crack as rock splintered. Grass twisted beneath her feet and the pathway crumbled to nothing. She stepped onto icy air, then she was falling; her backpack scraping against rock, its straps catching on roots and jagged stone. Wind snatched her hair. The sandy shore, littered with clumps of rock and jumbled shells, drew closer. She wondered if it was the last thing she would see.
When she was a child, she collected shells like treasure. She remembered a queen conch that she’d carried from a distant beach. Every time she wanted to hear the waves, she’d held it to her ear, comforted by the gentle swish. Her bedroom held shelves filled with glistening razor clams, ridged limpets, pretty cockleshells and periwinkles in different hues, olive-green, deep red, primrose yellow and delicate pink. Cockleshells were her favourites. She distracted herself from the drop, trying to remember every tiny detail of them; their delicate fan shape, the pattern of fine lines etched in burnt umber on their backs, and the smoothness of the inside where she liked to rub her thumb. If only she was safe in her childhood bedroom now, admiring the cockleshells and conjuring the roar and hiss of the sea with the conch shell.
The immediate situation facing us was frightening. Dank weather summed up the predicament perfectly. On the way to collect Melanie I knew with certainty that both our lives would dramatically change. Whether we could endure the physical and mental anguish was questionable. Could we overcome such an event? It would test our love for one another to the limit.
I arrived near the entrance to the room but was afraid to enter. What could I possibly say to her. Someone in authority caught sight of me and came to chat. Her words were powerful and I felt more at ease. ‘Come in Mr Thomas, you’re both going to need all your strength to recover from this. Melanie is extremely fragile at the moment but with time you will both get through the ordeal. It’s not going to be easy but you can give each other great comfort and support’. My hands trembled as I entered, palms sweating, eyes focusing on her. She was dressed and ready to leave. Her face tearful with unhappiness.
A miracle; no other way to describe it. After the washing-up of Sunday lunch, she and Freddie had either taken a left out of the front gate and walked towards Mam’s parents, or turned right over the railway bridge to Dad’s. Attempted recall techniques had included a retracing on GoogleMaps of as much of the route as could be remembered by a failing 90 year old brain and cajoling her granddaughter to drive her on their weekly car trip along every exit of every roundabout in the town. Pris was giving up hope. There were over a hundred roundabouts and at least five hundred possible exits. Some she recognized; some not. Road realignments, estate clearances and the ripple-out expansion of shopping centres, had remodelled the once familiar. Every now and then something – the sight of an old industrial chimney, a stretch of stone wall, the metallic nose of rusting industrial archaeology blasting through the car’s air vents – promised to tug a distant memory chime, only to muffle, return into the unrecognisable and remain silent. Did she have 10 years?
“Go into business with your twin,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
If you call sweating in a café, cleaning up after customers while your twin sister’s gallivanting overseas in pursuit of new teas and coffees to sell, “fun,” then they were right.
I sigh. Where to start with this clean-up operation? I watch the stain spread across the pale wood floor, seeping into the grain. It was her idea to get wooden floors, of course. Wood the colour of her platinum blonde hair that she insists on bleaching to look as different from me as possible. “Mousey,” she calls our natural hair colour. “Classy,” I always reply.
The cardigan with the paint stain on the elbow that she could never wash off: why had she kept it so long? She remembered touching up the sitting-room door, brush in one hand, Sylvie in the other, when a blob of gloss had attached itself to her sleeve almost as firmly as her baby’s fingers.
The uncomfortable wooden armchair that guests sat on, or rather, hovered above as though it were a large hedgehog. The enormous ghetto-blaster like a plastic-armoured beetle squatting on the windowsill. Rachel’s drum: memories of a small child marching around the sitting room like an infant platoon, noisier than a massed military band. She ought to let all this stuff go.
Michael closed the door of his adoptive parents house for the last time. Now was the time to make his way in the world.
He was to transfer to his firm’s sister company in South Wales. It was a long way from Scotland but he felt that he needed his own space.
As far as he was aware, he had never been to Wales before, but he felt that he had come home. He knew that he was adopted when he was three. His birth parents had been killed in a car crash, which he had survived, but had been left with both physical and mental scarring. He couldn’t remember anything else.
Felicity handed the wine bottle around. The girls had decided on a quiet weekend, nibbles and wine, relaxing in their pyjamas, the usual banter – who did what to whom and how their romantic lives were. The subject of Kelly came up when Jodie asked why she wasn’t there.
Felicity laughed, ”Have you not heard? She has a new infatuation.”
Groans and laughter spread across the room. Jodie looked towards the heavens. ”Who is it this time? Thought she was still chasing Simon?”
I wait in the car outside the home, waiting for the Lateral Flow Test result. Part of me wants it to be positive, as an excuse not to go in. I’m unlucky in my wish as I have the all clear. I climb out of the car wearily, taking as much time as possible. My mind and my conscience wrestle. I need to do this, but I don’t want to do it.
It’s more and more difficult every day. My mother’s dementia has taken away the parent I once knew. Her long-term memories come to the fore as her most recent dissolve within seconds. Conversations circle between us. It feels like we are both trapped in a revolving door.
Well, why not? Seven tasty days and nights with her in that holiday camp, fifteen years ago. She’d said she lived in the Swansea valley, place beginning ‘Ys’, on an estate. Probably married now and moved. Probably wasting his time.
Atop Ystalyfera, a couple of streets clinging to a hillside, a deep valley dizzying below. A faded place: dogs, kids, toys on the pavement. Even the evening sun seemed grubby. He was getting in the car, about to go, when, standing by a front door, a blonde, thirties, curvy, nice.
She’s at it again, using her allure to get people to do things for her. I watch jealously from my bric-à-brac jumble sale stall. I had spent the last half an hour carrying heavy bags from my car. Now, she strolls in, followed by a team of eager pleasers hauling all her boxes. I really hate her sometimes.
Angela, five foot eight and with an effervescent personality and curly blond locks. I understand what the entire male population sees in her, but what I don’t get is why she is able to bewitch the female population as well. That doesn’t include me, of course. I’m immune to her charms.
As Clare put her key in the lock, a sense of foreboding overcame her. She slowly turned it and pushed the door wide open. Her flat was in disarray. Everything she owned seemed to be scattered all over the floor. As her knees collapsed, she grasped the doorframe as her body slid down to the floor.
Without bothering to get back up, she phoned the police.
It was the talk of the office. When the number missing reached 15, Robert as Lead-Informant knew decisive remedial action was needed to ensure the Department’s survival. It would not be easy to persuade The Council to employ an intergalactic military psychic. In times of austerity for the masses, how could such fiscal extravagance be justified? Fortunately, Supreme Commander Shand of Joint Forces was an ally. Anything that affected the continuity and security of the Colonisation Expansion Programme would naturally silence the naysayers.
The wind howls around the hospital towers. I squint through the rain, and for a moment the birds overhead look like tiny witches on broomsticks, swooping unpredictably in all directions.
‘Meadowside Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit,’ a sign announces. Like everything else up here, it is wonky, madness seeping into any semblance of order.
Nestling deeper into her bedding Valentina sighed pleasantly tired. It had been a busy day but she was sure the end of her journey was at hand.
She remembered the stories her mother had captivated them with as babies. Ivan the terrible was a folk hero to them. Fighting for the territory around them, often returning bloodied from battle: that was her great grandfather. Romance of how he met his wife in the tunnels they inhabited, love at first sight – so her mother told them. How he fought for her hand, paying a heavy price, losing territory but Ivan was elated to have his beloved Sasha by his side.
Jackie sighed as she heard the tap-tap of high heels approaching her office door. Forewarned by Lisa in accounts, she waited as her door swung open. Leoinie crashed through sobbing, “They all hate me. I’ve never been anything but generous to them; now they call me names and snigger behind my back.”
Passing the tissues, Jackie told her to sit. “Why do you think this is happening again, Leoinie? You had the same problem in two different offices. I thought you had made friends with Dawn and were happy there?”
In the stroke ward were a dentist, a heavy-metal bass player, an underwater welder, a politician, and Nat Wharton, bigshot drug dealer, whose bed was surrounded by a posse of gun-toting cops, each of them as large as a truck laden with opium.
The bass player didn’t know if she was in Carnegie Hall or a hall of mirrors. She listened to the faint boom ba boom of her hapless heart, trying to detect the backbeat and ascertain if the instrument was in four-four time.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Martha laughed “but first, close your eyes.”
What was this little surprise? Martha would probably hold up a deformed jumper, which she had knitted over many nights, and Chris would force herself to wear the itchy ill-fitting thing with a “Oh it’s just what I wanted!” kind of smile. That was typical Martha. A trait Chris still found rather charming.
Her birthday surprise as it turned out was much more alarming, for as Chris sat cross legged upon her lavender sofa, she felt the warm sensation of something soft pressing against her lips. Her eyes bolted open to find Martha, her BFF, kissing her.
The quaint and characteristic muddle of smells has stayed with me since the earliest of days. I can look back down the years and remember visits to great aunt Violet (my grandmother’s sister): first as duty visits with my mother and then more eager and self-willed visits on my own. I can well recall her face and details of the tiny cottage and surrounding garden, but it is the smells stay in my memory.
Each beam and hook and cupboard handle in the kitchen held drying herbs and flowers. These were later crumbled into jars and packets and used in cooking or medicinal remedies. Herbs were kept perky in jars of water, ready to be freshly chopped into oils, alcohols or distilled into tinctures. Soaps and lotions, vinegars and essential oils filled cupboards and shelves. Sometimes Violet sold her wares to local shops, and she also had postal enquiries and word-of -mouth recommendations.
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