‘Aspen?’ Bill spat out the letter ‘p’ like it was a bitter pill. ‘What sort of name is that?’
I stroked my swollen abdomen and gazed out the window for added wistfulness. ‘Mum would have loved it.’
‘Hazel still rules our lives from beyond the grave,’ he muttered into his tea.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I stood up, losing my balance. In an instant he was easing me back onto the sofa, my vulnerability softening him.
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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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Memories of the past ebb and flow around me like a fast-running stream. Here and there, I pick out snatches of melody, laughter or tears, heartache or guilt. Occasionally, small groups clump together in eddies, circling round, threatening to drag me into the whirlpool of emotion of a particular moment; a birth, a death, singing with joy until my voice is hoarse. I linger at each of these, but the need for closure presses me onward.
This is my personal Hall of Ancestors and, as I walk its length, portraits on the wall show each reincarnation; the twenty-first century social media star, the patent office clerk, the eighteenth-century Swiss craftsman. Here, a rural Italian mother garnishes a steaming pasta dish, and there a mediaeval herbalist offers a concoction of their own devising that claims to be a panacea for any illness from a sore throat to parasitic infections.
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My heart races against the clock. As 17:59 becomes 18:00, it looks like the word ‘Boo.’ Mum says a swear-word and I jump. My swimming lesson starts now but we haven’t even parked the car.
On the radio, the newsreader says an asteroid will narrowly miss Earth tonight. I picture myself riding it, flames shooting behind me, and diving into the pool just in time.
Mum stops the car so suddenly that I jolt forward. ‘Jump out here, Thomas!’
My bag is wedged in the space in front of my seat. I tug while another clock inside my head counts down until Mum explodes. Beside me, she inflates like a balloon. Three, two, one…
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The Austerik Muminsim are an ancient race, who emerged from the quark aggregation taking place just millionths of a second after the big bang, so they aren’t exactly matter, but they really DO matter.
A lot.
They allowed nuclei to form, which also permitted everything else to happen, like stars and galaxies forming. So, it was a surprise when I was asked to meet them.
How do you “meet” an entity with no physical dimensions existing simultaneously in all places and times?
I got an invitation.
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Tourdor stole a secret recipe book from a brewer and set himself up as the kingdom’s best innkeeper. Without it, he could not enjoy the wealth to which he had become accustomed, so he stuck a notice on his door: “Wanted! Three stout fellows to guard my secret.”
An old man with a white beard approaches him.
“I will guard it.”
Tourdor says he wants a stronger man.
The man points a wand at a barrel and lifts it across the bar.
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Do you remember when we made that promise, Dad? In the fading light of a summer’s evening, when you sat beside my bed and closed the book you’d been reading, leaning in to kiss me and wish me sweet dreams? Always that. Never goodnight. Definitely never goodbye.
You smelled of tea and biscuits. The beginnings of a beard peppered your chin, bristling against my cheek. Your beard was dark then. Not even a whisper of grey. Nothing like the creep of white that haunts your face now. Your skin in the glow of my bedside light was bright and flushed from a day’s work, and the comforting clatter of Mum washing up floated through the floorboards. I don’t remember how old I was, but I remember the book. The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
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“I’ll get you Lewis! And that’s a promise.”
With his words still ringing in my ears, I hastily packed a suitcase. I just had to get away.
A new town, a fresh start, I could only hope.
I picked up a job quickly and began to settle down. My jangled nerves were slowly uncurling with each passing day.
It took him six weeks to find me.
I awoke one morning to find a note on the doormat. Things started to spiral out of control.
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‘It’s day three hundred and sixty of the kids singing and the band playing, and I’m starting to wish it wasn’t Christmas every day,’ I said, my paper hat falling down over my eyes. ‘I’d feel rude sending my family home though.’
Sombre nods spread around the circle, everyone at the Christmas Song Support Group feeling my pain.
‘I hear you,’ said Bethan. ‘When the first partridge in a pear tree arrived, I thought, how romantic. But by day six, my neighbour with the bird phobia had called the police. It was the twelve drummers drumming that got me evicted. I didn’t have the heart to tell my true love that it was too much.’
Daniel was the longest-standing member. Every year without fail, he gave away his heart only to have it cruelly given away on Boxing Day. Despite his resolutions to give it to someone special next time, it inevitably happened again.
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The orange-acned teenager read part of the letter to me: ‘Fit to go back to work.’
Fit? Twelve months of depression after being passed over for the headship at Ysgol Milton Friedman. That went to a kid with a face on him like a lamb sucking on its mother’s teat. Not to the school’s deputy head, with proven management skills garnered from thirty years teaching. ‘The successful candidate has more energy,’ I was told. Meaning obvious: Phillips, you’re too old at fifty-four.
Shortly after came melancholy and lethargy. The GP prescribed anti-depressants. She was a kid too, fresh out of doctors’ college.
It got worse. My wife, Sandra, left. Told me my moodiness would try the patience of an angel, plus she’d met a nice, younger man. That word was like a knife in my heart. Soon after, an overdose of paracetamol. They pumped out my stomach and I’m in the bin, sectioned. Four blurred weeks.
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My mission had been to submit my story by the deadline. I was failing fast.
I had to write something. My head was stuffed with a myriad of ideas, but none of them seemed to work. I sighed as I looked at the pile of screwed up papers overflowing the waste bin.
I reread all the other submissions for what seemed like the tenth time. What did they have that mine lacked? Even my analytic powers seemed to have deserted me.
I tried some displacement activities to look for inspiration elsewhere. My e-mails and You Tube displayed the same as when I had looked before. I came up with no fresh ideas for the story.
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It started off like a game. Lucy passed me her piece of cake under the table on Mum’s birthday. It felt funny singing happy birthday when half an hour ago Mum was crying, and Dad wasn’t living with us anymore. But I got two slices of cake and that made me smile.
Then she started putting all her lunch in my lunchbox. I didn’t know what to do with it.
It wasn’t only the food. She shouted all the time and she was always in her room. Mum said it was just teenage behaviour, but I didn’t think so.
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My name is Stephen Sacks and I’m a complete faggot.
Oh, I know, I know, bluntness is discouraged these days and words like that reek of self-loathing but I’m not pussy footing around, tonight I aim for honesty.
I’ll tell you about a revelation I had last week which stoked the embers and relit my passion. I was at an outdoor pool party, held by my sister’s in-laws. A celebration over the fact they had stuck it out for fifty years.
So, there I was, meekly maundering by the barbecue when I became aware of somebody’s nephew, Johnny whatever, wafting by the swimming pool. And as that handsome youth, wearing nothing but tight trunks, beer in hand, talked to another Adonis, dear reader I felt the desire.
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“Can you picture her face?” My words tumbled out of my mouth as soon as my sister picked up the phone.
“Huh? Whose face?” Evelyn replied.
“Mum’s,” I said.
At sixty years old, I had just learned that most people possessed a superpower. They could visualise objects, places, events and people in their “mind’s eye”. I could not. Suddenly the darkness of my mind seemed blinding. What’s more, I felt the loss of my mother more acutely than ever.
Our mother had died six months earlier, after a long battle with cancer. Evelyn and I had nursed her until the end. Now there was a gaping hole in my life. It was Larry, my husband, who had suggested giving meditation a go.
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I first met Jose Luis Vercas on the concrete apron jutting out into the mouth of the Targus where the splendour of the Manueline Port of Lisboa ends and a wide expanse of river divides the city from Alcântara. He was short, but well-muscled and possessed of that curiously Portuguese combination of a mane of swept-back, black and wavy hair; and a forehead so high it begged to be labelled, “domed”. He said he too was a teacher, but offered no hint of subject or at what level he taught and, to be frank, my interest did not extend that far.
“Do you have it?” I asked in my formal Portuguese. He smiled and nodded – a slight movement of his head, causing a lock of stray hair to struggle free. Patting his messenger bag, he said in accent-free English, “It’s here.”
Continue readingHelen sat down with a sigh. It was time to think of a new year’s resolution.
Why do I do this to myself? she pondered. Each year promising myself to do something useful. My spare room is filled with things from years past. The cross stitch still unopened, the exercise bike which I generally hang my ironing on. Shelves stacked with books I never get round to reading, exercise videos that maybe were watched once, and I nearly put my back out with them.
Think I must have tried every avenue to a healthy life. It cost me a fortune in gym membership, even personal trainers. They all fell by the wayside. Even tried volunteering with charities, every time finding out I couldn’t give them the time required with my work schedule.
Continue readingSo here I am, 24th of December, aged thirteen, lying in my bed and I don’t want to weep but there’s a real good chance I won’t see Christmas Day.
It’s no fun having a brain aneurysm, because hey it will be the death of me. I know this because Death himself sits by my bed.
No honestly, it was yesterday when I found the bald boy, that lad who glared moodily at everyone lying still on his bed. He wasn’t blinking or breathing. And as I stood there gaping at a dead body, I heard a strong steely voice behind me, calling out with a cackle “Oh don’t worry, he wasn’t going to amount to much.”
Continue readingWe were up at dawn. I was so excited I was nearly sick, but I still managed to eat a bowl of porridge. This was our Christmas trip we were embarking on … to have Christmas with my grandparents and my uncle and aunt in Cardiff.
‘Come on, Glynis,’ my mother shouted. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
I came downstairs wearing my pink fairy dress which I insisted was the proper outfit for Christmas.
Continue readingI’ve lived in Swansea all my life and the lights in town used to be across the lamps, and brightly lit. The parades were great and fun with always Lewis’ Pie van going past. The tree was always great. But times have changed and the lights are new, and are more up to date. But I think the lights now are not as good as they were before. The tree is still good but Swansea seems bare across the sky. And the parade now is not the best but the waterfront is lovely and bright, and the wheel is nice, also the ice-rink is fun.
Continue readingAs I reach to put my key in the front door, my husband pulled it open from inside. He shouted “You’ve won, you’ve one, we’re going on the cruise.” I was taken aback by the word “we”, I had had no intentions of taking him, as he had been getting on my nerves quite a lot lately.
He explained that he received a phone call whilst I was out, and had already given the lady all our details. We were to board at midday on 30th June, everything else had been taken care of. Not everything I thought to myself. I would have to go with the flow for now.
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