Dear Readers, I am hosting an Spring writing competition. The theme of your stories should be RENEWAL, in the broadest sense of the word. You have until the 6th of May 2024 to get your stories in. Please post your stories on this thread. They be should be no more than seven-hundred and fifty words.
Sometimes I smell the warm familiar meaty waft of his slept-in skin. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Proud fastidiousness he happily and confidently boundaried with the outer limits of his person. Whatever emanated from there on, was no longer his, or his responsibility. Mr Fastidious, Mr Punctilious, Mr Officious, Mr Scrupulous, Mr Meticulous. He could so lazily and uncarefully foul the air, soil a toilet. And deny his ownership of such ‘til the cows came home. Rosie and I, or should I now say ‘Ro’, had argued angrily about replacing the pillows. She tells me that keeping his died-on pillow, was creepy and evidence of my denial of his death, me comforted by the dent from his head and years old yellowing. And the smell. Good morning, I whisper. Good morning to the person for whom I, with all my faults, was the most important person in the world. And for those moments every day after his death, I was, still, somebody’s most important person in the world.
How appalled Ro would be if she knew that it had been a good ten minutes between me waking to her father’s corpse and calling an ambulance. No one would know what time I woke. Even though I was faced away from him, the silent, cool, rigidity told me he had been dead for some hours. I had been slow to turn toward him. I wanted time to prepare for what would happen that day, that week, that year and for the rest of my life. When I finally turned, I held his face and gently kissed him. Oh, my darling, I said, leaning and pressing into him to search for some fading warmth. Instinctively I adjusted the quilt to his shoulders. I rested my head on him, and as I had in the worst moments of our lives, let that big round hard shoulder cradle me, like a child. There without warning came the yelling and howling of me the animal, crying more salty water than one could imagine a body could hold. There was no mistaking this for the wailing of a child. The sounds of my crying slammed hard against the walls, floors and ceilings near and far in our home. The harsh volume I didn’t know I had, shocked my ears. Oxytocin and endorphins that had surged with my early morning find were released in an episode that hurt my gut and throat, my ears and my eyes, the salt burning my skin, a painful headache seeping through my head, every heartbeat driving the pain further, harder. I was wrecked.
I was back to three days at the practice. I’d been hinted to, clued up and then outright told, that this was more trouble to management of the practice than it was worth. They hadn’t yet had the balls to sack me. The more they dropped the hint that it was time for me to leave, the more my resolve to not leave, hardened. Years of unfairness scarred me into a hard, gristly, intimidating, combat veteran. The red beret of female staff. I wouldn’t have anyone pushing me around now. Now when there was nothing at stake. Now that I didn’t need the work. How it must gall the worst of them to come and ask my opinion on complex patients. I’m a good doctor.
Today is one of the four days in the week that I must fill to make it look like I am doing alright. Otherwise, there will be my adult children, family and friends who will, after interrogation, express concern. In all their annoying ways. What are your plans now? Forthwith analysed and followed by unsolicited advice or discussed with the blunter of family and friends who deliver their unsolicited advice. Ro says I’ve developed an aggressive habit of smiling and nodding while she tries to talk to me about such things. The things that seemed to be approved of are my practice and advisory positions, walking, errands and help in the households of my adult children, volunteering, cooking (but not too much because ‘remember it’s only you mum’). Has Con’s death left me so inept. Has his death taken him and with it me, leaving only this useless aimless shell?
Con’s words whisper from his grave, from his ashes tipped carefully below our lemon tree, from years of love, from the smell of that old pillow. Catherine Eleanor Dawes, the most important person in my life, you are not dead yet.
Standing behind Fred Chen once, we noticed a tiny bulge on his back, under the grey polo shirt that hugged his bulk too tight. “Is that a mole?” I whispered to Chez. “It looks like a button.”
Chez giggled. “It could be his self-destruct button.”
We couldn’t stop seeing it after that.
“What are you two buffoons laughing at?” Fred would ask, looking over his shoulder from his favourite bar stool.
We never told him. We didn’t dare.
Fred drank too much and was a heavy smoker. He was often morose, and if you said the wrong thing about his science fiction obsessions or, worst of all, his background, it could spark a red-faced tirade. So it felt like he really did have a self-destruct button sometimes.
But there was another side to his character. If someone brought a dog into the pub, he’d talk to them in a soft voice and smile, and they’d respond like he was an old friend.
“You should think about a career change,” I said.
Fred’s dad was a popular local doctor, originally from Hong Kong. He had to work hard to be popular, according to his son. When he joined the town clinic, some patients asked to see an ‘English’ doctor. “He decided he had to get to know people,” Fred told me. So Dr Chen joined local sports teams, hobby groups and, much to his son’s embarrassment, a drama club.
“It was excruciating,” Fred said, “seeing him in the local paper, always with a silly hat on at Christmas. They’d call the roles problematic now. All part of his plan to fit in, of course.”
Fred made a point of not fitting in, and refused his dad’s advice growing up. “He wanted me to join the Scouts! And an archery club! Fortunately, Mum let me get on with my own things.”
Mum was a nurse from Bolton, and the “things” she let him get on with were: playing with computers, watching TV and reading comics.
Fred worked in IT at the internet bank where I worked in sales. We frequented the same pub near our office, and bonded over beer and a shared interest in 70s TV – mainly old science fiction shows. I never told him I thought they were amusing rubbish, because of his self-destruct button. When he discovered I was a frustrated writer, he smiled, and the next time I saw him in the pub, he handed over the first chapter of an unfinished novel.
It was called: ‘Attack of the Space Bastards’.
“Funny title,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘funny’?” Fred asked.
“What I meant to say,” I said quickly, “was that it’s funny as in it’s very different.”
He was always in demand to resolve some IT crisis at work, and that, plus the booze, eventually took its toll. His face turned grey, he became even more morose and began to chain-smoke. One night, Chez criticised his smoking habit.
“Those ciggies will kill you,” he said
Fred drained his glass and sighed. “Good,” he said.
I left town shortly after that for a new job and didn’t see Fred or anyone from the pub for nearly a year. Then I bumped into him one day. I’d come back to see a friend and was walking through the park. It was a lovely spring day, and he was the last person I expected to see. I didn’t recognise him initially: he’d lost weight and looked fit.
“Hello, old pal,” he said.
It was warm and his face was pink – partly because of the heat and partly because of the four dogs he was attempting to hold onto.
“I listened to your advice,” he said, nodding at the dogs, “and get paid to walk these terrors now. I still do a bit of IT consultancy, but only work when I want to. Stopped smoking and boozing too, can you believe it?”
I was speechless – I couldn’t believe it.
“I feel renewed these days,” he said, smiling at the sun. “Regenerated, even.” He laughed and we chatted about old times briefly before he had to go.
I watched him as the dogs dragged him away. I couldn’t help staring at his back. He was wearing a tight-fitting orange gym top, but there was no sign of the self-destruct ‘button’ now, and I was really glad about that.
Note: I originally wrote this as a rough character study and shared it here. Had a go at rewriting it as a story!
Looking through the taxi window Sarah followed the West End lights as they slipped past like coloured streamers. The journey from East Finchley hadn't been that bad, just the usual lunchtime traffic. She recognized landmarks, the Palace Theatre showing Les Misérables, the wrought iron awning of the Lyric Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue, and red and gold lanterns of China Town down a side street further on. In Piccadilly Circus models with too-white teeth stared out from giant billboards, and high up the sloping script of Coca-Cola vied with SANYO and McDonald's big red letters. Piccadilly looked the same. Working there in her early twenties had shown her Soho’s Janus faces. By day it was a buzzing TV, advertising, and music business mecca. Italian restaurants and delis were all the rage back in the eighties, sandwiched between exotic Eastern restaurants and pubs like the French House and the Coach and Horses. Creamy homemade pasta or smoked ham and Panettone were on offer, while next door Rasa Siang had spicy mee goreng which would blow your head off. The lunchtime cure for hangovers. Berwick Street Market which supplied them was round the corner, a bustling smorgasbord of people, sounds, and smells. Shouts from hawkers selling fresh fruit and veg, vinyl records, and vintage clothes. Smells of fish and a variety of cheeses. Flower stalls in vibrant colors scents of stock and roses, freesias, and sweet peas beneath their green and white striped awnings. Soho was a dynamic village of creative industry.
But by night, the industry was something else completely. While one slept, the other woke. Daylight doorbells saying 'models' stayed discreetly in the background – you had to look for them – but as dark descended neon signs and red lights in upstairs windows throbbed against the night sky.
SEX.
Groups of drunken men wandered down Frith, Greek, and Dean Streets, some swigging from cans of beer, all shouting jeering comments up Wardour Street and Brewer Street. Neon lights proclaimed exotic entertainment at the Windmill Theatre, home of striptease and burlesque, while outside burly bouncers tempted passers-by.
“Come on mate, lovely ladies plenty of sexy flesh, luscious totty’s waiting for you.”
“Lots of tits, writhing lovelies dancing naked, come and see!”
And then as dawn began to turn the sky a chilly shade of grey it changed again. Shutters were drawn, red lights went off and the last remaining drunks slunk back to bed.
“Give me the car keys.” Myra demanded of Kevin, holding out her hand expectantly. Kevin obeyed before asking, “Hey, why? Where are you going? It’s teatime! Who’s going to feed the kids?” his words fell into air as empty as his stomach.
Nancy and Garth helped themselves to Coco Krispies straight from the packet, and powdery Angel Delight. Kevin joined them. He had no idea how to cook, he wasn’t even sure he was allowed.
Myra was wearing her “Women’s Lib or Bust” t-shirt, her friend Margaret was wearing the same. Margaret was waiting to be rescued at the end of her drive, her face red raw and her voice hoarse from crying. The soles of her Scholls were sinking into melting tar, it must have been eighty degrees in the shade, she reckoned.
“I knew you’d come.” Margaret croaked, trailing melted tar into Myra’s familiar green Escort.
“I’ll never let you down.” Said Myra, as they set off sedately. It would have been appropriate to screech the tyres on the hot tarmac and spin the steering wheel, but Myra was sensible with early-onset middle-age.
“That pub near Blake Crag.” Myra said, tapping the windscreen as if instructing the car. “That one we went to last summer, when the kids gave crisps to that cat, and it was sick all over your handbag. We’ll go there.”
Margaret nodded, sniffling.
They sat in the pub carpark, surrounded by dry-stone walls and moorland, frazzled brown, in the drought. Myra brought them both Coca-Cola with paper straws. “Plastic straws are better,” she said, “but beggars can’t be choosers. The sooner they phase out paper and bring in plastic for everything, the better.”
“Oh Myra, do shut up!” hissed Margaret, sloshing Coca-Cola onto her denim slacks. “What am I going to do?”
“Do?” said Myra, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it bloody isn’t!” Margaret retorted.
“You need to give up your fancy man and see the value in family life.” Myra stated plainly.
Margaret wailed. “And Darrell says we have to move house!”
“Maybe you should. A fresh start. I’ll miss you of course. The kids will cry their eyes out. But this is about your marriage. And to be quite honest, it’s about my marriage too. When Kevin found that letter of yours this afternoon, he thought it was me having the affair! I had to tell him it was you. Kevin told Darrell straightaway! Nothing is more important to us than our solid family unit. I need a break from you and your secret meetings, pretending to babysit my kids. We’ve all had enough now. My marriage is my security, my everything. You just seem to want to throw yours away and I can’t understand it.”
“I love Andre - he is cultured and vibrant. Darrell is as soggy as a paper straw.”
Myra tutted. “My Kevin is dopey too, but he’s also my provider and my children’s father.”
Both looked down at their women’s lib t-shirts, not feeling so much like protesting the patriarchy now.
“I need Kevin, and you need Darrell. You should feel sorry for Andre’s wife. She’s the one who’s really in trouble. I bet you’re not the only one he’s cobbing about with…don’t flatter yourself Margaret.” Myra paused to slurp her Coca-Cola. Margaret had barely touched hers. Perhaps it wasn’t fancy, or French or cultured enough for her, Myra wondered.
“When you get home, you’re going to come clean. You’re going to start again with Darrell,” she commanded, turning the keys in the ignition. “Now then, as we’re driving home, we’ll reminisce about your wedding day.” Myra smiled broadly with her lips closed, so that her dimples were emphasised.
Margaret sighed. She had had to marry Darrell. At the time she was almost thirty and there was nobody left. She had clung to the hope of Andre leaving Claire for 14 years.
“We were married at Heckmondwike Register Office.” Margaret recounted, “Our wedding photos were taken next to a dustbin and a no-parking sign. My dress was French, and I’d spent hours bouffantifying my hair. I did my best to smile all day. I was glad when we were finally in the car together, I was staring straight ahead, I didn’t want to look back as our friends clapped and cheered.”
“Alright love,” said Myra, when she pulled up outside Margaret’s gate. “Straight ahead now, start again, a new beginning!”
Margaret squeezed her best friend’s hand before returning to her family.
Humpty Dumpty Junior was pretty traumatised by the death of his father. The news and social media were full of images of his dad tumbling from the wall, then smashing into fragments on the pavement below. Video clips showed people momentarily frozen in shock, before starting to laugh, and collect up the fragments as souvenirs to take home. After all, it wasn’t every day that you witnessed the death of an egg man.
Humpty Junior was horrified. His father had spent years sitting on the wall, waving to passers-by as they went about their daily business. He had become a tourist attraction, with people from all over the world stopping to take photos. They seemed to love him, so it was a shock to Humpty Junior when his father’s death was treated as a joke. But he was just an egg man, there to be laughed at in death, just as he had been in life.
Humpty Junior sank into a deep depression. He locked the door of his apartment, closed the curtains and took to his bed, refusing to get up even for his father’s funeral.
He perked up when his grandmother came to stay. He thought she would look after him, and bring him tea and crumpets in bed. But Grandma Dumpty didn’t do those things. Grandma Dumpty believed in tough love. She wasn’t going to be an enabler.
She strode into Humpty Junior’s room and pulled back the bed covers.
“Get up!”
“I can’t…”
“No such word as can’t!”
She threw open the curtains. Harsh sunlight streamed into the room. Humpty covered his eyes.
“Let me sleep…”
“No. You’ve got to face the world.”
“The world’s a horrible place…”
“Yes, but it’s the only one we’ve got. So get up and make it better!”
Humpty sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“You’ve got to develop your bouncebackability,” said Grandma.
“My what?”
“Your ability to bounce back from bad things.”
“Did my dad have bouncebackability?”
“Well no – that’s why he ended up smashed to pieces on the pavement. I don’t want the same thing happening to you.”
“So what must I do?”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Humpty Junior. But you’re going to have to become… hard boiled.”
“Hard boiled? I don’t like the sound of that…”
“I’m not surprised. It’s horrible and painful. But if you want to develop bouncebackability…”
Humpty Junior thought for a moment.
“Are you hard boiled, Grandma?”
She nodded.
“Once I was old enough my parents boiled me. They threw me into a big pan of boiling water.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Oh yes – the worst pain imaginable. I hated them for it, but I’m grateful now. And I wish I’d done it to your father.”
“He wasn’t…”
“He was too scared. He ran away and climbed up on his wall. And that’s where he stayed, until…”
Humpty Junior nodded.
“But if I just stay here, where I’m safe…”
“Nowhere’s safe for an egg man! You’ve got to toughen up before they smash your shell and scramble your insides.”
They sat in silence. The sun slowly moved round, from the east to the south to the west, and finally began to set. Dark shadows fell across Humpty Junior’s bedroom.
“I’m ready,” he said.
“I’ll put the pan on.”
Humpty Junior’s screams that night were enough to curdle the yolk of any egg man. But when the sun rose the following morning he was stronger. He was hard boiled.
Grandma made him tea and crumpets for breakfast. Then she said
“It’s time for you to go. Time to take your father’s place on the wall.”
For many years Humpty Junior sat on the wall, smiling and waving to the tourists, just as his father had done. And, just as his father had done, finally he fell. But unlike his father, Humpty Junior didn’t die when he hit the ground. His shell smashed, but inside he was strong. People watched in amazement as the inner egg man emerged from his shell, and bounced back. He rose high above the ground, his bouncebackability defying the laws of gravity. He continued rising until he vanished, a distant white speck disappearing into the night sky.
Eventually Humpty found a place to land, where he could sit above the world and look down upon us all. And that’s how he got his new name. These days, nobody calls him Humpty. These days we call him the man in the moon.
They were both turning forty and had been in each other’s lives for the past twenty-three or so.
They were good, intimate, yet not-just-geographically distant friends. They only exchanged texts for birthdays, New Years, and making their ritual yearly spring lunch plans.
They could have become lovers at some points, but had now had a fifteen-year-long tacit understanding that they were better off with a non-romantic relationship.
She’d been flabbergasted when he’d told her he’d been certain they’d seal the deal at the end of their first year of higher ed over some June dessert in their early twenties. She had liked him dearly for making her laugh like no one else, but would never ever have had the thought. She’d found him too uptight and insecure. Unbeknownst to her, he’d been quite smitten, had mistaken her kindness for flirtiness, and she had very, very much dismayed him by falling for one of his classmates. Not to mention that she had elected an arsehole with whom he’d had to spend the next two years in academic competition.
They’d lost touch over the time she’d been with the wanker, but he’d resurfaced through common new acquaintances, the world of Parisian Arts & Humanities students being small.
The a posteriori bombshell had been delivered in an authentically detached tone after he’d gone on and on about how much in love he was with a complicated, brainy and pretty girl. She had been vexed, if only because she had found him grown in physical attractiveness as he radiated self-assuredness in the wake of enrolling in a Grande École. And also, because his type clearly hadn’t changed.
She’d had a crush. He had noticed, and shown he did not reciprocate. He had even, fairly enough, basked in being righted by the reversal.
There had been a May night of unabashedly luscious dancing although she’d been committed elsewhere again. It had thrown her off balance because it had made her wonder what if. But then, he in turn had been unavailable when she had freed herself anew.
The following year, on one rare occasion when they’d both been single, he had taken her on her first Opera night, which remained one of the grandest nights out of her life, albeit an awkward moment on the Bastille Métro platform.
They cleverly hadn’t dared ruining everything, and let the ship sail as it was meant to.
Time had gone on passing, punctuated by catch-up lunches, always at the same time of the year in London, Paris or Geneva, as his prestigious jobs moved him across Europe. Each other’s company was always a blast–within minutes, they could talk about anything and absolutely, absolutely everything.
It was a not-so-nice April day. She had now been happily married several years, and so had he. She had a five-year-old, he lay his heart open about the Assisted Reproduction Treatment journey he had begun, which was their main topic of discussion since she herself had undergone artificial insemination with donor sperm, and was godmother to the IVF child of a lifelong friend. Always the bureaucrat, he took diligent notes as she recommended clinics, suggested PGD, and gave practical advice about hormonal treatment.
He said he found her glowing, enjoyed her wit as ever, and was genuinely happy about it. She replied the truth: “same”.
It seemed obvious for a few minutes she would never read what was going on between them without effort. She still didn’t know what to make of the spark in his eyes, nor of her occasional blushing.
When they moved outside the café so she could have a smoke with her coffee before heading back to the university where she taught, they had a direct view of the lycée where they had met. She was still in the midst of trying to share a tip about his contribution to his IVF process, to which he most candidly retorted: “you mean, when I masturbate?” They laughed heartily, and moved on to musing and bitching over the odd characters they’d come across over there, themselves included.
Finally, they joked that they could only have fucked each other theoretically in the absolute. They couldn’t but agree that it would have cost them steady joy.
Another new beginning of their uncommonly beautiful friendship.
I lifted the lid of the scuffed black case. There it lay, a red violin on red velveteen. I breathed its familiar wood scent. The bow’s horsehair splayed across the case. The interior compartment held my faded nametag in careful cursive, flourished with an eighth note.
The luthier peered at the bow through pince-nez, expertly snipping the loose hair, which fell to the floor.
“Bow bugs” he said. “They eat the proteins in the horsehair.”
I stood in his cluttered workshop. Apothecary cabinets lined the walls, brimming with bridges and pegs. Snippets of string and hair formed a thin mantle over the floor. The shop was tucked between a massage parlor and a food mart, anonymous but for its violin shingle, barely visible above a tangle of venetian blinds. John was just as disheveled, pot-bellied in a dusty black apron, stringy hair running down his back and combed over his bald spot. On the wall hung a photograph of him, young with a shag haircut and broad smile, seated beside his father, who hunched over a violin.
He replaced the tailpiece, tuned the strings, and handed it to me.
“Play,” he commanded.
On a wave of anxiety, I raised it to my shoulder for the first time in thirty years. My fingers fumbled to find their positions. I timidly bowed the strings. He angled me toward a grimy glass cabinet.
“Watch your reflection.”
I played a scale, watching the bow’s trajectory. A dormant muscle memory began to stir.
“Pretty straight,” he observed, and I beamed. Then he sent me blinking into the sunlight.
I played violin from four to fourteen, studying under the Suzuki method, developing classical pitch and form. My classmates and I pulled finger guns from imaginary holsters and pointed them at each other blurting, “EGBDF!” to memorize the treble clef lines. We shook film cannisters of rice to learn the wrist motion of vibrato. We joined orchestras, practicing in metal folding chairs and donning black bottoms and starchy white tops for recitals.
My instructor Danielle had golden skin and a mane of honey blonde hair. She’d traveled to Egypt to record in the pyramids. The acoustics were the best in the world, she said. I treasured her cassette, even if her wild improvisations went against my Suzuki sensibilities. On the cover she appeared before a stone sphinx; on the inlay were her mystical song titles, “Consciousness Cresting” and “Feast of the Animals.”
After Danielle had a baby she would bring her to our house, until one day she ended our lesson abruptly.
“It’s not safe for my baby here,” she said, choking back her indignance.
My face burned. I knew we stood among bowls of crusted cereal, piles of dirty clothes. I could smell the acrid urine from our cats, consolation gifts for me and my sister in the divorce. My mom’s happy homemaking had unraveled, and we hadn’t stepped up. My sister and I watched as Danielle packed up her violin and her baby and left.
I kept playing in the orchestra, but I began to resent the violin, its unforgiving nature, its rigid demands. I hated its high, thin sound. By eighth grade, we were preparing the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, a baroque fast-finger frenzy. The music wormed its way into my brain, playing throughout the day as I visualized my fingers pressing every note. The more it consumed me the less I practiced. I shirked the gaze of the first chair, having degenerated into another lazy student. I managed through the performance, then quit.
For a while I would tell people I used to play. Then I stopped mentioning it. Then I stopped thinking about it.
Until I accompanied a friend to the symphony and the strings opened like a sweet delicacy, then swelled in love and pain. They enveloped me, inviting me back.
With the red violin restored, I began stealing twenty minutes each evening. I played in the bathroom, for privacy and a mirror to monitor my form. The acoustics, though not pyramid-grade, weren’t half bad. I relished coaxing beautiful sound out of this delicate, particular instrument. I’d play a pop song, gloriously simple. I’d follow notes as they took shape into melody. One time an old practice minuet, alert and precise. Another a hymn, over and over. My tone grew richer, my bow strokes bolder.
One evening my five-year old called to me, “Mommy, is that you?”
When you hide your emotions from those around you, then you cease to behave as the real you. Instead, you become the version of yourself that can survive, within the projection of bullshit that you’ve spun. People will tolerate you, but they won’t like it. They will sense that there is something, at the very least, that is unsaid. They may be happy to skirt around that for the sake of peace, but they know it’s lurking there. It will silently annoy them. Sometimes it’s staring out of your eyes when you haven’t got the wherewithal to guard against it with your usual vacant pretence. They will spot that look and realise that you’ve let your veil slip and that there is a sadness, no, much more, a truth there, that they hadn’t seen. The good news is they’re unlikely to mention it because it’s easier.
You may become very adept at self-managing and look very busy getting on with things, and you will complain about setbacks and make a great deal of small successes, and these are all parts of the same act. It takes effort to perform at this constant, sub-mediocre level. To call it a lie is problematic. It’s not blatant enough for that, it comes under the heading of a lie which is unspoken, or hard to explain at all, living in a way which seems bearable, but emotionally, it isn’t. You’re not saying it because of your fear of speaking at all, so you’re just living it, quietly, which is essentially the same and not so easily exposed as a blatant untruth.
I know that sometimes, even you allow a few moments of indulgence. You might close your eyes swiftly, and admit a daydream at the very back of your perception, or as you drift off at night, you allow a secret stiletto of true feeling to pass across your mind which is almost orgasmic because it will hover there until you wake, stirring you to force a brief smile, before you slip back on the mask and go back to the half-life. The tragedy is that you’re hiding those feelings until it becomes a habit. You get into a ludicrous routine where you almost convince yourself that the façade is in fact, the truth. That works until it hits you. When you have no warning you hear a song, watch something, hear a story on the radio, hear a string of utterances from someone, said in a familiar order, and in seconds you are transported back to a time where you lived within the raw fear of total truth. Part of you doesn’t want to remember because if you do then it means it must have been real. That admission would make carrying on all the harder. You should be grateful for those memories. Things you said and did with total conviction. That showed you who you really were. But any concept of honesty, within the context of something very dishonest, was never an option for you. You weren’t brave by any means, but you were certainly a little more courageous. More than now.
You will carry on with your performance. Until when? Most likely when the decision is made for you by someone who realises and is shocked by another, perhaps final, falsehood. Thankfully, that will never happen, so just lower yourself into the new role and shrug off the chance. You’ll enjoy letting the detachment game become the new reality, that’s not so hard, is it? Time is the useful healer, each second or minute onward, sealing more of the wound. It’s also the paid-for whore, used in the way you choose, so you can lie to time whenever it suits. I think you can stand it because it’s not so bad to live well in the meantime, albeit in pain.
The renewal of our lives was once going to be ours. I understand that outcome would have been so much worse for you, than this. Instead, the renewal is solely yours, and as long as you can remember to keep hidden that dying look behind your eyes, then you can have that clean new life for as long as you want. One day, seventeen years from now, beyond any concept of knowing, we will both look up at a far horizon as the sun sledges away, and wonder if our eyes ever again, expressed true happiness.
She had the face of a Cherokee, and the general look of a girl who spends the summer under the Greek sun. When I saw her walking down the narrow path, she had her arms stretched and carrying the peacock on her back. This was the summer that we dreaded, for it was to be one of memories and grief. Watching Ageliki play in the water was soothing. It brought me back to that age, before puberty, when nothing has really happened. Yet. No self-doubt, no boys, no loss, just pure happiness.
She descended to the beach, every day with her grandparents and her dog, Marla, in tow. They brought their own yellow folded chairs, and Marla dug a hole in the sand under one of them, to keep cool.
The kids were mad about Ageliki, my own son included. She was sweet, she was fun and had a giant peacock. What more could one ask for? I sat there taking in the sheer joy they felt, climbing on and off the colourful bird. Ageliki being so caring, helping the boy come out of the water and back in. I started chatting with grandpa. “Don’t worry”, he said, “I have a rope tied to the peacock”. The year before, a four year old girl got carried away by the current on her floating unicorn. She just stayed still as a sculpture, frozen from fear, until she was rescued by the coast guard.
Ageliki and the peacock became the highlight of our day. Sometimes we would call for her, when we passed her house. “Ageliki! Ageliki!”, my son would shout outside the gate. She slowly strode through the tall vegetation of the estate, a sort of paradiso perduto, with her as a contemporary Estella. Other than the beach, she wore cotton shorts and cropped tops. Her shy look, with her hands behind her back and head slightly bend downwards, made her look wise. The place had a magical quality, with its miniature sculptures of terriers, ancient olive trees, and old furniture scattered around the garden. It was certainly a place to explore, but she never let us through the gates.
One evening we saw her and her grandfather pushing an old boat in the sea, which was soft and still like olive oil. “We’re going fishing”, she said. Grandpa knew so many words for the wind, and he gladly explained them to us, “Maistros, Sirokos, they’re all different!”. “The Maistros is a north-western wind, pleasant and warm, that rises in the afternoon and dies at sunset. Contrary to the Sirokos, which comes from North Africa and can cause hurricanes, as well as bad moods”. In his youth he used to command large ships, now he rested in his small boat with the girl for company. There was no one else around, and the pink colour of the dusk made the vision of Ageliki on the boat, with her namesake, seem timeless.
Days turned to weeks, and the time came for Ageliki to leave. She would spend the rest of the summer at a holiday camp. I worried for her, will she be disappointed? Will she be heartbroken? Will she lose her smile? Could she stay like this forever? It was impossible to keep her from growing up, to protect her. On the day of her departure, I avoided saying goodbye. Eventually they came and found us, her in her cotton shorts and top, all timid and quiet. She hugged me, and I cried. Wondering why I felt so sad, to be separated from this little girl, whom I had met only a while ago. I didn’t want to let her go, I didn’t want to let me go.
After she left, the peacock stood lonely under the olive trees of the estate. I passed each day, on my way to the beach and looked at it from the corner of my eye. It slowly deflated, and one day, it was gone. We asked about Ageliki, “Is she having a good time? Will she come again next year?” The beach was empty without her and the peacock, but she occupied and distracted our minds from everything bad. The following years we would go back to the island and shout her name behind the gate, “Ageliki! Ageliki!”. We never saw her or the peacock again.
I was so delighted to see Renewal as an Autumn writing competition. The busyness of living and the death and destruction around us somehow remove us from the renewal of autumn rather than feeling the renewal of autumn. Is it just because I'm in my Autumn years? No as I have always loved Autumn and the changes it brings - primarily a slower, once orderly progression of changes.
Please excuse my typo. This is a SPRING writing competition, not Autumn.
Sometimes I smell the warm familiar meaty waft of his slept-in skin. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Proud fastidiousness he happily and confidently boundaried with the outer limits of his person. Whatever emanated from there on, was no longer his, or his responsibility. Mr Fastidious, Mr Punctilious, Mr Officious, Mr Scrupulous, Mr Meticulous. He could so lazily and uncarefully foul the air, soil a toilet. And deny his ownership of such ‘til the cows came home. Rosie and I, or should I now say ‘Ro’, had argued angrily about replacing the pillows. She tells me that keeping his died-on pillow, was creepy and evidence of my denial of his death, me comforted by the dent from his head and years old yellowing. And the smell. Good morning, I whisper. Good morning to the person for whom I, with all my faults, was the most important person in the world. And for those moments every day after his death, I was, still, somebody’s most important person in the world.
How appalled Ro would be if she knew that it had been a good ten minutes between me waking to her father’s corpse and calling an ambulance. No one would know what time I woke. Even though I was faced away from him, the silent, cool, rigidity told me he had been dead for some hours. I had been slow to turn toward him. I wanted time to prepare for what would happen that day, that week, that year and for the rest of my life. When I finally turned, I held his face and gently kissed him. Oh, my darling, I said, leaning and pressing into him to search for some fading warmth. Instinctively I adjusted the quilt to his shoulders. I rested my head on him, and as I had in the worst moments of our lives, let that big round hard shoulder cradle me, like a child. There without warning came the yelling and howling of me the animal, crying more salty water than one could imagine a body could hold. There was no mistaking this for the wailing of a child. The sounds of my crying slammed hard against the walls, floors and ceilings near and far in our home. The harsh volume I didn’t know I had, shocked my ears. Oxytocin and endorphins that had surged with my early morning find were released in an episode that hurt my gut and throat, my ears and my eyes, the salt burning my skin, a painful headache seeping through my head, every heartbeat driving the pain further, harder. I was wrecked.
I was back to three days at the practice. I’d been hinted to, clued up and then outright told, that this was more trouble to management of the practice than it was worth. They hadn’t yet had the balls to sack me. The more they dropped the hint that it was time for me to leave, the more my resolve to not leave, hardened. Years of unfairness scarred me into a hard, gristly, intimidating, combat veteran. The red beret of female staff. I wouldn’t have anyone pushing me around now. Now when there was nothing at stake. Now that I didn’t need the work. How it must gall the worst of them to come and ask my opinion on complex patients. I’m a good doctor.
Today is one of the four days in the week that I must fill to make it look like I am doing alright. Otherwise, there will be my adult children, family and friends who will, after interrogation, express concern. In all their annoying ways. What are your plans now? Forthwith analysed and followed by unsolicited advice or discussed with the blunter of family and friends who deliver their unsolicited advice. Ro says I’ve developed an aggressive habit of smiling and nodding while she tries to talk to me about such things. The things that seemed to be approved of are my practice and advisory positions, walking, errands and help in the households of my adult children, volunteering, cooking (but not too much because ‘remember it’s only you mum’). Has Con’s death left me so inept. Has his death taken him and with it me, leaving only this useless aimless shell?
Con’s words whisper from his grave, from his ashes tipped carefully below our lemon tree, from years of love, from the smell of that old pillow. Catherine Eleanor Dawes, the most important person in my life, you are not dead yet.
Regenerated
Standing behind Fred Chen once, we noticed a tiny bulge on his back, under the grey polo shirt that hugged his bulk too tight. “Is that a mole?” I whispered to Chez. “It looks like a button.”
Chez giggled. “It could be his self-destruct button.”
We couldn’t stop seeing it after that.
“What are you two buffoons laughing at?” Fred would ask, looking over his shoulder from his favourite bar stool.
We never told him. We didn’t dare.
Fred drank too much and was a heavy smoker. He was often morose, and if you said the wrong thing about his science fiction obsessions or, worst of all, his background, it could spark a red-faced tirade. So it felt like he really did have a self-destruct button sometimes.
But there was another side to his character. If someone brought a dog into the pub, he’d talk to them in a soft voice and smile, and they’d respond like he was an old friend.
“You should think about a career change,” I said.
Fred’s dad was a popular local doctor, originally from Hong Kong. He had to work hard to be popular, according to his son. When he joined the town clinic, some patients asked to see an ‘English’ doctor. “He decided he had to get to know people,” Fred told me. So Dr Chen joined local sports teams, hobby groups and, much to his son’s embarrassment, a drama club.
“It was excruciating,” Fred said, “seeing him in the local paper, always with a silly hat on at Christmas. They’d call the roles problematic now. All part of his plan to fit in, of course.”
Fred made a point of not fitting in, and refused his dad’s advice growing up. “He wanted me to join the Scouts! And an archery club! Fortunately, Mum let me get on with my own things.”
Mum was a nurse from Bolton, and the “things” she let him get on with were: playing with computers, watching TV and reading comics.
Fred worked in IT at the internet bank where I worked in sales. We frequented the same pub near our office, and bonded over beer and a shared interest in 70s TV – mainly old science fiction shows. I never told him I thought they were amusing rubbish, because of his self-destruct button. When he discovered I was a frustrated writer, he smiled, and the next time I saw him in the pub, he handed over the first chapter of an unfinished novel.
It was called: ‘Attack of the Space Bastards’.
“Funny title,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘funny’?” Fred asked.
“What I meant to say,” I said quickly, “was that it’s funny as in it’s very different.”
He was always in demand to resolve some IT crisis at work, and that, plus the booze, eventually took its toll. His face turned grey, he became even more morose and began to chain-smoke. One night, Chez criticised his smoking habit.
“Those ciggies will kill you,” he said
Fred drained his glass and sighed. “Good,” he said.
I left town shortly after that for a new job and didn’t see Fred or anyone from the pub for nearly a year. Then I bumped into him one day. I’d come back to see a friend and was walking through the park. It was a lovely spring day, and he was the last person I expected to see. I didn’t recognise him initially: he’d lost weight and looked fit.
“Hello, old pal,” he said.
It was warm and his face was pink – partly because of the heat and partly because of the four dogs he was attempting to hold onto.
“I listened to your advice,” he said, nodding at the dogs, “and get paid to walk these terrors now. I still do a bit of IT consultancy, but only work when I want to. Stopped smoking and boozing too, can you believe it?”
I was speechless – I couldn’t believe it.
“I feel renewed these days,” he said, smiling at the sun. “Regenerated, even.” He laughed and we chatted about old times briefly before he had to go.
I watched him as the dogs dragged him away. I couldn’t help staring at his back. He was wearing a tight-fitting orange gym top, but there was no sign of the self-destruct ‘button’ now, and I was really glad about that.
Note: I originally wrote this as a rough character study and shared it here. Had a go at rewriting it as a story!
It’s Spring!
Looking through the taxi window Sarah followed the West End lights as they slipped past like coloured streamers. The journey from East Finchley hadn't been that bad, just the usual lunchtime traffic. She recognized landmarks, the Palace Theatre showing Les Misérables, the wrought iron awning of the Lyric Theatre on Shaftsbury Avenue, and red and gold lanterns of China Town down a side street further on. In Piccadilly Circus models with too-white teeth stared out from giant billboards, and high up the sloping script of Coca-Cola vied with SANYO and McDonald's big red letters. Piccadilly looked the same. Working there in her early twenties had shown her Soho’s Janus faces. By day it was a buzzing TV, advertising, and music business mecca. Italian restaurants and delis were all the rage back in the eighties, sandwiched between exotic Eastern restaurants and pubs like the French House and the Coach and Horses. Creamy homemade pasta or smoked ham and Panettone were on offer, while next door Rasa Siang had spicy mee goreng which would blow your head off. The lunchtime cure for hangovers. Berwick Street Market which supplied them was round the corner, a bustling smorgasbord of people, sounds, and smells. Shouts from hawkers selling fresh fruit and veg, vinyl records, and vintage clothes. Smells of fish and a variety of cheeses. Flower stalls in vibrant colors scents of stock and roses, freesias, and sweet peas beneath their green and white striped awnings. Soho was a dynamic village of creative industry.
But by night, the industry was something else completely. While one slept, the other woke. Daylight doorbells saying 'models' stayed discreetly in the background – you had to look for them – but as dark descended neon signs and red lights in upstairs windows throbbed against the night sky.
SEX.
Groups of drunken men wandered down Frith, Greek, and Dean Streets, some swigging from cans of beer, all shouting jeering comments up Wardour Street and Brewer Street. Neon lights proclaimed exotic entertainment at the Windmill Theatre, home of striptease and burlesque, while outside burly bouncers tempted passers-by.
“Come on mate, lovely ladies plenty of sexy flesh, luscious totty’s waiting for you.”
“Lots of tits, writhing lovelies dancing naked, come and see!”
And then as dawn began to turn the sky a chilly shade of grey it changed again. Shutters were drawn, red lights went off and the last remaining drunks slunk back to bed.
Then it all began again.
Paper Straws
“Give me the car keys.” Myra demanded of Kevin, holding out her hand expectantly. Kevin obeyed before asking, “Hey, why? Where are you going? It’s teatime! Who’s going to feed the kids?” his words fell into air as empty as his stomach.
Nancy and Garth helped themselves to Coco Krispies straight from the packet, and powdery Angel Delight. Kevin joined them. He had no idea how to cook, he wasn’t even sure he was allowed.
Myra was wearing her “Women’s Lib or Bust” t-shirt, her friend Margaret was wearing the same. Margaret was waiting to be rescued at the end of her drive, her face red raw and her voice hoarse from crying. The soles of her Scholls were sinking into melting tar, it must have been eighty degrees in the shade, she reckoned.
“I knew you’d come.” Margaret croaked, trailing melted tar into Myra’s familiar green Escort.
“I’ll never let you down.” Said Myra, as they set off sedately. It would have been appropriate to screech the tyres on the hot tarmac and spin the steering wheel, but Myra was sensible with early-onset middle-age.
“That pub near Blake Crag.” Myra said, tapping the windscreen as if instructing the car. “That one we went to last summer, when the kids gave crisps to that cat, and it was sick all over your handbag. We’ll go there.”
Margaret nodded, sniffling.
They sat in the pub carpark, surrounded by dry-stone walls and moorland, frazzled brown, in the drought. Myra brought them both Coca-Cola with paper straws. “Plastic straws are better,” she said, “but beggars can’t be choosers. The sooner they phase out paper and bring in plastic for everything, the better.”
“Oh Myra, do shut up!” hissed Margaret, sloshing Coca-Cola onto her denim slacks. “What am I going to do?”
“Do?” said Myra, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it bloody isn’t!” Margaret retorted.
“You need to give up your fancy man and see the value in family life.” Myra stated plainly.
Margaret wailed. “And Darrell says we have to move house!”
“Maybe you should. A fresh start. I’ll miss you of course. The kids will cry their eyes out. But this is about your marriage. And to be quite honest, it’s about my marriage too. When Kevin found that letter of yours this afternoon, he thought it was me having the affair! I had to tell him it was you. Kevin told Darrell straightaway! Nothing is more important to us than our solid family unit. I need a break from you and your secret meetings, pretending to babysit my kids. We’ve all had enough now. My marriage is my security, my everything. You just seem to want to throw yours away and I can’t understand it.”
“I love Andre - he is cultured and vibrant. Darrell is as soggy as a paper straw.”
Myra tutted. “My Kevin is dopey too, but he’s also my provider and my children’s father.”
Both looked down at their women’s lib t-shirts, not feeling so much like protesting the patriarchy now.
“I need Kevin, and you need Darrell. You should feel sorry for Andre’s wife. She’s the one who’s really in trouble. I bet you’re not the only one he’s cobbing about with…don’t flatter yourself Margaret.” Myra paused to slurp her Coca-Cola. Margaret had barely touched hers. Perhaps it wasn’t fancy, or French or cultured enough for her, Myra wondered.
“When you get home, you’re going to come clean. You’re going to start again with Darrell,” she commanded, turning the keys in the ignition. “Now then, as we’re driving home, we’ll reminisce about your wedding day.” Myra smiled broadly with her lips closed, so that her dimples were emphasised.
Margaret sighed. She had had to marry Darrell. At the time she was almost thirty and there was nobody left. She had clung to the hope of Andre leaving Claire for 14 years.
“We were married at Heckmondwike Register Office.” Margaret recounted, “Our wedding photos were taken next to a dustbin and a no-parking sign. My dress was French, and I’d spent hours bouffantifying my hair. I did my best to smile all day. I was glad when we were finally in the car together, I was staring straight ahead, I didn’t want to look back as our friends clapped and cheered.”
“Alright love,” said Myra, when she pulled up outside Margaret’s gate. “Straight ahead now, start again, a new beginning!”
Margaret squeezed her best friend’s hand before returning to her family.
Start again with Darrell? she thought.
Will I heck as like.
Humpty Dumpty Bounces Back
Humpty Dumpty Junior was pretty traumatised by the death of his father. The news and social media were full of images of his dad tumbling from the wall, then smashing into fragments on the pavement below. Video clips showed people momentarily frozen in shock, before starting to laugh, and collect up the fragments as souvenirs to take home. After all, it wasn’t every day that you witnessed the death of an egg man.
Humpty Junior was horrified. His father had spent years sitting on the wall, waving to passers-by as they went about their daily business. He had become a tourist attraction, with people from all over the world stopping to take photos. They seemed to love him, so it was a shock to Humpty Junior when his father’s death was treated as a joke. But he was just an egg man, there to be laughed at in death, just as he had been in life.
Humpty Junior sank into a deep depression. He locked the door of his apartment, closed the curtains and took to his bed, refusing to get up even for his father’s funeral.
He perked up when his grandmother came to stay. He thought she would look after him, and bring him tea and crumpets in bed. But Grandma Dumpty didn’t do those things. Grandma Dumpty believed in tough love. She wasn’t going to be an enabler.
She strode into Humpty Junior’s room and pulled back the bed covers.
“Get up!”
“I can’t…”
“No such word as can’t!”
She threw open the curtains. Harsh sunlight streamed into the room. Humpty covered his eyes.
“Let me sleep…”
“No. You’ve got to face the world.”
“The world’s a horrible place…”
“Yes, but it’s the only one we’ve got. So get up and make it better!”
Humpty sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“You’ve got to develop your bouncebackability,” said Grandma.
“My what?”
“Your ability to bounce back from bad things.”
“Did my dad have bouncebackability?”
“Well no – that’s why he ended up smashed to pieces on the pavement. I don’t want the same thing happening to you.”
“So what must I do?”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Humpty Junior. But you’re going to have to become… hard boiled.”
“Hard boiled? I don’t like the sound of that…”
“I’m not surprised. It’s horrible and painful. But if you want to develop bouncebackability…”
Humpty Junior thought for a moment.
“Are you hard boiled, Grandma?”
She nodded.
“Once I was old enough my parents boiled me. They threw me into a big pan of boiling water.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Oh yes – the worst pain imaginable. I hated them for it, but I’m grateful now. And I wish I’d done it to your father.”
“He wasn’t…”
“He was too scared. He ran away and climbed up on his wall. And that’s where he stayed, until…”
Humpty Junior nodded.
“But if I just stay here, where I’m safe…”
“Nowhere’s safe for an egg man! You’ve got to toughen up before they smash your shell and scramble your insides.”
They sat in silence. The sun slowly moved round, from the east to the south to the west, and finally began to set. Dark shadows fell across Humpty Junior’s bedroom.
“I’m ready,” he said.
“I’ll put the pan on.”
Humpty Junior’s screams that night were enough to curdle the yolk of any egg man. But when the sun rose the following morning he was stronger. He was hard boiled.
Grandma made him tea and crumpets for breakfast. Then she said
“It’s time for you to go. Time to take your father’s place on the wall.”
For many years Humpty Junior sat on the wall, smiling and waving to the tourists, just as his father had done. And, just as his father had done, finally he fell. But unlike his father, Humpty Junior didn’t die when he hit the ground. His shell smashed, but inside he was strong. People watched in amazement as the inner egg man emerged from his shell, and bounced back. He rose high above the ground, his bouncebackability defying the laws of gravity. He continued rising until he vanished, a distant white speck disappearing into the night sky.
Eventually Humpty found a place to land, where he could sit above the world and look down upon us all. And that’s how he got his new name. These days, nobody calls him Humpty. These days we call him the man in the moon.
They were both turning forty and had been in each other’s lives for the past twenty-three or so.
They were good, intimate, yet not-just-geographically distant friends. They only exchanged texts for birthdays, New Years, and making their ritual yearly spring lunch plans.
They could have become lovers at some points, but had now had a fifteen-year-long tacit understanding that they were better off with a non-romantic relationship.
She’d been flabbergasted when he’d told her he’d been certain they’d seal the deal at the end of their first year of higher ed over some June dessert in their early twenties. She had liked him dearly for making her laugh like no one else, but would never ever have had the thought. She’d found him too uptight and insecure. Unbeknownst to her, he’d been quite smitten, had mistaken her kindness for flirtiness, and she had very, very much dismayed him by falling for one of his classmates. Not to mention that she had elected an arsehole with whom he’d had to spend the next two years in academic competition.
They’d lost touch over the time she’d been with the wanker, but he’d resurfaced through common new acquaintances, the world of Parisian Arts & Humanities students being small.
The a posteriori bombshell had been delivered in an authentically detached tone after he’d gone on and on about how much in love he was with a complicated, brainy and pretty girl. She had been vexed, if only because she had found him grown in physical attractiveness as he radiated self-assuredness in the wake of enrolling in a Grande École. And also, because his type clearly hadn’t changed.
She’d had a crush. He had noticed, and shown he did not reciprocate. He had even, fairly enough, basked in being righted by the reversal.
There had been a May night of unabashedly luscious dancing although she’d been committed elsewhere again. It had thrown her off balance because it had made her wonder what if. But then, he in turn had been unavailable when she had freed herself anew.
The following year, on one rare occasion when they’d both been single, he had taken her on her first Opera night, which remained one of the grandest nights out of her life, albeit an awkward moment on the Bastille Métro platform.
They cleverly hadn’t dared ruining everything, and let the ship sail as it was meant to.
Time had gone on passing, punctuated by catch-up lunches, always at the same time of the year in London, Paris or Geneva, as his prestigious jobs moved him across Europe. Each other’s company was always a blast–within minutes, they could talk about anything and absolutely, absolutely everything.
It was a not-so-nice April day. She had now been happily married several years, and so had he. She had a five-year-old, he lay his heart open about the Assisted Reproduction Treatment journey he had begun, which was their main topic of discussion since she herself had undergone artificial insemination with donor sperm, and was godmother to the IVF child of a lifelong friend. Always the bureaucrat, he took diligent notes as she recommended clinics, suggested PGD, and gave practical advice about hormonal treatment.
He said he found her glowing, enjoyed her wit as ever, and was genuinely happy about it. She replied the truth: “same”.
It seemed obvious for a few minutes she would never read what was going on between them without effort. She still didn’t know what to make of the spark in his eyes, nor of her occasional blushing.
When they moved outside the café so she could have a smoke with her coffee before heading back to the university where she taught, they had a direct view of the lycée where they had met. She was still in the midst of trying to share a tip about his contribution to his IVF process, to which he most candidly retorted: “you mean, when I masturbate?” They laughed heartily, and moved on to musing and bitching over the odd characters they’d come across over there, themselves included.
Finally, they joked that they could only have fucked each other theoretically in the absolute. They couldn’t but agree that it would have cost them steady joy.
Another new beginning of their uncommonly beautiful friendship.
A Red Violin
I lifted the lid of the scuffed black case. There it lay, a red violin on red velveteen. I breathed its familiar wood scent. The bow’s horsehair splayed across the case. The interior compartment held my faded nametag in careful cursive, flourished with an eighth note.
The luthier peered at the bow through pince-nez, expertly snipping the loose hair, which fell to the floor.
“Bow bugs” he said. “They eat the proteins in the horsehair.”
I stood in his cluttered workshop. Apothecary cabinets lined the walls, brimming with bridges and pegs. Snippets of string and hair formed a thin mantle over the floor. The shop was tucked between a massage parlor and a food mart, anonymous but for its violin shingle, barely visible above a tangle of venetian blinds. John was just as disheveled, pot-bellied in a dusty black apron, stringy hair running down his back and combed over his bald spot. On the wall hung a photograph of him, young with a shag haircut and broad smile, seated beside his father, who hunched over a violin.
He replaced the tailpiece, tuned the strings, and handed it to me.
“Play,” he commanded.
On a wave of anxiety, I raised it to my shoulder for the first time in thirty years. My fingers fumbled to find their positions. I timidly bowed the strings. He angled me toward a grimy glass cabinet.
“Watch your reflection.”
I played a scale, watching the bow’s trajectory. A dormant muscle memory began to stir.
“Pretty straight,” he observed, and I beamed. Then he sent me blinking into the sunlight.
I played violin from four to fourteen, studying under the Suzuki method, developing classical pitch and form. My classmates and I pulled finger guns from imaginary holsters and pointed them at each other blurting, “EGBDF!” to memorize the treble clef lines. We shook film cannisters of rice to learn the wrist motion of vibrato. We joined orchestras, practicing in metal folding chairs and donning black bottoms and starchy white tops for recitals.
My instructor Danielle had golden skin and a mane of honey blonde hair. She’d traveled to Egypt to record in the pyramids. The acoustics were the best in the world, she said. I treasured her cassette, even if her wild improvisations went against my Suzuki sensibilities. On the cover she appeared before a stone sphinx; on the inlay were her mystical song titles, “Consciousness Cresting” and “Feast of the Animals.”
After Danielle had a baby she would bring her to our house, until one day she ended our lesson abruptly.
“It’s not safe for my baby here,” she said, choking back her indignance.
My face burned. I knew we stood among bowls of crusted cereal, piles of dirty clothes. I could smell the acrid urine from our cats, consolation gifts for me and my sister in the divorce. My mom’s happy homemaking had unraveled, and we hadn’t stepped up. My sister and I watched as Danielle packed up her violin and her baby and left.
I kept playing in the orchestra, but I began to resent the violin, its unforgiving nature, its rigid demands. I hated its high, thin sound. By eighth grade, we were preparing the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, a baroque fast-finger frenzy. The music wormed its way into my brain, playing throughout the day as I visualized my fingers pressing every note. The more it consumed me the less I practiced. I shirked the gaze of the first chair, having degenerated into another lazy student. I managed through the performance, then quit.
For a while I would tell people I used to play. Then I stopped mentioning it. Then I stopped thinking about it.
Until I accompanied a friend to the symphony and the strings opened like a sweet delicacy, then swelled in love and pain. They enveloped me, inviting me back.
With the red violin restored, I began stealing twenty minutes each evening. I played in the bathroom, for privacy and a mirror to monitor my form. The acoustics, though not pyramid-grade, weren’t half bad. I relished coaxing beautiful sound out of this delicate, particular instrument. I’d play a pop song, gloriously simple. I’d follow notes as they took shape into melody. One time an old practice minuet, alert and precise. Another a hymn, over and over. My tone grew richer, my bow strokes bolder.
One evening my five-year old called to me, “Mommy, is that you?”
“I’m just practicing,” I yelled back.
“Oh,” he said, “it sounds like real music.”
Renewal
When you hide your emotions from those around you, then you cease to behave as the real you. Instead, you become the version of yourself that can survive, within the projection of bullshit that you’ve spun. People will tolerate you, but they won’t like it. They will sense that there is something, at the very least, that is unsaid. They may be happy to skirt around that for the sake of peace, but they know it’s lurking there. It will silently annoy them. Sometimes it’s staring out of your eyes when you haven’t got the wherewithal to guard against it with your usual vacant pretence. They will spot that look and realise that you’ve let your veil slip and that there is a sadness, no, much more, a truth there, that they hadn’t seen. The good news is they’re unlikely to mention it because it’s easier.
You may become very adept at self-managing and look very busy getting on with things, and you will complain about setbacks and make a great deal of small successes, and these are all parts of the same act. It takes effort to perform at this constant, sub-mediocre level. To call it a lie is problematic. It’s not blatant enough for that, it comes under the heading of a lie which is unspoken, or hard to explain at all, living in a way which seems bearable, but emotionally, it isn’t. You’re not saying it because of your fear of speaking at all, so you’re just living it, quietly, which is essentially the same and not so easily exposed as a blatant untruth.
I know that sometimes, even you allow a few moments of indulgence. You might close your eyes swiftly, and admit a daydream at the very back of your perception, or as you drift off at night, you allow a secret stiletto of true feeling to pass across your mind which is almost orgasmic because it will hover there until you wake, stirring you to force a brief smile, before you slip back on the mask and go back to the half-life. The tragedy is that you’re hiding those feelings until it becomes a habit. You get into a ludicrous routine where you almost convince yourself that the façade is in fact, the truth. That works until it hits you. When you have no warning you hear a song, watch something, hear a story on the radio, hear a string of utterances from someone, said in a familiar order, and in seconds you are transported back to a time where you lived within the raw fear of total truth. Part of you doesn’t want to remember because if you do then it means it must have been real. That admission would make carrying on all the harder. You should be grateful for those memories. Things you said and did with total conviction. That showed you who you really were. But any concept of honesty, within the context of something very dishonest, was never an option for you. You weren’t brave by any means, but you were certainly a little more courageous. More than now.
You will carry on with your performance. Until when? Most likely when the decision is made for you by someone who realises and is shocked by another, perhaps final, falsehood. Thankfully, that will never happen, so just lower yourself into the new role and shrug off the chance. You’ll enjoy letting the detachment game become the new reality, that’s not so hard, is it? Time is the useful healer, each second or minute onward, sealing more of the wound. It’s also the paid-for whore, used in the way you choose, so you can lie to time whenever it suits. I think you can stand it because it’s not so bad to live well in the meantime, albeit in pain.
The renewal of our lives was once going to be ours. I understand that outcome would have been so much worse for you, than this. Instead, the renewal is solely yours, and as long as you can remember to keep hidden that dying look behind your eyes, then you can have that clean new life for as long as you want. One day, seventeen years from now, beyond any concept of knowing, we will both look up at a far horizon as the sun sledges away, and wonder if our eyes ever again, expressed true happiness.
Ageliki and the Peacock
She had the face of a Cherokee, and the general look of a girl who spends the summer under the Greek sun. When I saw her walking down the narrow path, she had her arms stretched and carrying the peacock on her back. This was the summer that we dreaded, for it was to be one of memories and grief. Watching Ageliki play in the water was soothing. It brought me back to that age, before puberty, when nothing has really happened. Yet. No self-doubt, no boys, no loss, just pure happiness.
She descended to the beach, every day with her grandparents and her dog, Marla, in tow. They brought their own yellow folded chairs, and Marla dug a hole in the sand under one of them, to keep cool.
The kids were mad about Ageliki, my own son included. She was sweet, she was fun and had a giant peacock. What more could one ask for? I sat there taking in the sheer joy they felt, climbing on and off the colourful bird. Ageliki being so caring, helping the boy come out of the water and back in. I started chatting with grandpa. “Don’t worry”, he said, “I have a rope tied to the peacock”. The year before, a four year old girl got carried away by the current on her floating unicorn. She just stayed still as a sculpture, frozen from fear, until she was rescued by the coast guard.
Ageliki and the peacock became the highlight of our day. Sometimes we would call for her, when we passed her house. “Ageliki! Ageliki!”, my son would shout outside the gate. She slowly strode through the tall vegetation of the estate, a sort of paradiso perduto, with her as a contemporary Estella. Other than the beach, she wore cotton shorts and cropped tops. Her shy look, with her hands behind her back and head slightly bend downwards, made her look wise. The place had a magical quality, with its miniature sculptures of terriers, ancient olive trees, and old furniture scattered around the garden. It was certainly a place to explore, but she never let us through the gates.
One evening we saw her and her grandfather pushing an old boat in the sea, which was soft and still like olive oil. “We’re going fishing”, she said. Grandpa knew so many words for the wind, and he gladly explained them to us, “Maistros, Sirokos, they’re all different!”. “The Maistros is a north-western wind, pleasant and warm, that rises in the afternoon and dies at sunset. Contrary to the Sirokos, which comes from North Africa and can cause hurricanes, as well as bad moods”. In his youth he used to command large ships, now he rested in his small boat with the girl for company. There was no one else around, and the pink colour of the dusk made the vision of Ageliki on the boat, with her namesake, seem timeless.
Days turned to weeks, and the time came for Ageliki to leave. She would spend the rest of the summer at a holiday camp. I worried for her, will she be disappointed? Will she be heartbroken? Will she lose her smile? Could she stay like this forever? It was impossible to keep her from growing up, to protect her. On the day of her departure, I avoided saying goodbye. Eventually they came and found us, her in her cotton shorts and top, all timid and quiet. She hugged me, and I cried. Wondering why I felt so sad, to be separated from this little girl, whom I had met only a while ago. I didn’t want to let her go, I didn’t want to let me go.
After she left, the peacock stood lonely under the olive trees of the estate. I passed each day, on my way to the beach and looked at it from the corner of my eye. It slowly deflated, and one day, it was gone. We asked about Ageliki, “Is she having a good time? Will she come again next year?” The beach was empty without her and the peacock, but she occupied and distracted our minds from everything bad. The following years we would go back to the island and shout her name behind the gate, “Ageliki! Ageliki!”. We never saw her or the peacock again.
I was so delighted to see Renewal as an Autumn writing competition. The busyness of living and the death and destruction around us somehow remove us from the renewal of autumn rather than feeling the renewal of autumn. Is it just because I'm in my Autumn years? No as I have always loved Autumn and the changes it brings - primarily a slower, once orderly progression of changes.
Is it Spring renewal or Autumn renewal????