Jackie, after: a story for the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy

 

She had already put the clock into her bedside drawer and the ticking she heard now must be imaginary. She wasn’t even sure she could hear it anymore, each tick and tock like the sawing of a knife in her side.

Tick. In.

Tock. Out.

She grabbed at her stomach and with a flat hand pushed against her ribs. The pain seeped up through her chest and into her throat. She coughed and swallowed forcing the lump back down towards her middle and it grew and spread until her whole body was filled with a hurt as heavy as granite. Each breath she took was laboured, her lungs grabbing gravely at the air, heady with grief.

Tick. In.

Tock. Out.

Her mind crept over to him. To the way his voice said her name on their wedding day and to how he drank his coffee in the morning (with his buttered toast and one boiled egg), and to their children and to their faces when they knew; their small, round faces.  

“Now I have no one to play with” Little John had said, a sadness in his voice that didn’t correspond to the news.

She looked at the pillow next to her and tried to picture him there; tried to imagine his weight on their mattress, the smell of the day on his skin. And then she saw Lyndon at her side, his right hand in the air, his left on the bible. She heard his promise of allegiance as an echo in her ear, as an echo in her ear, as an echo. She was floating. She was swimming. She was perfectly still. He was lost. It was over. Jack had gone.

She rubbed the spot where her wedding ring had been and imagined the friction scorching a ruby red circle on Jacks little finger.  She fixed her eyes on the gold lampshade above her bed and forced herself not to blink until the stinging became one long buzz in her eyelids. She wanted to stay here, to stay disappeared in this room which they had shared. She was in love and she had been in love and with her eyes still open she willed the night to stop where it was. The silver grey of the sky lit up the corner of her dressing table and her pink hat lie upon it like a sleeping dog next to a tube of lipstick and a hairbrush. The country had needed a hero, her grief had been their grief; her lose, the world’s. But she was alone. She made a noise that sounded like crying and which filled the room as though a pipe had burst, then closed her eyes and let her head fall sideways onto her pillow. She must sleep. She must get up tomorrow and run a bath and brush her teeth. She must choose a dress and strings of pearls and wear stockings and shoes with buckles across her toes. She must continue.

Tonight, inside a half empty bed, under a night blacker than most others, beneath crumpled blue sheets she had chosen for them both, she found it difficult to remember entirely the reason why.  

The tick-tocking began again.

Everything was starting over.

New in my Shop for Christmas

I have been embroidering birds for the last few weeks and have made these wall hangings which I think are perfect gifts for Christmas.

 

If you want more information about 'Love is Us' then click here

If it is 'Love is Home' that you are interested in then click here

 

I'm also selling these Movie Character Christmas Cards in packs of six (two of each design.) Click here

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hastings Online Times

I have started contributing to the Hastings Online Times and my first two stories are now live. The first is called "This town that is my soil" and can be read here.

"The tide is heavy today and it looks like a tongue and the sky is the roof of a mouth and the town that seems so tiny now because I am twenty-six is going to be swallowed, I’m sure of it. I imagine it not being here. I imagine a hole in its place, a bite mark on a map, the concave of a rock that recognises my back and me, alone with a past that doesn’t exist anymore."

The second, "When we go back to the sea" can be read here.

We stop near the pier and you run across the road and I’m behind you, walking cautiously. It is dark and the sea is a still, black velvet blanket and the stones are just sounds under our feet. We walk beneath the scorched frame because you want to show me the silhouette made by the moon and it’s beautiful and I’m not scared though I hear people in the blackness. You put your arms around my shoulders and they are warm and porous and sip up my cold.

Perhaps you could read them and if you see me in the street some time you might let me know what you think of it all.

Invisible Lines, part three

Our third painting from the works of Edward Hopper, selected by Rob, is Summer Evening, 1947. Our three stories are below.

 Summer Evening

Robert Dennard

I am so sick of this. I feel like I rarely manage to contribute anything and gain even less. It’s as though, no matter how hard I try, no matter how much care or thought I put into every interaction, always establishing a common interest in conversation, remembering facts about others, inquiring into their happiness and just being plain old polite. I am always left lonesome, riddled with self-humiliation, wondering why I even bother, and would anyone notice if I was no longer here. It’s as though, without my input, without my asking or making the first move with those I meet, I would be forever stood in silence. Those around me are always exchanging interest in each other’s lives, but never with me. I am always the one asking, never being asked. This feeling of un-want, of neglect, has always been brushed aside, sheltered in my subconscious by other permutations of frustration at myself and my thoughts. Convincing myself that I read too far into what those around me think; inventing this reality of neglectful interactions by way of coping with, no....not coping with, heeding an inherent lack of self-worth, juxtaposed with paranoia. I am so sick of this.

I could return to the nullified seclusion of a former dependency, sticking pins in everywhere possible, until the only hole remaining screams and chokes as I take the plunge into a concrete shoed nothingness, in amongst the reed coated bed of a forgotten river: the water of which we skimmed stones and kissed in the long grass, many eons ago. You would watch and pay little notice to my demise, with the silent stare you hold at me now. Of all the introverted bitterness surrounding you I have never felt, then ultimately known, how to hate so strong. Segregated from a passion of the past, I find myself at a wits end when in a constant head hung stance of unjustified guilt in your presence. Why do you plague me with such cold contempt? When did you change? When did the smiling, dancing laughter of our love dissolve into a drawn grey grimace of an empty mind? I mean nothing to you now, is that right? Is that it? If so then why do you keep me here, a prisoner in my own life?

Free me, Jailor! Free me from this husk of an aged unity, I shall walk from this veranda and merge into the darkness yonder, taking the faceless fruit of our passions with me as I seek an end in the encroaching black of the wild outside. May the memory of your neglect burden you as the unkindness you dealt to me burdens the hope we had in the unborn. I sincerely hope your hate is justified for thee, justified in your view by the denying of a life, a life that we seeded but never bloomed. You never wanted it anyway did you, and now it can never happen. Who gives you the right? And why do I still sit here being hatefully ignored, in this deafening silence? 
 

Summer Evening

Katy Park

He is not coming home. I lay on the floor and I wait for him. I imagine the door slamming, once and once again. I plan to be busy as he walks in, and think of various poses and activities that will prevent him from seeing that I am waiting. I practice laying in different places. I play with the child. I sing and I stare at the crisp linen ceiling. I am an imitation of a life, pretending and waiting. He is not coming home.
 

As the day turns blue with night, I find myself outside. Standing and breathing the air - a believable enough occupation on a night so smooth and silent. I lean against the wood and imagine I can feel the years it spent as a tree pressing into my back like fingertips. I ask it to stop.
 

He is standing next to me.
 

Summer Evening

Thom Kofoed
 

“I can’t believe Fran is being like this.“ she said and then paused and looked across at me. In the silence I realised that I hadn’t been listening since she had told me about her dog and the time up at the lake by Billy’s old place, and now she was talking about Fran and swirling a number eight into the dust on the porch with her foot.

Fran with the birthmark on the tip of her elbow.

Fran with her tiny shoes.

Fran the girl I had kissed once, between Spring and Summer as fireworks banged and sizzled and swished. The girl who pulled away and put her hand on her mouth. The girl who giggled and twisted her orange hair around her fingers and said “You’re quite something,” and then “you really, really are.”

June was still looking across at me, her face made up of triangles and squares, and I jumped upon the first thing I could think of and said “It isn’t your fault, June” and her face softened and became a circle in the moonlight.

The porch light flickered and then stopped and two moths fizzed in its heat. She smiled a half smile across one side of her face and looked down at the eight on the floor. She didn’t speak. I supposed I had said the right thing so followed it up with “You’re a good kid, June” and patted her leg; a physical full stop, a lid, a line drawn underneath.

She scooted backwards on the porch wall and tucked her hands underneath her thighs and I scuttled away and sat down on the porch step beneath the empty bowl sky. I could feel her loneliness like an animal behind me, felt its breath low and heavy on my neck, and I adjusted my collar and scratched at my head. June began to whistle and the noise sounded alien amongst the trees. They sat still inside the evening as if they had been replaced by photographs. The whole night was a picture torn from a catalogue, a postcard, a scene from the back of a cereal box. It was real and imagined and June felt familiar and new all at once. Somewhere behind the house I heard a car backfire once and then twice and she whispered "She isn't yours to fix, June" as she kicked through the dust and made a tiny tornado with her feet.

Invisible Lines, part two

 

Here are the second set of stories in the series. Katy chose Edward Hoppers 1940 painting 'Gas' and our interpretations are below.

Thom Kofoed

End of day

His wife was dying.

The sky was turning pink to violet to grey and his wife was dying.
He put the coins into his pocket and wiped his oil slicked hands down his overalls. They had been a brilliant blue once but now they were streaked black, days and weeks and months and years painted across his chest.
The wind sighed and took a struggling breath behind him and Eddie coughed and spluttered like an engine and weaved the chain through the door handles and buckled the padlock and shook it three times. A light shone from inside the building and cast a shadow onto the gravel that looked like a Cathedral. The trees whispered and then shouted.
He heard music as he pulled into the driveway; Irving Berlin or Cole Porter or someone. His wife was singing and stirring a pot of something and the sounds and the smells tumbled out of the open window. He felt a lump rise in his throat. She was singing. Even now.
He threw his keys down onto the sideboard and sat on the stair, untying his boots as if untying a corset, each movement gentle and caressing. Slow.
His wife swished through the kitchen door and into the hallway with one hand above her head and the other across her stomach; her dance partner an invisible man. She looked at Eddie and pirouetted on the spot. It made him dizzy. Fred Astaire wouldn’t be dizzy, he thought; a pang of guilt like a punch in his stomach as Judy Garland sang through the open door, her voice heavy with woe. 
She pointed at Eddie’s feet and then at his face and danced over to where he sat and grabbed at his hands and pulled and he was a dead weight and she pulled and he was a dead weight and she pulled and he was a dead weight. She made a face like a small girl and he buckled and stood up and they held hands above their heads and wrapped around each other and she laid her head against his chest and they swayed from one foot to the other and back again.  
“It only happens when I dance with you” sang Judy, sang Eddie, sang his wife; their voices filling the room like vapour and then disappearing.

Robert Dennard

 The air felt hot, too hot, with an uncomfortable stickiness. A dense wind came up from the South and caused the Old Man to gasp in its humidity. Nobody should have to work in these conditions, especially when few ever notice the effort made. The Old Man’s tidiness and proficient upkeep of his business holds one in a pitiful thought, as he is only ever at the sport and sight of circling crows. Positioned too close to city, yet not far enough into the forest for most travellers to need gas or refreshments; his days were quiet and poor, but thankfully peaceful, just the way he wanted it. Oh sure, everyone desires plenty of money to live comfortably, and even treat oneself now and then. But for the Old Man, who runs a gas station, easy hours and peaceful surroundings suited him down to the dusty grey concrete ground of the garage forecourt.

                To the local’s in the neighbouring towns and villages, from all corners of the forest, he was somewhat of a household name, though nobody could ever decide on what his name actually was. None could settle on one, even told from the same tongues his title changed as often as the moon moves the tide it would. Jackson or Jimmy, Old Tom, Gareth at the gas station, Mickey or Mervin, Paul, Peter, Pat even Pablo – which was still feasible, in our highly integrated modern society, but realistically, his years rendered it unlikely. Some said Stu or Sal, Oscar, Richard, Dickie, Dustin or William from way down yonder; the list goes on, but for you, dear reader, it matters not. The Old Man at the gas station cares not for your title, or what others name him. For he is content, sweeping the dust from the front step, the fortnightly polishing of the nozzles, organising stock and making orders, which sadly gets more and more difficult for the old boy by the day. His mind isn’t as keen as it once was; he makes mistakes. Along with that his legs are bowed and his back crooked. His hair has thinned, leaving a sparse grey halo round a peeling and sunburnt scalp. The unrelenting heat pierces into his energy more easily as he no longer has the head of hair to shield him, thus sometimes leaving him dizzy and exhausted. Nowadays, when he looks eastward along the road, he can just make out the green channel of the woodlands tapering down into a dark indistinct hollow over looked by a blurred blue sky. Nowadays his hearing is muffled so that once he hears a passing vehicle, all he can register is the dust it leaves behind in his lungs, and the fading tail-lights as it heads into the forest. Nowadays he often forgets things, and under orders stock, leaving the odd empty row here or there in his refrigerators or on the wooden shelves in the shop – shelves, might I add, he built with his own two hands, even after they’d started to succumb to arthritic kinks in the knuckles, like that of an ancient trees roots. This makes him angry as he has always taken pride in his work and can’t suffer insubordination. All throughout his long years, in all the various and exciting jobs he’s had, he has always done so with the upmost care and attentiveness; good old fashioned pride in the work place, stemmed from his working class roots down in Dixie.

                The last few days leading up to this one have been, to any onlookers, absent as they might be, entirely repetitive; though to the Old Man who runs the gas station, he has started each with a vital new task every morning.

“My O my” he says walking out to the pumps, “Those nozzles need a right good polish; I haven’t done them in weeks.” Hobbling back out into the September haze, after fetching his polish and cloth, one thing puzzles the Old Man: how can he be running so low on polish? He’d only used it once, months ago. It’s as though it was used yesterday. Even the lid was slightly loose and as any good worker knows, if the lid of any tin has been left on for a good long while, it’s a right chore to prise it off. But the Old Man’s feeble arthritic grip managed to pop the lid off no problem, none whatsoever, which he wasn’t expecting.  And even queerer was that, though they had not to his mind, been cleaned in so long, the pumps nozzles shined up something wonderful, after barely touching them with the cloth.

“How odd?” the Old Man thought as the humid air and sun’s strength bore down upon him, causing dizziness and a sudden nausea. A sharp pain stabbed him in the chest, as if his heart were now a pin cushion for hot pokers. This is a very odd morning the Old Man finally thought as a near empty tin of polish fell to the floor, gently followed by the flutter of a dust cloth which had been used daily for the last few weeks; “very odd indeed!”

But at least the sun was shining on that morn, and it shines still. Rather a lot in this area of the state. Harmful to productivity or not, the weather is always beautiful down in Dixieland. What a beautiful day to leave a business. Left untouched until the lawyers can find another poor sucker to run a gas station, in such an ill advised location, with its former owner now buried in the yard behind the shop.

Katy Park

This place is a fucking waste of time. My hands press and screw and hang useless. Screw loose. I'm done with it. How can anyone get past the mundane humiliation of walking, talking, shitting, fucking. People that say they have are lying.

I had an idea once. A great fucking idea that I liked and wanted and gave a shit about. Ideas mean nothing unless other people think they do. I'd buy a giant ship in a bottle if I had a million bucks.

I have this recurring dream that there's a fire big enough that it burns through safes, leaves the sea an ash map with curled edges, doesn't stop until everything is dust and fucking grey.

I read a book about 'mindfulness' once. Some American bullshit. It's all about learning how to make your mind aware and focused on the present moment, not letting reality slip by unnoticed. I hate it. I hate that we are born with such inept mechanisms in our minds and no way of knowing how to deal with any of this. Joy is something I scrape from the dirty fucking windows I can't see through.

I think I've worked it out though. The point of everything. Fuel. Fuel, consumption and emptiness.

It's not all bad though. I really love my cat. His dumb face makes me smile.

Kitsune, illustrated

Company, illustrated

Night, illustrated

                                    

A new writing project

Katy Park, Robert Dennard and I have started a new writing project called Invisible Lines. Each week one of us will select an Edward Hopper painting and we will then each write a short story in response to what we see.

Our first selection is Night Windows, 1928. Our stories are below.

Hettie before dinner

Thom Kofoed

 She had spent twenty minutes looking for her knickers, the pink satin ones with the lace frill around the top edge. She was wet still from her bath and her towel kept slipping down below her breasts. She pulled it up, tucked the corner back in on itself and carried on looking through her drawers. She hated that chest of drawers, heavy and stern and dark, a gift from her Aunt. It looked like a School Mistress and stared at her from the corner of the room, its arms behind its back.

Where were her knickers? She was running late now, the clock above her bed chiming seven thirty, and she needed those knickers. They made her feel sexy, a secret beneath her skirt. They made her walk differently and her bum wiggled and jiggled and men stared as she past and she liked that though her mother had always scowled when it happened to her. Truthfully she had always thought her mother liked it; her eyes would change when they whistled as if a light came on, as if somebody had woken her up, as if she suddenly remembered she was living.
Her knickers weren’t in the bottom drawer. They weren’t in the middle drawer either. They weren’t next to her bed or in her closet or balled up inside the pencil skirt scrunched into a heap on her vanity table chair. Thinking about it she hadn’t seen them for a week or so, since she went to the movies with Walter last Friday, when he had pawed at her and squeezed the tops of her thighs and grunted so loudly that a fella three rows in front told them to shush. They hadn’t gone all the way but if that picture had run any longer she couldn’t be sure what would’ve happened. Her face flushed at the memory. She picked up her compact and brushed her cheeks with powder, the moon reflecting in her vanity table mirror. The phone began to ring in the hall and the girls scuttled like crabs to answer it. The ringing stopped and after a few seconds she heard doors like dominoes close one after the other.
“Hettie” it sounded like Barbara calling.
“Hettie” she said again.
“Walter is on the line,” she said.
“he sounds hot and bothered.” she said.
She started to laugh and Hettie imagined Walter, his dress shirt undone at the collar, embarrassed at Barbara’s jibe, small in his seat, squirming at her bravado.
Hettie checked her hair in the mirror and pushed her forefinger around her lips. Wind blew in from the open window and her curtain danced like an empty dress on a hanger.

The Perks of a Top Floor Flat

Katy Park

Shelly could not believe her eyes. A cigarette burn on the carpet. She knelt down, bending her mottled lace legs and folding her brow in a grimace. Shelly did not smoke. She did not smoke, and she did not entertain those that did. She ran her hand over the burnt scar, listening for a clue in the silent room. She breathed.

Hours later, and the city darkness had brewed to a deep brown. It was hot, and the flimsy pointless fabric at the window coughed and steamed. Shelly lay thickly on her silk sheets. Her skin was busy sending bubbles to the surface which popped and ran in rivers to meet with the small balls of carpet still clinging to her knees. She looked like an animal. Oozing white into red.

When Shelly woke, she felt happy and alert. She bustled into the bathroom, running taps and squeezing tubes, erasing the stillness with sound. Her body and mind found solace in movement, and by the time she emerged she was entirely human again. As she walked, the soft pink skin of her foot brushed against the brittle burn on the carpet. She glided oblivious to her wardrobe. Today was potato salad and bus route 9. Cardboard folders and 5.15.

Keys, sandals, bag, glasses. She left with a slam, announcing her departure.

The window was left open, and only an occasional hot sigh disturbed the room.

Robert Dennard

Jazz. The ripping and writhing toe-tapping root toot toot of sax wailing jazz billows from a blue curtain of a second floor apartment on the corner of 114^th street and Eight Avenue. Inside Edith bops and jives about her room to the swinging step of her gramophone. She pays no heed to the sounds of the street outside, carried in by the cool night air from the open window. Dancing round her room, Edith felt as though the world was hers and anything and everything was there for the taking, just as long as the jazz kept playing. Just as long as she kept dancing, nothing mattered. While her hips keep up a convoluting shake, and her feet a steady step, she bends down to take a sip of wine whilst reaching for her cigarillo tin. Smoking with her head back, her arms undulate to the quickening beat; she spins and swings, taking her shadow as a partner in the ecstasy of the dance. Her partner takes the form of a strapping young sailor, returned from months at sea. Months spent longing to be back on land with Edith in their arms, spinning and jumping as they are now. The pace quickens of which Edith can only just keep up, but her partner copes, violently kicking out their legs, clicking their fingers and throwing about the arms. They coil together in a frantic embrace. They spin and spin until the wine renders Edith’s head a miss. She can’t cope, it’s too fast. Her faceless partner cares not and continues to spin her in the squeaking ether the sax has formed around them. Round and round they go, Edith’s stomach tightens into tenderness as she trips, her arms flailing to break her fall, she crashes into the gramophone, causing the needle to shriek across the wax as it topples of the table.

Down on all fours with her head hung, Edith pants as she catches her breath. Her partner, now returned to the shaded silhouette of her own form, has left her spent in silence, and alone once more.

She lifts herself and sits back on her feet with her hands on her knees. She pauses for one more moment of recuperation then stands, crosses her pokey apartment room and sits down on the bed. She lights another cigarette. The night air brings in more screeching of tires and sounds of the city outside. Suddenly angered, Edith slams the window closed, trapping her blue drape in the latch. Slumped back on the bed in silence, Edith exhales her cigarette smoke with an exasperated breath, cups her head in her hands and starts to cry.

Sixteen

It's quite possible that in the decade that has passed since the Summer I turned sixteen the sharp edges of the weeks I spent about town have been made smooth by the passing of time, leaving it all, all of the days, all of the hours, as a round, flawless stone. I don't think so though.
We had just finished our exams and the four of us, bonded by the idea of impending adulthood, had grown inseparable, almost interchangeable, in the months leading up to our freedom from school. We had found one another haphazardly. A zig zagged line had jutted out from each of our social circles (mine decidedly smaller than theirs) and, like the darts that hunters sometimes use to paralyse their prey, jabbed us all in the sides and reeled us in, in, in until we were holding hands and laughing. So much time spent laughing.
We really were an unlikely group though. Two boys. Two girls. Two blondes. Two brunettes. One boy so filled with confidence it bubbled out of him in long, excitable, attention-seeking prose. The other, gay and hiding from everything. Two girls who had lost their fathers. All of us looking, finding something in each other that made it a little easier, at least for a while.
We would sit on the roof and some of us would smoke cigarettes and all of us would look across at the hill that rolled and tumbled into the cliffs and down into the sea and we'd talk sometimes about where we were going and where we had been already.
The things you think you know so much about at sixteen.
The things you're sure you'll never understand.
Cameras.
We spoke about cameras a lot in fact.
In the final weeks and days of school I had grown desperate to be a great photographer. I lacked any patience or real understanding of photography of course, and I completely hated being at the beginning of a journey that felt like it would take the whole Summer, an eternity in my eyes, to get to the end of.
He carried his camera everywhere, hung over his shoulder as though his heart beat from within the lens and would stop if he and it were separated. He snapped pictures with an ease and effortlessness that I envied and documented our days with such viveur and a joy so contagious that I am smiling a wide, wonky, brace filled smile in every photograph he took of us then. I loved him for that.
We spent most of our time in the roof of his house, through a small cupboard door always covered in freshly pressed shirts on hangers. We would climb up and into the room we had claimed as our own (to the chagrin of his Grandfather) and eat crisps and soup and sit on the cushions and pillows we had stolen from the rooms downstairs, away from the light outside, away from time passing.
Once, each laying out on the floor, our hands and arms wrapped up in one another, I played a CD I had bought by some Canadian guy with flat hair and soft, round eyes who promised to teach us how to be a more confident version of ourselves. Confidence was something I had been looking for for as long as I could remember and had hoped could be taught through exercises and bar charts; I thought it was like an expensive suit you had to earn. I hadn't yet realised that when I grew into myself it would come. Slowly and in its own time but it would come all the same; the others knew this already, their howling made that quite clear. I didn't try again to make us any better. Things were already pretty great as they were.
We set about redesigning our roof hideaway, boxing up old, toy train tracks and other things that had been stored there over the years. We assigned spaces for certain activities; eating was to be done in the corner by the cool box, playing computer games in the cushioned area by the door.
There was a junk shop near his house and we went there almost every day we were redecorating. The owner, a lady who always wore sweatshirts with collars and anchors or dog motifs embroidered on the front, would say hello at first and then soon started regaling the four of us with stories from her past. 
We convinced her, and I don't remember how it started now, that we were two young boys who had fallen in love, whose parents wouldn't accept the relationship, who had taken it upon themselves to climb into the world and fight.
"Love is worth fighting for isn't it?" we would ask.
"Sometimes it's all there is" she would say.
And so we told her we were living in some crappy loft and we had a mattress and one cupboard and some plates and each other and she would give us lamps and television units and small bedside tables for free and we would thank her and she would smile and then go about stacking chairs and piling up magazines, one after the other, after the other.

Grasshoppers

Ashes

He took a cigarette from his coat pocket and tucked it, unlit, between his lips. He was standing in front of me and I noticed his sleeves first and how long they were, covering his wrists and going all the way down to the middle of his hands. Long and impractical.
I thought about touching his wrists, I wanted to feel his heartbeat there with the tips of my fingers.
Ba-booming, ba-boom. ba-boom.
And then in the same breath I worried that when lighting his cigarette he would catch his sleeve, long and impractical as it was, and how quickly the flames would travel up his arms and how all at once he would burst into a ball of molten, orange fire and I could hear him screaming above all the other noise in my head and I could see him flailing and reaching out and trying, really trying; and my heart felt like a fist in my chest and I knew then that we were doomed because I cared too much and he would most probably die some violent death leaving me alone and surrounded by all the ashes. 
Somebody's always leaving.

The middle

She had already jumped to the middle, where the two of them were waiting, the big and difficult questions answered by then. The things they had carried over, the things from their lives before, piled neatly between her and him. There but not there; the intangible physical somehow. A glowing orb, a blue light bobbing up and then down, a quiet buzzing, a hum. A hum growing louder and louder still, he and her stood facing one another somewhere off in the distance, that hum a symphony of stories. Their stories. Echoes.

She wished they had a beach house where they could spend nights wrapped up in one another, the sea crashing outside the window like plates, sand spiralling up and up and up; tiny tornadoes whistling through and across seaside winds. Inside and against the crackling of kindling and fire, choruses of do you remember when's and I love you. I love you. I love you.

Night

It is late.
It is dark.
The wind outside is hard and noisy and sounds like pages being torn out of a book.
I am in bed.
I thought for a second how nice it would be to come home to someone. Somebody who had been waiting, their arms like two pillows.

Sarah

It was the picture of her graduating that started the whole thing. My want to design her life. Fill in the gaps. Triangles in square holes. And then later the photograph of her friends celebrating. The class of 93, black, button up vests and applique quilt patches, chokers tight around their necks, those two strands of hair pulled and twisted forward, framing their faces. Didn't everyone have those two strands of hair then? A membership card for something or other.
Her name was Sarah, so I learned later on, and she had an older sister whose hair was much darker. Their mouths were the same, that's how I knew they were sisters. Because of the way their mouths looked. Crooked a little. I wondered if hers had ever said my name.
And then of the shape of her mouth right before she said it and then right after. Two red pillows like heartbeats on her face. 
I didn't wonder how her voice sounded. I already knew how it felt.
I spent the two days after writing everything about her that I was sure to be certain,
breathing in that photo, a road map.
She wanted to help people, that much was clear. She liked peanut butter. And the smell of the air right before Summer turned into Fall. There was a scar on her left elbow, a souvenir from a summer spent camping the year she turned thirteen. She collected pennies, spoke broken Spanish when ordering food in restaurants, wore socks over her tights. White socks. Red Socks. Green.
Once, when Joey Forrester asked her to the Winter Dance she said no because he wanted her too much and she didn't feel enough.
"You deserve to go with someone who wants to be there with you as much as you want to be there with them," she had said, "it feels so much better when you're not trying to feel." She promised.

Fantastic Day

Hey, I'm in a show at the Stables Theatre in Hastings on June 21st and 22nd. I tap dance and speak and dress up and I might even wear a hat. I also happened to design and paint the show poster, this one with the clock.
Perhaps you should come along.
Tickets can be bought here or you can call the theatre directly on 01424 423221. I reckon it might be worth your while.

Movie Icons, Painting Series

I've painted a new series of paintings; iconic movie characters from iconic movies. They're being shown at the Electric Palace Cinema and can be bought there or from my shop. Hey, why don't you have a look.

Company

I am in a white tee shirt and a lady in an old cardigan calls me and she has something behind her eyes that I cannot read, that I waste too much time trying to memorise, and she says that she needs me and it's all that I hear at first, and then the sound of her pencil scratching something shorthand onto the paper she has fastened to a clip board in her palm. As we walk down the aisle, her hand now on my elbow, the line of people on the stage seems to part like biblical sea, making space for me to stand, to join, a wave against the shore.
Lapping again. Lapping again. 
And she is busy making introductions as we walk up the stairs to where the people are and they salute and wave half hearted waves and some say their names and others say "Nice to meet you" and "I'm glad you're here" and it seems sort of sincere and one girl with a blonde ponytail and a pink sweater looks at me into my face and she smiles with her mouth closed and I'm transported somewhere and its just the two of us and we've shared something that binds us, ties us in knots, two sides of the same coin; and then I am back and her smile is still there and I am in the middle of the line, in its belly, and the introductions have all been eaten. Leftover morsels floating up and up and up. The lady in the old cardigan is some way through a list of instructions that I haven't heard and she is waiting for a response so I nod and she carries on.
I am in over my head.
It is the beginning and it is the end.
Somebody elses life that I have climbed inside, their skin a coat over my skin.
I step forward, unsteady on my feet as if it all, every bit of this, is new.
I take another step, the emergency exit light above the emergency exit now a glowing green beacon.
"Go" it says, "Pick up and go."

A crying girl and an old, beaten leather bag

I was outside the train station when she cried. This girl, twenty maybe, carrying an old, beaten leather bag over her shoulder, so big it made her seem so small; you know how sometimes a girl can look like a bird? All legs and eyes and features. She was crying down her phone like nobody had any fucking idea about any of it and she marched and paced and the tears seemed to fall in direct correlation to how fast her feet moved, slowing as she turned to walk the other way, stopping completely when she stood still, her hand on her hip as if to say "this whole thing is fucking useless."
And then she balanced the phone between her cheek and her shoulder and she dropped the old, beaten leather bag onto the ground and undid the zip and took out a pair of red shoes and placed them side by side next to the old, beaten leather bag and took off the shoes she had on and put them into the old, beaten leather bag and did the zip back up and then took the red shoes, one by one, and put them onto her now bare feet and then stood up and wiped her face with the back of her right hand and ran her wet fingers through her hair and tucked it behind her right ear and then fussed with her dress and tugged at the sides until the hem puckered and rippled, the whole time shouting and hollering and sniffing.
Now I had a book in my hand as I stood waiting outside the train station, an old book folded at the spine, opened to the same page I had been on when I first was waiting outside the train station for the bus to take me home, and every now and then I would look up from the book at the girl, each time her face marked more with the path of her tears and I really did think that I should perhaps go over to her to try and see if there was anything I could do, but all of a sudden and in spite of myself I felt very British, reserved I suppose, and it seemed improper and gauche and so I watched out of the tops of my eyes, the same paragraph dancing over and over on the page in the old book I had in my hand, folded at the spine.
The girl was off the phone then. The phone in her pocket. That conversation hanging around her like city smog. Both of her hands at her sides. Stood straight up and down. The old, beaten leather bag by her feet. Her feet inside the red shoes. The both of us outside the train station. Together but not together.
I looked up from my book one last time, to try and catch her eye I guess, and saw the red shoes again, two rubies amidst the early evening commuters.
Maybe if she tapped her heels together three times she'd get to go home, I thought and then immediately hated myself for thinking it.

First, illustrated

Margaret, illustrated

T.K

I am in a coffee shop.

It is a coffee shop that plays the news on one of those twenty four hour news channels. I don’t like that very much, feels like the world is trying to get in my way when I all I want is to get away from it. I walked here this morning from my house, headphones plugged in playing music loud into my ears so I couldn’t hear the traffic. I didn’t always look when I crossed the roads down towards the sea either. I don’t know why. I was feeling sort of lucky I guess.

I order eggs, over easy, and a pot of peppermint tea which both come pretty quickly. I am the only one here save for the coffee barista and a guy in a beige t-shirt who I take to be the chef. They’re talking about hog roasts and the tenderest meat on the hog. They say it’s the cheek. It is 8.45am and it seems a little early for all of that. I find myself wondering about the tongue. Is that even a meat? I take a small book from my bag, one about a love that spans a lifetime and a continent, and stir the tea.

An hour passes.

A boy walks in. Twenty seven maybe. He has on a rucksack and a denim shirt that looks bleached by the sun but was probably bought that way, his hair swept backwards by the wind outside. It is cold and I think to myself that he should have worn a coat, a vestige leftover from my childhood being told the same thing once, twice, a thousand times.

I watch as he sits at the table just inside the window and beneath his denim shirt, rolled up to his elbow, I see two letters, etched onto his skin, black, architectural in their accuracy.

“T.K”

I take a sip of the second pot of peppermint tea I have ordered, concerned as I was that the barista would ask me to leave. The café has started to fill up with families, children in hats that cover their ears and the tops of their eyes.

The boy notices my gaze at his arm and, with what I suppose is at least a little self consciousness, strokes it with his left hand.

I put my cup of peppermint tea back on the table, wipe my mouth with the tips of my fingers, cough a cough I don’t really need to cough and look out of the window beyond his face to the young family outside. He in a coat that reminds me of my father, she saying something to the young girl, the young girl dressed in a Princess dress, all purple sequins and glitter; she is laughing back, pink hearts painted at the corners of her eyes. For a second I swear I hear it through the door but the barista starts grinding coffee beans behind me, the sound chasing away her laugh like birds.

I remember the boy now, eyes deep inside a book whose title I can’t read, and I think again of those initials on his arm and just for a minute allow myself to believe it’s a sign of something; because those initials are my initials. The ones drawn on the outside of his bicep belong to me.  Me, a man now, carving out a somewhere to be, gathering sticks, making a nest, and those initials are at my beginning. They are the start of all that has come since. They are mine.

 And then, with a confidence that surprises me, I lean forward in my chair towards his and I say

“Excuse me,” my voice like a stranger.

He looks up from his book.

“Your arm.” I say, “The tattoo on your arm.”

I point to the tattoo on his arm.

My name.

The beginning.  

He hardly reacts, turning slightly in my direction.

And as clear as I know I shouldn’t ask what I am about to ask I know too that I must, the question already bubbling up inside of me, a volcano no longer dormant. Waiting.

“Why do you have it?” I say.

He looks at his arm again and then at me, the black letters are whispering my name. The barista grinds more coffee beans and the whisper is silenced.

The boy puts his book down cover side up onto the table. The guy I took to be the chef comes over and puts a tall cup of coffee on the boys table next to his book. The boy smiles a thank you. The chef smiles back.

“They use it in copywriting.” he says in an easy sort of way that implies we’ve grown up together, that we’ve shared some sort of history. I even question the possibility of it for a second but am sure I would remember something like that.

“It is for when there’s more to come” he continues.

“It means that there are words yet to be written.”

And then “I’m a writer. It seemed to make sense.”

I say “I thought there would be a story behind it” and then I thank him and say I hope he enjoys his coffee. I don’t say anything else and he picks up his book and starts reading again.

Then I remember something I said once to my friend Marissa.

“I’ve always been tied to something, Marissa.” I said and she laughed and then I listed them until her laughter stopped. I didn’t need to think, I had carried them all like rocks in my pockets since I could walk, each getting heavier as the years added up. Dense as asteroids by the time adult life started happening around me to the kids I was a kid with too.

“I’m too frightened to run.” I said.

Marissa looked at me with eyes that said she understood. She took my face in her hands.

“There will always be something,” she said.

She smoothed my beard and smiled.

“And then there will be something worth running to. You just don’t know it yet.”  

The Electric Palace Film Quiz

A friend and I run a film quiz at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings. Here is the poster I designed for the upcoming Film Adaptations Quiz in May. Book your tickets here NOW. The website also has some taster clips from our previous quizzes-guess the film we're re-enacting and I'll give you a big fat pound.

I don't mean to brag, but it sells out pretty quickly; it's that good.

Margaret

Margaret Thatcher died when you were sleeping.
Thats what the note said; the one scrawled on the back of a brown envelope and propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen counter. Lois picked the envelope up, held it close to her face and read the words again, slower this time and out loud. The dog twisted in her basket, smacked her lips with her tongue and sighed. Lois took the envelope, opened the knife and fork draw and slid it into one of the recesses made for the knife edges to sit inside. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair but otherwise stood still, her pink house coat tied loosely around her waist.
She remembered then, a time long ago, her mum and her dad, her, small in her pyjamas, sitting around a television as the country buckled under its own weight outside. She remembered the look on her mothers face, the quiet concern behind her eyes, hands filled with knitting and yarn. She remembered her father yelling campaign slogans at images of angry and outspoken workers fighting for rights she didn't fully understand on the TV set, the wind howling through winter-empty streets.
And then she thought of Margaret, swollen with age, her skin draping heavy like curtains over her shoulders.
The world kept turning.
It somehow grew bigger in the shadow.
Lois took a carton of fruit juice from the fridge, walked back upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed; her feet cold from walking barefoot on the kitchen tiles. She took a pair of striped socks from the chest of drawers underneath the window and put them on.
Later, Lois fell back into sleep again until the sun, a teardrop in the sky, was replaced by night time.

Margot and her hat, illustrated

Gym

I caught myself in the middle of a lie yesterday as I stretched at the gym, a top knot on my head tied in a heap with strands of my own unwashed hair. The clarity with which I saw myself was so startling, and a wave of realisation washed over me so quickly that I stood there still, feeling foolish. A nakedness I had forgotten I had felt before.
I realised all of a sudden that I was trying to convince the girl by my side of something. The girl paying no attention to me, who hadn't noticed I was even there, mid work out and sweaty, headphones blasting music I couldn't hear. In that moment, as the sun had begun to disappear into the sea outside, more than anything else, I wanted her to believe I was a ballet dancer.
I was stretching stretches from a life long ago when I was a tiny somebody else trying to be somebody bigger than I was, pointing my toes and arching my back, small arabesques, fifth position.
How desperate I was for her to imagine me on the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet; masculine and soft, a Rudolf Nureyev type with arms that women felt safe in; arms that could lift them up towards heaven, arms that said I was guiding us to a magnificence so shiny and astounding in its newness.
I wanted her to think I was somebody else and let myself get lost in the identity I had created, her still none the wiser; everybody has to be somewhere. And so I continued until the lie grew so whole, so complete I barely recognised myself inside of it.
And then, with an urgency that scared me, I wanted to run to her and put my hands on her shoulders and make it clear, make it crystal clear, that I probably wouldn't always be lost. That I wouldn't spend forever sifting through the leftovers of lives that never were, that I wouldn't live inside the dreams that hadn't been weaved into the reality of my actual life, that it wouldn't always be an endless list of tasks that I'm better than or worse than or so deep in the middle of that I forget that I am still able to take my days in my hands and mould them into something else.
That I wouldn't always be that guy at the gym, imagining himself somewhere other than there.
That I would one day be enough.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack-illustrated

Margot and her hat

She looked smaller than I remembered, her red coat like a gown hanging from her shoulders, fastened up to her neck as precise as a math equation.

Margot was eating toffee pennies, folding their gold wrappers into quarters, putting them inside her pocket and chewing with her mouth open when she finally saw me standing in front of her. 

We had been here once before, some months earlier, when the sun shone a different colour on the trees; Margot in her hat, the sound of water somewhere in the distance.

She popped another toffee penny into her mouth, stroked her cheek with the inside of her hand and smiled the small smile of a young girl embarrassed by the idea of herself. It made her seem even tinier to me and I felt my heart pull inside my chest as the wind played music amongst the leaves and echoed up into the sky. A breath between two moments.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack

I sat down to watch a documentary on the life of Ethel Kennedy tonight and as I watched I remembered a book of letters written to Jackie after Jack's assassination that I read greedily some time after Christmas.
As Ethel quietly spoke about that day over black and white footage of people hearing the news for the first time, I saw the grief fresh as clean linen settle on their faces, and I thought of those letters, each written to try and make sense of the senseless. And I wondered if the people I saw, with their set hair and wet eyes, had sat down in the time after to write Jackie and to reach out to her; and I thought of the grief they shared, the man they lost, the dream they said goodbye to.
And then I imagined them all, Ethel and Bobby, Jack, Jackie, the children, in Cape Cod, dancing across blue seas on a big boat, sweaters tied around their necks, the sun making glitter on the oceans surface. And I imagined myself there too, laughing alongside them, before it changed into something else completely.
Before the waves crashed us back to the waters edge to begin again.