Birthdays

‘OI, JESUS. DO us a miracle, hur hur hur!’ David sighed and smiled, humourlessly, as the local youths in assorted tracksuits giggled to each other and moved on.

Just leaving the house at Christmas was a nightmare for David. For the rest of the year, ‘hippy’ was the insult of choice, but Christmas afforded some of the more eloquent scallies creative freedom. He doubted Jesus was white, British, 6’3 and from Newcastle, but that didn’t stop anyone.

The ‘Jesus’ jibes only ever came at Christmas, as if the time of year was haunting people’s imaginations. David often mused to himself that maybe the aggressive reaction to seeing the son of God in David’s unkempt, long-haired, scruffy appearance was just a reflection of their own atheist guilt in celebrating the birth of Christ.

But, by and large, it was just harmless ribbing, so he never let it bother him too much. See, if they ever found out that his actual birthday was in fact 25th December, that he was one of the poor unfortunates whose birthday was forgotten among the annual maelstrom of forced Christmas merriment, then the piss-taking would grow to a cacophony.

He had always hated Christmas, anyway. It wasn’t the bustling hypocrisy of the season. Or the annual mass delusions and insincere solemn oaths. Or it wasn’t even that every year Christmas turned his birthday into an insignificance. Well, it was all those things, a bit.

No, it was lost chances that made him ache so much. Every year, Christmas arrives, to every one of us, with such majesty, such searing potential for something better, an opportunity to harness an ocean of goodwill and create something magnificent, something human. We have a moment, every year, a blink in time, to do something extraordinary. But just as we have it in our grasp, just as something incredible arrives to every one of us, something wonderful to be nurtured, grown and cherished, we throw it away, every year, with a shrug, discarded into a dustbin of empty wishes.  And, you know, it’s not as if Christmas just arrives suddenly, unannounced, like an apple falling on us from a tree, catching us all unaware - we don’t have that excuse. We know it’s coming. Something magical is squandered, every single year. And then we all just carry on as if nothing happened, for the rest of the year, doing everything but thinking about our collective failure, like an embarrassing secret that nobody mentions.

But then, maybe, after all, we just don’t know what to do with that moment.

He belched, loudly, grinning at the echo as it bounced between the close buildings on the quiet, deserted village road, and thought warmly ahead to the annual late-night birthday/Christmas eve pub lock-in with his dear old Dad and friends that he was heading to. He checked his watch. 11.52pm. Just in time.  Eight minutes to Christmas Day. More importantly, though, eight minutes to his birthday!

A loud, sudden roar yanked him out of his meandering thoughts. A car skidded out of the sideroad ahead and, without slowing, swerved dangerously towards him, clearly out of control. At just the same time a figure staggered out of the silent shadows across the road from David and lurched towards the kerb, clutching a bottle and shouting something lost to the engine roar. The car careered to the right just as the stranger with the bottle, a woman, a homeless woman, stepped into the road, still shouting but now gesticulating wildly at the sky. David screamed at her to watch out, trying to get her attention, trying to push her back out of the way, pointing at the speeding car as it rushed straight at her…

Thump!

The old woman pirouetted into the air, dead arms flailing at gravity. Her bottle landed before she did, smashing into pieces on the road seconds before she landed a few feet away with a heavy thud and sickening crack. The car roared on, disappearing into the night.

It was over in seconds.

David stood stock still, shock, with unbelieving eyes, staring at the dot on the dark horizon where the car had disappeared. There was no sound from the figure on the road.

Nothing moved. No curtain twitched. No car returned. No passerby rushed to help; nobody passed by. It was a still, soundless night again. If it wasn’t for the dark, lifeless shape on the road ahead of him, he might not have believed the whole episode had happened at all.

David moved over to the body. The old lady was lying on her back, wide-eyed, breathless, ashen-faced, her left leg at a terrible, crooked angle. It was too dark to see whether there was any blood. He was grateful for that much.

He knelt up on his haunches and looked carefully up and down the road, scanning for signs of people or movement. Nothing. So he glanced up at the sky and, with an almost imperceptible nod, placed his hands on the corpse’s chest, over her still heart. A warm smile played on his lips, and then spread across his face and into his glittering eyes. He exhaled a deep, long sigh, drawn from the dawn of collective humanity.

The old woman suddenly snatched at a breath and blinked, brilliant life cascading again through her cold veins. David glanced left and glanced right, checking the road.

There was nobody to see, and nobody saw.

He pulled out his wallet, slipped £60 into the pocket of the old woman’s ragged coat, stood up and headed towards the pub where his friends were waiting. He had a bloody birthday to celebrate. The village clock struck midnight.

Bell at Sea

JAN SWAYED ACROSS the deck and rang the dinner bell, just outside the galley door. Those off-duty dribbled in gradually and took their seats around the dinner table, discussing the day’s chores and journey progression. They were just two days from Port Royale now, which meant two days from looting, drinking, fornicating and fighting. The excitement on the ship increased the closer they were to a port, and tonight, aided by extra rum rations, spirits were high and raucous.

Getting over-excited, and forgetting the new regime, one hulking pirate gulped down his beer and belched long and loudly, finishing with a tuneful flourish. His shipmates began to erupt in cheers, until Jan raised a questioning eyebrow. The cheering stopped abruptly. ‘Sorry’, muttered the offender, eyeing the wooden spoon in her hand.

Jan and her galley boy heaved the enormous vegetarian lasagnes from the ship’s ovens to the centre of the wooden table. The pirates, politely, one after another, helped themselves. ‘And whoever doesn’t finish doesn’t get pudding’, she warned to nodded grunts, as the salad bowl was passed around.

Thinking about it, Jan still wasn’t completely sure how she ended up as part of the crew of a 18th Century pirate ship.

Just six weeks earlier, almost to the day, she had been sitting desolate on the Bristol quayside, watching absent-mindedly through her one good eye the ferry boats sail past towards the city with cargoes of tourists. She had fingered the black patch covering her right eye, drained the last of the bottle, and sighed heavily.

Seven days before she had quite unexpectedly woken up with the complete right side of her face just, well, out of order. Her right eye had drooped, and had become frighteningly hard to blink. The right corner of her mouth similarly drooped, as if in formation with the eye, and Jan found it actually beyond use. Talking became a matter of forcing conversation through the left side of her mouth, making it raise slightly whenever she spoke, and giving her speech a curious growl.

Bell’s Palsy, apparently, is when the nerve that controls the muscles in your face become compressed due to some kind of viral infection. Basically, she thought, staring at her reflection, she looked like a stroke victim, but thankfully without having had the stroke.

The hospital had given Jan an eye-patch to wear, and a set of muscle exercises for her mouth. Eventually, they said, her face would recover.

She adapted well, at first. WIthin a few hours she was getting used to talking out the corner of her mouth, but she couldn’t do much about that rolling growl, no matter what she tried. In fact, it was getting more pronounced, if anything.

Mortified at her appearance to her colleagues, in desperation she had taken up her idiot son’s advice about ‘rocking the pirate look’ until she could bear to remove the eye-patch and her face exercises cured the worst of the droop.

Seemed like a good idea.

To head off any suspicions and questions from bewildered colleagues and friends she began a sponsored ‘Act Like a Pirate’ month to disguise her condition. She even started taking donations so as  not blow her cover.

Over the next few days, though, things deteriorated.

Her growl became more and more pronounced, and she unthinkingly began prefixing all her replies to colleagues with the guttural, rolling drawl.

On a midweek evening out with department colleagues, she was wrongly ordered a straight rum from the bar. Not wanting to cause a fuss, and despite never having liked rum, being more of a wine girl, she sat quietly and sipped at the dark liquid. Four hours later she staggered in through her front door, swigging straight from a half-empty bottle of Lambs Navy, shouting at imaginary mermaids and singing shanties she had no idea she knew.

She started referring to women she didn’t know as ‘wenches’, a word that definitely wasn’t in her pro-feminist vocabulary before.

She became claustrophobic in the city, hankering for the ocean, to get off dry land and into the open sea, which was weird given that she became sea-sick just by pedalling a swan pedalo on the shallow pond in the local park.

She had also recently started looking into buying a parrot. It just somehow seemed like a good idea.

After a few days of this, while she was sitting desolate on the quayside, wondering what on earth was going on, feeling the black patch covering her right eye, and with an empty rum bottle at her feet, the pirate ship unexpectedly sailed into Bristol harbour. As the crew laid waste to the city, the Captain, seeing one of his own, had her kidnapped and shanghaied aboard. They sailed away that same evening.

And now, six weeks later, under the Jolly Roger flapping in the wind, Jan gazed out across the beautiful blue, swirling ocean. The brilliant low sun cast dark shadows of the ship onto the water as it ploughed through the great seas. In truth, she was quite looking forward to arriving at Port Royale; the Captain had promised her gold and fine jewellery, fit for a queen. Gold and fine jewellery had never before excited her. But now it made perfect sense, and it excited her far beyond most things. Fit for a queen!

Yes, Jan couldn’t wait to get to Port Royale.

She still wore the eye-patch, and she was still talking out of the side of her mouth and growling at people. But the worst of the Bell’s Palsy had long worn off, so this was mostly for effect.

Concerning the Sighting of the Red-Throated Needletail Hawk

IN ONE LONG, graceful arc, the hawk swooped down from its perch at the top of a tall oak tree, gripped Janice tightly by the shoulders, closing its talons like a vice and, with a powerful beat of its wings, lifted her clean away. As the hawk climbed higher with Peter's bait clasped in its claws, he clicked and clicked his new Canon SX 50 digital camera, noting excitedly the vivid dash of brilliant red on the hawk’s throat and chest that confirmed two things: firstly its rarified breed, not often spotted in the UK, and secondly that he was now surely odds-on favourite to win the 2014 Extreme Birding in Bristol photo competition. He allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction, slung the leather strap of the Canon over his shoulder, and headed back to his car for a nice cup of herbal tea.

Lovely Man

LOVELY MAN STOOD stooped in the kitchen, putting away the last of the clean plates, when a sharp movement in the garden caught his eye. He grimaced.

The two neighbourhood cats, his nemesis, had darted into the garden and were now standing together, staring back the way they had come, quite purposefully, on the soft soil. Correction, his soft soil, in his garden. The corner of his mouth curled upwards in a shadow of a smile.

He gently stepped out of the back door and quietly picked up the nozzle of the garden hose. Tiptoeing, out of sight of the cats, to the side of the garden shed, he peered around. The mangey things were now sunning themselves in the Spring warmth, in his garden, not ten feet away.

Perfect.

Using a starting car engine as cover, he aimed the nozzle at the cats and turned on. A powerful jet of cold water sprang out of the hose and arched towards the dozing cats, hitting the fluffy white one on the side of the head. In a satisfying scrabble of soil and fur, the cats like lightening disappeared up over the wall.

Lovely Man chuckled contentedly, returned the hose to its holder, stepped back into the kitchen and switched on the kettle for a nice cup of herbal tea.

A week later

Meowington cradled his left arm, trying to stem the bleeding, shaking uncontrollably from the attack. Seconds later Mr Tibbs came haring over the rough, wooden fence and flew under the car, skidding to a stop just before careering into his friend. He turned immediately and peered back out, waiting for Tinkerbell to come marauding and snarling after them.

‘Bloody hell’, he breathed. ‘That was close.’

‘Close?!’ Meowington held out his unharmed paw, saturated in his own blood seeping from the deep gash in his right shoulder.

‘Yeah, close. You know what she can do, man. We were lucky.’

Mr Tibbs kept sentry while Meowington licked his wound fervently, eyes never moving from the fence they had bound over, watching and waiting. But the seconds turned into minutes, without further danger.

‘OK’, he said, catching his breath at last. ‘I think we’ve lost her for now. Come on, let’s get to 119.’

‘119?’, Meowington snarled. ‘Christ. You really think we’ll be safe there?’.

‘Tinkerbell won’t follow us there. She won’t come, I’ve told you. They say that that’s where she grew up, where she was born, years ago. She won’t go near the garden. They say it’s where her dad battered her into...well, into what she is now.’

‘What, a fucked-in-the-head maniac! But 119? What about Lovely Man? You know what that bastard does to the likes of us.’

‘I know. We’ll just have to be really quiet.

Meowington looked unconvinced. ‘Look’, continued Mr. Tibbs, impatiently. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We can’t stay here. We’re too exposed. Next time it won’t be just your arm Tinkerbell will try to rip off.’

Meowington stared gloomily at the floor. ‘So it’s come to this. Choosing between a cold-blooded killer who murders for shits and giggles, or a human sadist who just blind hates us and wants us dead.’

Mr Tibbs sniffed. ‘Well, you do crap in his soil, to be fair. And you go after his birds.’

Meowington threw his good arm into the air. ‘Christ almighty, I’m a friggin’ cat!

‘I know. Sorry. Look, number 119’s garden is the only sanctuary we have. You know Tinkerbell won’t stop until she rips you and me apart. We set her up. You think she’s ever going to forget that she did time because of us? Time at the vets?’’

As if in confirmation, a terrible, mewling howl erupted from nearby; a piercing caterwaul of promised violence and endless suffering, like the banshee scream of a plummeting bomb.  

‘Christ, I wish I had thumbs. Then I could throttle the fluffy bitch!’

‘Tibbs’, said Meowington, looking Mr. Tibbs square in the eyes. ‘Why don’t we just keep going? Let’s not go to 119 and have fucking water sprayed at us again. Let’s just leave.’

Mr. Tibbs’ eyes widened in astonishment. ’You mean’, he whispered, incredulously, ‘leave the neighbourhood. Are you out of you tiny cat mind?’

’Mate’, replied Meowington, eyes narrowing. ‘We’re trapped between a rock and a hard place here. And when you’re trapped between a rock and a hard place, you fuck them both off and do one! How much money have you got?’

Mr. Tibbs routed around the folds of his fur. ‘Not much. About 20 quid.’

‘OK, I’ve got the same. 40 quid will get two cats a long, long way from here. Let’s just keep going, and never come back here.’

Mr. Tibbs’ eyes welled, but he nodded. He loved Meowington so much, but his dream of them settling down and adopting some kittens together, and finding a garden to call home, seemed more distant than ever. He loved Meowington, and would do anything to make them work. But Meowington was right. There was just nothing else left to do.  

Together they darted out from under the car, Meowington limping on three legs, a brush of engine oil colouring the tip of Mr Tibbs’ soft, white coat, heading in the opposite direction to the wooden fence over which they had just escaped.

Patriachy

MISS NAN KNOCKABOUT wouldn’t wash her face, and everybody thought it was a real disgrace. But Nanny K don’t give a crap. Well-behaved women seldom make history.

On Approach to Beijing

ENGINE NO. 4 of the Moscow State Railway Company steamed across the barren open vastness of Siberia in imperial splendour, powering south to the Mongolia-China border. Thousands of miles of isolated tracks lay ahead and behind, stretching through the endless nothing like two long lines of footprints through a vast minefield, picking out the safest and quickest route across the emptiness, for empires to follow.

Nestled in one of the first class carriages, three down from the heaving, sweating engine, Jan and Peter drained their fine cocktails and nodded to the barman for another round. The barman deftly delivered two more to the table - white Russian for him, vodka martini for her. Jan sat back, drink clutched in her hand. She was enjoying herself immensely. Slightly tipsy from her third cocktail of the evening, she was excited about reaching Beijing in a few days time.

The train carriage rocked gently as the great steppes of southern Mongolia sped by the window. The past two weeks had been simply unparalleled, from the trans-Western Europe train odyssey from Bristol to Moscow, to the Trans-Mongolian Express from Moscow to Beijing: Bristol-London-Brussels-Cologne-Warsaw-Moscow; a few days in the Russian capital, a few in Irkutsk and a couple in Ulan Bator, finally to Beijing, and not a good few days and nights on the train itself, steaming across the most beautiful and breathtaking lands Jan had ever seen.

Best. 60th. Birthday. Present. Ever.

Very soon they would be thundering across the border into China. And just two days later they would be arriving in Beijing, the sprawling and congested capital city of the country that had many years ago wrapped its beautiful, maddening, enigmatic cloak around her, and in the warm embrace of which she continued, even after a 17 year absence, to long for. Beijing was to be the conclusion to a most wonderful story, a Catherine Wheel full-stop to a neon-lit paragraph.

Only a few miles from now, just crossing the border would be a return; an East Asian recharge to her Western soul. And even though the unworldly expanses flitting past her window were unlikely to change much, at first, just knowing that she was back on Chinese soil was enough to make flutter the bright butterflies in her stomach.

Then outside went dark, as the train plundered into the cross-border tunnel. The next time they see daylight, Jan thought, happily, they will be on Chinese soil and it will be Chinese daylight, on Chinese time.

She grinned at her husband, who grinned back. They clinked their cocktails together, drinking to Beijing. Oh yes, Jan was having a fine time.

Twenty minutes later, after pouring through the dark, deep tunnel, as the last of the vodka martini drained from her glass and they started eyeing up the barman for another round, they burst out of the gloom into dull sunlight.

Jan peered wide-eyed out of the window for her first view of China after 17 years. The view that greeted her, though, was odd. Streaming past outside in the overcast afternoon ran an endless dirty grassy bank, littered with discarded plastic bags and drinks cans, as ragged bits of newspaper fluttered from straggly bushes and bent trees.

Suddenly, with a stammer that threw her forward against her table, the train started to slow as the brakes screeched on the line. She looked questioningly from the window at Peter, who was nonchalantly packing his book and reading glasses into his bag. Her fellow travellers were similarly packing their belongings away and throwing on coats. The barman rattled down the shutters on the bar and slipped away.

The train slowed to a halt beside the station platform. Looming large in Jan’s window was the dirty yellow and black station sign, with the train company’s omnipotent ‘M’ logo crouching on it like an angry insect. Jan’s mouth fell open. She tore her eyes away from the sign, stared suspiciously at her empty cocktail glass, then around the carriage at her fellow travellers, then back at sign. She peered closer, unbelieving.

‘Birkenhead... North?!’

The train intercom fizzled to life: ‘Thank you for travelling with Merseyrail,’ it Scoused. ‘Change here for trains to Liverpool, West Kirby, Chester and New Brighton. Birkenhead North is our last stop. All change, please. All change.’

Peter slung his bag over his shoulder and headed towards the exit, chatting amiably to the other passengers.

A cavernous, empty silence replaced the low hum of the train engine as, one by one, the carriage lights began to flick off.